Into the sixties J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI went ahead and just wiretapped whoever the director wanted, whether he intended to use what they heard in a trial or not. A 1967 Supreme Court decision that disallowed wiretap evidence in a California fraud case led to the inclusion of the Wiretap Act as Title III in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. Title III defined what were acceptable reasons for police eavesdropping. Under the new law a cop assembled enough evidence of wrongdoing via witness or in formant affidavit, personal observations, photographs, etcetera, and went before a judge to plead a Title III application.
Over the course of three more buys totaling nearly $100,000, we used CS-1 to collect phone numbers, addresses, mentions of other buys and deals, and acquire, test, weigh, and voucher enough smack that a judge would sign the order for a wiretap on Animal’s mobile phone. Within a couple of months Benton had enough to go before the judge and one Tuesday morning, he joined the U.S. attorney in federal court to do just that. By lunch we were celebrating a brand-new Title III warrant for Animal’s cell at a Thai restaurant in Chinatown.
Seventeen
The wire that went up on Animal’s phone was a gold mine. Some days I wondered if his finger ever got numb from dialing. Every deal he did, every bust, every hassle, every good, bad, or indifferent event in the day in the life of this particular bad guy warranted a phone call to someone. And as Animal made calls, we made recordings, took notes, collected numbers, and compiled evidence. When he made a quantity sale, we were there at the designated location taking pictures. When he or any of his boys came to Avenue D to check their spots, Gio and I made sure to pull them over and toss them.
The fact that these guys were occupationally paranoid and prerattled was an enormous asset once the wires went up. Everything we did, the apartment raids, traffic stops, small-time busts in plain sight were coordinated and intended to get Animal dialing and talking. He rarely disappointed. And he was often mad, scared, or wasted enough to forget to filter what he said.
A second wire to Guerro’s cell phone was just as fertile. Conversations veered from the changing economics of high-volume dope sales, to cars, girls, and where to get machine guns and grenade launchers. These guys and girls we heard on the two phones all had double lives—running the spots we knew on the avenue and selling, brokering, and middle-manning “weight” to anyone with the equivalent weight in cash off the avenue. The names of those talking—Cheo, Eggie, Ish, Tracy, Louie, Chowsky, Hoi, Tomato, Boobie, and two dozen others each had faces. When they met up for a buy or to discuss a beef we were there taking their pictures. Gio and I knew or recognized most of them from the avenue. As the wiretap continued, they were matched to addresses—apartments in the projects, and elsewhere in Manhattan, private houses in Bayside, Corona, and Brooklyn. DEA’s surveillance web grew to include the regular dealing spots on Avenue D, a car service front supposedly owned by Davey’s cousins the Alvarez brothers on Attorney Street, and a bodega on Second Avenue with half-empty shelves up front and a back room that hosted dozens of dope and money exchanges.
Just two wires were shedding such a bright light on what was otherwise a shadow world of drugs, cash, and guns that it became an organizational marathon keeping it straight. Between running their dope spots and making additional quantity sales like the ones we initiated through CS-1, Animal’s and Guerro’s phones were going nonstop. More DEA agents were brought in to cover what was closing in on forty different bad-guy associates in the circle. The wire room at DEA headquarters was like Grand Central station some days. On one side of the room a bulletin board was completely covered in a collage of mug shots and covertly taken pictures of our ever-growing cast of characters, their hangouts, homes, families, and cars. What came in on the wiretaps was logged on index cards and filed. To keep up with the constant phone traffic on both Animal’s and Guerro’s phones, Benton asked us to reach out to our chief and get four more cops from PSA 4 to share some of the listening and logging work. Gio and I had worked with the guys we asked for in both uniform and plainclothes. They were decent cops. Good with paperwork and reliable. They were also nervous as hell to be part of a federal cloak-and-dagger operation. Procedure required that the DEA group supervisor swear them in (they also had to see the U.S. attorney). When the supervisor fed them the “repeat after me’s” I added a few clauses about jumping in place and hopping around on one foot. They went with it until the group supervisor, me, and the other agents present started cracking up. Once all four cops were sworn in, they joined Gio and me with full federal marshal status.
If you’ve seen the movie Casino, then you know how listening in on a wiretap is supposed to work. Having obtained a Title III warrant, a duly sworn law enforcement officer is bound by law to only listen to and record incriminating wiretap evidence. The officer on duty switches on the receiver and recorder from inside the facility set up for listening for about thirty seconds at a time. If in the thirty seconds nothing criminal is discussed, then the officer is obliged to switch off and wait for another interval before switching on, listening in, and trying again.
Our targets were all business. No matter how paranoid they acted, the best most of Animal and Guerro’s crew could do was refer to a “K” or a “Z” of “videos” or “cassettes,” “big ones,” small ones,” and order a “limo” for nineteen Gs. Animal’s relationship with his girlfriend, Tracy, however, mixed business with pleasure so bizarrely, it was sometimes difficult to decide which was which. One day Tracy explained to Animal that an Italian guy at her job told her he could hook her up with dope.
“Bitch, you ever talk about my business again with that guinea motherfucker, I’ll kill you! I’ll beat that shit out of you and fuck you in the ass and put a fucking cap in your head, you hear me?”
“I’ll talk to whoever I want to! I don’t need your fucking say-so to do anything! I ain’t afraid of you, your gun, your wrinkly-ass dick, or nothing! Fuck you!”
“Fuck you! I’m coming there and I’m bending you over and fucking you in two! You do and say what I tell you or they’ll find you floating in Oyster Bay with a bullet in your brain and cum leaking out your ass! We don’t need shit from no guinea motherfuckers! Egg roll shit is the best shit there is! Don’t fucking tell me my business!”
“You ain’t man enough, pendejo! You try that shit with me I cut your fucking balls off and feed them to the dog!”
I could never figure out where Animal and Tracy drew the line. Did all the drug and harsh sex talk turn them on? They say couples need to communicate and compromise, but these two were in a world of their own. Despite the millions rolling in, a regular rotation of cars, clothes, electronic toys, and everything else, the two of them seemed to be having the same foulmouthed confrontational meltdown every time they spoke to one another. After Animal bought a new house for three hundred thousand cash Tracy complained that the carport was too small. Animal threatened to gag her with his cock if she didn’t shut up.
“I went into your house and found dope all over your bed,” she screamed at him one night.
“How the fuck did you get into my house, bitch?”
“Through the door which was unlocked, bitch!” she screamed back. “You better not be fucking using! Are you fucking using?”
“Yeah, I’m using,” Animal said. “Leave me the fuck alone!” She hung up on him. Two minutes later she called him again.
“I found the dog licking dope on the bed!”
“If you don’t stop calling me, I’m going to kill you and your family.” He was clearly on the street and alternating threatening Tracy and negotiating with someone he was with. “I’m going to cop some dope now. If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to send someone after you!”
Animal didn’t make good on his threat. But three months after CS-1 first contacted and bought from Jimmy Rivera, Jimmy’s body turned up on the corner of Houston Street and the FDR Drive, the same place Frankie Nieves and I tackled Little Punk a few years earlier. Jimmy had been shot four t
imes by a nine-millimeter handgun. Though we didn’t get anyone taking credit on tape, both Animal and Guerro made it clear that Jimmy would still be alive if he had paid his dope bills on time. My snitches on the street said Animal did it himself.
Even though nearly everyone involved knew me on sight, and ID’ing me anywhere outside of the Lower East Side might start them finally asking themselves the right questions, I got a kick out of tailing Animal, Guerro, and the others on their rounds outside the neighborhood. I’d only ever seen these guys when they visited the avenue and I was enjoying observing and logging their other routines. Car surveillance and tailing takes practice. In the movies you see cops cutting off civilians while doing tails all the time. The reality is that another driver honking, swearing, and getting into a beef with you wasn’t worth it. If the noise didn’t alert your target to the fact that you were on him, you were likely to lose him while dealing with the irate civilian. There were a lot of little tricks—I always had a bunch of different rearview mirror and dashboard ornaments and decorations in my glove compartment so that I could change them up. Most people will remember those things more than the make or model of most cars. It helped that our quarries drove flashy sports cars, high-priced foreign jobs, and tricked-out Jeeps. It was tricky staying with a guy driving a Porsche with an engine the size of a washing machine in it, but thanks to Robert Moses’s narrow, pothole-cursed BQE and the constant snarl of New York City traffic, there was only so much the guys with the really hot cars could wind up.
As soon as anyone showed up in Alphabet City I pulled them over and tossed them and their ride. I especially liked hassling Animal. He’d had the mechanics at Tony’s install a big spoiler on the Mazda he was driving lately and it made him easy to tail. I’d go from hearing or reading him say something incriminating on the wiretap to listening to him brag that I couldn’t touch him in person.
“You got nothing on me, Rambo,” he’d say each time. “I’m clean and I’m staying that way. You got nothing.” If he knew that I was listening to him bitch about getting undercut by an uptown crew to Guerro an hour before he would’ve shit.
Working the case was a marathon. Weeks stretched into months and with the listening, observing, harassing, listening routine firmly in place I took a week’s worth of vacation days. While I was in Brazil training in jiu jitsu with the Gracie family, Guerro’s phone rang. It was Joco.
“You got my money?” Guerro asked him.
“Yo, I was on the corner on my way to see you and fucking Rambo grabbed me! Motherfucker ripped me off, can you believe that shit? Nineteen large, yo!” Three thousand miles away and I’m still the boogeyman for these guys.
Working with DEA was a godsend. I could strategically hassle the guys we heard on the wire down on the D and, as long as I stayed out of sight, do surveillance in Brooklyn and Queens where the growing investigation had spread to. It minimized my exposure in the Lower East Side in the wake of the hit scare while still allowing me to have a useful presence in the neighborhood. Once, after rattling one of Animal’s guys by pulling him over exactly where he’d said he’d be on the phone the previous day, I grabbed a perp a Ninth Precinct detective had asked me about a few months before the wire investigation began. When I arrived at the Ninth on Fifth Street, it was a total circus. The detective squad room was packed with everyone from rookies to two-star chiefs from all over the department trying to get a look at a guy the newspapers cast as a real-life Freddy Krueger—Daniel Rakowitz.
Everybody in the neighborhood knew days before it simultaneously made the front page of the Daily News, Post, Times, and Newsday. Musicians sitting around the guitar store on St. Mark’s Place, panhandler kids standing out front of Ray’s on Avenue A, dabbler junkies perched on barstools at the window of Vazac’s on B waiting for their man to come from Avenue D all heard versions of the same story. “The chicken guy killed his girlfriend!” Every day the story got retold, the scenario got worse. “The rooster guy killed her and he cut her up.” Then, “Crazy motherfucker chicken dude killed her, cut her up, and cooked her.” By the time it got to “Motherfucking psycho rooster man killed her, cut her up, cooked her, and fucking fed her to the homeless in the park,” the chicken guy, Daniel Rakowitz, was in custody.
Investigating homicide detectives learned more of what a lot of the neighborhood already knew. Rakowitz was a screw-loose kid in his late twenties who’d been in and out of psych wards in and around his hometown of Rockport, Texas, a short drive up Highway 35 from Corpus Christi. Heeding a call only he understood, he came to the Lower East Side mid-decade and dealt drugs around Tompkins Square Park. No band, no screenplay, no figure study, no novel like the hundreds of would-be Burroughses and Bukowskis who trickled into the neighborhood from small towns and suburbs. Rakowitz was just a Gulf Coast burnout who walked around with a tame fighting rooster under his arm telling himself and anyone that would listen that he was the numerically proven messiah and that he had pot, hash, and speed for sale.
Rakowitz was a pretty lousy drug dealer—he talked too much and was way too willing to get in anyone’s face about anything, especially religion, as long as there were eyes and ears on him. He was just one of those people that was always pushing things too far and confused challenging with irritating. You can’t turn every conversation with your customers and your suppliers toward God, the devil, numerology, and smoking your way to heaven without fucking up supply and demand. Unless they’re really hard up, most people who saw the rooster guy coming down the street turned the corner early.
There will always be a certain echelon of street creep using drugs, gullibility, a big-eyed stare, a beard, and a bullshit rap about Satan to make a social foothold in an outsider community. Rakowitz’s central casting blue-eyed Jesus look, the fact that he usually had good pot on him to smoke, no matter how bad the stuff was that he sold, and that he could cook earned him a pass from a handful of the transplants he harangued while selling dime bags and black beauties. The eighties Lower East Side was full of out-of-town girls and boys intoxicated by an image of a no-rules downtown Manhattan they cobbled together from movies, books, and records. In the pre-Internet days it wasn’t easy to find people that felt the way you did or liked the stuff you did, especially if it involved things nice people didn’t talk about. A generation of kids used the excuse of school or career to roll in the Lower East Side stink to get the smell of narrow-minded, intolerant, abusive, or privileged upbringings off their hide. Nobody bought Rakowitz as a guru, but he earned some admirers among the crusties, weekend peace punks, and runaways who hung out, got high, and lined up for free meals from the Hare Krishnas in the park.
Monica Beerle was none of the above. She was a dance student from the foothills of the Appenzell Alps in Switzerland who paid her school bills at Martha Graham by shaking her ass at Billy’s Topless on Twenty-fourth Street and Sixth. In the eighties titty bars like Billy’s were grittier and generally a lot friendlier than the upscale gentlemen’s clubs that would replace them over the next few years. Boogying on stage at Billy’s for tips from horny cabbies with one eye on her tits and one eye on the racing form fit a restless provincial European kid’s idea of vintage tolerably sleazy NYC.
Either Monica was drawn to Rakowitz’s blue eyes and lanky frame same as some of the patchouli-and-Mohawk teeny boppers who took the LIRR into Manhattan from Long Island when school was out, or she was attracted to the lease on the two-bedroom apartment Rakowitz rented on East Ninth Street. In any case, she began crashing at his place and covering his rent. The arrangement soured quickly when he turned out to be free with his fists and more interested in smoking dope, watching TV, and hanging out in the park than paying bills or showing up regularly at any of his part-time gigs prepping and cooking in catering hall kitchens around the city. Eight weeks after she moved in, Monica told Rakowitz to move out. Rakowitz refused. She asked him again louder and he refused louder. Monica yelled at him to get out in more harshly worded and strongly accented terms. Rakowitz threatened to b
eat her up and she threatened to call the cops. He shut her up with a hard punch to the throat then numbly watched her suffocate on her own crushed esophagus.
Rakowitz panicked. Using a kitchen knife, elbow grease, and the skills he picked up short-order-cooking his way from Texas to the Lower East Side, he broke up Monica’s limbs at the joints, cut her up, and skinned her. Most of her small frame went out to the sidewalk on garbage day in 3 mil plastic trash bags. The most incriminating parts of her went into a series of pots on the kitchen stove. But disposing of a human body was very different and far more difficult than prepping birds for banquet-size servings of chicken cacciatore. Nothing Rakowitz ever prepared caused him as much trouble as Monica. It turned out that cooking an ex-girlfriend down to unrecognizable bleached bone wasn’t as easy as it seems when pictured in your batshit crazy mind’s eye. The job took weeks and was only partly successful. Out of desperation, Rakowitz stashed the knife, parts of Monica’s teeth he had individually removed, wrapped in tissue, and placed in the fingers of a gardening glove, several large bones, and some deodorizing kitty litter together in a joint compound bucket. He eventually checked the bucket into baggage pickup at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Whatever plan Rakowitz had was rendered meaningless by the parade of witnesses in and out of his apartment during the boiling marathon, and by the fact that he couldn’t help bragging in the park about reducing his ex-girlfriend to brodo di carne. By the time the case broke and reporters came around, the park kids were only too happy to repeat every crazy rumor and claim Rakowitz made while passing a joint—he ate Monica, he fed her to the homeless, he used her as ingredients at his job. At the trial, the Manhattan DA even got some guy who lived in the park to say he saw a finger floating in a bowl of soup Rakowitz ladled out on a breadline.
Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side Page 29