PART TWO: A TALE OF REDEMPTION TURNS AROUND LIFE ON THE STREETS

BALTIMORE - They are men connected through family and street culture
but separated by paths chosen long ago: Benjamin (Eggy) Davis, the
career heroin dealer, and Leonard Hamm, the Baltimore police
commissioner who has now helped Davis change his life -- and the
lives of others ruined by drugs and alcohol.

Once, they might have faced each other across a legal divide. But the
other night they met at Sinai Hospital, where Davis was readying for
back surgery after a bad fall, and Hamm was at his bedside to wish him well.

Theirs is the story of roads not taken: Davis, 75, the South
Baltimore kid who entered the heroin trade at 18 and stayed there for
the next half century; and Hamm, 57, whose family was close friends
with Davis' and grew up hearing the street lore about Davis -- and
chose to make a life in law enforcement.

"I got into the drug trade because that's what I wanted to do," says
Davis. He makes no excuses. "It was good money, that's all. I had a
new car every year. I wasn't out on the street corner selling bags or
nothing, I was dealing with big stuff. Did I think about the lives
being ruined? Yeah, but I told myself I wasn't the one giving it to
them, it's what they wanted. See, any time you do something, you can
always rationalize it."

It went on for many years, interrupted only by prison. Davis was a
serious trafficker in a time when a handful of drug lords ruled the
area's heroin trade: John (Liddie) Jones and James Wesley (Big Head
Brother) Carter, Melvin (Little Melvin) Williams and James A. (Turk) Scott.

As he made his way through the police ranks, Leonard Hamm heard all
these names, though he was a generation behind them.

"I knew about Eggy before I met him," Hamm says, because of his
notoriety and "because our families were very close. They all grew up
together. But I never met him until one day at Maceo's Bar, on Monroe
Street, in November 2004. There he was, reading The Wall Street
Journal. I figured he was [faking it]. But he turned out to be one of
the most intelligent people I'd ever met, well versed in history,
geography, math. And well-versed in the street."

Hamm was about to start up a police program known as Get Out of the
Game, designed to help those whose lives have been wrecked by drugs
and alcohol. Davis understood. In his day, he'd made as much as
$20,000 some days a€"-- but he'd also done multiple prison stretches,
and put his wife of 47 years and four children through long, difficult years.

"In and out of prison," he says. "Plus, the game got bad. Back when
I was coming up, we didn't go around shooting people. These kids
today will kill you if you step on their feet." He was ready to
listen to Hamm.

"It was like providence sent Eggy as my street warrior," the
commissioner says. "Who's a better connection than this guy? He can
put all his knowledge, and all his street smarts and charisma to work
the way nobody else could."

The Get Out of the Game program helps those whose lives have been
ruined by drugs and alcohol find new housing and jobs and health care.

"It's changed Eggy's life," says Hamm, "and a lot of other people's
lives. He's really helping them. He told me, if he'd known his life
could be like this, he'd have changed long ago. Eggy's become a great man now."