S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (14 page)

My face remained glued to the window until dawn. As the sun rose, I collapsed onto my back and stared at the ceiling.

I wanted to stop smoking forever. I needed another hit.

I awakened at dawn. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. How many runs had we made to 7th and S? At least ten, for sure. We started out getting two for $35, and before long we were up to three for $50.

My God, had I blown through the entire comp check? I looked inside my wallet: It contained a solitary $10 bill.

Ten bucks. Maybe that was enough for a dime. I pulled myself up and headed out the door.

A lone slinger prowled the sidewalk in front of the bakery at 7th and S. Early-morning traffic was light. The neighborhood wasn’t quite awake.

I pulled over to the curb in front of John’s Place. The dealer’s eyes lit up when he saw my car. He made a beeline for me. I motioned toward the passenger seat while I leaned across the console and unlocked the door. The slinger settled in. I drove into the alley parallel to New Community Church and cut the ignition. I didn’t want to make the buy on the street in daylight.

“What you need, amigo?”

I checked the side- and rearview mirrors. “Can I get a dime?”

The dealer snickered and shook his head in disdain. “Nah, can’t do that. Can’t break up a twenty.”

Sunlight gleamed off my watch. It was the same timepiece I’d defended from the
vato
at the Experience Motel. The watch my uncle had given me.

I held up my wrist. “Ten bucks and the watch?”

The dope boy studied the timepiece. I checked the rearview. The slinger nodded yes. I slipped off the watch and handed it over, along with my last $10.

He handed me a $20 rock and hopped out of the car. I drove home and quickly killed the rock.

I remained at the window, looking for cops or feds who never came, until I passed out from exhaustion.

In early November 1991, Milton Coleman, the Metro section boss who’d hired me, and Phil Dixon, the assistant city editor who’d sent me to L.A. for the Rasheeda Moore profile, intercepted me as I walked to my desk to start my shift. The looks on their faces told me I wasn’t about to get a raise. Milton uttered the four words no one ever wants to hear from a boss or a lover: “We need to talk.”

We walked down the stairs to the second-floor cafeteria in silence. My double life was falling apart. I was not only using more frequently, but also more unpredictably. More and more, I was using before my shift started. That fall, I’d called in sick at least a half-dozen times to cover up my bingeing.

We reached the second floor. We had the dining area to ourselves. Milton led us to a corner table. Milton and Phil sat across from me.

“We’re worried about you, man,” Milton said. “You’ve called in sick a lot lately, and some of your co-workers think you’ve shown up for work drunk more than once. If there’s something going on, we’d like to help.”

“You’ve been borrowing money from co-workers, including some people you barely know,” Phil added.
So much for borrowing under the radar.
Ouch.
My gaze turned from Milton to Phil. Quickly, Phil gestured with his hand, as if acknowledging that my borrowing, by itself, didn’t prove anything, and added, “You
always
pay it back. But if you’re in trouble, we want to help you.”

Whew.
They knew, but they didn’t
know
.

Milton and Phil didn’t know the awful details. They didn’t know I picked up strawberries on the regular. They didn’t know I was a crack fiend. Hell, they were throwing me a lifeline.

I looked down at the table for a moment, processing, strategizing. Denying everything would be stupid. Admitting everything? Well, I figured I’d be unemployed if I did that. I decided on something in between.

My eyes came up to meet Milton’s. As I spoke, I shifted eye contact from him to Phil and back: “I have been drinking too much, I realize that. And now and then I’ve done some powder cocaine. I’ve had a rough time worrying about my father’s health. I’m a little over my head with credit card debt, which is why I’ve been borrowing money. But I’m starting to get that under control.”

I felt a limited sense of relief. I’d admitted my problem. Well, half-admitted.

Milton nodded. His expression softened, and his body seemed to relax as he leaned back in his chair. Phil leaned forward, his eyes locked on mine.

Reading my mind, Phil said, “Your job’s not in jeopardy.”

“As far as the company is concerned, this is a health issue, and will be treated as such,” Milton said. “For starters, we want you to see someone with our employee-assistance program. We have a counselor who has an office here, in the building. Whatever you say to her is confidential. This meeting is confidential. This is nobody else’s business. You’re not the first
Post
staffer who’s dealt with this kind of problem.”

Milton and Phil looked at me. I looked at them.

“Do you have any questions?” Milton asked.

“No.”

We walked back up to the fifth-floor newsroom in silence.

Milton headed to his office. Phil walked to his desk.

I settled in at my desk and turned on the police scanner, wondering how closely I was being watched.

Chapter 6

Unraveling

Lou had set a trap, and now the two gun-toting bandits were walking right into it.

They strolled toward the entrance to the Safeway grocery store in Capitol Hill just before closing time. A handful of plainclothes cops were inside the store. Another group watched from an unmarked van in the parking lot. Lou was in an unmarked sedan about a block away, in contact with the officers in the parking lot by radio.

The robbers had
always
gone straight to a checkout clerk. They’d show their guns, force the clerk to empty the register, and quietly slip away. Lou was ready for that. His people had placed devices on the floor at the checkout stations. If the bandits appeared, a clerk could tap the device with his or her foot. Two officers stationed inside the manager’s office would see an alert. They’d radio the cops in the parking lot, who’d confront the bandits in the small vestibule that separated the store from the street.

It was the night of October 23, 1992. Police had briefed the clerks. Lou’s people were ready. The two men walked into the vestibule, then into the main store. They were fifteen feet from the nearest checkout station. But they didn’t head for it. Instead they brandished their handguns, grabbed an assistant manager, and forced him toward the manager’s office.

The robbers were going for a bigger score. They wanted the contents of the safe inside the office. They had no idea there were two cops waiting for them behind the locked door.

At gunpoint, the manager fumbled for his keys. He found the one for the office, slipped it into the doorknob, and started to turn it.

The Safeway robbers were on a spree. Over thirty-one days, they’d taken down nineteen stores, in every quadrant of the city. But they were wearing out the one on 14th Street Southeast in Capitol Hill. Between late September and mid-October, the pair had hit the store four times.

The jobs weren’t sophisticated, well-planned heists. Lou, by then the captain in charge of detectives in the Metropolitan Police Department’s First District, where the store was located, suspected the bandits were drug addicts. The fact that they were hitting stores so often meant they needed a steady flow of cash. The fact that they hit them so brazenly meant they needed it desperately.

In those days, many grocery-store customers still paid in cash. If the bandits hit at the right time, a Safeway register could give up tens of thousands of dollars. And a grocery store was a much lower-risk target than a bank. The 14th Street Safeway was particularly inviting: Located in a residential area dominated by row houses, it was open at night, and nearby Pennsylvania Avenue led to several quick escape routes over the D.C. boundary into Maryland or Virginia.

“It was,” Lou said, “a great place to commit a robbery.”

After the store had been hit for the fourth time, Lou developed his warning-device plan. He also had detectives and officers ask their informants in 1D if they knew who might be knocking off the grocery stores. A street source mentioned a man who’d been seen running from one of the robberies. His name caught Lou’s attention: Theodore “Teddy” Fulwood.

Teddy lived and hung out near the Safeway, and he was a known cocaine user. He’d been released from Lorton Correctional Complex in 1990 after serving a year for trying to sell the drug. But he wasn’t just any ex-convict.

He was the brother of MPD chief Isaac Fulwood Jr.

After Teddy was released from prison, he lived in an Oxford House in Northwest D.C. Oxford Houses are similar to group homes, except everyone living in them is in recovery. Housemates are expected to help one another stay sober and hold one another accountable.

For a while, Teddy seemed to be doing well. He joined a drug-treatment program at St. Elizabeths Hospital, the city’s psychiatric medical center, and worked here and there as a painting contractor. In 1991, the chief accompanied Teddy to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the basement chapel of St. Elizabeths, where his brother was among a group of alcoholics and addicts celebrating their one-year anniversaries of being alcohol- and drug-free. Chief Fulwood spoke of the power of God to heal and presented Teddy with a bronze one-year AA chip. The two brothers teared up as they embraced.

Lou decided he’d better get word to the chief about Teddy’s possible involvement in the robbery spree. He discreetly told a supervisor, Assistant Chief Addison Davis, that Theodore Fulwood was a possible suspect in the Safeway holdups. Lou didn’t want his boss to be caught by surprise if his brother walked into a police trap.

The assistant manager opened the door. The two cops inside the office saw the bandits with their guns out and pulled their service weapons.

Gunfire blazed in both directions.

“It was like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” one witness told the
Post
.

The cops prevailed, killing one of the robbers and capturing his accomplice. Officer Jonathan Fuller took a round in the leg, and the assistant manager caught one in the buttocks.

Chief Fulwood arrived quickly—faster than Lou had ever seen him get to any crime scene.

Neither of the bandits was Teddy. Lou’s detectives later determined that he hadn’t been involved in any of the previous grocery-store robberies, either. He was cleared.

But less than a month later, Teddy ended up in much worse trouble than being a possible armed robbery suspect.

At about 3:00
a.m.
on November 19, a police officer on patrol near the 14th Street Safeway heard a series of gunshots. He raced toward the gunfire in his patrol car.

The officer found the body of a man sprawled on the sidewalk on 16th Street Southeast, two blocks from the grocery store and a short walk from Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. The victim was Teddy. He’d been shot multiple times in the head and torso. He was forty-three, and the 401st homicide victim in the District that year.

Detectives would determine that Teddy had been killed over a drug deal that had gone bad.

In an interview about a year before Teddy was gunned down, Chief Fulwood spoke of how much he’d encouraged his brother to stay clean. Still, the chief said, he knew that drugs were “like a huge monster that grabs a person and won’t let go.”

Like the vast majority of addicts, Teddy had been unable to break free.

The shootout at the Safeway capped a day during which MPD officers shot and wounded two other suspects in separate incidents and at least six other people in the District were shot, two fatally. At the time, about seven years into the crack epidemic, a night like that was “routine,” Lou said.

Working as a police officer in the eastern half of the city was “like being in a war zone,” Lou recalled. “And it was so concentrated in certain areas. West of 16th Street Northwest, you didn’t have anything going on. East of 16th Street, there were a lot of dangerous areas. In those neighborhoods, it seemed that everyone had a gun.”

Within the span of a few years, the drug gangsters had acquired so much firepower—semiautomatic handguns, AK-47s, machine guns—that by the early nineties Lou was concerned that they would graduate to even more effective ways of killing.

“I worried that they’d start to use explosives,” he said. “Then you’d have a lot of collateral damage. A lot of people not involved in drugs or gangs could have been killed.”

There seemed to be no end to the bloodshed. And the number of killings kept rising: In 1989, 1990, and 1991, the city clocked 434, 472, and 479 murders, respectively. Almost all of the deaths were east of 16th Street Northwest. The police department seemed powerless to do anything about the violence. About half of the city seemed to be flaring out of control.

In 1D, Lou handled a wide array of cases that weren’t homicides: nonfatal assaults, break-ins, armed robberies like the Safeway holdups. A decade before, when he was a detective, he had gone after killers. But the MPD required officers to change assignments whenever they were promoted. After his stint as a homicide detective in the early eighties, Lou made sergeant and went to internal affairs. When he made lieutenant, he was assigned to patrol in 3D. In 1988, when he made captain, he was sent to 1D, where he worked as a patrol commander for a year or two before being assigned to lead the district’s team of detectives.