Kevin Deutsch

Pill City Kevin Deutsch

April 28, 2015, West Baltimore, Maryland: Ground Zero in America's Opiate Wars.

In this crime-plagued section of the city, the death of Freddie Gray has triggered the worst domestic rioting since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and created a terrifying new breed of criminal entrepreneur.

Here, as looters and arsonists lay waste to already blighted parts of Baltimore, two of the city's brightest students are helping to carry out a historic drug robbery spree-one that will flood the city with highly addictive pain pills and heroin.

The teens' plan: to use their gang connections and computer programming skills to set up a high-tech drug delivery service and Dark Web marketplace. The result: the boys became America's youngest drug lords, in the process sparking bloody gang warfare and a nationwide wave of addiction and murder. Now mixing in deadly circles, Brick and Wax soon found their own lives were on the line.

In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, Newsday criminal justice reporter Kevin Deutsch chronicles the rise of these gangland upstarts as they help steal $100 million worth of high-powered opiates and build a national narcotics empire from scratch.

As gripping and compulsive as a thriller, Pill City takes listeners into the heat of the action as Brick and Wax outwit the FBI and DEA, as gang members like Damage and Lyric live and die by their own brutal code, as the cops battle to stop the carnage, and as a high school coach risks a bullet to get addicts into rehab.

A gritty, hard-hitting story of gangland survival, Pill City will open the world's eyes to the plague of drug-related killings rocking America and reveal the deadly cost of the Baltimore riots.