Mayor of the Tenderloin, page 9
CHAPTER 11
TWEETING HIGH
CONTROVERSY IN SAN FRANCISCO about the techie influx did not abate. In April 2014, Caroline Barlerin stepped into the fray, hired to become Twitter’s—she consulted an old resume to get the title correct—”global head of community outreach and philanthropy.” A woman recognizable from a distance for her long brown hair, Caroline had lived in San Francisco some twenty years, working in “a jigsaw puzzle background” of profits, nonprofits, startups, and foundations. Now, protests or not, she wanted to “harness the power of Twitter for good in the community.” She had also heard Del proclaim, in one of his two TEDx talks, that when people have a problem in the Tenderloin, “Don’t call the police, call HR [human resources].” His words stuck.
Speaking in Twitter’s vast free lunchroom (years before Elon Musk bought the company and obliterated such perks, among other more substantial changes), Caroline joked that to her the catchphrase “Facebook fifteen” means not being famous on Facebook for fifteen minutes but for the fifteen pounds tech workers typically gain from lunchroom largesse. Free tech lunchrooms, if popular with employees, angered others. Why weren’t tech firms, recipients of local tax breaks, supporting local restaurants?
Caroline’s initial self-assignment included a listening tour. “I met with sixty-five nonprofits in my first six weeks, trying to understand the neighborhood and community.” In that time, she heard about Del’s walking tours and contacted him. They met near Boeddeker Park, then walked to a coffee shop and talked. “I wanted to understand who he is and what the neighborhood is and which organizations he supports.”
Her first impressions were that Del was “a lover of history” and someone “trusted by the community. He was very thoughtful and very strong, intentional in design, and very entrepreneurial, trying to figure out a way of helping all sides.” Afterward, as she and Del walked around the Tenderloin, many people stopped him to talk or called him. “Already that day I was, like, ‘Who is this guy?’”
She continued, “Del and I connected on a real human level rather than . . . a transactional level of how we get stuff done.” The match worked for both. Caroline needed a guide to the community. Del, for nascent Code Tenderloin, needed more access to the tech world. The relationship grew into a friendship.
Caroline may or may not have been the person who first called Del “the unofficial mayor of the Tenderloin,” but she sticks by the label and more. “He is a very thoughtful, generous person, in spirit and in knowledge. And in meeting people where they are, which I think is an extraordinary thing. Two years ago, there was a lot of vitriol about the new [tech] people coming in, people protesting outside Twitter. It was a very hostile time.” Del’s feeling, she said, was: “The neighborhood’s been abandoned for a long time, and you guys are coming in, and how can we make the most of it?”
In the Twitter lunchroom where Caroline hosted Del, at one point twice a week, she brought up his work ethic. “He does more in a day than most people do in a week.” After he arrives in the Tenderloin about 5:45 each morning, she said, “He’ll be at the hearing or the event or the fund-raiser until nine o’clock at night.” Then he would return to Fairfield, in Solano County, where he was living, well over two hours via public transportation. Or, she continued, if he had an evening event in San Francisco, he might sleep in the office or basement of a nonprofit. Recalling the sight of one basement accommodation she exclaimed, “For goodness sakes! We need to give this man a room here in town.” Del professed not to mind, though, and, for a small audience of friends, demonstrated how he squeezed onto a narrow settee, using a stool to prop up his legs. The bathroom down a dark cellar hallway may have unnerved others but not the man who had slept on the streets. A private bathroom!
Caroline especially admired Del’s comfort with a spectrum of people, from “probably the most drugged-out homeless disenfranchised people” to “the San Francisco power elite,” including tech CEOs and mayors. “Somebody who can navigate both of those worlds and work in both is quite remarkable. It takes different traits for both. And, oh, by the way, he’s not just doing it here.” She cited his efforts on behalf of unsheltered people in Fairfield and in Los Angeles. “And oh, by the way, he’s not just doing Code Tenderloin, he’s doing the Tenderloin Walking Tour and [is involved with] Swords to Plowshares. I think he wants to do a lot on the planet as long as he can.”
Of professional interest to her was simply that Del welcomed tech firms. Soon he led their often wide-eyed employees, some from other towns or countries, on his tours. “A lot of the employees don’t know much about this area, so for him to be a guide and to help and explore and not be upset about X, Y, or Z is also pretty extraordinary.” Of course, connections to grateful tech leaders were a wise investment.
Del, asked during an early walking tour whether he hoped that tech companies would provide jobs for Tenderloin people, answered, “I don’t hope so. They have to.” He added, regarding promised tech investment in the Tenderloin, “They’re not as good as they need to be yet, but who’s to judge? They’re out doing something.” At least they patronized some local businesses. “We appreciate the things they do, because, if they didn’t get the tax break, they wouldn’t be here at all.”
At a panel discussion in early 2020 about San Francisco homelessness, he told the audience, “Don’t blame tech. Homelessness was here before tech.” And don’t blame tech workers for skyrocketing rents, amid other price increases. Tech people are the tightest people he knows, he said to laughter. Del raised his voice. “Blame developers, blame landlords.” His usual phrase is “greedy-ass landlords,” but this time he was more circumspect.
CHAPTER 12
A DOUBLE END
AROUND 1976, DEL LEARNED the federal government had gotten wind of the widespread deception involving foreclosed homes. “The FBI started sending undercover contractors out. At the time, because [an] indictment was in the works, they started freezing the money coming out of DC but not telling anyone why they weren’t writing checks. ‘Paperwork back up’ or something.”
At the same time, a bizarrely interrelated act of violence played out. “My kids’ mother shot my secretary.”
Joanne, Del’s girlfriend-secretary, was at her desk, on a conference call by speaker phone with HUD personnel back in Washington, trying to learn where the checks were.
“I was having breakfast with my friend, not too far away,” Del said. This friend was Rolls Royce–owning Larry. “We would have breakfast the same time every morning, because we were competing on contracts, where we really weren’t. We just did our catch-up to see what contracts are coming out and how we can leverage each other’s businesses.”
After breakfast, Del planned to inspect some of the three hundred properties he said he had under contract, then send in more invoices. He drove by the office on the way. “I see my front door open. It was the middle of the summer.” Del had air-conditioning units in both the front office and his own, in the back, and was pissed off, he said; someone had left the door open.
He saw a man at the entrance, “one of the street guys, not homeless, because we didn’t use those words at that time. He used to stop on the block, one of the OGs, old guys on the block. He was leaning inside of my door. I’m thinking he’s in there flirting and messing with my girls. I said, ‘Get the hell away from my door’—in a joking way, because I knew him. He said, ‘Man, you better come in. Your girl been shot.’ That’s how I found out.”
Joanne was bleeding badly—whether conscious or not, Del did not remember. His other secretary, Sheryl, Joanne’s sister-in-law, stood with her hands over her mouth. “I said, ‘Have you called anybody?’ She couldn’t talk. I picked the phone up and called my dispatch. ‘This is Seymour. I need everything you got to my office.’” The connection was well established. “I would talk to them every day. Within seconds you could hear the sirens coming from everywhere.”
Twenty-five police cars and three ambulances pulled up, he said. “Everyone that walked in that room I knew. All six paramedics were people I went to school with or worked with. On my day off and they were working, they would stop by my shop. I always have a fire engine or a couple police cars in front of my office. They come here, give them some coffee. When they heard that address, they came running. When the first paramedic walked in, he says, ‘Get back, Seymour. We got this.’ Because I was holding pressure on her wounds.”
Del went to his office “to try to get my mind together.” He knew it was a rough neighborhood, so had made a point of hiring only from the local community. “I was doing the same thing I do now. Why would someone come in and rob me? What’s going on, what do I need to do? After the initial trauma, I got to start thinking financial damage control. Then one cop I know comes in and asks me for the license plate of my Thunderbird, which I kept at home. I never drove it, but the keys were there. I’m saying, ‘What the fuck does this have to do with it?’ I’m thinking he’s some real bureaucratic guy that wants to know my Social Security number and place of birth and all of that.
“He says, ‘Your wife is driving the Thunderbird.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Then I put it together, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. ‘Oh, my God.’ My first question, ‘Where are my kids?’ He says, ‘They’re with her.’ I say, ‘Stop her, stop that car!’ He says, ‘We’re doing it, but we need the license plate number.’
“Now I got two tragedies going on. One, this girl is laying there, shot, and now this shooter’s got my kids. What’s she going to do next?”
The police told Del an Air 1 helicopter was on its way. It followed the Thunderbird to wide Vermont Street, landed, and stopped it. “She had the girls in the back of the car.”
Elaine was arrested and booked at the Sybil Brand Institute, a women’s prison in Los Angeles.1
Joanne, hospitalized in critical condition, was paralyzed, at least temporarily.
As for Del’s little girls, whom Joanne loved, he said, Joanne’s mother took them into her home nearby.
“That night, I’m at my office with my partner, Walter. He and I were inseparable. We’re sitting here trying to go over this whole day. I had already been to the hospital. We still got a million-dollar operation. We got places to do, places to board up. I mean, we got contracts. I’m trying to figure out financial liability, everything. I’ve got two different dilemmas here. I’ve got a girl laying in hospital, shot, and then I’ve got my kids’ mother in jail. I mean, my life is a little splintered right now. Elaine’s family calls me and said they need to talk. I said, ‘About what?’ I’m not feeling her family at all.” They insisted. Del said okay, come to his office. It was about 10 p.m. Soon about twelve members of Elaine’s family showed up. They brought up the subject of Elaine’s bail.
“I’m saying, ‘Why would you come to me with some shit like this?’ They kept talking and talking, mainly her brother, Steven, because he and I were in the service together. He kept ranting and raving, going on and on and on, at this end of a very tragic day. I can’t listen to this shit no more. I said, ‘How much you need?’”
The answer was $5,000. Del got it from a hidden stash he kept in a shoebox and handed it to him. “Here. Bye.”
“He says, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to get her, and we should have her back home . . . ‘
“Wait, wait! What the hell are you talking about ‘back home’? Are you crazy? They actually thought they were going to bring her back to my house. I said, ‘This ain’t part of the deal. Before you touch that money, this is not part of the deal. Here’s the $5,000. You go. Don’t even think she’s coming back to my house.’”
DEL SAID THAT AT HIS LAWYER’S ADVICE, he did not attend Elaine’s trial. Nor, he said, did he want to. He later learned Elaine’s defense was mental instability. “Her plea,” said Del, “[was that] she was a victim of a relationship affair. The presumption that she was the mother of my kids gave her credence back then that this is like a common law marriage.”
As far as Del knew, Elaine served some time but was released and went to live with relatives. Joanne recovered only partially. She required a wheelchair for a while and eventually was able to walk with crutches. Del lost connection to her, but later tried to find word of her through internet searches. Then, through her sister, he learned she had died.
When Joanne was shot, the HUD people she had been on the phone with became audio witnesses. “Everyone in Washington heard it on speakerphone,” said Del. “They immediately say, covering their ass, [what] about their liability by being sued for what was common law? They immediately distanced themselves from us by canceling our contracts.”
Then came an FBI investigation, Del uncertain however about the timing of events. At one point, FBI agents “dressed like moving men in coveralls, with guns,” came into Del’s office and removed his file cabinets. Quickly, the HUD program ended. “This was government money. FBI started indicting everybody. They indicted me. Indictment really don’t mean nothing until they actually charge you. It was over a hundred people in the indictment.”
Del went to trial with his attorney. “Now they [at HUD] owe me $27,000, which was a lot of money then”—if only three days’ worth, he acknowledged. Charges focused on whether work was completed or not. The prosecutor, Del recalled, placed a pile of yellow invoices in front of him. If they represented an “accurate truthful request for money,” Del was to sign each, stating Seymour Building Systems had done the job. “He says, ‘Wait. If I find one in there you didn’t do, I’m putting you in prison for ten years.’” He indicated a nearby paper shredder.
“I turned to my attorney. My attorney gave me a look like, ‘Can you do that?’ I looked at him like, ‘No, I can’t verify I did every one of those.’ He says, ‘Shred it.’”
The “gleeful” prosecutor, Del recalled, “looked at me and smiled” at every shredded invoice. After the last one, “he said, ‘Have a good day, Mr. Seymour.’”
Outside, Del saw Larry, the Rolls Royce owner. “He was a little flamboyant guy, reminds you of Redd Foxx.” Del affected a stage whisper. “‘Seymour! What happened in there?’ I said, ‘Larry, the federal prosecutor’s not playing. Don’t go for it because he will put you in jail.’ ‘Man, fuck them people. I’m getting my money.’ I said, ‘Larry, this ain’t LAPD. This FBI.’”
Del paused. “Larry might still be in prison.”
The end of Seymour Building Systems signaled a concomitant end to fast cash. “I figured this ain’t never going to end. Why save money? I was buying cars and going on vacation, buying houses. Buying diamonds. And I was using then but was not an addict. It was recreational cocaine. Like all the movie stars did.” Del said he also sold cocaine to colleagues in the fire department. That’s how it is always done in fire and police departments, he added. If one person goes down, all go down. In his case, nobody went down.
Del did have a stash of some $40,000 but also a house mortgage and payments for five trucks and his cars. The stash would not last long. He needed to find other work quickly. And there was Joanne, in the hospital. And there were his little daughters—babies, he called them. He felt he could not properly care for them. “Maybe, had they been boys . . .,” he said at one point. Maybe. And he figured Joanne’s mother, no matter how kind, would not want to continue caring for the children of the woman who shot her own daughter. Steve, Elaine’s brother, stepped back in.
CHAPTER 13
BAD NEWS
THE TIMING MUST HAVE FELT SHAKESPEARIAN. In 2013, Swords and Plowshares honored Del at a gala with a Profiles in Courage award. His acceptance speech, both self-deprecatingly humorous and pathos-filled thankful, Deleana recorded on her cell phone, panning to show her sister Regina, as well as Del’s sister Ethelear, here in San Francisco all the way from Chicago. Aware of Del’s earlier setbacks, Deleana said she recalled thinking, “He wouldn’t mess this up.”
Then in 2014 came two hammer blows of news. First, Del was diagnosed with prostate cancer. As someone preternaturally opposed to self-pity, his various health problems (including getting stents for a heart condition) are not subjects he discusses easily. No pity party for Del Seymour. “I’m good, I’m good,” he will say when asked how he is—even when he does not seem good. A dismissive wave of the hand typically stops any expression of concern.
Regina was more candid. While driving along the streets of Fairfield, near where she then lived, she spoke about the scare. “At some point we didn’t think he was going to make it. They were finding more stuff and more stuff. Being a very stubborn man, he didn’t like taking that medication. It made him sick. I thought he was just going to say, ‘Screw this medication. I’m going to go do me some drugs and go out with a bang.’ But he kept fighting. He kept working with the doctors and demanding certain types of treatment more comfortable to him. And he did research on certain treatments to say, ‘Hey! I know you guys can do this. Don’t treat me like this because I’m a VA veteran. Why would you have me uncomfortable when you could make me comfortable?’ He fought for his own medical care,” she said. And he got it.
“That’s why he survived. That’s where that intelligence comes in. He knows how to do research.” She paused. “I think he knows what he has to offer to other people who can’t figure it out. He knows that, if given the chance, a lot of people will make it. I think his whole idea is, ‘Some people don’t have the brain or the thinking power or the knowledge that I have, so why don’t I use it and help other people make it?’”
