POLICE, FOR NOW, HOLD THE POWER IN THE LIBERTY CITY DRUG WARS

Miami Community Repeats a Pattern of Violence and Hope

MIAMI—The bicycles flit by the window of the Rev. Richard Bennett's office
in Liberty City, one of Miami's most chronically troubled and violent
neighborhoods. They are not ridden by children, but by young men who seem
too big, too bulky, for the small, low-slung seats.

"If the police come to catch you on the corner loitering, as long as you're
moving, well, you're not really loitering," explained Bennett, 42,
executive director of the African American Council of Christian Clergy.
"They're brilliant young men. They just need to get jobs."

The police have been a powerful presence here in recent days, questioning
the young men on street corners, nosing their cruisers through the
trash-strewn streets, watching the rhythms of life from unmarked cars. More
than 200 city, state and federal officers, overseen by Miami Police Chief
William O'Brien, have taken part in "Operation Draw the Line" to curb a
drug war in Liberty City that has claimed a dozen lives in recent months,
five in December alone.

"There are so many policemen around here, it's like the president is in
town," Bennett said.

Most major American cities have their versions of Liberty City, a poor,
largely black community with high unemployment that seems to make the news
mostly when there are riots or gang wars. Violence tends to erupt in waves
in these neighborhoods, sending children indoors to play for fear of being
caught in the gunfire and prompting shrieks of terror whenever a vehicle on
the street backfires. Then a spate of arrests calms residents or the
criminals slip underground again, until another siege begins.

So it has been recently in Liberty City, where last week was a remarkably
successful one for law enforcement. Early Tuesday, police arrested
peacefully one of Miami's "Most Wanted" suspects, alleged drug kingpin
Anthony "Little Bo" Fail, who was squirreled away in a West Palm Beach
motel with a couple of friends. During one of Fail's most notorious
exploits, in August, he was caught on videotape lunging over a Liberty City
store counter in pursuit of a member of an enemy gang; the 8-year-old
daughter of the store owner was wounded by a ricochet bullet.

"He went meekly," said Miami Police Lt. Bill Schwartz. "He's cooperating
and crying. There are other players, but he was a major one, and we are
grateful he is out of the picture."

Then on Thursday, U.S. Attorney Thomas Scott announced indictments against
two rival drug gangs that had operated in Liberty City, the John Does and
the Cloud Nines. The indictments, involving about 25 people, many of them
already in custody, ranged from money-laundering and weapons charges to
murder.

"Some may ask, 'Won't another gang just step up and take the place of the
John Does and Cloud Nines of the world?' " Scott said at a news conference.
" . . . We're willing to take them on."

The news brought more people out onto the streets of Liberty City Friday,
and an atmosphere that seemed freer and less tense, but no one seemed
particularly convinced that the community's troubles are over. They never
have been before.

"Those boys have no respect for anybody," said Larry Sims, a security
guard, shaking his head.

"I'm never really home and I don't really want to know what's going on. I
just keep my head down," said Beverlyn Carr, 42, a cashier.

"It's nothing new that's going on in Liberty City," said T. Willard Fair,
executive director of the Miami-Dade chapter of the Urban League. "It's
simply highlighted by the fact that several people were killed in a
specific time, but it's not new behavior. You can tell it's not new because
of the way we are reacting to it. We have developed a pattern: When
somebody is killed, we come and place flowers on the spot or if it's a
child, we place teddy bears, then we have a couple of days of discussion
about what happened. Then most of the community goes back to business as
usual."

Originally, Liberty Square was the name given 50 years ago to a low-income
housing development in northwest Miami near 62nd Street NW, which remains
home to about 2,000 people, Fair said. But Liberty City, as police and
residents view it today, is a much larger and more populated area,
including nearly 100,000 people and stretching some nine square miles north
of city center and west of Interstate 95.

It is unquestionably Miami's largest African American community, with 70
percent of its households headed by women.

As greater Miami developed, Fair said, Cuban immigrants tended to turn
west, toward the Hialeah community; Haitians went east and northeast; and
American blacks moved north. "It always has been a segregated community and
it always will be," he said.

Much of that has to do with the political and cultural nature of Miami. In
some measure, the attention bestowed on arriving Cuban exiles in the 1960s
distracted Miami from the civil rights and economic improvements that were
getting underway then for blacks in many other U.S. cities. Arthur Teele
Jr., the only African American on the Miami city commission, represents
Liberty City. He says local government has followed an immigrant-driven
"salad" philosophy, and that even today "lettuce remains lettuce and
tomatoes remain tomatoes."

Business owners in Little Havana or Little Haiti, for example, still do not
dream of hiring Liberty City residents, he said. In addition, the African
American community here, unlike its counterparts in Atlanta or Birmingham,
has never developed its own banks or insurance agencies or other major
businesses to provide jobs. Liberty City's dilemma is complicated further
by its lack of a solid business corridor; public-housing projects line one
of its main thoroughfares.

"What you have in Liberty City is a once very stable neighborhood with a
lot of homeowners and it still has one of the highest-voting precincts in
the state," said Teele, who served as undersecretary of transportation in
the Reagan administration. "But it has no industrial base, no job base.
It's a very vicious cycle."

The absence of tall buildings makes Liberty City look somewhat less urban
and menacing. There are fewer palm trees and flowering bushes than
elsewhere in Miami, but the pastel motif remains, with houses painted
yellow, lavender, aqua and pink. Coin laundries seem to operate on every
corner and small food stores dot the streets.

But it is the churches that are most notable. Bennett says Liberty City is
home to 319 churches, and 15th Avenue NW offers a large sampling of
storefront houses of worship: the Church of the Old and New Testament, the
Apostolic Revival Center, the Jesus is Alive Ministries Praise and Worship
Center, the Nationwide Holiness Church of Brotherly Love.

Vacant lots are still plentiful, remnants of the most recent riots here in
January 1989, which began in the neighboring Overtown community and spilled
over into Liberty City after a Hispanic police officer shot a black
motorcyclist. Sniper fire and looting were widespread then, and police
officers were pelted with bottles and rocks. In 1980, riots here left 18
persons dead and $100 million in fire-bombed buildings after an all-white
jury acquitted four white former police officers in the beating death of a
black Miami insurance salesman.

Through the eyes of Bennett, who moved here at 10, graduated from school
here, left as a grownup and then came back to work for community
improvements, Liberty City still has an air of hope. Good families have
lived here for generations, he said. Children flourish in the community's
schools. The drug customers who flock here, he said, are not Liberty City
residents for the most part, but people from elsewhere who use convenient
Interstate 95 to zip into Liberty City, make their buys, then leave.

Fair of the Urban League said his agency has devised a "comprehensive,
holistic plan" that he will take to the mayor in a few weeks to address
Liberty City's problems -- and, he said, hopefully, reduce the number of
"Anthony Fails" the community produces. It asks the city to "fix Liberty
City's infrastructure -- the roads, the housing, the job opportunities" --
and it asks the police department to keep efforts like "Operation Draw the
Line" in place for the long haul, something Chief O'Brien has pledged to do.

(c) Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company