DRUGS AND VIOLENCE CLAIM THEIR OWN TURF

Resettled gangs escalate the misery and terror for residents
in O'Donnell Heights, Baltimore's "concentration camp."

It has gone beyond the daily echoes of gunfire and the lines of
addicts who stagger up Gusryan Street looking to cop their next cap of
crack. That has been going on so long in the O'Donnell Heights housing
project that it has become a way of life.

What frustrates people is the loss of simple amenities. The phones
often die because dealers cut the lines to prevent calls to police.
Cable television goes out because the outside boxes are pried open to
hide cocaine. The streets are dark because the lights get shot out.

"Now you have to worry whenever you open your door that someone is
behind it, ready to blow your brains out," said Shirley Dorsey, who
lives in this sprawling public housing project on the southeastern
edge of Baltimore.

Life has gotten more dangerous for the people who call O'Donnell
Heights home.

Last Sunday's execution of five women in Belair-Edison began as a
botched drug deal in this development isolated by a confluence of
interstate highways.

The four young men police have charged in one of Baltimore's worst
mass killings -- in which members of three generations of a family
were shot -- frequented or lived in the Heights.

Even with three of the four suspects in custody, police are worried
that violence could escalate as friends retaliate for a killing spree
labeled an "atrocity" by the police commissioner.

One of the men charged was found with his throat slashed 90 minutes
after his photo was splashed over the nightly news.

Detectives believe the women were killed to send a deadly message to
their drug-dealing relatives.

Last week, police swarmed the Heights and its 62 acres of white
clapboard dwellings -- rowhouse-Quonset hut hybrids laid out like Army
barracks -- grabbing dope pushers and crack addicts as they searched
for the fourth shooting suspect.

"I got a feeling he's in this development right now," said Housing
Officer Douglas L. Smith as he slowed his cruiser in front of a house
on Urban Way where the suspect's aunt lives.

"These guys have nothing to lose."

Temporary wartime housing

O'Donnell Heights was built in 1943 as a temporary shelter for wartime
steel and aircraft workers. It was one of 11 projects built in
Baltimore by the federal government to house workers at Bethlehem
Steel, Martin Aircraft and Edgewood Arsenal.

Many such developments were demolished at war's end or rebuilt to make
them attractive for families who needed assistance, but the Heights
remained virtually unchanged.

Millions in grant money went to Brooklyn Homes, Armistead Gardens and
Westport Homes, but none made its way to Southeast Baltimore.

For more than 20 years, the development at the end of O'Donnell Street
remained an all-white project known as "Hillbilly Heights."

Authorities called out the National Guard when integration took effect
in 1967. It remains one of the few integrated projects in the city.

Problems have persisted for years. A 1978 Sun article chronicled the
"city's forgotten edge" and noted not only crime and rampant drug
dealing, but also stagnant pools of water, eroding lawns, peeling
paint, backed-up toilets and weeds growing out of cracks on playground
asphalt.

Tenants then described their community as a "concentration
camp."

Today, the city's second-largest public housing complex in terms of
acreage, with more than 2,000 residents in 800 dwellings, remains
poor. The average family income is $5,400 a year.

City and housing officials have tried programs to turn O'Donnell
Heights around. A Police Athletic League is routinely packed with
children who have free access to computers, books and tutors. A
day-care center opened to help single mothers find work and take care
of their children.

Changing the streets

Officials tried altering the directions of the streets to confuse drug
sellers and their customers and to make it easier for officers to see
the criminals before being spotted by lookouts. One-ways headed east
were changed to westbound, and those headed north were changed to southbound.

The community has long been a haven for drug dealers because of its
location near highways and Dundalk, Essex and Middle River in
Baltimore County, just outside the city.

A traveler can get off Interstate 95 and be on Gusryan Street in less
than a minute, never having to pause for a traffic light.

Police say most of the addicts arrested come from the
suburbs.

Tear it down and rebuild

"I don't know what can be done except to level the place and build it
again," said Detective Christopher Graul of the Baltimore Police
Department, who investigated two warring O'Donnell Heights gangs for a
federal drug task force.

The Nickel Boys, so named because they sold enough $5 packets of
cocaine to gross $40,000 a day, disintegrated during an eight-week
trial at the U.S. District Courthouse that ended last month.

More than a dozen gang members with nicknames such as Cheese, Sleepy,
Bunky and Fonz went to prison, each sentenced to 20 years to life.

They started out small in Dundalk and hit it big in O'Donnell Heights,
sending girls to New York with $50,000 bundles of cash to buy cocaine
and heroin from Dominican suppliers.

Prosecutors outlined in horrific detail brazen homicides by young men
who killed the father of a rival and then executed a star high school
quarterback whom they mistook for a rival enforcer.

One dealer used his earnings to buy a black Mercedes Benz for himself
and a purple BMW for his wife.

Commerce abhors a vacuum

With the Nickel Boys gone, other dealers stepped in. Contributing to
the tension, residents say, were the recent closings of the Murphy
Homes high-rises and the Lafayette Courts and Hollander Ridge projects.

Many displaced residents were moved to O'Donnell Heights.

"When you put one set of projects in another, you are going to have
more rival gangs around," Dorsey said. "It can be an argument over a
pair of tennis shoes and the guns will come out."

Police said the new dealers, including members of the family targeted
in last Sunday's shootings, were a ragtag group of low-level street
pushers with no allegiances and no knowledge of how to build a fluid
organization.

Moving to a better life

Mixed in with this disjointed band were members of Mary McNeil
Matthews' family, who lived on Cavendish Way, a street controlled by
dealers for years, police and neighbors said.

Upset that drugs were taking over, Matthews, who mentored elementary
school children, moved her children from Elliott Way in the Heights to
the more secure Elmley Avenue in Belair-Edison.

"She was a good person," said a 60-year-old woman who has lived in
O'Donnell Heights for a quarter of a century and, like most residents
interviewed, was too frightened to give her name. "She moved to make a
better life for her family."

Police said her new house on Elmley Avenue continued to be used to
harbor narcotics. Detectives allege that more than 2 pounds of cocaine
moved from the dwelling to mid-level drug distributors each day.

Debt paid in blood

A drug dispute erupted involving old friends from O'Donnell Heights.
Police said four men with two guns came to Elmley Avenue last Sunday
night looking for owed drug money.

Finding none, they began shooting.

Mary Helen Collien, 54, was killed in the kitchen. Shot and killed on
a bed in the basement were Collien's daughter, Mary McNeil Matthews,
39; her granddaughter Makisha Jenkins, 17; and family friends Trennell
Alston, 26, and Lavanna Spearman, 23.

Collien's grandson and Matthews' son, Tavaris McNeil, 22, was killed
the same night near an apartment complex on Goodnow Road in Northeast
Baltimore. His body was found the next morning by children walking to
an elementary school.

New sense of fear

The killings made national news and instilled a new sense of fear in
O'Donnell Heights. Police searching for the suspects staked out homes
of girlfriends, aunts and mothers.

Though none of the wanted men was arrested in the Heights, many were
spotted lurking on the dark "cuts," the name given to pathways that
slice through the long rows of apartments, making it easy for dealers
to hide from police.

Police got a tip Thursday that Robert Bryant was outside his
girlfriend's house on Urban Way. He wasn't found.

A city police officer reported questioning Tavon McCoy at a carryout
near the Heights a night before he was arrested last week. The officer
said he released McCoy, not realizing he was a suspect in five
killings who was being sought in a highly publicized manhunt.

Staying out of sight

Many residents interviewed said they will remain indoors until all
four suspects are apprehended. But warnings by police couldn't keep
the most hardened addicts from trying to score.

"Over there is black-tops," a teen-ager yelled to a man on a bicycle
Wednesday afternoon, referring to the color of the cap of a crack
vial. Dealers use different colors to distinguish their products.

"Naw, that stuff is no good," the man replied, pedaling on in search
of a better high.

For the most part, the addicts straggle in from outside O'Donnell
Heights. A police sting several weeks ago yielded 20 suspects, 18 of
whom lived in Baltimore County.

Thursday night, with the search for Bryant in high gear, housing
officers Smith and his partner, Roderick D. Jackson, pulled up the man
on a bicycle searching for crack six days before his 41st birthday.

The Harford County (http://www.co.ha.md.us) resident, living
temporarily with friends in Dundalk, first told the officer he was
cutting through the Heights to get to a convenience store.

"I'm not looking for trouble," he said.

Smith didn't buy it.

"If you're here for any other reason, be a man and tell me," the
officer shouted. "I'm not going to lock you up for being honest."

The man admitted his drug quest and said he had heard about the
shootings of the women and that two of the suspects lived a block from
where he was standing.

"I didn't expect to find anything because of the recent trouble," he
said. Pleading for leniency, the man gave the street addict mantra:
"I'm not part of the problem. I'm just trying to support my habit."

Smith angrily replied: "You certainly are the problem. This is a
community, and people live here. If you didn't come here to buy drugs,
these guys wouldn't be out here selling."

A pocketful of twenties

Guys like the 16-year-old Smith and Jackson had questioned earlier on
Toone Street. Ordered to empty his pockets, the teen-ager pulled out a
portable compact disc player, headphones and 30 $20 bills.

An early Christmas present from his mother, the boy told the
officers.

Proceeds from selling dope, the officers responded.

Finding nothing illegal, the officers allowed the youth to stuff his
money into his jeans and walk away. He disappeared down a path left
dark by bullet-shattered streetlights.

A day earlier, John Brown, a maintenance worker for the city housing
department, had stood near that spot, called "The Hole," shaking his
head.

"Baltimore City should be ashamed," he said.