West Kaul Avenue

Editor's Note: Last spring, in the space of less than a week, four people were shot to death in and around a small residential neighborhood a few blocks north of W. Silver Spring Drive and just west of N. 60th St.

Curious about what was causing such violence in a part of the city not widely known for it, Journal Sentinel reporter Crocker Stephenson and photographer Gary Porter rented an apartment in the Kaul Ave. neighborhood. Stephenson spent a month getting to know the people there.

This is the last of three stories that together create a portrait of that neighborhood. The names of some of the characters have been changed, at their request, to protect their identities.

In Parts I and II, we met Rufus Lamont "Silk" Cassel, a drug dealerwho was shot in May. Lionized by neighborhood kids, Silk was shot whileholding a gun on a 16-year-old boy.

We learned about the Kaul Area Neighborhood Development Organization,a small group of residents and landlords working with city officials to stand up to the violence, drugs and decay that threaten their neighborhood.

And we have followed the Bransons - Hassie, Bernie and their sixchildren - an impoverished family struggling to move away from Kaul.

How to contact civic groups

If you want to learn about community organizations working in your neighborhood, one good way is to contact your alderman.

Milwaukee residents can reach their alderman by calling 286-2221, at City Hall. Or they can call the crime-prevention office of any of the city's seven police districts. In other communities, call your city, village or town hall, or your police department.

Another method is to ask your neighbors, especially those who areknowledgeable about what's happening in the neighborhood. The more thatneighbors are in touch with each other about community issues, the greaterthe chance of making a difference.

I am visiting with Dauna Totsky, who with husband, son, daughter, grandchild, two birds, two hamsters, one ferret and two dogs lives in the 6000 block of N. 64th St.

The ashes of a third dog rest in a beige plastic urn on the mantle in her living room. She takes down the urn and places it in my hands.

"That was a good dog," she says.

Dauna is 61 years old and has lived in the Kaul Ave. neighborhood for 34 years -- longer, probably, than anyone else. She's raised five kids in her little gray cottage, which she and her husband bought in 1962 for $24,000. In the early 1980s, the house was valued at $75,000. Today, it's assessed at $56,000.

She talks about growing up in Saukville, about pets, child rearing, flowers and cars. As the conversation drifts, I find myself admiring an antique clock that hangs on the wall near her front door.

Dauna, following my eyes, stops in mid-sentence.

"Do you see it?" she asks.

"What?" I say.

She reaches behind some decorative carvings at the top of the clockand pulls out a chrome .25-caliber handgun.

"And I keep a rifle upstairs," she says.

For the next week, Hassie and Bernie Branson continue to insist they and their six children are about to move from their tattered apartment on Kaul Ave.

But their belongings remain packed in bags and boxes and stacked around their apartment. The children take shifts staying with aunts and uncles, while Hassie and Bernie sleep on a mattress they drag out each night and unfold on the floor in their living room.

One day, Hassie asks me if I want to go see their new place.

We drive over to the building, about 30 blocks to the east. Hassie goes in to talk to the owner, while Bernie waits in the car. The street is lined with trees. There's a church school, and a playground beside it. Pretty houses sit on neatly kept lawns, decorated with flowers.

"This is a nice area," Bernie says. "It's a nice area, you can tell."

When Hassie comes back to the car, she has good news. The apartment is still available, and the owner is willing to prorate her rent.

I ask them why they haven't yet made the move.

"We don't have the money," Hassie says.

"Why?" I ask. "What happened?"

"We don't have the money."

It's Bernie who tells me what's going on.

A couple of days before they were to move, Hassie's stepfather had aheart attack. The next day, he suffered three strokes. The Bransons hadbeen counting on Hassie's mother to help them buy school supplies. Instead, Hassie ended up sending her mother $400.

Last night, Bernie says, Hassie drove down to Illinois to visit her mother and stepfather. He had been unable to speak, though he was able to squeeze Hassie's hand. Hassie sat with him for hours.

Afterward, Hassie's mother told her she didn't know when she would beable to pay the Bransons back.

For the second month in a row, the Bransons refuse to pay rent on their Kaul Ave. apartment. They figure that if they can hold out untilHassie's next round of checks comes in the mail, they'll have enough tomove with by the end of the month.

When the Bransons get home, they find their phone has been disconnected.

To prepare this series of stories about the Kaul Ave. neighborhood, the Journal Sentinel rented an apartment to use as an office at the corner of N. 63rd St. and W. Florist Ave., a block south of Kaul Ave. and about 100 yards from where Rufus Lamont "Silk" Cassel was killed.

The day after we moved in, a 20-year-old man, Danny Conner, was sentenced to life in prison. He would not be eligible for parole until five days before his 86th birthday.

Conner ran a drug house in the central city. He was convicted of persuading a 13-year-old girl who worked in the drug house to murder Ameritech worker Albert Thompson. Conner thought Thompson, who was sitting in an Ameritech service van when the girl tapped on the window and then shot him in the head, was an undercover police officer.

During my first few weeks in the neighborhood, one of the most common questions people asked me when I told them I was a reporter was, "Aren't you afraid people are going to think you're a cop?"

"One week, everything is going pretty good," Bernie says. "The next week, everything is caving in.

"I get so much pressure on me -- I be sitting on the couch late into the night. Thinking. Figuring things out. I be thinking good things, too. Like if I had a lot of money, how I'd build a park, or playground or campground. I used to think those same thoughts a lot when I was a boy.

"My dreams ain't never come true. It seems every time I seem to be getting my life together, something pulls me down. They say you got to crawl before you can walk. Well, I've been crawling for a long time. I just want to know when I'm going to be walking again."

Bernie digs through a plastic container, then shows me a Polaroid photograph taken of him on his wedding day. He is wearing a white tuxedo.

"I looked pretty good on that day," he says.

I ask Bernie where he thinks he'll be 10 years from now, what his plans are for Hassie and their children. He shakes his head and smiles.

"It ain't promised that 10 years from now I'm going to be living," he says. "Time ain't promised to nobody. It's you just out here living until He say it's time to go."

It's a perfect late August afternoon. Bright. Clear. Cool.

A dozen rows of folding chairs are set up on the grass beside Silk's grave at Valhalla Memorial Park.

Silk's mother, Shirley Harris, has invited family and friends to a graveside service to dedicate Silk's headstone. It's a slab of emeraldblack granite, imported from Norway, with gold inlay.

A picture of Silk, wearing his favorite gold chain and pendant, is engraved on the stone. Beneath the picture are the words "My Caring and Sharing Child." The stone is decorated with flowers, their blossoms stained blue -- the color of the Gangster Disciples.

Cars choke the cemetery roads that lead to the grave. Family and friends fill almost every chair. Fifteen or so young men -- most wearing Gangster colors and symbols -- stand away from the group, amassed in the shade of a nearby tree.

There are prayers and poetry and gospel singing. Then Faith Cross-Orr, a cousin of Silk's from Des Moines, Iowa, steps up to the podium. She is a small woman, dressed plainly, fighting back tears and shaking with rage. She directs her remarks to the men standing beneath the tree.

"You can throw down your beer and your liquor here," she says. "Whatever may happen, whatever you may do, you can't bring him back.

"You came to his funeral, you come here today, in a show of support and respect. But where were you when he was killed? Where were you then? You are so fond of saying, 'I've got your back.' But I am interested in the man who can stand out front."

More poetry, more prayers, more songs. At the end of the service, the men who stood beneath the tree gather in a circle around Silk's grave. They pour one bottle after another of Hennessy cognac -- Silk's favorite drink -- onto the grass. Then, raising their right hands abovetheir heads, offer a Gangster salute: a pitchfork formed with thumb andtwo fingers.

Most leave the grave still clutching the programs they were handed whenthey arrived. On the back, the program says:

"We hold in our hands the power to lift each other up to new heights of humanity -- or to let go, plunging mankind into an abyss of destruction. The choice is ours to make."

Norm Jewell is wearing a light blue work shirt and a shiny pair of dark blue pants. There's a blowtorch on his kitchen counter beside the sink. There's a sander on the arm of his couch. The steps leading to the basement of his Kaul Ave. apartment are paved with tools.

It's the end of a long day. The neighborhood kids who hang around his place have gone home. Norm has fixed their bikes. Shown a few how to toss a football. Quizzed a few others on geography.

Now he sits on a chair in his living room, juts out his chin and gives his goatee a thorough scratching, then drops his hands to his side.

Norm grew up in the Sherman Park neighborhood, lived in the same house for 20 years. He can still tick off the names of every person who lived in every house on his block. Some, including his parents, still live there.

He could too, he supposes, if he wanted to. But his home, for now at least, is here on Kaul. It's not just where he lives, but it's where he's made a life. He knows how important he's become to the kids who live around him, and he cherishes that, just as he cherishes the memory of Tiny, Iggy and Mike -- three guys in his old neighborhood who took the time to make a difference in his life.

"To this day, I can remember Tiny coming over to the house, asking me if I wanted to play a game of hoops. He was having a lot of fun. And he was making an impact on my life.

"The impact was that I felt important. I felt important. That's all. I felt important. That day was Norm Jewell day, as far as Tiny was concerned. I went to bed that night thinking, 'This was my day.'

"To show a kid how to throw a ball properly, that's just a small thing, but it matters so much to a kid. And kids remember. If you give a kid the sense that this is their day, that they matter, that they are special, that stays with them. They go to school the next day holding their heads up a little higher."

The Bransons' landlord -- John Bosanec -- agrees to meet me at a McDonald's near Kaul Ave.

"Aren't you going to pay for my drink?" he asks when he arrives.

"You can buy your own," I tell him.

We sit down.

In 1993, the state Department of Justice sued Bosanec, alleging unfair rental practices at his two Kaul Ave. properties and at a third property on N. 39th St.

The suit alleged that Bosanec, who lives in Colgate in Washington County, accepted deposits from prospective tenants, then rejected their rental applications without returning their money.

It also alleged that he rented apartments without telling tenants about almost 100 uncorrected housing code violations and that he promisedto make repairs but never made them.

The lawsuit would be old news -- Bosanec eventually agreed to pay $5,000 in civil forfeitures and was ordered to refund $700 in securitydeposits -- except that a description of the properties contained in thesuit could have been written that afternoon.

Roaches. Cracked windows. Broken appliances. Non-fitting door jambs.Water leaks. Peeling paint.

It's not his fault, Bosanec says.

To run those buildings on Kaul Ave., he says, "you have to be a bigot."

"Those people are animals," he says. "You have to train them where to(defecate), where to eat, how to clean up their slop."

As he leaves the restaurant, Bosanec tells me, "Next time we meet, you pay for my drink."

Two days later, police search the common areas of the Bransons' building, but find nothing. An hour or so after they leave, Bosanec arrives.

I arrive at the building a few moments after he leaves.

A small group of residents is gathered at the front door. They confront me as I try to go in. Bosanec, they say, had just told them I am a police informant. I try to tell them I'm not, but not everyone appears convinced.

"You aren't going to be afraid to come back, are you?" Hassie asks as I walk toward my car.

"No," I say.

But I am.

I have been back to Kaul Ave. only a couple of times since that day. People who once opened their homes and their confidences to me now greet me with distrust and suspicion. I make them uneasy. I am no longer welcomed.

I think about what KANDO's Bob Stein said, that "it's the fear, as opposed to the reality, that kills people." It has, for me, become both a rebuke and a warning.

Hassie calls me once in a while on a borrowed phone to let me know how she and her family are doing. One morning, after gunfire erupted in the apartment below her, she called to ask that I not use her real name or the names of the people in her family. I agreed.

Near the end of August, the Bransons -- now $850 behind in rent -- are ordered to appear in small claims court to answer an eviction complaint filed by Bosanec. Although they have cobbled together enough money to secure the apartment 30 blocks east, Hassie decides to go to court anyway and contest the eviction.

"He (Bosanec) has no right to one single dime for that place," she says.

She arrives at court without a lawyer, but with a new, self-inflicted tattoo on the calf of her right leg. It says, "Thug."

The hearing lasts just a couple of minutes. She's asked two questions: How many people live in the apartment? Can they be out within a week?

"They don't let you say nothing," she says later. "I was going to tellthem how the roaches is, the mice is, the holes in the wall. I was fixingto talk, but they just stamped the paper and cut me off."

Hassie sits on a wooden bench outside the courtroom. After a few moments,she says, "That's OK. I came to court to show him I'm not scared."

Norm, engaged to an elementary school teacher, is considering remainingin the neighborhood -- for a while, anyway -- once he gets married. His fiancee, he says, seems willing to give it a try.

Silk's friend, Peanut, is awaiting trial in connection with the shooting. Charged with being party to the crime of armed robbery and possession of firearm by a felon, he is free on $10,000 bail.

Stein and members of KANDO continue to work with the city to improve the neighborhood. Among their next projects: implementing a plan developed by the city that would use fences to break up the parking lot and distinguish the properties along Kaul Ave.

The city has filed foreclosure actions against Bosanec on the two buildings he owns on Kaul. Two years delinquent on his taxes, Bosanec owes the city $10,446 on the Bransons' building and $9,612 on the building next door.

The garden that Norm and the kids had planted in the vacant lot onKaul struggled for a while, then died. It wasn't that it was trampled and it wasn't that it was neglected. It's just that the soil was too rough to sustain it. It never took root.

The world is vast and full of contradictions. Even a small piece of it, a piece as small as eight city blocks, can be difficult to grasp, and it is tempting to attach too much meaning to a single event, good or evil, great or small.

Silk's death, the death of a garden, a girl confined by rain to the lightless hallway of a shabby building. KANDO, Norm's playground, the Bransons' struggle to find a decent place to live.

No one thing can stand for the whole.

A block from the withered garden, Bob Stein bends down to collect the pieces of a broken bottle shattered against a curb and drops them in a recycling bin nearby.

It's a small deed, but like all the others, both hidden and revealed, it matters.