Good Kids, Bad City Read online

  The couple—two slow-talking southern kids 850 miles away from everything they knew plunked down in the fast-lane rhythms of the industrial North—settled near Central Avenue. Ronald got work at a nearby gas station; some of Rickey’s first memories were of taking his father’s lunch to him every day. Ham and cheese with mayo and a tomato slice.

  Rickey learned early that if he wanted to understand his parents or what was happening in his house, he’d have to pick it up on his own. His parents weren’t the type to talk or explain. In 1965, with a new baby brother in the house, stiff white people began making regular visits. New cheese and oatmeal would then appear in the cupboard. But for some reason, Rickey’s father could never be around at the time. Even his clothes had to be hidden. Rickey could see these visits were putting a strain on his parents. His father was out of work. As a condition of welfare aid, Rickey later learned, an unmarried adult couldn’t stay in the house. His father started coming back less and less. And then he was just gone.

  Essie Mae didn’t explain. They just kept on moving from place to place, Essie Mae from boyfriend to boyfriend. Sometimes the guys were nice. Sometimes they drank and hit her. When Essie Mae had had enough, she took her family—which eventually included two more brothers and a sister for Rickey—to another part of the East Side. There was no camouflaging the fact they were poor. But Essie Mae never let them go hungry or sleep on the street. The journey north hadn’t rubbed out her sense of southern decorum. She was a drill sergeant about keeping her kids in clean clothes and combed hair. Even when they only had milk crates for furniture and two chipped plates to eat off, she kept them immaculate. If they didn’t have a place to stay, she would get the whole family on a bus to some far-flung distant relative and march her children inside over protests or excuses.

  As Rickey got older, he could read his mother better. To her children, Essie Mae yo-yoed between angry and sad, otherwise keeping her feelings out of sight. Whatever crashed around inside, Essie Mae couldn’t box all that up in words, much less explain it to her children. All that surfaced was that unshakable loneliness. Rickey felt an unsatisfied yearning pulsing off his mother, a gap that home couldn’t patch.

  Sometimes she’d pull Rickey aside, palm him some cash, and tell him he had control of the house. Then she’d vanish. Three days. Seven days. Ten days. Once, when the family was living in an apartment on Hough after the riots—they took to calling the cratered neighborhood “Baby Beirut”—she was MIA when the power cut out at night. Essie Mae hadn’t paid the bill. Rickey and the four kids laughed it off at first. Then they heard the rats. They began by chewing through food in the kitchen. Then they were bolting across the family room. Soon all the kids were huddled on the bed screaming, Rickey vainly tossing shoes at the scurrying shapes.

  “Does anybody need to make a phone call?” The desk sergeant’s question yanked Rickey’s thoughts back to his current situation at the police station. Despite all the history between them, he knew he needed to let his mom know what was happening to him. Along with Wiley, he followed the desk sergeant to a phone bank down the hall from the lineup. Essie Mae’s phone wasn’t working, so they dialed the Bridgeman house, hoping Mrs. Bridgeman could relay the message.

  As the call was going through, Rickey spotted two detectives enter the room with a young boy from the neighborhood. The paperboy, Darlene’s brother, Ed Vernon. Toothpick arms and legs. Face fishbowled behind glasses that looked thick enough to stop a bullet. Rickey got it then. Word had been going around the neighborhood that Ed was telling folks he knew who did the killing at the Cut-Rate earlier in the week. Rickey looked at Ed. Ed looked at Rickey. Ed pointed at Rickey and said something to the detectives. Rickey knew then that this was all about the dead man up on Fairhill.

  * * *

  No Washington, D.C., hack bureaucrat or committee report could tell the Cleveland police much about a war on crime. Glenville drove the department to its battle stations, and they never really stood down. The department, in the words of one city hall staffer, began to “relate change to subversion, see progress as a threat to self-interest, and view civilian direction as outside interference.”6 As the years progressed, the interactions between Cleveland officers and the black community increasingly took on a furious and delirious edge.

  The East Side was super-charged with ill will. Regularly, officers reported taking sniper fire from dark alleys on patrol. In September 1970, a routine car stop at East 105th and St. Clair ended with a black driver fatally shooting one officer and wounding his partner. Soon even plainclothes detectives started carrying military-style .30 caliber carbines for protection. “We will stop carrying them when the militants stop using them on us,” a police officer said at the time.7 This anticipation of violence was even formalized in the department; promotions were rarely based on anything more than how well a cop could shoot at the range. “We had some great shots,” Chief Patrick Garrity later admitted. “But not that great in the brain department.”8

  Earlier in 1970, fifty Cleveland cops surrounded an East Side apartment building where members of the local Black Panther Party put together a community newsletter. Ostensibly there to serve a pair of warrants, the lieutenant leading the raid—Harry Leisman—opened fire with a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun, tearing apart the building’s second floor. He claimed later he’d seen a muzzle flash. One Panther and one cop were injured in the ensuing exchange of gunfire. Later a black Cleveland police sergeant—only the fourth African American man to reach that rank in the department—told the city’s leading black newspaper he wondered whether his fellow officers were there to “execute a search warrant or to execute any blacks found there.”9 The Cleveland cop union’s president, Frank Schaefer, didn’t dispel the idea. “This country doesn’t need a Black Panther Party,” he told the press. “To my way of thinking, they have to be wiped out.”10 That same summer, in the span of a few days, three leaders of the black activist group Pride, Inc. were shot in the street. Two died, the third recovered. One journalist wondered openly in print if the city’s police were either ignoring the violence or hunting down prominent black activists themselves.

  Within the department, police officers witnessed their fellow officers beat suspects, coerce information, and pull over black drivers with no probable cause. “And God,” one former police officer would remember years later in a court deposition. “Don’t let him have a white woman with him.” The same officer would later tell the story—under oath—of police officers preparing a suspect for a lineup with a witness. Realizing the suspect was wearing a different-colored pair of pants than the individual described by the witness, the officers forced the suspect to change clothes before the lineup for an easier ID. “You learn rather quickly that the way things are handled on the street is contrary to what it should be handled according to the book,” the officer recounted. “Winning the case was what it was all about. It wasn’t about what was fair, it wasn’t about what was honest. It was about winning.”

  Within the department, good men and women may have been uncomfortable with such activity. But it was also clear the department was walled off by a code of silence. “You do something they don’t like, you are not in the group, you are not in the clique, you get punished for it,” an officer later recounted.11 Another Cleveland police veteran would describe the attitude within the ranks as “it is us and everybody else,” he said. “Us against them.”12

  Still, some whistle-blowers did leak accounts of the chaos inside the department. The Call and Post, Cleveland’s black weekly newspaper, ran a series of articles written by “Arthur X,” an African American patrolman. “Black officers have spoken privately for some time on matters involving questionable police tactics and unequal application of the criminal justice system in the black communities,” the officer wrote.13 “Most black officers are hesitant to complain or protest any police action for fear of reprisals.” Arthur X’s pieces later went on to describe daily violence from his fellow officers. “I saw seven or eight p
olicemen without badges hitting some black kids over the head for no apparent reason … it was as if they were trying to see how many they could get.… If I, as a policeman, couldn’t do anything about the police violence, then what the hell could the citizens do about it.”14

  It was only a matter of time before this runaway antagonism that had taken up shop inside the department began pushing officers into outright criminal behavior. On Christmas Eve 1971, a police officer—the same one who led the trigger-happy raid on the Black Panther apartment—was summoned to a bar near his home where a fight was allegedly taking place. Off-duty, Harry Leisman burst into the place with an M14 rifle—the same automatic weapon issued to U.S. military in Vietnam. Leisman sprayed the room. A twenty-five-year-old patron was killed. One of the M14’s stray rounds punched through the wall into the family room of an apartment across the street, killing a ten-year-old boy watching television. When questioned by his fellow officers, Leisman—who’d already killed two people in his thirteen years on the department—claimed a mysterious stranger had handed him the hefty automatic weapon outside the bar.15

  Less than six weeks later, in February, two white Cleveland police officers were indicted on charges of rape and sodomy. John Mandryk and Ronald Turner had come upon a young black couple in Woodhill Park. The patrolman told the twenty-two-year-old man at the wheel that he could go to jail for a year for not having a driver’s license—or his nineteen-year-old fiancée could go with the cops. The girl was then taken to another, secluded part of the park and raped. When the officers’ arrest hit the news, another teenager came forward; she also had been raped by the same men.16

  Leisman, the Christmas Eve shooter, was charged with first-degree murder for the deaths of the twenty-five-year-old woman and ten-year-old boy. A jury acquitted the officer, who was taken off the street but later promoted to captain and put in charge of the city jail.

  Mandryk and Turner both ducked felony rape and sodomy convictions, but a jury did find them guilty of abducting a woman for immoral purposes. They were both given prison sentences of five to thirty years. The Call and Post cheered the convictions, noting it was “one of the first times in Cleveland that policemen were brought to trial and found guilty.”

  But forty days into their prison stays, Mandryk and Turner were both released by the sentencing judge. Evoking a twist in the law justifying “shock parole” in exigent circumstances, the court ruled the ex-cops’ prison terms were “cruel and inhumane” because they were being kept in solitary confinement for protection.

  “It was a shock when I first heard the announcement,” one of the young rape victims told the newspaper after the release. “But then, with that, by them being white, you know it was sort of expected.”17

  * * *

  The first judge to see the state’s case against Rickey Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman wasn’t impressed.

  The two appeared before Cuyahoga County Circuit Judge John Angelotta at a preliminary hearing not long after the police lineup. The case against the two was woefully thin, even for the low bar of the Cuyahoga County Court system. There was no physical evidence, and at the time, prosecutors presented no details on any witness identification. Nothing. Angelotta was ready to dump the charges altogether. But an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor piped up, telling the judge that one of the victims in the crime—Anna Robinson—was still in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound and hadn’t yet had an opportunity to view the suspects. He asked Angelotta to hold Rickey and Wiley for two more weeks. The judge agreed. So the two were shuffled back to the city jail, where they were slotted into individual cells on the fourth floor reserved for murder suspects. Rickey was left alone, mulling over the irony. All this could have been avoided had he made a different choice three months earlier.

  After years of knocking around the East Side, Rickey’s family had settled into a stable life by the time he was in his teens. Essie Mae met Milton Copeland, a sanitation truck supervisor. Not only did he bring home a sizable city paycheck, he was a pro at gaming the system: Milton’s routes stretched into the suburbs, where folks would junk perfectly good furniture and other items for no reason. When Essie Mae and her kids moved into the house with Milton on Arthur Avenue, the whole place was fitted out with quality castoffs from the county.

  Milton and Rickey got along fine. Unlike some of the other men his mother went with, he didn’t press a dad act on Rickey. Milton’s unsaid message seemed to be: Look, I’m the guy who’s with your mom, I would appreciate if you occasionally listened to me. Fine by Rickey. He respected that. Actually, he would always think of Milton as his stepdad.

  Rickey himself was rounding into the last stretch of childhood. Already that adventurous streak was pointing him elsewhere. He liked to watch Star Trek with Milton, and Rickey felt the pull to boldly go where no Arthur Avenue kid had gone before, way past the county limits. The U.S. Marine Corps was recruiting heavily out of Cuyahoga County. Rickey had seen the guys who came back from Vietnam, strutting in uniforms and unrolling war stories. The military looked better and better as his home life started cracking with familiar strain.

  Like so many of the men Essie Mae had been around, Milton liked to drink. The fights didn’t usually get physical. But one night at the end of 1974, Milton was into Rickey’s mother about hiding money again. “Don’t touch my mother,” Rickey preemptively warned his stepdad. Milton palmed Rickey’s head like a basketball. Rickey blinked, suddenly finding himself on the floor, his mother shaking him awake. There was an imprint of his head burrowed into the wall. On his feet, Rickey immediately went to get some lighter fluid. Milton had a new car in the driveway, a Deuce and a Quarter. Rickey doused the car with the fluid, but he hesitated before flicking a match. He looked around. Assessed the scene. If he turned Milton’s Deuce into a fiery blaze, the flames might torch the house as well. He walked. Milton later apologized, but Rickey was signing those enrollment papers soon after.

  Marine recruits were funneled to Parris Island in South Carolina, the basic training meat grinder for the military’s fiercest branch. At first Rickey could handle the brutal physical routines. But soon he began getting headaches, red storms of blinding pain that crawled all the way down to the tips of his fingers and toes. When military doctors examined him, they asked if he’d had any recent head trauma. He relayed what happened with Milton, and the doctors concluded he was likely suffering the mental aftershocks of an untreated concussion. They couldn’t clear him for combat. The marines handed him an honorable discharge.

  That was how Rickey found himself sitting in a South Carolina bus station in February 1975, waiting to catch an all-nighter home. A single thought stood up in his mind, waving its arms around, trying to be heard: You don’t have to go back. He could go anywhere. This time the change in his pocket could actually get him someplace. He could boldly go. But home was Bitzie and Buddy. The house on Arthur furnished with great sidewalk finds. His mother planted on the couch all afternoon watching her soap operas. His own bedroom down in the basement where Milton had his prize possession, a big-ass color Curtis Mathes TV that he’d rescued from a burning building. No matter how much Pine Sol Essie Mae rubbed into the wood the console still stank of smoke. He got on the bus for Cleveland.

  Now, sitting in the city jail three months later, Rickey figured this was just like Parris Island, a trip outside his orbit before heading back. It was just a matter of time before he was on Arthur Avenue again. But the days pooled into weeks. Eventually he asked one of the jail guards when his family was coming to get him. “Coming to get you?” the deputy said. “You’ve been identified and charged with murder.”

  * * *

  On his second run for office, Ralph Perk was propelled into city hall in 1971 by the West Side fear of black unrest.

  A Republican county pol with little campaign or party machinery at his back, he leveraged law-and-order rhetoric to a surprise win in a three-way contest. The momentum tilted to Perk largely because his campaign pressed many of the
same emotional buttons Richard Nixon hit in his 1968 White House run, including sharp criticism of black radicals and war protesters.

  In Washington, D.C., the Nixon administration had fully embraced the previous president’s federal law enforcement funding programs, supersizing the pile of money available for local departments waging the war on crime. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration would become the fastest-growing government agency throughout the 1970s. And as one of the few big-city Republican mayors, Perk was sure his party affiliation would open the right doors in Washington.

  But when the new mayor arrived in the capital for a sit-down with Attorney General John Mitchell about enlarging Cleveland’s take of federal money, the country’s top lawman had concerns. Cleveland police, he told Perk, had the worst reputation in the country.18 This wouldn’t help with grants, Mitchell indicated. As if to hammer in the point, when LEAA announced the first eight cities that would receive funding in 1972, Cleveland was left off the list. Perk personally rushed back to the capital to beg the administration to reconsider. Cleveland was eventually included, receiving twenty-one million dollars for crime prevention. The funding went directly to “target areas” on the East Side, increasing the numbers of patrols. Drug arrests alone tripled by 1974 thanks to this influx of federal money.19 But Perk realized a dirty department would risk losing any additional money from Nixon’s war chest.

  And Perk—and Cleveland—needed every dime. Cleveland had been bleeding businesses and residents to the suburbs for years. The city had never passed tax increases to compensate. Perk’s administration would be remembered for its desperate bookkeeping. During his years in office, the city’s debt grew modestly—$326 million in 1971 to $434 million in 1977. Perk, however, ran up Cleveland’s short-term debt—$14.6 million in 1971 to $140 million in 1977. At the same time, Perk became overly reliant on federal money, fiscal blood transfusions that by 1975 were covering one-third of the city’s operating budget.20 But this funding was constantly threatened by bad headlines about police misconduct. Perk was left tiptoeing the fine line between corralling a wayward department and keeping law enforcement’s reputation clean.