Once they had Jones in handcuffs, Metcalf wanted to pounce; he gathered as much evidence as possible from Jones’s apartments before word of his arrest reached the other dealers in the ring. The day was filled with hurry up and wait—too much waiting and not enough hurrying, in Metcalf’s view—as search warrant requests slogged their way out to local judges in several localities for everything from Jones’s residences to his vehicles to the homes of other members in the ring. Jones stonewalled throughout, initially telling Metcalf he didn’t have an address and then giving him the wrong apartment number when he did. (Judges require police to offer an exact address before issuing a warrant.)
Lutz arrested Pete Butler and Charles Smith in their respective homes near George’s Chicken while Kevin Coffman and Metcalf surveyed Jones’s apartments, where they confiscated copious amounts of heroin, crack, firearms, and cash. They finally located his Dumfries apartment after finding an estimate for a repair bill in his name at the apartment in Front Royal.
*
Later that day, when Metcalf finally got his first close-up look at Ronnie Jones in a county jail interviewing room in Front Royal, he found him to be “very smug, very arrogant.”
The feeling was mutual. “He was very aggressive; he harassed people,” Jones said of Metcalf. Jones hated him for delivering a subpoena to the mother of his oldest child—at work, embarrassing and intimidating her, he said—and for interviewing Jones’s mom.
His younger brother, Thomas Jones, told me the family had no idea Ronnie was a big-time heroin dealer until they heard about it on the news. Their mother was deeply embarrassed by it and did not wish to be interviewed, he said. She had seen him only a week before his arrest. Ronnie stopped by her house in the northern Virginia suburbs to chat after delivering cupcakes to his daughter’s school.
Ronnie told his family he’d been running his own computer repair shop, fixing broken laptops, iPads, and cellphones. He even showed them a logo he’d had prepared for the business, called Nu2U.
Metcalf and Jones hated each other instantly. But they had more in common than either of them knew.
*
Metcalf, forty-four in mid-2013, had worked gang cases in L.A. and drugs in Washington. “From my perspective, in the cities, you take off one drug dealer, and they’re not even missed, there’s so many,” he said.
“But this, this was truly the front lines. You shut down somebody like Ronnie Jones, somebody who’s making the whole town dopesick, and you’re really making an impact.” If he could get Jones or the other FUBI consorts to give up their Harlem source, the effects would be more widespread.
The quest had become deeply personal. The worst event in Bill Metcalf’s life had taken place almost four decades earlier on a hot summer night when he was seven years old. He was seated at the dinner table with his parents and older sister when he noticed a police officer running outside the window with his gun drawn.
“Go to your room,” Bill’s mother told the kids. What Bill didn’t know then was that his father was a heroin-addicted drug trafficker, and that his mother felt she had no option other than cooperating with police to have him arrested.
Metcalf remembered running down the stairs the night of the arrest, in time to see officers slam his father against a wall and handcuff him. His father looked at him, his head still pressed against the wall, and told him: “You’re the man of the family now. Take care of your mother and your sister.” Metcalf said he was more confused than intimidated by the order. He wondered: “How am I going to do this when everyone’s so much taller than me?” His mom hustled him and his sister into her car and fled to her mother’s house in Chapmanville, West Virginia, with just the clothes on their backs.
*
His parents had met in the 1970s, after his mother migrated from West Virginia to Baltimore for factory work; the family moved to Cleveland, chasing better factory jobs, a few years later. His mom did piecework in a Cleveland textile factory while his dad worked sporadically, constantly feeling the tug of his Baltimore hometown.
His father and uncles were in and out of jail, and only the oldest brother of the five, his uncle Bill (for whom Metcalf is named), was not a heroin user. “There were always guys just out of prison showing up at our house. And when my dad’s brothers