S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (39 page)

She continued, describing some of my shortcomings as a reporter and writer: I didn’t have enough respect for daily deadlines. I didn’t always stay in touch with my editor. I focused too much on what happened in the courtroom. I crammed too many details into the ledes of my stories.

I was in a state of shock—in a good way. The North Wall had sided with me. I felt like I’d pulled a David and slain Goliath. That was great—in the short term. In the long run, the victory had a price, I figured. I thought there was no chance Jo-Ann would promote me within the Metro staff. And if I applied for a plum assignment elsewhere within the paper—say, with the National staff—the editor of that section would ask Jo-Ann about me. In a newsroom packed with talented and ambitious journalists, anything less than a full-throated recommendation would torpedo my chances.

As I walked out of Jo-Ann’s office, I was sure of two things: That unless I screwed up spectacularly, Jo-Ann would leave me alone and let me keep working in Prince George’s. And that any chance I’d ever had for a promotion or a choice new assignment was now gone.

Chapter 15

“A Perfect Easter Story”

The group of uniformed Prince George’s County cops who sat together in one row of the courtroom death-glared me as I walked past. Another twenty or so cops were scattered throughout the room. I felt their eyes on me as I headed toward the hallway.

As I passed the clustered uniforms, some of them hissed. I thought about saying something but decided not to react. I simply walked out. There was a break in the trial, and I had to check in with my editor. I allowed myself a brief smile when I reached the hall.

It was April 2006. The mood in the Upper Marlboro courtroom was grim, angry, and tense. By then I was accustomed to such antagonism from Prince George’s cops, many of whom held me responsible for the criminal conviction of former canine cop Stephanie Mohr and the revamping of the police-dog unit. I’d also written plenty of other stories that had led to officers being suspended or investigated, as well as to criminal charges being dropped against suspects because of questionable police tactics.

Five years earlier, I’d covered the trial of Brian Catlett, a county cop who was charged with involuntary manslaughter for fatally shooting Gary A. Hopkins Jr., a college student who’d allegedly been trying to grab another cop’s gun. Catlett was acquitted. Moments after the trial ended, the state’s attorney at the time, Jack B. Johnson, took me aside in the hallway.

“I’ve overheard a couple of officers say how great it would be to ‘get’ something on you,” he warned me.

Some cops, without identifying themselves by name, wrote me angry e-mails. “I have to wonder what it would be like to make a living in the vile way that you do,” one wrote in January 2003. “You sit back and report half truths and innuendoes about a job which you know nothing about. Ever faced a gun? Have you ever been in a fight for your life over a weapon?”

The Prince George’s officers who were hostile to me apparently took my reporting personally—many of them seemed to assume I hated cops. I didn’t. Some of the finest people I knew—Lou included—were with the Metropolitan Police Department. I did loathe bullies, though, and the abuse of power.

I respectfully responded to every message, offering to write a correction if any of my reporting was in error.

None of the senders ever asked for one.

The day I was hissed at, I was covering the murder trial of Robert M. Billett, forty-four. He was charged with killing a county cop the previous June, during a confrontation that had begun as a traffic stop. An officer in a squad car had tried to pull over a Chevy Tahoe. The driver hit the gas, ran two red lights, and pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex in Laurel, a community in the northern part of the county.

Billett and two other men in the car jumped out and ran. Corporal Steven Gaughan, forty-one, was working nearby as part of a plainclothes detail looking for stolen property. At the apartment complex, Gaughan got out of his vehicle and joined other officers in chasing the men. Billett pulled out a gun and fired.

One round hit Gaughan in the shoulder. Another slipped by his protective vest and hit him in the abdomen, police said. He was taken to a hospital, where he died a few hours later. Police shot Billett, who was seriously wounded. He survived.

Near the end of the trial, the defense called a witness, Terri King, a woman who lived in the apartment complex where the gun battle erupted. She testified that Gaughan had fired first and that Billett had shot back in self-defense. Under a withering cross-examination by Deputy State’s Attorney John Maloney, King acknowledged that she’d worked as a prostitute in several cities and been convicted of theft in Prince George’s in 2003. The admissions were damaging to King’s credibility.

I wrote up the story, reporting King’s account of the shootout and her acknowledgment of her checkered past. It was a basic news story, thoroughly fair.

But someone with a badge and a gun apparently thought differently. The day the article was published, I received an anonymous e-mail reminding me of my detention by the LAPD, some twenty years earlier, when I’d gotten roaring drunk and tried to pick up a woman who turned out to be a plainclothes cop. I felt a sense of shock as I read the brief message about one of the worst nights of my life.

The taunting message was almost certainly written by a Prince George’s County cop. Only an active member of law enforcement could have looked up such a record on the police computer database. It was a federal offense to use the database for non-law-enforcement purposes.

I took the incident seriously enough that I told a
Post
editor about it. I didn’t know how far the e-mailer was willing to go. He or she had risked catching a federal charge just to mock me in an e-mail. What if that person learned about my crack addiction? By that point, I’d told some relatives and close friends, including a couple of co-workers and a girlfriend or two, that I’d struggled with addiction. A handful of editors who knew the newspaper had arranged for me to go to rehab, such as Milton Coleman and Len Downie, knew I’d battled substance abuse, though neither editor had ever asked for details, and I hadn’t volunteered them. Could the e-mailer obtain my hospital records? That would be illegal, too—not that it seemed to matter.

I was a different person from the man who’d drunkenly tried to pick up the wrong woman. I attended support-group meetings and tried to help fellow alcoholics and addicts. I worked hard and did my job well. When I traveled to California to visit my family, I doted on my young nieces and nephew, and I gave their parents no reason to distrust me.

But someone hated me enough to break the law to goad me. Police officers had been overheard talking about getting something on me.

“They’re afraid of you,” Lou said when I told him about the glares and hisses. He mentioned one of his friends on the Prince George’s force. “He said you wrecked the police department.”

I thought I’d misheard. “You mean he thinks the
Post
has wrecked the police department?”

“No, he thinks you personally have wrecked the department.”

Just how far could an angry and enterprising cop go?

A few months later, in early 2007, I wandered into the office of Tracey Reeves, a
Post
editor. We started out discussing news stories, but we eventually began talking about our lives. I sensed that I could trust her, and I told her the broad outlines of my struggle with and recovery from crack addiction and alcoholism.

Tracey’s eyes lit up: “You have to write that story!”

She suggested I pitch it to the
Post
’s
Sunday magazine. I wasn’t so sure.

But Tracey’s reaction made me think about a popular saying in my support group: “Your secrets will kill you.” In the context of the program, that meant that we needed to disclose our misbehavior to a trusted fellow recovering alcoholic. It was part of the process of cleaning the slate and moving forward.

But I began to think the saying could have broader applications. What if my addiction wasn’t a secret? A pissed-off Prince George’s cop couldn’t use my addiction against me if I revealed it myself, I decided. Late that summer, I met with Sydney Trent, a
Post Magazine
editor, and pitched the idea of writing about what it was like to cover the crime beat during the crack era while I was an active crack addict.

“Go for it,” Sydney said.

That fall, I wrote the article on weekends and before and after my work shift. In December, as the publication date neared, I called relatives in California to let them know what was coming. I told Lou and other close friends. I notified judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys I routinely worked with. I told the other reporters in the Prince George’s bureau. I called friends throughout the country. One, a fellow journalist, wondered whether the disclosure would harm my career.

“What career?” I replied.

I still loved my job, but I knew I was just about maxed out at the
Post
,
a fact that was oddly empowering. And the newspaper industry as a whole was imploding. Newspapers throughout the country were folding, and many of those that were left standing were laying off tens of thousands of journalists a year. Career-wise, I realized, I had nothing to lose.

I met with the president of the county police union and called a Prince George’s white shirt I was friendly with. I told them I was writing about being a crack addict while covering the police beat in D.C.

“I know a lot of officers don’t like me, and I expect some of them will attack me,” I said. “That’s fine—I’m putting myself out there, so I’ll be fair game. But they need to keep it legal.”

I told the union chief and the white shirt about the e-mail that referred to my L.A. detention. “If any cop goes there, well, I know the number to the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” I said. “How long would it take the FBI to figure out which police computer was used to look up my name?”

The article was published on December 30, 2007. The issue’s cover featured a cartoon of Paris Hilton wearing a tiara and a sash emblazoned with “2007.” The cartoon character was carrying a Chihuahua. The cover went with a year-in-review piece by humorist Dave Barry. My story was anything but humorous: I described my encounter with Big Man, how I picked up female addicts to make crack buys in exchange for sex, my forays on S Street, and my stint in rehab.

I woke up before dawn, retrieved the newspaper from outside my building, read the article, and braced for the blowback.

There was none. In the ensuing days, more than six dozen readers sent e-mails saying they had a loved one who was struggling with addiction. The article gave them hope, they wrote. Some friends whom I hadn’t tipped off called to congratulate me—for getting clean and for the piece. Later that week, Greg Shipley, a Maryland State Police spokesman, looked at me after he completed a press statement about a prison inmate who’d been taken to a hospital for treatment of chest pains and had escaped.

With a handful of fellow journalists looking on, Shipley asked if I was the reporter who wrote the magazine article.

I felt my neck muscles tense.

“Yes,” I said.

“Man,” Shipley said. “You are
tough
.”

The day after the story was published, I wandered into the main
Post
newsroom downtown to pick up a couple of additional copies of the magazine. Publisher Don Graham spotted me a few feet from the elevator and walked over.

“Glad you made it,” he said as he patted my shoulder.

There were no taunting e-mails or phone calls from Prince George’s County police officers.

Just like old times, I pulled up in front of the hulking bakery on S Street. The slingers quickly surrounded my car. I made the buy and drove through the alley behind the church that looked like a castle. Minutes later, I was back at my old apartment on 10th Street Northwest. Quickly, greedily, I loaded half the chunk of crack into the end of my pipe and lit up. The rock crackled and hissed. Trembling, I closed my eyes and brought the pipe to my lips .
.
.

I woke up in a panic. The nightmare was so realistic, so detailed, it took me a few terrifying seconds to realize it was just a bad dream. It was August 2008, eight months after I’d come out in the magazine as a crack addict.

The publication of the story didn’t change my day-to-day routine. My friends remained my friends. My sources continued to provide tips. The judges, lawyers, clerks, and security officers at the state and federal courthouses didn’t treat me any differently.

In January 2008, a few days after the article was published, I received a breezy congratulatory e-mail from Mark, a former
Herald Examiner
colleague. We’d been out of touch for eighteen years, ever since I’d left Los Angeles. I quickly wrote back, saying I needed to talk to him to make amends and asking for his phone number. He was part of the wreckage of my past, and I needed to clean it up.

When Mark and I had worked together at the
Herald Examiner
,
in the late eighties, we were seemingly barreling toward doom on parallel tracks. Everyone knew that I drank hard, but Mark was considered the real wild man of the paper.
It was common knowledge that he indulged in marijuana, cocaine, and maybe other drugs. He often dragged himself into the newsroom around noon, his eyes bloodshot.