By the time he was 24 years old, Thomas Mickens, a high school dropout turned cocaine dealer, had amassed a fortune.
He owned a fleet of luxury cars, including a Rolls-Royce, and 20 pieces of real estate, including a $760,775 home in Dix Hills, L.I., a condominium in Diamond Bar, Calif., a sporting goods shop, a grocery store and a laundry. He relaxed on his 38-foot yacht berthed in California. He even had diamonds, a sapphire and an emerald implanted in his teeth.
But for Mr. Mickens, a 26-year-old who was sentenced last month to 35 years in Federal prison on drug, tax-evasion and money-laundering charges, there was more to some of the lavish spending than just a mindless pursuit of expensive trinkets. Law enforcement authorities say his case demonstrates the methods used by middle-level narcotics traffickers to launder the huge profits they earn from selling illegal drugs.
Unlike major international traffickers, who have recourse to off-shore corporations, Swiss bank accounts, and other sophisticated schemes, these dealers, sometimes with little education and few contacts outside their neighborhood, find ways - often with the connivance of legitimate businesses - to hide their assets.
''He probably did the best job of all dealers out here of getting his money into legitimate businesses,'' said Sgt. Michael McGuiness of the Queens Narcotics Division. ''Tommy's a smart kid.''
Mr. Mickens made most of his purchases in cash - sometimes carried in plastic shopping bags - and despite Federal laws that require the reporting of cash transactions involving more than $10,000, he had no trouble finding lawyers, merchants and real estate agents who would look the other way.
As head of a 50-person organization that controlled the flow of drugs in the Laurelton and Springfield Gardens neighborhoods near Kennedy Airport, Mr. Mickens was one of hundreds - no one knows the precise number - of dealers who in the decentralized world of the drug trade constitute its middle management, investigators say.
Often these are unschooled youths who, in their late teens or early 20's, displayed enough guts and guile to move up from the street corners where they sold crack to where the real money could be made: heading gangs distributing drugs in fairly well-defined territories.
''For every neighborhood in New York, there is someone like Tommy Mickens,'' said Special Agent Jim Triano, who heads the forfeiture and assets seizure team in the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ''The police generally know who they are.''
Kirby Heller, the assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted Mr. Mickens, said in an interview: ''The downfall of Tommy Mickens was that he was too extravagant in his life style. If he wasn't riding around in a Rolls and buying a fancy car every few months we still might have gotten him, but it would have been more difficult.''
He called himself Tony Montana, after the drug-trafficking protagonist played by Al Pacino in the 1983 film ''Scarface.'' And at his apex Mr. Mickens was, along with dealers like Lorenzo ''Fat Cat'' Nichols, Howard ''Pappy'' Mason, and Kenneth McGriff, one of the drug kingpins of Queens.
''He ran Merrick Road,'' said a detective who spoke on condition that he not be identified. ''On almost every corner you had about five guys who did crack, and it was all his organization.''
After his arrest in May, 1988, law-enforcement officials were able to trace and seize about $2.5 million in assets. But they said that that was only a fraction of what Mr. Mickens made selling cocaine and crack for four years.
An Internal Revenue Service investigator who spoke on condition that he not be identified estimated that another $1 million in assets, including five cars, had not been seized. ''We found a huge safe deposit box at a bank near his residence in Diamond Bar,'' he said. ''Inside were two large empty shoe boxes. You don't keep shoes in a safe deposit box.''
Claimed He Inherited A Trunk of Money
Mr. Mickens may have come by his free-spending ways naturally. He is the youngest child of Thomas Harris, a dapper numbers operator in Queens. How big a numbers operator Thomas Harris was an issue at Mr. Mickens's Federal trial. His attorney, Robert Simels, contended that Mr. Harris was a major figure in the policy racket and that when he died in 1974 he left his son a trunk full of money. This money, Mr. Simels said, bought the cars, houses, stores and yacht. The police dispute that.
By the time he was 19 years old, Mr. Mickens was peddling cocaine in fair-sized quantities. In October 1982 he sold half an ounce to an undercover detective, and eventually served a one-to-three year sentence.
Robert Russell, the detective who made that buy, recalled a clean-cut, personable, almost charming young man, unlike many dealers he has encountered. ''He didn't really smell of the streets,'' said Mr. Russell, now a detective with the Manhattan District Attorney's office. ''He hadn't picked up that evil, wary look.''
Even before his parole in June, 1984, Thomas Mickens began the spending spree that was to characterize his next four years, according to testimony at his Federal trial. In May 1984, while on a work-release program, he paid $28,146 in cash for a 1985 Cadillac Fleetwood. Two months later he bought a 1984 BMW, again for cash.
During the next four years he was to buy at least 18 more cars, including Jeeps, BMW's, Porsches, Saabs, two Mercedes-Benzes, a Ferrari, a Jaguar and a Rolls-Royce, sometimes trading in old models. He also bought a Bayliner Yacht for $141,467 and 20 pieces of property for which he paid more than $1.6 million, according to evidence admitted at the trial.
Turning Big Deals Into Little Smurfs
To hide the true ownership of his property, and to protect himself from liability, Mr. Mickens often set up corporations and listed property in their names, law-enforcement officials said. Sometimes with the help of a lawyer, he bought houses to convert his tainted funds into clean money, Ms. Heller said.
In February 1987, when Mr. Mickens bought a piece of property at 159-21 Grand Central Parkway in Queens for $184,766, the seller accepted $69,000 of the payment in cash and agreed to list the official sale price on the closing documents at around $116,000. The transaction, though not illegal, allowed Mr. Mickens to turn the cash into equity on the home. Even if he were to sell the house for exactly what he paid, he would recoup the $69,000 and have a ready explanation to the authorities on how he received it. ''It would be clean money,'' said the I.R.S. agent.
After Jan. 1, 1985, when the I.R.S. began to require reporting of cash transactions over $10,000, Mr. Mickens often used a tactic called ''Smurfing.'' The practice, breaking up a large cash transaction into smaller ones, takes its name from the elfin television cartoon characters, the Smurfs. Usually, payments are made using cashier's checks or money orders for less than $10,000.
For example, Mr. Mickens used 12 checks and money orders to pay the bulk of the cost of the $100,655 Rolls- Royce he bought in November 1986, financial records showed. He used 69 money orders to make payments totalling $51,700 for property on Hollis Avenue in Queens, and 159 money orders and bank checks for $90,000 in payments for property on Grand Central Parkway.
Cars in the Names Of Unwitting Relatives
Though the authorities had their eyes on Mr. Mickens, it was his love of fancy cars that gave them their break.
On Feb. 6, 1987, a New Jersey state trooper pulled over a Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL going 80 miles an hour in a 50 m.p.h. zone. At the wheel of the car was Anthony Jacobs, who the police said was Mr. Mickens's chief lieutenant. In the passenger seat was Mr. Mickens, though his drivers license identified him as Thomas Harris.
On the back seat was a bag containing $15,175 in small bills, on which drug-sniffing dogs found traces of cocaine. Mr. Mickens told the police that the car belonged to his aunt, Azzierene Young, and that they had bought it two days earlier from Martin Motorcar in Atlantic City. He said he put down a $500 cash deposit and was returning with his aunt's money to pay the balance.
The police later confirmed that a deposit had been placed on the Mercedes, and that it was registered to Ms. Young at 2228 Murray Avenue in Atlantic City. Investigating further, however, the police discovered three other cars - two more Mercedes and a Saab 9000T -that were bought at Martin Motorcar between March 1986 and January 1987 and registered at the same address. When the police interviewed Ms. Young, who turned out to be the mother of one of Mr. Mickens's associates, she denied knowing Mr. Mickens. She said she did not live in Atlantic City and had never been to Martin Motorcar.
What the police had stumbled on was Mr. Mickens's practice of purchasing luxury cars and registering under false names or in the names of friends or relatives. Checking motor vehicle registration lists, the police discovered other cars allegedly belonging to Mr. Mickens's mother, his sister and the father of his long-time girlfriend. Agents then tracked down the salesmen, who generally remembered the sales and said that Mr. Mickens had bought the cars. The cars indicated to investigators that Mr. Mickens's income was far beyond the $28,000 he said he made as an upholsterer.
Mr. Mickens tended to use checks or cash, often in small denominations. A dealer who sold him a Ferrari Mondial Cabriolet testified that Mr. Mickens brought in $35,250 in a plastic shopping bag. ''You know - what they give out in grocery stores,'' he said. Another testified that his own thumbs turned black from counting bills.
Yet according to the authorities, no car dealer called the police. ''Nobody,'' said Ms. Heller. ''Not a one.'' One, Glenn Shafer of Martin Motorcar, was prosecuted, investigators said, because he was particularly active in helping Mr. Mickens evade the reporting law.
''I asked every car dealer: 'What did you think? You had to know the money was dirty,' '' said the I.R.S. agent. ''To a man, they all said the same thing: 'I'm not a cop. My business is to sell cars.' ''
Drug investigators say the failure of merchants to report suspicious cash transactions hampers their fight against drug traffickers, though some officers take a fatalistic view.
''It takes a great deal of moral courage to say: 'I can't accept money because I'm suspicious of where it comes from,' '' Mr. Triano said. ''It just doesn't happen.''
To curb Smurfing, Congress in 1988 authorized the Treasury Department to require some banks and other financial institutions to report all cash transactions involving more than $3,000.
Mr. Mickens was convicted in June after a four-month trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. Under new Federal sentencing guidelines, he will have to spend at least 30 years in prison. He was also fined $1 million.
Still, in Laurelton, where the police say a group of Jamaicans is already vying to replace Mr. Mickens's operation, there appears to be nearly as much grudging admiration for his success as there is criticism for his line of work.
''He was 23, 24 years old, and he had it made,'' said Lindell Poole, 31, a custodian. ''He should have taken the money and walked away.''
nikkas couldnt even catch him sellin dope nikka. god damn nikka lmaooooo
