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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  It was a unique situation. On one hand the people we came in contact with weren’t used to being heard, certainly not by cops. My partner and I had taken the time and gone to the trouble to learn how things worked as best we could, and the locals who knew the score appreciated that. We saw and understood what both legit residents and the scumbags did. At the same time, our constant presence on the street and the stories filtering back about how we were only too happy to tune a guy up for fucking with us, or add or subtract details of an arrest if it made our case better made the perps we quizzed afraid of us and the straight-arrow civilians who came calling positive we’d take action. If you were a bad guy we were sure as hell going to treat you like one, so why not be nice and tell us something good? If you were a good guy and had a problem we could fix, we would listen and we would try. If you were in-between, well, take a seat. I’ll be with you in a minute.

  Our informants, “friends,” and fan club in the ant farm world we worked were a hustler’s version of the United Nations. Out-of-towners, familiar faces, total strangers, Puerto Rican, Italian, Dominican, Irish, Chinese, Orthodox Jews, American blacks, African blacks, Ca rib be an blacks, you name it. Short, tall, fat, skinny, college-educated, high school dropouts, neighborhood storeowners, women, children, users, hookers, preachers, the whole range of urban life—anyone that was down on the Lower East Side up to no good or trying to sidestep the bad guys came to us for a break or a pass or friendship or some kind of combination of the three.

  Part of Jerry and Tony’s work style was to drive more than walk. RMP 9864 was a nice car and they were tired of the streets. That was fine by me. I liked to walk. Who drives in Manhattan, if they don’t have to? You miss what’s going on when you go around the city with the windows rolled up. And I didn’t want to miss a thing. Walking around the projects gave us presence and visibility. It allowed us to familiarize ourselves with the people in the neighborhood. It also allowed the people in the neighborhood to familiarize themselves with us. And to rename us.

  One hot summer day about two months into our time at Op 8 Gio and I were hanging out near the spot on Fourth Street and D. Gio jerked his thumb at two scowling black dudes walking tall and tough away from the avenue. I’d seen them coming in before and was already pretty sure then that they were small-time Jersey dealers up from Camden or Newark to score a couple packages to sell back home. Color lines cut sharply on Avenue D. We knew just about every African-American, Asian, and Caucasian badass among the Puerto Rican and Dominican majority by sight and by name. These were fresh faces.

  If these guys bought a package they could nearly double their money. Any markup was worth it to their home turf junkie constituency. The convenience of having everything ready to go in ten-buck decks was worth a drive from as far away as Ohio for some guys. Out-of-towners were easy for us to make and, since they usually bought at least a few packages, were prized busts. We didn’t need to discuss it. Gio grabbed one of the guys, tugging him to the side and shoving him to a car hood. My guy decided to run. He sure as hell knew how.

  Tall and thin, he bolted back to the avenue like an Olympic sprinter. I gave chase, thinking that I might lose him as his stride opened up, until he headed toward the back of 30 Avenue D. I knew I had him on geography now. Weaving between parked cars slowed him down. The low chain-link fence in back of the building would slow him even more—enough for me to get my hands on him. I got to him as he was trying to hurdle a long wooden bench. When I yanked him down to terra firma, I discovered that he could fight almost as well as he could run. The guy had a foot on me both in height and reach, and the two of us stood there, legs akimbo trading punches like prize fighters in a painting behind a bar. We were both in tank tops and it was so hot out that some of our punches just sort of slipped off each other’s hides. As I ducked an overhand right, I realized then that I was simply fighting for a collar but this guy was fighting for his freedom and his life.

  Watching other people work has always been one of New Yorkers’ favorite pastimes. The crowd that gathered to see me and the kid from Camden pound the fuck out of each other began to cheer like fans at a rap concert. “Go, Rambo, go, Rambo, go!” Rambo? I’d been growing and trimming a beard since the day we went to plainclothes. I guess there was more than a passing similarity. “Lower East Side,” “LES,” “Alphabet City,” “The D,” “Loisaida,” “East Village,”—the neighborhood itself had nearly a half-dozen nicknames. Pretty much everyone I met that lived there had some other handle they went by, too. Now I had mine. I landed an uppercut in the kid’s left eye socket. He was reeling, but I wasn’t about to let my audience down. I beat him down, kicked him, and beat him again. The lesson was clear. Call me what you like, but know that you will not run from me. If you do, you’ll get what this prick is getting and more. Do not raise a fucking hand to me. Before you try it, remember how this guy looked when I finally cuffed him and called in the collar. Rambo, huh? Okay, now you know me. But I know you, motherfuckers. Tell your neighbor Davey Colas. Remember the movie? “I’m coming to get you.”

  “There he goes again.” A few weeks after going a few rounds with the Jersey bulk buyer, Jerry, Tony, Gio, and I were sitting in the RMP across the street from a dope spot on Fifth Street doing pretty lively business. All four of us were focused on one customer, or would-be customer, doing a bust-shy series of walk-bys before going in to score. Of all the backgrounds I’d seen represented in the junkies scoring in PSA 4, this was a first. The guy walking nervously back and forth in front of the spot we were watching was a meter maid, excuse me, a “traffic enforcement officer.” “Maid” in this case was way off base. He was six foot five if he was an inch, with a uniform cap perched on a high forehead above eyes locked on the dealers. When he finally made us, he went through the exaggerated motions of writing a parking summons and sticking it under the wiper of a delivery van just north of us on the avenue and vanished around the corner. Suave.

  “He’ll be back,” Jerry said.

  Jerry and Gio reparked 9864 farther off the avenue, and Tony and I grabbed a corner dealer to ask him what gives.

  “Fucking pain in the ass, Rambo,” the dealer said. “Been here since noon. Nobody on the D gonna hook the motherfucker up, though, because he looks like a cop. He’s an undercover, right?”

  “Why the hell would anyone go undercover as a fucking meter maid?” I asked him.

  “Go ahead and hook him up, bro.”

  The dealer scowled. “Why, so you can bust me? Again? Fuck that shit…”

  “No, so I can bust him, stupid,” I said, leaning in to make my point. “Listen, if I wanted to bust you, you’d be in Central Booking already eating a day-old bologna sandwich. You think I don’t know how long you been out here selling? You think I don’t know you’re selling for Animal? Meter maid’s out here since noon but you’re out here since eight this morning.” He smiled, gave a little “you got me” palms-out gesture, and shook his head. “It’s either you or meter maid over there,” I told him. “Serve him and make him my collar, or be a wiseass and make yourself my collar. Either way, my man, I’m going through the system tonight with one of you motherfuckers.”

  “Aw’right. So how you wanna do this?” he said.

  “Easy. Once he cops his dope, take your hat off. We’ll be watching. I’ll bust him for the buy, not you for the sale. Just don’t give the signal till he’s dirty. Got me?”

  He got me. The meter maid returned a short time later. He looked around but didn’t see the RMP where we’d backed into a space behind some Dumpsters. He walked right up to the corner guy I just briefed. Our guy talked with him, their hands touched a couple times, and a moment later, the hat was off.

  The meter maid headed up the avenue a lot quicker than he came down it. I realized why when he got to the corner of Sixth and D and stepped onto an M14 bus heading north. In three-quarters of a mile the bus hangs a left on Fourteenth Street and heads out of PSA 4. The son of a bitch timed it perfectly so the bus would arrive, he�
��d get on, and the bus would pull out as the light changed.

  I ran back to the car. Instead of pulling the bus over and making a big deal out of busting one asshole, Jerry drove us farther up the avenue, passing the bus along the way. Tony and I got out at a bus stop at Twelfth and D just as the bus arrived on the corner. We got on and there he was sitting in the center rear seat, smirking like he had his book and pen out as a meter went red. We walked to the back. He was clenching one hand.

  “Open it up, man,” Tony said.

  “C’mon, let’s see what you got,” I added. The guy just shook his head like a bratty kid. He made a show of trying to get up a couple of times but I just kept shoving him back down into his seat by the top of his head. He was huge, a city worker, and everyone on the bus was watching to see how this played out. Neither Tony or me wanted to throw him the beating he increasingly deserved, but neither of us was enjoying looking like idiots, either.

  Finally the big jerk slowly opened his hand for us and the rest of the bus to see like he was doing a magic trick. It was empty. A lady near the front actually gasped. To an untrained eye this probably was starting to look like two white cops in street clothes hassling a black uniform city employee in front of a busload of law-abiding citizens for no clear reason. But even though the meter guy played to the crowd he wasn’t winning them over. Everybody that has ever been ticketed hates meter maids. Finally I let him get up and I cuffed him. The pantomime stopped when the cuffs came out, but his loud “somebody do something” protests ended when Tony found a half-dozen dope bags where the guy had apparently tossed them when we got on the bus. A passenger sitting a few seats from him nodded to me after frowning at the dope and at the meter maid. In essence she was saying she saw him make the toss.

  The bus stopped, we hustled meter guy off, and got him into the car. On the way back to the Command Jerry handed me the radio mike. People think cops get a break from traffic enforcement. It isn’t true. We get ticketed just as much as anyone else and all four of us wanted to milk this bust for all it was worth. “Central be advised,” I said with a grin. “OP Eight has one meter maid in full uniform under and to PSA Four for possession of heroin.”

  The radio goes wild. “Way to go, Op Eight! Great job!” Even the dispatcher congratulated us. The channel didn’t clear for a full minute. As we pulled up at the Command, nearly a dozen different cars from various precincts greeted us with sirens and horns beeping, lights flashing, and cheering and applause over their radios and grill loudspeakers.

  The guy was big. It was a struggle getting him off the bus and into the car and it was a struggle getting him out before walking him into the Command. He’d ridden in the backseat with his cap in his lap but out on the sidewalk Tony put the guy’s cap back in place. “There,” Tony told him. “You were out of uniform, Officer.”

  When the meter maid’s union rep arrived to go with him through processing, he told us the guy was supposed to be in Midtown writing summonses until six.

  The varying attitudes cops have about their job will always isolate risk-takers from the rest of the rank and file. Cops who don’t give a shit think you make them look bad, cops who are scared think you might get them hurt, and cops who think that the job owes them promotions and raises just for getting to work on time, resent that you leave them so far behind in arrest statistics, citations, and all the other bureaucratic thumbs-ups the department gives to officers who actually get off their asses. Even excellent cops like Tony and Jerry had their limits. They were great guys and I always knew they would have my back, but exotic arrests like the meter maid bust were what they lived for, not the idea of bringing down the entire Avenue D smack business and putting Davey Blue Eyes behind bars. Maybe it was the age difference. Tony and Jerry had maybe five or six years on us, but they were cop years and hard ones. They were ready to move on and that sometimes made it feel like there was a generation gap a mile wide between us. Seeing their buddies promoted to detective had reenergized Tony and Jerry, but the way that Gio and I liked to work made them seem cautious and conservative by comparison.

  If I knew someone was selling, or had bought, I’d grab them. Simple as that. If there was a building open nearby, I’d take them inside and search them. If there wasn’t time, I’d toss them out there right on the sidewalk. If I knew you were dirty, I was going to prove it, and later in court I was going to make it stick. It didn’t matter how. Tony never called me out directly on anything, but I could tell some of the things I was willing to do to make a small collar big or an iffy collar a good one were more risk than he was comfortable taking.

  “You have to see it,” Tony once said. “You just can’t know someone is dirt, it’s not worth it. I don’t work like that.” The closer he got to a gold shield and a pay raise, the more he stuck to the book.

  “No problem,” I told him. I respected Tony and appreciated all that I’d learned from him and from Frankie. Getting the guys in the squad in trouble with IAB was as unthinkable as letting them get shot by a perp. But I wanted to be let off the leash and Gio did, too. I got such a kick out of working my way that the book was always an afterthought.

  After about two weeks, Sergeant Andrews sat us all down.

  “All right guys,” he said, lighting a little Clint Eastwood cigar, “I’m gonna make some moves here. I think everyone is gonna be happy and go out and produce for me. Tony, you and Jerry will work together.” Tony and Jerry did their best to look surprised. “So, of course, Mike and Gio you two guys are gonna go back to being partners.”

  With the squad now pared down to two sets of cops, we got into the Op 8 routine the way it had been designed. At least a few shifts a week, Sergeant Andrews would go out on patrol with one team riding along in the Chrysler our uncle Sam bought us. “Who’s looking?” was the first question at the start of a shift. It was an observe or catch proposition and we took turns either tracking perps for the guys catching or doing the collars and the processing ourselves. Gio and I preferred to do the collars. We liked getting in there and getting on the bad guys directly. Tony and Jerry were fresh from seeing their partners promoted and would rather observe. There were less risks in watching. With Gio and I back together as a team everybody got what they wanted. We could do our thing without fear of fucking up anyone’s careers but our own. Jerry and Tony were free to work their way. The big winner was the captain. Between the old school slow-and-steady approach our ex-partners had perfected and the anything-goes style that Gio and I were now free to explore, crime numbers in PSA 4 began to change.

  Making the bosses look good was the best job insurance you could have in the police department. Reprimands and cautions from the sergeant on up became mere hand waves as long as we were making the Command’s stats strong. Collars bought us freedom. Op 8 was an anticrime squad, not just an antinarcotics squad. When word came down from One Police Plaza, aka the Puzzle Palace, that the bean counters saw specific types of violent crime on the rise, we were supposed to do something about it. The column with complaints of specific crimes needed to have a column of corresponding arrests alongside it. Captain Cataldi tells Sergeant Andrews that HQ is on him about robbery stats in the PSA 4 projects? Not enough robbery arrests to go with the complaints? Gio and I were only too happy to oblige. Who were we to not try and help out the cap?

  Cap made sure that word filtered out to all the cops in his Command that robbery arrests would be the priority until the numbers got better. So I made robbery arrests my priority. If I saw two junkies get into a fight over a bag of dope, I’d separate them, and tell one, “Yo, so this prick robbed your money, right? Before you answer, let me just remind you that if you say he didn’t, you’re both going to jail.” Making that threat on a Friday when the manpower bottleneck on weekends meant that anyone collared on a Friday would not see daylight or a fix until Monday usually got results.

  “Yeah, Officer, this motherfucker robbed my ass,” m’man would chime in.

  “Central,” Gio would say into his radio, “be
advised, we have one under for robbery.” Between the junkie-on-junkie beefs, guys getting burned on dope deals (the old “give me your money and wait here” act never went out of style), and the other drug-related petty annoyances throughout the neighborhood that could be rewritten to fit the new priority at One PP, we were bringing in one, two, sometimes three robbery collars every couple of weeks.

  It took balls. It was a little complicated and definitely risky, but our request-a-thon worked for as long as it needed to. Within a few months redirecting some of our arrest traffic into robbery collars brought the columns enough into balance that the captain could relax. Like nearly everyone else in the police department, he was only too happy to turn a blind eye if it meant his impossible job could get easier.

  Gio and I must have locked up about a hundred perps in the first couple of months of getting partnered again in plainclothes. Our bread and butter remained drug busts. At first we just nailed the corner dealers, their buyers, and the runners who carried material to the spots the way that the other Op 8 guys had been doing before we got there. Soon we were locking up the steerers and lookouts, too. The charge we came up with for lookouts was loitering for the purpose of engaging in narcotics. They rarely stayed in jail long, but it interrupted a street dealer’s workday nevertheless. Busting steerers took a little research.