A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  A heater hissed in the corner, and the windows were speckled with grime, and the courtroom seemed weighted down by something beyond the creep of age. Each gesture—the practiced innocence of the defendants with their heads turned toward the floor, the shrug of a police officer in a chair waiting to testify, the judge taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes, the court-appointed defense attorneys earnestly scrutinizing pictures of the crime scene—had been scripted and played out a thousand times before.

  McGovern refused to succumb to the stupor. He placed his hands gently on the front railing of the jury box as he gave his opening statement, lifting himself up on the balls of his feet for emphasis. He was calm and clear, letting the story he was reciting do most of the emotional work for him. He likened his opening statements to a jury to telling his children a story, but with one major difference: when he told his children a story, he wanted to soothe them and help them go to sleep; when he told these particular listeners this story, he wanted them to go home with nightmares.

  THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN BY THE NAME OF ROBERT JANKE. HE WAS TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD. HE LIVED IN CONNECTICUT. HE GRADUATED FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT IN 1991 AND DECIDED TO COME TO PHILADELPHIA TO GO TO THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MEDICAL SCHOOL TO BE A DOCTOR. HE WASN’T VERY FAMILIAR WITH PHILADELPHIA. HE WAS NEW TO THE TOWN, EAGER ABOUT HIS FUTURE.

  Virtually unheard of for a lawyer, McGovern could boast of having a job that was both professionally and personally satisfying. But it also exacted a price. The intensity of what he saw, the “heart of darkness” as he called it, had made him appreciate the preciousness of life more than ever. As a prosecutor in the city, he knew how ephemeral life could be, how an innocent act, something incidental and random, could result in something tragic. “In a way, you appreciate the beauty of life more,” he said once. “In a terrible way, you are part of a select group of people who have a full understanding of man’s inhumanity to man and the depths of that cruelty.”

  THERE ARE SIX MEN WALKING AROUND CENTER CITY WITH GUNS LOOKING TO ROB PEOPLE. TWO OF THEM ARE IN THIS COURTROOM RIGHT NOW. GIOVANNI REED IN THE BLACK SHIRT AND CARLTON BENNETT IN THE STRIPED SHIRT. THEY’RE LOOKING FOR A VICTIM; THEY ARE LOOKING FOR PREY, SOMEONE, AS THEIR EXPRESSION IS “TO GET PAID.”

  Earlier that fall, McGovern had traveled nearly two hundred miles upstate on a special assignment, to assist the Tioga County prosecutor’s office in a double homicide in which a husband and wife had been killed over a dispute involving payment for marijuana. In the city, the case would have been routine, relegated to a few paragraphs in the newspapers and hardly high profile. But in Tioga County, it was the first murder in nearly a decade. The district attorney was newly elected and scared of losing, and McGovern couldn’t help but feel a little bit like Gary Cooper in High Noon, riding into the little town of Wellsboro to “slam-dunk” one of the defendants accused of the murders. Tioga County is on the New York border and home of the Grand Canyon area of Pennsylvania. McGovern liked the open space, and he was fascinated by the degree to which the ritual of deer hunting influenced the local culture. As he drank in the brilliant foliage and traveled in a leisurely arc from Bellefonte to Wellsboro, he became intrigued by the idea of living in such a region. He wasn’t sure he could do it, but at least he got a taste of what it would be like to live somewhere so different from what he was used to. Whether he intended it or not, he was also forced to confront the emotional toll of his job, the kind of person that he had to be in order to do what he did.

  He approached the murder case in Tioga County the same way he approached a murder case in Philadelphia. His outrage over the crime, his hardened nastiness in regard to the defendant, filled the gentle wings of the courthouse. The Tioga County district attorney watched McGovern in admiration and fascination. When a jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder, he told McGovern that justice had been served, but he thought the defendant pathetic and dim-witted, drawn into the crime by a manipulative codefendant. Although he admired McGovern’s aggressiveness, he wasn’t sure he could replicate it.

  “You’re nasty, and I think your aggressiveness may be important to winning this trial, but you can have it because it takes too much out of you,” the district attorney told him at one point.

  “I was sent here because you need a nasty guy,” McGovern countered, and he pointed to the pictures of the crime scene, in which two people had been left dead. “Look at these pictures. Four people were in here, two people left alive, and two people were in this condition. Anybody who’s capable of leaving a home in this condition is disgusting and evil.”

  The trail of carnage, especially in sleepy Tioga County, was beyond belief—the husband shot dead first, and then his pregnant wife, first in the meat of the arm and then in the head as she was fleeing for her life.

  But when McGovern came back to the cramped quarters of his office on the seventh floor of the district attorney’s office, brown case files piled upon brown case files, white pages of transcripts upon white pages of transcripts, each containing a tale of murder worse than the next, he thought about the conversation he had had in Tioga County, and there were no easy answers. “I know I’m good at what I do,” he said. “You want to be a whole person, but you wonder if you’ve lost pieces of yourself.” He had no innocence about the city anymore—how could he, in a world mediated by murder?—and he couldn’t help but wonder whether he might be different if he left the district attorney’s office and did something else. “Do you regain some of your lost innocence? Do you regain some of the desensitized nerve endings that have been covered over with rhinoceros plating? Do they regenerate?

  “Is it like a guy smoking cigarettes? Once you quit, do your lungs become pink again?”

  He had been at a golf tournament when a member of his foursome brought up a murder case that McGovern was prosecuting. He began to talk about it, and another member asked him to stop. “That was the first person I’ve met in a long time who was not dying to talk about murder,” said McGovern. “Anywhere else I go, it’s ‘Mike, tell me a nightmare.’ ”

  Nearly 80 percent of the defendants he tried were black, and given the absolute zealousness with which he performed his job—each act of violence taken as a personal affront—there were some who wondered whether his gusto was born of something other than professional dedication. “You really like putting young nigger boys in the electric chair, don’t you?” a defense attorney once asked him after a guilty verdict.

  “No,” said McGovern, bristling at the insult, “but I wouldn’t mind putting you in the electric chair.”

  Far from liking it, he couldn’t help but be disturbed by the endless cycle of it. “When you see young black men routinely capable of numbing hostility, you just say to yourself, ‘Why is this?’ ”

  The temptation to be racist was enormous, but he fought it, and he also refused to temper his style because to do so would have been the antithesis of who he was and why he did what he did, and he knew no other way than the full-throttle way—to walk into that courtroom as if it were the penultimate arena in which questions of life and death were settled. “I’m not out to get a notch on my belt,” he said. “If they’re not guilty, I can live with the verdict.” But the converse of that—that a guilty man might go free, might walk out of the arena of that courtroom and go home and pull a beer out of the fridge and a cigarette out of his breast pocket and lay his feet up on the sofa and give a little self-satisfied laugh—gnawed at him.

  He thought about all these issues, and considering the financial constraints he would labor under as long as he worked for the city, he increasingly began to think that he had no choice but to leave. At the $70,000 mark, his salary had gone as high as it was going to go, and with a thirteen-year-old daughter on her way to Catholic high school the following fall at a cost of roughly $6,000, he needed either to make more money or to take out a second mortgage on his house. “Am I leaving for the wrong reasons?” he asked. “Should I stay? I’m really good at what I do. What h
appens if the next case comes to someone who is not as good as me, and he gets mismatched, and the guy walks?”

  But in the arena of Courtroom 653, in the case of Commonwealth v. Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed, there wasn’t the remotest scent of self-doubt.

  YOU ARE GOING TO FIND OUT THAT ROBERT JANKE DIED.

  After Robert Janke’s graduation from the University of Connecticut, where he was on the dean’s list, he entered a postbaccalaureate program at Penn in the summer of 1991 in preparation for medical school. “I simply ask for a chance, and promise that you won’t be disappointed,” he had written in his application for admission. He had been an Eagle Scout, an altar boy, and a newsboy. He had been the chairman of the local drive for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He had worked with the severely retarded at a local hospital. He was one of those kids who seemed too good to be true because he was too good to be true, with a rare sense of duty.

  HE GOES TO HIS APARTMENT, NO WAY OF GETTING IN. HE GOES TO A PAY PHONE. HE GETS ON THE PAY PHONE. HE IS STRANDED AT SEVENTEENTH AND SOUTH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, ON A PAY PHONE AT THE CORNER.

  There were six altogether when they started out from their homes at 4:00 A.M., Dwayne and Carlton and Gee and Tyrone and Richard and Wanny. They had three guns between them, passing them back and forth like a child’s toys so that each would get the thrill of feeling the barrel tucked inside their waistband. Dwayne Bennett, a twenty-year-old unemployed high school dropout, was the one most keen on “getting paid,” street vernacular for robbing someone, or what McGovern described as the urban equivalent of a hunter roaming for deer. They walked up from Fifteenth Street, then over to Sixteenth and Fitzwater, then up to Sixteenth and JFK in the shadow of City Hall.

  They sat for a little bit in the concrete park on JFK, and Tyrone went to use a pay phone to call his girlfriend and let her know what he was up to at 4:30 A.M., in case she was wondering. He told her who he was running with, and she said to him, “You don’t need to be hanging with them, you’re only going to be getting in trouble.” They hung out at the park for a little bit longer, but they didn’t find any deer, so they went over to the Wawa Food Market on Eighteenth and JFK, then down Eighteenth to Market, and then down Eighteenth toward Chestnut.

  Dwayne thought about robbing a cab driver he saw and spoke to him for a little bit and asked him what time it was, but his instincts advised him against it. They walked over to Rittenhouse Square, and Dwayne was walking around the square looking really hard to get paid, but it was right around 5:00 A.M. now, and he wasn’t finding anyone, and he was getting frustrated, and he said “fuck it” in a loud enough voice that several others heard it. They split up, Tyrone and Richard and Wanny in one group, Dwayne Bennett and Carlton Bennett and Gee—Giovanni—Reed, in the other. Dwayne and Carlton and Giovanni walked down Eighteenth to Eighteenth and Lombard, over by Graduate Hospital, then cut down Lombard to Seventeenth, and then started walking down Seventeenth over to South on their way home. The sun was coming up over the dark brown of the row houses, and they sure didn’t have a lot to show for it. That’s when they saw the white guy in front of Ray’s Cleaners using the pay phone, and Dwayne, knowing he had found what he was looking for, wasn’t saying “fuck it” anymore but realized he had finally found his deer. He and Carlton and Giovanni watched as the white guy got off the phone and settled on the steps of an abandoned grocery at Seventeenth and South, apparently waiting for someone.

  DWAYNE BENNETT PRODUCED A HANDGUN AND BEGAN BRANDISHING IT, POKING IT IN MR. JANKE’S FACE, HIS CHEST; MR. GIOVANNI REED AND MR. CARLTON BENNETT STOOD ON EITHER SIDE.

  Robert Janke had finished his shift at T.G.I. Friday’s on Ben Franklin Parkway at 2:00 A.M. He had gone to a party at Ninth and Spruce, then to an after-hours hall on the Penn campus at Thirty-ninth and Chestnut. A friend named Liz Mahoney had offered him a ride home around 5:30 A.M., and he had gladly taken it. She had dropped him off at his apartment on Seventeenth, right near the corner of Seventeenth and South, and almost as soon as she left, he realized that he had done something stupid: he had left the gym bag containing his keys in the trunk of her car.

  He found a pay phone in front of Ray’s Cleaners, called the hall where they had been, and left Liz a message that he needed his keys. Then he sat in front of the abandoned grocery store at Seventeenth and South to wait for her.

  “MOVE IT, MOTHERFUCKER, MOVE IT!”

  Dwayne and Carlton and Gee had the deer in their sights now, sitting on the steps of that abandoned grocery store. Gee whipped out his gun, a .38 long, and cocked it. Dwayne grabbed Janke by the shirt and took the gun. Carlton was armed too, with a .22 short, a silver revolver with a white handle. Dwayne poked Janke in the back with the .38, and Carlton and Giovanni locked their arms around him and held him by the wrists as they directed him down Seventeenth toward Kater.

  TWO MEN HELD HIM IN ON EITHER SIDE WHILE THE THIRD MAN WALKED AROUND CUSSING AT HIM, DERIDING HIM, SCARING HIM TO DEATH, POINTING THE GUN, SAYING “WHAT HAVE YOU GOT? WHAT HAVE YOU GOT? GIVE IT UP.”

  Dwayne got ahold of Robert Janke’s wallet and saw there was only five bucks in it.

  “I know you got more than that in there,” he said.

  “No, no,” Janke pleaded. “I don’t have any money. I don’t have any money.”

  Dwayne could see Janke was scared. There was some brief discussion between him and Carlton about what to do with him now that he could identify them. Carlton suggested that Dwayne cap him. It seemed like a good idea. Why not?

  He held the gun a little bit to the back of the right temple, flush against the head, like an execution. There was no resistance.

  AS MR. GIOVANNI REED STOOD ON ONE SIDE AND MR. CARLTON BENNETT ON THE OTHER SIDE, MR. DWAYNE BENNETT WALKED BEHIND ROBERT JANKE, HIS FACE FACING TOWARD HIM, TOOK THE GUN, AND PUT IT UP TO MR. JANKE’S RIGHT TEMPLE, RIGHT UP AGAINST HIS HEAD, THIRTY-EIGHT-CALIBER GUN, AND PULLED THE TRIGGER.

  Dwayne Bennett felt the body of the hunted go limp, and he gently laid it to the ground before he and Giovanni and Carlton ran away, back into the maw of the neighborhood. There was some inevitable discussion of the murder, and Dwayne, when he wasn’t telling people to shut up about it, also seemed irritated by the reactions of others, particularly those who asked whether it weighed on his conscience, placing the rounded edge of that .38 barrel flush against the flesh of the temple so that it was touching like the soft graze of a kiss, squeezing on the trigger as the sun was coming up.

  “I shot him. So what?” he said. And if the police got wind of it and started asking questions about it, Dwayne said he would tell them what happened without a lawyer, which is exactly what he did. He voluntarily gave himself up to the police a week later. He made no attempt to mitigate the crime or even lie about it, as if he really didn’t care what happened to him. A life on the streets with no job and no future, or a life in prison—what exactly was the better choice? In his statement to the homicide detectives, he expressed what for him, at least, might have been the equivalent of a guilty conscience: “I only shot him once.”

  Carlton Bennett was arrested the same day as Dwayne Bennett, and Giovanni Reed two days after that. A day before his scheduled trial in January 1993, Dwayne pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. That left Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed as the remaining defendants. McGovern offered them twenty-five to fifty for a plea, but they said no and decided to take their chances and watched intently as McGovern told his story step by step and phrase by phrase in that oversize courtroom with its grimy windows and high ceiling, asking the jury to conclude, as he long ago had concluded, what the outcome of this trial should be.

  I ASK YOU TO COME INTO THE TRIAL AND RENDER YOUR OATH AND RENDER A VERDICT ACCORDING TO THE EVIDENCE, SO HELP YOU GOD, AND I ASK YOU TO RENDER THE VERDICT THAT JUSTICE DEMANDS, AND THAT IS TO FIND THESE TWO YOUNG MEN GUILTY OF MURDER.

  He guided them carefully through an array of witnesses, some favorable, some not so favorable, particularly in terms of pinpointing the exact location of C
arlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed in relation to the victim. Two of those who testified had been part of the group of six that had all gone out together that August night, and their testimony, while not necessarily favorable to the defendants, lacked precision. Richard King wasn’t in the group that had confronted Janke, but he had been nearby, and he had seen something. He said the two defendants were inches away from Janke, but then on cross-examination, he said they were several feet away. Tyrone Mackey had seen something as well. When McGovern prepped him at lunch right before he was to take the witness stand, he completely reversed his original statement to the police and now said the defendants had been some fifteen feet away from the victim. McGovern got into Mackey’s face and stayed there with that scary and schizophrenic street look and warned him that he would be under oath and he had better tell the truth.

  “I don’t get paid enough to get fooled by clowns,” he said back in the courtroom, as if he had just been thrown a brushback by some punk minor league pitcher. When Mackey testified, he dropped the fifteen-foot assertion and said the two defendants had been close to Janke that night.

  McGovern’s neck got stiff and started to throb, and the more he looked at the jury, the more it began to worry him, particularly since Philadelphia juries by their nature were wild and unpredictable. But he had the testimony of a nurse named Lorraine Hill, who had witnessed the killing from across the street while on her way to work and was resolute in her recollection that Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed had locked their arms in Janke’s own arms and moved him down the path of his execution.