S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (35 page)

“They had us write down everything we bought throughout the week,” B. J. said. “If I bought a muffin for $1.25, I wrote it down. I learned how to manage my money, and I learned how to save.”

Never a big spender, B. J. became even thriftier. By the end of the program she had paid off $5,000 in credit card bills. The Homebuyers Club required her to save $25 a week, which she did faithfully. Manna kicked in $50 every week, as it did for all Homebuyers Club members.

In the spring of 2001, B. J. was walking on Riggs Street when she saw workers renovating one of the row houses. Manna staffers had offered to show B. J. properties she could buy, but she didn’t feel the need.

“I decided that was going to be my house,” she said.

B. J. started wandering over to watch the workers as they refurbished the condo. They would ask her what she was doing and she would reply, “I’m coming to look at my house.”

That June, she bought the condo for $102,000. Between her part-time job with the church and her work as a child-care provider, she was earning about $18,000 a year while supporting three kids.

She didn’t sleep well the first night in her new home. “The first night I slept here, it was so surreal,” she recalled. “I stood on the steps and stared at my dining room table. I was afraid it was a beautiful dream and I was about to wake up.”

In February 1997, a few weeks after Baldie’s funeral, the D.C. Financial Control Board assumed more authority over the day-to-day operations of the police department. The board acted after a consulting firm recommended limiting Marion Barry’s influence on the police force, particularly in personnel decisions.

The move was widely viewed as giving Chief Soulsby more power. When he was appointed, he’d faced budget cuts and a shrinking staff. “I don’t think he’s had a fair chance at managing the department the way he’s wanted to,” U.S. Attorney Eric Holder said. “The test of whether he’s a fit person to run the department starts about now.”

Ten months later, Soulsby admitted he wasn’t a fit person to run the department.

Lou called me: “You heard about Soulsby?” he asked. He sounded excited.

“Yeah, I have.” I was at my desk in the Prince George’s County bureau, reading the budget of the following day’s stories on my computer screen. It was November 25, 1997, two days before Thanksgiving. A story on Soulsby was at the top of the local budget.

Soulsby had suddenly resigned as police chief that afternoon, under multiple shadows of suspicion. He quit less than two hours before his best friend, Metropolitan Police Department lieutenant Jeffery Stowe, was indicted by a federal grand jury for shaking down married gay men and embezzling department funds. Stowe and Soulsby had been close for years. In fact, they were roommates, sharing a luxury apartment downtown.

“This is
great
,” Lou said.

Stowe was the lieutenant in charge of investigating extortion plots. But instead of tracking down blackmailers, he’d been running his own shakedown scheme, an FBI affidavit alleged. He targeted patrons of the Follies Theatre, a gay bar in Southeast, not far from the Capitol. Stowe would prowl around outside the bar, looking for parked cars that contained baby seats, an investigator told me. According to the affidavit, he would then write down the license plate numbers and use a police computer to learn to whom the car was registered and where he lived. Two months earlier, court documents alleged, he’d tracked down a married man who’d gone into the Follies Theatre and demanded $10,000 from him. If the man didn’t cough up the cash, Stowe threatened, he would send photos of the man inside the bar to his wife and boss.

Stowe and Soulsby’s high-end digs also raised suspicion. Their apartment typically rented for between $1,700 and $2,000 a month. But the lieutenant and the chief were paying only $650 a month. Stowe had reportedly obtained the steep discount by lying to a building manager, claiming that the unit would be used for undercover police work. Soulsby said that he knew nothing about the discounted rent.

A little more than two years earlier, Soulsby couldn’t stop grinning when Barry announced his appointment as chief. That afternoon, as he made public his resignation, Soulsby teared up.

“I cannot allow another controversy to impact on my officers and to detract from their accomplishments,” he said. “My concern for the welfare of my officers and the people they serve transcends my own personal welfare.”

Soulsby did not acknowledge any wrongdoing. He said he was stepping down for the good of the department, “not because I feel I have done anything wrong.”

In an interview, Soulsby told a
Post
reporter that he was actually happy to be stepping down: “I need to take some time off and chill out. I’m just tired, very tired. I’m tired of fighting these silly battles.”

The morning after the resignation, I called Lou early, as soon as I’d finished reading the articles on Soulsby and Stowe.

“This is awesome,” I said. “And it’s just the beginning.”

Lou and I were convinced that it was just a matter of time before Soulsby was charged with a crime. Like any other defendant, Stowe would be looking to cut a deal with prosecutors to help himself. He
had
to have dirt on Soulsby. If Stowe dished on Soulsby and the feds could corroborate his accusations .
.
.

“I can’t wait until that fat son of a bitch is marched into court in handcuffs,” Lou said. “I’ll be sitting in the front row.”

“Save a space for me,” I said. “I’ll be sitting right next to you.”

Soulsby’s resignation was the main topic of conversation the next day when I went to Lou’s house for Thanksgiving. He now invited me every year.

“What I don’t understand is why he felt he had to lie about me, why he had to attack my integrity and reputation,” Lou said. “He was the chief of police. He had the authority to transfer me. He could appoint anyone he wants. All he had to do was say he was going in a different direction—or nothing at all.”

“Maybe he felt he had to discredit you because of the Roach Brown investigation,” I said. “But I don’t think it was premeditated. At the press conference, when I asked him what was going on with you, he got this look on his face—he seemed upset. I think he made it up on the spot. And when I gave him a chance to back away from it, in the elevator, he just dug in deeper.”

“He’s a sick guy,” Lou said, shaking his head. “He’s told so many lies, I don’t think he knows what’s true.”

“But he’s not
that
sick. He knows right from wrong. It’s amazing someone like that could become police chief in a big city.”

“He’d do anything to be chief, and Barry knew it. That’s why he got the job. I can’t wait to see him walk into the courtroom as a defendant,” Lou said.

“They’re going to need a really big orange jumpsuit,” I said, imagining the nearly three-hundred-pound Soulsby finally doing his perp walk. “A whole cotton field’s worth.”

In federal court in January 1998, Stowe admitted to having lied to get reduced rent on the luxury apartment for himself and “another person” and pleaded guilty to wire fraud. Stowe also admitted that he’d embezzled $55,000 in MPD funds and pleaded guilty to two counts of extortion for shaking down two married men who’d visited the Follies Theatre.

“I know you all have a lot of questions—probably thousands of questions—and I wish I could answer them,” Stowe told reporters. “Some of those questions concern other people that are in [MPD] and possibly others. Unfortunately, I cannot do that at this time. I wish I could.”

For the next few months, Lou and I routinely swapped rumors we’d heard about Soulsby’s imminent arrest or indictment. But nothing materialized.

Years passed. Federal prosecutors kept postponing Stowe’s sentencing as the investigation continued.

In the end, the information Stowe spilled led the feds not to more police misconduct, but to union corruption. In October 2002, Jake West, the former president of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers, pleaded guilty to two counts of embezzling union pension funds. According to court papers, West spent more than $51,000 in union funds on golf, dinners, and items for his home in suburban Virginia. Six other union officials and employees would also plead guilty in the case.

West and Soulsby were golfing buddies who often dined together at the Prime Rib, a pricey downtown steakhouse. The feds wanted to know whether West had ever spent union money on Soulsby—and if so, whether he’d ever gotten anything in return. West’s guilty plea inspired a new spate of rumors that the ex-chief would be the next to fall.

But Soulsby was never indicted. In October 2003, a federal judge finally sentenced Stowe to twenty-three months in prison, signaling the end of the investigation.

“What I did was reprehensible,” the disgraced lieutenant said in court. “It’s something I think about every night and sometimes through the day. It was a low point in my life. I had my financial back against the wall, and I made some very bad decisions.”

He didn’t say a word about his old roommate.

By then, Lou and I had pretty much stopped talking about whether Soulsby would ever be charged.

For a few weeks after Soulsby resigned, Lou had held out hope that interim police chief Sonya Proctor might offer him his old job in homicide or some other substantial assignment. They’d been at the police academy at the same time and had also worked together in 5D as young officers. Lou respected Proctor. She was smart and honest, the antithesis of Soulsby.

But Proctor never called. Though the Control Board was taking a greater role in running the police department, Barry was still mayor. Lou suspected that Barry could still pull a few MPD strings. In February 1998, three months after Soulsby’s departure, Lou also left the police department.

His retirement dinner was held at the Bolling Air Force Base Officers Club, in Southwest D.C. About two hundred people attended. Dozens of detectives who’d served under him in homicide were there. The retired chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, a former Prince George’s County police chief, and a former lead agent for the Washington field office of the Secret Service all came. But only one current or former MPD white shirt showed up. After Lou’s conflict with Soulsby over the chief’s off-the-record attack was first reported, in the spring of 1996, many of his fellow officers had treated him as if he had a communicable disease.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Lou said years later. “I felt really good that my troops were there. The fact the event was well attended meant more to me.”

Lou wasn’t one to emote publicly, but he choked up briefly during his farewell speech as he addressed his former detectives directly. He spoke of how he’d aspired to lead the homicide command almost from the moment he joined MPD, twenty-four years earlier. He thanked the men and women who worked for him and told them they’d made a difference. “Commanding the homicide squad was the most rewarding experience of my time in MPD,” he said.

By this time Lou had earned his law degree and passed the Maryland bar exam on his first try. By passing the Maryland bar, he was allowed to join the D.C. bar. He found office space in the District and began doing criminal defense work, along with personal-injury cases. By the early 2000s, Lou’s private practice was prospering. During particularly good years, he was making more than triple his top police salary—close to $200,000.

In 2002, Lou ran for state’s attorney in Charles County. The county was mostly rural, largely white, and somewhat conservative, if reliably Democratic in elections. But it was rapidly changing. Blacks were moving in at a brisk pace, and commercial and residential development was escalating. Lou waged an unconventional campaign, certainly for a Republican. He reached out to the county’s burgeoning African American population, meeting with local NAACP leaders and speaking at black churches. His incumbent opponent, Leonard Collins Jr., a Democrat, was a hard-line, lock-’em-up prosecutor. Drawing on more than twenty years’ experience as a cop in one of the country’s most violent cities, Lou emphasized prevention over punishment.

Law enforcement alone isn’t a fix for crime, Lou told voters. Only 50 percent or so of all crimes are reported, and only about 10 percent of those offenses are closed with arrests, he pointed out.

“I talked about how I could go out into the community and deal with a hundred percent of the population, talking about prevention,” Lou said. “I could help people benefit from my experience in D.C. I could educate young people that the decisions they make when they’re eighteen, nineteen years old will impact how they live the rest of their lives.”

Lou also offset the incumbent’s advantage in name recognition by appearing numerous times on TV news programs, where he was interviewed as a law enforcement expert about the D.C. Sniper case, raging that fall.

As the returns came in, the possibility of being the county’s next state’s attorney became a distinct reality. The result wasn’t known until all of the 35,000 votes were tallied. Collins eked out a victory, but by only about two hundred votes.

But running for office raised Lou’s profile, and not just with potential clients of his law practice. On the same day that Lou barely lost, another Republican, Robert L. Ehrlich, defeated Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the lieutenant governor of Maryland and the eldest child of Robert F. Kennedy. Ehrlich became the state’s first GOP governor since Spiro T. Agnew, in the late sixties. In January 2003, Thomas Hutchins, the delegate who represented Lou’s district in Maryland’s state legislature, resigned his seat to become Ehrlich’s secretary of veterans’ affairs.