DEADLY SEDUCTION

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

It is hard to imagine Nushawn Williams, 21, as the sort of young man in possession of a facility with the opposite sex. However, in the desolate housing projects of Brooklyn's Crown Heights section and the depressed pockets of rural Chautauqua County in western New York, the crack dealer collected female admirers with displays of bravado, promises of jewelry, a willingness to steal a coat if a girl found herself too cold. "It don't take much, you know. These girls don't have much," explains Lakeesha Moore, a former New York City neighbor of Williams'. "He had money, and he'd buy them things, take them out sometimes. Talk to them."

Slick men often leave vulnerable women with broken hearts, but Williams left his many girlfriends in danger of far worse. According to Chautauqua health officials, Williams is the source of a near epidemic of HIV in the county of 141,000 and has caused the greatest public health crisis the area has ever faced. Since learning that he was HIV-positive in September 1996, Williams has had sex with dozens of young women in and around Jamestown, N.Y., and also in New York City, apparently without ever using protection or disclosing his condition.

So far, Chautauqua health officials have identified 110 people in the area who had sex with Williams or with partners of his. Nine of his partners, girls and young women ranging in age from 13 to 22, are known to be infected with HIV. Moreover, Williams, who is in prison on a drug conviction in New York City, gave health officials the names of 19 of the 50 to 75 city women he claims to have slept with during the past 14 months.

It was medical detective work that enabled Chautauqua County health officials to identify Williams as a sexual predator. In August, health commissioner Robert Berke found he had a sixth case in five months of a young girl who tested positive for HIV. The county had recorded only 50 AIDS cases since the disease began to spread in the 1980s. Although Williams used 18 aliases, including names such as Face and JoJo, caseworkers went back to the six women and eventually figured out that they'd all had sex with the same man. Because of confidentiality laws in New York designed to protect people with HIV, Berke had to get a court order to publicize Williams' name so that more women could come forward for testing.

While parts of Chautauqua are serene, Jamestown is a small, beaten-down city where for years drugs and homelessness have made their mark. Authorities say Williams moved to the community in 1995 to see family and allegedly to sell narcotics. A self-proclaimed member of the Bloods street gang and widely disliked by his Brooklyn neighbors, Williams has eight arrests and three convictions behind him. In Jamestown he seems to have used his urban of-the-street credibility to impress the disaffected girls he picked up in local parks. Chautauqua investigators believe in some cases Williams may have bartered drugs for sex. (Williams' grandmother Eleanor McCrae told the Buffalo News she believed he contracted HIV from a homosexual in a youth detention facility in New York City.)

One of the Jamestown girls who fell hard is Amber Arnold, 18, who dated Williams for a year. Awaiting her HIV test results, Arnold harbors little regret about the relationship: "I just want people to know that even though he did know that he had it and he did this to a lot of people, he is not a monster." Starteisha Hood, 16, says Williams infected three of her friends, but she too comes to his defense: "The girls could have said no; it takes two."

That so many did not say no is what horrifies parents and health educators in Chautauqua, who say safe-sex information is widely distributed in the area. As clinics were flooded with young people seeking HIV tests in recent days and an AIDS-education seminar drew hundreds, many, like Sue Genco, a Jamestown mother of three, came to see the Williams case as "our wake-up call."

As for Williams' future, Chautauqua prosecutors plan to charge him with first-degree assault in the cases of those who contracted HIV from him. But that may do little to heal the trauma he has inflicted on circles of Jamestown youth. The hope offered by new AIDS treatments still hasn't entered their thinking. "There's nothing to do now," says Danielle Rapp, 18, "but watch your friends die."

--Reported by Elaine Rivera/Jamestown and Barbara Maddux/New York

With reporting by ELAINE RIVERA/JAMESTOWN AND BARBARA MADDUX/ NEW YORK