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ST. LOUIS — Derrick Terry was working at one of his houses on Margaretta Avenue in north St. Louis when Anthony Jordan showed up and said he needed Terry’s help.

Jordan led him down the street, through a hole in a fence, to a car covered by a tarp. Underneath, a dark blue four-door Audi with stolen plates was waiting. The two left their phones on a concrete ledge there, grabbed masks and guns, and got in. Terry drove. Jordan gave directions.

Terry, at the time, was one of the most successful drug dealers in north St. Louis. Jordan, his friend and business partner, was another.

It was June 2013. Terry parked at an alley off of Cote Brilliante Avenue, near a federal halfway house for recently released inmates. He scanned the street, and kept his gun close. At the time, Terry had a price on his head, and he worried Jordan — despite their long relationship — would try to cash in.

“I didn’t think he’d kill me,” Terry said years later in court. “But who knows?”

After a while, a silver car pulled up to the sidewalk. A man walked out of the halfway house and got into the passenger’s seat. Terry and Jordan didn’t know it, but he had a job resume in hand. He had recently told loved ones that he was working to turn his life around.

Terry pulled the Audi in front of the silver car, boxing it in. Jordan got out with an assault rifle.

Terry saw a woman in the driver’s seat.

“Don’t shoot that girl, man,” he said.

Jordan smirked.

Then he fired about a dozen times into the passenger side, keeping all the rounds in a tight cluster on the windshield.

The murder of Anthony “Blinky” Clark was a retaliation.

It was the first in a string of killings that would, eventually, become part of the biggest murder case in the region.

***

This winter, “TT” Jordan was found guilty of murdering nine people and running a major drug operation in north St. Louis.

His conviction was the culmination of an investigation into cocaine trafficking that spanned from the Mexican border to the streets of St. Louis. Detectives used wire taps, surveillance, drug and cash seizures and confidential informants to uncover webs of dealers, customers and trigger men. They followed leads that took them into the Missouri bootheel, Arkansas and Texas. They connected dozens of homicides and shootings.

In the end, 34 people were indicted. The last remaining defendant was Jordan. His three-week trial, which featured dozens of witnesses and hundreds of pieces of evidence, explained how the case all came together. That case — plus additional court records reviewed by the Post-Dispatch and hours of interviews — told a story about how a few men from St. Louis became drug dealers, grew their influence and killed to protect the market, their people and themselves.

“This case was one of a kind,” retired St. Louis intelligence coordinator Bill McDonough, who oversaw the investigation, said in an interview. “You can literally say we took a chunk out of violence in St. Louis.”

Three of the biggest players in the case: Terry, Jordan and another dealer, Antonio Washington.

They started working together in the mid-2000s. They bought cocaine in bulk and cornered the market in a chunk of north St. Louis. They kept drugs, cash and guns in separate properties, often in other people’s names. They never used phones to discuss business. ������Ƶ watched over their neighborhoods to ferret out police surveillance and find those who might report them.

They lived by a code: Don’t snitch. Don’t steal. And don’t come after my people. The penalty was death.

When Jordan’s close friend and fellow dealer was gunned down outside of an east side nightclub, Washington, Terry and the friend’s sister helped Jordan wage a retaliatory campaign.

They tapped a prison informant. They passed names to a police employee at the downtown jail who searched government databases for photos and addresses.

But, as the body count grew, Terry began to worry. He approached Jordan.

“Just chill,” Terry told him, according to court testimony. “You ain’t gotta kill all these people.”

It was bad for business, he said.

At the same time, a squad of detectives based out of the St. Louis police department was gathering information about violence and drugs in the city, and building a network leading them toward Terry and Jordan.

But, in the end, it was a betrayal that brought them down.

***

Terry’s nickname was D-Boy. The way he saw it growing up, the drug trade was his best option.

Terry, 47, is broad-chested and soft-spoken. At trial, he paused before responding to questions, clearly considering his answers.

He grew up in north St. Louis, bouncing between his mother’s house near the Corinthian column water tower at North 20th Street and East Grand Boulevard and his grandmother’s at Northland and Marcus avenues in The Ville.

His mother struggled with addictions to crack, alcohol and marijuana. His grandmother didn’t have a lot of money. Terry, the eldest of five children, dropped out of high school in ninth grade to support them.

He cut grass and pumped gas. He stole and robbed. He sold rocks of crack for $20.

Over time, Terry saved enough to buy bigger quantities of drugs — grams, ounces and eventually kilograms. He became a supplier. His profits grew.

In 1999, he was indicted in federal court for dealing cocaine. He was in and out of prison for the next decade. At one point, he tried to change, and got a union job in construction, he said in court. But the Great Recession hit the industry hard, he said. He went back to the drug trade.

He re-established his hold on his old home base by his grandmother’s house. There, he knew everybody. He could walk the alleys and backyards and do his business in peace. Neighbors warned him if they saw the cops snooping around.

It was an uncertain, violent life. But when you grow up scraping by, “you have a fear of not having again,” he said. “You’re motivated to keep growing and growing.”

With his profits, he bought property in north St. Louis — 17 places in all. He’d hire folks from the neighborhood who fell on hard times to fix up dilapidated houses. He rented them out. His goal was to get out of the drug business for good.

His home was a condo in Clayton. He wanted to get away from crime in the city.

***

Terry met Jordan in the late 2000s.

During his trial, Jordan, 38, wore perfectly tailored suits in black, gray and burgundy. His face rarely gave away emotion, but his eyes were always searching the room.

Jordan grew up in a brick bungalow on West Sacramento Avenue a block from Fairground Park in the city’s O’Fallon neighborhood, about a mile and a half from Terry’s grandmother’s house.

By the time Terry met him, Jordan was moving kilograms of cocaine at a time.

The two men immediately connected, even though Jordan was nearly a decade Terry’s junior. Neither were flashy with their money. Neither used phones for business; both kept their drugs, guns and cash all separate to prevent robberies or police raids. Jordan was “fearless,” Terry said in court.

Sometimes when one’s supplier ran dry, they bought from each other. They pooled their money for major cocaine purchases. But they never overlapped in territory. Jordan stayed over on Sacramento; Terry on Marcus.

“His money was always right,” Terry said of Jordan. “I believe he’s an astute businessman.”

***

Washington, called “Tony,” now 40, grew up in the Penrose and Fairgrounds neighborhoods.

From the time he was in middle school, he was hustling — selling $10 bags of marijuana at school and rocks of crack on the street.

He’d tuck his drugs into a tennis ball and stash it in the bushes outside his mother’s house for safekeeping. He’d make crack by blending cocaine with baking soda and heating it up on the stove or in the microwave until it turned into a solid.

At 14, Washington’s family briefly moved to Houston, Texas. He watched the dealers there run entire apartment complexes, holding court in the center of all the buildings. Washington realized he didn’t have to depend on hustling individual addicts on the street.

“I wanted to be the one with the dope,” he said recently in court.

He moved back to St. Louis with his family a couple years later. By 2006, he had his own system: He bought cocaine in bulk and moved it to the streets through lower-level dealers.

By day, he was an aircraft mechanic for the National Guard. He attended classes at community college and got a degree from Ranken Technical College.

In the evenings, he’d meet up with Jordan. They knew each other growing up, and got close selling cocaine. Washington’s base of operations was on Margaretta, just a couple blocks north of Jordan.

Business was booming. They bought bricks upon bricks of cocaine, cornered the market in their neighborhoods, grew their empires and defended them.

***

The first murder authorities connected to Jordan was in 2008. He set up a fake drug deal targeting a snitch. When the parties arrived, Jordan ambushed them in an alley, killing three.

Over the next few years, Jordan, Washington and Terry were involved in other shootings, too.

But it was the death of Montez “Tez” Woods in May 2012 that changed everything. Jordan thought Tez stole from him. So Jordan and his crew killed Tez.

And that set off a string of retaliatory shootings that killed at least five and wounded several others.

The first to die after Tez was on Jordan’s crew: Michael “Mike Mike” Brooks. Brooks helped kill Tez. So Tez’s crew killed Brooks.

At Brooks’ funeral, Jordan told Brooks’ sister that he wouldn’t tolerate it.

He and Washington started planning their response.

“Ain’t nobody going to walk around this city like they didn’t kill my partner,” Jordan told Washington, Washington said in court.

Over the next several months, Brooks’ sister, Gloria Ward, became a key ally in Jordan’s campaign to find and kill anyone connected to Brooks’ death.

Ward tapped a family friend in prison with strong neighborhood connections, who gave her names.

She asked another family friend, this time a St. Louis police department employee working at the downtown jail, to look up the names in police databases. He sent her addresses, birthdays, mugshots, even driver’s license photos.

She sent it all to Jordan.

***

In early 2013, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department revamped an intelligence unit to handle the city’s most sensitive cases and crack down on violent crime. The unit reported directly to the chief.

McDonough, the retired St. Louis police task force officer, was recruited to oversee its investigations. He had spent a decade investigating terrorism.

That same year, his team got a tip: An officer who patrolled the north side was dirty.

The team started watching him. He was hanging out with drug dealers in his off hours. He was driving their cars. He gave one dealer a gun.

Investigators started writing down names and looking into the people he was spending time with. They tracked those people’s connections, too.

The dirty cop didn’t lead the team directly to Jordan, Washington or Terry. But he was the first thread in a web that kept growing, McDonough said.

“It got so much traction,” McDonough said in an interview. “It didn’t stop.”

***

At the same time, Jordan’s campaign of retaliation was underway.

On June 25, 2013, he shot and killed Blinky Clark outside of the federal halfway house, called the Dismas House. Jordan didn’t shoot the woman in the car. It’s still not clear why.

On Aug. 5, Jordan shot Terrell “Hell Rell” Beasley on a porch. Beasley was placed on life support but survived.

On Dec. 23, Washington shot Anthony “Spree” Anderson, but only got him in the legs. He lived.

On Dec. 29, Jordan shot Robert “Parker G” Parker outside of an apartment complex on Peck Avenue near Fairground Park. That day, a stray bullet also pierced a window in a nearby apartment, killing Clara Walker, 51, a grandmother of eight.

On Jan. 21, 2014, Jordan and Washington sat in an abandoned home on Rolla Place in the Greater Ville neighborhood and, in the freezing cold, staked out the home of one of Parker’s associates, Michail “Yellow Mack” Gridiron.

They saw Gridiron walk out of the house and toward a waiting car.

Washington and Jordan fired so many times, Jordan’s gun, which had an extended magazine, ran out of bullets. As he moved to reload, Gridiron tried to jump across the car.

Washington shot him.

Gridiron fell.

Washington walked up, stood over him and fired again.

Terry was dismayed by it all. Jordan and Washington were killing too many people.

“It’s too much,” he said in court. “Like a bloodthirst.”

***

Meanwhile, federal agents were making headway in their own investigation into the St. Louis drug trade:

A federal judge approved a wiretap in August 2014 that led the feds to one of Jordan’s drug suppliers, Adrian “AD” Lemons. A tap of his phone led them to his Mexican supplier.

And an FBI investigation in McAllen, Texas, connected them with a courier charged with bringing drugs up to St. Louis.

Agents intercepted bricks of cocaine packed in an open space in the axle of a semitrailer. Drug task force officers in St. Louis replaced them with Bisquick wrapped in plastic and electrical tape. ������Ƶ watched the load get delivered to an auto lot on Theodosia Avenue in Wellston and arrested the couriers and a mechanic who worked there taking the drugs from hidden compartments in the axle, some wedged so far back that he pulled them out with twine.

They had also seized a truck from one of Lemons’ customers. In it, they found notes with initials and amounts. One of the initials: TT.

But they didn’t yet know who that was.

***

The big break in the case came that same year.

Washington’s girlfriend called the police on him.

He had moved largely away from cocaine and into the more profitable heroin business. But he was trying to get out of town and got lazy. He left a dozen guns at the house and half a kilo of heroin in a safe.

Washington pleaded guilty for the drugs in state court in January 2015. Weeks later, he was federally indicted for dealing drugs and also having the guns — a charge that could carry a much harsher penalty.

He was locked in jail for an extended period of time for the first time in his life.

Detectives repeatedly stopped by to see him, asked if he wanted to talk. He said no.

But out on the streets of St. Louis, fear was setting in. Terry knew Jordan hadn’t heard from Washington in weeks.

So Terry and Jordan went to Washington’s mom’s house. She had cameras outside. Terry saw cars he didn’t recognize. Something didn’t feel right.

Inside, Washington’s mom was puttering around.

Jordan caught Terry’s eye and cocked his head in her direction.

Terry widened his eyes and shook his head slightly.

Don’t do it, Terry remembered thinking: If you kill her, I have to kill you.

“I ain’t saying that’s beneath me,” he clarified later, “but at this point, it’s a losing battle. It’s carnage for nothing.”

They left without learning anything about Washington’s whereabouts.

Washington, meanwhile, had lost a series of appeals, meaning he’d be in jail for a while. Then he heard that Jordan and Terry had paid his mother a visit. And that made him angry.

So Washington sat down with prosecutors and detectives.

It was June 2015. McDonough, the St. Louis cop, sat directly across from Washington.

“Where do you want me to start?” Washington asked him.

“Just start at the beginning,” McDonough said.

What he said next was “jaw-dropping,” St. Louis police detective Leo Rice testified in court.

In astonishing detail, Washington recounted the retaliation murders. He told them about shootings.

He told them about getting rid of guns at gun shows, where it was much easier to trade without screening.

And he told them about a major cocaine supplier — a tall guy from Baden named “AD.”

The same one the feds were closing in on.

***

On Aug. 7, 2015, agents descended on two of Jordan’s properties on Sacramento. In a garage, they found stolen cars and multiple guns. In the homes, they found a face mask, more than a dozen guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, 14 cellphones and a box containing a “bug detector” to find recording devices.

They searched a car lot nearby and found multiple cars connected with Jordan, including a stolen Infiniti. In the back of the vehicle, wedged behind a head rest and also in the corner of a trunk that wouldn’t open, they found shell casings that matched the murders of Walker and Parker.

But they didn’t find drugs or known murder weapons.

Nearly three weeks later, police waited outside of a suburban home on Brighton Park Drive in St. Charles. They suspected Jordan may be inside.

������Ƶ watched and waited.

The garage opened, and a green Pontiac backed out.

Jordan got out and went back inside the house.

Police surrounded the home and ordered him to come out with his hands up. He waited there for about 30 minutes. His lawyers said he was waiting for someone to come take care of his infant daughter before he was arrested.

Under the floor boards of the Pontiac, police found a cellphone containing screenshots of messages from Ward, Brooks’ sister, and her family friend who worked at the jail, photos of some of the murder victims, as well as screenshots from news reports of the Blinky Clark crime scene outside of the halfway house.

***

Terry knew the gig was up. He’d been to federal prison before. He knew how the system worked.

He had been telling Jordan to be ready. Clean up your houses. Get rid of phones, scales, everything. Stay out of the way.

But Jordan didn’t take him seriously, Terry said.

Terry booked a plane ticket to Texas. He stole another man’s ID. He put tens of thousands of dollars in his shoes.

“I done advocated for you all this time,” Terry would later say in court about Jordan. “Now I’ve got to advocate for me. It’s nothing more, nothing less.”

Authorities tracked Terry to Texas, and brought him back to St. Louis.

***

In 2016, Brooks’ sister, Ward, and Terry were alone on a transport van from jail in Ste. Genevieve County, headed up to St. Louis.

Nearly three dozen people had been indicted in the case, including Jordan, Ward and Terry.

Terry had already decided to cooperate. He had told authorities about yet another murder from 2010, where he and Jordan followed the SUV of a man named Marquis Jones, who was suspected of stealing from Jordan. Jordan opened fire into the vehicle. Jones’ girlfriend, Keairrah Johnson, was inside the car with him. She died, too.

In the van, Ward talked about the daughter she’d had when she was just a teenager. The girl was bouncing from house to house since her mother’s arrest. Ward didn’t know if she’d ever get back home.

Terry told her to tell federal authorities about everything he did, to reduce her sentence.

She was crying.

“Just go tell on me,” Terry said he told her. “Go on and get your baby and go.”

***

By the end of the investigation, law enforcement had dismantled a drug organization responsible for moving hundreds of pounds of cocaine and millions of dollars through St. Louis. They had connected more than 50 homicides to the entire group.

For McDonough, the investigation was the culmination of everything he’d learned in his career.

“I’ve gotten to do really big stuff, but nothing that was probably as impactful from a law enforcement perspective,” he said. “It was an unbelievable team effort.”

Ward was sentenced to 35 years in prison for aiding in the deaths of five people and participating in the drug conspiracy. A judge may still take time off her sentence for her cooperation.

Ward’s prison informant, Charles “Man Man” Thompson, got 45 years.

The city jail clerk, Donte Jacobs, was granted immunity for his testimony. He was never charged with a crime.

“AD” Lemons, Jordan’s supplier, got 20 years.

Washington was sentenced to five years for his gun charges and has since been released. He was never charged with any of the murders.

One day in February, in a federal courtroom in downtown St. Louis, Jordan’s trial was underway. Prosecutors called Terry to the stand and asked him to identify the defendant.

Terry stood. Silence fell. Terry and Jordan locked eyes.

Then Terry shook his head, sat down, and began to testify against his longtime friend and business partner.

Jordan was convicted of nine homicides and participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy. Court records indicate he may have been involved in the deaths of up

to 16 people. He is set to be sentenced May 29.

Last month, Terry sat at a table in that same courtroom, his head bowed, eyes closed. He had pleaded guilty to two homicides, participating in drug trafficking conspiracies, money laundering and obstructing justice. His lawyer was asking Judge Henry Autrey to sentence him to the nearly nine years he’d already spent in federal custody, awaiting trial.

Terry was a different man, his lawyer said, than the one who wreaked havoc on the streets of St. Louis for more than a decade. He’d had time to think and reflect. He had decided to tell the truth.

And that truth brought closure to several family members of the victims, his lawyer said. Without Terry, they would have never known what happened. Nobody would have been held responsible.

Terry spoke softly and leaned closely into a microphone as he unfolded a written statement. He started by apologizing to the families of the people he hurt. He apologized to his own family and the community at large.

“I am making peace with my past,” he said.

Judge Autrey gave Terry nine and a half years.

That means Terry has just a few months left to serve.