The Prosecutors - Softcover

Delsohn, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452285542 ISBN 13: 9780452285545

Verlag: Plume, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Rick Brewer thought the robbery would be “easy in, easy out” when he rounded up a team to rob the Bread Store.  But when they arrived, there was no money, and Brewer shot employee Jason Frost three times at close range with a sawed-off Mossberg shotgun. 

John O’Mara, for twenty years the top prosecutor in Sacramento’s homicide division, must decide whether or not to seek the death penalty, and his team of prosecutors must fight for justice for the family and the state.

This case—and others that are just as shocking, including the case against Nikolay Soltys, the Ukranian émigré who slit the throat of his pregnant wife and then killed four members of his family, including his three-year-old son, and a high-profile case involving the SLA and Patty Hearst—is the subject of The Prosecutors, a graphic, behind-the-scenes look at how the criminal justice system really operates.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gary Delsohn is a senior writer for The Sacramento Bee.  A recipient of the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, he is a past Knight Fellow at Stanford University.  His work has been featured in Salon.com, The Denver Post, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Easy In, Easy Out

That went sour downtown. That went real sour downtown.
—Rick Brewer to Carlos Cervantes

NOTHING could go wrong. That’s what Rick Brewer told everyone. With a crew he could trust, Brewer knew there was a pile of cash waiting to be slipped into his empty pockets. A mean-eyed twenty-four-year-old parolee with a drug-addict girlfriend and three young children to feed, Brewer knew from experience that the Bread Store, a popular sandwich shop and bakery about a mile east of the California Capitol in Midtown Sacramento, was an easy target.

On November 23, 1996, just before 6:00 p.m., as the day’s cash was about to be emptied from the registers and placed into a floor safe that could not be opened until the owners arrived the next morning, Brewer, a Latino, and an accomplice identified by witnesses as a tall, thin black man, slipped in through an open back door and held up the place. Between the registers and the employees’ wallets they stole $1,903.42. Brewer’s getaway driver was his sister, Angelina, who waited in the alley in her white Jeep Cherokee. The tall black man was Michael Smith, a paroled felon whose crime of choice was robbing small Sacramento motels. The stocky, slump-shouldered Brewer, wearing a child’s skeleton mask from Halloween and carrying his beloved Mossberg pistol-gripped twelve- gauge shotgun, scared the shit out of the employees who were closing up. No one was dumb enough to give the robbers any trouble. Not with Brewer and his ugly brown-and- black Mossberg—it measured a menacing twenty-eight inches from its finger-sculpted grip to its deadly muzzle opening—staring them in the face. It was a snap—easy in, easy out.

A month later, Christmas was coming. Brewer and his girlfriend, Marichu Flores, liked to party and get loaded. Their favorite drugs were cocaine and marijuana. Flores liked crank too. She used it heavily when she was pregnant with her then five-month-old son, Rick Brewer, Jr., and the baby suffered from drug-induced tremors when he was born.

The couple was not in the Christmas spirit, however. They’d been fighting even more than usual. Worn out and depressed, Flores had checked herself into a county mental health facility for some peace. When Brewer called to find out when she’d be coming home, he got belligerent at the nurse’s stonewalling and threatened her. “I have the same thing the cops have,” he barked into the phone, apparently referring to a gun. The nurse reported the threat and because he was a paroled felon, police came to search for the weapon. They couldn’t find it, but a few days later caseworkers from the state’s Child Protective Services agency came and took away his three children. Brewer ran for his shotgun, retrieved it from its hiding place, and was about to chase the CPS workers down the stairs of his apartment complex when Smith, who was with him at the time, stopped him. Brewer had already served time in state prison for dealing drugs and had no job skills or prospects. He was mad at the world. His kids and lady were gone. He was broke. Why not hit the Bread Store again?

Brewer didn’t want to use his sister this time. Smith’s cover was blown because he had refused to wear a mask in the first robbery. Brewer wanted a new crew, people he could control more easily. Because he and Flores had lived in Southside Park before they moved a few months earlier to an apartment several miles north, he was familiar with a lot of the young wanna-be gangsters in the area. Southside is a rough part of Sacramento that sits on the southern edge of downtown. The new office towers and a downtown mall are achingly close by, but the only common ground between the impoverished streets of Southside and the shiny buildings a few blocks north is at lunchtime, when the secretaries and state office workers put on their running shoes and jog around the well-worn track at the park’s edge. At night, Southside Park itself is a haven for drug dealers and gangbangers, despite a couple of new housing complexes sponsored by the city and a few brave urban homesteaders.

Brewer knew the scene. He had plenty of punks to enlist from the collection of unsupervised teenage males who used the park to hang out and get wasted. Because everyone in the neighborhood knew Brewer had been to the joint and wasn’t reluctant to kick someone’s ass when necessary, many of these punks both looked up to him and were afraid of him. None of them would give him any shit.

“Easy in, easy out,” he told sixteen-year-old Carlos Cervantes, a sweet-faced kid who liked to steal cars and was among Brewer’s Southside admirers. When he wasn’t smoking dope, Cervantes would sometimes play touch football in the park with his two younger brothers. He could run like a track star and dreamed of becoming a professional football player, but he was too little and undisciplined to have a chance.

“Wanna make some money?” Brewer asked him a few days before Christmas. “You down for a lick?”

“Yeah, man, I’m down,” Los, as his neighborhood buds called him, assured Brewer. He didn’t want to appear weak in front of him.

For a wheelman, Brewer chose Bobby Dixon, a twenty-three-year-old parolee who was only three weeks out of state prison for grand theft auto. Brewer had grown up with Dixon, a tall, skinny black man who, like Carlos, could barely read or write but had an uncanny talent for being able to bust into a locked car, get it started, and rip it off in less than five minutes. Brewer, whose father and grandfather had each served time in state prison for robbery and drug-related crimes, felt he could trust Dixon. If they got caught, Brewer knew Dixon would keep things quiet with the cops. Dixon knew how things worked. He’d served almost two years of a three-year sentence for the auto theft and a prior purse-snatching. On November 29, 1996—six days after Brewer first robbed the Bread Store—Dixon was released on parole and came to live in Southside with his grandmother. He needed cash. He could be depended on. Brewer considered him rock- solid loyal. Dixon wasn’t too bright, but he understood what a snitch’s life was worth.

Brewer was the only one in the group who had a car that ran, a ratty old 1976 Cutlass, but he wasn’t about to use it in a robbery. They needed some wheels, a G-ride they could dump right after the job. It was up to Dixon and Cervantes to find one. The term G-ride came from the gangsta rap music Brewer and his pals liked to listen to while they drank malt liquor and hung out in the park. Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube. That was their language, the slang of the streets. A gangster’s car was his G-ride, a robbery was a lick. Everything was cool.

Three days before Christmas, Dixon and Cervantes were walking around the neighborhood when they found their G-ride parked outside a dive not far from the park called the Monte Carlo Club. The black, four-door 1992 GMC Jimmy was sitting in the alley. It was a snap to jack. Dixon smashed the driver’s side window, got in, and, using a screwdriver he kept in his back pocket, started tinkering with the steering column until the engine started. Dixon told his pals that when they finished using the G-ride, he planned to get some help and take the motor out and put it into his own dead 1976 Buick Skylark.

As soon as he got his hands on the Jimmy, Dixon was driving the hot truck like a wild man around the streets of his neighborhood. He’d burn rubber and peel down the street, try to take a turn on two wheels. He did doughnuts, accelerating and slamming the brakes so the car spun in a circle. He wanted everyone to see his new ill-gotten toy. Less than a month out of the joint...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Plume
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0452285542
• ISBN 13: 9780452285545
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar