Source: Washington Post (DC) Contact: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Copyright: 1998 The Washington Post Company Pubdate: 30 Nov 1998 Author: Leon Dash and Susan Sheehan JUSTICE SYSTEM CATCHES UP WITH BROTHERS IN CRIME Drug Deal Becomes a Fatal Fall; From Street Dealing to Courtroom Deals Second of two articles Eighteen-year-old Tyrone Wallace woke up at noon on Nov. 22, 1994, at a girlfriend's apartment in Southeast Washington. He ate a breakfast of Corn Pops with her two sons and set out across town in his 1976 blue Cadillac to deal crack on 21st Street NE, his place of business for five years. Tyrone had been regularly selling drugs since he was 12, and he unloaded his $240 supply of crack rocks in a few hours. Traffic was slow in the neighborhood known to police as "Little Vietnam" -- a half-mile square pocket of Northeast Washington ruled by warring street crews and armed drug dealers. With his business done and the winter day fading, Tyrone caught up with his kid brother, Russell, in one of their favorite haunts. "The evening was chilly," Tyrone later recalled. "Me and Russell were on the second [floor] landing of 1108 21st St. NE, where we usually went when it was cold, smoking weed." The landing had a large window overlooking the building entrance and the walkway from 21st Street. The apartment where they had lived with their mother for five years stood to the right, a stone's throw away. Carolyn Wallace, the boys' mother, had moved into the neighborhood in 1989, renting a one-bedroom apartment at 1104 21st St. NE in Carver Terrace, a low-slung, red brick complex that climbs a hill near Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Originally built by a private developer in the 1940s to house the city's growing population of lower-income black families, Carver Terrace had fallen on hard times. The shabby warren now was in one of the city's most violent neighborhoods. Russell often gave their address as "21st and Vietnam." Both boys were fixtures in the local drug scene. Even after Carolyn Wallace and her companion, Patricia Harris, had moved around the corner to an apartment on Maryland Avenue, the brothers returned daily to their spot on 21st Street to hang out with friends and peddle drugs. Tyrone specialized in crack while Russell, then 17, mostly sold "loveboat" or liquid PCP, which he dispensed in vanilla extract bottles. At first, the Wallaces had only flirted with violence. The brothers carried pistols because guns symbolized manhood and power in the street culture of Little Vietnam; for drug dealers, they also were tools of deterrence and self-protection. Yet Tyrone disliked the neighborhood's frequent killings. He considered murder bad for business. Russell, on the other hand, had become part of the mayhem. He used his gun to hold up drug dealers and participated in a long string of gang shootouts. In the previous 18 months, he had also killed two people -- Anthony "Ant" Davis and Johnathan "John John" Ray. So far, Russell had eluded arrest. Around 9 p.m., as the brothers waited in their second-floor hideaway, an occasional customer of Tyrone's named Ronald Camp pulled up in a car with a woman and two other men. The driver double-parked. Camp, 39, got out of the car and sauntered up the walkway, evidently looking for the drug dealers who frequently loitered around 1108. Tyrone watched him approach before walking down to meet Camp on the first floor. Camp asked if he had "something for $100." His own supply was depleted, so Tyrone went back upstairs and asked Russell if he had any crack. Russell was down to a pair of $10 rocks. As Camp began to climb the stairs, a thought occurred to Tyrone. As he later recounted: "This dude has more money than what we got. My little dumb mind said, 'I'm a-gonna take it.' " Tyrone didn't have his gun and he asked Russell for his .357 magnum. Russell hesitated. He was the robber in the family, not Tyrone, but when Tyrone insisted, Russell handed over the weapon. Camp reached the landing and Tyrone pointed the pistol at his chest. "Give me the money!" he demanded. "Naw, man. Naw," Camp stuttered. "This ain't my money. This ain't my money." Through the window, Tyrone spotted an acquaintance approaching 1108. He yelled down, warning the man to stay outside. The moment of distraction gave Camp, who was slightly built and barely five feet tall, a chance to grab the weapon. "Let go of the gun!" Tyrone shouted. Camp, in Tyrone's recollection of the night, shouted back, "No!" "So my brother begins punching Camp in the face," Tyrone recalled. "Hits him in the face. Boom. Boom. He ain't even feel it. Boom. Boom. I guess [Camp] was already smoking or was drunk. You could smell liquor on his breath." Russell kept socking Camp while Tyrone kicked at his shins and tried to wrestle the weapon away. The pistol abruptly discharged and a bullet passed between Russell's legs, ricocheting off a concrete step. Tyrone weakened, his grip slipping. "Don't let that gun go!" Russell yelled. "He'll kill both of us." The three pitched down eight steps, tumbling onto the ground floor. As Russell tried to land a knock-out punch, Tyrone and Camp struggled to their feet, each clutching the .357. "Next thing I know," Tyrone recalled, "boom! The gun went off." The bullet hit Camp's chest, knocking him down five more steps and through the lobby. He fell across the doorway. Tyrone, who had been frightened, was now enraged. He fired three more rounds into Camp's head and neck. This dead man would never identify him, as he later said. Russell flattened out on the walkway outside to make any witnesses believe "we were getting shot at." Tyrone scurried back to the second floor landing to retrieve a black-and-white Nike and his red headband, which had come off in the scuffle. The brothers left the building and climbed into Tyrone's Cadillac. The car Camp had arrived in was gone. They drove across town to Southeast. Both Wallaces had girlfriends there, and Russell stashed the .357 in his girlfriend's apartment. Tyrone asked his girlfriend to help him change his appearance by weaving his short bush haircut into cornrows. He changed his clothes after noticing blood on his left shoe and trouser cuffs. As he had after Russell killed Anthony Davis in June 1993, Tyrone drove back to the crime scene. For reasons he couldn't explain, he felt irresistibly drawn to inspect the site. Russell rode with him. They parked along the National Arboretum, the northern border of Little Vietnam, and walked half a block to 1108. A single police car stood on the street. Camp's body was still sprawled across the threshold, uncovered, almost an hour after the shooting. Tyrone walked up to a policeman and asked what had happened. The brothers lingered a bit. Camp's body was still there when they left. The loud shots from the .357 had been audible in at least a dozen apartments in and around 1108. Yet neither Russell nor Tyrone saw any doors cracked or faces peering out of windows. The residents of Little Vietnam were exhausted by the violence-without-end, fearful of coming forward to bear witness in yet another killing, fearful of becoming victims themselves. After the Camp shooting, Russell and Tyrone continued to hang out on 21st Street, dealing loveboat and crack, just as they had after Russell committed his second murder two months earlier. Playing 'The Game' >From the day in January 1989 that Tyrone, then 12, entered what he called "the game," he viewed drug dealing as a lucrative trade despite the tensions of dodging police and "stick-up boys." He had never held a regular job, but thanks to crack he now had plenty of money for cars and clothes. As children, the Wallaces had been ridiculed for their unfashionable clothes, but drug profits allowed Tyrone to be a fastidious dresser. He owned a large wardrobe of Polo shirts, Nike sneakers, and Guess jeans that he routinely had dry-cleaned. He was tight with money and didn't believe in "spending it up" on marijuana and wine the way Russell did. Tyrone had been arrested for drug dealing in 1990, not long after the family moved to Little Vietnam. Put on probation, he entered the seventh grade at Browne Junior High School. He was an indifferent student, tempted by the streets, and he failed to fulfill his parole terms. In 1991, at 15, Tyrone was sent away to a juvenile group home in Pennsylvania. On his second weekend visit home, he refused to go back and was placed on escape status. He eluded police for a year. That same year, Tyrone stole his first gun, a .22 caliber six-shot revolver with a wooden handle. He pilfered it after watching a drug dealer named "Lil' Man" hide the pistol in the grass. Tyrone had lent the gun to Russell, convinced that his 14-year-old brother needed a weapon to defend himself. Russell promptly committed a series of robberies -- mostly against teenage drug dealers -- and began participating in occasional gang shootouts. By the time he turned 16 in 1992, Tyrone had been a crew "big boy" for more than two years, but the frequent shootings and random stickups in the neighborhood threatened his livelihood. Pipehead crack addicts began avoiding the 1100 block of 21st Street NE. As business cooled, Tyrone's life became even more aimless. Little Vietnam by this time was an urban combat zone. Police would respond to one shooting and hear shots around the corner from another. Gunfire seemed incessant -- "night and day," said one officer who patrolled the neighborhood. Of at least 49 killings that occurred in the half-mile square between January 1990 and December 1995, detectives estimate that more than one-third remain unsolved. One of those cases was the first killing Russell and Tyrone witnessed. They were party-hopping in August 1992, when gang members from Lincoln Heights - -- east of the Anacostia River -- appeared at a house at 19th and M streets and challenged the boys inside. The go-go music stopped abruptly; girls ran for cover in the back rooms. Like characters in a Western shootout, Russell and Tyrone jumped out a front window, pistols in hand. As the two gangs exchanged wild shots, the Wallaces retreated to the back of the house. There they saw someone with an Uzi submachine gun spraying bullets into the body of Russell's friend Damon Lassiter, who was 16. The brothers took cover until the shooter left. An important influence on both Wallace boys in those days was James "Reds" Rauch, an established drug dealer three years older than Tyrone, who had helped initiate them into the 21st Street crime culture. Rauch also loomed large in the life of their sister, Renee. When Renee was 15 and Rauch 16, she "cracked" on him -- made a play for him. "I was attracted to him by his cars," she later recalled. "He had a four-door Jaguar sedan and a Nissan 300 ZX. Girls in the neighborhood told me he had a lot of money. And he was handsome." When police tried to disrupt neighborhood drug trafficking, Renee said, she hid Rauch's gun and drugs in the Wallace apartment. Rauch often stood in front of her building, keeping an eye on the boys who sold drugs for him. In early 1991, Renee realized she was pregnant but didn't feel ready to have Rauch's child. Carolyn Wallace opposed abortion and refused to let Renee live with Rauch, much to his irritation. When their son was born, in November 1991, he stopped speaking to Renee. Carolyn baby-sat for her grandson so that Renee, then 17, could finish her senior year in high school. After graduation, Renee went on welfare for five years before eventually finding work as a beautician. Not since the early period of hiding Rauch's drugs and gun has she been involved in criminal activity. "I was blind, but I was in love." Renee said recently. Rauch's estrangement from Renee did not extend to her brothers. Russell's first gun -- other than the one Tyrone lent him -- came from Rauch, a .25-caliber revolver. The same night he got the revolver, Russell, who was 14 at the time, stood transfixed near the playground on 21st Street as Rauch led an attack against a Ford Bronco full of rivals from Lincoln Heights. No one was killed in the shootout, but the intruders crashed the Bronco and ran away on foot. Russell said later he was too excited to fire a shot. The body of Reds Rauch was found in a Prince George's County motel April 23, 1996. At 22, he had been shot dead in an apparent holdup for drugs and money. A witness identified two men as the killers but later recanted. No one has been prosecuted for the slaying. The Wallace brothers saw a photograph of Rauch in his coffin. His face was battered, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. They still speak of him with admiration. "Even if Reds was tortured," Russell said, "he wouldn't have told them where his money and his drugs was hidden." 'I Feel Guilty' At midday on April 12, 1995, two uniformed police officers slowly strolled north on 21st Street, where Russell Wallace, high on marijuana and wine and carrying a .380 automatic, was hanging out with several friends. As the officers approached, Russell slipped his pistol to a younger boy to take into a nearby apartment. The policemen ordered Russell and the others to "get on the gate" -- to stand against the fence with their legs spread. When one officer began patting him down, Russell considered fleeing until realizing -- through his stupor -- that the second officer was holding him by the back of his pants. The patrolmen then frisked the other boys and told them to move on. At that moment Tyrone, who had just finished smoking a marijuana "blunt," unsuspectingly walked out of the adjacent alley. The police ordered him against the fence and for the first time indicated that they had been looking specifically for the Wallaces. Homicide investigators wanted to talk to them, one of the officers said. Two squad cars soon arrived to take the brothers to police headquarters at 300 Indiana Ave. NW. Tyrone was suddenly overpowered by the guilt that had gnawed at him since Ronald Camp's murder. Part of him wanted to give up the hustling life and go to jail to "get my life together" as he later put it. Still high as the homicide detectives began questioning him, he prevaricated a bit before confessing. "I confessed because I'm guilty," he later explained. "I feel guilty." His interrogators, however, accused him of lying. "We know you didn't do it. We know Russell did it," a detective insisted, according to Tyrone's account. Tyrone assumed that someone who had recognized the brothers at the scene of Camp's murder had finally come forward. In giving a complete account of the killing, he denied Russell's complicity while admitting that he had used his brother's gun to shoot Camp. That same night, in a separate interrogation room, Russell was questioned about the killing of Johnathan Ray on Sept. 14, 1994. "There were too many eyes out there that night," Russell later said. He also had watched police raid an apartment at 1110 21st St. NE. and bring out six guns wrapped in plastic gloves. One policeman carried a .45 out in a plastic bag. Russell strongly suspected it was the gun he had used to shoot Ray. He had given the pistol to a boy in 1110 for safekeeping. "Before that it was probably just 'he say, she say' evidence against me," Russell added. "But after they got the gun, it was hard evidence." The boy's family moved away the day after the raid, and Russell assumed that the boy had given him up to the police. Why it had taken several months after the gun confiscation to arrest him is unclear, but by 1 a.m. on April 13, with a video camera running, Russell confessed to Ray's murder. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen O'Connor was assigned to prosecute Russell. She learned from witnesses to Ray's murder that Russell had killed before. By the time Russell went to court with a public defender to plead guilty in the Ray case, O'Connor told Judge Harry F. Greene Jr. she had evidence linking Russell to the murder of Anthony Davis on June 27, 1993. The judge postponed the plea while prosecution and defense lawyers talked. The government offered a deal. If Russell pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder while armed, he would not be charged for giving Tyrone the pistol used to kill Ronald Camp. Sensing that his options had run out, Russell was tempted. But the plea bargain came with a condition: He also would have to testify against Steven Curtis Moore, the youngest son of Carolyn Wallace's companion and someone Russell had known most of his life. Moore was charged with first-degree murder in the May 10, 1993, shooting of Michael Oliver, a crack user and hustler who had been shot seven times on 21st Street NE. Police had questioned Russell about the case shortly after finding Oliver's body and again in September 1994. In early 1995, shortly before his arrest, he had been summoned before a grand jury and asked by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kohl to recount under oath what he knew about Oliver's death. Russell lied, elaborately. Steve Moore was like a brother; he'd also long been a partner in crime, since the summer day in 1984 when Russell and Steve had been caught shoplifting together at the age of 7. Moore had nothing to do with the Oliver case, Russell assured the grand jury. A thug named Ronald "Booger" Wilkins had pulled the trigger, Russell added, knowing that Wilkins -- whom police considered responsible for six to 10 slayings -- had been killed in November 1993. Moore was indicted despite Russell's false testimony, but the trial had ended in a hung jury, with eight jurors voting to convict, three voting to acquit and one undecided. Now investigators and prosecutor Kohl saw a chance to nail Moore by producing a new eyewitness in Russell Wallace. >From jail, Russell telephoned his mother for advice on whether he should testify. Would his testimony damage the intimate relationship between Carolyn Wallace and Steve Moore's mother, Patricia Harris? He also talked by phone to Harris, who says her son had admitted killing Oliver to her. Both women urged Russell to tell the truth. He accepted the deal, pleading guilty to two homicides. In February 1997, Moore was tried for first-degree murder a second time. Russell took the stand, testifying that he had seen Moore put seven bullets into Oliver with a 9mm handgun after Oliver tried to steal a small portion of crack. Three other drug dealers testifying for the government told similar stories. In cross-examination, Moore's attorney sought to impeach Russell's account, forcing him to acknowledge that he had lied to the grand jury. The attorney also noted how Russell had benefited by swapping his testimony for a lighter sentence that would allow him to leave prison as a young man. The second trial again ended in a hung jury, with eight votes for conviction and four for acquittal. In April 1997, the U.S. attorney's office brought Moore to trial a third time. Russell Wallace testified again. Once again the jury was deadlocked. This time five voted for conviction and seven for acquittal. The Aftermath Today, the intense gunfire and drug dealing that shattered so many lives in Little Vietnam from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s has ebbed -- mainly, police say, because most of the perpetrators are dead or in prison. Feuds were left hanging while the dealers and killers who controlled 21st Street went off to serve their time. Tyrone Wallace is in federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., serving five-years-to-life for Camp's murder. He will be eligible for parole in 2000. Russell Wallace is serving two five-years-to-life sentences for the murders of Johnathan Ray and Anthony Davis in the same prison. Under the plea bargain, he must serve at least 10 years and will be eligible for parole in 2005. Russell calls his mother twice a month, less frequently than his older brother Ben, who calls home weekly from Youngstown, Ohio, where he is serving a three-to-12-year term for attempted child abuse and attempted sex with a minor. In June 1997, a prosecutor gave Russell Wallace the address of Anthony Davis's mother, Patricia Jones, and suggested that he write to her. The proposal disturbed Russell. "What can I say about killing her son?" he asked. He wrote that he was sorry for "putting so much pain in your life. Ms. Jones, I know [there] is nothing I can say or do to bring your son back or to be [forgiven] by you or your family. . . . I am glad to be locked up today for what I did to your family." Jones, who had found the body of her son in the gutter where he died in June 1993, said she finally reached a point where she could forgive Russell Wallace. "I had to for my own sanity. I got to the point where I was going to lose my mind," she said. "I didn't want to lose my mind for something I didn't do. I didn't kill my child. Russell did." In April 1997, when the third murder trial ended in a hung jury, Steve Moore was released after 31 months in jail. He was then 20 years old. When Russell called home from prison in subsequent months, Steve sometimes answered the phone, accepting his collect calls. Moore was friendly enough, Russell said. "Steve told me I should have pled not guilty, like he did," he added. "He hung tough and was released." In October 1997, in an attempted robbery, Moore was shot in the back in the 900 block of 21st Street. He spent a night in D.C. General Hospital and was released the next morning. "They left the bullet in," said his mother, Patricia Harris. "Said it would be too dangerous to take it out because it was near his spine." By 6 p.m. on the day of his release, Moore was back on 21st Street, walking with a cane. According to Superior Court documents, a tipster told police that Moore was armed. When an officer approached him -- near the spot where he'd been shot the day before -- Moore took off, hobbling with surprising agility. Before he was caught, he pulled a five-shot Brazilian-made Tarus 38-caliber revolver from his pocket and tossed it aside. Police recovered the pistol and charged Moore with assorted firearms violations. Moore, who declined to be interviewed for these articles, pleaded guilty in April and received a 20-month-to-five-year sentence. He will be eligible for parole next June. Harris had hoped her youngest son would get a longer term. She fears that when he is released he will seek revenge against whoever shot him. "That's why I hope he stays in jail," she added. "That's a terrible thing for a mother to say, but I don't want to see him take another life or die himself." Carolyn Wallace is 43 now, a stocky woman with a round, cherubic face. She says she never profited from her sons' illicit gains, never wanted any part of the gangster life. In September 1994, she got off welfare by taking a job as a school crossing guard. Three months ago, she began a job as an aide in a Mitchellville retirement home -- working five days a week, often 12 hours a day. She and Patricia Harris currently live in a modest public housing apartment in Southeast Washington. "I don't have the finest of clothes," she said, "but I'm not going to go out there to kill anybody or deal any drugs because I don't have these things." Carolyn Wallace said she is glad her sons are off "the streets that swept them up." She believes they are safer in prison, where she hopes they will learn a trade or pursue an education. She loves and misses them. Patricia Harris used to envision herself "living in a substantial neighborhood" and "sending her children off to college." Living in Little Vietnam was not part of the dream. After Steve Moore's first trial began in 1996, Harris suffered what she called a nervous breakdown and quit a job at Wendy's. She lives on medical disability checks and takes medication for depression. "I couldn't see how a child I raised could resort to such violence," she said. "The way they told me that man [Oliver] was shot. Shot seven times." Michael Oliver's mother, Maxine, 56, had moved to 1106 21st Place NE in 1975 -- before the neighborhood turned into Little Vietnam -- with her husband and two young sons, Alvin and Michael. Both boys graduated from Phelps Vocational High School, worked, married and had two children apiece before Michael drifted into the 21st Street drug culture. Four months before Michael was killed, Alvin committed suicide. Last January, after "31 years and a day" working for the federal government as an inspector of janitors who clean government buildings, Maxine Oliver retired. She mourns the death of her sons every day. Leon Dash, a Washington Post reporter for 32 years, recently became a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois. Susan Sheehan, a contract writer for The Post, has been a staff writer for the New Yorker for 37 years. Even as homicides in the United States began to plummet in the early 1990s, the teenage murder rate soared and today remains higher than it was a decade ago. "The juvenilization of violence," as criminologist James Alan Fox calls it, has been horrific in Washington, where the homicide rate involving victims ages 15 to 19 increased 700 percent from 1985 to 1995. This slaughter of the young by the young is especially devastating in the nation's inner-city African American communities. Although young black men ages 14 to 24 make up less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, they still constitute a sharply disproportionate share of murderers and murder victims. Ninety percent of the victims of young black male killers are other young black men. The transformation of brothers Tyrone and Russell Wallace from little boys into convicted murderers illuminates a lost generation and the harsh reality that nearly one-third of black American men in their twenties are in prison, on probation or on parole, according to the ACLU's Sentencing Project. Theirs is a tale told from a cellblock, where the two killers serve their time, mull the murders they committed, abetted or witnessed -- and await the parole eligibility that draws nearer every day. U.S. prisons and jails hold 1.7 million people -- one out of every 155 U.S. residents is behind bars. U.S. INCARCERATION RATE People incarcerated per 100,000 residents 1985 313 1995 600 1997 645 Since 1985, incarceration rates for young African American and Latino males (ages 20 to 29) have risen to the levels shown below. YOUNG MALES BEHIND BARS Percentage by race and ethnicity Black 30.2% Latino 12.3% White 6.7% Homicides committed by young African American males peaked in the early '90s but remain far above the rates for white males of the same age groups. Estimated homicides committed by young males per 100,000 U.S. residents 1996 Age group: 14 to 17 Black 133.5 White 17.2 Age group: 18 to 24 Black 268.0 White 30.9 Age group: 25 and older Black 49.9 White 6.6 MURDER IN 1997 * There were 18,209 homicides in the United States last year, 26 percent lower than in 1993. * 48 percent of victims were white, 49 percent black. * 53 percent of murder offenders were black, 45 percent white. NOTE: Data on victims and offenders are from partial, supplemental data. SOURCES: National Institute of Justice;U.S. Census Bureau; FBI Uniform Crime Reports; James Alan Fox; ACLU National Prison Project - --- Checked-by: Mike Gogulski