Heroin

The title for "High Art" is a macabre sort of pun. The movie is about people in the Manhattan art world who are high on dope most of the time. Or low on dope, as is the case here. The movie stars Ally Sheedy as a reclusive photographer, a lesbian who lives with a German actress (Patricia Clarkson) in a New York apartment that is a gathering place for people who like to snort heroin, then slouch into a stupor. Sheedy is jolted from her hermitlike existence by a reclusive young admiring magazine editor (Radha Mitchell)

For more than a year, a drug ring peddled $3.75 million worth of heroin in a Kensington neighborhood. Yesterday, the suspected suppliers and dealers got busted. Federal, state and local agents swooped down with indictments and arrest warrants around the neighborhood of A and Somerset streets. Altogether, 27 were indicted by a federal grand jury. By noon, all but 10 were in custody. "This is not the arrest of one dealer," U.S. Attorney Michael R. Stiles said at a press conference.

In his hot bedroom on North Fourth Street, Tomas "June" Vasquez lay naked and sweating just after dawn yesterday. A shotgun lay under his bed, but he did not bother to retrieve it. As Vasquez awakened, narcotics agents burst into the bedroom and roused him from his slumber. They did not have to break down the door of the brick rowhouse. They merely knocked, and his wife let them in. It was a surprisingly ginger arrest for a man labeled the number-one target of what the U.S. Attorney's office called the largest single federal narcotics roundup ever in Philadelphia.

Gerald J. Kauffmann, 39, was bound over for trial last week on charges of possession and sale of controlled substances during a preliminary hearing before District Justice James W. Speers. The case of Kauffmann, a resident of the 2000 block of Spring Mill Road in Whitemarsh, goes to Montgomery County Court. Similar charges against Kauffmann's wife Donna, 30, and brother-in-law, Ronald, 34, both of the same address, were dismissed during the proceeding Thursday after four witnesses failed to appear.

For six days, Roland "Pops" Bartlett behaved in a manner befitting a monarch. Bartlett, long thought to be an "untouchable" kingpin in the drug world, remained calm and businesslike as he listened to former top aides Darryl Cherry, Lorenzo Werts and others testify against him in his trial in U.S. District Court. Wearing smoked aviator glasses and impeccably tailored conservative business suits, Bartlett heard how he wielded violent power in running the "most lucrative, long-running, undetected" heroin empire, which he called "The Family," in North Philadelphia, Germantown and nearby counties.

WCAU-AM (1210) sports director Steve Fredericks, an outspoken critic of drug use, was released on his own recognizance yesterday after being charged with buying a $20 bag of heroin Sunday night in lower Kensington. Fredericks, 49, of Havertown, whose real name is Stephen Oxman, was released yesterday afternoon from Philadelphia police headquarters, where he was arraigned late Sunday. A hearing has been scheduled for Nov. 14. Reached at home yesterday, Fredericks referred all questions to the CBS- owned station.

A Camden city man was caught trying to smuggle 10 bags of heroin concealed in a paperback book to an inmate at the Camden County Jail, authorities said yesterday. Joseph Czarnecki, 19, of the 2000 block of Howell Street, was arrested Wednesday and charged with possession of heroin and possession with intent to distribute. He was being held in the Camden County Jail yesterday after failing to post $7,500 bail. Sgt. Philip J. Dollarton, a spokesman for Camden County Sheriff William J. Simon, said that at 6 p.m., Czarnecki walked up to the visitors' desk and presented a corrections officer with a set of long underwear and a copy of Mario Puzo's novel The Fourth K for delivery to an inmate.

North Philadelphia restaurateur Pedro Jiminez yesterday was sentenced to 14 years in prison, without chance of parole, by U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr., for trafficking in heroin. Jiminez, 32, a Dominican national, ran El Esfuerzo, a popular neighborhood restaurant on Lehigh Avenue, his lawyer said. He was convicted by a jury in September of being part of a group that supplied more than 2.2 pounds of heroin to dealers in the area of 2nd Street and Lehigh Avenue, a neighborhood targeted for drug sweeps in Operation Sunrise.

ST. LOUIS - With heroin becoming cheaper than a six-pack and as easy to obtain as pot, police and prosecutors are turning to more aggressive tactics against the drug, dusting off little-used laws to seek murder charges against suspected dealers and provide for longer prison sentences. Angry suburban parents are joining the effort, too. They've organized antidrug rallies and founded organizations to spread the word about heroin in affluent areas where it is usually considered a distant, unlikely threat.

Federal drug enforcement agents have charged two New York men with attempting to smuggle $500,000 worth of heroin to three drug rings operating in Camden. The suspects, Paul Rivera, 39, of the 1500 block of Fulton Avenue in the Bronx, and Jorge L. Agudelo, 36, of Elmhurst, were arrested late last week on drug distribution charges. Rivera posted $500,000 bail and was released yesterday after a brief hearing in U.S. District Court in Camden. Agudelo was denied bail. The arrests capped a five-week investigation of the two men, Detective Fred Davis of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said yesterday.

ST. LOUIS - With heroin becoming cheaper than a six-pack and as easy to obtain as pot, police and prosecutors are turning to more aggressive tactics against the drug, dusting off little-used laws to seek murder charges against suspected dealers and provide for longer prison sentences. Angry suburban parents are joining the effort, too. They've organized antidrug rallies and founded organizations to spread the word about heroin in affluent areas where it is usually considered a distant, unlikely threat.

Police are searching for a North Philadelphia couple, charged with murder in the cocaine and heroin overdose of an infant. Milton Galarza-Rojas was 9-months-old when he was rushed July 29 to St. Christopher's Hospital. Medics had responded to a residence on the 4500 block of N. 7th Street where a caller had reported a baby was having difficulty breathing, police said. The child was not breathing when, at 2:36 a.m., medics arrived. Milton was dead on arrival, police said.

Little girls need role models. So do grown women. Instead, they get characters like Katniss Everdeen. Katniss, in case you haven't heard, is the bow-and-arrow-wielding teenage heroine of the film The Hunger Games, based on a best-selling young-adult trilogy that is deeply adored by teenage girls and substantially older women. In cultural terms, it's the successor to the Twilight series of vampire romances. By most accounts, Katniss is the opposite of Bella, the protagonist of Twilight.

I JUST GOT an early birthday present. Last Tuesday, while perusing the latest edition of Philadelphia Magazine , I happened upon a list of the "31 People We Wish Would Just Shut Up. " The "we" in question were the editors, of course. And there, at No. 10, was yours truly. My first reaction was: Really? Out of all the annoying people in this city, I made the final cut? (It wasn't actually a surprise. There is a petition to have my columns axed from the Daily News as well.

After commuters in four states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, left their vehicles at park and ride lots or train stations, thieves stole the cars' catalytic converters, took them to Delaware, then sold parts to scrap yards in Philadelphia to fuel heroin habits, authorities say. The U.S. Attorney's Office announced charges Thursday against James "Cat Man Jim" Sepulveda, 31, of Wilmington. If convicted, Sepulveda faces a maximum of 45 years in prison for a list of offenses that includes conspiracy and interstate transportation of stolen property.

A year ago Thursday, when he left the family's Blackwood townhouse for outpatient addiction treatment, Sal Marchese showed no sign that heroin was again taking over his life. Police found him dead of an overdose at 2 the next morning, parked outside the Northgate 1 high-rise apartments in Camden. He was 26. "We don't know, when he walked out the door that night, whether he knew he was going to go use heroin," Patty DiRenzo says. "It's heartbreaking," says her daughter, Blake Marchese.

NEW YORK - In many ways, the reputed drug dealers on Grandview Place were good neighbors. Their two-story, redbrick home in the suburb of Fort Lee, N.J., looked perfectly ordinary with its white trim, gabled porch, and manicured shrubbery. Neither noise nor sketchy visitors was an issue, authorities say. The only sign that something was amiss was the rented van that would disappear into a lower-level garage each day. The driver's job: To deliver immigrant workers from the city to package heroin in thousands of glassine envelopes stamped with catchy logos like "LeBron James" and "Roger Dat. " The Fort Lee operation represented the more serene face of the thriving heroin trade in the New York area, according to the Manhattan-based narcotics investigators who shut it down.

In a sentence that left him stunned and saying he regretted pleading guilty, Kensington drug dealer Joseph McGrath was sentenced today to 20 to 40 years in prison for crimes that included a contract killing recorded on a prison phone call. "Put yourself in the place of your victims and if you can feel the way these victims felt," Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Karen Shreeves-Johns told McGrath as she sentenced him for stomping and critically injuring a man over a $50 drug debt, and ordering the death of a female drug customer he believed helped get him arrested.

FORMER Philadelphia police Officer Mark Williams felt a "great responsibility" to make large child-support payments, his attorney said in a court filing, offering a rationale for his client's criminal misdeeds. Williams, 28, was convicted by a jury in March in a plot to steal 300 grams of heroin and resell it for cash, and was sentenced yesterday to 16 years in federal prison. Two other ex-Philly cops convicted in the case - James Venziale, 32, and Robert Snyder, 31 - were sentenced in May to 3 1/2 and 13 years behind bars, respectively.

Mark Williams, a former Philadelphia police officer convicted by a jury in March in a plot to steal 300 grams of heroin and resell it for cash, was sentenced Thursday to more than 16 years in federal prison. Williams was found guilty by a jury on March 4 of conspiracy to distribute heroin, distribution of heroin, attempted robbery, using a firearm in relation to a violent crime, and related offenses. Two other former Philadelphia police officers convicted in the case - James Venziale, 32, and Robert Snyder, 31 - were sentenced in May, Veneziale to 31/2 years behind bars and Snyder to 13. Federal prosecutors said "pure greed" was the motivating factor for Williams.