Faces of the Gone

CHAPTER 1

If there had only been one dead body that day, I never would have heard about it. From a news standpoint, one dead body in Newark, New Jersey, is only slightly more interesting than planes landing safely at the airport. Assuming it’s some anonymous gangbanger-and in Newark it’s almost always an anonymous gangbanger-it’s a four-paragraph story written by an intern whose primary concern is finishing quickly so he can return to inventing witty status updates on Facebook.

Two bodies is slightly more interesting. The intern has to come up with eight paragraphs, and maybe, if there’s someone unfortunate enough to be hanging out in the photo department when an editor wanders by, a picture will run with the story. Three bodies is worth a headline and a picture, even a follow-up or two, though the interest peters out quickly enough.

But four? Four means real news. Four gets a town buzzing, even a town as blood-jaded as Newark. And four bodies is what I was contemplating that Monday morning in early December as I arrived at the offices of the Newark Eagle-Examiner and opened up the paper.

We had managed to cram a quick story about it in our late edition. It was done by our night-shift rewrite guy, a man named Peterson who delighted in hyperbolizing gritty crime stories. He quoted a Newark police spokesman as saying four victims, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, had been found in a vacant lot next to a church on Ludlow Street.

The police spokesman didn’t provide much color, so Peterson created his own, describing the “brazen execution-style slayings” as having “rocked an otherwise quiet Newark neighborhood.” The bodies, he wrote, had been “stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked plot.” The Newark police had not released the names of the victims, because next of kin had not been notified, so Peterson referred to them as “four John Does” every chance he got.

I was making it through the last of Peterson’s compositional flourishes when I heard my editor, Sal Szanto.

“Crrttrr Rssss,” Szanto growled. From experience, I knew he was at least attempting to say my name, Carter Ross.

“What’s going on, boss?” I said, lurking in his doorway.

Now in his early fifties, Szanto often had trouble with vowels until his voice warmed up a bit. No one could say which of his vices-coffee, cigarettes, or antacid tablets-had taken the letters away.

“Ssttddnn.”

Sit down. I think. As I entered the office and took the chair across from his desk, Szanto turned away and held up his left hand while coughing forcefully into his right, his jowls jiggling at the effort. He stopped for a moment, started to speak, then hacked a few more times until he finally dislodged the morning phlegm that had rendered him all but unintelligible.

“Ah, that’s better,” he said. “Anyway, Brodie is really pitching a tent over this Ludlow Street thing.”

As far as anyone knew, Harold Brodie-the legendary Eagle-Examiner executive editor who was now pushing seventy-had not gotten an actual hard-on in years. He got stiffies for stories and, sadly for Mrs. Brodie, nothing else. And although they were erections only in the figurative sense, the impact they had on the rest of us was very real. When you heard the phrase “Brodie has a real hard-on for this one”-or any number of colorful derivations on that theme-you knew it was trouble. Once he was turned on to a story it could take days for the old man to tire of it. And, in the meantime, he was going to harass everyone in the newsroom on a half-hourly basis until he got the story he imagined existed.

“I’ve already sent Whitlow and Hays down there. They’re going to do the daily stuff,” Szanto said, then aimed a stubby finger at me. “You’re going to get to the bottom of what the hell happened down there.”

“And how am I going to do that?”

“I don’t know. You’re my investigative reporter. Figure it out yourself.”

I enjoy the title “investigative reporter” because it impresses women in bars. And I was proud to have earned the job at an age, thirty-one, when some of my peers were still slaving away on backwater municipal beats in faraway bureaus. But it’s just a line on a business card. It’s not like there are files marked “for investigative reporters only.” It certainly hasn’t made me any smarter.

“So what do we know, besides ‘four John Does stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked plot’?” I said, mimicking Peterson’s style.

“That one of the John Does is actually a Jane.”

“Whoops.”

“Yeah,” Szanto said, wincing as he sipped his still-too-hot coffee. “The police already called to bitch about that this morning.”

“So what do you think Brodie wants from this?” I asked.

“You know exactly what he wants: a fascinating story with great art that gives us all piercing insight into the woes of New Jersey’s largest city. And he wants it tomorrow.”

“How about you give me a week and I’ll try to turn in something that doesn’t read like it was written by a lumberjack?”

“Hey, if it gets Brodie off my ass, you can rewrite Tuesdays with Morrie for all I care,” Szanto said.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that,” I said as I departed his office.

“Tk Hrrrndzzz,” Szanto hollered after me.

“Hear that?” I asked Tommy Hernandez, the aforementioned Facebook-obsessed intern.

“Yeah, it sounds like a lawnmower that won’t start,” he said, then looked at me with something far beyond disdain.

“How many times do I have to tell you that a wristwatch is an accessory and it should match your belt?” he demanded.

Tommy is only twenty-two, but he’s blessed with a great reporter’s instinct of noticing every small detail. He’s handy to have on the streets, because he’s second-generation Cuban-American and speaks flawless Spanish. He’s also gay as the Mardi Gras parade.

“Come on, Tommy,” I said. “Let’s go embrace another beautiful day in Newark.”

The abandoned lot on Ludlow Street was, true to Peterson’s imagination, a sorrowful little patch of earth covered in dried weeds. The neighborhood around it wasn’t bad, by Newark standards. Most of the houses appeared to be owner occupied and decently maintained, with either newish siding or fresh paint. The church, St. Mary’s Catholic, was a century-old stone building with a tidy rectory next door. There was public housing across the street, but they were newly constructed town houses, the kind that wouldn’t go to seed for at least another decade. Weequahic Golf Course, a charming little cow pasture county residents could play for fifteen bucks, was maybe two blocks down the street.

“This place is pretty decent,” I said as Tommy and I pulled to a stop on Ludlow. He cast me a sideways glance.

“Yeah, let’s start an upscale day spa here,” he cracked.

“Okay, fair point,” I corrected myself. “But look around. There’s no one just hanging out. The cars are all gone. The people in this neighborhood work during the day.”

“How far are we from Seth Boyden?”

The Seth Boyden projects were a festering den of urban despair. Even the toughest reporters got jittery about going there during the day. Going there after dark put you on the short list for a mugging.

“Three or four blocks,” I said.

“Think it could have been someone from there? A lot of Blood sets hanging around.”

“Could be. But would some Blood really go through the trouble of marching four people all the way down here? Those guys are hit-and-run types.”

Tommy, who had written up nearly every shooting in Newark over the past six months, knew that as well as I did. We were really just stalling. The car was being buffeted by gusts of wind and neither of us was real keen to face them. A cold front had barreled down from Canada overnight and the winter season was giving New Jersey its first slap. Which figured. It’s a meteorological fact that as soon as the weather gets extreme-in either direction-it coincides with me having to do manon-the-street reporting. I’ve spent most of my career either sweating or shivering.

“I don’t suppose the story will come to us in here, will it?” I asked.

“You know, for a superstar investigative reporter, you’re a real pussy sometimes,” Tommy said.

Grunting, I willed myself out of the car, across the street, and into the vacant lot. The Newark police’s Crime Scene Unit had already retreated back to the warmth of their precinct. A few strips of windblown yellow tape were the only sign they had ever been there.

I gingerly picked my way toward the fence that lined the back of the lot, where a makeshift shrine was already forming. In the past few years, these shrines had become a ubiquitous part of the city landscape. As soon as some way-too-young kid gets gunned down, his boys come with candles and other mementos to memorialize the spot where he fell. If the victim is a Blood, you’ll see red bandanas and “BIP”-Blood in Peace-spray-painted somewhere nearby. If he’s a Crip, the bandanas will be blue and the graffiti will have some kind of number (Crip sets often have numbers). The Latin Kings decorate in black and gold, and so on.

I had interviewed kids who bragged about how big their shrines would be when they got killed. They talked about it with a nonchalance that was chilling.

This shrine was small, so far. But it would undoubtedly grow over the next few days. Four bouquets of flowers, one for each victim, had already been attached to the fence. One of the bouquets had a card attached. I turned it over to read the inscription.

“Wanda,” it read. “May you rest in peace forever. Love, Tynesha.”

Tommy had walked up behind me. As I stared dumbly, Tommy was scribbling something in his pad.

“Let’s find out who Tynesha is,” he said as he copied the name of the florist.

“Good plan,” I said, slightly chagrined the intern thought of it before I did.

“Someone’s gotta do your work for you,” he shot back.

Richard Whitlow approached us from the sidewalk, stepping carefully through the waist-high weeds. A beefy, dark-skinned black guy, he had been covering Newark for more than a decade and was, how to put it, a little bit inured to violent death. His greeted us with, “Hey, make sure you don’t slip on the blood puddle.”

“You journalists are so insensitive with your gallows humor,” I joked back.

“I wish I was kidding. Check it out,” he said, pointing to a bare patch of dirt that, sure enough, appeared to have been stained by something dark and red.

“Oh, nasty,” Tommy said.

“Yeah, poor suckers bled out right there,” Whitlow said, shaking his head.

“Police told you anything new?” I asked.

“Finally got the names out of them.”

“They mean anything to you?”

“Nah. Not until I figure out their street names,” Whitlow said. Aliases littered the hood like so much trash, especially among those who were employed in what you might call the city’s informal economy. Your friendly neighborhood drug dealer could be known by up to a half-dozen different aliases, which bore scant resemblance to his real name. Depending on the name the police settled on, the victim’s own mother might not recognize it. Or she might be the only one who recognized it.

“What names did they give you?”

Whitlow flipped open his notebook and shoved the page toward me so I could copy them down: Wanda Bass, Tyrone Scott, Shareef Thomas, Devin Whitehead. I had to press hard on my pen. The ink was already freezing.

“Cops say anything else?”

“Around ten, there were four shots, bang, bang, bang, bang,” Whitlow said, turning to the next page in his notebook. “No one called the cops or even thought much of it because there’s a bar down the street and people are always coming out drunk, shooting off their guns for the hell of it.”

I always found strange comfort that the American propensity for mixing alcohol and firearms cut across racial, socioeconomic, and cultural divides, from rural redneck to ghetto gangbanger to skeet-shooting blue blood.

“Around eleven, some guy came out of the bar and happened to see four people lying in the back of the lot,” Whitlow continued, flipping more pages as he went. “He told the cops he thought they were homeless and he was going to roust them and take them to a shelter, on account of the cold. Then he got close, saw the blood, and made the call.”

“Wow, there are helpful citizens after all,” I interjected.

“Yeah, anyway, that’s about all I can tell you, other than that my ass is about to freeze off,” Whitlow said, storing his notepad back in his jacket. “I got enough to write a daily. Hays is working some of his cop sources trying to get stuff out of them. Let me know if you find anything interesting around here.”

Tommy and I decided to work the streets, which can be a wonderful source of information for the reporter who doesn’t mind the trial-and-error method of walking up to random people until you bump into one who knows something.

Which is not to say it’s easy. As a rule, Newark residents don’t trust anyone. They especially don’t trust anyone who looks official, be they cops, politicians, or newspaper reporters. And they doubly don’t trust white folks, who are usually only there to arrest them or scam them.

Therefore, for someone of my pallor and profession, milking information from the streets involved bridging that rather huge chasm of natural distrust. Some white reporters running in the hood try to “act black”-talk the vernacular, quote rappers, dress like they’re going on BET-but that was never going to work for me.

The fact of the matter is I’m Carter Ross, born to an upper-middle-class family in the privilege of Millburn, one of New Jersey’s finer suburbs. I was raised by two doting parents alongside an older brother who’s now a lawyer and a younger sister who’s now a social worker. We vacationed down the shore every summer, skied in Vermont every winter, and were taught to view Newark as the kind of place you heard about but did not visit. I was sheltered by some of New Jersey’s best prep schools until age eighteen, whereupon I went to Amherst College and spent four years around some of the nation’s most elite students. I just don’t have any street in me.

And anyone could see it. The things that allow me to blend into the tasteful decor at any of New Jersey’s better suburban shopping malls-my side-parted brown hair, my preference for button-down-collared shirts and pressed slacks, my awkwardly upright carriage, my precise diction and bland anywhere-in-America accent-made me a circus freak in the hood. Most people I pass on the street are polite enough to merely stare. A few openly point. People are constantly asking me if I’m lost.

Yet through the years, I had come to realize a simple fact of reporting: if you approach people with respect, listen hard, and genuinely try to understand their point of view, they will talk to you, no matter how different your background is. So that’s what I attempt to do.

Over the next three hours, I learned a lot about the neighborhood: how the vacant lot had once been home to a crack house, until the city got its act together and tore it down; how the public housing across the street, which had been slapped together by a developer known to be cozy with the mayor, was already falling apart; how the bar down the street, the Ludlow Tavern, just kept getting rougher, with the patrons leaving their knives at home and bringing their guns instead.

But I didn’t learn anything about the four victims, which suggested they weren’t from this part of town. Most Newark neighborhoods were tighter than outsiders realized, with familial connections that went back generations. If someone from the neighborhood got killed, you could always find a cousin or a friend-or a cousin of a friend whose aunt was distantly related to the victim’s stepmother. Something. But I had struck out.

By the time I was done canvassing and had returned to the vacant lot, a truck from a New York TV station had pulled up outside the church. No doubt, they were ready to lend great insight and understanding with their ferociously dogged reporting, which would consist of taking off just as soon as they had collected one usable five-second sound bite from the first “concerned citizen” they could find.

I don’t want to launch into too much of a rant against local television reporters. But if I were a modern-day Noah, I’d take the bacteria that causes the clap on my ark before I took one of them.

This reporter (I loathe to even use that word) was a typical TV news chick whose good looks were an entirely artificial creation. It was possible, underneath the layers of eye makeup and expensively treated hair, she might have once been an attractive human being. But who could tell anymore?

“I’m standing outside St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Newark,” she began breathlessly, “where four bodies were found stacked like cordwood in this. . dammit.”

A gust of wind had sullied her hair, momentarily halting her unflappable dedication to delivering the news.

“Come on. My fingers are freezing,” her cameraman complained.

“Shut up. You think I’m warm here?” she said testily, running a gloved hand through her hair.

Then she saw me, instantly dropped the bitchy act, and affected a huge smile, as if she were happy to see me-which, I knew, meant she was going to try to leach information out of me. TV chicks believe they can get stuff from male newspaper reporters simply by flipping their hair and batting their eyes a few times. They do this because they assume male newspaper reporters are hard up. Most of the time, they’re absolutely correct. But I can proudly say I don’t let Mr. Johnson do my thinking when I’m on the job. I save that for after work.

“Hiiiiiii,” she said, managing to fire off two hair flips inside seven seconds. “Alexis Stewart, News 8 Action News Team.”

“Hi,” I said flatly.

“Do you know where any of the victims’ families live, by any chance? I’d love to get a bite from a grieving mom.”

“Yeah. They all live just a few blocks up that way,” I lied. “They’re in an apartment complex called Seth Boyden. You might want to hurry. I hear they’re just about to hold a news conference.”

The News 8 Action News Team rushed off like they were headed to a free hair spray handout, leaving me alone on Ludlow Street. A strong gust of wind sliced into me as I gazed at the vacant lot, trying to imagine what circumstances had led four people to this spot for the purpose of taking their last breaths.

Four bodies. It was a big number. There had only been one other quadruple homicide in Newark in the last quarter century, mostly because the drug-related killings that typified the city’s murders tended to be one- or two-at-a-time type affairs. Contrary to what suburbanites believed, the drug trade in Newark was not highly organized. There were no kingpins, no major operators, no Evil Geniuses behind it all. The local gangs, who did most of the selling, were all neighborhood based, with little centralization beyond that. Even though all Bloods wore red and all Crips wore blue, each set operated independently. The violence they committed tended to be limited in scale.

So four bodies suggested something new, something much more pernicious. To herd together four people, lead them to a faraway vacant lot, and kill them? That took planning, organization, coordination. And those were higher-order skills we hadn’t seen from the street before.

I soon realized I wasn’t alone in staring at the lot. An older guy with long, salt-and-pepper dreadlocks was doing the same thing. He was wearing the uniform of a Newark Liberty International Airport baggage handler and was carrying some flowers.

“Hi, there,” I said.

“Hey, Bird Man,” he said.

On the streets, the Newark Eagle-Examiner was known as “the Bird.” Its reporters were called “Bird Man” or “Bird Woman.” It was an unfortunate consequence of the long-ago marriage of the Newark Eagle and the Newark Examiner into the Eagle-Examiner. And while the merger made us New Jersey’s largest and most respected daily newspaper, it also made us sound like we were the official publication of the Audubon Society. I suppose the reporters didn’t have it as bad as some: the guys who tossed the papers onto people’s front porches in the morning were called “Bird Flippers.”

“Gee, what makes you think I’m a reporter?” I asked, trying not to sound too sarcastic.

“You got that nosy look.”

“You can call me Carter,” I said, sticking out my hand for him to shake. He looked a little surprised-people in the hood often are when a white person is friendly toward them-then grabbed it and pumped it twice. His hands felt like they had gripped a lot of Louis Vuitton knockoffs in their time.

“You know one of them?” I asked.

“Yeah. Tyrone Scott. Called himself ‘Hundred Year.’ He told people he was supposed to get himself a hundred years in jail for killing some guy.”

“So I take it he got paroled.”

“Ah, he was full of it,” the man said. “You know how these young bucks are. Always trying to puff up their damn reputations, trying to make themselves all bad. He was just caught selling near a school.”

That was one of the Catch-22s of urban drug sales in New Jersey: there were stiffer penalties for dealing within a thousand feet of a school, the difference between jail time and no jail time. But the thousand-foot standard was set with the suburbs in mind. In the city, everything was within a thousand feet of a school. It was the main reason New Jersey led the nation in the disparity between its prison population (60 percent black) and its general population (12 percent black).

“So how’d you know him?”

“I go with his mama a little bit. She asked me to come down with this,” he said, holding up the flowers.

“Any idea what he did to end up here?”

“What you think?”

“Dealer?”

“Nah,” the man said. “He was just a hustler.”

In Newark, the distinction between “dealer” and “hustler” was an important one. A “dealer” is a guy who does nothing but sell drugs, and is mostly despised. A “hustler” is a more sympathetic figure: he only sells drugs out of necessity, to keep the lights turned on.

Which is not to say a hustler couldn’t get himself in the same kind of trouble a dealer did.

“What was his hustle?” I asked.

“Diesel,” the man said. Heroin.

“Did he live around here?”

“Naw. His mama lives over off South Orange Avenue by the Garden State Parkway. He hustled in front of the chicken shack over there.”

I was keeping mental notes at this point. Sometimes people clam up when you pull out a notebook and I didn’t want to spook this guy.

“So how come he ended up down here?” I asked. “I mean, that neighborhood has to be three miles from here.”

“His mama was asking the same question,” he said, then started mimicking a woman’s voice: “ ‘What was that boy doin’ down there? Why he leave his hood? Don’t he know they ain’t got no respect for nothing down there?’ ”

“She have any idea why this happened to him?”

“She didn’t even know he hustled. She didn’t want to know. He’d be out on that corner hustling all day and she’d say, ‘Ain’t it nice of Tyrone to keep an eye on the neighborhood? He’s such a good boy.’ ”

“He in a gang?”

“Don’t think so. He was too old for that.”

“How old was he?”

“Tyrone? Hell. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”

In gang years, that was the equivalent of about ninety-seven. Gang members reached middle age by eighteen. By twenty-three or twenty-four, after a quick stint or two in jail, you were considered OG, an “Original Gangster.” No one made it to thirty in a gang. By that age, you were either dead, in jail for an extended stretch, or you had finally found the good sense to change occupations.

“Well, I best be moving on,” the man said. “My bones is getting cold.”

“Mine too. Thanks for talking.”

“Uh-huh. Just make sure the police catch whoever did this, okay?” the man said, as he began walking toward the shrine with his flowers. “I don’t know if Tyrone’s mama could take it if she don’t get a little justice.”

With early-stage hypothermia setting in, I was making the teeth-chattering walk back to the car when I saw Tommy emerge from a house at the far end of the street.

“Hurry up,” I hollered. “Pretend there’s a sale at John Varvatos.”

“What’s the matter?” he shot back as he caught up to me. “You’re nervous because it’s been four hours since you checked on your fantasy football team?”

“Hey, that’s important stuff. I’m thisclose to pulling off a blockbuster deal for Peyton Manning.”

“Let’s just say my fantasies involving football teams are a little different from yours.”

We hopped into my car to escape the cold just as a gust of wind rocked it. I got us rolling and clicked on the radio, where an all-news station was midway through another report about the troubled newspaper industry. For those of us who had been living with the devastation, this hardly qualified as news.

People think newspapers are struggling because the Internet stole our readers. But that’s not the problem; when readers go online, they’re still clicking on our sites for their news. Between print and online, most newspapers have more readers than they’ve ever had. We don’t make much money off online readers at the moment, because most advertisers are still learning how best to utilize the Web. But we’ll figure that out eventually.

The real problem is that the Internet stole our classified advertising. Every daily newspaper used to have a nice thick section stuffed with nothing but ads-used cars, apartments for rent, houses for sale, secondhand pianos, job postings, and so on. We were the community’s marketplace and in most areas we were the only game in town. As an industry, our entire profit margin came from that one section.

That’s gone now. Gone to Craigslist, to eBay, to Monster, to Autotrader. Combine that with some of our other issues-shrinking retail advertising budgets, soaring newsprint prices, increased distribution costs, and so on-and it made for a fiscal conflagration that was threatening to consume an entire American institution.

“Can we turn that off?” Tommy said. “It’s like listening to someone narrate your own funeral.”

“Happy to oblige,” I said.

It was easy to get caught up in the sense of doom. The threat of layoff was constant and I didn’t care to think about how many good people we had lost already. Yet for all the Internet had done to shake up newsrooms, the basics of what we did-gather information and disseminate it in a speedy and sensible manner-were unchanged. So I turned my attention back toward that job.

“You learn anything out there?” I said, holding my hand against the car’s heater, which was finally spitting out lukewarm air.

“Not really. Nobody seems to know anything about these guys. I just keep hearing the same thing: there were four shots, no one called the police because gunfire in the neighborhood is so common, suddenly there are four dead bodies. Everyone is a little freaked out.”

“Sounds like stuff you can feed to Whitlow and Hays for the daily.”

“Yeah. What did you get?”

I related the conversation I had with Tyrone Scott’s mama’s boyfriend.

“Well, that’s a little something,” Tommy said. “Should we check out that chicken shack?”

“No, I’ll do that. Let’s split up. Why don’t you visit that florist and see if they can tell you who ‘Tynesha’ is.”

Tommy agreed and, as I drove back to the office, he subjected me to a harangue about how my shoes were just wrong, saying I should free myself from the bondage of laces and get slip-ons.

“Tommy, I’m born and bred WASP,” I reminded him. “You ought to be proud of me for not wearing shoes with tassels.”

Upon returning to the office, I made a quick Coke Zero pit stop at the break room vending machines. There, I found Tina Thompson, our city editor, reading Fertility for Dummies. Tina was excessively candid about her sex life, and the thunderous ticking of her thirty-eight-year-old biological clock could be heard as far away as the Pine Barrens. It never failed to amuse me how a woman whose life had until recently consisted of work, yoga, jogging-and a series of relationships that lasted between one night and two weeks-had suddenly entered a nesting phase. Her search for Mr. Right had taken on a highly procreative bent. She wasn’t looking for a life partner, just a mating partner: a man who was, above all else, fecund.

“Hey, Tina,” I said. “Gotten yourself knocked up yet?”

“Jesus Christ!” she said, without looking up. “Did you know that excessive time riding a bike can cause sterility in males? That’s it. No more bike messengers for me.”

She threw the book down.

“Might want to take it easy on the X-ray technicians, too,” I suggested.

“Hey, if he’s six foot one, a hundred eighty-five pounds, with dark hair and blue eyes, I might let him throw one in me anyway,” she said with a flirty grin.

I’m six one. One hundred eighty-five. Dark hair. Blue eyes. I’m not a bad-looking guy. Occasionally, I’m even somewhat dashing. But I’m not under any illusion Tina is attracted to me. Just my sperm. So far, my little swimmers had held off on her overtures. Though I’m a little worried about what might happen if she got them drunk someday. They’re weak-willed. And Tina has that hot-older-woman thing going on, with yoga-toned arms, never-ending legs, and expressive brown eyes that seemed to be winking at me even when they were still.

“Too bad I’m a born-again virgin,” I said. “I’m going to Virgins Anonymous and everything. Just celebrated my three-month anniversary of celibacy.”

That last part was actually true, sadly, though not by choice. I was just in a little slump. That didn’t mean I was going to hop into bed simply because Tina patted the pillow. I wasn’t ready to become one of those Modern Fathers who parade around with Precious Bundle strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn all day. Nor was I particularly interested in spawning a child who would someday refer to me as “my biological father.”

“Fine, have it your way,” she said. “You’ll cave someday.”

Alas, she was probably right. Tina was wearing a button-down white blouse that was just slightly see-through and an above-the-knee charcoal-gray skirt with black tights. And in one motion-she recrossed her fabulous legs and tucked a lock of curly brown hair behind her ear-I could already feel my resolve crumbling.

“So you look like you’ve spent all day in a meat locker,” she said. “You get anything out there?”

“Other than frostbite? No.”

“Buster Hays has a cop source who says they’re looking into a theory that this has something to do with a robbery at the Ludlow Tavern,” Tina said.

“What’s the theory?”

“That one of the victims helped stick up the place a couple months ago then had the balls to walk back into the place and order a drink. Supposedly, the owner had him whacked.”

“Which one?”

“The one with the Muslim name. . uh, Shareef Thomas.”

“So who are the other three people?”

“Accomplices?” she said, sounding uncertain. “I’m not sure they know.”

“The police got any good evidence to back up this theory?”

“Source won’t say. But do the Newark police ever have good evidence?”

She had a point. I once covered a murder trial where-no lie-the whole case had been pinned on the eyewitness account of one drug addict who admitted to being high at the time of the shooting. “I was high,” she said on the stand. “But I have a really good memory.” The jury disagreed, deliberating for about thirty-five minutes before returning a not-guilty plea.

“What does Hays think?” I asked.

“That they may be on to something. His cop made it sound like this was a really hot lead.”

“Huh,” I said. “Brodie still got wood for this thing?”

“His flag has been at full staff all day long,” Tina said.

Before that imagery developed any further, I ended our conversation and went back to my desk.

I started punching the victims’ names into my computer, seeing what it might tell me. Between Lexis-Nexis, New Jersey voting records, the Department of Corrections Web site, and the other public records to which a reporter had instant access, you could usually piece together a solid bank of information on a person within a few minutes.

Unless their names are Wanda Bass, Tyrone Scott, and Shareef Thomas, all of which were too common for me to get anything definitive. The only name that returned much of anything was Devin Whitehead. I got his Department of Corrections profile, which included six convictions for possession and possession with intent to distribute. I also got his last known address, which was in the Clinton Hill section of Newark.

And that was a good break, because I happened to have a source there.

My guy in Clinton Hill is Reginald Jamison, but I think the only person who calls him “Reginald” is his wife. Everyone else calls him “the T-shirt Man,” or just “Tee.”

Tee has a small storefront on Clinton Avenue. He and I became acquainted a few years back when I did a story about RIP T-shirts, which happen to be Tee’s specialty. RIPs had become a disturbingly prevalent urban fashion trend: anytime some too-young kid got killed, his boys rushed to have a T-shirt made in his memory. Every RIP T-shirt was different, but they followed a basic formula, featuring the deceased’s photo, the dates of birth and death, and the words REST IN PEACE. The people who wore them essentially became walking tombstones.

More than half of Tee’s business came from RIP T-shirts. And while he hated the idea that he was profiting from these kids’ deaths, he was also a businessman who figured if he wasn’t making these things, someone else would. He assuaged his guilt by putting extra care into the design, so each T-shirt would be special to the grieving family.

The story I wrote about Tee had given him some good publicity and I became a semiregular visitor to his store. We couldn’t have been raised in more different circumstances-while I was taking SAT prep classes, Tee was dropping out of high school to support three younger siblings. But we were close to the same age, shared a fundamental curiosity for the world, and enjoyed each other’s company because of it. Tee could explain the hood to me, while I translated white people for him. Plus, Tee had a natural eye for news. He could have made a great reporter.

Instead, he was just one of my best sources. And as soon as I got buzzed into his store that afternoon, he greeted me with, “I wondered when I was going to hear from you.”

“And why is that?”

“You’re here about Dee-Dub, right?”

Dee-Dub. D.W. Devin Whitehead. Got it.

“Good guess.”

“Everyone’s talking about it. Figured you’d get here sooner or later. I’m making his T-shirt right now.”

I walked over to Tee’s computer, where he designed all his shirts. Sure enough, Devin Whitehead’s face was on the screen, waiting to be immortalized on a Hanes Beefy-T. I did quick math on his dates. He was exactly two weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday.

“Can you believe that? Twenty years old.” Tee shook his head and I could tell he had been near tears. Tee looks like a badass-five ten, at least two hundred fifty, most of it muscle, braids, and tattoos-but the dude could cry from watching a car commercial.

“You know him well?” I asked.

“A little bit. He was one of those knuckleheads who hang outside my store. But he was a good kid.”

The definition of a “good kid” in Newark was perhaps a little different than it was in the suburbs. Out there, being a good kid meant you did your homework, made it home by curfew, and participated in resume-building extracurricular activities that would compare favorably on a college application. In Newark, it meant you hadn’t shot anyone.

“Gang?”

“Allegedly.”

“Allegedly” was one of Tee’s favorite words. He used it with the appropriate sense of sarcasm.

“Which one?”

“You ain’t gonna write nothing bad about him, are you?” Tee asked warily. “I know his mama. If his mama found out you got it from me, she’d smack me upside the head. And his mama is one big bitch.”

“He’s dead, Tee,” I said. “I’m not gonna piss on the kid’s grave. I’m just trying to figure out what he might have done to get himself killed.”

“Okay, well, allegedly he was part of the Browns.”

The Brick City Browns was one of Newark’s more venerable street gangs-which meant it had been around since the late 1990s.

“Are the Browns at war with anyone right now?” I asked.

“No more or less than usual.”

“Was he a dealer?”

“Allegedly.”

“What did he sell?”

“Mostly smack, I think,” Tee said. “I don’t know. I ain’t into that stuff. Hang on a sec.”

Tee went outside his store and had a brief conversation with the aforementioned knuckleheads. Tee could get more information out of those kids in thirty seconds than I could get in half a lifetime.

“Yeah,” Tee said as he came back in. “They said he used to sell cook-up”-street term for crack-cocaine-“but he kept getting popped for it”-street term for sent to jail-“and when he got out the last time he switched to smack. Allegedly.”

That made two heroin sellers.

“So what are you hearing? What are people saying?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Tee said. “This one is weird. You know how it is around here. Someone has a beef with you, they find you on a corner somewhere, they drive up and shoot your ass and then they drive off. That’s a dime a dozen. You know what I’m saying? This don’t make no sense.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I mean, what was he doing down there?”

“I’m trying to figure that out. Is it possible he knew anyone in that neighborhood?”

“Dee-Dub? The only times he left Clinton Hill was when he got arrested. He lived with his mama. He had a baby with a girl down the street. His boys are all here. He didn’t have no reason to go down there.”

We mulled that over for a moment. Tee busied himself by rearranging the used DVDs and CDs he sold as a side business.

“What are you hearing?” Tee asked.

“Not much, to be honest. The police think this was retribution for some kind of bar robbery the victims pulled. Is that possible?”

“I mean, possible? Yeah, it’s possible. It’s possible Busta Rhymes will decide to make his next video in the back of my store. But I don’t think it’s gonna happen, you know what I’m saying?”

“Uh, no.”

“I’m saying, Dee-Dub wasn’t no stick-up artist,” Tee said. “He just didn’t have that in him.”

I pulled my pad out of my pocket and showed him the list of victims.

“Any of these other names mean anything to you?”

As he scanned my pad, I added, “Tyrone Scott goes by the name ‘Hundred Year’ sometimes.”

“Nope. Don’t know none of them besides Dee-Dub,” Tee said.

“Huh. Well, keep your ears open, okay?”

“You got it,” Tee said, then went back to the task of memorializing Devin Whitehead in the way he knew best.

My next stop was the South Orange Avenue chicken shack, hard by the Garden State Parkway. Like a number of Newark’s finer providers of well-crisped fowl, this one was a shameless knockoff of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was called Wyoming Fried Chicken. Its mascot was “Cowboy Kenny,” who looked like the Colonel after a hot shower. It featured “the Cowboy’s” secret blend of herbs and spices-as if salt, pepper, and MSG were a secret.

Any corporate lawyer would have filed a lawsuit quicker than he could eat a five-piece basket. But that was the blessing of Newark that protected every bootlegger, boondoggler, and copyright infringer within the city limits: anyone who might have the inclination to file such a suit wouldn’t come within three zip codes of the place.

I pulled up in front of the WFC, which had roughly a dozen guys hanging out in front of it-or at least it did until one of them saw my pasty face, at which point there was a rapid scattering. The sight of a well-dressed white man in the ghetto often has that effect. Only one of the loiterers stayed behind. He was wearing a North Face jacket, which was all the rage among discerning urban pharmaceutical salesmen. Lots of pockets.

“What you want?” North Face asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m just working on a story. You know a guy named Tyrone Scott? Goes by the name Hundred Year?”

“Never heard of him,” North Face said, spitting his sentence out almost before I finished mine. I could have asked him if he knew Mickey Mouse and the answer would have been the same.

“Really? That’s funny, because someone told me he hustles around here.”

“Well, good for him,” North Face said, getting agitated. “But you can’t stand here.”

“Excuse me? This is a public sidewalk.”

“It’s my sidewalk. Get out of here. You’re scaring away all the customers.”

“Well, we can do this one of two ways,” I said. “Either you tell me about Hundred Year, or I stand here all night until I find someone who knows him. What’s it gonna be?”

He glanced around, clearly not liking either choice. And perhaps he was considering a third option-pulling a piece out from under his jacket and reducing me to a bloody speed bump on Cowboy Kenny’s sidewalk-but I think he realized having dozens of cops responding to a homicide call was going to be an even greater business disruption.

“I talk and then you leave?”

“You have my word,” I said. “What was his deal?”

“I don’t know. He went to jail for a while. Then he got out.”

“What was he in for?”

“Dealing, I guess. He told people he shot someone, but if he did, it wasn’t no one around here. I ain’t never heard no one saying, ‘Yeah, Tyrone, that nigga shot me.’ ”

“Was he in a gang?”

“Naw. Tyrone’s just a mama’s boy.”

“Did he hustle?”

“Yeah, sometimes. Not all the time, you know what I mean? But more lately.”

“What did he sell? Diesel?”

“Diesel?” North Face said, screwing up his face like he had never heard the word.

“You really want me out here all night, don’t you?”

“Okay, yeah, he was selling diesel.”

“You think it got him killed?”

“I don’t know. Look, it wasn’t me or any of my boys, okay?”

“Convince me.”

North Face looked left, then right, like he wanted to make sure no one was eavesdropping. Or maybe it was just a reflex to keep your head on a swivel in his line of work.

“Man, I’m saying, he just did his own thing, you know?” he said. “He had his own customers, the real hard-core junkies. He got a reputation for selling really good junk and then, bam, all the junkies started going to him.”

“Didn’t that piss you off?”

“Naw, man. I don’t sell drugs.”

“For a guy who doesn’t sell drugs, you sure know a lot about it,” I said, cracking an I’m-kidding-please-don’t-shoot-me smile.

“Who me?” he said. “I just read that in National Geographic.”

I made good on my word to leave him and his business dealings in peace, and it was probably about time to do so anyway. It was getting dark. The streets of Newark aren’t quite as treacherous as outsiders think. But they’re still no place to dawdle once the sun sets.

I returned to the newsroom to find it humming with its usual five o’clock buzz as deadline loomed. Our newsroom, like most newsrooms, had offices only along the outer walls and only for the most high-level editors. The majority of the editors-and all of the reporters-sat in a sea of desks that sprawled uninterrupted, without walls or partitions, over a vast open space.

So it wasn’t hard to monitor the daily ebb and flow, and sometimes the newsman in me-the part of me that is incurably ink-stained-delighted in watching what we in the business call “the daily miracle.” My mother always wondered why her handsome son didn’t seek the greater fame and fortune to be had on TV (her dream for me was to be the next Charles Gibson). But there were too many things about the newspaper business I loved.

The early-evening newsroom scene was one of them: reporters straining to burnish their prose before deadline; editors roaming about, hungry for copy, pestering and pressuring the reporters to give it to them; designers forcing the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of stories, artwork, and advertisements to fit on a page. Once upon a time, in the hoary old days of our business, the primary motivation for finishing was getting to the bar. The local watering hole was essentially a second newsroom. Going to work the next day hungover and wearing yesterday’s clothes was not frowned upon. It may have even been encouraged.

Today’s newsroom bears little resemblance to the newsroom of yore. Sometime during the seventies, inspired by Watergate and the notion that a newspaper had the power to overthrow a president, journalism sobered out and grew up. Reporters became responsible members of society with degrees from respectable colleges and paychecks you could actually live on.

So the end-of-day hurry-up was about getting home to the family, where a respectable, SUV-driving, diet-soda-drinking life would continue to be led. The old-timers will tell you something was lost along the way, that journalism went so corporate it surrendered its soul. But I disagree. To me, journalism is still a calling, just as it was to our ruffled, alcoholic forefathers.

I believe the stories I write matter. I believe the world is a wonderful, chaotic, fascinating place and that I’ve done my job if I can help people understand it just a little better. I believe a free and vibrant press is an essential part of a free and great society.

And sure, it gets messy sometimes. What used to be known as journalism has morphed into this ugly, chimeralike beast collectively called “the media.” And “the media” has its faults, what with all the princess-chasing paparazzi, the sleazy tabloid folks, and, of course, the cliche-drenched local TV newscasters. But I’ll link arms with all those malcontents and proudly state the world is a much better place with us than it would be without us.

Take my current assignment. I’m sure someone who loves to bash “the media” would say I’m exploiting the death of four people by writing a story that sensationalizes violent crime. I disagree entirely. To me, I’m helping people make sense of a profoundly tragic act: the intentional taking of four human lives. And it would become even more tragic if we in the media-who have both the privilege and obligation of being society’s vocal cords-allowed such a terrible act to pass without commenting on it.

I was lost in that thought when the voice of Buster Hays, our resident aging crank, jolted me out of my reverie.

“Hey, Ivy, come over here a second,” he hollered. Hays grew up on 133rd Street in the Bronx and felt his common-man roots made him a superior journalist to an overeducated prep school boy like me. So he called me Ivy, no matter how many times I told him Amherst was not part of the Ivy League.

“What can I do for you,” I said as I walked up to his desk.

“This may be a shock to your delicate system, but it seems we’re putting out a newspaper that we plan to sell tomorrow,” Hays said. “You got anything to add to that effort or are we going to have to wait until January to read what’s in your notebook?”

Hays was of the general opinion that reporters like me-who spent weeks developing more complex stories-were about as useful as paper cuts.

“Well, I think this thing might be drug related,” I said. “Tyrone Scott and Devin Whitehead both sold heroin.”

“Well, stop the presses,” Hays said, then announced to no one in particular, “Hey, Ivy boy here says two of the Ludlow Four were drug dealers! Can you imagine that? Drug dealers! In Newark!”

“Dammit, Hays, this guy-”

“Look, Ivy, let me explain a little something to you,” Hays interrupted in a condescending manner, peering at me over the top of his reading glasses. “Just because someone who sold drugs is involved in a crime, it doesn’t make the crime drug related, okay?”

“Well, I know that, Hays, I just think your cop sources may be throwing this bar-robbery theory against the wall to see if it sticks,” I said, sounding whinier than I wanted to.

“Tell you what, Ivy, you get someone credible to say this thing is drug related, I’ll put it in tomorrow’s paper.”

“And who, in your mind, is credible?”

“I dunno. Why don’t you call the National Drug Bureau?” he suggested with a smirk.

The National Drug Bureau was a federal agency that targeted international drug smuggling. Every so often, we’d quote them crowing about another big bust at the airport, along with a picture of NDB agents preening in front of a pile of controlled dangerous substances. But they didn’t really concern themselves with street-level drug trafficking. Hays telling me to call the NDB for a story about Newark homicides was like phoning the Democratic National Committee and asking for comment on the Barringer High School student council race.

Then again, if I could convince some bored federal flak to give me a line or two, it’d be fun to throw it back in Hays’s sneering face.

“You know what, Hays? Fine. I’ll call the National Drug Bureau,” I said.

“Have fun wasting your time.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, groping for something to put Hays in his place. “It’s my time to waste.”

Retreating from the Dinosaur’s Den, I stomped back to my desk, all the while stewing that I hadn’t come up with a snappier rejoinder. It’s my time to waste? Dammit. Couldn’t I have at least managed some kind of comeback that involved him filing his stories on an IBM Correcting Selectric II?

I hauled up the National Drug Bureau’s Web site, which featured whole photo galleries of agents posing in front of large piles of powdery junk, then clicked on their “For the Media” link. After about sixteen more clicks-government efficiency at work-I found a number for their Newark Field Office and the contact name L. Peter Sampson, Press Agent.

Agent Sampson’s voice mail informed me he was in the office today but currently unavailable. I looked at the clock. Five thirty-two. No way a federal bureaucrat was still hanging around. Luckily for me, his recording concluded by saying that if I was a reporter on deadline, I could call his cell phone.

“Why, yes, I just so happen to be a reporter on deadline,” I said out loud, to no one in particular, copying down the number. I hung up and immediately dialed it.

“Agent Sampson,” an enthusiastic, Boy Scout-sounding voice answered.

“Hi, Agent Sampson, Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner.”

There was a long pause on the other end. It has been explained to me that low-and mid-level PR people live in constant fear they’ll be fired because of something a miscreant like me puts in the newspaper. It turns them into sad little creatures, analogous to any timid, furry animal of your choosing. With few exceptions, they’re not all that smart, startle easily, and don’t like leaving their holes for long. Above all else, they hate surprises. And a reporter calling unsolicited after hours qualified as a surprise.

“What, what can I do for you?” he said cautiously.

He sounded very much like a guy who didn’t want the world to know his first name-L. Peter Sampson, indeed. I wondered what his friends called him. L. Pete? L. Peter? Or just plain L.?

“We’re working on a follow-up story about this quadruple homicide in Newark, the one down on Ludlow Street,” I said. “I’m looking into the theory that it’s drug related.”

“What makes you think it’s drug related?” L. Pete said, his voice quickening, sounding even more panicked.

I went into a brief summary of my reporting, glossing over the parts I didn’t really know and concluding, “. . so, it’d just be nice to have a quote from you guys saying a crime of this nature could be drug related.”

“I’m, I’m not authorized to give a quote.”

A PR guy not authorized to give a quote? What’s next, a plumber not authorized to flush toilets?

“I’m not trying to say you guys did anything wrong,” I explained in an attempt to calm him. “I just want an authoritative voice on drugs to add to the story. How about a quick interview with your boss?”

My attempt to soothe his nerves-to lure the timid, furry animal out of his hole with a few kind words and some bits of bread-was backfiring. I was only scaring him more.

“My, my boss?”

“Yeah.” I scanned the Web site and pulled the name off the roster. “Randall N. Meyers.”

“What’s he got to do with it? We don’t have anything to do with this case.”

“I know, but it’s a big case and I thought, with all the times we put news about your guys’ airport busts in the paper, Randall Meyers would be a name our readers would recognize and trust on this subject.”

That’s it. Soften him up. C’mere, little guy. C’mere. .

“Randy won’t. . uh, Agent Meyers won’t. . is unavailable for comment.”

“So you guys are a no comment,” I said. I didn’t know if I would stoop this low, but no comments could be useful as a sleazy, backdoor way to force unverified news into the paper, the classic being “Senator Gobble D. Gook had no comment on whether he was beating his wife.”

“No, no,” L. Pete corrected me. “I didn’t say ‘no comment.’ I said ‘unavailable for comment.’ It’s different.”

So it was. It was also less useful. And frankly, I was beginning to lose interest in this exchange, which wasn’t at all going the way I hoped.

“All right,” I said. “If you guys don’t want to be mentioned as respected experts on this subject, that’s up to you, I guess.”

It was my last attempt and I thought he just might take the bait. But no, he took it as his exit strategy, quickly thanked me for calling, then hung up.

I was still pouting a little when Tommy returned from the flower shop.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Just a conversation that didn’t go well,” I huffed. “My life needs better scriptwriters.”

“Yeah. You should get those people from Will and Grace. They’re not doing anything these days. You could stand to get in touch with your queer side.”

“I thought hanging out with you filled my daily gay quota.”

“You can never get too much gay in your day,” Tommy said.

“Now what would your father think if he heard you say that?” I asked. Tommy still lived with his parents. At home, he was so far in the closet he was rearranging his sweaters.

“He’s so clueless, he’d probably think I was talking about vitamin supplements,” Tommy replied.

“Very nice. How was the flower shop anyway?”

“Helpful,” Tommy said, flipping open his notebook. “The owner was this sweet little Costa Rican lady. She kept talking about how she had a daughter my age and how I looked like such a nice boy and how I should come back when her daughter was around.”

Tommy is a good-looking guy, to be sure-dark, handsome features; small, wiry body; neat, natty clothing. But his sexual orientation is as obvious as three snaps in a Z-formation.

“So we have a flower shop owner with no gaydar whatsoever,” I said.

“Yeah, but luckily she does have caller ID. Tynesha placed the order from this number,” he said, showing me his pad.

“Great,” I said, hauling up a reverse lookup service on my screen. I typed in the number. No luck.

“Well, so much for the easy way,” I said. “Let’s try it the old-fashioned way.”

I dialed the number. Tommy leaned over by the earpiece so he could eavesdrop.

“Hello,” said a female voice I assumed belonged to Tynesha. It was cold, impersonal.

“Hi, is Tynesha there?” I said.

“Heeyyy, baby,” Tynesha said, having suddenly warmed up by a hundred degrees. “How you doin’ today, cutie-pie?”

“Uh, I’m fine,” I said, confused.

“Where you get my number from, honey? Lucious give you my number?”

“Lucious?”

“Yeah, what price he give you?”

“Uhh,” I said, trying not to sound like an utter imbecile. “I’m not sure.”

“Okay, let’s just call it a hundred, okay? A hundred and you can do whatever you want for an hour. One-fifty for two.”

My confusion instantly evaporated. Tynesha was a hooker.

Tommy doubled over in noiseless laughter.

“An hour. . an hour would be great,” I said, blushing. “Where can I find you?”

“You know where the Stop-In Go-Go is?” she said.

“The Stop-In Go-Go,” I said. “You mean that place in Irvington?”

“Yeah, baby. I’ll be dancing there tonight,” she purred. “I’d looove to see you there. I can just tell from your voice you’re a gorgeous white boy.”

Tommy was now quietly hitting his fist on the table as he bit his lip to keep from laughing aloud. I swatted at him. This was hard enough without his histrionics.

“What time are you dancing?” I said.

“I’m on stage from six to seven and again from nine to ten. In between, I’m all yours, baby.”

“Great,” I said, unsure of what else to say. My career in journalism had helped me develop a great many skills. Soliciting prostitution had not been one of them.

“So,” I continued, “how does this, you know, happen? I’ve never done this before.”

“Of course not, baby,” she said. “Neither have I.”

I didn’t want to think about how thoroughly untrue that was.

“No, I mean, how will you know who I am?”

“Oh, don’t worry, baby, I’ll know who you are,” she said. “You’ll be the one who tips me the most during my dance.”

I had to admit, she was good.

“Right,” I said. “Of course I will be. I guess I’ll see you later on, then?”

“Bye, baby. I’m looking forward to it.”

I hung up the phone and Tommy finally let his pent-up laughter explode outward.

“Nice job, stud!” he howled when he was done, then started another laughing fit.

Half the heads in the newsroom turned our way.

“Carter has a date with a hooker tonight!” Tommy exclaimed.

Suddenly, Tommy wasn’t the only one laughing. They all were-and hooting, and whistling, and mocking. Some comedian from over on the copy desk started clapping, and soon I was getting a full standing ovation. I could feel my face, which had already been red, cycling through about six different shades of scarlet until it settled on something close to purple.

“You know me, anything for a story,” I said, waving my hand in the air to acknowledge the cheers, which slowly died down. “Let’s get out of here, Tommy.”

I walked out of the newsroom to a variety of catcalls-“Go get ’er, Casanova,” “Remember, she won’t kiss on the mouth,” and, lastly, “Don’t forget to double-bag.”

The Director enjoyed the irony of how he had gotten into business in the first place. He was always reminding Monty: they owed all their success to the U.S. government and the things it had done unwittingly to prop up the East Coast heroin trade.

The first was to declare war on Colombian cocaine during the mid and late eighties. For a while, the Colombian cartels stubbornly continued to harvest their coca crop. But even they couldn’t fight glyphosate-an herbicide better known by its stateside brand name, Roundup. Using spy satellites to determine where coca crops were being planted, the U.S. government helped the Colombian government dump tons of the gook on the countryside from airplanes. The Aerial Eradication Program, as it was known, was hailed as a tremendous success in the War on Drugs.

But while the government was congratulating itself on the plummeting cocaine traffic on America’s streets, the Colombians were busy rolling out a new product line. And it was one the feds and their spy satellites weren’t looking for: heroin. It was an almost instant hit. The Colombians had been hooking America on cocaine for years and had the supply routes, distribution systems, and retail muscle to move massive quantities of the drug at never-before-seen purity levels.

The heroin of the seventies was perhaps 5 or 10 percent pure. The rest of it was baking soda or aspirin or whatever additive a dealer could find to cut it with. The heroin of the new millennium was 50, 70, even 90 percent pure and delivered its high-and addictive powers-with corresponding efficiency.

The second thing Uncle Sam did to help the Director’s operation was to declare a War on Terror. After 9/11, America’s picture of evil changed overnight. It was no longer the swarthy Colombian drug lord in a linen suit. It was now the straggly bearded Muslim extremist. For every new wall of protection the U.S. built against the Middle East menace, a piece of the wall that once kept the Colombians at bay came tumbling down.

New Jersey proved a particularly ideal entry point. It had the infrastructure, with a major international airport, a bustling seaport, and a vast highway network sprawling in every direction. It had the geography, being wedged in between New York and Philadelphia in the heart of the Northeast corridor. And it had the demography, with a densely packed population spread over urban areas (where most drugs are sold) and suburban areas (where most drugs are stashed and, yes, consumed).

The third thing the U.S. government did was kick the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Taliban had ruthlessly suppressed poppy production. But with the Taliban out, Afghani farmers who had been growing poppies for generations got right back into business. All it took was a few growing seasons for Afghanistan to transform into the world’s newest narco-state.

That meant the Colombians had competition. They responded by pushing even more product across the borders in an effort to keep up, to the point where they were getting sloppy with it.

And it was the Colombians’ sloppiness that was allowing the Director to grow rich.