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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  The post-Knapp paperwork ordeal of making a narcotics arrest was its own trial by bureaucracy. I swear the laborious process of vouchering evidence and processing drug collars in the eighties was one of the major contributors to New York’s street heroin nightmare. Even cops that could get away with arresting dealers and junkies like us in housing usually couldn’t be bothered because of the necessary administrative follow-through. When you made any kind of arrest, you had to deal with your Command’s desk officer. The desk officer (D/O), usually a sergeant or a lieutenant, was most often a cop who’d taken the apathy route. If doing nothing while wearing a badge was your idea of a good time, then being a desk sergeant was a slice of heaven.

  The majority of desk sergeants were careerists who worked the civil service side of police work, seeking a safe spot in the supervisory ranks without ever actually making any collars. Typically, a desk sergeant or lieutenant was someone who gravitated toward hiding out in the back of a precinct house studying the Patrol Guide. After roll call all that most desk officers had to do was read the paper, not choke on their coffee, and shift their weight enough to avoid hemorrhoids until their watch was over. Repeat five times a week for two decades and collect a full pension.

  What ruined most desk officers’ day were go-getter uniform cops like Philly and Louie back in Coney Island and me and Gio in Alphabet City coming in with actual arrests. Procedure dictated that every salient detail about the collar and the condition and disposition of the prisoner be recorded in the precinct’s log—place of arrest, charge, priors, the perp’s apparent health while in custody, time spent within the Command, time out to Central Booking, the whole deal. As A/O (arresting officer) I had to search the prisoner in front of the D/O, inventory anything I found, and then count out the perp’s money to the penny. It wasn’t fun for anyone, but it was torture when the desk officer couldn’t be bothered and thought he could teach you a lesson about interrupting them while they were reading about Miss July’s hobbies and turn-ons, or Rickey Henderson’s hammy and picturing themselves chipping golf balls in Boca. Imagine your worst junior high vice principal, DMV, or bank teller experience and multiply it by a hundred. The precinct bosses could make what’s already a lousy procedure feel like a root canal.

  In narcotics arrests, the A/O had to transport the prisoner from the Housing PD Command to the local NYPD precinct (generally the Sixtieth in Coney Island and the Seventh on Pitt Street in Alphabet City) to inventory and put away (“voucher” in honor of the combination envelope and form used) the narcotic evidence found on the prisoner. So, having bid a clipped but polite good-bye to my own pain-in-the-ass D/O at the Housing Command, I now stepped into round two with an even bigger pain in the ass—a D/O who wasn’t even my boss. Regular city cop NYPD desk sergeants and lieutenants genuinely disliked the interruption just like mine did. They also bitterly resented the fact that it was coming from a cop from another division and Command and that the arrest involved the extra unfamiliar paperwork of a drug bust that the D/O’s own men weren’t even permitted to do.

  Adding to the fun was the department’s laborious procedure for putting confiscated drugs into evidence. I had to count out, individually label, and initial every bag of dope I found on my prisoner (1 of 100, 2 of 100, 3 of 100, and so on). This wasn’t such a big deal in Coney Island where the pickings were small, but in Alphabet City, even before I made plainclothes, I would sometimes bring in perps holding three or four hundred bags of dope. Having counted and numbered each bag, I then had to put them in a clasped manila envelope, seal it, and sign the fold. If I missed a bag, or the numbers didn’t match up, I was in for a hard time from a captain or an inspector and ran the risk of receiving a Command discipline. Command discipline punishment could range anywhere from a warning to having precious vacation days taken away. If a problem with vouchering happened too many times, or enough bags of dope were brought into question, Internal Affairs got called in. An IAB investigation could result in charges and specs filed, a departmental trial, up to thirty vacation days taken away, or possibly even getting fired from the job. No wonder so few cops bothered making drug busts.

  Once after we made plainclothes, Gio and I busted an Avenue D small-timer named Fats. We followed procedure, took him first to our Command then to the Seventh Precinct, and vouchered the two dozen bags he had on him as evidence. An hour later we get a call from the Seventh Precinct. Fats was found with another bundle of dope on him inside the Seventh’s lockup. We missed ten bags? There was no fucking way. Gio and I went back and leaned on him.

  “What the fuck, Fats? I checked you out top to bottom,” I told him out of earshot of the Seventh’s glaring desk sergeant. “Where did you get this dope?” Fats whined and wheedled and eventually admitted the truth. He was owed some dope from another dealer who was also in the cells with him. The cop that busted this other dealer had missed a bunch of dope when he searched him. Fats got his dope back, and got me jammed up in the process. I didn’t want to rat out the other dealer’s arresting officer, but I also didn’t want to take a hit. I gave Fats an ultimatum—tell the desk sergeant you found that dope in the corner of the cell, or stay off of Avenue D until further notice. I dodged the complaint and Fats got another count added to his online booking sheet.

  Another time I finished tagging and bagging four hundred glassines of smack only to find that the adhesive on my voucher envelope didn’t stick. I took the envelope to a big industrial sink in the Seventh’s basement to moisten the glue and accidentally dropped a few bags down the drain. I had no choice but to go back out on the avenue and grab enough dope off some junkie to replace what had washed down the drain, match the numbers of the new dope with what was missing from the envelope, and then get the fucking envelope sealed at last. Again, not a peep from the command or IAB.

  “Weather is the best policeman.” I used to hear Jack Genova say that about once a week during my rookie years on Coney Island, and I’d heard him say it in my head about once an hour since coming on the job this morning. Gio and I had drawn an eight-to-four shift, but the rain had been coming down so heavily since before dawn that there was literally nothing for us to do. We were rained out like a ball game. It was my turn behind the wheel again, but the torrent pelting our windshield was like movie rain—thick and continuous as if it were man-made—and I didn’t want to spend any more time driving against it than I had to. We’d spent what seemed like hours parked on the corner of Houston and D. A cuchifritos sign flashed through the torrent outside. Inside the car we were both lost in our own thoughts. The rain pounding on the roof and windows was like white noise. Anyway, we’d both pretty much run out of things to say for the day. The radio would occasionally bark out a job, but none of them was for us. I’d take the dullest, most unnecessary aided case or the biggest pain in the ass emotionally disturbed person over this. Then:

  “Available unit, ten fifty-four, aided case, possible EDP up on the roof of ten Avenue D, possible jumper. Units to respond?”

  We were only fifty yards from the building. I jammed the car into drive. Gio was already on the radio.

  “Nine-five seven-seven, K, we’re ten eighty-four at the scene.”

  It was a U-turn to the address Central gave. As we screeched to a stop I sensed something drop to the sidewalk next to us. We could make out a loud, dull thud through the rolled-up windows. We got out fast and were instantly soaked. A male body lay twisted on the sidewalk. The guy’s arms were exposed. Even in the driving rain I could see that they were ulcerated and had the collapsed patches, scarring, and withered contours of someone who’d given up on everything but shooting dope. Blood, lymph, and God knows what else was pouring out of the back of his shattered head and washed away in the downpour. Chunks of brain bobbed into the sewer backup that had filled every gutter in the neighborhood since breakfast. Eventually they’d flow out into the rivers. We needed a minute to take this all in. The rain didn’t matter anymore.

  Whether he fell or jumped didn’t matter either.
What seemed important somehow was his body language. The guy had hit Avenue D so hard, less than a body length from our car that his hips were twisted nearly a hundred and eighty degrees and both legs were bent completely backward. We moved closer and an EMS van pulled up on the sidewalk next to us. One of the techs knelt, swore, lifted the dead guy’s head and made an effort to fit some of the brains that hadn’t been washed away back into his skull. I gave the EMTs a break and helped lift the corpse into the back of their truck. He was wet and heavy, his eyes open and lifeless like a casualty in a war comic.

  I moved my head around a little to see if I could look into them like he was still alive, but you can never find yourself in a dead guy’s eyes. As I studied his face he stopped being a body and became a person for one final moment. He looked familiar. I knew him, or used to know him. He was nameless to me, but I’d seen him around—a member of the walking dead so far gone that there was no point in even arresting him. There was nothing a guy this bad off could tell you that you couldn’t see from across the street as he searched the ground outside and between the project buildings for discarded bags of dope hoping to get one last little taste the same way bums smoked the final quarter-inch of tobacco left on a cigarette butt.

  What he was telling me now was a sad, sad story of a guy so bad off he’d just as soon die as live. I watched the EMS van pull away. Neither Gio nor I were in a hurry to get back in our car. Somehow standing there in the rain like idiots felt better than trying to act normal and radioing Central from inside the RMP. I looked down the avenue. The weather had stayed so bad for so many hours that we weren’t the only ones ignoring it. A dope hot spot on Third Street was doing a light business. People walked and ran along the sidewalk oblivious to the blood and brains mixed in the puddles, unaware that another fucked-up life had reached the end of the line and added an instantly forgotten layer of human landfill to the Lower East Side.

  Avenue D

  School Boy lives in Alphabet City but his reputation spreads throughout the New York drug underworld. He looks like a schoolboy—younger than his age, well groomed, dressed like he was going to take communion with a school backpack over one shoulder. His look and easygoing, low-key style enables him to walk up to just about anyone and have a gun out and firing before they can do anything about it. School Boy may look like a kid who’s lost his dog, but he’s a hitman who’s killed dozens for Davey and others who can afford his price to clear human obstacles from their path.

  We get so many inquires from detectives all over the city about School Boy that it’s become routine. We want to catch him, but he knows us just like we know him. School Boy doesn’t kid himself. He knows we won’t need an excuse to toss him when we see him, so he learns when we work and only packs heat in his schoolbag when we’re off the clock. It sucks for us because we can’t catch him with a gun, but it really sucks for him. A lot of the people he’s killed have friends and a lot of those friends want School Boy dead. The hours he spends unarmed have to be giving him a lot to think about.

  After nearly a year of grabbing guys fitting the description of another killer named Sammy Molina, Gio and I finally collar Sammy and hand him off to our detectives. With Sammy in custody and arraigned for two homicides, the detectives ask us to round up one of Sammy’s homicide witnesses at Fifth Street and the FDR Drive as a favor. It’s the end of our shift but we’re happy to do it. We’re even happier when we pass Macatumba, Londie, and School Boy sitting on a car hood together on Third and D. School Boy turns green when he sees us. “Motherfucker!” I say to Gio, “School’s dirty!” I swing back around and he’s off, running like hell down the D, backpack in hand.

  “Op Eight in pursuit Avenue D and Fourth,” Gio says into the radio. School Boy hauls ass right past us, books down Fourth Street and tosses the pack as he goes. He thinks we won’t follow him against traffic. He’s wrong. I floor it, forcing a cab up onto the curb, pull up in front of School Boy and we’re out. Gio runs back for the backpack and I chase School Boy a half a block before dropping him and slapping him around in the middle of the street. I cuff him and drag his sorry ass back to the car. He whines the whole way about running because he had dope on him and that he doesn’t know what backpack I’m talking about. Bullshit.

  But Gio can’t find the backpack. Several uniform cars pull up. The guys in them join the search. They can’t find the backpack. Without that bag, we don’t have enough to hold School. We drive over to Houston and D with School Boy cuffed in the backseat to give the uniforms time to find the bag. But after fifteen minutes of searching, still no backpack. I’m about to cut School loose and literally have the key in his cuffs, when the radio squawks. “You guys lose something?” the uniform on the other end says. We drive back to the scene with School Boy, and the uniform is standing there holding up a backpack. A passing car had parked on it and it rolled up inside a wheel well. School’s gun is inside. The cuffs stay on. School Boy curses us out the whole way back to the Command.

  Months later, he’s singing a different tune. The night before he goes on trial for the gun we find in his bag, the Navarro brothers from Cherry Street up the ante in a war they’re having with the Third and D crew. With Davey Blue Eyes’s approval, they pull up in a van next to a car with Macatumba and Londie from Third Street in it and open fire. Londie’s killed instantly and Macatumba barely makes it out alive. If he didn’t have to be in court, School Boy would’ve been in the car with them. During the trial, quiet, polite, and dressed as always like a schoolboy, he pauses at the prosecution’s table where we’re conferring with the ADA and calmly thanks us for saving his life.

  Eleven

  PSA 4 Command was a tight collection of rooms in the ground floor of the Vladeck Houses on Grand Street. Roll call took place in a dusty basement classroom space with a half dozen chairs, a blackboard in the center, and a TV set on a rolling cart off to one side. I stood through roll call as I had for nearly two years waiting for the squad sergeant to dole out the evening’s assignments. The sergeant was detailing some memo from on high that I’d unconsciously tuned out. There was an old shoeshine machine in the back of the room and I found myself wondering how it got there and when the last time was that anyone had actually used it.

  For some reason when the sergeant awkwardly delivered the observation “…see you new guys need to know—some of you old guys, too—you need to remember that when you work on this job, you can go places,” he got my full attention. For a moment, like everyone else in the room except the sergeant, I had no fucking idea what he was talking about. It was like waking up in a hotel room and forgetting where you were and why you were there. “Gio, Mike, c’mon up here.” By the time the words were out of his mouth I remembered. The two of us stood up, dodged nightsticks, .38s, and knees, and awkwardly made our way to the front of a squad full of eyes. I shuffled into place doubly embarrassed at being in front of the class and caught off guard by this presentation.

  Sarge cleared his throat and announced, “Guys, I want everyone to know that tonight will be the last night Gio and Mike will be working with us. They’ve been reassigned to the Operation Eight unit.” The room erupted with a mixture of genuine and sarcastic applause. I didn’t care either way. PSA 4 was no different than any other housing Command or city cop precinct—there were some good guys in our uniform squad and there were a few four-star assholes, and the full range of police eagerness, apathy, arrogance, commitment, and incompetence in between.

  Sarge stuck his arm out and shook Gio’s hand and then mine before we took our places back in the roll call line we’d come from. His palm was as dry as paper. “See,” Sarge said again, “if you work on this job, you can go places.” After we were seated, he finished with the assignments for the evening. The last patrol squad shift either of us ever worked in uniform was a relatively uneventful tour in Sector David.

  In the mid-eighties New York was still years away from the police hiring bonanza that began under Mayor Dinkins and eventually climaxed with Rudy Giuli
ani’s famous cleanup. But the ford to city: drop dead days of the seventies when laid-off cops picketed One Police Plaza and even rioted, were already a thing of the past. Reagan was in the White House and federal purse strings loosened for every pre-9/11 politician’s favorite vote-getter—The War on Drugs. Each NYPD and housing Command had its own plainclothes squad. PSA 4 was such a hot zone that it had two. The federal government picked up the tab for the second one—Operation 8. Washington’s money bankrolled overtime costs for a squad sergeant and four-man crew whose beat was narrowed to eight specific projects within PSA 4 and for RMP 9864—a brand-new unmarked Chrysler to tour them with. Op 8 cops answered to the PSA 4 Command captain, who in turn answered to the department. His bosses answered to the Feds who’d earmarked the money.

  It was all about crime statistics—complaints, arrests, and convictions detailed in graphs, spreadsheets and lists. PSA 4 and the Lower East Side were throwing off the curve big time and Op 8 was put in place to bring those stats under control. The way to do that was to arrest drug offenders. So the center ring of the Op 8 circus were the buildings Gio and I had been specializing in for the last two years—the Wald and Riis houses. If we were working there anyway, why not do it in plainclothes? We lobbied heavily and hard for our spots on the Op 8 roster. As luck would have it, two Op 8 vets made detective at the same time and would shortly be moving on. After a few weeks of the six of us working together, we would be the new meat replacing them when they collected gold shields and headed upstairs.

  Making drug collars on the Lower East Side could feel like you were emptying the ocean with a soup ladle. You grab a junkie or a dealer, arrest, process, and arraign him on Friday and on Monday he’d be back on the same corner. The situation in Alphaville was out of hand enough, and the system fucked up enough, that if you wanted to stay in the game you needed something to believe in or get behind. Gio and I just loved the action and the neighborhood. We connected with the electrical jolt of running down perps and taking risks and fed on the energy that radiated from every shadow we crossed and character we met on our beat. Our new colleagues connected with something else—each other.