*
The two cars screamed as fast as ninety miles an hour. Gray led the local officer on a squealing chase through Middletown, a one-stoplight hamlet, down a scenic byway across I-81, and into neighboring Strasburg. On the southern edge of Strasburg, Gray abruptly stomped his brakes, causing the cruiser to ram the tail of the Hyundai and veer into an embankment before skidding and coming to rest on its side. The wreck left the officer with minor injuries. His police dog, a black Lab named Trooper, broke loose and ran frantically around the totaled car, his training toys strewn across the street.
While the officer extricated himself from the vehicle, Gray drove away, then abandoned his Hyundai and took off on foot—less than a mile from the field where Jesse Bolstridge had made his hometown football fans stand and roar.
*
The case was sprouting new tentacles by the day. As it stretched across state and county lines, Metcalf called in a federal prosecutor from Roanoke who specialized in heroin cases, and a grand jury was eventually convened. The prosecutor’s Obama-era marching orders, according to a road map written by then–attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., was to use discretion in filing criminal charges, reserving the harshest penalties for serious, high-level, and/or violent drug traffickers. Responding to a nearly sixfold increase in the national prison population between 1972 and 2008, Holder wrote: “Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for truly no good law enforcement reason.”
This case seemed to fit all the criteria. It targeted the biggest dealers.
But to get the worst offenders off the streets, investigators typically need witnesses in the form of user-dealers. It’s a messy and often dangerous business, in which police try to glean evidence and witness testimony from lower-level offenders in exchange for what’s called substantial assistance. The unofficial interviews are not typically part of the public record, giving prosecutors and law enforcement officers alike a great deal of discretion over which witnesses to believe and which to target for the harshest punishment.
*
With a fugitive hit-and-run now among his list of offenses, Gray was definitely in the mid-level category. The day after the high-speed chase, he reached out from his hideout—in a tiny town near the base of Shenandoah Mountain—to the same informant Metcalf used for the earlier drug buys. Gray was desperate to buy a gun. (On the day of the chase, he had left the house without his usual complement of weaponry.) Metcalf was eager to do the undercover deal.
Within a week, a new setup was arranged to focus on Gray, a Florida native with a history of evading police. Metcalf arranged to meet Gray and trade him a gun for heroin. The deal would take place in a local storage facility, a public space with long rows of buildings and surrounding fences—easy to surround at a moment’s notice by throngs of federal and local police.
“My story was, I was recently out of jail and cleaning out my storage bin,” Metcalf recalled. “I had some guns there, and I was trying to get back on my feet by trading guns for dope.”
A stocky guy with graying temples and piercing eyes, Metcalf grew out his trim beard for the occasion and wore a wire to capture the quick exchange. As soon as it was finished and Metcalf walked away, federal agents swarmed in to place Gray under arrest.
From the moment he was in handcuffs, he cooperated with authorities.
“I can give you the name of the guy who controls everything,” Gray offered, according to Metcalf and other officers working the case.
It was a huge moment, albeit a messy one, relying as it usually did on joining forces with one criminal to nab another. “In the end, they all sing” is how Metcalf told the story. But desperate people often lied to reduce their prison time, and there were a lot of people crooning some discordant, self-interested tunes.
*
He went by the nickname D.C., Gray told Metcalf, but his real name was Ronnie Jones.
While Jones controlled the heroin supply in the northern Shenandoah Valley, Metcalf would later learn, Kareem Shaw—aka New York—controlled the supply east toward the northern Virginia bedroom communities closer to Washington. Their dope was Mexican, trafficked by a Dominican dealer who ran a lab somewhere in Harlem.
Agent Metcalf and Sergeant Lutz now knew not only D.C.’s name but also where he lived—in a low-income apartment on the outskirts of Woodstock. His drug ring trafficked in seven counties, and federal authorities were on their way to proving he was the largest heroin trafficker along Virginia’s I-81 corridor and possibly in the state. In the small towns that dotted the region, Jones’s business model was wholly new. “When you get someone like Ronnie coming in here with real weight, that’s far beyond a bunch of users piling into a car to go to Baltimore for the day,” Metcalf said.
But a black man in an almost entirely white town driving a Mercedes SUV, even if it wasn’t flashy? That was harder to camouflage than the smell of the chicken plant.
“When big dealers come into small towns, they don’t last long, because they get talked about a lot,” said Don Wolthuis, the assistant U.S. attorney who directed the prosecution of the case. Not much time elapses before their customers become involved with police, who catch the addicted users stealing stuff—or robbing banks—to afford their next buy. “They get dimed out quick,” he said.
“The drug dealer’s dilemma is always: How do I market myself and remain invisible simultaneously?”
Metcalf alerted Lutz to Jones’s identity, only to learn that Lutz had just identified him through another George’s Chicken diversion worker, Logan “Low” Rose, who sold Jones’s heroin from a Honda Civic with gold rims that really did stand out. He had been Jones’s “stick man,” or driver, on occasions when he couldn’t find a mule and had to personally replenish his Harlem supply. Jones wasn’t allowed to leave the state without his probation officer’s permission.
Before Lutz could move in for the arrest, Rose fled to his native Puerto Rico, where federal marshals caught up with him a few days later. They found him sitting on a wall in front of his mother’s tiny shack, eating a bowl of cereal.
When the marshals phoned with news of Rose’s arrest, Lutz was stunned. “We’re like, ‘Puerto Rico? You’re kidding me. But that’s so far away!’”
It was so far away, in fact, that Rose had forgotten it was a territory of the United States, complete with its own federal law enforcement offices.
While Brent Lutz was memorizing Jones’s driver’s-license photo and Bill Metcalf was learning about his gun—a Taurus .357 revolver, nicknamed the Decapitator—Ronnie “D.C.” Jones confided in his neighbor, Marie, one of his user-dealers and one of the many women with whom he kept company. When Jones or his runners went to New York to resupply, Marie later told investigators, “two hundred people I know of would get sick [go into withdrawals]. They could not wait for Jones to get back, and when he got back, everybody was better.”
“You can’t blame Ronnie for everything,” Marie told me. “We’re the ones who stuck the needle in our arms. But we didn’t have heroin available to buy here in town till Ronnie came. What he did ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she said, ticking off a long list of names.
By importing heroin to a small town in bulk, Jones was able to make twice what the dealers in Baltimore and other cities were making. He made so much that he stockpiled new clothes in his new apartment, discarding them after a single wearing. He had a security system installed so that when he opened his front door, a woman’s chipper recorded voice intoned, “Front door. Open.” He kept a personal trainer on call for workouts. He hired a designer to create a logo for an all-natural skin-care line he hoped to sell. He wore gold chains, outfitted his girlfriends in new clothes—one kept her own stacks of new Lucky jeans in his apartment—and told people he followed the motto of rapper Biggie Smalls: “Never get high on your own supply.”