MINISTER OF JUSTICE

The Rev. John C. Raphael Jr. was tired of the murders, of the drug deals,
of seeing the street corners around his Central City church wrapped in
yellow police tape. So the cop-turned-preacher rallied the residents to
replace the cycle of violence ...

By the time the minister got to the murder scene, a crowd had already
gathered around the body. Fifty people, maybe more, he thought, all
standing there watching another young black man bloodied and lying in the
street.

It's like those animal shows on television, thought the Rev. John C.
Raphael Jr., the shows where the lion chases down a herd of gazelles, picks
off the slowest one and then eats it while the spared gazelles rest nearby,
watching the killing, waiting.

"Waiting for the next one. Waiting for the next time," said Raphael, the
pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church in Central City. Like there's nothing
they can do about it, he said, and sometimes he worries that too many
people in his neighborhood feel the same way: that one way or the other,
drugs or guns or indifference will chase them down and pick them off one by
one.

At the murder scene that day in early June, Raphael couldn't shake this
thought. Reminders were everywhere. Nine people had been killed in New
Orleans in six days, four people within 21 hours, two within two weeks near
his church. In the days to come, New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie
Compass would be calling out to ministers, asking them to help bring peace
to the streets by bringing witnesses forward. Raphael, a 49-year-old former
NOPD officer, was standing there now.

He was walking among the crowd near the city's latest victim, Thaddeus
Corey Stalks, a 21-year-old New Orleans man shot under an oak tree in broad
daylight at St. Andrew and South Robertson streets. He was thinking about
how an errant bullet could have hit a child going to camp at his church. He
was thinking about what he sees as the source of the problem and turned his
thoughts to the corner of Josephine and LaSalle streets, two blocks down
and one block over.

"Attack that corner," Raphael thought.

He had considered this thought before, considered focusing all the energies
of New Hope's street ministry in one place. But now, he said, he wasn't
just thinking about it; he was being called to it. Raphael was being called
to the corner of Josephine and LaSalle, he said, because that's where you
go when you want to push heroin or cocaine in the neighborhood, that's
where you go when you want to buy or get high, and that's where all the
other problems begin.

And so on the first day of July, Raphael and members of his congregation
made the short walk from New Hope to the corner at 5 p.m., set up their
battery-powered speakers and nailed signs to the faded clapboard walls of
vacant homes that said: "God Has A Purpose For Your Life." And they kept
going for 30 days.

They kept going because they wanted to preach the gospel to the users and
the dealers and the neighbors who fear them. They wanted to offer them
options or a way out, a choice or a second chance. They wanted to give
these people a different sort of high at the crossroads where the users go
to buy.

"I'm a pusher," Raphael shouted into the microphone, standing on the corner
one evening. "Somebody can call and turn me in if you want. Call and tell
them there's a pusher on the corner of Josephine and LaSalle and he's
pushing a rock out there. But make sure to tell them the rock is named
Jesus. He's all the rock you need."

He remembers the footsteps, kids running away. It was years ago now,
Raphael said, but there were gunshots on the corner near the church and
then there were footsteps scampering down LaSalle, and that's what he
remembers: "Tennis shoes hitting against pavement."

Raphael -- his towering 6-foot-5 frame folded over into a desk chair in his
church office -- shook his head at the memory of it. The kids were running,
he said, and in a way they've been running for years. John Bargky, a
76-year-old resident near the corner of Josephine and LaSalle, has seen it
happen.

What was once a neighborhood of laborers who found work in the booming
post-World War II years is now a neighborhood littered with loiterers,
Bargky said. What was once a place where families gathered, is now a place
where kids "cut up," he said. And where he once felt safe, he now feels
uncomfortable, always choosing to go inside when darkness falls.

"It was beautiful. You could walk and go anywhere you want and come home,"
he said, sitting on his front stoop one evening just before sundown. "I
don't know what happened here."

Tanitha Smith, a 47-year-old mother of five who lives across the street
from Bargky, doesn't know what happened, either. But ever since she moved
into the neighborhood about 10 years ago, she said it has been known as a
place to buy and sell drugs, making her two-bedroom, first-floor apartment
on the corner "the worst living arrangement you've ever had in your life."

There are reasons for that, Smith said: Her bones ache, her hands swell up,
she can't hold a job like she used to, lost her own place, had to move in
with her daughter near the corner, lost her independence and ultimately her
two sons, Roger and Tierre, to drugs.

"Both of them," she said, sighing.

It's a story that's all too common around the block, and among the
neighborhood's younger generation because, as Bargky said, "They don't
understand life. They don't understand nothing. They just want to do what
they want to do. That's just the way it is."

Some huddle up under the "No Loitering" sign in front of the food store on
the corner. Others skitter off into the shadows of their cars and porches
and doorways when the church folk show up with their battery-powered
speakers, their Bible tracts and T-shirts that say: "God Has A Purpose For
Your Life." Many get arrested.

"Drug proliferation? Yeah, we have it," said Capt. Michael Ellington, the
commander of the 6th District, a 3.9-square-mile area that includes
Josephine and LaSalle. In fact, Ellington said, even as violent crime has
dropped since 1994 when 6th District homicides accounted for nearly
one-fourth of the city's 421 murders, drug activity in the district has
remained some of the worst in the city. Police arrest an average of 30
people there every week for drug offenses, Ellington said.

And this, Raphael said, is just part of the problem. The greatest tragedy,
he believes, runs deeper than any needle into a vein. It runs back in time,
he said, decades back, because the neighbors are right. "It didn't used to
be this way," Raphael said, and when he says that he's talking about how
attitudes have changed since the days of white-imposed segregation.

"We got what we wanted, but we lost what we had," he said. "We lost that
responsibility of being our brother's keeper, being responsible for one
another."

Now, Raphael said, too many people see things going on in the neighborhood
and say: "You don't get involved. . . . You leave that alone. . . . You
shut your mouth." And while he supports Compass' plan for a witness
promotion program, while he believes it's necessary, he knows he can't just
stand up inside his church, talk about it and expect people to come
forward. He knows he can't just put up a billboard that reads "Thou Shalt
Not Kill" like he did in Central City eight years ago, go to church and
then pray for a solution.

"How can I say I'm a pastor," he wondered, "somebody sent by the Lord to
care about people, if I'm sitting in the church down the street while
people are losing their lives here on this corner, while people are having
their lives destroyed on this corner?"

And so, he said a prayer, asked for protection and guidance, asked that
someone out there would hear his message, and walked down to the corner to
face what Smith called "the demons."

Others followed him. Every afternoon at 5 p.m., they met at the church,
prayed together and then descended on the corner in their blazing white
T-shirts. Sometimes a dozen people came. Other times it was closer to three
dozen. Every time, no matter how many people came, they fanned out, up to
Freret Street, down to Saratoga Street, over to Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Some helped set up the sound system. Others swept the shattered glass from
the street and the limp, gray cigarette butts from the cracks in the
sidewalks. They handed out Bible passages, then they handed out Bibles, as
they walked up to people and asked their questions: "Are you saved? . . .
Do you have a church home? . . . Would you like to come to the church?"

Some learned how to give the right answers -- "Yeah . . . not really . . .
OK" -- the answers that would give them the best chance to avoid further
questions. Others hid themselves away in the corner store or in their
homes. But the people in the T-shirts did not turn away. They stayed.

They handed a Bible to a man who said, "Never know. I might just pick that
up and read it," even as neighbors pointed him out as a drug dealer. They
walked up to anyone who passed by because, they said, this wasn't about
striking people down. This was about lifting people up, they said, about
giving them choices.

Raphael had made his choice some 19 years earlier when he asked another
NOPD officer out to dinner and she asked him to go to church with her instead.

"He thought that was rather boring, I guess, at the time," said Catherine
Raphael, who married him in 1984. But one Sunday morning, when they asked
the visitors to stay, she turned around and saw him sitting there. In a
way, he never left, quitting the police force to become New Hope's pastor
in 1988.

And now his wife was tapping her feet -- the white T-shirt draped over her
shoulders like a cape -- as Raphael worked himself into a sweat, worked
himself into a throaty cadence, and Al Jefferson talked to the kids in
baggy pants, and Desiree Watson Jones approached the woman with track marks
up and down her arms. Jones told the woman, Ladonna Porter, her story.

Fifteen years ago, Jones said, she had stood on this corner for a different
reason. She stood here, she said, screaming for the drug dealers, screaming
for someone who could sell her cocaine. " 'Where y'all at?' " she
remembered yelling. "I didn't care who heard me or who saw me. I had to
have the rock."

And she would get it any way she could, Jones said, stealing checks from
family members, selling food stamps, turning tricks on the web of streets
around the corner where she went to buy. It got to the point, she said,
when she was walking the streets barefoot and dirty, "looking like a dog."

But Jones had changed her life, she told Porter. She told her how she had
been saved, how Raphael had found her 13 years ago slumped over in a
rainstorm at the corner of Freret and Felicity and invited her to church.

"If you're holding onto drugs and want to be free from drugs," Jones told
her, "Jesus has the power."

Porter began to cry. Others moved in around her. They held her hands,
hugged her, and told her they could help.

"I know a clinic," said a recovering addict and church member who prefers
to remain nameless. "I promise you. I promise you. I'll come get you and
bring you down there."

Porter nodded her head. They exchanged phone numbers. Then they all held
hands again, bowed their heads, and formed a circle.

"Come on now," Jones said. "Let's pray."

Tanitha Smith came to like the prayer circles best. Not the small circles
they formed with people several times each evening, but the community
prayer circle at the end of the hour on the corner, the circle that shut
down the intersection for as long as Raphael prayed.

Smith got up for that, came outside for that, and held hands with her
neighbors even if she didn't always listen to the sermons on the corner.
And for those moments when they held hands in a circle, she said, it seemed
like the neighborhood could stop itself from breaking apart, like she could
hold on to what she has left, even if her sons can't be there with her.

Tierre, 26, was the protective one. "You talkin' to my mama?" Smith
remembers Tierre asking anyone who bothered her on the corner and she'd
tell him, "Sit down. I don't need anybody protecting me." Now he sits at
Orleans Parish Prison, convicted in June of possession of cocaine, awaiting
sentencing as a multiple offender and writing the judge notes in which he
accuses the police of "lying" and complains that his attorney doesn't want
to help him.

Roger, 31, was the mama's boy, her first child. But Smith said it has been
years now since she has seen him and she doesn't know when she'll see him
again. Arrested for crack cocaine distribution and convicted in 1996 of
being a being a habitual drug offender, Roger is serving a life sentence at
the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.

"Life," Smith said, spitting out the word. "Life, life, life."

Perhaps for him, she thinks, it's too late. But Smith hopes that somehow
she and the others left behind can find a way to keep from ending up like
her sons or, worse, like Thaddeus Corey Stalks, murdered in the
neighborhood on June 11, or Reginald "Lil' Reg" Ringo, murdered near the
corner store at Josephine and LaSalle on May 31.

On a recent afternoon, Raphael stood on that very corner and told anyone
who would listen that he could show them the way. The sky had opened up and
rained, one of those summer rains that floods bone-dry gutters with
steaming hot puddles of water, and fewer people than usual had attended.
Maybe just a dozen. But Raphael was still there, standing in the steady
drizzle. He was there, he said, for Daveion Jones, the 11-year-old New
Orleans girl murdered the night before when she opened the door of her home
to an AK-47.

"I'm thinking of that 11-year-old who had so much future before her eyes,"
he said, his voice tired but strong over battery-powered speakers. "Nobody
knows what God could have or would have done with her life. Her life was
suddenly snatched away. So even though it's raining, I have to be here
because there are 11-year-old girls and boys right in this neighborhood."

Those who had come with Raphael listened, then fanned out to the homes up
and down the block. Two ministers, Christopher Carter and John Raphael, the
pastor's son, visited a 42-year-old woman who peeked out her door, wept at
the sight of them and said: "I don't have any food."

Rev. Creal James, sitting in the church van, listened to Veronica Sterling,
who begged him to pray for her daughter who had recently lost her two young
girls in a 7th Ward fire. James told her that they would. And others
continued down the block toward six kids, who sat with their backs against
a wall under a battered sign that read: "Drug Free Zone."

There they asked their questions and the kids eyed the pavement and
laughed, even as a few of them admitted having gone to New Hope for the
first time in the last month. "I knew it was the right thing to do," said
16-year-old Dion Simmons. But he wasn't sure if he would keep going, and
the others did little more than giggle.

For weeks now, the church members had faced down this sort of indifference.
Porter, for example, never called them like they asked her to, and when
they called her, she did not answer. Another boy, 15-year-old Terreil, had
promised to come to church the previous Sunday and skipped out only to be
arrested that morning when he raced away from a police car on his bicycle.

Raphael refused to let it get to him. He kept on believing that someone
hearing his voice would understand and make a change. He kept on believing
that even after their 30 days were done, their work would continue to make
a difference on the corner. And when he finished preaching on that hot
rainy evening, he placed his arm around the boy who had skipped church and
promised to be there with him when it was time for him to go to court.

"I'll be there," he said. "I'll go with you."

Then Raphael was praying, shouting, one last time. He was calling out to
the people, to anyone who could hear him, that it was time to bring it
together in the prayer circle, time to hold hands and give thanks for
having lived through another day.

"I'm so thankful I didn't turn on the news and see anything about a brother
on LaSalle and Josephine being killed," Raphael told them. "I'm glad I
didn't see that the police wanted somebody on this corner for murder. I'm
glad that it wasn't your aunt or your sister or your child or your mama
crying on television because of you. I'm thankful to God.

"Because I'm out here believing that God is going to take care of the
brothers and sisters here," he said. "He's going to change lives. He's
going to give an opportunity and give a chance and bring hope where there
was no hope. I'm out here believing that. I believe in that."

And the people joined hands around him. A dozen people on the corner became
five dozen as they stepped out of their homes, out of the corner store, out
of the shadows to make a circle that filled the intersection. Users and
dealers took up the hands of the neighbors who fear them. The kids who had
laughed before now scrambled down the block, straight faced, to join the
circle. Smith popped out of her apartment in pink flip-flops, and Raphael
stood among them listening to their footsteps.

They were the footsteps, he thought, of people running toward something,
not away from it, and he bowed his head, closed his eyes and prayed once
more for the people who live near the corner of Josephine and LaSalle.