Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  Applebaum was trying to make the case that Skaggs had overpowered the vulnerable and confused teenager Devin Davis. Under his questioning, Skaggs acknowledged that he sometimes lied to suspects to extract the truth. And, yes, he sought to manipulate them.

  “You are a very persistent investigator, aren’t you?” Applebaum demanded. Skaggs hesitated. But his confusion quickly passed. A half smile flickered across his face and his features resolved into their usual self-assurance. He returned Applebaum’s gaze with conviction. “Yes!” he said.

  There was no room for false modesty in Skaggs’s world. He was, in truth, a very persistent investigator.

  “WE HAVE TO PRAY FOR PEACE”

  “Salvation, not retaliation!” cried a voice outside the unit in Nickerson Gardens.

  Inside, curled on the beige-specked linoleum floor, lay the body of a young man. He lay half rolled on his side, almost on his stomach, eyes closed, a sleepy, comfortable position like that of a napping child. One of his arms was stretched out straight along the floor. A hand clutched a few bills, tens and fives—a total of forty-five dollars. He had brown hair, grown out a little, and brown skin, and he was neither tall nor short, thin nor fat. Rather, he had that perfect, fully formed middle build, the birthright of healthy young men of his age, which was twenty-nine—that moment in men’s lives when adolescence is fully shed and age not yet visible. A mazy web of faded tattoos covered his naked back. From under his torso seeped a large amount of blood, so much that it had pooled on the linoleum. There was a single sweeping brushstroke through it, perhaps from paramedics, or a last sweep of the young man’s outstretched arm in death.

  The room was empty except for a green Schwinn bicycle on its side, the upholstery torn from the seat, a blue Calypso soda on the countertop, and a shell casing on the floor. It was early in the morning. Somehow, the pallid California light streaming through the half-open door and the steel grates of the window above had washed away the shabbiness of this unit in the Nickerson Gardens public housing project, with its tan walls, peeling paint, and huge institutional fire alarm on the wall. The light had transformed architect Paul Revere Williams’s small apartment unit into a bright and peaceful country cottage, its rays settling softly over the contours of the murdered young man’s smooth skin like a baby’s blanket, the most pitiful sight in the world.

  Nathan Kouri was moving in and out of the room in a dark suit, a black leather notebook clutched to his chest, an intent wrinkle shaped like a little v in his forehead. He was processing the crime scene. The cries of “Salvation!” were coming from a knot of people outside. A woman in Ugg boots was preaching: “We have to pray for peace!”

  Michael Scott had been shot inside unit 88 of the project at 115th and Success Avenue early in the morning of March 13, 2010. His body had been found by the woman he called his wife. The sun was just beginning to burn through the night’s mist as a crowd gathered to watch the police investigate.

  The crowd coalesced into little knots among the geraniums, wafts of marijuana smoke drifting between them, the preacher’s voice rising over murmurs and the thwack of pigeon wings in the wires overhead. Southeast patrol and gang officers were out in force for this emotional crowd with its rows of haunted eyes—stunned-looking eleven-year-old boys with earrings, weeping fifteen-year-old girls with Rococo cell phones.

  Scott’s family sat outside the unit on white plastic chairs, his grieving mother hunched in slippers, a pack of Aquafina water bottles at her feet. Her eyes were closed. Her head tilted skyward, her chest heaving. Off to one side, a man sat on a curb, head in his hands, shaking with sobs.

  A woman appeared at the mother’s side and embraced her: it was Barbara Pritchett. The mother was a dear friend. Barbara remained by her side throughout the morning, stroking her hair, watching the cops.

  Nate Kouri had been scurrying out of sight, pen on his lapel, jacket askew over his gun. He was deep in thought, juggling too many objects at once—yellow plastic placards, notebook, manila envelopes, plastic bags. At last he emerged to talk to Scott’s mother. Pritchett saw him.

  She threw her arms around him—right there, in front of everyone in the projects. She knew people from her neighborhood might look askance at her for embracing a cop. But she didn’t care. “Nathan!” she cried. “You tied to this?”

  Twenty-eight uniformed cops formed a skirmish line so that Scott’s body could be brought out to the waiting coroner’s van. They stayed far back: “friendlies” in the crowd had promised the cops they would keep the crowd from rushing the corpse, a common hazard. A few officers chafed at the liberties being granted to the emotional Nickerson crowd. “They ought to be pushed back to a hundred and fourteenth,” one grumbled, eyeing the knots of teenagers.

  The coroner’s van with its blue lettering pulled up, orange lights flashing. A stretcher rolled out of the unit, bearing the corpse in a blue body bag. Emotion caromed through the crowd at the sight of it. Someone cried out. A few people pressed forward. The friendlies hollered at them. “Stay calm!” As her son’s body passed her, the mother cried out and collapsed. “Oh no, no, no! Mikey, oh Mike!” she gasped. Her head lolled to the side with grief as the officers, watching from afar, drew in their lips, their faces betraying a trace of the anguish unfolding before them.

  Scott had been in a gang. His rap sheet was almost twenty pages long. His murder was related to drug dealing, or some arcane argument within the gang. But there was more to the story, as always. Scott had almost escaped the life. He had fallen in love with a girl. They had fled to Bakersfield, where he got a good job in a glass molding plant and for a while was earning thirty bucks an hour. Then the recession hit. He lost his job. The couple had moved back to Los Angeles. They were just moving into the empty unit when he was killed.

  Scott had a number of friends and relatives who were also in the gang. When Kouri and a detective named Gerry Pantoja sat down with one of them for an interview after the murder, he was frank about what was on his mind: “I hound this stuff myself … I’ll kill that ’un myself,” he told them. The man was almost apologetic about it.

  “Don’t do that,” Kouri counseled quietly. “You all don’t get ’em.”

  Kouri was by now running crime scenes with a sure hand. He had always insisted that he could never be as natural as his mentor, John Skaggs. So he had sought to make up for his supposed deficiencies by working harder than anyone else.

  It turned out that his ability to work hard was its own brand of genius. Through endurance, focus, and sheer earnest effort, Kouri had found in himself his own version of Skaggs’s relentlessness.

  Kouri worried less about not being able to talk to people. He had discovered he could be effective simply by trying to reason with people without affectation, using the manner that came most naturally to him, stumbling over his words if he had to. He was not smooth. But he was sincere and nonadversarial, and people trusted him.

  More important, Kouri’s commitment to the craft had deepened with every case. This was really the key to his success: his emotional response to working homicide. He was open and sensitive enough to take in the misery of the people involved in his cases. He allowed their pain and terror to rework his understanding of the work he did.

  Like Skaggs, like Skaggs’s father before him, Kouri had found nothing was the same after working homicide. He could no longer invest any other type of police work with the same conviction. Homicide investigations had opened his eyes. Before, he hadn’t understood the depths of grief and trauma in Watts—never comprehended the pain set in motion by each murder. In all his years in uniform, “I never saw it. Then you do these interviews. It’s a whole ’nother world,” he said.

  His cases had shifted his allegiances. He had come to sympathize with the same people against whom he had directed the harshest doubts when he wore a blue uniform. Hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, probation violators had become his witnesses, his suffering family members, all united with him against the Monster. “I don’t care
who they are. It impacts them,” he said.

  Kouri no longer shared the views of some of his uniformed colleagues, who parroted the clichés insisting that the people of Watts lacked “values” and didn’t value life. “Until you live it, you can’t fully understand it.”

  Far from his commanders’ assertions that detective work was “reactive,” or that faster response from detectives would not lower crime, Kouri had become quietly convinced that solving ghettoside homicide cases was worth almost any price.

  He believed in his heart that violence comes first—that law is built on the state’s response to violence—and that responding was better than preventing. It was more true to the spirit of the law—and in the long run, more effective. This belief, more than anything else, made an ordinary investigator into a great one. Earlier that year, the Laconia case had finally concluded. It had been more than eighteen months since the murders. After the mistrial came a new trial. All of the witnesses were dragged through the ordeal of testifying again. This time, all four defendants were convicted.

  As usual, by the end, the only people watching in the courtroom were parents. The mother of one defendant ran out just before the verdicts were read—just the sight of the manila envelope in the judge’s hand was too much for her. When the judge said “guilty,” victim Raymond Requeña’s mother dropped her head and covered her eyes.

  But the costs were great. One witness had been a promising high school student. Over the course of two trials, and various threats and relocations, he dropped out. The marijuana dealer ended up living far from the ’hood, where she had no means of support, and was beaten up at least twice. After one incident, Kouri came to see her and found her with a row of blue stitches across her forehead. She was relocated far from her family and her customers, and she continued calling Kouri for help with various personal problems for years after the trial.

  Asked later why she had agreed to cooperate in the case, enduring threats and beatings for the sake of justice in the state courts, she gave a short answer. “I trust Nate,” she said.

  Kouri ended up handing off the Michael Scott case to Pantoja, who solved it, and the killer was convicted.

  Unbeknownst to the detectives, Barbara Pritchett spent hours as the case unfolded arguing and pleading with various friends and acquaintances. They wanted to retaliate. Pritchett begged them not to. They did not believe the police would solve it. Give the cops a chance, Pritchett countered. Over and over, she invoked the name of Nathan Kouri, whom she had hugged at the crime scene. Kouri was one of the good ones, Pritchett assured her friends. There was no need to strike back; they could trust him. She no longer talked of the need for John Skaggs to come back.

  By that spring, in the closing days of the Tennelle case, La Barbera had to finally admit that Kouri was the talented apprentice he had so long hoped to find. He’d been their man all along, the real Li’l Skaggs, the personification of vigor in the face of societal indifference. Kouri was now what Seymour Applebaum had accused John Skaggs of being: “a very persistent investigator.” In Skaggs’s world, there was no higher compliment.

  Daylight savings time arrived over the second week of the trial, so working days now ended in sunlit evenings. Perlo and Skaggs both now had the flu that had started with John Colello. It had made the rounds of the courtroom. Perlo joked that his coughing would win sympathy from the jurors.

  It was Jessica’s turn. Stirling had never had the faith in her that Skaggs had. She remained for him ever a prostitute, a street person, and, after all, the driver of a murderer’s car. Midkiff offered the defense so many opportunities to discredit her. Even her repeated relocations might be portrayed in court as prosecutorial favors.

  Stirling also feared the case being hurt should Midkiff grow testy or temperamental under defense questioning. The prosecution’s theory that Starks had directed the murder relied heavily on her account. The cell phone records, the Suburban, and the many independent points of corroboration between Midkiff’s and Davis’s testimony amounted to quite a bit of evidence. But without Midkiff testifying well, the case would be much weaker.

  Stirling had devoted much of the work of preparing for this trial to Jessica—asking her questions, allowing her to read her prior statement. He and Colello had met with her until late the previous night. Still, Stirling remained nervous. Her performance at the preliminary hearing had not reassured him, and this time, he worried, the high-pressure conditions of trial could push her over.

  Skaggs, too, appeared uncharacteristically edgy. Later he would blame it on the discomfort of the flu. But it was also true that much of his work on this case rode on Midkiff’s performance.

  But this Jessica Midkiff was not the same chain-smoking, girlish young woman of two years ago. She was twenty-five now, seeing her daughter regularly, and she was within ten points of passing her GED exam—she had only to boost her math score. Her handsome new boyfriend was kind and decent. He had a job. It was miraculous, given where Jessica had been not so long before.

  But what most impressed Skaggs was not the educational gains, not the sobriety, not the boyfriend, but the fact that Jessica had taken to working out at a gym. She was learning kickboxing. This fit well with Skaggs’s notions of a wholesome life.

  Jessica walked in all in black, long sleeves and high heels, with a gold cross around her neck. The dyed streak in her hair was gone. Her dark locks were pulled into a tight braid down her back. The braid plus her plucked eyebrows made a sharp, pious contrast with her vanilla complexion. On the stand, she heaved a sigh, lifting her shoulders once and dropping them. Then she leaned forward into the mike, her face serious and sad. This time, there were no opportunities for the discomforting sexual energy that had unnerved her at the preliminary hearing; she did not glance at Starks. Stirling began.

  Jessica answered Stirling’s questions one after another. There was no repeat of the dramatics of her earlier appearance, the tears or the temper. Instead, with a serious delivery and a small frown, Jessica plodded through her story, pausing now and then to look at the ceiling, or scooch up her mouth, trying to remember details now dim, admitting it readily when she couldn’t recall them. Slowly, methodically, Stirling elicited all the details that Skaggs had first drawn out at the Seventy-seventh Street station so long ago, on the night when the Tennelle case “broke open.” Matching Stirling’s methodical tone, she related her story, the antithesis of the alternatively weeping and cutesy probationer Skaggs had first met in a jail cell in December 2007. In the back of the courtroom, Olitha Starks listened with her face twisted in skeptical disgust. She had been accompanied this day by a woman who sat next to her and regarded Midkiff with a look of blank hostility. Midkiff did not look back.

  Skaggs gripped his hands together or played with his pen. Once, Jessica tilted her head up to view some point on the map, and her neck tattoo became fully visible to the jury. As the testimony wore on, she looked cold, sinking in her chair and drawing in her shoulders. But she missed no cue.

  She was perhaps just a little too affectedly ladylike (she made an unnecessary show of delicacy when Stirling asked her if she’d been “intimate” with Starks), but apart from that, Stirling could not have asked for a better witness. He sat down and braced himself.

  But neither Applebaum nor Perlo went after Midkiff. They cross-examined her in a perfunctory, careful manner, Perlo trying to build a case that Midkiff also knew the man in the wheelchair’s cousin Bobby Ray Johnson, twenty-six, nicknamed “Gutta,” whom investigators believed had been stabbed to death by one of his own comrades from the Bloccs in 2008. Perlo was planning to try to pin the murder on Johnson later in the trial.

  Applebaum did manage to summon a little of Midkiff’s old combativeness when he asked why she had at first hidden from police. “You didn’t want to get caught?” he asked. “No,” Midkiff snapped. “Who would?” But the cross-examination Stirling dreaded never materialized. Good defense attorneys know that if a witness is telling the truth, it can only hurt
their case to attack. Midkiff stepped down without having lost an ounce of self-possession. As she passed the bench where Tennelle sat on her way out of the courtroom, he whispered to her, “Thank you.”

  On what was supposed to be the last day of testimony, an earthquake hit. People across the region were awakened at 4:30 A.M. by a 4.4 temblor under Pico Rivera.

  John Skaggs, of course, was already awake. Further rattled was Arielle Walker, who was by then complaining to Skaggs about what she said were cars with tinted windows parking in front of her house since her testimony. She was convinced she was being threatened. Skaggs was not so sure.

  Half of the jury, it seemed, was coughing and sneezing. The lineup offered no relief: a coroner’s investigator and Rubin, the weapons analyst. Numbing talk of “muzzle climb” and “lead cores.” The state patrol officer who arrested Starks in the Suburban testified. Then came the “gang expert,” Sheriff’s Detective Daniel Leon of the Lennox station, a crew cut and a chin in a light beige suit clutching an attaché case by the handle.

  Leon spoke with confidence of the gangs’ undying hatred of each other and the brazenness of their face tattoos as if he were describing some exotic tribe. They lived for “putting in work,” he said. Leon’s testimony was supposed to back up the gang enhancement charges in the prosecution’s case. But when Stirling showed Leon graffiti of a down-pointing arrow—perhaps the most universal bit of gang shorthand in L.A., it means “this is our turf”—Leon could not tell him what it meant. Skaggs, watching, looked pained. Later, again, Leon failed to recognize graffiti containing the initials “S.C.” Stirling had to tell him the obvious: “South Central.”