By jumping into an election political insiders said she had no business winning, Lisa was able to probe the weaknesses of a corrupt and sclerotic system, and test her theory that it could be outsmarted and beaten. It was a thrilling discovery: We weren’t chained forever to a broken system. We weren’t stuck with apparatchiks. Maybe democracy could work in our favor. And the code to victory we cracked on her first try wasn’t even all that complicated. We just had to learn a few key lessons to apply the second time she ran:
Lesson 1: Any dominant political party’s power is mostly perceived and therefore highly vulnerable to insurgent candidates who connect with people.
Lesson 2: Being a supposedly unelectable outsider can be an advantage, if it means your chances are underestimated, your tactics unknown, and you have no old beefs with political insiders.
Lesson 3: Let your book of business be years of helping others with no expectation of anything in return, and you might get something in return. Voters can smell public service for powerless people that’s selfless and real rather than performative.
Lesson 4: Check your nuts and bolts, novice. The local party is called a machine for a reason. It wants you to believe that what it does is complex, opaque, and beyond the ken of a political novice to deconstruct. But it’s not hard to figure out which polling places attract thousands of votes and which polling places attract less than a hundred. It’s not difficult to focus resources on the high-turnout polling places where the characteristics of the voters make traction for a particular candidate possible. There are decent people everywhere, including many of the people within the party structure, who are open to someone new once there is a meeting. And it’s not that hard to match persuasive supporters and persuasive literature to the polling places where they best match the voters.
Lesson 5: Believe voters want to pick and vote for candidates they believe will do a good job. That’s why most of them bother to vote. You or someone they trust just needs to persuade them with a credible message that resonates.
Lesson 6: Be creative and unexpected. The local party has shown its routinized tactics in election after election, but your newness means it hasn’t seen yours and may have no idea of how you can exploit the flaws in its own tactics. Let the dominant party and your opponents figure out your moves too late to adjust. This means keeping your strategies very close and very quiet. It means zagging when they think you’re going to zig.
Lesson 7: If you can avoid it, don’t make it impossible for the dominant party to offer support. Remember: They want to support winners. But don’t trust that support enough to give up your secrets or pull back on your own support.
Lesson 8: Don’t campaign like a politician, for God’s sake. Answer questions directly. Speak your truth. People hate politicians.
Every one of these lessons would guide our campaign for district attorney almost twenty years later, when the weaknesses in the dominant party were even more apparent.
CHAPTER 10
Victims and Survivors
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen
—David Bowie, “Lazarus”
Thirty years of representing criminal defendants taught me how to try a case, and how to see the dirt in the dark corners of a traditional prosecutor’s office. But it didn’t teach me as much about the needs of victims and survivors, who are just as often used as helped by traditional prosecutors. Even though I didn’t spend much time with victims as a defense attorney, I knew something about the needs of victims and survivors before becoming DA. What I knew came from becoming a victim of violent crime in my private life, from things that were first illuminated for me in moving shafts of light.
I was slashed in the face about fifteen years before becoming DA, a couple hundred feet from my old law office, in a little grid of narrow historic streets and alleys in the center of the city, less than ten minutes’ walk from City Hall. I was cut at the end of being assaulted and robbed by two people who had just smoked crack or maybe meth in the alley behind where I worked, on my way to my parked pickup truck to drive home.
It was early afternoon on a sunny Saturday in summery weather. I had just finished meeting with a new client, Matt, a cheerful “train kid”—a modern hobo—whose neck and arms were tatted up. In his early twenties, Matt had joined the train-hopping subculture for adventure. The day I met him, he had been charged with assaulting a police officer and trying to get his dog to do the same.
The incident happened in the lot outside the same church where I would later perform “Clampdown” with Sheer Mag during my campaign. A two-day, all-ages punk festival was going on in the basement music venue. The music promoter had hired a gang of white crew cuts who called themselves Fuck Shit Up (FSU) to be security for the event. After the first night, some of the train kids and others who attended claimed that a member of FSU had raped a woman who was attending the festival. As tension built between festival attendees and FSU, police were mingling with FSU, whose look and demeanor and supposed purpose at the venue were similar to their own.
At one point, an FSU security guard accused an unarmed train kid of carrying a weapon. The train kid was threatened, searched, and humiliated with the help of police, who must have believed there was a weapon. The train kids were increasingly incensed about the disfavored treatment they and other attendees were getting and the free pass on the rape allegations that FSU apparently enjoyed. Arguments and minor scuffling broke out between FSU and some of the attendees. No one was injured until a mountain of a cop—who had seen nothing of what had happened earlier—drove up suddenly in his patrol car and began cracking train kids’ heads with his police baton.
A documentary photographer took more than fifty serendipitous photographs of the incident. She had been following the train kids all day and happened to be on-site when the incident occurred. The photographs indisputably showed that Matt was innocent, which is what a judge ultimately found at trial when Matt was acquitted. I remember Matt and that case for a few reasons, including Matt’s amazingly good fortune that there were photographs of it all. Matt was a strong kid, the son of a bricklayer, and could have done me some good in that alley. But we parted paths two minutes too soon.
As we parted, I was thinking about the ironic duality of Matt’s position in the case. He was a defendant, but he was also a victim of egregious police misconduct during and after his arrest. His girlfriend, a slight train kid, had it worse. She was a victim of life-threatening police brutality. Both were victims of obstruction of justice and false statements to police by a police officer, and at least Matt was a victim of perjury by a police officer. The fifty-plus photographs proved that the massive three-hundred-pound ex-boxer cop had hit Matt’s girlfriend with his baton across the bridge of her nose so hard he knocked her out cold, and permanently changed her profile. An ambulance was called. The photographs showed that police dragged her sprawled-out body and concussed head along the pavement before the ambulance arrived, which had the accidental effect of riding her shirt up to her neck, exposing her breasts while she lay unconscious.
In the midst of this chaos, the photographs showed Matt, understandably concerned, talking to the giant police officer while holding his placid pit bull mix by a leash. The photographs are sequential. The first shots show that Matt is talking, but not yelling. He makes no effort at a punch or a push. He never makes physical contact; there is no struggle. The dog is docile, with four paws touching the pavement, mostly facing away from the police officer and never even barking at or moving toward the officer. The story the police officer told was a lie: He claimed Matt attacked him and sicced the dog on him. The officer probably had nothing against Matt, but he had created his own reason to lie.
The real motivation for the assault charges was to dirty Matt up as a witness against the officer’s extreme brutality against Matt’s girlfriend. The dirty, tattooed train kids—with their asymmetrical hair, frailties, and un
conventional lives—appeared powerless, which makes them exactly the kind of people most likely to be victimized by the kind of cops who like to hurt people who are different from them and lie about it. Many, including Matt’s best eyewitness at trial, are Black and brown. All of them, like all people perceived as powerless, are marginalized.
Matt’s fear and anxiety around his outrageously unjust prosecution abated when he was acquitted. But his girlfriend didn’t fare as well. Her face was changed. She had a permanent depression at the bridge of her nose and who knows what else. No healthcare. She didn’t remember much of the incident and never made it to court to testify in support of Matt—they had split up and grown apart, it appeared. But Matt’s trial and acquittal came over a year later. On that particular sunny Saturday, I had just met Matt and heard his compelling story and learned that his mother lived in New Jersey at 45 Shades of Death Road before we left my office and parted ways. “Why forty-five?” I asked him. He responded: “Forty-five is the house number. The road is Shades of Death.”
It all happened so quickly. I was heading for the little street behind my office, where I’d parked my pickup truck, to drive home and cook a nice weekend dinner for my boys. Lisa was in Georgia for a couple of days, attending an educational course for judges on the history of American law. I walked by two skinny people sitting hunched on the steps of the rear porch of a building fifteen feet from my truck. They were smoking some kind of drug through a straight glass pipe.
I casually told them not to smoke drugs there and kept walking. I was too comfortable. Fifteen-plus years into my career, I had dealt with a few thousand people who suffered from addiction. I was used to being direct with them. I had talked to people on that same porch more than twenty times who were sleeping it off or in withdrawal or jonesing to buy drugs but too broke or panhandling. I would ask where they were staying and suggest where they could get food, a shelter bed, or treatment if they showed any interest. Until that day, there had never been a problem. But until that day I had never spoken to two people who were in the middle of smoking meth or crack or coke or whatever through a glass pipe. It was a mistake.
They didn’t move or say anything after I walked past them. Just as I was getting ready to open the driver’s door and get in, I noticed they hadn’t even reacted. I got irritated and said, “Look, you can’t smoke drugs here. Do you want me to call 911?” while I reached for my bunch of keys to get into the truck. It was another mistake. Immediately one of the two skinny people was off the steps moving quickly, as if to talk, but walked past me, turning me around. From the corner of my eye, I saw the other one still seated but fidgeting with his pants cuff or sock. As I turned to the first one, the second one ran up from behind. They attacked from opposite sides, each becoming more aggressive as I defended against the other.
As I kicked and turned and threw punches, the back of my heel caught on the curb. I tripped and fell backward. The second one swung his arm as I was falling and must have cut me. I never saw or felt the blade. As soon as I hit the ground, they both stopped and stared for a moment. I wondered why they had stopped. The first one looked horrified. The second one’s look was colder. He grabbed my phone off the ground. They both ran.
I got up slowly. I was completely alone on a beautiful, breezy afternoon with shafts of sunlight moving on the pavement. The world was silent except for some birds chirping in the swaying trees. My right hand was bleeding a little and swelling from the fight or maybe the fall. Still, I didn’t feel any pain. As I got up, I reached in my pocket for my phone even though it was gone. I looked down and saw splashes of blood intermittently hitting the asphalt, but the flow wasn’t coming from the torn-up skin on my hand. I remembered that Lisa was out of town and my kids were home by themselves.
I stumbled out of the alley and walked the couple hundred feet back to my law office to find a mirror and a landline. Heavy bunches of blood drops followed me across the black pavement and brick sidewalk, across the hardwood floors of my office, and onto the white tile floor of my office bathroom, where it began to pool around my shoes. I started to panic, thinking that if my neck was somehow cut, I might bleed out before getting help with no one else in the office.
When I looked up and into the bathroom mirror, I saw what looked like a mouth above my left eyebrow. The left side of my face was sagging with gravity, my brow peeling away from my skull. In disbelief, bewildered and shaky, I knelt to keep from passing out and then got back up. I tried to push the cut closed. I was standing in front of the mirror, heart racing, breathing heavily, when I heard the front door open.
Scott, a lawyer who rented space from me, was coming in the building. He had stopped by the office to pick up a file for court on Monday. He spotted me through the open door of the bathroom, quickly turned around, and came back in. Scott calmly directed me to skip calling an ambulance, and to walk with him immediately the couple of blocks to Jefferson Hospital Emergency. I walked with him, my hand clamped over my brow, blood dripping between my fingers and guttering down my forearm to gather at and drip from my elbow. Pedestrians stared or covered their mouths. Homeless people winced and pointed. Some wore the same look of horror I’d seen on the face of the attacker who hadn’t cut me. Even medical staff sat up and quietly looked when I walked into the emergency room.
Inside the ER’s automatic doors, I knew they wouldn’t let me bleed out. I began to calm down. Faces bleed. It might not mean permanent injury. It was just a question of damage. Not knowing how bad the injury was or how long I would be in the hospital, I didn’t want to scare Lisa and have her come home just yet. I didn’t want to scare the boys, then eleven and thirteen, by telling them over the phone what had happened to me. And I knew they would call Lisa immediately if they knew the truth. Maybe I would be stitched up and home soon.
Still, I needed to let my boys know I’d be late. I couldn’t call them myself because I would never be able to hear their voices and stay composed, even if I didn’t tell them everything. My distress would be theirs. They would have no answers yet and no one to comfort them. Scott took charge again. He called my boys and told them something had come up at work. I would be home later, not sure when. It might be awhile. I couldn’t hear them, but I could tell they weren’t saying much. They didn’t know him. I knew this weird, vague news coming from an unknown voice would be strange to them. They would wonder why I wasn’t calling. What about dinner? Was something wrong since I didn’t call them myself, like always?
In the first few hours at the hospital, detectives came to see me, while bits of sand and gravel from the street were being plucked and washed from my wounds. I overheard doctors discussing whether or not I might have lost nerves that control the eye. Given the precision of the cut, doctors figured it came from a razor blade. The detectives asked me what I, a mid-forties man, was doing on a Sunday afternoon in an alley in that part of Center City, which really meant the part commonly known as the gayborhood. I explained that I was a lawyer, that my office was located there, that I had just seen a client before walking from my office to the alley to get in my truck to drive home and feed my kids. And then they had me explain it again.
They asked why my wife wasn’t at the hospital. I explained she was out of town. They looked at each other. They slowly asked who was with my kids. I said the oldest was a teenager, his brother was almost a teen, and they were fine at home. More questions about why I wasn’t in a suit. It’s Saturday; I’m representing a broke client for a low fee, mostly as a favor for people we knew. I saw no need to say more about the facts of Matt’s case to police. Then we got to their questions about my key ring, which was lying next to me on the gurney. It was a carabiner that had a few rings holding a bunch of keys on them for various doors in my office, for my house, and for my truck and car. The carabiner holding keys must have meant something to them. Why the carabiner? they wanted to know. What were the keys for? And so it went. They kept asking why I was “standing on the co
rner” where the assault occurred. They either hadn’t heard what I said or were clearly implying my story was false—that I had nowhere to be or that I was looking for drugs or a hookup or maybe that I was a john who had done battle with a sex worker. Every time they said I was “standing on the corner,” I corrected them, repeating that I had just left my office and walked past the corner, on my way to my truck to drive home. Finally, I reminded them “I never stood there.” They stared at me. Months later, when I saw the police report, it simply said what the detective wrote: that I was “standing on the corner.”
The detectives were professional in demeanor, and their words were mostly polite. Part of their job is to test what witnesses say, as they should when the story is odd. But their bias was clear, the reason they perceived my story as odd. Their overt suspicion about what I told them was rooted in the fact that I was in Philly’s historically gay neighborhood, on the weekend, casually dressed and carrying my keys in a way that they didn’t.
Having grown up broke before becoming a suit, I already knew that if I had gotten cut wearing professional clothing in another part of town on a workday, the detectives would have reacted very differently and doubted nothing I said to them. But, as they asked questions and I answered them, I silently wondered how much worse I would have been treated—by police then and prosecutors and defense attorneys later—if I had been a victim who was Black or brown or gay, or suffering from addiction, or homeless. How would I have been treated if I were a woman who was sexually assaulted or beaten by someone she knew during an era when those crimes somehow were suspect or didn’t matter enough to law enforcement? The list goes on.
For the People Page 17