A MAYOR'S FATEFUL JOURNEY: FROM CAMDEN'S STREETS TO JAIL

CAMDEN, N.J., Jan. 2 — Three days before Christmas, Milton Milan made the
short journey from the office of mayor of Camden to the life of a convict
in a Philadelphia detention center. But if his fateful trip could be said
to have started anywhere, it would have been in a mean, weed-clotted track
between two sad rows of public housing that was known as The Alley.

The Alley was what Camden drug traffickers call a set, or drug bazaar. And
in a city where the police have counted more than 100 sets, The Alley was
the big one, earning the two men who ran it more than $130,000 a month in
profits from cocaine.

Mr. Milan, 38, once seemed immune to rumors that he himself was a drug
dealer before his rapid rise as a young political leader in Camden. But
when the authorities finally cracked down on The Alley five years ago and
put its two operators in jail, they quickly pointed fingers at the young
mayor, who was swept up in a federal and state dragnet that is still far
from complete.

The investigators found a criminal world that reached beyond the homicidal
drug culture of The Alley to the Philadelphia and South Jersey crime
families, to the Camden police and into the politics of the city. And in
tracing the connections among these seemingly separate arenas, the long
inquiry offered a glimpse into the tangle of corruption that has helped
make Camden one of the country's most dangerous cities, and that prompted
the state to take over the insolvent city's government.

On Dec. 21, a federal jury convicted Mr. Milan of 14 charges of money
laundering, insurance fraud and accepting bribes from mob figures and city
vendors. On the courthouse steps afterward, Robert J. Cleary, the United
States attorney for New Jersey, said the charges amounted to a criminal
smorgasbord "motivated by Milan's unquenchable thirst for money and
material possessions."

"The evidence," he said, "has shown that Milton Milan is a one-man crime
spree."

But Camden's problems did not begin with Mr. Milan, who was removed from
the office he had held since 1997. In this city, which has long been New
Jersey's poorest, Mr. Milan is the third mayor of the last five to be
convicted of corruption charges.

Sixteen other Camden men are behind bars awaiting sentencing in the
crackdown against narcotics and organized crime. As Mr. Milan waits for his
sentence, investigators are expected to start questioning him about other
crimes he may have information about, dangling the hope of a reduced
sentence as the reward for cooperation. Using the same tactics, they
obtained damaging testimony against Mr. Milan from men arrested earlier in
the same crackdown.

And the former mayor's problems did not end with his conviction. He is
still a suspect in the unsolved killing of Francisco Chamorro, a heroin
dealer known as Poncho who was shot by three men as he was parking his car
in Camden on Christmas Eve 1988. Mr. Milan has admitted to investigators
that he was part of a street fight involving associates of Mr. Chamorro.
Police officials believe that the fight, in turn, led to the killing of Mr.
Chamorro as an act of revenge.

And investigators say Mr. Milan may yet be linked to other crimes as they
focus on members of the Camden Police Department who have been implicated
in the crackdown.

"Let's put it this way," said Kevin T. Smith, the assistant United States
attorney in Camden. "We will remain employed for quite some time."

The Alley investigations that eventually led to Mr. Milan's arrest started
in 1995, when he was a city councilman. That year, analysts with the F.B.I.
noticed that murder rates in Camden were rising sharply.

The city had always been dangerous, averaging about 40 murders a year, but
that number jumped to 58 in 1995. With a population of just 83,000, Camden
had the highest murder rate of any city in the country, and by the next
year, 65 unsolved murders were on the books. The high number suggested to
officials that a drug war was under way. The Camden police, the Camden
County prosecutor's office and the F.B.I. created a special unit to find
out what was behind the killings.

Their investigation began by focusing on the 1993 murder of Manuel DeJesus,
a drug dealer known as Manoling, whose body was found in the trunk of a
burning car in Philadelphia. He was known to be one of the Alley's dealers.

The link to the organized crime of narcotics dealing made the case a
federal one. That allowed federal agents to sweep up the Alley's drug
dealers and threaten them with stiff federal sentences for narcotics
trafficking, which can include life in prison. To street dealers, those
were frightening words, Mr. Smith said in an interview last week.

"We would pick up one of them and say: `You're dealing drugs. Here's what
you could be facing in prison, so tell us about the murder of Manoling,' "
Mr. Smith said. "And it would flow right out."

As one dealer after another confessed, investigators were able to arrest
Saul Febo and Jose Rivera, partners in running The Alley who were the
city's most notorious drug dealers. Mr. Smith successfully prosecuted Mr.
Rivera on drug and murder charges. Mr. Febo, after seeing the evidence
against him, pleaded guilty to selling drugs and conspiring in the murder
of Mr. DeJesus.

Facing life in prison, both men are cooperating with investigators, and
both implicated Mr. Milan.

At Mr. Milan's trial, Mr. Febo testified that the future mayor taught him
how to sell cocaine on a Camden corner in the late 1980's, after Mr. Milan
got out of the Marines.

The authorities say four other drug figures have told them the same story
about Mr. Milan. Mr. Milan has never been charged with drug dealing.

Mr. Rivera also testified that he lent Mr. Milan $65,000 in drug proceeds
that Mr. Milan needed to post as a bond to win city housing contracts for a
construction company he operated at the time. The money-laundering charge
on which Mr. Milan was convicted involved his efforts to conceal that loan.

At the same time that Mr. Milan's name began surfacing in the Camden drug
raids and subsequent arrests, it was also showing up in investigation
reports across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, where Ralph Natale, the
former head of the Philadelphia mob, had returned after spending 15 years
in prison for arson and fraud.

In 1995, the United States attorney in Philadelphia obtained a
court-ordered wiretap on Mr. Natale's phone. On March 5, 1996, the wiretap
picked up a conversation between Mr. Natale and Caesar Ortiz, a Camden
builder whom Mr. Natale had recruited to stand in as the owner of a
mob-operated construction firm that intended to bid for $40 million in
federal public housing renovation contracts that gave preference to
minority firms.

In the wiretap, Mr. Ortiz is heard telling Mr. Natale that he was going to
have lunch with Milton Milan, a new member of the Camden City Council.

"Ah, ah, don't talk about this over this, ah, ah — meet me in person," Mr.
Natale can be heard whispering emphatically (he always whispered on the
telephone), cutting off Mr. Ortiz before he could say more.

"We started the wiretap in July 1995, and Milan's name started coming up in
March 1996," said Mary A. Futcher, a member of the Organized Crime Task
Force, who, with another assistant United States attorney, Renee Bumb,
prosecuted Mr. Milan.

"But the significant part was that Milan had been sworn as a Council member
in January, so we know that only two months and four days after he was
sworn into office, they were into him," Ms. Futcher said.

Mr. Natale also showed up at Mr. Milan's trial to testify that he had given
Mr. Milan more than $30,000 since 1996.

Mr. Natale said he had hoped that Mr. Milan, as councilman and later as
mayor, would steer city contracts to mob-owned businesses. Federal
prosecutors acknowledged that Mr. Milan never did any favors for the mob,
but said that under federal law, simply taking a bribe was grounds for
conviction. The jury agreed, convicting Mr. Milan on several counts of mob
bribery.

For a while, federal, state and Camden County law enforcement officials
included the Camden Police Department in their work, but that, as Mr. Smith
put it, "may have been a mistake." For as the arrests mounted, so did word
that some police officers, and possibly Mr. Milan, were alerting crime
figures of coming raids, Mr. Smith said.

Suspicions of cooperation between the police and criminals deepened when a
handgun registered to Pierre Robinson, a Camden detective and Mr. Milan's
chosen bodyguard and driver, was found in the office at the auto parts
store of Mr. Rivera, one of the partners in The Alley.

Mr. Robinson pleaded guilty to the illegal transfer of a firearm and left
the force, but two other officers who are under investigation are still
working, Mr. Smith said. In a surveillance audiotape, Mr. Rivera is heard
discussing one officer as a possible source of information about law
enforcement investigations, Mr. Smith said; the authorities say the other
officer is believed to have informed Mr. Rivera of police activities.

Today, only the scrawl of graffiti in The Alley reminds residents that Mr.
Febo and Mr. Rivera were once forces in the city, but others have already
begun to move in to feed the drug world's endless appetite.

"When these guys were locked up, other groups moved in," said Sally M.
Smith, a special assistant United States attorney who prosecuted Mr.
Rivera. "It's like when Macy's closes, Wanamaker's makes money."