A Prayer for the City (55 page)

And then there was Tony. He had been in prison for sixteen years for a murder that in today’s climate would have merited little more than a shrug. But unless some miracle happened, he was destined to be in prison the rest of his life because that was his sentence. In the state of Pennsylvania there was no automatic parole eligibility for a life sentence, according to a
spokesman for the state board of pardons. He needed a new trial, which seemed a remote possibility given the number of appeals that had already been rejected, or he needed a commutation of his sentence by the governor, which would make him eligible for parole.

For sixteen years, Fifi had been writing to governors of the state, asking them to grant her wish. For sixteen years, she had gathered money together and hired lawyers to handle appeals, some of whom had done things and some of whom, as far as she could tell, hadn’t done a damn thing except take her money. For sixteen years, she had thought about why this had happened to her and her son and how this had happened and how, on the basis of faith, it would right itself.

During those same sixteen years, Tony had had time to examine carefully the pages of his own life. He knew what had happened to his three boys, how one was dead and the other two constantly in the skirts of trouble, and as he told his mother, “I missed my children’s life. That’s probably why they’re in jail.” He knew what it was like to hear through the prison grapevine that his son had died, shot down in the streets, and not be able to do anything about it except hope that the prison officials would at least let him view the casket. He knew what it was like to sit in his eight-foot by twelve-foot cell in B block, equipped with its bed and cabinet and radiator and sink and toilet and combination TV–radio–cassette player, and ponder the likelihood that regardless of what he hoped and prayed for and regardless of what his mother hoped and prayed for, this was where he was going to die.

He had pondered other things in prison, and as he weighed their consequences, and thought about what he had seen over those endless years, he felt himself gripped by something, his own edges of fate and mortality. His mother insisted that he had been unfairly convicted, and a journalist met with him to hear the story of what had happened that night of August 28, 1976, the night that had landed him in prison for the rest of his life. In his appeals and briefs and testimony in court, he had insisted that he had been the victim of a vendetta against him. The journalist assumed that this was the story he would tell again now, tell it so well based on all those briefs he had painstakingly written and all that fantasy he had fed himself all these years. Tony talked about the first lawyer he had, who told him he could get him ten to twenty on a guilty plea and how offended he was by that, how much it pissed him off, this lawyer telling him to cop a plea without even hearing the facts. The journalist assumed that the interview would
be a continued litany of outrage and woe, of how the system had screwed him, of how his lawyers had screwed him, of how he was in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed.

“But I did,” said Tony Mazzccua in a prison interview room, with its hard wooden chairs and peeling walls. For a brief second, the din outside in the visiting room went silent.

“I did.”

After sixteen years, he had decided to tell a different story of what happened that night, a story that resembled the truth of what happened, particularly when matched with the facts that were already available in the public record. Not even his mother knew what had gone on that night. She had asked him once at the very beginning whether he had done the shooting, and he had said no, and that had been enough for her, as it would be for any mother trying so desperately to save her son. She had held bake sales and parties to raise money for his appeals, and the tragedy of what he would say now was that if he had told that story to a lawyer sixteen years ago, he might not have been where he was now, in prison for the rest of his life. He would have taken the plea of ten to twenty if it had been offered. If he had still insisted on going to trial, a lawyer could have argued a case of self-defense and mitigating circumstances that would not have gotten him off but might have resulted in a conviction on manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. There wouldn’t have been any guarantee, but by not telling the truth on the witness stand, one thing was certain: he had
guaranteed
himself life imprisonment. His contradictory story was utterly transparent. And he knew that.

The facts of what happened that night, as Tony Mazzccua told them in the prison interview room, were straightforward and plausible, unlike the story he had told the jury. Every Friday and Saturday night, Tony and his brother-in-law George Butts would play cards, and they were at a local speakeasy buying some wine when they saw a man they both hated. He was referred to in the court records only as Danny, although Tony of course knew his full name. The man had had a relationship with Tony’s sister, and when she broke the relationship off, Danny and George Butts got into a fight, and Butts had his neck so severely slashed that it required nearly 175 stitches. Tony and Butts had been looking for Danny, and the tension was obvious when they saw him at the speakeasy.

“We wanted to get this guy,” said Tony Mazzccua in the prison interview room. His intent, he said, was to hurt him, not kill him, just as Danny had hurt his brother-in-law. Maybe shoot him in the leg or maybe even in
the butt because it would be comical and humiliating and something he would remember every time he sat down. Tony was also depending on what he called the law of the ghetto. The year was 1976, and the Philadelphia police force, under the direction of Mayor Frank Rizzo, had made clear that its only interest in blacks in the city was to beat the bejesus out of them to extract confessions. Police were a rare sight in the neighborhood, and the underlying assumption was that as long as you took care of what you needed to take care of in the neighborhood—shot someone, stabbed someone, beat someone—no one in authority gave a rat’s ass.

Tony got a shotgun. Then he and George Butts went looking for Danny and found him in the doorway of an apartment building. “We thought we were going to surprise him,” said Tony in the prison interview room, “and we got surprised.” Danny had the door open a crack, and Tony, as he later related in court, said he saw him with a gun. So he walked past a little bit. He wheeled and fired, and simultaneously a burst of shots came toward Tony from the apartment and also from the corner. As Tony fired, he saw another man near the apartment doorway. His name was Bernard Redding.

Tony said he had no idea whom he had shot or not shot, but he did know one thing: he had been shot right below the ankle. In the time it took for George Butts to throw Tony into a car, his shoe had filled with blood. He was seriously wounded. He went to his mother’s house, and it was then that he made up a story about being with her and getting accosted and then shot by five kids walking down the street. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, and the next day he was visited by police officers and placed under arrest for the murder of Bernard Redding.

His mother pleaded with him to listen to the lawyer and take a plea. But headstrong and uncomfortable with the string of attorneys he ended up with, he decided instead to try to beat the system in a jury trial, and he told a story that made no sense, and he was eviscerated in masterly fashion by the prosecution. He said that Danny had shot him for no reason. When asked why he hadn’t filed a complaint against Danny, he referred to the law of the ghetto. Despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary, he claimed he was unarmed, an innocent bystander. The story was only contradicted further by testimony indicating that he originally had told the police he had been shot by the five hoodlums. The thrust of his testimony was totally self-incriminating, a textbook example of why defendants, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, should never get anywhere near the witness stand.

The absolute waste of what happened that August night was apparent even to the judge, who had no choice under the law but to sentence Tony
Mazzccua to life. Common Pleas Judge Theodore Smith noted that Tony had no criminal record to speak of. He noted that he had an IQ of 115, which would have qualified him for officer candidate school in World War II. He urged him to get his GED and maybe take some college courses as well once he got into the swing of things. He told him to get some psychotherapy, learn to think things out instead of acting so impulsively. Then he wished him “good luck,” as if he were going on an exotic voyage, and sent him to prison.

It could be strenuously argued that Tony Mazzccua had more than paid for what he had done. He had spent sixteen years in prison for a crime that in today’s world of urban violence would have merited two paragraphs in the newspapers. On one of the days that Fifi came to visit him, a man was sentenced to eight to twenty years for beating his one-year-old son to death because the child hadn’t learned to walk yet and the man had grown tired of him “acting like a baby.” In another case the same day, a couple was sentenced to four to ten years for nearly starving their seven-month-old son to death. In the sad spectrum of violence, was Tony Mazzccua’s crime anywhere near as egregious as these? And didn’t his admission of the crime after all these years reveal something important about his soul and his character?

In the late 1970s, when Tony Mazzccua was sentenced to life, it was not uncommon for the governor, Democrat Milton Shapp, to commute life sentences to sentences of life with the eligibility of parole. He did it 254 times. But after that, such commutations became rarer and rarer. The next governor, Republican Richard Thornburgh, granted only seven. The state’s governor in 1994, Democrat Robert Casey, had granted twenty-four. If Republican congressman Tom Ridge, with conservative ideas about the criminal justice system, succeeded Casey in January of 1995, as many thought he would, there was a likelihood that no life sentences would be commuted during the next term.

In the absence of an answer by the Lord to Fifi’s prayers, the cycle of Tony’s life seemed likely to continue. For the rest of his mother’s life, Tony would see her amid the din and the greasy smell of a prison visiting room. For the rest of his life, he would communicate with his children by phone or letter or visits once they got out of jail. He kept up with them as best he could, and when he communicated with them, he apologized for what he was. He held himself up as an example of what their lives must not become—lives of potential ruined by the millisecond of gratification that
comes from violence. But the cycle of life was too firmly in place. His wife turned to crack, and his sons ran wild, and the middle one, Keith, had died in a shoot-out at seventeen. And it seemed only fitting that Tony should learn intimate details of Keith’s death not from Fifi or other family members but from the lips of someone he had never laid eyes on before.

But since they were doing time together—the father whose son had been killed and the young man who had killed him—meeting each other was just a matter of working out cell-block logistics.

Tony was on A block when he got word through the prison grapevine that Terrell Moore was in B block, serving his sentence for killing Keith. Tony heard that he was scared, and Tony himself didn’t know what he would do if they met. He could feel the old hostility rising as he thought about this “little motherfucker” who had killed his son, but he also knew that he had to see him, so he passed the word through a go-between.

“You tell this young brother I don’t care what he do, where he go, he’s gonna have to see me. He’s gonna have to see me now, or he’s gonna have to see me later.”

Tony was at the end of the sanitation shop, where inmates pick up supplies, when there was a knock on the door. He had never seen his son’s killer before, but he knew it was he as soon as he saw him. Other inmates cleared away, and Tony and Terrell Moore spoke privately.

“Why’d you shoot my son?” were the first words he asked him.

Moore tried to explain what happened, how there had been a fight and then a shoot-out in which Moore himself had been injured in the leg and shot in the chest but didn’t die because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

“What about my daughter?” Tony wanted to know. “How could you have also shot my daughter, my daughter Renee. My God, she was only eleven.”

He said he hadn’t.

What did he mean he hadn’t? Then who the hell had?

Your son, Moore gently told him. Your own son. As he was falling backward to his death, his upper body filled with bullets, one of the guns he was carrying had gone off, and the bullet hit her.

“You telling me my son shot my daughter?”

“Yes, Mr. Mazzccua.”

Tony had never heard that before, and it was shocking to hear it now from this man who was half his age. He felt a burst of anger. But then a
sense of calm came over him. And when he looked at Terrell Moore, he saw someone who was scared and frightened and much like the young man he had been when he had gone to prison so long ago. And Tony was thankful for the way he felt.

He asked him whether he had any children, and he said that he did, a little daughter, and Tony asked him, “Don’t you want to be with your daughter?” He said yes, and Tony shared with him how old his children were when he left the streets to come to prison and the devastating impact of that on all of them. He felt no hostility anymore toward the young man in front of him. He felt sympathy and a sense of paternalism, and he urged him to break the cycle. “I’m doing life for what I did,” said Tony. “You got another chance to make something out of your life. You got a little girl out there, you got a woman who cares about you.”

And after that, after they spoke for those forty minutes, he never saw him again.

Tony went back to the routine of his cell block, and the killer of his son went back to the routine of his.

At least once a month and sometimes more, if she could arrange the transportation, Fifi went to visit Tony. The first few years she felt apprehensive all the way up and then cried all the way back. But after a while the rhythm of acceptance set in, and the trip became an automatic part of her life, just like taking care of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Up Henry Avenue and then over to Ridge Avenue until it turned into Ridge Pike. Then into the gray-water town of Graterford. When she had the time, she stopped at the Stroehmann factory to get some bread on the cheap, and when her parents were alive and visiting with her, they always went to the smorgasbord at the Collegeville Inn. Sometimes, when they had taken Germantown Pike instead of Ridge, her father would proudly show her the tracks of the railroad that he had built.