S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (21 page)

In another nightmare, I stood in the dark at the edge of a deep crevasse. Carrie or Champagne would be on the other side of the fissure, ten feet away, inhaling from a crack pipe. They’d smile and hold out the pipe, beckoning me to take a hit. I’d jump, anxious to be with them, eager for a hit. About halfway across, I’d start spiraling down into the dark. I always woke up before I crashed.

The dreams weren’t subtle.

They weren’t even the worst of my sleep problems. Around this time I’d also started grinding my teeth. My dentist fitted me with a guard made of supposedly unbreakable material. I’d chomped through it in a few months. Then I started snapping my left wrist as I slept—with such force that it would be sore when I awoke. I asked a couple of doctors about it; neither had an answer. I researched the problem and found nothing. I adapted: I started sleeping with a soft wrist brace, the kind people afflicted with carpal tunnel syndrome wear.

I took the job on the day shift.

For about eight months, I worked my new beat. I was energized, making new contacts, writing stories about overextended social workers and the horrors of the city’s public housing stock. I was also going forward with my recovery, attending support-group meetings, staying in contact with fellow sober addicts and alcoholics.

One member of my informal support network, a man who’d been sober for about two decades, noticed that, unlike many newbies, I wasn’t fighting constant urges to drink or use drugs again.

“You’re one of the lucky ones,” he said.

Then, in the spring of 1993, Phil took me to lunch and asked me to take over the daytime police beat.

I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of jumping back into combat zones. But I was loyal to Phil, and it was supposed be a temporary assignment. Besides, working the beat during the daytime would mean I would get more of an opportunity to write real stories, instead of news briefs or overnight memos. I agreed to do it.

“How do you want me to handle the beat?” I asked.

“Follow the violence,” Phil replied.

Sometime during Lou’s first week on the job, I called his office to check on the status of the investigations into the spate of civilian killings. The captain had been cordial the one time I’d met him, at the scene of the drive-by at the intersection of 5th and O Streets Northwest, but I wasn’t expecting much.

The previous homicide commander usually wouldn’t take or return my calls. I had to work around his lack of cooperation as best I could.

The homicide secretary who answered the phone asked me to hold.
I’ll just leave a message and .
.
.

“Captain Hennessy.”

The captain wasn’t defensive or dismissive, like many white shirts. He didn’t volunteer anything, but he answered my questions and provided basic information about where the cases stood.

It was a start.

During the first few months he was in charge of homicide, Lou made my life marginally easier. He was professional, which made him stand out among white shirts. When he declined to answer a question, he usually explained that doing so might compromise an investigation. I figured that the new homicide captain probably wouldn’t become a source—but that he wouldn’t become an obstacle, either.

Everything changed in late January 1994. I was sitting at my desk when a caller offered a bombshell tip about the homicide squad. The caller claimed that the office was embroiled in racial strife, and he blamed the new captain.

The tipster was a black detective named Rod Wheeler. He dropped a passel of accusations: Captain Hennessy was playing favorites, assigning high-profile cases to white detectives. He’d brought in some white cronies. He was shutting out veteran black investigators. The squad was fracturing along racial lines.

There had just been a contentious meeting to clear the air, he said. Each of the thirty-five homicide detectives, as well as another fifteen who worked with the feds on task forces, had confronted Hennessy and his lieutenants. Wheeler said he’d asked Hennessy during the meeting whether he was racially biased. The captain had declined to answer. The detective said all this on the record, which strengthened his credibility.

I took notes and put down the phone, my adrenaline surging. An accusation of racial bias in Chocolate City could blow up a white cop’s career.

Lou didn’t strike me as someone who carried any racial baggage, but that was a gut feeling. I didn’t know him very well. On the other hand, the detective who’d called in the tip was a smart guy. He didn’t seem the type to level such accusations lightly. But what if his agenda was strictly to stick it to the new captain? What better way to do that than accuse him of bigotry?

I thought of Phil’s edict to follow the violence. It was crucial that I maintain a good working relationship with the homicide commander. He was the single most important contact I could have on the police force, more so than even the chief, who was as much a politician as a cop. How would the captain react to my doing a story on Wheeler’s allegations? I could envision it poisoning our working relationship—if Lou even survived. If he didn’t, I couldn’t imagine that his replacement would be thrilled about talking to me.

There was something else to consider, too: The
Washington Times
had an aggressive police reporter. Wheeler might ring him up, too, especially if a story didn’t appear in the
Post
within a couple of days. I didn’t want to disappoint Phil. And I really didn’t want to disappoint
Post
executive editor Len Downie, who would almost certainly read any potential
Times
story and then yell at Phil.

Phil was a rarity, the kind of editor who would take a bullet for his reporters if he could. He hadn’t ever come down on me for missing a story. He appreciated how hard I worked. I didn’t want to put Phil in the position of explaining how I hadn’t picked up on racial tension in the homicide squad.

I stared at my notebook. There was no way around it: I had to pursue the story—and kick it out quickly, before the
Times
did.

I took a deep breath and called the homicide office. I identified myself to the receptionist, who put me through.

“Captain Hennessy.”

“Hello, Captain. I have to ask you about something. Detective Wheeler said there’s racial animosity in the homicide squad, that there’s a perception you’re not treating the black investigators fairly. He told me about the meeting. He said he asked you if you were racially biased and you declined to answer.”

Silence for four, five counts.

“I’m not comfortable talking about that,” he finally said. The discomfort was evident in his voice.

“I don’t think it’s as simple as all that,” I said. “I’d really like your side.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t comment on that.”

We hung up.

Under the rules of journalism, I was covered, technically: I’d given Lou a chance to respond. I could knock out the piece in good conscience. A story this explosive would have a shot at the front page.

But it didn’t feel right. I didn’t blame Lou for shutting down. Anything he said would make him look defensive. I drummed my pen on my desk. There was more to this, I sensed. I stood up and began pacing around my desk.

I needed to get the captain to talk.

An idea came to me. I picked up the phone, dialed the number to a pager, and punched in my phone number.

Trevor called five minutes later. He was a detective in the Fourth District. Each police district had its own contingent of detectives, which worked on nonfatal attacks, robberies, burglaries, and other crimes that weren’t the responsibility of the investigative teams that worked out of headquarters, such as the homicide squad. Trevor was one of the best investigators on the force and about Lou’s age. They might know each other.

“I need your help on something,” I said. I laid out the accusations.

“That doesn’t sound like Lou Hennessy,” Trevor replied.

“Yeah, I know, but I have to do a story. Do you know him? Can you talk to him, persuade him that he’s better off talking to me? Or at least convince him to give me names of other cops who will speak up for him? If he doesn’t, this story may not turn out too well for him.”

“Yeah, I know him. I’ll call him. Hit you back in a few.”

Trevor called back ten minutes later.

“Call him right now,” he said.

The captain talked to me.

There had been some heartburn among some of the detectives, he acknowledged. But as he saw it, the issue was change, not race. He was shaking up the unit, and some of the big egos in the squad were getting bruised. He’d set up a team of detectives to focus on homicides in one specific police district, on the theory that most killings involved players from the same neighborhood. Eventually, Lou said, he planned on creating a team for each police district. He was holding sergeants accountable for the closure rates of their teams of detectives. Homicide cases were assigned based on a rotation; he hadn’t been freezing anyone out of any big investigations. The captain didn’t mention he was planning on radically changing the way investigations were assigned and conducted. Not yet. His tone was calm and measured.

I called Lieutenant Lowell Duckett, president of the Black Police Caucus, who was well known for speaking his mind on racial issues within the department. Duckett scoffed at the idea that Lou was racially biased. I interviewed a veteran black detective, who said he and Lou had talked after the tense meeting and agreed to work together “harmoniously” for the betterment of the unit.

Then I talked to William Ritchie, the inspector who’d hired Lou as homicide captain. He told me something Lou hadn’t mentioned: Twice in the past seven years, Lou had taken troubled teenage boys from D.C. into his home to try to help them get on the right track. Both of the kids were black.

The background provided by the captain, the veteran detective, Duckett, and Ritchie put Wheeler’s allegations in context. I wrote up the story, focusing on the changes Lou was bringing to the squad. Deep in the article, the racial question was brought up and knocked down by Duckett and others.

The story ran on the front page of the Metro section, not on the front page. I was good with that.

Around noon, a call for homicide came out over the police scanner. I rode out to Northeast, where a young man had been shot in the courtyard of an apartment complex. Outside the building, I ran into one of the lieutenants Lou had brought to homicide. This lieutenant always carried a book, pulling it out whenever he wasn’t talking to detectives or witnesses. He was glued to a dog-eared paperback as I approached.

The lieutenant looked up from his reading.

“You wrote that story about the captain?”

“Yes, that was me.”

“Good story,” he said.

I called Lou the following day. I’d worked into the article a brief reference to the two kids he’d taken into his home. One of them was Kenny McFarland, a basketball star at Gonzaga College High School.

“Tell me about these kids you brought into your home,” I said.

A week later, I sat next to Lou in the bleachers of the Gonzaga gym, watching Kenny play. The kid had game. He was six foot six, wiry, and strong, with quickness, speed, and skills. He dropped twenty-six points on the opposing team, delivering the final two with a thunderous two-handed dunk.

“He’s going to get a Division I scholarship,” Lou said.

The captain had met Kenny while working as a volunteer basketball coach at Gonzaga. Kenny lived in a tough section of Northeast. A lot of his contemporaries had ended up in the drug game. Kenny wasn’t a bad kid, but he was impressionable, the captain said. His home life was chaotic. He was drifting in school. He was on the verge of tumbling into the drug world.

Lou talked to Kenny’s mom and aunt, who gave their blessing to his taking the teenager temporarily under his wing. Then he simply brought Kenny home; he didn’t ask Loraine, he just did it. Loraine wasn’t thrilled about suddenly having a teenager, a stranger, in the house, but she didn’t object.

Lou described how he’d taught Kenny to study with three-by-five flash cards. He told me how they worked out together with free weights.

I interviewed Kenny and Loraine and wrote up the story.

This one did hit the front page.

One evening in March, I was getting ready to go home for the day when a call came over the scanner for a shooting at the corner of 7th and O Streets Northwest, just three blocks from my apartment. The dispatcher said homicide had been requested but provided no details. I could have left it to the night reporter, but I was curious to see what had happened so close to where I lived.

“I’ll check it out,” I told Phil. “If it turns out to be nothing out of the ordinary, I’ll brief the night reporter and go home.”

The attack had occurred inside the O Street Market, a brick building filled with small stalls where merchants sold baked goods, meat, fish, candy, and other items. The entire building was surrounded by crime-scene tape. A crowd of spectators almost two dozen strong was gathered across the street from the market. One TV news crew was already on the scene.