Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  “You’ve got to understand—this happens all the time,” says Kyung Ji “Kate” Rhee, who has worked with Chino for ten years and with kids in this area for even longer. “I honestly don’t think it’s that exceptional,” she says about Chino’s experiences. “I’m not mitigating the pain that she went through. It’s just that this is happening on a scope and scale that the general public has no idea about . . . The disconnect is immense . . . We are ten minutes away from Brooklyn Heights,” she says, and shakes her head. “It’s a different world.”

  As I traveled from country to country, I started to realize that this story—of a street dealer—is only the story of the first layer of violence and criminality caused by transferring the drug trade into the illegal economy.

  Beyond Chino Hardin, there is another layer of gangsters controlling the neighborhood.

  Beyond them is a network of smugglers who transported the drugs from the U.S. border to New York.

  Beyond them is a mule who carried them across the border.

  Beyond them is a gang controlling the transit through Mexico, or Thailand, or Equatorial Guinea.

  Beyond them is a gang controlling the production in Colombia, or Afghanistan.

  Beyond them is a farmer growing the opium or coca.

  And at every level, there is a war on drugs, a war for drugs, and a culture of terror, all created by prohibition. I started to think of Chino, and all he has been through, as only one exploded and discarded shell, left behind on a global battlefield.

  Chapter 6

  Hard to Be Harry

  Two groups fight this war out with sweat and guns every night. One is Chino’s side. The other is the police. As I spent time with Chino, I found myself wondering—How does all this look to the other army in this war? To find out, I interviewed sixteen1 current or former law enforcement officials, from the Swiss mountains to the U.S.-Mexico border—but there was one I kept coming back to, again and again, over three years, because I could never quite understand her.

  I first met Leigh Maddox around the same time I met Chino, in a restaurant in Manhattan, not far from where Occupy Wall Street had just erupted. Our meeting was arranged by an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). As she came into the restaurant, I saw she was a slender woman in her fifties with brown hair, but she walked with the confidence of a person who is used to flashing a badge and making arrests.

  No matter how well I got to know her later, Leigh always made me picture the Heather Locklear character in the 1980s TV series T. J. Hooker: I always half expected her to suddenly tell me to duck so she could take a shot at some villain she had spotted at the other end of the room. She ordered a glass of wine, and started to tell me her memories of life on the front line of the drug war.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Leigh Maddox was standing on the I-95, the long stretch of highway that leads into Baltimore. She was a police captain with long hair and a short temper. Her men were waging the war on drugs by pulling over cars and hunting through them for contraband. Leigh had been busting people for drug possession like this for years. Her cops had clear orders: Go for numbers. Get the maximum possible arrests. Don’t worry about how severe the offense is. If a person is found with any drugs at all, even the tiniest roach, bust them. She was Anslinger’s dream girl made flesh.

  Her officers all knew they could seize the property of anyone they arrested for drug offenses to be auctioned off, with much of the proceeds—usually 80 percent—going straight back into the local police budget. “So if you stop a car [and search it and find], say, four million [dollars in cash]—not unusual—shit, that’s good,” Leigh said.

  Drugs were flowing so fast into Baltimore that hauling out users was like throwing your rod into a crammed commercial fishery. Her police force had taken all the measures Anslinger could never push through in his lifetime and put them into practice. Every night, army-style SWAT teams using the latest military equipment were smashing their way across the state. The prisons were crammed with people serving the harshest possible sentences. The streets were militarized. Harry’s old instruction—“Shoot first!”—was believed to be the unofficial motto of the state’s cops by many of the people who lived here.

  But for Leigh, the fight was, by this point, about much more than that. She ended up here for a very personal reason.

  Leigh first met Lisa Renee Taylor in gym class when they were thirteen years old, and they almost immediately became best friends. They looked so alike—both brunettes and slim—that a few years later they were able to share a fake ID to buy booze because nobody could tell them apart. They smoked weed and partied together and shared everything. Even their names sounded similar. Leigh comes from a strict military family—her dad was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. She left home when she was eighteen to marry a jerk, mainly to anger her parents—but when she did it, Lisa was there as her maid of honor, just as she was always there for her.

  While Lisa studied chemistry at Salisbury State University, Leigh was working as a cocktail waitress and a pizza delivery girl, but they stayed in constant contact. In June, during Lisa’s first year at college, the girls met up in Ocean City, and they spent the day on the beach, talking and tanning. Lisa wore a white one-piece swimsuit with the stomach cut out; Leigh wore a similar black-and-gold number. A couple of photographers came up to them on the sand and told them they could be models—a cheesy pickup line but one that made them laugh. But Lisa, lovesick for her new boyfriend John, decided she just had to see him and couldn’t wait. She didn’t have a car and she didn’t have the money for a bus, so she decided to hitchhike to his place in New Jersey.

  Late the next day, Leigh got a call from Lisa’s sister. She hadn’t heard from her. Oh, there’s nothing to worry about, Leigh said—she’s only gone to see John.

  The next day, Leigh received a knock at her back door. It was hot and she had no air-conditioning. Through the door she could see the silhouette of John standing there. “Leigh, she never made it to New Jersey,” he said.

  The police came and asked some questions and concluded that Lisa had run away. Leigh told them it was impossible—she had left her makeup bag behind, and “girls don’t run away without their makeup bag.” But they refused to investigate. The murder investigator assured Leigh “she’ll pop up sooner or later.”

  She didn’t. The summer passed, and nobody heard from Lisa. Leigh prayed a lot, and told God if He got Lisa out of this, she would dedicate her life to doing good. She marched up the steps of the state police barracks and demanded an application to join. One evening, she was working as a cocktail waitress at the Sheraton Hotel in Bloomsbury while her application was being processed when she saw a headline on the TV news. “Body of missing woman found,” it said. “My whole life stopped,” Leigh would say, years later, “and all these people were still partying and having a good old time, and I was just standing there.”

  Once she graduated from the police academy, she climbed to the third floor of the Salisbury state police barracks where the files were kept and forced herself to read every document on Lisa and look at every photograph of her, to try to find out what really happened.

  Lisa had stopped by her mom’s house and asked for some money, and they’d had some kind of argument, so she started to walk back to her dorm room a mile away. She never made it. She ran into a drug gang—a group of at least ten young men. Lisa was sexually assaulted by all of them, and at the end of it, she was stabbed thirteen times and left for dead in a wooded area directly across the street from the university. Years later, after Leigh had worked in policing for a long time, she would come to believe this gang was bonding itself together—establishing its reputation for terror—with a gang rape, as part of its initiation rites.

  The woman living in the house across the street from the university couldn’t understand why her dog had been barking incessantly all summer. Lisa had lain there all season rotting, and animals started eating her. When they found he
r body, her ankle was missing. Only one person was ever arrested and charged.

  So Leigh became a state trooper to honor Lisa. Nobody had a better reason to hate the drug gangs than she did. Nobody was more determined to stop them.

  A few years later, the Ku Klux Klan was marching through Elkton, a town of fifteen thousand people in rural Maryland. The men in white hoods were at the front, with sixty supporters in train, chanting, “Hey hey! Ho ho! Niggers have got to go!” Antiracist campaigners who turned up to counterdemonstrate were jeering and hurling objects like batteries at them and yelling abuse, but the Klan kept on going. And in the middle of the march, there was a proud Klanswoman in her white hood—Leigh Maddox.

  She had been helping to plan their marches and their picnics and recruiting people in the street for a year now. Near her, in another neat white hood, was the head of this Klan chapter’s chief henchman, a man who had committed murder twenty years before and been let off when he pled insanity. Leigh continued marching, through a hail of batteries.

  Her bosses told her that women couldn’t infiltrate the Klan because it’s too dangerous. But she insisted. She explained that she believed they were burning crosses outside the homes of African Americans in Elkton and threatening violence against them, so the police need somebody in there. Eventually, because she insisted for so long, her bosses gave in. But for Leigh, it was doubly risky, because she was going home from the Klan rallies to her black boyfriend.

  Her undercover Klan name was Rosa Leigh. Women rarely turned up at Klan rallies alone, so she had to invent a boyfriend who was living far away and couldn’t be with her. She was forced to find something to talk to these people about, so she burrowed hard to find something good about them, or at least something she shared. One of the Klansmen knew a lot about plants, and she liked nature, so they discussed that. Another liked Coors Light—she isn’t much of a beer person, but she imagined that if she were . . . Yes, this was hard going.

  But she was gathering intelligence that was vital to the safety of black people in this town. One day, in broad daylight, two of the Klansmen were driving through Elkton when a black guy pulled up next to them at an intersection with a white girl next to him. Her comrades from the Klan grabbed a length of lead pipe, dragged him from the vehicle, and beat him close to death. Leigh was able to identify them from the witness reports, so they were taken off the streets. And this went on. She was able to tell the police which vehicles to stop on their way to the rally that would contain illegal guns, drugs, and who was driving under the influence. She was giving intelligence almost in real time.

  The Klan soon began to panic. Is there a snitch? How else could the police know this much? Which one of you motherfuckers is telling the cops everything?

  After one Klan meeting, the men asked “Rosa Leigh” to stay behind and accused her. Outright. Of being a cop. Leigh knew these were felons and psychopaths with a history of violence and killing. She felt sick. All she could do to have a chance of surviving was to lash out.

  “You are a bunch of goddamn motherfuckers,” she yelled. “I can’t believe that after all this time and all I’ve done for this organization you would dare question my loyalty . . . I’m beginning to think you guys are a bunch of losers. I don’t even know why I hang out with you.” They started to insist. We want to see your house. We need to see your grandparents. Leigh had to think fast. “You guys want to come down see my house? Seriously? You wanna come down see my grandmother on a Sunday without notice? You know how ill my grandmother is, and you guys are not exactly the kinda guys she would want me to bring around!”

  But they insisted. She had to agree. There was no choice.

  “Fine, fine,” she said. She told them to follow her car—and then sped away faster than she had ever driven in her life.

  Leigh would always know she made a difference in Elkton, getting violent racists put away. Thanks to her, fewer Americans were terrorized.

  It wasn’t easy being a female cop in those days, but Leigh was proving she had balls, and she had some crucial allies. She drove the ninety miles to work every morning talking to her colleague Ed Toatley,2 a goateed African American undercover narcotics agent who had grown up just outside Baltimore. He was head of the union, and he stood up to the encrusted sexism on the force as Leigh rose higher and higher, cracking a series of glass ceilings.

  Yet the work Leigh was most driven by was taking on the drug gangs. This was what got her out of bed in the morning. She was sure that her roadside stops and drug busts were disrupting the supply routes through Maryland—and this meant there would be fewer gangsters, fewer addicts, less violence, and less misery in the world.

  This is one of the most important facts about Leigh, and one that it would be easy for somebody like me—with the politics that I have—to ignore.

  Leigh’s support for the drug war was an act of compassion. She genuinely believed that she was making the world a better place by protecting people from drugs and drug gangs. She is a kind and decent person, and that is what drove her to fight the drug war.

  She pictured Lisa, and fought for her.

  Yet all over the United States—all over the world—police officers were noticing something strange. If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists, the number of violent racist attacks goes down. But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down.

  Another police officer, Michael Levine, was learning this lesson for himself. As he made clear when I interviewed him in 2011, as with Leigh, the drug war was personal for him. His brother died of a heroin overdose in Harlem in the 1950s. His son was a cop murdered by a drug addict in the 1980s. So when he was told to go to one of the most notorious drug-selling corners in Manhattan—near the top of Ninety-Second Street—and “clean up that damned corner,3 once and for all,” he was delighted. In a long surveillance operation, his team identified a hundred likely street dealers within fifty feet who work from the moment the sun falls to the moment the sun rises. Within two weeks, he had busted around 80 percent of them.

  He was satisfied, and for a couple of days, there was less drug activity. But within a week, everything was back to normal, “as if we had never been there,” as Levine puts it in his writing. Why? Because “as every dealer knows, if he is arrested, there are hundreds right behind him ready to take his place.” He asked himself: “If all those cops and agents couldn’t get this one corner clean, what is the purpose of this whole damned drug war?”

  Back on the roads running into Baltimore, Leigh was discovering something that was going to change her life. It was even worse than Levine suspected. It’s not just that arresting dealers doesn’t cause any reduction in crime. Whenever her force arrested gang members, it appeared to actually cause an increase in violence, especially homicides. At first this puzzled her, but it was a persistent pattern.

  Why would arresting drug dealers cause a rise in murders? Gradually, she began to see the answer. “So what happens is we take out the guy at the top,” Leigh explains, so “now, nobody’s in charge, and [so the gangs] battle it out to see who’s going to be in charge.”

  As I try to understand this, I imagine if Chino had been put away for a really long stretch, or killed. The demand for drugs in Flatbush would not be reduced. There would still, every day, be people turning up on his corner in search of drugs. So there would either have been a war within Souls of Mischief to see who would be the new top dog, or a rival gang—like the older men whom they drove out that day—would have sensed weakness and swept in to fight for control of the patch. In the fighting or the crossfire, it’s easy to see how there would be killing.

  Is that right? Is this why every crackdown triggers a turf war? I went away and read through the studies, trying to discover if what Leigh witnessed is part of a wider pattern. Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has studied the murder statistics4 and found that “statistical analysis shows consistently
that higher [police] enforcement [against drug dealers] is associated with higher homicide, even controlling for other factors.” This effect is confirmed in many other studies.5

  So Leigh was beginning to realize that while she went into this job determined to reduce murder, she was in fact increasing it. She wanted to bust the drug gangs, but in fact she was empowering them.

  In her heart she suspected this had been the case for years—but she tried to avoid seeing it for as long as she could, until one night she was left with no choice.

  One job in policing is, everyone told me, pretty consistently the toughest gig. Ed Toatley—the union head who championed Leigh as she rose through the force—had to pretend, every day, to be a drug dealer among drug dealers.

  Back in the 1950s, Harry Anslinger had described what it takes to do this job. An undercover agent, he said, “must be a better actor than an Academy Award winner,6 quick on his feet, even faster with his hands, and ten times as fast with his mind . . . one slip—one false word—could cost his life.”

  When they were being honest with themselves, Leigh and Ed admitted they were both adrenaline junkies. “There’s nothing like knowing you almost died [and] spending the next half hour saying—‘but I didn’t!’ ” Leigh told me, laughing. So she wasn’t surprised when, on the morning of October 30, 2000, Ed told Leigh how excited he was—he had finally been given the order to take out a midlevel dealer he’d been tracking for six months. He was given three thousand dollars to head to Washington, D.C., buy a kilo of cocaine, and do the bust. “This is like the pinnacle of my career,” he said.

  That night, Leigh got a call from the duty sergeant. He was brief. As Ed handed over the three thousand dollars, the twenty-four-year-old dealer didn’t hand him cocaine. He shot him straight in the head. “I didn’t give it a second thought,”7 he said later in court.

  A few minutes later, as she was hurrying to the hospital, her major called her. “Leigh, this is Mike,” he said, and all she could say was: “Who the fuck is Mike?” She couldn’t process anything. When she arrived at the emergency room, more than a hundred police officers were there. Ed was the head of the union and a popular man. As soon as they heard, they all came. One of them put his hand on Leigh’s shoulder and said, “Leigh, man—he’s gone.” Her chief appeared and said: “This is going to be hard, but you got to be strong for the troops—they need your leadership right now.”