Dopesick

by Beth Macy

  Lutz’s boss, Shenandoah County sheriff Tim Carter, told me the Department of Corrections was equally lax. “They put these people in this program, but they don’t put the resources to monitor them,” he said. A local probation officer, one of two overseeing the diversion workers at George’s, told me she was lucky to check in with them once a month. Among the divertees who stay after their sentences are complete, “very few of them earn enough money on their own to make expenses. So, they either commit new crimes, or they decide to give up and return back home. Or they abscond. They run.”

  The plant had become such a sore point among local police that Lutz and his colleagues joked: “Forget building a Mexican border wall. What they should really build is a wall around George’s Chicken.”

  But the arrival of bulk heroin in Woodstock was more proof that borders were impotent in the face of the drug. The weed-killer Roundup may cure your front yard of crabgrass, but if your next-door neighbor’s lawn is infested with it, those weeds will eventually creep back into your turf.

  During the six months Lutz was away from his usual drug beat, heroin exploded in his tiny, bucolic community—three people died of overdose, and the hospital would soon report its first opioid-dependent baby. “How it transformed from a pill problem to a heroin problem here, it was like cutting off and on a light switch,” Lutz recalled.

  Local deputies had yet to identify the supplier of the dope. But an informant helped them zero in on people close to the dealer, including Smith and Butler, who were the eyes and ears of a major heroin supplier Lutz knew only by his nickname: D.C.

  In late 2012, D.C. was more rumor than reality, a malignant but murky force. A few counties to the east, an associate of D.C.’s selling heroin in Stafford County went by the nicknames Sunny and New York. In between the new heroin hot spots, local police were also noticing a spike in drug arrests and shoplifting.

  Lutz called in federal reinforcements when he heard that D.C., whoever he was, was in the habit of demanding sex from female addicts before he’d sell them their dope. Informants said at least one was a teenager. Lutz was also beginning to see former classmates hijacked by the drug—farmer’s kids, football stars, many of them still managing, somehow, to get up and go to work. One woman he knew was in the habit of kissing her husband goodbye in the morning, putting her kids on the school bus, then driving to Baltimore to buy enough to last the day before returning to Woodstock just as the school bus brought her kids home.

  Though Lutz had made his first undercover heroin buy in 2010—at a price twice the current going rate—Woodstock was now, three years later, beginning to fall prey to what economists would label the diseases of despair. Whereas central Appalachian communities like Lee County—victims of factory and coal-mine shutdowns, followed by skyrocketing disability claims that made them prime sales targets for Big Pharma—had been battling opioid addiction since OxyContin’s 1996 release, Woodstock and similar small towns were slower to experience deaths related to opioid addiction, alcohol-related liver disease, and suicide. They seemed to be somewhat shielded because their economies, while not exactly robust, had maintained a centuries-old agricultural base and were never dominated by a single industry or two like so many smaller Appalachian counties where pill abuse first took root.

  “The places with the lowest overdose mortality rates tend to be in farming-dependent counties” with a more diversified economy, said Shannon Monnat, a Syracuse University professor. She likened Woodstock to her hometown of Lowville, New York, a village near the Adirondacks that’s economically dependent on dairy farming, wood products, and a wind farm that generates about $3.5 million a year for the local school district.

  Compared with Lee County at the western tip of Virginia, Woodstock and other rural communities like it displayed far better indicators of health: Fewer residents smoked, fewer were uninsured, and drug-related mortality rates were much lower than in places where single, labor-heavy industries like coal and furniture once dominated.

  More significantly: The opioid-prescribing rate in the Woodstock region was almost half the state’s rate—and less than one-third the rate of opioid prescriptions in the coalfield counties. On average, every person enrolled in Medicare Part D in Lee County had been handed a whopping 10.23 opioid prescriptions in 2013, compared with just 2.96 in Shenandoah County.

  As the epidemic spread from rural enclaves to cities and suburbs in the early aughts, police in Monnat’s upstate New York hometown began seeing the same trends as Sergeant Lutz: “They were saying, ‘It’s coming, we see traces, but it isn’t yet here,’” she said. “That doesn’t mean people weren’t self-medicating in other ways. It’s just that alcohol doesn’t kill you instantly like heroin and fentanyl can.”

  As journalist Sam Quinones theorized in his 2015 book, Dreamland, maybe the addiction-prone people who would have succumbed to alcohol addiction in late middle age—had opiates not appeared—were the same people who were now prematurely dying of heroin in their early adulthood.

  Monnat’s deep dive into rural wellness data underscored that hunch: Binge-drinking rates in the northern Shenandoah Valley were roughly the same, even a little higher, than rates for rural dwellers living in the nation’s most distressed counties and towns. But people in their late teens and twenties didn’t often die from booze.

  The real perfect storm fueling the opioid epidemic had been the collapse of work, followed by the rise in disability and its parallel, pernicious twin: the flood of painkillers pushed by rapacious pharma companies and regulators who approved one opioid pill after another. Declining workforce participation wasn’t just a rural problem anymore; it was everywhere, albeit to a lesser degree in areas with physicians who prescribed fewer opioids and higher rates of college graduates. As Monnat put it: “When work no longer becomes an option for people, what you have at the base is a structural problem, where the American dream becomes a scam.”

  She likened the epidemic’s spread not to crabgrass but to a wildfire: “If the economic collapse was the kindling in this epidemic, the opiates were the spark that lit the fire.”

  And the helicopters were nowhere in sight.

  By the spring of 2013, Lutz still didn’t know D.C.’s real name or what he looked like. But he had pieced together an impressive dossier of details: D.C. was African American, in his midthirties, with no tattoos. He drove a silver, older-model Mercedes SUV, nice but not too flashy, no custom rims. His heroin was said to enter Virginia’s I-81 corridor in plastic Walmart bags, tucked inside snack containers carried by young women riding the Chinatown bus from New York, earning $300 to $500 per round trip.

  Packaged in Harlem, the heroin was shaped into uniform, four-ounce hockey-puck-shaped disks that nestled snuggly inside a Pringle’s can. Whoever was coordinating the production seemed to have a craving for a single flavor, cheddar cheese. And they were methodical, emptying the cans, then repacking them with four pucks and stacking a few Pringles at the end before resealing the tubes with a hot-glue gun. The mystery source also seemed to crave Nilla Wafers and Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies, using those empty packages to transport powder cocaine, which Butler and Smith cooked into crack, Lutz later learned.

  An ex-offender who had long dealt in crack and marijuana, D.C. at first had no idea what to do with the Pringles pucks when they landed in Woodstock. So he hired Smith and Butler to break them down into dosage-sized units, or tenths of a gram. In fact, D.C. was so afraid of the drug that he wore rubber gloves, goggles, and a face mask while Smith and Butler cut and packaged the heroin into bags, called points or tenths—on the other side of his living room.

  “He looked like he was doing surgery,” one of his subordinate dealers told me. “He was way too scared of heroin to ever use it.” Like many black heroin users and dealers, D.C. pronounced his product “herr-on,” as in: None of my friends or close associates does herr-on. I wouldn’t even know where to put the needle.

  But from the first moment he sent one of his subordinate
dealers out in Woodstock to sell a gram’s worth of heroin he’d paid $65 for in Harlem—and the dealer returned with $800 in cash—D.C. was hooked on another drug.

  “What you sell up in the city, you can double down [your profits] here,” said an investigator on the case. “You don’t have the competition in the small towns, and you don’t have people shooting at you.”

  Whereas commuter dealers running to Baltimore were bringing in 20 grams—at most—D.C.’s Pringles haul routinely contained 200 grams.

  Lutz crouched beneath the window, waiting for the Mercedes and thinking about his fiancée back home, still pissed that he’d been called out to work on Christmas Day. At a family wedding in Florida, he’d spent most of his time on his cellphone, monitoring an investigation of the latest overdose. When his cellphone rang at night, his fiancée’s kids moaned loudly about him leaving, again, for work. As the county’s point man for drug activity, he was now getting, on average, one phone call a night.

  Ever since the 2010 reformulation of OxyContin, Lutz had been tracking a small cluster of heroin users, most of them young white men who made the two-hour drive to Baltimore, a longtime heroin stronghold, on a near-daily basis. They’d buy enough to use, plus extra to sell to friends, making enough to fund both their next fix and gas for the trip to get the fix after that. Police classified them as commuter-dealers, and they were becoming an important subset of the drug trade in Baltimore, where heroin sales were estimated at $1.5 million every day.

  For forty years, Baltimore had been a prime staging area for dealers moving drugs, especially heroin, along the East Coast. Its port was an entryway for international drug smuggling. Another trafficking artery was Interstate 95, which connected Baltimore to cities from Miami to Bangor, Maine, with nicknames that transitioned over time, depending on the drug of choice, from Reefer Express to Cocaine Lane to the Heroin Highway, also called the Highway to Hell.

  With the highest per capita rate of heroin use in the country, Baltimore residents were six times more likely to die from an opioid overdose than the national average.

  Commuter-dealers weren’t making the trek just from Woodstock but from nearby towns, too, including Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Hagerstown, Maryland, localities that would both earn the nickname Little Baltimore for their explosions in heroin-overdose deaths. A 2017 New Yorker profile of Martinsburg by Margaret Talbot opened with the synchronous thud of two Little League parents who had fallen from the bleachers after overdosing at their daughter’s softball practice, their younger children running around and frantically screaming, “Wake up! Wake up!”

  Twentysomething Roanokers were drawing on drug-dealing connections for their daylong northern treks up I-81 to New Jersey and New York. But in wide-open Baltimore, commuter-dealers needed no such connection.

  When Shenandoah County native Dennis Painter made his first trip to Baltimore to buy heroin, in 2012, he’d been advised simply to look for the blinking blue lights. Intended to aid police surveillance of high-crime neighborhoods, the lights also functioned as beacons for drug seekers with out-of-state plates. “Sometimes the dealers will flash their lights at you when they see your plates, it’s just crazy,” he explained in a phone interview from a Nashville rehab facility in 2016.

  “Then, once you know somebody [to buy from], you just keep going back. And when the police arrest someone, there are four more people waiting to take that person’s place.”

  Dennis usually drove to Baltimore with his best friend, Jesse Bolstridge, Kristi’s son. Sometimes the pair stopped by the city health department’s syringe-exchange van to pick up clean needles. Once when Jesse was away at rehab, Dennis made the trek to Baltimore with friends of friends, only to be robbed and ultimately abandoned by the people in his car pool. His girlfriend had to pick him up late that night, fuming, their toddler twins asleep in the back seat.

  Jesse and Dennis had been best friends since they were toddlers—“I have pictures of us together as three-year-olds playing in a sandbox,” Dennis told me. They’d been partying together since the age of sixteen, when Jesse began trading his ADHD medication for painkillers.

  Whereas at the start of D.C.’s heroin ring in late 2012, Jesse still preferred injecting crushed-up Roxys, Dennis said, his friend’s drug of choice soon became IV heroin, because it was cheaper and stronger, and suddenly it had become much easier to get. As their cravings grew in 2013, their parents paid for them to get residential treatment in separate out-of-state facilities, only to watch them fall back into using shortly after they returned and reunited. The first time Jesse shot up heroin, his mother told me, it was with drugs Dennis bought from one of D.C.’s subdealers.

  Police officers and prosecutors working the case told me they could count on one hand the number of heroin users in the region before D.C. arrived. But Dennis and others familiar with heroin in Woodstock contend there were more. Dozens of young twentysomethings from Woodstock had already been driving to Baltimore to buy heroin, some making the trip twice a day.

  One night in late March 2013, Sergeant Lutz got a lucky break from an unlikely source—a minor traffic stop in neighboring Middletown (population 1,320). A traffic cop had pulled over the driver of a 2008 Hyundai Elantra for a broken license-plate light and smelled marijuana wafting from his car.

  The moment the officer returned to his cruiser, Devon Gray floored the Hyundai—before the policeman could piece together that Gray was driving on a suspended license or that he was an armed career criminal who went by the street name D, with several felonies on his record, including multiple convictions for assault and battery, smuggling drugs into a prison, and felony cocaine trafficking. In the course of Gray’s forty-two years, his only legitimate employment, police later learned, had been a stint at George’s Chicken that ended a few months before. And he was one of D.C.’s and New York’s key distributors.

  Neither did the Middletown cop know that Bill Metcalf, an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, had already been pursuing Gray for the past three weeks, arranging undercover buys from him in the parking lots of Pizza Hut, Target, 7-Eleven, and Petco in several northern Shenandoah Valley towns. (During the Petco buy, Gray had ridden shotgun with a girlfriend who had her two-year-old in the back seat.) Metcalf surreptitiously captured the buys on video from his vehicle and supplemented the visual record with an audio wire he’d tucked into the clothes of his confidential informant. Metcalf had been called into the case a month earlier by a detective buddy in Front Royal, a half hour east of Woodstock, who explained that Gray was carrying guns, in violation of his probation terms.

  Lutz had teamed with Metcalf before on cases and admired his ability to work all night and keep going the next day. “ATF agents are the street cops of the federal world; they’re a different breed and very much more gung ho than we’re allowed to be,” Lutz told me in early 2016. “The [Obama] administration is trying to rein ’em in a little; if there aren’t guns connected to a case, they want ’em to pull back. But ATF agents want to work. They’re like, ‘Call us, call us, call us.’”

  Every officer and prosecutor involved in the sprawling D.C. investigation used the same word to describe Metcalf: “relentless.” Frequently they used the same phrase: “He can be a pain in the ass.” “We’ve almost come to blows a couple times,” said Sergeant Kevin Coffman, the Front Royal officer who alerted Metcalf to Gray’s guns.

  The two cars screamed as fast as ninety miles an hour. Gray led the local officer on a squealing chase through Middletown, a one-stoplight hamlet, down a scenic byway across I-81, and into neighboring Strasburg. On the southern edge of Strasburg, Gray abruptly stomped his brakes, causing the cruiser to ram the tail of the Hyundai and veer into an embankment before skidding and coming to rest on its side. The wreck left the officer with minor injuries. His police dog, a black Lab named Trooper, broke loose and ran frantically around the totaled car, his training toys strewn across the street.

  While the officer extricated hims
elf from the vehicle, Gray drove away, then abandoned his Hyundai and took off on foot—less than a mile from the field where Jesse Bolstridge had made his hometown football fans stand and roar.

  The case was sprouting new tentacles by the day. As it stretched across state and county lines, Metcalf called in a federal prosecutor from Roanoke who specialized in heroin cases, and a grand jury was eventually convened. The prosecutor’s Obama-era marching orders, according to a road map written by then–attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., was to use discretion in filing criminal charges, reserving the harshest penalties for serious, high-level, and/or violent drug traffickers. Responding to a nearly sixfold increase in the national prison population between 1972 and 2008, Holder wrote: “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for truly no good law enforcement reason.”

  This case seemed to fit all the criteria. It targeted the biggest dealers.

  But to get the worst offenders off the streets, investigators typically need witnesses in the form of user-dealers. It’s a messy and often dangerous business, in which police try to glean evidence and witness testimony from lower-level offenders in exchange for what’s called substantial assistance. The unofficial interviews are not typically part of the public record, giving prosecutors and law enforcement officers alike a great deal of discretion over which witnesses to believe and which to target for the harshest punishment.

  With a fugitive hit-and-run now among his list of offenses, Gray was definitely in the mid-level category. The day after the high-speed chase, he reached out from his hideout—in a tiny town near the base of Shenandoah Mountain—to the same informant Metcalf used for the earlier drug buys. Gray was desperate to buy a gun. (On the day of the chase, he had left the house without his usual complement of weaponry.) Metcalf was eager to do the undercover deal.