The Point of the Ruse

"You dirty drug mule. Running a community center in the name of social service but furthering your own little selfish agenda by selling strong drugs like LSD to kids! Typical slum-dweller!” the brutal police officer yelled at 17-year old Coleman.

Queens was never a good place to be born in, especially not in the early 2000s, the unfortunate time of birth of Coleman. Coleman was a lovely young teenage boy with excruciatingly cute looks. He had a chiseled face and a lovely prominent jawline, beautiful as if hand-drawn eyebrows and lovely supermodel eyes. His hands were hardened due to constant toil and hard work he did for his father’s small-scale construction firm and even though he had never been to a gym, his body was an exact copy of that of the statues of the Greek Gods we see in museums. His neighborhood though was not nearly as cute as him. This neighborhood I’m talking about was and still is one of the top choices for gangs to establish their headquarters in. This neighborhood was famous even in the inside circles of the biggest gangs as the Ku Klux Clan (yes, the white-supremacist group who the FBI and the CIA are crazy for) had established several branches in a pretty congested pattern here. I’m not saying that all the people in this neighborhood had gang-like behavior otherwise Coleman’s little community improvement project that we’re going to talk about would never have succeeded, but I am saying that the bad influence they faced from the gangs in their neighborhood or due to the harm that the gangs did to the normal households that wanted to work their way out of the neighborhood to keep those respective families “under control”, forced them to get involved in the nasty drug and other businesses the gangs dealt in. One thing to admire though was that the gangs never fought among themselves. They had this uncanny brotherhood among themselves as if they were “working for a common goal”. This eerie unity among the gangs worried the government in a very extensive manner.

The thing which made Coleman different was that he was originally not from this neighborhood. You might be wondering why on earth someone would ever move into this neighborhood from any other neighborhood because frankly speaking, any other neighborhood was better than this neighborhood. The answer is that Coleman’s father loved doing social service. He loved to see the surroundings prosper. He loved to see his city, as a whole, prosper. Yes, these kinds of people are still found in this world. The Colemans previously lived in upper Manhattan. The Coleman sincerely believed that life meant more than just slopping around on a couch and bingeing on shows all day. Also, the construction business that Coleman’s father owned needed a much bigger market. There were not many constructions to do in upper Manhattan except for fixing couches and attaching cupboards. So, his business was naturally stuttering and on the verge of bankruptcy because fixing cupboards didn’t earn much money. So one day he was travelling through a better alley in Queens for construction work when he noticed the aforementioned neighborhood with houses having broken roofs, broken drains and even a broken community center. The most important thing he noticed that that was no construction firms nearby. This was when this wonderful opportunity struck him. This area needed a construction firm and a broken community center meant an opportunity from the government for him. So he quickly rented a house because he thought, “This many repairs! It will take a whole lot amount of time.” the biggest mistake he ever made in his entire life. His family did not want to live separately from him, so they moved in with him. Only if they had seen the state of the neighborhood they were moving into. Coleman’s father moved his entire team working at the firm to the neighborhood and gave them the first floor and the second floor of the three-story building they rented.

Well, Coleman’s father was not wrong about one thing, they did get the Government job of fixing the community center but not for hosting parties and balls and stuff, but to serve as a welfare center for the people in the neighborhood, devastated by the ruthless gangs beating up on them, physically and mentally. But, to state the entire thing, Coleman’s father was not offered the job without any conditions. There was only one condition. Coleman’s family would have to arrange the staff that would run the community center. The Government apparently appointed a lot of people in past to run the community center but all of the previous major staff members were beaten up. Since then, nobody would take the job to run the community center. Well, for Coleman the problem wasn’t nearly as complicated enough. Coleman, himself was an ardent lover of community service. “Well, the problem is solved then!” the government official exclaimed happily. “The government will surely have a piece of mind now knowing that the neighborhood is in good hands.”

Little did Coleman know what he was in for. The first anomaly that Coleman wanted to address in this respective neighborhood was the drug dealing problem. He first analyzed the pattern in which the gang members chose the families who they would recruit for their drug operations. They were usually members of families whose senior members weren’t educated or resilient or resistive enough. He then systematically wrote down the names of families with a similar profile and knocked on the door literally one by one. It was not like he did not have help. His father’s construction workers were also kind of his friends. So, those construction workers also helped him a lot. After varieties of grades of interrogation most of the family members gave in and confessed. Coleman assured the family members that nothing would happen to them now that they have confessed. He then reported the names of the families and the non-intentional drug mules inside them to the police, specifically requesting that the police don’t arrest the members of the family because of the promise he made to them. The police abided by his advice and did not arrest the members of the families. They instead counseled the hypnotized teenagers turned drug mules and generously enrolled them in government schools which would educate them for free. Coleman did not only target the drug operations of the gangs but also targeted various torturing operations that the gangs carried out against the members of the neighborhood. He set up a hotline so that the members of the neighborhood could report any crime against themselves or their family members. The most remarkable thing to be noticed here is that Coleman never ever did take law into his hands. He always reported it do the respective authorities responsible for handling those kinds of crimes.

However, the gang members were not the kinds of people who would just stay silent and watch their entire base crumble. As expected, they retaliated. Coleman, being a ferocious but innocent person did not see the plot coming, and only realized afterwards that some of the last deliveries that some of the last remaining drug mules of the gangs did was in the name of Coleman. The police who absolutely adored Coleman was surprised just see his name in the recent drug busts they did. They instantly figured out that there was something much more malicious in the play. The police did not like the gang members pinning their nasty crimes on Coleman. Therefore, in order to flush out the last of the gang operators in the neighborhood, they decided to televise Coleman’s questioning. The police knew that the gang members were very ceremonious about their parties, as they held each and every one of them in their operations center. If they came to know that the police that Coleman was behind the crimes, they would undeniably and out of habit hold a party, a huge party in their operations center.

"You dirty drug mule. Running a community center in the name of social service but furthering your own little selfish agenda by selling strong drugs like LSD to kids! Typical slum-dweller!” the brutal police officer yelled at Coleman on camera which almost made Coleman tear up even though he knew that it was all a ruse. “Family fallen due to bankruptcy so you decide to come here and sell drugs to pull your family out of the crisis” the Police Officer yelled further. The staged questioning went on for further half an hour till the time even the neighbors were convinced that Coleman was guilty.

That half an hour of questioning that Coleman faced was the most humiliated he had ever been his entire life. But it was worth it. As expected, the gang members held a huge party which was surprisingly just beside the building Coleman’s family lived in. The noise coming from the building in which the party was being held led the police straight to the gang members, even the most senior ones. All of them were arrested on-spot. The neighborhood hailed Coleman as their hero. Here came a simple 17-year old boy with undeniably powerful grit and determination who changed the entire neighborhood  just with the help of some construction workers. He was the teenage boy who fought ruthless gangs to change a neighborhood of his city which, for decades, had been in the grasp of crime and was now crime-free.