The story so far

Deutsch, a New York-based freelancer who’s worked for Newsweek, the New York Times, and Newsday, claims to have had intimate access to law enforcement and both sides of a brutal gang war provoked after the 2015 riots following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

Most of the violence centered around, of all things, an app created by two high school honor students that Deutsch calls “the Uber of drug trafficking”: the titular “Pill City.” The name also describes the alliance between the two students — “Brick” and “Wax” — and the Black Guerrilla Family gang, a powerful combination that Deutsch claims manage to corner the drug trade in Baltimore and several other cities with pills and heroin looted during the riots.

Kevin Deutsch

Deutsch’s supposed level of access is really astonishing. He recounts gangland repartee exchanged seconds before a murder. In another part of the book, one character reveals that he has lied to his brother for decades about their father’s dying wish for him, completely skewing his brother’s life towards crime. But he’s willing to finally reveal this secret to Deutsch.

Many, in Baltimore and elsewhere, aren’t buying it. Since the book’s release in late January, Deutsch has been challenged nearly every week with new questions about either Pill City or his other work.

Proving details in Pill City are wrong is difficult, because nearly every character in the book, including doctors, addiction counselors, or murder victims who typically wouldn’t need anonymity, have had their names changed.

Deutsch claims he’s protecting his sources; coincidentally or not, that also makes his tale of a massive gang war difficult to verify.

Still, the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore City Paper have both published stories punching significant holes in Pill City. Law enforcement and crime figures say they’ve never heard of anything like the events described, dates for murders described in the book don’t match with actual murders recorded in Baltimore, and a Baltimore shock trauma unit whose operations Deutsch describes has no record of his visits. The murder of the anti-drug pastor, described as a tragedy that send a good part of the city into mourning, appears to have no analogue in the real world.

David Simon, the creator of The Wire and a former Baltimore crime reporter himself, has turned challenging Pill City into his latest Twitter crusade. The Baltimore Police Department said in a statement to me that they have “no evidence or information that corroborates the claims made in the book.”

One of David Simon’s latest tweets about Deutsch

Curiously, a section of the book is named “Jimmy’s World”—also the title of a fabricated, Pulitzer-winning 1980 Washington Post story about a nonexistent 8-year-old heroin addict that was later entirely debunked.

Meanwhile, Deutsch’s freelance reporting has also been slammed. The Times pulled several quotes in a story he wrote after they failed to find evidence the people quoted actually existed, and both Newsday and Newsweek are reviewing his stories.

The media site iMediaEthics has launched an investigation into Deutsch’s work outside of Pill City that, to my mind, conclusively proves that several people he’s quoted don’t exist. Deutsch counters that he’s been the victim of sources who lied about their names.

Deutsch has strenuously pushed back on the attacks, albeit not by proving that the claims in his articles actually happened. Instead, he’s written several fuming blog posts and one op-ed for the New York Observer claiming that his critics are just jealous of his scoop.

And then there’s this: a mysterious Twitter account, created amidst the debate about Pill City, that claims that it’s all real.

“DonVITO89" later tweeted that he would answer questions about the book’s accuracy, but didn’t respond to requests for comment. Deutsch called a question from iMediaEthics about whether he made up the account to defend his book “absurd.”

Deutsch didn’t respond to my requests for comment. As of February, publisher St. Martin’s Press told me in emails that they were sticking by the book. They reiterated their commitment to the book in a March 14 email to me.

“We have every reason to believe, and no reason to doubt, the author’s veracity and the accuracy of his book,” the statement reads.