Stand Tall

by Dewey Bozella

  The Sing Sing team would fight amateur clubs and other prisons, and I became famous as the guy no one could knock out. It earned me a new kind of respect, one that came out of being admired instead of just feared. I became the light-heavyweight champion of Sing Sing and was awarded a championship belt crafted by a fellow inmate. The sense of pride that came from achieving something and having that achievement acknowledged was new to me. I thought about all the opportunities I had squandered when I was younger—all the different programs and education available to me when I was in the foster-care system—and I knew that even though I was innocent, I was still partly responsible for my circumstances. I was the one who chose the street over the classroom, who surrounded myself with sketchy criminals instead of righteous men. Self-pity wasn’t my tune, but I did feel sorry as hell for the boy I had been, for that unwanted kid who had taken a foolish turn down the wrong path.

  NOT LONG AFTER MY FIGHT WITH LOU DEL VALLE, a CO came to tell me I had a phone call. Mickey and David were on the line with news so good I thought they were bullshitting me: one of their numerous legal maneuvers to try to get my guilty verdict thrown out had finally worked. They had gotten hold of notes my prosecutors had made during jury selection. Out of a pool of 275 potential jurors, there had been only six black people. One had been excused, and the prosecution systematically dismissed the other five. A judge agreed that I had been denied my constitutional right to a jury of my peers, and seven years into my sentence, a new trial was ordered in November 1990.

  Before we went to court, though, I had some unresolved business to tend to in the cellblocks. Donald and Anthony Wise had been transferred to Sing Sing to serve their time for the slaying of Mary King, the eighty-year-old woman who had been beaten and suffocated with cloth stuffed down her throat just like Emma Crapser. My defense team planned to bring up the striking similarities between the King attacks and the one on Ms. Crapser, and to point out again that the FBI had concluded that the fingerprint found on the inside of Ms. Crapser’s broken bathroom window belonged to Donald Wise. Likewise, the description of the bogus plumber who had been inside Ms. Crapser’s apartment earlier that afternoon matched Donald Wise. There was not one shred of evidence placing me in that apartment or linking me to the murder.

  Even though I was doing time for a murder that evidence strongly suggested Donald Wise had committed, I bore no particular grudge against him. Don’t get me wrong: he was one foul cat. But he wasn’t the one who had concocted the big lie and then borne false witness against me in court. I held Wayne Moseley and Lamar and Stanley Smith accountable for that. And more than anyone, I blamed the Poughkeepsie police and the Dutchess County prosecutors for the injustice done to me. That said, if I didn’t handle this delicate situation with Wise just right, I could end up with a prison label far worse than murderer: snitch. I had to let Wise know what was going down.

  One day out in the yard, I had a brother watch my back while I approached the Wises. They were, as usual, together. I’d heard that Donald had become Buddhist, while Anthony was Muslim. We saw each other every day but had never spoken.

  “Yo, man, you know who I am?” I asked now.

  Donald nodded once. I could sense him tighten just slightly, getting on point for whatever came next. I would have done the same.

  “I just want you to know, my case been overturned.”

  Both of them looked at me, waiting. I held their stare and kept talking. I knew it was critical that I come across as neutral but direct. They didn’t bother asking what you would think an innocent man would—why my business had anything to do with them—because we all knew why.

  “I just want you to know, I got a new trial and your name is likely to come up,” I went on. “Nobody’s looking to jam you up here, but I gotta do what I gotta do. I’m not gonna sit up there and point a finger, so don’t go around talking about me like a dog, like I did something to you, like a snitch. I don’t want any problems.”

  They considered this for a moment, then Donald spoke up.

  “Naw, ain’t no problems,” he said.

  I tried not to get my hopes up too much about the second trial. One jury already had convicted me on the word of a couple of juvenile delinquents who were persuaded to testify in exchange for their own freedom. Would a second jury see through the bald-faced lies? Mickey and David felt confident that an acquittal was within grasp. Besides the similar attacks on three elderly white sisters within a few months and less than a mile from the Crapser murder—and the trail of evidence and witnesses that led straight to Donald Wise—my lawyers were also itching to kick giant holes in the credibility of prosecutor William O’Neill’s star witnesses. None of them had so much as mentioned me when they were questioned as possible suspects right after the murder, but once O’Neill’s team pointed the finger at me and then offered them sweetheart deals on jail terms they were already serving, it was game on, and the lies got so tangled up even the liars couldn’t keep them straight. Lamar Smith’s own brother, Stanley, was the only one to feel even a tinge of remorse about what he had done to me, but his perjury confession two days after my conviction didn’t undo the damage.

  Now Stanley was willing to admit in open court that he had lied on the stand during my first trial when he claimed to have been watching from across the street with Lamar while Wayne Moseley and I supposedly broke into the Crapser house on North Hamilton. No one was offering Stanley immunity for betraying his brother; he was running the very real risk of being charged with perjury or obstruction of justice.

  To say the police investigation into Emma Crapser’s murder was shoddy would be generous. It was a cartoon. All they did was lazily round up “the usual suspects” from the street—Lamar Smith being one of the first—and then fixate on their scapegoat—me—without any regard for evidence, procedure, or simple logic. They indicted me before they bothered to run the fingerprint evidence on the inside of the victim’s bathroom window. And they conveniently destroyed or lost taped interviews we could have used in my defense, like those with Lamar Smith originally denying any knowledge of the crime and providing a verified alibi that he was at McDonald’s when it happened. Wayne Moseley and Lamar Smith testified at this second trial, their convoluted lies losing and adding various embellishments from the first time they had spun their tale. At one point during a recess, I was left in the courtroom with Wayne Moseley. I stood up and glared at him. He refused to look at me.

  Donald and Anthony Wise were both subpoenaed for the 1990 trial and both took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. It had been thirteen years since the murder itself, and many of the people who originally gave statements to police—neighbors, street people—had either moved away or passed away. Anthony’s girlfriend at the time, Madeline Dixon (later Madeline South), had died. Despite all the obstacles and frustrations, though, the second trial went so well that we were in an upbeat mood once the jury went to deliberate. Even the judge seemed to think it was a slam dunk in my favor, remarking out loud that the jurors would probably return with a not-guilty verdict within an hour. She questioned why prosecutors had even bothered to bring the case to trial.

  Hearing that, O’Neill quickly left the room, then shortly after that summoned Mickey Steiman. District Attorney William Grady was ready to play let’s make a deal. An acquittal would be a huge black eye for the D.A. in such a sensational case and would also move one more murder into the “unsolved” column during his term in office. Reopening and reinvestigating a case thirteen years after the crime occurred would no doubt cost the county a good chunk of money and manpower. It looked to us like Grady wanted to save face and avoid the headache of trying to solve a cold case.

  “Plead guilty to manslaughter in exchange for a sentence that would make you immediately eligible for parole,” Mickey came back and relayed to me.

  I shot it down as soon as I heard the word guilty.

  “I didn’t kill anyone, and I’m not going to say I did,” I said.

  Mickey carri
ed the news back to the prosecutors, who instantly upped the ante. Mickey approached me again with the newest offer.

  “Guilty to manslaughter and immediate freedom.”

  Same answer, I told him. It wasn’t even tempting to me. I’d been in prison for nearly seven years already and dreamed every single damn day of getting out and becoming a pro boxer, of pursuing my education, of getting married, of raising a family of my own, of having a real life. I would have given just about anything for all that.

  Except my name.

  I didn’t care if it took twenty minutes or twenty years or my lifetime: my name had to be cleared.

  This go-around, Grady indicated he would consider something called an Alford-Serrano plea. An Alford plea is one where you don’t admit doing the crime, but you agree that the prosecution has enough evidence to establish guilt. Before I could wrap my head around the Alford option, though, the bailiff interrupted us.

  The verdict was in.

  Once again, I watched a jury file back into the courtroom without meeting my eyes. I knew what that meant.

  “In the matter of the People of the State of New York against Dewey R. Bozella, we find the defendant guilty . . .”

  This time, my legs stayed strong, not buckling beneath me, and I held back the bitter tears.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “You can’t be serious!”

  When I stood later before the judge, waiting to be sentenced, I asked to read a four-page statement I had written out by hand in my prison cell.

  “I stand here strong with the faith of God that one day I will be free,” I read. “I recognize that you may have my physical body, but you don’t have my mind and spirit.”

  I thanked Mickey and David for fighting for me and begged them not to feel bad about losing in court, because “people in our day and time are deaf and don’t want to listen to the truth, and dumb to their own blindness, and don’t know what is going on, or [sic] too damn scared to stand up for what’s right.”

  I went on for some time about the history of racism in America, and how it demanded now that a black man be punished for a white woman’s murder regardless of the facts. I offered sarcastic regards to William O’Neill, “for he has to be a hell of a man to go to sleep with a smile on his face and then wake up in the morning and say, ‘Job well done,’ on taking away my life twice.

  “If there was ever a case in the County of Dutchess that showed inconsistency, lies, and reasonable doubt, this is it. So, if you wonder how I feel? I feel let down and destroyed by my own human race.”

  I recounted how I had used my time in prison to box, participate in various workshops, earn my paralegal certificate, and pursue a college degree. I was even learning how to speak Japanese and read Arabic.

  “The hurt and letdowns of life have just made me stronger,” I told the court.

  “I know there is no justice when I have to pay the price for someone else’s crime,” I concluded. “As a man, I’ll make the best of the worst because I refuse to be weak and wicked and become a coward to that which I know is right.”

  The judge sentenced me, once again, to twenty years to life.

  “I didn’t do Miss Crapser’s murder, and you know I didn’t do Miss Crapser’s murder,” I protested. I knew my words didn’t matter, but it felt important to say them, to keep saying them, until my truth was acknowledged.

  “I wasn’t there, sir,” the judge responded as the deputies escorted me from the courtroom. “That’s all. Thank you.”

  But it wasn’t all. It couldn’t be.

  6

  WHO DOESN’T DREAM OF ESCAPE? When your mind is the only part of you still free, it tugs at you now and then, urging you to find a way to follow it out of this place, out of your imprisonment. I heard of a couple guys who tried to break out of Sing Sing while I was there, but the details were always hazy on the cellblock grapevine, and the bottom line is that no one succeeded. They don’t call it maximum security for a joke. I remember one dude supposedly slipped out through a window down at the school building and made it all the way past the fences, using coats or a blanket to cover the barbed wire. He got caught at the old railroad tracks that cut through the far edge of the prison grounds. On the rare occasion when I would let my daydreams drift to escape, the practical side of my nature would jump right in and push back hard, the voice of reason haranguing me back to cruel reality: Where you going to go if you make it past the razor wire and the dogs and guards? the voice demanded. How you going to find money, food, a roof over your head? You got nobody.

  My loneliness was a chronic ache, a muffled drumbeat in the background of my life. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel the pain; I was just used to it. If you wanted to knock me down with an emotional blow, it took a sucker punch to get the job done. The first one came back when I’d been locked up for a year. A CO had come to my cell one day just before lunch, after I’d finished working out.

  “They want you down at the chapel,” he said.

  “Why?” I wondered.

  “The reverend would like to see you.”

  “The reverend wants to see me? What for?” I was starting to feel the dread build inside me. I wasn’t involved in any kind of religious activity then, and I didn’t even know the chaplain. A summons like this could not mean anything good. It was a long walk to the chapel, down the A block and across two football fields. I tried to hope it wasn’t news of a death awaiting me when I arrived at the reverend’s office. He greeted me kindly.

  “How you doing?”

  “Okay,” I answered tentatively. I tried to brace myself for whatever was coming. He told me to sit down, then got straight to the point.

  “Your brother Tony, he passed away. Would you like to make a phone call?”

  I called Allen Thomas, and Leon answered.

  “Tony was shot in the head,” Leon told me. Tony had been in his car. Police were saying it was a drug deal gone bad, but I knew instantly that Tony was collateral damage. He was nowhere near like me. Tony was a Good Samaritan, not a street thug. He worked with street kids, and more than likely had been trying to save some lost soul when he stuck his nose in the wrong business. Leon said the cops had arrested the guys who did it.

  “Don’t tell me any names,” I warned Leon. I had already let Stanley Jackson slide for killing our brother Ernie, and I knew I couldn’t do it twice. If Tony’s killers got convicted and ended up at Sing Sing, as they easily could have, I couldn’t afford to know.

  After we hung up, the chaplain asked if I wanted to attend Tony’s funeral, and he promised to make arrangements for me to go. I took the long walk back to my cell. I remember sitting down on my bed and being very calm—before I went berserk. Two brothers murdered. I tore my fucking cell up. I threw the locker across the room, turned the bed upside down. I let all the rage inside me out. A couple of COs came around. “You all right?” one asked. “You all right?”

  “I’m going to be all right, man, just leave me the fuck alone.”

  They left without ordering me to clean up my cell or writing me up for the outburst. Inmates started coming back from lunch and paused when they passed my trashed cell. “You all right?” people kept asking.

  “Yeah, just need some time alone.”

  I spent from noon until late that night just sitting there, staring at the floor. Finally I asked for a mop and broom to clean out my cell before going to bed. If I dreamed, my dreams all escaped before dawn.

  When the day of Tony’s funeral arrived, two officers came to escort me to the service in Poughkeepsie. “Listen, man, when we get to the funeral, promise not to try to escape,” they said.

  “Yeah, I promise.”

  I was allowed to say good-bye to my brother unshackled. The room was packed, and my eyes scanned the crowd, not finding the faces I sought. Where were my brothers Michael and Albert? And Leon? The only sibling I spotted was my sister Lisa, whom I barely knew. When the service ended, the officers told me I could have a few minutes with my family. Lisa and I
hugged. Then it was time to go back to Sing Sing. Prisoners weren’t allowed to attend burials—being out in the wide open like that was considered too great an escape risk.

  SOME TIME AFTER MY SECOND TRIAL, Leon came up from the city to see me and I hardly recognized the strapping man in front of me.

  “Yo, man, I’m boxing now,” Leon had boasted. “I went to the Golden Gloves. I lost but I had my first fight, and I’m feeling good.” I thought the pride swelling my heart would bust my chest wide open. Leon had turned out okay, thanks to his surrogate father, Allen Thomas. He looked good and was making something of his life.

  My own boxing days had come to a frustrating end after my recent trial, which had kept me locked up in Poughkeepsie and away from Sing Sing for about year. When I got processed back to Sing Sing, I discovered that budget cuts and the imminent retirement of Bob Jackson had caused the boxing program to wither away. A few of us from the old team tried to get it going again with another sergeant and a promise of help from world welterweight champ Buddy McGirt, but it just didn’t come through.

  Leon and Allen Thomas came to visit again in 1994. I could tell by looking at my little brother that something was wrong. The robust young boxer I had seen before was gone, replaced by a man who looked too tired and empty to be Leon.

  “Don’t tell me you’re dying,” I blurted out before he could say a word. “Man, please don’t tell me it’s HIV and AIDS.” I had never talked to Leon about his sexuality and it didn’t matter to me. But while working as a porter in the hospital I had seen the suffering that victims of this cruel disease endured; I was the guy who packed up the clothes of the dead in the basement. This was before there was anything doctors could do to slow the disease down or give a patient any hope of surviving. Now Leon nodded his head, and Allen Thomas started to cry.