IN BALTIMORE, SLOGAN COLLIDES WITH REALITY

BALTIMORE - Darrell Brooks stood at the front of a courtroom,
tears streaming down his cheeks, and choked out an apology.

He had killed seven people, five of them children, and now he said he
felt sorry.

"I will never, ever, as long as there is breath in my lungs, ever
forgive myself," he said last Wednesday. "I knew those kids. I loved
them. I swear I didn't mean it, I swear."

The lanky Mr. Brooks was off to prison for life for burning down a
house full of people last October, a crime that seared the heart of
this city and blasted a signal that things in Baltimore were still out
of control.

Mr. Brooks, a drug dealer, did not Believe. He had not gotten the
message, stamped all over the city, on garbage cans, squad cars,
T-shirts, skyscrapers, even thumping basketballs.

Believe. One word, printed in black and white, as if things were that
clear. It began as a high-concept public relations campaign, begun by
the mayor, Martin O'Malley, to tackle Baltimore's most infamous
problem, drug crime. For years, the city had been at or near the top
of the list of per-capita misery statistics: most murders, most
addicts, most high school dropouts, most cases of H.I.V. and syphilis.

Believe was a way to address those ills, not through programs, but
through commercials, banners and bumper stickers. Few cities had ever
tried anything so abstract.

"It's spiritual warfare," Mr. O'Malley said.

But just as the mayor's new religion was taking off, Mr. Brooks
reached for the gasoline.

Darrell Brooks used to visit his friend Octavia Briscoe and cradle her
baby in his arms. He called her the Pink Pamper.

"He was so good with kids," Ms. Briscoe said. "It was as if he was
always looking for love."

Mr. Brooks, born in Baltimore on June 10, 1981, watched his family
evaporate. His father walked out when he was born. His mother beat him
so badly when he was 5 that she lost custody of him, according to
court records. When Mr. Brooks was 12, his only brother, Jeffrey, was
shot to death. Mr. Brooks then asked people to call him Jeffrey, the
first of many signs of serious instability that landed him in mental
institutions three times, his defense lawyers said.

By the time he was a teenager, court records showed, he was living in
an East Baltimore row house with his two sisters, struggling through a
special-education school, taking antidepressants and working at
Fuddrucker's. He was striving to be "the man of his house," he told
people.

"He was raising himself," said Trevira Jefferson, a
friend.

It left him impressionable, Ms. Jefferson said, and when the older
boys told Mr. Brooks to steal, he would steal. When they said fight,
he would fight.

William Wells, a neighborhood coach, used to sit at the edge of a
summer league basketball court, looking at Mr. Brooks's latest black
eye or fat lip, and listen to his anger pound like the basketballs on
the blacktop.

"He told me his mother loved her boyfriends more than she loved him,"
Mr. Wells said. "The boy had no structure."

At age 17, Mr. Brooks was charged with holding a BB gun to an
11-year-old's head and stealing his mountain bike. Over the next few
years he was arrested several times for minor drug offenses and put on
probation.

Still, people tried to help. A city councilman found Mr. Brooks a job
as a page at City Hall. In a jacket and tie, Mr. Brooks adjusted
microphones and filled pitchers with ice water. In May 2002,
Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. saw Mr. Brooks at a bus stop in
front of City Hall. He had not shown up to work in a long time, Mr.
Mitchell remembered and the playful light in his eyes had gone out.

"I keep going back to that day and can't shake the guilt," the
councilman said. "Would five little kids be alive if I picked up the
phone and tried to do something?"

A Mayor With a Swagger

As Mr. Brooks began to slide, Mr. O'Malley started to climb. Richard
Burton, a neighborhood activist, actor and now City Hall employee,
remembers the mayoral candidate forum in 1998.

It was supposed to be at North Avenue and Longwood Street, a notorious
drug corner. None of the candidates showed up. Until, Mr. Burton
recalled, "I saw this broad-shouldered white guy strutting up the street."

The broad-shouldered white guy turned out to be the next
mayor.

In November 1999, at age 36, Mr. O'Malley was elected with 91 percent
of the vote, a white candidate in a city that is 65 percent black.

The product of a Roman Catholic, Kennedy-loving clan, Mr. O'Malley was
a former city councilman, prosecutor and cut-off-T-shirt-wearing
guitar player. He had run a one-issue campaign: fighting crime.

Heroin had cut through the city like a famine. One out of eight
Baltimore adults was a junkie. Entire city blocks had been emptied.
The port, the Interstate, the city's fatigued industry and shrinking
population - in 1950, Baltimore had nearly 1 million residents, today
it has 641,000 - all played a role in the city's decline.

The killings peaked in the mid-1990's. Kurt Schmoke, then the mayor,
pushed to legalize drugs. Mr. Schmoke also tried to promote literacy.
He dubbed Baltimore the City That Reads. People on the street turned
that into the City That Bleeds.

Mr. O'Malley came into office and took the A.A. approach. Baltimore
had to admit it had a serious problem. That was Step 1.

The mayor became obsessed with crime statistics. His days started with
the blurt of a fax machine and the latest overnight numbers:
homicides, aggravated assaults, armed robberies.

Mr. O'Malley vowed to keep murders below 300 a year and to close 10
open-air drug markets. In his first year in office, he did both.

He hired a team of image consultants to come up with a catchy phrase
to recruit police officers. John Linder, a focus group guru who helped
burnish the image of New York City subways, seized upon "Believe."

"There is a religious or spiritual quality to that word," Mr. Linder
said. "A certain transcendentalism."

The mayor liked the sound of Believe. Believe commercials were
broadcast discouraging street crime. A Believe hot line was set up for
drug addicts. A Believe machine began to crank out merchandise to
scatter across the inner city like Army leaflets in a war. To date:
234,500 bumper stickers, 75,000 trash cans, 15,154 T-shirts and
forests of pencils and placards and pamphlets.

Believe. Its vagueness was its power. Believe in yourself, in the
city, in God.

Or, as the mayor's political rivals assert, believe in Martin
O'Malley. Some accuse Mr. O'Malley of using Believe for his
re-election campaign or a race for higher office.

Mr. O'Malley denies that.

"I'm not mayor of Baltimore to do something else," he said. "I'm doing
this to do this."

The goal was to take back the city, corner by corner. By last October,
Mr. O'Malley was gaining ground. Angela Dawson, meanwhile, was losing
it.

Fighting the Dealers

Ms. Dawson lived across from Mr. Brooks on Eden Street, with her
husband, Carnell, and five of their six children. On summer evenings,
as Ms. Dawson stood in the kitchen with the window open boiling hot
dogs for her children, she could hear the boys on the corner yelling
out the going price of crack. It bothered her.

Mr. Brooks, according to police reports, was on that corner, a
6-foot-1-inch, 21-year-old lookout, a job usually filled by fifth graders.

He and his friends clashed with the Dawsons. Between June 26 and Oct.
16, 2002, the Dawsons called the police 35 times.

"The drug dealers are all around my house," Mr. Dawson told a
dispatcher on Oct. 1. "They're trying to do something to my kids and
my wife."

Two nights later, two Molotov cocktails crashed through the kitchen
window. Mr. Brooks now admits he threw them.

The police urged the family to move. Ms. Dawson considered it. But the
path out of East Baltimore was difficult to find.

It disappeared entirely on Oct. 16, at 2:20 a.m.

That was when Mr. Brooks, by his own admission, kicked in the Dawsons'
front door, splashed a pickle jar full of gasoline on the stairs, and
lighted a flame. Seven people died: Ms. Dawson, Mr. Dawson, and their
children: Lawanda, Juan, Carnell Jr., Kevin and Keith.

A few hours after the fire, two Baltimore talk radio hosts implied
that the disaster was the fault of "nitwit" politicians. Mr. O'Malley
sped to the radio station, where he bawled out the hosts. For five
minutes. On the air. And then said, "Gentlemen, if you enjoyed that,
come outside after the show."

Later, Mr. O'Malley said: "Every day I do this job I get more
emotional. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing."

Aftermath of a Fire

Mr. Brooks was arrested the day after the fire and charged with
murder. Officials said he was on probation at the time, but no one was
supervising him. Two probation officers were disciplined.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Brooks, 22, pleaded guilty in federal court to
arson resulting in death. He was still searching for affirmation,
looking at the family of the people he had destroyed and begging for
forgiveness.

"I thought I deserved nothing but death," he said in a speech before
he was led away.

Mr. Brooks could have faced the death penalty. But prosecutors said
his mental capacity was so impaired that he might not be eligible for
it, and they agreed to a life sentence without parole.

The case may be over, but Mayor O'Malley said he did not want any
closure. He keeps a picture of the Dawson children on his desk, next
to that of his own four.

The mayor spends his days driving around in a Ford Expedition,
intense, distracted, attacking the Blackberry electronic planner in
his hands, plugging in the coordinates of a broken bench or
drug-plagued corner.

Sometimes, he finds himself in front of the Dawson
house.

"That was our Alamo," he says.

The stoops are full, the snow cones drip and another tank-top summer
slides on by.

It has been more than three years since Mr. O'Malley won office, and
Baltimore now leads the nation's biggest cities in reduction of
serious crime, with a 26 percent decrease since 1999. The city has
also doubled spending on drug treatment since then, to $62 million
from $29 million.

Believe might go national. Organizations from Los Angeles to Atlanta
have been asking about it.

But Mr. Brooks did lasting damage to the campaign. On a recent
afternoon, Marjorie Collins, an unemployed housekeeper, creaked back
in a rusty chair in front of her row house apartment, a few blocks
from the gutted Dawson home, and said: "You can try to do something
about the drug dealers. But you better have Fort Knox behind you."

Her block has one home occupied, seven abandoned. Instead of neighbors
standing in the nearby doorways, there are stacks of bricks to keep
people out.

Across the street, balloons mark the spot where a girl was recently
killed in a car accident with a police officer. She was about to go to
college.

"Believe?" Ms. Collins said, when asked about the Believe campaign.
"Believe in what?"