But clothes alone do not make the man in the case of Paul Short.
To be a precinct commander anywhere in New York City, Short was telling Valentine one day amid repeated calls from the commissioner’s office downtown on “delicate” cases and calls from neighborhood big shots and would-be big shots and brief visits from line officers handling cases in which the inspector had requested briefings, is pretty much a matter of having to switch one’s personality gears, to change with the times even though you may not agree with either the times or the changes. On the whole, Inspector Short believes cops in New York, if not elsewhere in the country, are much improved.
Not that everything was wrong back when Short was a street cop, he adds. It’s just that there has been a natural progression going on.
In 1954, Paul Short left his job as an airlines mechanic, where he was never once required to shoot anybody, and became a foot patrolman. “I was your regular beer-drinking, cigar-smoking cop like you don’t see too much anymore these days,” he says to Valentine. Officer Paul Short went to Emerald Society meetings, the principal fraternity of the main ethnic group of the New York City Police Department, and precinct dances. He got married early and stayed married. He worked hard at his job, too, and earned a reputation as an unusually tenacious cop. If a crook had Paul Short on his tail, it was like Joe Louis used to say, “He can run, but he can’t hide.”
There was the case of the Cuban giant, for instance:
“I was in the Bronx and that guy was the second guy I shot in my career. The other one was a taxicab stick-up artist and a junkie and isn’t even worth mentioning. But the Cuban! I’ll never forget it, mainly because he was enormous, close to seven feet. Also, because when I got him, it was the day before I made sergeant.
“He was a rapist, this guy …”
When Short says this, you understand the ferociously unspoken contempt of an Irish Catholic cop and family man for the loathsome rapist. His eyes go dead and cold and just about murderous. Valentine would see this expression many more times. And he would share the sentiment. He would also admire the control.
“… He liked to get the nurses. Then he’d take their money by threatening to pay them another visit.
“The guy was incredible. Three times already, he’d escaped police traps.”
One of those traps, the one just before Short finally brought him down, involved an apartment-house corridor. The Cuban had telephoned one of his victims and the young woman, in turn, called the police. So Paul Short rounded up the three biggest cops he could find in the Bronx and the four of them staked out the hallway on the nurse’s floor. The Cuban arrived, right on schedule. When the cops moved in on him, the Cuban giant beat up the three big men and slammed past Short down the stairway to disappear into the street.
But that day before making sergeant, Short finally got his man. The Cuban, as per his habit, called up one of his victims and demanded that she meet him in a Bronx bar—with money. Otherwise, he said, she would die. Short was notified.
Posing as a neighborhood saloon patron, Short sauntered into the pub with a sack of groceries, as if he’d just been doing the day’s marketing for his wife, and ordered a shot and a beer.
“The guy made me right away. Don’t ask me how, but he made me. Some of these guys can smell cop. So he comes at me, this huge thing. He’s a karate expert. He hits me so hard in the head I can’t see anymore. I’m down on the floor and my head’s split open and I can barely see. I figure this isn’t right.”
Officer Short peeled himself up off the barroom floor and staggered to the street. The big Cuban was in no hurry, remembering the heap of medium-build cop he’d just left back in the pub.
Short started following the Cuban, his .38 police special drawn. The big Cuban started running when he got a look at the fire in Short’s eyes. There was Short, head flowing with blood, about a foot shorter than the Cuban, fully authorized to shoot to kill. The rapist, big and tough as he was, was frightened out of his mind. They ran for blocks, the dark giant panting and shouting, the loco Irish cop screaming and shooting behind him. Few things in the world are more terrifying than a stampeding, gored bull—or a cop who won’t give up.
Finally, with a crack of fire that thudded into its mark, the big Cuban stumbled and fell, his legs full of lead.
“That was the easy part of it,” Short recollected. “Any cop will tell you the same today. Some things haven’t changed all that much. The collar’s nothing sometimes compared to talking a victim into testifying against the perpetrator in court. Well, I managed to get one of the nurses to come through for us and we put away the Cuban pretty good that time.”
Things were considerably different, operationally, when Paul Short cut down the Cuban as a beat cop in the Bronx. Today, Inspector Paul Short has something like seventy-two hours of paperwork on his hands when one of his men uses his gun in the line of service. There is an immediate hearing with the duty captain, or precinct inspector; there is an interview with the district attorney, then with a lawyer from the Policeman’s Benevolent Association; there is a session, maybe more, with a police psychologist; there might be an interview with an officer from Internal Affairs Division; there might be a videotaping of the officer’s testimony; there is a second interview with the precinct commander, who makes a decision with the officer on the question of continued psychological counseling. Back when he was Officer Short, there wasn’t anything nearly like it. You just told your commander at the precinct house and then you lived with it, which was sometimes not the easiest thing in the world to do.
“I lived with that one real easy, let’s just say,” Short said.
In those old days of not so very long ago, the street cop in New York and other big cities around the country had profoundly more discretion than he does today. Justice, if it was justice, was swift indeed. An old-line cop worked in a system that seemed quartered by function: bust them, beat them, try them and fry them.
At times, the old ways seemed right and proper enough, even if they were a tad crude. At times, stripping away the sentiment of contemporary civil libertarianism, the old ways seemed practical. But in the long run, the percentage was not good. Cops came to work like an occupational army in a mean and beaten town. “Us against them,” as Short puts it. And all that happened was that the cops were divorced from the people they served. It didn’t say much for managerial methods, either.
“Way back, a cop didn’t think anyone was in charge,” Short said. “God forbid you should call a car for assistance. You just walked your post and took care of what came up. Guys in the cars didn’t like to be bothered and let you know it by chewing up your ass.
“I don’t think I even talked to a captain until I was a lieutenant. Now I’m commander of this precinct and the guys think nothing of coming in here to talk to me.”
Which suits Short just fine. He likes to know what’s going on and he likes the banter.
Tony Ciffo stuck his head through the door when Short recognized his knock.
“The desk’s holding a delicate for you, boss,” Ciffo said.
“Thanks, Tony.”
Before he picked up the private line on his desk, Short said to Valentine, “We’re all going to start calling him Chief-O now. Ciffo doesn’t sound so good.”
Short made notes on a pad with a Mont Blanc fountain pen and then hung up after some additional chitchat with the commissioner’s office.
“Comes with the territory here in the Nineteenth,” Short said. “We’ve got heavyweights. Lots of cases are delicate, referred from the commissioner or the mayor himself. They both live up here.”
A series of delicates interrupted the conversation.
Short had to deal with the local exigencies of international political tensions, none of which would crop up in the course of a business day for the police chief of, say, Omaha. There are hints from anonymous callers, self-serving no doubt, that pipe bombs would be rolled into the Lebanese tourist office on Park Avenue in response to
the Israeli military sorties into Palestinian Liberation Organization guerrilla camps; there would be a general picket-line protest outside the French Mission to the United Nations, the subject of which was French armaments shipments into the Middle East; it might be wise to keep an eye on the Egyptian mission due to the fighting between Coptic Christians and the majority Moslems.
The Nineteenth Precinct of Manhattan contains more than three dozen foreign missions to the United Nations or consulate offices, including the Russians, directly across the street from the Nineteenth, on East Sixty-seventh Street. Short’s men are responsible for security duty, which consists of round-the-clock uniform guards in the “boxes” stationed outside the mission buildings. Most of the missions, particularly the Russians and the PLO on East Sixty-fifth Street, have their own security people working inside and quietly on the outside. The Russians are sometimes seen with submachine guns.
“So,” Short said, resuming his conversation with Valentine, who was taking notes for a lecture he was preparing for a meeting of the East Side Republican Club, “in a way everything’s delicate here, you might say. It’s so attractive for criminals, we have to do a lot of preventive work. We haven’t got time for bullshit cases. We don’t cover the sheet by rounding up a few junkies or something like that. It’s futile and it doesn’t really help all that much.
“Well, right there is my philosophy about running the Nineteenth and it gets me into trouble with community groups all the time. If I wanted to really please the Republican Club, to name a group, I’d haul in all the hoors …”
Short says hoors, the way the Irish do in upper Manhattan and the Irish neighborhoods of the northern Bronx.
“… and I’d have all the cars towed and we’d bust up all the kids’ big radios. But I’d be tying up my men on bullshit that takes them to court all day and the burglars would be stealing the people blind in the meantime.
“That’s the big problem here, burglary. We got career burglars. This is a very attractive place for them, like I said. Some guy goes back to Williamsburg, for instance, and he tells his pals that he scored for two grand up here and one of his buddies says, ‘What the hell am I doing busting my ass for fifteen dollars on Amway Street?’ So this second guy gets himself a Brooks Brothers suit like his pal and an attaché case like yours and pretty soon we’ve got two career burglars. They get on the subway in the morning and they head uptown for Fifty-ninth Street, where my command starts. It’s just like they’re going to work. That’s a big problem and that’s why we’re pretty heavy on plainclothes officers here. How do you tell the bad guys from the good guys when they dress the same?
“We’ve got the usual sort of thing, too. Lots of hoors on Eighty-sixth Street. Sometimes our detectives make directs on them, which is picking them up for questioning in hopes that they can get some information helpful to some investigation. But they’re pretty wise about that sort of thing. I have our uniforms run them in on occasion for soliciting, just to keep a presence, or an appearance of a presence. They’re pretty wise to that, too.
“Anyway, we practically know them all by name and their career histories. There’s Crystal, for instance. She got shot in the head by a john a while back, but the doctors decided removing the bullet would be a bigger risk than not. She’s back there, same old corner, hooking like always.”
Short shook his head.
“I don’t like to get our officers too involved with the pross. You run the risk of exposing your men to corruption just once too often and it’s not worth it. Just little stuff, but it’s not good. Like maybe a pross will offer a feel, or maybe some hotel will pay to be left alone. You have to trust your men, but you have to be reasonable, too.”
He shook his head again.
“More and more, if you want to be a good commander, you’ve got to think about the private lives of your men. Their private stresses. Cops are part of the society, too, you know, and they’re subject to all the same troubles. Everything’s seemed to change so much, you know, from the Vietnam War onward.
“Years ago, as cops, we wouldn’t put up with the things we see today on the streets and now some of those things are thought to be practically normal. We’ve got entirely new attitudes about drugs and sexual mores and life-styles. All of that turmoil affects cops, too.
“I remember years ago that all the trouble you’d see with a cop’s life is how it was going for him at home. You used to be able to tell a divorced cop just by looking at him, and there weren’t too many anyway.
“Today! Hah! Today, the phone’s ringing off the hook sometimes with wives and girl friends complaining about support payments being held up.”
Once more, he shook his head.
“I shouldn’t be talking about cops like they were only men. One of the biggest changes around here is all the women officers we’ve got nowadays.”
At one end of the officers’ locker room, men’s division, in the dank basement of the Nineteenth Precinct station, Jack Clark, as usual, was complaining about unkempt colleagues. Clark works the burglary detail in plainclothes. His ensembles run toward ripped jeans, scuffed leather jackets, sweat shirts and always some sort of seedy hat. The reason for his fastidious nature is, therefore, mostly a mystery.
“Some of these guys,” he says, sniffing the locker-room atmosphere, “don’t hit the rain room too often, if you catch my drift.”
He had a special contempt for the man who lockered next to him, a sweat-soaked officer whose locker door hung open, its contents ripe with the same fragrance that affected its owner. He had just placed the uniform he’d managed to pick off his body into the locker.
“What’s that uniform?” Clark asked. “You shoot it out of a gun into the locker?”
“Hey, Clark, you keep your damn locker the way you want to and I’ll keep mine the way I want.”
“Okay,” Clark said, “just so long as nothing jumps out of yours and bites me.”
“Take a look at one of New York’s finest,” another cop said, swinging open the doors to an immaculate locker, one that Clark would approve.
The inside of the door was plastered with five pages of the September ’82 number of something called Beaver, the “wildlife” magazine. The photo spread in question consisted of five color poses and one black-and-white of a dark-eyed and obviously authentic brunet model to whom the magazine had given the nom de plume Nina.
Nina was almost wearing a red teddy with white lace trim. The straps were loosened down around the shoulders of the fetching femme, the bodice dipped below high, tiny breasts with prominent dark red nipples. The bottom edge of the garment grazed her navel. She wore dark hose with black elasticized tops and spikey black leather pumps. A puff of red feather accented her bouffant hairdo.
She had a taupe beauty mark below one eye and dazzling white teeth, perfectly straight and even except for a bit of space between the two bottom front incisors. The lower portions of the photographs were explicit enough to be of some use to Nina’s gynecologist.
There was a block of text accompanying the layout, which explained Nina’s favorite fantasy, the one about taking on more than one stud at a time.
“Doesn’t look like any cop I’ve ever seen,” one of the cops in the locker room said.
“Sure about that?” the cop with the open locker asked. “Little bitty thing around here, not even five feet? Not a bad cop, either. She was decorated not long ago for bringing down three strong-arms.”
“She’s not at the One-Nine anymore,” another cop said. “Haven’t you heard? She’s been transferred downtown to Public Morals.”
The cop laughed and added, “When word about this gets around, boy, there’s going to be some heavy dung going to hit the old propeller. You heard it here first.”
The delicate was very old and very rich and she hadn’t shown up at the appointed time for dinner in Southampton.
The Nineteenth was full of them. Rich old women who lived out lonely marriages for the big payoff: wealthy widowhood. Trouble
with them was that they went a little loopy from all the wasted years and now here they were with plenty of cash, but very little sense. They were perfect marks for all manner of smooth scam, the more exotic the better. Mostly, the old family retainer from some Park Avenue law office would settle accounts when they got their teats caught in the wringer, so to speak. But sometimes the police were unavoidable. That’s when the commissioner’s office would call up Paul Short.
There was a day when a delicate case meant something far more important to Paul Short’s job than what the term meant for him today. There were the days back in Harlem, in the sixties, when his exploits were the stuff of cop movie legend. In fact, his partner then was Sonny Grosso, creator of TV’s “Kojak.” The “Kojak” pilot written by Grosso, The Marcus Nelson Murders, was, in fact, the story of Grosso and Short and their incredible adventures as two of the most productive narcotics cops in New York City and, therefore, the world.
There was the Frankie Paradise case, for instance:
As a narc, Short worked out of the city-wide Major Violators Squad. He’d been after Frankie Paradise for months, knowing that somewhere in the city Paradise had the biggest stash of heroin anyone had known about all in one place since the French Connection bust.
Paradise was a slippery character. He had a half-dozen Cadillacs, but he never used them. He went everywhere by subway, which was how Short knew the stash had to be somewhere within the city limits. The problem was to find Paradise’s safe house, which is what it had to be, since Paradise liked to sleep with his stash to know it was safe and sound.
For months, Short and his partners worked an “A, B, C, D tail” on Paradise, meaning four different cops would be used to follow him, the four in communication with PTP radios and alternating to throw off any suspicion of a tail, any sign of the same man in close proximity. And for months, Short and the others were frustrated by Paradise’s uncanny ability to make them. Before Short and the other tails gave up, Paradise had taken them on a tour of all 239 route miles of the New York City subway system, through all three separate lines several times, through all 458 stations and back again to point zero.
Precinct 19 Page 3