Guilty As Sin

No, Alonzo Barnett’s four words of explanation fell far short of that standard. And when he uttered them, they initially struck Jaywalker as being not only legally worthless but pretty insignificant in terms of moral culpability, as well. Then again, he was at something of a disadvantage. For as he listened to them, he had yet to hear Alonzo Barnett’s story. He had absolutely no way of knowing just how fertile with possibility the words were, or how in time they would germinate, take root, sprout and grow into a full-fledged defense, the likes of which Jaywalker would never have dared to even dream about, sitting there in the pens of 10 °Centre Street, back on that Thursday morning in May of 1986.

“I did a favor,” is all Alonzo Barnett said.

4

No good deed

The fact that he took a moment to think before answering a question in no way meant that Alonzo Barnett couldn’t tell a story. He could, and for the next half hour he spoke almost without pause or interruption. So articulate was he and so riveting was his story that Jaywalker dared to break into it only once or twice, seeking some minor clarification here or amplification there. Other than that, it was Barnett’s story, told in his own words and his own voice.

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