Chapter 31

When Andy, Kelly, and Prince returned to the Collins’ apartment, they found that the group from the SPCA hospital had arrived just before them. Very quickly, the family members were reassured that everyone would be just fine. Now the people were crowded into the library and were all watching CNN which was covering the New York City attack as its major story of the day. Memories of the Central Park jogger were still fresh, but this story had a very different ending.

Remembering what Dan Murphy had said, Kelly asked if there had been any mention of an arraignment on the news. Heads were shaking in negation when the on-screen anchor announced that they had just come into possession of some of the most remarkable news tape ever produced. “Because we believe this to be so incredible, we’re going to do something we almost never do: We will be watching it for the first time at the same time you’ll be seeing it.”

There followed a scene in which it was obvious to the viewers that the camera was just being set up in a courtroom. The reporter was being checked for her position while there was some activity going on beyond her and to the right. The reporter said, “This is Melissa Martin, CNN News, in Judge Bruce Rosen’s courtroom. We’re awaiting the bail hearing on—”

She was interrupted by a motion from the cameraman. Turning, she looked back over her left shoulder, then turned to watch the proceedings. The camera then zoomed in to focus on the activities at the bench.

Eight young men ranging in age from twelve to sixteen were standing in front of the judge. Suddenly the audience could hear the words being spoken at the bench as the relevant microphones were activated and their sound incorporated with the pictures. Judge Rosen was saying, “ ... and so, I must say, this is the most incredible travesty ever attempted to be perpetrated on this court.”

Turning to one of the police detectives standing before the bench he continued, “Sergeant, are you seriously trying to make me believe that these ... these young boys ... actually confessed? Utterly ridiculous! Clearly, their constitutional rights were violated. They never received their Miranda warnings—”

“But, Judge,” the sergeant protested, “we have signed waivers from each of them. The waivers are in front of you on the bench.”

Ignoring the officer, the judge continued, “Accordingly, I’m releasing these boys on their own recognizance. We will schedule appropriate juvenile hearings—”

At that point Calvin Monroe could take no more. “You asshole!” he screamed.

The audience heard the first syllable but not the last which was covered by a late bleep. Before anyone could move, Monroe, who had been handcuffed when he was brought into the courtroom but had been earlier freed on the judge’s order, reached across the bench and slapped him as hard as he could across the face. “No wonder you’re called ‘Let ‘em loose, Bruce!’ Do you really want to get us all killed? Do you?” he screamed.

Judge Rosen, while gently rubbing his left cheek, had motioned for the court officers to leave the young man alone. Now, utterly baffled, he asked, “What do you mean by that?”

Monroe laughed bitterly and then replied, “I guess it’s only right. You and your like-minded friends have done a lot — maybe even more than guys like me — to make this city a jungle. Well, guess what, Judge? Now there are a couple of tigers roaming this man-made jungle. And you know what else? They’ve gotten good looks at all of us. If we show our faces on the streets in less than ten years, we’re dead! You and your colleagues talk about rehabilitation of criminals. These tigers think in terms of retribution. And we understand their way of thinking. We really do!”

After pausing for a moment he asked, “Judge, are there any photographs of the crime scene there on your bench?”

Judge Rosen started to sift through the pile of material on his desk but couldn’t find any photographs. After a quick exchange with the clerk and a phone call, a detective came hurrying into the courtroom with a stack of pictures. For the first time Judge Rosen, sensitive to the presence of the TV cameras, put on his reading glasses.

A moment later, he wished that he hadn’t as he almost became ill looking over the pictures of the carnage in Central Park. The TV camera picked up the fact that his face became white. After looking at just a few, he covered up the remaining pictures, took off his glasses and said with his voice shaking, “Yes, there were pictures. Why do you ask?”

“Because, Judge, what you just saw was the retribution I mentioned. My name is Calvin Monroe, Judge, and you and your friends were directly responsible for the mess out there in the park.”

The judge, hearing Calvin’s words, was genuinely shocked. “That can’t be!” he protested. “We — none of us — were anywhere near the place.”

“That’s true, you weren’t,” Calvin conceded. “But you never are, are you? You live in your very well-policed little enclaves and read about crime in the ghetto as if it were taking place in a foreign country. Do you realize, Judge, that the Encyclopedia has several references to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago?” he stated. “It does. And you know what? Only seven men were killed, but it made the history books. Today, in New York City, only seven deaths would be a quiet day. But you don’t even care!”

“Of course I care!” Rosen insisted. “But we’re doing our best. There are programs to try to stamp out poverty—”

“Sure there are!” Monroe interrupted, “And they’re mostly run by the poverty pimps, getting rich on them. But poverty as a cause of crime? What utter nonsense! If it were, I can’t even imagine what the death toll would have been in the Depression when unemployment was around 25 percent of the workforce. And that was a time when single-wage-earner families predominated, too. When a guy lost his job, the very survival of his family was at risk. And yet in 1940 there were only about 350 murders in New York City. In 1990 there were thirty-two hundred. You talk about programs to end poverty? I guess number one is AFDC, isn’t it? I’m a product of AFDC—”

“But that’s the problem!” the judge said, interrupting him for a change. “We must stamp out poverty, spend more on education...”

Monroe was just shaking his head. “I’ve got to give you credit for consistency if nothing else. You’ll just never learn. You ‘sentence’ us to school! What does that do? Not a hell of a lot — except make it virtually impossible for the kids who want to learn to do so. We’re disruptive!

“When once the biggest discipline problem in the New York schools was talking in the hallways, now it’s armed robbery! You have to go through a metal detector to get into my school. Take a look at one sometime. For God’s sake, they’re more like prisons than schools. Why? To try to keep the animals at bay. The animals? Yes! That’s us.”

Again he shook his head and said, “Just look at that pile of folders in front of you. ‘Released on their own recognizance,’ I think you said. For what? To continue to prey on the public? Have you actually read a single word? You should try it. I think you’ll find that, reviewing activities, if Willie said he was with Chuck mugging on the street, Chuck will have said the same thing. Or pretty much the same thing.”

The judge again put on his reading glasses and actually began reading through the police reports.

While he was occupied, Barbara Sloan looked over at Prince. The tiger had let out a low growl when he first saw Calvin Monroe appear on the screen, but now he was just watching the proceedings with great interest as was everyone else present.

“Who is that young man?” Barb asked.

“I was wondering the same thing myself,” Steve murmured.

Finally Judge Rosen looked up from the files. “This is horrible!” he exclaimed. “What’s going on here?”

“‘What’s going on?’ you asked?” Calvin replied. “What’s going on is what you’re causing to go on. Do you realize you have marginalized the black male? You have, you know. We have no rôle anymore. Why should a girl marry us when she can ‘marry’ the welfare system? Do you realize that all we are is a bunch of uncivilized studs? The schools? Utter disasters, every one.

“I read one of his columns in which Thomas Sowell mentioned his young niece. She apologized to him for not doing better in school. ‘And I go to the same one you went to,’ she said. He replied, ‘It’s the same building, but it’s certainly not the same school.’ And he’s absolutely right! Judge, you and your friends are racists!”

“Racist?” Rosen exploded. “That’s utterly ridiculous. Why I’m a member of the NAACP, the ADA, the American Civil Liberties Union, the—”

“Wonderful!” Monroe interrupted disdainfully. “But I stand by what I said: You and your liberal friends are racist.

“Why? Just look at affirmative action. What does it amount to? It amounts to dumbing down the curriculum so that blacks can handle it. It means we can’t compete even up with whites; we have to have a built-in advantage. Do you know something? Tom Sowell claims that the best thing that ever happened to him was to have gone to Harvard in the early 1950’s, before affirmative action. Why? Because he could be confident that he was there because he belonged there, not because he was graded against an entirely different — and much more lenient — set of standards.

“Do you realize what you’re doing? Do you realize that any black graduating from a top school has a bar sinister across his diploma. Why? Because a prospective employer doesn’t know if he has a real degree, or a cheap imitation. That really hurts everyone, doesn’t it?

“Look at the high-school curriculum! ‘Black English’ — but I guess it’s Ebonics now, isn’t it? What, in hell, is that? There is one English language. In the South one of the things I noticed when I visited down there was the way all the black kids worked on their English vocabulary and pronunciation. They sound educated, so they could get better jobs. They speak the way everyone else speaks, and the way the language is meant to be spoken—”

“But that’s only one form of speech,” Rosen protested. “And much of it was written by dead white European males. It totally ignores African civilization—”

“Like what?” Monroe demanded. “Like teaching math to the Egyptians? Like flying around on gliders built thousands of years ago? Without a single solitary shred of evidence?” Then he shook his head and added, “You’ve just confirmed what I was saying.”

After pausing for a moment he continued, “Can a black be a racist?”

“Of course not!” Rosen replied instantly.

“Why not?”

“Because you’ve been victimized—”

“What a laugh that is!” Calvin interrupted. “Try telling that to some of our victims. Admittedly, most have been black, too. But you don’t really care about them, do you? You just want to feel good. And we help make you feel good, too. Most of my buddies here don’t even know what slavery means, for God’s sake. We’re all bastards. We have no idea how many generations there have been since an ancestor of ours was a slave. We don’t even know where.

“I’m fairly typical, I suppose. I’m sixteen. My mother is thirty-two! She was pregnant with me when she was fifteen years old! It’s called ‘children having children,’ Judge. And you foster it, too. By the way, she now has four more children. I don’t know how many fathers there have been, and you know what else? I don’t think she does, either. Hell! We don’t have fathers, we have sires! My mother might as well have gone to a sperm bank.”

He just shook his head in disgust. “Now what do those files tell you?”

“They’re ... They’re appalling!” the judge gasped. “But how could this have happened? There must be some explanation...” His voice tailed off as he just shook his head.

“Look, Judge, it’s really pretty simple,” Calvin explained. “It’s you and your friends on the bench.”

Pointing to a fifteen-year-old he said, “Eddie, here, is a pretty good example. He was burglarizing an apartment and was surprised by the young woman who lived there with her husband. He ran down the fire escape but she had seen his face. Then two things happened that are pretty rare around here. First, the woman actually called the cops, reported the break-in, and gave the police a description.

“The second was even more surprising. One of the officers recognized Eddie from the description and picked him up. When they called the young woman, she actually came down to the station for a line-up. There she picked out Eddie right off the bat. Finally, she goes downtown to a juvenile hearing.

“There, the hearing officer — a young social-worker type — begins the hearing by asking the woman, ‘Why do you want to ruin this young man’s life?’ At that point the arresting officer pointed out that it was Eddie’s seventeenth arrest. The reaction of the hearing officer? She wheeled on the officer and shouted, ‘You can’t say that! He’s a juvenile! His records are sealed.’

“So there you have it, Judge: It was Eddie’s seventeenth ‘first arrest.’ And, of course, since it was a first arrest he was sent home on unsupervised probation.

“Now keep in mind that was his seventeenth! And if you think for one moment the Black Avengers would take in anyone who’s so dumb and incompetent he’s arrested every time he commits a crime, you’re out of your mind! I guess on average we might be picked up once every ten to twenty times.”

Looking intently at the judge he asked, “Do you want to count the total number of arrests listed there and multiply by ... oh ... let’s say, fifteen? What sort of total do you get?”

Judge Rosen actually did what Monroe suggested, or at least started to. After the first three records, his multiplication was giving him a total in the hundreds. Then turning to Monroe he changed the subject and said, “Okay. I get your point. But what does that have to do with letting you out on your own recognizance? Although, I must admit, the records before me argue strongly against it. But why don’t you want to be released?”

“I told you about the tigers, Judge, and you saw what they did. I guess it was Ahmed’s hand that was found, still gripping his gun, about twenty feet from the rest of his body. Well, Judge, that was when there were two of them against eight of us. I’ll tell you honestly, there’s no way I want to be caught alone by that pair of tigers. There wouldn’t be enough left to bury. And guess what? The young dark-haired girl who was giving orders to the tigers—”

Rosen looked incredulous, so Monroe explained, “That’s right, Judge. A little girl, about ten years old, was giving orders to a pair of Royal Bengal tigers. And they clearly understood everything she said to them. When she needed something to bandage the woman and the cubs, she told one of the tigers — I guess it must have been the cubs’ mother, because she called it Princess — to get some shirts to use as bandages. That huge tiger cut the shirt off my back using claws that must have been as sharp as razor blades, then brought it back. She did the same thing to two other guys, too.”

He paused for a moment as he tried to recall the events of the afternoon. “Well, anyway, Judge, this little girl was controlling those tigers. She told them to look at each of us carefully and to memorize our scents. I guess tigers have a marvelous olfactory memory. Anyway, that’s exactly what the pair of them did. I mentioned earlier that there was something utterly frightening about it. I could feel their hot breath on my bare body. But worse, I could see the look in their eyes. It was like Arctic ice, it was so cold. They would kill any of us in an instant without a thought.

“But that little girl said something else. She said that if any of us was free on the streets in less than ten years, we would be instantly dead! Now that’s something the Black Avengers do understand: It’s called vengeance.

“While you and your friends develop an endless series of creative excuses for our antisocial behavior, the girl said the tigers would just kill us. However, she added, if we were unlucky enough to be caught alone, they would probably play with us first. Maybe for hours.” Monroe thought for a moment and shook his head. “Alone, hell! If all eight of us were together, it wouldn’t make any difference at all.”

Looking straight into the judge’s eyes he continued, “New York doesn’t have a death penalty. Personally, I doubt if it would be much of a deterrent. It’s too damned slow! A guy can — and some do — sit on death row for more than twenty years while appeal after appeal is filed.

“Although the guys don’t know it, I do spend some time in the library when I can sneak away. Did you know that, in 1932 during the presidential campaign, there was an attempted assassination of FDR in Chicago? The assassin missed Roosevelt, but did shoot and kill the mayor of Chicago. I think his name was Cernik. Anyway, it happened in October or November of 1932.

“In those days the presidential inauguration was held in March. Do you realize, Judge, that the killer was executed in the electric chair before Roosevelt was inaugurated? He was. In other words, the whole process arrest, indictment, trial, appeal, and ultimate execution took less than four months. Now that was a deterrent. But now? Hah!”

Then he shook his head as if to return to the present and concluded, “Judge, I want to stay nice and safe ... in jail!”

Judge Rosen looked at Monroe’s fellows with an obvious question in his eyes. Without exception, they all eagerly nodded their agreement with Calvin’s position. Rosen then bound them all over for trial in adult court and had them held against $100,000 cash bail, each.

At that point the camera swung away from the bench and back to the reporter. “I have never seen or heard anything like that,” Melissa Martin said. “Because of the way this started, there wasn’t time to set the stage for you. As I’m sure most of you have already guessed, the eight men in front of Judge Bruce Rosen were the ones arrested in Central Park earlier today. They are charged with attempted murder, attempted rape, and a host of other crimes.”