S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  In October of that year, MPD homicide detective Joseph Schwartz testified in a routine pretrial hearing. In his testimony, Schwartz described what a handful of witnesses had said about Williams’s killing. The detective didn’t name any of the witnesses, whom police and prosecutors were determined to protect. He provided no ages or addresses or even genders.

  Even so, two days after the detective’s cautious testimony, Janellen Jones, forty-one, a former crew member, was gunned down as she walked home from a bus stop. She had a subpoena in her pocket. Jones was shot in the mouth—a message to other potential witnesses. A man who was nearby when Jones was killed, John P. Barton, fifty-three, was also shot to death. Police and prosecutors believed that Barton was killed because he’d witnessed the Jones hit.

  The killing didn’t begin or end there. By the time the RICO trial had concluded, in March 1994, nine witnesses connected to the case against the gang had been shot to death. Five, including Williams, were gunned down before Schwartz’s testimony, four after. White and his fellow crew members denied that they’d killed anyone or ordered any hits.

  The jury didn’t convict White or any other gang members for killing Williams. But the jury did convict White of racketeering. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene cited the destruction caused by the gang’s drug enterprise: “It is hard to know but easy to imagine how many persons had to rob, burglarize, even kill, to get money to buy the amount of drugs distributed by this organization,” he thundered. White got life in prison. The other gang members all got long terms behind bars.

  Greene noted the killing of the police informant, adding that many witnesses who did testify were obviously terrified. “The judicial systems of several countries [such as] Colombia and Italy at one time were paralyzed by witness killings and intimidations,” the judge said. “We must prevent that kind of development [from happening] in the District of Columbia and in the federal courts at all costs, because if witnesses can be intimidated, injured, or killed, all the crime bills Congress may pass will be just illusions, limited in practical effect.”

  During the late eighties and early nineties, there were dozens of gangs like the First Street Crew in every quadrant of the city. Some were even more violent. About five miles from White’s crew’s turf, near the U.S. Capitol in Southeast, Alberto “Alpo” Martinez ran his drug operation with impunity. His enforcer was Vernon Gudger’s childhood friend Wayne Perry.

  D.C. police arrested Martinez in November 1991. He eventually pleaded guilty to federal drug-trafficking charges and gave up Perry. In March 1994, Perry pleaded guilty to five murders—though he admitted to FBI agents Dan Reilly and Vincent Lisi that he’d killed thirty-three people altogether. Perry said he had registered his first kill at age twelve, and he provided enough details to suggest that he was telling the truth about most, if not all, of the murders he claimed to have committed.

  Compared with the likes of White, Martinez, Perry, and others, Baldie was a lovable teddy bear. But then, his was apparently a strictly mom-and-pop operation, selling drugs on S Street and nowhere else. Other, younger D.C. drug dealers moved large quantities of product all over the city. Baldie undoubtedly made a lot of money selling drugs—probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, maybe even north of a million. But there was no evidence that his drug-dealing operation extended beyond S Street. Baldie didn’t make nearly the amount of coin that other local kingpins did.

  According to federal investigators, between 1982 and 1990, the R Street Crew, which operated in Northwest, sold $50 million worth of drugs. Nearby, the P Street Crew sold $100 million worth of drugs during a handful of years in the late eighties and early nineties, federal authorities alleged. Both crews were taken down by federal investigations in the early nineties, with the leaders of both gangs convicted of offenses connected to drug trafficking.

  Baldie didn’t have any flash in his game. Younger neighborhood kingpins went on shopping sprees in Georgetown and jetted to big boxing matches in Las Vegas. They wore gold and diamonds and tooled around in fully loaded SUVs and luxury sedans. In the early nineties, Martinez and other drug dealers organized teams for pickup basketball games; the losing side would have to pony up $10,000 to the victors.

  Baldie did none of that. He had his old truck and his row houses—the one he lived in and the one next door, which, police would discover, he used to run his drug enterprise. He never took part in a high-stakes hoops game. He splashed out by hosting annual barbecues for his neighbors.

  If someone else had been running the drug traffic on S Street, the church and the after-school program probably never would have had a chance. Jim was grateful for Baldie’s protection. But Jim didn’t tolerate everything Baldie did.

  In fact, Jim became so upset with Baldie once that he threatened to renege on his promise not to call the police on him.

  A couple of weeks before Gudger’s rooftop reconnaissance mission, Cynthia Barron had taken some of the kids from the after-school program out for an afternoon of fishing at Hains Point, a recreation area on the Potomac River in Southwest D.C. She parked her car across the street from New Community and retrieved a half-dozen bamboo fishing poles from the trunk, struggling to keep them from slipping out of her arms as she walked toward the church. Baldie got up from his porch and met her on the sidewalk.

  “Let me help you with those,” he offered.

  In the five years she’d been running the church’s after-school program, Cynthia had developed a cordial relationship with Baldie. He always waved and said hello when she and her kids walked past his house, heading to or from the after-school program. She knew that he had a soft spot for the program and the church—and for her. One evening, after she’d walked the kids to their homes, she was headed toward her car when Baldie approached her.

  “You guys need some money?” he asked as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of cash. Cynthia was making seventeen grand a year. She looked at the bills in Baldie’s hand. She could see they were all hundreds. Cynthia thought about the art supplies and books she could buy for the after-school program. She thought about her own monthly bills. But she knew where Baldie’s money came from.

  “No, thank you, Baldie. But thanks for offering.”

  So Cynthia didn’t hesitate when Baldie volunteered to help her carry the fishing poles—no harm in that. She led Baldie to the back of the church and down the steps to the basement. She opened the door and stepped inside.

  Baldie was on her as soon as she was inside the door.

  He pressed his big torso against her slender frame and hugged her. Cynthia tried to squirm out of Baldie’s grasp. She smelled alcohol on his breath.

  “No, Baldie. I think you’ve been drinking.”

  Baldie held her body tight against his and started pawing at her. Cynthia tried to struggle out of his grasp. He drew in for a kiss.

  “No way!” Cynthia shouted. She wriggled her arms free and pushed Baldie as hard as she could. He could have easily overpowered her, but he backed off. He turned and lurched out of the basement. Cynthia put away the fishing poles and drove home.

  The following day, as he parked his car outside the church, Jim saw Baldie sitting on his porch as usual. Cynthia had told him about her encounter with the drug dealer. Jim made straight for Baldie and got right in his grill.

  “Listen to me, Baldie. I heard what you tried to do to Cynthia,” Jim said sharply. He was visibly angry. “If I ever hear of you doing anything like that again, you’re finished. Do you understand?”

  Jim didn’t say he would start cooperating with the police, but he didn’t have to. Baldie understood.

  The big drug dealer stared at his shoes. He looked sheepish—embarrassed, Jim thought.

  “Yeah, okay,” Baldie muttered.

  The outburst from the little girl sitting on Baldie’s couch had given Gudger and his fellow officers a second chance to find the evidence they needed. Gudger and a supervisor got into a squad car and drove to
a judge’s home in an upscale neighborhood in upper Northwest D.C. They recounted the girl’s spontaneous statement. The judge issued an emergency search warrant for the house next door to Baldie’s.

  The police discovered a passageway that connected Baldie’s home to its neighbor. The houses were narrow and deep; the passageway was near the back, hidden from view from the street by a wooden partition. The officers entered the house through the concealed side entrance. One videotaped the search.

  The door was unlocked. The cops stepped inside and immediately found a sixteen-gauge pump-action shotgun.

  They walked into the kitchen. There was a .357 Magnum on a mirrored table. Nearby were a strainer, a measuring spoon, loose razor blades, and some two-kilogram scales, all tools used for cutting crack—which was in the room in great abundance.

  The officers started opening kitchen drawers. One held dozens of bags of huge chunks of crack, each the size of a small pancake and a couple of inches thick. They hadn’t yet been cut for street sale.

  In another drawer, the cops found dozens of $50 rocks wrapped in small plastic baggies. In a third, they found dozens of $20 rocks. In all, the crack was worth $43,000.

  In other parts of the house, the officers found boxes of ammunition for the .357, for a .270 handgun, for .44s and .45s and .22s, for twenty-and twelve-gauge shotguns.

  Gudger walked out of the stash house thinking, Mother lode.

  Police and federal prosecutors still had to tie the guns and the drugs and the ammunition to Baldie. The little girl’s utterance had provided probable cause, but she was too young to serve as a witness in a federal drug-conspiracy prosecution.

  They questioned Robert Epps, the man renting the house, who was known as “Bama Rob.” The night of the search, he acknowledged that he knew Baldie and even claimed that he was his brother. A fingerprint on the .357 matched his. The police scooped him up.

  A federal grand jury indicted Baldie and Bama Rob for running a drug conspiracy. Baldie was scheduled to go on trial in late July 1994. Just before Baldie’s trial began, Bama Rob cut a deal with the government. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy with intent to distribute more than fifty grams of cocaine and using a firearm during a drug-trafficking offense, in exchange for a fifteen-year sentence.

  He also gave up Baldie, agreeing to testify that he had begun renting the row house on behalf of the drug dealer in October 1991. The house was used to cook, cut, and stash crack, he said. The passageway between the two homes was constructed in 1992. Baldie used it to go between the two houses and gather crack, which he would provide to his street slingers, Bama Rob told investigators.

  Baldie’s trial lasted four days. His defense attorney argued that the crack in the stash house didn’t belong to Baldie. The members of the jury didn’t buy it. They convicted him of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, possession with intent to sell, carrying a firearm during drug trafficking, and a couple of other counts. Baldie had made his living off crack, and now nationwide fears over the crack epidemic assured he would never be a free man again.

  In 1984, Congress had passed the Sentencing Reform Act, as part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. Among other provisions, the SRA abolished parole eligibility for those who committed a federal crime on or after November 1987. Before the passage of the reforms, the judge might have had some latitude in sentencing Baldie. The changes in sentencing, coupled with the crimes he’d been convicted of, guaranteed that Garnell “Baldie” Campbell would be spending the rest of his life in prison. He was fifty. His young daughters, who at that time were on the cusp of adolescence, would never see him as a free man again.

  In October 1994, Baldie’s attorney, Cynthia Lobo, stood to address U.S. District Judge Charles R. Richey before he sentenced her client.

  “Well, Your Honor, I’m afraid that, after practicing law for fourteen years, this is the first time I have stood next to someone who is bound to be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole,” Lobo began. “This is also the first time in my life, therefore, that I have had very little that I could say, since I know there’s nothing that I can say that can persuade the court, since the court is bound by the law in this case.”

  Lobo offered “profound thanks” to Richey for giving her and her client “probably one of the best criminal trials that I’ve had the pleasure of trying in fourteen years. It is rare, and it is becoming increasingly rare in the climate of drugs and violence in this country, unfortunately, to find such an honest judicial temperament in the face of very strong evidence.”

  Then it was Baldie’s turn to speak.

  “How you doing, Your Honor?” he began. “I wanted to thank you, because I think I got a fair trial, and I want to thank Ms. Lobo for handling my case, and I wanted to thank Mr. [Assistant U.S. Attorney John] Cox, because I don’t think he treated me so bad, you know. I think he gave me a fair trial, and then it could have been an act of God, you know. In fifty years, I never picked up a Bible in my life, but since I’ve been locked up the last fourteen months, I have one in my hand every day. So it might have been an act of God. So I’m satisfied with what happens.”

  Richey then sentenced Baldie to life in prison. A couple of federal marshals quietly escorted the kingpin of S Street out of the courtroom.

  Jim heard about Baldie’s conviction from a couple of street slingers. During the fourteen months he was in jail before being sentenced, Baldie never reached out to the pastor, never asked him to write a letter to the judge or testify on his behalf. Baldie didn’t ask Jim or anyone else from the church to visit him in jail. He didn’t ask them to attend his trial or sentencing.

  “I think he was embarrassed, being locked up,” Jim told me, nearly twenty years after Baldie’s conviction. “I kept praying for him. But he knew that I wasn’t going to testify for him or write a letter to the judge saying what a great guy he was.”

  On S Street, the crack market was as bustling as ever in the immediate aftermath of Baldie’s arrest, though it would begin to slow down by the time of his conviction a year later. Slingers still lined both sides of the block; users continued to drive onto the street day and night to make their buys. Maybe one of Baldie’s lieutenants filled the power vacuum. Perhaps another drug dealer slid in and took over Baldie’s street crew. It’s even possible that more than one drug dealer did business on the block, in relative harmony. Jim didn’t know who was running the street in Baldie’s absence, and he didn’t try to find out.

  “I kept talking to the guys on the street, the dealers, trying to get them to leave that life,” Jim said. “I never stopped trying, as I’d never stopped trying with Baldie before he was locked up.”

  The accommodation and friendship Jim had with Baldie had developed organically, over time. It occurred because Baldie, for all his faults, understood and supported what Jim and the church were trying to do, and because Jim reached out to Baldie and his dealers rather than turning them in to the cops. Their understanding couldn’t simply be replicated.

  Baldie was gone, but he’d left a legacy on the street: The church was off-limits. New Community remained safe, whoever was running the block.

  While Baldie went down, Marion Barry rose up.

  His political resurrection began on April 23, 1992, the day he was released from prison. Barry didn’t merely return to the District with his head held high. He came home like a conquering hero.

  About 250 supporters piled into a six-bus caravan in the predawn hours in D.C. and greeted the former mayor in the parking lot of a Days Inn forty miles from the low-security federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, where Barry had finished serving his six-month prison term for misdemeanor drug possession. (He’d originally been housed at a federal prison in Virginia but was moved after being accused of receiving oral sex from a female visitor. Barry denied the charge.) The caravan had been organized by the Reverend Willie F. Wilson of the Union Temple Baptist Church, in Southeast D.C. Many of the people who took part were mid
dle-aged women. When Barry arrived, some were singing the hymn “Victory Is Mine.”

  Wearing a black suit, dress shirt, and tie, accented by a colorful kente cloth scarf and kufi, Barry was accompanied by his mother, Mattie Cummings, seventy-five. Barry basked in the crowd’s adulation, speaking of his personal redemption and spiritual rejuvenation.

  “I come out of prison better, not bitter,” he said. “I gained the realization that I had come to experience a spiritual power outage. It caused me to get my life out of balance and out of control.”

  “Amen!” some in the crowd shouted.

  “God does not require perfection of us, only progress,” Barry said. The phrase is similar to one commonly heard within recovery groups, in which individuals are encouraged to seek “progress, not perfection.”

  Barry and his supporters had lunch in the motel ballroom. There, he sang “Happy Birthday” to Florence Smith, who’d come to Pennsylvania from Southeast on the day she turned fifty-four. “He is one of the greatest persons, one of the only people I know who can do something for us as poor blacks,” she told the Baltimore Sun.

  The former mayor then joined the caravan for the ride to the District. The buses arrived at Union Temple Baptist, where another large crowd of admirers was waiting, at around 8:00 p.m.

  Barry stepped off the bus and proclaimed, “Free at last! Free at last!”

  During a brief meeting with reporters at the Days Inn, Barry had talked about a possible return to D.C. politics. “I have a number of options,” he said. “I cannot get involved ever again in my lifetime, I can wait and run later, or I can get involved this year.”

  Few political observers in the District believed he would go for option three. But just two months after his release, Barry announced that he’d be running for the D.C. Council seat in Ward 8, which comprised the poor, violence-plagued neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.

  In the Democratic primary in September, he easily defeated four-term incumbent Wilhelmina Rolark. In the general election in November, he trounced two candidates, a Republican and an independent, winning with 90 percent of the vote.