Guilty As Sin

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 10 °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 released 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.