A Prayer for the City (47 page)

“That pitch cost us three hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

It was an instant computation of how much the city would have to shell out in extra police security if indeed the Phillies eked out another win and took the National League pennant. The mayor laughed, but there was something hollow about it, and for a brief moment, as he shot a glance at this man next to him, it was hard to tell whether he was laughing because he thought David Cohen was funny or because he thought David Cohen was really quite mad.

T
he day after the president of the United States called to congratulate the mayor of the city for assuming control of the housing authority, Assistant District Attorney Mike McGovern was back in that space between the rows of spectators and the judge’s bench, spinning yet another story of his city.

He was dressed in a crisp blue suit, and his contempt for the defendant
sitting at the table next to him, trying to act like some sweet-Jesus choirboy who was in court only because his spitball had broken a stained glass window during silent prayer, was fierce. But with one slight variation: Today, September 10, 1993, was his last day with the district attorney’s office.

He had submitted his resignation.

Earlier that summer, as he lay on the beach at Avalon on the Jersey shore, figuring out his future, he knew it was time to leave. He was joining a small firm in the city with two former prosecutors he knew and admired professionally. The job change meant that he would be representing criminal defendants instead of prosecuting them. For someone who approached the prosecutor’s job with as much zeal as he did, this was a morally queasy position to be in—knowing he might be the one to produce the self-satisfied laugh of someone getting away with murder. He knew how much he would miss that sense of being the white knight, depended on by the victims’ family members to act with vigilance and seek vindication. “It makes you feel you really were a crusader for a good cause,” he said, “and it’s hard to walk away from.” The wall of his little office had been a testament to the work he did, covered with notes and letters of profuse thanks for squeezing something good, something just, out of the horror of what had happened. But economic reality dictated the move, and McGovern’s eternal competitiveness, the way his street folksiness hardened when challenged, made the transition more palatable.

But it was still odd to see his helter-skelter office, like a manager’s office at a busy train station, stripped so bare, the notes and thank-you cards gone, the pictures and mementos packed away, the brown cardboard cartons piled high with notes of testimony hauled into storage—the Sean Daily case, which had defined him as a lawyer; the Will Taylor case, with its wrenching window onto the racism of the city; the case of Robert Janke, the young man who had died because of a misplaced set of house keys; the case of Gilda Taylor, the former cocaine addict who was trying to scare her sixteen-year-old son when the gun she was holding went off and who was found by the police kneeling next to his bed, trying vainly to resuscitate him, with blood all over her face and hands. As he recalled these and other cases he had tried, he could once again feel the heart of darkness, the endless capacity of men and women for evil, vengeance, and sadness.

“Someone once said to me, ‘You see things that no one else ever sees.’ I told him, ‘Hey, I see things that no one else wants to see.’ ”

All that was left was a piece of paper taped to a beige file cabinet, a note that had been left by one of his colleagues: “Mikey, we hardly knew ye.”

The final days had been bittersweet and conflicted. He still took notes on legal pads and scraps of paper, and he knew that the jazzy equipment lawyers fancied now, “candy” as he called it, the laptops and the cellular phones, was no substitute for a closing argument that went right to the jugular. In his office, packing up the few remaining items that were left, he remembered trying a case in which the defense attorney used a computer and a phone and a beeper that flashed lengthy messages. McGovern himself was equipped with a legal pad and a number 2 pencil, and the lawyer was cross-examining a witness and scoring points when McGovern heard a little murmur from the lawyer’s back pocket. “Your phone is ringing,” he said to break the momentum and allow the witness time to regroup. And of course there was no way he could have resisted what he said next. “If it’s my wife, tell her I’m not here.”

As he was packing, he came upon the first newspaper article to mention his name, a 1982 column in the
Daily News
by Pete Dexter, who went on to win the National Book Award for
Paris Trout
.

It had been a grand ride, hadn’t it?

And it had been more than just obligation that had prompted McGovern to say in his resignation letter to District Attorney Lynne Abraham, “I regret that I shall not continue to be part of this fine Office and its noble and tireless pursuit of justice for the citizens of Philadelphia. I will cherish my
years as an Assistant District Attorney for a lifetime.” But the other part of the letter told the truth about why he was leaving. “Unfortunately, as my children have grown so have my family’s financial needs. Of course, this growth requires one to make difficult choices.”

The McGoverns’ oldest child, Bridget, had just started ninth grade at Nazareth Academy, and they had three younger children to worry about as well. They had tried the public schools once, which seemed only reasonable since their tax dollars went to support them. Bridget had gone to kindergarten at Comly Elementary, over on Byberry and Kelvin, but as McGovern’s wife, Mary Pat, recalled, the teacher was in her sixties, had a heart problem, and often fell asleep because of the medication she was taking. She was replaced—but by revolving-door teachers. The school itself was old and dirty, and the McGoverns became unwilling to consider the public schools a viable option for any of their children. That meant parochial schools, and that meant tuition costs that would only multiply as each child reached school age. They weren’t alone in this. Because of the quality of the city’s public school system and the reliance instead on private and parochial schools, Philadelphia had the lowest percentage of its students attending public schools of the ten largest cities in the country.

It made the McGoverns, as it made so many thousands of others in the swath of the middle class, subject to the illogic of city life. Because the city’s public schools were uniformly poor, they spent thousands on education that they would not have spent if they had lived in the suburbs. Compounding this, because McGovern lived in the city, his salary was subject to a 4.96 percent city wage tax that he would not have had to pay if he had lived and worked in the suburbs. In return for the additional taxes he paid as a city resident, McGovern not only was unable to use the schools, but he also received a level of service that was a shadow of what he would have received in the suburbs.

Liberated now from such strictures, McGovern and his family could move. They could cross the border. When Mary Pat tallied it up, the ledger sheet of reasons to stay and reasons to leave was so lopsided that it was hard to believe anyone within the spectrum of the middle class was still left. Beyond sheer emotion, what exactly was the reason to stay?

Housing costs in the city were generally cheaper, and her husband had a shorter commute than he would have had from some of the suburbs they might have considered. She also knew that her husband might want to be a judge someday, a position that required residence in the city.

On the negative side, there was the school dilemma, which by the time
their son Michael went to high school, in the fall of 1995, would cost them about $15,000 in tuition. There was the wage tax dilemma. There was the car insurance dilemma, with rates in the city nearly twice as high as rates in the suburbs. There was the services dilemma, particularly when it came to such things as snow removal. There was the parking dilemma. There was the traffic dilemma. There was the surroundings dilemma. There was the safety dilemma.

All of that might have been somehow palatable, but what particularly disturbed Mary Pat was the indignity of it all. There were good things about city life, but the penalties were so onerous as to completely drown them out, as if over the years, city officials, through their tax policies and their school policies and their fiscal policies, were literally daring people to leave. It disturbed her that the middle class was given no incentive to stay while businesses and corporations, many of them rich and thriving, were given all sorts of incentives to stay—free land and tax abatements and low-interest loans. She understood the need to preserve jobs, but in the meantime, demographics showed that the middle-class family in the city was moving closer and closer to extinction. “They give businesses tax breaks and incentives to stay in the city all the time,” she said. “But what about the average citizen?” You paid taxes for schools you couldn’t use and for services that were often inferior, and after a while what joys you might derive from the city got lost in hardened disdain. “Why should I be loyal to the city?” she asked.

Mike McGovern’s debate with his wife over leaving or staying would only intensify. But on his last day of work, he wasn’t dwelling on that. He was just thinking of saying good-bye in some way that would do justice to all the emotions he felt. He stood in Courtroom 696 and found the room as effervescent as ever despite the usual accoutrements of sound-blasting air-conditioning and tired wooden chairs and limp brown shades hanging halfway down dirt-soaked windows.

Because the complete notes of testimony in the case at hand,
Commonwealth v. Edward Graziano
, were not available, defense attorney Jack Meyers wanted a thirty-day continuance. McGovern argued vociferously against it because he sorely wanted to end his career with a sentencing, particularly the sentencing of Graziano. He argued so vociferously, in fact, that the judge presiding over the case, Ricardo Jackson, had to tell him to shut up.

“Doesn’t counsel understand that I’m talking?” said Jackson.

“I’m sorry, your honor,” said McGovern sheepishly.

According to testimony at the trial, Graziano had killed a college student outside an after-hours club in an apparent dispute over the victim’s girlfriend. Dominic Capocci was twenty when he died, his look of intimidation and menace that night amounting to shorts, a T-shirt, Air Nikes, and a Yankees cap turned backward. He was killed with a single bullet from Graziano’s gun, which had been placed almost equidistant between the eyes, the bullet making a silver-dollar-size hole in the forehead and then exiting above the bill of the Yankees cap. The look on his face when he died wasn’t terror but absolute shock, as if he couldn’t believe what had just happened. He was a junior at La Salle University and worked at his family’s sandwich shop.