S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (36 page)

Under the Maryland constitution, whenever a delegate steps down from his or her seat, whichever party the outgoing delegate belongs to gets to nominate a replacement to the governor. Hutchins was a Republican. The state’s Republican central committee nominated Lou to replace him. Late that month, Lou was sworn in as a member of the Maryland legislature.

Lou was appointed to the Judiciary Committee, a plum assignment for a freshman lawmaker. Being a state delegate was a part-time job—the legislative session lasted only ninety days, near the beginning of each year. But between his legislative duties and his law practice, Lou was working almost as many hours as he had when he commanded homicide.

In late 2004, a member of Ehrlich’s staff asked Lou whether he would like to be a judge. The governor had a vacancy to fill in Charles County. District court judges typically deal with misdemeanors such as traffic violations and low-level thefts—not exactly clashing with prosecutors with a client’s liberty hanging in the balance. Taking the job would also mean a pay cut, a serious factor, given that Lou and Loraine were planning on paying for four college educations. At the time, the post of district court judge paid a little less than six figures.

But being a judge would have some advantages: The hours were regular, and the courthouse was a five-minute drive from Lou’s house. He wouldn’t have to trek all over the region to meet with clients or appear in different courthouses. No more endless hours spent investigating cases on behalf of clients. No more worrying that his kids were growing up without him.

Lou agreed to the appointment. On a frigid day in early February 2005, I drove to the Charles County Courthouse and joined about sixty of Lou’s friends and relatives to watch him be sworn in, with Loraine and their kids at his side.

“Congratulations, Your Honor,” I said as I shook Lou’s hand after the ceremony.

One morning in 2008, a middle-aged black man walked into the well of the district courtroom in La Plata, Maryland, to stand before Judge William “Lou” Hennessy. Decades had passed since he and Lou had last seen each other face-to-face. But Lou recognized the man the moment he saw his eyes.

The defendant, Gary Johnson, was charged with driving a truck with expired tags, driving without insurance, and driving without a seatbelt. He recycled old carpet pads and needed the truck to keep his business going, Johnson said, adding that he wanted to plead guilty.

Johnson was older and heavier, but Lou was certain.

“I think I remember you from back in 1977,” he said.

Johnson wasn’t so sure.

“You know a guy named Johnny McIlwaine?” Lou asked.

“Yeah, he just passed.”

“You remember an incident at the Safeway store on 12th Street? I was one of the people involved in that case,” Lou said. “I don’t know if you want me to hear your case or not.”

Lou wasn’t more specific. He didn’t want to embarrass Johnson in front of the other defendants. He didn’t describe how he’d almost shot Johnson after he and a fellow bandit, both armed, stormed into a Safeway and ordered everyone down. Lou had been an arm’s length from Johnson, his service revolver inside his coat pocket, leveled at Johnson’s torso. He’d come very close to pulling the trigger.

Now, more than thirty years later, Lou offered to recuse himself from Johnson’s traffic case. “I’m not saying I hold it against you,” he said.

But Johnson apparently didn’t recall the Safeway standoff. Or at least he didn’t remember Lou. He was fine with Lou keeping the case.

Lou assessed him $75 in fines. “Fair enough?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Johnson replied.

“Good luck to you,” Lou said. “I’m glad to see you got yourself in good shape there.”

Then he called his next case.

Chapter 14

Suburban Success Story

“Can I see?” I asked.

Julius LaRosa Booker bent down, grabbed the cuff of his pants, and lifted it up to display the damage inflicted by a Prince George’s County police dog.

Booker was a large, powerful man with thick arms and legs. A chunk almost the size of a softball was missing from his right calf. I felt nauseated. And for a moment, I felt like I might cry.

I’d seen many terrible things during my reporting career. A man sprawled on the sidewalk in Northeast D.C., moaning, a bullet wound in his head. Thousands of bloated body parts gathered under a tent in Mexico City following the 1985 earthquake. And too many corpses to count—shooting and stabbing victims left lying in the street or slumped over the steering wheels of cars.

But nothing had struck me like the sight of Booker’s leg, missing a huge chunk of flesh, courtesy of a police-dog attack eighteen months earlier. It was shocking. I fought back the encroaching tears—they wouldn’t have been professional. I wondered what kind of pain Booker must have felt when the dog was ripping at his flesh. Then I nodded, indicating that I’d seen enough. Booker let go of his pants leg as I scribbled into my notepad.

Booker, thirty-four, walked with a pronounced limp. He’d greeted me at the front door of his home in a blue-collar section of Prince George’s and invited me inside. He’d shambled slowly to a couch as I settled into a nearby chair.

“How does it feel?” I asked after he’d rolled his pants leg back down.

If he stood for more than a few minutes, his right leg would swell painfully, Booker said matter-of-factly. He showed me a photograph of his four-year-old girl, Tanisha, who was afraid to sit on his lap.

“She asks me if it hurts,” he said.

Booker wasn’t a saint. But he wasn’t a hard-core criminal, either. In October 1997, he’d been inside a stolen van with a prostitute in a tough part of Capitol Heights, Maryland, near the D.C. line. Someone called the cops. Patrol officers and a canine unit arrived. Booker blew out of the van and ran. The police dog ran faster.

I finished up the interview and walked out of his home. By the time I reached my car, I was no longer feeling weepy or queasy. I was feeling angry. Corporal Anthony Mileo, the canine officer who’d allowed his dog to rip away most of Booker’s calf, hadn’t been fired, hadn’t been suspended. The department hadn’t even given him a symbolic reprimand.

It was March 1999. Booker was one of a half-dozen police-dog-bite victims I would interview that month. I would read eighteen civil lawsuits alleging that Prince George’s cops had brutalized someone with a police dog.

The fact that some cops use more force than is necessary on the street was hardly a revelation. One of my good Metropolitan Police Department sources had told me that if a suspect got too far out of line, he’d administer a “wood shampoo,” raining baton blows on his head. It was an unwritten rule that both cops and criminals knew: “If you run, and you make us chase you, you’re going to take a beating,” my detective friend had said. I suspected he’d exaggerated some of his street escapades for effect, and I didn’t think he’d ever maimed anybody.

This was something different, completely disproportionate and possibly illegal. Booker had been tortured and disfigured for life. I was outraged that police officers could use their authority to inflict such injuries with no accountability.

As I drove away from Booker’s home, I felt a surge of adrenaline. It had been a while since I’d felt this excited about my job. For a year and a half, I’d been competently taking up space in my new assignment in Prince George’s, covering the county courthouse and trying to figure out a way back to the city.

But now I had a
story
.

I hadn’t been optimistic when I first drove out to the
Post
’s Prince George’s bureau, located on the second floor of a cookie-cutter duplex in a nondescript office park. I’d covered the occasional trial or court hearing before. But I’d never been assigned to cover an entire courthouse, let alone two. In my new job, I was responsible not only for the county courthouse, in Upper Marlboro, but also for the Maryland federal courthouse in Greenbelt, about twenty miles away. That courthouse covered the southern district of Maryland.

On the D.C. crime beat, I’d been a natural at racing to shooting scenes and swooping into gang-controlled territory for stories. I’d become adept at interviewing gangsters and the survivors of homicide victims. And, of course, I had great contacts in the homicide squad.

All of that was now useless. And the idea of following cases through the court system had been vaguely unnerving. There would be indictments, pretrial hearings, trials, and appeals. Defense attorneys and prosecutors would file motions. How could I keep track of everything?

Prince George’s hugs the Northeast and Southeast quadrants of D.C., with the Capital Beltway cutting through the county a few miles out from its boundary with the District. Most of the violent crime in Prince George’s occurred in the poor and working-class communities situated inside the Beltway, close to the D.C. line. Outside the Beltway, towns were generally wealthier, whiter, and more suburban or rural in nature, with lower crime rates. Inside the Beltway was predominantly black and Latino and more urbanized. Some local residents derogatorily referred to the area as D.C.’s “9th Ward.” The District has eight wards, and the city’s Ward 8, located in Southeast D.C., for years was plagued with high rates of crime and unemployment.

Still, it had taken only a couple of days for me to feel like I was a world away from the excitement of the city and my old beat. The courthouse and the county administration building were on opposite sides of Upper Marlboro’s main street—which is, of course, Main Street. The street featured some modest law offices, a bail-bonds place, a small jewelry store, a bank, a pizza joint, a Chinese carryout, and a lone sit-down restaurant that went out of business and reopened under new ownership every few years.

I’d purchased court attire—a couple of inexpensive suits, a few nice ties, some dress shirts. I dutifully attended murder trials and sentencing hearings. In an effort to gain traction on my new beat, I chatted up prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the occasional friendly judge. I kept in mind something Lou had said when Soulsby exiled him to the training academy: “Any job is what you make of it.”

Thirteen months into my new gig, in September 1998, a short, dark-haired woman named Sharon Weidenfeld had introduced herself in the hallway of the courthouse. She was an investigator who worked for private defense attorneys as well as the public defender’s office. We’d both been in a courtroom where I was taking notes on a murder trial, and she’d quickly made me as a reporter.

Sharon told me she worked on a lot of civil cases involving brutality by the Prince George’s County Police Department. In particular, she’d investigated some cases in which canine cops had supposedly urged their dogs to rip people up.

“You should think about doing a story about how the police use the dogs to hurt people,” she said. “Some of the bites are really bad. I can help you. I’ve got lots of cases.”

“Let me think about it,” I said.

I stuck Sharon’s card in my wallet but didn’t give her idea much thought. She was an advocate for her clients, so of course she had strong views about police misconduct. It wouldn’t have surprised me if police dogs got in an extra nip now and then, but I wasn’t sure there was enough for a story.

The following month, something happened that convinced me there probably was: Within the span of three weeks, three unrelated civil lawsuits alleging excessive force by county police canine officers landed on my desk. All of the lawsuits claimed that officers had used their police dogs to inflict unwarranted injuries on the plaintiffs. And none of them involved the firm that usually hired Sharon to investigate police misconduct. They’d been mailed to the bureau independently.

I wrote a brief story on each of the lawsuits and started wondering: If three cases of alleged brutality by the canine unit could simply land in my lap, how many would I find if I went looking for them?

The Prince George’s County Police Department was founded in the 1920s as a four-man force. Almost from the moment it was formed, the department earned a reputation for brutality. In 1967, a unit that called itself the Death Squad was led by a couple of white shirts and used informants to set up robberies of liquor stores and other businesses. Officers would then wait inside the stores to shoot the robbers. The existence of the unit was disclosed by one of its members in 1979. A county grand jury investigated, but none of the officers were charged or punished.

In 1969, hundreds marched on the Prince George’s County Courthouse to call for the firing of an officer who’d shot and killed an unarmed man holding a baby in his arms. On the day before Christmas 1977, a county cop went after an unarmed man who’d allegedly shoplifted two $7 hams. The officer shot the man in the back of the head, killing him. Similar fatal shootings of unarmed men occurred throughout the eighties and into the nineties. In many cases, the victims were black and the officers were white.

Meanwhile, Prince George’s underwent a dramatic demographic transformation. In 1960, its population was just under 400,000. By 1990 it had nearly doubled, even as whites steadily left. In 1960, only about 10 percent of county residents were black; by 1990 that number was 51 percent, with about 370,000 black residents, versus about 31,000 three decades before. Many of the blacks who moved in were college-educated and had high-paying jobs as lawyers and doctors, as well as in local, state, and federal government. Meanwhile, poverty and high levels of joblessness, addiction, and crime persisted in the communities on and near the D.C. border.