Pubdate: Wed, 11 Feb 2004
Source: Times-Picayune, The (LA)
Copyright: 2004 The Times-Picayune
Contact:  http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848
Author: Michael Perlstein

Series: Day Four - Article One

A BATTLE WITHOUT END

The 1987 Murder Of Drug Kingpin Sam 'Scully' Clay Sparked A Deadly Turf War 
That Still Plagues The Calliope

Even in a city numbed by violence, the surveillance tape was 
blood-curdling: three men, lying in wait at an open-air carwash on 
Louisiana Avenue, springing toward their targets with assault rifles, then 
calmly unleashing a hail of bullets at the unsuspecting victims.

Frozen in time, video images from the July 26 shooting document brutality 
of a type that regularly places New Orleans among the most violent cities 
in America. Amazingly, the two victims survived their wounds. Even more 
amazingly -- given the planning and precision of the attack -- the men 
weren't intended to be victims at all. The shooting was a case of mistaken 
identity.

"It was retaliation," Lt. Christy Williams of the 6th Police District said, 
"but they retaliated against the wrong people."

It was an easy case for detectives to put together. Less than 24 hours 
earlier, Le'Devin Pearson, 22, was the victim of a drive-by shooting in 
which six men in a truck opened fire with an arsenal that included an 
AK-47, a .45-caliber pistol and a 9 mm semiautomatic. One of the men who 
watched Pearson die, 21-year-old Elton Hooks, is awaiting trial on a charge 
of attempted murder in the carwash ambush. Pearson was like a brother to 
Hooks and, according to police, Hooks and two other suspects mistakenly 
thought they had cornered Pearson's killers.

But people in the Calliope, formally known as the B.W. Cooper public 
housing complex, didn't see the shootings as bookends in a 24-hour feud. 
Instead, they were only the latest twists in a years-long cycle of 
drug-fueled killings and retribution that has made the neighborhood one of 
the city's bloodiest.

"Elton went to the carwash because he just couldn't take it anymore. He 
flipped out," said Wilhemina "Mama" Cole, conceding that the crystal-clear 
videotape implicates her great-grandson.

In the previous 18 months, Hooks had lost his father, Alexis "Slam" 
Williams; his cousin, Raynell "Rico" Cole; and another friend, Pearson's 
younger brother, Le'Var Pearson -- all gunned down in the grass-and-dirt 
courtyards of Calliope. Before his death, Williams had been identified by 
police as the triggerman in a previous Calliope killing, although he was 
never charged.

"It all runs back and forth and ties together. It's a never-ending battle," 
said New Orleans Police Capt. Anthony Cannatella, commander of the 6th 
District, which includes the housing development.

Spark Of Death Spree

Certainly, some of the Calliope killings -- 88 in the past 10 years -- are 
isolated incidents, springing from petty arguments, a fight over a woman or 
a domestic dispute turned deadly. But in a city where police chalk up three 
out of every four murders to narcotics, the tit-for-tat in the Calliope is 
painfully easy to follow.

Many people say it started in 1987, when the first shot fired in the 
Calliope's drug wars claimed a man named Sam "Scully" Clay.

Some people remember Clay for his generosity. Others remember him for his 
flashy wardrobe and his way with women. Most people, though, remember him 
as the neighborhood's first drug kingpin of the crack cocaine era and, from 
the moment the blood began pooling under his head on a Calliope sidewalk, 
as its first high-profile casualty.

To people outside the neighborhood, it was just another killing. But within 
the complex, Clay's execution-style rubout was the beginning of a long 
trail of murder that has sent dozens of young men to early graves and 
dozens more to prison.

Longtime residents can trace the offshoots of Clay's killing to subsequent 
Calliope murders, and those murders to even more recent murders, including 
some of the six killings that took place in the complex in 2003. In the 
Le'Devin Pearson slaying, Darryl Clay, a nephew of Scully Clay, was one of 
three men booked with second-degree murder. The suspects were released in 
September when witnesses got cold feet.

"It's the same groups of people doing the same killing, over and over," 
Cole said.

Like genealogists studying a family tree, authorities have come to see how 
the Clay drug gang begat the Glenn Metz gang, which begat the Richard Pena 
gang, which begat the gang allegedly run by Derrick "Eyes" Washington. 
Authorities now await another generation of slayings after August's federal 
indictment of Washington and 10 co-defendants in a string of four murders 
and three shootings tied to cocaine trafficking.

One of the defendants in that case came under suspicion in a March 2 
Calliope murder before he could be arrested by the feds: Terrance Benjamin, 
25, is still considered by the New Orleans Police Department to be a top 
suspect in the assault rifle killing of 24-year-old Ray Miner.

With the Washington group off the street, police say they have had no 
trouble identifying the two rival groups that have stepped in to fill the 
vacuum. One of them, known as the 3 'n' G -- named for the intersection of 
Third and Galvez streets -- earned supremacy by wiping out their biggest 
rivals, the Porch Boyz, said Sgt. Terry Wilson, 6th District narcotics 
commander. But Wilson said 3 'n' G is now getting stiff competition from an 
upper-level West Bank dealer with extensive ties in the Calliope.

"Right now you have those two factions both trying to take over the 
business," Wilson said. "If you go there in the morning you can see the two 
groups lining up on opposite sides of the courtyard to make their sales" of 
crack and heroin.

Familiar Territory

When it comes to the Calliope drug market, few people have followed the 
bloodshed more closely than Charlie Smith. As an agent for the Bureau of 
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Smith has pieced it together through guns 
and drugs and informants and wiretaps and, in some cases, friends from his 
childhood in the development on South Johnson Street.

"If you follow these guys long enough, everything ties together: the 
shootings, the killings, the drug deals. It's like they're all caught in 
this bubble of poverty and hopelessness and they can't help stepping on top 
of each other," Smith said.

With his shaved head and the diamond stud in his ear, Smith glides easily 
through his old neighborhood, a place where he was nearly Justice in one 
fell swoop

Federal law enforcement agencies, like the ATF and FBI, have tried to 
supplement local police efforts by conducting lengthy investigations, 
sometimes spanning several years, to take out entire drug gangs in one big 
sweep. Their targets aren't simply drug organizations, but drug 
organizations that incorporate killing into their business plans. That was 
the approach that dismantled the Metz and Pena gangs in the mid-1990s.

Glenn Metz was known as a dime-bag weed dealer before he hooked up with 
Arthur and Elwood, fearless killers who paved the way for Metz to take over 
the Calliope drug market. At Metz's trial, prosecutors showed that at its 
peak, the gang bought cocaine directly from cartel-level connections in 
Houston.

Richard Pena was even bigger, law enforcement officials said. When 
convictions took Metz and his accomplices out of circulation, Pena filled 
the vacuum, using his Latin American roots to cultivate big-league drug 
suppliers in Houston, Miami and Mexico. Although he was an outsider, Pena 
recruited local distributors in Calliope and other public housing 
developments, in some cases helping them launder their profits through a 
series of rap music labels he incorporated. For protection, Pena placed 
veteran New Orleans police officer David Singleton on his payroll. The Pena 
gang was responsible for more than 20 killings, prosecutors said, including 
several in Calliope.

When the feds grabbed Pena, they also grabbed 15 accomplices, including 
Singleton. It's the same "clean sweep" strategy behind the recent federal 
drug case involving Derrick "Eyes" Washington.

In the Washington case, the indictment of 11 men came after a yearlong 
probe under ATF's Project Safe Neighborhoods program. Smith and local ATF 
chief Mark Chait say agents tried to forge a partnership with residents, 
recruiting more than three dozen informants, relocating key witnesses and 
visiting the neighborhood frequently enough to become fixtures.

"We made a lot of repeat visits, bringing food or ordering pizza, sometimes 
taking witnesses to restaurants outside the area," Smith said.

Even so, the reluctance of witnesses was daunting. In New Orleans, in fact, 
fearful witnesses are the most common reason murder cases go unprosecuted. 
To fight the problem, Smith said he tries to gain the confidence of 
witnesses by using a simple code of the streets: If you do something to one 
of mine, I'm going to do something to one of yours. It's called revenge. To 
turn the credo into a police tool, Smith said he tries to convince people 
that testifying against a killer is a legitimate form of payback.

"We worked with witnesses over a long period of time," Smith said. "You 
have to get them to understand that testifying can be revenge. You have to 
teach the community a new way of thinking. Unless you can get the people to 
buy into that, it's like putting Band-Aids on a gunshot wound."

That kind of police presence is certainly needed, Marrero and Taylor said, 
but arrests and convictions provide only a temporary fix.

"When law enforcement comes in with a big sweep and then backs off, they're 
really just plowing fertile ground. You don't pull weeds without planting 
something positive," Taylor said.

As Marrero put it: "We can't just tell these kids, 'Just say no to drugs.' 
We have to give them things to say yes to."

Hard Cycle To Clip

Earl Barconey Sr. knows how difficult it is for law enforcement to stop the 
bleeding.

Barconey is a Baptist minister and a longtime deputy with the Orleans 
Parish Civil Sheriff's Office. He has lived in Calliope most of his life. 
And he has buried two sons who were killed there: Randall Watts in 1997 and 
Earl Pierre Barconey in 1998.

"The street has a lot of say-so over your children. You do what you can for 
them, but you can't control them," Barconey said. "If you look into what's 
in their head, half of these kids don't care whether they live or die."

Watts, a charismatic figure known around the neighborhood as "Calliope 
Slim," was a Pena associate and, allegedly, a hired killer. At the time he 
was fatally shot in a Thalia Street courtyard, Watts allegedly was on his 
way to carry out a murder contract for the gang. His funeral included a 
raucous second-line in which his casket was hoisted in the air by a throng 
of pallbearers and paraded through the legendary Rose Tavern at Thalia and 
Dorgenois streets. A mural depicting Watts with angel wings now adorns an 
exterior wall of the bar, just steps from where he was murdered.

Watts' younger brother, Troy Watts, was as low-key as Calliope Slim was 
flamboyant. When the younger Watts, nicknamed "T-Dub," pleaded guilty to 
selling cocaine for Pena, hardly anybody noticed. When he served five years 
in federal prison, few people knew he was gone.

Troy Watts, 29, was freed earlier this year, and when he returned to 
Calliope, he found an altered landscape. The Pena gang had long been 
dismantled, two of his brothers had been killed, many of his old associates 
were in prison. He vowed to go straight and made plans to open a sweet shop 
with another brother.

Even so, his father pulled him aside for a lecture, a talk he had given all 
of his sons many times before.

"You have three options," Barconey told his son. "You can get swallowed up 
by the streets. You can get caught by the law. Or you can quit."

According to police, Watts didn't heed the warning.

On Oct. 1, he was booked with attempted second-degree murder after a 
shooting near his home. Police said Watts and an accomplice, Joshua Small, 
17, calmly walked up to a 30-year-old man sitting on a porch. Believing the 
man to be a police informant, Watts allegedly yelled, "I don't want to see 
your face around here," before firing at the man's feet, presumably as a 
warning. The man wasn't hit, but a bystander was shot in the arm by a stray 
bullet.

Watts surrendered the day after the shooting. Small remained at large for 
two months, but allegedly surfaced on Dec. 1 when the 30-year-old targeted 
two months earlier found himself again at the wrong end of a gun. This 
time, he was hit four times and severely wounded. Police arrested Small two 
days later and accused him of trying to finish the job he and Watts had 
started.