Peter Hermann's "Crime Scenes" is a reported feature that provides context about many of the incidents that take place on the streets of Baltimore and beyond.
The last shots in the decades-long feud between the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys might have been fired years ago. Arrests, violent deaths and attrition have rendered these once-notorious neighborhood groups nothing more than street-corner legend.
Graffiti and tennis shoes that once hung from power lines marking turf no longer mar the urban landscape that defines North Baltimore's Pen Lucy neighborhood, though its main street, Old York Road, remains a desolate, narrow passageway lined with empty, gated storefronts, one where a South Korean merchant was killed in a robbery in 1997.
"It's been a tremendous change," said Robert Nowlin, a longtime outspoken community activist who remembers bullets being fired into his house years ago in a failed attempt to keep him quiet.
But in recent weeks, the names of the thought-to-be-defunct groups have resurfaced - in connection with a death off York Road in McCabe Avenue Boys' territory and in a federal drug indictment - raising questions about a comeback.
Last month, a 19-year-old man was fatally stabbed in the chest during a brawl on Tunbridge Road in what police described as retaliation for an earlier attack. The four-paragraph police charging document refers to a gang "from McCabe Avenue" and the victim's "gang friends."
Earlier this year, federal authorities busted a prison-based gang called the Black Guerrilla Family, and the indictment references the Pen Lucy groups. Authorities said BGF corrupted prison officers and tried to take over the city's lucrative drug markets.
Eric Brown, whom police identify as the BGF leader, had been a member of the McCabe Avenue Boys. He joined or formed the bigger, more violent and more organized gang while he was imprisoned on drug charges from a 1992 shooting that left two people dead and six others wounded on Old York Road.
Brown had been charged with murder, but two other men were found guilty in the killings - which claimed the lives of a gang member and a city worker caught in the crossfire - and were each sentenced to 30 years in prison. Murder charges against Brown were dismissed, but an ensuing investigation resulted in drug charges that landed him a 25-year prison sentence.
