IN AMBITIOUS ASSAULT ON BROOKLYN DRUG TRADE, LIMITED VICTORY

It was a big show of force: 60 people under arrest, 5 gangs
vanquished, more than 200 criminal charges, a $1.5 million narcotics
enterprise shattered and an urban village of 3,500 liberated.

The 2002 raid on the sprawling Cypress Hills housing project in East
New York, said Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, shut
down "a historic conspiracy."

His choice of words signaled an aggressive change in prosecution
tactics. Prosecutors planned to file felony conspiracy charges. That
approach, long used against Mafia suspects, could produce sentences
unheard of among the housing project's pushers, lookouts and addicts:
life in prison.

Again and again in the years to come, similar raids concentrated on
housing projects in Coney Island, Fort Greene and East New York. The
numbers peaked with the arrest of more than 140 people at the Red Hook
Houses in 2006. Nearly all the defendants were charged with
first-degree conspiracy, their bail set at $100,000, sometimes $1
million. Tenant associations and community boards lavished praise on
the district attorney.

But soon, the strategy stumbled at the courthouse steps.

Judges rebuked the prosecution tactics. Juries rejected the conspiracy
charges.

And after six years, eight major operations and more than 500 arrests,
no one has been convicted of first-degree conspiracy. Instead, many
defendants have spent a year or more on Rikers Island, awaiting trials
that in the end never come. Typically, they plead guilty to lesser
crimes, are sentenced to time served and then are released.

Prosecutors say that the mere threat of their novel conspiracy charge
has resulted in longer prison terms, some through plea bargains,
keeping accused dealers off the streets as the system moves along.

But defense lawyers have routinely advised their clients to stall,
waiting for the favorable plea deals that eventually come. And they
call the whole program a miscarriage of justice, an upside-down world
where sentences end up being handed out after time has been served.
The lawyers argue that prosecutors have abused the use of the
conspiracy charges -- using the more significant counts to withhold
evidence from defendants, and to exact jail terms they might never
have won otherwise.

A portrait of the Cypress Hills case, drawn from hearings, interviews,
court records, police reports and secret grand jury testimony
transcripts provided to The New York Times, offers insights into the
goals of prosecutors and the police. And it indicates an outcome that
allows both sides to offer competing claims of just what has been achieved.

A Shifting Battleground

By the numbers, Cypress Hills is 1,430 families, 261 of them with a
man in the house, living on an average of about $19,000 a year. In the
surrounding community, 31 of every 1,000 men have been in jail, among
the highest rates in the borough, according to the independent Justice
Mapping Center.

By other measures, Cypress Hills is the roar of the jetliners soaring
over 15 blunt seven-story rectangles of weathered red brick, the
windows barred even on the top floor, the small satellite dishes and
ragged foreign flags poking through the slats like letters in a
neglected mailbox.

For decades, the project's gangs have grown in sophistication. A
generation ago, the police pursued housing project drug dealers with
the buy-and-bust method: An undercover officer buys some drugs, then
other officers arrest the seller.

By the late 1980s, the authorities acknowledged they were losing
ground to violent crack cocaine gangs. A supervisor, Sgt. Donald
Flynn, told a grand jury what was happening: Dealers had begun
retreating from the courtyards into the buildings, farther from the
reach of surveillance.

"They become, as I like to call it, unholy alliances between some of
these groups and agreements as far as who would control what side,"
Sergeant Flynn testified. With graffiti on the walls and color-coded
caps to mark vials of drugs, the groups staked their territory, the EU
organization, the Front Boys, the Ruffryders and the A Team dividing
up the 29 acres of Cypress Hills.

Buy-and-bust operations became more difficult to perform, Sergeant
Flynn explained. At Cypress Hills, "a lot of people have grown up
together, go to school, junior high or elementary, and an undercover
not being from the development would be known pretty much right away,
as would, of course, any surveillance vehicles."

So the police devised a more aggressive, long-term approach. On April
3, 2002, two undercover detectives, Gilwyn Ferguson and Michelle King,
moved into a Cypress Hills apartment on Fountain Avenue. Posing as a
drug abuser, Detective Ferguson began to wander the courtyards in a
bandanna and a nylon do-rag.

"I was sometimes dressed with dirty clothes," he recalled in
testimony. "Sometimes I would have my beard grow out to the point that
when I eat, when I am eating food, I have, like, mayonnaise on my
beard. Sometimes I would be, like, stumbling or dragging my feet."

Inside the apartment, the detectives kept records of their purchases.
Outside, uniformed officers stopped, questioned and frisked residents
of the project several times a day, recording names, heights, weights,
eye colors. Investigators compared their observations over a period of
six months.

A Plan of Infiltration

As the police worked the streets, the district attorney began
developing a strategy to take the case to court. Mr. Hynes promoted
Suzanne M. Corhan to chief of the Major Narcotics Investigations
Bureau. Raised in the borough and educated at Brooklyn Law School, she
embraced Cypress Hills as the first major challenge of her new assignment.

Many of the drug gangs had evaded traditional police tactics by
employing children, who could not be turned into cooperating
witnesses. "They use kids to shield themselves," Ms. Corhan said in an
interview.

And so she set out to turn the tables by showing that using minors to
sell drugs constituted a conspiracy. By such reasoning, those arrested
would be hit with impossible-to-raise bails of $100,000 or more and,
if convicted, would face much longer sentences than anything they had
encountered before.

Her strategy borrowed techniques from racketeering prosecutions.
Federal agents routinely conduct long-term surveillance, pressing
low-ranking criminals to carry recording devices or testify against
crime syndicate organizers.

"The basic philosophy was to create an investigative plan to determine
hierarchy, scope, identify acts of violence, infiltrate and then
ideally dismantle them through a prosecution of the entire
enterprise," Ms. Corhan said.

Connecting the Dots

The Ruffryders worked the middle section of Cypress Hills. They
stocked drugs in an apartment at 1140 Blake Avenue for sale at three
spots around the neighborhood. They excavated crown moldings in
lobbies to hide Ziploc bags of cocaine. And they made a robust profit,
paying workers $30 to sell $130 worth of drugs.

But by early 2002, the Ruffryders were spending themselves into
trouble, smoking their supply of marijuana and fighting another group
for control of a sales spot a block west of the project.

"They were selling drugs on the block, but they was also gambling and
smoking trees and everything else, but spending their money, so they
couldn't buy more drugs," a drug suspect named Bernard Roachford later
testified.

Detectives Ferguson and King did not seem to worry gang members when
they moved in on April 3, 2002. Less than a week later, Detective
Ferguson bought three small bags of crack cocaine from a teenager.
This time the boy was walking with a man named Rolando Leon, known
around the projects as Face. Investigators identified him as a leader
of the Ruffryders.

The investigation moved methodically. With each interaction, the
detectives were building evidence to chart the hierarchy of the
Ruffryders and the other gangs. Connecting Mr. Leon to the teenage boy
- -- just as Ms. Corhan envisioned -- was a crucial element of the
conspiracy charges.

Five months later, the investigation complete, the police raided the
project. A grand jury handed up charges of first-degree conspiracy
against 60 people, including Mr. Leon.

This was meant to be the first major string of arrests in Ms. Corhan's
plan. Hundreds would follow, right up until the 2006 raid in Red Hook.

A Familiar Pattern

These days, every Wednesday, defendants and their mothers and their
crying babies pack a Brooklyn courtroom for a familiar ritual: The
clerk calls cases one by one, the defense lawyers say they have not
seen evidence for conspiracy charges, the prosecutor says the evidence
is secret, then the defendants nod to their families and return to
Rikers Island.

This rotating clearinghouse, meant to handle the backlog of cases
stemming from the raids at Cypress Hills and the other projects, is
overseen by Justice Danny K. Chun of State Supreme Court.

"These cases, they're just picking up slops from the streets, users,
and hammering them to make pleas," said one of the defense lawyers,
Larry Wright. "Anybody who buys or sells drugs, obviously there's an
agreement. It's taking a legal theory and expanding it."

In the end only five defendants from Cypress Hills were tried on
first-degree conspiracy charges, and some were convicted of lesser
charges. The rest of the cases were eventually settled with plea
bargains or dismissed.

Other first-degree cases from other housing projects have ended the
same way. Judges have been dubious of the prosecution's theory; other
times, juries have been unpersuaded.

In a case at the Vanderveer Estates in East Flatbush, an undercover
officer recorded six purchases of cocaine from her downstairs neighbor
Deran Spencer. Rejecting an offer to plead guilty for as little as six
months in jail, Mr. Spencer chose to go to trial. He, too, was acquitted.

"Everything they alleged against him was absolutely true," said his
defense lawyer, David S. Jacobs. "The jury cut him a break. We walked
down the courthouse steps together."

The formula for a typical plea bargain is simple: Prosecutors display
overwhelming evidence, then defendants plead guilty to reduced
charges. But in the conspiracy cases, prosecutors have argued that
their evidence involves secret negotiations and must be withheld.

But defense lawyers have adjusted. Instead of rushing to accept deals,
they have become emboldened. Many now warn their clients not to plead
guilty to any sort of conspiracy.

"If you just hold out and wait a year and a half," said John B.
Stella, a veteran defense lawyer who has represented many clients in
these cases, "you're going to get a better offer when the fire sale
happens."

Many of the defendants at Cypress Hills eventually pleaded guilty to
traditional sale and possession charges. Some of the plea bargain
negotiations outlasted the sentencing terms: By the time the last
deals were finally struck, more than two dozen of the defendants from
the earliest cases had already been paroled.

Among those arrested at Cypress Hills was Elijah Bussey, a clean-cut
young man with a firm handshake, who asked not to be photographed for
this article for fear of reprisals from the police. His defense
lawyer, Paul Madden, said he had been charged with first-degree
conspiracy but not with any overt act, like selling drugs.

The evidence disclosed to Mr. Madden showed that another defendant in
the case had waved to Mr. Bussey as he played basketball, prompting
Mr. Bussey to leave the court and wait in front of a building. Mr.
Bussey was 18 at the time. His bail was set at $100,000. Unable to
raise it, he was held for four months. The charges were eventually
dismissed.

'Not Perfect, but Better'

By the numbers, Cypress Hills is a marginally safer place since the
raid in 2002. And prosecutors believe they have succeeded in sending a
message to drug dealers, even if the triumph fell well short of their
initial ambitions.

"It's not always foolproof," Ms. Corhan said of the conspiracy
strategy. But she added, "Drug dealers believed they were in control.
I think we flipped that a little bit."

Thick metal gates cover the doors of the Cypress Hills senior center.
Inside, Rita Newsome organizes music programs and lunches of chicken
and string beans. On gloomy days, she sometimes passes the hours
alone. On sunny days, women come to sing and trade gossip, but they
take care to get home before dark.

"It's nice out there now. Just once in a while they do a little
shooting up, a little shooting the guns," said Herman Buchanan, a
retired welder who lives in the project on Linden Boulevard. "Not
perfect, but better."

Last spring, the police returned to Cypress Hills for another raid. In
June, a grand jury indicted 31 people on charges of first-degree
conspiracy. This time the district attorney made no public
announcement.