Indianapolis Colts wide receiver
Marvin Harrison is under investigation in his hometown of
Philadelphia in a shooting that took place earlier this week, a
source close to the investigation told Anthony Gargano of
Philadelphia's WIP Radio.
Harrison was interviewed by police
about the shooting near his North Philadelphia bar this week.
Lt. Frank Vanore said the
investigation of Tuesday's shooting was continuing. Harrison has not
been arrested or charged.
"He was interviewed,"
Vanore said Friday. "Why he was interviewed, that is all part of
the investigation. No one is a suspect."
After the first day of Colts rookie
minicamp, coach Tony Dungy said he knew little more than had been reported.
"My phone has been ringing,
too, but I don't have any details," Dungy said. "I really
don't have any more information than you do."
Calls by ESPN to Harrison and his
agent have not been returned. NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the
league was "aware of the report, and we are looking into it."
The source said the alleged victim
came into the bar, Playmakers, about 5 p.m. and engaged in an
argument with Harrison, who was at the bar. The victim then left the
bar, heading to his car, with Harrison following. Gunfire broke out,
the victim was hit in the hand, and a young girl was slightly injured
by flying glass from a car that apparently was hit by a bullet.
Police came to scene, but the
victim did not identify a shooter. On Wednesday, according to the
source, ballistic tests showed that the gun that had fired the shots
was a custom-made Belgian weapon, and police determined that Harrison
owned such a gun. A source told ESPN.com's John Clayton that the gun
is registered.
Police then went to a Philadelphia
car wash owned by Harrison to question him about the gun. Harrison
admitted owning such a weapon, but claimed it never left his suburban
Philadelphia home.
However, the source said the gun
was discovered in a bucket at the car wash, and tests showed that it
had fired seven bullets that matched those found at the scene.
The source said police were
contacted Friday by an attorney representing a second alleged victim
in the shooting, and police are now waiting for that individual to
come forward.
Harrison, a prep football star at
Philadelphia's Roman Catholic High, has owned Playmakers since July
2004, according to state records.
Harrison has played his entire
12-season career with the Colts and is the franchise's record-holder
in every major receiving category -- receptions (1,042), yards
(13,944), touchdowns (123) and 100-yard games (59). The 35-year-old
is one of only four players in league history to top 1,000 receptions.
But after eight consecutive Pro
Bowl appearances, last season was the most frustrating of Harrison's career.
He injured his left knee against
Denver on Sept. 30, missed all but five games, and finished with 20
receptions for 247 yards and one TD.
Team president Bill Polian said in
February that Harrison was recovering from offseason arthroscopic
surgery on his right knee and had been rehabilitating the inflamed
capsule in his left knee. He was not expected to be completely
healthy for the start of Indianapolis training camp July 24.
Typically quiet Harrison has a
reputation for being humble on and off the field.
But he's still one of the Colts'
most visible players -- and their longest-tenured veteran. Harrison,
along with Peyton Manning and Edgerrin James, were nicknamed Indy's
triplets in the late 1990s. He was a first-round draft pick in 1996
out of Syracuse and wound up the best receiver in a class that
included Keyshawn Johnson and Eric Moulds.
The Indianapolis Colts won’t
comment right now on the situation.
Colts GM Bill Polian said in a
statement, “We have no credible information at this time, and we
will not comment until we do.’’
Coach Tony Dungy also didn’t
have much to offer.
“My phone has been ringing,
too,” Dungy said. “I really don’t have any details. I
don’t know what ‘involved’ means. (I) probably
don’t have any more information than (the media has) right now.’’
Profootballtalk.com reminds us that
this isn’t the first time there has been a situation with Marvin
that runs contrary to his squeaky-clean, good-guy image.
In 2003, Harrison attacked a Jets
ball boy who was fielding pre-game punts from Jets P Matt Turk.
The Updated Story on Marvin Harrison
May 3, 2008
Details remain scant out of Philadelphia
following a shooting outside of Playmakers, Marvin Harrison's
establishment in North Philadelphia. The Indianapolis wide receiver
has been questioned by police as part of the investigation, but he is
not considered a suspect at this time.
Lieutenant Frank Vanore said the investigation
of Tuesday's shooting was continuing. Harrison has not been arrested
or charged.
"He was interviewed," Vanore said
yesterday. "Why he was interviewed, that is all part of the
investigation. No one is a suspect."
Harrison won't be commenting any time soon, but
his agent Tom Condon has issued stated that previous reports of
Harrison's involvement in the shooting were false.
"I've spoken with Marvin and I've spoken
with his attorney, and they say the reports are erroneous,"
Condon told ESPN. "Marvin was not involved in any shooting, and
he is not the subject of this investigation."
I'm not saying that agents, lawyers, and men
caught up in police investigations are always to be trusted, but in
this case it seems warranted.
This morning David Gambacorta and Ted Silary
reported on Philly.com that Harrison conceded to police that he had
been engaged in a fight and that he was the owner of the FN5.7
firearm in question.
The agent's claim in the Star report seems
at odds with a report in today's Philadelphia Daily News. The facts
that can be surmised from this report are:
Harrison is under investigation for a shooting
that took place this past Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. one block from a
garage and car detail shop owned by Harrison.
Six shots were fired, hitting an unidentified
32-year-old man--who had just had a fistfight with Harrison. The man
suffered a gunshot wound to the hand, while a 2-year old boy suffered
a cut under his eye from glass that showered him after a bullet
struck a car windshield.
The gunshot victim initially lied to police
about where he was shot. It turns out the man had been kicked out of
Harrison's bar two weeks earlier and had been feuding with him since.
Police retrieved from Harrison's garage and
detail shop a Belgian firearm, FN5.7 on Wednesday. Police described
the gun Harrison turned over to them as a high-powered weapon which
fires armor-piercing rounds. Harrison acknowledges being the owner of
the gun and ballistic tests confirm that five of the six shots fired
during the shooting came from Harrison's gun.
Police further report that a man contacted them
Friday night also claiming to have been shot by Harrison. Police have
not been able to find the man who made the telephone call.
Police say Harrison was questioned by police for
four hours accompanied by an attorney. He denies he shot anyone,
although he admits to the fistfight with the shooting victim.
UPDATE
The latest update in the Marvin
Harrison - related shooting case is that . . .
there isn't any update.
Although actually, this article
does offer more details about the incident. It's sounding less and
less likely that Marvin wasn't involved in the shooting, as he claims.
Little has changed since NFL star
Marvin Harrison was linked to a North Philadelphia shooting two weeks ago.
Harrison still has not been
charged with any wrongdoing, but national interest in the April 29
incident remains high.
That night, Harrison was involved
in a fistfight with a 32-year-old man on Thompson Street near 25th,
where Harrison owns a car-detail shop, police sources said.
When the fight was over, the
unidentified man - who had been kicked out of Harrison's bar,
Playmakers, two weeks earlier - was shot in the hand. A little boy
also suffered minor injuries when a stray bullet shattered a nearby
car windshield.
Investigators concluded that six
shell casings found at the scene had been fired by a Belgian firearm
that Harrison owns, the sources said.
While Harrison admitted to
detectives that he owned the gun and was involved in the fistfight
that night, he insisted that he had nothing to do with the shooting,
sources said.
The victim has refused to
cooperate with police and to identify the person who shot him.
Since then - while investigators
have struggled to find witnesses - the Indianapolis Colts wide
receiver and his handlers have maintained his innocence.
Harrison recently assured top
Colts brass, including head coach Tony Dungy and president Bill
Polian, that he was not involved in the shooting, according to a
story reported yesterday by the Indianapolis Star.
Colts owner Jim Irsay did not
respond to a Daily News interview request, but he seemed to strike a
careful tone with the Star. "At this point I'm keeping my
fingers crossed," Irsay told the paper. "We've done
everything we could do in our diligence to try to discern what
happened. He said he was not involved in that shooting and . . .
the authorities have said there
is nothing imminent."
Last week, crime-scene
investigators found, in a rowhouse on Thompson Street, three more
stray bullets that they believed were from the April 29 incident.
Results of ballistics tests are not yet known.
Internet sites have run wild with
rumors about the shooting.
One report suggested that
Harrison had been the target of a gangland hit supposedly tied to his
incarcerated father - despite the fact that Harrison's father has
been dead for years.
6ABC jock tells radio station
that shooting victim planned to whack Marvin Harrison, website reports
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
6ABC Sports Anchor Keith Russell
has reportedly supplied shocking and as yet wholly unsubstantiated
details to a Florida radio station about last week's shooting linked
to Indianapolis Colts and Roman Catholic football star Marvin
Harrison. Harrison is being investigated by Philadelphia police
following the April 29 shooting in which a gun he owns was used to
shoot a man who had just beaten him up, in the hand. According to
ProFootballTalk, Russell appeared with Jason Jackson on Miami's WQAM,
and said his sources tell him that the man who was shot had come to
carry out a gangland-style hit on Harrison. According to the website,
Russell said during the segment that the issue relates to Harrison's
father, who Russell told the radio station was incarcerated, and that
the supposed "hit" was related to something in which
Harrison's father was supposedly involved. However,
according to this 1999 article from the Sporting News, Harrison's
father died when he was 2. The as yet-unidentified 32-year-old
man was shot around Thompson Street near 25th in North Philadelphia
after a fight with Harrison, police sources have said. The fight may
have stemmed from the victim being kicked out of Playmakers, a bar
that Harrison owns, on 28th Street near Cambridge, a few weeks
earlier, the People Paper's David Gambacorta has reported. Efforts to
reach Russell have been unsuccessful. A 6ABC spokeswoman declined
comment but says it is looking into the matter.
October 9, 2008
Civil suit
filed against Colts' Harrison
Alleged victim in Philly
shooting seeks damages from receiver
By Mark Alesia and Mike Chappell
indystar.com
Indianapolis Colts receiver Marvin Harrison is
being sued by the alleged victim of an April shooting in Harrison's
hometown of Philadelphia.
Harrison has not been charged or called a
suspect in the April 29 incident which happened after he and the
alleged victim, Dwight Dixon, reportedly fought near an auto repair
shop Harrison owns.
Harrison has acknowledged owning the gun used in
the shooting but denies having anything to do with the incident,
police have said. Law enforcement officials told the Philadelphia
Daily News that shell casings found at the shooting scene had been
fired from a gun owned by Harrison, a Belgian-made FN5.7 firearm.
Dixon claims "serious and permanent
injuries to his arm, body, etc., and a severe shock to his nerves and
nervous system," according to the lawsuit. He is seeking more
than $50,000 in compensatory damages and more than $50,000 in
punitive damages.
Kenneth Rothweiler, a Philadelphia personal
injury lawyer not involved in the lawsuit, said the damages could be
much greater if the case goes to trial. The minimum damages, or
"amount in controversy," listed in the Harrison lawsuit is
meant to avoid mandatory arbitration for cases with less than $50,000
in damages.
The lawsuit was filed Sept. 2. Philadelphia
police would not comment Wednesday, except to say the investigation
is ongoing.
The lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by The
Indianapolis Star, claims that Harrison, 36, "intentionally and
outrageously shot" Dixon, although another part of the document
says Dixon could have been shot by someone else using Harrison's gun.
Robert M. Gamburg, Dixon's attorney, did not
return messages from The Star.
"Look, it's our position that Marvin
Harrison was the shooter," Gamburg told the Daily News. "But
even if you believe the other theory, Marvin's gun was still used in
the shooting, so he was negligent for leaving the weapon where
someone else could obtain it."
Dixon is scheduled to appear in court Nov. 17 on
a charge of making a false report to police. After the incident,
Dixon initially told police he had been wounded while driving in
another part of the city. He later changed his story, identifying
Harrison as the shooter.
A Colts spokesman said Wednesday that the team
would have no comment on the lawsuit, and Harrison was not made
available to reporters. Harrison's agent, Tom Condon, did not return messages.
In his previously scheduled news conference at
the Colts complex, coach Tony Dungy said: "Really, from our
standpoint, there's nothing new, no new information that's come to us
in the last two months. There's really nothing to say and nothing
we're handling any differently until we hear something from the
authorities in Pennsylvania."
Asked if this would distract Harrison from his
football duties, Dungy said, "No, Marvin will be fine. I can't
speak for Marvin, but my sense is he'll be fine."
The Colts next play Sunday against Baltimore at
Lucas Oil Stadium.
An NFL spokesman had no comment directly on
Harrison, but generally speaking, he said the league's personal
conduct policy does not apply to civil matters.
The
Dirtiest Player
Was it
only last season that Marvin Harrison was still catching TD passes
for Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts? Now, in the wake of a
brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight-many details of which are
reported here for the first time-the man who holds the NFL record for
most receptions in a season may yet find himself with a permanent
record of a different sort
BY JASON FAGONE
GQ Magazine
FEBRUARY 2010
A PRAYER
in the city, four words long: I ain't seen nothin'.
It was a
lie, of course.
Robert
Nixon had seen everything. He had seen more than enough to put a rich
and famous man, an NFL superstar, in prison. But this is what you
tell the police unless you're a fool. You can't go wrong if you say
you ain't seen nothin', and you can go very wrong if you say
otherwise. And as far as Robert Nixon is concerned, what happened to
the fat man with the Muslim beard is proof.
Nixon
didn't know the fat man with the Muslim beard when the fat man was
still alive-that is to say, before he was perforated with bullets.
But he'd seen him around. More than a year before the murder, Nixon
stumbled upon the fat man lying in the street, in front of a
water-ice stand, getting the crap beaten out of him by Marvin
Harrison and Stanley McCray, one of Harrison's employees.
It was a
scene* to make anybody stop and watch. Broad daylight in North
Philadelphia. April 29, 2008-a Tuesday. The corner of 25th Street and
Thompson, about seven blocks north of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
and the steps Rocky climbed. A block of brick row houses, a church
with a rubbed-out sign, a Hispanic grocery, a vacant lot. In one
sense, the presence of a future Hall of Famer at this seedy vortex of
the city-Harrison, eight-time Pro Bowl wide receiver with the
Indianapolis Colts, then at the tail end of a thirteen-season career
and a $67 million contract-was incongruous. Especially given that
Harrison, who is usually described as "quiet" and
"humble," was noisily stomping the fat man in the face and gut.
To Nixon,
the fat man looked semi-conscious.
After
several minutes, Harrison and McCray walked away. The fat man slowly
picked himself up. Shouting epithets, he staggered to his car. Nixon
watched as Marvin Harrison got into his own car, parked to the west
of the fat man's. The fat man put his car into reverse. Thompson
Street is one-way going east. The fat man backed up the wrong way
until he was smack in front of Chuckie's Garage, a car wash Harrison
owns. The fat man was now blocking Harrison, who was trying to drive
away.
Nixon saw
Harrison get out of his car and exchange words with the fat man. He
couldn't hear the words, but he could see the gestures of threat and
counterthreat. The fat man stayed in his car. He called somebody on
his cell. Harrison got back into his car and called somebody on his
cell. After a minute or two, Harrison got out of his car for the
second time.
Marvin
Harrison is six feet tall and 185 pounds. He has a neatly trimmed
mustache and the body-fat content of an Olympic swimmer. He became
the dominant wide receiver of his era not by outleaping or
outwrestling defenders but by exploiting an almost supernatural
talent for getting open: for feints, fakes, jukes, dodges, bluffs,
stutter steps, sudden bursts of sick speed. But at this moment, Nixon
says, Marvin Harrison did not run. He stood on the sidewalk and
calmly raised his wiry arms. In each hand, Nixon clearly saw, was a
gun.
Nixon froze.
"YOU
A BITCH-ASS NIGGA!" Nixon heard the fat man scream at Harrison.
"YOU AIN'T GONNA SHOOT. YOU AIN'T GONNA SHOOT. DO WHAT YOU GOTTA
DO."
Nixon was
across the street and thirty yards away when Harrison started
shooting. Pop pop pop pop pop pop-a great staccato gust of bullets.
Steadily, Nixon says, Harrison unloaded both guns into the fat man's
car, stippling the red Toyota Tundra with bullet holes as the fat man
ducked in his seat. Eventually, the fat man sat up and sped off,
heading straight toward Nixon's position as Harrison darted into the
street and continued to shoot.
Now Nixon
was in the line of fire. He turned and ran. He ran as fast as he
could with his belly and his smoker's cough as bullets slivered
through doors and lodged in walls.
Behind
him, unbeknownst to Nixon, a bullet ripped through the fat man's
hand. Another bullet shattered the glass of a car containing multiple
adults and a 2-year-old boy. The adults instantly bailed, abandoning
the little boy in the car, the glass flowering into razor-sharp
petals and bloodying the boy's eye.
And yes,
Robert Nixon was also hit. Once, in the back. He didn't realize it at
first. Too much adrenaline. Then he scraped his left hand against his
right shoulder. He felt a hole in his black T-shirt. His fingers came
back stained with blood.
By this
time, Marvin Harrison and the fat man had both fled. But Nixon needed
to retrieve his car, which was parked on Thompson Street. As Nixon
sprinted back to the scene of the crime, the police pulled up. An
officer spotted Nixon running and thought he might be the shooter.
Hey, c'mere. The officer patted him down for weapons. Nixon was
clean.
The
officer didn't notice Nixon's gunshot wound, and Nixon didn't
volunteer that he'd been shot.
I ain't
seen nothin'.
The smart call.
So the
officer moved on.
*Re-created
from interviews, court filings, and police reports, and told through
the eyes of Robert Nixon.
*****
MARVIN
DARNELL HARRISON was not supposed to be this guy, the black athlete
with a gun. Insecure, obnoxious, prone to acts of catharsis-that was
Terrell Owens, Michael Vick. But Marvin?
Marvin
drank juice.
He was a
worker. Marvin was the guy who never wore his gloves in practice
because the gloves were sticky and made catching balls easy, and he
wanted to practice the hard way. He was the neat freak who sat with
his back to the press at a locker that would make a drill sergeant
swoon. Marvin, who juked my repeated requests for an interview, was
the perfectionist who evolved an ability to communicate almost
telepathically with his quarterback, Peyton Manning, but barely at
all with mere English. If he left any trace of his existence in the
league, it was only in the record books: second (to Jerry Rice) in
all-time receptions, third in all-time one-hundred-yard games, first
in receptions in a single season. Through all this, his teammates
claimed they didn't know him in the slightest. "He's like
Batman," linebacker Cato June told Sports Illustrated.
Think
about the discipline it would take to make a living as an elite star
of a multi-billion-dollar entertainment juggernaut without ever once
being truly seen. In this sense, Harrison's football career is not
only historic; it's also a sort of miracle. The dude skipped like a
flat stone across a rancid pool and emerged, twelve years later, dry
as a bone.
And when
he stood up and looked around, he went right back to the place his
heart had always been, the place he had never really left:
Philadelphia, the city of his birth. His family was large and close,
and although some members had been violent criminals, his inner
circle struggled to protect him from those influences. His uncle
Vincent Cowell was a respected anesthesiologist at Temple University
Hospital. His mother, Linda, and his stepfather, Anthony Gilliard,
were modest businesspeople who worked hard and fed needy families
when they could. (Just like Marvin did: In 2006 at Thanksgiving, he
donated eighty-eight turkey dinners to the poor of North Philly.)
They had
taught Marvin to value family above all else, certainly above mere
dollars. Yes, he had splurged on a couple of large purchases-a house
for his mother in a leafy enclave of Montgomery County, and for
himself a four-bedroom, five-bath 7,600-square-foot stucco home in
Jenkintown, a quiet village to the north-but otherwise he was so
conservative about money (he favored low-risk mutual funds, according
to a 2006 newspaper profile) that if you started asking Philly people
about Marvin Harrison, one of the first things you heard about the
man was that he was, well, cheap. Whenever you went looking for
Marvin, you tended not to find him sipping Venti lattes in
Jenkintown. You found him on the streets of North Philly, tending to
the unpretentious businesses he was either too detail-oriented or too
stingy or too authentically modest-too something, anyway-to let other
people run: his car wash, his sports bar, the soul-food kitchen he
had bought for his aunt and his mother, and more than a dozen rental
and investment properties he had snatched up at bargain prices.
From up
high, Marvin appeared to be a millionaire athlete like any other; at
street level, he was a businessman cobbling together a mini-empire in
the hood. It was an iconoclastic way to reconcile his money with his
roots-a tricky thing for any athlete flung from poverty into wealth.
Many simply flee to suburban McMansions. Some, like Allen Iverson, go
the other way, keeping questionable company and giving shout-outs to
"my niggas back home." But Marvin didn't run and he didn't
flaunt. He just sort of hid. His life was exquisitely controlled-an
extraordinary man's attempt to become a ghost in his own story. For a
long time, it worked. And then, for reasons that go well beyond
Marvin Harrison-reasons having to do with race, class, jealousy,
politics, and the problems of American cities-it didn't.
*****
"FUCK
YOU," the fat man said. "Fuck the bar, and I'll fuck you up."
It was
mid-April of 2008, two weeks before the shooting. The fat man, a.k.a.
Dwight Dixon, age 32, was standing with a friend at the front door of
Playmakers, Harrison's bar, demanding to be let inside.
Playmakers
is about a half mile southwest of 25th and Thompson, on a side
street of a gentrifying neighborhood; a block to the east is North
Star Bar, where you can see indie bands like the Mountain Goats. From
the press coverage of the Harrison case, you'd think Playmakers was
some kind of ghetto shithole. But once you get past the bouncers and
their pat-downs, you find yourself in a warm, upscale black bar.
There are two pool tables and an old-school Galaga arcade console.
The walls are covered with framed jerseys (Donovan McNabb, Jerry
Rice) and photographs (Charles Barkley, a Negro League baseball
team)-but no Harrison jersey, no Harrison photos. Who needs
memorabilia when you've got the hero himself? Odds are good that if
you go to Playmakers on a weekend, you'll see Harrison adjusting the
thermostat, checking the taps, peering out the front door.
Or if
you're Dwight Dixon, you get to watch him pat you down, and pat your
friend down, and lay a hand on something gun-shaped and concealed on
your friend's person, and tell you both to get lost.
Dixon-everyone
called him Pop on account of his size-was not welcome at Playmakers,
Harrison made clear that night in April. And Pop was not the sort of
person to let this insult slide. Three hundred pounds of swagger
squeezed into expensive Gucci and Polo shirts, he was a finely tuned
instrument for the detection of disrespect. "I call him a
straight-up hustler," says Fishay Bryant, one of Pop's cousins.
"Like, he didn't take any handouts. He was very proud."
Pop saw
himself as Harrison's equal. After all, they'd both grown up in the
same North Philly neighborhood. They knew each other as kids. They'd
both been born in the city's worst modern hour-when it was grimy and
vegetal, when it stank, when gangs ruled the neighborhoods, when the
old industries were dying and the white ethnics were hightailing it
to the suburbs, when the notorious Black Mafia was flooding the
streets with heroin of unprecedented potency and the newly elected
mayor was a skull-cracking cop who promised to be so tough on crime
he'd "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot." And they
both had chosen to hawk their products-car washes and liquor for
Harrison, drugs for Pop-in a part of the city that remained, even in
April 2008, profoundly fucked.
If
Harrison had moved to some better place, Pop would have understood.
Hell, Pop wanted to leave Philly himself. Dreamed of it. Took his
girl on vacations every weekend he could-Texas, Florida, California,
Arizona. They flew Southwest. Super-saver fares. But Harrison had
stayed, digging his roots deeper and deeper. In 1994, Pop had gone to
state prison for dealing crack. When he came out six years later, he
was a Muslim, but otherwise he was the same prideful Pop-and Harrison
was still there, a king among paupers, distributing small-scale
charity to needy supplicants beneath the media's radar, his wealth
creating a gravity that warped the physics of the neighborhood.
"Everybody sucks up to him, and I don't," Pop told a close
friend. "I'm gonna see you in your place of business, and I'm
gonna buy drinks."
A week
after Pop was barred from Playmakers, he drove to Chuckie's and
demanded a car wash. He was denied. That Friday he went back to
Playmakers. He was turned away-again. The next Tuesday was his
confrontation with Harrison. Harrison describes it in detail in his
statement to police:
I walked
down and asked him why he was continually threatening me and coming
to my businesses and harassing my employees. He said, "I'm a
grown man, I can do and go wherever I want and say what I
want&ldots;and like I said, I will fuck you up and fuck your bar
up&ldots;NOW WHAT!" He put his hands up and swung at me. He
grazed me on my left shoulder and chin. I swung back and I missed. We
wrestled and threw punches a little bit&ldots;I then walked up the
street back to my garage, I guess like five minutes later he backs up
the street to in front of my car wash. Gets on the phone and is
saying, "get your guns&ldots;you know what you gonna get STAN
[McCray]&ldots;I'm gonna fuck you up MARV&ldots;you ain't no
Gangster." I told him that I wasn't a gangster but that he
couldn't keep coming back to my place of business and threaten me and
start trouble. He drove off down the street. I was inside the garage.
I heard gunshots like right after that.
*****
THREE
YEARS BEFORE Marvin Harrison was born, there was another man on the
streets of Philly who faced a similar sort of fight-or-flight
decision. His name was Marvin, too.
Marvin
Greer was a 16-year-old gang member. He lived in a high-rise housing
project in South Philly. On January 15, 1969, Greer and three friends
spotted a boy from an enemy gang. The boy ran. Greer and the others
chased him. When Greer caught up to the boy, he pulled out a
four-inch pearl-handled knife. He stabbed the boy in the back,
killing him, and threw the knife into the sewer. He pled guilty to
second-degree murder.
About
five years later, in 1974, Marvin Greer died suddenly at age 22;
there was no mention of his death in the newspapers, and the cause
remains a mystery. Before he died, Greer fathered at least three boys
with different mothers. (Back then in Pennsylvania, juvenile felons
were furloughed for good behavior, affording them a certain freedom
of movement.) The eldest boy was Marvin Harrison.
The next
was Markwann "Coots" Gordon. From 1995 to 1997, Gordon
participated in a string of seven armed robberies in Philadelphia.
According to a 1999 account by Kitty Caparella, the dean of
Philadelphia's crime reporters, Gordon was one of "the
Philadelphia Mob's two top associates in the African-American
underworld," an enforcer with the Junior Black Mafia. Gordon is
currently serving 140 years in a federal prison in White Deer,
Pennsylvania.
After
Gordon came Marvin "Back to Back" Woods. On September 3,
1991, when Marvin Woods was 17, he was playing in the championship
game of a schoolyard hoops league when his coach took him out of the
game, subbing in another boy. Woods got angry. He left the game. When
he rode back on his bike, twenty minutes later, he was carrying a
Tec-9. He sprayed his substitute with bullets, killing him, and rode
off. Marvin Woods is currently serving a life sentence for
first-degree murder at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas,
Pennsylvania.
So those
are Marvin Harrison's half brothers. In more recent years, Marvin
Harrison's cousin Lonnie Harrison, age 41, has been convicted of
robbery, drug possession, and possessing an illegal firearm. And in
2000, another cousin, Isa Muhammad, was murdered in the aftermath of
an eight-man shoot-out that also wounded a 10-year-old girl. The
police described the murder as a revenge killing.
None of
this proves, of course, that Marvin Harrison shot Dwight Dixon and
Robert Nixon. It just shows that he has a strikingly violent family
history. It also suggests that Harrison's NFL career is an even
greater triumph than commonly understood. He was able, for all those
years, to reject the logic that claimed the life of his cousin and
the freedom of his father and his half brothers-the same street logic
that allows only one sort of response to a challenge like Pop's.
After the
shooting, Pop got a ride to Lankenau Hospital, five miles west of
Chuckie's Garage. The hospital staff called the cops, as they're
required to do when they see shooting victims. The cops arrived and
asked Pop for his name.
Malik
Tucker, he said. It was one of his many aliases: Demetrius Bryant,
Swight Dixon, Donte Jones, Dwight M. Mobely.
The cops
asked how he'd been shot.
Pop said
that he'd been robbed at 62nd and Lebanon-again, several miles west
of the shooting.
Soon, the
cops at the hospital got a call from the cops back at 25th and
Thompson. A red Toyota Tundra full of bullet holes was being towed
there. The person who had called the tow truck was Pop's girlfriend.
The cops
now knew that Pop was lying. They told him he'd better come clean.
Pop grinned and told them to fuck off. The mood around Pop's hospital
bed was relaxed, jovial; the cops had a professional appreciation for
the purity of Pop's bullshit. "You know who shot me," Pop
said, toying with them.
Why
didn't Pop blurt out the truth? He might have been scared. To be a
witness in Philadelphia is no small thing, even if you're a 300-pound
drug dealer. In December The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that
thirteen witnesses or relatives of witnesses have been murdered in
the city since 2001.
But there
are two other theories. The most likely one is that Pop lied to the
cops because he had shot back at Harrison with a gun of his own. If
this was true, then Pop was potentially on the hook for an attempted
murder charge, same as Harrison. No gun of Pop's has ever been found,
but casings were recovered from three types of guns: a five-seven, a
nine-milli-meter, and a .40-caliber. And two fired nine-millimeter
casings were found in the cab of Pop's truck.
The
second theory is that Pop lied to the cops simply because he didn't
want them to get in the way. He was planning to resolve the dispute
himself, in his own fashion.
*****
THE
POLICE KEPT Pop in custody overnight to give him time to cool off and
rethink his story. The next day, Wednesday, they began gathering
evidence. Acting on a tip, they plugged Harrison's name and DOB into
a state database of gun licenses. A long list of guns came up,
including two Fabrique Nationale (FN) five-seven pistols. The cops
already knew that some of the casings recovered at the scene came
from this type of gun.
The
five-seven has been described in newspapers and on ESPN as
"custom-made" and "a collector's weapon." Wrong.
A five-seven is a lightweight, low-recoil, high-capacity,
semiautomatic tactical pistol made by a Belgian arms manufacturer.
NATO uses it for peacekeeping missions, and the ersatz jihadist Nidal
Malik Hasan allegedly used it to massacre thirteen at Fort Hood. So
it's not unique, but it's hardly your average urban drug dealer's
piece; the Philly officer who recovered the casings, which have a
distinctively long and skinny shape, had never seen anything like
them before.
Later
that day, about a dozen plainclothes and uniformed officers,
including several guys from the state attorney general's Gun Violence
Task Force, drove en masse to Chuckie's Garage in search of the
five-seven. Harrison seemed to know they were coming. He was lounging
in a cheap aluminum beach chair before a full-size cardboard cutout
of himself. He looked serene. A detective asked him if he was
carrying a gun. Yes, he said. He swung his right foot up onto a pool
table-he had bruised his left knee the previous season and had
trouble bending over-and the detective reached down and removed, from
an ankle holster, a loaded .32-caliber handgun.
But the
.32 was irrelevant. It had nothing to do with the crime. At this
point, a lieutenant disappeared into the car wash's office along with
Harrison and Anthony Gilliard, Harrison's stepfather. Fifteen minutes
later, they emerged. Gilliard said, "Detective, I know what
you've come for. It's right over here." Gilliard led the
detectives to a filing cabinet. In front of the cabinet was a trash
bucket. Behind the bucket, lying on the floor, was the five-seven.
It, too, was fully loaded: nineteen bullets in the clip, one in the chamber.
This was
suggestive, but not necessarily incriminating. Harrison still had a
number of plausible alibis, even if the gun hammer were to exactly
match the markings left on the recovered casings (and ballistics
tests would eventually prove that five of six casings did match). For
instance, Harrison could have been acting in self-defense-maybe Pop
had barged into the car wash with his own gun blazing. Whatever the
alibi, Harrison was under no obligation even to provide one; he
wasn't under arrest.
But
then-and even the cops couldn't figure out why-Harrison answered
questions at the Central Detectives Division for about an hour,
accompanied by his lawyer, Jerome Brown, and his stepfather. When it
was over, he signed each page of a typed seven-page statement: a
single M for "Marvin," its points like the peak of a crown.
In the
statement, excerpted here for the first time, Harrison admits that
his fight with Pop took place "five to ten minutes before"
the shooting. He says that immediately before he heard the gunshots,
he was "sitting in the doorway of my garage." The
detectives ask him if Pop had a gun that day. Harrison says
"no." In his own words, then, Harrison establishes his
motive, puts himself at the scene of the crime, and eliminates any
possible self-defense defense.
The real
doozy, though, is that Harrison admits to continuous and unbroken
custody of the gun.
Q. When
was the last time you or anyone else fired your FN 5.7-caliber
handgun?
A.
Probably the day that I bought it.
Q. What
day was that?
A. In
2006 or 2007.
Q. Where
do you store this weapon?
A. In a
safe at my home in Jenkintown, Pa.
Q. Today,
you had it at the car wash? Do you know how it got there?
A. I
brought it today, twenty minutes before you came.
Q. Are
you saying that the 5.7-cal handgun that you own was in the safe at
your home up until today, when you decided to bring it to your shop
in the 2500 blk. of Thompson St.?
A. Yes.
That
"yes" is the sound of a trap snapping shut. Harrison says
his gun hasn't been fired since 2006 or 2007. That's impossible.
Fresh casings exist, so the gun had to have been fired. But by whom?
Harrison says he doesn't know. All he knows is that the gun couldn't
have been lent or stolen, because it was locked away the whole time
in his suburban safe. Only it couldn't have been in the safe, either,
because it had to have made an appearance at the corner of 25th and Thompson.
Harrison's
story makes no sense.
*****
ON MAY 2,
three days after the shooting, Robert Nixon contacted the police. It
went against his instinct, but he felt he was out of options. He was scared.
According
to Nixon, who spoke to me in November-his first interview with a
reporter-he was scared because he had been contacted by
intermediaries of Marvin Harrison. The intermediaries offered to pay
for surgery to remove the bullet. And if Nixon stayed away from the
police, he says, they might also compensate him. He was ready to make
a deal: "I really wanted it to be over." Then, according to
Nixon, he was summoned to a meeting in West Philly-specifically, in
the woods across from the Philadelphia Zoo-at 2 A.M. Nixon shut off
his phone. The next thing he knew, news of the shooting was all over
the papers, and his voice mail was filling with threats: "You
think you slick. We gonna kill you."
There was
no way for Nixon to know if the threats were serious, he told me.
That was the problem. Nixon was a low-level hustler. He was
overweight and shuffling, with eyes hidden behind heavy glasses and a
low, scratchy voice. Even his transgressions were small-time: weed,
cough syrup, pills. He was a nobody, and he knew it. But now he had a
Very Important Bullet in his back. The gap in wealth and stature
between Marvin Harrison, a pillar of the community, and Robert Nixon
created an inherently unstable situation. Harrison wouldn't have to
say a word for something bad to just&happen. "The streets
pick it up," says Malik Aziz, a North Philly activist who spent
ten years in jail for dealing drugs. "Some a-hole, he's puttin'
pressure down there? You'd be surprised how many people would take
care of it, just on general principle."
On May 3,
then, Robert Nixon sat down with detectives and prosecutors at the
office of the Philadelphia district attorney and gave a formal
statement. He told them about the fight in front of the water-ice
stand, Harrison and his guns, and the aborted meeting at the zoo.
Afterward, he was placed in protective custody in a downtown hotel,
and detectives started to kick the tires on his story.
There
were a few discrepancies. For one thing, Nixon claimed that Harrison
had two guns-same as Pop had eventually claimed, despite his initial
stonewalling-but the neat, even spacing of the recovered shells along
the street convinced the cops that the shooter had been gripping a
single gun with two hands on the stock, keeping it steady. Then there
was the tale of the zoo meeting. According to one source close to the
investigation, it didn't happen the way Nixon claimed. It wasn't
Harrison's people who asked to meet Nixon at the zoo at 2 a.m. It was
Nixon who asked them, in a ploy to suss out their intentions; thugs
from North Philly never go to West Philly, and vice versa, so Nixon
only suggested the meeting spot in West Philly because he thought
they'd never agree. When they said yes, that's when he knew he was in
trouble and panicked. (Nixon denies this.)
The cops,
however, saw these as minor flaws in a largely truthful tale. The
crucial story beats were 100 percent verifiable. Through hospital
records, detectives verified that Nixon sought treatment for the
bullet wound on May 1. They talked to the cop who had originally
patted Nixon down, and the cop remembered him, placing him at the
scene. Overall, Nixon's story proved "incredibly
consistent," according to one detective who interviewed him
multiple times. It also matched up well with the statements from the
other witnesses. "They all had different pieces of the same
story," the detective says. "And here's a case where you
don't need to believe anybody." You have a gun. You have
casings. You have ballistic tests. You have Harrison's own words. You
have probable cause for an arrest warrant.
But the
prosecutors saw the case differently. They had been burned before by
witnesses who changed their stories between the interview and the
trial. (Their last big case against a Philly athlete, a 2002 gun
charge involving Allen Iverson, blew up when a key witness recanted
his story.) During "balls-out fuckin' arguments" with cops,
the Philly prosecutors fixated on the criminal records of the
witnesses and slight discrepancies in their statements. They thought
it would be hard to win the case on the backs of such blatant pieces
of shit.
Piece of
shit is a versatile bit of law-enforcement slang. It can mean
something as specific as "hustler with a record" or it can
mean something rounder, like "person who won't cooperate with
us" or "person who lied to us" or "person who
will not be trusted by a jury." All of the witnesses, for
various reasons, could be grouped under this same heading. Nixon was
a piece of shit. Pop was a piece of shit. The father of the wounded
boy was a piece of shit. McCray was a piece of shit, albeit an
intelligent piece of shit, because he never signed a statement. And
Harrison, although he had no record, was a piece of shit, too. The
prosecutors and cops were in agreement on the piece-of-shit front;
the only difference was that the cops believed that there were
degrees, with Robert Nixon being what one of them called "the
least piece of shit."
The cops
also thought it was wrong to drop the case just because a
piece-of-shit famous person might be guilty of shooting a piece-of-shit
unfamous person in a piece-of-shit part of the city. If prosecutors
required every witness to have a pristine record, one detective says,
"most of the cases in the city wouldn't be solved." None of
the cops doubted for a second that if Harrison was a plumber or a UPS
driver instead of a famous athlete, he'd have long since been
arrested. "Everybody has their career-anticipation light on with
this," says veteran Philadelphia detective Michael Chitwood, now
a police chief in Florida. " 'If I go forward with this and this
guy's found not guilty, I may not get promoted'... and I just think
that's wrong."
In the
end, though, it wasn't the cops' call. It was Lynne Abraham's. After
investigating the Harrison case for more than eight months, the
veteran Philly D.A. called a press conference on January 6, 2009. A
diminutive woman with frosty white hair, Abraham has built her career
on making life miserable for "punks with guns." Toughness
is her brand. But at her press conference, at which no detectives
were present, she spent much of her time impugning the credibility of
the witnesses who had cooperated (Nixon, Dixon) and lamenting the
ones who had not (the father of the 2-year-old boy, who never spoke
to police; anyone else who may have seen the broad-daylight
shooting). The case would not be going forward, Abraham said, due to
"multiple, mutually exclusive, inherently untrustworthy, and
sometimes false statements by the people present." (Abraham
declined to be interviewed for this story.)
As for
Nixon, he was back on the street. The D.A. had apparently forgotten
to pay his hotel bill after a month, so he wandered off.
*****
"I'M
GONNA GET Lynne Abraham if it kills me." This is Pop's mother,
Pearl Bronson, a middle-aged woman wearing gray Nikes and her braided
hair back in a bun. "I truly believe that because Lynne Abraham
did not arrest that son of a bitch, my son is dead," she tells
me, eyes aflame. "Just like she pulled the trigger herself."
On
January 28, three weeks after Abraham's press conference, one of her
deputies prosecuted Pop for making a false report to the police. It
was surreal, carnivalesque-like when Dick Cheney shot his friend in
the face and the friend apologized for getting in the way of Cheney's
bullet. The judge imposed six months' probation. Pop was already on
probation for another case, and the conviction meant he had to go to
jail; he was briefly handcuffed, then immediately released pending appeal.
Before
that day, Pop seemed willing to let the system give him some measure
of justice. He was suing Harrison in civil court for damages. Pearl
overheard him one night talking on the phone; he mentioned Harrison's
name, then said, "I'm gonna let it go, let my lawyer take care
of it." But to be shot and prosecuted? Especially while Harrison
walked the city a free man and the street was abuzz about how Pop had
been punked? They were laughing at him. He told a friend, "He's
not gonna run me out of my neighborhood."
Pop made
it a point to eat breakfast every day at the Chopstick & Fork, a
diner on 28th and Girard, half a block from Playmakers. Pop didn't
live anywhere near the Chopstick & Fork. Even to sit down over
some eggs and pancakes was an act of defiance.
On July
21, 2009, according to surveillance video captured from a nearby
convenience store, Pop emerged from the Chopstick & Fork and
walked to his car. He looked over his shoulder, then got into his car
and made a phone call. Three minutes later, a six-foot-tall man in a
black hoodie and white sneakers ran up to the driver's side and shot
Pop multiple times through the window. Then the man sprinted around
the hood to the passenger side and shot Pop again. The shooter fled.
Pop spent
the next two months in Hahnemann Hospital, a tracheostomy tube jammed
into his windpipe, able to communicate with his family only by
blinking. He died on September 4, 2009.
According
to multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation, the primary
suspect in Pop's murder was initially Lonnie Harrison, Marvin's
cousin. Acting on a tip, police searched Lonnie's apartment, looking
for a gun. The apartment was a tiny room above Deborah's Kitchen, the
soul-food restaurant on Girard run by Marvin's mother and aunt. But
Lonnie hadn't been living there for a year. There was no gun or any
other evidence to tie him to the murder, and no witnesses have ever
come forward to identify Lonnie or anyone else as the shooter. On the
convenience-store video, the shooter's face was obscured by shadow,
making a positive identification impossible.
The cops
recovered a second surveillance tape, but it, too, was inconclusive.
It came from Playmakers. This tape, according to police, showed a man
crossing in front of the bar on 28th Street just below Girard.
Detectives felt certain that it was the same man they had seen on the
convenience-store tape: the shooter, walking toward the scene of the
crime. But just as the man got close enough to the camera to bring
his face into focus, the tape went blank-and skipped the next three
minutes. "There are no coincidences," says one police
source. "For the previous hour, that camera picked up every
movement, and then it happens to go blank just at that moment?"
*****
IN
INDIANAPOLIS, when Marvin was still playing football, he ate most of
his meals at a small cluster of fast-food joints off the highway.
There was a Wendy's, a McDonald's, a sub shop, and a Chinese buffet.
"This is me, right here," he once told ESPN's Suzy Kolber,
who was riding shotgun in his car. "If Wendy's has a long line,
I go right across the street to Mickey D's." He smiled, rubbed
his hands. "That's how it works."
The
Kolber clip is on YouTube, and it's an amazing thing, because you get
to see Marvin in a rare affectionate mood. He's talking about the
perfect order of his world, from his mealtime routine to the way he
keeps his favorite snack foods secreted around his condo.
"Pillsbury Doughboy," he sighs, hefting a tube of cookie
dough in the freezer. "Me and him get along just fine."
Everything is in its right place. He seems so happy.
How,
then, did such a careful man end up making such a mess? What happened
to him back home in Philly?
It's a
sunny afternoon in November, and I've gone to see a man I hope can
give me some answers. I'm sitting in a white room in a prison I'm not
allowed to name. I'm not allowed to name the prison because the man
I've come to interview says he fears his fellow inmates might assault
him if they knew he was the guy who snitched on Marvin Harrison.
Robert
Nixon's jeans are scuffed. His hands are folded in his lap. His
glasses give him a sort of professorial, beatnik vibe-a pudgier
version of Cornel West. He calls me "sir." In fact, Nixon
is deferential to the point of meekness until the moment I ask him
about Pop's murder. Does he think it was meant to send a message to
any other potential witnesses? "Are you kidding?" Nixon
says, startled. "Do you think it was a message?" Nixon
shoots a look to his attorney, Wadud Ahmad, a powerfully built black
man who is sitting in on our interview, and the two of them explode
into howls of laughter, as if I just asked the dumbest question in
the history of white people.
Nixon is
here on a misdemeanor drug conviction. Perversely, he says he's glad
for. "That's probably the best thing that happened to me. That's
how fucked-up my life is with this. [Jail is] the safest place for
me." Nixon says he would move himself and his family to another
city if he could afford it, but he can't. He's now suing Harrison in
civil court, claiming damages from the shooting. Nixon's civil suit
is only one of several dangling threads in Marvin Harrison's life.
There's also the civil suit filed by Pop, which is still alive even
though Pop is not. If the lawyers in the two civil suits get a chance
to depose Marvin Harrison, Harrison's words could, in theory, be used
against him by prosecutors down the line. In January, Lynne Abraham
stepped down after almost twenty years, making way for the incoming
D.A., Seth Williams, a young, passionate reformer with a grassroots
political base. (Williams, who is black, has not commented on the
Harrison case.) Harrison could avoid the depositions by settling the
cases. As of press time, though, he hadn't done that. Nor had he
announced his definitive retirement from football, though no team has
demonstrated much interest in his services, given his declining stats
and aging knees.
Say this
for Marvin Harrison: He tried to be his own person. He succeeded on a
level that most of us can only dream of reaching. But he either never
realized or flat-out denied the destabilizing effect of his presence
in a poor and desperate part of the city. Much as he insisted that he
was a normal working person like any other, he was never going to be
seen that way. He was always going to be a target for the hopes,
resentments, and ambitions of other people, a reality that rippled
and swirled around him in unpredictable ways. And the proof is still
there, scattered across the city, for anyone who cares enough to look.
"Can
I see it?" I ask Robert Nixon.
There in
the prison, Nixon pulls up his shirt. I spot it immediately. A dark
bruise, oval-shaped. Remarkably clean-edged. Dark-bordered and
slightly lighter in the center. Six inches from his jugular. I press
my index finger into the bruise's soft center. I can feel the bullet.
So close. So lightly embedded. As if I could pop it out with the
slightest scrape of my fingernail. Not a hustler's tale, not a prayer
uttered and revoked, but a truth awaiting a seeker.
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