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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  “Unit one-five-four, have a car respond to Thirtieth and Mermaid, holding one.”

  “RMP nine-five-five-eight responding, ETA about two minutes.” A few minutes later I had the guy in the back seat of an RMP en route to my Command.

  Drug collars came with extra paperwork. But I happily filled out the narcotic voucher for the five bags, the online booking sheet, and the complaint report with an almost giddy knowledge that I’d made a good collar using good old-fashioned street smarts. It was the beginning of my shift, too, so it wasn’t like I was going to clear a bunch of OT just for doing my job right. The sections of the online booking and the complaint report marked “details” weren’t really for anything epic. As I’d learned from Jack, I simply put the least amount of information necessary to get the point across. As a housing cop I was only really supposed to make arrests within the confines of NYCHA property. The first rule of housing collar paperwork was to keep the location as vague as possible so that the arrest wouldn’t be recorded by a city cop precinct or get questioned by your superiors in housing. “Defendant found to be in possession of five bags of heroin…”—short, simple, and to the point. The desk officer signed off on my paperwork and me and my prisoner were transported to Brooklyn Central Booking. More signatures, more paperwork, and my bottle cap collector was lodged in a holding cell and I had a date with an assistant district attorney who would take over from me and prosecute the guy I had collared.

  Brooklyn employed dozens of ADAs. Theirs was an assembly-line gig of interviews, depositions, hearings, and trials. ADAs sought the maximum penalty or a plea bargain leveraged to their advantage that made them look good in the eyes of their bosses. The first part of any criminal case they put together was an interview with the arresting officer. I sat and waited to be called by the ADA assigned to my arrest in a room full of other cops crammed onto a big smelly sofa, two old leather chairs, and a row of what appeared to be church pews. An old black-and-white TV played reruns of The Honeymooners. Three hours later I heard my name called. I grabbed my jacket and followed an overweight chain-smoking Irish ADA down a hall to an office the size of a broom closet.

  The ADA pressed his ass into a small steel desk chair and coughed out an introduction.

  “I’m ADA McBride,” he said. “Take a seat and tell me what you got.” I let him get up to speed by reading my paperwork before I started.

  “Well, I was on the corner of Thirtieth and Mermaid and I saw a guy who looked like a junkie. He bent down and picked up a bottle cap.” McBride shut my folder and looked at me sharply. “I had a feeling I knew what he was going to use the bottle cap for so I—” He yanked himself out of the chair and stood up.

  “You had a ‘feeling,’ Officer?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “We don’t work on feelings, guesses, or assumptions here. This is the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. You better not come in here and tell me you had a feeling, or a goddamn hunch, then decided you’d search this guy and throw out all his constitutional rights while you were at it!”

  McBride went on for a while about the sanctity of his job, the law, and a half dozen other things. I didn’t know how to answer. After a while I realized he wasn’t looking for an answer. Finally he lit another cigarette, waddled around me, and headed back out to the hallway.

  “I’ll be right back, Officer. When I get back you should have a different perspective of how this collar went down.” I was stunned. I was also pissed—pissed at myself for allowing this fat fuck to talk to me that way, pissed at Jack for not preparing me with the answers this guy wanted, and pissed even more because I’d used good judgment to make what I thought was a good arrest that now was in jeopardy of being thrown out because that intuition and common sense didn’t line up with the inflexible letter of the law.

  McBride’s office walls were lined with plaques and certificates recognizing his successful convictions. These prosecutions, I thought, all involved arrests made by cops, and all involved working with those arresting cops and not yelling at them. McBride, like any other ADA, wanted to prosecute perps successfully. I was there not to tell my side of the story but to supply him with the right argument and right tools for him to do that. His self-righteous lecture and hasty exit were his way of telling a rookie cop to get his shit together and make himself useful.

  When McBride came back to his office a few minutes later his cigarette was augmented with a cup of coffee, and he seemed much calmer.

  “So, okay, now what happened here, Mike?” He took a puff.

  “Well,” I began, “I was walking on Thirtieth and Mermaid when this guy walks out of a building counting bags of dope.” McBride smiled and nodded.

  “Yeah? Go on. And what happened next?”

  “Well, since the dope was in plain view, I walked up to him, took the dope right out of his hand, and placed him under arrest. I then called for backup and read him his rights while we waited.”

  “Congratulations, Mike. Very nice collar,” ADA McBride replied, “very nice police work.”

  Juggling “behave-a yourself,” “have fun,” and “don’t get caught,” wasn’t much different with a badge in Coney Island than it was with a bat in Canarsie.

  Avenue D

  Davey Blue Eyes is almost singlehandedly responsible for the consolidation of dope sales in lower Manhattan. If other people try to set up shop elsewhere, they either pay back to Davey, or suffer the consequences. As more snitches open up about Davey, I hear more about his keen interest in the other members of the greater New York narcotics rackets.

  The name Miguel Lopez is rarely spoken above a whisper by those who know what it means. Lopez is the poster child for the new Colombian drug gangs that operated on the fringe of the city’s drug trade in the seventies. The Colombians move into the criminal mainstream when cocaine surges in popularity and Nicky Barnes turns state’s evidence and wipes out the remains of Frank Lucas’s Harlem smack trade. Lopez’s cocaine mini-empire is made possible by connections with Medellin Cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. And his sovereignty is symbolized by his trademark—a small glass jar full of human molars and eyeteeth that his associates take from the mouths of the guys Lopez orders killed for transgressions and slights of any kind. Lopez flashes the jar like a badge, gently clicking the contents like a voodoo rattle.

  Halloween 1985 in Douglaston, Queens. When one of his street runners is discovered skimming, Lopez makes a call. The doorbell rings at a mid-block Cape. George Reyes and his wife Celia open the door. A punch bowl full of candy rests on an end table that’s been moved into the hallway behind them.

  “Trick or treat!” a half-dozen kids all shriek at once. There’s a princess, a Batman, a vampire, a ghost, a Frankenstein, a mermaid, a Hulk, and a pirate. Behind the little kids stand three bigger, older kids. Two Batman masks and a Spider-man—just masks, their costumes are everyday work clothes and a jogging suit. Celia hands out the candy and the two big Batmans and Spider-man shove the kids into the entryway. Celia falls backward onto the carpeting and five of the kids tumble over her. The Batmen grab the other three kids by the pants and wrangle them into the living room. Spider-man shuts the door and locks it. Some of the kids are screaming. Some think it’s funny and laugh. Nobody’s hurt yet. Celia scrambles to get up. She and George are very scared.

  George turns and runs. There’s a shotgun in the bedroom and a pistol in the kitchen. Spider-man walks a spray of bullets from a silenced nine-millimeter MAC-10 up George’s spine and George spins and pitches forward into the hallway. Spider-man takes off his mask to see better and hands his gun to a Batman who herds the kids into the living room. All the furniture is covered in plastic. The television blares the news. The other Batman holds Celia’s right arm behind her back at an awkward angle, with a revolver pressed to her forehead. The muzzle makes a red ringed dent on her skin. She isn’t making a sound. Just shaking. Some of the kids are sobbing.

  Spider-man comes out of the kitchen with a black-handled butcher’s knife. George is still alive, sp
inal cord cut, legs useless, pulling himself down the hall. Spider-man grabs him by his slack ankles and drags him into the bedroom. He closes the door.

  Celia starts to struggle as George disappears into the bedroom leaving a trail of blood and spit on the hallway runner. Batman hits her across the face with his pistol. She falls to her knees bleeding from her mouth and nose. The kids start to scream and the other Batman shoots out the television. The kids quiet.

  Spider-man pulls George’s body back out of the bedroom and the kids scream again. George’s throat is slit and his tongue, impossibly long if you’ve only ever seen the part you lick and talk with, pulled through the gash. It’s obscene. Blood is everywhere. Spider-man reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a pair of pliers. He puts his foot on George’s forehead, seizes a molar and adjusting for the salty slippery blood pooling in George’s mouth, yanks as hard as he can, tearing out a full tooth, roots and all. Sweat drips from Spidey’s nose. Tears run down the faces of the kids. Several of them put their faces on the wall and cover their eyes.

  Spider-man motions to Batman. He fires the revolver. Celia’s body jumps once and then she lays still on the carpet she vacuumed that morning. Spider-man sinks the knife into her throat and gives her a necktie. It’s easier with women—no adam’s apple. He rolls her lifeless head to one side and extracts a tooth from her as well. The three assassins leave the children alive. They’ll never be able to describe the killers to the cops and probably never be able to watch Spider-man or Batman cartoons again. Anyway Lopez paid for two teeth, not ten.

  The Batmans drag the bodies down the steps, over the sidewalk and into a waiting van. There are still groups of kids in costume going from house to house. The three men get into a Mercedes-Benz and slowly drive out of the neighborhood. The van vanishes in the direction of Long Island.

  The message isn’t lost on anyone Lopez deals with. But for Davey, it’s a throwdown. A few weeks after the anonymous Halloween “gangland slaying” the papers described, Davey Blue Eyes decides to make Miguel Lopez his bitch. Lopez is selling in Manhattan, and Davey wants a piece. Through channels, Lopez tells Davey to go fuck himself. Davey sends his own trio to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. They position themselves outside an after-hours joint run by one of Lopez’s associates and gun the man down, leaving him to bleed out in front of his own bar. Lopez gets the message—have a sit-down with Davey Blue Eyes and settle the dispute.

  A sit-down is arranged in the VIP section of an uptown nightclub. Lopez bribes the bouncers to disconnect the club’s metal detector but Davey does the same thing and arrives with twice as many gunmen two hours earlier. No shots were fired, but a deal was cut. Lopez keeps the terms to himself. Nobody in his crew that was there ever mentions it again. It’s left up to Davey to remind anyone working for Lopez who they answer to now. A couple of months later, Davey Blue Eyes is driving down Essex Street, when he sees a few of Lopez’s crew leaving Castillo de Jagua burping garlic and cerveza Bavaria. Davey slows down, comes alongside, rolls down his window, and nods. Lopez’s three gunmen make a point of ignoring him. Davey drives around the block and stops in front of them. He reaches his hand out the window and shows them Lopez’s trademark jar of teeth. One of the three traquetos he’s accosted is responsible for pulling at least a half dozen of them. Davey looks through the glass at the three men and shakes it. They hear the shake loud and clear and get the meaning even clearer—“You may work for Lopez, but he works for me now. Respect that or you’ll be making this jar louder next time.”

  Seven

  A cop can get shot, fall off a roof, crippled in a patrol car crash, or get beaten into a permanent coma with their own nightstick. I’ve known uniforms who had those things happened to them. But apathy can end a policeman’s effective life just as completely as a bullet in the face. The next of kin of the cop killed on the job gets a lump sum check from the union, death benefit money from the city, a flag and a handshake from the mayor. A police officer who doesn’t give a shit and stays on the job collects a bimonthly check himself.

  From those first years in Coney Island through every posting in a two-decade career I’ve worked around a certain percentage of men and women clocking in, suiting up, and falling out after roll call only to spend each shift counting the seconds to their retirement. “Twenty and out”—that was the mantra for the beat cop who allowed himself to get stuck in a tar pit of fear and apathy. The only ambition these cops had was to get themselves into a precinct or specialized unit that allowed them to mark time for two decades, rubber stamp their way into some overtime and a promotion or two, and retire with a decent pension the second their contracted obligation to the people of the city of New York was up.

  I was the opposite. Amid all the shrugging, gallows humor, and bullshit, I discovered in Coney that being a cop was a unique opportunity. First—the job allowed me to put bad guys in jail. It may not have been clear to me why I sat down and took the police exam after high school, but within a week of wearing a badge and a gun I was sure as shit glad that I did. People, especially people in the projects, needed help getting on with their lives when they were forced to live sandwiched between predatory scumbags. I felt obliged to help them out. Second—police work gave me what I’d looked for and found my whole life—fun, my kind of fun. I needed action, plain and simple. Running down and collaring up perps was simply the most fun I’d ever had.

  Being a cop was the greatest thing in the world because helping out and a knock-around good time went hand in hand. The tension and risk that drove a lot of NYPD rank and file into an RMP with the windows rolled up or behind a desk until retirement was exactly what I craved. And unlike tear-assing around the MTA tracks, rolling pimps on Forty-second Street with my friends from Canarsie, or risking seven to ten years behind bars for jacking Joker Poker machines in Red Hook, I was doing the right thing. When I busted skells, I felt good and I was doing good. I was having “behave-a yourself” both ways. The irony was, as I learned on the street and in the courthouse, that if I worked by the rules, I wouldn’t put anyone in jail or get any kicks.

  The problem with Coney Island was that 99 percent of the workload was the kind of stuff that fed apathetic cops justification for showing up and doing nothing. Standing by while EMS techs carted off the sick and lonesome in aided cases, refereeing “he said, she said” arguments in domestic disputes, and other small-time, minimally adrenaline-inducing nickel-and-dime crime complaints wasn’t for me. The only surefire way I found in uniform to feed my legal addiction to higher stakes police work was through drug busts.

  After that first highly educational smack arrest on Mermaid Avenue and schooling at the hands of ADA McBride, I began asking and looking around PSA 1 for more of the same. But while I found a few decent narcotics collars, I also found that the drug business in Coney Island was small potatoes. A liquor store on Twenty-fifth and Mermaid that sold coke and dope along with MD 20/20 and Alizé yielded a few trips to Central Booking. Even on that handful of busts, I already had a better narcotic arrest and conviction average after a little over a year on the job than some cops managed for their whole career. As far as uniform NYPD beat cops were concerned, I had more collars than any of them would ever have until the rules changed in the nineties.

  The housing police didn’t have any rule forbidding uniform rank and file from making drug busts so I was under no obligation to observe drug dealers and junkies like they were endangered wildlife. If I saw a deal go down, I made a collar. If I could hide behind a car and sneak up on a junkie shooting or snorting a bag, I snatched him up. If I suspected drug activity, I was free to do whatever I thought had to be done. And I wasn’t just able, I was willing. But the drug trade in the Coney Island projects couldn’t hold a candle to what was going on a river away on the Lower East Side. It had been that way for years and in the making for centuries.

  Young Charlie Lucky’s entrepreneurial streak was something to behold. Even when working that “crumb” job clerking at the hat factory on the
Lower East Side in his teens, he’d used his employer’s shipping department (and hat boxes) to transport heroin to dealers and in turn customers on the East Side waterfront. The smack trade that Luciano helped get on its feet in the first quarter of the twentieth century had a future brighter than even Lucky could foresee, and the dope that he sold had its own pedigree dating back thousands of years. Growing poppies for opium rivals prostitution for the title of “world’s oldest profession.” The Mesopotamians were in the drug business more than three thousand years before Christ was born. Poppies thrived in the “cradle of civilization” climate and opium literally oozed out of them.

  The good news was that opium could be good medicine. Whether losing a gangrenous leg to the saw, quelling the effects of dysentery, or giving a raving madman whose brain was ravaged by syphilis a little artificial serenity, most medical procedures went better with a ball of opium in the belly or a cloud of it in the lungs. The bad news, of course, was it was addictive as hell. Opium’s narcotic effect romanced the human brain so suavely that what started out as doctor’s orders could easily become the only thing that mattered. Eating or smoking the gooey black tar cast a euphoric spell and extended an addictive grip that spanned civilizations and held for centuries. Languages, customs, religions, political systems, and trade routes came and went, but opium stayed. Its manufacture was easy, its initial effects glorious, and its enslavement, though initially subtle, could be nearly unshakable.