GANGSTERS & OUTLAWS > COPS & OTHER CHARACTERS

Mary Ann Collura

As If He Never Was

Omar Marti

There isn't a trace of him on Paulison Avenue near Oak Street. Gangstas* like to memorialize each other. But not here. Not for Omar Marti. There isn't a single line of graffiti sprayed on a wall, not a crude crown painted in day-glow colors to indicate that Omar Marti ever existed. On the third floor of the ramshackle old mustard colored house where he lived with his father and brother, it's as if Omar Marti never was.

As New Jersey Monthly put it; "Gone is any trace of the elaborate pot-growing operation police say he ran up there, the long rain gutters filled with water pumped up by a hose run from his father's first floor kitchen. Knock on what had been Omar Marti's third floor apartment, and a shirtless old man, his head and body shaking from some disorder or other, opens the door a crack, peers outside, and in broken English, apologizes and says he never heard of Omar Marti."

Outside, two young girls bound down the front stoop, still wearing their Catholic school uniforms. They moved in to what had been Omar Marti's father's apartment just a couple of months ago. "No," the older one says. "I don't know who he is. Who is he?"

There is, it seems, only one guy in the neighborhood who remembers Omar Marti at all. His name is Ray Gomez and he grew up with Marti. He doesn't remember him as a gangsta. He remembers him a quiet kid with good parents, who used to love to go fishing with his dad, and would, if he got lucky, try to hustle the fish he caught on the street. "I think one time my mom had got some fish from him, but it wasn't a regular thing," Gomez said. But a gangsta and a drug dealer who would, by his own account, rather die in a blaze of gunfire than be arrested for some outstanding warrant? "That took me totally by surprise," Gomez said. "I was like, Omar going out in a blaze of glory like that? That's crazy. I would never have thought."

*A modern corruption of "Gangster".