No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop

by Robert Cea

  “C, you caught me at a bad time, yo.” I think he laughed, but it was hard to distinguish any noise that escaped from his bloody mouth. His nose was spread across his face; I ran back to my car and pulled out a rag and an Evian bottle. I doused the rag and handed it to him. He accepted it and tried to wipe away the blood.

  “Can’t wipe away the pain, Tatico… ma’fuckers took my stash… I’m sick, C.”

  “C’mon, I’ll take you to the hospital, brother, let’s—”

  He was pissed. “Not the beat down, C. I’m motherfuckin’ sick…I need a boost.” He started to throw up, and he was shaking. The horrific beat down he’d so violently received ran a distant second to the pain of not being able to boot up some smack. “Please, poppa, you holdin’ for me?” He was almost in tears at this point; he was starting to shake violently and I could not imagine the pain he was feeling.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said as I ran back to my car.

  “Hurry, C, I’m gonna…” He moaned some more as I jumped into the car and drove three short blocks. I knew some Panamanian upstarts were out there this evening slinging, so after I parked my car in one of the housing-employee lots, I used the cover of darkness to spy the Pano who was pumping this late in the evening. Boy is a twenty-four-hour business. Once someone starts jonesing for a hit of smack, they will do anything, suck anyone, fuck anyone, or sell anything for that syringe of liquid love. I had witnessed a brokendown junkie chick who at one time was supposed to have been a beauty contestant in Puerto Rico; she actually gave a dog head for a dime bag of heroin. The Shah made us watch because he thought it would bond us; I must say that I was curious. I did not think that any jones could be so powerful that it would allow a person to sink that low, but he was right, and he had all of his boys out there watching, taking pictures and filming it. The Badlands were motherfucking perverse and TKO could corrupt anyone’s soul and humanity.

  The Panos were smart. They not only knew when our hours ended, but also when the narcotics teams’ tours ended, at about one a.m. So they felt relatively safe; their guard was lowered, there were no rooftop lookouts. In short, they were extremely vulnerable. The street lookout was a big kid, about eighteen years old. He had jailhouse muscles, but his back was to me and he was seated on a bench looking at the Pano sling. The slinger was wiry; he looked like he could run, but so could I: I had my head down as I walked out of the shadows to the asshole on the bench. He was not even aware of my presence, that is, until I had my gun and shield out in his face. He was about to say something, but I had no time for bullshit. I clocked him over his left eye with the butt of my gun. He went down like a box of rocks, then got up and ran away. The dealer saw what had happened and took off. He did not disappoint me, as he was quick, but I caught him between two buildings. I swung hard at the back of his head with my gun and he stopped running, hitting the ground hard. No words were exchanged. I jammed my gun with extreme prejudice into his ear; I saw blood drip down his neck and chin as he screamed in pain. I tossed his pocket, felt that familiar bulge of a package, and tore at it, ripping it off the pants leg.

  “Don’t move or I’ll blow your fucking heart out.” I said this calmly; I don’t even think I was breathing hard. He had no idea who I was, but complied, probably happy to think he was getting ripped off as opposed to getting collared. I took about fifteen bags, rewrapped the remaining gack in the rubber band, and tossed it at his feet. “Have a nice night,” I said as I trotted back to my car.

  Cho looked worse than before, pale, unable to speak. “You got any works?” I asked as I pulled the decks out of my pocket. He kicked out his leg with great effort, revealing a syringe jammed into his sock. “Can you cook?” He shook his head no; he was a stone-cold junkie, so I knew that if I weren’t there, and he had no arms or legs, he would have found a way to cook up, but I let it go. I searched for a bottle top, found one, used the Evian to clean it out. “How many you want?”

  “Whose is it?” This he asked as he heaved some more.

  “The Pano’s.”

  “How many you got?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Put two in the cap, fill it halfway with the water, then light it up.”

  This was a first for me, but I had watched him and others like him do this hundreds of time, so it felt natural. “Cho, I’ll cook, but I ain’t gonna feed you, brother, you’re on your own with that, sabe?” He nodded through a ferocious bout of convulsed coughing. This truly looked worse than any torture imaginable; the Shah knew how to get Cho, deep up in his guts. He fucking owned Cho; he owned everyone up in the Badlands.

  I sucked the brown liquid up into the dirty syringe and handed it off to Cho, who was shaking uncontrollably. Let this be a hot shot, put this poor motherfucker out of his misery, I thought. It was decent boy though, and the second he banged it in his foot, without even tying off, it was as if God had appeared, placed his hand on Cho’s forehead, and released him from his wretched agony. The color came back into his face; he looked at peace, even happy. He drooled slightly, a sign that the chocolate gack had found its mark. I helped him up.

  “You the motherfucker, Tatico. You everything they say, true that, C, true that!” he mumbled as he limped to my car.

  We stopped at a bodega for some forties of Bud, then drove to the pier at the tip end of Red Hook. He was flying and feeling no pain any longer. He pulled out his works again and was going to hit it once more. “You going deep tonight, Cho. Slow the fuck down, ’cause listen to me, you OD, you’re on your own, hustler.” He sucked his teeth, then spit out a wad of brownish fluid, traced with blood and phlegm.

  “You think an oh’ school ma’fucker like myself gonna play out on a few bags a this cheap Johnson? C’mon, son, I’m hittin’ twelve bags a eighty pure a day, I’m a missile, son, I gots more love in my veins then all a these ma’fucker’s put together. Shiiit!” To translate: His body was already immune to a hot shot of smack unless it was purer than the 80 percent he was banging all day long. It would take a deeper count, or more heroin, to lay him down, and dime bags were no more than what they were sold as, dime bags. He should have been a pharmacist, hell, he was a pharmacist.

  I opened a forty, and drank as he booted another barrel. “He caught you dippin’, yes?” I asked.

  “Yeah, some white ma’fucker came back crying like a cunt, sayin’ the bags were soft and weak on the count. Shah happened to be there, grabbed me aside, pulled my shit off me, and left. He must a tested the shit, ’cause I was waitin’ to get re-upped, next ma’fuckin’ thing I know, I’m dodging some big-ass Filas, and lots a them too!”

  “I don’t know why you don’t just take the money you make in bags instead of cash.”

  “Why pay for it, Tatico, when I could get it for free? Man, fuck that, nigga’, when you ready to bag that punk up you let me know, ’cause we can light his shit up, son. I know when all the play is played.” I laughed; I liked him, and he liked me. He laid back on a piece of cracked and upturned asphalt, a ghetto beach chair, cooling the fuck out. I watched him and slugged from my forty; a couple of old buddies just chillin’. I noticed the lights across the river. Manhattan was so close in proximity that I probably could’ve taken some of the lights out with my five-shot, but like Rockaway, my home, it had become a different planet for me; I had no need or desire to ever step into that borough again. I was home and so content right there, on that rat-infested pier, with my number one cumumba-jumba, Cholito. If he had the keys to the castle, we would loot the motherfucker dry.

  He scratched at his nose slightly; it bled a little but he just let it drip, then wiped it off. “What you doin’ out here, Tatico? Lookin’ for some a that ghetto pussy?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Needed to get out for a while.”

  “Right.” He laughed. “Everyone come to the Badland when they can’t sleep, ’cept if they lookin’ to get high.” He focused on me, and smiled deliberately. “You lookin’ to get high, Tatico?”

  I tilted my head at him and grinn
ed. “I like you, you little German, but I will place a cap up in your ass.”

  “You so full a shit, C. I gots eyes, I see right through you.”

  “Only thing you see are bottle caps, tie-off belts, dirty works, and bags a TKO, which is gonna get you got, sooner than later. So just sit back and enjoy that Pano’s gack. Which, by the way, is brought to you from the fruits of my hard labor.”

  He laughed, liked the fact that I was stealing his line; he had always said he got half of Brooklyn high “behind the fruits a his shit.”

  “Yo, you ain’t like the rest a these ‘my name is Joe’ ma’fucker’s out here, that’s for damn sure. Why you become a cop?”

  “So I can keep crazy lokes like you on your end a Brooklyn, far the fuck away from my end a Brooklyn.”

  “You keep feedin’ yourself that shit, maybe someday you actually believe it.” He laughed again; he liked playing with me.

  “Why? Why else would someone come on this job? The perks? Like all those fabulous and interesting cats we meet shuttling from restaurant to restaurant sippin’ martinis and spending all the cash we make?” I looked at him this time without smiling. I guess I wasn’t that hard to read; Cholito may not have been schooled with books, but in the street, and his judgment of the people who played the street for good or bad, well, he was an Einstein. There was no getting over on this fated little junkie.

  “What you think, Cholito is stupid, yo? You out here like the rest a us, you lookin’ to tool up, feel the juice, pumpin’ it hard right there on the edge.” He jerked his fist up and down, as if he were masturbating. “You lookin’ a ride up in here with the rest a us, do the same ma’fuckin’ thing we doin’ ’cept you wanna get medals for it ’stead a gettin’ collared for it.” He laughed, leaned forward for some ghetto dramatics. “Gots the four-eleven on you, Tatico, there ain’t no difference ’tween you and me ’cept you’s got ambition.”

  “And I ain’t got a habit, son.”

  He eyed me knowingly for a moment, then he looked out into that expanse called the East River. “Yes you do, C, yes you do.”

  That was the first time that someone else had acknowledged what I thought was known only to me. I’d wondered if I’d be able to cover up my track marks the same way that junkies covered theirs, but I did not have long sleeves or pants legs to cover my telling eyes. I sipped the forty, and watched Cho nod comfortably, surrounded by dirt, garbage, and weeds. I kicked back, and those moments of worry and angst disappeared as quickly as they’d come, because I might have had a jones for the Badlands, but from where I was sitting, I was as comfortable as that little junkie, who was now sleeping peacefully.

  9

  “Shots Fired! 10-13, K!”

  My resolve to move on and away from Billy Devlin grew every day. I had told Conroy about the potential breakup and he was glad. He thought Devlin was soft in the street and he didn’t trust the fact that Devlin would be in a 100 percent test-i-lie mode at court; he didn’t trust him. He thought Devlin would be a better fit with the crew of guys he had working for him on his team. Those cops just weren’t on the same page as Conroy. Yeah, they would do what needed to be done, but they just did not understand the darkness as we did. They could not communicate with a lot of the perps in the street, and that is 90 percent of the game, being able to get down on their level, so we could all speak and understand the same language. John and I were just biding our time till the hookup would occur. And the more I enjoyed the darkness that the streets afforded me, the quicker that was going to happen. Especially after the Tuff Gong incident.

  It all started when Sergeant Mahoney called us over the point-to-point radio band to see if we would pick up a job, man down, for the precinct commander. There had been a major backlog within the confines of the 7-6 he said, and they needed backup at the Tuff Gong Bar and Grill. Mahoney was one of the good ones; he was squat in size but had incredible strength, as he worked out in the precinct gym every chance he got. He had a streak of white hair that he desperately tried to blend into his orange hair as he headed toward the wrong end of middle age quicker than he had ever anticipated. He had twenty-five years on the job, and at his age he should have been long retired and working toward a second pension, but this job, he felt, was a young man’s job, and by his remaining on the job, in these nasty streets, he was going to stay young forever.

  The Tuff Gong was a Jamaican hangout that was located on Smith Street, at the ass end of the precinct. It was a transient bar, located close to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, bringing in blood from that other borough. It was right off the corner of Atlantic Avenue, which ran the entire northern part of Brooklyn from west to east, bringing in its own denizens from every nasty section that Brooklyn had to offer. There was always a gunfight between Jamaican posses, the occasional stabbing, or really fun-to-watch catfights that would erupt outside the place every Friday night. Riding with Mahoney one night we picked up a half dozen eggs (a six-pack of Bud) and sat in our unmarked across the street from the Tuff Gong. We watched the chicks fight, just tear into each other, ripping the clothes off their backs; someone would always end up naked. Many a night we’d get out of the car, identify ourselves, and transport a threequarters-naked girl home in the back of our ride.

  Billy and I rolled up to the storefront bar, where we noticed Conroy’s unmarked parked up on the sidewalk.

  “What the fuck is he doing here?” Billy asked. He didn’t know Conroy had done a tour change and that we were working the same chart that night. I did not feel like getting into an argument with Billy about Conroy’s motives, but I assumed they were good ones, otherwise this would be the last place he’d be.

  The outside of the bar was small, about twenty-five feet across, but upon entering the garish bar I saw it was three times the size of the outside. Walls had been removed on both sides, and the club had picked up the extra space from two adjacent stores. It was completely empty except for Conroy, Mahoney, Pirelli, the DJ who was still spinning third-world tunes, and a very nervous-looking bartender biting his nails behind the bar. Conroy, Pirelli, and Sergeant Mahoney were sitting at the bar nursing three Heinekens. In the middle of the now-empty dance floor lay a man, obviously dead. With the music playing and the disco ball shooting shards of light over the dead guy’s bloody body, the comical juxtaposition of the situation was not lost on any of us. This was as surreal as it was going to get.

  “He was just dyin’ to dance.” Pirelli said this with absolute deadpan humor, which he was by now famous for. Mahoney coughed out some of the beer and Conroy had to hold himself up on the bar to keep from laughing. I figured Pirelli must’ve been on fire with this scene since they’d walked into the place. They all touched their bottles in a toast and drank.

  “What we have here is an alleged misunderstanding between two of the local businessmen,” Conroy mocked.

  Again Pirelli jumped in with deadpan delivery. “Over drugs we’re told, and the bad man who did this…black!” Everyone laughed except Billy, though he did smile to show that he was with the program. I knew the truth though. He was definitely not with the program.

  “We picked up the job boss. What are you guys doing here?” Billy asked. I was annoyed by his lack of spontaneity on crime scenes like this one. He knew they were there because it would bring a laugh in horrible situations. He was taking everything way too seriously. What I did not realize was how right Billy was to look at this murder scene for exactly what it was: a guy just out to meet some people, drink a little, blow off a little steam; instead, he came out to dance and ended up murdered.

  The rest of us looked at this differently. In situations like this, most cops try to find the humor somehow. You have to, otherwise you will eventually become so battle fatigued you’ll end up sucking the barrel of your gun. What you have to do is try to balance the humor without running away from the reality of it. You can’t shy away from the truth, as I’d tried to do after the man blew his head off in front of me in the 6-7; I’d learned my lesson, or so
I thought. What Billy was able to do was process the truth, confront the feelings he had, and then move on. What we were doing there on that scene was just tamping it down with humor and booze. We never looked at the plain facts, that this guy was a child once, with a mother and a father, and maybe he did have a family who cared for him. At that moment, he was a performer in a twisted ghetto comedy.