Читать книгу Among Murderers - Sabine Heinlein - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

Street Code

On May 25, 2007, Bruce was released to the Castle. He met Angel and Adam at the first Morning Focus meeting, where residents discuss their plans for the day. It was difficult not to notice the new resident. Bruce was a towering six-foot-six, dark-skinned man with a clean-shaven head. At fifty-two, he had hands the size of dinner plates and heavily scarred wrists from an old childhood burn injury. He wore big, square glasses with bulky frames and pop-bottle lenses that were given to him in prison. His outdated-looking glasses gave him away to anyone familiar with New York’s reentry scene: watch out, here comes an ex-felon.

The glasses were courtesy of Corcraft, an institution within New York’s correctional facilities that produces furniture and apparel—and glasses—for government agencies, schools, and universities. New York’s biggest “rehabilitative” machine, Corcraft claims to “[keep] inmates employed to help prevent disruption” and “[teach] work disciplines and job skills,” which, hopefully, come in handy once they are released.¹ Corcraft pays prisoners less than one dollar an hour.

When Bruce was released, Angel had already discovered that he could replace his prison glasses with stylish frames from Duane Reade or Rite Aid. Bruce, however, was stuck with his prison glasses for the time being because he was nearsighted and needed to save up before he could afford a new pair.

Bruce, Angel, and Adam began to hang out because they could relate to each other. They had no need to ask one another what they were in for. Murder, clearly. There is hardly any other crime that gets you twenty-four years and up. Combined, they had spent eighty-four years behind bars, more than an average lifetime.

Bruce, Adam, and Angel didn’t feel the need to talk to each other about their crimes. Of course, the men knew the basics about one another: Bruce shot a stranger in an argument, twenty-four years; Angel killed a friend in an argument, twenty-nine years; and Adam was involved in a robbery, in the course of which two security guards got killed, thirty-one years. But they didn’t discuss the specifics, the reasons why they committed the crime in the first place, its consequences, or the feelings that came with these traumatic events.

“That’s one thing [prisoners] don’t discuss: the crime,” Bruce told me right at the start. “If you got twenty to life, then they know you had to have a homicide. Once they find out how much time you got, people know.” He explained that prisoners are snitches. In prison you had to constantly watch your back. The rule held that if you were provoked, you had to put your foot down. “You gotta come in and set your territory,” Bruce said. “It’s gotta be known that Bruce will fight.” This attitude didn’t just change overnight, and hints of it remain to this day. Inside himself, Bruce was still a prisoner. How could he be expected to change from one day to the next?

The trials and tribulations of the new world seemed a bit less threatening when they were approached together. Adam and Angel quickly applied their newly gained knowledge, while Bruce trotted along with suspicion. On his second day out they took Bruce to Fairway to show him how to shop.

Number one: To avoid confusion and terror, you have to make a shopping list. Update your list during the week. Number two: Look for store brands first. Store brands are cheaper and narrow your choices. Number three: To save money, look for value packs of soap and toilet paper. Number four: Don’t think too much. Just grab something and head to the register.

Then Adam and Angel put their next lesson into practice: the subway. They got Bruce a MetroCard and showed him how to slide it at the turnstile. At first Bruce didn’t get it. He only knew tokens and kept sliding the card the wrong way, first too slow, then too fast. He felt stupid and hoped that no one was watching. He was relieved when he finally made it to the subway. But this was where the trouble really began. What were all those people staring at, and why did they brush him on their way out? Bruce felt “disrespected” and provoked. In prison there was no reason to stare unless you intended to start a fight. The same was true for physical contact. If your safety mattered to you, you simply didn’t bump into others. In prison you automatically made space for people approaching you, but in the subway there never seemed to be enough space. The men often felt provoked by their fellow riders. Yes, this would take some getting used to.

Once they had gathered strength again, they headed to the bank to try out Angel’s new ATM card.

“We were like the three stooges,” Angel told me, who, unlike Bruce, was rather amused by his daily mishaps. “Bruce said, ‘I’ll be the muscle.’ Adam was the bagman—the one who carries the money. And I’m the computer guy. I’ve never touched an ATM, though. But Bruce had seen his sister use her ATM card. Well . . . and Adam doesn’t know a damn thing.”

Angel couldn’t stop chuckling while telling the story. He described how the three of them stood outside the bank scratching their asses trying to figure out which way to insert the card to open the door. When they finally made it into the lobby, they struggled to put the card into the machine. They tried it in all possible directions to no avail. Their attention was so focused on the slot that it took them a while to realize that the machine was broken. “Look! It says on the screen that it’s out of order.” Exhausted, the three went back to the Castle without having withdrawn any money.

It is ironic that the men’s support system could land them back in prison. In New York, parolees are not allowed to associate with other people with criminal records. The argument behind this rule is that this association may be detrimental to their rehabilitation. A parole officer told me: “Parolees palling around with each other leads to gangs, robberies, conspiracies, and ultimately back to prison. That’s the idea.”

Angel repeatedly reminded Bruce and Adam that if either one of them were ever hit by a car, he would go to the nearest telephone booth, place an anonymous 911 call, and then flee the scene. This was not only to avoid association with another ex-felon but also to avoid police contact (another parole stipulation).

Like their relationships in prison, in which an unannounced transfer could tear them apart, the men’s new friendships had an impermanent quality to them. Friendship provided support where support was needed and saturated their idleness—the time they spent without women and work and without a real home. But it was also a result of desperation and the assumption—their own and society’s—that three murderers must relate to each other, no matter their differences.

When I would come to the Castle to meet Angel, Bruce usually hovered in the background like a ghost. Not a scary ghost, just restless and wary, as if sentenced to relive his past eternally. Eventually, at the end of the summer of 2007, Bruce and I started talking. Our first real conversations were slow and awkward. We would sit down in the Castle’s backyard, and Bruce would put my digital recorder in his shirt pocket. He folded his large hands and waited for me to ask questions. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk. It seemed as if he “couldn’t find the zipper of his prison armor”—an expression Adam had coined to describe the isolation former prisoners tend to experience in “our” world.

At a coffee shop, over doughnuts and tea, Bruce quickly admitted what he had done. Then he was silent again. Twenty-four years ago he and a girlfriend went to the liquor store to buy something to drink. His friend went ahead while he looked for parking. When he entered the store, he saw that a stranger had cornered his friend and was making sexual advances. The girl was screaming hysterically. Bruce separated the two, and his friend left the store. Bruce and the stranger began to fight, and Bruce shot him. He aimed for his shoulder but hit his chest. “Tyrone Davis,” Bruce said. “I always call my victim by his name.” That was it.

I was relieved when Bruce offered to give me his trial transcript. Between two pieces of yellowing cardboard with rust-colored speckles were more than three hundred typewritten pages. Handing the transcript to me, he told me that people said he could get rid of it now that he was out. But he opted to keep it. He opted to hold on to his past.

Bruce’s trial transcript is far more comprehensive than I had imagined. It didn’t only open the door to his particular story; it revealed in detail an experience that for the most part remains in the dark.

The transcript entailed a loaded drama: two eyewitnesses, two opposing arguments, and a leading actor without any lines. Yet no newspaper even took note of the case. On the surface Bruce’s case was so commonplace that hardly anyone cared. It blended into the anonymity of daily statistics: men kill men; blacks kill blacks. Men kill with guns. Men kill under the influence of alcohol, heroin, and cocaine. Drunk and high black men kill one another. Bruce was no exception.²

Bruce was charged with possession of a loaded pistol with the intent to use it unlawfully and with murder in the second degree for causing the death of Tyrone Davis. The judge offered Bruce a plea bargain if he pled guilty to manslaughter. This was Bruce’s first felony. Bruce said the most he could have gotten was 8⅓ to 25 years. He might have been out after 16 years. But his public defense attorney, Michael Torres, suggested Bruce go to trial. He was convinced he could get him off with less time. After all, no murder weapon was ever found, no physical evidence was recovered, and Bruce didn’t admit to the crime. And the only two witnesses, unreliable boozehounds, changed their stories with the wind.

Torres thought it might be better if Bruce didn’t testify. So Bruce just sat there and listened. He was effectively absent when the second-most important decision of his life was made.

April 22, 1983. The day the shot was fired, thirty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran Slover Bouknight, an acquaintance of Bruce’s who would later witness the shooting, bought his first bottle of Thunderbird wine as soon as the Monte Carlo Liquor Store opened. It must have been around eight o’clock in the morning. He went to his mother’s house, hung out there for a while, and, around eleven o’clock that same morning, returned to the store to buy another bottle. Over the course of the day he continued drinking, alternating among wine, rum, and maybe some vodka. He didn’t quite remember. He hung out with friends at the corner of Creston Street by the liquor store when he saw Bruce approach that night. “Gave me five,” Bouknight said. He followed Bruce inside the store to borrow some money.

Bouknight’s memory of his previous criminal record seemed as hazy as his recollection of the night of the crime. When Johnson, the prosecutor, asked him what he was convicted of, Bouknight answered, “Misconduct or something like that, mischief.” Johnson continued his questioning:

JOHNSON: If I mentioned the name, would that refresh your recollection?

BOUKNIGHT: Yeah.

JOHNSON: Reckless endangerment?

BOUKNIGHT: Yeah.

JOHNSON: What was that about?

BOUKNIGHT: Me and my wife had an argument.

JOHNSON: As a result of that argument, what happened?

BOUKNIGHT: I went and got some gas.

JOHNSON: Some what?

BOUKNIGHT: Some gas.

JOHNSON: What did you do with the gas?

BOUKNIGHT: Poured it on the floor.

Perhaps aware that the reckless endangerment conviction would take him in the wrong direction, Johnson finished his direct examination rather abruptly. For Johnson, Bouknight was there to reaffirm that he saw Bruce pull a gun, a claim he had made to the police and the grand jury earlier. He wasn’t there to demonstrate that he was an unpredictable, violent, lying sponge—someone who saw a pistol and smoke coming out of Bruce’s jacket one moment but later recanted, saying he heard a shot but that it was too dark and he was too far away to see anything, and that the street was filled with people.

Johnson handed Bouknight over to Torres for cross-examination. Torres extracted, in an equally labored fashion, testimony that Bouknight intended to burn his wife and children out of their apartment; that before he went to Vietnam he tried to sell drugs to an undercover agent; that he hadn’t had a single job since he got back from the war; and that he still occasionally used heroin and cocaine.

On the evening of Bruce’s crime Joseph Vega, a heroin user who had been fired from Center Fence for stealing chain-link fencing, was hanging out with Tyrone Davis. The two men visited Vega’s fiancée, who was Tyrone’s sister, at North Central Hospital. After leaving the hospital at around eight o’clock, they went to a liquor store at Bedford Park and bought a bottle of wine, which they drank on their way to the subway station. Vega said Davis was “kind of tipsy. . . . You know, he was kind of loud, you know, but he was in control of himself.” (The toxicology lab found Davis’s blood alcohol level to be 0.27, which according to the medical examiner’s testimony leads to “loss of muscular coordination, staggering gait, thickened speech and some disorientation.” The lab also found traces of heroin in Davis’s blood.) Vega and Davis got off at 183rd Street and walked to Davis’s house at 182nd Street and Creston so Davis could use the bathroom. Davis then agreed to walk Vega to the bus stop. On their way they apparently decided to get a bottle of White Rose at the Monte Carlo Liquor Store. At the store Tyrone Davis “complimented the girl” Bruce was with, according to Vega. “Dirty looks” were exchanged, and Tyrone Davis followed Bruce outside.

VEGA (CONTINUING): I didn’t hear what they were saying. The next thing you know they were like face to face and the tall guy, named Bruce Jones, he went to hit Tyrone and Tyrone went to hit him back and the next thing you know Tyrone ran into the street from the sidewalk, around the car, back up onto the sidewalk, running down toward Jerome Avenue and as he was running down toward Jerome Avenue and as he was running, he turned around a little to see if he was still being chased—

MR. TORRES: Objection. It calls for an operation of the mind, Judge.

THE COURT: Just object, please, without a speech. He turned around?

THE WITNESS: Yes.

THE COURT: He just turned around.

VEGA (CONTINUING): When he turned around, the man that was chasing him pulled out a gun and shot him.

Later on in the direct examination Vega mentioned that Bouknight, who’d been wearing a trench coat that night, pulled out a carpenter’s knife.

“I told him it was unnecessary to pull out a carpenter’s knife,” Vega said, “because if there was going to be [a] fight, it was between the two.” After firing the shot, Vega said, Bruce didn’t bat an eye. He turned around and ran toward Grand Concourse.

Vega looked at his friend Tyrone Davis, who just stood there, his hands grabbing his chest, before collapsing. Blood streamed out of his mouth and nose.

Vega forced Bouknight, who seemed eager to get away, to return with him to the liquor store and wait for the police. From Bouknight’s perspective Vega became quite violent. “The Spanish guy”—as Bouknight, Torres, and Johnson repeatedly called Vega— “hit me in the back of the head, ripped my shirt off,” Bouknight said. “Then he drug [sic] me back down to the corner ‘cause I had turned the corner and he drugged [sic] me back down and that’s when the police put handcuffs on me.”

The bullet had perforated Davis’s chest four and a half inches above the left nipple, entered the left chest cavity through the second rib, and pierced the upper lobe of the left lung and the sac that surrounds the heart. It went on to penetrate the main bronchus and the upper lobe of the right lung and exited into a muscle through the fifth rib in his back. Dr. Mella Leiderman, the testifying medical examiner, could not say for certain from which direction the bullet was shot or from what distance. At first it appeared the shot was fired from below and not from short range, facts that might have worked in Bruce’s favor. A man of his height would be more likely to shoot a shorter victim from above, and a shot from far away could have established a decreased likelihood that Vega or Bouknight were capable of accurately identifying the shooter. But Leiderman explained that any small change in posture (a slight turn or bend or even a deep inhalation) could change the course of a bullet.

In the cross-examination Vega suddenly admitted that, although the fluorescent light of the liquor store illuminated the dark street somewhat, he could not really make out the details of the process that made Davis collapse. He saw “a flash” and heard “a bang.” At this point Davis and Bruce were between thirty and forty feet away from him, and Bruce had his back turned to Vega, who now claimed that he had been distracted by Bouknight, the man in the trench coat with the carpenter’s knife, when the shot was fired.

Because he considered the testimony of both witnesses insufficient if not ridiculous, Bruce’s defense attorney, Torres, motioned for a mistrial. When the judge denied his motion, Torres asked him to reduce the charges from murder in the second degree to manslaughter in the second degree.

JUDGE: Second? Where, from a fair view of the evidence, do you see that? Would you explain that to me?

MR. TORRES: Well, Judge, in view of the fact there’s been no testimony that actually saw the weapon being shot and in view of the fact that both witnesses merely heard a sound, a pop, and saw a flash at a considerable distance, I think the jury could infer that the shooting was done accidentally and not with any intent to cause death or cause injury, physical injury.

COURT: Accidentally?

MR. TORRES: Recklessly. By the same view that Bruce possessed a weapon and discharged it in the direction of Tyrone Davis, they could believe that he did so not with the intent to kill or cause his death, but rather merely with the intent to either cause serious physical injury, which would make it manslaughter in the first degree, or to scare him and as a result of that he recklessly caused the death.

Bruce was sentenced to twenty years to life. While he now admits his guilt and shows genuine remorse for having ended someone’s life, he thinks he did not receive a fair trial. No one ever saw a gun on him. There was no physical evidence. His brother, who had observed the incident from across the street unnoticed and from whom Bruce found out that Tyrone Davis had died, had gotten rid of the murder weapon. Bruce was arrested more than sixteen hours after the act at Munchtown. A drug test may have shown that he was high on cocaine when he committed the crime, but no one bothered to check. The only two witnesses were drunk and possibly under the influence of illegal drugs.

It took Bruce two years to reveal to me another, pivotal piece of information, one that the trial transcript had neglected. Over barbeque ribs at a restaurant not far from the Castle, Bruce finished his story. After having separated his female friend and Tyrone Davis, he left the liquor store. The girl immediately took off on foot. Joseph Vega and Tyrone Davis followed Bruce out of the store. Bruce and Tyrone started to argue again. Every time Bruce and Tyrone started to fight, Joseph would stick his hand in his coat pocket as if he were about to pull a gun. According to Bruce, Tyrone was the first to land a blow. He hit Bruce in the face. Bruce pulled a gun. It was then that Bruce realized that neither Tyrone Davis nor Joseph Vega actually had a gun. They were just bluffing. Terrified, Tyrone ran. I’ll fuck this motherfucker up, Bruce remembered thinking. He chased Tyrone down and shot him. At that point the fact that Tyrone and Joseph had just bluffed and that Tyrone had run away like a coward was more infuriating to Bruce than the insults Tyrone had hurled at his friend.

“Then I was living by a street code,” Bruce explained to me at the restaurant. “If you don’t have a gun, you don’t play like you have a gun. You pull a gun, you use it.” Tyrone didn’t play by the “street code,” but Bruce did. The code held that because he had pulled a gun, he had to use it. After all, his internal sense of propriety was not the only thing at stake. At that point the whole neighborhood was watching.

Bruce’s trial transcript and his follow-up story provide a window onto an environment with codes revolving around self-preservation and respect. Bruce had to communicate to his community that he was willing to fight.

Elijah Anderson, now a sociology professor at Yale, spent several years in the 1990s documenting street law in a poor African American neighborhood in Philadelphia for his book Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. Anderson describes street laws as a response to alienation and racial discrimination by those who make and enforce America’s mainstream laws (namely the police and the judicial system).

Street law governs “interpersonal public behavior, particularly violence,” Anderson wrote. It is a form of communication whose nature “is largely determined by the demands of the circumstances but can include facial expressions, gait, and verbal expressions.”³ Joseph, would stick his hand in his coat pocket as if he were about to pull a gun. . . . The whole neighborhood was watching. If you don’t have a gun, you don’t play like you have a gun. You pull a gun, you use it.

For people like Bruce, who have lived in poor, violent environments all their lives, these laws provide safety, “for if they are bothered, not only may they face physical danger, but they will have been disgraced or ‘dissed’ (disrespected).”⁴

After listening to Bruce’s story I wasn’t surprised to read in a 2009 Department of Justice study—which followed up on Anderson’s findings—that “a youth’s expressed street code attitude is a developmental predictor of violent behavior.”⁵ What struck me was that the street code didn’t loosen its grip in prison. I now understood what Bruce told me when we first started talking. He said, “You are coming from a crime-infested environment. You are familiar with the people [in prison] and their lifestyle. They were doing the same thing as you were doing in your neighborhood. We all know each other from the street.”

Dismissing your moral code and thinking in an environment that, whenever you take a step forward, pushes you back seems almost impossible. Yet being able to control your impulses, feel empathy, and take responsibility for your actions is the first step toward rehabilitation, the first step necessary to return to and function in mainstream society. Naturally, I wondered who or what taught Bruce alternative ways of thinking. And since I came to see conditioning, violence, and rehabilitation as tightly intertwined, I also wondered how exactly he came to think the way he did in the first place.