ROCK SOLID

Investigation and pursuit by N.Y.C. cops Bose and Barchiesi of a big-time coke dealer—as told to paperback novelist Dolph LeMoult (co-author, Blood Tide, 1991, etc.). On March 27, 1988, Alejandro Lopez, guarded by snarling pit bulls on his Puerto Rican estate, was run to ground by NYPD officers Bose and Barchiesi, ending a three-year manhunt that had begun with their arrest of a small-time pusher outside a building in Manhattan's Alphabet City. Word on the street was that ``The Rock,'' as the building was called, was the place to buy Rock Solid, Lopez's brand of cocaine. The two cops found that The Rock yielded numerous beatings, stabbings, shootings, and homicides: Lopez's name was spoken only in whispers by terrified neighborhood people. Often, queues of men and women—some with small children in tow—stretched around the block. Inside The Rock were dealing rooms with iron-grilled wickets, from which underlings, with coke on the counter and MAC-10 machine guns below, served customers. Escape hatches in the secure rooms led to tunnels and steel security doors. Bose and Barchiesi became increasingly obsessed with shutting down this operation (going on under the nose of the 9th Precinct) and soon zeroed in on Lopez, an incredibly elusive multimillionaire who nevertheless delivered his own product to his store in ``I Love New York'' shopping bags. How could such a Mordred in his castle stronghold, with his evil fiefdom, be allowed to exist six blocks from a precinct house? The authors indict a frozen bureaucracy (when they took urgent extradition papers to Commissioner Ward's office, they were stopped by a clerk who told them that the Commissioner did not sign documents on computer paper—only those on rag bond), as well as by ``the unwillingness of law enforcement agencies to enter buildings, and their obsessive fear of violating citizens' rights.'' As contemporary as it comes; the real deal on the inner-city drug business. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—some grisly.)