Blind Man's Alley (24 page)

30

D
AYS STARTED
early at Rikers: breakfast was usually served in Rafael’s cell block around six a.m. Rafael had gotten used to falling asleep by ten o’clock at night; when he’d been free he’d routinely stayed up until two in the morning or later. He’d usually worked in the restaurant until at least eleven, then often hung out with people from the kitchen after his shift, so it hadn’t been unusual for it to be past one by the time he got home on a typical workday, even if he wasn’t partying.

He was woken at around five thirty by noise outside his cell. Yawning and barely awake, Rafael dutifully got out of bed, assuming it was the breakfast crew coming a little early. But instead it was the tactical unit, charging in full force for a spot search.

Surprise cell searches were a part of life at Rikers, but that didn’t make them any less jarring. It was like some sort of military invasion; the tactical guards came in full gear: helmets with protective visors down, shields that could deliver an electric jolt severe enough to temporarily incapacitate a prisoner.

They searched the cells a dozen at a time, the prisoners lining up for a body-cavity search while their cells were gone through. This was done through a special chair that was wheeled in, the BOSS. It was a clunky device, gunmetal gray, with a scanner that could detect metal or other contraband that was hidden in the body.

When his cell door was opened Rafael stepped out, getting into line for his turn on the BOSS. He was standing there, still mostly asleep, when he heard raised voices from behind him. Rafael glanced over his shoulder, knowing the guards wouldn’t like it if he actually turned around. An inmate a few cells down from his was refusing to come out, though Rafael couldn’t hear why. It was a newbie on the cell block, a middle-aged white guy with stringy long hair and missing front teeth. Everyone had given him a wide berth: the guy was jittery, talked to himself, seemed to be seeing things the rest of them weren’t. A crackhead, Rafael was pretty certain, though it also seemed like the miswiring of the guy’s mind was more fundamental than that.

A half dozen of the tactical guards had quickly flanked out around the cell door, their electric shields at the ready. Another guard turned on a video camera to film the forced extraction. The prisoner was yelling something from inside his cell, but Rafael couldn’t make out the words. There was an edge to everybody now, prisoners who’d been sound asleep five minutes ago tensing up. The tang of imminent violence was in the air, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks. “Stay in line, stay cool,” a guard next to Rafael said, his voice sharp.

Then the tactical unit moved into the cell, which hardly seemed big enough to contain them all. There was a loud scream, then nothing but the sound of moving feet in heavy boots as the guards carried the prisoner, who even from a distance was clearly unconscious, out of the cell. He’d been hit with an electric shield; Rafael could smell it, like burning plastic. There was muttering from other prisoners, vague noises of protest at seeing one of them treated this way, but Rafael thought it a little halfhearted. This was a white guy, a crazy dude: he had no allies on the block; nobody really wanted to stand up for him. Rafael guessed the man’s refusal to leave his cell hadn’t even been because he had something to hide, but was just a reflection of his crumbled mental state.

Once the unconscious prisoner had been taken out of the block, the guards began moving back into cells while prisoners were placed on the BOSS. There was still tension in the air, the energy flowing from the proximity to violence, but it felt contained.

Rafael made his way to the front of the line. Once there, he first had to place his chin on the back of the BOSS, the machine working its magic on his mouth. Then he sat in the chair, the scanner looking for something hidden up his ass. That was the most common hiding place on the body in Rikers, and Rafael had heard some pretty unbelievable stories about things that had gotten smuggled in that way—cell phones and the like. He couldn’t even think about it without squirming.

Once cleared through the BOSS, Rafael went to stand in front of his cell, which a corrections officer was still inside of. His bedding had been removed and was being scanned by another CO with a wand like those used at airports.

He noticed that a guard was waving a scanner around the common areas. Rafael felt his nerves tighten as the guard held the scanner up to the air-conditioning vent that ran above the top of the cells and then began walking in his direction. Rafael knew something was in that vent right above his cell, but he didn’t know what, or if the scanner would detect it.

A few days ago he had seen Luis Gutierrez fiddling with the vent. Rafael had been fifteen feet away, watching TV. He hadn’t been able to tell what exactly Luis was doing, but had assumed he was hiding something. Rafael had wanted to tell Luis to put whatever it was somewhere else, but hadn’t had the nerve.

The CO with the scanner was now waving it right above Rafael’s cell. There was a high-pitched whine as the device reacted to something. A couple of other guards came over, and one started unscrewing the vent’s grille.

Rafael watched nervously as the guard gingerly reached up into the opened vent. The CO pulled out a homemade shiv, a thin piece of metal that had been sharpened at one end, the other end wrapped in duct tape. Other guards quickly gathered around. Rafael could sense movement behind him, and he tensed, trying to keep himself still, not wanting to give the guards any excuse to take out their leftover adrenaline from the forced extraction on him.

“What you got?” a CO called out as he approached. His uniform had officer’s stripes on the sleeve; Rafael assumed he was in charge.

“We found a shank hidden in the vent right above this cell,” the guard holding the scanner said.

The head guy nodded brusquely, then turned to the gathered prisoners. “Who’s cell is this?”

There wasn’t any point in denying it, so Rafael stepped forward. “That blade’s not mine,” he said.

“Never heard that one,” the CO holding the shiv said.

The head guy’s eyes were locked onto Rafael. He had the hood of his visor lifted, the rest of him cloaked in the riot gear the entire tactical team was wearing. All Rafael could tell was that he was a middle-aged white guy with a graying mustache. “I’m Deputy Warden Ward. You’re who?”

“Rafael Nazario.”

“Nazario—you’re that kid who killed a cop?”

Rafael was surprised that Ward knew who he was. “I didn’t kill nobody,” he replied. “And he wasn’t a cop anymore.”

“You mouthing off to me?” Ward barked, taking two quick steps forward, so that he was fully in Rafael’s face. They were about the same height, but Rafael reckoned Ward had nearly fifty pounds on him.

Rafael hadn’t been mouthing off, didn’t think Ward really thought otherwise. The CO was just trying to provoke him. “No, sir,” Rafael said, casting his eyes down, trying to appear subservient, just get through this.

“You affiliated, Nazario?”

Rafael shook his head, keeping his gaze on the floor. “I’m not in no gang,” he said.

“You going to fess up that this is your blade?”

Rafael shook his head. “I never seen that before.”

“What’s it doing in the vent right above your cell? If you didn’t put it there, you must’ve seen who did.”

Ward was staring at him, awaiting a response, but Rafael knew that fingering Luis would lead to far worse problems than taking the blame himself. Whatever the guards could do to him was nothing compared to what prisoners would do if they considered him a snitch. Especially if he crossed Luis, who was with a gang. “I didn’t see nobody messing around with that vent,” he said.

“You planning to take out a guard here like you did that cop?”

“I never seen that blade before,” Rafael said again, trying to keep his voice calm.

Ward sneered at him, moving still closer, their faces just inches apart. Rafael forced himself to meet the man’s stare, his whole body braced for a blow. “Cuff him,” Ward said to the COs behind Rafael. “We’ll write him up for the shank.”

“It’s not mine,” Rafael protested.

“You going to tell me whose it is, then?” Ward said. When Rafael didn’t respond, Ward nodded to the guards. “Then looks like it’s yours now.”

31

C
ANDACE HAD
arranged to meet Councilwoman Serran at her East Village office and speak to her on the walk to a school board meeting in the neighborhood. Candace had been as vague as possible about what she wanted to discuss, saying only that she was reporting on the changes to Riis. She figured there was a good chance that Serran already knew about her meeting with Dewberry, but that wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make the councilwoman nervous.

Serran was a short, stocky Hispanic woman in her early forties, dressed in a light cotton business suit. She was wearing tennis shoes and carrying both a formal attaché case and a rumpled shopping bag.

“Hope you don’t mind walking,” Serran said as she shook Candace’s hand. “The school’s about fifteen minutes away.”

Candace was wearing flats, as she usually did when working. “No problem,” she said.

The heat of day was just starting to cool, and although it was too early for the East Village’s nightlife to have kicked in, there were already plenty of people crowding the streets: the teenage punk rockers whose look hadn’t changed since Candace’s own teenage years in the city, the newer yuppies, heading home to their condos in buildings that twenty years ago had been squats, the Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans who still claimed dwindling slices of the neighborhood.

Serran turned out to be a quick walker, Candace having to increase her own pace as they headed up Avenue A. Candace wondered if it was a conscious effort on Serran’s part to make their time as short as possible. “So I understand you’re doing a piece on the changeover to mixed-income at Riis,” Serran said.

Candace nodded. She was planning on doing her best Columbo impression today, not wanting Serran’s guard up. People who spoke with her often failed to realize how much prep she did prior to any interview, all the time on the computer she logged before actually sitting down with someone. Information was power, never more so than when asking someone questions that you knew they weren’t going to want to answer. Candace was confident Serran was going to be pretty unhappy by the time they were done.

“One basic thing I haven’t been able to figure out is why Riis was chosen as the guinea pig, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“First I heard of the proposal, it was already attached to Riis. That’s how it was brought to the council’s housing committee.”

Given that Serran chaired the city council’s committee on public housing, Candace’s guess was that Riis had been chosen to sweeten the pot for Serran, ensure her support for the development. “Was it the mayor who brought it to you?”

“Actually it was Speaker Markowitz.”

David Markowitz, the council’s speaker, was young and preppy and photogenic, widely considered the most promising and ambitious city politician of his generation. Candace guessed, perhaps unfairly, that Serran must hate his guts.

“But you don’t know why the speaker wanted it to be Riis?”

Serran shrugged. “I don’t think he has any public housing in his own district,” she said, before adding quickly: “That’s off the record.”

An interview subject couldn’t place something off the record after saying it, which Candace certainly expected any politician to know. But she wasn’t looking to work up a snarky quote (though perhaps accurate: Markowitz’s district was in the Upper East Side) into anything—she was after bigger game. “How did Roth Properties come to be the developer on the Riis project?”

“There was a bidding process, but that was handled by the Housing Authority. The council didn’t have a direct role.”

“You probably know the Riis project better than anyone else in city politics,” Candace said, intending it as flattery but also thinking it could well be true. “What do you really make of the idea of changing it to mixed-income?”

Serran glanced at her, Candace guessing the politician was gauging how honest she wanted to be. “I had some concerns, sure. I didn’t want it to just end up being an excuse for dispersing poor people out of the neighborhood so that the city could do to the East Village what it just did to Times Square. Tourists own enough of this city as it is. But I’m a realist, and I can’t pretend to much nostalgia for the Jacob Riis I grew up in. Avenue D wasn’t pretty back then. I know some people in the community are opposed to anything that can be called gentrification, but it’s not that simple. My constituents who live or work near the project—the people who own stores over there—I can tell you they supported this one hundred percent.”

They turned onto First Avenue, just a few blocks below P.S. 19. Candace was already running out of time. But she still didn’t think an all-out attack was the way to go. “I assume you’ve been following the recent murder case at Riis?”

Serran’s face went dutifully somber. “The security guard? A terrible thing—not just for the victim, but for the community. But it didn’t have anything to do with the changes to Riis, did it?”

“The family of the accused, the Nazarios, are getting evicted because of the private security guards. Have you heard anything about problems between the private security and residents, or issues concerning evictions?”

Serran shook her head. “There’re always evictions going on at Riis, unfortunately.”

“I’ve got sources telling me that the security guards are setting people up on minor drug charges, then using that to evict the families.”

Candace watched Serran for a reaction, but saw nothing other than surprise. “If people have claims about that, you should have them call my office.”

Candace nodded noncommittally. She was generally reluctant to broker such contacts, not wanting to take an active role in a story she was reporting, even when doing so might help her subjects. She decided instead to throw a curve. “Your brother Antonio hasn’t told you anything about it?”

It worked: Serran’s gaze darted toward Candace, then quickly away. “You mean because of his work at the ACCC,” she said after a moment.

“Right,” Candace said.

“I don’t recall him mentioning it.”

“I assume you follow the ACCC’s work carefully,” Candace said, studying Serran as she spoke. “Not just because of your brother. Most of their funding comes from you, doesn’t it?”

Candace had expected Serran to be on guard for the question, but the councilwoman appeared unnerved. An ambulance with its siren on went screaming by, giving Serran an opportunity to pause for a long moment before answering. “I’ve helped them secure some funding from the city, yes,” Serran said once the noise had died down. “There’s nothing surprising about that. Riis is in my district, and I’m very active with public housing issues through chairing the council’s committee.”

“But aren’t you then essentially helping both sides? I mean in that you’re supporting the redevelopment, while also financing its opposition?”

“The existing community at Riis deserves protection. That’s what the ACCC is doing. My focus was on helping to ensure that the existing residents had a voice.”

Bombs away, Candace thought. She wasn’t getting anywhere interesting playing nice, and she lacked the time for a subtle approach. “What about the fact that you allocated a half million dollars to the ACCC, and a short time later you got a few dozen donations from people who were in some way connected to the organization? It looks to me like in the month or so after they got the city’s money, you must’ve received at least a couple hundred thousand dollars in contributions linked to the ACCC. And that’s just what I’ve been able to track down so far.”

“What are you suggesting?” Serran said. She’d stopped walking right in the middle of the sidewalk, so Candace stopped too, looking the councilwoman in the eye.

“I’m not suggesting anything. But it is a fact that those two things happened in quick succession. You arranged for a lot of city money to go to the ACCC, and people connected to the ACCC then gave a lot of money to your reelection campaign.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Serran protested, but it sounded feeble to Candace. Serran looked thoroughly rattled; she looked, Candace thought, like somebody who’d just been caught. “What’s your agenda here?”

“I’m simply going where the story takes me,” Candace said. “I was just trying to get a handle on the redevelopment, which brought me to the ACCC. That organization appears to consist of a storefront, a telephone number, and a couple of desks. If they’ve made good use of a half million dollars in city funds, it’s not readily apparent. Perhaps that’s because a lot of that money just passed through them on its way to your reelection campaign.”

“Jesus,” Serran said, the councilwoman appearing so shaken that Candace found herself momentarily entertaining the possibility that she really hadn’t known. “To the best of my knowledge, all campaign contributions I’ve received are legitimate. It isn’t illegal for employees of a nonprofit that receives city funding to donate to a city politician.”

“There’s probably something illegal about it if they were simply laundering the city’s payments to the ACCC back to your campaign,” Candace said.

Serran flushed, but held her anger in check. “If they were contributing taxpayer money, I’ll certainly return it. But I don’t know that’s true.”

“Your position is that you had no idea that so many people connected to the ACCC were donating to you?”

“Maybe my brother was encouraging people,” Serran said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Candace wasn’t going to argue the point, though she didn’t find it convincing. “You want me not to focus on you, what you need to do is put the focus somewhere else.”

“And how would I do that?” Serran asked. They were still planted in the middle of the sidewalk, people giving them dirty looks as they walked by.

“You’re the council’s point person on public housing. I’m assuming Simon Roth wanted you on his side in terms of becoming the developer on Riis. Did somebody suggest to you setting up the ACCC, getting it established as the visible opposition to the transition to mixed-income; you could fund it with one hand and take the money for your campaign with the other? Was that your reward for supporting the project?”

“Is that what you want me to say?” Serran said, studying Candace carefully.

Candace realized she’d overplayed her hand. “I want you to tell me the truth,” she replied.

“What you just said would mean I was taking a bribe for my support of Riis.”

“I was speculating is all,” Candace said. “My point is just that if there’s a larger context you want to put this in, I’m listening.”

“Nobody bribed me to support the changes to Riis,” Serran said after a moment. “I believe in what’s happening there.”

Candace was irritated with herself for feeling disappointment; she shouldn’t have come into the interview with preconceptions that Serran would lead her to Simon Roth. “So how did your brother come to be working for the ACCC?”

“Can you keep Antonio out of it?” Serran pleaded, her voice strained. She looked on the verge of tears. “My brother’s not a public figure. I understand that I’m fair game, but my brother’s just a regular guy, trying to get through the day. He doesn’t need you destroying him on the front page of a newspaper.”

“I’m not out to destroy anyone,” Candace protested, a little taken aback. Anger in a subject she could deal with, but pleading was hard, and unexpected from a politician. “But you see how this looks from my angle on it.”

“I see how you can make it look if you choose to,” Serran replied.

Candace didn’t like the sound of that: it wasn’t a matter of her using insinuation to manufacture a scandal. “I think things usually look like what they actually are,” she said. “And this looks like taxpayer money being funneled into your campaign coffers. If you want to get back to me with a different story, by all means, but you have very little time.”

WHEN SHE
returned to the newsroom, Candace left a voice mail for Nugent, giving her editor a heads-up that she thought she was well on her way to breaking a significant story. Next she turned to David Markowitz, wanting to see if she could find anything indicating why he would be leading the charge on having Roth Properties transform Jacob Riis. She started by reading through some archived articles from her paper from when Markowitz had been elected speaker, reminding her of his privileged upbringing on the Upper East Side (not so different from her own); college at Princeton followed by law school at Yale, a handful of years as a staffer for Senator Schumer, then a couple of years with the state attorney general’s office before winning a council seat his first time in the race, followed by becoming speaker four years later. Term limits were going to force the current mayor out at the next election, and Markowitz was among the names rumored to be running.