S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Lou’s expression didn’t change. “You’re okay now?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Lou nodded. At that moment, I knew the trust went both ways.

  We resumed talking about Soulsby’s lie.

  A couple of weeks later, the whole episode seemed to be buried. Lou hired a lawyer, who met with an attorney for the police department. They worked out a deal. The D.C. Council was set to hold confirmation hearings for Soulsby in December. Lou agreed not to testify against Soulsby and to keep the audiotape of himself screaming at the chief under wraps.

  In return, Soulsby took Lou off the night shift and assigned him to the training division. The chief also agreed, essentially, not to fuck with Lou anymore.

  I was at my desk when Lou called with the news. “Good,” I said. Part of me was disappointed that Soulsby wouldn’t be exposed as a treacherous liar. But I was relieved to have the incident in my rearview mirror.

  If the story ever became public, my role in tipping off Lou about Soulsby’s lie would become known—and there was no predicting where that disclosure might lead.

  Chapter 12

  Exiled

  Every morning, Lou reported to his new assignment at the training academy, an isolated outpost in Southwest Washington, hard by I-295. Every morning, he went through the same cloak-and-dagger routine: First he’d park his two-door Honda Accord in the facility’s outdoor lot. Then he’d slowly turn and look in each direction, until he’d completed a careful 360-degree sweep.

  When he was satisfied that no one was watching, he’d pull out a roll of Scotch tape, tear off a few pieces, and carefully attach them to the Accord’s driver’s-and passenger’s-side doors and trunk. When he returned to his car at the end of his shift, he’d examine every piece of tape to make sure it was exactly as he’d left it.

  A scene in the 1973 Robert Redford­–Paul Newman movie The Sting had inspired Lou’s Scotch-tape tactic. Redford’s character, con man Johnny Hooker, enlists a veteran grifter, played by Newman, to exact revenge on the Mob boss who killed his partner. In one scene, Hooker wedges a piece of paper into the doorway to his apartment so he can tell if anyone slips inside while he’s away.

  At the outset of 1996, Lou didn’t know what might be coming next. For that matter, he still didn’t know why Chief Soulsby had suggested he was under criminal investigation, why he’d been transferred so suddenly out of homicide, or exactly how he might have crossed Mayor Barry. Whatever the case, it was clear that Soulsby wanted to wreck his reputation.

  “It would have been easy for Soulsby to have someone plant drugs in my car,” Lou would say later. “He was capable of anything. I had to try to protect myself.”

  Lou’s windowless office was four by eight feet, just big enough for a small desk and a chair. He had no responsibilities, no teaching duties, no one to command. He was at the top of his game and he was in exile, tucked away in far Southwest near the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Blue Plains wastewater treatment plant. The pungent smell from the plant assaulted him for the first few days, but eventually he became acclimated to it.

  Lou made the best of his situation. In his tiny office, he studied for his law classes. To clear his head, he often ran the five miles from the academy to National Harbor and back, along the Potomac and into Prince George’s County, Maryland.

  The reason for his exile remained as murky as the waters of the river. It would be months before he had any inkling of why he might have been bounced from homicide.

  One day that spring, Lou was walking on the street just outside Metropolitan Police Department headquarters, on his way to meet a friend for lunch. He ran into a homicide detective. The previous June, his prize informant, the ex-cop, had given Lou information about the abduction and murder of a gambler and racketeer named Carlton “Zack” Bryant.

  Bryant was known to keep large sums of cash on hand and rumored to have made millions of dollars over the decades running off-the-books numbers games—his own lottery—in his Northeast Washington neighborhood. In late April 1995, he’d been kidnapped from his home and held for ransom. Without contacting the police, Bryant’s relatives paid $50,000. That didn’t save him, however: A few days after the abduction, Bryant’s beaten body was found, dumped in a wooded area in Southeast.

  No one had been arrested for the kidnapping/killing. But Lou’s ex-cop source had given him a name: Roach Brown. Lou passed the tip to the detective on the case and arranged for the investigator to meet with his source. Now, a few months after Lou had suddenly been transferred out of homicide, the detective and Lou exchanged hellos and small talk.

  “How’s it going on the Zack Bryant case?” Lou asked.

  “Oh, it turned out your guy was wrong,” the detective responded. “It wasn’t Roach Brown. It was Roach Henry.”

  Lou scratched the back of his neck. That couldn’t be right, he thought. His informant had been sure. “No, it was Roach Brown,” he said. The detective shrugged and soon went on his way.

  This was the same Roach Brown who as a young man had been convicted of murdering a man whose home he and three others had broken into. The same Roach Brown whose work in a theater troupe in prison had caught the attention of President Gerald Ford, who commuted his life sentence. The same Roach Brown who, in 1987, was busted selling cocaine to an undercover agent and stole $45,000 from a charity for poor kids, then was let out sixteen years early by the D.C. parole board. The same Roach Brown who’d organized the ex-con vote for Marion Barry’s triumphal 1994 mayoral campaign. The same Roach Brown who greeted everyone he met with a hearty “Merry Christmas!” all throughout the year—because, to Roach, “every day is Christmas.”

  There were dozens of guys in the city nicknamed Peanut or Spider. There weren’t many guys known as Roach. And there was no one else with Roach Brown’s remarkable history or larger-than-life public persona.

  From the beginning of the Barry administration, Brown supposedly worked as the mayor’s special assistant, as the director of the Office of Ex-Offender Affairs. But he wasn’t on the mayoral payroll. In February 1996, D.C. Council members Kevin Chavous and William Lightfoot had raised questions about what Brown actually did for the city and which department paid the ex-con. Lightfoot chaired the committee that had oversight of the District’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, for which Brown was on the payroll as a “logistics assistant.”

  The previous November, a report by Russell A. Smith, the city’s auditor, had noted that Brown had never spent a day at Emergency Preparedness. It recommended that he be fired from the position. The report further noted that when Brown applied for the job, he’d claimed to have earned a bachelor’s from Morgan State University—even though he had no such degree.

  Barry brushed aside the criticism. He simply shifted Brown to the Office of Employment Affairs. Brown would remain employed by the city until September 1997.

  The scathing auditor’s report was issued five months after Brown’s city employment came to the attention of U.S. District Judge Oliver Gasch. It was Gasch who had sentenced Brown to life in prison in 1965. In June 1995, Gasch was unpleasantly surprised to learn not only that Brown was working for the city government instead of doing time, but also that Brown wasn’t making good on the restitution he’d been ordered to pay to Hillcrest Children’s Center, the charity he’d fleeced in 1987. Brown was on the hook for $45,000.

  It was a lot of money for someone on a government salary.

  In July 1995, about six weeks after Zack Bryant was kidnapped and killed, the mayor headlined a fund-raising event for Roach Brown at the historic Lincoln Theatre, on U Street Northwest. “He needs this forty-five thousand dollars,” Barry said as he passed a hat around the theater, referring to Brown’s restitution. The mayor would personally be kicking in $200.

  That summer, shortly after Lou’s informant said Brown had been behind Bryant’s kidnapping and murder, Lou checked Brown’s court file. Brown had paid a healthy chunk of the amount he owed in restitution, the fil
e showed.

  Brown had used some of the ransom money to pay down his restitution, the source had told Lou. At the time, Lou was unaware of the fund-raiser, but it wouldn’t have allayed his suspicions of Brown. Even if Brown had used some of the fund-raiser money to pay down his debt, that wouldn’t have meant that his source’s information was wrong. After all, Lou’s informant had always been on target. Besides, Brown had been convicted of murder, drug charges, and fraud and always seemed to be in trouble.

  The chance meeting with the detective gnawed at Lou. After his lunch appointment, he returned to his office at the training academy. He checked a law enforcement database and found that Roach Henry had a good alibi for the Bryant kidnapping: He was incarcerated. Lou made a few phone calls and learned that Henry was also gravely ill, dying of cancer. Roach Henry died just eight days after Bryant was kidnapped.

  Someone’s sidetracking the investigation from the inside, Lou thought.

  After his informant had come forward with information about Roach Brown, Lou had written up a memo for the Bryant case jacket. Now he couldn’t remember whether he’d included the informant’s name. If he had, the informant’s life could be in danger. Lou kept copies of his write-ups in a computer file. He checked the file: The ex-cop wasn’t mentioned by name.

  The following day, Lou arranged for a friendly homicide detective to pull the case jacket and come to his office. His memo wasn’t in the jacket. In fact, Brown’s name had been scrubbed from the file. Someone had replaced the memo detailing Roach Brown’s possible involvement in the murder with a flimsy write-up blaming it on the dying Roach Henry.

  Lou was dumbfounded. It was the first and only time he’d ever seen such information removed from a homicide file. A homicide jacket was supposed to provide a history of the case; investigative leads were never dumped from such files. Suppose information turned up later that implicated a suspect who was named early in the investigation?

  Lou handed the file back to the detective.

  He ran through the sequence of events: Bryant is kidnapped and dies; his death is ruled a homicide. Lou’s best informant passes him a tip that Roach Brown was behind the abduction. Out of nowhere, Lou starts hearing that Barry wants him relieved of his command. Soulsby not only transfers him but also tries to assassinate his character.

  Suddenly it made sense that Barry would want him out of homicide. There was no evidence that the mayor had anything to do with the Bryant abduction or killing, but how would it look if a mayoral aide was arrested for murder? Lou was surprised that Brown hadn’t already been indicted, based on the information provided by his informant.

  That night, Lou called his source.

  “The detective working the Zack Bryant murder says Roach Henry did it, not Roach Brown,” Lou said.

  “No way,” the ex-cop replied adamantly. “It was Roach Brown. His office is down the hall from the mayor’s office, and if you go in there you’ll find drugs in one desk drawer and a gun in another.”

  Lou believed him. All the pieces fit: The mayor’s newfound interest in him, his transfer out of homicide, Soulsby’s attack on his integrity. The derailing of his police career seemed to be connected to his effort to investigate the Bryant murder.

  But with Soulsby in charge of the police department, there was no one he could take his suspicions to. The U.S. attorney, Eric Holder, hadn’t stood up for him regarding Soulsby’s off-the-record lies about a grand jury investigation. Lou had hoped that Holder would make a public statement confirming that Lou wasn’t and never had been the target of a grand jury probe, but the prosecutor had said nothing. Lou had no reason to believe Holder would buck the police chief on a murder investigation.

  Lou kept taping his car, studying, and running.

  For me, the Soulsby thing was dead. In the months since I’d relayed the chief’s off-the-record statements to Lou, I’d continued on the crime beat. The paper sent me to New York to do a piece on plummeting violence in that city and the crime-fighting efforts of the NYPD.

  My recovery from crack and alcohol was proceeding steadily. I’d become a faithful member of a support group that met weekdays at noon one block from the Post. Most of the core members were professionals who worked downtown. Their lives weren’t perfect, but many of them had families, thriving careers, or their own businesses. A few of them, such as my friend Tom, had a level of peace and serenity I aspired to. There was no magic formula, but it was important to attend as many support-group meetings as possible, Tom advised.

  There was no right or wrong way to do the program, either. When I started attending meetings regularly, right after my release from rehab, I’d worried about the program tenet that a belief in a “higher power” could restore alcoholics and addicts to sanity. I’d been raised Catholic but had fallen away from the church, and I didn’t know what I believed about God.

  My worries turned out to be unfounded. One of the regulars at the meetings I attended was known as “Godless John” because of his enthusiastic, almost gleeful atheism. Godless John had compiled more than a decade of sobriety. He faithfully went to meetings and was available whenever I wanted to talk. His example was crucial: Godless John showed me that adherence to a religious belief wasn’t a prerequisite for staying clean.

  Some people throw themselves into their recovery program, attending every support-group holiday gathering, developing a circle of exclusively sober friends, raising their hands and talking at every meeting. My approach was more reserved. I showed up and mostly listened. I remained close to people who weren’t in the program, including one pal who liked to drink but wasn’t an alcoholic.

  In meetings, I listened closely to people who’d relapsed describe how miserable and dangerous it was to resume drinking or using drugs. I also listened to successful people with long-term sobriety who seemed to handle whatever life threw at them with grace and good humor. They had this in common: They stuck with the program. They went to meetings and helped fellow alcoholics and addicts whenever they were asked. They did the basics.

  In my quiet way, I did the same. When Tom asked me to temporarily mentor a man who was a crack addict, I jumped in, meeting and talking with my fellow junkie. He eventually got sober. Whenever someone asked me to lead a meeting, I agreed.

  After a year or so, I realized that on the few occasions I’d talked, it wasn’t about struggling with alcohol or crack. It was about conflicts at work or with a disagreeable landlord. It was about dealing with life. I heard some old-timers say that the program could help a lot of non-alcoholics.

  I had to agree.

  Even though it seemed that I would escape the Soulsby–Lou skirmish with my career unscathed, I started having nightmares about the chief. In them, Soulsby was a dark, menacing presence who silently stalked me. More than once, my girlfriend awakened me to offer comfort after I’d tossed and turned during a particularly awful dream.

  Not long after he ran into the detective outside of headquarters, Lou called me at my desk. I cradled the phone on my shoulder and furiously scribbled notes as he related what he’d learned about the Bryant murder investigation and Roach Brown.

  I was about to say what a great story this was going to make when I remembered: I couldn’t write it. Because I’d disclosed Soulsby’s lie, I was part of the story. There was no way Metro editor Jo-Ann Armao would let me write something, no matter how explosive Lou’s accusations might have been. And I couldn’t simply hand the story to another reporter. For one thing, Lou didn’t trust anyone else at the Post. For that matter, neither did I. I worried that a fellow reporter who didn’t have all the background might be spun by the chief, especially if Soulsby implied or offered ongoing access. I wasn’t even sure the paper’s editors would want to pursue a story about the Bryant murder with another writer, given my involvement in the Soulsby–Lou conflict.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “What can I do?” Lou said. “Soulsby’s the chief, Barry’s the mayor, and I’m out of homicide.” />
  Both of us were handcuffed. We finished the conversation and rang off. I put the phone down, thinking that Lou and I were living in a James Ellroy novel.

  About a month later, on a Friday afternoon in mid-May 1996, I took the elevator down to the Post’s second-floor cafeteria for a snack. I picked up a blueberry muffin and took a seat in front of a TV mounted on the wall. It was set to a local channel, and the five o’clock news was coming on.

  As I chewed on the muffin, an announcer trumpeted the lead story—something about a secret agreement between the chief of police and a former homicide captain. Video footage of Soulsby and Lou flashed on the screen. The reporter, Joan Gartlan, said she’d confirmed that the two had entered into the pact after the chief had made derogatory off-the-record remarks about Lou.

  I froze mid-bite. Oh, fuck, this thing’s a zombie, I thought. It won’t die. It won’t go away. I watched the rest of Gartlan’s report in despair. She didn’t say what the off-the-record remarks were, but it didn’t matter. She’d nailed everything else. Gartlan was a good journalist. She’d stay on the story, I figured. My role in the episode was being resurrected, and there was nothing I could do about it. I suddenly lost my appetite and tossed the rest of the muffin into a trash bin.

  Lou spent the weekend stewing over Gartlan’s report. On Monday he was at the hospital with Loraine, who was about to give birth to their third child. The TV was on in Loraine’s room. The local news started.

  A doctor and a nurse watched the news with Lou. Gartlan appeared with a follow-up to her first story about the secret deal. Pictures of the chief and Lou appeared. The doctor and the nurse peppered Lou with questions. He told them the chief was assassinating his character. He was getting more upset by the minute.

  Loraine wasn’t too happy, either. When Lou had been head of homicide, he was never home; he was always out chasing after killers. Loraine had accepted that. She knew Lou would pour his heart into his command. Now, though, he was out of homicide and she was in labor. She needed his attention.