“For weed, when you was like ten.”
“How many months did I do up Forrest?”
“You never went to Forrest. You was in Mahanoy.”
“What’s the last birthday I spent home?”
“Shit. Probably when you was like nine.”
Reggie grinned. “What’s my social?”
“I don’t know.”
Reggie told Jevon his social security number.
“Okay,” Jevon said.
“Repeat it back,” Reggie insisted.
Jevon repeated it perfectly.
. . .
Reggie gave Jevon’s acting skills a try that night, leaving around seven and returning at two in the morning. Jevon reported that everything had gone according to plan: the PO had phoned, asked what halfway house he’d been sent to, what his first baby-mom’s mother’s name was, and what part of his body the guard had injured while Reggie was a teenager in county jail. Jevon had answered all these questions correctly.
Jevon launched his enterprise by charging his cousin five dollars a night, but at his mother’s urging switched to asking for five dollars an hour. Reggie seemed to resent this rate increase, but admitted that nobody else could come close to his voice, which had the heavy nasal quality of a young Biggie Smalls. When Reggie missed several payments, Jevon offered his services to his uncle and then to a neighbor, both of whom were also on parole, and eager for a stand-in to answer calls from their PO.
Responding to curfew calls required a number of skills beyond the mimicry of voices: punctuality, confidence, a good memory, and the ability to imagine what someone who has recently come home from a long sentence might sound like and say to his PO. Jevon took this all on as any professional actor might, and seemed to delight in his roles. He also took careful notes about the conversations in a little book, so that the next time a man saw his PO he’d know where their relationship stood.
Over time, Jevon developed quite a client base. In his sophomore and junior years of high school, I watched him bring in upwards of one hundred dollars a week. As his graduation neared, though, he seemed to grow tired of sitting in houses all evening and night. After a futile attempt to forward the calls to his cell phone, and another failed attempt to train one of his friends to do the job, he stopped “the phone hustle” and went to work as a mall security guard.
Like Jevon, a number of young people I got to know were making a little money by providing goods and services to friends and to friends of friends who were living under various legal restrictions. One important service was the smuggling of money and drugs to those constrained the most: inmates.
Twenty-four-year-old Shonda got her start by doing a favor for someone close to her.
“You have to wrap the bill around the weed,” she explained to me as we sat at her grandmother’s round kitchen table. “That way you keep the weed together and you cover the smell.”
“Okay.”
“And you have to do it a day, two days in advance, because they got the hand machines now.”1
Shonda first smuggled drugs into jail at the age of eight, when she helped her mom pass a crack-filled balloon to her dad, a heavy user who was on trial for aggravated assault. Her mom’s method was to insert the balloon like a tampon, then adjust and pull it out in the visiting room. Shonda’s job was to watch the guards and give her mother the green light. Sometimes she handed the balloons from her mother to her father. Her dad would swallow them, and either throw them up or pass them once he got back to the cell block.
After her mom broke things off with her dad, Shonda stopped going to the prison to visit him. There followed a long stretch—about seven years—in which Shonda’s life was not punctuated by trips to jails or courthouses. Then during her junior year of high school, her boyfriend caught a gun case. She returned to county jail to visit him. When she was twenty-three, her baby-dad got booked for armed robbery, and she was back again.
Shonda was unemployed when her baby-dad got taken into custody, so her household income evaporated. In addition to taking over the groceries, the diapers, and all the bills, she now had the added expense of sending money to her baby-dad in jail so that he could buy soap, shower shoes, and better food inside. He also asked her to bring in marijuana and tobacco. After a few weeks, she started smuggling small quantities of marijuana into the visiting room along with cash, which he used for buying items like cigarettes from other inmates.
To offset the high costs of visiting him and keeping him in relative comfort while inside, Shonda began taking in packages for other men at the county jail; she either visited them herself or took a girlfriend with her while she visited her baby-dad. We met in this way. Reggie had been on trial for possession of drugs and for fleeing the police, and found out from his cellmate that a woman named Shonda would bring in marijuana for fifty dollars. His mother met up with her one Wednesday afternoon, paid her the money, and gave her a small bag of weed to smuggle in for him. I tagged along.
On one of the first days I spent with Shonda, she put together three packages: one for her baby-dad, one for his cellmate, and one for a man with a bullet lodged in his back who said that marijuana was the only drug that dulled the pain. Her younger sister came with us to the jail and called the cellmate out into the visiting room so that she could pass off the package for him at the same time Shonda was visiting with her baby-dad. After this half-hour visit, Shonda got a new ticket and waited another five hours to visit the third man. On this last visit of the day, she acted as if she were visiting an old family friend, and passed off the small bag of marijuana this man’s girlfriend had sent him for the week.
Assembling a package was a four-part process for Shonda. First, she pounded the marijuana down to get the air out, creating a tiny and dense cube. Next, she covered it in one layer of plastic wrap, taping the packet together to form a rectangle of about one inch by three-quarters of an inch. Then she took a dollar bill—though sometimes it was a ten, other times a twenty—and folded it tightly around the packet, making the total package about as thin as a Ritz cracker. Finally, using double-sided tape, she made the package sticky on both sides so that the man could hide it securely between his wrist and his jail ID band.
The sudden appearance of hand-screening machines at CFCF led Shonda to take extra precautions in planning her package deliveries. A few days after the machine appeared, I was visiting Reggie and watched as frightened women passed a bottle of hand sanitizer around the waiting area, scrubbing their hands and arms free of any incriminating specks of contraband. That day, the smell of sweat mixed with that of the ammonia used in cleaning the waiting room. Even women like Mike’s mother, who weren’t smuggling in packages, worried that they had touched drugs recently and would be denied entry or worse, get arrested.
The heightened risk didn’t stop Shonda from bringing in packages for cash: she needed the money. After the screening machines came in, she began placing the packages between the inner and outer lining of her panties, in that rectangular patch of cloth that seems made for small quantities of contraband. In the bus on another trip to jail, she explained to me that the guard on duty that afternoon wouldn’t touch your coochie, just the inner thighs. As she explained this, I remembered hearing Reggie and Mike describe how exciting it was, sitting in jail, to hold a tiny square containing a drug that would make you forget where you were, and smelling of woman.
“You have to put the package in before you go,” Shonda explained, “because you have to wash your hands enough times so that you pass the drug screen. And always put it in the lining, so it doesn’t fall out while you wait.”
“Do you get scared?”
“You have to control your fear,” she said. “You have to pretend that you don’t have anything on you, that you’re just a regular visitor. You have to get to the point where it’s normal.”
Shonda told me that she made enough money to support both her trips to jail and her baby-dad’s drug habit. Sometimes she could also afford to put money on hi
s books, but it wasn’t really enough extra money to pay, for example, her phone bill.
If the money in smuggling is low, the risk of arrest is substantial, with or without the drug-screening machines. In my years visiting young men from 6th Street in jail and prison, I observed seven women get handcuffed and taken away after a guard found drugs on their person during the pat-down in the search room. Two of these women had come with their children, so Child Protective Services was called. One woman I knew from the neighborhood lost custody of her child and served a year in jail. Reggie seemed fairly unconcerned: “She should have been more careful. That’s on her.”
Like Jevon, Shonda began her business by doing a favor for someone close to her, and then started to charge a few people for the service. Neither one made a lot of money this way, but Jevon seemed to relish his acting roles, as well as the status it gave him around his older neighbors and kin. Shonda expressed her satisfaction at helping people in great need, like the man who smoked the marijuana she smuggled in to alleviate the pain of his bullet wounds. And they both really needed the money, however little it was.
OPPORTUNITIES AT WORK
Some residents of 6th Street become part of this underground network of support through opportunities provided by their legitimate jobs. They find that the skills in which they were trained or the particular goods or services their jobs make available prove useful to people with legal entanglements, and that they can earn a little or even a lot of extra money by helping these people out under the table.
Rakim, a rotund man in his forties, ran a photo stand in downtown Philadelphia. The stand (or rather, mobile office), sat near the Philadelphia customs office, and a large sign reading Passport Pictures, Cheapest in the City welcomed patrons inside. Rakim’s customers entered at the rear of the trailer and saw a row of plastic chairs, a tripod at one end, and a white backdrop hanging from the other. Rakim charged fifteen dollars for three passport-sized photos and took four shots, allowing customers to choose from among them before printing.
On the first afternoon I went to see him, a mother and her teenage son were sitting in the plastic chairs that formed a small waiting area. They came, she told me proudly, because her son was going to London for his junior year abroad. Ahead of her in line was an employee of a large company about to spend two weeks in Canada for training. A lawyer arrived next, needing a passport renewal for a vacation in Argentina.
When these customers left, another customer came in, wearing a torn jean jacket. Seeing me, he made a move to leave. Rakim said, “It’s cool, she’s cool.” The man smiled and said, “I wasn’t sure.” He handed Rakim a wad of crumpled bills, and Rakim passed him a small plastic bag full of yellow liquid. The man gingerly accepted the bag and walked into the tiny bathroom. He emerged a few minutes later, nodded to Rakim, and walked out.
Rakim had begun working at this photo stand in the mid-1990s, when he took over the business from his father. As he told it, the stand did fairly well until 9/11. “People did not want to cross a border,” he explained. “They did not want to get on a plane.”
During this slow period, Rakim’s cousin would stop by the trailer on his way back from his weekly parole meetings, since the offices of the Probation and Parole Board are located not two blocks away, and they would catch up for an hour or two. Then one week his cousin came in a day early, visibly upset. He asked Rakim if he had smoked weed or used any other drugs recently. When Rakim replied that he hadn’t, the cousin confessed that he’d slipped up with drugs, and begged Rakim for the use of his urine for the test the next morning.
“How would I give you my urine?” Rakim asked.
His cousin explained that he would heat it up at home, put it in a Baggie taped to his inner thigh, and release it into the sample cup at the parole office. Rakim agreed, so the next morning, his cousin took Rakim’s urine to the parole office meeting and passed the drug test with it. Later, when his cousin asked for the favor again, Rakim told him it would cost him twenty dollars. This arrangement went on for some months, until the police caught the cousin driving a car and the judge returned him to prison for the parole violation.
While inside, Rakim’s cousin told a friend about the photo booth, and when this friend came home he stopped by on the way to his parole appointment. News spread, and Rakim’s urine business grew.
I met Rakim through Chuck’s close friend Steve in 2007. At the time, Steve had been trying to complete a two-year probation sentence while battling a serious addiction to PCP. One afternoon, he came back to the block, favoring his left leg and wincing as he walked. When I asked what was wrong, he said simply, “The piss was too hot.” Mike explained that Steve had been buying urine from a guy downtown, and it had burned the skin on his inner thigh, where he had taped the bag.
I asked Rakim about this during our interview, and he knowingly nodded his head.
I had trouble with the temperature at first. Guys were burning their legs, because the coffee warmer was too hot. I had to keep antibiotic ointment and gauze bandages in here because guys were coming back with their skin peeling off on the plastic bag. So I got one with an adjustable temperature, and I keep it at 100 degrees. Problem solved.
A year into this side business, Rakim had three coffee heaters going, and was contracting out to two women to provide supplemental urine. He told me he didn’t know of anyone else who sold urine for use at this probation and parole office, noting that you needed a place where people could come inside and safely “put on” the urine. “So if you’ve got a hotdog stand, a lottery and magazine stand, you can’t do this.” He explained that most guys on probation or parole get urine from relatives or partners, but that this is an unsatisfactory solution:
Your girl can always give you her piss, right, but you’ve got to take it from West Philly, North Philly, all the way downtown. You’ve got to carry it on the bus, keep it warm, keep the bag from breaking. And then, you never know if the urine is clean. Your girl says she’s not using, but you can’t watch her every second. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell you she’s been using, so she gives you the urine and hopes it will come back okay. Then you’ve got problems with your PO and problems in your relationship. You’re back in jail, you’re blaming her, now ya’ll are on bad terms. . . . If you come to me, you don’t have any of that. Hell, I sometimes have women come to me for their boyfriends! Because they don’t want him to know what they’re doing, you know? So they buy it from me and give it to him like it’s theirs.
Another item that people with certain kinds of jobs are able to supply is fake documents. In 2006, a rumor started to circulate that a woman who had recently been transferred to the PennDOT (Pennsylvania Department of Transportation) nearest to 6th Street was accepting one thousand dollars for making driver’s licenses for people who didn’t actually qualify for them (or who were too concerned about their pending legal issues to try). Mike reasoned that since the tickets on his license amounted to more than three thousand dollars and his parole sentence prevented him from getting a license anyway, it made financial sense to pay this woman the thousand bucks. He never did save enough money to purchase the license, but through his negotiations with her I learned that a number of other men in the neighborhood had obtained one, including Chuck and Reggie’s uncle, who had a warrant out for a parole violation dating back to 1983. This woman never agreed to talk with me, but two years later, when she was discovered and arrested, she claimed she’d made over three hundred thousand dollars selling real identities to people who don’t otherwise qualify for them. Nobody could figure out who was carrying these phony licenses, or just how many people had them.
More commonly, people help those facing difficulties with obtaining formal identification by providing the goods and services that typically require ID, with no questions asked. That is, rather than supply the ID itself, they instead supply the goods and services otherwise denied to people without proper identification.
Pappi’s corner store sits at the corner of 6th and Manki
n. A yellow neon sign above the entrance reads Hernandez Grocery, Cigarettes Milk Eggs Hoagies Lottery. A smaller sign below reads We Take Access Card. Mr. Hernandez was known as Pappi, and around 6th Street his store was the go-to place for loosie cigarettes, chips, drinks, and snacks. Since the nearest grocery store was eleven blocks away, neighbors who didn’t have a car or bus fare would do most of their grocery shopping at Pappi’s.
Bulletproof glass framed the counter, but Pappi kept a one-by-two-foot space open so he could pass customers their cigarettes and lottery tickets by hand.
“A turnstile,” he once told me, “would mean that I expect my customers to pull a gun on me. Nobody would ever do that.”
Pappi used the bulletproof glass as a giant frame on which to showcase pictures of his grandchildren and other children from the area. Alongside his granddaughter and three grandsons were the faces of his 6th Street customers and friends, in baby pictures, prom pictures, graduation pictures, funeral pictures, and even jail visiting-room pictures. Pappi prided himself that in fifteen years of business in an increasingly violent and impoverished Black section of the city, he had never been robbed.
Across from the main counter and perched above the doorway, a small TV broadcast sports or the news. Customers sometimes stopped to watch for a few minutes, commenting with Pappi on the stories. They also asked Pappi how their friends and relatives were doing. Indeed, the store served as a kind of informational hub for the 6th Street neighborhood. It was often the first place people went when they came home from jail or prison. Though Pappi seldom spoke more than a few words, he quietly kept up with a great many neighborhood residents, and possessed that rare ability to make people feel noticed and genuinely appreciated. He played baseball in high school, and forty years later still cut an impressive figure.
When Mike and Chuck and their friends were home from jail, we’d visit Pappi’s four or five times a day to buy a soda, a loosie, or a bag of chips. After a few months, Pappi gave me the nickname Vanilla, which he later shortened to Nil.
On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 18