On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (4 page)

That fall Tim started speaking again. He remained very quiet, preferring to communicate
with a small smile or a shake of his head.

Tim’s first arrest came later that year, after he’d turned eleven. Chuck was driving
Tim to school in his girlfriend’s car, and when a cop pulled them over the car came
up as stolen in California. Chuck had a pretty good idea which one of his girlfriend’s
relatives had stolen the car, but he didn’t say anything. “Wasn’t going to help,”
he said.

The officer took both brothers into custody, and down at the police station they charged
Chuck with receiving stolen property. They charged Tim with accessory, and later a
judge in the juvenile court placed Tim on three years of probation.

With this probation sentence hanging over Tim’s head, any encounter with the police
might mean a violation and a trip to juvenile detention, so Chuck began teaching his
little brother how to run from the police in earnest: how to spot undercover cars,
how and where to hide, how to negotiate a police stop so that he didn’t put himself
or those around him at greater risk.

REGGIE

Chuck and Tim’s middle brother, Reggie, came home for a few months then. He was an
overweight young man of fifteen, and already develop
ing a reputation as good muscle for robberies. Older guys in the neighborhood referred
to him as a cannon, meaning a person of courage and commitment. Reggie had heart,
they said. He wouldn’t back down from danger. Miss Linda described her middle son
as a goon. Unlike herself and her oldest son, Chuck, Reggie seemed utterly uninterested
in neighborhood gossip. He didn’t care if someone else was out there making money
or getting girls—he only cared if
he
was.

“And he fearless,” she said with some pride. “A stone-cold gangster.”

Reggie also had a lesser-known artistic side: he wrote rhymes on the outside, and
penned a number of “
’hood” novels while he was locked up.

When Reggie came home this time, he planned a number of daring schemes to rob armored
cars or big-time drug dealers, but he could rarely find anyone around 6th Street willing
to team up with him. “Niggas be backing out at the last minute!” he lamented to me,
half-jokingly. “They ain’t got no heart.”

Chuck tried to discourage Reggie from these robberies, but Reggie didn’t seem to have
the patience for making slow money selling drugs hand to hand, so he contributed only
sporadically to the household. “My brother’s the breadwinner,” he acknowledged.

A month after he turned fifteen, Reggie tested positive for marijuana at a routine
probation meeting. (This is referred to as a piss test, and when you test positive,
it is called hot piss.) The probation board issued him a technical violation, and
instead of allowing them to take him into custody, Reggie ran out of the building.
They soon issued a bench warrant for his arrest.

That evening, Reggie explained that there was no point in turning himself in, because
being in juvenile detention is much worse than living on the run.

“How long are you going to be on the run for?” I asked.

“Till I turn myself in.”

“That’s what you’re going to do?”

“No, that’s something I
could
do, but I’m not.”

“Yeah.”

“
’Cause what happened last time I turned myself in? Time.”

“Last time when you got locked up you had turned yourself in?”

“Did I.”
¹

“How long did you sit before your case came up?”

“Like nine months.”

During the time Reggie was on the run from this probation violation, he also became
a suspect in an armed robbery case, so the police issued a body warrant—an open warrant
for those accused of committing new crimes—for his arrest. The robbery had been caught
on tape, and the footage was even aired on the six o’clock news. The cops began driving
around the neighborhood with Reggie’s picture and asking people to identify him. They
raided his mother’s house in the middle of the night, and the next morning Reggie
told me:

Yo, the law ran up in my crib last night talking about they had a body warrant for
a armed robbery. I ain’t rob nobody since I had to get that bail money for my brother
last year. . . . They talking ’bout they going to come back every night till they
grab me. Now my mom saying she going to turn me in ’cause she don’t want the law in
her crib. . . . I’m not with it. I ain’t going back to jail. I’ll sleep in my car
if I have to.

In fact, Reggie did take to sleeping in his car, and managed to live on the run for
a few months before the cops caught him.

.   .   .

Some people in the neighborhood said that Chuck and his younger brothers got into
so much trouble because their fathers weren’t around, and their mother failed to set
a good example. By virtually all accounts, Miss Linda was an addict and had not raised
her boys well. One had only to step foot inside her house to know this: it smelled
of piss and vomit and stale cigarettes, and cockroaches roamed freely across the countertops
and soiled living room furniture. But many of Chuck’s friends had mothers who hadn’t
succumbed to crack, who worked two jobs and went to church. These friends, too, were
spending a lot of their time dealing with the police and the courts.

MIKE AND RONNY

Mike was two years older than Chuck and had grown up just a block away in a two-story
home shared with his mother and uncle, who had
inherited the house from Mike’s grandfather. His mother kept an exceptionally clean
house and held down two and sometimes three jobs.

Mike’s first arrest had come at thirteen, when the police stopped, searched, and arrested
him for carrying a small quantity of marijuana. He was put on probation and managed
to stay out of trouble long enough to finish high school by taking night classes,
as the large graduation photo on his mother’s mantel attested.

The two jobs Mike’s mom worked meant that he had more money growing up than most of
the other guys—enough for new school clothes and Christmas gifts. Chuck and Alex sometimes
joked that as a result of this relatively privileged upbringing, Mike had too strong
an appetite for the finer things in life, like beautiful women and the latest fashion.
His elaborate morning routine of clothes ironing, hair care, body lotion, and sneaker
buffing was the source of much amusement. “Two full hours from the shower to the door,”
Chuck quipped. Mike defended these habits and affinities, claiming that they came
from an ambition to make something more of himself than what he was given.

At twenty-two, Mike was working part time at a pharmaceutical warehouse and selling
crack on the side for extra cash. His high school girlfriend was about to give birth
to their second child.

A few weeks after his daughter was born, Mike lost the job at the warehouse. Complications
with his daughter’s birth had caused him to miss work too many days in a row. He spent
the first six months of his daughter’s life in a fruitless and humiliating attempt
to find work; then he persuaded a friend from another neighborhood to give him some
crack to sell on credit.

Mike had no brothers or sisters but often went around with his young boy Ronny, whom
he regarded as a brother and in more sentimental moments as a godson.
²
Ronny was a short and stocky boy who wore do-rags that concealed a short Afro, and
hoodies that he pulled down to cover most of his face. His mother had gotten strung
out on crack while he was growing up, and he spent his early years shuttling between
homeless shelters. An adopted aunt on his father’s side raised Ronny until he was
twelve. When this beloved aunt died, his maternal grandmother took over his care.
That’s when the trips to detention centers started.

A self-proclaimed troublemaker, Ronny was repeatedly kicked out of
school for things like hitting his teacher or trying to steal the principal’s car.
When his grandmother asked him to be good, he smiled with one corner of his mouth
and said, “I want to, Nanna, but I can’t promise nothing. I can’t even say I’m going
to try.” Daily she threatened to send him away to a juvenile detention center. Ronny
began to carry a gun at thirteen, and at fifteen he shot himself in the leg while
boarding a bus.

Ronny was also an excellent dancer and, in his words, “a lil’ pimp.” The first time
we had a real conversation, we were driving to various jails in the city to find where
Mike was being held, because the police had arrested him earlier that morning. We
were sitting in my car, and Ronny asked how old I was. I told him my age at the time:
twenty-one. After a moment he grinned and said, “I’ve been with women older than you.”

Soon after we met, Ronny made a name for himself in the neighborhood by getting into
a cop chase from West to South Philly, first by car and then on foot through a gas
station, a Laundromat, and an arcade. He spent most of the next six years in juvenile
detention centers in upstate Pennsylvania and Maryland.

ALEX

Alex had grown up a few blocks off 6th Street, but he hung out there all through his
childhood and became good friends with Chuck and Mike in high school. He lived with
his mother, but when he turned fifteen his father had reconnected with the family,
which improved their circumstances substantially. His dad owned two small businesses
in the neighborhood, and Alex got to hang out there after school.

By twenty-three, Alex was a portly man with a pained and tired look about him, as
if the weight of caring for his two toddlers and their mothers were too much for him
to bear. He had sold crack and pills on the block in his teens and spent a year upstate
on a drug conviction. By his early twenties, he was working hard to live in compliance
with his two-year parole sentence. He worked part time at his dad’s heating and air-conditioning
repair shop, moving to full-time hours by the end of 2004. Sometimes Mike and Chuck
grudgingly noted that if their dads owned a small business they’d have jobs, too,
but mostly they seemed happy for Alex and hoped he could keep his good thing going.

ANTHONY

Anthony was twenty-two years old when we met, and living in an abandoned Jeep off
6th Street. The year before, his aunt kicked him out of her house because she caught
him stealing from her purse, though Anthony denied this. He occasionally found day-labor
work in light construction, sometimes getting on a crew for a few weeks at a time.
In between, Mike sometimes gave him a little crack to sell, though he was never any
good at selling it because he put up no defense when other guys robbed him. “Living
out here [in a car], I can’t just go shoot niggas up, you feel me?” Anthony explained.
“Everybody knows where I’m at. I ain’t got no walls around me.”

When Anthony and I met, he had a bench warrant out for his arrest, because he hadn’t
paid $173 in court fees for a case that ended that year. He had spent nine of the
previous twelve months in jail awaiting the decision. Soon after, two neighbors who
knew that Anthony had this bench warrant called the police and got him arrested, because
they said he had stolen three pairs of shoes from them.

“Where would I even put three pairs of sneaks?” Anthony asked, pointing to the backseat
of the Jeep.

“He probably sold them,” Mike said, “for food and weed.”

When Anthony got sick with what looked to be pneumonia, Chuck started letting him
sleep on a blanket on the floor next to his bed in the basement, sneaking him in through
the back door after his grandfather was asleep. Chuck’s mother, Miss Linda, let Anthony
stay even after Chuck got locked up later that year, though Anthony’s tax, she said,
would have to go up. In angry moments Anthony complained bitterly that he would never
be able to leave Miss Linda’s for his own place, because she continually stole the
money he was trying to save from his pockets when he was asleep.

.   .   .

The legal issues that Chuck and his friends on 6th Street struggled with seemed immense
to me—too numerous and complex to keep straight without copious notes. Between the
ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, Mike spent about three and a half years in jail
or prison. Out of the 139 weeks that he was not incarcerated, he spent 87 weeks on
probation or parole for five overlapping sentences. He spent 35 weeks with a warrant
out for his arrest, and had a total of ten warrants issued on him. He also had at
least fifty-one court appearances over this five-year period, forty-seven of which
I attended.

Initially I assumed that Chuck, Mike, and their friends represented an outlying group
of delinquents: the bad apples of the neighborhood. After all, some of them occasionally
sold marijuana and crack cocaine to local customers, and sometimes they even got into
violent gun battles. I grew to understand that many young men from 6th Street were
at least intermittently earning money by selling drugs, and the criminal justice entanglements
of Chuck and his friends were on a par with what many other unemployed young men in
the neighborhood were experiencing. By the time Chuck entered his senior year of high
school in 2002, young women outnumbered young men in his classes by more than 2:1.
Going through his freshman yearbook years later, when he turned twenty-two, he identified
roughly half the boys in his ninth-grade class as currently sitting in jails or prisons.
³

ON BEING WANTED

In 2007 Chuck and I went door to door and conducted a household survey of the 6th
Street neighborhood. We interviewed 308 men between the ages of eighteen and thirty.
Of these young men, 144 reported that they had a warrant issued for their arrest because
of either delinquencies with court fines and fees or failure to appear for a court
date within the previous three years. For that same period, 119 men reported that
they had been issued warrants for technical violations of their probation or parole
(for example, drinking or breaking curfew).