S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Perhaps just as important, Williams was, in style and substance, the polar opposite of Barry. He wore bow ties and was widely perceived as lacking charisma. Williams didn’t associate with ex-cons, carouse at nightclubs, or have a string of ex-wives. He wasn’t publicly or privately struggling with cocaine addiction. He was viewed as steady and reliable.

  That November, Williams defeated Republican D.C. Council member Carol Schwartz in the general election. It was as if the city’s electorate was taking the first step toward recovery from Marion Barry. He was Mayor for Life no more—though perhaps not for long.

  On March 6, 2002, his sixty-sixth birthday, Barry announced that he would be running for a citywide at-large seat on the D.C. Council. He was, he said, no longer using drugs. Some political observers wondered whether Barry planned on using the seat as a launching pad for another mayoral bid.

  Supporters of Mayor Williams braced for a divisive campaign.

  Two and a half weeks later, a federal law enforcement source called me at home: “The Park Police found Marion Barry with drugs.” Officers had discovered Barry a couple of nights earlier in his Jaguar in Buzzard Point, an isolated section of Southwest. They’d found marijuana and cocaine in the car, my source said, though not enough to make an arrest.

  I called the city desk downtown, passed the tip to an editor, and went about my day. The editor would assign someone else to chase down the lead.

  It panned out: The following day, the Post reported exactly what my source had told me. The encounter between Barry and the police had begun when someone called to report a suspicious car in a no-parking zone. The officer who approached it saw that the occupant appeared to be “ingesting something.” Sergeant Scott Fear, a Park Police spokesman, said that Barry appeared to have a powdery substance under his nose.

  A police dog trained to detect drugs was called to the scene, and it “alerted” that drugs were in Barry’s car, Fear said. A field test conducted on the interior of the Jag was positive for cocaine and marijuana residue.

  Through his attorney, Barry denied being in possession of any illegal drugs. But the fallout from the incident was significant, for Barry as well as the city. His wife, Cora Masters Barry, left him shortly afterward, and on April 4 Barry announced that he was dropping out of the at-large race.

  “My decision to seek office has to be weighed against the greater issue, which is what is the best overall interest of my family, this city, and its residents,” he said in a statement.

  In early 1997, Jo-Ann again summoned me to her office. She said she’d heard that everyone in the police department knew I’d disclosed Soulsby’s off-the-record remarks. Word was out that I couldn’t be trusted.

  “Who did you hear that from?” I asked.

  She named a local activist who worked with the police. I knew the guy. He was tight with Soulsby and had a hair-trigger temper.

  I started to say something, but one look at Jo-Ann’s face told me I’d be wasting my breath.

  “So what now?”

  “I’m taking you off the police beat and moving you to general assignment, in the city,” she said.

  “General assignment” meant just that—I’d have no beat; I would have to find stories that weren’t part of someone else’s beat. Editors could throw me into whatever stories they needed help with. Though general assignment in the city isn’t necessarily a bad job, it felt like a demotion. It felt punitive.

  I nodded, turned, and walked out of the office.

  The new gig was punitive. My new editor was in a perpetually foul mood. She didn’t seem to like me. She was critical about almost everything I did. When I told her I’d applied for a three-month stint with the Post Magazine, she sniffed, “I know, and you’ll probably get it, though God knows why. You haven’t done anything for Metro.”

  My stomach was knotted all summer. I hated coming to work. Dutifully, I cranked out stories about the weather, about traffic accidents, about a group of neighborhood kids who’d visited the National Mall for the first time on a school field trip. In August, Jo-Ann again called me to her office.

  “We need someone in Prince George’s County—on the court beat,” she said. “I’m reassigning you there.”

  “But all my contacts are in the city,” I said.

  “It’s better if you get out of the city, because of the Soulsby incident,” Jo-Ann replied. “Change is good,” she added.

  I felt a swell of rage. I thought, Are you fucking kidding me? Soulsby lies and Lou is bounced from homicide. And now I’m going to be exiled to some one-stoplight county?

  “I don’t want to leave the city,” I said.

  Jo-Ann smiled. “I can assign you anywhere.”

  It was a threat. The Post had news bureaus way out in Virginia, in Loudoun County and Prince William County. The tiny towns that dotted them weren’t Mayberrys—they were places that aspired to be Mayberrys.

  A few weeks earlier, I’d talked about my situation with Vernon Loeb, a highly regarded Metro reporter who years later, after Jo-Ann had moved on to a job as an editorial writer, would be appointed the section’s editor. Vernon had said that he didn’t think I’d done anything wrong in the Soulsby situation and that I should tell Jo-Ann to “pound sand.” Part of me wanted to say just that, and more, but I decided this was a fight I couldn’t win. If I didn’t leave soon, I feared, I would do or say something that couldn’t be fixed.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  But I knew I had no choice. This reassignment didn’t feel punitive.

  It felt like a career killing.

  Chapter 13

  Death and Resurrection

  In between organizing files, fielding phone calls, and greeting clients, Gloria Lowery would often stand at her office window and watch drug deals. Gloria was the office manager of Manna Inc., the housing nonprofit Jim had founded. Initially, Manna operated out of a small office on 14th Street Northwest. But within a couple of years, shortly after New Community moved onto S Street, Manna moved to the two-story brick carriage house behind the church. In the late nineties, it would move to office space in Northeast. While Manna was located behind the church, Gloria had a prime view of the drug market in action.

  Drivers would stop their vehicles in one of the alleys outside New Community Church. Slingers would approach the driver’s side. Cash and drugs—heroin, meth, then mostly crack—would change hands.

  Many of the buyers, Gloria noticed, were whites who drove cars with Virginia tags. Some of them apparently couldn’t wait to get home before using. From her vantage point, Gloria could see them pull over in the back alley and tie up the crook of an arm with a rubber tube. She didn’t see any of them actually plunge a needle in, but it was clear what they were doing.

  “They didn’t just speed off,” like most people who’d just made an illegal drug buy, Gloria recalled. “That’s where we’d find the discarded needles—back in the alley.”

  She sometimes saw arguments or fistfights. She heard gunshots more than once. Early on, whenever trouble was brewing, Gloria called a Third District captain, who would send a patrol car to roll through. The captain was Larry Soulsby.

  “It was like a movie,” Gloria said. “It was Starsky & Hutch all the time around there. I saw more than I needed to see.”

  Eventually, Gloria started volunteering with New Community’s after-school program. She got to know Baldie’s girls, Angie and Nicole, and she exchanged hellos and small talk with their father. Like everyone else who lived or worked on S Street, she soon learned that Baldie ran the drug traffic on the block.

  Baldie never gave Gloria a hard time. “He was the notorious, lovable godfather,” she said. “Back then, it was different. There was respect. He tried to show respect where it was given, and not let his activities cause us any harm. He saw the good the church was doing for his girls with the after-school program, and he was reciprocating. There was a code he lived by.”

  Gloria wasn’t afraid of Baldie or any of his sling
ers. She never viewed them as “the other.” For one thing, she’d grown up in a tough section of Northeast, in the shadow of I-295, where drug dealing and shootings were part of the landscape. Also, she had family members and one close friend who’d been incarcerated. The fact that they’d done bad things didn’t make them bad people, she believed.

  She was a member of the Spiritual Guidance Interdenominational Church of God, in Clinton, a community about five miles past the Maryland state line in Prince George’s County. Her church had a prison ministry that visited the Lorton Correctional Complex. Gloria joined it in 1995.

  The church volunteers and inmates would gather in the prison’s small chapel. One Sunday, about a year after she started volunteering, Gloria saw a familiar face walk in for the service: Baldie. He’d put on some weight and seemed a little worn out. But he appeared to have achieved a measure of serenity.

  Baldie was a “trusty”—an inmate who’d earned small privileges for being well behaved and having a good attitude. In addition to getting some minor perks, trusties are typically assigned responsibilities such as working in the laundry room or the kitchen mess. Baldie’s responsibility was to keep order during the services, to make sure the inmates there for worship didn’t get out of line.

  There were eight rows of wooden pews, four on each side. About thirty inmates, including ten or so who sang in a choir, would fill the chapel for each service. Baldie would stand in the row between the pews.

  No one ever acted out, Gloria said. Now and then, someone might behave as if he wasn’t paying attention, whispering to another inmate or looking around distractedly. Baldie would give the guy a hard look—and his attention to the service would be restored.

  “Baldie never missed a Sunday,” Gloria said. “He wasn’t the same Baldie. This was a man who was tired, who was grateful to have found peace in his later life. The drug-dealer part of him was gone. If you didn’t know him before, you never would have guessed he’d been engaging in those kinds of activities.”

  After each service, Gloria and her fellow volunteers went to a small room off the chapel where they stored their belongings. There, she and Baldie would have a chance to speak briefly. They never talked about why Baldie attended the Sunday services, but she believes that he was there by choice—not that he’d been assigned to go by prison officials.

  “He would greet me by saying, ‘Bless you,’ ” she said. They discussed Bible passages, and Baldie would ask about Angie and Nicole and his granddaughter, the daughter of an older daughter. The granddaughter was probably the girl whose spontaneous statement had led the police to Baldie’s stash, but the former dealer held no ill will against her.

  “He encouraged me to encourage Angie and Nicole to do the right thing,” Gloria said.

  Gloria wasn’t naive. She’d visited enough people who were incarcerated that she could spot faux jailhouse religious conversions. Baldie, she thought, was sincere. “I think toward the end he accepted Christ,” she said.

  Then, in late 1996, Baldie suddenly stopped coming to Sunday services. Gloria heard he was being treated for a serious illness at D.C. General Hospital.

  On January 10, 1997, Baldie died.

  Around the neighborhood, Jim heard that he’d been battling cancer.

  The pastor had never visited the dealer while he was locked up.

  “Baldie was a proud man. I don’t think he wanted me to see him that way,” Jim said. “He would have invited me if he’d wanted me to visit him in prison. But he didn’t.”

  Baldie’s memorial service was held in a tiny funeral home two blocks from the church. Someone in Baldie’s family asked Jim to deliver one of the eulogies. On a brisk, bright day, Jim and Grace walked from New Community to the funeral home for the afternoon service.

  The small chapel was dim, filled with a few of Baldie’s relatives and some of his friends and associates, many of whom were drug dealers or street hustlers. A good number of the mourners had bloodshot eyes—and not, Grace suspected, because they’d been crying. They seemed drunk or high or both. She smelled marijuana. The darkness of the room unsettled her. “It was spooky,” she recalled.

  Jim listened as a handful of Baldie’s friends delivered tributes to the former kingpin of S Street. They eulogized him as a kind and generous family man who would do anything for anybody who needed help. One of his daughters remembered Baldie as a “good father.” No one talked about his drug dealing or the verbal abuse he’d heaped on his wife when he was drunk. She was absent from the funeral.

  One of Baldie’s relatives summoned Jim to the front of the chapel. Though they’d had different goals, Jim had always liked Baldie. He considered him and his daughters part of his congregation. Though Baldie never took up Jim’s invitation to come to church, Angie and Nicole had attended the after-school program and even occasional services and Sunday-school classes.

  Jim still hated hypocrisy, however, whether it was coming from churchgoers in a small Arkansas town or associates of a D.C. drug dealer who’d run a city block for more than a generation.

  “Baldie was a friend of mine. We liked and respected each other, and I treasured his friendship,” Jim told the mourners. “Baldie did some good things. He loved his daughters and provided for them materially, though he set a terrible example for them. And as the benevolent godfather of S Street, he helped some people in the neighborhood.”

  Jim continued: “But Baldie was no saint. He sold a lot of drugs, which harmed a lot of people. He did terrible things to other people. His enterprise made life difficult for law-abiding people in the neighborhood. Like you, I mourn for Baldie. But let’s remember him for who he truly was, not some mythical character he was not. Let’s use his life and things he did wrong to be a lesson for us not to go in that direction.”

  A lot of Baldie’s people, especially those who were still in the drug trade, seemed to squirm in their seats as Jim delivered his unvarnished description of the dealer’s life.

  They were visibly relieved when he wrapped it up.

  After the eulogy, Jim and Grace walked back to the church, past only a couple of drug dealers. It was like that on most days now. Dealing on S Street was far from eradicated, but it had greatly diminished since Baldie’s heyday in the eighties and early nineties.

  In fact, dealing throughout the city had waned—especially crack dealing. In 1989, periodic urine tests taken by sample groups of District arrestees showed that 64 percent of them had used crack or cocaine within the previous forty-eight to seventy-two hours. By 1996 that number had dropped to 35 percent. Among younger arrestees, it fell from 39 percent to only 10 percent.

  For a year or so after Baldie’s arrest, in August 1993, dealing on the block had seemed to continue at about the same pace. As the years went by, however, it declined, slowly but steadily at first, then more rapidly. By the time Baldie died, traffic was down to a trickle. By the early 2000s, it was all but gone.

  “It got better little by little,” Jim said. “As time went on, there were fewer dealers on the street. There was no single event that brought about the change as far as the drug dealing.”

  The record-breaking violence of the crack era disappeared along with the drug. In 1994, the year Baldie was sentenced, D.C. recorded 399 homicides. In 2000, the city recorded 242. In 2012, there were only 88 killings. It was the first time since 1963 that the District had recorded fewer than a hundred homicides in a year. Most large cities throughout the country experienced similar trends.

  There are many likely reasons for the decline. There was the work done by Lou and his detectives, and by FBI, DEA, and ATF agents, to lock up killers and dismantle violent drug gangs. According to at least one study, higher levels of incarceration coincided with a decrease in crime, particularly violent offenses.

  There was also the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program to revitalize failing public housing projects by changing them into mixed-income, mixed-use developments. Beginning in 2003, District officials used m
ore than $34 million in federal funds plus another $750 million in money from public and private investors to raze and redevelop the seven hundred dilapidated public housing units of the Arthur Capper/Carrollsburg Dwellings, between Capitol Hill and the Navy Yard in Southeast. The worn-out, crime-ridden buildings were replaced by an equal number of new public units, as well as by sixteen hundred new market-rate apartments, townhomes, and a building dedicated to senior citizens. Crime dropped dramatically during the redevelopment, according to an Urban Institute study.

  On S Street, the renovation of the building that became New Community and the continued presence of the church set a tone. Instead of providing a haven for drug users, slingers, and prostitutes, the building became a place of worship, a home to the after-school program, and more.

  The church hosted Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Jim helped ex-cons who were looking to turn around their lives, counseling them and helping them find jobs. Grace focused on providing educational opportunities for young people, launching an initiative to work with kids of all ages, particularly teenagers. After graduating from college, Jim and Grace’s daughter, Rachel, started an arts program for kids as well as adults.

  Manna also had an effect on the immediate area, throughout Shaw, and eventually in other city neighborhoods, too. In the eighties, the nonprofit purchased and renovated forty properties within a two-square-block radius of S Street. A half-dozen of them were on S Street itself. Most of the dwellings were vacant, rundown single-family homes; some were apartment buildings that would become condos or co-ops. One building became a home for mentally ill people with AIDS. Over time, hardworking low-income people purchased the homes and moved in, transforming the neighborhood from an inner-city badland filled with drug dealers and strawberries to a stable community. Eventually, Manna renovated three hundred homes in Shaw.

  Jim knows that simply having a job, particularly a low-paying one, doesn’t necessarily allow someone to improve his or her financial situation. Home ownership provides a permanent place to live and stability. It’s the best foothold for climbing up the economic ladder, Jim believes, and Manna does everything the organization can to help working people gain it. Besides renovating homes, Manna provides financial-literacy programs, savings plans, and continued support once a sale is complete. The idea behind the organization is to provide an opportunity to climb out of poverty, not to offer charity.