A Prayer for the City (35 page)

He held the gun a little bit to the back of the right temple, flush against the head, like an execution. There was no resistance.

Dwayne Bennett felt the body of the hunted go limp, and he gently laid it to the ground before he and Giovanni and Carlton ran away, back into the maw of the neighborhood. There was some inevitable discussion of the murder, and Dwayne, when he wasn’t telling people to shut up about it, also seemed irritated by the reactions of others, particularly those who asked whether it weighed on his conscience, placing the rounded edge of that .38 barrel flush against the flesh of the temple so that it was touching like the soft graze of a kiss, squeezing on the trigger as the sun was coming up.

“I shot him. So what?” he said. And if the police got wind of it and started asking questions about it, Dwayne said he would tell them what happened without a lawyer, which is exactly what he did. He voluntarily gave himself up to the police a week later. He made no attempt to mitigate the crime or even lie about it, as if he really didn’t care what happened to him. A life on the streets with no job and no future, or a life in prison—what exactly was the better choice? In his statement to the homicide detectives, he expressed what for him, at least, might have been the equivalent of a guilty conscience: “I only shot him once.”

Carlton Bennett was arrested the same day as Dwayne Bennett, and Giovanni Reed two days after that. A day before his scheduled trial in January 1993, Dwayne pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. That left Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed as the remaining defendants. McGovern offered them twenty-five to fifty for a plea, but they said no and decided to
take their chances and watched intently as McGovern told his story step by step and phrase by phrase in that oversize courtroom with its grimy windows and high ceiling, asking the jury to conclude, as he long ago had concluded, what the outcome of this trial should be.

He guided them carefully through an array of witnesses, some favorable, some not so favorable, particularly in terms of pinpointing the exact location of Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed in relation to the victim. Two of those who testified had been part of the group of six that had all gone out together that August night, and their testimony, while not necessarily favorable to the defendants, lacked precision. Richard King wasn’t in the group that had confronted Janke, but he had been nearby, and he had seen something. He said the two defendants were inches away from Janke, but then on cross-examination, he said they were several feet away. Tyrone Mackey had seen something as well. When McGovern prepped him at lunch right before he was to take the witness stand, he completely reversed his original statement to the police and now said the defendants had been some fifteen feet away from the victim. McGovern got into Mackey’s face and stayed there with that scary and schizophrenic street look and warned him that he would be under oath and he had better tell the truth.

“I don’t get paid enough to get fooled by clowns,” he said back in the courtroom, as if he had just been thrown a brushback by some punk minor league pitcher. When Mackey testified, he dropped the fifteen-foot assertion and said the two defendants had been close to Janke that night.

McGovern’s neck got stiff and started to throb, and the more he looked at the jury, the more it began to worry him, particularly since Philadelphia juries by their nature were wild and unpredictable. But he had the testimony of a nurse named Lorraine Hill, who had witnessed the killing from across the street while on her way to work and was resolute in her recollection that Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed had locked their arms in Janke’s own arms and moved him down the path of his execution.

McGovern ended his presentation of the evidence with testimony from the assistant medical examiner. He did it on purpose, to remind the jury
that ultimately this case wasn’t about Carlton Bennett or Giovanni Reed but about the person who had died that night.

The assistant medical examiner spoke in the cold flatness of a trained professional, reducing the once vibrant life of Robert Janke to a series of forensic findings, anatomical blips across a report:

McGovern asked the assistant medical examiner what the chances of survival were from an injury such as this.

“His chances of survival from this wound were zero.”

“Thank you very much.”

After five days, the jurors retired to deliberate. They reached a verdict in two hours and fifty minutes. “Should I bring my crying towel?” asked McGovern over the phone when he was told that the jury had come in. He ran his fingers through his hair, and as he threw on his coat and got ready to walk back over to the court from his office, he was supremely confident that the jury would convict on robbery and conspiracy charges. But he wasn’t nearly so certain about the charges of murder, and he knew they hinged on whether or not the jury had believed Lorraine Hill. “There is enough humility in me that says, ‘You should win, McGovern.’ I hate losing so much that it scares the shit out of me. Those kids held him and watched the expression on his face when he was being tortured and tormented like taking the wings off a fly before he was killed. Are they going to be out hanging around tomorrow?” But he wasn’t about to convey such doubt publicly. As word passed through the tiny cubicles of the homicide wing of the district attorney’s office that a verdict in the Janke case had been reached, McGovern’s Port Richmond bravado was as tight as a guitar string. “When I lose, I’ll let you know, because that’s news.”

McGovern walked back to court. He listened as the judge asked the foreman to rise and read the verdict.

Carlton Bennett, fat and slow-footed, wearing the same green pants and green striped shirt that he had worn the first day of the trial, went first.

On the charge of robbery:

Guilty.

On the charge of criminal conspiracy:

Guilty.

On the charge of second-degree murder:

Guilty.

Giovanni Reed, all of sixteen years old at the time of the killing, went next.

Guilty of robbery.

Guilty of criminal conspiracy.

Guilty of second-degree murder.

Mike McGovern knew that he was in a perpetual tug-of-war over living in the city, the pull of loving it endlessly tempered and tested by the financial rigors of a city wage tax and tuition for private schools. He knew that barring some miracle, he would be switching jobs in several months. But at the moment of those guilty verdicts and the sentence of life that they carried, it was hard for him to think of any feeling better than this one. Standing in that cavernous courtroom, accepting congratulations, he did what he always did after a trial: he marked the file, writing the word
guilty
next to the charges with a flourish.

“See how neat and pretty it is,” he said as he left the courtroom and stepped outside into the yellowish haze of the hallway.

But for some, even those with a personal stake in the outcome, the sight of those fat and slow-footed defendants going off to prison for the rest of their lives wasn’t a source of celebration but was a source of sorrow. “There are no winners,” said Robert Janke’s aunt, Lucinda Janke, when a reporter asked her for her reactions to the verdict. “Four young men will never be the same. Bobby was killed, and three others will spend their lives in prison without parole. I’m satisfied the system worked, but I wish I weren’t here. It’s just very sad.”

There would never be any sufficient explanation of why Dwayne Bennett had pulled the trigger that August day as the sun was coming up. McGovern described him as a great white shark, with those deadened eyes that made no differentiation between right and wrong, good and evil. His attitude seemed unfathomable, unless perhaps you were part of the same environment of vacant houses and public high-rises and dishwater jobs that had yielded him. Then perhaps it was possible if not to understand the
motivations of Dwayne Bennett, at least to see the effects of hopelessness on others. McGovern got on the narrow elevator, deservedly flush with his success. He pressed the button for the ground floor and rode past the second floor, past the mayor’s office, where all that same week in January 1993 a pivotal institution of the city—one ostensibly designed to serve those in the greatest need, those who were black and poor and shared backgrounds similar to Dwayne Bennett and Carlton Bennett and Giovanni Reed without committing crimes—was in its usual throes of politically engineered chaos.

In a political career stretching back to the mid-1970s, it was an astounding concession for Ed Rendell to make. But never in his life, not during two terms as district attorney, not in his runs for governor and mayor, had he ever heard a yelling match between two public officials as long as this one.

Ostensibly the screaming had to do with the future of public housing in the city and the age-old mess of the agency in charge of it, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, but it really had to do with the things that invariably guided such institutions—political ego, contradictory agendas, and the bottomless differences of race. Lucien Blackwell, formerly a city councilman and now a congressman, was the screamer. Michael Smerconish, regional administrator for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, who had jurisdiction over the Philadelphia Housing Authority, was the screamee. But midway through the session, roles reversed. The federal official became screamer. The congressman became screamee. And then at a certain point, they said to hell with it and became simultaneous screamers, both men screaming so loud, with such sustained intensity, that not a word of what they said was remotely decipherable.

It was a comical, slightly pathetic sight, these two grown men yelling at the top of their lungs, not even directly at each other but through the wonders of a speaker phone, since the federal official was in the mayor’s office and the congressman more than a hundred miles away, in Washington. It made the whole spectacle even more surreal, the federal official in his crisp white shirt and presidential cuff links, yelling into a little plastic box on top of the desk in the mayor’s office as if it were alive, the congressman yelling back with such force and velocity that the little plastic box seemed to skitter across the desk every time the scratchy racket of his voice sounded.

“It’s amazing we get anything done,” Rendell whispered to a visitor midway through, and then he just shook his head and rolled his eyes and stared rather forlornly at the little plastic box, as if it were hard to believe that something so small, which never worked particularly well during a
local call
, could be responsible for so much noise
long-distance
. But in the long and sorry history of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, which controlled more than twenty-two thousand units of public housing in the city and served as landlord to more than eighty thousand tenants, the interchange between the federal official and the congressman came as close as anything to clear and constructive dialogue.

No one who knew anything at all about public housing in the city would have taken much issue with that statement. It was a succinct summation of what public housing had become in the city, and other than the fact that it had been written
fourteen years earlier
, in 1979, it was still hard to quibble with, except perhaps that its depiction had proved overly optimistic. By the early 1980s, roughly 10 percent of the housing authority’s units stood vacant, even though more than twelve thousand families were on the authority’s waiting list. By 1992, the vacancy rate at the housing authority, the fourth largest in the country, had climbed to 20 percent while the waiting list had grown to at least thirteen thousand applicants. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees public housing in the country, had set a standard of thirty days in which to reoccupy a vacant unit. The Philadelphia Housing Authority, not content with that, had set a standard in its own handbook of seven working days. But the reality turned out to be slightly longer than that, somewhere close to sixteen hundred days, or approximately four and a half years.