Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  “Jesus.”

  “He says they’re also making out a lot of money orders, and they’re making them for just under the ten-thousand-dollar maximum, so it doesn’t have to be reported. They’re making a lot of money, in other words, and it’s all going, my friend says, to three people who have the same account number down in Miami.”

  “Laundering in small amounts,” Mike said.

  “Yep.”

  “Colombians?”

  “Colombians.”

  The first of the Colombians had been recruited in Central Falls in the early seventies. They were textile workers. Most of the mills around Central Falls were textile mills. The Colombians were willing to work for a lot less than Americans. And once the migration started, Central Falls became a cultural beachhead for Colombians. The flow north turned to flood. They came even after there were no more jobs. The urge to come north transcended immigration laws, language barriers, unemployment. As the tide mounted, longtime residents started moving out, driving down housing costs and accelerating immigration. Today the city is officially one-third Colombian; unofficially, maybe half. Next to New York and Miami, Central Falls has the largest community of Colombians in North America. Now Rudy and Mike were thinking it had plenty of coke, too.

  “How are we supposed to get at somebody dealing in amounts like this?” asked Mike. “We’d need a couple of thousand just to set up a buy for an ounce! And we already spent our two hundred dollars.”

  “You mean three hundred,” Rudy corrected.

  “We need help,” Rudy said.

  “DEA?”

  “Yeah, but we need more. We’ve got to have something definite—or they’ll think we’re nuts.”

  When the brawl inside spilled out the front door, it was no longer something Mr. Blanco could ignore. Mike was doing his standard Saturday-night detail at the Sportsman Cafe, one of the few occasions when he still wore a uniform. The Sportsman is a barn-sized bar and dance hall, the center of Colombian night life—on Saturday nights, that is. There’d been a stabbing some years back that closed the place down, and when the city liquor authority allowed it to reopen, it was for one night a week. The chief liked to keep two men in uniform on the scene, just in case.

  Mike and Skip Jameson, the officer sharing the detail, leaped into the fight, pulled two men apart, and cuffed them. Mike radioed for a cruiser, and within minutes the men were gone. All in a night’s work. The crowd had already drifted back to the music inside when Mike was approached by a man he recognized but didn’t know by name.

  “Mr. Blanco, I want to talk to you.” The man was small, middle-aged, with a broad, flat nose. He gestured toward the darkness around the side of the Sportsman. Mike left Skip under the portico and walked back to the tall fence that kept cars from spilling onto the parking lot of McDonald’s next door.

  “One of those guys you just busted is a big dealer,” the man said.

  “Coke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean by ‘big’?”

  “I don’t know. Kilos. He gets weekly shipments from Miami.”

  “How?”

  “By car.”

  The story was familiar, but this was no punk kid or drunk telling it. Mike got excited. This might be the break they needed. He tried to keep the man talking.

  “No. No. Not here. People will see. But I will come in.” He walked across the lot to a car, got in, and drove off.

  Mike phoned Rudy in triumph. Rudy had his hometown confidants, but Mike’s years outside the Sportsman Cafe earned him access to the insular Colombians. He knew names, families, where they lived, who they went out with. Maybe now it would pay off.

  He hung around the office the next few days, but the man never called or came in, never approached Mike again.

  But his tip was good. One of the Colombians busted the night of the fight had been carrying a gram. He got himself a pricey lawyer, and he wouldn’t talk. But the lab tests on the coke…Well, normal purity on the street is between 10 and 20 percent. This stuff came back, certified, 98 percent pure.

  “Mike, I’m having a problem with my daughter. Could I bring her in—you talk to her?”

  Mike told the woman on the phone, “Sure. Bring her down.”

  They were waiting in the lobby, mother and daughter, less than an hour later. Mike was surprised at how young the girl was. He guessed ten. She turned out to be twelve. She had this crazy spiked crop of brown hair and lots of makeup. She looked bored and annoyed. Mom looked weathered, about forty.

  In the interview room, Mom stood, the girl sat behind the desk. Mike took one of the metal chairs, turned it, and straddled the back.

  “Okay. What kind of problem?” Mike suspected she had been shoplifting Top Forty cassettes.

  “Well,” began Mom unsteadily, drawing breath, “she has been staying out all night; she hasn’t been coming home; she was gone for two days, and I looked everywhere and couldn’t find her. I finally found her in front of this house on Dexter, and she was sittin’ out on the front steps, and she had this white shit all over her nose. You wanna hear what she was doing?”

  With her eyes averted and a pained smirk on her face, the daughter looked like she was trying to will herself onto a different planet.

  “Yeah. What was she doing?”

  “She was giving these Colombian men blow jobs to get a little of the coke they have.”

  Coke whores: the latest clue, Andy of Mayberry meets Miami Vice. Rudy said, “They picked up this one girl over on Lonsdale Avenue the other night. She used to babysit for my friends’ kids.” It disgusted him.

  He and Mike were weaving through orange cones set out on Broad Street for repaving crews. It was shortly after dawn. The crews weren’t out yet, but Mike and Rudy had been up all night on another fruitless stakeout. They had watched people coming and going from the place on Dexter Street. That was all they could do, watch.

  They were on their way to Kentucky Fried Chicken for an early sandwich and coffee before heading in for another day’s work. It was a cold and sunny November morning. They were still talking about coke whores when Walter Alvarez drove by, going the opposite way in his white Corvette.

  “There goes the Nitwit,” noted Rudy.

  It was hard not to notice Walter. They had learned about most of the suspected coke dealers the hard way. Whispered information, corroboration. There were a few big names that kept coming up: Carlos Arroyave, the cheerful ladies’ man in Lincoln with the pretty, pregnant young wife; Roberto Tabares, the tall, beer-bellied businessman in Pawtucket; the flamboyant Gomez brothers, who had an apartment just three blocks east of headquarters. But nobody had to tell them about Walter. Mike had known him for years. He had watched Walter get more and more outrageous. Mike and Rudy could tell that Colombian dealers felt they had nothing to fear from the police in Central Falls. But Walter took things a step further. In recent months he had started calling himself the Snowman. He drove the white Corvette and wore white suits, white shirts, white shoes. He was the Prince of the Sportsman on Saturday nights.

  Just as Mike and Rudy sat down at Kentucky Fried, Walter walked in and ordered coffee. Mike said, “That son of a bitch turned around and came back just to let us know he doesn’t care that we’re watching him.”

  Sure enough, Walter strutted by their table on his way out. “Greetings,” he said. Walter’s white shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, and a white towel was wrapped around his neck. And there was something new. Walter had bleached his bushy moustache white!

  “Weird,” was all Rudy could say as Walter’s great bushy head disappeared out the door. “That guy,” Mike said, “is just begging us to bust him.”

  Roll-call room, on the second floor of headquarters, looks like a classroom. Writing surfaces are attached to chairs, and behind the sergeant’s podium is a long blackboard. The room smells of stale coffee and tobacco, leather and chalk.

  Mike strode in as the morning shift was getting ready to leave. There were friendly hoots a
s he asked to say a few words. He stood to one side of the podium, addressing a roomful of blue winter uniforms.

  “Rudy and I just wanted to take a minute here to tell you that we have reason to believe there are some major cocaine deals going down here in Central Falls. I know that’s maybe hard for you to believe”—Mike could see the looks on their faces—“but Rudy and I have been gathering a lot of information that I can’t be too specific about right now. We just wanted to ask that you keep your eyes and ears open and be careful of any out-of-state vehicles you might stop. We’re talking about people moving hundreds of thousands of dollars of coke and probably armed.”

  There was silence. Mike stuffed his hands into his pockets and turned to leave. But as he reached the door, he heard someone from the ranks mutter, “You boys have been watching too much TV.” And the room erupted in laughter.

  After asking for Mike White, the Hispanic woman on the phone sounded reluctant. She wouldn’t say her name.

  “I just want to meet with you and talk,” she said.

  “Okay, when?”

  “Now.”

  “Where?”

  “Someplace away from Central Falls. No one must see us together. No one must know I called you.”

  “My partner and I can meet you in Providence.”

  “Partner?”

  “Yeah, Lieutenant Rudy Legenza. If you trust me, you’ll have to trust him. We work together.”

  They agreed to meet in the parking lot of a downtown hotel in Providence, about a fifteen-minute drive. The woman said she’d be in a new green LTD. Mike and Rudy grabbed their coats.

  When the woman’s car drove into the hotel lot, they automatically noted the license plate. The woman looked Colombian. Mike stood up outside for a moment and waved to her. She was in her twenties; she was finely dressed in pressed blue wool slacks and a white sequined sweater. When she climbed in the backseat, Rudy drove toward I-95. They cruised into Massachusetts as they talked.

  “…If they discover that I came to you, I will be killed.” She spoke with quiet resolve, describing a man she knew well. She said she had personal reasons for wanting him arrested. He controlled “a lot” of cocaine, she said, which came up from Colombia through Miami, then to Central Falls in regular deliveries by car. The man supplied major dealers in New York, Boston, and Providence and throughout New England.

  “How much is ‘a lot’?” asked Mike.

  “One customer in Boston gets twenty kilos a month, and he has many customers like this.”

  Mike and Rudy looked at each other. “That’s a lot.”

  She laid out the operation: names, dates, addresses, amounts. She had more answers than they had questions. Mike scribbled notes as fast as he could. She stopped several times to stress her danger.

  “You must understand. They will kill me. I will just disappear. Not only me, but also my family—in America and Colombia. They keep lists of the relatives, even the children. They know where to find them. It is a simple thing for a Colombian to disappear from Central Falls. It is said that they went home to Colombia. Who is to know if it is true?”

  Mike and Rudy stayed calm and professional, reassuring her. But after they dropped her off down the street from the hotel, Mike whooped for joy. It was true! If this information checked out—and they were sure it would—then cocaine traffic in Central Falls was bigger than their wildest suspicions.

  Then it sunk in. Jesus, they were in over their heads.

  Mike stood next to Rudy’s desk. Rudy sat behind it. They were nervous. Sitting in front, sipping coffee, was Dan McCarthy, head of the DEA in Providence. McCarthy is a tall, slow-talking, very Irish fellow with a shock of white hair. He has puffy eyes and the look of a man who stays out late. On either side of McCarthy sat two police detectives from Pawtucket.

  Mike and Rudy didn’t know what to expect. There was a good chance McCarthy wouldn’t believe them. A cocaine ring in Central Falls? Or maybe he knew all about it, and they would seem foolish, two local cops stumbling where they didn’t belong. All they really wanted was in on the case. No one knew the city like they did. No one had their contacts. Maybe they could help. They could almost taste it.

  They had planned it the night before: once things got started, Mike would do the talking. For a while he’d been the community-relations officer, so he was used to speeches. Mike had rehearsed what he was going to say. That morning, he began, “We’ve got a street drug problem here just like every city in America, you know? And when we started working on that more and more, we started gettin’ more and more information of a drug nature, you know? And the information we got was outrageous. That, you know, this guy’s dealin’ twenty kilos a month, this guy is dealin’ fifty kilos a month, just wild stuff.”

  “Stuff that we didn’t believe,” said Rudy.

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “But as we found out more and more, we heard this stuff more and more, and then the out-of-state cars, you know, it all started to fit.”

  Mike told of Rudy’s talk with Ralph Mott, the stories from the kids he busted, the skittish man at the Sportsman and the lab results. He told about Rudy’s banker friend and the girl with coke on her nose. He told them about the Snowman and about Carlos Arroyave and Roberto Tabares and the Gomez brothers. He saved the meeting with the woman for last.

  “So we asked you to come here…We don’t know what you can do to help us, but we’d like to get some help, because Rudy and I would sure like to do something about this.”

  McCarthy’s face betrayed little. Mike finished, feeling lame, as if it all added up to very little.

  Then McCarthy spoke: “Not only is what you have told me true, but there’s more.”

  Exhaust clouds on a winter night are enough to give you away. So Mike and Rudy had to freeze in the car outside the Newport Creamery in Pawtucket. Another night of backup.

  The DEA agent had pulled into the lot some time before, waiting to meet a dealer and set up another buy. Mike and Rudy were parked about a hundred yards off, away from the tall spotlights on the street side. Their job was the same unglamorous task they had performed nearly every night for the previous two months: wait, watch, stay inconspicuous, be there in case the agent needs help.

  It was now January 1984. At that first meeting with McCarthy, Mike and Rudy had learned that the DEA had two agents in Central Falls. The feds had been feeling their way in. As McCarthy listened that morning, he could see months of dangerous undercover work spared—Mike and Rudy could guide his people. If he had a face, they had a name, an address, a contact, a relative. Working together, they had made progress in two months. One of McCarthy’s agents, Pegg Cafolla, had already made buys from Arroyave and Tabares, two of the biggest people they were after. In a few months, if all went well, they’d be ready for a sweeping bust.

  This meeting at the Creamery was late. When the toes and fingers were numb, Mike and Rudy decided to dash inside just to get warm, pick up coffee. It would only take a minute. But once inside—“Charlene!”

  “Mike!”

  “Paula!”

  “Michael!”

  Cousins. Rudy was used to it. How many first cousins can one man have? There were times it seemed like Central Falls was two-thirds Colombian and one-third Whites and Doughertys. These were Whites.

  “This is my partner and my friend, Rudy Legenza,” Mike said.

  Rudy shook hands with the two women. “We got to be getting right back out, Mike.”

  “Okay, just a second. I haven’t seen Paula and Charlene in years!” The Whites started catching up on family history. “…And then Danny, he’s three now,” Mike was saying.

  “Three!” the woman exclaimed.

  “Danny plays Star Wars with Michael, who’s six—”

  “Uh, Mike,” Rudy said. He edged toward the door and looked out. The agent’s car was gone! Rudy pushed through the doors and ran around the corner of the building. Gone!

  “Mike!” Rudy called. “No car! Let’s go!”

  They sp
rinted back out to the lot. All sorts of drastic scenarios were going through Rudy’s head. But before they got to the car, they spotted the agent again. He had moved to a spot under a light. Mike and Rudy climbed sheepishly back in their car.

  “From now on,” Rudy said, “I’ll get coffee myself.”

  Mike had to push his way through the dancers, noise, and smoke of the Sportsman to get back to the john. He was in uniform, in the heavy blue coat and gloves that preserved him in the cold outside. These days he had more reasons than usual to mind his own business outside, but once or twice a night he’d push his way back through the crowd when he had to take a leak. Onstage was a dance band playing rock, rumba & roll.

  In the men’s room, Mike spied six feet under one of the stall doors. Due to his extensive police training, as he would later say, “I knew something was amiss.”

  The stall door was unlocked. It pulled right open and brought Mike face-to-face with Walter Alvarez, the Snowman himself, white suit, white shirt, white shoes, white moustache and all. Two men in the stall with Walter pushed out on either side of Mike, who, in his bulky overcoat, nearly filled the doorway. They stopped before fleeing, though, and turned to see what would happen. The Snowman faced Mr. Blanco with a flat-out look of amazement. Cupped in the palm of his right hand was a tiny bit of white powder.

  A lot flashed through Mike’s mind. Walter was someone he, Rudy, and the DEA wanted. They were already setting him up to see if they could score something big. He didn’t want to arrest Walter. Not for the half gram in his hand. So he hesitated, figuring Walter would ditch the coke in the toilet. Then he could throw him against the wall and yell, “If I ever catch you with that again, I’ll throw you in jail so fast…”