Meanwhile, rumors began circulating around Cleveland Avenue about Javaris’s involvement in the murder. Soon his Twitter feed was filled with threats and subtweets and he dashed back to L.A. Detectives, meanwhile, found the black SUV rental car and began tearing it apart, peeling every inch for evidence of fingerprints and gun residue.
When Javaris arrived in L.A., he seemed upbeat. He saw the movie The Help, ate at the trendy Berri’s Café on Third, worked out, and tweeted how happy he was to be back in L.A. He didn’t tell anyone about the police investigation, but he could hear the footsteps. He messaged a friend playing overseas and asked if he could send an immediate transfer of money. It never came. By Friday, a week after the shooting, his name was all over the radio and TV. Police had found gun residue on the backseat of the rental SUV and issued an arrest warrant for Javaris and Scooter.
Javaris’s supporters in Atlanta came out in huge numbers. At his bond hearing, his lawyer brought a petition signed by 1,000 people asking the judge to grant bond and several character witnesses, including his college coach Paul Hewitt, his middle school teacher, and his ex-girlfriend Mia. All testified to how exceptional he was.
There were also missing pieces of evidence. No gun was found, and no witness could identify Scooter, the supposed driver. It was only Javaris, the alleged triggerman, who would have been firing at the witnesses, and who was already well known in Atlanta and to the residents of Cleveland Avenue.
Javaris was granted bond for an astonishingly low figure of $230,000, almost unprecedented for a murder case in Georgia. He walked out of Fulton County Jail less than a month after being arrested.
He headed to L.A. hopeful that the charges against him were falling apart, but his destruction was already coded into the spiral.
He became involved in a custody battle over a newborn son and needed money for a family lawyer. Through connections in Atlanta, according to a source there, he was put in touch with a man who, through two high-level suppliers, was shipping massive amounts of drugs around the country. This man set up Javaris as a runner, and linked him up with an accomplice who ran a car shipping business. Javaris, who was flying back and forth from Atlanta to L.A. and Washington, would have his car shipped full of weed; then when he landed, he would pick up the car and hand its contents to the proper distributors. Unbeknownst to Javaris, federal agents had been tapping the man’s phone for months.
On Wednesday, January 15, 2014, at 6:00 a.m., DEA agents, federal marshals, and local police descended on Javaris Crittenton’s home in Fayetteville. Guns were raised, and there was loud banging at his door to wake him up. The boy who once had the world at his feet was then handcuffed, paraded outside, and led to a waiting police cruiser.
Epilogue
Draw a line roughly equidistant from Cleveland Avenue to Adamsville to Fulton County Jail and you’ll find once promising lives strewn across the Atlanta landscape.
It’s February, and I’m sitting in June’s living room. Her niece’s presence is everywhere, framed pictures of Pee-Pie above the TV and across the house. June recently had open-heart surgery and a jagged scar runs down her chest. Her face lights up when she recalls her niece dancing to her favorite song, or the outpouring of emotion from the neighborhood when she was killed—around 400 people attended her funeral. Soon Julian’s oldest son, now 10, pokes his head around the corner.
“What do you remember about your momma?” June asks him. His features are strikingly similar to the pictures of his mom—a long face, with a large glowing smile. He looks over at me, holds his gaze a few seconds. We lock eyes, then he darts back into his room.
At Fulton County Jail, Javaris talks to his visitors through closed-circuit TV. His mom, Sonya Dixon, comes by often, and many continue to defend him. They point to the lack of direct evidence, but mostly they hold on to the memory of the kid they once loved. Javaris counts the days until the murder trial, currently scheduled for September, where he’ll be prosecuted by an old familiar face who once watched him win a Georgia state title—the Fulton County district attorney, Paul Howard, Dwight’s uncle.
Across town, PJ and I finish our desserts at Red Lobster and get into my car and drive back toward his home in Adamsville. He excitedly points out where the old rec center once stood, the place where he first met Javaris and poured his soul into teaching basketball. The nostalgia seems to change him.
He looks out of the window, and lets the pain fill the chasm between what could have been and what is.
“I’m more hurt than anyone can imagine and feel,” PJ says. He no longer coaches basketball, the seemingly never-ending bout with cancer has sapped his energy. He’s trying to recover and clings on to hope that Javaris will be exonerated.
“The only thing I can do is believe in him,” he says.
We pull through a gate and I stop in front of his place. He opens his door, then turns back to me and shakes my hand. “You know,” he says, “sometimes I just wish he could go to sleep and it was all just a dream.”
KATIE BAKER
Those Kansas City Blues: A Family History
FROM THE DAILY BEAST
THE ROYALS HAVE made it to the World Series. Those true blue underdogs, the down-on-their-luck little guys of the American League, have made it—after what I’m told is one of the longest postseason droughts in all of baseball history, 29 years on the sidelines—to the championship. And two games in, they’re holding steady.
Kansas City natives will say that the Royals are a team that could only have come from their Midwestern mecca, their riverine cattle town, where the stockyards and the packing houses down in the West Bottoms used to move three million cows a year and where the American Royal livestock show and rodeo has taken place every autumn since 1899. My mother used to watch the animals marching down the parade route alongside the Future Farmers of America, all those cornflower boys in bright blue jackets. Kansas City natives will also say that there was a time when the greatest steak joints were located down in the West Bottoms—like the Golden Ox, where a century-old set of steel horns still hangs above the grill and where you can order 12 different cuts of Grade-A beef—and that the stockyards never quite recovered from the great flood of ’51, when the swollen waters of the Missouri crested its banks and eddied over the tops of the slaughterhouses.
Of course, the Royals (and here I mean the baseball team, not the cowhands) came late to the history of Kansas City. Before them, the A’s were the hometown heroes, playing in the old Municipal Stadium down near 18th and Vine. My grandfather used to dress up smartly in a suit and tie and take my dad to watch talents like Roger Maris and Hector Lopez, who were both quickly traded to the Yankees. After Charlie Finley bought the team, he brought all sorts of entertainment to town—including the Beatles, who performed on a stage set up behind second base during their tour of ’64.
My father had no great loyalty to the A’s, though he adored the Royals and the Chiefs, whom he watched every Sunday. After we moved to the Pacific Northwest, he adopted the Seahawks—and so 2014 was shaping up to be a banner year indeed, long before the Royals had aced their wild-card game. My dad needed a heart operation in the spring, but he wouldn’t risk it before the Super Bowl. When the ’Hawks won big, he danced around the house for days.
This sheer ebullience—his expansive elation that his team had finally triumphed, that the odds turned out in his favor, that his number came up lucky—it was something I would cling to when, two months later, he had the surgery and did not survive it.
And now his Royals are in the World Series. And millions of baseball fans are watching the television cameras pan over the wide boulevards and the Spanish-style Plaza, over the curving fountains and the railroad tracks, and thinking about what a pretty city Kansas City must be. I want to tell you a story about those wide boulevards and those fountains, about the Plaza and the Paseo and about the railroad tracks and what they once led to. I want to tell you how Kansas City sits at the center of my family’s history and of our national psyc
hogeography, the nexus where north meets south in uneasy conflagration, where the east expands onto the grassy vistas of the western prairie, where vices are indulged and industries built. It is the omphalos, this city that straddles two steamboat rivers at the continental crossroads. There, pioneers embarked on their perilous journeys. There, militias fought in feverish abolitionist wars. It’s the place where my parents grew up and where they fell in love. The place where jazz and barbecue and mob bosses and the blues flourished. The place where our past bleeds into the present, where you can and can’t go home again—and where the muddy Missouri flows ever onward, winding slowly toward its distant manifest destiny.
When we talk about Kansas City, what we’re talking about is a certain state of mind, a bricolage of bootstrap can-do-ism and ingrained suspicion of the more lawful authorities. The town’s character is a product of the kind of attitude reflected in favorite Missouri phrases like “The buck stops here” (from native son Harry Truman) and the “Show Me State,” in outposts with names like Independence and Liberty and Agency. It is also a product of generations of vagabonds looking to hide out from the Pinkertons or the Feds, hucksters and scoundrels who could vanish out onto the open plains or into the city’s smoky underbelly. To put it another way: the same city that nurtured all-American sweethearts like Ginger Rogers and Walt Disney also spawned Jesse James, Big Boss Pendergast, and the Mafioso “Willie the Rat.”
The first pioneer to reach the riparian tributary where Kansas City now shimmers was, in fact, on the lam himself. An illegal fur trader by the name of Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont, he was fleeing French authorities after deserting his military post at Fort Detroit. Monsieur le Sieur slunk into the fertile lands of the Sioux and settled down with his Native American wife (he also had a bride back in France) to swap pelts with mountain men, trappers, and local tribes. Later, back in the graces of the French crown, he was appointed commander of the Missouri and built Fort Orleans in 1723. From there, he led groups of Kansa and Osage to scout for Spanish garrisons. After securing the region in the name of the House of Bourbon, he took a few favorite chiefs back to Paris, where they hunted with Louis XV and palled around Versailles. Whether the warriors enjoyed their time in Europe, it is not said, although one version of the story has it that when they returned—without Bourgmont, who had tired of the New World—they slaughtered all the soldiers who remained at his fort.
A century later, Lewis and Clark rowed up the Missouri on the first leg of their journey to find the Northwest Passage and reach the Pacific. Within a few decades, hundreds of thousands of pioneers and gold seekers were flooding into Kansas City—they called themselves, romantically and perhaps fatalistically, “Argonauts”—to stock up on staples at the Pike’s Peak Express Company, which ran the fabled Pony Express. Three trails led out of Independence, just east of town—the California, which trekked up and over the treacherous Sierras; the Oregon, which tracked across the buffalo-rich plains to the Rockies and the thundering Columbia; and the Santa Fe, which wound through Comanche country on its way south to Mexico. For every few wagons that left, another one straggled back—during one Gold Rush bust, the Kansas Historical Society notes, “the roads were strewn with culinary utensils . . . and oxen, teams and wagons were sold for a song.”
My great-grandmother’s grandparents would have passed through Kansas City en route to farm in Iowa, probably taking the Oregon Trail up the river to Omaha, then turning east along the Platte tributary. By the time my great-grandmother, Katie, was born, railroads raced across the land where wagon ruts still cut deep into the dry earth. It was an era when social reformers like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth toured through the territories and Arabella Mansfield was sworn in as America’s first female lawyer at Mount Pleasant. Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West circus vamped off an idea of the plains that was already fast disappearing. Katie’s family still traveled by covered wagon in the last decade before rail became king, roaming around Nebraska and the Dakotas as her father homesteaded outside of Deadwood and worked on the Burlington line. He never laid the tracks beyond Wyoming; one night, crossing a railroad trestle, he suffered a mortal fall into the Cheyenne River.
With younger siblings to feed, Katie—14, industrious, impossibly shy—was sent to work at a hotel owned by the Lamb family, a clan of backwoods warriors who had migrated down from the dark northern forests around Prairie du Chien and Bad Ax. The patriarch, Josiah, had fought with the 42nd Wisconsin Infantry, marching all the way to Kentucky to battle the Confederates. After the war’s end, he took advantage of the boosterism campaigns to resettle in Nebraska. His youngest son, Orange Scott, was a rough-and-tumble trickster and a terrible tease. When he left to join the Spanish-American War, Katie kept a picture of him on a locket around her neck. After two years in the Philippines, he returned and they married, moving “back east” to Iowa, and then to Kansas City. There, Orange Scott ran the interurban, a turn-of-the-century electric trolley line that connected the boomtown with its exurbs. The cars had plush green upholstery and stained-glass windows and were faster and cheaper than a horse-and-buggy. “It could run 80 miles an hour,” remembered one passenger long after the interurban had vanished. “You could hear the wires sing as it went down the road. They just sang you a song.”
That song would soon morph from the jaunty clip of the light rail to the siren sounds of jazz. Under the protection of political boss Tom Pendergast, who ensured that Prohibition never infiltrated Kansas City, the ’20s and ’30s saw the town christened “The New Storyville,” after New Orleans’s scandalous red-light district. Down in the clubs around 18th and Vine, players like Charlie Parker and Count Basie developed a hard, bluesy style and jam sessions at the Hi Hat, the Hey Hey, and the Chocolate Bar went on late into the night. When police raided the joints (which rarely happened, since the federal prosecutor was in Pendergast’s pocket), “the Boss man would have his bondsmen down at the police station before we got there,” recalled Big Joe Turner, who worked at the time as a “singing barman” at fixtures like the Kingfish Club at The Sunset. “We’d walk in, sign our names, and walk right out. Then we would cabaret until morning.”
Thanks to the jazz scene, the city fostered a thriving African American culture. “Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all,” the blues musician Jesse Stone once remarked. “Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that’s the place where jobs were plentiful.” Out at Municipal Stadium, the Kansas City Monarchs showcased Jackie Robinson and the great pitcher Satchel Paige; around the same time, Langston Hughes—raised in Joplin and Lawrence while his mother worked in Kansas City—wrote his first and most famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” while studying at Columbia in New York. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” He was talking about the golden Mississippi, but he could have easily been describing the Missouri, flowing thickly through the aorta of his childhood home.
This image of Kansas City—the jazz, the booze joints, the levantine nightlife—is the one that Hollywood so loves, as do those of us drawn to noirish decadence and a concupiscent sort of decay. Gatsby and his West Eggers may have been tailored to New York’s Roaring Twenties excess, but Kansas City could hold its own when it came to crime and sin. Pendergast’s political machine ran all sorts of corrupt sidelines—it was no coincidence that the city’s newest buildings were constructed with Pendergast Readi-Mix Concrete—and sewed up elections with bought votes. (Pendergast’s early patronage of Harry Truman would almost cost the Democrat the presidency.) Gangsters with ties to City Hall, like “Pretty Boy” Floyd and Eddie Richetti, littered the streets with bodies, casualties of their underworld wars. When Eddie and Floyd decided to bust the bank robber Frank Nash out of FBI custody, they ended up killing him and four unarmed agents in the 1933 Union Station massacre. Their
handler for that gig, “Brother John” Lazia, ran the city’s biggest gambling resorts, as well as illicit nightclubs, loan-shark operations, and bail bond companies. By 1934, he’d made enough enemies that someone decided to mow him down in the street with a sawed-off shotgun. His last words, or so they say, were woefully self-indulgent: “Why me, Johnny Lazia, who has been the friend of everybody?”
Yes, Kansas City was a city of chancers whose luck could turn on a dime—and this is where my father’s side of the family comes in. My grandfather, Horace, arrived in town in the early ’30s along with a passel of siblings searching for work (and apparently dodging a few warrants). The kids were descendants of Southerners who had fought in the Seminole Wars and founded Baptist parishes high on the Alabama plateau, where they quaked for Jehovah and prayed fervently for deliverance from the North. The family had grown up dirt-poor, sharecropping the 20,000 acres of cotton that stretched out below Sand Mountain. Horace was athletic and clever, known, probably apocryphally, as the fastest cotton picker in Clay County. He won a ticket to college on a basketball scholarship but had to drop out to support his siblings. At some point, the brothers decided to head up to Kansas City and found jobs at Armco, still known locally as Sheffield Steel. At its peak, the mill employed more than 4,500 workers as it churned out ironworks for FDR’s war effort.
At the steel mill, Horace operated the overhead cranes and fell for one of the bookkeepers, the daughter of a small-town sheriff turned Kansas City cop. Margaret was straight-laced and churchgoing but her background was a bit wilder—her ancestors had lived way out on the prairie, in the same remote region where Jesse James fled after robbing the Kansas City fairgrounds and where Bleeding Kansas’s border wars resulted in grisly trading post massacres. Her grandfather had been a physician and healer who—according to family lore—married a descendant of the Osage or Pawnee tribes. This may have accounted for Margaret’s dark eyes and her raven hair, or perhaps her features were from the Sephardic ancestors whose names we have lost but who show up in our DNA. In any case, she was a looker and Horace—with his blue eyes and his sweet-talking ways—won her over.
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