Man Gets 25 Years to Life for Alleged Food Heist

Inside the prison that holds mass murderers Juan Corona and Charles Manson, a 37-year-old derelict named Gregory Taylor is serving 25 years to life.

But Taylor didn’t kill, or even injure, anyone. His crime? Attempting to break into a church. He told the arresting officer that he was trying to take food.

The case recalls “Les Miserables,” the classic Victor Hugo novel in which Jean Valjean is imprisoned for stealing bread, said one of the three judges who ruled on Taylor’s appeal in April.

The other two, however, upheld the conviction.

Taylor’s sentence stems from the California three-strikes law intended to reduce crime by taking habitual criminals off the streets. Two “serious or violent” felonies, followed by one felony of any sort, require a sentence of 25 years to life.

Taylor had the requisite record. He once snatched a purse containing $10 and a bus pass from a woman on the sidewalk. A year later, he and a buddy, armed only with macho attitudes, tried to rob a man on the street.

That the second conviction was 14 years ago mattered not at all. Without the previous convictions, his church break-in would have drawn no more than three years. Instead, he’ll be eligible for parole in 2022, the year he turns 60.

His remaining chance is the state Supreme Court, which has not yet decided whether to consider his case.

The three-strikes law was approved by voters in 1994, the year after the kidnap-murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas by a paroled felon. Critics maintain that by curtailing the sentencing powers of judges, the law was bound to lead to unjust punishments.

Taylor grew up in the tough South Central section of Los Angeles, one of nine boys born between 1949 and 1966 to a nurse who quit work and went on welfare to care for her children.

His stern, religious mother gathered the boys each Sunday for church, hoping to keep them on track.

“I didn’t want to go,” Taylor recalls, looking out the visiting room windows of Corcoran State Prison. “I’d say, ‘I’m sick.’ But it never worked.”

During the week, the boys heard spontaneous sermons from their mother’s two sisters, both ministers.

His older brother, Dwight, who went on to play outfield for the Kansas City Royals and other professional baseball teams, “taught me how to play sports,” Taylor says. But the curious teen would slip away to check out what the other boys were doing.

“At recess, we’d go in this little room and be shooting dice,” he recalls. “Dwight would come looking for me, and I’d hide in the bathroom stall with my feet up. He’d find me and smell my hands and ask me, ‘You been smoking cigarettes?’ ”

The strict upbringing couldn’t shield Taylor from bad influences. At age 12 he was initiated into the Crips, joining periodic gang battles against rival Bloods. It was mostly fistfights, he says, “back in the days before the drive-by shootings.”

He quit school in the 12th grade, had some run-ins with the law while still a teenager, and spent time in the California Youth Authority. In his 20s, he did a total of about two years in state prison for the purse-snatching and the attempted street robbery.

Once out, he met Vivian Fox, a new tenant in his brother’s apartment building. He helped her unload her furniture and soon moved in himself. Vivian got pregnant, but the relationship didn’t last.

“We had an argument, and I left,” Taylor says. “When I went back, she had my clothes out on the porch.”

Taylor’s daughter, Tamra, is 13 now. He says he hasn’t seen her for seven or eight years, misses her and thinks of her often.

After his family broke up, Taylor began sleeping from time to time in the laundry room or an alcove at St. Joseph’s, a Roman Catholic Church on 12th Street, a few blocks from the Los Angeles fashion and flower districts.

By day, the area is an open-air bazaar. Mannequins in rayon blouses and taffeta gowns line the streets. Bolts of fabric stand in rows next to shelves of baseball caps. The smell of hot dogs flows from food stands along sidewalks bustling with bargain hunters.

Taylor found part-time work in the district, doing construction jobs at flower shops, running machines at a clothing store and, although he had no driver’s license, making deliveries for various companies.

He also volunteered to help church workers feed the homeless and occasionally worked as a guard at church weddings.

Ten years ago, at the church, Taylor met the Rev. Allan McCoy, a Franciscan priest. They got together often to talk over baseball scores, family problems, spirituality. Sometimes McCoy served Taylor sandwiches or drove him to his mother’s house in south Los Angeles. Sometimes he gave Taylor money to stay at a hotel.

“He was like a father to me,” Taylor says.

But as the friendship grew, so did Taylor’s heroin and cocaine addiction.

When he had the money, he would get a hotel room for a few days and shoot up. When he couldn’t afford a room, he says, he would sometimes crawl into a tent under a highway to shoot up.

His brothers tried to help. Michael drove him to a drug rehab center where Taylor completed a 90-day program and stayed clean for a few years. But it didn’t last.

“I’d do good for a year, nine, 10 months,” he says. Then it was back to the streets, he says, “not doing crimes, doing drugs.”

He was stuck in a cycle, he says, his sad downward-angled eyes casting about the visiting room. “I’d do a little and I’d want more. That’s a bad feeling, when you come down off that stuff. I’d ask myself, ‘Why? Why?’ It’s crazy.”

Sometimes Taylor would wander over to the church and tell McCoy, “I’m tired, burned out.” The priest would give him a ride back to his mother’s house, where he would rest, dry out.

Sometimes the police picked him up for drug use, and in 1992 he was convicted of cocaine possession. Put on parole, he violated its terms by not checking in with his officer, he says, because he knew he would fail the drug test.

About 4 a.m. on July 11, 1997, two guards paused in the shadows and watched a tall, slender man in dirty clothes and worn-out tennis shoes bend over the bottom of the back door to St. Joseph’s. He was working a piece of 4-by-4 into a crack in the door.

The door led to a kitchen where industrial-size refrigerators chill tubs of cottage cheese, and shelves of cups and plates line a wall above a row of deep sinks.

The guards, as they later told it, watched for a couple of minutes as the man pried at the door. Then they yelled “Stop!” Gregory Taylor froze, then pulled the board from the door, leaned it against the wall and, following instructions, put his hands behind his head.

The arresting police officer later testified that Taylor said he “was trying to go in the kitchen to get something to eat.”

Taylor continues to deny the whole thing. “I would never go into that place to steal,” he says, adding that the break-in was concocted by one of the guards who had argued with him over sleeping in the church alcove.

At trial, Taylor’s lawyer, Graciela Martinez, argued that even if Taylor had tried to break into the church, he was guilty of no more than trespassing. The kitchen was where church workers fed the homeless, Martinez said, and it wasn’t a break-in if Taylor believed he had permission to enter to get food.

But a jury convicted him, a judge handed down the law-mandated sentence, and the appeals court agreed.

“I was devastated,” Martinez says. “This was the most painful case I’ve ever handled because it was so unjust. He did not have a violent nature. He was just poor and hungry. Now he has 25 to life.”

“He was a gentleman throughout the trial,” she recalls. “Even at the end, when the sentence was imposed. He thanked the judge, then turned, he was crying by this point, and he thanked Father McCoy. Then he thanked me.”

Alex Ricciardulli, Los Angeles County deputy public defender, says Taylor is not the kind of defendant lawmakers had in mind when they wrote the three-strikes law.

“The law was designed for repeat felons, not repeat nuisances,” he said. “The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.”

Prosecutor Dale Cutler sees it differently.

Taylor “failed at both probation and parole and did more than that,” he said. “What he violated was the trust of a man [McCoy] who showed him nothing but kindness over a nine-year period.”

Today, Taylor lives among some of the country’s most violent offenders. He works out every other day and is eager to get reassigned to a new prison job.

He quit his last one because “they wanted me to kill gophers,” he says. “I can’t do that. That’s nature.”

McCoy moves ghostlike about the church grounds in his long, brown Franciscan robe cinched at the waist with a gold cord. His normally gentle eyes catch fire as he speaks of the sentence he considers unjust, of the friend he knows “as a peaceful man, a man who helped down at the center with the feeding of the street people.”

“What about the concept of human dignity?” he demands, lightly pounding the table with his fist.

McCoy and Taylor remain friends. They exchange letters.

Taylor draws happy faces on his.