I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  Throughout that fall, a group of at least nine people connected to the Tompkinsville Park scene where Eric Garner lived and died had been targeted for undercover drug buys. The Staten Island police, embarrassed around the world, were striking back with a wide sweep, with Ramsey the biggest catch.

  Orta remembers the undercover agent who got him. He was suspicious right away because the guy was white and talked too much.

  “He was going on and on about how he liked to party in Atlantic City and all that,” Orta says. “I remember thinking the guy was suspicious. But he was shooting up right in front of me, so I thought he had to be okay.”

  Police ended up capturing scenes on video of Orta directing Mr. Atlantic City to Michael Batista, Orta’s brother, who allegedly gave him drugs.

  There is also a scene in one video involving his mother, Emily Mercado. In it, Orta tells his mother on the phone, “G’head, Ma, pass it.” The grainy film shows her handing a paper bag to the man before counting some money.

  Later on, police would charge Orta with an incredible thirty-four separate charges in just this one case, including nine sales. Although it would be extremely unlikely to happen, prosecutors could theoretically have asked for ten years on each sale.

  In a detail that would later send Orta’s paranoia levels through the roof, the evidence for seven of those nine sales was supposedly on videos where the audio containing the alleged drug deals was missing. Authorities said they had to alter the videos to protect the identity of the undercover agent.

  When his lawyers asked what was going on, authorities replied only that “seven of the sales were captured” but promised that “the defendant can set up a mutually convenient time for a viewing of the unredacted video.”

  But they never set up the viewing.

  Significantly, the police made most of these undercover buys before December 4, when the nonindictment in Pantaleo’s case was announced and New York City blew up in protests. But the arrests weren’t made until long after the furor from that grand jury decision died down.

  The buys in Orta’s case supposedly took place on November 18, 2014. But Orta was not actually busted until February 10, 2015. Shortly after sunup, Staten Island cops burst into his Staten Island home with the bravado of soldiers raiding Entebbe.

  The door flew open and Orta, who was already awake, suddenly saw officers tearing through his house. The first thing he noticed was a weird detail.

  “I expected them to be waving guns, but they were flashing cameras at me,” he said. “They was like, ‘You had the camera, now we got the camera.’ It was fucked up.”

  He watched as officers tore through his house.

  “When they came in I was already up,” he says. “They hit the door and started bringing everybody to the living room.”

  Orta says he tried to explain to police that his then wife, Chrissie Ortiz, wasn’t up yet.

  “Listen, my wife is not dressed. Let her get dressed,” he said.

  “Fuck your wife,” he says they said.

  Then they kicked his bedroom door down.

  “Now my ex-wife is standing there naked, pussy all out, tits all out,” Orta recalls. “And I’m telling him, ‘Officer, you’re not supposed to be doing this. You’re sitting there getting off on my wife.’ ”

  “Fuck you,” the officer said.

  “Now my wife is screaming,” Orta remembers. “I had to wait until a female officer came into the house for her to put clothes on. They didn’t even allow her to get dressed. Like, my little brother witnessed my ex-wife butt-ass naked while they searching the house.”

  Police didn’t find anything else in the house, but they did bring Orta in. They also arrested other members of his family, including his mother, on drug charges.

  The arraignment in Staten Island was a tense affair, attended by still more protesters, with Ramsey screaming that it was a frame-up and his mother in obvious distress. The glee of the authorities over Orta being arrested on the strength of an undercover video was palpable. A “police source” summed it up for the Daily News just as they had for Ramsey.

  “He took the video,” the source said. “Now we took the video.”

  The fact that it could just as easily have been the Easter Bunny as a low-level drug dealer like Ramsey Orta making the video of Garner’s murder was lost on the department.

  The News quote showed that police saw the whole narrative as one more skirmish in the ongoing war between Them and Us. While Orta may not have been innocent as a general rule, he was certainly an innocent bystander when it came to his role in making the Garner video.

  The police, however, made it absolutely clear that they saw a connection between Orta’s criminality and the fact that he’d taken the film, and they were determined to have the rest of the world make that same connection.

  After that hearing, Orta ended up on Rikers Island on the drug charges. His unit was put on lockdown shortly after he showed up. As a result, prisoners were not allowed to help in preparing their food, as was customary.

  During this time period, the unit was fed a meatloaf dinner. Orta ate it but noticed that the meat contained a funny-looking bluish-green substance. He quickly began to feel unwell but didn’t think anything of it at the time. He even joked about it in phone conversations with his family.

  “I said, ‘There’s something weird about this food. There’s like these green pellets in it. Maybe they’re trying to kill me by poison,’ ” he says. “But I was joking.”

  Next thing he knew, though, other inmates in his unit were experiencing vomiting, stomach pains, dizziness, nosebleeds, diarrhea, and other symptoms. This led to a lawsuit in which nineteen men from Orta’s unit accused the city of putting rat poison in their food. Orta says he was shocked when he found out that there were many brands of blood-thinner-based rodenticides that actually come in blue-green pellet form.

  “I’m from the projects. Rat poison to me is a big-ass box that says ‘POISON’ on it,” he said. “I never heard of no pellets.”

  That incident terrified Orta, who later became convinced that he was the intended target of the poisoning. He was still recovering from that incident when he caught some jailhouse gossip about his lawyer, Zuntag.

  Apparently one of the Rikers inmates, also represented by Zuntag, had tried to buy his freedom by giving evidence against Zuntag for bringing drugs into the jail.

  “Basically the inmate had snitched on Matt,” Orta said. “He had his sister bring the drugs to Matt. She was basically testifying against Matt for her brother, the one that was locked up.”

  Normally, no lawyer caught up in a drug case could help his or her cause by serving up a low-level street dealer. But Ramsey was no longer just another small-time dealer. He was famous and a prize.

  Orta immediately wondered if his lawyer might now be tempted to get out of his own problems by trading on their relationship somehow. He even wondered if his cases had already been messed up. Holed up in his friend’s Bronx apartment nearly a year later, he still wondered about that.

  At the time, though, he fired Zuntag and had his family set up a GoFundMe account to get him new lawyers. They raised twenty thousand dollars and set about looking for new help.

  Because Orta was a high-profile figure by then, he and his family had received tons of letters already from criminal attorneys willing to take on his case, so they had a lot of names to go through.

  Orta ended up with two well-known criminal attorneys with a reputation for taking on cops, Ken Perry and Will Aronin. They came on his case and immediately set about getting him out of Rikers. Soon after that, a relieved Orta bailed out, having lost a significant amount of weight.

  Almost immediately, he was arrested again, this time in Manhattan.

  “I go into a store, and when I come out, the police grab me and say I did a robbery,” Orta says. “Then they’re saying I had a knife that was found on someone else, and they’re saying I did a robbery for ten dollars.”

  Ort
a pauses. “Then they got to the station and they say they found Percocet in my jacket pocket. They didn’t find it until I got to the station. So now I’m being charged with possession also.”

  He sighs. “Come on, man, you think I’m gonna rob someone of ten dollars? That shit is insulting.”

  Orta around that time began to draw parallels between the way he had been treated and the way Daniel Pantaleo was being treated. The two men had somehow switched fates. Pantaleo had actually killed Eric Garner, but it seemed like Orta was somehow stepping into what should have been Pantaleo’s role of the man being hunted for the crime.

  Orta was still under near-constant surveillance, while Pantaleo enjoyed twenty-four-hour police protection. Then it came out that Pantaleo was reportedly training for a career as an MMA fighter. The news turned out not to be true—fake news, before fake news was famous—but it was on the Internet, and Orta, like a lot of people in and around Bay Street, believed it and saw it as still more evidence of the double standard.

  “They’re chasing me and Pantaleo is going to be fucking choking people for a living or whatever? Shit is crazy,” Ramsey said.

  On September 15, 2015, which Orta noted would have been Eric Garner’s birthday, he had a court appearance in his drug case. When he got there, he discovered that his brother and codefendant, Michael Batista, had had all of his charges dropped. He immediately began to suspect that his brother had cut a deal to give Ramsey up.

  “He done, he ain’t got no charges, no nothing,” Ramsey said. “Like, where the fuck his charges went if he got wrapped up in this secret indictment with me?”

  Subsequently, authorities let him know that they had new evidence against him, apparently recordings of jailhouse phone calls between himself and Batista that were incriminating. Orta insisted that couldn’t be.

  “I’ve been doing this Rikers Island shit for so long that I know not to talk over those phones,” he said. “The only conversations they have over those phones is me and my wife fucking talking dirty to each other. Normal locked-up shit.”

  Perry and Aronin at the time were filing motion after motion on the gun and drug cases, trying to tilt some leverage back in Orta’s direction to make a possible deal more favorable.

  According to their math, by February 2016, Orta was facing charges that could easily have landed him in jail for twenty years or more. They began to talk to Orta about taking a single deal to make all the cases against him (and, ostensibly, his mother) go away if he would just do, say, five years.

  Orta didn’t like hearing from his own lawyers about any deal. What he heard was them telling him in one breath that all of the cases were flawed and then arguing for a deal in the next breath. He started to get suspicious. Of everybody.

  —

  Meanwhile, Orta was increasingly stressed out by his fame. After more than a year, he’d been unable to find any way to navigate the immense double-edged celebrity the Garner video had brought him.

  He was never sure what to do with his new status. Should he make money off it, become an activist, or what? The pressure to do something seemed to throw his whole life into disarray. Life was much simpler when he was a small-time drug dealer nobody cared about.

  He tried to get involved in an organization dedicated to monitoring the police called Copwatch, but his commitment waxed and waned. One thing he was sure of was that if there was a way to play being Ramsey Orta that involved getting rich, he hadn’t found it.

  “If you look at the pictures throughout the whole two years since I took the video, I’m still wearing the same clothes in each picture,” he said. “I mean, let’s just be real. I didn’t make no money.”

  He sighed. “The thing is, this is not about the money. I don’t give a fuck about the money. This is more about my life.”

  And what was his life supposed to be now? All over Staten Island and beyond, people had opinions. Some said he had a responsibility now to stay out of trouble, not give the cops any headlines. There were a lot of whispers of this sort on Bay Street, where some people close to Garner were pissed about his arrests.

  “Ramsey, dude, throw a little shade on it” was how one of Garner’s close friends put it.

  But was it Ramsey’s fault he kept getting arrested? Was he a true victim or just a criminal who had a bad habit of getting caught? Was he being persecuted and singled out by police, or was he a villain and an abuser of women who was finally getting his comeuppance? The reality was that all of these things might have been true.

  In conversation, Orta was a great storyteller, tremendously candid, raw and foulmouthed about his criminal past. He cut a thrilling figure for reporters and foreigners, who seemed to flock to him. He was constantly surrounded by European film crews, magazine writers, documentarians.

  But he was also just an ordinary street kid facing a hundred years in jail, and so there were limits to what he could say without talking himself into a long sentence. He wanted to be completely honest and couldn’t. Nor did he want his protestations of legal innocence to be misinterpreted as a desire to be put up on a pedestal.

  Call it a triumph of racially charged propaganda and dog-whistle reporting that Orta eventually resorted to using the infamous cliché newspapers often slapped on the victims of police abuse.

  “I mean, I’m no angel,” he said.

  —

  The awkwardness reached a height on January 18, 2016, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. At the small but beautiful Trinity Lutheran Church in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, Orta was given the Martin Luther King Community Service Award, presented by Copwatch, the activist group he had begun working with.

  Also receiving an award that day with him was Kevin Moore, the Baltimore man who’d made a similar cellphone video of police arresting Freddie Gray. Moore, a burly, broad-shouldered man with long dreadlocks and a cheerful disposition, stood at the rear of the church with the sullen, stressed-looking Orta.

  The church was not filled, but the people who were there represented decades of constant struggle against police brutality, mass incarceration, and the drug war. There was Dennis Flores, leader of Copwatch, the man who’d been embroiled in an argument with the Justice League folks. Flores was trying, best he could, to mentor Ramsey, be a friend to him, and help him use his name for something good.

  Also in the crowd was Javier Nieves, a former state assemblyman who’d once helped stop a prison construction project that was being pushed by erstwhile liberal-hero governor Mario Cuomo after he’d undertaken the largest prison construction campaign seen in the industrial world since Stalin.

  The room was filled with such people, who had all taken part in hard-fought political action campaigns with profound relevance to the life and death of Eric Garner. And Flores took the stage and asked all of them to salute Ramsey.

  “Police violence is something that continues to exist, from Dr. King’s day to today,” Flores said. “And we are honoring brother Ramsey Orta and brother Kevin Moore. It is important for us as a community to build support for them, because they are targets, just like Dr. King was a target.”

  Orta looked like he might turn green when he heard himself compared to Dr. King.

  Still, he kept his cool. He read a brief statement of thanks and meekly accepted his award, a little wooden statuette in the form of a camera.

  —

  A few weeks after that, the incident with Bella happened. Now Orta had cause to freak out even more. He explained that after the fight with his wife, he saw that details of his case had been leaked almost immediately to local papers.

  “Sources” had told the Daily News that Orta had waved a knife at his wife and said, “I’ll kill your ass.”

  Then he saw a story in Vibe that took a year-old quote from his aunt, Lisa Mercado, speculating that Orta was suicidal.

  “He was always an outspoken person. He’s not anymore,” the article read. “He talks about, ‘Maybe I should just kill myself. I’m just hurting my entire family.’ ”

 
Orta nearly jumped out of his seat when he read that.

  “That shit scared me,” Orta said. Now, he was not only sure police had leaked details of his case to the News, he was convinced that they were also spreading word to other publications that he was suicidal.

  “Now if something happens to me in jail, they can just say he was depressed or whatever,” he explained. “Like, where the fuck is this coming from, on the day I’m supposed to turn myself in? That’s what blew my mind. This is why I’m running, because now I’m scared.”

  Orta had other concerns. Though they’d gotten him out of Rikers a year before, he’d begun to seriously wonder whether or not his well-heeled pay lawyers, Aronin and Perry, were really on his side. He felt they were pressing him too hard to deal.

  Among other things, he said, they’d come to him with a proposal that maybe he could shave some years off his future jail term by doing a humiliating joint press conference with some senior Staten Island law enforcement officials.

  The idea they presented was that upon surrender, Orta would sit next to all of the officials who’d been pilloried in the press as a result of his video, hang his head, and admit to being a criminal.

  He would be a captured trophy for the likes of former DA Dan Donovan and perhaps even Daniel Pantaleo, who in Orta’s understanding of the fantasy presser would also be invited.

  Ramsey thought it was crazy. As it happens, the Staten Island district attorney’s office also thought it was a crazy idea. They later confirmed that “an offer of this type was put on the table by Mr. Orta’s defense team” but that “such an offer would never be entertained by…this office.”

  Perry and Aronin said only that as defense lawyers, they were duty bound to explore any avenues that might lead to reduced sentences for their clients. Which was true. But Ramsey was very put out.

  “They just want me to not only cop out but go in front of the media, standing next to the officer who killed my fucking friend, standing next to the commissioner of the police, and state that ‘yes, I, Ramsey Orta, was guilty of a firearm that was on my possession,’ ” he seethed. “This is what they want me to do in the media.”