Good Kids, Bad City

by Kyle Swenson

  I ran the numbers—the crime had occurred thirty-six years before, in 1975, ten years before I was born. Pop culture and historical fact assisted with the picture. Gerald Ford in the White House. The official end to the Vietnam War. Jaws. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Blood on the Tracks. The details put weight on the story. But they also pushed the events Kwame was describing further into the past. It was hard to compute. I began to seriously consider that if this man was telling the truth, if a boyhood lie from a twelve-year-old’s mouth had ruined so much, the human toll was inestimable. The size of that hurt—the emotional mileage and pain and despair—was too big to properly think through. I really couldn’t. But I really didn’t need to. I was a reporter at a weekly paper brought low by tough times but still chasing its past relevance. The small staff was overtaxed, underpaid, waiting out the fresh layoffs constantly in the offing. Every month I was tasked with filing a five-thousand-word cover story, and I was a few months behind coming up with ideas. So although I heard Kwame’s story, up front it didn’t really sink any deeper than a story idea, a news item, five sections, some heavy anecdotes up front, mix in national statistics, maybe grab some good timepiece photos from the library archives. My understanding remained professional.

  I agreed to look into the case. Kwame pushed the cardboard box over the table to me. “My mind is now: Get Rickey out. Get Rickey out. Then maybe we can clean up our names. But get that man out of there.”

  Before we parted, Kwame said something that shifted the way I looked at his tale, as if a sharper camera lens had clicked into place. As he’d been talking through his situation, my mind had been staging it as history, grainy footage from the 1970s, a closed chapter. But Kwame brought me into the present. “We are now in a society that beats the little guys down,” he told me. His shoulders shrugged as if he was inviting me to acknowledge what I should have already known. “If they get you, they get you.”

  * * *

  About three months after I first met Kwame, I was standing on the edge of a weed-spewing lot on East Ninety-second Street. The street was a quick two-block run of houses north of St. Clair in Glenville. The buildings still standing were bled dry from neglect. Porches melted into overgrown lawns. Graffiti-striped cardboard covered many windows. The power lines stitching the houses together overhead dripped like old shoelaces.

  I was the only white person within sight, likely the only white person in a two-mile radius. Young black men in dreads and sweatpants were tossing hard eyefucks in my general direction, but no one spoke to me. If the sight of a twenty-five-year-old paleface geek with a notebook in his hand was usually enough to draw curiosity on this block, today it was losing out to what was happening in the field.

  A circle of black women, their ages running from teens to late sixties, held hands in a circle, screaming into the mild afternoon. Each pair of arms flung up and down with no concern about syncing with their neighbor, as if a different electrical bolt jerked each limb. Rick Ross charged out of the stereo speakers of a parked car, laying an incongruous Miami-booty-bass backdrop against hard grief pooling in the dead field.

  On paper this was a protest. Until a month ago, a thirty-six-year-old black man named Jamelle had lived with his girlfriend and five kids a few houses away. He’d grown up nearby, and like many guys in the neighborhood, he was trailed by a handful of felony drug convictions. Recently he’d been trying to stay straight. One evening in April, he got into a fight with a neighbor. Over what, stories shifted. But the conflict ended with the neighbor unloading eighteen bullets into Jamelle. Cleveland police arrested the shooter. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office filed murder charges. But just when it seemed as if the societal machinery designed to right a criminal wrong was working smoothly, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office dropped the charges. The shooter walked. The reason: the Castle Doctrine, a stand-your-ground-style law cooked up by the National Rifle Association and spoon-fed to the Republican-controlled state legislature, part of the national creep to expand gun laws. Ohio had embraced the statute; because Jamelle had technically fallen in the shooter’s house, the state felt there was no grounds for prosecution. Case closed.1

  This was understandably shocking to the victim’s family. They couldn’t arrange their grief in a way to provide for such an unexpected curveball, and it soon grew into flabbergasted rage. To draw attention to the case, the dead man’s bereaved family had asked friends and neighbors to come out for a show of outrage this afternoon. But the political theater quickly ran off elsewhere.

  From the brief conversations I had before the circle formed up, I learned that most of these women—and only women came—had seen random violence sweep away pieces of their lives. The uniform chorus of chants that started the rally soon splintered into a berserk heartbreak babel, each woman shouting her own plea to Jesus or naming a lost loved one or stuffing her personal anguish into a wordless cry.

  I couldn’t decode this, neither the words nor the names being flung about. But I understood that the downtown world responsible for the ruling on this case—not to mention the world of buddy-buddy hayseed legislators and gun lobbyists—did not stretch out to St. Clair and East Ninety-second. Here and there—between them sat a massive dissonance. Later I thought of Thoreau’s line from the close of “Civil Disobedience,” after the writer has spent a night in jail and escaped to the woods, away from town: “then the state was nowhere to be seen.” Take that sentence, hose off the romantic self-assertion, and you could easily, sadly, find Jamelle’s neighborhood—a place the state had left behind.

  By 2011, you ran smack into the dissonance all around the city. Whatever connections once linked Cleveland together seemed to have been unplugged. The longer I spent in the city, the more I realized that the recent civic dysfunction was tied to a shifting power struggle that had pitted the region against itself. It was a cresting wave, years in the making, now breaking across town. Everything—from the ignored grief of East Ninety-second Street to Kwame’s story—was wrapped up in it.

  Downtown was a glass castle of condo projects rising above retrofitted brick warehouses and other antique pieces from the last century saved from bulldozers. But this wash-and-scrub only went for about twenty blocks in either direction from Public Square. After that, the neighborhoods—or what was left of them—began. Between its population high point in 1950 and 2000, Cleveland had lost around 436,000 people. The ruined infrastructure and vacant housing left behind looked less like the result of demographic shifts than what remains after floodwaters slurp back to the sea. Just over the city line but still in Cuyahoga County, the fifty-eight suburbs were engaged in an ongoing cold war, undercutting one another for retail projects and corporate headquarters in an effort to block the deleterious influence of the urban core’s tailspin.

  To say race—or at least the leftover tensions from the sixties and seventies—was the reason Cleveland was in such disarray was to risk a sarcastic no shit from anyone who knew the score. But that was also to undersell the complicated realities.

  By the 1990s, the power structure of the city was firmly in the hands of second-generation black politicians who owed their footing to Carl Stokes’s vision. Yet Stokes’s legacy also did not succumb to easy analysis. After he left office, Cleveland didn’t elect another black mayor until 1990. The black political scene was dominated by George Forbes, the city council president between 1974 and 1989. Forbes was a bombastic presence, a hulking man who threw reporters out of council chambers and once even swung a chair at a council member. Forbes cozied up to business interests, worked alongside Republicans, and survived a bribery trial with an acquittal. The question of his legacy was whether the power he held was used in the service of civic goals or for its own preservation. And the same question can be raised with respect to those who followed him. His protégé, Mike White, was mayor for three terms between 1990 and 2002; these years not only saw the city’s manufacturing base and population dwindle, but gave rise to persistent whispers about corruption
at city hall. Eventually, two of White’s closest advisers went to prison for pay-to-play schemes involving city contracts. White himself never faced charges. The ostensible inheritor of White’s political machine is the current mayor, Frank Jackson. But while White was an operator, it does not appear that Jackson has inherited his forcefulness, certainly not enough to maintain the power of the black community.

  For decades, the city’s clout had been positioned against the leadership of Cuyahoga County, until 2009 controlled by a three-person panel of commissioners. Countywide elections were controlled by the Democratic Party, the late-stage iteration of the white ethnic voting bloc from the last century, now relocated to inner-ring suburbs like Parma, Euclid, and Lakewood. Any urban studies professor worth tenure will tell you that from a governance standpoint, a regional, countywide authority is the best political structure for handling the civic challenges presented by postindustrial America—the challenges aimed directly at Northeast Ohio’s head. A regional government can rule based on the interests of the entire region, rather than the narrower goals and needs specific to cities. But the Cleveland area had fended off any political rethink because of the détente between county and city—between white and black. Cleveland was left to black politicians. The county stayed with white suburbanites. Any strong regional government would dilute the sway of the former and dump urban problems on the latter. It was a mutually beneficial balancing act.

  Then the 2008 political scandal erupted, forty federal indictments, the entire county government ripped up by the roots. Into that disarray, savvy suburbanites—including suburban Republicans who had little regional power under the status quo—made a hard sell on a voter referendum that reorganized the government under a regional eleven-person council and executive drawn from the entire county. It passed. The city—meaning Cleveland’s black political class—watched its regional influence slip to the suburbs.

  This sudden senescence left black political might sidelined in Cleveland. But if Carl Stokes’s political offspring were surprised, they shouldn’t have been. The county’s wrenching power from the city was the last stage in a fait accompli that was decades in the making, less a masterminded plot than the gradual but complete isolation of this corner of urban black America. It was the feeling I bumped against on East Ninety-second Street.

  In Cleveland, the housing statistics told the story. Beginning in the late 1980s, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton proposed that the skeleton key to understanding the country’s racial inequality was residential housing segregation, a legacy of federal redlining, discriminatory banking practices, and racist suburban pushback that created the modern urban ghetto. Cleveland was front and center in this thesis. In 1930, there were only two American cities where the average African American was likely to live in a neighborhood where their fellow residents were also exclusively black—Chicago and Cleveland. By 1970, blacks in every major northern American city lived in segregated neighborhoods. Five cities, however, had a higher segregation index than the others, meaning that the city’s black population was crammed into a particularly confined area: Chicago, Newark, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. This condition—which Massey and Denton termed hypersegregation—still held in Cleveland.

  Massey and Denton’s research showed that extreme neighborhood segregation concentrated poverty and increased the impact of economic downturns, leaving black neighborhoods more vulnerable to any twitch in the economy or bad news out of Wall Street. After decades and generations, this created at the century’s end a community apart, separate, and unequal. “People growing up in such an environment have little direct experience with the culture, norms, and behaviors of the rest of American society and few social contacts with other racial groups,” the two wrote in their 1993 book, American Apartheid. “Ironically, within a large, diverse, and highly mobile post-industrial society such as the United States, blacks living in the heart of the ghetto are among the most isolated people on earth.”2

  * * *

  Public records were always dicey in Cleveland. When future archeologists finally dust off the ruins of our Rust Belt hub, I would not be surprised should they uncover a bunker under Public Square containing the whole stash of civic records, every memo, police report, employee review, and letterhead missive spelling out our history. Or—they might just find a room full of ash. Every reporter in town understood that when you made a legal request for documentation from the city, you were about as likely to be ignored or stymied as helped.

  “Open investigation,” “unable to find,” and radio silence were among the usual responses. I don’t know whether this was the product of an Orwellian memory hole or just the indifference of city workers punching the clock in the records department. Ohio has a good public records law. The city was required to comply. But you likely had fifty-fifty odds of dragging to light the requested documentation from the city and county.

  Not long after meeting Kwame, I went to the county clerk’s office to see what court filings related to the three trials were still in the building. One of the women staffing the desk showed me to the microfilm, but cautioned that much of the material hadn’t made the jump from paper to film. “A lot of that stuff is just gone,” she told me. Sure enough, most of the court filings and motions were missing.

  We were lucky with the trial transcripts. The appeals process basically ensures that the stenographic play-by-play of criminal cases is kept. Still, three decades is a long time for documents to sit on a shelf without being misplaced or damaged. It took an afternoon of leapfrogging from one county department to another before I tracked them down. In Ohio City, a Cleveland neighborhood just over the river from downtown, the county owned a stately Victorian mansion that had been converted into an archive. Here, in dusty rooms that once hosted the soirees and chatter of Cleveland’s big money, were stacked boxes filled with birth certificates, land deeds, and court paperwork. The whole mothballed predigital legacy.

  The individual court transcripts for each trial were in leather-bound books. Unfortunately, the place wasn’t a lending library; I’d have to copy the material—time consuming to anyone interested in a large number of documents. Plus, the pages were so brittle—as delicate as insect wings—that you couldn’t just load a stack of pages into the Xerox or else they’d jam up the machine. Each page of testimony, over three thousand sheets, had to be individually copied. It was tedious enough work that I flirted with the idea of giving up.

  It took a little over three weeks to copy everything. I ran over to the archive on my lunch hour, carved a half hour free from my daily schedule when I could. I recognized right away that portions of the transcripts were missing—a page or two here, larger sections in a few places. Wiley’s first trial lacked all record of the opening and closing statements. When I finally had as complete a record as possible of the four trials, leaning Pisa towers of papers stacked on my bedroom floor, I sat down to pore through the pages.

  On a first push through, the material outlined the general shape of the proceedings. Ed’s credibility was easily the main issue driving the trials. The central inconsistencies in his story—the wild departures between Ed’s written police statement and his testimony; the differences between Karen Smith’s eyewitness account and Ed’s own—blared from the pages. But as I reread, I began catching tiny cracks and chips in his story, double-backs and errors and miscues. I got a helpful assist here from an unknown hand: tucked into the material from the court was a typewritten list tracking inconsistencies in the transcripts, a list prepared, I assumed, for a doomed appeals bid.

  Often these discrepancies appeared in the same trial. For example, in Ronnie’s trial, Ed initially testified he’d left school after his ninth-period class. Later in his testimony, he told the court he’d left before his eighth-period class. In the same round of testimony, the witness claimed he’d never seen the green-colored drop-top Wiley was driving before the crime. Yet later, in the same trial, Ed told the court he’d actually seen the car before
“in front of their house.” When Ed was asked during Wiley’s trial if he saw Mr. Loper that day as he disembarked the city bus, the boy told the jury no. In Wiley’s retrial, he said the exact opposite. “Yes,” Ed testified. “I waved.”

  Then there was the flowered shirt. Anna Robinson had told the court she noticed one of the killers wearing it. In his statement, Ed told police Rickey was wearing the distinctive shirt. But in Wiley’s trial, Ed said it was Wiley wearing the shirt. There emerged questions about what Ed claimed he saw when. Throughout his trials, he testified he could only recognize Wiley behind the wheel of the car as the boy spotted them from the city bus. But when Ed gave his written statement, he clearly stated that he could identify all the passengers in the car: “I saw buddy [sic] driving the car with Vincent and Rickey in the car with them and I waved to them.”

  Ed’s story also changed in terms of where he was when he viewed the crime. In some testimony, the boy told jurors he was walking down Fairhill toward the corner of Petrarca when he witnessed Franks doused and struck with a stick; he claimed he then turned around and ran back to the bus stop, where he hid behind the shelter’s wall. From there, he testified, he saw Rickey shoot Franks twice, then turn the gun on Mrs. Robinson. But Ed also testified he saw the first two shots up close near the corner, then ran back to the bus shelter, where he watched the third shot fired.