At Syracuse mayor's request, Salvation Army rehab center agrees to stop welcoming addicts from Newark.
View full sizeLeRoy Jennings during a Dec. 1, 2002, court appearance, after he was charged in the torture slaying of Walter Perry. Jennings came from Newark, N.J., with a one-way bus ticket to join a drug rehab program run by the Salvation Army in Syracuse. He is serving 25 years to life in Attica.By Michelle Breidenbach and John O’Brien / The Post-Standard
Syracuse, NY -- Long before police discovered the migration of heroin addicts from New Jersey to rehab in Syracuse, there was the case of LeRoy Jennings.
Jennings came to Syracuse from New Jersey to recover from alcohol addiction at the Salvation Army counseling center on Erie Boulevard East. He dropped out of the evangelical program and crashed at the apartment of his new friend, Walter Perry, the bell captain at the Hotel Syracuse.
After about two months, in February 2002, Jennings walked into a neighboring apartment with a 22-ounce beer and a hand swollen like a grapefruit. He was singing gospel hymns and asking for prayers, witnesses said.
Jennings bought a one-way bus ticket back to Newark.
Police found Perry dead in his apartment. His arms and legs were hogtied behind his back with electrical wire. His mouth was sealed with duct tape. He had been beaten, gagged, burned and cut. Police thought he had been tortured for a week.
Jennings pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and is spending 25 years to life in Attica prison.
The investigation took Syracuse police and attorneys to Newark and the Salvation Army, but the isolated murder case did not tip police off to the bigger picture.
A minister in Newark, N.J., had been buying one-way tickets for hundreds of drug addicts to get to the Salvation Army’s alcohol and drug rehab program in Syracuse, 230 miles away. The Rev. Anthony Hawthorne, from New Hope Baptist Church, said he would pitch the idea to the homeless drug addicts who came to the church’s free lunch program.
Many people who went through the program have recovered and set up successful new lives in Syracuse. But only about 20 percent of people finish, according to the Salvation Army, and some return to drugs.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department charged 17 people from New Jersey in connection with a major heroin pipeline.
The drug dealers saw Syracuse as a business opportunity and they boldly sold drugs at the public library and outside another drug rehab center, two blocks from Syracuse police headquarters, investigators said.
There have been new developments:
• Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner asked the Salvation Army to stop taking referrals from the outreach groups at the heart of the investigation. The agency agreed.
• The Justice Department discovered that all 17 of the people arrested were from New Jersey. Prosecutors and Salvation Army officials said three went through the Salvation Army drug program and at least three others have a family connection to the program.
• One of the men arrested, Derrick Campbell, came to the Salvation Army drug rehab program after serving three years in prison in New Jersey for his seventh felony drug conviction.
“In my 18 years as a prosecutor, I’ve never seen a defendant with seven prior felony drug convictions,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Katko said at a detention hearing last week. “He’s used to the revolving door of justice in New Jersey. He’s used to short sentences, then getting out on probation or parole and he’s back at it again.”
• Until Miner’s request, the Salvation Army continued to take people from New Jersey and other states last week and took no responsibility for bringing drug activity to Syracuse. Staff said they did not do criminal background checks and instead relied on the drug addicts to reveal any past crimes.
Salvation Army staff said, in a written statement, that they had not had any contact with federal prosecutors and had no knowledge of the incidents except the information in the newspaper.
Rehab to heroin
Two of the former Salvation Army addicts — Geneva Brown, 52, and Derrick Campbell,
35 — were identified in court as playing a lead role in the heroin-dealing conspiracy.
Brown entered the Salvation Army rehab center in 2000 while she was on probation from a drug charge in New Jersey, her lawyer said. She owns a home at 115 John St. in Syracuse from which multiple sales were made to undercover police informants wearing hidden microphones, Katko said.
Brown’s son, Salaam Brown, 27, came to Syracuse because of her, and he was charged in the heroin-selling conspiracy, Katko said.
Campbell went into the Salvation Army rehab center in 2000 after serving three years in prison in New Jersey for his seventh felony drug conviction.
Campbell took over a leadership role after another defendant, Keyfa Sampson, had to step back in January because police raided her home and found large amounts of heroin, Katko said.
Her father, Joseph Sampson, came from New Jersey for the Salvation Army’s drug rehab program. In 2004, he was charged in Syracuse with illegally possessing a pistol as a convicted felon.
Keyfa Sampson, 28, worked at the Salvation Army’s warehouse until recently, when she went out on maternity leave to give birth to her fourth child, said her lawyer, James Medcraf. She came to Syracuse in 2002 to be near her father. Two years ago, she became a large-scale heroin dealer, Katko said.
Her cousin and another defendant, Darleen Sampson, is a spokeswoman for Narcotics Anonymous and is scheduled to attend the group’s national convention in Florida in July, her lawyer Craig Schlanger told U.S. Magistrate George Lowe on Friday. The judge gave permission for her to attend the convention.
Sampson came to Syracuse from New Jersey about eight years ago for the Salvation Army’s rehab center, Schlanger said.
Open door in Syracuse
The Salvation Army continued last week to accept drug addicts from New Jersey and other states, said Maj. Kevin Schoch, who runs the rehab center.
The agency also took no responsibility for what happens if they flunk out of rehab.
“We can encourage them, and we can hold them accountable while they’re here,” Schoch said. “But ultimately, when they walk out that door, like anybody else from anywhere else, they’re going to make their own choices.”
The rehab center screens people who enter the program, he said. They are asked
about any legal issues that might prevent them from leaving their hometown for seven months, he said.
Hawthorne also said he interviewed people before he sent them to Syracuse to ensure they were suitable for the facility. He said he would not, for example, send an addict who also had a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia. He also asked people about their criminal backgrounds and would contact probation or parole officers to see if they could get a pass to come to Syracuse. Hawthorne said he would relay that information to the intake officer in Syracuse.
The rehab program has no government oversight and receives no government money, he said.
One-third of the Erie Boulevard East rehab center’s beds are filled with people from New Jersey. That’s about 100 people a year.
The Salvation Army does not follow up with people after the program.
And regardless of the high drop-out rate, the Salvation Army staff did not see a reason to tell police about the people they were importing to Syracuse — even though the police chief is on the Salvation Army’s advisory board.
“I don’t see it as our responsibility to tell the police department, just as when folks are moving from one community to another they are not required to do that,” Schoch said.
The program supports itself. The people in the program work 40 hours a week at the Salvation Army warehouse and at the rehab center without pay, helping the agency generate annual revenues of more than $6 million at its thrift stores.
Rehabilitating people from their addictions has been a part of the Salvation Army’s ministry as a church since the late 1800s, Schoch said. Many of the people who graduate from the program return for Sunday church services at the rehab center, he said. Others attend services at the local Salvation Army’s church, the Citadel.
“The most important thing is the need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” Schoch said. “Some people come and they know it’s a Christ-based program, but they act like they’re surprised when they get here. And sometimes people don’t want to listen.”
Mayor seeks 'balance'
Syracuse police Chief Frank Fowler said he is working with prosecutors to address the issue of New Jersey addicts being bused to Syracuse, but he declined to give specifics.
Miner on Thursday called the Salvation Army and asked that they suspend accepting people from the agencies at the heart of the investigation.
She said rehab centers should also be open to people from outside the area, but she does not think the Syracuse agency should be recruiting people from Newark.
“That’s what I think we have to ascertain, where the balance is,” she said.
She also said she did not think the onus should be on the Salvation Army to decide that people are not going to be rehabilitated.
“They are a rehabilitation center and so they should be rehabilitating people,” she said. “Just because somebody drops out of a rehabilitation program does not mean that they will become a drug dealer or does not mean that they will stay in Syracuse and set up a heroin ring.”
After speaking with Miner, Salvation Army officials agreed to temporarily stop accepting people into the rehab program from any New Jersey organization in the criminal investigation, Schoch said. That will continue at least until the investigation is over, he said.
“We determined that was a reasonable request on the part of the city,” Schoch said.
He would not identify which organizations that would include, but said no one from those entities was in the program now or scheduled to start at the rehab center.
In recent years, the number of people enrolled in the program through New Hope Baptist Church in Newark has been sporadic, Schoch said. When it started 10 years ago, as many as 15 people a week were bused from Newark to Syracuse, according to the minister who got the program started.
Contact Michelle Breidenbach at mbreidenbach@syracuse.com or (315) 470-3186 and John O’Brien at jobrien@syracuse.com or 470-2187.