One Man, 26 Years, 112 Convictions

Smooth is on the phone. "I've been charging $750," he tells his customer one day in 2007. "You know, I just give you a deal... my prices [between] me and you don't be the same prices to everybody else."

Jersey, his customer, listens. "I've been getting $250 a quarter [ounce]," Smooth says over his cell. "Two a quarter, you know." Jersey, a police informant, agrees to meet up, handing the phone back to a Seattle vice detective.

And Smooth is busted for drugs again.

In a word, busted is the life story of Stacy Earl Stith, street name Smooth. He's been caught a lot, often stumbling into the hands of police. In 1996, when a prostitute at Seventh and Bell asked what he was doing, Smooth said, "Selling, man!"—and pulled a cache of rocks from his pants pocket. "I sell to everyone!" The undercover police hooker beckoned her backup team, and Smooth went to jail.

In 2006, plainclothes cops were nabbing another dealer when Smooth and his girlfriend made two drug sales practically in front of them in City Hall Park, next to the King County Courthouse, where he'd already been convicted of nine felonies. He was arrested and went to jail only hours after he had been released from prison that same day.

According to court records and interviews, catching him wasn't complicated. He was mostly a street dealer—a cop's easy quota—distributing his stones, as he calls crack cocaine, hand to hand from Belltown to SoDo or by vehicle to home-delivery customers in the 'burbs. At times he stowed the tiny bags of stones in his car's or van's engine compartment, from where, an informant told police, the bags would occasionally drop onto the street, requiring Smooth to hop out and run back through traffic to retrieve them. Other times he'd spread the stash around: In a 2004 bust, cops found more than 15 grams of marijuana separated into 16 different bags in Smooth's pants pocket, 27 grams of marijuana and nine grams of crack in the trunk of his vehicle, 11 grams of crack in bags tucked into his waistband, and 49 grams of bagged crack in his underwear.

A 230-pound black man, his braided hair often dangling from under a sideways ball cap, Smooth has been relentlessly, if ineptly, selling and using drugs in Seattle for more than 25 years. Along the way, he's compiled a criminal record that's something of a record itself, authorities say: Adding up misdemeanors and felonies since the mid-1980s, he has 112 convictions. Not arrests, convictions: 94 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, revolving through the doors of juvenile court to municipal court to district court to superior court to federal court, from traffic and theft offenses and weapons and assault charges to burglary and crack sales. His first day in court was at age 13; his most recent, in January, at age 39.

"I have never seen anyone with this number of convictions around here," says 12-year King County deputy prosecutor Andy Colasurdo, who couldn't think of another violator who even came close. Some had a similar number of felonies, but "most of them only had 20 to 40 misdemeanors."

For all those convictions, Smooth has served an aggregate 14 years behind bars in local jails and state prisons, by Colasurdo's count. He had been sentenced to considerably more time, but his terms typically ran concurrently and he was usually released early. So he's had to work fast, scoring those 112 convictions in just 11 years of freedom. That's an average of 10 guilty verdicts per year.

"He," by the way, could mean Stacy Stith—or James Howard or Cal Beaver or Eric Smith, among others. Smooth has used 18 aliases, five dates of birth, and four Social Security numbers. It's possible, given that older court documents are often incomplete and crimes could be recorded under some of those aliases, Smooth's record may be even longer.

On the street, beat cops would recognize him on sight and assume he was in violation of something—parole, work release, curfew, loitering; most likely there was an arrest warrant somewhere with his name on it. (Court records show he had been sought on 52 warrants over two decades for a variety of crimes and failures to appear in court.)

Smooth was a sometimes hapless lawbreaker. One early-morning call brought officers to a smashed display window at the downtown Bon Marché, where they found him standing nearby with a pile of stolen clothes at his feet, department store tags flapping in the wind. But he was no comic figure. In 1999, he sped away from a police stop and careened around Central District corners in his '85 Buick. The chase ended when he slid sideways to a stop, tossed a loaded 40-caliber Glock out a window, and bailed. An officer pinned him down, but needed backup help to get him into handcuffs. Smooth was later convicted of being an armed felon.

He also has six convictions for resisting or obstructing police officers. In South King County in 2004, holding $1,300 in powder and rock cocaine, Smooth had to be Tasered four times before two cops could cuff him. Court records describe him as "a high-risk offender who presents a significant threat to the community."