THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603170057
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LYNN WALTZ AND JON FRANK, STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: Long : 265 lines
A walk through River Edge Apartments is eerie these days. Most of the units are abandoned. Graffiti screams racial epithets to passers-by.
Boards cover windows and doorways. Garbage and broken glass are strewn across yards and porches. All but 40 of the original 190 residents are gone. Those who remain must leave within the next two weeks before the razing of River Edge begins.
It's as hard to imagine the 150 new homes planned to ring a new man-made lake as it is to imagine the neighborhood as it was during the heyday of the River Edge drug gang, from 1993 to 1995.
Then, crack addicts and customers streamed into the neighborhood all day long in search of the open-air drug market that drifted from the parking lots outside the Zippy Mart and Mini Mart along Cambridge Street to the shade of the large trees along Wallace Circle.
The men who ran the drug market were seldom known by their real names. The customers - numbering sometimes 50 a day - knew them by face or by their street names.
There was Robert Winfield, known as Tubbs. Lorenzo Winfield went as Geek. Taubari Latson was known as Tabar. Demetrius Williams answered to Meat. John Cobbs went by John. Andre Branch was Dre. Lemuel Britt was called Dee. All were in their 20s.
Five were convicted Friday in a federal trial for conspiracy to distribute drugs in the River Edge neighborhood. Two pleaded guilty before the trial began.
The convictions were the first major victories to result from a federal task force assigned to combat violent crime in Portsmouth.
Robert Winfield and Cobbs were also convicted on charges related to murder and attempted murder. Winfield was the gang's leader, Cobbs, his right-hand man and enforcer.
If customers - who sometimes came to the drug market as many as five times a day - didn't know the dealer's names, they knew their reputation. And as Robert Winfield's reputation for violence grew, so did his power.
Winfield controlled the entire neighborhood, deciding who sold crack and who didn't. Who would be beaten for not paying their crack bill. And who would live or die.
Norfolk's federal courthouse has never seen the likes of the Winfield gang drug trial, federal officials said. Spectators accustomed to the easygoing atmosphere in Portsmouth's state courts were loose-lipped and loud in the hallways.
Sometimes they went too far. Three were barred from the courthouse, and one - Robert Winfield's father - was arrested for allegedly threatening a witness.
For prosecution witnesses, fear permeated the trial. Several went into hiding rather than testify against a gang whose reputation for violence and murder was well-known in the neighborhood.
Four witnesses were eventually threatened with or cited for contempt until they testified or were released. Several witnesses flip-flopped on expected testimony.
Other key witnesses, however, came through. And numerous residents of River Edge from 1993 to 1995 testified about the neighborhood they called Twin Lakes, its name when it was built in 1942 as shipyard housing during World War II.
What emerged was a vivid picture of life before Winfield and his gang were arrested.
``It used to be like Vietnam around here,'' 57-year-old James Branch said in an interview in the neighborhood. ``There was always gunfire.''
Dealers - sometimes numbering a dozen - stood in groups all times of the day, rushing up to cars or bicycles or pedestrians who walked up to them.
``Want to score?'' they'd ask.
Sometimes one of them would get into a car or truck for a drive around the block to exchange money for a ``twenty block,'' ``fifty block,'' or dime piece of crack cocaine.
Sometimes, the dealers would cup their hand in front of the customer, letting them choose the ``rock'' that looked the best.
The dealers used local houses as ``crack houses'' to cut up their cocaine for sale and to store their guns. Sometimes they hid their guns in sheds guarded by dogs. Other times they slipped them into jagged holes cut into the crawl spaces of apartments.
They often got guns from customers desperate for a high, and sometimes they got their cars the same way, trading a few days' use of a car for a 15-minute high.
``These defendants had 25 to 50 customers a day,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Tayman told the jury during opening statements. ``Customers who were beaten, robbed and assaulted because they wouldn't do what the defendants wanted.''
All the defendants carried guns, Tayman said. As one supplier testified, guns were ``second nature'' to Robert Winfield. ``It's like American Express,'' he said. ``Don't leave home without it.''
The sound of gunshots at night was common. The defendants shot out street lights and fired into cars and apartments.
And sometimes, into people.
William ``Poor Boy'' Bales, 21, was a regular customer when he was killed during an argument over whether Robert Winfield gave him one rock of crack or two, Tayman told the jury.
Reginald ``Fat Daddy'' Cannon was killed by John Cobbs because he was a rival dealer who had taken a woman's bicycle for an unpaid drug debt.
Mark Martin was killed by Robert Winfield because Martin - who had traded the use of his car for crack - wanted his car back from Cobbs, who refused to return it.
Ron Curry was shot in the back when he turned to help his friend Martin, who had pitched forward on the ground, a bullet in the back of his head.
Darwin ``Doe'' Eady was shot four times in the back, once in the side and once in the head because he told police he saw Robert Winfield shoot Mark Martin.
But the victims of the cocaine trade in River Edge were not just those killed, shot, beaten and threatened. They were people who lost their cars, their homes, their marriages, their families and their self-respect. They were the ones hooked on crack cocaine:
Nicholas Pugh, 30, whose wife turned him in for writing bad checks and forging her name on checks. Pugh was buying about $50 worth a day, at least five times a week.
Walter DuPree, 45, who sold the use of his house for the dealers to cut up crack. They paid him well - two to three $20 rocks from each dealer every time they used the house. DuPree told the jury he smoked about 14 $20 rocks a day, ``sometimes more.''
James Wynn III, 36, born and raised in Portsmouth, a commercial fisherman who made a good living. Wynn was married. He had a truck and part ownership in a seafood business. He lost it all, he told the jury, for a $100-a-day habit.
``I spent more than $50,000 in a couple years,'' Wynn said. ``I sold and lost everything I owned.''
``I've been shot at many times (by these defendants). I've had them break out my windows with bottles. Had store signs thrown at me,'' Wynn testified.
Wynn stole guns his father had hidden from him for safekeeping and traded them for crack, he said. ``That was an easy trade, better than cash.''
Wynn told the jury he had purchased crack on ``at least 10,000 separate occasions.''
Mark Martin was 21 when he went to River Edge on Friday night, July 21. His mother, Shirley Powers, believed he had been free of his cocaine addiction for nearly a year.
But something lured him back.
Late that Friday night, Martin and his friend Ron Curry took Martin's cream-colored Mustang into River Edge. They traded the use of the car to John Cobbs for a $20 rock.
On Monday, July 24, 1995, Martin and Curry went back to River Edge, looking for Cobbs and the car he had never returned.
They saw Tubbs, Doe, Dre and Fat Boy standing under one of the large shade trees at the corner of Wallace Circle and Cambridge Street. They saw children playing up and down the street.
Curry did all the talking, witnesses later said, asking if anyone had seen John Cobbs or the car. Tubbs - Robert Winfield - walked past them to his burgundy and gray Cadillac and took a .38-caliber long-barreled revolver from the passenger side, tucking it into his pants.
As Curry and Martin turned to go, they walked past Winfield. Winfield turned, lifted the gun to shoulder height and fired, shooting Martin in the back of the head.
Martin pitched forward.
``I heard the first shot. I said. ``Haul ass, somebody shooting,' '' Curry testified, his voice breaking. ``Mark, he wasn't beside me. I took a couple steps. I thought he was running but he wasn't, The force of the bullet forced him to the ground. I didn't know he'd been killed.''
``I looked back and saw he was laying down. I went back to help him.''
As Curry knelt beside Martin, he looked quickly over his shoulder again, saw Winfield holding the gun, and saw a flash and smoke.
``It was a split second till I was hit,'' he said. ``It happened so quick. He shot me one time in the back as I was leaning over Mark to see if he was all right. One bullet pierced my lung. One is still lodged near my arm. The second bullet severed the main artery in my leg. The third went behind the kneecap.''
The artery was bleeding badly. Curry fell and began to pass out from blood loss.
Darwin Eady - Doe - sat stunned, he testified, looking at the two men lying in the street. Winfield wrapped the gun up in his shirt and dropped it in Eady's lap.
Eady dropped it over a fence just before he was arrested. Eady told the police everything he'd seen, and he paid for it, he told the jury.
That week, Robert Winfield called his cousin David Winfield and told him he knew who the snitch was. His orders: Have John Cobbs take care of it.
The following Sunday night, on July 30, 1995, John Cobbs tracked Eady down and asked him for a cigarette. Then Cobbs told him he wanted to walk with him up to the laundry. But the laundry was dark, and Eady became suspicious.
Other gang members had already told him a narcotics officer had said he was ``singing like a bitch.'' Eady had denied it, but he was watching his back. Eady slipped away when Cobbs saw some people he knew in a car, but moments later, as he raced through the dark, he heard Cobbs calling his name, ``Doe. Doe.''
Cobbs caught up with him, shot him once in the side, four times in the back and once through the side of the forehead as Eady tried to take cover behind a telephone pole.
But Eady lived and became a key witness for the federal government as an eyewitness to Martin's murder, Curry's attempted murder and his own brush with death.
Eady is trying to build a new life, but Martin's family is left with just a memory.
Shirley Powers, 54, was sleeping when she got the 4:15 a.m. call from her daughter that her son, Mark Martin, was dead. ``It was one of those dreaded middle-of-the-night calls you know can't have any good when you answer it,'' Powers remembered during last week's trial. ``We tried to figure out why he was out there and why wasn't he home.''
Powers, who works as a waitress in North Carolina, carries the memories of ``her baby,'' the youngest of six children. ``I've seen people who've lost children who was riddled with guilt. You're always `what if, what if, what if?' But I've had no nightmares. Mark and I had a good relationship.''
Powers said Martin was quiet and shy, but with a definite giddy side and a good sense of humor. The sheet metal ductworker liked to lift weights and loved to help his mother garden. And he loved good food.
``That's when I think of him mainly. Thanksgiving and Christmas,'' Powers said. ``He'd still be eating when everybody else was through.''
Two other men were killed in River Edge Apartments in the early 1990s. One was William Bales, the man who was shot after he argued with Robert Winfield about whether he had purchased one or two rocks of crack.
Paramedics worked in the rain the night of Nov. 4, 1993, cutting off Bales' clothes, trying to save him. All that was left when evidence technician Barbara Peirce arrived were pieces of a black leather jacket, blue jeans and a wrapper from a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
Four bullets were removed from Bales during the autopsy.
Andre Branche recalled during testimony, ``I saw Robert Winfield and Poor Boy face to face, an arm's length away. There was something black in the hand of Robert Winfield. I heard shots. I saw Poor Boy fall and saw Tubbs run away with a real long black revolver.
Reginald Cannon - Fat Daddy - was killed in a turf war. A competing dealer, Cannon did not heed warnings to clear out of the neighborhood where at least one customer said he sold a superior product.
On May 20, 1994, Cannon was confronted by a group of men who came to his car in front of his house on Wallace Circle. The immediate argument was over a bicycle he had seized from a woman for nonpayment of drug debts.
A witness later testified that John Cobbs claimed credit for the murder when he threatened him, ``Don't make me do you like I did Fat Daddy.''
The violence now seems distant in and around River Edge. For those who are left, the newfound quiet is short-lived. They will be relocated to a nearby neighborhood, displaced by the larger homes the city hopes will upgrade the area.
The middle- to upper-middle-class community will reflect conceptual designs from the city's economic development plan, known as Vision 2005.
The city will own the lake in the center, but the home buyers will pay a $400 fee toward its maintenance. The builders will pay the city a $412,000 development fee.
For 39-year-old Marvin Mayo and his fiancee, River Edge has been home for the last year. But just months after moving in, Mayo began hearing rumors that his home wouldn't be home for long.
``I didn't know they could just condemn a place and more or less leave people homeless,'' Mayo said.
Residents of River Edge were given the dubious option of moving to Fairwood Homes, he said.
``Fairwood Homes is not a place anyone wants to go,'' Mayo said. ``They are making you move from one place that is bad to another place that is worse.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Drug gangs once ruled the now-desolate River Edge neighborhood with
terror and violence. All but 40 of the original 190 residents are
gone now, and the rest will be forced to leave soon; the apartment
complex will be razed to make way for new homes and a man-made
lake.
Maps
Graphic
JOHN CORBITT/The Virginian-Pilot
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
Photos
Mark Martin's mother says her son loved gardening and good food.
Drug dealers killed him in July.
BETH BERGMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Marvin Mayo, 39, must find a new place to live before the River Edge
apartments are razed to make way for new development.
KEYWORDS: DRUG GANGS PORTSMOUTH by CNB