REIGNING FROM BEHIND BARS

Officials Say W. Md. Prison Inmate Ran Brutal City Gang

HAGERSTOWN - His mother says she sent him to this Western Maryland
town as a teenager to escape the drugs and violence of their Bronx
neighborhood. Instead, this is where he cut his teeth as a criminal.

Now 28 years old, Steve Lamont Willock has lived all but six months of
his adult life behind bars. His home for the past four years, the
Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland, is even farther from
Baltimore - a place in which he might never have set foot. Yet
authorities say they believe Willock commanded one of Baltimore's
largest and most violent gangs, a set of the Bloods called Tree Top
Piru.

From his prison cell, according to a federal racketeering indictment
last month, Willock enforced the gang's rules and oversaw its
activities, including violent initiations, witness intimidation and
five murders. Twenty-seven other alleged gang members were indicted,
including Willock's girlfriend, Diane Kline, a Hagerstown woman who
relayed his messages to the streets of Baltimore, authorities say.

Willock could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of the
racketeering and drug conspiracy charges he faces. His defense
attorney, Thomas Crowe, declined to comment on the specific charges
but said his client "maintains his innocence" and will plead not
guilty at an arraignment scheduled for March 21.

Authorities have not explained how they believe Willock ascended to
the top of a Baltimore gang even as he remained behind bars in
Cumberland. But the snippets of jailhouse letters and recorded phone
calls included in the indictment portray him as a fearsome leader who
called himself "Kanibal Lecktor." He instructed members, authorities
said, to defend the Bloods' honor through violence.

"Understand that it's a violation to side with ... another set over
Tree so make sure that y'all fully understand that anyone who does
carry out that sort of violations will be sanctioned," he wrote in a
letter to a gang member in Baltimore, according to federal
prosecutors.

That gang lord persona comes as a surprise to those who knew Willock
as "Chu," a seemingly low-level crack-cocaine dealer in Hagerstown - a
small city that has become a magnet for big-city drug dealers. He was
so nondescript that police officers who arrested him testified later
that they couldn't remember him.

"Our relationship with him was pretty basic," said Washington County
Deputy State's Attorney Joseph S. Michael, who secured an
18-year-prison term for Willock in 2004. "He came here from New York,
we arrested him, he went to prison. He got out, we arrested him, he
went to prison. He got out, we arrested him, he went to prison."

Born April 11, 1979, Willock lived in the Bronx until he was about 16.
His relatives could not be located for this article, but letters from
his mother and sister to a Washington County judge offer some shadings
of his early years.

Dolly Campbell said she was a single mother raising Willock and four
other children. She described him as "very caring, respectable and
friendly" and said she sent him to live with her sister in Hagerstown
"to escape the violence and drug-infected neighborhood."

She said she didn't realize that her sister was a drug addict, and
that her sister's children, around Willock's age, were "involved in
drugs activities."

Willock fell into addiction at age 18, Campbell wrote, and never
received any treatment. Natasha Campbell, Willock's sister, also wrote
that he "has a drug problem, and he really should be getting help for
his condition."

In the half-dozen or so letters he has written to Judge W.P. Kennedy
Boone III, who sentenced him in 2003, Willock also repeatedly calls
himself a drug addict. He sold drugs, he claimed, only "to support my
habit."

The prosecutor isn't so sure.

"Aside from all his whining about drug addiction," Michael said,
"there's no indication he was ever anything but an enterprise criminal."

For this modest Western Maryland city, Willock appears to be part of
an unlikely migration of dozens, if not hundreds, of young men from
New York City. Many of those who relocated during the past decade and
a half were involved in the drug trade, according to
authorities.

"His story is repeated over and over and over again," said Michael,
who was prosecutor of the Washington County Narcotics Task Force for
10 years before becoming deputy state's attorney in 2004. "Like
lemmings, they're drawn here."

Hagerstown, founded in 1762, has a population of about 40,000 and a
low rate of violent crime. At the intersection of two major
interstates - I-70 and I-81 - it's known as "Hub City." And with three
state prisons six miles outside of town, it's often a first-stop for
the newly paroled.

Michael said he has interviewed dozens of the New Yorkers that he has
convicted and asked them bluntly: "Why the hell do you come here?"

Their answers are consistent, Michael said, and his successor,
prosecutor Brett R. Wilson, separately offered the same opinions.

Drug dealers can make far greater profits, as the price of crack can
be five times higher in Hagerstown than in New York; they were safer
from gang warfare and turf battles in Hagerstown, particularly in the
mid-1990s; and there's no shortage of local women who have sheltered
the out-of-towners, they said.

Regardless of why Willock came to Hagerstown, his criminal record
makes clear that he quickly established himself as a drug dealer.

In 1997, by age 18, he was selling crack cocaine on Jonathan Street,
at the time an open-air drug market just a few blocks from the
historic downtown.

His first arrest, May 9, 1997, would set a pattern for his next two:
Each time, he was brought down by a criminal informant in a simple
sting operation.

The police had been looking at street-level dealing at Jonathan and
North streets and sent in an informant to make a buy. Willock sold the
man two small pieces of crack for $40.

He was arrested and convicted of drug distribution charges, but served
almost no jail time.

On Dec. 19, 1998, Willock was in the same area, near Jonathan Street,
when a man walked up and asked for $40 of crack.

Burned by his first arrest, Willock - wearing a New York Yankees cap
and a gray Tommy Hilfiger jacket - asked the customer, "You the
police?" The man said he wasn't.

"You testify to that?" he asked, before exchanging the drugs and
money.

The police closed in, and after a brief chase he was in handcuffs. He
gave a fake name, Lamount Willcock, but was quickly discovered after
he signed his real name to his waiver of rights.

Willock pleaded guilty, was sentenced to eight years in May 1999, and
by December 2002 had been granted work release from the Maryland
Correctional Training Center prison in Hagerstown. He worked in the
kitchen of a nearby Sheraton on U.S. 40.

Prison officials gave the local police a heads-up that Willock "was
getting out, and that he was going to be back in the drug business,"
prosecutor Michael said.

"He had an association with local people," Michael said. "It was all
set up for him to be back in business right away. It was child's play."

Also at the Sheraton with "Chu" on work-release was Tareq Yarbrough, a
fellow Bronx native known as "Freaky Ty" and "Bloody Ty."

A woman who befriended Yarbrough and Willock in late 2002 said the men
met in the Maryland prison system, not in New York. The woman asked
not to be named because of the gang ties alleged against Willock.

The woman said she doesn't condone criminal behavior, "but I guess
maybe I know a different side to Chu."

"He's very true, very honest," she said. "He has a great, very loving,
personality. They have made him out to be a monster, but he's very
kind. He has been my emotional support at times."

She added, "What a lot of people don't understand with these gangs is
that these boys are a product of their environment. A child growing up
in inner-city New York - that's a very different world than a child
growing up in Hagerstown."

Court records show that Yarbrough and Willock worked together as crack
dealers, occasionally selling in the Sheraton parking lot.

Michael said police targeted Willock not long after he left prison in
2002, and within five months had set up a sting using a criminal informant.

The informant arranged to buy "an eight-ball" - one-eighth of an ounce
of crack - for $170. At 4:30 p.m. April 25, 2003, the informant met
Willock in the hotel lot.

Police continued to monitor Willock and Yarbrough. Both were arrested
in May.

At his court hearing, Willock was despondent. "My life is finished,"
he told Judge Boone. "It's done. Let's just get it over with. Let me
plead guilty."

Willock did catch a bit of a break: Although he was a third-time drug
offender, making him eligible for a sentence of 25 years in prison
without the possibility of parole, officers from his first arrest
testified that they could not remember him.

Instead, he was sentenced to 18 years. Yarbrough, also a third-time
offender, got the lengthier sentence. Both men were sent to Western
Correctional Institution near Cumberland.

Michael said he is certain that Willock's connection to Baltimore was
fostered "entirely through the prisons." Whether it was at Western or
a prison from an earlier sentence is unclear.

The federal indictment alleges that Baltimore's Tree Top Piru set was
born in the Washington County Detention Center nine years ago - about
the time Willock was there awaiting trial in his second case.

Wilson, the current drug task force prosecutor, said the reason an
imprisoned gang leader can hold onto power is simple: "Everyone
involved in drugs knows they will end up in prison at some point.
Prison is bad enough without ticking a gang leader off. That's what
keeps them in line."

Willock ruled his gang with "an iron fist," as one alleged member put
it in a letter quoted in the federal indictment. His Tree Top Piru
members fanned out from Western Maryland to the Eastern Shore, with
the core in Baltimore, according to federal prosecutors. Authorities
could provide no estimate of the number of its members, but city
prosecutors have called it the largest and most violent gang in the
city.

In telephone calls and letters flowing in and out of prison, federal
prosecutors said, Willock discussed murders and assaults and planned
ways for Tree Top Piru to buy and sell firearms and drugs for a
profit. He wrote of his plans to purchase a kilogram of cocaine for
$17,500 and resell it on his release from prison.

Willock discussed his power - and theorized why he was such an
effective leader - in an Aug. 21 letter to Kline, his girlfriend.

The city "is a gold mine and them dudes is [too] geographical to do
what I can. They on [their] east side, west side [expletive], but they
all trees. Being I'm from the outside and I am who I am, only I can
put everyone on one page and when money is involved, everyone listens!"

Letters that Willock wrote to Boone, asking for a sentence
modification that would permit drug treatment, portray him as turning
his life around.

"I am not a violent person," he wrote July 4, 2004. "I am a drug
addict who has made many bad decisions to support my habit. I am tired
of messing my life up, hurting my family and being alone."

Another letter to the judge, written Sept. 12 of last year, strikes a
more hopeful tone.

"I have given my life to the lord. Recently I completed a 19 month
mail in course to become an ordained minister. I am hoping to use my
achievement to mentor the youth and start an anti-drug and anti-gang
program."

But quite a different image emerges through letters federal
authorities allege he wrote to Bloods members - including one dated
Sept. 12, the same day he wrote to the judge.

In that one, the indictment alleges, Willock promoted a member to "Top
Young Gangster" but told him earning rank in the gang is not easy. The
young man, Willock allegedly wrote, must enforce the gang's right to
be given respect by other gangs.