by Matt Taibbi
When they died, her biological father was in prison, so she ended up in the foster care system. For the rest of her life state offices and state aid gave her an uneasy feeling.
By the time she reached her thirties, though, she had four children of her own to take care of. She had split from their father, a college basketball player who had NBA dreams but never made it to the big time, and was raising the kids alone. She had a good job with benefits at a temp agency in the city, but when the 2008 financial crisis hit, she was laid off, and her kids needed health insurance, which meant Jewel had to return to the system.
So one day in late 2010, she went to the Medicaid office in Staten Island, which is located at 215 Bay Street, directly across from Tompkinsville Park. She was trying to sort things out for her four kids, but the woman behind the counter wasn’t making sense to her. Only the big man with the deep voice behind her seemed interested in helping.
“I was fussing and cussing, and he was trying to help,” she says. “He was telling me which numbers to call, how to do this, how to do that.”
By amazing coincidence, cigarettes were the first thing Jewel Miller asked Eric Garner about. “I asked him, ‘Who sells bootleg smokes around here?’ ”
Garner smiled and puffed out his chest. “I got packs,” he said.
They exchanged numbers. “We was friends for like a year,” she says.
Jewel was outgoing, quick-witted, and proud. She wasn’t afraid to tell you who she was or what she thought about things. She was bisexual and open about it. She knew Eric was after her, but she didn’t want a relationship at first.
“I was playing girls at the time,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I’m free, I’m single, I have no time for no man.’ ”
Also, Eric wasn’t exactly her type.
“I like them six two, two hundred ten pounds, drink of water, you know what I’m saying?” she says. “And Eric wasn’t that. But he had a good heart. He was a good person. That’s what won me over.”
It was six months before Eric told Jewel he was married. Jewel didn’t like it. She wanted Eric to get a divorce. If he liked her so much, why was he going home to a wife?
“No, I want you,” Eric said.
“I was going, ‘What? A divorce needs to be done,’ ” Jewel recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t date married men.’ That was my biggest thing. ‘I don’t date married men.’ ”
Then Jewel found out that Eric’s two young sons, Eric Jr. and Emery, were in foster care. “I started finding out about the children, and at the time the children weren’t at home, they were actually in foster care,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, hell no! You’re out rolling with us while your kids are in care?’ ”
Eric started to listen to her. “I was like, ‘Well, we definitely can’t date until Emery and Eric come home,’ ” Jewel recalls. She told him, “I don’t know how you live, but in the world that I live in, we just don’t do that. We take care of our kids, you know?”
Eric had come to treat the status of his children with resignation, but now he resolved for the first time to do something about it.
Shortly afterward, Eric moved out and began to live with Jewel. Eric even took Jewel to meet his mother and stepfather. He hadn’t gotten a divorce and he hadn’t succeeded in getting his kids out of care, but Jewel was satisfied that he was making an effort to go down that road, and finally, they were together.
This didn’t go over too well with Esaw.
“I was very jealous,” she says. “There was no way in hell I was going to let him go.” When he started disappearing for long stretches, she called more and more.
“[Jewel] used to get mad because I would call his phone. I called his phone every day,” Esaw says. “And if he didn’t call me, I would be texting his phone, like, ‘What’s going on? Why aren’t you answering your phone, why aren’t you calling me?’ ”
For a while, Garner continued to insist nothing was going on between himself and Jewel, even after he’d moved out.
Esaw drops her voice and does her own polished Eric Garner impersonation as she recounts the scene of her husband explaining his nights away with Jewel.
“He’d say, ‘Baby, that’s just my friend. She’s not my girlfriend. She just gave me a place to stay.’ ”
“And I’d say, ‘Eric, you expect me to believe that shit? I don’t believe that shit.’ ”
Eric Garner would just shrug. He put about as much effort into finding a good cover story as he did into buying clothes for himself, which is to say not very much. Jewel Miller was about to discover what Esaw had already long known, which is that Eric Garner pushed the act of not taking care of himself almost to an art form.
In many ways, Garner acted as if his own life and health were permanently damaged and disposable, not worth keeping in repair. All he really cared about was the money he kept flowing to his family. His life was ruined the day he got picked up for selling crack when he was eighteen. Maybe before that. But his kids had an unblemished future, so that’s what mattered. And the only way he knew how to show that concern was with money.
Even in his interactions with police, the self-annihilating instinct came through. He was more than willing to go to jail, to sleep in the unventilated, urine-soaked air of the 120th Precinct house, so long as they left his money alone.
It was the same with his health, which had worsened considerably since his first prison stint. As recently as the mid-2000s, Garner had been in good shape. An excellent athlete in his youth, he passed on his genes to his son Eric Jr., who was on his way to becoming a scholarship college basketball player.
Garner had suffered from asthma since childhood. He didn’t know it, but this was a common problem among black people of his generation. Black kids born in the seventies and beyond, like Garner, were far more susceptible to disease than the national average—roughly two and a half times more likely to suffer from asthma, and more than five times more likely to die from it. No one is exactly sure why; even the CDC has said it doesn’t know for sure. In any case, Garner’s illness was such an ever-present part of his life that after his passing, his mother, Gwen, would line a living-room memorial to her son with asthma inhalers.
In prison, the family says, officials treated his asthma with steroids, which made his weight balloon. After his last stretch behind bars, he gained nearly a hundred pounds. It wasn’t all steroids, though; he also ate in heroic amounts. John McCrae tells a story of Eric going to the new Domino’s on the corner of Bay and Victory, ordering a whole pie, and eating it standing up.
“He would take a whole pizza, fold that motherfucker in half, and eat it like you and me eating a slice,” he says.
Esaw says that when he got out of jail the last time, eating became Garner’s main recreation. “We didn’t go dancing, we didn’t go swimming, we went to eat,” she says, laughing. “And don’t let him get hold of a location where a good buffet is. Forget it! He’d have about eight plates!” She chuckles. “His favorite meal was spaghetti. Spaghetti and pork chops.”
But it caught up to him. Now pushing 350 pounds, he very quickly developed other complications.
By the 2000s sleep apnea made his nights miserable. His snoring was a thing of legend. His wife, Esaw, recalls that when Eric went away to stay with Jewel, it took her family a long time to get used to the absence of his snoring.
“When he was with her, we missed his snoring in the house,” she says. “Then we got used to not hearing it, so that when he came home, we were like, ‘Oh, shit, here we go with the snoring.’ ”
Both wife and mistress speak with awe about Garner’s messiness, like it was a mystical thing.
“He’d make himself a sandwich at night, and you’d go down, there’d be enough mayonnaise on the spoon to make you and me both a sandwich,” Jewel says. “Then he’d come to bed and put his clothes in a pile next to the bed. ‘Babe, are you gonna get those?’ you’d say. And most he would do is sort of scoot ’em over.”
Just a
s his own children loved watching scary movies with their father, Jewel’s four kids loved playing with the mountainous Garner and often pigpiled on top of him in bed. Jewel recalls entering her bedroom and having to reprimand adults and kids alike for bringing food into the room.
“I’d say, ‘All of y’all need to get out of my bed. Eric, you too! It’s time!’ And they’re all covered in crumbs, Oreos and shit…”
She laughs and tells a story of confronting Garner in the morning. “One time, I said, ‘Listen, babe, don’t eat in here.’ ” She looked down. “Eric, you’ve got sandwich wrappers here. What time did you eat that sandwich? This morning?”
And he’d say, “Oh, I forgot. I’m gonna get that right now.”
Jewel tells the same story about Eric refusing to buy himself shoes that his wife tells. This was despite the fact that his feet ached so much. “You could argue until you were blue in the face, he didn’t want to buy stuff for himself.”
His wife, Esaw, concurs. “The only time he would buy something for himself is if it was something he needed, like a coat,” she explains.
Garner buying himself fine things was so out of character that it sometimes backfired on him when he tried. One time, he showed up at the park in Tompkinsville wearing a big, shiny, puffy black North Face jacket. He bragged to everyone about his purchase.
“Yo, E, man, that shit is fake,” McCrae told him.
“Nah,” he said. “I paid four hundred dollars for this.”
Another one of the men on the block shook his head. “Eric, look at the logo. It’s too big and on the wrong side,” he said.
Garner cursed out loud. The whole block burst out laughing.
—
Almost everyone who knew Eric Garner reports that the man liked to argue. Not aggressively, mind you, but recreationally. In a half-serious way, he absolutely refused to lose any debate. As a maker of jokes and wisecracks, he was corny, no stand-up comic. But the manner of his relentless arguing was funny. On the streets and at home, people would start rolling their eyes and chuckling as soon as he got going.
“Eric was never wrong,” says Jewel. She points at a box. “You’d say something silly like, ‘This is just a box.’ And just to argue, he’d start telling you where the box was built, what it was made of, that it was some special super kind of box and not just a box like you said. You couldn’t win.”
He didn’t let anything go, not even a cigarette. Although Garner was known to hand out dollar bills to kids when the ice cream truck drove down Bay Street, he wasn’t big on handing freebies to grownups. Over the years, a few people tried buying smokes on credit and not paying back. “Eric didn’t go for that shit,” says McCrae. “He’d show up at your house.”
With any subject that mattered to him, you could count on Garner to know what he was talking about. Football stats were one area of expertise. Another was closer to home.
“He knew the law,” says his mother, Gwen Carr. “He knew what was legal and what wasn’t. Knew it inside and out.”
Garner knew the laws surrounding cigarette sales. He knew how many packs he could carry on him at a given time, knew what constituted a sale, knew what actions would trigger an arrest. He knew he could be charged with serious offenses with longer potential sentences if he was caught crossing state lines with a trunk full of cartons but that he wasn’t risking as much time standing on a street corner. Street corner time was time he could live with.
As careful as he was, once Garner built up his operation he began having trouble with the police. He had roughly a half-dozen misdemeanor arrests and convictions in his first few years selling cigarettes, but those didn’t bother him so much. He was more upset that police kept stopping him or pulling him over when he was driving, searching him, and then vouchering his smokes and his money.
The legal word for this is “forfeiture,” but Garner just called it “taking my shit.” Police take anything they turn up in a search that they think is contraband, i.e., the proceeds of an illegal activity, like for instance gambling or drug dealing or selling untaxed cigarettes.
Police might stop your car or stop you on the street, and it didn’t matter what you said, they’d find a way to go through your stuff. You waited while they went through your pockets.
If they found a wad of cash or a carton of smokes, they might just take it and dare you to come to the station and prove where it came from. Even when they’re wrong, the tactic never really backs up on the police.
“Sometimes the cops will take something that they believe is contraband but actually isn’t,” explains Staten Island defense lawyer Joe Doyle, who later represented Garner. “Pills are a good example of this. The cops seize some Oxy from your client, but then the case gets dismissed because your guy has a prescription for it.”
The lawyer adds: “Clients will ask if they can get the pills back. My advice is normally, ‘I get it, you should get them back, but I just don’t see it happening.’ ”
Garner had no illusions about what he did for a living or whether the police had a right, legally, to take his money. The issue was more about how they took his money.
Were there rules? Could they reach into his pockets anytime they wanted? Not according to the law. Police did not, in fact, have the right to reach into his pocket anytime they wanted, just because they knew he was Eric Garner, the guy who sold cigarettes. Police had to have a “reasonable suspicion” that he was armed and dangerous in order to effect even a pat-down search.
Jewel estimates that Eric was stopped and searched in excess of a hundred times during the few years they were together. It got to the point where she would carry her pay stubs with her in her pocketbook, so they wouldn’t take her money, too.
“This one time, I was like, ‘You better give me back my money, because this is my money!’ ” she says. “And they’d say, ‘Release the money. She’s got pay stubs.’
“But they took seven hundred, eight hundred dollars from Eric.”
Sometimes Garner would try to argue that the money in his pocket was actually Jewel’s, and he would frantically point to her pay stubs. Police usually didn’t buy it. They’d take his money away and his eyes would follow it.
Whole days spent standing in the snow on his swollen feet handing fifty-cent cigarettes to drunks would disappear in an instant, thanks to chance meetings with snickering cops who always had a little extra word for him, too.
“They’d be like, ‘You want to go to jail?’ ” Jewel remembers.
Bloomberg’s cigarette taxes had made a street cottage industry not just for people like Garner but for the police who patrolled them. All over the city, the neighborhood loosie dealer became an easy mark for police looking to make a quick bust.
Garner was the perfect person to help cops make their arrest quotas. Unlike drug dealers, who used runners and other middlemen to make the ultimate criminal transaction harder to trace, the loosie dealer usually did the whole exchange by himself, money for a smoke, hand to hand in the street. Eric and the other dealers in his small crew were sitting ducks.
The typical loosie dealer in New York was also an older man, sometimes homeless or close to it. He was an easier takedown for cops compared to some young hotheaded drug dealer who might be armed or want to make a name for himself going down swinging in an arrest.
In 2011, for instance, The New York Times profiled a Manhattan version of Eric Garner who called himself Lonnie Loosie. Lonnie, like Garner, was an ex-con without much in the way of real job prospects. He took advantage of Bloomberg’s tax laws to make a living but lamented that he was an easy bust.
“They call me a fish,” he said, “because I’m easy to catch.”
—
Slow moving, often sick, and easy to spot, Garner was an even easier catch. He got stopped over and over again. It got to the point that Garner was running into Staten Island police everywhere he went, even when they were off duty.
“We were in Pathmark once,” says Jewel. “And these cops i
n street clothes, guys he knew from Bay Street, they came up to us and started giving it to Eric.
“They were like, ‘Yo, man, you got any New-pawts? You got Kools? You got menthols?’ Real cute like that, and laughing. That sort of thing.”
The pressure from the law, on top of the physically exhausting nature of the work, started to take its toll. There was also the matter of the growing feud between Esaw and Jewel. Even though Garner had all but moved out, Esaw did not let her husband go. She went into combat mode to get him back.
She presented her husband with a very simple choice. He either had to come home, or at least support her, or she would go after Jewel physically.
She recalls, “He would tell [Jewel], ‘That’s my wife, those are my children. I have to give her whatever she wants, because if I don’t, she’s going to come over and cause a scene.’ ”
Esaw claims things got so bad that the two women came to blows. There are, to put it mildly, differing accounts of how these confrontations played out.
“My threat to him was, ‘Anytime that I ask you for something, if you don’t give it to me, I’m going to beat up your girlfriend,’ ” Esaw explains. “I beat her up three times.”
Jewel, who calls Esaw “Satana,” says that the venom came from the fact that Eric was changing and was happy. “He was a new guy, trying something new,” she says. “And she didn’t take it well.”
SEVEN NUMBERS
In early August 2013, unbeknownst to Eric, a decades-long effort to force a judge to rule on the constitutionality of the Stop-and-Frisk policing Garner faced on a regular basis finally reached a head.
The tale of how Stop-and-Frisk finally made it into court was a long and twisting one. As in all things related to law enforcement reform, the road was littered with obstacles and legal leprechaun tricks.
Way back in 1971, the NYPD started a specialized squad called the SCU, or Street Crime Unit. The SCU was a roving gang of plainclothes ass-kickers who roamed all over the city and targeted pimps, rapists, stickup kids, muggers. Frequently undercover, they employed decoy squads and considered themselves the cream of the crop.