Slow Motion Riot (24 page)

Bill points out the building we're
going to and I lead the way. As I pass the first building, I see "JustICE
for JAmal" drawn in chalk under a window and I hear a man calling out
something to us. At first, I think it's "go away please" that he's
saying. But then his words get more distinct.

"GO AWAY, POLICE!"

"He thinks we're cops,"
Angel says with a weary smile.

A bottle of Heinz 57 Varieties
comes flying out of nowhere and smashes into 114 pieces near my feet.

"Watch it!" Bill stops
walking and looks up, as if he's expecting to stare down any of the five
buildings the bottle might've come from. "Who did that?" he calls
out.

"Fuck you, Uncle Tom!" a
voice calls out from a high window behind us.

We're almost in the middle of the
courtyard now, equidistant from each building and the street. I look up and see
dozens of people hanging out the windows of all the buildings. We're surrounded
by hostile faces. Boys. Girls. Old ladies in curlers and floral gowns. Chunky
guys in sleeveless shirts, drinking beer. It's just after noontime. What's
everybody doing home? Before I can say anything to Angel or Bill, I hear a low
grumbling sound that gradually gets louder and louder. People are chanting
something in Spanish.

"MAMON! MAMON! MAMON!" it
sounds like.

I've got to ask Angel what that
means when I get a chance.

Somebody hurls a beer can at us and
it wings me on the knee. I look around again and see people ahead of us, behind
us, beside us, and above us are leaning out their windows, yelling at us and
giving us the finger. Their chanting is a wall of sound that completely
surrounds us; it's like we're in the middle of a Roman gladiator arena.

"Let's get the fuck out of
Dodge," says Bill as somebody else narrowly misses us with the smelly
garbage they're throwing out the window.

We make a run for it back to the
car and manage to get away after being pelted with only rotten eggs and fruit.
The odor is awful when it's mingled with our sweat, and for once I ask Bill if
he'll light up a cigar.

"To hell with 'em," Angel
says as he starts the car and pulls away. "We'll have to call the office
and tell them they gotta send somebody out here much earlier in the day to pick
that guy up."

"Yeah, but, Angel, what the
fuck was that about?" I ask.

"People be pissed off, Baum,"
Angel replies, breaking off from his usual social-work-speak to give me some
straight street talk.

"About what? The Perkins
kid?"

"Not just that," Angel
says, barely avoiding a mover's truck that comes barreling through an
intersection. "They be angry about their air conditioner not working and
the paint coming off the walls and how nine-one-one don't come when they sick
and the school's no good and they can't get a bigger apartment with the kids..."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I
say. "But we're here to help. Why are they picking on us?"

"Why are they picking on
us?" Bill slowly repeats with an incredulous smile. "Because we're
here."

The rain was coming down in sheets
on the first Sunday that Richard Silver decided to go up to the country.

"I don't understand why we're
doing this," his girlfriend, Jessica, said loudly as she opened up the
back of the car to put their bags in. "Couldn't we have waited until next
weekend?"

She was getting soaked in the
downpour and her blouse was sticking to her back. She looked like a bird
drowning in the middle of Park Avenue. Richard Silver closed his umbrella and
got in on the driver's side. He leaned across the seat and opened the
passenger's side door for her.

"We have to go up this
weekend," he told her as she got in. "Otherwise, we'll waste all of
next weekend opening the house up. And if it's nice out, we won't want to lose
the day. And I'll have Leonard ..."

"I thought you didn't like
going to Greenwich," she said. "Wasn't part of the settlement that Gloria
got to be there every other weekend?"

He winked and grinned as he turned
the key in the ignition. "Larry got an injunction against her," he
said.

The rain beat steadily on the
windshield as they drove north across Eighty-sixth Street. A cloud of steam
rose from a hole in the street, like an explosion was building underground.

"So what do you hear from your
friends in Chicago?" Jessica asked.

"Still very nervous,"
Richard Silver told her. "They're talking about a lot of investigations
with these savings and loan associations, you know. But to tell you the truth,
I don't think anything's really doing with it."

"So let me ask you something,
Richard," she said. "Why don't these savings and loan people use
someone they know in Chicago to wash their money for them?"

He let out a long breath and the
dark circles under his eyes seemed to get a little bigger. "They can't do
that," he said. "It's too much of a straight line. They need somebody
who's a little bit out of their circuit to set some of that up."

She pushed back her wet hair with
both hands. "So why do they come to you? Everybody knows about you
already."

"Yeah, well, we gotta watch
out for that too," he said. "In fact, one of these days, we're gonna
have to find somebody to make a trip to the Caymans for us."

He told her to turn on the radio so
they could hear a traffic report. But all they could get were Madonna songs and
news updates. The latest one said that the Perkins kid who'd been shot by the
cop was going to pull through and get out of intensive care, but there were
still plans for community protests. In the meantime, there was no sign of
Darryl King turning up.

"Another long, hot
summer," Richard Silver said sardonically, as if reciting some old piece
of verse he'd been forced to memorize as a kid.

The cars directly in front of them
seemed to have come to a dead halt. Richard put on his left-hand signal and
tried to switch lanes, but a maroon Le Baron cut him off. He honked his horn in
frustration and then moved over. But by then the light had turned red and he
found himself stuck halfway in the crosswalk. An old lady, trying to walk past
the front of his car, struck his hood with her cane.

"Do you think there're going
to be riots?" Jessica asked.

Her question caught him off guard
and he blinked like he'd just been awakened from a sound sleep.
"What?"

"Do you think they'll have
riots?" she said.

"Well." He cleared his
throat. "You know, I have a theory about that," he said.

"Just a second."

Jessica turned up the radio and
began singing along with Madonna. Even with her hair all wet and her face red,
she was lovely. But Richard had heard cats in the rain making nicer sounds. He
turned right on Ninety-sixth Street and headed toward the entrance to FDR
Drive.

"See, people only riot when
they want the attention of the institutions," he told her, "because
they think that's how things get changed. But most people in the ghettos here
don't believe in the institutions anymore."

They were going north toward the
Willis Avenue Bridge. Traffic had lightened up, but the road was still slick
and the gray curtain of rain coming down on the East River was so thick that
Ward's Island was invisible on the other side.

"So you think it won't be as
bad this time?" Jessica asked.

"No, I think it'll be much
worse," he said. "With the riots everybody got angry all at once and
got it over with. Now things get broken down a little bit at a time. Instead of
one big riot, people are angry all the time. And since they figure they got
nothing to lose, they might as well burn the city down block by block."

They made the turn and headed
across the Willis Avenue Bridge, a humpbacked metal beast reaching across the
river. The road was pockmarked and bumpy. On the left, a cigarette company's
clock said it was 1:02 and seventy-four degrees. Richard Silver glanced over to
his right at the useless smokestacks and abandoned factories, where generation
after generation of immigrants had held down their first jobs. It didn't matter
if you even spoke the language. Of course, his own father hadn't done anything
of the kind, but there were millions of others who had. All that was gone now anyway.

He made the turn off Bruckner
Boulevard and got on the expressway. Off to the side, old tenement buildings
and housing projects stood like forgotten sentries in the rain.

"So what can anybody do?"
Jessica asked.

"What do you do?" Richard
felt around in his pockets for change to pay the first toll. "What you do
is get a nice house in Connecticut so you can get out of town and not have to look
at this mess."

Slowly, the mainstream media began
to concentrate on finding out how Darryl King had managed to slip through the
cracks in the system.

For the first few days after the
shoot-out with the police, Judge Philip Bernstein took most of the blame. He
had, after all, decided to release Darryl on his own recognizance after a
violation of probation hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court. The headlines about
Bernstein went on for two days and the uproar was such that the head of the
Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, who was normally too much of a snob to talk
to anybody except The New York Times and TV reporters, actually had a press
conference to denounce the judge and call on the governor to take disciplinary
action.

When stirrings and rumblings began
to be reported in Albany, the judge, who'd maintained a stony silence in the
face of all the criticism, finally went on the offensive. As a former head of
the district attorney's rackets bureau, he was shrewd about the press, and
particularly sensitive to the needs of reporters on deadline. He waited until
after five o'clock on a slow news day and then picked up the phone in his
chambers to call a reporter he knew at one of the city's major tabloids.

Speaking with a confidence honed
from years of courtroom experience and back room wheedling, he spent fifteen
minutes ripping into the Probation Department and blaming its officials for
Darryl King's release.

"If I had to single out any
one factor, I'd say it was the probation officer who presented the violation in
my courtroom," he told the reporter. "Never in forty years in the
criminal justice system have I heard anything so sloppy and self-serving! He
neglected to give me any of the facts that would've allowed me to make an
informed decision about the defendant. My hands were tied! What am I supposed
to do if I don't have the facts?"

When there was a long silence on
the other end of the phone, the judge asked if he was talking too fast again.
The reporter said no, it was fine, he was keeping up with him. The judge went
on to say that if he'd still been at the D.A.'s office and the probation
officer Baum had been on his staff, he would've been fired immediately for
incompetence. He then broadened his attack to include the entire Probation
Department and even suggested the mayor was at fault for allowing such mismanagement.

"Don't you think that's a
little over the top?" the reporter asked meekly.

"No, I do not!" the judge
thundered back. "What I am telling you is that at the racetrack of justice
we are betting on a lame horse and the losers are all of us ..."

The judge's rant went on with such
ferocity that the reporter thought smoke was going to come out of his end of
the receiver. Finally he told the judge he thought he had quite enough for a
story, thank you very much. There was less than ten minutes until deadline and
it would probably be impossible to get a full response out of anybody at
Probation on such short notice, which of course had been the judge's intention
all along.

"Do you need a picture of
me?" the judge asked.

"No, I think we have something
in our files, Your Honor."

"Don't use that one where I'm
wearing the hat again," the judge said before he hung up. "It makes
me look like Francis the Talking Mule."

An hour after the tabloid hit the
street with the headline "THEY TURNED HIM LOOSE!" and the subhead
"Judge Blames Probation for Releasing Darryl King," Steve Baum got a
call at home, telling him to be in the deputy commissioner's office first thing
in the morning.

"Bring a second pair of
underwear," the guy calling said.

"Why?"

"Because they are going to rip
you a new asshole."

The Probation Department's
administrative building on Leonard Street is a misconceived hunk of modern
architecture that somebody left in lower Manhattan. At first it appears to be
an imposing gray edifice with jutting angles—at least an octagon. But on closer
inspection, it's just a horrible mistake. Even though the building is not that
old, its marble surface is crumbling and for the past few years the entrance
has been surrounded by protective scaffolding to keep passersby from getting
bonked on the head by the falling pieces. Somebody has scrawled the name of the
anarchy group "MISSING FOUNDATIONS" in white spray paint across the dark
scaffold boards. I guess it's meant to be ironic, but it comes off as more of
an understatement.

Upstairs, Deputy Commissioner
Kenneth Dawson is waiting for me in his office. His walls are cluttered with
those idiotic Probation—Be Part of the Magic stickers and pictures of him
shaking hands with various assemblymen and clubhouse politicians. I remember
how Big Jack told me that Dawson got this job because his father was hooked up
with the Staten Island Democrats. He has a copy of the newspaper with the
headline about Probation letting Darryl King go on his lap. It's already so
well thumbed that it looks like a vintage edition.

He chews his upper lip furiously
and glares at me. "I want you to tell me what happened here," he
says.

The clock on his desk reads 8:08. A
cup of coffee would be nice, but with the look he's giving me I know I
shouldn't expect any small kindnesses. Deputy Dawson. For once, I don't think
of Deputy Dawg.

"You wanna know what happened
with the violation hearing?"

"I didn't call you here to
congratulate you on your sharp work," he says in a nasty, insinuating
voice that would earn him a good beating from some of my clients.

I rub my eyes and try to get my
thoughts in order. I should be used to getting up at this hour from being out
with the Field Service Unit, but it still takes me a while to get going.

"Well," I say slowly,
"it's not at all like the judge said. I handed in. my V.O.P. papers
..."

"Your what?"

V.O.P. stands for Violation of
Probation. I thought everyone who worked here knew the term. But then again,
this guy Dawson is mainly supposed to be in budget, so he may not be up on all
the shop talk.

"I touched all the
bases," I say. "I pulled together all the papers and the evidence and
the judge made his own decision. What else was I supposed to do?"

He shakes his head like he hasn't
heard a word I've said. "Why did you leave it up to the judge?"

"I'm not sure what you mean.
It's his decision."

"But why did you put this guy
King on probation in the first place?"

I look at him skeptically, not sure
if he's putting me on or not. Can he know that little about the way this agency
works? He's been here a year, I think.

"I didn't put Darryl King on
probation," I explain.

He picks the newspaper off his lap
and reads out loud. "The judge said the Probation Department had
originally recommended King not be sent to jail..."

"First off, they're talking
about the presentence investigation, which I didn't write. Tommy Markham wrote
it and he certainly didn't recommend probation. I read the report."

He rocks back in his chair
abruptly. "All I know," he says, "is that so far this morning,
I've gotten calls from City Hall, the PBA, the criminal justice coordinator,
and three newspapers all wanting to know how it is that one of our officers is
responsible for six cops getting shot..."

I just look at this guy a minute,
with his sunburn, and his Sy Syms suit, and his little political clubhouse
mementos spread across his desk. What a hack. I used to think those
descriptions were unfair and two-dimensional. But this asshole can't see beyond
the doorway of his own office. Here's a guy who doesn't know the first thing
about probation and is just serving time until another administrative job opens
up at a city agency that pays better. I suddenly feel a surge of admiration for
Richard Silver; he's what this guy can only aspire to be.

"I just told you what the
situation was," I say as evenly as I can. "I went in to the judge and
I gave it my best shot, and the guy got out anyway."

"And that's not good
enough." Dawson turns slightly red and shakes an emphatic finger at me.
"The people we have to work with want to know that there's some
accountability in this department. And I've had to assure them that the officer
responsible is going to be disciplined."

"What'd you do, give 'em my
name?"

"In some cases, that was
necessary."

"Well, you know, I'm not gonna
be the fall guy for this."

"Well, somebody's responsible
and it certainly isn't me."

Of course, I think. It couldn't be.
To be responsible you'd have to have some idea of what's going on.

"So as of today we're starting
dismissal proceedings," Dawson says matter-of-factly.

"Against who?"

"Against you. I've already
told the people at City Hall that you're being let go."

It takes a couple of seconds for
what he's saying to sink in. Two years of hard work are disappearing just
because the judge was in a bad mood that day. For a couple of seconds, my mind
goes blank and I can't think of anything to say in my own defense.

"We both know all about
severance pay and administrative procedures," he says. "But you'd be
doing everyone in the department a great service if you'd start clearing out
your desk today."

A half hour after I storm out of
his office, I'm still bouncing around the locker room downstairs in
frustration. I keep smoking cigarettes and asking myself how I wound up in this
mess.

Do they think they can just make me
the scapegoat for the whole system? After a while, I stop and try to think
about whether it could be my fault. I start going over the Darryl King case
step-by-step in my mind, trying to figure out what I could've done differently.
I know this is going to eat at me for years. Maybe if I'd been a little firmer
with him the first time he came into my office, it might've turned out
differently. It could be that Bill's been right all along, and I have been too
soft on these people. Maybe I shouldn't have acted like such a social worker,
arrogantly thinking I could persuade Darryl to change.

I haven't even gotten to the
question of what I'm going to do with the rest of my life when Jack Pirone
shows up and asks me what's the matter. Before I'm halfway through telling him
about my getting fired, he's barreling out of the locker room like a pickup
truck without brakes and heading upstairs to Dawson's office.

"I want you to tell me
something," Big Jack says, his girth pushing against the arms of the most
comfortable chair in Dawson's office. The deputy commissioner is looking at
him, like he's afraid of Jack coming across the room to sit on him. "Did
you read the transcript of Mr. Baum's violation hearing in Judge Bernstein's
courtroom?"

Dawson shifts the tension from one
side of his face to the other and then back again. "I haven't had the
chance."

"I see," Jack says
pleasantly.

I'm standing in the corner with my
hands in my pockets, feeling like an outcast. On top of being fired, now I get
the embarrassment of hearing people talk about it.

"So you don't know what was
actually said in the hearing?" Jack asks.

"Well, I've certainly read the
judge's account."

"Then FUCK YOU, you fucking
child!" Jack roars. "How fucking DARE you call Baum in here before
you know what the fuck's going on, you dumb fuck. How many times have you been
across the street to see the supervision offices? Huh? When was the last time
you were in a courtroom besides seeing your old man almost get indicted? What'd
you ever do besides getting your name on a list? You fucking child."

Jack's voice is so loud that I have
to look to make sure he's still sitting in his chair, and not across the room,
yelling in the deputy commissioner's face. "Listen, Pirone..." Dawson
says, trying to sound tough.

"No, you listen. You wanna get
pushed around by the media, and set policy that way, I know people who work for
the newspapers too..."

Dawson lowers his head and starts
speaking rapidly like he's trying to slip his words through the barrier of
sound Jack's putting up. "The fact remains that we have to have some
accountability."

"You want
accountability?" Jack says. "Then you can account for eight hundred
probation officers walking off the job. You fire Baum and I'll stage a walkout
that'll shut the town down. You'll have sixty thousand probationers walking
around totally unsupervised. An invading army. How do you like that for a
headline? You wouldn't just have the tabloids with that. You'd get the Times
and TV news too."

A silence falls over the room.
Dawson sits back in his chair and sighs, looking beaten. He picks up a pen and
drops it right away.

"All right," he says to
Jack. "What do you want from me?"

Jack looks down at his pudgy hand
and sticks out his forefinger. "Number one," he says. "Baum gets
his job back."

Dawson pats the pale, translucent
hair on his scalp and looks pained. "That's going to be very difficult,"
he says. "People are very upset about this Darryl King business and they
want to know who's to blame."

"Blame the judge," Jack
says. "You got a very good press officer and he knows how to make phone
calls. Tell everybody it was the judge's fault and we're still on the case."

"I guess I can try,"
Dawson mumbles. "We can have an administrative panel review the court
proceedings."

Whatever that means. From the way
he says the words, it's clear he doesn't know either.

"What else?" Jack says.

Now he's looking at me. I hold up
my hands like I don't know what he wants. But he keeps looking at me and
asking, "What else?" as if he expects me to present a list of
demands.

"He's got his job back,"
Dawson whines to Jack. "What else does he want?"

"You've put him under obvious
duress here," Jack says, suddenly taking the tone of a concerned family
therapist. "I think Baum's entitled to some compensation for the shabby
treatment he's received."

I start to tell Jack to knock it
off, but Dawson's already asking me what I want to keep my mouth shut and not
make a fuss. I can't think of anything too extravagant at the moment.
"It'd be nice if I could have a couple of report days back at the office
next week," I say. "With all the time I've been out in the field, I still
have a couple of people to see and some paperwork to take care of."

"Done," says Jack. Dawson
nods in reluctant agreement. "What else?" Jack asks me.

"No, that's enough," I
tell him.

"Come on, you've been harassed
by the administration. They owe you something. Take a comp day."

"I don't want a comp
day," I say. "I'm already behind the eight ball in my work."

"Take the rest of the day
off," Dawson interrupts. "I could use it too, with the headache I
got."