U.S. Charges 19 With Flooding Washington Square Park With Drugs

New York|U.S. Charges 19 With Flooding Washington Square Park With Drugs

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed charges on Thursday against 19 people who they said ran a year-round open-air drug market in Washington Square Park, distributing millions of doses of fentanyl, heroin and crack cocaine.

During the past five years, a federal indictment said, the police and emergency medical personnel responded to more than 65 reports of apparent drug overdoses in the Greenwich Village park and nearby neighborhoods. Prosecutors said the park, with its arch, three playgrounds and chess tables, had become strewed with used syringes, needles and drug packaging.

In one six-month span last year, the indictment said, two people died of overdoses caused by fentanyl and its analogues, including an 18-year-old days after graduating from high school in Aspen, Colo., who had come to New York City for a prestigious theater internship, and a 43-year-old, who had been homeless and had lived in the park for years.

Prosecutors said the drug network operated as a sophisticated collective to distribute its wares around the park, including by color-coding different packages, tipping members off to the presence of law enforcement and sharing workers.

The indictment, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, charges the defendants with conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death. There would have been more overdoses, prosecutors said, if not for advocacy groups providing Narcan to drug users.

The defendants, according to the indictment, have collectively been arrested at least 80 times for drug-related offenses since 2020.

The network primarily consisted of two groups, prosecutors said, including a subset of the Bloods gang and a team of dealers led by John Livigni, a man who has dealt drugs in the park for around 25 years.

The Bloods and Mr. Livigni’s group had an agreement not to sell in each other’s territories — which included different subway stations — and they sold their drugs at different prices. Many of the Bloods dealers were also customers, prosecutors said, while Mr. Livigni relied on a team of managers who worked in shifts.

Mr. Livigni’s lawyer could not immediately be identified.

The first of the two fatal overdoses occurred in June 2024, when the 18-year-old bought drugs from one of the sellers, and the two used some of the product together, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said in a memo asking a judge to order all 19 men detained pending trial.

The next day, June 4, the 18-year-old was found dead in a Manhattan apartment. Ripped-up pieces of purple bags that later tested positive for fentanyl, its analogues and heroin lay on a table in a bedroom, along with other drug paraphernalia.

The 43-year-old victim was found on a sidewalk on Nov. 24, 2024, next to a needle, bags of crack cocaine and empty bags that bore the markings of the groups that sold drugs inside the park.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.