Ghettoside (14 page)

Department policy dictated that the books were supposed to be stored away in a vault somewhere, even if the cases weren’t solved. But La Barbera considered no case “cold.” From his years in South Bureau Homicide, he knew how rushed detective work had been. He viewed “unsolved” cases as incomplete investigations. Sometimes, it took only a few days’ work to clear them.

He also knew that many cases were not discrete crimes. In Southeast, murders sprang from a dense tangle of communal conflicts. Killings were often tied to previous murders, assaults, and arguments. Revenge cycles sometimes played out for years, with sons exacting retribution for fathers. “It’s
aaall
connected” was one of the mottoes adopted by Watts detectives. Sometimes it was invoked several times a day. A witness to one murder might be a suspect on the next—or brother, or play cousin, to the previous victim. The murder books shed light on these links; La Barbera wanted them at his fingertips.

So La Barbera recruited Skaggs, Barling, and a few others. They took over an abandoned red construction trailer in the station’s parking lot. They cleaned it and installed metal shelves from Home Depot. Then they quietly collected all the precinct’s old murder books, in violation of department rules, to make a library. It took them three years to go through every book. In the end, the blue binders stood in organized rows—688 cases going back to 1978. Solved and unsolved cases were separated. The latter assessed for difficulty and labeled accordingly. The cramped rows of shelves made a disturbing monument to the Monster. Barling dubbed it the “Lost Souls Trailer.”

But the project that most preoccupied La Barbera was legacy-building. He wanted to make sure the values he’d fostered in Southeast were preserved in the next generation.

Recruitment became an increasingly urgent focus. Skaggs and Barling helped. It was one of the few duties outside investigating in which Skaggs took interest. With each trainee who failed or moved on, La Barbera redoubled his efforts. He knew what he was looking for: the next John Skaggs.

Finally, in 2005, he found him.

Sam Marullo was thirty-four then, a gregarious Southeast gang officer from a big Italian American family in Mount Morris, New York. He was an exemplar of that species of smart attention-deficit cops who are drawn to ghettoside work. The son of a laborer, he had graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology and attended law school for two months at the University of Albany before losing interest.

Marullo was exceptionally good-looking. He had dark brown hair, blue eyes with long curly lashes, and an excess of boyish charm. He excelled at cultivating street sources—“friendlies,” as the cops called them—especially women.

He had his flaws. He was impatient and a little immature, and he was not a good listener. But he made up for it with generosity of spirit. He worked hard, cared about the people he policed, and was complimentary toward almost everyone he worked with. Plus, he loved his job with an intensity that bordered on the self-destructive. At least one marriage had fallen victim in part to his dedication to his work, according to his friends.

La Barbera saw in Marullo a rare incandescent talent. He recruited him as a detective trainee, just as Skaggs and Tennelle had once been.

Marullo wanted to bring a friend with him: Nathan Kouri, then a gang detective.

La Barbera was dubious. Kouri shaved his prematurely balding head; his round, puzzled hazel eyes peered from beneath a scrunched brow as if he were perpetually in deep thought. As is often the case with male friends, Kouri was Marullo’s opposite; he was happily married with two special-needs kids, introverted, and always buried in work. He loved to read and to ask people questions. He devoured nonfiction books and newspapers. But he disliked talking. La Barbera agreed to train him at Marullo’s insistence.

Mentorship is important in policing, and especially in ghettoside homicide work, an art form so underrated that it had been relegated mainly to an oral tradition. There were professional “homicide schools”
for working officers. But much of the curriculum was irrelevant to ghettoside work. The classes focused on handling physical evidence, not on, say, keeping track of a witness with a substance abuse problem or responding to jurors threatened in the courthouse parking garage.

Professional organizations were likewise unhelpful. Skaggs and his colleagues attended a yearly conference organized by the California Homicide Investigators Association. But the agenda rarely touched on their daily work. “When the National Media Moves to Your Town” was
the name of a typical seminar. By necessity, detectives learned on the job, older ones passing their craft to younger ones.

La Barbera assigned Skaggs to train Marullo. Skaggs was not a natural teacher. Young detectives who watched him work were forever influenced, but he was too intolerant of mistakes to be comfortable as a mentor. He could not lower his standards even for those starting out. Marullo’s case was different. In this young gang officer, Skaggs, too, saw a talent worth the effort.

Skaggs and Marullo clicked. Early on, though, Skaggs had to curb Marullo’s socializing. They’d return from some interview and Marullo would wander off to catch up with his gang unit friends. Skaggs scolded him. In homicide, there’s no time to waste on office chatter. Marullo straightened out and soon proved his value. He was a great talker. Like Skaggs, he overwhelmed people with conviction.

Marullo, for his part, embraced Skaggs’s style—that penchant for direct action, going after every clue right away, hitting it all head-on. “Get to the point,
get to the point
” is how Marullo summed up his mentor’s philosophy. “Sometimes you only have one chance.”

Skaggs and Marullo solved every one of their first eight cases during those busy months of 2005. Late that August, Marullo was given the lead on his first case.

Charles Williams was twenty-six years old and “on disability” due to psychological issues. He was black and poor and had never worked. His
neighbors in the Grape Street Crips had allowed him to wear a purple Lakers outfit, the Grape Street color.

Gang members are often expected to “put in work.” A bit of derogatory ghettoside slang condemned those who didn’t: they were called “hood ornaments.” But Williams, though a “hood ornament” of sorts, had been given a pass.

Williams liked to ride his bicycle around the neighborhood. He was standing in front of the counter of Watts Cyclery at 112th and Wilmington one day when an assailant burst through the door and shot him at close range, leaving him in a pool of blood on the floor. Williams’s purple clothes had drawn the attack. The suspect was from Fudgetown Mafia, a Grape Street enemy. They took Williams for a combatant—or a good-enough proxy.

Marullo met with Christine Jackson, Williams’s aunt. She had raised Charles from early childhood. His mother had died from illness, his father from an ice-pick homicide, never solved. Jackson worried that the police wouldn’t take the case seriously. Her brother, Charles’s uncle, had also been killed in a homicide, stabbed in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in 1983. That case, too, was unsolved. Jackson had sharp words for Marullo. She’d been through enough, she said. She was near crazed with grief; Charles’s murder felt like the last straw. If police didn’t solve it, “I will do what I’m gonna do—I will take care of business,” she told him.

Anxious to prove himself, Marullo buried himself in the case. He got leads and was lied to. One witness, a Fudgetown gang member, said he knew the truth but couldn’t speak it: his parole terms required that he remain in the neighborhood, and it would be too dangerous for him to remain as a snitch. Marullo turned his attention to the parole bureaucracy and succeeded in getting the man moved. Then he traveled to the witness’s new home and convinced him to give a full statement.

A second witness was also a gang member. This young man had been a good student with a double life, a surprisingly common ghettoside story. He was riding in the car that day when a group of Fudgetown
Mafia gang members pulled up to the bicycle shop. An older gang member handed him a gun.
Get out and shoot that Grape Streeter
, the older man ordered.

But the younger one held back, horrified. The older man insisted. The younger refused to get out of the car. At last, the older gang member, in disgust, took the gun. He went into the bike shop where Williams waited, unsuspecting in his purple Laker gear.

It took several interviews for the young man to reveal this story. He lied, then recanted. At last, he confessed to Marullo that he was terrified. He feared the shooter, although ostensibly the two had been friends and “homeys.” So-called gang loyalty is often like this: men go along to get along, as battered women go along with their abusers. Marullo’s version of moral comfort was his earnest, boyish appeal: he persuaded the young man to testify despite his fear.

La Barbera was triumphant. He gave Marullo a nickname. Borrowing from gangster lingo, as cops love to do, he called him “Li’l Skaggs.” La Barbera felt well on his way to assembling a crack team of homicide craftsmen, a group who might finally bring law to South Los Angeles.

SON OF THE CITY

It was a truth that all parents seemed to acknowledge: kids just come out different, no matter how much you try to treat them the same. Wally and Yadira Tennelle were not the first parents, and surely not the last, to be thrown off balance by their youngest child.

Both DeeDee and Wally Jr. had excelled in school. DeeDee had always been a reader. Wally Jr. had shown an abrupt intellectual bent as he got older, and he turned downright scholarly when he went to the University of California, Irvine. But Bryant was frisky, wiggly, and seemed unable to focus on his schoolwork. He misbehaved at school. He clowned and pulled pranks. He once sneaked into one of the nuns’ offices with a bottle of stink spray—that sort of thing. He couldn’t remember what his parents had told him five minutes before.

A psychologist told them he had attention deficit disorder—something more incapacitating than the milder form that DeeDee suspected afflicted the whole family—and that they should medicate him. Wally Tennelle resisted; at work he had seen so many junkies who had been medicated for similar disorders as children and it seemed to have done them no favors. He and Yadira spent thousands of dollars on tutoring for Bryant. Sylvan. Learning Tree. Wally Tennelle tallied it up
once and realized it rivaled what they were spending on private school tuition. Year after year, they persevered, but the problems seemed to get no better. It took Bryant hours to do the simplest homework.

Bryant had abilities, just not academic ones. He loved animals. He cared for all kinds of pets, never losing interest in them. He maintained a tank full of exotic fish.

He was good with his hands. Wally Jr. marveled at how he seemed able to build anything. When Bryant’s bicycle was stolen, he got interested in lowrider trikes. He restored an antique one, built a speaker box and battery cage for it, and wired the whole thing together. He designed and made clothes. He won his school’s chili cook-off. He could reupholster car seats. He poured himself into what his older brother considered quirky, endearing little hobbies for a biracial kid from South Central L.A.