Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9402030008
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HUGH A. MULLIGAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ THE bizarre behavior of the mourners at cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar's funeral points up history's recurring moral contradiction of the hoodlum as a hero.
Was Don Pablo, as the frenzied faithful smashing guard barriers and breaking chapel windows to view his bullet-ridden remains seemed to believe, the world's first narco-saint, a public benefactor who donated housing in Colombia's dismal slums, sponsored sports teams, provided lighted soccer fields in the bleakest barrios and handed out crisp new bills to struggling university students?
Or was he public enemy No. 1, the world's first gangster billionaire as listed in Forbes magazine, a narcoterrorist who headed up a $20 billion-a-year cocaine industry? He was accused of offering a $4,200 bounty for every cop killed in his home base of Medellin and was implicated in hundreds of homicides, including the bombing of an Avianca passenger jet that claimed 107 lives, and ordering the assassination of three presidential candidates, the attorney general, a top anti-drug enforcement officer, a newspaper publisher, several judges and more than 400 police officers.
``He was worth a dozen of any of these,'' one voice among the 20,000 admirers who jammed Medellin's Jardines Monte Sacro cemetery called out to his grieving mother, Hermilda Gaviria. ``He built my house. He did more for the people than any government official did or ever will do. He is our hero. He spit in the face of the gringos.''
Some of the mourners depended on him for their livelihood: the coca growers, the processors and shippers, his private army of bodyguards and ``sicarios,'' the motorcycle hit men he recruited at motorcycle races and rallies.
Colombian President Cesar Gavira pronounced a less-flattering epitaph in handing out medals to the police snipers who gunned down the mustachioed prison escapee in a rooftop shootout at his hideaway early in December: ``Colombia's worst nightmare has been slain.''
Meanwhile, miles away geographically but not emotionally, faithful fans and neighbors of John Gotti hung a banner from a railroad overpass in the Ozone Park section of New York City lamenting his absence because of incarceration in a federal penitentiary on 44 counts of murder and racketeering: ``JOHN IS MISSED BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.''
Their sentiments again raised a basic question about the outlaw as folk hero: Is he another Robin Hood or just another robbing hood?
To his admirers flaunting the ``Free John Gotti'' T-shirts, the head of the Gambino crime family was a latter-day Florentine prince who held court every day in a back room of the storefront Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, the gang's social center in Ozone Park. There, besides mob matters, he adjudicated neighborhood disputes, handed out ``balloons'' ($1,000) to the needy, dispensed entry-level rackets jobs to promising young toughs.
Every Fourth of July, ``Johnny Boy,'' as he is called locally, presided over the big neighborhood block party in a high-backed kitchen chair, set out on the sidewalk like a throne, surrounded by his praetorian guard of heavies and hit men. Independence Day courtesy of the don meant free hot dogs, carnival rides, spectacular illegal fireworks in the illegally blocked-off streets.
What a guy. On a subzero January day the ``Dapper Don,'' dressed in the best his truck hijackers could provide, would plunge into a curb-side snowbank to serve coffee and Italian crullers to the cops on duty in the electronic snooper van parked outside the club.
His fans and neighbors shrugged off the evidence gathered by these listening devices that convicted him of extortion, loan sharking, labor racketeering and five murders, including the rub out of Paul ``The Pope'' Castellano outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan, which elevated Gotti to top underworld boss. They don't want to know about his gangster image as a vicious killer and a hands-on hood who administered his own beatings, but openly admired his cockiness in court, the way he pointed an imaginary pistol at prosecution witnesses and smirkingly squeezed the trigger.
With polls showing crime as the nation's No. 1 concern, Gotti ironically is seen as a force for law and order in this blue-collar neighborhood of wooden row houses. Like many mob turfs, the crime rate is lower than in surrounding areas, not counting occasional breaches of the peace emanating from the clubhouse. Bumper stickers like ``Touch This Car and I Break You Face'' and ``Honk if You Like Bullets in Your Windshield'' underline the homespun nature of neighborhood crime-watch efforts.
Hero worship of the hardened criminal is not limited to the blue-collar class. Jean Genet, a professional thief and pimp for homosexuals who had been in and out of jail since the age of 10, had a dual life as a gifted novelist and playwright. He was serving a life sentence when Jean Paul-Sartre, Jean Cocteau and other French intellectuals successfully campaigned for his release. Genet became a major dramatist in the Theater of the Absurd. His novels, brimming with sex and violence, are thinly veiled autobiographical accounts of underworld life that suggest only an illusory difference between good and evil in a repressed and hypocritical society.
Crime as existential proof of the absurdity of the human condition caught on with other literati.
Norman Mailer was researching ``The Executioner's Song,'' his Pulitzer Prize novel about condemned murderer Gary Gilmore, when Jack Henry Abbott wrote him a letter from the Marion, Ill., federal penitentiary ``with a little pencil stub because that is all I'm allowed here.''
Abbott's harrowing descriptions of prison violence impressed the famous novelist, who soon paid several visits to his cell, encouraged his writing, became his friend and literary mentor. Collected and edited, Abbott's letters became ``The Belly of the Beast,'' the only best seller ever to come out of Marion's ``control unit,'' a section of the prison set aside for the most troublesome inmates.
The acclaim accorded the book by intellectuals more impressed with Abbott's literary talent than his proven talent for crime soon brought about his release after 19 years in prison. A few weeks later, he stabbed a 22-year-old Hispanic waiter to death during a 3 a.m. argument in a lower Manhattan cafe, then fled to Louisiana, where he was eventually caught.
After taking the stand in his protegee's behalf, Mailer provoked a storm of criticism when he told a news conference ``culture is worth a little risk.'' Mike Pearl, veteran police reporter for the New York Post, asked the devastating question: ``Mr. Mailer, specifically what elements of society are you willing to risk? Cubans? Waiters?''
Essayist Diana Trilling, a long-time friend of Mailer's, later wrote that ``the literary imagination has always been fired by the idea of the prison, the criminal, the outlaw - and not only the literary imagination but the popular imagination too. How else do you account for Robin Hood and Genet and the undying appeal of the gangster film?''
Even gangsters love gangster films. Al Capone spent his retirement years after Alcatraz watching his favorite James Cagney flicks in his Miami retreat. John Gotti patterned his swagger and smirking giggle after Richard Widmark's chilling portrayal of killer Tommy Udo in ``Kiss of Death.''
America's main contribution to crime as culture is the Western outlaw, the gunslinger turned folk hero, an enduring and versatile oxymoron: the good badman.
Aaron Copeland composed a ballet about ``Billy the Kid,'' who also was the hero of 20 movies, including one starring Robert Taylor and Jane Russell, and an early Broadway play that its producers claim was seen by 10 million people. Dime novels and the National Police Gazette mythicized the Kid as a sensitive loner who turned to a life of crime after some varmint insulted his mother.
In reality, he was Henry McCarthy, born in New York City, a ``narrow- shouldered, buck-toothed, adenoidal moron,'' who according to newspaper records killed 21 men, ``mostly unarmed and not counting seven Mexicans whom he shot just to see them kick.'' When Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned him down, the Kid had not reached his 22nd birthday. Less than a month later, his reincarnation as a folk hero began with the pulp publication of ``The History of an Outlaw Who Killed a Man For Every Year of His Life.''
Billy's lingering aura inspired Giacomo Puccini opera's ``The Girl of the Golden West,'' sonorous with glorious arias to outlaw Dick Johnson (alias Ramerrez in the libretto), redeemed from a life of crime by Minnie, the school marm who also runs a saloon.
Next to Billy the Kid, the James brothers, Frank and Jesse, have the most movie credits, which echo the esteem in which they were held by their rural neighbors. Somehow the legend spread, with some help from their pious mother, that the boys only caused grief to bankers foreclosing on helpless widows and railroad barons cheating folks out of their farms.
``Oh my generous noble-hearted Jesse,'' she wept at his graveside, ``Why did they kill my poor boy who never harmed anybody but helped them and fed them with the bread that should go to his orphans?''
Jesse did train the choir at Kearney, Mo., Baptist Church, but there is no record of him protecting any orphans or widows. The record does show he learned the killing trade as a teen-aged bushwhacker, a part-time Confederate soldier riding with the psychotic William Quantrill to the infamous massacre at Centralia, Ill. Between stints in the choir loft, he led a gang that in 15 years held up ll banks, seven trains, three stage coaches, one country fair, one payroll messenger, and killed at least 16 people.
Soon after his death, crowds began turning up at the James farm. Mom sold them souvenir shoes from Jesse's horse.
Shakespeare in ``Julius Caesar'' caught for all time the public's fondness for favors from dictators and desperados. The demagogue Mark Antony turns the crowd at Caesar's funeral against his civic-minded assassins by reading from the dictator's will which bequeathed 75 drachmas to every Roman citizen and set aside his villa and orchards as public parks.
Escobar and Gotti are only the latest in an endless police lineup of punks, hoodlums and vicious killers to attain thuggish charisma. Minutes after John Dillinger was gunned down by FBI agents in an alley beside Chicago's Biograph Theater, souvenir hucksters were mopping up his blood with handkerchiefs for sale in the Loop. When a show-biz entrepreneur offered $10,000 for the bullet-ridden body, his father had concrete and scrap iron poured into the grave to deter body snatchers.
A line of mourners, most of them women, stretched for five blocks around the morgue where Public Enemy No. 1 was put on display. A crowd of 5,000 climbed over the high iron fence of Crown Point Cemetery where he was laid to rest with President Benjamin Harrison, three vice presidents, two governors and Indiana's beloved poet laureate James Whitcomb Riley.
Dillinger and his gang maimed and murdered a number of innocent bystanders, along with bank guards and law officers on their spree of bank robberies. Still the legend quickly grew in those Depression years that he was an avenging angel against greedy financiers, guilty only of ``victim-less crime.'' Why he once let an old lady cash her pension check before cleaning out a bank.
The downtrodden envied his impudence to government officials, his daring prison breaks. His grieving father and sister toured the vaudeville and carnival circuits with tales of his bravado and gallantry, inviting women in the audience to kiss the bullet holes in his suit.
Ostentatious bereavement is essential to gilding the gangster as hero. The Mafia funeral attests to the loved one's popularity in the community. Brooklyn wasn't exactly prostrate with grief, but thousands lined the sidewalks to watch the cortege of 200 limousines, including 38 flower cars, escort mobster Frankie ``Yale'' Uale to his final reward inside a silver-handled coffin. His parting in 1928 set a high standard for gangland burials.
From Kevin Barry to hunger striker Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican Army has keened its fallen heroes in lachrymose ballads and defiant rebel songs.
Cocaine cowboys in Mexico are beatified with a classic ``corrido,'' or storytelling ballad which characterizes them as modern Robin Hoods who take from the rich, decadent gringos and give to the poor.
When drug trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero was arrested for the murder of a U.S. drug enforcement agent, a corrido boasted that ``it took 10 federal agents to guard him because he was a fine fighting cock.'' Another lamented the jobs lost when Hacienda Bufalo, a huge marijuana plantation, was dismantled at the insistence of U.S. authorities.
Even in Japan's conformist society the outlaw is romanticized on TV and in movies as a chivalrous descendant of the feudal ``ronin,'' literally ``floating men,'' free-lance samurai who roamed the countryside like Robin Hood and his merry men. Many of Japan's 3,000 ``yakuza'' gangs claim kinship with the feudal ronin, adopting mysterious rites and flashy clothes to proclaim they are the last bastion of samurai-style machismo.
In Somalia, the people in the countryside clearly seem to prefer clan leader Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid to the U.N. peace keepers.
Wasn't it thus ever? When Pontius Pilate offered to release Jesus in the customary Passover amnesty, the crowd cried ``Away with him, give us Barabbas.''
Barabbas, according to Luke's Gospel, ``had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city and for murder.'' Biblical scholars say he belonged to Zealots, a fanatically nationalist Jewish sect, and probably was one of the Sicarii, literally ``dagger men,'' a terrorist group bent on ridding Palestine of Roman rule.
The crowds in Jerusalem preferred him to the nonviolent Jesus who believed in ``rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar'' and turned the other cheek to his tormentors
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB