D.C. BROTHERS GROW UP ON THE EDGE (Part One)

In One Evening, a Deadly Turn; Dealing and Dying on Tough D.C. Streets

* Even as homicides in the United States began to plummet in the early
1990s, the teenage murder rate soared and today remains higher than it was
a decade ago. "The juvenilization of violence," as criminologist James Alan
Fox calls it, has been horrific in Washington, where the homicide rate
involving victims ages 15 to 19 increased 700 percent from 1985 to 1995.

This slaughter of the young by the young is especially devastating in the
nation's inner-city African American communities. Although young black men
ages 14 to 24 make up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, they
still constitute a sharply disproportionate share of murderers and murder
victims. Ninety percent of the victims of young black male killers are
other young black men.

The transformation of brothers Tyrone and Russell Wallace from little boys
into convicted murderers illuminates a lost generation and the harsh
reality that nearly one-third of black American men in their twenties are
in prison, on probation or on parole, according to the ACLU's Sentencing
Project. Theirs is a tale told from a cellblock, where the two killers
serve their time, mull the murders they committed, abetted or witnessed --
and await the parole eligibility that draws nearer every day.

Around 10 p.m. on a warm June evening five years ago, Carolyn Wallace asked
her son Tyrone to dry a load of freshly washed clothes at an all-night
laundromat at the corner of 17th Street and Benning Road NE.

Tyrone, 17, tossed a plastic bag filled with laundry into the trunk of one
of his two Cadillacs -- a brown 1976 Coupe de Ville. He then returned to
hustling crack from his customary spot along 21st Street NE in a violent
half-mile-square section of Washington known to police as "Little Vietnam."
Tyrone's business in front of his mother's apartment brought a lucrative
income for a high school dropout with a juvenile record, typically making
him a couple of thousand dollars a week.

After 2 a.m., when the drug traffic quieted, Tyrone asked his younger
brother, Russell, who had just turned 16 and graduated from Browne Junior
High School, to accompany him to the Capital Laundry Mat. Russell was the
youngest male child in the Wallace household, called a momma's boy by his
teasing brothers. Five feet nine and 165 pounds, he had developed into a
street fighter who was recognized as a "big boy" in the 21st Street Crew --
someone who protected his followers. Russell had long arms that he used to
his advantage in countless fistfights, and for added power, he sometimes
carried a .357 magnum handgun. Since childhood, Russell had loved the sound
of a powerful weapon -- even from a rival's gun. He relished the
life-on-the-edge atmosphere that surrounded him, and he often gave his
address as "21st and Vietnam."

Russell had spent that morning with his girlfriend, wolfing down a
breakfast of leftover pig's feet and cabbage and playing with their
8-month-old daughter. He whiled away the afternoon smoking blunts --
marijuana-stuffed cigars -- and drinking Wild Irish Rose wine with friends.
Typically, his nights were occupied peddling loveboat -- the drug
phencyclidine, or PCP -- but his supply had run out, and this evening he
was free.

Tyrone and Russell borrowed their older brother's red Chrysler LeBaron --
they preferred its sound system to the Cadillac's -- and transferred the
wet laundry to the trunk. Russell hid his .357 in a "cathole" behind the
electrical box of the apartment house next to his mother's building. He
stuck Tyrone's 9mm pistol in his pocket, concealing the bulge beneath a
hooded sweat shirt and black leather jacket.

As they neared the laundromat, Russell spotted a rival, Anthony "Ant"
Davis, standing on the sidewalk in the 1700 block of Benning Road NE.
Animosity had been building between them for three months, beginning with
an incident in which Russell intervened when he saw Davis bullying a girl
in a school hallway. They had tangled in three fistfights, one of which led
to mutual three-day suspensions. The brawling eventually escalated to
gunfire. Russell was convinced that Davis had fired at him twice, followed
by a third gunfight in which they traded shots behind the school on June
14, the afternoon of Russell's ninth-grade graduation. "I shot three times
at him when his back was turned to me," Russell later recalled. "He turned
around and shot two times. His gun sounded nice, like a 9mm or a .380."

Now Davis was standing near a "No Loitering" sign outside the Benning Court
apartment complex, talking to a young woman with a baby. "There he is!"
Russell shouted at Tyrone. "The one who shot at me."

Russell slipped the 9mm from his pants pocket and urged his brother to pull
over. Tyrone suggested that they first establish an alibi by conspicuously
stuffing the clothes in a dryer at the laundromat. Tyrone was skeptical of
his kid brother's courage and wondered whether he was bluffing. Russell
pocketed the pistol again.

After putting coins into the dryer, they climbed back into the Chrysler and
circled behind the Benning Court buildings onto Gales Place NE. Tyrone
braked the car in the middle of the block. Feeling a sudden protective
impulse, Tyrone asked whether his brother wanted him to take on Davis.

"Naw, naw, man," Russell replied. "I got this! I got this!"

Russell cut through the courtyard, past the apartment where Davis lived
with his mother. A group of teenagers, sensing trouble, scattered. Ant
Davis was still chatting with the young woman on the Benning Road sidewalk.
Russell turned his head to the side as he approached, so she wouldn't be
able to identify him.

"I still ain't got the gun out. I call his name, 'Hey, Ant!' " Russell
recalled. "I ain't know what I was going to do. I know he shot at me, so
I'm going to shoot at him."

Davis turned at the sound of his name, did a double take, then bolted.
"Ant! Come 'ere!" Russell called. As Davis neared the corner, sprinting for
his life, Russell drew the 9mm and fired a single shot at a range of 50
feet, hitting Davis in the back. He skidded heavily into the gutter near a
green fire hydrant. Russell ran up and saw blood spreading across Davis's
white shirt as he lay on his left side in a fetal position.

"He's looking at me. His eyes were open real wide," Russell recalled. "The
first thing that came to my mind was, 'Finish him.' He was choking and
gagging on blood in his throat and blood coming out of his nose."

Russell felt anger wash over him. "Now look at you, you bitch-ass nigger!"
he shouted. Extending the pistol, he pumped 10 more shots into Davis's head
and body, then ran, laughing, back to where Tyrone had parked, next to
Peace Baptist Church.

"I got 'im! I got 'im!" Russell exclaimed. He felt exhilarated. Tyrone
fumbled with the gas pedal, an old knife wound causing his right foot to
jerk. "Go, man, go!" Russell shouted. Tyrone used his right hand to steady
his leg and his left hand to steer. The car shot forward. They sped back to
their mother's apartment. It was 3 a.m.

A Defining Moment

That morning -- June 27, 1993 -- marked a transformation in the short life
of Russell Wallace from junior high gang member to a killer who would
murder twice before police caught up with him.

With Davis's slaying came Russell's full initiation into the brazen culture
of guns and mayhem, a culture made particularly toxic in Washington after
the appearance of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s. Killing in this culture
is sometimes seen as a rite of passage into manhood. For Russell Wallace,
the appearance of being ruthless and remorseless became as important as
life itself.

Davis's death was also a defining moment for Tyrone Wallace, who had begun
peddling drugs at age 12 and had been an armed dealer since 15. Although he
never admitted it to Russell -- and only confessed it years later in prison
- -- from the day his younger brother gunned down Davis without flinching,
Tyrone was afraid of Russell. Tyrone had always considered himself the
harder of the two, occasionally punching and teasing Russell to toughen
him. After the Davis killing, he never hit Russell again.

When Tyrone and Russell returned to Carolyn Wallace's apartment early that
Sunday morning, they made little effort to hide the crime. Tyrone told
their brother, Benjamin Denny, a 22-year-old crack dealer, that Russell had
just killed someone; Ben initially did not believe him. Russell told his
19-year-old sister, Renee Denny, who was still up watching television; she
was indifferent, though she later regretted not condemning him.

In the brown Cadillac, Tyrone and Ben drove back to the murder scene. A
small crowd milled around Davis's corpse. A police officer asked the
brothers if they had seen anything. They said no.

On the way home, they stopped at the laundromat and retrieved the dried
clothes.

Anthony Davis's murder made the Sunday television news. Only then did the
Wallaces learn that the dead boy was only 14.

"You shouldn't have shot a young'un," Tyrone scolded Russell. "Why did you
do that?"

"That little young'un was trying to shoot me," Russell answered.

Davis's youth notwithstanding, there was nothing singular about his murder
in a city in which the homicide rate reached unprecedented levels in the
early 1990s.

The violence had been particularly savage in Little Vietnam, a densely
populated and poor Northeast Washington neighborhood bordered by the
National Arboretum on the north, Benning Road on the south, 26th Street on
the east, and the intersection of Maryland Avenue, Benning Road and
Bladensburg Road on the west. Davis was one of at least 49 victims -- most
of them young and black -- killed in Little Vietnam from January 1990 to
December 1995, according to police. Many were acquaintances or adversaries
of Russell and Tyrone Wallace.

Yet even in Little Vietnam, the extent to which violence defined the
Wallace brothers and their family was unusual. By the fall of 1998, the
household presided over by Carolyn Wallace and her partner, Patricia
Harris, had disintegrated. Russell and Tyrone have been convicted of
murder. Their brother, Benjamin Denny, is in prison for attempted child
abuse and an attempted sexual act with a 14-year-old.

Harris, or "Miss Pat," as she is known to the Wallace boys, also had three
sons: Nokomis "Nick" Moore III, Paul Moore and Steven Curtis Moore.

Steve, the youngest, has a long juvenile arrest record and has been tried
as an adult three times for a murder allegedly committed when he was 16.
All three trials resulted in hung juries. He is now in prison for various
firearm convictions.

Nick, the oldest, was grazed in the head by a bullet in 1990, according to
his mother. He served a short jail sentence last year for carrying an
unlicensed gun and now works as a truck driver.

Harris's middle son, Paul -- who alone among the six boys in the
Wallace-Harris household avoided drugs or guns -- is dead, the victim of a
bullet through the heart.

Young Street Fighters

Carolyn Wallace was born in 1955 in rural South Carolina and grew up on a
farm her maternal grandparents sharecropped. Her mother was one of 18
children. When Carolyn was 10, a man visited and bought her a pair of
shoes. He told her that he was her father. She never saw him again.

After Carolyn got pregnant in the ninth grade, she dropped out of school in
South Carolina and gave birth to her son Benjamin in 1971. She went on
welfare and became pregnant again during a visit to Washington. Her
daughter Renee was born in 1974.

Back in Columbia, S.C., Carolyn became pregnant again and returned to
Washington for a longer stay. Here she began living with Rufus Denny, an
11th-grade dropout and Army veteran from Northeast Washington who was
willing to accept that he was not the father of Carolyn's baby. Tyrone
Wallace was born March 4, 1976. Fourteen months later, on May 5, 1977,
Carolyn gave birth to Rufus Denny's son, Russell. The couple moved to
Aiken, S.C., where Rufus studied sheet-metal work, and they married.

The family returned to Washington in 1979. They moved into a first-floor
apartment at 3138 Buena Vista Terrace SE, a steeply graded street east of
the Anacostia River. Rufus gave the two oldest children his surname after
adopting them; he never got around to giving his name to Tyrone or Russell.
An upstairs neighbor was Patricia Harris, a divorcee with three boys about
the same ages as Carolyn Wallace's. Harris had lived there since 1981 with
her sons Nick and Steve; her middle son, Paul, lived with his father in
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Buena Vista Terrace was "a very violent-type neighborhood," Rufus Denny
recalled in an interview. He encouraged his boys to become fighters, once
threatening to "whup" Ben if Ben didn't "whup" an adversary. Shadowboxing
- -- as well as more serious fighting -- was common in the neighborhood streets.

Ben and Tyrone were deft fighters, and young Russell loved to watch
skirmishes between two neighborhood crews -- the Ghostbusters and the
Gangster Chronicles. In kindergarten at nearby Winston Elementary School,
Russell saw fights almost daily; by the second grade, he would "step to"
any child who tried to take his pocket change or cut in line.

Fighting soon held Russell's interest more than schoolwork. Reading was
difficult for him. Carolyn was told he might benefit from special
education, but he was never placed in a program. Renee remembers that she
and her brothers frequently were "Jone'ed on" -- teased -- about their
cheap clothes.

Carolyn worked as a nursing home aide in Virginia from 1979 to 1983, while
a younger sister baby-sat. As the children grew, they increasingly got into
spats with Rufus Denny, who worked sporadically and who, by his own
account, was often high on drugs and alcohol. Rufus acknowledges selling
marijuana and continuing the heroin habit he had picked up in the Army.

The Wallace boys said Rufus sometimes hit them with sharp jabs to the
chest. Rufus, while denying that he abused the boys, conceded occasionally
punching them -- "mostly it would be one hit" -- and once slapping Renee
during an argument.

Carolyn became pregnant with her fifth child in 1983. She soon quit her job
and went back on welfare. She said she sold marijuana for Rufus a
half-dozen times, then left the drug trade for good.

In August 1983, D.C. police narcotics officers raided the family's
apartment and took Rufus away. Superior Court records indicate that police
found marijuana, drug paraphernalia and a .38 caliber silver-plated
handgun. Carolyn, then seven months pregnant, was arrested on gun charges
and spent a night in jail before being released with the charges dropped.
Four months later, Rufus pleaded guilty to possession of an unregistered
firearm and was sentenced to 60 days in jail.

Soon after Carolyn's brush with the law -- she has had a clean record for
the last 15 years -- her sons' careers in juvenile crime began.

Checked-by: derek rea