Andy Furillo

Andy Furillo, a freckle-faced police beat reporter hired away from the smaller Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, wrote the first story about crack to appear in the national press. Published on November 25, 1984 - one day before the DEA arrested Jairo Meneses and Renato Peña Cabrera in San Francisco. The story ran in the Los Angeles Times under the headline "South Central Cocaine Sales Explode into $25 Rocks."¹

Furillo discovered the story after officers at South Central Los Angeles police stations mentioned a flood of cocaine in the ghettos. He hit the streets, knocked on doors, and confirmed the officers' accounts. He found a gigantic, wide-open cocaine market flourishing in the poorest section of Los Angeles that no mainstream media outlet had covered.¹

Story Impact

Furillo's scoop began: "Police say hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men, most of them gang members, are getting rich off the cocaine trafficking that has swept through L.A.'s black community in the past 18 months." He described the rock house phenomenon and quoted police as saying several hundred rock houses operated in South Central at that time. His story accurately predicted that crack was a threat that could "destroy South Central Los Angeles for years to come."¹

The Times buried the story inside the paper, but it prompted an embarrassed LAPD to launch raids on several dozen rock houses shortly afterward. On December 13, a diversionary explosion police set off during a raid on a West Sixtieth Street rock house killed a woman who happened to be walking by.¹

Gang Power Shift

Furillo's story identified street gangs as the prime beneficiaries of the new crack trade and presciently predicted that crack would dramatically alter the power structure on the city's streets by providing gangs with money. He quoted Tom Garrison, director of field operations for the Community Youth Gang Services Project: "They've always had the numbers and the firepower, but now they've got the economic power too."¹

Aftermath

Furillo pressed his editors at the Times for permission to do more stories on crack, but they showed little interest. He eventually quit the paper in disgust and returned to the Herald-Examiner, where he continued producing ground-level reporting on crack's impact on inner-city residents.¹

His story also prompted the first scientific study of the early L.A. crack market by USC sociologists Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson in early 1985, and caught the attention of the Washington Post's L.A. bureau chief, Jay Matthews, who wrote a follow-up story in December 1984 describing rock cocaine as "a marketing breakthrough that furnishes this middle-class drug to the city's poorest neighborhoods."¹