David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog

by Malcolm Gladwell

  Why did the patrol stop? Why didn’t they just keep going? Lingering in the neighborhood is exactly what the priest told them not to do. The priest went back to the soldiers and pleaded with them again. If they stopped the tear gas, he said, he would get the crowd to stop throwing stones. The soldiers didn’t listen. Their instructions were to get tough and be seen to get tough with thugs and gunmen. The priest turned back toward the crowd. As he did, the soldiers fired off another round of tear gas. The canisters fell at the feet of the priest, and he staggered across the street, leaning on a windowsill as he gasped for air. In a neighborhood so devout that four hundred people would show up for mass on a typical weekday, the British Army gassed the priest.

  That was when the riot started. Freeland called in reinforcements. To subdue a community of eight thousand people—packed into tiny houses along narrow streets—the British brought in three thousand troops. And not just any troops. To a fiercely Catholic neighborhood, Freeland bought in soldiers from the Royal Scots—one of the most obviously and self-consciously Protestant regiments in the entire army. Army helicopters circled overhead, ordering the residents by megaphone to stay inside their homes. Roadblocks were placed at every exit. A curfew was declared, and a systematic house-by-house search began. Twenty- and twenty-one-year-old soldiers, still smarting from the indignity of being pelted with stones and petrol bombs, forced their way into home after home, punching holes in walls and ceilings, ransacking bedrooms. Listen to one of those British soldiers, looking back on what happened that night:

  A guy still in his pajamas came out cursing, wielding a lamp, and whacked Stan across the head. Stan dodged the next one and decked the bloke with his rifle butt. I knew full well that a lot of the lads were taking this opportunity to vent their anger over things already done. Heads were being cracked and houses trashed from top to bottom. Everything in the houses became a mass of rubble, but, out of the blur, little sharp details still cut through: school photos; smiley family pictures (cracked); trinkets and crucifixes (snapped); kids crying; crunching on the glass of the Pope’s picture; unfinished meals and bad wallpaper; coloured toys and TV noise and radio crackle; painted plates; shoes; a body in the hall, flattened against the wall.…This is when I did feel like we’d invaded.

  Three hundred and thirty-seven people were arrested that night. Sixty were injured. Charles O’Neill, a disabled air force veteran, was run over and killed by a British armored car. As his body lay on the ground, one of the soldiers poked a bystander with a baton and said, “Move on, you Irish bastard—there are not enough of you dead.” A man named Thomas Burns was shot by a soldier on the Falls Road at eight p.m. as he stood with a friend who was boarding up the windows of his store. When his sister came to pick up his body, she was told he had no business being on the street at that time. At eleven p.m., an elderly man named Patrick Elliman, thinking the worst was over, went out in his bedroom slippers and shirtsleeves for a pre-bedtime stroll. He died in a burst of army gunfire. One of the neighborhood accounts of the curfew says of Elliman’s death:

  That very night British troops actually entered and quartered themselves in the shot man’s home, the distraught sister having been moved to the other brother’s up the street. This tasteless intrusion into the abandoned home was discovered the next afternoon during the interval in the “curfew” when the brother, with his daughter and son-in-law, went down to the house and found the door broken down, a window broken, kit lying on the floor, shaving tackle on the settee, and used cups in the scullery. Neighbors informed them that the soldiers had dossed down in the upstairs rooms as well.

  A door broken down. A window broken. Dirty dishes left in the sink. Leites and Wolf believed that all that counts are rules and rational principles. But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do—or don’t do—to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.

  By Sunday morning, the situation inside the Lower Falls was growing desperate. The Lower Falls was not a wealthy neighborhood. Many of the adults were unemployed or, if they were not, relied on piecework. The streets were crowded, and the homes were narrow—cheaply built nineteenth-century terraced redbrick row houses, with one room to a floor, and bathrooms in the backyard. Very few houses had a refrigerator. They were dark and damp. People bought bread daily because it grew moldy otherwise. But the curfew was now thirty-six hours old—and there was no bread left. The Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast are packed so tightly together, and linked by so many ties of marriage and blood, that word spread quickly from one to the next about the plight of the Lower Falls. Harriet Carson walked through Ballymurphy, banging together the lids of pots. Next came a woman named Máire Drumm.8 She had a bullhorn. She marched through the streets, shouting to the women: “Come out! Fill your prams with bread and milk! The children haven’t gotten any food.”

  The women started to gather in groups of two and four and ten and twenty, until they numbered in the thousands. “Some people still had their rollers in their hair, and their scarves over their head,” Lawlor remembered. “We linked arms and sang, ‘We shall overcome. We shall overcome someday.’

  “We got down to the bottom of the hill,” she went on. “The atmosphere was electric. The Brits were standing with their helmets and their guns—all ready. Their batons were out. We turned and went down the Grosvenor Road, singing and shouting. I think the Brits were in awe. They couldn’t believe that these women with prams were coming down to take them on. I remember seeing one Brit standing there scratching his head, going, ‘What do we do with all these women? Do we go into riot situation here?’ Then we turned onto Slate Street, where the school was—my school. And the Brits were there. They come flying out [of the school], and there was hand-to-hand fighting. We got the hair pulled out of us. The Brits just grabbed us, threw us up against the walls. Oh, aye. They beat us, like. And if you fell, you had to get up very quickly, because you didn’t want to get trampled. They came out with brutality. I remember standing up on top of a car and having a look at what was going on in the front. Then I saw a man with shaving cream on his face, and putting his braces on—and all of a sudden the soldiers stopped beating us.”

  The man putting his braces on was the commanding officer of the Slate Street checkpoint. He might have been the only voice of sanity on the British side that day, the only one who understood the full dimensions of the catastrophe unfolding. A heavily armed group of soldiers was beating up a group of pram-pushing women, coming to feed the children of the Lower Falls.9 He told his men to stop.

  “You have to understand, the march was still coming down the road, and the people at the back hadn’t a clue what was going on at the front,” Lawlor went on. “They kept coming. Women were crying. People started coming out of their houses—pulling people in because there were so many injured. Once all the people started coming out of their houses, the Brits lost control. Everyone came out on the streets—hundreds and hundreds of people. It was like a domino effect. One street they’d come out, next thing you know, doors are opening on another street, another street, and another street. The Brits gave up. They had their hands up. The women forced—and we forced and we forced—until we got in, and we got in and we broke the curfew. I’ve often thought about it. God, it was like—Everybody was jubilant. It was like—We did it.

  “I remember coming home and suddenly felt very shaky and upset and nervous about the whole episode, do you know? I remember speaking to my father about it afterward. I said, ‘Daddy, your words came true. They turned on us.’ And he said, ‘True. British Army—that’s what they do.’ He was right. They turned on us. And that was the start of it.”

  1 An impressive number of famous people have come from Brownsville over the years: two heavyweight boxing champions (Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe); the composer Aaron Copland; the Three Stooges (played by Moe and Shemp Howard [later replaced by his brother Curly] and L
arry Fine); the television host Larry King—not to mention a long list of professional basketball, football, and baseball stars. The operative words, though, are “come from Brownsville.” Nobody who can help it stays in Brownsville.

  2 Here are the U.S. imprisonment rates by race and education level.

  WHITE MEN 1945–49 1960–64 1975–79

  High school dropouts 4.2 8.0 15.3

  High school only 0.7 2.5 4.1

  Some college 0.7 0.8 1.2

  BLACK MEN 1945–49 1960–64 1975–79

  High school dropouts 14.7 41.6 69.0

  High school only 10.2 12.4 18.0

  Some college 4.9 5.5 7.6

  The key statistics are the ones in boldface. Sixty-nine percent of all black male high school dropouts born between 1975 and 1979 have spent time behind bars. That’s Brownsville in a nutshell.

  3 In Belfast, the Twelfth march wends its way through the city and ends up in the “Field,” a large staging area where the crowd gathers for public speeches. Here is a sample of one speech given in 1995. Keep in mind that this is after the Downing Street Declaration that officially began the peace process in Northern Ireland:

  We have read the history books, from 200 years ago. The Roman Catholics forming into groups known as the Defenders, to get rid of the so called heretic dogs, better known by you and I as Protestant people. Well today is no different from 1795. There is a Pope on the throne, a Polish Pope who was around in the days of Hitler and the concentration camps of Auschwitz when they stood back and watched thousands go out to death without one word of condemnation.

  4 There are many versions of this children’s rhyme, of course. A slightly less offensive version is sung by fans of Manchester United about their archrival Liverpool. (A “scouser,” incidentally, refers to someone from Liverpool or who speaks with the Liverpudlian accent. The Beatles were scousers.)

  Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,

  Put the scousers on the top,

  Put the city in the middle,

  And we’ll burn the fuckin’ lot.

  As you might expect, numerous highly enthusiastic renditions of this rhyme are available on YouTube.

  5 The next day, a Loyalist mob burned the Catholic neighborhood along Bombay Street to the ground. The Loyalists, who are fond of their verse, had a ditty for that attack as well:

  On the 15th of August, we took a little trip

  Up along Bombay Street and burned out all the shit.

  We took a little petrol, and we took a little gun

  And we fought the bloody Fenians till we had them on the run.

  6 As Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams would say years later, the curfew’s result was that “thousands of people…who had never had any time for physical force now accepted it as a practical necessity.”

  7 By the way, things didn’t get much better in 1973. The British cracked down even harder that year, and there were 171 civilians killed, 5,018 shootings, 1,007 explosions, 1,317 armed robberies, and 17.2 tons of explosives seized by the army.

  8 Six years later, Drumm was shot to death in her bed by Protestant extremists while she was being treated at Mater Hospital in Belfast.

  9 One of the many legends of the Lower Falls curfew is that the prams pushed by marchers had two purposes. The first was to bring milk and bread into the Lower Falls. The second was to take guns and explosives out—past the unsuspecting eyes of the British Army.

  Chapter Eight

  Wilma Derksen

  “We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.”

  1.

  One weekend in June of 1992, Mike Reynolds’s daughter came home from college to go to a wedding. She was eighteen, with long honey-blond hair. Her name was Kimber. She was a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. Home was Fresno, several hours to the north, in California’s Central Valley. After the wedding, she stayed on to have dinner with an old friend, Greg Calderon. She was wearing shorts and boots and her father’s red-and-black-checked sports coat.

  Reynolds and Calderon ate at the Daily Planet restaurant, in Fresno’s Tower District. They had coffee and then wandered back to her Isuzu. It was 10:41 p.m. Reynolds opened the passenger door for Calderon, then walked around the car to the driver’s side. As she did, two young men on a stolen Kawasaki motorcycle moved slowly out of a parking lot just down the street. They were wearing helmets with shaded visors. The driver, Joe Davis, had a long list of drug and gun convictions. He had just been paroled from Wasco State Prison after serving time for auto theft. On the back of the motorcycle was Douglas Walker. Walker had been in and out of jail seven times. Both men were crystal-meth addicts. Earlier in the evening, they had attempted a carjacking on Shaw Avenue, Fresno’s main thoroughfare. “I wasn’t really thinking much a nothing, you know,” Walker would say months later when asked about his state of mind that night. “When it happens, it happens, you know. It just happened suddenly. We were just out doing what we do. I mean, that’s all I can tell you.”

  Walker and Davis pulled up alongside the Isuzu, using the weight of the motorcycle to pin Reynolds against her car. Calderon jumped out of the passenger’s seat, running around the back of the car. Walker blocked his way. Davis grabbed at Reynolds’s purse. He pulled out a .357 magnum handgun and placed it against her right ear. She resisted. He fired. Davis and Walker jumped back on the motorcycle and sped through a red light. People came running out of the Daily Planet. Someone tried to stanch the bleeding. Calderon drove back to Reynolds’s parents’ house but couldn’t wake them. He called and got their answering machine. Finally, at two-thirty in the morning, he got through. Mike Reynolds heard his wife cry out, “In the head! She’s been shot in the head!” Kimber died a day later.

  “Father-daughter relationships are kind of a real special thing,” Mike Reynolds said not long ago, looking back on that awful night. He is an older man now. He limps and has lost most of his hair. He sat at a table in his study, in his rambling Mission-style home in Fresno not more than a five-minute drive from the street where his daughter was shot. On the wall behind him was a photograph of Kimber. In the kitchen, next door, was a painting of Kimber with angel’s wings, ascending to heaven. “You may fight with your wife,” he went on, his voice filled with the emotion of the memory. “But your daughter is kind of like the princess—she can do no wrong. And for that matter, her dad is the guy who can fix anything, from a broken tricycle to a broken heart. Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn’t fix. I literally held her hand while she was dying. It’s a very helpless feeling.” At that moment, he made a vow.

  “Everything I’ve done ever since is about a promise I made to Kimber on her deathbed,” Reynolds said. “I can’t save your life. But I’m going to do everything in my power to try and prevent this from happening to anybody else.”

  2.

  When Reynolds came home from the hospital, he got a call from Ray Appleton, the host of a popular Fresno talk-radio show. “The town was going berserk,” Appleton remembers. “At the time, Fresno was number one in the country in per capita murders—or close to it. But this was just so blatant—in front of a million people, in front of a popular restaurant. I got the word late that night that Kimber had died, and I got hold of Mike. I said, ‘Whenever you are ready to come on, let me know.’ And he said, ‘How about today?’ That’s where this whole thing began, fourteen hours after his daughter’s death.”

  Reynolds describes the two hours he spent on the Appleton show as the most difficult of his life. He was in tears. “I’ve never seen devastation like that before,” Appleton remembers. In the beginning, the two took calls from people who knew the Reynolds family, or who just wanted to express their sympathy. But then he and Reynolds began to talk about what the murder said about California’s justice system, and calls started coming in from clear across the state.

  Reynolds went back home and called a meeting. He invited everyone he
thought could make a difference, and they sat in his backyard around a long wooden table next to his outdoor barbecue. “We had three judges, people from the police department, lawyers, the sheriff, people from the district attorney’s office, people from the community, the school system,” he said. “And we were asking, ‘Why is this happening? What’s causing it?’”

  Their conclusion was that in California the penalties associated with breaking the law were too low. Parole was being granted too easily and too quickly. Chronic offenders were being treated no differently than people who were committing crimes for the first time. Douglas Walker, the man on the back of the motorcycle, had his first run-in with the law when he was thirteen years old for trafficking heroin. He had recently been given a temporary release so he could visit his pregnant wife, and he had never returned. Did that make sense?

  The group put together a proposal. At Reynolds’s insistence, it was short and simple, written in laymen’s language. It became known as the Three Strikes Law. Anyone convicted of a second serious or criminal offense in California, it stated, would have to serve double the sentence currently on the books. And anyone convicted of a third offense—and the definition of a third offense included every crime imaginable—would run out of chances entirely and serve a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life.1 There were no exceptions or loopholes.