Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  At 8:36 A.M., 10-4 dialed the Morris Avenue apartment. George was sleeping with Jessica in the bed that his mother had left behind. DEA agents posing as Con Edison repairmen waited in a parked Con Ed truck. Others waited in unmarked cars, eyeing the entrance of the building through binoculars. All wore bullet-proof vests. The government agents monitoring the wiretap heard 10-4 tell George to meet him beneath a nearby streetlight, bring plenty of money, and be prepared to break out, to “do a Jimmy James Brown.” The two bricks of heroin that had been milled the night before had disappeared.

  Boy George hurriedly dressed and told Jessica, “I gotta go.”

  “Where you going?” she asked sleepily.

  “Don’t worry. I gotta go, I’ll call you from where I am and maybe you can visit me.” He grabbed $7,500 and instructed Jessica to burn his photographs: the blown-up picture of him in Hawaii, his arms covered in parakeets; shots from the Christmas party; the picture of him posing like Rambo, strapped with guns. In one etching, Boy George stood shoulder to shoulder with his Mafia heroes—Fat Tony, John Gotti, and Carmine Persico. These precautions were unnecessary, however; the agents nabbed George as soon as he hit the street.

  The feds drove Boy George through Central Park on their way to central booking. As he looked out the window of the white Lincoln Mark IV, one of the agents pointed to a seedling: “See that plant? It’s gonna be a tree when you get out.”

  The police detained Jessica and Enrique while they searched the apartment, then arrested them. George assured the investigators that they weren’t involved. Jessica and Enrique were interrogated and eventually released. Jessica scribbled a notation in her pocket calendar: “Bad day (went to jail.)”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After questioning George at DEA headquarters, agents brought him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in lower Manhattan, where he joined 10-4 and other members of the Obsession crew. 10-4 flipped in less than a week. Outside, agents confiscated money and property under the federal forfeiture laws. They’d already found one of George’s Porsches and a Mercedes that had just received $50,000 worth of custom bodywork. Meanwhile, as word of 10-4’s defection spread, the loyalist ranks continued to dwindle. Boy George would glare around the bullpen and say, “Who’s next?”

  Vada was next, although she never snitched. It was rumored that she had run off with the man who’d tried to sell George shares in the fast-food chicken chain. By the time the DEA got to George’s house in Puerto Rico, nothing much was left to take: no cars, no cash, no jewelry. They found leftover food and a bottle of Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume. Pair after pair of sneakers remained neatly lined up in a walk-in closet. The agents drained the built-in swimming pool so they could take snapshots of the incriminating tile work. George never heard from Vada or their son again.

  It took prison to make George realize what Jessica had believed since they’d met—that she was the right one to be his wife. The morning of the Obsession roundup, when she called George’s mother to relay his instructions about destroying evidence, the wiretap recorded Jessica’s prescient concern: “You know what makes me laugh?” Jessica told her. “The same people that talk are telling him how he can’t trust me because I’m gonna squeal on him.” She collected her three daughters and moved to his mother’s. George doubted Jessica would betray him, but he still wanted Rita to keep a close watch on her. Jessica’s day calendar, however, showed a woman who took her duties seriously:

  Went to court.

  Serena’s birthday.

  Went to see Honey.

  Run Errands!

  Go with Grandma to doctors.

  Went to see George.

  Go see George.

  Jessica learned that it was smart to arrive at the Metropolitan Correctional Center no later than eleven-fifteen for the noontime visit, which sometimes didn’t start until one o’clock. Prison visiting—like going to the emergency room, or to welfare—subjected people to lengthy, arbitrary delays. Jessica had to wait for a guard to give her a form, longer for the guard to collect it. There was almost always a line. Veteran visitors brought their own pens and change for the locker and the vending machines. They knew to stay close to the door to hear their name called. Guards summoned women by the last name of the inmate they were visiting. To step up for the notorious George Rivera was for Jessica a point of pride.

  It could take another hour to complete the processing: coats and bags lurched along the conveyor beneath the X ray. Jessica dropped her jewelry and beepers into a grungy plastic tray. Boy George had given her his favorite charm for safekeeping—two tiny gold boxing gloves, which symbolized the Golden Gloves boxing competition he still planned to win. She wore the delicate charm on a slender gold chain around her neck. “Because I’m his champ,” she said.

  Once she cleared the metal detector, she had her hand stamped, was buzzed into the interior lobby, lined up again, and signed the visitors’ log. She exchanged her ID for a locker key. Visitors had to store most of their belongings in a locker. When George’s unit—5-South—was called, she was buzzed into yet another interior hallway. She placed her hand beneath an ultraviolet light. A guard checked her hand for the stamp, and another guard rode with her in the elevator to the fifth floor. There, in the hallway, she waited again. A guard unlocked a door that granted access to yet another short hall, where visitors could buy snacks. George refused junk food, though, so Jessica usually bought only a diet soda for herself. The hall ran between two oval visiting rooms, visible through thick glass. Smudged plastic chairs lined the walls of each room, facing inward, as if recently vacated by an encounter group. Jessica was assigned a chair. She sat. She waited. At some point, the inmate was “produced.” Visits usually lasted an hour, unless your inmate had pull with the guard. George did.

  Jessica briefed George about what she’d heard on the street: who planned to plead guilty, who else might rat. At one point, rumors were circulating that his mother might cooperate with the police. Jessica’s attempt to live with Rita didn’t work out: the two women argued over money and George’s left-behind things. Jessica complained to George that his mother had no patience with children; she claimed that Rita used George’s rottweiler to terrorize the girls. Rita charged Jessica with laziness and disrespect. By summertime, Jessica had brought the girls back to her mother’s house. Lourdes was still living with Que-Que and Cesar in the dismal apartment on Vyse.

  Jessica didn’t make much time for her daughters, but she dressed them well and documented their good-looking life in photographs. She bought sailor suits, socks and panties, barrettes and bracelets, headbands and adorable hats. She surprised them with a Barbie playhouse and equipped a play kitchen with miniature dishes and pots and pans. She stuffed the play refrigerator with play food and stocked the miniature shelves. It felt good to provide her girls with the things that she’d wanted herself as a child. Cesar inherited several of Boy George’s name-brand sweat suits and pairs of his unused sneakers. Jessica added to her collection of leather coats. She had more than forty: full-length and waist-length, car coats and jackets, one lined in mink.

  At first, Jessica visited George every day. In their long, undistracted hours together, Boy George opened up to Jessica. Despite the cool front he projected, his situation was extremely grim. If convicted under the conspiracy law, he faced a possible life sentence. Rascal and 10-4 were cell mates: by June, Rascal joined the government, followed by Danny. Throughout the betrayals, Jessica remained a stalwart friend. “He just came close to me, and this, while he was in jail. We shared a lot of things together,” she said.

  Jessica mentioned the upcoming birthday of one of her girlfriends, and George told Jessica to take a thousand dollars and do the birthday right. He booked a Mercedes-Benz limousine to deliver her and her friends to Victor’s Café. They ate an enormous meal. He called Victor’s Café on the pay phone that night to send his good wishes. Placing direct calls to unauthorized numbers from prison required some maneuvering. Jessica and her friends got
drunk on champagne. They snapped pictures of themselves eating cherries, slicing knives into steak. The plátano had candles. The handsome waiters sang.

  The celebration was a vast improvement over Jessica’s own birthday, when George had been in Hawaii with that other girl. He’d bawled Jessica out when she’d tracked him down in the honeymoon suite to ask why he hadn’t called. Now George called several times a day. He dedicated a song to her—Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl.” He marveled at her apparent loyalty. Had Jessica been the one locked up, George said, “probably the same day I woulda been fucking somebody else.”

  Publicly, George treated his detainment as a temporary setback, but the other drug dealers regarded the collapse of Obsession the same way he’d regarded the downfall of the Torres brothers’ operation years before. One person’s misfortune was another’s opportunity. There were always customers to satisfy. A crew revived the Blue Thunder brand name. Jessica’s street currency was also renewed. Dealers were interested in getting to know Boy George’s girl. And she was interested in getting to know them—maybe because she was George’s girl, or maybe just because she was Jessica.

  Inside, George languished in the MCC, obsessing about his business, his future, and Jessica’s whereabouts. She brought him pornography and his favorite, Yachting Magazine. He’d redesign the two-hundred-footers, adding Jacuzzis to their decks. “I get a scrap paper,” he said, “and I draw.”

  Outside, Jessica was enjoying his money. She crammed as many girlfriends as would fit into limousines and treated everyone to dinner and dancing. “With the money, Jessica began to change—like I thought she would,” said Lourdes. “She would spend a thousand at a club—not that I want any for myself, I didn’t—but you take away something from my grandchildrens.” Jessica sarcastically prompted Lourdes’s faulty short-term memory: “Ma, ain’t you forgetting that you get the girls’ welfare checks?” But Jessica did buy Lourdes a washing machine and give her money for the rent and the light.

  Soon, Jessica and her little cousin Daisy were going out dancing almost every night. Short and tall, experienced and trusting, Jessica and Daisy made an excellent team: Jessica dated drug dealers, and the dealers had friends who went with Daisy. Jessica introduced her little cousin to the night world. It was a summer of cocaine, clubs, and hotel rooms, and thick, airless visits to the MCC. One boy let Jessica drive his red Corvette.

  Jessica inherited the lease to a project apartment from her maternal grandmother, who had moved to Florida. Jessica could not imagine living in the one-bedroom high-rise alone, on 54th Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, but it was a safe place for her to store valuables—too many people passed through Lourdes’s apartment on Vyse. On those nights Jessica and Daisy went clubbing in the city, the apartment served as a convenient place to crash. They also occasionally entertained boys there, but Jessica still preferred to sleep at her mother’s.

  From time to time, Jessica ran into Coco there. Coco loved hearing about the adventures of her wild sister-in-law: Jessica once dragged Daisy beneath a car during a shoot-out; another time, she and Daisy went to a hotel with two brothers, and Jessica paid the tab. Jessica had the same way with men that Cesar had with girls. She’d go to Grande Billiards and pretend she couldn’t play pool. She liked to wear white leggings and a low-cut top. With her beeper tucked into the V of her cleavage, she’d ask a handsome boy to help her take a shot. The boy usually would. He’d place his arms around Jessica from the back and she would bend over the table to aim, pressing her butt into his crotch. It was a simple gesture, and it always worked.

  Jessica lived the fast life. She took cabs everywhere. “I guess George got me used to that, constantly moving around,” she said. That summer, Little Star traveled by car so often that she balked when Coco put her on a bus to take her to Foxy’s block.

  A formidable grapevine connected prison and the street, and news of Jessica’s booming social life soon reached George. He confronted her; she denied the allegations. He yelled at Jessica and complained to his mother, who encouraged him to give Jessica room. To prove her devotion, Jessica agreed to get a tattoo. “If you love me, you’ll do it,” George said. He demanded high quality, not some crude ghetto tattoo drawn by an excon with only two colors and crayon lines. He researched the trade magazines until he discovered a tattoo artist in Elizabeth, New Jersey, who’d been rated one of the nation’s best.

  The first tattoo, a heart with a rose high on her right thigh, was elegant. George. She opened the slit on her skirt to show George on her next visit to the MCC. “You stupid bitch!” he said with appreciative incredulity. On the elevator ride back down to the exit, one of the other inmates’ girlfriends expressed her exasperation with Jessica: now her boyfriend wanted her to get one, too. Jessica’s next read Jess loves George, with an arrow over her actual heart. He promised to get the same one with the names reversed.

  In August, four months after he was arrested, the authorities transferred George to Otisville, a holding facility upstate, where he would wait over a year for his trial to begin. With the distance, Jessica’s calendar entries dwindled; their monthly anniversary became the only notation concerning George. By October, the commemorative George and Jessica’s anniversary had inverted to Jessica and George’s anniversary. On the back page of her little black book she asked hard questions of herself:

  1. Is this a punishment from God for me not to be happy

  2. Do I really Love this person

  3. Do I really wanna be Happy with

  4. Could I really wait for George

  5. How can I help myself besides him

  6. Will I ever be happy

  7. Does he really Love me.

  8. Do I need companion from another man

  9. What will I really do for this person? What are my limits?

  10. When I say that I promise I’m promise the opposite or I’m I lieing just a little bit, or do my promises mean nothing.

  Yet she continued with her more public testaments of loyalty. Altogether, she got six tattoos in his honor, including a banner reading Property of George across her buttocks and a poem, written on a scroll, which unrolled just above her shoulder blade:

  George

  No matter where I am

  or what I’m doing

  You’re always there

  Always on my mind

  and in my heart

  It was as if Jessica was trying to convince herself of love from the outside in.

  Circumstances forced George to adjust to Jessica’s escapades. Still, he was shocked when he finally listened to the wiretaps. He’d been given copies of the tapes in preparation for his trial; they filled a large box. Jessica received the first blast of his reaction in the middle of the night. She was at Lourdes’s. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Bitch, listen to this.” George played a cassette into the receiver.

  “How’d you get to use the phone?” Jessica stalled.

  “Don’t mind how I got to use the phone, you fucking bitch, listen to this.” And so it went. The DEA’s wiretaps had recorded the calls she’d made from the Morris Avenue apartment she’d shared with George—her intimate exchanges with Danny and Puma; uncensored conversations with girlfriends about sex and life with George. The wiretaps also explained a mysterious visit earlier that spring by the New York City Police that had continued to baffle George. An officer had appeared in response to an anonymous report of domestic violence. It was true that George had hurt the twins, who were with Jessica at the time. But George had doubted that his neighbors would have dared to call the cops on him. In fact, a DEA agent had called the local police after overhearing Jessica’s panicked call to a friend.

  Jessica claimed the government had framed her: “It’s some white girl’s voice.” She reminded George how she’d stood by him in the most important way—she had refused to snitch on him. She remained one of his only friends. But that type of loyalty wasn’t enough to appease George’s anger. Tombstones, he would say, were g
oing like hotcakes. He fantasized openly about delivering her to Lourdes in separate body parts.

  Night after night, in his cell, Boy George played and replayed the cassettes. Jessica’s voice surrounded him. In real time, she was rarely home—or was ignoring his phone calls. He obsessively tried to reach her at the Manhattan apartment, where he caught only her breathy recording for the answering machine, which she’d tailored in anticipation of his prison calls: “Hello, yes, I accept a collect call . . .” Boy George was finally listening to Jessica, just as she was moving out of range.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Cesar had gone from acting like a hoodlum to being one; his tough posture had calcified and become part of his identity. He called himself a stickup kid. As he remembers it, he went from playing tag to hiding drugs in his pocket to carrying guns. “That part where you and your boys go to the movies? I passed right by that,” he said. His friend Tito still dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. Mighty never spoke much about the future, but then Mighty never spoke much. Rocco was more interested in the gangster lifestyle; when asked his age, he would jokingly reply, “Twenty-five to life.” But Cesar liked being a gangster. Like George, he did not equivocate: he took action. He had become FMP’s acknowledged leader.

  FMP’s crimes had become more serious. Cesar and Mighty were the boldest, with Rocco and Tito following their increasingly reckless leads. They would listen to Public Enemy to get pumped. They did a daylight robbery on Fordham with a Dillinger two-shot. They hunted for victims on the subway. Mighty often got carried away. Said Rocco, “He had that Napoléon complex, because he was short.” One time, while Cesar cleaned out a guy’s pockets, Mighty pulled off his shoes. Rocco, who had his eye on the man’s white jacket, warned Mighty, “No blood,” but Mighty punched him in the nose anyway, ruining the jacket. Another time, they were riding around in Rocco’s car when they spotted a man with a Walkman and a car radio, looking for a livery cab. With its tinted windows, Rocco’s Caprice Classic passed as one. Rocco dropped off Cesar and Mighty, looped around the block, and the man got in. Rocco sped ahead, collected his friends, and ordered the terrified man to give them everything. “I’m Puerto Rican,” the man begged as Cesar ransacked his pockets. Rocco replied, “We’re not robbing you for your nationality.” When the man shit on himself, Mighty went crazy and started beating him over the head with The Club. “Mighty, don’t make him bleed! Don’t bleed in the car!” Rocco yelled. It was all they could do to throw the guy out on the street before Mighty finished him off. Later, they used Lourdes’s Ajax to clean up the mess.