MITCH'S MISSION

When Nancy Reagan just said no to Phoenix House, its new drug treatment center went up in smoke

LESLIE BENNETTS

Psychiatry

At the entrance to the parking lot, a big sign says, HOSPITAL CLOSED-CERRADO, in red. The letters that spell out "Lake View Medical Center" on the front wall are deteriorating; half of the "C" hangs broken and limp, splayed out at an odd angle like a broken bone. Baking under the relentless sun of the San Fernando Valley, the shrubbery around the hospital is dying, the desiccated ground cover turning from green to a ghostly gray. His shoulders sagging, Mitch Rosenthal sighs, a long, slow exhalation of breath that sounds like a final acknowledgment of defeat. "Can't you just close your eyes and see kids here, see life here," he says. "It's such a waste."

Until a few weeks ago, this building represented the centerpiece of his plans for the future. Not only would Rosenthal—the president and creator of Phoenix House, the nation's largest private nonprofit drug-abuse program— be opening a new $10 million treatment center in this abandoned property near Los Angeles, but it would bear the name, boast the prestige, and house the office of Nancy Reagan.

For two years Rosenthal had worked to find the perfect site, not only for the facility but also for Mrs. Reagan's convenience to her new home in Bel-Air. All that time the former First Lady seemed enthusiastic about the proposed Nancy Reagan Center—making the required appearances at fund-raisers, talking in her interviews about what a great boon the center would be. And then the unthinkable happened. The day before Memorial Day weekend, she pulled out of the project with no warning, citing neighborhood opposition to the center's location. Shocked and stricken, Mitch Rosenthal was left holding the bag: $5.3 million in pledged financial support in jeopardy, $600,000 for the option on the site and related expenses a total loss.

In the ensuing weeks, a bewildered Rosenthal began to grapple with the legal nightmare Mrs. Reagan left in her wake; even the lawyers were scratching their heads at the complex tangle of pledges and contributions, options and obligations on a project that had seemingly just evaporated. Photographs of her still adorn Phoenix House brochures; the autographed picture of her and Rosenthal still occupies a place of honor in his office. But Nancy Reagan, once Phoenix House's most visible supporter, has left Mitch Rosenthal twisting slowly in the wind.

For Rosenthal, the Nancy Reagan Center was the ultimate expression of his mission in life, a crusade he has waged for more than twenty years with a passion and a tenacity that have stunned his friends and impressed his critics, one by recalcitrant one.

Phoenix House began with six former addicts holing up in a tenement on New York's Upper West Side to try to overcome their drug habits by forming their own therapeutic community. Over the years it became not only an empire in itself (with six different facilities in New York, four in California, and one planned for New Jersey) but also a prototype for countless offspring in the U.S. and abroad. When The New York Times discovered "crank" last summer, announcing to the middle-class world that the scourge of crack had been exacerbated by the growing popularity of a potent crack-andheroin mixture, Rosenthal was quoted on page one. When Representative Charles Rangel held hearings for the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control a few weeks later, he extended a particularly warm welcome to "my friend Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal." From Capitol Hill to the network news shows, Dr. Rosenthal has become everybody's favorite drug expert.

The crisp black hair that always looks as if he just stepped out of the shower after a vigorous game of squash, the ruggedly handsome face, the taut, welltailored body, the silken manners of Dr. Rosenthal undeniably make the sordid subject of drug addiction easier to take. Indeed, back in the first year of the Reagan presidency, when everyone was clucking about the First Lady's china and couture clothes and her staff went shopping for a drug center where she could introduce her new cause, Dr. Rosenthal and Phoenix House seemed made to order. He trotted out the young drug abusers and a big cake decorated to look like the American flag. She cut the cake, slicing into the red and white stripes of frosting: photo-opportunity heaven. And he was so good with her— so charming, so well groomed, inclining his head solicitously to catch her every tremulous word, touching her elbow with his hand to guide her, flashing his irresistible smile as the cameras whirred. Rosenthal looked divine in black-tie; Mrs. Reagan invited him to state dinners at the White House by night, to speak to visiting dignitaries at the U.N. by day. Phoenix House enjoyed the visibility and status conferred by the First Lady; in return, the organization's solid track record enhanced her credibility in the drugabuse field. "I would call it mutually exploitive, in a positive sense," says Ann Wrobleski, Mrs. Reagan's director of special projects during her husband's first term in the White House.

Nevertheless, the First Lady's patronage also raised a few eyebrows; some of Rosenthal's acquaintances saw his willingness to align himself with her as cynical. For those who expect social-welfare types to be nerds in rumpled suits, Rosenthal has always seemed somehow suspect. To skeptics, the rap on Dr. Rosenthal has been that he is a charismatic opportunist who usually has an ulterior motive for the connections he makes. "There's always an angle," says one longtime acquaintance. "If he needs you, he calls you."

His friends are enraged by such criticism. "He's a saint, as far as I'm concerned," says John Scanlon, a publicrelations executive who worked at Phoenix House years ago and still counts Rosenthal a close friend. "He's been extraordinarily committed, at significant personal sacrifice. He is truly a man for others." In talking about Mitch Rosenthal, even the jaded frequently use words like "saint" and "hero." Many also emphasize what his alternative choices might have been. "Mitch could have made a fortune being a Park Avenue psychiatrist," says Barbara Walters. Sherrye Henry, a New York radio personality, says, "With his charm, with his looks, with his education, with his grace, with his natural talent, he could do anything he wanted to do. And yet he deals with nothing but lost souls; he literally saves people's lives. He rents a one-bedroom apartment; his one dream is to own a house in the country, but he doesn't have the money for a down payment; all the things the people he knows have, he'll never have. And he is the most satisfied of them all."

Rosenthal is bemused by the fact that many people see him as a self-sacrificing do-gooder. "I think what they're missing is that I get enormous pleasure from the work," he says. "The pleasure I have in seeing people's lives change dramatically, in developing an area of social psychiatry I think has enormous promise—that's thrilling."

"He likes his empire," says Joan Ganz Cooney, chairman of Children's Television Workshop and a close friend. "He's proud of what he's done. He knows who he is there. He's his father's son."

When the First Lady's staff went shopping for a drug center, Dr. Rosenthal and Phoenix House seemed made to order.

Rosenthal set out to be a child psychiatrist, but in the navy he started to work with returning Vietnam veterans with alcohol and drug problems, and he was galvanized by what he saw: when a number of people with similar problems were sharing the same quarters, not only did group therapy have a dramatic effect, but the community itself could form a powerful therapeutic tool. "In regular psychiatry, to get a patient to be so open and so revealing would take four years, but because of the group dynamic and the living together, in a matter of months you could get somebody to own their behavior and to own their feelings," Rosenthal explains. "It touched me personally, and it really reoriented me professionally."

Those who know him well see Rosenthal as a man with a deep need to help people. He learned it early, and he learned it well. His grandfather, who left Russia and came to this country alone at the age of twelve, was a doctor in Brooklyn; his father, who practiced and brought up his children in Queens, was the kind of family practitioner who accepted lasagna instead of money from patients who couldn't afford to pay. "I remember how hard Dad worked and how long his hours were," says Rosenthal. "He never complained. He loved to work."

So does Mitch. "Mitch has always been adult, even as a child," observes his mother, Adele Rosenthal. The firstborn and the only son, Mitch was forever taking on jobs despite the fact that it did not sit well with his father; when he was hired as a drugstore delivery boy, his father, who thought such a role unseemly for a doctor's son, called the pharmacist and demanded that he let Mitch go. Mitch promptly went out and got another job packing groceries in an Italian supermarket.

"It was a tough relationship," he says. "There was a lot of tension between us. He was a strong man, and I was a strong male child; he wanted things done his way, and I didn't necessarily want them done." Neither seemed to realize the degree to which Mitch was simply emulating his father. "Whatever I did, I threw myself into," Rosenthal says. "There was a curiosity and a pleasure in finding out how things worked and then making them work." Including, finally, other people. When Mitch began trying to figure out how people worked so he could fix them too, his father didn't or didn't want to understand. He made a joke out of Mitch's specialty, calling it "sickiatric"; he teased Mitch about Phoenix House, saying, "When are you going to really practice medicine?"

But after Abner Rosenthal closed his own practice, he went to work as a physician at Phoenix House for the last seven years of his life. "My father really came to appreciate the importance of Phoenix House in medicine and in social psychiatry," Mitch says. "It gave us this mutual ground we'd always searched for but never found."

By that time, Mitch had built a large organization; he had started out as a pioneer in developing therapeutic communities for drug abusers, but he had gone on to become more of an administrator—Phoenix House has a $22-million-a-year operating budget— than a practicing physician. His father may have helped everyone in the neighborhood, but Mitch's restless eye encompassed the whole country.

High on a hill in northern Westchester, a sprawling complex of red brick buildings commands a sweeping view of the treetops. Surrounded by green lawns, it could be an exclusive private school or an expensive sanatorium. In fact, it was built as a Jesuit seminary; today it is called Phoenix Academy, and it serves as home to 250 youthful drug abusers and functions as a board-certified New York City public school. Inside, the corridors are quiet and orderly. Boys wear shirts and ties, girls prim white blouses, and both sport navy blazers with a phoenix insignia on the left breast. All seem cheerful and well mannered; there is a striking absence of the kind of visible attitude usually found in the presence of one or more teenagers.

Peggy Salgado, who has been here for a year and a half, is giving her visitor a tour of the premises. Her voice is proprietary and full of pride as she shows off the computer room, the science room, the impeccably kept grounds. Back home in Brooklyn, she started smoking marijuana at age eleven, left school at twelve, and was using heroin by the time she turned thirteen. Barely five feet tall, with creamy skin and bright dark eyes, she became a dealer to support her habit; on the street they told her she looked like a baby, and they called her China Doll. Her heroin habit alone was $500 a day. "Weekends I would go off with crack—forget it," she says, shaking her head. "I would waste $2,000; I would make the money and spend it in a second. There was a lot of money. It's gone; I have nothing. I was just living day by day, never knowing what's going to happen next day, if I be dead." The fifth time she got arrested for selling drugs, she went to jail; she was sixteen, and she served six months at Rikers Island.

In talking about Mitch Rosenthal, even the jaded frequently use words like "saint" and "hero."

Peggy grew up with her grandmother—"My father, I don't know where he's at, and my mother left with another husband"—but when her grandmother died she had no one. "I was so angry, I was like a madwoman. I was like, Why did she leave me all alone in this big lonely world?" She likes Phoenix Academy. "In workshop, we just scream and yell. They let us do things like that to let out all these feelings. It's like a family here," she says. "It's nice. I feel like this is my home. I never had so many friends in my life before." Peggy is eighteen now and aiming for "a business-type career. I like fashion. I want to own a clothing store," she says.

Like Peggy, many of the residents at Phoenix Academy come from disordered childhoods in black or Hispanic families; often their parents are alchohol and drug abusers as well. Most of the time affluent whites see drug abuse as a problem for the underclass in poor, crimeridden neighborhoods. That view tends to crumble, despite fierce resistance, when a well-to-do family finds that one of its own children is in trouble. "Our lives were absolute hell," says the father of two drug-using boys. He himself is a stockbroker, the product of prep school and the Ivy League; he lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "I felt absolutely helpless. Mitch saved both my boys, and he gave me the courage to do some very tough things. He saw me at the drop of a hat, and he kept my sanity. He's the most insightful person I've ever known. I'd follow Mitch off the edge of a cliff. When I went to Phoenix House for the first time I was absolutely horrified; I thought, I don't want my son there. It took me about six months, but I finally realized they're all going through the same thing when it comes to drugs, no matter what class they've come from."

As Dr. Rosenthal told Representative Rangel's committee during his congressional testimony this summer, "Recovery involves more than sustained abstinence with minimal likelihood of relapse. It must include changes in those negative attitudes, values and behavior that are as much a part of the drug abuse syndrome as chemical dependency.

... Drugs may vary and degrees of dependency differ, but the basis of abuse is much the same for all abusers. It is this basis—the underlying causes of abuse— that drug-free treatment addresses. And it enables abusers to confront and overcome the emotional problems and negative conditioning that prompt and sustain not only drug abuse, but all kinds of antisocial and destructive behavior."

This is why Phoenix House has been able to accommodate successive waves of heroin users, cocaine and crack addicts without substantial changes in its approach. It is also why Dr. Rosenthal is not a fan of substitute-oriented treatments like methadone maintenance: chemical intervention may provide a different drug, but it doesn't cure the dependency or address the deeper causes of an individual's substance abuse.

Work is central to the Phoenix House method, a highly structured approach in which every minute of the day is accounted for. At the drug treatment center facing the beach in Venice, California, the schedule calls for wake-up at six A.M. and lights out at ten P.M., with five hours of schooling, assigned chores, cleanup, inspections, homework, and other activities set for specific times during the day. Residents gather once a day to discuss group dynamics and work out any problems; encounters are held three times a week, and family therapists work with each of the kids and their families at least once a week.

"Rather than staying with the program they first started, Phoenix House has remained very much on the cutting edge of change as new knowledge came along about the importance of education," says Dr. Herbert Kleber, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

From a bullet-riddled building in the South Bronx to Orange County, California, the business of Phoenix House is transforming people's lives. In the last twenty-two years, its centers have treated 50,000 people, affecting countless others—spouses, children, parents, lovers—in the process.

Ralph Figueroa, who grew up in Harlem, is a gangly nineteen-year-old who wears thick glasses and started dealing drugs when he was fourteen. He has served time in three different prisons for robbery, he says; nine months into his stay at Phoenix Academy, he is thinking about how satisfying it would be to get his high-school diploma and go on to college. "From what I've seen, it's a good feeling, and I want to have that—a feeling I can be proud about, instead of all the bad feelings I've been having," he says. Like his fellow residents, he is asked whether he's comfortable with the idea of seeing his full name in print. "I have no problem with that. I want the world to see me for what I am." He pauses; a sudden smile lights up his face. "And what I'm gonna be," he adds.

It is just past dawn in Central Park on a cool gray morning as a trim, tanned man in running shorts and a T-shirt comes loping around the comer with a massive black-and-brown Rottweiler puppy on a leash. Mitch Rosenthal has an early appointment in the park with Alan (Ace) Greenberg, the chairman of Bear, Steams and an experienced dog trainer, who is going to demonstrate some obedience routines.

Rosenthal watches attentively. Ace Greenberg is the kind of man Rosenthal cultivates, the kind of man who shows up on Phoenix House's lists of supporters. From the board of directors to the sponsors for the program's annual benefit dinner, they are stunning lists, virtual indexes of topflight names in corporate America and an eloquent testimonial to the ability of Mitch Rosenthal to woo the wealthy and powerful. If he was not bom to power, he has learned to seek it out; wherever he goes, his radar is constantly scanning, alert to whatever person or angle might be helpful to Phoenix House.

"In building a support system for a nonprofit institution, you never know where and when someone is going to be very helpful, because they have an idea that's brilliant or because they open a door you never could have opened," he says.

In romance, too, Rosenthal has tended to go for the high profile. He has been married twice—at twenty-five to a young woman who was curator of primitive art at the Brooklyn Museum, and at thirty-two to a wealthy divorcee with two daughters. Rosenthal adopted both girls and had a son of his own; they are all in their twenties now, and he remains close to each of them. Since his last divorce, ten years ago, Rosenthal's inamoratas have included Ali MacGraw, Kitty Hawks, Brenda King, who later married Roy Scheider, and Suzanne Goodson, the ex-wife of Mark Goodson, the television tycoon. At fifty-four, Rosenthal sees a young woman who works at Mirabella magazine, but his friends suspect that Phoenix House consumes the lion's share of his psychic and emotional energy. "Ultimately, this is his wife, his child, his family," says Joan Ganz Cooney. "This is where his passion is."

Rosenthal is used to working hard for every dollar he raises, but during the heady months of planning for the Nancy Reagan Center he had seen rich and influential backers glide to his aid as if by magic. While Mrs. Reagan was still in the White House, Merv Griffin gathered a stellar group in the tennis pavilion of his manicured Beverly Hills estate for what was described as a "power breakfast for power people": financiers and moguls, corporate C.E.O.'s, and even Dear Abby. Smiling and pert in a black-white-and-red Adolfo dress and matching sweater, Mrs. Reagan greeted every guest with practiced ease. Then she got down to business. She wanted to "put to rest the whole idea" that her anti-drug campaign was "a P.R. thing created for me," she said. She told her listeners that some progress had been made, but that there was still a tremendous need for facilities to help young drug abusers. "The final answer lies in taking the customers away from the product.... We've got to do it, and I need your help," she said.

Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, and Bill-Blass offered their support. The campaign's advisory committee glittered with prominent names, from Mike Wallace and Robert Strauss to former C.I.A. director Richard Helms and Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. Barron Hilton underwrote a gala fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton Hotel that featured pink neon shooting stars hanging from the ceiling and such guests as Charlton Heston, Mary Martin, Joan Collins, Angie Dickinson, Eva Gabor, Aaron Spelling, Burt Bacharach, Arm and Hammer, Marvin Davis, and the late Lucille Ball. They boosted the coffers by $1 million in one night. An "Enchanted Evening Under the Stars" in the penthouse of the Wilshire House drew Ed McMahon and a host of other California celebrities with fat bank accounts. By last spring, the Nancy Reagan Center had racked up more than $5.3 million of its $10 million goal.

The plans for the center stirred up a flurry of neighborhood opposition in Lake View Terrace, but Mrs. Reagan gave every indication that she was undeterred by the flap. As always with a new drug treatment facility, neighborhood residents worried that the center would draw junkies and criminals into the area to rob houses and drive down property values. It's called the "nimby" syndrome: of course, people say when confronted with the need for a new prison, a soup kitchen, a shelter for the homeless— certainly, but Not In My Back Yard.

Mrs. Reagan understood the nimby syndrome; she sympathized, but she stood fast. Only last February, when her press spokesman was asked how she felt about the community opposition, he said Mrs. Reagan was "sorry," but "she is also aware that everyone agrees we need to be treating our kids, but they say, 'Please don't do it in this neighborhood.' " There had been fierce opposition to many of Phoenix House's other facilities at first, but its harshest critics often became its most ardent supporters when they saw how well run the centers were, how disciplined and hardworking their residents. Mrs. Reagan's commitment seemed unquestionable. "I'm going to be very involved at the drug center," she said last winter. "Very. I worked awfully hard for seven and a half years and I'm not going to give it up now." And so she didn't—until the problem arrived in her own back yard. that they would picket the Reagans' own home in Bel-Air on June 4.

"I think [Mrs. Reagan] thinks the 'Just Say No' thing is national and effective," says Grant Tinker. "It isn't; it's just a lapel button."

By May, the Nancy Reagan Center seemed like a done deal, and local homeowners were accepting it with resignation, if not with the welcome wagon. But just before Memorial Day, as a last-ditch effort to block the plans, several neighborhood activists announced

To the amazement of everyone, including the protesters, that did it. On the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, a spokesman for Mrs. Reagan issued a statement that she was dropping out of the entire project. "Mrs. Reagan respects the concerns of those in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood," it said. "She regrets that this situation has upset members of the community."

Those who talked to her about it reported that she simply couldn't bear the idea of protesters near her own home. "Nancy says she really didn't go into private life to be picketed," says Mickey (Mrs. Paul) Ziffren, one of Phoenix House's California board members. "She said, 'I just can't cope with the picketing.' She just couldn't do it, and that was that."

Although Mrs. Reagan's defection was a terrible blow, Rosenthal remains scrupulously correct when talking about her; he will not discuss her pullout or his own feelings about it. Privately, however, his friends say that he was devastated by her betrayal—that she never bothered to call him personally before her announcement, leaving a functionary to inform him only hours before the news was released to the press; that he wasn't even told whether she would be willing to go ahead with a center at another location or whether she simply wanted out of the whole business.

Nor did the next couple of months make the situation any clearer. Mrs. Reagan refused to answer any questions about her plans; in response to repeated requests, she issued a statement through an aide. "Mitch Rosenthal runs a very fine program," it said in its entirety. Many of the project's supporters are furious with Mrs. Reagan. "I really thought that given the purpose here, she did something very negative," says Grant Tinker, the president of GTG Entertainment. "You could translate it into X number of people who won't be helped as a result, and that's something to be angry about. We were just about to cross the goal line, and she shot us down. I think she thinks the 'Just Say No' thing is national and effective. It isn't; it's just a lapel button. It isn't what Phoenix House does, which is constructive and effective. You only wish you could multiply it enough times to address the whole problem. And what doejs Nancy Reagan do? She shows up one night with the police in Los Angeles on a drug bust. It's like seeing Dukakis with his little head sticking up out of a tank; to see her in a flak jacket—what does that accomplish?"

''If she really cared about the institution, she would have written a really nice letter to all the people who gave money and said, 'Listen, I'm pulling out, but I'm a supporter of Phoenix House and I hope you'll continue your support,' " says Beth Rudin DeWoody, a Phoenix House board member. ''But I guess once you're out of office and don't have those pressures on you, you can revert back to your true self. I think Nancy's out for Nancy."

Although Mrs. Reagan has consented to the occasional photo opportunity since leaving office, for the most part she seems to be devoting her energies to making money. Reports on how much she got for her new book, My Turn, ranged from $2 million to $3 million, and she has not shown a marked interest in poorly remunerated activity. Five days after dropping out of the Phoenix House project, she accepted a lucrative position on Revlon's board of directors, but she is choosy about other engagements. Ronald Reagan has been drawing a pension from California ever since he left the governor's office, and when state officials asked Mrs, Reagan to speak at a recent conference on drug abuse, they were hopeful she would accept, even though they were only able to offer a $500 honorarium. She received the invitation three months in advance, but they waited more than two months for an answer—whereupon her office said her schedule was too busy and she wouldn't be able to make it. However, she was not too busy to give a speech for Toyota over the summer; they were able to come up with her current speaking fee, reportedly $30,000.

At about the same time as Mrs. Reagan's appearance for Toyota, Mitch Rosenthal began to hear through mutual friends that she was no longer interested in a drug treatment center bearing her name. He then got a phone call from a Reagan staff member, who suggested that Rosenthal give all the money that had been raised for the Nancy Reagan Center to Mrs. Reagan, so she could use it for the Nancy Reagan Foundation, her new charitable organization. Rosenthal pointed out that even if he were disposed to give away Phoenix House funds, this might well be illegal. When Mrs. Reagan withdrew from the Lake View Terrace project, three of her friends called him immediately, demanding their money back. Rosenthal was appalled. "I realized that most of the donors gave money because of their regard for Mrs. Reagan, but the reason any of us are in this is because we're doing something to help kids in this town, so the fact that they would come asking for their money—this, to me, was shocking," he says.

His own lawyers told him that giving back money to donors, many of whom had already used their contributions as a tax deduction for the preceding year, would be problematic. Rosenthal wrote California's attorney general, asking for guidance; the response was that should Phoenix House "decide to refund cash donations to donors, the Attorney General's office would certainly question the legality of such a distribution of charitable funds." The attorney general added that just because Mrs. Reagan had changed her mind, that didn't alter the charitable purpose of Phoenix House and its goals.

When Mrs. Reagan withdrew from the project, three of her friends called Rosenthal immediately, demanding their money back.

Still, the last thing Rosenthal wanted was to antagonize Mrs. Reagan and her friends, so in mid-August he finally decided to put the question to the donors themselves. He wrote all two hundred of them, explaining the situation, noting Mrs. Reagan's interest in diverting the money to her own foundation, and asking the contributors to let him know by the middle of September what they wanted done with their donations. Then he went back to Lake View Terrace.

The foothills rising around the rim of the valley there are dry and brown, almost lunar in their desolate aridity. Just down the street from the medical center, roosters scratch in someone's front yard; a block away, four people were recently murdered in a crack house. At a low-income housing development nearby, most of whose tenants are single welfare mothers and their children, crack is ravaging whole families; when the mothers get evicted and start living on the street, where they deal and turn tricks to support their crack habits, the children end up in foster care or being handed around by relatives.

The small band of local residents who opposed the Nancy Reagan Center are pleased they were able to keep Phoenix House out, and they are grateful to Mrs. Reagan. Half an hour and worlds away, her own Bel-Air neighborhood is peaceful and undisturbed by protesters.

If the Nancy Reagan Center had opened, it would have offered 210 beds, most of them to teenagers. As things stand now, in all of Los Angeles County, whose population is 8.6 million, there is a total of 110 beds for residential long-term treatment of adolescents; this figure includes the 40 beds already provided by Phoenix House in Venice. "There are a lot of people who have gotten on the stuff and want to get out, but they don't know how," says Mary Cooley. "They tell you, 'I need help,' but there's nothing available. They're dying out there."

Cooley, a handsome black woman who works as a secretary and lives in Lake View Terrace, used to be opposed to the idea of a drug treatment center there, until her own daughter's crack habit got out of control. Cooley, whose grandchildren now live with her, managed to get her daughter into a Phoenix House program upstate, where she is doing beautifully. "It's like she died and was resurrected," says Cooley, her eyes glimmering with tears. "It's a miracle, it really is."

Cooley is now an ardent supporter of Phoenix House. "I just want to say, don't give up," she says shyly to Mitch Rosenthal. He winces. "If we had had a little more money in hand, we could have proceeded," he says.

That night he has dinner with a couple of colleagues from Phoenix House California. Rosenthal, who has always described himself jokingly as a "pathological optimist," has a faraway look in his eyes. "If we had two more million, there might be a way to do it," he says, watching Geoffrey Nathanson, a board member and an old friend.

"Only two million?" says Nathanson, raising his eyebrows. He grins. "You've never lost one yet," he says.

Rosenthal begins to smile. As he walks out into the cool night air, his head is buzzing with possibilities; he is already making mental lists of people to call in the morning. "Maybe there's a way," he says softly.