Corean Humphrey spread out a quilt last winter and for two months slept on the floor. She was afraid she'd get shot if she slept in her bed.
"People talk about having a war in Saudi Arabia," says Humphrey, who lives two blocks south of Bon Secours Hospital. "We were having a war right here on Pulaski and Hollins Street.
"They shot through my kitchen door. They shot through my neighbor's window . . . I didn't sleep in my bed on account of people shooting. By my windows being low they could have shot through the windows and hit me in bed."
Neighborhood residents were the prisoners of this war. Many were afraid to leave their homes after midday, when the drug dealers patrolled the streets.
Humphrey, 56, moved into this southwest Baltimore neighborhood near Monroe, Baltimore and Pratt streets 23 years ago, when it was safe to sit out on the steps at night.
But for one year -- from April 1990 to last month -- drug dealers controlled the neighborhood, threatening residents, shooting each other and selling drugs openly to anyone with cash.
Residents were afraid to call the police or even to meet as a group to challenge the dealers. Finally, surrounding community groups banded together to pressure politicians and the police to launch a coordinated assault to liberate the neighborhood.
The streets are safer now, but still, eight of the 10 residents interviewed for this story, including the presidents of two neighborhood associations, asked that their names not be used. They still live in fear of the dealers, who may have retreated, but not withdrawn.
"Look," says a 74-year-old woman who has lived in the neighborhood 51 years, "I'm here by myself. I'm not taking chances like that."
People in the Boyd-Booth community south of Bon Secours first noticed unfamiliar faces on the streets in April last year. Almost overnight, it seemed, the outsiders established a drug stronghold.
The main marketplace -- but far from the only one -- stretched two blocks on Boyd Street between Payson Street and Calverton Road. The intersection Boyd and Pulaski Street marked the midpoint in this war zone. These blocks of Boyd are narrow and menacing, more alley than street.
"THICK AS FLIES"
"You could walk down Pulaski to the market and look up the 2100 block of Boyd Street," says Humphrey, who was raised not to fear anything, even the use of her name in this story. "They were thick as flies. There'd be nothing but people, and they were buying drugs."
Judith R. Bennick, a social worker for the Urban Services Agency at Hollins and Payson streets, says 300 to 500 people at a time congregated on Boyd Street -- even in broad daylight. They spilled out onto other streets in the neighborhood as well.
Bennick recalls waiting in traffic at Frederick and Fulton avenues. Suddenly she realized she was in a drive-in drug line, as she calls it.
A man leaned into the car in front of hers, had a brief conversation with the occupants, and then charged back to Bennick's car. With money in one hand and vials of drugs in the other, he glared in at Bennick and shouted: "Get the f--- out of the way!"
She backed up, drove around the car and went about her business. Presumably, the dealer went about his, too.
The police say some of the dealers were New Yorkers searching for new markets in Baltimore. Some were area dealers who police had chased from other neighborhoods. And some were local dealers who lived on the streets they terrorized. Mainly they sold crack cocaine.
Residents of Boyd-Booth heard gunshots at night, and found blood on their sidewalks in the morning. Many retreated into their homes, afraid to report the violence to the police, afraid drug dealers would retaliate by burning them out, or worse.
The president of a local neighborhood group says that after she told police how to contact the owner of a vacant building taken over by drug dealers, a teen-age boy stuck his finger in her face and screamed: "I'm going to blow your f------ brains out!"
LIVING IN FEAR
Bennick, the Urban Services worker, and Betty Townsend, who runs the Southwest Senior Center, don't schedule events in the evening anymore. People won't come. They're too afraid.
"They come out in the morning, do their shopping, come here for what they need, and in the afternoon they go in and shut their door and don't come out anymore," Bennick says.
The 74-year-old woman who has lived in the neighborhood 51 years says: "When it gets dark I pull my shades down, but that's not going to stop a bullet, you know."
The woman, like other older people in the area, can't move. She owns her home (now a rarity in the neighborhood), and even if she could sell it (and who would buy it?), she can't afford a house in a nicer neighborhood.
"Most of the people who could leave, left," Bennick says. "The rest are stuck here.
"They realize their kids or grandkids are involved in this. They all know somebody who's died from this, in a shooting or a drug overdose.
"And if it's not drugs they're on, they're alcoholics. It's a decaying situation, really. The kids coming up, there's no hope for them that I can see. It's the most distressing thing you can imagine."
The siege became complete last fall when the Boyd-Booth Community Association called a meeting to devise a strategy for taking back their streets. When they settled into their seats in the basement of the public library at Payson and Hollins streets, they discovered they weren't alone.
Drug dealers straight off the street were there. Women who held drugs for dealers in their homes were there. Mothers whose children dealt drugs were there.
Leaders of the association realized tragically that they were powerless.
POLICE DEFEND EFFORTS
Some people in the community say the police were willing to sacrifice this poor, mostly black neighborhood to the drug dealers as long as they confined their lawless empire to a few blocks.
Police Lt. Donald Haupt, who works in the neighborhood services division of the Southwest District, insists that police did not purposely neglect the area. He says they made drug arrests there throughout the summer and fall, just as they did in other areas of southwest Baltimore where drug dealing was rampant.
"You can't be everywhere," Haupt says. "You have to use your resources where the problem becomes acute."
After sensing the helplessness of the Boyd-Booth Community Association, other groups began meeting in the fall to consider how they could help.
Michael Keeney, president of the Carrollton Ridge Community Association, just south of Boyd-Booth, helped spearhead the effort.
"My heart went out to those people," he says. "They weren't living up there. They were surviving. And they weren't even doing that, really."
Neighborhood leaders began meeting with the Southwest District's community relations officer, Sgt. Gregory Eads. They soon forged a coalition of about a dozen neighborhood groups.
The police began mounting large raids. Politicians began taking notice. Mary Pat Clarke, president of the City Council, visited the area.
"Boyd-Booth," she says, "that was the worst drug-dealing center I have ever seen in the city of Baltimore -- bar none."
MAYOR TAKES A LOOK
Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke rode with police officers through the neighborhood one Friday night.
"It was like a nighttime community festival, except there were no rides, no booths, and the only thing being sold was drugs," Schmoke says.
The umbrella group of neighborhood associations in southwest and West Baltimore, COIL (Communities Organized To Improve Life), became involved when tenants of its rehabilitated houses in the 1900 block of Booth Street threatened to move out.
Ward Smith, the head of COIL, says an elderly woman and a young mother with a child pleaded to leave because they were fed up with taking their laundry off the line and finding bullet holes in it.
COIL had to evict a tenant in the same block, a young woman dealing crack. Smith met the woman at the house late one afternoon as she waited for a city truck to move her belongings, which had been carted out onto the sidewalk.
Smith left briefly to check on another COIL property. He says that by the time he returned, a drug dealer had commandeered the woman's refrigerator as a storage place for drugs.
He says he found this out because he was leaning on the refrigerator and a young man came up and politely said, "Excuse me." Smith moved, and the man opened the refrigerator, took out vials of drugs and walked down the street and sold them.
Smith says drugs were dealt from the refrigerator for about 45 minutes, even though it was daylight, and even though Smith and a crew of city workers repairing a broken water main watched in amazement.
The culmination of the community's effort to save Boyd-Booth came March 12, when Schmoke attended a meeting at Bon Secours Hospital with representatives of neighborhood groups, the police department and area businesses.
Out of that meeting came the formation of two task forces: One to attack the drug problem using officers from the southern and southwestern districts and agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, and another made up of city officials assigned to deal with community problems such as vacant housing.
The second task force held its first meeting just last week. The police task force made tremendous success quickly, residents say.
Haupt, the Southwest District lieutenant and a member of the task force, says officers have made more than 125 drug arrests in the area since April 2. In one three-day period, they arrested 51 people, he says.
A sustained, highly visible police presence is necessary, Haupt says, because the dealers often make bail and return to the streets within a day or two.
"We're doing the best we can," he says. "We're arresting them. We're harassing them. We're moving them."
What is happening, says Sgt. J.C. Smith of the Southwest District, is that the dealers have retreated, but they're regrouping. And they will, Smith says, re-emerge in another neighborhood.
But they have not deserted Boyd-Booth completely. The neighborhood is safer, residents say, but still they are scared -- scared that one day soon the police patrols and the task forces and the attention from City Hall will shift to other areas. And they will be forgotten again.
On Saturday, May 4, Schmoke toured the neighborhood. It was a fine morning, warm and breezy, and the mayor wanted to look at vacant houses and piles of trash.
About a half dozen police cars parked on corners before he arrived. Police officers in snappy uniforms stood on the sidewalks.
Schmoke's car drove up, and he got out, and he walked up and down the narrow, dismal streets, greeting residents on front steps, as his people made notes of rundown, empty rowhouses and littered, smelly alleyways.
This lasted an hour or so, and then Schmoke left, and his people left, and the police cars left. Down at Hollins and Calverton, on the corner where residents say you could buy about any drug you want, a tall, thin man in jeans, an Army jacket and a hooded sweatshirt stretched and yawned.
The mayor was gone, and Boyd-Booth was waking up.