Kevin Deutsch - Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire

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For Laura

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

J AMES B ALDWIN

The following is a work of nonfiction. It is based on interviews with more than 300 opiate dealers, drug addicts, treatment experts, law enforcement officials, gang members, and others. Additionally, it draws on thousands of documents, including law enforcement records, autopsy reports, death certificates, and several sales databases provided to the author by Pill Citys co-founders.

In order to disguise the identities of interviewees, most of their names have been changed. For that same reason, certain locations, physical descriptions, and other identifying details have been altered or obscured. In addition to gang members and addicts, I spoke at length with a number of social workers, physicians, and police officials as well as federal agents involved in the investigation of street gangs and looted drugs. Many of these men and women requested their names be changed, since revealing their identities would have compromised their work, and likely jeopardized their jobs. Most of my interviews with officials were conducted after the events described in these pages. For the purpose of narrative cohesion, Ive interwoven their accounts of the investigation into all five sections of the book.

As for methodology, I conducted most of my interviews with gang members and opiate addicts on the fly, spending many hours with them in their homes, vehicles, and on drug corners. With regard to dialogue, all conversations and quotes appear verbatim as they were recounted to me; the result of hundreds of hours of interviews and on-the-ground reporting in Baltimore, South Florida, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, Connecticut, and New York City. About 50 percent of the events chronicled in this book are based on interviews. The rest, I witnessed firsthand. Ive used interior monologues or referenced a subjects thoughts only in cases where I interviewed them extensively about their thinking at a particular moment.

For purposes of clarity, the term opiates is used throughout this narrative to describe both heroin and prescription painkillers.

* * *

This book tells the story of one of the most profitable illicit opiate dealing schemes in American history, and the tech-savvy teenagers who helped pull it off. The earliest of their syndicates crimesbrazen, well-planned heists of approximately 50 pharmacies, drug corners, and stash spotsoccurred during a 25-hour period on Monday, April 27, and Tuesday, April 28, in Baltimore, Maryland, as rioters burned and looted properties across the city in response to the death of Freddie Gray.

The unrest has cost city government alone about $20 million. But the riots human tollthe number of lives lost and families destroyed due to pilfered drugsremains incalculable. Approximately $100 million worth of narcotics stolen in Baltimore flooded Americas streets in the months after the riots, creating scores of new addicts. Bloody turf battles were waged between heavily armed gangs battling over those drugs, conflicts that left at least 91 young men, women, and children dead across the country in 2015 and at least 187 others injured. Entire families succumbed to deadly overdoses, creating a generation of parentless kids dubbed Generation Pill by social service workers. And a pair of impoverished tech geniuses from Baltimores West Side transformed scores of inner-city drug markets, their actions making them heroes in the eyes of some but the cruelest kind of killers to others.

At the height of the teens success, their franchises were trafficking more than a quarter billion dollars in opiates. This book tells the story of the damage these gangsters inflicted, from their first pharmacy break-in to the latest bullet fired in Pill City. It also chronicles the bloodiest organized crime conflict America has seen since the days of Al Capone and Murder Incorporatedthis one fought not by bootleggers but by inner-city-dwelling, opiate-slinging gangsters.

Last, this work explores the impact of opiates on heavily black, low-income census tracts across the country, places where addicts and their families continue to suffer in silence, deprived of both resources and attention.

In these pages, I have tried to give them voice.

Kevin Deutsch, Baltimore, March 2016

BGF the Black Guerrilla Family gang

Dark Web an unindexed part of the Internet accessible only through an encrypted browser

dope, raw heroin

dope sick sickness caused by withdrawal from opiates

enforcer a gang member who commits homicides and other acts of violence to protect his gangs interests

field marshal a high-ranking member of BGF; usually oversees a team of enforcers

Frankenstein heroin cut with fentanyl

hot shot a deadly dose of heroin

Percs Percocet

Pill City a Baltimore-based drug syndicate founded in April 2015

re-up to obtain a new supply of drugs from ones supplier

rig a syringe

riot pills pills stolen during the April 2015 riots

Roxys Roxicodone

spike an unused needle

twin a communal syringe shared by multiple addicts

vacant an abandoned property, usually a rowhome, in Baltimore City

Vikes Vicodin

The Dealers

James Brick Feeneycofounder of Pill City

Willie Wax Harriscofounder of Pill City

Lamonta Lyric JohnsonBGF set leader

Desmond Damage VickersBGF field marshal

Dante Slim RobinsonBGF enforcer/dealer, Iraq War veteran

Christopher Train LockwoodBGF enforcer/dealer

Jimmy Mastersleader of the Masters Organization, a Baltimore-based drug syndicate

Ezekiel Zeke MastersJimmys younger brother, responsible for the familys operations in Kansas City, Missouri

Stephan Stacks MastersJimmys son, drug dealer

Andrew Blackrock MastersJimmys son, responsible for the familys operations in South Florida

Kenny Mondo MackJimmys nephew and security chief

Lionel Dome SimmonsBGF enforcer

Raheem Wallacecomputer hacker, high-ranking member of the Youngstown Boys drug syndicate

The Customers

Keisha Jonesopiate addict, mother of a six-year-old boy

Terry Augmanopiate addict, pregnant with her first child

Derek Curryopiate addict, former professional jazz guitarist

Otis Washingtonopiate addict, former sanitation worker

The Investigators

Frank CalvaccaNarcotics detective, Chicago Police Department

Jamal GraysonNarcotics detective, Baltimore Police Department

Jeffrey MadiganGang detective, Newark Police Department

Mike MalinowskiSergeant, Baltimore Police Department

Kirstin MarquesSpecial agent, Drug Enforcement Administration

Theres enough narcotics on the streets of Baltimore to keep it intoxicated for a year. That amount of drugs has thrown off the balance on the streets.

B ALTIMORE P OLICE C OMMISSIONER A NTHONY B ATTS

April 28, 2015, West Baltimore

James Brick Feeney and Willie Wax Harris are standing on the corner of Mosher and North Mount Streets, pistols tucked into their waistbands, toothpicks dangling from their lips. To their right, Freds Discount Pharmacy is engulfed in orange-red flames, its marquee shrouded in a cloud of gray smoke. To their left, five members of the Black Guerrilla FamilyBaltimores biggest, most powerful gangare bashing in the head of a dealer whod just encroached on Brick and Waxs territory. Its a seemingly minor offense but one that will get dozens of young men killed here in the coming weeks.