During the opening statement, as Smith described the terrible things he would have to prove, an unbelieving Street laughed out loud in open court. He brayed disruptively and gestured with his hands, and as Dick Smith talked, Jerome swiveled around in his seat, scanning the courtroom in derisive contempt, scorn imprinted on his flawed Negro face. I have an image of a large, intensely angry Black man - very unattractive - openly baiting the prosecution in front of the jury. I have seen Jerome's vitriolic outbursts and the powerful image he evokes. He scared me badly in that instance, and I can't bu wonder what it must have done to the jury to see his caustic behavior displayed. Whatever Smith said on that day probably didn't matter in the minds of those people; Street was finished.

        As the trial progressed, it became clear to Jerome that the witnesses were lying, that they were talking about kilos of crack and huge payoffs that he had never seen. The truth was being buried under an avalanche of bullshit, and in spite of all Street's urging, his attorney was not challenging any of the damning testimony. The lawyer claimed he was hamstrung by the judge and the rules of cross-examination. "It's us against them," he said, "and we have nobody to dispute what they are saying." The fact that the witnesses were testifying in order to get time off their own sentences didn't evoke so much as a yawn from the trial participants. It would seem that in any fair court of law, you shouldn't be able to bribe witnesses, but that is exactly what had happened, and the defense was powerless to point it out or question the motives of these prisoners.

        During lunch that second day, Street was put in the holding cell next to one of the witnesses, and he asked what was going on. "You don't know, man," said the frightened inmate. "Smith says I's gonna do life. He told me fifty years. Hey Jerome...he made me, man...He made me. We all had to do it."

        All his life, Street had thought older white people in power had an unrealistic sense of fair play, and now he was finding that the opposite was true and that, if anything, he was the one with the misplaced sense of honorable intent. He expected Jimmy Carter and got Nixon. What he was just beginning to understand was that these people were playing with his LIFE as if it were inconsequential. They had put together a scenario in which he played the part of the bad guy just by sitting there in his costume of blackface, scaring the jury with the historical menace of his race. Had he been Hispanic, the vision of a swarthy bandito might have served the same cause. Before I ever knew Jerome Street, I can remember wondering what sort of mind was in there behind those untractable eyes. Imagine again what a bunch of retiree jurors were thinking.

        By the end of the second day, it was evident that Street's only defense was based on his denials, and they weren't going to be enough. He would need something physical and concrete. He would need to prove his own innocence in the convoluted legal atmosphere of the federal system, and he had nothing with which to make his case. All he could hope for now was mercy.