Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side

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Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side Page 5

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

She’s also been doing and dealing smack for almost as long. I’ve known her for nearly a year now—since my first week assigned to plainclothes Operation 8. When I busted her then, she tried to swallow a bag of dope she was holding, and I had to improvise a variation on the Heimlich maneuver before she could choke it down. I collared her, but we became friends. It’s hard not to like her—she isn’t just incredible looking, she has a blunt kind of honesty about everything except her own dope habit that’s endearing and comes in pretty handy sometimes. Like now. It’s a few months after the Sabu fiasco and I still want a name. A real one. One that fits the organization and order enforced within the Third Street crew.

  The goddess of love is a reliable informant. Her info is always on the level, and she never once asks for any of the things I’ll trade with other snitches—money, dope, or some uninterrupted dealing time—in return. Venus always says she’s going to clean up, move out to California with a boyfriend, leave the Lower East Side behind, and all that. I kid her about meeting a rich stockbroker and getting herself set up in a house with a pool in return. A few months from now she’ll vanish from the scene. Some guys on the avenue will claim she OD’d. I kid myself and pretend she’s out in L.A. in a little pink house on a hillside with a husband and a kid that looks like her.

  Right now she’s alive and beautiful, talking from the hip the way she does, her hair licking the wind at the start of her final summer in Alphaville.

  “He’s for sure gonna start some crap,” Venus says, tugging a strand from her mouth. I’ve heard her curse out guys on the street in two languages worth of blue and it kills me how she censors herself when she gives us a tip-off.

  “Big Arthur used to have a lot of spots and move a lot of stuff, like way before you guys. He’s been upstate for a long time, but he’s coming back like right soon. He’s a nasty SOB, Rambo. Worse than his brother.”

  Shit. Michael Washington, Big Arthur’s brother, is a first-class asshole and a neighborhood menace. Though barely out of his teens, Michael has already done enough time to cultivate the classic prison yard bodybuilder look—arms the width of fire hydrants and a tight, swaggering walk. When I first meet him, the word on Michael is that he had gone into the stickup business to support a newfound dope habit. Driving down Avenue C one afternoon, Gio and I see Michael strutting along the sidewalk like Ric Flair, forcing people to step aside and put a foot in the gutter as he passes. We slow to a crawl, matching his pace. After about half a block, I punch the siren trigger on the steering wheel to jolt him. He doesn’t even flinch. Is he fucking deaf? We pull over in front of him and got out. It’s time to employ one of the most effective and adaptable tools in a cop’s bag of tricks—the discon.

  According to the NYPD Patrol Guide, article 240.20 of the penal code describes disorderly conduct—a C summons violation and a pink ticket like letting your dog go on the sidewalk or jumping a turnstile—as any situation in which a person “engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior,” “makes unreasonable noise,” “uses abusive or obscene language,” or “makes an obscene gesture,” “disturbs any lawful assembly,” “obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic,” “congregates with other persons and refuses to disperse,” or “creates a hazardous or physically offensive act which serves no legitimate purpose.”

  In other words, issuing a disorderly conduct or discon summons was a perfect catchall allowing any cop to hassle, search, and lock up anyone annoying, threatening, or looking like they could use a search or a warrant check on the Command’s computer. The law requires the unlucky but always deserving recipient of a discon to make a mandatory court appearance on a given date (announced at roll call each morning), something a majority of skells are too fucked up or arrogant to remember to do. Even if a search and warrant check doesn’t turn up anything useful, issuing a discon ticket plants the seed for a future arrest for failure to appear in court.

  We toss Michael but he’s clean—no gun, no dope. It’s an educational collar anyway. Once it’s clear that we’re arresting him, he cans the attitude and doesn’t give us any fight. At least not on purpose.

  “Fuck me,” Gio says as he pulls at Michael’s arms. He’s gotten one side of his cuffs onto one of Michael’s wrists, but the guy’s arms are so pumped that Gio can’t get them close together enough behind his back to attach the other cuff.

  “Ow! Yo, you hurting my shoulder and shit!” Michael yells as I push his other arm. It eventually takes both of our sets of cuffs joined end to end to get his wrists fastened behind his back. By the time we get Michael cuffed and in the car, I feel like I moved a couch up a flight of stairs.

  Within a month or so Michael’s dope habit eclipses what little sense he has and the stickups we could never nail him for go from bold to ridiculous. He’s finally arrested hours after going into his local bodega wearing a ski mask and carrying an Uzi. The guy behind the counter has probably seen Michael at the counter, minus the mask and the Uzi, for every day of Michael’s entire life outside the pen. The guy hands over the contents of his register, waits for Michael to leave, calls 911, gives Michael Washington’s name and points out where Michael lives with his mother to the officers that respond. The Uzi and the stolen cash are there on his bed and Michael works out in a prison yard for the next decade.

  Three

  Senior year of high school, two friends of mine, Zee and Lenny, approached me about a thing they were going to do as a favor to a wiseguy named Eddie Lino. Eddie was a coke dealer supplying Canarsie with his product. He was also a made member of John Gotti’s Ozone Park crew, and a tough guy in his own right. Gotti and the Gambinos drank at Geffken’s down the street from the Lucchese’s hangout, the Nut, and things were getting a little tense. I didn’t really care. Ever since the pizza guy thing, it was pretty clear to me that the Nut, Geffken’s, Vic Amuso, and John Gotti were guys from Zee and Lenny’s world, not mine.

  I hadn’t told anyone, but I finally followed my dad’s suggestion and took the police exam. The department had long since evolved from a patronage gig where you got on the force because someone with juice sponsored you, to a civil service job like working for ConEd or sanitation where you took a test and sweated the results while waiting for a spot on the payroll to open up. Between World War I and World War II, the NYPD and other big city police forces started modernizing the same way the U.S. Army did. Cavalry horses gave way to tanks in the army, and precinct barracks and tall hats gave way to modern police methods and specialized assignments in the NYPD.

  Soon after the New York City Housing Authority was created in 1934 to develop and maintain public housing projects all over the five boroughs, a small housing security patrol was chartered to go with the new developments, just like building maintenance and management. What nobody expected was that regular NYPD uniform cops would refuse to answer calls in the towering new public housing blocks. Citing regulations about entering domiciles with specific, dedicated street and avenue addresses (even the first generation of public housing developments were hard to indentify by number and cross street), regular NYPD uniforms, what housing and transit police would come to refer to as “city cops” until the three branches merged in 1995, balked at doing their duty in densely populated clusters of middle- and low-income residential towers, where anyone above the second floor with a brick or bottle had the upper hand.

  In 1952, the state of New York approved a proposal calling for the creation of an actual Housing Police Department. Initially the housing police was a security force with police powers—the right to detain, question, and arrest—along the lines of corrections or court officers. But as the NYCHA’s holdings swelled to the equivalent of about one hundred and fifty World Trade Center–sized sites towering over more than twenty-five hundred acres of ground, the city and state kicked in for a bigger budget, and Albany made housing cops fully empowered police, whose beat was vertical as much as horizontal. By 1966, the year after my father was sworn in and began working the projects in Brooklyn, the Ne
w York City Housing Authority Police was the fourth largest individual police force in the state, and the twenty-fourth largest in the country, with its own uniform rank-and-file, plainclothes squads, detectives, and specialized investigative bureaus—narcotics, burglary, homicide, and so on—all kept very busy by residents and visitors to the NYCHA’s properties in each of the five boroughs.

  After high school, I’d taken a long hard look at my prospects and my friends from the neighborhood’s futures. Almost every kid that gets good at sports and receives encouragement from coaches that “get you,” and a trophy with a gold guy doing whatever it is you do frozen in action on the top, thinks at least for a little while that they might make it professionally in their chosen sport. I was captain of my high school football team and played just about every minute of every game on both offense and defense. I’d boxed, winning often enough to inflate my ego, and holding my own sparring and competing at Gleason’s gym. For a while I coasted on the encouragement of my coaches and little bits of coverage in the school and Canarsie papers. But like the majority of people with those dreams my bubble finally burst. I didn’t have the size or talent to make it in the NFL. I loved boxing, but my instincts were better set for mixed martial arts. Eventually I became heavily involved with Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. But that kind of thing was still pretty rare and didn’t pay in the eighties.

  I gave college a try and then said no thanks. I loved to read, could keep all kinds of notes and ideas safely tucked in my head, but I couldn’t stand writing anything down and doing homework. The nuns at Holy Family had seen to that. Not exactly a recipe for academic success. With high school behind me, my choices were pretty narrow. I wasn’t from a wolf family and I was sick of that future wiseguy bullshit from friends who did have that card to play. For whatever reason the guys who were born to the mob career track were the hardest partiers and that wasn’t my thing, either. I was never afraid to work—I’d been a waiter in a catering hall, worked at a Herman’s sporting goods store, been a health club instructor, and done construction and other gigs of one kind or another my whole life, but those always just felt like stops along the way. But along the way to what? Well…

  In those days the police exam was administered in person a few times a year by the New York City Department of Personnel. You waited for an announcement that the test was being given in your area, signed up, and then went off to take it in a big room full of other would-be cops like it was the SATs. My father wasn’t exactly a chatterbox. We got on fine but it’s not like we shared a lot of father-son heart-to-hearts. Looking back I have to admit that what advice he did give me was usually pretty good. From junior year of high school on whenever I changed jobs or grades came in, like clockwork he’d announce where and when a police test was being given and suggest that I go wherever that was and take it.

  A few weeks before Lenny and Zee came to see me, I finally took my old man’s advice, went to Canarsie High School one Saturday morning and sat down with about two thousand other applicants with pencils in hand. The written section was made up of a bunch of multiple choice questions mostly to test reading comprehension and memory. In an effort to weed out psychos along with illiterates, the Department of Personnel included a lengthy psych portion with the test. Of the hundred or so questions about half of them seemed to be variations on the same two inquiries about your relationship with helpless animals and your mother.

  Question 4: Have you ever hurt an animal?

  No.

  Question 7: Do you love your mother?

  Yes.

  Question 13: Would you ever kick a dog?

  No.

  Question 22: Does your mother’s love matter to you?

  Yes.

  Question 32: Do you hit a pet when it misbehaves?

  Yes. Wait, no! Shit, you almost caught me!

  Question 37: Do you dream about your mother?

  What a funny coincidence, I have a recurring dream in which Mom and I beat up small animals together.

  The next part of the psych test asked us to draw a picture of a house. Guys that I knew from the neighborhood who were now in the academy or on the job told me to keep it simple and happy and to make it complete—a box with a triangle on it for a house and cetera. No gravestone with “Mom” written on it or a picture of a guy in the front yard kicking a dog and an arrow that says “me” pointing to it, I guess…

  Along with the written evaluation, my fellow applicants and I were ushered into a gym in the police academy and put through a series of drills by some old-time cop who called everyone “Skippy”—wall-climbing, running, dragging a ninety-five-pound dummy a specific distance while a stopwatch ticked. I did fine.

  Eventually you met with a police psychologist for an interview to see if there was maybe something not right enough about you to qualify you for police service that the questions and picture drawing hadn’t revealed. I’d been tipped to what to expect from this, too. At the time there were two women doing most of the interviews. One was a dwarf, which rattled some guys so much right off the bat that they would clam up, stare, babble apologies, and blow it on their own. The other examiner was an unremarkable middle-aged civil servant who smoked through the entire exam. Either one could keep you in her office for as long as she liked while asking questions and taking notes.

  “Should it be illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater?” my examiner asked me after a few preliminaries and puffs.

  “Isn’t it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, is it?” she replied.

  “Yeah, it is.” I was 99 percent sure on this.

  “Should it be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s wrong to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” For a second I thought I may have said “theater in a crowded fire.” I hadn’t.

  “Why?”

  “Because someone might get hurt in the rush to get through the exit doors.”

  “How much do you drink?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “You don’t drink? Not at all?”

  “No.” I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t. The booze questioning was a tough issue for a lot of young would-be cops. I’m guessing that it still is. We went around like this for less than five minutes. I passed. Later I found out that some guys are in there for as much as half an hour and a surprising number don’t pass the first time. Once I made plainclothes in Alphabet City, I’d learn a lot more about interrogations. In a potentially hostile interview the majority of people with something to hide will always offer too much information. Confession may be good for the soul but too much of the wrong kind will wash you out of a law enforcement career.

  I had little to hide and not much to say and I guess that made me sane. The passing mark in sanity and the results of that supervised workout and the written testing were combined, I was ranked 10,463 against the rest of the people taking the test (not bad, actually) and placed on a list that any of the three divisions of the New York City Police Department—the city cops, housing police, and transit police—could pick from to fill spaces in their ranks. The test itself wasn’t very hard. The difficult part was being between jobs and sweating the results.

  Three hundred bucks for only one night’s work was just what I needed. The job itself was a simple break-in at a closed-up longshoreman’s bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that was used to store Joker Poker video games for some wannabe wiseguy who’d wound up on Eddie Lino’s bad side. I was the quickest, so I would be the one to climb over a rusty old barbed wire fence, break in the back door, get in, and unlock the front door for my guys. Together we were supposed to move all the machines to the front as quickly as possible then load them onto a Penske truck that one of the boys backed up to the front.

  “Hurry the fuck up!” Lenny had done break-ins before. He was nervous and knew that we were taking too long.

  “What? I’m hurrying up, what the fuck!” Zee hissed
back. We were each holding a side of a Joker Poker machine. Even though the metal edges were cutting through leather work gloves I wore and into my hands, I kept silent. We filled the truck with about twenty game machines and a half-dozen cigarette machines, Lenny and Zee piled into the cab, and I got in back. Whoever was driving did such a lousy job I didn’t know whether to try to sit or stand. Just as I was about to tell them to pull over and let me drive, I heard a siren. My heart pounded and I started to sweat like Nixon. I had a momentary vision of my dad and his friends from the job setting fire to the police exam results in front of me. There was no way I would get on the force with a burglary bust on my record. Lights flashed and the sound of the siren passed and faded.

  “It’s not for us, they’re not after us, we’re cool,” Lenny yelled from the front.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “That you behind the wheel up there? Slow the fuck down. You drive like my ass.”

  We were supposed to meet up with Eddie at a parking lot in Marine Park. Along the way Lenny assured me for the thousandth time that Eddie was the real deal and that, yeah, I was going to get paid. I needed the money, and unlike the two would-be mobsters in front, I had no reason to do favors for made-guy coke dealers from Queens. By the time we arrived at the parking lot a fog and drizzle had descended over Brooklyn. We orbited the lot until Zee figured out where the entrance was, parked and killed the engine and lights. Some couples had parked away from the streetlights and were dry humping and making out. This sucked. Finally a big El Dorado coupe rumbled up and flashed its brights. It had to be Eddie.

  “There he is. I told you he’d be here,” Lenny whispered.

 

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