by Robert Cea
Cops started to fill the apartment. This was a good crime scene for the ghetto ghouls, so everyone showed up. Most cops carried instamatic cameras in their RMPs just for occasions like this, so they all entered the apartment with cameras in hand, snapping away at the headless body; they then snapped away at the head. Once the sergeant left the room, one of them actually slipped rubber gloves on and placed what was left of the head in the corpse’s lap and took more pictures. All this while I sat huddled in a corner with the crying infant.
My sergeant came back in the room and tried to remove the baby from my arms. I would not let him go, but after a struggle they got him from me. Everything came rushing back—where I was, what had occurred, the dead body, and all that blood and excrement from both father and baby; I was covered in it. I charged out of the apartment ripping the sticky uniform shirt off my body. Billy followed me out.
We drove back to the station house in silence. I was angry with myself for allowing my feelings to get in the way, but I still felt sorrow for that little boy. I don’t know if I cried. Billy never brought that moment up. When we pulled into the parking lot, I got my gas card out of my shield case, turned on the gas tanks, and doused my shirt with gasoline. I then dropped it in a barrel and set it on fire. I turned around, went into the precinct, and never looked back.
I thought that I could burn those images out of my mind, but really, all you can do is suppress them, tamp them down deep inside, hoping they will never surface again, but sadly, that isn’t ever the case.
Mia took off from work early and was already home at the apartment making dinner when I arrived that evening. She was dressed in fabulous tailored silk pajamas, the kind starlets wore in those black-and-white movies from the forties. She said she’d had a long week at work and just needed to chill; chill for her meant to cook, eat, and make love. I did not say a word of my day, there was no need to. She was the last person I wanted to know of this life. I just needed her to be there for me. I just wanted to know that she was close by.
The table was set with crystal she had just purchased for our soon-to-be new home. There were candles lit and white linen everywhere. She would pass me and touch my neck gently. She’d put down the antipasto and pour me some more wine, then hum some pretty Italian song and move back into the kitchenette. I was there in body, but my mind was not. The ringing in my ears had not stopped once; the smell of that acrid, spent gunpowder was still so abundant that I looked around the table to see if it was the food. I just drank more of the wine to help soften the day. Mia stepped into the room carrying a large bowl of something red, probably pasta; I remember that it was a lighter color than the blood I had witnessed that day. Then I looked at the wine, more the color that was emitted from my man’s neck. I heard a tremendous crash and saw Mia running to me. She grabbed hold of my hand; only then did I notice that the table was covered in blood; I was toying absently with a knife and had slit a three-inch gash in my hand. She walked me to the bathroom, and though she was talking to me, I heard nothing, saw nothing except my bloody hand, which now was the exact shade of crimson I’d witnessed in that tight apartment on Church Avenue. I definitely needed a hospital visit even though I refused. She wrapped my hand and we sat on the couch. She asked over and over what had happened that day. I wanted to tell her, I should have told her, maybe it would have absolved me of the nightmares that were sure to come, but I just sat next to her and cried silently. Sympathy was the last emotion I was trying to elicit from her. I knew that if I was going to last without imploding, I would need to find an unemotional road to work on. That day redefined me. I swore I would never again feel that out of control; those woeful, disgusting, pussy feelings that coursed through my being were to be a thing of the past. This was to be the last time I would ever cry about anyone or anything. I kept rethinking the day, all the blood, and I kept drinking the wine, then some bourbon; I drank until I passed out. When I woke the next afternoon, I vomited uncontrollably; the food, the wine, the bourbon, and those white-hot emotions were excised and purged from my body along with everything else.
My transfer did not come for approximately eight months. That was okay because where Conroy left off, I picked up. Gun collars became an everyday event, capped off by an obligatory Academy Award performance with the ADAs. The perps I was locking up did not have a chance in court. Most of the time they pled out at the suppression hearing after the evidence that had been procured during the arrest was admitted into the court proceedings. Now, as opposed to going to trial and facing maximum sentences, most of the arrestees would plea to lesser charges and generally do a quarter of the time they would have done had they gone to trial. This does not sit well with the perps, but the guys who really get pissed are the 18b lawyers, or the defense attorneys. Not that I could give a fuck about the scumbags who told one of my perps that he should have “just shot me in the head, as it would have been the same charge.” The more I beat these jackals in court, the better I felt, and trust me, the safer the streets of New York were because these “gentlemen” I was locking up were the absolute worst animalistic underbelly this city had to offer.
In the time that I remained at the 6-7, I was not only honing my street skills, but also changing within myself. Compartmentalizing every emotion. I had become or was becoming a different person. As I look back now, I realize that it truly was a catch-22. You see, in order to thrive and excel in working environments like the Badlands, you have to become the monster that surrounds you. You have to be as cold and unforgiving as the people you are paid to protect, but more important, as the people you are paid to arrest. I realize that not everyone unfortunate enough to live in the Badlands is cold and unforgiving, but you see, once a man blows his head off with his infant in his arms in front of two cops just to get the last “fuck you” to a society that has balled him up and spit him out, well, you kind of lose trust in the human experience. The rub of all of this: It is almost impossible, once your tour of duty is over, to turn back on those loving, gentle emotions that we are all born with.
There is a profound verse in Latin that has always spoken to me: “Quod me nutrit me destruit,” which is translated as “That which nourishes me also destroys me.”
7
“Welcome to the Jungle”
Our transfers finally came through. We had two full years on the job, and all of that, not counting academy time, was done in an A house, code for a very busy and dangerous precinct. The 7-6 precinct in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was also considered an A house, especially with the dangerous housing projects that bordered it. The 7-6 had two civilized pocket neighborhoods running through the middle of it, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, an area inhabited by a mostly Italian population dating back to the turn of the twentieth century. Al Capone grew up and was married in the area, and lived there until he was exiled to the far reaches of the Windy City. I was rarely in these two neighborhoods though, except to eat or drink. Most of my time was spent in the outlying areas: where the animals lived.
Billy and I drove to the precinct together the night before our tour began. We needed to find lockers and we wanted Patty Pirelli, who was now in the plainclothes anticrime unit in the precinct, to show us the area from his perspective. Patty had moved into the unit quickly, within his first year. It was probably a no-brainer for the precinct commanding officer, as Patty was different from the other cops who were assigned there. Where the other cops had to learn the streets, Patty had an inherent sense of them. Patty had become the go-to guy in the area. He had already cultivated snitches and made dozens of quality arrests. None of it meant anything to Patty though. He stayed assigned to the precinct because of the abundant ghetto pussy that the area was famous for. We knew he wouldn’t sugarcoat anything, and we also knew he would have the skinny on everything going on in the precinct and on everyone inside and outside the precinct. What we learned was nothing short of amazing.
Patty explained that the 7-6 was a dumping ground of sorts. That meant, in simple terms, that if a cop
fucked up on the job, but was lucky enough to beat a judicial trial and subsequently a departmental trial, the job would punish him, or her, with a transfer into these “dumping ground” precincts, hopefully never to be heard from again. Most of the time these places were in far-off environs where you would not have the chance to deal with real people or real cops ever again. Whether they were in industrial areas, or hellhole armpits of the city, they guaranteed one thing: You’d never have to be bothered with normalcy again. Welcome to Red Hook and Gowanus.
Most of the cops in the precinct had gotten jammed up in one way or another with the job, but not just your average, everyday run-of-the-mill fuckups. No, these guys and girls fucked up in monumental proportions. This precinct held every psycho and loony tune on the job. There was the cop who unloaded at a bird in a tree because the bird shit on his car after two hours of buffing and waxing. There were guys who worked in sensitive details and mysteriously lost thousands of dollars in buy money. There was the lieutenant who completely fucked up a high-profile triple-murder case while commanding a PDU and was now back in uniform working the desk, surviving on massive doses of thorazine. He had no friends or family, so the conversations he had at home were with a life-size cardboard cutout of the Budweiserbeer girl. There were the cops who lost their driving privileges because of excessive accidents on and off the job, even cops who were not allowed to carry guns anymore. How they remained on the job is far beyond any realm of comprehension.
There is more. A five-foot-seven cop who weighed three hundred and some odd pounds was suing the city for weight discrimination. Another got caught with a box of grenades, then skirted a serious collar by saying he’d found them on his way to work and was bringing them into the precinct to voucher them. Word had it he was bringing them to the precinct, but certainly not to voucher them. A bona fide terror suspect, an alleged hit man caught on a federal wiretap; and then the guys who were just caught fucking their bosses’ wives or girlfriends. The list goes on and on; the 76 had them all.
Banishment to these precincts does not exist on paper as a disciplinary type of action. You get sent to these places behind a late-night phone call from one captain to another, and that is that, never to be heard from again—hopefully. I had heard that these guys and girls existed on the job though I’d never met any. Now, I was to work side by side with them. Think of the great Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman movie Papillon. Their home was Devil’s Island; my new home was the 7-6, and I had asked to be there. This worked to your benefit if you wanted to excel on the job as far as collars were concerned, because the last thing any banished cop wanted to do was police work. They were embittered cops who only wanted to sign in and sign out—fuck the job and the system. So for guys like me, Billy, and Conroy, who were here to clean an uncleanable mess, this was the place to be.
Billy and I were in a zone anticrime unit subdivided into three teams, covering three precincts. John Conroy was flipflopped, doing opposite tours, so we never worked together, though when I made a collar late in the tour, I would see him on my way to central booking and vice versa. He welcomed us when we got settled in. It was tepid, though I got a real sense that he was happy to see me. He briefed us on all the guns he was bringing in, where the hot spots were, and what cops to stay away from in the precinct: all of them. Our meeting was maybe three minutes long. I was glad I wasn’t working with him right away, though I would want to eventually. At that moment I was content with Billy, even if we did not see eye to eye on the ways of the streets.
We hit the streets running, making collar after collar in this new hellhole. My stories with the ADAs were getting more elaborate because a lot of our arrests were being made indoors. The big difference between the East Flatbush Badlands and the Badlands of Red Hook was that, in Red Hook almost all of the criminal activity was done inside the projects, either in the atriums or inside the lobbies and apartments. In East Flatbush 90 percent of the work was in the field: the street. So of course the legal stories in court had to be modified with the change of environment—why were we in the building, how did we get into the apartment, what were we doing on foot in plainclothes in the atrium? We were also starting to go to trial more and more, as the perps in Red Hook were much more organized and lawyered up. Though we never lost any suppression, Map, or Wade hearings—three primary judicial trials to see if evidence, arrests, or statements were obtained without duress or coercion—it was really pissing off defense attorneys who thought they knew what we were all about and developed gonz-magilla hard-ons for us. For Billy, these were all obstacles to climbing the ladder. He figured that we got into this detail by a stroke of luck, so why the fuck upset the apple cart? He just wanted to ride it out, and after we had our time in, we could apply to an investigative unit to get our detective shields. He also wanted desperately to study the patrol guide in hopes of passing the tests for higher rank and working his way up the chain of command to captain. I had no interest in that; last thing I wanted was to be an astronomer when I could be an astronaut.
I knew as soon as I got to this hellhole that I would have to follow Conroy’s “business model” and cultivate someone who’d be my stool in the street, someone who’d be my eyes and ears. The trick was getting an informant I could trust who was going to give truthful and good information. Without good information, you could go for years without really knowing what was going on in your own backyard or your target area, and there was way too much going on in this jammy-jam to let slip by. Yes, you could make the occasional car stop and find a gun or get lucky enough to stop the ride with a wanted homicide suspect in it, but you absolutely had to rely on inside help to get to the core of the problem that Red Hook and Gowanus faced, and that was seriously organized criminals and drug dealers. These criminals went for years in this precinct basically owning the streets; it was all about to radically change.
The biggest, baddest, and I must say smartest cat in these streets was John Conroy’s go-to guy, Shah King. In terms of drugs, the Shah ran the projects on both sides of the precincts as well as in other parts of the city, and he also had a great business pumping, with his extremely pure heroin counts and his organized crew of workers. He was off-limits, of course, but he was the type of informant I could definitely use to eradicate other dealers sprouting up, trying to take over spots and indiscriminately busting shots into crowded corners, killing innocent kids and not-so-innocent parents. I needed a cat like him, and since there was no one on his level, I would try to turn one of his own people, someone close enough to the Shah to have the same information, yet in the streets 24-7 to get me information on his competition. That guy was Cholito, or Cho.
Cholito was Shah’s main street dealer, and he was amazing. He did the hand-to-hand dealings in the street, so fast that I actually clocked him slinging Shah’s potent boy to twenty junkies in less than a minute. That is a hand-to-hand every three seconds, truly a godsend in a business that relied completely on stealth and quick turnover of the product. He was short and chubby; junkie chunky, overweight from the massive amounts of sugar consumed during any junkie’s waking hours. Cholito had tattoos up and down his arms; some were good, from back in the day when he took care of himself, when he just had a couple-bag-a-day habit. Then he fell deeper and deeper into the opiate’s loving clutches and his teeth and weight and tattoos all went south. He did, however, have a heart of gold and a contagious personality, one that I would grow to like, a lot. Cho’s problem was that he’d grown up in the Badlands of Red Hook.
I’d watch him out there doing his hand-to-hands. He’d have his team assembled nicely. The lookouts were young boys ranging anywhere in age from ten to thirteen, stationed on rooftops at the four ends of the Red Hook houses with a bird’s-eye view of anyone coming into or out of the projects. When someone suspicious would drive in, the kids would whistle; simple as that, and it worked. Next came the steerers, the cats who would send the business over to Cho for the actual hand-to-hand. They were usually about fifteen years old, and would have t
o be proficient in telling the difference between the real junkies and the undercovers looking to jack the spot on a buy and bust. They were the eyes and ears of the neighborhood; they knew who was developing a habit, and who had one. They knew a user’s daily intake, and they would raise up if someone suddenly tripled his or her intake of junk for the day. That would send flags up, telling everyone that that junkie might have gotten turned by the police and was now working for them as a confidential informant, or a CI. The last on the playlist were the girls; they would be used to mule the boy from the bagging plants and drop the heroin to prearranged spots where Cho’s steerers could deliver it to him on his spot when he needed to be re-upped. Everyone knew what their job was, and it was performed with the precision of an automotive production line in Detroit.