The plague years were a topic I attempted to cover in the early days of this newsletter. I felt like a war correspondent reliving my days observing the rising tide of violence in my community during the crack epidemic. Those of us old enough to remember, knew a time when fighting was done with fists and plenty of people had to take ass whippings. The plague changed all that. Or as a student in a Sunday School class I was teaching a few years ago put it “Mr. Hawkins, ain’t nobody taking an ass whipping anymore.”
I thought I had covered that material. The violence seemed to be subsiding. The pandemic proved me wrong.
Anyway, gentle reader here we go.
Back in the day before the plague years I ran up on a member of the crew I hung around. We’ll call him Johnny after Johnny Cockeye Dunn the notorious Irish American waterfront racketeer who died in the electric chair at Sing Sing after being convicted of murder. Johnny was limping. He was supporting himself with a golf club. He greeted me “What’s up E?” I told him nothing much and asked him what happened.
He beckoned me to come closer and said matter of fact, “I was burglarizing and the people came home. I jumped out of a second story window and hurt my foot getting away.” Johnny was a master criminal and I wasn’t surprised in the least bit to hear about his escapade. Now days he would have been armed to the teeth and killed the homeowners. A few months later he sent a drug dealer to his maker with a blast from a nickel-plated sawed-off shotgun. I think everybody in the neighborhood except the police knew Johnny did it. Seems the drug dealer walked in on Johnny as he helped himself to his stash. And for me this is when the plague years began.
Johnny wasn’t a bad sort. Me and him were always cool. I had just been in the drug dealer’s apartment about an hour before Johnny. My brother’s friend Mark was with me. We talked about it. It was sad. I didn’t tell him who did it. As Omar said in The Wire a man’s got to live by a code.
The code of those streets I ran it didn’t allow for snitching.
A couple of months later Mark and I were hanging out over a friend of mine’s apartment. I was talking to my boy and watching all the people floating in and out of his apartment. It had the feel of what a rock house would be as the plague took hold. Young black men in and out to buy dope and a select few standing around the kitchen table freebasing. Having spent time in a few I figure hell must be like a rock house- evil lurking and lost souls everywhere. There should have been signs saying abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Or maybe that’s just how it felt that night. I pulled my boy to the sign and tried to tell him he needed to slow down. I told him he had too much traffic coming through his front door. Refusing to listen he told me he’d started to move enough weight to buy from the fifty-pound dealer. In other words you had to buy fifty pounds of marijuana at a time from these guys for them to do business with you. My boy was a notorious liar. I thought he might be exaggerating, but he was sure moving a lot of weed.
I warned him somebody might try to take him out, but like I said he wasn’t hearing it. We hung out until about two three in the morning and Mark and I broke camp. The next day my boy’s old lady called me and told me he’d been shot in the stomach with a twenty-two. Those twenty-two shells are tricky. They bounce all over when you get shot with one. This was one went in his front and came out his side destroying his gall bladder as it remerged from his body.
A surgeon removed his gall bladder and stitched him up. He was in the hospital several days. He asked me to hold onto fourteen hundred dollars for him he had hidden from the robbers. He had a half of ounce of cocaine stashed somewhere. He didn’t ask me to hold that. For the life of me I still can’t understand why. I picked him up from the hospital and took him home. I gave his money back and he opened the base station to do some serious celebrating. I watched him bleed through the gauze covering his wounds. That was some serious cocaine. He never went back to the doctor and may still be out there running the streets.
We went our separate ways after he went to the pen. People like my boy did not fear the police. The nab as we called them would eventually catch up to you because criminals are reckless and over time they develop patterns the police discern and use to track them down. I saw that over and over again out there. I used to think if they’d put some these cats away early maybe they could have been reformed. But what happened was they’d lock them up, slap them on the wrist and put them right back out there. Jail became an occupational hazard rather than a deterrence by the time the plague years began.
I laugh at broken windows policing. The professor who thought this one up obviously never committed a crime or rolled with criminals. The focus is on the risk side of the crime equation. That’s stupid because life on America’s assimilating margins has consistently created a hot house for criminal activity be it in the tough Irish neighborhoods of Cockeye Dunn’s youth or in the tough Black neighborhoods that produced the modern Cockeye.
I’ve said this before and will say it again. There are emotional, psychological, and financial returns on crime. Criminals know this. Criminals live this. Criminology professors like the parents in Will Smith’s first big hit don’t understand.
Al Capone and Myer Lansky were both raised by their fathers. I believe children are better off with two parents, but I believe it is life on America’s assimilating margins that ultimately breeds large numbers of criminals on say Chicago’s west side when Italian gangsters like Bloody Angelo Genna became criminal legends. Those same mean streets where Black gangsters run amok in the modern era produced crime hall of famers like Anthony Spilotro who was played under an assumed name by Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s film Casino. And when Black people began to weave ourselves into the fabric of American society we too began to see far too many of our young people began to see returns on crime while accepting the risk of punishment as an occupational hazard.
I’m not telling you what I think. I’m telling you what I saw. Assimilating groups who choose a slow path to equality struggle with the high costs of the inefficiencies in the path they choose. One of those is crime.
Our community must reduce returns on crime. Or the plague will continue.
And my brother’s friend Mark. When I told him we left another house not too long before a shooting occurred, he looked at me and said “E, I can’t hang with you anymore. Every time we go somewhere somebody comes in and shoots the place up after we leave. It took years to come around to his way of thinking. You ought not want to put your life on the line like that. Maybe the next time you don’t get out in time.
I’ve never looked back since I lost my taste for returns on crime. And I no longer associate with criminals. You have to offer alternative returns. It is the cost effective, lifesaving path to change.
And I think we all want change.
Ted Turner, once said “No venture,No gain”! Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty or give me death!
My mother said, I would rather live a short happy and eventful life than a long boring one!
Reflection only arrives after a long life of what ifs! Maybe Criminals know something we don’t know!