The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi

  “Watching my children suffer broke my heart every day.”

  Natividad remembers one particularly awful night from this period of her life. She had parked the van in a tough section of Boyle Heights. She and the kids were all sleeping when suddenly the Aerostar started to shake. The neighborhood gangsters had discovered the sleeping family and decided to have a laugh.

  “The cholos were shaking the car over and over again,” she says. “We could hear them outside the van laughing at us. I didn’t say anything, I told the kids to stay quiet.” She shakes her head. “Those were some of the worst times.”

  After months of this, Natividad finally got the kids into a shelter. They were allowed to come in at seven every night, then had to leave at seven the next morning. The older kids could go to school, but Natividad had to keep the younger ones busy all day, which made it nearly impossible for her to find work.

  This went on for about a month, until she found room in a halfway house at Fifth and San Pedro. Obviously this was better than the van, and she was grateful, but it wasn’t an ideal solution either. “We were living among drug addicts and mentally ill people,” she says. “I tried to shield my kids from all this as much as I could, but this was the environment we were living in.”

  She had a place to stay now, but the van remained the crucial possession in her life. She used it to drive the kids back and forth from school and to look for work, which she occasionally found, mainly odd jobs cooking and cleaning. She drove slowly and with exceeding caution, always on the lookout for car stops. Without papers or a license, the stakes were extremely high.

  Then one morning in the winter of 2007, as she was dropping her children off at school, she spotted a police car in her rearview mirror.

  “I was just coming out of Third Street,” she says, pointing to an intersection down the block from where we’re sitting now. “I saw him following me. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he was just following behind. Finally they pulled me over.”

  There were two policemen, one white, one black. The white one leaned into the van and asked for her license and registration.

  “I need the car to get my kids to school,” she pleaded.

  Nati’s real problem wasn’t what she’d done, but when she’d done it. It had actually been legal for an undocumented immigrant to obtain a driver’s license until 1993. That was when then-governor Pete Wilson signed into law SB 976, which granted licenses to those who had Social Security numbers and were “authorized under federal law” to be in the state of California.

  Natividad herself, just like Alvaro, had once had a legal driver’s license; in 2003, then-governor Gray Davis had signed into law a measure briefly repealing Wilson’s ban on immigrant licenses. But the window of legality was shut by Arnold Schwarzenegger very shortly after Davis was ousted from office, and Natividad was again left without a legal license. Years later, Governor Jerry Brown would again sign a law permitting undocumented residents to have driver’s licenses.

  So at the time of her first car stop in 2007, this single mother of six was driving in a van with four of her children, and suddenly the lives of seven people were hanging in the balance, not because she’d done something inherently wrong but because her state had recently changed governors.

  Anyway, the policeman peered into her car. He threw up his hands.

  “Look,” he said, “you know you’re wrong here. You can’t drive without a license and a registration.”

  She and her family pleaded with the patrolman. “But the man wasn’t interested,” she says. “He took the car, gave us a ticket, and told us to get all our stuff out of the van. We took all our things, our laundry, everything, and we were just sitting on the side of the road there. I had to take them to school on the bus.”

  Soon afterward Natividad was stunned to find out that California had a special rule for cars seized from undocumented drivers.

  All such cars were to be impounded for a minimum of thirty days, and in order to get the car back, you had to pay an enormous fee. In 2007 the fee was a thousand dollars, well more than the car itself was worth.

  “There was no question of even thinking about paying the fee,” Nati explains. “I knew I would never see the car again. By then I was way more worried about the ticket. The ticket was five hundred dollars. I didn’t have the money to pay that one, either. So I opted for community service.”

  She ended up doing fifty hours of work.

  “I cleaned up cans and garbage in various parks, like Hollenbeck Park,” she says, indicating with a thumb the park not far from her Boyle Heights neighborhood.

  Nati remembers being embarrassed on her first day of community service, but some of the other people she was carrying out her sentence with cheered her up. “They told me not to be ashamed,” she says. “It wasn’t for something I’d done wrong, really. It’s not like I didn’t want a license. I would have gotten one if I could have, but I wasn’t allowed.”

  She picked up cans and papers in the park. Joggers and walkers passed by without noticing she was there. It wasn’t so bad, in retrospect, but there were negatives. The worst part was that she couldn’t do paying work while she was fulfilling her sentence. That, and having to use the buses all the time.

  “Sometimes the buses would run late, and it was even worse when it would rain,” she says. “I’d have to stand there with all my kids waiting for a bus in the rain.”

  In late 2007, shortly after she lost her first car, Natividad awoke with a start. Adan, one of her young twin boys, had awoken with a very high fever. It was one o’clock in the morning. She had to get the boy to a doctor, but she couldn’t figure out how. When she called the taxi companies, they all refused to come to her neighborhood that late.

  “The problem was, the gangsters had a system,” she says. “When an unfamiliar car came into the neighborhood, they would use trash bins to block in cars and rob them. There was no escaping once the gangsters corralled them.”

  So when she called the taxi service, they told her they couldn’t come to her neighborhood at night. “I had to get out of the neighborhood and meet the cab in a safe place,” she says.

  She gathered up all her children—five healthy ones and one sick one, whom she carried—and walked out of the Boyle Heights projects, where she’d moved a few years after her husband’s deportation. She walked a mile through the neighborhood and over a footbridge to the intersection of Evergreen and Marengo, where a taxi was waiting for her. Then she piled the whole family into the cab and went to the clinic. Her son, it turned out, had bronchitis and a high fever. The doctors treated him, and by morning he was well enough to return home. Things had turned out as well as possible, but the incident rattled Natividad.

  In 2009 she took a chance and got another car. It was another beater, a little brown Toyota Corolla. She was driving by herself at around five p.m. when she got caught up at a checkpoint at the intersection of Soto and Slauson Avenue, again not far from her home.

  These checkpoints themselves were controversial. In fact, the LAPD itself ultimately rebelled against them. Ostensibly designed to weed out drunk drivers, the checkpoints attracted the attention of local politicians, activists, and others, who started to notice that police were choosing odd times and locations to set up their drunk-driver sweeps. Instead of at two in the morning outside strip clubs, the roadblocks were stationed at the start and close of workdays at the main traffic points connecting downtown L.A. with Latino neighborhoods.

  “You’d have them late in the afternoon, even in the morning,” says Zachary Hoover, director of LA Voice, an advocacy group for immigrants. “And they’d be in places like Boyle Heights.”

  Anyway, Natividad saw the checkpoint too late and got nabbed. This time she knew the drill. And at least this time she was by herself; no kids to worry about. She hopped out of the car, grabbed a few things out of the backseat, and walked back down the highway toward the nearest bus stop.

  The impound arrangement was the same. It w
as a minimum thirty-day hold, plus a recovery fee, which had been raised since her last car stop and was now nearly $1,200.

  So she forgot about that car. About a year later she had saved up enough for a third car, another Toyota, this one a red Celica. In early 2010 she took that Celica and picked up her kids from school. It was late afternoon and she was heading home, when she got nailed for a third time. This time the mistake was trying to enter a highway via an on-ramp.

  A police car was crouched at the highway entrance, the driver peering into cars as they came up the ramp. “It was pretty obvious, they were just looking to see what the drivers looked like,” she says. “If the cars were beat up enough, they stopped them. That’s all it was.”

  When she got stopped for the third time in what to her was an obvious profiling campaign, she lost it.

  “Suddenly I wasn’t afraid,” she says. “I was really furious. I said to them, ‘This is the third time you’ve done this to me. You’re not fighting crime. You’re just taking my car for your own benefit. I’m not dealing drugs. I’m driving because I have to, do you understand?’ ”

  The officers just shrugged and handed her the ticket. She stood there and looked at the piece of paper in her hand. She knew what the implications of that ticket were. Closing her eyes for a moment, she gathered herself, put the ticket away, collected her children, and walked down the highway on-ramp to the nearest bus stop. She was already thinking of the hole she was in.

  The impound fee, which by now had reached nearly $1,400, meant this third car was gone for good. But the bigger problem, again, was the ticket. She still hadn’t paid her previous ticket. She would eventually find herself owing a total of $1,700 in fines for driving without a license. There was no possibility of paying that money. Her only hope was leniency from the judge.

  Finally her day in court arrived. The L.A. County Superior Court was a hall packed with more than a hundred people, most of them poor immigrants like herself. Just as Alvaro was stunned to see the quantity of buses in his deportation caravan, she was amazed by the crowd of people like her in court. She came first thing in the morning and waited most of the day through one painfully slow case after another.

  Natividad talked with other people in the gallery as she waited her turn. “About a quarter of the people there were in court for having no driver’s license,” she says. “It was like they had created this courtroom just for us.”

  Finally, she stood before the judge, a middle-aged white woman, whom Natividad describes as “not that hard on me. At least she thought she was not being hard on me—that was the impression I got.”

  The judge told Natividad she had to pay five hundred dollars in fines. The rest would be made up in community service, which had to be completed within three months. How much community service?

  “A hundred and seventy hours,” Natividad recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. I almost collapsed when she told me the number.”

  She tried to figure out how to complete the sentence. She spoke to the priest at her church, who helped her arrange to do her time through a local organization called Homeboy Industries, which sent her to clean offices and bathrooms and the like.

  But finishing those 170 hours of community service would prove to be a challenge even greater than being homeless.

  “I would get up at five in the morning,” she recalls. “I’d get the kids ready, then take them to school by bus. Then I would come home to eat breakfast. From there, I would go to Homeboy and clean bathrooms and vacuum until about two p.m. or so.

  “Then I would leave, pick my kids up by bus, and go to a local homeless shelter, where I had a job as a cook. I didn’t have day care or any relatives in town, so I had to bring my children to work with me. So my children would be sitting there at the shelter with the homeless all afternoon and evening. I was cooking for about seventy or eighty people a day and trying to watch them at the same time.

  “I would get home every night at about eleven p.m. The kids were angry and exhausted, every night. They were suffering; it was awful to see. Also the senselessness of it was a very difficult thing to accept. I thought, ‘Whom does this help? What’s the reason for all this?’ ”

  She shrugs, recalling the very recent past. “Actually, I was crying almost constantly that whole time,” she says.

  The Felix family takes the bus now, mostly. As of this writing, Natividad pays twenty-four dollars for a bus pass for each of her children every month, plus seventy-five dollars for one of her own. Since she has to leave for work at three a.m., before the buses run, she takes a taxi to work most days. The new law permitting drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants may help, but her children, American citizens, tell her they’re uninterested in getting licenses. Their experiences growing up have turned them off to driving.

  In many states across the country still, immigrants from south of the border have to take taxis and bicycles everywhere they go, because the law enforcement presence is so massive that traveling any other way is a huge risk. Capture can mean the loss of everything, from never seeing a spouse again to being kidnapped, in addition to being thrust into debt for years. And this is for crimes that are essentially administrative in nature, immigrating in a proscribed way, trying to live without the right papers.

  But on the flip side, there are certain kinds of crimes a native-born American can commit without any risk of arrest at all. It turns out that we prosecute administrative/political violations like serious crimes, and serious crimes like administrative violations. A completely different group of visitors found this out the hard way.

  * * *

  *1 Name changed to conceal identity.

  *2 There were more than one hundred deaths of immigrants in ICE custody between 2003 and 2010, and the government has refused to release information about most of the cases. Many of the deaths were suspicious. In one case, a Salvadoran man named Nery Romero who suffered from severe pain was left untreated and committed suicide. It was later discovered that ICE officials faked documents to show they had, in fact, given him Motrin. The only problem was, they screwed up the documents, which showed that he got the drugs only after he was already dead.

  *3 I asked several lawyers about the chains. Some of them didn’t know what to say. “There are a lot of things in this world that … it’s not just that they don’t fit our idea of what the normal laws should be,” says Melissa Keaney. “It’s just not our values. We don’t imagine this kind of thing.”

  On a warm summer afternoon nearly a decade ago, on August 3, 2005, to be exact, a man named Spyro Contogouris sat down at a computer in the office of a New York City hedge fund and began to type out an email. Short, fit, and handsome (“like a retired middleweight or lightweight boxer” is how one acquaintance described him), the colorful Contogouris was just over a year away from being arrested for felony embezzlement in a real estate scam he’d been involved with years before. But he had no way of knowing about that that afternoon. Now he was thinking only about how to provide reassurances to his current employer, a noted hedge fund hotshot who happened to be one of the world’s leading patrons of modern art.

  Along with a number of other Wall Street billionaires and millionaires, the art patron had hired Contogouris to do a little side job. His task was to destroy a Canadian insurance company called Fairfax Financial Holdings. The hedge fund wanted the company bankrupted, and they wanted its Indian-born CEO, a diminutive, soft-spoken Canadian immigrant named Prem Watsa, publicly disgraced. Despite nearly two years of constant trying, the job hadn’t been done yet, and this particular hedge fund employer was becoming impatient.

  Sensing this, Contogouris sent a message, assuring his employer that Fairfax was indeed doomed.

  IT IS GOING TO GIVE IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO

  “It” being Fairfax. Contogouris then added an attachment, a news story about a corporate executive going to jail. To the attachment, Contogouris added another comment:

  PREM NEXT

  Meaning that Pr
em Watsa, the CEO of Fairfax, would be the next CEO to go to jail.

  Contogouris sent the email to his billionaire employer, then waited. Soon a series of replies came. The hedge fund manager was clearly pleased by Contogouris’s email. Inspired by the thought that Watsa might soon be publicly shamed, he sent back a joyous fantasy “headline” about the future that awaited the little-known Canadian insurance executive:

  PREM BREAKS RECORD FOR CUM SWALLOWED AT SING SING

  The hedge fund wizard who wrote that line is to this day a darling of high society, a man who owns more than one thousand works of art, patronizes the likes of Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman, and has been celebrated by journalists for both his “devotion to Ashtanga Yoga” and his nose for finding “the very best work.” You can find news of him attending all sorts of cheery cultural events, like the time he invited society scribes into his five-thousand-square-foot Miami home, which had been refashioned into a kind of museum—with Matthew Barney’s take on Johnny Cash giving the finger perched atop his staircase and “Richard Prince’s treatment of a Gary Gross photograph showing a naked, 10-year-old Brooke Shields” hanging on a wall in a child’s bathroom.

  Even now, the hedgie is considered one of the beautiful people by almost everyone who matters in the financial community. But he’s apparently not always smiles and Miami sunshine. On that August day in 2005, he wrote this, continuing his thoughts about Fairfax and Prem Watsa:

  I HEAR THAT FUKS VOICE IN MY HEAD AT NITE MAKES ME SICK.

  I WANT HIS HEAD IN A BOX

  The lines were written by Adam Sender, the CEO of Exis Capital. Why did Adam Sender want Prem Watsa’s head in a box? Because nearly two years before, Sender had, along with half a dozen of some of the richest and most influential men in America, men with names like Loeb, Cohen, and Chanos, billionaires who were often collectively known as the “Masters of the Universe,” placed a massive short bet against the company. If Fairfax went bust, they all stood to gain tens or hundreds of millions.