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

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Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side Page 31

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett


  The windows thing was too huge and went too long to not go south in a big way and it concluded in one of the longest, costliest, and weirdest federal trials in U.S. history. Vic’s trial was a more subdued affair and I’m glad Nick and I went to show our faces. I’d flashed my tin at the courthouse entrance, but Nick went through the ID check and a metal detector and security was so Tupperware tight and it took forever to get upstairs. By the time we were seated in the courtroom gallery, the proceedings were under way. Nick and I nodded courteously at a lot of familiar faces on the benches, and looked in wonder at the center of the room where a huge prosecution exhibit bulletin board displayed a flow chart hung with pictures of Vic and other heavies like Gas Pipe Anthony Casso, along with Timmy and Tommy’s dad, the Nut, and here and there among the dozens pictured, shots of guys whose charcoal steaks we’d eaten, daughters we’d dated, and lawns we’d run across years before.

  Suddenly the big wood doors opened at the side of the courtroom. Everyone turned. It was Vic. He walked in flanked by Feds, winked at me, and gave Nick a big smile. The judge banged out order. We listened for the rest of the day as state’s witness Little Al D’Arco explained how he’d killed Bruno Facciolo, the guy with the bat from the pizza parlor sidewalk, on Vic’s orders. Apparently Little Al and a kid who sat two desks over from me in high school and played offensive tackle on the football team went to California to do a hit for Vic. My former teammate stole the car they used, and Little Al pulled the trigger. When they got back to Brooklyn, word had already gone around about Al’s business trip—a serious breach. Lou Eppolito, the infamous “Mafia Cop,” tipped Al that the “little bird” doing the singing was Bruno. A few days before his daughter’s wedding, Al shot Bruno in a garage, stabbed out his eyes, stuffed a canary in his mouth, and dumped the body in Marine Park. The prosecutors had the police pictures up on their board, bird and all.

  No one except Al and the dirty cop thought Bruno did it at the time, and they all realized the wrong guy died since. Dead birds, mistaken murders, and a city cop who marked wiseguys for death—no wonder my father came home from the job, quietly had a nice meal, watched a little TV, and went to bed every night at peace.

  That was the final time I ever saw my dad and uncle’s old baseball teammate, Vic Amuso. And that’s not likely to change. He’s in Supermax in Florida for life.

  Of Davey Blue Eyes’s Forty Thieves, thirty-nine either copped a plea, informed, or ratted. One of the many reasons to be thankful for a small trial was that the only person we hated more than Davey was his lawyer, Lynne Stewart, who was to represent the accused in our case. The self-described anarchist kids in Tompkins Square may have claimed to be devoted radicals, but Stewart really was one. She was a Ramsey Clark and William Kunstler protégée who took her mentors’ skepticism and healthy opposition into the realm of the surreal. Stewart defended drug dealers and murderers and crowed to the press about being a radical activist attorney rather than the menace to society she was. She publicly advocated, “violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions.” She put her practice where her mouth was by unsuccessfully defending a twenty-year-old thug nicknamed Loco Larry Davis who shot six cops to death in 1986, and the Blind Sheik who conspired to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Larry Davis was killed in jail. Years later, Lynne Stewart was sentenced to prison for acting as a go-between for the sheik and his followers.

  One of the most satisfying professional compliments I’ve been paid was seeing how much Lynne Stewart hated my partner and me. At one hearing Stewart, who is enormous, made a point of slamming into a chair Gio sat in so hard he was knocked to the floor. As each one of her clients flipped, Lynne Stewart’s growing frustration was a nice consolation.

  Stewart began the case at a forty-person arraignment held on a set of bleachers at the U.S. courthouse. Every one of the Forty Thieves sat cuffed together and it took twenty minutes for a court officer to read off their names. Thanks to the U.S. attorneys’ relentless maneuvering and the strength of the evidence, within a few months Stewart was only representing one person named in the complaint. Even tough-talking, badass Animal eventually decided to cooperate. Much to my and the U.S. attorney’s surprise Guerro, the soft-spoken, innocuous coleader of the crew was the sole holdout. We had him, his drugs, his money, his guns, his mother, his sister, their house, and his partner Animal all stitched up, but Guerro wouldn’t budge. The prevailing opinion at the time was that he must have had a money stash somewhere so big that it was worth gambling on parole to keep it safe. Guerro got about twenty-five years.

  If life was more like the movies of that era, the story would’ve climaxed with me and Davey in a guns-drawn foot chase through the warehouse in which Davey was holding my beautiful crime reporter or ADA girlfriend prisoner, a shoot-out in a circus hall of mirrors, or a swordfight on a building rooftop in a lightning storm. But that’s not how things work anywhere, especially not in Alphaville.

  We never got Davey on the wire and never arrested him. What we learned from the thirty-nine canaries we caged was that just prior to our beginning the case, he had indeed fallen out with Animal and Guerro and decided to lay low for a while. The Navarro brothers’ hits on the Third Street crew had something to do with it. My grandfather described once how farmers in Sicily would set fire to fields that had been overcultivated and then plant in the new ground fertilized with the ashes. Maybe that was Davey’s rationale—let the Cherry Street and Third Street crews burn each other down and then start over. Whatever his ambitions may have been, the federal and state investigations into the hit he ordered on Gio and me had jammed Davey up really badly and sent him deeper into the shadows than he’d ever been. Now, with thirty-nine known associates suddenly telling all, he would have to lay lower and longer than he expected. He wasn’t in cuffs but he was out of the picture. Ironically, if Gio and I hadn’t done such a good job of putting the screws to Davey’s Third Street crew, he probably would still have been around when we went up on the wire with DEA and been indicted like the rest of his former employees.

  A few months after our investigation concluded another DEA unit lucked onto a guy who was Davey’s accountant. He was an actual CPA from Great Neck, a user, and was so scared of going to jail that he handed over ledgers that itemized every penny Davey made and every bag of dope he sold to the tune of $140,000 a day. Soon after that Davey was popped for gun possession at a movie theater in Whitestone. He was set to plead on the charge in the hopes of avoiding a double-murder rap, but the case stalled and he cooled his heels in Rikers for what may have been close to a year.

  One of the agents in charge showed me parts of the arrest paperwork on Davey’s case. On the way home that night I stopped at one of the addresses listed as belonging to him in the documents. It was a modest detached brick house in Midwood less than five miles from where I lived in Canarsie throughout most of my time in Op 8. If it weren’t for the extra gates and fences and the seizure and auction announcement on the front door you’d never guess it was owned by a guy who’d fucked up as many lives as Davey Colas had. I’d literally been stuck in traffic in front of it a hundred times on my way home from a shift in Alphaville, completely unaware that it belonged to a guy who’d wanted me whacked so badly, he put a price on my head.

  One cool autumn morning in Canarsie, I read in the papers about a big DEA bust-up of a Brooklyn heroin ring that involved turning a major heroin dealer who gave up the rest of his crew. A lightbulb went on. Maybe I was still trying to settle a vendetta like the guys my grandfather knew in his day. I called the agent in charge of handling the cooperating former kingpin. Would his narcotics violator want to rat on one more pusher and murderer? Had he heard of Davey Blue Eyes Colas? Yup he would and hell yes he had. The tape went on, the guy started telling what he knew, and Davey now faced charges from running a continuing criminal enterprise, to using a firearm during a narcotics transaction, to felony
possession of narcotics. Faced with multiple life terms, Davey cooperated with the government and became a rat as devastating to the narcotic trade on the Lower East Side as Sammy “the Bull” Gravano was to the Mafia.

  Davey testified under oath about the mounds of cash, the guns, the killings, and the rest of what it took to run his now collapsed empire. In 1996, after sitting out more than half a decade cooperating with DEA from federal lockup, Davey was finally sentenced to jail for six more years. He was released from protective custody in 2001 to eight years of supervised probation. Currently, he has vanished off everyone’s radar. My guess is that he leveraged witness protection somehow. If that’s true he could be living next door to you.

  It’s funny to think about it now. After all that time in Alphaville trying to nail Davey he wound up at large somewhere with a government handler, a new name, and an unlisted phone number. Well, the Feds showed their gratitude and to be fair I should acknowledge mine. Davey Blue Eyes formed a purpose and a function in my life that’s as important to me as it is hard for me to admit. Gio and I brought the fight to Davey and his crew. It was a fight I had trained for my whole life—in Canarsie, at the academy, in Coney Island, and in Alphaville itself—without knowing it until it was over. It was a fight I refused to lose, through lying down by punching in and waiting out my pension, or by dropping my gloves when the rulebook and the people holding it over my head said to. Davey kept me sharp. He kept me focused. He put a name and a face on the horror that was heroin in Alphabet City in the eighties. The contract he put on Gio and me just kept the fight personal. In a way, I needed Davey the way Muhammad Ali needed Joe Frazier. Ali called Frazier an ugly gorilla and a dozen other things before they faced each other in the ring in the Philippines. But the day after beating Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila, Ali said, “Joe Frazier, I’ll tell the world right now, brings out the best in me.” Davey brought out the best in me. Whether the ends justified the means is a question some people might debate. Some people, not me.

  Most of Alphaville today resembles Epcot center, or one of those streets in southern college towns where kids go to get drunk on weekends, more than the place Gio and I spent years trying to clean up. The projects are still there and the drugs are still there, but there’s no longer space for an operation like the one we fought to flourish like it did. Housing, transit, and city cops work under a single chain of command, one that since the Giuliani administration is held accountable from the top down like the Feds are.

  People haven’t changed. They don’t. There will always be those that need to get high, those that want to get paid to make that possible, and those, like me, who genuinely enjoyed hanging out among them even while coming between them and enforcing the law. Much as I can look back on those years and shake my head as I remember what I saw and what I did, I knew where I stood then and I know that it was worthwhile now. How many people can say that at the end of a twenty-year career? Where I came from, who I was, and what I became all lined up on Avenue D. I may not have always behaved myself, but I did the right thing more than the wrong thing. Most of all, though, I didn’t get caught. And I had fun.

  Acknowledgments

  If we managed to list the names of everyone to whom we owed thanks for helping us make Alphaville a reality, this book would have to be two volumes. Abridged, unabridged, excerpted, or otherwise, our friend, agent, and secret weapon Shawn Coyne’s name must top the list. It was Shawn’s instinct and enthusiasm that put us together under the nurturing umbrella of Genre Management. His eagerness and imagination brought our book to life, and his insight guided our work. Many thanks to editor Pete Wolverton, along with Liz Byrne and Anne Bensson and their team at Thomas Dunne Books. Like all the best creative professionals, Pete dealt in possibilities, not criticisms, and his contributions were indispensable. Thanks also to Mark Korman for schooling both a twenty-year NYPD veteran and a former Lower East Side bike messenger on some finer points of law outside our combined experience. Kirby Kim and Richie Kern at William Morris Endeavor have earned our gratitude and then some.

  Looking back, Mike would like to express his appreciation to all those he worked with in law enforcement, particularly his former partner, who made every tour an adventure and not just an existence. Looking forward, Mike thanks Marco, Bianca, and Santino, his three beautiful children, who enrich his heart and his life every day. Most important, he thanks his lovely wife, Rita, who has taught him the true meaning of love and compassion. Mike would also like to thank his parents, Mimi and Mike Codella, for a lifetime of loving direction, and his sister, Linda, for her endless generosity. The blessing of his mother-in-law, Tillie Muniz, and father-in-law Tony Muniz’s kindness has been and remains essential. Mike’s lifelong friend Nick Cappadora proved once again that he’s in for the long haul by reading and rereading early pages and drafts. Thanks and more are due to everyone at the Codella Academy, especially Mark Conroy and Gerry Fajardo, who kept the team in fighting shape during book-mandated absences. Respect and gratitude to Renzo Gracie for the opportunity to pass along his family’s art. Thanks also to Chad Millman, without whom this book might never have been written.

  Additionally, Bruce wishes to acknowledge his gratitude to Anna Thorngate, whose generosity, patience, acute intelligence, and wit made the rough stretches faster and smoother. Thanks also to his parents, Elizabeth and Robert Bennett. Much of Alphaville was researched and edited alongside Miriam Linna, Billy Miller, Mark Natale, Lars Espensen, and, occasionally, Ira Kaplan—bandmates and treasured friends of more than two decades. Their companionship lent much to a parallel creative enterprise partially conducted in minivans, airplanes, and hotel rooms in Spain, France, Canada, New Orleans, Japan, and Hoboken. More than anything, Bruce wishes to thank his old friends who generously (and anonymously) shared their war stories and recollections from the Lower East Side days, and those who, though gone, contributed in memory and spirit as much as those still close by—in the long run, possibly more.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  ALPHAVILLE. Copyright © 2010 by Michael Codella and Bruce Bennett. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Codella, Michael.

  Alphaville: 1988, crime, punishment, and the battle for New York City’s lower East Side / Michael Codella and Bruce Bennett.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-59248-6

  1. Codella, Michael. 2. Detectives—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 3. Crime—New York (State)—New York. 4. Drug traffic—New York (State)—New York. 5. Heroin industry—New York (State)—New York. I. Bennett, Bruce, 1940–II. Title.

  HV7911.C59A3 2010

  363.2092—dc22

  [B]

  2010032671

  Table of Contents

  Note to the Reader

  From A to D

  A

  Avenue D

  Chapter One

  Avenue D

  Chapter Two

  Avenue D

  Chapter Three

  B

  Avenue D

  Chapter Four

  Avenue D

  Chapter Five

  Avenue D

  Chapter Six

  Avenue D

  Chapter Seven

  C

  Avenue D

  Chapter Eight

  Avenue D

  Chapter Nine

  Avenue D

  Chapter Ten

  Avenue D

  Chapter Eleven

  Avenue D

  Chapter Twelve

  D

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

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  Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett, Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side

 

 

 


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