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As far back as the early 1900s, illegal drug markets developed around nightspots, pharmacies, and residences in the south-side Levee District, on North Clark Street, and in the skid row area on the Near West Side. Reformers pushed for a crackdown on users, but the police chief asked if they’d considered the repercussions, according to a paper by University of Florida historian Joseph Spillane. “Do you want us to drive them into the lake, as has been suggested?” the chief asked. “Do you want them driven to the resident districts? What do you want done with them? Isn’t it better to keep them corralled in one spot with their names and histories tabulated?’”
Starting in the 1920s, when Congress began passing laws to restrict the supply of heroin and other opiates, criminal smuggling organizations took over the supply chain. In 1951, federal officials declared that 54-year-old gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano (now infamous all over again as a character in Boardwalk Empire) was the chief narcotics smuggler into the United States, moving heroin from Asia or the Middle East to Italy and then stateside. In Chicago the “dope” business was centered in low-rent hotels on the Near West Side and in East Garfield Park.
The drugs weren’t sold on the street in an open marketplace then. Buyers would call their dealers to arrange a purchase, then go to a designated building, exchange a code, and make the sale through a slit in the door. Williamson would man the door of his family’s heroin flat for eight-hour shifts. To keep the business running, police were paid off regularly.
Williamson says he still remembers the first time he saw dealers standing on the corner. “The only thing they didn’t have was a sign saying ‘Drugs for sale,’” he says. “There was no wait. It was everywhere.”
