Inside N.J.’s suburban drug mills, a grimy, lucrative business

Inside N.J.’s suburban drug mills, a grimy, lucrative business
Sunday December 22, 2013, 10:53 PM
BY  TOM MASHBERG AND REBECCA D. O’BRIEN
STAFF WRITERS
The Record

New Jersey drug agents have seen plenty of bizarre sights when busting heroin mills, the sunless, foul-smelling assembly lines where laborers spend hours on end grinding up raw heroin and spooning it into $5 street bags.

They’ve seen trash bags filled with coffee grinders that fried out after being used thousands of times to pulverize the drugs into sniffable powder; they’ve confiscated tens of thousands of tiny glassine envelopes stamped with cheeky brand names like Barack Obama, DEA and Lady Gaga; and they’ve seized Build-A-Bear stuffed animals sliced open at the belly to reveal freshly smuggled wads of the raw narcotic. They’ve walked in on middle-aged drug packagers clad only in underwear — to prevent stealing — and surgical masks — to keep them from getting high from the airborne powder.

But for local investigators, one case stands out: an April 2011 raid on a new suburban two-family home on Grandview Place in Fort Lee, a quiet green cul-de-sac near the George Washington Bridge, less than 1,000 feet from a school. There, investigators found a woman at a kitchen table, stamping glassine bags filled with heroin while her preschool-age daughter sat nearby eating cereal. She was among a dozen Dominican immigrants who had been bused in from the New York City overnight by minivan to work the 12-hour shifts needed to meet what cops call “a ravenous demand” for opiate drugs.

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