He was just getting started. In May 1994, he walked into the auditorium of Calvin Coolidge Senior High School, in Northwest. The school is located in Ward 4—then-mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly’s home ward. There, Barry announced he was launching a campaign to return to the mayor’s office. This time, he spoke in biblical terms of redemption: “The day they arrested me, I was blind, but now I can see,” he said. “I was lost, but now I’m found.”
Barry’s timing was good: Kelly’s administration was mired in a fiscal crisis. In March, Congress had voted to slash $150 million from the city’s budget of $3.4 billion for fiscal year 1995. A report by the General Accounting Office had said the D.C. government could run out of money in less than two years if it made the $190 million in pension contributions it was required to.
In the eastern half of the city, where drug violence was still exacting a horrible toll, Barry campaigned relentlessly. He showed up at barbecues, at senior-citizen centers, at Sunday church services, missing no opportunity to talk about his personal transformation. One of his campaign strategists was Rhozier “Roach” Brown, a charismatic former con who courted and organized the city’s ex-offender vote.
In 1965, when he was in his twenties, Brown was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He and three others had beaten and fatally shot another man during a robbery. Brown admitted he had been part of the attack but maintained that he didn’t shoot the victim.
Brown was sent to the Lorton Correctional Complex, where he joined an inmate advisory council. Prison guards who weren’t happy about his activism inflicted a beating so severe that for a while he lost feeling on his left side. Instead of being taken to a hospital, Brown was thrown into solitary for eight months. Years later, a civil jury would award him $300,000 in damages over his mistreatment.
At Lorton, Brown also became one of the leading members of the Inner Voices, a troupe of prisoners that was allowed to leave the facility to perform plays throughout the Washington area. Brown wrote plays about the difficulties and humorous absurdities of life as a prisoner. Because of his dramatic work, around Christmas 1975, Brown caught a big break: President Gerald Ford commuted his sentence from life to thirty years in prison. The sentence reduction made Brown immediately eligible for parole. He was released.
Brown worked a series of jobs, including production at a local TV news station. But everything fell apart for him again in 1987. He started smoking crack and was caught selling cocaine to an undercover law enforcement agent. About the same time, Brown stole $45,000 from the Hillcrest Children’s Center, a charity that serves emotionally disturbed kids from poor homes. From a girlfriend who worked there, he learned how the charity invested its funds, convinced a bank official he was the organization’s executive director, and had the money put into his own account. In federal court, Brown pleaded guilty to drug and embezzlement charges and was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was also ordered to pay $45,000 in restitution to Hillcrest.
Again, Brown caught a big break: In 1993, he was transferred from federal prison to the D.C. Department of Corrections to finish serving the thirty-year sentence for his murder conviction, which would have been an additional sixteen years behind bars. The D.C. parole board released Brown after he’d been in District custody only five months, most of which he spent in a halfway house. A year after his release, he was working hard on Barry’s campaign. Just like the candidate, Brown often talked about redemption and second chances.
“A lot of people make mistakes,” he said in an interview after the election. “Why do we keep on punishing them for the same act?”
In D.C., winning the Democratic primary for mayor was tantamount to winning the election. Barry was running against Kelly and six others. A few weeks before the early-September primary, I was talking to Lou on the phone about some homicide investigations when we turned to the subject of the mayoral race.
In the eighties, the Washington City Paper had dubbed Barry “Mayor for Life.” But I didn’t think he could overcome his conviction for crack possession and all the tawdry details about his life that had spilled out during his trial—not in a citywide election. The campaign was racially polarizing. From news reports, it was clear that Barry had virtually no support west of 16th Street Northwest, which divides the eastern and western halves of the District. The western half of the city was predominantly white. I expressed my doubts to Lou.
“He’s going to win,” Lou replied confidently. “He’s a master politician, maybe the best I’ve ever seen. He’s great at working crowds. He seems to know everyone’s name. I’m telling you, he will be your next mayor.”
“No way,” I said. “Sure, he can win in Ward 8 forever, but he can’t win another mayoral election. He won’t get a vote west of 16th Street.”
“He’s going to win.”
“I’ll bet you dinner that he doesn’t.”
Lou was right. Barry easily won the primary, with 47 percent of the vote. D.C. Council member John Ray, endorsed by the Post, received 37 percent. Kelly lagged far behind with 13 percent.
Following Barry’s primary victory, the Post published a poll showing that 81 percent of the city’s black voters planned to vote for the former mayor in the November general election, while 74 percent of whites planned to support Carol Schwartz, the white Republican candidate, who was a member of the D.C. Council. With African Americans making up about 65 percent of the city’s population, Barry was all but back in the mayor’s office.
A few days after the primary, Lou and I were sitting in a booth at one of Lou’s favorite Irish restaurants, near Union Station, when the waiter came over with the check. The waiter looked at Lou, then at me. I gestured for the bill.
“I told you,” Lou said, laughing. “He’s a great politician—‘Get over it.’ ”
In a press conference after he’d won the primary, Barry had been asked what message he had for white voters wary of his return to power. He responded that he was the best person to handle the city’s finances—and advised those who opposed him to “get over it.”
I shook my head as I took the cash out of my wallet. “Unbelievable. I wonder what he would have to do to lose an election in this city.”
Lou didn’t seem particularly worried about Barry’s imminent return to the mayor’s office. During his first three terms as mayor, Barry had developed a reputation for meddling with the police department, often when officers were investigating his behavior. But the homicide team was a rare bright spot for MPD. There seemed to be no reason for Barry to mess with it.
I figured that there would probably be no shortage of Barry rumors for reporters to chase, and that I’d be called on to pitch in.
That November, Barry easily defeated Schwartz, winning 56 percent of the vote. It was impossible to predict how his return to office would play out.
The only sure thing was that it wouldn’t be boring.
Chapter 10
“Captain Hennessy Must Die!”
Two days before Thanksgiving 1994, Lou was sitting in front of a typewriter on his kitchen table, typing a law school paper on contracts. He’d started taking night classes at the University of Maryland School of Law, in Baltimore.
Lou didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. He’d gotten into school through a program that provided opportunities to people with atypical educational backgrounds, including those who’d worked in law enforcement. He’d earned the required ninety college credits by attending community college at night. He was following through on his plan to launch a legal career after his time in the police department ended.
The young Lou Hennessy wouldn’t have aspired to a career practicing law. The people in the neighborhoods he grew up in became cops, firefighters, and bartenders. But spending time in courtrooms with high-powered attorneys from Ivy League law schools had given him confidence.
“I realized they were no smarter than me,” Lou said. “I knew I could do it. And the fact I was going nowhere in the police department motivated me.” He
’d started law school in August, just after his son Billy was born.
This was the first workday Lou had taken off since he assumed the homicide command, fourteen months earlier. He had the house to himself. Loraine was out running errands with Billy and their toddler daughter, Megan.
In the middle of the afternoon, the phone rang. “There’s been a shooting,” one of Lou’s detectives said.
“Okay,” Lou said. There’s always just been a shooting.
“No, you don’t understand,” the detective said. “The cold-case squad got hit. We don’t know how bad it is. We don’t know how many shooters there are, or if they’re still in there. ERT’s preparing to go in.” ERT was the Emergency Response Team—the SWAT unit.
Made up of a team of Metropolitan Police Department homicide detectives and FBI agents, cold case was down the hall from Lou’s office, which was connected to the main squad room.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Lou said.
Lou put on a suit and tie, clipped his nine-millimeter Glock onto his belt, and strapped on his ankle holster. He opened the ankle holster and slipped his .38-caliber revolver in place, then began the forty-five-minute drive to the city from his home in Charles County, Maryland. With the holiday two days away, traffic was light, and Lou made good time.
His pager chirped over and over as he drove toward headquarters. It seemed as though every detective in homicide and every member of the police brass was trying to reach him. Cradling his department-issued cell phone on his shoulder, Lou returned as many of the calls as he could. No one knew anything beyond the awful fact that gunshots had been fired.
As he approached the 3rd Street Tunnel, leading to police headquarters, Lou punched in the numbers to the cold-case office.
The phone rang and rang and rang.
About ninety minutes earlier, FBI agent John David Kuchta had wandered into the cold-case office for work. He and the other members of the squad typically started their shifts in the afternoon, unless they had to be in court.
The squad room, nearly empty so close to the holiday, was small, containing only about a dozen old metal desks. The phone on the one belonging to Detective Mike Will rang. Kuchta picked it up. A teenage boy asked for Will, then asked if there was a voucher authorizing payment for an informant on the detective’s desk. Kuchta found it. The teenager’s name matched the one on the voucher. The kid said he’d come around to pick it up.
Sergeant Henry “Hank” Daly then invited Kuchta into his “office.” Daly had set up some portable cork walls around his desk, near a six-foot-long sofa. Daly was a twenty-seven-year MPD veteran. Kuchta considered him a walking encyclopedia when it came to homicide investigations. When he wasn’t chasing leads or interviewing witnesses, Kuchta liked to talk to Daly to soak up investigative wisdom. Kuchta settled into the sofa, to the left of Daly.
As the two chatted, FBI agents Mike Miller and Martha Dixon Martinez arrived and started in on paperwork at their desks.
A few minutes later, the main door opened again. Three young men walked in, striding past Martinez. They were in their late teens to early twenties. It was bright and cold outside, and each of the three was wearing a heavy coat. One of them looked like he was on his way to a job interview. He wore gray slacks, a tan shirt, and a red tie under a brown sweater.
The three stopped five feet in front of Kuchta.
“Is Mike Will in?” one asked. The kid looking for the voucher, Kuchta thought.
The teenager standing directly in front of Kuchta, the one in the red tie, reached inside his three-quarter-length blue coat and pulled out a Cobray M-11 assault weapon. The gunman turned toward Daly and squeezed the trigger.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!
Daly’s chest exploded in blood. The shooter slowly turned to his right as he fired, making a full 360-degree sweep. He wasn’t pulling the trigger for each shot—the weapon had been modified so it was fully automatic. Cobrays were relatively cheap, the Saturday-night specials of assault pistols. This one was a machine gun.
The two others scrammed. One took a round in the buttocks and fell to the floor.
Kuchta got tunnel vision. All he saw was the assault weapon.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!
Smoke filled the room. Kuchta rose from the sofa as he recited a silent Hail Mary.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!
The kid was strafing every corner of the cold-case office. The booming sound of the fired rounds seemed to shake the room. Kuchta got to his feet.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou—
One round slammed into the right side of Kuchta’s chest. Another entered his left side and penetrated his heart. A round hit his right arm—his shooting arm. Bleeding, he grabbed the nine-millimeter Cobra from the holster on his hip and desperately started squeezing rounds at the gunman.
The shooter was now at one end of the sofa, Kuchta at the other. The agent and the attacker traded shots from a distance of seventy-two inches. Hopelessly outgunned, Kuchta backpedaled as he fired. He broke off the Hail Mary and started silently reciting Glory Be.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
A bullet grazed his neck. Kuchta kept firing, knowing his chest wound was serious, fearing his life might be about to end. I gotta get down, I gotta get down.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
Three rounds slammed into Kuchta’s lower right leg. He collapsed to the floor, his femur shattered.
Kuchta lay prone, lifted his wounded arm, and fired blindly toward the guy with the machine pistol.
Everything went blurry. Kuchta lost consciousness. He woke up. He saw Hank Daly slumped in his chair, his chest bloodied. Kuchta checked his gun and realized he had a few bullets left.
Gunfire boomed a few feet away. The shooter would probably come back to finish him off, Kuchta thought.
He tried to raise his weapon.
As Kuchta traded shots with the gunman, Neil Trugman, a 1D detective who at the time was detailed to homicide, was walking down the steps outside police headquarters heading toward his car. He’d worked his early shift and was going home.
He was thirty feet from his car when the screaming voice of homicide lieutenant Michelle Taylor blared from his handheld radio: “Emergency! Shots fired on the third floor!”
The third floor—the homicide office.
The detective pivoted, raced back into the building, and charged up a stairwell. He turned a corner and smelled gun smoke coming from the cold-case office down the hall. A group of detectives and uniforms was near the main cold-case entrance.
Trugman ran down the hall to the cold-case office. The detective pressed himself against a wall and eased his way in. Another step and he’d be exposed, without cover. Was the shooter waiting to ambush more cops? Were there multiple shooters? There was no way of knowing.
He backed out and saw two younger investigators, Chris Kauffman and Brian Callen, near a heavy wooden side door that led to Hank Daly’s office.
Trugman joined them. Gun smoke was filtering out of the room through a horizontal vent near the bottom of the door. Other detectives and officers gathered near the door. Angry and anxious talk filled the hallway.
Trugman crouched and put his ear near the vent. Another detective kept trying the doorknob. “Shut up!” someone ordered. The hallway went quiet.
Inside the office, the shooting had stopped. Kuchta heard voices from behind the door, on the other side of the sofa.
Cops!
“Officers down!” Kuchta cried. “Three black male unsubs”—FBI-speak for “unknown subjects.”
Kuchta’s life was draining away. He needed help—fast. He cried out, “I’m FBI agent John Kuchta.” His voice faded with each syllable.
Kuchta heard a series of clicks at the door.
“We can’t get in!” someone behind the door shouted
. The other entrance, the one Trugman had backed out of, was too dangerous. Anyone who entered through there would be exposed if any attackers were lying in wait. But Trugman and the other officers knew that a wounded FBI agent wouldn’t be crying out for help if a shooter was still in his immediate area.
Kuchta suddenly remembered: A few days earlier, a maintenance worker had changed the door’s cipher locks.
The agent thought of his thirteen-month-old daughter, Anastasia, and his young wife, Helena, whom everyone called “Leni.” They needed him. “I’m John Kuchta. I’m an FBI agent. I’m shot. Get me out of here,” Kuchta croaked.
On the other side of the door, Trugman heard Kuchta’s calls for help. The door was huge and solid and bolted from the inside. Kicking it in wasn’t an option—it wasn’t going down without a battering ram.
Trugman put his mouth close to the vent and yelled: “Reach up and slide the bolt!”
Kuchta heard Trugman’s voice. The voice told him to open the bolt lock. Cordite and the coppery odor of fresh blood filled his nostrils.
Kuchta eyed the door, ten or twelve feet away. He vowed to himself, I’m not dying in here.
On his belly, Kuchta reached out and crawled toward the door, leaving a trail of blood on the tile floor. He slid past the sofa, past Daly, slumped in his chair. Slowly, he moved toward the voice. His shattered leg pulsed with otherworldly pain.
Kuchta reached the far end of the sofa. He crawled to the door. He looked up at the bolt. In his condition, he might as well have been peering at a sheer thousand-foot cliff. Kuchta thought of Anastasia and Leni.
The FBI agent struggled to his feet. He reached for the bolt—and fell onto his backside. The voice on the other side of the door pleaded with him to open the lock.
Kuchta was getting light-headed. Blood was gushing from his leg, leaking from his chest. Again he looked up and stared at the bolt. One more lunge.
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