By TED CONOVER
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Alex White had the initials of the drug ring Black Mafia Family tattooed on his hand. |
Kathryn Johnston was doing pretty well until the night the police showed up. Ever since her sister died, Johnston, 92, had lived alone in a rough part of Atlanta called the Bluff. A niece checked in often. One of the gifts she left was a pistol, so that her aunt might protect herself.
The modest house had burglar bars on the windows and doors; there had been break-ins nearby.
Eight officers approached the house, and they didn’t knock. The warrant police obtained, on the basis of a false affidavit, declared they didn’t have to — the house where their informant had bought crack that day, the affidavit said, had surveillance cameras, and those inside could be armed. Because they couldn’t kick down the security gate, two officers set upon it with a pry bar and a battering ram in the dark around 7 p.m. on Nov. 21, 2006.
Burglars, Johnston probably thought, or worse — an elderly neighbor had recently been raped. No doubt she was terrified. That is why, as the cops got closer and closer, she found her gun. And why, as the door was opening, she fired one shot. It didn’t hit anyone. But it provoked a hail of return fire — 39 shots, 5 or 6 of which hit her (and some of which struck other policemen). By the time the officers burst inside, Kathryn Johnston lay in a pool of blood.
Waiting outside, in the back of a police van, was the small-time dealer who told the police there were drugs in the house. He did so under pressure: earlier in the day, three members of the narcotics team, working on their monthly quota of busts, rousted him from his spot in front of a store. Tell us where we can find some weight, they said, or you’re going to jail. The dealer climbed into a car with them and, a few blocks away, to save his own skin, pointed out Kathryn Johnston’s house — it stood out from the others on the block because it had a wheelchair ramp in front.
How did the dealer feel as he watched the home invasion, heard the fusillade of shots? And, inside the house, how long did it take for the police to realize their grave error and for some of them to decide to handcuff a fatally wounded woman and plant drugs in order to cover it up?
Alex White was at his mother’s house several miles away that evening. She called him downstairs when she heard the news on TV, using a nickname from his childhood (it was the way he first pronounced his own name): “Alo, a bunch of police got shot. Come and see.”
White went in the living room and sat next to her. The reporter said the shootings had taken place on Neal Street. White knew it was in the Bluff, where he bought and sold drugs. Earlier that evening, in fact, the Atlanta narcotics police for whom he worked as a C.I., or confidential informant — a snitch — asked him to go to the Bluff and buy drugs. His car was in the shop, so he had to say no. His mother knew none of this.
Upstairs at his mother’s house, he had already received a call from J. R. Smith, one of the officers from the unit. Smith sounded tense. “Hey, you got to help us out with something,” White told me Smith said. (Smith did not respond to a request for an interview.) White said sure. He tried to be helpful to the police, do what they asked — willingness was one reason he was their most trusted informant for four years running. If White could help cover for them, Smith said, there would be good money in it for him.
“You made a buy today for us,” Smith explained. “Two $25 baggies of crack.”
“I did?” White asked. It took him a moment to register. “O.K. Who did I buy it from?”
“Dude named Sam.” Smith described the imaginary seller, told how Sam had taken his money then walked White to the back of the house and handed him the drugs as Smith and a fellow officer, Arthur Tesler, watched from a car across the street.
“O.K.,” White said. “Where?”
Smith said: “933 Neal Street. I’ll call you later.”
Now in the living room, the TV reporter was saying how a 92-year-old woman had died in the incident, and people were suggesting that the police had shot her. Two and two came together in White’s mind. They did it, he suddenly knew. They messed up. They killed that old lady. Now his heart pounded as the implications became clear. And they want me to cover for them.
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White had lived near the Bluff, a neighborhood of Atlanta infamous for drugs and crime, for a year or so. Its residents are almost all black and poor. There are no row houses here, nor high rises; the housing stock is seldom more than two stories tall. Streets of small, well-kept houses alternate with streets full of junk-strewn, overgrown lots, abandoned houses and apartment buildings with broken windows and dirt instead of lawns. There is little that says money and much that says despair: semiabandoned commercial strips with hand-painted signs, bodegas with few products and fortified cashier booths, pit bulls on chains, groups of men hanging out on corners and behind car washes and outside probation centers, drinking beer or selling drugs. Police cars, often with lights flashing, are ubiquitous, but I never saw a police officer on foot. A stark contrast are the nearby enclaves belonging to prosperous black colleges like Spelman, Morehouse, Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College, their grounds immaculate and, to the local poor, effectively off-limits.White, who is 30, is a big man, almost six feet tall, about 235 pounds, with a mustache, an easy smile and a gold incisor. (Girlfriends have noticed a resemblance to the rapper Nelly.) Inwardly suspicious, he is outwardly gregarious, charismatic and upbeat. He will happily shake your hand and immediately start in with what’s on his mind, looking away while speaking in the manner of an N.F.L. coach on the field who doesn’t want the camera to see what he’s saying; it’s confidential. Often his ideas have to do with making money; White is a natural-born hustler. Native to the Atlanta metro area, he grew up partly in Decatur, just to the east, and partly in what was the sprawling Bankhead Courts housing project, a 20-minute drive west from the Bluff.Drugs, police and the questions of loyalty that arise when the two cross paths have been part of his social landscape since he was a child. One of his earliest memories is from age 9. “One day there’s an old-school dealer, about 40, named E. T., selling crack,” White told me in one of our many conversations over the last 15 months. “He kept his stash in a purple cup [from] Kentucky Fried Chicken. . . . I remember that cup plain as day. The police drove up, arrested him — they must have just had somebody do a buy from him — and put him in the car. I was standing around. They asked me what I was doing there. I said, ‘Nothing.’ ”In fact, White had seen where E.T. was hiding the KFC cup in a pile of garbage nearby. Somehow the police knew to pressure White and, pretty quickly, he gave the dealer up. “Right then and there, I knew I screwed up — I screwed him,” he said. “But at that age, you don’t know how to lie to the police.” White was scared to see the dealer after that — until E.T. told him it was O.K., everybody makes mistakes when they’re young.Though White doesn’t paint his family as impoverished, clearly there wasn’t much money to go around. His dad, a quiet, mild man, worked only sporadically, laying carpet, while his mom, who received a Social Security disability check for a nerve problem, took care of him and his younger siblings — Calandra, who’s now 28, and Kevin, who’s 18. When Calandra started having children at 16, his mother cared for them, too. “In the hood, it’s a struggle,” White said. “Your mom get a check at the end of the month, and ain’t $20 left three days later. There was money for what we needed but not for what we wanted.”What he wanted would cost more than he could make at McDonald’s, where he worked briefly as a teenager. White hit the street to make up the difference. “He was always coming up with something new,” Trel Burnstine, his longtime friend, said. “He was always hustling, and I respect that, always the businessman. He would sell you anything.” He added: “Big-screen TVs (I still have one), cases of liquor, stuff stolen out of the back of trucks. He’s the ultimate hustler. He could flip anything.”