Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  “Yo, Mr. Reid, what can I do, man?” I demanded brashly. “How do I get a part?”

  “You got a hundred dollars?” he asked me. “First thing you need to do is get a portfolio. Professional headshot will cost you a hundred dollars.”

  He went back to work, and I went back to New York. End of that scene.

  BACK IN NEW YORK, I ENROLLED IN DUTCHESS COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE, aiming to get first my GED and then an associate’s degree. I cobbled together a few part-time jobs to support myself—buffing floors in the predawn hours at the Rite-Aid, pounding nails and laying tiles at construction sites.

  During my free time, I chased another dream. I began riding my bike out to New Paltz, where boxing great Floyd Patterson had turned an old barn on his chicken ranch into a gym for at-risk kids and aspiring young fighters. Patterson had been only twenty-one years old when he knocked out Archie Moore to become the youngest undisputed world heavyweight champion in history. He’d already won an Olympic gold medal at seventeen after being trained by the legendary Cus D’Amato at the old Gramercy Gym. He held the world title for five years, becoming the first to regain the crown after briefly losing it. He was humble even then. It was in defeat, he was often quoted as saying, that a man reveals himself. By the time our paths crossed, he had been retired from the ring for a good fifteen years and was intent on teaching street kids the discipline that boxing commands. Floyd’s childhood was similar to my own. He was one of eleven kids, a chronic runaway and petty thief who had spent more time out on the streets than in the classroom. He’d gotten sent to reform school, where he was introduced to the sport he credited with saving his life. Now he was intent on giving other troubled young people the same ticket out of poverty and struggle. He and his wife had even adopted one of his most promising pupils; Tracy Patterson would eventually go on to become a world champ in the bantam and featherweight divisions.

  Floyd noticed me hanging around the barn, watching him train Tracy and the others.

  “Can you box?” he asked me one afternoon.

  “I can fight a little bit,” I said. I had usually come out on top in any street brawls I’d gotten into.

  He put me in the ring to spar with Danny Chapman, the top-rated fighter in the club. When I caught Danny with a lucky punch, Floyd issued a quiet directive from the sidelines.

  “Cut loose!”

  Danny pummeled me with body shots and knocked the air clear out of me. When the bell rang, I got the hell out of there. Floyd called after me.

  “Where you going?”

  “I’ll be back,” I wheezed.

  Floyd Patterson’s experience overwhelmed me, but there was not one arrogant or egotistical bone in that man’s rock-solid body. He was a very calm, mild-mannered person who commanded respect just by the way he carried himself. He didn’t expect any payment for training us, and when I asked how much it cost to join his Huguenot Boxing Club, he thought about it for a minute before telling me it would be ten dollars a month. We both understood it was about the commitment, not the cash. I showed up every day, either bicycling or hitchhiking the ten country miles to get there. From the start, Floyd showed me how seriously I had to take the sport.

  “You can’t just go out there fighting,” he lectured me. “You gotta go out there thinking.”

  Boxing is about strategy and endurance, not brute strength. You have to learn how to read your opponent, anticipate his moves, catch him off guard, wear him down. Most of all, you have to stay on your feet, try never to let them see you faltering. I thought the push-ups, weight training, and jumping jacks I’d always done had me in pretty good shape, but Floyd thought otherwise. He told me to work on my wind and my conditioning. When I got off work buffing the floors at Rite-Aid, I would set out running through the deserted streets of Poughkeepsie in combat boots. Even the cops got used to the sight of me and just waved or nodded as I jogged past at three or four in the morning. I’d do a few miles, go home, take a shower, get some rest, and do my calisthenics later on. Everything I did, I was working my way up the ladder, increasing my stamina. Sit-ups, push-ups, dips, mountain climbers, toe touches by the hundreds. Up to five hundred jumping jacks. Sometimes in Mansion Square Park, I’d spot Floyd Patterson on one of his own jogs. If he didn’t want people to bother him, he’d put a newspaper over his head while he sat on a bench waiting to be picked up and taken home. I never approached him there. That was his time, his space, and I respected that.

  In the Huguenot ring, Floyd would sometimes come out and spar with you himself to show you a point. He taught me how to work a jab. It doesn’t get better than that, having a world champ step into the ring with you to show you how it’s done. Patterson had been famous for keeping his gloves high, in front of his face, in what sportswriters used to call his “peekaboo stance.” Then he’d just spring forward and catch his opponent with unexpected hooks. When he hung up his gloves for good, Patterson’s professional record was 55-8-1 and forty knockouts. Some interviewer once commented that he might hold some record for being knocked down the most, and Floyd quickly jabbed back: “I also got up the most.”

  One time when I was hitting the bag, Floyd planted himself next to me.

  “What’re you doing?” he wanted to know.

  “What do you mean? I’m hitting the bag!”

  “No,” he chastised me. “Don’t just hit the bag. Pretend it’s an opponent.”

  That was the essence of his approach: Always be on point. Always.

  The club had some fighters on the ticket in the hinterlands of New Jersey one night, and Floyd invited me to come along to watch. We won three fights and lost one (that was on one of my sparring partners, who got too cocky for his own good). I was busy watching some of the other fights, and they forgot about me. I went outside and they were gone. I was in the middle of fucking nowhere and had no idea how I was going to hitch a ride all the way back to the Poughkeepsie projects. I was mulling this over in the parking lot when Floyd drove up.

  “I knew I forgot somebody,” he said by way of apology. Floyd never lost his cool. I never saw him mad, or even frustrated.

  I couldn’t be hurt or angry about being left behind—I was more amazed that Floyd had gotten a full half hour down the highway, halfway home, and had still bothered to turn back for me. In the coming years, his faltering memory and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease would force him to resign as New York State’s athletics commissioner. But he remembered me that night.

  I never got the chance to tell him why I stopped showing up all of a sudden.

  SIX YEARS AFTER I’D BEEN ARRESTED FOR THE CRAPSER MURDER—with insufficient evidence to bring charges—a former girlfriend caught wind of a new warrant out for the same case. When I heard, I was visiting an old New York City friend, Leon’s mentor, Allen Thomas. I couldn’t believe that this old case was coming back to haunt me now, just when everything in my life was going right. I called the Poughkeepsie police, pretending to be some detective working a case in New York City.

  “You looking for Bozella?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we got a warrant for murder out on him,” came the answer.

  I hung up, stunned but furious. I waited a few minutes and called back, identifying myself by name this time.

  “Yo, you got a warrant out for me?” I demanded.

  The cop on the other end said something about a misdemeanor, but I called his bluff.

  “That’s bullshit! I just called and they confirmed there’s a murder warrant,” I said. “I got nothing to hide. I’m coming up there tomorrow and turning myself in.”

  They picked me up and cuffed me while I was walking to the police station. I figured it would be a rerun of my 1977 arrest, and I’d be released soon enough. Prosecutors hadn’t had any evidence to charge me the first time, and I knew there was no way that could have changed, since I’d never been inside Emma Crapser’s apartment and had never laid a hand on her. I was dumbfounded when an indictment came down for second-degree murder. I pleaded “not guilty”
at my arraignment and began reviewing the case with my court-appointed defense lawyer, Mickey Steiman, and his colleague, David Steinberg. Mickey was maybe a decade older than I was, with a ’fro to rival my own and a commitment to seeing justice served, though neither of us could have predicted it would be so sorely tested when he agreed to represent me. Mickey and David studied every document the prosecution turned over and conducted their own investigation. They felt confident that no jury would convict me. The entire case against me was built around the finger-pointing of two hard-core juvenile offenders whose testimony against me had come with get-out-of-jail-free deals so sweet even their own attorneys could scarcely believe it. The stories Wayne Moseley and Lamar Smith told were inconsistent and confusing at best, and flat-out contradictory at worst. Mickey thought it read like the script of a bad B movie with a cast full of shifty liars, thugs, and lowlifes. He was smelling a slam-dunk victory for us in the courtroom.

  “There’s not one piece of evidence tying you to this,” he stressed.

  The trial began on November 23, 1983, the day before Thanksgiving. The prosecutor, William O’Neill, was the same assistant district attorney for Dutchess County who had tried and failed to charge me for the crime as a teenager. His star witnesses were people I knew barely or not at all. Seven men and five women, none of them black, were selected as a jury of my peers. They learned the gruesome details about what had happened to Emma Crapser at the same time I did, as my trial unfolded.

  Ms. Crapser lived alone in the ground-floor apartment of a small brick house at 15 North Hamilton Street in Poughkeepsie, in a neighborhood that had gotten rougher over the years as downtown Poughkeepsie started to die out. Her great-niece, Evelyn Petterson, sold ladies’ undergarments in one of the small businesses still struggling to survive—The Shape Shop was visible from Emma’s back stoop, and Evelyn checked on her elderly aunt every day. Ms. Crapser lived a quiet life, renting the upstairs apartment out to a couple to supplement her monthly Social Security check. Her four-room apartment was cluttered with stacks of old newspapers and magazines, and the tchotchkes of a long lifetime. There was a Goodyear Tire store on one side of her house, and another house converted to apartments on the other side. Some of the black teenagers and young men seen going in and out of the neighboring house were said to belong to a group of Five Percenters. Five Percenters were a breakaway faction of the Nation of Islam—younger guys mostly from the street, who believed that only five percent of the earth’s inhabitants knew the truth and were capable of enlightening the rest. The Five Percenters considered themselves God, and white people oppressors. Across the street from Ms. Crapser’s house was a parking lot and an ambulance service. The garage door was open on the night of June 14, 1977.

  Julia Emma Crapser was ninety-two years old, frail with poor hearing, but she was still sharp enough to know something wasn’t quite right about the plumber who had shown up unexpectedly at her door earlier in the day and talked his way inside, saying he had been sent to check a leak that she knew nothing about, and he certainly hadn’t reported to the service she regularly used. After he left, claiming he needed to get a stepladder and would be back later, the old woman called her plumbing company and discovered that they hadn’t dispatched anyone. “I had another scare today,” she told her niece, recounting the odd encounter with the man pretending to be a plumber. Ms. Crapser had been burglarized before, and she was worried. That evening, a couple picked her up for their usual Tuesday night bingo game at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. Emma Crapser won ten dollars. The friends dropped her off around eleven o’clock and the husband walked her to the front door. Ms. Crapser unlocked her apartment door, then turned back in the vestibule to wave good-bye.

  Evelyn Petterson found the apartment door unlocked the next morning when she dropped by on the way to open her shop, and a quick glance inside told her the place had been ransacked. She could see her elderly aunt’s favorite rocking chair tipped on its side. She backed out and called the police. Emma Crapser was dead on her kitchen floor. Her arms and legs were bound with telephone cords and the cord from her own hearing aid, and several pieces of cloth had been shoved into her mouth, including an eighty-eight-inch length of crocheted lace. What looked like a chisel was sticking out of her mouth—the killer had apparently used that to stuff all the cloth down her throat. A T-shirt and lady’s slip were wrapped around her head and knotted. The coroner concluded that she had been suffocated to death, and also brutally beaten. Several ribs were broken, and there was damage to her liver, as well. She was still wearing her winter coat, and her watch had stopped at 10:58 P.M., leading investigators to believe that the killer or killers were already inside her apartment when she came home from bingo and interrupted a burglary. The upstairs neighbors had been home that evening and told police they hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual.

  The only time in my life I ever saw Emma Crapser was when the prosecutor brought out the crime-scene photos he had of her trussed, gagged, and battered body and slapped them on the table in front of me during the trial. Tears of disbelief and outrage filled my eyes.

  “Man, I never done nothing like that!” I remember shouting. “I ain’t do no shit like this. You got to be kidding me! You got the wrong man! You’re outta your damn mind!”

  Someone—I was too upset even to know whether it was the judge, the bailiff, or my own attorney—told me to calm down, and I swallowed back my tears and horror. What happened to that poor woman was barbaric, the work of a psychopath. That I was being falsely accused of doing it was an anguish I couldn’t bear, like a public declaration that I was a vicious animal. Assistant District Attorney William O’Neill looked at me, with pure contempt in his eye. We would face each other in court time after time in the years to come, and he never once brought those pictures out again.

  My name, it turned out, wasn’t the first, second, or third that came up in connection with the Crapser murder. Right after the murder, police also interrogated a kid named Lamar Smith and his pals Wayne Moseley and Elbert “Sweet Pea” Pittman. They all had records, and a detective reported having spotted Smith, his brother, Stanley, Pittman, and an unidentified person near the Crapser residence about four hours before the murder. Police and prosecutor’s records showed they all offered up alibis and denied knowing anything about the crime when they were first questioned. Four days after detectives interviewed him, though, Lamar was busted on a larceny charge and, with some prodding from his interrogators, changed his story about the night of Ms. Crapser’s murder. Now he claimed that he had seen me and Wayne Moseley jimmying the front door of 15 North Hamilton that night while Pittman served as lookout. Moseley and his mother both swore before the grand jury that Wayne, then fifteen, was home that night watching TV on his mother’s bed. That was when the grand jury decided there wasn’t enough evidence to return an indictment against me—or anyone else.

  Fast-forward to 1983. Wayne Moseley and Lamar Smith were both in prison on felony convictions. Detectives paid Wayne and Lamar a visit and offered them sweetheart deals to get out of jail immediately with blanket immunity from prosecution if they cooperated in the still-unsolved Crapser murder—specifically, my suspected role in it. Lamar Smith changed his story: he claimed I had talked about wanting to boost a stereo while hanging out in Mansion Square Park earlier that evening with him, Wayne, and some other dudes. According to Lamar’s fairy tale, he had followed Wayne and me to North Hamilton Street, then watched from behind the ticket booth in the municipal parking lot across the street with his brother Stanley while Wayne and I supposedly broke in the front door. Lamar told investigators a car had pulled up, and an old lady got out and went inside, which could hardly be considered proof he was there, since it had been widely reported that Emma Crapser was murdered as she returned home from her bingo game that night. Lamar claimed he saw me and Wayne come running out the front door shortly after the old lady went inside. Wayne Moseley was also offered immunity and instant freedom in exchange for implicating me. He acc
epted the deal and immediately changed the story he originally gave to police back in 1977, about being home with his mother and knowing nothing about the murder (an account his mother had echoed under oath). Now Wayne was claiming I had kicked Ms. Crapser’s legs out from under her and killed her when she walked in on the two of us while we were burglarizing her apartment. Wayne claimed he had run out the front door first and I had followed, then confronted Sweet Pea and yelled at him for screwing up as the lookout. All this commotion supposedly was going on right there in the street at eleven o’clock on a summer night, in view of the open bay of the ambulance service and across from a public parking lot. And the best witnesses the prosecution can produce are a couple of street thugs whose recollections change according to the size of the carrot dangling in front of them?