No remorse for ‘Little Melvin’

He had lots of time to study while he was doing a quarter-century behind bars for heroin trafficking.

He was, as described here Monday, part of the original cast of outlaws spreading drugs big time across Baltimore and simultaneously gaining such street credibility that political and military figures asked him to help halt the 1968 riots here — and a man who now says he’s opening a learning center for area youngsters.

He was “Little Melvin,” a legend who’d made a few hundred grand by the time he was 15 hustling pool and shooting dice. When an undercover cop spotted him one time at an after-hours joint, he took Melvin home and told his mother, “Ma’am, did you know your son was betting?”

“Sure, I knew,” said Williams’ mother. “I give him the money every morning so he can play. He always wins.”

But it wasn’t just crap-shooting. Twice in a row, he bet $100 on the street number and hit. Each earned a $70,000 payoff. When he went to collect the money, from the legendary Block figure Julius “Lord” Salisbury, the two men hit it off. Salisbury, says Williams, “never” dealt in drugs. But he knew out-of-town people who helped Williams with a new career.

Half a century ago, in a segregated city with cruel economic limits for black people, Williams found his openings. By the time he was 21, he’d been arrested for assault, auto theft, handgun violations. The cops said he was dealing drugs, but they never made a case against him until 1967, when Baltimore police Sgt. Lawrence Winecke put his hand into Williams’ coat pocket and came out with 16 capsules of heroin.

“He planted it,” Williams screamed then, and maintains to this day. Twenty years after the arrest, when “The Wire” creator David Simon wrote about Williams in The Sun, law enforcement sources expressed their own doubts about the case’s legitimacy.

But nobody heard from Sgt. Winecke or a federal drug agent who worked the case. Winecke, facing his own corruption charges, committed suicide. And the federal agent was convicted of shaking down a drug suspect.

“So that was that,” Williams was saying the other day. He sat inside a North Avenue warehouse he’s converting to a learning center called Correct Choice, where youngsters can learn computers and self-defense. Williams intends to deliver anti-drug lectures there. He’s also finishing his memoirs, “American Gangster, Retired.”

“They wanted to call me a drug dealer,” says Williams, “so I was gonna be the biggest drug dealer anybody ever saw. I sold more than anyone. I did it in anger.”

“What about the lives that were destroyed along the way?” he was asked.

“I ain’t got no remorse,” Williams said. “Those people who set me up — when do they take responsibility? All the legally wonderful people who watched a kid go to jail who might have discovered the next miracle? Where’s their remorse?”

The next 40 years were a blur of drugs and money and imprisonment. He met with major East Coast heroin importers. Each kilo would cost him $75,000. He says he bought 40 — and sold them for $200,000 a kilo. This was just a start.

His street legend was so strong that, when the Baltimore riots erupted after the 1968 killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., there came a knock on Williams’ door on the fourth morning of fire and rage. In walked National Guard Gen. George Gelston, state Sen. Clarence Mitchell III, and Police Maj. William “Box” Harris.

“We think you can help stop the rioting,” they said. “We’ll give you a bullhorn and a bullet-proof vest.”

“I’ll take the bullhorn,” Williams says he told them. “Give the vest to Senator Mitchell.”

That afternoon, as thousands stood at Pennsylvania Avenue and Mosher Street, Williams told the crowd that they’d expressed their rage, they’d made their point — and now it was time go home.

The streets quickly emptied, and that day the riots were over.

On the front page of the next day’s News American newspaper, there was a beaming Gen. Gelston standing with Williams.

But, one week later, there was Williams, arrested again, part of a revolving-door, 40-year pattern.