LANDLORDS, CITY RECLAIM DRUG HOUSES

The landlord was waiting in a sport utility vehicle parked in the back when
Joe Musi arrived out front, followed by a couple of sheriff's deputies.
Their target was a house in an older neighborhood off South Anthony
Boulevard, not far from the Fort Wayne police headquarters.

Sure, Musi said, you can watch us go about our business, as long as you
don't put the address in the paper.

Then the deputies and Musi, a special police officer who works for the vice
and narcotics division of the Fort Wayne Police Department, quickly did
their jobs. Walking to an apartment in the rear of the building, they found
people on the porch. One man was pulling a large, new-looking piece of
luggage, the kind with wheels and a handle, out of the apartment, while
another man milled aboutbeside the porch, saying nothing.

No one was taken by surprise. Everyone knew what was going to happen that
morning. The apartment's occupants were being evicted for violating the
city's drug house ordinance. They had been living in an apartment where the
renter had been caught selling drugs. The landlord had taken the tenant to
court, asking for an emergency eviction order. Now it was Musi's job, as
drug house ordinance coordinator, to get them out.

Evictions for normal tenant problems, such as unruly behavior or failure to
pay rent, can take two months. An emergency order for someone in the drug
trade, though, takes 24 hours. The landlord had been in court the day
before, and the results of that court hearing were being carried out. The
dealers were being put on the street.

Musi and the deputies asked for a particular woman, and in a few moments,
the woman they were looking for emerged, looking dazed, her arms full of
what appeared to be clothing. One of the deputies gave her a piece of
paper, a copy of the eviction order. The woman, saying nothing, wouldn't
take it, so the deputy tried to stuff it among the items the woman carried.

"This is your copy," the deputy said. The document fell out of her arms and
landed on the ground. The woman didn't pay any attention to it.

That's your copy, a deputy told the woman. If you don't want to take it,
that's your business, he said.

Then the deputies told the woman her rights. She had two weeks to remove
her belongings from the apartment but would have to make an appointment
with the landlord to get in. If she showed up on the property alone, she
would be arrested.

The landlord was cordial. Call me. You can get your stuff. Bring a truck so
you can get all your stuff in one trip. We're changing the locks, though,
so the keys you have won't work.

No one made any argument, and after a few minutes the woman and fellow
tenants trundled off with their arms full of items and the wheeled luggage.
One of the men stopped and picked up the eviction order the woman had left
on the ground.

Meanwhile, Musi and the deputies went upstairs to another apartment. One of
the officers banged on the door and called the tenant by his first name.

Inside, two men were sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor and clothes
were strewn in piles along the wall. There was an enlarged photocopy of an
obituary taped to the middle of a painting on one wall, and a funeral
program with the picture of a woman was propped above a window on the other
wall. An ax was hidden behind the bedroom door.

The men in that apartment were being evicted, too.

Like the woman downstairs, the men seemed in something of a daze and didn't
seem too troubled about being evicted at 9 a.m. When you're selling
drugs, worse things can happen.

One man groggily pulled on a shirt and put on a coat. Another rummaged
through the apartment looking for his glasses. "Did you get so blasted last
night that you can't remember where you put your glasses?" Musi asked the
man. The man seemed to take no offense at the comment as he rummaged from
window sills to chairs looking for his glasses.

"Where's your crack cocaine?" Musi called to the man from the other room.

"Crack cocaine?" the man responded. The answer sounded like he said it was
in the gutter or the sewer.

Police could have searched the apartment, but they were there to evict the
men, not search the piles of clothes on the floor. Besides, he'd already
been snagged. There was already a warrant out for the tenant for selling
drugs to an undercover officer.

The men left, and down in the yard, the landlord seemed pleased. She hadn't
checked out the backgrounds of any of the tenants when she rented to them,
she said. She felt kind of sorry for the woman. She suspected she had a
mental disability. Someone else was paying her rent.

Then, one day when the landlord came by, neighbors from all around
converged on her about the constant traffic in and out of the house. They
were dealing, the neighbors said, and a call to Musi verified it. Police
had made buys in both places.

The woman the landlord felt sorry for was just fried from doing drugs for
too long, Musi said. Same for the haggard-looking man upstairs.

So much for being kindhearted. Now, the landlord said, she knows to check
people's backgrounds before she rents to them. That's the goal of the drug
house ordinance. Get drug dealers out in a hurry and make it hard, if not
impossible, for them to rent an apartment anywhere in the city.

A little later, an officer came downstairs with a tin box full of drug
equipment -- copper-colored Brillo-type wire, a glass tube for smoking
crack and wire stick called a stuffer for shoving it all into a small crack
pipe.

They had found evidence of heroin use in the apartment, too, one officer
said. "What should they do with it?" the officer asked. Just throw it away,
they agreed. The man already was heading to court on a charge of selling drugs.

Before long, everything was finished. Scratch two places where people were
selling drugs. Musi estimated he's shut down 1,200 drug houses in the past
decade or so. This probably makes it 1,202 or something like that.

Good luck finding another apartment in Fort Wayne for those evicted. Any
landlord who checks out potential tenants will learn of their eviction.
They now have no choice but to find someone who will take them in or get
out of town.

Out in front, Musi looks at the houses. Back in the 1990s, Musi said, this
street was scary. The houses had gone to pot and were overgrown with weeds
and shrubs that covered the windows. Drug dealers love houses like that.
You can't see what's going on inside.

In the decade or so since Musi took over the position, the street has been
cleaned up. It's deep in the southeast side, an older part of the city, an
area known for shootings and drug sales, but houses now have new siding,
new roofs.

It's not ritzy. Never was. Never will be. But it's better than it was when
drug dealers ran the neighborhood.

Frank Gray has held positions as a reporter and editor at The Journal
Gazette since 1982, and has been writing a column on local issues since
1998. His column is published Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. To discuss
this column or others he has written recently, go to the Frank Gray topic
of "The Board" at www.journalgazette.net.