DAY IS FOR PEOPLE, NIGHT IS FOR DRUGS

Police Estimate It's At Least A $400,000-Per-Week Business

Public housing communities are quiet, peaceful and even friendly by
day, but change noticeably an hour after sundown.

At night, late-model cars, pickup trucks and SUVs, such as a
glistening black Cadillac Escalade with dark windows and lots of
chrome, roll onto avenues such as Clay Street.

Young men run alongside these vehicles in a ritual that makes no sense
to outsiders.

The runners, knowledgeable sources said, are most likely low-level
drug dealers, and the drivers are their suppliers. The runner will
toss a roll of money onto the car seat or in the back of the pickup,
and the driver will go elsewhere to count the loot. If the roll is
short, the accounting may be painful.

In Annapolis Gardens and Bowman Court, dealers use cabs and cars with
auto dealership tags, sources said, so they will not forfeit their own
vehicles if they get busted on drug charges.

At Harbour House and Eastport Terrace, the low-level dealers play out
a scene that could come from the television series "The Wire." They
hide in halls and stairwells, but have lookouts posted around the
neighborhood.

When the cops are coming, the sentinels alert the dealer by clicking
the push-to-talk feature on cell phones, sources said.

A lot of young men in public housing "double-shirt," sources said,
meaning they wear two shirts - a white one underneath a black one, for
example. That way, when police are pursuing "a medium-height black man
wearing a black shirt," an official said, the suspect may disappear
around the corner of a building and emerge wearing a white shirt and
say "The dude went that a-way."

Police officers estimate the citywide drug trade is at least $400,000
weekly. Heroin comes in from Baltimore and cocaine from New York City,
they say.

Young men in public housing either refused to talk about life in their
communities or, more often, refused to recognize a reporter's existence.

Business as usual

"It is a trade, it is an industry," Annapolis Police Chief Michael A.
Pristoop said of drug trafficking, and his attempts to stop it.

"For some people, it is their job; they change tactics - marketing
strategies - whenever we change our tactics," he said.

One of Chief Pristoop's officers was more blunt.

The war on drugs, he said, has done nothing more than saddle a
generation of young black men with criminal records that make them
unemployable. Along the way, it has guaranteed work for police
officers, defense attorneys, prosecutors judges, prison guards and
probation agents.

"The way we have been dealing with the drug problem hasn't worked,"
the officer said. "We have been doing the same (stuff) for 30 years,
and it hasn't made a (bit of) difference."

A number of politicians, in private, agreed and said drugs should be
legalized and taxed, the same as alcohol. But, they said, they
couldn't imagine any elected official committing suicide by advocating
the change.

Drug dealing isn't the only crime the police have their eye on, Chief
Pristoop said.

Some of the public housing projects have small local gangs. While they
are not affiliated with larger, more dangerous gangs, Chief Pristoop
said he is concerned because he has seen local gangs in Baltimore
public housing projects make that transition.