All-American City Now Crime Leader -- By Percentage, Drug Dealing In Newburgh Outdoes New York City

NEWBURGH, N.Y. - Cops in hiding on Newburgh's East End watch three men selling crack cocaine make a couple of quick deals.

``There's no business like drug business,'' sings out one of the dealers, to the tune of the Irving Berlin show biz anthem.

The cops move in and bust all three.

That's Newburgh, 1990, a city of 25,000 on the Hudson River just 50 miles north of New York City, but with a worse reputation in relation to its size.

The Newburgh of Donald Presutti's youth was so safe, so prosperous, so clean that in 1952 Look magazine called it the ``All-American'' city.

The Newburgh of Donald Presutti's adulthood, the one he administers as mayor, is an urban battleground where citizens are trying to reclaim their streets from the drug pushers and addicts and criminals who've made the city a dirty word in the Northeast.

``The fight for freedom on the American soil is being fought in Newburgh and on the streets of cities like Newburgh,'' Presutti said. ``If we lose this war, society as we know it today will no longer exist. What you'll end up with is possibly what old Rome was like, with all the villas and cities walled, and armed guards everywhere.''

Presutti doesn't think he is overstating the danger, and neither do other city and civic leaders. What has happened to their city is happening all over America, just not to such an extraordinary degree, they say.

More than 9,000 crimes were reported to police in Newburgh in 1988, the last full year for which statistics are available. The city's crime rate of 139.5 per 1,000 in population was more than double the statewide average and approaches those of cities on top the FBI's national high-crime list.

For a community in New York state, however, the crime index that's always mattered most is how a city compares with New York City.

Newburgh has a higher murder rate than New York City, and a higher rate of rapes and burglaries and robberies and aggravated assaults and larcenies, according to data from the New York state Division of Criminal Justice Services.

A special anti-crime unit formed within the Newburgh police department in 1985 was supposed to deal with burglary, robbery and prostitution. Now, 90 percent of its work concerns drug-related crime. The task force makes eight to 10 felony drug arrests each week.

People old enough to remember agree that Newburgh's slide began in the 1960s, when manufacturing companies began to scale back local operations in the face of foreign competition and aging factories. Newburgh was once the biggest maker of pocketbooks in the nation, once a thriving fabrics and garment center, once a busy bottler of beverages.

The bottom fell out in the 1970s.

The city's median household income is $10,923, far less than the $18,012 average for Orange County as a whole. Unemployment in the city runs at about 8 percent, compared to the statewide average of about 5 percent.

Newburgh's location on the Hudson River was once an ideal place for a manufacturing center to distribute its goods. Later, the city benefited from being at the intersection of two major interstate highways, the north-south New York State Thruway and the east-west Interstate 84.

Now, police say the city has become a crossroads for drug traffic between New York City, upstate New York and New England. Authorities say local dealers have ties to cocaine distribution networks based as far away as Miami.

Police say the buyers range from Newburgh's own poor to affluent businessmen and college students. Buyers also come from as far away as Albany, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, according to Newburgh Police Capt. Santo Centamore.

State Social Services Commissioner Cesar Perales said after a recent tour of Newburgh that the most blighted parts of the city are comparable to the notorious South Bronx in New York City.

A citizens' group called the Newburgh Drug and Alcohol Task Force has tried for a year to mount a grass-roots campaign against drugs.

Among the most visibile anti-drug activists are Joan Shapiro, a former mayor of Newburgh, and her husband, Jerry. While in office, during the mid-1980s, she regularly cruised the streets at night in search of her son, a cocaine addict who eventually was sent to a drug treatment center and has been ``clean and serene'' for more than three years.

In late September, Gov. Mario Cuomo declared that Newburgh would be the only area outside New York City to be included in an experimental state program to fight drugs through a combination of stepped-up enforcement, better treatment programs and improved education.