I used to drive down to DC once a month to see my probation officer, it was on one of these trips I decided to stop by the old neighborhood. The strip was still running but nothing like it used to back in the day the open air market was pushed back into the alleyways with lookouts on every corner, the traffic was thin.
That was the day I ran into Key, he was one of the kids from my block that used to deal with me out there before the bust. Key filled me in, told me how things had changed, police were coming down the block a dozen times a day, pulling cars over as they left the block plus people were making and selling crack in the suburbs now so there wasn't any reason for those customers to travel into the dangerous parts of the inner city and because of this the money was thin, we used to make a couple thousand a day now it was just like Baltimore, you were lucky to make $1000 a week and the strips were no longer 24/7, the city was dead by 2 or 3 am.
The one thing that hadn't changed was who was supplying the market in that area.
Key told me that Ray was still calling the shots from jail and supplying most of the big weight in the city when it came to the coke game. The Trinidad neighborhood that we were at war with a couple years earlier was still pumping but it was Ray's product they were moving now.
Being I had my new hustle with my cousins when I heard this I immediately thought about the train tracks that run about 7 blocks north of there, parallel to New York Ave. The thing about those train tracks was they went all the way up through west Baltimore by where I stayed at.
I had found the biggest mark we ever hit.
I told Ricky about it as soon as I got back to my aunts, we decided to keep it between us until we figured out how we were going to do it.
For the next two weeks me and Ricky would drive down to DC and post up at the Rec Center which was right across from the strip on Trinidad all day and at night we would post up in an apartment down the block that belonged to a chick that Key was sleeping with until about 3 am and then we would drive back to Bmore. In two weeks we had the whole operation figured out, we were able to identify where the stash house was, where the lieutenant and the lookouts were posted, what time they would shut it down at night.
Basically at the end of the night, around 2 am, the runners would drop whatever was left in their package and their money to the lieutenant who would then take this into the stash house, once inside they would spend about an hour counting the cash and bags. There were three to five people inside the house at all times and they got their re-up on Mondays and Thursdays around 11 am.
The next step was figuring out the trains schedules, there was a spot 12 blocks east of Trinidad where the trains slow down in an industrial area for the tracks to switch, during the day it was a lot of commuter trains and at night cargo trains about every 45 mins.
The next couple of nights we hopped on the cargo trains in Camden Yard and rode them down to the spot in DC. It took about 1 hour and 25 minutes to get from point to point and we had 30 mins until the train heading back north to Baltimore would come through.
Once we got it all figured out we told Jo-Jo, Zipp and Dust the plan and got everything we needed to pull it off, the plan was simple, jump off the train, set the house on fire, take their shit when they come out and jump back on the train and head home.
We did it on the first of the month because that's when the welfare checks came in and that was always the busiest day of the month on any strip in any city in the U.S.
At 1 am we hopped on the cargo train coming thru Camden, this train would drop us at the industrial park spot in DC at around 2:25 am I think it took about 7 mins to get to the stash house, we came up the alley behind the house, opened the 40 oz bottles filled with oil and gas that we brought with us and poured it all around the back of the house and lit it up.
Me and Dust stood in the alley behind the house with a MAC-11 and a Defender, that's a 12 gauge shotgun with a pump loader, pistol grip and a 8 shot tube mag, Ricky, Zipp and Jo-Jo ran around and stood out front with a couple of mini uzi's and two .45's pointed right at the front door.
There was six of them that ran out of the house and the first thing they saw were those guns pointed right at them, Jo-Jo was quick to let a shot off in one of their legs to show what we were about. Ricky had them all strip naked and throw everything, clothes, drugs, money and shoes in a pile, Zipp and Ricky put everything into a couple of old canvas bags we brought with us.
When they were done they ran around back and we ran back over to the spot to catch the train, we only had to wait around for about 5 min for the train but it felt like hours. We knew they weren't coming after us but we didn't know who else might have seen or if there were eyes on the house, not to mention the police and the fire department.
I think we came out with something like six kilos and over $300,000 in cash. It was the biggest score we ever did and it was taken from the same person that gave me my start just 5 years earlier.
I know I jumped a little ahead of myself with this one but I was back in Baltimore this week and I went by Camden Yards on my way to Lexington Market and it made me think of this story.