Guilty as Sin Read online

  Your tax dollars at work.

  There was still one more item in the file that caught Jaywalker’s attention. It was a small color photo of the defendant, no larger than the ones they stick on passports. Not your traditional mug shot with a pair of images—one full face and one in profile—above a series of numbers. No, this one was a single exposure, a shot of the defendant looking directly into the camera, taken hours after his arrest. He was dark-skinned, but not so dark that Jaywalker didn’t have to check his race under the pedigree section, where he found it listed as “black,” “African-American” not really being in vogue yet in law enforcement circles. Barnett was described as five-foot-seven inches and one hundred and sixty pounds. His graying hair made him look every bit of his fifty-one years and then some. Staring out at Jaywalker, as he’d stared at the camera a year and a half earlier, he looked neither belligerent nor defiant, the way a younger man might have. If anything, he looked sad. If he was angry, he was angry only at himself.

  Before returning the file, Jaywalker jotted down the A.D.A.’s name and number. He took a look at the earlier notices of appearance that had been filed in the case. There turned out to be three of them, not two, as Lorraine Wilson had thought. The two court-appointed lawyers— Jaywalker now being number three—had been preceded by a private attorney, some guy who’d walked away from the case after making a single appearance. Maybe he hadn’t been paid enough, or maybe he had suspected early on that Mr. Barnett was going to be hard to deal with. Whichever had been the case, later on he’d somehow managed to sneak the words For Arraignment Only onto his notice. It was the different color ink that gave the notation away as an afterthought. So one thing was certain, at least. Whether it was Alonzo Barnett’s long record, his lack of money or his disinclination to take a plea, it seemed nobody wanted any part of him.

  Nobody, at least, until Jaywalker.

  Having done the unusual by looking through the file a full week before the case was scheduled to appear in court, Jaywalker next did the unthinkable. He went to visit Barnett.

  He would have done it the hard way, killing a full day by making the round-trip out to Rikers Island and back. That’s where the vast majority of the city’s detainees were housed while awaiting trial or some other disposition of their cases. But it turned out Jaywalker didn’t have to go that far. Barnett was a guest of what was at that time known as the Manhattan Detention Center. In its later incarnations it would become the Bernard B. Kerik Complex, and then—following Mr. Kerik’s indictment, conviction and fall from grace—the Manhattan Detention Complex. But to everyone familiar with it, whether as an insider or an outsider, it had always been, and would always be, the Tombs.

  The good thing about the Tombs was that, rather than being plunked down in the middle of a river, it was conveniently located at 125 White Street, at the northern end of 100 Centre Street. So in order to get to it from the Criminal Court Building, all you had to do was walk around the corner. In fact, if you were unlucky enough to be a guest of the city, you didn’t even have to do that. Both an underground passageway and a twelfth-floor covered bridge—imaginatively referred to as “the bridge”—saved you the trouble. Jaywalker, who’d been a guest of the city on more than one occasion—whether for mouthing off to a judge or committing some other minor breach of courtroom etiquette—took the trouble on this occasion of walking around the corner.

  The other thing about the Tombs was that it was then, and continues to be to this day, reserved for the more desirable detainees in the system. Not that there’s any written policy decreeing it as such. But it can’t be purely by accident that at any given moment the population of the Tombs is considerably older, whiter, more fluent in English and less prone to committing crimes of violence than the inhabitants of Rikers Island.

  An hour after arrival, Jaywalker found himself sitting across a table from Alonzo Barnett. It was an old wooden table, covered with peeling paint and cigarette burn marks, and it was securely bolted to the floor. But sitting across it sure beat trying to carry on a conversation through iron bars or bulletproof glass, or using telephone handsets manufactured sometime during the last Ice Age.

  Barnett looked about like he had in his photograph, only older. And not just a year and a half older. Even in the Tombs, time has a tendency to take its toll. But other than that, he was the same man the photo had promised. Relaxed, mature, self-aware, sad and somehow dignified despite the predicament in which he found himself. And if you think it’s easy to look dignified while wearing an orange jumpsuit and paper slippers, sitting at a bolted-down table in a room walled by steel and cinder blocks, try it sometime.

  “I suspect my previous attorneys have warned you that I’m a bit of a pain,” were the first words out of Barnett’s mouth. “And the prosecutor, as well.”

  Which wasn’t quite the opening line Jaywalker had expected. Defendants didn’t generally make a habit of using terms like suspect, previous and as well. Or even attorney, for that matter. Not to mention prosecutor. Evidently, what Mr. Barnett was trying to say was, “I bet all my otha lawyers and that muthafuckin’ no-good D.A. been bad-mouthin’ me, huh?”

  But he hadn’t said it that way, and the almost quaint manner he’d used to express himself instead brought a smile to Jaywalker’s face. “Actually,” he said, “I haven’t spoken with any of them.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Well,” said Jaywalker, “if I understand the way things are supposed to work, I’m assigned to represent you, not them. So I figured I’d come in here and see what you have to say first, before I talk to any of them. If that’s okay with you.”

  Which evened the score at one smile apiece.

  They talked for an hour that first day, maybe a little more. Alonzo Barnett came across as a gentle, thoughtful and intelligent man. Born on a farm in central Alabama, he’d had almost nothing in the way of formal education, finally earning his GED at the age of forty-eight in a place called Green Haven. A GED is a high school equivalency degree, a not-quite-diploma that the state corrections system used to hand out, back when there was enough money to hold classes behind bars. And despite its bucolic name, Green Haven was and continues to be a maximum security prison surrounded by a huge wall topped with miles of razor wire. It was no doubt given its name by someone who never set eyes on it.

  Barnett had made his way north at the age of fourteen, alone. He slept on the floor of a Harlem shooting gallery, a large room shared by upward of twenty men and women who otherwise would have been out on the street. In summer, it was cooled by a single window cracked open at the top. In winter, it was heated by the open lit burners of a gas range. And lest there be any confusion, there are no targets to shoot at in a shooting gallery, and no trophies awarded for marksmanship. What is shot is heroin, what are aimed at are veins, and the only prize for hitting one is an hour or so of oblivion.

  Days, Barnett worked for street corner dealers as a gofer. A gofer is someone who’s willing to go for this and go for that. This and that might include coffee, soda, lunch, cigarettes, change or more product. The product could be heroin, cocaine, marijuana or pills. At the end of the day the gofer would get paid in the form of a few dollars or, more typically, a few glassine bags filled with white powder.

  Barnett’s first arrest came shortly after his fifteenth birthday and was for possession. Too young to be brought to criminal court, he was treated as a juvenile delinquent and placed on probation. He succeeded for a full twenty-seven days, before being rearrested for sale. This time he was sent to Spofford. Until 1998, the Spofford Juvenile Justice Center, located in the Bronx, was the facility where they sent boys so they could learn how to grow up to be adult criminals. Although the curriculum did indeed include mandatory education classes, that fact had little or nothing to do with how its residents referred to it.

  They called it Crime School.

  The juvenile justice system has jurisdiction over its subjects until they reach their twenty-first birthdays. Most are rel
eased much sooner, so they can be supervised while on the equivalent of parole. At the time of Alonzo Barnett’s stay at Spofford, probation officers typically carried caseloads upward of two hundred juveniles apiece. Which allowed an officer to spend four minutes with each of his charges, oh, every six weeks or so. When it came to Alonzo Barnett, they didn’t even bother. Seeing that he’d already flunked probation once, they weren’t about to give him another chance. Instead, he was released outright two years later, having been outfitted with a shirt, a pair of pants, a pair of ill-fitting shoes and a subway token, all courtesy of the Fortune Society, and a ten-dollar bill, thanks to the largesse of the taxpayers of New York State.

  He was seventeen at the time.

  As interested as he was in Barnett’s account of the years that followed, Jaywalker figured that could wait for another day. With eight dollars in commissary funds and no bail set, Barnett certainly wasn’t going any where. Besides which, Jaywalker knew the odds. No doubt there were some uneducated, unemployed, unskilled, seventeen-year-old African-Americans with no families who came out of lockup, defied the odds and went on to succeed. But a look at Barnett’s rap sheet had already told Jaywalker more than he needed to know. In addition to Green Haven, he’d seen the sights at Sing Sing, Great Meadow, Fishkill, Dannemora, Auburn and Attica. As for the little time he’d spent out on the street between visits, it didn’t require all that much imagination to fill in the blanks.

  What Jaywalker was more interested in right now was the case at hand, the one that looked like it might turn out to be Alonzo Barnett’s final encounter with the court system. Not that it didn’t promise to at last provide Barnett with something he hadn’t had since his fourteenth birthday.

  A permanent address.

  As seamlessly as he could, Jaywalker gently steered the conversation toward the current charges. Unsure if, GED or no GED, Barnett could read—Jaywalker had made that mistake once with a client, and like most mistakes he made, he would never repeat it—he read the complaint aloud and then summarized the ten counts of the indictment.

  “Funny,” said Barnett. “You’re my fourth lawyer on this case. But you’re the first one who’s bothered to read me the charges. Thank you.”

  Jaywalker nodded but resisted commenting. He didn’t make criticizing other lawyers a habit, not unless he recognized their names and knew they were $750-an-hour blowhards. None of the ones listed on the previous notices of appearance came close to fitting into that category. So he simply said, “What can you tell me about them?”

  “The lawyers?”

  “No, the charges.”

  He half expected Barnett to deny them, to say he was being framed, that he was the wrong guy, that he had an alibi, that he hadn’t known it was heroin. Once a client of Jaywalker’s had explained that he had diplomatic immunity. The guy was an American citizen, born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, who worked as a pipe fitter and had never once been out of the country. But he’d taken a few correspondence courses from an outfit he’d seen advertised on a matchbook, after which they’d mailed him a piece of paper with the word Diploma printed across the top of it. So having received the diploma, he’d figured immunity came along with it.

  Kind of like fries, he’d explained.

  Alonzo Barnett wasn’t asserting diplomatic immunity. Nor was he claiming frame, ignorance, alibi or mistaken identity. Without missing a beat, he looked Jaywalker squarely in the eye and said, “The charges are true. Every word of them.”

  3

  I did a favor

  “So there you have it in a nutshell,” Jaywalker would tell his listener. “Here was a five-time loser, a man who’d spent the better part of his life in state prison, charged this time with selling a pretty hefty amount of heroin, freely and unequivocally admitting that he’d done exactly that.”

  To make matters worse, what Barnett had been accused of went far beyond the single sale and possession spelled out in the Criminal Court complaint. If you were to read the indictment—as Jaywalker had read it first to himself and then aloud to Alonzo Barnett—you soon realized that the case involved more than the October 5 sale and possession. In addition to those crimes, the grand jury had signed off on two earlier heroin sales made to the same “law enforcement official,” although both of those had been for amounts smaller than the two ounces required to turn them into A-1 felonies.

  Jaywalker hated drug cases back then and does to this day. Which isn’t the same as saying he hates the defendants themselves. Not by any means. In fact, he’s always found it far easier to empathize with a drug defendant than he has with the vast majority of the muggers, burglars, drunk drivers and con men who come his way. Those sorts deliberately prey on their victims, or by their conduct place others in grave danger. The drug defendant’s biggest victim turns out to be himself. Sure, the politicians will tell you otherwise. They’ll tell you that drug dealers disseminate poison and destroy not only their own lives but those of their customers and their customers’ families, and that they end up costing society billions of dollars annually in health care and social services. To Jaywalker, those words pretty much describe what the tobacco and liquor companies do, year in and year out. The only difference, so far as he can tell, is that they happen to have lobbyists. And whatever you do, don’t get him started talking about the gun manufacturers.

  Jaywalker’s years as a DEA agent, especially on those occasions when he was working undercover, had brought him face-to-face with enough small-time, midlevel and even major dealers to know that they were pretty much like other people, just trying to get by. If one dealer got caught—whether by Jaywalker, or some other agent or cop—there was always another one waiting in line right behind him to take his place. No, it wasn’t the dealers who were the problem, either individually or as a group. It was the system itself that perpetuated the charade. By pouring so much money into interdiction, enforcement and imprisonment, and so little into education, treatment and rehabilitation, all the lawmakers ever succeeded in doing was driving up the price of the product until it was literally worth more than gold itself. That in turn insured that people would risk everything—their health, their freedom and their very lives—to grow it, import it, distribute it and even look the other way when it was worth their while to. So no, he didn’t hate the dealers. Most of them were beaten-down users themselves, and almost all of the ones he encountered were getting worse than they deserved. If not this time, then surely the next.

  What he hated were the cases.

  He hated them because they made him sad. Sad in their testimony to human frailty and human suffering. Sad in their needless futility and ultimate folly. Sad in their dreary same-old, same-old familiarity. There were the direct sale, the observation sale, the buy-and-bust, and the cash-and-stash uncovered in some roach-infested tenement apartment during the execution of a search warrant. It was almost like ordering from one of those old Chinese take-out menus. Choose one from Column A, one from Column B, one from Column C. But it made no difference. You could forget about the names of the different generals and whether you wanted white rice or brown rice. Whatever you ordered was going to taste pretty much like everything else, and would come with the same stale fortune cookie. And whether they got you for possession or sale, direct or observation, you were going to end up with a one-way ticket to state prison.

  They talked some more that day, Jaywalker and Barnett, but not all that much more. It was already apparent to Jaywalker that, like most cases, this one wasn’t going to trial. It couldn’t. Sooner or later Alonzo Barnett was going to have to plead guilty, even if it meant copping to an A-2 felony and accepting a minimum sentence of eight years to life. And since there was little likelihood that a parole board was going to give him yet another chance, Barnett might not die in prison, but he was going to be one very old man by the time he came out the other end of the meat grinder.

  But that realization by no means ended Jaywalker’s job. Just as he’d been the first of four lawyers to bother to re
ad the charges to Barnett, so would he be the first to listen to the rest of the man’s story, and to come to know him as an individual and not just a defendant. He would make it his business to draw Barnett out and make him talk, make him explain just why an intelligent-sounding man who had to have known better had succumbed yet again to the lure of easy money. Jaywalker would describe in detail the trial process itself, since despite all Barnett’s arrests and convictions he’d never been through a trial, having pleaded guilty each time. Jaywalker would point out the futility of changing that pattern now, and the dire consequences of being convicted after trial, when all bets were off.

  In a word, he would become a friend.

  Only not now.

  Having resisted taking a plea for a year and a half, Barnett evidently had his reasons, whatever they were and however foolish they might be, for wanting to go to trial this time. For Jaywalker to begin that conversation now, at the very first meeting between lawyer and client, would have been totally counterproductive. It would have marked Lawyer Number 4 as no different from Numbers 1, 2 and 3. It would have undermined the very foundation of something Jaywalker needed to build between himself and his client.

  Something called trust.

  So they talked some more, but about other things. Jaywalker learned that Barnett had two young daughters who were somewhere in foster care. That he’d been a heroin addict beginning at age fifteen, but had been clean for almost eight years now. That, like Jaywalker, he was a Yankees fan. That not only had he taught himself how to read and write, but that he’d begun composing poems, a sample of which he agreed to show Jaywalker sometime.

  They didn’t teach you in law school to ask about that kind of stuff. You didn’t need it in order to pass the bar exam or to hang up a shingle on the outside of your office door. Nor did the supervisors at Legal Aid talk about it. But it mattered; it mattered hugely. And even back then, back in 1986, without ever having been taught about it, Jaywalker knew and understood that. And the best thing about doing it was that it cost absolutely nothing, just like saying “please” or “thank you,” or pausing for a second to hold a door open for someone a few steps behind you. So the only thing about doing all that stuff that mystified Jaywalker was that nobody else seemed to realize how terribly, terribly important it was.