Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  We were in Marrakech, and, having toured hard the day before, we were planning to enjoy a leisurely day. We slept late and padded downstairs to breakfast in our hotel slippers. Jean wanted to poke around the market, which sounded good to me. I was feeling myself relax a little—an unusual feeling. It was August 21, 1998.

  A television hung on the wall of the coffee shop, with its sound off. I didn’t notice it at first, but then I saw a couple of people standing under it, looking at something. A few more people joined them. On the screen was footage of some destroyed building, which looked as if it had been bombed. More people stood under the television now, maybe ten.

  I jumped up and ran to the television. They were watching CNN International, and it said “Sudan” across the bottom. The images were of smoking rubble, people wailing, men waving their fists. An American cruise missile had flattened a building in Khartoum. The Sudanese said it was a pharmaceutical factory. The U.S. government said it was a chemical weapons plant belonging to an alleged associate of al-Qaeda, a man who had been implicated in the earlier bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. To me, it looked like the wreckage of our infant Sudan peace process—months of work, literally blasted to pieces.

  I vowed never to take another vacation again in my life.

  16. “Let’s Stop This”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  Rolando—who we called Lando—was four years old when Nikki gave me the most wonderfulest thing in the world: a baby boy: Michael Marcel.

  One night, Nikki came by Georgia Avenue at about ten o’clock to see if I wanted a ride to the little apartment we shared in Hyattsville, Maryland. She had little Lando in the backseat, and nine-month-old Mike in a car seat. Nikki was pregnant again, and they looked so pretty all together—my own family. But I was still being the tough guy, and I said to her, no, you go on. James will drive me home.

  Less than an hour later, I see Nikki’s car coming up Georgia Avenue fast, and I think, uh oh. Something bad’s happened. I could see it in her face when she screeched to the curb. She jumps out, crying, and tells me what she’s been through since I saw her.

  She’d been walking from the car to the apartment with little Mike in her arms and Lando by her side, when a man asked her, did she know where such-and-such an apartment was. No, she said, and she kept walking. “Well then,” the man said. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  Nikki didn’t know enough to be scared at that point. She just got her back up. “What you worrying about that?” she snapped, and then out came the gun.

  “We’re going up to your apartment,” the dude said. Now Nikki, she’s smart. She knows there’s a policeman living on the third floor, so she starts leading him up there. But the dude’s been watching us, and he knows we live on the second. He takes her in the apartment, makes her sit in the chair, and then he and his friend start tearing our place apart.

  I’d been expecting something like this. I’d gotten in the habit, when I came home, of taking out my gun and holding it in my hand as I walked to the door. Even if I was holding little Mike, I’d have him in my left hand and that big Army Beretta nine-millimeter in my right. And I’d moved most of my cash to Nikki’s mom’s house.

  These dudes found two pistols, half a ki of coke, and about $7,000, but they were moving so fast and were so fucking stupid that they missed another $15,000 and another half a ki that I’d hidden. So while it hurt, it wasn’t enough of a robbery to put me out of business. They didn’t hurt Nikki, little Mike, or Lando, but they scared them real bad. I didn’t like that one bit. It made me wonder how much the life would end up costing me.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  Of all the crises in Africa, the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea was one of the bloodiest and most heartbreaking. Ethiopia and Eritrea were locked in a senseless conflict that between 1998 and 2000 had already killed about 100,000 people, which made it the deadliest war in the world during that period. Most of these were shooting deaths, soldiers on the battlefield; very few civilians were being caught in the crossfire. Still, their war had settled down into World War I–style trench warfare—horrific slaughter every day, with few appreciable gains by either side. Our fear was that Ethiopia, which on some parts of the border had a five-to-one advantage in soldiers, would suddenly mount an all-or-nothing offensive and push through Eritrea to the Red Sea. The killing would have been wholesale, civilians would be caught in the maelstrom, and Eritreans would mount another insurgency like the one they conducted from the 1960s until 1991, the very war that had brought my attention to Africa seemingly so long ago on that La-Z-Boy chair. This offensive would ensure decades more war and hundreds of thousands more deaths at a minimum.

  President Clinton decided to help stop the war. He had met both heads of state, and he felt the United States could play a unique role in ending the conflict.

  He asked Tony Lake, his former national security advisor, to be his special envoy to the region, and Tony did it for free—didn’t take a dime to do the job. Old-school sense of service, like no one I had ever met before. The consensus of the diplomatic community and many in the United Nations was: Yeah, right. You might as well try to solve the Israeli-Palestinian question. Ethiopia and Eritrea were locked in a death struggle, and no outsiders would be able to affect the outcome.

  Tony Lake, two colonels from the Pentagon, and I began shuttling between Asmara and Addis Ababa. Back in Washington, punctuated by strategic visits, the diplomatic strategy was mapped out by Susan Rice, Gayle Smith, and Joe Wilson, all working closely with President Clinton. As we went back and forth between the two heads of state, we could show each that we knew where their troops were. We knew where they were strong, and where they were weak. And while we would never give one side specific intelligence about the other, we’d tell them enough about their own positions—in tremendous detail—to impress upon them how much we knew about the overall battlefield. This eliminated 90 percent of the usual diplomatic posing and allowed us to get right down to the business of negotiating peace.

  In between marathon negotiating sessions, Tony and I would play basketball or tennis against the colonels. Tony had twenty years or more on the rest of us, but he was a terrific athlete. During one tennis match in which I hurled yet another racket into the fence in self-disgust, Tony dubbed me the “Latrell Sprewell of the tennis world,” after the former basketball star more legendary for his volatile temper than for his hoops prowess.

  Peace negotiations require commitment, and Tony Lake had it. President Clinton stayed involved by telephone despite all the impeachment nonsense he was dealing with back in Washington. Or maybe he was taking refuge there.

  Because I was in Africa all the time working on these peace processes, I was seeing the boys less and less frequently. Michael’s life was largely a mystery to me, as was James’s. I had met Nikki a few times, and I felt that Michael was very lucky to have such a strong and committed woman by his side. Even with the shadow surrounding Michael’s daily life, there was a stability about him that did not exist with the other brothers. When I’d see Michael, he was always solid as a rock, guarded to the point of impassive, exuding a quiet confidence and determination, occasionally flashing that tongue-in-tooth grin that had melted me when he was a little kid.

  17. “To Tell Her What I Got Out of, I’d Have to Tell Her What I Got Into”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  Our second boy together was born fine and healthy. I wanted to name him “Ginino the Don Mattocks”; I liked those Godfather films. But Nikki wasn’t having no child with “the” in his name, so we compromised and named him Ginino Da’Don. We moved out to Silver Spring, Maryland, but I didn’t tell anybody about that robbery at our home a few months back. It shook us both up, and we didn’t want to face a repeat of that shit.

  I had a woman and three little sons at home now, and what was all my drug dealing getting me? All I really had to show for it was a lot of cars. James and I bought every car we liked even a little bit; we must have had twenty or t
wenty-five parked all over the city. Sometimes we’d drive them. Mostly we just owned them—bought and traded them around like guns or baseball cards, just for something to do. Didn’t register or insure them or nothing. That tells you how bored I was getting with the life; I couldn’t think of anything better to do with all that money I was making. And even though we were living in Maryland, I was still going down to Georgia Avenue every day to take care of business.

  One day James came to me and said, “Michael, I’m fucked up. I got no money.”

  Well, that was James. He never could hold onto it. I said, “How much do you need?” And he said, “Sixteen hundred dollars.”

  I peeled it off and gave it to him. Couple of days after that, I was out without any money in my pocket, and I turned to James, and I asked him to give me $200.

  “I ain’t got no money.”

  I stepped back and gave him a long hard look. “Nigger,” I said, “I gave you $1,600 not two days ago.”

  He just shrugged. “I ain’t got no money,” he said, and I’m thinking: Shit. We’re to the point where the money doesn’t mean anything to us. We can’t even keep track of it. James was still living with our mom. By this time he had three kids, so most of the money he was making went straight to them and their mom.

  It was around then I started noticing that the police weren’t hanging around us anymore. The cop I was paying wasn’t cruising by, and the uniformed police seemed to be staying away. At the same time, there was a new crop of unmarked cars cruising around, driven by hard-faced men with curly little wires in their ears.

  It came to me like a bolt of lightning: This life is over. I was twenty-two years old and had been dealing drugs for ten years. It had been a good run. I’d made a lot of money, earned a lot of respect. I hadn’t killed anybody, and I hadn’t done any serious jail time. But it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to rob me again, and the next time, either Nikki or me—or the boys—might get hurt.

  It was time to get out.

  “James,” I said to him one Thursday. “We’re going to sell off everything we got on Saturday night, and that’s it. We’re getting out of the life.”

  “What the fuck do you mean?” James said. James couldn’t see what I was seeing.

  “The feds are onto us,” I explained. “This is it. We’re done. I’m not going to prison for no thirty years.”

  James made a face and walked away. Come that Saturday I sold it all off and went out to our home in Silver Spring. I put the money I’d earned that night in the same trash can I used to hide it in when we lived in our apartment, and I sat down on the couch, feeling weird, disconnected—like I’d just left home all alone. Nikki came home from work, and I didn’t say anything about it. To tell her what I got out of, I’d have to tell her what I got into. For some reason I didn’t tell her I’d left the life, even though it would have made her happy. I kept up appearances—went out at night like I always did, but now I just drove around, with no drugs or money in the car. I’d see the police and tense up, but then I’d relax. They couldn’t touch me anymore.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  The negotiating to end the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea went on for two years; that’s how committed President Clinton and Tony Lake were to finding peace. The climax came in Algiers. We’d somehow managed to talk the foreign ministers of the two countries into staying with us in a sprawling, near-empty presidential palace a stone’s throw from the Mediterranean Sea. The place was enormous, and there was nobody there for long stretches of time but us four Americans, the two foreign ministers, a brilliant and affable Algerian diplomat, Ahmed Ouyahia, who worked closely with Tony, and a tiny staff. I felt like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, wandering around the vast deserted hallways. We were there on and off for months—negotiating, wandering, negotiating. For me, the days and nights all started running together. I was out of place, out of time, cut off from the world, dizzy from all the long sessions.

  An undiagnosed but deepening depression was enveloping me during this period. That hole in my heart that I’d felt since childhood was still there, and it seemed to be getting larger, not smaller. Whenever I felt its sting too acutely, I’d just bury myself in more work, hoping it would eventually recede and hoping for affirmation and redemption somehow in a job well done. But I was carrying a huge bowling ball of anxiety and sadness around wherever I went. True, I had a great job and a great life, but I had progressively walled myself off emotionally from everyone that mattered in my life, and I was drifting away from Jean. I painted a smile on my face every morning to mask the hurt. The accumulated trauma of a childhood spent at war with my dad and an adulthood spent working in war zones with the survivors of real wars had led me to construct a self-protective emotional prison, carefully calibrated to avoid intimacy and emotional risk. But the cracks were beginning to form in this artificial edifice.

  Often, during my wanderings, I would think about Michael and James. I felt helpless and disconnected from them. The world I had inhabited had changed so much since when I first met them. The same could be said for Jean. How was it that I could help end wars in Africa but I couldn’t help straighten out the lives of a couple boys in Washington, D.C., or my own marriage?

  The stakes, meanwhile, were increasing daily. Ethiopia was massing its forces for a major offensive aimed at overrunning Eritrea all the way to its Red Sea coast right across from Saudi Arabia. Then, one day, after a couple of separate private sessions with the foreign ministers of the two countries, Tony came down the stairs with a piece of paper in his hand, a ceasefire agreement, and that was that. The guns went silent. The deadliest war in the world at that time was over.

  The experience gave me a deep appreciation for the “soft power” of American diplomacy. Throughout much of Africa especially, there is an unstated and profound respect for the United States and all it represents. That we were never a colonial power in Africa probably helps. But well-motivated Americans also have a knack for making deals, for finding a way that serves all sides and keeps negotiations from becoming a zero-sum game.

  The most important ingredient in this case, though, was a thoroughgoing allegiance to the very idea of diplomacy, to finding a solution through discussion and through addressing the core interests of the parties involved in the deadly dispute. It takes a long attention span and an appetite for hard, uncomfortable work. Our country can be very good at it when it wants to. But it has to want to.

  18. My Father’s Grandsons

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  Man, the days and nights are long when you’re not hustling anymore. I’d get up late, hang out, drive around a little, go to the bars. But the passion for the drugs had left me, and I really had no desire to go back up to Georgia Avenue and take that all up again.

  Sabrina’s new boyfriend was a cop—a uniformed D.C. police officer we called Duke. He was pure cop—his father had been one too—but Duke was a real good dude. He knew what I’d been, knew about Sabrina and her .357, but he didn’t judge us at all. He was a man of a man too. He’d put his big hand on my shoulder and say things like, “Michael, you got babies now. You got to get yourself a job and take care of them.” And I’d listen to him! Me! Listening to a D.C. policeman in his uniform and gun belt! Duke would talk to me like the dad I never had, and because I’d left the streets, I was ready to listen to him.

  But it’s not like I went out and got myself a job. When I needed money, I reached into the trash can. I didn’t even know how much I had in there; I’d never counted it. But it was an assload. Then it was half an assload. Then a quarter. I could see the money was running out, but couldn’t rouse myself, somehow, to do anything about it. It was like being in a car accident where everything slows way down and you can watch the disaster happen. I knew I’d be broke soon, but couldn’t make myself do something about it. If I’d been thinking, I could have taken that money and invested it—bought a business or some stocks and bonds or some shit. But on some level, I think I wanted to go complete
ly broke. In my own way, I was looking for the bottom so I’d know where it was.

  Every now and then, James would give me a few rocks so I could make some money. But it wasn’t for the money or even for the thrill that I’d serve from time to time. It was mostly out of boredom. I’d taken drug dealing out of my life, and I hadn’t found anything to replace it with.

  Although I never told Nikki I’d stopped selling drugs, she could see I was around more and wasn’t in the life. She was glad about that. At the same time, though, my responsibilities were growing, as I continued to pay my mom’s bills, buy stuff for my brothers and sisters, and take care of my own boys. Times were tough, and we needed that money just to get all the bills paid.

  And then one day, about a year after I stopped dealing, I reached in that trash can and it was empty. I felt like a building had fallen on top of me; I sat down on the couch and couldn’t get up. I don’t know why it hit me like such a surprise; I knew this day was coming. But now it was here. I was broke—as broke as my mom had been when we’d been staggering from shelter to shelter with those Hefty bags full of our shit. I’d been a king on Georgia Avenue, the Godfather, the man. And now I was nobody.