BLOOD TRADE- MEMPHIS AND THE MEXICAN DRUG WAR

A Violent Venture Hits Home

Blood Trade ? Memphis and the Mexican drug war: A violent venture hits
home

They found Marcus Turner in a ditch in Olive Branch, naked and shot to
death.

It was the end of a young man's life and a grim reminder of a larger
truth: The Mexican drug war isn't as far away as you might think.

The order that led to Turner's death was phoned in from Mexico,
prosecutors say. They say the man on the other end of the line was
Craig Petties, alleged to be one of the most powerful and violent drug
entrepreneurs the area has ever seen.

The charges against Petties have not been proven, but what is clear is
that he made an improbable journey from South Memphis to central
Mexico and finally to a federal prison in Florida.

His story shows that the drug business is much like any other. The
difference is that it's illegal, which makes violence one of the few
ways to resolve business disputes.

Like any other business, it requires a distribution infrastructure --
Memphis has a good one.

It requires suppliers. Today, most drugs that arrive here come through
Mexico, though they may originate in places like Colombia,
law-enforcement officials say.

And like any business, it needs customers.

"(Colombians) say to me all the time, 'We don't think we have a drug
problem. We think you have a drug problem,'" said Michael LaRosa, a
Colombia expert at Rhodes College.

In the meantime, the lust for drug profits often leads to
death.

A federal indictment accuses Petties and others of many crimes,
including six killings in the Memphis area.

Petties allegedly ordered Turner's kidnapping because he believed
Turner knew the location of a man who had stolen a big shipment of
cocaine from his organization.

Petties' associates lured Turner into a meeting and kidnapped him at
gunpoint around Sept. 19, 2006, the indictment says. On Sept. 27, a
public works crew found the 30-year-old's body.

His mother was at her job at the West Memphis police and fire dispatch
center when she got the call.

Someone from the Olive Branch police asked if she knew Marc
Turner.

"Yes, that's my son," Lucy Turner recalled saying. "What's wrong with
my son? Is he in the hospital. Or you got him in jail or is he dead?

"And he goes, 'I'm sorry.'"

Marcus Turner was an unlikely candidate to get involved in drug
trafficking. His father, Robert Lloyd Turner, was a strict Baptist
minister, said his mother, who has worked for years as an emergency
services dispatcher.

But the minister died of a lung disease in 1985. Marcus was 9 at the
time and his brother, Robert Lloyd Turner Jr., was 10.

"Robert would have fits," said Lucy Turner, a soft-spoken 59-year-old.
"He was so hurt over it."

Over the years, she saw her boys drift into drugs and leave school.
She worked long hours, which gave the boys time alone to get in trouble.

Her whippings seemed to make no difference, and she wishes a man had
been around to help raise them.

Robert recently finished a six-year sentence for drug trafficking in
an Ohio prison.

Marcus was involved in the same trade, and when he made his frequent
visits home, his mother begged him to change.

"I would mostly quote the Bible to him. Tell him what God didn't like
and what his daddy didn't like and what I didn't like."

Her son's response was always a polite, "Yes ma'am, yes ma'am." When
he was tired of listening, he would leave.

"And he did tell me before he died. 'Mama, I do what I do by choice.
Not because I don't know better. Because you and Daddy taught me well.'"

He was a singer in a church choir and continued to go to East Trigg
Avenue Baptist Church even as he was doing "those worldly things," his
mother said.

His mother didn't like the other music he made as a rapper in a local
group called Grenade Posse. Some of the songs refer to the drug trade.

His funeral was at East Trigg. "And the church was packed. Don't know
half of them, but it was packed."

She never got his personal belongings. At the time of his death, he
was separated from his wife and living with a woman who didn't come
forward.

Now Turner's 8-year-old daughter is growing up without a
father.

She's tall for her age, and thin, with a head full of narrow braids.
She looks just like her dad, down to her skinny feet, says her
grandmother. "When I wake up in the morning, I can see him in her."

The loss has affected the girl.

"Her doctor says she's very depressed, and he thinks that's what she's
depressed about," her grandmother said. "But she talks about her daddy
all the time."

Recently, the girl spoke of how her father took her to Chuck E. Cheese
on her birthday years ago.

The girl now spends afternoons at the noisy day care center where her
grandmother works her second job. Two of her half-siblings by other
mothers live elsewhere.

Lucy Turner didn't weep in a recent interview about her son. She says
that a few months ago, she wouldn't have been as strong.

"I would just cry my heart out. That was my baby."