of people who died of heroin overdose before Ronnie arrived in Woodstock. “I never introduced herr-on to the area. The only thing I did: I gave it to ’em at a cheaper price.”
Ronnie believes he was made out to be a monster in the federal government’s case against him, vehemently denying that he had sex with underage females and dopesick users—an accusation that Wolthuis said fueled him and the task force in their quest to put him behind bars for many years and possibly even for life. “I would pay for sex before I’d have sex with someone doing drugs,” Ronnie said.
Jacobs, the fired first attorney, believes Ronnie on this point, even as he called him a “con man” and “a pain in the ass.” Jacobs saw Ronnie as someone who dealt drugs because it “was easier than working, and you can be a big guy in your own eyes, and people follow you, and it’s like you’re the head of a business, which you are—until it all comes crashing down.”
Female user-dealers are incentivized to lie in their quest for what the government calls substantial assistance, and they exaggerate their addictions so they’ll be given less time, according to Jones and Jacobs. Keith Marshall, the dealer whose expletive “Fuck. You. Bring it.” gave the case its informal name, said the women not only cooperated for less time but also played up their addictions to their advantage. When Kareem Shaw’s girlfriend was arrested, “she batted her eyes and talked about how she was just an addict forced into this and used up by everybody when the reality was quite the opposite. She was selling and setting up new people to move [drugs] just like myself,” Marshall told me in an email, mad that she’d gotten a lighter sentence than him and was due to be released from prison in late 2018.
*
Ronnie turns the case over in his mind, including his own complicity. “I promised myself I’d never grow up to be like my father, and while I may not have an addiction to an actual drug, I do feel my addiction,” he said. “I’m addicted to that lifestyle. It wasn’t my intention. I didn’t want to do it. But no one would give me a job in the field I’d trained for, and no one would let me create my own.”
He was disappointed in himself and felt bad about hurting his relatives, especially his daughters. He no longer has relationships with their mothers, one of whom told me, “Ronnie was just not mentally mature enough to be a father. His biggest thing was, he felt entitled.”
Ronnie ended the interview with a version of the same old saw I’d heard at so many of my stops along the heroin highway: He predicted that “ten more dealers would pop up to take my place,” which was accurate. It was hard to envision a future where shit in fact stopped.
*
It was a long drive back to Roanoke. I was too tired to stop in Woodstock, where I’d arranged to meet with Kristi. She was eager to learn what light Ronnie had shed on Jesse’s death, but I dreaded telling her just how little he seemed to think or care about the victims of his crimes. Since our last meeting, she had arranged to view the pictures police took of Jesse lying dead on the floor. He looked surprisingly peaceful. “What I’d been imagining was actually much worse,” she said. When Sergeant Lutz called them up for her on his computer screen, the task force had noted a lull in overdose deaths in the wake of the prosecution of Ronnie Jones and others in the FUBI ring. But that was also before fentanyl and other synthetic analogs came roaring onto the scene.
Kristi still went by her son’s grave overlooking the football field several times a month, less often since her family moved to the other side of the county. But she still decorated it for every holiday. “I feel bad every day that I don’t go,” she said.
She had recently met Dennis Painter’s son, the curly-haired toddler named for Jesse. His mother, Courtney, had awakened him in his car seat after she and Kristi ran into each other at the Dollar Store. “He woke up reaching for me,” Kristi said, as if it were Jesse reaching out from beyond the grave. “I got in my car and cried for ten minutes.”
It was almost three years since Jesse’s death. His grave was now decorated with red-white-and-blue