Preppy Killer Robert Chambers had a dozen-bag-a-day heroin habit when he was busted last summer for allegedly dealing a half pound of smack out of his girlfriend’s East 57th Street apartment, his lawyer said yesterday.
“He was using 10 to 12 bags of heroin a day,” the lawyer, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, told a Manhattan judge yesterday.
Chambers, who became an addict at age 14, is going for an insanity defense, arguing he was so drug addled during the alleged dealing he didn’t know what he was doing.
A dozen bags a day would put Chambers in the higher levels of addiction, experts said.
“That’s a serious amount of heroin,” said David Rosenthal, director of the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, where 1,800 addicts a year get help.
A bag goes for between $10 and $20 on the street.
Chambers was also using cocaine, smoking marijuana and taking prescription drugs, the lawyer said. He was so addicted, it took Rikers Island doctors two to three weeks to gradually reduce the amount of methadone they were using to detox him, according to the lawyer.
Prosecutors have countered that Chambers had enough of his marbles intact to successfully sell as much as $2,800 in heroin at a time to undercover cops – and that they have tapes from hidden video cameras to prove it.
Chambers is notorious for the “rough sex” strangulation of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in Central Park two decades ago. He faces life in prison on the current drug charges.
While he was serving a 15-year state prison manslaughter sentence for the Levin strangulation, he repeatedly tested positive for drug use.
Chambers was arrested again when traces of heroin were found in his car after cops pulled him over in Harlem in November 2004. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor possession charges.