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“Okay, Kenny—I mean, Kareem,” Badde said when he’d closed the sliding glass door, “calm down and start from the beginning.”
For his first twenty-two years, Kareem Abdul-Qaadir answered to the name Kenny Jones. That had changed two years ago when Kenny Jones, not the brightest bulb on the marquee, had gotten arrested for selling crack cocaine to undercover Philly cops in Germantown, then fled the justice system by jumping his two-thousand-dollar bond.
The Jones family, who’d lived in a brick-faced row house across Daly Street from the Baddes in South Philly, had four brothers. Kenny was second oldest, after Jack, who’d been a classmate and friend of Badde’s seemingly forever.
When Kenny went on the lam, he called his big brother for help and advice. Jack then turned to his old buddy, Rapp Badde. The city councilman had connections with the authorities—“Maybe he can get the whole case thrown out or something,” Jack told Kenny. And if for some reason Badde was not able to use those connections, he had other resources well beyond the Joneses’.
Badde hadn’t hesitated. Beyond being old neighbors, the Jones family had campaigned hard for his election to office. He couldn’t do anything with Kenny’s case; that, he told Jack, was a matter involving the court
system and the district attorney’s office, over which a city councilman such as himself had absolutely no sway, even in a place like Philadelphia.
So he called the manager of his campaign office in West Philly, which was run from a rented row house, and told him to let Kareem live there in the basement bedroom, which had its own door to the street, and to pay him, in cash, to work as one of Badde’s “community voter canvassers.”
Badde even helped Kenny pick out the cover name “Abdul-Qaadir,” which was Arabic for Servant of the Capable. Badde quietly enjoyed the implication of that.
At first, Kareem Abdul-Qaadir’s job had been to go door to door pretending to be a volunteer with the City of Philadelphia working for the Forgotten Voters Initiative—a program that, had anyone actually bothered to investigate, would’ve been found not to exist. He asked the residents if they were registered voters. If they said no, he helped get them registered.
But then came his real job: the compilation of the names and addresses of all these voters, especially noting the elderly, immigrants, and others who could easily be convinced that they needed to request absentee-voter ballot forms. More important, once those ballots arrived in the mail, Kenny would help those voters with filling out the forms—specifically, under “city councilman,” marking the box next to “H. Rapp Badde, Jr.”
Kenny had then stumbled across an idea that had turned out to be borderline brilliant.
As he was canvassing a far section of West Philly, knocking on door after door, he walked up to a retirement community, Fernwood Manor at Cobbs Creek. The ten-story-high building overlooked the greenbelt of the small tree-lined stream—and, curiously, on the opposite side of the creek, Fernwood Cemetery.
Kenny, whose experience with retirement communities could be equated to his knowledge of quantum physics, had been excited to find the place was packed with really old people. In no time he had talked his way into its Community Activity Center, a large building that reminded him of a high school auditorium. There he found that the residents watched TV, played card games and bingo, and otherwise pleasantly passed time in their retirement before, ultimately, winding up across the creek.
At Fernwood Manor’s Community Activity Center, he didn’t have to go door to door. The retirees came to him. They were happy to see a nice, clean-cut young man such as Kareem. Especially the old-timers who had failing memories, Alzheimer’s disease in particular, and never remembered previously meeting him—or filling out forms.
And when Kareem had explained the purpose of his volunteer work, everyone thought that the nice young man was extremely considerate to think of forgotten old folks. That, and to understand how difficult it was for them on voting day. They said visiting polling stations that invariably had long lines was very painful for their aged bodies. At the community activity center, though, they could at their leisure fill out the requests for absentee-voter forms, then later, when the forms arrived, fill those out also at their leisure.
Especially with the kind help of a nice young man like Kareem.
Kenny started visiting as many retirement homes as would let him in the door.
And then he went to nursing homes, where he found the residents were more or less unconscious—almost every one on medication that kept them in a mental fog, or worse—so all he had to do was forge their signatures on the forms. Even easier to sign up were those who in the last year or two had fallen into their own category: deceased.
Slipping the kid or old man in the mailroom a little stash of cocaine or cash, with the promise of more, guaranteed that there’d be a telephone call alerting him when the absentee-voter ballots arrived in the mail.
Over time, Kenny Jones did one hell of a job collecting names and helping the forgotten voters of Philadelphia support Badde for city councilman—and soon, for the office of mayor.
And Rapp Badde had been impressed. Ignoring the unfortunate fact that Kenny was a fugitive charged with a felony, he’d thought that Kenny was still pretty much the good, if dim, kid he’d been when they were growing up. And in two years since his arrest—What the hell’s wrong with a little coke now and then? That probably was a bullshit bust, anyway—he’d never gotten into any other trouble.
Until now.
“What the hell do you mean something’s gone bad with you and Reggie?” he said into his Go To Hell cell as he looked out over the city to the right, toward West Philly and the rented campaign-office row house.
Reggie was the baby Jones brother, but at age twenty and two hundred thirty pounds, not much of a baby anymore.
Rapp knew that Reggie had never been really normal—his mother had had him late in life, in her forties, and there’d been complications at birth—and when Reggie got mixed up with drugs, he really went off the deep end.
Worse, while Kenny had just sold dope, Reggie both sold and used the stuff. Unfortunately, a lot more of the latter than the former, and he was forever trying to pay off his dealer.
Kenny said, “I got a call from Reggie. He was crazy. Crazy scared. Crying, man. Said, ‘If I don’t come up with thirty large to pay the man, I’m dead.’ He didn’t, and next day they grabbed him.”
Thirty thousand dollars! Badde thought. Jesus!
“How’d he get that deep in debt?” Badde asked.
“Hell if I know. Snorting more than selling? A lot of IOUs over time? And some crazy interest on top of what he owed? Adds up fast.”
