Series: Day Four - Article One

A BATTLE WITHOUT END

The 1987 Murder Of Drug Kingpin Sam 'Scully' Clay Sparked A Deadly Turf War
That Still Plagues The Calliope

Even in a city numbed by violence, the surveillance tape was
blood-curdling: three men, lying in wait at an open-air carwash on
Louisiana Avenue, springing toward their targets with assault rifles, then
calmly unleashing a hail of bullets at the unsuspecting victims.

Frozen in time, video images from the July 26 shooting document brutality
of a type that regularly places New Orleans among the most violent cities
in America. Amazingly, the two victims survived their wounds. Even more
amazingly -- given the planning and precision of the attack -- the men
weren't intended to be victims at all. The shooting was a case of mistaken
identity.

"It was retaliation," Lt. Christy Williams of the 6th Police District said,
"but they retaliated against the wrong people."

It was an easy case for detectives to put together. Less than 24 hours
earlier, Le'Devin Pearson, 22, was the victim of a drive-by shooting in
which six men in a truck opened fire with an arsenal that included an
AK-47, a .45-caliber pistol and a 9 mm semiautomatic. One of the men who
watched Pearson die, 21-year-old Elton Hooks, is awaiting trial on a charge
of attempted murder in the carwash ambush. Pearson was like a brother to
Hooks and, according to police, Hooks and two other suspects mistakenly
thought they had cornered Pearson's killers.

But people in the Calliope, formally known as the B.W. Cooper public
housing complex, didn't see the shootings as bookends in a 24-hour feud.
Instead, they were only the latest twists in a years-long cycle of
drug-fueled killings and retribution that has made the neighborhood one of
the city's bloodiest.

"Elton went to the carwash because he just couldn't take it anymore. He
flipped out," said Wilhemina "Mama" Cole, conceding that the crystal-clear
videotape implicates her great-grandson.

In the previous 18 months, Hooks had lost his father, Alexis "Slam"
Williams; his cousin, Raynell "Rico" Cole; and another friend, Pearson's
younger brother, Le'Var Pearson -- all gunned down in the grass-and-dirt
courtyards of Calliope. Before his death, Williams had been identified by
police as the triggerman in a previous Calliope killing, although he was
never charged.

"It all runs back and forth and ties together. It's a never-ending battle,"
said New Orleans Police Capt. Anthony Cannatella, commander of the 6th
District, which includes the housing development.

Spark Of Death Spree

Certainly, some of the Calliope killings -- 88 in the past 10 years -- are
isolated incidents, springing from petty arguments, a fight over a woman or
a domestic dispute turned deadly. But in a city where police chalk up three
out of every four murders to narcotics, the tit-for-tat in the Calliope is
painfully easy to follow.

Many people say it started in 1987, when the first shot fired in the
Calliope's drug wars claimed a man named Sam "Scully" Clay.

Some people remember Clay for his generosity. Others remember him for his
flashy wardrobe and his way with women. Most people, though, remember him
as the neighborhood's first drug kingpin of the crack cocaine era and, from
the moment the blood began pooling under his head on a Calliope sidewalk,
as its first high-profile casualty.

To people outside the neighborhood, it was just another killing. But within
the complex, Clay's execution-style rubout was the beginning of a long
trail of murder that has sent dozens of young men to early graves and
dozens more to prison.

Longtime residents can trace the offshoots of Clay's killing to subsequent
Calliope murders, and those murders to even more recent murders, including
some of the six killings that took place in the complex in 2003. In the
Le'Devin Pearson slaying, Darryl Clay, a nephew of Scully Clay, was one of
three men booked with second-degree murder. The suspects were released in
September when witnesses got cold feet.

"It's the same groups of people doing the same killing, over and over,"
Cole said.

Like genealogists studying a family tree, authorities have come to see how
the Clay drug gang begat the Glenn Metz gang, which begat the Richard Pena
gang, which begat the gang allegedly run by Derrick "Eyes" Washington.
Authorities now await another generation of slayings after August's federal
indictment of Washington and 10 co-defendants in a string of four murders
and three shootings tied to cocaine trafficking.

One of the defendants in that case came under suspicion in a March 2
Calliope murder before he could be arrested by the feds: Terrance Benjamin,
25, is still considered by the New Orleans Police Department to be a top
suspect in the assault rifle killing of 24-year-old Ray Miner.

With the Washington group off the street, police say they have had no
trouble identifying the two rival groups that have stepped in to fill the
vacuum. One of them, known as the 3 'n' G -- named for the intersection of
Third and Galvez streets -- earned supremacy by wiping out their biggest
rivals, the Porch Boyz, said Sgt. Terry Wilson, 6th District narcotics
commander. But Wilson said 3 'n' G is now getting stiff competition from an
upper-level West Bank dealer with extensive ties in the Calliope.

"Right now you have those two factions both trying to take over the
business," Wilson said. "If you go there in the morning you can see the two
groups lining up on opposite sides of the courtyard to make their sales" of
crack and heroin.

Familiar Territory

When it comes to the Calliope drug market, few people have followed the
bloodshed more closely than Charlie Smith. As an agent for the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Smith has pieced it together through guns
and drugs and informants and wiretaps and, in some cases, friends from his
childhood in the development on South Johnson Street.

"If you follow these guys long enough, everything ties together: the
shootings, the killings, the drug deals. It's like they're all caught in
this bubble of poverty and hopelessness and they can't help stepping on top
of each other," Smith said.

With his shaved head and the diamond stud in his ear, Smith glides easily
through his old neighborhood, a place where he was nearly Justice in one
fell swoop

Federal law enforcement agencies, like the ATF and FBI, have tried to
supplement local police efforts by conducting lengthy investigations,
sometimes spanning several years, to take out entire drug gangs in one big
sweep. Their targets aren't simply drug organizations, but drug
organizations that incorporate killing into their business plans. That was
the approach that dismantled the Metz and Pena gangs in the mid-1990s.

Glenn Metz was known as a dime-bag weed dealer before he hooked up with
Arthur and Elwood, fearless killers who paved the way for Metz to take over
the Calliope drug market. At Metz's trial, prosecutors showed that at its
peak, the gang bought cocaine directly from cartel-level connections in
Houston.

Richard Pena was even bigger, law enforcement officials said. When
convictions took Metz and his accomplices out of circulation, Pena filled
the vacuum, using his Latin American roots to cultivate big-league drug
suppliers in Houston, Miami and Mexico. Although he was an outsider, Pena
recruited local distributors in Calliope and other public housing
developments, in some cases helping them launder their profits through a
series of rap music labels he incorporated. For protection, Pena placed
veteran New Orleans police officer David Singleton on his payroll. The Pena
gang was responsible for more than 20 killings, prosecutors said, including
several in Calliope.

When the feds grabbed Pena, they also grabbed 15 accomplices, including
Singleton. It's the same "clean sweep" strategy behind the recent federal
drug case involving Derrick "Eyes" Washington.

In the Washington case, the indictment of 11 men came after a yearlong
probe under ATF's Project Safe Neighborhoods program. Smith and local ATF
chief Mark Chait say agents tried to forge a partnership with residents,
recruiting more than three dozen informants, relocating key witnesses and
visiting the neighborhood frequently enough to become fixtures.

"We made a lot of repeat visits, bringing food or ordering pizza, sometimes
taking witnesses to restaurants outside the area," Smith said.

Even so, the reluctance of witnesses was daunting. In New Orleans, in fact,
fearful witnesses are the most common reason murder cases go unprosecuted.
To fight the problem, Smith said he tries to gain the confidence of
witnesses by using a simple code of the streets: If you do something to one
of mine, I'm going to do something to one of yours. It's called revenge. To
turn the credo into a police tool, Smith said he tries to convince people
that testifying against a killer is a legitimate form of payback.

"We worked with witnesses over a long period of time," Smith said. "You
have to get them to understand that testifying can be revenge. You have to
teach the community a new way of thinking. Unless you can get the people to
buy into that, it's like putting Band-Aids on a gunshot wound."

That kind of police presence is certainly needed, Marrero and Taylor said,
but arrests and convictions provide only a temporary fix.

"When law enforcement comes in with a big sweep and then backs off, they're
really just plowing fertile ground. You don't pull weeds without planting
something positive," Taylor said.

As Marrero put it: "We can't just tell these kids, 'Just say no to drugs.'
We have to give them things to say yes to."

Hard Cycle To Clip

Earl Barconey Sr. knows how difficult it is for law enforcement to stop the
bleeding.

Barconey is a Baptist minister and a longtime deputy with the Orleans
Parish Civil Sheriff's Office. He has lived in Calliope most of his life.
And he has buried two sons who were killed there: Randall Watts in 1997 and
Earl Pierre Barconey in 1998.

"The street has a lot of say-so over your children. You do what you can for
them, but you can't control them," Barconey said. "If you look into what's
in their head, half of these kids don't care whether they live or die."

Watts, a charismatic figure known around the neighborhood as "Calliope
Slim," was a Pena associate and, allegedly, a hired killer. At the time he
was fatally shot in a Thalia Street courtyard, Watts allegedly was on his
way to carry out a murder contract for the gang. His funeral included a
raucous second-line in which his casket was hoisted in the air by a throng
of pallbearers and paraded through the legendary Rose Tavern at Thalia and
Dorgenois streets. A mural depicting Watts with angel wings now adorns an
exterior wall of the bar, just steps from where he was murdered.

Watts' younger brother, Troy Watts, was as low-key as Calliope Slim was
flamboyant. When the younger Watts, nicknamed "T-Dub," pleaded guilty to
selling cocaine for Pena, hardly anybody noticed. When he served five years
in federal prison, few people knew he was gone.

Troy Watts, 29, was freed earlier this year, and when he returned to
Calliope, he found an altered landscape. The Pena gang had long been
dismantled, two of his brothers had been killed, many of his old associates
were in prison. He vowed to go straight and made plans to open a sweet shop
with another brother.

Even so, his father pulled him aside for a lecture, a talk he had given all
of his sons many times before.

"You have three options," Barconey told his son. "You can get swallowed up
by the streets. You can get caught by the law. Or you can quit."

According to police, Watts didn't heed the warning.

On Oct. 1, he was booked with attempted second-degree murder after a
shooting near his home. Police said Watts and an accomplice, Joshua Small,
17, calmly walked up to a 30-year-old man sitting on a porch. Believing the
man to be a police informant, Watts allegedly yelled, "I don't want to see
your face around here," before firing at the man's feet, presumably as a
warning. The man wasn't hit, but a bystander was shot in the arm by a stray
bullet.

Watts surrendered the day after the shooting. Small remained at large for
two months, but allegedly surfaced on Dec. 1 when the 30-year-old targeted
two months earlier found himself again at the wrong end of a gun. This
time, he was hit four times and severely wounded. Police arrested Small two
days later and accused him of trying to finish the job he and Watts had
started.