Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh Page B

could refer any customers, and that same afternoon a customer asked if he knew which building that blond hooker lived in. Was he going to throw money away?
    Soon Azad provided this service for the woman’s friends too. Sometimes he held cash for them or stepped out of the kiosk to let them change their clothes. He earned about a hundred fifty dollars per week—more than half what he made selling newspapers—which he saved so he could bring his family over. Eventually he found a better job as a clerk in a Midtown bodega, but his experienced eye fell on the street prostitutes and he soon discovered they had similar needs. Teaming up with another bodega clerk, Rajesh, he created a network of local store owners and clerks and deliverymen, along with johns, drug dealers, and black marketers. The key was the kiosk vendors. Tourists at a local hotel might ask a bellhop where they could find prostitutes or drugs. The bellhop would tell a kiosk vendor, who would call Azad and Rajesh, who would alert a drug dealer or prostitute. Or a deliveryman from a local restaurant would hear of some available cocaine and check in with Azad and Rajesh, who would put the word out among the kiosk vendors, who would put the word out to all the bellhops and clerks in their network.
    For his part, Manjun stumbled directly into his life of crime. The porn shop was the very first job he landed on arrival and the shop workers had already had in place a deal with local sex workers, which was why the back room had a bed. Women could entertain their clients for a fee of twenty dollars an hour, which was much less than the hot-sheets hotels charged. Sometimes they came in just to rest, so the fee was lower. And sometimes, a prostitute or petty criminal would want to hide from the police for a few hours; they’d pay fifty dollars an hour. Manjun resisted at first, but he needed five thousand dollars to bring over his wife and infant son, and the extra money could save him years of waiting. It did save years—he was able to send the five thousand dollars in just six months, sparing her the difficult life of a single mother in Bangladesh.
    But all this was invisible to the mainstream culture, and this invisibility would soon have consequences. As Mayor Giuliani began his cleanup of the Times Square area, nobody in power gave any thought to the thousands of “support” people whose survival would be affected when the economic driver of sex was removed from the scene. And the optimistic view that these workers would be forced toward more legitimate work turned out to be puritanical hypocrisy—it was
crime itself
that gave these men an entrée into the straight world. In time, Santosh began selling laptops of dubious origin, Rajesh started offering small short-term loans, and Azad operated an increasingly successful sideline as a job referralservice for undocumented immigrants. Whenever otherwise legitimate employers found themselves in need of some quick off-the-books labor—and they often did, even the hedge fund titans and investment banks down on Wall Street—Azad made it happen for them with one phone call.
    All of Manjun’s friends had been robbed at gunpoint. None of them had health insurance or unemployment insurance or 401(k) contributions, and the taxes deducted from their paychecks went into the ether because none of them had real social security numbers. I heard the same story again and again from Central American dishwashers, West African security guards, and Mexican laborers. They lived day to day, always looking over their shoulder, hiding their crimes from the police and their success from thieves. And sometimes, as I would soon see, they lost the battle.
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    A s the months passed, a grim mood fell across Ninth Avenue Family Video. On the very same block, a man stabbed another man in a drunken fight, a woman was found shot to death, and a drug dealer shot a man who