A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  “Watch Out”

  I

  Between the rows of spectators and the judge’s bench, in that small and claustrophobic space where lawyers perform their theatrics of shock and sympathy in the name of justice, Michael McGovern awaited the verdict.

  A month had passed since the killing of Robbie Burns, and politicians in the city, realizing that they had picked the victim’s bones clean and could gain no more from instant indignation, had gone on to other pursuits. The fissures of race remained, but when McGovern grappled with them in a courtroom in the continuing heat of the summer, the very trial itself revealing the soul of a city so very much torn by hate and misunderstanding, not a single politician was there to listen.

  McGovern, a prosecutor of hearty vintage, was dressed in a gray striped suit that he had purchased a month ago because he thought it would bring him good luck. He had slept poorly the night before, partly because of his three-year-old’s nightmare about Dracula tapping on the window and partly because the anticipation of a verdict in a murder case made him edgy. Sometimes he could gauge the outcome of a criminal trial with confidence, was so sure of the evidence and the way it played upon judge and jury that there was no need to be squeamish. But this case, Commonwealth v. William Taylor, carried no certainty.

  McGovern approached his job the same way athletes approach major games. There was no such thing as a Pyrrhic victory. Regardless of his own performance, there was no dignity or valor in what he perceived as a loss. In the vernacular of his trade, when he took a case file and wrote the verdict across the top of it, he called it marking the file. There was a range of verdicts that a judge or a jury could hand down in any homicide case. But for McGovern, that moment of pulling out the pen and marking the file, if it was to carry any flair and flourish, meant only one verdict, murder in the first degree, which carried a minimum sentence of life in prison. Only with that verdict did all the energized performances in that small and claustrophobic space seem truly worth it, not simply for McGovern but for those he believed depended on him—the spirit of the victim, the victim’s family, the city itself.

  McGovern had been a prosecutor for ten years, five of them in the homicide unit. Although there were elements of the job that he found increasingly difficult, particularly the pay and the legal requirement that he live in the city because he was a city employee, he undertook his work with a zeal that at times seemed almost evangelical. He loved the challenge of a trial, particularly a jury trial, the uses of narrative and pace with a pinch of melodrama here and pathos there. McGovern believed that juries listen to evidence to a certain degree but that what they really listen to are stories, with the evidence serving as character and plot. If you didn’t have a good story to tell, something with which to entice the jurors to stay with you and listen to you, you were going to lose them.

  Although there were variations, the story McGovern told always had basically the same demarcations and the same outline: the story of a city he had been born in and had grown up in and loved terrorized by a strain of killers who regarded murder as a common and acceptable form of conflict resolution—an argument that had gone wrong, a twenty-two-month-old who was making too many demands, a teenager with the misguided suspicion that someone was hitting on his girlfriend.

  Criminologists and other social scientists had spent tens of thousands of pages tracing explanations and answers to urban crimes such as these. Some ascribed them to the breakup of the family. Some, longing in a nostalgic way for a return to the good old days of heroin, when addicts more often than not did harm to themselves, attributed these crimes to the appearance of crack in the mid-1980s. Others traced them to the destruction of the city’s manufacturing base and to the loss of jobs that not only had meant steady pay but also had provided the spiritual lift one gets from actually producing something and making something for a living. But whatever the causes, much of the life of the city seemed to be guided by twin poles of fear, fear among those who lived in it and wanted to leave, fear among those who lived outside and would never step inside because of what they believed and what they had heard. Tales of urban crime could be embellished until, with each retelling and each added detail, they took on the lore of myth.

  When the crime rates of the nation’s ten largest cities were compared, Philadelphia’s was usually among the lowest. But the trend of the city’s crimes over thirty years still revealed something shocking. In 1960, there were 6,734 violent crimes (homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery) in Philadelphia, a rate of 336 per 100,000 citizens. In 1990, the number of violent crimes, 21,384, had more than tripled, and because of continued population loss, the rate, 1,349 per 100,000 citizens, had more than quadrupled. In 1960, there were 150 homicides, a rate of 7 per 100,000 citizens. In 1990, there were 500 homicides, a rate of 32 per 100,000 citizens. In 1960, the rate of robberies was 101 per 100,000 citizens. By 1990, it had increased eightfold, to 808 per 100,000 citizens. In the meantime, the city’s perpetual cycle of budget woes, mismanagement, population loss, and a dwindling tax base had created an equally incredible phenomenon: a drop in the number of police officers, from a high of 8,127 in 1975 to 6,140 in 1990.

  Given the crime rate, McGovern had ample opportunity to refine his craft. And he did it exceedingly well, not simply because it was the posture of a prosecutor to loathe crime but also because he knew firsthand its effects on the psyche of the city. He was born and bred in Port Richmond, a neighborhood hard along the Delaware River that was next to Kensington and shared its characteristics—white, working class, held together within the rectangle of school and playground and row house and factory. His father was born in Port Richmond, and so was his mother. His father was Irish, a toll collector on the Ben Franklin Bridge who went to work every day, ate meat and potatoes when he got home, said as little as possible without being certifiably mute, and then went over to the local taproom to play pinochle and darts and drink some beer. He spent one summer week of every year in the seedy surf and sand of Wildwood on the New Jersey shore, and perhaps because he had spent nearly an entire life peering into driver’s-side windows and observing outstretched palms, he never owned a car.

  Mike McGovern’s mother was Italian, and the alchemy of the two cultures made him a kid who had the wits and street smarts to hold his own, a good fighter and an even better talker. He fought—most kids in the neighborhood fought—but there were basic, agreed-upon rules of engagement: snitching on someone, running away when a buddy was getting the bejesus knocked out of him, cursing in front of somebody’s sister. You didn’t gouge or bite or use bats but fought with your fists, and the fights never lasted too long, for kids were more inclined to go down to the railroad tracks with shakers of Morton’s salt, rip the covers off them, and spend all day throwing them at one another as if they were grenades.

  For the first thirty-one years of his life, McGovern didn’t simply live in Port Richmond. He lived in a variety of homes on the same street—Chatham Street. He lived there in 1951, when he was born, and he lived there when he went to Nativity BVM elementary at Belgrade and Madison Streets and then when he went to high school at Northeast Catholic. He lived there when he went to Villanova University and Temple Law School. He lived there when he married Mary Pat and they had the first of their four children. He lived there in 1980, when he went to work for the district attorney’s office.

  Between him and his parents, the McGoverns’ roots in Port Richmond went back nearly seventy-five years. But there had been changes, particularly during the last ten years. Kids began to piss on his steps and then say “fuck you” when he asked whether maybe they could walk to the alley and piss there. It was a small thing, but it made him realize that the neighborhood he had grown up in bore no resemblance to the neighborhood he was living in now. He lived on the same street, but that was the only thing that remained the same. In 1985, he decided to move to the northeast corner of the city, as far away as he could possibly go without breaking the city’s residency requirement.

 
McGovern left the district attorney’s office in the mid-1980s and went into private practice for about a year and a half. But he missed the sense of doing something that he thought was noble and in the service of the city. He came back to the district attorney’s office in 1988 and was assigned to the homicide unit. Many of the cases were wrenching, but none caused him greater anguish than he felt when a seventeen-year-old boy, the son of a cop from the same neighborhood that McGovern himself had grown up in, had his skull battered and his legs broken by an angry mob wielding baseball bats.

  “That was like an epiphany for me,” Mike McGovern said of prosecuting the killers of Sean Daily. “Everything I did as a lawyer brought me back home.”

  But there was no sense of homecoming, just the juxtaposition of the neighborhood that was gone and the neighborhood that now existed—Sean Daily found dead on a metal grate across the street from where McGovern had gone to elementary school, the prescribed rules of fighting that McGovern had grown up with replaced by baseball bats and guns and slow torture, the tearing off of the tops of shakers of Morton’s salt and playing war hardly as satisfying anymore as the smashing of a seventeen-year-old’s balls with a baseball bat.

  Sean Daily was killed on May 20, 1989. A week before, a Latino had been insulted and punched by a group of whites during an altercation in the neighborhood. The incident wasn’t forgotten, as all incidents of racial hatred are never forgotten, and a group of Latinos returned to the corner of Belgrade and Ann Streets seeking revenge. Most of the kids scattered, but Sean Daily wasn’t lucky enough. His legs were knocked out from under him by a baseball bat, causing him to fall, and then there were swings from the bat, repeated swings, to his shoulders and his skull and his buttocks and his legs and his testicles. Like a dog that had been hit in the street by a speeding car, he somehow tried to crawl to the safety of his home. But before he got there, God took mercy on him, and he was shot in the back.

  McGovern didn’t tell the reporters he was from Port Richmond. He didn’t want to be seen as the neighborhood’s avenging angel, but that’s what he was, his relationship with Sean Daily’s family stretching back nearly thirty years. When McGovern was thirteen, he and a friend had set fire to some leaves. The fire spread to a tree, whose burning leaves fell onto the roof of the B and H Deli, and the fire department had to be called. McGovern and his friend did what any other thirteen-year-olds would have done—they hid, assuming it was better to disappear and live on their own for the rest of their lives than ever face their parents. But their plan didn’t work. The source of the prank was discovered, and it was Keith Daily, Sean’s father, who knocked on the door of the McGoverns’ house to tell Mike’s parents that their son had narrowly missed burning down a neighborhood landmark, not to mention a damn good deli.

  McGovern spent much of that trial in fever pitch. He ignored the predictable charges of racism made against him and his office by members of the Hispanic community, as well as the absurd claims that the defendants were the subject of a racially motivated prosecution. He knew that hate had no bounds in the city, and he knew that the context of the Daily case was rooted in the hate that many white kids had for Latinos and the hate that many Latino kids had for whites. But he also knew that Sean Daily was an innocent, a seventeen-year-old innocent. And he knew that Sean Daily had been tortured before he died, his body “one deep, dark contusion” from his shoulders to his buttocks, as he described it to the jury, from the repeated blows of baseball bats. One blow after another. For two or three minutes.

  The case took eleven weeks in a sweltering courtroom that didn’t even have air-conditioning at first, and at one point McGovern moved his family to the Jersey shore because he had received death threats. But he refused to throttle his outrage by a single decibel, and in his closing argument to the jury he took a broken baseball bat that had been introduced into evidence and struck it against a courtroom table to give the jurors an idea of the sound such an instrument makes when it is repeatedly used for torture.

  “What clearer example of intent to inflict pain?” he asked. And the jury answered.

  In August 1990, five of the seven defendants in the case were sentenced to life. McGovern marked their files with particular gusto, a neighborhood boy making good on his debts and obligations to the neighborhood even though he didn’t live there anymore. One of the effects of having had a quiet father is the tendency to remember what little he did say, and Mike McGovern always remembered this piece of advice: “As long as you never forget where you came from, you’re welcome back.” For Mike McGovern, the best and truest measure of that was the number of people who tried to buy him a beer when he went back to visit. After the Sean Daily trial, when he went to Mick’s Inn, he could have sat there for three days and not spent a single dollar. He was a guy from the neighborhood who still carried the neighborhood with him regardless of who he was and where he went, still Kewpie McGovern’s kid regardless of how many times he got his name in the Inquirer. Something precious had been taken from the neighborhood, and Mike McGovern had given something back—faith in a system of laws and justice in a city that creaked and sputtered sometimes but still worked. In the absence of restoring a life, it was the best that anyone could do.

  And now, two years later, in August 1992, he was telling the story again in a different courtroom with a different victim and a different defendant and a different set of family members but with the same undercurrent of frustration and racial hatred that had claimed the life of Sean Daily. There was a new mayor now, and McGovern, like many others, could feel the clouds of gloom that had hung over the city slowly lifting, as if Rendell, through the sheer force of his enthusiasm, had just blown them across the Delaware to the eternal misery of Camden. McGovern had worked for Rendell when Rendell had been the district attorney, and he knew the considerable persuasions of his charm. It was Rendell, in fact, who had hired McGovern away from the public defender’s office as part of a group of young, aggressive lawyers who reveled in the daily combat of the courtroom. As mayor, Rendell was changing perceptions, and people who had thought they would never again believe in the city’s future were, if not quite ready to become believers again, at least thinking about it. But from the vantage point of a prosecutor and the kinds of cases that a prosecutor tried and the kind of city that a prosecutor saw day in and day out, certain realities were very much the same.

  II

  He could sense the horrible feeling in Courtroom 246 in City Hall, the Berlin Wall as he described the atmosphere, blacks on one side and whites on the other. But at least the Berlin Wall was a wall, a physical impasse. This was different and somehow worse. Without a single impediment, the narrow aisle between the two sides had become impenetrable. Defense attorney Dan Rendine saw it too, particularly as the trial progressed and the tension spiked and sharpened so that it was no longer just a murder trial but a trial about polarity and division and whites seeking vindication and blacks seeking vindication. But neither attorney was there to pass moral judgment. Rendine was there to represent a defendant, and McGovern was there to convince the judge of the premeditated, first-degree guilt of that defendant, a fifteen-year-old who looked closer to ten and spent much of the trial doodling and hanging his head to the side, as if self-consciously trying to adopt a pose of carelessness and detachment not because he necessarily meant it but because that’s how he thought he should act.

  His name was William Taylor, and he was known as Will. He had an IQ of 72, had been in special programs in the Philadelphia public schools in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and was performing at a level five to seven grades below what was expected for a child of his age. His parents had never married, and he was raised primarily by his mother. When he was two, they moved to Texas, where, according to a report that was submitted to the court, he was repeatedly abused by someone his mother lived with—beaten with bare hands and struck with a belt across the back, legs, and face. He came back to the city when he was eleven, and his father noted how timid he see
med and wondered whether he might be gay, a sentiment the son seemed determined to rid him of. On a reading examination administered by the Philadelphia public schools after his return, he scored 1 percent, meaning that 99 percent of the students in his age group were more proficient. He scored 2 percent on spelling and 0.8 percent on math. It was noted that Will had a need to be “perceived as a strong and masculine figure” to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by his intellectual limitations. In November 1991, he was arrested for possession of a loaded weapon and was placed on probation. A little more than a month later, on January 10, 1992, Will set off to take his midterms at Audenried High School.

  During the trial, it was never clearly established whether Will, in anticipation of his exams, took any papers, pencils, or books to school that day. He may well have thought he didn’t need anything other than the pump shotgun he concealed under his Raiders Starter jacket and then placed in his locker.

  School let out early because of the midterms. Somewhere around 11:30 A.M., Will and eight or nine other kids passed through the edge of Grays Ferry on their way home. Like so many neighborhoods in the city, Grays Ferry was its own social fortress, with a tradition of suspicion and hatred of blacks.

  At Don’s Variety at Taney and Dickinson, a little American flag had been taped to one of the windows, and inside the furnishings included a pinball machine, an ice-cream chest, and a rack for potato chips. The boys went in, supposedly to buy something to eat. They were not welcomed, either by the elderly woman at the counter or by the man with the mustache and the blue jean jacket who was sitting on a board on top of the radiator. The boys milled about, and the lady told them that if they weren’t going to buy something they would have to leave. They knew they were being watched by the white man in the blue jean jacket. One of the boys, Gilbert Robinson, knocked the man’s hat off as he was leaving, and Robinson was tripped in retaliation.