by Matt Taibbi
“Money was his main focus,” says Esaw. “Eric would look like he lost his best friend if he was broke. And the only time I can remember him being broke is whenever he got out of jail.”
Garner tried, once again, to get a square job.
“I’m poking him every morning, saying, ‘Get up, go find a job. Get up, do something, because you can’t be laying up in the bed with me watching TV,’ ” Esaw says. “And he would walk up and down the street and ask the guys if they needed somebody to sweep the store, if they needed somebody to shovel snow, if they needed anything. Whatever he could do to make money, he would do.”
But there wasn’t much of a job market for an ex-convict who had been charged with selling crack during his last attempt at gainful employment.
He tried to put it off, but pretty soon he started to drift back toward old habits. Finally, in a state of desperation, he started asking around on the streets of Staten Island’s North Shore who might put him back in business as a drug dealer. And people started giving him names. One of those names was John McCrae.
Tall, lean, and broad shouldered, John McCrae had been nicknamed Douse as a teenager, because when he hit someone, the lights went out. He was a fancy dresser and a flamboyant personality, a jokester who always had something to say to a pretty girl who passed by. You could hear his cackling from around the corner. Behind the laugh was a quick mind, long trained in the art of the hustle.
McCrae was the sixteenth of eighteen children in his family. His parents were too poor to provide beds for all those kids, just sheets filled with clothes on the floor. His father, an upright southerner from Bennettsville, South Carolina, had worked every day of his life—he’d even been on one of the work teams that helped build the original World Trade Center. But for all that backbreaking labor, he never made much money, certainly not for a family as large as his.
The old man would sit in a lounge chair after work, dead tired, chain-smoking Pall Malls, exhausted and stretched to the limit. John had pants with holes in them and would ask for new things, but his father usually couldn’t help. So John had to get the money himself.
When he was nine or ten years old in Jamaica, Queens, he and his friends developed a scheme for robbing grocery stores. Kids would roam up and down the aisles of the store, pretending to shoplift, distracting the storekeeper. Meanwhile, the smallest of the group would crawl in the back room and snatch the strongbox. They called that scam the “creep deef.” For the rest of McCrae’s life, no hustle ever worked as well.
When he got older and moved to Flatbush, he fell in with a new crew that specialized in home burglaries. “Hitting cribs,” he says. “Did that for a while.” When crack came around, he started off running a con he cooked up with a girl named Nefertiti, who was as beautiful as her name. He’d run all over Flatbush selling vials of bread crumbs designed to look like crack, moving every few hours to stay alive.
“Actual drug dealers catch you at that, they’d kill your ass,” he says. “Throw you off a roof. Worse.”
Then he moved on to selling actual crack himself, which turned out to be his worst idea yet because he got caught. In prison, he quickly schemed up more hustles to survive.
At Downstate Correctional Facility, he traded on the sewing skills his father had taught him as a boy, stitching prison clothes with a little style. “Cons wanted to jazz up they greens,” he says, chuckling. He also got so good at writing letters to prisoners’ girlfriends that at times he found himself falling in love with the women on the other end. “I was good at that shit, too,” he says, laughing.
McCrae went to prison for crack dealing in the early nineties, just like Eric Garner. A hustler his whole life, McCrae knew a con when he saw one and felt pretty sure the prison boom was one of them.
In jail, he spent a lot of time reading. He read that states in the Cuomo years earned matching funds and other incentives from the federal government if they committed enough resources to catching crack dealers. That explained why cops spent so much of their time and resources watching black people trade a few dollars of this for that. “Otherwise, nobody gives a fuck what goes on in our neighborhoods,” he says.
After his stint in prison, McCrae eventually moved to Staten Island. He’d met a woman named Diana and tried to start a family and a quieter life, but they split up. She stayed in their apartment in the middle of the 200 block on Bay Street, where he spent a lot of his afternoons.
Over the years he’d tried parking cars, working HVAC jobs, construction. He looked into getting a commercial driver’s license, but he could never stay excited for long about any of those options. He still hustled sometimes to make money, but the most he ever did now was deal a little weed.
But there was no future in hustling, either. Even in Tompkinsville Park, where 98 percent of everyone you met had less than a dollar or two, the police were everywhere. They came by in patrols and kept plainclothes detectives staked out around the edges. Sometimes he’d watch them and shake his head in amazement. Did they think nobody noticed when a Ford Fiesta or a Dodge Neon with tinted windows parked and no one got out for two or three hours? And later, when they planted cameras and even hidden microphones in the park, he was blown away by how much effort they put into patrolling this tiny little trash-strewn triangle.
It wasn’t always this way. “When I first came to Staten Island, I didn’t see a cop for six whole months,” he says nostalgically.
This was more than a repeat of the strange Cuomo-era policing incentives. Now that there were fancy condo complexes across the street, the park full of dead-broke drunks and addicts was monitored like it was an al Qaeda safe house.
He was in the middle of such reflections one afternoon in 2008 when a big, tall, burly-looking man in sweatpants and huge sneakers came lumbering toward him.
McCrae listened as the big man explained that the word on the street was that John was a man who could get him a job selling drugs.
This didn’t go over well.
“I about lost my mind,” says McCrae. “I thought I was being set up. I told him he had the wrong guy. And a few other things.”
Eric Garner walked away with his head down. Even crack dealing was starting to seem impossibly beyond his grasp.
—
It wasn’t long after that that Esaw made an offhand comment that would change her husband’s life. While Eric was away in jail the last time, she’d picked up her own little side hustle—one she didn’t realize was illegal.
“I’m selling cigarettes,” she said.
Eric immediately raised an eyebrow.
“Selling cigarettes?” Eric said. “And how’s that working out?”
“I make a lot of money in a day with these loosies,” she explained.
He paused.
“How much money?”
—
Drug dealing was the wrong fit for Garner. As with the Ferris wheel at Coney Island, he preferred a ride with a little less bounce to it. In a stroke of good luck, he found one.
New York under its famed previous mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had dropped income taxes to their lowest levels in thirty years, to an average of about 8 percent. This was well below the 10 percent average seen under Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins. But the destruction of 9/11 created a massive hole in the budget, and the city needed money.
Term limits forced Giuliani to leave office after 9/11, and the incoming mayor, the billionaire media plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, had promised not to raise taxes. “We cannot raise taxes. We will find another way,” he said.
It took less than a month for Bloomberg to go back on his word. The city’s upper-crust financial sector had required huge amounts of state and federal aid to get back on its feet. The cleanup cost about $1 billion. But Bloomberg picked the most regressive conceivable tax as his first move to plug the hole in the budget, raising the city’s cigarette tax from 8 cents to $1.50.
The Wall Street cleanup, in other words, was going to be paid for in part at least by a surcharge o
n cartons of Kools and Newports. Bloomberg hoped to raise $250 million a year with the new tax.
From the very first tax increase, people all over the city began selling bootleg cigarettes that came either from Internet sales or from trips to Native American reservations. Selling cartons became a way to make quick cash in a lot of poor neighborhoods.
Eric Garner saw the possibilities in the cigarette hustle from the start. Pinky was talking about selling loosies from packs, but before his wife could finish her story, Eric had gone out to find out where to buy a carton.
“Then he went to three, then five, then ten, then thirty, then sixty, then ninety,” she says. “Then up to three hundred cartons a week.”
What others did as a hobby, Eric quickly made into a full-blown business. Some entrepreneurial urge in him—the same urge, perhaps, that made it impossible for him to keep a straight job that shackled him to a desk or straitjacketed him into a uniform—kicked into overdrive. He built up a little crew of four or five to handle the volume and kept his “store” at Tompkinsville Park open almost all day.
The spot he picked to do most of his business was near the corner of Bay and Victory, in front of a check-cashing storefront, a high-traffic area. People from all over the neighborhood used to meet at the “check cash,” and they always came out with money in their pockets.
Before Garner came, that spot had been occupied by a man named Doug Brinson, a slim southerner with wraparound shades and a deep voice who hailed from Wilmington, North Carolina. Brinson had a deal with the owners of the check cash, who allowed him to set up a table in front of their doorway where he sold things like oils, T-shirts, and incense and talked to every man, woman, and child who passed. “Oils and Incense and a Little More, that was the name of my store,” he says. He thought of that little stretch of sidewalk as his home.
“You see that tree over there?” he’d say, pointing to a sidewalk planting. “I remember when it was a little shrub.”
—
If white Staten Islanders had come fleeing “city problems” on the other side of the Narrows, black men and women often came to Staten Island fleeing problems that had followed them from even farther away. Doug Brinson was born in the Deep South in the heat of the civil rights movement and first tried to get out of the Carolinas as a teenager in 1970. He was so desperate he took a bus to Philadelphia with basically nothing in his pockets. Once in the big city, he hooked up with some other men from Wilmington, who convinced him to join them in a robbery.
The men lived in North Philly, but the house they’d cased was in another part of town, a white neighborhood. “I don’t know how we got into the house, but when the shit got started, somebody was coming or something, and they broke away,” Doug recalls. Sixteen, inexperienced, and now separated from the group, Doug froze. “I didn’t know where the hell to go,” he says. “So I ran into the backyard.”
Doug was tall and strong but also skinny as a beanpole. He remembers he was wearing a light blue shirt and light blue pants, a bad outfit for a daytime home invasion. He ran into the backyard of the house in his sky-blue outfit and made a beeline for an eight-foot wall in the very back. He jumped up and started to climb over the edge.
“So I’m coming up that wall, and a police car is coming up the damn hill,” he says. “I tried to look cool, but they came over. My heart sank.”
“What’s going on, man?” the policeman said, smiling.
“Nothing,” Doug said, unconvincingly.
“Where you from?”
“North Philly.”
“Well, then,” the police asked, “what are you doing around here?”
“Uh, I was hanging around here with my boys,” Doug said, trying to sound calm. He looked around. “But I don’t know what happened to them.”
“Yeah, okay,” the cop said, chuckling. “Come walk around the corner with me, I got somebody that wants to take a look at you.”
The police walked him around the corner. Apparently someone had seen Doug going into the house. When Doug saw this witness standing next to the squad car, he couldn’t believe it. The guy had on glasses so thick, his eyes looked like ping-pong balls behind them.
“Them bifocals was so damn thick, they were like magnifying glasses,” Doug says, laughing. “I said, ‘Damn, how can you see anything?’ And they put me in jail for that shit.”
Doug says he ended up in Philadelphia’s notorious Holmesburg Prison, one of the lesser-known monuments to America’s lunatic past. He remembers arriving at the facility and being puzzled to see young men, mostly young black men, walking around with bizarre symmetrical patches of gauze on their arms and backs.
“I was walking around and people had tape and bandages on,” he says. “They were having skin grafts and shit.”
While the federal government in the infamous Tuskegee Study in rural Alabama was leaving black men with syphilis untreated, researchers at Holmesburg were paying inmates to allow them to perform tests and biopsies on patches of their skin. The studies were for developing skin creams, deodorants, moisturizers, suntan products, and other substances. This was the 1970s.
Doug was released from Holmesburg just before it erupted in a massive riot, part of a prison-revolt movement that engulfed penitentiaries from San Quentin to Attica. He ended up heading north, following relatives to Staten Island, and made himself a living as the colorful street character who sold stuff outside the check cash. Like Garner, Brinson would increasingly clash with police, who hassled him over his business, constantly asking him to move. He wasn’t selling anything illegal but it still wasn’t everyone’s idea of a legitimate business.
“I was Eric Garner before Garner,” he remembers. “Until he came along, I was the one they focused on.”
For a time, the two men worked the same stretch of the block, and they came to be friends. Ultimately, however, the check-cash storefront closed up and was bought by a beauty supply store, whose owners didn’t want Doug and his oils, incense, and “little bit more” around. So he moved, and Garner stayed.
It took a little while, but Bay Street and Tompkinsville Park became a central part of Garner’s identity. He learned everything about this place. It didn’t look like much driving through, but Tompkinsville was a refuge and a bazaar for people from all over the island who lived off the books. It had its own particular schedule, and Eric made sure his store kept the light on during business hours.
—
Diana, who goes by DiDi, is the queen of the block. She’s a native Staten Islander, just like her mother, and had lived in a second-floor apartment overlooking Tompkinsville Park since 2000. The junkies came and went, the drunks came and went, the hustlers came and went, but over the years, DiDi was always there.
She was once John McCrae’s common-law wife, and he was the one who brought her to live on this block. He had long since moved out, but even he’d come back to the block to hang out from time to time in the afternoons.
DiDi on the other hand was here every single day, a fixture. She was a handsome woman now in her early forties, always dressed cool in well-matched outfits of camouflage or leather. Her day’s outfit would set the mood for the neighborhood.
You’d find her sitting on a bench on the outside of the park, or sitting on the stairwell inside her building, or leaning in her doorway. DiDi knows the schedule and the score of the neighborhood, who’s arguing with whom, who’s up to what, who’s trying to play at being king of this particular hill. The block would teem with activity, but DiDi was its anchor.
“I could tell you something right now. You can look down here and look around all of these people out there, I’m the only one that lives here,” she says.
When DiDi turns in at night, she takes to her bed in her second-floor apartment on Bay Street, with the window overlooking the park. She can hear everything on the street, but it’s mostly quiet there. The place is different from some of the more notorious blocks in the city, DiDi thinks, because the hustlers keep to the block’s busines
s hours. It isn’t a gangland battlefield. The drugs and booze go home every night.
That wasn’t always the case. Some of the homeless and the addicts used to try to sleep in the park until, sometime in the 2000s, the city installed a sprinkler system that would go off like clockwork at about 4:00 A.M. There’d be people lying out on the park’s benches and walkways, knocked out drunk, who’d suddenly wake up soaked and freezing.
Now, people didn’t start showing up at the park until around five thirty in the morning.
“That’s when I hear the first voice. When I hear the first person,” she says.
Often those first voices are raised. “You’ll hear people arguing early in the morning, which don’t make no sense to me. You’re just getting up! I put my TV on mute. Then I can just hear the bullshit.”
Around 2011, she started hearing a different sound: people selling cigarettes early in the morning. Eric Garner had put an older man out there to sell for him, a foreigner with immigration problems whom Eric trusted. He was respectful and did his business quietly. And he made a lot of money, because the traffic came quickly, as soon as the sun came up.
In the very early morning the Bay Street crowd is multiracial. Just down the street from the park is the Bay Street Health Center, a methadone clinic that hands out doses in the morning. People from all walks of life come from all over the island, get their doses, then walk to the park and smoke and hang out. Addicts are the most diverse community in the world.
“Puerto Rican, black, white,” Diana says. “It’s more white people, though, on that heroin and shit than the black people.” The traffic had gotten progressively heavier over the years as police cracked down on an exploding opiate craze on the South Shore.
The South Shore was below what Staten Islanders called the “Mason-Dixon Line,” the ominous local name for Interstate 278, which bisected the island into north and south halves. Almost all the black people lived north of the interstate. They didn’t much venture south of it, where the white people lived.
When white people came over the line to neighborhoods like this, it was usually for one reason. “The dope and the pills must have dried up over there on the South Shore, where the white people is at. That’s why they come over here,” Diana says. “That’s what it is. They can’t buy that in they neighborhood, in they mother’s neighborhood, or where they go back to at night.”