by Jill Leovy
Years before, the same accrual of understanding had prompted Wally Tennelle’s reluctance to work at RHD, the phrase “some daddy’s baby” ringing in his ears. Before that, it had prompted Skaggs’s father to conclude that nothing matters after working homicide. And on this winter day, it prompted Skaggs’s chill response to Arenas. He gave up on training for a moment. When they pulled up to the house, Skaggs walked ahead, and confronted a man in dress shoes on the porch.
He asked the man’s name. He was the father they sought. Skaggs told him that his son had been killed—right there on the front porch. No buildup. No euphemisms. Just straight truth and clarity. The father sagged against the door frame: “Oh my God.”
Skaggs followed him into the house. Spotless glass coffee table, red carpet, snow-white upholstery. The father, face wild with confusion, bent double as if punched, asked three or four more times, “He’s dead? Dead?” And Skaggs answered patiently each time: “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
The city’s murder rate was dropping fast. But Southeast’s homicides remained high. Seventy-two people would be killed in that small area in 2004. Sixty-five more would die in 2005, and sixty-nine in 2006, representing a per capita murder rate that was eight to ten times the national average. As always, the majority of the killings were black-on-black.
Skaggs and Barling remained partners, and in their first two years together, they cleared twenty-six of thirty-two cases—an 81 percent clearance rate. After that, clearing cold cases from previous years boosted their rate even higher, and it remained high for the next three years.
They had developed an odd relationship. Though best friends, they argued constantly. They argued about football, dinner plans, politics, and every detail of their homicide cases—always without rancor. It drove their colleagues up the wall. Barling was pedantic. Skaggs was impish. Barling would wave his arms and spout malapropisms. “Constringent” combined the words “contingent” and “constrained by”; “cycular cycles” meant the persistence of inner-city problems. Skaggs would shake his head, aping astonishment. Round and round they went.
Some of it was the result of a conscious policy the two had established: they agreed that only one of them would lead on each case. It freed them to debate their investigations, knowing there was no real danger of conflict. But for Skaggs, countering Barling’s endless hand-waving fulminations also may have served a subconscious need. It ensured that Barling would serve as the repository of outrage and left Skaggs free to work.
Compassionate by nature, Barling was unafraid to air his distress over the bloodshed in Watts. He was appalled by the Monster, tormented by what he perceived as the public’s indifference and political neglect, baffled by the black tilt to the stats. “It’s either society’s racism, or something is wrong with them—something wrong just with black people. And I don’t believe that!” Barling said, his voice rising in distress. “I believe we are all created equally, men, women, all races! That’s why I cannot buy that.”
Skaggs forced Barling to move on. His private views on homicide remained buried at the level of intuition, surfacing now and then in flickers—beats of awkward silence like the one that met Arenas’s joke. The rest of the time, he appeared carefree. It was key to his stamina.
Even the sordid misery of the streets rolled right off him. Skaggs by that time had spent years amid drug addicts, prostitutes, and killers. Yet he retained a squeaky-clean propriety. He was not morally rigid. But he had a strong idea of what he considered a sensible life and was surprised by even minor lapses. Bad housekeeping scandalized him. Sleeping late was worse. As for the homicides, after a hundred cases, Skaggs would still shake his head, amazed someone could actually be so dumb-ass as to kill. In this way, he preserved what was not exactly innocence, but an unsullied spirit that allowed him to go home to his family each night psychologically intact.
Sal La Barbera never lost his high ambitions for the unit. He sought not just to perform adequately in his modest D-3 supervisory post, but to make of his job a great life project.
There was a touch of grandiosity to his attitude. But La Barbera had a rare combination of skills. As anyone who has worked in a professional environment knows, top practitioners don’t always make effective managers. La Barbera was both workaday administrator and man of ideas. He would expound on some lofty crusade one minute, put the paperwork in good order the next.
At work, he displayed no anger, reserving his emotions for his various personal dramas. He emphasized team spirit. He taught his detectives to take pride in speaking for homicide victims, no matter who they had been in life. It was his version of Tennelle’s “some daddy’s baby.” In Watts, the idea had particular relevance. “Innocent victims,” in the conventional sense, were a minority. More often, victims in Watts murder cases were combatants, and everyday language in Watts reflected residents’ sense that they lived in an unseen war zone. The LAPD was an “occupying army.” Gang members called themselves “soldiers” and “warriors.” And over on Broadway and Manchester, a protest banner announced the area’s nickname: Little Baghdad—a pointed comparison to occupied Iraq.
As a result, victims in Watts cases were often suspects, too: fighters in a continuous flow of street skirmishes. Today’s executioner might be tomorrow’s victim. A detective might have a pretty good idea that a victim had been a “soldier,” and even an exceptionally vicious one.
“Murderers are mean,” as the historian Monkkonen said, and in Southeast, they seemed especially so. The meanest among them urinated on their victims, or blasted away as they lay dying and shielding their faces with their hands; punctured palms were a common homicide injury. But the creed dictated that the murder of a killer be treated as that of a child felled by a stray bullet. “They are all innocent angels when they get to me,” La Barbera would say.
Most of all, La Barbera drummed into his detectives his conviction that virtually all the cases were solvable. The way he saw it, the perennially low ghettoside clearance rates were malfeasance. It was a theme he hammered away at in almost every staff meeting, and in a dozen quiet asides per day. He was not above goading his detectives: “These guys are sitting around smoking dope with no high school education!” went a typical refrain. “You guys are smart people. I think you can fucking figure out what happened!”
There was defiance in La Barbera’s stance. It inspired loyalty. Skaggs and Barling absorbed his philosophy. They considered a respectable clearance rate to be 80 percent or higher. Ever the perfectionist, Skaggs took the notion even further. He coined a derisive term for detectives he considered mediocre. “Forty percenters,” he called them.
Typically, the mix of South Bureau cases included a number of “self-solvers”—murder-suicides, simple domestic homicides, killings witnessed by police officers, cases in which suspects were caught running from the scene, and so forth. The prevalence of self-solvers meant police agencies had to solve a few additional challenging cases to produce a natural 30 to 40 percent clearance rate in official tallies. Given that reported rates were often not much higher than this across many of L.A. County’s highest-crime areas, it could be inferred that Skaggs thought dimly of the whole system. Too often, he said, it seemed to him that detectives were “just going through the motions.” Nothing annoyed him like low professional standards.
Skaggs and Barling became La Barbera’s co-conspirators. They helped him hatch and execute little plots. One involved Southeast’s old murder books—the blue binders detailing investigations.
Department policy dictated that the books were supposed to be stored away in a vault somewhere, even if the cases weren’t solved. But La Barbera considered no case “cold.” From his years in South Bureau Homicide, he knew how rushed detective work had been. He viewed “unsolved” cases as incomplete investigations. Sometimes, it took only a few days’ work to clear them.
He also knew that many cases were not discrete crimes. In Southeast, murders sprang from a dense tangle of communal conflicts. Killings were oft
en tied to previous murders, assaults, and arguments. Revenge cycles sometimes played out for years, with sons exacting retribution for fathers. “It’s aaall connected” was one of the mottoes adopted by Watts detectives. Sometimes it was invoked several times a day. A witness to one murder might be a suspect on the next—or brother, or play cousin, to the previous victim. The murder books shed light on these links; La Barbera wanted them at his fingertips.
So La Barbera recruited Skaggs, Barling, and a few others. They took over an abandoned red construction trailer in the station’s parking lot. They cleaned it and installed metal shelves from Home Depot. Then they quietly collected all the precinct’s old murder books, in violation of department rules, to make a library. It took them three years to go through every book. In the end, the blue binders stood in organized rows—688 cases going back to 1978. Solved and unsolved cases were separated. The latter assessed for difficulty and labeled accordingly. The cramped rows of shelves made a disturbing monument to the Monster. Barling dubbed it the “Lost Souls Trailer.”
But the project that most preoccupied La Barbera was legacy-building. He wanted to make sure the values he’d fostered in Southeast were preserved in the next generation.
Recruitment became an increasingly urgent focus. Skaggs and Barling helped. It was one of the few duties outside investigating in which Skaggs took interest. With each trainee who failed or moved on, La Barbera redoubled his efforts. He knew what he was looking for: the next John Skaggs.
Finally, in 2005, he found him.
Sam Marullo was thirty-four then, a gregarious Southeast gang officer from a big Italian American family in Mount Morris, New York. He was an exemplar of that species of smart attention-deficit cops who are drawn to ghettoside work. The son of a laborer, he had graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology and attended law school for two months at the University of Albany before losing interest.
Marullo was exceptionally good-looking. He had dark brown hair, blue eyes with long curly lashes, and an excess of boyish charm. He excelled at cultivating street sources—“friendlies,” as the cops called them—especially women.
He had his flaws. He was impatient and a little immature, and he was not a good listener. But he made up for it with generosity of spirit. He worked hard, cared about the people he policed, and was complimentary toward almost everyone he worked with. Plus, he loved his job with an intensity that bordered on the self-destructive. At least one marriage had fallen victim in part to his dedication to his work, according to his friends.
La Barbera saw in Marullo a rare incandescent talent. He recruited him as a detective trainee, just as Skaggs and Tennelle had once been.
Marullo wanted to bring a friend with him: Nathan Kouri, then a gang detective.
La Barbera was dubious. Kouri shaved his prematurely balding head; his round, puzzled hazel eyes peered from beneath a scrunched brow as if he were perpetually in deep thought. As is often the case with male friends, Kouri was Marullo’s opposite; he was happily married with two special-needs kids, introverted, and always buried in work. He loved to read and to ask people questions. He devoured nonfiction books and newspapers. But he disliked talking. La Barbera agreed to train him at Marullo’s insistence.
Mentorship is important in policing, and especially in ghettoside homicide work, an art form so underrated that it had been relegated mainly to an oral tradition. There were professional “homicide schools” for working officers. But much of the curriculum was irrelevant to ghettoside work. The classes focused on handling physical evidence, not on, say, keeping track of a witness with a substance abuse problem or responding to jurors threatened in the courthouse parking garage.
Professional organizations were likewise unhelpful. Skaggs and his colleagues attended a yearly conference organized by the California Homicide Investigators Association. But the agenda rarely touched on their daily work. “When the National Media Moves to Your Town” was the name of a typical seminar. By necessity, detectives learned on the job, older ones passing their craft to younger ones.
La Barbera assigned Skaggs to train Marullo. Skaggs was not a natural teacher. Young detectives who watched him work were forever influenced, but he was too intolerant of mistakes to be comfortable as a mentor. He could not lower his standards even for those starting out. Marullo’s case was different. In this young gang officer, Skaggs, too, saw a talent worth the effort.
Skaggs and Marullo clicked. Early on, though, Skaggs had to curb Marullo’s socializing. They’d return from some interview and Marullo would wander off to catch up with his gang unit friends. Skaggs scolded him. In homicide, there’s no time to waste on office chatter. Marullo straightened out and soon proved his value. He was a great talker. Like Skaggs, he overwhelmed people with conviction.
Marullo, for his part, embraced Skaggs’s style—that penchant for direct action, going after every clue right away, hitting it all head-on. “Get to the point, get to the point” is how Marullo summed up his mentor’s philosophy. “Sometimes you only have one chance.”
Skaggs and Marullo solved every one of their first eight cases during those busy months of 2005. Late that August, Marullo was given the lead on his first case.
Charles Williams was twenty-six years old and “on disability” due to psychological issues. He was black and poor and had never worked. His neighbors in the Grape Street Crips had allowed him to wear a purple Lakers outfit, the Grape Street color.
Gang members are often expected to “put in work.” A bit of derogatory ghettoside slang condemned those who didn’t: they were called “hood ornaments.” But Williams, though a “hood ornament” of sorts, had been given a pass.
Williams liked to ride his bicycle around the neighborhood. He was standing in front of the counter of Watts Cyclery at 112th and Wilmington one day when an assailant burst through the door and shot him at close range, leaving him in a pool of blood on the floor. Williams’s purple clothes had drawn the attack. The suspect was from Fudgetown Mafia, a Grape Street enemy. They took Williams for a combatant—or a good-enough proxy.
Marullo met with Christine Jackson, Williams’s aunt. She had raised Charles from early childhood. His mother had died from illness, his father from an ice-pick homicide, never solved. Jackson worried that the police wouldn’t take the case seriously. Her brother, Charles’s uncle, had also been killed in a homicide, stabbed in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in 1983. That case, too, was unsolved. Jackson had sharp words for Marullo. She’d been through enough, she said. She was near crazed with grief; Charles’s murder felt like the last straw. If police didn’t solve it, “I will do what I’m gonna do—I will take care of business,” she told him.
Anxious to prove himself, Marullo buried himself in the case. He got leads and was lied to. One witness, a Fudgetown gang member, said he knew the truth but couldn’t speak it: his parole terms required that he remain in the neighborhood, and it would be too dangerous for him to remain as a snitch. Marullo turned his attention to the parole bureaucracy and succeeded in getting the man moved. Then he traveled to the witness’s new home and convinced him to give a full statement.
A second witness was also a gang member. This young man had been a good student with a double life, a surprisingly common ghettoside story. He was riding in the car that day when a group of Fudgetown Mafia gang members pulled up to the bicycle shop. An older gang member handed him a gun. Get out and shoot that Grape Streeter, the older man ordered.
But the younger one held back, horrified. The older man insisted. The younger refused to get out of the car. At last, the older gang member, in disgust, took the gun. He went into the bike shop where Williams waited, unsuspecting in his purple Laker gear.
It took several interviews for the young man to reveal this story. He lied, then recanted. At last, he confessed to Marullo that he was terrified. He feared the shooter, although ostensibly the two had been friends and “homeys.” So-called gang loyalty is often like this: men go along to get along,
as battered women go along with their abusers. Marullo’s version of moral comfort was his earnest, boyish appeal: he persuaded the young man to testify despite his fear.
La Barbera was triumphant. He gave Marullo a nickname. Borrowing from gangster lingo, as cops love to do, he called him “Li’l Skaggs.” La Barbera felt well on his way to assembling a crack team of homicide craftsmen, a group who might finally bring law to South Los Angeles.
SON OF THE CITY
It was a truth that all parents seemed to acknowledge: kids just come out different, no matter how much you try to treat them the same. Wally and Yadira Tennelle were not the first parents, and surely not the last, to be thrown off balance by their youngest child.
Both DeeDee and Wally Jr. had excelled in school. DeeDee had always been a reader. Wally Jr. had shown an abrupt intellectual bent as he got older, and he turned downright scholarly when he went to the University of California, Irvine. But Bryant was frisky, wiggly, and seemed unable to focus on his schoolwork. He misbehaved at school. He clowned and pulled pranks. He once sneaked into one of the nuns’ offices with a bottle of stink spray—that sort of thing. He couldn’t remember what his parents had told him five minutes before.
A psychologist told them he had attention deficit disorder—something more incapacitating than the milder form that DeeDee suspected afflicted the whole family—and that they should medicate him. Wally Tennelle resisted; at work he had seen so many junkies who had been medicated for similar disorders as children and it seemed to have done them no favors. He and Yadira spent thousands of dollars on tutoring for Bryant. Sylvan. Learning Tree. Wally Tennelle tallied it up once and realized it rivaled what they were spending on private school tuition. Year after year, they persevered, but the problems seemed to get no better. It took Bryant hours to do the simplest homework.
