No Matter How Loud I Shout (19 page)

George's lawyer, Anna Noriega, pleads with Jones to find a reason to keep George in the juvenile system. Unlike a John Sloan, who had so many advantages in life before he became the leader of a botched armed robbery, George has never been much more than a bystander to crime, his lawyer argues. He has never physically hurt anyone. He was an unsophisticated, minor player in a foolish robbery planned and directed by an adult, she says, and he is consumed by remorse.

“He has been a victim of the system. It's too soon to give up on this minor. He wants to accept the consequences of his actions. He doesn't want to go home. He wants to do better. That's the mind-set we need more of in Juvenile Court. Let's give him that chance.”

The fact that he possessed a gun doesn't mean much anymore in Los Angeles, she adds. “If the crime statistics are to be believed, weapons are all too readily available to our children.”

George tugs at her, whispering urgently. “Tell her it was unloaded. I told the police that. It was unloaded. I couldn't have shot anyone.” But
Noriega sits down. She had made exactly the same pitch to Jones that John Sloan's lawyer made to Judge Dorn. But this was a different court, a different day.

The deputy DA on the case rises, looking uneasy. She is not an uncaring woman, but she represents a certain point of view in the system, one that supports the notion that punishment should fit the crime. She looks at George, ignores the knot in her stomach, and does her job. “Yes, everything that happened in his life may have been terrible,” she says. “But there comes a time when it's on him. . . . The boy did need help. He's had a terrible life, I'm not contesting that. But on that day, he made a personal choice. On that day, he showed criminal sophistication. He is responsible, not the system.
He
committed the crime, not the system. . . . Those people in that house were terrorized. There was a baby in that house when the bullets started flying. If that's not a grave offense, I don't know what is.”

It is a familiar argument, and a true one. Even George concedes that. “I made the choice, that's true,” he says later. “I was there. I went in. Nobody forced me: I chose trouble. But you got to understand. They were my friends. They were all I had. I never hurt anyone. I never wanted to hurt anyone. But you just don't walk away from your friends.”

It took a long time sitting in Juvenile Hall for George to articulate these thoughts. But in the courtroom, the words in his head are just a jumble. When the prosecutor sits down, he wants to yell out to Jewell Jones, to plead with her, to explain, to rail. He wants to tell her he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy—then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?

But he says none of these things. How could he? And what would it matter if he did? As the prosecutor sits down, he just stares downward at the tear-spattered table, the words lodged in his throat like bile. He begins to sob again, silently, with Kathy's warm, large hand gently rubbing his back.

Commissioner Jones is silent a moment. She is a compact woman in her mid-fifties, with tousled auburn hair and a fondness for bright lipstick, brighter nail polish, and large, dangling earrings that sway hypnotically as she speaks. She greets everyone who enters her court with a cheery hello rather than insisting on judicial decorum. All the chairs in her courtroom are labeled with block-lettered strips of manila paper—one chair for the defense attorney, one for the prosecutor, one for the “minor/defendant.” The parents get a pair of chairs, right next to the accused at the defense table—so they become part of the process, rather than being relegated to the audience, as in Dorn's court and most others in the juvenile system. A former probation officer, Jones is, unabashedly, what other judges refer to snidely as a “social worker on the bench.” She spent most of her judicial career in dependency court dealing with 300 kids, so she is well aware of the forces at work in George's short, sad life, and she hates sending such kids to adult court. But prosecutors have tried to cow her liberal leanings of late by “papering” her—filing legal papers to have her removed from cases whenever transfers to adult court were at stake. Blanket papering of Judge Dorn by public defenders on every type of case had paralyzed the undermanned juvenile system years earlier, eventually forcing Dorn out of Juvenile Court until his recent return. In Jones's case, the DA relented after a few months, but prosecutors still treat her like a kid on probation. Decisions vary wildly from one courtroom to the next in Juvenile Court, depending on the judge, the prosecutor, the defense counsel, even the size of the docket or the space available in some program or home. There is no consistency—only luck of the draw. Today, it just so happens that the pressure on Jewell Jones to take a hard line is enormous.

“This case does indeed come down to responsibility,” Jones says, picking up on the prosecutor's train of thought. “And the people with responsibility for George, myself included, did not make the right decisions for him. . . . God knows the facts of his life are horrendous. . . . God knows the system should have done better.”

It seems, then, that the commissioner is about to find George fit for Juvenile Court after all. The prosecutor tenses—perhaps her office gave up on papering Jones too soon. She picks up her pen, ready to jot down anything Jones says—for use on appeal. The defense attorney, meanwhile, leans forward in her seat. Even George looks up for a moment, his sobs stopping. Jones is clearly grappling with what she has to do, right there in open court, the social worker in her battling with that five-prong test that makes it so hard to give a kid like George a break.

Then the moment passes. Jones looks directly at Kathy Reveles and says, “I'm sorry.” The DA relaxes then, and Jones keeps her eyes averted from George, whose sobs have resumed. They are no longer quiet. His shoulders are heaving now in a mad shrug, his head resting on the scarred wood of the defense table. The DA hands him a tissue.

“Mistakes have been made,” Jones continues, “but, unfortunately, that's not enough. The law is very, very tough. If there was some way we could give credit to kids for the crappy things adults have done to them, there would be a lot of credit in that column for George. Unfortunately, I cannot do that.

“George is sweet, he's compelling, he's dear, and he begged me to send him to you,” Jones says, still looking directly at Reveles, wanting her to understand. “I did it, and I probably shouldn't have. Maybe I should have bitten the bullet and sent him to camp then. Maybe we wouldn't be here now if I had. Believe me, I lie awake at night wondering about things like that.

“I'm sorry,” she says again, and now she is looking at the sixteen-year-old boy before her. “I have no choice.” George must be tried as an adult, she rules.

“That is the order of the court,” Jones says wearily. It is the expected outcome. It is what the law requires. No one will try to appeal it. If Jewell Jones can't be convinced, no appeals court is going to give George a break. Yet the lawyers, clerks, probation officer and judge, even the DA, all look as if they'd just been punched in the stomach. It is one of those Juvenile Court cases: no one wins.

Of the four people involved in the failed robbery of Shorty's house, George has fared the worst. Bambi and JoJo, whose criminal records were no better or worse than George's, were under sixteen; she got straight probation, he went to a Probation Department camp in the mountains outside of LA for six months. The adult, Villa, entered a plea bargain and got an eight-year prison sentence. That leaves George for the District Attorney's adult office to hammer, to pursue as a gang member, a violent felon, a sixteen-year-old danger to society. In adult court, he will face a potential sentence of twenty-nine years to life in state prison if convicted of every possible charge against him.

As the bailiff escorts him from Jones's courtroom, George, eyes puffy and wet, remembers something and turns to his lawyer. He says, quietly and without a trace of irony, “Thanks for your time.”

Everyone else files from the courtroom without a word.

The surreally violent landscape of Los Angeles street gangs has been transformed this month as if by an earthquake. A deadly and notorious prison-based gang with tentacles throughout Southern California, the Mexican Mafia, has ordered something no cop or prosecutor or social worker has ever been able to muster:

A truce.

There will be no more brown-on-brown gangbanging, this gang of gangs has declared. No drive-bys, no hits, no contracts. Latino gangs constantly at war with one another, accounting for thousands of shootings and hundreds of deaths every year, would have to set aside their differences. It was time to work together, to build something greater, the prison gangsters had decided, and there would be no exceptions. Violations of the truce would be punished by death, quick and without appeal. And unlike the puny threats that emanate from the Juvenile Court, when the Mexican Mafia promises to come to your barrio and hunt you down, you take it seriously. Or you die.

When law enforcement catches wind of all this, skepticism runs high. There is some hope at first that this truce, however unexpected and rife with ulterior motives it may be, will still bring about a decrease in shootings and murders in Los Angeles (statistics later prove this to be true, at least temporarily).
But it soon becomes clear that the motivation behind the truce is not altruism: The purpose is to assemble an army.

With rival factions united and no longer letting one another's blood, a lucrative block of the drug trade currently controlled by black street gangs—the Crips and the Bloods—could be wrested away. Gangbanging against black gangs was to continue under the Mexican Mafia truce, and police intelligence uncovered a secondary directive to young gang members to stir up racial confrontations at schools, in Juvenile Hall, in the probation camps, and at CYA. The truce is a cover for a power struggle of epic proportions for the streets of LA.

A huge meeting has been called in Venice to hand down these directives. Delegates from every major Latino gang in the area are being dispatched to hear about the new order. In response, police patrols have been stepped up, with orders to use any pretense to stop and interrogate gang delegations. This is not precisely legal, but the gangbangers are in no position to assert their constitutional rights. It is part of the game.

On the day of this meeting, a pair of Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies stop a white Chevy Blazer headed toward Venice with four men and one woman inside, all of them dressed down in bandannas, oversized baggy pants, Pendleton shirts, and big, black engineer boots. The deputies make the passengers get out, and they saunter and slouch insolently, knowing they are untouchable (the delegates, expecting the police to be trawling the streets, have scrupulously avoided bringing guns or drugs to the meet, another Mexican Mafia instruction). The girl particularly impresses the police, so young, yet appearing as hardened as any
veterana,
coldly protesting being stopped and reluctantly giving her name as Sylvia Mercado. She barely looks sixteen, but something about the look on her face, the bandanna pulled tight down on her skull, the unfrightened look in her eyes, makes her stand out. The deputies have to let the car go—the driver and passengers had broken no laws—but in keeping with the unwritten policy to harass gang members whenever possible, the officers snap photos of the whole carload of them. All of the gang members pick up their shirts for the photographer, Sylvia included, displaying the large tattoos across their stomachs, announcing their membership in Tepa-13.

Back at the station, one of the patrol deputies mentions the incident to an officer who specializes in gang work. “We ran into this girl, she is without doubt the most hard-core gangster any of us has ever seen.” The patrolman pulls out the packet of Polaroids they had taken and shows the gang expert. “Look at this kid. Name's Sylvia Mercado.”

“That's not Sylvia Mercado,” the other cop says. “That's Carla James. I investigated her on a drive-by last year.”

The revelation that Carla is using an alias, dressing like a gangster, going to a major gang convention, and sporting a huge tattoo—in short, violating just about every condition of her probation—sets in motion a two-week hunt by Deputy Probation Officer Sharon Stegall, who finally nails the girl during one of Carla's infrequent visits home. When Carla showed up one morning, her mother quietly phoned Sharon while the girl showered and, a short time later, probation officer confronts probationer. Sharon forces Carla to display her tattoo, which provides instant legal grounds for arrest.

“You have the right to remain silent, do you understand that?” Sharon tells Carla as she snaps on the handcuffs. “You have the right to an attorney. And you have the right, apparently, to be stupid.”

“It's my body,” Carla says quietly. “I can wear my barrio if I want to.”

·  ·  ·

A few weeks later, I catch up with Carla in the Sylmar branch of Juvenile Hall, where she is waiting to learn what the Juvenile Court has in store for her next. She has assumed her usual position of responsibility in her unit, a trustee who helps the staff maintain order, distribute meals, assign tasks, break up fights. Outwardly repentant, she insists she wishes to clean up her act, and has even filed the necessary paperwork to have her tattoo surgically removed, though somehow she never gets around to actually scheduling the operation. She says she wants a private doctor to do it, not some “county hospital butcher.”