Two hours later, Dennis saw that Jesse’s door was cracked open and went in to bum a cigarette. His bed was empty.
A few steps away, Dennis found his best friend unconscious in the bathroom, slumped over the vanity, a needle stuck in his arm and the belt he’d used to tie off with in a perfect circle on the floor.
“What do I do?” he shouted, running back and forth between the living room and the bathroom, screaming and crying and grabbing his hair. Some friends quickly fled, chucking the drugs and the paraphernalia into the woods beside the house.
Courtney was one of them. She said she ran because she feared her children would be removed by social service workers. (She does not do drugs, she said, and her kids had been asleep in an upstairs bedroom throughout the party and were not exposed.)
Dennis called 911 and waited for police.
By the time Lutz arrived—between two and six hours later—rigor mortis had set in. “I think there’s still something they’re not telling me,” Kristi says about why Jesse’s friends waited so long to call 911. “Jesse usually used pills instead of heroin, and I don’t think he’d use alone. I’d feel better knowing that he was not alone when he died.”
Lutz remembered thinking how strange it was: Here was a fit, burly construction worker, a guy who’d just put in forty hours of work that week, felled to his core by the diabolical drug.
When a cellphone atop the bathroom vanity rang that morning, Lutz picked it up. It was a counselor, calling Jesse to confirm his Sunday arrival time at the Jacksonville rehab.
*
Over the next several weeks, Metcalf pounded Ronnie Jones with questions, trying to get him to reveal his source. But Jones denied being a drug dealer, denied that the confiscated guns and drugs belonged to him. And who the hell was Mack?
It didn’t help Jones’s case that his gun, recovered from the Dumfries apartment, had Jones’s DNA on it, as did another gun, reported stolen from a car in Woodstock. Or that Metcalf had multiple witnesses claiming that Jones threatened to kill them with it if they didn’t pay off their drug debts.
Police even recorded phone calls from Jones trying to coordinate drug pickups and sales—from inside the jail.
“Shit don’t stop,” he told one of his girlfriends.
He wrote angry letters to people, telling Marie he still loved her but was mad that she’d dimed him to police. Above all, he wanted people to know, he was not a snitch.
“Arthur, I have been hearing a lot of foul shit lately from people who you have spoke to,” began one of Jones’s letters from jail. “I want to set the record straight…I never told/snitch on you. NEVER.…After that nigga Logan [Rose] gave all that info to the [feds] they still told him he would be charged, and he ran to Puerto Rico with his girl that he met at George’s. Do you see me putting a bad bone out there on you for that shit? Hell no, because I’m going to wait until I see you face to face to ask you about it like a man.…I don’t want nobody fucking up my name or character in these streets or jails. If you got questions just holla at me.”
Though most of the user-dealers were happy to sing, it was code among the people at Jones’s level to behave as if not only their dignity was at stake but also their lives, which quite possibly they were.
Not so with dealer Kareem Shaw, who was happy to pull back the curtain on the FUBI ring when the task force arrested him four months after Jesse’s death. Best of all, he led Metcalf to a key piece of information: a face.
“You saw the video, right?” he asked Metcalf.
What video?
An eighty-minute production, Hell Up in East Harlem was a gritty, street-level documentary about a Harlem block plagued by gang violence during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and ’90s. It was all available on YouTube and so, around minute thirty, was the source of the tsunami of misery that descended on Woodstock a decade after the film was made.
Seated on a bench for the camera, Mack wore a red hoodie. He bemoaned the fact that death and prison seemed too often to be the only avenues out of the loop of poverty and drugs.
Appearing on camera had been a rookie mistake for the young, then-low-level dealer, who described walking the block and seeing “guts and brains.…That shit be like some real walkin’ hell shit,” he said. “N—s gettin’ laid out.”
Shaw watched the video with Metcalf and, dutifully—in exchange for substantial assistance at sentencing time—he pointed out Mack. Though the filmmakers identified him only as Matt Doogie, Metcalf was thrilled to have a visual of his target.
“Now I could hear his voice and see his mannerisms,” he said.
*
Still, not even Shaw, who was from New York City and forged the initial connection to Mack through a cousin, knew Mack’s real name. He could, however, describe the general vicinity of the Harlem heroin mill where Mack “stepped on,” or cut, the pure tan powder, diluting it to extend their profits before re-rocking it into pucks.
Metcalf now had more than enough proof to arrest Mack based on witness testimony and scores of cellphone exchanges among Jones, Shaw, and Mack. But where exactly was the apartment, and who exactly was Mack? He felt as if he were being taunted by a ghost.
“Most agents would have written it off, but Metcalf was not gonna leave it alone,” Wolthuis said.
In a city of almost eight and a half million people, now all Metcalf had to do was find the ghost.
*
Mack had recently been released from prison; Metcalf knew that much. One witness remembered that when Jones first landed in Woodstock and struggled to buy bulk heroin, a friend had tipped him off to Mack: “When my cousin gets out [of prison], it’s game on; he’s got the connects.”
Mack was by now a pro, with lawyers on retainer and a network of assistants. Earlier, when he learned that Jones threatened to shoot a customer if he didn’t pay back his drug debt, Mack rebuked Jones, telling him, “Why would you do that? You’re running a business. If you want to harm someone, don’t do it yourself. We’ve got people for that.”
But Mack didn’t always make the best choices about which details to delegate and which jobs to personally execute. When Shaw paid Mack back for the heroin he’d fronted him, the payments were retrieved in cities across the country—in MoneyGram kiosks from New York to San Diego. Someone was picking up the money for Mack, and Metcalf figured it had to be someone he trusted, a relative or girlfriend, perhaps. (On federal probation, Mack wasn’t allowed to leave the state without checking in with his probation officer.)
Late one night, working out of the regional drug task force office in Front Royal, in the upstairs bedroom of an unmarked house, Metcalf reached out to the security department at MoneyGram, read out the transaction numbers from the text messages, and ultimately came away with a woman’s name and several seemingly random addresses in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx.
He cross-referenced the addresses and found one that turned out to be legitimate. He was stunned when, the next morning, he ran that address through the city’s probation and parole database and found a single match: a Brooklyn probationer named Matthew Santiago. It had to be Mack.
The thirty-seven-year-old New York native had recently finished a two-year prison stint for his part in a $2 million marijuana-trafficking conspiracy. He’d gotten out of prison just a few weeks before Jones’s business in Woodstock picked up.