It was after midnight. I needed some powder and I needed it bad.

“Take the seven to Flushing and ask the Mexican man at the corner,” said Tommy, who worked the night shift at my neighborhood deli. “But he might not sell it to you. You look like a cop.”

No, I wasn’t looking to get high. Like many in New York City, I was desperate to find a way to control the roaches swarming my apartment. Bomb with Raid? Fuhgitaboutit — they’d be back the next day. I wanted a long-term solution, and with 30 percent of New Yorkers sharing their living quarters with roaches, I didn’t have to look far. The city is a veritable cornucopia of illicit pesticides.

Take $20 and the subway to a vermin-ridden part of town, and you’ve got a good chance of stumbling across hawkers selling products they claim will solve your problem. The most common poisons — Tempo, Tres Pasitos, Power Moth Balls and Chinese Insecticidal Bait — are on street corners, behind store counters and in some cases, openly displayed on store shelves. So what exactly are these products that vendors are not supposed to sell and we’re not supposed to buy?

Tempo Ultra WSP (street price $20 for 50 grams), a white-powder mixture containing cyflurin, is used legally by professional exterminators, but New York state prohibits sale of the Bayer-produced insecticide to non-licensed individuals. Illegal demand remains strong, because hiring an exterminator to apply it is significantly more expensive than buying it on the street.

Tres Pasitos (street price $10 for three tiny bags) typically contains aldicarb, a commercially produced chemical that is legal for limited use on crops for killing insects and roundworms. The deadly chemical apparently works equally well for killing rodents. Green granules of Tres Pasitos — imported from Latin America — are sold as mouse and rat poison in tiny plastic baggies. Potentially fatal to humans in high doses, the toxin has sent dozens of New Yorkers to the hospital since it appeared on the street in the mid-1990s.

“Chinese chalk,” one of the best known street pesticides, is no longer anywhere to be found. But plastic vials of light brown granules with the same active ingredient — deltamethrin — are displayed openly on shelves in Chinatown’s many small stores. Labeled Fuxin Brand Insecticidal Bait (street price $3 per box, 10 vials to a box), the package says the product is made by the Fuzhou Control Termite Company in China. Overexposure to deltamethrin, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, can cause, “vomiting, stomach pains, convulsions, tremors, and loss of consciousness.” Often the powder is sold next to five-ounce bags of peppermint candy look-alike Power Moth Balls, which also are illegally imported from China.

The EPA doesn’t mince words when it comes to the dangers of illegal pesticides. A flyer targeting the Spanish-speaking community, which disproportionately uses the illicit products, tells potential buyers, Tres Pasitos, tiza insecticida y otros pesticides ilegales: Claro que matan plagas … pero tambien pueden matar a la gente — Tres Pasitos, insect chalk, and other illegal pesticides: Of course they kill pests … but they can also kill people.

So what prompts New Yorkers to risk exposing themselves and their children to illegally used pesticides?

The pests, of course.

On the first night in my new Astoria apartment, roaches scurried up the walls and crawled in and out of my unpacked boxes. I took a shoe and smashed one climbing on the wall next to my bed and swatted another off the blanket. Orange and brown roach poop peaked out at the edges of the paint and covered the bathroom cabinet. A year earlier, I had moved into another Queens apartment with two guys. Sitting on my bed for the first time, I covered my nose with a pillow thinking, “Boys sure do smell.” Then I saw the rotting mouse on the floor. It had been killed, presumably, by the legal poisons we were using, but over the coming months I learned that many of his brethren were able to weather the onslaught of state-sanctioned toxins just fine.

After moving into his apartment, Tom — the deli worker — told me he saw a stream of roaches climbing into his living room through an outside window. “You take this can of soda” — he picked up my grape Welch’s — “put it down, there would be five roaches underneath it, right away.” He bought Tempo, sprinkled it onto his floor, and within a week, no more roaches. He lived there two years and never applied another pesticide.

Dan Kass, assistant commissioner for New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, disputes the effectiveness of Tempo when used as a powder. But with people like Tom advertising the product, it’s no surprise that the market is sizable. According to a 2003 city health department survey, 9 percent of households with roaches use Tempo. A 2007 article published in the pre-eminent toxicology journal Environment Health Perspectives studied pesticide exposure in pregnant New York City black and Dominican women. It found that 3 percent of participants used illegal pesticides. And the market isn’t limited to New York. According to news reports, illegal pesticides have been found in Illinois, New Jersey, and California as well.

As with virtually every market for illicit substances, for every winner, there are losers. People — especially children — who are exposed to illegal pesticides run health risks, but then again, so do those who live in heavily roach infested apartments. And those selling unlicensed products run the risk of jail time if they’re caught.

Not that illegal pesticides are a high priority for law enforcement.

“Tempo? I haven’t heard of it in years,” a Bronx officer told me. I had approached him after spending an hour on a futile search of the neighborhood for the pesticide. I told him I was a reporter working on a story and asked if he knew where I might find it.

“I don’t know where they sell it,” he said. “I heard it’s a good chemical.” I thanked him and began to walk away.

“One sec,” he yelled after me. He took out his cell phone and called his dad. Two minutes later he gave me the names of two South Bronx neighborhoods where I’d be able to find it. “I use the glue strips myself,” he said. “They’re easier to get.”

This officer took the service part of his “Protect and Serve” oath seriously. And besides, it wasn’t his job to protect the public from illegal pesticides. In New York State, enforcing pesticide regulations falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Attorney General’s office, not the city police. And these bureaucracies face a daunting task. While Tempo Ultra WSP can only be sold to licensed exterminators in New York City, in other states — including New Jersey, a $3 round trip PATH train ride away — you can buy it without any special license. The other chemicals are smuggled in from as nearby as Latin America or as far away as China and often sold by street vendors, who can be “tough to find,” Kass said.

They might be tough to find, but it’s not clear enforcement agencies are looking very hard. A statement released by the press office of the DEC said that sales of illegal pesticides are addressed immediately by Environmental Control Police Officers, or ECO, whenever they learn of them, but didn’t put any figures on ECO actions. The statement also referred to two interagency efforts to combat illegal pesticide use, but was short on specifics. One undated effort “involved inspections of distributors warehousing and selling illegally imported pesticides.” The other occurred in 2003, when the DEC and EPA sent inspectors out to conduct “an exhaustive inspection of stores offering for sale mothballs imported from China.”

After the Attorney General’s office took up the illicit pesticide battle in 2002, they made only nine arrests in the next 17 months. In another action, as part of a larger campaign to limit children’s exposure to pesticides, the AGs office levied fines of between $2,000 and $25,000 for 12 stores caught selling unregistered products. But rather than confiscating the pesticides, they made the miscreants agree to perform a Kafkaesque task — dispose of them legally and immediately. In New York City this would involve waiting years for a clean sweep campaign — a DEC spokesperson said one occurred four years ago in the Bronx and Queens. Or the agency refers people to two private hazardous waste disposal companies, both of whom, when contacted, said they did not typically accept pesticide deposits from the public. In any case, if public announcements are an indication of concern, as of late the AG’s interest in prosecuting vendors of illegal pesticides seems to have fizzled.

So the pesticide dealers — if indeed they ever saw law enforcement as a serious barrier to their business — have re-emerged. Despite DEC efforts, Power Moth Balls are sold openly in Chinatown, both in stores and kiosks. Poisonings from Tres Pasitos tripled from 2005 to 2006, said Dr. Robert Hoffman, director of the Health Department Poison Control Center, in a news release. And vendors of illicit pesticides aren’t exactly hiding.

The tip from the deli worker that I go to Flushing proved fruitless, but someone on the street directed me to the 82nd Street subway stop in Jackson Heights, where a vendor was yelling “Tempo, Tempo, Tempo!” at passersby. I told him I was a journalist, and he wouldn’t talk to me, but he continued loudly hawking his illicit goods. The Bronx cop’s suggestion that I head to the 3^rd Avenue/149 Street subway station was more productive. I quickly attracted a man who appointed himself my guide to the neighborhood. We couldn’t find the roach-killing contraband on the street, although he said it was sold everywhere years ago. We did finally find a stash behind the counter in a 99-cent store. I was surprised it had taken so long, at my last stop, a short subway ride away, the first street vendor I spoke with directed me to the Morenito down the street, an apparent community fixture.

“Do you have Tempo? Tres Pasitos?” I asked him.

He led me to what appeared to be a trash heap next to an empanada stand and a young man selling books and religious posters. Throwing an empty carton to the side, he uncovered a large black trash bag, overflowing with pesticides.

“You have babies, mami?”

“No.”

Another vendor prodded him to warn me of the dangers. “Dile, Dile,” Tell her, tell her. “Very Dangerous, very dangerous.”

“But it works, mami,” the Morenito told me. He shuffled his feet three times — Tres Pasitos, three little steps — and whatever pest eats it is dead.

He had placed three one-inch long baggies, each about half full of Tres Pasitos, in my hand.

“What are you doing holding it?” The men grew alarmed when they realized I hadn’t put the baggies away.

“You handed it to me!” I was more concerned about the small unsealed manila envelope of Tempo in my other hand. The empanada vendor produced a brown paper bag, and I quickly stuffed the contraband inside.

“Wash your hands,” they told me, with some urgency.

The warnings were the approximate equivalent of a cigarette seller leaning over the counter and yelling “This stuff will kill you!” at his customers, but the packages didn’t come with proper written labels, nothing to tell people that Tempo should be heavily diluted with water, for example. Typically, buyers simply sprinkle the powder on the floor at a concentration 200 times stronger than its intended use.

The Morenito was suddenly eager to go after I told him I was a reporter. I followed him.

“How much do you sell?” I insisted.

“Ten or twelve a day of the Tempo,” he said. Sales of Tres Pasitos are rare.

He scuttled off into the crowd before I could ask him where he got the stuff. He headed to the ice-cream vendor who had first directed me to him to give her a couple dollars for the referral. He had reason to be generous. You can buy Tempo on the Internet for the equivalent of $10 per 50 grams; he sold it to me for $20. A $10 tax-free profit per bag means the Bronx street vendor could be making $100 to $120 a day — around $28,000 a year minus transportation costs — on Tempo sales alone.

Of course, for anyone living in a roach-infested apartment, there are other options. Scores of pesticides can be bought legally, but, warns Assistant Commissioner Kass, these can be as bad as or worse than the illegal stuff. For its part, the city recommends taking steps such as using boric acid, sealing cracks, and keeping a clean apartment.

As for me, I took an option available to only a privileged few of those sharing living space with the city’s pests.

I moved.

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