On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (25 page)

More commonly, people help those facing difficulties with obtaining formal identification
by providing the goods and services that typically require ID, with no questions asked.
That is, rather than supply the ID itself, they instead supply the goods and services
otherwise denied to people without proper identification.

Pappi’s corner store sits at the corner of 6th and Mankin. A yellow neon sign above
the entrance reads Hernandez Grocery, Cigarettes Milk Eggs Hoagies Lottery. A smaller
sign below reads We Take Access Card. Mr. Hernandez was known as Pappi, and around
6th Street his store was the go-to place for loosie cigarettes, chips, drinks, and
snacks. Since the nearest grocery store was eleven blocks away, neighbors who didn’t
have a car or bus fare would do most of their grocery shopping at Pappi’s.

Bulletproof glass framed the counter, but Pappi kept a one-by-two-foot space open
so he could pass customers their cigarettes and lottery tickets by hand.

“A turnstile,” he once told me, “would mean that I expect my customers to pull a gun
on me. Nobody would ever do that.”

Pappi used the bulletproof glass as a giant frame on which to showcase pictures of
his grandchildren and other children from the area. Alongside his granddaughter and
three grandsons were the faces of his 6th Street customers and friends, in baby pictures,
prom pictures, graduation pictures, funeral pictures, and even jail visiting-room
pictures. Pappi prided himself that in fifteen years of business in an increasingly
violent and impoverished Black section of the city, he had never been robbed.

Across from the main counter and perched above the doorway, a small TV broadcast sports
or the news. Customers sometimes stopped to watch for a few minutes, commenting with
Pappi on the stories. They also asked Pappi how their friends and relatives were doing.
Indeed, the store served as a kind of informational hub for the 6th Street
neighborhood. It was often the first place people went when they came home from jail
or prison. Though Pappi seldom spoke more than a few words, he quietly kept up with
a great many neighborhood residents, and possessed that rare ability to make people
feel noticed and genuinely appreciated. He played baseball in high school, and forty
years later still cut an impressive figure.

When Mike and Chuck and their friends were home from jail, we’d visit Pappi’s four
or five times a day to buy a soda, a loosie, or a bag of chips. After a few months,
Pappi gave me the nickname Vanilla, which he later shortened to Nil.

Most days, Pappi’s college-aged son ran the cash register in the front, taking lottery
ticket numbers and selling drinks and snacks. His daughter worked the grill and meat
counter in the back, serving up hoagies or grilled cheese. But in addition to common
corner grocery store items, Pappi also sold prepaid cell phones under the table. Depending
on the day, he might have a hookup for a used car rental with no questions asked,
or a “connect” to a local motel where you could check in without showing ID or a credit
card.

The goods and services Pappi sold under the table weren’t known by the store’s normal
customers. You had to ask for them, and you had to be the right person asking in order
to get them. But they weren’t exactly illegal, either. These items ordinarily required
the purchasers to provide documentation of both their identity and their creditworthiness—a
state-issued identification card, proof of insurance or credit, or a bank account.

Pappi supplied specialty goods and services to his customers, but he also acted as
a broker between legally compromised people and individuals providing a range of goods
and services they were seeking. One of the people he connected his customers to was
Jahim, who worked at a garage a few blocks south. At this garage patrons could ask
for Jahim, and get their car serviced or repaired without presenting ID, insurance,
or any paperwork on the car whatsoever. Downtown on South Street, a man named Hussein
sold stereos and other electronics on payment plans, allowing the customer to give
any name whatsoever, and asking for no ID to set up the arrangement. Bobby M on Third
Street rented out rooms without any proof of ID or credit. His rates were higher than
elsewhere, but he accepted a handshake rather than a lease.

People working in the medical field also find that their jobs enable them to provide
under-the-table support to legally compromised people. Indeed, a number of local women
who worked in area hospitals and doctor’s offices provide medication and expertise
to men too scared to seek treatment at a hospital, where their names might be run
and warrants or other pending legal matters would come up.

The first time I witnessed this kind of underground health care was the day Steve’s
fourteen-year-old cousin, Eddie, broke his arm while running from the police. An officer
had stopped him on foot just outside Pappi’s, and after patting him down found a small
amount of crack on his person. Eddie took off when the officer began taking out the
handcuffs, and he soon lost him in the alleyways. In his efforts to escape, Eddie
had scaled a fence and landed badly. He walked into his grandmother’s house panting
and clutching his right forearm, the bone exposed.

After an hour on the phone, his grandmother told me triumphantly that a woman was
coming over to fix Eddie’s arm.

“Is she a doctor?” I naively asked.

“She’s a janitor,” his grandmother laughed. “But she works at the hospital.”

.   .   .

Two hours later, Eddie’s arm was still bleeding, even though we’d wrapped it in dish
towels and propped it up on the high back of the couch. Eddie had been taking swigs
of Wild Irish Rose, and was now cursing and singing in about equal parts.

The woman finally arrived around midnight, wearing scrubs and carrying a large plastic
bag full of medical supplies. She unwrapped Eddie’s arm and injected him with some
kind of anesthetic. After a few minutes of cleaning the wound and catching up with
Eddie’s grandmother, she told me to turn up the music. Then she asked his grandmother
to hold on to Eddie’s torso while she clutched his broken arm between her thighs and
pulled the bones back into place with both her hands. Eddie screamed and struggled
to get away, then cried for a good ten minutes. The woman dropped two needles into
boiling water on the stove and used them to sew up the broken skin. With Eddie quietly
crying, she placed a bandage over the stitches, and then began wrapping his arm in
white cotton padding, placing rolled gauze in his hand
for him to cup in a loose fist. She took some tougher foam material from her bag and
cut it to fit his forearm, then wrapped this in an ace bandage. After about an hour,
Eddie’s arm sat in a sling, and the woman left instructions to change the bandages
and check the wounds every day. For her service, Eddie’s grandmother paid the woman
seventy dollars and a plastic bag filled with three plates of corn bread and chicken
she had made that afternoon.

After this memorable event, I began to observe that a number of other local residents
who worked in the medical field supplied various forms of off-the-books care to young
men who avoided the hospital for fear of encountering the police.

Aisha and Mike’s cousin Ronny, sixteen, had been boarding a bus when the gun tucked
into his waistband went off, sending a bullet into his thigh. (He had begun carrying
the gun when, coming home from a two-year stint in juvenile detention, he found his
neighbor and close friend slain and the 6th Street Boys in a series of shootouts with
the 4th Street Boys.) Having recently returned from the juvenile detention center
on three years of probation, Ronny refused to go to the hospital, convinced that the
trip would land him back in juvenile on a violation. He spent the next five days bleeding
on his grandmother’s couch, his friends and family pleading with him to go to the
hospital, but to no avail. Then his grandmother located a woman working as a nurse’s
aide who agreed to remove the bullet.

She performed this procedure on the kitchen table. Ronny’s grandmother shoved a dish
towel into his mouth and asked me to turn up the music to cover his screams. When
the nurse’s aide finished up and Ronny appeared likely to survive, his grandmother
paid her $150, and the next day brought her some of her famous spicy fried chicken
wings.

OPPORTUNITIES ON THE INSIDE

While some people supplying protections and privileges to legally compromised people
launch this enterprise through their personal contacts, or by finding that their job
opens up ways to help and profit from these people, others come into contact with
people living under legal restrictions directly through their position within the
criminal justice
system. Certain court clerks, prison guards, case managers, and halfway house supervisors
leverage their professional positions to grant special exemptions and privileges to
defendants, inmates, and parolees who can come up with the cash. And like those brokers
of goods and services who aren’t employed by the criminal justice system, these individuals
occasionally assist for personal reasons or simply out of a desire to help.

Janine finished high school with great grades and then enrolled in a two-year college
to earn a certificate in criminal justice. As she told it, a lifetime of watching
her brothers and father deal with the police, the courts, and the prisons had convinced
her that she’d be more qualified for this kind of job than for medical work—the other
sector of the economy that seemed to be growing at the time. Upon graduation, she
tried to get a job as a prison guard, since the benefits were great and the wages
good, but instead was hired by the scheduling office at the Criminal Justice Center
downtown. The job was pretty straightforward: handle the scheduling of court cases,
and manage the calendars of the judges, district attorneys, and public defenders.
Since each of the hundreds of cases that came through the criminal courts each month
had upwards of twelve court dates before going to trial—or far more likely: settling
with the defendant, making a deal—this scheduling provided fulltime work for Janine
and two others.

Janine had been going through the cases one day when she came upon a name that looked
very familiar to her: Benjamin Greene. Benny—if it was indeed the same person—had
been the only guy who was nice to her in middle school, when she was overweight and
her mother’s boyfriend was touching her at night. Benny would let her sneak into his
basement bedroom to sleep without asking anything from her. She looked up his name
on the court computer and saw his picture pop up on the screen. It was Benny, sure
enough, now fifteen years older.

Janine had heard that Benny had become a major dealer after high school and was even
wanted by the feds for a while. But this didn’t stop her from remembering his kindness.
Benny had a preliminary hearing for a gun and drug case scheduled for the following
week, so she waited out in the hallway for him, approaching him shyly as he was leaving
the courtroom. “My heart was pounding,” she told me a couple of months later while
we had coffee across the street from the courthouse. “I didn’t
know if he was married, or had kids, or if he ever thought about me anymore. But he
looked the same, just with more hair [on his face].”

Within minutes of their meeting, Benny asked Janine if she could help to get his case
thrown out—if she could perhaps talk to the judge or the district attorney. She refused
to do this, but realized she could arrange the judge’s schedule so that Benny’s court
dates would be quite far apart—four months instead of one or one and a half.

I met Janine through Benny; he came through the block one day and told everybody listening
that he’d gotten a girl who worked in the courthouse to push his dates back. He acted
as if he thought nothing of exploiting her feelings for his own gain and spoke quite
dismissively of her. But when I had coffee with Janine, she explained that Benny had
offered to pay her handsomely for her efforts to muddle the schedules; in fact, he
insisted on paying her each time she was successful.

“How much is he paying you?” I asked.

“Three hundred. Three hundred each time.”

“What are you doing with the money?”

“I’m paying off my student loans!”

Seeking additional verification that Janine was really receiving this money, I asked
Benny about it in private one afternoon. He admitted he was paying her, and explained
that this was in part because he didn’t want to be indebted to her for the great favor
she was doing him, especially knowing how much she liked him.

A year later, Benny was still on the streets, thrilled to be spending time with his
baby-mom and two children. In the end, his court case took three and a half years
to process—a good year and a half longer than any other case I’d seen. When Benny
was finally sent to state prison, Janine told me that he wrote her that same week,
thanking her for giving him the extra time outside with his family.

If court clerks have a bit of leeway to grant certain defendants special privileges
such as extra time between trial dates, jail and prison guards have considerably more.
And though a number of legal restrictions are imposed on those who are on probation
or parole or going through a court case, jail and prison inmates encounter a far greater
list of rules and prohibitions, opening up a much larger window of economic opportunity
for those working at correctional facilities. While
certainly not all or perhaps even most guards participate in the informal penal economy,
at least some profit from smuggling in everything from knives to drugs to cell phones.

Twice I accompanied Miss Linda to meet a guard whom she paid to smuggle in marijuana
to one of her sons sitting in county jail. Another time I accompanied Mike’s girlfriend
to a meeting with a prison guard who accepted a blow job and thirty-five dollars in
exchange for smuggling in three pills of oxycodone to Mike, which he took to ease
the pain from a severe beating received in the yard.