On the same day the body of Philip Betts was found, by police, in his Afton home after neighbors reported a suspicious smell. Foul play was ruled out though cause of death was not determined. Betts, forty-one, lived alone and was unemployed.
A St. Louis Christmas
by Umar Lee
North County
I
December 2013
Bubba Gates thought of it as an out-of-town Christmas, like those an out-of-town businessman might have to celebrate on the road. Or what football and basketball players would do if they had games on Christmas. As Bubba drove the streets of St. Louis he thought about those Christmases as a kid in the Bootheel of Missouri. The Bootheel, Southern with only a slight trace of Midwesterness. Where young boys learn their work ethic in the fields chopping cotton and look forward to yearly trips to St. Louis to see the Cardinals play.
Christmas had always been Bubba’s favorite holiday. On Christmas Eve his family would go to both sets of grandparents’ homes and eat cookies, open presents, and stuff themselves on good Southern cooking. On Christmas morning the family would wake and open the presents under the tree after the reading of Luke, chapter 2, from the Holy Bible. Never all that much under the tree. Family farmers in the Bootheel never had all that much extra money for things such as gifts. Didn’t matter to Bubba. To him it was about family and about love.
Driving the gray GMC conversion van, flipping through the radio channels during a KSHE 95 commercial break, heading along West Florissant past Bellefontaine Cemetery, Bubba couldn’t find anything he liked. Black stations, pop stations, and sports talk radio was all he found. He didn’t care for any of those. One religious channel was running a commercial, “Remember, He is the reason for the season. Keep Christ in Christmas.”
“Amen, brother. Amen, brother,” Bubba said aloud to himself. A car pulled beside him at the intersection of Goodfellow with a pretty young girl in it. At forty, bald, overweight, and married with three kids, Bubba didn’t even pay much attention to pretty young things like that anymore.
West Florissant started in the slums. Isolated black ghettos full of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, dope sellers and dealers roaming the streets, historic homes in a state of decay, Chinese carryouts, Arab corner stores, and American muscle cars with temporary tags racing up and down the street. It then turned into a mixture of ghetto and the black middle class in the North St. Louis County suburbs of Jennings and Ferguson. Ghetto had the middle class on the ropes like George Foreman had Muhammad Ali on the ropes in Africa. This time there didn’t appear to be a rope-a-dope strategy, as strip malls were half-empty and boarded-up suburban homes dotted the landscape. Bubba liked what he saw.
It was past Ferguson in the city of Florissant where Bubba had set up shop. It had the right racial mix for one. There were enough whites so a group of country white boys didn’t stick out. There were enough blacks so black guys coming to meet them also didn’t stick out. Florissant was a northern St. Louis suburb in transition. Where older white people sat around and talked about the good old days. The days when the Catholic parish schools and sports teams were full. When the local North County high schools were bursting at the seams with white students. The winters when as soon as it snowed kids flocked to the Florissant Civic Center to ice skate and Killer Hill across the street to go sledding. When Mayor James Eagan ran the city with an iron fist and his pit-bull chief of police enforced his edicts. Those days were long gone in Florissant. Outside of the historic Old Town district the city now mostly consisted of five categories: old white people who wanted out but couldn’t get anything for their homes, new middle-class black families seeing promise in suburbia, Section 8 housing and apartments, those homes now being rented out after subprime mortgage defaults, and lastly, those who were too tied to Florissant to leave. Either those who were tied to the city in a political or business sense and needed it to make money or maintain stature, or those in a life of crime who needed to stay because this was their hood and the local bars were their lairs. Again, just as Bubba saw Florissant to have ideal racial demographics for his purposes, it also had ideal economic conditions as a growth market for his product, meth.
After making a left on Dunn Road and a right on Waterford and a left on St. Anthony, Bubba was at his place. He saw the curtains drawn closed. The guys were waiting on him. They had probably cooked something special for Christmas. God love ’em. Before stepping out of the car Bubba heard a commercial that made him pause and think. It was for a local children’s hospital and it gave him an idea.
II
Back in the city, Faheem and Danny stepped out of the Chase Park Plaza Cinemas. Neither Faheem, an African American Muslim, nor Danny, an Orthodox Jew, were celebrating Christmas, and both were generally bored on the holiday. The two couldn’t look more different. Faheem was a tall and muscular, dark-skinned black man with a long well-trimmed sunna-style beard. He wore a black knit kufi cap, a black hoodie, and jeans that cut off above his ankle on top of his Tims. Danny was a short and pale white guy with a close-cropped reddish beard. Under his red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap was a small black yarmulke. Although he was physically fit, Danny didn’t possess any type of a menacing presence and looked like your run-of-the-mill white guy.
“That was a pretty good movie, I have to agree. Didn’t think I would like it,” Danny said, walking down the steps of the theater toward Lindell where their car was parked.
“Why not?” Faheem asked.
“Black people going on and on about all that slavery stuff. It was bad. Time to get over it though,” Danny replied.
“Man, are you serious? Jews won’t shut up about the Holocaust. Every year there are new movies and documentaries coming out about it. I could say the same thing. Yeah, it was bad, now it’s time to get over it,” Faheem said, laughing.
“That’s different,” a now irritated Danny shot back.
“How is it different?” Faheem asked as they got into their all-black tinted 2008 Ford Crown Victoria police interceptor model.
“The Holocaust wasn’t that long ago. There are survivors still alive. The memory is fresh. And let’s be honest, it was one of the greatest tragedies in the history of humanity. Slavery ended like a hundred and fifty years ago. Nobody’s alive from that time. Also, always evoking its memory is tied to the grievance industry and a political agenda,” Danny said from the passenger seat as he slipped on his shades.
“You gotta be kiddin’ me. You’re not serious, right? Like the Holocaust movies and remembrances aren’t tied to a political agenda of supporting Israel. Like the two aren’t even connected. If white people feel so bad about the Holocaust they should have given the Jews Germany or Austria. Palestinians didn’t have anything to do with the Holocaust,” Faheem said as he drove toward Vandeventer and made a left heading toward the Northside.
“Historic homeland. We were there first. That’s what Muslims don’t understand. You’re always talking about—”
And just like that Danny was cut off. “Call from the Big Man, be quiet,” Faheem announced. He answered the phone, said hello, gave a few yes sirs, and then hung up.
“What did he want?” Danny asked.
“Said he wants to see us. Said it’s urgent. Wants to meet us in the Jamestown Mall parking lot by the movie theater,” Faheem answered.
They argued a lot about religion and politics though they were good friends. Danny had attended Muslim Eid holiday celebrations, and Faheem had been to Yom Kippur and Passover meals. When they argued it was more about trying to figure out where the other was coming from than winning. Between two aggressive alpha males, discussions can take on an aggressive tone.
Faheem was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a large family. Both of his parents had converted to Islam in the early 1970s and were members of the black Sunni Muslim organization Dar al Islam, based at Masjid Yaseen in East New York. After the movement split in 1980, with some following the Pakistani Sufi cleric Syed Mubarik Shah El-Gillani, who sent his foll
owers to establish rural “Muslim villages,” and others following Imam Jamil al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown), who was based in the West End of Atlanta, Faheem’s family went their own way.
As a boy Faheem moved with his father, his stepmom, and all the other kids across America. Cleveland, Chicago, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Los Angeles, and places Faheem had forgotten, only to be reminded of later. Now his parents were old and settled down in Atlanta, the Black Mecca, along with thousands of other black Muslims from the East Coast who moved south to grow old and die. Faheem ended up in St. Louis after marrying a Muslim sister he had met while living in Northern Virginia, who wanted to come back to “da Lou” to be near her family. Without any real hometown, Faheem didn’t object even if he found St. Louis slow, Southern, and country, and the Muslim community lackluster at best.
The River City Robinhoodz had recruited Faheem because they suspected he had experience in vigilantism. East Coast black Muslims, especially those out of Brooklyn, Newark, and Philly, had a reputation for robbing drug dealers, and for the security teams at mosques performing neighborhood street patrols. One day while he was setting up shop as a street vendor across from the veterans hospital on Grand and Enright, a representative of the RCR approached him. What they didn’t know was that Faheem had never participated in such vigilante actions before. He had been just a teenager when the security team of Masjid at-Taqwa in Brooklyn did its thing. However, two of Faheem’s sisters, who had been raised strictly on the deen, had become addicted to drugs and were out in the streets, making his hatred of drug dealers personal, and he jumped at the opportunity.
Danny had been recruited strictly for his military expertise. A St. Louis native, Danny had not been raised in a religious home. His parents were “high-holiday Jews” who only went to the synagogue twice a year. They weren’t even really political Jews; they donated to a few pro-Israel groups and the Anti-Defamation League and had a few Chaim Potok books on their shelves, and that was about it. Growing up in the wealthy western suburb of Ladue, with its heavy Jewish population, Danny knew some serious Jews. He just didn’t happen to be one of them.
Senior year at Ladue Horton Watkins High School changed all of that. Danny began dating a girl named Sarah, a Jewish girl who’d grown up in a home like his. The only difference was that Sarah had become fascinated with Jewish history and culture and began reading about the topics nonstop. In an effort to win her over and to get laid, Danny began reading the same books she was reading. Eventually that led the two of them to begin taking classes with Chabad, a Jewish outreach organization, and after high school they said to hell with college and moved to Israel. The two became observant Jews, Danny joined the Israeli Defense Forces, and Sarah stayed behind in an apartment in the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem. Arriving to Israel in 1999, Danny completed his Hebrew-language courses and entered the IDF just in time for the Second Intifada. He saw plenty of action on the streets of Hebron, Nablus, and Jenin, and the deeper he got into the conflict the more passionately Danny and Sarah embraced religious Zionism. They left the more pluralistic Ramot for an ultra-Orthodox settlement near Hebron known as Kiryat Arba. In the “hills of Judea and Samaria,” Danny and Sarah, with their small children, felt they were a part of history and the redemption of the Jewish people. Then reality came calling.
Back in St. Louis there were problems. Danny’s younger brother Scott had gotten hooked on heroin. St. Louis from the eighties to the midnineties had been crack city. Entire neighborhoods like Walnut Park, the JVL, Wellston, and Kinloch were decimated by the drug. Since the late nineties heroin had been coming back with a vengeance. Starting in the black neighborhoods of North City, North County, and the near South Side, it had spread all over the region. Heroin fatalities had become common. Scott was one of them. His body was found in a ghetto apartment building in the 5300 block of Cabanne near Soldan High School in a neighborhood known for drugs and crime. Ironically, the neighborhood had once been Jewish, before Jews migrated west.
Danny’s parents were still grieving when he had to return home with his family. They settled into an Orthodox Jewish enclave in University City just off Delmar, and Danny found a job helping his uncle run a chain of dry cleaners. It was at one of the locations in Central West End one day that he met the Big Man. When he told the Big Man of his IDF experience and why he had returned to St. Louis, the rest was history.
* * *
The Big Man lived in a beautifully restored nineteenth-century home on St. Louis Avenue in the St. Louis Place neighborhood just north of downtown. That was where the RCR usually met. Today he wanted to meet at Jamestown Mall. Faheem headed up Vandeventer, cut through Fairgrounds Park, took North Broadway until it turned into Bellefontaine near the county line, and then cut across Chambers to 367 which took him to the Jamestown Mall/North Highway 67 exit.
The mall had once been a booming suburban hub for commerce. Large department stores, trendy shops, all the regulars at the food court, and a movie theater. These days the department stores had pulled out, the food court was almost empty, few stores remained, and grass grew on the parking lot. There had been a recent attempt to turn the mall into a flea market and the county had come in and shut the whole thing down one day because the indoor temperature was below fifty degrees. The movie theater had also recently closed. Hard times for sure. The mall had risen and declined along with the blue-collar industrial economy of North St. Louis County. These things also made the mall a great place to meet and not be seen.
The Big Man was parked in an all-white Cadillac Escalade. He sat in the passenger seat listening to an old-school Isley Brothers CD while smoking an Arturo Fuente Hemingway Signature Cameroon Perfecto cigar he’d selected at Brennan’s. The Big Man had read all of Hemingway’s books while in prison. The driver was his nephew, Rodney. Unlike the Big Man, Rodney had never come up hard on the streets of North St. Louis, nor had he sold drugs. Rodney grew up in Berkeley in North County and excelled as an athlete, boxing for North County, playing football and wrestling at McCluer North, and going to Mizzou on a wrestling scholarship before his knee blew out. Back in St. Louis he began working for his uncle.
Faheem and Danny pulled up in their Crown Vic, parked, and hopped in the backseat. The Big Man was wearing an all-white suit with cream-colored gaiters, an off-white fur coat, and a hat to match. His wrists and fingers were full of gold jewelry that matched the chains and cross around his neck and the four gold teeth in his mouth. A dark-skinned, chubby, middle-aged black man, the Big Man founded the RCR for two reasons: to give back to the community as a way of atoning for his sins, and to stop the flow of meth into St. Louis. Crack had been bad for St. Louis, heroin was arguably worse: but to the Big Man, meth would be the worst. He could already see the effects. The dealers themselves were coming up from the Bootheel, the Ozarks, and other places in rural Missouri in search of larger and more lucrative urban markets.
What the Big Man hated most was the fact that these white gangs, racist to the core, had been using local black gangs to spread their product. The RCR had been shutting down meth houses, robbing dealers, and killing dealers for a while now. There were bounties on all of their heads. Unlike another local vigilante group, the RCR used guns and they took the money for themselves. They had no rich benefactor. No shame in being rewarded for good behavior.
“Merry Christmas,” the Big Man said to Faheem and Danny.
“Yeah, have a good one,” Faheem replied. He didn’t want to wish him a Merry Christmas because he didn’t believe in the holiday. He also didn’t want to be rude. Danny remained silent.
“That’s right, you two non-ham-sandwich-eating brothers don’t celebrate the birth of Jesus. We gonna have to have a serious debate about that one day. Another time. Right now we got business,” the Big Man said.
“What’s up?” Danny asked.
“We got word from one of our sources this crew out of the Bootheel ran by Nehemiah Calhoun is gonna try to get a big shipment of cash out of town to him soon. His ho
use is in Advance, Missouri, but it’s too dangerous to get him down there. We need to get the money before it leaves St. Louis.”
“How are we gon’ do that?” Faheem asked.
“The guy running things for him up here is some country-ass cracker named Bubba. Bubba is renting a house in Florissant where some of his buddies are staying. It’s a five-minute drive from here. Given the fact he’s trusted by Nehemiah Calhoun, Bubba will probably be the one taking the money to him. Or at least someone close to him will be. We need you to go over to his house and keep an eye on his movements. See if he’s leaving town.”
“Why us?” Faheem asked.
“The rest of the crew are all celebrating Christmas. Matter of fact, I’m headed to see my grandbabies now,” the Big Man said as he handed Faheem a piece of paper with the address written on it.
III
Bubba sat at the table exchanging Christmas gifts with his crew. Cartons of cigarettes, cases of bullets from Bass Pro, Duck Dynasty T-shirts, scratch-off lottery tickets, porno mags, and other items. Frank, the best cook in the crew, had prepared a ham with mashed potatoes and corn on the side. Apple pie and vanilla ice cream for dessert.
Taking out a brand-new bottle of Jack Daniel’s, Bubba offered a red-cup toast for his friends: “Frank, Kevin, and Billy, this has been a great year. We’ve made a lot of money. Put food on the table. Our families are living good. Kids are wearing nice clothes. Back home they’re playing with nice new toys. All of that is from the sweat of our brows. From this work we are doing here in St. Louis. That’s what brings money back to the Bootheel. Thank God, thank Nehemiah, and on this blessed day thank our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Family First!”
All the men raised their cups and echoed, “Family First.”
Family First was not the official name of their group. Nehemiah had never sanctioned that. It was just a popular saying among them and some people had begun calling them by that name. They just saw themselves as a group of good ol’ boys from southeastern Missouri. Good ol’ boys doing what they had to do to survive and support their families. The factories were closed, family farming made almost impossible, and for them the way to go was meth.
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