S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (5 page)

He had good instincts and a great training officer, Skip Enoch, who taught him the value of building a rapport with people in the neighborhoods they patrolled—blue-collar workers, civil servants, store owners, junkies, hookers, and, if they were willing, even drug dealers and thugs. Some officers maintained the standoffish attitude of a soldier occupying a hostile foreign country. Skip showed Lou that an effective cop is part of the community. A good cop knows whom in the neighborhood to call when something happens on his beat; a great
cop has people calling
him
. Skip also advised Lou that he didn’t have to worry about internal affairs if he beat up a handcuffed suspect: He would lock up his protégé himself if Lou ever abused someone.

A couple of years after he became a full-time officer, Lou showed that he knew how to handle himself when the guns came out, too.

In January 1977, Lou was on a plainclothes assignment in a working-class Northeast D.C. neighborhood known as Brookland, near Catholic University. He went into a Safeway to grab an orange juice while his partner waited in their unmarked sedan on the street.

Lou was standing in a checkout line when two men stormed into the store and pulled out sawed-offs from beneath their jackets. Without being told, many of the patrons and workers hit the ground; armed robbers took down the store fairly regularly, the employees and the shoppers knew the score. A few patrons and workers headed for the back of the store, away from the trouble. Lou quietly drifted to the back. He didn’t want the gunmen to see him unbutton his coat and retrieve the police revolver on his hip. Fighting back his fear, Lou held the gun in his shooting hand and slipped it into the pocket of his coat.

Less than a minute later, a half-dozen squad cars roared onto the street in front of the store. As they were preparing to enter the store, the two bandits had aroused the suspicion of Lou’s partner, Freddy Merkle; he’d radioed for backup moments before the duo stormed in and took out their weapons. Freddy had a feel for developing trouble; he’d been in three shootouts with robbers in the neighborhood.

The two bandits were shocked by how quickly the cops swarmed outside the store.

“The rollers are here!” one of the gunmen yelled.

Clutching the gun in his pocket, Lou walked to the front of the store, toward the gunmen. Outside, uniformed cops pulled out their service pistols and shotguns and took cover behind their cruisers.

The gunmen saw the small army of cops and panicked. One of them started screaming and swearing. He headed for the back of the store, apparently looking for an escape route. The other bandit trained his weapon at the store manager’s head. Lou stepped to within a yard of that robber. The bandit didn’t seem to notice Lou; he was preoccupied with the cops gathered outside the store. Lou leveled the revolver in his pocket at the man’s torso. The bandit’s partner was out of Lou’s line of sight.

Lou tensed. His right index finger caressed the trigger of his revolver. Lou thought it through: If he shot the bandit, would the robber reflexively shoot the store manager? How would the bandit’s partner react? Lou figured he was busy trying to flee. But he might start firing if Lou shot his partner. A bloodbath seemed inevitable.

To Lou, it felt like he, the bandit, and the store manager were the only people in the store. Lou kept his gun pointed at the bandit for what seemed like a half hour. In reality, it was three, maybe four minutes. The gunman menacing the manager suddenly turned his head toward Lou.

“What should I do?”

“If I were you, I’d call 911 and talk to the police,” Lou said.

To his astonished relief, the bandit lowered his shotgun, walked behind a service counter, and picked up the phone. He was patched through to a police commander in the parking lot.

Minutes later, both gunmen dropped their weapons and walked out of the store with their hands in the air.

Later that night, in the police station, Lou walked up to the bandit he’d almost shot. The man was sitting in a holding area, handcuffed.

“Do you realize how close I came to killing you?” Lou said.

“Who the hell are you? You’re too young to be a roller.”

Lou brushed his coat aside and showed the badge and gun clipped to his belt.

“Goddamn, you
are
a roller!” the man exclaimed.

By the early eighties, Lou was working as a homicide detective, discovering that he liked jumping into investigations, gathering evidence, and figuring out ways to coax—or leverage—witnesses to talk. Lou took the sergeant’s exam when he was thirty. He aced it. Same with the exams for lieutenant and captain. In a span of three years, he rose from officer to captain.

At thirty-three, he was young for a captain—and he figured he had maxed out. Tests determined promotions up to that rank; all promotions beyond it were political, approved by the mayor. Barry was known to favor certain high-ranking commanders, who in turn looked out for other white shirts in their clique. Lou never joined a faction and didn’t put any energy into departmental politics—he was all about being the
po-lice
,
enforcing the law and keeping the peace. Being part of the clique meant telling his chief whatever he wanted to hear, and Lou wasn’t wired like that.

Beyond that, Lou believed, the city’s political system for police appointments wasn’t helping matters on the street. People in dozens of neighborhoods overrun by drug dealing and violence pressured elected officials for relief. The pols leaned on the police brass. The white shirts responded with a series of highly publicized sweeps, arresting dozens of street dealers at a time. These operations got great play on the TV news shows, local residents felt grateful, and the Metropolitan Police Department bumped up its arrest statistics. MPD made some forty thousand arrests between 1986 and 1988, in Operation Clean Sweep, which focused on street dealers and buyers.

But a day or two after police made arrests, the street dealers were either back out or replaced by other slingers. The buyers lined up again. The police department didn’t even bother to interview arrestees to try to compile intelligence on the serious players. The real dealers and enforcers weren’t on the street making retail sales, so the sweeps didn’t touch them. MPD was going after garden snakes and ignoring the cobras and pythons.

Not only did the sweeps have no lasting impact, they were actually counterproductive, Lou thought. They made the police look like ineffectual amateurs.

In the city’s most violent neighborhoods, detectives heard the same names over and over in the wake of a shooting. The fact that there were more than four hundred homicides in the city didn’t mean that there were four hundred killers. There were a relative handful of shooters—two, maybe three dozen—killing a lot of people, Lou believed. They tended to operate in specific neighborhoods, where everybody knew who they were. Most killings weren’t whodunits. The challenge was getting frightened witnesses to testify.

Lou had given the problem a lot of thought. He’d developed a plan for how to go after the most violent players in the city.

All he needed was a chance to put it into action.

Six days after Barry flipped the bird, I began my first Saturday in town with some pickup hoops at the downtown YMCA. Then I settled down to watch a college football game. After a couple of beers, I upgraded to gin and tonics. Three drinks later, I was happily drunk.

I was in no condition to drive. But in L.A. I’d gotten behind the wheel dozens of times while hammered and had never been pulled over. It was a warm, sunny September day. I wanted to explore my new neighborhood, my new city. What harm could come of that?

My street was dominated by Victorian row houses. There was an old four-story apartment building at the far end of the block, directly across the street from a church. I drove a block past the apartment building and the church and turned right, toward downtown.

I’d gone exactly three blocks when I saw her. She was standing on the corner of 13th and M Streets Northwest, near a liquor store. Her brown eyes followed each passing car. She was trying to make eye contact with motorists.

The woman was petite, with curly, dark brown hair and fair, freckled skin. She wore a calf-length black skirt, a short-sleeve blouse, and flats. She held a small black handbag. I guessed her to be about my age, in her late twenties.

She was working the street, trying to be subtle, and mostly pulling it off. The woman was pretty, but not TV-ingenue gorgeous, like Raven. She looked like someone I’d feel comfortable approaching at a party after one or three drinks.

If I’d been sober, I might have kept driving, but the beer and gin had drowned my better judgment. There’d be no harm in talking to her, I figured. I pulled over to the curb, leaned over, and rolled down my passenger-side window.

“Hi!” she chirped. “You want some company?”

Her invitation unleashed a little jolt of adrenaline, the kind I’d felt whenever I’d pulled up to the curb on Raven’s street. The rush of getting high began with making the buy, and making the buy usually started with finding the girl to cop the rock.

I glanced at the street in front of me and checked the rearview mirror. Traffic was light. There were no cops in sight. The thought just popped into my head:
Why not?

“Sure,” I replied as I reached over and opened the passenger door.

The woman swiveled her head, taking a quick look down both ends of the street, then settled into my car.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Champagne.”

Maybe it was her obvious street name. It could have been junkie intuition. Real estate certainly had something to do with it. Though we were only two blocks from the shiny office buildings and upscale hotels of downtown, we were in a neighborhood full of liquor stores and run-down apartment buildings, its streets populated by junkies, winos, and strawberries. I’d chosen my apartment because it was just five blocks from the main offices of the
Post
,
but I think part of me was drawn to the inherent drama of the whole area.

Whatever the reason, as soon as Champagne was in my car, I just
knew
.
It had been eleven long days since my last hit, and in that moment, some internal switch was flipped.

“So,” I said. “Do you party?”

Champagne knew exactly what I meant. She opened her handbag and held it over the gearshift so I could see inside. The bag contained a nail file, a handful of condoms, a small mirror, a lighter, a six-inch strand of hanger wire, and a crack pipe.

Aces. I checked the rearview again. All clear.

“If I buy a rock for you, and one for me, would you do me while I’m hitting the pipe?”

“Sure.”

“Are you holding?”

“No, but I know where to go. It’s close by. I can get us two for thirty-five.”

One more party wouldn’t hurt.
“You navigate.”

Champagne directed me two blocks north, to Logan Circle. She had me bear right, onto Rhode Island Avenue, toward the east. We passed people engaged in ordinary Saturday-afternoon activities: a group of kids playing basketball on the outdoor court of a middle school, a handful of old people passing the time in chairs outside their building, a woman carrying a bag of groceries. They hardly looked like the residents of a city under siege from crack violence.

At 7th Street Northwest, Champagne had me turn left. Two blocks later, we hit the corner of 7th and S.

“Turn right here and park,” she said.

I pulled up directly in front of a squat concrete building with a small sign that read JOHN
’S PLACE
. A nightclub. I killed the engine and gaped.

In front of us, a half-dozen or so sullen young men and teenagers in wifebeaters or tees and sagging shorts or blue jeans loitered in the shade of a tree in front of a row house. Across the street, an equal number of slingers leaned against a rusty railing in front of an abandoned bakery.

The two-story brick building was huge. The front spanned about thirty yards, and it looked to be more than fifty yards deep. Two sets of front doors were padlocked, and the windows were covered with plywood. Near the top of the facade, plastic letters spelled WONDER BREAD and HOSTES CAKE, a space where the second S in HOSTESS had once been. I wondered whether some young gunslinger had knocked it off during target practice.

The building seemed like some kind of giant, urban ghost ship.

My eyes flickered to the right, to our side of the street. A brick row house stood next to John’s Place, then an alley, followed by four modest two-story houses.

In the middle of the block stood a large brick Victorian with circular bay windows and a large turret on top. It looked like a small castle. The lush front yard was filled with boxwoods, a rosebush, and daisies, all shaded by a large sycamore. The yard was set off from the sidewalk by a short, black iron fence. A small sign near the front door read NEW COMMUNITY CHURCH
.
A church? Here? In the middle of a crack zone?

To my right, just past John’s Place, a thin man flipped burgers on a grill in the small front yard of his home, seemingly unconcerned about the brazen drug dealers working the block. The aroma of barbecue wafted into the car.