He was arrested a month later when the FBI, the state police and U.S. marshals kicked down the door of their house at 5:30 in the morning. He is now serving a nine-year sentence in the maximum-security federal prison at Lewisburg, Pa.
"That's when I really went off the deep end," Pagano says. "I gave up on everything."
She sent her son to live with her mother, who is a teacher. She moved in for a while with her boyfriend's sister, Baby, in Jersey City. She eventually became homeless, sleeping in an abandoned flower shop. Her drug use soared. She would be awake for six or seven days at a time. She had as many as 20 clients a day. Finally, nearly broken, she got back into rehab. She became sober again. She met a man in the program. He relapsed two weeks later and went to jail. She began drinking heavily with the mother of her baby's father.
"We were in Atlantic City one night, me and his mom," she says. "We were out all night long at some grimy bar. Some guy offered me 'dog food.' And I said, "What the hell is dog food?' I had never heard a lot of terms before. It was heroin. I was drunk. I followed him. I got the heroin. It progresses very quickly."
She started taking the bus from Williamstown, N.J., where she was living, to Atlantic City to "trick" and buy drugs. She got arrested. When she got out of jail she decided to go to Camden. Camden was where many Atlantic City pushers got their drugs. Heroin costs $10 a bag in Camden and $6 a bag in Jersey City, but the Camden heroin was far more potent and provided a much longer high. And Camden was only 20 minutes from where she was living.
Camden is among the country's poorest and most crime-ridden cities. The loss of its manufacturing base has seen its population shrink from 120,000 in the 1950s to less than 80,000 today. Whole blocks lie abandoned. There are an estimated 1,500 derelict buildings. The roofs of many empty row houses, gas stations, stores and warehouses have collapsed. Basements in derelict buildings are flooded. Copper wiring, metal doors, radiators and piping have been ripped out by scavengers who sell the materials to the huge scrap yard along the Delaware River. Some 175 open-air drug markets exist in the city. Hookers, often white addicts, congregate on street corners and near the main exit ramp of the multilane highway that cuts through the heart of Camden.
The first time Pagano took the bus to Camden, she walked up to the first person she saw upon her arrival at Walter Rand Transportation Center and said: "Where do you sell your ass around here?" She was told to go to Broadway. She never went home. Camden, however, was not Jersey City or Atlantic City. Her clients were not wealthy businessmen or Wall Street managers, but fellow addicts. She could not make the same kind of money. There were women on the street who would give oral sex for as little as $5.
"They'd suck your dick for a hit of crack," she says. "Camden was like nothing I had ever seen before. The poverty is so bad. People rob you for $5, literally for $5. They would pull a gun on you for no money. I would get out of cars, I would walk five feet up the road and get held up. And they would take all my money. The first time it happened to me I cried an hour. You degrade yourself. You get out of the car. And some guy pulls a gun on you."
She scaled down her charges, eventually giving oral sex for $20. And she found that her clients refused to let her use condoms.
"I gave up on everything at that point, I wanted to die," she says. "I didn't care anymore. All the guilt and the shame and leaving my son, not talking to my son, not talking to my family."
She met a man named E-frie who had just finished an 18-year prison sentence. He gave her drugs in return for sex. He drank heavily and smoked marijuana. He taunted her for being a junkie and frequently beat her, once pushing her down a flight of stairs.
"I was still living on the streets," she says. "I was living everywhere. Abandoned buildings. Most of my stuff was hidden all over downtown Camden. I would dig holes and bury stuff in backyards."
She gently fingers a ring dangling from her necklace.
"My mother gave this to me from my son," she says. "I never take it off my neck. It's a mother-and-son ring. It's made it through everything with me. Someone ripped my necklace off one time. I flipped out. It was the only thing that made me feel like I had my son with me. I found the ring after someone ripped it off. I used to wear it on my hand. But I would get nervous that someone would rob me over a ring. I would dig holes and bury it. I would bury it with my money."
She put her profile on an Internet site to solicit clients. By then she had been raped as many as 20 times.
"The last time was the most brutal," she says. "It was on Pine Street near the Off Broadway [Lounge]. There's weeds on the side. I never took tricks off the street. They had to be in cars. But I was sick. I was tired."
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