Crack Cocaine

A former city worker was ordered yesterday to stand trial on charges that he used a city van to deliver crack cocaine. Municipal Court Judge William A. Meehan Jr. ordered Idris Enlow, 39, of Princeton Avenue, arraigned May 13. Assistant District Attorney Christopher Fromm argued that Enlow, an employee of the Mayor's Office of Community Services who worked cleaning up vacant lots, ran a complex web of drug stash and packaging houses....

WASHINGTON - A year ago, a drug dealer caught with 50 grams of crack cocaine faced a mandatory 10 years in federal prison. New rules have cut that to as little as five years, and thousands of inmates not covered by the change are saying their sentences should be reduced, too. "Please make this situation fair to all of us," prisoner Shauna Barry-Scott wrote from West Virginia to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which oversees federal sentencing guidelines....

Some truckers arriving at the Food Distribution Center area in South Philadelphia last night had more on their agendas than work, police said. They wanted to buy crack. Narcotics officers were happy to accommodate them. Standing at Seventh Street and Pattison Avenue in biting cold for several hours, two undercover officers had $10 bags of something that looked like crack cocaine for sale. Before the well-orchestrated sting was over, nine truckers had been arrested and their tractors confiscated.

A raid on a Levittown apartment complex has netted police three suspected crack-cocaine dealers. A woman whom police identified as a target of gunfire two months ago at another apartment complex here also was arrested during the raid. Charged with possession of crack cocaine, possession with intent to deliver, delivery, and criminal conspiracy were Darren Lee Roberts, 23, Isaac Marshall, 18, and Jermaine Ugono Blount, 23, all of Trenton. Elizabeth Ann Abare, 36, who police said currently has no permanent address, was charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

A three-month undercover investigation into crack cocaine trafficking at one of Philadelphia's most notorious drug corners peaked yesterday with the arrest of 17 people and the confiscation of drugs, money, cars and firearms, police said. Those arrested, police said, included the "corner boss" at Franklin and Butler Streets, the targeted intersection, and numerous street sellers. Police said they expected to make at least 12 more arrests. According to investigators, a raiding party of 80 officers made up of plainclothes police from the Narcotics Bureau along with K-9 and SWAT officers fanned out about 8 a.m. yesterday in the Hunting Park, Fairhill and Oxford Circle neighborhoods.

It was Monday afternoon. Bennie Swans, once head of one of the city's best known antiviolence organizations, drove his car through North Philadelphia, a few blocks from where city workers were boarding up crack houses. The family dog, Caesar, was in the backseat as Swans, 49, cruised up Germantown Avenue, headed home to West Philadelphia. Swans knew these streets well. He had spent more than two decades on them, confronting gang leaders. But Swans wasn't thinking about the past as he neared the corner of Ninth Street and Germantown Avenue.

Bennie Swans, former head of anti-gang and anti-drug organizations in Philadelphia, will be ordered into a pretrial probation program for six months to two years for allegedly buying two packets of crack cocaine on a street corner last month. Swans, 49, who was arrested Feb. 5 after an alleged drug buy on Beaumont Street at 58th, near his Baltimore Avenue home, will be admitted into the district attorney's Accelerated Rehabilitation Disposition program, known as ARD. Swans was scheduled to be in court yesterday, but was ill with a virus, said his attorney, Ronald J. Pressley.

The alleged killer was 15 years old. The boy who brought him the gun was just 11. The killing was over a nasty remark, and a Pennsauken man's offer to trade toy remote-control trucks for crack cocaine in the middle of the night. That is how authorities say Stephen M. Quattrochi, 29, of Pennsauken, was slain outside a Camden housing project on Aug. 20. The 15-year-old was charged yesterday with robbing him of the toy trucks and murdering him. Camden County Prosecutor Edward F. Borden Jr. said his office intended to prosecute the 15-year-old as an adult.

A suspected drug dealer choked to death yesterday after swallowing a crack cocaine stash while running from police, authorities said. The incident, which began as a drug bust in West Philadelphia, triggered a confrontation between a crowd of bystanders and police. Several people said that police had beaten and strangled the suspect. Inspector William Colarulo said officers tried to clear the man's air passages and pump his stomach after it became clear that he was choking.

The son of 76ers legend Julius Erving was found guilty yesterday of one count of possessing crack cocaine, a misdemeanor, after an undercover narcotics officer saw him buy $5 worth of the drug from a dealer in North Philadelphia. Cheo Erving, 23, agreed to stipulate to the prosecutor's facts, was sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to report regularly to the Philadelphia probation department. Municipal Court Judge J. Earl Simmons found Erving guilty after Assistant District Attorney Steven Collier summarized the evidence: Undercover narcotics officers were monitoring the 2900 block of Hancock Street about 9:30 a.m. July 1 when Lt. John Gallo saw Erving drive up in his black Mercedes-Benz and buy the drug from a street dealer.

FORMER major league outfielder Otis Nixon has been arrested on drug charges following a weekend traffic stop in suburban Atlanta. Nixon was pulled over just after midnight Saturday after another driver called police to report a Dodge Ram truck weaving all over the road, according to an incident report from the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office. The 54-year-old remained in jail yesterday afternoon on $11,880 bond. Officers found a pipe for smoking crack cocaine in Nixon's pants pocket and found a suspected crack rock in the driver's seat, the report says.

A Lawnside man was sentenced to 23 years in state prison Friday for illegally possessing guns, cocaine, and prescription drugs. Reginald V. Brown, 37, who was sentenced by Superior Court Judge Irvin J. Snyder in Camden, had been found guilty by a jury in February of five criminal counts, according to a spokesman for the state Attorney General's Office. After obtaining evidence that Brown was selling cocaine, state police searched his Gloucester Avenue home and found a cooler pack holding two semiautomatic pistols, a revolver, and a .38-caliber teargas pen gun containing a rifle bullet.

Testimony in a Norristown double-murder trial this week stretched far beyond Montgomery County, from a single crime scene to a vast network of interstate drug rings, federal investigations, wiretaps, confidential informants, and "snitching. " Luckenson Desrivieres, 25, has admitted that he stabbed to death two friends - Marc Winchell Estiverne, 23, and Estiverne's girlfriend, Shamara Hill, 26 - in the boardinghouse where they were staying. Prosecutors argued that the killing was premeditated, and presented a witness who said Desrivieres had talked about robbing and killing Estiverne over a debt.

Seven people were arrested Tuesday morning in a roundup of suspected members of a Camden drug gang. Among those taken into custody on federal drug charges was the gang's alleged boss, Carl "Call Call" Wiles, 23, of Camden officials said. The gang members were arrested in a series of raids by members of a task force made up of the FBI, New Jersey State Police, Camden Police and the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, officials said. Authorities said the gang operated in the area of Eighth and Tulip Streets in the Morgan Village section of Camden, selling heroin, crack cocaine and powder cocaine to customers who arrived on foot or by car, in some cases calling ahead for service.

NORTH Philadelphia's notorious Broaster brothers - two of whom former Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson dubbed "the worst people in the city as far as violence is concerned" after they beat triple-murder charges - were still at it. But late last week, the feds busted four Broaster brothers: Cassius Broaster, 37, Jerome Broaster, 38, Elliott Broaster, 34, and Larkeem Broaster, 33 - along with three others: Shannon Powell, 36, Nick Higgens, 29...

She was high on crack cocaine, alone, and too embarrassed to ask for help when she gave birth six days before Christmas 2011. So Patricia Crawley did what she thought best - she walked three blocks to a day-care center and left her newborn girl, wrapped in clothes and a blanket, in a cardboard box on the curb. Those details in Crawley's police statement, read aloud at her nonjury trial Friday by the detective who questioned her, helped Common Pleas Court Judge Alice Dubow decide to acquit her of attempted-murder charges.

After a prison stint for peddling crack cocaine, Brandon Coleman abandoned the drug trade for a job at a fast-food joint. Then he discovered history is not so easily erased. In March 2010, Coleman ran into his ex-girlfriend, Jacklyn Smith. She lured him back to her Yeadon apartment - and into an ambush. Coleman was blindfolded, stripped and bound, stabbed 20 times and scorched with a clothes iron. "Where's the money?" his captors demanded, deaf to Coleman's claim that he no longer sold drugs.

THIS IS JUST VILE. A Philadelphia woman was hiding 36 vials of crack in her vagina when she and her boyfriend were busted for trying to sell the drug at an Upper Darby Wawa on Saturday, police said. Shortly before 5 a.m., a man in his 40s from Sicklerville, N.J., was at the Wawa on 69th Street near Patterson Avenue when he tried to buy crack from Marcus Gibson, 23, and his girlfriend, Ashley Bellamy, 22, who were in a black GMC Yukon, said Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood.

A South Philadelphia drug gang is officially history after the conviction of seven key members by a federal jury. The Sanders Drug Trafficking Organization operated out of a Queen Village apartment complex, dealing large amounts of crack cocaine between March 2009 and August 2011. Though crack was their mainstay, they also offered heroin, marijuana, Oxycodone and other prescription drugs at several locations within the Courtyard Apartments the 500, 600 and 700 blocks of Christian Street, federal prosecutors said.

Two separate traffic stops by Pine Hill police earlier this week resulted in drug arrests. On Tuesday, Richard C. Bryant, 24, of Bryce Road, Berlin Borough, was charged with possession of heroin, crack cocaine, and marijuana after he was stopped while driving on Berlin-Clementon Road. Authorities said officers discovered an unspecified amount of the drugs "packaged consistent with distribution" in the car. Bryant, who was also charged with operating a vehicle with a suspended driver's license, is being held in the Camden County Jail in lieu of $16,000 bail.