S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. Read Online Free PDF

through, but I wanted to be sure. I pulled out $100 and tried to hand her the cash.
    “This is for helping us,” I said.
    The woman shook her head vigorously. “No, I don’t need any money,” she said.
    I looked at her children. “For the kids.”
    The woman thought about it for a second, glanced at her kids, and took the money. A couple of days later, I flew back to Los Angeles and learned that the gambit had worked: My story had made the Sunday paper.
     
    Being a reporter gave me a ticket to parachute into drama most people would never experience. I was naturally introverted and shy, but when I was on the job I assumed another, more forceful, more confident persona.
    Three years before the Post hired me, I’d even roamed Raven’s neighborhood looking to commit a felony in pursuit of a story. President Ronald Reagan had signed an immigration reform bill. The law required employers to check new hires for papers, to confirm they were in the country legally. I pitched an idea to my editors. They weren’t thrilled about having me break federal law for an article, but I ran my scheme by a contact at the immigration service. The feds probably wouldn’t come after me, she said. That was close enough for my bosses.
    I didn’t shave for a day, dressed down in tattered jeans and an old T-shirt, and made for the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Alvarado Street, a couple of blocks from Raven’s motel hangout. The intersection was a magnet for shady characters. Inside of five minutes, a guy asked me, in Spanish, what I needed.
    “Papers,” I said.
    “Seventy bucks,” he replied.
    He led me into a little office in a corner strip mall. Another guy asked what name I wanted to use. I made one up, and he took my photo and disappeared into the back. A couple of minutes later, the photographer returned and handed me a laminated “green card” with my picture and the name I’d provided. The ID hustler told me to meet him at a doughnut shop around the corner in ten minutes. I settled into a booth and waited.
    He arrived on time, nervously swiveling his head side to side, looking for federal agents, then settled into the booth across from me. He reached under the acrylic tabletop and left a card on the metal crossbar that supported it, telling me to take it and leave the cash. The document peddler quickly counted the money and slipped out of the shop. I studied my “Social Security” card. The name matched the one on my green card.
    A trained federal agent would quickly make both cards as fakes. A civilian employer might not. I wrote a first-person sidebar to a longer piece. It took Congress years of contentious negotiations to pass immigration reform; it took me fifteen minutes and $70 to buy fake documents that could defeat the new law. The feds didn’t come after me.
    I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my life other than journalism, and I didn’t think it would go well for me if I did. With the right tools, it seemed, my father could fix anything under the hood of a car or in the house. Hammering a nail was the extent of my fix-it skills. And I don’t think I would have thrived in a nine-to-five office job. I couldn’t stand routine, and I was congenitally disheveled. I could put on a freshly pressed suit and a brand-new dress shirt and within five minutes look as if I had slept in them. But the street didn’t care how I dressed, or that I couldn’t fix a carburetor.
    As the local news droned on, I finished my meal, swigged the last of my beer, and headed to the fridge for another. A big smile crossed my face as I envisioned what it would be like covering record-breaking violence in a city with an in-your-face crackhead mayor.
    Working here was going to be fun .
     
    The possibility that Barry was a crack user and the violence unleashed by neighborhood drug wars were the top two stories in the city. By the end of 1989 there would be 434 killings, in a city of about 610,000 residents.
    D.C. hadn’t always been so