vice | When the Baltimore riots erupted
in April 2015 after Freddie Gray's death in police custody, James
"Brick" Feeney and Willie "Wax" Harris*, two tech-savvy teenagers with
ties to Maryland's Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), saw opportunity. Using
the chaos as cover, they managed to steal at least a million doses of
prescription drugs and heroin from city pharmacies and rival
dealers. But even if their caper was essentially an old-school,
smash-and-grab-style theft, the teens had plans to sell the drugs in a
more sophisticated manner: via the Dark Web, where pills went for
upward of $100 each.
Leaning on location-based technology and
encrypted messaging software, Brick envisioned their operation as
an "Uber of drug dealing."
As
the looted drugs were shipped up and down the East Coast, a spike in
opiate overdoses in African American communities raised eyebrows, and
the DEA and FBI eventually took notice. In his forthcoming book Pill City: How Two Honor Roll Students Foiled the Feds and Built a Drug Empire, veteran
crime reporter Kevin Deutsch profiles the the teens' massively
profitable scheme, which he contends had (distant) ties to El Chapo's
Sinaloa cartel.
Deutsch enjoyed incredible access to the two
teens and some 300 other dealers, addicts, gang bangers, police, and
drug-treatment specialists for the book. A reporter who prefers to work
with his "feet on the ground," Deutsch saw the vicious effects of
America's opioid epidemic in an urban setting. VICE talked to the
journalist about how he wrapped his head around the technology in play,
how opiates were never just a middle-class white problem, and where
Brick and Wax are at now.
