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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  “Available RMP to respond to one eighteen Avenue D apartment one-X, ten fifty-two family dispute.” It was about two in the morning on a night that had already been a snoozer when Central broke the first patch of silence we’d had in a while. Gio grabbed the radio.

  “RMP nine-two seven-seven on the way, K.” Somewhere along the way “K” had replaced “ten-four” or “roger wilco” as standard NYPD radio jargon.

  Nothing escalates faster than a family dispute—usually couples having it out. The phrase “you always hurt the one you love” might have been written by a housing cop. I was driving and I hit the siren and floored it through the intersection.

  “I hope it’s a good one,” Gio said.

  “Yeah. Too slow tonight,” I replied. We’d already become connoisseurs of the family fracas. They broke up the monotony of a dull night like this one and were usually good as some kind of guerilla theater. Also, we were almost guaranteed a collar. What people rarely realized when they called the cops about a neighbor arguing, was that we were expected to arrest someone. The department had too many bad PR experiences where cops arrived on scene, talked everybody down and left only to be recalled when one of the people involved had managed to really hurt or kill another one after all. If we responded, we arrested someone. I stopped our car on the sidewalk in front of the address and we sprinted into the lobby. Ground floor apartment. Thanks, Central.

  As we neared the door to apartment 1X we both turned down our radios and listened to hear whether the show we were about to referee was rated PG or R. The yelling and screaming was loud enough that I was surprised we hadn’t heard it on the sidewalk. One, two, three voices. Fuck. Gio and I looked at each other—an unspoken “on your marks…”—and I rapped loudly on the door. No one answered. I knocked again, this time with my nightstick and kept knocking until I heard the lock turn on the other side of the door.

  “Who?” a female voice yelled from inside.

  “Police officers. You’ll have to open up,” I said, turning my head to listen for anything else I might want to know before we met face-to-face. The door opened. The woman who answered was three hundred pounds if she was an ounce. None of it was clothing. She smelled like someone had marinated her in rum. A cigarette in the corner of her mouth traced an oval in the air as she slurred, “Who call you? Who? We don’t need you! Get outta mi casa! Go away!”

  “Look, someone called. What’s going on here?” I stood up straight, leaned on the door, and spoke in my best “police business” voice. She was wasted and rattled and unconsciously she stepped back far enough that we pushed our way inside. The apartment stank of booze, cigarettes, and sweat. The plastic covers on a couch near the door had gone yellow from old tobacco smoke. Gio caught my eye as a male voice whined from the next room.

  “Por favor, por favor, come back here. In here, in the bedroom!” I grabbed the fat naked lady’s hand by the wrist and brought her into the back room with us. Inside an even fatter and far hairier body lay handcuffed to the bed. Turns out this show was going to be rated X.

  “Look, look what she did to me,” the guy whined. “She said we were gonna have some fun like this but she leave me here and she fuckin’ with her old lady.” As if on cue the fat lady started screaming at the guy in thousand-mile-an-hour Spanglish, lunged for him, and swung her arms wildly at his helpless body. I tried to hold her back, but with physics on her side she broke free and belly-flopped on the poor guy. The impact sounded like dropping a thanksgiving turkey in a kiddie pool of Jell-O.

  “Lady, cut it out!” I wrenched her arm back behind her. “Sit down on the floor!”

  Gio looked over my shoulder, eyes bugged, as a third hefty package emerged from the bathroom wearing a pink bikini bottom that nearly vanished into her rolls of flab. For a second I pictured Don King.

  “I can’t find them! I’m sorry, but I had to call the police,” she screeched. “I can’t find the damn keys!”

  “Okay,” I said to all three, “any more naked overweight people gonna pop out of anywhere, or is the clown car empty?”

  It took some patience and a lot of repetition, but eventually we got the three of them calmed down. Gio decided not to let it die.

  “Okay now, what’s the deal here?” he asked loudly, rubbing his hands together. “Who was fucking who, and when’s the next party?” The three started in again like he’d flipped a switch. I had to hide my face so they wouldn’t see me laughing. The joke wound up being on Gio. Lady Don King had found her keys finally. Neither responding officer had any intention of touching three hundred pound Moby Romeo so we coached the girls through the process of unlocking him. They were both too wasted to get the tiny key in the lock, however. The bed and the guy on it took up almost the whole room and there was no way they could get to his cuffs without crawling around on top of him. It looked like we might get stuck there all night. It was my night to drive and Gio’s night for paperwork and we both understood that unlocking fatso was on the paperwork side of the necessary humiliations of law enforcement. Gio drew the disgusting duty of slithering over the guy to unlock him.

  “There’s a little handhold down there below his waist, if you can’t get leverage,” I told him. Watching him crawl up the guy redefined dirty work.

  When we walked out of 118 Avenue D we were still laughing. Gio thumbed the radio and gave Central our disposition. We hadn’t made an arrest and needed to go on the board as having settled the matter to our satisfaction.

  “Central, RMP nine-two seven-seven.”

  “Go ninety two seventy-seven.”

  “Central be advised that dispute at one eighteen Avenue D is condition corrected. If you get any more jobs there tonight, don’t send patrol units, send pizza.”

  “I don’t know what that means unit,” the dispatcher said trying to stifle a laugh, “but copy.”

  Avenue D

  Thanks to the van hit, Davey goes on DEA’s and NYPD’s radar around the same time we learn about him through Big Arthur Washington’s rampage. One afternoon the Feds get lucky and put together a six-vehicle surveillance that tracks Davey’s black Mercedes from Avenue D into Queens. On the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge Davey makes the surveillance team and uses a new weapon he’s recently acquired to cut them loose—a cell phone. Davey makes two calls and a little while later he’s flanked by a Jeep and a town car. On cue the Jeep and town car block two lanes of traffic, Davey runs a red light, floors it and is gone. At least at first.

  The DEA team radio each other, comb the immediate area but can’t find a trace of Davey’s car and in the process lose the other two vehicles. The team breaks up and the DEA agents all take the long way back to Midtown still hoping to catch Davey by accident along the way. Davey hasn’t vanished completely. He spots one of the DEA tails going by and decides to do a role reversal. After a few blocks the young agent driving the car Davey spotted realizes he’s being followed. He then realizes the car following him is Davey’s. He gets on his radio and sends a mayday out to the other five cars, but they’re scattered all over Queens and can’t get to him. Davey’s on the agent’s bumper now. The young guy looks into his rearview and turns around but can only see tinted windshield. The Jeep and the town car join him. Davey cranks up his stereo and the vibrations travel bumper to bumper. The agent has his gun out on the seat next to him. Suddenly he spots the light fixture of a police precinct. The agent floors it, and nearly wipes out a cop standing on the precinct steps when he screeches to a halt and runs inside, gun in hand. In a moment he’s back out again with two uniforms in tow. Davey’s gone. So are the Jeep and the town car. All that’s left of them is black paint on a government bumper.

  Ten

  Movies and TV make it look like cop partners automatically complement each other and get along just fine. Dragnet, Adam 12, Starsky & Hutch, T.J. Hooker, Miami Vice are built around a couple of cops who seem to be able to spend eighty hours a week in each other’s company without showing any stress or strain. The truth is that kind of chemistry
between two beat cops and even detectives working together is rare—as rare as a marriage with the same unity of purpose and lack of friction. The two of you are side-by-side for eight hours or more a day, five days a week, either sweating your asses off or freezing your balls off. No matter how steady a shitstorm a given day on the job presents, you can’t take each other for granted and can’t take petty bullshit out on each other or blame your partner for anything that can’t be talked out or fixed down the line. When you start getting into that bad roommate headspace on duty, you’re asking to either burn out fast on doing actual police work, or worse, get both of you hurt bad or jammed up with the bosses.

  No cop, I don’t care who he or she is, can operate all out, every day on a beat like the one Gio and I shared in Alphaville. It’s just like any other gig—good days follow bad days. One shift one of us would maybe feel the burn, want to go home on time and get laid, not feel like taking a call that would put him waist deep in human misery while the other would be spoiling for a collar, a fight, overtime, and a weird story to laugh about later. We took turns driving and being the recorder—the partner in charge of the small mountain of paperwork every uniform shift produced. One tour we would relax, take radio calls, and let the drug collars wait, another shift we would go to war with the dealers and junkies on the D and spend half a day extra in processing and booking. Gio and I had solid intuition about which of us was up for what on most days. It made the job livable and it made it doable. Neither of us would ever have gotten as far as we did without the other.

  We read each other’s mood within the first twenty minutes of a shift, picked up on each other’s cues all day or night and arrived at every radio call showing a united front. Neither of us was ever surprised or caught off guard by the other one’s reaction to the crazy shit we’d find. It was important in some situations not to verbally communicate in front of a suspect. If they sensed confusion, they could get brave and try to hurt you, or scared and try to run. Correctly reading a look from your partner could mean the difference between facing a knife, chasing a skell down twenty flights of stairs, or just cuffing the fuck and frog-marching him to the elevator. I always knew when Gio was going to go for his cuffs during a family dispute. I don’t think he ever misread me when we tackled a pair of junkies at the same time. We never got in each other’s way in a beef and always laughed off the stuff that was just too absurd for words.

  As the months in uniform wore on, the voyeuristic appeal of Avenue D after dark wore off and I began to prefer day tours. They were less fun and risky than midnight to eight, but a lot more educational. The important thing with the eight to four shift was to get out early, before someone found some bullshit aided case call for us to respond to, and hustle a collar from those A.M. junkies that I’d seen the first time I came through the neighborhood. They were easy to spot. In this mostly Hispanic neighborhood, the morning junkie was usually a white guy in a wrinkled suit, or a construction worker trying his best to walk, talk, and look like he wasn’t compelled to be where he was by a four-hundred-dollar-a-day monkey on his back. These guys and girls were the eighties’ Willy Lomans. They lied to their spouses, children, coworkers, and anyone else they had to in order to keep the dope going through them. They were a sad and sorry bunch of motherfuckers.

  The script rarely varied. We’d pull up alongside one of these mopes in our marked car. With all the suburban entitlement they could muster, they’d pretend not to see us, or look down the street for whatever it was we must really be looking for. It was sad. We’d creep along next to them driving as slow as the car would let us, and watch their eyes land on everything except us. Eventually, they’d stop and look around as if they were suddenly lost. That wrenching change from single-minded search for dope to lost lamb in the big city was a hard one to pull off. They’d look up at the tall buildings, squint at street signs, and study their watch as if they were late to catch a train. That was our cue.

  “You all right?” one of us would ask. “You look lost.”

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” was the usual response.

  “Oh, and he’s late, huh? Where were you gonna meet your friend?” By this time the junkie is sweating. We’re just not going to go away. Sorry.

  “Here,” they’d say.

  “Here? No address, just ‘here’? What’s your friend’s name? Where does he live?”

  The next answer was the end of act one. No matter what they said, our answer was the same: “Give us your dope or you’re going to jail. Now.”

  “Dope, no, I swear to God, Officers, on my wife and kids that I’m just here waiting for somebody.” If a guy broke our balls about “why aren’t you out catching real crooks” or any of that bullshit (you’d be amazed at how many junkie lawyers shopped in the Lower East Side) we would give him a hard time back. A few threats about charging with intent to sell usually shut them up. If not, or if they bolted, there were other solutions we had tried and tested. Most guys caved quickly, and admitted that, yeah, they partied a little and yeah, they had bought a little dope, sure, we could have it, and hey, were we serious about not taking them to jail? Well, um, no.

  We were rookies and we needed collars. One bag of dope or a ten-bag bundle, college professor or crackhead, we needed an arrest to boost our stats, earn us more freedoms, and let us use most of the rest of the shift pumping a perp for information while we processed them.

  “RMP nine-eight oh-seven, has one under from Third and D, Central.” That was our wake-up call to the dispatcher. Other units would still be drinking their coffee and eating their doughnuts when we were out kicking ass and taking names.

  I loved getting up and out early and bringing some asshole in on a dope charge. The early birds came in handy. They were usually an easy collar that didn’t get sick in the backseat, smell bad, or whine all through the booking process like the more hardcore addicts we’d grab. They were also easy to get information from. Gio and I were both genuinely curious about how the dope business worked. Our assembly line approach to creating collars didn’t put a dent in the dope business that was fucking up the neighborhood. So rather than just nailing a guy, calling it in, and heading for the valley of vouchering and paperwork, we began to grab them and question them.

  Junkies can be like children. Like a baby grabbing for the tit, they have an infantile need that trumps every other part of their consciousness. It’s all about avoiding pain. If answering our questions meant shortening or eliminating the pain of going through withdrawal in Central Booking and a cell in the Tombs, they would tell us just about anything. Our sidewalk burlesque show became truth or dare. Where’d you cop? The corner? What corner? What’s the dealer’s name? What’s his dope called? What does he look like? Has he been there long? Is he part of a crew? Who turned you on to him? How often do you cop? How long have you been coming here to do it? Where else have you copped? What corner? What’s that guy’s name? What’s his dope called? You get the picture.

  When one of them dummied up and refused to answer or got wise with us, we’d smack him in the head or across the mouth, just like the nuns at Catholic school. It was an antiquated method, but it was time-tested and it worked. We learned where dope was being peddled, and we became familiar with junkies and the guys that sold to them. Now when we drove down Avenue D past all the spots, we had names and descriptions we could fit on each corner dealer, and the brand of dope they’d be pushing.

  The high-functioning addicts were especially helpful. They all acted like they didn’t belong there and were only too happy to rat out anyone they could in the hopes that we’d let them go or even sometimes let them keep their dope. In time we began to do both. That same black-and-white, right-and-wrong mentality I found so unrealistic at the academy didn’t last long when it came to dealing with the dope scene on the LES. We didn’t set out to, but we were, out of sheer curiosity and disgust, compiling a dossier—and unofficial fact sheet that would eventually lead us to the one guy running the whole sick show—and that informat
ion came at a price.

  It was a high-wire act—ballsy as hell for rookies. On the plus side our arrest activity, the means by which the department weighed out worthiness for promotion, and the stats for our command were phenomenal. We were making drug collars, good ones, in uniform which was practically unheard of in those days. No one in uniform anywhere else in Housing PD, or NYPD, was vouchering hundred bag packages of dope like we were, let alone the other guys in our command.

  On the minus side, we were using those early morning drug collars to avoid aided cases and the other workaday aspects of being a housing cop that didn’t agree with us, and a lot of our arrests were based on common sense observation that would never have held up in court if we detailed each story as it really happened. As I’d learned in Coney Island, “We saw a guy who looked like a junkie, searched him and discovered that he was a junkie and had dope on him,” didn’t cut it in the courthouse, so we didn’t pitch it that way in our paperwork or our interviews with ADAs. The punch line was the same either way—a junkie or a dealer got taken off the street—all we needed to do was streamline the setup sometimes to make it work. It was arrogant at best and drifting across the line into rogue cop territory at worst.

  Our new hobby of grilling the skells we busted to try to make sense of the 24-7 heroin bazaar going on around us, wasn’t exactly protocol. What we were up to was task force stuff, not uniform rookie cop stuff. We were young and loved what we were doing and had the confidence of a two-man team that played well together and the free rein of a precinct skipper who appreciated how good our arrest spike looked on the paperwork accounting he was obliged to pass upstairs. If we looked into the future, it wasn’t very far. A promotion to plainclothes was as likely as a disciplinary hearing. In the meantime we got our kicks and our collars the way we liked and tried not to do anything we’d really lose sleep over.