Racketeering trial of alleged Bartram Village drug ringleaders enters seventh week

Mutrel Stuckey walked slowly, almost gingerly, to the witness stand.

Three years ago, he was shot in the back running from a robber who stormed his van as Stuckey parked near his Southwest Philadelphia home. Stuckey, then 49, was hospitalized for a month and bedridden for three more.

"I'm still in constant pain," he told a jury last month.

Stuckey said he didn't know his shooter or why he was targeted. Agents later identified the alleged gunman as Ramel Moten, a fixture in the nearby Bartram Village Housing Development.

Drugs and the crime they spawn are a way of life in dozens of Philadelphia neighborhoods. But evidence in the racketeering trial against Moten and six others, which begins a seventh week Monday, suggests his crew, which called itself the Harlem Boys or Young Hit Men, operated on a different level.

Instead of just disrupting the neighborhood, for a decade they controlled it, defined it, even walled it off to outsiders. They also showed an unusual penchant for violence.

When Moten suspected a low-level dealer nicknamed Fatty of stealing from him, the gang leader allegedly confronted him, took his stash, made him strip, and sent him running down the block in a hail of gunfire.

"It's a dangerous game walking past the projects," Shyheem Davis, a defendant who has since pleaded guilty, told investigators in 2010, according to an affidavit filed in the case. "If you're not from there, don't come there."

Alphonso Greer, 41, described being attacked twice by Harlem Boys in 2007 for no apparent reason. Once, Greer said, he was ambushed from behind as he talked on his cellphone at a Lindbergh Boulevard trolley stop after visiting his girlfriend in Bartram Village.

"Every time I tried to lift my head up," he said, "I got a kick in the face or a punch in the head."

Greer got away but later saw the same men at a local store. As he walked out, one pistol-whipped him, breaking a bone near one of his eye sockets.

"I don't know these dudes," Greer, exasperated, told Assistant U.S. Attorney Salvatore L. Astolfi. "I never done nothing to none of these guys."

Greer was among a parade of victims, cooperators, and police officers called to testify during the first 17 days of trial before U.S. District Judge Lawrence F. Stengel. Together, they detailed how the group kept a stranglehold on the projects, a warren of 78 low-slung buildings in the shadow of historic Bartram's Garden.

The 139-page indictment against Moten and his codefendants outlined scores of crimes - attempted murders, robberies, beatings, carjackings, and brazen open-air drug dealing. Most weren't news to the 1,600 residents in the housing complex just off South 54th Street near the edge of the Schuylkill.

"It was pretty bad," said Donna Henry, who runs the Southwest Community Development Corp., a nonprofit in the area. "People felt trapped in their homes."

Thirteen of the original 20 defendants have pleaded guilty since the arrests two years ago, and at least half of them are expected to testify before the trial ends, probably next month.

Jurors have also watched jittery black-and-white videos of bustling crack kitchens and street buys. Many were captured by cameras hidden in the jackets of wire-wearing informants or affixed to utility poles by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who built the case over two years with Philadelphia police, as part of an initiative to target the most-dangerous neighborhoods.

Defense lawyers have wasted little time challenging evidence such as videos. Instead, they have tried to chip away at witnesses' credibility and build an argument that the occasional drug sale or scuffle wasn't part of a structured criminal enterprise, the federal offense that could send the defendants to prison for life.

Racketeering and organized crime are two terms that often go hand in hand. But an organization doesn't have to include a hierarchy, ATF Special Agent John Bowman told jurors. Not every mob has bosses and soldiers.

"In this case, we had an enterprise where it's an association of fact," Bowman testified. The fact, the glue that connected them, was Bartram Village, for many the only home they knew.

Some of the gang members wore tattoos boasting YHM or "54." Davis had the numbers tattooed under his eyes. "5-4 represents Bartram Village," he boasted to agents. "People know you're from the village and you're not to be messed with."

One cooperator, Terrance "Tay" Hamm, told jurors the group started calling their turf Harlem "because that's where the money" is.

Hamm said he was 13 when he got his first job in the projects in 1992. Each day, he would come from Tilden Junior High School in Southwest Philadelphia, pick up $100 worth of crack cocaine, and resell it for a $30 profit.

Within a decade, Hamm had climbed the ladder. He spread the operation to several apartments, paying residents' rent and a commission so he and his cohorts could use their units to cook, bag, or sell the finished product.

At his peak, Hamm said, he pocketed $1,000 a day. He flaunted his status, hosting barbecue "reunions" each summer for current and past crew members. "People in the neighborhood loved me," he told jurors.

Hamm said he wasn't sure where all the cash went. "I didn't know if I was going to live to see the next day," he testified, "so when money came in, it went out."

After an ATF raid in April 2007, Hamm said, he handed the reins to Moten, a bearded 28-year-old known around the projects as "Smiz" and "Smelly." Hamm saw leadership potential.

"He was good," Hamm said. "The best hustler I ever had."

One of Moten's lawyers, Christopher Furlong, noted that Hamm incriminated men below him but gave agents "worthless" information about his suppliers.

Michael Huff, the lawyer for defendant Hikeem Torrence, reminded Hamm that he once told a grand jury he resumed drug dealing on his own in 2008, when Hamm said, "Everybody was desperate and people just started doing things for themselves."

"Certainly, no one was working for you?" Huff asked. "No," Hamm acknowledged.

William Cannon, lawyer for Reginald Stephens, pointed out that Hamm's decision to testify might literally save his life. "You didn't want to die in jail, did you?" Cannon asked.

The gang became so much a part of the fabric at Bartram Village that some witnesses conceded doing more than just tolerating the crime.

Leah West, 42, lived sporadically in the complex for more than two decades. She knew some of the defendants when they were just toddlers, she said, and watched years later as they made a swath of grass just outside her window one of their preferred sales spots.

For much of her time there, West testified, she was also a customer, smoking crack almost every day. She rattled off five apartments and other spots where she regularly bought drugs from Moten and his colleagues.

What made you stop? Assistant U.S. Attorney Katayoun M. Copeland asked.

"This," West testified, in a nod to the trial. "All this stuff going on. The drugs, the guns, the violence. Everybody getting locked up. It just wasn't for me anymore."

Under cross-examination from one of Moten's lawyers, Thomas Bello, West acknowledged she sometimes let the dealers use her apartment to prepare drugs and got discounts and freebies by steering them business.

"I wasn't a crack dealer," West insisted defensively. "I just made sure that customers went to them."

Even Stuckey, the 2009 shooting victim, said under cross-examination that he at times had ferried packages for a neighborhood man he knew as a marijuana dealer.

City officials say the neighborhood has improved since the roundups two years ago. In 2009 and 2010, police investigated eight nonfatal shootings in and around Bartram Village, according to Lt. John Walker of the Southwest Detective Division. In the two years since, they have logged one.

"The impact down there has been huge," Walker said.