Dopesick

by Beth Macy

  Growing up, he told me, he wanted Nikes instead of Reeboks, steak instead of hot dogs and fish sticks. He wished for a closer relationship with his single mother, a hospital nursing assistant and, later, nurse. But she got along better with his easier-going little brother, Thomas, who was into music and sports and was promoted to his school’s gifted program. “I’d get jealous of my brother, of his attention from my mom. I’d get mad at her and threaten all the time, ‘I’ll go live with my dad.’”

  Ronnie was obstinate to a fault, recalled Thomas Jones III, and would talk back to teachers and to their mom. “The weird thing is, he wasn’t a very bad kid; it was more of his total disregard, at times, for authority. I learned that it was best just to try to stay out of his warpath.”

  Now a music promoter based in Charlotte, Thomas Jones said his brother had a brilliant business mind and had helped him, when he was younger, with his advanced math homework even as he refused to do his own.

  Their family was not without connections. His uncle Petey Jones was a linebacker on the 1971 state-champion team memorialized in the movie Remember the Titans, which was set against a backdrop of racial tensions brought on by the integration of Alexandria’s high schools. In 1990, his maternal grandfather, Thomas “Pete” Jones Sr., was such a fierce fighter for equal housing that then–president George H. W. Bush met with him and other residents to discuss ways to rid Alexandria’s public housing units of drugs.

  Ronnie and his brother grew up in Section 8 housing in northern Virginia, moving every few years as their mom worked her way up to better jobs. A no-holds-barred fight between the brothers when Ronnie was fifteen taxed his mother’s nerves to the breaking point. She sent him to live in Alexandria with his father, dropping his belongings on the curb in trash bags and telling his dad, as Ronnie recalled it: “He your responsibility now. I’m done.”

  Ronnie’s father and uncle were regular drug users. He remembered them going down into the basement regularly to freebase powder cocaine. Six months after moving in with his dad, Ronnie moved in with his maternal grandmother, Rosie, his favorite relative. Her husband was an Air Force mechanic who took Ronnie to air shows at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, and let him sit in the pilot’s seat. He was fascinated with airplanes and wanted to be an Air Force pilot. It was a short but happy time in a tumultuous upbringing: His grandmother helped him get a dishwashing job at a nearby retirement home, and he sold cookie dough for a door-to-door nonprofit organization on the side, developing an acumen for sales.

  His grandmother gave him anything he wanted—as long as he stayed in school. But he had already switched schools ten times before his sixteenth birthday, often butting heads with his teachers. One memorable clash with authority came during a class discussion that spiraled into a debate about who had been persecuted most: African Americans, native Americans, or Jews. The exchange grew so heated that Ronnie was asked to leave the classroom, which he did, forcefully pushing the door on his way out in a way the teacher perceived as threatening. The incident culminated in a fine and his first juvenile probation stint.

  “I play those incidents over and over in my head,” he said of his first few legal charges. “If I had never drove that girl’s car and then [the car with the stolen goods], I could’ve been probably in the military now and having a regular life.”

  Jobs were hard to get. Because of Ronnie’s felony record, his applications were turned down by Burger King, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Lowe’s. For a time, he worked at Food Lion in Maryland, driving an hour each way to get there. A cousin introduced him to cocaine dealing, he said, whereupon Ronnie realized that he could stock shelves for two weeks and not come close to making what he could dealing drugs in a single day. The math was irresistible.

  Ronnie said he hated hard drugs and didn’t want to end up like his dad. So he drank only on his birthday and New Year’s Eve, and eschewed marijuana entirely. But dealing drugs gave him the two things he craved most: money and respect. He says he was profiled in early 2000 when he and a black friend were pulled over on Interstate 66 near Herndon, Virginia, and naïvely consented to being searched, ostensibly for not having a county sticker on their car. (They were driving a car with Maryland plates, he said.) Police found 3 grams of crack cocaine tucked into his sock. “I was guilty. I did have the drugs.”

  Bonded out of jail by his grandmother, he was arrested a short time later for selling drugs to an undercover cop, and the two state charges plus a probation violation combined for a state-prison sentence of eight and a half years. His court-appointed attorney was overworked and “just wanted to get me over with,” Jones said; he didn’t answer the letters Jones wrote about his case from jail. He was encouraged to accept the prosecutor’s first plea deal, and to remain mum in court. This was 2001, a time when prosecutors across the country were doubling the number of felonies they filed in state courts despite declining crime rates. In his 2017 book, Locked In, Fordham Law School professor John F. Pfaff argues that it’s politically safer and economically cheaper to charge a person with a felony, which sends them to prison—on the state’s dime—than it is to incarcerate someone locally or put them on probation, paid for by local budgets.

  “No matter where you turn in this epidemic,” East Tennessee State University public health professor Robert Pack told me, “there are systems in place to address the problems, but none of them are working together.” The biggest barrier to collaboration is the fact that everyone involved views the problem too rigidly—through the lens of how they get paid, according to Pack.

  Ronnie finished high school in jail, then took computer-repair classes in the state prison system, earning a GPA of 3.6. He tutored other inmates working toward their GEDs and earned a certificate in computer-repair tech. His goal was to get a job as a certified network administrator, maybe land a government job.

  His brother’s career was on a high when Ronnie got out of prison in 2008. Thomas, also known by the stage name “Big Pooh,” had been traveling in Asia on a contract with Atlantic Records, recording with the rap band Little Brother.

  “I gave him five thousand dollars for a laptop and helped him get on his feet,” Thomas told me. Ronnie was working for T-Mobile, selling cellphones for a time, but grew frustrated that he wasn’t advancing in the company, a failure that he attributed to his record. He was too impatient, too clever by half. “I kept telling him, ‘Man, the system is set up for you to fail. Just be happy you found some employment because most people who are felons can’t,’” Thomas recalled. “Ronnie has a knack for quickly reading people and knowing how to talk to ’em and reel ’em in. I said, ‘You just got to work that opportunity till you get another one.’ But it wasn’t fast enough for him.”

  Thomas was on the road in 2010 when he took another collect call from Ronnie. His brother had been locked up again, this time for credit-card fraud.

  “I was like, ‘Come on, we just did all this stuff trying to help you get on your feet?’” Thomas remembered, exasperated.

  Thomas rapped about devotion and disappointment in a song called “Real Love,” from an acclaimed solo album released in 2011:

  Brother, wrong or right

  The fact that you were incarcerated

  After being free let me know you never made it

  To that point where the old you is not outdated…

  No matter how this picture looks

  I’m still putting money on your books.

  I told you…we family.

  It was the credit-card fraud charge that landed Ronnie in the diversion program at George’s Chicken, and for a time following his release from it, his family believed he had turned a corner. He told his brother and mom he’d launched a computer-repair startup, which was certainly within his abilities, given the skills he’d picked up in prison programs. Thomas’s own business was in a lull at the moment, so Ronnie floated the idea of starting a joint venture. He wanted Thomas’s help opening a Caribbean jerk-chicken restaurant in Winchester. He didn’t tu
rn to his brother because he needed the money; Ronnie needed Thomas’s help securing a liquor license, which wasn’t possible for a felon.

  “I didn’t understand the urgency for him wanting to buy something legitimate,” Thomas said. “I just kept saying, ‘I don’t live in Virginia, and I’m not going to have my name on nobody’s liquor license and I can’t be there. And anyway, who’s going to come to a restaurant in this dead little small town?’”

  Thomas began doubting his brother during their final visit, when Ronnie and a girlfriend drove to Charlotte to see him and his wife. “I’m like, I don’t know if the computer business is this good? He had a Mercedes-Benz truck. And he had a motorcycle that he couldn’t really ride, and another car back at home.”

  Thomas said he wondered if the girlfriend, who worked at a federal agency, owned some of the vehicles but admits that he didn’t really want to know. Thomas now believes his brother was trying to phase out of drug dealing so that if and when he got arrested, there would be a legitimate revenue stream already established to help support his daughters.

  Ronnie Jones has frustrated his younger brother his entire life—and that pattern of behavior included his initial refusal to cooperate with Bill Metcalf and Don Wolthuis, the ATF agent and prosecutor responsible for his conviction. Ronnie thought he deserved a ten-year sentence, so he fired his first court-appointed attorney, Sherwin Jacobs, who’d negotiated a plea deal of fifteen years with Wolthuis—a decision Ronnie regretted the moment it backfired.

  Thomas was on a month-long European touring stint when a relative texted him the stomach-sinking news that Ronnie’s federal sentence was in: twenty-three years. “I told him, the last to talk is always the last to walk,” Thomas said.

  Though he’s never been in legal trouble, Thomas said he is regularly profiled, pulled over ostensibly for speeding—presumably because he’s a thirtysomething black man with tattoos driving a Lexus through his middle-class Charlotte neighborhood. Though the experience is frightening, he always looks forward to the moment in the exchange when the officer runs his license, and it comes back crystal clean, with the vehicle registered to his wife, a third-generation operator of a successful bail-bonding company. “I don’t have the leverage to get smart or act crazy when I get pulled over,” he said. “My goal every day is to make it back to my wife in one piece so I can live to fight another day, so I’m just ‘yes, sir, no, sir,’ and all that.”

  He feels for Ronnie and other ex-offenders getting out of prison. “They don’t rehabilitate you in prison, and they don’t make it easy for you to get a job. I truly believe they don’t make it easy because they want you back, and they want you back because that’s the new factory work in so many places now—the prison.

  “You have to be very strong mentally when you get out to not make those same mistakes.”

  Ronnie Jones said he initially felt welcomed in Woodstock. When he first landed there to work, in 2012, he found it charming that drivers waved to one another on the country roads, and his minimum-wage paycheck from George’s Chicken went further than it had in the city. “It was almost a culture shocker for me. I could count on one hand the number of black people. I loved it. I actually thought I couldn’t get into anything there,” he told me.

  He didn’t even mind the early shift, he said, even though “you’re standing in chicken shit, and you be dealing with ’em while they’re live, and they be scared.” He kept working at George’s after his twenty-one-week diversion sentence was complete but lost the job several months later when he got sick and had to be hospitalized for a week. At the time, he hoped to open a small diner with ten chairs—he’d learned to cook from his mother, and his first job at the diversion center, where he worked before going to George’s, had been as a cook—but no one would rent to him. He said the same thing happened when he contacted a landlord about renting space for a computer-repair shop and was told the space was already leased. (“I got a white girl to call, and he was willing to rent to her, and I was like, ‘This is bullshit.’”)

  At the time, he owed $5,000 in medical bills and $20,000 in court fines and restitution. Jurisdictions across the country increasingly inhibit ex-offenders’ ability to reenter society by assessing hefty court fines and fees, requiring them to pay thousands or face more jail time.

  Jones was hired at another chicken plant but netted only $300 to $400 a week. “I was at the second chicken plant for less than thirty days before I decided, ‘I’m making too much money; let me concentrate on this,’” he said, deciding to deal drugs full-time—temporarily, he told himself—until he could pay off his fines and go legit.

  In a convoluted feat of logic twisting, Ronnie justified his heroin enterprise by declaring himself the ring’s wholesaler, far removed from the moment the needle touched the vein. He clings to the narrative that he was providing an actual service—offering the drug cheaper and in a much safer environment than Baltimore. Like Purdue Pharma announcing it had created the perfect time-release painkiller that was addictive in “less than 1 percent” of cases and then reproaching the hordes of addicted people who misused its drug, Ronnie had an easy time shifting the blame, with responsibility often lost in the cloudy penumbra of bureaucratic disconnects and cops-and-dealers Whac-A-Mole.

  If you were a user-dealer, you would, employing Ronnie’s model, buy your heroin from his subdealers for $100 a gram, which was substantially cheaper than driving to Baltimore and paying $150, plus it saved you the driving time and the risk of dealing with armed inner-city dealers (though Ronnie and some of his lieutenants were also armed).

  “Herr-on was already there,” he insisted, a truth confirmed in interviews with survivors of people who died of heroin overdose before Ronnie arrived in Woodstock. “I never introduced herr-on to the area. The only thing I did: I gave it to ’em at a cheaper price.”

  Ronnie believes he was made out to be a monster in the federal government’s case against him, vehemently denying that he had sex with underage females and dopesick users—an accusation that Wolthuis said fueled him and the task force in their quest to put him behind bars for many years and possibly even for life. “I would pay for sex before I’d have sex with someone doing drugs,” Ronnie said.

  Jacobs, the fired first attorney, believes Ronnie on this point, even as he called him a “con man” and “a pain in the ass.” Jacobs saw Ronnie as someone who dealt drugs because it “was easier than working, and you can be a big guy in your own eyes, and people follow you, and it’s like you’re the head of a business, which you are—until it all comes crashing down.”

  Female user-dealers are incentivized to lie in their quest for what the government calls substantial assistance, and they exaggerate their addictions so they’ll be given less time, according to Jones and Jacobs. Keith Marshall, the dealer whose expletive “Fuck. You. Bring it.” gave the case its informal name, said the women not only cooperated for less time but also played up their addictions to their advantage. When Kareem Shaw’s girlfriend was arrested, “she batted her eyes and talked about how she was just an addict forced into this and used up by everybody when the reality was quite the opposite. She was selling and setting up new people to move [drugs] just like myself,” Marshall told me in an email, mad that she’d gotten a lighter sentence than him and was due to be released from prison in late 2018.

  Ronnie turns the case over in his mind, including his own complicity. “I promised myself I’d never grow up to be like my father, and while I may not have an addiction to an actual drug, I do feel my addiction,” he said. “I’m addicted to that lifestyle. It wasn’t my intention. I didn’t want to do it. But no one would give me a job in the field I’d trained for, and no one would let me create my own.”

  He was disappointed in himself and felt bad about hurting his relatives, especially his daughters. He no longer has relationships with their mothers, one of whom told me, “Ronnie was just not mentally mature enough to be a father. His biggest thing was, he felt entitled.”


  Ronnie ended the interview with a version of the same old saw I’d heard at so many of my stops along the heroin highway: He predicted that “ten more dealers would pop up to take my place,” which was accurate. It was hard to envision a future where shit in fact stopped.

  It was a long drive back to Roanoke. I was too tired to stop in Woodstock, where I’d arranged to meet with Kristi. She was eager to learn what light Ronnie had shed on Jesse’s death, but I dreaded telling her just how little he seemed to think or care about the victims of his crimes. Since our last meeting, she had arranged to view the pictures police took of Jesse lying dead on the floor. He looked surprisingly peaceful. “What I’d been imagining was actually much worse,” she said. When Sergeant Lutz called them up for her on his computer screen, the task force had noted a lull in overdose deaths in the wake of the prosecution of Ronnie Jones and others in the FUBI ring. But that was also before fentanyl and other synthetic analogs came roaring onto the scene.

  Kristi still went by her son’s grave overlooking the football field several times a month, less often since her family moved to the other side of the county. But she still decorated it for every holiday. “I feel bad every day that I don’t go,” she said.

  She had recently met Dennis Painter’s son, the curly-haired toddler named for Jesse. His mother, Courtney, had awakened him in his car seat after she and Kristi ran into each other at the Dollar Store. “He woke up reaching for me,” Kristi said, as if it were Jesse reaching out from beyond the grave. “I got in my car and cried for ten minutes.”