“So they picked him up and threw him around. His head hit the third rail and sparks flew everywhere. His body just bounced up like you never seen, like a big dummy bouncing up, like he was on strings or rubber bands. There was blood all over the place. We thought they killed him. They thought they killed him, too, cuz they got scared; they talked about what to do with the body and what to say happened, what their story was gonna be.
“They were gonna say they chased off a gang of punks who were beating him up and when they got there, that the punks threw him on the rail and ran. That’s what they were going to say,” Seville shakes his head incredulously.
“We wanted to do something, watching all that, but we were afraid to go forward. I don’t know. We should have. But we just stood there.
“Then the medics came, and they took him to a hospital and he lived. Peppin’s still alive, but he’s not the same. He can’t even take care of himself no more. He just wanders around. I guess those officers were having a real bad day, but they shouldn’t have been doing that shit.”
Not all police are brutal, of course. Even those who brutalized Peppin are not always nasty, the homeless say. Also, many of the police are repelled by such behavior by fellow officers.
“It’s no wonder these tunnel people don’t come to us for help,” says one cop. “If I heard those stories, I’d be hiding, too. But they’re not true, or, if they are, they’re exaggerated.
“I mean, people get scared down there. Policemen, too. And they act in unacceptable ways at times. No one’s perfect. But if anyone has the advantage, they do, those people in the tunnels, not us. The people who live down there, they can see in the dark, and they can hide, and they throw things—steel bars and bottles and chunks of concrete. And they come right up behind us without us knowing. All we got is a gun. It doesn’t do us much good if we can’t see them.”
Sergeant Henry bleeds, too, in his own way, although it doesn’t always show.
In 1988 he became the first officer ever assigned to deal exclusively with the tunnel people, and he was told to keep them a secret. His task was described vaguely as “homeless outreach,” without admitting these homeless lived underground. For sometime he told those who asked, including reporters, that no one lived in the tunnels, that the stories of “mole people” were a kind of underground folklore concocted by homeless people for their own amusement. Yet now he admits that he and his officers had cleared about four hundred peoples from the tunnels under Grand Central Station.
Henry often jokes with the homeless he encounters, in an effort to neutralize their fear and hostility. His large, loose frame conveys an image of comfortable friendliness. Like his body, several homeless people describe his shiny brown eyes as “soft.”
When he and I come upon a group of homeless in the northeast corner of the station, Henry staggers backward in clowning disbelief, one hand to forehead, when he recognizes a man in a handsome trench coat over worn Reeboks.
“Man, oh, man, what happened to you?” he asks, grasping the man’s frail hand in a firm, warm handshake.
“He got himself a job,” explains another of the homeless group happily, still giggling at Henry’s surprise. The cop is pleased—sincerely so, it seems to me—that one of the homeless is getting up and out of the tunnel life.
Despite his easy way and rapport with most homeless on his beat, some tunnel people do not trust him. Borrowing from psychological jargon, some accuse him of being on an “ego trip.” One claims he likes his gun and black leather gloves “too much” and that he likes the credit and the publicity, including his picture in newspapers. Another broadly hints that Henry has taken part in beatings of homeless people, but he won’t say it outright.
On the other hand, Henry has helped many homeless like J.C. to escape the tunnels, to get into job training programs, and to find housing aboveground. He asked for the duty. When he found out the great size of the problem, he asked for more officers but was refused. He took pictures of the underground people and their communities to the mayor’s office and to the governor’s office, he says, but he got little additional help. It may be that he shows me his pictures and leads me to some tunnel people because of his frustration with the authorities.
Henry sometimes makes extra sandwiches at home, which he gives to the homeless he meets in the tunnels. His job is to wean people away from the tunnels, to accept help aboveground. If they refuse to leave voluntarily, he has to evict them, but he prefers not to.
He takes his work home with him, too. He has experienced more than one episode of profound depression because of his job and has had to take time off to recover. He blames it on the darkness, however, rather than on the sad condition of the people he works with.
“You don’t get enough light working down here,” he says. “You get depressed. One time I was getting desperate. I used to sit so close to a light bulb that it singed my papers. A doctor told me what I had was depression and that light helps, any kind of light, and I should try to get more of it.”
Another time, after some diligent work, he found a homeless community deep underground where one tunnel opened into a huge cavern. The scene was peaceful, with shacks and campfires, well protected and virtually hidden behind a thirty-foot-high cliff of rock between it and the tracks. The community called the site “the Condos,” because the living environment was so good. The cliff even drowned out the noise of passing trains, and an electric wire had been diverted to actually allow some of the cardboard and wooden shacks in the Condos to have light. Water was available from a convenient sprinkler system that leaked.
“It was the only environment where I thought that ‘Hey, once, maybe, these people are better off down here because what they get upstairs is a hell of a lot worse,’” he recalls pensively. “That’s when I knew it was time to take a vacation, so I went to Jamaica and started light therapy,” he smiles.
The Condos, where more than three hundred people once lived, have now been cleared of the homeless and most of their camps.
Some social workers also believe that at least some of the police brutality stories are exaggerated, or even fabricated, by the underground homeless. Harold Deamues is one of them. A worker for the outreach program of the Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment (ADAPT), Deamues contends that the stories primarily reflect the hostility and tension between the tunnel people and the police.
“The problem is that the police go down there assuming all these people are crazy or bugged [drugged] out. There’s no trust between them at all,” he says.
“These people don’t have any belief in themselves, and if you don’t believe in them or trust them, they know, they sense it, so how are you going to help them? I always feel like if I can look them in the eye, they’re not going to hurt me,” explains Deamues, who holds ADAPT’s best record for persuading tunnel people to go aboveground. “If they have a gun in their face, that’s not helping.”
This philosophy is built into ADAPT’s outreach effort, which is funded by the Transit Authority. The program’s director, Michael Bethea, said none of his team takes a weapon or wears protective gear when they work in the tunnels.
“We got to get through to them, and convince them that they’re not untouchables, not animals. That they’re people just like us, and we’re people like them. I don’t know how you can do that by pulling a gun all the time,” Bethea says.
SOCIAL WORKERS MUST COPE WITH LEGAL REGULATIONS IN ORDER TO help the tunnel homeless. Families found underground are often split up. The children are usually put in foster homes on the grounds that the parents cannot adequately care for them, which causes families to avoid seeking any welfare help.