The next county over, in tiny Kermit, West Virginia, Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter Eric Eyre had just won a Pulitzer for pointing out that Big Pharma shipped nearly nine million hydrocodone pills to a single pharmacy in a town of just 392 people, giving Mingo County the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in America. Metcalf had seen it coming as early as 1997. Out of the country at the time, he was serving in the Air Force and hated the thought of missing his ten-year high school reunion, though the turnout was dismal.
The chief organizer, a drug user, had absconded with the class-reunion funds.
“When everybody showed up, she wasn’t there, and neither was the party,” he said.
*
By arresting Jones, Metcalf was not only doing his job; he was atoning for the sins of his father. His wife, though, was starting to complain about his obsession with Jones—he routinely worked till midnight or later, leaving her stranded at home with their four kids. With every new conspiracy chart, he promised he’d request a desk job “after this case.”
“I spent one Thanksgiving on the hood of a car,” doing surveillance work, he said. He did not want to end up like Lutz, who’d recently split with his fiancée, partly due to conflicts over work.
A former Air Force military police officer, his wife, Jessica, understood the life. She’d witnessed how enraged Metcalf had been after arresting a user-dealer in a traffic stop and finding heroin tucked into his baby girl’s shoe, the smell of marijuana blanketing the inside of the car.
But their kids were another story. One night in the middle of the FUBI case, Jessica drove them to the task force headquarters to see Metcalf, and his youngest daughter asked him plaintively, “Daddy, is this where you live?”
He renewed his promise to his wife: After this case…
“Ronnie Jones was a predator, and the people in Woodstock were sheep to him,” Metcalf said. His desire wasn’t just to be a big-time heroin dealer, Metcalf believed. It was also “about money. Control. Manipulation. He created a market that didn’t exist before, then he manipulated it to increase his profits. And that’s the problem with heroin, and why I don’t think it’s going away: The money is insane, and the customers are always there.”
Bulk dealers like Mack, the New York supplier, manipulated Jones by adding their own diabolical spin to the scheme, designed to keep him returning for more: When Jones sent a runner up to Harlem to buy 200 grams of heroin for $13,000, rather than just give the mule what Jones paid for, Mack typically sent the runner home with double what Jones had ordered—400 grams—plus a bill for an additional $14,000, amounting to $5 extra per gram on the fronted drugs. It was double the Pringles at a bargain interest rate, and Jones had no trouble selling the dope.
The rule was: The money had to be paid back to Mack, via Western Union or MoneyGram, before the next order could be placed. The arrangement not only contributed to the exponential growth in heroin in Woodstock and bigger profits for both Mack and Jones, it also created a paper trail that Metcalf could follow. “They thought, ‘These country bumpkins will never figure this out,’” Metcalf said.
*
With Shaw’s supply side of the ring still operating, dozens more low- and mid-level user-dealer arrests were made as the summer of 2013 wore on, including in an EconoLodge motel in Dumfries, where police found dealers setting up shop in a room and selling heroin stuffed into the false bottom of a can of Red Bull. As local task force officers staked out more deal-making hot spots, Metcalf tried to home in on Mack.
Wolthuis plotted out the officers’ progress on the FUBI chart as one arrest led to another. Every time another person was jailed, Wolthuis tallied the offense by the weight of the drugs sold in grams and by the dosage unit: the number of times someone stuck a needle in his or her arm. One low- to mid-level dealer ended up with a five-year sentence for selling the equivalent of between 6,400 and 14,400 needles’ worth of dope.
Metcalf wanted badly to arrest Jones’s main girlfriend, in Dumfries—he’d found the Decapitator loaded in a safe in her apartment next to a concealed-carry permit in her name. Surely she was also complicit and not just going to the movies, as she claimed, as Jones’s heroin made its way to farmers’ kids and high school football stars. Did she really buy Jones’s story about fixing computers at the local library? Didn’t she realize what paid for all those new Lucky jeans?
Wolthuis, the prosecutor, had to keep reminding Metcalf: “There’s this thing the courts require, Bill. It’s called evidence.”
The E-word became part of their banter, with Wolthuis drawing a giant E on a piece of paper and telling Metcalf to stick it to the ceiling above his bed. By the time the case wrapped up the following year, with sixty-six people prosecuted in state courts and eighteen convicted federally, Metcalf presented Wolthuis with a homemade award: a glass-encased can of cheddar cheese Pringles, with a single word on the trophy nameplate: EVIDENCE.
*
In a corner of Wolthuis’s desk, not far from the trophy, he still keeps an old case file open. Experience tells him that the September 2013 death of Jesse Bolstridge, once the Strasburg Rams’ defensive star, was connected to the FUBI ring, but the shards of evidence have never fully formed into a whole. “I don’t forget this one,” he said.
Wolthuis, sixty-one, is known for litigating “death cases,” prosecutions of suppliers in which a person has died as a direct result of that dealer’s drug. From his perch in the U.S. attorney’s office in Roanoke, the same office that prosecuted Purdue Pharma, he’s indicted heroin dealers for decades, long enough to witness the transition from a small, fairly quiet group of mostly black and middle-aged users in the mid-1990s to a much larger, younger, and whiter group. One of his first death cases involved a thirteen-person conspiracy brought to his attention when police found a middle-aged woman slumped over on a chair inside her apartment door, shortly after she’d shot up in the bathroom of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “She was sitting on a claw hammer when [the officers] found her; they’d just left her there all alone to die.” Her friends had propped her up in the chair, he remembered, placed atop the randomly discarded tool.
Another woman prosecuted in that same heroin conspiracy sent her child to the door to deliver the heroin because she was nodding out in her bedroom and couldn’t get up. “There’s just something so fundamentally soul-sucking about heroin,” Wolthuis said.
He said he was still “just waiting for something to fall from the sky” in the Jesse Bolstridge case. The timeline between the point of sale and his death was not airtight: Too much time elapsed between the time Jesse’s best friend, Dennis Painter, bought the heroin and the moment Jessie died, some eighteen hours later, and there were too many people with Jesse in the interim and too many other unknowns.
Metcalf and Lutz believe Dennis bought the heroin from a local user-dealer originally supplied by people in the Jones/Shaw ring, but such death cases are hard to prove in the fluid realm where most overdoses occur, and resources are limited. “We don’t have the capacity to try everyone involved in a ring of hundreds of people,” Wolthuis said. “But we do try to cut the heart out of the monster.”
*
Kristi Fernandez was already scared when a homesick Jesse begged to come home for the weekend from an Asheville sober house in May 2013 against his counselor’s advice. She worried that weekend, too, when he disappeared for hours at a stretch with Dennis. She liked Dennis—and still has pictures of the two of them together playing in the sandbox at their preschool, Grasshopper Green—but she knew full well that Dennis had been in and out of drug rehab for heroin. And as far as she knew, Jesse’s problem hadn’t progressed to that.