S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (9 page)

The next spring, near the end of the school year, Cynthia was leading the kids into the building when one of Baldie’s young daughters, Nicole, walked over and joined the group. She was about seven. A couple of weeks later, Nicole’s sister, Angie, age four, joined, too. Neither Baldie nor his wife ever talked to Jim or Cynthia about enrolling their kids in the after-school program. The children simply showed up. Sending the girls to the program was Baldie’s way of trying to be a good father, Jim figured.

Jim never asked Baldie to fill out any paperwork for the girls. Baldie wasn’t much for documentation, and Jim didn’t want to do anything to discourage him from continuing to send his girls to the church.

New Community had been on S Street for five years. Jim no longer simply assumed that the church had Baldie’s protection.

He counted on it.

Chapter 4

Room Service Champagne

As was the case every Halloween, on October 31, 1989, a couple of
Post
reporters were sent to cover the festivities in Georgetown, where thousands of mostly white and affluent revelers partied through the night. I was dispatched to Potomac Gardens, a run-down public housing project a mile east of the Capitol, where Marion Barry was scheduled to make nice with the residents. My job was to take notes and contribute a few paragraphs to an innocuous story about how Washingtonians celebrated the holiday.

I’d already been to Potomac Gardens a handful of times during my first month on the night crime beat, to cover shootings. The complex was a collection of boxy concrete buildings between three and six stories high, surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence that reminded me of a penitentiary. At one crime scene near the project, I’d overheard a street cop joke that the fence was there not to protect the residents but to keep the rest of the city safe from Gardens inhabitants. A violent drug crew operated in and near the housing complex. At night, it was a forbidding, dangerous place.

I arrived early and staked out a spot at the edge of a concrete courtyard inside the complex. A few minutes later, a black Lincoln pulled up. A security man in a dark suit hopped out of the shotgun seat and opened the rear passenger door for the mayor. Barry stepped out and smoothed the lapels of his charcoal-gray suit coat.

Some people in the courtyard saw him and cried, “Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor!” and “We love you, Marion!” Barry smiled. He waved. He sauntered toward the courtyard.

He was in friendly territory. While much of white and upper-class-black Washington viewed Barry with hostility or disdain, he was beloved in places like Potomac Gardens. In the eastern half of the city, many people believed that Barry was being unfairly persecuted by the white establishment, that reports of his cocaine use had been trumped up by his political enemies to discredit him.

Some blacks even thought there was a grand conspiracy among whites to retake the reins of city government, which would require knocking Barry out of office. The alleged scheme was known simply as “the Plan.” It seemed that everyone who’d been in D.C. more than five minutes had heard about the Plan, and a surprisingly high percentage of people, mostly blacks, gave it credence.

If there was such a scheme, it wasn’t troubling Barry at the moment. Smiling ear to ear, the mayor waded into the crowd. I slipped my notebook and pen from the inside pocket of my jacket and went to work.

The mayor posed for pictures with children and kissed babies. Someone turned on a boom box. Some teenagers busted moves to the music, and Barry joined them for a minute.

A handful of kids took shots at a portable basketball hoop set up on the edge of the courtyard. Barry slipped off his coat and awkwardly clanged a couple of set shots, then strutted to the front of the courtyard and faced the crowd to deliver an impromptu speech.

“This time last year, you couldn’t come here,” he said triumphantly. “A year ago, there were shootings every night.” I stifled a laugh. The city was hurtling toward a record homicide total. I was logging double-digit miles in the company sedan every night, racing to the latest crime scene.

The crowd cheered. Some people clapped. Some pumped their fists. Some cried out, “You tell ’em, Mr. Mayor!”

Barry advised kids to stay away from drugs, then led them in a little rap: “My mind is a pearl / I can do anything in the whole wide world!” The children responded out of sync, the words all jumbled up. Barry beamed.

The routine was too much. I laughed out loud.
Barry’s got a big brass pair
, I thought as I put away my notebook.

Using crack on the sly while running a city was one thing. Openly taunting the establishment, the
Post
, the feds—daring them to prove he was a junkie—was another.

Around the
Post
newsroom, reporters swapped rumors about purported Barry investigations. The FBI was hot on his trail; he could go down any day, one said. No, the investigation is on the back burner, another argued. No, the feds are ready to indict him; they’re just taking their time, a third suggested.

Police were gossiping about the mayor, too. After just a few weeks on the job, I’d already encountered one particular police inspector four or five times at late-night crime scenes. In the Metropolitan Police Department hierarchy, inspectors ranked above captains but below assistant and deputy chiefs. At the time, this one was the “nighthawk,” the de facto
chief during late-night hours. Unlike most white shirts, he was friendly to me, providing basic information about whatever shooting I was covering and happy to chat about sports or whatever was in the news.

One night that fall, as detectives hunched over the body of a young man who’d been shot in the street, the inspector and I landed on the topic of Barry. The mayor was so paranoid about the FBI that he summoned the chief to his office every few weeks to look for listening devices, the inspector told me.

The chief, Isaac Fulwood Jr., would dutifully check the mayor’s phone and lamps. He would even check under Barry’s desk, the inspector said.

“He didn’t know what he was doing. He wouldn’t know an FBI bug unless it was labeled,” the inspector chuckled. “But he went through the motions.”

The story seemed goofy, and in interviews Fulwood had always insisted that he’d never done anything to interfere with an FBI investigation. But I didn’t dismiss it. After all, Barry had appointed the chief, and the mayor had already shown he was willing to deal ruthlessly with MPD officials he viewed as threats. In the spring of 1982, police inspector Fred Raines reported alleged drug use by Barry to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Raines passed along accusations that Barry had snorted cocaine at a 14th Street Northwest strip club called This Is It? around Christmas 1981. When the mayor learned what Raines had done, he ordered the commander busted down to night supervisor.

Barry couldn’t manipulate the FBI or the U.S. attorney, though. In 1984, a federal grand jury indicted Karen Johnson, a city employee and reportedly a onetime Barry girlfriend, on charges of selling cocaine. An informant had worn a wire and recorded her talking about dealing to Barry. Federal prosecutors pressured Johnson to testify against the mayor, but she refused. Johnson was charged with contempt of court and incarcerated for eight months.

Barry wasn’t charged in connection with the Johnson case. But federal attention returned to him in December 1988. Just before Christmas, Charles Lewis, a Barry acquaintance, reportedly displayed a bag of white powder to a Ramada Inn maid and propositioned her. She reported Lewis to a hotel security officer. A hotel official called the police. Two D.C. detectives were on their way to the hotel when Barry arrived and headed to Lewis’s room. The hotel manager waved off the detectives, who aborted their assignment. Six days later, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jay Stephens announced he was launching an investigation into the incident.

Then, in March 1989, the FBI arrested Lewis for selling twenty-five rocks of crack to an undercover agent in the Virgin Islands. A federal grand jury issued a sixteen-count indictment against him, charging him with conspiracy, cocaine distribution, perjury, and other offenses.

Would Barry be the next to fall?

The mayor remained unflappable. “I want to repeat that I never saw any drugs or drug paraphernalia during my visits with Mr. Lewis,” he said in a statement.

What Barry didn’t know was that by late summer, Lewis would agree to a plea bargain and begin talking in detail about his cocaine escapades with the mayor to a team of FBI agents and MPD internal affairs detectives. Lewis told the investigators about the times and places he’d used powder cocaine or crack with the mayor. Lewis said he’d used drugs several times with Barry in the Virgin Islands from 1986 through 1988.

And he told them about a onetime Barry girlfriend named Hazel “Rasheeda” Moore.

I was unable to resist the combination of crack and an attractive woman. The FBI bet that Barry couldn’t either.

By mid-January 1990, newsroom rumors of an imminent Barry indictment had grown more persistent than ever. Meanwhile, people were getting shot in the city’s combat zones virtually every night. I was riding a seemingly nonstop wave of adrenaline, racing to crime scenes when I was working, driving Champagne to S Street to buy crack for our next tryst on my off days.

The night of January 18 began routinely: I parked near Logan Circle, then walked to the
Post
for my night shift. Parking closer without getting a ticket was always tough. But just before 8:00
p.m.
, I decided to try again and walked back to my car. It was going to be a frigid night, and I didn’t want to hike those four long city blocks after the temperature had really plummeted.

I was on M Street Northwest, driving toward the office, when two white shirts bolted into the street ten feet in front me. They sprinted toward the entrance of the Vista Hotel, to my left. A tall man in a suit and a guy lugging a TV camera were hot on their trail.

It was unlikely that a shooting had occurred in an upscale downtown hotel. Right away, I thought,
Barry?
I pulled over and ran across the street and into the hotel. The white shirts were in the lobby, talking to a serious-looking man in a dark suit.

I spotted Tom Sherwood, a reporter for a local TV news station. Tom had covered D.C. government for the
Post
; he’d left the paper about the time I’d arrived. I sidled up. Tom was gazing at the white shirts and the guy in the suit, mesmerized.

“Hey, Tom,” I said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“I think the FBI just arrested the mayor for drugs.”

Byline glory.

I’d left my equipment bag, with my
Post
cell phone inside it, in my car. I didn’t want to leave the hotel, not for a moment. I raced to a bank of pay phones a few feet away and called Curt Hazlett, the night city editor.

“Curt, I’m at the Vista Hotel. I think Barry’s just been busted by the FBI.”

“Ha-ha, very funny.”

“No, I’m serious. A couple of white shirts ran into the lobby, along with Tom Sherwood and a cameraman. The white shirts are talking to a guy in a suit. He may be FBI.
Something
is happening.”

The mirth disappeared from Curt’s voice. “Stay right there. I’ll get back to you.”

A couple more police commanders ran into the lobby. I stayed near the pay phone. Curt paged me about five minutes later. The reporter who’d been tracking the Barry investigation had confirmed that the FBI had busted the mayor, he said. They’d nabbed him inside a hotel room.

The news was traveling at warp speed. A radio reporter showed up, followed by a wire service guy. A white shirt went over to them and made a vertical chopping gesture—he was telling them they had to stay put.

“Do you have a credit card?” Curt asked.

“Yeah.”

“Get a room—on the
Post
.
The paper will reimburse you. Spend the night there, see if you can interview any staff, guests, anyone who saw or heard anything. We’re working on finding out where in the hotel they busted him. As soon as I know more, I’ll page you.”

After retrieving my equipment bag from my car, I checked into a room on the fourth floor and for the next ninety minutes roamed all over the Vista, buttonholing guests and hotel staffers. No one knew anything about the Barry arrest. I retreated to my room and called Curt.

“Hang tight,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much else you can do. I’ll call you if anything comes up.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, clicked on the TV, and channel surfed. Every station had abandoned its usual lineup of sitcoms and cop dramas to report on the Barry takedown. After an hour or so, I hadn’t heard from Curt. I figured I was done for the night. I rang up room service and ordered a lobster dinner with a rum and Coke. The mixture of adrenaline and booze produced a nice buzz. I ordered another rum and Coke.

By 10:00
p.m.
the news was reporting that Barry had been taken from the Vista to FBI headquarters. A dark SUV was shown rolling into an underground garage at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. A statement was issued by the U.S. attorney and the FBI: Barry had been arrested on narcotics charges in an undercover operation that was part of an “ongoing public corruption probe.” It wasn’t long before sources told my colleagues who were working the story that the mayor had been videotaped smoking crack.