LIMA FEARS RETURN TO DRUG GANG ERA OF '90S

LIMA, Ohio - Sheila Banks sat alone on a couch in Lima Memorial Hospital's
intensive care unit. Her eyes were misty. She held a Kleenex in her hand.

Throughout the room, relatives were positioned on other couches and
recliners. Some sobbed, others had glazed looks on their faces; all spoke
in hushed tones about the bloody rampage Thursday night when two gunmen
shot eight people, killing two, inside a family apartment.

The killings horrified a community that will be losing six police officers
because of budget cuts and caused residents to ask whether the cuts could
lead the city back into a cycle of violence similar to one that it endured
a decade ago when gangs ruled the streets.

"To me, it appears to be a downward spiral. It's encouraging the crime rate
to come back," Allen County Sheriff Dan Beck said a week before the
shootings when asked about city plans to cut the officers beginning in March.

Thursday, Ms. Banks sat with her brother, Layshane Liles, who was
recovering after surgery from a bullet through a lung. He told her how
their cousins, Jeronique Cunningham and Cleveland Jackson, had come into
his apartment on East Eureka Street and turned guns on their family because
the men believed there was money from a recent legal settlement in the
apartment .

Lying at the bottom of the steps after being shot, Mr. Liles told Jackson
to take whatever money he wanted and get out, begging him not to hurt his
niece, Jayla Grant, 3.

But he didn't listen.

Minutes later, Jackson joined Cunningham, who was released from prison Dec.
3 after serving 10 years for felonious assault, in the kitchen, where they
shot every person in the apartment, police said.

By the time they left, Jayla and Leneshia Williams, 17, were dead and
Armetta Robinson and Mr. Liles' fiancee, Tomeaka Grant, were left clinging
to life.

Yesterday, Ms. Robinson, 26, and Ms. Grant, 24, were in critical condition
at St. Rita's Medical Center. James Grant, 27, Mr. Liles, 28, and Coron
Liles, 18, were in fair condition at Lima Memorial Hospital.

Police arrested the suspects near Dayton yesterday.

Less than five hours before the tragedy, the Olympic torch relay had passed
100 feet from the apartment as it made its way down Pine Street. It was a
shining day for Lima that ended darkly.

The killings were the second and third murders in the past week in the
gritty, blue-collar city of 40,000, known for an Army tank plant and BP
chemical factory. The previous Saturday, Wesley Smith was shot and killed
in his apartment. Last year, the city had seven homicides.

The deaths reverse gains that the city has made since the turbulent years a
decade ago when five gangs battled for supremacy of the streets. They occur
at a politically inopportune time for city leaders, who have been forced to
answer criticism about the proposed cuts.

"I don't see why they're doing that," Ms. Banks says softly. "There have
been so many deaths."

A City In Turmoil

By mid-October, Lima's number-crunchers knew that the city was in trouble.
A steady exodus of residents drained local income tax revenue from city
coffers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Lima lost 12 percent of its
population, or 5,500 residents, during the 1990s.

The flight of white residents was particularly prevalent, according to the
data. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of whites in the city fell from
33,949 to 27,776. At the same time, the number of blacks went from 10,949
to 10,614.

"A lot of people in the city relocated, and they took their incomes with
them," Sheriff Beck says. "If we could query each of them and ask them why
they left, the answer would be 'We didn't feel safe in the city."'

By late-October, city leaders began notifying employees that low revenues
would mean jobs would have to be cut.

Mayor David Berger told city council on Dec. 14 that the city general fund
is expected to have a shortfall of $925,657 in 2002. Thirty-six employees -
including nine firefighters and 14 members of the police department - will
be trimmed from the city's payroll beginning in March.

The police department has an authorized strength of 105 officers. The
reductions and one retirement will drop the force to 82 - a number that has
not been seen since the early 1990s, when the drug gangs ruled the nights.

Mr. Berger, who is the longest-serving mayor in the city's history,
bristles at suggestions that the city's safety forces are being needlessly
cut to dangerously low levels.

"We are also cutting roughly a dozen positions in the public works
department and leaving a number of positions vacated. Throughout the
organization, there will be a reduction in force. The budget is 85 percent
personnel out of $23-$24 million. To make up a shortfall, it has to affect
a number of personnel," he says. "We will continue to provide essential
services. The safety of the city remains paramount."

Following a news conference on the East Eureka Street killings, Chief Greg
Garlock sounds a more leery tone: "There's no doubt we don't need to lose
six officers at this time," he says. "This type of investigation is
resource-driven. We need to have the resources available."

The Kings Of The Street

East Side Posse, Detroit Boys, Joe Manley gang, the Folks, Bloods, and
Crips. For almost a decade, beginning in the late '80s, these were the
names that terrorized Lima.

Around 1987, crack cocaine appeared in the city with the arrival of the
Detroit Boys, so-named because most of them were from Detroit and many of
them were 18 years old or even younger. The Lima area was a prime market
for cocaine dealers. Major interstates bisect the city, and dealers found
they could buy a rock of cocaine in Detroit for around $3, then sell it in
Lima for up to $10.

The lucrative market led to an influx of gangs, which led to turf wars and
shootings.

"You'd stand out in front of the sheriff's department on a warm summer
night, and it would sound like firecrackers. The drug boys ran this town,"
Sheriff Beck says of the frequent shootings.

According to figures the sheriff compiled when he ran and was elected to
office in 1992, violent crime increased a whopping 255 percent between 1985
and 1991. The violence reached its peak in 1990 when 11 people were
murdered, an all-time high for the city. Each killing was in some way
linked to drugs.

"When we had five gangs fighting with each other, we'd have home invasions,
drive-by shootings. It was a zoo," Sheriff Beck says.

"People would go to the mall, and they'd refuse to drive through Lima."

Just before Sheriff Beck took office, the county and city moved against the
Detroit Boys. In October, 1991, 180 local, state, and federal agents swept
through 16 suspected drug houses that the Detroit Boys used, arresting 25
people.

Still, the gangs had such little respect for authorities that on the
weekends, crowds would swell to 100 to 150 people in a parking lot across
from the sheriff's department in the downtown area.

"They'd sit on top of their cars smoking dope," the sheriff says. His
office eventually cracked down on the parties, sending officers through the
lot to prevent the drug use and public drinking.

In the Steiner-McBride section of town, groups of people would block off
the street to play craps. "It was like Mardi Gras - every night," the
sheriff says.

By 1993, the sheriff's office and city police department began identifying
problem areas and began challenging the rule of the gangs.

"The presence of gangs is almost now nonexistent," Maj. Larry Winegardner,
the commander of the Lima police department's investigative services
division, says. "We do still have drug problems, but a lot of cities have
drug problems."

Sheriff Beck disagrees with his colleague that the gang activity has
diminished greatly.

"We still have the gangs, but we don't have as much violence because we
took out all the competing gangs," he says.

The gang and drug problem returned to torment the city in March, 2000, when
10 gang members, led by Samuel Williams, fire-bombed a house on Leland
Avenue, killing a mother and four of her children, because they believed a
resident had stolen money from them.

The shootings on East Eureka Street are not believed to be gang-related,
but Ms. Banks says her brother told her that Cunningham and Jackson were
strung out on drugs.

However, the streets are safer than they once were, and the sheriff and
Major Winegardner point to one factor - an aggressive community policing
program by the police department. In this program, officers are assigned to
problem neighborhoods. They walk the streets and interact with the residents.

One of the best examples of how the program has been able to lower crime in
a neighborhood took place during the program's infancy in 1995 when
officers were assigned to the Riverside North neighborhood. Prior to that,
19 percent of the city's crime took place there. Twelve months later, crime
in the neighborhood had dropped to 1 percent of Lima's total.

The community policing program now has six officers assigned to five
neighborhoods. It has been nationally recognized for its impact it on
crime-ridden areas.

Because of the budget cuts, the program is in danger, although the chief
says no decisions have been made about whether officers will be pulled from
the neighborhoods.

An Uncertain Future

A tightly wrapped ponytail flaps over the left shoulder of Wes Wheeler as
he greets a regular in Cappi's Pizzeria on Elm Street.

"What's up?" the gray-haired, gray-bearded entrepreneur asks.

The two men clasp hands. "Not much, man. Not much," the customer replies.

He has a scrapbook to show what the place looked like before he bought it -
rotting boards, peeling paint. He has been here for almost 20 years.

"One guy got shot right out here, and someone got shot right across the
street, and someone got shot out on the corner," he says.

He's not going to talk too much to a visitor about all that he has seen.
The neighborhood has been good to him, and he is not about to anger the
wrong people, but he admits to getting nervous about the city's problems.

"Yeah, I am," he says. "You look at the paper and say, 'Oh my God, they're
cutting police, fire.' That's our well-being."

Critics of the cutbacks can point to the recent murders as evidence that it
is a dangerous time to trim officers.

Chief Garlock says there is no reason for the community to be alarmed about
the three recent murders.

"This is an aberration. There is no relation to each other, but it is a
message that we must never abandon that partnership with the community. We
need to come together to deal with the violence."