Mayor of the Tenderloin, page 15
The ghosts did not bother him, he implied, but a few longtime employees did. They seemed upset Marie gave him, not them, keys to the building and that he alone could use petty cash for purchases. Racists, he said.
Marie shrugged at the allegation. “I knew there was a little friction here and there but not that it was racial. Not that I’m saying it wasn’t racial,” she added with a look. “I trusted him more than I trusted most people, let me tell you that much.” To Del, the connection with Marie included feeling like part of her family.
Did her professional respect for him, the reintroduction of normalcy, save Del’s life? No, she said. “I helped. I think he saved his own life. But what was provided for Del at Joe’s was a safe place where he could go back to being a tradesman. Being able to ply regular skills, rather than these other skills. I didn’t know a lot of this stuff, and I didn’t look to know. We were operating on a common ground with common problems.” The main one was indeed the sump pump. “I’m telling you, I’d be in water up to my ankles. And he was my guy that was going to fix that pump at eleven o’clock at night.”
CHAPTER 22
ADVENTURES IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE
IN HIS YEARS OF ADDICTION, Del’s main arrests involved prostitution and drugs. According to San Francisco rap sheets from 2000 to 2004, the first of six noted arrests happened on April 10, 2000, on Ellis Street in the Tenderloin.1 “POSS NARC CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE,” it read. Oh, right, he said, examining the data. He was living in an SRO across from Glide Church. “Til they put me out.”
On Ellis, “[I] sold some dope to a cop. It was a sting. I was walking back across the street, coming this way, and a white guy was coming this way. We’re in the middle of the block, jaywalking. As I tried to sidestep, he sidestepped. I got the money in my hand. Everywhere I go, he heads towards me and tries to snatch the money. I pushed him in his chest and felt the badge, under his T-shirt on a chain. I still didn’t realize he was a cop because everything was happening in nanoseconds. I’m thinking he’s trying to rob me. Then the other guys come out of nowhere, because they saw me push him. They get me on the ground in the middle of the street. He said, ‘This is my money. This is city of San Francisco money.’ And it was. He wanted his money back so he could use it for evidence.”
Part of the arrest was for the shove. “I think I pleaded guilty because there was a fine. Let’s see,” he said, looking at the sheet of paper. “This is the Municipal Court eleven three fifty [11350 on the rap sheet], Health and Safety felony. I plea-bargained.” He was fined, he recalled, two or three thousand dollars.
“This one here,” his finger moved down the page, “was on the corner of 6th and Market.” The arrest involved another violation of the Health Code, as possession of drugs is listed. “I got arrested for possession, and I also had a warrant out for my arrest.”
He moved on to the second page, an arrest in 2002 in the Mission District, about two miles from his usual Tenderloin locale. “I was running from police. They arrested me for a $181 warrant. They charged me $800.” He interpreted the numerical shorthand, codes for resisting arrest reduced to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. “It was more or less fighting with the police but reduced.”
So it went, next arrest at Turk and Taylor, by the same policeman who had arrested him multiple times. On the third page came a heavier charge, from June 18, 2003. “This is possession of base rock. That’s different. Raw cocaine. That’s a much higher case.” During this period, Del said, he was arrested four or five times and jailed in one month.
The final arrest in the sheaf startled him: a 647 PC. “That’s when I got arrested in jail.” He had gone to visit one of his girlfriends, a prostitute, Zeena (a pseudonym), whom he was annoyed at for getting arrested in the first place. “She was in jail because she sold dope to a friend of mine who was a cop, an African American undercover I knew from the streets.” She knew him too. “That pissed me off. He came up to my room, said, ‘Man, I just got your girl. What’s wrong with her stupid ass? She knows me.’ He says, ‘I kept telling her to get back,’ because the camera was on the transaction. The other cops were getting ready to pounce, and he was trying to tell her, ‘Don’t come over here.’ He came up to apologize to me for arresting my girl. He’s saying, ‘I’m so sorry.’”
To prepare for his jail visit, Del drank. “I was always drunk when I would visit. It’s the only way I can handle going in jail. I’ve been in there so many times myself, I medicated to be able to stand being in that place.”
Jail, he said at another juncture, was his breakdown. “Shelters, yeah, I didn’t like it.” But they offered the option—indeed, usually a command—to leave the next morning. Del made sure he realized that, telling himself, “When I get out of here in the morning, I’m not going to be here tomorrow night.”
Of the lack of freedom in jail, he said, “It don’t bother some people. It bothers me.” To cope, Del developed a strategy. He got close to people in for a long time. “I can always say, ‘I’m getting out next week.’ They hate me.” He also avoided being around prisoners who would be released the next day. “That depressed me.”
Whenever in jail, he said, as in a hospital, he never wanted visitors, nor did he often visit anyone in jail. The exception was Zeena, “because she was always in jail.”
This time, in the small visiting room, watched over by “two big old sheriff ladies,” he and Zeena got into a fight. “She said I was with somebody or something like that. She got up to hit me. I got up, and I hit her first. In the jail.” The two sheriffs reacted with opposite commands. One yelled, “Sit down!” while the other yelled, “Stand up and turn around!” Meanwhile, Zeena still tried to hit him. “So I’m fighting three women.” Amid continued shouts both to sit down and stand up, Del said, “You all bitches need to make up your mind.”
“When I used the word B‘s to them, they went crazy. This one maced me; this one hit me in my neck. They drug me outside and put me in an elevator, took me down to the men’s jail and booked me in there. They did not like that B word.”
Some of Del’s San Francisco arrests—he tallied fourteen—he attributed to the SFPD being out to get him. From his own descriptions of himself, he could be plenty annoying. “I fought the police all the time. I was doing my community activist ‘Why you messing with me? You just arrested me two days ago.’” It did not endear him. “The police would sometimes go through the crowd, grab me, and leave fifty other people selling dope.” He shook his head. “Thank God, I’m not in that culpable situation anymore.”
And thank God, he might have added, for another part of the VA’s Stand Down program. It brought together Superior Court judges from local counties to consider clearing pending criminal charges.
Del became rhapsodic, remembering the volunteer judges. “They take the day off and come out there and administer justice. You sign up and tell them all your charges. Then they go back to the courts and come back the next day with all the records, the bailiffs, the court clerks, the court reporter, and set up a courtroom at the Stand Down location.”
Whatever year it was Del availed himself of the program, he was in big trouble, stemming from charges relating to drug sales for which he had not yet been arrested. In fact, knowing San Francisco’s fugitive squad was looking for him, he had been hiding in a woman’s apartment in the Tenderloin, at Ellis and Jones, feeling imprisoned.
Del managed to sneak to the Stand Down site in the East Bay, where he was assigned Alameda County judge Ronald Hyde, in Del’s description “a very well-known, no-nonsense judge” and “maverick,” as well as a “dinosaur” in terms of sexism. (Judge Hyde in 2003 was removed from the bench for “improper sexually explicit comments, manipulating a court docket to benefit a family member, and other misconduct.”)2 Del attributed Judge Hyde’s difficulties to petty small-town conflicts.
“When I walked into his courtroom in Dublin [in Alameda County], I was sitting on seven active warrants. Possible seven prison sentences.” In another telling, Del said it was three warrants. More significantly, he remembered Judge Hyde’s surprising verdict on each one: “Dismissed.”
“I walked out of there a completely free man. Jumping up in the air and all.”
The next day, Del was back in the Tenderloin, carrying a bucket of tools and keys to Original Joe’s and in plain view of “the fugitive guy,” the county marshal from the probation department. “He looks for wanted felons. They drive through the Tenderloin all day. They only use three specific cars, which is stupid because we all know the car when it’s coming.”
“I’m still shaky, but I’m not tripping because I know I’m free and clear.” The marshal’s car, which Del had spotted a few blocks away, appeared. “He pulls up. We know each other. But he says, ‘Are you Del Seymour?’
“I said, ‘Dude, you know I’m Del Seymour. Why are you playing?’
“He says, ‘What’s your full name?’
“I’m standing there looking in the squad car, and he’s got the book on his lap.” The “book” included photographs of people being sought. “My picture’s right there, big, in color.”
Del’s claim he had been cleared led to a testy exchange. The marshal pointed to Del’s photograph. “He says, ‘You bullshitting us, man. You’re right here. We got three of your warrants: two no-bails and a hundred thousand dollars.’”
Del had no written exoneration and doubted it would been believed, given the possibility of forgery. But he insisted he had no more warrants.
“He says, ‘Oh, yes you do. You need to come with us today. You know the drill.’” After the marshal drove him to Original Joe’s to drop off his tools, Del was handcuffed and taken to 850 Bryant, a complex including San Francisco’s main county jail.
There he was uncuffed and turned over to a probation officer, a “straight asshole” who lit into Del, saying “the bounty hunters told me you gave them some bullshit about you went to some court out in Dublin and they cleared you,” adding that Del was always trying to con the police, then cuffed him again. “He walked me down and pushed me in the cell. He said, ‘Besides all this, you’re a fucking liar.’ I said, ‘Man, check! Check!’ He said, ‘I ain’t never heard of no bullshit named Stand Down. You got three serious felonies.’”
Later, the same officer paid Del a surprise visit. “He came to my cell, said, ‘I’m getting ready to retire, and I’ve never apologized to a prisoner in thirty years, but I’m going to do it right now. Everything you said was the truth.’ He says, ‘I’m sorry. I never heard of a justice system like what they did for veterans.’”
He added, recalled Del, the program was “‘so preposterous, I didn’t even entertain the idea. You’ve got three crimes that could put you in jail for twenty years and some judge dismissed it? Without a trial or anything?’
“I said, ‘That’s how we do it.’”
CHAPTER 23
DIFFERENCES OF OPINION
LIKE SEASONED WHITE HOUSE REPORTERS who speak of “their” seventh or eighth president, Del speaks of “his” sixth Tenderloin police captain in thirty plus years. Captain Teresa Ewins and Del clashed, at first.
“I remember the day she came down and going to a meeting, wanted to lock everybody up. The entire Tenderloin,” Del said, smiling, as he addressed a graduation class of Code Tenderloin and an officer Captain Ewins sent to attend the event. “I said, ‘Captain, it don’t work that way. You can’t lock us all up. C’mon, you ain’t got room.’ She saw what we go through down here. She saw the reason people stand on the corner selling crack, because they can’t get into Twitter.” Now, he said, she sent such people to Code Tenderloin. “She’s been active in job recruitment in this community. She wants to see those folks out there off the corner but wants to see them working.” He turned to the officer. “I want you to give her thanks for that.” The audience applauded. Captain Ewins, Del added, was the first Tenderloin commander he had known who was “actually trying to do something positive.”
Over the years, a cordial, if at times sparring relationship evolved between the two. They have spoken together at various San Francisco sites, including a church in Pacific Heights (Del was astounded it had valet parking) and crossed paths at Tenderloin events. In one community meeting of several dozen people, on the topic of safety, Del suggested store owners in the crowd go back to the old school way of doing things and take care of matters themselves, including by hiring security guards.
Captain Ewins, trim in her uniform, her blonde ponytail neatly pulled back, stood by, exuding confidence. When it was her turn to speak, she took Del on, saying private security was “a dangerous slope,” in part because of insufficient background checks. If Tenderloin business owners and residents have a problem with a situation, she said, they should call her. “We’ll meet.” She also took Del on about a subject that loomed substantially in her work: drug dealing.
In his talk, Del had addressed the subject in a joking manner. “The Tenderloin is maybe not as nice-looking or nice-smelling as the Mission, but it sure in hell’s a lot safer, because there’s too many eyes watching. There’s something I want to tell you about safety in the Tenderloin, and I hope the captain’s not listening.” He told her, “Close your ears,” as the audience laughed and she smiled.
“I was involved in a lot of the shenanigans in the Tenderloin about twenty-six years, until I finally got enough sense to stop it. What most of you all don’t know, on every block there’s one guy who’s paid to make sure that block is safe. His job is to keep folks like you,” he addressed the mostly white audience, “from being assaulted or harassed. Because if you walked down that drug block and someone grabbed your camera or your phone or slapped you, you’re going to call the police. You’re going to call Teresa, which means that block’s going to be shut down for one or two hours while she does her investigation. The drug dealers can’t lose their money. So he pays the guy every shift to stand there and make sure all of you culturally different people walk down that street unmolested.” In the Mission, he claimed, “you can be walking from your car to Valencia and two cats will jump out of their cars and snatch every i-product you got. Does not happen in the Tenderloin. We got too many eyes out here.”
In response she said, with a raise of an eyebrow, if what Del said were true about lookouts monitoring Tenderloin streets, she would not need her hundred or more officers.
The mild exchange belied her considerably stronger feelings about drug dealers. This issue in particular she addressed later in her office, a few steps off the unadorned—close to shabby—Tenderloin police station lobby, where people in various modes of distress communicate through thick plastic windows and a fixed telephone.
Teresa Ewins saw the Tenderloin not as the neighborly we-help-each-other-out place Del sometimes conjured but instead as a repository of people who have “made so many bad decisions they give up. That’s why sometimes they’re here in the Tenderloin. [It] for many years has been considered the bottom of the barrel. If you’re coming here using, you’re coming here buying. You’ve run out of all ability to find it or afford it somewhere else.”
Yet, Captain Ewins mentioned repeatedly that help often arrives via “relationships we build with people. A lot of times we find them places to stay; we find them jobs.” Officers recently came across a woman and child in an alley, she said. The shelters being full, the officers pooled their own money to get the two a place to stay.
Officers also intervened similarly, Captain Ewins related, in a situation involving two parents and five children during a torrential downpour. “Both parents were addicts. They got them a couple nights at a hotel. The kids were healthy, probably a little more put together than the parents. We connected them with services. I think ultimately the kids were taken away from the parents because they couldn’t deal with their addiction, which sometimes is a blessing, because they can always be reunited.
“We have a homeless car. Every morning they go out and check on everybody, which is important because a lot of people have medical issues. We have ambulances for people. We try to connect them with services at that point, waking people up.” The Tenderloin station has gotten a lot of people into St. Anthony’s or Glide or Hospitality House. “Those locations are the best thing the city has, because they’re always there for people.”
Officers and homeless people, she said, are often on a first-name basis. “It goes back to the relationship.” A major problem, however, is that after the police connected people to services, people were “not showing up for their appointments, to get services they vitally need.”
The reason they did not show up? “Addiction.” To her, most bad paths led back to drugs.
A Santa Monica native, Teresa Ewins moved with her family to the East Bay when she was ten. She first noticed “seeing a lot of homelessness” as a teenager during a trip with her mother to Berkeley. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. People kind of do what they want to do.’ My mom was like, ‘It’s just wrong. This is the world. You have to be responsible for yourself and others.’”
Her daughter agrees, to a point. “If you’re going to make a decision for yourself, it’s one thing. But if it involves a child or being responsible for someone else, there needs to be a little more responsibility. Addiction is on top of that. I can talk to people about it, but I can’t necessarily understand it, deep down, because I don’t have that in my family. We have a bunch of drinkers. I’ve seen how that affected our family, but I can’t imagine the narcotic part. I can’t.”
