A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  McGovern ended his presentation of the evidence with testimony from the assistant medical examiner. He did it on purpose, to remind the jury that ultimately this case wasn’t about Carlton Bennett or Giovanni Reed but about the person who had died that night.

  The assistant medical examiner spoke in the cold flatness of a trained professional, reducing the once vibrant life of Robert Janke to a series of forensic findings, anatomical blips across a report:

  SIX FOOT THREE INCHES TALL, WEIGHT 179 POUNDS, SINGLE WHITE MALE, 22 YEARS OLD, DIED 8-11-91 AT JEFFERSON HOSPITAL AT 1:35 P.M. OF GUNSHOT WOUND OF THE RIGHT TEMPLE, BLACK POWDER BURNS ON THE FACE, A PORTION OF BONE SHOT OUT OF THE HEAD, THE PATH OF THE BULLET THROUGH THE SOFT TISSUE AND SKULL OF THE RIGHT TEMPLE, THE RIGHT FRONTAL-TEMPORAL-PARIETAL BRAIN, THE ORBITAL PLATE, AND THEN EXITING FROM THE MEDIAL ASPECT OF THE ORBIT OF THE LEFT EYE.

  McGovern asked the assistant medical examiner what the chances of survival were from an injury such as this.

  “His chances of survival from this wound were zero.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  After five days, the jurors retired to deliberate. They reached a verdict in two hours and fifty minutes. “Should I bring my crying towel?” asked McGovern over the phone when he was told that the jury had come in. He ran his fingers through his hair, and as he threw on his coat and got ready to walk back over to the court from his office, he was supremely confident that the jury would convict on robbery and conspiracy charges. But he wasn’t nearly so certain about the charges of murder, and he knew they hinged on whether or not the jury had believed Lorraine Hill. “There is enough humility in me that says, ‘You should win, McGovern.’ I hate losing so much that it scares the shit out of me. Those kids held him and watched the expression on his face when he was being tortured and tormented like taking the wings off a fly before he was killed. Are they going to be out hanging around tomorrow?” But he wasn’t about to convey such doubt publicly. As word passed through the tiny cubicles of the homicide wing of the district attorney’s office that a verdict in the Janke case had been reached, McGovern’s Port Richmond bravado was as tight as a guitar string. “When I lose, I’ll let you know, because that’s news.”

  McGovern walked back to court. He listened as the judge asked the foreman to rise and read the verdict.

  Carlton Bennett, fat and slow-footed, wearing the same green pants and green striped shirt that he had worn the first day of the trial, went first.

  On the charge of robbery:

  Guilty.

  On the charge of criminal conspiracy:

  Guilty.

  On the charge of second-degree murder:

  Guilty.

  Giovanni Reed, all of sixteen years old at the time of the killing, went next.

  Guilty of robbery.

  Guilty of criminal conspiracy.

  Guilty of second-degree murder.

  Mike McGovern knew that he was in a perpetual tug-of-war over living in the city, the pull of loving it endlessly tempered and tested by the financial rigors of a city wage tax and tuition for private schools. He knew that barring some miracle, he would be switching jobs in several months. But at the moment of those guilty verdicts and the sentence of life that they carried, it was hard for him to think of any feeling better than this one. Standing in that cavernous courtroom, accepting congratulations, he did what he always did after a trial: he marked the file, writing the word guilty next to the charges with a flourish.

  “See how neat and pretty it is,” he said as he left the courtroom and stepped outside into the yellowish haze of the hallway.

  But for some, even those with a personal stake in the outcome, the sight of those fat and slow-footed defendants going off to prison for the rest of their lives wasn’t a source of celebration but was a source of sorrow. “There are no winners,” said Robert Janke’s aunt, Lucinda Janke, when a reporter asked her for her reactions to the verdict. “Four young men will never be the same. Bobby was killed, and three others will spend their lives in prison without parole. I’m satisfied the system worked, but I wish I weren’t here. It’s just very sad.”

  There would never be any sufficient explanation of why Dwayne Bennett had pulled the trigger that August day as the sun was coming up. McGovern described him as a great white shark, with those deadened eyes that made no differentiation between right and wrong, good and evil. His attitude seemed unfathomable, unless perhaps you were part of the same environment of vacant houses and public high-rises and dishwater jobs that had yielded him. Then perhaps it was possible if not to understand the motivations of Dwayne Bennett, at least to see the effects of hopelessness on others. McGovern got on the narrow elevator, deservedly flush with his success. He pressed the button for the ground floor and rode past the second floor, past the mayor’s office, where all that same week in January 1993 a pivotal institution of the city—one ostensibly designed to serve those in the greatest need, those who were black and poor and shared backgrounds similar to Dwayne Bennett and Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed without committing crimes—was in its usual throes of politically engineered chaos.

  II

  In a political career stretching back to the mid-1970s, it was an astounding concession for Ed Rendell to make. But never in his life, not during two terms as district attorney, not in his runs for governor and mayor, had he ever heard a yelling match between two public officials as long as this one.

  Ostensibly the screaming had to do with the future of public housing in the city and the age-old mess of the agency in charge of it, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, but it really had to do with the things that invariably guided such institutions—political ego, contradictory agendas, and the bottomless differences of race. Lucien Blackwell, formerly a city councilman and now a congressman, was the screamer. Michael Smerconish, regional administrator for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, who had jurisdiction over the Philadelphia Housing Authority, was the screamee. But midway through the session, roles reversed. The federal official became screamer. The congressman became screamee. And then at a certain point, they said to hell with it and became simultaneous screamers, both men screaming so loud, with such sustained intensity, that not a word of what they said was remotely decipherable.

  It was a comical, slightly pathetic sight, these two grown men yelling at the top of their lungs, not even directly at each other but through the wonders of a speaker phone, since the federal official was in the mayor’s office and the congressman more than a hundred miles away, in Washington. It made the whole spectacle even more surreal, the federal official in his crisp white shirt and presidential cuff links, yelling into a little plastic box on top of the desk in the mayor’s office as if it were alive, the congressman yelling back with such force and velocity that the little plastic box seemed to skitter across the desk every time the scratchy racket of his voice sounded.

  “It’s amazing we get anything done,” Rendell whispered to a visitor midway through, and then he just shook his head and rolled his eyes and stared rather forlornly at the little plastic box, as if it were hard to believe that something so small, which never worked particularly well during a local call, could be responsible for so much noise long-distance. But in the long and sorry history of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, which controlled more than twenty-two thousand units of public housing in the city and served as landlord to more than eighty thousand tenants, the interchange between the federal official and the congressman came as close as anything to clear and constructive dialogue.

  Public housing once provided safe, comfortable housing for people in need. Today high-rise public housing is a threat to the health and safety of its inhabitants and a cause of blight in its host communities.

  To undo the tragic deterioration of these communities requires that we face up to the harsh realities of the present situation and adopt bold new initiatives to end the cruel and inhuman conditions that exist.

  No one who knew anything at all about pub
lic housing in the city would have taken much issue with that statement. It was a succinct summation of what public housing had become in the city, and other than the fact that it had been written fourteen years earlier, in 1979, it was still hard to quibble with, except perhaps that its depiction had proved overly optimistic. By the early 1980s, roughly 10 percent of the housing authority’s units stood vacant, even though more than twelve thousand families were on the authority’s waiting list. By 1992, the vacancy rate at the housing authority, the fourth largest in the country, had climbed to 20 percent while the waiting list had grown to at least thirteen thousand applicants. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees public housing in the country, had set a standard of thirty days in which to reoccupy a vacant unit. The Philadelphia Housing Authority, not content with that, had set a standard in its own handbook of seven working days. But the reality turned out to be slightly longer than that, somewhere close to sixteen hundred days, or approximately four and a half years.

  In his first year of office, Rendell had concentrated on the city’s financial condition and the union negotiations, but public housing had inserted itself on his agenda anyway, without waiting for an appointment. In February of 1992, Smerconish, in his capacity as HUD’s regional administrator and eager to establish himself as bold and aggressive, froze millions in federal funds earmarked for the rebuilding of Southwark, the high-rise public-housing project that had played such a pivotal role in driving Linda Morrison out of Queen Village.

  About a month after that, a draft audit of the housing authority by HUD showed conditions that were shocking even to those who had already assumed the worst: in a random inspection of eighty-seven units, eighty-six had failed HUD’s standards for safe and sanitary housing. Each unit inspected averaged eleven violations. Infestations of roaches were common. So were tub and sink faucets that would not shut off. One unit had twenty-nine violations, including a rotting subfloor in the kitchen, a second-floor bedroom ceiling that had caved in because of leaks in the plumbing, and large holes in the living room walls. The inspectors doing the audit declared the unit uninhabitable, but because of the limited availability of decent housing in the city, that wasn’t the case. Instead, a household of five slept in one bedroom.

  The audit presumably did not include units that the mayor himself talked about, where sewage and excrement came through the sink. Nor did it include unit 3C of the Cambridge Plaza high-rise on North Tenth Street, where the radiators raged with such heat 365 days a year that Gaynell Gillespie could put a pot of water on top of them and literally boil eggs. Gaynell lived in the three-bedroom unit with her seven children. She was well aware of the dangers of those radiators, and over and over again she asked maintenance people to come and fix them before something horrible happened.

  Six of her children were old enough to stay away from them; they understood why the windows were open and why the fans were blowing in the dead of winter, but her youngest child, Adam, was too young to grasp such incongruities. He was a little bit over a year old, just learning how to walk, and, when she heard his screams from one of the bedrooms and smelled the odor of sizzling hair, she knew what had happened. She ran to the bedroom and grabbed him, but it was too late—his head was jammed between the radiator and the control knob. There was a burn in an oblong shape from right below the earlobe to the jawline, and whole pieces of his skin looked as if they had been ripped off. She prayed and she called 911, and when the doctor at the hospital fixed him up, he told Gaynell Gillespie that if she had found her son a second later, he would have been glued to that radiator, the flesh of the baby’s skin melded with a boiling chunk of metal in a public-housing high-rise in the city. She spoke with other tenants, and they too had stories to tell of scaldings, including that of one girl whose lobe had been melted. She once again begged the maintenance people to do something, but, she said, she was told she was lucky to have heat. It was only when she appeared at a public meeting and told her story in the presence of a reporter for the Inquirer that something was finally done. “I sat home and waited and waited,” she said. “They didn’t take it seriously about my baby’s face. If they could have been there when he screamed.”

  Maintenance workers put wrappers of insulation around the pipes and new plastic knobs on the radiators, but the one in the bedroom that had burned her son still raged, and in the dead of winter she still had a fan on to stifle the heat.

  As awful as it was, her story didn’t appear to be isolated, for the audit depicted an institution that had, at the very least, a lackadaisical attitude toward those it was supposed to serve and, at the very worst, outright contempt for them. Maintenance work orders that should have been completed within a week were still outstanding forty-five days later. Millions of dollars in rent that should have been collected from tenants, thereby solidifying the authority’s financial condition, was simply ignored. On the other hand, the audit found that the authority had nearly five hundred more employees than it should have had according to recommended staffing patterns, a strong indication of the degree to which the authority existed not for the housing needs of its tenants but for the patronage needs of local politicians. In one two-year period, while the authority’s uncollected rents rose by $2 million and operating reserves declined by $5.4 million, its board saw fit to award bonuses of $82,000 to senior staff members for their performance. The audit did not specify who exactly received the bonuses, and finding out might have proved an unfathomable pursuit anyway, since the authority had no less than forty-nine directors, deputy executive directors, deputy and assistant directors, division directors, and executive assistants.

  The HUD audit was as scorching an indictment of a public institution as any in America. The Philadelphia Housing Authority was the ultimate quagmire, drowning those who stepped into it regardless of the purity or the impurity of their intentions. Ed Rendell also knew that this was hardly an issue of public urgency. The eighty thousand tenants who lived in public housing in the city were by and large invisible, holed up inside monoliths of hopelessness, treated with scorn. “The general public doesn’t care at all about the housing authority,” said Rendell at one point. “Because it serves only poor people, it has no constituency.” But with the results of the audit, he knew he had to do something. Michael Smerconish knew it too.

  Both knew that the authority provided a perfect Harvard Business School case study of why public institutions fail—because they are guided not by efficiency or accountability but by power, patronage, webs of impenetrable bureaucracy, and racial politics. Both knew that the driving force behind the authority had not been the needs of the tenants but had been the needs of the feudal kingdoms that existed. Both knew that major decisions affecting PHA, particularly those involving personnel, required the OK of certain politicians, as if they were major shareholders of a private corporation with access to an enormous number of proxies. Both knew of the potential for corruption in free-flowing contracts. Both knew the degree to which the question of race swirled through everything, since the vast majority of those living in public housing in the city were black. Both knew, because they were white, that anything they did, regardless of how much managerial sense it made, was likely to be treated with suspicion and contempt and accusations of racism. These ideas, more than mere suspicions, were vividly expressed in a remarkably candid letter that the mayor received from John Paone, the executive director of the housing authority until he left under fire in the spring of 1992.

  Under the umbrella of confidentiality, Paone’s letter told a sordid tale of the forces that controlled a public institution supported by taxpayers’ money, a system of spoils in which three groups—tenant leaders, employees, and politicians—were guided by complete self-interest. The tenant leaders, Paone wrote, formed

  your shadow government. In other words, continue to maintain a plantation society type organization where the tenant groups really ran the show in the developments and kept the peace. In return, they expected certain perks
, jobs for relatives and friends, transfers to better developments, trips to conferences etc. I found out early on that you didn’t have to have leadership qualities or even abilities to be part of the top management at PHA, you just needed the political savvy to stay on the right side of the tenants and their political allies.

  Race, Paone wrote, was used as an effective cudgel:

  Another factor to take into consideration is that 95 percent of all PHA tenants are Afro-American, they have been able to use racism as a weapon against successive administrations that have been predominantly white and, thus have been able to frustrate reform. This is not to say you can’t have a white Executive Director, but you must have a minority Board Chairman and a significant number of minority senior staff members, including a minority Chief of Staff.

  The employees of the authority, wrote Paone,

  have sought protection from the tenant groups or politicians to maintain their jobs because they see that the tenant groups and politicians have power and influence. Their loyalty is to the tenant leaders and to politicians, not the PHA administration.… Over the years, the tenant groups and the tenant leaders have established their own system of patronage and coerced the various PHA administrations to support it.

  As for the influence of politicians, Paone was equally blunt.

  Let’s make no bones about it, PHA has been a political dumping ground for every inept political crony in this town for the past twenty-five years. It has served as a retirement home for former city/state officials and their relatives who needed some place to go to finish out their careers. No one’s hand is clean here, everyone dumped on PHA; the tenants, the Board, various city administrations.…

  In a private meeting in 1992 with Smerconish shortly after the federal audit was released internally, the mayor framed the authority in a startlingly blunt way: “The two things that have driven PHA over the past three or four years have been patronage and the black issue. Many of the blacks [hired] are incompetent. Many of the white contractors absolutely fuck the tenants and skimp on everything because they know there’s no oversight.” Rendell understood the suspicions of black politicians in the city in regard to whites coming in and trying to run the authority. But incompetence was incompetence regardless of skin color, and in the crisis seizing the authority, he made it clear that there was no time for racial politics. “All of us have to be conscious of the black issue, but it can’t be the tail that wags the dog.”