Mission Flats

13

The Grove Park housing project was a collection of six ugly, yellow-brick apartment buildings. They were arranged asymmetrically, like blocks dropped here and there by a careless giant.

We caught up to Martin Gittens on a rooftop. He was bending forward with his hands on his knees like a running back before the ball is snapped. At Gittens’s feet, an African-American man in his mid-twenties sat splay-legged, his back slumped against the concrete parapet. He had a forlorn look on his face. ‘You can stop this any time, Michael,’ Gittens was telling him. ‘Just say the word. I’m not gonna make you do anything you don’t want to do.’ The man just sat there, in a daze. Gittens hunched over him, waiting for a response, then straightened and said, ‘Your call.’

Nearby, a couple of plainclothes cops monitored the conversation. They seemed anxious to just get on with it already.

But Gittens was in no hurry. He came over and shook our hands. Martin Gittens was not an imposing guy. His face was unlined and pleasant, even bland. The forgettable face in the crowd. A receding hairline and prominent forehead — which together formed a headland, a tall forehead shaped like a sperm whale’s brow — were Gittens’s only irregular features. He wore khaki pants and sneakers. If not for the small nylon holster and badge on his belt, you might have taken him for an accountant or a high-school teacher, if you remarked him at all.

‘This kid is getting ready to make a buy for us,’ Gittens said. ‘He’s almost there.’

‘Should we come back?’

‘Nah. This isn’t a bad kid. He’s just having a little crisis. He’ll figure it out. Then we can talk.’ He gave us a knowing look, letting us in on the game. You know how it works; you know the score.

A few feet away, the kid let out a sigh. It seemed to take all his strength to look up at Gittens and say, ‘I can’t do it.’

Gittens went back to him. ‘Alright, Michael, no problem. If that’s what you want.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘Well, I’ll file my report with the DA, see how they want to handle it. When they get around to it, they’ll indict you. Couple of weeks maybe. They’re busy. It’s just a drug thing.’

‘I can’t believe this shit.’

Gittens nodded sympathetically.

‘What would you do, Detective?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I would do. It’s your life, Michael. I can’t tell you what to do. I’m not your lawyer.’

‘Well guess what: My lawyer isn’t here at this particular moment. Just tell me, what am I supposed to do?’

Gittens knelt beside him. ‘Look, I gave you this opportunity because I thought you deserved it. I don’t see you in state prison, Michael, I really don’t. But what am I gonna do? I’ve got a job to do, right? I can’t just shit-can the thing without a reason. I need you to give me something in return. Tit for tat.’

‘Where will I do the time? Walpole?’

‘No, Concord probably’

‘What’s Concord like?’

‘What do you think, Michael? It’s state time, it’s bad.’

The kid sagged against the wall, disconsolate. ‘I don’t know how I got here. I really don’t.’

‘You don’t know how you got here?’

‘No, I mean I know. But it was a fucking dime bag. What the fuck! Three years for a dime bag? Mother fucker!’

‘It wasn’t a dime bag, Michael. It was sixteen grams.’

‘I didn’t weigh the shit! I told you, it wasn’t mine.’

‘Michael, you put yourself here. You should learn to take responsibility.’

‘I told you, I was just holding it.’

‘Holding it, selling it, putting it on a hot dog, whatever — if you have sixteen grams, that’s trafficking, end of story. You have to own that.’

The guy made a face. He wasn’t up for the lecture.

‘Look, Michael, you want to try and beat it? Go for it, take a chance. I’ll be rooting for you. Hey, you never know, right? Maybe you’ll walk.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘It’s a three-year minimum, and that’s day-for-day — no parole, no good time, no work release, no nothing. You sit there. There’s a war on drugs, maybe you haven’t heard.’

‘I got two kids, Gittens, you know that. I can’t go away for three years. I can’t go away for three days. You got kids, Gittens?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got kids.’

‘Then you know how it is.’

‘I’m offering you a way out, Michael.’

‘A way out with a fuckin’ cap in my head.’

‘I told you, they’ll never know who you are.’

‘They’ll know.’

‘No. You won’t be named in any of the reports; no one will ever name you in court. You have my word on that. What’s between you and me stays between you and me. Have I ever broken my word to you?’

‘They’ll know.’

‘Not if everybody does their job.’

The man breathed deep, considering his options. ‘This is the last one. I can’t take no more of this shit.’

‘Last one, Michael.’

‘After this, I’m out.’

‘After this, you’re out.’

‘What about the DA? What’s he gonna do with my case?’

‘There won’t be any case. The DA doesn’t have a case until I bring it to him. Until then, it’s my case. This is between you and me, Michael. I’ll take care of you. You know you can count on me.’

‘Truth?’

‘Truth. The DA will never hear your name.’

‘Last time,’ Michael warned, relenting.

Gittens nodded. ‘Last time. Alright, you know the drill. Stand up, empty your pockets. Detective,’ he called to one of the plainclothes guys, ‘will you come witness this?’

The kid emptied his pockets and turned them inside out for good measure. He left his things in a tidy pile on the rubbery surface of the roof, then raised his hands and allowed Gittens to frisk him. Boredom registered on both their faces. The procedure had become routine for them. Gittens carefully copied down the serial numbers from two twenty-dollar bills and handed them to the kid with the advice, ‘Knockout, Michael, nothing else. Tell him it’s got to be Knockout. And make sure the money goes to Veris himself. Big guy in the red FUBU shirt.’

‘I know who the motherfucker is.’

‘Alright, Michael. We’ll be watching.’

‘That makes me feel much better,’ the kid sniffed, and he disappeared down the stairs.

Gittens invited us to watch. ‘Step right up, men. Showtime at the Apollo.’

We moved to the edge of the roof, which overlooked Echo Park five stories below. Like so many things in Mission Flats, Echo Park was not what its name suggested, a rolling green meadow where sounds echoed off trees and hills. Instead, it was a crooked pie piece wedged into the joint where North Tremont Street branched off from Franklin Street. Gittens said the locals called it Hypo Park for the hypodermic needles found there. Inside were a few stringy trees and some park benches — the unfancy kind, green slats in concrete bases. A Y-shaped walkway connected the three corners of the park. Graffiti on the walkway read, Fuck the PoPo, DeeZee, the ubiquitous MP, and some markings I could not interpret.

Gittens looked down at this scene, rapt. He held a pair of binoculars, which he passed to me occasionally.

I mimicked his posture, craning slightly, forehead creased with concentration.

I tried to detect something more than a few kids hanging out in a ratty park. There wasn’t much going on, though. A half dozen young guys — kids, all of them black, wearing baggy hip-hop styles — were draped over the benches. A few people came and went, loitering, talking, moving on. From all appearances, the Echo Park drug trade had shut down for the day.

‘What’s Knockout?’ I asked Gittens.

‘Heroin with some other garbage in it. It’s been turning up the last few weeks. We had a kid die from it.’

One of the cops with us muttered, ‘Come on, shithead.’

‘Give him a minute to get down the stairs,’ Gittens soothed. ‘Be patient.’

Echo Park struck me as an indiscreet place for a drug market. There was nothing to hide behind, no privacy from the heavy traffic on Franklin Street. ‘Isn’t this place a little… exposed? You can see everything.’

Gittens shrugged. ‘It’s not enough to see. We have to get the stuff, we have to catch them with the dope in their pockets, otherwise there’s no case. And we can’t get close enough for that. There are lookouts all up and down the block. You go down there, you’ll hear them whistling signals to each other. It sounds like a birdcage.’

A woman was entering the park now, at the corner closest to us, the narrow tip of the pie wedge. She was black, rail thin, with a knock-kneed walk and a rainbow-colored knit hat. A kid greeted her just inside the park. He seemed glad to see her, greeting her as an old friend, laughing, clasping her hand, pulling her close for a hug.

‘That kid’s a sweeper. His job is to steer the buyers to the right place. He’ll hang out near the entrance to the park, ask you what you’re looking for, figure out if you’re a player or a cop or just someone walking through the park. If you’re a buyer, he’ll tell you to go sit on one of those benches and he’ll give one of those whistle signals.’ Gittens whistled a little bird call, soft, under his breath, low-high-high-high.

The woman moved on. She sat on one of the benches next to a guy in a red FUBU baseball shirt.

‘ FUBU,’ Gittens said, ‘For Us, By Us. Those FUBU clothes went big-time and they started telling white kids it meant For U, By U.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s June Veris in the red shirt. He’s original MP. Used to run with Braxton when they were kids. Now Braxton just uses him as muscle.’

June Veris had muscle to spare. Big guy with massive shoulders that tapered down to a narrow waist. Veris sat a level higher than the buyer, his butt on the backrest, feet on the seat of the green bench. He chatted with the woman for some time before she reached into her pocket and slapped her hand down into his. The gesture was a sort of exuberant handshake. From our position, you could not see any cash being passed. Then Veris disappeared and a kid walked toward the woman.

‘That’s the slider,’ Gittens narrated.

The slider sauntered right past the woman. There was a little seesaw in his walk, a flourish. It was a walk the kid probably practiced, checking himself out as he passed store windows. He dropped something in a garbage can and kept walking. When the woman retrieved it, the three guys who’d been so friendly with her a moment before were nowhere to be seen. They’d melted away to the edges of the park. She hurried out of the park with anxious, bird-like glances.

‘The slider has the most dangerous job,’ Gittens said. ‘Nobody touches the dope but him. That way the risk to everyone else is minimized. Even if we catch the others, there’s no case because there’s no dope on them. Without an informant or an undercover buy, there’s no way to tie the sweepers or anyone else to the drugs. But the slider has to carry the drugs on him, so if he’s caught…’

There was a lull in the sliders’ business.

‘There’s a stashpad around here somewhere,’ Gittens lectured to fill the downtime, ‘to replenish the sliders. The kitchen will be somewhere else. It moves around. We close one down, another one opens somewhere else. It’s like Whack-a-Mole, you know that game? It’ll never end.’

‘What about Braxton? What does he do?’

‘Braxton designed all this. He runs this whole thing. If things were different, he’d have gone to Harvard Business School. As it is, he runs a damn good business. He doesn’t need Harvard Business School. Harold’s a player. He’s a damn smart guy’

‘And a murderer.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not like that,’ Gittens said.

Our man Michael finally emerged. He moved casually between the buildings, entering at the near corner of the park.

This time I did not need Gittens’s narration to follow the process. Michael was met by the same sweeper, who approached him tentatively. There were no smiles, no hugs. Presumably the sweeper did not know him, maybe even suspected he was a snitch. Whatever the reason, their chat took a little longer than the previous one. But the informant bluffed his way by the sweeper and made his way to a bench. Veris sat down next to him, easy to pick out in his cherry-red shirt, and it was Veris who actually took the cash. Gittens’s two twenties, the serial numbers recorded, disappeared into his pocket. After the money was passed, less gracefully this time, Veris moved off. A slider walked past to drop a plastic envelope in a trash can for Michael to retrieve.

‘Another satisfied customer,’ Gittens drawled as the informant quick-stepped out of the park.

Echo Park was quiet again. June Veris sat alone on his bench and soon was joined by another guy, who talked to him in an animated way. The sweeper loafed near the entrance awhile, then drifted back to his friends on the benches. Kids hanging out, nothing to do but yack with one another. If Gittens had not explained what I’d just seen, I wouldn’t have recognized it as a drug sale at all.

Michael emerged on the roof again and the search procedure was repeated. He emptied his pockets to reveal no money and a little plastic envelope that had not been there when he left. The ‘controlled buy’ was complete.

Gittens displayed the little opaque plastic square to me. There was a red boxing glove rubber-stamped on the package — Knockout.

‘Send them,’ one of the cops urged Gittens. He was watching the park, apparently anxious that June Veris — the target of this whole operation — would leave or simply pass the marked twenties to someone else. If that happened, there would be no way to tie him to the drugs. It was essential the cops arrest Veris while he had the sting money in his pocket. ‘Let’s go, Martin,’ the cop urged.

‘Not yet,’ Gittens said.

‘Let’s go! Send them now!’

‘I said, not yet.’

We waited through several more purchases, maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes in all. At one point a white kid in a Volvo pulled up to the park. He had shaggy red hair and a goatee. The Volvo had a Yale sticker in the rear window. ‘Hello there, Skippy,’ Gittens muttered. Only after a handful of others had scored their drugs — that is, when it was no longer obvious that our informant was Michael — Gittens murmured into his walkie-talkie, ‘Okay, go.’

Within seconds, four unmarked black cruisers converged on the park, pulling right up onto the curb to block the three gates. The kids in the park scattered. Cops ran after them, caught and tackled a few, disappeared down side streets chasing others. It was a joyful chaos.

As it turned out, Veris escaped. The operation failed. But as I think back on that day — even knowing, as I do, that Gittens probably expected Veris would escape, maybe even warned him of the raid — what I remember is that Gittens kept his word. He protected his informant. I remember, too, how it felt to watch that wonderful anarchy in the park, the riot of police and sliders all running, all shouting. From above, through binoculars. How I smiled. It was exhilarating. It was fun.

‘Listen,’ Gittens told Kelly and me afterward, ‘the question isn’t Who killed Danziger? Everybody knows who killed Danziger. The problem is What do you do about it? Nobody in this neighborhood will even talk about Harold Braxton, let alone testify against him.

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know what Danziger thought he was doing. That case he brought against Gerald McNeese was an old beef, just stupid crackhead stuff. Ray Ratleff was a slider who came up short on a bundle the Posse gave him to sell, so McNeese tried to collect the debt. That’s all there was to it. Ray probably did the coke himself, then he told McNeese he got robbed. Ray Rat’s a pipehead. He’s not a bad kid. I mean, I like Ray. But he’s been on the pipe a long time, he just can’t help himself. Harold shouldn’t have trusted him with the stuff in the first place. It was his mistake, really.’

We were in Echo Park, where the drug market was closed until all these cops decided to go home. The three of us sat on a bench as Gittens illuminated the secret history of Mission Flats. There was none of the wiseguy Boston accent in the detective’s voice. He spoke in an adenoidal, Midwestern tone that matched his white sneakers and home-ironed khakis. The story he told was a different thing.

‘Ray gets into a hole and the debt piles up. So now Braxton has to respond. He can’t allow that kind of thing to go on, he’s got a business to run. He can’t just get ripped off and do nothing about it.

‘So Harold sends out McNeese to square the thing away. But G-Mac was a bad choice. McNeese has killed guys for way less than what Ray Rat did, and Ray’s basically harmless. It was like dropping a bomb on a mosquito. Maybe Braxton figured G-Mac would scare Ray Rat into paying, but Ray just didn’t have the cash because, like I said, any money Ray gets goes straight into the pipe.

‘Anyway, the only thing Ray has is this piece-of-crap Volkswagen Jetta. So one day G-Mac sees Ray driving the Jetta. Ray comes to a light, G-Mac walks up, sticks a gun in his ear — this is right on Mission Ave — and he tells Ray he’s taking the car on account of the money Ray owes the Posse. Just like that. So that’s the carjacking — boom, life felony, right there.

‘Now, Ray’s not a bad kid, like I said. But let’s be honest: Ray did owe the money. Plus, he was lucky McNeese didn’t cap him right there, being the way he is. So the whole thing should have been over and done with — Ray Rat screwed up, so G-Mac took the Jetta, case closed. Ray should have walked away.

‘Okay, so at this point somehow Danziger got Ray Rat to agree to testify about the whole thing — which is unheard of. These DAs can never find a witness in a gang case. I don’t know what the heck Danziger promised him. I don’t even know why Danziger was pushing the case in the first place — and I liked Bobby Danziger, believe me; we were in SIU together a long time — but no jury in this city was going to send anyone to jail over a drug beef, not when the only witness was a crackhead like Ray Ratleff. Even if Danziger could get Ray into the courtroom, he’d have to strap him to the chair to keep him from falling off. I mean, you could have tried this case in Beijing, it still would have come back not-guilty.

‘Anyway, predictably Ray Rat boogies, and now things get really crazy. Braxton can’t find Ray Rat; and G-Mac’s all hot and bothered because Danziger is pushing this thing about Ray Rat’s Jetta. And if it gets to trial, who knows? There’s always a chance a jury will believe Ray because, crackhead or not, you know Ray is telling the truth. So, long story short, everybody’s looking for Ray Rat — cops, gangsters, everybody — and nobody can find him.

‘So what happens is, the trial is coming up and Braxton’s crew can’t reach the witness. Well naturally something has to be done to stop that trial. So Braxton goes up to Maine and caps Danziger. I mean, maybe he didn’t actually pull the trigger, but he sure as hell gave the order.’

I asked, ‘How do you know all that?’

‘Chief Truman, everybody knows all that. There’s no great mystery here, fellas. Half the people in this neighborhood could tell you what happened. But go prove it.’

Kelly frowned at this version of events. It was all hearsay, of course. Rumor, not evidence. Or maybe it was Gittens himself that Kelly did not approve of. But to me, this was all good news. Gittens represented something more important than evidence: an insider, a skeleton key.

‘Where is this Ray Rat now?’ Kelly asked.

‘Who knows? The whole department’s out looking for Braxton. Nobody’s thinking about Ray right now, because Ray didn’t shoot Danziger.’

‘But you could find him?’

Gittens shrugged. ‘I’ve got some friends around here who might know something.’

Friends? What to make of this guy? If Kelly was right that there are two kinds of cops, talkers and fighters, then here was the beau ideal of the talkers. But there was no way to know how much of Gittens’s talk was just that — talk.

Kelly and I exchanged a glance. Why not?

‘You can really find Ray Rat?’ I asked.

‘Chief Truman, I found you, didn’t I?’