by Shorty Rossi
He trusted me not to steal. Apparently, he’d seen me return money to some guy that dropped it on the street. That made a big impression on him. Later, he told me he’d even tested me a few times, leaving me alone with big sums of cash to see if I took a skim off the top. I never did, so for the next year, before he was arrested, he paid me $1,000 a week to count his money and track his books.
I never told anyone, not even Mama Myrt, Cerisse, or Little Al, that I was holding money or drugs for him in my bedroom. On some days, I’d have as much as $100,000 under my bed. Once a week or so, I’d travel with Uncle D. to Atascadero to sit and count out the money. I’d never seen so much cash in my life: $350,000 in cash and it wasn’t in $100 bills. It was dollar bills, fives, and twenties. I begged him to stop selling nickel pieces and start selling bigger bags. All those singles got on my nerves.
You would think that I had learned my lesson all those years ago when I tricked the bank into giving me an ATM card and ended up getting beat to hell for it. But nope. I spent the money as fast as I could make it. On clothes, on jewelry, I even bought a junker of a car. That ass-whooping Dad laid down hadn’t taught me one damn thing. Mama Myrt got suspicious. She asked me, “Where do you get all this money?” She kept pounding it into my head, “Don’t sell drugs! Don’t sell drugs!” I told her, “I promise you, I’m not.” But she didn’t buy it. “Then what are you doing?” I couldn’t think of nothing else, so I told her, “I’m a Little stripper!” I thought Mama Myrt’s face was gonna fall off, saying, “Shut up!” I convinced her that ladies would pay big money to watch a Little Person shake it and strip. It was such a crazy story, she had to believe it.
In reality, while I was working for Uncle D., I also had a job working at a law firm called Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. Even though I’d dropped out of high school, I still had my dream to be a lawyer or a corporate boss. I thought I could work my way up the ladder the hard way, no college necessary. I started out as a mailroom clerk, then was promoted into the accounting department. I had big hopes for the job. I wasn’t gonna be a dealer’s bookkeeper forever.
I had no interest in becoming a permanent part of the drug trade, and I considered myself on the outside of the nasty work. I knew how to cook crack, but I wouldn’t do it. I knew how to sell, but I wouldn’t do it. I saw a way to make a shitload of money without having to get into the real mess of dealing. So I took it. It wasn’t my life goal.
The law firm was inside the Crocker Center, which is now the Wells Fargo Towers in downtown L.A. We were on the fortieth-something floor, and at night, me and my homies would go there and have meetings in the boardroom. We’d discuss where to get drunk and who to shoot. I’d started carrying a pistol in ninth grade when all my friends started carrying, and I was like, ooh-la-la, I need one, too. I had a .22 I got from my homies, but with all of Uncle D.’s money under my bed, I decided I needed something more. I graduated to a .25. I couldn’t get too big a gun ’cause my fat, chubby dwarf fingers wouldn’t fit through the trigger hole.
I liked feeling like a corporate boss. It was the closest I’d ever come to living out my childhood Halloween dream of being an executive cowboy. Only now, I wore red jeans and do-rags when I was off the clock. No one never said nothing about us meeting there. Of course, this was before the days of video surveillance in offices and high security. We’d leave the office and head to the bar at the top of the Bonaventure Hotel. The more we drank, the more we talked about who to shoot. We were intelligent and stupid at the same time. We looked good. We were making money, and yet, we all assumed, someday we would end up in jail. It seemed inevitable. All around us, our friends were either dying or being arrested. If it was a choice between death by drive-by or five-to-ten, jail was the better option. It wasn’t something we were trying to avoid. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. The headlights of an oncoming train.
It took about a year for that train to catch up to Uncle D.
He got busted for possession, and not long after he was locked up, I was arrested myself. Not for counting his money. Or crossing the border with drugs in a trunk. Or for sneaking my homies into the law office most nights. No, the train that came barreling down the tracks at me had big-ass lights. I was arrested for attempted murder.
3
Felon
was hanging with a bunch of idiots, four guys named Dante, Lewis, T.J., and Bernard. These were friends of mine. At least, I thought they were. We were all young, not out of our teens. I was eighteen, Bernard and T.J. were seventeen, and Lewis and Dante were nineteen. Dante and Lewis had the ugly habit of robbing people. That was their thing. Not mine. I had saved enough money working for Uncle D. that I didn’t need to rob anyone, and even if I’d needed the money, I wouldn’t have robbed someone for it.
The only reason I ran with Dante and Lewis was ’cause they had a truck. I had a 1978 Monte Carlo that was a piece of shit. It used a broomstick as the stick shift, and I had to crawl out the passenger-side window ’cause neither door would open, and the window on the driver’s side wouldn’t roll down. The car looked like it had survived a demolition derby. It wasn’t street legal, so having access to wheels via Dante and Lewis was a plus.
One night, the guys picked me up at the law firm. We had our usual boardroom meeting to discuss the night’s party, but I didn’t know that Dante and Lewis had been on a robbing spree for the past couple of days. I got in the car with them, and we started our usual shit, hanging out, chasing women. It was a typical night until Dante and Lewis decided to drive to an area called Southgate.
Dante and Lewis had attitude problems. They’d gangbang on anyone they saw, without thinking of the consequences. There was a guy there, from a Southside gang, the East Coast Crips. I didn’t know him, but Dante did. He started an argument with the guy. After the gangbanger walked off, Dante turned around and robbed an innocent bystander just for the hell of it. I was in the truck, looking at Dante, thinking, “What an idiot. We’re in the middle of the fucking street. Why would he rob someone in the wide open like that?” Next thing I knew, the gangbanger had come back with his crew. Ten of them. Dante was so busy beating the bystander, he didn’t even notice.
There were five of us: me, Dante, Lewis, Bernard, and T.J. We were outnumbered two to one. We got into it. Right there, in the middle of the street. Dante drove a green, old-style Chevy truck with a mattress in the bed, and it was loaded full of guns. That was how we always rolled. Next thing you know, one of the Crips pulls out his gun. They did not realize our firepower. I was standing on the bumper and when they started shooting, I jumped and hit that mattress and grabbed my guns. We shot back. It was just bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. I don’t know how many shots were fired. I had three guns. I was shooting a .25, a .32, and a .22. It seemed like an eternity passed.
The Highway Patrol just happened to be driving down the street when they heard the shots fired. They hadn’t been called. What the hell the Highway Patrol was doing on a side street, I don’t know, but here they came. Bernard and Dante took off on foot, but T.J. and Lewis jumped in the truck and we took off in a high-speed chase. They clocked us at 110 miles per hour. I was being bounced around the back of the pickup truck like a fucking Ping-Pong ball. The Highway Patrol called in reinforcements, and then we were being chased by the LAPD and the County Sheriff’s Department. I couldn’t see nothing at all. I couldn’t get a grip on nothing. I was being tossed back and forth, but nobody was shooting at us, so I thought we might have a chance. Until we crashed.
We hit something so hard, I went into a daze. Lewis and T.J. took off on foot, but I just laid there on that mattress trying to recover. Since I was lying down, the cops didn’t see me. They took off after T.J. and Lewis. They just left me there in the back of the truck. When I realized I was all alone, I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Oh shit, really?” I climbed out of the truck and started calmly walking away. That’s when I heard, “Hey, you! Stop!” I ran. The Highway Patrol started chasing me on foot. I was able to run around t
he corner and there was a three-foot-high wall in front of me. I jumped over it and fell into some hedges. I heard the police run toward me, and then stop. They couldn’t figure out where I went. I heard them call in on their radios. They reported that they were on foot chasing a Little black male, dressed in all red. I waited until they had run off, then I climbed out from the hedges. I started walking calmly across the street. Here comes the sheriff. They flashed a light in my eyes. “Hey you, what are you doing?” I said, “I’m on my way home.” They looked me over. I was dressed in all red and I was a Little Person, but I was white, not black. They let me go.
I went into a Mexican restaurant. The helicopters were circling, and I’ll never forget the lady there at the register. She took one look at me and saw something was wrong. She was so kind. “You okay?” she spoke in broken English. I said, “Yeah, I just need to rest.” She pointed to the video game room, so I gave her five dollars, and she gave me a whole bunch of quarters. I hid in the back room of that restaurant, playing video games. Cops were running everywhere, looking for me. Finally, everything cooled down, and the cops left the area. I thanked the lady and left the restaurant. There was a bus coming, so I jumped on. I didn’t know where I was going but I knew I was in a shitload of trouble.
I rode the bus downtown, then transferred to another bus that took me to Dante’s house. I needed to think, to find out if anyone knew anything. I was too afraid to go back to Mama Myrt’s. I thought the cops might be looking for me there. Dante hadn’t made it home. Everyone got caught but me. Dante called from jail. His sister told him I was there, and he told her to put me on the phone. He said, “Shorty, you gotta do something. They’re talking about giving us the death chamber.” Apparently, three guys had been hit during our shootout, and one of them was the innocent bystander Dante had robbed. He was in the hospital, in critical condition, and the cops were saying all kinds of shit to scare the crap out of Dante. I got off the phone and Dante’s sick mom let me spend the night in his room. After I left the next day, she had a heart attack.
I called Mama Myrt and she told me to come home. She said, “We’ll take you up to Uncle D.’s house in Atascadero. You need to get outta town until we find out what’s happening.” I walked out of Dante’s house and got about a block from the school on the corner. The kids were on recess, spilling out onto the sidewalks, when all of a sudden, five or six cop cars came out of nowhere. Screeching wheels, sirens, guns drawn, screaming into a megaphone. Kids running. Cops everywhere. It was chaos. They treated me like I was the biggest, baddest motherfucker. Like I was six-foot-nine and carrying an arsenal of weapons. They slammed me into the ground. I yelled, “I’m not armed!” It didn’t help. Officer Martinez—I can still see his face—cuffed me and threw me in the back of his squad car. He smirked. “Enjoy your last breath of fresh air, you little piece of shit.”
They took me to the Southgate substation. When I walked in, all the cops were laughing at the guys who’d been part of the chase the night before. “You let this little fuck get away from you?” It embarrassed them so badly they got pissed off. One of the cops kicked me as hard as he could in retaliation. They put me in the holding tank. It was freezing in there, with no toilet. Finally, they pulled me out and said, “Tell us your story.”
I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The cop interrogating me said, “Your friends told us everything. You were with these guys all day yesterday.” Turns out Dante and Lewis had been robbing people for hours before they picked me up at Wells Fargo. Thank God, I had proof I’d been at work at the law firm until six o’clock. Swipe cards don’t lie. The cops didn’t believe me. They kept questioning me and threatening me with the death penalty. They’d recovered all the pistols: Lewis told them I’d thrown the guns from the back of the truck and he took them on a tour, showed them where they could find all the tossed evidence. The cops told me they had my fingerprints all over the weapons. I knew they were right. My fingerprints were all over those guns, but they hadn’t even fingerprinted me at the station yet, so I also knew they had no proof. They were lying. I told them, “I don’t have nothing else to say.” I didn’t ask for a lawyer. I didn’t know I could.
I asked to call my sister Janet. I told her, “I’m in jail.” She couldn’t believe it, and she started crying. Of course, I lied about everything. I didn’t wanna tell her the truth. I wanted to keep her out of it and I didn’t want her to tell my parents, but I knew, eventually, they would find out. Janet drove in from Palmdale to check on me. When they found out she was my sister, the cops started messing with her mind. They told her I was gonna get the death penalty and made her cry. One of the cops pulled her aside and acted concerned. “Take a good look at your brother. This is the last time you’ll see him alive.” They were upsetting her to try to get information out of me. It was a mind game, those four days at the substation. They were working on me and I just kept saying, “I don’t know nothing.”
Mama Myrt came down and tried to post bail, but they hadn’t set the bail yet, so they wouldn’t let me go. I was more worried about Coco than I was about myself. Mama Myrt promised me Coco would be taken care of. Little Al was watching him, but if things dragged on, they’d take Coco to Uncle D.’s house in Atascadero. They held me over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. The reality of my situation began to sink in. It’d been six months since I broke off my wedding to Liz. I wondered: If I had married her, would I have been arrested? There was no way to know.
I started having the same dream every night. In the dream, I’d wake up in my own bed, at Mama Myrt’s house, look around, and see everyone there. I’d have this happy feeling and be so relieved. Then I’d really wake up, and be in the prison cell. Son of a bitch! Oh, I was so mad to wake up like that. The dream continued every night for the entire time I was in holding. It was a miserable way to sleep.
On Tuesday morning, I went to Southgate Municipal Court for my preliminary hearing. It was a media circus. During that time in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the murder rates in Los Angeles and cities like Philadelphia and Chicago were sky-high. Crack cocaine was around on a massive scale, and guys who did that shit were nuts. South Central had the worst crack problem in the country, and that meant violence. Gangs were on a killing spree. There was so much senseless killing, so many drive-bys. It was on the news every night. There was a spotlight of national media attention on the entire South Central community. Police estimated that there were seventy thousand active gangbangers in Los Angeles alone. The city was the Gang Capital of the World.
At the same time, everybody and their brother wanted to be glorified as a gang member. Gangster rap was all over MTV, kids were getting gang tattoos when they weren’t even in gangs, the movie Colors came out, and even white kids in the suburbs were wearing baggy jeans around their knees, red bandanas on their heads, and gold grills across their teeth. It was like the more the media demonized South Central, the more everyone wanted to either pretend to be a part of it or join up. Gangs that had no juice suddenly had juice. New gangs formed.
There was a public outcry for the police and government to “do something,” so politicians were promising to “crack down on crack” and “clean up the streets,” or “gang up on gangs” or whatever stupid thing they could say about it. In Los Angeles, they were passing a Gang Act that essentially labeled anyone involved in a gang a “terrorist” against the city or the state, so they could enforce longer sentences and press for more serious charges in court.
That’s what we were walking into that Tuesday, at our arraignment. Since there were five defendants, and one of them happened to be a midget, the press had a field day. The L.A. Times, the L.A. Sentinel, and the Herald Examiner all covered the story. We were profiled on the evening news. My mug shot was in the papers. The headlines read: “Four Foot Gunman Leader of a Black Gang.” Leader of a gang? I was on the bottom of the totem pole and anyone who was in the Bloods knew that. But the press didn’t. They made up what they wanted me to
be. Or maybe some cop wanted his five minutes of fame and gave them his opinion of my position. Either way, it was all lies. Pure sensationalism that made for great copy. It got picked up by the newswires. My face was splashed all over the L.A. papers. It also ran in the Little People of America quarterly newsletter: “Shorty Rossi, the son of Sonny and Dixie Rossi, was arrested …” Blah, blah, blah. I could just imagine the horror on my dad’s face.
We stood accused of heinous crimes, and ’cause there was a robbery in progress during the shooting, we were considered the instigators of the fight. I was charged with everything: four counts of attempted murder, four counts of attempted robbery, four counts of conspiracy to commit murder, and a whole list of gun charges. The public defender turned to me that day and said, “Shorty, they’re trying to kill you.” She explained to me that the conspiracy charges were a way to prove intent, like we had planned to commit murder, like we had planned the robbery, like we had planned the shoot-out. I had nothing to do with the robbery. I got in that car to pick up girls. I defended myself when the Crips started shooting, but unbelievably, my shots were the only ones that actually hit anyone. Out of fifteen gangbangers shooting God knows how many shots out of God knows how many guns, only my bullets landed. I hit two of the gangbangers and had accidentally shot that poor innocent bystander that Dante was robbing. My attorney stood up in my defense. “Your Honor, this is the first time Mr. Rossi has ever been arrested.” The judge just looked at me and said, “No, this is just the first time he’s been caught.” It sunk in hard what was going on. I was totally fucked.
