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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  “Good,” I whispered back. “I want to get the hell out of here, I’m tired of watching windows fogging up.”

  “Let me do the fucking talking, okay?” Lenny acted like this was his big score. “I know him pretty good.” The three of us got out of the truck simultaneously. Eddie, a smirk and a two-hundred-dollar haircut in a suit, was already leaning on his Caddy smoking a cigarette.

  “Hey kids,” he said in a way that deserved a slap. I could already tell this was not going to go my way.

  “Hi, Eddie,” Lenny answered. Zee and I nodded.

  “Do okay? You get ’em all?”

  “We cleaned ’em out,” Lenny replied. “Even got a few cigarette machines.”

  “Good. I’ll need one of you guys to follow me over to Avenue P. The truck goes in a lot over there.”

  “Okay, I’ll go,” Lenny volunteered.

  “All right then. See you two guys around,” Eddie said, as he began to get into his car.

  Wait a second.

  “See ya around? What about my fuckin’ three hundred bucks?” I asked. The smirk vanished. Lenny and Zee both stiffened.

  “What the fuck’s your problem?” Eddie demanded as his fingers let go of his car door handle.

  “I ain’t got no problem, I just want my three bills,” I answered. Eddie faced me, shifted his weight, and waited for a moment before answering me.

  “Three bills, huh? Is that it, three fucking bills?”

  “That’s it,” I said, measuring the distance between us. Eddie was a heavyset guy close to six feet tall, over two hundred pounds, and probably about thirty or thirty-five years old, I guessed. I could tell by the way he moved his weight from foot to foot that he could handle himself.

  “What the fuck’s your name, kid?” he asked.

  “Mike,” I answered. As he walked toward me I turned to the side like Sugar Ray Leonard fighting Roberto Durán. If he was going to hit me, I didn’t want to give him a big target. I didn’t clench my fists but I was ready to bob and weave and roll with the punch if he went for me. For sure, I wouldn’t get caught flat-footed. Eddie reached into his pocket, and whipped out a roll of hundreds big enough to choke a horse.

  “Where you from, Mike?” he asked, as he counted out three bills.

  “Canarsie,” I answered.

  “Figures,” he said. He laughed, the smirk returned, and he lightly smacked the money into my hand and motioned for Lenny to get in the truck. As the Caddy and rental truck convoy headed out of the lot, Zee turned to me.

  “What about my money?”

  I just shook my head.

  “He’s your friend, go ask him for it.”

  Once many years after my family and I had long since turned our backs on the old neighborhood and I had moved on from Alphaville to a post with the DEA, I was in a diner on the fringes of Coney Island, near Stillwell Avenue and the Belt, sweating a bunch of bonus-round questions and sudden trips to the bathroom from a very uptight, very suspicious, and very dangerous heroin dealer. I was undercover and it was a preliminary meet: a setup for a setup to make a buy, then more buys, until we get enough on the guy and his crew to go up on a wiretap. First, however, I had to convince the dealer that I was just as bad a guy as he was and that I had the juice and money to back up all the bullshit I was telling him. My specialty when doing undercovers with the DEA was to pretend to be a wolf like the Canarsie wiseguys I knew growing up.

  The contact was getting inquisitive and the food was getting cold. Eventually the dealer agreed to take me up the ladder to his supplier, but as we paid the check and left I wondered whether I should cut my losses. It felt like maybe I would never hear from the guy again or if I did I might be as sorry as a previous undercover someone in his crew had supposedly shot in the gut months earlier.

  As we walked out to the sidewalk I spotted a familiar face from Canarsie in the parking lot. He was dressed in Armani and was getting out of a BMW that I couldn’t afford in a thousand years. The only thing that had kept this particular guy from becoming a full-fledged mafioso was his half-Irish heritage and non-Italian last name. We had both played football for Canarsie High. He’d been big, mean, and dangerous on the field. From the look of him now, that hadn’t changed. I heard he’d been jammed up in construction bid-rigging along with a lot of the Lucchese crew and was about to do some federal time.

  I fought to not freeze up. My Canarsie pal knew I was a cop same as I knew what he did for a living. All he had to do to ruin my day and possibly get me shot was say, “Hey Mike, how’s police business?” Morning, Sam. He locked eyes with me, walked to where I stood, flashed a disdainful look at my Colombian B-boy drug connection and wrapped me in a hug and a showy handshake and kiss that would’ve looked perfect in The Godfather. My lunch companion could tell this was a connected guy because of the look, the threads, the car, and the attitude. His narrowed eyes bugged out as we wordlessly greeted each other with such familiarity. In one gesture I became the real thing. Thanks, neighbor. Eight months later the dealer, a twelve-thug crew, and about a million dollars in heroin and crack were all locked up down on Foley Square in the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

  Like the Lower East Side and every other New York neighborhood, Canarsie has two legacies. One is recorded history—the facts, dates, and stats, newspaper articles, police blotters, census records that track waves and cycles of immigration, growth, building, suburban exodus, decay, and a new population from somewhere else getting the ball rolling all over again. The other is the more ghostly remains—memories, stories, legends, and lessons that are all that remain of the individual lives, the fading faces and voices of the people who lived, worked, and died there.

  For a while when I was a kid, the house next door to us was occupied by an off-the-boat Sicilian named Paulo and his family. Like my grandfather, Paulo had an old country ease and pride that showed in the way he did little things. Just strolling down the sidewalk or watering his lawn he had a kind of swaggering walk—shoulders back, stomach out, feet angled out to either side in a reverse pigeon toe. No one actually born in Brooklyn in the twentieth century walked like that. Paulo was as Old World as grappa.

  Around the house Paulo was a happy-go-lucky guy—always whistling to himself, singing, narrating what he was doing in the mixture of hyper-speed Sicilian and slow English that earned native guys like him the behind-the-back handle “zips.” He loved kids and played with me sometimes when I was young. Paulo had two daughters and for a while I guess I was a stand-in for the son that he probably always wanted but never got. We played a game together that Paulo called “focu” (Sicilian for “fire”) that mostly involved us chasing each other around the outside of our semidetached houses. But Paulo had an edge. He was always fiercely competitive in the checkers games we had on his porch, and quick to loudly announce he had beaten his eight-year-old neighbor. When the mood struck him, he would go around to the back of the house where his daughters kept a rabbit hutch, remove one of the bunnies from the cage, snap its neck in a single shake of his arm, and deposit it on his kitchen counter. Lunch. It didn’t rattle him one bit.

  If his wife spoke a word of English or any other language she never felt obliged to show it. She was always in black, scowling like she was born in mourning. Their daughters were beautiful girls. Olive skin, deep brown eyes, long dark hair like burnished mahogany—they were the apple of their father’s eye and the object of desire of every guy in school. Paulo ran his home like a castle where those girls were concerned. It was like they lived on the right side of the tracks and the tracks ran around the outside of the house. When his daughters were done at school and their retail jobs afterward, they went home and they stayed home. Selling lemonade together on the corner of Avenue M when we were little was one thing, but once we all got older, no amount of hormones in the world would’ve made me ask either of them out. It was just understood. I pictured Paulo and the rabbits.

  Eventually, Paulo bought his family a big place on the water in Mill Basin and the
y moved away. How a roofer could afford to move into a five-bedroom home with an in-ground pool was the subject of some very quiet talk among the people he left behind in Canarsie. You really only had to look at his Mill Basin neighbors—made guys, mob lawyers, Canarsie crew stars and their families to start forming ideas. Paulo, the rumor went, had a side business, closer to what he did to those rabbits than what he did with a hammer on construction sites. The word was that he’d been imported from Sicily to use that skill on someone who pissed someone else off. The money was good, the work didn’t rattle him and he decided to stay. He sent for his wife in Sicily and started a family in Canarsie.

  By the time I was working in Alphabet City, Paulo had achieved what he set out to do. He married his eldest daughter off to an Italian guy who had passed inspection in a huge wedding staged in a rented tent in their sprawling backyard by the water in Mill Basin. Paulo installed his daughter and her new husband into a similar house just down the street, and bought her a wedding boutique to operate while making her papa proud and her mother hint at a smile with a dozen or so grandkids. That was the plan, anyway.

  One morning in the late eighties a man walked into the boutique. If you saw him come through the door you probably wouldn’t remember much about him—what he wore, how tall he was, what he looked like, other than a pair of dark glasses covering a lot of his face and a bright smile he occasionally flashed below them. The man browsed the glass cases displaying crystal and bone china, his gloved hands clasped behind his back, then flipped through a sample book of wedding registry patterns and sets until he and Paulo’s daughter were both alone in the store. When they had the place to themselves he locked the door, pulled out a butcher knife and began stabbing her. Paulo’s daughter was petite but she was her father’s child to her last breath. She fought and twisted against the knife, tried to push the man away, tore at his face, yelled for help, and demanded to live, but the man just kept pushing the knife blade in and out of her until she was silent and still. The medical examiner logged over eighty stab wounds in her.

  Detectives found nothing missing from the store, the register, or Paulo’s daughter’s purse except her car keys. A short while later they discovered her cream Mercedes ragtop parked across the street from Paulo’s old house—the one next door to my family’s old place—a home neither Paulo nor his family had set foot in for more than seven years.

  I was out in Canarsie at the Six-nine Precinct interviewing a robbery perp a few years after it happened. Out of curiosity I took a look at the investigating officer’s case file on my old neighbor’s homicide investigation. The file itself was a mess—badly organized and typed up—a textbook example of sloppy police work. I could handle that but I couldn’t handle the pictures. I knew her, I knew the store, and knew that no one anywhere needs to die of eighty stab wounds or see what that looks like. According to the Six-nine’s detectives, despite the blood on the counters, the carpet, the door to the store, in Paulo’s daughter’s Mercedes, and on the sidewalk, there was only one partial fingerprint successfully lifted. The FBI database supposedly identified it as belonging to a Sicilian national, whereabouts unknown.

  The grieving father offered a huge reward to anyone who could identify the killer. He even hired a famous private detective to do his own investigation, but the case remains unsolved. I don’t have any more actual insight into what happened than anyone else. But I do have a feeling. It feels like a message. An anonymous Sicilian assassin cuts the thing you love most out of your life and leaves a reminder about it a few yards from your former house before shifting into park, stepping out onto the sidewalk, and vanishing? What that says to me is no matter where you go, remember where you came from. No matter what you do, remember that there’s someone you’re doing it for, and doing it to. On the right side of the law, the wrong side or, like nearly everyone I encountered during my time as a cop in Alphaville, somewhere in between, every one of your choices and acts has a potential consequence—good, bad, or outright tragic—if not today, then tomorrow. If not where you started out in life, then where you wind up farther down the line.

  Avenue D

  Big Arthur is a different story than his brother Michael. He’s physically even more of a monster, but with enough brains to stay off the spike and to avoid getting caught dirty. He also must have some heavy friends because now that his four-year manslaughter sentence has ended, he returns to the neighborhood in a brand-new burgundy Alfa Romeo. Arthur makes a point of circling the block where I stand a few times the first day he’s back. I guess we both have a reputation.

  Within twenty-four hours of our staring contest Arthur’s strong-arming corner dealers into kicking back dope and money to him and giving up the spots they’ve been working while he was upstate. A bunch of Arthur’s boys from the East Williamsburg and Red Hook projects on the other side of the river start dealing on the avenue. Arthur’s plan appears simple—rip off anyone with material and money, redistribute the material to the dealers he’s hooked up in Brooklyn and buy even more dope with the money he takes. Overnight our snitch network becomes a Big Arthur Washington complaint department. The Avenue D heroin racket suddenly starts to resemble Dodge City lawlessness for the first time since I’ve been here.

  A growing trail of busted jaws, broken windshields, and dead bodies all lead back to Arthur, but we only ever hear about it when it’s over. He’s rattling everyone from the lowest junkie to the most profitable corner guy looking to climb the ladder to the next tier of perpdom. He’s also fucking us up. He can’t be the man with the way he’s acting, and the shit he’s pulling are all sad stories after the fact for us, not heads-up tips like we’ve been working with a lot of the time up to now. When business is good, nobody thinks twice about ratting each other out. With business in turmoil, mouths stay closed except for bitching. With Arthur on the rampage, good people like Venus stop coming around with anything other than another fucked-up Big Arthur story.

  First day back Arthur walks up to one of the more profitable Third and D dealers, pulls a big Belgian automatic from his pants and jams it in the guy’s face.

  “Give me everything, motherfucker,” he growls. “Your money and your shit. All of it or I’ll fucking kill you.” It doesn’t really take balls to duck away from a gun. Fight or flight—running from a gun barrel is a natural instinct, one that usually results in an unnatural death by gunshot wound. Whether or not the dealer has balls I’ll never know. But in the moment he succumbs to the flight instinct he clearly has luck to spare. Arthur squeezes the trigger the second the guy flinches. Nothing. His gun is jammed. Arthur looks at the gun, thinks of the Schwarzenegger movie he saw it in and the lunch bag of twenties he traded for it, swears, and watches the dealer take off like a bat out of hell down Avenue D toward Houston Street. Arthur takes off after him, yanking at the slide on his gun, trying to unfreeze it and keep his promise. Arthur is big and he’s fast. Picture Dave Winfield crossed with the Tasmanian Devil. The dealer is a five-foot-two chain-smoker whose idea of a workout is to stand on tiptoes and scream into the face of his runner for not picking up a hot café con leche along with a fresh bundle of smack.

  The dealer runs, Arthur runs. The dealer gets winded and Arthur sinks to one knee in the middle of Houston Street. Whack! He smacks his still jammed gun on the pavement and tries the slide again. Nothing. Whack! He hits it on the ground again. Still nothing. Arthur slaps the gun down onto the pavement alternating sides over and over until finally, click—a dented .380 round pops loose and hits the street with a dull ting. Arthur stands up, chambers a new round and fires twice in the air. He drops his arm, takes aim, and knocks the dealer off his feet in midstride with a clean shot through the guy’s shoulder. Arthur calmly crosses Houston Street, walks up to where the guy is leaking blood from his shirt collar, and shoots him a second time. He then helps himself to the deck of dope he’s just seen the dealer take from his runner five minutes before, and a fat wad of bills rubber-banded together and stuffed deep into the now dead guy’
s windbreaker pocket.

  Four

  “Is this for real?” I was sitting in the backseat of Mr. Daley’s brown station wagon. Mr. D’s son Robby, a lifelong friend and brother to one of my best friends, was in the front seat, WNEW was playing the Moody Blues and the three of us—Mr. Daley, Robby, and me—were all in uniform. Mr. Daley had twenty-five years on the job, ten with NYPD Emergency Services Truck 1, and all the commendations and decorations to prove it. Robby and I each had a few months in at the police academy and were both in the generic uniforms assigned to academy recruits—dark blue trousers, light blue shirts, shiny thick-soled oxford Herman Munster shoes, and little metal nameplates pinned under our left pockets.

  Most days I took the double L from the Rockaway Parkway Station at the end of the line in Canarsie to the Third Avenue stop in Manhattan and walked six blocks up to the NYPD academy on Twentieth Street. A lot of days Rob rode with me. I never really minded the train or the walk to the academy. You never know what entertainment the streets of New York would provide. One morning on the way to Twentieth Street, I saw a former great white hope heavyweight boxer whose career I’d followed buying coke in a doorway.

  Today, Mr. Daley gave us a ride. It was six thirty in the morning and we’d numbly listened to the radio, the sound of shocks and potholes on the BQE, then the growl of tires on the metal grating roadway on the Manhattan Bridge before turning onto the FDR Drive, a stretch of six-lane highway running along the eastern edge of Manhattan island.

  Traffic was heavy and slow on the FDR and we exited at East Houston Street for a shortcut up Avenue D, paralleling the drive to Fourteenth Street, then to Third Avenue and on to the academy’s Twentieth Street entrance. Avenue D is the last letter in Alphabet City—the final north–south residential road on the map before the multilane FDR, the strip of public borderland beyond called East River Park, and the river itself separated from a concrete promenade at the park’s edge by a metal railing and a twelve-foot drop to shoreline rocks and foamy brown water.