‘Gangster business will undo more lives than I can count’

I have long thought that living in Baltimore these days is much like living in a Jimmy Cagney gangster film from the 1930’s.

In ‘The Public Enemy’ from 1931, Cagney and his partner employed both boyish charm to exploit and adult brutality if needed during Prohibition in much the same way young men do these days in this city.  The difference between then and now is who fills our jails.  Where once our jails were filled with Papists and Sons of David, now they are similarly overrepresented by the descendants of American slaves.

At a community meeting last Wednesday, one of my neighbors suggested Baltimore take precautions for our upcoming marathon in light of the Boston Marathon bombing.  A few of us in the audience shyly giggled, knowing our neighbor was correct but with an asterisk.   We couldn’t help but wonder why someone would think terrorists, home grown or otherwise, would wish to bomb Baltimore?

To make the point, I suggested to the native Baltimoreans if the World Trade Centers were bombed in 1981 instead of 2001, no one would have given a damn about location.  And why?  Sure, Americans would’ve been mad about the attack.  But, given the state of disrepair New York City endured in 1981, most would’ve thought the terrorists were doing Americans a favor.   The same can be said of present day Baltimore.

Moan if you must but the cruel simile holds water.  Terrorists are wise to target locations that draw great numbers of our populace for maximum effect.  Where they err is in believing Americans would cower after an attack on institutions they love and use.  We don’t.  Still, to think Baltimore a potential terrorist target is to think, based on the damage we already inflict on ourselves, that the terrorists might inflict worse.  They couldn’t.

Word came down on that same Wednesday of 25 federal indictments of both inmates and corrections officers at the Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC).  The ringleader is a 37-year-old inmate, Tavon White, a gang member of the Black Guerilla Family.  He has resided in BCDC since 2009, awaiting trial on attempted murder charges.   In that time, he and his BGF cohorts, by strategically targeting female corrections officers, have managed to take control of inner workings of the 4,500 inmate prison.

Maryland Corrections officials have both asked for and given aid to federal authorities over the past several years in the hope of stamping out the growing prison gang affiliations of inmates.  Still, this latest set of indictments, charged federally to inflict the most damage on the nationwide BGF organization, are a harsh reminder of how far we have to go in removing our more tribal tendencies from a present day generation of Americans.

George Jackson, “Soledad Brother”, founded the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) while in a California prison in the late 1960’s.  Like the Black Panthers, each group was founded based on a need for empowerment and defense against authorities little more than a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education court case ruled segregation unequal.  Since then, each group has devolved into something altogether different from a focus of Black liberation.   BGF is now basically a well organized, full time criminal organization dedicated to drug dealing largely in the communities it once purported to serve and protect.

Many Americans look at the situation in the BCDC, throw up their hands and say ‘black people’.   Some will blame the public sector union while others decry the racist institutions who many feel are designed to aid non whites in failure.  Somewhere in between the pointing fingers and fear mongering lay several truths no single group wants to hear.

That only 13 corrections officers were indicted as complicit in this scheme to control the prison is hard to believe.  It’ll be difficult to sell anyone on how a total breakdown of security that allowed cell phones and drugs into the prison was the work of little more than a dozen guards.

As Gary Maynard, head of Maryland’s Public Safety and Correctional Services is now moving his office into the prison, he may quickly unearth a stench much worse than some union loophole.  Once he starts looking into the behavior of the present or past administrators and their lieutenants, he may find something more odious and transgressive than just willful ignorance.

For more than 80 years, from about 1840 to 1920, this nation filled with immigrants, growing our population more than five fold to over 106 million Americans.  Most of those people came from a Europe far poorer and less educated than it is today.  And the majority of those who came were either Catholic or Jewish.

The fearful cries over the bastardization of the American way of life emanating from the largely Protestant citizenry in the U.S. filled newspapers and quarterlies for decades.  They feared the supposedly ‘religion first’ Papists and Jews inability to adapt to a republic that favored secular responsibility alongside faith.

In the end, the Protestants were, in parts, both wrong and right.  Some ways of doing things were destroyed with waves of immigrants.  Others were created, such as mandatory public education for all.  And nothing is so perfect as we perceive.  Yet nowadays, many of those who point fingers at Black America are descendants who forget their forbears were once similarly blamed for America’s demise.

It took years and varied experiences to create a person like 36 year old BGF ringleader Tavon White, who is alleged to have fathered five children by four corrections officers since his incarceration in 2009.  The indictments against him and others also allude to a handbook used by BGF members to target female officers’ weaknesses as exploitable.

If the allegations prove true, the BGF playbook may in the end be more rooted in Cagneys’ gangster films than political expression.   In other words, we’ve been here before and may be again.  To simply say a racist society created Tavon White is to underestimate how clever he, being both thug and sociopath, may really be.

The horrible situation at BCDC is yet another sign that we are living in a second Gilded Age.  Symbols of enormous wealth for the few has been crossed with job losses, economic depression, human indifference and violence affecting us on a scale only the U.S. could tolerate.  That we have been here before seems little solace when one thinks of anyone currently incarcerated in BCDC who has the wits to understand this gangster business will undo more lives than I can count.  Currently, two of the kids I coached in hockey are locked up in BCDC.

‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste.’

One need only recite the motto of the United Negro College Fund as a reminder that beyond ‘race’ and class is the idea that Tavon White once was a boy.  A boy whose life might have been molded better at home, in school and on the streets if we paid more attention to what unites rather than what divides us.  The terror he may have inflicted in prison and on these streets is far more destructive than the acts of a few purile and immature saboteurs.

Many in America thought the Irish-American could never assimilate or contribute to the needs of our nation.  They were wrong.  More than Jerry Plunkett, an ignorant and fearful street thug played by James Cagney in ‘The Fighting 69^th’, was the person actor Pat O’Brien played in the film.  After a career in both the military and the law, Bill Donovan was tapped by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 to found a spy service with the coming of the Second World War.  What Donovan founded was the O.S.S., the precursor to the present day C.I.A.