The informal walking tour came to a pause on Amsterdam Avenue, outside a brick building where a beloved Upper West Side pizzeria had recently been replaced by yet another rogue weed shop.
The store was called Holiday Candy Convenience. But to the local councilwoman, Gale Brewer, it was simply No. 23 — an entry on an oversize spreadsheet tracking the explosion of unlicensed cannabis stores in her district since New York legalized the drug in 2021.
An aide, Sam Goldsmith, inspected the shelves, stocked with flavored vapes and edibles. “These guys are currently out of compliance with absolutely everything,” he muttered before moving on to the next shop.
At last count, there were 56 within about 200 square blocks, twice as many as a year ago. But to understand how Ms. Brewer, a 72-year-old former Manhattan borough president, came to be a leading combatant in New York’s madcap battle against illegal weed, you need to know about just one: Zaza Waza.
It started almost by accident. The city and state were failing to stop blatant disregard for the law. Ms. Brewer, a tireless tinkerer, believed she could help find a better way. And Zaza Waza, just across Columbus Avenue from her district office, presented the perfect test case.
But the harder she pulled, the more entrenched the problem appeared. The little shop with the neon lights in the window became Ms. Brewer’s bête noire. Her obsession pitted her against a mysterious operator with a shockingly cavalier approach to rules and eventually involved an indifferent Police Department, nearly a dozen other government agencies, trash bags filled with confiscated edibles, a couple of padlocks and what must have been a pretty good saw.
By the end, it was not clear if Ms. Brewer had prevailed, but she had begun to doubt what winning even meant. She had set out to prove how the power of government could solve one of the city’s fastest-growing problems. Now she feared she had just more vividly demonstrated its failure instead.
“It’s like the Wild West,” she said on the walking tour. “I’ve never seen anything so intractable. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
An Unlikely Adversary in Pearls
It is important at this point to clarify that Ms. Brewer has never really been opposed to cannabis. She does not use the stuff herself. “I don’t like vegetables,” she explained.
As a child of the 1960s, she came of age politically protesting the war in Vietnam. And since getting her first government job in Mayor John Lindsay’s parks department at age 20, she has proudly identified as an unapologetic big-city Democrat.
Ms. Brewer grew up on Massachusetts’s North Shore, the pearl-wearing daughter of moneyed Boston Brahmin stock. But in adulthood she has come to so perfectly represent the Upper West Side’s particular brand of New Yorker — exceedingly liberal, notoriously opinionated — that constituents often affectionately misidentify her as a Jewish native of the city. Her predecessor once called her a “walking information kiosk,” and indeed, few city officials know the obscure levers of power better.
“She is sort of like politics on speed,” said Ruth W. Messinger, who hired Ms. Brewer in the 1970s as an aide in the City Council office Ms. Brewer now occupies. “She has a particular feel for the people who are the most screwed.”
When New York became the 15th state to legalize cannabis, Ms. Brewer enthusiastically supported the law. She was serving as borough president at the time, something like the mayor for Manhattan, and shared the goal of bringing the drug trade out of the shadows.
Legalization accomplished that, but not in the way ruling Democrats had promised. As state officials in Albany made painfully slow progress toward standing up a full legal market, they created a vacuum for rogue shops like Zaza Waza, which the law had not foreseen.
To customers eager for a legal high, stores like Zaza Waza — slang for top-shelf weed — looked every bit the real deal. It did business out in the open, had velvet rope lines and hundreds of products, from edibles claiming 250 milligrams of THC to pre-rolled joints.
But without state licenses, the shops were playing by their own set of rules — no testing, slapdash labeling, no taxes — which even the staunchest legalization advocates feared could choke out the nascent legal industry. When the authorities failed to close the first ones, the model exploded, on a scale no other state has seen.
By some counts, there are now as many as 2,000 bodegas, delis and smoke shops illegally selling cannabis products from the north Bronx to the outskirts of Queens — roughly 50 for every licensed seller. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has called the rollout a “disaster.”
Ms. Brewer began hearing first from parents and principals who said the shops were selling to their underage children, opening their doors before the first school bells and often using cartoons to market the product. But soon entrepreneurs trying to win legal licenses were sounding alarms, too; even Ms. Brewer’s own cousin, who had signed up to be a licensed grower upstate, gave her an earful.
“For me, I needed to respond to the parents, and I began to see this is much bigger than what we thought,” she said.
Besides, Ms. Brewer is not the kind of person who can leave a pressing problem to someone else. During the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, she and her husband fostered close to 30 children.
Like other Democrats, she was determined not to encourage a full-scale backlash on looser marijuana laws. She simply wanted to close the shops so a healthy, regulated industry could grow up in its place.
She had taken on mayors and pushed noisy bars into line. How hard could it be?
“Maybe I sound like a prude,” she said. “But you’re not supposed to sell illegal stuff!”
‘This Insane Game of Whac-a-Mole’
In Zaza Waza, she was up against an formidable adversary. Mr. Goldsmith, a bespectacled former tabloid journalist who serves as Ms. Brewer’s communication director and de facto cannabis czar, had dug up court records suggesting the shop was more than your neighborhood mom-and-pop.
Ms. Brewer walked in the day it opened in summer 2022. She remembered greeting a “nice young man behind the counter,” and telling him, “Be sure you’re legal.”
There was little chance of that. The man who signed the store’s lease, Abrahim Kassim, appears to be the same one who pleaded guilty in 2016 to conspiring to smuggle cigarettes over state lines. Last fall, not long after Mr. Kassim purchased a $2 million Long Island mansion, the federal government indicted someone with the same name on charges of running a food stamp fraud ring at a deli in the Bronx. He pleaded not guilty.
Court records show that no fewer than eight landlords have gone to court against businesses that are connected to Mr. Kassim — some after receiving notice that they were illegally selling tobacco and cannabis products.
But when it came to closing them, Mr. Goldsmith and Ms. Brewer found their own partners in government acting unusually fecklessly. Everyone agreed the ad hoc dispensaries were openly breaking the law, but one by one, agencies looked at the crimes and either shrugged off responsibility or conceded they were simply not equipped to help.
“I wouldn’t have believed it if I wasn’t living it,” Mr. Goldsmith, 40, said.
The state’s recently created Office of Cannabis Management gained explicit jurisdiction over the unlicensed sellers in 2023 and wanted them snuffed out. But it was so overworked and understaffed that of the millions of dollars in fines it had issued, the agency had collected only about $22,500. As of April, its 16 statewide inspectors had padlocked only one unlicensed store in New York City, according to a spokeswoman.
The Police Department, which has 36,000 officers dedicated to enforcing the law, was even less help. After decades of aggressive tactics related to marijuana, the state had taken a new approach to cannabis that was explicitly designed to decriminalize recreational use and move enforcement away from the police.
Mayor Eric Adams has argued that has left the department without the authority it needs to police the shops, and some Democrats wary of reviving those rough bygone days are insistent on keeping it that way.
But Ms. Brewer was a member of another bloc that believed City Hall could be pushing more aggressively. It remains a crime to possess marijuana with the intention to sell without a license. The police seem content to let business go on uninterrupted.
On a recent afternoon, two officers standing outside Bing Bong, another unlicensed shop in Midtown Manhattan tied to Mr. Kassim, said confidently that the business was legally selling cannabis.
“Yeah, 90 percent of the storefronts you see are legal,” one said incorrectly, comparing them with liquor stores.
In January 2023, it looked like there might be a breakthrough when the Office of Cannabis Management and the New York City sheriff, Anthony Miranda, raided Zaza Waza. They brought TV news cameras along, and Ms. Brewer helped haul out 17 trash bags filled with some tobacco and a stoner’s dream stash.
But Zaza Waza simply restocked, and the sheriff’s office, strapped for employees, moved on to other neighborhoods.
“It’s just this insane game of Whac-a-Mole,” said State Senator Liz Krueger, a friend of Ms. Brewer’s and the coauthor of the state legalization bill, who has pushed for more aggressive enforcement.
Months dragged on. Ms. Brewer and Mr. Goldsmith scoured for creative workarounds. They asked the city health department to enforce food safety rules at stores that sell edible cannabis products. The answer was no. They tried working with the Manhattan district attorney’s office to pressure landlords to evict scofflaw tenants, but many of the owners simply ignored them; others got tied up in court.
Then Mr. Goldsmith tried one last idea, one that would cinematically escalate the fight.
Finally, a Victory?
In the bureaucratic labyrinth of New York City, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection is little more than a blip. It has only a couple hundred employees working in licensing and enforcement to “protect and enhance the daily economic lives of New Yorkers.”
On paper, the agency has nothing to do with cannabis. But it can regulate tobacco. And since Zaza Waza and most of its competitors sold both products without a license, Mr. Goldsmith realized the little-known agency could shut down the place if no one else would.
In mid-March, 14 months after the sheriff’s raid, its agents placed padlocks on Zaza Waza for the first time — not because of the pot, but because of cigarettes.
Ms. Brewer was elated. By then, “UPPER WEED SIDE: Gale Brewer vs. Zaza Waza” was getting the tabloid treatment, and the mayor had dubbed her “smoke shop lady.” She called a news conference for the next morning.
But by the time she and Mr. Goldsmith showed up to take their victory lap, Zaza Waza had sawed the fastenings clear off.
“I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or angry,” Ms. Brewer recalled. She said what came next was “like a Fellini movie.”
City agents returned with bigger locks. Zaza Waza paid $108,000 in fines, and Consumer and Worker Protection agents had no choice under current law but to remove the locks. Two days later, inspectors returned to find more unlicensed tobacco products and padlocked again.
Lawyers representing Mr. Kassim in several cases declined to comment. A man who identified himself as the owner of Zaza Waza refused to answer questions when reached by telephone.
“Don’t waste your time,” he said. “Bye.”
Ms. Brewer was initially doubtful the closure would last. But when she returned to Zaza Waza a few weeks later in April, it was still dark.
“Still closed! Still closed,” Ms. Brewer cheered as she approached. “Yay, Sam! Yay, Sam!”
Back in her office across the street, Ms. Brewer and Mr. Goldsmith debated the lessons of Zaza Waza over coffee.
Political forces seemed to be galvanizing: Ms. Hochul was pushing for changes to state law designed to make shutting the shops easier, and giving local lawmakers like Ms. Brewer greater power to legislate solutions. Mr. Adams promised (not for the first time) to crack down.
“It’s going to take a ton of work, a ton of coordinated persistent work by multiple entities, including the D.A.s,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “But I think we’ve shown it’s not impossible.”
Ms. Brewer was more pessimistic, though. It felt like the shops themselves were still one step ahead, and even if officials found a formula to close them, she wondered who would actually have the wherewithal to shutter a couple thousand.
“I don’t quite see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she said.
She was also thinking of one last twist in the case of Zaza Waza. The day after the dispensary was padlocked for the last time, Ms. Brewer’s office received a cold call from a landlord in her district.
The woman explained that she had recently rented out a storefront she owned on Ninth Avenue for use as a deli. But her tenant had gone rogue, converting the space into an unlicensed weed shop instead, and then locked her out of her own building.
It felt like déjà vu. An intern for Ms. Brewer asked the woman for the tenant’s name.
She said it was Abrahim Kassim.
Jack Begg contributed research.
