S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (17 page)

I looked at Milton, hoping for support. He was looking at the counselor, nodding in agreement. They were putting me away.

“How long will I be in for?” I asked.

“Three weeks,” the counselor said. “It’s an excellent program. I’ve worked with a number of people who have gone through there and gotten sober.”

I didn’t ask what happened to the ones who failed. I didn’t want to know. “What now?” I asked.

“Milton will take you to your home so you can get your toothbrush and some clothes. Then he’ll drive you to the hospital.”

I sat dumbstruck in Milton’s black Toyota SUV, staring out the window at the patches of snow on the ground as my boss drove north on Connecticut Avenue toward the hospital in Bethesda.

I had no idea what rehab was, other than expensive. A strange thought popped into my head:
This can’t be good for my career.

As we approached the hospital, I asked Milton who would cover my shift.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “We’ll get volunteers.”

“Will people know that I’m in rehab?”

“Absolutely not. That’s nobody’s business.”

“How much will this cost?” I fretted.

A three-week stay clocked in at about twenty grand, Milton said. Before my heart could stop, he added, “Don’t worry about it. The
Post
’s
insurance has got this. Just focus on getting better.”

We pulled into the hospital parking lot. Milton walked me to the front desk, made sure I signed in, and shook my hand.

“Good luck,” he said. He looked as though he couldn’t wait to get out of there.

I couldn’t blame him.

Chapter 7

The Least and the Lost

One afternoon in the summer of 1991, Billy Hart was sweeping the kitchen floor inside New Community. Billy was the resident manager at the church. The Sunday service had ended a couple of hours earlier, and Jim and the congregation were long gone.

Billy heard a loud bump upstairs. It sounded as if it was coming from the room used for the after-school program. Billy leaned the broom against a table and walked upstairs to check. He wasn’t alarmed.
Probably a stray cat
, he thought.

He stepped into the classroom. Three men were loading boxes of crackers, cartons of juice, and bags of cookies into cardboard boxes. They were dressed in jeans or shorts and T-shirts. The invaders looked surprised to see him.

“What’re you doing?” Billy challenged.

The men looked at him, then at one another.

“White man told us to come by and pick this stuff up,” one of the men said.

The ringleader
, Billy thought.

The white man would be Jim. He was well known in the neighborhood as the pastor. But Jim hadn’t told Billy anything about three guys coming by to raid the after-school program’s supplies. How dumb did these mopes think he was?

“He didn’t tell
me
,” Billy said.

The ringleader squared his shoulders.

“You get the fuck out of here,” he snarled. “I told you what we’re doing.”

Billy began to curl his right hand into a fist. He was no Bambi: He’d done a few years in jail and prison for nonviolent offenses before he got his life together and met Jim, who hired him as New Community’s resident manager in the late eighties.

Billy made the three raiders as junkies looking to swipe anything they could sell or trade to finance their next hits. He took a deep breath and did the math. Billy was five-eight, 170 pounds, in his late thirties. Each of the men was about his size and age, give or take a few pounds or years. Billy reckoned he could take any one of the three individually. But three on one?

This was no time to be a hero. Billy uncurled his fingers and backed out of the room.

“That’s right, get on out of here,” the ringleader taunted.

Jim had told Billy that if he ever had any trouble when he was at the church by himself, he should not call the police—he should get Baldie. Billy raced down the stairs, zipped right past the phone in the hallway near the kitchen, stepped out into the sunshine, and made the short trip to Baldie’s house. The kingpin of S Street answered the door.

“Three guys are robbing the church,” Billy said. “They’re taking snacks from the after-school classroom.” Baldie didn’t say anything. He just nodded and followed Billy toward New Community.

Billy and Baldie were heading toward the side entrance when they saw the three men loading their loot into the back of a van parked in the alley behind the church.

Billy and Baldie walked toward them. The three bandits froze at the sight of Baldie. Two of them had boxes in their arms. The ringleader had already dumped his into the van. They knew who Baldie was.
Everybody
in the neighborhood knew who Baldie was.

“Hey, Baldie. What’s up?” the ringleader said, all friendly.

Baldie turned to Billy.

“That’s them,” Billy said.

The three men seemed to go pale. The ringleader put his palms up. “Our bad, Baldie. We didn’t know.”

Billy almost felt sorry for them. They had no idea Baldie had two little girls in the after-school program. They might as well have been walking up to Baldie’s kids and their little friends and taking their snacks away.

“Y’all need to take that shit back upstairs,” Baldie said evenly.

There was no argument. The three would-be thieves picked up the boxes and marched back into the church. Baldie gave Billy a little nod; he wanted Billy to keep an eye on them. Billy followed the three men into the church and upstairs.

The three men and Billy returned. Baldie was waiting for them near the van.

“
All
of it,” Baldie said.

The men picked up some more boxes from the van and carried them into the church. Billy followed, to keep an eye on the intruders.

Again the would-be bandits and Billy returned to the van.

“They bring back everything?” Baldie asked.

“Far as I can see, yeah,” Billy said.

Baldie turned to the three men.

“Now, y’all need to get out,” he said. “If I catch you in this neighborhood, me and my boys will break your fuckin’ backs.”

The men hustled into their van and zoomed off.

The following day, Billy ran it all down for Jim. Weeks passed. Jim heard rumors that Baldie and his boys had tracked down the intruders and inflicted an epic beat-down. Jim never asked Baldie about the rumor. If it was true, he would never admit it anyway.

The three men were never seen on S Street again.

After nearly a decade on S Street, Jim was comfortable coexisting with Baldie and his crew of slingers. He continued his ministry, preparing and delivering sermons, organizing and participating in mission groups, helping people get jobs and find affordable housing. Baldie doled out product to his slingers, paid them, and collected the profits. He kept sending his two young girls, Angie and Nicole, to the church’s after-school program. Every summer, it seemed, Baldie fired up the grill and threw a party for the neighborhood.

Jim saw Baldie yell at his wife more than a few times, usually when the drug dealer was drunk. But he never saw Baldie physically harm anyone, and the big man’s street slingers remained respectful of the church and its members.

Jim often talked to Baldie, trying to cajole him to change his life, to give up drug dealing, to come to church just once. Baldie never did. Nor did he refrain from violence entirely. One morning in 1993, Angie was outside the house waiting for her father to take her to swimming class. A man wandered by. Baldie started talking to him. From the conversation, she guessed that the man owed him some money.

The girl watched as her father picked up a piece of lumber and whacked the man on the head, knocking him to the ground. Angie ran back into the house, crying.

“Baldie was a complicated person,” Jim said. “He believed in what we were doing. But I think he had no hope, that he couldn’t imagine having a different life.”

Most of Baldie’s slingers couldn’t, either. One Sunday morning, in the middle of a service, Jim answered a knock at the front door. A slinger held up a Styrofoam cup stuffed with cash—mostly ones, but also a couple of fives.

“This is for the church,” the slinger said.

“Thank you,” Jim replied. “Would you like to come in?”

The drug dealer waved him off and walked away.

Most of the slingers never accepted Jim’s standing invitation to attend a church service. But a couple did join some members of New Community on a weekend retreat to the Maryland countryside. And Jim managed to help some of the slingers leave the drug trade.

One afternoon around 1989, Jim went out to the street and summoned about a dozen S Street slingers. Some of them were dealing drugs primarily to support their own addictions, Jim suspected.

“How many of you would get off the street if you could get a real job?” he asked.

Eight hands shot up.

Jim made a few calls to his D.C. government contacts and got each of the slingers a job in the Department of Public Works as a temporary garbage collector or street sweeper. Some of the dealers stuck with the city jobs; some didn’t. But Jim didn’t see any of them return to S Street to sell drugs. Eventually, one of the former slingers rose to a high position in the department. Jim didn’t worry about offending Baldie, he didn’t tell him about his effort to get some of the slingers off the street. Jim had told Baldie he was there to try to change people’s lives. Besides, Baldie would have no problem finding replacements for street slingers.

It was part of the church’s mission to embrace the “least and the lost, those rejected by society,” Jim said. On S Street, that included not only Baldie’s slingers but also their customers.

Whenever he had the opportunity, Jim showed the neighborhood addicts that he believed they could turn their lives around—even though he knew most of them wouldn’t.

A commercial truck hauling building materials pulled up to the curb in front of the church. Jim stepped out to greet the driver. About four years after the church’s inaugural service, on Easter Sunday 1984, the church looked much better, but there was still plenty of refurbishing to do. The truck was delivering supplies for the ongoing renovations.

Jim was expecting the truck. He wasn’t anticipating the motorcyclist who pulled up right behind it.

The biker was a young, good-looking black man in his mid- to late twenties. He was wearing shorts, boots, and a do-rag beneath his helmet—and no shirt. That was a show-off move, Jim thought: The guy had the huge, cartoonish muscles of a professional bodybuilder.

The biker took off his helmet. Jim wandered over to talk to him.

The motorcyclist said his name was Diamond Jimmy. He said he’d followed the truck hoping to pick up some work. He had construction skills, he claimed—he could lay Sheetrock and do carpentry.

Diamond Jimmy was easygoing, charismatic, and confident without being cocky. The gangly white preacher and the ripped black motorcyclist couldn’t have looked more dissimilar. But they turned out to have something in common: Both were world-class talkers.

Jim liked Diamond Jimmy straight off. On the spot, he hired the motorcyclist to do work for Manna Inc. He figured Jimmy could help fix up the run-down row houses and apartment buildings Manna bought to sell to people with low to moderate incomes.

Diamond Jimmy did good work, and he and Jim became friends. The biker and the pastor exercised together at a gym in suburban Maryland, near where Diamond Jimmy lived with his mom. Diamond Jimmy pumped prodigious amounts of iron; Jim lifted more modest quantities.

Diamond Jimmy revealed that he’d spent some time in jail on misdemeanor drug charges. He also said that he was a crack addict but that he was now clean. Diamond Jimmy’s personal history didn’t scare off Jim. In fact, he saw some of himself in the buff biker.

Jim had turned his life around after he’d given up booze, and part of his mission was to help others do the same. “The addicts around the church were no different from me,” he recalled. “Different color. They lived in the city; I grew up in the South. But otherwise, we were the same.”

Jim felt a little different about the more well-to-do people who drove onto the block from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to buy drugs. “I did not like it that they came from outside to spend money to fuel the fire here. It was a desperate place,” he said. “But they were addicts as well, so I had compassion for them.”

After Diamond Jimmy had been working for Manna for a few weeks, Jim offered him the job of resident manager at New Community. The manager would maintain the building and keep an eye out for intruders, living in a spare room on one of the building’s upper floors.

The motorcyclist accepted and moved into the church.

Hiring a crack addict, even one who was clean at the moment, to live and work in the middle of a crack emporium was a risk, Jim knew. The slingers were out in force every day and night. Diamond Jimmy would face almost nonstop temptation.