As he looks out over the chaos at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues — the sprawling homeless encampments, the people injecting heroin and nodding off in the street, the dealers, the trash, the suffering — this is what Flac sees: Money.

“All I see is money, money, money. Ain’t nothing but money down here,” he said, waving at the intersection. “This is one of the few places in America where you can wake up Monday flat broke and on Tuesday you can have $10,000 in your pocket.”

Flac, who manages heroin-dealing operations on a number of corners in Kensington, and who asked to be identified by his nickname because his business is illegal, is a cog in the vast machinery that is Kensington’s drug trade — the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast, if not in the nation.

He is launching a new venture at K & A: a heroin-dealing operation across from the Allegheny El Station, the latest addition to his portfolio of corners around the neighborhood, where some blocks reap as much as $60,000 a day in heroin sales.

Flac says he is only following the riches. Since the temporary closure of the Somerset El stop two months ago, the growing crowds of people who use drugs and live on the street have been moving up Kensington Avenue. There are more customers at Allegheny now, more money to be made, and Flac and his supplier want to plant their flag.

“This is one of the few places in America where you can wake up Monday flat broke and on Tuesday you can have $10,000 in your pocket.”

“Every day is a party out here,” he said. “Every day is a good day.”

Even as pandemic lockdowns ease, Kensington’s heroin economy thrives, along with the endless gun violence it fuels. Some corners pull in more than $20 million a year. Crowds of addicted people jam McPherson Square, where children discover drug dealers’ stashes during playtime. Bullets rattle houses and send the people inside diving to the floor. And the neighborhood’s pain is plainer than ever.

All of it, residents and authorities say, has meant booming business for the illicit economy that for years has held an entire neighborhood captive, one that prospers in a place where the city’s legitimate economy is overwhelmed.

“I would say it’s approaching a billion-dollar enterprise,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said of Kensington’s heroin trade.

With more customers comes more competition. More than ever, violence follows the markets.

In a 1.9-mile stretch covering the narrow streets along Kensington Avenue, near McPherson — an area smaller than Old City — police have identified 80 corners with open-air drug markets.

In 2020, in that same grid, the heart of the drug markets, 40 people were killed and 178 were shot and wounded.

The escalating bloodshed is overwhelmingly driven by disputes among drug rivals fighting for the profits to be made, said Capt. Pedro Rosario, the commanding officer of the 24th police district in Kensington.

“There’s a lot of great people that live on these blocks,” said Rosario, walking down the narrow blocks by McPherson. Even with the captain there in his uniform, the sales didn’t stop. “And right now, they’re basically prisoners in their own homes.”

Pedro Morales feels like one of those prisoners.

As dealing has worsened near Hart Lane, Morales, 46, has pestered dealers to stay off the steps of his rowhouse — which he is in the middle of remodeling — and to stay out of the grassy lots neighbors have transformed into a play space for neighborhood children. He doesn’t want them selling where neighbors planted vegetable gardens and painted murals that say: “Think of the kids.”

On a weekday afternoon in late April, as Morales plastered a kitchen wall, a gunman from another block opened fire on the Hart Lane dealers, spraying the street with bullets. No one was hit, but the gunfire sounded so close, Morales said he could almost feel the pressure of the firing gun from his kitchen floor.

Shaken, he wasn’t sure if he’d speak up to the dealers anymore.

Outside, the dealers weren’t so shaken.

“The violence is nonstop,” shrugged C, a dealer who said he’d been working the corner and had been among the targets. “You just know that you can wake one day and say ‘I’m going out’ and never come back.”

Rosario, the police captain, says that with such an overwhelming amount of drugs on the corners — and with gun violence in the district nearly tripling since 2017, when the opioid crisis exploded — it often feels as if the best his patrol officers can do is displace dealers from one corner to the next, providing neighbors temporary relief.

A transit hub like K & A, with its ceaseless streams of customers pouring off the El, becomes a battleground. In 2020, two people were shot and killed at the intersection, and two more were wounded. This year, two people have been shot and killed on the blocks near K & A and five have been wounded. All of the cases are drug-related, Rosario said. And in recent weeks, after a spike in shootings, nearly a dozen more patrol officers have been redeployed to the intersection.

This is the already-competitive marketplace Flac and his crew are hoping to push into.

For now, authorities say, there is no competing with the heroin economy in Kensington.

Testifying before a grand jury in 2019, a city narcotics officer assigned to a state drug task force led by Shapiro’s investigators described the amount of heroin and fentanyl sold on just one block of Clementine Street as “astronomical.”

In the heroin trade, the count — the money — is king. And by 2019, the count from the 600 block of Clementine was staggering. Investigators believe the drug ring there was selling $400,000 worth a week.

“I would say it’s approaching a billion-dollar enterprise.”

And there are streets that make even more: Small, unassuming corners like Weymouth, Custer, and Reach operate like the Main Streets of the neighborhood’s drug trade, with dealers competing for prime commercial real estate. Police believe a 150-foot stretch of those corners can haul in more than $1 million a week.

For the last three years, Shapiro’s busts, like the one on Clementine Street, have represented the most robust law enforcement effort to reclaim Kensington corners. His office has teamed with city social agencies and Temple University in a unique effort to infiltrate its heroin markets and provide some relief to residents.

It’s called the Kensington Initiative, and it’s animated by the principle that simply arresting every dealer or buyer on a street corner — for long the preferred tactic for narcotics busts — won’t make a dent in the larger drug organizations upending residents’ lives.

The intelligence-driven effort — federal, state, and local investigators meet for weekly huddles to share information — has dismantled five Kensington heroin networks. Those arrested include a man they describe as a leader of the Clementine ring, Brandon pere, 29. Also charged were four men who authorities say supplied the drugs, and 24 others who played a role in the operation.

Bill McKinney, director of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, is among those adamant that his neighborhood needs more than law enforcement to solve the deeply entrenched problems of poverty, inequity, and addiction.

Shapiro agrees. He sees his plan as what the state’s top law enforcement office can do to help residents move safely about their neighborhood. He says the city needs to bring more resources to the blocks his team clears of drug dealers, efforts that have slowed during the pandemic.

And he notes that, despite decades of police responses, investigators rarely bother to study whether the community’s quality of life improves after a series of drug busts.

To that end, with $350,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice, they’re partnering with Temple criminal justice researchers to see if their efforts are helping in a community where drug sales are perhaps more concentrated than anywhere else in the nation.

Shapiro said reclaiming corners is his ultimate goal: “To me, the measure of success is whether you reclaim that block so a mom could walk their kid to school and not worry about getting shot or stepping on needles or bumping over people who are battling addiction.”

Some blocks targeted by the Kensington Initiative, like Argyle and Potter Streets, have stayed largely quiet, giving neighbors a merciful, if tense, two-year reprieve.

But the dealing continues on the surrounding blocks. The Clementine Street bust shows the reality of Kensington — that even when law enforcement officials arrest the big dealers in a neighborhood where there are millions to be made, someone else can step in before the next sales shift begins.

By 2019, the block — where neighbors could recall nights not too long ago playing dominoes in the street and hosting summer block parties for the kids — had been transformed into a 24-hour drug bazaar.

On most days, investigators say, the Clementine Street crew tore through 100 “sticks” of heroin — 14,000 doses.

“Grab a body and a bag,” the block boss would say on the rare days when sales sagged. At that, a shift manager, or “caseworker,” knew to use the lure of a freebie from a new batch on a willing customer, making sure to report any complaints back up the chain.

Perez controlled Clementine Street, authorities said, and ran his drug ring like a corporation, holding regular management meetings. He reveled in the flashy trappings of the job, investigators say, driving a Slingshot, a three-wheeled race car, and flying off for vacations in Los Angeles and once to attend the BET Awards.

When the state swept onto Clementine, the street was quiet for less than a day. Then a new crew moved in. And it was back to the calls of dealers through the night: Dope. Dope. Powder.

Investigators say heroin sales have fallen on the block, with some operations pushed west. Kids still don’t ride their bikes down the street. They sit, with their mothers close by on the steps, and watch the new dealers work.

On a late April afternoon, a dealer who asked to be referred to as Bebo, was working a double shift for the new crew just off Clementine. Business was brisk.

“You can try locking people up — that ain’t going to stop nothing,” he said. “You can lock all of us up, tomorrow there is going to be another group taking our place. It’s like trying to cover the sky with a finger.”

The heroin economy far eclipses the legal economy in Kensington, where residents’ median individual income is less than $17,000. Young people, lacking job training — and in many cases, high school degrees — must look outside the neighborhood for jobs that offer little chance of mobility. And older long-term residents face the push from out-of-town developers gobbling up abandoned factories to build luxury apartments.

Profit flows out of Kensington, not in, especially in the drug business. And risk flows down.

“The corner is no different than the rest of this country — it’s capitalist in nature,” said McKinney, the community development director. “There are some people making a lot, and there’s a whole bunch of people making very little. The average guy on that corner is making sneaker money, if he’s lucky.”

A corner dealer gets paid on commission, like an incentive program.

Bundles — 16 individual doses in glassine baggies stamped with brand names like “Hipster Paradise” or “Just for You” — sell for $80. Individual doses — “slices” — sell for $5.

At K & A, on a Sunday afternoon in May, Flac parked his Lincoln Town Car, with a toddler’s seat in the back, a block away. He had come to check on business.

Flac is upper management. According to his crew, he’s running the operation for a drug supplier with access to heroin sold on the best corners in the neighborhood. Flac, who says he’s out on bail for a gun charge, will oversee the squad of shift managers, dealers, runners, and lookouts. Eventually, the aim is to match sales on some of the other “gold standard” blocks — many millions a year.

There’s G, the dealer, deep in addiction himself, who grew up in Kensington, sleeps in an encampment at night, and sells bundled heroin mostly to stave off his own withdrawal. There’s Black, “middle management” who delivers drugs to the block and collects the cash. “It’s my job to see the police before they see me,” he says. A former college football player, he reckons he can still outrun them.

The plan is for G to set up on a side street — the same one the city had for a time considered as a possible location for a supervised injection site.

“You can try locking people up — that ain’t going to stop nothing,...tomorrow there is going to be another group taking our place. It’s like trying to cover the sky with a finger.”

As business gets going, G gets $10 on every bundle. That can earn him between $180 to $250 in an eight-hour shift, he says. Most days, he makes enough to cover his habit. On the blocks with the best drugs, where sales are guaranteed, $5 commissions make dealers $500 to $600. It’s a living, but hardly riches.

It’s the bosses who earn most of the profit in Kensington — and spend the least amount of time on the streets. Some never visit at all.

These aren’t cartel bosses. For all their power on a block, they are small cogs in an international drug industry. They’ve simply risen as high as you can rise on the corners of Kensington.

Guys like Douglas Gonzalez, now serving a 9½-to-20-year prison sentence, who ruled Potter Street by the point of an AK-47 he hid under a mattress where an infant slept.

And Damon McCandliss, 25, who Shapiro’s investigators say ignored the corner game entirely and used his connections to buy bulk prepackaged fentanyl and flip it for a profit — moving $100,000 worth multiple times a week — to customers who drove from Maryland and Virginia and met him in neighborhood parking lots. Free after posting $40,000 in bail, he has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Other bosses made a point of keeping business in the family. Edwin “Welo” Parrilla, now serving a 2½-to-10-year prison sentence, ran the 3300 block of Argyle Street, where his mother lived, and stashed heroin and cash in her pristine rowhouse.

For his part, Flac says he comes and goes from the avenue as he pleases, pulling in $1,000 to $3,000 a day.

“That’s just the way the food chain works around here,” he said. “The ones you don’t see — they are the ones making $50 to $60 a bundle. The person who is actually risking their lives every day is making crumbs.”

This is the tension in an economy that can be both lucrative and lethal.

Near Hart Lane, the dealers have returned to their steps after the shooting.

“Half the guys out here have felonies and can’t get a 9-to-5,” said C, 23, who counts himself among that group. “We got to provide for our families — and you can make out here in two days what you make in that check every two weeks.”

Bebo, near Clementine, is 31, with three children and a record for drug dealing and gun possession that would likely exclude him from a legitimate job. So he works his double shifts, hoping to clear a few hundred.

Bebo’s oldest is 14, he says. And as Bebo slips into the rhythm of dealing, nods into the high of pills, he tries to forget how embarrassed he is that his son knows what he does.

Still, Bebo needs money. Money for rent. Money for his pill habit. Money for an attorney. Money for a headstone, if the next bullet that finds him does more than leave a cigar-sized scar on his elbow.

“The risk,” he said, “is you can either get shot, you get locked up — or you’re dead.”

Philippe Bourgois, a professor of anthropology at UCLA and a former Penn professor who studied the Philadelphia drug markets for years, said that for decades, police efforts to stop dealing in Kensington were as fruitless as “sweeping sunshine off the sidewalk.”

Larger-scale efforts to unravel entire drug networks, like the Kensington Initiative, hold more promise, Bourgois said. But, like McKinney, he said no policing strategy will work without relief for the neighborhood.

Bourgois envisions something like “an inner-city Marshall Plan” — the $12 billion aid package that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II — and a far cry from any effort so far to improve conditions in Kensington.

“There needs to be an investment by the public sector that enables the building up of the legal opportunities to compete with the drug economy,” he said. “That’s a longer-term process.”

“We’re going to have to answer for this being allowed to exist in America, in Philadelphia. There’s something wrong here.”

In the meantime, business booms.

At K & A, confidence was high as the supplier paid a visit to Flac and the crew, a rare visit from the top. G was trying out sales pitches — things “that set the product apart,” he said. His latest selling point: a customer who overdosed on the corner and needed three doses of Narcan from G before waking up.

“This is what our dope does,” G said.

Still, looking out over the intersection, G turned pensive. Like Flac, he saw the money. But what he saw also made him feel uneasy — the dealing, the suffering, the cardboard encampments, the profits flowing up and out. The enormity of it all.

“We’re going to have to answer for this being allowed to exist in America, in Philadelphia,” he said. “There’s something wrong here.”

Staff writers Aubrey Whelan and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.