make twice what the dealers in Baltimore and other cities were making. He made so much that he stockpiled new clothes in his new apartment, discarding them after a single wearing. He had a security system installed so that when he opened his front door, a woman’s chipper recorded voice intoned, “Front door. Open.” He kept a personal trainer on call for workouts. He hired a designer to create a logo for an all-natural skin-care line he hoped to sell. He wore gold chains, outfitted his girlfriends in new clothes—one kept her own stacks of new Lucky jeans in his apartment—and told people he followed the motto of rapper Biggie Smalls: “Never get high on your own supply.”
*
As the task force charted out Jones’s ring, pinning photographs on police department walls, with street names to keep everybody straight, Metcalf turned to Lutz. The goal before had always been to stop the small-town dealers. This case was larger and more complex than any conspiracy they’d worked before. Maybe it was possible this time, even, to bring down the source.
“Man, this reminds me of The Wire,” Metcalf said.
Lutz hadn’t heard of the show. But watching it later with his fiancée, he agreed. Thinking about the exponential scope of Jones’s impact—a trail of addiction that would not be contained, in all likelihood, for many years—both men seethed. “We were starting to have eighteen-year-olds overdose,” Lutz remembered. “We were disgusted with what he was doing to our town.” Before 2013 was over, overdose deaths in the region would surge to twenty-one, up from a single death in 2012.
Heroin was so wildly lucrative that even mid-level dealers in the ring could make $15,000 in a single weekend. Metcalf and Lutz interviewed an addicted user-dealer from Stafford County, thirty-one-year-old Kimberle Hodsden, who was dating Kareem Shaw and going on regular trips with him to Harlem to test the potency of the heroin before he bought it. On one trip, Shaw got mad at Hodsden when she declined his initial offer to buy her a $400 pair of pants from a swanky Manhattan store. It was heady stuff for a local girl, a high school dropout who’d been shuffled among her mother, grandmother, and a local shelter.
Hodsden’s name and picture were pinned halfway down the growing chart, the words “Crash Test Dummy”—Shaw’s pet name for her—inked beneath her mug shot. And Hodsden had a tiny clue about the New York supplier to share: He went by the nickname Mack.
Jones controlled the left, or western, side of the chart while Shaw’s name went on the eastern side of the ring, on the right. Low-level informants dealing only to support their habit were at the bottom of the pyramid, including some whose names would eventually get crossed out due to overdose death.
The chart eventually earned an unusual nickname, thanks to an interview between Metcalf and one of Shaw’s lieutenants, Keith Marshall, in jail for possession of illicit pills. Addicted to opioids since the age of sixteen, Marshall was a functioning heroin addict from Baltimore who’d managed to keep a job for fifteen years—as a worker for Payne’s Tree Service in Stafford—before getting ensnared in the Jones/Shaw ring. His lawyer told me he’d overdosed five times, and had been in and out of jail for petty theft and possession charges most of his adult life.
In a letter from a North Carolina prison, Marshall himself wrote: “I’ve done tree work, tended bar, did graphic design for a studio up in Manhattan, among other jobs. I’ve had 20 grand stashed in my house for the re-up, and I’ve lived in a tent in the woods because I was so far gone on dope.”
Scheduled to be jailed on possession charges in mid-2013 (stemming from an earlier state charge), Marshall said he returned to dealing because he wanted to make extra money in preparation for going to jail. He had debts to pay off, and he wanted to have money on his jail account for toiletries and food. “He started dealing for Kareem Shaw to take care of business, before he went away for a year” for the possession conviction, his lawyer, Dana Cormier, said. “Jones and Shaw were living the life, but almost everyone underneath them, Keith Marshall included, were junkies distributing just to supply their own habit.”
Metcalf waited until Marshall went to jail for the 2013 state charges to interview him, carefully, about his role in Shaw’s network. “You don’t want to reveal too much of your case,” Metcalf explained. “You just