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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  One afternoon I saw a wiseass Third Street dealer washing a beautiful copper-colored Firebird Trans Am in a cul-de-sac in the Wald Houses with a couple of neighborhood girls oohing and ahing over it.

  “Nice car,” I say. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Oh, you know,” he replies with a smirk. The guy had the fucking nerve to open up a new spot not far from where we spoke and I was dead set on making his life as difficult as I could.

  “No, no I don’t, actually. For real, where’d you get this nice expensive car here. And where did you get the money to buy this nice expensive car?”

  “What, I gotta tell you, Rambo? You know where I got it.” He was still acting the wiseass. Daylight and an audience did that to some people.

  “How you paid for it, I mean,” I say. “As in, where you got the money to buy it? It wasn’t in a card game or on the Price Is Right, was it?”

  “You know, man.”

  “Well, I know you’re a low-life fucking drug dealer who kisses Davey Colas’s shoes. That how you got it? By selling Davey Blue Eyes’s smack on my fucking avenue?”

  “You know the way it is, Rambo.” His too cool act was backfiring badly and he knew it.

  I walked to the corner and called Agent Ruiz. “I have a guy here and based on what he just told me, I suspect that the car he’s washing was acquired using drug profits,” I told him.

  “Hold him,” Ruiz said. “I’ll be right down.” I could hear him smile on the other end. A half hour later the Trans Am was impounded and wiseass was standing on the sidewalk with a carbon copy of a government receipt in his pocket where his car keys used to be.

  Eventually Davey’s bigger dealers began to wise up and started leasing cars so that we couldn’t seize them. But the cash kept getting split fifty-fifty. No job, no pay stub, no checking account and yet you have twelve thousand bucks in twenties in your car? Speak to Agent Ruiz. Any squawk and the perp got a discon and an arrest and warrant check for his troubles, too. There was always something worth checking out on guys that lived to have flashy stuff on them. Once I finished questioning Jimmy Rivera’s brother Dean about two bundles of smack I’d arrested him with on a tip from a snitch, I began asking him about the huge gold dookie rope chain with a St. Lazarus medallion that he wore around his neck.

  “Looks expensive,” I said. He was jammed up as it was—possession and sale for sure—and he immediately got defensive.

  “This isn’t what you think, Rambo, it’s a gift, yo,” he said.

  “If it’s a gift, who gave it to you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, no, wait look, it’s not even like drug-related, you know? Don’t fucking take it, Rambo, I’m already fucked. Come on, yo.”

  I didn’t take it, but Ruiz did. Dean got a receipt and instructions as to how to file a claim if he felt the property had been seized in error. Like everyone else I introduced to Agent Ruiz and his government printing office receipts, Dean never filed a claim. It took a lawyer, which took money, and these guys would just spend their cash replacing what Uncle Sam took away on my cue rather than go downtown and fight it out with a judge.

  Fourteen

  It was a Friday, Gio was off, and instead of working the four in the afternoon to twelve at night tour with one of the other Operation 8 guys, I had an early call at 111 Center Street. The trial itself, a low-level dealer named Martinez we’d watched exchange a full package of dope for a manila envelope of cash and toss in back of the Wald Houses, was just starting. In all likelihood we’d go a few rounds of jury selection until lunch, the judge would recess until Monday, and I’d have the rest of the day off to get a head start on the weekend. I spent most of the morning in a Special Narcotics assistant district attorney’s office preparing my testimony with the ADA when his phone rang.

  “Martinez took the plea deal,” he told me after hanging up. “He’s getting one and a half for the sale.”

  “Good.” I shook my head and stood up. The ADA extended a hand.

  “Thanks, for coming down. We’ll see each other real soon.”

  “My pleasure,” I told him and headed out his door. I’d been flirting like crazy with Tara, a civilian employee supervisor with an office on the next floor and I vaulted the steps two at a time to drop in and surprise her. Tara was tall, pretty, and straitlaced looking with her hair always pulled back and big black glasses. That was in contrast with a body that no matter how dowdily she dressed looked like a horny teenage kid’s notebook margin doodle. Tara had a lot of admirers from precincts all over the city. Unlike the rest of the visiting cops that talked her up then gave up when she wouldn’t agree to go out with them, Tara and I had become friends. She was funny and smart. She’d been promoted three times since I’d known her. Most of all, though, Tara was fucking hot.

  “Hey sexy,” she half whispered as I walked into her office. She was placing pictures in a cardboard file box. There were half-empty boxes everywhere.

  “Hey yourself, cutie. What’re you doing?”

  “Moving. They gave me a bigger office down the hall. I got promoted again.” She put another picture frame in the cardboard box, came over, and kissed me on the cheek. She was sucking on a mint.

  “I know, I hear you’re a big shot now.”

  “Oh, is that what you hear? Well, I hear some things about you, too, Mr. C, or should I call you Rambo?” I smiled not knowing how to take “Rambo” at first. No one off the D used it much.

  “What are you hearing?” I asked, leaning against her desk. Tara smiled wickedly. She had never been this forward before and I was really, really curious where it was going.

  “Well, Mike, you know it seems like every cop that has a collar comes through here. So they say things and I hear things. I keep hearing about you; that you’re kind of running wild and you like things dangerous. I hear you’re dirty, too.”

  I shook my head. She meant it as some kind of compliment or come-on but I was sick of hearing that bullshit, no matter how it was meant. “I ain’t dirty. I never took money from anyone, never. It’s like you say, I just like the action.”

  “I know, baby, I’m just telling you what’s going around.” Tara stood in front of me now. She really was something to behold. “As long as you’re careful, bad boy.” She caressed my face. I’d known her about two years, and until this moment I never would’ve thought she’d initiate something this direct or be as good at it as she was.

  “I will, yeah. I’m just doing a job,” I told her. I could’ve said anything. She closed her eyes and kissed me passionately. The mint went into my mouth, she grabbed my belt with one hand and slammed her office door shut with the other. “Don’t apologize,” she said, breaking the kiss. “I like bad boys.” We kissed again and my hands moved across her sides to her ass. I flashed on the door and saw there was no lock on it. “Let me put something against the door,” I murmured into her neck.

  “No way, baby,” she hissed, “you’re not afraid of getting caught, are you? I thought you liked the action.”

  I grabbed her waist and picked her up. She wrapped her legs around my hips and I stepped her back to the edge of her desk. Some necessary fumbling and we were quickly fucking. I leaned in, she grabbed me tighter and we sped up. This wasn’t going to be a marathon. She smelled like vanilla for some reason.

  The thing she said about other cops talking about me flashed in my mind. Why does everyone assume I’m on the fucking take? Sure I broke the rules, but dirty? That was the last thing I wanted to hear. I pounded into Tara harder and her moans changed note. If I’d wanted to be crook or a scumbag, I thought, I could’ve just stayed in my old neighborhood, hung out at the Nut every night and gone from shitty heists, to drug deals, to construction shakedowns with Vic Amuso’s crew. Then I’d be no better than the assholes on Third and D making Dumpsters of cash for Davey Blue Eyes. But try telling that to some Internal Affairs Bureau dick. I had to break regulations and procedure and quite possibly the law in order to get Davey’s guys behind bars and when IAB
came calling as they were lately, I then had to lie to them just to keep my job and keep putting bad guys away. Nice system.

  Suddenly I realized that even though I was living a moment out of a Penthouse Forum letter, I was still thinking about the job, Davey, and Avenue D. What the fuck? It was ridiculous. I couldn’t even get laid without my mind going back to the Lower East Side.

  Even though she didn’t mean it that way, what Tara said about other cops was true. The crooks weren’t the only ones that knew our names and talked shit about Rambo and Fastback. And, like everyone else in the Command, our new Op 8 boss Sergeant Angelo had heard rumors and sarcastic cracks suggesting that Gio and I were on the take.

  The fucked-up irony was that if you’re a cop that actually makes arrests instead of reading the paper and drinking coffee for twenty years, you’re guaranteed to have run-ins with the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau—the in-house arm of the police department devoted to cops investigating cops, and the Civilian Complaint Investigative Bureau—a similar body that responded exclusively to less harsh allegations brought by members of the public. Under Mayor Dinkins, civilian complaints became the jurisdiction of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB)—an autonomous civilian-run organization. During my time on the Lower East Side, civilian gripes were heard by a mix of police employees and appointed members of the public who all ultimately answered to the commissioner, not the mayor. If an alleged offense involved behavior and professional comportment, it was referred to Civilian Complaints. If it involved a problem in procedure or hinted at corruption in any way, it went to IAB.

  The funny thing about the whole good guy–bad guy War on Drugs mentality was that effectively policing drug sales always required lies and called for some kind of deception. Big money narcotics investigations and arrests could easily pit the cop that does them against his bosses just as much as against the dealers and users the cop was out to get. Jack warned me—the amount of money involved in heroin sales was so big, and the department’s confidence in the rank and file was so shaken by corruption scandals, that Internal Affairs began with the assumption that most narcs were on the take.

  It was a shitstorm blowing from two directions. If a cop is able to resist lining his pockets with drug money, did the right thing, and stuck his neck out to bring down dealers, that left him at the mercy of the pissed-off and vengeful bad guys he or she put in cuffs. The bad guys were totally hooked on the money they made and got high on the cars and clothes and toys and stuff that they could buy where and whenever they felt like it. Most of them just couldn’t believe we weren’t into all that bullshit, too. They’d watch us take their dope and then just assume that we were going to trade enough of it for cash and get ourselves boats and condos in Montauk. Plenty of cops before us had, and plenty have since. Other than the one or two bags here and there kicked back to snitches, I never held on to a grain of smack, and I sure as hell never resold it. But people believe what suits them, especially on the D and that didn’t stop the greedy big mouths hanging out in front of the projects from telling stories about my partner and me that remade us in their own scumbag image.

  The downside of our local boogeyman status was that everyone who knew our names used them. Drug dealers tend to be fuck-ups, so it also suited the many sloppy and unlucky mopes associated with the Third and D crew to be able to tell Davey Blue Eyes and anyone else they jammed up that Gio and me were the dogs that ate their homework. Where’s the dope? “Yo, Fastback and Rambo beat me for it!” Who were the cops who knocked you down? “Rambo and Fastback!” Did you get a look at the driver of the plainclothes car that clipped your Jeep? You guessed it. A teenage girl on the avenue even told her parents that I’d fathered her kid. I’d never even met her.

  Gio and my homegrown brand of “community policing” had a lot of lowlifes seeing red. When we fucked with a dealer it was easy enough for any of them who felt like it to turn around and lodge a made-up or petty official complaint with the department in the hopes of slowing us down or getting us off the street and out of their hair. One of my earliest IAB hassles was the result of taking a wiseass dealer kid’s sneakers and throwing them off a roof. I’d had to chase the son of a bitch up about ten flights of stairs. When I cornered him on the rooftop, even though he had nearly a package of dope on him, he gave me a lot of lip about his rights and my mother. I’d made him yank off a brand-new pair of Jordan IIs when I’d searched him and found the dope. “You want to live in a free country?” I told him, “Move across the avenue or stop dealing smack.” To illustrate my point I picked the shoes up and hurled them out into the air. They were brand new and the height of style and watching them sail to the ground and get snapped up by a homeless guy almost before they touched down actually made this kid cry. Good. He was a fucker. I collared and processed him, and he was out on bail in a day. He knew the system (he’d been through it at least a dozen times) and knew how to dial a phone and within about a week I received notice from the Command captain that IAB was investigating a complaint involving me taking money off a perp and stealing his shoes. Great.

  Working IAB is truly the ass end of police work. Cops generally don’t shoot other cops. It was a lot easier and less risky to lock up another policeman after a series of behind-the-back interviews with witnesses and some formal hearings with the accused than to run down and cuff a real bad guy. IAB’s investigators were either whistle blowers or misfits who, like my academy group sergeant, were ostracized by their brothers at arms, or they were conscripts—cops pressed into the IAB ranks for a mandatory two-year posting that was absolutely irrevocable. Either way the officers that worked IAB were a miserable bunch who didn’t and couldn’t even trust each other.

  One IAB deputy inspector in particular had it in for us. He used to indulge in all kinds of threats and table-slapping grandstanding even though IA interviews were held in a hearing room with only two or three people present. I ran into him a few years later after his IAB tour of duty had gotten him promoted and he acted like we were best friends. I told him to go fuck himself. In essence I said the same thing to the sneaker mope and every IAB and Civilian Complaint investigator I ever faced. Gio and I went up before IAB and Civilian Complaint boards so many times that we used to joke about having our own seats set aside in the hearing rooms where we were questioned with a union rep and a lawyer at our side. In nearly two dozen investigations of complaints or suspicions I was never disciplined once. Not once. Neither me or my partner ever lost even a day of vacation time. We knew how to keep our mouths shut, and we always stuck to our story.

  Most importantly at the end of the day, no matter what regulations we violated and policies we ignored, any and all money and drugs we grabbed was used to bring down someone else. We never took anything off anyone for ourselves. Never. There were always terrible things happening on the avenue and we always at least tried to do the right thing, even if we didn’t use methods we learned from the Patrol Guide. Sometimes the line between right and wrong was just too clear to debate.

  That line was probably never clearer than on a day when Gio and I were staring down some dealers from the Op 8 car and a teenage Puerto Rican girl approached us through a light rain. I’d spotted her as she came out the door of 50 Avenue D and headed across the street to where we were. She didn’t belong in the crowd we were watching. We’d never seen her before, which meant that she was probably pretty together—still in school, trying to live as right as she could. She’d strode out of the building entrance with an obvious sense of purpose. She walked up to where we were parked and the dealers and scumbags on the sidewalk stared after her instead of yelling dirty shit to her. Her name was Maria. She’d never seen us and we’d never seen her, but she told us she’d heard we were the guys to talk to about a problem she had. Actually it was her friend.

  “Your friend?” I asked her, assuming she was bullshitting.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she said, obviously leery of being fucked with by a non–Puerto Rican cop she’d had to really
screw up some nerve to approach. “Look, I need to talk to you guys, but in private. I don’t need the whole world to hear me.”

  “All right, no problem. Meet us on the second-floor stairway over in nine-oh-five East Sixth Street,” I told her. She looked at me suspiciously. For straight-up residents, the stairwells were to be avoided. But for us they were good meeting spots—an easily accessible satellite office closer than the building roofs, and more comfortable in shitty weather.

  When Maria met us in the stairway, she didn’t look either of us in the eye. “Ana, my friend, she lives in my building down the hall from me,” Maria said.

  “What apartment?” I asked.

  “Five YY. There’s a sticker of the baby Jesus on her door. Fifty Avenue D. She lives right down the hall from me.”

  “What apartment do you live in?”

  Maria hesitated.

  “Listen, you don’t have to be involved in this,” Gio said. “We won’t come to your home or have anyone ever call you or anything.” I also gave her my word that whatever she had to tell us wouldn’t come back to her. She relaxed a little and looked straight into my face for the first time. “Okay, now what are we talking about here?” Gio asked. A metal apartment door slamming a few floors above us echoed throughout the stairway.