James Bigelow, a retired lieutenant with the Washington, D.C. Metro Police Department, awoke early one cold, February morning to the sound of his doorbell and a knock at the door. That was quickly followed by the sound of a sledgehammer smashing into the same door. As he and his wife ran downstairs, they were met by a team of narcotics agents—and their guns. Bigelow, 58 at the time, had a brother who was a former deputy police chief in D.C. His son was still a police officer with the department. Somehow, the cops had still managed to mistakenly raid his home.

Bigelow and his wife sat at gunpoint while police ransacked their home. They found nothing. They didn’t bother fixing the front door, which they had knocked clean off its frame.

At about the same time — 5 a.m. on Saturday, February 22, 1986 — Thomas Timberman awoke to a sharp knock at his door. When Timberman, a career foreign service worker, answered the door, he was met by two agents dressed in dark clothes, carrying shotguns. They didn’t tell him they were police. Instead, they told him he should go look at the door to the basement apartment he was renting out. That door too had been knocked off its frame. Timberman rented the apartment to a colleague, a senior official at the State Department. He was on vacation at the time. Eventually the officers admitted they had made a mistake. They had intended to raid the home next door.

And at about the same time, narcotics agents also raided the home of Ewan Brown, who worked for The Washington Post at the time. According to Brown, the police quickly looked over the house, after which the head of the raid team said, “I think we have the wrong house.” They spent the next two hours tearing the place apart, anyway. Brown tried to point out that his house didn’t match the description of the house described in the warrant. He tried to tell them that neither he nor the nephew who lived with him fit the description of the dreadlocked Rastafarian the police were looking for. They found no drugs, apologized, and left. “It was like the allied troops at Normandy,” he’d later say.

In all, 530 police officers — 12 percent of the Washington, D.C. police department, plus federal agents from the IRS, U.S. Parks Police, ATF, Immigration, and the IRS conducted 69 simultaneous raids all across the city. “Operation Caribbean Cruise” intended to target a ring of Jamaican drug smugglers. It was the largest planned police operation in Washington, D.C. history. They had anticipated making over 500 arrests, and seizing hundreds of pounds of marijuana, plus dozens of automatic weapons. The early morning raids were the culmination of a 16-month investigation.

The tally: 27 arrests, 13 of them merely for possession of marijuana. The cops also seized 13 weapons, and found $20,000 in illegal drugs. They were anticipating millions. In fact, the police department had assigned more people solely to handle the paperwork of the expected arrests than the number of people who were actually arrested. They found none of the alleged Jamaican drug dealers.