Forced Entry

by Stephen Solomita

  The reality was undeniable. A week before, Ali “Supreme Boy” Reynolds, one of South Jamaica’s legendary crack lords, had had all his properties seized while awaiting trial in a Rikers Island dormitory. Everything the feds could lay their hands on, including two apartment buildings in Miami, a 7-Eleven in Tennessee, a yacht anchored in the Flushing Bay Marina, and a stretch Mercedes. Since the racketeering laws, state and federal, had taken effect two years before, major drug dealers stood to lose their assets before the trial even took place. Theoretically, if they were found innocent and could prove they’d acquired their property through honest toil, they could recover. It’s the second part, of course, that provided the problems. A sharp lawyer might find a way to get a dealer off the hook, but even a genius can’t find a technicality that accounts for an unemployed man’s possession of hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars in assets.

  “Ya know somethin’, Najowski? You got a big fuckin’ mouth,” Blanks said finally. His short, square body was rock-hard, a hundred and ninety pounds glued to a five-foot-six-inch frame; his head was broad and the heavy bones over his small, blue, Irish eyes made him seem dull and stupid. He was neither, though he sometimes played the fool.

  “Yeah,” Najowski replied, “but am I right, or what?” He nudged the Jaguar into the right lane and they exited the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at Roosevelt Avenue and turned east, crisscrossing the streets between Roosevelt Avenue and 37th Avenue, the main commercial blocks in the neighborhood known as Jackson Heights. Dozens of small shops declared the prosperity, the middle-class character of the area: food, clothing, hardware, pharmacies, stationery. The neighborhood might have been set in any large city, except that half the signs were written in two languages and there were as many Orientals on the streets as whites.

  “Pakistanis and Koreans,” Najowski said, anticipating Blanks’ question. “With a few Indians and Hong Kong Chinese. The neighborhood used to be Jewish, Italian, and Irish. This is where they came when they got enough money to leave the slums and it held up until the late 60s. Then the spics—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Mexicans, Cubans—started to arrive and a lot of the whites got out. The Koreans came around 1980 with the wogs right behind. Now you find young professionals trying to beat Manhattan rents.”

  “Why’d they run?” Blanks asked. “This neighborhood is clean. There’s nothin’ happenin’ on the streets. I don’t see no sign of drugs. They look like they come outta church.”

  “It gets worse further east and along Roosevelt Avenue. There’s drugs in the bars. There’s even a dirty movie and a topless bar a couple of blocks from here. Hookers work the bar and sometimes the streets. That’s gonna be a big thing for us. That movie and that bar.”

  Najowski pulled the car to the curb in front of 337-11 37th Avenue, an eighty-unit building with the name Jackson Arms carved over the entryway. Leaning back in the bucket seat, he watched his guest survey the neighborhood. Najowski had asked his connections to tell Blanks that Najowski wanted to propose a real estate deal. Nothing else. Now Blanks was looking over the property, impressed with the obvious quality of the housing, as Marek had hoped.

  “Still looks like a good neighborhood,” Blanks observed neutrally. “These people take care of their shit. Not like in Flatbush, where you used to live.” He turned to his host and grinned innocently.

  Najowski, ignoring the cut, changed the subject. “The way I figure, the mob is your best bet. They can take your money, for a percentage, and make it legitimate. But you’d have to trust them. You’d have to make them partners and, most likely, wops being wops, they’d have no reason to give an Irishman a piece of the action. Not once they got up a relationship with your suppliers and your customers. After that, they’d probably drop you in a field with a little hole behind one ear. Am I right, or what?”

  “And you got a better way. Nat’rally. You want me to become a landlord. Well, I went to a lawyer, an old friend of mine, and he told me I can’t make no money buyin’ buildings more than fifteen years old. All them old buildings are rent-controlled. He says I’d be better off puttin’ the money in the bank. I’d get more return. Plus, the landlords are in a computer now. Up in Albany. All that’s gotta happen is one of the big pigs types ya name into that computer and you don’t have no more property.”

  Najowski turned away from Blanks, staring out the side window long enough to make both of them uncomfortable. When he finally turned back, he was visibly upset. “You think I don’t know this? I’m a landlord, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You know about rent control, all right,” Blanks said evenly. “But maybe you think that I don’t know about it. Maybe you think I’m another Irishman with potatoes and whiskey, instead of brains, between his ears.”

  “What would you do if I ripped you off, Martin?”

  “I’d kill ya. I wouldn’t have no choice.”

  Najowski grinned enthusiastically; it was going exactly as planned. Let the asshole have his macho victories. It was the last card that mattered. He leaned in close to Blanks as he prepared to flash the bait. “Now listen carefully, Martin. This is where it gets good. Two years ago, Morris Katz, the Jew who owns this building and the two buildings running down 74th and 75th streets, sent his tenants notice that he wanted to convert his real estate from rental to co-op. Without gettin’ into it too deep, you should know the laws about conversion are written in such a way that the owner of the property has to beg the tenants to buy or move on. You can’t throw anybody out. Not even if their leases have expired. So long as they pay the rent, tenants have the right to renew their leases until they’re carried out in a box. That’s why Morris offered to sell the occupying tenants their apartments at a price thirty percent below the market price. That’s called the ‘insider’ price and it means the tenants could buy a hundred-thousand-dollar unit for seventy thousand. That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar profit. You’d think nobody in their right mind could refuse thirty thousand dollars. Am I right, or what?”

  Najowski held up three fingers for Blanks’ inspection. “Three people took it, Martin. Three.” He paused to let the information sink in. “There’s two hundred forty units in these buildings and I can get them for just over fifteen million dollars. Two million up front and the rest in a ten-percent mortgage which Morris will hold. I can swing the two million. Two million ain’t a problem for me. Morris Katz is the problem. He bought the buildings in 1960 for two and a half million and the profit is gonna be taxed like ordinary income. Morris wants something under the table by way of compensation. Also, Morris don’t trust banks. Or anything else run by Christians. He wants a million dollars in gold coins—one-ounce Mexican pesos—at the exchange rate on the day before the closing.

  “I don’t have cash, Martin. Or any way to get cash without attracting a lot of attention, but I know Morris Katz could get eighteen million if he wasn’t in such a hurry to get out.”

  “What the fuck is an eighty-three-year-old man gonna do with a million dollars in gold?” Blanks interrupted, frowning. The whole deal had something wrong with it.

  “Check this out, Martin. The Jew wants to sail his yacht to Jamaica, where he’ll pass out the coins to any little native gal who can get him off. He lost his wife and kids in the concentration camps in World War Two and he spent all his efforts makin’ money after the war. Didn’t have time to start another family and now he’s gotta have compensations.”

  “I still don’t see what it’s got to do with me,” Blanks insisted. “What do I want with a rent-controlled building that even a Jew couldn’t make no money on?”

  “Well, you understand that when Morris tried to convert, he had to send his tenants a written proposal, right? That’s called a red herring. In that proposal, he had to establish the value of each unit. The average price of a unit in one of Morris Katz’s buildings, to an outsider, is just over one hundred thousand dollars. Multiply the number of units times one hundred thousand and what do you get?”

  “Twenty-
four million,” Blanks replied without hesitation. “You’re talkin’ about a nine-million-dollar profit.”

  “No.” Najowski grinned like a little boy. The bait was taken. All that remained was the formal setting of the hook. “Not nine million. The co-op assumes the mortgage, so the profit, minus legal fees and cosmetic repairs, is closer to twenty-one million dollars. But that’s for empty units. That’s if the Koreans and the Jews and Pakis already living here are encouraged to find other housing. I admit I can’t do it. I got no way to get those assholes off my property. But you got a way. I’ll bet you got a lot of ways.”

  Marek paused again, his grin widening. “Listen, Martin. This neighborhood might look like paradise, but Morris’ buildings are only three blocks from an alley that runs off Broadway. There’s a fuck-flick moviehouse there and a topless bar and, late at night, drugs and whores. If that scum took a notion to move the few blocks to our real estate, who could blame us? If it moved into our vacant apartments, how could we, as helpless landlords, blocked from real ownership of our property by ass-kissing politicians, be held accountable? And if these scum were to concentrate in a single building and conditions became so bad that we were able to empty that building, you, Martin Blanks, could be out of the dope business in two years. Am I right, or what?”

  “And all I gotta do is trust you with a million bucks?” There was a challenge in Martin Blanks’ words, but not in his voice. The figures were too astounding.

  “Trust is not part of our arrangement,” Najowski announced. “The units’ll be operated by a management company for five percent of the gross rents. The properties will be owned by a corporation registered in New York. That corporation will be wholly owned by a corporation registered in the state of Delaware, where the disclosure laws are very weak. The Delaware corporation will be owned by a third corporation registered in the Bahama Islands, where the bankers make the Swiss look like gossip columnists. Each of us will own half the stock in that final corporation. Now, maybe the CIA could find us. Or the FBI. But there ain’t much chance the FBI or the CIA is gonna give two shits about some asshole tenants from Jackson Heights.

  “Plus, Martin, you should consider that I can empty fifteen percent of the building just by checkin’ leases. The Pakistanis and the Indians never do anything straight. One tenant moves out, a cousin moves in. Like they never heard of paperwork. And a lot of them are illegals. They’ll fly the minute they see an eviction notice.

  “The Koreans are better about the paperwork, but they won’t fight. They’ll be off as soon as there’s a threat of drugs or violence. That’s ’cause they’re afraid their kids’ll turn out to be Americans.

  “Now, if we don’t rerent the empty apartments, they’ll attract squatters. Junkies. Whores. Alkies. The Jews and the Christians’ll fight; they think the rent laws can protect ’em. When they find out the truth, they’ll leave. Or we’ll buy out the few we can’t convince. The only real question is whether you can overcome their addiction to low rent.”

  Martin Blanks grinned from ear to ear. “That’s the least of the problems, pal. I can make the cocksuckers wish they’d moved to fuckin’ hell instead of Jackson Heights.” He paused, then ran his fingers lightly over the Jaguar’s leather seats. “I meant what I said before, though. If you rip me off, I kill you, if it means I gotta die myself.”

  Najowski echoed Blanks’ smile. Despite his guest’s reputation, Najowski felt no fear at all. “Martin, listen with both ears. If you want to stop being a criminal, you should learn to protect yourself with lawyers instead of threats. Look around, then buy yourself an attorney who accepts cash payments. Maybe the one who recommended you in the first place. Now, where could I drop you?”

  Marek took his time driving back into Manhattan. Instead of running the BQE south and coming in through the Midtown Tunnel, he drove northeast, to the Grand Central Parkway and the Triboro Bridge. At 116th Street, he exited the Parkway and cut across Spanish Harlem, to Fifth Avenue, then turned south. Once past Mt. Sinai Hospital, with Central Park on the west side of the Avenue, the squalid tenements miraculously gave way to the most expensive real estate in Manhattan.

  Martin Blanks was suitably impressed with the opulence surrounding them—the doormen and the long canopies extending to the curb, the glittering chandeliers in ballroom-sized lobbies, the beautifully dressed couples hurrying into their homes. For a short time, right after his parole, Martin Blanks had held, at the insistence of his parole officer, the exalted position of assistant janitor in a similar building on York Avenue. He had no more love for these people (or desire to live among them) than he’d had for his father on the day he pulled the trigger, but the years upstate had made him cautious. They could bite, these people, despite the fragile bodies and the bullshit facade. If he crossed them, his parole officer would certainly send him back to prison, so he tiptoed when in their exalted presence and, now that his parole was complete, ignored them altogether.

  Still, watching the canopies pass, the doormen bowing and scraping, he had to concede the rich several truths: there were no cops coming to put them in jail. No rivals longing to put a bullet between their eyes. Or employees tempted to head south with a year’s profits. They didn’t hold their economic lives together with guns and shanks and tiny vials of rock cocaine; they were safe in a way he had never known.

  When the white Jaguar pulled to the curb on 47th, between Ninth and Tenth, the whores and dealers were out in force. Despite the cool weather, knots of people dotted the tenement stoops, buying and selling. Hell’s Kitchen had been Irish first, then Italian, then Puerto Rican. Now adventurous New York professionals, drawn by its proximity to midtown, were renovating individual tenements, but welfare hotels and decrepit slum buildings still dominated the neighborhood, furnishing the dealers with a ready clientele. Later, after midnight, the wolf packs, black and Latino kids from the outer boroughs, would roam the same streets, looking for prey, but, for now, the transactions were peaceful, if noisy.

  This was Martin Blanks’ territory and, though he hadn’t been involved in the retail end of the business for several years, he was a role model for the street people, and a dozen voices greeted him as he stepped from the white Jaguar. The whores, the dealers, the neighborhood thugs…

  Martin listened for a moment, then turned to Marek Najowski and said, “First thing is I’m gonna talk to that lawyer you mentioned. Then I’ll be in touch.”

  ONE

  January 4

  CONNIE APPASTELLO, SEVENTEEN YEARS old, waited impatiently in the first-floor hallway of the Jackson Arms for Yolande Montgomery to finish. Occasionally pressing her head to the door of apartment 1F she could hear Yolande’s caressing voice and the tricks steady grunts. It sounded like he was nearly done, so it probably wouldn’t take that long. Still, Connie cursed Solly Rags, her pimp, for setting up two whores in a studio apartment. Unless one or the other turned a car trick, the situation was impossible. It could take a half hour to get these old shitheads hot enough to part with fifty bucks. How could you tell ’em they had to wait in a hallway ’cause the bed was full? And even if she was smart enough (which she definitely was) to maneuver the trick and make enough money to satisfy the rapacious Solly Rags (by freezing her ass off, mostly) she still had to stand around and be stared at, like some mutilated freak, by these asshole tenants (who probably never laid eyes on a working girl before) while Yolande did her thing in the apartment.

  Finally (it seemed like forever), the door opened and a short, heavy man, buttoning his coat, hurried past her down the hallway. Connie pushed inside without waiting for the door to close. Yolande was lying in the bed, nude, her ample black body at ease. “What’s happenin’, baby?” she asked. “You still hurtin’?”

  Connie ignored the question. She went right to the bureau against the far wall, to the glistening mirror with its heap of white powder. Quickly, expertly, she pushed a small pile to the center, chopped it with a razor blade then snorted it up, one line into each nostril. As the drug
came on, she silently wished for a vial of crack, for that quick, overwhelming rush of ecstasy, but crack was forbidden, at least for the time being. They were opening up new territory, Solly explained, and they needed to keep their heads reasonably straight.

  “Fuck that prick,” Connie said. She admired her cheerleader reflection in the mirror for a few minutes, trying to gauge the coke’s quality by the quality of her blue eyes, her full mouth. Then she found a pimple on her cheekbone, a tiny, red area that looked like it might develop into something really nasty. She consoled herself by cutting another line, chopping briefly, and snorting it up.

  “You better take it easy with that blow, baby,” Yolande called. “Ain’t no more comin’. Solly say he won’t be back.”

  Instead of answering, Connie stripped off her clothing: pink feathery jacket, electric blue micro-mini, five-inch spike heels, bright red push-up bra and matching panties, black, acrylic leg warmers. Nude, she climbed into the bed and cuddled up against Yolande, casually throwing a slender leg across the older woman’s body. Tricks find such moments incredibly erotic, but Connie (for the moment) just wanted to cuddle.

  “What a night,” Connie said. “You wouldn’t believe the fucking night I had.” She laid her arm against Yolande’s, noting the contrast between Yolande’s dark, oily skin and her own baby-powder complexion. Six months into the life, Connie admired Yolande tremendously. Yolande had been on the street for years. Had actually been in jail, on Rikers Island, six different times and done a two-year bit in Bedford Hills for nearly killing a pimp. Yolande made sure Solly Rags didn’t beat Connie more than absolutely necessary and that he put a gram on that mirror every night. It was one thing when the two girls worked the Lower East Side. There was every kind of dope on the street and they could always hold a few dollars back from their tips. Now Solly had them somewhere out in Queens and they had to rely on him to keep them high.