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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  When detectives from the Ninth arrested Rakowitz he led them to the bucket with Monica’s remains. Dazzled by the sudden spotlight he confessed to everything that crossed his pretzeled mind. By the time he went on trial, Rakowitz had decided that wasn’t such a great idea and pleaded innocent. No attorney materialized to represent him and Rakowitz defended himself using such unusual legal tactics as threatening to squirt a witness with a water gun loaded with “stagnant urine” (the fresh kind was too good for them, apparently) and offering to smoke a joint with the jury, who eventually found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Rakowitz was bundled off for a to-be-determined number of decades at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island, and the presiding judge declared the trial, “a lulu.” I’m sure Monica Beerle’s friends and family used a different adjective to describe their experience.

  The detective whose perp I delivered showed me a Polaroid that Rakowitz had made out to the Ninth. It read: “I’d like to have you all for dinner.” Like everybody else, I laughed.

  Something I read in the papers the next day stuck in my head and eventually something bad started to stick in my throat. After looking at the calendar, I realized Rakowitz was one of the guys I saw dishing out entrées at the El Caribe catering hall in Mill Basin during a close friend’s wedding reception just a few days before the arrest. I didn’t have anything but coffee for the rest of the day and didn’t order Italian food anywhere for nearly a year.

  “Hey Mike, talk to you a minute?” Hamilton, one of the cops brought up from the PSA 4 Command had just finished a shift listening to the wire. I couldn’t read what was bugging him.

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Hey, you still seeing Mirabel?”

  Mirabel was a girl I’d dated for nearly a year. We were together long enough that she’d met some of the guys at the Command. She was a looker and a flirt and men tended to remember her. When I met her she was a decorator doing store windows. I saw her driving down Avenue B in a custom Corvette convertible a few times and finally pulled her over and chatted her up. Mirabel lived on Long Island and had friends in the projects. I got her phone number and one thing led to another. We went out for a while but it never got too serious.

  It hadn’t helped that when we met, I was still fresh from the Davey Blue Eyes hit scare and didn’t know who to trust. For the first couple months I was with her, I couldn’t fool around with her unless I was facing the door and had my .38 out of its ankle holster and under a chair by the entrance of any room we were in. The .380 I bought when I heard about the hit was under a pillow, and a four-inch Smith & Wesson on the windowsill stayed hidden under the shades. I liked her a lot, but it took months for me to be sure she wouldn’t set me up for the guys from Alphabet City. She never found any of the guns.

  In the end she was too much of a party girl for me. Mirabel loved that I could get us into the World on First Street and the other clubs that used to pop up, get bled dry by the mob, and then close a year or two later in those days. I avoided abusing “Mastershield,” as Jack Genova called it in my rookie days, but waving my badge every now and then to get seats in the VIP section close to the dance floor didn’t bother my conscience much.

  Mirabel’s friends were all night owls—DJs, bartenders, and bouncers—and she mixed well in the club world. It was never really my scene, but I was a bachelor in those days so I made do. The music was usually too loud for us to talk. Most of the people she knew could barely handle that I didn’t drink or get high, and when they found out I was a cop, they really freaked out. Sometimes, particularly at the World, we would run into dealers from the Avenue D crews. Those guys loved checking out and hanging out with the rich and famous who would take limos to a nightclub just a few blocks from the projects. Crooks and celebrities have been drawn to one another for years and in those pre-camera-phone days, it wasn’t unusual to see rock stars and movie actors getting high with made guys, dealers, and lowlifes. Johnny Depp drank beer in Avenue A bars at a table full of Third Street Hells Angels for a while. I remember one Sixth and D dealer bragging to me that him and his boys had posed for a picture with Madonna one night in her limo outside the World. When I called bullshit he pulled out a Polaroid of him, her, and two other guys all holding up champagne glasses to the camera.

  I hadn’t seen Mirabel for months and I told Hamilton so. “Listen to this,” he said and handed me a pair of headphones. Hamilton played back a call that came in on Animal’s phone during his watch. I recognized both voices instantly. One was Tracy. She used Animal’s cell to make calls every chance she got. The other was Mirabel.

  “See I told you it wasn’t going to do anything,” Tracy said laughing like it was girl talk. “You just leave it in your trunk for a couple days, no big deal.”

  “You’re coming to get it, right? I can’t drive around with that thing in my car anymore. I’m having fucking heart failure.”

  “Yo, mami, can you just come by with it? I’ll come down, I don’t want to have to bring it downtown with me.”

  As the conversation went on, detouring into whether or not a hair-dresser they both went to had AIDS, it became clear that the thing in the trunk was an Uzi that belonged to Animal. Among the ordnance that Davey ran and that some of the Avenue D crew toted around, an Uzi was pretty common. But having one in your car was a twenty-year federal rap in the making for Mirabel.

  “Any more like this?” I asked Hamilton. He shook his head and flashed me a blank index card. He came to me first before logging anything officially. I was right, he was a good guy.

  “Thanks, Hamilton, I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  “No problem, anything for you Mike.” Hamilton dropped the blank index card on the desk and walked away.

  The case was building to the point where we were starting to apply for arrest warrants. If everything went off the way it was shaping up, we would be taking down enough dealers to fill a major league baseball roster—DL, farm system, and all. I didn’t want Mirabel to go to jail with them. She was a good person, she just had shitty taste in friends, and maybe boyfriends. Her getting jammed up may not have seemed like that high a price to pay for the case to go our way, but it still wasn’t right. And if Mirabel did get accidentally caught in the web DEA was spinning, what would happen when it came out that we’d dated?

  I was taking a risk already, but I realized I needed to take an even bigger gamble—I had to warn her. Somehow she needed to understand that she was hanging out with people that were going to do her harm. It was going to require tact. I couldn’t jeopardize months of hard work by letting her know about the wire. If talking to her helped Tracy or Animal to catch on, our case would be ruined, agents’ and cops’ lives would be in danger, and I would probably go up on corruption charges. Still, I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I hadn’t at least tried to steer her clear of the head-on collision with the law that the Feds were scheduling for her friends. I’d done as much for sniffling junkies who had helped me out. Though we weren’t together anymore, it was still personal.

  “I know you’ve been hanging around with her.” I’d arranged to meet Mirabel in a coffee shop in Long Island away from the eyes and ears of the DEA and the Alphaville crew. Her ’Vette was parked in the lot across from where we sat. I hoped that the Uzi was no longer in the trunk.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. It was instantly awkward. We hadn’t been in touch in weeks and now here I was telling her to behave herself like I was her father. She’d hated being told what to do when we were going out and now she was looking at me like I was nuts. The only thing I could do without jeopardizing the wire and the case was keep it blunt and hope that she got the message. I was banking on the fact that she already knew that I was so up in everyone’s business in the buildings and she wouldn’t interpret “I heard” literally.

  “No. You have.”

  “Mike, I haven’t! Why are you telling me this?”

  I stayed as calm as I could without pissing her off even more. “L
ook,” I said, “it’s a free country, I’m not your boyfriend, I don’t want to fight, but I’m just telling you as a cop and as someone who cares about you, if you’re going to hang around lowlifes, you’re going to get into something you’re not going to be able to get out of. I know you have friends down on the Lower East Side. Hell, that’s where I met you, but you have to stay away from the projects, all those scumbags, their girlfriends, and anyone else that’s close to the Third and D perps.”

  I studied Mirabel’s face. “I can see you heading for trouble and if something bad happens, I can’t make it all just go away.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t listen! I’m not hanging out with anyone from the avenue!” Mirabel’s voice was getting less emphatic. I hoped it meant that what I was telling her was sinking in. I sighed and admitted to myself that I had done all I could. We moved on to small talk, wished each other the best, and left together, Mirabel to her ’Vette, me to my government-issued Camaro, and back to the wire room. By the time I got there she had already called Tracy.

  “I was just talking to Rambo. It was crazy!”

  Tracy and Mirabel quickly moved on to other topics. I could spend the rest of the investigation with my fingers crossed, or I could just move on, too. With so much at stake I had done everything I could, so it was back to work. Mirabel stayed out of jail. Her new boyfriend, a party promoter at Webster Hall and the Palladium, was spooked by Animal and his crew so Mirabel took a break from the Lower East Side and she and Tracy drifted apart on their own.

  After about eight months of living, breathing, eating, sleeping, watching, and listening, Benton announced that he’d met with the U.S. attorney working with us and they’d decided it was time to make arrests. I’d spent more than half a year immersed in just how fast word traveled among Animal, Guerro, and their crew. Our case had swelled to involve nearly forty potential felons, yet we still needed to bring them in at the same time or risk losing anyone who heard about one of his associates getting led away in cuffs. These guys all had multiple addresses and the smart ones had money stashes and exit strategies.

  After a marathon session of picking over index cards and photos, typing and retyping, the U.S. attorney took the 120 pages we prepared from the evidence we’d compiled to a federal judge. The judge picked over every conspirator’s name, their description, and the descriptions of the crimes they’d committed and the laws they’d broken, the drug sales, where they took place and the dollar amounts they represented, then issued forty arrest warrants and nearly as many search warrants.

  Oscar Roland, assistant special agent in charge of Group 34, Benton, his partner, Gio, myself and Robert Stutman, DEA’s special agent in charge of the New York office met in Oscar’s office to discuss arrest strategy. A Colombian flag with a sign on it saying so many colombians, so little time hung in the hallway outside. Inside we finalized the tactical end of what was going to be a forty-warrant simultaneous bust that would slow the heroin deluge on Avenue D and elsewhere in the city to a trickle. Roland was a soft-spoken, light-skinned black guy from New Orleans with a spare frame and a lilting good ol’ boy accent. His desk held a cigar humidor full of expensive Cuban stogies, a wide-brimmed straw hat that he wore to and from work, and framed family pictures including one of his wife and one of their kids with Michael Jordan. His daughter, he explained once, was engaged to Jordan’s attorney. There were photos on his wall of Roland fishing, standing with confiscated bricks of coke, and shaking hands with President Reagan.

  Roland did most of the talking. We all knew what the next moves were, and this tactical meeting was more a formality than a necessity, but Roland was engaging and upbeat and it felt good to see someone excited about something we’d all been working on day and night for half a year. Some upper-tier cops can get pretty rah-rah over anything, but Roland was a good guy, was genuinely proud of the work we’d done, and was looking forward to the next step.

  I felt great about the case except for one thing: the index card I’d written Davey’s name on, and which had been joined early in the investigation with a blurry photo of Davey taken outside the Riis Houses by DEA, had been taken off the board months ago. For some reason, Davey had stopped dealing with Animal, Guerro, and the rest of the Third and D crew almost entirely. Mentions of him on the wire had been infrequent, and when they had come up, they were fleeting and dismissive. The best that I could guess, and some of what I heard from snitches confirmed this, was that Davey had beefed with Animal over something and that whatever it was wasn’t bad enough for him to go to war over. The Cherry Street crew led by the Navarro brothers, the guys who killed Felix Pardo and shot up Macatumba and Londie on the FDR, were still in a power struggle with Animal and Guerro’s guys, but their fight didn’t have enough of the definitive, case-closed killings I associated with Davey to make me believe that. Had Davey chosen a side? Was he playing both crews against each other as a smoke screen between him and DEA? Wherever the reason, Davey was laying low—so low that he was off the board.

  Roland looked at a wall calendar and opened the floor to suggestions of what date to perform the massive bust and hit all the houses, apartments, and businesses we would need to in order to scoop everyone at once. He looked at the list of forty warrants for a moment and then casually noted that we’d need to ask the Housing PD chief for a hundred additional officers to round up our “forty thieves.” The name stuck for the rest of the investigation, the arrests, and the legal maneuvering and trial that followed.

  A few days later, between three and four hundred law-enforcement personnel from DEA, Housing, NYPD, IRS, INS, and the FBI sat in cars outside Alvarez’s limo office, the grocery on Second Ave, every project building that anyone on our bulletin board lived in or frequented, the house in Oyster Bay Animal had bought with cash, and the attached three-bedroom in Ozone Park that Guerro shared with his sister and his mom, who were both also cited in the complaint and warranted by the judge. The Forty Thieves were about to become history.

  Arrest kits with photos and descriptions of each of those charged, lists of aliases, places they frequented, the charges themselves, copies of the warrants and a list of prior arrests and convictions sat on the seat next to every arresting officer. The call came. In Ozone Park, Gio picked up his arrest kit at the same time I grabbed mine in Oyster Bay and hundreds of other cops checked their guns, grabbed their documents, and headed to their designated doorways.

  I knocked on Animal’s door. He answered himself, wearing a robe and two days of beard. I smiled and thought, “I got you, you bastard, I got you and you are mine!” but before I could even tell him he was under arrest he read my mind. Animal’s mouth twisted into a sly grin as he looked at me and at the agents already searching his car in the driveway. He almost looked relieved—like he’d finally pieced together something that had been bothering him for a while.

  “Rambo. Fuck. You got me.”

  Eighteen

  We sat together, my old compadre and I, in the public area of a large federal courtroom watching the wheels of justice slowly grinding up a major crime figure I’d been following for a long time. He was a feared boss responsible for dozens of murders, undertaken at his order and, earlier in his career, done with his own hands. But this courtroom wasn’t in Manhattan where, until recently Davey Blue Eyes ruled the heroin trade and the DEA wire case against Animal and Guerro had been made. This was in the eastern federal district—Brooklyn.

  The guy we were there to see wasn’t Davey Blue Eyes, it was the head of the Lucchese family, Vic Amuso. I was working a day tour and had a court appearance of my own to make in an unrelated and uneventful evidence hearing. But I’d been following Vic Amuso’s racketeering trial in the papers and with a few hours to kill, I phoned my best friend from the old Canarsie neighborhood, Nicky Cappadora, and suggested he meet me at the courthouse. We both had grown up knowing Vic. Nicky’s family was particularly close to the Amusos. It seemed like the right thing to do—come down, show some support and respect and get wha
t was likely to be the last look at Vic we’d ever have that wasn’t on A&E.

  A half decade earlier back in PSA 1, I’d run into the Flynn boys. We shot the shit in the usual way. They ribbed me about being a cop and working around all the “moulies” living in the projects, and I asked after their dad. I didn’t ask what they were doing. The two of them in hardhats was enough to know it was wolf business. Neither of those guys would know which end of a shovel to grab if you tossed them one. Whatever it was, it involved replacement windows apparently. There was a flatbed truck stacked with them parked next to Timmy’s Chrysler Cordoba.

  It turned out that through Vic and the Luccheses’ connections in the iron workers union, the Flynns had moved from plush no-show construction jobs and running numbers and taking bets (what the old-timers called “policy”) through a network of mob-owned grocery stores and retail joints to become part of a huge construction bid-fixing ring that thrived for a decade. The “windows” racket became such a cash cow of kickbacks, payoffs, and lucrative contracts that it swelled to feed all five of the New York families. That kind of success went to the Flynns’ heads in the worst way. The last time I’d seen them, I’d met Nicky outside the Nut. The Flynns talked a bunch of tough-guy crap about their rivals and kept patting me on the back and telling me how great it was to have “a legal gun” with them in case the bar got attacked and reminding me that I was “allowed” to shoot anyone who came in looking for trouble. I wasn’t prepared for how far gone they were and was so repulsed by their coked-out bullshit that I had to leave.

  But now the windows racket was sunk and the Flynns were, too. Lenny, one of my two Red Hook burglary buddies had flipped after fucking up an armored car robbery and was living in Minnesota somewhere with a new name. His partner Zee’s head washed up on the beach at Sheepshead Bay after he’d gone missing owing money to some Colombian coke dealers. Eddie Lino had been dead for years. He was shot four times inside his Cadillac on the side of the Belt Parkway five minutes from Canarsie. Where else.