Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  I was indicted for the murder. Elbert Pittman was indicted for burglary, but the statute of limitations had run out, and he wasn’t charged. Wayne and Lamar would get their freedom once they testified in court against me.

  What confounded me then and still does to this day is that I barely knew these guys—I’d only been in Poughkeepsie a few months back then in 1977, and they weren’t my friends or, as far as I knew, my enemies. But they were happy as hell to railroad me and tell whatever lies investigators wanted to hear to shave a few years off their sentences. Didn’t matter to them whether an innocent man died in prison or not.

  Investigators had bagged three hundred to four hundred pieces of evidence from Ms. Crapser’s apartment, plus some fingerprints and palm prints. The items they catalogued included a flashlight, a chisel, a pocketbook, a pair of women’s shoes, a bankbook, white cord, a bottle, a tin can, a pair of cutting pliers, and a window frame with glass, taken from the bathroom. A thumbprint had been found on the inside of that window. The fingerprint evidence was among thirty-four items sent to the FBI; forensic analysts were asked to compare the prints to mine, Lamar Smith’s, Wayne Moseley’s, and Elbert Pittman’s.

  There were no matches.

  The only thing tying me to the murder was the inconsistent testimony of Wayne Moseley, Lamar Smith, and Lamar’s brother Stanley, who claimed that he and Lamar had seen me in Mansion Square Park and had followed me to North Hamilton, where they supposedly stood across the street and watched me messing with the door at number 15 just before eleven o’clock the night of Emma Crapser’s murder. Stanley was crucial to the prosecution, my attorneys explained to me, because you need a second witness to back up any story provided by a criminal getting a deal in exchange for their testimony. Stanley’s account made his brother’s story admissible in court, and Lamar, of course, needed to testify to seal his deal with the prosecutor.

  I had no alibi witnesses to offer the jury. My brother Tony had spent the night of June 14 at his girlfriend’s, so he hadn’t heard me come in. I didn’t even know the name of the kid whose bike I rode home that night, and I never saw him again.

  Nonetheless, Mickey and David felt certain that I would be acquitted: How could the jury not have reasonable doubt? No physical evidence, dubious eyewitnesses who had changed their stories to get favorable treatment from the prosecutor’s office on separate convictions, and a motive that sounded lame from the get-go. I had been known to lift a stereo or two during my street days, and I can tell you right now that a ninety-two-year-old woman with a hearing aid is not someone you think of targeting if you’re looking for a boom box to fence.

  What the jury didn’t hear was that two young brothers with a history of violence had committed a similarly gruesome murder just months after the Crapser slaying, and only a few blocks away. Donald and Anthony Wise had confessed and were in prison when I was arrested and put on trial for a crime that matched their pattern to a T.

  The Wises had been arrested in February 1978 for the murder of eighty-year-old Mary King during a burglary at the home she shared with her two sisters, who both survived the attack. Mrs. King was bound and gagged in similar grisly fashion as Emma Crapser had been eight months earlier, and their bodies were found in a similar position. The brothers were serving twenty-five years to life, each. Just before I went on trial—six years after Ms. Crapser was slain—the FBI finally compared the thumbprint on the inside of her bathroom window to the prints of convicted murderer Donald Wise.

  They matched.

  During my trial, Prosecutor William O’Neill argued that it proved nothing, that Wise could have been in Emma Crapser’s apartment at any time, for any reason. He had a rap sheet for burglary. Besides, detectives had concluded the bathroom window was too small to be a likely point of entry or escape—a conclusion that overlooked how small Donald Wise was. O’Neill had also attacked the damning testimony by Madeline Dixon, Anthony Wise’s girlfriend and the mother of his child. Madeline had told police that Anthony and Donald had walked her past the Crapser house a couple of weeks after the murder and told her that Donald had done a “movie” there—street slang for hurting someone—during a burglary. She recalled the Wise brothers also showed her a big brown leather purse filled with old coins and jewelry, which purportedly belonged to Emma Crapser. The jewelry and coins had later been sold or pawned, the girlfriend testified.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER MY 1983 TRIAL BEGAN, the jury came back with its verdict on a Saturday afternoon. Some of the jurors were crying as they walked back into the courtroom, and none of them would look at me.

  I was found guilty of murder in the second degree. The jurors were polled one by one to confirm that this was their verdict, and the reality hit me when I heard the twelfth yes.

  “I didn’t do no murder. I didn’t commit no murder, man!” I shouted. “I tell you, I didn’t commit no murder, man! What the fuck is going on? I didn’t do no murder. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ!”

  The judge ordered the deputies standing by to remove me from the courtroom, but I kept hollering as they hustled me out.

  “I didn’t do no fucking murder. I didn’t do no murder, man, I didn’t kill no woman. God, I didn’t commit no murder, didn’t do it.”

  William O’Neill got into the elevator with me and the officers taking me away to jail. I looked at him with tears still streaming out of my eyes.

  “You know I didn’t do it,” I said. “How can you live with yourself?”

  The prosecutor bowed his head without saying a word. He couldn’t look at me. The doors to the elevator opened, and I didn’t see him again until my next trial.

  TWO DAYS AFTER MY CONVICTION, a distraught Stanley Smith raced to the courthouse and recanted his testimony, not even asking for immunity for perjuring himself before the grand jury and on the witness stand during the trial. Stanley said he and Lamar had never seen me in the park that day, and they hadn’t been on North Hamilton Street the night of the murder. They never witnessed me jiggling the lock on that front door or running out of the building afterward. He said his brother had pressured him to corroborate his story just so Lamar could get the promised deal and walk out of prison immediately, instead of serving out the three years left on his sentence. He would do anything for his brother, he apologized.

  Stanley’s admission came too late. The judge refused to overturn my conviction or order a new trial.

  4

  I REMEMBER ONE PERFECT DAY. It was the day I turned thirty-two. I already had spent eight birthdays behind bars, and though I didn’t know it at the time, I would spend eighteen more. But the beauty of April 20, 1991, was forgetting that, all of that, for one single, blissful day.

  Late April is when springtime peaks in the Hudson River Valley, like the high note in a favorite song. You get this soft patch of weather between the bone-cold winter and muggy hot summer, a perfect mix of breezy and warm, where you just want to turn your face to the sun and let your thoughts slip away like a kite cut free. I woke up feeling good, the kind of good that feels settled in for the day, so you know you’ll be able to hold on to it for a while. After breakfast, I went out to the yard, headed for my usual workout. With boxing, you’re always building on what you’ve got, pushing for better footwork, stronger hooks, more stamina. I was disciplined about my training, but on this particular day, I allowed myself the small luxury of getting distracted. On the way to the weights, something out of the ordinary caught my eye on the ground ahead. From a distance, I could tell that it was yellow, but what it was, I couldn’t make out. I decided to investigate. When I was a few steps away, I laughed when I recognized the unfamiliar sight.

  It was a flower.

  I stooped down and plucked it, decided it was mine, a little birthday present blossoming in the hard dirt of a prison yard. I wandered over to the handball court and lay down on the warm concrete, using my workout clothes for a pillow. I put the yellow flower in my lap and closed my eyes, enjoying the sunshine. I heard footsteps and heard a familiar voi
ce, my man Cisco.

  “Yo, man, happy birthday,” he greeted me. I’d forgotten mentioning it to him and felt gratified that he had remembered.

  Pretty soon, the other guys I usually worked out with came looking for me.

  Yo, man, what you doing? Why aren’t you working out?

  “It’s my birthday,” I announced, again and again.

  Happy birthday. Happy birthday, man. Yo, happy birthday.

  One of the Carribean dudes who ran a little carryout restaurant from his cell told me to drop by later for a meal.

  Back on the gallery, my run of good luck continued when I saw that the CO on duty was one of the friendlier, more laid-back officers who knew I wasn’t a troublemaker and sometimes cut me some slack. It was the other cellblock’s day for the movies, not mine, but I asked if I could go, anyway, and he gave me the nod. I grabbed a shower and put on my dress shirt and best pair of state-issued green pants before heading to the chapel, which doubled as the Sing Sing Cineplex. It was always funny, in a twisted-up kind of way, to sit there watching some movie knowing that whatever bad thing happened on-screen—bank heist, shooting, a car chase—a fair number of the guys sitting with you in the audience had probably done worse. People always had opinions afterward about how something really would have gone down, or what a bad guy should’ve done to avoid getting caught. As if they were experts on that subject.

  During rec, a group of Muslims I knew beckoned me over, and their leader surprised me with a yellow cake he had baked for me in the mess hall. They all sang “Happy Birthday,” and we spent the rest of our time outside eating and talking and laughing as if we were picnicking in a park instead of a prison yard. Back inside, I went to claim my free birthday dinner from the friend who’d offered to cook for me. He greeted me with a big helping of canned jack mackerel with rice and yams. I took it back to my cell and sat listening to music on my little portable stereo while I ate my fill. Everybody had made my day good. I had celebrated, and I felt proud of myself for making the best of the worst. The prison sounds of night faded in the background, becoming a white-noise lullaby of keys jangling, cell doors shutting, men’s voices rising and falling.

  On my thirty-second birthday, I went to sleep happy.

  5

  THE BOXING RING WAS IN THE ABANDONED DEATH HOUSE, right over where the electric chair used to be. You could still see the hole in the ground where they had taken it out, but it didn’t bother me one bit. We had staked our claim, and we were going to turn this notorious room into our refuge, a sweat-equity workshop for rebuilding ruined lives.

  The man behind this vision was Sergeant Bob Jackson—a ruddy-faced CO who trained boxing champs on the outside first at the old Gramercy Gym and then at the famed Gleason’s in Brooklyn. In 1985, word started making its way around the cellblocks that Jackson had permission from the superintendent to form a prison boxing team. At first, the other COs balked, protesting that it would just make aggressive men even more dangerous and give them lessons, no less, in how to better overpower prison staff. But Jackson was adamant and used the respect he’d built over his twenty-year career in the prison system to persuade the naysayers, arguing that the focus and self-discipline the sport demanded would make his boxers the best-behaved inmates in Sing Sing. I was one of the first ones in line to sign up. I went down to the first floor of the prison hospital, where Jackson was interviewing candidates, and tried to make my case. I told him about my brief time with Floyd Patterson, and how I’d stuck to my workout routine since getting locked up.

  “How much time you got?” he wanted to know.

  “I got twenty years to life.”

  Jackson was shrewd enough to know what kind of crime likely went with that kind of sentence. I could feel his pale blue eyes sizing me up. I could feel my heart racing. I wanted this. I needed this.

  “Why should I put you on?” he asked.

  “Listen, you put me on this boxing team, you don’t have to worry about me,” I pleaded. “Just give me a chance.”

  “If you’re on the team, you gotta stay out of trouble,” he warned me.

  I nodded. I was in.

  A dozen of us on the team were tasked with turning the old Death House into a gym. There was no roof on the old building, and it was now a crumbling ruin with deadwood, twisted metal, and other debris from its last incarnation as a vocational shop. The last of the 614 inmates executed at Sing Sing—more than at any other prison in the country—had been electrocuted on August 15, 1963. Sing Sing had housed some of the most notorious criminals in the world, people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Willie Sutton, Lucky Luciano, and members of Murder Inc., a Brooklyn gang responsible for at least twenty homicides. Some of us on the boxing team likely would have met the same gruesome fate if New York hadn’t abolished the death penalty.

  We’d gather in the yard to work out in the morning, then we were allowed to go through the gates to the adjoining field to continue our workout with Bob Jackson. Only afterward, in the afternoon, would we do our boxing—hitting the bags, jumping rope, sparring. Spider, Sun God, Whisper, Omar, Big Red and Big Black, Macho, and Salladin, the six-foot-five welterweight, and I spent a whole year just training.

  Boxing became my peace, my salvation, my pain reliever, and my strength. I used it to get rid of my anger, to purge all the hurt and pain and frustration boiling up inside me. Everybody who had been in my life before—my family, my lovers, my friends—was gone, either taken away or pushed away or run away or drifted away. I was by myself. I put on a good show of seeming tough, too cool to give a damn, but I felt lonely on the inside.

  Training was all about conditioning myself. I would run three or four miles every day. When I ran or hit the bag or did my jumping jacks, my five hundred sit-ups, or my military push-ups, I had to concentrate, focusing my mind on what I wanted my body to do. I had to command myself to do better, work harder, get stronger. I had to learn how to breathe right. You don’t prepare yourself for the punch, Jackson taught us, you prepare yourself for the fight.

  Sparring with my teammates, I ended up with a few black eyes and got dazed, but I never got knocked out. I’ve never been laid out on the floor.

  The first time I sparred with Spider, we were going at it real good when Spider got me with a hook that hit my nose and knocked it back into place. It’d been crooked since it was busted in street fights when I was a kid. “Thank you, man!” I said as I hopped out of the ring. It took two weeks for it to heal, but Spider did as fine a nose job as any plastic surgeon could’ve.

  When we weren’t conditioning our bodies, we were priming our minds. Bob Jackson would show us films of all the greats—Sugar Ray Robinson, Larry Holmes, Jack Dempsey. I tried to steal moves like the mean jab that made Héctor Comacho famous, or the fast dancing of lightweight Pernell Whitaker, who was so slippery his opponents could hardly land a blow. I even had ideas about creating my own signature moves.

  I pushed myself even harder on my calisthenics, the soreness in my muscles giving way to strength as I got bigger and bigger. I denied myself the junk food I usually snacked on—cheddar chips, cupcakes, candy bars, honeybuns. Jackson got us little extras, like orange juice and V8s. Sometimes I’d fast to help me tone up. I felt myself getting healthier. My eyes were sharper. My mind was clear and calm. My rope work and footwork improved until finally I felt ready to make my debut.

  “Okay, everybody gets to see what I been working on,” I announced one day. Spider stepped into the ring with me and right away threw his killer jab. I stepped over and hit him with a body shot and cracked his ribs with the first punch.

  “Next,” I said.

  Every man on the team had his particular strength. Whisper, a middleweight, was known for his speed. Big Red was tough as nails, a heavyweight. There was Muhammad Aziz, a light-heavyweight pro with an 18-0 record, a stick-and-move fighter who used to spar with me. One of my trainers was Carlos, an inmate who had once been on the Cuban boxing team. In six months, he had me doing ten-punch combina
tions. My signature punch was from the southpaw stance, right hand to the left side of the body. I knew I did it right if I made a guy twitch or crumble to the floor or something ended up broken. That’s why I loved that punch. If you can’t take my right hand, that ain’t my fault, that’s your fault.

  In the ring, you have to hide pain. You learn how to conceal your hurt.

  Sparring was tough. That kid who could never stand to lose a basketball or baseball game burst out from inside me, and I quickly got a reputation for being fiercely competitive. I made some enemies, but I could tell Bob Jackson was impressed. That mattered more.

  One guy wanted to fight me because I stung him in a sparring session, and I could tell he wanted to turn it into a war.

  “Hey, man, you wanna go there, I’ll go there,” I told him. I wasn’t one to start anything, but I wasn’t about to back down, either. We went at it. He let one go on me, I let one go on him. We went four and a half rounds before Bob Jackson stopped us in the middle of it. He could see we were starting to get real serious.