NEW YORK — The handwritten letter, with the return address of an Upstate prison, ran four pages.
It arrived, unsolicited, on Jan. 22, 1999. "Dear Mr. Race," it began politely, before detailing the 1987 murder of a Brooklyn cabby. Two innocent men, it claimed, had spent the last dozen years in prison for the robbery and slaying.
One of those men was the writer, Anthony Faison. He had never met the letter's recipient, an ex-NYPD detective turned private eye named Michael Race.
The letter was one of 6,000 mailed that year by Faison, one of 62,000 letters he wrote over 13 years as an inmate and logged into 10 notebooks. Virtually all of the letters were postal "cold calls."
Faison wrote then-President Clinton and New York Gov. George Pataki. He wrote cops and congressmen, lawyers and legislators, senators and strangers--20 letters a day. Every day. Year after year.
Each letter was handwritten, the pen gripped tightly, as if Anthony Faison were squeezing every ounce of his hope into each sentence, each paragraph.
Like a jailhouse Johnny Appleseed, Faison scattered his words from coast to coast. Somewhere, he hoped, his tale of injustice would take root.
By the time Michael Race reached the last line in his letter--"Your assistance may save the rest of my life"--a seed of doubt about Faison's conviction had been planted.
It would take more than two years for that seed to grow into a truth so obvious that it could not be denied.
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Growing up in Brooklyn, Anthony Faison was known as "Shan."
In 1987, the 21-year-old lived in a Crown Heights apartment, rearing his 2-year-old daughter and working a $700-a-week construction job with his closest friend, Charles Shepherd.
The pair took their work seriously. When a local druggie named Nicky Roper asked for a job recommendation, they turned him down cold.
At 5 a.m. on March 14, 1987, cabby Jean Ulysses arrived to answer a radio call on the street outside Faison's apartment. Minutes later, a passing police car found Ulysses, 46, dying with a single bullet hole through his right cheek.
The cab was locked, except for its rear passenger door.
Homicide detectives approached Nicky Roper, looking for the street buzz on the slaying. Roper steered them to Carolyn Van Buren, who said she watched from across the street as the cabby was killed during a holdup.
The shooter was Faison, she said. The lookout was his pal, Shepherd.
