Saturday, February 11, 2012

Scared Detroiters wage quiet war against neighborhood drug dealer -- and win

For about a decade, residents of southwest Detroit near Woodmere Cemetery existed in an uneasy peace with the man called Mr. Pill.

Aram Alkazoff -- known as one of the most prolific prescription drug dealers in Detroit -- was slowly destroying the neighborhood.
The coexistence between Alkazoff, 62, and his neighbors had turned violent, and as blight led to flight and kids entered the drug trade, the people of the Woodmere-Lawndale-Springwells area said enough was enough.

Over two years, neighbors logged hundreds of records about the goings-on around 9210 Lane St., then handed the stack to police.

Alkazoff was sentenced in December to at least three years in prison.

"The switch got flipped," said Detroit Police Sgt. Brandon Cole, a lifelong resident of the neighborhood. "It went from a dirty secret to a drive-through, and people were leaving because of the drug dealing."

Crimes of nice-guy drug dealer bled into neighborhood

Last year, for several months, Wayne County sheriff's deputies periodically hid in Woodmere Cemetery, staking out 9210 Lane St. and the drug dealer who lived inside.

Their target: Aram Alkazoff, a 62-year-old prescription drug dealer known to police as Dr. Pill. He had skirted prison time in 2008 for selling Vicodin and the like. Officers had tried to catch him in raids, but he always seemed to have a prescription for what was with him.

It was time to try something else. "We were going to have to build a long-term case against him," said Deputy Chief Dennis Richardson.

Between February and August 2011, based on police intelligence and information in hundreds of nuisance reports angry residents filled out over two years, undercover officers made a series of drug deals with Dr. Pill. At the end of August, he was arrested, and a team of Detroit, Wayne County and federal law enforcement agents found $258,000 in cash and hundreds of pills. In December, he was sentenced to at least three years in prison.

After years of increasing drug violence, the kingpin of Lane Street was gone.

"No one in that neighborhood wants it to be a destination for destruction," said Esteban Castro, a resident who leads the Springdale-Woodmere Block Club. "Everything got together, and it worked."
Neighbors' quiet fight

While other streets of the Woodmere-Lawndale-Springwells area of southwest Detroit shuffle between run-down and renewed, the block of Ellsmere Street between Lane Street and Mason Place stands decimated as spoils of the drug trade. Empty lots stand next to burned-out buildings.

"I hate to blame this all on one guy," said area resident and Detroit police Sgt. Brandon Cole, looking at the 360 degrees of decay, "but this is Rocky."

"Rocky" was the name by which most of the neighborhood knew Alkazoff, an affable man who tended to his neighbors for the decade or so he lived on Lane Street. For many years, said one resident, he carried out his business quietly. But around 2008, neighbors said, things changed.

Residents told the Free Press that people associated with Dr. Pill started taking over abandoned houses, stripping them, squatting and threatening the neighbors who saw them do it. One woman said her house was shot at, and another said she was attacked in her sleep. Tall fences went up. Cars cruised the street constantly, and deals started happening in broad daylight.

Complaints mounted, first to police, then to elected officials and community and business organizations that support southwest Detroit.

In 2009, state Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who represents the Woodmere-Lawndale-Springwells area, started the block club. That same year, the Southwest Detroit Business Association adapted its nuisance-abatement program for residents of the neighborhood.

On a log sheet originally intended to track activities at problem properties in southwest Detroit, neighbors could document everything from prostitution to drug dealing to noise and traffic issues. They could leave the sheets anonymously with community organizers that would go to Detroit police and the Sheriff's Office each month.

Dennis Nordmoe, executive director of Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, based in southwest Detroit, urged residents to get involved. "If you have a chronic crime problem, it will eventually take a neighborhood down," he said.

Several residents, some afraid, started compiling log sheets in a process that lasted about two years. From the reports came a clear picture of the players in Dr. Pill's empire -- runners, buyers, even people who would provide transportation to the neighborhood.

No one who compiled log sheets would talk to the Free Press on the record, and only two Lane Street residents would comment on the condition of anonymity. Dr. Pill may be in prison, they said, but his associates aren't.

At the beginning of 2010, as new Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon did meet and greets in southwest Detroit, he kept hearing about Dr. Pill. He became a priority.

"This guy was a very big problem in the community," Napoleon said. When police finally amassed enough information to take to the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, they asked the prosecutor not to make a deal.
For dealer, just business

For the havoc that Alkazoff caused, in the beginning, his neighbors got along with him. Born in Chicago and raised in Detroit and Dearborn, Alkazoff excelled at everything he did, but couldn't see how a 9-to-5 job would make him successful, a relative said through Alkazoff's lawyer, Samuel Konikow.

"Rocky was the Fonzi of the '60s in Dearborn," the family member said, an enthusiastic and loyal health nut who exercised every day and didn't drink or do any of the drugs he was convicted of selling. He was well-versed in Armenian history, the family member said, and was a clerk at the University of Michigan-Dearborn from May 2000 to January 2001 in the Armenian Studies Department.

But there were always drug arrests. He did two stints in federal prison, once between 1990 and 1999 for possession of heroin and firearms, and once for cocaine possession in 1988 and 1989. The 1988 conviction overlapped with state sentence that began in 1987. And in 2008, a year after his federal probation ended, came a Wayne County Sheriff's Office bust for prescription drugs.

Despite his record, despite the $250,000 police found in a safety-deposit box that suggests hundreds of thousands of pills sold over time, he was given probation.

"That is our frustration with law enforcement, with the system," Napoleon said, and part of the reason why police pushed the Prosecutor's Office not to make a deal in the August arrest.

Alkazoff's family member said he rationalized prescription pill sales: He was just redistributing them to people who needed them. The combination of personality, strength and seeming compassion for treating pain made Alkazoff a cult-like figure, a neighbor said. People would sell him their pills and turn around to buy food for their families. He supposedly paid for the funeral of a kid who was killed on the block, and forgave the young man who shot him several times in a fight.

"He did his business and still respected and took care of his neighbors," she said.
Hard-earned comeback

The duplex at 9210-9212 Lane St. is supposedly empty. Alkazoff's nephew owned it when Alkazoff moved in, and eventually, it was sold to a man who let it go into foreclosure.

Cole said that when it goes up for auction, he'll be there to bid on it, just to get it out of the drug-dealing system. But residents of the community are worried -- drug dealing is a chronic issue in southwest Detroit, and even though the big fish is gone, neighbors said the little fish are still dealing and squatting. Who knows whether Dr. Pill will return when he gets out of prison, neighbors said. He has done it before. Napoleon said it's an issue of police resources.

Even so, getting Dr. Pill off the streets is a victory, he said, and the teamwork that made it possible is what sets southwest Detroit apart.

"There's strong community groups. Strong business groups. Close contact with law enforcement, and folks that are willing to speak up," he said.

Castro agrees, but also sees a community with no choice. Folks had to speak up, he said, to save homes they can't always leave, and to preserve their way of life.

"My neighbors are spending the last years of their lives doing this," he said. "This neighborhood is coming back, but we're earning it."

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