Editor’s Note
Coming to Terms With a Criminal Past
Donnie Andrews is in a federal prison somewhere in the United States, in a special unit for people in the witness protection program. You won’t find any mug shots or other photos of him with our cover story — that was part of the deal, the only way Sun reporter David Simon would get to interview him.
David found out about Donnie through investigators and prosecutors who thought he’d be a great story. “Usually,” David Says, “a guy like this wants to hold things back. He won’t tell you about the things he’s done. Donnie is coming to terms with what he’s done by talking about it. The process is still going on.”
Remember that this is Donnie’s story. David spent a lot of time interviewing him both in person and on the phone, then went back and corroborated as much of it as he could — a surprising amount, he says. But some things that happened many years ago are unverifiable. Still, “where I could check the ancient history,” David says,” “like some of the murders and robberies Donnie talked about from the ’70s and early ’80s, his information is right on the money.”
In some basic way, David feels, the Donnie he knows is not the same person who killed Zach Roach in 1986. “I genuinely enjoy the conversations whenever he calls,” David says. “The story shows this was always someone who had something inside. And what’s happened in the last couple of years has made him even more self-aware.”
— Elizabeth Large [Editor, Sun Magazine]
AFTER A LIFETIME IN THE WEST BALTIMORE DRUG TRADE, DONNIE ANDREWS BELIEVED THERE WAS NO WAY OUT OF THE LEXINGTON TERRACE PROJECTS.
TO LEARN THE TRUTH, HE WOULD HAVE TO KILL A MAN.
West Side Story
By David Simon
Reggie saw him first.
Zack Roach. Hanging with a couple of others on a Gold Street stoop, watching touts and runners working a package in the breaking down. It was coming on six, but the shop was still open for business. Straight time means nothing at Gold and Etting.
“There he is. There’s Zack, there,” said Reggie, slowing the car.
“That ain’t him.”
“Say what?”
“That ain’t him,” Donnie said again, playing it off.
Reggie cursed. “That’s him there… the boy standing up.”
It was Zack, all right. On the street. In the open.
Donnie looked at Reggie, listened to the tremor in his voice, and knew that at that moment there was nothing else to say, that the thing was going to happen. Ten minutes, no, five minutes earlier and Reggie had been talking about going home and getting high, laying up with some girls and firing up what they had bought earlier that night. For hours, they had cruised the same stretch of battered rowhouses, block after block, until weariness and boredom turned the suggestion of morning sunlight into a threat. One more pass, said Reggie. One more pass, then home.
Now suddenly, Reggie Gross was wired.
“Let’s do it.”
No, said Donnie, not this way.
Park the car around the corner, he told Reggie, then you go around the block while I come up Gold the other way. Reggie thought for a moment then nodded and pulled the car to a curb on Division. Donnie had succeeded in sending Reggie the long way around, but still he stepped quickly, hoping to arrive first and somehow tip Zack and the others. Earlier that night, he had done just that, when the boy Anthony — “Fruitloop,” they called him on the street — wandered over while he was standing with Reggie.
“Yo, Donnie.”
Donnie nearly choked. Fruitloop was a friend, but he, too, was a name on Warren’s list. Reggie knew the list, knew he was supposed to be looking for Fruitloop, but he had never seen the boy and didn’t know what he looked like.
“Get away from me,” said Donnie, praying the boy wouldn’t give his name.
“Hey, what’s up? It’s me.”
“Goddammit, get the hell away,” said Donnie. “I’m dirty.”
Thinking Donnie was holding dope and didn’t want a crowd, Fruitloop stalked off to live another day. Zack Roach, on the other hand, was no friend; he was to Donnie’s thinking a user and a liar. But still, Donnie hoped for some similar reprieve, some warning that might get the boy off the stoops.
But no. Reggie was already there.
Donnie pulled his .38 and stood in the shadows, a short distance from the stoop. Zack and the other boy, Touche, were motionless, waiting silently as Reggie held the machine gun to his hip. Touche was on the middle step, with Zack beside him, leaning off the side of the stoop with his eyes on the ground. They ain’t running because they’re thinking robbery, Donnie told himself. They think this is for the dope.
Reggie squeezed the trigger and the gun jumped in his hand. Donnie watched, strangely transfixed, as the top of Touche’s head came off. Wild with fear, Zack Roach bolted wildly at Donnie as Reggie fired another long burst, the bullets smacking against the brick and stone of the rowhouses.
Zack ran directly toward Donnie, who could hear bullets coming closer and realized suddenly that he was in Reggie’s line of fire. With Zack almost on top of him, Donnie raised the gun, took aim and squeezed off one round after another, until Zack tumbled onto the street.
Then he ran.
Back in the car, Reggie was wide-eyed and raving. Did you see that? Did you? Goddamn, did you see me open up with that gun? Goddamn. For days afterward. Reggie couldn’t help but talk about it, telling and retelling the story so many times that Donnie began to wonder who might be listening. Reggie was a big kid, a boxer in fact, who three months earlier had gone a short round with Mike Tyson at the Garden. But for all that size and strength, Reggie Gross could be a child.
Donnie said nothing in the car.
And in the days and months that followed, he found himself brooding. The names and faces of the dead men, the reasons for murder, the way in which it was done — none of it had meaning for him. Zack was a cheat, but Donnie had not been cheated. And Touche, he got killed for sitting on the wrong stoop. This war — Warren’s war — was not his, Donnie reasoned. Yet he had taken Warren’s money and he had taken Warren’s dope and, in the end, he had taken the loaded .38 down to Gold Street.
Time would pass before he could see the act as inevitable, as necessary punctuation to a lifetime in the streets, a life in which some large-caliber steel was never more than an arm’s reach away. Under the top mattress, behind the loose heating vent, in the dip of his sweatpants — the gun was a constant companion.
Survival, after all had been a sucker’s bet for most of 32 years — six of them in state prisons, the rest on the streets of West Baltimore. He was running errands for the local dealer at 13, sticking up corner liquor stores at 18, selling dope at 25 — all of which was mere prelude for the occupation in which Donnie acquired his real reputation.
He robbed drug dealers.
In crowded streets, in darkened stairwells, in stash houses that no cop could ever find, Donnie put the gun to their faces and took their dope. He used it, or sold it, or bartered the larger packages to a competing dealer. Then he went out and did it again. And again, until half the corner boys were giving up bags in tribute, while the other half contracted to have him killed. Time for Larry Donnell Andrews wasn’t borrowed, but stolen outright; every gunfight, every narrow escape brought him closer to a reckoning, to a day when he would take life or have his own taken.
It excuses neither the man nor the act to suggest that there are places in West Baltimore where evil is all but assured, where violence requires only the arrival of its proper servant. Such a moment waited with cold patience on Gold Street.
There, for the first and only time, Donnie Andrews killed a man.
You can’t stop it.
Not with your lawyers, not with your guns. Not with your five-year plans for new prison construction, or your sanctimonious politicians and just-say-no platitudes. Not if the police department bulldozed both sides of Edmondson Avenue clear to the bridge, or called down airstrikes on every tower in the Terrace. Not if the mayor posted those fool signs on every last corner and declared the whole city a drug-free zone.
From a prison cell thousands of miles away, Donnie Andrews wants you to know that nothing changes. It was there when you sent him away, and it’s there right now. It’ll be there whenver you bring him back. Down at the Terrace, change is limited to the faces in the stairwells, in the courtyards, on the Fremont Avenue corners where lookouts mak the arrival of the unmarked police cars with shouts of “rollers” or “Five-Oh.”
Younger faces. Different faces.
Zack is dead, of course. Touche, too. So is the boy Coxson, and Mike-Mike, and Vestor Poole. And Freddie Chandler, who worked for Warren and got aced by the Downer crew in the 221 building. And Tyrone Downer, who lives in a wheelchair now because a bullet caught his spine. And Shorty Small. God knows there’s no forgetting Shorty, who lived just long enough to become like a brother to Donnie, then bled to death in his arms.
Warren’s gone, too, down on some serious federal time. So’s Reggie. And Drunky and C.C.O., who got 15 each; and Dykie Robeson, who swallowed two more than that. And Mo Charles and Chris, who both took 18 years, with Chris telling the judge that he didn’t keep all his money, that he gave a lot of it back to the community. Can’t imagine what the boy was thinking.
And then Donnie, the last man to court, who’s doing 10-to-life in a place apart from the others. Because when all is said and done, the lawyers can only do so much, and after that, the government gets paid in straight time.
Like nothing else, the war proved them all expendable.
And yet down at the Terrace, nobody will his shot today. The shop will be wide open by late morning. Touts will take the money, runners will bring a little bit of the package down, and the fiends will line up at the far edge of the courtyard, scratching and nodding. The money will go up into the towers, up to some ninth-floor apartment to be counted and banded and dropped into nothing more conspicuous than a plastic garbage bag. Then it will be carried far, far away from the Lexington Terrace.
Like Gold and Etting, the projects are 24 hours. Today, tonight or tomorrow, of you got the itch and can’t get what you need on Edmondson or on North Dallas, in Westport or in the Grove, you can go the Terrace. Cash upfront for boy or girl, John or Jane, maybe a little of both if you’re mixing speedballs. No, it won’t be Warren’s package — and say what you want, Warren sold some mean dope — but some new boy’s stepped-on stuff. But you’ll take a chance and take it away, fire it up and wait for the wave to crest. And damned if that first warm rush isn’t always the same.
The Terrace is forever.
Forever because of the fiends, thousands of them, who want that dope, need it the way other souls need to breathe air. Forever because of the Warrens of the world, the predators, who crave the power as much as the money. God knows it wasn’t enough for Warren Boardley, at the age of 24, to count his millions in silence. In the housing project where he grew up, Warren had to be feared. He needed absolute loyalty from his fiends, unequivocal destruction for his enemies. He needed everyone in the Terrace to know exactly what the gunfire meant, needed them to shake their heads over the latest dead man and know that the word on the street was true, that Warren don’t play.
And what was it Donnie needed? What was in it for him?
The question hangs in the antiseptic air of a prison visiting room, hands like dead weight on a man who sits slumped in a wooden chair, bakced up to a cinder-block wall. Dark brown eyes wander across the empty room before fixing themselves on scuffed linoleum at his feet.
“For me?” he says, surprised.
There is no flash to Donnie Andrews — baseball cap, sweat pants, knitted sweater, high-top tennis shoes, one thin gold chain serving the simple crucifix that hands from his neck — nothing that gives truth to the deeds. He isn’t all that big a man; 6 foot even and 190, maybe 200 pounds, but the build is solid, a fire-hydrant frame. The face, too, is sturdy and broad, the features open, the smile, quick and infectious.
“Well,” he says, struggling with it, “it wasn’t about the money…”
It never was. Even when he was out on his own, doing robberies, the money didn’t matter. It went to dope or women or parties. Hell, he gave away most of the money from the Downer shooting, gave it to Jo Jo and the other people he was living with on Carey Street.
“… and I could get all the dope I needed.”
True fact. He could walk out his door, go down the block, and half the corner boys would give it up just to keep the gun from coming out. Besides, the dope was never live-or-die to Donnie; he liked it, he fired it, but if it wasn’t around he just slept it off and came out the other side. He never got sick the way the fiends did.
“It was, like…”
Donnie pauses at the thought, remembering one long-ago stickup at a West Baltimore bar. He went into that place flush, with a roll of $1,400 in his pocket and no intention of doing anything but buying a soda. It was something to do with the bartender looked at him, something to do with the gun that Donnie knew was just below the cash box.
Go on, the bartender seemed to say. Just try me.
“… It was something I couldn’t get anywhere else.”
“Donnie,” his brother once asked him, “you really think she’s our mother?”
Kent wasn’t kidding, either, he wanted to know. And Donnie, who wondered the same thing himself now and then, gave him a plain answer.
“I guess so,” Donnie said, “she says she is anyhow.”
But if there was blood to tie that woman and her children, you couldn’t tell from what passed between them. In a hundred small ways, in acts of omission more than cruelty, she let them know that they were resented, that they were there on sufferance alone.
They were children of a man no longer there, a man who stayed in Carolina when she made her way north, and perhaps for that reason, they became interlopers in their own house. Donnie often thought that if he had stayed away from that house, if he had stayed with Miss Ruth, perhaps, it might have been different.
It was Miss Ruth who first gave him that feeling of home, of belonging. A childless woman who lived at the other end of Pulaski Street, she volunteered to care for Donnie when he first came to Baltimore, and with a new man and new babies on the way, Donnie’s mother readily agreed to keep her growing son under a neighbor’s roof.
Miss Ruth was a working woman, a hospital nursing assistant, who loved Donnie like he was hers by birth. He had a bed of his own in a room of his own, with new clothes, picture books, Christmas presents. For a few precious months, while his brother and sister ran a gauntlet of abuse in their mother’s house half a block away, Donnie was sweetly spoiled. It was Miss Ruth who taught him letters, who dressed him up proud and walked him to Sunday church. She was the one who told him, with absolute conviction, that he could be anything he wanted.
The following year, he was sent south to spend the summer with his Carolina cousins and he got on the train willingly, confident of his new-found place in a fixed, finite world. He returned to Baltimore in the fall to find his things back at his mother’s house. He was old enough for school now, Miss Ruth told him. Old enough to live at home.
What followed made him hard. His mother’s house was an ordeal, a sentence to be served. Between mother and son, the only emotional currency was obligation — cleaning, laundry, chores. Once, when he and Kent had forgotten to do the floors, they woke to their mother with a barber’s strap and a beating that ended only when they were downstairs, pushing mop and pail in early-morning darkness.
There was no joy in that house, no running jokes between family members, no quiet conversations around the kitchen table. The comfort of family, of shared lives, that Miss Ruth had shown him soon seemed to be another life entirely.
When he was 9 or 10, his stepfather made the mistake of shimming a lopsided table with a tin that contained loose coins. Donnie initially greeted the discovery with caution, taking only the occasional dime or two from the collection. But as days passed and the deductions went unnoticed, caution became caprice and Donnie soon treated much of the neighborhood to ice cream.
“Why did you take the money?” his stepfather asked after discovering the theft.
“Because I wanted ice cream,” Donnie replied.
His stepfather was a good man, kind in his way, who heard some purity in the answer and offered only a mild rebuke. Donnie’s mother was another story.
“Why,” she asked him after the beating, “why are you here?”
Donnie had no answer. But he would not be there long.
At 12, he was out in the street, learning lessons on west-side corners. He stayed out all hours, doing anything rather than go home or go to school, and he found a belonging, a companionship, in the street that mattered more than anything else in his life. He learned to fight, to steal, to survive. With the other boys his age, he began “creeping,” sneaking into stores and stealing everything not nailed down. While the manager’s attentions were drawn to one kid decoyed at the counter, Donnie and the others would be on the other side of the store lifting things.
Then there were the errands for the local heroin connection, who ran his shop from a small drugstore, followed by the thieving from the railroad cars on the west-side tracks. Then came the wine, the weed and eventually the heroin. Finally, at age 17 or 18, there came the gun.
God knows he was good with it, working with the teen-age crews that hung on Poplar Grove. Donnie found he had the temperament for armed robbery, an ability to read the street, to see and act on things seconds before they actually occurred. He learned that he’d rather hit a store than someone outside, out where anything might happen. He learned, too, that there were lines his conscience could not cross, that he could not put the gun to a woman. Most of all, he learned to project a quiet menace, to stay calm and let the gun do the work. A small pistol can get a man into trouble, Donnie came to believe, but a bigger gun — a .38 or .44 — can get him out. Wave the big gun and they won’t argue.
As crime sprees go, it wasn’t a long ride — store robberies, drug dealers, numbers men, a couple of payrolls — ending with a New Year’s tavern robbery in ’73. Donnie was almost 19 then, working with a boy named Haywood, who convinced him the bar would be a cakewalk. It might have been, too, if they both weren’t loaded on pills: Problems began when Haywood spent too much time in the bar, making the counter-man servce free bottles to customers for New Year’s, then continued outside, where they had a helluva time getting the car out of park. It stalled on them after a dozen blocks, and they were pushing the damn thing when the cops came up.
He did five years, most of it with the redneck guards up in Hagerstown, coming out wiser in one way only: He would back away from the commercial stick-ups and street robberies, concentrating instead on the dealers. This, he knew, was a high-risk venture, for the simple fact that any self-respecting drug trafficker feels the need to respond in a meaningful way when his product disappears. He can’t call the police, but he will, if he can, put steel to the back of your head and compress the trigger.
“I didn’t think about that,” he says now. “I just kept doing it.”
He lived hand-to-mouth, with survival resting on wit and luck, not to mention the weight of his reputation. After all, most of the men he robbed had no heart at all; some would offer free samples before he even brought the gun out. Once, as he and a partner were preparing to hit a stash house, the terrified dealer began throwing packages of dope out the front window, pleading with him not to come through the door.
Even those dealers who could not be cowed still had to be cautious, knowing Donnie could find them just as easily as they might find him, In the beginning, there were a few threats, a few ambushes, a fire-fight or two in which both sides miraculously emerged unscathed. Once, he jumped from the Poplar Grove rail bridge to avoid a pursuing dealer. On another occasion, with a posse battering down the door, he had to leave a Murphy Homes apartment from an upper balcony, suffering nothing more than a sprain.
But the pot soon boiler over.
In the summer of ’82, when he hit a Saratoga Street stash house with three others — the crew being Donnie, Shorty Boyd, Roamie and John Bailey — they caught some younger boys on the first floor with cash and dope. A lot of dope. Up on the second floor, a major dealer by the name of Cookie Savage was found snorting some lines of his own. Cookie was no corner boy — he could make people dead just by picking up a phone — but Donnie jacked him up just the same, forcing Savage to give up jewelry, wristwatch, cash, and an ounce of quality coke.
A good night’s work, or so it seemed until Roamie was shot to death a week later and word got back that Cookie Savage had contracts for all of them. Friends warned them to stay out of the projects, but Bailey wouldn’t listen. The cops found him in a third-floor stairwell at the 770 building, three bullets to the head and a loaded .32 still tucked in his pants.
That left Donnie and Shorty Boyd, and neither man wanted to wait any longer. They loaded up and went hard after Savage — kill or be killed, Donnie reasoned. They almost caught him, too, on a late summer afternoon up off Athol Avenue, where Savage kept a girlfriend. Dressed as joggers, hooded sweat shirts over their heads, the two of them were running at half-speed down the street as Savage walked toward his car.
“Now,” said Shorty, reaching for the gun.
“Easy,” Donnie told him. “Not yet.”
They were less than a block away when Savage suddenly made them, jerking his head up to see Shorty Boyd bringing the gun out of his sweats. Terrified, the dealer crashed through the front door of the nearest apartment building, racing out the back and disappearing in the alley. Shorty wondered aloud what made Savage look up at the last minute.
“All that cocaine,” said Donnie, oblivious to the irony. “It makes you paranoid.”
As if Savage wasn’t problem enough, Donnie was down by the projects a week later, out on the corner when another stick-up artist named Pat Mills decided to jack up one of the Giles brothers. A good-sized dealer himself, Eggie Giles too the robbery to heart and came back on Donnie and Pat Mills both.
Caught without a gun one morning, Donnie was ambushed in a west-side alley. But he pretended to have a weapon inside his jacket, and the young boys working for Eggie got scared and ran. Then, Eggie himself caught Donnie up on Poplar Grove, shooting holes in a taxi until Donnie dove from the back seat and raced down to the railroad bridge, step for step with the terrified hack.
Savage, the Giles brothers — Donnie was buying enemies wholesale. He loaded up and waited, only to be saved at summer’s end when another dealer intervened to broker a truce, all-out war being bad for business. Melvin Stanford, who was supplying most of the Terrace, did the honors, warning Donnie and Shorty Boyd to be more careful about whose dope they ran off with. Damn, Melvin told him, some of my own people in the projects are saying that you also been robbing them.
No, said Donnie. Not me. Not this time.
You took the 100 joints off of Eggie, didn’t you?
That was Pat’s idea, said Donnie.
“You weren’t with him?”
“Well,” said Donnie, “I was there.”
Melvin was appeased, if not entirely satisfied. Donnie would lay low for a while, deal a little dope for Will Franklin up on Laurens Street, and promise to leave the project dealers alone. As a show of faith, Eggie Giles and Cookie Savage both got back their jewelry, then agreed to drop their contracts.
Almost despite himself, Donnie would live.
Greed sparked the war, pride fueled it.
God knows there was enough money in the Terrace for every last one of them. God knows the gunfire wasn’t going to bring that much more money to anyone’s pocket. But then, Warren was always fighting for something more than money.
Negotiations broke down in January, with the Downers and Jim-Jim Ellis in one corner, Warren and Chris Burrows in the other; each side arguing for a larger share of the project, each side threatening to oust the other from the stairwells of the contested 221 building. There was more heat when a street dealer stole $4,000 from Spencer Downer and went over to work for Boardley. Then came the brawl in the project courtyard that March when Jim-Jim got beat by Chris and Warren. And finally, the first firefight at the 221 tower, when Warren had to run from Spencer Downer, taking a bullet in the foot.
That truly began it. The Terrace had seen Warren run, a humiliation that could only be answered with a holocaust. In the end, Warren would own the Terrace and the Poe Homes, own it all at a cost of seven murders and 14 wounded, all but a handful of them tied directly to his feud with the Downers.
For Donnie, hostilities began that August, when he shot Spencer Downer for $1,000.
At the time, his reasons for taking the contract seemed diffuse, even inconsequential. He had no stake in the war and nothing against Spencer personally. Sufice to say that when death comes that cheap to a man, then so does life.
“I didn’t respect myself, I didn’t respect anyone. I didn’t see any way out of it. I mean, there was always this part of me that wanted to stop the drugs and the women and the parties, but I shut it out. I wouldn’t listen to it because I couldn’t see any way of beginning again. I just couldn’t see it.”
What he did see — all he could see — was the money. Donnie was 32 then, still firing drugs, still selling a little in the street, still playing a younger man’s game one day at a time. Three thousand, Reggie told him. Three thousand from Warren if you put the gun to Spencer. Donnie knew Warren’s money was good, his dope even better.
He never saw himself as a murderer — not the way the government would come to see him. To the government, to any cop that punched him up on the city computer, BPI number 156–663 was a finished product: Andrews, Donnie, alias Donnie Anders, FBI number 422885H, with a career criminal notation atop the printout. Caution — armed target.
“Look at him. He’s got killer eyes,” an FBI supervisor would later declare in Donnie’s presence, an assessment that surprised and angered him. You got them same eyes, thought Donnie to himself, only you’re walking around with a badge and gun.
No, for Donnie, the shooting of Spencer Downer was merely incremental, a thoughtless summation to everything that occured before. As a boy, he learned to steal, and as a young man, to rob at the point of a gun. In time, he learned that to save himself from vengeance, he was willing to take life. Each step was taken by a man who expected nothing more from this world than drugs and women, whose pride rested on little more than his ability to survive. Each step was not so much a conscious decision, but an absence of decision, a testament of personal faithlessness. Donnie required no real rationalization, no crisis of conscience; murder for hire was merely the last, suffocating embrace in a love affair with failure.
“What am I gonna use?”
Reggie gave him a .38 and brought the car around.
He caught Spencer coming off an MTA bus at Saratoga and Fremont. Camouflaged in an Orioles cap and shades, Donnie had the gun to the man’s head, point-blank, then suddenly lowered it — a last, fragile act of equivocation — firing into the upper shoulder. It was the third ambush of Spencer Downer that summer and, once again, Spencer survived the wounds. Warren cut the promised payment to a third, but still, Donnie became the man of the hour in the Terrace, the newest shark in Warren’s tank.
The following day, Reggie took him to see The Man at the Bob’s Big Boy in Reisterstown Road. Warren was a much younger man, dark-skinned, with wide features, deep brown eyes and a hard, weary temperament that somehow suggested more than 25 years. Warren was tutored in the drug trade by Melvin Stanford, then struck out on his own when Stanford went down on a federal sentence in ’82. Since then, the world had become simple for Warren Boardley; you were his friend, or you were hunted.
As Reggie finished his own meal and began pulling food off the other two trays, Warren expressed genuine pleasure with the attack on Spencer Downer. A good start, he told Donnie, but it wasn’t enough. Spencer had to go. And Ty Downer, he was the one that started the whole thing. Zach and Fruitloop, too. Warren showed Donnie the list of men who needed to die. On that slip of paper, there were more than a dozen names.
When you worked for Warren, Donnie learned, you worked on retainer. Reggie, Mo Charles, Drunky, Big Ed Woodford — every one of Warren’s soldiers was paid regularly in money or dope. The army answered to a cousin of Warren’s by the name of Aaron Hedspeth — “Asaready” was his street name — who assigned shooters to the various targets. It was Asaready who would dial Warren’s beeper, then punch in a special three-digit code when a shooting was about to go down. Warren liked to know when bullets were flying.
For Donnie, the lure was basic — money and dope, all that he needed — whether or not he actually used the gun. Not only that, but Warren also let his people rob the independent dealers with impunity, turning the Terrace into Donnie’s personal hunting ground.
And yet at the same time, Donnie had to contend with Asaready and Reggie, who kept pushing him to follow through on the contracts. For a couple of weeks, Donnie played them off: This job was too tough, that one needed to be done at night. Once, before the Gold Street ambush, he and Reggie were cruising when they spotted Zach out in the open.
Do him, Reggie urged. Do him now.
No, said Donnie. Too many people know me on this street.
The truth was that he didn’t want to kill. He wanted the dope, he wanted the money, but damned if he was actually going to start shooting all the people in the world who couldn’t get along with Warren Boardley. Once, after the attack at the bus stop, he actually ran into Spencer Downer near the Terrace. Spencer had no idea who shot him, of course; he remembered nothing but some hopper wearing an Orioles hat and shades. Past was past, thought Donnie, as the two men shared a speedball.
Standing beside Donnie through all of this was Shorty Small. Sweet Shorty, who came back to the projects after doing a long prison term, then stuck to Donnie like white on rice. Shorty was also in his mid-30s, having spent most of his adult life behind bars, and Donnie wondered whether it was all that lost time that gave the bot such heart. Like his nickname, Shorty was diminutive — but in size only. Shorty would be the first to follow Donnie down any alley, the last to leave in a firefight, the one who’d be there every morning with Donnie’s shot of dope and a smile to light up any Terrace stairwell. The two men had known each other in prison, but it was the street that made them true companions. Batman and Robin. Cisco and Pancho. Donnie and Shorty — for one of the few times in his life, Donnie Andrews knew someone worth caring about.
It was with Shorty that he managed to bluff Warren on one of the contracts. Knowing that neither Boardley nor Hedspeth knew Fruitloop’s real name, Donnie cut a small murder story from the morning newspaper, then showed it to Warren. The victim in the story was about the same age as Fruitloop and had been shot to death on McCulloh Street. No arrest was reported.
“That’s the boy Fruitloop,” Donnie assured Warren. “I pointed him out on the corner and Shorty here took care of him.”
Gratified, Warren paid the contract.
After that seeming murder, Donnie found himself as a favorite, serving as Warren’s personal bodyguard. He was there for the meetings between Warren and his lieutenants, as well as the re-up days when 50 or 60 street dealers would get their share of the new package, each of them turning over $5,000 or more from previous sales. When Donnie wanted dope or money, Warren would simply point to an underling. See my man over there, Warren would say, he’ll take care of you. Damned if working for Warren wasn’t the easiest kind of money, thought Donnie, who had all but forgotten the original terms of employment.
In the end, it took the carnage of Gold Street to make him remember. Gold Street, where Reggie drove once more around the block, where the boys were working a package from a rowhouse stoop, where a machine gun sputtered, where a man ran in terror toward a loaded .38 revolver.
After Gold Street, nothing would ever be easy.
After Gold Street, the brooding progressed to nightmares — apparitions in which Donnie could see the terror in Zach Roach’s eyes, could study once again the look on the dead man’s face. By light of day, Donnie found that as he moved around the west side he consciously avoided the crossroads of Gold and Etting; he couldn’t bring himself to go back there. It was, for Donnie, the first and strangest revelation. Twenty years in the street should have made him immune, 20 years should have steadied him for the reckoning on Gold Street. He had lived by violence — prided himself on it — taking what he wanted at the point of a gun; yet in the end, he had no stomach for murder.
He began to drift from Warren, and Warren from him.
It didn’t help matters that Asaready began talking trash about him and Shorty, telling Warren that they weren’t willing to work, or worse, that they were plotting against him. Hell, it was Asaready himself who had come to them with a proposition that they hit Warren and Chris Burrows and take over business. Donnie told Asaready there was no way in hell, and now Asaready was giving Warren all kinds of bad news on Donnie.
In January, one of Warren’s boys got sent to Hagerstown and discovered that Fruitloop was alive, doing time there on a drug charge. After that, Donnie stopped hanging in the projects. Word on the street was that the wheel had come full circle: Warren now had a contract for him.
He spent his nights working in another part of the city, or up at Laurens and Carey, where Donnie gave away much of the dope he stole. Anyone came up on Carey Street looking for him, Donnie would hear about it from half a dozen friends. Days were spent behind the locked door of his apartment, listening for the sounds of slowing cars or heavy footfalls. The gun stayed loaded and within reach. The nightmares continued.
It was in the worst cold of February, in the quiet of the early-morning hoyrs, when Donnie heard a faint, muffled sound outside the door. Jumping out of bed, he grabbed the gun, killed the lights and waited.
Nothing. No sound.
After a good three minutes, he cracked the door and stared out into the street. Then he flung the door wide and fell down to his knees near the edge of his stoop, shouting for someone to call an ambulance.
Shorty Small was barely breathing, his chest soaked in blood.
“Shorty, oh man. Who did it? Who did it?”
Shorty shook his head.
“Oh man, Shorty…”
“Who are you?” asked Shorty.
“It’s me. It’s Donnie.”
Shorty shook his head again.
“I can’t see you,” he said, at the point of dying. “Who are you?”
Only later would Donnie begin to think about the question. Only later would he begin to equate Shorty’s voice with his own conscience. That night on Carey Street, the Western District cops allowed no reflection; they arrived in a swirl of blue emergency lights to find Donnie’s gun in the apartment and accused him of participating in the robbery.
“What robbery?”
Shorty Small had tried to take off the liquor store up on Presstman, only to get shot to pieces by the counterman. The robbery was reckless impulse; Shorty went up there with a broken revolver, a gun that wouldn’t even fire.
The patrolmen listened to a little of Donnie’s argument. He was asleep. Shorty was his friend and had come to him hurt. Look at me, said Donnie, I’m not even dressed.
“He was my friend…”
A Western lieutenant arrived, called Donnie a liar and some other things, then smacked him hard in the face. The patrolmen looked at their shoes, embarrassed. With his hands cuffed behind him, Donnie hesitated for only a second before rearing up to kick the departing lieutenant in the back of the head. They beat him, of course, but it had to be.
Shorty would have done the same.
“If you don’t want to tell us,” Ed Burns told him at the end of the first interrogation, “maybe Reggie will.”
Maybe Reggie will.
In the beginning, Donnie didn’t like Ed Burns. Not a little bit. But then agaib, there isn’t much reason to appreciate someone when they’re kicking down your door at six in the morning. Three months after Shorty’s death, Donnie was once again on his apartment floor, cuffed and naked. He vaguely remembered one of the agents talking trash, giving a little speech to Georgianna.
“Do you know who you’re sleeping with?”
Georgianna looked at him.
“That,” said the agent, pointing to Donnie, “is death itself.”
When they came through his door that morning, Donnie saw the men pursuing him as nameless, faceless rollers, as interchangeable pieces of the same cold, massive machine. Only in time would he be able to separate them in his mind.
There was Burns, of course, a city detective who could surprise Donnie with his opinions, his understanding of the Terrace. Dope was dope, Burns told him, but all this killing has got to stop. And Ron Groncki, who not only made you feel like you had never done anything wrong in the world, but cooked the finest spaghetti sauce in Baltimore. And Jimmy Fitzsimmons, a decent guy trapped in the body of an FBI agent, who still tried to be fair in his own three-piece way. And, of course, Harry Edgerton, Burns’ partner, who did the first decent thing when Donnie was down on the floor, freezing.
“It’s cold in here,” Edgerton said, pulling him up. “Let’s get you dressed.”
They found the bullets, .32 shells mostly, but Donnie’s gun was hidden behind the vent. Donnie watched Groncki stick his hand halfway down the slot, then come up empty.
“Nothin’ in here.”
Thank God. If they found the weapon, he was gone on a 15-year charge as a state parolee. They knew it, he knew it. The raid was a chance for the feds to put a charge over Donnie’s head, then try to roll him into Warren. Denied the gun, the agents took Jo Jo’s works and settled for a drug paraphernalia charge.
“You want to talk with us?” asked Fitzsimmons.
Not really. Not yet.
The raid was in May, and by then, the government was all over the Terrace. All over Warren. Unmarked cars were cruising the Terrace and Poe Homes, and players on the fringe of the organization were being visited by agents and police detectives — IRS, FBI, Baltimore city. It seemed like every roller in the city had a piece of the action.
That same month, Reggie had come back to the Terrace after eight months courtside in the city jail, held for murdering that boy Coxson on Fremont Avenue, firing the same .38 that Donnie used at Gold and Etting a week or so later. Coxson was killer on Robert Dowdy’s contract, shot down in the middle of the street in retaliation for the murder of Dowdy’s pregnant wife, who was herself shot to death in her apartment in a drug robbery gone bad. Warren didn’t even like Dowdy, but he took the Coxson contract for $15,000, subcontracting the work to his own soldiers. Warren like the other dealers to know his people were serious.
When the Coxson case went before a city jury, Warren did his best for his man — Donnie heard that a defense witness was paid $5,000 to alibi Reggie on the day of the murder. After the acquittal, Reggie came back to the Terrace like some kind of war hero. In front of three eye-witnesses, he had killed a man in broad daylight, then kicked the government’s ass in court: “Now that I was found innocent,” he told a newspaper reporter, “where are all the apologies? Someone’s got to pay.”
The interview with the reporter was stupid, thought Donnie. You beat the charge, you just walk. You don’t rub their noses in it. Down at the Terrace, the investigation actually seemed to pick up steam after Reggie came back. Like the law took it personal.
“If you don’t tell us, maybe Reggie will.”
No, Donnie thought to himself, Reggie won’t roll over on Gold Street, not after beating one murder in court. But what about all those people Reggie told, all the people who heard him bragging in the days after the murders? How much of that was getting back to the government?
That same month, Donnie got bad news from a friend coming off courtside. Asaready was at the jail, locked up on a gun charge, and — get this, the friend told him — he’s going out every and comin’ back with them Burger King bags. To Donnie, this was a sure sign that Asaready was cooperating with detectives, who will take a man out of jail on a writ, then feed him fast food for lunch.
Maybe Reggie will. No, not Reggie. But Asaready, hell yes. In a New York minute.
The raid on Donnie’s apartment that month was only the first, with the feds hitting his place again three weeks later, attempting to stack drug possession and paraphernalia charges on top of him, pressuring him to cooperate. They began sending informants into him as well.
One young boy from the Terrace, Bo-Bo, had been courtside on a robbery charge; now he was back on the street, following Donnie around, asking strange questions about machine guns and murders. On one June afternoon, Bo-Bo asked Donnie to bring his gun down on the corner and meet some people. Donnie went halfway, then doubled back and asked another boy to hold his weapon. Even before Donnie got back to the corner, Bo-Bo and another guy — a guy who looked a little like Donnie — were jacked up on the wall. Detectives were patting the two down for weapons, with one of the cops looking directly at Bo-Bo, as if to ask why the hell they couldn’t find the gun.
When the charges from the May raid came to court, Burns was waiting for him at the Wabash Avenue courthouse. You can take it to trial, the detective told him, or I can get the prosecutor to drop the case so you can come talk with us.
“C’mon,” Burns told him. “Let’s get it over with.”
He went just to see what they knew, or maybe that’s what he told himself at the time. He knew that he was tired of the cat and mouse, tired of running. In the daytime, Donnie had to watch for Warren and the government both; at night, in his sleep, he had to contend with Zack Roach, tumbling into the street. He was ready to listen.
“I’m driving my personal car today,” Burns told him in the parking lot. “So wipe your feet.”
Donnie laughed, climbing inside, and in the back-and-forth banter of that short car ride, Burns could feel the walls beginning to come down. He did not know how much Gold Street bothered Donnie, but he could sense, intuitively, a man looking for a way out. On his own, Donnie had already arrived at a decision.
In the interview room at FBI headquarters, it was Burns and Fitzsimmons, with Burns doing most of the talking. The Downer shooting. Gold Street. The contracts. The dope. Reggie. Warren. Donnie listened with his best poker face, but in truth he was impressed. Most of the information was on the money, and Donnie could tell from a few select details that the source was Asaready. Still, Asaready wasn’t there for either shooting. They had no witnesses, no gun, no evidence.
If you don’t want to tell us, maybe Reggie will.
Not likely, thought Donnie. Not after beating the Coxson charge.
We can find witnesses to the Downer shooting. We can get Spencer to testify.
Yeah, thought Donnie, except I just got high with Spencer a few months back. He still don’t know who it was shot him.
We’re offering you a way out.
For that, Donnie had no answer. None at all. For a long time, his faith had been limited to the belief that there was no way out of the Terrace. It was too late to believe otherwise. Too much had happened, and if Warren didn’t take him, a prison would.
This might be a last chance to do something for yourself.
What kind of chance? What kind of time are we talking about? Ten years? Thirty years? Natural life? How much will be left for me if I come out?
That depends on what you did.
What if I shot Spencer?
What about Gold Street?
No, not Gold Street.
If it’s just Spencer, you might stay on the street. If it’s Gold Street, 10 to 15. Maybe you can work some of that off, but you’re not gonna walk on a murder. You willing to take a polygraph?
Yeah, said Donnie, playing for time, I’m willing. But let me think on it.
He wanted to believe them when they talked about federal protection, about a prison apart from Warren’s people. He wanted to believe in the promises of drug treatment, of job training, of a sentence that would leave him with a chance for some other life, for some better ending than Shorty had shown him. Since Shorty’s death, Donnie had grown closer to Georgianna; now he wanted to believe there could be something for the two of them.
He went to his brother.
“What should I do? Should I believe them?
Kent thought for a moment. After a couple of prison terms, Donnie’s younger brother had cleaned himself up. He had a job now, a family, a future.
“If you’re just gonna go back to doing your crimes, then don’t do it,” Kent told him. That would make Donnie nothing but a snitch. “But if you’re really going to try to straighten out, then you should take the deal.”
There would be no need for the polygraph. He went before a federal grand jury in August, answering every question put to him about Gold Street and the Downer shooting. He told them about Warren and Reggie and all of Warren’s troops, about the dope and the contracts, about the re-up days with $5,000 apiece from half the street dealers at the Terrace. He told it true.
At a short ceremony attended by city detectives and federal agents, he married Georgianna. She would wait for him, or at least he hoped that she would. Then he gave himself over to the law, putting his life in the hands of men he had known for little more than weeks. And once the issue was decided, the detectives learned, Donnie was 100 percent.
Burns, for one, was amazed at Donnie’s commitment, his willigness to participate in the probe and even suggest scenarios for producing evidence. Conditioned to expect reluctance or incompetence from cooperators, the detectives and agents managed a grudging respect and eventually a genuine affection for their informant. Donnie seemed to want the investigation to succeed, as if Warren’s fall was the only way for Donnie to come to terms with his own past, to somehow exorcise his own demons. Donnie, in turn, relished being needed, being treated like an essential part of a team. Like no one else, he could take these people into Warren. He knew the Terrace. He knew the players. He could see the street in a way that even veteran detectives could not. Once, when Donnie was out on surveillance with Burns, he caught a glimpse of another west-side dealer rolling around a nearby corner in a new Jeep.
“Did you see Chin go by just then?” he asked Burns.
“Chin Farmer?”¹
“Yeah. He drove down down Eager in that Jeep.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, man, you didn’t see that? Damn, Ed.”
At times, Donnie reminded Burns of a Kit Carson scout he had once known in Vietnam, a man who could see things in a jungle that no other man would ever find. In every essential way, Baltimore was Donnie’s jungle, and in the end, it would be Donnie who brought up the idea of wearing a wire into the projects. We’re here to take Warren down, Donnie agreed, and if that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes.
The prosecutors were initially reluctant. Having taken the plea on Gold Street, Donnie was looking at 10-to-life guaranteed. What if he ran? What if he gets killed, or somehow manages to tip Warren. The investigation could be set back months.
The detectives and agents backed him. Donnie was straight up, they said.
But out on the street, even the cops had occasional doubts. Riding around with Donnie in the back seat, Groncki once drove within sight of the high-rises and Donnie began to reminisce, talking about the time he had jumped from the balcony.
“You weren’t hurt?”
Hell, Donnie told them, that wasn’t as far to fall a when Eggie Giles came after him up on Poplar Grove and he had to jump from the rail bridge. Landed perfectly and just kept running. Eggie never got another shot at him.
Groncki looked at the other agent in the car. Christ, they both thought, if he runs, we’re history. We might as well just wave goodbye and start writing the reports. Still, they kept him out there with them on surveillance looking for ways to catch Warren and his people on the street.
When the time came to go directly at Warren, an FBI supervisor — a man who knew nothing about the Terrace — suddenly decided he knew how to make the play. Donnie would come up on Warren when Warren wasn’t expecting it. Catch him off his guard.
Right, thought Donnie, I’m gonna go out there unarmed and sneak up on Warren Boardley, a man who wants me dead. The last fool that tried something like that spent quality time in a hospital trauma unit. This downtown suit was gonna get him killed.
“That won’t work,” Donnie said.
“You mean you don’t want to do it.”
“No…”
Out of nowhere, Harry Edgerton suddenly took his side, standing up to the supervisor.
“If he says it won’t work then it probably won’t work,” the detective said. “He’s the one who knows Warren. He’s the one who’s going to be taking the risk.”
Donnie listened, amazed. A cop was saving his life.
“Donnie,” said Edgerton, turning to him, “how do you think we should do it?”
The go-between motioned form the edge of the courtyard. Come ahead.
“This is as far as I go,” said Ceruti.
Donnie nodded, so damn scared he could barely breathe. Ceruti was an older black detective, brought into the probe as an undercover. He would be the closest man to Donnie, standing with a gun in each coat pocket. But he would be a block away, and if Warren’s people came up shooting, Ceruti would not matter.
“You ready?”
“Yeah,” said Donnie, feeling a little like a microphone stand. The Nagra recorder and body mike were beneath his underwear, on the chance that Warren would be less likely to reach down there for a wire.
Slowly, Donnie began moving into the courtyard that marks the center of the Poe Homes, the same courtyard where Pat Mills got himself killed. He tried to push that thought away, and his mind wandered to a bad joke he once heard, a ghetto tale in which some black guy is made to walk the plank of a ship with a man-eating shark swimming in the water below. The body hits the water and there’s a whole lot of splashing and the black guy comes up out of the water and tears ass back to shore, the shark trailing behind him.
“Yo, Mr. Shark,” the guy yells, “you might be king of the ocean and master of the sea, but you got to be one swimmin’ mother — — — to outswim me.”
Yeah, right, Donnie told himself, as he walked across the courtyard. Warren might be master of the game and king of the projects, but he’s got to be one ambushing mother to get at me. After all, Donnie told himself, he had set it up beautifully, sending one of Jimmy Fitzsimmons’ FBI calling cards to Warren through an intermediary.
“The feds left this with my mother, tryin’ to talk to me about things,” he told the go-between, showing the business card. “Tell Warren I want to ask him ‘bout it.”
The underling took the card into the projects. It was a perfect ploy, the only one, perhaps, that could explain Donnie’s willingness to seek out a man with whom he had not spoken for seven months, a man who supposedly wanted him head.
A few minutes later, that same man was waiting for him in the courtyard, standing alone in front of a low-rise but closely watched by three or four of his people, all of them obviously armed. One apartment window, just behind Warren, framed a young kid, his face vacant, his hands wrapped around a sawed-off shotgun resting on the ledge.
A child for a soldier, thought Donnie. Warren ain’t Warren without an army.
As Donnie came closer, Warren nodded. Looking at the man, Donnie let go of his fear and allowed himself to feel a little sorry for Warren. It was exactly a year to the day since Donnie had wounded Spencer Downer, and in all that time Warren had learned nothing. Donnie had killed for him, killed to make Warren feel a little harder, a little bolder, and yet, he told himself, it was not as though he could stand here and blame Warren. Donnie had been heading toward Gold Street his whole life. Still, thought Donnie, burns had it right:
It ain’t supposed to be about killing people, it’s supposed to be about selling dope.
If he had seen the truth in that, Warren could have flooded the Terrace with packages and no one would have noticed. Hell, the drug police spend all their time down in the street; they never get close to the Warren Boardleys. If he had understood anything, Warren wouldn’t have to worry about the unmarked cars cruising through the Terrace. He wouldn’t have to think about who was talking to the grand jury. He wouldn’t have to stand in a Poe Homes courtyard with an army of children behind him.
“What’s going on?” asked Warren, his face a mask.
“I don’t know,” said Donnie, bringing up the feds. “That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to figure out, yo. I been duckin’ them mothers for the last week.”
“For what?” asked Warren, motioning him closer, “come on…”
“I want to see if everything is smooth, right. So I was tryin’ to figure out what’s going on with you. I been hearing that Asaready has been running off at the mouth, right?”
Boardley nodded.
“You know, I didn’t want to go down there and they got me in a bind,” added Donnie, referencing to the agents. “I go down there and they got something on me.”
“I seen ’em all around here today,” said Warren.
“Yeah.”
“Look at me all crazy.”
Donnie brought up the contract. Asaready had been saying that Warren was out to kill him.
“Killin’ who?”
“That’s what he told me, you know, that’s why I stopped comin’ around here…”
“I ain’t never hear that,” said Warren, shaking his head.
“Yeah, that’s the way I got it, you know. And then I tried to beep you one time, you didn’t answer the beeper, so I said somethin’ musta been wrong.”
“No, I got a new beeper number, man.”
Donnie took the answer at face value. If there was a contract out, then Warren would not be backing it today; he seemed more interested in hearing about the feds. Donnie played into that, gradually bringing the conversation around to the investigation, telling Warren about the May raid.
Suddenly, Mo Charles and Warren’s younger brother began checking their guns; Ceruti had been spotted. A strange face in the projects had to be checked.
“The nigger’s a damn fool, Warren,” said one of the soldiers.
“Where he at now?”
“He got on black?” asked Donnie. “He got on a black sweatshirt… that’s my brother.”
“All right then,” said Warren, satisfied.
Donnie caught his breath as Warren’s men demobilized and the lookouts began backing away from Ceruti. He described the raid on Carey Street, drawing suspicion from himself by complaining bitterly about Asaready, who he blamed for talking to the government.
“He come out with the Gold Street thing, right? And the Uzi…” said Donnie, mentioning the machine gun used by Reggie.
“I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
“Huh?”
“About the Uzi on Gold Street.”
“Yeah,” said Donnie. Warren was damn careful.
“What did happen on Gold Street?” Warren asked, laughing softly. “We don’t know nothin’ about that shit.”
Right, said Donnie. Exactly. So why is Asaready talking?
“He wanted me to believe that you was the police,” Warren said. “You understand that?”
“Um, yeah.” Donnie’s throat went dry.
“Answer me this,” said Warren. “Remember the boy Fruitloop?”
“Yeah,” said Donnie. “I know that’s the wrong one… that’s one reason I wanted to talk to you.”
Warren nodded.
“‘Cause we got the wrong one. Shorty got Fruit, he got the wrong Fruit…”
“The dude got struck by lightning.”
At that moment, Donnie didn’t pick up on it, but sure enough, Fruitloop had three months earlier been seriously injured while walking across the Hagerstown yard. Three prisoners were on the way to the dining hall when they were hit by a bolt of lightning.
“Struck by lightning,” Warren repeated, as if to equate his contract with an act of God.
“I like pointed him out to Shorty…”
“OK,” said Warren. “No big thing.”
“But, I owe you one, right?”
Warren nodded with indifference.
Once again, Donnie tried to bring the conversation back to Gold Street, asking Warren whether he should see what the feds wanted from him. Warren told him to go check it out, confident that the government had no real evidence.
“They’re going to tell you a bunch of bullshit. They can’t prove none of that Gold Street.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s hearsay, even if you went to court. Who seen you?”
“Yeah. Nobody.”
“All right, then. The Big Man,” added Warren, implicating himself in a reference to Reggie and Reggie’s earlier arrest, “he ain’t gonna tell ’cause if he was gonna tell he would have turned up everybody in there. He would’ve, sure enough.”
Three months later, they brought Donnie out of a county detention center for one more conversation. In a parked car a short distance from Mack Lewis’ gym at Broadway and Eager, Fitzsimmons tested the mike and transmitter once kagain, then sent Donnie walking the last few blocks. Reggie Gros proved less cautious than Warren.
“If Asaready snitching, you got to be cool,” he told Donnie after a few minutes of banter.
“Yeah,” said Donnie. “That’s why I be on the run. I been up to New York. I just got back here yesterday.”
“You ought to know this is a hot area,” said Reggie, looking around the gym. “They watching me.”
“Yeah.”
“And back at all those windows, they can see right in here.”
“Yeah.”
“They can see in here,” said Reggie, truly paranoid.
Donnie agreed, telling Reggie about the earlier conversation with Warren and the efforts of federal agents to talk with him.
“But you ain’t done nothing,” Reggie told him. “There ain’t no evidence or any of that kind of shit. That gun melted. My brother dumped that shit.”
“Yeah,” said Donnie. “Asaready told them.”
“Asaready telling ’cause he was supposed to be with us,” said Reggie, bitterly, “but he wanted to go chase some girls… I wasn’t. I was ready to make some money.”
“Yeah,” said Donnie, getting up to leave.
Reggie smiled, telling him to stop back in a few minutes. Warren was supposed to stop by the gym.
“All right,” Donnie told him. “I’m gonna be floating…”
Then he walked out onto Broadway, out of the gym and out of Baltimore. Out to Burns and Fitzsimmons and an unmarked car with government tags. Out to a federal prison cell in God knows where.
For Reggie, for Warren, for all the soldiers in Warren’s war, there would be no trial. The taped conversations, coupled with Donnie’s grand jury testimony, were the essential evidence linking them to the conspiracy. Warren would plead to racketeering in June 1989, calling his 47-year sentence “a great injustice to me and my family.”
A month later, Reggie Gross took a similar plea to federal charges stemming from both the Gold Street murders and the Coxson killing. The judge hammered him with double life, exceeding the government’s recommendations. Reggie was shaken.
“I made some huge mistakes,” he told the courtroom.
Two days later, Donnie Andrews came before the same federal judge.
Standing before the impisition of sentence, Donnie broke down and wept. On the day he was sentenced to life in prison, he thanked the government for giving him one more chance at life. He thanked the lawyers and the cops “for standing by me… They showed me opportunity, made me see that I’m a much better person than I thought I was.”
His confession was a beginning, not an end.
“I realized that I had a conscience. That I couldn’t sleep at night,” he told the courtroom. “I did a lot of wrong in my life, that’s how I was brought up. I want very much to have an opportunity to show them, and show my wife and mother, that I can be successful in society and do something with my life.”
Charlie Scheeler, the federal prosecutor, could not recall a sentencing like it. Ninety-nine out of 100 men who had lived as Donnie lived would be stone sociopaths, he told himself. And yet we’re all standing here, listening to real remorse.
Scheeler told the judge that Donnie had kicked heroin in prison, that he was studying for an electrician’s license, that he had married Georgianna before taking the plea. He told the judge of Donnie’s willingness to return to the projects, of the risk he took walking up to Warren unprotected, wearing a wire on a man who was supposed to want him dead.
“He went into the mouth of the lion,” Scheeler said.
Donnie’s public defender said she could add nothing to those remarks. In the hallway outside the seventh-floor courtroom, as the marshals took her client away, she, too, found herself crying.
Sometimes after sundown, Donnie walks out into the prison yard and lies on his back, staring up at a clear sky and a thousand stars that can’t be seen from West Baltimore. The nights are cool out here, the days warm and dry.
They say federal time is the easiest, but there are still moments when Donnie would rather be in Hagerstown or down in the Jessup Cut. There, he knew the game and all the players. Out here, the other men in his unit are all on the government plan, every last one a rollover witness in a major prosecution. Snitches. Rats.
Donnie can’t think of himself that way. An informer would take the government deal because it offered less time. Donnie got a life sentence, with the promise of the U.S. attorney’s support at the first parole hearing 10 years down the road. But the value of the deal, to Donnie, went deeper than the years. This was a chance for something else, something he never thought he could have.
He keeps away from the other inmates, working in the prison shop and watching cable sports broadcasts or videotapes sent by friends — Burns mailed him the PBS series on Joseph Campbell and the power of myth; another friend sent pro wrestling tapes. He still reads the newspapers from back home, scanning the local sections for familiar names, noticing that one boy he worked with got a 20-year term, or that another kid, that wild one from the Avenue, up and killed a police. Donnie could see it coming; the boy was always a loose cannon.
He reads the longer stories, too, the tomes about the president’s drug czar and the bombings in Colombia, about all the new laws the governor passed and those drug-free zones the mayor set up. Nice talk. You give Donnie Andrews a 24-hour pass and a .38 six-shot and he’ll come back from Edmondson Avenue with enough dope to stay high for a week.
“They always talk about taking the dope out of the ghetto,” he says. “You never hear them talking about putting anything back in. For a lot of people, there isn’t anything but dope, but they don’t ever think about that part of it.”
He grew up on Pulaski Street a true believer, convinced that dope was the only real money in West Baltimore, the only real future for someone like him. Twenty years haven’t changed much; most every kid hanging at Pulaski and Edmondson nowadays will tell you they believe the same thing. It took Donnie half a lifetime and the death of a man before he ever thought to argue the point.
Now he tells himself he doesn’t want to come back to Baltimore. He doesn’t want to fire dope or carry a gun or look over his shoulder when he walks out the door. He tells himself that he wants a life as an electrician, working on computer hardware maybe, with Georgianna and maybe some kids and a home of his own. He tells himself these things and truly believes them, knowing that he did not come this far alone. Shorty Small brought him part of the distance, and Georgianna, and Kent and Burns and Edgerton and Scheeler. Warren and Reggie also gave him something, and Zach Roach, too, in a strange way. All of them are connected, and if there is going to be any kind of victory here, then all of them have a share.
Donnie doesn’t want to go back, but neither can he lie about the past. There is something in the street that will always stay with him, something that first made him feel like he had to be counted in this world. A man can be ashamed of the things he did, yet proud of the fact that he survived doing them. In the small place between the two, Donnie keeps his memories.
There was a day that summer when Warren told his soldiers that they had permission to rob a few select dealers who working out in the Terrace. A mid-level mover by the name of Dollar Bill had stopped taking Warren’s package and had his people selling someone else’s stuff.
“Go ahead and stick ’em up if you want,” said Warren. “I’ll get my money either way.”
And in the solitude of the visiting room, Donnie laughs at the thought, reliving that perfectly righteous moment when the tables were turned, when some users got used. From a prison visiting room, Donnie is suddenly transported back to the Terrace courtyard, to a stretch of pavement where all the boys were working out.
“I go up to the first guy, right?” says Donnie, moving across the empty room to challenge a man no longer there. “And I say, ‘Who you selling for?’”
“Sammy,” the man answers.
“Who you selling for?” Donnie asks another empty space.
“C.C.O.,” says the second dealer.
“Who you selling for?”
“Dollar Bill.”
“Then,” says Donnie, pulling an imaginary handgun from his waist and leveling it against a face no longer there, “you the man I’m looking for.”
Donnie Andrews laughs loudly, shaking his head at the image of Dollar Bill’s man with the barrel flush to his face, giving up 100 bags and all his cash. Slowly, reluctantly, he gives up the stage, retreating softly to a chair against the wall.
Laughter from the killing field, life at the broken edge of a bottle. For one long, violent summer, the Lexington Terrace was hell itself.
But he belonged.
