Pubdate: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 Source: New York Daily News (NY) Copyright: 2005 Daily News, L.P. Contact: http://www.nydailynews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/295 Author: Joe Mahoney, Daily News Albany Bureau Chief LOWLIFE BROUGHT CRACK BIZ UPSTATE GLENS FALLS - Just a few miles from where steamboats ferry tourists on Lake George and hikers step into the Adirondacks, 15-year-old Ruth Needham sucked on a cigarette and talked about the Brooklyn drug dealers who wrecked lives in this city of paper mills and quarries. "I just got out of rehab for the fifth time and had to get rid of my boyfriend because he's been smoking crack," Ruth said. "Crack is everywhere now." The narcotics epidemic that plagues this city and others around it was spread mostly by one man - a depraved Brooklyn thug named Dupree Harris. Convicted in Brooklyn Federal Court last month on charges of overseeing a thriving crack empire, Harris, 31, smuggled drugs to the Lake George region and sold it for up to 100 times the price of the going rate in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Until he was taken off the streets last year, the two-time convicted felon routinely wheeled around sleepy Glens Falls in a maroon Cadillac Escalade, nodding at desperate customers and sneering at cops who he suspected were trying to nail him. "We had wanted to get a conviction on him for a long time, but he kept killing the witnesses," a law enforcement official told the Daily News. Harris was charged but acquitted of murder in Brooklyn in December 2003 after witnesses either refused to testify or changed their stories. At the time, he was under indictment for coercing three witnesses in another homicide case, by telling them they could "lie or die" if they helped prosecutors pin a murder rap on his half-brother, Wesley Sykes. Harris has since been convicted of trying to silence those witnesses, drawing a state sentence of 15 years to life. Despite all of his legal jams in Brooklyn over the past decade, officials said the career criminal found plenty of time to travel upstate where he built a lucrative drug network. "The flow of drugs between Brooklyn and Glens Falls is daily," said Warren County District Attorney Kate Hogan, who was a prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney's office before coming home to the Lake George region in 1993. "Little did I know then how Brooklyn would come to play such a major role in the day-to-day life of a Warren County prosecutor," she said. Harris often stopped at an Albany home to cut and package the crack before doling out the poison to his squad of dealers in Glens Falls, some 200 miles north of the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, which were his stomping grounds for years. It was easy money, not views of the sylvan lake, that beckoned the crack cowboys upstate. "There is not a lot of competition here and they can get a much higher profit margin," said Hogan, noting crack bought in Brooklyn for $10 can be resold for $100 in Glens Falls. The casualties of the drug trade can be found in such places as the Henry Hudson projects near Glens Falls Hospital and the John Burke housing project in Queensbury, a village just outside the city. At John Burke, where Harris once roosted, Wayne Mattison, 36, a father of two who has started a volunteer neighborhood watch group, said, "The gangs bring the drugs here, and it's like a domino effect." At a nearby picnic table, a middle-aged woman too scared to give her name said she doesn't even have to see the drugs to know they are around. "I can smell the crack being cooked at night," she said. "You know it's crack because it smells like burning plastic." A decade ago, Glen Falls authorities saw crack as a problem ravaging only big cities. "Today, we can pretty much go out on any given day and make a buy for crack or heroin," said Glens Falls Police Capt. Joe Bethel. A former crack user now in recovery, a 30-year-old mother of two who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the dealers often take advantage of female addicts, living rent-free in their homes. "A friend of this one drug dealer robbed a woman I know at gunpoint, took all her drugs, her money and her car," she said. To avoid easy detection by the cops, the dealers often use prepaid cell phones that don't require a traceable individual account. "When they're driving up the thruway, they call ahead to their customers and say, 'The coffee's hot,' which means they're bringing in the crack," said one investigator. For those who get involved with the dealers, the scourge of addiction is just one of the risks. Consider Lindsey McDonnell, 25, who was charmed by Harris and ended up having his baby. The Glens Falls native will be a long way from her hometown in November when she is expected to get hit in Brooklyn with a sentence of 10 years to life for aiding him in the crack trade. Harris faces a federal stint of 17 years to life when he is sentenced Nov. 15. - --- MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman