Dopesick

by Beth Macy

  Within a week, a new setup was arranged to focus on Gray, a Florida native with a history of evading police. Metcalf arranged to meet Gray and trade him a gun for heroin. The deal would take place in a local storage facility, a public space with long rows of buildings and surrounding fences—easy to surround at a moment’s notice by throngs of federal and local police.

  “My story was, I was recently out of jail and cleaning out my storage bin,” Metcalf recalled. “I had some guns there, and I was trying to get back on my feet by trading guns for dope.”

  A stocky guy with graying temples and piercing eyes, Metcalf grew out his trim beard for the occasion and wore a wire to capture the quick exchange. As soon as it was finished and Metcalf walked away, federal agents swarmed in to place Gray under arrest.

  From the moment he was in handcuffs, he cooperated with authorities.

  “I can give you the name of the guy who controls everything,” Gray offered, according to Metcalf and other officers working the case.

  It was a huge moment, albeit a messy one, relying as it usually did on joining forces with one criminal to nab another. “In the end, they all sing” is how Metcalf told the story. But desperate people often lied to reduce their prison time, and there were a lot of people crooning some discordant, self-interested tunes.

  He went by the nickname D.C., Gray told Metcalf, but his real name was Ronnie Jones.

  While Jones controlled the heroin supply in the northern Shenandoah Valley, Metcalf would later learn, Kareem Shaw—aka New York—controlled the supply east toward the northern Virginia bedroom communities closer to Washington. Their dope was Mexican, trafficked by a Dominican dealer who ran a lab somewhere in Harlem.

  Agent Metcalf and Sergeant Lutz now knew not only D.C.’s name but also where he lived—in a low-income apartment on the outskirts of Woodstock. His drug ring trafficked in seven counties, and federal authorities were on their way to proving he was the largest heroin trafficker along Virginia’s I-81 corridor and possibly in the state. In the small towns that dotted the region, Jones’s business model was wholly new. “When you get someone like Ronnie coming in here with real weight, that’s far beyond a bunch of users piling into a car to go to Baltimore for the day,” Metcalf said.

  But a black man in an almost entirely white town driving a Mercedes SUV, even if it wasn’t flashy? That was harder to camouflage than the smell of the chicken plant.

  “When big dealers come into small towns, they don’t last long, because they get talked about a lot,” said Don Wolthuis, the assistant U.S. attorney who directed the prosecution of the case. Not much time elapses before their customers become involved with police, who catch the addicted users stealing stuff—or robbing banks—to afford their next buy. “They get dimed out quick,” he said.

  “The drug dealer’s dilemma is always: How do I market myself and remain invisible simultaneously?”

  Metcalf alerted Lutz to Jones’s identity, only to learn that Lutz had just identified him through another George’s Chicken diversion worker, Logan “Low” Rose, who sold Jones’s heroin from a Honda Civic with gold rims that really did stand out. He had been Jones’s “stick man,” or driver, on occasions when he couldn’t find a mule and had to personally replenish his Harlem supply. Jones wasn’t allowed to leave the state without his probation officer’s permission.

  Before Lutz could move in for the arrest, Rose fled to his native Puerto Rico, where federal marshals caught up with him a few days later. They found him sitting on a wall in front of his mother’s tiny shack, eating a bowl of cereal.

  When the marshals phoned with news of Rose’s arrest, Lutz was stunned. “We’re like, ‘Puerto Rico? You’re kidding me. But that’s so far away!’”

  It was so far away, in fact, that Rose had forgotten it was a territory of the United States, complete with its own federal law enforcement offices.

  While Brent Lutz was memorizing Jones’s driver’s-license photo and Bill Metcalf was learning about his gun—a Taurus .357 revolver, nicknamed the Decapitator—Ronnie “D.C.” Jones confided in his neighbor, Marie, one of his user-dealers and one of the many women with whom he kept company. When Jones or his runners went to New York to resupply, Marie later told investigators, “two hundred people I know of would get sick [go into withdrawals]. They could not wait for Jones to get back, and when he got back, everybody was better.”

  “You can’t blame Ronnie for everything,” Marie told me. “We’re the ones who stuck the needle in our arms. But we didn’t have heroin available to buy here in town till Ronnie came. What he did ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she said, ticking off a long list of names.

  By importing heroin to a small town in bulk, Jones was able to make twice what the dealers in Baltimore and other cities were making. He made so much that he stockpiled new clothes in his new apartment, discarding them after a single wearing. He had a security system installed so that when he opened his front door, a woman’s chipper recorded voice intoned, “Front door. Open.” He kept a personal trainer on call for workouts. He hired a designer to create a logo for an all-natural skin-care line he hoped to sell. He wore gold chains, outfitted his girlfriends in new clothes—one kept her own stacks of new Lucky jeans in his apartment—and told people he followed the motto of rapper Biggie Smalls: “Never get high on your own supply.”

  As the task force charted out Jones’s ring, pinning photographs on police department walls, with street names to keep everybody straight, Metcalf turned to Lutz. The goal before had always been to stop the small-town dealers. This case was larger and more complex than any conspiracy they’d worked before. Maybe it was possible this time, even, to bring down the source.

  “Man, this reminds me of The Wire,” Metcalf said.

  Lutz hadn’t heard of the show. But watching it later with his fiancée, he agreed. Thinking about the exponential scope of Jones’s impact—a trail of addiction that would not be contained, in all likelihood, for many years—both men seethed. “We were starting to have eighteen-year-olds overdose,” Lutz remembered. “We were disgusted with what he was doing to our town.” Before 2013 was over, overdose deaths in the region would surge to twenty-one, up from a single death in 2012.

  Heroin was so wildly lucrative that even mid-level dealers in the ring could make $15,000 in a single weekend. Metcalf and Lutz interviewed an addicted user-dealer from Stafford County, thirty-one-year-old Kimberle Hodsden, who was dating Kareem Shaw and going on regular trips with him to Harlem to test the potency of the heroin before he bought it. On one trip, Shaw got mad at Hodsden when she declined his initial offer to buy her a $400 pair of pants from a swanky Manhattan store. It was heady stuff for a local girl, a high school dropout who’d been shuffled among her mother, grandmother, and a local shelter.

  Hodsden’s name and picture were pinned halfway down the growing chart, the words “Crash Test Dummy”—Shaw’s pet name for her—inked beneath her mug shot. And Hodsden had a tiny clue about the New York supplier to share: He went by the nickname Mack.

  Jones controlled the left, or western, side of the chart while Shaw’s name went on the eastern side of the ring, on the right. Low-level informants dealing only to support their habit were at the bottom of the pyramid, including some whose names would eventually get crossed out due to overdose death.

  The chart eventually earned an unusual nickname, thanks to an interview between Metcalf and one of Shaw’s lieutenants, Keith Marshall, in jail for possession of illicit pills. Addicted to opioids since the age of sixteen, Marshall was a functioning heroin addict from Baltimore who’d managed to keep a job for fifteen years—as a worker for Payne’s Tree Service in Stafford—before getting ensnared in the Jones/Shaw ring. His lawyer told me he’d overdosed five times, and had been in and out of jail for petty theft and possession charges most of his adult life.

  In a letter from a North Carolina prison, Marshall himself wrote: “I’ve done tree work, tended bar, did graphic design for a studio up in Manhattan,
among other jobs. I’ve had 20 grand stashed in my house for the re-up, and I’ve lived in a tent in the woods because I was so far gone on dope.”

  Scheduled to be jailed on possession charges in mid-2013 (stemming from an earlier state charge), Marshall said he returned to dealing because he wanted to make extra money in preparation for going to jail. He had debts to pay off, and he wanted to have money on his jail account for toiletries and food. “He started dealing for Kareem Shaw to take care of business, before he went away for a year” for the possession conviction, his lawyer, Dana Cormier, said. “Jones and Shaw were living the life, but almost everyone underneath them, Keith Marshall included, were junkies distributing just to supply their own habit.”

  Metcalf waited until Marshall went to jail for the 2013 state charges to interview him, carefully, about his role in Shaw’s network. “You don’t want to reveal too much of your case,” Metcalf explained. “You just wanna poke around and see if they’ll talk.”

  But Marshall refused, steadfastly and defiantly.

  “Guys, I could’ve given you the biggest dealer supplying Stafford County, but I’m not giving you shit,” Marshall told him.

  Already surveilling Marshall’s dealer, Kareem Shaw, now operating out of cheap motels along Route 11, Metcalf was fishing, trying to see if Marshall knew anything that would help him peel another layer from the onion, maybe a detail about the New York source. He challenged Marshall to tell him everything he knew, but Marshall refused.

  “What if we have proof you’re already involved [in the federal case], and we come back here with a warrant?” Metcalf challenged.

  Marshall was sure Metcalf was bluffing, convinced he would have already indicted him if he had the evidence, Marshall later told me from prison. “Mr. Metcalf unfortunately is a man of his word,” he said, referring to the additional federal distribution charges Metcalf returned with six months later, which resulted in another sentence for five years.

  But at the time, Marshall leveled a cold stare at his interviewer and ended the conversation with a clipped “Fuck. You. Bring it.”

  Back at the prosecutor’s office, Wolthuis now had a name for the worst drug ring in the region’s history. Above his chart, topped with the names of Ronnie Jones and Kareem Shaw, he took out a Sharpie and wrote in black capital letters: FUBI.

  “It just resonated,” he said.

  Jesse Bolstridge’s grave, Strasburg, Virginia

  Chapter Eight

  “Shit Don’t Stop”

  The Ronnie Jones arrest, when it finally came in June 2013, was almost anticlimactic. Poetic, just about, the way it featured the usual cascade of drug-bust interactions: an informant tip, followed by a recorded buy that led to one of Jones’s main subdealers, a former Marine who’d been kicked out of the Corps for alcohol-related charges before spiraling into heroin addiction. In the end, all Bill Metcalf had to do was track the movements of Joshua Pettyjohn, the ex-Marine, as he bought 20 grams of heroin from Jones and then drove away. Pettyjohn would warble a detailed tune, confessing immediately after police arrested him in possession of heroin.

  Jones had known he was “hot,” a police target. A month earlier, Brent Lutz and other task force officers swooped in on his Woodstock apartment complex on Lakeview Drive, only to find that he’d decamped to one of the two other apartments he was also keeping, one with a girlfriend in Dumfries and the other in Front Royal, closer to Kareem Shaw. He drove a decidedly less flashy Chevy Impala when he drove to Woodstock, reserving the Mercedes for nondope activities. Police called the Front Royal apartment they’d been surveilling—a vinyl-sided three-floor unit just off Main Street—the man cave. They suspected it was where the Pringles pucks were now being “re-rocked,” or broken down.

  To lower his profile even more, Jones changed cellphone numbers and started parking several blocks away from his apartments. He also transitioned his operation from a “brew-thru,” as Don Wolthuis called it—selling at his apartment, to just about any buyer who showed up—to dealing only with a handful of subdealers. He was trying to distance himself from his buyers and therefore, he hoped, from arrest.

  At the Lakeview raid, Lutz and his colleagues arrested Marie instead, along with four others near the bottom of the FUBI chart. Marie spent seven months in the county jail on charges of heroin possession, a probation violation from an earlier, Suboxone-distribution charge, and child endangerment. “My daughter, she’s seven now, and she still has bad dreams about the night the cops kicked in our door,” she told me in 2016.

  “We spooked him,” Lutz recalled of Jones.

  Jones had been so positive that Marie would sing that his expression barely changed six weeks later, when more than two dozen state, federal, and local officers descended to place him under arrest. Lutz would never forget the moment he first eyed, through binoculars from the Chinese restaurant next door, the guy whose picture he’d fixated on for months. “He had the look like he wasn’t surprised,” Lutz said, an assessment Marie echoed when she remembered Jones telling her months before: “If I have a good run, it’ll last three months. If I have a great run, I can make it six.”

  Jones had been bringing bulk heroin to Woodstock for exactly six months. During that time, not only had overdose deaths surged but so had nonfatal overdoses, the number of children entering foster care due to parental opioid abuse, and the cases of children born with neonatal abstinence syndrome—all at roughly five times the previous year’s rate.

  Once they had Jones in handcuffs, Metcalf wanted to pounce; he gathered as much evidence as possible from Jones’s apartments before word of his arrest reached the other dealers in the ring. The day was filled with hurry up and wait—too much waiting and not enough hurrying, in Metcalf’s view—as search warrant requests slogged their way out to local judges in several localities for everything from Jones’s residences to his vehicles to the homes of other members in the ring. Jones stonewalled throughout, initially telling Metcalf he didn’t have an address and then giving him the wrong apartment number when he did. (Judges require police to offer an exact address before issuing a warrant.)

  Lutz arrested Pete Butler and Charles Smith in their respective homes near George’s Chicken while Kevin Coffman and Metcalf surveyed Jones’s apartments, where they confiscated copious amounts of heroin, crack, firearms, and cash. They finally located his Dumfries apartment after finding an estimate for a repair bill in his name at the apartment in Front Royal.

  Later that day, when Metcalf finally got his first close-up look at Ronnie Jones in a county jail interviewing room in Front Royal, he found him to be “very smug, very arrogant.”

  The feeling was mutual. “He was very aggressive; he harassed people,” Jones said of Metcalf. Jones hated him for delivering a subpoena to the mother of his oldest child—at work, embarrassing and intimidating her, he said—and for interviewing Jones’s mom.

  His younger brother, Thomas Jones, told me the family had no idea Ronnie was a big-time heroin dealer until they heard about it on the news. Their mother was deeply embarrassed by it and did not wish to be interviewed, he said. She had seen him only a week before his arrest. Ronnie stopped by her house in the northern Virginia suburbs to chat after delivering cupcakes to his daughter’s school.

  Ronnie told his family he’d been running his own computer repair shop, fixing broken laptops, iPads, and cellphones. He even showed them a logo he’d had prepared for the business, called Nu2U.

  Metcalf and Jones hated each other instantly. But they had more in common than either of them knew.

  Metcalf, forty-four in mid-2013, had worked gang cases in L.A. and drugs in Washington. “From my perspective, in the cities, you take off one drug dealer, and they’re not even missed, there’s so many,” he said.

  “But this, this was truly the front lines. You shut down somebody like Ronnie Jones, somebody who’s making the whole town dopesick, and you’re really making an impact.” If he could get Jones or the other FUBI consorts to give up their Harlem
source, the effects would be more widespread.

  The quest had become deeply personal. The worst event in Bill Metcalf’s life had taken place almost four decades earlier on a hot summer night when he was seven years old. He was seated at the dinner table with his parents and older sister when he noticed a police officer running outside the window with his gun drawn.

  “Go to your room,” Bill’s mother told the kids. What Bill didn’t know then was that his father was a heroin-addicted drug trafficker, and that his mother felt she had no option other than cooperating with police to have him arrested.

  Metcalf remembered running down the stairs the night of the arrest, in time to see officers slam his father against a wall and handcuff him. His father looked at him, his head still pressed against the wall, and told him: “You’re the man of the family now. Take care of your mother and your sister.” Metcalf said he was more confused than intimidated by the order. He wondered: “How am I going to do this when everyone’s so much taller than me?” His mom hustled him and his sister into her car and fled to her mother’s house in Chapmanville, West Virginia, with just the clothes on their backs.

  His parents had met in the 1970s, after his mother migrated from West Virginia to Baltimore for factory work; the family moved to Cleveland, chasing better factory jobs, a few years later. His mom did piecework in a Cleveland textile factory while his dad worked sporadically, constantly feeling the tug of his Baltimore hometown.

  His father and uncles were in and out of jail, and only the oldest brother of the five, his uncle Bill (for whom Metcalf is named), was not a heroin user. “There were always guys just out of prison showing up at our house. And when my dad’s brothers moved to Cleveland, it got progressively out of control,” he said. His father sometimes beat his mother, who felt so trapped that she ultimately informed on him to the police. It was her kids’ one shot, Georgia Metcalf believed, for a peaceful life.