The scourge of Pope's Hill

The Dorchester neighborhood was a quiet place to live until an ex-con named Charles Finnin changed all that, residents say. But that's not the end of the story.

The super-syllabic Westglow-Auriga-Ashmont-Garner Neighborhood Crime Watch did not exist until a man named Charles Finnin came to town.

In 2005, Finnin joined a quiet Dorchester neighborhood of laborers and teachers, young mothers and retirees, and, residents say, later subverted it with his own professional credentials: accomplished ex-con.

From his dwelling at 49 Garner Road, neighbors say, Finnin and his posse non grata were hard to miss.

Day and night, they say, cars would pull up for pit stops at the disheveled house, and it probably wasn't to admire the architecture, as it featured chipped front steps and a faded exterior shedding paint chips. Too, a rash of breaking-and-enterings buzzed through the neighborhood, a crime wave they attributed to a Finnin associate who was caught wandering about a neighbor's yard around 8:30 one morning.

When the resident asked what he was doing there, according to a police report, he allegedly replied: "I'm looking for work." In response, neighbors pulled their children in from playing ball. They shuttered bedroom windows cracked open to catch the nighttime breeze.

But residents also fortified, and formed the crime watch. A tip to police led to a raid on 49 Garner. There, police hauled away Finnin after seizing drugs, ammunition, and a gun.

This past March, a cell door slammed on Finnin for his 18-month sentence. For good measure, a judge tacked on an order for the 38-year-old Finnin to stay clear of Garner Road, as the DA and neighbors had asked.

Case closed.

Or is it? With a longtime Finnin friend and former Garner Road habitue still lurking in the margins, a surrogate Scourge of Pope's Hill may be just waiting to take over.

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley says that all it takes is one person - sometimes compounded by the collateral crumbums he or she attracts - to menace a neighborhood.

"A single individual who is not conforming to the rules of civilized society . . . can really wreak havoc on a neighborhood," Conley says in a phone interview.

In the 1990s, a 6-foot-6-inch towering terror named Victor Morales visited mayhem and murder on the people of Villa Victoria. The courts ultimately removed him from the streets of the South End.

More recently, a 47-year-old woman named Donna Pimental (or Donna Ferguson, Gina Gillis, or Elaine Reilly, among her seven aliases) - she of the 10-page rap sheet - more than made her presence known on Ridge Street in Roslindale.

After she and some pit bulls squared off against police there, records show, Pimental in January was convicted of resisting arrest. As a condition of probation, she was told to keep away from the house on Ridge Street.

In a recent open letter published in the South End News, Conley lauded the good people of Pope's Hill for not falling prey to fear or indifference.

"Community involvement," he wrote, "is an invaluable tool in our efforts to reduce crime and increase our shared quality of life."

Residents describe Pope's Hill as a peaceful place where folks still pass their houses on to their children.

By the time Charles Finnin and longtime friend Edwin Lopez moved in, the pair had already established themselves as peripatetic troublemakers.

Finnin had been provisionally banned from Boston Common in 2005 after being convicted of attacking a stranger there the year before, according to court documents.

The victim told police that Finnin and another man set upon him while he sat on a bench, repeatedly punched him in the face, and stole his cellphone and $20.

The 30-year-old Lopez, meanwhile, had bounced around from community to community - and courthouse to courthouse.

In 1997 it was Roxbury, and a conviction on charges of smashing a victim's head into a sidewalk, records say. That same year, he was found guilty of larceny in Brookline.

A decade later, he was successfully prosecuted for breaking into a home in Brockton.

But it was Finnin whom residents saw as the ringleader of the Garner Road rogues.

"It's like a crew of transients, staying a day or two, coming and going," is how 49 Garner is described by Philip Carver, a 39-year-old crime-watch member who heads the Pope's Hill Neighborhood Association.

"Their level of creepiness is equal. But the one who had the gun was more disconcerting."

The live-in owner of 49 Garner says he has known Finnin for years through a local family and that he is a responsible and respectful man who helped him around the house and made the sign of the cross when he passed a cemetery.

"I can't find deep fault with Charles Finnin," says Gerard O'Regan, 53, who, as he sat in his kitchen below a picture of Jesus, acknowledged Finnin's penchant for smoking marijuana. "He's basically a good person."

O'Regan says Finnin was misunderstood by the neighborhood.

"I think he's a victim of his friends more than anything," says O'Regan.

O'Regan points the finger at Lopez, not Finnin, and attributes the late-night traffic at his door to another Finnin associate he describes as an insatiable lady's man.

O'Regan says he booted Lopez and the other guy from his home, but resisted the neighborhood's entreaties to evict Finnin.

"Charles needed a place to live," O'Regan says. "Even though I didn't like it, I wasn't about to throw him out just for weed."

Residents say the crew at 49 Garner turned a tranquil place into the speedway at Loudon, responding with threats when asked to slow down.

But rather than recoil and run, neighbors say they turned even more vigilant through their crime watch, one of more than 600 in the city.

They jotted down license plate numbers and detailed descriptions of suspects, and passed the information to police. They kept neighbors informed of potentially nefarious goings-on via phone calls and e-mails. They stayed abreast of complicated court proceedings.

"They accomplished a lot by working together," says Joseph Porcelli, a program coordinator with the Boston Police Department's Neighborhood Crime Watch Unit who offered strategies to the Garner Road area group.

Too often, says Porcelli, residents resist calling police when they see something less than a violent incident go down because they feel the cops have bigger crimes to chase.

But it was such a simple act - a call to the cops - that eventually led police to Finnin's Garner Road bedroom.

A year ago this month, police were summoned to Garner Road after Edwin "I'm looking for work" Lopez was found snooping around yards there with a folding knife in his rear pocket. Lopez gave a false name but was arrested anyway.

A week later, he was back on the street, back at 49 Garner Road. Police came there looking to arrest him on outstanding warrants out of Brockton and Stoughton.

According to a police report, Police collared Lopez and then followed the smell of marijuana.

Under Finnin's mattress, police did not find a comic-book collection, but instead a rifle. In a nightstand drawer, they discovered 70 rounds of ammunition. Police also recovered marijuana.

Though Finnin told police the gun and ammo belonged to Lopez, he later pleaded guilty to the weapons and drug charges.

In a practice typically employed by personal victims, the crime watch submitted an "impact statement" to the court, saying: "We implore you to not allow Charles to return to our neighborhood."

As part of his sentence, Finnin was banned from returning to Garner Road for several years at the risk of returning to jail.

As for Lopez, though he is currently incarcerated in Plymouth County on the Brockton B&E conviction, his criminal history shows he has been able to slide in and out of jail as easily as if he were playing Monopoly.

Near Garner Road, residents say calm has been restored with Finnin gone.

But they are now feeling edgy about Lopez - who was quoted in a 2006 Boston police report as saying he was looking to buy a gun - and many crime-watch members declined to be interviewed, saying they worried about retribution.

His return, they say, could mean the difference between quiet and chaos, so they vow to stay strong against what they see as evildoing.

"If you don't stop it, before you know it, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger," says John Schneiderman, a 57-year-old letter carrier and crime-watch member who raised his family on Ashmont Street.

"Then people say, 'I'm selling my house, I'm getting out of here.' "

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com.