HOMES NO SAFE HAVEN FOR DEALS

ALBANY -- Albany County prosecutors are broadcasting a new message to
drug dealers they hope will resonate with even hardened criminals:
Sling drugs from home, and we'll even evict your mom.

When police swoop in to raid suspected drug dens, family members can
and will be thrown out if they knew what was happening and did
nothing about it, authorities said.

"We demand that everybody be evicted," Assistant District Attorney
Jessica Blain-Lewis, who has been bringing the cases since November,
said flatly. "It's going to be up to the judge to decide who knew or
should have known."

The program, which has parallels in Troy and Schenectady, is based on
so-called "bawdy house" anti-vice laws that have been on the books in
some form since the early 1900s.

Authorities say it gives them the power to disrupt drug markets and
punish those who give haven to dealers and the landlords who
knowingly and repeatedly rent to them.

In law enforcement circles they are known as narcotics evictions, and
the premise is simple: If you let people sell drugs out of your
apartment, if you know about or should have known about it, you will
be tossed out on the street.

And for the first time since the program started in Albany, it
survived a legal test this week when a judge ordered an Ontario
Street landlord to heed the prosecutors' eviction order and fined him
for not complying sooner.

New York City authorities have been doing the evictions for years to
near-universal praise. They bill them as a way to counter a
closed-door drug market less visible and sometimes harder to reach
than the street-corner sales that have come to symbolize the trade.

"There may be a limitless supply of drug dealers from downstate," and
drug users may continue to fuel the marketplace, said Schenectady
County District Attorney Robert Carney, "but the thinking is that you
ultimately have a finite number of locations. And it's not going to
happen where people live in their own homes and care about them."

In Albany and elsewhere, the programs are part of larger efforts to
get landlords and tenants working with police and prosecutors to
protect them from the lawbreakers around them.

Albany's initiative is known as "Safe Homes-Safe Streets" and
includes another program where landlords give police a list of their
tenants and permission to roust and arrest trespassers who should not
be on the property.

The buildings are marked with white signs stamped with the police and
district attorney's seal -- about 252 so far, and growing.

The DeWitt Clinton Apartments, where a 69-year-old man was found
stabbed to death earlier this month, is one of the program's newest
participants, authorities said.

A similar program in Troy has helped North Central resident Tina
Urzan keep unwanted nighttime visitors from her porch.

"One night I went out and they were all sitting there eating pizza,"
said Urzan, 55, who owns the Olde Judge Mansion, a bed and breakfast
on Sixth Avenue. "You would have to say, 'It's not public property --
it's my house!' "