The Hustle (23 page)

“It doesn't surprise me at all to hear Tyrell's dad say he knew a lot of those girls,” Sean says when I tell him about Doug Johnson's comment. “Ridgway targeted young girls, fifteen, sixteen years old, low income, a lot of them black. He'd cruise areas like the Central District, Rainier Avenue South. He preyed on them because society didn't give a shit. What's society? Well, unfortunately, it is their parents, it is their schools, it is law enforcement, it's social services. That may be hard saying that they didn't give a shit—I'm sure that there were people who cared and parents who cared—but not in a meaningful way that helped those girls make choices that could have saved their lives. Hooking was an easy way to make money. And their pimps would put them out on the streets. It's a business model. And Ridgway exploited that with great effectiveness. He isn't particularly bright. In fact, he's a moron in many senses of the word. But he was quite good at taking advantage of a disadvantage, and he did that with, in his mind, great success.”

After the Ridgway case ended at the close of 2003, Sean went back into the regular rotation—prosecutors generally work for about two years in one of the office's divisions, such as juvenile, drug crimes, domestic violence, and violent crimes. In court, Sean, in a navy suit, with his height and upright posture, cuts an imposing figure. In one assault trial I watched, he towered over the defense lawyer, a man in his early thirties who was perhaps five-foot-eight and wore a rumpled suit. When presenting in court, Sean tends toward formality, always addressing the judge as “Your Honor” and standing to speak. “It's a privilege for me to be there,” he says. “I am acting as a representative of the state of Washington and so I need to appear to the court, the opposing counsel, and any member of the public who may be there as they would expect a representative of the state of Washington to act.”

Sean transferred a few years ago to the sex crimes division, where it looks like he will remain. The work—which includes prosecuting pimps, rapists, and child molesters—suits him. “This job gives me a great sense of purpose, and I'm always entertained, it's always interesting,” he says. “I can get up in the morning and be excited about what I do, because a successful prosecution means there's one less jerk out there hurting someone.”

When I ask how he sees his role, Sean says, “I guess I sort of extract justice from the process for someone who has been wronged—the focus of course is on the defendants, but you don't have defendants unless we have victims. Their recourse, other than some sort of civil reward, is seeing the offender punished. A lot of people deserve to be punished, and this is the system through which that occurs.”

Of course, many cases don't end the way Sean would like them to. One or two jurors may hold out against the rest, resulting in a hung jury. Judges sometimes make rulings that Sean finds incomprehensible. He tells me that perhaps one in ten cases results in an outcome where “the victim of the case comes to you and they can say that they have felt that they've been heard, they walk away from this hard and cold process feeling that some bit of justice has been done.”

As we speak in his office, he tells me that one case in particular comes to mind—a woman who worked as a stripper and prostitute was kidnapped and raped by her boyfriend and a friend after she refused to continue prostituting. The trial went to court three times—the first two resulted in hung juries of eleven to one—before Sean got a conviction. Each time, the witness had to take the stand and testify for hours about what was done to her.

As he tells me the details, Sean searches through the files on his computer to find a letter that the victim wrote after the case was done. In it, she singles out the victims' advocate of the sex crimes unit, the detective who worked the case, and Sean. Without their support, she writes,
I would have never made it through this hard time in one piece, and I would genuinely like to thank each of them for helping save my life.

Sean skips down and continues reading the letter to me:
Thank you to those twelve individuals in the jury who saw my side of the story, felt my side of the story, and for some instant lived my side of the story as I told it to you from the witness stand. Your act of consolation, compassion, and understanding for me is greatly appreciated and will never be forgotten for you are the people who helped me move on with my life.

“That paragraph is the coolest paragraph,” Sean says, “because when you present a case, that's what you want the jury to see. You want the jury to live in her shoes just for a moment, so they can see what she went through.”

Sean's assignment to the Ridgway case enabled him to skip the drug crimes rotation, which is generally reserved for junior prosecutors. Drug cases such as Myran's take up a lot of manpower—of the average 2,600 prisoners in the King County jail system, 460 are in for drug charges, more than for any other crime. That compares to 304 for assault, 126 for drunk driving, 125 for sex crimes, and 110 for robbery.

“They're a huge resource suck,” Sean says of the drug cases. Though he has never worked in the division, as a senior attorney in the office he has been involved in negotiating plea bargains on drug cases—junior prosecutors generally do the gruntwork and then must kick cases up to higher levels for talks with defense attorneys. In those cases, Sean picks up the paperwork and has a look before sitting down to deal.

The options open to the prosecutor include asking for a straight jail term, recommending a reduced sentence that includes drug treatment, or kicking the case over to drug court, a separate system in which the prosecution is suspended and the defendant is released, as long as he successfully completes a monitored drug-treatment program. “There's so many different factors that can go into it,” Sean says about how prosecutors decide what route to take. “On a drug case, you'd want to know how many times in the past they'd been arrested, how much drugs were involved, whether there's an addiction problem, whether there's any crimes of violence, whether children are involved, what the defendant has done since his arrest to make amends. Is he going to Narcotics Anonymous? Is he trying to find treatment? Is he trying to keep his job? If they demonstrate genuine remorse and are taking steps to get better, we would consider that.”

I ask what would happen in the case of someone like Myran, who has been arrested repeatedly for misdemeanor drug charges, generally for acting as the “cluck” in a transaction. “If there are a lot of misdemeanors, cases that have been negotiated in the past and reduced, there's probably not a lot you're going to be able to do for them,” Sean says. “When you think of, ‘Hey, where are we going to spend the limited money that we have to help someone?' are you going to spend it on a guy who has made no effort to improve himself over the last fifteen or twenty years, or are you going to try and take the money and maybe you get a kid who's nineteen years old, his first offense, he's scared shitless, and doing those things that on their face look positive. In terms of triaging your resources, you're probably going to go with the young kid, see if he has a chance, but the other guy would have demonstrated, ‘I'm not interested in turning things around.' ”

…

One day, Myran's grandmother and I both show up at his visiting hours but are told he has been taken across the sky bridge for an appearance before a judge. We walk the two blocks to the court and find the right courtroom, where an omnibus hearing is in session. The purpose of these hearings is to keep things moving through the system, setting court dates for defendants, and taking care of other procedural issues.

Myran's grandmother and I sit on a bench in the gallery and wait. There are nearly ten lawyers up front, bunched around two adjoining tables. The lawyers—defense attorneys and prosecutors—are all white. Since the omnibus hearing is informal, very few wear ties. One guy walks in wearing a bike helmet and a yellow waterproof backpack. It's Friday, and there's a bit of relief in the air. The lawyers joke and laugh while they shuffle their papers and await their turns before the judge.

Defendants who are not being held in jail arrive and sit on the benches near us. Defense lawyers approach and ask them their names: “Are you Mr. Davis?” At one point, a female lawyer approaches Mrs. Barnes and me with a puzzled look. “Do you need to sign in?” she asks. “We're just here for support,” Mrs. Barnes answers. Other defendants are brought in from the jail one at a time. As they enter the courtroom, one of the guards escorting them takes a key and releases their handcuffs. Whatever they did on the outside, inside the court, in their red jailhouse outfits, in front of the judge, they all look like they have shrunk. All of the defendants brought in from the jail while we wait are either black, Latino, or Asian.

Mrs. Barnes and I talk as we pass the time. A petite woman in a long denim skirt and white blouse, she tells me about her nursing jobs after she moved out to Seattle from St. Louis, and how Myran, as a kid, used to come down after school to the retirement home where she worked evenings to hang out until the end of her shift. “Myran used to stay up, help the old folks eat, play cards with them, give them rides in their wheelchairs, talk with them,” Mrs. Barnes says. “They all remembered Myran. When he didn't come, they would ask where he was. They had Alzheimer's—they couldn't remember their own families, but they remembered Myran.”

We watch for Myran's attorney, but there is no sign of him. Mrs. Barnes tells me about the work-release program that Myran had left. “It was terrible,” she says. “There were lots of drugs available.” People in the program paid $400 a month for room and board, she says. You were expected to find your own job—the program did not set you up—and for many it was hard to come up with even $400. “There was just not enough support,” she says. “The system is set up so they fail. The government is behind it. How many poor blacks, poor whites, and Latinos are importing the drugs? It's a business. They could stop it if they wanted to.”

She continues, “I'm not saying that they haven't done anything wrong, but these are people with drug problems. You don't send them to prison for that.”

After about an hour of waiting, Mrs. Barnes goes out into the hallway to call her doctor's office, where she has an appointment. I walk to the front of the court and ask the clerk if she knows what time Myran is going to appear. She looks at a list in front of her and then tells me that his appearance has been canceled—his lawyer couldn't make it today.

After five months in jail, it appears that Myran's stalling strategy might be working. When I visit him, he tells me that the prosecutor has reduced the plea from ninety months in prison to sixty-eight. By my reading of the law, sixty-eight months is the bottom of the sentencing range for the level III drug crime for which Myran has been charged. Myran tells me that after thinking about it, he has decided to still push for trial—he says that since he did not know the girl involved in the drug deal, he shouldn't be punished for her involvement as a minor. I don't offer an opinion, but privately I wonder if it's a good idea: If he is found guilty now, he could be up for all of the 120 months. At the moment, the process is tied up in knots—Myran has requested a psychological review, which is taking months for the court to organize.

I ask Myran if he knows what he's going to do when he gets out, and if he thinks he'll get pulled back to the streets. He shakes his head. “I'm done. I've learned my lesson. My mind is clear, I won't go back again,” he says.

“I'd like to learn about twelve languages,” he continues. “I'd like to be able to interact with people, be able to really talk with them, to talk with all kinds of people from all over the world.

“I'm going to hook back up with Damian and hook back up with you. Raise the status of my friends. There's a school in Kirkland, a religious school, what do you call those?”

“A seminary?” I ask.

“Yeah, a seminary. I've been thinking about going to that. I'd like to do that. I just spend so much time idle. That's not good, all that idle time.”

A few minutes later, the guard in the control room breaks in over the phone line: “Wrap it up.”

Myran says good-bye, stands, and lines up with the five prisoners who have been speaking in the other booths. They wait silently. When the door back into the jail slides open, they walk single-file past the visiting room's thick glass window. A young guy who has been speaking with his girlfriend in Russian blows her a kiss and mouths something to her. Myran, who walks behind him, smiles and waves. Then the prisoners begin to exit the visiting room's field of vision. One by one, each fades from view.

Part Four

Schools

Lakeside School fosters the development of citizens capable of and committed to interacting compassionately, ethically, and successfully with diverse peoples and cultures to create a more humane, sustainable global society. This focus transforms our learning and our work together.

—Complete text of the Lakeside School Mission Focus

Our Kids Are Not Getting
What They Need

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, I stop into Damian's classroom at Zion Preparatory Academy. Damian stands at the chalkboard, a solid man in black slacks and a black sweater. The fifteen third-graders in the class—all of them African American—wear maroon and gray school uniforms and sit at three rows of desks. The walls are decorated with pictures of the three black astronauts who have been on the space shuttle; posters of LeBron James and Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander; a picture of Maurice Ashley, the first black chess grandmaster; a poster listing the Ten Commandments; and another of Martin Luther King Jr. with the words “I have a dream” written below. On his desk, Damian keeps a tattered copy of the Bible and a small boom box that he uses to play gospel music.

Damian is leading the kids through a logic problem. He reads aloud from a workbook as the students follow along. Five people are going to a market to pick up fruit and vegetables. The question revolves around what each one is going to buy. There are clues related to each of the five people in the problem—for example, James buys twice as many bananas as Karen. The kids are supposed to figure out the exact purchases of each shopper.

“The trick to this is that you need to make a chart to keep track of everything,” Damian says, drawing a grid on the board with a line for each character and empty boxes for the produce they get. Damian calls on individual kids to read clues and then has them decide which box to place the resulting information in.

The school day ends before the class arrives at a solution. The kids hop up, stuff their papers and books into backpacks, and grab their coats to go either to the bus or to the school's daycare. A couple of boys get out the game Connect 4, a vertical version of tic-tac-toe in which you stack up chips and try to get four in a row. A kid named Michael challenges me to a game, and we sit opposite each other at a tiny desk to play as the other students gather around. Michael quickly beats me—I lose focus and make a fatal error—to the delight of the kids.

“Brother Damian, you ready?” Michael asks. Damian makes a show of thinking about whether he wants to play, and then consents. “Watch out, I don't want to beat you too bad,” Damian says as he sits down in the kid-size chair.

As they begin the game, Damian tells me about what he has just been teaching—test prep for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, better known as the WASL (pronounced “Wassel”), a statewide achievement test all fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-graders must take. He pauses every once in a while to talk trash to Michael: “Is that what you want to do? Are you sure? You better check yourself. Oh man, I'm shutting you
down
!” Michael reacts by putting his hands over his face and looking out between his fingers, eyeing the game up and down while the other kids laugh and tell him what move he should make next. “I don't think you should listen to the peanut gallery here, Michael,” Damian says. “Doesn't sound like good advice to me.”

The two play almost to a tie, with the chips stacking up near the top of the plastic structure, until Michael drops one in a slot that allows Damian to get a diagonal four in a row. “Brother Damian got you!” another boy shouts to Michael, who slaps his forehead and leans back. “That wasn't bad. You almost had a draw. You lost your concentration at the end,” Damian says as he stands up. “All right, you all need to get your stuff and get ready to go.”

Damian and I keep talking as the kids file out. The WASL is Washington State's response to the No Child Left Behind Act, a set of educational reforms passed by Congress in December 2001. One of the main goals of the bill was to eliminate the “achievement gap” between black and Latino students and whites—the “soft bigotry of low expectations” was George W. Bush's sound bite on the subject. The most tangible real-world result of the bill is a mandated series of standardized tests that children must take throughout elementary, middle, and high school. Students and schools must show “adequate yearly progress.” In Washington State, students who can't pass after several tries are not allowed to graduate from high school.

As Damian sees it, the WASL test is just another in a line of hurdles that his students need to clear to avoid low-wage futures. “It's a sorting system,” he says. “They're weeding out certain people. Not everyone's going to pass the WASL. Not everyone's going to go to college. Some people are not going to have those good jobs. There are kids who will study and study for this test and they're still not going to pass. That's just the way it is.” His job, he says, is to make sure that the fifteen kids in front of him every day are in a position to do as well as they possibly can.

Zion Preparatory Academy occupies three squat buildings arranged around a horseshoe-shaped driveway in South Seattle, one block off Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The school was founded in 1982, out of necessity, when Eugene Drayton, the pastor of Zion United House of Prayer in the Central Area, became distressed that several kids in his church's Bible study class had a hard time reading. He also knew that black kids were getting kicked out of the Seattle public schools at an alarmingly high rate for discipline problems. When black leaders went to speak about the problem with school district administrators, the district maintained that kids who misbehaved would be suspended or expelled. But Drayton saw that these same kids behaved perfectly well on Sundays. Maybe the school district just didn't understand how to relate to them. He thought the church could do better educating its children on its own.

Doug Wheeler, then a thirty-five-year-old member of the congregation, took on the job of heading the new school. Wheeler grew up in the Central Area, his father a state probation officer and his mother a police matron who worked security in clubs (his parents also took in foster kids, two of whom were Jimi Hendrix and his brother Leon). The few police officers on the Seattle force in the 1950s and 1960s hung out at his parents' house, and Wheeler always wanted to be a cop. He joined the force after graduating from Seattle University and worked his way up to become assistant director of the Victim's Assistance Unit. Off hours, though, he was wild. But on the morning of August 9, 1980, he heard a voice that told him, “Go walk down the street.” He did, entered into the Zion United House of Prayer, and was saved. The chance to head the new school was another opportunity to take his life in a new direction.

Zion Prep began its first year in a two-bedroom house next to the church, with eight students and an initial budget of $13.64. “We went down to the Seattle public-school distribution center,” Wheeler says, “climbed into the Dumpsters and got spiral notebooks half-used, computer paper that we could use the back of, and books that were thrown away because the bindings were broken.”

Zion Prep took the opposite tack from the Seattle public schools, focusing first on building trust with the kids by bombarding them with love and attention. “The concept was: family, clear structure, building your character and your value of who you are, and then educate you,” says Wheeler. “The first three came first. Education was second to us. We were ridiculed by education professionals because we were quote-unquote ‘wasting time' in classrooms on noneducational issues. That means our kids are not getting what they need. We said, ‘No, we're spending time up front to get the product we want in the end.'… Well, our success, as far as the kids and the type of kids we were transforming, became known, and Zion grew.”

Zion Prep became known among African Americans in Seattle for turning around children who had been deemed “unteachable” by the public schools. Wheeler calls it a “public school that privately funds itself,” meaning that there are no tests to get in and no one is turned away unless a class is already full. Enrollment surged to eighty-three in the second year, and by the end of the 1980s reached four hundred.

As Zion Prep grew, it became tightly linked to some parts of our basketball team. Willie McClain hired on in 1984 as playground supervisor and bus driver; Wheeler promoted McClain to vice principal in 1989, a position he held for more than fifteen years. Damian and Willie Jr. took jobs at the school in the 1990s. The school gave all of them a chance to work at an institution headed by African Americans, deeply embedded in and committed to Seattle's black community.

Randy Finley also became involved with Zion Prep in the 1980s, after he started his mission to help black kids get into elite private schools. He worked with Willie McClain to identify Zion students who could make the transition. Finley, of course, did it with some panache. One of his efforts was to get the chocolate-chip cookie mogul Wally “Famous” Amos to come to the school to give a motivational speech (Amos also was the manager of Finley's sister, Pat, an actress and local television personality). As Finley remembers it, Amos told a school assembly a story about waking up that morning in a fancy hotel room. Amos said he looked around, took in his luxurious surroundings, and made his way to the bathroom. When he got there, Amos told the students, he leaned over the sink to wash his face. When he looked up into the mirror, he told the kids, he got a shock. “I said: ‘Lord, I'm black!' ” The whole school burst into applause and cheers.

For Finley, the institutional structure and support of Zion were vital—they made his efforts more than just a white guy lobbying for some black kids. “The way you have to do this is working at Zion,” he says. “They can build from the inside themselves.” But Finley recalls that it was “really tough” getting the kids from Zion into private schools. It was even harder to make sure they received the attention and guidance they needed. The few kids he helped gain admission to Lakeside struggled. “I could never get Lakeside to mentor or stay with the kids,” he says. “Lakeside just wanted athletes. They didn't want just ordinary kids.”

Finley had more luck with the Bush School, another elite private school, where he found some teachers who seemed interested in working with the kids. The administration also was open to increasing its black enrollment. Finley got about six kids into Bush, but he still found that progress was slow. “I was forced to reevaluate constantly,” he says. “I thought I could take these kids, work with them for six or eight months, and then turn them loose, that they could make it.” The gap between Zion and the elite, mostly white and wealthy private schools of Seattle, Finley found, was larger and more complex than he had imagined.

A major difference between Zion Prep and many other private schools in Seattle is that Zion is always short of money. Tuition is officially $7,000 a year. All families are asked to contribute something, but those that can't afford the whole thing might pay only $100 a month. Doug Wheeler has to raise up to half of the annual budget of $3.5 million to make up for the shortfall after tuition and regular donations.

“You don't sleep at night, you really don't, because sometimes you don't know if you have enough money to cover all the payroll and wonder where it's coming from. It just gets that tight sometimes,” Wheeler says one day when we speak in his office. A tall man with a shaved head and a salt-and-pepper beard, Wheeler wears all black—shoes, slacks, shirt and jacket—and speaks in a soft voice, gently articulating each word. A framed photo of Wheeler with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Magic Johnson hangs on his wall, as well as a plaque Wheeler received from the accounting firm Ernst & Young for being the company's 2003 Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year in education/nonprofit work.

Wheeler tells me that most of the school's deficit is made up by donations from the CEOs of locally based corporations with whom Wheeler has built relationships, such as Schultz and Jim Sinegal of Costco. “It was amazing to me, literally, to watch some of the wealthiest men in the world walk into this school and sit down at this table and say, ‘What can I do? Help me figure out what I can do to help. Just tell me what you want,' ” Wheeler says. “They love these kids, honestly they do—they will do whatever they can for these kids, and they have. It humbles you.”

The school's results line one hallway, called the Zion Prep Hall of Fame, which is decorated with about twenty posters of former students. Text underneath their pictures describes what they are doing today—one got a degree in engineering; one teaches preschool; one started his own line of clothing; another is the produce manager at a Safeway. “The education here prepared me for the outside world,” reads one quotation.

The school follows in a tradition—Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute being the archetypal example—of black institutions looking to develop and prepare African Americans for survival and success in mainstream America. Just as Wheeler has developed relationships with the corporate titans of our day, Washington received much of his funding from those of his, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Wheeler says his desire is to provide “a Lakeside education on a Wal-Mart budget.”

In the world of Seattle private schools, Zion is a feeder—for those students chosen to make the transition—into elite white institutions. Wheeler tells me that Bush still maintains a relationship with Zion, more than twenty years after Randy Finley first forged the connection. Wheeler has a deal with the school so that the parents of Zion students who get in will still get charged the same tuition they pay at Zion (high school tuition at Bush runs more than $23,000 a year). Bush, for its part, is able to enroll some of Zion's best-performing students. In an era when “diversity” is a priority for elite schools, the arrangement between Zion and Bush is beneficial for both sides. “They want our kids,” Wheeler says.

Zion Prep is just one of dozens of Seattle private schools, the vast majority aimed at the middle and upper-middle classes and the rich. Besides Lakeside, Seattle Prep, and Bush, other elite schools include Seattle Country Day, Villa Academy, University Prep, and the Northwest School. These schools, in turn, are just specks in the shadow of the Seattle public school system, a behemoth that for decades has been mired in a seemingly constant state of crisis. The welfare of minority students, especially, has been a continual issue. “We're not educating our kids,” Wheeler says of the Seattle schools and black children. “Ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, it's been the same song. And everyone says, ‘This is what we're going to do to improve it,' but it hasn't improved yet.”