Heroin Takes Over a House, and Mom

Staten Island, New York: Darkness fell on Wood Court on Staten Island, and they came. Footfalls on the gravel path, their crunch-crunch-crunch setting dogs barking, babies wailing, parents peering out windows, night after night.

"Cars pulling in and out," said one neighbor who, still concerned for his family's safety, declined to give his name. "Fifteen, 20 minutes, then out. Fifteen, 20 minutes, then out." Cars idled on the corner, rock music thumping.

The strangers were headed to 19 Wood Court. A family had moved there in 2009. A father, a mother and three teenagers: two girls and a boy.

Soon, the husband was gone. The children, gone. The woman stayed - or more accurately, a jittery version of the busy, gregarious housewife with the day job and the quick laugh.

And she was not alone. All sorts of people seemed to be coming and going now, and living there. And dogs.

"Two pit bulls," the neighbor said. "One of them almost attacked my father-in-law. They used to walk them off the leash."

The condo is one of several that back up to one another, a gravel path alley in between. Strangers, lost, stumbled into the wrong yards.

"All white," one neighbor, John Barclay, said. "They blended into the neighborhood."

"People were coming out of the alleys, throwing up," a third neighbor said. "They were finding needles in there."

After months of this - after community meetings, complaints to the police and countless calls to 311 - the police raided the home on June 5. Officers arrived in full armor. Children playing outside gawked at the battering ram. The police arrested the woman inside, Laurie Sperring.

By the time she and her boyfriend were led to a police vehicle in handcuffs, neighbors had gathered out front, and they clapped.

A mother told her young children, "They're bad people, and that's why you should stay away from drugs."

Sperring's fall from life as a suburban mom and a wife played out with dizzying speed. By the end, her modest condominium was a locus for a borough's ravenous heroin demand. Dealers set up there; Staten Island's bands of addicts, linked by word of mouth and cellphone connections, descended en masse; the police followed.

"What possessed me? I don't know," Sperring, now 45, said in one of several interviews from the Rikers Island jail complex. She was describing the first time she took heroin. "I just wanted to see what it was like. Which is stupid, I know."

She openly acknowledges that after that first experience, she and others flooded her quiet corner of Staten Island with drugs and interloping addicts. She also suggested, as others have in recent months, that heroin, once thought of as a scourge of days past, is back, everywhere. Those touched by her descent were also remarkably open to recalling it - her ex-husband, the police officers who took her in, even her daughter.

The drug washed over the borough in the wake of law enforcement crackdowns on painkillers, replacing oxycodone as the intoxicant of choice for the bored and restless. Elected officials characterized heroin's hold on Staten Island as an epidemic, with the borough second only to the Bronx in per capita deaths from heroin overdoses.

To witness what happened in 19 Wood Court, to grasp the mix of temptation, chance and dark opportunity that took place there, is to see how heroin addiction can metastasize and ruin the many lives it touches. The drug has been found in all walks of life on the island, but Sperring's addiction offers a vivid, telling example of the blight, one that drove away her family and poisoned her neighborhood.

"People have this misconception that you have to look a certain way," she said. "There's not a face of heroin."

'All the Homes Are Beautiful'

Life for Sperring began on Staten Island. She dropped out of high school and, aimless, moved to Florida, married and had a daughter. But in 1999, with that marriage over, Sperring with her daughter, Christina, 5 at the time, returned to Staten Island, finding work with her aunt and uncle. She met a man, Steven Sperring, a technician for Verizon.

He was as even-tempered and deliberate as she was brassy and spontaneous, but the two clicked. He was divorced with a teenage son and daughter. They married in 2003, living for a time in Arden Heights. But he was sick of renting. He came across a condominium for sale in Rossville.

Wood Court is part of a winding complex of condominiums built alongside a hilly park in the 1980s, its pastoral aspirations announced in the naming of the streets within: Balsam Place, Larch Court, Berry Court. There is a pool and a clubhouse. Middle-class families, including several police officers, live in and around the development alongside Rossville Avenue.

"All the homes are beautiful, the landscape was kept nice," said Steven Sperring, 48.

They were warmly received, he said, with neighbors dropping by to introduce themselves. They threw parties with their friends, and sat in the little backyard that opened up to the gravel alley. A fence at the end of the alley had been built years earlier, to deter thieves from taking lawn furniture, but in truth, crime was practically nonexistent.

Life was good for the Sperrings. But Laurie Sperring's daughter, Christina Potter, was 15, and she saw things.

"Growing up, me and my sister found, like, cocaine residue," she said. "We weren't stupid."

Sperring called her relationship to cocaine "recreational." It was not, looking back, a big deal to anyone in the home.

That changed in a day.

Loss of a Mother Figure

Sperring's aunt and uncle, Marian and Arthur Bellucci, owned a home health care agency and gave Sperring a job. She visited elderly clients on the island, helping out. Her aunt was more than an employer. She was a mother figure and a friend and a daily coffee companion.

On Oct. 13, 2010, unimaginable tragedy struck the family. The bodies of Marian and Arthur Bellucci were found, stabbed to death in their home. Their son, Eric, with a history of schizophrenia and violent outbursts, had booked and boarded a flight to Israel earlier that day. He was later arrested and charged in his parents' murders. He has been repeatedly deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial.

The deaths left Sperring reeling. "Everyone went back to their normal lives," she said, "and I was like, 'How could you do that? My aunt's not here anymore.'

"I went crazy," she added. "I was drinking, getting high."

She sold her jewelry for money to buy cocaine. When that was gone, she turned to her daughter's. "She stole my tennis bracelet," Potter said. It was engraved, a gift from her mother.

She ran up credit card charges. She went to a P.C. Richard & Sons electronics store with her cocaine dealer and let him pick out a new computer and a camcorder for himself in exchange for $500 or so worth of drugs.

Her husband found out. "That's when the fighting started," Steven Sperring said.

She screamed at him. She threw dishes. He moved out of the bedroom and into the basement.

"She would just come down for hours on end and berate me," he said.

She found a source of money in the form of an elderly man she looked after, stealing from him. She was arrested and jailed for a short period, then released, a cycle that repeated over and over in 2011 and 2012. She opened a credit card behind her husband's back, hiding the statements. She sold her own Xanax. She hit up the neighbors.

"She started going around, asking, 'Can I borrow 10 bucks?'" one of them, Mark Ponemon, 61, recalled.

By 2012, everyone had had enough.

"I just couldn't take it anymore," Steven Sperring said. "I was going to have a nervous breakdown."

He left, along with the three children.

"I'm still dazed," he said. "To think about how quick it happened."

First Taste of Heroin

Left alone, Sperring accelerated her descent into crime and addiction.

By 2013, to support her crack habit, she had fallen in with an identity-theft ring. Her role was to use counterfeit credit cards with stolen numbers to buy iPhones at retail stores. She turned them over to her boss, who paid her, say, $100 for her troubles. She was arrested outside a Best Buy in March 2013 and charged with identity theft, and, after pleading guilty, was sent to the women's jail dorm at Rikers Island to begin serving what turned into an eight-month sentence.

The time at Rikers helped her clean up, and she looked forward to her release in November 2013. She recalled a phone conversation she had had with her daughter.

"She said, 'Mom, be careful when you come home because heroin is really big on Staten Island,'" Sperring recalled.

Heroin?

"Christina," Sperring replied, "Mommy would never do that."

She came home to Wood Court in November 2013. Only a bed remained of her old life; Steven Sperring had cleaned out the place. But he let her stay there, rent-free; he filed for divorce but the couple remained cordial while she was in jail.

Then another former Rikers inmate, named Ashley, tracked down Sperring and came to Wood Court to visit her in February.

"She goes, 'Do you want to come to this guy Eric's house?'" Sperring said. "She wanted to get high." Sperring feared relapsing into her cocaine habit, but felt safe going with Ashley: In this house, the drug was heroin. "I wasn't going to do heroin," she said.

Eric's house, eight miles away on Jefferson Avenue, was bare inside. A couch, a little table, an empty refrigerator. There were six or seven guys sitting around. Ashley and Eric, a dealer who looked to be in his 50s, went back to a bedroom to get high. Sperring stayed in the living room. Then the women left.

No harm done.

Sperring accompanied Ashley on another visit to Eric's house soon after, in March. This time, there were two new faces, a father and a son of high-school age. There was a woman there, too, some kind of dancer. Sperring learned that the father and son were living in Eric's living room.

The father was Christian Patterson, 38. "I liked him," she said. "I was attracted to him. He's like that Brooklyn tough guy. Rugged. And his son, she said, was adorable.

Patterson injected heroin, she said. Maybe there was something about the way he seemed to have his act more or less together. Whatever it was, Sperring said she could not believe what she said that night.

"Let ... me get a bag of dope," Sperring said. "I want to try it." She sniffed her first dose. The high was thrilling, she said, a peaceful rush that washed over her.

A few days later, she went back again, and snorted again, and in this state, while Eric and the dancer were arguing - "this big to-do" - Sperring had an idea. Come stay at my house, she told Patterson and his son. It is bigger than this, and nicer, and empty.

They threw their stuff in a car and moved in that very night, while Wood Court slept.

A Condo Filled With Strangers

The condominium was attached to identical homes on each side, with private, numbered parking spaces out front. Two stories, red wood facades, bay windows. The master and two other bedrooms upstairs, the kitchen and living room downstairs and a spare bedroom in the basement.

Very quickly, the rooms of the house filled up. Patterson not only used heroin, Sperring said, but he also sold it. So others followed.

A man named Steve traded haircuts for drugs. There was Andrew and Joey. There were six or seven regular visitors who came at least once a day, Sperring said.

They did not use drugs in front of Patterson's son, she said. The boy had his own friends coming over regularly to hang out.

Then Eric, the dealer on Jefferson Avenue, moved into the basement.

The basement had its own entrance, from the backyard. It got busy back there. Addicts who bought heroin from Eric would park on Rossville, open the creaky wooden gate, and walk along the gravel path past the yards and kitchen windows of four homes - two on each side - to get to that basement door.

How many people were doing that every day and night? How many stumbled around lost? "I have no idea," Sperring said. She mostly stayed in her bedroom, getting high.

Neighbors started rigging up motion-activated lights in the backyards. Ponemon answered his doorbell once and saw strangers at the door. He remembered one wayward visitor asking, "Do you know where that lady lives who sells?"

There were still the periodic flashes of normalcy. Sperring woke up early most mornings to get Patterson's son out the door to school, allowing the father to sleep in until the feelings of withdrawal were too urgent for her to ignore.

About a month after letting the Pattersons move in with her, she had stopped sniffing heroin and started shooting up with a needle. But she was unable to do it herself.

"Chris shot me up," she said. "He always shot himself up first."

Soon, she was using a bundle - a package of 10 tiny bags - per day, three bags per dose. Sperring bought clean needles at Duane Reade every couple of days. "Heroin was a whole new world," she said.

May 11 was Mother's Day, two months after her introduction to heroin. She went downstairs to the motley assemblage and decided she was baking a cake. She did not notice when a car pulled up outside, and a woman, now 19, stepped out with her boyfriend. It was Sperring's daughter, Potter, visiting from Florida and there to surprise her.

The doorbell rang.

As she waited outside, Potter recalled, a man drove by.

"He looks at me and my boyfriend like, 'Can I help you?'" Potter said. "I gave him a little attitude back. 'No, I'm good, thanks. Just waiting for my mother.'"

The man parked his car and opened the front door, entering with some friends whom Potter described as "shady."

Then she saw her mother.

"She was wearing sweatpants and a white T-shirt that had stains on the front," she said. "It could have been blood. I knew she was using. But she said, 'Oh no, I was baking.' When she's using she has an excuse for everything."

Potter looked down. "I saw a mark on her arm," she said. "It wasn't like the movies, where it's purple and red. It was just a raised bump."

She looked up.

"What told me something was different than cocaine or crack, this time her face was, like, sunken in," she said.

She immediately confronted her mother, demanding answers.

Her mother denied anything was going on. "How can you do this to me on Mother's Day?" Sperring said.

"Call me when you want to tell me the truth," Potter said, and left. It was the last time she saw her.

Sperring distinctly remembers her reaction as her daughter walked away: not anger or sadness, but relief.

"I didn't want her to know what was going on," she said.

'Drug Parties' at All Hours

It was not hard to figure out. Neighbors had Steven Sperring's number and, furious, were calling even though he did not even live on Staten Island anymore.

"'What's going on?'" they asked him, Steven Sperring recalled. "'There's drug parties going on at all hours of the night. There's screaming, there's yelling.' I said, 'OK, I'll see what I can do.'" He began looking into ways to evict whoever was living there, including his ex-wife.

The complaints to the police reached Detective John Fahim, with the Police Department's Staten Island gang squad, in May. He knew the address from growing up just down the block.

"I never believed so much heroin could be coming out of that house," he said in an interview. He started watching the place from an unmarked car. This particular brand of heroin coming out of 19 Wood Court seemed hugely popular with users. (Tests on the drugs would show that the heroin was mixed with crystal methamphetamine.)

At least one neighbor noticed the surveillance and told Sperring, "Laurie, they're watching your house." Sperring told Patterson to be more careful where he sold heroin.

Before long, Fahim had witnessed enough heroin sales to get a search warrant, and he led a police raid on June 5. Patterson was outside at the time, arguing with a neighbor - the pit bulls, Max and Missy, were an increasing source of neighborly friction - when he noticed the detectives and ran inside. Officers entered quickly. The house was a mess; the basement was worse, dog feces and used needles everywhere.

Sperring went quietly. "I should have been surprised when men with guns kicked my door in," she said. "I really wasn't."

When officers led her outside, she saw the neighbors applauding. "I'm not blaming them. I'm ashamed," she said. "I could never go back there."

For all that, the police found only a few bags of heroin and a wad of cash on the floor: $1,106 wrapped with a rubber band. A dealer was supposed to bring a delivery of drugs, but drove away when he saw the raid in progress, Fahim said he later learned. Sperring spent about 10 days in the infirmary at Rikers Island. She got out and went straight back to Wood Court.

She found some money and dispatched Joey to buy a bundle of heroin. Patterson was to be released from jail the same day, and he was probably on the subway or ferry already. When the drugs arrived, she sniffed a couple bags and set the rest aside. It would not be long before the couple, and those around them - including the police - resettled into their routines.

On July 1, a dealer who sold drugs to Patterson came to the Wood Court neighborhood. Mindful of the recent police raid, he parked his van away from the house. Sperring went to the van and paid the dealer.

The dealer pointed to a car parked nearby.

"'See that black bag underneath the tire?'" he asked her, she recalled. Sperring walked to the car, picked up the bag and stuffed it into her bra.

She headed toward home. "As soon as I got to the corner, a blue Subaru pulled up next to me," Sperring recalled. She recognized the driver as an officer from the raid in June. It was Fahim. "He said, 'Laurie, please give me the bag.'"

She was arrested and taken to jail and has been there ever since.

Cleaning Out the 'Junkie Den'

Even without its matriarch, the house continued to be a suburban heroin den. Patterson was still selling heroin into July, according to an indictment. By then, another dealer, Shaun Sullivan, 33, was living in the basement with his wife, the police said. Sperring said she had never heard of him.

Fahim could not believe it; it was as if the raid had never happened. "Now you've got two businesses running," he said. The police eventually arrested Patterson, Sullivan and his wife.

Steven Sperring, after learning of his former wife's arrest, asked a nephew to head over to the house and lock things down.

The nephew told Steven Sperring that an unfamiliar man answered the door. His nephew told the man, "'Here's 40 bucks,'" Sperring said. "'Get out.'"

The upper two floors looked fine, all things considered. The basement, where he himself had once slept, was another story.

"Like a junkie den," Steven Sperring said. "Needles, spare needles, blood rags all over the place, all over the floor. Everywhere, everywhere. As soon as you turned on the light, the entire floor was littered. You had to watch where you stepped or you'd step on one."

The locks were changed, the place cleaned out. Today, a renter from Brooklyn lives in the home. She found needles tucked behind the boiler, but otherwise, it has been quiet. Things around the neighborhood, though, seem different: Younger residents say they believe the police are now monitoring them for no reason.

"They said, 'What are you doing over here?'" said Kate Barclay, 21, who was recently pulled over because the police said she did not use her signal. "They searched my entire car," she added, including the occupants: one by one, a stop-and-frisk search that was, until this year, unheard-of in the neighborhood.

Eric, Joey, Steve, Andrew - all seem to have eluded arrest in this case, and have moved on.

Patterson pleaded guilty to attempted possession of a controlled substance and was released from jail on Nov. 20. He declined to be interviewed, as did his son. Patterson is suing the Police Department over what he says was a rough arrest at Wood Court.

Laurie Sperring was indicted on charges of selling heroin and pleaded guilty in August. She will be sentenced in December, but after her time served, she anticipates being released in late February.

Life in jail has frayed her nerves. But without the heroin, she said she feels healthy again, staying busy with drug treatment programs, classes, a job in the jail and church services.

What seems to frighten her most is the prospect of getting out. She has no idea where she will stay. She hopes her ex-husband helps her so she can rent a room somewhere. Asked if she would contact Patterson, she paused for several beats.

"I don't know," she said. Then she added, "I'm not going to reach out to him, no."

Her heroin use began and ended in less than four months. She does not want to return to that life.

"This is my last shot," she said. "I can't go out and do this again. I'll be dead. I don't want them to find me in a hotel with a needle in my arm."