S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (24 page)

They questioned Robert Epps, the man renting the house, who was known as “Bama Rob.” The night of the search, he acknowledged that he knew Baldie and even claimed that he was his brother. A fingerprint on the .357 matched his. The police scooped him up.

A federal grand jury indicted Baldie and Bama Rob for running a drug conspiracy. Baldie was scheduled to go on trial in late July 1994. Just before Baldie’s trial began, Bama Rob cut a deal with the government. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy with intent to distribute more than fifty grams of cocaine and using a firearm during a drug-trafficking offense, in exchange for a fifteen-year sentence.

He also gave up Baldie, agreeing to testify that he had begun renting the row house on behalf of the drug dealer in October 1991. The house was used to cook, cut, and stash crack, he said. The passageway between the two homes was constructed in 1992. Baldie used it to go between the two houses and gather crack, which he would provide to his street slingers, Bama Rob told investigators.

Baldie’s trial lasted four days. His defense attorney argued that the crack in the stash house didn’t belong to Baldie. The members of the jury didn’t buy it. They convicted him of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, possession with intent to sell, carrying a firearm during drug trafficking, and a couple of other counts. Baldie had made his living off crack, and now nationwide fears over the crack epidemic assured he would never be a free man again.

In 1984, Congress had passed the Sentencing Reform Act, as part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. Among other provisions, the SRA abolished parole eligibility for those who committed a federal crime on or after November 1987. Before the passage of the reforms, the judge might have had some latitude in sentencing Baldie. The changes in sentencing, coupled with the crimes he’d been convicted of, guaranteed that Garnell “Baldie” Campbell would be spending the rest of his life in prison. He was fifty. His young daughters, who at that time were on the cusp of adolescence, would never see him as a free man again.

In October 1994, Baldie’s attorney, Cynthia Lobo, stood to address U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey before he sentenced her client.

“Well, Your Honor, I’m afraid that, after practicing law for fourteen years, this is the first time I have stood next to someone who is bound to be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole,” Lobo began. “This is also the first time in my life, therefore, that I have had very little that I could say, since I know there’s nothing that I can say that can persuade the court, since the court is bound by the law in this case.”

Lobo offered “profound thanks” to Richey for giving her and her client “probably one of the best criminal trials that I’ve had the pleasure of trying in fourteen years. It is rare, and it is becoming increasingly rare in the climate of drugs and violence in this country, unfortunately, to find such an honest judicial temperament in the face of very strong evidence.”

Then it was Baldie’s turn to speak.

“How you doing, Your Honor?” he began. “I wanted to thank you, because I think I got a fair trial, and I want to thank Ms. Lobo for handling my case, and I wanted to thank Mr. [Assistant U.S. Attorney John] Cox, because I don’t think he treated me so bad, you know. I think he gave me a fair trial, and then it could have been an act of God, you know. In fifty years, I never picked up a Bible in my life, but since I’ve been locked up the last fourteen months, I have one in my hand every day. So it might have been an act of God. So I’m satisfied with what happens.”

Richey then sentenced Baldie to life in prison. A couple of federal marshals quietly escorted the kingpin of S Street out of the courtroom.

Jim heard about Baldie’s conviction from a couple of street slingers. During the fourteen months he was in jail before being sentenced, Baldie never reached out to the pastor, never asked him to write a letter to the judge or testify on his behalf. Baldie didn’t ask Jim or anyone else from the church to visit him in jail. He didn’t ask them to attend his trial or sentencing.

“I think he was embarrassed, being locked up,” Jim told me, nearly twenty years after Baldie’s conviction. “I kept praying for him. But he knew that I wasn’t going to testify for him or write a letter to the judge saying what a great guy he was.”

On S Street, the crack market was as bustling as ever in the immediate aftermath of Baldie’s arrest, though it would begin to slow down by the time of his conviction a year later. Slingers still lined both sides of the block; users continued to drive onto the street day and night to make their buys. Maybe one of Baldie’s lieutenants filled the power vacuum. Perhaps another drug dealer slid in and took over Baldie’s street crew. It’s even possible that more than one drug dealer did business on the block, in relative harmony. Jim didn’t know who was running the street in Baldie’s absence, and he didn’t try to find out.

“I kept talking to the guys on the street, the dealers, trying to get them to leave that life,” Jim said. “I never stopped trying, as I’d never stopped trying with Baldie before he was locked up.”

The accommodation and friendship Jim had with Baldie had developed organically, over time. It occurred because Baldie, for all his faults, understood and supported what Jim and the church were trying to do, and because Jim reached out to Baldie and his dealers rather than turning them in to the cops. Their understanding couldn’t simply be replicated.

Baldie was gone, but he’d left a legacy on the street: The church was off-limits. New Community remained safe, whoever was running the block.

While Baldie went down, Marion Barry rose up.

His political resurrection began on April 23, 1992, the day he was released from prison. Barry didn’t merely return to the District with his head held high. He came home like a conquering hero.

About 250 supporters piled into a six-bus caravan in the predawn hours in D.C. and greeted the former mayor in the parking lot of a Days Inn forty miles from the low-security federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, where Barry had finished serving his six-month prison term for misdemeanor drug possession. (He’d originally been housed at a federal prison in Virginia but was moved after being accused of receiving oral sex from a female visitor. Barry denied the charge.) The caravan had been organized by the Reverend Willie F. Wilson of the Union Temple Baptist Church, in Southeast D.C. Many of the people who took part were middle-aged women. When Barry arrived, some were singing the hymn “Victory Is Mine.”

Wearing a black suit, dress shirt, and tie, accented by a colorful kente cloth scarf and kufi, Barry was accompanied by his mother, Mattie Cummings, seventy-five. Barry basked in the crowd’s adulation, speaking of his personal redemption and spiritual rejuvenation.

“I come out of prison better, not bitter,” he said. “I gained the realization that I had come to experience a spiritual power outage. It caused me to get my life out of balance and out of control.”

“Amen!” some in the crowd shouted.

“God does not require perfection of us, only progress,” Barry said. The phrase is similar to one commonly heard within recovery groups, in which individuals are encouraged to seek “progress, not perfection.”

Barry and his supporters had lunch in the motel ballroom. There, he sang “Happy Birthday” to Florence Smith, who’d come to Pennsylvania from Southeast on the day she turned fifty-four. “He is one of the greatest persons, one of the only people I know who can do something for us as poor blacks,” she told the
Baltimore Sun
.

The former mayor then joined the caravan for the ride to the District. The buses arrived at Union Temple Baptist, where another large crowd of admirers was waiting, at around 8:00
p.m.

Barry stepped off the bus and proclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last!”

During a brief meeting with reporters at the Days Inn, Barry had talked about a possible return to D.C. politics. “I have a number of options,” he said. “I cannot get involved ever again in my lifetime, I can wait and run later, or I can get involved this year.”

Few political observers in the District believed he would go for option three. But just two months after his release, Barry announced that he’d be running for the D.C. Council seat in Ward 8, which comprised the poor, violence-plagued neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.

In the Democratic primary in September, he easily defeated four-term incumbent Wilhelmina Rolark. In the general election in November, he trounced two candidates, a Republican and an independent, winning with 90 percent of the vote.

He was just getting started. In May 1994, he walked into the auditorium of Calvin Coolidge Senior High School, in Northwest. The school is located in Ward 4—then-mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly’s home ward. There, Barry announced he was launching a campaign to return to the mayor’s office. This time, he spoke in biblical terms of redemption: “The day they arrested me, I was blind, but now I can see,” he said. “I was lost, but now I’m found.”

Barry’s timing was good: Kelly’s administration was mired in a fiscal crisis. In March, Congress had voted to slash $150 million from the city’s budget of $3.4 billion for fiscal year 1995. A report by the General Accounting Office had said the D.C. government could run out of money in less than two years if it made the $190 million in pension contributions it was required to.

In the eastern half of the city, where drug violence was still exacting a horrible toll, Barry campaigned relentlessly. He showed up at barbecues, at senior-citizen centers, at Sunday church services, missing no opportunity to talk about his personal transformation. One of his campaign strategists was Rhozier “Roach” Brown, a charismatic former con who courted and organized the city’s ex-offender vote.

In 1965, when he was in his twenties, Brown was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He and three others had beaten and fatally shot another man during a robbery. Brown admitted he had been part of the attack but maintained that he didn’t shoot the victim.

Brown was sent to the Lorton Correctional Complex, where he joined an inmate advisory council. Prison guards who weren’t happy about his activism inflicted a beating so severe that for a while he lost feeling on his left side. Instead of being taken to a hospital, Brown was thrown into solitary for eight months. Years later, a civil jury would award him $300,000 in damages over his mistreatment.

At Lorton, Brown also became one of the leading members of the Inner Voices, a troupe of prisoners that was allowed to leave the facility to perform plays throughout the Washington area. Brown wrote plays about the difficulties and humorous absurdities of life as a prisoner. Because of his dramatic work, around Christmas 1975, Brown caught a big break: President Gerald Ford commuted his sentence from life to thirty years in prison. The sentence reduction made Brown immediately eligible for parole. He was released.

Brown worked a series of jobs, including production at a local TV news station. But everything fell apart for him again in 1987. He started smoking crack and was caught selling cocaine to an undercover law enforcement agent. About the same time, Brown stole $45,000 from the Hillcrest Children’s Center, a charity that serves emotionally disturbed kids from poor homes. From a girlfriend who worked there, he learned how the charity invested its funds, convinced a bank official he was the organization’s executive director, and had the money put into his own account. In federal court, Brown pleaded guilty to drug and embezzlement charges and was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was also ordered to pay $45,000 in restitution to Hillcrest.

Again, Brown caught a big break: In 1993, he was transferred from federal prison to the D.C. Department of Corrections to finish serving the thirty-year sentence for his murder conviction, which would have been an additional sixteen years behind bars. The D.C. parole board released Brown after he’d been in District custody only five months, most of which he spent in a halfway house. A year after his release, he was working hard on Barry’s campaign. Just like the candidate, Brown often talked about redemption and second chances.

“A lot of people make mistakes,” he said in an interview after the election. “Why do we keep on punishing them for the same act?”

In D.C., winning the Democratic primary for mayor was tantamount to winning the election. Barry was running against Kelly and six others. A few weeks before the early-September primary, I was talking to Lou on the phone about some homicide investigations when we turned to the subject of the mayoral race.

In the eighties, the
Washington City Paper
had dubbed Barry “Mayor for Life.” But I didn’t think he could overcome his conviction for crack possession and all the tawdry details about his life that had spilled out during his trial—not in a citywide election. The campaign was racially polarizing. From news reports, it was clear that Barry had virtually no support west of 16th Street Northwest, which divides the eastern and western halves of the District. The western half of the city was predominantly white. I expressed my doubts to Lou.

“He’s going to win,” Lou replied confidently. “He’s a master politician, maybe the best I’ve ever seen. He’s great at working crowds. He seems to know everyone’s name. I’m telling you, he will be your next mayor.”

“No way,” I said. “Sure, he can win in Ward 8 forever, but he can’t win another mayoral election. He won’t get a vote west of 16th Street.”