From the outside, they are ordinary apartments.
But dozens of New York City homes have been turned into fentanyl mills — churning out millions of dollars worth of deadly drugs.
Now authorities are lifting the lid on the signs that a unit has been taken over by gangs, after the death of 1-year-old Nicholas Feliz Dominici in a Bronx nursery which had been turned into one of the mills.
A string of recent busts have revealed that as well as apartments and a nursery, a pizzeria had been made into a drug mill.
Bridget Brennan, special narcotics prosecutor for the city of New York, told The Post that traffickers are seeking the most innocuous places. “The goal is to not stand out,” she said. “Sometimes, workers in these fentanyl mills go in and out at all hours. Apartment buildings are good for that since coming and going does not attract attention.”
Inside, sometimes behind reinforced front doors, workers earn up to $1,000 per day, in cash, to handle a drug so deadly that the ingestion of just two milligrams (the equivalent of 10- to 15-grains of table salt) can be fatal.
They mix the man-made opiate with other substances, such as heroin or cocaine, dilute its potency with baking soda, baby laxative or caffeine, and package the pills and powders for distribution to dealers in and around New York City.
Ideally, the dens look out on highways that conveniently lead to drug-hustling destinations and reduce the risk of cruising urban streets with illicit cargo in the trunk.
Fentanyl arrives, pressed tightly in kilo-weight blocks. Sometimes, the blocks are covered in grease to avoid detection.
Once broken open, with grease inevitably splattered on the floor, the fentanyl is broken up and put into a coffee grinder to be made into powder – meaning dens will be filled with burned out grinders when cops arrive.
Once turned into fine powder, the deadly substance can be mixed in with cocaine or heroin and cut with baking powder, baby laxatives or caffeine powder. That powder can be packaged in glassine envelopes and sold.
Or it can be dumped into a pill press — a table-top machine, available online — which uses 1.5 tons of pressure to press as many as 5,000 pills per hour. Ideally, this is done in a sound-buffered basement because the pill-pressing machines are as loud as jackhammers.
Frank Tarentino, special agent in charge of the New York division of the DEA, told The Post,“These are sparsely furnished apartments with the bare necessities.
“Usually, there’ll be a couch, a couple beds – sometimes, when the shipment is large, work gets done around the clock. That’s when people sleep between shifts rather than leaving. Maybe a PlayStation is set up. They need something to occupy their time when they are not milling.”
The milling often takes place in the bedroom, while the operation’s Mr. Big keeps things under control from inside the living room.
“There will usually be a glass table, so they can see all the particles under bright lights,” Tarentino said “The windows are blacked out with black garbage-bags, so no one can look in on what they are doing.
“There’ll be powder all over the place, pill presses, take-out food. You see metro cards on the table; they’re used for scooping up the drugs and moving them around.
“You always see glassine envelopes [that the drugs are sold in] and tape to keep them shut.”
Most pills are stamped, said Brennan.
“One we see is I-95. That’s the highway on which a lot of this stuff is transported to different locations. There’s been a Trump stamp and another with the Golden Arches, and the words ‘I’m loving it.’ That was for a guy who sold drugs in front of a McDonald’s.”
And it’s not only drugs that are uncovered on these missions. Sometimes there is cash, and, in at least one instance, agents found a baby asleep in a bedroom.
Air conditioners run constantly in an attempt to keep the air clear. Air purifiers rest on tables sprinkled with drugs. But usually, those clear-air efforts are in vain.
The danger is not just to the pill makers. “We’ve had cases,” said Brennan, “where [the criminals] threw drugs at the investigator coming in.” Getting hit in the face with a large quantity of fentanyl can be fatal.
There can be touches that get close to homey.
“People wear K95 masks thinking that the masks will protect them from fentanyl in the air; they probably won’t,” said Brennan. “But I remember seeing a mill where the masks were all hung up with people’s names on them.”
Agents and cops have also found inspirational art, including a sign that said “You can do it,” propped on a shelf above cold medicine and an asthma inhaler. Alongside a plastic bag of white powder and bricks of drugs was a cartoonishly illustrated cup that declares “I heart SPK.”
And, cautioned Tarentino, the fact that professional lab equipment — such as beakers, flasks, strainers and scales — lay around is no reason to believe that the mills are places where dangerous drugs are handled with medical-grade care.
“There is no quality control,” said Tarentino who’s seen more than his share of fentanyl related drug deaths. “They’re science experiments that go wrong every day.”