A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Through the glass at Polunsky Stroman agrees. ‘What is there left,’ he asks, ‘that’s actually American?’

  Perhaps it’s a question of how you define American’. In February 1982, while Stroman was busy getting into drugs and dropping out of school, a young Indian man flew to Texas looking for work. Vasudev Patel wasn’t some economic migrant looking for a free ride. He had a good degree, a bachelors in accounting from the University of Gujarat. In India, where 13,999 out of every 14,000 fail to attend higher education, this put him in the top fraction of the top 1 per cent of the population.

  Despite the fact that there were no grants available for new arrivals, he immediately found himself an apartment, lodging with friends in Dallas, and a job as a janitor. The salary, $2 an hour, was meagre, but it was a start. He took the job, pocketed the cash and set about looking for something better. It wasn’t long before he found it. On the basis of his degree, Patel was offered a job on the night audit desk at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

  He didn’t give up his day job, though. By day he cleaned, by night he kept the hotel books. Soon he swapped the cleaning job for a better one at the Dallas Zoo, where he worked as a cashier. Things were on the up. Eighteen months after his arrival, when he was confident he could prosper in America, he flew home to find a wife.

  For most Indian girls, the fact that Patel had a university degree, that he was earning good money and that he was on his way to becoming an American citizen would have made him extremely eligible. Alka, however, was not like most Indian girls. She wasn’t interested in America. She wasn’t interested in the marriage lottery.

  ‘I didn’t want money,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want a handsome man: if they’re handsome to look at but not handsome inside, then you have a problem.’

  The meeting, arranged by Alka and Vasudev’s parents in the summer of 1983, lasted just half an hour. The pair briefly discussed their likes and dislikes and agreed to the match. Patel, it seems, ticked the right boxes. The couple married later that year, and, when Vasudev finally got his green card in 1985, Alka flew over to Texas to join him.

  The early days were tough. There was no money. There was no car. If the Patels wanted to go somewhere, they walked or took the bus. On top of the cash shortage was Vasudev’s workload: two separate commutes to two separate jobs, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Then home to help with the kids.

  As if Vasudev didn’t have enough on his plate, in 1992 he decided it was time to stop balancing other people’s books and start balancing his own.

  The couple investigated potential concerns, before eventually settling on a rundown gas station at the junction of John West and Big Town Boulevard in Mesquite, an eastern suburb of Dallas. The Patels pooled all their cash, borrowed from relatives, stretched their credit cards to the limit and bought the business. They then set about transforming it.

  When they bought the station in 1992, it was failing. There were no regular customers. This, Alka knew, was a serious problem: in America, she reasoned, people are always in a hurry. If there is a queue, they go somewhere else. But loyal customers will wait: if you treat them well, they will come back. Who knows? They might even help you out one day.

  The station was spruced up and repainted and the Patels installed a convenience store. They cultivated customers, so that by 2001 there was a steady stream of regulars. Vasudev Patel, a man who had arrived in America with no cash, no references, no wife and no job, was saving enough money to ensure that his children would be able to study medicine at some of the country’s top universities.

  Patel came to the United States seeking the American Dream. It took him twenty years, but he found it. Then, at 6.45 a.m. on 4 October 2001, Mark Stroman walked in.

  Although his defence attorneys would never manage to garner much support for it from the jury, there was a different side to Stroman. He was intelligent, had a quick wit and considerable charm. His grandfather Robert had also managed to instil in him a cast-iron work ethic. Tom Boston experienced this first hand. Boston, who had a policy of employing former convicts at his auto body shop on Garland Road in Mesquite, hired Stroman in 1992 when he was released from prison. He instructed him to wear a long-sleeved shirt to cover his tattoos and smartened him up.

  ‘You got a second chance,’ Boston told the young parolee. ‘Don’t screw it up.’

  The results were extraordinary. ‘Bear’ Hartline recalls a visit from the newly made-over Mark shortly after he landed the job. He didn’t recognize his oldest friend. Convinced the guy in the suit at the door was an FBI agent, Hartline assumed the Feds were out to arrest him, hid in the back of the house and refused to come out.

  ‘Mark just took the ball and ran with it,’ says Boston. ‘He surprised even me: became boss manager at the shop. Dealt with the employees. Put money in the bank for payroll.’

  Stroman kept the customers happy and made sure deadlines were met. Above all, he worked.

  ‘In twenty-two years in the business,’ recalls Boston, ‘he was probably one of the best. Just because of his ambition. His drive.’

  Simultaneously, Stroman’s personal life took a turn for the better. A new girlfriend, Shawna, and a baby daughter, Cassandra, appeared.

  ‘One thing I can say,’ says Shy Galloway, ‘he was crazy about that girl. She looked just like him. That man loved his daughter.’

  For Stroman, however, old habits died hard. The body-shop industry tended to attract undesirables: bikers, tattoo nuts, speed freaks. He had a new audience. Worse, he now had enough money to be able to indulge his passion for illicit drugs. Since school, he had always enjoyed narcotics: most mornings he smoked a joint in the car on the way to work. But his special favourite was crystal methamphetamine. Meth was a versatile drug that could be eaten, snorted or smoked. Apparently, it was impossible to overdose on. Stroman took to dissolving it in water, heating it in a spoon and shooting it directly into the vein. He loved the rush crystal meth gave him, plus – a huge bonus – it helped him to work harder.

  The drug gave him the edge at Tom Boston’s shop. The work was done so fast because Stroman was on speed, and encouraging the other employees to take it, too. Each evening he would buy half an ounce and ask who wanted to work overtime, distributing it to volunteers. The next morning the work would be done, but they would be exhausted, necessitating another half an ounce so they could get through the day.

  George Dodd, who later employed Stroman as a granite cutter, recalls him as ‘addicted’ to crystal meth. ‘He’d get all wound up. He’d be happy at first. You could go two or three days like that. He’d go real, real strong. But then, when you’re coming down, you know, it’s gonna get ugly.’

  ‘Ugly’ was about right. Stroman figured that the trick to shooting crystal meth was not to let the drug wear off. The result was more shots, larger doses and ‘tweaking’: irrational behaviour, edginess and paranoia.

  ‘Not good,’ he recalls. ‘You think you’re doing everything normally, but you’re not – and you’re wondering why everyone is looking at you. Not good at all.’

  He should know. Back in the 1980s he and his wife were in an argument on speed. Things got ugly. She ended up getting stabbed in the throat.

  In the end, even Stroman, whose appetite for the drug was almost heroic, would have to stop. It took him four or five days of constant use, but eventually he’d get to the point where he couldn’t go on, and would collapse and sleep for two or three days straight. The moment he woke up, he’d show up at work and start the process again. By the mid-1990s, he had lost nearly half his body weight.

  The old school trait – acting out – lingered on, too. There was a lot of attention seeking, usually in the form of tall stories and racist outbursts. Stroman would show up for work with black eyes and pomegranate-coloured knuckles, boasting of glorious fights. He flew a confederate flag in the back of his car and drove around black neighbourhoods, looking for trouble. Asked at weekends what his plans were, he would reply that he was off to the hous
ing projects in South Dallas, ‘hunting niggers’. No one was ever really sure whether he was serious.

  ‘There were two sides to Stroman,’ recalls Boston. ‘He cared about his daughter. I heard him out several times about how he cared so much about Shawna and his daughter. But then he kind of put on this persona to where he was always playing Billy Baddass. Always wanting attention. Very Nazi-like. I mean, very “I hate niggers, I hate this, I hate that.” At heart he was very sensitive, but he wanted to be free and go play at the same time – and the two don’t mix.’

  Friends learned to take Stroman’s tales with a pinch of salt. They thought he was playing the hard man to get a reaction. At the same time it was clear that he had an extremely short fuse. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.

  Prior to the Patel shooting there were warnings. Stroman’s came in the form of a repetitive bad trip that started in 1999. There was a large room, with friends on one side and strangers on the other. Television screens in the ceiling were broadcasting events from his life. Everyone was looking at him; he could sense the hostility. There was a palpable sense of doom, an unbearable certainty that something was about to go very wrong. But he could never work out what it was.

  He would start to struggle, to get himself out of this unfriendly place, but the more he tried to escape, the more he was drawn back in. Every now and again he would emerge for a brief taste of reality – see Bear, grab a few breaths – and then, as if he were trapped in a revolving door, he would start to swing back again. He became frantic to get out, but there was no escape.

  Stroman didn’t realize at the time that the trip was a premonition. All he knew was that it was so unpleasant, left him so anxious, that after he’d had it a few times he stopped taking LSD. He gave up the drug, just like that. It was a shame, really. He’d always enjoyed acid before. But it was no big deal: the moment he stopped taking LSD, the paranoia seemed to evaporate. Shortly afterwards, however, the crystal meth began taking its toll and his life entered a downward spiral.

  For Stroman, 2001 started catastrophically On 23 January, the 303rd District Court of Dallas County ruled that his child-support payments were in arrears. If he failed to pay them, the Attorney-General’s office threatened to suspend all of his state licences. A court order was issued instructing employers to withhold disposable income. The total sum due was $39,359.40.

  That was $39,359.40 that Stroman didn’t have.

  Hell, he didn’t even have the $68 court fee.

  Things were not going well at home, either. Unimpressed by his drug use, Shawna left him, taking with her his beloved daughter, Cassandra. Despondent, he hooked up with Sherry, a bartender at a biker bar, the Texas Trap. The relationship was tempestuous: from the start they were unable to decide where to live. He had his own place, but she wanted him to move in with her. The moment he did, they split up. He found another place, a house belonging to a friend called ‘Smo’ Smolensky, who was out of town. At that point, Sherry decided she wanted to move in with him.

  Smo allowed Stroman to live in his house on the condition that he covered the rent. For some reason, this didn’t happen. When the bank decided to foreclose on Smo for non-payment, he hightailed it back to Dallas. Since Smo was one of the leaders of the Scorpions biker gang, this was a serious problem. Stroman fled, abandoning his possessions. Never one to back down from a fight, however, he baited the Scorpions, driving his car up against the front of their club to block the main exit and lobbing a homemade bomb through the door. The biker gang threatened to blow him up in retaliation. He took to sleeping in his car.

  By the summer of 2001, all of Stroman’s friends had noticed he was in a bad place.

  ‘That was just a bad time for Mark,’ recalls Boston. ‘He was doing a lot of drugs at the time. I didn’t really know where he was staying. I knew that he was kind of down and out . . . I’d seen the guy cry several times, and he wasn’t that kind of guy. I saw him just depressed. I felt really bad for him.’

  ‘He became real distant, and just – he was trying to put up a good front that he was happy and normal,’ says Bear. ‘I could tell, and he mentioned it about the child support and all that shit, but he never let it come across that it bothered him as much as it really did.’ After one visit, Bear told his wife Sheila that something appeared to be very wrong with his friend.

  ‘He was reaching out, I guess, wanting to talk about it,’ says Sheila, looking back.

  Stroman told another friend, Bob Templeton, about his problems with the Scorpions. He also mentioned that he was having difficulties meeting his child-support payments, but didn’t reveal that he was $40,000 in debt. Nevertheless, when Bob’s mother heard that he was in trouble, she offered to help.

  ‘See if he needs a place to stay,’ Carolyn Templeton told her son.

  ‘Really?’ said Stroman when Bob passed on the offer. ‘You don’t mind?’

  Carolyn didn’t mind: Mark was unfailingly polite and helpful when he visited. He got on well with her husband, Billy. Most importantly her Great Dane, Sara, had taken a liking to him. This in itself was unusual: ‘She was very picky and choosy. And dogs don’t lie.’

  Even secure in a new house, things failed to improve. On 14 July 2001, Stroman was picked up in the Texas Trap when a policeman responded to a report that there was a bald man carrying a concealed firearm inside. The .45 automatic shoved down the back of his belt was illegal; moreover, as a convicted felon, he was not allowed to carry a firearm at all. This was big trouble. He was arrested and charged. After two days in jail, the Templetons came up with the $1,000 bond needed to release him, and he was freed.

  That was another $1,000 he owed.

  The bad luck fell like rain. At the end of August, Stroman took a job refitting a kitchen in Garland. While fetching the granite worktop for the bar, he left his car in the wrong place and received a parking ticket. When he lifted the granite worktop – worth $3,000 – to fit it, it broke in half. The next day, fetching a replacement piece, he was awarded another ticket in the same place. At lunchtime, when he popped home for a break, he found Sherry in bed with one of the Scorpions.

  Stroman’s friends were now aware that something was seriously wrong. The signs were unmistakable. Richard Wood, his employer, bumped into him outside the granite shop, trying to change the oil filter in his truck. The cap was stuck, and when Stroman tried to prise it off with a screwdriver he punctured it and the oil flooded out. He started shouting and screaming, then pulled a shotgun from the trunk of the truck and shot both barrels simultaneously into the air. Because the shotgun had been sawn off, and because the stock had been cut down to make it into a pistol, he sprained his wrist.

  ‘That month, two months!’ says Boston. ‘It just kept coming and coming and coming. He was about ready to pop.’

  In August 2001, Shy Galloway was at Garcia’s Garage on Garland when Stroman asked him if he’d like a little work. The job was lucrative, but illegal: he was planning on robbing a gas station. Stroman would drive past the store to make sure there was no CCTV, then the pair would go in together. It was, he said, an ‘easy take’. And there were no real victims: the owner of the station was a sand nigger. Shy wasn’t impressed.

  ‘That’s not my style,’ he told his friend. ‘I don’t need that.’

  But Stroman, $40,000 in debt, did need it. Badly.

  Not long afterwards, Shy was on the corner of Garland Road and Northwest Highway when his friend pulled over and honked his horn. When he leant in to the car, Stroman told him he should have accepted the offer: he’d taken $20,000, ‘living off the land’. He showed Shy a hockey goalkeeper’s mask, a note demanding money and a set of false licence plates. He also showed him a large gun, a chrome-plated Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum.

  Shy was wary. ‘Be careful, man,’ he told his friend.

  Once again, the Stroman bravado kicked in.

  ‘He said, “Shy, when you read about me, I’m gonna go down big! I’m gonna make headlines!”’ recalls Gallow
ay. ‘I thought he was shooting the shit, you know? But I knew he was robbing. I knew he was robbing.’

  Stroman should have known better. Shy Galloway was famous for his loose tongue. Sure enough, the next time he visited Tom Boston’s shop, he couldn’t resist sharing his exclusive news.

  ‘I saw Mark,’ he told his employer. ‘He was in his car.’ The story tumbled out: Stroman was robbing Ay-rabs. He had a mask. A note. A big gun. If Shy expected Boston to react, he was disappointed.

  ‘I completely brushed it off. Just never thought twice about it,’ he recalls. ‘Knowing all these cockamamie stories, the story just went in one ear and out the other.’

  But it was such a strange story that, while Boston brushed it away, he didn’t forget it.

  Money problems, drug problems, girlfriend problems, biker-gang problems, crime, guns and a tattletale: for Stroman, the ingredients necessary for a serious outburst were now in place. All that was missing was a trigger.

  Alka Patel was at home when the telephone rang. Vasudev was at the station as usual, the radio playing in the background.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ he told her. ‘Turn on the TV.’

  She did as she was told, but only briefly: after five minutes she began to feel sick and turned it off. The first thing Vasudev did when he got home that evening was turn the television back on. He couldn’t watch for long, either.

  ‘This is so sad,’ he told Alka. ‘Why would anyone do this?’

  The greatest tragedy of all was that this was likely to be just the start.

  ‘Whatever revenge they have with each other,’ he said, ‘they’re just going to kill innocent people.’

  Stroman was also at work when he heard the news. He downed tools, jumped into his Thunderbird and raced home to find Bob and Billy Templeton sitting in the den.

  ‘Have you SEEN this?’ he asked as he burst through the door.

  Bob said nothing, just pointed at the TV. Billy, a former policeman, had some experience of this sort of thing.