JUSTICE SYSTEM CATCHES UP WITH BROTHERS IN CRIME

Drug Deal Becomes a Fatal Fall; From Street Dealing to Courtroom Deals

Second of two articles

Eighteen-year-old Tyrone Wallace woke up at noon on Nov. 22, 1994, at a
girlfriend's apartment in Southeast Washington. He ate a breakfast of Corn
Pops with her two sons and set out across town in his 1976 blue Cadillac to
deal crack on 21st Street NE, his place of business for five years.

Tyrone had been regularly selling drugs since he was 12, and he unloaded
his $240 supply of crack rocks in a few hours. Traffic was slow in the
neighborhood known to police as "Little Vietnam" -- a half-mile square
pocket of Northeast Washington ruled by warring street crews and armed drug
dealers. With his business done and the winter day fading, Tyrone caught up
with his kid brother, Russell, in one of their favorite haunts.

"The evening was chilly," Tyrone later recalled. "Me and Russell were on
the second [floor] landing of 1108 21st St. NE, where we usually went when
it was cold, smoking weed." The landing had a large window overlooking the
building entrance and the walkway from 21st Street. The apartment where
they had lived with their mother for five years stood to the right, a
stone's throw away.

Carolyn Wallace, the boys' mother, had moved into the neighborhood in 1989,
renting a one-bedroom apartment at 1104 21st St. NE in Carver Terrace, a
low-slung, red brick complex that climbs a hill near Robert F. Kennedy
Memorial Stadium. Originally built by a private developer in the 1940s to
house the city's growing population of lower-income black families, Carver
Terrace had fallen on hard times. The shabby warren now was in one of the
city's most violent neighborhoods. Russell often gave their address as
"21st and Vietnam."

Both boys were fixtures in the local drug scene. Even after Carolyn Wallace
and her companion, Patricia Harris, had moved around the corner to an
apartment on Maryland Avenue, the brothers returned daily to their spot on
21st Street to hang out with friends and peddle drugs. Tyrone specialized
in crack while Russell, then 17, mostly sold "loveboat" or liquid PCP,
which he dispensed in vanilla extract bottles.

At first, the Wallaces had only flirted with violence. The brothers carried
pistols because guns symbolized manhood and power in the street culture of
Little Vietnam; for drug dealers, they also were tools of deterrence and
self-protection. Yet Tyrone disliked the neighborhood's frequent killings.
He considered murder bad for business.

Russell, on the other hand, had become part of the mayhem. He used his gun
to hold up drug dealers and participated in a long string of gang
shootouts. In the previous 18 months, he had also killed two people --
Anthony "Ant" Davis and Johnathan "John John" Ray. So far, Russell had
eluded arrest.

Around 9 p.m., as the brothers waited in their second-floor hideaway, an
occasional customer of Tyrone's named Ronald Camp pulled up in a car with a
woman and two other men. The driver double-parked. Camp, 39, got out of the
car and sauntered up the walkway, evidently looking for the drug dealers
who frequently loitered around 1108. Tyrone watched him approach before
walking down to meet Camp on the first floor. Camp asked if he had
"something for $100."

His own supply was depleted, so Tyrone went back upstairs and asked Russell
if he had any crack. Russell was down to a pair of $10 rocks. As Camp began
to climb the stairs, a thought occurred to Tyrone. As he later recounted:
"This dude has more money than what we got. My little dumb mind said, 'I'm
a-gonna take it.' "

Tyrone didn't have his gun and he asked Russell for his .357 magnum.
Russell hesitated. He was the robber in the family, not Tyrone, but when
Tyrone insisted, Russell handed over the weapon.

Camp reached the landing and Tyrone pointed the pistol at his chest. "Give
me the money!" he demanded.

"Naw, man. Naw," Camp stuttered. "This ain't my money. This ain't my money."

Through the window, Tyrone spotted an acquaintance approaching 1108. He
yelled down, warning the man to stay outside. The moment of distraction
gave Camp, who was slightly built and barely five feet tall, a chance to
grab the weapon.

"Let go of the gun!" Tyrone shouted. Camp, in Tyrone's recollection of the
night, shouted back, "No!"

"So my brother begins punching Camp in the face," Tyrone recalled. "Hits
him in the face. Boom. Boom. He ain't even feel it. Boom. Boom. I guess
[Camp] was already smoking or was drunk. You could smell liquor on his
breath."

Russell kept socking Camp while Tyrone kicked at his shins and tried to
wrestle the weapon away. The pistol abruptly discharged and a bullet passed
between Russell's legs, ricocheting off a concrete step.

Tyrone weakened, his grip slipping. "Don't let that gun go!" Russell
yelled. "He'll kill both of us."

The three pitched down eight steps, tumbling onto the ground floor. As
Russell tried to land a knock-out punch, Tyrone and Camp struggled to their
feet, each clutching the .357.

"Next thing I know," Tyrone recalled, "boom! The gun went off."

The bullet hit Camp's chest, knocking him down five more steps and through
the lobby. He fell across the doorway.

Tyrone, who had been frightened, was now enraged. He fired three more
rounds into Camp's head and neck. This dead man would never identify him,
as he later said. Russell flattened out on the walkway outside to make any
witnesses believe "we were getting shot at."

Tyrone scurried back to the second floor landing to retrieve a
black-and-white Nike and his red headband, which had come off in the
scuffle. The brothers left the building and climbed into Tyrone's Cadillac.
The car Camp had arrived in was gone.

They drove across town to Southeast. Both Wallaces had girlfriends there,
and Russell stashed the .357 in his girlfriend's apartment. Tyrone asked
his girlfriend to help him change his appearance by weaving his short bush
haircut into cornrows. He changed his clothes after noticing blood on his
left shoe and trouser cuffs. As he had after Russell killed Anthony Davis
in June 1993, Tyrone drove back to the crime scene. For reasons he couldn't
explain, he felt irresistibly drawn to inspect the site.

Russell rode with him. They parked along the National Arboretum, the
northern border of Little Vietnam, and walked half a block to 1108. A
single police car stood on the street.

Camp's body was still sprawled across the threshold, uncovered, almost an
hour after the shooting. Tyrone walked up to a policeman and asked what had
happened. The brothers lingered a bit. Camp's body was still there when
they left.

The loud shots from the .357 had been audible in at least a dozen
apartments in and around 1108. Yet neither Russell nor Tyrone saw any doors
cracked or faces peering out of windows. The residents of Little Vietnam
were exhausted by the violence-without-end, fearful of coming forward to
bear witness in yet another killing, fearful of becoming victims themselves.

After the Camp shooting, Russell and Tyrone continued to hang out on 21st
Street, dealing loveboat and crack, just as they had after Russell
committed his second murder two months earlier.

Playing 'The Game'

>From the day in January 1989 that Tyrone, then 12, entered what he called
"the game," he viewed drug dealing as a lucrative trade despite the
tensions of dodging police and "stick-up boys." He had never held a regular
job, but thanks to crack he now had plenty of money for cars and clothes.

As children, the Wallaces had been ridiculed for their unfashionable
clothes, but drug profits allowed Tyrone to be a fastidious dresser. He
owned a large wardrobe of Polo shirts, Nike sneakers, and Guess jeans that
he routinely had dry-cleaned. He was tight with money and didn't believe in
"spending it up" on marijuana and wine the way Russell did.

Tyrone had been arrested for drug dealing in 1990, not long after the
family moved to Little Vietnam. Put on probation, he entered the seventh
grade at Browne Junior High School. He was an indifferent student, tempted
by the streets, and he failed to fulfill his parole terms.

In 1991, at 15, Tyrone was sent away to a juvenile group home in
Pennsylvania. On his second weekend visit home, he refused to go back and
was placed on escape status. He eluded police for a year.

That same year, Tyrone stole his first gun, a .22 caliber six-shot revolver
with a wooden handle. He pilfered it after watching a drug dealer named
"Lil' Man" hide the pistol in the grass.

Tyrone had lent the gun to Russell, convinced that his 14-year-old brother
needed a weapon to defend himself. Russell promptly committed a series of
robberies -- mostly against teenage drug dealers -- and began participating
in occasional gang shootouts. By the time he turned 16 in 1992, Tyrone had
been a crew "big boy" for more than two years, but the frequent shootings
and random stickups in the neighborhood threatened his livelihood. Pipehead
crack addicts began avoiding the 1100 block of 21st Street NE.

As business cooled, Tyrone's life became even more aimless. Little Vietnam
by this time was an urban combat zone. Police would respond to one shooting
and hear shots around the corner from another. Gunfire seemed incessant --
"night and day," said one officer who patrolled the neighborhood. Of at
least 49 killings that occurred in the half-mile square between January
1990 and December 1995, detectives estimate that more than one-third remain
unsolved.

One of those cases was the first killing Russell and Tyrone witnessed. They
were party-hopping in August 1992, when gang members from Lincoln Heights
- -- east of the Anacostia River -- appeared at a house at 19th and M streets
and challenged the boys inside. The go-go music stopped abruptly; girls ran
for cover in the back rooms.

Like characters in a Western shootout, Russell and Tyrone jumped out a
front window, pistols in hand. As the two gangs exchanged wild shots, the
Wallaces retreated to the back of the house. There they saw someone with an
Uzi submachine gun spraying bullets into the body of Russell's friend Damon
Lassiter, who was 16. The brothers took cover until the shooter left.

An important influence on both Wallace boys in those days was James "Reds"
Rauch, an established drug dealer three years older than Tyrone, who had
helped initiate them into the 21st Street crime culture. Rauch also loomed
large in the life of their sister, Renee. When Renee was 15 and Rauch 16,
she "cracked" on him -- made a play for him. "I was attracted to him by his
cars," she later recalled. "He had a four-door Jaguar sedan and a Nissan
300 ZX. Girls in the neighborhood told me he had a lot of money. And he was
handsome."

When police tried to disrupt neighborhood drug trafficking, Renee said, she
hid Rauch's gun and drugs in the Wallace apartment. Rauch often stood in
front of her building, keeping an eye on the boys who sold drugs for him.

In early 1991, Renee realized she was pregnant but didn't feel ready to
have Rauch's child. Carolyn Wallace opposed abortion and refused to let
Renee live with Rauch, much to his irritation. When their son was born, in
November 1991, he stopped speaking to Renee.

Carolyn baby-sat for her grandson so that Renee, then 17, could finish her
senior year in high school. After graduation, Renee went on welfare for
five years before eventually finding work as a beautician. Not since the
early period of hiding Rauch's drugs and gun has she been involved in
criminal activity. "I was blind, but I was in love." Renee said recently.

Rauch's estrangement from Renee did not extend to her brothers. Russell's
first gun -- other than the one Tyrone lent him -- came from Rauch, a
.25-caliber revolver. The same night he got the revolver, Russell, who was
14 at the time, stood transfixed near the playground on 21st Street as
Rauch led an attack against a Ford Bronco full of rivals from Lincoln
Heights. No one was killed in the shootout, but the intruders crashed the
Bronco and ran away on foot. Russell said later he was too excited to fire
a shot.

The body of Reds Rauch was found in a Prince George's County motel April
23, 1996. At 22, he had been shot dead in an apparent holdup for drugs and
money. A witness identified two men as the killers but later recanted. No
one has been prosecuted for the slaying. The Wallace brothers saw a
photograph of Rauch in his coffin. His face was battered, his eyes hidden
behind sunglasses.

They still speak of him with admiration. "Even if Reds was tortured,"
Russell said, "he wouldn't have told them where his money and his drugs was
hidden."

'I Feel Guilty'

At midday on April 12, 1995, two uniformed police officers slowly strolled
north on 21st Street, where Russell Wallace, high on marijuana and wine and
carrying a .380 automatic, was hanging out with several friends.

As the officers approached, Russell slipped his pistol to a younger boy to
take into a nearby apartment. The policemen ordered Russell and the others
to "get on the gate" -- to stand against the fence with their legs spread.
When one officer began patting him down, Russell considered fleeing until
realizing -- through his stupor -- that the second officer was holding him
by the back of his pants.

The patrolmen then frisked the other boys and told them to move on. At that
moment Tyrone, who had just finished smoking a marijuana "blunt,"
unsuspectingly walked out of the adjacent alley. The police ordered him
against the fence and for the first time indicated that they had been
looking specifically for the Wallaces. Homicide investigators wanted to
talk to them, one of the officers said. Two squad cars soon arrived to take
the brothers to police headquarters at 300 Indiana Ave. NW.

Tyrone was suddenly overpowered by the guilt that had gnawed at him since
Ronald Camp's murder. Part of him wanted to give up the hustling life and
go to jail to "get my life together" as he later put it. Still high as the
homicide detectives began questioning him, he prevaricated a bit before
confessing. "I confessed because I'm guilty," he later explained. "I feel
guilty."

His interrogators, however, accused him of lying. "We know you didn't do
it. We know Russell did it," a detective insisted, according to Tyrone's
account. Tyrone assumed that someone who had recognized the brothers at the
scene of Camp's murder had finally come forward. In giving a complete
account of the killing, he denied Russell's complicity while admitting that
he had used his brother's gun to shoot Camp.

That same night, in a separate interrogation room, Russell was questioned
about the killing of Johnathan Ray on Sept. 14, 1994. "There were too many
eyes out there that night," Russell later said. He also had watched police
raid an apartment at 1110 21st St. NE. and bring out six guns wrapped in
plastic gloves. One policeman carried a .45 out in a plastic bag. Russell
strongly suspected it was the gun he had used to shoot Ray. He had given
the pistol to a boy in 1110 for safekeeping.

"Before that it was probably just 'he say, she say' evidence against me,"
Russell added. "But after they got the gun, it was hard evidence."

The boy's family moved away the day after the raid, and Russell assumed
that the boy had given him up to the police. Why it had taken several
months after the gun confiscation to arrest him is unclear, but by 1 a.m.
on April 13, with a video camera running, Russell confessed to Ray's murder.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen O'Connor was assigned to prosecute
Russell. She learned from witnesses to Ray's murder that Russell had killed
before.

By the time Russell went to court with a public defender to plead guilty in
the Ray case, O'Connor told Judge Harry F. Greene Jr. she had evidence
linking Russell to the murder of Anthony Davis on June 27, 1993.

The judge postponed the plea while prosecution and defense lawyers talked.
The government offered a deal. If Russell pleaded guilty to two counts of
second-degree murder while armed, he would not be charged for giving Tyrone
the pistol used to kill Ronald Camp. Sensing that his options had run out,
Russell was tempted.

But the plea bargain came with a condition: He also would have to testify
against Steven Curtis Moore, the youngest son of Carolyn Wallace's
companion and someone Russell had known most of his life.

Moore was charged with first-degree murder in the May 10, 1993, shooting of
Michael Oliver, a crack user and hustler who had been shot seven times on
21st Street NE. Police had questioned Russell about the case shortly after
finding Oliver's body and again in September 1994. In early 1995, shortly
before his arrest, he had been summoned before a grand jury and asked by
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kohl to recount under oath what he knew
about Oliver's death.

Russell lied, elaborately. Steve Moore was like a brother; he'd also long
been a partner in crime, since the summer day in 1984 when Russell and
Steve had been caught shoplifting together at the age of 7. Moore had
nothing to do with the Oliver case, Russell assured the grand jury. A thug
named Ronald "Booger" Wilkins had pulled the trigger, Russell added,
knowing that Wilkins -- whom police considered responsible for six to 10
slayings -- had been killed in November 1993.

Moore was indicted despite Russell's false testimony, but the trial had
ended in a hung jury, with eight jurors voting to convict, three voting to
acquit and one undecided. Now investigators and prosecutor Kohl saw a
chance to nail Moore by producing a new eyewitness in Russell Wallace.

>From jail, Russell telephoned his mother for advice on whether he should
testify. Would his testimony damage the intimate relationship between
Carolyn Wallace and Steve Moore's mother, Patricia Harris? He also talked
by phone to Harris, who says her son had admitted killing Oliver to her.
Both women urged Russell to tell the truth.

He accepted the deal, pleading guilty to two homicides. In February 1997,
Moore was tried for first-degree murder a second time. Russell took the
stand, testifying that he had seen Moore put seven bullets into Oliver with
a 9mm handgun after Oliver tried to steal a small portion of crack. Three
other drug dealers testifying for the government told similar stories.

In cross-examination, Moore's attorney sought to impeach Russell's account,
forcing him to acknowledge that he had lied to the grand jury. The attorney
also noted how Russell had benefited by swapping his testimony for a
lighter sentence that would allow him to leave prison as a young man.

The second trial again ended in a hung jury, with eight votes for
conviction and four for acquittal.

In April 1997, the U.S. attorney's office brought Moore to trial a third
time. Russell Wallace testified again. Once again the jury was deadlocked.
This time five voted for conviction and seven for acquittal.

The Aftermath

Today, the intense gunfire and drug dealing that shattered so many lives in
Little Vietnam from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s has ebbed --
mainly, police say, because most of the perpetrators are dead or in prison.
Feuds were left hanging while the dealers and killers who controlled 21st
Street went off to serve their time.

Tyrone Wallace is in federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., serving
five-years-to-life for Camp's murder. He will be eligible for parole in 2000.

Russell Wallace is serving two five-years-to-life sentences for the murders
of Johnathan Ray and Anthony Davis in the same prison. Under the plea
bargain, he must serve at least 10 years and will be eligible for parole in
2005.

Russell calls his mother twice a month, less frequently than his older
brother Ben, who calls home weekly from Youngstown, Ohio, where he is
serving a three-to-12-year term for attempted child abuse and attempted sex
with a minor.

In June 1997, a prosecutor gave Russell Wallace the address of Anthony
Davis's mother, Patricia Jones, and suggested that he write to her.

The proposal disturbed Russell. "What can I say about killing her son?" he
asked. He wrote that he was sorry for "putting so much pain in your life.
Ms. Jones, I know [there] is nothing I can say or do to bring your son back
or to be [forgiven] by you or your family. . . . I am glad to be locked up
today for what I did to your family."

Jones, who had found the body of her son in the gutter where he died in
June 1993, said she finally reached a point where she could forgive Russell
Wallace. "I had to for my own sanity. I got to the point where I was going
to lose my mind," she said. "I didn't want to lose my mind for something I
didn't do. I didn't kill my child. Russell did."

In April 1997, when the third murder trial ended in a hung jury, Steve
Moore was released after 31 months in jail. He was then 20 years old. When
Russell called home from prison in subsequent months, Steve sometimes
answered the phone, accepting his collect calls.

Moore was friendly enough, Russell said. "Steve told me I should have pled
not guilty, like he did," he added. "He hung tough and was released."

In October 1997, in an attempted robbery, Moore was shot in the back in the
900 block of 21st Street. He spent a night in D.C. General Hospital and was
released the next morning. "They left the bullet in," said his mother,
Patricia Harris. "Said it would be too dangerous to take it out because it
was near his spine."

By 6 p.m. on the day of his release, Moore was back on 21st Street, walking
with a cane. According to Superior Court documents, a tipster told police
that Moore was armed. When an officer approached him -- near the spot where
he'd been shot the day before -- Moore took off, hobbling with surprising
agility. Before he was caught, he pulled a five-shot Brazilian-made Tarus
38-caliber revolver from his pocket and tossed it aside. Police recovered
the pistol and charged Moore with assorted firearms violations.

Moore, who declined to be interviewed for these articles, pleaded guilty in
April and received a 20-month-to-five-year sentence. He will be eligible
for parole next June.

Harris had hoped her youngest son would get a longer term. She fears that
when he is released he will seek revenge against whoever shot him. "That's
why I hope he stays in jail," she added. "That's a terrible thing for a
mother to say, but I don't want to see him take another life or die himself."

Carolyn Wallace is 43 now, a stocky woman with a round, cherubic face. She
says she never profited from her sons' illicit gains, never wanted any part
of the gangster life. In September 1994, she got off welfare by taking a
job as a school crossing guard. Three months ago, she began a job as an
aide in a Mitchellville retirement home -- working five days a week, often
12 hours a day. She and Patricia Harris currently live in a modest public
housing apartment in Southeast Washington.

"I don't have the finest of clothes," she said, "but I'm not going to go
out there to kill anybody or deal any drugs because I don't have these
things."

Carolyn Wallace said she is glad her sons are off "the streets that swept
them up." She believes they are safer in prison, where she hopes they will
learn a trade or pursue an education. She loves and misses them.

Patricia Harris used to envision herself "living in a substantial
neighborhood" and "sending her children off to college." Living in Little
Vietnam was not part of the dream.

After Steve Moore's first trial began in 1996, Harris suffered what she
called a nervous breakdown and quit a job at Wendy's. She lives on medical
disability checks and takes medication for depression. "I couldn't see how
a child I raised could resort to such violence," she said. "The way they
told me that man [Oliver] was shot. Shot seven times."

Michael Oliver's mother, Maxine, 56, had moved to 1106 21st Place NE in
1975 -- before the neighborhood turned into Little Vietnam -- with her
husband and two young sons, Alvin and Michael. Both boys graduated from
Phelps Vocational High School, worked, married and had two children apiece
before Michael drifted into the 21st Street drug culture.

Four months before Michael was killed, Alvin committed suicide. Last
January, after "31 years and a day" working for the federal government as
an inspector of janitors who clean government buildings, Maxine Oliver
retired.

She mourns the death of her sons every day.

Leon Dash, a Washington Post reporter for 32 years, recently became a
professor of journalism at the University of Illinois. Susan Sheehan, a
contract writer for The Post, has been a staff writer for the New Yorker
for 37 years.

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.

U.S. prisons and jails hold 1.7 million people -- one out of every 155 U.S.
residents is behind bars.

U.S. INCARCERATION RATE

People incarcerated per 100,000 residents

1985 313

1995 600

1997 645

Since 1985, incarceration rates for young African American and Latino males
(ages 20 to 29) have risen to the levels shown below.

YOUNG MALES BEHIND BARS

Percentage by race and ethnicity

Black 30.2%

Latino 12.3%

White 6.7%

Homicides committed by young African American males peaked in the early
'90s but remain far above the rates for white males of the same age groups.

Estimated homicides committed by young males per 100,000 U.S. residents

1996

Age group: 14 to 17

Black 133.5

White 17.2

Age group: 18 to 24

Black 268.0

White 30.9

Age group: 25 and older

Black 49.9

White 6.6

MURDER IN 1997

* There were 18,209 homicides in the United States last year, 26 percent
lower than in 1993.

* 48 percent of victims were white, 49 percent black.

* 53 percent of murder offenders were black, 45 percent white.

NOTE: Data on victims and offenders are from partial, supplemental data.

SOURCES: National Institute of Justice;U.S. Census Bureau; FBI Uniform
Crime Reports; James Alan Fox; ACLU National Prison Project

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski