Whitey's Payback (12 page)

The last time George McDonald saw Artie was on Valentine’s Day. That night, up in the office, Artie was in a bad way.

“He was slugging off a bottle of Stolichnaya,” McDonald remembers. “He was shooting pool, then he turns to me for no reason and says, ‘You know, me and my brother, we never liked you. In fact, get the fuck outta here.’

“I tried to ignore him, walked over and handed him a joint. Then I realize he’s gonna take a swing at me with the pool cue. I think,
Oh, Jesus, is it really gonna come to that?
So I duck. But I realize he’s so drunk he can’t stop his momentum. He’s gonna come around a second time. Finally, he caught himself. Ten minutes later, he’s curled up in the fetal position, snoring.”

Artie enjoyed the freedom to intoxicate himself regularly and misbehave partly because big brother Jim was the responsible one, the one who would keep the business running smoothly. He was also the one their friends would call with tales of Artie’s sometimes frightening wildness. By late last year, however, Jim seemed to have grown weary of his role as his brother’s keeper.

“One night, I was with Artie and Jim at a little party we had for a local boxer and a bunch of boxing writers,” recalls Bob Callahan, a Bay Area journalist and friend of the brothers. “And Artie was drunk and making an ass of himself, trying to pick a fight with this boxer. And I could see Jim was just heartbroken. You know, he never showed his emotions much. But he just looked at me and said, ‘God, it drives me nuts to see my brother like that. I built an empire with this guy, and now he’s like a Telegraph Avenue street babbler. He doesn’t understand how fucked up he is. He’s got to go into a hospital.’ And that’s when I knew Artie was really getting to him.”

In fact, Mitchell family discussions of Artie’s problem had often concluded with the thought that if he could only be coaxed away from the scene upstairs at the theater, he might finally seek medical help. It was under these pressures that the brothers had begun to dissolve their partnership. They had even gone so far as to begin the paperwork with Dennis Roberts, their attorney.

Jim also began looking for new challenges away from the theater. One outside endeavor he got involved with—sans Artie—was
War News
, an impromptu anti–Gulf War newspaper that their buddy Hinckle was to edit and publish. At significant cost to Cinema 7, their joint-business entity, Jim had agreed to bankroll the project. Staff members were amazed at the energy Jim was devoting to an enterprise that most considered a lark. When I spoke with Jim in mid-February, he seemed consumed by the
War News
project. He had even bought a defunct restaurant in North Beach to serve as headquarters for the paper.

“This is it,” he said dramatically as we downed a couple beers. “A lot of us are pushing fifty. This could be our last chance to do something worthwhile.”

A few days later, the publication of the first issue coincided with a series of heated phone conversations between Jim and Artie. As the afternoon wore on, Artie got increasingly angry over the fact that when it finally came time to terminate their twenty-two-year partnership, Jim had chosen to do it through Roberts, their attorney, rather than face-to-face. According to Julie Bajo, a former dancer at the theater and Artie’s last girlfriend, Artie threatened Jim over the phone that evening, suggesting that if he were not “treated fairly” in their business settlement, he would come over to Jim’s house and “blow away” Jim and his girlfriend.

Reportedly, Jim’s girlfriend took the threats seriously and suggested they call the police. Jim said no; he could handle it himself. Alone, he hopped into his late-model Ford Explorer and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge.

Only Jim Mitchell knows what thoughts raced through his mind as he drove for thirty minutes though Marin County along Highway 101. Nothing in his life up to that point suggested a man capable of killing anyone, much less a brother to whom he had been thoroughly devoted.

When he arrived in Corte Madera, Jim parked his car on the street behind his brother’s house. He slashed two tires on Artie’s van with a pocketknife. At approximately 10:15 p.m. he entered the house, where Artie and Julie slept in a back bedroom. Once inside the front door, Jim immediately opened fire with a .22 caliber rifle.

Artie and his girlfriend head the gunshots from their bed. Julie grabbed the telephone, crawled into a closet, and dialed 911. Artie shouted, “Who’s there?” and then headed—unarmed—into the hallway.

Then Jim fired, hitting Artie three times, in the stomach, arm, and right eye. The Marin County medical examiner said the fatal shot had come from nearly twenty feet away. The entire rampage took two minutes. A total of seven bullets had been fired.

Outside the house, a Corte Madera policeman who had been summoned by Julie’s call found Jim Mitchell trying to get away. He had “the most desperate look I’ve ever seen on a human being in my career,” the arresting officer later told the grand jury.

“Sure, we all knew they had differences and arguments about the business,” says Warren Hinckle, echoing the sentiments of many. “But there’s no way it was a planned act. If Jim had planned to kill Artie, he would have really planned it. He isn’t stupid. The brothers were Okies in a way. It’s possible Jim went out there with a gun to scare Artie. Fire a few shots in the house and try to get Artie to straighten up. It may not make sense to you or me, but it’s the logic they would have used. Okie logic.”

“So far,” insisted Marin County deputy district attorney Charles Cacciatore two weeks after the shooting, “the circumstantial evidence suggested cold-blooded fratricide.” The district attorney’s theory was that there might be some tie between the shooting and the financial aspect of their agreement to dissolve the partnership.

Jim Mitchell’s defense team, Dennis Roberts and New York lawyer Michael Kennedy, a longtime friend who has also represented Ivana Trump and Jean Harris, scoffed at that. Admitting that Jim had pulled the trigger, Kennedy told reporters outside a Marin County courtroom, “This was not a premeditated, malicious murder. It was at most a situational, aberrational, accidental killing.” Most of those who knew the brothers agree with Hinckle and Kennedy that the idea of Jim planning to kill Artie is preposterous. Still, considering that Jim got into his car armed with two guns and drove for thirty minutes before he begun shooting, the lawyer’s argument does little to console the brothers’ friends or solve the dark mystery that surrounds the event.

After the initial shock of the shooting, friends and associates immediately began to worry about Jim, who had been jailed. Word was out that he had gone into a deep depression and was possibly suicidal. Later, after he pleaded not guilty to the crime of having murdered his brother, he would be called a “serious threat to society” and denied bail.

At the memorial service for Artie, on a gray, windswept day, friends and family gathered at a funeral home in Antioch, the town of the brother’s birth. One recent exploit the brothers shared came to most minds: In March 1990, one year before the shooting, Artie and Jim were at Ocean Beach, on the city’s western shore, and while swimming Artie got caught up in a riptide and was carried out to sea. Paddling a surfboard through rough water, Jim and some lifeguards saved Artie from drowning.

Friends and family members spoke at the service, and they seemed to be mourning not just Artie but Jim, too. “I love Uncle Jim,” Artie’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Mariah, said. “I don’t blame him at all. No matter what, he’s my uncle and I love him.”

Artie and Jim’s cousin, the Reverend Bill Mitchell, presided over the ceremony and read a statement from their mother, Georgia Mae. “I know Jim loved Art,” it read. “He took care of him all their lives.”

POSTSCRIPT: At trial in 1993, Jim Mitchell admitted shooting Artie, but claimed that, as a result of his brother’s erratic behavior, he had “snapped” and was not fully cognizant of his actions. He was found guilty of “involuntary manslaughter” and sentenced to six years in prison. After serving less than three years at San Quentin prison, he was released in October 1997 and resumed his overseer role at the O’Farrell Theater.

There were three books published about the Mitchell brothers, and, in 2000, Showtime aired
Rated X
, a movie about the brothers directed by Emilio Estevez, with Estevez starring as Jim Mitchell and Charlie Sheen as his brother, Artie Mitchell.

On July 12, 2007, Jim Mitchell, age 63, died of a heart attack at his home in west Sonoma County.

On Eldridge Street, a sharp winter breeze rustles the debris that has accumulated alongside beat-up metal dumpsters and garbage cans. A few blocks to the west, in the heart of Chinatown, the restaurants and other commercial buildings have been spit-shined for the tourists. But here on Eldridge Street, the buildings are dilapidated, and long-standing restaurants and laundries are nearly indistinguishable from four- and five-story residential walk-ups.

Down the front steps and in the basement of one anonymous tenement is a sprawling, cluttered living quarter, once home to nearly two dozen Chinese immigrants. Further down a dark hallway, deep into the basement of the building, is a maze of low-ceilinged cubicles measuring perhaps five feet by ten feet. Each cubicle is furnished with only a homemade bunk bed haphazardly put together with unfinished wood. The rooms are dank and filthy. There are no windows. The lack of air is stifling.

Throughout the rooms and hallway there is evidence that the occupants have left in a hurry—scattered clothing, a calendar on the wall from a local Chinese restaurant, cigarettes left in ashtrays. In one cubicle, a pair of men’s underwear hangs neatly on a hanger perched on the back of a door.

Outside, around the corner on Hester Street, similar conditions prevail. Here, a seven-story walk-up was recently cleared out when an anonymous phone caller informed the fire department about the dwelling’s primitive conditions. Fire officials found each of the five floors occupied by some fifty people, all living in makeshift cubicles that were even more cramped than those on Eldridge Street.

Once again, the occupants—in this case “illegals” from Fujian Province in southern China—scattered quickly. Among the items left behind on the third floor was an unpaid phone bill totaling $1,351.84.

For every deserted Chinatown building like the ones on Eldridge and Hester Streets, there are perhaps a dozen more within a few blocks’ radius that are fully occupied. In most, the tenants are illegal aliens, ready to move fast when housing inspectors or the fire department pay an unexpected visit. Alone, with no understanding of the English language or the byways of American culture, they represent the undocumented Chinese, growing in vast numbers each year. Now, an estimated 30,000 illegal Chinese live in New York City. Traditionally, their presence has always been tolerated in the Chinese community; their willingness to work “off the books” has fueled the underground economy.

But these days the presence of the illegals has created a crisis in Chinatown, taxing community groups and bringing about troubling accusations of exploitation, both within the community and beyond. The squalid living conditions tell only half the story.

Like generations of Chinese immigrants who came before, most new illegals will find work in the restaurant and garment trades. They will work long, arduous hours for low wages, and they will do so without many of the benefits on which most Americans rely—worker’s compensation, overtime pay, medical insurance. But unlike those who came before, these undocumented aliens will spend years working before they accumulate anything even remotely resembling a savings.

That’s because many of them owe huge fees—anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000—to be paid to the smugglers who provided fake documents and secured their passage, usually through Central America and Mexico, sometimes through Canada. Part or all of the fee will have been fronted by a relative, an informal credit association, or the smugglers themselves. U.S. immigration officials estimate that since 1980, as many as 50,000 Chinese have been smuggled into the metropolitan area from Fujian Province alone.

Upon arrival in the United States, the smuggled aliens work to pay off their debt. The consequences for those who don’t pay are sometimes enormous.

In early January, police arrested thirteen people—all illegal aliens from Fujian Province—for kidnapping and torturing Kin Wah Fong, a thirty-year-old restaurant worker also from Fujian. Fong had refused to pay his smuggling debt. He was snatched from the restaurant where he worked and taken to an apartment in the Bronx, handcuffed to a bed for twelve hours, and beaten with a claw hammer. “They also put him on the phone with his family and he begged them to come up with the money,” Lieutenant Joseph Pollini of the New York Police Department’s Major Case Squad told
Newsday
. “He thought that at any moment they might terminate him.”

One week later, Pollini’s squad rescued four more Fujianese who had been kidnapped on Christmas Day and taken to an apartment near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There abductors demanded money still due from a $20,000 smuggling fee. For twelve days, until they were discovered, three of the illegal immigrants were handcuffed to a bed. The police found a fourth crammed into a small sink cabinet.

Despite the recent spate of kidnappings, the more common way for smuggled immigrants to pay off their debt is somewhat less sensational, though no less demeaning. It’s a payment described as “debt bondage” by the international Anti-Slavery Society, a 150-year-old human rights organization affiliated with the United Nations, and it amounts to a modern form of slavery.

“We’ve never seen anything like this in the Chinese community before,” says Pete Kwong, author of
The New Chinatown
and a professor at State University of New York at Old Westbury. “Living conditions are worse than ever. As for wages and working conditions, they’ve always been bad. But now it has become like slavery competing against slavery.”