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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Jessica also ran errands. She flew to Florida on “confidential business” and trekked up and down Fifth Avenue shopping for his outfits for court. George’s sartorial demands were exacting. He wanted only patterned pullover sweaters. The slacks had to have cuffs. The socks had to match the slacks. Jessica carted dirty clothes to the dry cleaner’s and clean ones back to the MCC. She carted sneaker boxes of cash to his broker on Wall Street, who briefly hired her as a receptionist. “George would call. ‘How’s the stock doing?’ And I’d be like, ‘Reebok’s going up!’ ”

  Her grandmother’s Manhattan apartment turned out to be a convenient place for Jessica to stay on trial days. George expected her in the courtroom. Jessica said it was because he loved her; George said her presence in the courtroom reduced the risk of her being subpoenaed to testify.

  George also expected her to continue visiting him at the MCC. One night, on her way home, some boys robbed her on the platform of the Fifty-ninth Street station and took her engagement ring. She was glad she had taken that portrait: What Jessica valued, perhaps more than the relationship, was the evidence of it.

  At Harlem Valley, a juvenile detention center in Wingdale, New York, the boys divided themselves by block and neighborhood, just as they did at home. Cesar’s connection to Boy George preceded him. Cesar said, “When I got there, they be like, ‘Yo, that’s Boy George’s brother-in-law,’ and guys be coming up and saying, ‘Yo, I knew Boy George.’ ” But Cesar chose not to exploit the association.

  Harlem Valley had the best conditions Cesar would experience during his prison years. At the time, juveniles were still treated like teenagers. George could place only collect calls; Cesar could receive calls and dial outgoing calls directly. George had to ask Jessica to send in photographs. Cesar shot his own rolls of film with a camera the staff let the teenagers use. He mailed Coco pictures of him sitting in his cinder-block room, on his Ninja Turtle sheets. George’s Walkman had only an AM radio; all cassettes had to be mailed directly from the distributor. Coco sent Cesar homemade mix tapes, her selections encoding private memories. George bribed guards to bring in food from Little Italy and Chinatown. Cesar ate the home-cooked food that Lourdes brought in Tupperware.

  At first, Lourdes visited often. Her home cooking reminded Cesar of the happiest periods of his childhood, when life was the way he liked it—predictable and strict. He still remembered those first months in the Bronx with fondness: Lourdes had continued working off-the-books at a factory that made costume jewelry. In the morning, she prepared oatmeal for everyone—her special kind. After school, they waited for her in a pizza parlor near the factory. There was a bedtime. You even had to ask for water. “Without the men, we lived a structured, disciplined life,” Cesar said.

  Harlem Valley was strict. The guards inquired about Lourdes’s packages. They sniffed them and tested her dishes. They phoned her in the Bronx and said, “Mrs. Morales, you coming up?” They placed orders; the extra cash helped. If Cesar managed to reach his mother before she visited, she told him about the menu.

  “You want that, Papi?” she asked.

  “I guess that’s all right,” Cesar said. He liked everything she cooked.

  Lourdes hoped prison might teach Cesar lessons she had not been able to. She wasn’t optimistic but didn’t see a choice. At least Cesar was safer at Harlem Valley; none of the kids had guns. Two bigger boys had already jumped him and stolen his sneakers. Rocco saw the bruises during a visit and snapped a Polaroid for evidence. But Cesar refused to press charges—he’d handle it privately; making a reputation was the only way to ensure that other boys didn’t mess with him. Rocco eventually passed along the disturbing photograph to Coco, who placed it facedown in an album. Sometimes she slipped it out of the plastic sheets, kissed the black-and-blue marks on his swollen face, and tenderly put it back again.

  Lourdes willed herself to believe Cesar could protect himself in juvenile. She knew machismo often wilted under pressure, but he’d owned up to the consequences of his bad actions, and Cesar was a fighter. She said, “A ratter will never become a man. He will become an insect.” They could say what they wanted about her, but when it came to her baby, she could hold her head high on the street.

  Of the thirty-three defendants originally charged in the Obsession case, only George and five codefendants rose for the entrance of Judge Shirley Wohl Kram on the opening day of the first trial. One of them was Miranda, who, at the time of her arrest, had been out of George’s life and the drug business for two years and refused to plead guilty. Her sister also went to trial; she was a bank teller who’d only briefly worked at one of George’s mills. Most of the other lower-level workers accepted guilty pleas; they had little useful information to trade. 10-4, Rascal, and Danny were facing thirty- and forty-year sentences, and hoping their cooperation would cut down their jail time. In exchange for 10-4’s testimony, the U.S. attorneys agreed not to prosecute his son.

  10-4’s days of testimony, in which he matter-of-factly explained the drug business in punishing detail, set the pedestrian tone for a story that the lawyers alternately tried to dramatize or dismiss over the next three long months. Being stuck in the courtroom was not so dissimilar to the insularity of a block in the ghetto; other people’s humiliations became a source of entertainment, and the seriousness of what was at stake got lost in the heightened significance of petty things.

  Scores of agents and officers and experts would testify, including a quivering car salesman who had sold George several cars. The prosecutors would display the piles of weapons, the flamboyant jewelry, and the boxes of empty glassines with the red Obsession crown. At one point, they would theatrically introduce a “real” king’s crown—a rhinestone costume crown someone had given George as a joke. There were other silly moments, such as when a pig latin specialist soberly deconstructed Boy George’s attempts to speak in code. Just three weeks before his arrest, George had said over the phone to a friend, “I gotta write my shit down somewhere secret and shit. I gotta code it up.” In the following conversation, which was played for the jurors, George was bemoaning a dry spell to his friend Snuff. George was considering temporarily opening crack spots—“ackie-jays”—to keep money—“paper”—coming in, and also to keep Obsession workers from defecting to other jobs:

  Snuff: I got plenty aper-pay, though.

  George: Oh, I got plenty, but still I just don’t wanna fuck around and one day starve and shit, that’s not the thing about the aper-pay . . .

  Snuff: Yeah.

  George: That’s all I worry about cause them niggers there man if I catch them niggers making aper-pay somewhere else, ah man, we’re going to have a crucifixion out here.

  Snuff: Well! . . . I know what you mean, what if they elly-say aggies-bay in the otty-spay?

  George: Yep, you know what I’m a do, too. I’m a open up ackie-jays man.

  Snuff: Ackie-jays for what?

  George: Just for fucking emergency purposes, brother, you crazy? Right now, it would’ve been cleaning up.

  During the interminable court breaks, George’s codefendants would sometimes play Nerf football in the hall, but Boy George focused on the larger game, as he so often had. Each morning, he’d hand his lawyer a list of questions and concerns he’d devised from mulling over the testimony given the day before. He studied shorthand in an attempt to keep his note-taking of the court proceedings up to speed. At night, he combed the Bible for strategy. “I can take arguments out of there,” he said. He scorned the chumminess developing among the courtroom regulars. One day, when Miranda amicably chatted with a case agent, George hissed: “What the fuck are you talking to him for? He’s trying to put you away for the rest of your natural life!”

  For years, the Obsession case would continue, in large part because of 10-4’s record-keeping and help: the police would arrest the company hit man, Taz, that December; not long afterward, Snuff and two of the Chinese suppliers would be apprehended and successfully tried. Papito—the man who’d been arre
sted with heroin glassines and the annotated copy of George’s indictment—would end up dead, and the bound and brutalized corpse of Joey Navedo, George’s old mentor and informant, would be found in Florida, in the trunk of a car. But the morning of opening arguments, George was hopeful, respectful, and appropriately dressed: his lawyer cast him as a flashy jewelry dealer with bad luck in bookkeepers and poor taste in friends.

  That same September, Jessica ran into Felix, the older man from Tremont she’d known from girlhood. Felix still hung around the same bodega near his apartment on Mount Hope Place. He still parceled out dollar bills to little kids as he had with Jessica. And he still maintained his soft spot for her. Jessica told him that Lourdes and Little Star were about to be evicted from Vyse, and Felix invited them to stay with him. He told Jessica that he was planning to move to Florida; his son had committed suicide, and Felix wanted to get away. Shortly after that lucky meeting, Lourdes, Que-Que, Jessica, and Little Star moved to Mount Hope. But the commotion and the financial strains of the household drove Felix out.

  Lourdes’s new block of Mount Hope ran parallel to her old stretch of Tremont: if she peered out of the security gates from the living room window, she could see her old apartment. But the new place was more spacious than either Tremont or Vyse. Felix’s building retained a trace of grandeur. The front door was ornate, with wrought-iron patterning, even though the glass was often broken. The floors were marble, and the building had an intercom, even though it never functioned (guests pushed their hands past shards of glass to let themselves in). The lobby had a fireplace, its flue plugged with cement, like a pacifier. Sometimes the elevator worked. Lourdes already knew lots of the neighbors; for all the shuffling around between apartments, few people left the neighborhood. Tito, Cesar’s old friend from FMP, was working one corner of Mount Hope; the recognition afforded Lourdes respect, and a certain measure of protection.

  The apartment itself was like lots of the apartments that Lourdes had lived in: dusky bedrooms; a cramped, patched bathroom; a narrow, sloping hall. Plaster crumbled off the walls in the kitchen; the colors in the stairwell were the familiar slumlord favorites—harsh mustard, reddish brown. The old windows gave too little air in summer, too much in winter, and never enough natural light. But, as she had countless times before, Lourdes dug in to work. She put a table in a dining nook, beneath an alcove, where she carefully placed Saint Lazarus and meticulously arranged his shrine. She scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees. She washed down the walls, then tackled the kitchen, unpacked her mortar and pestle, and nailed her lucky horseshoe above her door. Little Star, who had just turned five, stayed close to her grandmother. Jessica came and went.

  One day, as Jessica and Daisy strolled down Mount Hope toward the corner store, Jessica spotted Tito standing beside the phone.

  “Tito man,” she remembered saying. “You blossomed! You done blossomed up!” Back at Lourdes’s apartment, Jessica called the pay phone. Tito answered; he treated it as his private business line. In her sultry voice, she said, “Hello, handsome man.”

  “Who’s this?” Tito asked.

  “Who’s this?” Jessica echoed back. She told him just how fine he looked. She described his outfit—beige-and-white Calvin Klein polo shirt, the beige jeans.

  Tito became alarmed. Rival drug dealers sometimes sent girls as lures. Some of his and Rocco’s most successful robberies had been possible because of tips they’d overheard from girls. The girls didn’t necessarily leak information intentionally; dealers would show off their money and stashes to impress them, and the girls would naturally brag about what they’d seen. Jessica heard the fear in Tito’s voice and revealed herself. Then she invited Tito to give her the ride she needed downtown.

  Whether Tito remembered his vow to FMP—never go out with a homeboy’s sister—he couldn’t later recall. He’d had a crush on Jessica since he’d met Cesar. All FMP did. Tito had a wife, but suddenly there was Jessica in her grandmother’s old apartment, sitting on the couch before him, lifting off her tank top in front of a window with a view of the George Washington Bridge, grinning her invitation with a question that had only one answer: “You mind if I take it off? It’s hot!”

  Coco saw more of Jessica after Lourdes moved to Mount Hope. She was too afraid to act like Jessica, but she learned a lot from Jessica’s ways of handling things. Once, Coco accompanied Jessica to a restaurant with two drug dealers, one of whom Jessica was dating; the girls broke night talking and they watched pornography. Jessica knew all about handling locked-up men: she told Coco how guys “get more poetic, more romantic, they show that side of themselves they can’t show on the street.” She explained that you had to write boys about the things they wanted to hear while they were in prison, and that it was better to keep your problems and adventures to yourself. Coco unburdened her confusion about Cesar and Kodak to Jessica. Jessica listened without judgment; she loved both Tito and George.

  Coco discovered Jessica wasn’t the perfect girl she had imagined, though: “Sometimes she would be really fun, like, ‘What are we gonna eat tonight?’—cuz we would order out—and other times she would be, like, ‘Leave me the fuck alone.’ ” Sometimes Jessica deliberately antagonized George on the phone, and she could turn as abruptly on her children. When Jessica would head out to go dancing, she ignored Serena, who would claw at her legs, ripping her nylons, desperate for her not to leave. Lourdes attributed the up-and-down of her daughter’s moods to her having been born in an elevator.

  On the other hand, Jessica was generous to Coco. When Jessica flew to Puerto Rico, she gave Coco $100 to baby-sit, even though Coco would have done it for free. Coco spent part of the money on take-out food and sent the rest to Cesar. Coco and Jessica rarely went out together; instead, Coco stayed with the children and Jessica went out with Tito or one of her men. Coco welcomed the excuse to get away from her mother’s, which was hectic. She styled the girls’ hair. Coco said, “I used to spike their hair up.” She slathered their tufts with Vaseline. They poured baby powder on the floor in the dining room and pretended to ice-skate. Serena liked to turn off the television and watch her reflection on the screen. She would sway back and forth, holding a hairbrush microphone.

  Lourdes had once wanted to become a singer. She liked to tell whoever would listen that she was so talented as a girl that an agent invited her to join a touring singing group. Her mother had refused to let her go. The details of the story varied—sometimes her mother worked too hard and needed Lourdes to help with her siblings; sometimes Lourdes wanted to be a detective, a trucker, or an airline stewardess. But the theme remained—Lourdes yearning for freedom, her mother destroying her dreams. Her mother wanted her firstborn to be a son, and she used to joke with friends that she’d found Lourdes in a garbage can. Lourdes explained her lot largely as the result of spite: “If I couldn’t be what I wanted, I wasn’t gonna be nothing. And if I couldn’t do what I wanted, I wasn’t gonna do nothing.”

  Lourdes chided Jessica’s ambitions and, like Lourdes, Jessica had resented it. George wasn’t much better. When Jessica confessed she wanted to be an interior decorator, he scoffed, “Those people go to school.” But when Serena confided to Jessica that she wanted to be a singer, Jessica protected her hope; she told Serena that she could do anything. The few minutes Jessica gave to Serena were Serena’s entirely.

  Every once in a while, Jessica brought Serena to court. Invisible to the reddening eyes of the judge and the jurors, Serena knelt on the floor, using the mahogany bench as a desk, quietly drawing pictures for Daddy George.

  For a while after Cesar and Mighty went to prison, Rocco and Tito robbed drug dealers. George sent word to Rocco to attend the trial because each day’s testimony was a master class: detectives outlined the latest surveillance techniques; the IRS representative explained tax laws; two solid years of state and federal investigation were presented in a clear, accessible language a jury could understand. “Sit here and listen to what these people say, because you’re gonna
need to know,” George said. “Don’t be stupid. Learn something. Learn the tax forms.” But Rocco was losing the heart for crime. He’d fallen for a schoolgirl named Marlene. Then he also lost Tito, who had gone back to school and preferred to spend his free time playing baseball and hanging out with Jessica.

  One girl did cull pointers to launch her own drug business, but most of the girlfriends of George’s codefendants were eager for another sort of education; they relished learning what their boyfriends had been up to all the hours they’d been away from home. It came out that 10-4 had kept three girlfriends in three apartments that he’d cleverly furnished identically. One girl discovered that her boyfriend had moved her into a hotel not because of a gas leak, but because a rival dealer had threatened to murder her to punish him. Wives met the girlfriends they’d long known of, and girlfriends met other girlfriends they hadn’t known about; some became cautious friends. Jessica lunched with Gladys, the bank teller George had dated. She also went clubbing with Isabel, the mother of his second son.

  Jessica, Elaine, and Lourdes were all in the courtroom the day Mike Tyson appeared. Tyson had his own court date down the hall, but he stopped by to wish his old pal luck. Afterward, in the cafeteria, he asked Jessica on a date.