S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (10 page)

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.

As a kid, under a merciless Southern California sun, I would shoot jumpers alone on the asphalt court at my middle school. I loved the distinctive, gritty music of an accurate shot falling through a metal-chain schoolyard net. Other kids who played on the blacktop during recess were taller, quicker, stronger. But I had a limitless supply of
ganas—
desire.

When I was in the first grade, my family moved to South El Monte, a little San Gabriel Valley city about ten miles east of downtown. When I was twelve, I convinced Pop to mount a basket and backboard over the garage door. I quickly made him regret it.

The first Saturday the hoop was up, I was out at first light, before 7:00
a.m.
, dribbling and shooting. The sound of the ball smacking against the cement driveway echoed throughout our quiet neighborhood. I was up and at it again on Sunday. I’d taken only a few shots when Pop leaned out the front door.

“Your mom is trying to sleep,” he said, an edge in his voice. “And so are the neighbors.” He gave me a
look
.

I grabbed the ball and didn’t say a word.

I adapted. Ball under my arm, I walked a few blocks to my middle school. I played like a junkie on a ferocious binge. For nearly four hours at a time, on a court with no shade, I’d dribble and shoot, dribble and shoot, pausing once or twice to hit the water fountain.

One morning, I was following through on a jump shot when I felt a wet sensation on my shooting hand. The inside of my right middle finger, where the joint bends, was bleeding. The constant repetition of rolling the pebbled ball off my fingertips had created a nasty little red canal. I started taping my finger with Band-Aids before heading to the court. I didn’t get any quicker or stronger, but I made myself a deadeye shooter.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was developing the kind of relentlessness I would need to make it in journalism. I joined the high school newspaper as a freshman because it looked like fun. It was.

When I was a senior, a vice principal shut down a photographer for the school paper who was trying to take shots of a campus demonstration. The vice principal agreed to an interview in his office to talk about the skirmish. I was a skinny teenager who was painfully shy around girls. Sitting across from the administrator, pen and notebook in hand, I asked a series of questions about the incident with the photographer. To my amazement, the vice principal hemmed and hawed. This adult authority figure was
nervous
.

It was thrilling.

I was hooked.

From that point on, every move I made was designed to give me the best chance possible to make it with a big-time newspaper. Nothing came easy to me, yet I always seemed to find a way. I applied to USC because it had a good journalism program. My grades weren’t stellar, but I aced the essay portion of the application and got in. Near the end of the last semester of my senior year of college, I landed an unpaid internship at the
Herald Examiner
.
I worked my tail off and was offered a permanent position a couple of weeks before I graduated.