Tony was originally named Michael Anthony Kinge and called Michael until he started using an alias when he moved upstate to escape the law. As a kid, Michael had been fastidious about his appearance. When he was twelve, he asked his mother to teach him how to sew his own clothes. He learned the craft and from then on made most of his clothes. In addition to his handiness with a needle, Tony like to read and take small household objects apart and put them back together. His mother marveled at her son’s abilities and since a toddler, Michael could smile his way out of trouble. His sister wasn’t so fortunate; from early on a rivalry existed between brother and sister that developed into full blown hostility by the time they were adolescents.
With no man in the household and no financial support from her ex-husband, Shirley was away from home working to support the family a good deal of the day and night while her kids were growing up. She had met her husband, Robert Kinge, at a lunch counter in Newark while she was working for the government as a key punch operator in 1954. They got married when she was four months pregnant and after their daughter, Ga-brielle, was bom. the marriage began to sour. Shirley went home to her mother after Robert slapped her for something she said that he felt insulted his manhood. Her mother said he wasn’t any good anyway. They got back together for a few months until Michael was bom a year after Gabrielle. The next time Shirley left it was for good. She couldn’t stand to be bossed around. Shirley went home to her mother, Sally Reese. Shirley and the children lived with her until 1963 when she moved to New York City.
While they lived there Shirley worked hard but she barely earned enough as a bus information clerk at New York City’s Port Authority Building to pay the rent for their apartment on the upper westside of Manhattan. It was an integrated, middle-class neighborhood when they moved there and Shirley liked it that way. She wanted to move up the social and economic ladder. She was an independent, articulate woman with a hard edge who was always getting a raw deal, she felt. Boy friends stayed around for as long as they got what they wanted. At least, she ended up with some nice clothes and fur coats. She was taken in by Manhattan’s penchant for fashion. Having expensive clothes and jewelry became important to her.
Shirley was used to lying about her son Michael. She’d been covering up for him since he first told her he didn’t feel like going to school when he was nine or ten years old. It was easier to give in. The kid was a real charmer and she didn’t have any man around to show authority, so she had to just glide through and try to rock the boat as little as possible. There was enough friction between Michael and his sister already. She didn’t want any more problems to deal with.
Michael didn’t know his father as he was growing up. He came around a few times while they lived in Newark, but Shirley and her mother put up such a fuss when they saw him that he stopped coming.
One day Michael bumped into his father on a Newark city bus. He wouldn’t have known him, but Robert Kinge recognized his son. It was the last time they saw each other.
The neighborhood had changed; the more affluent moved out and poorer blacks and Hispanics moved in. Street crime was on the rise. It became tougher for Shirley to cope. She was tired of a job that wasn’t going anywhere; she was often late or absent from work.
Later Shirley tried to forget those years in the city. Gabrielle started running away from home when she was barely a teenager, Michael was always in trouble and the neighborhood was rotting with crime. Their apartment was broken into three times.
By the time Michael reached junior high school he missed as many days as he attended. School absence was a well-entrenched pattern by then. School work didn’t interest him; he considered teachers and school kids dumb; his mother was the only smart one. Occasionally he’d put on his charm and help with after school projects. But more frequently he was an unresponsive loner who could lose his temper when things didn’t go his way. His short fuse was noted in elementary school by a teacher who reported that Michael lacked self-control. He was the last to finish class assignments, an underachiever who routinely performed below his scores on aptitude and intelligence tests. Michael was fifteen when he entered the new alternate Westside High School designed for kids at risk.
Michael was adept at using his charm to flirt with girls. He often got his way. At sixteen he fell for a white girl from a rich family. Her parents scorned her for going out with a black boy, but she defied them and continued to see Michael. When she discovered she was pregnant, the situation overwhelmed her. She couldn’t face her family with that kind of news. In desperation she killed herself.
The following January, Michael was arrested for burglary and sent to Rikers Island for sixty days. Westside High’s secretary, who was as much a social worker as an administrator, was concerned that no one was visiting him in prison. She arranged for a school volunteer to see him several times during his incarceration.
Michael dropped out of school at seventeen and joined the Marine Corps with his mother’s blessing. After his girlfriend’s suicide, Michael wouldn’t even look at black girls. No one was going to dictate to him who lie would see and what he did. His girlfriend’s suicide seemed to harden his determination to defy the rules. And he began to wear his anger as a badge of honor.
At the time he met Joanna in 1980. he was out on parole from Fishkill prison, having served one year of the three-year sentence for a crime he committed in New York City in 1975. He had skipped town when convicted in 1975 on an armed robbery charge and not until 1978 when he applied for a $1,300 bank loan using a bogus name and Social Security number in Auburn. New York, did the law catch up with him. After he served eight months in Cayuga County jail for the loan fraud, he was moved to Fishkill prison in Clinton, New York.
Tony liked Joanna well enough to make an effort at trying to do something that could lead to a good paying job. He attended Cayuga County Community College in Auburn, graduating with a business degree in 1982. He had lied on the college application form about his “honorable discharge” from the Marines; he was actually court-martialed in July 1974 when stationed at Okinawa, Japan, for refusing to obey his commanding officer to clean latrines and for stealing four cartons of Winston cigarettes worth about $5. He was ordered to forfeit $400 in pay and was given thirty-five days at hard labor. He’d been trained as a mortarman during his brief tenure in the Marines.
It was against New York State law to ask about an applicant’s criminal record on the college admissions form.
Tony applied to large and small business firms in the area. He dressed in a business suit and imagined he was going somewhere, now that he had a degree. But he was rejected wherever he applied. This was a time, during an economic recession, when many firms had a hiring freeze on. but Tony took it personally. He felt they didn’t hire him because he was black and he was convinced that companies would investigate and find out about his criminal record.
Five months after graduation, he was arrested in New York City with a loaded firearm.
Like his mother, Tony also aspired to material things, good things, and attractive companions. In his case he seemed to care little about how he got them.
Joanna found out later that Tony only went out with white women. He was proud of his success with them; they enhanced his self-image and gave him a sense of power. Joanna turned him on with her petite good looks and long, light brown hair. And she liked a good time. Soon he convinced her to drive to New York. It was an exciting adventure for a rural girl whose idea of wild up to then was getting drunk and smoking a little pot. They slept in the car most of the day and at night.
Joanna worked as a go-go girl in a striptease joint. Tony was doing stickups at grocery and liquor stores. After Tony had robbed enough cash and loot to last a while, he’d buy drugs at a good price on the street. The big city capers ended when Tony was arrested in the city on an armed robbery charge one night. He didn’t appear in court the next day, so a bench warrant was issued in the name of Michael Kinge.
Joanna’s