BIG OAKLAND DEALER HEADED FOR PRISON

OAKLAND - For a decade, Anthony "Ant" Flowers was one of Oakland's
most violent and successful drug gangsters.

He may also have been the luckiest.

Marked for death in a three-year drug gang war that claimed 16 lives,
he survived without a scratch.

Implicated in one of the war's most horrific events - the
automatic-weapons strafing of a funeral home in 1990 during services
for two murdered drug rivals - he was convicted only of a misdemeanor
charge.

Facing life in prison for possession of 20 kilos of cocaine, he beat
the rap because of a blunder by an overzealous young police officer.

But now the diminutive, 31-year-old Flowers stands convicted of new
cocaine conspiracy charges that could put him in federal prison for 30
years.

And on Tuesday, a deputation of Oakland community leaders - led by the
city's new mayor, former Gov. Jerry Brown - is set to attend Flowers'
sentencing in U.S. District Court here to assure themselves that the
kingpin is really going to prison this time.

"I'm going with the DA," Brown said. "It's important to make plain
that Oakland is going to take every action it can to make this city
safe.

"There are some people out there who are not only dealing drugs, but
using assault weapons and basically making life dangerous for the
people of Oakland.

"And we're going to take every action we can to make sure that these
kinds of people go away for a long, long time."

As California governor from 1974 to 1982, Brown was regularly flailed
by law-and-order Republicans, who complained he made crime worse by
appointing lenient judges with little regard for public safety.

But Russ Giuntini, the Oakland prosecutor who urged Brown to attend
Flowers' sentencing, said he believes the new mayor's interest in
cracking down on crime is sincere.

Brown's appearance at Flowers' sentencing, he said, will underscore
the city's commitment to rooting out drug-gang violence - Oakland's
bane for a generation - once and for all.

Brown and City Manager Robert Bobb have "urged the community to get
involved and testify against the guys who are raising hell in the
streets," Giuntini said. "People are serious about making it tough for
dope dealers to do business in Oakland." Schoolboy dealer

According to court records and interviews with former gang members,
Flowers began his career as a schoolboy cocaine dealer in East
Oakland's Elmhurst District.

In the late 1980s, after federal agents broke up the cocaine gang
commanded by drug kingpin Darrell "Little D" Reed, Flowers emerged as
the head of his own crack gang. But by 1989, Flowers was butting heads
with rival gangster Timothy "Black" Bluitt, who had taken command of
the Reed organization.

In the end, federal wiretap transcripts showed that the gangs clashed
because Flowers, in an effort to grab market share, offered deep
discounts on cocaine, selling the drug at $700 per ounce when Bluitt's
gang was charging $1,000.

But the flash-point of their conflict came at a drug dealers' barbecue
at Oakland's Dimond Park in 1989, when a reputed Bluitt dealer named
Eric "Squeeze" Smith attacked the 5-foot-5 Flowers and beat him up.

After that, as Bluitt's brother Norbert later told police, "War was
on." Blazing battles

The conflict pitted Bluitt's gang against Flowers and an allied gang,
the Lacy Family, and over the next three years there were repeated
firefights on the streets of East Oakland.

Sometimes the clashes were marked by high-speed auto chases and wild
shootouts in which gunmen used military-style automatic rifles - and,
at one point, even a World War II-era machine gun - to blaze away at
one another.

One of the wildest occurred on Thanksgiving Day, 1991, when two
carloads of gunmen exchanged broadsides while racing each other along
71st Avenue in Oakland.

On other occasions, there were daylight assassinations in front of
innocent bystanders.

On March 7, 1990, armed men chased two of Bluitt's dealers into a
grocery on Seminary Avenue and opened fire, killing one and wounding
another as children who were in the store to buy snacks after school
ducked for cover. Bluitt's brother later told police that Flowers'
gang had killed the men to avenge the murder of a Flowers dealer who
had been gunned down after an auto chase three days before. Casualties
of war

The war between the gangs finally ended in December 1991, when federal
agents rounded up Bluitt and 11 confederates on drug conspiracy charges.

The toll, according to a review of federal and state court records,
was 16 dead.

Among them: Beverly Bell, girlfriend of one of Bluitt's dealers,
killed by gunmen with Uzis in what investigators assumed was a
mistaken-identity shooting; Theodore Collins, a former Lacy gang
member who was cooperating with police, assassinated in front of his
house; Patricia Welch, a motorist who died in an auto wreck as police
trailed a getaway car after Bluitt's gang ambushed two of Flowers'
dealers.

Few of the homicides were prosecuted. Difficult to
convict

Flowers was arrested repeatedly, but he proved difficult to
convict.

In a series of raids in 1988, Oakland police seized 20 kilograms of
cocaine, more than $250,000 in cash and a small arsenal of assault
rifles from houses linked to Flowers' drug dealing. The suspected
dealer and a partner were indicted on cocaine conspiracy charges.

But as the case went to trial, prosecutor Giuntini learned that a
police officer had inserted false information in a search warrant
affidavit prepared before the raids. The district attorney dropped the
charges.

In August 1990, Flowers was arrested on a weapons charge after gunmen
wearing ski masks shot up the C.P. Bannon Mortuary on East 14th Street
during a funeral for two of Bluitt's dealers. He was later convicted
of a misdemeanor firearms charge.

In December, Flowers and two other men were arrested at Hayward's
Southland Mall with a carload of automatic weapons and bulletproof
vests.

Court records show investigators presumed they were looking for
Bluitt; the same evening, Bluitt and two of his gang members, also
heavily armed, were arrested in West Oakland. No charges resulted.

Court records show Flowers attracted the attention of federal drug
agents in 1993, after he was stopped for a traffic ticket in San
Leandro and found to have $14,155 cash in a paper bag in his car.
Prosecutor says too much

The agents obtained wiretap warrants. In June 1994, they taped phone
calls indicating that Flowers had obtained six shipments of cocaine -
each of at least eight kilos.

Flowers and five others were indicted and went to trial. Flowers came
close to beating that case, too.

In 1997, after Flowers and the others were convicted of drug
conspiracy charges, then-U.S. Attorney Michael Yamaguchi said
Oakland's murder rate had dropped because Flowers and his gang were in
custody.

But Flowers was before the court on separate charges under the federal
"drug kingpin" law - and Justin Quackenbush, a visiting federal judge
from Washington state, angrily charged that Yamaguchi's published
remarks had prejudiced the jury.

He dismissed the kingpin charges.

Later, the judge also granted Flowers a new trial on the drug
conspiracy charges, ruling that a juror who had personal knowledge of
an Oakland drug murder had committed misconduct by mentioning it to
other panelists during deliberations. But last year an appeals court
reinstated the conviction. Thirty-year term urged

In legal papers, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kennedy asked the judge
to sentence Flowers to 30 years in prison because of the devastation
the gang assertedly wreaked on East Oakland neighborhoods.

"Narcotics trafficking and its associated violence devastates
communities as well as individuals," Kennedy wrote. "Residents of some
neighborhoods cannot allow their children to play in their front yards
for fear of random bullets from drive-by shootings. . . .

"Parents suffer years of anxiety worrying over their children becoming
addicted to narcotics, being swept up in the flashy allure of
narcotics trafficking, or becoming an innocent victim of the violence
that permeates the drug world."

Flowers' attorney, Mauren Kallins, couldn't be reached for
comment.

Jacquee Castain of the Webster Tract Neighborhood Association in East
Oakland's Elmhurst District said 50 neighborhood people are planning
to go to court for Flowers' sentencing.

They want to show "that we don't want that type of criminal activity
in our neighborhood, because its not safe for us," she said. "We're
trying to keep our community safe."