The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (32 page)

So those are Marvin Harrison's half-brothers. In more recent years, Marvin Harrison's cousin Lonnie Harrison, age 41, has been convicted of robbery, drug possession, and possessing an illegal firearm. And in 2000, another cousin, Isa Muhammad, was murdered in the aftermath of an eight-man shoot-out that also wounded a 10-year-old girl. The police described the murder as a revenge killing.

None of this proves, of course, that Marvin Harrison shot Dwight Dixon and Robert Nixon. It just shows that he has a strikingly violent family history. It also suggests that Harrison's NFL career is an even greater triumph than commonly understood. He was able, for all those years, to reject the logic that claimed the life of his cousin and the freedom of his father and his half-brothers—the same street logic that allows only one sort of response to a challenge like Pop's.

After the shooting, Pop got a ride to Lankenau Hospital, five miles west of Chuckie's Garage. The hospital staff called the cops, as they're required to do when they see shooting victims. The cops arrived and asked Pop for his name.

Malik Tucker, he said. It was one of his many aliases: Demetrius Bryant, Swight Dixon, Donte Jones, Dwight M. Mobely.

The cops asked how he'd been shot.

Pop said that he'd been robbed at 62nd and Lebanon—again, several miles west of the shooting.

Soon, the cops at the hospital got a call from the cops back at 25th and Thompson. A red Toyota Tundra full of bullet holes was being towed there. The person who had called the tow truck was Pop's girlfriend.

The cops now knew that Pop was lying. They told him he'd better come clean. Pop grinned and told them to fuck off. The mood around Pop's hospital bed was relaxed, jovial; the cops had a professional appreciation for the purity of Pop's bullshit. "You know who shot me," Pop said, toying with them.

Why didn't Pop blurt out the truth? He might have been scared. To be a witness in Philadelphia is no small thing, even if you're a 300-pound drug dealer. In December the
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported that 13 witnesses or relatives of witnesses have been murdered in the city since 2001.

But there are two other theories. The most likely one is that Pop lied to the cops because he had shot back at Harrison with a gun of his own. If this was true, then Pop was potentially on the hook for an attempted murder charge, same as Harrison. No gun of Pop's has ever been found, but casings were recovered from three types of guns: a five-seven, a nine-millimeter, and a .40-caliber. And two fired nine-millimeter casings were found in the cab of Pop's truck.

The second theory is that Pop lied to the cops simply because he didn't want them to get in the way. He was planning to resolve the dispute himself, in his own fashion.

 

The police kept Pop in custody overnight to give him time to cool off and rethink his story. The next day, Wednesday, they began gathering evidence. Acting on a tip, they plugged Harrison's name and DOB into a state database of gun licenses. A long list of guns came up, including two Fabrique Nationale (FN) five-seven pistols. The cops already knew that some of the casings recovered at the scene came from this type of gun.

The five-seven has been described in newspapers and on ESPN as "custom-made" and "a collector's weapon." Wrong. A five-seven is a lightweight, low-recoil, high-capacity, semiautomatic tactical pistol made by a Belgian arms manufacturer. NATO uses it for peacekeeping missions, and the ersatz jihadist Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly used it to massacre 13 at Fort Hood. So it's not unique, but it's hardly your average urban drug dealer's piece; the Philly officer who recovered the casings, which have a distinctively long and skinny shape, had never seen anything like them before.

Later that day, about a dozen plainclothes and uniformed officers, including several guys from the state attorney general's Gun Violence Task Force, drove en masse to Chuckie's Garage in search of the five-seven. Harrison seemed to know they were coming. He was lounging in a cheap aluminum beach chair before a full-size cardboard cutout of himself. He looked serene. A detective asked him if he was carrying a gun. Yes, he said. He swung his right foot up onto a pool table—he had bruised his left knee the previous season and had trouble bending over—and the detective reached down and removed, from an ankle holster, a loaded .32-caliber handgun.

But the .32 was irrelevant. It had nothing to do with the crime. At this point, a lieutenant disappeared into the car wash's office along with Harrison and Anthony Gilliard, Harrison's stepfather. Fifteen minutes later, they emerged. Gilliard said, "Detective, I know what you've come for. It's right over here." Gilliard led the detectives to a filing cabinet. In front of the cabinet was a trash bucket. Behind the bucket, lying on the floor, was the five-seven. It too was fully loaded: 19 bullets in the clip, one in the chamber.

This was suggestive, but not necessarily incriminating. Harrison still had a number of plausible alibis, even if the gun hammer were to exactly match the markings left on the recovered casings (and ballistics tests would eventually prove that five of six casings
did
match). For instance, Harrison could have been acting in self-defense—maybe Pop had barged into the car wash with his own gun blazing. Whatever the alibi, Harrison was under no obligation even to provide one; he wasn't under arrest.

But then—and even the cops couldn't figure out why—Harrison answered questions at the Central Detectives Division for about an hour, accompanied by his lawyer, Jerome Brown, and his stepfather. When it was over, he signed each page of a typed seven-page statement: a single M for "Marvin," its points like the peak of a crown.

In the statement, excerpted here for the first time, Harrison admits that his fight with Pop took place "five to ten minutes before" the shooting. He says that immediately before he heard the gunshots, he was "sitting in the doorway of my garage." The detectives ask him if Pop had a gun that day. Harrison says "no." In his own words, then, Harrison establishes his motive, puts himself at the scene of the crime, and eliminates any possible self-defense defense.

The real doozy, though, is that Harrison admits to
continuous and unbroken custody of the gun.

Q.
When was the last time you or anyone else fired your FN 5.7-caliber handgun?

A.
Probably the day that I bought it.

Q.
What day was that?

A.
In 2006 or 2007.

Q.
Where do you store this weapon?

A.
In a safe at my home in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.

Q.
Today, you had it at the car wash? Do you know how it got there?

A.
I brought it today, 20 minutes before you came.

Q.
Are you saying that the 5.7-cal. handgun that you own was in the safe at your home up until today, when you decided to bring it to your shop in the 2500 block of Thompson Street?

A.
Yes.

That
yes
is the sound of a trap snapping shut. Harrison says his gun hasn't been fired since 2006 or 2007. That's impossible. Fresh casings exist, so the gun had to have been fired. But by whom? Harrison says he doesn't know. All he knows is that the gun couldn't have been lent or stolen, because it was locked away the whole time in his suburban safe. Only it couldn't have been in the safe either, because it had to have made an appearance at the corner of 25th and Thompson.

Harrison's story makes no sense.

 

On May 2, three days after the shooting, Robert Nixon contacted the police. It went against his instinct, but he felt he was out of options. He was scared.

According to Nixon, who spoke to me in November—his first interview with a reporter—he was scared because he had been contacted by intermediaries of Marvin Harrison. The intermediaries offered to pay for surgery to remove the bullet. And if Nixon stayed away from the police, he says, they might also compensate him. He was ready to make a deal: "I really wanted it to be over." Then, according to Nixon, he was summoned to a meeting in West Philly—specifically, in the woods across from the Philadelphia Zoo—at 2:00
A.M.
Nixon shut off his phone. The next thing he knew, news of the shooting was all over the papers, and his voice mail was filling with threats: "You think you slick. We gonna kill you."

There was no way for Nixon to know if the threats were serious, he told me. That was the problem. Nixon was a low-level hustler. He was overweight and shuffling, with eyes hidden behind heavy glasses and a low, scratchy voice. Even his transgressions were small-time: weed, cough syrup, pills. He was a nobody, and he knew it. But now he had a Very Important Bullet in his back. The gap in wealth and stature between Marvin Harrison, a pillar of the community, and Robert Nixon created an inherently unstable situation. Harrison wouldn't have to say a word for something bad to just ... happen. "The streets pick it up," says Malik Aziz, a North Philly activist who spent 10 years in jail for dealing drugs. "Some a-hole, he's puttin' pressure down there? You'd be surprised how many people would take care of it, just on general principle."

On May 3, then, Robert Nixon sat down with detectives and prosecutors at the office of the Philadelphia district attorney and gave a formal statement. He told them about the fight in front of the water-ice stand, Harrison and his guns, and the aborted meeting at the zoo. Afterward, he was placed in protective custody in a downtown hotel, and detectives started to kick the tires on his story.

There were a few discrepancies. For one thing, Nixon claimed that Harrison had two guns—same as Pop had eventually claimed, despite his initial stonewalling—but the neat, even spacing of the recovered shells along the street convinced the cops that the shooter had been gripping a single gun with two hands on the stock, keeping it steady. Then there was the tale of the zoo meeting. According to one source close to the investigation, it didn't happen the way Nixon claimed. It wasn't Harrison's people who asked to meet Nixon at the zoo at 2:00
A.M.
It was
Nixon
who asked
them,
in a ploy to suss out their intentions; thugs from North Philly never go to West Philly, and vice versa, so Nixon only suggested the meeting spot in West Philly because he thought they'd never agree. When they said yes, that's when he knew he was in trouble and panicked. (Nixon denies this.)

The cops, however, saw these as minor flaws in a largely truthful tale. The crucial story beats were 100 percent verifiable. Through hospital records, detectives verified that Nixon sought treatment for the bullet wound on May 1. They talked to the cop who had originally patted Nixon down, and the cop remembered him, placing him at the scene. Overall, Nixon's story proved "incredibly consistent," according to one detective who interviewed him multiple times. It also matched up well with the statements from the other witnesses. "They all had different pieces of the same story," the detective says. "And here's a case where you don't need to believe
anybody
." You have a gun. You have casings. You have ballistic tests. You have Harrison's own words. You have probable cause for an arrest warrant. But the prosecutors saw the case differently. They had been burned before by witnesses who changed their stories between the interview and the trial. (Their last big case against a Philly athlete, a 2002 gun charge involving Allen Iverson, blew up when a key witness recanted his story.) During "balls-out fuckin' arguments" with cops, the Philly prosecutors fixated on the criminal records of the witnesses and slight discrepancies in their statements. They thought it would be hard to win the case on the backs of such blatant pieces of shit.

Piece of shit
is a versatile bit of law enforcement slang. It can mean something as specific as "hustler with a record" or it can mean something rounder, like "person who won't cooperate with us" or "person who lied to us" or "person who will not be trusted by a jury." All of the witnesses, for various reasons, could be grouped under this same heading. Nixon was a piece of shit. Pop was a piece of shit. The father of the wounded boy was a piece of shit. McCray was a piece of shit, albeit an intelligent piece of shit, because he never signed a statement. And Harrison, although he had no record, was a piece of shit too. The prosecutors and cops were in agreement on the piece-of-shit front; the only difference was that the cops believed that there were degrees, with Robert Nixon being what one of them called "the least piece of shit."

The cops also thought it was wrong to drop the case just because a piece-of-shit famous person might be guilty of shooting a piece-of-shit unfamous person in a piece-of-shit part of the city. If prosecutors required every witness to have a pristine record, one detective says, "most of the cases in the city wouldn't be solved." None of the cops doubted for a second that if Harrison was a plumber or a UPS driver instead of a famous athlete, he'd have long since been arrested. "Everybody has their career-anticipation light on with this," says veteran Philadelphia detective Michael Chitwood, now a police chief in Florida. "'If I go forward with this and this guy's found not guilty, I may not get promoted'...and I just think that's wrong."

In the end, though, it wasn't the cops' call. It was Lynne Abraham's. After investigating the Harrison case for more than eight months, the veteran Philly DA called a press conference on January 6, 2009. A diminutive woman with frosty white hair, Abraham has built her career on making life miserable for "punks with guns." Toughness is her brand. But at her press conference, at which no detectives were present, she spent much of her time impugning the credibility of the witnesses who had cooperated (Nixon, Dixon) and lamenting the ones who had not (the father of the two-year-old boy, who never spoke to police; anyone else who may have seen the broad-daylight shooting). The case would not be going forward, Abraham said, due to "multiple, mutually exclusive, inherently untrustworthy, and sometimes false statements by the people present." (Abraham declined to be interviewed for this story.)