My Ghost Vapes

Forty-five days in 1992

A crack crew out of Trenton set up in two Richmond-area neighborhoods. Between January 4 and February 19, ten people were dead.

, 4 minute read

If you want one case that explains how Richmond got to 160 murders in a year, this is the one I would hand you.

In August 1990, a crack operation that had been working out of Trenton, New Jersey expanded south to Richmond. Three men ran it: Richard Tipton, Cory Johnson and James Roane. They set up in two places, the Central Gardens area and a neighborhood called Newtowne, which is where the name the newspapers used came from.

In early 1992 I was eight, growing up in the East End. To me, Central Gardens was where the Henrico County Math and Science Center was, where we would go on the occasional field trip to look at reptiles, amphibians and whatever else they had in the tanks. That was my only experience of CG back then.

This was a pattern, not a fluke. Richmond sits on I-95, a few hours below the cities where the wholesale supply was. Federal drug reports from the period describe the same route over and over: buy in New York or Philadelphia, drive it down, sell it for more in a smaller city with less competition.

I-95 is the main vein of the East Coast, Maine to Miami, and Richmond sits virtually at the midpoint. It’s no surprise that crime from the most populous metro area in the country would eventually spill out here.

January 4 to February 19, 1992

According to the federal court record, the three of them were tied to the killing of ten people in the Richmond area between January 4 and February 19, 1992. Forty-six days, start to finish.

The court lays out who they were. A man who worked for the operation and had botched a deal. Two rival dealers. A man who had threatened Johnson while working as a bodyguard for a rival. A woman who owed money for crack, and her brother, shot in his own front yard. A man Johnson suspected of talking to the police. And people who were simply in the room when it happened.

Ten killings by one small crew, in six weeks, in a city that was already burying a hundred people a year.

The trial

The government tried the case in federal court in Richmond. In February 1993 a jury convicted Johnson, Tipton and Roane. Johnson was sentenced to death seven times over. Tipton received three death sentences and Roane one.

They were sentenced under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, the law that brought the federal death penalty back for murders tied to drug trafficking. It was one of the first cases in the country to end in federal death sentences under that law.

Johnson was executed on January 14, 2021, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, twenty-eight years after the verdict. Tipton and Roane had their sentences commuted to life in prison on December 23, 2024, when President Biden commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences in the country.

What I take from it

One crew, in town less than two years, and ten people dead in six weeks. Then they were gone, and nothing got better. Richmond buried 160 people in 1994, two years after Tipton, Johnson and Roane were locked up. Taking out a crew doesn’t take out the road. Somebody else was already driving the next load down 95 before the jury came back.

In a courtroom it was a win. On the street it was a vacancy. The demand was still here, the money was still better than it was up north, and the highway was still open all night.

Then there’s how it ended. Johnson waited twenty-eight years to be executed. Tipton and Roane waited thirty-one, and then got life anyway. Whatever you think about the death penalty, that is nobody’s idea of justice moving fast, not for the families and not for a city that was supposed to feel safer when the verdict came down.

The ten people are the reason to tell this story, not the three men and not the law they were sentenced under. I left their names out. But every one of them had people in this city who remember January and February of 1992 a lot better than I do.

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