The Cost of Drugs: Some youth decide to sell drugs for easy money

LIMA — He felt the end coming.

“Just for the simple fact that the money was coming in — it didn’t even make sense, how it was coming in so fast. In order for it to come in as fast as it was, I was real, real hot. You know what I mean?”

Donny Ardner Jr.’s first prison stay was three months, not enough to make an impression. He is now three years into a sentence that could last until 2013. He is eligible for parole in 2011.

Ardner, 37, started selling drugs when he was 13 or 14 years old. He liked to smoke weed, he said, and the habit cost more than his dad’s allowance provided.

He found the money easy, so easy.

The “sleep in, stay out all night, no nagging boss” easy money flowed for John Baker Jr., 35, and for Thomas Walton, 28, too.

All three men are serving prison time at Allen Correctional Institution for selling crack cocaine in Allen County.

The money is why they started. It’s why they kept selling. It’s why, even if they say otherwise now, they have a good chance of going back to selling.

If drug dealers seem to fly high for a time, they will almost certainly crash with a life of incarceration, violence or worse.

Clothes, cars, cash

Profitable dealers don’t use their product. It’s an early lesson learned: They see the effects of what they sell, even in family members who are addicted.

Ardner’s addiction was money. He had two cell phones because one couldn’t hold the numbers of all his buyers. He wouldn’t fish, wouldn’t go out with friends, for fear of missing a sale.

“A normal day was wild. It was just all day long, just selling drugs,” Ardner said. “Friends would say, ‘Hey let’s do this.’ Nah, I can’t do that. Going to the club for one hour, I might lose a potential $300, $400 or even a potential $1,000 at one quick bang, so I wasn’t risking that. It was the money. That’s what the life was.”

A dealer doesn’t start out wanting rivers of cash. He — nearly all are male — just wants a little something in his pocket. Chances are it’s empty, and no one has taught him how to aspire to something and work hard to achieve it.

Young men typically see dealing in their own homes or neighborhoods, said Marcel King, a counselor with Urban Minority Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Outreach Program who works with juvenile offenders reentering their communities.

“They’re trying to survive, make sure they can feed their family,” King said. “They learn how to do it. Instead of having a job, it’s the easiest way to make money, so why not do it? There’s no adult telling them not to.”

Kids with the best intentions come home after detention stays to literally nothing, King said: no food, no clothes, many times a single mother trying to raise several siblings.

Baker doesn’t remember at what age he first sold in the projects, after his parents separated and his mother moved when he was in the third grade.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “I was young. I had a rough life. It was right outside my doorstep, every day. It wasn’t hard to find. If you wanted trouble, you was gonna get it.”

Walton remembers watching friends and older guys with those three Cs: clothes, cars, cash.

“I was running around in cut-off shorts,” Walton said. “I just wanted a little clothes, shoes, stuff like that. At that age, that’s all I wanted.”

A teenager who sells can become a family breadwinner, which turns a parent-child relationship on its end and leads to a parent looking the other way because bills are paid, King said.

Dealers continue to cultivate positive feelings about what they do by “providing” for their own families. Ardner has three children, and Walton and Baker each have four.

Women and children

On the street, Baker lived with “my kids and my baby’s mother.”

“She knew what I was doing. I kept it away from my kids. I always kept another apartment across town,” Baker said. “I kept all that away ... I know I was providing.”

Sergeants Brian Leary and Matt Treglia, with the West Central Ohio Crime Task Force, a combined unit from Lima Police Department, Allen County Sheriff’s Office and other agencies, see things quite differently.

“They hide behind women and children,” Leary said.

The situation is a sad but common one King, Leary and Treglia said. Dealers coming from Fort Wayne or Detroit often pick up a girl in a club and use them.

Women may feel safer or simply not see anything wrong with taking in a drug dealer, particularly when they pay the bills, King said, because it’s become a community norm.

King equates it to the cycle of abuse, if a girl grows up watching someone hit her mother.

“When you ask her the question of would she ever put up with that, she may tell you no, but she’s seen Mom go through this, so when it happens to her, it’s OK; this is what it’s supposed to be like,” King said.

The relationships appear inherently dangerous and casual to people not in that life.

“It’s hard to accept that when you’re a person who works hard and is goal-minded,” King said. “You see it all the time. They’re trying to make ends meet. Financially, they can offer them a whole lot. ‘Why not? I won’t be suffering. My kids won’t be suffering’ (is what they think.)”

It doesn’t take much, Treglia said.

“They need attention, and they’ll accept a lot less,” Treglia said. “(Dealers) are not going to go looking for some professional person. They’re looking for someone who needs attention, needs a little money, might be addicted to drugs. They might have two or three kids, and she wants a male figure around for them.”

Walton said his girlfriend had an “attitude” about his selling.

“My girl, she knew I did it back in the day, so I said I sold weed,” said Walton, who sold crack cocaine. “I’m pretty much sure she knew. She wasn’t stupid.”

Walton believes a son who was living with him didn’t know about the dealing.

“He just knew he had shoes and clothes,” Walton said. “I provided for the family and saved — put the rest up for hard times.”

Rippin’ and runnin’

Hard time, as in prison. Prison is part of the business plan, Treglia and Leary said.

Short stretches of less than five years don’t deter selling, they said. Dealers with prison numbers tattooed on arms and necks actually gain street credibility. The first time in, a young man makes friends and learns the game. The experience is no longer scary. They also get educated, Treglia said, making drug cops’ jobs more difficult.

Baker sounds like a real estate agent or insurance salesman when talking about the money to be made.

“It depends on how much you assert yourself, put yourself out there,” Baker said. “Some people just do it on and off. ... That was my livelihood. I took it serious. I wanted everything I could get and everything I had coming.”

Baker ran through millions of dollars while selling. He had a Cadillac, a BMW, a few “old-school” cars. In six months, he put 60,000 miles on a new Dodge pickup.

“Typical day was always, you know, sleep late, rise late. Then, you know, basically I just ran around, constantly, from here to here to here, all day long,” Baker said. “Just running. Rippin’ and runnin’, a lot of miles.”

Walton kept his old-school cars in the garage. He liked having them but wouldn’t drive the conspicuous vehicles. Ardner smiles when he remembers his Lincoln town cars, both of them, and a Chevy Suburban.

Baker’s 15-year sentence resulted from a mistake he made. The mistake, in Baker’s mind, was not selling drugs. He caught a light stay, 25 days in the Allen County Jail. He fled, and police apprehended him two days later.

“I did not want to do them 25 days. It was the first of the month, you know. I had drugs to sell, and I was going to sell them,” Baker said. “I would have never been in this position right now if I just would have did what I had to do. So, never run. Take care of your business, right then and there.”

‘This ain’t a life’

As a prevention educator at UMADAOP, King struggles to get a kid to understand why he should work a regular, crummy job for minimum wage or stay in school. Thoughts about juvenile detention, even the county jail, range from meals and a warm roof to a vacation. A fast-food job, maybe walking or taking the bus to work, opening at 4 a.m. or closing Saturday nights, can’t compete with making a quick $500 in a couple of hours.

Some of the young men who manage to leave the lifestyle behind still get pulled back in, sometimes with a job loss.

“I tell them they don’t need to do that,” King said. “But they look at you and ask, ‘Are you going to feed my family? Make my car payment?’”

Walton reached the 10th grade. He is studying for his GED diploma and working in the ACI flooring program, learning how to carpet and tile. He did ceramic tile jobs on the street when he wasn’t selling and liked it.

“If I can get a job right when I get out, I think I can deal with that. I can go with that flow. I don’t think I could do the drugs no more,” Walton said.

Baker loved school, especially math and science. A thick man now, he played football in high school. He was already in trouble with drugs but still earned his GED diploma after not quite finishing his senior year. He worked factory jobs as a young man but says he “gave up.”

“I don’t know what it was. The money was out there; I knew it was faster,” Baker said. “Just had big dreams and tried to take the shortcut. Didn’t try to go the long route.”

With divorced parents, Ardner had a lot of freedom and ran the streets with the wrong crowd. Now, behind bars, he says, “This ain’t a life.” He says all the right things about what he wants for his children, about understanding what he can’t get back and what he needs to do when he gets out.

But, the way he answers two questions makes you wonder if he can make it happen.

Did he want to be anything when he was growing up — baseball player, firefighter?

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I never had nothing where I was like, ‘I want to be this,’” Ardner said. “Not really. Not really.”

What would he like to do when he leaves prison?

“I haven’t really gave it a whole lot of thought,” he said. “I know I don’t want to do the same thing I been doing.”