PHILLY'S DRUG DEALERS: YOUNGER ALL THE TIME

As Deadly Year Nears the End, a Look at 2 of the Hundreds of Teens
Who Sell Dope

DRESSED IN A black Dickies suit and black Timberlands, the
chubby-faced 17-year-old crack dealer paced around the desolate lot
working another graveyard shift.

In the darkness, a steady stream of addicts ambled toward him to
make a buy. Then he saw a familiar face: his close friend's mom. "I
need a nick," she mumbled to him. Without hesitation, he sold her a
nickel bag - $5 worth of crack.

"I was surprised that she was a smoker," Mikey recalled, months
after that night. Today he calls it "the deal I will never forget."

"I was thinking that a real friend wouldn't sell to his mom," said
Mikey. "If he found out, how would he feel? But that is life. If she
won't get it from me, she will get it from somewhere else."

On the toughest, meanest streets of Philadelphia, hundreds of
youngsters like Mikey live by the rule that money is thicker than
anything - even loyalty.

It is one of the most appalling features of Philadelphia's deadly
year of crime: The youngest drug dealers are getting younger.

Cops consider Mikey a veteran dealer. (It's not his real name; he
asked that his identity be obscured to protect him from other
dealers who don't want the details of their business exposed.)

Drug dealing now attracts children as young as 10, and top police
brass admit they are only beginning to scratch the surface of the
kiddie drug world.

More children selling drugs means more children being shot. Among
the biggest increases in shooting victims this year are
14-year-olds, police said.

Sometimes, the innocent are caught in the crossfire: The men behind
the shooting death of 5-year-old Cashae Rivers - who was killed in
her family's car on a Strawberry Mansion street in September - had
drug records that stretched back to their teens.

"Drug corners are every police officer's problem," Police
Commissioner Sylvester Johnson said. "I am holding everyone
accountable. This is the new focus."

Seeking to understand why some Philadelphia kids risk their lives to
sell poison, the Daily News spent weeks with a teenage drug dealer
in the Abbotsford Homes public-housing complex in North
Philadelphia, and also visited a busy drug corner in West Kensington
filled with high-school hustlers - and found that:

Kids are lured by cheap promises of cash and respect - currency hard
to find elsewhere in a city in which 40 percent of public-school
kids drop out and the supply of menial jobs for those without a
diploma is shrinking.

All too frequently, the corner life is the entrance door to violent
crime. Young dealers often carry guns and stand exposed to thugs
twice their age, who are quick to pull triggers and spill blood to win turf.

Mikey started selling at 12, the age when he also bought a revolver
from another kid in exchange for $50 worth of weed. He has sold
marijuana and crack cocaine off and on for five years. He has one gun arrest.

Mikey and other young drug dealers say they don't fear death.

"Most people don't stop hustling," Mikey said. "They are scared of
the real world. So they stay on the streets."

Another dealer, "Donnie," 16, and his corner crew laughed when asked
about murder. Donnie is proud of being a "corner boy." He said he
and his pals sell crack around Clearfield and Hartville streets in
West Kensington, where the only open businesses are bodegas and barbershops.

"I am not scared," Donnie said, his skinny frame hidden under his
tan Edison High School uniform and an oversize black Rocawear jacket
that reached his knees.

"I don't care," he shrugged. "You are going to die anyway."

Donnie excused himself. An emerald-green Oldsmobile driven by a man
in his 20s pulled up to the corner. Donnie slinked into the back seat.

"That's his old head," said one of the boys, using street slang for
mentor. He was Donnie's boss.

The car sped off.

How to buy six pairs of white Nikes

A desire for designer clothes and shoes drove both Mikey and Donnie
to the street corners, or so they say.

Their families couldn't support their hunger for blue jeans, Nike
sneakers, Lacoste shirts. The boys said they had no other choice but
to find the easiest and closest job available: hustling.

"I had to do me," said Donnie, explaining in street slang that he
had to survive. The lanky teen boasted that he'd bought six pairs of
$75 white Nike Air Force sneakers after his first crack payday at
age 14. That way, he wouldn't have to clean his old pair.

Rule One of urban chic: Keep your sneakers spotless.

Those reasons seem superficial, but the truth is that drug dealing
can seem an appealing career in tough city neighborhoods void of
healthy businesses and jobs.

Forty percent of city residents over age 15 are out of work and not
collecting unemployment, according to U.S. Census data. One-quarter
of Philadelphians live in poverty, which can be difficult to escape.

Computers have become central to most city businesses, yet too many
kids can barely read at the grade level for their age group, said
Elijah Anderson, an urban sociologist at the University of
Pennsylvania. Four of 10 public-school students never earn a
diploma, according to a recent report on Philadelphia's dropout epidemic.

"They feel alienated," Anderson said. They embrace the street life
because "it is functional. You rely on yourself."

And so, in many tough neighborhoods, the economy is made up of
low-wage jobs, government-funded checks, and an "idiosyncratic,
irregular underground economy of bartering, hustling, and begging,"
Anderson said.

Complicating that mix, single mothers and their children have lost a
legal source of income to welfare reform that put five-year limits
on assistance.

"In this distress, drug dealers are becoming younger and younger,"
Anderson said.

One narcotics cop said recently that teen dealers typically don't
know their Social Security numbers. Some mfay not have them.

Since 2004, more than 2,000 Philadelphia juveniles have been
arrested for selling cocaine-based drugs, the most popular product
among young dealers. The largest increase in those arrests has been
in the 10-to-12 age group.

More than 800 children under 18 have been arrested in Philadelphia
for gun crimes since 2004, and kids are being shot at a record rate.
Fourteen-year-olds have had one of the highest jumps, said Deputy
Police Commissioner Patricia Giorgio Fox. Cops counted 14 shooting
victims in that age group during the first eight months of 2006,
compared with six victims during the same time in 2005.

"This is our future," Fox said. "Something has to make these kids
see differently."

Yet Mikey thinks hustling leads to success faster than a high-school diploma.

Mikey proudly cited one 30-something dealer he knows who invested
his drug money in several North Philadelphia barbershops. Another
dealer opened up a recording studio.

"They went legit," Mikey said with a proud smile.

Andre Chin, 26, case manager in the probationary program Don't Fall
Down in the Hood, said Mikey is one of 50 boys with whom he works
who have been charged with gun and drug crimes. The youngest, he
said, is a 13-year-old boy charged with selling drugs.

Mikey told him how hard it is to turn his life around, Chin said:
His mother was too sick to chase after him, his father was gone, and
the streets were more welcoming than his own house.

Mikey and the other boys in Don't Fall Down can save themselves only
if they stay away from older drug dealers and focus on school, Chin warned.

"A lot of these kids need a father figure in their lives," Chin
said. "They only have a mother at home who is busy raising four or
five kids on below a minimum wage. Then there is a man on the corner
who can give these boys the money that their mothers can't give them."

Pre-teen and dealing

Mikey had a rough start in life.

His mom, relatives say, busted her knees as she escaped from a West
Philadelphia apartment fire with her two young daughters, three
years before Mikey's birth. His mom told a Daily News reporter she's
in too much pain to talk about her son.

Mikey's father lives in the Midwest and never talks to him. His two
older sisters, ages 32 and 26, moved out of Abbotsford years ago,
leaving their baby brother to fend for himself.

By 12, Mikey rarely went to class.

Instead, he spent his mornings hanging around Abbotsford Homes with
his role model - a drug dealer with wads of cash.

The young man taught Mikey the fun side of being a hustler. He
bought Mikey a PlayStation and took him on drives in his blue
Pontiac and his orange Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

He introduced Mikey to the essence of being a man in their
neighborhood - hustling while armed.

"You can find an old head and he don't care that much about you,"
Mikey said. "He knew I had potential to stand on the block with a
gun on my hip."

Mikey heeded the advice and started to sell weed.

"I didn't notice it at first," said Mikey's oldest sister, Shirley,
32. "My brother could do no wrong." (Her name has been changed to
protect Mikey's identity.)

Shirley wanted to confront the older men in Abbotsford, but she knew
better than to get involved with hustlers.

"They would protect him," she said. "I guess they are respected
because of their quote-unquote power."

His family caught wind of his new job and sent him to live near
Harrisburg with one of his adult sisters.

But Mikey couldn't give up the fast money.

His Philadelphia connections set him up with a dealing gig in his
new housing project outside Harrisburg.

Mikey needed protection. He traded $50 worth of marijuana for a
stolen "cowboy gun," a .22-caliber revolver.

"That is how it is in the drug game," Mikey said. "You need a gun so
nobody will mess with you."

During his trips back home, Mikey studied crack: how to package it,
how to make it, how to use gimmicks to persuade addicts to come back.

At 14, he was ready for a promotion.

Mikey's Abbotsford contact handed him pre-packaged baggies of crack
to sell in Harrisburg. He had trouble pricing it.

"I was selling big $20 rocks for $5," he said. "I was messing my money up."

Still, Mikey became tough.

He broke juvenile curfew and cost his family a $375 fine. He pulled
his cowboy gun on a group of boys who shouted in his face. A warrant
was issued for his arrest.

Mikey moved back to Abbotsford and enrolled as a freshman at
Roxborough High School. But instead of going to class, Mikey made
money without a middleman.

He bought 8-balls, or 1/8-ounce bags of cocaine, from various
dealers across the city. He carried the white powder back to
Abbotsford and usually paid an addict $10 worth of the finished
product to use the addict's kitchen.

The two mixed the concoction with baking soda, boiled it down with
water, cooled it off, and smashed the rock into tiny pebbles.

Mikey hated the salty smell of the cooked drug, but his helper liked
to take deep breaths as the white paste simmered on the stove.

At 15, Mikey had a routine. His workday began at 3 p.m., even after
a typical morning of skipping school. As users called his pre-paid
cell phone with their orders, Mikey raced around Abbotsford on a
minibike with his crack baggies stuffed in his pockets.

When he got tired, he went to his usual spot.

"I would just walk down the strip or stand on top of the hill," he
said. "People know where I would be at."

In darkness, the tree-lined complex is hidden from the city. It sits
atop a nondescript hill where the grass is always cut and children
play tag in the streets.

Shiny new Mercedes and Cadillacs sit doubled-parked on the complex's
curvy roads. The SUVs belong to the older dealers, who often return
to Abbotsford to show off their wealth, Mikey said.

He wanted to live like them and one day open a business.

When Mikey worked hard, he made more than $1,400 a night. He usually
aimed to clock 15-hour shifts, especially at the beginning of the
month, when addicts received their government checks.

He bought mostly clothes and fast food with the cash. Not wanting to
look like a thug, he typically dressed in preppy clothes such as
tapered blue jeans, Lacoste shirts and white Adidas sneakers.

Mikey, whose chubby cheeks, bright eyes and wide smile give him an
innocent look, never seemed like a criminal.

But, he said, "once money touches your hand, that is all you think about."

Giving up freedom

In September 2004, cops nabbed Mikey near the old Budd Co. building
on Hunting Park Avenue in East Falls with $200 worth of crack in his pockets.

Authorities learned of the outstanding warrant for his gun charge.
Mikey's decision to pull out his cowboy gun had caught up with him.

Ten months later, Mikey was sentenced to Don't Fall Down in the
Hood, the juvenile probationary program.

He hated it. "I'd rather do my bid" - his jail sentence - he always said.

Mikey left Roxborough for De La Salle Vocational School in Bensalem.
The school gave him the chance to graduate with a high-school
diploma and earn a certificate in general carpentry. Teachers told
Mikey that carpenters can earn more than $90,000 a year. But Mikey
didn't care. He rarely went to class and continued to sell drugs
for another six months.

This past March, Mikey's mother found a pile of crack baggies in her
daughter's old bedroom. Mikey admitted he sold drugs despite being
on probation. Still, Chin pushed for Mikey to stay in the program
and asked Mikey to promise to quit.

"He needs a male figure who is constantly there," said Chin, who
believed in Mikey.

When Mikey ditched Don't Fall Down classes at Temple University,
Chin drove around Abbotsford to find him.

When Mikey complained that he didn't have enough money to ride SEPTA
to the university, Chin gave him tokens.

Still, Mikey became broke and frustrated.

He managed to save $4,200 during the winter, but loaned his last
$800 to a friend for bail money. He was tempted to hustle. Mikey
struggled to avoid the streets. He even contemplated working at a
Bensalem McDonald's that paid about $7.50 an hour.

"If I got a job, I would want to hustle again," he said, explaining
that he'd use hard-earned money to buy drugs and sell the dope for more.

Donnie, meanwhile, disappeared. By the end of the summer, he had
left his West Kensington corner and couldn't be reached again.

In September, Mikey gave up. He saved himself the only way he knew
how. He turned over his freedom, telling a judge at a scheduled
hearing that he didn't want to be part of his probationary program
anymore and was willing to enter a juvenile institution. Mikey knew
that he didn't have the family support or the will to stay off the streets.

Mikey is now serving a minimum six-month sentence at Saint Gabriel's
Hall in Audubon, Montgomery County, a boarding school for young criminals.

"I always say that a kid who asked to be placed is showing signs of
maturity and is also a cry for help," Chin said. "Maybe things will
work out for him."