S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Maybe Jo-Ann or another editor thought it would be too much for me to cover my beat and work on a big project, too. Maybe I should have met with whoever had chosen the project team to make my case for inclusion.

  Years later, I entered therapy to try to get through a painful breakup. I worked in some venting about the Post in general and Jo-Ann in particular. With the help of my therapist, I figured out that my identity was dependent on being a Post reporter. I took work slights too personally.

  At the time, I didn’t have such insight. I also didn’t have it in me to meet with Jo-Ann or any other editor. I should have asked for a meeting and made a methodical case for inclusion. I had sources and knew background the other reporters didn’t. I might have succeeded in persuading Jo-Ann and other editors that I should be part of the team.

  But I was so caught up in my anger, I assumed that Jo-Ann and other editors would brush me off. So I seethed—mostly in silence. That spring, Ashley Halsey III, the Maryland editor, sent me a message asking me to retrieve court records for a reporter working on the project. Typically, a news aide would be asked to conduct such a task. It felt like a deliberate dig. I shot a message back to Ashley, declining the assignment and offering to talk about my refusal. “Never mind,” he replied.

  In March, however, I did at least ask Jo-Ann for a raise, writing a detailed memo describing the impact of my reporting, which had led to officers being indicted or suspended, as well as policy changes.

  A few weeks later, the jury in the first trial involving Mohr and Delozier deadlocked on the charges against Mohr and acquitted Delozier of a civil rights violation. The government retried the officers. In August, a second jury convicted Mohr of a civil rights violation and again acquitted Delozier of conspiracy.

  There was a direct line from my first major story on police-dog attacks to Mohr’s conviction. During the first trial, Terry Seamens, a Takoma Park city councilman, testified that he’d heard about the Mohr incident shortly after it occurred. He was troubled by the use of force, but he didn’t know what to do. When he read my article, Seamens said, he learned of the FBI investigation into the canine unit and called the Bureau. The FBI wired up Seamens and had him talk to a Takoma Park cop who’d witnessed the biting incident.

  The officer’s recorded account gave life to the investigation. Eventually, Dennis Bonn, the Takoma Park sergeant who said he’d given Delozier permission to let Mohr’s new dog “get a bite,” pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. Bonn testified for the government. In December 2002, federal judge Deborah K. Chasanow sentenced Mohr to ten years in prison, the maximum penalty.

  The conviction and the tough sentence had a dramatic impact on the police department, Sharon said. “The police department was operating lawlessly. Officers felt they didn’t have to answer to anyone. They felt they could do anything in their county. Until then, nobody had held them accountable—no county executive, no county council member, no chief of police. They ran wild. That was the first time they saw that if the federal government comes in and prosecutes a police officer, there’s going to be serious prison time.”

  Before I started writing about police-dog attacks, the canine unit was registering more than a hundred biting incidents a year. By the time Mohr was sentenced, county canine bites were greatly reduced. In 2000, the first full year after the department retrained its police dogs, there were just nineteen biting incidents. The numbers remained low—nine in 2001 and eleven for each of the two ensuing years. County police dogs registered only three biting incidents in 2004, and the number of incidents remained in the single digits or teens throughout the next decade. Using less force did not seem to have any negative impact on the unit’s effectiveness. Canine officers detained dozens of suspects every year—fifty-four in 2012, for example.

  Sharon stopped hearing about unnecessary or excessive county police-dog attacks.

  A month after Mohr was convicted, Jo-Ann turned down my request for a pay raise. Instead she gave me a $1,500 bonus. I was disappointed, but I kept working hard, knocking out stories about police misconduct. In December, I sent her a follow-up e-mail, reiterating my request for a raise. She didn’t reply. Months passed.

  In late September 2002, Jo-Ann asked me to lunch at the upscale restaurant in the Madison Hotel, directly across the street from the Post’s main office, downtown. Almost immediately, she handed me an envelope. Another $1,500 bonus. She was again turning down my request for a raise. Non-management employees, such as reporters, received modest raises, which are negotiated by the Newspaper Guild, which represents non-management employees at the Post. In addition to those pay bumps, editors doled out annual merit raises to reporters who’d done good work. Every year, Jo-Ann and the editors in charge of other sections, such as Style and Sports, decided who on their staffs would get merit raises. I would not have asked for a raise if I believed I had a very good or even great case. I requested a raise because I believed I had an overwhelming and undeniable case. The impact I was having in Prince George’s was unmatched by any other Metro staff writer. It wasn’t close. Also, when I had agreed to transfer from the D.C. staff to Prince George’s, I had pointed out to Jo-Ann that the commute would cost me thousands of dollars a year in gasoline and car maintenance costs. “You do a good job out there, and I’ll get you more money,” she had promised.

  Jo-Ann’s refusal to give me a raise wasn’t the only bad news. She said she wanted to reassign me to Montgomery County. I’d be on not only the courts beat but also the police beat. It would diversify my portfolio, she said.

  I was stunned. Leaving Prince George’s would mean losing all of my contacts and sources once more. I didn’t know anyone in Montgomery County, a well-off, majority-white jurisdiction just north of D.C. Montgomery County seemed like a sleepy beat in comparison with Prince George’s. The cops in Montgomery were accused of excessive force now and then, but they didn’t seem to have a culture of brutality. Change was always hard for me, and I loved the work I was doing in Prince George’s. There would be plenty more police misconduct for me to write about, I figured. I didn’t want to start over in what seemed a far less interesting place from a journalistic standpoint.

  I didn’t say yes to the reassignment. I didn’t say no. But Jo-Ann could clearly see that I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect.

  “Think about it,” she said.

  Two days after our lunch, a man was killed by a rifle shot while walking across the parking lot of a Montgomery County grocery store. The following morning, four more people in Montgomery were similarly killed, all in the midst of everyday activities—mowing the lawn, pumping gas, sitting on a bench, vacuuming out a minivan. Police determined that each of the victims had been shot with the same gun. So began the three-week siege of the so-called D.C. Sniper.

  While the rest of the newsroom mobilized, I stewed. I decided I needed to stand up for myself. I called Phil Dixon. He’d been away from the Post for seven years, but we’d remained friends.

  I ran down my situation, then told Phil my plan: “I’m going to file a discrimination lawsuit. I know the paper could retaliate, could pick apart anything I do, could make my life miserable. I figure this could blow up my career. I don’t care if I go up in flames, so long as Jo-Ann gets burned, too.”

  Phil suggested a more measured approach.

  “That would be a really big step, filing a lawsuit. You could do that,” he said. “Or you could try to work it out internally. Management always prefers that.”

  “Go over her head? Won’t management just support her?”

  “It’s worth a try,” Phil said. “If that doesn’t work, you could still go the legal route.”

  I decided to take Phil’s suggestion. I started with Milton Coleman, the former Metro editor who’d hired me. At the time, he was a deputy managing editor, the third in command of the newsroom, just below Len Downie and managing editor Steve Coll. I gave Milton copies of my memos requesting a raise. I included a copy of the flier touting me as a “Sub
urban Success Story.” In a cover letter, I went for broke, asking not only for a bump in pay, but also that I be allowed to stay in Prince George’s.

  We met a couple of days later. “If you show these memos to Len Downie and Steve Coll, you will get a raise,” Milton said.

  My eyes lit up. “So I should go to them, right?”

  “Go back to Jo-Ann,” Milton said. “Give her another chance.”

  I wrote Jo-Ann an e-mail asking for a response to my latest request for a raise. Three days later, she hadn’t responded. She was no doubt busy directing the coverage of the sniper shootings, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop now. I sent her another e-mail advising her that I was taking my case directly to Downie and Coll. She replied immediately, saying that of course I had the right to go to upper management if I had an issue.

  For three months, I heard nothing. Then, in January 2003, Jo-Ann called me to a meeting in her office.

  She acknowledged the good work I was doing in Prince George’s and said I didn’t have to worry about being reassigned to Montgomery. She also said that I would be getting a raise. She’d been scripted, it seemed to me.

  She continued, describing some of my shortcomings as a reporter and writer: I didn’t have enough respect for daily deadlines. I didn’t always stay in touch with my editor. I focused too much on what happened in the courtroom. I crammed too many details into the ledes of my stories.

  I was in a state of shock—in a good way. The North Wall had sided with me. I felt like I’d pulled a David and slain Goliath. That was great—in the short term. In the long run, the victory had a price, I figured. I thought there was no chance Jo-Ann would promote me within the Metro staff. And if I applied for a plum assignment elsewhere within the paper—say, with the National staff—the editor of that section would ask Jo-Ann about me. In a newsroom packed with talented and ambitious journalists, anything less than a full-throated recommendation would torpedo my chances.

  As I walked out of Jo-Ann’s office, I was sure of two things: That unless I screwed up spectacularly, Jo-Ann would leave me alone and let me keep working in Prince George’s. And that any chance I’d ever had for a promotion or a choice new assignment was now gone.

  Chapter 15

  “A Perfect Easter Story”

  The group of uniformed Prince George’s County cops who sat together in one row of the courtroom death-glared me as I walked past. Another twenty or so cops were scattered throughout the room. I felt their eyes on me as I headed toward the hallway.

  As I passed the clustered uniforms, some of them hissed. I thought about saying something but decided not to react. I simply walked out. There was a break in the trial, and I had to check in with my editor. I allowed myself a brief smile when I reached the hall.

  It was April 2006. The mood in the Upper Marlboro courtroom was grim, angry, and tense. By then I was accustomed to such antagonism from Prince George’s cops, many of whom held me responsible for the criminal conviction of former canine cop Stephanie Mohr and the revamping of the police-dog unit. I’d also written plenty of other stories that had led to officers being suspended or investigated, as well as to criminal charges being dropped against suspects because of questionable police tactics.

  Five years earlier, I’d covered the trial of Brian Catlett, a county cop who was charged with involuntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Gary A. Hopkins Jr., a college student who’d allegedly been trying to grab another cop’s gun. Catlett was acquitted. Moments after the trial ended, the state’s attorney at the time, Jack B. Johnson, took me aside in the hallway.

  “I’ve overheard a couple of officers say how great it would be to ‘get’ something on you,” he warned me.

  Some cops, without identifying themselves by name, wrote me angry e-mails. “I have to wonder what it would be like to make a living in the vile way that you do,” one wrote in January 2003. “You sit back and report half truths and innuendoes about a job which you know nothing about. Ever faced a gun? Have you ever been in a fight for your life over a weapon?”

  The Prince George’s officers who were hostile to me apparently took my reporting personally—many of them seemed to assume I hated cops. I didn’t. Some of the finest people I knew—Lou included—were with the Metropolitan Police Department. I did loathe bullies, though, and the abuse of power.

  I respectfully responded to every message, offering to write a correction if any of my reporting was in error.

  None of the senders ever asked for one.

  The day I was hissed at, I was covering the murder trial of Robert M. Billett, forty-four. He was charged with killing a county cop the previous June, during a confrontation that had begun as a traffic stop. An officer in a squad car had tried to pull over a Chevy Tahoe. The driver hit the gas, ran two red lights, and pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex in Laurel, a community in the northern part of the county.

  Billett and two other men in the car jumped out and ran. Corporal Steven Gaughan, forty-one, was working nearby as part of a plainclothes detail looking for stolen property. At the apartment complex, Gaughan got out of his vehicle and joined other officers in chasing the men. Billett pulled out a gun and fired.

  One round hit Gaughan in the shoulder. Another slipped by his protective vest and hit him in the abdomen, police said. He was taken to a hospital, where he died a few hours later. Police shot Billett, who was seriously wounded. He survived.

  Near the end of the trial, the defense called a witness, Terri King, a woman who lived in the apartment complex where the gun battle erupted. She testified that Gaughan had fired first and that Billett had shot back in self-defense. Under a withering cross-examination by Deputy State’s Attorney John Maloney, King acknowledged that she’d worked as a prostitute in several cities and been convicted of theft in Prince George’s in 2003. The admissions were damaging to King’s credibility.

  I wrote up the story, reporting King’s account of the shootout and her acknowledgment of her checkered past. It was a basic news story, thoroughly fair.

  But someone with a badge and a gun apparently thought differently. The day the article was published, I received an anonymous e-mail reminding me of my detention by the LAPD, some twenty years earlier, when I’d gotten roaring drunk and tried to pick up a woman who turned out to be a plainclothes cop. I felt a sense of shock as I read the brief message about one of the worst nights of my life.

  The taunting message was almost certainly written by a Prince George’s County cop. Only an active member of law enforcement could have looked up such a record on the police computer database. It was a federal offense to use the database for non-law-enforcement purposes.

  I took the incident seriously enough that I told a Post editor about it. I didn’t know how far the e-mailer was willing to go. He or she had risked catching a federal charge just to mock me in an e-mail. What if that person learned about my crack addiction? By that point, I’d told some relatives and close friends, including a couple of co-workers and a girlfriend or two, that I’d struggled with addiction. A handful of editors who knew the newspaper had arranged for me to go to rehab, such as Milton Coleman and Len Downie, knew I’d battled substance abuse, though neither editor had ever asked for details, and I hadn’t volunteered them. Could the e-mailer obtain my hospital records? That would be illegal, too—not that it seemed to matter.

  I was a different person from the man who’d drunkenly tried to pick up the wrong woman. I attended support-group meetings and tried to help fellow alcoholics and addicts. I worked hard and did my job well. When I traveled to California to visit my family, I doted on my young nieces and nephew, and I gave their parents no reason to distrust me.

  But someone hated me enough to break the law to goad me. Police officers had been overheard talking about getting something on me.

  “They’re afraid of you,” Lou said when I told him about the glares and hisses. He mentioned one of his friends on the Prince George’s force. “He said you wrecked the police dep
artment.”

  I thought I’d misheard. “You mean he thinks the Post has wrecked the police department?”

  “No, he thinks you personally have wrecked the department.”

  Just how far could an angry and enterprising cop go?

  A few months later, in early 2007, I wandered into the office of Tracey Reeves, a Post editor. We started out discussing news stories, but we eventually began talking about our lives. I sensed that I could trust her, and I told her the broad outlines of my struggle with and recovery from crack addiction and alcoholism.

  Tracey’s eyes lit up: “You have to write that story!”

  She suggested I pitch it to the Post’s Sunday magazine. I wasn’t so sure.

  But Tracey’s reaction made me think about a popular saying in my support group: “Your secrets will kill you.” In the context of the program, that meant that we needed to disclose our misbehavior to a trusted fellow recovering alcoholic. It was part of the process of cleaning the slate and moving forward.

  But I began to think the saying could have broader applications. What if my addiction wasn’t a secret? A pissed-off Prince George’s cop couldn’t use my addiction against me if I revealed it myself, I decided. Late that summer, I met with Sydney Trent, a Post Magazine editor, and pitched the idea of writing about what it was like to cover the crime beat during the crack era while I was an active crack addict.

  “Go for it,” Sydney said.

  That fall, I wrote the article on weekends and before and after my work shift. In December, as the publication date neared, I called relatives in California to let them know what was coming. I told Lou and other close friends. I notified judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys I routinely worked with. I told the other reporters in the Prince George’s bureau. I called friends throughout the country. One, a fellow journalist, wondered whether the disclosure would harm my career.