Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  The man was silent. “What are you thinking?” Gordon asked. Silence. Gordon dropped his voice, called him by his first name. “Just like I told you before, you can erase everything you told us,” he said. “If it’s not the truth, I’d rather not be spinning my wheels.”

  Homicide detectives lie to suspects routinely and legally. But Gordon had an even more cunning tactic. He began telling the man the truth. His tone was as unadorned as if he were speaking to a colleague. “You don’t even know how busy we are,” he told him. “I got more murders I’m working than you can imagine. If it’s not the truth, I’d rather follow real stuff. I’m not gonna be pissed off at you if all this was made up. I’m just looking for the truth.”

  Gordon said precisely what he really thought. He did have a lot of cases, and he really didn’t want to waste time.

  Skaggs was quiet. At last, the man insisted again that he bought the gun from “a smoker-type transient.” He added the detail that the two had discussed swapping a stereo.

  The detectives were getting nowhere. Gordon was dogged but not harsh. He kept asking the same question five different ways. Finally, seemingly defeated, he veered away into inconsequential chatter.

  The detectives were preparing to leave. They asked after the man’s family. They asked about his children. The man told them he had a new “little baby.” His tone grew relaxed. “I’m not the jail type,” he offered. “I just want to get out of here, start back my life, go back to school.” The detectives were sympathetic. The conversation flowed. At last, Gordon and Skaggs made movements to go. Gordon tossed out one last question.

  “Anything else?” Gordon asked. “Is there a way you can help us?” Gordon was trying to give the man an opening to drop a hint. Hints were common in such interviews. People who were afraid to testify would try to help detectives indirectly. Sometimes they would leave them anonymous messages, scrawled notes crammed under the windshield wipers of police sedans.

  But the man in the wheelchair didn’t hint. He threw open a curtain—suddenly, blindingly. His tone changed. He had sounded nonchalant. Now he was somber.

  “Well, I’m just gonna go ahead and tell you officers,” he said. “Actually, I got the gun from this dude.”

  The detectives froze, waiting. Then the man produced the key Skaggs knew he had had all along. “They call him No Brains,” he said.

  Gordon and Skaggs emerged with the case transformed. The man in the wheelchair had not bought the gun from a smoker. He had paid fifty dollars to a mysterious gang member with hazel eyes and curly hair called “No Brains” one day on the campus of Southwest College.

  He said No Brains belonged to a gang called the One Hundred and Eleven Blocc Crips, a subset of the Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips. For a moment, both detectives were baffled. Despite all their years in South Bureau, neither Gordon nor Skaggs recognized the name of this gang. Gangs were so hyperlocal that the Rollin’ Hundreds, located a few minutes’ drive from the Seventy-seventh over in the sheriff’s territory, might as well have been from a different country. No Brains had a teardrop under his eye, the man said, and the letter B tattooed on his arm.

  No Brains hung out with a girl, the man said. A girl. Both detectives were doubly alert. Who was she? A homeless type? they asked. No, the man said: “She ain’t that type. No drugs or gang.”

  A good girl? they asked. “Yeah,” the man said.

  When it was over, Gordon asked him why he hadn’t leveled with them before. He gave the answer Gordon had heard a hundred times: “I got family out there … I don’t want someone to blow my head off—my mama and kids shot.”

  They said they’d keep his name out of it. They lied.

  In Skaggs’s mind, an idea was taking shape.

  A witness interviewed at the murder scene the night of Bryant’s death had mentioned a rumor that a gang called Rollin’-something was involved in the crime. The word “Rollin’ ” was used in several gang names in L.A., including the Rollin’ Sixties located to the north. But now the detail came back to Skaggs. He paired it with a flash of memory: new graffiti Skaggs had spotted shortly after Bryant was killed. He and Nathan Kouri had seen it while driving near the crime scene—the word “Bloccs” scrawled on a wall.

  Skaggs was looking for an alternative to the Rollin’ Sixties theory, which he felt had monopolized too much investigative effort and borne no fruit. Now here were two clues pointing to the Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips.

  This was typical of how Skaggs went about his work. His capacious memory was engaged from the first minute on a case, filing away every detail—a stray comment, a graffiti tag scratched on a window. Such random impressions might seem meaningless to someone else. But Skaggs knew that down the line, a pattern would form. It was another reason he preferred fieldwork and put so much emphasis on face-to-face contact. Going back to the crime scene, revisiting homes of bereaved families, chatting up people he met on the street, might have seemed a waste of time to another detective. But to Skaggs, every moment in the field was an opportunity to load his memory with more grains of information. He knew that eventually one grain in the great sand pile would prove the diamond. Sometimes he would go back to the scene, park his sedan, and just wait, windows rolled down. He would call out to anyone who passed, “How you doin’?” and then chat.

  Now he remembered that in one of the many reinterviews of witnesses on the cases, someone had mentioned a fight in the neighborhood not long after the murder. Chris Wilson and a brother of his, a gang member who had refused to speak to the police, had reputedly seen two strange teenagers on their street and thought they recognized Bryant’s killers. Tellingly, they didn’t call the police. They ran out, confronted them, and challenged them to fight—street justice for the killing of a police officer’s son whom they considered a friend.

  Reports held that one was a Rollin’ Ninety. The brothers got beaten up. The Rollin’ Ninety had pulled the elder’s pants down—sexual humiliation being, like threats and low-level violence, an instrument of message-sending that was relatively common in the gang milieu. Skaggs knew how inaccurate the GIN could be, but this incident could help point toward other facts. In this case, it was clear that some gang members in Bryant’s neighborhood believed that the attack had come from affiliates of the Rollin’ Nineties, and the Nineties were allied with the adjacent Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips.

  Since the talk with the man in the wheelchair, this remembered tidbit suddenly had new significance.

  A warrant database search located by their gang monikers the pair of Nineties gang members the brothers had fought. It turned out that the young street fighter from the Rollin’ Nineties was sixteen. He was on the run with a probation warrant. Gang officers were asked to keep an eye out.

  A week went by. Then Skaggs got a call: the sixteen-year-old probationer who’d beaten Bryant’s neighbors was in custody. He’d been brought in by a gang officer who recognized him at Jesse Owens Park. This youth was the son of a plumber from Hot Springs, Arkansas, who had come to L.A. three decades before during the great migration wave and stayed because it was beautiful. The plumber’s family mostly had done well. One son worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the other for United Parcel Service. But his youngest was different.

  The father had been struggling with his problems for several years at the time of the Tennelle case. Like many black parents in Los Angeles, he felt danger pressing in from all sides. Like Wally Tennelle, he was fearful that a gang might recruit his boy. But the father also viewed law enforcement warily and worried for his son’s safety at the hand of the police. He believed many police officers conducted themselves poorly and had it out for black young men. He had sent his son all the way across the city to attend high school in Beverly Hills. But the son hid a friend’s pellet gun in his locker and got caught, the father said.

  The boy was suspended by the school and put on probation by a juvenile court. Once he entered the criminal justice system, things went downhill. He ended u
p violating his probation and going to juvenile camp. When he came out, he seemed to have taken on a new gang persona. Later, his father turned him in to a probation officer himself. It was an extreme step. But the father hoped that some jail time would straighten him out. Instead, his son came out tougher than ever.

  The son had medium light brown skin, flat cheeks, and an angular chin. He looked a little older than he was and had a lean grace. That Tuesday evening, when Skaggs went to the Seventy-seventh to meet him, he had none of the swagger that might have been expected from a hardened Rollin’ Nineties Crip. His eyes were full of tears.

  Up until that point, Skaggs had thought this young probationer might be his killer. But once he had sized him up, he shifted gears. When he mentioned the intersection where Bryant was shot, the probationer responded readily: Was this about the killing of “the policeman’s son”? Skaggs began by asking him why he was crying. “My pops, man,” he said. He was going to miss his father’s birthday once again—he had been in jail for every one of his father’s birthdays since he was fourteen, and he was desperate to be available for this one.

  Although his speech was laced with ’hood talk—words such as “cherp” and “nigga”—the probationer could turn it off when he wanted. Skaggs asked him to speak up because “my partner’s not the smartest guy around.”

  Skaggs loved teasing Farell with this line in the interview room. He had used it many times, taking advantage of the younger detective’s predicament: Farell had to sit by silently to observe the “one lead” rule.

  The probationer proved a lucid interview subject. He seemed to have a good memory, and he even displayed a little literary flair, offering details that suggested he was a sharp observer. He made it clear he would help them so long as he never had to appear in court: “You say my name not gonna be in nothing. I believe you,” he said.

  “Everybody know.”

  This was the phrase the probationer used several times in the next half hour.

  Everybody, he said—that is, dozens of people in the gang milieu—knew about Bryant’s death. They knew who did it and for what gang. Everybody knew. Everybody was talking.

  It was just as Kelle Baitx suspected—the young probationer’s account suggested that the suspects lived within a few miles of the crime scene, and that they belonged to an underground network that was buzzing with gossip about the case. The case was like many others—more of a public murder than a secret one, a communal event. It was no mystery—except to the police.

  The probationer said he had been back in Hot Springs visiting his grandmother in May when he got a “cherp” from a girl he called “Hollywood.” “A tramp just got chipped,” she told him. The probationer was happy—it meant a gang rival had been shot. “I was like, all right, woo woo woo,” he said. But then one of the probationer’s homeys called, alarmed. “A police officer’s son got chipped somewhere off Normandie and the police is hot around here—shit!” The homey recommended he stay put in Arkansas.

  The probationer got several more calls to the same effect. Everyone was talking about how the “tramp” had turned out to be a police officer’s son and how cops were now scouring the neighborhood. People were scared they’d be swept up in a dragnet and “put up for that shit.”

  When the youth returned from Arkansas in early September, his friends were still abuzz. “Stay away from Bloccs,” they warned. “They chip that nigga—police been over there, like, swarmin’.”

  People were mad about it. “That Baby Man from Bloccs is stupid,” someone said.

  Baby Man. The probationer knew him. “Oh, cuz did it?” the youth had replied. “That’s crazy!” In the days that followed, he heard more and more. “Every day people talking about it!” he told Skaggs. “Everybody know!”

  Ordinarily, gang members welcomed some demonstration of police concern as proof of the seriousness of their attacks. A bit of gang slang expressed this: “puttin’ up tape” was a phrase used a little like “earning stripes.” A member who “put up tape” had executed a successful mission—killing or maiming a rival with gunfire. Because police encircled shooting scenes with yellow tape only if someone had been seriously hurt or killed, tape signaled that the shooters hadn’t missed or chickened out. It was a badge of honor.

  But this was different. With most gang shootings, police intervention often did not go much beyond “putting up tape.” But with an officer’s son dead, police were “superhot.” “Stay away from Bloccs,” people said. “Stay away from Baby Man.”

  Push hard enough and eventually the current sweeps you downstream. Skaggs’s case was moving swiftly now. He had two nicknames: “No Brains” and “Baby Man,” both members of the Blocc Crips. There would be no more time wasted on the Sixties.

  But the case still remained squarely in the arena of street rumors, where many gang cases foundered. “Everybody know” was a phrase that applied to a lot of unsolved murders south of the Ten.

  Skaggs asked the probationer Baby Man’s real name. He couldn’t remember. “His real name is D-something … D … D …” The youth pondered.

  What does he look like? Skaggs asked. “Dark skin. Funny-shaped head,” the youth said. He said Baby Man was about seventeen years old, and he added one of his literary flourishes: “Dry rough hands.”

  The detectives kept pressing. What about his head? “It’s, like, an oval shape, like an egg—a cracked egg!” the probationer said. Farell stifled a laugh, and the youth laughed, too. “When you see his picture, you gonna see what I mean,” he promised.

  There was more. The probationer had run into Baby Man in Jesse Owens Park at a gathering of gang members. “What’s up, man? You shot that nigga? You shot that police officer’s kid?” he had said in front of everyone.

  Baby Man was aghast. People were mad about the trouble the case had caused. Baby Man denied his involvement before the group. After, he pulled the probationer aside, pleading: “Don’ be sayin’ that shit.” He didn’t admit or deny his involvement. He said he didn’t know what to do and was scared. “Man, I’m gonna go to jail!” he had lamented.

  The probationer still couldn’t remember his name, except that it began with D.

  He told the detectives Baby Man was not popular: “He has got something wrong with him,” he said. “He’s stupid.”

  Skaggs started to speak. But the probationer interrupted him. “Devin!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “That’s his name—Devin!”

  Devin Davis, sixteen years old at the time of Bryant’s death, was then serving time in a juvenile camp after having been caught with two guns in less than a month. He was easy enough to identify from police records. He had been arrested more than once and had been entered into the gang database—his picture, his personal information, his gang name of Baby Man as well as three or four other monikers, and his membership in the Blocc Crips.

  Hazel-eyed No Brains was a different story: Skaggs did not have enough detail to figure out who he really was. He had found no one matching his description in any record search. He was still searching when he got a call from a gang deputy at the Sheriff’s Department.

  The deputy’s “friendly” knew exactly who No Brains was. He identified him as an older, light-skinned Blocc Crip with green eyes. He was in jail. But the friendly didn’t know his real name.

  The case now had not just direction, but momentum. Skaggs and Farell were working full tilt. In mid-November, they served a search warrant on Devin Davis’s house. Skaggs met his mother. Sandra James, kind, religious, and proper, was very cooperative. She had other grown children who had done well in life, going to school and working, she told Skaggs. But Devin, her youngest, had ADD. He had thrown her off balance with his many problems.

  In Devin’s bedroom, Skaggs found what he was looking for: scribbles on notepaper celebrating the Blocc Crips and bearing the gang moniker Baby Man.

  And one more find: a little white scrap of paper with a phone number scrawled on it, and a name: No Brains.

  The two Blo
cc Crips were now linked. But No Brains remained elusive. Skaggs by then knew exactly which bed and jail module No Brains was assigned to. But he still could not get an accurate identification of him from the sheriff’s deputies who manned the jail, and they couldn’t seem to find him.

  It took Skaggs two weeks of wrangling with the sheriff’s jail bureaucracy to figure out exactly who and where No Brains was. At one point, he threatened to walk through the module himself—how hard could it be to spot a light-skinned, green-eyed gangster with Blocc Crip tattoos? At last, they came back to Skaggs with a name. The light-skinned inmate was Wright Lawrence.

  The name didn’t match any rap sheet. And the state fingerprint database had listed the inmate as “Lawrence Wright.” Skaggs was exasperated—authorities could not even keep their mistakes straight—but he was not surprised. Given the abundance of nicknames, gang monikers, and fake names used by criminals, the problem of people being imprisoned under the wrong name was not uncommon in his experience. This extended to other records as well—homicide victims were frequently listed under different names in various public databases. Spanish names were a mess: Mexican immigrants typically had one or two first names and two last names—their father’s followed by their mother’s. But arrest forms insisted on English conventions, listing everyone as having a first name, middle name, and last name. As a result, Spanish names were often mangled in the booking process.

  The names of black people who interacted with the system could present authorities with similar problems. Apart from the endless nicknames and aliases, there were many formal names with multiple variations, unconventional apostrophes, and unusual spellings, and these were frequently misstated or misspelled in public records, even death records. Officers relied on fingerprints and other elaborate cross-checking methods to keep track of who was who.

  Skaggs went back to his computer and started over. He looked for records of light-skinned Blocc Crips and rap sheets that matched the inmate known as Wright Lawrence—dates, addresses, arrests—and, by cross-checking several databases, he arrived at the correct name: Derrick Starks.