Guilty as Sin (3 page)

 

The case appeared in court that Thursday, in Part 91. Part 91, located at the far end of the fifteenth floor of 100 Centre Street, was at that time designated as the L.T.D. Part, which stood for Long Term Detainees or, as one cynic suggested, Let Them Die. Its calendars were filled with cases of jailed defendants that were not only ripe for trial, but overripe. In a system that supposedly guaranteed an accused felon a speedy trial within six months of arraignment, every defendant in Part 91 had already been locked up for a year or more. And in a business that was evaluated largely on statistics, these aging cases
were negatively skewing the average arrest-to-completion time that the administrative judge desperately needed to bring down in order to demonstrate efficiency and justify budget increases. So the word had gone out to get the cases disposed of by plea or, failing that, to get them tried.

Jaywalker had a couple of other cases besides Barnett's on that Thursday, involving defendants who were out on bail. So he stopped by Part 91 early in the morning and left word with the clerk that he'd be back.
Back
turned out to be just before eleven, and when he walked in, the judge was waiting for him.

Judges come in all shapes and sizes. Not all of them look like they were born to the bench like Learned Hand, say, whose iconic photograph—featuring his shock of white hair and bushy eyebrows, his black robe and his craggy face—has “judge” written all over it. Then again, it's entirely possible that Justice Hand may have looked like that at birth, only in miniature, seeing as his parents had pretty much
named
him to the bench, too. Still, we tend to think of judges as dignified, august father figures, peering down from the bench with an overabundance of firmness and just a hint of compassion. John Marshall comes to mind, as do Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Cardozo and William O. Douglas. Giants, all.

Shirley Levine hardly fit the mold.

Barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds if she was that, Levine was not what Jaywalker would have called a beautiful woman. Somewhere in her sixties, she was either cursed with a permanent bad hair day or simply unconcerned with her physical appearance. Her voice could charitably be called squeaky. She had no use for formality, having long ago dispensed with the trappings of the standard-issue black robe that came with the job.
Or perhaps she'd simply been unable to locate one small enough for her. She didn't expect people to rise to their feet when she entered her courtroom, and she quickly beckoned them to sit if they insisted on doing so. She needed no gavel to bring the room to order, and so far as Jaywalker knew, she'd never once raised her voice in anger.

Some judges maintain decorum through the volume of their voices or the sheer force of their personalities. Others develop a reputation from their willingness to toss troublemakers into the pens at the first hint of insubordination. A few make it their business to get even, taking out their frustrations on defendants in the rulings they make and the sentences they dispense.

Shirley Levine did none of those things.

She didn't have to.

She accomplished everything she needed to, and more, through her unfailing cheerfulness, her unquestioned fairness and her curious habit of treating people—all people—with uncommon decency. How she'd ever ended up as a judge was anyone's guess.

Not that she didn't have an interesting backstory. Rumor had it that in her early twenties she'd been involved in some sort of special operations in the War, and had been parachuted behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany. That she'd been good with a gun and better still with a knife. Jaywalker had tried to get her to open up once about the subject, offering to trade a few of his DEA stories in exchange. But she'd demurred. “Who can remember?” She'd laughed him off. Still, the rumors persisted, and in a place like 100 Centre Street, rumor was often as good as it got.

This would be Alonzo Barnett's trial judge, should he really insist on a trial. And though that would ensure a
relatively pleasurable couple of weeks for Jaywalker, in the long run it would do absolutely nothing for Barnett. Save for the fact that after the jury had convicted him and the judge had sentenced him, her parting “Good luck” to him would be genuine instead of sarcastic.

“Ahh, Mr. Jaywalker,” she said now as she spied him making his way up the aisle. “How nice to see you. And thank you for leaving us a note earlier.” Then, turning to a court officer, she said, “Would you please bring out Mr. Barnett.”

Would you please. Mister.
From a
judge,
mind you.

Not that anything of substance went on that first day. The assistant D.A. in the part read off a note from Daniel Pulaski. The eight-to-life sentence was still being offered on a plea to an A-2, it said. But if the defendant didn't take it this time or next, it would be withdrawn. After that, he could have fifteen to life—or worse.

“How much time do you need?” the judge asked Jaywalker, once his client had been brought out from the pen.

“Two weeks would be good,” he told her.

“Two weeks it is. See you then. Are you doing all right, Mr. Barnett?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

It was stuff like that that confounded Jaywalker. Try as he might, he just couldn't picture Shirley Levine jumping out of a plane in the dark of the night, a gun stuck in her belt and a knife clenched in her teeth.

 

Back in the pens, Jaywalker had his second sit-down interview with Barnett. This one would take on a bit more urgency than the first, if only because of the ultimatum delivered by Daniel Pulaski's note. While threats to withdraw plea offers were often no more than
that—threats—Jaywalker couldn't put it past Pulaski to follow through on his. What difference would it make to him if some defendant ended up with a fifteen-year minimum instead of an eight year one? So Jaywalker didn't mince words.

“If you ever want to take a plea, next time is the time to do it,” he said. “I don't trust this D.A. to keep the offer open past then. I really don't.”

Barnett seemed to think for a moment, and Jaywalker half expected him to say, “Okay, we'll do it next time.” After all, he hadn't once said, “I'm not guilty” or “I didn't do it” or anything along those lines. In fact, at their first meeting, he'd made a point of admitting that the charges against him were true, every word of them. But what Jaywalker hadn't learned yet was that unlike most defendants, and for that matter most people, Alonzo Barnett was never quick to answer a question of any sort. Not that he stalled before replying or repeated the question aloud in order to buy time. No, Jaywalker would come to understand, it was simply a matter of Barnett's taking a moment to
think
before responding. A rare thing indeed.

“To tell you the truth,” he finally said, “I don't intend to take a plea. If that's all right with you.”

“Of course it's all right with me,” said Jaywalker. “But it brings us to another issue.”

“What's that?”

“Well,” said Jaywalker, “you've been around long enough to know that the chances of beating a direct sale case aren't very good.” A
direct sale
meant one in which the buyer was an undercover cop or agent, as opposed to an
observation
sale, where the authorities claimed to have witnessed a transaction between a seller and a buyer, both of whom were civilians.

Barnett nodded but didn't say anything. Not only had
he been around long enough to know that Jaywalker was speaking the truth, but his record of guilty pleas suggested he understood the odds.

“So,” continued Jaywalker, “it might be a good idea if we spent a few minutes talking about the facts of your case.”

“Fair enough,” said Barnett.

“Why don't you tell me what happened.” It wasn't a question on Jaywalker's part so much as an invitation. Nor was it something he always asked of a defendant, particularly in a sale case. Strange as it may sound, sometimes a lawyer and client talk about everything
but
the facts. There are times, for example, when they both know the defendant has done precisely what he's accused of but on the one hand doesn't want to lie to his lawyer
or
come right out and admit his guilt on the other. So without ever saying so, they agree to ignore it and spend their time dancing around it, the elephant in the room. Or, in this particular instance, the elephant in the cell.

Again, Barnett took his time before answering. When finally he did, he spoke only four little words. They added up to neither an admission of guilt nor a denial, but rather an explanation for his behavior. In no way did they amount to a legal defense, the way they might have had he said, for example, that he'd been forced into doing what he'd done, or coerced, or that he'd been insane at the time, or that he hadn't realized that it had actually been heroin he'd sold to the undercover agent.

Believe it or not, Jaywalker had once won a case on just such a theory. His client had been making a living by “beating” his customers, selling them supermarket-bought spices at marijuana prices. When the cops had examined the evidence they'd bought back at the station house, they'd realized they too had been victimized. So
they'd simply sprinkled some of their own emergency stash into the ounce they'd bought, enough to convince the police chemist. But not the jury. Not once had Jaywalker insisted upon having an independent analysis conducted. The sample came back two percent cannabis, eighty percent oregano and eighteen percent basil. Highly aromatic stuff, perhaps, but hardly the kind to get high on.

No, Alonzo Barnett's four words of explanation fell far short of that standard. And when he uttered them, they initially struck Jaywalker as being not only legally worthless but pretty insignificant in terms of moral culpability, as well. Then again, he was at something of a disadvantage. For as he listened to them, he had yet to hear Alonzo Barnett's story. He had absolutely no way of knowing just how fertile with possibility the words were, or how in time they would germinate, take root, sprout and grow into a full-fledged defense, the likes of which Jaywalker would never have dared to even dream about, sitting there in the pens of 100 Centre Street, back on that Thursday morning in May of 1986.

“I did a favor,” is all Alonzo Barnett said.

No good deed

T
he fact that he took a moment to think before answering a question in no way meant that Alonzo Barnett couldn't tell a story. He could, and for the next half hour he spoke almost without pause or interruption. So articulate was he and so riveting was his story that Jaywalker dared to break into it only once or twice, seeking some minor clarification here or amplification there. Other than that, it was Barnett's story, told in his own words and his own voice.

When he'd arrived at Green Haven in the mid-1970s to begin serving the latest of his prison sentences, Barnett had been accompanied, as all inmates were, by a
jacket.
A jacket, at least in prison parlance, isn't something you wear. It's your file, containing a certified copy of your conviction, your indictment, your presentence investigation report, your entire criminal record, your photograph and your fingerprint card. All of that is kept in a folder, or jacket, to keep it private and confidential.

But “private” and “confidential” are concepts that simply don't exist within prison walls. With guards on the take and inmates assigned to work as clerks in receiving, classification and records, every detail about an
inmate's past is not only visible to prying eyes but is
currency.
And with respect to Alonzo Barnett, there were two details that stood out.

The first was that at age twenty-two, Barnett had been arrested and convicted for the felonious forcible rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. Never mind that the two of them had been in love and already had a child together, that there'd been absolutely no force involved or threatened, and that they would get legally married three years later. Or that in order to resolve the matter quickly and inexpensively, Barnett had waived his right to counsel, pleaded guilty to statutory rape as a misdemeanor and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine. If you'd opened Barnett's jacket, all you would have seen were the initial felony charge of forcible rape of a fifteen-year-old female and the fact that the arrest had resulted in a conviction.

The second thing you would have found, had you taken the trouble to read the indictment handed up in the case that had most recently landed Barnett in Green Haven, was that in addition to the usual counts of sale and possession, there was, way down at the very bottom of the list, a charge that had been added to the Penal Law only recently. “Sale of a Controlled Substance in the fourth degree upon school grounds” it read. Once again, the dire official language masked a far more innocent reality. The legislature, it turned out, had defined “school grounds” in such a way as to include “any area accessible to the public located within 2,500 feet of the boundary of any public or private elementary, parochial, intermediate, junior high, vocational or high school.” In other words, anywhere within nearly
half a mile
of any such place. In Manhattan, that translated into a nearly ten-block radius, resulting in just about anyplace in the borough qualifying as school grounds. The law has since undergone several
amendments, and the 2,500-foot zone is these days down to a slightly more reasonable 1,000. But labels being what they are, the charge made it look and sound as though Alonzo Barnett had set up shop in the playground and started handing out free samples of drugs to kindergarten kids.

Put that together with the forcible rape of a child charge, and Green Haven had a new arrival who might as well have had a bull's-eye painted on his back.

“Prison is a lot like the street,” Barnett explained. “Only it's, like,
concentrated.
Out on the street, the strong gang up together and prey on the weak. But the weak have choices, at least. They can split. They can move out of the neighborhood. They can lock themselves indoors. And they can complain to the police. Inside, you don't have options like that. You can't move out just because you don't like the neighborhood. You can lock down in your cell, but only for so long. When it's mealtime, you got to come out and go to the mess hall. When it's rec hour, you got to go to the yard. You got a job—you got to go to work. As for the police, there are none. There are the COs, the corrections officers. But a lot of them are down with the gang members, and most of the others find it's easier to look away when trouble starts. And trouble is always starting.”

“So what do you do?” Jaywalker asked, even though he pretty much knew the answer.

“You find safety in numbers,” Barnett told him. “You join up with the Bloods or the Kings if you're Latino, or the Aryans if you're white. Me, I'm black. I joined up with the Muslims. I converted to Islam.”

Jaywalker nodded. In the 1970s, it made sense. Today, in a post-9/11 world, it would have set off alarm bells. But back then, even if you didn't happen to be a big fan of
Malcolm X, hearing that someone was a Muslim didn't automatically make him a terrorist.

“And how did that work out?” Jaywalker wanted to know.

“Not so well,” said Barnett. “At first, the brothers thought I was a plant, a snitch. Between the rape charge and the school-grounds thing, they figured I was looking to join up so I could spy on them and rat them out.”

“To whom?”

Barnett laughed. “Funny, that's what I asked. But I never did get an answer. All I got was a contract put out on me, a price on my head. So I did the only thing I could. I found me a protector.”

Jaywalker said nothing, but his stare must have said enough.

“No,” said Barnett, “not the way you're thinking. I didn't become somebody's bitch, or anything like that. When I say I found a protector, I simply mean I allowed myself to be taken under the wing of an older con, a guy who'd been there long enough to have established a rep for himself. Someone the brothers trusted.” Jaywalker nodded.

“His name was Hightower. Clarence Hightower. He ran the prison barbershop, where the inmates went to get haircuts. He saw I was having a real hard time, and he'd heard about the contract on me. And for some reason he could tell I wasn't a snitch. So one day he offered me a job cutting hair. I told him I didn't know the first thing about it. He laughed and said, ‘You think I did when I started? I was an enforcer for a numbers ring. All I knew was how to crack skulls and break kneecaps. You'll learn.'

“Still, I'd been in enough joints to know that, inside, nothing comes free. Nothing. So I ask him what it was going to cost me. I figured he'd tell me smokes or candy
or commissary money, stuff like that. Instead he looks at me and asks what people called me on the outside. ‘AB,' I tell him. He says, ‘AB, what I'm doing for you is called a favor. Understand? It's the kinda thing you can't put a price tag on. But who knows. One day I may need me a favor myself. You just remember that, okay?' And I said ‘Okay.'”

“And that was it?” Jaywalker asked.

“And that was it. I knew it might come home to haunt me someday,” said Barnett. “But the way I looked at it, I had no choice. It was only a matter of how long it was going to take before I got a knife stuck into my gut or a razor pulled across my throat. Compared to owing a man a favor? What kind of choice was that?”

“Not much of one,” Jaywalker had to admit.

Assigned to the barbershop, Barnett spent the first month sweeping up, sorting towels and linens, and keeping track of scissors, combs and Afro picks, which even though they were all plastic and round-tipped, had to be turned in each evening. There were no razors allowed in the shop. And bit by bit, simply by virtue of working for Clarence Hightower, Barnett managed to shed his reputation as a child rapist, school-yard drug dealer and snitch. And though no official word ever came down that the contract on him had been lifted, a time came when he felt safe.
Safe
being a relative word in prison, of course. After three months Hightower let Barnett start cutting hair himself, under his watchful eye. Before a year was up, he was an accomplished barber, at least to the extent one can become an accomplished barber with instruments designed for preschoolers.

Barnett was doing a four-and-a-half-to-nine at Green Haven, and he made parole on his second try, after five years. He'd lined up a bed in a halfway house and a job
washing dishes in a restaurant, the New York Department of State having informed him that despite the qualifications spelled out in his written request, his felony convictions disqualified him from obtaining a barber's license. In his plan for parole, he'd listed among his goals reestablishing contact with his daughters and eventually getting them back from foster care.

His parole officer told him to get real.

Still, by the time of his release Barnett had won the trust of the brothers, earned his GED and kicked his heroin habit for good. He hadn't realized it at the time he'd signed up, but practicing Muslims didn't do drugs, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes or curse their god. Had the Koran only thought to prohibit flying airplanes into buildings, it might be a different world we live in today. But this was 1981, a full two decades before that particular loss of innocence.

On the day of Barnett's release, Clarence Hightower was the last one in line to high-five him and wish him success on the outside. Hightower himself was doing a ten-to-twenty bit for aggravated assault and wouldn't be getting out for another three years. There was no mention of favors done or favors owed.

There'd be time for that later.

 

Barnett and Jaywalker were interrupted by a corrections officer, an old-timer known to Jaywalker by face, though not by name. Which was no surprise. Jaywalker had always been good at faces, while names and phone numbers eluded him. So the exchange of greetings became something of a guy thing.

“Hello, Counselor.”

“Hey, big guy. Howya doon?”

Big Guy reached one hand through the bars and handed
Barnett a couple of sandwiches wrapped in paper, and a cardboard cup. Then, without asking, he did the same for Jaywalker. The COs all knew Jaywalker, knew he spent more time in the pens talking with his clients than all the other lawyers combined. Knew he worked straight through the lunch hour. And knew he never turned down a day-old cheese sandwich or a lukewarm cup of something that passed for coffee. They considered him one of their own, and they looked after him and, by extension, his clients.

“Thank you,” Barnett and Jaywalker said as one.

“You got it,” said Big Guy, moving on to the next pen.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, lawyer and defendant, separated by a dozen thick iron bars and the fact that one of them would be going home when the visit was over, while the other was already home, in a manner of speaking.

“So,” said Jaywalker once they'd finished eating, “what happened next?”

As he always did, Barnett waited a few seconds before answering. And this time he took additional time to count on his fingers—backward, it would turn out. “Summer of 1984,” he said after a while. “I've been out three years. Drug free. Have an apartment to call my own. Not much to brag about, but still…I'm working as a grill man at a different restaurant, a better one. Got visitation with my daughters. Haven't missed a single reporting date with my parole officer. Life is good.”

Jaywalker nodded. These were significant accomplishments for anyone. For a recovering heroin addict and five-time felon, they defied all the odds.

“So who do you think shows up?”

Jaywalker didn't bother answering. He knew Barnett's
question was a rhetorical one. They'd both known who was going to show up.

“Catches me as I'm sitting on my stoop at the end of the day, minding my own business. Says he's been out a month and can't catch a break. Can I help him out?”

Jaywalker could only wince. He knew where this was going.

“So I reach into my pocket,” said Barnett, “fish out whatever I've got on me and offer it to him. I think it was maybe eighteen dollars, something like that.”

Reminded Jaywalker of some of his fees.

“‘I don't want no charity,' Hightower tells me.

“I ask him what he does want.

“‘You know,' he says. ‘I been outa action all this time, I don' know who's doin' what, who to see, who to go to.'

“I ask him, ‘For what?'

“‘To get hooked up,' he tells me. ‘I need to get back in the business.' The
bidness,
he called it. Which is right when I tell him he's got the wrong guy. I give him the eighteen dollars or whatever it was. I wish him luck. I stand up and I go inside. Lock the door behind me.”

Oh, thought Jaywalker, what a wonderful ending to the story that would have been. An act of charity toward an old friend, a debt repaid. But of course it wasn't the end of the story. Jaywalker knew that every bit as well as Barnett did. Had it been the end of the story, the two of them wouldn't be sitting where they were today, talking through the bars.

No, Clarence Hightower would keep coming back. He'd come back five times, six times, each time with a slightly different story. Only they all had the same ending. “He needed to find a connection,” Barnett explained. “He understood that I was finished with that stuff, and he said
he was okay with that. But he also knew that I knew who was still around, who was still doing.”

Doing.

“He kept saying that all he wanted was for me to hook him up, to put him together with someone who was in action. He had this customer, he said, a real live one who was looking to buy weight. Had all sorts of cash money. All I'd have to do was find somebody to cut him into. Once I'd done that, I could walk away from it. Keep a piece of the pie if I wanted to, turn it down if I didn't.”

“And?”

“And I kept saying no.”

“Until…” said Jaywalker.

“Until the seventh time, when he started crying like a baby and threatening to kill himself and all that. Until he played his hole card, and reminded me how he'd saved my life when no one else was going to. And telling me that because of that I owed him now. And you know what?”