you do, is i think going a long way toward that. that's a much more hopeful note on which to end what i appreciate thank you, i certainly recommend everybody pick up a copy of this unbelievable. it will have a place of honor on my bookshelf now and it was great having this conversation with you. thanks so much, matthew. thanks much, peter. so much to think here. but that was really fascinating stuff. thank you, matthew. you're a great interlocutor. such a pleasure to have you both with us here tonight. and really look forward to future work by both. also want to thank all of you in the audience for joining us. our event has been made possible by the city lights foundation, continuing the legacy, our founder, lawrence ferlinghetti, into the future public events, our programing in publishing and educational outreach all dedicated to sustaining a vibrant community of readers. writers and independent

thinkers. so be safe, everyone. be i'm going to introduce our speaker and guest now. so, ben westhoff, books are taught nationwide and have been translated around the world. he is the author of the definitive history of west coast hip hop, original gangsters and ink and speaks about the opioid crisis at conferences across. the country. a native of saint paul, minnesota. yeah. oh, give it up. he now lives in saint louis, missouri. which. all right. he lives with wife and two children. so give it up for ben. hmm? yeah. i'm going to stop for another minute because i just saw brett pulling up the rear.

brett larson and his wife jerry can everyone hear me? i can't tell if this is on or not. i oh, it doesn't come. from i'm tethered, i won't be able to pace around room and be interactive with the audience like i like so sorry everybody. so yeah. so i was going to do an audio video presentation, but that didn't work out and dan marasco supposed to get me a projector. anyone knows him, but he wasn't able to do that. but so i have some pictures from the book and these are mostly pictures of jerell and jerell and me and. i will kind of pass these around going to just not work very well because by the you know by the time they get passed around to the back, i'll be like well, well beyond the part in the book

where i was talking about that, but you'll just have to use your imagination. and also we're going to go to tiffany's sports bar after in highland park on ford parkway. i think after this. so if you like, i think some people had to pay like $5 or whatever. so sorry about that. but if you have one of these pictures, if it's like musical chairs and it lands with you and, you get it at the end, you get a free drink at sports bar with, any of these pictures, and there's a lot of them. there's like as many as there maybe as people here even. so hold on to this, but don't take it to the bar at tiffany's sports. and i don't like hand it to them because they won't know. you have to hand it to me and i will make sure that you get one free drink. all right. so anyway, so as much as this event is about my new book,

little brother. it's about celebrating the life. the book's title character, gerald cleveland jeryl and i were matched in the big brothers big sisters program in 2005 when he eight and i was 28, we were together for 11 years. and it's no exaggeration to say that he changed my life. i know some people have met him, so i'm going to read some very short excerpts from little brother. and about our together, about his death at the age of 19 and why i decided it'd to to investigate his death myself and so here's the first picture this is daryl around the time when we first met. so so all right.

and so now these are little short excerpts in 2005 while working as a reporter at the saint louis riverfront times, i was a bit aimless and, looking for a way to meaningfully give back. that's around the time. read a news story about a big brother's sisters program focused on children who had parents in prison. for many children, a parent's incarceration are often the beginning of a generational cycle of crime, the article said having a mother in prison often a child's environment more than having a father in prison. the article touched me and it big brothers, big sisters. they had an immediate need for male and so after going through a background check, i was assigned to march in the early evening of june 30th, 2005. i went to the big brothers big sisters offices and met my little a tiny year old who possessed a gigawatts.

what's your name? i asked. gerald cleveland. he said, it's great to meet you. i said, extending my hand. nice to meet you too, he said, shaking it without making eye contact. i thought there must be some mistake. this kid is so charming and adorable all that he couldn't possibly need mentorship. people must follow just. i was also introduced his father, joe, who seemed open and appreciative of my efforts so. here's a picture. this is not showing up on tv very well at all, is it? i won't show this just for you and the people who are here in person. but yeah, i don't don't pass them too fast either because then the person at the back is just going to get all the free drinks or maybe they should stay in circulation. you guys have to figure that out. tara's mother was in prison back in arkansas where he grew up, and he lived with his father and

seven siblings in the saint louis neighborhood called forest southeast. when i drove the area at night, guys standing on the side of the street tried to flag me down to sell drugs. one time, when gerald's dog got off leash, police shot and killed a but despite our biological differences, i mean, biographical differences, as we found plenty in common as we explored saint louis together trying new restaurants and bowling alleys, seeing bad movies. i took him to his first cardinals game at, busch stadium, and got him swimming lessons at the ymca. a couple of years later, i to new york to try to make it as a writer and in 2000 a ten year old gerald boarded plane for the first time to stay with me and my girlfriend anna for a long weekend. he enjoyed the flight, watching the cars on the ground turn to ants and drinking sprite. i wrote in my journal during a visit to the museum of natural history in new york.

i snapped a photo of him standing next to a tiger stuffed roaring in a glass cage. gerald posed with his hands up in the air, cowering and pretending to be petrified of the tiger. when i look at the photo now, i see the ideal image of childhood a happy boy, carefree, totally at ease on guard at the summer, he came back and stayed with us for weeks, sleeping on the pullout sofa in, our apartment in new jersey, attending a ymca day camp. this tyrrell and my wife anna. tyrrell quickly friends with the other kids in the area, even starting a dog walking business with boy next door, posting signs around the neighborhood. in october 2009, when anna and i got married in birmingham,

alabama, tyrrell and his dad drove the 500 miles south from saint louis. and this is gerald and, me. and then this is from the wedding also with gerald dad and gerald. i'm going to start this over here. i was up all night with nerves, but at the crack of dawn, gerald agreed. go jogging with me on the hotel treadmill. somehow it completely calmed my nerves that day i successfully surfed the largest tickle snafu, whose in-law glad handing and occasional moments of grace that encompassed a wedding upon release of my book, dirty south in 2011, i embarked upon my first book tour picking jerel at the cleveland families new house in ferguson to bring him to my reading in memphis.

i'd been to before, but gerald hadn't, and it was thrilling to see it fresh through his eyes, though he hardly knew who elvis. he pored over every inch of graceland from the jungle room to the pink to the queen sized bed, the lisa marie plain, complete with gold plated safety belts. we drove around town so i could do a little book related networking. at one point, gerald saw and identify from two blocks away the lorraine hotel, where martin luther king was murdered. the next morning at the breakfast, he served himself eggs, sausage and french toast, drenching the entire plate in sirup. you can't always eat stuff like i castigated him, insisting he would be headed for diabetes if he kept it up. that's just what people eat for breakfast, he said, sulking before dumping the food in the trash and grabbing a banana instead. i felt terrible throughout the

trip i was torn between simply enjoying my time with and trying to change his behavior. there was part of me that just couldn't him alone and felt a dubious responsibility to try to fix everything. in 2014 i moved back to saint louis again this with ana and our two young boys. we were thrilled to reconnect with gerald in early december. gerald accompanied me and the boys across the river to get a christmas tree at a seasonal market. we rode a tractor out onto a field of blue furs after he chopped it down, we went inside to drink hot apple cider and take pictures with an inflatable santa gerald bent over at the waist to pose with our almost three year old, which me smile not long ago. gerald had been the short guy himself, the employee's the tree to our roof, and we drove feeling like a cozy little family. but reality dawned as. we drove gerald home across the west florissant avenue strip in

ferguson not long ago. this thoroughfare, daryl's house, had been in flames. just two months earlier, the unarmed teenager, michael brown, had been shot dead in ferguson by a white police. images of brown's body in the street went viral and local businesses were burned to the ground. this is the michael brown memorial. gerald joined, the protests and looting ferguson's main thoroughfare, including at the quiktrip which became ground zero for the protests, adjusted department report. later later how the ferguson police targeted african-americans. brown's killing shook me because in him i saw gerald michael brown was only a year older and he lived nearby. gerald him gerald could have

been here not long. afterwards, i learned that gerald had been transferred away from his high school called mcclure to a place called the mark twain students center. an alternative school for kids with behavioral and academic issues. i learned that this happened because of a shooting at bus stop one day that year when he got off bus right in front of his house. he was in 11th grade. what happened i assume you were you were shot at while getting off the bus, he shook his head and cryptically explained happened. 12 shots were fired. he estimated some of which he saw whizzing past his head. i moved a girl from the bus out of the way and hit her behind pole until he left, then walked home. he said he, made the whole thing sound cinematic. i wasn't satisfied with his answer, and we would later that there was more to the story. but in the meantime, daryl and, i started to drift and. dan and i had him over to the house for some long weekends, and while i thought it was fun,

he seemed kind of bored. i found other clues. meanwhile all that pointed towards anguish in his that he wasn't telling me about. on december 2nd, 2015, i logged on to facebook and came across an alarming post and whoever wanted it's coming out. that's 16 shot beretta. tyrell had written the followed by emojis meant to look a gun firing bullets. i didn't know what to make of this post the threats, the use of the unsettling squirt gun emoji because facebook doesn't have emojis for actual guns. reading it, i saw a different from the one i just spent a pleasant with. i saw a young man expressing rage, fear and desperation. the next, when i pulled up to his house to pick him up, i raised the issue. what was that facebook post about? asked who do you have this beef with? he looked at me for a moment like he didn't know what i was talking about.

oh, that. that's nothing, he said. it looked pretty serious to me. he stayed silent in the front seat, his eyes drooping. after a moment, i wondered if, he'd fallen asleep. couldn't something like that spill over into a real life? i asked him. darrell opened his eyes, shook his head as if it were the dumbest question he'd ever heard it. well, he said he had nothing more to say on the matter. i let it go. it wasn't until after died that i really began to understand and how obsessed with guns darrell was. he had handled guns with his father on trips back to arkansas. his father joe considers himself a sportsman. he brought gerald to the levee by the arkansas river, where they set up cans and at them with 22 year. this is a target that was set up in their backyard in ferguson.

as he got older. gerald sometimes pilfered his dad's to shoot target practice in the backyard. once joe found an old barrel back there with bullet holes. i had to get on him saying don't do that joe told me it turns out that gerald had been buying handguns. this is something i didn't learn about until after his death. to do so. he walked to the now to the town next to called kinloch kinloch is actually a historic african-american commune really. that was the first black city incorporated in missouri during the segregation era. it was completely self-sustaining. and celebrities raised in kinloch include the actress jennifer lewis comedian -- gregory and u.s. congresswoman maxine waters. but after the airport. but after airport fire decimated

the population, the city is basically going back to nature. darryl had been hanging out there with guys selling illegal guns and drugs. so a picture of ferguson on the grass completely overgrown. his first purchase was an inexpensive, likely something cheap and unreliable. a small nine millimeter or 380, perhaps he later exchanged it a small amount of money to trade up the ladder for. a better gun jeryl to the same spot again and again. trading guns until he acquired the handgun of his dreams. a black 1911 semi-automatic pistol with brown wooden grip. he was so happy to have it, said his friend montréal fuller. darryl almost always had his 1911 with it should have been on him when they found him dead, but they never found it, said his friend. big and the cash in jewels was

left alone. but the 1911 was stolen off his body. that made people, some people wonder, was darryl killed for his gun? but i didn't know any of this back story when i received the call on august 2720 16 from a number i didn't recognize. hello, ben, are you sitting down? who is this it? turns out it was the mother of gerald's girlfriend. someone i never spoken with in my life. what happened? darryl has been shot. she. he's dead. after us. after gerald's, i went numb. i remained so through his funeral, which was attended by dozens of friends and family members. and four weeks to come. i no idea why he was killed.

and it appeared that the police didn't either. weeks turned into months. and my shock turned into anger as the killer to go unnamed that anger turned to guilt without knowing why he was killed. focus the blame on myself. to this day, the guilt has subsided. i was his brother after all the. big brothers big sisters program had no specific for the program. it was our bond that kept us together for over a decade. any formal obligations. but i believed it was my job to keep him safe and at that failed for years i stuck my head in the sand i thought gerald's killing must have been random. the must have mistaken him for another person or he must have accidentally gotten in the of someone else's despair. he was so good hearted that he couldn't possibly be tied up in

any dangerous business. there was no denying that he had a lot going against him in his life, but he had a big heart and a winning attitude and didn't seem possess an ounce of cynicism who could possibly want him dead. that's the question i set out to answer this book doing required me to find out what was happening behind the scenes in gerald's life, the stuff he never told me. it required me to reconnect drugged his last months and with almost everyone he knew well. when the police investigate into his death stalled, leaving daryl's family with no answers. i took matters into my own hands, employing my skill set as an investigative journalist to find the truth, i retraced his steps. dangerous st louis streets tracked down underworld figure

and pored over reams of police records. in the end what i discovered challenged everything i believed about your. it turns out he wasn't a happy, lucky kid. i always believed he was he grown paranoid in his final answering his front door while clutching his gun. he also had real enemies. never imagined. this story is more than a whodunit. learning the truth about gerald's killer required me to understand the troubled of saint louis and cities around the country. just like how discrimination and pervasive poverty has shaped life for millions. it also required me to my own privilege choice and mistakes. there were times i was terrified and considered abandoning this quest altogether. but ultimately, this book became most rewarding project i've ever

taken on. because though it's a story of tragedy, it's also a story of hope. it's a picture. gerald's whole extended family. my research taught me more about gerald than known during his life, and it convinced me that he was a truly remarkable kid. it brought me closer to his family and closer to my own. investigating gerald's death. also, help me understand the dual worlds that exist in all cities, how wealthy people rarely cross with those. excuse me? how wealthy people? rarely paths with those living in poverty amidst violence. it helped me see with my own eyes the inequalities i'd taken for granted. i've learned learned about the systems that conspired against gerald and how they might be torn down. this is from gerald candlelight

memorial. so that is everything. my my presentation about gerald i will take questions in a few minutes but i wanted to add another thing. it was about a year ago that my mother died, who many of you knew? katherine read. she grew up in the twin cities. and next weekend, my family scattering her ashes in itasca, which is one of her favorite places, which is one of her favorite places in the world. i read a rough draft of this book during her final days to her, and she passed before its publication. she helped me describe the landscape of animals and plants and attacks i owe it all to her. i saw an incredible right before she died in a rainbow, right after gerald died. when i see these phenomena now,

i remember these two people that i love so deeply and this is a nice picture of my mom. so that's a. there. so one more photo if anybody didn't get one. but yeah, just if anyone has any questions, i'm happy to answer them. i don't know how that works with the camera it's kind of like oc, so only their voice will and c span no big deal if you want to be physical if you want to appear on c, you have to come up here to take the question question.

i have a few questions. the first one is just you could talk a little bit about if at the end you talk about you think might be some solution as to some of this whole with gun violence and particularly the community or type of community that grew up in. and i was just wondering if there's if you could talk a little bit about that and if think if you think that there are any bills either being proposed that could be proposed that maybe could have saved him. thank you, emilie, for the good question. yeah, um, i read a book about the so-called iron pipeline how guns get into the country. um by and called ian grillo called blood gun money that was illuminating for me basically like a lot of these guns like the kind that daryl would buy

are made in eastern europe and they are imported the us legally as like sporting rifles sporting style rifles and then once they're here they're they make alterations on them to turn them into more like assault style rifles. and so these these guns are sold at gun shows and at gun stores and how they get onto the black market is through these so-called straw buyers who aren't buying them for themselves. they buy like loads of guns and then sell to whoever wants and the biggest you these guns not only get into places like st louis and know minneapolis st paul all over the us, but they also give to the mexican cartels in like a big, big way. and whenever there is a, you know, a mexican, there's like,

you know hundreds of, you know, acres or whatever that can be traced back to the us. and so the penalty being caught is the straw buyers basically a slap on the wrist and there's no jail involved. and so i think i don't know ins and outs of the current legislation being proposed, but more heavily penalized straw buyers would be very high on my list of suggestions is you know is only 19 like he shouldn't have been able to legally buy a gun. he shouldn't have had guns at all. you know and missouri is a particular really easy place to not only have guns, but to like wear them. so, you know, you even have to conceal them. so it's a really very volatile of circumstances that the, you

know, led to his death and and further it's sort of this mentality that having a gun makes you more and you know, particularly in african-american communities in particular after george floyd's death membership in like gun clubs and things like that, like way up in the black community. and i can know, can understand that feeling. but you if you look at statistics and you know sure everyone has heard this that having a gun makes less likely, you know, less safe and not more and. i and i particularly believe this, which are i believe that if he had never messed around with guns, if he never a gun, he would still be alive today. you know, as you'll see in the book, it was it was his own aggression. and that sort of precipitated his own death, you know,

involving handguns. so that is my long answer. the gentleman the back. so what congratulations on the book, by the way, what what in the book like gives hope what in the book gives me have. oh rough question rough question. i think you know to me the book the main theme of the book is poverty and daryl's family has had generations of poverty and it's been exacerbated by drug abuse know mental health, gun violence and in st louis in particular it's extremely segregated and not just racially by class and. i don't think it's quite as bad here in the twin cities, but i

think just generally the sort of upper middle class, you know, people like many people in this room, won't name any names. but like, you know, we don't we don't have a of contact with how the other half lives you know, people who are living living in poverty. i think there is kind of a fatal is and i think really easy to believe that like this is the way it's always been and this is the way it's always going to be and i think meetings are real and spending all those years with him, meeting his family, that's like taught me otherwise. you know, it's taught me, you know, these problems are not insurmountable. it's like that. if there are like good job, if there are, you know, people have some to live, something to live for that people really can

transcend their situations. it starts with the people who are in power being of what life is really and being you know, knowing what changes sort of have be made on a systemic level i mean, you know, during covid, we saw a lot of you, you know, you might call it like universal basic income style. you wealth distribution. these are great economic terms i know i'm using right now but but know and you saw that it really can make a difference in people's lives and that's the kind of thing would be in favor of and and you know the only positive to me that gave me hope is just just about daryl. you know, he he never wanted me to to know real he didn't ever want to know about bad. he did. and for me, myself, i feel like

i've lived a sort of a version of that too with my friends, you know, i don't i don't want them to know when i'm doing bad. i just want them to know about, you know, when are great in my life. and i've started to take the attitude that everybody is struggling in their way and the more kind of real you can be with people, the more it might them. and you're brave to put your real this in your book. thank you, jesse i appreciate it. um, anything else? emily, you said you had multiple questions, but i only heard one of the second one. i think you kind of touched. but i'll just ask if there's anything else you would add. i was wondering, with all your discussions with drill's dad afterwards, what you thought that he say about things that could happen to change this cycle of poverty and violence? you of just touched on it but i don't that you mentioned good jobs but i don't know if there's anything else that you could imagine from point of view.

well, i have talked to sheryl's dad, joe, about this he was at my other reading. he introduced me in saint louis there was it was very sweet. i mean, i haven't you know, i mean, like the what we spent the most time talking about was the criminal justice system. and that's something that's really relevant in his life. you know, when he moved ferguson in 2005, it was like a relatively safe place. and he saw the neighborhood kind of disintegrate before his eyes and and it was kind of it was taken over the crips gang and know there were shootings and, um, and then, you know, michael brown was killed in ferguson in 2014 and, and the, you know, defund the police became a popular mantra after more after george floyd. and there was something called the ferguson effect people talking about also known as the

minneapolis effect was this idea that like the police are not doing their jobs in the wake of some of these police killings because they're afraid of the the backlash and, you know, so these are all really, really complicated issues are above my pay grade perhaps. but when talk to someone like joe cleveland and the rest of his family, you know, they they they honestly why more police you they wanted like a sense of law order in their community which had really sort of gone and you know it's it's a complicated thing because obviously they they don't want, you know, just recrimination and they don't want you police brutality, but like something, you know kind of cool happened in ferguson after, michael brown's death like before that. ferguson is a traditionally white community and the

population became majority black. you know, around the time gerald family was moving in. but people in power were all still white. and so the mayor and the city council people, the school board, the police chief, but in the years following michael brown's death there, a new mayor who's, black, the police was black. the police force became starting to look more. the demographics of the city and the cleveland families. they're not having as much problems with the police you know, they say there's no more like walking while black sort of persecuted germans and stuff like that. so so that's the kind of stuff we talked about. so. i'm curious, ben, if you and i think it's on if your boys remember darrell and if you've talked to them about what happened and how talked to them about it, that's a really good

question. yeah, they knew him very well. and when he died, you know, he was killed like we really know how to go about what to do. so we just did nothing. i mean, isn't that how it is with parenting when you don't know what to do, you just nothing. so we didn't tell him. we didn't tell them that he was killed. and then eventually they were like, darrell. like, what's happening with darrell. and and then i think just said something vague about how he died without going into details. but now, you know, my oldest is ten. and so we have started like engaging with about how he died why and and it's rough you know but it's important for them to know and so. i guess that's what we did i don't know if it was the right thing.

well, thank you again, everyone i will sign copies wherever i don't know where. right here. okay great. and then so yeah, we're to tiffany's sports bar in forward park for the parkway, i think you have a question? yeah. i guess if you have a question. yeah. how many siblings you said there were a lot of siblings and. yeah curious whether the violence what i mean whether because i'm assuming at the end of the book, you know, who murdered him and so that's their community i'm assuming this person was from their community and if they're just how how the siblings are doing i don't know if the mom ever got i don't even need to know that but was i can't remember where he was in age with the siblings but just how that affected community and whether you see any hope for any

change that um or whether it's perpetuates. yeah well was one of ten children and i was kind of in the middle his siblings i two other of his siblings died too. one died from basically complications to diabetes and the other had a weird like c had a situation where he had like a seizure while walking down the road and fell into this pit water in arkansas and like drowned one night. so they've a lot of tragedy in that family. they've all like, you know done they've just it's been really hard for everyone and. joel's older brother just had a baby and named james a baby giraffe, which is very nice. um, so, you know, as the killer and the cycle of violence. yeah, that's of like the the coda of the book is about this cycle of violence and there was actually a famous rap star who

got tied up in all of this, too name was huey and he had a hit called pop lock and drop it, which i'll play for anyone who goes to tiffany's tonight. if you don't know the song, then he was killed just like literally blocks away from daryl was killed, and this was, you know, like a billboard or like chart topping rap or and his death was never solved either. and it turns out that were like a lot of the same people all in the mix with these two murders. and that kind of plays into this sort of perpetuating cycle of violence. so, yeah, unfortunately it is really not slow down down. yeah. so all right. thank you again, everybody. and we'll see you over at tiffany's.