Ghettoside (31 page)

He presented Starks with true information, but he wove in some lies, too. For example, he told Starks the police had found his DNA on the gun. This was something that almost never happened in real life at that time. But it happened so much on TV that Skaggs had found it to be a useful deception. He wanted to convince Starks that the evidence against him was insurmountable.

The lies were just decorative touches, though. For Skaggs actually did, by now, have plenty of information, with or without statements from Starks. He was telling the truth again when, more than an hour into the interrogation, he told Starks sternly, “It doesn’t matter what you say. Meaning I don’t really have to get any statement from you at all.” Already, Skaggs had enough evidence to seek murder charges, and his chief purpose in this meeting with Starks was to see whether Starks could present evidence to exonerate himself. Skaggs needed to be able to say “I did my job as a policeman and as a human, to give a man a chance,” he said later. He made it clear to Starks that his window was closing. “Today is the last thing I have to do on this case. When you and I part”—Skaggs emitted a whistle—“done. Done. Go on to the next one.” He snapped his fingers. Again, this was the truth.

Starks responded mostly with silences—one stretched for fifteen
seconds—and deep sighs. Skaggs paused periodically to let him talk. When he didn’t, Skaggs fell back on his usual meandering chatter, seeking an angle that might provoke Starks into loquaciousness. At one point, Skaggs unintentionally echoed Wally Tennelle in a revealing way: he told Starks he had always been able to look defendants in the face in court and had no fear of their anger. “Why? ’Cause all’s I do is go in there and say what happened,” Skaggs said. His words were almost identical to those Tennelle used when explaining why he was not afraid to run into people he’d arrested. Both men believed deeply in the straightforwardness of their craft. For all the deception that went into interrogations, they saw their work as a simple effort at truth seeking: they presented the facts as best they could ascertain them, turned them over to a court, and let go of the results. Skaggs was once asked to turn over the records of an investigation to authorities in Mexico who had extradited his suspect. He later described this as one of the worst moments of his career—being forced to cede control of the facts he had gathered to a foreign court that he neither understood nor trusted. For Skaggs, the American system was his safety net.

He never expressed resentment of Miranda or any other constraint of constitutional due process. He was used to the restraints and drew comfort from the knowledge that once he finished, his work would be painstakingly vetted by the defense, judge, and jury. “Just say what happened” was another of La Barbera’s credos from the old Southeast homicide squad. Skaggs and Tennelle believed so wholeheartedly in this description of their role as law enforcement officers that they did not see how anyone could be mad at them. This was part of the emotional equipment of men capable of scorching earth.

Skaggs even went so far as to offer Starks a pretty good defense: he suggested that a question remained about whether he knew what Davis planned to do. Did he “just jump out of the car and do his own thing?” he asked.

Assigning intent to Davis alone would have been a potentially effective legal strategy for Starks, although it went against some evidence in
the case. There was, for example, Midkiff’s account of being yanked out of the driver’s seat for the getaway so Starks could take the wheel. But Starks did not take the bait. “I’m overwhelmed. I don’t have nothing to say,” he said.

Skaggs worked every angle. He exhorted Starks to look him in the eye. “How come you don’t look someone in the eyes when they’re talking to you?”

“I don’t know,” Starks answered. “My dad—he says the same thing.” It was the only exchange between them that day that revealed anything intimate.

The rest of the time, Starks spoke in monosyllables or short phrases. He gave no hint of weakening in the way Skaggs wanted him to. Starks suggested he couldn’t be expected to remember events Skaggs mentioned because he had been “jumped” in 2002 and “my memory’s been messed up ever since.” He said people were lying about him. He said, “I weren’t nowhere near it.”

At last, Skaggs prodded Starks for “your side of the story,” one last time.

Starks took his time, then answered slowly:

“I told you my side.
There is no side
. I wasn’t there. I didn’t do nothing,” he said.

Skaggs exhaled in a long breath. It was over.

On February 19, 2008, the Los Angeles district attorney filed charges against Devin Davis and Derrick Starks in the murder of Bryant Tennelle.

Skaggs had barely spoken to Wally Tennelle through the whole course of these events.

He had made one mortifying visit to the Tennelle family early on. This was when he was still paired with Bernal. A supervisor from the bureau had come, too. Skaggs couldn’t stand working this way. In Southeast, he had always sought quiet and intimate encounters with
grieving families, but this felt like a conference of diplomatic envoys, and the conversation was stiff and formal. “We went three deep!” he exclaimed later in disgust.

But at some point, as the case broke open and Skaggs became sure it would be solved, he picked up the phone. For the first time, he spoke one-on-one to the RHD colleague he barely knew. He told Tennelle what had happened. Tennelle did not ask any questions. Skaggs said arrests were pending.

Then, as Skaggs had done so many times before, he fell silent and waited, listening as Tennelle wept at the other end of the line.

MUTUAL COMBAT

Sam Marullo stared at Sal La Barbera in disbelief.

It was the summer of 2008, several months after charges were filed in the Tennelle case. The trial was still more than a year away, and Skaggs’s initial victory was fast fading from view.

Marullo was in T-shirt and jeans, having returned from a long day’s stakeout. He stood in the new Southeast detectives’ “pod” of cubicles, which was now part of South Bureau Criminal Gang Homicide Group, Gannon’s combined South Bureau detective office at the Seventy-seventh Street station. In the LAPD, “innovation” often meant reverting to previous practice, and this new organizational structure was essentially a reprise of the old South Bureau Homicide unit that had launched Skaggs’s career.

Marullo adhered to Skaggs’s rule of putting every hour to use, including evenings. He had been about to leave in pursuit of a witness when La Barbera stopped him and told him to go home instead; he could not approve the overtime. La Barbera had just learned his overtime budget was to be cut by 57 percent.

In any world that made sense, homicide detectives would have been compensated with set salaries like other professional white-collar workers.

But in the anachronistic world of American policing, they were bluecollar workers paid by the hour, and prohibited by union rules from unpaid work after hours. So Marullo was effectively grounded. With all the other impediments, it seemed one more insult. Marullo was wavering.

Pat Gannon had hoped Skaggs’s success on the Tennelle case would inspire the many young apprentices in his new consolidated “group.” It had worked to some extent.
One detective coined a noun in the aftermath of the arrests—a “John Skaggs Special.” It meant a certain kind of investigation: aggressive, relentless, field-focused.

But new difficulties had already cropped up.

In the new office in the Seventy-seventh Street station, one-way windows to the interrogation rooms had been installed backward: suspects could observe police, but not the reverse; the windows had to be covered. The office phones didn’t work. There weren’t enough sedans. Supervisors were secretly hoarding “salvage” cars. One of the office secretaries had gone rogue. She had been ordered to ration office supplies but was secretly handing out pens and notepads anyway.

Gannon had moved on, and the group’s new commander, Kyle Jackson, formerly of RHD, had never been a detective. His introduction had provoked dismayed murmurs. Jackson was on his last command before retirement and had a persnickety reputation. He believed, he said, in “dotting
i
’s and crossing
t
’s.” Tall and thin with a long oval face, Jackson had introduced himself to the detectives by lecturing them on racial and gender bias, a gold bracelet flashing under his sleeve. As he talked, a bright patch of sunlight on the roll call tables faded and the detectives’ faces grew progressively glummer.

Then word came that John Skaggs was leaving. Skaggs had been transferred to head up the new homicide unit in a new police station under construction north of the Ten.

Skaggs had been struggling since his promotion to D-3. His slot in Southwest had been temporary. He and Barling had been assigned to train new young Seventy-seventh Street detectives. But Skaggs itched to get back to investigating. The Tennelle case had boosted his visibility, and an ambitious new lieutenant in the new Olympic Division wanted
him to head a very small unit by himself. Skaggs sensed an opportunity to take a more hands-on approach to cases. He felt, like Tennelle years before, that he was running out of good ghettoside options.

It left South Bureau, as always, short of master craftsmen. “That no-good rotten bastard Skaggs,” Prideaux called him jokingly behind his back. He was miffed. Skaggs hadn’t even bothered to tell Prideaux about the transfer. Prideaux tried to enlist Barling in his resentment. But Barling, ever loyal to Skaggs, just stared back at him blankly.

La Barbera remained in charge of Southeast but now worked under Prideaux. He hated reining in Sam Marullo, who, with Kouri as his partner, had continued to live up to his moniker “Li’l Skaggs.” But the overtime restrictions were no joke. An economic recession had slammed an unprepared nation in late 2008, and local governments were reeling. La Barbera worried he’d use up his allotment for the week, then be swamped with new homicides. Now he told Marullo his interview would have to wait.

Marullo stared. La Barbera, he realized, was serious.

Marullo was enough like Skaggs and Tennelle not to appear angry. He had the good detective’s gift of an unflappable demeanor. But he made it clear what he thought. This witness was key to solving the killing of a thirty-two-year-old black man: without him, the case might not be cleared. La Barbera remained firm. “Fine!” Marullo said at length, and spun away.

With Kouri later, Marullo fumed. What was the department thinking? Why didn’t people care? Marullo was discovering anew, in 2008, what Wally Tennelle, Sal La Barbera, and John Skaggs had discovered years before: that, relative to the challenge, to work ghettoside homicide was to dwell in the weakest outpost of the criminal justice system.

Overtime reductions were, of course, a pay cut for homicide detectives. But it was the practical difficulties that stung Marullo, who might have earned overtime doing something else.

For ghettoside homicide detectives, the ability to work odd hours was essential. It was absurd to assume witnesses could be corralled via office-hours appointments made by phone. The whole job was ambushing
people who sought to avoid cops—barging in on them, pleading with them, going back to plead again.

Aware that detectives were looking for her, one witness on a Southeast case left a decoy note on her door:
We’ll be right back, we went to pay the gas bill
, it said. The note remained for days, growing soggy in the rain. At length, the detectives camped at her door until it opened and she grudgingly confessed to the ruse.

So when Prideaux had first announced the overtime reductions at the weekly meeting,
sheeshes
erupted from the benches. “We have seven hundred open cases!” Dave Garrido had protested. Chris Barling had cited the math: based on current caseloads, and assuming court procedures intervening, detectives would be left with only sixteen hours to work each case, he said.

Ever mindful of morale, La Barbera had tried to soften the blow by making light of the restrictions. One day, he wrote on the whiteboard: “Top Ten OT Reduction Strategies: (1) Drive faster (2) Wear running shoes” et cetera. But Marullo couldn’t laugh.

Skaggs, Barling, and La Barbera were used to it—they had been tilting at windmills for years. But Marullo was growing increasingly frustrated. Although he had solved many cases, his few unsolveds ate at him.

In April, a black man named Nye Daniels, a John Skaggs witness in his early years at Southeast, had been murdered. Marullo had been assigned the case but had no leads. He had formed a bond with the mother of Daniels’s two children, who was now raising them alone. The children’s photos were taped to his computer terminal, their small faces gazing at him day after day.

As Skaggs had taught him, Marullo always gave his personal cell phone number to victims’ family members, and sometimes even to the parents of suspects. For months now, he had been getting calls from the mother of Henry Henderson, an eighteen-year-old killed next to Barbara Pritchett’s house. Pritchett had been startled by the gunshots. Venturing out, she had recoiled at the sight of the teenager’s empty shoes. Henderson’s mother would call Marullo drunk and distraught. In June, the trial of her son’s alleged killer had ended in a hung jury.