A little digging reveals that the Suffolk County DA had repeated chances to lock up Taylor several years ago, but failed to sentence him to a single day. The DA’s office even halted its prosecution of Taylor for allegedly selling crack cocaine in order to protect a confidential informant that federal prosecutors were using, according to court documents obtained by the Phoenix.

On February 9, 1998, federal agents videotaped Taylor allegedly selling crack cocaine. Four months later, he was indicted on drug charges along with 40 other alleged members of Castlegate, one of the most relentless and violent gangs in Boston. (One former Castlegate member told the Phoenix he remembers Taylor but would not elaborate.)

Yet prosecutors clearly did not consider Taylor a major player in the gang: he was one of only five men charged at the state level; the others were charged in federal court. The court released him on a mere $100 bail.

Then, in 2000, with Taylor’s trial approaching, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office suddenly dropped the charges, citing a “decision not to bring forward the confidential informant to testify in this trial.”

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In other words, the feds didn’t want to tip their hand by revealing their secret snitch in an unimportant case like Taylor’s. At the time, federal prosecutors were, by their own admission in court documents, shielding the identity of at least one Castlegate informant. (The DA’s office would not return calls soliciting comment.)

Just as Boston’s police and prosecutors today claim to be targeting the “impact players,” prosecutors in the Castlegate cases let go of some they considered small fish — like Rodrick Taylor — in their quest for the bigger prizes and bigger headlines. But tossing back the little fishes creates a pond full of potentially dangerous criminals who one day may come back and bite the authorities hard. Rodrick Taylor may very well be one of those cases.

Since dodging that bullet, Taylor has moved back and forth between Boston and Georgia, where much of his extended family resides.

For the past several years, he seems to have stayed out of trouble with the law. But when he was around Dominique Samuels’s age, Taylor began a three-year term in a Georgia prison for burglary, obstruction of an officer, and car theft. He was released in late 1993 and moved north to Dorchester — into the heart of Boston’s gang wars.

Since then, he has compiled a fairly lengthy, though nonviolent, rap sheet in Massachusetts: a 1995 arrest in Dorchester for speeding and negligent operation of a motor vehicle; a 1996 indictment for drug trafficking in North Adams; arrests in both 1997 and 1999 for driving with a suspended license in Dorchester; and a May 2000 charge for stealing a car. None of his offenses resulted in jail time.

On April 7, 2003, Marie Anderson, a Dorchester resident and mother of Taylor’s then-five-year-old son, asked a probate court to mandate supervision during any visits between Taylor and his son. “[Taylor] has a history of abuse against me that has required me to take out restraining orders,” she wrote.

A law-enforcement official confirms that there were several restraining orders.

Taylor also stiffed Anderson out of $23,083 in back child support — more than four years’ worth — which he avoided by filing for Chapter-seven bankruptcy in Georgia.

In the beginning of the year, Taylor’s cousins, the McCrays, sold their Milton house. Taylor came to help them move, according to his attorney, John Swomley. As a result of the move, 20-year-old Brian McCray and a female cousin moved in with older brother Martin McCray at 9 Woodbine Street, in Roxbury. They brought with them two friends from Milton who took the attic rooms on the third floor. One of them was Dominique Samuels.