Bleary-eyed from 16 hours on a Greyhound bus, he strolled into the stadium running on fumes. Heād barely slept in two days. The ride he was supposed to hitch from Charlotte to Indianapolis canceled at the last minute, and for a few nervy hours, Antonio Barnes started to have his doubts. The trip heād waited 40 years for looked like it wasnāt going to happen.
But as he moved through the concourse at Lucas Oil Stadium an hour before the Colts faced the Raiders, it started to sink in. His pace quickened. His eyes widened. His voice picked up.
āI got chills right now,ā he said. āChills.ā
Barnes, 57, is a lifer, a Colts fan since the Baltimore days. He wore No. 25 on his pee wee football team because thatās the number Nesby Glasgow wore on Sundays. He was a talent in his own right, too: one of his old coaches nicknamed him āBirdā because of his speed with the ball.
Back then, heād catch the city bus to Memorial Stadium, buy a bleacher ticket for $5 and watch Glasgow and Bert Jones, Curtis Dickey and Glenn Doughty. When he didnāt have any money, heād find a hole in the fence and sneak in. After the game was over, heād weasel his way onto the field and try to meet the players. āThey were tall as trees,ā he remembers.
He remembers the last game he went to: Sept. 25, 1983, an overtime win over the Bears. Six months later the Colts would ditch Baltimore in the middle of the night, a sucker-punch some in the city never got over. But Barnes couldnāt quit them. When his entire family became Ravens fans, he refused. āThe Colts are all I know,ā he says.
For years, when he couldnāt watch the games, heād try the radio. And when that didnāt work, heād follow the scroll at the bottom of a screen.
āThere were so many nights Iād just sit there in my cell, picturing what itād be like to go to another game,ā he says. āBut youāre left with that thought that keeps running through your mind: Iām never getting out.ā
Itās hard to dream when youāre serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder.
It started with a handoff, a low-level dealer named Mickey Poole telling him to tuck a Ziploc full of heroin into his pocket and hide behind the Murphy towers. This was how young drug runners were groomed in Baltimore in the late 1970s. This was Barnesā way in.
He was 12.
Back then he idolized the Mickey Pooles of the world, the older kids who drove the shiny cars, wore the flashy jewelry, had the girls on their arms and made any working stiff punching a clock from 9 to 5 look like a fool. They owned the streets. Barnes wanted to own them, too.
āIn our world,ā says his nephew Demon Brown, āthe only successful people we saw were selling drugs and carrying guns.ā
So whenever Mickey would signal for a vial or two, Barnes would hurry over from his hiding spot with that Ziploc bag, out of breath because heād been running so hard. Theyād sell an entire package in a day. Barnes would walk home with $50. āI could buy anything I wanted,ā he remembers.
Within a few years he was selling the dope himself ā marijuana at first, then valium, eventually cocaine and heroin. Business was booming around the towers, which the locals referred to as the āmurder homes.ā Sometimes, heād sell 30 bags in an afternoon. He was 14, pulling in $500 a day.
āA dealer of death,ā he calls himself now.
He learned to push away guilt. The way he saw it, he was in too deep, āimmune,ā he says, āto what I was seeing every day.ā The drugs. The decay. The murders. He was 9 when a friend fell out of a 10th-floor window, dying instantly. He was 11 when his older brother, Reggie, was locked up; 15 when his birth father died of an overdose.
But he had a loving mother, a hardworking stepfather, a family that didnāt want for anything when so many around them did. His stepfather drove a crane at a steel company and made a good wage. His mother cooked dinner every night.
āWe had a black-and-white television, and nobody we knew had one of those,ā Barnes says. āUs kids wanted bikes for Christmas? We got bikes. We wanted ice skates? We got ice skates.ā
Mary Barnes was no fool. She heard the whispers. She noticed her son wasnāt home. Finally, she confronted him. āYou were raised better than this,ā she scolded. āThere will be consequences to what youāre doing.ā
Antonio denied all of it. āLied right to her face,ā he says now, still ashamed.
He was climbing the ranks, working with a high-up hustler named Butch Peacock. Anytime the plainclothes police ā āKnockersā ā would roll up, Butch would shout, āBird, grab the bag and go!ā and Barnes would listen, because he relished that feeling, of being needed, of being trusted, of being part of it.
One Saturday, while Barnes was playing shortstop in a little league game, the Knockers closed in. His teammates begged him to stay. He ignored them. He darted off the diamond in the middle of an inning, grabbed the duffel bag and disappeared into the towers while the cops chased. He climbed 10 flights of stairs and nearly passed out before a neighbor let him slip into an apartment.
Inside that duffel bag that day: a half-dozen guns, thousands in cash and 200 caps of cocaine. Later that night, Butch handed him a different bag. It had $4,000 in it. āThis is all yours,ā he told him.
Barnes rose from runner to dealer to mid-level player. He quit football. He dropped out of high school. He drove around the streets of west Baltimore with a .357 Colt Magnum resting on his lap. āLike it was a credit card,ā he says. A few nights a week, heād work the count, sorting through some $20,000 in cash, plenty of it in $1 and $5 bills, stacking the drug ringās profits from a single dayās work.
He never killed anyone, he says, but heās also not ignorant to all that he was caught up in. He was awash in a world of violence.
āThat was our business,ā he says. āOn those streets, it was either you or them. Theyāre out to rob you. Theyāll kill you. Theyāll snatch you up, duct tape your mouth and torture you if you didnāt give them what they want. Theyād put your mother on the phone to scare you more.ā
They found Butch in the front seat of his car one morning, blood trickling down his neck, a bullet in the back of his head. Heād been executed at point-blank range outside a nightclub.
Barnes shrugged it off. He told himself he just had to be sharper. āThatās how backwards my thinking was,ā he says. So instead of getting out, he plunged further in. He started running with a new crew, one headed by the cityās most notorious gangster at the time: Timmirror Stanfield.
They busted through his back door at 5:30 one morning. Barnes, cornered in bed, had his arm around his girlfriend, Tammie, who was nine months pregnant with their daughter.
āBird, take your hands out from under those covers,ā he remembers the officer telling him. āDo it real slow.ā
Heād been arrested before on misdemeanor weapons charges, but this was different. Five members of Stanfieldās crew would be tried for killing a stateās witness before that witness could testify in a separate case, the boss for murder and four of his top lieutenants ā including Barnes ā for conspiracy.
According to prosecutors, the dispute started when a low-level dealer didnāt show Stanfield āappropriate respectā during an argument on the fourth floor of the Murphy towers. Police said Stanfield put one bullet in the dealerās chest and five in his head. The trial lasted nine weeks, interrupted at one point when Marlow Bates, a co-defendant and Stanfieldās half-brother, warned one of the witnesses, āYouāre going to die.ā
Barnes barely paid attention, sleeping through most of it. He was 20 years old and arrogant, convinced he had nothing to worry about.
A witness who had originally placed him at the murder scene later recanted under oath. He refused to cooperate with police. He figured they had nothing on him. āI thought it was the easiest case in the world to beat,ā Barnes says. āI wasnāt there when the shooting happened.ā
After closing arguments, the jury deliberated for 90 minutes before landing on the verdicts. His attorney took it as a promising sign. āWhen it comes back this quick,ā Barnes remembered hearing, āthat usually means not guilty.ā
It was a Wednesday. April 1, 1987. Barnes made plans for that evening. He was going out to celebrate.
They called his name first, and when he heard that word ā GUILTY ā he damn near fell over. His stomach tightened. His knees wobbled. He started to lose his breath. The first thought that ran through his mind was how embarrassed heād be if the front page of the next dayās Baltimore Sun read, āBIRD FAINTS AFTER VERDICT.ā
The rest was a blur. Guilty, all of them. Life sentences, all of them. Stanfield and Bates snickered after they heard the verdict, according to the Sun, laughing out loud in the courtroom.
Instead of passing out, Barnes remained as cocky as ever. He exited the courtroom, handcuffs clamped around his wrists, and eyed Ed Burns, the Baltimore city homicide detective whose eight-month investigation led to the arrests and dismantling of Stanfieldās gang.
āYou happy now?ā Barnes asked, flashing a smile. āSee ya in a year or two.ā
More than a decade later, Burns would co-write a television drama with a longtime Baltimore Sun cops reporter named David Simon. They called it āThe Wire.ā One of the most feared drug kingpins in the show went by the name Marlo Stanfield. And in the sixth episode of the second season, a vicious hitman stands trial for killing a stateās witness, defiant to the end.
They called him Bird.
Over 36 years, Barnes bounced among 14 prisons, including a stay in the late 1990s at Marion, a maximum-security facility in Illinois. Three cells down from him was famed New York City mobster John Gotti. The two talked baseball, Gotti never missing a chance to rub it in when his Yankees beat up on Barnesā Orioles.
His dreams of getting out died slowly, one appeal after another swiftly denied by the state. It didnāt really hit him until two years into his sentence that he was going to grow old inside, wasnāt going to get to watch his newborn daughter grow up. Thatās when the depression sunk in. The anger. The regret.
Panic attacks would come at night, startling him from sleep. Heād have visions of his past life ā Eight months ago, I was here; three years ago, here ā¦ ā and just lie there, mind racing, eyes open, until 3 in the morning.
Slowly, Barnes came to reckon with what heād done, the choices he made and the harm he caused. He weighed the pain he brought his family and his community. He didnāt pull the trigger on the fourth floor of the Murphy towers that day ā he wasnāt even there, he maintains ā but he was part of the poison plaguing his city and choking its youth.
āI can never make up for what I did,ā he says.
In prison, he learned to read and write, earned his G.E.D. and led counseling meetings for troubled inmates. He became a published author ā āPrison is Not a Playgroundā is Barnesā story in his own words, starting with that plastic bag Mickey Poole slipped him as a 12-year-old.
He tutored those with developmental disabilities, including a former cellmate. āAntonio is an amazing example of someone deciding that theyāre going to grow and develop instead of being sucked into all the negativity that happens in there,ā said Brian Teausant, that inmateās father.
He worked as a suicide companion for 23 years, counseling the prisonsā most at-risk inmates. He founded three self-help programs that, according to one of his former wardens, led to a decline in inmate discipline issues. āWardens donāt usually put their John Hancock on a letter of support for someone with a life sentence,ā Barnes notes proudly. More than one did for him.
He was denied parole five times. At one hearing, Barnes was asked, āHow can we put you back in a community that you helped rip apart?
He thought for a moment.
āBecause Bird is dead,ā he told them. āAnd youāre talking to Mr. Antonio Barnes.ā
Still, the denials battered his belief and tested his patience.
āThey were trying to see if Iād give up,ā he says. āIt was hard. But I told myself, āI will die before I give up.āā
Then one afternoon last spring, while he was reading in the prison law library, another inmate told him the parole officer was looking for him. He grew anxious. He hurried upstairs to her office. āMaryland is letting you go,ā she told him.
He felt his knees start to wobble, same as 36 years prior, when he stood in that Baltimore City courtroom as a cocky 20-year-old. His stomach tightened. He could barely speak. Only this time, it was relief.
āI was shaking like a ā57 Chevy,ā he says.
On July 20, he walked out of the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in central Florida. An Uber driver picked him up and gave him a lift to the bus station, where he hopped on a Greyhound bound for Charlotte. Barnes sat in the backseat, staring out the window, and when the car pulled onto the highway, he closed his eyes and began to cry.
Now, instead of a pistol on his nightstand, he keeps his cell phone nearby. The calls come late, sometimes at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, and itās his job to answer them.
Barnes currently works as a peer support specialist at ARJ, a mental health center in Charlotte co-owned by his nephew Demon Brown, who overcame his own troubled teenage years on the streets of Baltimore, plus three stays in a juvenile facility, to become a standout point guard for UNC Charlotteās basketball team in the early 2000s.
Demon had a room ready for his uncle and a job waiting for him after Barnes was released in July. āAs soon as he came home, he told me he wanted to help others any way he could,ā Demon says. āHow many guys getting out of prison think like that?
āIām telling you, the only thing he ever talked about doing for himself was getting up to a Colts game.ā
At ARJ, Barnes specializes in the centerās most at-risk patients, a lot like the ones he worked with in prison. Heās taken what he learned on the inside and now uses it to save lives.
āA lot of these patients are battling substance abuse issues,ā Brown says. āSome are just out of prison. Some are in and out of shelters. Some are homeless. Itās incredibly challenging, and Antonio just has this talent, like this empathy for them, that helps him connect.ā
One recent call came in the middle of the night. A woman was delirious, wanting to hurt herself. Barnes stayed on the phone with her for five hours.
āI donāt drink, I donāt do drugs, I donāt do none of that,ā he says. āBut every time we have a successful story with one of our patients, thatās the biggest high in the world for me.ā
His goal is to have āPrison is Not a Playgroundā passed out in juvenile detention centers across Charlotte. He wants to speak to classrooms. He wants to use his story to change lives. He goes back to what Detective Ed Burns told him 37 years ago while he sat in a jail cell awaiting processing after his conviction. āBarnes, youāre smart,ā Burns said. āYou can still make something of your life.ā
Heās determined to.
He never watched āThe Wire.ā No need, he says. He lived it. (On Wednesday, Simon posted on X ā formerly Twitter ā that the Bird character was not based on Barnes or any one person, that the name was āa simple shout-out by Ed Burns and myself to a Baltimore street legend whose adventures date to the 1970s.ā)
But Barnes says Burns āsaved my life.ā He calls the life sentence he was handed in April 1987 āthe greatest reward a career criminal could receive.ā Without it, he believes, he wouldnāt be alive.
Away from work, heās still acclimating to his new life, and sometimes has trouble sleeping, startled awake by those little noises he never used to hear in prison. He takes long walks in the afternoons, still in disbelief that heās a free man. He borrowed a car recently so he could practice parking, something he hadnāt done since the spring of 1987.
He started saving for a trip to Indianapolis as soon as he was released this summer, then burned through just about every dollar he had to make it happen. He was granted permission from his parole officer to make the trip, then slogged through 16 hours on a Greyhound, too excited to sleep. āThat ride couldāve taken two days,ā he says, āand it wouldnāt have bothered me.ā
Around noon on New Yearās Eve, he slid into his seat in Section 126 at Lucas Oil Stadium, stunned by the scene in front of him. Heād never seen so much blue in his life. He snapped photos. He learned that everyone stands when itās 3rd down. He sweated out a 23-20 win for the Colts that kept their playoff hopes alive.
āIt still donāt seem like itās real,ā he texted his nephew.
After the game, he lingered inside the stadium for over an hour, until the place was almost empty.
āStill feels like a dream Iām going to wake up from.ā
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos courtesy of Antonio Barnes, Bobby Ellis / Getty Images)
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