Undercover DEA agent Sam Gaye doesn’t remember that early September day in 1989 particularly vividly. After all, it was nearly 30 years ago and it was supposed to be an ordinary case.

“My supervisor had asked me to contact one of my [dealers],” the retired 62-year-old tells DCist from his home in Liberia, “to see if he was going to be brave enough to bring crack into Lafayette Park.”

Sitting across the way from the White House at about 11:30 a.m., Gaye was posing as a tourist. Nearby, another agent was hiding ready to snap photos. Then, the suspect walked up with the package, accompanied by a DEA informant.

The deal was made: three ounces of crack cocaine for about $2,400. A few days later, on September 5th, that package of crack cocaine showed up on national television in the hands of President George H.W. Bush.

Even three decades later, it remains a seminal moment in both the Bush presidency and D.C.’s battle with crack cocaine. That speech and the prop he used is the image that most closely ties the Bush presidency to the District.

In the primetime address, President Bush sat behind the resolute desk and told the country, “the greatest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs … in particular, crack cocaine.” A beat later, he pulled out the crack and solemnly declared, “This. This is crack cocaine, seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House.”

He meant to shock the nationwide audience and shore up support for the re-launching of the so-called “War on Drugs.” But for those who called D.C. home in the late 1980s, crack’s ready availability was anything but surprising.

“Welcome to our world,” Bill Lightfoot, who served on the D.C. Council as an At-large councilmember from 1989 until 1996, remembers thinking at the time. “He wasn’t telling us anything we already didn’t know.”

1989 was near the height of the crack epidemic and D.C was one of the epicenters, epitomized by being declared in the “murder capital” of the country. In 1989, there were 434 homicides in the District (compared to 116 in 2017). “There was a hysteria about what crack was doing [to D.C.] and how it was spreading,” says Michael Isikoff, who served as the Washington Post’s national drug reporter at the time and reported on the Lafayette Park operation.

The city was also in the midst of dealing with a very high profile drug case. In April of 1989, law enforcement arrested drug kingpin Rayful Edmond III, disrupting the largest cocaine operation in the city. He, along with 10 associates, went on trial on September 11th (five days after Bush’s speech) and would be found guilty on all accounts in December. The District was also struggling with major financial setbacks, something that had plagued the city ever since it got home rule in 1973.

For those in D.C. government, it was a trying time. “We had terrible problems,” says Lightfoot. “The public schools were disaster. The recreation centers were dilapidated. HIV was rampant. Drugs, crack, and guns were everywhere. And the city was going bankrupt.”

Bush’s speech rankled many locally. While drugs were certainly prevalent throughout the city, the dramatic story of a crack deal right outside of the White House was, at best, contrived. Isikoff says today, as he did in his reporting 30 years ago, that Lafayette Park wasn’t known for drug activity.

“We don’t consider that a problem area,” the commander of criminal investigations for the U.S. Park Police told Isikoff at the time, “There’s too much activity going on there for drug dealers…There’s always a uniformed police presence there.”

Several weeks after Bush’s speech, several newspapers reported that the drug deal in Lafayette Park was manipulated in order to provide a “dramatic prop” for the nationwide address. The word “entrapment” was tossed around. It set off a firestorm that forced the president to fiercely defend the DEA’s tactics.

“I think it can happen in any neighborhood, and I think that’s what it dramatized,” Bush told reporters at the time. “The man went there and sold drugs in front of the White House, didn’t he? … I can’t feel sorry for this fellow.”

Isikoff thinks the administration unnecessarily overdramatized a very real crack problem both in D.C. and nationwide. “What that speech became was political theater,” says Isikoff, “When you use it to score political points, you are going off-track and should be called out.”

Lightfoot says that while Bush may have been correct in terms of crack’s availability, it gave the District another kick in the stomach. “His description was accurate,” says Lightfoot, “but it openly embarrassed a government that was struggling with self-determination.”

A few days after the buy, Gaye was asked to pick up the “package” from the evidence vault in the field office and meet his boss at the front gate of the White House. The Secret Service ushered them into the Oval Office, where they were greeted by speechwriters, Chief of Staff John Sununu, and the president himself. Because it was an ongoing drug case, there had to be a chain of custody, meaning that Gaye had to stay with the evidence at all times.

He remained at the White House in view of the evidence from ten in the morning until the speech was over late that night. “I was a little nervous,” says Gaye. Upon arriving, the president thanked him and showed him the part of the speech where he was going to refer to the package.

Gaye says that the First Lady Barbara Bush offered him lunch and wanted to learn about the details. “She was very curious to know exactly where the sale took place,” says Gaye, “we were on the [White House] balcony looking at Lafayette Park and I showed her.” She told him that at that particular day at that particular time, she was having a meeting with the wife of the Japanese Prime Minister, but if she wasn’t doing that, she would have seen the deal take place. “She could have seen it from her balcony,” says Gaye.

After that night’s speech, Gaye took the crack back to the DEA field office and locked it in the evidence vault.

Gaye worked as an undercover agent in D.C. until 1990 and retired from the DEA in 2011. He now lives in Liberia, where he was born. He thinks the work he did helped the “war on drugs,” which included aggressive law enforcement, working with foreign counterparts to cut the supply, and helping to convict criminals to long sentences.

“A lot of these guys went to jail for a long, long, long time, 20, 30, 40 years,” Gaye says.

In the decades since Bush displayed that bag of crack cocaine on national television, the “war on drugs” that he supported has come under scrutiny, specifically for disproportionately targeting communities of color.

As for the suspect who sold Gaye the crack, he was an 18-year-old local high school student who had no prior criminal record. He was arrested following the sale and convicted on three counts of selling crack, related to incidents that took place before the Lafayette Square sale. One of those incidents took place within 1,000 feet of a school, which carried a mandatory 10-year prison sentence without parole.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, who presided over the case, said in court that he regretted having to hand down that sentence, and encouraged the young man to ask Bush for a commutation, according to the Washington Post. “He used you, in the sense of making a big drug speech,” Sporkin said.