Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,65
wanna poke around and see if they’ll talk.”
But Marshall refused, steadfastly and defiantly.
“Guys, I could’ve given you the biggest dealer supplying Stafford County, but I’m not giving you shit,” Marshall told him.
Already surveilling Marshall’s dealer, Kareem Shaw, now operating out of cheap motels along Route 11, Metcalf was fishing, trying to see if Marshall knew anything that would help him peel another layer from the onion, maybe a detail about the New York source. He challenged Marshall to tell him everything he knew, but Marshall refused.
“What if we have proof you’re already involved [in the federal case], and we come back here with a warrant?” Metcalf challenged.
Marshall was sure Metcalf was bluffing, convinced he would have already indicted him if he had the evidence, Marshall later told me from prison. “Mr. Metcalf unfortunately is a man of his word,” he said, referring to the additional federal distribution charges Metcalf returned with six months later, which resulted in another sentence for five years.
But at the time, Marshall leveled a cold stare at his interviewer and ended the conversation with a clipped “Fuck. You. Bring it.”
Back at the prosecutor’s office, Wolthuis now had a name for the worst drug ring in the region’s history. Above his chart, topped with the names of Ronnie Jones and Kareem Shaw, he took out a Sharpie and wrote in black capital letters: FUBI.
“It just resonated,” he said.
Jesse Bolstridge’s grave, Strasburg, Virginia
Chapter Eight
“Shit Don’t Stop”
The Ronnie Jones arrest, when it finally came in June 2013, was almost anticlimactic. Poetic, just about, the way it featured the usual cascade of drug-bust interactions: an informant tip, followed by a recorded buy that led to one of Jones’s main subdealers, a former Marine who’d been kicked out of the Corps for alcohol-related charges before spiraling into heroin addiction. In the end, all Bill Metcalf had to do was track the movements of Joshua Pettyjohn, the ex-Marine, as he bought 20 grams of heroin from Jones and then drove away. Pettyjohn would warble a detailed tune, confessing immediately after police arrested him in possession of heroin.
Jones had known he was “hot,” a police target. A month earlier, Brent Lutz and other task force officers swooped in on his Woodstock apartment complex on Lakeview Drive, only to find that he’d decamped to one of the two other apartments he was also keeping, one with a girlfriend in Dumfries and the other in Front Royal, closer to Kareem Shaw. He drove a decidedly less flashy Chevy Impala when he drove to Woodstock, reserving the Mercedes for nondope activities. Police called the Front Royal apartment they’d been surveilling—a vinyl-sided three-floor unit just off Main Street—the man cave. They suspected it was where the Pringles pucks were now being “re-rocked,” or broken down.
To lower his profile even more, Jones changed cellphone numbers and started parking several blocks away from his apartments. He also transitioned his operation from a “brew-thru,” as Don Wolthuis called it—selling at his apartment, to just about any buyer who showed up—to dealing only with a handful of subdealers. He was trying to distance himself from his buyers and therefore, he hoped, from arrest.
At the Lakeview raid, Lutz and his colleagues arrested Marie instead, along with four others near the bottom of the FUBI chart. Marie spent seven months in the county jail on charges of heroin possession, a probation violation from an earlier, Suboxone-distribution charge, and child endangerment. “My daughter, she’s seven now, and she still has bad dreams about the night the cops kicked in our door,” she told me in 2016.
“We spooked him,” Lutz recalled of Jones.
Jones had been so positive that Marie would sing that his expression barely changed six weeks later, when more than two dozen state, federal, and local officers descended to place him under arrest. Lutz would never forget the moment he first eyed, through binoculars from the Chinese restaurant next door, the guy whose picture he’d fixated on for months. “He had the look like he wasn’t surprised,” Lutz said, an assessment Marie echoed when she remembered Jones telling her months before: “If I have a good run, it’ll last three months. If I have a great run, I can make it six.”
Jones had been bringing bulk heroin to Woodstock for exactly six months. During that time, not only had overdose deaths surged but so had nonfatal overdoses, the number of children entering foster care due to parental opioid abuse, and the cases of children born with neonatal abstinence syndrome—all at roughly five times