Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  Beyond this, white people saw to it that solidarity among black people was kept to a minimum. They enlisted blacks as spies, favored “their Negroes” over other black people, and used them as pawns in their battles with each other. For people of all colors, the South was a stew of factors that produce homicide—a place where law remained a contested prize in a low-level, unfinished revolution. But black people experienced law, both its action and inaction, as a systematic extension of the campaign of terrorist violence that had brought an end to Reconstruction and stripped them of their rights under the Constitution. For years after the Civil War, a taint of sectarian rivalry tinged black–police interactions. Nashville blacks declared they would not “submit to … arrest by any damned rebel police!” Black people fought police in street battles, and—just as in the Seventy-seventh a century later—they wrested friends from police hands. Later, as segregated enclaves formed in Southern cities—Nashville’s “Black Bottom,” Atlanta’s “Darktown”—police avoided them. Officers “did not go through the areas where most Negro homicides occur, but rather stayed on the main thoroughfares.” Black communities became, “at least to some extent, self-policing,” a historian summed up.

  This set up the great clash of the late twentieth century. A flood of black migrants, schooled by the lawless South, swept into cities such as Los Angeles. They brought with them their high homicide rates and their tendency for legal self-help. The police they met were not unlike those back home. LAPD officers shot and killed many people and were free with their fists. “I worked with one who took his gun belt off and said, ‘You wanna fight?’ ” said Bernard Parks, the former chief, recalling his patrol days in the 1960s. But L.A. cops were different in important ways: there were more of them and they were a lot more intrusive. New professional standards meant deploying officers by mathematical formula based on frequency of crime. Since there was more crime in black neighborhoods, they got proportionally more police. In 1961, for example, the LAPD spent four times as much per capita in Newton Division as it did in West L.A. Southern black migrants had been used to police who ignored them. But these cops were ever-present, hounding them with aggravating “preventive” tactics.

  The results were explosive. Watts burned, and so did Newark, Detroit, and other cities in the 1960s. From this turbulent brew the nation imbibed a deep skepticism toward bureaucratic justice that echoes to the present day. Black protest against overzealous police and prosecutors remains a cherished template for left-leaning critics of criminal justice. But another, profound grievance of the period went mostly ignored—the inadequacy of official response to black-on-black violence.

  Instead of confronting the mounting death toll in the cities, the justice system took a permissive turn. It practiced victim-discounting on a mass scale just as black homicides surged. Prison terms per unit of crime in the U.S. hit rock bottom in the 1960s and 1970s, making this country one of the world’s most lenient. Courts acquitted. Parole terms were generous. In the midseventies, only a third of California’s convicted homicide perpetrators remained in prison after seven years, and the rough streets of South Bureau teemed with murderers newly released. Reformers focused on the rights of defendants, seemingly blind to the ravages of underenforcement.

  The pendulum swung. Change in the 1980s was quick and ruthless. Get-tough policies became political winners. Prison populations soared. Change included longer prison terms for violence. But their impact was blurred by unreasonably harsh sentences for lots of lesser crimes. Cops began filing charges for “every Mickey Mouse thing,” recalled defense attorney Seymour Applebaum. “And it’s always a felony. Everything’s a felony now.” By 2007, parole violators returned to custody on technical violations made up the largest single category of new prison arrivals. But through it all, the basic weakness didn’t change. In fact, homicide solve rates dropped.

  Since it’s not the harshness of punishment but its swiftness and certainty that deters crime, black people still had good reason to feel unprotected. Murderers still went free, while the new crime-suppression tactics bore more than a passing resemblance to the old Southern wink. Even after legal discrimination was abolished, the situation didn’t change much from what black migrants had known in the South. Homicide wasn’t just a bad habit black people couldn’t break. Segregation, economic isolation, and the flawed workings of American criminal justice created the same conditions anew.

  For white people, justice was almost as ineffective; homicide solve rates for all Americans still lag behind those of the safest European nations. But what might appear a tolerable level of incompetence to a relatively safe, dispersed, white majority felt different to black migrants from the embattled South. White people were more likely to have jobs, money, mobility—assets that compensate for criminal-justice failures by giving people other means to achieve independence and autonomy from each other. Not so the black people who fled to industrial centers in the twentieth century. For generations, black Southerners had experienced the weakness of criminal justice as a central feature of a system that kept them down. To them, the state’s tendency to allow people to kill and face no consequences was an aspect of its enmity toward them. Blacks were like an occupied people. Especially in poor urban centers, they lived in minority enclaves and settled their scores outside the law.

  By the late twentieth century, the criminal justice system was no longer very corrupt. Many police and prosecutors were sincere and professional, and legal outcomes were relatively color-blind. But because the reach of the system was so limited, the results were similar to those produced by masquerade justice. Even when criminal justice procedures were clean and fair, violent-crime investigations remained too ineffective and threadbare to counter the scale of black-on-black murder. Black people still had reason to doubt that the law would have their backs, and they reacted accordingly. This is the world that Skaggs lived in, although he didn’t put it into this historic context. What Skaggs saw was simply this: the system looked busy, but didn’t do its job.

  It took just a few weeks for things to come to a head between Skaggs and Bernal. Bernal went out of town briefly and Skaggs got what he considered “a bullshit clue”—some report of a black SUV matching the description of the killers’. He did not touch base with Bernal about it. Instead, he simply marched up to the owner’s house, knocked on the door, and immediately ascertained that the SUV belonged to Hispanics, not blacks, thus eliminating the clue. Upon his return, Bernal was annoyed. In Bernal’s memory, Skaggs had duplicated something that had already been done and communicated poorly about it. In Skaggs’s account, Bernal didn’t want him pursuing leads alone and objected to his methods.

  In any case, they had words.

  Skaggs did not waste time arguing with Bernal. He made no effort to try to work things out with him. He was, as ever, blunt and unequivocal. He told Bernal he was walking into Prideaux’s office to say the partnership could not work and to demand a change. Bernal tried to defuse the situation and hold him back, but Skaggs was not to be dissuaded. In this, as in everything, Skaggs sought to propel events to their conclusion as quickly as possible.

  And so Lyle Prideaux found himself faced with the decision he had tried at first to avoid. There were Skaggs and Bernal, sitting before him in his office, obviously at a crisis point. Skaggs demanded that he be given the case to work free and clear or be taken off it.

  Inwardly, Prideaux sighed. He was disappointed in the two of them for putting their personality problems before the case like that. But then again, he reflected, he had not brought Skaggs into this case because he was “some quiet little guy who was going to keep things under wraps.” He had sought out Skaggs to burn down forests, and he could only blame himself that now here he was, squarely in the midst of a full-on Santa Ana blaze.

  He told Bernal and Skaggs both to leave his office, then pondered his next move.

  Prideaux didn’t have to think long. In his mind, the Tennelle case was the number one priority of his new command. It
was important for the future of the reconstituted homicide bureau, for the department’s reputation in South L.A., and for the principle of the thing.

  And it was important because of how Prideaux felt about it, deep down. Prideaux was like everyone else in the department who knew Tennelle: he could barely talk about the case without his eyes filling with tears. This was, Prideaux realized, a moment to earn his rank and pay.

  So, in the next minute, he changed the course of the Tennelle case. He walked out of his office and told Skaggs he could have it.

  Bernal was stunned. The decision was highly unusual, and a completely crushing condemnation of his work. Most of all, he was stung by the implicit suggestion that he had not given the Tennelle case his all.

  Bernal was not the indifferent worker that Skaggs took him to be. After all, he had also worked the Big Years in South Central Los Angeles. He had also devoted his career to ghettoside work and felt a strong sense of duty about the neglected crimes there. He knew Tennelle a little, and he felt as they all did about Bryant’s murder—namely, that it was unbearable, and that the case was a must-solve.

  And on top of all this, Bernal had a personal stake in the case that went beyond his loyalty to Tennelle as a coworker. Unbeknownst to most of his colleagues, Bernal’s nephew had been murdered in East L.A. over in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s territory a year and a half before Bryant’s killing, and the case was never solved.

  Christian Bernal was nineteen. He had been planning a career in law enforcement and had applied to join the Sheriff’s Department. Like a lot of young would-be cops, he had a shaved head. Bernal’s son was in the parked car with him when attackers came up on foot. It was like the Tennelle case. The cousins were not gang members. They were just young Hispanic men who the assailants assumed were gang rivals because of how they looked. The revolver blasts showered them both in broken glass.

  Bernal was at home when his phone rang, and he picked it up to hear his son screaming hysterically—“They shot him, they shot him, they shot him.” Bernal’s sister, Christian’s mother, was devastated. At the time of Bryant’s death, the whole Bernal family was still reeling: Armando Bernal, like Wally Tennelle, had only experienced homicide as a police officer up until then. Now he knew how different it felt to have one’s own family ravaged by the Monster.

  Rick Gordon thought highly of both Skaggs and Bernal and believed both men had contributed to the case in unique ways. Gordon would point out later that various investigative styles were needed to meet the demands of the South L.A. homicide environment. Cases differed, and not every investigator’s style fitted every case. Bernal’s approach might not have been the best fit for the Tennelle case, Gordon said, but there had been many other cases in which his combination of patience and meticulousness paid off.

  Chris Barling had a similar take, despite being Skaggs’s greatest fan. Bernal was a tenacious investigator who “absorbs before he acts,” he said, but it just so happened that Skaggs was “the right detective at the right time.”

  And it was not fair to suggest the case had languished in Bernal’s hands. In fact, huge inroads had been made. By the time Prideaux officially handed it off to Skaggs, the main eyewitnesses, the gun, the description of the car, and the most important street rumors had already been cataloged, giving Skaggs plenty to pursue. Skaggs did not inherit a hopeless case, but a stalled one. And there was no question that Bernal cared deeply about it and had applied to it the comprehension that was rooted in grief over his murdered nephew, just as Wally Tennelle was then channeling his own grief into his RHD cases.

  Finally, to Bernal’s great credit under the circumstances, he handled the fiasco with some grace in the end, swallowing his anger, going back to work under the very lieutenant who had yanked this most important of cases out of his grip, and pouring himself into his other duties with set-jawed professionalism.

  Skaggs, meanwhile, went to work.

  EVERYBODY KNOW

  To some of his detractors in the bureau, John Skaggs already had the partner he needed. There were sarcastic murmurs behind his back about the new detective team made up of “Skaggs and His Ego.”

  But Prideaux made Skaggs choose a flesh-and-blood second on the case. Skaggs would have liked Barling, but that was no longer realistic, since Barling was now a D-3. So Skaggs tapped his recent young partner from his tour in Southwest, Corey Farell.

  True to form, he also did whatever was needed to get out and talk to people as much as possible. So one day, when Farell was tied up doing something else, he looked around the office to see who else was on hand. As the clear lead on the case, he could finally move as he wished, and he was in no mood to be held up by anything.

  It happened that Rick Gordon was nearby. And so, on October 1, five months after Bryant’s death, Skaggs—in need of a temporary partner—asked Gordon to accompany him. And that’s how the two men—arguably the two finest ghettoside detectives in the city at that time—set out on a very particular mission.

  The man Coughlin had caught with the revolver was a member of South Central’s battalion of black men whose lower halves were crumpled in wheelchairs, propped on crutches, or crammed into leg braces. One saw these victims with regularity driving around South Central—young male gunshot victims, jarring collisions of health and debility, young faces and wasted limbs. Asked what happened, they gave the same answer this man later gave in court. One word: “Shot.”

  He looked younger than his twenty-eight years. He had a small mouth and a slim, narrow nose that widened at the base, skin very dark and smooth. A neat thread of beard framed his chin. His clothes were bright and pressed—even the pants that lay in a loose fold across his thighs. He was efficient in his wheelchair, propelling himself with athleticism. If a wheelchair could saunter that’s what his did. He had not been quick enough to outrun Francis Coughlin. But Coughlin was faster than a lot of guys on foot.

  The man had a quiet dignity despite his mask of gloom and wariness. He didn’t seem deranged by trauma, as some gang members do past twenty-five. His manner of speaking was quiet and reasonable. He talked about getting out and said he wanted to go to school. It seemed he meant it. A number of Southeast officers knew him personally. “A gangster,” they called him, but were quick to add, “he’s not a bad guy.” Some even said they liked him. The man in the wheelchair was a type—a normal guy somehow caught in the pathos of gang life.

  He had been shot while walking home from a night game at his high school a dozen years before. A car rolled up and he heard someone yell “East Coast,” then heard the shots. He’d been hit seven times but felt only the last three. He was surprised later to learn of the others. Knocked flat, he lay on the ground as a burning sensation rose through his body. That was all. Just a burn. The doctor came into his room at King-Drew Medical Center the next morning, after surgery. His spine was fractured. He would never walk again. He was seventeen.

  After Francis Coughlin caught the man with the gun, Bernal immediately went and “hit” him: he visited him in custody and asked him where he got the gun. The man said he bought the gun from a “smoker”—a crack addict. The man appeared forthcoming. He gave details of the homeless man.

  Still it was not helpful. A homeless guy would probably not have gang ties and so would be harder to track. Bernal returned with Rick Gordon. The man stuck to his story. After Skaggs was assigned to the case, he and Bernal returned together a third time. Same story.

  When John Skaggs came to interview the man in the wheelchair at Twin Towers Jail on October 1, it was his fourth visit from investigators.

  To Skaggs, it was obvious the man in the wheelchair was lying—obvious that he must be reinterviewed, again and again if necessary. He was to Skaggs simply a point of exertion: a rusty lever that would give once the right persistence was applied. The sort of persistence that was his specialty. Why was Skaggs so sure? Skaggs couldn’t say. The man’s dishonesty was so plain to him that it needed no explaining. This was part of the altered
perspective of the craftsman: Skaggs saw lies the way a good contractor would notice a beam out of true.

  Gordon and Skaggs sat with him in a small interview room in Twin Towers.

  The man in the wheelchair already knew Gordon, so Skaggs let Gordon do the talking, observing the old Southeast rule of only one lead. Gordon began the conversation with a tone of familiarity, as if picking up a thread dropped moments before. Like Skaggs, Gordon conducted interrogations like business meetings. His style was subdued and apologetic, as if he were sorry for the trouble he brought.

  The man in the wheelchair elaborated on his story of the crack addict who sold the gun once again. “That guy has a white beard. He is skinny. He is forty.” When Gordon pressed for details of his hair, the man paused as if straining to be accurate: “More gray. Low haircut,” he told Gordon.

  Gordon turned up the pressure without changing his tone. By this time, the man had certainly guessed that he had been caught with a very, very dirty gun indeed. You don’t get four visits from homicide detectives for just any gang killing.

  Gordon suggested the man might be fingered for a serious crime. “I don’t want to see a guy like you going to some shitty-ass pen,” Gordon said. “You and me both!” the man rejoined quickly.

  Gordon’s voice remained gentle. But he bore down. “We want your cooperation, one hundred percent, and I feel like we have it, but …”