Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  15

  Mauling Apollo

  All kinds tried to convince Ty Law to play out his college career at Michigan, stay for his senior year. His name was only then becoming widely known; yes, he was a newly minted all-American, but NFL “experts” projected him as nothing better than a fourth-to-seventh-round draft pick, and urged Law to resist the temptation. A Wolverines strength coach tried to convince him, too, saying, “What are you going to make? Two hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? And what’s that after taxes? And then you buy a house, car. . . .”

  But none of them knew. Law had been seeing all these strange bills when he’d go home to Aliquippa, and in his junior year he learned that Ray had filed for bankruptcy and lost the Wykes Street house after taking out a $5,000 loan. For him. To buy Ty that used Chrysler LeBaron for those journeys to and from Ann Arbor. The old man tried to assure him that things would be fine, but Ty was scared. Two to three hundred thousand? he thought. Sounds good to me! Besides, he’d seen the other, so-called top college defensive backs. He knew he was better.

  “I had to leave,” Law said. “I knew that if I worked out I would go higher than projected. I was, like, I’m just going to prove it to ’em in the league in due time, but I’m going to get my granddad’s house back and get my mom up off these drugs. That was my only concern.”

  On April 22, 1995, at 4:12 p.m., the New England Patriots chose Law in the draft’s first round, the twenty-third pick overall. With Sean Gilbert by his side, Law took in the news at Champs Sports Bar in Aliquippa. “I bet on myself—and I won,” he said. His mother was there that day, and a newspaper’s camera snapped and captured Ty as he closed his eyes and squeezed her tight. The experts were all wrong. The contract would be five years for $5.5 million—worlds more than he’d ever dreamed.

  But what Law remembers most is grabbing Ray, his granddad—his ally, a weary man who’d grown up in Brookville, Pennsylvania, the only black kid in a segregated world playing on teams full of whites, a man who’d endured too much early and late, the grandfather who’d raised him like a son and never let him down. The two hugged hard. The world quieted and Ty held on, and the moment felt like it lasted forever.

  That was a great story, for a day. But once the local writers filed their copy and the TV news aired the footage, reality settled back in. Ty Law? A once-in-a-generation talent hitting the lottery. The rest of Aliquippa? Minimally skilled, and realizing at last that the mill was never coming back. The slow exodus continued. Families tapped connections in Phoenix, the Bay Area, New Jersey, and soon their car was packed, their houses were empty, and they were gone.

  The Walkers almost left, too. Chedda had a sister in Atlanta who said there were jobs to be had, but that would mean moving into the projects down there, the twins and Diedre hitting adolescence in a new, cramped, seemingly more troublesome landscape. She went back and forth on it. Everyone kept saying: There was more upside down South, in Detroit, anywhere but Aliquippa; there just had to be. So many neighbors were leaving. Yet something about the devil you know . . .

  “I just made up my mind: We were going to raise our kids right here in Aliquippa, where we knew they would be safe,” Chedda said. “Which, back in the day, they were safe.”

  “I thought about it a thousand times, because of the money,” said Chuckie. “But we just couldn’t do it. We were born and raised here. We could walk anywhere and everybody knew you.”

  Familiarity was thin provision, admittedly, but better than nothing. Because either way—stay or go—the family had embarked on the now-common reverse odyssey, a step-by-step devolution in security and status of America’s Working-Class Man. Between 1945 and 1978, real earnings for manufacturing workers had risen by 95 percent; over the following three decades the number shrank by 2.3 percent. For the unskilled, especially, it was worse: jobs simply evaporated. By 2002, 72 percent of men over twenty-five with only a high school diploma were employed. Ten years later, the number would be down to 64 percent, and those jobs were increasingly unstable.

  The family got by for a time on Chuckie’s unemployment and Chedda’s job as a line cook at Perkins Cake & Steak; Chuckie would stay home and play Mr. Mom, combing out Diedre’s hair and getting dinner on the table. Four years after his departure from J&L, he began working the assembly line at Rockwell International in New Castle, rose to inspector. Then Rockwell closed up in ’91 and moved the plant to Mexico. After that came a string of odd jobs, an eighteen-month stint of long-haul trucking, time as a janitor at FedEx.

  In 1996, Chuckie found work again as an electrician, this time in the 14-inch beam mill that had opened on the riverfront site five years after the shutdown at LTV. The operation went by the name “J&L Structural,” but had nothing to do with the old place; it felt off, somehow, like launching a new blimp called “Hindenburg.” A scaled-down tin mill—owned by old adversary U.S. Steel—also operated in the now-desolate expanse. Together the two shops provided some 515 jobs in a place that once employed 14,000.

  Chuckie managed to get out a few months before J&L Structural filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 2000. Then he hooked on for a four-year stint at the new, $112 million U.S. Gypsum plant that opened up on the old J&L mill site, spawned two hundred jobs, and produced the lightweight Sheetrock and ceiling material that supplanted plaster and steel in the making of homes and offices. George W. Bush, then running for president, showed up one April day on a twenty-minute campaign drive-by and praised USG’s cleanup as a shining example of industrial reclamation. So went the cycle then: slight hope, then desolation. U.S. Steel shuttered the tin mill that October. Four hundred more jobs—and $70,000 in annual tax money for the town—vanished.

  Then Chuckie fixed streetlights for the state: part-time, no bene­fits. Now he was driving school buses for Aliquippa mayor Anthony Battalini, working building maintenance for a rehab center in Moon.

  He smiles when he speaks of his stops, saying more than once that “God blessed me.” But, in truth, all of it took a toll on body and pride. Chuckie’s blood pressure spiked during his years driving the truck, and if he kept his head high and determinedly set an example of the work ethic for his kids, the struggle that began when J&L closed never really ended. “I didn’t want my sons working there, but I enjoyed the work,” Chuckie said. “I loved the people I worked with. I really missed it. I really missed J&L.”

  For thirteen years, the son of a laborer from Oklahoma had achieved that most basic version of the American Dream: a foothold in the middle class. He wasn’t alone: In 1971, 61 percent of Americans fit into many economists’ definition—household income between two-thirds and twice the national median—of “middle class.” By 2011, the number would shrink to 51 percent—and Chuckie Walker wasn’t included.

  After the age of thirty-five, in fact, he never again came close. Even as the culture’s vague promise of progress, the echo of an earlier, optimistic age, kept insisting that a better life lay ahead, Chuckie found himself forever losing ground. His first job after J&L halved his hourly wage of $18.75—then it dropped again, falling to as low as $8.50 per. His three decades since have been one endless, demoralizing struggle to avoid poverty.

  “Where I’m at?” Chuckie said. “I started at twelve dollars—and I’m up to thirteen now. You get thirty-five, thirty-seven cents raise a year. That $18.75 is the most money I did make, in the mill—and I haven’t seen that since.”

  Despite the despair, all the disruption and loss caused by the crack trade, Aliquippa still clung to that old idea of itself—strong, proud, and tough, a place abiding by the idea, if not the strict reality, of family, respect for elders, right and wrong. Yes, more and more babies were being born out of wedlock, but still with a faint tinge of disgrace. You might not come out and say that it’d be better if the parents married, but the notion obtained. And there were deeds one didn’t think about, much less do.

  Then, just before 10 p.m. on the night of April 11
, 1996, William “Hacken­sack” Samuel, forty-nine, opened the front door of his Plan 11 home to two young men who said they were returning a Sega video game to his sixteen-year-old son, Brian. William let them in. After the door closed, one of them, Traz Durham, opened fire with a 12-gauge shotgun.

  The spray of bullets ripped into William’s stomach and the back of his forty-seven-year-old wife, Tresa. The other gunman, Pete Schoonover, finished her off by shooting a Tec-9 model 9mm semiautomatic pistol at the back of her head. William stumbled outside. Durham followed, shooting him again in the neck. William collapsed and died over the hitch of his boat trailer, entrails hanging, blood staining the street.

  The couple’s popularity only compounded the horror. Soft-spoken Tresa and the outgoing “Hackensack,” named after the New Jersey hometown he left to come work at J&L, had made plenty of friends at church and acquired plenty of customers for their home-improvement business. A neighbor needed a tow, a car dug out of the snow? Hack was there. The Samuels prized their sixteen-foot fishing boat and Winnebago camper, but liked to share. The previous December, in fact, when Ty Law made his rookie appearance at Three Rivers Stadium, Hack had eagerly rented out the camper, and he and Tresa shuttled nineteen boisterous Aliquippans, including Ray Law, into Pittsburgh for the game.

  It was a win-win: the Steelers crushed the Patriots, but Ty gave up only one completion and, after just a month as a starter, was conspicuously avoided by the Pittsburgh passing game. Best of all, after Hack got everyone home safely that night, they all gathered at the Quippian Club, where, later, Ty made a surprise appearance. Drinks flowed, men told stories: It was one of those warm interludes, a moment of pure victory.

  But now, Hack and Tresa were dead. Brian Samuel had been in the house at the time, and immediately fingered two acquaintances—one with a previous conviction for murder, the other Jeff Baldwin’s son, Jamie Brown. This made sense, at first, if only because of Brown’s rising reputation as a street thug. He was just 18, but his flight toward trouble seemed unstoppable.

  “Friends, everybody, tried their best to break me,” Brown said. “My mother would be on me, and I’d go to my grandma’s, my mom’s mother, my dad’s mother—ping-ponging around.” He’d deny to family that he was dealing, but never stopped. Fights and gunplay were a constant.

  “You had to get that respect, to not be prey,” Brown said. “That’s the only way you can survive: If you’re known, they know you’re not prey.”

  But the arrests didn’t hold: Brian Samuel’s behavior after the murders—a shopping spree, speeding around Plan 11 in his red Geo Tracker—got everyone’s back up on Hack’s street; soon police were fielding calls saying that they had gotten the wrong men. A high school kid told Sheriff George David that he’d overheard Brian and two others planning the murders, and police rounded up the new suspects at Aliquippa High. Peep Short had coached the eighteen-year-old Schoonover when he played for the Quips. Since he was not a minor, he could be interrogated alone—and Schoonover said enough to implicate himself and the others.

  “I think why he told me what he told me is because of that relationship,” Short said. “I don’t know if he fully understood that I was in my law enforcement hat.”

  As gruesome as the murder had been, the story behind it was, somehow, even more chilling. Brian Samuel, a slight child who been given every kind of bauble—a new dirt bike, a new computer—had begun in the months before to act out. He marked up a wall with graffiti, was caught carrying a .380-caliber handgun to school. He shed old friends, gambled and lost to new ones. Word spread that football players were shaking him down for money.

  Meanwhile, Hack was getting fed up. Two weeks before, the Times reported, he had punched Brian in the face, asked police to mediate an issue of stolen cash, and had the kid’s handgun destroyed. But his wife coddled Brian, and when the couple returned from a brief vacation they found that the boy’s grandfather had bought him that Geo Tracker. The night of the murders, Hack took the keys. He was sure: Aliquippa is not a place for showing weakness. The last thing you want to be there is prey.

  “The father was like, You can’t be one of them motherfuckers who every five minutes somebody say, ‘Go get me a hundred dollars’ and you give them a hundred dollars because you scared!” said Peep Short. “Hack was like, ‘Hell, no, you ain’t giving them any more money. Go get your ass whupped; I don’t care.’”

  Brian promised Durham and Schoonover $12,000 apiece to kill his father. Reports at the time had the boy standing passively by while the gunmen finished off his parents, but both Short and David state that Schoonover recalled Tresa saying, “We forgive you, Brian, don’t do this. We forgive you. . . .’ before Schoonover lowered the barrel of the Tec-9 to the back of her head and Brian told him, “She’s still alive. Shoot her. Shoot her!”

  After the arrests, as word of Brian’s cold calculation spread through town, dismay filled the air like bad weather. “We have been violated,” neighbor Stephane Griffin said then. “The community has been mentally raped.”

  “I’m sixty-four years old: I never heard of nobody killing their mommy and daddy” in Aliquippa, grocer Benjamin Lee said. “I don’t know if this town will ever get over it.”

  As palace coups go, you couldn’t have asked for one more cold or sudden or clean. One day Frank Marocco was the most important man in town, the new king of Aliquippa football, a winner beloved by his players. And the next? By the time he realized his head was on the block, it was rolling across the floor.

  At 7:51 p.m., on a stormy June night in 1997 that made the machinations at an Aliquippa School Board meeting seem even more portentous, Marocco found himself stripped of his head coaching position and replaced by Mike Zmijanac. This despite the fact that Marocco had just won his third WPIAL title in eight years, had no desire to leave his dream job, and was backed by a raucous crowd of players, coaches, parents, and friends. Once the vote to replace him—7-1—was tallied, the outraged gathering shouted the meeting to a close and kept going until the police arrived.

  “It was the most ugly thing in the world,” Marocco said. Nearly two decades later, he still hasn’t gotten a straight answer as to why he was sacked. Making matters worse was the fact that three of the board members voting against him—Art Piroli Sr., Dan Casoli, and Dan Santia—were relatives. “They just took it away, and slapped me in the face,” Marocco said. His older brother Dominic, who had stood up to their father and made it possible for young Frank to play for Aliquippa High, who had made Frank get back on the plane when he tried to drop out of N.C. State, was enraged. A week later, on June 27, he had a heart attack and died.

  “I hate a lot of people for that,” Marocco said. “It really hurt me. It hurt my family.”

  Led by president Dave Wytiaz—one of Zmijanac’s former ­players—the board had built a bureaucratic wall around Marocco that left no room to maneuver. Publicly, its reasons were budgetary and educational. To make the Aliquippa job more attractive in 1989, Marocco had also been given work as “Director of Secondary Services”—in essence, the principal’s assistant in charge of discipline—at Aliquippa Middle School. In May of 1997, after being told that his “Director” job was being eliminated—and that he’d lose benefits if he didn’t ­retire—Marocco accepted an early-retirement plan. He still, however, intended to coach.

  But the board’s position, suddenly, was that the coach needed to be a full-time presence in the high school. At the time, no Aliquippa team coach except Zmijanac, who’d been teaching English there for thirty-three years and who, in his first year as head coach, had just led the basketball team to the state title, worked full-time in the building. And later in his football career at Aliquippa, when Zmijanac himself had retired from teaching but still coached, the idea of a “retired” teacher continuing to coach was hardly an issue, with Wytiaz or anyone else. If the board had wanted to keep Marocco as head coach in 1997, they would have. Instead, his job was poste
d the minute his retirement from the “Director” job was official. Zmijanac applied and was instantly hired.

  “What’s getting misinterpreted is that we honestly had no problem with Frank’s performance,” Wytiaz said, officially, at the time.

  On one level, that was the only feasible thing to say. Marocco’s 73-25 record at Aliquippa, not to mention the fact that twelve of his fifteen seniors from 1996 had landed scholarships to play college ball, was unassailable by the core standards of high school football. No one wanted to state publicly that Marocco had alienated many of the program’s boosters, or that he had less than thirty players on his roster, with only a dozen underclassmen expected to return. No one wanted to state the true reason for forcing him out, if only because that would be an admission that what outsiders had been saying for years about Aliquippa and its players was all true.

  “We had a lot of gang activity starting on the team,” Wytiaz admitted years later. “You see how the team dresses now? Everything’s set. That had all gone by the wayside—there were bandannas. There was no discipline. You always heard how tough of a guy Frank Marocco was: great football player. But he had no discipline.”

  In one sense, the sixty-one-year-old Marocco knew no better. He was like everyone else his age—and plenty younger—in Aliquippa then: mystified by the influx of crack cocaine in the ’80s. By the early ’90s, the closing of mental institutions and group homes—and the relaxation of age restrictions in residential buildings once reserved for the elderly—had turned once-low-rent havens into crime magnets. The projects at Valley Terrace, Griffith Heights, and Linmar, the narrow streets on The Hill and Plan 11 extension, were subject to prostitution and every kind of violence. Turf was carved up and contested by Crips and Bloods, and ancillaries like the Black Rags at Valley Terrace and the G-Pound Crew, or Green Rags, in Griffith Heights.