Crayons to Chaos: and now for something completely different

and this is what I did with it all. With Dale's blessing, I'm channeling Truman Capote/Philip Gourevitch. (Everything in here is supported by statements made in the courtroom, including the description of the conversation at the arrest.)

And it sounds more like me, I think, than anything I've done for RW1.
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Call it the 2003 Valentine’s Day Massacre, with a body count of 3.

The morning of February 14, 2003, Seann Duconn – also known, according to police, as God Bless – was found dead on the stoop of his house on Huxley Avenue in Queens. Not content to shoot him, his attacker had also cut his throat, and left the body splayed on the steps for all to see.

By noon the block was swarming with police. Detective Salvatore Molino, of the 105th Precinct Special Victims Unit, knelt by the body, while officers tried to string yellow CRIME SCENE TAPE past the debris in the front yard.

Molino squinted when he saw the $100,000 Mercedes slide into the driveway, ignoring the tape and the squad combing the scene for evidence. The slim driver slowed down, but didn’t speak; Molino gestured to the passenger, whose wide shoulders and muscular neck hinted at numerous hours at the gym. “Why are you here?”

Gregory Clarke, the driver of the car, scowled. Duconn was his brother-in-law, he explained.
Clarke didn’t tell the officer that his sister had died of cancer the preceding year, and that right now he just wanted to make sure that his eight-year-old niece was all right.

But Molino had likely already run Clarke’s license plate through his Compstat laptop, and knew that Clarke was on probation for a three-year-old assault conviction.

Molino asked the passenger, Desmond Tapper, to get out of the car. When Tapper complied, Molino saw that he was wearing a toy-looking police shield that said “US Bail Enforcement Fugitive Recovery Special Agent,” and a bullet-proof body vest. He asked Clarke to get out, too.

Then Molino saw a silver bullet on the floor of the vehicle, and sighed. His question, about what they were doing here, had perhaps just been answered.

When Molino searched the car, he found a defaced Ruger 357 magnum revolver in the glove compartment, with all six bullets in the chamber, as well a forged check for $35,000 in the trunk.
“I’m going to have to ask you to come to the station,” he said. Molino asked an officer to guard the Mercedes, but didn’t cuff the two men; Clarke stayed on his cell phone, calling relatives and business associates, as well as his lawyer, Michael Schmukler. Desmond Tapper, on the other hand, stayed silent, looking to Clarke for cues.

By the time Schmukler, a dapper man with a mini-John Bolton mustache, arrived at the 105th, police had already gotten Tapper to make a statement, in his crooked handwriting:

“We were on our way to work in Lawrence Long Island when he got the call about his brother in law murder. Thats [sic] when I went to my house and got the gun because by Gregory owning the Laundramat [sic] he getting a lot of calls about people wanted to hurt him.”

Schmukler held up his hand, to stop him before the situation got any worse.

“You know you can’t use that,” he said, sighing. “Now – can I see the warrant you used to search the car?”

Two and a half years of trials, hearings, delays and motions later, Gregory Clarke, 29, of 38 North Conduit Avenue in Brooklyn, and Desmond Tapper, 31, of 2230 Strauss Street in Brooklyn, were convicted in October 2005 of weapons possession, wearing body vests (illegal if you’ve got a gun conviction), and for Clarke, possession of a forged bank instrument.

Clarke, who was declared guilty of all six charges on his rap sheet, – including the most serious, second-degree weapons possession with intent to harm another person. He also had an extra count added to the gun charges, while Tapper was convicted of only two of five original counts - criminal possession of a weapon, and of wearing a body vest in connection with that crime.

Thus, Clarke now faces between seven to fifteen years in prison, while Tapper’s sentence could be the minimum three years. For two close friends from the same Jamaican community, who worked together, went to church together, and freelanced as security guards together, the outcome was a shock – because Tapper cut a deal, and changed his statement to reflect the prosecution’s version of events.

To the police, and to prosecutor Malik, the two men were co-conspirators in an attempted revenge killing, sworn to avenge the murder of “God Bless” by killing someone called “J-Low.” They looked for confirmation of their theory somewhere – something they could use in court.

In the meantime, Schmukler and another lawyer, Hirschman, were trying to suppress or minimize the results of the police seizures in a series of pre-trial hearings, or else get the charges taken down to misdemeanor. In the process, Hirschman got Tapper to identify the police revolver over and over again as his gun. Tapper complied, thinking that meant that it would be over soon.

As the hearings and delays dragged on, Tapper’s anxiety grew – and he called Malik’s office. On March 8, Tapper talked to a Detective Loverdi, and told him a different story than what he had told at the 105th.

Tapper told Loverdi that the gun belonged to Clarke, and that they had gone to Canarsie that day looking for the person who cut Duconn’s throat. ”If someone’s responsible for this, they’ll pay,” Tapper reported Clarke saying.

At trial, Tapper’s attorney, Michael Hartofilis, portrayed Desmond as a naïve, vulnerable young man manupulated by his wealthier, more powerful “kingpin” friend into confessing to crimes he hadn’t committed. Meanhile, =Eric Prusan, Clarke’s attorney, kept on the path they’d pursued in all those hearings, focusing on Molino’s search and other questionable police tactics to poke holes at the prosecution’s case.

In the end, the jury of four white men, two black men, two Asian women, two black women and one Hispanic man seemed have found Tapper credible enough to half-exonerate him, and to convict Clarke of the heavier gun charge.

After the two men were cuffed and led away, bailiffs handed their keys, wallets and ties to family members. Linda Tapper, Desmond’s mother, left quietly with her priest and another male friend, while Clarke’s family wailed their grief in the corridor outside the courtroom.

“My sister died,” Clarke’s sister said, referring to the wife of the murdered Shawnn Deconn. “Now my brother’s not coming home. I don’t understand!” She started crying, quietly, while her mother, a large woman with long golden d and a flowing black blouse, filled the floor with her grief.
After chanting in Jamaican patois a while, Clarke’s mother turned to prayer. “Oh have mercy! Oh my God!” She recited the Lord’s Prayer to the assembled. And when Clarke’s wife, Claudine Henry, tried to gather her up to go home, she said “Wait. I need to be with my Lord first.” She knelt in a phone booth outside the courtroom and continued to chant.

“That family’s been through a lot,” said Eric Prusan, who said he’s already planning an appeal. He still maintains that the original search of the car, that Valentine’s Day, was illegal, and that Tapper’s initial statements to the police, before lawyers got there, should have been inadmissible in court.
Prusan also said there are some concerns about the jury, whose racial composition –- was so unfriendly to the two defendants as to raise concerns about jury selection. '

“I don’t like to talk about race,” he said, “but in a case like this it comes up.” Why else would prosecutor ask, he said, as Malik did, “why is that man driving a Mercedes?”