four months for cocaine posses sion and intent to sell; and ninety days for stealing headsets from a Radio Shack. The court gave her time served (two weeks) for a misdemeanor assault charge: she punched some guy she claimed was her boyfriend, and he never showed up to testify. Ms. Lin sey was also on probation twice during this time period, both to settle charges of solicitation. In other words, prostitution.
The arrest record goes back even further, to 1972.
There are more charges of solicitation, theft, hot checks, plus trespassing and public intoxication. These are poor people’s crimes, Jay knows, the stuff you find in the worst neighborhoods, places where people live on the edge of society, their lives frayed and their economic situations completely unstable.
What Jay finds most puzzling about this woman’s life and her run-ins with the law is that it all stops—the trials, the arrests— sometime in the fall of 1980. Elise Linsey simply drops out of the system. Only to show up a year later in a town house on the west side, flush with jewelry and expensive clothes and, appar ently, money to throw around. Jay hovers over the pages, trying to make sense of what he’s reading. There’s one question that keeps playing over and over in his mind, hammering away at him, making his head ache: how in the hell did she get from West Eighth Street in Galena Park—a marshy stretch of land a few hundred yards from the Ship Channel that smells of chemi cal waste and the salt of the Gulf—to Oakwood Estates? Accord ing to her birth date, printed on nearly every piece of paper in front of him, Elise Linsey is only twenty-four years old.
Chapter 15
That was their M.O. back in the day.
Find a kid with a boatload of problems, most especially prob lems of a criminal nature. Find a kid who’s got nothing to lose. And cut him a deal.
Jay remembers how it was done.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a war going on, right here at home. It was initially a war of ideas, going back to the ’30s. Civil rights as a commonsense argument: people are people, eat and shit the same, ought to be able to eat and shit in the same places. Then black folks got on voting, want ing something real, and law enforcement ratcheted up the vio lence, finding more and more creative ways to beat the shit out of people, publicly humiliate them and test their souls. The next generation coming up—Jay was only a kid when King organized the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama—wanted more than a lunch counter at which to eat, more than the right to vote for one knucklehead over another. They wanted true political power, not crumbs off a moldy piece of bread. They wanted the whole estab lishment turned on its head.
The federal government’s response:
They used tax dollars to build a stealth army to take down these activists and agitators, who were mostly students, mostly kids. The FBI had plenty of young agents working COINTEL PRO, their well-financed counterintelligence program, but the feds quickly discovered that academy-trained officers didn’t always make the best moles, not for groups like SNCC or SDS, certainly not for infiltrating the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers (whom Hoover called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). These groups were suspicious by nature, not likely to trust
From Chicago’s South Side to Detroit to East Oakland and Watts, to places as desolate as Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, they pulled kids out of lineups and pool halls, pulled them off the streets and offered them a hand up, a way out of whatever legal or economic predicament they might have found themselves in. They paid these kids with promises—to make a felony assault charge go away or to knock a few years off a stay at Angola or San Quentin—paid them to learn the Panthers’ ten-point program, to be able to recite Chairman Mao’s
Everybody knows that’s how they got Fred Hampton.
December 4, 1969, 4:00 a.m. They shot him in his sleep.
The federal government called the raid on the headquarters of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party a success, pub licly praising the Chicago Police Department, their partners in crime, citing the officers’ bravery in an extremely volatile sit uation—a house full of sleeping black folks, one of whom was eight months’ pregnant. But they failed to mention their secret weapon, their secretest of secret agents—the young felon they had spying on Fred for weeks, the man who made Fred’s last meal, lacing a glass of Kool-Aid with secobarbital, and quietly slipping out of the house long before the bullets started flying.
It was all a setup. And policy back then.
The federal government was essentially paying kids to kill kids.
Cynthia was the first one to point out Roger. “Something’s wrong with that guy,” she said one night, lying on her back in the sand. They had driven Cynthia’s truck out to West Beach, in Galveston, where the seawall ended and the colored beach began, a place where heads would turn, surely, but no one was likely to call the police. They could be lovers in public and in peace.
The Dells were playing on a transistor radio resting on top of Jay’s jacket, which was laid out like a blanket on the sand. The air was salty and soft, and warm for this time of year. It was March 1970, his senior year at U of H. Jay was propped up on his elbows next to Cynthia, broken conch shells digging into his flesh. The discomfort was nothing, though, compared to the quiet thrill of catching her in this moon-swept light, still and yielding. He held her hand.
The music played.
Cynthia sat up, stuffing the bulk of her prairie skirt between her legs, dusting sand off her ankles. She wanted to talk about
Roger Holloway.
“He’s all right,” Jay offered.
There was another couple on the beach that night, their feet
hanging out of the front seat of a baby blue Ford Fairlane that was parked across the sand. Jay could hear the woman laughing, high-pitched squeals that melted into the soft, wet air, sounding like wind chimes. He thought he could stay out here all night. He rested his chin on Cynthia’s shoulder. She smelled like cloves. “He come around Scott Street?” Cynthia asked, still on
Roger.
“He wants to get more involved with the Africa thing.” “You know he was hanging around SDS last semester,” Cyn
