Series: Day One - Article One

VIOLENCE THRIVES ON LACK OF JOBS, WEALTH OF DRUGS

Cycle Of Death

The word on the street was that Ahmad Edge, a crack dealer known as
Juvenile to his customers, was working with federal agents.

Although the rumor would prove patently false, a rival dealer known only as
Big L put a price on Edge's head, and in due course, someone collected. A
single bullet was fired into the back of Edge's skull, and he fell dead on
a 7th Ward street.

Robert Hoobler, a seasoned New Orleans police detective working the case,
knew that the cycle of vengeance on the city's streets gave him little time
to catch Edge's killer.

"Most of us have a feeling they'll get killed if we don't catch them," he
said of the city's murderers.

Sure enough, less than six weeks later, the detective found the suspect in
Edge's killing dead in the street of multiple gunshot wounds --
retribution, Hoobler said, not for Edge's death but for some other murder.

Edge was the city's first homicide victim in 2003, and his death and the
chain of retaliation that ensued set the tone for the year. By year's end,
the city had recorded 275 murders -- the fourth consecutive year of
increases and the highest number since 1996.

The total gave New Orleans the highest per-capita homicide rate in the
nation among major cities, a distinction it earned for the second
consecutive year. In 2002, with 257 murders, New Orleans had 53 slayings
for every 100,000 people. In 2003, the rate was up to 59 per 100,000, more
than eight times greater than the rate in New York City and three times
greater than in Chicago.

"We won the prize, no doubt," said criminologist Peter Scharf, director of
the Center for Society, Law and Justice at the University of New Orleans,
which has surveyed the nation's major cities and found New Orleans to have
the highest murder rate for last year. "We were off the chart in terms of
the rate of homicide nationally."

The numbers are daunting, but for a time they had looked much worse. By the
end of April, the number of murders was on track to outpace the previous
year by an appalling 58 percent. In collaboration with the FBI and federal
prosecutors, the New Orleans Police Department went into overdrive,
revamping the homicide division and, along with it, their strategies for
combating murder.

Murder is a cyclical phenomenon that leaves experts debating where
crime-fighting strategies leave off and social trends begin. Whatever the
reason, by year's end, something had gone right in New Orleans, and the
uptick in murder had been whittled to a 7 percent jump over 2002's rate.

As horrifying as the city's experience was, it was also deeply instructive,
shedding light on the nature of the disease -- murder, much of it
retaliatory -- that eats so ravenously at the city's well-being and
self-esteem. The lessons extended to crime-fighting techniques and the
challenges posed to police and prosecutors not just by the killers but by
their unwitting accomplices: witnesses who refuse to come forward; the drug
culture that underlies so much of the slaughter; the failure of the
judiciary to intervene effectively in the lives of career criminals; those
who equip killers with firearms.

Nearly all 275 of those slain in 2003, along with the people accused of
killing them, had criminal records. Among the victims, 104 -- more than a
third -- were killed within three months of their last arrest. And police
say 15 percent of people identified as suspects committed murder within
three months of their last brush with the law.

Much of the blood was shed in a handful of neighborhoods -- indeed, a mere
seven square miles -- where guns are plentiful and life is cheap.

The violence reached deep into pockets of the city. In a six-month period
that ended in April, one woman who lived near the St. Bernard public
housing complex until she fled in fear lost her nephew, her husband and a
son, all casualties of what she calls an Uptown-Downtown rivalry.

"They've taken everybody," she said. "We have two or three (men) left. They
took everybody.

Drugs Play Major Role

Although homicide trends hinge on no single factor, drugs and joblessness
are almost always entwined.

The youth unemployment rate in New Orleans is high, giving young men few
legitimate options and making them feel trapped and marginalized, said
Ronald K. Barrett, a psychology professor who specializes in urban youth
violence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. "Instead of lashing
out at the system, they lash out at each other."

But except when bullets claim innocent bystanders, the few square miles
that comprise the city's killing fields are the domain of a relatively
small, self-contained cadre -- maybe 1,000 to 1,500 men, most of them
young, Scharf said. And in the overwhelming majority of murder cases in
2003, people were fighting over drugs and the turf needed to build their
market.

"The problem in New Orleans is the lack of centralization of the drug
market," Scharf said.

Maybe "the former drug guy who comes out of prison goes to his old buddies
and says, 'Where's my turf?' And they say, 'Those other guys took it,' "
said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. "Then
he starts planning a war, and you're likely to see retaliation as part of
that process."

New Orleans' public housing complexes, like those in many major cities, are
arguably some of the most fought-over real estate. The engagements can be
protracted, such as the generations-old war for control of the drug trade
in the Calliope public housing complex. In August, authorities indicted 11
men on charges of selling cocaine, heroin and marijuana in the
neighborhood, a group also accused of four homicides and three nonfatal
shootings linked to their illegal trade.

Or, the battle can be as brief as a match that flares then goes dark.
Police think Rarrick Beaco, for example, was killed when he walked onto
Orleans Avenue in July, selling $50 bags of weed on someone else's turf,
and got mouthy when confronted.

Violence is not limited to drug dealers. The consumers, or addicts,
sometimes resort to violence in their desperation to get high. Or they
steal money or a stash to nourish their habits, breaking the rules of the
street once too often.

Latasha "Shannell" Adams, a 25-year-old mother, crossed the line in August
when she looted a dealer's stash of crack cocaine. A month earlier, Terry
Faulkner, 42, had made the same mistake. Both were executed: Adams in
Algiers, Faulkner in a Hollygrove crackhouse.

Caught In The Crossfire

Sometimes, though, the bloodshed extends beyond participants in the drug
trade to take the lives of people who simply were in the wrong place at the
wrong time.

Vera Jackson was killed on Mardi Gras at 2 a.m. by bullets that pierced the
walls of the Hollygrove shotgun she shared with her husband. Screeching
tires and gunfire outside their house on Palm Street prompted the Rev.
Thomas Jackson to tell his wife to get down on the floor. Vera Jackson, 43,
was shot as she rose from their bed.

Mardy Hussein, 40, a clerk at Omar's Food Mart, was killed in August when
three robbers, guns blazing, entered the store on Simon Bolivar Avenue.
Earl Morriz, an 85-year-old retired police officer, was taking out the
trash on a November afternoon when a man knocked him down, kicked him
repeatedly, robbed him and fled on a bicycle. Morriz died the next day.

But those are the exceptions. From Sgt. Fred Bates' experience in the 5th
District, it's a rare homicide in which the victim didn't in some way
contribute to his or her death.

"I can count on one hand the victims that were totally innocent," he said.

No Strangers To Crime

Far more often than not, homicides in New Orleans involve criminals killing
other criminals.

According to an ongoing New Orleans Police Department analysis, of the
people arrested or identified as suspects in 2003 murders, 92 percent had
previous felony arrests. Few of the victims could be considered angels: 87
percent had criminal records, most with felonies. Forty-four had been
released from jail -- either after serving time, making bond or having
charges dropped -- within 30 days of their deaths.

Corey Bolden lasted 29 days.

On June 16, he posted bond on a count of being a felon in possession of a
firearm. His record included a manslaughter conviction and a five-year
sentence. On July 14, Bolden, 28, was found shot to death several houses
away from where he lived, near the old Falstaff Brewery. The night before,
police think, Bolden killed Samuel Prater Jr., a 27-year-old maintenance
worker, less than six blocks away, on Banks Street.

Terrell Lampton, a suspected heroin dealer, was ambushed on July 17 as he
pulled into a driveway in the Lower 9th Ward to visit his daughters.

In the driveway on Deslonde Street, Lampton's station wagon was riddled
with bullets. Both windows on the driver's side were blown away. A single
bullet hole, which appeared to be aimed at Lampton's head, pierced the
windshield.

Lampton, 25, had one 1999 conviction for heroin possession; prosecutors
dropped four counts of heroin distribution against him in 2002. Roland
Adams, 29, one of the men accused of killing him, has a 1999 conviction for
distributing cocaine. Larry Adams, his 26-year-old-brother who was also
accused in the killing, has a record of minor thefts.

Anthony Murray, business manager of gangsta rapper James "Soulja Slim"
Tapp, who was killed Thanksgiving Eve in front of his mother's home in
Gentilly, says simply that the streets are ruled by predators.

"You cannot control people that you do not understand," Murray said.

To those involved, homicide is a way of taking care of business, be it
market competition, an errant employee, a shoplifting customer or a
romantic rival. To outsiders, it approaches a form of insanity, Barrett
said, where the smallest infraction can provoke a deadly response.

"Simply to look at someone too long can be a life-threatening episode," the
psychology professor said.

Stifled By Fear

And more and more, police say, residents of New Orleans want to take
matters into their own hands. At least two relatives of murder victims who
saw the killings have told police they would not cooperate because they
wanted a shot at the killers themselves.

"Some of them have explained to us that they don't have much confidence in
the judicial system," said Lt. Bruce Adams, assistant commander of the 5th
District. "They prefer to handle it on their own, and they don't report it.
Both parties believe that they are going to take care of their business at
some point."

Far more witnesses, however, stay silent out of fear.

Keisha Robinson, 29, was shot in May, along with her longtime companion,
shortly after she testified before a grand jury investigating her younger
brother's killing. Two months before, Ryan Smith, a key witness in another
murder case, was shot dead outside a barbershop where he worked.

Police have not confirmed that Robinson or Smith were targeted because they
had agreed to testify for the prosecution. Indeed, Robinson's companion,
Thomas "Papa Bear" Miller, might have been the intended target of the
bullet that took Robinson's life, according to police. But deaths of this
type contribute to a climate of terror sufficient to silence other
potential witnesses who might play a key role in taking killers off the
streets.

"It's a culture of fear, whether it's real or not," said defense attorney
Robert Jenkins. "It's just a belief, not just here but across the nation in
our inner cities. It's a real fear."

Despite a community relations push by police Superintendent Eddie Compass
to get witnesses involved -- and a beefed-up protection program in the
district attorney's office -- making cases is a daunting task.

At year's end, police were still struggling with the fallout from the death
of Jonathan "Caveman" Williams, who was shot down in his high school
gymnasium in April. On the street, Williams was believed responsible for
the murder of Hillard "Head" Smith a week before. Since the shooting at
McDonogh, and despite arrests in that case, the chain of violence continued
unbroken, taking three more lives.

"The neighborhood is under siege, and no one is willing to come forward,
1st District Detective John Hunter said.

"They are afraid," he said. "They are afraid to sit out on their porches."

When a predator's honor is at stake, there is only more reason for
potential witnesses to duck inside.

"Instead of walking away, we are seeing people going straight to shooting
or stabbing," said Detective Mitch Weatherly, who has been investigating
the homicides that followed the McDonogh school shooting. "There is no
middle ground -- that's extremely tragic."