He raced from high school to the army to the Police Academy with a boxer’s fury. On the streets, he hated the uniform but liked the taste left in his mouth from being a cop. He stayed clear of neighborhood tags, choosing instead to go for the big arrests. He never wrote up a parking violation, hassled a bookie, or shook down a numbers runner. He saw the working poor not as the enemy, but as important allies to be used against the larger fish that floated in the nearby swamps of drugs, murder, and shakedowns.
In November 1964, the same week Lyndon B. Johnson won a landslide presidential election, Giovanni Frontieri was moved out of uniform and into plainclothes. He was assigned to buy-and-bust operations in Harlem, a neighborhood he had watched change all too quickly from a haven of hardworking families living in well-kept apartments to the central headquarters for desperate men hungry for heroin. He ignored skin color, age, sex, and language. If you moved drugs on his streets, regardless of who you were or who you knew, Giovanni Frontieri made it a point to move you.
Three weeks into plainclothes duty, Frontieri scored his first major case. He brought down three members of Little Nicky Matthews’s drug crew, costing the gang $250,000 in cash profit and eventually earning them double-decade stretches behind bars. The junkies on the streets were hungry for their score, and the dealers were sour over the lost money. It didn’t help anybody’s image that the bust was orchestrated by a street cop who was as green as a dollar.
Four days after the bust went down, one dealer, Sammy “Dwarf” Rodgers, decided it was time to teach the young cop a lesson. He offered $25,000, a same-day cash payout, to anyone who would bring him one of Giovanni Frontieri’s eyes.
“Ain’t nothin’ personal against the boy,” Rodgers said to members of his Black Satin gang. “I just need me a new key chain. Besides, I like the color of his eyes. They match my car.”
• • •
SAMMY RODGERS WAS tall, well over six feet, with a big stomach, wide chest, and full Afro. The street called him Dwarf because he employed half a dozen dwarfs as drug couriers, sending them from house to house, door-to-door, pockets crammed with nickel bags of junk and rubber band rolls of cash.
“I love watching the fuckers walk,” he once said. “Move down my streets like fuckin’ robots. Time you see ’em, they already past you. Cops hate bustin’ ’em too. Makes ’em feel cheap.”
Dwarf was standing in front of his bar, La Grande, on the corner of 123rd Street and Amsterdam, when Giovanni Frontieri pulled his car up to the corner. Giovanni had grown solid, muscular like his father, his hair thick and black, his face sharp, handsome, and unmarked except for a thin scar above his right eye. He spoke in a strong but low voice, never shouted, not even during the heat of a bust. His first partner called him “Boomer” because of it, and the name stuck.
He stepped out of the car and walked over to the dealer, stopping when he was only inches from the man’s face.
“Hey, Dwarf,” Boomer said. “I hear you’re looking for me.”
Dwarf looked around at his men and then back at Boomer. He had to keep his street-cool facade or lose face. Any sign of a backdown to a young cop could easily give the gunmen behind him ideas, any one of which could end with Dwarf packed in ice.
“What I need with you?” Dwarf said. “I ain’t lonely.”
“Twenty-five large,” Boomer said. “That’s a lot to pay out for one eye.”
“Got me a business,” Dwarf said, “and you startin’ to cost me.”
Boomer reached a hand into the side pocket of his leather jacket, his eyes on Dwarf. The hand came out holding a black switchblade. Boomer clicked it open with his thumb and tossed it to Dwarf, who caught it awkwardly with both hands.
“You take it,” Boomer said.
“Take what?”
“My eye,” Boomer said. “You got the knife, so, take it. Right here. Right in front of your crew.”
“You crazy,” Dwarf said, inching two steps back. “Pull a move on me like this, you got to be fuckin’ crazy.”
“Take the eye now,” Boomer said, pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket, his voice steady and controlled. “’Cause it’s your only chance.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then your business is shut.” Boomer lit his cigarette with his father’s silver clip. “I don’t care where you go or what part of town you move your shit to. But if I see you on this corner ever again, I drop you and leave you dead.”
Dwarf held his ground, not a move, not a sound.
Boomer smiled and nodded, as if they’d just been exchanging pleasantries about the weather, then put both hands in his pockets and turned. He walked to the driver’s side of his jet black Plymouth and took another look at Dwarf.
“Keep the blade,” he said, smiling, cigarette still in his mouth. “And enjoy what’s left of your life.”
Boomer Frontieri got behind the wheel of the Plymouth, kicked over the 426 cubic-inch engine, shifted into first, and pulled out into the Harlem street traffic, radio tuned to Sam Cooke singing “It’s All Right.”
• • •
HE SPENT EIGHTEEN years on the force, rising to the highest rank he sought, gold-shield detective, faster than anyone in the history of the department. In his career, working with a variety of partners, Boomer Frontieri was credited with more felony arrests and convictions than any other New York City cop. The job consumed him; he lived it and loved it. He never married and had no desire for a family. A bullet had killed his father, had left his mother alone at night, crying herself to sleep. He was a cop and he knew his bullet could arrive at any moment. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind.
Boomer kept his pleasures to a minimum. He worked out regularly, running as many as twelve miles each morning, long before it became fashionable. He would allow nothing to get in the way of the run. During all-day stakeouts, Boomer would, at some point, jump into the backseat, change into sweats, bolt from the car, and hit the pavement.
“What do I do if they come out while you’re gone?” a stunned new partner once asked.
“That’s why they gave you a badge and a gun too,” Boomer told him.
“They’re gonna know you’re a cop,” his partner whined. “The minute you step outta the car, they’re gonna know.”
“They already know I’m a cop,” Boomer said. “I’ve been sitting in front of their house all day.”
“I ain’t takin’ ’em down alone.”
“I’ll be back if you need me,” Boomer said, starting his run.
“How you gonna know if I need you?” his partner asked.
“You’ll be miles away.”
“I’ll hear you scream,” Boomer said, turning a corner, eager to break a sweat.
• • •
THE DARK WEIGHT Boomer Frontieri carried into his work grew heavier through the years. He felt surrounded by the face and smell of death. It had touched many of those around him, from partners to family members to street friends, but had merely toyed with him, hanging him from the brink before returning him to the safety net of a dangerous life.
When his mother died from a stroke in a New York Hospital bed, Boomer was asleep on his stomach in a crosstown hospital as a nervous intern sewed thirty-six stitches down his back, closing up a razor slash, courtesy of a pimp riding a cocaine high. His baby sister Maria, a month shy of her thirtieth birthday, was killed crossing a Jackson Heights street; the hit from a drunk driver’s front end sent her through the window of a shuttered bar. Boomer had to go to her funeral on crutches, his ankles shattered from a two-story fall off a fire escape. His brother, Carmine, suffered a severe heart attack when he was thirty-one years old and sat home in Bellmore, Long Island, living hand-to-mouth on a small disability pension. Boomer would spend time with him, the emptiness of his brother’s life further fueling his own thirst for action.
Three of Boomer’s seven partners died in the line of duty, each working by his side.
The majority of cops go through their entire careers never pulling
gun from holster. Boomer was not one of those. He viewed his job under a bright, unmistakable moral light. To him, it was all a battle for turf. The dealers were foreign invaders. The more of them who went down, the safer it would be for a man heading to work, looking to keep a family fed and warm.
The truth be known, he enjoyed his dance with death. And that made him the deadliest type of cop to have on the street, the kind who never thinks he will live long enough to see a pension. In his years on the force, plainclothes and detective, Boomer had been involved in fourteen serious shootouts, half a dozen knifings, and hundreds of street fights. Once, his car was machine-gunned to pieces while he sat in his favorite Italian restaurant, eating a plate of pasta with red clam sauce.
“You just going to sit there and let them do that to your car?” asked his date, Andrea, a dark-haired detective working out of a Brooklyn fingerprint unit.
“It was my car,” Boomer said, wiping his pasta plate with a chunk of Italian bread. “Sold it to Pete Lucas over in Vice a couple of days ago.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
Boomer sipped from a glass of red wine and looked through the window at the shell of what had started the evening as a shiny Impala.
“To keep up his insurance payments,” Boomer said.
• • •
BOOMER FRONTIERI NEVER stopped working. Maybe it was because he had nothing else in his life. Maybe it was the feeling of power he got when he walked into a dark bar and every criminal eye turned his way. It could also have been the nods and smiles he garnered from the working people of the tough, put-upon neighborhoods he made it his business to clean up. Whatever it was, Boomer Frontieri was never far removed from the streets, always minutes from his next bust, doing all he could to cause havoc in the pursuit of civil peace.
In between, he always managed to make time for a little fun.
• • •
“I DON’T KNOW if I can do this,” the informant said, standing in the darkened vestibule, Boomer by his side.
“Do what?” Boomer said, his eyes farther up the corner, checking out a small circle of dealers. “Point out a friend?”
“They find out it’s me that whispered them out and they gonna smoke me for sure,” the informant said.
“You showing up at that job I got you?” Boomer asked, eyes still searching faces.
“That job sucks,” the informant said. “It’s long and hard and don’t pay for shit.”
“It puts money in your pockets and keeps you out of Rikers,” Boomer said. “That’s all your mother gives a shit about. Now, cut the chatter and let me have the dealer.”
The informant hesitated, his feet shifting nervously back and forth.
“Guy in black,” he finally said.
“They’re all in black,” Boomer pointed out.
“One with the panama hat,” the informant said. “He’s always got pockets full of change. Jiggles ’em all the time. Thinks it’s funny.”
“He got a name?”
“His boys call him Padrone,” the informant said. “Don’t know his real catch.”
“Disappear,” Boomer said, leaving the vestibule and heading down the front steps.
He walked down the street, one hand at his side, the other holding an old New York Telephone meter. It was thick, black, and heavy. It had a reading on it, running from green to red, with a white button at its center. A squeeze of the button and a thin black needle would move from the green area to the red.
The six men, huddled in a circle, turned still as stone the minute they spotted him.
“Five-O on the block,” one said. Five-O was the current street code for narc, derived from the Jack Lord TV series Hawaii Five-O.
All of the men except for one carried 9-millimeter semis tucked inside their stonewashed jeans. The one they called Padrone, short and heavyset, a pockmarked face ringed with stubble, was clean. A nail clipper in his shirt pocket was his only brush with a weapon.
“What’s the matter, guys, library closed?” Boomer asked as he came up to them.
“We did our reading,” Padrone said. “Now we thinking about it.”
“Anything I might like?”
“I don’t know what you like,” Padrone said. “Don’t give a fuck either.”
The men around him snickered, and one, the tallest of the bunch, laughed out loud, baseball cap tilted over his eyes, the Rikers cut of his arms gleaming in the afternoon sun.
“So let’s forget books,” Boomer said, “and let’s talk drugs.”
“Got any on you?” Padrone said.
This time the laughter grew louder. Even Boomer smiled.
“Nope,” Boomer said. “But I know one of you does. The question is, which one.”
“That’s a good question,” Padrone said. “You gonna give us three guesses?”
“I thought you might just want to tell me.”
“Think again, badge,” Padrone said. “Even if we had the shit, which we ain’t, we gotta be dumber than sand to tell you.”
“Then I’ve got no choice,” Boomer said, lifting the old New York Telephone meter. “Gotta use the machine on you.”
All eyes shifted down to the box in Boomer’s hand.
“Fuck is that thing?” one of the men asked.
“It’s a drug detector,” Boomer said. “New. FBI brought it out. There’s a sensor in it picks up a drug scent. When that happens, the needle here starts to move. Tell you the truth, I’m not all that sure myself how it works. All I know is that it does work.”
“That’s bullshit,” Padrone said, one hand in his pants pocket, nervously jiggling coins.
“You got nothin’ to worry about either way,” Boomer said, staring directly at Padrone. “You’re clean.”
Boomer turned to face the man closest to him and pointed the box directly at his torso. Staring intently, he kept his finger away from the white button.
“Back off,” Boomer finally said. “You’re just a dope without dope.”
Boomer moved through the next two in the circle in the same manner.
Then he came up to Padrone.
“Mr. Clean,” Boomer said, smiling. “Time to read your fortune.”
Boomer held the box to Padrone’s face, slowly moved his finger to the white button, then pressed down. The needle jumped from green to red. Padrone, sweat already pouring down the sides of his face, swallowed hard, coins in his pocket jiggling at a trotter’s pace.
Boomer’s smile widened.
“Bingo,” Boomer said.
“It’s the change,” Padrone said, looking around to his men, desperation filling his eyes. “Like at the airport. They make noise, that’s all. Empty your pockets and they stop.”
“I’ll bite,” Boomer said. “Empty your pockets.”
Padrone hesitated, running a beefy hand across the stubble.
“Like you ain’t got all the fuckin’ cards in your hands already,” Padrone finally said, lifting the back of his flowered shirt and handing two five-pound heroin bags over to Boomer. “Now you got yourself a fuckin’ machine too. What am I gonna do?”
“Three-to-five,” Boomer said, taking the drugs in one hand and pulling Padrone away from his cronies.
• • •
BOOMER LIVED IN a well-kept two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a four-story brownstone on West Eighty-fourth Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam. The living room furnishings were simple, boiled down to one frayed blue couch, two dusty-gold wing chairs, and a marble coffee table. He kept his twenty-one-inch Zenith in the bedroom and had small stereo speakers in every room. His extensive record collection, jazz, blues, and Sam Cooke mostly, filled the left side of the living room. A framed photo of Rocky Marciano landing the knock-out blow to Jersey Joe Walcott’s chin in their 1952 heavyweight title bout hung over the mantel of the shuttered fireplace. A small statue of the Blessed Mother rested on a bureau in the hall, left to him by his mother.
The kitchen was well stocked, although Boomer was h
ardly ever home long enough to make himself a meal. He picked up fresh fruits and vegetables from the nearby Fairway market. But for fish he traveled all the way down to the Fulton market and for meat to Murray’s on Fourteenth Street. There, old man Hirsch himself would cut up the rib steaks and chops, wrapping them tight in butcher paper. Murray Hirsch had been his father’s employer and closest friend. Two immigrants from two different cultures, trying to make a go of it in a new country. Whenever Boomer saw Murray, he always came away with the feeling that Hirsch missed his father as much as he did.
Boomer dated an assortment of women, staying with them long enough for companionship but never long enough to fall in love. Some were cops, a couple worked in bars he scouted, one was an ex-hooker now earning a living as a meter maid. There was even a college professor he helped clear on a marijuana bust. Of them all, the only woman Boomer Frontieri ever gave any thought to marrying was Theresa.
They met at a cookout at his sister’s home in Queens. She was tall and thin, had red hair flowing long down her back, and hazel eyes that twinkled mischievously from an unlined face. She worked in the check reconcilement department of a Wall Street branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank while taking night courses at St. John’s, crawling her way toward a business degree. They both spoke Italian, drank coffee with their pizza, and loved music but hated to dance.
She never asked about his work, or complained when he disappeared for days or canceled long-standing dates with last-minute calls. From the go, she understood the nature of his job. Boomer could relax around Theresa, put down his guard as easily as he would slide his gun inside a desk drawer. He felt safe, instinctively knowing she would never betray him and would always be honest with him, tell him what was in her heart whether he wanted to hear it or not. He knew life for a cop’s wife was, at best, difficult and lonely. But he trusted Theresa could handle that part. It was the other end of the table that troubled him, the steady gaze of death that hovered above him, the chill of a late night ringing phone or doorbell. It was there that his doubts rested.
• • •
“IT LOOKS BAD,” Theresa said to him, sitting on a plastic chair across from his hospital bed. Boomer looked back at her and smiled. His hands were bandaged, his chest wrapped tight, and his face marked with bruises, welts, and stitches, the results of a drug raid gone sour.
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