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Authors: Anand Giridharadas

Tags: #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime

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BOOK: The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
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“I’m the first guy to take a guy that’s had a past that nobody else will give a break,” he said. It was charity-cum-hobby: “I take
personal enjoyment in bringing someone in who’s a real fuckup and trying to turn them around. And I’ve done that with so many people over the years, and there’s been a small handful—a
small
handful—who have come and been real fuckups, and I can look back and say, ‘Wow. The fucker really turned out to be somebody.’ ”

The reality, as Tom figured it, was that if you ran a body shop in the Dallas metroplex in this precarious new time—after the globalization came in and sucked jobs down the rat hole to China; after the affirmative action and political correctness took hold and you basically had to be a minority or woman to get ahead; after the wives and mothers went off to school and work and left the boys in the dust; after homes without fathers became the new normal for all Americans, not just one color or community—then the reality was that these were the kind of up-and-down, fate-battered men available to you. “I keep them around me because they make me look good,” Tom joked.

While driving home that afternoon for his refrigerator, Tom noticed a hurricane of activity around the Shell station at John West and Big Town in the suburb of Mesquite. It was the last pump on his regular route home and where he invariably stocked up on gas and Pall Malls. He knew the couple that ran the place—the Patels, from India, who had run it since the early 1990s—and he even recognized their children. He wondered what the squad cars and yellow tape and camera crews were about.

He was ruggedly handsome, with a face coated by gold stubble and a hard, athletic body that was slowly melting into middle age. A chunky three-stone ring fortified his left pinky. He had an inbuilt thousand-yard stare. He was a former pro race car driver; a door from one of his old cars hung in the body shop. He had come to Texas from Ohio in the 1980s. He liked to remind people that, unlike the screwballs who worked for him, he had gone to college—studied theology there. He was doing this work out of choice. It was part of his heroic self-conception. He also didn’t hesitate to tell people that his
friends often flattered him by saying he should run for some kind of public office.

Crossing the station again on his return trip, refrigerator in tow, Tom pulled over. It was just before three in the afternoon. He asked a Channel 23 reporter on the scene what was going on. A shooting, the reporter said. The owner’s dead.

The copper-wrapped bullet entered Vasudev Patel just above his left collarbone. It tore through the left side of his body—through his three uppermost ribs, then through his lung, then through three lower ribs, stopping just under the skin of his lower back. This suggests that he was crouching when it happened, bowing to his taker. It had happened earlier on that morning of October 4, around 7:30. The police found him lying on the floor in his own blood, perfectly still, beside the black pistol that hadn’t saved him and an off-the-hook phone receiver. He was forty-nine, short, and mustachioed, with black-and-white stubble and a single umbrella of a brow. The last words he heard, according to the surveillance tape, were “Open the register now, or I will blow your brains out.”

Tom was dazed: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, can’t believe that.’ Hopped back in my truck, went on.” A strange thought crept into his head shortly thereafter, though, and he couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t based on anything he knew firsthand, just some things he had heard … but really, what were the odds that one guy he randomly knew from one part of his life would kill another guy he randomly knew from another part of his life, even though he was sure they wouldn’t know each other? “I said, ‘No fucking way. Not even possible. It’d be a billion to one, zillion to one—who the hell? No way,’ ” Boston said. “Didn’t even fathom the connection. About an hour and a half had gone by, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. That’s when I called a buddy of mine who I had raced with.”

The buddy was a big-shot prosecutor downtown named Paul Macaluso. Tom told him that he was calling about the Shell station murder. He didn’t have a formal tip or anything like that. Just
a hunch that he wanted to get out of the way. It was more that he wanted to make sure it wasn’t his friend Mark Stroman than to suggest that it was. He and Mark didn’t keep in touch as much as before, but in recent weeks and months, he had heard second- and third-hand about Mark’s saying some things about Arabs and fooling with guns; Mo Phillips had said something about a string of robberies that Mark was maybe involved with. It hadn’t been all that alarming to Boston, since he had known Stroman to blabber about the darker peoples ever since they met in the mid-1990s. Boston had long ago convinced himself that Stroman was a wannabe and didn’t mean much by it, but now he wanted to make sure. It was the duty of the kind of responsible citizen he fancied himself to be.

The Shell murder wasn’t in Paul’s jurisdiction, but he offered to make some calls. Eventually he found out that they were processing a surveillance tape from the store.

Tom told his friend to call back if by chance the tape showed a guy with two hog thighs for arms, decorated all over with tattoos.

W
HEN TOM BOSTON
hired Mark Stroman in ’94 and took him under his wing, he offered the job with a condition: “If you’re going to be in a position where you’ve got to meet with people on a daily basis in the front office, you’re going to have to cover those up.” The “those” were Stroman’s rambling tattoos.

The body shop was in the sparse northern margins of the city, in a building typical of the neighborhood: a low, wide matchbox that clutched the ground and avoided having too many windows. Tom remembered Mark coming in off the street one day and filling out an application. He said he’d been working over at a body shop named The Body Shop. He’d started as a detailer over there and rose to the rank of manager. But he and a bunch of the guys weren’t happy with the place. There was no room for expansion, he said. He wanted
to run his own crew, but he’d take anything at this point. He was straightforward with Tom about his prison record, which he perhaps didn’t realize was a bonus for a boss who fancied himself a reformer. Mark was bubbly and energetic, with a drive that Tom had always found missing from the industry. He had smoldering red hair and energetic eyes and ruddy, protruding cheeks and an easy, goofy charisma, and those sprawling tattoos.

Although they ranked not far apart in the layers of Dallas society, Tom and Mark thought of themselves in starkly different terms. Tom saw himself as better than his surroundings—an educated man who owned a body shop by choice. Mark, by contrast, had few of Tom’s pretensions. Unlike Tom, he took pride in being a run-of-the-mill guy with run-of-the-mill ideas and tastes. There was a widely circulated manifesto of sorts, sometimes called the “Bikers Creed,” that Stroman liked and sent around to friends. He gave it the alternative title “American Me,” and it gave a flavor of his red-blooded self-conception.

The “proud American” described by the creed was a patriot who liked his cars, motorcycles, and ladies domestic. He relished a burger and fries like everyone else and drank regular coffee, not the fancy stuff that tasted like pancakes or fruit. He enjoyed the smell of rain, of bacon, and of auto fumes. He made no apologies for his love of naked women, in print or in person, and thought Hugh Hefner more of a revolutionary than Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln. He liked country music and hated child molesters. He continued to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” no matter how old he got. He confessed to being confused about sex at times but was far from sexually confused. He believed that most of us do the best we can with what we’re given and usually get what we deserve, and that just holding on could be as important as winning. He tended to trust his country more than his government. He thought America—its blood and culture and soul—ought to be preserved as it was, not perennially remade. He believed that if you didn’t like America, you were free to leave it.

As it happened, this bleeding heart of an ex-con called Stroman had come to Tom Boston at the right time. “Managers in body shops are usually good for about a year, and then they either get comfortable or burn out, or they want to go someplace else,” Tom said. “So I was getting rid of one at the time that was in that situation and was looking for guys—somebody to run underneath me.” What he needed in particular was a good estimator: a guy who could be personable when customers came in, who could type the estimate into the software form they used, who didn’t need it explained that insurance will reimburse one hour of labor for a dent the size of a quarter and four hours for something as big as your palm. When Stroman turned up, Tom sensed that he had found his guy. Mark was hungry and wanted to learn. Tom hired him and quickly discovered him to be “one of the most ambitious individuals that I have ever met,” a climber in a pit of screwy laterals.

Tom trained his new protégé by taking him on sales missions, which meant wining and dining guys at Thrifty and Alamo and the other rental agencies, so that they’d think of A Paint and Body Shop when customers brought back banged-up vehicles. It might be lunch or dinner at the Sheraton by the airport or after-hours at the titty bar. Tom would manage the selling while his twenty-five-year-old apprentice, dressed in a white shirt and slacks, sat beside him in silence. Soon Mark had the handle of it, though, and he began making sales calls on his own. He took over the rental business, driving out to the airport most days to do estimates and then, via walkie-talkie, coordinating pickup and delivery of the vehicles by his colleagues. It wasn’t simple work; you had to keep a lot of moving parts in your head at once. Stroman was making $500, $600 a week. Aside from a few red flags that Tom Boston somehow minimized at the time—like the time they lost the Dollar rental account because a company hotshot happened to be visiting Dallas, he happened to be black, and Mark happened to call him a “fucking nigger”—the boss was thrilled with his new hire.

Mark proved himself a natural leader of the shop’s ordinarily anarchic men. In the cavernous garage, the guys listened to shrieking guitar orgies all day while spray-painting and forklifting and undenting the exteriors of cars, pickups, and semis. They either lunched out or ordered in to the back room, which was routinely thick with cigarette smoke. Mark had, as promised, brought guys over from The Body Shop. He ran the front office for a while and coordinated separate day and night shifts, which allowed the shop to start running around the clock. Over time, Tom gathered that Mark had wanted to leave the other place because he was trying to shake his old heat-seeking ways. The life of boozing and girls and fine powders was OK for the screwup he’d been when he surfaced from prison in ’91, all of twenty-one and utterly alone; it was sustained by knowing the wrong guys at the last job. But now Mark had a wife and a daughter whom he bragged about to Tom. He wanted to show them that things could be different.

For a year or so, Mark earned steady checks, led a squad of men, and rose in Tom’s esteem. Then somehow he reverted. “Mark started going off in the other direction again,” Tom said. “He had money, and he was going out and partying with the guys—kind of leaving the old lady at home.” Tom observed that Mark handled his work fine during the day but was running with what he called “radical” people or “druggy troublemakers” after hours. Tom claimed to be shocked to learn that Stroman’s change of heart had been contagious among the staff, turning his body shop into a kind of drug den: “At that time, I didn’t really know. I was kind of green when it came to all that. I felt stupid after a while, because then I found out what everyone was doing at my place of employment. I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I didn’t know that shit was going on. There was ecstasy, there was acid, there was cocaine, there was meth. There was everything.

“Here I’m a fricking race car driver, so I’m lean and clean, and I didn’t stay into that loop,” Tom said. His emphasis could sound a bit like protesting too much: “I mean, smoking dope is one thing. At
noon, employees would smoke dope. It’s like cigarettes to me. I never really considered that a problem drug, so to speak.”

Tom remembered a turning point in Stroman’s tenure: the time one of his radical friends, a guy named Phillip with long red hair, shot himself or got shot—one way or another, the guy ended up slumped in a bathtub. With Phillip gone, Mark felt hollow and lost. Tom remembered him getting a new tattoo to commemorate his friend. He and some guys went down to the grave site, drank some beers and made memories. The incident stuck in Tom’s mind. “I guess that was the time that I really saw that he just started going off on a different path,” Tom said.

It was around this period, ’96 or so, that Mark’s wife, Shawna, walked out with their young daughter. It was said that she took much of the apartment with her. She’d been threatening it for a while and had warned him to straighten up. At the start, she hadn’t known what a drug head she’d taken on.

Mark couldn’t hide his devastation from Tom: he was “broke up about his wife, losing his kid—pretty broke up. Very depressed. Sad and depressed. Seemed like he didn’t give a shit about anything anymore.” Mark fell down a manhole of depression. At times, his sadness exploded into untamable anger. Like the time that restaurant cook came in with his truck. “Mark had brought the guy in, that’s how I met him,” Tom said. “Did the custom paint job. But apparently he was one of Mark’s drug connects at the time, and they got crossways.” Two weeks after Tom finished the job, he heard that Mark, still reeling from the breakup, had stuffed a fuel-soaked rag in the truck and “burned it to the ground.”

BOOK: The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
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