Good Kids, Bad City

by Kyle Swenson

  Each week he still had to call Detective Terpay to check in, even though the officer had left the Cleveland police for a job at the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department. The check-ins always reactivated his fears. The detective reminded Ed he was still in danger and couldn’t talk about the case. Ed had to carry this silently. All alone.

  In his senior year he found a release—albeit a temporary one. Ed was sitting with some friends outside of the school, barely listening to the talk drifting around, his own mind kicking with the same thoughts as always—Rickey, Ronnie, and Wiley. Bottles of alcohol circulated. Wild Irish Rose. “Man,” Ed announced to the surprised group. “Let me get a drink of that.”

  It turned out, he wasn’t much of a drinker, it scrambled him up too much. But Ed’s baby steps into chemical escape carried him straight to marijuana. That became his thing—it was nothing for Ed to walk around with five dime bags on him. The weed put enough mental bubble wrap around the present moment to insulate him against what had happened before and what might happen next. In this way, Ed was able to shove aside his guilt and fear and settle into a blank space—at least, until the fog thinned.

  After getting his diploma in 1980, Ed had hoped to steer for college. But as he was working for tuition money, he got his girlfriend pregnant. There went college. He took an entrance exam for the U.S. Army, but decided against it. Job Corps shipped him off to Indiana, but he bailed on that, too. “What are you going to do?” his mother kept asking him. He had no answer.

  Sometime in 1980, he was getting high with one of his cousins when she asked for a couple extra dollars for her own stash. When she came back with some white powder she commenced to melt down into little chalky crumbs and smoke, Ed asked for a hit. “You ain’t getting this,” she snapped. “You got to buy your own.” Okay, he thought. That night, Ed swallowed his first blast of freebase cocaine—and waved goodbye to the world for the next two decades.

  * * *

  Crack cocaine socked American cities like a blizzard at the worst possible time, particularly Rust Belt areas feeling the hurt of the economic recessions running through the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The appearance of a cheap, smokable form of cocaine diluted with baking soda would disfigure American city life as radically as the Model T or the electrical grid.

  The curtain went up on the 1980s crack era in Cleveland at low volume. The drug leaked into the city early in the decade, but few in law enforcement or the city mainstream noticed. Then, in 1986, top NBA prospect Len Bias and the Cleveland Browns’ own Don Rogers both suffered cocaine-related deaths within eight days of each other. Tabloid anxiety spun into national hysteria. Whether this overnight shock was the engine behind it or not, suddenly crack cocaine became a conversation piece in the national discourse; Cleveland’s police began speaking publicly about a drug they had written off earlier as only a West Coast fad.

  Crack’s debut was fortuitously timed for the right end of the political spectrum. Ronald Reagan, like Richard Nixon, had absorbed the lesson Cleveland’s pols learned in the Stokes era: law-and-order rhetoric served as a secret language for talking about race, for revving up the fears of the white mainstream against black Americans. The well-grooved financial paths between the federal government and local law enforcement had already been established by Johnson and Nixon. In October 1982, Reagan declared his own “War on Drugs,” later dubbing America’s drug problem a “national security threat”; crack cocaine became the perfect enemy combatant for those saber-rattling ambitions. Between 1980 and 1984, the FBI’s annual antidrug budget exploded from nine million dollars to ninety-five million. In 1984 the administration pushed forward legislation that allowed departments to keep cash and assets confiscated in drug cases. Federal programs offered up military equipment to local agencies, further remaking law enforcement into a wartime enterprise. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court was loosening the protective grip the Fourth Amendment had on police interactions with suspects. Between 1982 and 1991, the court heard thirty cases involving narcotics and police search and seizure. The court sided with police in all but three, vastly widening police powers.

  In Cleveland, law enforcement officials speculated that a local marijuana drought, combined with the increased purity of the base cocaine arriving in the U.S. from the Miami–South America pipeline, may have propelled more local users to crack cocaine around 1986.2 Certainly it wasn’t hard to find—this was the era when you could stroll into any head shop and find a freebase kit on the shelf with the bongs and black light posters. Street econ also played into it. Detroit gangs who ran cocaine figured a crack rock selling in Dexter-Davison for five to ten dollars could go for twenty-five dollars on Cleveland’s Buckeye or Central. By mid-1986, one Cleveland hospital was reporting a 70 percent bounce in cocaine-related admissions.

  The city was woefully unprepared for the spike. Cleveland’s narcotics unit had just twenty officers, down from the all-time high of fifty-five; budget cuts had shorn the local public funding for drug treatment programs, going from $7 million in 1971 to $3.4 million in 1986.3 By the fall of that year, Cleveland law enforcement officials were on the ground in Washington, D.C., scrambling to land some of the federal money being dished out for President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs. “We have no money,” Cuyahoga County Sheriff Gerald McFaul told a Plain Dealer reporter on the Capitol Hill trip. “Just tell us where we can get some more money. I didn’t come to Washington to have lunch.”

  Throughout the middle of the decade, the local crack game was mostly a two-party system. Detroit gangs, particularly Young Boys Inc., cornered much of the Cleveland market, often shuttling teenage drug mules on Greyhounds or in taxis from Motor City to Northeast Ohio with kilos of cocaine. Once in Cleveland, Detroit outfits became infamous for setting up beachheads in public housing facilities—once the pride of the city’s liberal social justice spirit. Now, dealers were reportedly either paying single moms or elderly folks to convert their units into crack shops, or simply cocking a pistol to force their cooperation.4 By 1988, the housing authority reported that 75 percent of their evictions were related to drug issues, and the head of the Cleveland police’s drug unit told a reporter 85 percent of the crack traffic in the city was tied to Detroit operators. The Garden Valley low-rises off Kinsman, the King-Kennedy buildings in Central, Morris Black Place in Woodland—all were hot spots for Motor City drug dealers, some doing up to one hundred thousand dollars a week in sales.

  The other main players in the underground were also out-of-towners: Jamaican drug gangs, mainly the Shower Posse, a trigger-happy crew tied to the warring political factions back home. With their Miami-smuggled product, the Jamaicans were running “gatehouses” up and down West Twenty-fifth, on the western lip of downtown, cashing $150,000 per kilo. The Posse was also reportedly turning those profits over to an Arab Clevelander linked to the PLO in exchange for arms or donations to Jamaican political parties back home. Police linked the Posse to five murders and seventeen shootings in a twelve-month stretch. In 1987, the local FBI office was listed eighteenth nationally in terms of drug crime; a year later, the office jumped to third.

  But really the market demand was heavy enough for all comers; by the 1990s, Southern California gang members were getting in on Cleveland’s trade. One memorable hustler, “L.A. Jay,” was pulling $250,000 a week out of the King-Kennedy houses before his arrest in 1990; he then became a county jail legend while in lockup after paying ten thousand dollars to trade identities with a fellow prisoner about to be released. He strolled out of jail with his purchased identity. But Cleveland largely avoided the asphalt combat that bloodied so many American cities. Eventually the Jamaican gangs left the crack rock to Motor City suppliers, focusing their business on powder cocaine. At one point, Detroit and Jamaican dealers were actually selling drugs out of the same fleabag motel in suburban Euclid, their businesses cordially chugging along only one floor apart from one another.

  By far the most infamous name floating through the Cleveland drug wor
ld was “White Art.” A former building contractor, Art—born Arthur Feckner—bumped around the East Side in a flashy El Camino tricked out with a drop compartment for the thirteen-kilo shipments of cocaine he regularly drove up from Miami. When the white suburbanite ran afoul of his black competition in the city, Feckner was beaten and injected with a “hot shot” of cocaine and heroin meant to stop his heart. Left for dead outside his Woodland Avenue warehouse, he was found by Cleveland police.5

  Under pressure to make some dent in the growing local market, a group of major-crime detectives—they called themselves the A-Team—concocted a flashy plan to use Feckner to go after the Miami and Colombian suppliers selling him product. But Feckner couldn’t buy any new drugs, he told the police, until he paid off what he owed to the suppliers. Eyeing the big score—and working on a timetable: The Cleveland detectives were scheduled to attend a national DEA convention in a few months and they wanted to walk in with a major bust on their record—the A-Team greenlighted Feckner to sell off enough drugs to erase his debt so the sting could march on. Feckner and a partner pumped half a million dollars of crack into the East Side while the A-Team allegedly directed other Cleveland police away from their operators.

  The Cleveland cops got their bust, dramatically arresting fifteen dealers and confiscating fifty million dollars’ worth of cocaine in South Florida. But the celebration was short. Feckner revealed to the FBI and DEA that he was under the protection of local police. Five internal investigations looked at the operation, all clearing the cops of knowingly sanctioning Feckner’s drug operation. Yet Cuyahoga County Prosecutor John Corrigan secured indictments against five A-Team detectives on drug trafficking charges. In court, the detectives said they thought Feckner was only collecting debts from past sales. They made this claim despite hundreds of hours of police wiretap recordings catching Feckner plotting new business. The detectives simply claimed they never listened to the tapes. After the prosecution rested its case, Judge Michael J. Corrigan stunned the room—and the city—by averring that the state had failed to prove the charges; as Corrigan read the Ohio law, drug sales by law enforcement were legal if done for law enforcement purposes. The judge acquitted the five cops, and once again, Cleveland was smoking with anger from a confrontation between police and the black community.

  “No decision like this could’ve been made to have this type of operation on the West Side of Cleveland or anywhere that’s predominantly white,” Louis Stokes, former mayor Carl Stokes’s brother and then a U.S. congressman from the area, told the L.A. Times.

  “They didn’t do it on their own. Somebody gave approval. Somebody above those five officers made a conscious decision that this is a throwaway community.”

  * * *

  For the seventeen years Ed Vernon was on the receiving end of this crack distribution game, you could smell him before you saw him.

  Mostly he worked construction sites as a laborer for bricklayers. He’d be hauling stacks around the work area, mixing mortar, or high up on the scaffolding. All sweaty, hard effort. The other muscle on-site were union types, guys who rolled in each day in pressed, clean clothes. They would dog Ed about the stink coming off him before the shift even began. “You ain’t work yet today, so you couldn’t be that musty,” they’d chide. Ed laughed it off. What his coworkers didn’t know was that he’d often go a month without changing his clothes. He just didn’t care.

  Addiction stripped you bare, your normal wants, needs, and cares killed off until there was only one: getting high. Ed slid easily into the cycle. Clean clothes and hygiene weren’t a priority. Food—whatever. Sex didn’t enter his head; the other guys he used with assumed he was gay because Ed never leveraged his stash to coerce favors out of junk-sick women. He passed many a night stretched out in abandoned houses on the East Side. Later his sister Darlene allowed him to crash in a car that wouldn’t start anymore parked outside her house. Ed would pile into the backseat under old blankets and clothes. On nights when the temperature crawled below freezing, Darlene banged on the car window to see if Ed moved, if he was alive. Hard-core addiction also didn’t leave any free space for irony, either: the busted car Ed called home was beached on Arthur Avenue, the same street Ronnie, Wiley, and Rickey all lived on before the murder.

  To Ed, everyone else seemed to be chained up to the same carousel. Everybody was getting high, he thought. It spread into the very texture of the neighborhoods. Your grandmother might come to find her can opener missing, the next day her microwave gone; when she asked you about it, you’d play ignorant, even though you’d pawned it for drug money. Crack users got creative, too. Ed watched guys secretly taking out second mortgages on their mothers’ houses to feed the habit. Others inherited property from their families and quickly turned the houses into drug dens, boards slapped over once-polished windows, the lawns shaggy and brown. Worse, when dealers filling their pockets with money realized they couldn’t keep buying flashy cars and stay unnoticed, they bought property instead, leaving behind a trail of neglected houses and storefronts all down the way.

  Ed’s years puddled together in a mindless slush. Work, sleep, get high. Get high, sleep, work. But there was a hitch to his drug use. Crack might pick you clean of everything you care about, but the drug couldn’t shake Ed of what he wanted to lose the most—the guilt and fear and anxiety still knotted in his stomach. They stayed around when everything else was stripped away. Usually, the feelings ganged up on him at night. Ed liked to review his day as the sun went down, going over what he did right, what he did wrong. Inevitably, like a train screaming in on time, thoughts of the trial came at him. What he did. What he did to those three guys. Then it was time to reach for his stash again.

  By the mid-1990s, Ed was sunk so deep in his addiction, beyond care or concern, he was talked into a felony charge. A friend of Ed’s was a drug dealer; he’d been arrested, and the cops were pressing him to offer up his supplier. This friend, as Ed would later explain, was looking for a patsy: you play like a big-time dealer; you sell to an undercover cop; the law thinks they’ve snagged a big player while the real operation continues unabated. The friend told Ed that because he didn’t have a previous drug charge, he might not even go to jail. But Ed was barely listening. All he focused on was the money—half now, half after the arrest. He agreed, pocketed his share, and ran for the nearest dealer.

  But out on the street, Ed, crack-dizzy and careless, hadn’t considered two things. The first was the 1996 Federal Crime Bill, a provision that hammered into place tougher sentencing guidelines for drug felonies. The amount he was busted with was four times the felony max; he was looking at a thirty-year stretch. The Cuyahoga County judge, however, looked over his record and showed mercy. Ed received a four-year prison term. He was lucky. But looking at four years inside, Ed slammed against the second thought he’d failed to consider: I’m going to run into those boys and they are going to kill me.

  Ed Vernon arrived at Grafton Correctional Institute, whittled skinny like a dying tree, his head a box of terror. He didn’t know what Rickey, Ronnie, or Wiley looked like now. They could be anyone. As soon as possible, he shipped a kite, a prison note, to the warden, explaining his situation. The administration decided to put him in protective custody while they verified the three inmates’ whereabouts. Isolated for twenty-three of every twenty-four hours, without drugs to gag his guilt, Ed again was thinking about killing himself, be done with it. Why not? I can cut my wrists and call it a day, he thought as he searched his cell for a Bic to do the job. He called out to the guard, asking for a razor so he could shave. The prison staffer knew why Ed wanted the sharp blade.

  “Shave what?” the guard told the inmate, indicating his boyish cheeks. “You don’t have anything to shave.”

  * * *

  Ed served two years, mostly in isolation, on suicide watch. He was released in 1999. Got high the same day. Sleep, work, get high. All over again.

  In March 2000, Ed’s maternal grandmother passed away. He went to the fune
ral with the last traces of a crack hit still running around his system. A cousin, an ex-addict now clean and sober, came up to Ed after the burial. “Don’t let me be a pallbearer at your funeral,” he cautioned.

  The warning stuck in Ed’s thoughts, like a song refrain you can’t shake. The next time he got high, his heart started frantically rocking his chest so badly, he thought he was dying. Only a close call, but Ed was startled.

  Later in the day he was back out on the streets, no place to sleep, nowhere to get a meal. His sister wasn’t letting him back into her house. Ed was exhausted, his tank empty; still, he managed to walk fifty blocks or so west to the City Mission. Any self-respecting drug fiend knew which shelters were open when, where you could crib a free meal or a month’s stay in exchange for sitting through some sermons or self-help spiels. Ed queued up before the doors opened at 4:00 P.M. Shook his head when they asked if he was there for the rehab program—just looking for something to eat. That’s how he found himself sitting in an evening church service at the mission the next night.

  When the preacher asked if anyone was interested in rededicating their life to Christ, Ed thought on it. He’d left the church when he was twenty and hadn’t looked back. But he needed something now. He was exhausted with the whole deal. Get high, sleep, work. Sleep, work, get high. Maybe he needed God.

  Ed entered the City Mission’s rehabilitation program, a twelve-month boot camp of soul-searching and group therapy. The counselors introduced Ed to the basics of the addiction that had scrambled his last twenty years. He learned about triggers, the anxiety and pressures that sent him reaching for the chemical outs that booze, weed, and crack provided. Ed saw right away the twin jets of fear and guilt that had been snapping at his ankles since he was a boy. That, along with placing his faith in God again, allowed Ed to hoist himself up for the first time in decades.