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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  “If the guy brings a buyer to the dealer, isn’t he also selling?” I was playing twenty questions with a sympathetic ADA in a tiny shared office downtown at 80 Center Street. People always crap on lawyers, but the Manhattan DA’s office was a lot more gung-ho about fighting crime than some police precincts I knew. “I mean he’s standing there advertising the dope to prospective buyers. Isn’t that a sale? Doesn’t the mere offer of a controlled substance constitute a sale?”

  “Well, yeah, offering a drug is considered an attempt at a sale by definition in the New York State penal law,” the ADA said. “Fuck ’em. You’re right. Arrest ’em and let’s charge them and see what happens.”

  Court days were like playing hooky for some cops, but I took the DA’s part of the job and my testimony seriously. At the very least I needed to keep my story straight when swearing under oath to things that may or may not have been entirely true. Trial testimony against the Avenue D dealers and junkies was a blinking contest between me and the defense attorney. It was like a three-sided chess game where all the players were cheating in some way and knew it. The defense attorney knew his client was guilty, the ADA knew I’d given him everything I had in order to make his case, and I knew what the jury needed to hear when I took the stand. Everyone involved, with the possible exception of the jury, knows that the truth lies somewhere between what a cop says and what a perp did. It’s all a big twisted system that often leaves good cops wondering if they should stretch the truth, ignore the facts, or out and out lie to convict some scumbag criminal. I never wondered. I never got stage fright or clammed up on the stand. I always knew the answer, always had it ready and I never lost a case.

  Part of the appeal of being a steerer or a lookout was the belief that if you didn’t carry drugs or do hand-to-hand sales you weren’t likely to be arrested. Now everybody in a corner sale crew had equal chance of going to jail whether they were dealing, muling re-supply, steering, or keeping an eye on the block. Op 8 was now closing down multiple spots and fucking up whole operations—Davey Blue Eyes’s operations. If we couldn’t charge Davey, we sure as hell could make his life harder.

  As always, it was a matter of cash. The big shots like Davey had to keep their crews happy. But instead of making bail for a dealer or a runner that got popped with a package on him, Davey now had to regularly dig into his wallet and come across with bail money for an entire Third and D crew from the steerers on up. The guys that worked for him were taking more risk and wanted more money to compensate for it. Davey liked things smooth and clean and we almost singlehandedly were making his business rough and messy.

  By doggedly working a single area within Op 8 instead of bouncing around from project to project like the rest of the squad, we were making a difference and I was sure we were fucking up Davey Blue Eyes’s life. We also were making a name for ourselves. The Riis and Wald houses were a world we had penetrated. We walked, rode, watched, busted, and hung out around the same people every working day and night. We liked a lot of the people we met down there. Some of them liked us. Either way everybody began to know us—Davey Blue Eyes who remained out of sight, the dealers who worked for him, their crews, the junkies who looked away when we came around, the old guys we cracked jokes with, and the pretty Spanish girls who flirted with us, confided in us, and invited us into their apartments.

  After enjoying that initial period of anonymity with Frankie when I first transferred to plainclothes, I knew when I was known and could see when I’d been made. One afternoon Gio and I got to stare into our own faces.

  DON’T MESS WITH RAMBO AND FASTBACK!

  There we were, part of the downtown cartoon mirror world looking down on ourselves from a graffiti mural. It was around Easter and the moment had kind of a weird vibe left over from a Hispanic church procession that had just passed made up of a guy dressed as Jesus hauling a cross with very realistic discomfort behind a van crawling down the avenue blasting Spanish language hymns and prayers and a parade of priests and parishioners singing and praying along behind.

  “What the fuck…?”

  A local artist had taken it upon himself to “immortalize” us in acrylic and brick. There we were, our names bigger than life, clearly recognizable staring down from a wall on East Second Street. We weren’t undercover on the Lower East Side, we were everywhere! As weird as it was to see, I liked it—Fastback and Rambo in front of an angry Bengal tiger. The paint looked fresh. It couldn’t have been up for very long. I wondered if Davey Blue Eyes had seen it yet.

  Thirteen

  I stood in position in the hall of 950 East Fourth Walk and watched a pair of Drug Enforcement Agency agents tug on gloves, pick up a metal battering ram by its handles, and approach the door of a ground-floor apartment. I’d seen firefighters make short work of the same metal doors more than a few times. These guys looked like they knew what they were doing and my money was on them, not the door. The cop in charge, DEA Special Agent Carl Ruiz gave the guys with the ram a hand signal.

  “DEA! Open up!” Ruiz shouted and the ram swung into the door. It fell in on the third hit, top forward. Ruiz and his men were inside almost before the door settled to the ground. Gio and I were on hand as backup making sure that no one entered or left the building during the DEA’s raid. They were there serving a warrant in a NYCHA building and common sense dictated if they were going to have a knock-down, drag-out in Wald Houses, Housing PD needed to be standing by.

  A few minutes later the same agents marched out, stepping over the battering ram where it had been dropped, with the particular distracted slump of cops who’d cranked up the adrenaline and charged into an apartment blind only to emerge empty-handed. Ruiz caught my eye at the doorway.

  “He wasn’t there, the prick,” he said with a sigh. A maintenance guy from NYCHA walked into the middle of the handful of milling Feds and housing cops to size up the door-rehanging job.

  “You’ll get him,” I replied. As Ruiz, Gio, and I walked out to the sidewalk together, Ruiz stuffed a hand into his windbreaker pocket and showed me a mug shot of the guy he didn’t get.

  “You guys know him?” I looked at the picture and nodded.

  “Sure, Little Loco. He doesn’t do anything on the avenue here, but I know he has material.” I pointed east toward the Brooklyn waterfront. “I think his spots are over in Williamsburg. Thinks he’s some kind of player.”

  “Haven’t seen him for a while, but he’s around for sure,” Gio added.

  Ruiz smiled. “Any idea what he’s driving these days?”

  “Last time I seen him he had that hooked-up BMW, right?” Gio said. I nodded back. “Sort of blue-gray.”

  “Fuck,” Ruiz said. “So, how do you guys know him?”

  “We kind of know everyone down here,” I said. “If you guys see him would you grab him for me? He’s my whole case. He was the main target.” Gio and I both nodded.

  “No problem, happy to collar that little douche bag,” Gio said. Ruiz handed each of us his card. I stuck mine in my pocket. Gio tossed his into the gutter. We both watched Ruiz drive off. I’d been thinking a lot lately about DEA. They were on the avenue all the time now and generally I liked the way that they got things done. Guys like Ruiz weren’t dicks, ran clean operations, asked questions, took suggestions, and were always good about giving credit where it was due. This had been a hurried job, but usually when they set up an arrest or search in the buildings they worked closely with Op 8 and were always grateful for the additional info Gio and I usually had for them.

  “He seems like somebody we could work with, you know?” I was kind of testing the waters.

  “I dunno,” Gio replied. “He’ll call up next time he needs a tour guide down here, I guess.”

  If the Feds needed a tour, we were the guys to give it. It was now over two years since I began working in Op 8 and we’d been doing our thing on the avenue for long enough that it seemed like there wasn’t a single veil left to lift in PSA 4. What had seemed alien and hostile and fucked up then
was as much like the back of my hand as Canarsie was in the seventies. The cast and the set were always the same, it was just a different story each day.

  Supposedly, Sesame Street was at one point going to be called “1, 2, 3, Avenue B,” before that was scratched in favor of the title that’s now a household name. The sidewalk sets of the show itself resemble high-stoop brownstone Harlem more than the tenement and housing project LES, but something about the mixture of real and outlandish live-action cartoon puppet people populating the studio-bound sidewalk evokes the streets Gio and I worked in Operation 8.

  Every spring, sure as the first crocuses peeking up through the dirt in the trash strewn common areas around the Riis Houses, and the first new generation of summer flies buzzing around garbage on the street, an animated neighborhood character would make the scene. During the winter it was easy enough to spot this enormous, lumbering white dude with the particular swinging walk of someone whose girth was overtaxing his skeleton and whose pasty skin and glazed eyes were those of a guy whose immune system had declared war on his liver. When the weather got better he toddled through the neighborhood in Bermuda shorts—his huge, dimpled, ash-colored thighs rolling up and down like taffy pistons. There was no mistaking him—Rockets Redglare.

  Old-time animators called the exaggerated motions in old cartoons “squash and stretch.” Rockets Redglare was the living, breathing 3-D embodiment of that principle. With his undulating walk, squeaky “I ate alum” voice, outsize glasses, and beatific toothless smirk, he turned every sidewalk he went down into a panel from some kind of bizarro world Bazooka Joe bubble gum comic come to life.

  Rockets was a kid from Little Italy born to a junkie mom and a wiseguy dad. His mom was murdered by an abusive boyfriend who filled in at home once dad was sent back to the old country handcuffed to a Cunard Line gunwale by the Feds. This lineage left Rockets with a dual legacy. On the one hand he had the entitlement of a precocious abused kid that had been passed from aunt to grandma to aunt throughout his childhood. “The women in my family treated me like a Mandarin prince,” Rockets used to say when holding court in the East Village bars he worked like an old-time ward heeler campaigning for drinks and drug money instead of votes. He also had the blood and brain chemistry of a baby who had been unsuccessfully detoxed in the womb and was already addicted to narcotics before the doctor who delivered him in Bellevue’s OB ward gave him the other kind of smack with a rubber-gloved hand.

  A combination of overgrown cherub charm, vicious wit, and nearly superhuman and totally unapologetic appetite for drugs and alcohol gave Rockets a weird charisma that he exploited to the hilt. Even casually telling a wide-eyed NYU coed in a local bar that she looked “like the kind of chick who could satisfy a whole motorcycle gang,” earned him a kiss on the cheek instead of a faceful of mace. It was as if he’d found the exact middle ground between degenerate clown and degenerate ringmaster. When he was younger he was big, smart, and reassuring enough that band, club, and bar managers hired him as a roadie, doorman, bouncer, and titty bar MC. What his bosses often found out the hard way was that in those days Rockets was also the man to see when you needed to score or wanted to get into a sold-out show on the other side of the door he was guarding.

  While working as a bouncer at the trendy Red Bar on First Avenue in the eighties, Rockets’s practiced response to one coked-up patron smashing a bottle on another’s head was to separate the two parties, hail a cab for each, send the bleeder to Cabrini Emergency and the hitter to another bar before anyone who’d been nicked by stray glass or sprayed with blood made it to a payphone and called the Ninth Precinct. Rockets was part of Warhol darling artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s entourage until Basquiat was killed by a speedball in 1988. When Sid Vicious’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death in the Chelsea Hotel, Rockets was there, too. Some say he was the source for the dope that Sid used to join Nancy via OD. Others say Rockets did Nancy in himself. None of this kept the tabloids from dubbing him both Sid’s and Basquiat’s “bodyguard.” Rockets stayed coy on the topic until the day he died.

  Just about everyone who knew or recognized Rockets from the streets of Alphaville experienced the same late-eighties moment of shock while at the movies. Either at the St. Mark’s theater on Second Avenue (home of the weirdest double-feature pairings in the city) or at the tiny syringe-strewn single-screen theater on Grand and Essex there he would be—that guy—Rockets, on screen forty feet high bitching about sushi alongside Madonna, hassling Tom Hanks, and sending a hate letter straight to Eric Bogosian’s heart. It turns out that the St. Mark’s Place cabaret shows Rockets hosted and performed in the early eighties, along with two moonlighting firemen and a bartender who worked at Vazac’s on B and Seventh, caught the eye of casting agents. Rockets, the bartender, Mark Boone, Jr., and one of the firemen, Steve Buscemi, began appearing in art films, TV, and Hollywood blockbusters in the mid-eighties.

  Fame of a kind brought Rockets perks of a kind. The teeth he’d lost to the bad, good life were replaced courtesy of a Hollywood paycheck during a year spent as a fish out of water in L.A. But the neighborhood and his mother’s chemical legacy wouldn’t let him go. Maybe it was the other way around. No matter how much he worked in front of the camera Rockets never gave up a side career hitting up friends and acquaintances for money, squashing and stretching down the streets of the Lower East Side and alternately getting strung out on and dried out from booze and drugs.

  Old friends, bartenders, and starstruck college kids alike were happy to spot him a twenty and buy him drinks in exchange for stories about his fucked-up childhood in and out of rehab and reform school and the crazy life and off-the-wall career he’d managed to make of it. So what if he’d copped a prison rape story from a book he read or nodded out before the punch line of a joke? He was good enough company, as long as you didn’t mind lightening your wallet a little and didn’t have to help him up off the ground. As his health faded and body ballooned, the movie limelight dimmed and sentimental tavern owners, doting bartenders, and famous friends were all he had left.

  Eventually, years after I had left Alphaville behind, one of Rockets’s patron bartenders, a guy named Luis who’d come up to the Lower East Side from New Orleans for the punk rock and stayed for the drugs before cleaning himself up, inherited a little family money and decided to make a film on the subject of Rockets himself. The picture, Rockets Redglare!, featured the title character reading from his unpublished memoir User’s Manual and was littered with off the-wall testimonials from his less self-destructive Lower East Side luminary friends. The film became the talk of the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. Unfortunately, Rockets’s overtaxed body had thrown in the towel two years earlier, and he only attended in spirit. And, like Nancy Spungen, Sid Vicious, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Luis joined Rockets soon after their film hit big in Utah via a motorcycle wreck upstate.

  Reagan Youth was a rock-and-roll band formed by Forest Hills high school buddies that earned a loyal following with high-energy, ritually combative shows, and simple but smart and catchy songs that were like infectious antiestablishment nursery rhymes. On stage, a kid born David Rubinstein and renamed Dave Insurgent lovingly mocked the ritual riot antics of the crowds at Great Gildersleeves, A7, and CBGB’s eighties hardcore all-ages Sunday matinee bills.

  But the sharper and more of the moment a rock band is, the shorter its lifespan is likely to be. Even the Beatles only lasted ten years. Reagan Youth pulled the plug when their satirical namesake left office in 1990. But what really lit the fuse for the band’s bust-up was Dave’s heroin habit. After years of chipping, the son of Holocaust survivors was not only shooting up, he was dealing.

  He wasn’t the only one in the household doing it. Rubinstein hooked up with a girl named Tiffany from Metairie, Louisiana, who was also on the punk scene, also strung out on dope, and went from exotic dancing to curb service prostitution to support both her and Dave’s habit. Neither of them had much luck pursuing their respective livelihoods. Dave was
so unreliable that a group of dealers he’d burned bought him a beat down with a baseball bat for nonpayment. The doctors who opened up Dave’s skull and removed some of his brain to prevent a potentially fatal hemorrhage guessed that if his head wasn’t covered in thick matted dreadlocks, he would’ve been DOA. Dave was in a coma for days. When he woke up he had a prominent scar bisecting his forehead, and a quarter second or so reality hiccup caused by a lobotomy that probably saved his life.

  One day in June 1993, Dave watched his wife climb into a Mazda pickup with a guy she reassured her husband is a freak but a regular. She told Dave that she would be back in a half hour and that when she returned she’d have dope for both of them. The next time her husband saw her she was on a morgue slab.

  A few days later in the hours before dawn, two state troopers cruising the Southern State Parkway on Long Island hit their lights to pull the same pickup over for a missing rear license plate. The driver hit the gas and barreled down an off-ramp. Five cars eventually joined a ninety-mile-an-hour chase. Mario Andretti couldn’t maintain control of a small pickup truck at that speed for very long and after misjudging a turn the Mazda plowed into a light pole in Mineola. The driver was unhurt. When the troopers tossed him they found an X-Acto knife in his pocket and a smear of Noxzema on his mustache that made it look like he was drinking greasy milk. When they tossed the truck they found Tiffany’s rotting corpse under a blue plastic tarp in back.

  The cold cream on his face was a trick the driver, Joel Rifkin, picked up from the movie Silence of the Lambs. The corpse in the back was inspired more by an Alfred Hitchcock picture called Frenzy. Tiffany was the last of seventeen prostitutes Rifkin had picked up, raped, and strangled since the late eighties. Detectives picked over the ID cards, clothing, jewelry, and other souvenirs Rifkin collected from his previous victims inside the house he shared with his adoptive mother. Around the same time, widowed, strung-out, and brain-damaged Dave received word that his own father had accidentally run over and killed his mother in a parking lot in Queens. Shortly after he cooked up and shot up enough heroin to make his heart both stop aching and stop beating.