The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (27 page)

The majority of gang-related homicides took place in public and were the result of retribution. But in Newark, far more than any other city in the nation, the gangs were intertwined with the drug trade in complicated ways. Twenty percent of gang violence in Newark was drug related, compared to 5 percent nationally. Gangs were known to cooperate with one another in order to string together and enforce distribution corridors, which ran like veins through the city. More than ever before, driving around these streets was a mortally dangerous endeavor, particularly if you were a black man in your early twenties with cornrows and tattoos, carrying cash and weed and desiring no affiliation with any group, and in fact carrying contempt, as Rob did, for those insecure enough to covet that affiliation. The standard warning to “watch your back” began to take on a meaning beyond the basic vigilance that a violent neighborhood necessitated; you literally had to watch your own back, because a stranger might be aiming a gun or a knife at it. At Yale, Rob's initiations had entailed singing Madonna songs in the dining hall for water polo and arm wrestling campus police for Elihu. In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.

T
HE BUSINESS OF
dealing drugs was liquid, transient: connections appeared and then disappeared, usually due to prison sentences or attempts to avoid them. Rob's initial connect—the one given him by Flowy—had fallen off the grid at some point; most likely he'd fled town to avoid conflict with a rival, police, or both. The subsequent source of his marijuana supply had come through Carl, in exchange for small kickbacks. Carl was in his late forties now, living in an apartment in Bloomfield. He insisted on being present for any transaction Rob made with his supplier, as if the man he considered his nephew might try to cheat him somehow. So Rob would drive to Carl's apartment to pick him up, drive to the supplier's house in Ivy Hill, smell the marijuana to make
sure it wasn't bunk, haggle over the price per pound—Rob had negotiated $1,800, which was on the very low end, and the supplier was constantly angling to raise the figure. Rob would go through the motions of standing his ground, speaking profanely but not threateningly while maintaining an exasperated but not derisive visage. He would act willing but not too willing to walk away. And, when the arduous transaction was complete, he would drive Carl back home, leaving him with $200.

Flowy, Tavarus, and Drew, all of whom were in Newark (like Tavarus, Drew had dropped out of college after two years), didn't understand why he dealt with Carl. Plenty of more stable people would eagerly help him obtain those pounds of weed. Even a minor drug on a minor level involved fronting: haggling with suppliers, canvassing for buyers and haggling with them, too, the presence one had to maintain in the neighborhood in order to keep business fluid. Rob had to be cool and laid back while also tough, imposing. These contradictions were necessary in order to keep the gap between operating costs and profit wide enough to make the risk worth it, and they didn't need to be compounded by rolling around with an unstable element such as Carl—who could be quick to take offense at real or imagined slights.

“He's family,” Rob would mumble when asked.

“He's wack,” Flowy replied.

“He's my business.”

They figured that what Rob meant was that, of all the other men he could be associating with, none of them had lived in the house on Chapman Street while he was growing up, none of them had given him rides to the Essex County Jail to visit Skeet, none of them had driven the car that took his father home from prison that one and only time—an hour-long transit that Rob still carried with him. But still, his friends didn't get it. Rob's role as a dealer was already more complicated than the next guy's, because he was now a Yale graduate tagged with all the many stigmata that simple word carried in this neighborhood's underworld. Like a bird handled by humans whose flock would not accept it back, Rob now wore the unwashable scent of the Ivy League. To the extent that he
could, Rob kept his Yale pedigree a secret from everyone he dealt with. If his supplier were to become aware of it, he would automatically assume Rob was trying to get one over on him, and even the suspicion was dangerous. So Rob played the role of desperate, struggling, paranoid, not-too-bright hustler once every couple weeks. And as he finally explained to his friends, he used Carl not out of loyalty or charity but as a beard to legitimize this image of himself, yet another Newark-proofing trick.

After these pickups, he would drive the stash back to New Haven, bury it in the black trunk beneath the python tank, and return to the high-definition screen in his lab to study the way proteins a few molecules wide interacted in a cancerous environment.

“W
HAT'S IT LIKE
, still being on campus after graduating?” I asked.

Rob shrugged. “Same old, I suppose. Quiet, at least.”

We were walking together along the western edge of campus, to a bar. It was early August 2002, and I was visiting for the weekend. The campus was placid during these off months, populated mostly by faculty and graduate students, the quads and throughways and bars nicely untrafficked. I was there to visit a female friend who was about to enter the Yale Drama School as a playwright. I'd emailed Rob and we'd arranged to grab a drink. To me, the atmosphere felt surreal in comparison to New York City, where hundreds of my classmates and I were now beginning to make our way, flinging ourselves fervently into the entropy of city life. Knowing how eager he'd been at times to get out of Yale, I was curious about the irony of him being the one who'd stayed behind.

Rob had been dealing with rapid atmospheric transitions, far greater than the one I was pondering, for the last eight years. He didn't seem to worry about it in the slightest. And yet when he spoke of Rio, which was all he really spoke of that night, I heard a craving in his voice.

“When the sun goes down there,” he said, “everyone along the beach stops what they're doing and claps. Every night.” He shook his head
and smiled, seeing it. I'd never known Rob to be much of a romantic, but there it was in his eyes: pure romance, not with a person but with a place. A poetry professor had once defined romance to me as “bringing two people together when every force in the universe is working to keep them apart.” As Rob's still-vague plan to make it there for Carnival next spring coalesced, he seemed to feel like a part of that construction. At night before he went to bed, as he'd once done legal research on his father's behalf, he now practiced Portuguese for an hour.

We had a few drinks and talked like this, ground-level information, as was our way. Then I met up with the playwright and her friends, aspiring artists all, who talked of nothing but Big Ideas and how they would capture their essences in prose and achieve greatness that way—or at least staff writing positions on cable TV shows. In comparison to the time I'd just spent with Rob, the rest of the night was painful in its pretension.

After graduation, like many of our classmates, I'd gone home for two weeks to do nothing except be genially back-patted for my Yale diploma. Unlike many, I had no job lined up and no plans for graduate school. I'd made attempts with various organizations and charter schools to become an English teacher in New York City, mostly in Harlem and Brooklyn, but the veteran administrators had taken one look and known immediately that the urban kids would steamroll me. I stayed at my uncle's house in Summit, New Jersey, a base camp of sorts while I commuted into the city for job interviews, looking for something that would allow time to write books. Though I'd been to East Orange just weeks earlier for that cookout, I had no idea that the ritzy town in which I was crashing was less than a ten-minute drive from Rob's neighborhood; the New Jersey Transit line took me through Newark Penn Station each morning, but the proximity still didn't occur to me. Ultimately, I found a job writing a grant proposal for a broad “Life School” scheme conceived by a successful corporate event producer in the city. My brother made the connection for me, as family members were often able to do in the arena of Ivy League alumni.

Friends and teammates had already begun their finance jobs and were working upward of one hundred hours per week as data analysts. Others were beginning academic fellowships both here and abroad, or gearing up for law and medical schools. For those of us in New York, the city had a playground feeling of being unbound; an excitement fixed itself to negotiating dumpy sublets in the East Village, opening up social circles to include new and varied people, going to rock shows on Houston Street, and finding the best dive bars in which to talk giddily about how broke we all were and lament the $5 beers we were drinking. We strived to become “authentic” New Yorkers and, though we were embarking on different journeys, we clung to the idea of shared experience that buoyed us in that familiar off-to-college feeling even after college had passed us on.

Rob, in his way, did the same. For the first time, he owned a cell phone (throughout college, he'd used a beeper and exercised the device well), and he kept in close touch with everyone. Curtis was still at Morehouse on a five-year graduation plan. Tavarus was still working in real estate and had it in his head to try to flip houses, an idea that Rob took to himself, possessing as he did the start-up capital. Flowy was living with LaQuisha, still lifeguarding, landscaping, and helping friends fix their cars. Drew worked in construction. Victor had moved back in with his brother in southern New Jersey, and he'd gotten a job at Home Depot to make ends meet while hoping to eventually land a job with the FAA. Ty was in Cambridge, England, on his fellowship. Danny Nelson was getting an MBA at the University of Chicago. Daniella Pierce remained in New Haven, segueing her volunteer social work into a career. And Oswaldo Gutierrez had come home to Newark, where he was living with his family in a kind of emotional chaos that all but nullified the academic and mental progress he'd made at Yale. While his family expected him to begin contributing financially, his boyhood friends were trying to figure out what to make of him. Like Rob, he felt his psyche being racked by the relentless obligation to be of this world after the last four years had wholly removed him from it. In the meantime,
he was twenty-two years old, unemployed, and in the grip of an internal maelstrom that he felt fundamentally unable to overcome. While looking for work, he helped his father's home repair business, haggling with low-income Newarkers about how much a radiator should cost with the same tricky dynamics that Rob navigated while negotiating the price of weed.

“Come to Rio with me,” Rob told Oswaldo. Almost all of Oswaldo's Yale friends had been advising him to just get out of Newark, get away from his family, disengage and embark on his own life. To Rob alone, the fact that Oswaldo had to remain in his family's orbit was simply a given. Between them, Rob justified his own current living situation with the knowledge that, once he returned from Rio—once he permitted himself that vacation—he would be home for good.

“I can't dip out like that,” Oswaldo replied.

“Just come for a minute.”

“Ticket's over a grand.”

“I'll spot you. It'll get your mind right. We'll just chill.”

“No, Rob. No. Can't.”

“All right, then. You need some money?”

“I do, yeah, but I'm not taking any from you.”

“It's all good,” Rob said, which was what he always said at some point. “How much you need? I'll take care of it.”

“I'll figure it out,” Oswaldo replied. “Always have.”

“You need anything, you just let me know. Cool?”

“Yeah.”

“You'll get through this. You're a scrawny little bitch, but you're hard, too.”

And as Rob spent hours each day checking in on friends like Oswaldo, offering advice on how to achieve their short- and long-term goals, he began on his own short-term goal—which was to launder the $60,000 of cash that still languished in his black trunk.

One can launder money in two primary ways. The first option is to bring it aboveboard with the IRS, hence the business fronts and trans
actional razzle-dazzle that tentpoles the large-scale drug trade. This venture is expensive, not just because of the overhead costs inherent to the process but because ultimately—as is the entire point—the money becomes taxable. The second method is to do nothing, keep the money in cash, and “clean” the bills only by spending them slowly, such that the IRS would never figure out any discrepancy between cash earned and cash expended over the course of a year. Rob had no discernible reason not to opt for the latter. He made a livable income. Now that school expenses were over with, he barely spent any of his savings at all. In the great scheme of things, he hadn't made all that much money selling drugs to begin with, and Rob Peace wasn't exactly a prime target for an audit. And yet, for reasons unknown, Rob felt compelled to clean his money. Maybe he felt that, since he didn't have any employment lined up once the lab stint ended and he returned from Rio, he needed to launder his earnings in advance, while he still had a vehicle to do so. Maybe, because he planned to give much of it to his mother, he wanted to protect her. Maybe, rather than legitimize the money, he wanted to legitimize himself and feel like he was a true player with the capacity to rig the system any way he wanted: he wanted to feel in complete control of the innately uncontrollable business in which he dealt.

He used the lab where he worked, which had both university and grant funding in excess of $4 million per year. Much of the budget went toward the high-tech screening equipment and biological supplies used in their research. Just as much was used for standard lab equipment—beakers, chemicals, sterilization kits, the biochemical equivalents of toilet paper and lightbulbs. Rob began buying these items in his own name and submitting the receipts to the accounting office for cash reimbursement. These figures usually fell in the neighborhood of $500 per week but sometimes ranged up to $2,000, and one to three weeks after submitting the claim he would receive the cash, along with the reimbursement receipt that legitimized it. Because he did this slowly, carefully, over a period of nine months, neither the IRS nor the university accounting office ever took note. When a graduate assistant asked him why he had
paid cash out of pocket, the inquiry came more out of confusion than suspicion: Why put yourself out in the time between expenditure and reimbursement when you could have signed a form charging it to the lab? Rob just shrugged and explained that there had been an account issue with the wholesaler and he'd needed to restock the equipment fast.