But from the first moment he sent one of his subordinate dealers out in Woodstock to sell a gram’s worth of heroin he’d paid $65 for in Harlem—and the dealer returned with $800 in cash—D.C. was hooked on another drug.
“What you sell up in the city, you can double down [your profits] here,” said an investigator on the case. “You don’t have the competition in the small towns, and you don’t have people shooting at you.”
Whereas commuter dealers running to Baltimore were bringing in 20 grams—at most—D.C.’s Pringles haul routinely contained 200 grams.
*
Lutz crouched beneath the window, waiting for the Mercedes and thinking about his fiancée back home, still pissed that he’d been called out to work on Christmas Day. At a family wedding in Florida, he’d spent most of his time on his cellphone, monitoring an investigation of the latest overdose. When his cellphone rang at night, his fiancée’s kids moaned loudly about him leaving, again, for work. As the county’s point man for drug activity, he was now getting, on average, one phone call a night.
Ever since the 2010 reformulation of OxyContin, Lutz had been tracking a small cluster of heroin users, most of them young white men who made the two-hour drive to Baltimore, a longtime heroin stronghold, on a near-daily basis. They’d buy enough to use, plus extra to sell to friends, making enough to fund both their next fix and gas for the trip to get the fix after that. Police classified them as commuter-dealers, and they were becoming an important subset of the drug trade in Baltimore, where heroin sales were estimated at $1.5 million every day.
For forty years, Baltimore had been a prime staging area for dealers moving drugs, especially heroin, along the East Coast. Its port was an entryway for international drug smuggling. Another trafficking artery was Interstate 95, which connected Baltimore to cities from Miami to Bangor, Maine, with nicknames that transitioned over time, depending on the drug of choice, from Reefer Express to Cocaine Lane to the Heroin Highway, also called the Highway to Hell.
With the highest per capita rate of heroin use in the country, Baltimore residents were six times more likely to die from an opioid overdose than the national average.
Commuter-dealers weren’t making the trek just from Woodstock but from nearby towns, too, including Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Hagerstown, Maryland, localities that would both earn the nickname Little Baltimore for their explosions in heroin-overdose deaths. A 2017 New Yorker profile of Martinsburg by Margaret Talbot opened with the synchronous thud of two Little League parents who had fallen from the bleachers after overdosing at their daughter’s softball practice, their younger children running around and frantically screaming, “Wake up! Wake up!”
*
Twentysomething Roanokers were drawing on drug-dealing connections for their daylong northern treks up I-81 to New Jersey and New York. But in wide-open Baltimore, commuter-dealers needed no such connection.
When Shenandoah County native Dennis Painter made his first trip to Baltimore to buy heroin, in 2012, he’d been advised simply to look for the blinking blue lights. Intended to aid police surveillance of high-crime neighborhoods, the lights also functioned as beacons for drug seekers with out-of-state plates. “Sometimes the dealers will flash their lights at you when they see your plates, it’s just crazy,” he explained in a phone interview from a Nashville rehab facility in 2016.
“Then, once you know somebody [to buy from], you just keep going back. And when the police arrest someone, there are four more people waiting to take that person’s place.”
Dennis usually drove to Baltimore with his best friend, Jesse Bolstridge, Kristi’s son. Sometimes the pair stopped by the city health department’s syringe-exchange van to pick up clean needles. Once when Jesse was away at rehab, Dennis made the trek to Baltimore with friends of friends, only to be robbed and ultimately abandoned by the people in his car pool. His girlfriend had to pick him up late that night, fuming, their toddler twins asleep in the back seat.
Jesse and Dennis had been best friends since they were toddlers—“I have pictures of us together as three-year-olds playing in a sandbox,” Dennis told me. They’d been partying together since the age of sixteen, when Jesse began trading his ADHD medication for painkillers.
Whereas at the start of D.C.’s heroin ring in late 2012, Jesse still preferred injecting crushed-up Roxys, Dennis said, his friend’s drug of choice soon became IV heroin, because it was cheaper and stronger, and suddenly it had become much easier to get. As their cravings grew in 2013, their parents paid for them to get residential treatment in separate out-of-state facilities, only to watch them fall back into using shortly after they returned and reunited. The first time Jesse shot up heroin, his mother told me, it was with drugs Dennis bought from one of D.C.’s subdealers.
Police officers and prosecutors working the case told me they could count on one hand the number of heroin users in the region before D.C. arrived. But Dennis and others familiar with heroin in Woodstock contend there were more. Dozens of young twentysomethings from Woodstock had already been driving to Baltimore to buy heroin, some making the trip twice a day.
*
One night in late March 2013, Sergeant Lutz got a lucky break from an unlikely source—a minor traffic stop in neighboring Middletown (population 1,320). A traffic cop had pulled over the driver of a 2008 Hyundai Elantra for a broken license-plate light and smelled marijuana wafting from his car.
The moment the officer returned to his cruiser, Devon Gray floored the Hyundai—before the policeman could piece together that Gray was driving on a suspended license or that he was an armed career criminal who went by the street name D, with several felonies on his record, including multiple convictions for assault and battery, smuggling drugs into a prison, and felony cocaine trafficking. In the course of Gray’s forty-two years, his only legitimate employment, police later learned, had been a stint at George’s Chicken that ended a few months before. And he was one of D.C.’s and New York’s key distributors.
Neither did the Middletown cop know that Bill Metcalf, an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, had already been pursuing Gray for the past three weeks, arranging undercover buys from him in the parking lots of Pizza Hut, Target, 7-Eleven, and Petco in several northern Shenandoah Valley towns. (During the Petco buy, Gray had ridden shotgun with a girlfriend who had her two-year-old in the back seat.) Metcalf surreptitiously captured the buys on video from his vehicle and supplemented the visual record with an audio wire he’d tucked into the clothes of his confidential informant. Metcalf had been called into the case a month earlier by a detective buddy in Front Royal, a half hour east of Woodstock, who explained that Gray was carrying guns, in violation of his probation terms.
Lutz had teamed with Metcalf before on cases and admired his ability to work all night and keep going the next day. “ATF agents are the street cops of the federal world; they’re a different breed and very much more gung ho than we’re allowed to be,” Lutz told me in early 2016. “The [Obama] administration is trying to rein ’em in a little; if there aren’t guns connected to a case, they want ’em to pull back. But ATF agents want to work. They’re like, ‘Call us, call us, call us.’”
Every officer and prosecutor involved in the sprawling D.C. investigation used the same word to describe Metcalf: “relentless.” Frequently they used the same phrase: “He can be a pain in the ass.” “We’ve almost come to blows a couple times,” said Sergeant Kevin Coffman, the Front Royal officer who alerted Metcalf to Gray’s guns.