Millionaire Boys' Club

On the night of March 15, 2001, 21-year-old Danny Petrole, the son of a retired Secret Service agent, was brutally gunned down in an affluent suburb near Manassas, Va. A college student, Petrole was shot nine times as he sat in his car, just outside his townhouse.

Within days, police traced the murder weapon to a 21-year-old named Owen Barber. According to Barber's longtime girlfriend, Jennifer Pasquariello, Barber was a normal suburban kid.

Barber told police that another 20-year-old suburbanite, Justin Wolfe, had hired him to kill Petrole in exchange for money and drugs. Wolfe and Barber had been friends in high school. Wolfe was arrested and charged with capital murder.

Peter Van Sant reports on an unlikely tale of death and drugs in the suburbs.

Sergeant Greg Pass started work on the Petrole case the morning after Danny's murder. In Petrole's garage, police found 47 pounds of high-grade marijuana. Petrole and Wolfe were drug dealers.

According to his mother, nurse Terri Steinberg, Wolfe was a typical teen-ager. She calls him an "all-American kid." Wolfe aagrees, saying that for many high school students in town smoking marijuana was no big deal. "It's not viewed as the other drugs are." He first smoke marijuana in eighth grade, he says.

Both Regina Zeuner and Jennifer Pasquariello became friends with Wolfe in high school. "Smoking weed, a lotta people make friends in high school that way," says Pasquariello. "You wanna be like everybody else, or haven't tried it and wanna try it. You get sucked in - peer pressure."

"From your smartest jock to everyday, average student - everyone smoked," says Zeuner.

But they weren't smoking the same weed that their parents' generation did. They were smoking a much more powerful version of the drug, known as "chronic," which is also much more expensive. It costs up to five times more than normal marijuana, which is known as "schwag." Chronic can cost up to $350 an ounce on the street.

In an affluent suburb, finding that kind of money was often not difficult, according to Zeuner.

Wolfe began dealing to support his own habit. "You smoke for free, and then you're like, 'I can make money doing this,'" he says. He says he began dealing in the ninth grade. He started out selling a few ounces of schwag, but by graduation, he was dealing multiple pounds of chronic. Business boomed when he met Petrole.

According to Wolfe, Petrole controlled all of the chronic coming in the area. Petrole's roommate, Paul Gunning, testified at trial that Petrole got his chronic from a source in Seattle, Wash. According to Gunning, Petrole bought 100 pounds a month, on average, for $360,000.

Wolfe became one of Petrole's distributors. Only 19 at the time, he made up to $15,000 a month selling the chronic Petrole supplied him.

"It makes you a movie star - in a small town," says 28-year-old Jason Coleman, who hung out with Wolfe for years, and managed a bar where all of their riends partied. "They always had money. They did whatever they wanted. They didn't care."

"We always had girls around us," says Wolfe. "I blew money basically. I'd run through money like it was nothing." His friend Zeuner says that on a typical weekend, they would spend $2,000.

Wofe says he was smoking marijuana, doing cocaine and ketocet, a tranquilizer. Zeuner says they would smoke dope "constantly throughout the day. Just like money, that was an unlimited supply as well."

His mother says she had no idea he was dealing and using drugs so heavily. She says she checked his room regularly. But he hid his money and his drugs elsewhere.

"None of these parents never would have imagined. They never would have known," Zeuner says.

Find out what happens in Part 2, Wolfe On Trial