Ruben Castaneda is author of the memoir S Street Rising: Crack, Murder and Redemption in D.C. From 1997 to 2011 he reported from the Post’s Prince George’s County bureau on federal and state courts in Maryland.

As was the case every Halloween, on October 31, 1989, a couple of Washington Post reporters were sent to cover the festivities in Georgetown, where thousands of mostly white and affluent revelers partied through the night. I was dispatched to the other side of town—Potomac Gardens, a rundown public housing project a mile east of the Capitol, where Mayor Marion Barry was scheduled to make nice with the residents. My job was to take notes and contribute a few paragraphs to an innocuous story about how Washingtonians celebrated the holiday.

I had already been to Potomac Gardens a handful of times to cover shootings during my first month at the Post, where I was on the night crime beat. The complex was a collection of boxy concrete buildings between three and six stories high, surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence that reminded me of a penitentiary. At one crime scene near the project, I had overheard a street cop joke that the fence was there not to protect the residents but to keep the rest of the city safe from Gardens inhabitants. A violent drug crew operated in and near the housing complex. At night, it was a forbidding, dangerous place.


I arrived early and staked out a spot at the edge of a concrete courtyard inside the complex. A few minutes later, a black Lincoln pulled up. A security man in a dark suit hopped out of the shotgun seat and opened the rear passenger door for the mayor. Barry stepped out and smoothed the lapels of his charcoal-gray suit coat.

Some people in the courtyard saw him and cried, “Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor!” and “We love you, Marion!” Barry smiled. He waved. He sauntered toward the courtyard.

He was in friendly territory. While much of white and upper-class black Washington viewed Barry with hostility or disdain, he was beloved in places like Potomac Gardens. In the eastern half of the city, many people believed that Barry was being unfairly persecuted by the white establishment, that reports of his cocaine use had been trumped up by his political enemies to discredit him. Some blacks even thought there was a grand conspiracy among whites to retake the reins of city government, which would require knocking Barry out of office. The alleged scheme was known simply as “the Plan.” It seemed that everyone who had been in D.C. more than five minutes had heard about the Plan, and a surprisingly high percentage of people, mostly blacks, gave it credence.

If there was such a scheme, it wasn’t troubling Barry at the moment. Smiling ear to ear, the mayor waded into the crowd. I slipped my notebook and pen from the inside pocket of my jacket and went to work.

The mayor posed for pictures with children and kissed babies. Someone turned on a boom box. Some teenagers busted moves to the music, and Barry joined them for a minute. A handful of kids took shots at a portable basketball hoop set up on the edge of the courtyard. Barry slipped off his coat and awkwardly clanged a couple of set shots, then strutted to the front of the courtyard and faced the crowd to deliver an impromptu speech.

“This time last year, you couldn’t come here,” he said triumphantly. “A year ago, there were shootings every night.”

I stifled a laugh. The city was hurtling toward a record homicide total. I was logging double-digit miles in the company sedan every night, racing to the latest crime scene. The crowd cheered. Some people clapped. Some pumped their fists. Some cried out, “You tell ’em, Mr. Mayor!”

Barry advised kids to stay away from drugs, then led them in a little rap: “My mind is a pearl / I can do anything in the whole wide world!” The children responded out of sync, the words all jumbled up. Barry beamed.

The routine was too much. I laughed out loud. Barry’s got a big brass pair, I thought as I put away my notebook. Using crack on the sly while running a city was one thing. Openly taunting the establishment, the Post, the feds—daring them to prove he was a junkie—was another.

If only Barry’s double life weren’t so similar to my own.

***

By that Halloween, I had been addicted to crack for about a year.

I first tried the drug on another reporting assignment, when I was working for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. It was mid-September 1988, and was a mile or so west of downtown looking for people to interview for an immigration story. A young woman, apparently in her twenties, caught my eye. We struck up a conversation—her name was Raven—and she offered me my first hit. I was 27, old enough to know better, young enough to feel invincible.

Raven and crack became part of my routine for the next 11 months. I’d usually see her on Saturday afternoons, after playing pickup hoops in the morning. Now and then, if I was flush after scoring some holiday pay, I’d see her twice a week. The truth is, by the time I took my first hit, my alcoholism was already taking me to scary places. I was reckless, compulsive, and I made bad choices. My career wasn’t going any better. After more than six years at the Herald Examiner, I wanted to move on but had nowhere to go.

In early August 1989, a Post job fell from the sky. A few months earlier, in the spring, I had run into the paper’s West Coast bureau chief, Jay Mathews, while we were both on assignment at a community center in Boyle Heights, a hardscrabble section of East L.A. I saw Mathews struggling to interview a Latina woman and volunteered to translate. Before I could ask, he offered to write a letter of recommendation for me. Now, with the D.C.’s homicide rate spiraling upward thanks to neighborhood crack wars, the paper needed to hire a night police reporter ASAP.

In anticipation of a drug test, I abstained from crack for a long, miserable week. I flew to D.C. on a Monday, went through a gauntlet of interviews on Tuesday, flew back to L.A. on Wednesday and was offered the job on Thursday. It turned out the paper didn’t screen for drug use. I accepted without bothering to negotiate. I didn’t feel the need—the first offer represented a 33 percent pay bump. I was moving up from the minors.

Leaving Los Angeles felt like a getaway. For me, L.A. was the city of doomed romance, excessive drinking and risky crack use. D.C. beckoned like a new lover. I would be working in the same newsroom as Bob fucking Woodward, racing to crime scenes in the most murderous city in the country.

On top of that, the previous month, a nationwide ABC News– Washington Post poll had shown that 44 percent of Americans considered illegal drugs the nation’s most serious problem. In a televised Oval Office speech, President George H.W. Bush had just declared a federal War on Drugs (while displaying a large bag of crack)—and I was going to be a war correspondent. Dozens of D.C. neighborhoods were being wracked by violence fueled by crack turf wars.

As I drove cross-country to my new life, I vowed to end my drug habit.

That proved much harder than I’d hoped. On only my fourth day in D.C., my pledge evaporated like a puff of crack smoke when I got drunk and picked up a strawberry—a woman who traded sex for crack. She called herself Champagne, and she directed me to a 24-7 drug emporium on S Street Northwest, where I would soon become a regular customer.

Just as I was getting my start with crack in D.C., Barry was under increasing scrutiny. By late summer, Charles Lewis—a Barry acquaintance who had been arrested for selling crack to an undercover agent in the Virgin Islands—would agree to a plea bargain and begin talking in detail about his cocaine escapades with the mayor to a team of FBI agents and MPD internal affairs detectives. Lewis said he had used drugs several times with Barry in the Virgin Islands from 1986 through 1988. The mayor remained unflappable. “I want to repeat that I never saw any drugs or drug paraphernalia during my visits with Mr. Lewis,” he said in a statement.

I was unable to resist the combination of crack and an attractive woman. The FBI bet that Barry couldn’t either. By mid-January 1990, newsroom rumors of an imminent Barry indictment had grown more persistent than ever. Meanwhile, people were getting shot in the city’s combat zones virtually every night. I was riding a seemingly nonstop wave of adrenaline, racing to crime scenes when I was working, driving Champagne to S Street to buy crack for our next tryst on my off days.

***

The night of January 18, 1990, began routinely: I parked near Logan Circle, then walked to the Post for my night shift. Parking closer without getting a ticket was always tough. But just before 8 p.m., I decided to try again and walked back to my car. It was going to be a frigid night, and I didn’t want to hike those four long city blocks after the temperature had really plummeted.

I was on M Street Northwest, driving toward the office, when two white shirts bolted into the street 10 feet in front me. They sprinted toward the entrance of the Vista Hotel, to my left. A tall man in a suit and a guy lugging a TV camera were hot on their trail.

It was unlikely that a shooting had occurred in an upscale downtown hotel. Right away, I thought, Barry? I pulled over and ran across the street and into the hotel. The white shirts were in the lobby, talking to a serious-looking man in a dark suit.

I spotted Tom Sherwood, a reporter for a local TV news station. Tom had covered D.C. government for the Post; he had left the paper about the time I had arrived. I sidled up. Tom was gazing at the white shirts and the guy in the suit, mesmerized.

“Hey, Tom,” I said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“I think the FBI just arrested the mayor for drugs.”

Byline glory.

I left my equipment bag, with my Post cell phone inside it, in my car. I didn’t want to leave the hotel, not for a moment. I raced to a bank of pay phones a few feet away and called Curt Hazlett, the night city editor.

“Curt, I’m at the Vista Hotel. I think Barry’s just been busted by the FBI.”

“Ha-ha, very funny.”

“No, I’m serious. A couple of white shirts ran into the lobby, along with Tom Sherwood and a cameraman. The white shirts are talking to a guy in a suit. He may be FBI. Something is happening.”

The mirth disappeared from Curt’s voice. “Stay right there. I’ll get back to you.”

Left: A frame from an FBI videotape shows Marion Barry lighting a crack pipe in a Washington, D.C., hotel room on Jan. 18, 1990. Right: FBI agents stand above Barry after his arrest the same night. | AP Photo

A couple more police commanders ran into the lobby. I stayed near the pay phone. Curt paged me about five minutes later. The reporter who had been tracking the Barry investigation had confirmed that the FBI had busted the mayor, he said. They’d nabbed him inside a hotel room.

The news was traveling at warp speed. A radio reporter showed up, followed by a wire service guy. A white shirt went over to them and made a vertical chopping gesture—he was telling them they had to stay put.

“Do you have a credit card?” Curt asked.

“Yeah.”

“Get a room—on the Post. The paper will reimburse you. Spend the night there, see if you can interview any staff, guests, anyone who saw or heard anything. We’re working on finding out where in the hotel they busted him. As soon as I know more, I’ll page you.”

After retrieving my equipment bag from my car, I checked into a room on the fourth floor and for the next 90 minutes roamed all over the Vista, buttonholing guests and hotel staffers. No one knew anything about the Barry arrest. I retreated to my room and called Curt.

“Hang tight,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much else you can do. I’ll call you if anything comes up.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, clicked on the TV, and channel surfed. Every station had abandoned its usual lineup of sitcoms and cop dramas to report on the Barry takedown. After an hour or so, I hadn’t heard from Curt. I figured I was done for the night. I rang up room service and ordered a lobster dinner with a rum and Coke. The mixture of adrenaline and booze produced a nice buzz. I ordered another rum and Coke.

By 10 p.m. the news was reporting that Barry had been taken from the Vista to FBI headquarters. A dark SUV was shown rolling into an underground garage at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. A statement was issued by the U.S. attorney and the FBI: Barry had been arrested on narcotics charges in an undercover operation that was part of an “ongoing public corruption probe.” It wasn’t long before sources told my colleagues who were working the story that the mayor had been videotaped smoking crack.

The frenzy surrounding Barry was just starting. But the Vista portion of this party was over, which meant I was done for the night. In one gulp, I knocked back half my drink. A crazy idea came to me. I punched in the numbers to Champagne’s pager. By now I knew it by heart. Champagne called me back almost immediately.

“Someone page me from this number?”

“Yeah, it’s me. This is, uh, a work phone. Are you near Thomas Circle?”

“You know it.”

“Are you holding? Do you have two?”

“You’re in luck. I do.”

I hesitated. Two hours earlier, the hotel lobby had been full of FBI agents and white shirts. But Barry was gone, and with him the feds and cops. Champagne usually dressed conservatively, but every now and then she tramped it up with a short skirt, black fishnets and do-me stilettos.

“I’m in a hotel, and I don’t want to draw attention. How are you dressed?”

“I don’t look like I’m working, if that’s what you mean. I look respectable.”

“I’m at the Vista,” I said. I gave her my room number.

Champagne arrived wearing a black trench coat and spiked heels. She stepped into the room and unbuttoned the coat, revealing a short, form-fitting black cotton dress with a plunging neckline and a high slit.

She settled onto the edge of the bed and removed the rocks from her purse. I sat next to her and watched the nonstop Barry news. Champagne glanced at the TV and quickly returned her attention to the task at hand. Carefully, she cut a rock in half with a sharp red fingernail.

“I guess you’ve heard about the mayor,” I said.

She shrugged. “Yeah, I heard they got him here in the hotel. He should’ve known they were watching him. He should’ve known better than to try anything in some place he couldn’t control.”

Champagne loaded half of the rock onto her pipe. Her analysis made sense—enough sense to make me nervous. We were in a room over which we had no control. The cops or the feds would need a warrant to get into my home; I wasn’t sure the same rules applied to a hotel room. I jumped off the bed and pressed my face against the door, staring out the peephole.

“No one’s coming,” Champagne said calmly.

I took a couple of steps back and stared at the small space between the bottom of the door and the carpeted floor. Crack smoke didn’t produce any particular odor, at least none that I had ever noticed. But suddenly I was fixated on the possibility that smoke would seep out and someone would notice and call the guy at the front desk, who would call the cops.

Champagne seemed to read my mind. She placed her pipe and lighter on the bed, walked to the bathroom, and came out with a thick white towel. She folded it into a rectangle, went to the door, bent down, and pressed it into the space between the carpet and the bottom of the door. I crouched to get a good look. It appeared to be a perfect seal.

I followed Champagne to the bed. She handed me the pipe and lighter. As I resumed watching the coverage of the Barry arrest, I lit up and inhaled.

***

A few days after the mayor was arrested, I was on a plane headed back to Los Angeles. The FBI, it turned out, had used Barry’s former girlfriend Rasheeda Moore to lure him to the Vista. She had provided the crack and the pipe that the mayor had used. The Post was putting together a profile of Moore, whose last known address was in Los Angeles. My job was to find out whatever I could and hand over my notes to the staffer who was writing the story. But I was excited to be going home on the company dime.

I was pleasantly drunk on airplane rum-and-Cokes when I picked up my rental car and maneuvered out of the airport and onto the eastbound Santa Monica Freeway. I had a room reserved at the downtown Westin Bonaventure Hotel. As I approached the downtown exits, I wondered whether Raven, the girl who’d given me my first taste of crack, was still working the motel off Olympic Boulevard. The motel was only a few minutes from the Bonaventure. Maybe I would cruise by just to say hello.

Sure enough, Raven was in her usual spot. I eased the car to the curb, leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window. She approached warily, then smiled broadly when she recognized me behind the wheel. Raven leaned against the passenger door.

“Hi, stranger. Haven’t seen you in a minute. What have you been up to? When did you get the new ride?”

“I moved—to D.C. This is a rental. I’m in town for business.”

Raven brushed away a stray strand of hair. She looked good. I’d planned on calling some of my old contacts to ask about Rasheeda Moore as soon as I got to my hotel. That could wait.

“So,” I said. “Are you holding?”

“Not at the moment, but you know my connect is just around the corner. One thing, though: I don’t have a room right now. Could you pay for that, too?”

I’m on my own time right now. It’s not like I’d be violating any Post policies prohibiting smoking crack on company time.

“I’ve got a place nearby,” I said.

After quickly checking the rearview and sideview mirrors to confirm no cops were around, I handed Raven a pair of twenties. She walked around one corner of the motel, then returned less than a minute later and jumped into my car. Minutes later we were sitting on the bed inside my hotel room, Raven slipping off her jacket and breaking out the party kit: two rocks, a pipe, a lighter.

Three days blew by. By day, I worked hard. I rode out to Moore’s last known L.A. address and knocked on neighbors’ doors. I called every LAPD detective and street cop I knew. I rang up county prosecutors, defense attorneys, federal agents, private eyes—anyone who might be familiar with the woman who had lured Barry to the Vista. Nobody knew anything about her.

Ruben Castaneda today, 22 years after getting over his addiction. | Morad Boroomad

I compartmentalized. I kept my advance money and traveler’s checks in a plain white envelope. I paid Raven from my own money, which I kept in my wallet. Since my assignations with her were on my dime, I was fine, I convinced myself. I hadn’t shirked my job, but the frequency with which I’d hooked up with Raven was unsettling. Getting high once or twice a week was manageable. In L.A., I’d done it four nights in a row.

Back in Washington, a brazen shooting got me back on track.

Three nights after I returned, I headed to Northeast Washington for a homicide that was announced over the scanner. The victim was inside an SUV at the intersection of 5th and K Streets Northeast. Uniforms cordoned off the intersection. A couple of detectives in suits and overcoats peeked into the SUV. The victim, a young black man, was slumped in the front passenger seat. I stood dutifully behind the yellow tape.

It was unlikely this murder would become a newspaper story. I was just grinding, putting in the time necessary to develop sources. I blew out white breath and rocked side to side, trying to keep warm. My trench coat, gloves, and fedora were no match for the bone-chilling cold.

Then: Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

Six gunshots, ear-splittingly loud, maybe 30 yards away. The onlookers ducked and ran in the other direction. Three uniformed cops drew their guns and sprinted toward the source of the sound. I pulled out my notebook and ran with them.

A block south, a middle-aged man was lying on a patch of snow on the sidewalk, writhing in pain. His forehead was bleeding; it looked like a graze. I tore off my right glove, grabbed my pen and began furiously taking notes.

One of the cops seemed to notice me for the first time. “Hey, who are you?”

“ Washington Post.”

“You can’t be here.”

I ignored him and kept writing.

“You have to leave. Now.”

I backed away, disappointed at being shooed away, giddy that I was lucky enough to be there when a shooting broke out within yards of a half-dozen cops working a crime scene. I raced back to the car and called my editor. He told me to work the scene for another 15 minutes, then get back and write it.

About 10 minutes later, I buttonholed a detective who had been working the murder and who was now helping investigate the second shooting. He provided a quick rundown: The new victim and his attacker were in a group of men who were talking when an argument broke out, the investigator said. Someone pulled a gun and started firing. I began writing the piece in my head as I drove back to the office. Once I was in front of my computer, I knocked it out in 20 minutes.

The following night, there was an envelope on my keyboard when I came to work. It bore the Washington Post seal and address in the upper left-hand corner.

Inside was a handwritten note: “Amazing story in today’s paper, a shooting a block from a crime scene in full view of the police. Keep up the good work on the police beat.” It was signed by Don Graham, the paper’s publisher.

I showed the note to Carlos Sanchez, the daytime police reporter.

“You got a Donnygram,” he said. “He sends notes to people when he likes their stories. Congratulations.”

All right then. How bad could things be if I’d just received a Donnygram?

This article is an adapted excerpt from S Street Rising: Crack, Murder and Redemption in D.C.