Life/Death in the Projects

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April 21, 2004
When the high-rises came down, in a 20-second implosion eight summers
ago, it seemed possible that the demolition of Lexington Terrace also
could erase the cycle of brazen drug dealing, gunplay and early death
long attached to the troubled housing project.
For Michael L. Taylor and Keon D. Moses, though, the deadly bonds of
Lexington Terrace held fast.
Born a year and a month apart, the two were raised in the same high-rise
building and came of age as the West Baltimore project approached nearly
unlivable conditions and horrifying levels of violence.
Keon Moses' grandmother warned him as early as kindergarten to duck
under a parked car if he heard gunshots on the streets.
Over time Taylor, now 20, and Moses, 21, became such close friends that
Moses told Taylor in a letter from jail: "You the only real home boy I
got. ... You like my brother for real."
But as the boys became teens, their relationship increasingly hinged on
violence that set them apart even in a city made famous by homicide.
Authorities allege that Taylor and Moses, as teens, committed or were
connected to as many as a dozen murders.
The two are on trial now, in the first federal death-penalty trial in
U.S. District Court in Baltimore since 1998, for their roles in a
neighborhood crack cocaine operation that authorities portray as as much
a killing club as a drug ring, one named with a nod to its members'
past.
The group became known as the Lexington Terrace Boys. In their tattoos
and graffiti tags, the members left their mark as surely as the housing
project left its stamp on them:
"LT" became the group's signature; "Terrace Life" its incongruous
slogan.
Legacy of death
The death toll that authorities attribute to the Lexington Terrace Boys
is long, laid out in trial testimony over the past three months and in
records filed by U.S. prosecutors.
Two victims executed in a rowhouse basement. A witness in that crime
shot to death months later as he crossed the street. Another victim, a
product himself of Lexington Terrace, vanished the day after Easter two
years ago, after warning his mother that if anything happened to him,
his friends from the neighborhood probably did it.
Earlier this month, a U.S. District Court jury convicted Taylor and
Moses of drug conspiracy and weapons violations that led to half a dozen
deaths. Also convicted was Aaron D. Foster, 24, who grew up in the
projects a few years ahead of his co-defendants.
A judge will sentence Foster, who faces life in prison without parole.
The jury will decide whether Taylor and Moses should be sentenced to
death.
Prosecutors linked the Lexington Terrace Boys to six homicides during
the initial phase of the trial. During the penalty phase, in which
testimony could conclude this week, they have presented evidence of
three additional killings - including a second double homicide two days
before Christmas in 2001.
In court records, prosecutors also connect the group to three slayings
not presented at trial.
The deadly pattern of the Lexington Terrace Boys, which counted about 30
members at various points, echoed the violence at Lexington Terrace and
the nearby Edgar Allan Poe Homes in the 1980s, when Taylor and Moses
were growing up in the buildings.
Baltimore drug dealers as notorious as Nathan "Bodie" Barksdale and
Warren "Black" Boardley each had a turn presiding over the west-side
projects in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, a group known as the Jamaican
Black Mafia ran a well-armed drug ring in part from the urine-stained
stairwells of the Terrace high-rises.
It was a time when life in Lexington Terrace often was paired with early
death. Two 17-year-olds were found shot to death in November 1990. In
April 1992, a 12-year-old girl was accidentally shot in the head by a
teen-age visitor. Eight months later, a 7-year-old girl was raped and
suffocated.
"You liable to see anything," said Aaron Butler, 23, one of the
government's chief cooperators in the Lexington Terrace case, who gave
his own testimony about growing up there. "Go outside, and you might see
somebody handcuffed to the monkeybars, bleeding. ... But that wasn't
nothing compared to some of what you saw."
Well after the doomed high-rises were reduced to rubble and dust one
bright Saturday morning in July 1996, Lexington Terrace's troubles still
followed many of its youngest residents - kids like Michael Taylor and
Keon Moses.
Opportunity missed
Just before his 10th birthday, Taylor appeared to be headed for a better
life.
Evicted along with his family from an apartment in one of the Lexington
Terrace high-rises, Taylor was sent to live in Northwest Baltimore with
an aunt, Janice Taylor, who had doted on him since he was a baby -
buying him sale clothes at The Gap and paying for his haircuts.
For a time, Taylor balanced between the world he knew at Lexington
Terrace and his new life with his aunt, who said she tried to keep her
nephew on a straight path. At 13, Taylor wanted to become an architect
and imagined someday making enough money to buy a house and a car,
social work records show.
But already, Taylor had begun making a life of crime on the street. As
young as age 11, he worked as a lookout for drug dealers when he
returned each day to Lexington Terrace to hang out with his old friends.
By 12, he could earn $400 in a few nights' work selling drugs.
By age 14, Taylor had been charged with breaking into cars and with
assault. State juvenile justice workers decided the answer for Taylor
was boot camp.
In October 1998, just before his 15th birthday, Taylor arrived at Big
Savage Mountain in Western Maryland, committed to one of the nation's
most violent juvenile reform programs.
The Sun followed Taylor's squad that winter; its articles documented
extensive abuses that resulted in such camps being shut down across the
state.
In interviews, the young cadets described the street life that had
brought them there.
"My whole day was spent selling drugs because the money had me stuck at
first," Taylor told the newspaper then. "I couldn't stop if I would have
tried ... because that was the most money I ever seen at one time, and
it seemed like the girls were coming like water."
Taylor graduated from the camp in March 1999, pledging not to hurt
anyone again. A month after his release, Taylor, then 15, was charged
with attempted murder.
A bike and a gun
Ronald "Wolf" Watson had just finished a lucky afternoon playing cards
in a park in the 900 block of W. Fayette St. on April 13, 1999. As he
celebrated his winnings, of $700 or $800, a boy on a black dirt bike
rode up and demanded money.
Authorities say it was Taylor, fresh from boot camp. The robber made his
point clear.
"You got to give it up - the hard way, or the easy way," the young
robber told Watson, according to a statement Watson gave police a few
days later.
The robber pulled a gun from his waistband. The two struggled, and then
the shots came.
An injured Watson threw his winnings to the ground. The robber picked up
the money, then rode away on his bike.
At the Maryland Shock Trauma Center, Watson told city detectives that he
would recognize the boy who had shot him, though he did not know his
name.
But Watson never had a chance to do so in a courtroom. About four months
after the robbery, on Nov. 26, 1999, he was shot to death by two gunmen
dressed in black and wearing bandanas across their faces.
Watson's death was not among the homicides detailed at trial, but it is
one of the first killings that authorities in court records attribute to
the Lexington Terrace Boys.
Before his death, authorities say, Watson was approached by Taylor's old
friend Keon Moses, who warned him to stay quiet.
Watson refused.
Introduction to violence
Keon Moses learned early about violent ends and troubled fates.
He was 4 years old when his mother's boyfriend, who had raised Moses
since he was a baby, was shot to death by drug dealers in the lobby of
one of the Lexington Terrace buildings. Keon was outside playing when
the shots rang out and followed the crowd to find the man he thought was
his father dead on the floor.
Moses' biological father had a federal life sentence for drug crimes by
the time Moses was 10. His mother, a drug addict, died from AIDS in
2002. Moses by then was in jail.
As a child, Moses attended school infrequently and, instead, became a
fixture on the project's worn basketball courts. Like Taylor, Moses
found trouble young and was sent to the state's boot camps, graduating
in January 1999. Like Taylor, Moses soon returned to crime.
On May 27, 1999, Moses shot and wounded Kevin "Mandingo" Parker after
arguing over drugs and money. Less than a month later, authorities say
Moses and another man from the gang killed Kevin "Rollo" James.
U.S. prosecutors tied Moses to James' killing with evidence that Moses
was carrying a .380-caliber gun that day that matched one of James'
wounds and that a fingerprint belonging to Moses was found on the car in
which James was killed.
In the Parker shooting, Moses was charged that summer as an adult with
attempted murder. But a Baltimore City Circuit Court jury deadlocked,
allowing him to plead guilty in April 2000 to reckless endangerment.
About a year later, in August 2001, Moses was back on the street.
Year of crack, blood
That summer, Taylor was 17 and Moses was 18. Both were hustling crack in
their old neighborhood, and they began a killing rampage that by the
next spring had claimed at least nine lives, according to trial
testimony and court records filed by U.S. prosecutors.
The first victims died on Aug. 16, 2001, in a shootout along the 4900
block of Alson Drive that killed a 19-year-old youth and a 30-year-old
innocent bystander hit in the chest when a bullet came through his
window.
The centerpiece of the government's case was an execution Sept. 23 in
the basement of 303 N. Calhoun St., where authorities said Taylor and
Moses killed two men - Ronald Harris, 23, and Gregory Spain, 30 - and
wounded a third, Charles Brockington III.
Those killings led to a string of others, prosecutors said.
Derek Hamlin, who was 24 and who had made clear to Taylor that he was
angry about Spain's death, was killed along with his friend Kiari
Cromwell, 23, as they sat at a dining room table in Cromwell's mother's
apartment two days before Christmas.
Two months later, authorities say, Taylor shot to death a potential
witness to the September killings, Robert "Snoop" McManus, as he walked
across West Mount Street on Feb. 22, 2002, in a late afternoon execution
so public that a minister sitting in his parked car witnessed the attack
in his rearview mirror.
Those deaths, in turn, resulted in two more.
In March 2002, prosecutors said, Taylor was one of three gunmen
responsible for the death of Vance Beasley, 32, who was shot between the
eyes in the bedroom of his Cockeysville apartment. The reason,
prosecutors said: One of the other gunmen thought Beasley had killed his
friends Cromwell and Hamlin, and Taylor went along to deflect suspicion
about his own guilt.
The last victim was 20-year-old Travis "Phat Harold" Burley, who had a
falling-out with Taylor after he refused to get rid of a .44-caliber
revolver that investigators said was used to kill Cromwell and Hamlin.
Burley was last seen with Taylor on April 1; his body has never been
found.
Throughout that stretch, Taylor remained free. Moses, jailed as the only
defendant in the killings of Spain and Harris, was acquitted after a
weeklong state murder trial.
Overtaken by the law
But by the spring of 2002, agents from the FBI, working with city and
county detectives, were closing in on the Lexington Terrace Boys.
In a search of Taylor's home that May, police found a letter that Moses
had written to Taylor while awaiting the double-murder trial in state
court. Moses voiced his concerns in the letter about potential
witnesses, especially McManus.
"His statements can hurt me, dog," Moses wrote. "I don't gotta say it,
you know what I mean."
In the end, Moses' own words would become evidence. By fall, the men
whose elementary school teacher Avis E. Sneed recalls being "always
together - you always knew they were friends" - had been indicted. They
would refuse to plead guilty, refuse to testify against each other, and
instead go to trial and find themselves convicted together.
The case against Moses and Taylor marks the first time that U.S.
prosecutors in Baltimore have asked a jury to recommend the death
penalty since 1998.
To avoid a death sentence for their clients, defense attorneys for
Taylor and Moses in the Lexington Terrace case have put on trial the
housing project itself.
Jurors who will decide the men's fate have heard about the broken
elevators, defeated residents and a cycle of violence that in large part
simply moved to the low-rise apartments in the adjoining Poe Homes and
to nearby rowhouses and empty buildings when the high-rises were
demolished.
Today, where the Lexington Terrace apartments once loomed, there are
blocks of tidy new rowhouses with white porches, part of a
multibillion-dollar federal program to overhaul the nation's
long-troubled public housing system.
"It's no comparison - it's no comparison at all," said Edward Robinson,
a pastor in the adjoining Poppleton neighborhood who runs a shelter for
families and after-school programs for children. "The density of people
is less, and it's very well-kempt."
Some residents of Lexington Terrace moved to those new homes. Others
scattered to the dilapidated houses and apartments in the surrounding
neighborhood. Still others moved farther away, to try to leave behind
the hard life of the projects.
Moses' family settled just west of where the high-rises had been.
Taylor, sent to live with his aunt at age 10, continued returning to the
neighborhood and his old friends. For both men, there would not be an
escape from Lexington Terrace.
It was along the streets and alleys of the neighborhood once shadowed by
the high-rises where authorities said they planned their crimes and
sealed their fates, something Taylor himself seemed to recognize in
jailhouse conversations at the center of the government case against
him.
"No matter how you try and do [expletive]," Taylor can be heard telling
a one-time associate, "I just say: What's in the dark, always comes to
the light."