Prosecution rests in Kaboni Savage murder trial

After more than 10 weeks of trial, federal prosecutors on Wednesday rested their case against Kaboni Savage, the drug trafficker accused of ordering a 2004 North Philadelphia firebombing that killed the mother, son and four relatives of a witness against him.

FBI agent Kevin Lewis, who spent more than a dozen years investigating Savage, was the first government witness when the trial opened and became its last on Wednesday. Lewis took the stand to verify secret prison recordings that prosecutors contend show Savage's deadly and relentless determination to retaliate against cooperators.

"Their kids gonna pay, their mother gonna pay," Savage told a fellow inmate in December 2004, about two months after the deadly arson, according to one recording. "That's the kind of conviction I got for this."

Later, he told his girlfriend in a phone call: "That's all I dream about - killing rats."

After Assistant U.S. Attorney David Troyer declared the government concluded its case, U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick dismissed the jury for the rest of the week.

Lawyers for Savage and his three codefendants are scheduled to begin their case on Monday. None have revealed if the defendants will take the stand, but the defense case is projected to last a week.

Savage, 38, is accused of committing or directing 12 murders while running a sprawling drug network. He is already serving a 30-year term on trafficking charges but faces the death penalty if convicted of racketeering and murder.

His alleged victims include the mother, cousin, 15-month old son and three other children related to Eugene Coleman, a onetime friend and associate who was preparing to testify against him.

Each died when two men hauling red gas cans bombed their North 6th Street home in a predawn attack in October 2004.

To put an exclamation point on their case, prosecutors played for jurors a tape secretly recorded days after the bombing, when Savage had learned that prison authorities would escort Coleman to the funerals for his relatives.

Savage joked that the guards ought to stop first and get Coleman some barbecue sauce, "so he can pour it on those burnt (expletive)."

His court-appointed lawyers have denied his role in the attacks and asked the jury - a panel whose names are sealed - not to be swayed by rambling jailhouse bravado.

Also facing death are two codefendants, Steven Northington and Robert Meritt Jr. Prosecutors say Merritt was one of the two men who carried out the firebombing and that Northington was an enforcer who murdered a rival for Savage.

Savage's sister, Kidada Savage, faces life in prison on charges that she helped plot the attack.