LOWLIFE BROUGHT CRACK BIZ UPSTATE

GLENS FALLS - Just a few miles from where steamboats ferry tourists on Lake
George and hikers step into the Adirondacks, 15-year-old Ruth Needham
sucked on a cigarette and talked about the Brooklyn drug dealers who
wrecked lives in this city of paper mills and quarries.

"I just got out of rehab for the fifth time and had to get rid of my
boyfriend because he's been smoking crack," Ruth said. "Crack is everywhere
now."

The narcotics epidemic that plagues this city and others around it was
spread mostly by one man - a depraved Brooklyn thug named Dupree Harris.

Convicted in Brooklyn Federal Court last month on charges of overseeing a
thriving crack empire, Harris, 31, smuggled drugs to the Lake George region
and sold it for up to 100 times the price of the going rate in
Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Until he was taken off the streets last year, the two-time convicted felon
routinely wheeled around sleepy Glens Falls in a maroon Cadillac Escalade,
nodding at desperate customers and sneering at cops who he suspected were
trying to nail him.

"We had wanted to get a conviction on him for a long time, but he kept
killing the witnesses," a law enforcement official told the Daily News.

Harris was charged but acquitted of murder in Brooklyn in December 2003
after witnesses either refused to testify or changed their stories.

At the time, he was under indictment for coercing three witnesses in
another homicide case, by telling them they could "lie or die" if they
helped prosecutors pin a murder rap on his half-brother, Wesley Sykes.

Harris has since been convicted of trying to silence those witnesses,
drawing a state sentence of 15 years to life.

Despite all of his legal jams in Brooklyn over the past decade, officials
said the career criminal found plenty of time to travel upstate where he
built a lucrative drug network.

"The flow of drugs between Brooklyn and Glens Falls is daily," said Warren
County District Attorney Kate Hogan, who was a prosecutor in the Brooklyn
district attorney's office before coming home to the Lake George region in
1993.

"Little did I know then how Brooklyn would come to play such a major role
in the day-to-day life of a Warren County prosecutor," she said.

Harris often stopped at an Albany home to cut and package the crack before
doling out the poison to his squad of dealers in Glens Falls, some 200
miles north of the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, which were his stomping
grounds for years.

It was easy money, not views of the sylvan lake, that beckoned the crack
cowboys upstate.

"There is not a lot of competition here and they can get a much higher
profit margin," said Hogan, noting crack bought in Brooklyn for $10 can be
resold for $100 in Glens Falls.

The casualties of the drug trade can be found in such places as the Henry
Hudson projects near Glens Falls Hospital and the John Burke housing
project in Queensbury, a village just outside the city.

At John Burke, where Harris once roosted, Wayne Mattison, 36, a father of
two who has started a volunteer neighborhood watch group, said, "The gangs
bring the drugs here, and it's like a domino effect."

At a nearby picnic table, a middle-aged woman too scared to give her name
said she doesn't even have to see the drugs to know they are around.

"I can smell the crack being cooked at night," she said. "You know it's
crack because it smells like burning plastic."

A decade ago, Glen Falls authorities saw crack as a problem ravaging only
big cities. "Today, we can pretty much go out on any given day and make a
buy for crack or heroin," said Glens Falls Police Capt. Joe Bethel.

A former crack user now in recovery, a 30-year-old mother of two who spoke
on condition of anonymity, said the dealers often take advantage of female
addicts, living rent-free in their homes.

"A friend of this one drug dealer robbed a woman I know at gunpoint, took
all her drugs, her money and her car," she said.

To avoid easy detection by the cops, the dealers often use prepaid cell
phones that don't require a traceable individual account.

"When they're driving up the thruway, they call ahead to their customers
and say, 'The coffee's hot,' which means they're bringing in the crack,"
said one investigator.

For those who get involved with the dealers, the scourge of addiction is
just one of the risks.

Consider Lindsey McDonnell, 25, who was charmed by Harris and ended up
having his baby.

The Glens Falls native will be a long way from her hometown in November
when she is expected to get hit in Brooklyn with a sentence of 10 years to
life for aiding him in the crack trade.

Harris faces a federal stint of 17 years to life when he is sentenced Nov. 15.