NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed charges Thursday against 19 people who they said ran a year-round open-air drug market in Washington Square Park, distributing millions of doses of fentanyl, heroin and crack cocaine.

During the past five years, a federal indictment said, police and emergency medical personnel responded to more than 65 reports of apparent drug overdoses in the Greenwich Village park and nearby neighborhoods. Prosecutors said the park, with its three playgrounds and chess tables, had become strewed with used syringes, needles and drug packaging.

In one six-month span last year, the indictment said, two people died of overdoses caused by fentanyl and its analogues, including an 18-year-old days after graduating from high school in Aspen, Colorado, who had come to New York City for a prestigious theater internship, and a 43-year-old who had been homeless and had lived in the park for years.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Benjamin Weiser and Santul Nerkar/Benjamin Norman
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