TYRANT, DRAW THY SWORD
Of all the
stories I heard and collected about the siege of the Joke since the night of
December 7, 2007, the forgotten tale of a boy named Lee Good was the one that
bonded me with the father of the most notorious figure in the Joke's history. A
year after I started working on this book, Herbert Le Beth let me drive him to
the place where the notorious slum once stood. It was November 23, 2029. On the
way there, we stopped at his son's grave, the first time he had seen it in
almost a decade. It was there that he told me that by some great coincidence, he
had chosen the story of Lee Good to begin his own telling of those distant
events to his twenty-one year old grandson, Damon. One week after his
seventy-seventh birthday and a visit to a new doctor who had been quite blunt
and forthright, Herbert had bought a ruled two hundred-page notebook from
Walgreen's and begun to write in it, longhand, alone in his bedroom, while Damon
sat outside on the back porch, watching the autumn leaves skitter across the
tiny yard. Lee Good was
eight years old in 2007, and was one of the last children to leave the Joke
before its night of disaster on December 7. It was Lee Good who picked up a rock
ten days before all that and accidentally killed John the Baptist, becoming
single-handedly responsible for bringing down all the tragedy that came next. He
lived back then in a fourth story apartment on Attucks Street and Eighth with
his mother and eighteen year old brother. They were going to leave the Joke
forever as soon as Lee's grandmother cleared out a room for them two miles away
in Shreve, but on the third they were among the last remaining stragglers in
their almost empty building. Lee would never remember why he wasn't in school
that day. It was
raining when he got up that morning, but it had cleared by about ten and Lee
left the apartment to go play despite the chill. His brother and mother were
already gone, having left by bus for their jobs in the city. Lee took an
elevator whose lights had been smashed long ago to make robberies more
convenient down to the ground floor, then wandered out onto the Joke's two-block
central quad. There was almost no sound. Not a single car went by on any of the
streets. On that day there were perhaps no more than one hundred people still
living legally within the untended city blocks that comprised the Joke. In Lee's
imagination the twenty shadowy, hulking apartment buildings had become one
gigantic haunted house with arms and legs like a spider's, stretching in all
directions down every block, and this both secretly terrified and pleased
him. He drifted
past about a dozen dented, rusting rows of card tables that had never been
cleared after the final Saturday flea market almost a month before. They sat in
a quarter inch of mud which covered the lot from Sixth to Seventh streets, along
with some scattered remnants of that last sale which no one had ever bothered to
pick up. He pushed his palm through the thin cold layers of water the morning
rain had left behind on the surface of those card tables and crossed to the
sidewalk on Van Der Zee Street to get to the old church, looking to his left at
one point at the Diary, but not for longer than a moment, because the Diary had
always scared him. This was true especially since the time he and his friend
Reynolds had walked past there at midnight on a Sunday and seen strange
repeating flashes of bright yellow light inside a corner apartment on the eighth
floor, which could perhaps have been explained away as gunshots had the flashes
not been so eerily silent. They started and stopped twice, coming at odd
intervals. Reynolds had said it was a poltergeist. Lee believed him. Across the
way from the Joke's original church, built in 1983, was an unfenced vacant lot,
now home to a sprawling pile of debris which remained from the city's recent
demolition of the YMCA. The debris, comprised of everything from drywall to old
mortar to carpeting to a soda machine protruding like a zombie's hand through
the wreckage, ate up a space the size of a half city block. It was an excellent
junk universe, and was exactly the right distance away from the church to throw
stuff at it. The side of the pre-fabricated church had been scarred by a
thousand bricks, boards, beer cans, and tiny pieces of cement since the week
before, and it was Lee's goal on that gray morning to scrounge around the debris
for the perfect chunk of something to throw in that direction. He liked the
sound of the cement hitting the aluminum siding because it echoed. He could
usually only get a chunk to hit the siding one time in three because it was so
far away, but he had all morning to get good. He climbed the pile two-thirds of
the way, to a height of about four feet, maneuvering his way ever so carefully,
avoiding the slippery parts where things that seemed stable could just as
suddenly break your foot, and wound up standing on a folding chair that was
perfectly upright. From there he could see down into the two miniature valleys
that had been created by the random settling of debris. The bottoms of the
valleys were muddy and forbidding. He had never explored them. A policeman would
sustain a deep leg wound from a blind fall in one during the siege four nights
later. The infection from the cut would almost kill him. Five stained
glass windows faced the debris pile and the western edge of the Joke. All of
them had been already broken to some extent, and one was almost entirely gone.
The little black kid Lee Good, who would one day grow up to teach in a high
school just ten blocks from the center of the Joke, broke the rightmost one
again with an extraordinarily strong throw which sent a rock stained with green
paint directly through the forehead of a praying John the Baptist. As soon as
that happened, as soon as the small sound of the breaking glass reached Lee's
ears, he froze in shock, knowing he had done something truly horrible. He had
been to church just twice in his life. In his eight years he had been called
'nigger' more often than he had been called 'black', and though he didn't fully
understand the difference between those particular concepts, his heart was quite
clear on the difference between innocent vandalism and the unforgivable
destruction of any face that looked out from the windows of the church. For all
he knew, God had been watching, or God might have actually been the person he
broke in two neat pieces. So he turned, descended the junk pile, and ran away,
and he may have cried, but there was no one there to see it, and this detail was
eventually lost to him. He ran
panting in the cold to Building O, which was closest, entered it through a
perfect rectangular gap where one of two glass doors had once been, turned
right, ran down a fetid hallway land-mined by the scattered bits and pieces of
someone's old bicycle, and rushed into the open elevator cage. This elevator had
been removed from service entirely. He scrunched himself against the rear wall,
leaning his head back until it came into contact with the thin damp layer of oil
coating the wall's surface in yet another futile gesture meant to prevent
graffiti from becoming permanent. And there Lee stayed, the cage open and his
eyes closed. He had decided that if he gave up the entire day to loneliness
there in the lightless, useless elevator, God might forgive him for what he had
done. He eventually
napped, and when he awoke, he changed his mind and figured that had been long
enough. He emerged from the elevator and walked slowly down the unpainted
corridor, which smelled to him of vinegar and burned toast, listening for any
sound at all. There was a single resounding boom somewhere two or three floors
above him, then nothing again. Someone taking a sledgehammer to a wall, maybe,
or shoving some old wooden dresser down the stairs, like he had seen his
brother's friends do once. Just as he felt daylight again, he heard the sound of
an engine. A red van had
entered the Joke, and as Lee crouched to keep out of sight, peering around the
corner through the gap in the front entrance, the van turned off Van Der Zee
Street and stopped on Bunche, only two or three hundred feet away. Two men got
out of the van, which was left running. Unlike Lee, they were bundled up against
the wet chill. One of them held a large video camera. They stood in the big open
tomb that used to be a train yard before it became a public housing project and
checked it out for usable images. Lee walked
hesitantly out to meet them, having seen no white adults there in at least two
months. The taller man, the one without the camera, was looking around and high
up in the air, at the rooftops of O and S, and at the Diary, the highest of them
all. When they saw Lee, they paid him no real attention. The cameraman was fat
and totally bald. Lee approached in wonder, fascinated. Maybe he would be on
TV. A voice came
shouting down at them almost immediately from Building S. GET THE FUCK OUT, it said, and Lee looked upwards. A
man was standing daringly on a window ledge on almost the top floor. There was
no glass in the window anymore. He was pointing a gun down at the men from the
van. He wore a yellow kerchief around his head. Lee knew that sometimes big guys
in blue kerchiefs used to hang around the Joke too, and they were the ones who
had allowed families to pay less in protection money if everyone in the family
wore their color every day, or at least did not ever wear the colors of the
Street Spiders. But mostly the dominant color there was yellow. The man
without the camera put one nervous hand on the hood of the van and raised the
other in front of him in a calming gesture. Then he yelled back up at the black
man. He said it was okay, they were making a documentary for Channel 4. But the
man standing precariously in the window only shouted it again, GET THE FUCK OUT, without either raising or lowering
his voice, and held his pistol tightly. The
documentarian said: Can we talk to you, buddy? Lee remembered those exact words,
twenty-two years later. Even being that young and small, he knew this man
standing near him was completely terrified, so frightened he was not even able
to think clearly enough to agree to the order he'd been given and simply back
away, leave that place where no one wanted them. Lee was standing about fifteen
feet from them at that moment, suddenly very afraid to get closer. The
documentarian had thick black hair with gray in it, forty years old, maybe
fifty. The gunman,
who was no more than thirty, and whose jeans were visibly soaking wet, yelled it
just one more time: GET THE FUCK OUT. His words echoed and cracked across the dead quad where the only visible
pair of footsteps had, until three minutes before, been Lee's own. We're not
here to bring harm to anyone, the documentarian shouted, we're just here to get
some tape, though the cameraman had finally worked up the sense to take his
first steps back to the passenger's side door. He said something to his friend
which Lee never really heard. Then there came a hollow splitting sound from
above, and within a second of its eruption the gunman was shoving an arm out to
his side for balance, and then some of the cement beneath the thin wooden beam
supporting his feet gave way, and the ledge descended, and down came the gunman
with it. It was as if Building S had coughed him out all at once from its
toothless mouth. Lee saw him fall with his arms stretched out high all the way
down to the ground, more than eight stories, wood and cement falling with him
but not as fast somehow, and the sound when his back hit the sidewalk below was
nothing extraordinary, just a wet thud like a bag of cat food. There was no cry
of pain. Little bits of mud flew up. The man had managed to fire his pistol as
soon as he began to slip. It sounded like a tiny firecracker. In the two
seconds after his body struck the ground, the three witnesses did nothing more
than stare at that spot, stupefied. The van's engine idled. "Then when I
turned," Lee Good told me in a bar twenty-two years later, "I saw that yes, God
had found out what I'd done, and He'd sworn that as soon as I left the elevator
something awful would happen to punish me, and it was all my fault, because I
threw that rock at the church when I had no right to. The man who shot at us got
punished for what he'd done, and now here was my turn." The cameraman
had just started to run toward Building S when he stopped, seemed to realize
something, and fell heavily to his knees. He unzipped his thick green jacket and
groped his stomach and chest madly with both hands, suddenly gawking at Lee with
frightened eyes, blubbering, then tilting his head to face the sick white sky as
he tried to find the place where the bullet had gone into him. The expensive
camera remained in the mud even after his friend had dragged him, screaming
incoherently, back into the van. Lee would not go near that camera, not for the
world. He had started to run east, in fear of God and what his mother might
do. By the time
Herbert Le Beth was finished writing what he knew of the Lee Good story, his
hand was already aching, but he went on. His grandson might never be able to
read the contents of the Walgreen's notebook, but as long as there was a slight
chance that he could, the work would have to be done. Damon's autism was severe
and permanent, and he had spoken no more than a few hundred words since Herbert
had begun to visit him when the boy turned three. At twenty-one, he was
considered by all but a few to be almost uneducable. Yet the old man sat in his
bedroom under a window and kept writing, in the hope that one day the boy
sitting silently outside on the porch could be taught to read about his famous
father. Herbert Le Beth, a mere retired taxi dispatcher, believed it was his
last chance to tell the story as he wanted it told before he left this life
himself. If he sometimes felt like a fraud because he had only been in the Joke
on the night of December 7 for less than an hour, he tried to remind himself
that he had seen more than enough living there for two and a half years, and
trying to raise his only child there, to be true to its lonely grave.
I met him
just a few months after he had given up writing his personal history of the
Joke, in sadness and frustration, feeling simply that he didn't know enough to
go on. After we spoke that first time, I called him with an idea I hoped would
help us both: we would go to the ground that had once been called the Joke and
spend a few days talking with the people who lived there now, in hundreds of
brick townhomes comprising a fashionable neighborhood called Glen Elm. We both
wanted to know what those innocent people remembered, believed, or had been
taught in school about that night in 2007. I brought along a tape recorder so we
wouldn't lose anything. What follows is an account of the infamous events as
told by both those who lived them and those who only knew of them as history.
Somehow what the citizens of Glen Elm told us was as fascinating as anything
we'd heard before. They were so kind to us, unerringly patient with two
strangers who wanted to ask so much about a distant past to which they owed
nothing. Throughout all the interviews, Herbert himself remained almost totally
silent, reluctant to tell anyone who he really was. He talked to me at length,
though, after we had left those upper middle class homes for the day and gone
back to Point Unity for the night, and I preserved it all. It has now
been six months since Herbert Le Beth's passing. When he died, I asked his
grandson's mother if I could read the contents of the notebook he had finally
completed for Damon after we'd left Glen Elm. She said yes. I could tell when I
read it that our interviews there had hurt his heart. He could have let our time
there corrupt his history, taint it with bitterness, but to his credit, nearly
everything Herbert Le Beth wrote down about the Joke was the simple truth. In
fact, he consciously deceived his afflicted grandson only once, when he
purposefully omitted one thing he saw first-hand on the night of December 7 as
he moved sorrowfully through the sewers beneath Gray Hill into the heart of the
Joke. It was a half-finished mural of the wife of the President of the United
States being raped by a lion. Herbert Le
Beth, age 78 Even before
the orders came to the people in the Joke to move to Phoenix View, it had become
a green ghetto, which meant it was a place with so little people and activity in
it that big stretches of it had gotten overgrown with weeds, and even pheasants
were there. You could go and shoot them easy, and you'd see their carcasses
everywhere, and the bodies of squirrels and raccoons and sometimes even wild
dogs. The top part of La Guma Avenue was totally overgrown because the post
office that they were supposed to build there when the Joke was built, it was
never put in place. They neglected that half of the road for years. Every three
or four feet you saw empty bottles, parts of TVs, cereal boxes, detergent
bottles, candy wrappers. Animals would go crouch there and just sit there
licking them for the taste. And rats, too. Everything was thrown there, and it
was never taken away. Now when the
gangs seriously moved in, the maintenance on the grounds just pretty much
stopped. The crews had always been on a day schedule so they could make sure to
end their work long before the sun went down, and then even that became an
every-other-day thing, and then maybe weekly. As soon as Phoenix View started
being constructed, the grounds got ignored, potholes never got filled, and the
buildings became unlivable. There were more important worries, I guess, and as
long as the crime was so terrible, they said upkeep had to wait, and no one in
the Joke pushed for it much, not that the community had much organization. The
Tenants' Board had no lawyers they could depend on. By 2006, I think it was
around then, you'd start to read that the elderly people in the buildings,
especially the Diary, they'd wait for someone they knew to be out in the hallway
before they got into an elevator. They'd ride in twos and threes out of fear.
When I lived there with Charles and his mother, there was one murder every six
weeks. Eventually it got as high as one every three days, and a robbery every
day. David
Faulkner, age 25, De Haven Court, Glen Elm I saw
pictures in a book once of the graffiti they had there, I think it said that
most of the really interesting stuff came near the end. But there were photos in
the book of all this really colorful and political graffiti all over the
buildings. Like the candles they painted, someone painted one ten feet high on
the side of a building, and after that they were doing them everywhere, all
these giant murals of candles. Herbert Le
Beth A Street
Spider named Ali Krebbs did most of them. There were a total of fourteen at the
end. The biggest one was sprayed on the side of the Worship Center. People used
to laugh and say you could walk around at night in the Joke even when the street
lights were broken because of all the candles everywhere. Krebbs always made his
red, red like blood red, with flames that had faces inside of them. He drew
Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Crispus Attucks, Malcolm X, and dead rappers,
you know, I don't know their names. The flames at the ends of the candles were
always blown to the left by the wind, that was Krebbs's signature. The others
were just imitations. On buildings where there were no candles there were a lot
of angels, they were kneeling, they were praying, they were floating above the
Wincopin Bridge, they were floating above the Tree, touching the heads of little
kids, children. They were such sad images because of what they were drawn on,
you knew from looking at the buildings those angels weren't happy ones. The
radio was doing a story about the graffiti, it was public radio, they were doing
a story about it when the Street Spiders nearly beat the reporter half to death
with the end of a lamp. After that, no one else came into the Joke to interview
anyone. Word got around fast that talking to anyone about anything meant you
could die. Gloria
Musial, age 43, Rosette Street, Glen Elm Our father
used to tell us stories about the Joke because he worked right across the street
from where it began, he was right over on Nell Street. He owned a pawn shop and
he said people came in all the time trying to sell the plumbing from the
buildings. He said the gangs and the drug addicts just stripped away as much as
they could and tried to sell it. Then he told us that the gangs had target
practice in there a lot, they'd sell guns up on the highest floors, and to test
them, the people buying the guns would get up on the rooftops and fire at the
building across the street. My father claimed it got so bad that the police
learned just not to respond to certain calls. All the windows along the top
floors were broken. I remember seeing that myself a few times. My father would
say it was because of the target practice. He said the people who lived there
didn't even pay any attention to it. They knew the difference between a target
shot and one where someone was being killed. I don't know if it was really
true. Herbert Le
Beth In winter the
shots would shake loose these long thick icicles and patches of snow and they'd
go crashing to the sidewalks. It became a game to them. Martin
Sturris, age 59, Bright Cove Road, Glen Elm I had
to turn in reports to the city every two weeks about conditions in the Joke.
That became my job. I'd get in the car and spend about three hours a week in
there. Near the end, I wrote something like, "If no one can address the problems
stated in this report within the next thirty days, I would advise accepting the
worst case scenario of each of them." I didn't get any answer to that, of
course. They read the reports, but the machinery was just so slow. There was a
lot that I couldn't report, because the reports weren't the place for it. There
was no room to write about a lot of the things I saw, I didn't tell anyone about
them for years. No one in the mayor's office I talked to wanted any part of it.
I remember one time I had to go into the Joke at night because I absolutely had
to talk to a family about their transfer to Phoenix View, it was getting close
to the deadline, early fall, and it was the only time I could go, and it scared
me pretty bad, because at night, with all the street lamps busted, it was like I
was standing in the shadow of a big empty castle. Now here I am, and I'm living
in the Joke, technically. Not really, because you would never, ever know what
was right here, just outside where my door is, but here I am. David
Faulkner, age 25 The graffiti
book about the Joke showed all these sidewalks that were totally chipped away,
and then there was a photo of a big stretch of one street where the sidewalk was
just half gone. I saw that and thought, where were the pieces of sidewalk
disappearing to? Who would take parts of a sidewalk, what kind of life was that
in there? All the photos, there were almost never any people in them, so you got
the impression it was like a movie where some plague had come through and left
nobody alive. Or there'd be one person standing between two buildings, and that
was the only thing in the frame that let you know someone was living there. The
place looked really huge, there were huge spaces between the buildings, not like
a normal apartment complex. Big amounts of dead space between everything, space
that wasn't used for anything, apparently. The strangest picture was of
something that was spray-painted on one of the walls in a stairwell inside the
building they called the Diary. The words said THE DEVIL'S SCRUNCHED UP IN MY
MOUTH. What made that so eerie was that the writing was so big, and no one had
signed it. It curved all the way down the stairwell. What did that mean, I
wonder. Interesting book, all real pictures from that neighborhood. Martin
Sturris, age 59 There were
these little mysteries everywhere. There was an Asian family that was squatting
in one of the buildings, the two kids were going to the local school day after
day, and then the family stayed in one room all night, they never went out
anywhere, they lived there illegally. Something had happened to put them there,
and after about three months of living in the Joke, and being left alone more or
less, supposedly, they just left in the middle of the night. A woman who lived
down the hall said they left a note on her door thanking her for not telling
anyone about them, and in an envelope with it was about a thousand dollars, in
cash, in all denominations of crumpled bills. She swore the man and woman hadn't
left that room once in all that time. No one ever reported them, or almost any
of the homeless people who were there. So many of them were so far gone. It was
a homeless woman who claimed there was witchcraft going on in the building.
Everyone thought she was insane, but then it turned out she wasn't really wrong.
How was someone supposed to report something like that in a state file? What
would the point of it be? Herbert Le
Beth I remember
this man everyone called the Mitten Man, and I remember once coming home from
work and seeing someone lying on his back in the dead center of the hallway,
this was on the tenth floor of the building at noon, he was lying there totally
high, with his arms held up straight up toward the ceiling. And I came back out
two hours later and I saw him still there, his arms held up like before, just a
piece of trash waiting to die. People from the state couldn't talk about that.
It had to be seen, you understand, it had to be felt, but no one important was
there to feel it. Charles's
mother and I moved into the Joke the year it was created, in 1983, and we lived
there raising him until 1985, when we wanted to leave very badly and finally
did. Charles was sixteen when we left, and after only about four months he left
us and he went back to live in the Joke to be with his gang. I was furious at
this, but I reacted badly and he hid from us there. We hadn't been able to keep
him from the gangs. We named him
Charles after Charles Lindbergh, the great pilot. Donna
Briarly, age 30, Bel Air Street, Glen Elm Do you
remember the name of the TV show, the one that showed the incident between
Charles Le Beth and Stephen Dunkirk? Oh, no, I
don't. I only know that it was a public access show....no, public television,
the local PBS station had it. I don't remember the name, though. But you saw
the incident, when you were seven? No, I mean,
when I was seven I just watched cartoons. They showed the tape to us in school
much later, it was part of a civil rights unit or something, I was in eighth or
ninth grade. Before that, I was only sort of aware that something had happened
in the place where my neighborhood was built, long before, something about black
people fighting white people. That's all I knew. Where else
have you seen TV footage of Charles Le Beth? Well, by now
I've seen him on old shows like Meet the Press, shows like that, because
I guess he was on a lot of them. In college, in history class, we saw a few
tapes. John Takoma,
age 74 You see, I
have all the dates of all the shows we did from 1996 on still written down in
the booking log, and I can tell by the name "Le Beth" here that Charles Le Beth
came in to tape that debate on the second. That would have been three days
before the siege of the Joke, then. Look, you see I have his name pencilled in
on the ninth, which would have been impossible. I got the week wrong when I
wrote it down twenty years ago. I remember
very vividly when Le Beth entered the studio. Once you saw him, it was tough to
forget him. You'll have people tell you that they felt something strange about
that night, and mostly it's because our memories have changed over the years,
and we shape things so we remember them the way we want. But I swear I felt it
coming off him when he came into the studio. He wasn't right, not physically,
not mentally. The Congressman, Dunkirk, he was normal, but not Le Beth. If
someone had only asked me back then, "Do you feel something's wrong?" I would
have said Yes, something's going to happen tonight, right in front of
us. Bill Mullen,
age 42 We watched
the show at Purdue, a group of us. We were following the whole situation with
the Joke pretty carefully for the student newspaper, obviously we were coming
down on the side of the people in the Joke, we just hated what the state was
doing. We would print almost anything as long as it made somebody mad. We were,
I don't know, freaked out a little by how Le Beth looked when he was on Here
and Now. He had cancer, it just made you mad somehow. Do you
remember the name of the man he debated that night? Sure, Stephen
Dunkirk. What do you
remember about the show? Other than the moment everyone knows
about? Well, it was
a weird vibe, because you just knew the two of them hated each other.
Thomas
Sarton, age 65 Le Beth had
been on Meet the Press two weeks before he did Here and Now, and
while I was booking the December 2nd show, Le Beth's man hadn't given any
indication that his health would be a problem, but Le Beth showed up at about
six o'clock and he looked absolutely terrible. He was noticeably thinner than he
had been even two weeks before, and his eyes were a kind of dark yellow. He'd
just had a dialysis treatment that morning, I was told, and he was terribly
weak. He got out of this small blue Cadillac and his assistant, Stoops I think
was his name, had to help him into the studio. And my first thought, somewhat
shamefully, was "What are we going to do about his eyes?" He was going to look
quite sick on camera, but because he showed up fairly late and we were going
live, there wasn't much we could do. Here he was, not even forty years old, and
no one would ever say openly he was dying but he clearly wasn't getting any
better. He and
Dunkirk of course did not shake hands before the show. We had Le Beth in makeup
for maybe ten minutes, and Dunkirk was already on the set by then. He just sat
here drumming his fingers on the table, not having a whole lot of small talk
with Evan. I was sort of watching him on one of the monitors as he sat there,
looking tense, no one else in the frame with him so he seemed unguarded. When we
booked him we had a moment of hesitation because we thought the personality
clash would be too great, but who knows why we didn't think on it more than we
did. It was an
unspoken thing that Le Beth and Dunkirk were not to meet beforehand, they were
given a rundown of the show individually. Evan himself talked to Le Beth, right
there on the set, maybe a ninety second briefing of how things would go. Le Beth
took his chair, and Dunkirk just nodded in his direction. I'd say Le Beth was in
his seat and ready maybe two minutes before we went on live. So there was no
time for any exchange between them beforehand. Evan Viorst,
age 71 I had never
met Charles Le Beth before. He'd declined to come on the show twice before.
Congressman Dunkirk had been on once, years before, when he was involved with
the Republicans in Dallas. I'd watched a lot of video of Le Beth and he
absolutely fascinated me. It seemed impossible to tell how much of his technique
was false stage presence and how much of it was real. You could see the street
hood inside him, it was still there though he was sick and thin. The way he
physically leaned far to one side during an argument, away from his opponent,
was interesting to me, and he began the show that night that way, he was already
passive aggressive, confrontational. I can't even demonstrate it correctly, that
extreme lean he did. Total contempt, that's what it signaled. What caused most
of the tension that night, I think, was the sense right away that sitting there
on the set was not a Republican Congressman and a liberal activist, both in
their proper suits, but a black man and a gray-haired white man, the extreme
ideologies of both races at that moment in time. They were not going to be able
to talk about the Joke as politicians; it was going to be a black man and a
white man squaring off, something inevitable. John had told me the night before,
after he'd looked at the questions I'd prepared, he said, "It might be best on
this one to just keep them off each other however you have to. Dunkirk despises
him and he despises Dunkirk. You're only going to be able to ask maybe half the
stuff on this list. The rest you might just have to improvise." Martin
Sturris, age 59 It's said
that the taping of Here and Now was the last time anyone outside the Joke, in the outside
world, saw Charles Le Beth alive. You saw him just before
that?
Well, if my memory is right, it would have been about two or three days before he went on that show, because I went into the Joke to make my final report on the conditions and to give some help to a woman who was still living there and had no one to help her move her things out. She was on 12th Street, she was about seventy years old, she'd lived there since the beginning in the eighties, and she'd called Human Services and given them hell, because she'd been expecting someone to just magically drop by at some point unannounced and help her move. Six months had gone by and nobody had come, and she was, you know, unhappy. So I was going there to do this, and on the way to her apartment I saw Charles Le Beth standing on the first floor in the central community room, the doors were open. This was building G, I think. The community room was just a big empty room where the tenants were supposed to meet. It was kind of a shock, seeing him there, because he had a little celebrity status back then, at least if you followed politics. He was standing there sweating in a suit with no jacket, standing there talking to this giant, this huge black guy, he wore a T-shirt and jeans, he was just the most muscular guy. And I know he was wearing a long necklace that was meant to look like a snake. Le Beth saw me and he said, "Whoa, whoa," and he came out to talk to me and ask me if I was from Human Services and had come to help Mrs. Deck. He said that Mrs. Deck had Alzheimer's and sometimes she imagined she owned things that weren't really there, and that if there was a problem, he could come help, I should walk back down and get him. I left with the impression that this man really did know everyone in the Joke.
Do you think the big man with the necklace was Rod Baker?
You know, the pictures I've seen of him, I really do think it was him. It's easy to say that looking back, but I really do.
So in all likelihood, you saw both Charles Le Beth and Rod Baker, the man who commanded the Street Spiders during the siege of the Joke, talking together about a week before it all happened. And both of them were dead by Sunday night.
I would say so, that it's true.
This man with me here today, you've never seen him before, correct?
No, I don't believe so.
This is Charles Le Beth's father.
Oh, my. That is really amazing. Hello, it's good to meet you. That is really educational. Incredible, to meet that man's father.
Corrected transcript from the December 2nd live taping of the public affairs program Here and Now, hosted by Evan Viorst, Indiana Public Television, Tuesday, 8:00 p.m., 2007:
EVAN VIORST
Good evening, this is Here and Now. I'm Evan Viorst. This Friday is the deadline for the remaining residents of the public housing project of Bello Gardens to leave their homes in east Indianapolis and move into Phoenix View, a new $110 million project two miles to the north. The city's sale of the property on which Bello Gardens was built has caused a storm of controversy within the African-American community, with the revelation last week that the sale stands to benefit the Chapelwaite Foundation, an organization with the stated purpose of constructing a private Christian university on that land. With us tonight are Republican Congressman Stephen Dunkirk, representing Indiana's eighth district after the August resignation of Lowell Baird, and activist Charles Le Beth, founder of the Socialist Ascendancy Party and an advocate for the city's African-American population. Gentlemen, welcome.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Thank you for the opportunity.
EVAN VIORST
Congressman Dunkirk, it was you who finally brought to public light the deal with the Chapelwaite Foundation, in which the city has committed to sell the bulk of the Bello Gardens acreage so that a private, and it appears predominantly white, Christian university can begin construction there sometime after 2009. Was this a voluntary disclosure on the state's part, or would it not have been fully revealed, had a city audit not done it, for quite some time?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Well, let me take this opportunity to again erase the misconception that the Chapelwaite Foundation deal and the state's decision to move the people of Bello Gardens into a new community were ever in any way related. It had been decided by the city council as early as summer of 2004 that conditions in Bello Gardens were deteriorating to a point, both with its infrastructure and its crime rate, where it would most likely have to be razed. That property was to revert to the city of Indianapolis if that were to happen, it is city property, and the worst did happen, and the state decided to spend $110 million to resettle every legal resident, giving them notice of more than six months. It wasn't until this year that Chapelwaite approached the Governor's office with their offer for that parcel of land, a parcel that would likely have gone undeveloped for upwards of five, maybe even ten years. With the money the sale will generate when it goes through, we will be able not only to pay off sixty percent of the debts the state has incurred in building Phoenix View, we will be able to approve more than two million dollars in housing vouchers so that many families can move into privately owned, or privately rented, apartments. But the assertion that this was some sort of back door deal remains quite frankly malicious, just wildly misinformed.
EVAN VIORST
Mr. Le Beth, what is your organization's objection to the city's sale of that land?
John Takoma
I remember Le Beth waited so long to speak that the people around us in the studio thought something was wrong, but it was for effect. Then he did what he did a lot when he was on television, he spoke to the air in front of him, into space. He was talking to the top of the table they were sitting at. He didn't look at Dunkirk, and he didn't look at Evan. It was some effect. It was like he was lost in his own world, or that he couldn't even stand to look across the table at the man he was dealing with.
CHARLES LE BETH
What I object to, what the people of Bello Gardens object to, what all thinking men object to, is the fact that the state of Indiana never had any other intention for this housing project but to sell it to this overwhelmingly white, affluent institution. Not a single plan for the land was ever spoken of for the time after its destruction, there was not a whisper of what would ever be done with it, even when the demolition plans were set in stone. We see now that it was always going to Chapelwaite, that the people of Bello Gardens were doomed to be rushed out of their homes the second Horace Nye walked into the Governor's office, not this year as the Congressman claims, but back in February of 2004. The city council started talking about Bello Gardens's extinction two weeks after Nye showed Indiana his money. We know he met with the Governor twice three years ago; those meetings are a public record. Mr. Dunkirk can't produce a single piece of written evidence before that which ever suggested this housing project needed to come down. Today, fifty-five hundred people are out of their homes because the state thought it was expedient and profitable to shuffle them, and because they knew the objections would be quiet and easily squashed, because the public wouldn't want to hear the objections of people on welfare and people too poor to put up a fight.
EVAN VIORST
Congressman?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Well, I'd be very interested to hear how Mr. Le Beth sees any profit in the state spending $110 million to build a bigger, better housing project and getting only a $70 million payment from Chapelwaite in return. Let me first, though, point out my own column in the Indianapolis Star in May of 2004 in which I first pointed out the need to explore other options for the people of Bello Gardens, including razing it as a belated response to its terrible crime rate and giving those people a better chance to have some kind of productive life in an environment that wasn't so hostile. I re-iterated those views several times on the floor of the State Senate—
Thomas Sarton
Le Beth hated statistics, and Dunkirk knew that. Charles Le Beth wanted to talk about emotions, he wanted to talk about history, because he knew how to cut people with it. He would make eye contact with Dunkirk only every ten seconds or so when he spoke. It was so much more interesting seeing it live than people who had to see it later. So much more visceral. And Evan didn't even seem to exist, it was like he wasn't even there. The feeling in the control room was palpable. The nervousness.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
I re-iterated those views several times on the floor of the State Senate—
CHARLES LE BETH
Congressman, you know very well that so-called deficit you're talking about vanishes in a heartbeat when you suddenly eliminate city funding for the upkeep of Bello Gardens, when you wipe out the paltry seven social service programs that still remained there, and charge Chapelwaite upwards of three million dollars a year in city services to keep that pretty university going strong. And it will go strong, because it was guaranteed a long life years ago, but nobody knew it. The land was good as sold and nobody knew it, but now they do, and we're going to get as many people out of office because of it as we can, including yourself, who was never even elected to the eighth district.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Well, we can....we can debate finances and debate the reasons for those meetings in 2004, which had nothing to do with Bello Gardens, actually, they were about the legality of a possible campaign contribution made by Mr. Nye. Or we can step back a second and look at the bigger picture. We had a situation in Bello Gardens that was, really, a death spiral. When it was first populated in 1983, its crime rate was seven points higher than in the areas right outside its boundaries, north, south, east, and west. That doubled within a year as the drug trade insinuated itself. Last year, the homicide rate in Bello Gardens was forty points higher than any other single district in the city. We know that no less than four major gangs were fighting for business there. We know that the homicide rate was still climbing, and beyond that, that the infrastructure of the residences was beyond repair in many cases. So the city was confronted with a choice, to rebuild and resettle, or let the situation go on indefinitely. I don't think even Mr. Le Beth can argue that moving those residents to a place where tenancy is more closely scrutinized, where the facilities are new, where the citizens will have a guaranteed Tenants' Board already in place....ah—
CHARLES LE BETH
Five percent of the people who are being evicted from Bello Gardens won't be getting any of these mythical vouchers, they won't be going anywhere because there's not enough room for them in the same vertical cement slabs as were built before. Nowhere are there row houses, townhouses, or mixed income residences as mandated by Hope IV years ago for ending the cycle of poverty. There is no child care facility yet in Phoenix View, there is no post office, there is fifty percent less green space than in Bello Gardens. Phoenix View is the same demon in a different suit. But I won't talk about its specifics, not while this hideous lie has come to light. I will talk about hate.
EVAN VIORST
What do you mean by that phrase?
CHARLES LE BETH
What am I talking about, I'm talking about the hate that causes people to be sold like properties on a Monopoly board. Chapelwaite will build its college on the place where misery festered for twenty-four years, and it will be allowed to build there because Bello Gardens is an embarrassment to the city. It hates the people who live there, it hates them for living in a place people have to stay away from at night, that they have to look away from when they go past. Chapelwaite gave the city the reason to destroy it and push the people there two miles north where there is no affordable plan for revitalization, where the river naturally separates its business district from the ones that actually work, where they won't be an eyesore anymore. Do you understand, Congressman, that in Bello Gardens, on the street, that it is known why they have to move, that there's not a second of debate about it? They know they're hated, they know you and the Governor sold them out?
CONGRESSMAN
If I may.....I can't tell you how many cases I know of where citizens of Bello Gardens will be closer to their jobs, have better access to three new bus lines, and a proposed light rail stop; I can't tell you the relief expressed by Marjorie Adams, the head of the Tenants' Board, and Charles Eads, the State Commissioner of Human Services, that there will no longer be such an easy venue for gangs to sell drugs and battle each other over the drug market and do harm to those people. This has nothing to do with public perception, or the city's perception, of any one group. It's about a social responsibility, it's about economic necessity.
CHARLES LE BETH
What it's about, Congressman, is blind men who don't understand the monster they've created, so they decide to kill it however they have to. This time, you got lucky and turned a profit on it all, but you made a terrible mistake and tried to conceal the deal until it was too late for anyone to object, but it didn't work because of a freak chance, a city audit you never saw coming. That was where you lost control of the lie, with the audit. And you've been caught. You've been caught in that hate.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Ah, I can't even respond to that allegation, and it's an allegation which has distorted the issue here and caused me to have to spend time I should be spending representing the people of my district on responding to baseless innuendo.
EVAN VIORST
Let's shift the topic just a bit. Mr. Le Beth, you and others have long written of—
Herbert Le Beth
When they arrested my son the very first time, he was seventeen years old. He'd become a member of the very first gang that set up in the Joke. That was the Dark Reds. The police had something called Operation First Strike or something, which was basically them accumulating lots of search warrants, warrants for everything they could get. The point was to make their presence known to everyone on their watch list. Part of it too was them going in on dates they had scheduled and arresting certain names on a list. They wanted this person and this person and this person arrested, and they had almost nothing to charge them with except very minor parole violations or suspicion of drug possession. It was more a way to get information about who else was entering the gang. They were hoping to scare the younger ones with jail terms. At that time, the Reds had no organization, and they weren't even selling drugs on a big scale yet. They did graffiti and they would break in and rob the same two or three places month after month, and they were getting into the crack business, selling a little here and there, but there was no open market for it yet that you could see on the street as you drove past. A year later they were the scariest gang in the city, but this was before the revenge murder of Ci Carter. What the police would do was go looking for the names on the list on that certain day, it was always a Tuesday, and they had pencilled in next to their names the charge they were supposed to use for the arrest. So beside a person's name they would have written the word "possession", even though they didn't have any sort of case on them for it. They just had to have a reason for the arrest and the questioning, which would give them information.
When Charles was arrested, he didn't even have a nickname, a gang name. They found him at the Chinese take-out place the kids in the Joke used to go to on Chalice Street, Tasty Bowl. They took him out, drove him to the station to be questioned. He didn't put up a fuss. They told him they were arresting him on suspicion of possession, that someone had turned him in.
He was questioned all alone. But he wouldn't say a single thing, not one word, not even his name. They threatened him just a little, but it didn't do any good. He just stared into space. They told him he could make a phone call, but still, no reaction. He made a motion, kind of a scribbling motion, so they gave him a pad and pen, and they actually thought for a minute that he might have been deaf. He took the pad and pen and at first they thought he was writing something for them, but no, he started to draw. They asked him a few more questions, like who had he been hanging out with, if he knew about some robbery from the week before, but he kept his head down, he totally ignored them, he kept drawing. What he was drawing was some kind of a tunnel, and he drew himself standing inside of it, looking out, and it was very well done, I'm sure, he'd had some classes. The police just let him do it and finally they let him go. Not even the threat of holding him for a few days until he answered them worked. He left, but he didn't take his drawing with him. He'd finished it while the police were talking about him in the next room. They gave it to me when they came to talk to me. Charles was just a shadow standing in that dark tunnel, except he'd made it seem like a light was glowing around his head, and it was by that light you could see his face by. And below the drawing he'd written one word: SOON.
EVAN VIORST
Mr. Le Beth, you and others have long written of what you call the cruelty of the welfare state you see being created inside impoverished housing projects. Do you see the construction of Phoenix View as just another slum perpetuating that, or—
CHARLES LE BETH
Of course it's perpetuating that, and when Phoenix View is infested with drugs and unemployment and despair, Congressman Dunkirk will tear it down and resettle the next generation somewhere else. And then they'll be evicted from whatever hell has been made in another thirty years. You take a black baby born to a welfare mother and a father with no job, he grows up in a place where he's made to feel an outcast by his playmates if he does well in school, the peers who he has an innate desire to be accepted by as an adolescent are pushing him to try and sell drugs, the world outside the slum is disgusted at the idea of even setting foot in his community, treats it like a leprous dog, and everything outside those walls is foreign and populated by a culture that until fifty years ago segregated his race from their own out of their distaste for his kind....tell me what's going to happen to that child, Congressman. Tell me what happens when he has a child of his own, not when he's married and twenty-five, but as a teenager in a gang who represents the only loyal family he's ever known, the only people in the world who listen to him and talk his language and treat him with respect.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
It's a tragic cycle, I grant you—
CHARLES LE BETH
And it ends how?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
—and that is why we have to try to break it.
CHARLES LE BETH
Break it how? By kicking that child out of his home so you can sell it to people who won't shame the city so much?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
No....no, we break that cycle by creating a community that can be a home for a struggling family but not its prison. Phoenix View is a unique project which is going to be supported by—
CHARLES LE BETH
Oh, you've—
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
—no less—
CHARLES LE BETH
Hey, you've found a way to magically fix the sense of helplessness that infected that slum baby from birth?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
If I could finish, supported by fourteen new pilot programs created specifically for Phoenix View by the Department of Human Services. We're going to see things like—
CHARLES LE BETH
Congressman, what do you think you would have become if you had been that baby?
EVAN VIORST
Let's let him finish, please....
CHARLES LE BETH
You think you'd be here in this studio today?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Let me just outline some of what Phoenix View is going to do for five thousand people, and then I'll respond.
CHARLES LE BETH
I don't want to hear it, Congressman, I really don't. You've sent out pretty information packets to everyone in the Joke along with their eviction notices, they all know what they're going to get, and none of that has the slightest effect on anyone who isn't living there, so I'm not going to let you speak to anyone else about it and PR your way past your lies. I'm asking you, what do you think you would be today if you had been born in the Joke to one or maybe even both parents who didn't give a damn about you?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Okay, I will respond, if you want to get into a discussion that is so wildly off topic—
CHARLES LE BETH
Yes.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
—and since your organization has been so vehemently opposed to any sensible dialogue about the sale of Bello Gardens, and is interested only in threats and public character assassination, I will answer your question. The way you go—
CHARLES LE BETH
How about—
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
The way you go about giving that child a chance to compete in this world is to provide an atmosphere, using Section Eight, using housing vouchers, using everything at our disposal, where he is made to feel like he can contribute, and that he is not just a poor African-American child, but a person who is welcome in any classroom, in any job—
CHARLES LE BETH
You want me to tell you about the atmosphere in the Joke? Thirty people were shot to death this year. The elementary school has the word 'nigger' sprayed on it in ten different places.
EVAN VIORST
Let's allow him some time to answer your question.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Well, let me ask you, Mr. Le Beth, who is ultimately responsible for the conditions inside a community?
CHARLES LE BETH
You mean who spray-painted the word 'nigger' on the school, and forty times inside the Diary? The people who live there.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Not the city of Indianapolis, and not the state of Indiana.
CHARLES LE BETH
That's right, people who look around this city and feel that if everyone else is thinking it, and has since before this country collected slaves, they might as well say it. Now I ask you again, what do you think you'd be today if you grew up inside the Joke?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
I would hope that I would take a look at the world around me, and see that if others have escaped poverty, it is within me as well, I am the one who ultimately holds the key, and though it may be far more difficult—
CHARLES LE BETH
Difficult? When your textbooks are getting ripped from your hands and grown men three times your age are intimidating you daily not to go to school at all? Did you say difficult?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Mr. Le Beth, we as a nation are built on certain principles. Our government is obligated, not by law but by a tradition of compassion, to assist those in need, with the understanding that it is incumbent on all of us to help ourselves. We're not a socialist country but we are the most compassionate democracy in the civilized world. In the case of Bello Gardens—
CHARLES LE BETH
Come with me into the Joke tonight and read that right off your notes to however many children are still left.
EVAN VIORST
All right, we don't want this to become a shouting match, Mr. Le Beth. Congressman—
CHARLES LE BETH
Then I'll tell you what happens after you turn your back.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Mr. Le Beth, who exactly are you blaming for Bello Gardens becoming totally unlivable in the space of two decades?
CHARLES LE BETH
You want me to blame the city, Mr. Dunkirk, or white people, or the federal government, I'm not going to do it, the fact is none of these entities has the intelligence enough or the compassion enough to understand what happens to a human being's mind when they're trapped in complete despair. Your solution for a hundred years has been to wall these people into the slums and hand them a couple hundred dollars a month to not be a problem for anyone at Fountain Square or any of the other nice places in town where they might make white people nervous. I'm telling you that's all part of the collective idiocy of people in charge and I'm not so stupid to think that's going to change with me. But what I am telling you is that the anger that you thought was wrapped up so nicely inside the Joke isn't wrapped up anymore, because they know what you think of them now just as if you wrote it on the sidewalks. You sold the Joke to Chapelwaite. You might as well have said, "Niggers get out."
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Those people, those African-Americans, sir—
Evan Viorst
Now I could look at this transcript today and I look for places where I could have stepped in. It seems somewhat shameful that I didn't do it, when I was sitting three feet from them both, and I wonder if part of it was the spectacle I began to see taking place, and being in a kind of awe of it. When people in power begin to lose control and speak from their gut, it is so extraordinary that my first temptation, even today, even twenty years since I've done any sort of serious journalism, my first instinct is to let myself become mesmerized. But I should have stepped in, I've always known it, because what happened at some point is that the public wasn't watching an exchange of honesty anymore. They had begun to watch something that had been corrupted. It was poisonous.
Thomas Sarton
The next day people were saying that things escalated so fast because Le Beth knew he wouldn't be alive much longer, even then. How's that for gruesome? But I can't disagree with that. If you looked at his public career, which was only, what, three years long or so, he had been building toward something, but inside of five minutes he had thrown his image away and become....not an activist suddenly, more like a wolf or something. He wasn't staring at the table anymore, and he wasn't leaning back in his chair. It looked like he wanted to hit Dunkirk, I mean actually hit him, just erase him from the earth. No one had ever seen that from him before, I don't think. So I had the cameras hold on the both of them and didn't cut to Evan much at all.
Herbert Le Beth
Maybe he was spending the last part of a whole life of being angry before he died. I won't deny it.
John Takoma
But about Dunkirk's breakdown that night, that's something that people....no, people still don't totally understand.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Those people, those African-Americans, sir—
CHARLES LE BETH
Mr. Dunkirk, I don't want to hear you speak about those people, not individually, not collectively, because you have never, not for one moment—
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
—who I am paid to represent—
CHARLES LE BETH
—not for one moment walked any of those streets unless it was with cameras watching you and aides telling you what to say. I am not going to let you claim those people as your constituents or your friends. You wouldn't touch their hands unless there was a ballot in it.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Mr. Le Beth, you have slandered me in public before and I turned my head, you have tried to get me to remove myself from office over the Chapelwaite matter, which I was only tangentially involved in, and you have called me a racist in print. Yet I am the one trying to help the people of Bello Gardens get a new start while you are stuck in finger-pointing over a perfectly legal and ethical land sale. Would you like me to explain that sale to you, or do you want to call me a racist again and again?
CHARLES LE BETH
There's nothing to talk about, this criminal sale is done.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
The sale is not done, despite what you say and despite the ridiculous ads your group has taken out in the newspapers, despite you calling for my resignation in every media appearance. You are not doing any favors to your followers by distorting the facts so that you can feed off your own venom. The process of the sale—
CHARLES LE BETH
I am doing you a favor, Mr. Dunkirk, by warning you that a community of angry, desperate people who haven't ever had anything to lose has now been slapped in the face with a reason to become angrier and more desperate—
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
And who is fanning those flames, not just here, but in every city you go to, every housing project you visit on the grounds of increasing voter registration and homeless advocacy, but which turns out to be nothing more than fear-mongering? That is you, Mr. Le Beth, not me!
CHARLES LE BETH
Be ready for a crime rate that's higher than you ever thought possible. Be ready to have your police force on constant overtime to deal with it. You think different application forms are going to keep the drug dealers out of Phoenix View? The Cleans and the Water Street Dracs are already there. They walked there.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Well, I'm sure you'll be there to help things along with your message to blacks that anger comes before anything, anger before achievement, anger before self-policing. But for someone who grew up with all that in the Joke, you don't seem to have done so badly for yourself, Mr. Le Beth. It seems
that he couldn't possibly have said that, it was too much a loaded gun to hold out, a member of Congress would never have provoked this man in this way unless he was subconsciously headed out of office and wanted out as quickly as he could, unless he was just giving up and didn't care what happened to his image anymore. Le Beth had gone after him with such hostility in the previous three weeks, Dunkirk had people on his lawn, at his home, protesting him, people who didn't even have the name of the Socialist Ascendancy Party right on their signs, their placards. The eighth district was Dunkirk's and he really had no idea how to talk to them, so I think he wanted out, and it was cracking through. I seem to remember signaling a cut to Le Beth's face on the word "yourself" because I could sense Le Beth's response would be so, so deadly, and he did speak then in such a menacing way that I
was shot at twice inside the Joke, Mr. Dunkirk. Twice. I can't work two finger joints because I got a bullet in the hand twenty years ago. And I turned my share of teenagers into drug addicts and felons before I got so scared for my stupid, wasted life that I got the hell out, and looking back I know I became exactly what I should have become, that I couldn't have possibly turned out any differently.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Well, forgive me for thinking the public might be more interested, ah, in hearing from someone who was dealing with this issue before you ever even decided to join a gang, to join a gang and perpetuate that misery the police force now has to deal with every day.
CHARLES LE BETH
You think anyone would start selling crack if they saw any other option for themselves, Mr. Dunkirk? You think they plan for it when they're six years old? You want to know what I wanted to be when I grew up? I wanted to be a train conductor. Ten years later I was molded. I was becoming a killer.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
What sort of options did you want, sir? You couldn't have walked outside the Joke and gotten a job, the young people of Bello Gardens aren't physically able to go to work? I wasn't aware—
CHARLES LE BETH
No one in their right mind would have hired what I had been made into back then. You think you're frightened of me now? Ask the police who remember the Dark Reds what we were like.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Whose fault was that? Whose—
CHARLES LE BETH
It's not about fault anymore, don't you understand that, you fucking lied to those people, and you're going to do nothing while their home becomes another ghetto!
EVAN VIORST
I'm going to ask that we—
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Why don't they stop that from happening? We gave them Bello Gardens and we are giving them Phoenix View, tens of millions of dollars spent because they're not helping themselves, what more do they want from us? Tell me, Mr. Le Beth! Do these adults want to be babysat all their lives?
CHARLES LE BETH
They want to live in a fair world, they want the right to have been born into a fair world, the most basic human right, and no one in the Joke has that from the very first day of their lives, they're born pressed down by a stone, that's all you can call it—
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
My world is everywhere around them, Mr. Le Beth, it's right outside the boundaries of Bello Gardens, they're welcome to it any time, I'm not keeping them from it. Bello Gardens is part of the city of Indianapolis, one of the most thriving cities in the United States.
CHARLES LE BETH
You're not keeping them from it? A hundred and forty years after the end of slavery and millions of blacks stay locked inside the inner cities destroying and killing themselves? You think they feel your arms are open to them?
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
You've got to—you've got to give to get, and if you give nothing, only God can help you, because it's most certainly not in my hands anymore. If all you want is a handout, for the state to feed and provide for you, you're not choosing life, you're choosing death.
CHARLES LE BETH
What free will do you have when everything around you is death? Bello Gardens is death, Phoenix View is death, and I'm going to show it to you, I'm going to shove it into your face until you admit it!
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
I won't listen to a madman, it's death only if they want that for themselves.
CHARLES LE BETH
They want for the people outside those walls to tell them they're human beings and not a dirty secret, and for a hundred years this—
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
Listen—
CHARLES LE BETH
—for a hundred years this sociopathic country has never bothered to do it!
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
They're not human beings, they're sows taking from the trough! I refuse to believe
it could happen that way, but it did, it was over at the exact halfway point, and you'll never find anyone who was in the control room with me who can remember what he said right after that, the thing that almost sounded like an immediate apology but which wouldn't have possibly been good enough anyway. And then there was that freakish silence when he stopped talking, and something in his eyes that almost made it seem like he realized he had not just murdered his career, but that Le Beth was solely the one who had managed to draw that venom out of him, like some horrible magic trick had been pulled on him. He might still be on Capitol Hill today had he not sat across from that one man for those fourteen minutes. It was that silence that Le Beth used as the stake. He seemed totally flabbergasted that a man could say such a thing on the air, true, but his silence in the seconds afterwards was a conscious choice, a conscious choice to frame the words and drive them right into the stomachs of everyone watching. Now Dunkirk had been pushed and prodded by Le Beth in the press over an issue he was never supposed to deal with, and right after the taping that night we all said to each other: Of course this is what was going to happen, it was there all along, waiting below the surface, but what we still thought was, My God, how could Dunkirk really have said that, on the air, live, when just fourteen minutes before he had been so calm, so seasoned on the air. It was unthinkable. I can't even watch the tape today. I last saw it ten years ago. That moment is just too hideous.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
They're not human beings, they're sows taking from the trough! I refuse to believe that given the examples of—what I mean to say is that when I
realized that Le Beth wasn't going to say a single word after that, that he was going to let that sentence be the last one to be heard, I responded automatically, as if I was on auto-pilot, and that's what no one ever saw. I had actually begun to announce that we were changing the topic entirely, to what I had no idea, but first came those awful three seconds when there was just total silence. No speech at all. Then I saw Le Beth physically get up from his chair on my left, which was when Tom cut the feed altogether, so no one heard me say that. It was unprecedented on the one hand because I was essentially cutting the planned show off in the middle, something that I still have never seen done on that kind of television, and secondly because Tom literally beat me to it and took it farther. He threw up a station ID screen and pretty quickly rolled a promo reel, which he was entitled to do even earlier, when Le Beth had used that profanity. So the last thing the audience saw was Dunkirk's face. Le Beth's reaction, those three seconds of dead nothingness, was actually only seen by the people on the studio floor and in the booth, and people watching on the IFH affiliate, which is how the clip got out to the world. Then Le Beth was gone, just like that. Vanished from the room. Dunkirk literally didn't move until his aide came for him. If the aide hadn't come for him, I don't know if he would have had the strength to even turn in his direction.
CONGRESSMAN DUNKIRK
What I mean to say is that when I think of what African-Americans are capable of, that to endanger an entire community which, ah, which has been built not to—
Cy Stoops. age 54
I was ten feet away from the stage when Dunkirk said what he said. And I know there was nothing conscious about the way Charles just stopped and couldn't say anything. It was genuine. He was just so stunned. He had seen the worst of people all his life, and when out of the mouth of a Congressman came that, when he'd almost run out of people to listen to him and gone all the way up high into the government, and even there it turned out that what he believed about people was true, it broke him. That's what I believe today. You can't get how he was feeling up to then from reading a transcript of it somebody has. He was at the end of everything.
He was really weak and he was able to get up out of the chair himself, go across the stage, and come up to me, but I had to hold a hand out to keep him steady. Not one single person approached us. We walked right down a hallway past the green room and out of the building. There were about ten people on the studio floor who watched us go. We walked to the car together. No one came out. It was just us, alone. We got into the car, and Charles just collapsed in there, in the front seat. We started to drive away, and still he hadn't said anything to me. Finally I asked him where we were going, and Charles said that he needed to go to the Joke. Now there was nothing that unusual about that back then. It was the way he said it, I suppose, that made me not ask why.
When it was all over there was actually talk about trying to get a conspiracy charge against me, because they figured Charles must have told me more than that in the car, and in the weeks before that show, but especially in the car, on the drive to the Joke. But no, he didn't discuss anything with me, at any point. He just sat there and thought with his eyes closed. I asked him if he needed some food and he said yes, so we stopped at a Boston Market and I brought him out something to eat because he was weak. Other than that, we didn't speak. It was like he'd had one last chance to make himself heard, and it was obvious now that it was useless. More than useless even. He had underestimated what he was really up against, Charles who was always on guard against the worst. We went into the Joke at about 8:30, and I let him out near the Diary. He told me to go home, he said he was all right, and that he would call me the next day or the day after that. He was going to stay there working. He had an apartment set up there, a ratty little thing with decent running water, someone else in the S.A.P. had set it up. When I drove out of the Joke, that's the last time he ever saw him.
Ed Kidman, age 60, Pioneer Street, Glen Elm
You said you watched a lot of news back then. How much was Charles Le Beth on the news after that, what did they do with it?
A lot, because everyone was looking for him. That was the second or third story the next day on the national news, because everyone wanted to know where he had gone to, everyone wanted him to say something, nothing's changed. But nobody ever went into Bello Gardens looking for him, it seemed like. All these reporters wanting to talk to him and blow up the story even more, but no one wanted to go into that neighborhood, boy, especially not after that show. Everyone was more afraid of it than ever. There was old video of it all over the evening news, just quick clips. Then Dunkirk resigned from Congress almost right away and that was the lead story for a day or so. Then that Kendi guy, that real radical guy, was on a lot saying he was going to get the people who had already moved out of there to stage some kind of a mass disruption.
Kojo Kendi, the leader of the Resistance Intent.
That's him.
What kind of a mass disruption?
I'm not sure. I had forgotten about him. He was a character, he was one serious guy.
More serious than Charles Le Beth?
Well, you can't compare them, really. But I was thinking back then that Kendi was the one who was going to start riots somewhere, he was the one who was going to get people in a really bad way. So, he was on a lot. if you watched TV back then, every channel ran pretty much the same thing on the news. They would show one clip of Dunkirk saying what he said, and then Le Beth's reaction, then they would talk about the Chapelwaite thing for a minute, and the reaction to that, and then you'd hear a lot of crime statistics, and then all this old video of that slum, nothing too new. To go into that neighborhood and dig up more, it seemed like none of the networks were too anxious to do it. They probably thought they'd be shot at since it had happened before.
What were you doing for a living back then?
I was mailroom supervisor, at the University of Evansville.
Senator John D'Acquisto, Indiana
The Joke had four thousand, two hundred people in the beginning, on April 4 of 1983, and five thousand, eight hundred people on June 2, when the general eviction notice was announced. No more units were ever built since 1990. The Joke actually lost units. More people were living in the same space, minus one building, building U on Bearden. It burned out in 1994. That‘s legal residents, people who actually signed on to live at a certain address. The population rose to eight thousand and some almost every Sunday during the winters, when the Worship Center would pack in three thousand people, people from Livingsong and Gray Hill and Point Unity. For a while the weekends made it a fairly lively place, with the flea market and the Worship Center crowds.
When Bello Gardens began accepting applications to live there based on what they called a strict code of conduct, no one was doing serious background checks on the people who applied. The leases said that only the primary householder had to be run for a record. Women moved in with their sons, and the sons might all have had criminal records, but as long as the mothers were all right, no one noticed. The sons had to put their names down as a resident of that address, but not their ages. So if they had criminal records they wouldn't put down their real age and they wouldn't be run for a check. Their information then wasn't used for anything. It was factored in for the census, and to report to the state. But many people should not have been living there. The crime came with the people the day they moved in.
What was your official position on the investigating committee, the one that submitted the report on the siege?
I formed the committee, I was the chairperson.
Herbert Le Beth
When they put me in the Lurps in 1969 we went on patrol after patrol after patrol, so many we didn't even know where we were sometimes, it was all just grid points on a map. But we came across some real poverty in the countryside, places that weren't even destroyed by the war, but sad, sad, these people in these tiny villages had nothing. And once, somewhere in the Highlands, we went through a village of Montagnards, seven or eight huts, that had no sewage, no electricity like usual, but things were far worse there in that little place. It was filthy, there was no food and no evidence of any food, these people were barely able to keep going. They looked at us like they would do anything if we just gave them a candy bar or some rations. And a guy who had been in Vietnam for more than a year said to me, "It just takes a certain level of humanity for me to think of these people as human beings. They're not even at that level. Look at them. I can't think of them as people. I'm sorry, I can't do it." And it's terrible to say, but I thought of what he said sometimes when I went back to the Joke in 2004. That was when I had to drive a cab part-time and I had to go there sometimes. Once on a Saturday a group of people from Americorps was building a playground, and I watched that for a while, then I walked through one hallway of one building and saw all these bags of trash that were supposed to be put outside but weren't, and beer cans on the floor, stuff that no one was going to touch, and I remembered what was said to me in the Lurps, and I went home that night and I almost cried. Things had gotten even worse than when we lived there. Charles was living in Los Angeles during the time I was driving the cab, so I never saw him in the Joke or at all in 2004 or 2005. Sometimes I think about how I missed almost the first two years of his life because of Vietnam, and if that had anything to do with how rebelling he was. But I was there from then on, so probably not.
Ed Dowloin, age 45, Barnaby Street, Glen Elm
How much did you pay for this house?
This place was a little cheaper than the ones on either side of me, the walls aren't great, you can sort of hear the people on either side. You saw the yard, too, what there is of it. It was two twenty-five when we bought it.
And that was in 2011, right?
Right.
That was the first year these townhouses were built, the ones on this street?
Right.
Do you like it here?
We do like it here, we moved in because the school was so close by, and we stayed for various reasons.
What's the crime like?
Pretty much non-existent. It's a nice area, a really nice area.
NOTICE TO ABATE PUBLIC NUISANCE AND OF INTENT TO SEEK A PRELIMINARY AND PERMANENT INJUNCTION IN LIEU OF VOLUNTARY ABATEMENT
TO:
PERSONS KNOWN AS STREET SPIDERS, aka JOKE SPIDERS, also the WATER STREET DRACS, aka WSD, also SANDANISTA RED, UNINCORPORATED ASSOCIATIONS AND STREET GANGS AS DEFINED IN CODE SECTION 180.12 OF THE INDIANA PENAL CODE, AND ALL OF ITS MEMBERS, ASSOCIATES, AGENTS AND ALL OTHER PERSONS ACTING UNDER, IN CONCERN WITH, FOR THE BENEFIT OF, AT THE DIRECTION OF, OR IN ASSOCIATION WITH THEM:
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF INDIANA, BY AND THROUGH JOHN S. DUNCAN, CITY ATTORNEY FOR THE CITY OF INDIANAPOLIS, HEREBY PUT YOU ON NOTICE THAT:
You are creating, maintaining and encouraging, and permitting others to create and maintain, a public nuisance in that you are engaging in and encouraging, and permitting others to engage in, continuing, repeated and ongoing acts of:
a. murder;