Beneath the surface, trouble in N.Y. town

By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff

AMESTOWN, N.Y. It's the sort of town that the phrase ''middle America''
was meant to evoke. The main street is called Main Street. The foliage is
glowing this time of year. The sign at the town's entrance boasts of ''New
York State's BestTasting Water.'' Lucille Ball grew up here. There's even
a Lucy & Desi Museum.

But talk to the teenagers and the police and you learn that, as in many
small towns of middle America, some dark and gloomy corners lurk in
Jamestown.

''This may look like a nice little town, but there's more to it than
that,'' said Brandy Heim, 17. ''All the drug sellers come here from
Buffalo, Niagara Falls, New York. There are crack houses here on Lakeview
Avenue. ''

''They're filled with 1819yearolds,'' added her friend, Tammy Sipple,
16. ''I know of one 12yearold'' who takes drugs.

Jamestown, perched near Lake Erie in the southwestern corner of the state,
is also where 20yearold Nushawn Williams comfortably lived for most of
the past year. Along with a couple other towns in Chautauqua County, it's
where law enforcement officials say he had sex with at least 28 teenage
girls and young women. In some of those cases, he traded drugs for sexual
favors. At least two of those girls are pregnant. In at least 11 cases, he
allegedly infected the girls with the HIV virus that causes AIDS.

The revelation of such a farflung cluster of HIV infections among the
three or four largest known cases to have been set off by one man has
hurled this town of 34,000 people into a panic.

''This is a tightly knit town. It's a good town,'' Nancy Knee, president of
the Jamestown High School PTA, said yesterday, outside the school.

''I grew up here, moved away, then came back because it's a good place to
raise my children,'' said Michelle Peterson, a rentalcar clerk at the
local airport.

Law enforcement officials say that Williams, who grew up in the Bronx, had
come to town looking for young girls hanging on the fringes of the school
yard, the parks, the community center. He would offer them marijuana and
cocaine for sex. He had sex with them even after he tested positive for the
HIV virus in September 1996, officials said.

Michael Knepp, 17, said he knew Williams. ''I knew him by the name
`Face,''' he said, one of the aliases that police say Williams used. ''He'd
come over to my friend's house about a year ago.'' Did Williams use drugs?
''Sure,'' Knepp replied.

Both Sipple and Heim said they have friends who had sex with Williams.
''He's a disgusting, sadistic pig,'' Sipple said.

Williams has been in jail for at least a month now, until yesterday in
Riker's Island outside New York City, on drug charges. He was moved to the
Brooklyn House of Detention yesterday because officials were concerned
about the notoriety of the case. He was arrested in the Bronx on Sept. 22
for selling $20 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover police officer. As
long ago as 1994, he spent a year in a Brooklyn jail, awaiting trial on
murder charges, but he was eventually acquitted.

Residents and childhood friends of Williams in the Brooklyn neighborhood of
Crown Heights said the man they knew as ''JoJo'' had a rough upbringing,
Newsday reported. His mother, Diane McCrae, was addicted to crack cocaine
and his father was never around, they said.

''He had crackaddicted parents,'' said a 20yearold man who grew up with
Williams and went to school with him at Wingate Junior High. ''It was rough
for him. He never had anything. He was really out there. He was a wild cat.''

At a relatively young age, Williams moved in with his grandmother, Eleanor
McCrae, but that relationship soured a couple of years ago as Williams
spiraled further into the criminal life. When she asked him to move out, he
went upstate.

Belgeum Welcome, a longtime friend of McCrae's, said he saw Williams in the
neighborhood last fall and that Williams was selling guns.

Keisha Williams, who is 27 and is no relation, offered a different picture.
''He was a nice person, like a comedian, always cracking jokes,'' she said.
''For me to hear this, knowing him as long as I did, it's shocking. It's
not him.''

Keisha Williams said she knew that ''JoJo'' was infected with HIV, and
after he moved upstate, rumors spread that he had died of AIDS.

''I can't judge him; it wouldn't be fair,'' she said.

Still, his tale and the HIV virus that officials say he brought into this
community has made the girls he met and entire communities very afraid,
has compelled them to be more careful and questioning about their own
behavior.

But many of the teenagers say that people like Williams though nobody
knew he was HIVpositve have been coming through Jamestown for quite a
while.

''A lot of adults just don't want to face reality,'' Heim said of the drugs
and teenage promiscuity. ''Some people are afraid to be aware of it.''

Their assertions amount to more than just feisty teenage talk. Captain
Randall L. Present, the Jamestown Police Department's chief of detectives,
confirms the general drift of their conversation.

''We've been dealing for several years with an increase in the number of
people who come here for the sole purpose of selling drugs,'' Present said.
As a result, the town has seen an increase in violent crime, larceny,
assault, and street robbery.

The absolute numbers are small by bigcity standards two murders last
year, 19 rapes, 61 cases of aggravated assault, 485 burglaries but
they're higher than they used to be. The FBIstandardized Crime Index for
Jamestown, measured as 52.8 cases per 1,000 in 1994, rose to 58.3 per 1,000
last year, an increase of 10 percent.

''The larger metropolitan areas are reporting decreases in the crime rate,
but that's not true here, and an awful lot of this is drugdriven,''
Present said.

''I grew up here,'' he added. ''It's been a good place to live. It's still
a good place to live. The fact that this HIV case has been such a shock to
us that indicates it's a good place.'' But, ''We're seeing things that we
didn't see 10 years ago.''

He outlined some of the reasons drug dealers might be picking Jamestown as
a choice location. The supply of drugs is scarcer here than in larger
cities, so they can charge more money, he said. They have less competition
from other sellers.

And Jamestown is more convenient than might be suggested by its 300mile
distance from New York City. It is located just off two major highways
Interstate 90, also known as the New York State Thruway, and Route 17,
which draws a straight line to the Big Apple.

A slumbering economy also has transformed the town and the county. A
thriving steel industry no longer exists. Farm profits are down.
Unemployment hovers around 7 percent. Singlefamily homes have been
converted to rental properties, and neighbors are, more and more, strangers.

Several years ago, a transient like Nushawn Williams might have been more
widely noticed, not so much because he's black blacks do live in
Jamestown but because he behaved so flagrantly.

A declining economy has also meant lower propertytax receipts, which means
reduced city services, including a smaller police force. The Jamestown
force had 75 officers 20 years ago and only 67 today.

Special drug task forces have been set up and arrests are regularly made.
But, Present said, ''there's only so much we can do, given the resources.''

Williams was arrested three times here between January and September of
last year, according to yesterday's edition of the Jamestown PostJournal
for 4thdegree grand larceny, petty larceny, the unauthorized use of a
motor vehicle, and possession of marijuana.

Present said the police have outstanding warrants out for Williams on those
charges, as he never showed up for his court date. The district attorney
wants New York City to return Williams to Chautauqua to face trial for
statutory rape. (One of his alleged victims was 13 years old.)

His infection is unlikely to have started and finished in Chautauqua
County. The 28 girls with whom he had sex here went on to have sex with
another 53 boys or men. The Daily News yesterday quoted a state health
official as saying Johnson kept a list of 70 to 80 women, extending from
New York City to Rochester, with whom he claimed to have sex.

© Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.