I Can't Breathe

by Matt Taibbi

  Things like this are part of what drive the resentment toward police in nonwhite neighborhoods. For the most part, people living in low-income housing and in project towers don’t see the more egregious double standard in the justice system enjoyed by, say, Wall Street CEOs committing massive real estate scams that decimated neighborhoods.

  But you do notice that your landlord is getting away with decades of violations without consequence. In the case of Jewel’s place in Staten Island, the landlord, the aptly named Mad Realty Holdings LLC, had done nothing to fix most of her building’s many problems. A lone $280 fine for emergency repairs was the only government sanction in the public record.

  The only reason Jewel wasn’t in the house at the time of the fire was that she was out trying to deal with the vermin problem. “I had just left my home,” she says. “I found bedbugs in my carpet. So I threw everything in my living room out. I woke up at, like, eight thirty that morning, my living room was bare. Couches, pillows, curtains, I threw away everything.

  “So I went to Home Depot to get a steam cleaner. As soon as I signed my name on the [rental agreement], my son called me and said, ‘Mom, the house is on fire.’ I’m like, ‘Our house is on fire?’ He said, ‘Our house.’ I said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

  It turns out a tenant in the apartment below Jewel had left an electrical appliance on too long. It was the second time in a week this had happened. Nobody was hurt, but the fire completely destroyed Jewel’s apartment. The blaze was so big it made the local newspapers. One of the other tenants complained in print that even before the fire, her ceiling had caved in and the pipes didn’t work.

  “It’s typical low-income housing,” said the tenant, Susan Antonelli. “It happens.”

  The hits kept coming. In the first days after the fire, Eric and Jewel moved to a hotel. On August 22, they drove from there to Bay Street to do some laundry, a little shopping, and to wire his daughter Erica fifty dollars via a check-cashing shop there.

  After they were done, as they pulled out, a police car followed. Police ended up pulling them over outside the Western Beef supermarket on Forest Avenue.

  Jewel, who was driving, looked over at Eric.

  “Did I forget to signal?” she said. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing, babe,” Garner said. “Just pull over.”

  A police officer walked up to Jewel. “License and registration,” he said.

  Jewel was driving without a license. The officer sighed.

  “Step out of the vehicle,” he said.

  As Jewel tells it, the police tossed the car, throwing all of the clothes on the ground, as well as the shopping bags from a trip she and Eric had taken to one of those Family Dollar stores. Police ended up arresting them both, and Eric and Jewel spent the night in jail.

  The next day, Jewel went to court expecting to be charged with driving without a license. Instead, she found out the police were claiming she had a joint in the car, and she was being hit with a possession charge. “I had no idea,” she says. She insists there was no joint in the car. “I didn’t even know the charge until I was standing before the judge.”

  Garner was hit with possession charges, as well as charges for some cigarettes in the car. They released him on a thousand dollars bail, which was high in his experience. His business was getting more and more expensive.

  Garner thought he’d found a nice little legal loophole through which he could quietly make money without much interference. Instead, he was becoming regular sport for a group of Staten Island police who, he was starting to believe, probably didn’t have quite enough real work to do.

  According to friends and relatives both, after this arrest Eric Garner got fed up and actually called One Police Plaza in Manhattan. They say he spoke to the Internal Affairs Bureau and tried to file a complaint for harassment.

  This decision might seem strange on the surface, calling the police to complain about the seizure of money that Garner was, after all, making illegally. But it fit absolutely with Garner’s temperament. He was fixated on the idea that there had to be rules. And somewhat naïvely perhaps, he expected the police who chased after him to follow the rules. The rules were, if they caught him in the act of selling, so be it. Charge it to the game. But to stop his girlfriend for no reason and then bust her for driving without a license or drugs or whatever and use that as a pretext to take more of his money when all he was doing was sitting in the passenger seat? That was wrong.

  “His thing was, ‘If you catch me, you catch me, I’m not gonna argue,’ ” recalls Jewel. “ ‘But if you don’t catch me, don’t go making up a case.’ ”

  Rules were all he wanted. Everyone knew that the government didn’t care about the law; if it did, Jewel’s landlord wouldn’t be free to run his business in open violation of dozens of building codes. If the law mattered, cops wouldn’t be stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of people every year in violation of the law. Eric knew that the city didn’t run according to the law but according to the unwritten rules. But those rules needed to be followed or there was no way for a person to live. If the cops could stop him from doing his business—the only business left to him—whenever they wanted, on whatever pretext they could find, according to nothing more than their own whims, then there were no rules, just chaos. Friends and relatives say his complaint led to a visit and interview by Internal Affairs officers. To this day, many members of Garner’s family believe that this IAB episode led to trouble for officers of the 120th Precinct, which increased the level of hostility between Garner and the local cops.

  Garner’s stepfather, Ben Carr, a taciturn, serious man who after Eric’s death could be found most every day sweeping a sidewalk memorial at the site of Garner’s homicide, insists that the police had it in for Eric from the moment he called Internal Affairs.

  “They weren’t going to let that go,” he says.

  The NYPD has declined to comment on whether or not Eric Garner ever initiated an Internal Affairs investigation. Freedom of Information requests on the subject were rejected. But one thing is certain: by late 2013, the police had become a serious problem for Eric Garner.

  —

  Meanwhile, after the fire, Jewel was in a panic. The school year was about to start and she didn’t know where to keep her kids.

  Eric was not a solution. He couldn’t have his own place and had moved back in with his mother. New York is one of many states where a person with a drug conviction can’t get public housing. In fact, in many places in America, a convicted murderer can get public housing but not a former drug dealer.

  That left renting privately, and even though he could certainly have gotten together a first and last month’s rent, getting a lease with no credit, no on-the-books income, and a criminal record was a different story. It was a nonstarter, just like getting his name on a car loan or a mortgage or a credit card or anything else.

  Eric Garner’s name, like his wardrobe and his health, was shot. By that time in his life, he’d actually gone through two names. Eric Garner was the name on his birth certificate, Garner being the name of his father, Elliott Garner. But when he started hustling in his teens, he switched and began using his mother’s maiden name, Flagg. His first arrests were under the name Eric Flagg, and eventually, after he’d run up enough of a record on that name, he decided to switch back to Garner.

  But by 2013, the Garner name had its own problems. To find a place to sleep, drive, or do a hundred other things most people take for granted, he had to depend on a circle of friends and relatives, mostly women, whose names were still good. As someone who had defined himself even as a child as the man of the house, it was humiliating. And now he was about to endure one more humiliation.

  With four kids and nowhere to go, Jewel ended up in a temporary housing facility called Help 1, on Blake Avenue in Brooklyn. The setup wasn’t bad: two bedrooms, a kitchen area, and a bathroom. But the rules were strict. Even as a grown woman, Jewel couldn’t have company in the room at night.
There was a seven thirty curfew. And she definitely couldn’t have a man who was not her husband sharing her bed.

  Eric, who turned forty-three that September, was being kept from spending a night with his girlfriend. It was like having a slow dance refereed by a high school chaperone.

  Jewel and the kids, meanwhile, began a new, grueling routine, with the children still commuting to school in Staten Island every day.

  By November, Jewel had another thing to worry about. One night in the shelter, she sat in the bathroom, staring down at some surprising news. “I was in the bathroom, pregnancy test in one hand, cigarette in another,” she says. The test was positive. “I was like, ‘You can’t be serious.’ Like, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ ”

  She called Eric, still holding the test and the Newport. “We’re about to be parents,” she said.

  “Oh, my God,” he answered.

  Jewel wanted the baby. “I wasn’t trying to go to the chop shop,” she says. “That wasn’t going to work.”

  They talked and tried to make plans, but what Jewel didn’t know was that Eric had made plans of his own. Eric had decided to give Esaw another chance.

  On Bay Street, on the rare occasions when he brought it up, Garner told his friends that he was only moving back in with his wife because he had nowhere else to go. He talked a big game about being a ladies’ man and told his friends not to think anything of the fact that he was going back to his wife of so many years. He also said he couldn’t keep living with his mother, who wouldn’t abide him keeping illegal cigarettes in the home.

  But there was more to it than needing a stash spot. Some part of Garner still loved his wife, despite all the wicked episodes between them, and the profound personal problems they’d both had over the years. For a man who was open about so many things, this was one of his most closely held secrets.

  “Love is a powerful thing,” his daughter Erica remembers. “To be in love with someone who has [issues] and not give up, or degrade them…he was a strong man. He took a lot. And he loved her.”

  EIGHT ERIC

  By the spring of 2014, Eric Garner was back living with Esaw and still working his cigarette business. It had been a long, cold winter. He was having a harder and harder time on Bay Street. His margins were getting smaller.

  It wasn’t only a matter of not being caught in the act of selling untaxed cigarettes. It was also a question of not keeping all of his money and/or his smokes in one place, where they could all be confiscated.

  One way to diversify his risk was to disperse it to others. You give packs and cartons to other people on the street, and they do the selling and the holding. He had one man doing his early early morning business. Another, also named Eric, a younger Latino man who was the son of a navy cook, handled some of his inventory, particularly during the rush-hour traffic.

  Young Eric today says he got packs for eight dollars and would sell them for nine. He sold loosies for fifty cents apiece, which came out to ten dollars if you sold a whole pack that way. “So I made a dollar selling packs and two dollars selling loosies,” he says now. “But those packs went fast. Like in minutes usually, especially when it was busy in the mornings.”

  That was great for Eric’s workers, but every pack that someone else sold was money lost for Garner. He was going through an extraordinary amount of effort just to make a few dollars—arranging for the drives to Virginia, stashing the inventory, dealing out cartons to his crew, and, finally, handling the bulk of the street sales himself. The effort seemed magnified in the winters. He would stand on the corner, sniffling and wheezing, stomping his feet to keep the circulation going, eyes peeled all the time for someone with fifty cents to spare.

  Despite the fact that he went to great pains not to be caught with either a lot of money or cigarettes on his person, it didn’t always work out.

  On the afternoon of March 28, 2014, he was walking out of the check-cashing storefront on the corner of Bay and Victory when police stopped him. They asked him where he was going and asked for ID. Garner protested that he didn’t have any ID on him. They asked where his ID was.

  “It’s in my car,” he said.

  “Let’s go to your car,” they told him.

  He went with the police to his car, which was parked around the corner. While he looked for his wallet, police took the opportunity to search inside the car. They found a carton of untaxed cigarettes and arrested him on the spot.

  He was brought to jail and charged with selling untaxed cigarettes and slapped with a thousand dollars bail, again, an extremely high amount for such a small offense. He was already out on thousand-dollar bail as a result of charges from the previous August’s car stop. Even that bail had seemed high, but that at least had involved a drug charge.

  Now he was having to pay a thousand dollars over cigarette charges alone. When he went back out on the street, he couldn’t stop talking about it. Now even when he didn’t have cigarettes on him on the streets, he wasn’t safe.

  —

  The stakes kept getting higher and higher, the odds worse and worse.

  His wife, Esaw, says he had a large amount of cash vouchered after that March arrest and also had his cellphone taken. She claims that Garner was hoping to do a stint in jail in exchange for the return of his money.

  “His idea was, ‘Before I step in anybody’s cell, you put the money in my wife’s hand,’ ” she explains.

  His mother, Gwen Carr, remembers Eric talking about the same thing. She says that after one of his arrests that spring, he’d been told by a police officer that he had to do ten days in jail.

  “He said they told him, ‘You’re gonna do ten days,’ ” she says. “And he said, ‘I’ll do the ten days. Just give me my money. I’ll come in and I’ll do the ten days.’ ”

  —

  The police weren’t Garner’s only problem.

  Tompkinsville Park wasn’t the South Bronx or even Staten Island’s notorious Park Hill projects, also known as Killa Hill. But it wasn’t completely safe, either. Where you had drugs, you had danger. The police were always picking people up and springing them, and you never knew who was informing and who wasn’t.

  DiDi, from a park bench, would cast a hand across the daytime crowd. “These people are always getting locked up,” she says. “They get caught with some shit on them. Then the next thing you know, they’re getting their snitch checks. There are people who will deal with you and then go right around the corner and call the police.”

  For that reason, Diana didn’t deal with new people. “There’s a lot of informants running around. I don’t want you near me or in my building. I’m not doing anything illegal, but get away from me, you know what I’m saying?”

  At least twice Eric was attacked on the street by young kids trying to rob him. The first time, back in 2011 or so, he fought off three young men in the park. Years later, Doug Brinson and a local black Muslim named Frank, often seen on the block dressed in a suit and tie, recalled the spectacle of three not quite men bouncing off the massive Garner, who stayed on his feet and never once went down.

  “He whipped their asses,” Frank says, whistling.

  “That man didn’t play,” agrees Doug.

  In that incident, the kids eventually got tired and ran off with nothing.

  But in 2014, shortly after his March arrest, Garner was robbed again, and this time it hurt.

  A young man in his late twenties, someone Garner not only knew but knew was part of a Staten Island chapter of the Bloods, offered to buy a carton. He told Garner he didn’t want to buy it on the street and asked if they could do it inside.

  Garner shrugged and said that was fine.

  The two then ducked into the Boom-Boom Room.

  There were two other young men inside, and Garner quickly found himself surrounded. One of the men was armed. Garner didn’t resist and handed over his smokes and his money, north of eight hundred dollars.

  Later, when Garner told McCrae what had happened, McCrae stared
back at him, wondering if something was wrong with his friend. Was he slipping?

  “Man, how did you let that happen to you? You didn’t see that coming?”

  Garner just shrugged.

  —

  The two incidents—the arrest and bail and the street robbery—happening in such quick succession put Garner in a hole. He’d been beat for large sums of money twice within days, and he needed to keep his business going. To keep his head above water, he had to borrow money from a local storekeeper. He would have been fine soon enough had the police not stopped him again, just as he was getting back on his feet.

  —

  The next arrest was on May 7. This time, he wasn’t carrying very much on him, just about six packs or so, when he spotted police cars circling the park. He pointed them out to McCrae. “I’d better go,” he said, then slowly walked down Bay Street to a nearby bodega, where he hid in the bathroom.

  He waited for about twenty minutes, popped his head out, and saw the police were now parked outside. He went back into the bathroom and waited some more, hoping they’d leave.

  No luck. “He came out and they were still there,” McCrae remembers. Garner walked out of the store and tried to go down the block, but it was no use. Police rushed him, cuffed him, and brought him to the 120th.

  Even by Staten Island standards, the case stank. The police didn’t even try to charge him with selling cigarettes, just possession, which of course raised the question: If police didn’t see him selling anything, then why were they searching him and finding what was in his pockets in the first place?

  Even the judge in the case seemed skeptical. He released him without bail, which in the context of the borough’s ongoing squabble with Garner was a bit of a middle finger to the police and their dubious arrest. After all, Garner had been hit with thousand-dollar bail decisions in his previous two cases.

  But the judge didn’t go so far as to throw the case out, which is characteristic of how the system often operates. Even when the police get sloppy, the convictions conveyor belt still keeps moving forward. It may slow just a little, but everything keeps moving in the same direction.