VETERAN NOW AT WAR WITH NEIGHBORHOOD DRUG DEALERS

Pushers pest

It doesn't matter if it's 20 bucks or several hundred. A good day's work
for Charlie Taylor is when he causes a big enough disruption to "knock" his
neighborhood's drug dealers out of cash.

About 3 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, Taylor parks his beaten-up '86 Ram van
along the side of the road, slouches back in his seat and watches three
young men a block ahead, loitering on the corner.

Drug dealers, Taylor says.

The guys don't seem to pay Taylor much attention, but after about 20
minutes they break up. Two of them amble toward the open-windowed van,
muttering insults as they pass.

"If they weren't doing anything," Taylor says, "why should they confront me?"

Taylor is used to the name-calling.

"They call me everything but a child of God," says the 54-year-old retired
Marine, who owns a pit bull named M.C. (Marine Corps) and rarely is without
his "Vietnam Veteran" cap.

Taylor has lived in the Columbus neighborhood of East Highland for 12
years. For the past few years, multiple times every day, Taylor, in his
light blue van or on his mountain bike, has patrolled the neighborhood's
streets. Sections of East Highland are among the city's busiest for the
buying and selling of illegal drugs, particularly crack cocaine and
marijuana. Lawyers and businessmen and a former police officer have been
caught buying drugs in East Highland.

Longtime residents describe a formerly peaceful and sociable neighborhood
that began to decline roughly a decade ago when homeowners died and
properties became rentals. In some places, just a street separates East
Highland's chipped-paint houses from The Park District, whose homes fly
flags announcing their place in the district.

On his rides, Taylor scouts for the buyers and sellers of crack, or "rock"
as it's known on the streets. A single rock fetches about $20. Aiming to
disrupt their business, Taylor parks and watches the guys, most in their
late teens and 20s, he says loiter on the streets daily. "He'll just stare
them down and they'll leave," says his wife of 28 years, Mary Taylor, a
nursing student used to the detours around the neighborhood whenever
they're coming or going. Around the neighborhood, he's often acknowledged
with waves and hellos, even from some of the guys he's after.

It wasn't until 1996 or 1997, when the dealers started encroaching on his
street, 16th Avenue, that Taylor took an interest in their business.

Taylor writes license plate numbers and addresses on gas station receipts
and on envelopes. He follows suspicious cars. Recently he trailed a kid on
a bike. He's been known to get out the video camera his family gave him for
Christmas one year and direct it at suspected dealers. On a video he has
somewhere, he says, he captured part of a drug sale.

Many of the dealers' names are familiar to Taylor. If he sees someone he
doesn't recognize, he might consult his children's yearbooks. "You have to
use every trick you can," he says.

The Taylors have eight children -- 16-year-old fraternal twins and a
14-year-old son still at home -- and Taylor says he kept a tight rein to
keep them off the neighborhood's streets.

Police say citizens like Taylor often provide tips -- about all-night
traffic in front of a house with new occupants, for example -- that have
aided in arrests and convictions, not just for drugs but drug-related
crime, such as thefts and burglaries. Police are vague, however, when asked
about Taylor's particularly vigilant and aggressive brand of drug fighting.

"He has taken some actions on his own that only he can decide was good or
bad," said Columbus police Lt. M.C. Todd.

Citizen drug fighters

Taylor's daily pursuit is usually solitary. But he has broader
responsibilities as president of East Highland Against Drugs, one of 10
activecitizen drug-fighting groups under the umbrella of Columbus Against
Drugs.

Formed nearly two years ago and with an active membership of about 20, East
Highland Against Drugs is one of the newest and loudest of the
drug-fighting organizations. In all, the majority of the citizen drug
fighters are black and in their 50s, 60s and 70s, said police Sgt. Renee
McAneny, the police department's liaison to the groups.

The groups are based in middle-to low-income neighborhoods, but police say
illegal drugs can be found throughout town, from the most affluent to the
poorest. McAneny believes some neighborhoods are reluctant to organize
groups out of fear that open acknowledgment of a problem will drag down
property values. A group of residents in the downtown Historic District
looked into forming a group several years ago, she says, but a lack of
consensus among residents killed the idea.

"They wanted help," McAneny says, "but they didn't want anyone to know they
needed help."

The level of activity among the drug-fighting groups varies. At least one
exists on paper only, and another, Peabody Apartments Against Drugs, limps
along. Nine years after forming, Peabody is left with only a few members,
and only one, Doris King, the leader, lives in the Housing Authority-owned
apartments.

Despite her size (slight, 5'4") and health (she has a heart condition that
causes her to black out), King, 55, walks the rows of brick apartments with
a small notepad, on the watch for drug activity and violators of apartment
rules. She passes her information along to the apartment manager or police.

Leaders like King and Taylor are responsible for organizing the groups'
high-profile events: monthly marches through particularly bad sections of
neighborhoods and sit-outs. During a sit-out, a suspected drug house or a
"hot" street corner is targeted by drug fighters basically demanding,
through a megaphone and under police supervision, for the criminals to get out.

Like others of the drug-fighting groups, East Highland Against Drugs is
part of an improvement association, which organizes events like cleanup
drives. Charlie Taylor's over it all, but he brushes off the broader
duties, skipping last weekend's clean-up that his wife helped with.

"We can't be an improvement association and fight these drugs," he says.

Taking action

On a damp Tuesday about 7:30 p.m., Taylor stands on a corner of Hood Street
and Samson Avenue during a sit-out in the neighborhood residents call East
Wynnton.

The target is a brick duplex with white shutters. Neighbors got suspicious
about the place when cars started showing up all hours of the night,
setting off a chorus of barking from a neighbor's dogs.

Six people, most in their 60s and 70s, show up to protest -- not an
unusually low number, but fewer than organizers expected before the spell
of rain earlier in the evening. It's the second protest there in the past
few weeks.

They set out a few folding chairs and stools, a cooler of soda and a table
with chips, snack cakes, peanuts and a box of figs.

Drug Fighters of Columbus, a spin-off of Carver Heights Against Drugs,
organized the event, but Taylor, who frequently attends marches and
sit-outs outside East Highland, takes the lead. Through a megaphone, he
initiates a round of chants, his voice as jarring against the quiet as the
sudden crack of fireworks.

Get off the crack!

And take your neighborhood back!

Hit the road jack!

Take your crack and don't come back!

Police say they're aware of drug dealing in the area but don't know for
certain about the duplex.

"We can only speculate," says Officer Vernon Harris, a member of the
tactical operations unit who, with Officer Misty Howell, accompanied the
group. No one appears to be home at the duplex, and as the sky grows dark
the neighborhood is quiet and its streets empty, except for a few parents
and children outside.

Shortly after the protest gets under way, Wallace Jones,who lives across
the street from the duplex, tells the group that the suspected dealer is gone.

"It's a blessing because I have grandkids and I don't want my grandkids
around it," Sylvia Jones, Wallace Jones' wife, says later.

Jones, 43, says she called the police several times during the three or
four months the suspected dealer, who appeared to be in his late 20s, lived
there. She says she watched him move out in the middle of the night days
after the first sit-out.

"He moved out because we were here," says Earl Whitaker, a 77-year-old
wearing a Drug Fighters of Columbus T-shirt over a light green dress shirt
with a fraying collar.

This is Whitaker's neighborhood. It's a lot cleaner than it was in the
mid-1980s when he returned to his hometown after living in suburban Boston
for 35 years.

"It was wicked," he says, describing the traffic that clogged Samson
Avenue. "It's much better now, but we gotta stay on it. You slack off a
little and they're back on it."

After learning of the suspected drug seller's departure, the group spends
most of the two hours set aside for vigils snacking and in spirited
conversation. Officer Harris tackles a crossword puzzle for a while. When
someone mentions dinner plans, he says, "You got salmon at the house? What
time is supper?"

Shutting 'em down

The self-described drug-fighters may seem more like obstinate, nosey
grandparents than the do-good vigilantes suggested by names like Drug
Fighters of Columbus. But police say their approach is effective in chasing
away dealers, though they almost always reappear, sometimes in a different
part of town.

"What they do is bring attention to the neighborhood that there's a
problem," said Capt. J.D. Hawk, special agent in charge of the Metro
Narcotics Task Force, which consists of representatives from five regional
law enforcement agencies."It gets too hot for the drug dealers and they
move on to another neighborhood."

Citizens often provide tips that lead to investigations and later arrests.
Hawk gets calls from citizens, as does Sgt. Larry Parker Jr., who works
closely with the drug fighters.

Two years of work by Carver Heights Against Drugs in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, Parker says, helped eliminate the brisk drug business in the
area of Ninth Street and Benner Avenue. Every day, he says, they were on
the street marching.

"It's putting a damper on their business, especially with law enforcement
there with them," says Parker, a police officer for 16 years who'll take a
spin through a drug-infested part of town if he can't sleep.

Smoothing edges

Charlie Taylor likes to pass time sitting on his porch. Out there,
sometimes in the early morning hours when he can't sleep, he seems as
firmly rooted as the tall and upright magnolia in his front yard. Someone,
he says, once commented that he must not want company out there since there
weren't many extra places to sit. He doesn't dispute that.

The porch was where Taylor was one clear Sunday afternoon in October 1998
when, instead of taking his family on a country drive, he ended up in
handcuffs.

Taylor says a group of young men congregated near his house, openly passing
drugs. He told them to stop. They called him names. The verbal altercation
escalated for several hours, he says.

About 5:30 p.m., Taylor flagged down a cruiser patrolling the neighborhood
and reported that the group of young men had called him names and
threatened to kill him. A couple of witnesses said it was Taylor who issued
the threats.

Police arrested Taylor, according to the incident report, for allegedly
pointing a shotgun at a 26-year-old man who Taylor says was among the group
bothering him. A judge dismissed the case and ordered Taylor to keep away
from the men. Taylor answers obliquely when asked about the incident. "That
was a walking stick," he says, a hint of good-natured mischief in his
voice. "I told the judge it was a walking stick."

Taylor's temper made for a rough start when he first got involved with
Columbus Against Drugs about two years ago.

"You can't put fire on fire and make the fire go out," says David Lockett,
67, a retired first sergeant Army Ranger and president of Columbus Against
Drugs and Carver Heights Against Drugs, the city's first group.

"He wanted action right then and there, but it takes time," Lockett says.
Initially the two men clashed, but now -- following Columbus Against Drugs
protocol -- Taylor calls "Sarge" up to a few times a week to report any
major problems in East Highland.

Though that fire still burns, Lockett says, Taylor has calmed and become
one of his most committed leaders. Other members respect him for it. Taylor
admits he's less likely to take matters into his own hands. He's more
"humble" and not as uncomfortable around the police and city officials.

That's not to say the self-described loner was unhappy with the way things
were before he started organized drug fighting, when he didn't know most of
his neighbors.

"I'm comfortable right here on this porch all day," he says on a hot
afternoon, a tall glass of ice water at his side. "That would've been me."