The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (8 page)

She saved that number, and now it reminds her of that night in March 2006 when she was partying like everyone else on the south side and, after a few cocktails, had picked up her girlfriend's cell. She was interested and curious and—football fan's curse—attracted even though she'd never seen him. Like it would be with a lot of people, she says, her desire to talk to him took control. She wanted to find out what he might say, because, “Who doesn't want to talk to a Steeler?” She left him a message that went something like, “So, what's up? My girl tells me you're a Steeler, so…”

But Kristin isn't stupid. Maybe just a little naïve.

 

I
S IT HIM?
Well, yes, of course it's him, in a baggy gray hoodie and jeans that fall off his behind. He's been watching out the window of his redbrick house, the one with the unattached trailer in the front yard. He grudgingly opens the glass screen of his front door to greet the unwelcome company, and nearly slips when he steps on the porch.

He doesn't look so threatening as he clings awkwardly to the door frame. He looks like he hasn't slept, though, just as he looked when he turned himself in to Detective LaQuatra last year after Kristin came forward and his gig was up. He groveled to LaQuatra that day: “I can't help myself, I really can't.” And he doesn't sound so cocksure now, as he didn't when he called Kristin right before she pressed charges, to offer this rambling admission: “I just idolize these guys and what they do, and the attention they get from women, and I just want that for myself, and I don't think I can do it on my own and I just want to be them.”

On this February morning, Brian Jackson just looks angry or nervous or both, like a man about to face felony charges who doesn't want to be bothered. As the sun hits his face, he stares off to the side, eyes bloodshot-red like kindling.

Are you Brian Jackson?

“No. I'm his brother,” he says.

Well, is your brother home, then?

“No.”

Do you think he'd want to talk about…

“No, he wouldn't.”

He's tall, all right, his head is square, his body sturdy. His voice is as heavy as lead, and standing in front of him, it is not only conceivable he could pass for a Steeler, but understandable, especially in a town that sanctifies the men who wear that uniform but are often unrecognizable without it.

This morning, the Denali with tinted windows is docked in the drive, without the rims. Taking a step back, Jackson shuts the screen door. He's not wearing his Steelers hat. But he does have on a nice pair of sneakers, with a metallic swoosh on the side.

 

J
USTIN
H
ECKERT
is a native of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and now lives in Atlanta. He is a contributing writer for
ESPN: The Magazine.
After graduating from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he was a staff writer at
Atlanta
magazine for two years, where his narrative work was awarded the City and Regional Magazine Association's gold medal for Writer of the Year in 2005 and its silver medal in 2006. He has also written for
Esquire,
the
Oxford American,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Washington Post, Vox
magazine, the
Columbia Missourian,
and the
Southeast Missourian.

Coda

He swindled other women, too. No one knows how many, but the number is probably a lot more than three. Though Kristin, Tara, and Annie all came forward and shared their stories about Brian Jackson with the Pittsburgh police, officials at the Allegheny County Courthouse postulated there were maybe a dozen more women who had been afraid to speak out, even when encouraged to. Not because they were afraid of his physically imposing presence, or his anger, or the thought of vengeance—but because they were much more scared of what something like this, in a relatively small city that thrives off its football team no matter the season, would do to their reputations. The Steelers wouldn't touch this story. Their PR people, the security director, the players, their agents—nearly all of my calls and requests went unanswered, no matter my vigilance. It was a coup to even get Ben Roethlisberger on the phone, finally, two days before the story was put to press. (When he did talk, he was lighthearted and seemed unbothered when reflecting about all of this trouble.) I walked around Pittsburgh, and drove across its bridges, and passed the empty stadiums, heading into the hills in the ice and cold to ask people if they knew about this. Nearly everyone remembered something about him, or had heard about him, or the women, or had some vague recollection of the guy who had pretended to be
a Steeler. No one remembered his name. It was an important topic on local radio stations, but for the most part the hosts just mocked the women, ran bits about how stupid they were, and the sentiment from more than a few Steelers fans was that they deserved what they got, because they were “gold-digging” anyway. Kristin even sent me a recording of one station that (though they didn't have her name) was merciless in its excoriation of her. The women who did agree to speak with me—none of them had spoken on the record before, and getting to them involved a great deal of groundwork—provided invaluable insight into Jackson, and though none of them had ever spoken to each other, they all had pretty much the same things to say, despite the different experiences they had hanging out with him. While I doubt these women are perfect angels, I also know they're not the money-grubbing, gold-digging harlots the local radio made them out to be. I literally staked out Jackson's house to try and speak with him. His lawyers asked him, but he didn't want to talk. Every day in the morning I'd drive to Brentwood and sit for a few minutes by his driveway; I'd come back at lunch; then at night; and then I'd go again, to ask his neighbors if he still lived there and what times he might be home. I was always looking for the white Denali. It was only the last morning I was in town that I saw it there, finally. (Though he didn't speak to me when I approached his door, he had his lawyers call me just as the story was going to bed and we were able to print part of his confession in the magazine.) In August of last year, Jackson was sentenced to ninety days in prison and five years probation after pleading guilty to impersonating Tuman and taking $3,200 from Kristin. He gave back all the money he owed her, writing a $1,950 check and paying the rest in cash. He seemed very sorry for what he had done, as though it really had ruined his life. I have wondered if he'll do it again, though; if we'll be seeing another blurb in the paper, or on one of the news websites, like the one that originally
sparked an interest in me to embark on this story. I've wondered if that old feeling, whatever's inside him, will rear itself, and if he'll put the gloves or jersey on and take the Denali out of the driveway and head back to the strip on the South Side of the city one night, and what might happen if he does. I asked Kristin what she thought about that. “I don't know. I think it's over,” she said. “I've moved beyond it. Although, training camp has started here. You never really know.”

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HE RESIDENTS OF
C
EDAR
S
TREET,
a thinly settled road on the island of Grand Manan, would not have considered Ronnie Ross an ideal neighbor even if they hadn't believed that he was running a crack house. Ross was a slim, sporadically belligerent man in his early forties who had grown up in Nova Scotia and had worked from time to time on Grand Manan lobster boats. He was a devotee of loud music and powerful speakers—both sometimes left on, the neighbors had come to believe, even if nobody happened to be home. He often seemed high on something. Carter Foster, a burly young fisherman who lived across the road with his girlfriend, Sara Wormell, has recalled that one of the first conversations he had with Ross—about two years ago, a few months after Ross moved into 61 Cedar—began with Ross stating that he could see people up in the trees behind his house. Erin Gaskill, who lived with her two small children in the house next to Ross's, once saw Ross take a two-by-four and smash all the windows of a car parked in his driveway—a car that apparently belonged to his girlfriend. The people who congregated at Ross's
were a rowdy lot. The neighborhood children were so reluctant to walk past the house that the school-bus stop was moved so they wouldn't have to. Laura Buckley, the proprietor of the Inn at Whale Cove Cottages, who is known on the island for tart speech, recently summed up Ronnie Ross this way: “He had asshole issues that were much larger than just being a drug dealer.”

The calm assumption that some people are just drug dealers is a phenomenon of recent decades on Grand Manan, which lies off the southeast coast of New Brunswick, in the Bay of Fundy. There are older people who remember the days when someone who wanted nothing more than a bottle of beer was faced with a trip to the mainland on the ferry, which runs to Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, twenty miles away. Grand Manan always had more than its share of churches that take a stern view of drinking and carrying on. Whenever the question of opening a liquor store on Grand Manan was being debated in the provincial capital, an islander in his sixties said recently, so many stalwart Christians were so eager to testify in the negative that casual travellers to the mainland couldn't find space on the ferry. On the other hand, he added, there have always been a lot of people who believe that “the good Lord can't see you once you get past Blacks Harbour.”

Although the needs of whale watchers and birders and people with vacation cottages provide some employment in the summer, most people on Grand Manan make their living from the sea, in jobs whose rigors and dangers predispose them to a robust celebration of, say, the arrival of Saturday night. From November through June, Grand Mananers haul lobster traps out of the frigid waters of the Bay of Fundy. Starting in the spring, some of them, including Carter Foster, tend weirs—towering herring traps that look like Richard Serra sculptures made of telephone poles and netting. Some drag for scallops or sea urchins. Some work as divers, maintaining the nets used in salmon farms or weirs. Some “wrinkle”—gather periwinkles from the rocks at low tide—or
collect and dry dulse, a seaweed that is edible, or at least considered so in the Canadian Maritimes.

Grand Manan experienced a boom in the nineties, but in recent years there have been some economic reversals. The aquaculture industry, which had disease problems, has greatly shrunk. Two years ago, a large sardine factory closed down. A federal program to buy fishing licenses and turn them over to Indian tribes eventually drove the cost of a boat and a lobster license so high that young islanders found it difficult to enter the field as proprietors. Still, someone just out of high school can make a considerable amount of money in the fisheries if he's willing to work hard. There is not much to spend it on. Grand Manan is seventeen miles long. Since virtually nobody lives on what residents call the back of the island—the imposing cliffs whose shade helps produce high-quality dulse—just about all the houses and businesses are close to the one main road, officially New Brunswick Route 776, which runs from North Head through Grand Harbour to Seal Cove. Given the wait for the ferry and the drive on the mainland to St. John, New Brunswick's largest city, it's a three-hour trip to the bright lights. Activities for young people who aren't interested in church functions have always been in short supply on Grand Manan and so have drug-prevention programs. In the view of the Regional Crown Prosecutor, James McAvity, who is based in St. John, Grand Manan has almost laboratory conditions for a serious drug problem.

In the late sixties, a liquor store finally came to the island, and it wasn't long before liquor was supplanted by marijuana and hashish, as it was in small communities all over the Maritimes. Grand Mananers who came of age in that period are likely to be undisturbed by the sight of a fisherman lighting up a joint. That tolerance wavers around cocaine and tends not to extend to crack. People said they'd heard that Ronnie Ross was not simply selling crack but selling it to schoolchildren, and they wondered why he was never arrested. Law enforcement on Grand Manan is in the hands of a four-officer detachment of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police. The Mountie who concentrated on drug enforcement had spent hours watching Ross's place from Carter Foster's or Erin Gaskill's. A search warrant to go through Ross's premises was executed, but the evidence required for a charge wasn't found. One community activist thought of organizing a sort of mothers' vigil in front of 61 Cedar to monitor the comings and goings, until she heard that Ross kept some particularly nasty dogs. Someone posted a sign, quickly torn down, warning people who turned off Route 776 onto Cedar Street that they were about to drive down a block that held a crack house. As time went on, Ross seemed to grow more brazen. “People on the wrong side of the law usually keep a low profile,” a councillor in the Grand Manan village government said recently, in discussing Ronnie Ross. “He made himself out to be this big-time gangster.”

The big-time-gangster image was fed by having plenty of visitors from the mainland. Grand Mananers are not as wary of people from away as they might have been in the days when just about everyone on the island seemed to belong to one of the families that had been there for generations. In recent years, there has been turnover in the population. Some young people, like a lot of other young people from Atlantic Canada, have moved to British Columbia, which has an appealing climate, or to Alberta, which has an appealing wages. (Carter Foster and Sara Wormell, who are in their twenties, had been thinking about a move to British Columbia themselves.) Some Newfoundlanders who came to work in the sardine factory or the salmon farms have remained. But the mainland still represents dangers that don't exist on an island of twenty-five hundred people. Stolen goods, which would be recognized in a community as small as Grand Manan, can easily be fenced on the mainland, for instance, and last summer more people reported missing property—especially power tools. It was rumored that the stolen goods were being taken by Ronnie Ross's crowd, or being accepted by Ross as payment for drugs. One of Ross's regular visitors, Terry Irvine, a young man from St. John,
drove a G.M.C. Jimmy, and some people on Grand Manan began to see the Jimmy as a way of carrying stolen goods off the island and bringing drugs on. The stealing seems to have caused at least as much anger on Grand Manan as any drug dealing. “That's where it changed, I guess,” Carter Foster later told the R.C.M.P. “When stuff started getting stolen.” On the first weekend of July last year—the long Canada Day weekend, which is roughly equivalent to the Fourth of July—Irvine's G.M.C. Jimmy, parked in Ronnie Ross's driveway, was destroyed by fire.

 

R
OSS ACCUSED
C
ARTER
F
OSTER, AMONG OTHERS, OF HAVING
burned Irvine's S.U.V. Foster pointed out that he hadn't even been on the island at the time of the fire. That assertion had no effect on Ross, who told Foster and Sarah Wormell that they had better sleep with their eyes open, because “a flaming ball of fire is going to come through your window.” That evening, Ross piled some wooden palettes in his front yard, right next to the street, put a couple of propane tanks on top of the pile, started a fire, and, according to Foster, said that he was going to blow up the entire neighborhood. The R.C.M.P. constables who put the fire out were told by Ross that people at a community meeting had decided to burn his house down. During the next few weeks, various accusations were exchanged, including a claim by Ross that, even before the car fire, someone had thrown a propane tank through his living-room window. R.C.M.P. Constable Gerald Bigger had what sounds like a rather typical confrontation, in which Ross went from obscene gestures and obscene language to picking up a large rock and saying, according to the constable's report:

A lot of rumors went around the island, many of them about who might arrive from the mainland and what they intended to do to avenge the burning of Irvine's S.U.V. On Grand Manan, some rumor enhancement is taken for granted. It has always been said that if hailstones the size of mothballs start to fall in North Head they're the size of icebergs by the time the story reaches Seal Cove. Some of the rumors, though, were disturbingly specific. Larry Marshall, a wrinkler and dulse-gatherer, heard that Ross was importing people from the mainland to burn eight or ten houses, with Carter Foster's house at the top of the hit list. Marshall's brother, Harold, whom he customarily describes as “a bag of trouble with a capital ‘T,'” hung around with Ross. The two of them, Larry Marshall told Foster, were “planning to have people come from away with dynamite and machine guns.” A volunteer fireman later told the R.C.M.P., “I heard…that Ronnie Ross had some of his friends come down, supposedly from the Hell's Angels.” It was said that on July 21st, a Friday, ten thugs were going to be arriving from St. John in an S.U.V., presumably the vehicle that would take them around to the houses on their hit list. The estimate quickly grew to twenty.

Not long after midnight on that Friday night, Constable Bigger stopped by Carter Foster's house. By that time, there were thirty or forty men in Foster's yard. A number of them were, in Foster's words, people “who'd had something stolen and knew where it went.” Some were people who had come from a baseball game and were still in their uniforms. Some were older men who were saying that Carter Foster and his neighbors oughtn't to put
up with Ronnie Ross. Constable Bigger informed Foster that the rumor about twenty hoodlums arriving from the mainland wasn't true. Irvine's new vehicle, a white G.M.C. Yukon, had been stopped by the R.C.M.P. when it left the ferry and had turned out to contain only three men and no weapons. Foster told Bigger that he had, in fact, spotted the three men at Ross's. According to the constable's report, Foster said that if the crowd at 61 Cedar started something, he and his friends were going to finish it. Sara Wormell, a polite young woman who likes to take photographs and keep journals, had put her dog and some family papers and favorite photographs in her car. “I thought for sure our house was going to be burnt down,” she later said.

The talk on both sides of houses being burned down would have come as no surprise to one summer resident—Marc Shell, the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, who recently completed research for a book called “Grand Manan; or, a Short History of North America.” Shell concluded that on Grand Manan, which has always been lightly policed by officers sent from the mainland, “unpopular groups are often driven off island by fire” and “sometimes the only form of law enforcement is illegal police-enforced banishment.” As far back as 1839, for instance, the Episcopal church was destroyed by fire, and any question about whether the blaze had been started by what a church statement called “a sacrilegious incendiary” was settled by a note at the scene containing, according to the same statement, “language which betokens premeditated malevolence and hostility against the Bishop of the Diocese, against the Rector of this Parish in particular, and four other persons of this County.” All of the men brought to trial for the arson were acquitted.

 

“T
HE IDEA WAS
to put the fear of God in 'em
,
get 'em on the boat, and get 'em the hell off the island,” a lifelong Grand Mananer said recently. “But it got out of hand.” On Friday the twenty-
first, Erin Gaskill was told that she might want to have her children sleep over at their grandmother's that evening. According to later court testimony, there had been hints, or perhaps more than hints, from the R.C.M.P. that calls involving Ronnie Ross would not draw a swift response. For a while, the people in Foster's yard seemed less like a group of aroused citizens than like a bunch of men attending a barbecue. Accounts of what happened when the trouble started are imprecise. It was dark. People on both sides of Cedar Street had been drinking. It's clear that the sides were not evenly matched—there were fewer than a dozen people at Ross's—and were not cleanly divided between outsiders and islanders. Some of the people at Ross's house were from Grand Manan and a few of the people on Carter Foster's side of the street may at times have tempered their outrage at drug dealers with a few purchases of their own. It's clear that at one point some of the men on Foster's side were carrying bats, and at least one of Ross's crew had a knife taped to a pole. Shortly after midnight, Carter Foster and several companions moved into Cedar Street to confront the men who had come out of Ross's house. “You're going to fucking get off the island!” Foster shouted at Ross. He and Ross began to fight. Foster, who was winning, had Ross in a choke hold when the shooting started.