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Crime Story Episode 4: Yohance Lacour

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST MALE SPEAKER: In Chicago tonight, a group of teenagers is charged with beating a black boy to a pulp and then boasting that they kept their neighbourhood white.

SECOND MALE SPEAKER: Lenard Clark is still in a coma. Police say he was attacked by a group of white teenagers who used racial epithets as they beat him unconscious.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: On the first hot day of March 1997, 13-year-old Lenard Clark was out for a bike ride with his friend when they were attacked for being in the wrong neighbourhood.

SOUNDCLIP

YOHANCE LACOUR: I learned that the lead attacker was the son of a powerful mob boss, a mob boss with ties literally dating back to Capone.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: When Yohance Lacour first heard about this attack, he was a 23-year-old man from the South Side of Chicago, and the case pushed him to become a journalist and to look deep into what happened to Lenard. He ended up breaking stories on how the mob and racial politics affected the investigation. And now, 25 years later, Yohance tells the entire story in one of my favourite podcasts of all time, the powerful and riveting “You Didn't See Nothing”.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yohance Lacour, welcome to Crime Story. It's a real pleasure to have you.

YOHANCE LACOUR: It's a pleasure to be here. This is exciting. Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So take me back to Chicago in 1997. What was going on in your life?

YOHANCE LACOUR: I was a part-time student at University of Illinois at Chicago. I was selling weed in the neighbourhood and, you know, across the South Side, I was living with my father. I was also starting to write plays, so I was figuring it out. I knew I didn't want to be like a full-time drug dealer, but that's how I was feeding myself. And I was pursuing my own like creative interests. Created a theatre company with my best friend Earl. We were writing plays at the time, and I'm just kind of throwing stuff at the wall, trying to see what lands and what's comfortable.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Not exactly a typical 24-year-old. I wasn't starting theatre companies and writing plays at 24. [laughing]

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah, a lot of my friends weren't either. Looking back, my experience wasn't a typical one.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's jump into the story you told. Tell me, who is Lenard Clark?

YOHANCE LACOUR: Lenard Clark in 97 is a 13-year-old boy, I guess relatively nondescript. He was from the projects, still kind of young, not yet too atoned, it seemed, to like street life, right? He was still an innocent kid. He's, you know, innocent. He hadn't been lost yet. And one day, he and his little buddy just wanted to go ride bikes and go play. And he and his friend went to play on their bikes, he catches a flat tire. Air in his neighbourhood cost a quarter. You know, we're talking about people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. And so that quarter, he could have found better things to do with it, knowing that air was free one neighbourhood over across the expressway. That neighbourhood was Chicago's sundown town. That was Bridgeport, and that's where he was attacked.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me about Bridgeport. That expressway divide is more than physical.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah. So, you know, so one, just to give you some context, there's a history of redlining that is, you know, has just continued to haunt black Chicago because we don't own much land or property and weren't able to create land and home ownership. And so there was a time when there were only certain neighbourhoods black folks could live in. They call them racial covenants, right? Black folks could only live in certain pockets of the city, and they called it a black belt. The red line was a line basically that separated the places black folks could live from the places that they couldn't by law. Once that was, you know, outlawed and banned, a kind of de facto redlining took place where the projects and the way they were set up was like the new redlining. It was almost like a legal loophole that, you know, was obviously intentional too. And so the expressway was built between Bridgeport and the projects so as to separate these white folks in Bridgeport from these black folks in the projects. So yeah, Bridgeport was for a long time that very racist sundown place where black folks were still being attacked and beaten or worse, you know, simply for being black and caught out of bounds.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so what happens to Lenard?

YOHANCE LACOUR: He and his buddy had gone to get air for their tire, and they wound up playing a game of pickup football with some Mexican kids in the area. And as they were leaving, they were spotted by some Bridgeport young men who decided that they wanted to attack them for being black in their neighbourhood and who decided they had no business being over there. And Lenard Clark was beaten into a coma and left for dead at 13. And, you know, fortunately for his friend, he got out of there with, you know, with just, I think they landed a couple of blows, but he was able to get away. And the crowd focussed on Lenard, who ran in another direction, and Lenard took the entire beating.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And how did the police get involved Finally?

YOHANCE LACOUR: Well, the police were called. There was a witness. There was a guy named Jeff Gordon who lived in Bridgeport but wasn't from Bridgeport. He'd only been there a short time, so he wasn't one of these Bridgeport races. He was a transplant. He was from somewhere else and just found a place to stay in that area. And thank God for him, right, because who knows if and when the police get called had it not been for him, had it been up to just, you know, regular, average Bridgeport residents.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But it was his experience that gave you the name of the podcast, right? Can you tell me what he hears?

YOHANCE LACOUR: He's called the police. They show up. By this time, there's a huge crowd of Bridgeport residents, right? And there was a lot of excitement. Everybody comes out. The police show up. And as the police are asking Jeff Gordon what happened, men from the rest of the crowd, Bridgeport residents, are saying some Mexicans did it. And so they're basically just trying to blame someone else. I mean, it's kind of a perfect example of dumb racism. We’re just blaming Mexicans, you know what I mean, because they could have, you know, you could have mistaken them for white folks. They were blaming Mexicans for it. Obviously, they won’t want to blame black folks for it because, you know, everybody knows black folks ain't over there. If they are, they end up like Lenard Clark often. You know, while this Bridgeport man was giving this, you know, this false narrative of what happened, Jeff Gordon stood up and was vocal, like no, no, that's not what happened. And then someone from the crowd shouts, you didn't see nothing, in a threatening manner, in a way to let him know you didn't see nothing. Shut up. Everybody out there understood that that was a threat, that that was like, you know, shut your mouth. And so yeah, once it was time to come up with a title, it just made all the sense in the world. You Didn't See Nothing audio podcast. You know, it was maybe a quadruple entendre. It just fit.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It was great.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Thank you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: As an aside, I thought it was perfect.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The media, though, did really cover the beating both locally and nationally. There was a lot of news about it. What was the public reaction?

YOHANCE LACOUR: Outrage. And, you know, when it first happened, everybody was outraged. I mean, because, you know, it was like as biased and racist as local media may have been. You know, the beating of this little 13-year-old boy in Bridgeport, it says so many things about Chicago. And, you know, I think most people with any kind of humanity were outraged by it. So there was a lot of protests. The media jumped on it swiftly and it went to national heights. And President Clinton, then President Clinton, was on his weekly address talking about it. It was a huge thing.

SOUNDCLIP

BILL CLINTON: Just last week in Chicago, a 13-year-old boy riding his bike home from a basketball game was brutally attacked and almost beaten to death, apparently for no other reason but the colour of his skin.

YOHANCE LACOUR: And during these days when the media first jumped on it, those early days, he was still in a coma, and people were unsure if this kid would even make it. Was this going to be a tale of a youngster murdered in Bridgeport or just, you know, damaged for life?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How did you respond?

YOHANCE LACOUR: I responded by wanting to react with violence. When I heard about it, I was outraged too. And so I called my buddies. I called my friends who I would call to fight fire with fire if fire had been set upon me or mine. And so we went to Bridgeport. We piled in my buddy's little car and rode over to Bridgeport with some bats and some pipes or whatever. And we reacted really emotionally. Like we forgot where we were going or what we were up against. So as we got there, we were reminded quickly, like wait a minute. Like first of all, we stand out like sore Thumbs. It’s Bridgeport and we like sorely outnumbered. You know, the five or six of us that fit in that car was, you know, we got chased out of there pretty quickly.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And your dad, though, told you to do something differently, right?

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Your dad plays a pretty important role at this point.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah, he does. Like I told you, I started writing plays. I had done some writing for other smaller publications and, you know, smaller stories here and there. And I had been writing since I was a kid in some shape, form or fashion. And so that's when he said, look, write. Write about it. And he just happened to have come across an ad for a freelance journalist for a local newspaper that also came from out of the projects called the South Street Journal, and they were paying $25 an article and, you know, I would have done it for free. So yeah, I found the South Street Journal. I met Ron Carter, the editor and publisher over there, who was just a phenomenal… who is just a phenomenal guy in the community and on the south side. And he was able to like immediately put me in tune with Lenard's mother, even. So I was thrown right into that world and began investigating and writing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I just want to stop and tell you one of my favourite parts of the podcast was when you debate the colour of the car.

SOUNDCLIP

YOHANCE LACOUR: I didn't have a driver's license at the time, so Earl, my playwriting partner, he drove me. He had this magenta mercury tracer. We used to call her Tracy.

EARL: Yeah. If I could pull it up and that was fine, I’ll never forget, in my red tracer.

YOHANCE LACOUR: It was fuchsia.

EARL: We pulled it up on those flats and I’m like, they’re looking for you?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That was such a lovely moment. [laughing]

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah, Earl didn’t catch that at first listen. Some of his buddies called him, like what’s up with the fuchsia car? What are you talking about? He didn't even catch this and we didn't laugh about it. Yeah, that was …

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Great. That was part of what I loved about the podcast is just every once in a while, your friendship and humour came through, and sometimes at the nicest moments when everybody sort of needs a little bit of a break because you're just so immersed in this. Like you said, it's a 13-year-old boy and you're feeling so sick and then…

YOHANCE LACOUR: Well, no, you know, I appreciate you saying it. A lot of people, you know, we've gotten feedback from folks who are like, is it okay that I laughed so much? And it absolutely is. Life is so tough and is so hard. And it has been in so many ways that if you don't find some humour in something, it'll break you down. And so yeah, we have to find times to smile. It makes me think… I was having this conversation recently with a good friend about just that, about that, that dynamic of smiling and laughing in the midst of intense pain and oppression. And I was telling him how even when I was in prison, we laughed. We laughed hard, but we were in prison and wanted to get out of there like our lives depended on it, you know what I mean? And it makes me think of the narrative that white folks started to come with about happy slaves. Because I'm sure when I think about my experience in prison, when I think about my experience on the streets of Chicago, when I think about the experiences in Chicago that my buddies who were born and raised in the projects and have had it the worst, when I think about the laughter and the good times that people still, you know, had and took from that, you know, it makes me think of the fact that yeah, during slavery, people laughed and joked. They had to. They couldn't have lived as long as they did. It's just something that if people can't understand it, they just haven't been in situations that perilous. But when that's then distorted, like okay, they're laughing and smiling so they like it, you know, to not be able to look at life with enough nuance and critical thought to understand how both can exist at the same time. And the laughter and smiles never indicates a pleasure or an embrace of the situation. It’s just dealing with reality and finding a way to live through it. It’s just humanity.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me what you learned about who his attackers were.

YOHANCE LACOUR: I learned that the lead attacker, the young man who was driving the car and initiated the attack and first spotted Lenard and his friend was the son of a powerful mob boss, a mob boss with ties literally dating back to Capone. And that was a huge discovery for me. Capone was like this mythical level of Chicago Mafia. I mean, it was… yeah, that was huge for me. Like that made me realize that we, you know, I'm investigating something pretty serious here, right? And then I, you know, came to find that the rest of the attackers were his buddies and one or two of them were likely, to some degree, also tied to the mob in the same, you know, mafia that this kid's father was a boss of. I also learned that there were probably at least six attackers instead of the three that were accused and charged. But yeah, the biggest find was this young man's deep ties to the mob through his father.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And how did that affect the police investigation, the whole official investigation into what happened?

YOHANCE LACOUR: You know, I was told that the lawyers for these young men were able to walk right into the police station and kind of take over the police station in a way that never happened, in a way that no one was used to seeing lawyers walk in and take command of a police station before. So which indicated, you know, a really strong connection between these families and that police station which was in Bridgeport. So we're talking about a neighbourhood where a lot of these young men wound up becoming cops.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And then what did that mean? How did that manifest in like witness statements and people coming forward and getting the case actually to the point where you can hand it off to a prosecutor to do something?

YOHANCE LACOUR: Right. So you had three Bridgeport, three young Bridgeport men in the car who roll up and spot Lenard Clark and his buddy. The lead attacker, Frankie Caruso Jr. from the Caruso family, he spots Lenard and says, you know, let's beat them up. Apparently, the two in the car, you know, didn't want to do it. He calls them pussies. He jumps out. He hits the street and a group of, you know, this is a neighbourhood, and a group of other young men who they all know see him running after these two black kids, you know, jump in the chase with him and beat the boy almost near lifeless. So when the two young men who were in the car who didn't jump out were interrogated, they spilled the beans. They told everything they knew and they incriminated the hell out of Frankie Caruso Jr. And so initially, there was a case here. There was a huge case here. You got two witnesses. Obviously, they didn't have time to put a story together, but their stories synched up about how this guy jumps out of his truck and beats Lenard Clark to near death. And I think that it was shortly after that that their families got involved and started kind of to take control. And they started to move a lot more like mobsters.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so you would have witnesses, right, that would go missing, Witnesses that changed what they said they saw. And then you have one who, Michael Cutler who…

YOHANCE LACOUR: He was murdered. So, right. That was… that's when stuff starts really looking like, okay, the mob is involved here. I mean, everyday Chicagoans start to realize, black and white start to see what's going on. Once this was understood, you know, the family and, you know, what's going on here, who these people are, you got one witness who can't be found. You've got another witness who has changed his entire story, and you got a third witness who's murdered, right? And he's murdered in really strange circumstances. He's murdered on Chicago's West Side, which is pretty much all black. And so, you know, this white kid who turned out actually to be mixed, which was a huge discovery for us, but this kid who we didn't know was mixed at the time, right? So we're looking at it as a white kid from Bridgeport who ends up murdered on the west side of Chicago visiting a girl just made everybody scratch their heads. It was called a robbery by the police, but the only thing that was taken was a class ring, which a lot of folks who've known mob activity and studied it say indicates a hit. You know, you take the ring to show you got them. It just didn't make sense, but that's how the police handled the case, as if it were just a robbery, dismissed any notion that it could have been related to this huge case of the summer that had gone national. You know, the judge suspected it was a hit. The judge in the case suspected it was a hit. You know, and all… then, every black person reading the story was confident that it was a hit. And most white folks expressed the same thing, including journalists. So while it was clear that in the court of public opinion, you know, the mob was guilty of having murdered this boy to keep this other one out of prison, the police never made the connection. So it was never connected to the case and ultimately just left an unsolved murder.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: All of this is in your earlier reports. What impact did your investigation have at the time?

YOHANCE LACOUR: At the time, my investigation had very little impact and it was super disappointing for me in a lot of ways. But I got a call I'll never forget. I wound up getting a call from the mayor's office. There was a sister who was a black woman who had told me that my name had come across the desk as a community member who had deep ties to the community, and they wanted to offer me a job. So it was obvious they heard it. It was obvious that that article reached them, and it was also obvious that it reached these Bridgeport Italians because they wanted to pay in a visit to the South Regional Office looking for me. This is all like movieish, right, because everybody fits the description. You know, you see it, you know, if you watch these tough looking Italian guys jump out of a mobish looking car going into the South regional office. And at the time, white folks would never be caught on that side of town. And so automatically, like they stuck out like saw thumbs like me and my buddies did when we went to Bridgeport for retaliation. So in that moment, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't get out of the carwash. Long story short, they leave. And while I'm dug down, I run upstairs. And so I just took this thing to a whole new level and indicated, you know, that much more how involved Mafia related folks probably were.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So after the attack, the Caruso family started speaking out and saying that their son wasn't guilty. But at the same time, they also start going around two black churches in the neighbourhood where they speak about racial healing and even develop a relationship with Lenard and his mother. Can you tell me more about this conversation of racial reconciliation that quickly took hold?

YOHANCE LACOUR: So yeah, a conversation about racial reconciliation was started. I don't have any faith that it was ever genuine, and it was concocted largely by this family, right?.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The Caruso family.

YOHANCE LACOUR: The Caruso family. Right. It's like, look, we got to keep this boy out of jail. And, you know, the first thing we got to do is like let's get some attention off this. Let's start to change how we're looking at this. Let's frame it differently. And that's when racial reconciliation came through. And then you had a couple mealy mouthed black folks who, you know, who were already probably on the Caruso speed dial and, you know, were made to feel like they owed them favours or something. They were already in bed with some black, you know, so-called, I call them so-called leaders because they did have some, you know, some strong constituencies and followings and support in the South… on the south side of Chicago. And, you know, they just fell in line. And so they were pushing this narrative about, you know, racial reconciliation and healing, which, you know, which is just absurd to even suggest when you're talking about a beating that was so vicious, of a boy that was so young, by people who were claiming they were guilty. What are you reconciling? What are we healing from if you didn't do it?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: As a listener, just what I heard too, along with all you're saying, is that all of a sudden, the responsibility is being placed on the victim and his family and his community as opposed to the perpetrator. And it just happened so quickly and there was no time to allow the victim, his family and the community to even process the actual event because they were forced into a conversation or they tried to force them into a conversation about reconciliation, which, as you said, is obviously was manipulated and politicized.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Well, the victim and the family actually were just the most exploited and manipulated, in my opinion, looking back, because one, the victim, Lenard Clark, was in a coma and had to learn how to walk and talk again, right? So, you know, him dealing with it and trying to come to some sort of grips and understanding, having time to it was definitely not even a thing. And his mother was already so vulnerable, having been burdened with a lot of the stresses of living in the ghetto, raising a child in the projects. She was in a particularly vulnerable situation that rendered her more easily manipulated and misled by this white family and their black henchmen, social henchmen, I’ll call them. There's a part in the podcast we’ve got to quickly mention. When we asked other children in the projects what they thought about what happened to Lenard Clark, there were a lot of them that actually wished it would have happened to them so that they could have been removed from the projects, because Lenard Clark wound up and his family wound up being moved to a home outside of the projects having a house with wheelchair accessibility and all those type of stuff. And so, you know, just the prospect of being moved out of the projects was so appealing that it made children wish that they'd been beaten into a coma, possibly near death, right? And so it doesn't take a whole lot to buy a victim's cooperation at a certain level. You know, if we have nothing and you can put some food on this table, that's going to start to mean a little bit more than, you know, this kid going to jail. I know this kid ain’t coming to attack my son again, you know, So him going to jail is kind of inconsequential when we don't have food, you know. And so yeah, I think that it was… that was to me still the most tragic factor in this whole story, is how the family was handled and manipulated and how they were already, you know, in such a vulnerable state that that was even able to happen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You mentioned mealy mouthed social… I can't remember the word you used.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Henchmen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Social henchmen.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Social… mealy mouthed social henchmen.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me about Reverend Martin.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah, you know, mm hmm. This is an interesting conversation for me just because… Tell you another story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Real quick. I was online, and there's a white woman who I'm like Facebook friends with or we follow each other on Instagram and really cool, cool lady. We met through some leather work. And so she saw the podcast and she got to talking about… she got to talking about really badly about Jesse Jackson, and I felt a way about it. And I had to tell her that, you know, even as a white ally, you got to be careful about how poorly you speak about the black folks that even I ain't on the side of because it's just a hell of a dynamic. It's almost like if my cousin or brother has betrayed me, he’s still my cousin or my brother and he's still a victim, and he's still operating like this because he is a victim of the same kind of racist manipulation, exploitative manipulation that I am. He's just too weak to fight back in the same way. So it just becomes a touchy situation. It can get emotional because it can get hard to maintain a certain logical approach to it. So that's why I just cringed a little bit. But, you know, I've introduced this concept and these terms. So it is what it is. I just had to deal with it in real time myself. Reverend Martin, I would call him slippery. I would call him slick. I don't think anyone is all bad. I think Reverend Martin has probably had better intentions in his life and his work than what was demonstrated by his participation and his role in this whole fiasco. He was the reverend who apparently the Caruso's contacted. As soon as they realized they needed to do kind of damage control with the community, they contacted Martin. They'd already worked with Martin to some degree. They knew Reverend Martin already. I believe that they were… a lot of them were in bed with these so-called black leaders through the Caruso's Union work. I believe that it was through the Caruso's involvement in the union and ability to kind of create and supply labour work for black folks that the Reverend Martins of this case were able to kind of hand out, which is what put them in communication in the first place. And so, you know, Reverend Martin just starts running with this absurd, ludicrous, ridiculous narrative that it wasn't Frankie Caruso Jr., that it was somebody else. He starts to invoke how Jesus would want us to all get along and how we should heal and no one wins from this animus and this hostility, which questions like what respect or regard do you have for this little boy and his family? And any little boy that looks like him, they may run up and find themselves in the same circumstances. And so he played a major part and that helped to divide, you know, black folks because he has a large constituency and congregation of black folks. And like a lot of spiritual followers tend to do, they bought it hook, line and sinker. This is their spiritual leader. It doesn't get bigger than that. It doesn't get more powerful than that. And don't get me wrong, you know, I can't judge Herbert Martin. You know, I'm not… you know, I come up in the tradition of Christianity myself. And so, you know, I live in a glass house. I can't throw stones. I've done wrong. I've done things I'm not proud of, but it was just so, so frustrating and disheartening to interview him 20 something years later and watch him stand by those words and stand by those moves. It was crazy.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I appreciate the honesty with which you responded to my question, but I also really appreciated the honesty with which you tell the story in the podcast, where you yourself explore your own internal contradictions about just those sort of things. I mean, that was a really amazing way for us to be brought into the story was through your own internal struggles. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it's through the whole thing.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah, I mean, that was something I didn't expect to deal with, we didn't expect to deal with. It was a woman named Perry Small who was on… worked at WVON. At one point when she realized I had gone to prison, she asked me what I was in prison for, and I told her I had sold drugs. And she just very nonchalantly quickly was like oh, okay, you sold out, but you did your time and you're back and you're here and you're doing good stuff with yourself. Let's move on, right? You've acknowledged it, right? And it hit me a little bit, right? And that was… it was at that moment, you know, we were discussing sellouts. We were discussing that whole concept. And so yeah, the fact that we were also discussing my trip to prison, my life as a drug dealer, and the fact that, you know, somebody we spoke to had suggested that I was a sellout, it was relevant. And it just made sense to talk about because we were honestly trying to explore. We weren't trying to just craft a narrative. We were honestly trying to explore what happened in that case, what happened with me, where are the through lines, where are the parallels? And it was just, you know, you can't really overlook that. It just stuck out like a sore thumb. Speaking of Sellouts, you've been called one for what you did, what you think, and I had to sit with that. And a lot of people, that resonated, interestingly, with a lot of listeners. And what I tell folks that I'm not sure came across on the podcast is that I wound up accepting and acknowledging the fact that yeah, when confronted with that question, did I sellout selling drugs, heroin in particular to black folks, knowing the struggle, understanding what black folks were already up against? Yeah, I would deem that a sellout move. However, that's not to say that I think that every black man selling drugs in his community is selling out. I don't think it's that simple. I think that, you know, we are in a very unique situation. You talk about nuance, right? We're in a very unique situation where our access to legitimate routes of building prosperity and wealth pales in comparison to our access to drugs as a means of developing what looks like prosperity and wealth. And that is by design. For me, I'm selling out because I know better, because I was raised in a different tradition, because I come from Panthers and civil rights activists. And I know how much this was designed to stifle black liberation and black progress. Knowing that and understanding that and still selling drugs with the idea that I'll get money and get out and change a situation, I was selling out by doing that. A lot of my buddies who never looked at life like that because they never understood life like that, because they were, you know, placed and started so far at the bottom, it wasn’t selling out. It was survival. And that just speaks to just how tricky and complicated our position as black folks in America is.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, I have to tell you, as a white woman from Canada listening, it came through and it was an experience and very worthwhile. And I really appreciate everything that you guys put into this podcast. It was really important to listen to.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Let's wrap up by unfortunately going back to the perpetrators. They finally do go to trial. Can you tell me what happens? What was the verdict?

YOHANCE LACOUR: They go to trial. Charges were only brought against three of the men when they were likely at least six. And the ringleader, Frankie Caruso Jr., the son of the mob boss, he gets sentenced to like eight years. His case is appealed. He winds up doing less than two years. The other two who were accused, with Michael Cutler who was going to, you know, testify, who had already agreed to testify and wasn't reneging, with him out of the way, with him now dead, murdered, and Caruso Jr. having been convicted and these other two changing their story, the case against them had just become weak and they were offered probation. So they wound up never seeing any jail time for the conviction. And so all in all, for the assault of a 13-year-old boy that left him in a coma, left his life permanently changed, disrupted his family, took them through stress that continues to haunt them to this day, less than two years of jail time was served in total. And it's just, yeah, when I compare that to all the stories, including myself, of black men going through the criminal justice system and the type of sentences we receive for the type of crimes we are found guilty of, I think it just kind of points to what we’re dealing with in America.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did this project help clarify anything for you? Did it release anything for you or did it, you know, you've got now a bit of time from being finished to being released to being in the public to getting a response. How has all of that sort of come back at you?

YOHANCE LACOUR: Yeah, it's put a lot on my mind. So on a good note, right, I'm reenergized and I feel a lot better about what can be done through journalism. We live in a different world now where it's not just three channels and a couple of newspapers that gets the word out to the masses. You've got independent journalism organizations that are doing amazing work. You've got social media which allows for a lot of voices that, you know, are noise, but it also allows for voices like ours and entertainment journalists that, you know, I've been introduced to. I have created really beautiful professional relationships and beautiful friendships with white allies that I hadn’t known prior to this experience. So I do see hope. I see more hope through journalism in particular. But, you know, going through all of it and talking to Reverend Martin 25 years later, you know, I'm also reminded of how much hasn't changed. A lot of this was motivated, you know, and inspired by watching these violent assaults on black life go unpunished for the past 10, 15 years. And so it's a lot that hasn't changed. And to be black in America is to be under constant attack. It is to be in a perpetual war. And so, you know, I'm reminded that that war is still intense and that battle is still going on. But I'm also encouraged by the fact that we got more weapons that we got to take advantage of and use.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, this was wonderful talking to you. I so appreciate the time and the thoughtfulness you put into this conversation. Thank you.

YOHANCE LACOUR: Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to share in a real way. Thank you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. Next week, I'll be talking to Michael Lista about the life and death of Dr. Elena Fricke.

SOUNDCLIP

MICHAEL LISTA: I think if you want to understand what crime really means, it is about, especially a murder, it is about a human being being obliterated by another human being. It's like… it's like a library being burned to the ground.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: That conversation is available now on CBC Podcast’s YouTube channel or for subscribers to CBC Podcast’s Apple True Crime Channel. In addition to early access, subscribers to our True Crime Channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound Design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Agaard. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcast’s senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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TRANSCRIPT: Crime Story, Episode 4

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