It was early January with about four inches of sooty snow on the ground. Jack led his litter of rookies through the Sheepshead Bay/Nostrand Houses. His head turned to follow a pretty young black chick’s ass as she hurried inside for warmth. Jack whistled and replaced a spit slicked toothpick in his mouth with a new dry one. We approached a building lobby but Jack led us around to the manager’s office on the side. He pulled out a set of keys big enough to tip a boat and, without saying a word, unlocked and opened a door to the office. Inside, he pointed at the key he’d just used.
“This key everyone wants. It fits every housing authority manager’s office in the city.” He led us into a plainly decorated office. “When you guys get some time on, you’ll have your own keys,” he said as he pocketed the ring and took off his heavy winter uniform coat. We stood and stared at the few desks, chairs, file cabinets, and small TV set on a wooden stand that was all that there was in the room.
Jack folded his coat like a Marine folding a flag. “We’re not supposed to be in here,” he said. “Don’t make a mess and fuck things up for us.” He gently removed his gun belt and placed it gingerly on a desk next to the chair he’d chosen to occupy for the rest of the shift. Seated, he looked up at us, still standing, dressed for the cold, unsure what the hell we were supposed to do. Or not do. After what seemed like an eternity, he addressed his pupils again.
“This is the quietest project in all of PSA 1. There won’t be shit going on, especially with this bad weather and all, so we’ll take it easy today. Anything happens, we’ll answer our radio jobs. But we won’t go out hunting for collars. You guys understand?” We nodded. “Tomorrow when we get assigned to a tougher, more active area we’ll hunt up some arrests and I’ll show you guys how it’s done.” Louie smiled. Philly shrugged his shoulders. I shrugged at Louie.
“Whatever, Jack,” I said. “Tomorrow’s another day,” Louie added. Jack started to fiddle with the television. I grabbed an old newspaper from the trash, folded it to the sports page and sat in front of it. Another story on Tyson and Cuss D’Amato. I wondered how long it would take for my shield to reach room temperature.
Jack turned out to be a no-nonsense guy who, despite the years and the miles, was still into making arrests and teaching young cops. He was a character, for sure. Even for a cop he had a weird sense of humor. But he was known around the Command as a cop who always did the right thing and knew the job—the real job: how to make collars, cover your ass when you needed to, and not get hurt or let your partner get hurt. It turned out that Jack had worked with my dad back in the day, and he took a particular interest in my training. I owe him a lot for showing me the ropes in PSA 1.
Jack also knew the things that good old-time cops always knew—where a uniform could get a good deal on anything in the city: a discount on a meal, a half-price tune-up for your car, a complimentary tux rental for a wedding, a break on the price tag on jewelry for a girlfriend, or a free massage in a dozen massage parlors from Staten Island to the Bronx.
Jack knew how to make the job work for him and how to do the job he was paid to do. Jack taught us how to patrol a housing project the right way.
“Always make sure to take note of the building address, and write it in your memo books. Just in case you need to call for emergency backup, you’ll know where the hell you are,” he told us as he led us through a building lobby to a bank of elevators the next night. Some of the NYCHA projects had address numbers that defied logic. The only way to be sure where you were and be able to communicate that to Central and in turn to any potential cavalry was to remember what it said on the outside of the building you were in. Jack punched the call button for the elevator and shut off his radio, gesturing for us to do the same. The elevator arrived. As the door opened the smell of piss was overwhelming. Jack smiled and shook his head, “Like a damn toilet, huh?” Philly nodded then covered his mouth with his hat.
“Fuck,” Louie coughed up.
“You’ll get used to the smell.” Jack smiled again and pushed the button for the top floor. “You guys will get used to all kinds of shit you never knew existed.”
Jack literally taught us the job from the top down. The elevator arrived at the last stop and we climbed some metal stairs to the roof itself. Every NYCHA lease says that tenants aren’t allowed on their building roofs. But that didn’t stop anyone. The first place to look on any building patrol was on top. First with Jack and then later on our own, Louie, Philly, and I would walk the upper floor hallways, roof landings, and roofs checking for trespassers and junkies. Even if we didn’t find anyone shooting up dope, or smoking cocaine, there’d be empty glassine envelopes that once held ten-dollar doses of heroin or our feet would crunch discarded tin foil that the coke had been packaged in. It wasn’t unusual for us to find used needles with blood still in them. Hardcore junkies jacked the plunger in and out to get a potent mix of dope and blood going from syringe to vein.
The smack high itself and the baby laxative that dealers used to cut dope and coke were rough on the bowels. Piles of human shit, ten times worse smelling and harder to get off your shoes than dog shit if you were unlucky enough to step in it, were everywhere. Jack also taught us to smash any empty bottles we found lying around into small pieces with our nightsticks. It might’ve taken a nickel out of the pocket of some fixed-income resident barely squeaking by, but it meant no one would use a bottle as “air mail” and drop it on any of us as we walked a beat below.
If there was no one up there to arrest, we’d split up and take the stairs down floor by floor. Most projects had at least two staircases. In order to catch anyone who didn’t belong in the building or who was fucking around (or just fucking) on the stairwells, and maintain the deterrent presence that our uniform, badge, and gun were supposed to provide, we needed to turn our police radio volume way down, and each go down separately. A stair walk was an adventure in itself. Along the way down the stairs you could trip over a sleeping derelict, interrupt a rape or robbery, or ruin somebody’s day by arresting them before the blow job they’d paid for was over. Jack taught us how to bang our nightstick on every floor as we passed it and listen for each other to send back the same message.
“Just rap the stick loud on the cement wall,” Jack said. “For cops it’s a reassuring sound. Listen for your partner’s nightstick bang,” Jack reminded us. If we didn’t hear our counterpart marking time on the way down we knew that they’d found something and that we should come running.
By the book policing required that you measure everyone you encountered solely by whether or not they broke the law. But effective policing challenged you to do some balancing of the scales of justice yourself. One of a cop’s most effective tools was his or her ability to choose who to bust and who to let free. Later, in plainclothes in Alphabet City, that ability would make it possible to turn bad guys to my own use, create informants and gather the information needed to make bigger, farther-reaching arrests. At the heart of that more sophisticated decision making was something that Jack insisted on. No matter how shit scared you may be walking your beat, and no matter how shocked, surprised, or confused you were by the rich pageant of questionable choices and fucked-up behavior you encountered, you the cop had to command one thing—respect.
Even though I’d mentally prepared myself for who or what might be around a corner, up some stairs, or through an open roof door, nine times out of ten what I found there would make my heart race and the adrenaline pump through my veins. It always gave me the rush I was looking for, and it was the thing I loved most about the job. Jack didn’t care about that anymore. What he required, and what he got, was a measure of respect from everyone he encountered in those winging-it, what-the-hell situations. He made it his personal mission to teach us to get the same respect in the same circumstances. Growing up in Brooklyn, I knew this already. What Jack reminded us was the same story my father taught me in Canarsie. If you don’t punch the school-yard bully in his face the first time he tries to take your lunch mone
y, he’ll be eating on you every day for the rest of the school year.
My first collar was a gift from Jack that underscored his point. Philly, Louie, and me were beginning a foot patrol in one of the worst projects in all of New York City, Carey Gardens. A sprawling seventeen-story clamshell of brown brick towers that was some sixties city planner’s idea of a good place to live when it was built, “Carey Garbage” as it was now known to the gangs of thug kids that lived and got their kicks there, was completed in 1970 and quickly sunk to the bottom of the public housing barrel. As we passed the entrance a group of black and Hispanic teenagers slowly dispersed from the front of the building. It was a game we all played—they knew we’d give them a hard time, maybe roust a couple of them and make them empty their pockets if they didn’t break it up, and we knew they’d take as much time as they thought they could get away with clearing out. I’d played the game from their side with the late Officer Sledge. But while all the other kids slunk off, one kid stayed put on the stairs. Jack led us right up to him. Without a word to the kid, Jack turned to me and said, “Okay, Mike cuff him up.”
“Cuff him up?” I asked. Philly, Louie, and I looked at each other. Was this a threat or Jack’s sense of humor? “Yeah, cuff up this little pain in the ass,” Jack insisted. I pulled out my cuffs. The kid turned around and assumed the position with practiced efficiency—head sloped, feet shoulder width, hands behind his back, palms together like saying an upside-down prayer.
“What the hell did I do? I was just hanging out. All’s I did was stand in front of the damn ass building,” the kid muttered. He had a point. I clicked the cuffs closed on his wrists and turned him around to face us.
“Yeah? Cut the bullshit,” Jack said. “Is this the first time you ever saw my face?” The kid shook his head no. “Then, you know what you did. No hanging out in front of the building.” Louie took out his police radio and called for a unit to pick us up and transport us back to the station house.
“Central, please have an RMP [a squad car] respond to twenty-three forty-eight West Twenty-third Street, front of [the address of the project and where to find us in the building]. FTO and three units holding one [Jack along with Louie, Philly, and I with a single bad guy in custody].” A short time later a police van picked us up.
Inside the Command, I took Jack off to the side and asked him what the kid did. After all the lessons and role-playing in social science at the academy, I didn’t understand the collar, and for sure didn’t want to start my career locking up guys for nothing. Jack walked me back to where Philly and Louie were standing.
“Listen,” he said to all of us, “when you come up to a building these guys know they shouldn’t be hanging in front. If they give you the respect you deserve, they leave. If they don’t, well then you either make ’em leave, or you lock ’em up. This guy has been told before to leave, by me and by a bunch of other guys. If we don’t lock him up, we make ourselves look like assholes and make it that much harder for the next cop to deal with this guy. You rookies bear the mark. You look young and sometimes you look scared. From now on this kid, and the kids that watched Mike cuff him up know that young, scared, or whatever, you’re for real. The bottom line is, it’s all about respect.”
As I filled out a summons for disorderedly conduct, I felt bad for the kid. It actually made me a little sick to my stomach. The letter of the violation said that a person could not obstruct pedestrian traffic, which the kid did, I guess. But the whole thing reminded me of getting hassled by cops when I was this kid’s age. As I scribbled, Jack did a warrant check on our young perp. It turned out that he was over eighteen and had two outstanding felony warrants. My suspicion that we’d grabbed an honor student and ruined his life instantly vanished. This guy was a wiseass and a perp. Moreover he was stupid. He knew the deal and still felt the need to test Jack and us even though he had two felonies hanging over him. Fuck him.
Jack knew the system and how it worked and didn’t work. He showed us how to use our discretion to kick ass when we needed to and to cut slack when it made sense to do that, too. Sometimes both. After we dumped the kid off at Central Booking he told me, “If you feel like it’s the right thing to buy a perp a sandwich while they’re being processed, do it. You never know, he may be the one who calls nine-one-one and saves you or your partner’s life someday.”
“We’re gonna make some overtime on this one,” Jack explained to me. “We might be in the system all night.”
“That’s cool with me, I could use some extra cash,” I answered. And so it was. Jack and I spent the better part of the night processing my first collar, one that I didn’t even know was a collar, while adding a few bucks to our paychecks in the time-honored tradition of cops everywhere. Did I say Jack taught us the job from the top down? Some of the lessons I learned were from the bottom line up.
Avenue D
While the neighborhood dealers cool off and quiet down, I work my informant contacts armed with a new weapon, the name Davey Blue Eyes. I put it to dealers, to junkies, that kid with the bat who hit an eyeball homerun—anyone and everyone who may have something to tell me about Davey Blue Eyes, where he came from, and how to bring him down. Initially I piece together the bio of a guy powerful enough to grant Arthur the freedom he abused to the point of extinction and then sanction Arthur’s execution along with a half-dozen Brooklyn bad guys, their families, and whoever was over to watch the game when the assassins came to call. Who did the killings didn’t really matter to me as much as who is operating a traffic light that went from red to green and allowed Arthur’s victims to become his executioners and Arthur and his boys in Brooklyn to become a cluster of snapshots, handwritten notes, and botanica candles in front of the project buildings they grew up in.
Backseat, rooftop, stairwell, and interrogation room conversations with Venus, Ronnie, and dozens of others gives me a composite picture of a guy that sounds like Lucky Luciano’s heir. What I learn is that in the Avenue D heroin trade, Davey Blue Eyes’s word is law. Half Italian, half Puerto Rican, project born and raised, Davey, like Charlie Lucky, is a product of the Lower East Side. By the time he joins the Marines at age sixteen, he’s already no stranger to guns and ammo. One story I hear repeated several times involves teenage Davey holding up another dealer at gunpoint in a back row pew in St. Mary’s on Grand Street during midnight mass on Christmas Eve.
The Marine Corps introduces Davey to heavier weapons and hardcore military tactics. When he returns to civilian life, he brings a flair for reconnaissance and a belief in superior firepower back with him. That’s not all he comes home with. Davey doesn’t just emerge from the Marines a marksman, he comes out with ordnance connections within the Corps that help him set up shop as a bona fide gun runner. Handguns are never a problem to get in Alphaville and even if you’re not connected, you or a friend with a cleaner record can just drive south to Virginia and pick one out at a sporting goods store. But Davey puts government-issue machine guns and grenades—stuff that couldn’t be had legally anywhere at any price—within reach of any local gangster who can pay.
Davey’s uncle is a connected guy who deals dope from a headquarters in a body shop near the boat docks in Mill Basin in the early eighties. Davey apprentices with his uncle dealing, collecting and, thanks to his interest in guns and the things he accomplishes with them, enforcing and regulating when his uncle encounters thieves and rivals. While I’m learning how to drive a patrol car at Floyd Bennett Field, Davey is running dope for his uncle a half mile away and forging his own links with a group of Chinatown-based smack wholesalers walking distance from his birthplace in the projects in the Lower East Side.
Visible is vulnerable and Davey makes a practice of being nowhere. “You know, him, yo. You seen him around,” snitches tell me, but if I have, I don’t know it. Davey’s Third and D dealers can chimp around in fancy cars, jewelry, and clothes, a debarked pitbull panting beside them and a stripper with a cast-iron septum cooing in their lap, as long as they stay earners
and as long as they stay loyal. The flash life wasn’t for him, though.
There’s bound to be some chaos in a retail drug operation as huge as the one Davey sets into motion. His roots are deep and the people he puts to work know their connections with him are till-death-do-us-part solid. Davey doesn’t try to micromanage every aspect of his ant farm. He just taps the glass or grabs the Raid when he needs to. But there are always some things that call for a clear message, delivered personally.
A year or two prior to me arriving on the D, Davey discovers a pair of upper tier main dealers he’s known since grade school are stepping on already cut dope he fronts to them. They’d set a price knowing full well that if they sold for more they needed to kick back to Davey as a courtesy. Or life insurance. Not good. Davey takes care of the two personally. In broad daylight, Davey climbs the roof of a library building on East Houston Street, assembles the high-powered Barrett rifle he qualified with in sniper school in Hawaii and waits for his soon-to-be ex-employees to cross the street from Avenue D. Both die from single bullets the size of an adult pinkie finger vaporizing their heads in broad daylight. On-scene forensics find teeth scattered a half block away from the impacts. Davey’s so sure of his timing and tactics, he doesn’t even bother with a silencer. In two trigger pulls he joins the ranks of Lee Harvey Oswald and water tower sniper Charles Whitman by showing, like the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket said “just what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do.”
Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side Page 10