Jim Goad: ‘Like Mumia, I drove a cab in Philly…’

“and know every square inch of that magnificently ugly town. When I heard the murder happened at 13th & Locust, I was able to visualize that precise corner, along with the parking lot where Mumia had been sitting in his cab.

“No one contests the fact that Mumia Abu-Jamal and his brother wound up on the same block of a 135-square-mile city at 4 in the morning. To my knowledge, neither Abu-Jamal nor his brother have ever stated that they had planned to meet up—yet somehow, they both found themselves there by happenstance. Given the city’s size and the time of day, such a coincidence seems almost mathematically impossible to me.“