The system, p.1
The System, page 1
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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For Roger Cortez
For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.
—PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
THE SYSTEM
In the United States, the term criminal justice system refers to the institutions through which an accused offender must pass—until the accusations are either dismissed or proven, and punishment is assessed and completed.
The system consists of three distinct entities:
1. Law enforcement, e.g., police and sheriffs.
2. Adjudication (courts), e.g., judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and clerks.
3. Corrections and supervision, e.g., jail or prison staff, probation officers, and parole agents.
They operate together in order to maintain the rule of law in civilized society.
* * *
When you are caught up in the system in Los Angeles County, you are at its mercy.
While in custody, your body is not your own. It belongs to the county.
Your necessities are county-issued. Your food. Your toothpaste. Even your clothes.
You sleep where they tell you to sleep. Get up when they tell you to get up.
If you or your family have no money for bail, you remain in jail until trial.
Depending on the backlog of pending cases, this can last months.
* * *
In 1993, California housed 15 percent of the U.S. jail population—more than any other state—and within its correctional institutions, a shift was occurring.
One that had been building for many years.
Organized prison gangs sought to direct the criminal activities of street gangs from behind bars, and as they became successful in doing so, power moved from the streets to jails and prisons.
These prison gangs offered an affiliation model, and its reasoning was simple: if they could control the environment behind bars—the worst possible consequence of criminal behavior—then they could control almost anyone, anywhere.
This is the story of one such crime—those accused of it, those who witnessed it, the law enforcement who investigated it, the lawyers who prosecuted and defended it, and those left behind on the outside.
PROLOGUE
THE ALIBI
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for
an entire lifetime.
—ANNE SEXTON, “45 MERCY STREET”
Jacob Safulu, a.k.a. Dreamer
December 6, 1993 • 9:18 p.m.
Angela’s never sat me down and looked at me like I’m a problem she finally solved before. She hasn’t said anything yet, but I feel her words on their way to me like how I can feel a punch is coming. Inside, I’m already trying to get out of the way.
“This isn’t easy for me or anything,” she’s saying, and I know it’s the windup before she hits me with, “but I need you to move out, Jacob.”
That’s the knockout right there. It’s over. Done.
When Angela makes decisions, they stay made.
What she’s doing right now is dumping me and making me homeless in the same swoop, but all I can think of is how the microwave’s beeping. This new one I got off a homie last week. It’s from Japan. Good shit. Digital. It’s got this thing where it reminds you if you don’t get your food out. That’s what it’s doing right now with her macaronis. It’s beeped twice already. The sound of it reminds me how that monitor sounded on my homie before his heart just stopped.
Tiny Gangster, R.I.P. Southsider. A real Lynwood rider. Un matón grande.* Toughest fool I ever met. And remembering that mixes into right now, and this hot hard pain sticks in my chest. Like a fire rock.
Angela snaps her fingers in front of my eyes.
“Hello?” She’s getting heated. “You paying attention to me, or what?”
Beep.
I come back with, “Or what.”
She rolls her eyes at me. She used to love how I made her laugh. Now she’s got a look like me even trying is just … sad.
“You see how this isn’t working out, right? You get all immature when you should be serious. Is everything a joke with you? Cuz I need somebody who can be more than one thing, like somebody who can deal with real shit and be all romantic with me.”
“Listen.” I grab one of her hands. It’s cold. It don’t want to be between my palms, I can tell. “I can be better. I can be all that. Buy you flowers.”
Angela pulls her hand away. All I ever heard from homies is how she’s too good for me. How she’s older. How she’s the prettiest around by far. How she’s going places. Even Wizard says all that. Over time that messes with you. And I’m regretting ever leaving Little’s house, ever having that big-ass fight with his mamá about how I wasn’t ready for this type of thing yet. Living with a girl, at seventeen? She wasn’t about it. I did it anyways.
Beep.
I smile again. Not at her tho. At my feet this time. I talk at them too, like, “So, if all of a sudden I was serious, this wouldn’t go different?”
“No,” she says to me, “we already crossed those bridges.”
“So why you want me to be different when you’re pulling the plug?”
She’s leaning forward. She’s looking me hard in the eyes. “But is this you? Or is this just what your homies want from you?”
I kind of retreat, like, “Whatever.”
She ain’t letting it go. “Remember that time you got caught up moving those TVs?”
I got to trip on that for a second. It was after the riots. After I maybe helped burn down that Jack in the Box on MLK. There was a storage shed in the hood, one full of shit we’d rounded up. Homies were coming all hours to fill it. That was laughs.
She’s saying, “Remember how you acted like you could be the one to find a buyer since Jellybean wanted to see who’d step up? You came with this big smile like you could fix it.”
Shit. I remember. I tried to sell everything to this old Korean lady with an appliances shop on Long Beach and that lady called the sheriffs on my ass. What Angela’s not saying is how Wizard’s advice came in real good. Not having tattoos. Not being on a gang card. Not being photographed or FIed. There’s no evidence of me being affiliated. Sheriffs didn’t even pick me up, cuz I’m a sleeper like that. And, besides, Mrs. Hong couldn’t pick anybody out of a lineup, anyways. She picked some pineapple-headed paisa, I heard.
Angela’s staring at me. Wants me to say something. I don’t have the right answers for her, so I don’t. I just wait for a beep. There isn’t one tho.
She puts her head down and brings it back up by pushing all her hair away from her face in a wave. She’s all, “Thanks for making this easier.”
All I got left is hurt. That’s the shit making me say, “I mean, at least I can do that, right? You’re welcome.”
She gets this wiggly look on her face like she’s not sure what to say. And I get that. It’s how I feel too. I know I fucked up. A lot. I messed around on her with Tiny’s cousin Giselle when I was high. It’s more than that tho. Angela’s always been after me to change it up, to be up out of the streets. Get a job. Or go to school.
“It’s like you’re still wearing a mask around me,” she says, “of what you think I want to see.”
The beeping’s done for good, I think. I’m remembering how all it ever does is five. It doesn’t go on forever or anything. That gets me thinking how maybe everything’s on a timer. Not just me and Angela. Everything. Ticking down. Running out.
So I figure why not be real with her if … if that’s what she wants?
So I’m leaning forward, saying, “All I got is this burning feeling right here since the moment you said what you had to.”
She nods, like whatever, she don’t believe me.
“I’m serious,” I say. “Just…”
She bites her lip at me, wondering where I’m going with all this.
I say, “I wish you luck. In life, you know? All that suerte. For real. Just please don’t be messing around with no homies. I can’t handle that. For real, that’s not … I mean, nobody needs that. Not me. Not you. Not Wizard. Not whoever the fuck ends up being next. Okay?”
She don’t need me to say that nobody needs another Tiny Gangster situation. Shot six times. Lying up in St. Francis till his body gave up. No match for some bullets that his girl’s ex put in him.
I say, “So I’m gonna go now, all right? I’ll grab my shit some other day.”
She blinks. And I see how she’s crying. And that gets me. Cuz this whole time she’s been so cool and calm and grown with dropping this on me. A couple tears letting go, running down her cheek. I wanna wipe them off. That’s not for me to do anymore tho. She
“I guess,” Angela says.
“Okay,” I say.
And I just get up, like a man, and I carry the weight of all the stupid shit I done, cuz there’s no other choice. Cuz you have to. Always.
And I turn my back on her and walk out that front door. I bounce.
And I don’t fucking look back …
PART I
THE CRIMES IN QUESTION
When citizens destroy neighborhoods because of rage and we are asked to “understand” and “sympathize,” what we are being asked is to have compassion for rage. Well, what about the rage of the cops who see their efforts thwarted daily by a system that returns an endless parade of human debris to the streets to commit more crime?… How about a little “understanding” and “sympathy” for them and what they face every day? At present, there is less than one chance out of a hundred that a criminal who commits a serious crime will serve time in jail. Law-abiding people are fed up with this.
—RUSH H. LIMBAUGH III,
THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE (ABRIDGED)
Augustine Clark, a.k.a. Augie
December 6, 1993 • 9:18 p.m.
1
I’m standing on the corner of Josephine and Long Beach Boulevard saying to myself how I need to walk eight houses down Josephine or I’ll die. And right then is when this earthquake goes off inside me. It bends me in half. Feels like my bones are breaking from the inside. I got to use the sidewalk to hold myself. I got to put two hands on concrete and it’s cold and I’m looking like I’m trying to be an animal on all fours.
These earthquakes I got are major. Every one’s like a mouth in the middle of my body trying to eat what’s left of me. And this one’s swallowing me up.
It lets me go and I know I need to be moving before another comes. I wipe my nose on my shoulder when I feel wetness going down my lip and I’m real glad when I find it’s not blood.
A car rolls up slow. Lights hit me in my eyes and I flinch out of them. It’s got the windows down and some girl singer’s singing out the speakers. I can hear it. But I can’t tell the words.
“The fuck’s wrong with this fool? He’s got them malias or what?”
I hear that from the driver. And then he’s gone. The lights too.
Me and him both know how this’s no neighborhood to get caught in being dope sick. South of the new 105 like this? Off Long Beach like this? This is gangtown shit. After dark? That’s asking for bad things to find you.
And I sure as hell’d not be here if I had other types of options.
But this is what happens when you sleep for a day and a half and you wake up and you need fixing up worse than you ever needed anything.
I feel the next earthquake coming in shaky at first. Like a little aftershock. So I lean on a wall I got next to me and ride it out like I’m in a storm. I’m five houses down now. Almost there. Holding a wall and looking like I’m trying not to get picked up by some hurricane winds.
The smell of beef comes at me. Meat. It’s Tam’s. Or it’s Tacos Mexico. And my stomach’s acting like it’s grabbing on that just to mess with me. The earthquake right after is the worst one ever. So bad I think I’m gonna scream right there.
I would. But it wouldn’t make the pains better. And it wouldn’t fix this calling I got inside me. The calling’s more major than major.
It’s above the pain. Around it.
The calling pushes my steps and I fight right through some type of spaz move that makes my legs go sideways but I somehow keep walking. I’m used to these pains. I hate them. But I know them. And always the calling’s on top of me. It’s a need. Up there with breathing.
I worked nights in the port. Till my accident. I know how the night sounds of the boats go. And these feelings are like the front ends of foghorns. All up. No down. Not beeeee-uhhhh. Just like a beeeeeee that trails off. That’s how dope calls me. How it keeps calling me. How it’s out there in the night and telling me to come to it. Telling me if I get there I can keep floating after.
And that’s what makes me get to this door right now. And knock on it. I know better than to do it at night. Than to do it here. But I got to. It’s do this or die. It’s talk to Scrappy or die. That’s what my stomach’s saying. What my brain’s saying. They’re both agreeing on how I got no options left.
So I knock on the metal screen door and it rattles and then I lean all over the house and tell it to hold me.
* * *
The first person opening the door is a little kid. A boy with no shirt on. Behind the screen I see him with a popsicle in his mouth and he blinks at me.
That’s when I hear somebody shouting, “No!” and coming at us from the living room.
And me and him both know how he’s in trouble for opening the door at night. And the little boy turns in time to catch a swat across his butt from Scrappy.
Scrappy’s looking pissed too. Only in a T-shirt and shorts. No bra. But she got a game face on. All types of anger come at me through the holes in the metal screen.
“Bitch, get on,” she says. “I got nothing for your hype ass.”
She slams the door in my face. I feel the air from it hit me and I know then that this’s what it feels like when you’re drowning and somebody motors up to you in a boat and looks at you sinking and then rides off.
It’s fucking humiliating. It’s sad. It’s embarrassing. It’s everything at once.
But then another earthquake hits me and nothing else matters.
Fuck Scrappy. I decide that right now. I’m here. I’m gonna do whatever till she comes out. I don’t even care. You kill me? Fine. You’re putting me out my misery.
I go to the window and start tugging on that wood shutter it’s got attached. I’m yanking on it. I’m putting my weight on it. And it makes this goddamn terrible sound. This sound that’s like teeth scraping when one of the hinges decides to break out of the stucco.
I feel bad about that. I do. But I keep going.
I see bodies through the white curtains at the windows and then the curtains open. And it’s got to be Scrappy’s mother or whatever. And it’s Scrappy behind her looking horrified and telling me to get the fuck out with her eyes but knowing I’m not about to. Knowing I’m all the way in and she better deal with me before I fuck shit up for her worse.
Right then I fake like I’m about to upchuck everywhere. Like I’m about to be Scrappy’s big problem if she leaves me out here. She sees in my face how I’ll be on this lawn all night. I’ll use her mom’s bushes like a bed. And maybe I’ll be there in the morning to deal with. I’ll either be dead and she’ll need to call an ambulance and have authorities through here and answer questions or just run my ass out right now.
We have this moment right after another earthquake hits me and I got to stare at her grass and how it’s had no water in weeks. How it’s mostly dirt. And then I look up and we stare at each other and we both know how we hate each other but we know how it goes.
This’s the game. I need something bad. So bad I’ll do whatever has to be done for it. She knows that and she knows she has what I need to get fixed up. And she knows she better give it to me because I definitely got nothing to lose. I’ll fuck her whole house up from outside. What’s she gonna do? Call some sheriffs?
She points at me and slings her arm like she wants me to go across the street and then she pulls the curtains closed fast and I walk back a little.
I lean on the mailbox. I got a stitch going in my side from my hip to my ribs. It’s real quiet outside too. And I’m feeling eyes on me but fuck them. I look left. I look right.
I see a car down the block turn the front lights off but I don’t know if it was the car from before or a new car or a neighbor or what. Don’t care either.
When I look up again? Scrappy’s coming at me from the side of the house. She’s got a hoodie on now. And jeans. And she’s coming at me hard.
