IN U.S. District Court sits John Edward "Liddie" Jones, looking nothing like his previous self. Once, he was a heroin trafficker who boasted to the wrong people of making hundreds of thousands of dollars a week. He had luxury cars and multiple homes. He should have quit while he still had his money and his life, but, things being how they are, this has always been an occupational long shot.

Now he sits in federal court, having lived most of the previous quarter-century behind bars on a 30-year heroin conviction, only to find himself facing brand-new drug allegations when finally out on parole.

Once, he was lean and muscular; now he looks thick and bloated, an old man who should sit in a rocker at day's end. Instead of expensive suits, yesterday he wore a sweat shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Instead of the calculating street operator of yesteryear, he lost his composure yesterday.

Handed legal papers at his defense table minutes before trial started, he threw the papers to the floor, turned to an assistant U.S. attorney and angrily declared, "Fat ass," so that a U.S. marshal had to reproach him. After he attempted to guide his attorney, Gary A. Ticknor, on the finer points of law, Ticknor turned to Jones and said, "On the list of a hundred things I have to worry about, that's 99th."

In his time behind bars, Liddie has become bilingual in street parlance and legalisms. He was scanning a law book when a man entered court and called "Daddy" to him. Liddie looked up for a moment, smiled at his son, but went right back to his reading.

The son is Edward Jones Jr. He is 40, a construction worker, married for 20 years and the father of two. For those who remembered Liddie Jones the last time he faced drug charges, in the mid-1970s before disappearing behind bars, it was stunning to measure such passage of time. Liddie, now 57, was younger then than his son is now.

"I grew up visiting my father behind bars," the younger Jones said. "He'd tell me, 'Don't follow in my footsteps.' I never have. I have my mother's genes. My mother works. The Old Testament says, 'You don't eat, you don't work.' You learn that in school.

"I was going to become a Pentecostal minister, but I fell from grace. I love my father, but when people say to me, 'Are you like him?' I say no. I know he's helped a lot of people who were hungry, or had their furniture put on the street. One time my lights were turned out, so he paid my electric bill. But, you know, he's been in trouble since he was 12 or 13."

It is useful to let the son talk about the father for some perspective. In the various so-called wars against drugs, Liddie Jones hit the beach real early. He goes back to a time of so-called nickel bags, of heroin sales at $5 a pop when dealers were just beginning to habituate one generation and then another.

Even his attorney told Jones' jury yesterday, "In the 1970s, as a young man, he was a hellion."

Ticknor was being purposefully brief in his account. In a time of legendary traffickers with colorful names like Big Head Brother and Big Lucille, who sometimes wore their notoriety like badges of celebrity, Liddie Jones ran perhaps the largest operation in the metro area.

But, Ticknor stressed yesterday, "That's the old Liddie. He served his time. He was paroled and had an auto parts store on Edmondson Avenue. He ran some rental properties. He was a patriarch figure for those around Edmondson Avenue."

This, said Ticknor, was so upsetting to law enforcement people, who had "expected him to die in prison and were upset when he didn't," that they manufactured new criminal charges against him. While awaiting trial, the government says, Liddie and others were smuggling heroin and marijuana into the Baltimore City Detention Center.

Investigators say they discovered this from wiretaps placed on the telephone of a woman named Joyce Cottom, 56, mother of five, grandmother of 13, great-grandmother of one, who "out of friendship" to Liddie agreed to help smuggle not heroin or marijuana but cigarettes into the jail.

Cigarettes are illegal at the detention center. This, defendants say, is why they were caught speaking in code on the wiretaps, referring to "little chairs" -- as if, perhaps, Liddie hoped one day to redecorate his cell.

"You'd have to believe he's arranging to have furniture brought to him" to find him innocent, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Smith told the jury in her opening statement.

She stood between Liddie and the jury. Liddie kept his back to all parties, running his hand over his face, closing his eyes, glancing down at legal papers, as though too preoccupied to listen to any of this business.

It was pretty sad. Once, in the course of hooking the first generation of this community's junkies, Liddie Jones seemed to stride through his mean world like a colossus. Now, having served so much time, having paid his criminal debt, having lost so much of his life and his money, he's back defending himself on these sordid charges.

"I told him to accept Jesus as his personal savior," Edward Jones Jr. was saying yesterday. "He wasn't ready at that time. I told him, 'Sooner is better.' "

Pub Date: 3/23/99