Guilty as Sin Read online

  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 t
he 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?”

  “What?”

  “He was right,” said Barnett. “He had saved my life, and I did owe him. When it came right down to it, that was the truth. And it was a truth that no matter how hard I tried to look away from it, it kept looking me in the face.”

  “So…?”

  “So I said okay. The next day I made a few phone calls and found out who was doing what. It wasn’t hard. And I paid off the favor, just like he asked. Just like he told me I owed him.”

  They talked for another forty-five minutes about what had followed. Jaywalker jotted down some details on a yellow pad. But he hardly needed to. He knew the story. He’d known it before he’d become a lawyer ten years earlier. He’d known it from his undercover days as a DEA agent. Unbeknownst to both Clarence Hightower and Alonzo Barnett, the customer—the “real live one” with all sorts of cash money, the one looking to buy weight—was the Man. And the story wouldn’t end until both men had been arrested, Hightower for possession and Barnett for sale.

  As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

  Replaying the story in his mind that night, Jaywalker was struck by the almost tragic aspect of it. Here was a guy who’d done everything right. Given up drugs, found a job and a place of his own, kept his nose clean, even reestablished contact with his daughters. And then along comes his past to catch up with him. He says no half a dozen times, only to be told he has a debt to repay, a favor owed. So he does it. And as a result, his whole world comes crashing down.

  Jaywalker could recite the various defenses to crimes laid out in the Penal Law, as well as others mandated by the Constitution, remembered from law school, or grounded in case law or common law. He knew which were complete defenses and which were partial ones, which were primary defenses and which were affirmative ones.

  There was alibi. There was justification, coercion and duress. There was entrapment and agency. There was infancy, along with insanity, incompetence, incapacity and impossibility. There were abandonment, renunciation and attenuation, lack of intent and lack of scienter. There were misidentification and mistake, whether of fact or law. Diplomatic immunity, transactional immunity and use immunity, the statute of limitations and the statutory right to a speedy trial. You had voluntary intoxication and involuntary intoxication, ex post facto and post-traumatic stress. Then you had extreme emotional disturbance, malicious prosecution, vindictive prosecution and selective prosecution. Also lack of jurisdiction and improper venue, double jeopardy and double punishment.

  But nowhere, absolutely nowhere, was there a defense called “doing somebody a favor.”

  5

  Grasping at straws

  The average lawyer would have stopped right there, Jaywalker knew. Here was a client who was flat-out admitting his guilt
to every single one of the charges against him. No ifs, ands or buts. The only explanation he could come up with for his actions—that he’d been doing somebody a favor—was no defense at all. Try killing someone and then telling the police it was just a favor you did for a friend, and see how far that gets you.

  Yet, as Jaywalker and Barnett had continued to talk, Barnett had made it quite clear that he had no intention of pleading guilty. “Look,” he’d said, “if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison—and it looks like I am—the last thing I want to do is put myself there. I may not have much of a chance at trial, but if I lose, at least I’ll be able to say I went down swinging.”

  Much of a chance at trial?

  Try no chance at all, Jaywalker had told him, though not quite in those words. But it hadn’t seemed to matter. Alonzo Barnett was stone-cold guilty. The prosecution could prove it, and in spades. Without even a theoretical defense, Jaywalker had absolutely nowhere to go at trial. Yet a trial was exactly what Barnett was insisting on having.

  Not that any of those things, or all of them added up, would have fazed most lawyers. Especially those working on the clock. To most of them, a trial simply meant a bigger payday. Not that you got rich back then on assigned counsel rates. But even at forty dollars an hour for in-court time and twenty-five for out-of-court, a two-week trial could generate a nice four-figure check. And since there was no chance of winning, there was also no pressure on the lawyer to knock himself out. If the defendant wanted to take the stand, fine. If he didn’t, also fine. Either way, it was going to be his funeral.

  The problem was, of course, that Jaywalker wasn’t your average lawyer. Never had been, never would be. If Alonzo Barnett wanted a trial, then a trial he would get. But that didn’t mean that Jaywalker was going to relax, sit back and listen to the meter click. Doing any of those things would have been constitutionally impossible for him, the functional equivalent of his donning a tuxedo, renting a stretch limo and going out dancing.