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Violent death of a Philly street legend: 'He ran out of lives'

'Capone,' they called Edwin Laboy in the Badlands, a North Philadelphia corner hustler with nine lives. He survived an assassination attempt when a notorious hit man sprayed bullets from an AK-47 into his car. He even lived after gang members kidnapped him and tried to pull out his teeth with pliers.

Tributes left to Edwin Laboy (inset) at the house where he died at the age of 46.
Tributes left to Edwin Laboy (inset) at the house where he died at the age of 46.Read moreEd Hille/Staff Photographer

"Capone," they called Edwin Laboy in the Badlands, a North Philadelphia corner hustler with nine lives.

He survived an assassination attempt when a notorious hit man sprayed bullets from an AK-47 into his car. He even lived after gang members kidnapped him and tried to pull out his teeth with pliers.

But last month, Laboy, 46, whose street name echoed through the underworld for nearly three decades, met his end in the city's most violent homicide of the year. Authorities said a schizophrenic with a shotgun fired at five people inside a Kensington rowhouse, leaving three of them - a mother of three, a 46-year-old laborer, and Laboy - dead on the floor.

How and why Laboy ended up in the rampage remains largely a mystery, even after his accused killer, James Elijah Dickson, 46, was held for trial last week.

But his past, as illustrated by interviews with current and former police officers, prosecutors, and court records, shows that Laboy was at home around the rougher corners of Philadelphia, an urban desperado who often inflamed the city's most violent streets.

"He lived his whole life that way, and was always able to duck successfully or hide behind a steel wheel to keep the rounds from hitting him," said Brian King, a retired Philadelphia police officer who patrolled Capone's turf for years. "But this time . . . he ran out of lives."

King met Capone around 1989, when Laboy was a gangly twenty-something slinging cocaine at the corner of Philip and Ontario Streets in North Philadelphia.

Capone and his crew called themselves the ATT gang, King said, for "At the Top." Laboy had the letters tattooed on his arm.

Over the next 25 years, court records show, Laboy was arrested dozens of times. In 1999, he was tried for murder in a death-penalty case.

Prosecutors accused him of shooting a member of a rival drug crew, 16-year-old Michael Torres, eight times while Torres was in the driver's seat of a parked car, court testimony shows. Eyewitnesses at trial, including the victim's sister, identified Laboy as the killer.

But Louis Savino, Laboy's lawyer at the time, said last week that jurors found reasonable doubt in the testimony of those witnesses. Laboy was found not guilty on all counts.

Despite constant run-ins with police, Laboy apparently found little use in talking to the authorities. During another man's murder trial in 2013, Laboy testified that participating in that case could have consequences for him.

"When the word get out, I'm done in Philadelphia," he said in court. When pressed by Assistant District Attorney Lorraine Donnelly, he added, "My life will be in danger."

In 1992, King said, Laboy was at a nightclub owned by two brothers who were gang members from 18th and Wallace Streets. Apparently Laboy and his friends got into an argument with the owners' sister, and he took things a step too far.

"He makes the fatal mistake of slapping her in the face in front of everybody," King said.

The brothers later recruited a woman to seduce Laboy, King said. When the two went out on what he thought was a date, the brothers abducted Laboy, bound his wrists, ankles, and face with duct tape, then tortured him throughout the night, according to King.

"One brother had a pair of pliers," King said. "He broke off maybe half a dozen of his teeth - broke them into pieces."

King and his partner drove to Laboy's hospital room to check on him. His captivity had left a mark.

"Any time he talked or smiled, you'd see his teeth," King said. "And they were a bloody mess."

In 1997, a different rival sought a deadlier form of retribution.

Jose "Little Bert" DeJesus, an infamous North Philadelphia hit man, was feuding with Laboy, King said. On June 30, 1997, DeJesus camped out on the second floor of a house in Fairhill and waited for Laboy's car to go by.

When he saw it, DeJesus unloaded 16 rounds from his AK-47 toward the vehicle. He didn't know that Laboy had just sold the car to a man named Carlos Martinez, who was killed behind the wheel.

Little Bert "thought he was shooting at Mr. Capone," Assistant District Attorney Carlos Vega said at DeJesus' 1998 trial.

DeJesus was convicted and is on death row for that murder and three others he committed in the 1990s.

Laboy managed to escape his wrath, but danger was bound to emerge again.

Last month, authorities say, it arrived in the form of a mentally ill man with a shotgun.

Levi Almonte, Laboy, and a few others were hanging out with James Dickson at his house on the 600 block of East Westmoreland Street on April 15, Almonte recalled last week.

Dickson was showing off his shotgun, Almonte said, when Laboy - apparently wary of Dickson - took the weapon and emptied out the slugs.

"Capone didn't feel safe enough," Almonte, 25, testified during Dickson's preliminary hearing Tuesday. "He thought [Dickson] was going to do something dumb."

Dickson, angry with Laboy, kicked everyone out, Almonte said. But the group returned the next night, a Saturday, to hang out, drink beer, and smoke blunts.

Dickson probably should not have been attending parties, let alone hosting them - and he certainly should not have had a gun.

He has served 14 years in prison for three separate cases, according to court records and the Department of Corrections, including sexual assault convictions in 1994 for carjacking a van and raping the woman inside, and in 2006 for restraining, raping, and beating his ex-girlfriend after breaking into her house.

He was released from prison for the latter offense in January 2013 but violated his probation at least three times, court records show. At one point he was sent back to prison for a year.

Since August, his probation had been supervised by the Philadelphia County Adult Probation Mental Health Unit. Dickson's nephew Jervazz Ballard said that his uncle was a schizophrenic who had been prescribed medication - but that no one was checking to see that he took it.

"He didn't have no supervision," said Ballard, adding that the condition worsened if Dickson smoked or drank alcohol. "My uncle was off his rocker. The illness and the high were a bad combination."

Martin O'Rourke, spokesman for the First Judicial District, which oversees the mental health unit, said Monday that he could not comment on the case because it is still being adjudicated.

As the party at Dickson's house burned into Sunday morning, Almonte said, Dickson - angry from an argument - went upstairs and began screaming:

"Intruder! Intruder!"

Within seconds, the low-key gathering became a horrifying bloodbath.

Dickson, standing at the top of the steps, shot Kenneth Stowe in the first-floor living room, Almonte testified, then came downstairs and unloaded his shotgun at the others.

Three people - including Almonte, his brother, and Laboy's adult son Ziyon - escaped the melee, Almonte said. Stowe was shot in the head and body while trying to protect Christine Chromiak, 33, according to prosecutors. Dickson subsequently shot Chromiak, the mother of three, in the head, authorities say.

On the dining room floor, police found Dickson's third victim: Capone. He was pronounced dead right there.

The victims' injuries were horrific: Stowe's only sibling, Sharonda, said she had to identify her brother - a kindhearted laborer and father of two - through his fingerprints.

When one of the surviving victims, Joel Almonte, 23, looked through a photo array for homicide detectives after the crime, he scrawled a message across Dickson's mug shot:

He shot Capone in the head.

Ballard, Dickson's nephew, said relatives were numb after learning of Dickson's alleged acts.

"We knew he had schizophrenia, but we didn't know it would go to that extreme," Ballard said. "That illness, it really took its toll that day. It took its toll in a very, very bad way."

Sharonda Stowe wonders how Dickson - with his violent criminal history and court-ordered supervision - was around to kill her brother.

"This is my question: Why was he even out?" she asked. "Why was he even out on the streets, if they knew all of this was going on?"

Where Dickson finds himself now is a far cry from where he said he wanted to be in a court filing in 2013.

"I just want to prove to my family, and society," he wrote, "that I can live a normal life like anyone else."

At Dickson's preliminary hearing on May 17, the right side of the courtroom gallery was nearly filled with Chromiak's and Stowe's relatives.

Capone, it appeared, went unrepresented by family or friends.

But about six miles north, where Laboy spent his life hustling, plotting, surviving, conspiring, a handcrafted banner hung on the porch of the house where he died.

"CAPONE," it read, in black marker. "Gone but never forgotten!"

cpalmer@phillynews.com

215-854-2817

@cs_palmer