Ghettoside (24 page)

Chris Barling had a similar take, despite being Skaggs’s greatest fan. Bernal was a tenacious investigator who “absorbs before he acts,” he said, but it just so happened that Skaggs was “the right detective at the right time.”

And it was not fair to suggest the case had languished in Bernal’s hands. In fact, huge inroads had been made. By the time Prideaux officially handed it off to Skaggs, the main eyewitnesses, the gun, the description of the car, and the most important street rumors had already been cataloged, giving Skaggs plenty to pursue. Skaggs did not inherit a hopeless case, but a stalled one. And there was no question that Bernal cared deeply about it and had applied to it the comprehension that was rooted in grief over his murdered nephew, just as Wally Tennelle was then channeling his own grief into his RHD cases.

Finally, to Bernal’s great credit under the circumstances, he handled the fiasco with some grace in the end, swallowing his anger, going back to work under the very lieutenant who had yanked this most important of cases out of his grip, and pouring himself into his other duties with set-jawed professionalism.

Skaggs, meanwhile, went to work.

EVERYBODY KNOW

To some of his detractors in the bureau, John Skaggs already had the partner he needed. There were sarcastic murmurs behind his back about the new detective team made up of “Skaggs and His Ego.”

But Prideaux made Skaggs choose a flesh-and-blood second on the case. Skaggs would have liked Barling, but that was no longer realistic, since Barling was now a D-3. So Skaggs tapped his recent young partner from his tour in Southwest, Corey Farell.

True to form, he also did whatever was needed to get out and talk to people as much as possible. So one day, when Farell was tied up doing something else, he looked around the office to see who else was on hand. As the clear lead on the case, he could finally move as he wished, and he was in no mood to be held up by anything.

It happened that Rick Gordon was nearby. And so, on October 1, five months after Bryant’s death, Skaggs—in need of a temporary partner—asked Gordon to accompany him. And that’s how the two men—arguably the two finest ghettoside detectives in the city at that time—set out on a very particular mission.

The man Coughlin had caught with the revolver was a member of South Central’s battalion of black men whose lower halves were crumpled in wheelchairs, propped on crutches, or crammed into leg braces. One saw these victims with regularity driving around South Central—young male gunshot victims, jarring collisions of health and debility, young faces and wasted limbs. Asked what happened, they gave the same answer this man later gave in court. One word:
“Shot.”

He looked younger than his twenty-eight years. He had a small mouth and a slim, narrow nose that widened at the base, skin very dark and smooth. A neat thread of beard framed his chin. His clothes were bright and pressed—even the pants that lay in a loose fold across his thighs. He was efficient in his wheelchair, propelling himself with athleticism. If a wheelchair could saunter that’s what his did. He had not been quick enough to outrun Francis Coughlin. But Coughlin was faster than a lot of guys on foot.

The man had a quiet dignity despite his mask of gloom and wariness. He didn’t seem deranged by trauma, as some gang members do past twenty-five. His manner of speaking was quiet and reasonable. He talked about
getting out
and said he wanted to go to school. It seemed he meant it. A number of Southeast officers knew him personally. “A gangster,” they called him, but were quick to add, “he’s not a bad guy.” Some even said they liked him. The man in the wheelchair was a type—a normal guy somehow caught in the pathos of gang life.

He had been shot while walking home from a night game at his high school a dozen years before. A car rolled up and he heard someone yell “East Coast,” then heard the shots. He’d been hit seven times but felt only the last three. He was surprised later to learn of the others. Knocked flat, he lay on the ground as a burning sensation rose through his body. That was all. Just a burn. The doctor came into his room at King-Drew Medical Center the next morning, after surgery. His spine was fractured. He would never walk again. He was seventeen.

After Francis Coughlin caught the man with the gun, Bernal immediately went and “hit” him: he visited him in custody and asked him where he got the gun. The man said he bought the gun from a
“smoker”—a crack addict. The man appeared forthcoming. He gave details of the homeless man.

Still it was not helpful. A homeless guy would probably not have gang ties and so would be harder to track. Bernal returned with Rick Gordon. The man stuck to his story. After Skaggs was assigned to the case, he and Bernal returned together a third time. Same story.

When John Skaggs came to interview the man in the wheelchair at Twin Towers Jail on October 1, it was his fourth visit from investigators.

To Skaggs, it was obvious the man in the wheelchair was lying—obvious that he must be reinterviewed, again and again if necessary. He was to Skaggs simply a point of exertion: a rusty lever that would give once the right persistence was applied. The sort of persistence that was his specialty. Why was Skaggs so sure? Skaggs couldn’t say. The man’s dishonesty was so plain to him that it needed no explaining. This was part of the altered perspective of the craftsman: Skaggs saw lies the way a good contractor would notice a beam out of true.

Gordon and Skaggs sat with him in a small interview room in Twin Towers.

The man in the wheelchair already knew Gordon, so Skaggs let Gordon do the talking, observing the old Southeast rule of only one lead. Gordon began the conversation with a tone of familiarity, as if picking up a thread dropped moments before. Like Skaggs, Gordon conducted interrogations like business meetings. His style was subdued and apologetic, as if he were sorry for the trouble he brought.

The man in the wheelchair elaborated on his story of the crack addict who sold the gun once again. “That guy has a white beard. He is skinny. He is forty.” When Gordon pressed for details of his hair, the man paused as if straining to be accurate: “More gray. Low haircut,” he told Gordon.

Gordon turned up the pressure without changing his tone. By this time, the man had certainly guessed that he had been caught with a very, very dirty gun indeed. You don’t get four visits from homicide detectives for just any gang killing.

Gordon suggested the man might be fingered for a serious crime. “I
don’t want to see a guy like you going to some shitty-ass pen,” Gordon said. “You and me both!” the man rejoined quickly.

Gordon’s voice remained gentle. But he bore down. “We want your cooperation, one hundred percent, and I feel like we have it, but …”

The man was silent. “What are you thinking?” Gordon asked. Silence. Gordon dropped his voice, called him by his first name. “Just like I told you before, you can erase everything you told us,” he said. “If it’s not the truth, I’d rather not be spinning my wheels.”

Homicide detectives lie to suspects routinely and legally. But Gordon had an even more cunning tactic. He began telling the man the truth. His tone was as unadorned as if he were speaking to a colleague. “You don’t even know how busy we are,” he told him. “I got more murders I’m working than you can imagine. If it’s not the truth, I’d rather follow real stuff. I’m not gonna be pissed off at you if all this was made up. I’m just looking for the truth.”

Gordon said precisely what he really thought. He
did
have a lot of cases, and he really didn’t want to waste time.

Skaggs was quiet. At last, the man insisted again that he bought the gun from “a smoker-type transient.” He added the detail that the two had discussed swapping a stereo.

The detectives were getting nowhere. Gordon was dogged but not harsh. He kept asking the same question five different ways. Finally, seemingly defeated, he veered away into inconsequential chatter.

The detectives were preparing to leave. They asked after the man’s family. They asked about his children. The man told them he had a new “little baby.” His tone grew relaxed. “I’m not the jail type,” he offered. “I just want to get out of here, start back my life, go back to school.” The detectives were sympathetic. The conversation flowed. At last, Gordon and Skaggs made movements to go. Gordon tossed out one last question.

“Anything else?” Gordon asked. “Is there a way you can help us?” Gordon was trying to give the man an opening to drop a hint. Hints were common in such interviews. People who were afraid to testify would try to help detectives indirectly. Sometimes they would leave
them anonymous messages, scrawled notes crammed under the windshield wipers of police sedans.

But the man in the wheelchair didn’t hint. He threw open a curtain—suddenly, blindingly. His tone changed. He had sounded nonchalant. Now he was somber.

“Well, I’m just gonna go ahead and tell you officers,” he said. “Actually, I got the gun from this dude.”

The detectives froze, waiting. Then the man produced the key Skaggs knew he had had all along. “They call him
No Brains
,” he said.

Gordon and Skaggs emerged with the case transformed. The man in the wheelchair had not bought the gun from a smoker. He had paid fifty dollars to a mysterious gang member with hazel eyes and curly hair called “No Brains” one day on the campus of Southwest College.

He said No Brains belonged to a gang called the One Hundred and Eleven Blocc Crips, a subset of the Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips. For a moment, both detectives were baffled. Despite all their years in South Bureau, neither Gordon nor Skaggs recognized the name of this gang. Gangs were so hyperlocal that the Rollin’ Hundreds, located a few minutes’ drive from the Seventy-seventh over in the sheriff’s territory, might as well have been from a different country. No Brains had a teardrop under his eye, the man said, and the letter
B
tattooed on his arm.

No Brains hung out with a girl, the man said.
A girl
. Both detectives were doubly alert. Who was she? A homeless type? they asked. No, the man said: “She ain’t that type. No drugs or gang.”

A good girl?
they asked. “Yeah,” the man said.

When it was over, Gordon asked him why he hadn’t leveled with them before. He gave the answer Gordon had heard a hundred times: “I got family out there … I don’t want someone to blow my head off—my mama and kids shot.”

They said they’d keep his name out of it. They lied.

In Skaggs’s mind, an idea was taking shape.

A witness interviewed at the murder scene the night of Bryant’s
death had mentioned a rumor that a gang called
Rollin’-something
was involved in the crime. The word “Rollin’ ” was used in several gang names in L.A., including the Rollin’ Sixties located to the north. But now the detail came back to Skaggs. He paired it with a flash of memory: new graffiti Skaggs had spotted shortly after Bryant was killed. He and Nathan Kouri had seen it while driving near the crime scene—the word “Bloccs” scrawled on a wall.

Skaggs was looking for an alternative to the Rollin’ Sixties theory, which he felt had monopolized too much investigative effort and borne no fruit. Now here were two clues pointing to the Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips.

This was typical of how Skaggs went about his work. His capacious memory was engaged from the first minute on a case, filing away every detail—a stray comment, a graffiti tag scratched on a window. Such random impressions might seem meaningless to someone else. But Skaggs knew that down the line, a pattern would form. It was another reason he preferred fieldwork and put so much emphasis on face-to-face contact. Going back to the crime scene, revisiting homes of bereaved families, chatting up people he met on the street, might have seemed a waste of time to another detective. But to Skaggs, every moment in the field was an opportunity to load his memory with more grains of information. He knew that eventually one grain in the great sand pile would prove the diamond. Sometimes he would go back to the scene, park his sedan, and just wait, windows rolled down. He would call out to anyone who passed, “How you doin’?” and then chat.

Now he remembered that in one of the many reinterviews of witnesses on the cases, someone had mentioned a fight in the neighborhood not long after the murder. Chris Wilson and a brother of his, a gang member who had refused to speak to the police, had reputedly seen two strange teenagers on their street and thought they recognized Bryant’s killers. Tellingly, they didn’t call the police. They ran out, confronted them, and challenged them to fight—street justice for the killing of a police officer’s son whom they considered a friend.

Reports held that one was a Rollin’ Ninety. The brothers got beaten
up. The Rollin’ Ninety had pulled the elder’s pants down—sexual humiliation being, like threats and low-level violence, an instrument of message-sending that was relatively common in the gang milieu. Skaggs knew how inaccurate the GIN could be, but this incident could help point toward other facts. In this case, it was clear that some gang members in Bryant’s neighborhood believed that the attack had come from affiliates of the Rollin’ Nineties, and the Nineties were allied with the adjacent Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips.