S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Police were gossiping about the mayor, too. After just a few weeks on the job, I’d already encountered one particular police inspector four or five times at late-night crime scenes. In the Metropolitan Police Department hierarchy, inspectors ranked above captains but below assistant and deputy chiefs. At the time, this one was the “nighthawk,” the de facto chief during late-night hours. Unlike most white shirts, he was friendly to me, providing basic information about whatever shooting I was covering and happy to chat about sports or whatever was in the news.

  One night that fall, as detectives hunched over the body of a young man who’d been shot in the street, the inspector and I landed on the topic of Barry. The mayor was so paranoid about the FBI that he summoned the chief to his office every few weeks to look for listening devices, the inspector told me.

  The chief, Isaac Fulwood Jr., would dutifully check the mayor’s phone and lamps. He would even check under Barry’s desk, the inspector said.

  “He didn’t know what he was doing. He wouldn’t know an FBI bug unless it was labeled,” the inspector chuckled. “But he went through the motions.”

  The story seemed goofy, and in interviews Fulwood had always insisted that he’d never done anything to interfere with an FBI investigation. But I didn’t dismiss it. After all, Barry had appointed the chief, and the mayor had already shown he was willing to deal ruthlessly with MPD officials he viewed as threats. In the spring of 1982, police inspector Fred Raines reported alleged drug use by Barry to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Raines passed along accusations that Barry had snorted cocaine at a 14th Street Northwest strip club called This Is It? around Christmas 1981. When the mayor learned what Raines had done, he ordered the commander busted down to night supervisor.

  Barry couldn’t manipulate the FBI or the U.S. attorney, though. In 1984, a federal grand jury indicted Karen Johnson, a city employee and reportedly a onetime Barry girlfriend, on charges of selling cocaine. An informant had worn a wire and recorded her talking about dealing to Barry. Federal prosecutors pressured Johnson to testify against the mayor, but she refused. Johnson was charged with contempt of court and incarcerated for eight months.

  Barry wasn’t charged in connection with the Johnson case. But federal attention returned to him in December 1988. Just before Christmas, Charles Lewis, a Barry acquaintance, reportedly displayed a bag of white powder to a Ramada Inn maid and propositioned her. She reported Lewis to a hotel security officer. A hotel official called the police. Two D.C. detectives were on their way to the hotel when Barry arrived and headed to Lewis’s room. The hotel manager waved off the detectives, who aborted their assignment. Six days later, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jay Stephens announced he was launching an investigation into the incident.

  Then, in March 1989, the FBI arrested Lewis for selling twenty-five rocks of crack to an undercover agent in the Virgin Islands. A federal grand jury issued a sixteen-count indictment against him, charging him with conspiracy, cocaine distribution, perjury, and other offenses.

  Would Barry be the next to fall?

  The mayor remained unflappable. “I want to repeat that I never saw any drugs or drug paraphernalia during my visits with Mr. Lewis,” he said in a statement.

  What Barry didn’t know was that by late summer, Lewis would agree to a plea bargain and begin talking in detail about his cocaine escapades with the mayor to a team of FBI agents and MPD internal affairs detectives. Lewis told the investigators about the times and places he’d used powder cocaine or crack with the mayor. Lewis said he’d used drugs several times with Barry in the Virgin Islands from 1986 through 1988.

  And he told them about a onetime Barry girlfriend named Hazel “Rasheeda” Moore.

  I was unable to resist the combination of crack and an attractive woman. The FBI bet that Barry couldn’t either.

  By mid-January 1990, newsroom rumors of an imminent Barry indictment had grown more persistent than ever. Meanwhile, people were getting shot in the city’s combat zones virtually every night. I was riding a seemingly nonstop wave of adrenaline, racing to crime scenes when I was working, driving Champagne to S Street to buy crack for our next tryst on my off days.

  The night of January 18 began routinely: I parked near Logan Circle, then walked to the Post for my night shift. Parking closer without getting a ticket was always tough. But just before 8:00 p.m., I decided to try again and walked back to my car. It was going to be a frigid night, and I didn’t want to hike those four long city blocks after the temperature had really plummeted.

  I was on M Street Northwest, driving toward the office, when two white shirts bolted into the street ten feet in front me. They sprinted toward the entrance of the Vista Hotel, to my left. A tall man in a suit and a guy lugging a TV camera were hot on their trail.

  It was unlikely that a shooting had occurred in an upscale downtown hotel. Right away, I thought, Barry? I pulled over and ran across the street and into the hotel. The white shirts were in the lobby, talking to a serious-looking man in a dark suit.

  I spotted Tom Sherwood, a reporter for a local TV news station. Tom had covered D.C. government for the Post; he’d left the paper about the time I’d arrived. I sidled up. Tom was gazing at the white shirts and the guy in the suit, mesmerized.

  “Hey, Tom,” I said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “I think the FBI just arrested the mayor for drugs.”

  Byline glory.

  I’d left my equipment bag, with my Post cell phone inside it, in my car. I didn’t want to leave the hotel, not for a moment. I raced to a bank of pay phones a few feet away and called Curt Hazlett, the night city editor.

  “Curt, I’m at the Vista Hotel. I think Barry’s just been busted by the FBI.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny.”

  “No, I’m serious. A couple of white shirts ran into the lobby, along with Tom Sherwood and a cameraman. The white shirts are talking to a guy in a suit. He may be FBI. Something is happening.”

  The mirth disappeared from Curt’s voice. “Stay right there. I’ll get back to you.”

  A couple more police commanders ran into the lobby. I stayed near the pay phone. Curt paged me about five minutes later. The reporter who’d been tracking the Barry investigation had confirmed that the FBI had busted the mayor, he said. They’d nabbed him inside a hotel room.

  The news was traveling at warp speed. A radio reporter showed up, followed by a wire service guy. A white shirt went over to them and made a vertical chopping gesture—he was telling them they had to stay put.

  “Do you have a credit card?” Curt asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Get a room—on the Post. The paper will reimburse you. Spend the night there, see if you can interview any staff, guests, anyone who saw or heard anything. We’re working on finding out where in the hotel they busted him. As soon as I know more, I’ll page you.”

  After retrieving my equipment bag from my car, I checked into a room on the fourth floor and for the next ninety minutes roamed all over the Vista, buttonholing guests and hotel staffers. No one knew anything about the Barry arrest. I retreated to my room and called Curt.

  “Hang tight,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much else you can do. I’ll call you if anything comes up.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed, clicked on the TV, and channel surfed. Every station had abandoned its usual lineup of sitcoms and cop dramas to report on the Barry takedown. After an hour or so, I hadn’t heard from Curt. I figured I was done for the night. I rang up room service and ordered a lobster dinner with a rum and Coke. The mixture of adrenaline and booze produced a nice buzz. I ordered another rum and Coke.

  By 10:00 p.m. the news was reporting that Barry had been taken from the Vista to FBI headquarters. A dark SUV was shown rolling into an underground garage at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. A statement was issued by the U.S. attorney and the FBI: Barry had been arrested on narcotics charges in an undercover operation that was part of an “ongoing public corru
ption probe.” It wasn’t long before sources told my colleagues who were working the story that the mayor had been videotaped smoking crack.

  The frenzy surrounding Barry was just starting. But the Vista portion of this party was over, which meant I was done for the night.

  In one gulp, I knocked back half my drink. A crazy idea came to me. I punched in the numbers to Champagne’s pager. By now I knew it by heart. Champagne called me back almost immediately.

  “Someone page me from this number?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. This is, uh, a work phone. Are you near Thomas Circle?”

  “You know it.”

  “Are you holding? Do you have two?”

  “You’re in luck. I do.”

  I hesitated. Two hours earlier, the hotel lobby had been full of FBI agents and white shirts. But Barry was gone, and with him the feds and cops. Champagne usually dressed conservatively, but every now and then she tramped it up with a short skirt, black fishnets, and do-me stilettos.

  “I’m in a hotel, and I don’t want to draw attention. How are you dressed?”

  “I don’t look like I’m working, if that’s what you mean. I look respectable.”

  “I’m at the Vista,” I said. I gave her my room number.

  Champagne arrived wearing a black trench coat and spiked heels. She stepped into the room and unbuttoned the coat, revealing a short, formfitting black cotton dress with a plunging neckline and a high slit.

  She settled onto the edge of the bed and removed the rocks from her purse. I sat next to her and watched the nonstop Barry news. Champagne glanced at the TV and quickly returned her attention to the task at hand. Carefully, she cut a rock in half with a sharp red fingernail.

  “I guess you’ve heard about the mayor,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Yeah, I heard they got him here in the hotel. He should’ve known they were watching him. He should’ve known better than to try anything in some place he couldn’t control.”

  Champagne loaded half of the rock onto her pipe.

  Her analysis made sense—enough sense to make me nervous. We were in a room over which we had no control. The cops or the feds would need a warrant to get into my home; I wasn’t sure the same rules applied to a hotel room. I jumped off the bed and pressed my face against the door, staring out the peephole.

  “No one’s coming,” Champagne said calmly.

  I took a couple of steps back and stared at the small space between the bottom of the door and the carpeted floor. Crack smoke didn’t produce any particular odor, at least none that I’d ever noticed. But suddenly I was fixated on the possibility that smoke would seep out and someone would notice and call the guy at the front desk, who would call the cops …

  Champagne seemed to read my mind. She placed her pipe and lighter on the bed, walked to the bathroom, and came out with a thick white towel. She folded it into a rectangle, went to the door, bent down, and pressed it into the space between the carpet and the bottom of the door.

  I crouched to get a good look. It appeared to be a perfect seal.

  I followed Champagne to the bed, undid my pants, and slid down my boxers. She handed me the pipe and lighter.

  As I resumed watching the coverage of the Barry arrest, I lit up and inhaled.

  Champagne went down on me.

  Lou was at his desk doing paperwork when news of the bust broke on the little TV set atop a nearby filing cabinet.

  No shock there. Lou made it a practice to debrief every witness or suspect, no matter how minor the charge. It was a good way of compiling street intelligence, and Lou had informants in every quadrant of the city. The people on the street knew Barry had been using.

  Lou picked up the phone and called Gary Abrecht, the inspector in command of the First District. Abrecht was smart, hardworking, and straight-arrow honest. He had an economics degree from Yale. His wife served as a city judge.

  “Have you heard the news?” Lou said.

  “What news?”

  “The mayor just got busted for drugs.”

  “Oh my God!” Abrecht replied. “Who got him?”

  Unlike Lou, Abrecht cared about police department and city politics. He wasn’t aligned with any particular faction of commanders, but he was careful not to offend any elected official who could affect his career—such as, say, Barry.

  Lou couldn’t resist the opportunity to needle his boss.

  “One-D vice arrested him,” Lou replied. Charlie Miller was the lieutenant in charge of the First District vice detectives—and a beast of a cop. The detectives in his squad were wearing out their handcuffs locking up slingers and users. It was within the realm of possibility that Miller’s people had busted Abrecht’s ultimate boss, the mayor.

  Five seconds of silence turned into ten. My God, Lou thought, Abrecht’s about to have a heart attack. Lou broke the silence and clued him in that the FBI, not 1D, had nabbed Barry.

  Abrecht let out a sigh of relief. Lou allowed himself a brief grin and resumed his paperwork.

  A few miles away, Jim and Grace sat on the couch in their living room in the Mount Pleasant section of Northwest and watched the unfolding news about Barry in near silence.

  “It’s not a surprise,” Grace said.

  “That’s true, but it’s a shame,” Jim replied. He wasn’t in denial about the mayor. Jim believed that Barry at times looked out for his political fortunes at the expense of the city. But he saw Barry as more than a self-centered demagogue.

  In 1982, just before he launched his church on S Street, Jim had founded Manna Inc., a nonprofit that renovated homes and apartment buildings for use as low-income housing. It relied on tens of thousands of dollars in loans from the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development. Manna paid back every dime.

  Barry had a reputation for leaning on people and organizations that did business with the city, asking such individuals and groups for campaign cash, but he never asked Jim for anything in return for the city loans. Manna had never donated a nickel to Barry, and neither had Jim. The mayor was a junkie and a liar and at times a racial provocateur, Jim thought, but for all his flaws, Barry genuinely cared about poor people.

  The news showed dumbfounded D.C. Council members and high-ranking city administrators walking into and out of the Reeves Municipal Center, the mayoral command post on 14th Street Northwest. Asked what he knew about Barry’s arrest, Chief Fulwood said, “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

  “It’s just sort of shattering,” said D.C. Council member H. R. Crawford, who represented a section of the city, in far Southeast, where Barry was popular. “I’m devastated.”

  Reactions broke largely along lines of race and class. Three days after the bust, the Post reported that a poll showed that 57 percent of respondents believed Barry should resign as mayor. But half of the poll’s respondents also believed that federal authorities were “out to get Marion Barry any way they could.” Blacks were three times more likely than non-blacks to believe that race had played a major role in the decision to investigate Barry.

  Across the country and around the world, the bust quickly became a symbol for the national drug crisis. “We’ve all been buzzing about the mayor of Washington,” Colorado’s top drug-prevention official told the Post. “Three different meetings, and everyone was talking about how amazing it is. I mean, the mayor of the capital videotaped by the FBI smoking crack! I think what it shows is we have a national social problem here that doesn’t respect position or authority or anything.”

  French newspaper Le Quotidien editorialized that the United States would finally have to admit that cocaine use was rampant in high places. In Spain, prosecutors and other officials who’d gathered for an anti-drug conference applauded when Colombian representatives said that the U.S. government needed to address the problem of demand at home before it turned its attention to problems in drug-producing countries abroad.

  Jim and Grace watched the news for a couple of hours. Before he turned in for the night, Jim got
on his knees and said a silent prayer for Barry, for the city, for Manna, for Baldie and his slingers, for all the suffering addicts who bought crack on S Street.

  A few days after the mayor was arrested, I was on a plane headed back to Los Angeles. The FBI, it turned out, had used Barry’s former girlfriend Rasheeda Moore to lure him to the Vista. She’d provided the crack and the pipe that the mayor had used. The Post was putting together a profile of Moore, whose last known address was in Los Angeles. Phil Dixon, an assistant city editor, threw me the assignment. Phil had worked at the Los Angeles Times in the eighties and liked my Herald Examiner work. The Post’s West Coast bureau chief was new to L.A., and the paper needed someone who wouldn’t get lost on the freeways, Phil told me.

  A lot of reporters wouldn’t have considered it a plum assignment. My job was to find out whatever I could and hand over my notes to the staffer who was writing the story. But I was excited to be going home on the company dime.

  From my window seat I gazed down at the ribbons of freeway and rows of neatly ordered subdivisions. After having held out for most of the flight, I’d ordered my first rum and Coke somewhere over the Grand Canyon. I nursed it until we crossed into California airspace, then ordered another. I quickly killed my second drink, reached into the inside pocket of my sport coat, and checked for the envelope with the $1,000 worth of Post-issued traveler’s checks inside.

  As the airplane neared LAX, I gazed out the window at the Forum, home of the Los Angeles Lakers. I could still barely believe that I, an unconnected kid whose family had started out in gang-infested Boyle Heights, was working at the Washington Post. There was nothing I would rather be doing. Well, almost nothing—the only job I would rather have was shooting guard for the Los Angeles Lakers. Journalism was my passion, but basketball was my first love.