A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  As he was packing, he came upon the first newspaper article to mention his name, a 1982 column in the Daily News by Pete Dexter, who went on to win the National Book Award for Paris Trout.

  Todd White was smiling Friday. Common Pleas Judge John Meade had just turned him loose. Probation. Besides that, Judge Meade had thrown Assistant DA Mike McGovern out of the courtroom. McGovern hadn’t wanted White turned loose. The reason for that was that White had just been convicted of robbery. He had gone into the home of a 57-year-old disabled minister in South Philadelphia, pistol-whipped him, taken $60, his television and his radio, and threatened to kill him if he told the police.… McGovern stood up to argue. Among other things, he said probation in this case was an outrage to the community. Meade instructed a sheriff’s deputy to take him out of the courtroom. “That young man’s problem,” the judge said later, speaking of McGovern, “is that he’s young. I was just saving him from being held in contempt of court.”

  It had been a grand ride, hadn’t it?

  And it had been more than just obligation that had prompted McGovern to say in his resignation letter to District Attorney Lynne Abraham, “I regret that I shall not continue to be part of this fine Office and its noble and tireless pursuit of justice for the citizens of Philadelphia. I will cherish my years as an Assistant District Attorney for a lifetime.” But the other part of the letter told the truth about why he was leaving. “Unfortunately, as my children have grown so have my family’s financial needs. Of course, this growth requires one to make difficult choices.”

  The McGoverns’ oldest child, Bridget, had just started ninth grade at Nazareth Academy, and they had three younger children to worry about as well. They had tried the public schools once, which seemed only reasonable since their tax dollars went to support them. Bridget had gone to kindergarten at Comly Elementary, over on Byberry and Kelvin, but as McGovern’s wife, Mary Pat, recalled, the teacher was in her sixties, had a heart problem, and often fell asleep because of the medication she was taking. She was replaced—but by revolving-door teachers. The school itself was old and dirty, and the McGoverns became unwilling to consider the public schools a viable option for any of their children. That meant parochial schools, and that meant tuition costs that would only multiply as each child reached school age. They weren’t alone in this. Because of the quality of the city’s public school system and the reliance instead on private and parochial schools, Philadelphia had the lowest percentage of its students attending public schools of the ten largest cities in the country.

  It made the McGoverns, as it made so many thousands of others in the swath of the middle class, subject to the illogic of city life. Because the city’s public schools were uniformly poor, they spent thousands on education that they would not have spent if they had lived in the suburbs. Compounding this, because McGovern lived in the city, his salary was subject to a 4.96 percent city wage tax that he would not have had to pay if he had lived and worked in the suburbs. In return for the additional taxes he paid as a city resident, McGovern not only was unable to use the schools, but he also received a level of service that was a shadow of what he would have received in the suburbs.

  Liberated now from such strictures, McGovern and his family could move. They could cross the border. When Mary Pat tallied it up, the ledger sheet of reasons to stay and reasons to leave was so lopsided that it was hard to believe anyone within the spectrum of the middle class was still left. Beyond sheer emotion, what exactly was the reason to stay?

  Housing costs in the city were generally cheaper, and her husband had a shorter commute than he would have had from some of the suburbs they might have considered. She also knew that her husband might want to be a judge someday, a position that required residence in the city.

  On the negative side, there was the school dilemma, which by the time their son Michael went to high school, in the fall of 1995, would cost them about $15,000 in tuition. There was the wage tax dilemma. There was the car insurance dilemma, with rates in the city nearly twice as high as rates in the suburbs. There was the services dilemma, particularly when it came to such things as snow removal. There was the parking dilemma. There was the traffic dilemma. There was the surroundings dilemma. There was the safety dilemma.

  All of that might have been somehow palatable, but what particularly disturbed Mary Pat was the indignity of it all. There were good things about city life, but the penalties were so onerous as to completely drown them out, as if over the years, city officials, through their tax policies and their school policies and their fiscal policies, were literally daring people to leave. It disturbed her that the middle class was given no incentive to stay while businesses and corporations, many of them rich and thriving, were given all sorts of incentives to stay—free land and tax abatements and low-interest loans. She understood the need to preserve jobs, but in the meantime, demographics showed that the middle-class family in the city was moving closer and closer to extinction. “They give businesses tax breaks and incentives to stay in the city all the time,” she said. “But what about the average citizen?” You paid taxes for schools you couldn’t use and for services that were often inferior, and after a while what joys you might derive from the city got lost in hardened disdain. “Why should I be loyal to the city?” she asked.

  Mike McGovern’s debate with his wife over leaving or staying would only intensify. But on his last day of work, he wasn’t dwelling on that. He was just thinking of saying good-bye in some way that would do justice to all the emotions he felt. He stood in Courtroom 696 and found the room as effervescent as ever despite the usual accoutrements of sound-blasting air-conditioning and tired wooden chairs and limp brown shades hanging halfway down dirt-soaked windows.

  Because the complete notes of testimony in the case at hand, Commonwealth v. Edward Graziano, were not available, defense attorney Jack Meyers wanted a thirty-day continuance. McGovern argued vociferously against it because he sorely wanted to end his career with a sentencing, particularly the sentencing of Graziano. He argued so vociferously, in fact, that the judge presiding over the case, Ricardo Jackson, had to tell him to shut up.

  “Doesn’t counsel understand that I’m talking?” said Jackson.

  “I’m sorry, your honor,” said McGovern sheepishly.

  According to testimony at the trial, Graziano had killed a college student outside an after-hours club in an apparent dispute over the victim’s girlfriend. Dominic Capocci was twenty when he died, his look of intimidation and menace that night amounting to shorts, a T-shirt, Air Nikes, and a Yankees cap turned backward. He was killed with a single bullet from Graziano’s gun, which had been placed almost equidistant between the eyes, the bullet making a silver-dollar-size hole in the forehead and then exiting above the bill of the Yankees cap. The look on his face when he died wasn’t terror but absolute shock, as if he couldn’t believe what had just happened. He was a junior at La Salle University and worked at his family’s sandwich shop.

  Graziano had been talking with Capocci’s girlfriend earlier in the evening and claimed that he pulled the gun he was carrying and fired accidentally in self-defense when Capocci and four of his friends surrounded him. But McGovern, during the trial, had called the shooting “totally unprovoked,” and a jury supported him with a murder conviction.

  Judge Jackson said the sentencing could proceed without the notes of testimony.

  “It was one of the most vicious killings I’ve seen in my eight years as a homicide prosecutor, and I’m not just saying that to make a speech,” said McGovern, dressed in his crisp blue suit. Pointing to the defendant, he said that Graziano, after shooting the victim in the forehead, then turned to the girlfriend and said, “There, take him home.”

  Suddenly from the grim soup of the courtroom came a voice. “Fuck you, motherfucker. You don’t know nothin’.” It belonged to the defendant, and McGovern turned red, the kind of deep red that anyone from the old neighborhood in Port Richmond would have recognized and immediately fl
ed from in terror. But to the bitter end, he was a good and loyal prosecutor, and however much he wanted to make a rousing speech for his grand finale or just walk several feet and strangle the defendant himself, he knew, even without the benefit of a laptop, that this was the time for a different strategy. The defendant had just made the best speech of all.

  “The Commonwealth rests, your honor,” said McGovern abruptly, and he sat down.

  “You have a smart-guy attitude, and you should spend your life in prison,” said the judge. Just for good measure, he threw in ten extra years on two gun charges.

  “I wanted that guy like meat!” McGovern snapped outside the courtroom, his face still red and glowing. But by the time he got back to the homicide wing at the district attorney’s office, he was exultant, his combativeness there for the world to challenge. “I crushed my last one like a grape!” he said to a colleague. Heading down the hallway back to his own office, he muttered to himself those final, epic words of his life as a prosecutor in the city. “Fuck you, motherfucker. You don’t know nothin’.

  “I know one thing,” said McGovern in the singsong taunt of a child. “You’re spending the rest of your life in jail.”

  To the very end, he was passionate and exultant. Maybe that was why, as he had walked back to his office, he had been stopped by several people who knew that this September day was his last and wanted to express their regret. They liked McGovern personally, but it was more than that, for as one of them told him as he grasped his hand, “The city’s gonna miss you.”

  II

  Several days later, still in September, as the mayor entered the sprawl of the navy yard, he seemed on the edge of total eruption. Karen Lewis, one of his saintly schedulers, was in the car with him, going over upcoming events. She could sense the build up of a wig out but knew that sometimes in moments such as these he was able to maintain his hold on rationality. Lewis watched with patience, looking for some inkling: Dr. Jekyll today or Mr. Hyde? Yin or Yang? Santa Claus or Scrooge? The answer came moments after he entered the yard.

  “Fucking waste of time! Fucking waste of time! Fucking waste of time!”

  The question of the mayor’s mood had been adequately answered.

  He most decidedly was unhappy to be going where he was going, to board the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy as it pushed up the Delaware and into the navy yard for an extensive overhaul. Although his outburst had to do with the endless burdens of overscheduling, this visit to the yard, however brief, was a sad and bittersweet experience that didn’t help matters any.

  About sixty-two hundred workers were still employed there, but the massive facility, spread over some nine hundred acres, barely stirred. In the absence of a miracle, its closure two years from now, on September 15, 1995, would be a monumental disaster for the mayor in terms of job loss in the city. As added injury, the closure would also come during the heat of his campaign for reelection.

  The overhaul of the Kennedy did provide some reprieve. Some fifteen hundred to two thousand construction workers would be employed at any one time during the $500-million project. In addition, nine hotels and apartment houses had won low-bid contracts for housing crew members who would reside in Philadelphia during the overhaul. But this was the last hurrah.

  The mayor’s car stopped at a landing strip. Rendell looked out the window, his fury of a few moments ago replaced by a voice simultaneously forlorn and mortified. “Look at that thing.”

  It was a helicopter, a big, clattering, kick-ass navy transport helicopter, and it would take Rendell and the aides traveling with him to the Kennedy. He got out of the car and lumbered to the craft. He resignedly clambered on board, where he got strapped in and had to don a life jacket and protective gear for the head and ears. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said, now laughing at the absurdity of it, aware of how bizarre he looked, with his gray suit pants sticking out of the life jacket and his head covered by plastic earmuffs. Even though he disliked heights, he seemed OK as the helicopter lifted, until he realized something else, and the voice of mortification returned. “Aren’t they going to close this door?”

  There was no door, at least no door that could be closed, and as the helicopter made its way toward the flight deck of the Kennedy, past the quiescence of the yard and its lines of mothballed ships, Rendell clutched the sides of the little bench he was sitting on with fanatic devotion. He talked incessantly even though no one, over the noise of the rotor blades and through the earmuffs, could hear a word except for a loud whooohhh when the helicopter made a sharp bank to the right in its final descent.

  Once on board, the mayor seemed as if another person from within had taken him over. He passed out pretzels in the Kennedy control room, instructing crew members on the proper etiquette: “You eat these babies with mustard.” He sat in the chair of the carrier’s commanding officer, and eyeing a string of phones nearby, he asked, “Which one is for the president?” He saw that the chair had protective padding that he recognized from someplace else, and then it dawned on him—“Oh, you got taxi beads.” He also conducted a spirited conversation with crew members on the authenticity of the Cher video in which she sings “If I Could Turn Back Time” on board a battleship, parenthetically noting that his son, Jesse, had changed the lyric to “Look at my firm backside.”

  Once safely back on the ground, he couldn’t get the Cher song out of his mind and began to sing it to himself over and over, with his son’s substituted lyric, of course. He described his visit to the Kennedy as “amusing, fun, but a total waste of time.” It may have been, but passing out pretzels and making crew members laugh seemed far more constructive than viewing the parade of politicians falling over themselves in their attempts to suggest that the yard would somehow survive its closing date with new work. There was inspirational talk about creating a national maritime and industrial center, in which the yard, operating as a public-private partnership, would continue to compete for naval maintenance and repair work while becoming a focal point for the development of shipbuilding-related technologies. There was still talk of enticing Mercedes-Benz to build its new plant inside the yard. There was talk of getting new subway cars built there.

  “The people at the shipyard should not be looking for jobs now,” proclaimed Congressman Thomas Foglietta, who made sure he was on the flight deck of the Kennedy as well. “I have a lot of faith in that.”

  “This shipyard can move forward as a center of shipbuilding and maritime work and help point the way to rebuilding the maritime industry in the United States,” proclaimed Senator Harris Wofford, even though most shipbuilding experts considered this an absurd fantasy.

  “If they do their usual top-notch work on this ship, there will be more work to come,” proclaimed Congressman Rob Andrews, whose district in southern New Jersey included a high percentage of shipyard workers.

  As a shipyard worker himself, Jim Mangan listened to what the politicians had to say in this latest round and digested it and continued steadfastly not to believe a word of it. Ever since the yard had been slated for closure in 1991, it had been the same, a massive manipulation of the hearts and minds of workers for their political support, an immoral trade of false hopes for votes, and he refused to buy into it. The effect of such comments on the workers was both predictable and cruel. The yard was a swell of rumors, and Mangan saw worker after worker cling to what the politicians said as if it were Scripture. “They still feel there’s some miracle around the corner,” said Mangan. “They are still in denial—‘We’ve got to do a good job [on the Kennedy] and then [the yard] will be saved.’ ”

  Early in his career, Mangan had enjoyed watching when one of the massive carriers came into the yard. He vividly remembered the first one he saw, the Saratoga, amazed something that big could actually float. But when the Kennedy arrived on this clear September day in 1993, Mangan didn’t even bother to watch. He felt no swell of feeling one way or another, except that it meant some work and probably some overtime, “the last gas
p” as he put it, “the last chance to make money.”

  The yard really had been reduced to a whisper anyway, so the work was welcome. There had been little for welders to do, and Mangan had spent most of his time repairing welding cable or, in his own blunt words, “doing practically nothing.” The shipyard was aware of the lull, and Mangan had been assigned to go down to the navy yard in Charleston, South Carolina, for thirty days at the end of the summer, but with six kids at home, he didn’t know how he could possibly do it. Neither did his wife, Linda.

  She was supportive of him in what he was going through as he faced the uncertainty of his future, and she did her best not to get nervous or in any way add pressure. When asked whether she was worried about what Jim would do if the yard closed, she said no without the slightest tic of reservation. After a year of volunteering, Linda now worked part-time as a classroom aide at nearby Smedley Elementary. It helped make ends meet, but she did it primarily to keep an eye on two of her children who went there and had come home with stories of fights. The school was small and overcrowded, and many of its students were reluctant refugees from the Catholic schools, there because their parents could no longer afford the tuition. She and Jim had discussed the idea of her working full-time. The pay would help, and so of course would the benefits if Jim decided to go into business for himself once he left the yard. But since the school district wasn’t hiring, the issue was moot.

  She had been terrified when Jim came home and told her the yard wanted him to go to Charleston, although she tried her best not to show it. She got headaches and had stomach problems. She worried about how she was going to take care of the kids by herself, but she also worried that if he didn’t go, he would get into trouble and maybe even lose his job. Pocketing her fears, Linda got out a suitcase and bought him new clothes. Jim in turn made a reservation at a hotel in Charleston, figuring he had no choice. Then, on the day before he was supposed to go, he heard of six or seven others in the welding shop who were refusing the assignment. As an old union steward, he knew there was safety in numbers. He went into the backyard of the little home on Haworth and told Linda he wasn’t going, even though in all probability that meant a five-day suspension, but she was relieved.