A Prayer for the City (48 page)

Graziano had been talking with Capocci’s girlfriend earlier in the evening and claimed that he pulled the gun he was carrying and fired accidentally in self-defense when Capocci and four of his friends surrounded him. But McGovern, during the trial, had called the shooting “totally unprovoked,” and a jury supported him with a murder conviction.

Judge Jackson said the sentencing could proceed without the notes of testimony.

“It was one of the most vicious killings I’ve seen in my eight years as a homicide prosecutor, and I’m not just saying that to make a speech,” said McGovern, dressed in his crisp blue suit. Pointing to the defendant, he said that Graziano, after shooting the victim in the forehead, then turned to the girlfriend and said, “There, take him home.”

Suddenly from the grim soup of the courtroom came a voice.
“Fuck you, motherfucker. You don’t know nothin’.”
It belonged to the defendant, and McGovern turned red, the kind of deep red that anyone from the old neighborhood in Port Richmond would have recognized and immediately fled from in terror. But to the bitter end, he was a good and loyal prosecutor, and however much he wanted to make a rousing speech for his grand finale or just walk several feet and strangle the defendant himself, he knew, even without the benefit of a laptop, that this was the time for a different strategy. The defendant had just made the best speech of all.

“The Commonwealth rests, your honor,” said McGovern abruptly, and he sat down.

“You have a smart-guy attitude, and you should spend your life in prison,” said the judge. Just for good measure, he threw in ten extra years on two gun charges.

“I wanted that guy like meat!” McGovern snapped outside the courtroom, his face still red and glowing. But by the time he got back to the
homicide wing at the district attorney’s office, he was exultant, his combativeness there for the world to challenge. “I crushed my last one like a grape!” he said to a colleague. Heading down the hallway back to his own office, he muttered to himself those final, epic words of his life as a prosecutor in the city.
“Fuck you, motherfucker. You don’t know nothin’
.

“I know one thing,” said McGovern in the singsong taunt of a child. “You’re spending the rest of your life in jail.”

To the very end, he was passionate and exultant. Maybe that was why, as he had walked back to his office, he had been stopped by several people who knew that this September day was his last and wanted to express their regret. They liked McGovern personally, but it was more than that, for as one of them told him as he grasped his hand, “The city’s gonna miss you.”

Several days later, still in September, as the mayor entered the sprawl of the navy yard, he seemed on the edge of total eruption. Karen Lewis, one of his saintly schedulers, was in the car with him, going over upcoming events. She could sense the build up of a wig out but knew that sometimes in moments such as these he was able to maintain his hold on rationality. Lewis watched with patience, looking for some inkling: Dr. Jekyll today or Mr. Hyde? Yin or Yang? Santa Claus or Scrooge? The answer came moments after he entered the yard.

“Fucking waste of time! Fucking waste of time! Fucking waste of time!”

The question of the mayor’s mood had been adequately answered.

He most decidedly was unhappy to be going where he was going, to board the aircraft carrier USS
John F. Kennedy
as it pushed up the Delaware and into the navy yard for an extensive overhaul. Although his outburst had to do with the endless burdens of overscheduling, this visit to the yard, however brief, was a sad and bittersweet experience that didn’t help matters any.

About sixty-two hundred workers were still employed there, but the massive facility, spread over some nine hundred acres, barely stirred. In the absence of a miracle, its closure two years from now, on September 15, 1995, would be a monumental disaster for the mayor in terms of job loss in the city. As added injury, the closure would also come during the heat of his campaign for reelection.

The overhaul of the
Kennedy
did provide some reprieve. Some fifteen
hundred to two thousand construction workers would be employed at any one time during the $500-million project. In addition, nine hotels and apartment houses had won low-bid contracts for housing crew members who would reside in Philadelphia during the overhaul. But this was the last hurrah.

The mayor’s car stopped at a landing strip. Rendell looked out the window, his fury of a few moments ago replaced by a voice simultaneously forlorn and mortified.
“Look at that thing.”

It was a helicopter, a big, clattering, kick-ass navy transport helicopter, and it would take Rendell and the aides traveling with him to the
Kennedy
. He got out of the car and lumbered to the craft. He resignedly clambered on board, where he got strapped in and had to don a life jacket and protective gear for the head and ears. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said, now laughing at the absurdity of it, aware of how bizarre he looked, with his gray suit pants sticking out of the life jacket and his head covered by plastic earmuffs. Even though he disliked heights, he seemed OK as the helicopter lifted, until he realized something else, and the voice of mortification returned.
“Aren’t they going to close this door?”

There was no door, at least no door that could be closed, and as the helicopter made its way toward the flight deck of the
Kennedy
, past the quiescence of the yard and its lines of mothballed ships, Rendell clutched the sides of the little bench he was sitting on with fanatic devotion. He talked incessantly even though no one, over the noise of the rotor blades and through the earmuffs, could hear a word except for a loud
whooohhh
when the helicopter made a sharp bank to the right in its final descent.

Once on board, the mayor seemed as if another person from within had taken him over. He passed out pretzels in the
Kennedy
control room, instructing crew members on the proper etiquette: “You eat these babies with mustard.” He sat in the chair of the carrier’s commanding officer, and eyeing a string of phones nearby, he asked, “Which one is for the president?” He saw that the chair had protective padding that he recognized from someplace else, and then it dawned on him—“Oh, you got taxi beads.” He also conducted a spirited conversation with crew members on the authenticity of the Cher video in which she sings “If I Could Turn Back Time” on board a battleship, parenthetically noting that his son, Jesse, had changed the lyric to “Look at my firm backside.”

Once safely back on the ground, he couldn’t get the Cher song out of his mind and began to sing it to himself over and over, with his son’s substituted lyric, of course. He described his visit to the
Kennedy
as “amusing,
fun, but a total waste of time.” It may have been, but passing out pretzels and making crew members laugh seemed far more constructive than viewing the parade of politicians falling over themselves in their attempts to suggest that the yard would somehow survive its closing date with new work. There was inspirational talk about creating a national maritime and industrial center, in which the yard, operating as a public-private partnership, would continue to compete for naval maintenance and repair work while becoming a focal point for the development of shipbuilding-related technologies. There was still talk of enticing Mercedes-Benz to build its new plant inside the yard. There was talk of getting new subway cars built there.

“The people at the shipyard should not be looking for jobs now,” proclaimed Congressman Thomas Foglietta, who made sure he was on the flight deck of the
Kennedy
as well. “I have a lot of faith in that.”

“This shipyard can move forward as a center of shipbuilding and maritime work and help point the way to rebuilding the maritime industry in the United States,” proclaimed Senator Harris Wofford, even though most shipbuilding experts considered this an absurd fantasy.

“If they do their usual top-notch work on this ship, there will be more work to come,” proclaimed Congressman Rob Andrews, whose district in southern New Jersey included a high percentage of shipyard workers.

As a shipyard worker himself, Jim Mangan listened to what the politicians had to say in this latest round and digested it and continued steadfastly not to believe a word of it. Ever since the yard had been slated for closure in 1991, it had been the same, a massive manipulation of the hearts and minds of workers for their political support, an immoral trade of false hopes for votes, and he refused to buy into it. The effect of such comments on the workers was both predictable and cruel. The yard was a swell of rumors, and Mangan saw worker after worker cling to what the politicians said as if it were Scripture. “They still feel there’s some miracle around the corner,” said Mangan. “They are still in denial—‘We’ve got to do a good job [on the
Kennedy
] and then [the yard] will be saved.’ ”

Early in his career, Mangan had enjoyed watching when one of the massive carriers came into the yard. He vividly remembered the first one he saw, the
Saratoga
, amazed something that big could actually float. But when the
Kennedy
arrived on this clear September day in 1993, Mangan didn’t even bother to watch. He felt no swell of feeling one way or another, except that it meant some work and probably some overtime, “the last gasp” as he put it, “the last chance to make money.”

The yard really had been reduced to a whisper anyway, so the work was welcome. There had been little for welders to do, and Mangan had spent most of his time repairing welding cable or, in his own blunt words, “doing practically nothing.” The shipyard was aware of the lull, and Mangan had been assigned to go down to the navy yard in Charleston, South Carolina, for thirty days at the end of the summer, but with six kids at home, he didn’t know how he could possibly do it. Neither did his wife, Linda.

She was supportive of him in what he was going through as he faced the uncertainty of his future, and she did her best not to get nervous or in any way add pressure. When asked whether she was worried about what Jim would do if the yard closed, she said no without the slightest tic of reservation. After a year of volunteering, Linda now worked part-time as a classroom aide at nearby Smedley Elementary. It helped make ends meet, but she did it primarily to keep an eye on two of her children who went there and had come home with stories of fights. The school was small and overcrowded, and many of its students were reluctant refugees from the Catholic schools, there because their parents could no longer afford the tuition. She and Jim had discussed the idea of her working full-time. The pay would help, and so of course would the benefits if Jim decided to go into business for himself once he left the yard. But since the school district wasn’t hiring, the issue was moot.

She had been terrified when Jim came home and told her the yard wanted him to go to Charleston, although she tried her best not to show it. She got headaches and had stomach problems. She worried about how she was going to take care of the kids by herself, but she also worried that if he didn’t go, he would get into trouble and maybe even lose his job. Pocketing her fears, Linda got out a suitcase and bought him new clothes. Jim in turn made a reservation at a hotel in Charleston, figuring he had no choice. Then, on the day before he was supposed to go, he heard of six or seven others in the welding shop who were refusing the assignment. As an old union steward, he knew there was safety in numbers. He went into the backyard of the little home on Haworth and told Linda he wasn’t going, even though in all probability that meant a five-day suspension, but she was relieved.

Jim was relieved too. He had not wanted to go in the first place, and if he had gone, he would have missed the birthday party for his daughter Cheryl. He was devoted to his wife and children, and he couldn’t help but worry about the impact the loss of his job would have on them, not simply in terms of the enormous financial burden but also in terms of how they
would think of him if he somehow failed in his role as the family provider. He still thought of running his own business, but it was a daunting prospect, and then he watched an episode of
60 Minutes
about Hewlett-Packard hiring software engineers from overseas, and that just added to his feeling vulnerable in the marketplace. “I was worried about competing with kids right out of college. Now I’ll be competing with people from other countries.”

He thought he at least had the underpinnings of the solid high school education he had received in the city. His children, as far as he could tell, didn’t even have that, in part because of the quality of the education they received, and in part because of their own mercurial motivation. Because of the spread in their ages, they attended three public schools in the city, Smedley, Harding Middle School, and Frankford High, and Mangan wished he could be in all three of them simultaneously to try to figure out what really went on. Because Linda worked at Smedley, they at least had that base covered. But as far as he could tell with his older children, none of them had ever sufficiently grasped the basics, and this seemed most glaring in his daughter Michelle, who was a senior at Frankford. By her own admission, Michelle had never written a real term paper. The most she had done was an essay with a couple of paragraphs, and she admitted that she had no idea of how to write a letter requesting a job. She had difficulty with geometry and physics and had taken general physical science instead. She said she got a B in the course without ever taking the final, and her strongest impression of the teacher was that he spent part of each class doing push-ups with the football players. Perhaps her greatest achievement was in ceramics, evidence of which could be seen in the ten little pots neatly arrayed at the bottom of the entertainment unit in the Mangans’ living room.

“You have to sell an awful lot of those pots to pay off a mortgage,” said Mangan to his daughter.

“I’m getting better,” said Michelle.