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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  The Alphaville heroin trade and unchecked human greed ravaged the neighborhood like a man-made plague. But to make things even worse, doing narcotics and having anonymous sex played a key part in spreading an actual medical epidemic through the streets. No amount of police intervention was going to stop it, and everyone was at risk. In 1980, rumors began to spread around the West Village piers and in male-only bath houses of a flulike illness so specific about who it made sick that it was initially called “gay pneumonia.” By the time I began patrolling Alphaville it had a name, AIDS. What little people seemed to be sure of was that AIDS was an incurable and pretty much fatal virus transmitted from person to person, straight or gay, either by fucking or by sharing a needle or doing anything else that brought infected blood or semen in contact with a noninfected blood. The PSA 4 projects were populated with people that fucked just as much as anyone else did and probably shot up heroin more than anywhere else in the world. If you were screwing around on the Lower East Side in the eighties, you were inevitably within a person or two of a needle and, therefore, one unprotected fuck away from chronic and, in those days, usually terminal illness. Gay, straight, young, old, junkie, or clean, AIDS cut a swath through the Avenue D projects that might have been the saddest and most fucked-up thing I saw while I was there.

  If AIDS hadn’t been an illness that evoked societal hang-ups, maybe the people in charge might have taken it on as the epidemic it was right from the start. It became an issue instead of a disease. President Reagan didn’t even say the word “AIDS” in public until 1987, and by then thousands of New Yorkers were infected. The New York City Health Department’s first move had been to close gay bath houses. When someone pointed out that it wasn’t just a gay disease and that there were lots of straight sex clubs around, the city closed them, too. That still didn’t address the health risk to IV drug users sharing needles and anyone who they fucked. The city went back and forth about whether or not the Health Department should exchange clean needles for used ones for years. A charter needle exchange program finally began in the end of 1988.

  Cops working narcotics were especially at risk of catching AIDS. Dirty needles were an everyday reality in Op 8. Bloody spent works littered the ground and the rooftops pretty much anywhere east of Avenue C. The ones you couldn’t see—in pockets, handbags, car seats, or couch cushions—were what worried me. Anyone I tossed potentially could be too scared or too stoned to tell me about a needle they had on them and inadvertently make me their blood brother while searching their pockets, purse, car, or apartment.

  Also, there were always project girls (and some guys) looking to get with cops. Some girls never outgrew the dream of being rescued from the D by Prince Charming. Bagging a cop fit that fantasy, somehow. I knew from my first days in uniform that being a cop really attracted some women. They don’t call it the “blue magnet” for nothing. And I discovered early on in plainclothes what the rest of the guys in Op 8 already knew—it didn’t make any difference whether you were in blue or in soft clothes—there were plenty of girls in the Avenue D projects who loved to flirt with, date, and fuck cops.

  There were, to be blunt, two kinds of women I met in and around the buildings. The first kind of girls were fighting the black hole gravity of a no-future life exiled to the edge of Manhattan. They knew that if they gave in they were bound for a high-altitude version of the medieval life cycle of birth, work, kids, heartbreak, and death all within the same five-block radius. These women respected themselves enough to stay in school in spite of growing up broke, and get jobs outside the neighborhood even if it meant going to work for some racist and uncaring creep anglo boss who wouldn’t last a minute in the environment these women were looking to get out of.

  The other kind were the girls who surrendered to the forces holding them where they were, the ones who were willing to trade something like a good time for something like security whether it was money, drugs, sex, or a higher rung on the Avenue D smack-dealing status ladder. I was single in those days and I met plenty of both. I dated some of the first group and fucked a few in the last group, but the more I became known in the neighborhood, the more careful I needed to be.

  There was no cut-and-dried regulation against police rank and file dating anyone who lived in the buildings and neighborhoods they patrolled. A lot of cops in my command, at the Ninth Precinct and the Seventh Precinct on Pitt Street did. We were down there the better part of almost every day, and it was a matter of nature taking its course. Unlike some uniforms and soft clothes guys I knew, I never shacked up with any project broads in one of the apartments in the neighborhood. Regulations did spell out that an officer couldn’t live within the precinct he or she patrolled. For a gung-ho Internal Affairs Bureau investigator, spending more downtime in an apartment in your own patrol area than safe at home grilling hotdogs and washing your car could be construed as a rules violation. Strike one.

  Strike two was the simple reality that if I was going to sleep and wake up inside the buildings as well as bust the dealers on the outside, I’d need to grow eyes in the back of my head. With our fame within the community growing, Gio and I were becoming better known and more trusted by some, while offering bigger targets to others. Davey Blue Eyes had killed dozens of people. To the best of anyone’s knowledge that I talked to on either side of the law, he hadn’t killed any cops yet. Scaring the shit out of rookie DEA agents was one thing. Killing or ordering the death of two New York City police officers was, hopefully, another story. But Davey had never before felt pressure like he’d been under since his 1018 Club van hit went south, and Gio and I had devoted five days a week for nearly two years to fucking directly with the Third and D crew and Davey’s livelihood. Working the way my partner and I did to achieve the results we had opened me up enough to risk. Taking on a project girlfriend was just too much exposure for me to handle. I flirted a lot and dated a little on the D, but I could never go completely native. It meant my job and arguably my life, and not just via a bullet from a dealer. I know of at least one PSA 4 uniform that found out the local girl he was banging had caught the bug and probably given it to him. I have no idea how he brought that up to his wife.

  The police department wasn’t quite sure what to do or to say about AIDS any more than the government was. With no guidelines coming out of One Police Plaza, I fell back on common sense. For starters, I tried not to touch blood with my hands or any other part of me. You couldn’t work the way we worked in Op 8 without breaking that self-imposed rule, but I was as careful as I could be in scuffles and takedowns. And if I did fuck around with girls in the projects I made sure I wore a condom. As far as needles went, that became the perp’s responsibility. Every search, toss, or collar I made included a brief conversation on the topic.

  “You got anything sharp on you, a needle, anything that might stick me?” I’d say as I patted a collar down before going into their pockets. “No? Good. Okay, here’s the deal: if you’re wrong about that and I get stuck with something, whatever it is that sticks me goes right into your eye after. Understand?” Everyone understood, especially when I pointed an index finger within a half-inch of the eye under discussion. If they had a needle, they’d dig it out and follow my instructions to cap it with a cigarette butt and set it down. After they were cuffed up I would voucher it and put it in one of the plastic tubes that had been issued for needle evidence since the seventies.

  “Yo, Rambo, what’s up?” Gio and I were walking through a hallway at Bellevue on the way to interview a guy Big Arthur Washington had shot in the face. As usual there were patients on gurneys lining most of the wall space between rooms. I went over to the one that called out to me and searched her sunken cheeks and glazed eyes for any idea who she was. Her voice was a phlegmy rattle and from that and the sores on her arms it was clear that whoever she was she had full-blown AIDS.

  “Hey,” I said, stalling for time. The girl was in such sorry shape that I had no idea who she could be. It was impossible to even guess her age. We
bullshitted for a while about the neighborhood and just as I was about to make my good-bye’s I remembered her. Tessy. She’d dated a couple of the corner dealers and had been a regular informant. Tessy was little and wiry to begin with, but she must have lost fifty pounds since the last time I’d seen her, along with most of her teeth. “Get yourself up and well, Tessy, okay?” I told her.

  “Okay, baby,” Tessy replied with an inadvertently ghoulish smile that seemed to peel her face in two. “You stay safe, Rambo, hear?” She was always nice. Within a week she was dead.

  Boo was a girl who’d helped us out with some information from time to time and always liked to laugh and flirt a little on her way to and from the avenue bodegas. She only bought lottery tickets for the big prize drawings and I used to kid her that the odds of winning were probably nearly the same if she played or didn’t. But one Saturday night she proved me wrong and won. Big. After she hit the lottery for $1.5 million I didn’t see her around anymore. We thought she was off somewhere living it up but it turned out that she was wasting away from AIDS. The first thing she did when she won LOTTO was buy her boyfriend, a small-time corner dealer named Bass, a Ducati crotch rocket. After she told Bass she had AIDS, he got on it one last time and rode it up the ramp onto the Williamsburg Bridge in a pouring rain storm. Bass wasn’t able to find a spot to ride off the bridge like he wanted to, so he settled for doing a one-eighty into oncoming traffic. He died instantly. Boo took eighteen months to join him.

  The buildings themselves were built with the “up and out” idea in mind. The plan was that you live there for a few years, save money, and move onto the next part of the American dream. But the overwhelming majority of the people I encountered in PSA 4 couldn’t manage it. The gravity of poverty and drugs, bad education, and AIDS kept them down and crossed them out. “Getting out.” Everyone wanted to do it, but for some reason only the women talked about it. It was a macho thing for guys. They were supposed to endure it. The TV flashed images of the rich and famous but omitted instructions on how to get there from this side of the screen. There had to be a way to get out of this place. People tried everything. Getting out was the reason behind almost every dope sale, lottery ticket purchase, and flirtation. Still, the house odds of getting a break and getting out always remained stacked against them.

  Raphael was born prematurely and got too much oxygen in the incubator at the hospital. He was a nice kid but slow and unable to learn much in school or on the street. His mom stepped up, curbed her dope habit and raised him as best she could with what she had on hand, what she made when she worked, and what the government paid out when she didn’t. Eventually she wrote down the number of a lawyer from a bilingual subway ad and, after a half decade of legal wrangling, the hospital settled with her for over a million dollars. Raphael was twenty by then and even though he was slow, the settlement, minus the lawyer’s percentage, was technically his. When the first money finally came through, he withdrew the full amount in cash, laid the bundles of bills out on his bedroom floor and played with them like they were toy soldiers. After a while he scooped up a few and took them outside to show his friends. When he flashed his cash and giggled at us, we gently but firmly led him back to his apartment and asked him to repeat back to us over and over that he wouldn’t show anyone else his money, he’d stay inside with the door locked, and not come out until his mom got home from wherever she had gone. We were off duty an hour when someone he knew convinced Raphael to open the door, shot him twice in the chest and took every bill.

  “That tall guy there, they call him Law. He’s a stickup guy. He’s got a dope habit from here to Japan. Either he’s too smart or doesn’t have the cojones to stick up dealers and he mostly feeds off of Jersey junkies and college kids. Over there with the dreads, that’s White Boy Ronnie, he helps us out here. A lot, sometimes, and we try not to collar him if we don’t have to.”

  Sergeant Andrews, Jerry and Tony were all slated to be cycled out of Op 8. Now me and Gio were the vets and it was our turn to show the new guys the ropes. We were cruising down the avenue in the company car with Bob Angelo, our new sergeant, pointing out some of the local characters he’d soon be getting to know on his own. Sergeant Angelo was young for his rank and seemed like a nice guy. He was also inexperienced and our guided tour had his full attention. He admitted months later that he thought we were making all this stuff up until he learned otherwise. I drove, with Angelo in the shotgun seat and Gio in the back. Gio pointed over Angelo’s shoulder.

  “Over there that guy in the brown suede, his name is Mace,” Gio said. “He’s got a couple of drug spots out here. He’s a bad dude who’s done a few bodies. The big dark guy there, that’s Animal. He hustles a few drug spots, too, mostly in Riis Houses further down the D.” Sergeant Angelo’s head moved from side to side like he was at the U.S. Open.

  “The two girls crossing the street that just waved to us? They work in a whorehouse over on Delancey Street,” Gio continued. “They help us out, too, whenever we need something.” Angelo’s eyes met Gio’s in the rearview.

  “Help with what?”

  “They give us head whenever we need it.”

  The three of us were silent for a beat. I smiled. “It’s a joke, Sarge. Information, Sarge that’s all they give us.” He didn’t look so sure. We parked at Third and D and outlined how the spot we were across the street from worked and reeled off yet more names.

  A couple of days later Gio and I were walking the avenue when I saw a blue-gray car parked across the street that set off a bell.

  “Ain’t that Little Loco’s BMW?”

  “It sure is.” Gio pointed with two fingers to a trio of punks laughing together farther up the street. “And ain’t that Little Loco talking shit with Cisco and Q about middle of the block?” Agent Ruiz and Little Loco’s status had come up in conversation the day before over Gio’s meatloaf and my egg whites at Lillie’s. “I guess that answers that question, eh? How you want to play this?”

  Our new Op 8 topkick had just dropped us off and Gio and I decided that the best plan of attack was to get him to come back with the car and grab Loco when he got in his BMW.

  “Central, can you raise Op Eight sergeant and have him respond?”

  “Op Eight sergeant on the air, K.”

  “Sarge, respond to Fourth and D where you just left us, please.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Gio and I withdrew to a building entrance and waited. Loco and his buddies had drifted to the corner but were still talking a blue streak. When the sergeant arrived we got in the car, explained about Ruiz and Loco, and told him to cross the street when Loco made a move toward his own car. Loco said his good-byes and pulled his keys out. Sarge roared across the avenue and neatly cut off Loco’s car. The three of us piled out guns drawn just as Loco shut the driver side door behind him.

  “Police! Don’t move!” Loco scowled and put both his hands on his head. I opened his door, pulled him out and cuffed him.

  “What I do, Rambo?”

  “Dunno. I guess the sweet life just caught up to you.” An RMP pulled up and we shoved Loco in the backseat.”

  “Mind taking him back to the Command for us?” Gio asked the uniforms inside.

  “You guys coming back to the house, right?” Sarge had clearly enjoyed punching the gas, pulling his weapon, and getting his feet a little wet but the rest of our shift was likely to be a lot of phone calls and paperwork while gift-wrapping Loco for DEA.

  “Yeah. Someone has to take this nice shiny blue BMW back, though.” The boss smiled.

  “Don’t be too long,” he said and got back into 9864. Gio jumped in the passenger seat of the Beamer and I took the wheel. We cruised up and down the avenue for about fifteen minutes, slowing down and making sure all the bad guys knew it was us driving Loco’s prize eighty thousand-dollar ride before returning to the command and turning it and its owner over to DEA.

  Agent Ruiz was relieved to have Loco in custody and made sure to thank us and the sarge f
or making his week. The joy ride in Little Loco’s Beamer got me thinking. The Uniform Crime Control Act of 1984, part of the slew of new legislation and policy that inaugurated Reagan’s War on Drugs and made money available to start and maintain programs like Operation 8 gave Feds new powers over “asset forfeiture” and the seizing of property assumed and/or proven to have been acquired via illegal means or used in crimes. I didn’t know much about it at the time as no one had ever briefed me or anyone at Op 8 about using asset forfeiture since we weren’t federal cops. I called Ruiz and asked him right out what the deal was with seizures like the one we’d sent his way with Little Loco. He explained that based on the experience he’d had with us so far, if we came across cash and property we thought was drug related, he’d be only too happy to come downtown, confiscate it, issue a receipt for it to the perp we’d tossed to find it, and let whoever it was try and get it back through the courts. All I had to do was establish that the car or cash or whatever it was in question was owned by someone with no legitimate source of income.

  There are a lot of cases reported in the papers of asset forfeiture gone awry—guys losing their houses over ounces of pot, some rogue cops in the LAPD narcotics squad singling out innocent people for forfeiture because they wanted to grab the cars they drove, that kind of thing. But with Ruiz’s help I used property seizure as a way to tighten the vise on the Third and D crew and on Davey Blue Eyes. It was a brand-new way to break balls in the most intimate way possible. Most of these guys were in the game for the toys. They loved the cars, the cash, and the stuff it bought. And the money we confiscated or made from auction sales of seized property was split fifty-fifty between DEA and the Housing PD to use as buy money, and go toward operating expenses, equipment, and overtime. It was called “equitable sharing” and both Ruiz’s bosses and my bosses loved it.