What's old is news again

Man, this is getting old.

Police arrest a woman turning tricks along a patch of Dorchester Avenue. At 50, Maxine Jones is eligible for an AARP card.

On Boston Common, the authorities bust a man allegedly dealing crack cocaine who tries to flee by vaulting a fence. But Quinton Adkins and his 51-year-old legs can't outrun the cops.

In Dudley Square, patrol officers say they spy a guy buying small bags of crack in broad daylight. When they approach, records show, the guy drops the drugs and tries to kick them under a parked car. Richard Smith is a spry 78, but still gets collared.

While the public fixates on what's perceived as an explosion of youths committing crimes, older people in Boston are quietly racking up their own arrests like there's no tomorrow.

Though arrests don't equal offenses, the stats are telling:

From 2002 through 2006, Boston police statistics show a 23 percent rise in arrests of those 40 and over for Part I crimes -- homicide, rape and attempted rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft. During the same period, arrests in every other age bracket -- 13 and under, 14 to 19, 20 to 24, and 25 to 39 -- declined, though some by only 1 or 2 percent.

Last year, the 1,764 arrests of those 40 and over for Part I crimes even outpaced the 1,641 of those 14 to 19, and the 1,323 of those 20 to 24, though still lagging behind the 2,683 arrests logged by those 25 to 39.

For those 50 and older, arrests in all categories have climbed, from 1,039 in 2004 to 1,152 in 2005, then to 1,328 in 2006.

Many of those suspects didn't passively pad into the crime books.

From '02 through '06, the number of those 40 and older arrested for violent offenses spiked 27 percent. The number of arrestees 50 and older booked for violent crimes went up even higher, 29 percent from 2004 to 2006.

Boston Police Department spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll attributes part of the increase in arrests to officers getting better at catching career criminals. For example, crackdowns on breaking-and-enterings within the past year, she says, led to the capture of veteran burglars.

For criminologist James Alan Fox and others, those numbers flow from a convergence of factors.

First, there's sheer demographics: The baby boomers, the uber-population group of more than 75 million born between 1946 and '64, are now all on the other side of 40.

And every 18 seconds another boomer is turning 50, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service.

In addition, folks generally are living longer. Not for nothing did a New York state prison last year open a dementia wing for its "cognitively impaired" inmates.

Also driving the surge in venerable delinquency are the surviving hard-core participants of the crack-cocaine turf wars from back in the day, says Fox.

As young players, they helped impel the crime rates of the '80s. Now coming out of prison and carrying felony raps and rehabilitation gaps, some of these cons, Fox and others say, are contributing to the current crime swell among those 40 and over, including gang graybeards trying to reclaim their old turf from younger thugs.

Law enforcement authorities and social service agencies try to peacefully reconnect ex-cons to their communities through substance-abuse programs, education, jobs, housing.

Still, the criminals continue to scale the barriers of time.

"As they're aging," says Fox, Lipman Family professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, "it's like a wave that will continue to move along the life course."

At the Suffolk County courthouse, District Attorney Daniel Conley 's docket is flecked with members of the tarnished golden-age club.

There's Michael Hart, 50, sentenced to life in prison, plus 10 years, in April for slashing his ex-girlfriend's throat, and then fatally knifing her 67-year-old friend as he rushed in to help.

And 61-year-old Dane Allen "the Mole" Brun, spotted by police early this spring allegedly up to no good in his old neighborhood, according to the Suffolk DA.

Court records say Brun is known to officers for breaking into houses, with a recent conviction in 2005. Police arrested him March 27 for trespassing after they say they saw him peering into a rear window in an Allston alleyway. After discovering he was out on a prerelease program from the Suffolk County House of Correction, the DA says, Brun was put back behind bars.

Brianne Fitzgerald, now a public health nurse for the New England AIDS Education and Training Center in Boston, says it's been her experience dealing with older patients over the years that few of them are turning to crime for the first time as they mature in age.

Most involved in illicit behavior, she says, are old-time hustlers still trying to get over even as they get older.

"They're lifers, not converts," Fitzgerald says.

Many have perfected their own senior scams to augment fixed incomes, outreach workers say.

Some sell their prescription pain pills for money or illegal drugs.

Others let prostitutes use their senior housing units as trick pads in exchange for cash or sex.

"They've always dabbled in the underground economy," Fitzgerald says.

Take the three cases cited up top. Court records show that before their recent encounters with the law, Jones, Smith and Adkins had all been charged with criminal offenses through the years.

As police officers worked to prevent teenagers from getting dragged into prostitution, cops also tried to keep 50-year-old Maxine Jones from selling her body on the Dot Ave. drag.

When a couple of undercover cops spotted her soliciting customers on Dot Ave., Jones had already pleaded guilty to prostitution charges. She'd been specifically ordered eight months earlier to stay off the avenue.

But there was Jones working the street again one October night in 2005. She was so eager to turn a trick, records show, that she started dropping her drawers before it dawned on her that the guy she was hoping to do business with for $20 behind a building was a Boston police officer in plainclothes.

Jones, who told authorities she was unemployed, pleaded guilty to sexual conduct for a fee and was placed on probation.

She could not be reached for comment at the address listed in court documents.

In one of her mug shots, Jones was missing a front tooth.

Of Jones's continued life as a prostitute, says Doris Gilliam, an HIV-prevention specialist, "At 50? Come on now. At 50 years old, you're talking about arthritis and osteoporosis and menopause."

During her work with the now-defunct Women's Awareness Resource project, Gilliam says, the oldest prostitutes she dealt with were in their 40s.

A 50-year-old, she says, is working the streets for the same reason as younger women.

"Trying to survive," says Gilliam. "Paying her bills."

Richard Smith had been on the run from a 1994 charge of possessing crack when, records show, cops watched the 78-year-old allegedly score the drug from a younger man at Ruggles and Washington streets on April 2.

The following day, records show, an arrest warrant was issued after Smith skipped out on court, again.

Smith did not respond to two written interview requests left at the subsidized senior-citizen complex where he lives in Roxbury.

His booking-sheet photograph shows an elderly man sporting bushy gray eyebrows who describes himself as retired.

In February, Quinton Adkins was indicted in Suffolk Superior Court for allegedly distributing crack on the Common. According to a police report, Adkins stored the drugs inside his mouth while awaiting customers.

Adkins, who described his occupation as "disabled," pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Two years before, he was convicted and put on probation for dealing to an undercover officer in Chinatown; the charge involved a $30 plastic bag of crack that he had spit from his mouth.

Court records show that Adkins had been playing an elusive game, changing his name, his birth date, even his Social Security number to confuse the authorities.

But this time, Adkins could not run from his past.

In an April 26 filing, his lawyer informed the court that Adkins had been diagnosed with gastric cancer, and was living "hour to hour" without hope of recovery.

On May 1, records show, the aging crack slinger died young, at 52.

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com