When a celebrity dies from a drug overdose and police find 50 or 70 or however many baggies of heroin it is now in their apartment, you better believe they’re going after their dealer. On Tuesday night, they may have found their people.
At around 7:30 p.m., working off a tip, police raided a Manhattan address belonging to the men believed to be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s dealers. Inside the apartment, cops found 350 glassine envelopes of heroin. The bags were stamped with “Ace of Spades” much like the ones found in Hoffman’s apartment.
Two men in their 50s, one woman in her 20s and another man in his 20s were arrested and questioned. They did not confess to selling to Hoffman nor were police able to determine if they did.
In an earlier story, another druggie said he was at an apartment in the East Village buying heroin when he ran into Hoffman doing the same.
The 46-year-old star scored his final, fatal stash — about $1,000 worth of heroin and coke — from two drug dealers outside a D’Agostino’s near his Bethune Street home Saturday night, sources said.
The dealers, both wearing messenger bags, stood next to the drug-addled actor as he withdrew $1,200 in six installments from the Greenwich Street grocery store’s ATM around 8 p.m., sources said, citing bank records and an eyewitness.
“That’s when the [drug] transaction took place,’’ a law-enforcement source said.
The drug deal wasn’t caught on video. But cops were scouring the area for other surveillance cameras that might show Hoffman or the suspects, including footage from a town house directly across the street from the star’s apartment.
On Tuesday, police described the heroin Hoffman bought as 59 percent pure, almost the highest they’ve ever seen and it was not cut with fentanyl, a synthetic morphine commonly added to strengthen the high.
If you’re looking for some silver lining in this tragedy, then I guess you could take pleasure in knowing he at least died shooting the good stuff.