The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (3 page)

S
EVERAL MONTHS LATER
, Lisa Hoffman, of the Iron Mountain
Daily News
, wrote a series of articles recalling the teenagers Johnson had killed. Tony Spigarelli, an outgoing young man from Iron Mountain who played soccer and hoped to study aeronautics someday, had been three weeks away from entering college.
Tiffany Pohlson, who was from Vulcan, about ten miles from Iron Mountain, had been due to start her senior year in high school in the fall; her goal was to become a surgical technician. Bryan Mort, who dreamed of opening an auto shop with his brothers someday, had dropped out of school at seventeen but, after working for a while, had gone back to get his diploma. On the summer day when he happened to go to the train bridge to swim, he was two weeks away from becoming the first member of his family to go to college. The shock caused in the community by the murders of three innocent teenagers—the mixture of disbelief and grief and rage—was intensified by the contrast between the horrific act and the tranquillity of the setting. Almost a year later, Terri Bianco-Spigarelli, as if still finding the events at the train bridge hard to believe, said of her son, “He was just going swimming.”

That statement was made during Scott Johnson’s sentencing hearing, this spring. Johnson had never expressed any interest in an insanity defense—what he called, in a letter from jail to his mother, “playing the coo-coo card.” In one interview with a court-appointed psychologist, he said, “You don’t have to be crazy to do what I did, just angry.” The specialists who examined him agreed. They were unanimous in believing that he did not lack the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of his actions. In March, 2009, Johnson had changed his plea from not guilty to nolo contendere, which has the effect of a guilty plea, and the circuit-court judge, Tim Duket, had scheduled a hearing at which victims as well as Johnson would have an opportunity to speak before a sentence was imposed. No matter what was said, Johnson was expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the most severe penalty the state of Wisconsin has to offer.

For the family of Bryan Mort, that wasn’t enough. Through a petition signed by local residents and the support of their congressman, the Morts pressed for a federal prosecution of Scott Johnson. Under a federal law passed after 9/11, acts of violence on railroad property—which is where Mort was, since the railroad’s right-of-way extends fifty feet on either side of the train bridge—can be prosecuted as acts of terrorism, with sentences that include the death penalty. Four days before the sentencing hearing, friends and family of Bryan Mort gathered at the Iron Mountain cemetery on what would have been his twentieth birthday. In the Iron Mountain
Daily News
coverage of the event, the quote from Bryan’s father was succinct: “The Bible says ‘an eye for an eye.’”

T
HE SENTENCING HEARING
was held in the county seat of Marinette County, a city that is also called Marinette, about an hour and a half from the scene of the crimes. The audience sat in a large, panelled room that is ordinarily used for meetings of the county board. In the earlier days of the courthouse, before an annex was built, it had been used for trials—“Equal Justice for All” is still carved over the door—and it had been temporarily changed back into a courtroom to accommodate those who had a personal stake in the outcome of
Wisconsin v. Scott J. Johnson
. Except for lawyers, just about everyone was dressed informally, even those who were there to speak. Two people were wearing T-shirts that said “Spigarelli Excavating.” Five women in one row, including Bryan Mort’s mother, Sylvia, were wearing T-shirts that said on the back “Bryan W. Mort 1989–2008” and on the front, under Bryan’s picture, “Always in our hearts.” Judge Duket began by reminding people that they were, in fact, in a courtroom, temporary or not, and that outbursts would not be tolerated. To back that up, more than a dozen officers from the sheriff’s office were stationed around the room. Before the judge began the proceedings, another employee of Marinette County—a woman responsible for the care of crime victims and their families—had handed out boxes of Kleenex and packages of hard candy.

Nine months had passed since the events at the train bridge, but there was no expectation that the anger felt by the families of those killed by Johnson had dissipated. From the release of documents like police interviews, it had become clear that he was not inclined to express remorse or to beg their forgiveness. (“What do other guys in my position tell ’em? They’re sorry? What does that do for them?”) In fact, in a jailhouse interview with the Associated Press, Johnson had said that being upset over the death of the teenagers was like being upset over spilled milk.

Given the anger at Johnson, who sat at the defense table in an orange prison jumpsuit, it was not surprising that a lot of what was said in the Marinette County courtroom seemed designed to wound him rather than to describe the loss and suffering that his crimes had caused. Tiffany Pohlson’s uncle called him a “useless piece of garbage.” Johnson was regularly reminded that he had failed at everything he’d ever attempted—including even his horrific crime, since he’d apparently intended to kill even more people than he had managed to kill. David Spigarelli, Tony’s father, concluded his statement by saying that prison would give Johnson “a chance to finally achieve something for the first time in his life, when his cellmate, Bubba, says ‘bend over, I’m ready to lay this pipe.’ He will finally have achieved his master plumber’s status…. Me and Tony will be laughing our asses off, Scott Johnson.” Most of what Terri Bianco-Spigarelli said, through tears, seemed designed to memorialize her son rather than to excoriate the defendant, but she said that Johnson would burn in hell, because God forgives only the remorseful. “I never hated anybody,” she said. “I’m a people lover. I get along with everybody. I hate him, and I could kill him.”

Scott Johnson read a prepared speech. At the start, he said that the points he would make were based on a maxim that he’d devised when he was twelve: “The truth of the matter at hand is that the truth doesn’t count anymore. It is the quality of the lie that endures.” He had any number of complaints to make about police-interrogation quotes being taken out of context or psychologists being biased or the press getting the facts wrong, particularly about whether he had planned the shooting in advance. He reiterated his belief that no purpose would be served by saying that he was sorry for what he’d done. (“If I showed a hint of remorse, what would people say then? ‘Oh, he’s lying. Oh, he’s faking.’”) He said what he did regret was that he had to live among people who were liars, gullible, arrogant, and brainwashed. The audience controlled itself through most of the speech, but, when Johnson implied that money donated to the victims’ families for funeral expenses exceeded the costs of the funerals, there was shouting in the courtroom. Sylvia Mort stood up and, before the judge could react, said, “Let me out of here!” As she stormed out, she said, loudly enough to be heard throughout the room, “Fuckin’ piece of shit!” When order had been restored, Johnson finished his remarks, closing by quoting two verses of the Louis Armstrong standard “What a Wonderful World.”

“These families have you pegged perfectly,” Judge Duket said to Johnson, when it came time to impose a sentence. He portrayed the defendant as someone who blamed others for his constant failures, who thought that he was smarter than everyone else, who craved attention, and who responded to his own problems by murdering innocent children. In addition to the harm Johnson had done to his victims and their families, the judge said, he’d brought great suffering to his own family. Johnson’s mother had said, “The pain is so bad I wanted to die. This is like a living death,” and the daughter he professed to love, now twelve, was, according to Theresa Johnson, terrified that Scott Johnson would get out of jail and come to Ohio to kill her. “If ever there was a constellation of criminal activities that called out for maximum consecutive sentences, this would be the case,” Judge Duket said. What the prosecutor had asked for, after enumerating the cases of murder, attempted murder, and sexual assault, was three life sentences without the possibility of parole, to be served consecutively, plus two hundred and ninety-five years—a sentence that sounded as if it required something beyond longevity, in the direction of reincarnation. On the subject of sentences that can obviously not be fulfilled, Judge Duket quoted a Wisconsin Court of Appeals decision holding that such sentences can, among other things, “properly express the community’s outrage.” The judge imposed everything that the prosecutor had asked for. Outside the courtroom, Sylvia Mort, who vowed to keep pursuing the death penalty, said of the sentence, “It’s a beginning.”

N
EAR WHERE THE PATH
through the woods to the train bridge begins, there is now a memorial to the three teenagers killed in what the inscription calls “a senseless act of violence.” A small section of ground has been bricked over, and on it two benches face each other, on either side of a rectangular granite monument that has pictures of Tony Spigarelli and Tiffany Pohlson and Bryan Mort on it. The monument is also inscribed with the first verse of a William Cowper hymn, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” Other than the memorial, the train-bridge swimming hole is unchanged from the time the three teenagers pictured on the monument went there to swim a year ago. It remains idyllic—a scene that could be a calendar painting depicting lazy summer days in some bucolic patch of the upper Midwest.

The young woman who was assaulted by Scott Johnson had mentioned the beauty of the spot when, to the surprise of everyone involved, she showed up at the sentencing hearing to deliver a victim’s statement about how Johnson had betrayed her with an act that still haunts her every day. The train bridge was also mentioned in the speech that Johnson made before he was sentenced. “The train bridge has been washed in the blood that I spilled,” he said. “The beauty of that place has been cursed by my actions. My memorial is made of iron and concrete.”

C
ALVIN
T
RILLIN
has been a staff writer for
The New Yorker
since 1963. For fifteen years, he did a
New Yorker
series called “U.S. Journal”—a three-thousand-word article from somewhere in the United States every three weeks. He is the author of twenty-six books, including
Killings
and
American Stories.

Coda

During the years I traveled around the country for a series of articles I was doing for
The New Yorker
, my wife used to joke that I’d go anywhere a transcript was available. There was a kernel of truth in that. Magazine reporters are, of course, attracted to stories that have the potential for, say, a strong narrative line or moments of great drama—such as the awful drama at the train bridge on that lovely summer day. But they are also attracted by the availability of raw material that can help tell the story—an official report, a trove of documents, or, yes, a transcript.

I learned of the incidents at the train bridge shortly before Scott Johnson’s trial was scheduled to begin, when I read in a brief newspaper item that he had changed his plea from guilty to nolo contendere. The sort of crime Scott Johnson had committed normally ends in the death of the perpetrator—killed by the police or by his own hand. Because Johnson survived, psychologist reports and police interrogations would be available.

He and the families of his victims would be speaking at his sentencing hearing. As it turned out, the judge permitted tape recorders at the sentencing hearing—meaning that I was able to leave Wisconsin carrying, among other things, the rough equivalent of a transcript.

FROM
Seattle Weekly

S
MOOTH IS ON THE PHONE
. “I’ve been charging $750,” he tells his customer one day in 2007. “You know, I just give you a deal…my prices [between] me and you don’t be the same prices to everybody else.”

Jersey, his customer, listens. “I’ve been getting $250 a quarter [ounce],” Smooth says over his cell. “Two a quarter, you know.” Jersey, a police informant, agrees to meet up, handing the phone back to a Seattle vice detective.

And Smooth is busted for drugs again.

In a word, busted is the life story of Stacy Earl Stith, street name Smooth. He’s been caught a lot, often stumbling into the hands of police. In 1996, when a prostitute at Seventh and Bell asked what he was doing, Smooth said, “Selling, man!”—and pulled a cache of rocks from his pants pocket. “I sell to everyone!” The undercover police hooker beckoned her backup team, and Smooth went to jail.

In 2006, plainclothes cops were nabbing another dealer when Smooth and his girlfriend made two drug sales practically in front of them in City Hall Park, next to the King County Courthouse, where he’d already been convicted of nine felonies. He was arrested and went to jail only hours after he had been released from prison that same day.

According to court records and interviews, catching him wasn’t complicated. He was mostly a street dealer—a cop’s easy quota—distributing his stones, as he calls crack cocaine, hand to hand from Belltown to SoDo or by vehicle to home-delivery customers in the ’burbs. At times he stowed the tiny bags of stones in his car’s or van’s engine compartment, from where, an informant told police, the bags would occasionally drop onto the street, requiring Smooth to hop out and run back through traffic to retrieve them. Other times he’d spread the stash around: In a 2004 bust, cops found more than 15 grams of marijuana separated into 16 different bags in Smooth’s pants pocket, 27 grams of marijuana and nine grams of crack in the trunk of his vehicle, 11 grams of crack in bags tucked into his waistband, and 49 grams of bagged crack in his underwear.

A 230-pound black man, his braided hair often dangling from under a sideways ball cap, Smooth has been relentlessly, if ineptly, selling and using drugs in Seattle for more than 25 years. Along the way, he’s compiled a criminal record that’s something of a record itself, authorities say: Adding up misdemeanors and felonies since the mid-1980s, he has 112 convictions. Not arrests, convictions: 94 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, revolving through the doors of juvenile court to municipal court to district court to superior court to federal court, from traffic and theft offenses and weapons and assault charges to burglary and crack sales. His first day in court was at age 13; his most recent, in January, at age 39.

“I have never seen anyone with this number of convictions around here,” says 12-year King County deputy prosecutor Andy Colasurdo, who couldn’t think of another violator who even came close. Some had a similar number of felonies, but “most of them only had 20 to 40 misdemeanors.”

For all those convictions, Smooth has served an aggregate 14 years behind bars in local jails and state prisons, by Colasurdo’s count. He had been sentenced to considerably more time, but his terms typically ran concurrently and he was usually released early. So he’s had to work fast, scoring those 112 convictions in just 11 years of freedom. That’s an average of 10 guilty verdicts per year.

“He,” by the way, could mean Stacy Stith—or James Howard or Cal Beaver or Eric Smith, among others. Smooth has used 18 aliases, five dates of birth, and four Social Security numbers. It’s possible, given that older court documents are often incomplete and crimes could be recorded under some of those aliases, Smooth’s record may be even longer.

On the street, beat cops would recognize him on sight and assume he was in violation of something—parole, work release, curfew, loitering; most likely there was an arrest warrant somewhere with his name on it. (Court records show he had been sought on 52 warrants over two decades for a variety of crimes and failures to appear in court.)

Smooth was a sometimes hapless lawbreaker. One early morning call brought officers to a smashed display window at the downtown Bon Marché, where they found him standing nearby with a pile of stolen clothes at his feet, department store tags flapping in the wind. But he was no comic figure. In 1999, he sped away from a police stop and careened around Central District corners in his ’85 Buick. The chase ended when he slid sideways to a stop, tossed a loaded 40-caliber Glock out a window, and bailed. An officer pinned him down, but needed backup help to get him into handcuffs. Smooth was later convicted of being an armed felon.

He also has six convictions for resisting or obstructing police officers. In South King County in 2004, holding $1,300 in powder and rock cocaine, Smooth had to be Tasered four times before two cops could cuff him. Court records describe him as “a high-risk offender who presents a significant threat to the community.”

Smooth has been found guilty so often that the word may be meaningless to him. Once he’d reached 50 convictions—as he did by age 19, for one of 31 theft offenses in his career—what was another 50?

Colasurdo, who is on loan as a special assistant prosecutor in gun and drug cases for the office of U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan in Seattle, thinks Smooth “is either incapable of changing his criminal ways or unwilling to do so.” So today the law has finally come down on Smooth. Except it landed so hard his defenders think the system might have gone too far the other way. Seattle attorney John Crowley, who has represented Smooth, says, “He has a dope problem. Like many of these guys when they’re young, he couldn’t figure out how to market himself, and found the best thing he could market was drugs.”

Another attorney, public defender Lynn Hartfield, thinks some compassion is in order. Smooth’s criminal career, she says, is “a testament as much to his being a victim of crack cocaine as it is to his being a perpetrator of its harms.”

But after 112 convictions, can Smooth possibly make a case for leniency?

S
TACY
S
TITH WAS FIVE DAYS SHY
of his 13th birthday when he was first arrested, for third-degree theft. He was convicted a week later in King County Juvenile Court, but given no time. Smooth was convicted of the same crime 15 more times in the following three years, with sentences ranging from a few days to a few months.

He later informed a drug counselor that he began using marijuana at age 12, and has continued to smoke it through adulthood. He also started drinking as a juvenile, and as an adult could down a fifth of liquor daily. Additionally, Smooth first used cocaine at age 16, a habit that grew to more than 10 rocks a day, he said.

Smooth has told counselors, attorneys, and judges that he just can’t beat his addiction, and that’s what led to his life of crime, which includes convictions for felony theft, forgery, and burglary. Court records show he’s done time in juvenile hall for possession of marijuana and cocaine, and has 11 felony convictions for possession or distribution of crack cocaine, not counting two charges that were dropped.

He was at least occasionally drugged up when he broke the law. In 2004, a Seattle police officer stopped Smooth in a ’72 Pontiac for erratic driving and displaying license plates that had expired four years earlier. He was driving without a license, something he’d already been convicted of 20 times, along with a DUI and a dozen other traffic offenses. He was worried the cop might see a baggie of rocks on his floorboard, so he confessed to having just smoked weed. Really, he said, “if I had stones, I would have run or something.” The cop found the drugs anyway.

Born in St. Louis and raised in the Seattle area, Smooth dropped out of high school at 15. His mother and father divorced when he was young, and his mom remarried and ran a day care. Family members couldn’t be reached, but prosecutor Colasurdo says Smooth “had parents at home who loved him, provided for him, and served as good role models.”

Smooth worked at times in the construction industry, but court records state his drug use had a “negative impact on his employment…such as being late for work, diminished productivity, absences, and using [drugs] at work, and termination.”

For much of his adult life, when not in jail, prison, or a halfway house, Smooth has lived in apartments in South King County or has been homeless. He recently suffered a minor heart attack from cocaine use, he told a drug counselor, who noted in his report that Smooth “enjoys playing basketball, fishing, and dancing with his girlfriend,” who was also busted for drugs.

Smooth married a Tacoma woman in 1998. She did not respond to phone calls for this story, but court papers show they have a child and she filed for divorce in 2004. It did not seem a happy union. Smooth, she said in her divorce filing, “resided in the penitentiary for the duration of the marriage.”

He was out for a while in 2004. That September—the month he and his wife officially separated—Smooth was arrested for possession of crack and marijuana, and was booked and released. Twelve days later he was arrested for selling crack, and again booked and released. Less than a month later he was arrested again for possession. He awaited trial in jail, and in 2005 was convicted of all three charges.

Smooth faced a maximum of 120 months. He got 24, and ultimately did 12, gaining his release on Sept. 2, 2006. “Amazingly,” Colasurdo says in court papers, “Stith was arrested on drug charges that same day after officers observed him selling drugs in a Seattle park [the City Hall Park incident]. Then, after being booked and released on that charge, he was arrested 11 days later, on September 13, 2006, after he was found in possession of both crack cocaine and marijuana.”

Smooth had repeat opportunities to escape his drug cycle, but always wound up in court again, records show. He was first told by a judge 20 years ago to undergo drug-diversion counseling, an order repeated with every drug conviction thereafter. Awaiting trial on the pair of 2006 busts, he asked again for treatment.

“I’ve been to prison several times,” he told a drug counselor, and received some drug counseling while going cold turkey. “I always come home and use drugs and alcohol. I’ve been a drug addict for 25 years. Please, for once, can you give me a chance to get sober and stay clean by going through with the recommendation [for drug counseling]? Thank you.”

He was allowed to enroll as an outpatient at a Renton treatment center in early 2007. After attending 25 two-hour sessions, completing about a third of an 18-month program, he bailed.

Then came the call from Jersey.

O
N
J
UNE
29, 2007, still facing his two latest King County drug felonies, Smooth met with Jersey, the police informant, at a First Hill parking lot and sold him an ounce of crack for $700. Seattle police detectives watched and took pictures.

In July, outside a convenience store in Tukwila, Smooth sold Jersey another ounce, also under surveillance. A week later, after another buy was set up, plainclothes cops moved in on Smooth’s Dodge Caravan at a Denny’s parking lot in Tukwila. They found 11 ounces of crack and three ounces of powder cocaine hidden in the engine compartment. Another quarter-ounce rock was discovered under the gas cap. Police began typing up four charges—two for possession and two for distribution of cocaine—potentially his 109th through 112th convictions.

Prosecutor Colasurdo isn’t sure how, exactly, the case came to him. He’s been on assignment from the county to the U.S. Attorney’s Office since 2004, and coordinates with local agencies on extraordinary cases. “It was SPD detectives or someone from the local task force, or maybe the [King County] prosecutor” who were concerned about the amount of drugs Smooth was selling, says Colasurdo. Only later did the breadth of his record emerge.

“Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to find a defendant who has been convicted of 10-plus felony offenses, or even close to 20 if juvenile felonies are included,” says Colasurdo. “What really distinguished Stith from others was the total amount of convictions.”

Statutes allow five-year sentences for cocaine convictions in state court, but Smooth’s offender level—a scoring system, based on past offenses, used to determine sentence ranges—mandated lower and concurrent terms, and judges are reluctant to hand down exceptional sentences to drug users. “We tried to get the maximum or near the maximum on him,” says Ian Goodhew, deputy chief of staff to King County Prosecutor Dan Satter-berg. “And yet Mr. Stith just kept committing crimes.” What’s more, his mostly nonviolent felonies also did not qualify him for a “three strikes” prosecution. “I don’t see what else we could have done to lock him up longer,” Goodhew says.

But under federal law, as a career offender Smooth could be prosecuted not only for his recent offenses, but in a sense for all of them. And he easily passed the test—a convicted federal offender needs only two prior felonies to receive an enhanced sentence as a career criminal.

“The fact that he has continued to re-offend so quickly after his last two stints in prison is extremely concerning, as is the fact that he has re-offended every time he has been released from jail and while charges have been pending,” wrote Colasurdo and fellow prosecutor Kit Dimke in court papers. “Not once did he repay the mercy shown to him by the prosecutors and/or the courts with law-abiding behavior. Each time he fell back into his old patterns, each time he made the same bad decisions, and each time he re-offended. Clearly, these prior sentences have not had the desired effect on him or his behavior. A sentence of 360 months surely will.”

That’s what prosecutors sought: 30 years in federal prison. If Smooth was convicted and survived incarceration, he would be almost 70 upon release.

P
ROSECUTORS OFFERED
S
MOOTH
a plea deal, but he chose to go to trial, claiming the informant, whom he met in his drug-counseling classes, talked him into getting back into drugs before entrapping him into selling again.

The feds conceded that Jersey made other drug deals with Smooth out of the circle of their sting. Smooth claimed that it was Jersey who was the drug dealer, and that the informant wasn’t prosecuted for a separate felony drug deal. But a federal jury found it hard to overlook the nearly one pound of crack and powder cocaine in Smooth’s van. And by using the entrapment defense, Smooth opened the door for prosecutors to introduce his prior bad acts to show the jury he was predisposed to sell drugs. The June 2008 trial lasted three days, swiftly followed by a guilty verdict.