Drug Trade Traps Hotel’s Poor, Elderly
Bob Ross goes through 2-1/2 cans of pepper spray a week fending off the creeps who prowl Spokane’s Crack Alley.
Ross, 54, is the security man at the Alberta Hotel, 172 1/2 S. Madison, in the heart of the city’s rock cocaine traffic.
He’s on call 24 hours a day, protecting the Alberta’s low-income tenants from the dealers, addicts, hookers and gang-bangers who have turned Madison Street into a dope-dealing flea market.
The 40-some residents are the big losers here, says Ross. Too poor to move. Many of them elderly. They live under siege, terrified to venture outside once the sun goes down and the bloodsuckers take over.
This is a nasty, crime-filled slice of Spokane most solid citizens would be shocked to see.
On a recent evening, Ross invited me into his second-floor apartment to watch the street action below. “Better’n color TV,” Ross says dryly, sipping a cold Budweiser as we sit in the dark and gaze out his window.
A deal goes down in front of Luminaria, the lighting fixture business north of the Alberta. A grim-looking prostitute with straight blond hair saunters up to a big-shouldered dealer in a gold rugby shirt.
The transaction has the smooth, practiced timing of a magic trick. She hands him the cash. He gives her a small baggie. She disappears into an alley.
Smoking a $20 crack nugget will buy her maybe 20 minutes of relief from one of the worst addictions imaginable.
“It’s pitiful,” says Ross. “I’ve seen ‘em go through $200 to $300 worth of food stamps in one night for rock.”
The welfare checks arrive at the first of the month. Ross says that’s when as many as 40 dealers and users turn the courtyard between the Alberta and Luminaria into a boisterous party that lasts past dawn.
Tired, exasperated residents fight back from their rooms, hurling eggs and water balloons like grenades from their windows to scatter the crowd.
If the wind is just right, Ross will fire a long blast of his trusty pepper spray out his window as if it were a can of Raid. As the chemical irritant drifts down, “they start rubbing their eyes and wondering what’s going on,” he says. “It usually gets rid of them. For a little while.”
My host doesn’t look the part of an enforcer. He’s a bit stoop-shouldered and on the small side. His face, framed by a scraggly brown beard, is as weathered and lined as a traveling evangelist’s Bible.
Looks are deceiving. This man with the slow Oklahoma drawl is as hard as drop-forged steel, toughened by years of laboring on fishing boats, logging camps, underground mines and cattle ranches.
“He’s saved my life,” says Hal King, a retired accountant who began managing the Alberta two years ago as a favor to the building’s owner, Dong Ha.
King is public enemy No. 1 to the Madison Street crackheads. Call him fearless or foolhardy, but he delights in getting in their faces, often matching the punks obscenity for obscenity, slur for slur.
The price for such a hard line has been high. King, 54, has had four heart attacks that he blames on the stress. He’s been beaten up, strangled and had guns pulled on him at least six times.
“If he went out there now he wouldn’t make it to the end of the block,” says Ross. “They hate him that bad.”
Rick Albin, the area’s police resource officer, worries that King will be hurt if he doesn’t leave.
“He runs an extremely clean place and is really looking out for his tenants,” says Albin, who coincidentally knew King when they both lived in California. “He’s stepped on too many toes.”
King’s wife died in 1987. He makes a joke out of how he left his home on upscale Country Homes Boulevard to come live in a war zone.
But he’s not leaving, he says, taking a deep drag on a cigarette. I guess if you live in the Alberta, lung cancer is the least of your worries.
“I have a sense of accomplishment,” says King, a bald man with a pleasant round face. A missing front tooth adds an endearing quality to his wide smile. “There are some good people living here and I’ve made this place reasonably safe and clean.”
And so the cruel beat goes on in Crack Alley, night after night, where the view from Bob Ross’ apartment is prime time.
“I think it’s hopeless,” says the security man. “That stuff is so addictive. There’s so much money in it. Chasing that next rock. That’s the name of the game down there.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo