Admit The Horse

by P. G. Abeles

  When a supporter wanted to make a contribution to a political candidate, the campaign was required by law to verify their name, address, and the name of their employer. For this reason, most political candidates utilized the services of a company in Arlington, Virginia, who had developed a software program called an “address verification system” or AVS. As soon as the contribution was logged, the candidate’s system ran a check with the credit card company to verify that the address given was correct. This cost the campaign exactly twelve cents. If the address on the credit card matched the name and address on the donation form, the money was accepted. If not, it was rejected and flagged for someone in the campaign to follow up on. The campaign would then send a letter to the donor using the address provided and request more documentation. Under FEC rules, the campaign was required to make publicly available the name of anyone who had contributed $200 or more. Anything less than that was exempt from record-keeping requirements.

  The easiest way to scam the system—whether you were a U.S. citizen or not—was to use pre-paid credit cards to make repeated contributions below the $200 reporting limit. Since using a pre-paid card meant that the systems had no way to match the donor’s name to an address, the data processing/AVS systems utilized by the campaigns of McCracken and the Republican Joe Malloy immediately rejected these contributions. Not the Okono campaign. For whatever reason, the Okono campaign, despite repeated notices, and lots of hand wringing by the FEC, had declined to put a safety net in place to track these contributions. According to the report, two brothers from Palestine had apparently contributed more than $24,321 over six months by this mechanism.

  In previous election cycles, these violations had been easily tracked and remedied before they had spun out of control. However, with Okono’s emphasis on an internet strategy for raising and collecting previously unheard of sums—the FEC was literally months behind in tracking suspicious contributions—and those were just the itemized contributions. They had no handle at all on the majority of the contributions the Okono campaign received, those under the $200 reporting limit.

  The Okono campaign claimed they were overwhelmed by the flood of contributions and could not police the system themselves—and their media supporters made sympathetic noises as they conveniently forgot, or forgot to report, that the campaign was legally obligated to do so. If a campaign couldn’t track the money, they were obligated not to accept it, until they could process it according to election law. And the Okono campaign curiously had no trouble processing the money into its bank accounts.

  Odd money amounts, or donations ending in odd cents–something like $42.89, for example—aroused suspicion because they suggested the very real possibility that the donation had been made in a foreign currency and then converted into dollars. For a candidate like Okono, who had made repeated calls to “limit the role of money in politics,” Lacey knew the information provided in the FEC printouts was explosive stuff. She called Connor on his cell.

  “Hey—I need your help. We need to get something to someone in the press.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Oglethorpe, Georgia

  FROM PLANTING TO HARVEST, it would take almost five months, an eternity for a Georgia farmer used to the promiscuous fertility of the state’s red soil. After much discussion and consideration, they’d planted Peruvian Runners—or simply ‘runner beans’ as the easiest to grow and the easiest to sell. The peanuts were planted after what (they hoped) was the last frost in late April. The first seedlings pushed through the soil in ten days. The plant that started to emerge, on which so many hopes now converged, was bushy and vigorous-looking with bright green oval leaves. In about forty days, yellow flowers appeared. Two months later the cylindrical green pegs that would become peanuts had formed and started to push themselves into the finely grained Georgia soil. If the soil remained at a consistent sixty-five to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, the shells and kernels inside would start to mature in the next month, about forty pods per plant.

  The croppers inspected their fields every day to make sure the plants were developing according to the diagrams the land agent for the county had provided Miss Amalia. They watched the fields like overanxious parents, breathing a sigh of relief as the broad green nyctinastic leaves closed as the sun went down, like sleepy children closing their eyes at bedtime. So many worried men came to the big house, slapping their denim overalls free of dust at the front step, nervously rolling rumpled hats between callused hands, desperate to reassure themselves by looking again at the pictures, that Miss Amalia took to leaving them spread out on the hall table in numbered order. Miriam was given the awesome responsibility of keeping the pictures in order and making sure none disappeared. At night, Miss Amaila would find her silently sitting in the big armchair by the door. “Go on home now, Miss Miriam,” she would say, giving her a few pennies. “Tell your parents you did a fine job today.” Miriam was happy to help. With the money she received from Miss Amalia, and the pennies she earned for collecting pecans, she could earn the 9¢ admission to the Douglass movie theater in Macon.

  Soon, there were signs that the nuts were starting to mature: changing color from a phosphorescent moony white to a warm reddish-brown. As if an alarm had sounded, everyone took to the fields. The children, the old people, no one waited to be told that every hand was needed. As Miss Amalia watched anxiously, the men worked down the rows, cutting the one and a half foot tall plants from their roots. The women followed, upending the root stalks, and exposing the goobers underneath to the drying sun. The county land agent had emphasized that once the harvest began, the most critical part of the process was to keep the peanuts away from the moist soil, as they were particularly susceptible to a lethal mold. So to ensure the soil was removed, the children followed last, sweeping the goobers with a stiff brush to remove the quickly baking soil from the drying nuts.

  They were lucky and the sun shone for four days. The crunchy outer membrane turned a soft sand color as it baked in the yellow sun. Without a thresher to separate the nuts from the plants, the croppers did it by hand, row by row. The goobers were then packed in large wagons to go to the shelling plant where they would be inspected and graded. Most farms then simply sold to whoever was buying, but Miss Amalia had never particularly believed in the benefit of leaving to chance what industry and intellect could secure for certain.

  In 1928, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a former dairyman for the Hershey Company decided to start a new candy company. When he sold his previous company in 1900 for the then unheard of price of $1 million dollars, it had made him a rich man. But Henry Burrett Reese was born to make candy. He loved to make chocolate, and he loved to eat peanut butter, and he was betting that most Americans would enjoy each flavor even more in combination. So, the H.B. Reese Candy Company was born, and within a few years was selling their chocolate and peanut butter ‘penny cups’ all over the United States. But all those penny cups required a lot of peanut butter, and all that peanut butter required an awful lot of peanuts (actually 540 peanuts to make 12 ounces of butter—to be exact).

  After what came to be known as the “Goober Nut Party,” Miss Amalia had written to the great man himself in her careful script and enquired if H. B. Reese Candy Company might be inclined to purchase one of the highest quality crops of peanuts in Georgia. As it turned out, they would, and they sent her a contract.

  Macon County sits on the “Fall Line”–the geomorphic contact point between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain, so called, transparently enough, because rivers flowing from Columbus to Augusta produce waterfalls. Less obvious was the fact that the Fall Line was the Mesozoic shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean. As such, it was one of the few places where the clay soil of the crystalline north combined with the sandy soil of the sedimentary south—creating a soil of almost perfect composition, rich in mineral deposits, fertile beyond belief— perfect for growing peanuts.

  Of course, Miss Amalia had no way of knowing what quality of peanuts her land might produce, b
ut she was a great believer in the power of positive thinking. She and her croppers needed the kind of break that Providence sometimes provides the righteously deserving or the white-knuckled desperate. Whatever the explanation, H.B. Reese Candy Company bought the Riverview peanuts and gave the croppers not only a fair price, but offered a contract for the following year. The peculiar upside-down plant had saved them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  February 2008

  Chicago, Illinois

  THE CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT was the second largest in the U.S.—responsible for the security of 2.8 million people. Its 15,000 employees were spread over twenty-five districts and five detective areas, each lead by a commander. Harrison belonged to BIS, or the Bureau of Investigative Services. All of them were under the control of the superintendent of police who in turn answered to the city council. It was the great irony of Chicago politics that the mayor—who had historically ruled the city like a feudal lord—actually held little power under the city’s corporate charter.

  Harrison had been assigned to Area 2 in the southern part of the city, known as Calumet, and a group called the Special Operations Section, or SOS. Area 2 had a nearly miraculous conviction rate and a bad reputation even then—it would eventually come out in the late 1990s that between 1971 and 1991, something like 200 suspects had been tortured to extract confessions. Internal affairs was ultimately able to document that at least 148 men—almost all of them African American—were consigned to death row as a result of confessions extracted by the “Midnight Crew from Area 2.”

  Because of the statute of limitations, the commander of the unit and the officers involved were not tried in criminal court, but many were facing civil cases estimated in the millions. Perhaps the worst part, or at least the part left untold, was that prosecutors had, for years, clearly ignored evidence that the suspects had been beaten. That part went untold, perhaps because the city’s current mayor was then the chief prosecutor. The city council had quietly approved a settlement for the victims—$19.8 million.

  When Harrison had first joined, the Special Operations Section was the most glamorous assignment in the force, but SOS’s incredible successes came at a higher price than most people knew. Rumors that dirty cops were cooperating with (and stealing from) drug dealers, and participating in home invasions and kidnappings were rampant in the unit for years. The cops on the take kept a watchful eye on their honest brethren—too many contradictory reports or requests for transfer were a quick way to die in a hail of friendly fire. Good cops close to their pensions stayed silent, younger cops followed their lead. Internal Affairs was finally tipped off to what was going on by the many court appearances the cops missed. ‘The Crew from Area 2’ were intentionally allowing criminals with whom they were in cahoots to go free on technicalities and lack of evidence.

  After allegations of widespread abuse within the department became public, the unit was disbanded. The good cops, like Harrison, transferred to other units. Special Ops units like K-9, mounted patrol, helicopter and dignitary protection were made separate and distinct units. But a stigma remained for those who had been part of the unit. Harrison and Johnson were still feeling the vibes of unvoiced but deeply held suspicions. Questions clearly persisted on the part of some of their fellow detectives. If they hadn’t been involved—why had they stayed?

  It was true that for good cops, an assignment to Area 2 had been nothing short of purgatory. But the salary was a generous $43,104 to start, automatically increased to $58,896 after eighteen months on the job. By the time you added in overtime, duty availability bonus, and uniform allowance—plus vision, dental, and medical coverage, and paid sick leave, most detectives were making in the $80,000 range. Combine that with a guaranteed pension of not less than 75% of their highest salary—and it was a hard job to give up.

  Harrison had also felt a sense of obligation. In spite of demographics in the city that matched black and white in almost perfect equality (38% vs. 35%), the police department remained 60% white. The C.P.D.’s history of race relations was, arguably, as flawed as that of many other big city police departments. African Americans were first hired on the force in the 1870s. But largely as a result of prejudice by the Irish majority, they were not permitted to wear uniforms or otherwise accorded any of the status so craved by those first recruits. For similar reasons, they were not allowed to patrol in white precincts, but strictly relegated to policing only black communities.

  By 1968, the year Harrison was born, his father and others had founded what came to be known as the Afro-American Patrolman’s League, to document and deal with discrimination in hiring, assignments, and discipline. A legal review turned up the information that a disproportionate number of African Americans were being rejected for heart murmurs—murmurs curiously unsuspected and unheard by any other doctors.

  Lawyers employed by the League continued to file lawsuits against the city until well into the 1980s. The litigation had two palpable effects. For the first time, the hiring practices of the Chicago P.D. were under the review of a federal judge, and with new scrutiny, the number of African American hires predictably shifted dramatically upward. The other effect, unfortunately, was not positive: a resentful, perennially beleaguered municipal department that felt under siege by the community it was sworn to protect. Community participation (guaranteed by federal oversight) created an antagonistic “us against them” dynamic that neither side had been able to resist.

  However imperfect, securing a position as an officer of the Chicago Police Department represented a degree of achievement and respectability that was hard-won. Harrison’s grandparents had moved to Chicago during what historians would later call the “Great Migration.” Between 1916 and 1930, approximately seven million African Americans left their lives in the rural South and moved to the industrialized North and Midwest. His grandfather got a job at the Armour Meat Processing Plant and his grandmother went to work in one of the many subsidiaries created by the incredible diversity of by-products produced by the wholesale slaughter of animals—creating buttons from their horns and bones.

  In the larger sense, his grandparents had left to escape the mummifying consequences of racism and to seek an education for their children, but the catalyst was the Great Flood of 1927, the most destructive river flood in U.S. history.

  It began in the summer of 1926, when heavy rains battered the Mississippi’s central basin. By September, the Mississippi’s 2,320 miles of tributaries were gorged to capacity. On New Year’s Day 1927, it happened. In Nashville, the Cumberland River broke through the 56-foot levees in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles. With no mechanism for spreading the word of the impending disaster, 246 people in seven states were killed.

  The scope of the catastrophe was overwhelming. The floodwaters reached ten states directly: Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Almost 20% of Arkansas was under water. By May, the Mississippi River below Memphis measured a whopping 60 miles wide.

  Some communities did try to stave off disaster—for themselves. In New Orleans, the city council authorized the detonation of 30 tons of dynamite to re-route the approaching floodwaters away from the city and toward the rural and poor St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.

  Ultimately, more than 700,000 people were forced to flee their homes and seek temporary shelter. 330,000 African American refugees moved into one hundred and fifty-four refugee camps set up by then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

  What appeared to be his efficient handling of the crisis instantly catapulted Hoover into the national spotlight and the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency. But the truth was a more complicated affair. The conditions in the camps were deplorable, and it was only a matter of time before Hoover’s inadequacies as a crisis manager were revealed. But Secretary Hoover was an ambitious man. Accordingly, he made a deal with Robert Rusa Moton of the Colored Advisory Commission. In exchange for Moton’s agreement not to p
ublicize the problems in the camps, Hoover promised he would, once elected, guarantee substantive reforms and improved living conditions for those who had lost their homes and livelihoods.

  Behind the White House gates, however, Hoover must have considered himself and his political future safe. So, in a move that would change party politics in the United States, perhaps forever, he reneged on his deal with Moton. In frustration and anger over what they perceived as Hoover’s betrayal, in the next election, Moton and the other African American leaders persuaded their followers to abandon the party of Lincoln—and vote for the Democrats. They did, in overwhelming numbers, and to Herbert Hoover’s eternal dismay, elected Franklin Roosevelt president.

  Despite this demonstration of electoral muscle, political gains were transitory. For most African Americans fleeing the dirty Mississippi floodwaters, the conditions they found in the rapidly industrializing Midwest were not appreciably more promising than what they’d left behind. Between 1910 and 1930, the African American population rose by about 20% in most northern states, and the population was almost entirely absorbed by the largest cities. In most cases, the sole consideration of where to relocate their families came down to basic economics: the cost of the train ticket.

  In Chicago, African Americans and new immigrants were utilized as strikebreakers. Fearful of the newcomers who were taking their jobs, ethnic and racial animosities frequently simmered over into violence in the seedy area known as “Back of the Yards,” where the employees of the Union Stockyards made their putative homes.