S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Lou talked to Kenny’s mom and aunt, who gave their blessing to his taking the teenager temporarily under his wing. Then he simply brought Kenny home; he didn’t ask Loraine, he just did it. Loraine wasn’t thrilled about suddenly having a teenager, a stranger, in the house, but she didn’t object.

  Lou described how he’d taught Kenny to study with three-by-five flash cards. He told me how they worked out together with free weights.

  I interviewed Kenny and Loraine and wrote up the story.

  This one did hit the front page.

  One evening in March, I was getting ready to go home for the day when a call came over the scanner for a shooting at the corner of 7th and O Streets Northwest, just three blocks from my apartment. The dispatcher said homicide had been requested but provided no details. I could have left it to the night reporter, but I was curious to see what had happened so close to where I lived.

  “I’ll check it out,” I told Phil. “If it turns out to be nothing out of the ordinary, I’ll brief the night reporter and go home.”

  The attack had occurred inside the O Street Market, a brick building filled with small stalls where merchants sold baked goods, meat, fish, candy, and other items. The entire building was surrounded by crime-scene tape. A crowd of spectators almost two dozen strong was gathered across the street from the market. One TV news crew was already on the scene.

  I buttonholed a friendly sergeant and asked him what he knew.

  “We’re still sorting out the details,” he said. “We’ve got nine down.”

  I wasn’t sure I heard him right.

  “Did you say nine victims?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How many dead?”

  “One, so far. Someone from PIO is on the way.”

  I had no interest in dealing with the Public Information Office, but there was no sign of Lou. That was odd. He made it a point to respond to every high-profile crime scene. I was judicious about paging him. I wouldn’t have necessarily tried to raise him for a double or even a triple shooting—but nine down was an easy call. I called his pager and punched in the numbers to my Post cell phone.

  He called back almost immediately. His voice was weak.

  “You don’t sound so good, captain.”

  “I’m sick as a dog. Flu’s kicking my ass.”

  “Sorry to hear that. I’m out here at 7th and O. Can you help me?”

  “I can tell you on background there were multiple shooters, at least two, maybe more. They seemed to be going for specific people. We don’t know who, not yet,” he said.

  The one victim who’d died, a fifteen-year-old boy, was the son of his secretary, he said. She was the woman I talked to every day when I called him.

  “Geez, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s a shame. She’s a nice lady.”

  For about two weeks, detectives worked the case hard without getting traction. Then Detective Donald Bell, sitting at his desk in the homicide office, got a call.

  Bell was part of a squad of investigators assigned to the Fifth District, in Northeast D.C. Lou had created the team a couple of months before the O Street Market attack. It was the pilot squad, the first district-based homicide team Lou had created. Some of his detectives were still skeptical about the district-squad concept, Lou knew. If the 5D unit succeeded, he believed, those detectives would see its value and be less likely to grumble about change.

  Lou had appointed veteran investigator Sergeant Dan Wagner leader of the 5D squad. He let Wagner choose his own team. Bell was an obvious pick for the unit.

  He’d joined the department in 1973, the same year as Lou. Like Lou, he’d started out in 5D. Unlike Lou, he’d stayed there, working as a street cop and in the vice unit.

  In the late eighties, while the MPD spent millions in overtime on mass arrests of low-level drug suspects in Operation Clean Sweep, Bell wasn’t simply making busts and pocketing extra pay. Instead he was cajoling street dealers for information, sometimes using the threat of jail time to encourage cooperation. He eventually built a stable of reliable informants in 5D. Bell worked the way Lou believed the entire police department should be operating, establishing contacts among the low-level offenders to go after the bigger players.

  In 1989, Bell worked in homicide on a three-month detail to help out on a spate of 5D killings. He did well and accepted an invitation to stay.

  When his phone rang two weeks after the O Street Market incident, it was one of his 5D informants.

  “He told me the information that was in the news about the O Street Market shooting was wrong,” Bell recalled. Until the moment his source called, Bell hadn’t been working the O Street Market shooting, which had taken place in the Third District.

  TV news reports suggested that the attack had sprung from a conflict between rival crews battling to control the neighborhood surrounding the market. It was a highly plausible theory, given that many shootings broke out over drug turf. But in fact, the shooters were with a Northeast D.C. crew, the informant told Bell. The group’s ringleader was nicknamed Heavy. He was a skinny guy, the informant related. A few weeks earlier, Heavy had been out near the market alone. Some local gangsters relieved him of his leather jacket and car. Heavy had organized a get-back attack.

  Bell believed his mole. His information always panned out. He took notes and ran them down for Wagner. Wagner took the information to Lou.

  Detectives obtained search warrants for the homes of four Northeast D.C. gang members. They found a gun in every house and test-fired them. Each weapon was a match for shell casings from the O Street Market attack.

  I’d completed my shift and was relaxing at home when my Post cell phone rang. It was Lou.

  “We’re getting ready to lock up some suspects in the O Street Market case,” he said.

  It was the first time the captain had called me with a tip. He explained that the suspected shooters had been out for revenge for a carjacking and asked me to keep the information to myself until they were in custody.

  I held back. I didn’t even tell my editors. I didn’t want to take the chance that they would push me to publish the information. A day or two later, the police department held a press conference announcing the arrests.

  I called Lou after the presser, knowing he would now be free to talk more about the case. He told me about the 5D pilot squad and about how he planned on creating similar units for each police district.

  “This is exactly what we set up the squad for: to develop this kind of intelligence, which will help us combat the violence,” he said. “This is a perfect example of what we need and what we hope will be a trend.”

  The detectives working the O Street Market shooting had had no reason to look at suspects in 5D. If Bell hadn’t had such a great source there, the case might have stayed open for a long time, maybe forever.

  It was exactly how Lou had envisioned the district-squad concept could work. He began to sense something happening in homicide. He could see it in his detectives’ faces, in their body language. They’d seen how Lou’s idea could help them get killers off the street.

  And now, Lou believed, they were ready to change.

  In September 1994, five months after the O Street Market arrests, homicide detectives locked up eight suspects in various murder cases over a span of four days. The arrests vaulted their closure rate to above 50 percent for the first time since 1991.

  Lou tipped me off, and I co-wrote an article on the milestone with a Post courts reporter. The article noted that the homicide team was now reorganized, with squads of detectives assigned to each of the seven police districts. There had been 284 killings in the city up to that point, 54 fewer than at the same time the previous year, the story noted. I quoted Lou: “We’ve reversed two trends. The homicide rate is going down, and the closure rate is going up.”

  By this time, the homicide commander was no longer “Captain Hennessy” to me. That summer, he’d invited me to his house for the first time, to
help construct a pigpen. We labored under a broiling sun for hours, then had dinner with Loraine. After dinner I thanked her for the meal and walked to my car.

  “Thanks for the invite, Captain.”

  “Call me Lou,” he replied.

  By September, Lou and I were talking about ongoing homicide investigations at least once a day, often two or three times a day.

  That month, Chief of Detectives William Ritchie retired from the police department to take a job at the Washington Hospital Center promoting organ donations. At his retirement lunch, Chief Thomas congratulated him on his long career and his new job, then added, “Thank you for persuading me to hire Lou Hennessy as homicide captain. He’s making a difference.”

  Chapter 9

  Baldie Goes Down

  About an hour before midnight on the last day of July 1993, Metropolitan Police Department officer Vernon Gudger walked into the alley on the west side of the abandoned Hostess bakery on S Street Northwest. Halfway down the alley, he stopped at a light pole three feet from the bakery wall.

  Gudger looked south, toward S Street, then west, in the direction of 7th Street. No slingers were in his line of sight, and no one seemed to have spotted him in the alley. He adjusted the binoculars hung around his neck, moving them over his right shoulder, then checked his belt to make sure his handheld radio and gun were secure.

  He grabbed the light pole with both hands and swung his legs toward the bakery wall. The soles of his boots grabbed brick. Gudger pressed his feet against the wall and moved one hand over the other up the pole. He was headed for the roof.

  Gudger was wiry and strong, five-nine and 175 pounds. The other cops called him Tree Monkey. Trees, poles, walls, fences, buildings—whatever needed to be scaled, Gudger could do it.

  He had developed his climbing skills while living in Southwest Washington as a child, playing at the big construction site of what would become the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters. To little Vernon, exposed rebar was a playground.

  The family living in the house next door included a boy about the same age as Vernon. They were friends as kids and young teenagers, shooting hoops together at the local Boys Club. But things changed when they got older. Gudger entered the police academy. His neighbor, Wayne Perry, broke the other way, becoming a feared drug-gang enforcer.

  In the spring of 1988, Gudger, now a young officer, was playing in an outdoor pickup basketball game. Sides were chosen. Perry sauntered onto the court and said he’d be playing, too. Gudger told him to wait his turn. None of the other ballers dared back him up.

  “Don’t make me go to my trunk,” Perry threatened.

  “Go to your trunk,” Gudger said as he patted the fanny pack secured around his waist that held his service revolver. “I’m authorized to carry this 24-7.”

  Perry huffed and puffed—but he didn’t go to his trunk.

  Now, at thirty-one, Gudger was a veteran cop tired of seeing young men in the drug game take their last breaths while bleeding on the street. He grabbed the edge of the bakery’s roof with one hand, then another, and lifted himself up. He walked to a front corner of the building, crouched, broke out his binoculars, and looked down on S Street.

  S Street was part of Gudger’s Third District patrol beat. Climbing the bakery was strictly his idea. He’d used the roof as an observation post maybe twenty times before. He’d seen a handful of street deals and radioed to cops on the ground, who arrested the slingers and a few buyers. But those were all small-time collars for insignificant amounts of crack. Like every other cop in 3D, Gudger knew that Baldie ran S Street’s crack trade.

  He just needed to find a way to get to him.

  It seemed like an unusually quiet night, with only a couple of dealers on each side of S. About an hour into his surveillance, Gudger watched as a white guy appeared on the street. A white guy on that street, at that hour, was likely to be either a cop or a buyer. Gudger zoomed in on the man’s face. He wasn’t a cop.

  The man walked toward a slinger standing in front of the house next door to New Community Church. The white guy and the dealer talked. The slinger walked to the front door of the house and knocked.

  Baldie stepped out of his house. He walked up to the white guy. They strolled down the sidewalk toward John’s Place. They took a few steps into the alley separating the nightclub from a row house. Gudger watched.

  The white guy pulled some cash out of his pocket and handed it to Baldie. The kingpin of S Street pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to the white guy. The buyer walked away. Baldie walked back into his house.

  Gudger put down his binoculars and grabbed his radio. He told a cop in a nearby squad car to jam up the white guy as soon as he turned the corner. The radio call came back a couple of minutes later: The guy was holding—a single rock.

  Gudger stared at Baldie’s house. He couldn’t go in and get Baldie without a warrant. Baldie’s pickup truck, parked right in front of the house, inspired an idea. Gudger radioed the cop on the ground with instructions. He hustled to the nearest light pole and shimmied down to the ground.

  A couple of minutes later, a uniformed cop stood next to Baldie’s truck and slowly wrote up a parking ticket. The cop tucked it under one of the wipers on the front windshield. Baldie opened his door and stepped onto his porch.

  “What are y’all doing?” he yelled. “You can’t write me up! I park there all the time!”

  Gudger walked over. He almost always wore his uniform when he climbed onto the bakery roof, but tonight he was in dark blue police utility coveralls. He looked like a tow truck driver.

  “I got one more car to tow, then I can get this truck,” Gudger told his fellow cop.

  Baldie stormed off his porch toward the uniformed cop.

  Gudger showed his badge.

  “MPD. You’re under arrest for selling a controlled substance, crack cocaine,” he said.

  The big man turned his attention toward Gudger.

  “I didn’t sell no goddamn cocaine!” he bellowed.

  A third officer arrived. The other two cops stood on either side of Baldie as Gudger broke out his handcuffs. Baldie was no fool. He turned around and held out his thick wrists.

  Word quickly spread through the Third District station: Baldie was locked up. The 3D narcotics squad had been after him forever, with scant success—a couple of minor charges over the years, but nothing serious enough to get him off the street for long.

  A day or two later, with Baldie still in the 3D cellblock, Gudger and a handful of other cops went to his row house to execute a search warrant. The officers knocked on the front door. A young woman, probably one of Baldie’s older daughters, answered and let them in. She and a little girl about five years old sat on a couch in the living room as the police swept the house. The girl was probably Baldie’s grandchild, friends of the drug dealer would say years later.

  The cops checked drawers, closets, everywhere. They found nothing. They met up in the living room, a couple of the officers shaking their heads in frustration and disbelief.

  “Where’s the money? Where’s the drugs?” one asked to no one in particular.

  “They’re next door!” the little girl chirped.

  The woman slapped the back of her head and said, “Shut up!”

  “Touch her again and we’re taking you in,” Gudger warned.

  Then he and the other cops looked at each other: Next door.

  Baldie was a thug and a drug dealer, but he was old-school: He would rather intimidate someone than beat him, and he would rather beat someone than shoot him. He didn’t like to use violence if he could avoid it, a philosophy that earned him a great deal of respect among the residents of S Street.

  There were shootings on and near the block. The volunteers who came to the church to help renovate it and the kids in the after-school program often heard gunfire nearby. Billy Hart and other church workers trained the volunteers and children to hit the floor when they heard shots.

  But S
Street wasn’t the killing zone that many crack markets were. Other parts of the city, some of them just a few blocks away, were ruled by young men who were quick to initiate bloodshed.

  In combat zones throughout the eastern half of the city, the level of violence was high and steady. But now and then there were dramatic spikes. On a single week in June 1993, for example, sixteen people throughout the city were killed. The District would finish that year with 454 homicides, a scant improvement over the all-time record of 482 killings set two years before.

  In the early nineties, Antone White and Eric Hicks, both in their early twenties, ran the First Street Crew, which operated just six blocks east of S. The crew’s slingers sold crack on both sides of 1st Street Northwest, at all hours, in all kinds of weather. I knew firsthand: On a few occasions when Champagne didn’t like the pickings on S Street, she’d directed me to 1st, where she’d make the buy.

  The First Street Crew’s reign would end in a torrent of blood. In August 1992, Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams walked into a U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered to help law enforcement investigate the gang. Pork Chop was angry with the crew’s leaders. He believed they had information about the murder of his uncle but wouldn’t give it to him. Under the direction of police, Williams began making large drug buys from White and other crew leaders.

  After his last buy, on October 2, 1992, Williams was obviously shaken. White had refused to talk to him, and he believed the gang suspected he was “hot” and working with the cops. On a crisp afternoon a few days later, Williams was sitting in a car, trying to set up a meeting between crew leaders and an undercover cop, when two gunmen pumped sixteen bullets into his body and head and ran away.

  The brazen killing didn’t derail the investigation. By the spring of 1993, White, Hicks, and two other crew leaders were indicted on federal racketeering charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO. Federal prosecutors also charged White with killing Williams.