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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  Within forty-eight hours of Arthur’s last run, every one of his buddies with dope spots in the Brooklyn projects is dead, too. Most of them are shot in their apartments along with anyone unlucky enough to be there with them. As usual, we don’t hear about it from our informants until after it’s happened. But what we do hear about the murders, is that they’ve been done under orders from the same guy who gives Dougie, Londie, Macatumba, ChaCha, and Jimmy Rivera the greenlight to cut Arthur in half with nine-millimeter rounds—Davey. Davey Blue Eyes. We don’t have our man yet, but we have his name. We start using the name in every conversation with every snitch, dealer, and user in PSA 4 and start learning that this Davey guy has more juice than anyone in the dope business on Avenue D or anywhere else in the city.

  Five

  “Central?” I said into my radio on a cold March night in 1984. “Can you raise post one-four-five?”

  By the late seventies nearly 30,000 new residents were pouring into the NYCHA’s 2,500-plus buildings a year with crime skyrocketing accordingly. To meet the ever-growing demands made on the housing police and the city cops who reluctantly followed perps into the city’s buildings, Housing PD tactically reorganized into nine individual PSAs all under dispatch control of the same 911 system the rest of the city’s law enforcement and emergency services responded to. The beat I drew my first year wearing a badge was PSA 1, the New York City housing police service area covering most of Coney Island.

  My first year in PSA 1, I was teamed with two other rookies, Louie Corsini and Philly Mazza. They were good guys, didn’t bust balls (mine or anyone else’s) unjustifiably, were genuinely curious about the job, and not afraid to get out there and work. They also had no problem embracing what you might call the gray areas of procedure and conduct that were, we quickly learned, a part of police work overlooked in the Patrol Guide.

  Tonight’s assignment was a foot patrol of the Marlboro Houses with two other rookies. There had been a series of shootings and robberies inside the buildings themselves and in the barren, poorly lit public spaces in between. The game was to be seen and maybe get lucky and catch one of the local bad guys in the act of making it tough on his law-abiding neighbors.

  I only had a couple months on the job but more and more I found that I liked having some breathing room and solitude on night patrols. A single uniform rookie may not exactly be the most potent crime-fighting weapon, but I felt like I saw more, learned more, and was focusing and fine-tuning my abilities and instincts better when I periodically walked the quads, gardens, and halls of the New York City Housing Authority’s buildings in Coney Island solo. I liked it that way and it was fine with my partners. While Philly and Louie walked through the Marlboro Houses’ bleak courtyard and piss-stinking halls together, I strolled a different part of the same beat on my own.

  Our shift was winding down and I felt like checking in with Philly and Louie before we went back to the PSA Command. My first weeks in uniform on Coney Island had yielded some domestic disturbances, the aftermath of a few fights, and other fairly mundane duties. Tonight hadn’t been much different. Most of the calls I’d responded to were “aided cases”—basically medical calls to 911. People in New York City housing projects call 911 a lot. Often the EMS guys got the runaround—my husband’s too drunk for me to get him off the floor by myself; I have this headache that won’t go away; I can’t find my medicine—that kind of thing. But no matter how sketchy the call, EMS was paid to respond and the rules said a cop had to check in, too. Tonight I’d done a lot of standing around trying not to look embarrassed as EMS techs either humored or ignored what were for the most part very lonely and very unhappy and probably not very sick people who had used the only tool they had available to them to reach out. Just to liven things up, I’d also shooed a nasty drunk who’d pissed his pants off a corner.

  It had been a cold, quiet, and just plain boring night and calling Louie was shaping up to be a highlight. But before I got a radio response I saw one of the other rookies we’d been sent out with break into a dead run. A tall, black male in a long jacket ran in front of him. The running cop raised his radio to his mouth.

  “Ten eighty-five forthwith, unit in pursuit!” I recognized his voice—Donny Cannon, another rookie who liked to patrol alone. One of the old guys at the Command had tried to hang him with the nickname “Boom-Boom” after a guy in the Top 40 in the sixties named Freddy “Boom-Boom” Cannon, but to Donny’s relief, he hadn’t made it stick. Without a second’s thought I joined the chase, keying my radio as I ran.

  “Central foot pursuit, twenty-two fifty West Eleventh, male black.” Cannon still had his thumb on his call button. I could hear him panting and the sound of his shoes on the pavement.

  “What do you have at twenty-two fifty West Eleventh?” Cannon just ran. “Unit in pursuit, what do you have at twenty-two fifty West Eleventh?” I ignored the call, too. The dispatcher wasn’t going to find out what was happening until I found out what was happening. Any other cops in the vicinity would come running anyway. I just chased. There was about twenty-five feet separating Donny from the perp and twenty-five yards between me and Cannon. All three of us ran like hell keeping about the same distance as we went.

  Bang! The perp ran inside the nearest building lobby slamming a heavy steel door behind him. Bang! Donny followed. Bang! It slammed behind me as I followed the two of them. My radio squawked again.

  “Unit in pursuit, what do you have at twenty-two fifty West Eleven?” Central wouldn’t let it go. Three more bangs as each of us exited the back of the lobby. I ran out through a garbage strewn back hallway and retched from a smell that was like a cross between shit and onion soup mix and from the sudden exertion in cool air.

  Outside in the shadows, the perp leapt over a bench and into the courtyard center of the Marlboro block. He must have sensed that he was gaining yards or had an exit strategy in mind, because he was hauling ass like Walter Payton running to daylight. My heart pounded and the distance between me and Cannon stayed the same as our quarry pulled ahead. Then—BOOM!—a shot rang out, the sound echoing between the high-rises. Cannon’s guy crumpled forward, chest-first and hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. Fuck me, Cannon shot him in the back! Just because he was getting away? Wait, no, his weapon was still in his holster. NYPD service .38s have a distinct pow that even rookie cops recognize a mile away. The shot that dropped this guy sounded like a bomb blast. Cannon stopped running and drew his service pistol. I looked around the four-sided wall of buildings that formed the courtyard we were in. Marlboro had distinctive floor-to-ceiling balcony grills that looked like they were designed to keep residents from jumping. Mostly they kept the size of things people could throw down to brick and bottle dimension. They’d probably be perfect for sniper cover. Tommy Cannon slowly approached the pile of bad guy half in shadow a few dozen feet away. I followed, gun drawn.

  Cannon and I moved forward warily, each of us quietly trying to get our breath back, with our guns pointed, and our eyes fixed on the still hands of a guy that was breaking the five-minute mile a moment ago. When I got within a few yards, I saw a sawed-off shotgun lying on the ground next to the perp. One of its barrels was frenching smoke. I also saw that his face was blown off. What had been huffing, puffing and cursing all the way to this spot was now a mess of dark arterial blood, fragments of bone, and glistening lymph. Cannon reached out with his foot and flipped open the guy’s coat. His lifeless head turned a little. Okay, only half his face was blown off. It didn’t make him any less dead or me any less sick to my stomach.

  Inside his jacket was a sling made with a wire coat hanger. It was attached to the gun.

  “He shot his own fuckin’ head off,” Cannon said, incredulously. I bent down and took a good look at the shotgun and the ghetto-rigged shoulder holster. Cannon was talking through it. “I’m chasing him, and he blows his own fuckin’ head off.”

  This guy may have been an athlete, but he wasn’t much of a gunsmith, or whatever you call the people
that make holsters. Apparently as he kicked into high gear across the courtyard his low-budget holster snagged the trigger on the sawed-off and his own gun delivered a load of twelve-gauge buckshot to his face from about a foot away.

  Within a few minutes there were five more cops on the scene and a patrol car. Within an hour the guy was on his way to the morgue. A short while after that, Louie, Philly, Donny Cannon, and I were all in the locker room at the PSA 1 Command changing back into our civvies at the end of our shift. Cannon couldn’t let it go. Neither could I, but I kept it to myself.

  “My first DOA, first sawed-off shotgun, and first foot pursuit,” he said for the fifth time. Every time he said it I pictured the dead guy’s non-face again. One of the purple-nosed dinosaur veterans that kept calling Cannon “Boom-Boom,” peered around the corner as he pulled on permapress western-wear slacks.

  “Yeah? You know what you got there?” he asked us with a shit-eating grin.

  “What?” I asked.

  “A hat trick!” He laughed.

  I used to ride my bike to Coney Island as a kid. By day, and within the confines of Luna Park and later Astroland, the last of the brightly lit and rusting thrill ride collections surrounding the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, and a few other old-time attractions, it was cheap fun. The parade had very much gone by and you could fuck things up and get away with it within the rusting steel and rotting wood of the rides and the boardwalk. The Cyclone’s reputation as one of the hairiest and scariest roller coasters is well deserved. I swear the first drop is nearly vertical and the fact that the whole thing feels like it’s going to collapse and send you and your car sailing out over the boardwalk and crashing into the beach beyond just adds to the panic when you’re on it, and the relief when you arrive back at the start more or less in one piece.

  The Cyclone was bought by the city, condemned, saved, and reopened in the mid-seventies. I always thought the items in the paper each year about last-minute insurance okays at the beginning of each season and of various injuries and lawsuits brought by riders who took a beating on the Cyclone worked as PR for the guys that ran it. It helps to be crazy to ride it, and Brooklyn and the world beyond have enough crazy people to keep the Cyclone running indefinitely. During my time in Alphabet City, a guy that ran a junk shop on East Tenth Street and his punk rocker girlfriend were even married on it. They took their vows while it was parked at the start. Then, after the “I do’s,” the Cyclone’s operator pulled the big lever and the couple’s married life began with a fifty-three-degree, seventy mile-per-hour plunge to earth in a car and on a track older than their parents.

  In the mid-seventies when I went to Coney Island with my friends, you didn’t want to stray too far from the boardwalk after dark. Even in daylight, on the beach or the rides, you had to keep your wits about you. If you wanted to fuck around, Coney Island was fine. But if you wanted to take a date to the beach you would skip Coney Island unless you don’t mind picking up garbage before you lay down your blanket and dealing with a real-life freak show while you’re there. The Marlboro Houses and the other NYCHA buildings that Philly, Louie, and I worked in PSA 1 were a big part of the reason why.

  Coney Island isn’t an island at all. In 1918, a project undertaken by local amusement park operators and the city to fill in the creek that had cut Coney off from the Brooklyn mainland finished a job that nature had been working on for centuries. The beach and boardwalk at Coney line up almost exactly west–east, giving it nearly perfect all day sun exposure during good weather. But the Coney Island I worked was one filled with the long shadows of public housing high-rises. And that wasn’t nature’s plan, it was Robert Moses’s.

  Moses was New York City’s “master builder”—the municipal architect who, for better or worse, shaped much of the five boroughs in the second half of the twentieth century, through mammoth public works projects like the East River Drive, Tri-Borough Bridge, Lincoln Center, and NYC’s best public beaches (one of which is named after him). Moses came from money and was a second-generation crusader with rigid and passionate ideas about how low-income New Yorkers should live. Like his mother, who had advocated for a prior generation of New York’s immigrant poor, Moses hated slums. He also hated anyone—from FDR to Frank Lloyd Wright—who resisted or disagreed with his ideas or who he suspected of having any kind of socialist agenda when it came to public works. And he hated Coney Island.

  A child of the era of deadly flu, tuberculosis, cholera, and other epidemics caused or made worse by overcrowding and pollution, Moses saw Coney Island’s crowds jammed into the dirty surf as a public health menace. “Her Grace,” as his political opponent turned reluctant ally Fiorello La Guardia called Moses, also blamed the living conditions of Coney Island’s locals for the area’s deserved reputation as one of the street crime capitals of the five boroughs. Moses’s solution was to use eminent domain to condemn and dynamite the shanties, bars, and tenements in the neighborhood’s western tip. What went up from out of the rubble were housing projects. Lots of them. Every decade from the forties on saw another addition to Coney Island’s growing array of low-income living possibilities. And each in turn provided more evidence that Moses and the New York City Housing Authority he took over in the forties had only really repurposed an overcrowded, crime-infested ground-level tenement environment into the same thing pointed dozens of stories into the air.

  Each decade since the fifties the NYCHA tried out some new architectural experiment on the mostly immigrant poor streaming into Coney Island, as native New Yorkers who could afford it headed for the suburbs in droves. Moses’s first attempt at cheap rent utopia was the Gravesend Houses, a cluster of low-rise brick buildings nearly identical to the Breukelen Houses in Canarsie. The first residents of Gravesend were working-class Italians, Irish, Jews, and blacks. Gravesend was followed by tower complexes like Marlboro that filled primarily with newly emigrated Hispanics. Slowly but surely the first generation of Gravesend residents either died off, headed for the suburbs, or dug in. The NYCHA relaxed their rental qualifications and the buildings began to fill with a disproportionate number of the jobless, the disenfranchised, those from broken if not outright shattered homes, and legions of kids growing up bored, pissed off, and hungry for a quick buck. A portion of that new population turned to drug dealing, armed robbery, and pretty much anything else they could get away with. More than anything, though, they turned on each other. Street fights, gang clashes, and race riots along just about any ethnic line, but particularly between the old-time white residents and the new black and Hispanic immigrants posed a daily threat to law, order, safety, and everything else Louie, Philly, and I were hired to maintain.

  My first day on the job began in the PSA 1 Command locker room. I remember pulling up a stiff new pair of dark blue uniform trousers, pulling on a regulation dickey to protect my neck from the winter weather, strapping on my new black leather gun belt, and snapping the same four-inch .38 caliber Smith & Wesson that hadn’t exactly earned me marksman cred during training into its holster. I pinned badge number 2389 to my department-issued wool coat, and thought of how, according to some friends already on the job, supervisors on patrol would feel a rookie’s shield in winter time to see if it was cold.

  The locker room at the PSA 1 Command was loud. Old hairbag dinosaurs took up as much room as they could while slamming their locker doors and shouting jokes and curses at each other. In the corner, I watched one old-timer who looked like he’d been soaking in brine for the last ten years lay down a twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch piece of carpet he kept in his locker. As he removed his street clothes he balanced on the carpet square one foot at a time, careful not to let his clothes or feet touch the dusty locker room floor. I wondered whether he’d done that before roll call on his first day. I doubted it.

  Louie introduced himself to me with a tap on the shoulder. “It’s gonna be me, you, and some guy named Philly working in the same training squad,” he said, shaking my hand with a tight grip.

  “How do
you know?” I asked him. Louie smiled. “I waited until the sergeant put down his clipboard then took a peek at it. How else?”

  After roll call we broke up into groups that the sergeant read off from the clipboard. Louie and I introduced ourselves to Philly and we waited to meet our field training officer. Every rookie cop was assigned an FTO, a veteran uniform cop charged with teaching a trio of new guys how to do the job and not get hurt. You couldn’t be a field training officer unless you had a lot of years on the job. But a lot of the cops that qualified for FTO assignments had worn the badge for too long and either didn’t care or didn’t remember how to teach newbies like us how to do what we were supposed to.

  Our FTO introduced himself. It was the same guy I’d watched balance on the piece of carpet in the locker room ten minutes earlier. His name was Jack Genova. Jack was fifty-five years old and looked every second of it. He had thirty-five years on the job and from the minute we met was laying down his law on how a cop needed to behave and what we needed to know to make it as far as he had.

  “A good cop never gets wet, hungry, or horny,” Jack lectured. Lou, Philly, and I nodded as he led us into the cold, down the floodlit pavement outside the Command.

  “Another thing, if you’re gonna do anything off your post, always let at least one other cop know where you are in case anyone looks for you. Never bring your wife or steady to any cop rackets, and God forbid you do, make sure she don’t talk to anyone’s project goomata. And,” Jack concluded for the moment, “if you’re off your post with a hot piece of ass, make sure you let your old FTO know. I wanna check her out, too.” Jack laughed, slapped Philly on the back and pointed and winked at Louie like some horny uncle. I thought he was bullshitting. We each found out later that he wasn’t. The uniform was a chick magnet, something we all experimented with. Jack’s single years were behind him. If he’d cheated when he was younger, those years were over, too. But Jack still loved looking at girls and lived vicariously through us as much as we’d let him. Sometimes I think we let him more than we should have.