Making Federal Case Out of Guns

RICHMOND, Va. —  For years, Joseph “Baybay” Bullock feared no one, least of all the law.

He packed a gun even during casual basketball games--and no opponents dared beat him. His drug-buying customers feared that a wrong look or a dispute over payment would prompt an on-the-spot execution.

At a busy Richmond intersection in broad daylight in 1994, Bullock pumped 13 bullets into a pair of rival drug dealers. A few hours later, confident that no one would dare point the finger at him, he returned to the scene to strut and mingle among onlookers.

So it was a triumph for prosecutors when they managed to turn Bullock into the public role model for Project Exile, a path-breaking effort to clear Richmond’s streets of illegal guns and the potentially violent offenders who carry them.

Under the program, prosecutors try defendants under at least 14 federal laws--carrying mandatory penalties of from five years to life--involving illegal gun possession. One reason is that, until recently, federal laws carried far harsher penalties than state laws in Virginia. But even in places like California where state laws often rival federal laws in harshness, federal laws are typically applied more aggressively. Another reason is that in far-off federal prisons, with no parole and no easy access to neighborhood networks, they are “exiled” not just from Richmond but from further crime.

Almost three years after Project Exile was launched, Richmond’s homicide rate has been cut in half. Since 1997, more than 650 guns have been taken off the streets and 326 offenders have been sentenced to an average of 56 months--often in maximum-security prisons.

Local officials report that drug dealers now routinely show up for street corner sales without their guns. “We have made [whether to carry a gun] much more thought-provoking” than which pair of Nikes to buy, said Richmond’s assistant U.S. attorney, James Comey, one of the program’s architects.

The program occupies rare common ground in the battle over gun control. The NRA, which has long championed tougher punishment for criminals using guns, has contributed $100,000 to help the Richmond effort.

Now local prosecutors in California and elsewhere are importing Project Exile to their own jurisdictions, tailoring the program to local needs. Prosecutors in Los Angeles plan to unveil their program within the next two to three months. But they are unlikely to adopt the name, concerned that, in Southern California’s diverse culture, Project Exile might sound anti-immigrant.

Finding Lessons in Richmond Campaign

Still, in Los Angeles, Oakland and elsewhere, prosecutors see two great lessons in the Richmond campaign. First is that federal gun laws--like the federal tax code in an earlier era of mob crime--can be used to prosecute criminals like Bullock before they kill again. And second is that, even with criminals, advertising pays.

Richmond is a quaint Southern town of 200,000 with a big-city edge, a state capital where antebellum homes and urban poverty are close neighbors. For part of the year, the streets fill with state legislators and the business of government gives Richmond a purposeful, prosperous feel.

Three years ago, however, the city was also a crossroads for drug dealers. Local political and business leaders were embarrassed by the city’s dubious distinction in 1994 of having the nation’s second-highest murder rate (behind Gary, Ind.). And law enforcement officials were overwhelmed by the gun “carry rate” among those on the street that made holdups, drive-bys and “disrespect” shootings a daily occurrence.

“It was like Dodge City,” said Sgt. Michael J. Shamus, a Richmond police officer who now leads a special unit that concentrates on the arrest of violent drug offenders.

So when Assistant U.S. Atty. Comey and other federal prosecutors from Virginia’s eastern district approached the Richmond police with the idea that they should work together to attack illegal guns, the cops were intrigued--but skeptical.

Police Chief Jerry Oliver, who had arrived in Richmond in 1995 after being at the helm of the Pasadena Police Department, was among the skeptics. A hard-charging reformer who likes to call himself the force’s “CEO for customer service,” Oliver was scrambling to turn around a force that was mistrusted by the community, outgunned by criminals and suffering from low morale. Along with the street cops he led, Oliver initially questioned whether federal action would match federal rhetoric.

But Oliver knew he needed the help. And Comey, who as an assistant U.S. attorney in New York had experimented with the application of federal gun laws to street crimes, convinced Oliver that it could make a difference in Richmond.

“Our original idea was to send a shock wave through Richmond and scare them about guns,” said Comey. “A drug dealer is a very bad thing. But an armed drug dealer is a plague.”

Police and federal prosecutors started huddling over which cases to bring before federal judges, focusing on some of Richmond’s most notorious violent offenders.

And as they learned more about the initiative, Richmond’s business leaders came up with a plan--and the funds--to give the new legal strategy more oomph. Turning to the Martin Agency, a national advertising firm based in Richmond, they asked for an advertising campaign aimed at Project Exile’s principal “target audience”: those who carry illegal guns.

“The advertising is absolutely essential,” said Comey, a veteran prosecutor whose gruff affability suggests a personality more suited to the courtroom than Madison Avenue. If the government means to take guns out of the hands of criminals, Comey declared, “they need to hear about it. They need to have the information that only advertising can get into their heads.”

At Martin, advertisers who had spent their careers pitching legitimate messages to conventional audiences were at first stymied by the challenge. “There was no demographic research we could tap into to find out where the criminals were, where they shopped, what they watched,” said Pam Orsi, a senior account executive with Martin. “We learn so much through media and market research, and there was none of that.”

But with a budget that has totaled about $400,000 over three years, reach them they did. One-fourth of the money came from the National Rifle Assn., which has been arguing that, instead of enacting new gun laws, police officials need to enforce the ones already on the books. The balance came from local businesses eager to cut the crime rate and make Richmond a safer community.

Billboards began popping up around the city bearing Project Exile’s stark message in white-on-black lettering: “An illegal gun gets you five years in federal prison.” On traffic stops and during casual street-corner encounters, police officers handed out cards with the same message. On the radio, 10-second spots hammered the message home during rush-hour traffic reports.

A black-wrapped city bus carried the warning along bus routes plying the city’s principal corridors. On the street, it came to be known as “the death bus.”

In the search for effective ways to reach their audience, the advertisers turned up an unusual nugget of information: Drug dealers working inside houses and apartments in Richmond tended to keep television sets on day and night, with volume blaring, as background noise. So the advertisers designed 30-second ads that were silent.

The effect was arresting: In the sudden hush, television audiences would look up from their work, and there, in stark print, was that grim warning once again.

Before long, police officers began hearing suspects echo the Project Exile message. When cops found drugs and money but no guns, they would ask why. And suspects would tell them. They had heard of Project Exile with its lengthy sentences, unsympathetic judges and no parole, and they just were not willing to risk it.

Trying to ‘Keep It From Going Federal’

Richmond defense attorney Daniel Boone began to hear it too. When a client would come to him facing gun and drug charges, he said, “their first priority would be, ‘Can you keep it from going federal?’ ”

Meanwhile, federal prosecutions of violent drug dealers were becoming increasingly visible, amplifying the effect of the Martin Agency’s efforts. “Once someone gets locked up in Exile, word really starts getting around,” said Sgt. Shamus.

The Project Exile message was taking hold not just among those carrying illegal guns but among citizens who had long been scared silent by the brazen violence of outlaws like Baybay Bullock.

“Nobody’s crazy,” said Chief Oliver. “They see a guy taken down in a squad car and back on the street with a gun and a vengeance a few hours later. People just shut up and they lose confidence--in the police, in the system.”

But, he added, the community gains confidence when the Baybay Bullocks of Richmond “start going away and staying away.”

On the street, Exile was making guns disappear. Frequently, the guns were stowed behind bushes or with a girlfriend or in a nearby trash can. But that made those who owned them slower on the trigger, and murders--especially those related to the drug trade--were becoming less frequent.

Project Exile is not without its critics. David Baugh, a former federal prosecutor and now a Richmond defense attorney, is suing to block Project Exile. Applying federal procedures and penalties to local street-crime cases, he charges, is an unconstitutional intrusion of the federal government into states’ affairs. And in Richmond, he is alleging, it is racist too.

By applying federal gun laws almost exclusively to suspects arrested in Richmond, which is 60% African American, the police force and its federal partners effectively have singled out blacks for tougher treatment, Baugh said. And because federal juries are drawn from a broader regional area and not a defendant’s immediate community, African American suspects are more likely to face majority-white juries under Project Exile than they were in state criminal courts.

Little Resonance in Racism Charges

“I think it’s amazing that people sit there and claim this kind of power is used in a racially neutral manner,” said Baugh. “That is a joke.” The lawsuit is in a preliminary phase.

But in Richmond, the charges of racism appear to have had little resonance--even though almost 90% of those drawn into Project Exile are black. Oliver, who is African American, said that is because the victims of Richmond’s gun epidemic are overwhelmingly black. Among leaders and members of the minority community, Oliver added, there is a consensus that “we have to remove some of these parasites--whether black, white or indifferent--from the streets.”

Project Exile has succeeded in a small city in Virginia, where state laws on illegal gun possession were notoriously lax. But will it work in California, where gun laws often rival federal laws for toughness?

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the U.S. attorney for California’s central district, believes that in some form it will. But with jurisdiction over 175 cities from San Luis Obispo to Orange and a population of gang members on the order of 150,000, Mayorkas has no illusions about the limitations of plucking the program off the shelf.

“In California, things are quite different,” said Mayorkas. “The notion of Project Exile has to be modified to our jurisdiction.”

What will translate, he said, is Richmond’s “focused, intensified approach to the firearms problem.”

But if his efforts are to change gun-toting patterns in his jurisdiction, Mayorkas is convinced that his office also must imitate Project Exile’s unusual use of radio and television ads, billboards and business cards handed out on street corners by police.

For Baybay Bullock, the national appeal of Project Exile has mattered little. All he knew is that one day after a routine traffic stop in 1997, he was arrested on a charge of driver’s license forgery--a pesky distraction that might have forced him earlier to raise bail money and result in a short stay in a state penitentiary outside Richmond. He would have been back on the streets of Richmond’s Church Hill district in short order.

Within days of the 1997 arrest, however, federal and local investigators, working together, tied Bullock to an illegal gun--enough to draw him into the federal justice system under Project Exile. They then began building a federal case against him for at least three homicides--the two rival drug dealers at the busy intersection and an earlier murder in which Bullock picked up a competitor, drove him down a dead-end street and, within full view of several houses, shot him four times.

With Bullock off the streets for at least five years on a federal gun charge, witnesses “came out of the woodwork,” said Comey, whose office prosecuted the case.

In the end, prosecutors said, 100 witnesses were prepared to go on the record to convict Bullock. After years of operating with little fear of legal penalty, the 33-year-old was facing the prospect of a federal trial that could end in the death penalty.

Last February, Bullock pleaded guilty to the three murders. A federal judge sent him away--for life--to a high-security federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.