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