Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  There was a stunned silence, broken by nervous laughter. Marullo was, after all, speaking to a superior officer, and a friend. “I can’t believe you said that!” someone murmured. Marullo broke off, abashed.

  But La Barbera waved his hands. “No, no!” he said. “You’re right … It’s ruined my life!” It was impossible to tell if he was joking.

  Marullo recovered and plowed on. Why were they struggling for resources when crime was low and the police force had expanded so much? Why? He stood with one hand on his head, eyes troubled. “I don’t get it,” he said at last. “Someone’s missing it here.”

  Chris Barling went up to Marullo afterward. “I’ve been there—don’t get me wrong. I’ve been as frustrated as you because of the constraints,” Barling told him quietly. But “you keep pounding away! You keep fighting!” Barling waved his hands, talking and talking, urging Marullo not to give up.

  Nathan Kouri was sitting nearby. He listened, a hand over his mouth.

  But when Barling finished, Marullo tossed his empty coffee cup into a garbage can with a bang. “I’ve made a well-thought-out decision,” he said, and turned away.

  A short time later, La Barbera came into the office in a particularly morbid mood. “Sammy broke up with me via text!” he announced.

  Marullo had taken a P-3 position in the Southeast gang unit—a uniformed job as a training officer focused on crime suppression. La Barbera, predictably, took Marullo’s defection personally. Marullo “is not a Fire,” he snapped. “He just thinks he’s a Fire.”

  LOST SOULS

  Skaggs hated multitasking. One thing at a time, up against only today—this was yet another of his maxims. But he had no choice but to start a new job while winding down his old one.

  It required months of shifting back and forth between roles. He continued to prepare for the upcoming trial in the Tennelle case while setting up his new office in the soon-to-open Olympic Division. The new station would include parts of Koreatown and a section of the LAPD’s Rampart Division.

  Back in the day, an open-air drug market in MacArthur Park and a kind of sectarian war in exile among Central American immigrants had made Rampart a savagely violent place. Crime was still relatively high when the LAPD secured bond funds to add a new station there. But by the time the station was built, wealthy Koreans, in flight from crashing Asian stock markets in the late 1990s, had snapped up real estate in the area, and developers had built hip new lofts that attracted students and professionals. At the same time, homicides had plummeted among the area’s remaining Spanish-speaking immigrants.

  It was an astonishing change. Among the lessons to be drawn was that poverty does not necessarily engender homicide. Even after gentrification began to take hold, nearly 40 percent of Rampart residents remained below the poverty line. Many of these poor city dwellers were illegal immigrants crammed into shabby brick apartment buildings; the neighborhood was relatively dense by L.A. standards. Yet black residents in South L.A. had vastly higher death rates from homicide.

  Scholars have made similar findings elsewhere. Despite their relative poverty, recent immigrants tend to have lower homicide rates than resident Hispanics and their descendants born in the United States. This is because homicide flares among people who are trapped and economically interdependent, not among people who are highly mobile.

  Immigrants are, essentially, in transit. Those in Rampart in the 2000s had left old ties behind in their native lands. They were deracinated. Their new neighborhoods were not like the underground, isolated, highly networked, communal enclaves of South L.A. Instead, they were stopovers. Their inhabitants would soon decamp from MacArthur Park to Whittier or La Puente. Hispanics had a further advantage over blacks: despite their high poverty rate, they had long enjoyed better private-sector opportunities than black Angelenos. Los Angeles employers had shown an “unabashed preference” for Hispanic labor over black for generations, historian Josh Sides showed. The supply of Mexican labor was one of L.A.’s first selling points, used by boosters to lure manufacturers. In the twenties, many employers who relied on Mexican immigrants refused to hire blacks. Organized labor in the 1930s bypassed black workers and directed its campaigns at Hispanics. During World War II, blacks, unlike Hispanics, were excluded from employment in the shipyards and docks, or relegated to inferior jobs. It wasn’t that Hispanic workers didn’t suffer discrimination—they did. But often they were treated badly in jobs that black people couldn’t get in the first place. A preference for Hispanic labor in the food and metal industries had become entrenched by the 1960s. Later, black men, unlike Hispanic men, lost out in the great Southern California aerospace boom. Barred by racism early on, they were later marooned by geography as the industry moved to suburbs where whites and Hispanics could more easily buy homes. Black people couldn’t buy homes or rent in many of the new defense and aerospace hot spots, first because of restrictive real estate covenants, then because of de facto efforts to continue these covenants in defiance of court rulings. Blacks became trapped in a sunny version of Detroit, living among shuttered tire and auto plants as the rest of Southern California enjoyed a second manufacturing boom. Although public employment remained a bright spot, by the 2000s, black people in L.A. had lower labor-market participation than their Hispanic counterparts, who as a group were less educated, and they still lived largely separate from whites, crowded into their own private Rust Belts.

  This fit a national pattern. Blacks lived in figurative walled cities; Hispanics did not. Black people had long been vastly more segregated from white people than Hispanics, and were more concentrated. In fact, black people had remained more crowded together and isolated much longer than any other racial or ethnic group in America. “Black segregation was permanent, across generations,” said the sociologist Douglas Massey. No one else had it as bad—not even residents of the Little Italys or Polish or Jewish immigrants to eastern cities of the nineteenth century. Black people couldn’t outrun segregation if they tried. It followed them, reinforced by invisible dynamics, like real estate steering. In the year 2000, decades after the courts struck down restrictive covenants, black people in Los Angeles were no more likely to have white neighbors than they had been in 1970.

  Segregation concentrated the effects of impunity. This helped explain why relatively modest differences in homicide clearance rates by race produced such disparate outcomes. Indices of residential segregation are strong homicide predictors. Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules. The intimacy part was also why homicide was so stubbornly intraracial. You had to be involved with people to want to kill them. You had to share space in a small, isolated world.

  By contrast, America’s lonely, atomized upper-middle-class white suburbs were not homicidal. Their highly mobile occupants were not much involved with each other. They didn’t depend on one another to survive. The occasional condominium board meeting might get ugly, but mostly there was enough law in such places—enough expectation of a legal response to violence—to keep the occasional neighbor dispute from getting out of hand. And if there wasn’t—for example, if a young man grew tired of his brawling high school chums—moving somewhere else was easy enough.

  In Skaggs’s time, Rampart, despite its poverty, had a murder rate equal to the citywide average—and similar divisions in the suburban San Fernando Valley. The new Olympic Division would not resemble any place Skaggs had worked in years. Nonetheless, he was preparing eagerly for the new station’s opening, spending most of his time in the new offices, which were still under construction.

  His old colleagues in South Bureau derided him as a “traffic cop.” They called his new division “Mission or Midwilshire or whatever that station is”—a swipe at the area’s low crime rates. Then they accused him of taking custodial supplies with him, including power strips and cans of Dust Destroyer. These were coveted items in homicide, where the most basic office products were rationed. Under interrogation by Barling, Skaggs
broke. He copped to stealing the Dust Destroyer.

  Finally, Skaggs made a last visit back for the South Bureau Christmas party—enduring jeers of “West Bureau!” when he walked in—and said goodbye.

  By that time, he was ready for the new station to open. He had a large whiteboard installed in his new office to list cases, just like La Barbera’s. He had it stenciled so it wouldn’t look messy. At the top, he wrote the old Southeast mantra “Always Be Closing” in red letters. He bought a top-notch coffeemaker and apple-spice Febreze air freshener.

  He laid claim to a closet the size of a room and had new shelving installed. Skaggs knew that for all the slowdown in crime, he was sitting on top of a vast dark stain of unsolved homicides from the Big Years in Rampart—back when the bodies floated in MacArthur Park lake. He planned to improve on the Lost Souls Trailer. He dug up the unsolved cases himself. There were 453 of them going back to 1966.

  Before the lights and floors were installed, John Skaggs had already gone through scores of the old books, and by the time the new station opened, he had assessed and sorted every blue binder. They stood in rows in his new closet, marked with labels that said SUPERHOT, SEMIHOT, and so on, all the way to SUPERCOLD.

  The work was interesting. The homicides were different from those he knew. There had been, for example, a spurt of killings of gay men in the 1980s, never solved. Some of the victims in those cases had lived secret promiscuous lives. Others were transvestites. This aspect of murder was familiar to Skaggs. Like homeless people, female prostitutes, and criminal-class black men, these victims were vulnerable because they were marginal: the Monster feasts on the despised. Skaggs was determined to secure belated justice for these victims.

  There were also gang killings among Hispanics. Overburdened detectives in the Big Years had barely investigated some of them. Skaggs found one case where police took three hours to respond to a shots-fired call. They came at last to find a body and no clues.

  But Skaggs was struck most of all by how many cases had strong leads. This was very different from Southeast. In many instances, he saw, Rampart detectives had received “righteous calls” from witnesses, people coming forward to report what they had seen. Even though many of the neighborhood’s residents had entered the country illegally, they appeared more apt to cooperate with police than people in Watts. In all his years in Southeast, Skaggs had never once taken a clue over the phone. He was amazed.

  In between, he worked on the Tennelle case. There were jail tapes to listen to, witnesses to track. Skaggs brought his old Southwest partner Corey Farell to the new station to help him with this part of his work.

  Farell had just had a second child. He promised his wife he would be home to help in the evening. She rolled her eyes: “You working for Skaggs?” she asked. “Yeah, right.”

  Skaggs alone dealt with Jessica. He felt she would be safe so long as she stayed where she was. But she would call him, then disappear. Skaggs would be left desperately trying to reach her, stuffing down his worries. “Probably has some dumb-ass boyfriend,” he would tell himself, dialing again and again.

  If she was gone long enough, he would lose a day’s work to check on her. Usually she reappeared soon, claiming illness or some problem with her cell phone, then would tell him her rent was late and she was out of money. Or that she hadn’t eaten and had no food. Skaggs, who had two teenagers already, felt that he had acquired a new daughter, a “nightmare child.”

  Yadira Tennelle made regular visits to Holy Cross Cemetery to replace the flowers on her son’s crypt in the cemetery’s mausoleum where Bryant’s cremated remains were inurned. She yearned for Bryant’s physical presence. The mausoleum seemed to bring him closer, yet the visits were always, in the end, achingly unsatisfying.

  Still, Yadira would aim her car every Friday after work toward that sunny hilltop, its crest revealing the expanse of the city stretching south and toward the bay. Wearing her turquoise hospital pinafore, white tights, and white sneakers, a basket of red carnations and yellow roses on her arm, she would make her way quickly across the parking lot, sharp white globes of sunlight reflected in the parked cars all around her and sea breezes rattling mini-palms in landscaped beds.

  Ignoring the view, she would vanish into the velvety shadows of the big multistory mausoleum. Yadira had a ritual: She bought flowers at the hospital, unwrapped them at the mausoleum, then used a long staff to mount them on Bryant’s high-placed crypt.

  Yadira couldn’t stop the habit of cherishing Bryant, of thinking about him constantly in the way a mother does, planning for his future, noticing activities he might like, opportunities that might be good for him, jobs that might suit him. DeeDee was the same way. Going to work at LAX, she would notice the various municipal employees around her—the facilities crews caught her eye—and she would think of the possibilities for Bryant. The crews of men worked outdoors all day in active, hands-on jobs with decent pay and benefits—a good possibility for Bryant, she thought. It didn’t matter that he was gone: such were the folds of maternal concern that had swathed him through life; they could not be loosened. Yadira Tennelle had to force her mind to conform to this new, hard reality, to accept that Bryant’s life had been lived, that he was now “a sentence with a period,” as she put it.

  It was a fact, just a fact. But it was astonishing how painful a fact could be. For Yadira, contending with this enormous, bobbing balloon of agony pushing its way into every instant of her life required exhausting effort. When it first happened, she had not cried much. The hurt was too great for crying—tears belonged to a realm of earthly physics, but the murder of her son had transcended the coordinates of her world.

  Only later, when the fact took shape as a dimension of her daily life, did it penetrate her flesh like an illness. Then she cried, and felt it in her whole body; it affected her physical health in bearable but bothersome ways. Being “strong” was a principle important to both Wally and Yadira Tennelle, but Yadira sometimes felt under assault. Bitterness was a temptation that pressed close around her; she had to keep herself ever alert. “Why be mad? Let him rest in peace,” she would tell herself. But then another voice would object: He did not suffer. She did. The dead rested. The ones who stayed behind did all the suffering … But no. Yadira sometimes had to stop her own thoughts. She would not be negative.

  She turned to her ritual. In the shade of the big, open mausoleum, the fall sunshine streaming through, she trimmed the carnations and roses with the cutters they provided, jammed their plastic bag back in her basket, and padded across the cement floor, up and around, to where a plaque stood high on a wall with Bryant’s photo. “In Memory of Our Beloved Son, ‘Brownie Boy,’ 1988–2007.”

  Yadira raised her eyes to it, leaned on the staff, and wept.

  “Motherfuckers!”

  Nathan Kouri was soldiering on without Marullo. His new partner was Tom Eiman, the former proprietor of a door and window installation service who had joined the LAPD as a second career.

  Eiman had become an effective undercover narcotics officer. He was the perfect Everyman—stout and middle-aged, with wire-rimmed glasses and a watchful bearing.

  It had been left to Kouri to shepherd to trial the Laconia double homicide, which Marullo had abandoned midstream. So, with Eiman in tow, Kouri had pulled over this woman, one of several reluctant witnesses, as she was leaving for work. He had reached through her car’s open window and laid a subpoena on her passenger seat. Now, she was screaming. “Motherfuckers! You are harassin’ me!” A crowd gathered.

  It had been like this with nearly every witness on the case. Two people involved were so afraid they would be attacked for cooperating with police they started carrying guns. One of them, a juvenile, had been caught with the gun and now faced weapons charges. A third witness had run into an ex-girlfriend of one of the defendants: the woman had “jumped on her” and beaten her up for snitching. A fourth witness, also a teenager, rolled himself into a ball at the preliminary hearing in Compton Courthous
e and refused to enter the courtroom. He had to be carried to the stand by two police officers, crying, his legs thrashing.

  Next, Daniel Johnson’s grieving mother was threatened by members of the defendant’s gang in the corridor outside the courtroom. It was “in her best interest not to testify,” they said. Finally, the boyfriend of another witness was threatened in the courtroom itself by an older man. The man used the graphic sexual language of gang intimidation: “I’m a real motherfuckin’ Crip with HIV and I fuck a nigger in the ass,” he said. When Eiman leaped out of his seat to confront him, the “real motherfuckin’ Crip” revealed that he was a gang intervention worker paid a salary from public funds. Then he dialed the cell phone number of an LAPD commander and complained that Eiman was harassing him.

  Now this woman was accusing Kouri of misconduct for serving her with a subpoena. She appealed to the crowd: “I don’t have anything to do with nothin’!” she shouted.

  “Unfortunately, you do,” Kouri retorted. They handcuffed her and bundled her into their sedan.

  “Can we talk about this?” Kouri pleaded.

  Before deciding on police work, Kouri had attended nursing school, and even now his manner on the job was like that of a stern but warm-hearted nurse. He met hostility with disappointment, resistance with dismay. He administered a subpoena like a painful injection, briskly and sympathetically.

  At length, he succeeded in calming the woman. They let her go, Kouri saluting her as if there had been no quarrel: “Take care!”

  Marullo, meanwhile, was at the Southeast station, back in the Southeast gang-enforcement unit. He arrived for his first watch that fall, grinning. He tugged at his uncomfortably tight blue uniform, observing that it had mysteriously shrunk; a colleague rolled her eyes. His fellow gang detectives—muscles bulging under the short sleeves of their Class C’s—mixed protein powder with bottled water as a sergeant discussed the night’s tasks. Mostly, gang officers were supposed to drive around and make “obs” arrests—catch guys with drugs or guns. Or, as Marullo put it later, taking the wheel of his black-and-white, “that big ol’ gangsuppression line you hear that no one knows the definition of.” At Ninety-eighth and Main, his headlights swept the legs of a group of Main Streeters. He stopped. “Where you been?” one asked. One of the man’s companions answered for Marullo. “He a homicide detective! He turned back over!” They eyed him, frowning. “Why you come back, man?”