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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  The five guys we joined at Op 8 were some of the best cops I would ever work with. Sergeant Andrews, Tony Mastro, Jerry Able, Frankie Nieves, and Pete Donnelly were all razor-sharp vets with incredible street smarts and instincts. They logged some of the biggest drug weight and dollar arrests in the city. “I know you guys know how to collar up and had a good thing going on patrol,” Sergeant Andrews told us on our first day at Op 8, “but this is a whole other world.” He studied our expressions for a second then continued. “You liked being on patrol, but you’re going to love being in my squad with these guys. It’s a real family here. Not like on patrol. We’re a family, and we look out for each other. One hand washes the other, and both hands wash the face. Any questions?”

  “No,” Gio and I answered in unison.

  “Okay then, Mike I want you to work with Frankie until he goes into the bureau. Gio, I want you to partner up with Tony for a few weeks. It’s not that I don’t trust you guys, it’s that you need to learn the ropes from people who know. You’re about to learn from the best. Okay?”

  Frankie Nieves was a thin Puerto Rican guy from Brooklyn with shoulder-length, jet-black hair and a poker face for every occasion. Frankie looked enough like a Hollywood Indian that the dealers and dopers on the avenue called him “Indio.” Frankie wasn’t a month away from a gold shield because he was stupid. But he wasn’t about to pass on what he knew until he was sure that I would fit in with the squad and use what he’d learned the hard way as well as he did. It took a few days but he thawed once he had a chance to feel me out.

  The first discovery I made in plainclothes was just how different the neighborhood was when you weren’t wearing a police uniform. Everyone changes how they act when they’re around a uniform cop. Most people just didn’t realize it. When Frankie and I walked into a bodega, no one pretended not to look at us, like they would’ve if we’d been in blue. Being in plainclothes was almost like being a ghost. Dressed in jeans and sneakers, I could walk right past guys I’d busted mere days before without them so much as batting an eyelash.

  Sure some people in the neighborhood recognized Frankie, and it wouldn’t be long before they would recognize me and Gio, but it always took a moment and sometimes a moment was all we needed. It was so much easier to catch people off guard when you weren’t in uniform. In plainclothes I could stand at a bus station and act like I was waiting for the M21 like anyone else while scoping out dealers in their spots. Lookouts and steerers no longer shouted “Five-O” or “agua” (“water”—the ocean, like police uniforms and cars, is blue after all) to let the block know that a cop was nearby when I turned the corner.

  It was important to dress as low key and naturally as possible in plainclothes. Some of the guys in the Seventh and Ninth precincts’ plainclothes squads never really got that message. Stuffed into skin-tight bike pants with a long-tailed button-down shirt to cover the gun and badge on their belt, and a bulletproof vest peeking through their shirt collar, they looked so absurdly out of place that they might as well have been wearing their dress uniforms.

  The most vital pieces of gear for any plainclothes cop were the same anywhere in the city. When Frankie made an arrest he put on two things—his shield, which hung around his neck like a medallion on a chain, and a colored bandanna. Every cop in every roll call everywhere in the city was told what the color for the day was. A plainclothes cop had a bandanna for each color in the daily rotation in his locker. If he knew what was good for him, he’d sooner forget his gun than forget what the color for a given tour was or leave his headband behind. That bandanna was the only way a uniform cop arriving on the scene of an arrest could tell a good guy from a bad guy. In a city full of new and nervous cops, a lot of them suburban kids from Long Island or upstate, a guy who played and looked his part as well as Frankie did ran a genuine risk of getting gunned down by one of his own.

  “I know the headband looks stupid as shit,” Frankie said the first time we made a bust together, “but I don’t want some new jack white kid rookie shooting me in the back.”

  Frankie wasn’t a cowboy and he gave a lot of thought to his place in the crazy fish bowl of life in the projects. His movements were slow and deliberate, and the points he made were always on target. Frankie had cultivated an eagle eye for street drug traffic, the ebb and flow of buyers and sellers, and the mechanics of a smack sale. Official Op 8 procedure involved spending hours at observation points within and near the projects tracking dealers and buyers. When an Op 8 cop saw a deal go down he would radio descriptions to other members of the squad who would then grab the buyer out of sight of the dealer. If the arrest was good, we’d then work our way back in, bust the dealer by description, and make a case based on what we saw and what we got off the perps we arrested—drugs, confessions, or information.

  Rock stars and rich kids bought their drugs in apartments, hotel rooms, cars, and the bathrooms of bars. Everybody else had to score in the projects. Truth is, just about all the smack in New York came through PSA 4 no matter where it was going. If he’s jonesing badly enough, a junkie will go anywhere to buy and shoot up a bag of smack. But generally, though, your average addict didn’t like going inside a building to cop. Since the Avenue D projects had been written off by nearly everyone outside of Op 8, they didn’t have to. Dealers were free to cater to their clientele and make sales on the sidewalk. Staging street corner drug deals let junkies get in, score, and get out, and reassured dealers that their customers wouldn’t hang around nodding out or OD and that their guys could see trouble coming before it got there.

  What it meant for us was that we could observe everything about a drug deal. The first lesson of Op 8 was to get to know the observation spots used for studying dealer and junkie traffic. Nobody gets into the drug business to get up early and there were always down times where Frankie and I could slip into a maintenance office, unrented apartment, or neighboring rooftop without being seen by anyone we were there to look at.

  Gio and I had made enough collars to recognize how the game worked on a uniform cop level. Huddled alongside Frankie watching dope and money changing hands from an unused office he had the keys to in back of a heavy dope spot in the Wald Houses at 30 Avenue D, parked across the street from 50 Avenue D or 950 East Fourth Walk, or in an empty project one-bedroom full of paint cans across from a three-story building at Third and D that was like smack sale Grand Central, was a master class.

  Once we settled in, Frankie would look out through the painted metal mesh that covered most ground-floor windows and start calling the plays like Tim McCarver.

  “Okay,” he’d say, “that guy is steering, that one is getting ready to re-up for them when they’re done, and that one is selling.” He sketched out verbal profiles of customers.

  “He’s here to buy weight,” Frankie would say about a guy crossing the avenue toward a dealer. “I’ve seen him before. Probably Jersey, probably good for a package.” A deal, some point-to-point radio conversation between us and our colleagues waiting for the buyer’s description in the unmarked car a couple blocks away, two cops, and one pair of cuffs later, Frankie’s assessment would turn out to be on the nose. In less than a month Professor Nieves’s Smack 101 got me straighter on the ways and words of dope dealing than I would’ve taught myself in five more years on uniform patrol.

  Smack wasn’t sold at street level by weight as much as by unit. And the basic unit of measurement in a dope deal was, in those days, a ten-dollar glassine (a kind of wax paper envelope) of dope. Ten bags makes a hundred-dollar bundle held together with a rubber band. Junkies whose tolerance had gone up far enough and who hadn’t emptied their pockets and those of everyone who cared about them would sometimes buy a bundle a day. A package was ten bundles—a hundred bags of dope—and would set you back a thousand bucks. Packages were wrapped tight enough to be about fist size.

  Since they were a solid felony bust and a potential goldmine for anyone who successfully beat a dealer for one, packages usually only came out one at
a time to be broken down and sold as bags. Because of the risk of getting busted or ripped off, the corner dealers rarely held more than a couple of bundles at once. Guys called runners kept their dealers supplied or “re-upped.” The big stashes were hidden in apartments upstairs, and runners would carry salable material by the bundle or package to and from the stash to the corner dealer they worked for as needed.

  “Hot 103,” “Thriller,” “Mr. T,” “Polo,” “Red Line,” “Body Bag,” “Elegante,”—the steerers were the guys who called out the brand name of a dealer’s smack like carnival barkers.

  “Yo, get your Hot One-Oh-Three here. Got that kick-ass shit, yo! Kick-ass D!—pass me by, you won’t get high!” When a steerer got a buyer’s attention, he’d answer whatever questions the junkie might have and walk the customer to their dealer’s spot. It was always a major selling point if a brand was known to be so good that it had killed a customer or put someone in the hospital with an OD.

  Ever since a bunch of South Asian businessmen opened up a row of different Indian restaurants on East Sixth street in the late sixties, the joke went that there was one enormous kitchen underneath the block serving all of them. When it came to brand-conscious junk buyers, the joke was on the customer. Despite the individual sales pitches and names, most of the dope sold out of the Avenue D projects came from the same shipments. Any variation was a matter of how much it had been stepped on by the main dealers who broke it up into bags. The brands were merely salesmanship for the crews and customers but they were also a reliable way for us to ID and track individual dealers.

  The last guy in the chain was the lookout. Like the name said, he was there to scan the sidewalks and streets for cops, stickup kids coming to rob a spot, pissed-off competitors, unsatisfied customers, and the inevitable crazies that might fuck up commerce and bring unwanted attention. A half-naked guy covered in his own blood staggering down the street with a needle bobbing in his arm in the middle of winter could slow sales as much as a blue-and-white parked at the curb. Good lookouts were hard to come by. The number of guys Op 8 sent to Central Booking attests to that. But the good ones did exist—ambitious kids who didn’t get so high or drunk that they couldn’t concentrate, guys whose game was to make themselves so useful and familiar with the gig that they would become dealers themselves and make some big money.

  If he had good material, guys working for him who weren’t idiots, and he kept from getting busted or shot, a street corner dealer would normally earn between five hundred and a thousand dollars a day. The runner was paid by the trip like any other messenger. Most made about two hundred dollars a shift, depending on the number of runs he made. The lookout was good for another two hundred or so a day, and the steerer usually banked between forty and fifty dollars for his troubles.

  Corner dealers and the crews they worked with all answered to another guy—a main dealer who stayed off the street except to make periodic checks on his guys. These main dealers usually had multiple dope-selling spots, each with their own corner dealer, runner, steerer, and lookout. Depending on how many spots the main dealer ran, if the weather and material were good, everyone stayed out of jail, and his guys weren’t stupid, brave, or fucked up enough to rip him off, a main dealer stood to make between ten and thirty thousand dollars a day.

  Most of the corner dealers, steerers, and runners grew up and lived in the projects. Everybody likes a short commute. They felt safe, knew where to hide from cops and rip-offs, and could realistically expect their friends, family, and neighbors to mind their own business and shut the fuck up about what went on in the street. The main dealers made enough money that they drove in from apartments and houses they bought or rented outside of the neighborhood. These main guys were the ones that I wanted to know better. Who were they? What would it take to bring them down and put them away? As it would turn out I was already on my way to having both of those answers.

  Growing up in Canarsie, where both omerta (the Cosa Nostra code) and the “blue wall of silence” (how cops sometimes described their approach to curious outsiders) were the rule, had given me an exaggerated idea of the lengths that people would go to keep secrets. What I discovered on the Lower East Side was if it weren’t for informants, no one would ever go to jail. Everybody on the wrong side of the law, and I mean everybody, has a price. Drug dealers, junkies, and most other crooks will rat out each other and incriminate themselves at the drop of a hat. Either you were so scared that the person you ratted out was going to hurt you that you kept silent about something you knew or you weren’t and you didn’t. There were a lot more people in Alphaville scared of going to jail, and a lot who got enough of a bump out of being paid for what they said that few people in the projects thought twice about fingering a neighbor, brother, coconspirator, or even themselves.

  Criminal justice may be founded on all kinds of high-minded principles of fairness and the needs of the community, but when it comes to drug dealing, justice depends on informants. On the Lower East Side law and order boiled down to this: cops pay off snitches, turn bad guys to their advantage by going easy on them, and play them against each other once they have their confidence. Passing harsh drug laws makes politicians look and feel good, at the same time that it gives prosecutors a big, heavy stick to wield in discussions with perps and their lawyers. DAs and prosecutors waive or reduce charges and sentences and make other arrangements on behalf of the accused criminals who will play ball with them and lead them to a better conviction of someone bigger and badder. The cold hard truth is that the people drug dealers need to fear the most are other drug dealers.

  Gio and I had created our own brand of “discretionary procedure” while we were on uniform patrol. We weren’t systematic about it, but when we wanted to learn something about who was dealing or buying in the neighborhood, we weren’t above letting a guy go if we appreciated his honesty with us, or threatening or touching up someone dirty who we were sure could show us someone dirtier. We never took money or drugs or any of that kind of renegade shit for our own gain or comfort. Never. But toward the end of our time in uniform patrol, we did start shaping cases and situations in order to get collars and gain insight into what the fuck was making the Lower East Side New York’s heroin headquarters.

  An Internal Affairs investigator could probably make a good case for us losing our badges over some of the leeway we already gaveth and tooketh away. Within another year at Op 8, looking over our shoulders for IAB would become part of the way Gio and I worked. When I first started in plainclothes, I wasn’t sure where Frankie stood in the gray area between legal departmental procedure and what it actually took to get narcotics offenders off the street. Initially working with Frankie sometimes felt a little like visiting with an older relative and having to remember not to swear. I didn’t want to volunteer any information or war stories that might make him wonder about Gio or me.

  One day I was seated alongside Frankie in the Op 8 RMP driving down Avenue D, when he pointed at a twitchy young Hispanic kid on the sidewalk and told me to pull over.

  “Fuck me, there he is!”

  The guy Frankie pointed at looked like he was going to rabbit at first but when he caught sight of Frankie he just bowed his head dejectedly. He seemed relieved. Frankie made a show of turning out the guy’s pockets and shoving him around a little before calmly telling him to meet us on the roof of 484 East Houston in ten minutes. “Ah, but mira, Indio, I got to go to the clinic, you know?”

  “It’ll wait, Ponte,” Frankie said. “I’ve been looking for you all week. Don’t make us come looking for you again.”

  Ten minutes later we were fifteen stories above the Wald Houses looking down on slowed traffic jamming up the FDR when Ponte came out the roof door.

  “Who’s this?” Ponte asked Frankie.

  “His name’s Mike,” Frankie replied. His manner was more macho than I’d ever seen before and he suddenly had a strong Hispanic accent.

  “He’s new but he’s gonna be here for a while. You be
tter come across with something good, and make friends with him. You do not want him on your bad side.” I played along and stood there in stony silence looking at Ponte like he was a roach.

  “Yo, I gots something good, Indio, believe me,” Ponte said. “Over in the FDR park dealing going on like fuckin’ mad crazy. The guy running the material over is a little black dude named Little Punk. He’s running Red Line on his bike over the overpass right there on Houston and the Drive.”

  “Where?” Frankie asked.

  “Yo, like right there!” Ponte said and pointed down into the trees along the riverbank. “Like right now! You can’t miss his ass today, he’s wearing a purple hoodie, and he’s on a bike. One thing though,” Ponte cautioned, “you got to make sure you catch him going into the park. That’s when he’ll be carrying the shit. When he’s going in. He’s got nothing when he’s coming back out again.”

  Frankie nodded, reached into his pocket, and gave Ponte a twenty-dollar bill. I’d seen him pull out the same fifty- or sixty-dollar fold of cash at lunch and knew for a fact that it was his own money. That’s when I knew I could relax a little around Frankie Neives.

  According to the rules, police informants have to be finger-printed and registered with the department. Their prints went through the FBI fingerprint file and their paperwork had to be signed and approved by the brass. Under almost no circumstances could a registered informant be on parole or probation. That disqualified about 99.9 percent of potentially useful snitches anywhere in the five boroughs. A guy like Ponte was for sure an addict and without question on parole, or eluding an outstanding warrant for some stupid shit. He didn’t have a chance in hell of qualifying for registered informant status. Even if he could, in order to get paid, you and your informant had to fill out stacks of forms, which in turn needed to be processed and approved by about a half-dozen pencil pushers in the department.