“However it happened, it’s beautiful music, that’s for damn sure.”
“You sure you gonna be all right?”
“Pretty sure. Lemme see your pen.”
Georgelakos drew his Bic from where it rested atop his ear. Strange wrote something down on a clean napkin he pulled from a dispenser.
“In case I’m wrong,” said Strange, “here’s the license plate number of their car. It’s a C two thirty, a two thousand model, in case it comes up.”
Georgelakos took the napkin, folded it, and slipped it under his apron. Strange left money on the counter and shook Georgelakos’s hand.
On the way out, Strange stopped by the photograph of his father, Darius Strange, wearing his chef ’s hat and standing next to Billy’s father, Mike Georgelakos, in the early 1960s. The photograph was framed and mounted by the front door. He stared at it for a few moments, as he always did, before reaching for the handle of the door.
“
“
OUT on the street, Strange stood before the open window of the Mercedes.
“Get in,” said Phillip Wood.
“Where we goin’?”
“You’ll find out, chief,” said Wood’s partner.
Strange looked at Wood only. “Where?”
“Out Central Avenue. Largo area.”
“I’ll follow you out,” said Strange, and when Wood didn’t answer, Strange said, “Young man, it’s the only way I’ll go.”
Wood’s partner laughed, and Wood stared at Strange some more in that hard way that was not working on Strange at all.
“Follow us, then,” said Wood.
Strange went to his car.
STRANGE followed the Mercedes east to North Capitol, then south, then east again on H to Benning Road. Farther along they found Central Avenue and took it out of the city and into Maryland.
As he drove, Strange mentally recounted what he knew of Granville Oliver.
Oliver, now in his early thirties, had come up fatherless in the Stanton Terrace Dwellings of Anacostia, in Southeast D.C. His mother was welfare dependent and a shooter of heroin and cocaine. When he was eight years old, Granville had learned how to tie his mother off and inject her with coke, a needed jolt when her heroin nods took her down to dangerously low levels. He was taught this by one of her interchangeable male friends, hustlers and junkheads themselves, always hanging around the house. One of these men taught him how to go with his hands. Another taught him how to load and fire a gun. At the time, Granville was nine years old.
Granville had an older brother, two cousins, and one uncle who were in the game. Cocaine at first, and then crack when it hit town around the summer of ’86. The brother was executed in a turf dispute involving drugs. The cousins were doing time in Ohio and Illinois prisons, dispersed there after the phase-out of Lorton. Granville’s mother died when he was in his early teens, an overdose long overdue. It was the uncle, Bennett Oliver, who eventually took Granville under his wing.
Granville dropped out of Ballou High School in the tenth grade. By then he was living in a row house with friends in Congress Heights, south of Saint Elizabeth’s. He had been a member of the notorious Kieron Black Gang in the Heights, but it was small change, a you-kill-one-of-us-and-we-kill-one-of-you thing, and he wanted out. So Granville went to his uncle, who took him on.
From the start it was apparent that Granville had a good head for numbers. After he had proven himself on the front lines — he was allegedly the triggerman in four murders by the time he was seventeen years old — he quickly moved into operations and helped grow the business. Through ruthless extermination of the competition, and Granville’s brains, the Oliver Mob soon became the largest crack and heroin distribution machine in the southeast quadrant of the city.
The center of the operation was a small rec center anchoring a rocky baseball field and rimless basketball court on the grounds of an elementary school in the Heights. There Bennett and Granville got to know the kids from the surrounding neighborhoods of Wilburn Mews, Washington Highlands, Walter E. Washington Estates, Valley Green, Barnaby Terrace, and Congress Park.
For many of the area’s youths, the Olivers, especially the young and handsome Granville, were now the most respected men in Southeast. The police were the enemy, that was a given, and working men and women were squares. The Olivers had the clothes, the cars, and the women, and the stature of men who had returned from war. They gave money to the community, participated in fund-raisers at local churches, sponsored basketball squads that played police teams, and passed out Christmas presents in December to children in the Frederick Douglass and Stanton Terrace Dwellings. They were the heroes, and the folk heroes, of the area. Many kids growing up there didn’t dream of becoming doctors or lawyers or even professional athletes. Their simple ambition was to join the Mob, to be “put on.” Working out of the rec center, the elder Oliver had the opportunity to observe the talent and nurture it as well.
Granville and Bennett’s hands no longer touched drugs. In the tradition of these businesses, the youngest shouldered the most risk and thereby earned the chance of graduating to the next level. The Olivers rarely killed using their own hands. When they did, they didn’t hold the weapon until the moment of execution. The gun was carried by an underling; the squire, in effect, handed it to the knight at the knight’s command.
So the Olivers were smart, and it seemed to the newspaper-reading public and to some of the police that they would never be stopped. There were possibilities: tax evasion was one, as were wires and bugs planted to record their conversations. The more likely scenario was that they would be ratted out by snitches: guys who needed to plead out or guys who had previously been raped in jail and would do anything to avoid being punked out again. The Olivers knew, like all drug kingpins knew, that they would go down eventually. And snitches would be the means by which they would fall.
