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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  I’d never driven this far into the Lower East Side before and the light from the east over Brooklyn and through the buildings was warm and clear and easy on the eyes. I automatically exhaled as the projects went by on our right. With sunshine obscuring and highlighting details at the same time, the buildings and the grounds below looked all right. Nice. The view up on the sun breaking out over the projects’ rooftops, and the low iron fences separating some ragged-looking little hedges and patches of turf from the parking cul-de-sacs between each cluster of towers reminded me of the Bay View Houses just inland of Jamaica Bay in Canarsie. It wasn’t Scarsdale or whatever but it looked livable. Yeah, it looked okay. Except for one thing. Every couple of towers there was a handful of guys in expensive leathers herding a little clustered mob of people into a line. It took me a second to realize what they were doing. And to get really pissed off.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said to Robby’s father. “Right out here in broad daylight?” The rough lines were groups of tensely milling junkies waiting to score. The herders were dope dealers.

  “E.T., E.T.,” I heard one guy in an eight hundred-buck shearling coat yell. A few people in line moved forward. The shearling guy stopped them with a hand gesture. It seemed like a fucked-up ritual. I found out later that smack dealers were just as into marketing as anyone else in retail. They often named their “brand” of dope after a popular movie or song title, a TV or movie character, or a video game like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. I also learned later that the brands were total bullshit and that most of the dope trading hands for cash at street level came from the same sources.

  “School taught one and one is two, but by now, that answer just ain’t true…” The radio sang a familiar song and I sat in a familiar car with people I’d known my whole life. We were on our way to the same destination I’d arrived at Monday through Friday for weeks. But what I was looking at out there on Avenue D was a completely new world to me.

  “What the fuck…? It’s six A.M. for Christ’s sake!”

  “Yeah, this is where they buy it,” Mr. Daley said, glancing quickly at the fucked-up pageant to our right. He’d seen a lot in his career with the SWAT team and what was blowing my mind didn’t faze him for a second. “It’s been like that for years.”

  “Yeah, but come on, broad daylight?”

  “It’s a shitty neighborhood,” Mr. Daley offered. It didn’t look that shitty to me, but I didn’t want to be rude.

  “Well, with those scumbags dealing in it, it is,” I said.

  “It’s concentrated here. Contained like the measles.” He sighed. Anyone with a police career as long and distinguished as Mr. Daley had to resign themselves to departmental and City Hall double standards. “The mayor and the commissioner don’t really care, as long as it doesn’t spread out to nicer neighborhoods. They’ve got other stuff to worry about, I guess. There’s always going to be drug addicts.”

  I didn’t know it then but the ragtag bunch of addicts we passed represented neighborhoods all over the city and the country. A lot of them were just straight-up junkies like Mr. Daley said—their days and nights were an endless cycle of scoring dope, getting works to shoot it with, a safe place to do it, and enough money to buy more dope. They came here to score, but they went anywhere and did anything they could think of in any neighborhood to get the money to buy more dope with. Shoplifters, second-story men, Dumpster divers, and bike thieves who’d sell whatever they could find off the sidewalk in front of Cooper Union at Astor Place jostled to make the hand-to-hand deal their brains screamed for, alongside whores, muggers, and former dealers who let themselves get strung out on their own shit.

  Those skells were elbow to elbow, and in some cases later needle to needle, with everything from East Village club kids and punk rock bohos looking for something to take the edge off an all-night coke binge, to commuting breadwinners—Jersey lawyers, Long Island truck drivers, Connecticut carpenters, city employees from Riverdale, schoolteachers from upstate, college professors from NYU—needing the day’s score. An early morning trip to Avenue D meant they could get through a workday without having shakes, sweats, or any other tell to their coworkers and families that their “allergies” or “touch of flu” is actually their strung-out brains shaking down their bodies for more heroin.

  I didn’t know any of that yet—I simply could not believe this shit was going on less than twenty blocks from where I was going to spend the rest of the day being drilled in methods created to wipe out lawbreaking on this scale. Sitting there in the car I just tried to wrap my mind around it. Why didn’t somebody send a half-dozen paddy wagons down there, or just fire a fucking shot in the air, or get on a bullhorn and tell them to disperse or just say no or something—anything? I was only twenty-one but by that age I’d seen and done enough to know at least half of the score when it came to double standards. These motherfuckers in expensive coats were forcing a bunch of pathetic fellow humans to beg for drugs out in the open. It was like they didn’t think they could be busted. The truth was, they couldn’t.

  In the late sixties an unlikely pair of cops named Frank Serpico and David Durk made the rounds at Police Headquarters and City Hall trying to get anyone big enough to help them. Serpico, whose niece I knew from school in Canarsie, was an Italian-American from Brooklyn. He got into a Greenwich Village lifestyle and wore a beard and an earring back when that kind of thing drew dirty looks. Durk was a clean-cut Jewish family man with an Ivy League education. Both cops worked in vice. They may have seemed like an odd couple but they had a few things in common—badges and guns issued from the same HQ, a shared oath, similar duty assignments, and the fact that they both loved being cops and detested the corruption they’d seen firsthand on the job.

  Together Serpico and Durk documented multiple instances of cops taking bribes and payoffs to look the other way while heroin dealers and numbers runners plied their trade. They didn’t want or intend to rat out individual cops. Their sources were anonymous and they expected that the official wheels of justice would grind up the guilty. But neither of them got any action from City Hall. At the New York Times, however, it wasn’t just a different story, it was the lead on page one. The Times put what the two cops tried to land on the desks of the people who should’ve been taking care of it smack in the middle of breakfast tables, diner counters, and straphangers’ laps across the city and in every newsroom in the country.

  Mayor Lindsay’s office, the Essex County DA, and especially the NYPD had ostrich-size egg on their face. What was most galling to average readers and people in power who were good at kidding themselves was that cops could take money from drug dealers, a nearly invisible, totally repulsive occupation on par with child molester in the minds of most Americans. Mayor Lindsay wiped yolk from his eyes and did what any politician on the road to a presidential campaign would do under the circumstances—he cleaned house, replaced his police commissioner, and appointed a fact-finding commission. After a few months of rattling papers and making statements, the commission, under the chairmanship of Judge Whitman Knapp, began a series of hearings exploring some of what Serpico and Durk had charged.

  When the hearings and the media circus finally ended, the commission issued recommendations that the department turned into a tangled cat’s cradle of too little, too late edicts and guidelines designed to force cops to be honest. They also increased the size and powers of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau. The assumption was that cops couldn’t be trusted to stay clean on their own.

  The scandal hadn’t taken place within the housing or transit police rank and file, and both of those departments dodged that PR bullet. But among street-level, everyday NYPD uniform city cops a new edict came down—do not make street drug sale arrests. Policing drug dealers would now be the exclusive domain of various task forces and specialized teams within the department’s narcotics division.

  If a regular city cop saw, say, a guy with a needle sticking out of his arm selling a quart-size ziplock of heroin to
Mickey Mouse on the corner of Second Street and Avenue D, the officer was not to interfere. Instead of pulling out their cuffs, he or she was to grab their pen and make a note of all the pertinent information surrounding the incident—descriptions of the principals, the events that transpired, and the location where it all took place. Having jotted down which arm the hypo was dangling from, the fact that Mickey had on white four-fingered gloves and used a squeaky laugh, which direction they arrived from and left from, et cetera, post-Knapp procedure dictated that the officer was then supposed to fill out an OCCB report documenting all this 411, and file it with their precinct captain to forward to the Organized Crime Control Bureau at the Seventh Precinct on Pitt Street. The form would be processed within a week or ten days, turned over to the narcotics division within OCCB, and a follow-up investigation would begin. Never mind that the dealer and Mickey were probably in Disneyland by then.

  The prize I had won by passing the civil service application process for joining the NYPD was an all-expense-paid (literally—when you’re accepted to the police academy you go on salary) admission to a half-year course of cop training in a school building on East Twentieth Street. That facility combined a military-style boot camp with class work, lectures, and training field trips along the lines of Army Officer Candidate School and ROTC. We didn’t cover any of the Knapp and Serpico-Durk history and policy at the police academy. There was plenty of other topics under discussion there.

  Investigators went through the formality of asking around among my friends and family, former bosses, and coworkers if there was anything they needed to know about me, gave me a piss test, and I became part of 83-58—the New York City Police Academy class of 1983, company 58. What I’d taken was technically a transit police test, but passing it qualified me for training in transit, housing, or as a city cop in the regular NYPD. Where my number was on the list and where the city was in retiring and hirings lined up so that I’d been selected for the Housing Police Department same as my father. In my company of forty academy PPOs (probationary police officers) I was one of about seven assigned to the New York City housing police. The rest were either on track to become city cops or transit police.

  City, housing, and transit all received the same treatment and education at the academy. Once we graduated, we’d have equal police powers and equal opportunity to advance or screw up in the eyes of our parallel chains of command and bosses in adjoining offices at One Police Plaza downtown and housing headquarters on Ninty-ninth Street in Harlem. The specialized stuff within each department and operations that procedurally distinguished the three subdepartments would come later during field training within the individual precincts’ jurisdictions (a “police service area,” or PSA, in housing cop parlance; a “transit district,” for transit police) to which we’d be assigned. On day one at the academy prospective housing, transit, and city cops all dressed in the same blue shirts, dark blue trousers, and spit-shined black shoes stood at attention and sweated gallons lined up side-by-side on a broiling hot muster deck located on the roof of the academy building.

  “You are now part of the greatest police department in the world,” an instructor yelled in his best Paris Island bark. “You will pay close attention to detail, but you will screw up. When one screws up, you all screw up.” After roll call we marched double time, still at attention, to the academy gym. Instructors took places alongside boxes and piles of textbooks, notebooks, equipment, and supplies that we’d need during the half-year course. Whistles blew, instructors yelled, shoes squeaked and we scrambled in a circuit from instructor station to instructor station with our gym bags open. At each stop, somebody shoved a notebook or piece of gear into our bags or smacked something into our hands. Each teacher slam dunked whatever they had as hard as they could. The object for us was to get all of our stuff in one fast moving, full-contact shopping trip—kind of like the old Supermarket Sweep game show. For the instructors the object was to make as many of us as possible fall down, trip up, or drop our books, gear, and bags so that they could berate us. The guy with the Patrol Guide was a gorilla. He had to be—the rookie cop’s bible must have weighed twenty-five pounds. The way he handed them out dropped recruits left and right. I lined up with him, swung my bag around to catch the book, then faked left to the outside like Riggins taking a handoff from Theismann. Before he could change the pitch to catch me off guard, I had the book and was gone and he was spiking the next guy.

  Academy training was divided up into a three-course classroom program of law, social and police science, driving instruction at Floyd Bennett Field near my neighborhood in Brooklyn, firearms training at a firing range in Rodman’s Neck in the Bronx that the city borrowed from the army after the war and never gave back, and gym training. Some guys took the whole thing as a kind of joke. Others took it completely seriously. Most of us, though, took it for what it was—part education, part hazing, and part necessary formality before the real training began on the beat we’d be patrolling after graduation.

  “Never tell anyone about what you learn in this here academy,” the police science instructor would remind us at least once a week. “If the skells and perps learn this shit they, not us, will have the upper hand.” The academy curriculum did indeed include lifesaving info. “Car stops are always dangerous,” an instructor said during the first week.

  “Always let Central [the bank of radio operators dispatching and keeping tabs on every cop working a given shift] know when you’re doing one. Never pull up directly behind the stopped vehicle. Leave your door open when you can. You can and may one day need it for cover. Place the bulletproof clipboard against your chest while approaching the vehicle and have your other hand on your firearm. When you walk up to a car after pulling it over, slap the side of the car. It’ll shake up the driver and divert his attention for a second that can potentially save your life.”

  A lot of academy routine and curriculum seemed designed to keep the department’s ass covered once we were out on the job. Firearms training centered on how not to shoot yourself or get shot while reloading. I’d only ever fired a gun once and that was into the air from inside a friend’s car hauling ass down the Grand Central Parkway, so I was grateful for the target practice. But the bulk of the two-weeks gun training was devoted to making yourself as small a target as possible, not hitting bull’s-eyes. Driving strategy was about how not to total a car that the department had successfully lobbied Albany to pay for. I was never a crazy driver, so I paid attention, avoided the cones and enjoyed the short trip home from the closed course after each session behind the wheel. Gym was pass-fail and centered around running and endurance drills that demonstrated whether you could or couldn’t hump yourself from corner to corner on your own. I was in fine shape so it didn’t bother me. Trainees that couldn’t manage the two-mile runs around the perimeter of the gym (fat or skinny anyone could get dizzy running the same loop sixteen times) got an earful from their supervisors.

  “Your partner is dead!” they’d yell at anyone who faltered and dragged themselves to the center of the room to dry heave and sit out the remainder of the run. “You couldn’t finish the run! You couldn’t save him! He’s dead! You let him die!”

  I learned one lesson at the academy that I would take out on the street with me for the rest of my career in law enforcement—a lot of cops spend their entire careers looking for ways not to work. In the mind of some cops yelling at a hyperventilating fat guy in NYPD sweats beats the hell out of walking a beat in the South Bronx. The academic and athletic instructors at the police academy were uniform cops. But they’d wrangled and finagled light, no-hazard duty teaching the same stuff out of the same text book to different PPOs until retirement. It was a warm, dry, safe, easy gig with regular hours and very little supervision and scrutiny. Whoever coined the phrase “those that can, do, those that can’t, teach,” might’ve been an NYPD academy trainee.

  My social science instructor was a guy named Curran who’d made the sergeant’s list and used some
pull inside the department to ride out the wait for his promotion behind a lectern at the academy. I guess it was a long wait because the textbook and subject matter at hand had apparently become so boring and familiar to him that his two-cent asides along the way were usually longer than the assigned business we were supposed to cover. I got the impression pretty early on that Curran had lost his nerve and couldn’t handle the street anymore. His little asides always seemed to be pointing back to whatever it was that had scared him out of real police work and into the academy. Like any other school situation, I got good at turning my brain off for the bullshit and back on again for what was going to be on the test. I was letting my mind wander one afternoon as Curran killed time with an aside about his years courageously walking a beat in the Seventy-fifth Precinct in Brownsville, a tough, primarily black and Hispanic section of Brooklyn about fifteen minutes from where I grew up, until he mentioned another beat he’d walked.

  “I would rather go back to the Seven-five in Brownsville,” he was saying. “I’d rather walk a beat in one of the roughest black and Spanish precincts in the whole city, than walk a beat on Flatlands Avenue in the Six-nine.” Wait, what? The Six-nine? That was Canarsie. I raised my hand.

  “Officer Curran, why is that exactly?”

  “I’m getting to that, Codella.” Curran launched into a spiel about how the kids on the streets in Canarsie, in his opinion, had less respect for police and the law than the kids in the surrounding neighborhoods. I was on my feet before he was done.

  “Then why are the murder, robbery, and violent crime stats so much worse in the Seven-five?”

  “This is just my opinion,” he said, “based on what I observed when I was working in the Six-nine.” His opinion may have been worth something in his local bar, but he was instructing a classroom full of guys most of whom had never been to either place and were forming judgments from what their instructor was telling them. What if one of the Long Island or Rockland county–born future cops I was surrounded by wound up posted in the Six-nine or the Seven-five? Was Curran’s opinion supposed to give them some kind of advantage or insight?