NEWARK OFFICIAL LIVING IN TRAILER AMID DRUG DEALERS

NEWARK -- A few blocks from a majestic cathedral lies one of the most
drug-infested corners in the city.

Open-air drug sales in front of the local bodega are common during
morning rush hour. Residents peek out worriedly from behind doors and
complain of gunshots.

The troubled neighborhood has become the summer home of Councilman
Cory Booker, a 31-year-old graduate of Stanford and Yale universities,
a Rhodes scholar, and a native of well-off Harrington Park. In May,
Booker moved into a 1987 motor home and planted it in front of a
housing project, daring drug dealers to continue their work under his
watch.

Booker's four-month trailer tour of the city's poorest, neediest
streets is the freshman councilman's latest, brashest attempt to
expose poverty and drive out crime simply by putting himself in the
middle of it.

Last summer, he slept in a tent outside one of the city's most violent
housing projects and fasted for 10 days until the city promised to
increase police presence and build a park for children. Fresh out of
law school in 1997, Booker moved to Newark and into Brick Towers, a
towering, low-income housing complex in one of the city's worst areas.

Rutgers University history professor Clement Price called Booker's
antics "rather unprecedented. They remind one of the dramatic
demonstrations of the 1960s when you would try to draw the moral outrage."

Booker is an earnest, philosophical sort who likes to name-drop and
quote heroes such as Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Tubman every few
minutes. He said he bypassed high-paying law jobs out of school to
move to Newark, feeling an obligation to share his privileged
background with the least privileged people he could find.

"There's not that much difference from me and the drug dealer on this
corner who looks like me, who's my same age," said Booker, a former
college football player who seems too big for the armchair inside his
Holiday Rambler with mauve interior. "Given the same opportunities
that I had, there'd be a dozen other Rhodes scholars on this corner
alone, probably."

Booker relied on the votes of many of the city's poorer residents to
unseat veteran councilman George Branch in 1998. While Branch won
roughly the same number of votes that he had every previous election,
Booker blanketed the housing projects to bring out new voters. He now
sees it as a mission to go to the most dangerous places in the city to
be there for residents.

"There are people who have to live in those environments. They have to
live with that fear and intimidation all the time," Booker said.

Booker's trailer cost between $20,000 and $30,000, raised through
private donations. In May, he drove it to the corner of Victoria
Avenue and Garside Street, just a few blocks from the Archdiocese of
Newark and the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

He painted over graffiti at a nearby convenience store, held a job
fair, and organized a neighborhood meeting. He went door to door and
asked residents what they needed -- safer streets, jobs, in one case a
new refrigerator.

"Everything calmed down a lot" after Booker arrived, said resident
Lydia Mendoza. Fewer crowds, which neighbors would usually associate
with drugs, filled the streets. "It'd be nice if they had him here all
the time," she said.

But Booker's critics, who include some neighborhood residents, say his
activism is more of a publicity stunt that produces no real results.
Booker's trailer didn't rid the neighborhood of drugs; it just moved
the drugs to another block, said one former resident.

"After a few weeks or a few months, it'll go back to the same," said
Daniel Mendoza, Lydia Mendoza's son and an admitted former drug dealer.

Magdalena Arington didn't raise Booker's hopes that residents would
empower themselves to make things better after he is gone. She said
she wasn't happy with the drug dealing, but had no plans to fight it.

"I just mind my business," she said.

Newark politicians have said Booker is merely trying to call attention
to himself to take him to the mayor's office in 2002, or perhaps a
higher office outside of Newark. A councilwoman once said that he
didn't actually live in Brick Towers, which produced a storm of phone
calls to her office from the residents at the housing project.

"Publicity stunts? You're darn right," Booker says proudly. "You've
got to attract attention to a problem sometimes to get something done
about it."

Of the charges that he lives elsewhere, he says, "One look at my messy
apartment and you can see it's very well lived in."

Booker says he is enjoying life in the trailer, which has a bedroom,
table for his laptop, extra beds for staffers who occasionally sleep
over, and a kitchen with a stove he has never used. Paring down
possessions and space makes life very simple, he says, and makes him
more focused on his goals.

He is undecided about his political future in Newark, but says he will
never leave. Although he enjoys the renaissance of the downtown, he
believes the city's ultimate comeback rests with its children. Until
that happens, he says, he's going to fight drugs, crime, slumlords,
and especially indifference.

"I'm going to put myself out there in scary ways," Booker said.