Free INDEFENSIBLE: One Lawyer's Journey Into the Inferno of American Justice by David Feige

single-family houses occupied by solidly middle-class folks push up against the rat-infested projects of the immobile underclass. It’s a place where the successful people are drug dealers or sanitation workers rather than corporate tycoons or investment bankers, and it sits just ten miles from the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, a place many residents have never even visited.
     
           I know the projects pretty well, and since one of the crimes I’m dealing with today took place there, I’ve been thinking about them a lot. I’ve represented some local celebrities, and walking around the hulking buildings, I’m likely to be recognized. “Yo, you was my lawyer!” is a common refrain, and “Hey, you Bemo’s lawyer, right?” is a close second. Kevin Bethea, known around the neighborhood as “Bemo,” was a Soundview legend. He had a rap sheet that ran to thirty pages and a crack addiction to which he had completely surrendered. He was bald, with the thin, resilient frame of a man who has spent many homeless nights seeking shelter in out-of-the-way places. A scar covered half his forehead --either the result of a gunshot or a close encounter with a jar full of lye.
     
           Bemo was a notorious gangster in his youth, but crack turned him into a charming but perennially petty criminal. He was single-handedly responsible for most of the neighborhood’s car break-ins, and, as with so much in the projects, everyone knew it. But there was something compelling about him. A detective I know told me that he once saw Bemo walking down the street with a few car radios that still had the wires hanging out of them. Bemo walked over to the detective’s car, carefully put the radios down, and put up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of surrender: “Okay, Garcia, you got me again.” He was so funny about it the detective couldn’t bring himself to arrest him.
     
           “Go, Bemo,” he ordered, “and get rid of that shit before someone you can’t charm comes along.”
     
           Bemo was gunned down two weeks after I got him out of jail for the fifth time. A citizen with a rifle, uncharmed by his antics, shot him in the head as he broke into yet another car, trying to steal yet another radio. Unlike the other times he’d been shot, this one was fatal.
     
           When I’d first heard about the shooting, I was terrified that Bemo would be buried in Potter’s Field --the massive paupers’ grave often tended by inmates from Rikers Island. He had, so far as I know, no relatives in New York. But for the anonymity, such a lonesome cemetery might have been a fitting place for Bemo --surrounded by so many others from the neighborhood who had no one to claim them, no one even to identify their remains, his unmarked grave watched over by the guarded gardeners of Rikers Island.
     
           But Bemo wasn’t destined for Potter’s Field at all. Within the tiny world circumscribed by the sweep of the Soundview Oval, a U-shaped drive flanked by drably identical project buildings, Bemo was a kind of hero. For days after he was shot, kids --for some reason it was mostly kids --swarmed through the tall project buildings with buckets, collecting dollar bills and spare change to cover the funeral home bill. And within hours of his body being carted away for evidence, a shrine went up at the corner of Randall and Rosedale, across the street from the little ghetto grocery store --a favored hangout of hustlers and drunks.
     
           The shrine was a cardboard box cut in two, with Polaroid pictures of Bemo taped to or propped next to it. One could see Bemo when he was young, mean, and gangstery, or when he was older, the small, scarred bald head cocked slightly to the side, his bright, dancing eyes sizing up the camera. There were flowers too, huge stacks of cheap deli flowers, their dyed blooms fading in the afternoon sun. And candles, of course --nearly two dozen of the colored votive