The Hustle (22 page)

When other players on our team talked about what they remembered from playing together, everyone brought up, in one form or another, Myran “acting crazy.” Usually that just meant Myran talking, capping on other guys, and running his mouth off, most of the time making everyone laugh through the sheer outrageousness of what he had to say. Some days, Myran seemed totally good-natured; on others, there was an edge. But someone, like Will, Tyrell, or Coach McClain, always kept him under control. I linked Myran in my mind to Richard Pryor—I had a tape of
Live on the Sunset Strip
I listened to repeatedly—whom Myran resembled in his ability to do imitations and say things no one else would.

In jail, Myran often makes me laugh in spite of the serious trouble he faces. Most of his jokes are at the expense of his defense lawyer. He tells me how one day the lawyer came in to talk to him and Myran, who says he spends most of his time in jail studying the Bible, asked, “Do you believe Jesus Christ manifested himself in the flesh?”

Myran takes on the persona of a middle-aged white lawyer, pursing his lips and furrowing his brow. “ ‘I'm not going to discuss my religious beliefs with you!' ” Myran says in a nasal voice.

Myran obviously enjoys performing, seeming happy if he can get a reaction. Just like when we were kids, his stories are so out there it's hard not to laugh.

One day he makes a whole routine out of a recent court appearance, playing the roles of the judge, the prosecutor, his defense lawyer, and the guards. In his effort to have his lawyer removed from his case, Myran told the judge that the attorney was making sexual advances at him. Myran mimics his lawyer looking angry and the judge shaking his head and asking, “What do you mean? He's obviously completely hetero.”

In his reenactment, Myran gestures around the courtroom. “Oh, I see how it is. You, you, and you”—he points at the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense lawyer—“are all in this together!” He tells me he looked back at the guards, who were rolling their eyes and looking at him like he was crazy. Next, Myran imitates his lawyer talking with him after the session in court: “ ‘You better apologize to me for that little stunt you just pulled or I'm not going to do anything for your little ass!' ”

Myran laughs when he tells the story and, though I try to stop myself, I can't help a chuckle. Of course, it doesn't seem like a good idea to antagonize the people who will decide his fate. I only later realize that, in Myran's situation, messing with the system might make some sense. He has no money, no power, and hardly any information about his legal situation besides what the defense lawyer chooses to tell him. He doesn't really have control of his fate, or much to lose.

One day, when we are speaking through the phones, Myran becomes wistful. He tells me that our conversations have gotten him to thinking about the old days. “I was just remembering team picture day, you know, just hanging out and having your picture taken, things like that,” he says. “Back when we were kids, there were angels watching over us. When you get older, it's not like that anymore.”

I know that Myran is talking, literally, about angels, but when he says it, I have different associations. My mind goes to people like Willie McClain and Randy Finley, men who were there as a backstop in the days we played sports. Behind them, of course, if you were lucky, there were parents, relatives, teachers, and other adults who kept an eye out to make sure you were headed in the right direction. They were practical angels—forces in the background helping you stay on track. You took them for granted. Sitting across from Myran, I begin to think about what it would be like if you were on your own.

In at least one sense, Myran has a lot of company. In 1980, some 500,000 people were incarcerated in prisons and jails in the United States. That number has grown to 2.3 million. Of those, 40 percent are black and 20 percent are Hispanic. The United States leads the world in imprisonment, with 762 out of every 100,000 people behind bars (second-place Russia lags behind with 635). The rise in incarceration has been largely fueled by laws imposing “mandatory minimums” for drug offenses, many of which were enacted in the heat of the “war on drugs” in the 1980s; about 1 in 4 inmates is now in on drug charges, compared to 1 in 10 in 1983. Although African Americans and whites use illegal drugs at about the same rates, blacks make up some 53 percent of people going to prison for drug crimes despite making up only 12 percent of the overall population. Much of this comes from a focus on busting street-level drug sales while dealing done in private residences and off the streets is pursued much less aggressively. Another way of putting it is that one out of every 131 Americans is locked up, but, unless you are poor and black, there's a good chance you don't know any of them.

The increase in the number of prisoners has resulted in what some call the “prison-industrial complex,” an economy worth tens of billions of dollars a year. There is a lot of money to be made from jailing people—someone has to provide the bulletproof glass, blastproof doors, closed-circuit TV systems, handcuffs, uniforms, telecom services, and thousands of other products specially designed for jails and prisons. The Corrections Corporation of America, one of several private companies operating prisons for profit, runs sixty-four correctional facilities and detention centers across the country and employs seventeen thousand people. In rural America, where prisons are now almost always located, the facilities offer badly needed sources of employment. The other side of the equation is made up of prisoners like Myran, a vast army of people with little education; possible mental health issues; negligible job skills; and, after their incarcerations, felony criminal records.

Though there are various proposals for the decriminalization or legalization of drugs floating around in policy circles—former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper is one of the most vocal national advocates of legalization—it would take a massive change in policy and a redirection of public spending to shift the priority from jailing people like Myran toward treating them. The system of mass incarceration that has developed over the past three decades has its own logic: When you put people in prison, you know exactly what you are getting. Treatment is hard—people backslide and otherwise screw up, and no politician wants to be accused of funneling money to the “undeserving” and “irresponsible.” Imprisonment takes of a whole class of people who, even if they were clean, would then have substantial problems finding work that provided a living wage, and places them out of sight. The people who suffer the most under the current system are those with the least ability to press for change.

…

“Oh, that's really sad,” Sean O'Donnell says when I tell him that Myran is locked up on drug charges. “It's a bad rut, once you're in the system. For some people the system—I mean by ‘system' prison or jail—actually gives them some stability, gives them some predictability. But too many folks like Myran turn up in the system and you see them all the time.”

As a King County prosecutor, Sean occupies the opposite end of the system as Myran, sometimes literally—he tells me that he's occasionally gone out with undercover cops to observe “buy-bust” operations in exactly the same area where Myran was arrested. “It helps you to know what's going on,” he says. “You see these guys down on Second or Third Avenue and you sit up on a roof with binoculars looking down, you're listening to communication from the undercover officers doing the buying. It's sort of pathetic—twenty dollars' worth of rock cocaine. It's pathetic but at the same time it's its own little structure, its own little business model. You got the guy with the drugs, you got the buyer, you got the cluck in the middle who facilitates the transaction.”

We are speaking in Sean's office, only two blocks from where Myran is locked up. It's a Sunday afternoon, and Sean is doing some last-minute preparation for a trial—the police have broken up a prostitution ring run by a gang based out of southwest Seattle. Five of the accused pimps have already taken an offer and pled guilty. The sixth, a nineteen-year-old who goes by the nickname “Cash Money,” decided to go to trial. It starts in the morning.

A long desk runs along one wall of Sean's office. It holds two computers—a desktop and a laptop—and a bobblehead of Washington State's former Republican U.S. senator Slade Gorton, for whom Sean worked after graduating from Georgetown. A framed poster of Winston Churchill in a pinstripe suit, clenching a cigar in his mouth and brandishing a tommy gun, hangs on the wall facing the entrance. Next to the door is a bulletin board with snippets of jokey e-mail exchanges and pictures of Sean's wife and two young sons. File folders full of documents pertaining to the upcoming trial are spread on the floor.

Sean roots through a stack of papers and pulls out some photos that detectives pulled off the Internet. One is of Cash Money and several friends posing for a picture while throwing gang signs. Another features Cash Money and a buddy posing in front of a black sedan while the lower part of a woman's leg, her foot in high heels, extends from the open door of the car. Another is simply of a coffee table with a red bandanna and a fan of $20 bills across the top.

“They called their gang the ‘West Side Mobb,' with two
b
's,” Sean says. “Take a guess what ‘Mobb' stands for.” When I come up blank, Sean tells me, in a voice conveying both amusement and disgust, “Money Over Broke Bitches.”

At six-foot-eight, Sean has stayed trim. His light brown hair, cut short, has receded. He answers my questions carefully, considering each one, answering directly and then stopping, as one would expect of an experienced lawyer. When he makes a point that he wants to drive home, he widens his eyes and smiles.

After a few years of working for Slade Gorton in Washington, D.C., Sean came back to Seattle to take a job as a spokesman for Boeing. He went to law school at night, and an internship in the prosecutor's office led to a job upon graduation. Sean is one of 170 prosecutors in the office. Together, they process a combined twenty-five thousand misdemeanor, felony, and juvenile cases every year. King County, which includes all of Seattle as well as large portions of the city's eastern and southern suburbs, is the country's thirteenth-most-populous county, with nearly 2 million people. The office has an annual budget of $56 million.

Only a few months after he started on the job, in the spring of 2002, Sean was assigned to the prosecution team working on the case of Gary Ridgway, otherwise known as the Green River Killer, one of the most prolific serial murderers in American history. “It was the most important case my office has ever prosecuted and probably ever will,” Sean says. “It was the chance of a lifetime, doing what I do as a prosecutor. But it's probably all downhill from here.”

Beginning in 1982, Ridgway, then in his early thirties, murdered dozens of women—forty-eight of his killings have been confirmed, though he's claimed more than sixty. Most were teenagers, and almost all were street prostitutes Ridgway had picked up for “dates.” He strangled his victims, either in his home or in the covered bed of his red pickup truck. He then dumped them in and around the Green River, south of Seattle. He was only arrested in November 2001. For thirty years he had worked painting Kenworth semitrucks in the suburbs south of Seattle.

In April 2003, Ridgway agreed to a plea bargain: In exchange for life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, he would tell the prosecutors and the cops everything he could remember about the murders. The investigative team set up an office just south of downtown Seattle. What they didn't share with the public was that Ridgway himself was going to live there—he occupied a converted supply closet, which had the door removed and two police officers with automatic rifles posted outside around the clock. When prosecutors arrived at the office, Ridgway, in a chipper voice, would call out and greet them.

“You see him every day at work, he knows your name, he shares your bathroom, he's walking around with a SWAT team, he's got belly chains on, his little red jumper,” says Sean, who—in contrast to his normal cool—can become visibly agitated when speaking about Ridgway. “He is confessing to the most horrible acts imaginable, and so not only do you have this that you're absorbing, but you can't share it with anyone for nine months or so. We were in complete secrecy. Complete radio silence. I couldn't tell my parents, friends in the office, no one else what I knew, that he was down living in a supply closet in my office, confessing to horrible acts of murder and desecration.

“I'm still exhausted,” Sean says. “Just talking about it, I'm exhausted. Talking to us for ten hours a day. To listen to that asshole's whiny, discombobulated voice.”

For several months, the prosecutors and police investigators drove Ridgway around south King County, revisiting the sites where the killer had dumped the bodies and then sometimes returned to have sex with the corpses. The teams left the office at five in the morning, to limit the possibility of the media finding out that they were taking Ridgway out on “field trips.” Those excursions consisted of prosecutors accompanying forensic investigators as they combed over twenty-year-old crime scenes, Sean says, “sifting through buckets and buckets of mud and gravel looking for a human tooth.”

Prostitutes were easy targets. Ridgway could pick them up in his truck, and he knew that since most drifted from place to place—and many had lost touch with their families after running away from abusive homes—police would not put as much effort into looking for them if they disappeared. His victims were white, black, and Asian. “I'd rather have white, but black was fine,” Ridgway told the investigators. “It's just … just garbage. Somethin' to screw and kill her and dump her.”

One day, when I was speaking to Tyrell's father, Doug Johnson, he began talking about the crack era in the 1980s and then brought up the Green River Killer. “Those were bad times,” he said. “You couldn't even turn on the news without seeing a girl you knew from the neighborhood turning up dead. You didn't know who it was going to be next.”