Ghettoside (37 page)

A jumble of squat prison buildings appeared on the horizon, round coils of barbed wire gleaming silver in the hazy light. A guard in a tower lowered a key to them using a bucket and string, reminiscent of Dr. Seuss’s
The Lorax
. No high technology had proved superior to this method.

A prison guard met them, a huge black walkie-talkie on his chest and blue and green tattoos covering his forearms. Skaggs and Stirling entered the prison, passing between circles of fences with dead space between them. Signs warned of high-voltage danger and bore silhouettes of human figures struck by lightning.

The pair waited in an office adorned with American flags as big as bedspreads. On the wall was a display of mug shots labeled “busted.” The “busted,” who included many women, were prison visitors caught trying to sneak in narcotics. Stirling chatted with the guards. One told about the prison’s new push on indecent exposure: “They’ve been giving them twenty-five years to life for exposing themselves to female guards!” he said brightly. Another boasted of a big-time Mexican Mafia leader who resided there. Stirling was impressed. But under questioning, the prison employee conceded that the capo was actually in the hospital. “He has kidney problems. He’s getting old,” he said.

Skaggs remained silent throughout, fingers tapping. The prison guards’ bearing had a touch of self-importance. They sauntered in and out wearing jumpsuits and black baseball caps. They appeared proud of
their status as law enforcement professionals and behaved as though Skaggs were one of them. They talked of their “investigations” in the confidential manner of equals sharing shoptalk. But the thin line of Skaggs’s mouth suggested he did not consider the prison guards of quite the same caliber as himself.

Stirling, who often talked too much, instantly adopted the guards’ tone. He began spilling details about the Tennelle case. Skaggs’s fingers grew still, and his mouth tightened into a frown. It was clear he was very displeased.

The inmate they had come to see was a black man with gang ties to South Central. He was young and athletic-looking. He had an engaging manner and his eyes conveyed clearheaded intelligence. It was easy to imagine him in another kind of life, as a popular high school football player or a promising college student. But in this life, he had been shot at and assaulted repeatedly. He had lost friends to homicide. He had attacked people and hurt but not killed them, he said. His family’s house had been “shot up.” A man had beaten him, broken his gold chain, then departed with the words, “I coulda killed you. No one would say anything about it.”

The young man was going to be released soon. He was worried.
Prison was safer than freedom for young black men in California, who were much more likely to be murdered outside than in. Some gang members even described incarceration as a reprieve—a temporary break from the terror of the streets, like a soldier’s leave from battle.

The young man indicated his “gang identity” was a ploy to survive. “Gotta play the role,” he told Skaggs. He spoke wistfully of a gang member he knew who had escaped the life, finding a job in construction far away. He was in love with a woman, and he wanted to do the same. But he had no money, and he knew his prison record would make it difficult to get a job or an apartment, even a credit card.

Skaggs had long been struck by how many gang members, like this young man, seemed to be pretty regular guys. They were gang members in
spite
of their normalness. They had joined gangs as thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boys. Some were forced. Others sought protection.

Still others were seduced by teenage enticements: Girls. Money. Adventure. A chance to brawl and “party.” By their twenties, they were sick of it. They appeared despondent, as repelled by the violence as any sane person would be. They cried a lot. Their loyalties had shifted to girlfriends and kids. But they couldn’t shake their adolescent ties.

There was, of course, a whole complex range of people in the ghettoside world. Some men liked hurting people. Some didn’t. Some men started out not liking it but became brutalized and sadistic. Maybe the mix would differ in other groups of Americans. Maybe some other racial or ethnic cohort would contain a higher ratio of regular guys, or a lower ratio of men susceptible to becoming violent. Maybe the gnawing fear of getting murdered—
estimated as high as one in thirty-five by a Justice Department report in the 1990s—would influence another group of men differently.

But this was hairsplitting. Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens. The young man turned on them somber, frightened eyes. He didn’t want to be in prison and didn’t want to die. He wanted out but couldn’t find a way.

As Skaggs and Stirling went out through the prison gates, an alarm sounded. A guard waved a hand toward the window to show Stirling the cause—a house sparrow trapped between the fences. Birds “just blow up” when they touch the high-voltage wire, the guard explained. They’d flutter a few moments, then perish.

Stirling stopped to watch the sparrow trace its last desperate loops. “Poor little bird,” he said, and walked on.

All through 2009, small motions played out in the Tennelle case. Skaggs and Stirling became acquainted with the two defense attorneys appointed for the defendants. Seymour Applebaum, Davis’s attorney, had a deep voice seemingly made for addressing juries and could have been
credibly cast as Socrates, with his white hair spilling over his collar and a white beard. Applebaum disdained computer gadgetry. He wrote with pencil on paper and spoke from a lectern, making eye contact with his listeners, not gazing toward a screen as so many prosecutors did. Ezekiel Perlo, Starks’s attorney, was built like a ship’s mast despite being nearly seventy years old. Perlo had an asymmetrical, humorous face and a slight limp, and he had recently battled lymphoma. Both attorneys were highend. They had considerably more experience than the prosecutors and were both qualified to try capital cases, which placed them among the elite of defense attorneys locally. The pair had been chosen for the case before the DA’s decision not to seek the death penalty. Trial was set for 2010.

As the months wore on, Skaggs’s new unit in Olympic finally got a few homicides—a justifiable committed by a juvenile who hit his adult attacker with his skateboard, a nineteen-year-old Latino youth killed in a drive-by, and a drunken man who had died two weeks after receiving a mysterious bump to the head.

Skaggs had been struck by how much more cooperative witnesses were in Olympic than they had been in Southeast. “I’ve been out on two shootings, and the wits didn’t run off. They waited and talked to police!” he said.

Roosevelt Joseph, one of the old-timers from Seventy-seventh homicide, had long held that witness cooperation varied according to crime rates: “As homicide creeps up, witness cooperation drops off,” he said. A feedback loop exists between murder rates and ambient fear; Skaggs was now seeing this firsthand.

Inwardly, he still chafed. He wasn’t used to free time. He had started running at 3:30
A.M
. before work. In April, he ran the Boston Marathon for charity. Friends had told him to start slow, to pace himself. Skaggs complied, though this went against all his instincts. He was still fresh at Mile 21 and finished in four hours, nine minutes, with energy to spare. “Bad tactics,” he thought. He’d violated his own creed:
Never hold back
.

He still enjoyed his job and his home life. But he felt tested in both. His son had turned seventeen. Skaggs worried that the boy was prone to “bad decisions” and fretted that he had not found a job. Skaggs had always
worked, pulling weeds starting at age twelve. He gave his son ultimatums, threatened to take the car. Finally, he found the less he said, the better. “Attitude!” Skaggs exclaimed. “He thinks he knows everything!”

Parenting a child in late adolescence is delicate work. For years, much research and advocacy directed toward homicide had focused on “youth violence.” There were virtually no charity or government programs focused on adult male victims. But statistics suggested that it was not youth but
leaving
it that heightened risk. Death rates for black men peaked at ages eighteen to twenty-two, then remained relatively high through the forties.

Black parents of homicide victims often felt criticized, as if their child’s murder somehow indicated a poor upbringing. But homicide risk descends on young black men at exactly the moment when they shake off parental authority. It’s a moment that also throws many white parents. Skaggs’s son presented different challenges than Bryant. But as the father of a seventeen-year-old, Skaggs said he related “100 percent” to Wally Tennelle’s struggles.

Then there was his other, lately acquired nightmare child.

Jessica Midkiff still needed constant tending. One day, Skaggs fetched her for a proceeding related to her probation. She came running out with her hair wet, breathing hard, clutching her HIV-test certificate. When she jumped into the car, Skaggs took off his sunglasses and gave her a long look. “You look healthy!” he exclaimed. She beamed. “I try to go to bed early,” she said.

She was still dancing, making two hundred dollars a night. She still smoked. She fell asleep in the backseat. But Skaggs was feeling encouraged. Midkiff had met, for once, a man whom he considered a nice guy, a security guard at one of her clubs. And she was finally taking steps to finish her GED.

As they drove by the University of Southern California campus, Midkiff woke up. She peered at the college girls walking by: she had always wanted to see a university campus.

THE VICTIMS’ SIDE

La Barbera badly missed Marullo. Four of his detectives defected that year, all for assignments that seemed to offer more perks and fewer frustrations. He was left once again with too many inexperienced detectives, and too few sure hands to train them.

The overtime pinch was hurting. And he remained unsure of Kouri, who never seemed to be able to explain what he was doing.

Kyle Jackson, the group’s new commander, had not been popular with the ghettoside crew at first. But he was showing signs of absorbing their subversive perspective. He fought for resources. He expressed compassion for what he described as the “desperately helpless community” of South Bureau.

La Barbera was surprised, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been. Jackson, who was black, had grown up in Watts. His mother had been on welfare and he had spent some of his childhood in Nickerson Gardens. His stepfather had built the notorious Louisiana Hotel, whose sign adorned the Southeast roll call room.

La Barbera was not in the office one evening when Jackson loomed over Kouri’s desk, lamenting Marullo’s decision to leave. He pointed at Kouri in his theatrical way. “But
you
? Do
you
want to stay?” he asked.

Caught off guard, Kouri answered without thinking: “
If
they let us work,” he griped.

Then he realized his mistake.

Kouri had been noticing the ease with which unsolved cases slipped into oblivion. Sometimes it seemed to him that investigators gave up too easily. Giving up was not acceptable. When Eiman had groused that the gang intervention worker from the Laconia case was going to “beef” him—that is, file a complaint against him—Kouri had countered solemnly: “You can’t let that stuff stop you. It would paralyze you.”

Now Kouri’s head snapped up to meet Jackson’s gaze. He realized his commander was testing him. “Yes!” Kouri corrected himself with sudden intensity. He
did
want to remain in homicide. “Yes, I do!”

One strangely cool and misty afternoon in August 2009, a boy dressed up in “old school” gangster style with an orange bandana hanging out of his pocket ambled toward the corner of Broadway and Eighty-ninth Street across from the Celestial Church of Christ.

A dark-clad figure awaited him and raised a gun. He gripped it in both hands, braced his legs, and fired. The boy tried to run but fell mid-step and pitched forward. He lay still for a moment, lifted his head, then dropped it. He was crying. He raised his head once more. Above him, festive yellow and orange helium balloons promoting a neighborhood store bobbed in the wind.

A young woman ran to his side then rushed away, hands pressed to her face. A man carrying a baby stepped around the boy and went into the store.

Paramedics soon arrived, followed a minute later by a police car.

A big officer got out and glanced at the boy on the sidewalk, who was still moving. Then he turned away, pacing out a perimeter. He and his partner put up crime-scene tape and shooed the crowd away. The big officer paused, hand on hip, to bark something into his radio, then shooed some more, waving his arms, and turned to watch the paramedics remove the boy’s clothing and shoes. By then, other officers had arrived.

They, too, stood and watched. Not one knelt to talk to the boy. Not one asked him who did it.