Ghettoside (35 page)

Midkiff’s nose itched as she testified; she didn’t know what to do about it. A defense attorney cross-examined her and she grew belligerent, stretching her neck and laughing scornfully. Later, there was mention of her grandmother, who had passed away. Midkiff broke down and made a scene. “ ’Scuse me!” Stirling brought her a tissue. Wally Tennelle, who attended the entire hearing alone, watched this scene unfold with a grim face, playing with a piece of Scotch tape adhered to the bench.

The case cleared “prelim”—that is, the judge ruled there was sufficient evidence for the pair to stand trial. But Midkiff had not increased Stirling’s faith in her. The trial was months away. Stirling was really worried now.

It wasn’t the horror that burned out ghettoside detectives. It was the frustration. Sam Marullo was beginning to drown in it. The day after Southeast victim La’Mere Cook was buried, the second trial of the defendant accused of killing Henry Henderson outside Pritchett’s front door ended with another hung jury, despite Marullo’s dogged work on the case.

Then Marullo learned that he was unlikely to be promoted to the rank of detective in recognition of the job he was already doing, despite his many successes.

The overtime crunch was getting to him. Recently, he had been told he could not attend a victim’s funeral. Skaggs had taught him to always attend funerals. “You have all the burden of the families who think about nothing but this. And you can’t do your best,” Marullo said. “You try to detach yourself as a coping mechanism … but then the family breaks that down.”

La Barbera still tried to crack bitter jokes about it. One evening around 4:30 he pulled a wooden whistle from somewhere, blew it, and yelled, “Fifteen minutes!” But he could see that Marullo was upset and thinking hard about his future. Worried about losing Li’l Skaggs—“my only Fire”—he called the squad for a meeting in mid-September to discuss the overtime restrictions. “I’m worried about the effect on you,” La Barbera said.

He was sitting in a low chair. His detectives sat on desks or leaned against partitions. He had intended a pep talk. But someone pointed out that officers assigned to Compstat—the fashionable management-accountability program based on the mapping of crime statistics—had been given take-home cars, unlike homicide detectives. Marullo jumped in. Homicide worked to “restore faith in the community,” he said. But since the work was so undervalued, “it’s hard to ask people to give up their life for this.” He gestured toward La Barbera. “Look what it’s done to you!”

There was a stunned silence, broken by nervous laughter. Marullo
was, after all, speaking to a superior officer, and a friend. “I can’t believe you said that!” someone murmured. Marullo broke off, abashed.

But La Barbera waved his hands. “No, no!” he said. “You’re right … It’s ruined my life!” It was impossible to tell if he was joking.

Marullo recovered and plowed on. Why were they struggling for resources when crime was low and the police force had expanded so much? Why? He stood with one hand on his head, eyes troubled. “I don’t get it,” he said at last. “Someone’s missing it here.”

Chris Barling went up to Marullo afterward. “I’ve been there—don’t get me wrong. I’ve been as frustrated as you because of the constraints,” Barling told him quietly. But “you keep pounding away! You keep fighting!” Barling waved his hands, talking and talking, urging Marullo not to give up.

Nathan Kouri was sitting nearby. He listened, a hand over his mouth.

But when Barling finished, Marullo tossed his empty coffee cup into a garbage can with a bang. “I’ve made a well-thought-out decision,” he said, and turned away.

A short time later, La Barbera came into the office in a particularly morbid mood. “Sammy broke up with me via text!” he announced.

Marullo had taken a P-3 position in the Southeast gang unit—a uniformed job as a training officer focused on crime suppression. La Barbera, predictably, took Marullo’s defection personally. Marullo “is not a Fire,” he snapped. “He just thinks he’s a Fire.”

LOST SOULS

Skaggs hated multitasking.
One thing at a time, up against only today
—this was yet another of his maxims. But he had no choice but to start a new job while winding down his old one.

It required months of shifting back and forth between roles. He continued to prepare for the upcoming trial in the Tennelle case while setting up his new office in the soon-to-open Olympic Division. The new station would include parts of Koreatown and a section of the LAPD’s Rampart Division.

Back in the day, an open-air drug market in MacArthur Park and a kind of sectarian war in exile among Central American immigrants had made Rampart a savagely violent place. Crime was still relatively high when the LAPD secured bond funds to add a new station there. But by the time the station was built, wealthy Koreans, in flight from crashing Asian stock markets in the late 1990s, had snapped up real estate in the area, and developers had built hip new lofts that attracted students and professionals.
At the same time, homicides had plummeted among the area’s remaining Spanish-speaking immigrants.

It was an astonishing change. Among the lessons to be drawn was that
poverty does not necessarily engender homicide. Even after gentrification
began to take hold,
nearly 40 percent of Rampart residents remained below the poverty line. Many of these poor city dwellers were illegal immigrants crammed into shabby brick apartment buildings; the neighborhood was relatively dense by L.A. standards. Yet black residents in South L.A. had vastly higher death rates from homicide.

Scholars have made similar findings elsewhere. Despite their relative poverty,
recent immigrants tend to have lower homicide rates than resident Hispanics and their descendants born in the United States. This is because homicide flares among people who are trapped and economically interdependent, not among people who are highly mobile.

Immigrants are, essentially, in transit. Those in Rampart in the 2000s had left old ties behind in their native lands. They were deracinated. Their new neighborhoods were not like the underground, isolated, highly networked, communal enclaves of South L.A.
Instead, they were stopovers. Their inhabitants would soon decamp from MacArthur Park to Whittier or La Puente. Hispanics had a further advantage over blacks: despite their high poverty rate, they had long enjoyed better private-sector opportunities than black Angelenos. Los Angeles employers had shown
an “unabashed preference” for Hispanic labor over black for generations, historian Josh Sides showed. The supply of Mexican labor was one of L.A.’s first selling points, used by boosters to lure manufacturers. In the twenties, many employers who relied on Mexican immigrants refused to hire blacks. Organized labor in the 1930s bypassed black workers and directed its campaigns at Hispanics. During World War II, blacks, unlike Hispanics, were excluded from employment in the shipyards and docks, or relegated to inferior jobs. It wasn’t that Hispanic workers didn’t suffer discrimination—they did. But often they were treated badly in jobs that black people couldn’t get in the first place. A preference for Hispanic labor in the food and metal industries had become entrenched by the 1960s. Later, black men, unlike Hispanic men, lost out in the great Southern California aerospace boom. Barred by racism early on, they were later marooned by geography as the industry moved to suburbs where whites and Hispanics could more easily buy homes. Black people couldn’t buy homes or rent in many of the new
defense and aerospace hot spots, first because of restrictive real estate covenants, then because of de facto efforts to continue these covenants in defiance of court rulings. Blacks became trapped in a sunny version of Detroit, living among shuttered tire and auto plants as the rest of Southern California enjoyed a second manufacturing boom. Although public employment remained a bright spot, by the 2000s, black people in L.A. had lower labor-market participation than their Hispanic counterparts, who as a group were less educated, and they still lived largely separate from whites, crowded into their own private Rust Belts.

This fit a national pattern. Blacks lived in figurative walled cities; Hispanics did not. Black people had long been vastly more segregated from white people than Hispanics, and were more concentrated. In fact, black people had remained more crowded together and isolated much longer than any other racial or ethnic group in America. “
Black segregation was permanent, across generations,” said the sociologist Douglas Massey.
No one else had it as bad—not even residents of the Little Italys or Polish or Jewish immigrants to eastern cities of the nineteenth century.
Black people couldn’t outrun segregation if they tried. It followed them, reinforced by invisible dynamics, like real estate steering. In the year 2000, decades after the courts struck down restrictive covenants, black people in Los Angeles were no more likely to have white neighbors than they had been in 1970.

Segregation concentrated the effects of impunity. This helped explain why relatively modest differences in homicide clearance rates by race produced such disparate outcomes.
Indices of residential segregation are strong homicide predictors. Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules. The intimacy part was also why homicide was so stubbornly intraracial. You had to be involved with people to want to kill them. You had to share space in a small, isolated world.

By contrast, America’s lonely, atomized upper-middle-class white suburbs were not homicidal. Their highly mobile occupants were not much involved with each other. They didn’t depend on one another to survive. The occasional condominium board meeting might get ugly,
but mostly there was enough law in such places—enough expectation of a legal response to violence—to keep the occasional neighbor dispute from getting out of hand. And if there wasn’t—for example, if a young man grew tired of his brawling high school chums—moving somewhere else was easy enough.

In Skaggs’s time, Rampart, despite its poverty, had a murder rate equal to the citywide average—and similar divisions in the suburban San Fernando Valley. The new Olympic Division would not resemble any place Skaggs had worked in years. Nonetheless, he was preparing eagerly for the new station’s opening, spending most of his time in the new offices, which were still under construction.

His old colleagues in South Bureau derided him as a “traffic cop.” They called his new division “Mission or Midwilshire or whatever that station is”—a swipe at the area’s low crime rates. Then they accused him of taking custodial supplies with him, including power strips and cans of Dust Destroyer. These were coveted items in homicide, where the most basic office products were rationed. Under interrogation by Barling, Skaggs broke. He copped to stealing the Dust Destroyer.

Finally, Skaggs made a last visit back for the South Bureau Christmas party—enduring jeers of “West Bureau!” when he walked in—and said goodbye.

By that time, he was ready for the new station to open. He had a large whiteboard installed in his new office to list cases, just like La Barbera’s. He had it stenciled so it wouldn’t look messy. At the top, he wrote the old Southeast mantra “Always Be Closing” in red letters. He bought a top-notch coffeemaker and apple-spice Febreze air freshener.

He laid claim to a closet the size of a room and had new shelving installed. Skaggs knew that for all the slowdown in crime, he was sitting on top of a vast dark stain of unsolved homicides from the Big Years in Rampart—back when the bodies floated in MacArthur Park lake. He planned to improve on the Lost Souls Trailer. He dug up the unsolved cases himself. There were 453 of them going back to 1966.

Before the lights and floors were installed, John Skaggs had already gone through scores of the old books, and by the time the new station
opened, he had assessed and sorted every blue binder. They stood in rows in his new closet, marked with labels that said
SUPERHOT, SEMIHOT
, and so on, all the way to
SUPERCOLD
.

The work was interesting. The homicides were different from those he knew. There had been, for example, a spurt of killings of gay men in the 1980s, never solved. Some of the victims in those cases had lived secret promiscuous lives. Others were transvestites. This aspect of murder was familiar to Skaggs. Like homeless people, female prostitutes, and criminal-class black men, these victims were vulnerable because they were marginal: the Monster feasts on the despised. Skaggs was determined to secure belated justice for these victims.