Page 4 of 5
Similarly, LaPierre's old friend and lawyer, Eric Safire, says there's more to his former client than what emerges from the public record and the mouths of terrified neighbors.
To make his point, Safire shares a story from a few years ago. The attorney was contacted by an extremely wealthy man from the East Coast and asked to help locate the man's underage daughter, who had gotten hooked on coke and other drugs and run off with a drug dealer. She was shacked up somewhere in San Francisco.
One day, Safire says, he was complaining to LaPierre about how uncooperative the cops were being. LaPierre said, "I'll find her."
And he did. LaPierre put the word out and, according to Safire, dove into the drug underworld of San Francisco and rescued the girl, sending her back home.
Even among the reams of unfavorable information in the public record are small clues of LaPierre's humanity -- and tenderness.
When he was arrested for domestic violence last year, his mother and others wrote the court asking that LaPierre be granted bail. The mother was at home, recovering from cancer. In shaky hand, she argued that Jon was her primary caretaker.
"[Seton Hospital] released me to his care after he attended their classes on my food, the proper beverages -- the walking etc. ... the stairs," she wrote. "24 hour care at all times -- I use a walker and take oxygen 24 hours every day. He helps me get to the bathroom.
"He prepares my food. Sees to it that I have what I need."
Jay Sciarra has no doubt that LaPierre loves his mother and his children. That's not what has been chewing at his gut as he has made trips to his new home in the months preceding his May 1 move-in date.
In the front of his mind, seared onto his gray matter like a brand, is information he's read in the files at the criminal courts. By late March, he still hasn't met Jon LaPierre. And he isn't sure what he'd say or do if he did. How do you tell your new neighbor that you've researched his criminal record and have developed a deep fear of him?
On April Fools' Day, Sciarra drives to his new house and surveys the property. He runs into Jon LaPierre's older brother, Kevin, and senses an opportunity to broach the subject of Jon, his record, or at least, his reputation.
"He's moody but he's good people," Kevin says, according to Sciarra. With Kevin is a friend of Jon's named Ivan, who, Sciarra says, is "the prototype biker brute."
Kevin invites Sciarra in-to the LaPierres' garage to show off two Harley-Davidson motorcycles. "I was visibly uptight," Sciarra says later, hugging himself with his arms and shaking to imitate fear. Later in the day, Jon drops by. All attempts at conversation fail.
"He's nonverbal. He grunted," Sciarra says.
Sciarra has a complicated view of the neighborhood bully. He shifts between theories from minute to minute. First, LaPierre is a redeemable figure. The next, he's an archetypal brute.
But if LaPierre is the thug that his public record indicates, how does Sciarra fit in to this new neighborhood? "If there's an observation to be made here it's Joseph Conrad's idea about the interloper, the newcomer who is resented for having more," Sciarra says. "I'm the yuppie interloper in his world. I'm the parvenu. That's a potentially dangerous situation."
What mostly concerns Sciarra is a clash of prejudice and perception. "They probably perceive me as someone who pulls down six figures," he says over a lunch of sweetbreads with mushrooms and artichoke sauce. "What they don't know is that I am a musician and a producer, and I have to do software consulting to pay for that, because I haven't made it yet. We have a problem with perceptions right now, and if those perceptions slip, something might really go wrong, and then it's a matter of how we both react. I know how they will react -- with brute force. And I will do what I can, within the law."
The potential for conflict is so high, Sciarra says, that he is considering not moving into his new house. He is not alone in this assessment of the situation. The couple who looked at the house before him were all set to buy it when some neighbors told them about LaPierre. "I heard from neighbors that were spooked," says the man who almost bought the house. "I had heard that there were guns and gunshots. They said there were sleazy characters pulling up at all hours, and lots of cars."
But Sciarra is stuck. He's closed the deal. Either he reaches some accommodation with LaPierre, or he gets the hell out of Dodge.
"I don't want to antagonize them," he says. "I have a vested self-interest in keeping the peace. And fear, you can smell it. It's that sniffing-dog thing. I don't want fear to be part of that equation."
It's a sunny afternoon in late April -- weeks after Sciarra checked the criminal files and vented his fears of the neighborhood bully -- and the parvenu is again up on Bernal Heights preparing to maybe move in.
He has already shared his concerns about LaPierre with Capt. Bruce and, he says, the police commander has advised him not to move in.
Next door, LaPierre's friend Ivan is standing on the sidewalk, and he calls Sciarra over. Word has gotten out that a reporter has been asking questions, and that Sciarra has been talking. Just then, LaPierre walks up.
Sciarra has no choice now. He has to confront his fear. He tells LaPierre that he's talked to the reporter. And what's more, he has inspected the court files. Frankly, he says, he's scared.
Showing 1-2 of 2
