The Hypocrite Kingpin Who Drugged St. Louis Then Preached Forgiveness

The Hypocrite Kingpin Who Drugged St. Louis Then Preached Forgiveness On the evening of June 19, 1978, Richard Ford was driving east on Delmar Boulevard with his cousin Jerome Brown riding shotgun, a twenty-seven-year-old father just trying to get home. They stopped at a red light at North Taylor Avenue. Another car pulled up beside them. The windows went down. Gunfire erupted, and three days later Jerome Brown was dead, killed, according to investigators, over nothing more than an unpaid debt. The man they charged was Dennis Haymon, and by that point in 1978, he was already St. Louis's most feared heroin kingpin, a man who had built an empire out of two decades of violence, fear, and a criminal justice system that couldn't get anyone to testify against him.