The Curse of Romeo and Juliet
Frankie Mitchell and Janet Evans want to be together, but their families are feuding. It’s a story as old as Shakespeare—older, in fact, because they’re Gypsies, the children of two prominent Dallas clans, and ancient superstitions guide every aspect of their lives. Even love.
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For the police the feud was a monumental waste of time. But the filing of charges against one another was serious business for the Gypsies. When Gypsy men describe their disputes, they invariably talk of respect. In Gypsy culture, it is vital for a Gypsy man to feel he is being treated with respect by another Gypsy; if he feels slighted in any way, he cannot rest until he inflicts what he calls disrespect on that person. When I once asked Bucky Mitchell why the feud had lasted so long, he sighed dramatically and pulled out a briefcase filled with court documents, newspaper articles, and police reports detailing alleged crimes committed by the Evanses against his family. “Look at these people!” he said. “They have no respect for us!” When I later met with a group of Evanses, I watched them open their own briefcases and pull out similar stacks of papers detailing alleged crimes committed against them by the Mitchells. “You tell me, does this look like any respect for the Evanses?” George snapped. “We will not rest until we get the respect we deserve!”
BY THE NINETIES THE CHILDREN OF Bucky Mitchell and George Evans had grown up and built their own reputations. Of Bucky’s sons, the eldest, Jimmy, was the most reserved; he was happy to let the second-eldest, Joey, act as the family’s heir. The corpulent Joey—obesity is a sign of prosperity in Gypsy culture—was the classic baby boomer Gypsy, nicknamed the Prince by other Gypsies. While Bucky was part of the generation that believed that Gypsies should keep their money hidden, Joey loved to show his success through what the Gypsies called “flash and cash.” He bought a nice new home in Hurst, drove a Rolls-Royce and a Mercedes, wore custom-made suits, and took regular gambling vacations to Las Vegas, where the casinos sent limousines to pick him up at the airport.
Joey, who is 28, was one of the first Gypsies to set up his own psychic hotline. According to the police and other Gypsies, his wife was also a successful fortune-teller who didn’t put a sign in her yard but advertised her hotline in the tabloids. Although the ad didn’t seem like a huge magnet for business—it was one of dozens promising good luck, health, and happiness—the talkative Angie had a steady stream of telephone customers. Joey says now that Angie has canceled her hotline and dropped out of fortune-telling entirely. “The stories about Angie and her money are all lies made up by the Evanses,” he told me. “The Evanses want to make us look like millionaires so that the FBI will start investigating us.”
In fact the Fort Worth office of the FBI did begin an investigation last year into Dallas—Fort Worth—area fortune-tellers. In January an Evans fortune-teller—a niece of George’s—was indicted for fraud after she allegedly took about $10,000 from a 79-year-old Missouri woman who called her hotline. The fortune-teller had supposedly promised the elderly woman that she would “cleanse” her evil money and then return it—but she never did. The police say the new generation of fortune-tellers are con artists. But the Gypsies say their customers believe they are doing nothing wrong. “Angie Mitchell just has an incredible power to make people feel better,” said Bobby Mitchell, a Dallas Gypsy who is unrelated to Bucky but knows Joey and Angie well. “After a couple of conversations with her, they think that she alone has the power to remove a curse. That’s worth a lot of money to people. Hey, you Americans give your money to astrologers and Robert Tilton. Why not the Gypsies?”
Sympathetic words considering that Bobby Mitchell has abandoned much of the Gypsy way of life, one of the few Gypsies in Texas to do so. Unmarried at 35, he dates a glamorous blond non-Gypsy—a huge taboo according to Gypsy law—and owns a large, perfectly legitimate roofing company that does more than $2 million in sales a year. In the eyes of the Gypsies, he has “gone straight,” which is why he is not invited to most of their functions. “Most of the younger Gypsy men won’t admit that they would be lost in this world if they didn’t have their women doing fortune-telling,” Bobby snapped. “Joey is one of the lucky ones making a lot of money. But you have to realize that a lot of guys are not. They are fifty to sixty percent illiterate, and they’re completely computer illiterate. If they don’t change with the times, they’re going to turn into hoodlums who end up in jail.”
Bobby may be proved right, but at the moment it seems like no one is listening. For the Evanses and the Mitchells, fortune-telling is very much the family business, which is why elders of the community start looking early for girls who have the gift. From an early age Janet Evans was drilled by her mother in the art of palm and Tarot card reading. She stood in another room and eavesdropped on fortune-telling sessions. Back in her bedroom, with MTV playing in the background, she would practice saying such lines as, “You are not smiling the way you should,” “There is something in your voice,” “Are you tossing and turning in your bed at night?” “I sense an evil spirit hiding in your money.” When she was in her early teens, her parents signed her up to work at one of the psychic hotlines—a common practice among Gypsies who want to season their girls for adulthood. Earning $12 to $24 an hour, the prepubescent Gypsy girls sit on the phone throughout the day, offering hope to gadje women who are anxious to be loved, to be healthy, or to keep the men in their lives faithful.
Although she calls herself “a nineties girl,” Janet told me that she has never considered anything other than the Gypsy life. She feels no shame about having dropped out of school in the seventh grade—“I don’t think it helps you, if you’re a Gypsy, to be book smart”—and has no doubt that she will spend the rest of her days telling fortunes. “I know some girls who have become Christians and don’t do fortune-telling,” she said, “but I think they will come back. It’s a great life being a Gypsy. We do more by age thirteen than most of you Americans do at thirty.” She gave me a mysterious little smile. As the ends of her lips rose just slightly, I realized why she is said to drive Gypsy boys mad.
Frankie Mitchell first spotted her years earlier at large Gypsy weddings and other gatherings. Although they were usually on opposite sides of the room with their own families, they smiled shyly at each other. Young Frankie seemed to be following in his father’s footsteps. He was a confident, worldly kid who was driving his own car at age thirteen around Dallas, where he made a little money buying used cars and reselling them for a profit. “Why would I want to be a gadjo and have a nine-to-five job?” Frankie once asked me, pointing out that he goes to bed and gets up whenever he wants.
In 1995 Frankie sent word to Janet through a cousin that they ought to meet. It was a risky proposition for him to make even if he hadn’t been a Mitchell. Gypsy rules dictate that Gypsy teenagers have little control over their romantic lives. A Gypsy boy and a Gypsy girl are not allowed to date until their fathers have met and agreed that the two of them should get married. As part of that agreement, the two fathers determine a bride-price—the amount of money, usually around $10,000 to $15,000, paid by the groom’s father to the bride’s father as compensation for his daughter’s leaving his family. If the two men do not agree on a price, the marriage cannot take place. If the teenagers date anyway, a Kris can bring them to trial and label them mahrime, which means they cannot eat or fraternize with other Gypsies for a long period of time. (“For a Gypsy, a fate worse than death,” said Bucky.)
When Bucky was growing up, children rarely got to have any say in who they would marry. Today’s Gypsy kids are given more of a voice in such matters, but parents still get the last word. Indeed, even before their first date was over, Janet and Frankie knew their relationship was doomed, for it would be impossible to get their fathers to sit down and agree to anything. Yet Gypsy teenagers are no different than anyone else when it comes to romance, so they kept slipping away from their homes to meet. They spoke to each other in Romany. On one walk through the mall, Frankie impulsively led Janet into a jewlery store to buy her 24-karat gold earrings.
By early 1996 the Gypsies were abuzz about Frankie and Janet. Joey Mitchell took Frankie aside and said, “You can’t get involved with this girl. Do you know what the Evanses will try to do to us if we take away their daughter?” In fact, when word of the romance reached George Evans and his sons Paul and Robert, they tried to scare Frankie off: According to an affidavit that Janet would later give the police, her father forced her to file criminal complaints claiming that Frankie had been stalking her, pointing a gun at her, harassing her by calling her twenty times a day, and even slapping her in the parking lot of a movie theater. To keep the feud from getting out of control, Frankie and Janet lied to their parents and said that they would no longer see each other. But they knew time was running out: Patsy Mitchell was urging Bucky to find another girl for Frankie, and George Evans was looking for a Gypsy boy for Janet.
In the first week of November, Frankie and Janet sneaked out of their houses before their parents had awakened and met at a movie theater parking lot; they then drove to Houston. In her affidavit to the police, Janet called her family from Houston and told them she and Frankie had eloped. (A practical Gypsy girl, she also told them where she had left her car, a white Mustang, so her family could go get it for safekeeping.) In Gypsy culture, an elopement is not the same thing as marriage. An elopement requires the boy’s parents to pay a $2,500 fine to the girl’s parents, and the parents have ten days to agree on a bride-price. If they don’t, the girl must be returned to her home.
The Evanses, of course, weren’t going to discuss anything with the Mitchells. George’s son Paul went so far as to file a police report claiming that the elopement was actually a kidnapping. He charged that Frankie and his mother had burst into his Dallas home wielding pistols, raced into the bedroom where Janet was supposedly staying for the night, and dragged her away as she kicked and screamed. Yet when a Dallas police detective questioned Janet, she said she had not been kidnapped—she had not even been staying at her brother’s house. Completely exasperated, the detective filed a misdemeanor charge against Paul Evans for giving a false report.
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