The Best American Crime Writing (12 page)

To broaden his knowledge, Darius visited employees from 179th Street who had taken up new positions elsewhere. He learned to drive garbage trains and de-icer trains and to repair the electrical boxes that control signals. In renovation shops he learned how to dismantle trains and reassemble them. In control towers he learned how to direct traffic: routing trains around obstructions, replacing late trains, switching ABD trains (“abandoned due to malfunction”) out of service. The more he learned, the more he volunteered to do, and the easier he made the lives of the people who
taught him. By the time he was 18, TA employees had begun calling him at home and asking him to pull shifts.

Darius was given his first uniform at 15: “I can’t compare that feeling to anything. I felt official. I felt like this is me, like this is where I belong.” Darius discusses his work in the subway with professional pride, generally using the first-person plural (“Sometimes we didn’t feel that management should be doing certain things …”). His vision of himself as an NYCTA worker is officious and uncompromising: “I’m a very good train operator. Even though I drive fast, don’t get me wrong: I believe in coasting, I don’t believe in excessive speeds. Even if you’re late don’t speed, because eventually you’ll catch up. As a conductor, I give a whole announcement before and during stops …. That’s just me. Sometimes they’ll make part of an announcement: ‘Next stop is Queens Plaza.’ Okay, the next stop is Queens Plaza, but what do we
do
there?”

The question of how Darius’s immutable sense of belonging has never been damaged by all the skillful impersonation and fakery it depends on is not one that he can answer. I spent almost fifteen hours sitting across a table from him, and I asked this question several times. He looked bemused, his eyes wandered, he half smiled, he said he just thought of himself as a part of the system, that he felt safer and more content there than anywhere else, that for reasons he doesn’t understand this paradox never occurs to him until he is behind bars for a while. He always stressed that he improved service to the “riding customers,” and that, given his ability and care, he would never endanger anyone. (During one of these conversations, he said, “Oh—in the article could you put that my title is Transportation Captain? That’s the title the employees gave me, because I move around the system so well.”) Eventually Darius began taking the skills tests the NYCTA requires for employment, but by then he was notorious.

Reclining in the tranquillity of the 57th Street tower, Darius heard the descending scale of a train losing its charge. He sat up and waited. He knew something had tripped the train’s emergency brake, and he knew the operator would reset the brake and try to recharge the train. When the recharge attempt failed, he picked up his helmet, his vest, his gloves, his lantern, and his flashlight. He was thinking only of the train. The first four cars had made it into the station. Darius questioned the train operator and lent him his flashlight so that they could begin the routine debris search. Darius was inspecting the tracks when over the train radio he heard Command Center order an evacuation, so he unhooked the chains between the fourth and fifth cars, climbed up and unlocked the two sets of car doors, made the standard evacuation announcement, and continued down the train this way until the last passengers walked off. (After opening each car, he stood by the doors to make sure everyone got through safely.) When the train was empty, he briefly examined its rear brakes and then resumed his debris search. Two transit cops arrived; Darius hurried back to help explain the situation.

The cops, Officers Cullen and Morales, saw passengers exiting the train in a neat stream, and they saw Darius conscientiously inspecting the track with a flashlight. They had just begun questioning the conductor and train operator when Darius rushed up and co-opted an answer: “Yeah, the train went BIE and we think it caught some debris, so we’re evaluating the track—the rear brakes checked out, the passengers are all clear.” When Darius had gone back to work, the train operator pulled the cops aside and whispered, “This guy’s not one of us. He’s an impostor.”

They found that hard to believe. Everything about Darius—his gear, his carriage, his total comfort with protocol—suggested authenticity. But the train operator had recognized Darius from a Transit Authority wanted poster, and he told the cops to ask for ID. Darius produced his study-group letter, which essentially convinced
them that he was legitimate (they had encountered track-study notices many times before), but the operator was adamant, and they asked Darius to have his supervisor come vouch for him. Darius led Officer Cullen back to the tower, unlocking the door and turning on the lights and telling Officer Cullen to sit down and make himself comfortable. Darius got a drink from a water cooler and sat down at a desk to call a friend. Cullen, short and thick-limbed, with a gelled part in his hair and multiple tattoos and nine years on the force, felt faintly guilty for inconveniencing Darius.

On the phone, Darius asked to speak to someone and then said, “Oh, okay, I’ll try back.” His boss was out to lunch, he said. Cullen said not to worry, they could wait, and apologized for the annoyance. Out the tower window Darius glimpsed an unfriendly superintendent conferring with the train operator. Darius started laughing. He said, “All right, you got me.” Officer Cullen asked him what he was talking about. Darius—now narrowly smiling and incipiently prideful—said, “You got me! I don’t work for the TA. The letter’s a forgery. I stole the letterhead and did the letter myself. The uniform and keys I got from people I know. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It’s actually easy if you know what you’re doing.” Officer Cullen stood silent and staring, suspended in his disbelief. “Here’s some articles about me,” Darius said.

On the way to a formal interview with Assistant District Attorney Michael Dougherty at 100 Centre Street, Darius offered unsolicited, sophisticated descriptions of the NYCTA surface crews the police car passed. Cullen and Morales wondered how he knew so much about the minutiae of surface work; Darius responded with monologues about his mastery of the system. To the officers it seemed that he couldn’t speak fast enough, that his confession had energized him and elevated his self-regard. The sight of the Brooklyn Bridge reminded Darius that he had plans to go to a barbecue the next day on the Manhattan Bridge: It was a Friday tradition of a bridge crew he had been working with. He asked if there was a
chance he would get out in time. Officer Cullen said that, whether or not he got out, it might not be such a great idea.

At Centre Street, Darius was interviewed by ADA Dougherty and Detective Martin Mullen. He gave no sign that he knew a transgression had occurred, that there was a permanent divide in the room and that he was alone on one side of it. With a single exception, neither interviewer noted any change in his demeanor, which was one of subdued bliss. According to Detective Mullen, “emotionally Darius was even-keeled the entire time. The fact that he was carrying these articles from his previous arrests—it was almost like he dug the publicity, like there was some prestige in the experience.”

The exception came when ADA Dougherty suggested that Darius might have had something to do with the train’s emergency stop. The absurd, pejorative idea that he would ever compromise service quality and passenger safety disturbed Darius. “That’s exactly what I’m trained
not
to do,” he said. He explained that stopping the train would have required both override permission from the City Hall control tower and access to the switch room in the back of the 57th Street tower. Neither was available to him—though, as he admitted, he probably could have guessed the location of the switch-room key. City Hall later confirmed Darius’s story, and evidence indicated that he had never been in the switch room. His theory of the event—a wheel-detector device had tripped the train’s emergency brake because the train had exceeded the posted speed—was later determined to be the most plausible.

Once it became clear that Darius wouldn’t plead to the charge of reckless endangerment, Dougherty and Mullen decided to let him talk. He talked for two hours and seemed willing to talk indefinitely. He was cagey when it came to identifying collaborators or detailing certain methods whose secrecy was essential to his freedom of movement; otherwise, almost any question elicited long tales of his exploits that gave way episodically to ornate, unnecessary
digressions. Once I asked Darius what he was doing at 57th Street before his arrest. My question implied that he’d been in the station. His answer began like this: “No, no. I was mainly in the tower, not the station. Now: Towers are for what is known as train-traffic control. The board lights tell you where everything is at. All right? Okay. So every single train from Fifth Avenue, on the N and the R, down to Canal Street. Not only that but there’s a communications box for listening to the crew on every train. You also have what is known as fire watch. I watch the board for anything relating to a fire condition. Now, if it’s something minute, I can hopefully go down and end the problem without having to call the fire department. If it’s close to the third rail, use a dry chemical. If it’s something major, call the fire department, call Command, have the power turned off for that section because otherwise the fire department cannot go on the tracks, that’s part of their protocol …. And if need be you can have EMS on standby, just in case. So you always take all necessary precautions. Okay! Now on this particular day, I’m in the tower …”

Darius’s obsession has always been concentrated on the subway, but a long interview with him will teach you how far beyond it he has roamed. He may describe his experiences as a substitute engineer on the freight trains of Conrail, Norfolk Southern, Delaware & Hudson, or CSX. (“CSX is definitely my favorite. Every single engine is freshly painted.”) He may tell you now to manipulate the employee-transfer protocol of the Metro bus system to get a job as a shifter (cleaning and prepping buses at depots), and how to use that position to take buses out on express routes. He might explain Job 179 (conductor) on the Long Island Railroad: what track you’ll be on (17 or 19), how to let the crew know when you’ve finished preparing the train for departure (two buzzes on the intercom), how you return to Penn Station “as equipment” (without passengers). It is unlikely that Darius will omit the year he spent wearing an
NYCTA superintendent’s shield. While he was doing a stint as a conductor, he discovered that he could have a shield made in a jewelry store. He began wearing it on a vest he pulled over his TA-specified shirt and tie. He had a hard hat and pirated ID. Darius considered himself a track-department superintendent, so he signed out track-department vehicles and radios and drove around the city, supervising track maintenance and construction projects and responding to emergencies. He was sensitive to the threat of close scrutiny by superiors, but given his high position and network of allies, that was rare. Darius worked regular hours: eight to four from Tuesday to Thursday, seven in the evening to three in the morning on Friday, and three until eleven on Saturday morning. That way he was off from Saturday morning until Tuesday morning. “Because of my title and my position,” Darius told me, “I figured I had the seniority to do it.”

At the end of the Centre Street interview, Darius was facing felony charges to which he had confessed. He had twice been convicted of felonies. He had just dramatically violated his parole, and he had multiple parole and probation violations on his record. But he never asked Detective Mullen or ADA Dougherty about his legal situation. He shook their hands and was led out in handcuffs, his still face showing contentment.

On that day Darius’s parents, who had retired from New York to North Carolina, awaited him uncertainly in their house outside Winston-Salem. Since his release, Mr. and Mrs. McCollum had prevailed on him to apply for a parole transfer and recommence his life in North Carolina, where Mrs. McCollum’s nephew had found him a job through a state program for parolees. Darius stayed with them for a few weeks, and then went up to New York for a parole hearing. But weeks had passed; Darius’s aunt, with whom he’d been staying, no longer knew where he was or what he was doing.

What he was doing, while sleeping and eating and showering at Nelly’s or in NYCTA crew rooms, was driving a de-icer train from Coney Island to Prospect Park on the D line; putting out track fires (a train dripping battery acid caused a small explosion at 34th Street and Sixth Avenue; a tossed cigarette butt kindled a small rubbish fire in Brooklyn); investigating a busted water main at 110th Street on the A line; flagging traffic, on weekends, around a transit construction project at Queens Plaza (“The guys from transit that do street flagging, they look as if they’re stiff, and see, when I do it, I look like I’m with DOT, because I make it look so efficient—I know how to do the hand signs”); assisting the track crew he mentioned to Cullen and Morales with inspections of the Manhattan Bridge on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and entirely repainting a crew room after hearing a supervisor say that it would make a good project for someone. This all happened, Darius says, because he ran into some old friends at Queens Plaza soon after he got back to New York and they invited him to hang out and take some of their shifts, and he thought he could do a few and go back to North Carolina, “but it just kept going, and that was it.”

Elizabeth McCollum is unreserved and accurately judgmental and dresses well and cannot discuss her son without becoming fervent; she retired a decade ago from an administrative job at a textbook company. Samuel McCollum, a former plant supervisor, is bulky and skeptical, has an impulsive falsetto giggle, and tries, when discussing the actions of others, to discover decent motivations that have been obscured by mistakes or cruelties. Like his wife, he has been injured by the experiences of his only child: “Darius won’t open up and talk about anything. He would never elaborate on an answer. That’s all we ever wanted. Now, how do you get somebody like that in touch with himself?” On the day of the final arrest, Mrs. McCollum was still hopeful: “You can’t let negativism cloud you, because with Darius, once that comes in, forget it.” She and Mr. McCollum talked about the life Darius might have in
North Carolina, and thought about getting him a driver’s license and a pickup truck, which he had always wanted. They didn’t say it, but they were each thinking that in their house Darius grew restless immediately.