S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  “I won’t be needing this anymore,” I said.

  On my final day as an Angeleno, Gordon and another Herald Examiner crony treated me to a final lunch at Corky’s, where I downed three gin and tonics with my turkey sandwich before lurching out to my Escort for the long drive east.

  Leaving Los Angeles felt like a getaway. For me, L.A. was the city of doomed romance, excessive drinking, and risky crack use. D.C. beckoned like a new lover. I was going to the Show, where I’d be working in the same newsroom as Bob fucking Woodward, racing to crime scenes in the most murderous city in the country.

  On top of that, the previous month, a nationwide ABC News–Washington Post poll had shown that 44 percent of Americans considered illegal drugs the nation’s most serious problem.

  The president had just declared a war on drugs—and I was going to be a war correspondent.

  Chapter 2

  Combat Zone

  Marion Barry strutted across the makeshift plywood stage, chin up and shoulders back, a bemused look on his face. Boos and catcalls greeted him. He turned to the crowd, gathered for a street festival in Adams Morgan, a trendy part of town full of nightclubs and ethnic restaurants. The mayor of Washington, D.C., lifted his arm and gave the crowd a single-fingered salute.

  Video footage of the event made it to the six o’clock news a day or two later, a little more than a week after my valedictory tryst with Raven. I sat in my new apartment in Washington and watched on a fifteen-inch TV perched atop a box of books as I chomped on a Roy Rogers burger and took slugs from a bottle of beer. It was mesmerizing.

  Los Angeles was also led by a black mayor, Tom Bradley. An ex-LAPD cop, he was calm, dignified, widely respected—and pathologically cautious. My pal Tony Castro, a Herald Examiner columnist, joked that Bradley had undergone the world’s first charisma bypass.

  Barry was a different kind of cat. During the previous months, the Washington Post had published several articles quoting unnamed sources who accused the mayor of doing crack. I’d read the stories carefully. I couldn’t imagine why people close to the mayor would make such a specific, damning allegation if it wasn’t true. Where there’s crack smoke, I figured, there’s crack. I knew better than most.

  Barry’s image disappeared from the TV screen. The anchor moved on to the next story.

  Okay, I thought, I’m not in L.A. anymore. In six days, I’d be starting my new job as a nighttime crime reporter, working in a city where the mayor himself might be a crackhead. Perfect.

  Washington has always been lousy with journalists who are drawn to the nation’s capital to cover national politics and government. Those topics never thrilled me. It seemed that most political and government reporters were at the mercy of the people they covered. The nature of their jobs required that they be spoon-fed by spin doctors. Covering a presidential press conference would be exciting exactly once, it seemed to me.

  I’d be on the street, chasing the gunplay, no two nights alike. Plus I was getting an unexpected chance to start my life and my career anew.

  It was exhilarating, living a short jog from the White House, preparing to work at the newspaper of Watergate fame. For the first time in a couple of years, I felt optimistic about my life and my career. I’d left all my troubles, including crack, behind in Los Angeles. I felt like one of those movie characters who escapes the bad guys on his heels by sliding under a descending metal door a moment before it slams shut.

  Oh, I’d had a blast at the Herald Examiner. If the Post was a powerful, shiny battleship in the sea of journalism, the Herald Examiner was a leaky pirate boat populated by misfits, malcontents, dreamers, and a few burnout cases. But as much fun as I’d had working there, the paper had no future. For years, the Herald Examiner had been hemorrhaging cash—about a million dollars a month, according to newsroom chatter. It folded six weeks after I arrived in Washington.

  But my six and a half years at the Herald Examiner had prepared me well for the Post gig. Working at a newspaper with a small staff in a big, news-rich city meant I got a chance to write about almost everything. I’d covered earthquakes, fires, L.A. City Council meetings, local and state political races, the murder of singer Marvin Gaye, and the takedown of infamous serial killer Richard Ramirez, who was dubbed—by a Herald Examiner editor—the Night Stalker.

  When I was working in L.A., I didn’t think of myself as a crime reporter, but I had the soul, instincts, and resourcefulness that any good crime reporter needs. Wailing sirens and tight deadlines made me tingly. Chasing the big story amid chaos was energizing.

  The more chaotic the situation, the better. I wrote a few longer pieces, articles that took two or three weeks to research and complete. But being in the street was what got my pulse racing. And I was good at it.

  When the big earthquake hit Mexico City in September 1985, the paper sent me. As the plane cruised in for landing, I surveyed a ruined city from my window seat—fires and rubble everywhere. Outside the airport, I quickly interviewed a handful of taxi drivers—not for a story, but for a short-term hire. My gut told me that a young driver named Carlos was the biggest risk taker, so I hired him.

  He confirmed my instincts. Young soldiers with assault rifles manned roadblocks, preventing non-official vehicles from going into damaged areas. Carlos roared through the stricken city, improvising alternate routes around the checkpoints. When we were stopped at a military roadblock, Carlos explained with urgency that “we” were press, persuading the soldiers to let us through.

  For several days I witnessed and wrote about one amazing story after another: Mass burials with quick blessings by exhausted priests. A series of rescues, after several days, of newborn babies from the rubble of a hospital that had collapsed below ground level. Dazed men and women roaming a makeshift morgue in the outfield of a baseball field, studying hideously bloated heads and other body parts to try to identify missing loved ones. I hardly slept, but I wasn’t tired. I was running on adrenaline.

  The first big quake had hit on Thursday, September 19, 1985. The 8.0 earthquake knocked out all communications—phones, faxes, and Western Union wires were all down. On Friday afternoon, I flew to Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, just to get to a phone. As I was in the air, an aftershock, almost as big as the first temblor, had struck the city. I called in my first story and hopped on a jet chartered by a group of journalists to get to Mexico City, after an editor approved the $1,000 cost. I spent Friday night reporting and Saturday morning handwriting my voluminous notes and a second story. The paper was counting on me; failure to file would have been a journalistic catastrophe.

  I gathered my notes and hailed a taxi to the airport. I found a checkin line for a flight to Guadalajara. A fellow Herald Examiner reporter was working the story from there, in an airport hotel that still had phone service. More than a hundred people were in line, anxiously waiting to check in for the flight. I had to stay in Mexico City to continue reporting, but I had to get my notes to my colleague in Guadalajara. I studied the people waiting to board the flight and zeroed in on a woman with two young kids—a boy and a girl. I introduced myself to the woman, explained that I was a newspaper reporter from Los Angeles, and told her that it was important my notes got to my co-worker. Would she deliver them?

  The woman nodded. Yes, of course.

  This was my one shot. I thought she would probably follow through, but I wanted to be sure. I pulled out $100 and tried to hand her the cash.

  “This is for helping us,” I said.

  The woman shook her head vigorously. “No, I don’t need any money,” she said.

  I looked at her children. “For the kids.”

  The woman thought about it for a second, glanced at her kids, and took the money. A couple of days later, I flew back to Los Angeles and learned that the gambit had worked: My story had made the Sunday paper.

  Being a reporter gave me a ticket to parachute into drama most people would never experience. I was naturally introverted and shy, but when I was o
n the job I assumed another, more forceful, more confident persona.

  Three years before the Post hired me, I’d even roamed Raven’s neighborhood looking to commit a felony in pursuit of a story. President Ronald Reagan had signed an immigration reform bill. The law required employers to check new hires for papers, to confirm they were in the country legally. I pitched an idea to my editors. They weren’t thrilled about having me break federal law for an article, but I ran my scheme by a contact at the immigration service. The feds probably wouldn’t come after me, she said. That was close enough for my bosses.

  I didn’t shave for a day, dressed down in tattered jeans and an old T-shirt, and made for the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Alvarado Street, a couple of blocks from Raven’s motel hangout. The intersection was a magnet for shady characters. Inside of five minutes, a guy asked me, in Spanish, what I needed.

  “Papers,” I said.

  “Seventy bucks,” he replied.

  He led me into a little office in a corner strip mall. Another guy asked what name I wanted to use. I made one up, and he took my photo and disappeared into the back. A couple of minutes later, the photographer returned and handed me a laminated “green card” with my picture and the name I’d provided. The ID hustler told me to meet him at a doughnut shop around the corner in ten minutes. I settled into a booth and waited.

  He arrived on time, nervously swiveling his head side to side, looking for federal agents, then settled into the booth across from me. He reached under the acrylic tabletop and left a card on the metal crossbar that supported it, telling me to take it and leave the cash. The document peddler quickly counted the money and slipped out of the shop. I studied my “Social Security” card. The name matched the one on my green card.

  A trained federal agent would quickly make both cards as fakes. A civilian employer might not. I wrote a first-person sidebar to a longer piece. It took Congress years of contentious negotiations to pass immigration reform; it took me fifteen minutes and $70 to buy fake documents that could defeat the new law. The feds didn’t come after me.

  I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my life other than journalism, and I didn’t think it would go well for me if I did. With the right tools, it seemed, my father could fix anything under the hood of a car or in the house. Hammering a nail was the extent of my fix-it skills. And I don’t think I would have thrived in a nine-to-five office job. I couldn’t stand routine, and I was congenitally disheveled. I could put on a freshly pressed suit and a brand-new dress shirt and within five minutes look as if I had slept in them. But the street didn’t care how I dressed, or that I couldn’t fix a carburetor.

  As the local news droned on, I finished my meal, swigged the last of my beer, and headed to the fridge for another. A big smile crossed my face as I envisioned what it would be like covering record-breaking violence in a city with an in-your-face crackhead mayor.

  Working here was going to be fun.

  The possibility that Barry was a crack user and the violence unleashed by neighborhood drug wars were the top two stories in the city. By the end of 1989 there would be 434 killings, in a city of about 610,000 residents.

  D.C. hadn’t always been so violent. Just four years earlier, in 1985, the District had recorded 148 homicides. By 1987 the number of killings had spiked to 372.

  In the 1970s, illicit drug sales in the city were stable, dominated by veteran dealers who controlled specific areas. Heroin was the street drug peddled the most during that decade. Its sale was highly centralized, limited to a handful of locations, mostly just north of downtown. Lou Hennessy recalled seeing as many as three hundred smack dealers and their clients clustering late at night at the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest, one of the primary copping zones for heroin.

  The profit margin for heroin dealers in geographically small D.C. was greater than it was for their counterparts in Baltimore and Philadelphia. District pushers sold a good portion of their product to users from the nearby Maryland and Virginia suburbs, who were willing to pay more than junkies from the city.

  In addition to the smack sellers downtown, a handful of seasoned drug dealers operated in other sections of the city: Mint Jelly sold powder cocaine on 9th Street Northwest, the Hartwell gang peddled coke and heroin in deep Southeast, and Big Pink—who cruised around town in a pink Cadillac—dealt smack at 4th and M Streets Northwest. They and the other old-school drug dealers had their enforcers, but they knew that violence was bad for business and didn’t use it casually or promiscuously.

  Around 1980, groups of Jamaicans set up shop in D.C. to deal marijuana. They never commandeered a large amount of turf, but their arrival marked an important step in the evolution of D.C. street crime as established dealers defended their corners against the newcomers. In the inevitable gun battles that ensued, the Jamaicans fought with the kind of weaponry that had been all but unseen in Washington to that point. They carried semiautomatic nine-millimeter handguns, MAC-10 fully automatic submachine guns, and Uzis. The display of Jamaican firepower sparked an arms race among local drug dealers.

  The long-standing drug markets blew up when crack hit the city five years later. Open-air crack emporiums appeared in neighborhoods that hadn’t hosted drug markets before. Stable heroin and marijuana corners became contested crack zones. Scores of neighborhood crack kingpins rose to power. They were younger than the old-school dealers, men in their twenties or even teens. They were suddenly making barrels of cash—and, unlike the veterans, they were impulsive and quick on the triggers of their powerful new weapons.

  Bandits who used to hit mom-and-pop stores with Saturday-night specials and sawed-off shotguns started going after drug dealers, because that was where the cash was. And the dealers were firing back—when they weren’t firing at one another. With frightening speed, a culture of intimidation and retaliation took hold. When Lou had joined the force, retaliatory violence was rare, witness killings almost unheard of. Suddenly each shooting required payback, and witnesses—most of whom were in the drug game themselves—were being gunned down with alarming frequency. One neighbor­­­­­­­­­hood in Northeast was so violent it was known as Little Beirut.

  Lou watched a series of police chiefs respond with ham-handed tactics that did nothing to stanch the bloodshed. He knew he could do better.

  From the moment he put on the uniform, Lou loved being, as he liked to say, po-lice. Not FBI, not ATF, not DEA, not Secret Service. Po-lice. There was excitement and a chance to do some good. And no two days were ever the same.

  He became a sworn officer two years after signing up as a cadet and quickly earned a reputation as a smart, resourceful, and effective street cop. While other newbies were writing traffic tickets, Lou and his partners were taking down armed robbers and capturing people carrying illegal guns.

  He had good instincts and a great training officer, Skip Enoch, who taught him the value of building a rapport with people in the neighborhoods they patrolled—blue-collar workers, civil servants, store owners, junkies, hookers, and, if they were willing, even drug dealers and thugs. Some officers maintained the standoffish attitude of a soldier occupying a hostile foreign country. Skip showed Lou that an effective cop is part of the community. A good cop knows whom in the neighborhood to call when something happens on his beat; a great cop has people calling him. Skip also advised Lou that he didn’t have to worry about internal affairs if he beat up a handcuffed suspect: He would lock up his protégé himself if Lou ever abused someone.

  A couple of years after he became a full-time officer, Lou showed that he knew how to handle himself when the guns came out, too.

  In January 1977, Lou was on a plainclothes assignment in a working-class Northeast D.C. neighborhood known as Brookland, near Catholic University. He went into a Safeway to grab an orange juice while his partner waited in their unmarked sedan on the street.

  Lou was standing in a checkout line when two men stormed into the store and pulled out sawed-offs from beneath their jackets. Without bei
ng told, many of the patrons and workers hit the ground; armed robbers took down the store fairly regularly, the employees and the shoppers knew the score. A few patrons and workers headed for the back of the store, away from the trouble. Lou quietly drifted to the back. He didn’t want the gunmen to see him unbutton his coat and retrieve the police revolver on his hip. Fighting back his fear, Lou held the gun in his shooting hand and slipped it into the pocket of his coat.

  Less than a minute later, a half-dozen squad cars roared onto the street in front of the store. As they were preparing to enter the store, the two bandits had aroused the suspicion of Lou’s partner, Freddy Merkle; he’d radioed for backup moments before the duo stormed in and took out their weapons. Freddy had a feel for developing trouble; he’d been in three shootouts with robbers in the neighborhood.

  The two bandits were shocked by how quickly the cops swarmed outside the store.

  “The rollers are here!” one of the gunmen yelled.

  Clutching the gun in his pocket, Lou walked to the front of the store, toward the gunmen. Outside, uniformed cops pulled out their service pistols and shotguns and took cover behind their cruisers.

  The gunmen saw the small army of cops and panicked. One of them started screaming and swearing. He headed for the back of the store, apparently looking for an escape route. The other bandit trained his weapon at the store manager’s head. Lou stepped to within a yard of that robber. The bandit didn’t seem to notice Lou; he was preoccupied with the cops gathered outside the store. Lou leveled the revolver in his pocket at the man’s torso. The bandit’s partner was out of Lou’s line of sight.

  Lou tensed. His right index finger caressed the trigger of his revolver. Lou thought it through: If he shot the bandit, would the robber reflexively shoot the store manager? How would the bandit’s partner react? Lou figured he was busy trying to flee. But he might start firing if Lou shot his partner. A bloodbath seemed inevitable.