It's 9 p.m. at a Dunkin' Donuts in Northeast Philadelphia. A husky man in the corner, wearing a white hard hat, is planning his night. A cup of coffee and a cell phone by his side, he sorts through a pile of index cards that remind him of the people he needs to visit. Soon after, Greg Bucceroni, a stocky, bald man arrives, playfully flirts with the cashiers as he orders his usual coffee, then turns to greet his friend. Once Kimmins gathers his belongings, the pair exits the shop.
Every night, Kimmins and Bucceroni meet at the Dunkin' Donuts in Fishtown. They drive around the city's worst neighborhoods, stopping to talk to the citizens most at risk of becoming criminals and victims. They are crime fighters, but the tools in their arsenal don't include weapons or bulletproof vests. Through mentoring and staging vigils, these men are getting drug dealers off the city streets and preventing youths from entering into lives of crime. Kimmins and Bucceroni are part of an unofficial network of volunteer activists who are cleaning up Philly's most dangerous streets by forging personal connections with residents most in need of help. While there are some 23,000 members in Philadelphia's 732 official neighborhood watch groups, the men act independently of any group or organization when they make their nightly rounds.
Kimmins, 63, covers his curly mop of brown hair with the white hard hat, which is adorned with stickers and pins from local law enforcement agencies and activist groups. He serves as chairman for the city's Citizens Advisory Board for Probation and Parole and leads an organization called Mantua Against Drugs. He has been fighting drug violence for 22 years and gang violence for nearly twice as long. Earlier in his life, he worked as both a milkman and a middle school history teacher. While his first name is Bernard, he goes by C.B. - short for "Cool Bernie," a nickname one of his students gave him.
Kimmins says that he earned a master's degree from Temple University, attended one year of law school at Villanova University and is only a dissertation shy of his doctorate. Kimmins says that he's been "kind of homeless" for the past few years. Andee, who is the mother of his first daughter Brynne, has been giving him a place in her suburban Broomall apartment to stay for the past year, though they sleep in different bedrooms. The location is convenient for Andee, who works at the Lawrence Park Shopping Center Dollar Tree store just steps away.
Being out in Broomall isn't ideal for Kimmins though. Since his 1992 Oldsmobile has been in the shop for the past couple of months, he's been taking the SEPTA 112 bus every morning. He boards it outside the Hair Cuttery (next to the same Dollar Tree where Andee works) and takes it to 69th Street Terminal, where he transfers to the "El Train" for the rest of the ride into the city. The trip takes over an hour.
He does it because he believes that his work is making a difference, not to earn a living. He makes about $75 per week through his work for Mantua Against Drugs. He uses this money to pay his transportation and cell phone expenses. Kimmins often relies on financial support from Bucceroni, who pays for the meals and cups of coffee they share together.
Kimmins is "a living legend," according to Bucceroni, but "he's broke, he's got bad credit, and he's got to take public transportation." The younger activist said it "really breaks my heart . to see C.B. not knowing where he's going to get his next cup of coffee." The 43-year-old Bucceroni, on the other hand, comes from a markedly different background than Kimmins.
After running away from home at a young age, Bucceroni became involved in legally questionable activities until he had a change of heart in his mid-teens and decided to turn his life around. "I was at the fork in the road," Bucceroni said. "I realized that it was going to get harder to get out, so I decided to get out when I could, and I never regretted it."
And although the transition took years to complete, he eventually transformed from gangster-wannabe to a member of both the Guardian Angels and Men United for a Better Philadelphia, two groups of volunteers who patrol city streets to prevent crime. In his earlier days, Bucceroni worked as a part-time cop in Gloucester and Camden, New Jersey. But now, like Kimmins, Bucceroni doesn't get paid for the work he does every night. His other two jobs, however, provide him with enough money to pay the bills for the Philly CarShare Toyota Prius he rents for the patrols.
During the day, Bucceroni conducts security checks on scrap yards around the city and works for the Adolescent Violence Reduction Program. Juvenile offenders are referred to him by the city's court system, and it's his job to check in on them to make sure they're going to school and meeting with their parole officer.
"When that kid does well, that means that I'm doing well as a mentor," Bucceroni said. "If he fails, that means I've failed."
If Philadelphia has any shot at curbing the disturbing trend of violent crime - 392 people were murdered in 2007 - Kimmins and Bucceroni will play a vital role, says Kimberly Byrd, the Philadelphia Police Department's executive officer and top aide to Commissioner Sylvester Johnson.
"The efforts of C.B. and Greg Bucceroni have helped the police department tremendously," Byrd wrote in an e-mail. "Whether it is a prayer vigil or a march for peace led by them, their support of the officers has helped to change the negative thinking by the community" about police work.
Maureen Rush, Penn's Vice-President for Public Safety, echoed Byrd's praise of the activists. "People are so busy today that there's a lack of volunteerism," Rush says. Activists like Kimmins and Bucceroni have the ability to "send a message to. the bad guys that [they] will not tolerate this kind of action."
Kimmins and Bucceroni's first stop on a recent Sunday night was a rowhouse on a dimly lit North Philadelphia block near the corner of 29th and Thompson streets. Bucceroni, wearing a black sweatshirt, blue cargo pants and an Under Armour skull cap, knocked on the door and waited a few minutes. The door opened to a dark interior and the sound of multiple voices, and then Gary, a teenager, came outside.
"He cares about me," said Gary, of the activist.
He says he hears a lot of gunshots in his neighborhood. Shootings claimed the lives of his brother and two cousins, and Gary was once arrested in school for 'jumping' one of his peers. But now, he's joined a junior basketball league at the suggestion of Bucceroni, who has been mentoring him since receiving a call for help from his mother.
"Here's a kid who would have been another statistic of the penal system, but he's stayed in school and wants to go to college," Bucceroni said.
Bucceroni, whose father died when he was young, says he relates to the kids he mentors, many of whom he says call him "Steve from Jerry Springer" because of his bald head and muscular build. "A lot of times, these kids have no father figure in their life," he says. "Me and C.B., we become that figure, as mentors."
Kimmins agrees, saying that he and Bucceroni offer these kids "hope that there's a way out."
After about five minutes, Gary heads back inside and the activists are on their way to another section of the city.
The two men say that their work takes them into dangerous areas, but they can deal with it.
"Greg and I are the stand-up people. We're not intimidated," said Kimmins. He stays out on the streets even if he's "soaking wet or overheated or frozen in the snow." He notes that his life has been threatened several times, but he says that he always responds with confidence.
Sam Porter, another activist and Boys and Girls Club counselor, says he used to think Kimmins was "absolutely out of his mind" for reacting to threats the way he does, but Porter realizes now that Kimmins's boldness is one of the main reasons for his success. It "made him what he is today - one of the most outspoken people in this entire city," he says.
Death threats often come when Kimmins is holding a vigil on a corner or outside a house known for drug activity. "Vigils are a powerful tool," Kimmins says. "Marches are one thing - they're loud. but vigils are where you stop and you stand still and you take over a corner. you stop their business for a couple of hours."
Recently, he and some fellow activists stood outside a house that was known for drug activity. They used a bullhorn to alert occupants that they knew about the activity and refused to leave until they came out of the house. Eventually, the offenders, who were squatters and didn't pay any utility bills, came outside and threatened to kill Kimmins. He went back the next night, and the night after that. He didn't stop, until one night, the dealers and addicts weren't there anymore.
"We got rid of that drug house in two weeks," he tells me. "It took the neighbors ten years and they couldn't do anything about it."
Occasionally, situations actually do get violent in this line of work. Two years ago, a man living in the rundown Parker Spruce Hotel at 13th and Locust streets came outside and punched Kimmins in the face while he was staging a vigil outside. Bucceroni's stories are even more violent. He's been "shot at, stabbed, hit over the head with stuff." Bucceroni estimates that between five and ten Philadelphia activists are seriously injured every year as a result of their work.
One of the reasons for this violence, Bucceroni says, is the psychology of low-income African Americans in this city.
"This is a learned behavior, that their lives don't mean anything," he says. "They consider themselves [less] of a human than white people."
He blames the easy accessibility of guns and issues like anger management for the high level of violence.
He says there is also a lack of motivation to escape their troubled communities. "No one's tired of the shithole," he says. "They just keep shitting in the toilet without flushing."
Bucceroni and Kimmins say that people want them to help clean up their communities, and as hard as they try, they can't do it without help. Bucceroni said he's saddened by the citizens' "lack of effort to improve the community." Unfortunately, he and Kimmins often don't see the fruit of their labors immediately, if ever.
Later that Sunday night, five prostitutes stand on Kensington Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia. Bucceroni pulls his car over to the curb and calls out to one he recognizes. The woman, Selena, remembers Bucceroni, who lives in this neighborhood, so he gets out to talk to her and her companion.
"To me, this is desperation," she says. "I might jerk a guy off. The worst I've ever done was give a blow job."
Bucceroni and Kimmins say Selena came to a rehabilitation center on the street to seek help for her addictions, but instead met fellow addicts and ended up relapsing. As a drug addict, she immediately spends what she makes on heroin, Xanax and Oxycontin. Until Selena and others like her ask for help, all Bucceroni and Kimmins say they can do is try to convince them that there is a way out of the cycle. Prostitution, Bucceroni says, follows drug dealing as one of the most serious problems in Philadelphia. In this area, drugs are hard to avoid, with each corner being known for a certain type: heroin, cocaine, weed or pills.
According to Penn criminology professor Lawrence Sherman, there is no actual evidence that community activists can reduce the homicide rate, while Bucceroni and Kimmins are convinced that they are effective.
"Somewhere along the line, this does work," Kimmins said. "I've seen the results; I've seen these kids or these families. come to me years later and tell me how important it was."
And sometimes, the public pays tribute to their actions. Kimmins received the Martin Luther King Community Involvement Recognition Award in 1999. The accolade, presented at Penn by former University President Judith Rodin and social activist Al Sharpton, honored Kimmins' work in the West Philadelphia community. Last summer, Dunkin' Donuts and the Philadelphia Eagles named him one of the 75 Greatest Living Philadelphians.
However, Bucceroni says he'd rather be out on the streets than at awards banquets. "To me, that's wasted time," he says. According to Bucceroni. the recognition he gives himself is all he needs. "I'm my greatest inspiration, 'cause I've surpassed any mentor I've ever had," he says. "I look in the mirror everyday and say, 'How can I do it better?"
