NYPD Green

by Luke Waters

  As the parole officers searched the apartment, Detective Joanne Hennessy from the Bronx Gang Unit stood in the background, doing her best to calm down the man’s wife, who was upset at the prospect of another Christmas holiday ruined without her husband. Her agitation was understandable.

  “Where did you get these, Ferdinand?” Parole Officer Sanchez asked, pointing to the twenty rounds of 9mm ammunition, along with drug paraphernalia, sitting in open view on an ashtray in a bedroom.

  “The bullets? Some crackhead gave ’em me, man. Jus’ a souvenir …” the parolee admitted, staring in helpless disbelief as Sanchez and his partner removed the projectiles, which were later passed over for examination by the Firearms Analysis Section. They questioned him about any guns present, but it appeared he was telling the truth. He had bullets, but without a gun they were useless. To him, perhaps, but not to us.

  *

  Across town, a day or two later, ADA Hannah Freilich glanced at her watch, picked up the phone, and punched in my number.

  “Happy Holidays, Detective Waters! I’m hoping you can play Father Christmas and do me this tiny little favor …” she began hopefully.

  “Merry Christmas to you, Hannah. Sure, ask away, can’t do any harm,” I replied.

  “Great! Okay … just got a guy on possession of ammunition. Name of Ferdinand Nazario. Habitual offender and a drug addict. Same old story. The maximum I can hold him for is nine days, but if we can get him to plead guilty in the meantime … well, then we can nail him for a parole violation. Question is, can you Triggerlock him?”

  Peace and goodwill towards all men stops at the door of the Bronx district attorney, and for us, too. Christmas is all about the green, hanging out the holly, digging out the tree from the garage, and insulating your wallet against the chill winds of New Year’s bills. Right then I would take all the overtime I could get, and I told Hannah to drop the paperwork over. I reckoned the Nazario case should be good for maybe twenty hours, which was another thousand dollars towards the nasty credit card bill which would drop in my mailbox in a month’s time.

  The case seemed like just a simple narcotics collar. Ferdinand was a New York native with multiple felony convictions, mostly for drug dealing, and a history of weapons possession. He was another parolee who, under the state system, would probably be released and spend the New Year with his family. He wasn’t learning any lessons from his time inside, and it was the DA’s intention to send him away for a much longer period of reflection at a federal facility.

  I needed a second opinion, however, and knocked on the lieutenant’s door. Sean O’Toole was a family man himself, with a wife and kids.

  “I just got this dropped in my lap by Hannah Freilich over in the DA’s office, boss,” I explained to O’Toole. “Five-time loser named Nazario. She wants me to Triggerlock the guy. What do you think?”

  O’Toole paused for a moment. His reply was short and succinct.

  “Fry him.”

  Ferdinand’s file appeared utterly unremarkable, but the way this case goes marks it out for special mention. He was a three-strike career criminal, with a wife and a young son. Now he would have to serve whatever time he had left on his sentence before he was paroled—being caught in possession of bullets was an automatic revocation of that parole. Although he was not found with a piece, federal law draws no real distinction between a firearm, a silencer, or ammunition. Checks had shown that four or more of the rounds found at his apartment contained tiny manufacturers’ marks which indicated that they were made outside the state, leaving Nazario open to federal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)/924(e): “Felon in possession of ammunition.”

  The curse of Code 18 had struck once more because, as far as a federal prosecutor would be concerned, our subject might as well have been arrested taking a bazooka through the Jersey Tunnel, since it amounted to that same automatic fifteen-year minimum term in prison, with no prospect of early release.

  This guy was perfect for Triggerlock.

  My views changed when we took a closer look at his known associates. We quickly realized that Nazario might be of far more use in our ongoing efforts to put a suspected killer, named David “Whiteboy” Marrero on the streets, behind bars for life.

  Marrero had been peddling drugs for years and Homicide suspected him of a few killings. The DA had managed to put him before the grand jury facing a murder charge a number of times, but on each occasion the witnesses either developed amnesia or suddenly disappeared. Marrero was far too smart to get caught with guns or ammo in his possession, so Nazario’s possession charge might be the best chance we had to take him off the streets.

  As well as being a real lowlife, Whiteboy was also our felon’s uncle.

  Reading through the arrest reports it was clear that these facts potentially gave us great leverage with our parolee. Added to that, Nazario’s mother-in-law and his wife were sick and tired of the life. So we offered him a simple, stark choice: your wife and child or your uncle. Give him up or the assistant U.S. attorney throws away the key. You decide.

  Initially this drug addict had meant nothing more than a few hours’ overtime to me and a drop in the crime statistics for O’Toole, but he was now an important pawn in the game to take down his uncle—or would be, if he didn’t steadfastly refuse to cooperate and give him up.

  In reality I had some sympathy for the man I was working to put away. A moderately successful pusher, several steps below Marrero, could make a couple of thousand dollars a day, in contrast to a couple of hundred bucks a week in a minimum-wage job.

  Ultimately his silence, and sacrifice, were in vain. Whiteboy was later collared in Brooklyn holding a large quantity of coke, which for him meant a lengthy sentence. For our parolee blood did indeed prove thicker than water and although we couldn’t prove that his uncle put a bullet in the head of anyone who crossed him, the system used a few unfired rounds to take Nazario’s remaining productive years from him.

  On balance this man probably didn’t deserve what happened to him because his sin was that he’d made bad choices, but it didn’t help that he was unlucky enough to be related to a criminal whom the cops really wanted. Few people get a reprieve under Triggerlock, or deserve one. Nazario might just be the exception, on both counts. He was convicted but appealed because he was only in possession of ammunition and was sentenced to seven to ten years.

  Over the next two years I worked with several other detectives, excellent cops like Scott Patterson, Michael Rodriguez, Robin Womack, and Al Hickey, working as a team to put, on average, fifteen to twenty people a week back in the pen and keep them there with nothing more deadly than a Bic Biro and a cell phone. After a while it prompted a standing joke around Homicide with the guys in Catching Teams.

  “Hey, Luke, chase any good perps today?” Sergeant Kenny Umlauft would call out as I signed out in the ledger.

  “Yep. I chased one right back into his orange jumpsuit this morning, Kenny,” was my stock reply.

  Most Code 18s were routine, but one which took place less than a year after Nazario stood out, particularly as it involved the worst stickup artist I ever came across in all my years as a police officer: Latie Whitley.

  *

  Bodegas are a common sight in the South Bronx, serving the community everything from groceries and lottery tickets to beer and cigarettes. The name in Spanish means “wine cellar,” but Whitley, who had felony convictions for drug dealing and armed robbery dating back as far as 1986, treated them like banks. Whenever he needed twenty dollars to get high (which was several times every week), he walked into a shop and used a combination of pester-power and low-level threats to make a cash withdrawal. Detectives out of the 40 and Bronx Narcotics knew him well, but local merchants realized that by calling the cops on a guy like him they would risk further attacks on staff and the store, so they paid up just to make him go away.

  On this night, Whitley walked into the tiny shop at 362 Willis Avenue and as usual began by begging the two clerks, Ali M
ohammed and Ali Aluorami, for some loose cigarettes, but for once he struck out. Our one-man crime wave stormed out on Willis Avenue and returned, moments later, with an accomplice and a loaded .38 Saturday Night Special.

  Highly agitated, he wildly waved the cheap, nasty revolver at the two immigrants, demanding not a couple of bucks, but the entire takings. When the terrified clerk closest to the counter didn’t move quickly enough, Latie suddenly pulled the trigger, to speed things along, shooting one of those present in the head. Himself.

  Any normal armed robber who had just taken a bullet at point-blank range would scram before the cops arrived. But this addict was dim and grim in his determination and, though bleeding profusely, he staggered behind the counter and grabbed about $1,400, mostly in coins. Whitley stumbled out the door and across several lanes of traffic, disappearing into the lobby of a nearby apartment building. His partner escaped at speed in the opposite direction as several detectives arrived on scene, guns drawn.

  After questioning the two clerks, the cops, backed up by colleagues from the 40, followed the trail of spilled coins across the road into an apartment building, checking floor by floor. They picked up the line of bloody coins dropped by their new owner, which disappeared behind a resident’s door. Inside they found a number of people, including Whitley’s girlfriend, and hiding in a closet one lame perp with a towel jammed against his bloody head. The NYPD had caught the shooter literally red-handed, and the takings as well as his gun were also soon recovered.

  Latie was lucky. Really, really lucky. The .38 bullet had only taken a lump of his jaw and by the time we came to trial, almost two years later to the day, he had made a full recovery.

  Latie Whitley’s trial was a perfect example of how well Triggerlock worked. Under state law our perp would be out and terrorizing the neighbors within a couple of years. But since his holdup took place on a commercial premises, I liaised with the DA and we pushed to charge him under the Hobbs Act—a felon discharging a firearm while committing another violent felony—catching a break when the Honorable Richard Conway Casey was assigned to our trial.

  From convicting Cold War Russian spies as a prosecutor to presiding over the trial of Peter Gotti, a leader of the Gambino crime family, Judge Casey had enjoyed a successful career on the bench while still finding time to attend Yankees games wearing a three-piece suit and a straw hat, and was the sort of judge unlikely to swallow any sob story from our perp’s lawyer.

  The judge had heard it all over the previous thirty years. In his case justice was literally blind, as Casey relied on his constant companion, Barney, a black Labrador “seeing eye” guide dog who dozed off during the boring bits.

  The trial lasted four days, and just after Christmas 2005 Casey and Barney emerged from chambers with the verdict as an expectant hush fell over the courtroom.

  Prosecuted under state law, with good behavior, the accused could have been back cheerfully terrorizing the stores of Willis Avenue in thirty-six months, but the judge sentenced him to concurrent terms of 282 months for the Hobbs Act robbery and firearms possession violation, plus a consecutive mandatory minimum term of 120 months for discharging the gun.

  Thirty-three years for the robbery. And ten years for shooting himself in the head while doing it.

  In just over a decade as a cop I’d seen every imaginable reaction to a sentence—anger, denial, tears, recrimination, stunned silence, relief—but that day I added another to the list. A dead faint.

  *

  Latie was another tick in the win column. For O’Toole, the case was a small drop in his future crime stats. For me, it was another fifteen hours’ overtime.

  Triggerlock was one of the most effective tools I ever used—feared and hated by repeat offenders, who would often readily confess to serious crimes and beg the DA to send them to state prison because, no matter how unpleasant that system was, it offered hope and the chance of a parole hearing in a few years.

  After I’d spent two years in this work, O’Toole called me into his office and told me that I was now ready to catch cases, assigning me to the B-Team. I still used Triggerlock from time to time because, despite its brutality and flaws, it was still the most effective tool we had to protect the public from those determined to prey on them.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ARTHUR’S THEME

  Sometimes one case is like a box full of other boxes, like a Russian nesting doll. It turns out to have many more aspects and intersections—and crimes—than the one you think you are investigating. That thought is somewhere in the back of my increasingly addled mind as I stand in the shelter. From the other side of the room the thirty-seven-year-old woman moves slowly, mechanically towards the cage as I murmur a silent prayer to Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost causes, that the bundle curled up on a blanket behind the metal bars is indeed her missing beloved.

  We have already spent half the morning here at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals shelter in Manhattan, and when it comes to finding Coca the truant tomcat, I’ve been useless.

  “Ain’t my baby. Nothin’ like Coca!” Nikki mumbles listlessly, her eyes filling with tears. I’ve known Nikki Wiley for several years, long enough to see her pregnant many times, but on each occasion she’s lost the life she was carrying. This cat, along with her other moggies, Gizmo and Pinky, are the closest she ever will have to babies. Nikki loves Coca, but her real romance is with coke, particularly crack.

  I keep helping her search because an elderly man was bludgeoned to death in his apartment and the case remains open months later. I suspect that Nikki Wiley can put two of her fellow addicts at the scene and ultimately behind bars. The deal is simple: if I want her to rat, then I have to help find that darned cat.

  It had all started a year earlier, on November 7, 2006, the same day New York went to the polls to elect a new senator and governor. The 911 operator logged an emergency call from a distraught woman at 1558 Bryant Avenue in the Bronx, and when patrol arrived they found seventy-year-old Arthur Jackson with his head cleaved open in a vicious attack which left parts of his skull embedded in the ceiling of his apartment.

  Next door the caller, Bernice Poindexter, a former girlfriend of the victim, was still in shock, being comforted by neighbors. She had discovered the body when she’d dropped off a meal to the man at ten a.m. The person who calls in a homicide is often the perp, but we soon dismissed this woman as a suspect.

  During the autopsy the ME later discovered trauma to the body indicating that a hammer had been used to hit him repeatedly around the head, shoulders, and stomach. This all fit with what had been found: the wall beside the body covered in a line of blood spatter which continued from floor to ceiling. The weapon was found in the grounds of the local public school on Vyse Avenue, an hour after the murder.

  “Media case for sure, buddy,” Pete Tarsnane said with a sigh as we took in the chaos.

  The appearance of a female detective from the 42 momentarily lifted our gloom.

  “Hey, Maria. What’s the word?”

  Pete’s greeting was to Maria Hoy, a tall, thin brunette who’d only recently received her gold shield but seemed to be surviving Bobby Rivera and all the craziness at the 42 pretty well.

  “Hey, you guys. Looks like we have a media case, eh?” Hoy said, hands on hips, as she surveyed the blood and gore.

  We sat down with Bernice Poindexter and the other neighbors who possibly witnessed or heard something to put us on the track of the killer—or killers—of Arthur Jackson, or “Mr. Arthur,” as our victim was affectionately known on the block. The motive seemed pretty clear right from the get-go. Arthur Jackson had just won the lottery, in a fashion.

  “The Numbers”—run by black hoodlums in Harlem and other African-American neighborhoods, and the Mob almost everywhere else in the early days—survived the crackdown on organized crime in the eighties and nineties, mainly because this lottery paid out regularly and allowed regular moms and pops to bet a couple of dollars.


  Jackson had collected his thousand-dollar win and everyone had heard of his good fortune, particularly the local crackheads like Nikki, who congregated on the stairs at his building most days. But Mr. Arthur’s popularity went beyond the block’s drug users. He was equally well liked by many local alcoholics, one of whom told us of how she would ask the old guy to hold a few dollars for her each week to help her avoid the temptation of spending all her grocery money on booze. Turned out Mr. Arthur also sold drugs on a regular basis, which probably accounted for his popularity with the local skells. The man lying on the bloody carpet also had a conviction for rape, dating back many years.

  The Numbers which the deceased played at the local store didn’t interest us. I was far more concerned with the illegally defaced .22-caliber handgun which our victim had hidden under his mattress and the ammunition the Crime Scene Unit (CSU) found close by the body. Although he was older than our typical mopes, Jackson was still a pistol-packing, drug-dealing convicted felon.

  We rang Narcotics, the NYPD Gang Unit, Crime Stoppers, and anyone else we could think of to turn up the heat, because the more pressure we exerted the more likely it was that some dealer unable to move his product, or some pimp unable to work his girls, would give us a name just to make us go away. We started to arrest anyone with outstanding warrants, and almost straightaway several people nominated Nicole Wiley as a Person of Interest.

  I knew Nikki from my years in the 42 and it was quickly clear to us that she had nothing to do with the homicide herself. Her prior arrests were for possession and steering other addicts to dealers in return for a free bag of crack, a pathetic addict rather than a killer who smashes someone’s head in with a hammer to get money for drugs.

  But I was certain that she knew who did it. Conversations with crackheads infuriate, and the frustrations of my years in Washington Heights came back as Nikki made statements which she later contradicted—with no memory of our earlier conversation.