One drug ring operated in Washington Square Park, one of the oldest and most infamous narcotics hubs in New York, the authorities said. The other sold its pills using TikTok, Snapchat and Telegram.
Their products — including crack cocaine and fentanyl-laced pills — killed five people, federal authorities in Manhattan said on Thursday while announcing a pair of indictments against separate drug dealing groups. Among the overdose victims were Robert De Niro’s grandson and a daughter of Chris Stein, a founder of the pop group Blondie.
Taken together, the indictments were aimed at holding dealers responsible for a few of the thousands of drug deaths in New York. Overdoses were responsible for 3,000 deaths in 2023 alone, prosecutors said, and many of the victims were teenagers.
The first indictment charged 19 people who prosecutors said ran a year-round drug market in the park, distributing millions of doses of fentanyl, heroin and crack.
“Washington Square Park, the heart of Greenwich Village, has for way too long been a highly visible symbol of the drug crisis in this city,” Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference.
The indictment said that in the past five years, the police and emergency medical personnel responded to more than 65 reports of apparent drug overdoses in the park and nearby neighborhoods. Prosecutors said the park, with its arch, three playgrounds and chess tables, had become littered with used syringes, needles and drug packaging.
In one six-month span last year, the indictment said, two people died of overdoses caused by drugs sold in the park, including a 43-year-old who had been homeless and had lived in the park for years, and an 18-year-old just days past graduating from high school in Aspen, Colo. The teenager had come to New York City for a prestigious theater internship.
The 18-year-old was found dead in a Manhattan apartment on June 4, 2024. Ripped-up pieces of purple bags that later tested positive for fentanyl, its analogues and heroin lay on a table in a bedroom, along with other drug paraphernalia, according to the indictment.
The 43-year-old overdose victim was found on a sidewalk that November, next to a needle, bags of crack cocaine and empty bags that bore the markings of the groups accused of selling drugs inside the park, the indictment said.
Washington Square Park has been an oasis for protest movements and street artists in Lower Manhattan. In good weather, the park plays host to a daylong spectacle of music, crowds and vendors, some of whose wares are illegal. Drug users openly smoke and inject themselves in more obscure corners of the expansive space.
Prosecutors said the park’s drug network operated as a sophisticated collective to distribute opioids, including by color-coding packages, tipping members off to the presence of law enforcement and sharing workers.
The park indictment charges all 19 defendants with conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death. There would have been more overdoses, prosecutors said, if not for advocacy groups providing Narcan to users.
The defendants, according to the indictment, have collectively been arrested at least 80 times for drug-related offenses since 2020.
The network primarily consisted of two groups, prosecutors said, including a subset of the Bloods gang and a team of dealers led by John Livigni, a man who has dealt drugs in the park for around 25 years.
The Bloods and Mr. Livigni’s group had an agreement not to sell in each other’s territories — which included different subway stations — and they sold their drugs at different prices. Many of the Bloods dealers were also customers, prosecutors said, while Mr. Livigni relied on a team of managers who worked in shifts.
Mr. Livigni appeared in court on Thursday and pleaded not guilty. A lawyer for Mr. Livigni, Elena Fast, declined to comment on the charges.
The second indictment concerned the overdose deaths of three 19-year-olds, which it said were brought about by drugs from a separate criminal network that distributed thousands of counterfeit opioid pills laced with fentanyl in 2023.
In recent years, many overdoses have been caused by fentanyl pills bought on social media. The defendants in the second indictment used social media and apps like TikTok, Telegram and Snapchat to promote the fentanyl pills, according to prosecutors. Some included xylazine, a tranquilizer often simply referred to as “tranq.” It is commonly used to sedate horses and cows.
Another victim was Mr. De Niro’s grandson, Leandro De Niro-Rodriguez, who was 19 when he died on July 2, 2023.
Another was Akira Stein, the daughter of Mr. Stein, who died May 30, 2023, in her family’s apartment in downtown Manhattan. The indictment says that the defendants had been selling her fentanyl pills since the previous December, and that she had suffered several overdoses in the months before the one that killed her.
On Dec. 2, 2022, the indictment said, a defendant texted Ms. Stein to make arrangements to stop by and sell her pills, and they discussed how he could discreetly pass them to her so that her younger sister, who would be present, would not notice.
The next day, Ms. Stein texted the seller to say that she had overdosed on the pills he had sold her.
“like I barely did anything and I know my tolerance,” she wrote. She apologized to him.
“Don’t say sorry,” he responded.
“just warn customers,” she added, telling him that his batch “might be extra strong.”
Frank A. Tarentino III, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Division, said, “These cases remind us that every overdose death and poisoning is not just a statistic.”
“It’s a son, a daughter, a friend, a promise for the future that has been cut short,” he said.
On Thursday morning, Washington Square Park was comparatively clean and quiet, though it was a chilly and rainy day. The park’s west side, where prosecutors say many transactions took place, was empty of people other than those rushing through with umbrellas.
When Mohammed Alam, 61, started working out of a newsstand on a corner of the park more than 24 years ago, vendors used to sell books from tables they had set up down Sixth Avenue, he said. In recent years, he said he had noticed more people either using or selling drugs on his block.
Mr. Alam recounted seeing some of the dealers selling drugs just by his newsstand. One man, standing to the side, would crumple a small piece of paper containing drugs and toss them on the ground, away from him. Then, the buyer would pick up the crumpled paper, walk over to another person and hand them cash.
Mr. Alam worried that the drug dealing had hurt businesses on his block, and said that he had placed a camera to “scare” one of the dealers away.
“I see so many,” Mr. Alam said. “Sometimes they move, for half an hour, and then they come back.”
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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