Good Kids, Bad City Read online

  This political storm also made landfall at the Justice Center downtown. Two judges were eventually charged with steering court decisions based on political favors. It also threatened the reputation of the region’s top lawman, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason. Along with Dimora, Mason was the top man in the local party. In fact, Mason openly used his office as a farm system for future Democratic candidates, urging his attorneys and employees to run for office. The countywide scandal singed the office with reports that Mason had ignored complaints of payoffs at the county building years before the FBI hit pay dirt there. While the prosecutor boasted one of the highest felony conviction rates in the state, there was also an apparent indifference to the quality of cases brought to trial. A 2010 investigation by the Plain Dealer dug into the numbers, finding the office regularly jammed cases through the system with little merit that were eventually thrown out by a judge mid-trial.

  “Almost anyone arrested in Cuyahoga County can be indicted, jailed and taken to trial whether guilty or not because Mason runs the prosecutor’s office like a factory,” the newspaper wrote.12 “Prosecutors pump out hundreds of cases for trial every year without always considering their flaws.”

  Consider the neighborhoods. Cleveland’s African Americans who sought bank loans had been historically blackballed; subprime mortgage slingers, however, hit African American neighborhoods hard with their low interest rates and no-money-down paper. When the housing crisis arrived, pink slips started papering over low-income areas of the town. Between 1995 and 2007, foreclosures countywide quadrupled. From 2007 to 2010 alone the county court was catching between thirteen thousand and fifteen thousand foreclosures each year.13 Besides further hurting a tax base already kneecapped by years of steady suburban flight and factory closures, the crisis turned whole neighborhoods into ghost towns. Officially, the city put the number of vacant addresses at around eight thousand.14

  Consider the schools. By 2010, the Cleveland Municipal School District was dwelling in the cellar in Ohio, with a 52 percent high school graduation rate. The system—with about forty-five thousand students—was staring at a seventy-four-million-dollar projected budget deficit.15 But the dirtiest stat attached to the education system was the blatant gulf between its success rate compared to suburban—and largely white—districts. A national study found that only 38 percent of Cleveland’s freshmen went on to graduate in four years. In the surrounding districts, on both the East and West Sides, 80 percent of freshman did.16 The disparity was the largest in the country.

  Consider the police. Already operating under a 2002 consent decree with the Department of Justice over excessive-force complaints, by 2011 the Cleveland Police Department—understaffed, underpaid, undertrained—had turned Keystone Kop fumbling into a continuous urban grotesque. In October 2009, police, following up on a report of an attempted rape, discovered a hell house belonging to a fifty-year-old ex-con named Anthony Sowell. The raped and murdered bodies of women were found all over the address on the East Side’s Imperial Avenue—in the living room, basement, crawl spaces, shallow graves in the backyard. Sowell was eventually tied to eleven dead women going back to 2006. Later it developed that Cleveland cops had ignored reports on Sowell going back years, writing off the pleas of family and victims as “unfounded.” Then there was the smell. Imperial Avenue stank of decaying bodies. But for years Cleveland police had blamed the odor on a nearby meat store.17

  The knocks continued for the department: Less than a year later, two officers responded to a call about a dead body lying on the side of a highway interchange south of downtown. The cops drove past the site without stopping, reporting back to dispatch that what they saw was just a dead deer. It was actually the strangled, nude body of a mother of three. After missing the body, the officers drove to a nearby cemetery, where they sat for two hours waiting out the end of their shift.18

  It was hard to tally the net effect all this institutional calamity had on your average Clevelander. I remember this distinct feeling soaking through headlines and nightly newscasts that we’d moved beyond the standard-issue Cleveland jokes. When the basics of your city—catching killers or putting diplomas in kids’ hands or stabilizing a tax base—don’t work anymore, there’s a sense of being edged out of the American mainstream. Wherever the country was going, whatever the twenty-first century would look like, you started to wonder if Cleveland would get there in one piece. Or at all.

  * * *

  Back on the street corner, a lightbulb had popped in my head and wouldn’t go dark again. “So basically what Ed testified to couldn’t have happened,” I said, less as a question than just to keep the thought rolling.

  “Exactly,” Kwame said.

  This was a tiny fragment of the testimony that had landed three men in prison. But it was like pulling a thread on a cheap sweater—everything began coming apart. The bus was like a starter pistol that sent thoughts sprinting through me. Leading the charge, and shifting everything, was that Wiley was innocent. Rickey was innocent. Kwame, the man standing here with me on a Cleveland street in 2011, was innocent. For a moment I felt like all the air had suddenly fled my lungs. A man whose life was ruined before it started—how do you look him in the eye? I suddenly felt like I couldn’t. I felt like I didn’t deserve to.

  * * *

  City life begs heavy questions, real Political Science 101 head-scratchers. I’m not talking about 911 response times or trash pickup. But what’s the best way to govern? What do the citizens owe a city? How do you balance the interests of the few against the many? What deal must be struck between ideals and compromise, facts and aspirations? And finally, the most basic: What does a city owe the people who call it home?

  The region’s current low position in the nation was all the more tragic considering the history. For a good chunk of the nation’s life, the Midwest—or Middle West, in the old rusty jargon—was the country’s best self in action, and its success or failure in reconciling the tensions within the modern American state was the measuring stick for the whole experiment conceived by the Founders.

  From the street level this might seem grandiose. But consider that the establishment of the states beyond the original thirteen colonies was originally seen as a radical experiment in representative democracy, test cases to see if the benchmarks of such a government—representative assemblies, common law, broad voting—could actually sprout without the influence of a colonial power. During the decades bridging the Civil War and World War I, the central part of the country between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River produced thirteen presidents, the most of any region; nurtured towering new metropolises like Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Cleveland; and served as the springboard for rock-star industrialists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Westinghouse, the figures who would gild the age.

  This was no accident, according to the prevailing historical thought of the day. “The Midwest was seen as the valley of democracy and the homeland of the greatest American democrat, Abraham Lincoln,” historian Jon C. Teaford wrote. “As opposed to the effete, aristocratic East and decadent, caste-ridden South, the Midwest was the true embodiment of the American political dream, a region where a rail-splitter could become president and where government was actually supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people.”19

  This idea found its fullest contemporary voice in Frederick Jackson Turner, a Wisconsin-born historian at Harvard University whose entire output was essentially a valentine to the possibilities of the region. Now out of fashion and largely forgotten, Turner published his “Frontier Thesis” in 1893; the theory proposed that the roughshod experience of settling the open spaces of the Midwest, an enterprise of constant invention and all-hands-in opportunity, fostered the ingredients necessary for the political dreamland that had sprung out from the pens of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Monroe. “The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man are deep rooted in all the Middle West,” Turner wrote.20 Cleveland, l
ike similar cities, gulped this down in the early twentieth century, an influence you can spot in the dramatic public building program that drew heavily on Washington, D.C.’s neoclassical architecture, or in the reformist political agendas that buzzed then through city halls.

  But the architect of the Midwest’s national image was also sharp to the region’s challenges, particularly as its industrial strength ballooned. “The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present,” Turner wrote. “This region which has so often needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.” The stakes couldn’t have been higher, Turner felt. “It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this; the future of the Republic is with her.”

  From the altitude of these high-minded aspirations, it was hard not to recognize that the Rust Belt I knew was grappling with more than regional decline but also the failure of this reconciliation Turner warned of between lofty American ideals and gangbuster capitalism. It dropped a sadder note on the city, recast its problems in headier terms. Cleveland in 2011, then, was a product of unfulfilled potential as much as anything else, and the city’s own failures weren’t just embarrassing headlines, but broken promises.

  Kwame’s story seemed at home in that larger failure. If we’d hit the point where we no longer expected our police officers to stop serial killers before body counts reached the double digits, or even know the difference between a dead animal and a black woman, or if we could no longer rely on the public schools to graduate the majority of students, or for the locals to negotiate new contracts, much less slow the flow of work overseas or protect pensions, if whole neighborhoods could disappear now under fine-print mortgages while the county government simply watched a tax base drain away, and if we could no longer expect the basic business of government to get done without a motel-room quickie—was it so hard then to believe the criminal justice system had put the wrong men in jail for a murder?

  As I began digging into Kwame’s case, I realized this was a story that highlighted all the major issues marking Cleveland’s history, the same mix of politics, race, and law that has stained and steered every American city in the last seventy years. Yet for all the historical and personal pain his story contained, there were also lights leading forward. This story is about more than three lives unjustly stolen; it’s also about how a city can finally face down—and fix—its ugly past.

  Part I

  DOWN THE WAY

  1

  A SPARK PLUS A SPARK PLUS A SPARK

  Cleveland, July 23, 1968

  The city in summer, bright afternoon dimming in the sky. The narrow jigsaw streets of Glenville tangle along the hills on Cleveland’s edge, brick double- and triple-deckers slotted tight on modest lawns fizzy with bugs. Windows were wide open to the heat. Porch radios murmured. Ronnie Bridgeman, a peewee-sized ten-year-old with nothing heavier sitting on his mind than his sister’s birthday party the next day, scuttled carefree down the alley next to his house. He was looking for his friend Kenneth. Together, they were going to do some garage hopping, jumping from one tin roof to the next. But when he popped out on Auburndale Avenue, he saw the men with guns.1

  They looked like movie bandits, young heavies with bandoliers strung over their dashikis. Two hefted long M1 carbines. The third gripped a .45 caliber submachine gun. Ronnie recognized all three from two houses down. The man he knew as Ahmed—an ex-army grunt and felon born Fred Evans—was the guy on the block if you wanted to get into heavy talk about cosmic law or astrological signs or UFOs. Maybe a notch or two stranger than the rest, but Ahmed wasn’t much different than the half dozen other young black men in the neighborhood, guys preaching Afro-pride, community betterment, and black nationalism. But the guns were new.

  “Hey,” Evans said. He nodded to the porch of Ronnie’s house, where the boy’s mother was yammering into the phone. “Tell the seniors to go in. There’s fitting to be some trouble up here on the corner.”

  The police had been there all day. Ronnie knew that. Impossible to miss—a car full of white guys just sitting in Glenville, binoculars steady on Evans’s house. What neither Ronnie nor Evans and his followers knew then was that it was really a botched surveillance job. The FBI had alerted the Cleveland police about possible violent plans being hatched by Evans’s group. The police higher-ups ordered rolling surveillance—black officers only. Somehow the message was hacked up in translation, and now these cops—some of them legally drunk—were just sitting in the open.

  “Mom!” Ronnie told his mother, pulling on her arm. “Mom!” Bessie Bridgeman swatted her son away. Then suddenly the Tuesday afternoon split with sound.

  Thunderclaps of gunfire rolled in from down the street, where Auburndale crossed East 124th Street. More ripped out from Beulah. Mrs. Bridgeman dropped the phone and shouted for her children to come inside. Ronnie fell to the ground, crawling on his stomach for the house like a soldier bellying up a Normandy beach. Safe inside, he crept up to the front windows. He wanted to see.

  Somewhere close to 8:20 P.M., gunshots pelted the two unmarked cars assigned to watch the militants. The vehicles roared off, bullets giving chase. Within a minute, a city tow-truck driver hauling an abandoned Cadillac around the corner on Beulah was blasted in the back with a shotgun.2

  An “all units” distress call blurted on the police radio at 8:30 P.M. Across Cleveland, patrol cars left their assignments and headed into what had suddenly become an urban war zone. The police had been waiting for this. They abandoned their patrol cars on the Glenville curbs, some engines still puttering, and blitzed the scene with no plan other than pouring rounds into every twitching shadow in the hazy twilight.

  After an hour of shooting, twenty-two people were dead or wounded. Three officers and three black nationalists died in the street. A high-powered rifle round punched into the motor of a police car, blowing the cruiser into a fireball. One cop had to wrench a shotgun from his bleeding partner’s hand in order to cut down a sniper firing from the bushes. Evans’s men shot from alleys and apartment balconies. Tear gas clouds soured the air. Homes on Lakeview began to burn.

  The chaos seemed to give off a contact high, reignite familiar feelings. Two years earlier and less than a ten-minute drive away, black Clevelanders in the Hough neighborhood had rioted for six nights in July. Now it seemed that whatever outrage propelled that earlier violence had not been dispelled but only suspended, momentarily unplugged. A block north from the shooting in Glenville, where a group of black residents had gathered, police and rioters picked up where they had left off two summers earlier. Arriving emergency vehicles were pelted with rocks. A Molotov cocktail wrapped flames around a police cruiser, while a crowd pulled another officer from his car and beat him bloody. A panel truck driven by a white man plowed into pedestrians; the driver was wrenched from the cab and attacked while the vehicle was flipped and burned. Looters busted into the storefronts on Superior Avenue. Arriving Cleveland police officers removed their badges so no one would be able to identify them. A group of cops marched into a Glenville bar, firing into the ceiling and pistol-whipping the clientele. When two local black men tried to carry a wounded black nationalist out on a stretcher, they were attacked by Cleveland police. “Leave that nigger here to die,” the cops reportedly said.

  Gunshots stopped, but the looting and fires picked up. By 11:00 P.M., the militant leader Evans emerged from a nearby house to surrender. “You police have bothered us too long,” he told the cops when asked why they’d attacked. Later, however, the black nationalist acknowledged that whatever forces were loose in the city now were beyond his control or planning. “I had come to be the leader,” Evans would say. “But the night of the twenty-third, there was no leader. After we got our guns, it was every man for himself.”

  Nose to the windowsill, Ronnie Bridgeman watched it all play out.
The window frame might as well have been a television screen—it was like The High Chaparral, but live action, real time, more vivid than Technicolor. The little boy was dazed and enthralled. It was cops against robbers. Good guys versus bad. Ronnie watched, even though he didn’t completely understand everything happening as the guns jumped and the night shadows stretched and pooled.

  * * *

  A little over a century before race hate split the city open for the second time in as many years, Cleveland bowed its head for John Brown.

  The radical abolitionist who led the failed slave revolt at Harpers Ferry swung from the gallows in Charlestown, Virginia, on December 2, 1859. When the news hit the settlement lapped by the fresh waters of Lake Erie three hundred miles to the northwest, Cleveland went dark with mourning. Shops closed. Flags lowered. Church bells echoed through the city. Brown’s own words—I do not think I can better honor the cause I love than to die for it—were draped in a banner over a main road. At night, fourteen hundred Clevelanders—about one adult for every fifteen on the census roll—gathered to honor Brown and his cause. It was the largest public event in the community’s short history.3

  The town was shifting gears then, pushing off from an early start as a young frontier outpost stuck on a foul swamp. Cleveland was founded as a business hustle. Early colonial surveyors dubbed the flat land rolling off the hills of Pennsylvania the Western Reserve. The area was claimed by the Connecticut Land Company; but after first planting the flag in 1796 where the Cuyahoga River met Lake Erie, the absentee landowners had little interest in structural improvement or community building. They just wanted to sell deeds. Picture the giddy New Englander, land purchase agreement in his pocket, trekking hundreds of rough miles west, only to find a muddy, malarial nub of land frequented by, in the words of one early visitor, “itinerant Vagabonds” and “a phalanx of Desperadoes … setting all Laws at defiance.”4 In 1800, Cleveland boasted one permanent resident. Two years later, a visiting churchman was shocked by what he found. “There were five families here, but no apparent piety,” he wrote home. “They seemed to glory in their infidelity.”5