A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Tony said he had no idea whom he had shot or not shot, but he did know one thing: he had been shot right below the ankle. In the time it took for George Butts to throw Tony into a car, his shoe had filled with blood. He was seriously wounded. He went to his mother’s house, and it was then that he made up a story about being with her and getting accosted and then shot by five kids walking down the street. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, and the next day he was visited by police officers and placed under arrest for the murder of Bernard Redding.

  His mother pleaded with him to listen to the lawyer and take a plea. But headstrong and uncomfortable with the string of attorneys he ended up with, he decided instead to try to beat the system in a jury trial, and he told a story that made no sense, and he was eviscerated in masterly fashion by the prosecution. He said that Danny had shot him for no reason. When asked why he hadn’t filed a complaint against Danny, he referred to the law of the ghetto. Despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary, he claimed he was unarmed, an innocent bystander. The story was only contradicted further by testimony indicating that he originally had told the police he had been shot by the five hoodlums. The thrust of his testimony was totally self-incriminating, a textbook example of why defendants, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, should never get anywhere near the witness stand.

  The absolute waste of what happened that August night was apparent even to the judge, who had no choice under the law but to sentence Tony Mazzccua to life. Common Pleas Judge Theodore Smith noted that Tony had no criminal record to speak of. He noted that he had an IQ of 115, which would have qualified him for officer candidate school in World War II. He urged him to get his GED and maybe take some college courses as well once he got into the swing of things. He told him to get some psychotherapy, learn to think things out instead of acting so impulsively. Then he wished him “good luck,” as if he were going on an exotic voyage, and sent him to prison.

  It could be strenuously argued that Tony Mazzccua had more than paid for what he had done. He had spent sixteen years in prison for a crime that in today’s world of urban violence would have merited two paragraphs in the newspapers. On one of the days that Fifi came to visit him, a man was sentenced to eight to twenty years for beating his one-year-old son to death because the child hadn’t learned to walk yet and the man had grown tired of him “acting like a baby.” In another case the same day, a couple was sentenced to four to ten years for nearly starving their seven-month-old son to death. In the sad spectrum of violence, was Tony Mazzccua’s crime anywhere near as egregious as these? And didn’t his admission of the crime after all these years reveal something important about his soul and his character?

  In the late 1970s, when Tony Mazzccua was sentenced to life, it was not uncommon for the governor, Democrat Milton Shapp, to commute life sentences to sentences of life with the eligibility of parole. He did it 254 times. But after that, such commutations became rarer and rarer. The next governor, Republican Richard Thornburgh, granted only seven. The state’s governor in 1994, Democrat Robert Casey, had granted twenty-four. If Republican congressman Tom Ridge, with conservative ideas about the criminal justice system, succeeded Casey in January of 1995, as many thought he would, there was a likelihood that no life sentences would be commuted during the next term.

  In the absence of an answer by the Lord to Fifi’s prayers, the cycle of Tony’s life seemed likely to continue. For the rest of his mother’s life, Tony would see her amid the din and the greasy smell of a prison visiting room. For the rest of his life, he would communicate with his children by phone or letter or visits once they got out of jail. He kept up with them as best he could, and when he communicated with them, he apologized for what he was. He held himself up as an example of what their lives must not become—lives of potential ruined by the millisecond of gratification that comes from violence. But the cycle of life was too firmly in place. His wife turned to crack, and his sons ran wild, and the middle one, Keith, had died in a shoot-out at seventeen. And it seemed only fitting that Tony should learn intimate details of Keith’s death not from Fifi or other family members but from the lips of someone he had never laid eyes on before.

  But since they were doing time together—the father whose son had been killed and the young man who had killed him—meeting each other was just a matter of working out cell-block logistics.

  Tony was on A block when he got word through the prison grapevine that Terrell Moore was in B block, serving his sentence for killing Keith. Tony heard that he was scared, and Tony himself didn’t know what he would do if they met. He could feel the old hostility rising as he thought about this “little motherfucker” who had killed his son, but he also knew that he had to see him, so he passed the word through a go-between.

  “You tell this young brother I don’t care what he do, where he go, he’s gonna have to see me. He’s gonna have to see me now, or he’s gonna have to see me later.”

  Tony was at the end of the sanitation shop, where inmates pick up supplies, when there was a knock on the door. He had never seen his son’s killer before, but he knew it was he as soon as he saw him. Other inmates cleared away, and Tony and Terrell Moore spoke privately.

  “Why’d you shoot my son?” were the first words he asked him.

  Moore tried to explain what happened, how there had been a fight and then a shoot-out in which Moore himself had been injured in the leg and shot in the chest but didn’t die because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

  “What about my daughter?” Tony wanted to know. “How could you have also shot my daughter, my daughter Renee. My God, she was only eleven.”

  He said he hadn’t.

  What did he mean he hadn’t? Then who the hell had?

  Your son, Moore gently told him. Your own son. As he was falling backward to his death, his upper body filled with bullets, one of the guns he was carrying had gone off, and the bullet hit her.

  “You telling me my son shot my daughter?”

  “Yes, Mr. Mazzccua.”

  Tony had never heard that before, and it was shocking to hear it now from this man who was half his age. He felt a burst of anger. But then a sense of calm came over him. And when he looked at Terrell Moore, he saw someone who was scared and frightened and much like the young man he had been when he had gone to prison so long ago. And Tony was thankful for the way he felt.

  He asked him whether he had any children, and he said that he did, a little daughter, and Tony asked him, “Don’t you want to be with your daughter?” He said yes, and Tony shared with him how old his children were when he left the streets to come to prison and the devastating impact of that on all of them. He felt no hostility anymore toward the young man in front of him. He felt sympathy and a sense of paternalism, and he urged him to break the cycle. “I’m doing life for what I did,” said Tony. “You got another chance to make something out of your life. You got a little girl out there, you got a woman who cares about you.”

  And after that, after they spoke for those forty minutes, he never saw him again.

  Tony went back to the routine of his cell block, and the killer of his son went back to the routine of his.

  At least once a month and sometimes more, if she could arrange the transportation, Fifi went to visit Tony. The first few years she felt apprehensive all the way up and then cried all the way back. But after a while the rhythm of acceptance set in, and the trip became an automatic part of her life, just like taking care of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Up Henry Avenue and then over to Ridge Avenue until it turned into Ridge Pike. Then into the gray-water town of Graterford. When she had the time, she stopped at the Stroehmann factory to get some bread on the cheap, and when her parents were alive and visiting with her, they always went to the smorgasbord at the Collegeville Inn. Sometimes, when they had taken Germantown Pike instead of Ridge, her father would proudly show her the tracks of the railroad that he had built.

  She had dressed beautifully on this particular day w
hen she went to see her son, as if to conceal from him the worries and the responsibilities that weighed her down. “You look great!” he said, and she acknowledged that she had not only done up her hair but she had also put her teeth in. They hugged each other, and he called her Mommy. The severity of the rules of prison visiting had increased and decreased over the years and had recently become quite spartan. There was a time when you could pull chairs around to play pinochle, but that wasn’t allowed anymore, so Tony and Fifi sat side by side in a long row of sagging chairs with greasy arms. She bought him the food he liked from the vending machine, and they talked idly and comfortably for two hours, and it was hard to believe that this was the way they had been forced to talk for all those years, under the glare of guards and over the noise of other inmates and against the green grime of those walls. Their love truly did flow like a river, unyielding and undying, mother to son and son to mother. He privately worried about how tired she looked, and she privately worried about how some gray was beginning to show around his temples. She dreamed of cooking him a meal. He dreamed of taking her on a cruise. He worried that she would die while he was still in prison, and she worried that she would die before God answered her and he was set free.

  “Keep the faith,” he said when it was time for her to leave, and he bent to give her a hug, one of the two he was allowed during visitation, a brief one at the beginning, another brief one right at the very end.

  “I’ll try,” she said as tears formed in her eyes.

  Then he stayed where he was, and she lumbered out through the visitor’s room and back up the stairs.

  The stairs were steep, and there was a little elevator attached to the railing for those who were handicapped. Fifi sighed and laughed and looked at those stairs as if she were scaling Everest and told a guard that the next time she came, she was going to go the proper way, in that little elevator. Then she looked at the stairs, and she did what she always did. She took hold of the railing and climbed them.

  Fifi ran around the corner on that August day in 1994 after she dropped the phone. She saw the crumpled fence and the car that had smashed into it and all the blood. There had been a terrible crash that made for front-page news even in the desert of North Philadelphia, where there seemed no room for new horrors. A man apparently under the influence of cocaine had been driving his car like a madman five minutes before noon. He sped through a stop sign at Eleventh Street, went over the curb, struck the steps of an empty corner store, and swerved back into the street for half a block. Then he mounted the sidewalk again, ran over a signpost and crushed a woman who was six months pregnant and her three-year-old son against a fence.

  The three-year-old would survive, and so miraculously would the baby. But the woman, named Kim Armstrong, would not. She was twenty-four years old, and Fifi knew her well. Sometime earlier Kim had given birth to a son. His name was Taheem, and his father was Tony’s son Keith. Now both his parents were dead, his father killed in a shoot-out over drugs, his mother killed by a driver out of his mind because of them.

  A few weeks earlier Fifi had asked aloud whether the cycle would ever stop.

  “Sometimes I wonder, What more, what more, what more?” she said. Now she knew the answer.

  On the last Friday in August of 1994, people in the neighborhood gathered at the Cookman Church in the aftermath of Kim Armstrong’s death. The issues they discussed were much the same as the ones that had been raised at the community meeting that had taken place at the end of June in the aftermath of the death of six-year-old Michelle Cutner. Black men talked about the need to regain control of the neighborhood. A police sergeant said drug activity in the neighborhood was so intense that there was at least one arrest a day. He urged people to call the police, and when people in the audience said there was little point in calling the police because the police never came, he meekly responded that for every call that did go out over the police radio, someone “eventually” responded.

  Fifi was there. Her daughter was there because she had been the meeting’s organizer. So were about fifty other people who just wanted some semblance of law to be brought back to their community. The mayor sent along an aide who, within the privacy of Rendell’s office, existed largely to serve as a willing target at those moments when the mayor felt like ridiculing someone. His presence at meetings was virtually a sign of their unimportance.

  “I just left the mayor,” said the aide, who arrived an hour and a half late. “He very, very much wanted to be here.”

  17

  Don’t Mess with Ed

  I

  Everywhere Rendell and Cohen went, he seemed to be behind them, out there in the shadows. Just when they figured they had shaken him, outwitted him for good and put him off the trail, there he was, the glint of his badge just barely visible in the summer sun.

  They had given him the mayor’s contributors’ list when he had run for governor, which was like going to the wine cellar and handing over the rarest bottle of Mouton Rothschild coveted during the war. They figured he would accept it in the spirit in which it was intended, part gift, part buyout, but there he was. They called their best fund-raising lieutenants to the long table in the Cabinet Room, held the political equivalent of a Mafia war summit, then sent these grim and powerful soldiers on a do-or-die mission to raise so much money from every law firm, bank, investment house, and business that no one, no one, would dare risk a challenge.

  By the middle of the summer of 1994, the Rendell campaign had $1.7 million sitting in various bank accounts. And yet there he was, inscrutable, impossible to read, refusing to go away, the sweet speculation of rumor only making him stronger.

  There had been a time during the spring when Cohen had become utterly convinced that State Representative Dwight Evans would run for mayor. He had seen him in Harrisburg during negotiations for the state budget. Evans was angry in a way that shocked Cohen, and had suggested that there was no true commitment to minorities in the city. The process of budget negotiations in Harrisburg, the endless horse-trading and behind-the-back deals that the petty men who called themselves legislators mistook for power, was always exhausting, and Cohen thought Evans’s private outburst was partially a reaction to that atmosphere. But Cohen thought something else was driving Evans, something he couldn’t blame him for at all. The state capital of Harrisburg was a miserable place, not only because the town was an ugly and crummy backwater but also because of the absolutely corrosive attitude that most legislators bore toward the city. Cohen himself saw it when a legislator whom he had never met before expressed his admiration for the mayor this way: “He’s done a helluva better job than the nigger you had in there before.”

  By the middle of the summer, Cohen wasn’t so sure what Evans would do, but he did know this, just as the mayor’s political strategist, Neil Oxman, had known it the night his client the mayor shared a giant hoagie instead of the pain over the death of a six-year-old: given the racial breakdown of the Democratic party in the city, Evans would be a credible and formidable challenger to the mayor if he decided to run. They had known it from the very first day of the administration, and they knew it now.

  As a state representative, Evans had served his district in the city loyally and well for thirteen years. Without shrillness and without the immediate instinct to hold a press conference or play racial politics publicly, he had become a leading advocate of the city’s minority community and was particularly masterly at strong-arming the mayor in a way that was quietly effective. He wasn’t flashy, and he might not have had the stamina for a citywide campaign against Rendell in a Democratic primary. The mayor’s popularity was formidable, and his ability to raise money daunting. But Evans had something the mayor would never have: immediate access to the base of the city’s minority vote. If Evans could get to those neighborhoods, if he could take the community that had humbly gathered in a church to mourn the death of six-year-old Michelle Cutner and a dozen other communities and seize upon their alienation, then the possibility of
an upset wasn’t some fantasy.

  Like a hard-to-get date, Evans refused to clarify his intentions one way or another, and there was always something mercurial about him. But Rendell and Cohen were acutely aware of his presence and of the need to head him off. The Rendell administration came up with a plan, the Philadelphia Plan it was called, a way of showing that the mayor, beyond his own private feelings, did care about the neighborhoods and the minority residents of the city. The plan, to rehabilitate housing, had good intentions and was modeled after the public-private partnership that Jimmy Carter had devised in Atlanta. But since one of the motivations behind it was politics, the polish and the presentation of it bore little resemblance to the reality. In private, the mayor readily agreed with the assessment of the plan as a drop in the bucket that would do little unless the city was able to increase its jobs base, with casino gambling or a second convention hotel or maybe even some miracle at the navy yard that no one had even considered. But perception was paramount, and one of the debates over the plan had to do with choosing the maximally effective visual backdrop for the press conference—should it be bombed-out buildings or rehabilitated ones?

  Rehabilitated homes won out, and the Philadelphia Plan was announced amid great fanfare on a picture-perfect day of clear blue skies. The governor was there. So was the mayor. So was Dwight Evans, and so were so many other politicians that someone must have spread the word that there were free umbrellas and tote bags for those who got there on time. So were representatives of the nine corporations that, under the terms of the plan, had made a commitment to contribute $250,000 a year for ten years to community-development corporations to develop and build new housing. Standing next to the mayor and the governor, they were preening and proud. Given the federal and state tax credits that existed for such neighborhood investment, the real out-of-pocket expense for these corporations, with aggregate assets running well into the tens of billions, was about $50,000 each per year, but that information wasn’t highlighted.