S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  For Mom and Pop, who raised a survivor

  Contents

  Chapter 1: The Show

  Chapter 2: Combat Zone

  Chapter 3: “This Must Be Where God Needs Us”

  Chapter 4: Room Service Champagne

  Chapter 5: “No One’s Out There, Babe”

  Chapter 6: Unraveling

  Chapter 7: The Least and the Lost

  Chapter 8: Drive-By Promotion

  Chapter 9: Baldie Goes Down

  Chapter 10: “Captain Hennessy Must Die!”

  Chapter 11: D.C. Confidential

  Chapter 12: Exiled

  Chapter 13: Death and Resurrection

  Chapter 14: Suburban Success Story

  Chapter 15: “A Perfect Easter Story”

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter 1

  The Show

  I should have gotten out of the car already. I should have been working the crowd, scribbling notes on the mayhem while looking for someone to interview.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to get out of my beat-up Ford Escort, pulled up to the curb near the intersection of 5th and O Streets Northwest.

  It was the afternoon of December 20, 1990. I was a twenty-nine-year-old night police reporter for the Washington Post. I’d joined the paper fifteen months earlier and was anxious to make my mark, willing to do whatever the bosses asked. I routinely raced to combat zones to cover drug-crew shootings, even if the trips didn’t yield many bylined stories. Single or even double gangster killings were usually relegated to the briefs column. But this assignment was different: five kids shot in a drive-by as they were walking home from school just before Christmas. Other Post reporters were at the scene, and chances were good that one of us was going to get our name on the front page.

  Marked Metropolitan Police Department cruisers, lights flashing, were parked at odd angles in the intersection. Two TV camera jockeys recorded the aftermath of the attack. A group of spectators was clustered behind the bright yellow crime-scene tape, gawking at the bloody clothes and shell casings scattered on the street and sidewalk. Your typical crime scene, in other words—but one that looked as dangerous to me as a sniper’s alley. One of those spectators could recognize me, pick me off as I stepped out of the car. For the moment, doing my job wasn’t important. Staying safe was.

  There were men and women of all ages in the crowd, along with some school-age boys and girls. I locked in on the faces of the teenage males and young men. I had to be sure that none of them knew me—knew about me, that is.

  The shooting had taken place just four blocks from S Street Northwest, where once, sometimes twice, a week I drove my girl Champagne to make crack buys. Champagne was a “strawberry”—a streetwalker who traded sex for drugs.

  All the S Street slingers knew Champagne. And all of them knew me and my car, at least by sight. I’d become such a regular customer that some dealers called out, “Hey, amigo!” whenever they saw me.

  Most of the S Street dealers no doubt lived in the neighborhood. What if some of them were among the rubberneckers behind the yellow tape? Would they say anything if they saw me approach a cop with my notebook out? Would one of them try to shake me down in exchange for his silence? Would he tell his boss—whoever he was—the dealer who was running the street? If the S Street kingpin found out that one of his loyal customers was a Washington Post reporter, what would he do with that unlikely nugget? Would he use the information as a bargaining chip if the cops tried to take him down?

  If the story of my tawdry double life leaked, local TV news would be all over it. It could be weirdly ironic enough for the national networks, too. Post executive editor Ben Bradlee would probably summon me to his glass-walled office and furiously curse at me before firing me, I imagined.

  I sighed, disappointed with myself for not having come up with a good, or at least plausible, excuse to dodge the assignment, after an editor had called me at home and asked me to clock in early.

  I usually thrived at crime scenes. My street instincts were good. Most reporters went straight for whatever police or fire officials happened to be on hand. I worked the edges, talking to the people others overlooked. Civilian witnesses were my priority. I’d talk to them before they vanished or were scooped up by the cops. I’d usually speak with police later, since they weren’t going anywhere.

  A few months earlier, I’d covered a killing at a blue-collar apartment complex near the Maryland state line. A man had been fatally stabbed inside one of the units. Outside the building, a police commander talked to a couple of detectives. Thirty feet away, a cluster of Latino men and women watched the police in silence.

  I wandered over and talked to them in Spanish. A couple of the men described what had happened. Two guys had been arguing. One of them pulled out a knife. He stabbed the victim and ran. They gave me the name of the culprit. When a detective headed toward the building, I cut him off and asked if he had a suspect.

  “No,” he said.

  “Would you like one?”

  That detective turned into a good source.

  But this afternoon, my instincts were useless. I sat in my car and stared hard at one of the spectators. He was wearing a black knit cap and appeared to be in his early twenties. He looked vaguely familiar. Where had I seen him?

  I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. I couldn’t stay in the car forever.

  Had I smoked myself into a corner? Was I about to become an embarrassing footnote in the national crack epidemic?

  At the time, no U.S. metropolis was getting hit harder by crack than D.C. In the eastern half of the city, bodies were dropping nightly in violence propelled by crack turf wars. Washington became known not simply as the nation’s capital but as its murder capital. A local TV station devoted a half hour to the carnage every night with a program called City Under Siege. A few months earlier, Mayor Marion Barry had been convicted of crack possession following an FBI sting at the Vista Hotel, downtown, an arrest that stunned the city and made screaming headlines around the world.

  The Post had gone into overdrive after the Barry bust. Reporters were assigned to keep an eye on the disgraced mayor or his house around the clock. My colleagues downed coffee to make it through their late-night Barry watches, but when it was my turn, I took a couple of hits of crack. The irony of riding a crack high while conducting surveillance on a mayor who’d been busted for possessing the same substance was lost on me.

  The possibility of being outed by the S Street slingers while working this scene was not. Earlier in the year, I’d covered a quadruple murder on the very corner where Champagne and I made our buys. But that was on a freezing, snowy night, not an overcast afternoon, and any slingers who’d been out scattered when the gunplay began and stayed away when the cops swarmed onto the block.

  The man in the black cap wandered away from the knot of gawkers, affording me a better view. It came to me: He resembled one of the guys I played pickup hoops with at the downtown YMCA. I wasn’t sure if he was the basketball player, but I was relieved: I hadn’t seen him on S Street.

  One deep breath later, I slipped my press credentials around my neck and got out of the car.

  Immediately, I spotted a police commander wearing a white shirt inside the crime scene. Uniformed officers and sergeants wore blue shirts; MPD commanders of the rank of lieutenant or higher wore white. Cops, criminals, firefighters, and reporters referred to them as “white shirts.” Hands in his jacket pockets, the commander was speaking with some onlookers on the other side of the tape. That was unusual—most police officials didn’t talk to civilians on the street.

  I wandered over, planted myself among the spectators, and waited. From the gold bars on the shoulders of h
is jacket I could tell he was a captain.

  A few minutes later, as he retreated from the crowd, I stepped up to the tape and called out, “Captain!” half-expecting him to ignore me. But he turned, walked over, and met me at the tape. I read the nameplate on his jacket: HENNESSY.

  I introduced myself as a Post reporter, asked if he could help me with what had happened, and prepared for the verbal stiff-arm. Most of the white shirts I’d encountered on the street ran from indifferent to hostile.

  To my surprise, the captain said, “Lou Hennessy” and extended his hand. “Not a lot I can tell you right now. Five kids were shot. They’re at the hospital now. We’re looking into the possibility it was a drive-by, but that’s preliminary.”

  I asked a few questions. Hennessy answered every one. He didn’t provide much detail, but I could tell he was trying to be helpful.

  I thanked him and was turning away when he said, “Listen, if you hear anything, would you let me know? Sometimes you guys hear things before we do.” He reached into his jacket pocket and handed me his business card.

  A white shirt who makes nice with reporters? Smart, I thought as I waded into the crowd looking for someone to interview.

  As I walked away, Hennessy turned his attention back to the crime scene. The victims were between the ages of six and fourteen. If any of them died, homicide would take over, but it looked as though they were all going to make it. If they did, the case was his.

  A lot of captains would stay out of the fray and let their underlings go after the suspects. Not Lou Hennessy. Investigating was his favorite part of the job. Besides, he figured, he had to get the shooters off the street quickly, before the momentum for payback became unstoppable.

  Most of the victims attended the same middle school. Lou called the principal. He asked whether there had been any trouble lately. The principal gave him the name of a sixteen-year-old kid who, with his friends, had been feuding with a rival crew. Lou went to his home. The kid’s mom was respectful and cooperative. She agreed to let her son go downtown to police headquarters for a talk.

  Lou participated in the interview. The kid gave it up right away, describing a neighborhood beef. He and his friends were gunning for a thirteen-year-old boy who was known for stabbing kids in the neck. They had cooked up a drive-by attack, the kid said.

  They needed a car. A local crack fiend had lent them his Toyota in exchange for a few rocks, the teenager told Lou. Two of his friends had fired handguns from the moving vehicle. He gave up one of the names. That boy gave up another name. Investigators went to that home, and that kid gave up one more name.

  Lou worked through the night. His detectives scooped up four of the five suspects within sixteen hours of the shootings. A couple of weeks later, cops in Los Angeles picked up the fifth kid, who was hiding out with relatives.

  The quick work had kept the peace. There was no payback.

  The rest of my own night wasn’t quite as exemplary. After interviewing Lou, I talked to a handful of bystanders, then drove to the Post and wrote up notes for the reporter who was writing the story. I stopped worrying about landing on the national news and losing my job.

  As the night wore on, my mood brightened. I’d escaped—and the 5th and O assignment was good for a few hours of overtime. My next paycheck would be fat. I typically used only on weekends, but now I could afford to be spontaneous.

  Instead of going straight home after my shift, I cruised around the badlands just east of downtown, where winos milled around outside liquor stores and dealers, strawberries, and junkies roamed streets lined with apartment buildings, small churches, and turn-of-the-century row houses. I quickly found Champagne, working one of her usual corners. She smiled when she saw my car, knowing she was about to get high.

  I pulled over and unlocked the passenger door.

  Champagne looked both ways for cops, then got in.

  In very different ways, Lou Hennessy and I were both profoundly shaped by the crack epidemic. As a veteran police officer, Lou had seen huge swaths of his hometown descend into crack-trade chaos. He would devise an approach to go after the most violent players in the city’s drug trade.

  As a Post crime reporter, I chronicled the burgeoning bloodshed in the city’s combat zones, even as I contributed to the pathology with my own addiction. I would cover Lou’s inroads against the city’s most prolific killers—until we came up against city and newsroom politics.

  Lou was thirty-four when I met him. He’d been on the police force for seventeen years, having joined as a cadet in 1973. Lou started out working as a patrol officer in tough sections of Northwest and Northeast Washington. He was smart, calm, dedicated, and determined to do what he could to stem the violence.

  Investigating shootings like the one at 5th and O provided a strange kind of refuge for him. He wouldn’t go home until the case was put down. That meant working twenty-four or forty-eight hours straight, which meant no sleep. That wasn’t such a bad thing—no sleep meant no nightmares.

  They’d started about the time crack hit the city in the mid-eighties. He dreamed of gunmen, their faces featureless, coming for him in a dark room. Some of them had handguns. Some wielded shotguns.

  “Get away, motherfuckers!” Lou would scream. Lately, his wife, Loraine, told him, he’d started sleepwalking toward the dresser, where he kept his service revolver. Loraine didn’t scare easily, but Lou could tell she was afraid he might grab his gun and shoot her without knowing it.

  I, meanwhile, was determined to write as much as I could about the carnage. By the time of the 5th and O drive-by, I’d been a crack user for a little more than two years. I’d first tried the drug on another reporting assignment, when I was working for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

  Staffers at that paper had minimal supervision, and I got away with more than most. I was a regular at Corky’s, a dive bar across the street from the Herald Examiner’s offices on South Broadway. I hit the place three or four times a week after work, and now and then I got an early start.

  In mid-September 1988, I was assigned an immigration story. After working the phones for a few hours, I headed out to find some interviewees. I drove west on Olympic Boulevard, past high-rises crowded with poor Central Americans, grimy motels frequented by streetwalkers, and concrete fast-food stands sporting sun-blasted peach and teal paint jobs and adorned with signs boasting of THE WORLD’S BEST TACOS or L.A.’S BEST BURGERS.

  It was a tough area, perfect for my mission. Central American gangsters controlled the streets, the parks, the alleys. Some blocks belonged to the gang known as Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Others were ruled by the 18th Street gang. In their wifebeaters and jeans, gangbangers openly peddled marijuana, heroin, and crack. At some intersections, the slingers covered every corner, keeping a sharp eye out for LAPD black-and-whites—or anyone who looked like he didn’t belong.

  Buttonholing strangers for interviews wouldn’t work in a full-on crack zone. The street dealers might figure me for a cop. Maybe they’d leave. Maybe they’d make me leave.

  I needed a relatively quiet street. A mile or so west of downtown, I hung a right and took inventory: a cheap little motel, a couple of apartment buildings, some single-family homes. No slingers in sight. With my notebook and pen tucked into my back pocket, I hopped out of my car and wandered up the street, looking for someone to interview.

  The girl quickly caught my eye. She was standing under a little awning in front of the motel. Apparently in her early twenties, she had fair skin, jet-black shoulder-length hair, and a beauty-pageant-worthy body clothed in cutoffs and a tank top. She looked like a rising starlet, someone you’d see in a cheesy sitcom or a shampoo commercial.

  She busted me checking her out and threw me a quick smile. I smiled back. She waved me over.

  The interviews could wait.

  “Hi,” she said. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”

  “I don’t live around here. I’m on a work assignment. What’s your name?”

&nb
sp; “Raven. How about you?”

  “Ruben.”

  “So, Ruben, do you work all the time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Raven twirled her fingers through her hair. “Do you party?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  Was she flirting? Was I that lucky? Raven took something out of her back pocket. She opened her hand, displaying a small plastic baggie. It contained a white, square-shaped chunk about the size of an M&M.

  “Got some rock,” she said. “Give you a hit, no charge.”

  Crack was raging through the poorest sections of the city. Though it was relatively new to L.A., the drug was already taking on a mythic quality. Doctors warned that even one hit could hook someone, hopelessly and forever.

  Time stopped. I knew the little chunk in Raven’s hand was dangerous.

  I pictured the junkies I’d seen during reporting forays to Skid Row: homeless, desperate men who crawled on the pavement, searching for stray bits of crack. Deadeyed women who worked the streets offering their bodies so they could score another hit.

  “I’m not lying,” Raven said. “First one’s free. You won’t find a better deal.”

  I pushed the images of desperate addicts out of my mind—no way I’d become one of them. I’d smoked pot four times and had never gotten very high. I’d smoked PCP twice. I’d hallucinated for a couple of days but quickly returned to my normal routine. If I could avoid becoming hooked on pot and PCP, what harm could there be in trying one hit of crack?

  I looked over one shoulder, then the other. No foot traffic, civilian motorists, or LAPD cruisers were in sight. Forty feet away, westbound traffic was flowing on Olympic Boulevard as downtown workers headed home in the direction of upscale Mid-Wilshire, Hancock Park, the Fairfax District, and beyond, toward tony Brentwood and finally Santa Monica, with its golden sunsets and cool ocean breezes.