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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  It turned out that I didn’t have much to worry about. There wasn’t much to it. The fucking guy started talking to me as I walked up to him.

  “What you need, papi? H or coke? I got D and C, aw’right?” I felt like an idiot, or a Boy Scout. I wasn’t sure what H or D was, or even if that was what he said. He had a squeaky mumble that was already familiar to me. While I searched for an answer he jerked his head at the corner behind me. I turned around. A regular uniform cop was stamping his feet against the cold.

  “Fuck that cop,” I told him. H was probably heroin and D stood for dope, but I wasn’t positive and went with the sure thing, “Give me five bags of coke,” I said. He nodded.

  “Chill here, papi, I’ll be right back.” The second he was out of sight I hustled back to the block where I’d left Gio and his partner.

  “G, I got you guys a seller,” I told them. “He’s wearing a short brown pleather jacket with a hooded sweatshirt underneath. He’ll be on C and Fifth Street in five minutes.” Gio smirked at me. He still thought I might be fucking with him.

  “Okay,” he said. “See you there in five.”

  When I arrived back at the dealer’s corner he was there. I walked up to him and he grinned. The smile vanished as I yanked out my cuffs and lunged at him. Off balance, he was easy to spin around. I gave him a little help with a shove between the shoulder blades and he slammed into the side of a parked car. He struggled for a second. I smacked him in the head and he wised up and let me finish clicking the cuffs on him without a fight. Gio and Gene pulled up in their marked RMP right on cue.

  “Here you go,” I told them as I handed the guy over. Gio searched the dealer and came up with the five bags of coke I’d asked for. As Gene shepherded the guy into the backseat of their patrol car Gio looked at me for a second in silence.

  “You cool with this?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, sure this is cool,” he said. He didn’t sound so sure.

  “You know what to tell the DA when you go to Central Booking, right?” I asked in a lowered voice.

  “No, tell me,” Gio answered even quieter.

  “It’s simple. Just tell the ADA you saw this guy with the dope counting them out like a goddamn blackjack dealer, okay?”

  “That’s it?” Gio asked.

  “Fuck yeah, that’s it. Just charge him with the possession, not the sale, and everyone will be happy about the whole thing. It’ll be an easy misdemeanor collar for you and Gene.”

  “Okay, yeah, good idea.” Gio and I shook hands. He seemed more relaxed. “See ya in a few weeks,” Gio said. “Thanks for the collar. Don’t forget, I got the locker right next to mine for you. Don’t let anyone in the Command tell you it’s taken, okay?”

  I nodded at Gene and waved good-bye to the perp.

  As I drove back to Canarsie, I wondered if what I had just done was entrapment. If it was, so what? I really didn’t give a fuck. He was a drug dealer, so screw him. It felt good to put a guy like that in cuffs and in a cruiser on the way to Central Booking. I figured Gio would make the collar stick and thought of McBride and his plaques. All Gio had to do was keep his story simple and stick to it. It was his first time but not his last and it was probably going to get easier to do each time.

  Avenue D

  Felix Pardo is a high roller moving big quantities of dope to Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Queens. He doesn’t sell to anyone on the D so he’s not directly my problem. I’m curious about him, though. I know a lot about Felix from our snitches. Supposedly he’s been dealing with Chinese gangs his whole life. His parents are from the Dominican Republic and barely speak English but Felix is fluent in Cantonese, English, and Spanish. He’s supposed to be an okay guy for what he is. Someone points him out to me and I’m surprised how innocent and ordinary he looks. He’s not dressed in flash clothes or rings, doing a macho gangsta prison yard walk, or driving some eye-grabbing jeep. If it weren’t for the nearly six-foot blond Puerto Rican girl covered in jewelry holding his hand he would have looked like a kid in grad school. Word on the street is that for some reason the big guys on Third and D hate Felix. Davey Blue Eyes himself has supposedly taken a particular dislike to Felix. So have Davey’s sometime allies and assassins from Cherry Street, the Navarro brothers. There isn’t much rhyme or reason for the animosity, but in their world there doesn’t have to be.

  One night Felix comes out of a Pathmark on Pike Street along with his cousin, an accounting student at City College. His cousin doesn’t notice a customized Mertz with black tinted windows that glides into gear as they cross the parking lot, but Felix makes it instantly. The car draws close and Felix shoves his cousin and tells him to run like hell. They drop the Heinekens they just bought and take off like shots. Felix knows the terrain and heads down an alley that looks left over from the nineteenth century and is too narrow and uneven for the Mercedes to get through. His cousin follows him. But when they get to the far end the car is already there. A rear door opens and they see Davey Blue Eyes pointing two nine millimeter pistols at their balls. “Get in,” Davey says to Felix. The two cousins look at the guns and each other, Felix gets into the Mertz, and the door slams. A moment later Davey’s window rolls down. “A hundred thousand tomorrow,” Davey says to Felix’s cousin. “A hundred thousand or his mother never sees him again. Right here, tomorrow six A.M.” The cousin waits until the car drives off, runs to a payphone and passes the message on to Señora Pardo. Before she’s hung up the phone she’s rummaging in the back of her closets for the dozen shoeboxes of cash Felix stashed there. She hangs up the phone and starts counting out bills.

  The following morning Davey’s Mertz pulls up and Felix’s mother is there at the curb watching. A rear window slides down just far enough to accommodate the shoebox Felix’s cousin has under his arm. The cousin pushes the box through, the window goes back up, and the Pardos wait while somebody inside counts. A short while later the door opens, Felix tumbles out onto the street and the car roars away. Even from fifty feet away Felix’s mother can see that her son spent a lot of the previous ten hours having the shit kicked out of him. She fights back the urge to scream at Felix’s bruised and bloodied face. It’s better after his cousin helps him up. At least he’s alive, no sense in attracting attention.

  Eight

  Brooklynites have had such a love-hate relationship with Manhattan that we even refer to it as “the City,” as if we lived on the prairie. No amount of Brooklyn pride could change the fact that Manhattan had two dubious distinctions over the rest of New York. One—rents were higher. Two—compared to Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and even the Bronx, in the eighties, the heroin trade on the Lower East Side was off the hook. Everything else about the neighborhood was, too.

  I saw a fifties science-fiction movie on TV once when I was a kid. In the movie a lost civilization builds a miles-wide underground machine allowing everyone on their planet to instantly transform thoughts into flesh-and-blood reality. When astronauts from Earth arrive on the planet the civilization that made the machine has destroyed itself and been extinct for centuries. What the masterminds that built the thing hadn’t factored in is that a lot of the most powerful stuff going on in people’s heads should really just stay between their ears. “Monsters from the id,” the Earth scientist who discovers and activates the machine cries out before he’s ripped to pieces by a gargoyle that materializes from his own secret, crazy places. That’s kind of the way the Lower East Side felt to me sometimes. The neighborhood itself was a mechanism that allowed people to act on and realize impulses that anywhere else they’d keep in check.

  A guy’s girlfriend fucks his two best friends (or says she did) and the guy grabs a baseball bat and beats both his friends’ heads in on the sidewalk. Between rounds of Bud tallboys and bathtub speed in an abandoned Puerto Rican social club, a group of cowboy artists transforms the vacant lot next door into a “sculpture garden” train wreck of metal, paint, and stone work reaching three stories into the sky. A couple on a city-run methadone ma
intenance program go into business for themselves by holding their daily prescribed and dispensed dose of liquid methadone in their cheeks until they get around the corner from the clinic on Avenue B and spit it into strangers’ mouths in exchange for cash they then take and go score real smack on Third Street. Outer borough rock-and-rollers blow off church, shul, or cartoons to march around a dance floor throwing punches, taking intentional headers off the stage, and pass each other back and forth like a manic version of the Jets and Sharks carrying Tony away at the end of West Side Story to the sound of jackhammering punk bands at weekend hardcore “matinees.” For a pretty wide variety of natives and transplants, Lower East Side life seemed to be about taking what was inside and making it happen on the outside no matter what the consequence or cause.

  “The criminal, the mentally ill, the socially rejected, and those who have given up the attempt to cope with life,” is how one academic described the so-called urban jungle.

  “Single men, pathological families, people in hiding from themselves or society, and individuals who provide the most disreputable of illegal-but-demanded services to the rest of the community.” Sounds familiar. Every person has the capacity to unravel and every neighborhood harbors misfits alongside the well adjusted. Saint or psycho, the trials of life can light anyone’s fuse. Something about the Lower East Side just shortened some people’s wicks.

  For more than a century the neighborhood had been the end of the line in Manhattan. Like Canarsie, a lot of the Lower East Side was once swamp and marshland. Until it was drained and filled, Manhattan’s southeastern edge going south from Fourteenth Street leached into a fast-moving tidal channel that narrowed enough between the Brooklyn and Manhattan shorelines to earn the designation the East River. Most of the neighborhood had no subway service. The double L barely glanced off the Lower East Side’s northern border, the IRT and BMT lines skirted its Western edge at Astor Place and Broadway, and the F, J, and M trains snaked underneath it en route to Brooklyn and Queens with barely a handful of stops between them serving the streets above.

  Generations of people arrived in the neighborhood hauling a generous allotment of cultural and psychological baggage that they would unpack on the neighborhood’s streets and inside tenements, factory buildings, and storefronts. For a while in the early twentieth century, the area around Tompkins Square Park had the largest German-American population in the U.S. But almost overnight the Germans were burned out of the Lower East Side melting pot when a ferry boat called the General Slocum caught fire while hosting a church-sponsored field trip in the summer of 1904. The parents of a generation of Lower East Side German-American kids watched helplessly from the shore as their community’s future burned to death and drowned in the East River. All that remains of Little Germany is an old church building on Seventh Street, a few architectural hints along Avenue B, and a monument to the Slocum’s thousand-plus mostly underage dead within the spielplatz the kids had once played in—Tompkins Square Park.

  Ukrainian and Polish families that came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were still there when I began working in the neighborhood. If they owned buildings they rented apartments and storefronts that could’ve been had for peanuts just a few years before to NYU kids for exponentially increasing monthly ransoms. There was some kind of Eastern European lunch counter on almost every block. Stanley’s on Avenue A, Christine’s on First Avenue, and Kiev on Second Avenue are all gone, but you can still get kasha varnishkes (a mix of steamed buckwheat and bow-tie noodles that is as savory and filling as spaghetti and red sauce) with your morning eggs instead of home fries at Veselka on Ninth Street. East Tenth Street still hosts a genuine Russian bath almost directly across the street from Lucky Luciano’s old family apartment, complete with steam rooms, a rock-lined “Russian room” sauna, and a changing area equipped with cots to sleep off a ritual beating from a masseur and any vodka consumed before or during a visit.

  The Eastern European Jews that once filled the apartments and stores below Houston had mostly moved on by the time I arrived, but synagogues and schvitzes remained along with Bernstein’s Kosher Chinese Food on Essex Street, Katz’s Deli (not Kosher and a dining mecca for three states’ worth of local law enforcement the way doughnut shops were in L.A.) on Ludlow, and the B&H Dairy Lunch farther uptown near St. Mark’s Place.

  The corner of First Avenue and Tenth Street retained traces of the even littler Little Italy that nurtured Charlie Lucky. John’s Restaurant where Joe the Boss’s hit squad settled a score and shot a couple locals in the bargain was (and is) still there same as DeRobertis pastry shop. Lanza’s Restaurant down the block from DeRobertis on First Avenue was reportedly a social club for made guys, and until it was finally opened under entirely new management for real in the nineties, tourists and new arrivals were firmly but politely directed back out to the sidewalk when they wandered into Lanza’s in search of a meal. Across the avenue Rosemarie’s Pizza was so unself-consciously old school that in August the management posted a sign saying they were closed for a week’s vacation, and a mix of employees and regular customers would hang out in front of the storefront in folding chairs until the week was up.

  The sidewalks of the Lower East Side have been decorated with gallons of mob rivalry blood. The neighborhood also spawned Thomas Rocco Barbella, better known as Rocky Graziano, one of the greatest boxers who ever lived. Not to be outdone, the Lower East Side’s Jewish community produced Barney Ross, a guy who held fight titles in three different weight classes, singlehandedly fought off two dozen Japanese soldiers at Guadalcanal, and beat heroin addiction when he got home from the war.

  They used to say that California must have been on a slant away from the rest of the country because all the nuts rolled there. But Alphaville had been East Coast visionary central for more than a hundred years. Nikola Tesla, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Charlie Parker, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Trosky all passed through or lived there at one point or another in their lives. The neighborhood offered a soapbox or a hideout. The genuinely creative, the genuinely clueless, and the genuinely nuts came from everywhere to reinvent themselves in a place that bore no resemblance to wherever it was that they came from.

  The Hells Angels motorcycle club bought into the block on East Third Street between Second and First Avenue in the late sixties. New recruits earned the bottom rocker on their colors by standing guard over their brothers’ machines all night in any weather across the street from a mural immortalizing Angel badass “Big Lenny” Giordano throwing a punch like Popeye the Sailor and the wisdom, “When in Doubt, Knock It Out.” A hippie surge in the sixties brought a more delicate pseudonym for the area around Tompkins Square Park—“the East Village.” Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground, a group that gestated in a Ludlow Street loft, remarked years later that the best thing about San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967, was that the hype surrounding it lured most of the parasitic hippie creep element of Lower East Side counterculture out to the West Coast for a season.

  The neighborhood was like some dry-docked coral reef constantly growing over the wreckage of immigrant armadas or individual adventurers who had run aground there, settled in, then either been wiped out like the Germans or picked up stakes and sailed on to fairer shores in the outer boroughs and suburbs. Every block was built on layers representing generations, stratas of society, traditions, beliefs, ambitions, delusions, compulsions, desires, and everything else.

  Each Lower East Side block was a crazy quilt of buildings and storefronts rented, owned, operated, and frequented by different members of an almost absurdly diverse community. Art galleries held openings alongside synagogues honoring the sabbath. Puerto Rican cuchifritos (maybe the single most thorough exploration of deep-frying ever conducted) places shared blocks with vegan restaurants. Polish bars served college kids on dates alongside old-timers who’d been drinking since breakfast. Both ended up shooting pool and singing along to the same Johnny Cash songs by closing time
. A block south of a Turkish-run newsstand serving the best egg creams and iced coffee on the planet, and around the corner from an old-time Italian funeral parlor, a Korean-owned dry cleaner on Avenue A turned a side business renting VHS tapes into a chain of video stores that became world famous.

  The sheer volume and variety of humanity encouraged a kind of myopia rather than connection. It was entirely possible for people in the Lower East Side to go their entire lives totally unaware of someone living the same number of years on the other side of a six-inch-thick wall of wood, drywall, and plaster. Unless you found some kind of key that opened the doors separating neighbor from unaware neighbor, it was hard to see the connections that bound people in the neighborhood together.

  During the mid–late eighties, the unavoidable fact was that heroin connected nearly everyone in Alphaville to someone else, whether they saw it or not. Smack was like an X-ray flashing through every apartment, every business, every life in that teeming patchwork neighborhood. It rippled out from the Avenue D projects like a shockwave. Junkies and non-junkies ran a gauntlet of lowlife rip-off artists that began at the foot of the buildings. Loose gangs of neighborhood kids were only too happy to risk juvenile detention for the pleasure of cracking open a head and taking drug money or milk money for a kid’s breakfast. Vomit, steaming in the summer and frozen solid in the winter, decorated sidewalks, park benches, and stoops whenever a new shipment of dope was strong enough to cause even seasoned addicts to empty their stomachs after snorting or booting it up.