Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (9 page)
Jurors wasted little time in voting to acquit. Mr. Gerber acknowledged, “Some of the witnesses were not terribly sympathetic, like the street dealers with huge rap sheets.”
His investigator on the Morgue Boys case was Anthony P. Valenti, who had grown up in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, which he described as a place where a young man had three career paths in life: “The cops, the clergy, or the cons.”
Investigating a Brownsville case, he said, is complex. “You’re operating in a neighborhood where the good guys don’t want to help and the bad guys for sure don’t want to help,” said Mr. Valenti in an interview. “It’s tough.”
With the plague now gone, where does this leave Brownsville? “I don’t know if it’s better or worse,” said Mr. Valenti, “or any different at all.” For four years—through the Mollen Commission hearings, the investigations, the trial—the three Brownsville cops were put on what bureau cops call modified duty. Street cops know this humiliation as the rubber gun squad.
Officers Goodman, SanFilippo, and Mistretta sought redemption through departmental administrative hearings. “I want to get back out there again, on patrol,” Mr. Mistretta told the
Daily News
. “This is what I am, what I do.”
His gun and badge were returned, and Frank Mistretta was back on his post. He filed suit against the city in the amount of forty million, but a judge dismissed the action. He remarried and retired from the force and now lives in Florida.
Mr. Goodman was not so lucky. The department cut him loose. He became a full-time killer of household pests. Mr. SanFilippo won back his job, but eventually left town—and an apparently resentful ex-wife, who answered a telephone inquiry by asking, “You’re suing him too, I hope?”
She would not divulge his whereabouts any more precisely than, “He’s not here. He’s in Mexico.” In unmistakable terms, as the vocabulary of scatology allows, the ex–Mrs. SanFilippo offered fair warning of her litigious impulse.
5. Crime Scene
The coffin factory on Herzl Street is layered in four spraypainted gang graffiti, making it difficult to determine exactly who is in charge:
Syc
or
Cripp 2XSS Gang
or
2-S Deuce
or
Royal Deuce
.
At the end of the block, the elevated subway tracks of the 3 train provide shelter for a colony of hard-faced individuals who will sell you dope or themselves.
One of them, a fellow named Daisy, said, “Yeah, I heard of the Morgue Boys.” So, were they guilty or innocent? “Man, it don’t matter,” said Daisy. “It’s Brownsville.”
In which two teams compete. One team crouches into a single-file line, each person holding
the waist of the person ahead. Members of the second
team try one-by-one to hop atop the “pony” and to stay on
for a certain amount of time before they’re shaken off.
All of us had worked hundreds and hundreds of cases but never
seen anything this horrible.—Detective Mike Hinrichs, NYPD’s most decorated officer
K
ayson Pearson and Troy Hendrix, already convicted of first-degree murder, spent their final moments in court in one final show of murderous bravado.
“I have no regrets,” said Hendrix.
“Me and my brother, Troy, we’re the fun-time monsters,” said Pearson. He was smiling.
Pearson was still grinning when New York State Supreme Court Justice James Starkey ordered the pair to serve another twenty-two years in prison on top of the crushing murder sentence they had already received—life plus twenty-five years.
The sentence meant that even if some legal fluke nullified their life sentences, Pearson and Hendrix would spend fortyseven years behind bars. Neither man is eligible for parole.
It’s about as much prison time as you can get in a state like New York that has effectively abolished the death penalty. (New York has not executed anyone since 1963. The state still has a death penalty law on the books, but in June 2004 it was declared unconstitutional by the state’s highest court. There are no prisoners on New York’s death row.)
As of this writing in late 2007, Pearson and Hendrix are being held in solitary confinement—locked down for up to twenty-three hours a day. They will almost certainly die behind bars. But it’s not an excessive punishment, considering the vile and vicious things they did.
On April 24, 2003, Pearson and Hendrix abducted a pretty, petite twenty-one-year-old college student named Romona Moore off the street in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood. She was walking along Kings Highway, a well-traveled road, around 7 o’clock that evening.
It’s not clear exactly how Pearson and Hendrix got Romona off the street and into the basement of 5807 Snyder Avenue. The most likely scenario is that they simply attacked and dragged her into their lair—a move that might have been risky, given how many cars travel along Kings Highway and its side streets, but not impossible.
It’s likely, too, that the monsters employed a wicked charm in luring Romona to the vicinity of the small house where they attacked her. Both men, it turned out, were good at sweet-talking young women. They had a knack for appearing normal and friendly just long enough to put their prey at ease—before erupting in savage violence.
Pearson was twenty-one, Hendrix was nineteen. They knew nothing about the young woman they would butcher, although she lived only a few blocks from Hendrix.
Romona, the only child of Elle Carmichael, arrived in Brooklyn at age four when her mother moved from Guyana, part of a tide of Caribbean newcomers who turned East Flatbush into a bustling black neighborhood full of ambitious entrepreneurs and hard-working civil servants.
The deal was simple, and understood from the slums of Kingston to the hills of Trinidad: You could trade status in the Caribbean for opportunity in the States. It was common to find men and women who had been engineers, administrators, or bankers in the Caribbean working as maids, cooks, janitors, and cab drivers in Brooklyn, often with the prickly impatience of people eager to regain their stations in life.
They bought homes, started families, joined churches, and saved their pennies. Some kept two passports, and thereby dual citizenship, sending their children to stay with relatives in Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Barbados, Grenada, or Guyana every summer—all with an eye toward a triumphant retirement someday back on their sun-drenched islands. What began as a small Caribbean colony in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century grew by leaps and bounds over the decades; by the 1980s, East Flatbush was an island community with its own robust civic associations, political clubs, restaurants, and grocery stores.
The proud islanders who built the community never let the West Indian lilt leave their voices. But many grew to love their new home, and either sank roots in Brooklyn or joined New York’s age-old, working-class pilgrimage to the suburbs.
Romona was part of this immigrant journey, growing up with five cousins in the heart of Caribbean Brooklyn. She was dark-skinned with a bright, warm smile. One of her professors at Hunter College called Romona “very proper and very formal” in class. “She was the type of student who you would feel wouldn’t answer your questions but suddenly would come with a very smart response,” he said.
In her third year at Hunter, Romona didn’t have a special boyfriend, although she did have plenty of friends, along with a 2.8 grade point average. She was studying psychology and preparing to vault her family forward with a career in medicine. Romona was going places.
All that came to a halt on April 24, when Romona went to visit a male friend in the neighborhood and trade some music CDs. From there, she planned to walk to a Burger King on the corner of Church and Remsen Avenues, about a block from her home.
She never made it.
After grabbing her off the street, Pearson and Hendrix held Romona prisoner in the filthy basement apartment for at least three days. They stripped and bound her, putting a heavy chain around her neck and connecting it to her hands behind her back. Then they took turns beating, raping, and sodomizing her between bouts of swilling booze and smoking marijuana.
The basement was a house of horrors. Police found rubber monster masks hanging in the apartment, along with pinup photos of women in chains.
In that same room, Pearson and Hendrix burned the young woman with cigarettes—three circles just under her eye in a triangle meant to look like a dog’s paw, a sign of the Bloods gang the monsters claimed to belong to.
Pearson and Hendrix weren’t hard-core gang-bangers: In fact, Brooklyn is a world away from cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, where highly organized sets hold and defend turf. More likely, the pair were playing at being tough guys, knowing just enough gang lore to think burning Romona’s face might be a cool thing to do.
Later, at trial, the burns didn’t get much attention; the focus was on other brutalities inflicted by Pearson and Hendrix. They mutilated Romona while she was alive, hacking at her hands and feet with a saw.
“Classic sociopaths,” is how Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes would describe the pair.
At least one person saw Romona’s agony unfolding.
Ramondo Jack, a childhood pal of Hendrix’s, had moved from Brooklyn, but was in town visiting his uncle and other relatives in the old neighborhood when he ran into Pearson and Hendrix. The pair brought him into the basement, poured a few drinks, and displayed their handiwork. They showed off Romona like a trophy, pulling back a sheet to display the innocent woman they had defiled and brutalized and chained like a dog.
“He lifted up the covers and I saw this female laying there,” Jack later told a reporter. “She had a bruise on one of her hands and one of her feet. She had bandages on one of her hands and one of her feet. And she was bleeding from the middle of her face. And one of her eyes was swollen. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
“Say hi, bitch!” Pearson ordered Romona, according to Jack.
“Her voice was low—teary. One of ’em tried to saw one of her hands and her foot,” Jack later told a jury. “They both had smirks on their faces, like no cares.”
Romona Moore, three days into her ordeal, bloodied and beaten, quietly begged Jack to help her. The psychology major even kept her composure enough to try and play on Jack’s sympathy.
“You seem nicer,” she told the last outsider to see her alive.
Romona was wrong: Jack was not nicer. A nice person— hell, a normal, compassionate person—would have walked out of the makeshift torture chamber and immediately called the cops. Not Ramondo Jack. He’d moved out of the tough Brooklyn neighborhood years ago and started a family in Maryland. But he clung to the idiotic, immoral code of the street and its first commandment,
Thou Shalt Not Snitch
.
“I left,” he would later tell the jury. “I went home. I wasn’t happy about it. I was bothered.”
Just not bothered enough to tell anybody who could help.
And so Ramondo Jack put the incident out of his mind and went shopping, he told cops.
He will go through life knowing he lacked the spine to make an anonymous 911 call that might have saved a desperate girl’s life. Jack’s refusal to act reflects a shocking moral collapse in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, in which witnesses to vicious, inexcusable crimes keep their mouths shut and refuse to notify police or cooperate in any way.
For a few witnesses, silence is borne of the legitimate fear of being harmed by drug dealers or other urban predators. But for many others, like the cowardly Ramondo Jack, silence is immoral apathy—a desire to appear cool and tough like the neighborhood gangsters, but in reality a weak-minded refusal to take responsibility for stemming the violence and chaos that have claimed countless lives and even entire neighborhoods.
The syndrome was on display in Baltimore in 2004, where drug dealers brazenly sold an underground video titled
Stop
Snitchin’
. The video featured dealers flashing guns and openly threatening to kill anyone who might dare to testify against them. Startled cops used the video to round up and prosecute the dealers, but not before
Stop Snitchin’
and a companion Tshirt became runaway hits in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, including Brooklyn.
“The most frustrating thing is while you’re pulling your hair out of your head looking for the girl, these people directly across the street know—saw and know that a girl’s being tied up and held in the fuckin’ basement,” said Detective Mike Hinrichs, who took charge of the Moore case. “And nobody calls the police. Where are their heads? So far up their asses, I don’t know.”
About the only thing Ramondo Jack did for the doomed girl was to gently chide her captors.
“I was like, ‘What’s wrong with you all?’” he said.
Pearson and Hendrix just shrugged, and told him, “It’s already said and done. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Pearson and Hendrix were uneducated losers, the product of families so failed and broken that Hendrix’s grandmother did not know, or never cared to ask, about the makeshift torture chamber in her own home. Not even when Hendrix and Pearson lured a second woman off the street and raped her in the Snyder Avenue basement near Romona’s dead, battered body.
On the morning of April 28, 2003, the second victim, a fifteen-year-old student, arrived at school too late and found the doors locked. Hendrix was hanging around the building.
“He said, ‘Do you want to come and hang out with me and chill with me? It’s just one block in between the school and the house,’” the girl later recounted.
With that deadly snake charm the monsters could turn on, Hendrix persuaded the teenager to come with him. When the pair got to the basement on Snyder Avenue, the girl saw Pearson, the taller of the two, standing near a futon bed.