Ollie’s New War : For His Iran-Contra Penance, the Ex-Marine Lt. Colonel Takes Aim at the Drug Problem Through an Inner-City Blitz

WASHINGTON —  She used the syringe needle to explore her arms and legs for some space between the sores. An abscess glistened white and a friend diagnosed a common complication. Maggots.

Then Morocco, a 57-year-old heroin addict, injected.

In a front room away from where she sat on a collapsing staircase at the boarded and abandoned Dickson Building on U Street, a red light district now the grimmest of slums, Ringo and Leroy and others rolled up pants legs and sleeves, removed socks and showed their physical losses to drugs.

Half a leg. Two toes. Ringo, on crutches, said that open wounds on a shooting gallery companion already smelled like gangrene.

Around the building and across the street--as a pair of police cruisers screamed past to some higher emergency, as a window sticker warned “Don’t Smoke Crack”--a knot of ordinary-looking citizens watched.

Some were youngsters who, on this frightening field trip to a sad corner of Northwest Washington, were receiving a mental impression through physical exposure. Others were their escorts, two ex-cons and a defrocked Drug Enforcement Administration agent. The eyes of matching, gray-suited security guards scanned one man standing at the curb.

Oliver North.

Someone said the scene inside the building must rank with any abjection of any city or country on earth.

“Welcome to Washington, D.C.,” replied North.

That’s about all Oliver North is saying in public these days. Except to explain, politely and with apology, that he has considered the instructions of a federal judge, heard the advice of his defense team and has decided not to speak with the media.

“Do you know how many interviews I have given in my lifetime?” he asked.

No. North made a zero with his thumb and forefinger. “That’s how many,” he said.

Although North may not be doing much talking, he is doing much working at his new, court-ordered employment as a community servant for inner-city youth.

In July, former Marine lieutenant colonel North was fined $150,000 and sentenced to three years probation and 1,200 hours of community service for attempting to cover up the Iran-Contra scandal.

The sentence is under appeal, but North nevertheless is working out the community service portion.

Last month, he reported to the nonsectarian Alliance to Save America’s Future (SAFe), a month-old, nonprofit, deeply spiritual but heavily underfinanced clutch of volunteers hearing a single call: “To protect and preserve America’s future by saving our youth from the perils of illegal drugs.”

The group is aiming squarely at the inner-city youngsters of Washington. But soon, organizers hope, its work may broaden to denied and drug-threatened children in adjoining states. Then the West Coast and any interested region in between.

At the moment, acknowledged Wilbur Atwell, 56, the Trinidad-born doctor of sociology who is SAFe’s executive director, the organization has the impetus of President Bush’s battle plan and his proposal to spend $7.8 billion on the war against drugs.

Atwell wants North to keep the public’s interest high by creating a special squad that can “dramatize the urgency of the substance abuse problem.”

“I expected a man who has functioned at the levels of Col. North to have a certain degree of confidence, a high degree of articulation,” said Atwell. “Given all of that, given this (alien) environment, he has exhibited all of these things and everything I have expected of him.”

To date, North’s daily run of duties has taken him from government conference rooms to ghetto street corners. He has a businessman’s handshake for the politician and, always, deep, devoted hugs when greeting or leaving SAFe board chairman John Staggers, his new mentor.

When calls arrive and no secretaries are free, North will answer the organization’s phones. In fact, goes the consensus at SAFe, North is attacking this public service with the energy and tenacity of a born Marine.

Monday, North was working with SAFe advisers and the youngsters on the U Street field trip. Last week, North telephoned a producer at Fox Network’s WTTG-TV (“can you imagine the guy trying to believe him when he said it was Ollie North calling,” chuckled a SAFe counselor) to suggest the station film the drug visit for its weekly program, “City Under Siege.”

Tuesday, the man addressed as “Col. North” in group documents but “Ollie” in greetings and on telephone message slips, met with city parks and recreation officials. They outlined their facilities and municipal commitment to him. He explained the ideals and potential of SAFe to them.

This week, North will be at a Washington hotel and a closed gathering of 250 ministers who might aid the work of SAFe or be assisted by it.

Soon there will be chats with players and coaches of youth teams that are part of the Jabbo Kenner Youth Football League. Also prayer breakfasts at Shiloh Baptist Church, where North will embrace, literally and individually, as a personal and preferred gesture of unconditional relationship, a weekly cadre of 10 convicts who are part of the Prison Fellowship International program (started by Charles Colson, former White House counsel and convicted Watergate figure) at nearby Lorton Reformatory.

He found time for daily visits when the 67-year-old Staggers was hospitalized recently for a heart condition. “He signed autographs for all the nurses,” Staggers recalled. “I became an instant celebrity.”

North was originally scheduled by SAFe to work 16 hours a week.

“He has often worked 14 hours a day, five or six days a week . . . and is doing something for us, somewhere, every day,” said Staggers, a former professor of sociology at Howard University.

North’s tour of duty at its original pace would have lasted 75 weeks.

“But he has told me that he doesn’t see this work as just a 1,200-hour job,” continued Staggers, a big, powerful, booming preacher, who, for emphasis, will pound the nearest solid object.

“I told him I wanted him not for 1,200 hours but as a brother for life.” Thump. “I didn’t get any negatives from him.” Bang. “When we first met, I told him: ‘We’re here to work together, to walk together with Christ.’ He’s my brother, mate.” Boom.

North’s start with SAFe, however, was not without its interruption.

Once word was released that SAFe (on the instructions of sentencing U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell) would be the benefactor of North’s public service, a media siege began at landmark National City Christian Church (Presidents James Garfield and Lyndon Johnson were members of its congregation) where the organization is cramped into two borrowed offices and an anteroom.

North delayed his arrival by two days and then, with reporters covering the front doors, he entered through a back door. Next, with both front and back doors under media scrutiny, North exited by a side door. Four weeks into that game, and hampered by SAFe’s refusal to disclose North’s work plans, the media has pulled back.

“It has been somewhat intrusive at times, but not to any great extent,” said Atwell. Nor, he said, has North’s notoriety stood in the way of his work. “The general feeling in the black community--and this isn’t unique to Oliver North--(is that) the criminal system is biased toward whites.

“They think he got off rather lightly . . . but he can still function in the minority community.”

Especially, added Atwell, by showing dedication to a cause benefiting that community.

“I can’t open his heart or his head,” Atwell explained. “But from the observable, from the hours he has worked, from the support he has exhibited and his tendency to complete all tasks . . . I look at these things, if not as dedication, certainly as a commitment.”

The source of that commitment to an inner city?

“Col. North has children as I have children,” Atwell said. “He recognizes that although he may be out there in (suburban) Fairfax County, there are drugs in the schools in Fairfax County. I think Col. North’s dedication stems from that.”

North’s rounds are to areas and among people where his presence can be, for an instant, more impressive than the problem he is attempting to reduce.

“Hey, you’re in the right place, man,” shouts a person at one stop. “You don’t need no police here, man. You’re safe. Nothing going to happen to you in this neighborhood. . . .”

North says nothing, does nothing. Nor do the two security men who have been with him since the first of several dozen death threats was received.

Both guards are ex-military. One is a former Marine Corps intelligence specialist. They are paid by the private trust fund raised for North’s legal defense.

They escort him from home to all functions and to his office at SAFe, where one man is never more than six paces from his side.

It is a very ordinary office that North shares with whomever might be short of a desk or chair that particular day.

There are no photographs, no gag paperweights, not even a personal coffee mug to say that Oliver North sits here.

But there is a cartoon taped over the desk.

It shows a television set and a newscaster announcing: “In a new turn, the government admitted making arms sales to the Gray Panthers with proceeds being funneled into the Social Security system. . . .”

They are seemingly odd warriors in this obviously bitter war.

There is Staggers, son of a railroad switchman from Charleston, S.C., whose working life has gone from that of college professor to social activist devoted to the poor, the homeless and Jesus.

There is Atwell, son of a pharmacist, who adopted Staggers’ passion when he was a graduate student at Howard.

Then there’s Thad Heath, an architect and real estate man, and Sam Hines, the pastor of Third Street Church of God in crumbling northwest Washington, and Ollie Thompson, who used to be a guard-forward with the Wilmington Jets.

Individually, yet always feeding from the guidance of one another, they represent, in this era of 1,200 hours of community service, more than a century of work for society and against its problems.

Collectively, and drawing tremendous energy from what they acknowledge as “their relationship,” they now are the Alliance to Save America’s Future.

They agree, said Staggers, on all the basics.

* That substance abuse, from penthouse suites to ghettos, is the heftiest social problem that America has faced in its 200-year history.

* That as government programs fail and law enforcement is unable to contain neither supply nor demand, then neighborhoods must work to heal themselves.

* That for neighborhood programs to succeed, their workers must build total trust within personal relationships that will sustain the work and its progress when the money runs out.

* That no matter the sins of adults, Staggers said, “I found no parent who didn’t have love for their children . . . so you can work with the child to influence the parents, getting the kids to do some role playing.”

* That just about all of the machinery to effect a gradual but significant turnback of the inner-city drug problem is in place.

But communities are short on coordination. That has produced wasted effort, duplication of services, a sense of isolation among neighborhood groups and reduced effectiveness.

Hence SAFe. A new umbrella.

“We’re saying we can bring these groups together and work toward a common goal,” explained Thompson, 58, a former physical education teacher and coach for hyperactive and problem children. “We have a plan that will unify as many groups who want to join us . . . a plan involving the best talent there is, a plan to optimize the effort and do it the way it should be done.”

SAFe currently is working with 27 Washington-area groups. They stretch from Masonic lodges to police youth clubs.

Five programs have been drafted and are in early formation.

* Athletes Don’t Do Drugs. Working with the D.C. Department of Recreation, it aims to increase the number of young people involved in sports by 50%--then supplement the athletic program with student tutoring and substance counseling.

* Reach Out Washington. A mobile classroom to teach 13,000 students annually the physical benefits of healthy living and the destructive forces of drugs.

* The Nehemiah Project. A counseling program to rebuild inner-city families.

* The Pied Pipers Program. Using ex-convicts and former drug users, this segment will take children to the worst reaches of their cities in an attempt to scare them straight.

* Youth Rescue Centers. A chain of city sanctuaries with 24-hour counseling for troubled youth.

There was SAFe before North. Barely.

Staggers carried the concept to his regular prayer breakfasts and business meetings with Hines and Heath.

A month ago, the three men formed the organization with a prospectus that is pure Staggers: “To change the image of our nation’s capital from that of the crime capital of the world, to that of a safe and productive community. To see Washington become the city on a hill for God.”

Implementation, of course, will be enormous.

SAFe has estimated an immediate annual budget of $1.5 million but has to date attracted only two sponsors--MCI and the Washington Times--who have pledged support, services and even new and larger office space, but no money.

North may attract continuing media attention--but he is prohibited by terms of his sentencing from participating in any fund-raising activities or public appearances that could produce revenues.

Meanwhile, believes Thompson, time is running out.

He is scared by drug deaths and their portent.

“The old folk aren’t dying,” he said. “It’s the young people, the 23-year-olds, the ones who should be marrying and having children. In 15 years, if we don’t do something, there will not be one good black man for a good black girl to marry.

“They’ll all be dead, on drugs, or in jail.”

He is confused by the national failure to heal drug abuse.

“To be the smartest and richest country in the world and (yet) we can’t solve this thing,” he said. “The thing that upsets me, is to see all this money, this $7.8 billion . . . and you’ll see all the programs come out of the woodwork, take the money and then they’ll disappear.”

Yet there’s an up side, he believes.

Recapturing America’s past is one facet.

He and Staggers and Atwell came from huge families of no great means. “But the one thing that kept us going was supportive parents with a high level of spiritual values.”

The progress that SAFe can make is another.

“We are not going to disappear. We have decided to save the future and that future is kids. We believe in what we are doing and we will win.

“Because we have a relationship.”

Morocco, say those who know her well, is close to dying as a result of her drug addiction.

But on that night the kids were watching, she was shooting up distilled water.

Ringo says that he has swallowed, smoked, snorted and injected any substance that has ever been abused.

But he actually lost those toes through complications of diabetes.

The other amputations displayed in the front room of the shooting gallery on U Street were real enough. So were the sores and suspected gangrene. So was the location.

But the entire scene was a composite, a pulling together of players from shelters and street corners around Washington--but a living docudrama nevertheless, and one produced by SAFe’s Pied Pipers Program.

Roland (Roach) Henry is a Pied Piper. He is 50 years old and has done hard time for car theft, possession of narcotics, armed robbery, prison escape and “everything except murder.”

Harold (Pumpkin) Minor is a Pied Piper. He is 47 years old and limps from partial paralysis, the legacy of being shot four times in a drug turf dispute.

And Oliver North is a Pied Piper.

For it was North, said Henry, who first suggested the idea of not simply telling kids why they shouldn’t do drugs--but taking them to the streets and showing them the end results.

Henry has other things in common with North. They share Ralph Ardito as a federal probation officer. That triangle brought SAFe and its Pied Piper program to the attention of federal officials--and as Henry suggested and Ardito agreed, North was brought into the organization.

“I’ve taken him (North) everywhere with me, to all the ghettos and the housing projects,” Henry said. “Then I go back and discuss it with him, let him know what my thoughts are and learn how he thinks we should approach a certain situation.”

Once North knows the streets, Henry continued, “we can use his mind. He is an expert on tactics of war--but he needs to know this battleground.”

Until only a few months ago, Henry was a street hustler. Mostly drugs, he says. “But I woke up one morning and a thought was there. I was 50 years old and was using drugs. . . .

“In this hustling thing, you’re either fortunate enough to realize you have to change. Or you wind up in prison. Or you wind up the street with a bullet in your head.”

So Henry--concerned also about his past example to three sons in jail and another hustling--decided to change.

Minor’s story is of similar realization. He served four years of a 15-year sentence for assault with attempt to murder. One of his six sons is in jail for possession of PCP.

“My life now is this program,” he vows.

Henry summed it up for both: “Why not take this (negative) influence we have on our kids and turn it into a positive direction? The same way you can give him (a youth) a dope bag, you can hit him up with an academic book.”

Currently, those following the Pied Pipers are some 80 inner-city boys of all school ages who may not yet have done drugs, but who are living in districts surrounded by sellers and users.

The kids are brought into the program through group contacts and parental concerns. They are taken by Pied Pipers to boxing matches and ball games. Always there are talks of role models, educational possibilities, job training, anything, Henry said, “to motivate them into escaping.”

When a trust has been formed, he continued, the conversations turn to drugs. Then talk is extended to the perils of places like U Street. But first, its profits.

Through their crime networks, Henry and Minor collect a selection of Mercedes and Cadillacs. A hustler is recruited. He wears the obligatory gold chains, Fila sweat suit and Avila high-tops.

“We tell the kids: ‘I’m going to let you drive the Mercedes and buy you all the tennis shoes you want,”’ Henry said. “‘But first . . . ‘

“Then you take them across the street and show the other side.”

Henry and Minor have culled about 30 addicts to fill the ground floor and steps of the house. The Rev. Al Lawrence, now a minister with Prison Fellowship, once a DEA agent who served more than two years of a 10-year federal sentence for a racketeering conspiracy involving confiscated drugs, has found distilled water for the syringes.

There is a simple explanation. It would not be prudent for any anti-drug program to be involved in part of even a staged performance with real drugs.

North, in the capital uniform of blazer, khaki pants and blue Oxford cloth shirt, is across the street watching this premiere of his program unfold.

So are cameras from Channel 5.

North has instructed them not to film him.

They don’t.

The boys, all preteens, do not know that this is not the real thing. Their upset is genuine. Faces wince at Morocco and her needle as she pierces a sore on her arm.

Henry is their guide and he orders them to look at the woman on the stairs, to absorb, to know that this is the end of a line and maybe a life.

“Look at her body,” he orders. “That’s what drugs does to your body. You all seen it? Now, do you all want to be like that?”

“No,” say the kids.

“I can’t hear you,” shouts Henry.

“NO WAY,” they shriek.

Later, Henry and Minor would speak of their concern that a newspaper report of their little play might destroy its effectiveness in the minds of their students.

It doesn’t seem likely.

Not if Dawuad Murray, 9, can be believed.

His reaction was a whisper.

“I couldn’t be like that.”