S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (23 page)

A day or two later, with Baldie still in the 3D cellblock, Gudger and a handful of other cops went to his row house to execute a search warrant. The officers knocked on the front door. A young woman, probably one of Baldie’s older daughters, answered and let them in. She and a little girl about five years old sat on a couch in the living room as the police swept the house. The girl was probably Baldie’s grandchild, friends of the drug dealer would say years later.

The cops checked drawers, closets, everywhere. They found nothing. They met up in the living room, a couple of the officers shaking their heads in frustration and disbelief.

“Where’s the money? Where’s the drugs?” one asked to no one in particular.

“They’re next door!” the little girl chirped.

The woman slapped the back of her head and said, “Shut up!”

“Touch her again and we’re taking you in,” Gudger warned.

Then he and the other cops looked at each other:
Next door
.

Baldie was a thug and a drug dealer, but he was old-school: He would rather intimidate someone than beat him, and he would rather beat someone than shoot him. He didn’t like to use violence if he could avoid it, a philosophy that earned him a great deal of respect among the residents of S Street.

There were shootings on and near the block. The volunteers who came to the church to help renovate it and the kids in the after-school program often heard gunfire nearby. Billy Hart and other church workers trained the volunteers and children to hit the floor when they heard shots.

But S Street wasn’t the killing zone that many crack markets were. Other parts of the city, some of them just a few blocks away, were ruled by young men who were quick to initiate bloodshed.

In combat zones throughout the eastern half of the city, the level of violence was high and steady. But now and then there were dramatic spikes. On a single week in June 1993, for example, sixteen people throughout the city were killed. The District would finish that year with 454 homicides, a scant improvement over the all-time record of 482 killings set two years before.

In the early nineties, Antone White and Eric Hicks, both in their early twenties, ran the First Street Crew, which operated just six blocks east of S. The crew’s slingers sold crack on both sides of 1st Street Northwest, at all hours, in all kinds of weather. I knew firsthand: On a few occasions when Champagne didn’t like the pickings on S Street, she’d directed me to 1st, where she’d make the buy.

The First Street Crew’s reign would end in a torrent of blood. In August 1992, Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams walked into a U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered to help law enforcement investigate the gang. Pork Chop was angry with the crew’s leaders. He believed they had information about the murder of his uncle but wouldn’t give it to him. Under the direction of police, Williams began making large drug buys from White and other crew leaders.

After his last buy, on October 2, 1992, Williams was obviously shaken. White had refused to talk to him, and he believed the gang suspected he was “hot” and working with the cops. On a crisp afternoon a few days later, Williams was sitting in a car, trying to set up a meeting between crew leaders and an undercover cop, when two gunmen pumped sixteen bullets into his body and head and ran away.

The brazen killing didn’t derail the investigation. By the spring of 1993, White, Hicks, and two other crew leaders were indicted on federal racketeering charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO. Federal prosecutors also charged White with killing Williams.

In October of that year, MPD homicide detective Joseph Schwartz testified in a routine pretrial hearing. In his testimony, Schwartz described what a handful of witnesses had said about Williams’s killing. The detective didn’t name any of the witnesses, whom police and prosecutors were determined to protect. He provided no ages or addresses or even genders.

Even so, two days after the detective’s cautious testimony, Janellen Jones, forty-one, a former crew member, was gunned down as she walked home from a bus stop. She had a subpoena in her pocket. Jones was shot in the mouth—a message to other potential witnesses. A man who was nearby when Jones was killed, John P. Barton, fifty-three, was also shot to death. Police and prosecutors believed that Barton was killed because he’d witnessed the Jones hit.

The killing didn’t begin or end there. By the time the RICO trial had concluded, in March 1994, nine witnesses connected to the case against the gang had been shot to death. Five, including Williams, were gunned down before Schwartz’s testimony, four after. White and his fellow crew members denied that they’d killed anyone or ordered any hits.

The jury didn’t convict White or any other gang members for killing Williams. But the jury did convict White of racketeering. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene cited the destruction caused by the gang’s drug enterprise: “It is hard to know but easy to imagine how many persons had to rob, burglarize, even kill, to get money to buy the amount of drugs distributed by this organization,” he thundered. White got life in prison. The other gang members all got long terms behind bars.

Greene noted the killing of the police informant, adding that many witnesses who did testify were obviously terrified. “The judicial systems of several countries [such as] Colombia and Italy at one time were paralyzed by witness killings and intimidations,” the judge said. “We must prevent that kind of development [from happening] in the District of Columbia and in the federal courts at all costs, because if witnesses can be intimidated, injured, or killed, all the crime bills Congress may pass will be just illusions, limited in practical effect.”

During the late eighties and early nineties, there were dozens of gangs like the First Street Crew in every quadrant of the city. Some were even more violent. About five miles from White’s crew’s turf, near the U.S. Capitol in Southeast, Alberto “Alpo” Martinez ran his drug operation with impunity. His enforcer was Vernon Gudger’s childhood friend Wayne Perry.

D.C. police arrested Martinez in November 1991. He eventually pleaded guilty to federal drug-trafficking charges and gave up Perry. In March 1994, Perry pleaded guilty to five murders—though he admitted to FBI agents Dan Reilly and Vincent Lisi that he’d killed thirty-three people altogether. Perry said he had registered his first kill at age twelve, and he provided enough details to suggest that he was telling the truth about most, if not all, of the murders he claimed to have committed.

Compared with the likes of White, Martinez, Perry, and others, Baldie was a lovable teddy bear. But then, his was apparently a strictly mom-and-pop operation, selling drugs on S Street and nowhere else. Other, younger D.C. drug dealers moved large quantities of product all over the city. Baldie undoubtedly made a lot of money selling drugs—probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, maybe even north of a million. But there was no evidence that his drug-dealing operation extended beyond S Street. Baldie didn’t make nearly the amount of coin that other local kingpins did.

According to federal investigators, between 1982 and 1990, the R Street Crew, which operated in Northwest, sold $50 million worth of drugs. Nearby, the P Street Crew sold $100 million worth of drugs during a handful of years in the late eighties and early nineties, federal authorities alleged. Both crews were taken down by federal investigations in the early nineties, with the leaders of both gangs convicted of offenses connected to drug trafficking.

Baldie didn’t have any flash in his game. Younger neighborhood kingpins went on shopping sprees in Georgetown and jetted to big boxing matches in Las Vegas. They wore gold and diamonds and tooled around in fully loaded SUVs and luxury sedans. In the early nineties, Martinez and other drug dealers organized teams for pickup basketball games; the losing side would have to pony up $10,000 to the victors.

Baldie did none of that. He had his old truck and his row houses—the one he lived in and the one next door, which, police would discover, he used to run his drug enterprise. He never took part in a high-stakes hoops game. He splashed out by hosting annual barbecues for his neighbors.

If someone else had been running the drug traffic on S Street, the church and the after-school program probably never would have had a chance. Jim was grateful for Baldie’s protection. But Jim didn’t tolerate everything Baldie did.

In fact, Jim became so upset with Baldie once that he threatened to renege on his promise not to call the police on him.

A couple of weeks before Gudger’s rooftop reconnaissance mission, Cynthia Barron had taken some of the kids from the after-school program out for an afternoon of fishing at Hains Point, a recreation area on the Potomac River in Southwest D.C. She parked her car across the street from New Community and retrieved a half-dozen bamboo fishing poles from the trunk, struggling to keep them from slipping out of her arms as she walked toward the church. Baldie got up from his porch and met her on the sidewalk.

“Let me help you with those,” he offered.

In the five years she’d been running the church’s after-school program, Cynthia had developed a cordial relationship with Baldie. He always waved and said hello when she and her kids walked past his house, heading to or from the after-school program. She knew that he had a soft spot for the program and the church—and for her. One evening, after she’d walked the kids to their homes, she was headed toward her car when Baldie approached her.

“You guys need some money?” he asked as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of cash. Cynthia was making seventeen grand a year. She looked at the bills in Baldie’s hand. She could see they were all hundreds. Cynthia thought about the art supplies and books she could buy for the after-school program. She thought about her own monthly bills. But she knew where Baldie’s money came from.

“No, thank you, Baldie. But thanks for offering.”

So Cynthia didn’t hesitate when Baldie volunteered to help her carry the fishing poles—no harm in that. She led Baldie to the back of the church and down the steps to the basement. She opened the door and stepped inside.

Baldie was on her as soon as she was inside the door.

He pressed his big torso against her slender frame and hugged her. Cynthia tried to squirm out of Baldie’s grasp. She smelled alcohol on his breath.

“No, Baldie. I think you’ve been drinking.”

Baldie held her body tight against his and started pawing at her. Cynthia tried to struggle out of his grasp. He drew in for a kiss.

“No way!” Cynthia shouted. She wriggled her arms free and pushed Baldie as hard as she could. He could have easily overpowered her, but he backed off. He turned and lurched out of the basement. Cynthia put away the fishing poles and drove home.

The following day, as he parked his car outside the church, Jim saw Baldie sitting on his porch as usual. Cynthia had told him about her encounter with the drug dealer. Jim made straight for Baldie and got right in his grill.

“Listen to me, Baldie. I heard what you tried to do to Cynthia,” Jim said sharply. He was visibly angry. “If I ever hear of you doing anything like that again, you’re finished. Do you understand?”

Jim didn’t say he would start cooperating with the police, but he didn’t have to. Baldie understood.

The big drug dealer stared at his shoes. He looked sheepish—embarrassed, Jim thought.

“Yeah, okay,” Baldie muttered.

The outburst from the little girl sitting on Baldie’s couch had given Gudger and his fellow officers a second chance to find the evidence they needed. Gudger and a supervisor got into a squad car and drove to a judge’s home in an upscale neighborhood in upper Northwest D.C. They recounted the girl’s spontaneous statement. The judge issued an emergency search warrant for the house next door to Baldie’s.

The police discovered a passageway that connected Baldie’s home to its neighbor. The houses were narrow and deep; the passageway was near the back, hidden from view from the street by a wooden partition. The officers entered the house through the concealed side entrance. One videotaped the search.

The door was unlocked. The cops stepped inside and immediately found a sixteen-gauge pump-action shotgun.

They walked into the kitchen. There was a .357 Magnum on a mirrored table. Nearby were a strainer, a measuring spoon, loose razor blades, and some two-kilogram scales, all tools used for cutting crack—which was in the room in great abundance.

The officers started opening kitchen drawers. One held dozens of bags of huge chunks of crack, each the size of a small pancake and a couple of inches thick. They hadn’t yet been cut for street sale.

In another drawer, the cops found dozens of $50 rocks wrapped in small plastic baggies. In a third, they found dozens of $20 rocks. In all, the crack was worth $43,000.

In other parts of the house, the officers found boxes of ammunition for the .357, for a .270 handgun, for .44s and .45s and .22s, for twenty- and twelve-gauge shotguns.

Gudger walked out of the stash house thinking,
Mother lode
.

Police and federal prosecutors still had to tie the guns and the drugs and the ammunition to Baldie. The little girl’s utterance had provided probable cause, but she was too young to serve as a witness in a federal drug-conspiracy prosecution.