The Fillmore Connection

PROLOGUE

His proclivity for trouble seemed to follow him no matter what role in life he chose. He was riding in the back seat of a black chauffeured limousine on his way from what proved to be a very lucrative book signing. There must have been at least seventy-five to one hundred invited guests all of whom stood in a line after purchasing their newly published novel, waiting for the popular author to personalize their copy with his autograph.

Derrick Knowles at the age of fifty was on top of the world and in the publishing game when he sat at a small desk at Yoshi‘s on the corner of Fillmore and Eddy. Yoshi‘s was located in a fashionably constructed thirteen- story complex of condominiums called The Fillmore Heritage Center and dubbed the Harlem of the West Coast.

It seemed like yesterday when as a young man of 17, he had his first of three experiences with heroin there, on that very corner, where a small grocery store once stood and he purchased a quart of milk for twenty-six cents, all in an effort to recover from the ill affects of the drug. The area was all so different now. The streets were lined with Jaguars, Bentleys, Mercedes Benz, Cadillacs, and Lincolns. It was unlike many years ago when pimps and drug dealers drove their customized Cadillacs and Lincolns up and down Fillmore, checking their traps (payment from the outward propositioning prostitutes along with the street corner workers spitting balloons of heroin). This new revitalized area, a benighted district that rose from generations of decay, was now borne aloft on a jazz vamp where artist like Roy Haynes and Taj Mahal now headlined.

A half century ago, the Fillmore streets were lined with dozens of evocatively names clubs: Café Society, Bop City, The Plantation Club, The New Orleans' Swing Club. There were late night joints where Dexter Gordon or Wes Montgomery, after finishing a show downtown, might play until dawn. Places that had breakfast jam sessions, where your Bebop came with a side of eggs. Although the buildings had undergone a dramatic change, not much could be said for the congregation of derelicts and visibly poverty-stricken people sleeping in doorways and begging for change from the patrons coming and going from the busy restaurants and club.

Derrick was neatly dressed in a two-piece steel gray pin stripe Armani, with gray silk shirt, blue floral silk tie and matching hand-made alligator lace up shoes. He wore a thin face Longine La Couture 18-karat yellow gold wristwatch with no other jewelry. His black hair pulled back in one long braid. As the limo drove up from the underground parking garage, Derrick picked up the car phone and spoke to the driver. Say Man, when you get up top, pull around to the front and stop. Within moments, the sleek black automobile stops on the corner of Fillmore and Eddy. The driver was setting the gear shift into park when Derrick opened the back door to get out.

The driver, a relatively young, uniformed, college looking white boy was in the process of bolting to the rear of the car to open the door for his passenger, but from over the roof, Derrick spoke saying,Don‘t worry about it.

Yes Sir, The chauffeur responded. Stopping in his tracks he then added, But unless you‘re going into the restaurant across the street, I wouldn‘t advise being out in this neighborhood for too long.

Derrick laughed lightly at young man and his advice then suggested, Why don‘t you just pull up the street and find a place to park. I‘ll call you from my cell phone when I‘m ready.

What ever you say Sir. He replied and obediently got back into the car pulling slowly down the street in search of a place to park. Derrick stood watching the taillights of the car as it pulled over in the middle of the block on Fillmore and parked.

He checked his wrist watch. 11:45 P.M. it read. The street were still very much alive with the nightlife people moving about on foot and in their fashionable automobiles. Stepping off the curb, out into the street, he flagged down a yellow cab and got in. Haight and Fillmore, he directed, even before the back door was closed.

With the steady flow of other cars out at that time of night, the ride took all of five minutes by the time the driver stopped in front of Walgreen‘s drug store there on the corner. He gave the driver a ten-dollar bill saying, Keep it. as he got out, closing the door behind him, walking swiftly in the direction of Market Street.

The Haight had not changed that much. Many of the old buildings had been freshly painted, some were even adorned with rod iron gates and security bars covering the doors and windows. A housing project extended from the middle of the block between Webster and Buchanan, but other than that it was all still the same.

On the corner of Haight and Webster was a small grocery store that sold everything from hard alcohol to Cracker Jacks. It was 11:55PM when he walked into the store. The sign on the door read closing time was 12:00 A.M.. A woman stood behind the counter dressed in Islamic attire clearing out the register of the day‘s receipts. She did not even bother to look up when the light beam was broken on the door, announcing the entry of a potential customer.

The neatly dressed man just walked to the center of the store where from the back of the business a man carrying a cardboard box in his hands emerged from the refrigerator section. He looked up into the face of the man in the suit and his eyes grew wide with fear. In the next second, a bullet fired from a .38 equipped with a silencer hit the man directly between the eyes, causing him to drop the box as his lifeless body crumpled to the floor. Then came the distinct sound of a shell being pumped into the chamber of a shot-gun behind him, causing him to spin back around towards the counter where he fired another round instantly that exploded into the right eye of the veiled woman, exiting out the back of her head, splattering blood and her brains all over the bottles of alcohol there on the shelf and sent her crashing to the floor. He coolly walked behind the counter and removed the tape from the surveillance camera then walked calmly out of the store...

ONE

Sandra Alexandria Matthews was referred to as Nurse Sam, taken from the first three letters of her whole name. At the age of 35, she had a body that the most physical aficionado would kill for. She stood five-feet-six and maintained a curvaceous 34-21-33 figure by eating right, a daily regimen of vitamins, along with a brisk run in Golden Gate Park every morning before the sun rose in the sky. She had the body and strong legs similar to those of a professional runner along with a face like that of a vision in an erotic dream. She was breathtakingly beautiful with a complexion of coffee with double cream.

Many would say that she missed her calling because she had the features and a body that belonged in front of a motion picture camera, but instead she chose to be a nurse at the Glenn Dyer Detention Center in Oakland, known as the North County Jail on Sixth and Clay near downtown. Her job consisted mostly of passing out medication to the male prisoners in the different pods of the six floor structure.

She had no fear or apprehensions about being around so many men who were facing criminal charges ranging from first-degree murder to rape. Her strongest asset was her personality. Not only was she visually beautiful, but she seemed to have an aura about her that held a certain calming affect on people, including the prisoners. They all held her in high esteem and simply adored her. For the most part, she had a certain degree of respect for them all and was not in the least bit afraid to go into the cell-blocks unescorted.

Joseph Wiley, a.k.a. Joe-Moe, a renowned drug lord, was being held in North County on federal drug charges. At thirty-two years of age, he had amassed a fortune so vast until he ultimately lost sight of the objective, which was to get away with his crimes. Instead he began to operate his illegal drug business as though he had a license to break the law.

Throughout the North Bay area he had acquired a number of properties in the Sunnydale and Daly City areas, Hunter‘s Point, and across the Bay in West Oakland where he would randomly choose to prepare his product. On an average Joe-Moe was moving twenty to thirty kilos of cocaine per week, not including the heroin he was shipping to Saint Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, all of which sold for three times the price he paid for there on the West Coast.

Joe-Moe was virtually born into the dope game. He was born the second son to a mother and father who were both hooked on heroin. While his older brother was born with the addiction, Joe-Moe was not. The young Joe grew up anxious and eager to learn, interested only in reaping the benefits from what he had personally witnessed ultimately cost both his parents their lives. For him, this was power, something that he had to have and control instead of it having control over him.

Breakfast hour at the jail was too early for Joe-Moe‘s liking, so he hardly ever got out of his bunk to go unless he was short on commissary and even then they had to be serving waffles. Earlier during the month of March a hard nose deputy did a random shakedown of the cell Joe-Moe shared with one other prisoner. On the bunk assigned to the other man, the deputy found contraband used for making Pruno, a jailhouse wine, along with an extra mattress in the cell that the deputy deliberately cut up with his over-sized keys, destroying it. The deputy then gave Joe-Moe a write up for destroying county property. Clearly this emissary for the judicial system carried a personal vendetta for people who chose to break the law in order to amass great wealth. The administration took eighty-seven dollars from Joe-Moe‘s commissary account, which contained over four-thousand dollars, and he was placed on L.O.P. (loss of privileges) for three weeks. This meant that he was not allowed visitors or to go to the commissary for twenty-eight days.

His cell was on the second tier. That morning he decided to get up. On his way down the stairs, wearing his county issued shower shoes, he stumbled and lost his balance. Down the steel stairway he went, landing at the bottom head first on the cement. By the time he regained consciousness he was in the infirmary with Nurse Sam standing over him taking his pulse. Slowly he opened his eyes and looked straight into her face then cracked, It‘s a little difficult for me to breath. Think a lil mouth to mouth might help?.

A male deputy was standing at the door talking with the deputy who saw Joe-Moe fall, and even though Joe was aware of their presence, it made no difference as he flirted with Nurse Sam. She continued to take his pulse without responding to his comment and simply said, You had me a little nervous there for a minute. But I can tell you‘re ok now.

Don‘t be so quick to say that! Joe-Moe shot back, I think I might have internal damage.

Do you hurt any where besides your head? she asked.

Yeah, he answered as he attempted to get up but couldn‘t, then, in obvious fear said, I can‘t feel my legs.

A sudden look of concern consumed her face as she began to first gently probe his right leg with her fingers. Can you feel that? she asked as she squeezed his upper thigh.

Feel what? he asked.

Come on Joseph, don‘t play.

What you mean Bitch! Feel what? he spat, obviously afraid, causing the two deputies to come stand by her side.

The one deputy with the name tag Pate was a former Gulf War soldier and recognized the fear Joe-Moe was experiencing as he spoke saying, Take it easy now, Wiley. Nurse Sam is just trying to help you.

He took a position on the other side of the injured man as a precaution for her safety. Still she spoke in a soothing tone of voice to Joe-Moe. It‘s alright. I only want to examine you, okay?

TWO

Hunter James. Thirty-eight, known to his piers as Oose. A giant of a Samoan at six-three; two hundred-fifty pounds of solid muscle from years of weight training. Long black hair that he wore in two thick braids that resembled the horns of a ram, with a lightening streak of gray directly in the middle of his head. When he was the age of ten living on the big Island of Hawaii, he was made blind in his right eye from a dynamite blast caused by a careless fisherman who used explosives for catching fish. One day while on his way home from school, this fisherman was attempting to sell the dangerous material unaware of the boy out on the road when he ignited the blast.

By the time Hunter had reached the age of twelve, he had committed his first murder. The same fisherman responsible for the explosion that caused his being blind in one eye was found with both of his eyes gouged out and his lower torso had been doused with gasoline, badly burned from a roadside flare that had been inserted into the dead man‘s rectum.Everyone on the island knew it was the young but large Hunter James responsible for the heinous act, so his mother decided to send him to San Francisco to live with her sister in order to avoid retribution from the family of the murdered fisherman.

When Hunter arrived in the city, his Aunt enrolled him in school. It wasn‘t long before he noticed that many of the other students seemed to be afraid of him. He refused to wear an eye patch to conceal his visionless right eye and the sight of it gave him a menacing appearance. Whenever his cousins tried to introduce him to their friends there was always a certain degree of discomfort among a few of them who found his presence disturbing. At first sight, he appeared monstrous with his size and hideous right eye glaring lifelessly at those in front of him. His refusal to wear an eye patch to conceal his visionless right eye, only gave him more of a menacing appearance. However, one girl, a class mate, did not display the slightest sign of being disturbed or uncomfortable with the giant youth. Her name was Lora. She, too, was Samoan.

The two had met when Hunter turned fifteen. He could sense that she had absolutely no fear of him. The giant of a boy was actually shy whenever he was around her but he knew that he was in love with her. She was a beautiful girl, intelligent and sometimes herself teased by other students for being what they called a book worm. One boy in particular, Teddy, used to taunt her the most. The real reason behind his taunting was because in actuality, he liked her, but she refused to accept any of his advances and invitations to go out on a date. It was his form of retribution for her having the audacity to refuse him; one of the most popular boys on campus. He was a jock and a jerk.

Teddy and Hunter had the same gym class and were on the varsity wrestling team. It was during a practice one afternoon when Teddy was paired up with the much larger Hunter who snapped Teddy‘s neck during a hold, killing the boy. The school along with the authorities decided not to file charges against the young giant but he was taken off the wrestling team. Although Hunter never spoke about the incident with anyone, some how Lora knew that it was no accident. She and Hunter grew closer during the school year and she would help him with his school work. Her parents on the other hand neither understood nor approved of the strictly platonic friendship and without any advance notice, they simply took Lora and moved out of the state before the school year ended.

The remainder of his teenage years passed with numerous altercations that earned him the reputation of being the most feared and violent predator there in the Bay View/Hunter‘s Point area. There were a number of unsolved murders involving drug dealers and young gang members who were all at one point or another connected with Hunter. Rumors circulated that it was the giant Samoan who was responsible, but there was never enough evidence or any witnesses able to link him to the crimes.

In the mid 90‘s he was sent to San Quinton on a three-year bit for assault on a night club bouncer who claimed Hunter had not paid the cover charge. The giant, not being one for arguments, broke the man‘s arm in three places, all in plain view of a moonlighting off duty San Francisco police officer. After serving two years and four months, he was released on parole. Walking out of he front gates of