and he's black, but Goff  is staying out of sight. A white boy would look quite out of place around here. The two other guys on the crew, Fisher and Washington, are across the street in the vestibule of the six-flat.  They're waiting for a coke dealer named Ramone.

It's been a long day.  They started this morning cramped up in this same van, watching crack deals go down near a grammar school way out on the West Side.  And that's what lead them here.  This elite team is with the school unit of the Chicago Police Department.  It's Goff's job to make some kind of dent, however small, in the gang and narcotics activity that is devouring the city's school system.  “To stop guns and narcotics around the school.  That's our specific assignment.  To get the drive-by shooters, to get the narcotics away from the schools.” 

Their target this morning was an area known as “K-town” about fifteen miles northwest of here. Goff had been tipped that the area around the Marconi Grammar School was flooded with crack.  He decided to drive a wedge in this operation. He got his team in position around 8:00 a.m. and what they saw over the next few hours would have left the average Chicagoan bug-eyed.  But none of it was news to Goff .  He sees this all the time.  A car pulls up, a couple of guys get out, each one with a dozen “Sixty-packs”—sixty  little vials of crack, about a fifth of a gram in each.  These guys are the wholesalers.  They round up their street dealers and front each one a single 60-pack.  In about ten or fifteen minutes, the street dealer will sell out his supply at ten bucks a pop.  He keeps $100, turns the other $500 over to the wholesaler, and gets another 60-pack.  If you hustle at this game, you can pocket $1000 an hour.

These street dealers, of course, are all quite young.  They have to be.  In Illinois it's a Class-X felony to sell drugs within 1000 yards of a school, a park or a church—which covers most of the city—and that carries a mandatory 6-to-60- year sentence.  But the maximum you can give a juvenile is 30 days in the Audy Home.  Common sense dictates that the dealers