“Maybe it’s the whole knife thing our stoolie did to his perp,” I offered. “I always had a bad feeling about that thing.” Gio said nothing. Bells on the restaurant’s door jingled.
Mark Testa walked in wiping the rain off his trench coat. He was a sharp dresser and looked like a beefier version of Pat Riley from the Lakers. His coat and his suit were expensive, and he had salt-and-pepper hair slicked flawlessly back even with the rain. With a slight smile, he shook our hands and sat down.
“What can I get you?” I asked.
“Just coffee,” he answered. I motioned for the waitress and asked her to bring him a cup.
“So what’s up?”
It took a minute, but finally he started talking in a voice so low that Gio and I had to lean in to hear him. His face hardly moved as he spoke.
“Okay, look guys, here it is. There was this bank robbery up in the Nineteenth, so there’s a bunch of Feds and other units involved, but anyway, the perp there might be the same perp from a homicide I have in Brooklyn.” I nodded. He kept talking. “See, when we were debriefing this informant about these two cases, the informant goes off on some rambling tangent and blurts out how he heard that there are two cops, Fastback and Rambo, on the Lower East Side and they’re shaking down drug dealers, and how the dealers all got together and put out a fifty-thousand-dollar hit on the two cops.”
Gio and I sat there stunned. “That’s fucking bullshit,” I finally said.
Testa nodded, “Listen guys, I only know you guys for being stand-up and helping me out, so I’m just letting you know what happened and what I heard.” He sipped his coffee. “Like I said, there’s all these other units and Feds sitting in on the interview when this jerk-off stoolie goes off about you two guys. Finally this boss from uptown and this Fed get up and call Internal Affairs and the special prosecutor’s office so they can hear this douche bag CI’s story.”
“What the fuck?” Gio finally spits out. “Now what?”
“Well,” Testa continued, “IA comes down and leaves with our informant. Now I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I want you two guys to be careful and watch yourselves. You know I’ve been around a long freakin’ time, and I’ve seen good cops get set up by these IAB dickheads. And we all know how easy an informant can be manipulated to say and swear to almost anything. Especially if the Feds are involved.” I shook my head. “If it helps, the CI’s name is Rudy Morales.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but I’ll have to check my records,” I said.
Detective Testa sipped his coffee and stood up. “I felt I owed it to tell you guys what happened. I hope you both just watch your asses out there.” He put his coat on and pushed his hair back with both hands. “Shit like this only happens to guys that work and you guys are out there working. I respect that and if I hear anything else, I’ll get in touch.”
“We do too fucking much,” Gio said.
I nodded to Testa then stuck out my hand. “Mark, thanks for coming all the way down here. No one will ever know we spoke about this.”
“No problem. Fuck them motherfucker Internal Affairs. Like I said, I’ve had them in my shit, too, and it was total bullshit. Just remember, you may love this job, but this job don’t love you.”
Gio and I sat quietly as I drove through the Lower East Side. I think we were both running an inventory of all the fucked-up things we’d done and every time we tossed the book.
“For what?” Gio spat out suddenly. “What the fuck did we get ourselves into here? For a good collar, to put some jerk-off behind bars, for a medal or a commendation, for what? I know it wasn’t the money, I never took a dime and neither did you, so why the fuck did we ever bother?”
“Because we’re not jerk-offs, and we give a fuck.” It was a fact. It wasn’t much comfort but it was easy to say. “That’s why we were out here hustling collars, kicking ass, and takin’ names. That’s why, ’cause we’re not jerk-off do-nothings.”
Gio nodded. “Yeah, well now what?”
“Now, we’ll be cool. Take it easy a little, do things by the book, cross our Ts and dot our Is, like the boss always says. That’s all. We’ll be all right. And as far as the hit, fuck them, too.”
Neither of us wanted a permanent transfer out of Op 8 and PSA 4 so we let IAB come to us when and if they thought they had a case and didn’t start making inquiries up the chain of command. Job one was to check with our informants and see if the price on our heads was for real. We saw Lydia, a girl from Baruch Houses who snorted dope and dated dealers. She’d fucked a lot of them and there were always about four or five bad guys using her apartment to hang out in. To her talking about the dope scene was just gossip. She was the one who had given me one of my only actual sightings of Davey Blue Eyes. Lydia grew up in the same building as Davey and pointed out a nondescript guy across the street one day when I was fishing for tips from her. She thought he didn’t see her and it was her way of acting tough. “Davey? You mean him,” she’d said. I looked, and the guy she pointed out turned his head to her and jerked his chin. She looked like she was going to shit. I looked back and he was already gone.
Gio and I found her quick. “Lydia,” I asked her, “have you ever heard of these guys putting a hit on us?”
“Oh yeah,” she said completely casually. “A couple of weeks ago I was in Macatumba’s car when they were talking about it. They said it was a big money thing. They were bitching that they were having a hard time getting anyone to do it. Everyone was scared because you’re cops and whoever does it might get caught, and you guys might kill them first and shit.”
Jesus fucking Christ. If she knew about it, every bad guy in the neighborhood must know about it. I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t mentioned it when I was bullshitting with her the week before.
“Who? Who was talking about it? Who was in the car?” Gio asked.
“Oh shit, everyone’s putting up some cash, Fastback,” she said. She was clearly stoned and it wasn’t making anything easier.
“Lydia,” I asked again, “who was in the car?”
“You know,” she said dreamily, “like Macatumba, Davey, Jimmy Rivera…”
“What did Davey say?” I asked.
“It wasn’t him saying shit so much,” Lydia replied, “more like the others were bitching about you guys and all the busts and taking their cash and their shit. Finally Davey goes like he’ll put up half the dead presidents for the hit, if they put together the other half. He was real all business, like always, but yo, Rambo, you’re really pissing off his boys. I’m just sayin’…”
The Third and D crew had had their fill of us, went to Davey Blue Eyes with their beef, and not only did Davey give them the go-ahead to kill us, he offered to put up half the money to hire someone from out of town to do it. Twenty-five thousand dollars against fifty thousand to see us dead and buried with the mayor in attendance. I knew what we were doing was working, but apparently it was really working. The biggest problem for the Third and D crew was that because of our blitz of arrests, seizures, and everything else we could think of and get away with, they were having to curtail sales on the D, particularly during our shifts. Davey could still make quantity sales elsewhere but the Third Street crew were his best sellers and, since he was in essence fronting them dope they paid him for out of their street sales, his best customers. The fact that they would risk murdering two New York City cops to get back their market share was a standing ovation. That didn’t make either of us any more comfortable about being out on the street that night.
We busted a junkie kid that was getting sick on Second Street, spent the rest of the shift processing the arrest, Gio took the subway home for the first time in a year, and I left my car at the Command and took a cab to a hotel room I booked in Midtown under an assumed name.
The next day I made two trips. The first was to a police store down by the old headquarters building on Lafayette. I bought a small, slim .380 automatic and switched my two-inch .38 to the ankle holster I sometimes used f
or discretion. Forewarned is forearmed.
The second was to headquarters in Harlem. Gio and I were summoned to Housing PD headquarters by Chief Cummings. Both the Feds and IAB had been compelled by regulations to let our headquarters know about the alleged contract, and word reached the chief the same day it reached us. We didn’t talk about any other IAB investigation. The chief loved us for our stats and was a go-getter himself with a wall of commendations from his uniform and plainclothes days to prove it. Without hesitation he handed us the keys to a new Plymouth.
“I’m gonna give you one of my vehicles to use as your own and transfer you guys to Harlem, PSA Five for a few weeks until we get this hit business settled,” he said. “I want you guys out of harm’s way. I don’t want you guys doing anything in PSA Five. Not anything, got me? And I want you working the tours you normally work, but I want you answering to me only. I’ll arrange it.”
As Gio and I started to leave, the chief sat down behind his desk. “I don’t want you guys getting involved with anything. Lay low, you got it?”
Gio and I nodded. “We got it, Chief.”
We were in Harlem for a few weeks, but got so bored doing nothing that we started tossing perps just like back on the avenue. One night we tossed two scumbags and came up with a kilo of coke. We’d promised the chief we’d lay low, so we gave the collar to the plainclothes guys in the uptown Command. But Davey’s guys could find us anywhere. We even ran into one of his top dealers on 102nd and First Avenue a few days after checking in at the PSA 5 Command. Anyone can kill a cop, but very few people can get away with it. The shield and the repercussions of a contract kill on someone wearing one may have been beyond anyone on Davey’s payroll. Issuing a contract on us was just making him more visible and more vulnerable. And IAB? Bring them on. Compared to getting shot stepping off a curb by some coked-out hired gun from Camden, IAB would be child’s play.
Finally, after a couple months uptown, we returned to Op 8 and played things as calmly and coolly as we could. If we made too much noise now, we’d be transferred out to another Command and never get a chance to show Davey and the Third and D crew how much they meant to us. We were careful and we were focused—not praying for a miracle, just hoping that a solid opportunity to drop Davey and his guys would come our way. After a few weeks, it did.
Sixteen
“So, what’s up? What did he want?” I’d just hung up a payphone on the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue C. A uniform at the Command had handed me a “while you were out” phone call memo with “Tom Benton—DEA” and a phone number written on it earlier in the week. We’d been playing phone tag until a few moments ago.
“He wants to meet with us,” I told Gio as I got in the car.
“Now?” Even after all the joint operations we’d done with DEA, Gio still didn’t think they were on our side somehow.
“I told him now was good, yeah,” I said. Gio was driving and it was still early in our shift. With all the anxiety and hassle that accompanied the hit and the IAB scare, it seemed like a good idea to take a break and have lunch on the Feds. Gio couldn’t argue with that. I thumbed the radio mike.
“Central, be advised nine-eight six-four is out to five five five West Fifty-seventh Street, DEA headquarters.”
I didn’t think we’d be out of the neighborhood for more than a couple hours. Instead we spent the rest of the day in conference with Benton, his supervisor Oscar Roland, and a handful of other agents it turned out we had something in common with. We were all looking to take down the Third and D crew and strangle the Avenue D heroin trade.
Prior to Prohibition enforcing federal drug laws was primarily up to the IRS. Narcotics traffic was still fairly small in those days and there were still only a handful of federal criminal statutes of any kind (most involving interstate theft) on the books. Most European countries had national police forces to complement their municipal and regional cops. But nineteenth century American lawmakers were leery of giving the federal government criminal arrest and prosecution powers beyond those granted to the Treasury. The new century brought new anxieties about crime and federal criminal offenses grew in number. A national policing bureaucracy charged with enforcing those laws grew at about the same rate. The fledgling FBI, created under Teddy Roosevelt, got a major shot in the arm doing domestic spying and counterespionage in the run up to World War I and Prohibition was, of course, a federal law-enforcement gold rush.
The Volstead Act called for the creation of a Bureau of Prohibition within the Treasury. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (named for the New York State congressman who sponsored it in 1914) and the surge in illegal heroin and cocaine use and sales that spawned it eventually gave birth to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Lucky Luciano’s nemesis, Harry Anslinger. The Bureau of Prohibition was absorbed back into the Treasury after repeal, but the FBN kept going. Like his counterpart, J. Edgar Hoover who’d risen through the ranks to head the FBI, Anslinger ran FBN as a personal fiefdom. Both men ardently romanced the press and didn’t sweat their own accountability. Neither was above using their agencies to explore the borderlands at the intersection of law enforcement, personal vendetta, and political ambition.
FBN was so much Anslinger’s baby that it only survived a few more years after he retired in 1962. The paranoia cocktail created by the Cold War and the Kennedy assassination was a potent one. The fact that here at home drug sales and abuse were on the rise and that much of the drugs being sold and taken originated outside the country added to a national siege mentality. In the mid-sixties FBN merged with a short-lived FDA spinoff called the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control into a single agency within the Justice Department called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Federal drug law enforcement had become such a hot topic that Elvis Presley made an after-hours visit to the White House (by most accounts zonked out of his mind) to trade Nixon a commemorative Colt pistol for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge and the title of “Special Agent at Large.” Life magazine began alternating cover shots of syringes with pictures of Raquel Welch. The Rolling Stones charted a top-ten hit with a song about suburban housewives overdosing on pills. Sergeant Friday talked L.A. teens on LSD off ledges and debated with dealers every week on Dragnet. Every lawmaker began to preach to their state electorate about driving the scourge of illegal narcotics from the land of the free and nearly every government agency and department was getting into the act.
New York’s drug problem had long since become America’s drug problem, and America’s drug problem was being fed from all over the globe. Organized criminal activity overseas was generating billions in untaxable blood money at home. First Lyndon Johnson and then Nixon sought to consolidate federal law enforcement manpower to create a legal reach that stretched from Washington across the country and beyond U.S. borders to address the globalization of drug cultivation, manufacture, and export. The Feds’ drug bust administrative apparatus began to bulge at the bureaucratic seams. Even before the escalation of combat in Vietnam and Watergate, the president and Congress found little to agree on. Nixon’s call for the creation of a single, sovereign antidrug law enforcement agency with field offices all over the national and international map was something nearly everyone could get behind. In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) became the government agency responsible for an “all-out global war on the drug menace” the president declared when he signed the agency into existence nearly unopposed on Capitol Hill.
DEA was still a pretty young agency and relatively free of the lifers, dinosaurs, and old-school emphasis on seniority and status quo that made the NYPD an easy place to step on toes. DEA agents had their own paperwork burden, but they maintained a pretty tight shop manned by mostly young, eager agents who drove nice cars and holstered fancy guns. Benton wasn’t much older than we were. Even though he only had a few years of experience on the job, he was sharp and Gio and I both liked him right away.
“You know these guys?” Benton asked as he dropped a
pair of mug shot blowups on the table in front of us.
“Sure,” I said. “I saw this mope in the cuchifritos place on D last night. Joco. He’s a droopy pants scumbag trying to deal his way upstairs in Davey Blue Eyes’s bunch. All he ever talks about is money.”
“I hate that motherfucker,” Gio said, pointing at the photos. “Both of them. Both of these guys are fucking scumbags.”
Benton explained that his task force had just walked away from an eight-week investigation of Joco and the other creep, a dealer named Roberto Campos. These guys were dirty and their dirt trail led back to Davey. We knew it and DEA knew it. Alone, these two were responsible for close to a million dollars’ worth of dope sales in the last eight months and had been suspected of arranging, witnessing, and possibly actually doing a couple of nasty homicides when they got burned on material they fronted to some guys from uptown.
The U.S. attorney had intended to use one of the two against the other and start climbing up the scumbag ladder in Davey Blue Eyes’s organization. But DEA had pulled the trigger on a buy-and-bust collar a little too soon and the gap between what was known and what could be proved in court got too wide to close. With the help of their lawyer, a truly revolting human being named Lynne Stewart, the two perps stuck together, beat the rap, and walked.
Benton and his guys were out months of work, the taxpayers were out thousands in overtime and overhead costs, and the two guys whose faces we were looking at were back out on the sidewalk in Alphabet City drinking beers and watching their spots as we spoke.
“If at first you don’t succeed…,” Benton sighed with a shrug. “You guys know all the names and faces down there. Feel like helping us win the next round?”
We were glad to help then and even more eager now. We really did hate the two guys the DEA had just lost and hated the idea that they’d squirmed out of jail time. Making life hard for Davey and the Third and D dealers who’d put a price on our heads was exactly what we wanted from life at that point and we told Benton as much.
Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side Page 27