The movers started the trucks early in the morning, diesel engines grumbling as the men gathered with cigarettes and mugs of black coffee. The city was soggy from the previous night’s rain. Some of the men were young and athletic with pierced ears. Others were barrel-chested and middle-aged, slapping their leather gloves on their jeans. The oldest among them was Tim, lean and sour-faced with reddish-brown skin, stubble, and a fresh pack of Salems in his front pocket. Almost all of the men were black and wore boots and work jackets with the name of their company—Eagle Moving and Storage—and various clever slogans: “Moving’s for the Birds,” “Service with a Grunt,” “Order Some Carryout.”
The Brittain brothers—Tom, Dave, and Jim—had taken over the company from their father. When he had started it back in 1958, there were only one or two eviction moves a week. He ran a two-truck operation out of his home and would pick up men from the rescue mission when he needed an extra hand. Fifty years later, the company employed thirty-five people, most of them full-time movers; owned a fleet of vans and eighteen-foot trucks; and operated out of a three-story, 108,000-square-foot building that had originally held a furniture factory. Forty percent of their business came from eviction moves.
Eagle’s moving crew worked with two sheriff deputies. The deputies would knock on the door to announce the eviction; the movers would follow, clearing out the home. Landlords footed the bill. Before a landlord could activate the Sheriff’s Office, he had to contract with a bonded moving company. There were four such companies in Milwaukee, Eagle being the largest. To hire one of Eagle’s five-man crews, a landlord had to put down a $350 deposit, the average cost of an eviction job. Eagle then handed over a Letter of Authority, which the landlord would take to the Sheriff’s Office, along with the necessary court documents and an additional $130 sheriff’s fee. The sheriff had ten days to remove the tenants. A formal eviction that involved sheriffs and movers could run around $600, when you included the court filing charge and process-server fee. Landlords could add these costs to a judgment but often never got them back.
Dave Brittain, a white man with graying hair and a long stride, gave the men the signal, and they climbed into the trucks. Tim drove the van, and when Dave went out on moves, he sat in the passenger’s seat.
The daily eviction route began with the northernmost address and pushed south. Eagle’s trucks would lumber through the North Side ghetto in the morning and early afternoon. Then they would cross the Menominee River Valley and course through the predominantly Hispanic streets of the near South Side before ending their day in the trailer parks on the white far South Side.
The sheriffs met the moving crew outside an apartment complex on Silver Spring Drive. John, the older of the two deputies and the one who most looked the part—broad shoulders, thick jowls, sunglasses, cop mustache, gum—gave the door a knock. A small black woman answered, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. When John looked around and saw a tidy house with dishes drying in the rack and not a box packed, he turned to his partner and asked, “Are we in the right house?” He placed a call back to the office.
When Sheriff John walked into a house and saw mattresses on the floor, grease on the ceiling, cockroaches on the walls, and clothes, hair extensions, and toys scattered about, he didn’t double-check. Sometimes tenants had already abandoned the place, leaving behind dead animals and rotting food. Sometimes the movers puked. “The first rule of evictions,” Sheriff John liked to say, “is never open the fridge.” When things were especially bad, when an apartment was covered in trash or dog shit, or when one of the guys would find a needle, Dave would nod and say, “Junk in,” leaving the mess for the landlord.
John hung up the phone and waved the movers in. At that moment, the house no longer belonged to the occupants, and the movers took it over. Grabbing dollies, hump straps, and boxes, the men began clearing every room. They worked quickly and without hesitation. There were no children in the house that morning, but there were toys and diapers. The woman who answered the door moved slowly, looking overcome. A sob broke through her blank face when she opened the refrigerator and saw that the movers had cleaned it out, even packing the ice trays.2 She found her things piled in the back alley. Sheriff John looked to the sky as it began to rain and then looked back at Tim. “Snowstorm. Rainstorm. We don’t give a shit,” Tim said, lighting a Salem.
No one was home for the next eviction, a two-story baby-blue house. Half the time, the tenants weren’t home. Some moved out before the sheriffs arrived. Others didn’t realize their day had come. A rarefied bunch called the Sheriff’s Office, asking if their address was on that day’s eviction list. But many were unprepared and bewildered when the sheriff came knocking. Some claimed never to have received notice or pointed out, accurately, that the notice did not announce a date or even a range of dates when the eviction would take place. The deputies would shrug. They figured the tenants were just playing the system, staying as long as they could. Dave’s assessment was subtler. He thought a kind of collective denial set in among tenants facing eviction, as if they were unable to accept or imagine that one day soon, two armed sheriff’s deputies would show up, order them out, and usher in a team of movers who would make it look like they had never lived there. Psychologists might agree with him, citing research showing that under conditions of scarcity people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future, often at great cost. Or they might quote How the Other Half Lives, published over a century ago: “There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort….The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come…it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.”3
Then there were cases that didn’t require any sort of psychological sophistication, cases where landlords purposefully conned or misled tenants.
Dave told Brontee, the rookie, to climb through a window of the baby-blue house and let them in. Inside, they found a Dell computer, a clean leather sofa, and new shoes lining the closets. Someone had left the television on. Dave pointed to the show playing on it and laughed. “Martha fucking Stewart!”
A few minutes later, an older-model Jaguar, forest green, pulled into the driveway. Four young black men hopped out.
“What is going on?” one asked.
“You’ve been foreclosed,” John replied, holding up the paper.
“What? We just paid rent this month! Lord, have mercy.”
One of the men marched straight into the house and quickly emerged cradling a shoebox. He held the box with both arms, the way a running back protects the football when the call is up the middle, then locked it in the Jaguar’s trunk.
The sheriff deputies stepped away to confer. “These people got screwed,” John told his partner. “The landlord took their rent but didn’t pay the mortgage.”
“Yeah, but John, this is a drug house,” the other deputy replied.
John raised his eyebrows, and the sheriffs started for the kitchen. Tim was there, assembling boxes.
“Tim, this a drug house?” John whispered.
Without a word, Tim pulled out a kitchen drawer, as if he had been in the house before. Inside were small Ziploc bags and razor blades. The deputies looked at each other. Sometimes in situations like this, when a landlord foreclosure caught tenants completely unawares, John would refuse to carry out the judge’s order that day, buying tenants more time. But he decided not to stop this one and not to ask to see what was in the shoebox.4 Narcotics wasn’t his beat, and he thought the faultless foreclosure was punishment enough.
The next stop was a “junk in.” The one after that was quick. The old black man didn’t have much. “Man, this makes no sense,” he kept saying as one of the movers dumped the contents of his bedroom dresser into a box. As Dave headed to the van for the next job, he pointed to the man’s pile of possessions, now slick with rain, and told John, “Some people paint on canvases. This is my art.” The pile at the next eviction was even more impressive. It included a half-eaten birthday cake and a balloon still perky with helium.