by S. L. Price
“Another time, my brother was the quarterback, it was my sophomore year, Short had maybe five or six sophomores starting at the time—me, Josh Lay, Monroe Weekley, couple other guys—and we were in a huddle at practice and messed something up,” Jon said. “Short started beating the hell out of all of us, punching us in the helmets with a forearm—and he got to Brandon . . . and just looked at him. He wouldn’t hit him because he was the quarterback.” Younger brother was not pleased.
“Hit his ass!” Jon yelled. “Hit his ass!”
It’s not that he wasn’t loyal. This was football, and when it comes to football in Aliquippa nobody—not family, not friend—gets off easy. Jon and Justin have always been close. The twins played together all their lives, up through their senior year—Jon a tight end and linebacker, Justin a center and defensive end. But when it came time to run the classic Oklahoma drill—one-on-one, two players colliding until one is driven to ground or out of bounds—everyone else was just a warm-up act. Siccing the LeDonne twins on each other was the show of the year.
“Like watching two pit bulls go at it,” Patrick said. “I’d say, ‘LeDonne on the right and LeDonne on the left!’ And they lined up and couldn’t wait to hit each other. It didn’t stop after the whistle, either: they literally were beating the crap out of each other. You had to pull them off each other.”
The first time Jeff Baldwin got shot, he was alone. The second time, his first son was beside him. It was June 27, 1999, a hot, rainy Sunday. The two men—Jamie Brown had just turned twenty-two—were idling around Brown’s green Jeep Cherokee on Third Avenue in Plan 11. Jeff was in the driver’s seat; Jamie stood outside the passenger door. A blue Mazda pulled up; thirty-year-old Steve Henry stepped out. Within seconds a spray of gunshots—at least nineteen, according to police—filled the air between.
“Words were exchanged,” Brown said. “I got behind the car and got my gun out. He probably fired six. I shot probably nineteen. Two guys, shooting recklessly.”
Some bullets ended in nearby cars, some in houses. One rattled through the cab of Jamie Brown’s Jeep, like a hot popcorn kernel looking to settle. When Jamie jumped into the passenger seat, Jeff told him he’d been hit. “Oh, yeah!” Jeff said, when reminded of it thirteen years later. “I forgot all about that one. I got shot in the head: the bullet hit me on the side and fell out. It went through the windowsill, the dashboard, and that probably stopped the momentum. But I got, like, three stitches in the side of my head.”
Both vehicles fled: Jeff, thirty-six, was the driver of his son’s getaway car. Father and son had been reversing roles for a while then, a result of Jeff’s growing weakness and Jamie’s growing strength. If he doesn’t admit to directly providing his father with drugs, Jamie knows that in a larger sense he was. “He was doing what I was selling,” Jamie said of Jeff. “He had a lot of stuff going on, because of his addictions.”
Father and son were picked up within days; the district attorney decided not to prosecute. But even after Henry was arrested two months later—then convicted and jailed—for trying again to shoot Jeff Baldwin, no one in law enforcement considered the latter exactly innocent. Later that fall, Jeff was arrested and faced charges ranging from conspiring to steal a truck to possession of drug paraphernalia; he pleaded no contest to unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and was sentenced to 18 months probation. Jamie Brown, meanwhile, was seen by area police as a particularly shrewd drug dealer, his ruthlessness reinforced, violently, by partner Anthony Tusweet Smith. And he was already being chauffeured about Aliquippa like a kingpin.
As for those who crossed him? Within fourteen months, Steve Henry would be dead, gunned down through his back door in Moon by an unknown assailant while microwaving a 4 a.m. snack. “Yeah, they got the guy,” Jeff Baldwin said of Henry, though it’s not clear if he’s speaking of the police or someone else. “He’s not living today. Somebody killed him.”
The only thing certain is that Jamie Brown didn’t pull the trigger. By then a far more innocent man was dead and Brown was charged with the murder and the prosecution was seeking the death penalty. It seemed to be, by every measure, an open-and-shut case.
The first time he wept, it caught Jon LeDonne like an ambush. There he was, a senior, all-WPIAL, 6-foot-1 and 190 sinewy pounds, 4.0 GPA, master of near every situation. But something about that dunt-dunt-dunt: just waiting for the three drumbeats, much less the actual sound, at Aschman Stadium early in the fall of 2000 left him rattled. He felt himself cracking during his last moments in the field house, clustered at the door with teammates before his name got called and the cheerleader took his arm. Because it was slipping away. Week by week, day by day, his time playing Aliquippa football was almost done.
“It was so emotional,” LeDonne said. “A lot of players run out with the helmet in their arms, but there were times I would leave my helmet on because I thought I’d be scaring the cheerleader running out with me. Like, This asshole’s crying? What’s he crying about?”
It wasn’t like he had nothing to look forward to. LeDonne would play four more years on a full-ride academic scholarship at Robert Morris University, earn a 4.0 in engineering, then grind out a master’s degree and PhD in material science at Carnegie Mellon. But there’s nothing like playing and winning for your hometown, alongside kids you grew up with forever. There’s nothing like a racially mixed team—a dozen whites still on Aliquippa’s thirty-man roster then, sons of the street and sons of the book lined up side by side, just as it had always been—sweating and weeping and winning together.
More than a decade later, LeDonne would complete his doctoral thesis while working for Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh, fine-tuning the wiry innards of nuclear propulsion systems for the U.S. Navy. His dissertation—“The Investigation of Length-Scale Effects of Layered Thickness on the Heterophase Interface Character Distribution of Copper-Niobium Robotic Composites”—is comprehensible to only a few. But in essence, it’s about marrying two metals—the penny-dark copper and off-white niobium—into a blend capable of conducting tremendous power.
“We just take two pieces, put them together, and put a force on them large enough to make the metals bond together—and then two pieces become one,” LeDonne said. “It’s an alloy, but it’s not intermixed. It’s still copper and niobium, in layers. And the interface of the bonding material is where the material gets its strength.”
LeDonne calls this “a simple idea,” but a human metaphor might help. Think of the two metals as a town’s two dominant racial elements, each with its own fierce identity and strengths. Layer the two together on a football team, knowing that they won’t ever fully fuse, and bond them with the force of tradition and family expectation and, yes, love. . . .
In 2000, Zmijanac’s Quips rose up to take hold of the WPIAL season. As one of the last great Aliquippa teams with a strong cadre of whites, it was in a sense Hollywood Don’s last gasp, the final example of what the town’s two dominant cultures—its past and future—could accomplish when interfacing under pressure. Led by perhaps the most talented quarterback in Aliquippa history, Josh Lay, and LeDonne, whom the blacks gave the ultimate honorific—“White Chocolate” (and then proceeded to baffle the uninitiated by shortening it to “Chocolate”)—the Quips steamrolled the competition, won the league title, and took a 14-0 record into the state championship game.
But what made Aliquippa truly scary that fall was the rampaging figure of Monroe Weekley, one of those once-in-a-decade talents so clearly better than everyone around him, so seemingly born to play pro ball, that it seems almost unfair to the rest. As a senior Weekley was listed at 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, freakish dimensions for someone so fast and quick. In terms of pure athleticism, Weekley was in that subset of Aliquippa oh-my-Gods with Ernie Pitts, Tony Dorsett, and Sean Gilbert. “A number one draft pick, for sure,” LeDonne said, “if he had just kept his head straight.”
“Mo-Mo was unbelievable
,” said Anthony Peluso, Weekley’s teammate in 1998–99. “He was so good, and I don’t want to say this like it’s bad, but he was, like . . . crazy. He had no regard for his body whatsoever. He’d just go in there like a crash-test dummy and throw his body on the line, didn’t care. If you told him to go run as fast as you can and head-butt that wall without a helmet—and that would win us the game? He would do it. Fearless and athletic: that made him deadly on the football field.”
And by deploying him at offensive guard and inside linebacker, Zmijanac took full advantage of Mo-Mo’s taste for violence. “I love hitting people,” Weekley said after he devastated Center in 2000 with thirteen tackles, a forced fumble, and another fumble recovery. “I can’t be on the field without hitting people.”
Big-time colleges slavered at the thought. Pitt, Notre Dame, Miami, Arizona State, Michigan, and Wisconsin offered him full scholarships. Of course, none of his prospective coaches knew that Weekley lacked the ballast to succeed in life, much less high-level sports. But once it fell apart for him a few years later—after Pitt flushed him in ’01 for stealing from his roommate and after the University of Kansas flushed him in ’03; after he hit the streets and killed a twenty-four-year-old over a $600 debt in 2010 by firing a bullet into his skull and was sentenced to decades in prison—no one who knew Monroe Weekley could say they were all that surprised.
But that senior season, LeDonne and the rest kept Mo-Mo’s lunacy in check, hanging out daily with Weekley and Josh Lay, who never panned out either and later fell into drug trouble. LeDonne kept his hand on the books but reveled in the grit, and the Quips crushed near everyone in sight that fall, avenged themselves on Washington after two straight losses, held off Waynesburg even after Lay broke his hand to win the WPIAL title at Heinz Field.
Zmijanac likes to point out that he’s the only coach to win a Pennsylvania state title game in football and basketball, and the only one to lose both, too. But players have it worse; too soon, for them, there’s no more “next year” to seek redemption. As senior captain on the 2000 Aliquippa football and 2000–01 basketball teams, LeDonne twice played for state titles—and lost both, just three months apart.
His reaction is telling. The Quips’ history of basketball success nearly equals its record in football, but to fans, most families, the local media, the fate of the basketball team is important, but hardly life-and-death. When LeDonne’s basketball Quips lost the state championship to Camp Hill’s Trinity in March 2001, Weekley punted the ball into the stands, and the team sat on the hardwood during the awards ceremony, exhausted and empty. It hurt, but LeDonne’s eyes were dry.
But when, three months earlier, the Quips lost the state football championship, undone by Lay’s broken hand and blown out 26-6 by Mt. Carmel? LeDonne couldn’t stop crying as he walked across the field. A photo of him, with Zmijanac muttering comfort into his ear, was splayed across the front page of the Beaver County Times. “Tears were coming down,” LeDonne said. “Because it’s the end to your high school career. You’re never going to don that Aliquippa jersey again.”
16
Shiny Things
When, exactly, does a town pass its point of no return? For every Watts or Scottsboro, with their crystallizing moment of ugly truth, thousands experience only a slow fade of grace, along with a concurrent dawning upon the outside world that things aren’t right there anymore. Aliquippa’s reputation had been on such a wane for thirty years. Then, just after 8:14 p.m. on March 15, 2001, Aliquippa police officer James Naim, on foot patrol near a playground and community center at Linmar Terrace, was killed when a 9-millimeter bullet entered his skull behind the left ear.
Some saw it coming. For the previous seventeen months, the drug trade in Aliquippa had experienced a spike in murders: Four young men had turned up dead, three others had come close, and earlier that afternoon Pennsylvania State Police lieutenant Paul Radatovich and trooper Don Neill met with a drug addict and thief named Rayetta Jo Lee at a rehab facility in Center. Lee, aside from telling them that Jamie Brown, with whom she had been sleeping, had directed two of those killings—of Eddie Humphries and Marvin Steals—also stated that Jeff Baldwin’s son had told her “repeatedly” that he was going to kill an area police officer because the cops were shaking down his dealers.
That struck an old nerve; suspicion of the Aliquippa PD had been part of the town’s DNA since Harry Mauk deployed it as a tool of J&L tyranny. But the infestation of crack—and the new flow of dirty money—turned mistrust into open antagonism, a disrespect edging right up to the door of police headquarters. Early on, that just meant addicts creeping into the Franklin Avenue parking lot to snap off the cops’ radio antennas for use as crack pipes. But six weeks before Naim’s death, Aliquippa officer Sonya Carter relayed to colleagues the same rumor about Jamie Brown’s “hit list” of police officers. In the days after, “they told us to be extra careful when you go out to your car,” Carter said. “Because somebody in Valley Terrace could shoot down and have a direct target.”
But the new police chief, Ralph Pallante, and his assistant, Andre Davis, dismissed her tip as idle threat. Day by day, cop by cop, the department dropped its guard; only James Naim, thirty-two years old and just fourteen months on the job, seemed unnerved. And he wasn’t just worried about Jamie Brown.
On February 16, Naim met with a Beaver County Times reporter and told him about the hit list, plus rumors of an ongoing investigation of department corruption. The FBI, it later turned out, had been investigating Beaver County law enforcement for months, looking into a pattern of cash evidence discrepancies: criminal sources reported that, after some arrests, money seized from dealers by Aliquippa cops would shrink when filed as evidence—or maybe none of it would be entered at all.
Naim also told his mother and brother, Paul, that he believed that he was going to be “ambushed”—and that if, indeed, any harm came to him the Aliquippa Police Department should be investigated. “He said, ‘When I get ambushed,’” Paul stressed to Radatovich. “Not ‘if.’”
William Alston, Aliquippa police chief for thirteen years before retiring in 2001, testified that he never heard a word about corruption in his department—from Naim or anyone else. Anthony Battalini, then an Aliquippa city councilman, says he never believed that Naim’s fear of his fellow officers was legitimate. But after he became mayor in May 2003, he tried to clean house. “I got rid of six policemen because I knew they were bad cops; I knew they were with the drug dealers,” Battalini said. “There was no discipline in the police department. It was, like, haywire; guys did what they wanted to do. When I got to be mayor, I had several meetings with them, tried to win the confidence with the guys, try to do them right. But it was just a bad situation in Aliquippa. They were just, like, renegades. They did what they wanted to do.”
Still, Naim’s suspicions were just hearsay—and no evidence of what he alleged was ever unearthed. The only thing certain to those who loved him is that Naim, just two months from finishing his bachelor’s degree at Geneva College, believed that he was in danger and believed that area cops—some from the Aliquippa Police Department some from the county at large—were the men he had to fear most.
“This is one day before he got killed,” George David said, sitting behind his desk in the offices of the sheriff of Beaver County, the post he was appointed to for two years in 1996, and elected to in 2007. Naim had called him, and “he told me, ‘If something happens to me, these are the guys that you look at,’” Sheriff David said. “He gave me the names and everything. He said, ‘I feel this way because I witnessed things and they know I witnessed it—so if something happens to me these are the guys that did it to me.’”
David doesn’t think that any law enforcement officer—none of the three men whose names Naim gave him, men he knows well—pulled the trigger on his cousin. But he finds it hard to believe that the events of the following day began and ended with Jamie Brown’s “hit list.” Even a d
ecade later, the county’s top law enforcement official couldn’t help but wonder about its most infamous crime.
“There was more he wanted to tell me, but he didn’t want to talk over the phone,” David said. “Maybe he was on the car radio, somebody could’ve heard it. I don’t know. Why would he have got killed the day after he told me?
“There could’ve been somebody with him. I’m thinking who was with him told Jamie Brown or Tusweet, ‘This guy’s going to talk.’ You know what I mean? In my mind, there’s a question. Because you tell me one day, and you’re dead the next day? How else? What did he witness?”
Even amid Aliquippa’s crime spree in early 2001, there was hope that Linmar Terrace, just an 80-yard Hail Mary from where Mike Ditka grew up, had reached a moment of calm. The ninety-four-unit, fifty-eight-year-old complex of brick buildings—with an average monthly rent of $181, and the vast majority of its mostly black families headed by single mothers—had been plagued by all manner of assault and theft the year before. But the infusion of a full-time, federally funded police substation in the complex had seemingly taken hold in the second half of 2000, resulting in a dramatic 66 percent drop in police-related incidents.
A half hour after Rayetta Lee told police about Jamie Brown’s intent to kill a cop, Naim began his shift at the Linmar Substation. It was 3 p.m. The job entailed making a circuit around the apartment buildings; investigators believe the men who ambushed Naim waited near the northwest corner of the Linmar housing units. After the first bullet struck, Naim dropped into the wet grass. “My theory: Jamie Brown did do the shooting,” said Sheriff David. “When you get shot in the head, you bounce and everything. The kid that was with him, Acey Taylor, said, ‘Shoot that motherfucker again! He’s still living.’”
