The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  The first time crack really registered in my consciousness came that March, when a different issue of Newsweek landed in our mailbox. The headline KIDS AND COCAINE was splashed on the front. “The new coke goes by many names on the street, but it is usually called ‘crack’ or ‘rock,’ ” the magazine cautioned breathlessly. “It is smoked, not snorted, and the resulting intoxication is far more intense than that of snorted cocaine—much quicker, much more euphoric and much, much more addictive.” One toke, warned an expert quoted in the article, could lead to “instantaneous addiction.” The hyperbole continued: “In New York, eager buyers queue up outside crack houses like movie fans outside a theater—and the lines, according to one drug agent, ‘are loaded with kids.’ There are white kids, black kids, Hispanic kids—kids from the ghetto and kids from the suburbs.”

  It’s doubtful that this multicultural group of teenage crack enthusiasts ever existed except in the imagination of a Newsweek reporter and his source, but the image of crack as a “smoke it once and be forever addicted” drug was prevalent. Crack is certainly addictive, and it hit the hardest in areas where people were looking to escape or were suffering from untreated depression or other mental health problems (you can think of rock cocaine as the poor man’s Prozac). In Seattle, the hard drugs of choice for white people have typically been heroin and, more recently, methamphetamine. Crack, though certainly not confined to blacks only, hit the Central Area and the South End like a tsunami.

  Nick Metz came on to the Seattle police force as a twenty-year-old in 1983, working the Rainier Valley in South Seattle. He remembers the beat as relatively mellow at the start—in his first two years on the job, he didn’t personally respond to a single gunshot call. When there was violence, it was almost always of the domestic or bar-fight variety. Drug dealing remained mostly out of sight, done from taverns, in workplaces, or in private homes. In about 1987, though, it felt as if he woke up one morning and the world had changed. “All of a sudden, we’re getting lots of gunshot calls, lots of gunshot victims, getting calls left and right from neighbors, residences, and businesses about people hanging out on street corners and dealing drugs,” Metz says. “And then obviously the pressure on the police department began to mount, ‘You’re not doing enough, you need to do more.’ ”

  The arrival of crack broke the Central Area and South End of Seattle into a number of separate fiefdoms, each populated mainly by teenage kids. You could track them straight down Twenty-third Avenue. The first spot was at the northern end of the Central Area, at the intersection of Twenty-third and Madison, the area where William Grose settled in the 1880s. Running south on Twenty-third for one and a half miles through the Central Area, you came to the intersections with Union Street—where Tyrell and JT hung out—down to Cherry, past Garfield High School, and on to Jackson. After Jackson Street, Twenty-third Avenue runs another mile south and heads down a hill before it spills into Rainier Avenue South, which soon crosses Martin Luther King Jr. Way, which it parallels through the South End. That area had its own corners, such as Rainier and Othello Street, where Myran sometimes could be found.

  The kids who sold drugs on each of these corners generally had grown up there—in many cases, their parents had, too—and they formed what could loosely be thought of as gangs. “You were in a gang because you lived in that neighborhood, period,” JT says. Of course, someone like JT, who had lived his whole life in the Central Area and had family all around, knew people at every intersection, so he could go anywhere in the Central Area and hang out. “It wasn’t really that rough, not when you know everybody in the neighborhood,” JT says.

  In about 1988, though, real gangs—the Crips and the Bloods from L.A., and the Black Gangster Disciples from Chicago—began to recruit new members in Seattle with the goal of taking territory and drug sales. Each tried to get a toehold in an area by getting in with the guys who were already there. The Crips, for example, took over Twenty-third and Cherry, just four blocks south of Union. Because the Crips would use violence to protect their turf, this made the area much more dangerous—even local guys like Tyrell and JT had to avoid it. In the meantime, ramping up the potential for conflict, the Black Gangster Disciples began to recruit kids from Twenty-third and Union.

  The separation into territories also hit along the old divisions of South Seattle versus the Central Area, a rivalry that ran back to community league sports teams, when CAYA would play Rainier Beach. Donnico Johnson, Tyrell’s brother, says that Tyrell wasn’t into gang life enough to become a full-fledged member of the Black Gangster Disciples. Nevertheless, several of Tyrell’s friends were, and distinctions between hanging out with members of a gang—who, after all, were your childhood buddies—and being in it were fluid. Tyrell’s dad, Doug Johnson, remembers driving Tyrell around one day and seeing Tyrell and a kid in another car scowling at each other. Johnson was shocked because the kid, who had played football for Rainier Beach while Tyrell played for CAYA, had only a few years earlier come over to the Johnson house to play. When Doug Johnson asked his son what was going on, Tyrell told him that the kid had joined the Crips.

  “For some reason, Seattle, it just opened up like this, and if you stayed here and you ran with this bunch of guys—the guys you had played sports with and grew up with—all of a sudden they were against each other,” Doug Johnson says. “I never understood that part, and to this day I don’t. Because if you stayed south, you couldn’t come over here no more, and if you stayed on this side, you couldn’t go south. All of a sudden it was the Bloods, the Crips, and the BGDs.”

  Random violence began to hit streets of the Central Area and the South End. In 1988, a twenty-six-year-old Crip leader who had moved up from Los Angeles fired out of a car and hit a sixteen-year-old boy walking near Garfield High School. The kid, who was injured but not killed, had been wearing a red jacket, the color of the Bloods. It turned out the victim had no gang affiliation. The shooting turned up the heat on the Seattle police, who heard increasing calls from community groups to do something to make the streets safer.

  “Our first instinct when everything started happening was to arrest our way out of it,” recalls Seattle police officer Nick Metz. The Seattle cops, to that point, had had no exposure to the type of wide-scale corner dealing that arrived with crack. Metz joined a newly formed street-level narcotics unit that was tasked with arresting as many street-level dealers as it could, mainly by going undercover, buying drugs, and then swooping in to make arrests minutes later. In March 1989, the narcotics unit busted Tyrell at Twenty-third and Union after observing him offering rock cocaine to people walking by. They found he had 1.2 grams of crack and a loaded .32-caliber handgun. Tyrell, who was seventeen, pled guilty and got five days in detention; he also had to agree to be home at his parents’ house by ten P.M. every night.

  The narcotics cops also began to go into crack houses to make undercover buys. It was hair-raising work. Metz remembers dealers holding guns on him as he made his purchases, not because they thought he was a cop but because they were simply worried about being robbed. Once the narcotics team scored, SWAT units moved in. In 1987, the Seattle police conducted 500 drug raids and seized 282 weapons. These raids were often based on informant tips, and the police went in blind. This led to some tragic results in the Central Area and the South End. In February 1988, two men were killed during such operations. William Tucker, who was forty-four, was shot when a police officer on a raid tripped and fired his gun. The incursion into Tucker’s house was the third in a month; the cops had found drugs and weapons on the previous two. Erdman Bascomb, who was forty-one, was sitting on a couch when the police busted in with a battering ram. As he began to get up, the cops spotted a black object in his hand and shot him to death. He turned out to be holding a remote control. A prior raid on Bascomb’s apartment had reportedly turned up small amounts of cocaine and marijuana. No drugs or weapons were found on the night he was killed.

  The Seattle police seized 6 kilograms of cocaine in 1986, 24 kil
ograms in 1988, and 89 kilograms in 1990. But no matter what the police did, Metz says, the influx of drugs didn’t stop. “Every time we took three or four guys off the street corner, there were three or four more behind him to resume business.” When they did make busts, Metz says, a lot of times all they got were “clucks”—crack addicts who dealers sent out to be middlemen. In exchange for a piece of the product, the cluck would hang around areas known to be drug spots, find customers, and then take the money to the dealer, who was off in a car, a house, or otherwise out of sight. When the cluck brought the cocaine back, the undercovers would arrest him while the dealer remained free.

  While the drug economy spread throughout the region, the worst impacts were localized in the black community. The Central Area became a destination for anyone seeking to score in Seattle. Metz remembers seeing BMWs and Mercedes pull up to the corners, running the plates, and finding out they were from the wealthy suburbs of Mercer Island and Bellevue. “They were coming down to the ’hood to get their stuff,” he says.

  Doug Johnson, Tyrell’s dad, observed the whole scene from the window of his apartment. He understood the teenage dealers’ desire for money, but he also knew their efforts were futile in the end. “Every time you’d look out you’d see a guy out there, just dealing like they had a license,” he says. “I watched a lot of them who had come up this year, they were flat on their ass next year. They had either gone to jail or got killed or shot or something of that nature—it never was good. You could say it was good, it seemed like they were having a little bit for a little while, but it never even lasted.”

  If you lived in the Central Area or the South End of Seattle in the 1980s, it was impossible to escape the impact of crack cocaine. Crime and violence rates rose. People who had been stable members of the community got hooked and slid down the tubes. “I had known people for years that had used drugs, they were using powder cocaine, but they were never like the people that used crack,” Doug Johnson says. “Once they messed with that crack they were a totally different person. It just changed them.” The drug also flipped the earning power in the neighborhood, with fifteen-year-old kids suddenly able to make more—by a large multiple—than their parents. The guys from our basketball team who were in the thick of it reacted pretty much in line with their individual personalities.

  Tyrell was never really all that ambitious—he just went with the flow. While his brother, Donnico, and other friends began to see themselves as Tony Montana-esque figures—Donnico had a videotape of Scarface that he put on the TV every day—Tyrell would dabble just enough to make a few bucks to see him through. He still lived in his parents’ apartment near Union Street. He kept his room spotless, with a shelf full of basketball trophies, a giant stuffed Mickey Mouse, and posters of his favorite basketball players, including Marques Johnson—a small forward who Tyrell liked because they shared the same last name—and Andrew Toney, a smooth guard for Philadelphia known for delivering huge games against the Celtics. Everything about Tyrell had to be immaculate. Damian remembers hanging out with him during middle school and Tyrell taking forever to leave the house because he had to starch and iron his jeans so they would have just the right crease.

  Tyrell also was friends with a white kid named John Doces, who was later featured in the Seattle Times article after Tyrell’s murder. Doces was from Bellevue, a suburb east of Lake Washington. He and Tyrrell met when they were both about twelve, after Doces’s mom had signed up for an “Adopt-a-Family” program established by the city of Seattle, in which wealthy families brought over food and toys to poorer ones on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Doces were assigned to the Johnsons, and Tyrell and John found they both loved basketball. The friendship, which lasted several years, centered around the game. Doces either came over to the Central Area to hang out, or picked up Tyrell and brought him over to Bellevue, where they played basketball on shortened “dunk” hoops. Doces remembers Tyrell as quiet, but also with an innate cool that surprised a white kid from the suburbs. One day, Doces and his mom dropped Tyrell off at his apartment. As Tyrell walked away, Doces yelled good-bye. Without looking back, Tyrell raised his arm in a Black Power salute.

  During high school, the pair sometimes went to parties together on the east side. Tyrell was always shy until he and Doces drank and smoked a little. It was still the days when rap was just coming into national popularity. As he loosened up, Tyrell would break out his rhymes—same as he did when we played basketball together—impressing all the white kids at the parties. The friendship faded in the later years of high school, especially after Tyrell dropped out and Doces got ready to go on to college at the University of Washington, only a few miles north of the Central Area. It ended in freshman year. “My whole mentality changed,” says Doces, who is now a professor of political economy at Bucknell University. He and Tyrell had nothing to talk about anymore.

  After he got away from basketball, Tyrell was basically drifting. Donnico, who was less than a year older than Tyrell, remembers a day in eleventh grade when they were both attending an alternative high school. They skipped out and went with a cousin to get tattoos on their shoulders. Donnico had a .45 put on with his name below it (the quality was so poor that people later made fun of it, saying it looked like a cigarette lighter, which it does). Tyrell got a .357 Magnum with the words “T-Baby for the records” written below. When I ask Donnico why the tattoos of guns, he shrugs: “I guess we was thinking we was hard,” he says. “Everybody had them.”

  Tyrell’s police record, mostly low-level crimes, grew: the bust for selling crack in March 1989; in August 1990, he was the passenger in a car when the driver pulled over to buy some cocaine; that November, he was caught with a mobile phone that had been stolen out of a car at a Texaco station near the Central Area while its owner was inside paying; in February 1991, Tyrell was the lookout while a friend climbed through a window to burglarize a Central Area apartment; they were caught in the act.

  During all this, Tyrell managed to retain the charm and charisma he’d always displayed on the court. “He was such a sweet, decent guy,” his public defender, Martin Powell, remembers. Tyrell was immature, he says, and there was still a basic goodness about him. When they had meetings, Tyrell would come to Powell’s office—only a few blocks from the Johnsons’ apartment—and they would spend time talking, with Tyrell listening and Powell trying to get him to think about getting away from the streets. “He was the kind of client you would want to spend more time with because you felt like there was some hope,” Powell says, “and the truth is you want to spend more time with people that you like.”

  Powell also remembers going to pretrial hearings at the King County Courthouse and seeing the other defendants greet Tyrell—these guys were all friends, Powell realized, and the shuffle into and out of the courtroom had just become part of life for them. With Tyrell, Powell says, there was a resignation that going to jail was inevitable, which struck Powell as strange in someone so young. “Unfortunately, [with] guys like Tyrell, who are out doing these low-level felonies, you just kind of do the best you can,” Powell says. “You get them in and talk to them, and maybe there’s some program or something that they can get into. Ultimately, your job’s to get them though the system with as little harm and as much protection as you can.”

  Tyrell’s principal motivation, Donnico says, was simply to have fun and keep some cash in hand. “See, Tyrell never saved his money,” he says. “He would spend his on sweatsuits and shoes and stuff like that. Looked good, though, you would think he had a pocketful of money. He had on a nice Fila sweatsuit, Fila shoes to match, Fila hat,” Donnico says with a laugh.

  Tyrell may have been heading toward getting in deeper, but no one can say now. In the meantime, Tyrell—who had never in his life left the state of Washington—was just another guy out and about in the Central Area. In the summer of 1991, he was riding with a friend when they pulled up next to Eric Hampton at an intersection. They honked to get Eric’s attention. “He rolled d
own the window and this smoke and smell came out, the strongest marijuana smell I ever smelled in my life,” Eric says, laughing. They chatted for a few minutes, keeping it light. “We may have exchanged numbers, you know how that goes—‘I’ll look you up’—and he just drove off.”

  Not long after, on August 10, 1991, a couple out taking their baby and dog for a stroll on a beautiful summer afternoon saw a bundle lying in a ditch along a wooded road in the South End. The man noticed it was about four feet long and wrapped in a blanket. It looked suspicious, so he went to take a closer look, poking at it with his walking stick. Whatever was inside was firm. He thought that maybe someone had disposed of a dead dog. He reached down, pulled the blanket back, and found Tyrell.

  “It crushed me,” JT says of Tyrell’s murder. “It was like losing my best friend, a friend you’ve been knowing since childhood. And you’re hearing about legs and arms and stuff, like a leg was chopped off, they was trying to chop his arm off, wrapped up in carpet.”

  It was impossible to understand why someone would want to kill Tyrell. If anyone would have been a more likely target at the time, it would have been JT; while Tyrell was going sideways, JT was moving up.

  JT’s friendly personality and large network proved to be good qualifications for the drug trade—people naturally gravitated toward him. “I was always the guy, if there was a new Starter jacket out—this was back in the break-dancing days—my uncle would give me this fly jacket and they’d be like, ‘Wow, where’d you get that one from?’ ” JT says. “I was always, as a kid, someone who could come up with it, get something that other people couldn’t, so they would attach to me, you know?”