On their way out, Brigidini tipped over a trash can and went through the contents. He found a phone bill. One number stood out. It had sixteen digits. They tracked it to a pay phone near the city of Arusha, in northern Tanzania—the only pay phone in a one-hundred-square-mile area.
Investigators sent photos of Mowatt and copies of his file to Tanzania. They told the police in Arusha that the guy they were looking for was responsible, indirectly, for the killings of three law enforcement officers in D.C. The locals went to work, standing at the phone in shifts and showing Mowatt’s photo to everyone who came by to use it. Someone recognized the man in the photo. He pointed in the direction of Mount Kilimanjaro.
The investigation picked up speed.
Giuliano and Brigidini enlisted the help of a State Department security officer in neighboring Kenya, who did some sleuthing. The officer discovered that Mowatt had been renting a hotel room in Arusha. He’d left a few weeks earlier, skipping out on his bill and stealing a guard dog.
The Americans couldn’t just snatch Mowatt. There hadn’t been an extradition from Tanzania in a long time. Justice Department lawyers began researching what paperwork would need to be written up and filed. By stiffing the hotel and stealing the dog, however, Mowatt had provided Tanzanian police with two reasons to lock him up. Arusha cops went out in a squad car and drove in the direction in which the witness at the pay phone had pointed.
The cops entered an area of flat grassland and spotted a lone mud hut, maybe five miles from the base of Kilimanjaro. The hut’s resident spotted them—and ran. The cops laughed: There was nowhere for Mowatt to flee, nowhere to hide.
The local cops watched as Mowatt sprinted until he got tired and stopped, then they drove over and arrested him. They held him in a tiny police precinct with no air-conditioning. When they took Mowatt’s booking photo, he flipped both his middle fingers.
It was March 1996, nearly sixteen months after Lawson’s rampage at police headquarters. Giuliano and Brigidini flew for nearly twenty-four hours to reach Tanzania. But they couldn’t bring Mowatt back right away: A Tanzanian official insisted on a $25,000 payment before the prisoner would be handed over. Giuliano and Brigidini had to wait until someone from the FBI could fly over with the payment.
The two lawmen killed time. They saw lions and giraffes and hippos in the countryside. They also ate something they shouldn’t have and got violently ill, with fevers and chills and diarrhea.
After several days, and more than 7,500 miles from D.C., Giuliano and Brigidini finally stepped into the little police station to arrest Mowatt. The gangster’s face registered shock when he saw them.
“Man, y’all are pressed to lock a nigga up,” he said.
It turned out that Mowatt had been in Tanzania for about a year. Before landing in Africa, he’d flown to Russia, where he wandered around Red Square during a layover that lasted a few hours. When he first arrived in Africa, the gangster had been living in a little community of Jamaicans in Rwanda. The Jamaicans expelled him because they didn’t like his attitude. Mowatt struck out on his own.
Outside his little hut, Mowatt grew vegetables and marijuana. He had a pet baboon that he kept on a leash. Mowatt said he’d taught it how to slip cassettes into a battery-powered boom box and hit the Play button.
The temperature in Tanzania felt about a thousand degrees to Brigidini. But Mowatt was still dressed like a D.C. gangster, in jeans, a long-sleeved Polo shirt, and Timberland boots. For a minute, he tried to pretend he was someone else. He spoke some half-assed Jamaican. The two lawmen asked Mowatt to pose with them for a photo.
“Fuck you,” he snarled.
Giuliano and Brigidini brought Mowatt back on a commercial flight. They got him a window seat and wrapped him up in a blanket to hide his handcuffs. Brigidini cut Mowatt’s food and fed him during the trip.
After he landed at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, the pilot came back to ask the two lawmen what was up with the guy in the blanket. Giuliano and Brigidini showed him their badges. Brigidini lifted the blanket to show Mowatt’s handcuffs. They were bringing back a fugitive, they explained. The pilot wasn’t happy.
Brigidini paid a steep price for the capture. At five foot five, Brigidini weighed close to 200 pounds when he went to Tanzania, though not because he was overweight. The detective was a powerlifter. For three years after he returned, he became repeatedly ill, about once every three months. At one point he was down to 130 pounds. Probably due to a parasite he’d picked up in Tanzania, doctors told him. It would work its way out of his system. Eventually it did, and Brigidini’s health returned.
The detective never regretted the mission.
“I just couldn’t fail,” he said years later. “It was a responsibility we owed to the family members of those people who were killed just reading case jackets at their desks. I couldn’t fail.”
Most of Lawson’s associates pleaded guilty to federal charges and received lengthy prison sentences, which they accepted quietly. Mowatt, however, went down with bravado.
A few months after he was captured, Mowatt pleaded guilty to participating in a racketeering conspiracy and agreed to a thirty-five-year prison sentence. At his sentencing hearing, in January 1997, Mowatt stood to speak moments before U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth formally announced his punishment.
Mowatt pounded his chest with his right arm and, referring to Lawson, declared, “He represented to the fullest. And that’s my man, my comrade for life.”
On Thanksgiving Day, two days after Lawson’s rampage in the cold-case office, a Post editor asked me to interview Lou. The news that Lawson was gunning for him had been reported on the local TV news the day before, and I’d written about it for that day’s paper.
“It could be a good story—what is it like to be the intended target of the headquarters killer?” the editor said.
I was working the holiday anyway, and it was no secret that the homicide captain talked to me. I routinely quoted him by name in news stories. A few days before the attack, Lou had even invited me to his home for Thanksgiving dinner. I’d told him I would try to come over, if I could get away from work early enough. Lou and his family lived on a farm in southern Maryland, about twenty-five miles south of D.C.
That morning, I’d called Lou at home, not sure if the invitation was still open, given the chaos of the previous forty-eight hours. “Come on over,” he’d said. He sounded tired.
Lou greeted me at the front door, welcomed me in, and immediately sank into his living room couch. He had raccoon eyes and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. I settled into a chair a few feet away. The smell of roasting turkey filled the room.
I felt queasy about my assignment. Lou knew I was far from my family in California. He had no agenda other than to assure me that I’d have a place to spend the holiday.
After some small talk about the football game, I said, “I’m supposed to interview you about what it was like to be Lawson’s intended target.”
Lou rubbed his eyes.
“I haven’t had time to process it, to be honest. I’ve been working straight through. I don’t think there’s much I could tell you right now.”
Maybe I could have chipped away at him, gotten a couple of usable quotes, and fashioned a story around them. I could have played on my editor’s expectations, telling Lou I’d be in a jam if I didn’t come up with something for the next day’s paper.
Instead, I called the editor who’d asked me to interview Lou.
“I’m at his house,” I said. “He didn’t say no. He said he hasn’t had time to process what happened. I think if I work on him, I can get him to start talking.”
“Keep trying,” the editor replied. “Call in if he starts talking, so we can budget a story for tomorrow’s paper.”
I rang off and returned to my chair. Lou and I watched the game in silence until it was time to eat. I didn’t work on him.
I could always interview him some other time, I figured.
Chapter 11
D.C. Confidential
In September 1995, Lou and his detectives received recognition from the Justice Department for their effectiveness in locking up suspected killers. The homicide squad had continued to maintain a closure rate of a little more than 50 percent, the milestone it had first achieved under Lou twelve months earlier, eight weeks after he had detective teams in place in every police district.
Justice sent Lou a shiny plaque commemorating the achievement and announced that it was awarding a $200,000 grant to the scandal-plagued New Orleans Police Department to study and try to emulate Lou’s district-squad concept. Lou appreciated the recognition, but he was focused on closing cases. He stuck the plaque inside a desk drawer. He figured he’d find a place to display it later.
Meanwhile, I spent the first half of the month in Durham, North Carolina, attending Duke University on an “academic fellowship.” Duke had a deal with the Post, offering reporters and editors short fellowships that allowed them to audit any class, so long as the instructor approved. The university provided an off-campus apartment.
I sat in on a handful of journalism, psychology, and sociology courses, and faithfully attended two classes: basketball and tennis. I was back at my apartment every day by early afternoon, allowing me plenty of time to watch the final weeks of the O. J. Simpson trial on cable television, a luxury I didn’t have at home in D.C.
Every year, dozens of Post staffers applied for six fellowship slots, spread out through the academic year. Executive editor Len Downie chose the recipients. I was being rewarded for doing a good job on the crime beat, a veteran editor told me.
By then I was going well beyond pro forma coverage of the most spectacular crimes of the moment. I had good police sources, but I was also interviewing gangsters and their friends. In March, I’d written a story about D.C. gang culture, describing the significance of various types of graffiti and discussing mourning rituals for fallen comrades. In D.C. combat zones, the sight of sneakers and boots hanging from power lines was as familiar as slingers on street corners, but their meaning remained a mystery to many. The suspended footwear honored the dead—friends and adversaries alike—gangsters told me.
At the corner of 1st and T Streets Northwest, once a backup corner for my crack buying, I interviewed a teenage gangster who called himself Dogg. He explained the graffiti on a nearby wall, the names of ten teenagers or young men who’d been killed. “It’s in memory of the homies who died. We got to keep their memories alive,” Dogg said as he thumped his arm against his chest.
As I wrote down his quote, I wondered if I’d ever copped crack from any of those homies whose names now adorned the wall.
Just before I drove to North Carolina for the fellowship, I filed a story for the Post’s Sunday magazine chronicling the extraordinary measures Lou and other white shirts and detectives had taken to keep the peace between white and black officers after a white cop had shot and killed a gun-wielding black man who was in street clothes in Southeast D.C. The cop thought the man was a bandit; it turned out he was a fellow officer from the white cop’s own district. The black cop, it turned out, was trying to stop two men who were robbing a cabdriver.
I hadn’t covered the shooting, which occurred in February, because I was out sick that week with the flu. But Lou had tipped me off to the story that summer, when I was at his house for a barbecue.
“We did a lot of unusual things to keep the lid on,” he’d said. “It almost became a race riot within the department.”
Many black officers, as well as some white ones, believed the shooting officer might have been quick on the trigger because he saw a black man with a gun. The district commander, Inspector Winston Robinson, held his shop together by keeping everyone informed and calm. Lou and Robinson arranged for the homicide detectives who were conducting the investigation to brief the officers in the station.
Reporting on a racially charged mistaken-identity police-on-police shooting was complicated, and Lou’s cooperation was crucial. Many other white shirts, street cops, and detectives hedged when I first called them to talk about the tragedy—until I mentioned that I’d interviewed Lou. His name worked like a key card. Lou might not have been liked by everyone in the department, but he was universally respected.
The article became a cover story. Steve Coll, the magazine’s editor, would later tell me that publisher Don Graham bear-hugged him in congratulations the day after the piece was published. Post editors would nominate it for a Pulitzer Prize.
By then, Phil Dixon had moved on. Earlier that year, Milton Coleman had been promoted, so Phil put in for the job of Metro editor. He was passed over in favor of another editor, Jo-Ann Armao. Phil worked for a couple of months in the sports department, but by the end of the summer he’d moved to Philadelphia to work for the Inquirer.
I missed Phil, but I kept churning out stories. Around the time I left for the fellowship, in August, my editor, Keith Harriston, told me how much he appreciated my work. “You’re the best police reporter the Post has ever had,” he said.
My fellowship ended in mid-September. I was given a nice certificate saying I’d completed the program. I stuck it in my duffel bag and drove back to D.C. I’d enjoyed my respite as a quasi college student, but I was looking forward to getting back to work.
Like Lou, I had every reason to feel optimistic about my career.
In mid-September, Lou received a strange phone call from a fellow white shirt he’d known for years. “I hear the mayor wants you out of homicide,” the caller said. “What gives?”
“News to me,” Lou said. He figured it was just the police rumor mill working overtime. Why would Marion Barry want him out? Lou and Barry didn’t know each other and hadn’t had any run-ins. Why mess with the one unit in the police department that was clearly succeeding?
A few days later, in the underground parking garage at police headquarters, Lou ran into Ron Linton, chief of the police reserves. Lou and Linton were friendly. Linton and Barry were tight. Lou buttonholed Linton and said, “I hear the mayor wants me out. Can you find anything out for me?”
“Get out of here,” Linton said. “Why would he want to bounce you?”
“He probably doesn’t,” Lou replied. “But can you look into it?”
Two weeks later, Linton called Lou. He sounded perplexed. “You’re right,” Linton said. “The mayor wants you out. I don’t know why.”
Lou needed to know what was going on. Fred Thomas had retired as chief in July. Barry had named an assistant chief, Larry Soulsby, to step in as interim chief.
Lou went to see Soulsby in his office. “Am I being transferred?” he asked.
“No way,” Soulsby said. “Everything’s fine.”
Lou kept working cases. Soulsby wasn’t known as the most honest guy in the department—the rank and file called him Lyin’ Larry. But if Barry was going to make a move on him, Lou wondered, what could he do?
Lou told me about the rumors shortly after I returned to Washington. By early October we’d both verified that the talk was true. Worse, Lou was being transferred to night patrol. It was a slap. Traditionally, homicide captains were promoted to the rank of inspector once they’d finished their time in charge of the squad.
Lou had been arguably the most effective homicide commander in the department’s history. He’d launched a bold and successful initiative under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. He’d turned things around. Homicide wasn’t just holding its own—it was being lauded by the Justice Department.
Still, the transfer was a done deal, sources told Lou and me. All that was left was the formal announcement.
In late October, Barry called a press conference to announce that he was removing the “interim” from Soulsby’s title. Soulsby would be the permanent chief. That meant he could appoint and transfer white shirts.
A couple of hours before the press conference, Lou was outside police headquarters, walking to a deli to get lunch. His pager went o
ff. Lou checked the number—it was an informant. Not just any source—a friend, an ex-cop Lou had known since his patrol days.
Lou pulled out his cell phone and called back. “I need to see you right now,” the informant said, his voice tense. They met outside a burger joint on New York Avenue, just east of downtown.
Lou arrived first and waited by an outdoor table. His source roared up in a rental car. He had a gig returning other people’s rentals. He didn’t bother with niceties: “What’s this I hear about you getting kicked out of homicide?”
“It’s true,” Lou said. “Soulsby’s announcing it today at a press conference. He’s putting me on night patrol.”
“Do you want me to kill him for you?”
Lou knew his informant was serious. He wasn’t just running his mouth. And he was fully capable of hitting the chief.
The source’s street skills were legendary. In the early eighties, when the entire police force was looking for a cop killer, he’d put on street clothes and found the guy within twenty-four hours, then taken him down in a shootout. The cop was a hero for a minute. But he met a woman who liked heroin and coke. Internal affairs got wind and busted him for supplying her with drugs. He went to trial and beat the charges, but the department fired him anyway.
Until then, Lou’s friend didn’t use. He loved the job—it gave him purpose. Without it, he fell down the rabbit hole. He started drinking, then using crack. He hung out at nightclubs and followed drug dealers home. The former cop would take them at gunpoint as they entered their apartments. He’d jack their money, their drugs, or both. He did a couple of jolts in federal prison for cocaine possession. By the early nineties he was back on the street. Other cops turned their backs on him after he was fired. Lou never did. He even slipped him money now and then.
S Street Rising Page 20
