S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (20 page)

An unmarked car pulled up to the curb. Inspector William O. Ritchie was behind the wheel. He and Lou had worked together in homicide in the early eighties, when Lou was a detective and Ritchie a lieutenant. Before that, when Lou was just a young street officer, they’d both been in the Fifth District.

Ritchie was one of the few white shirts at the time who was college educated. In 1971, he’d gotten a bachelor’s in physical education from Howard University, which he attended on a track scholarship. He later earned a degree in mortuary science from the University of the District of Columbia. He was smart and hardworking and didn’t like to engage in departmental politics. He and Lou knew each other, but they weren’t drinking buddies or cronies.

People kept streaming toward the parade route. The crowd was two, three, four deep. It would be a sea of humanity by midmorning. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood.

Ritchie rolled down his window.

“How’s your back?” he asked.

“Doing better, thanks,” Lou said. His lower back was balky. He’d started going to a chiropractor and doing exercises to strengthen it.

Like Lou, Ritchie wasn’t much for small talk. He got right to it: “I’m about to become chief of detectives,” he said. “How would you like to be my homicide commander?”

“Yeah, I’d do that job,” Lou replied almost instantly.

Ritchie wasn’t surprised.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, then rolled up his window and drove off.

Lou had aspired to command homicide since the early eighties. He knew that morale was bad in the squad, that detectives were overrun with unsolved killings. But he felt confident that he could improve its collective spirit and make it more effective. He had great street sources, including an ex-cop. Those sources alone would be good for an additional fifteen to twenty closures on homicide cases every year, Lou figured. He wasn’t afraid of the demands of assuming the command at a time when D.C. was the nation’s murder capital. In fact, he relished the prospect. He thought the plan he’d developed over the past few years could revolutionize the way cases were investigated, if only he could get an opportunity to put it into action.

But first things first. Lou returned to his parade-route duties. Many people in the crowd were smiling, excited that they were about to witness a piece of history and welcome a new, young president. An hour or so after Ritchie drove off, a pair of girls, about twelve or thirteen, approached Lou: They’d come to D.C. for the inaugural and gotten separated from their party. They were supposed to meet with the rest of their group at the corner of 12th Street and Independence Avenue Northwest to board a bus that would take them home after the parade.

They were old enough and close enough to their meeting spot that Lou could have given them directions. Instead he told them not to worry and drove them to the intersection in his marked squad car.

On the way, Lou thought about Ritchie’s offer and what he’d do if he were in charge of homicide.

Ritchie knew better than most the demands of the homicide command. He’d served as the captain in charge of the branch from 1988 to 1990, when the number of killings in D.C. had spiraled toward five hundred per year. In 1992, the city had clocked 443, and the police department seemed to have no real strategy for quelling the violence.

Many killers were, in fact, getting away with murder: The homicide squad’s closure rate was somewhere in the range of 35 to 40 percent. That didn’t mean that all those suspects were eventually convicted of homicide, though. With drug gangs killing people who cooperated with police and prosecutors, many witnesses were afraid to testify, making it impossible to go forward with a prosecution. Some cases were dropped, and some suspects pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

The situation clearly weighed heavily on MPD chief Isaac Fulwood Jr., who in September 1992 had announced that he would be making good on his oft-repeated promise to resign if the bloodshed didn’t stop. Talking about his tenure as chief to a
Post
reporter, Fulwood said, “The number one low has been the record number of homicides, the record number of young black men killed needlessly.”

Three months after Fulwood’s announcement, Marion Barry successor Sharon Pratt Kelly introduced the new chief: Fred Thomas, a former deputy chief who’d retired in 1985 and had been working as the vice president of the Metropolitan Police Boys and Girls Club.

Shortly after his appointment, Thomas met with all police department division commanders to get up to speed on how the white shirts were running their respective shops. Ritchie headed MPD’s medical services division, overseeing the facility that treated D.C. cops and firefighters, as well as some members of the Park Police and uniformed Secret Service officers. He told Thomas that he’d saved the department as much as $350,000 annually by setting up a fee schedule for the private physicians who treated injured officers. Before, it had been paying whatever the doctors charged.

“Is there anything else you would like to say?” Thomas asked Ritchie as their meeting wound down.

Ritchie saw an opportunity: The white shirt who was in charge of the criminal investigations division at the time was preparing to transfer to another assignment. Ritchie made his move.

“I think I’m the best person to command the criminal investigations division,” he told Thomas.

For weeks, Ritchie didn’t hear from Thomas. Then, on January 19, 1993, the day before the inauguration, Thomas called to tell him he would be the new chief of detectives, effective the following day. Thomas said he was going to promote the current homicide captain, Wyndell Watkins, to the rank of inspector. That meant there would be an opening for a homicide commander.

“I only have one person in mind,” Ritchie told Thomas. “Lou Hennessy.”

Thomas told Ritchie he’d get back to him. The following day, on the inauguration route, Ritchie asked Lou whether he wanted the job.

But it was hardly a done deal. Thomas called Ritchie about a week later: “I’ve been getting some bad reports on Hennessy,” he said. The chief had heard that Lou was “uncontrollable,” that he’d had verbal skirmishes with fellow white shirts.

The second part, at least, was true. In the mid-eighties, when he was a lieutenant, Lou had discovered a patrol officer playing Russian roulette with his service revolver in the basement of the officer’s home. The officer was distraught because his wife was having an affair with another cop—who happened to be close to Chief Maurice Turner. Lou relieved the man of his gun and badge and referred him to the Police and Fire Clinic for a mental health evaluation. Following procedure, he then wrote up a memo and sent it to the chief’s office.

The memo was kicked back: The officer was to remain on the street, with his gun. Livid, Lou called Reggie Smith, the lieutenant in the chief’s office who handled departmental memos.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lou yelled at Smith, who was close not only to Turner but also to Fulwood, then an assistant chief. Smith didn’t want a written record of the messy problem in the chief’s office, Lou believed. Lou went over Smith’s head, straight to Fulwood, who sided with Lou and arranged for the officer to be relieved of his duties while he was evaluated.

Ritchie wasn’t going to let some badmouthing and exaggeration interfere with his plan to appoint Lou homicide commander. He was highly motivated to have Lou in that key post.

“Lou knew homicide,” Ritchie recalled. “And we were getting our asses kicked.”

The chief needed reassurance, Ritchie sensed. He provided it: “Chief, if you give me Lou Hennessy as my homicide captain, I will personally assume responsibility for his conduct.”

Thomas signed off on Lou’s appointment.

Lou took over the homicide command in mid-September, during a particularly violent stretch of time in the city. It wasn’t just the usual gangsters who were getting killed;
civilians
were going down.

On Georgia Avenue Northwest, robbers gunned down a Vietnamese man in his family-owned jewelry store. A few blocks away, someone fatally shot a Korean woman inside her dry-cleaning shop. In Southeast, four gunmen emerged from the woods and methodically hunted and executed a spectator at a pickup football game. A stray bullet struck a four-year-old girl in the head. She lingered for four days and died in the hospital.

A feeling that the entire city was starting to veer out of control began to take hold. Mayor Kelly said publicly that she wished she had the authority to call in the National Guard.

Lou didn’t get much rest during those first few weeks. He rode out to murder scenes with his detectives to get a feel for how they worked. He kept a change of clothes and a shaving kit at work and sometimes slept on the couch in the homicide office.

When he wasn’t going out to crime scenes or meeting with detectives about the progress they were making, Lou sat at his desk and typed his plan to revolutionize the way homicide handled cases. As far back as anyone could remember, detectives had worked on a rotating basis. A detective who was “on the bubble”—first in line for the next homicide—would be responsible for that investigation, regardless of where in the city it occurred or under what circumstances. Then the next detective would be on the bubble.

That meant detectives were often investigating five or six killings at a time in different neighborhoods throughout the city, including homicides in places where they had no sources.

Lou’s plan called for creating seven teams of homicide detectives, one for each police district. The detectives would be responsible for getting to know the players in their respective districts and developing contacts with street cops, merchants, and residents—as well as whichever local thugs were willing to play ball.

Victims and shooters almost always lived in the same neighborhood, Lou believed. Southeast D.C. gangsters generally weren’t beefing with crews in Northeast or Northwest. They were waging battles on their home turf, killing people they’d grown up with. Assigning detectives to specific districts would give them the opportunity to build up a network of reliable informants, Lou reasoned. It was the same idea pressed upon him by his training officer, Skip Enoch: A good cop knows whom on his beat to call; a great
cop has people in the neighborhood calling
him
.

To maximize the value of the intelligence that would be gathered and to foster collaboration, Lou proposed holding weekly meetings at which the representatives of each detective squad would talk about their cases and swap information. Other officers from police districts with high crime rates would take part in the meetings, too. If homicide detectives obtained a lead that a guy nicknamed Peanut or Black was involved in a killing, they may not know which of the dozens of young men with those handles they should look at. But narcotics detectives or street cops working that neighborhood probably would. Representatives from nearby police departments in Maryland and Virginia would also be invited to the meetings.

“The approach just made sense,” Lou explained years later. “It really was the community-policing concept, only with detectives instead of patrol officers.”

Executing his plan properly would require additional resources. When Lou took over the squad, about thirty detectives were assigned to homicide. Lou asked for that number to triple within a year. He proposed that all detectives receive intensive training from prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, representatives of the medical examiner’s office, and retired investigators.

Lou wrote up a fifteen-page proposal. A couple of weeks after he assumed the homicide command, as the mayor spoke of bringing in the National Guard, Lou and Ritchie walked into Chief Thomas’s office.

Lou handed Thomas a copy of his plan and described his vision. Thomas asked detailed, thoughtful questions. The meeting lasted ninety minutes. Lou told the chief that he was confident his plan would bring down the number of killings in the city, maybe even below four hundred a year. “If you do that, you’ll be considered for a Nobel Peace Prize,” Thomas said.

At the end, the chief looked at Lou and Ritchie and said evenly, “I’m going to give you everything you want. If I don’t see some results in a year, I’m going to fire both of you.”

In the summer of 1992, about two months after Carrie last offered me crack and sex, Phil Dixon gave me a chance to move to the day shift. There was an opening covering social issues, including public housing and homelessness. I’d hit the wall on the night shift. The late hours were taking a toll, and I’d felt myself burning out on all the shootings I was racing to. One crime scene blurred into the next.

Also, I’d been starting to wonder whether working the late shift was threatening my recovery from crack and booze. Social isolation is an inevitable component of addiction. When I’d started to drink heavily, during my
Herald Examiner
days, I routinely joined colleagues at Corky’s after work. But as I drank more—and began using crack—I became more of a loner.

At first, I usually smoked crack with strawberries. But toward the end of my run, right before Milton Coleman drove me to rehab, I was smoking by myself. At that point I’d been drinking by myself for years. On most weekends, I would leave my apartment only to pick up strawberries and crack or to play pickup basketball.

After my relapse, I hadn’t had any urges to resume smoking crack or drinking—at least not any conscious ones. But nightmares about using crack had begun to invade my sleep. In one, I’d be at my apartment with Carrie or Champagne. I’d light a loaded pipe, bring it to my lips, and inhale. I’d wake up in a panic, unsure for a few moments whether I’d actually used again and wrecked my recovery.