Free On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman Page B

people to make purchases with no questions
     asked. Wanted people seek places to shop that don’t require any documentation, because
     getting an ID in the first place could lead to an arrest; buying things using an ID
     would make it easier for the police to track them; and their dealings with the criminal
     justice system have rendered unusable the identification they have (for example, their
     licenses are suspended). These places where items ordinarily requiring identification
     may be bought without showing ID, signing one’s name, or showing proof of insurance
     are known as ducky spots.
    A man concerned that he may be taken into custody also fears using the hospitals,
     and so purchases a variety of medical goods and services from people in the neighborhood
     who work in health care and who supply drugs, medical supplies, and their general
     expertise to legally precarious community members. Chuck paid a neighbor working as
     a custodian at the local hospital around forty dollars for antibiotics when his foot
     got infected after he ran through some debris during a police chase. After two weeks
     of severe tooth pain, Chuck’s neighbor, a twenty-year-old man, pulled his own molar
     with a pair of pliers and paid his cousin, who worked at a doctor’s office, eighty
     dollars for a course of antibiotics. Reggie broke his arm when he tripped over the
     curb while running from a man trying to stab him. His neighbor brought over material for a cast from his job at the VA hospital, heated it in a pan of water on
     the stove, and made a hard splint that Reggie wore for five weeks. Reggie gave him
     a large bag of marijuana as compensation.
    Mike and Chuck and their friends around 6th Street also paid friends and neighbors
     for their silence and cooperation, and for news about the police. In a community filled
     with suspects and fugitives, every resident is a potential conduit of information,
     either for the police or for the men they’re after. Mike and his friends tried to
     ensure that neighbors who could alert the authorities to their whereabouts or activities
     were instead helping them hide.
    In the same way that payments for sex can be placed on a continuum from prostitution
     to marriage, the money that legally entangled people pay others in the neighborhood
     to help protect them from the authorities ranges from explicit, short-term, quid pro
     quo exchanges, in which a set fee is paid for a single piece of information or a single
     refusal to talk to the police or testify as a witness, to longer-term relationships,
     in which the arrangement is largely tacit, and the legally precarious party provides
     extended financial support in exchange for silence, watchfulness, and general help
     in evading the authorities. 8
    The most extended relationship of this kind that I observed on 6th Street involved
     two brothers who sold marijuana in the area. The pair had grown up in the neighborhood
     but had long since moved away. They didn’t mention their business or anybody else’s
     illicit doings over the phone, they came and went quickly, and to my knowledge, no
     person on 6th Street had ever been to their house—or even knew where it was.
    When the two brothers came around in their dark SUV to drop off drugs or pick up payments,
     they gave back to the community. They helped pay for the funerals of three young men
     who were shot and killed during my time there. They also contributed grocery money
     to the mothers of the deceased, rent money to their girlfriends, and haircut money
     for their sons. They gave cash to people who had recently come home from prison: a
     kind of get-started money. They put money on the books of neighborhood men who were
     fighting cases in county jail. 9
    As these two brothers coached and mentored younger guys on the block, they often discussed
     the importance of giving as a core obligation to those less fortunate. But they also occasionally mentioned that their generosity