Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The Mothers of the Disappeared began with one middle-aged white man recovering from a coke binge in a Florida hotel room. Randy Credico had been working on an HBO special with a well-known comic, and when they finished, they went on a bender. He checked himself into a room near Tampa to relax and detox for a few weeks. "I watched a lot of C-Span and read a lot of books."
It was on C-Span that he saw Anthony Papa debating someone from the American Correctional Association. Papa had become an anti-Rockefeller activist after getting out of prison, and Credico knew right away he wanted to work with him. Back in New York, he tracked Papa down and took him out for drinks, and they dreamed up Mothers of the Disappeared.
"Unfortunately there's not enough people who give a shit about blacks in prison," says Credico, who is now the project director at the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. "No one's ready to lose any sleep over it. But mothers -- everyone's got a mother. You see these old, tired women whose kids have been in prison for a long period of time, it's really difficult not to care."
Credico isn't a large man, but he takes up a lot of space. He has dark hair and a fondness for martinis, and he manages to keep up a string of invective against racism in the justice system even when his mouth is plugged with a cigar. An old-school leftist, he claims he was blackballed from TV after he referred to Reagan-era U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick as "Eva Braun" while doing stand-up on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.
He says it was difficult but necessary to reject the governor's offer. "[Pataki] has got to go much further," he says. "It was a very cynical undertaking."
They'd worked too hard, he says, to give up without pushing for sweeping change. "To get a really shitty deal after all this violence against poor people by the law enforcement establishment, to get a small tinkering, to replace the firing squad with lethal injection, is that reform?" he asks.
Some people thought it was enough. Doreen LaMarca, whose brother Michael has been locked up for 17 years, says, "Sometimes you hold out too long, you get nothing. I can't understand why these people aren't jumping at this. It baffles me. I look at them and think, 'Bring your loved one home.' I think it's great that they want to help everybody. Randy wants to help the world. I'll just take that little piece that's going to bring my brother home."
That the rest of the group didn't feel the same is testament not just to their own resolve, but to their faith in Credico. Driving up to Albany for the July press conference, Wanda Best talks with him about the risks of turning Pataki down. She admits she's scared.
"I'm just afraid someone will say 'F' the mothers," she tells Credico, who is driving too fast and alternating between cigars and cigarettes. Darryl Best is nine months into his sentence, and under the governor's bill, he wouldn't be eligible for release for at least five years. But that's a lot better than 15, and the Bests have already lost one gamble, turning down a plea bargain that could have had Darryl out in a year.
Credico will hear none of it. "Do you want to get your husband out?" he booms.
Pointing to Elaine Bartlett, he says, "Do you want her husband to get out? Do you want to use the power that you have?"
Best, a small, demure 51-year-old, smiles sweetly and says, "I'll follow you to the death, Randy."
The women believe in Credico because his gift for combining P.R. with street action is responsible for propelling the movement as far as it's gone. As Papa says, a few years ago it would have been a "political death" for a candidate to advocate freeing felons from prison in an election year. "We put a human face on the issue and showed all these people rotting away because of these draconian laws," he says. "We changed public opinion so politicians were not afraid anymore to get involved."
"Six years ago, I was sitting in a 6-by-9 cage in Sing Sing," Papa says. "All the sudden here I am in front of the governor asking him to please change these laws."
Like Credico, Papa knows the power of a media-friendly story to influence politicians.
Sixteen years ago, he ran a radio installation shop in the Bronx. He had a wife and a daughter and was short of cash, and a bowling partner offered him $500 to deliver an envelope of cocaine.
The bowling partner was a police informant. "He had three sales indictments, and the police told him the more people you get, the less time you'll get." He got Papa, who got 15 years to life.
In Sing Sing, Papa earned a paralegal degree from Bronx Community College, a bachelor's degree in behavioral science from Mercy College and a master's degree from the New York Theological Seminary. What really saved him, though, was his painting. His despairing portraits of captivity -- some two-dimension and allegorical, like Diego Rivera, others roiling and impressionistic, like Francis Bacon -- caught the attention of the artist Mike Kelley, who included Papa's agonizingly bleak self-portrait "15 Years to Life" in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum.
Capitalizing on the publicity, Papa wrote his own press releases and sent them to local reporters. After five or six months, a piece about Papa appeared in a Westchester County paper. More followed, and as his story spread, so did calls for his release. In 1997, Pataki granted him clemency. "I painted my way out of prison," he says.
As soon as he was released, he began working to repeal the laws that put him away. He's become such a constant political presence that he and Credico now joke that Pataki probably wishes he could lock him back up.
As the son of an ex-convict, it was easy for Credico to relate to Papa. His father did eight years for safecracking during the Depression, before Credico was born, and imbued him with a deep sense of the horror of prison. "I got his mindset from it," he says. "I know how fucked up Tony [Papa] is from those 12 years of being hoisted into a dangerous environment away from his family."
That knowledge was the key to creating Mothers of the Disappeared. It helped him sweet-talk the women he met waiting at the bus stop for transport to the upstate prisons that house drug offenders. Slowly, he convinced them to join him in taking to the streets. His outrage at what they've been through is palpable in the clench of his jaw and the exasperation in his voice.
Credico's commitment is all-consuming. His girlfriend recently dumped him because of his single-minded obsession with changing the Rockefeller laws. Aviles calls him an "unsung hero. Sometimes he's hard to take, but if anything positive ever does happen, it will because of Randy."
The love is clearly mutual; while Credico barks and screams at most people, he's gruffly deferential to the Mothers.
"Randy saved my life," says Wanda Best from the backseat of Credico's Albany-bound rental car. When Credico tries to shush her, she tells him, "Randy, the truth will set you free."
"It's not going to set me free of this hangover," he shoots back, a cigar butt between his lips.
Maniacally switching between radio stations, he keeps up a soliloquy about the iniquities of the governor's bill and the need for across-the-board retroactive sentencing reductions. "Unless that's in, we're not supporting either bill," he says. "We ain't anyone's patsies."
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