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

violent. Just four years earlier, in 1985, the District had recorded 148 homicides. By 1987 the number of killings had spiked to 372.
    In the 1970s, illicit drug sales in the city were stable, dominated by veteran dealers who controlled specific areas. Heroin was the street drug peddled the most during that decade. Its sale was highly centralized, limited to a handful of locations, mostly just north of downtown. Lou Hennessy recalled seeing as many as three hundred smack dealers and their clients clustering late at night at the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest, one of the primary copping zones for heroin.
    The profit margin for heroin dealers in geographically small D.C. was greater than it was for their counterparts in Baltimore and Philadelphia. District pushers sold a good portion of their product to users from the nearby Maryland and Virginia suburbs, who were willing to pay more than junkies from the city.
    In addition to the smack sellers downtown, a handful of seasoned drug dealers operated in other sections of the city: Mint Jelly sold powder cocaine on 9th Street Northwest, the Hartwell gang peddled coke and heroin in deep Southeast, and Big Pink—who cruised around town in a pink Cadillac—dealt smack at 4th and M Streets Northwest. They and the other old-school drug dealers had their enforcers, but they knew that violence was bad for business and didn’t use it casually or promiscuously.
    Around 1980, groups of Jamaicans set up shop in D.C. to deal marijuana. They never commandeered a large amount of turf, but their arrival marked an important step in the evolution of D.C. street crime as established dealers defended their corners against the newcomers. In the inevitable gun battles that ensued, the Jamaicans fought with the kind of weaponry that had been all but unseen in Washington to that point. They carried semiautomatic nine-millimeter handguns, MAC-10 fully automatic submachine guns, and Uzis. The display of Jamaican firepower sparked an arms race among local drug dealers.
    The long-standing drug markets blew up when crack hit the city five years later. Open-air crack emporiums appeared in neighborhoods that hadn’t hosted drug markets before. Stable heroin and marijuana corners became contested crack zones. Scores of neighborhood crack kingpins rose to power. They were younger than the old-school dealers, men in their twenties or even teens. They were suddenly making barrels of cash—and, unlike the veterans, they were impulsive and quick on the triggers of their powerful new weapons.
    Bandits who used to hit mom-and-pop stores with Saturday-night specials and sawed-off shotguns started going after drug dealers, because that was where the cash was. And the dealers were firing back—when they weren’t firing at one another. With frightening speed, a culture of intimidation and retaliation took hold. When Lou had joined the force, retaliatory violence was rare, witness killings almost unheard of. Suddenly each shooting required payback, and witnesses—most of whom were in the drug game themselves—were being gunned down with alarming frequency. One neighborhood in Northeast was so violent it was known as Little Beirut.
    Lou watched a series of police chiefs respond with ham-handed tactics that did nothing to stanch the bloodshed. He knew he could do better.
     
    From the moment he put on the uniform, Lou loved being, as he liked to say, po-lice . Not FBI, not ATF, not DEA, not Secret Service. Po-lice. There was excitement and a chance to do some good. And no two days were ever the same.
    He became a sworn officer two years after signing up as a cadet and quickly earned a reputation as a smart, resourceful, and effective street cop. While other newbies were writing traffic tickets, Lou and his partners were taking down armed robbers and capturing people carrying illegal guns.
    He had good instincts and a great training officer, Skip Enoch, who taught him the value of building a rapport with people