S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (27 page)

For a couple of seconds, I thought about trying to figure out a way to use the information anyway. I had several detective sources—maybe one of them would confirm the incredible story that the headquarters shooter had been gunning for the commander of the homicide squad.

Lou might be momentarily upset if he saw the story in the paper the next day, but I could explain it by blaming my editors; that was a time-honored and usually reliable journalistic tactic. I could say that my bosses had heard about Lawson and ordered me to call every source I knew until I confirmed the story. Lou knew that I had bosses to answer to, and that I had other sources in the police department; he would no doubt accept such an explanation.

But Lou trusted me—which was precisely why I couldn’t try to slide the story into print through a side door.

Lou was one of the fairest, most honorable men I’d ever known, and maybe the smartest. I considered myself a tenacious and resourceful reporter who always found a way, but I couldn’t try to pull a fast one on him. And I didn’t want to do anything to endanger the investigation. Lou had always been straight with me. He deserved the same in return.

“All right,” I said. “I won’t use it until you give me the green light.”

I finished writing the story. I sat on the Lawson material. It would likely come out the following day, and one of the well-compensated TV people would be the first to report it. Which is exactly what happened.

I’d thought that losing the scoop would bother me, but it didn’t.

Some things are more important than a story.

Metal detectors were installed at police headquarters the day after the attack. The building was also home to other city offices, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Board of Parole. For years, even people with criminal records had been free to go in and out without having to clear significant security. Those days were over.

Working together, Lou’s detectives and FBI agents quickly determined that Lawson had been acting alone. By interviewing Lawson’s friends and associates, the investigators put together a narrative: After Lawson had returned to his neighborhood following Lou’s interrogation, some of his thug friends had taunted him, suggesting he’d been let go because the police had broken him. They’d teased him for being a “weak link.”

Lawson had previously been imprisoned for a weapons violation. Investigators discovered strong evidence that he’d been raped while incarcerated. The sexual assault and the taunting had probably motivated Lawson’s attack, investigators believed. FBI agents and police also discovered that the leader of Lawson’s gang, Kobi Mowatt, had apparently planned to have Lawson killed. Lawson had learned about Mowatt’s plan and preempted it by going on a suicide mission. It was a warped, violent way to show his fellow gangsters he wasn’t weak. And by killing himself, Lawson had made sure he wouldn’t face another sexual assault in prison.

It was happenstance that Lawson had ended up in the cold-case office instead of the much larger main homicide squad room, where he might have killed more people. When Lawson walked into police headquarters, he had run into two teenagers he didn’t know. He had asked where the homicide office was located, and one or both of the teenagers had said they were headed that way. Lawson had simply tagged along as they walked him to the cold-case office.

Lawson might have wanted to prove something to his fellow gangsters, but his actions ended up getting many of them locked up. In the wake of the shooting, a team of MPD detectives and FBI agents took down Lawson’s former crew. The task force arrested eight leaders of the gang, who were charged in federal court with offenses including murder, racketeering, kidnapping, and drug trafficking.

Understandably, the members of the task force took Lawson’s attack personally, and they vowed to search every corner of the earth for the killer’s compatriots. Almost all of Lawson’s fellow thugs were tracked down in the neighborhood where they sold drugs and committed other crimes—around 1st and Kennedy Streets Northwest. FBI agents and police clamped down on the neighborhood, pulling over everyone who bought drugs from the crew and trying to flip them. Facing jail time, many of the drug buyers agreed to testify for the government. By early 1996 the task force had locked up about a dozen of the gang’s most active members.

Collectively, the suspects were charged with seventeen homicides, including the triple murder that had led to the headquarters attack. Almost all of them eventually pleaded guilty.

Most D.C. gangsters who go on the lam get about as far as an aunt’s house in another quadrant of the city. But the leader of Lawson’s crew showed some enterprise in his efforts to evade justice. Kobi Mowatt was nowhere to be found in his neighborhood, in D.C., or anywhere else in the country.

FBI agent Mark Giuliano and D.C. homicide detective Anthony Brigidini teamed up to track down Mowatt. They were determined to get him.

“He’s the king,” Giuliano recalled. “And he needs to go down.”

Giuliano and Brigidini interviewed everyone Mowatt knew—gang associates, girlfriends, relatives. The case was featured on
America’s Most Wanted
. After about a year of painstaking investigation, Giuliano and Brigidini executed a search warrant at the home of Mowatt’s mother, in Prince George’s County, Maryland. They searched almost every inch of the house and discovered nothing suggesting where Mowatt might be hiding out.

On their way out, Brigidini tipped over a trash can and went through the contents. He found a phone bill. One number stood out. It had sixteen digits. They tracked it to a pay phone near the city of Arusha, in northern Tanzania—the only pay phone in a one-hundred-square-mile area.

Investigators sent photos of Mowatt and copies of his file to Tanzania. They told the police in Arusha that the guy they were looking for was responsible, indirectly, for the killings of three law enforcement officers in D.C. The locals went to work, standing at the phone in shifts and showing Mowatt’s photo to everyone who came by to use it. Someone recognized the man in the photo. He pointed in the direction of Mount Kilimanjaro.

The investigation picked up speed.

Giuliano and Brigidini enlisted the help of a State Department security officer in neighboring Kenya, who did some sleuthing. The officer discovered that Mowatt had been renting a hotel room in Arusha. He’d left a few weeks earlier, skipping out on his bill and stealing a guard dog.

The Americans couldn’t just snatch Mowatt. There hadn’t been an extradition from Tanzania in a long time. Justice Department lawyers began researching what paperwork would need to be written up and filed. By stiffing the hotel and stealing the dog, however, Mowatt had provided Tanzanian police with two reasons to lock him up. Arusha cops went out in a squad car and drove in the direction in which the witness at the pay phone had pointed.

The cops entered an area of flat grassland and spotted a lone mud hut, maybe five miles from the base of Kilimanjaro. The hut’s resident spotted them—and ran. The cops laughed: There was nowhere for Mowatt to flee, nowhere to hide.

The local cops watched as Mowatt sprinted until he got tired and stopped, then they drove over and arrested him. They held him in a tiny police precinct with no air-conditioning. When they took Mowatt’s booking photo, he flipped both his middle fingers.

It was March 1996, nearly sixteen months after Lawson’s rampage at police headquarters. Giuliano and Brigidini flew for nearly twenty-four hours to reach Tanzania. But they couldn’t bring Mowatt back right away: A Tanzanian official insisted on a $25,000 payment before the prisoner would be handed over. Giuliano and Brigidini had to wait until someone from the FBI could fly over with the payment.

The two lawmen killed time. They saw lions and giraffes and hippos in the countryside. They also ate something they shouldn’t have and got violently ill, with fevers and chills and diarrhea.

After several days, and more than 7,500 miles from D.C., Giuliano and Brigidini finally stepped into the little police station to arrest Mowatt. The gangster’s face registered shock when he saw them.

“Man, y’all are pressed to lock a nigga up,” he said.

It turned out that Mowatt had been in Tanzania for about a year. Before landing in Africa, he’d flown to Russia, where he wandered around Red Square during a layover that lasted a few hours. When he first arrived in Africa, the gangster had been living in a little community of Jamaicans in Rwanda. The Jamaicans expelled him because they didn’t like his attitude. Mowatt struck out on his own.

Outside his little hut, Mowatt grew vegetables and marijuana. He had a pet baboon that he kept on a leash. Mowatt said he’d taught it how to slip cassettes into a battery-powered boom box and hit the Play button.

The temperature in Tanzania felt about a thousand degrees to Brigidini. But Mowatt was still dressed like a D.C. gangster, in jeans, a long-sleeved Polo shirt, and Timberland boots. For a minute, he tried to pretend he was someone else. He spoke some half-assed Jamaican. The two lawmen asked Mowatt to pose with them for a photo.

“Fuck you,” he snarled.

Giuliano and Brigidini brought Mowatt back on a commercial flight. They got him a window seat and wrapped him up in a blanket to hide his handcuffs. Brigidini cut Mowatt’s food and fed him during the trip.

After he landed at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, the pilot came back to ask the two lawmen what was up with the guy in the blanket. Giuliano and Brigidini showed him their badges. Brigidini lifted the blanket to show Mowatt’s handcuffs. They were bringing back a fugitive, they explained. The pilot wasn’t happy.

Brigidini paid a steep price for the capture. At five foot five, Brigidini weighed close to 200 pounds when he went to Tanzania, though not because he was overweight. The detective was a powerlifter. For three years after he returned, he became repeatedly ill, about once every three months. At one point he was down to 130 pounds. Probably due to a parasite he’d picked up in Tanzania, doctors told him. It would work its way out of his system. Eventually it did, and Brigidini’s health returned.

The detective never regretted the mission.

“I just couldn’t fail,” he said years later. “It was a responsibility we owed to the family members of those people who were killed just reading case jackets at their desks. I couldn’t fail.”

Most of Lawson’s associates pleaded guilty to federal charges and received lengthy prison sentences, which they accepted quietly. Mowatt, however, went down with bravado.

A few months after he was captured, Mowatt pleaded guilty to participating in a racketeering conspiracy and agreed to a thirty-five-year prison sentence. At his sentencing hearing, in January 1997, Mowatt stood to speak moments before U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth formally announced his punishment.

Mowatt pounded his chest with his right arm and, referring to Lawson, declared, “He represented to the fullest. And that’s my man, my comrade for life.”

On Thanksgiving Day, two days after Lawson’s rampage in the cold-case office, a
Post
editor asked me to interview Lou. The news that Lawson was gunning for him had been reported on the local TV news the day before, and I’d written about it for that day’s paper.

“It could be a good story—what is it like to be the intended target of the headquarters killer?” the editor said.

I was working the holiday anyway, and it was no secret that the homicide captain talked to me. I routinely quoted him by name in news stories. A few days before the attack, Lou had even invited me to his home for Thanksgiving dinner. I’d told him I would try to come over, if I could get away from work early enough. Lou and his family lived on a farm in southern Maryland, about twenty-five miles south of D.C.

That morning, I’d called Lou at home, not sure if the invitation was still open, given the chaos of the previous forty-eight hours. “Come on over,” he’d said. He sounded tired.

Lou greeted me at the front door, welcomed me in, and immediately sank into his living room couch. He had raccoon eyes and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. I settled into a chair a few feet away. The smell of roasting turkey filled the room.

I felt queasy about my assignment. Lou knew I was far from my family in California. He had no agenda other than to assure me that I’d have a place to spend the holiday.

After some small talk about the football game, I said, “I’m supposed to interview you about what it was like to be Lawson’s intended target.”

Lou rubbed his eyes.

“I haven’t had time to process it, to be honest. I’ve been working straight through. I don’t think there’s much I could tell you right now.”

Maybe I could have chipped away at him, gotten a couple of usable quotes, and fashioned a story around them. I could have played on my editor’s expectations, telling Lou I’d be in a jam if I didn’t come up with something for the next day’s paper.

Instead, I called the editor who’d asked me to interview Lou.

“I’m at his house,” I said. “He didn’t say no. He said he hasn’t had time to process what happened. I think if I work on him, I can get him to start talking.”

“Keep trying,” the editor replied. “Call in if he starts talking, so we can budget a story for tomorrow’s paper.”

I rang off and returned to my chair. Lou and I watched the game in silence until it was time to eat. I didn’t work on him.