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

by Mark Bowden

  But the Snowman froze. He stood there with the stuff in his hand and gaped. With the others watching, Mike had no choice but to arrest him. As Mike led him through the crowd to the front door, the Snowman’s admirers pressed close, dismayed. “Oh, Blanco! What are jou doeen? What are jou doeen with Walter?” Mike shared their chagrin.

  After Walter was taken off, Mike sprinted to Kentucky Fried to phone Rudy. The call got him out of bed.

  “Rudy, I blew it.”

  “Blew what?”

  “Walter. I arrested Walter Alvarez.”

  “For what?”

  “A half a gram.”

  Rudy was washing his car in the garage under police headquarters the night the Gomez brothers, Jaime and Jorge, blew themselves up.

  “Rudy, you better get over here,” the fire captain said on the phone.

  “You’re gonna want to see this.”

  It was a crisp February night. Rudy’s black Chevy Malibu was still wet, shining in the streetlamps, as he drove down blocks of dark tenements to Foundry Street. He saw the hoses when he turned the corner.

  In the upstairs apartment, Rudy had to keep moving or the floor would burn through his tennis shoes. Smoke stung his eyes. He held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. The walls and ceiling were scorched black. The air was choked with smoke and steam. It seemed like the whole place was sweating. And there was this foul odor.

  The captain took Rudy back to a bedroom. There was an overturned mattress and bedspring to one side of the room, a dripping bureau on the other. On the bureau was the biggest bag of coke Rudy had ever seen. It must have been a pound. He had never seen much more than a gram. This must have been worth a hundred grand on the street.

  In the kitchen, globs of white paste stuck to the floor and walls, and the odor was particularly strong. As they pieced it together later, the Gomez brothers had been working one of the tricks of their trade. Cocaine sold as powder is more readily suspected of having been cut, or diluted, than cocaine in rock form. A quick test can easily measure the purity of either powder or rock, but most small buyers don’t carry testing equipment and tend to be in a hurry. So even though the powder in the bedroom tested almost 100 percent pure, the Gomez brothers had been turning it into rocks.

  They were mixing powdered coke with acetone (which accounted for the odor) to make a white paste, then warming the paste under heat lamps to evaporate the acetone and harden the paste into snowball-sized rocks. Acetone, however, is highly flammable, and the brothers’ lab technique was flawed.

  Jaime and Jorge turned themselves in the next morning. Rudy thought, Some people just can’t wait to get busted.

  Special agent Pegg Cafolla was a looker. Before joining the DEA, she had worked as a radio reporter in Providence, where she had known Mike’s brother. She had thick brown hair and big brown eyes and a street-smart way of talking. She didn’t mind a little excitement. This Central Falls assignment was her first.

  On the day before the big bust—it was April 16, 1984—Pegg’s job was to get back in touch with the two Colombians she’d been buying from for nearly six months, and arrange the big buy for the next day.

  Pegg drove to Lincoln that afternoon. She would see Arroyave first. Carlos was a small, scraggly man with deep lines in his face. You could kid around with Carlos, make him laugh. Pegg felt more relaxed with him than with Tabares, who made her nervous. Tabares was a big, broad man, all business. He got pissed if she showed up five minutes late for a meeting. Tabares had these small eyes that were so brown they seemed black. Pegg always felt like he could see right through her, could see DEA stenciled in pink right there on the inside of her skull.

  She slowed in front of Arroyave’s big brick apartment building, turned down the driveway, and followed it back to the parking lot in the rear. Carlos’s apartment was on the first floor. Pegg could feel her heart pounding. Carlos answered the door holding his newborn baby. He smiled, every inch the house-husband, a diaper slung over one shoulder of his blue button-down shirt. He showed Pegg into the living room. All the furniture looked new.

  Pegg leaned forward on the sofa, making it clear she did not intend to stay long. Carlos sat down with the baby in the lounge chair.

  “I’d like to pick up a key or two tomorrow,’ she said, “because, you know, I can move it. I’m going to a party tonight, and I should be able to make arrangements there.”

  “Well, I won’t have two keys until Thursday, when I get another shipment in, but right now I can give you one.” His accent was heavy. Since the whole idea was to grab Arroyave with the cocaine, Pegg didn’t want to buy now.

  “I can’t right now, Carlos. I’ve only got half the money with me.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you take it anyway, and if you can move it, just pay me tomorrow.”

  “What time should I come by?”

  “How about noon?”

  Pegg wanted to avoid making the bust there because of the baby.

  “Why don’t we have lunch,” she suggested. “I’ll meet you at the Dragon Villa.”

  “Okay, great.”

  Arroyave got up, still holding the baby, and walked down a hallway to the bathroom. Pegg walked out to the kitchen. He returned moments later with a blue plastic box. There was a kilo of cocaine packed in a plastic bag inside. Pegg took it out just to turn it over in her hand admiringly. It would be worth as much as several hundred thousand dollars cut and broken down. Pegg promised him $30,000.

  Arroyave fetched her a grocery bag, and she walked out without paying a cent. She was still in a mild state of shock when she drove up alongside her partner’s car in a shopping-center lot a few miles away. Both agents rolled down their windows.

  “Did you order up?” asked Rick Scovel, the other agent.

  “Yeah, I ordered up.”

  “Where do we pick it up?”

  “He gave it to me.”

  “He what?”

  Pegg just reached over with the brown bag and dropped it in his lap.

  It was still dark the next morning when Rudy picked up Mike. They drove to Providence for the six a.m. meeting.

  At DEA headquarters, just across the street from the big gray U.S. courthouse, there was an alphabet of feds—DEA, FBI, U.S. Marshals, and INS agents—and cops from several nearby towns. They sat down in a large conference room. McCarthy explained that they had twelve targets, with Arroyave and Tabares at the top of the list.

  A “Class One dealer,” in DEA terminology, is someone who handles at least four kilos of coke a month and has at least four people working for him. In the Boston metro area of more than three million people, the DEA could identify ten Class One dealers. In the Central Falls area, population maybe 50,000, they could now identify twenty-five Class One dealers. Ten of the twelve people targeted this day were Class One, McCarthy said. All were likely to be armed and dangerous. The agents were divided into pairs. Rudy and Mike split up. They would be bit players this day, but they were unquestionably the happiest cops in the room.

  Rudy was backup for the Tabares bust. He and his DEA partner waited in a car at one corner of the Almac supermarket lot in Pawtucket and watched as Tabares drove up, right on time at ten a.m., rolling his big white Oldsmobile up alongside Cafolla’s car.

  “Got it?” Pegg asked.

  “Yeah,” Tabares answered.

  “Do you have another one, Roberto? I really need two.”

  This had been prearranged. Pegg had ordered a pound from Tabares the day before, but the agents were unsure where he kept his stash. The DEA hoped Tabares would go off and fetch another pound. There were agents around the neighhorhood, to see where he’d go. Mike was in a car outside of Tabares’s house.

  Tabares took the bait and drove off. When he returned a few minutes later, he was in a different car and was not alone. This time a woman was with him.

  Pegg was startled when they pulled up. Tabares stopped his car a few spaces away. The woman in the front seat looked Colombian. Her small feature
s seemed set in stone.

  Pegg stepped out of her car and walked around to speak with Tabares. He was nervous. He gestured to the space between him and the woman, to a box wrapped up like a birthday present, with colorful paper, a bow, and balloons. Next to the box was a plain brown paper bag; Pegg assumed this was the second pound.

  “Just a sec,” she said, and walked back to her car to get the money. She leaned inside to unlock the trunk. Lifting the trunk lid was the signal for backup to start moving in.

  Pegg strode directly to Tabares and handed him the money bag, but at just that moment he spotted the cars. He pushed the money bag back into Pegg’s hands. His leg went for the accelerator. Seconds went like long minutes for Pegg. She had her gun under her sweater, stuck in the waistband at the small of her back, but she was sweating so much that the cold gun was starting to slide down her pants. Pegg dropped the money bag and drew her gun.

  “Get your hands up! Los policías!” she shouted. Tabares spoke English, but Pegg had to make this stone-faced woman understand. Tabares’s hands shot up. The woman hesitated; one of her hands crept behind her back.

  “Get your fuckin’ hands up or you’re history,” Pegg said, hoping her tone would penetrate the language barrier.

  Slowly, the woman raised her hands. When Rudy and the others ran up, they found a pistol on the seat behind her.

  That was the worst moment of Mike and Rudy’s day. The rest was clockwork: ten targets, ten collars. Arroyave surrendered in his car with Pegg’s second kilo of cocaine and a hurt look on his face. More searches that day turned up twelve pounds of coke and $105,000 in cash.

  It was the money that got to Mike and Rudy, amazed them, even months afterward, even now, a year and a half later, with more than a hundred fifty cocaine arrests on the books in Central Falls, with forty of those major dealers, twenty-four of them convicted (one acquitted), five on the lam out of the country, and more than a hundred cases pending.

  Their $200 investigation blew apart the biggest coke center in the Northeast, one of the biggest in the country. It hauled in over a hundred kilos of pure Colombian cocaine. But still, it was the money: it turned out their little town was moving a cool $100 million a year.

  And money is what Mike remembers from the day of the big bust. He was in Tabares’s bedroom and spotted a thick package, wrapped in duct tape and aluminum foil, under the dealer’s dresser. Got to be a kilo, he thought. But when he tore at the edge of the package to peek, he found instead cash, more than he’d ever seen. It counted up to $47,000.

  He remembers that number, forty-seven. Later that day, after they’d wrapped it up, he and Rudy invited the feds to a saloon down the street. Flush with Irish goodwill, Mike stepped to the bar and called for beers. He dug in a pocket and pulled out his money—then scanned the poor scatter of coin on the bar. He was exactly forty-seven cents short.

  So he had to bum it from Rudy.

  Carlos Arroyave was fined $30,000 and is serving a ten-year sentence in federal prison.

  Roberto Tabares is serving a nine-year sentence in federal prison.

  Walter (the Snowman) Alvarez was convicted of cocaine possession and given a one-year sentence. While in custody, he was convicted of a prior rape charge and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  Jaime Gomez is serving a seven-year sentence in federal prison.

  Jorge Gomez is serving a five-year sentence in federal prison.

  Mickey Mouse and the American kid on Dexter Street were not prosecuted.

  The Colombian who sold the gram to Mickey Mouse was convicted and given a one-year suspended sentence.

  Ralph Mott is holding down a steady job. His name was changed in this story to protect his identity.

  Special agent Pegg Cafolla is working in Detroit.

  Mike White and Rudy Legenza are still patrolling the one square mile of Central Falls, Rhode Island—now with avid cooperation from the DEA, the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Interpol.

  COPS ON THE TAKE

  JULY 1984

  This piece was my first extended work of narrative nonfiction, and tells the story of how a major police corruption scandal unfolded in Philadelphia. It ran in four issues of the Inquirer Sunday Magazine. When the first part appeared, it was illustrated with a cover photograph of a Philadelphia police badge altered to show a row of dollar signs at the bottom instead of a badge number. Large numbers of Philadelphia police marched down Broad Street in front of The Inquirer building to protest this defacing of their departmental symbol. It was by far a larger display of outrage than any prompted by the revelations of corrupt police behavior.

  Waiting for the fat man with the moustache on the corner of Thirteenth and Vine, Donald Hersing pulled on a Marlboro and dug his chin deeper into the upturned collar of his tan leather jacket. It was a cold March afternoon, 1981. Out on Vine Street rumbled ten loud lanes of traffic. Steam rising from sewers and manhole lids diffused to a sunny silver sheen and disappeared. From where he stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot on the icy sidewalk, Hersing could look up over three cluttered blocks of rooftops to City Hall, straight to the stone gaze of old William Penn.

  The fat man with the moustache had stopped by the new whorehouse on this corner a few afternoons ago. He had spoken to Cinnamon, the manager. He said he was a police detective. He knew what was going on here. If she wanted to do business in Philadelphia, she would have to see the right people, do the right thing. Cinnamon understood. This statuesque, busty redhead had worked in the city a long time. She knew how the game was played. That was why Hersing had hired her.

  I don’t own the place, she had told the detective, I just run it. You want to talk to Don. She promised to pass the message along.

  Hersing was to meet the detective in front of Frank’s Tavern, which was next door. Hersing flicked one cigarette to the pavement and lit another. Cinnamon had explained what to expect. He had $300 in his right pants pocket. He hoped that would be enough to keep the heat off his whorehouse, but just in case, he had $200 more in the other pocket. He was cold. Fists of gritty air from passing trucks bumped him off balance and steeped him in the stale odor of spent fuel.

  This whole thing annoyed him. Even before it had opened, several weeks earlier, Hersing had lost interest in the whorehouse (or “nude modeling studio,” as he preferred to call it). He felt he had been roped into it. During the first weeks he had hardly set foot in the place. There were several reasons for his unease, but the biggest was pride. Pimping didn’t fit his self-image. He had no moral qualms. And the idea of easy money was appealing. But Hersing felt irksomely amateurish, out of his element. Even if he had liked the idea of being a pimp, he knew, as he put it, “I wouldn’t make a pimple on a pimp’s ass.”

  So he had limited his involvement with 1245 Vine Street to stopping in late at night to pick up cash. Cinnamon complained that she might just as well hang the money out on the end of a long stick and let Hersing drive by and grab it, he seemed so loath to enter the place. For practically the whole first year of operation, profits from the whorehouse would primarily go to repay the $20,000 his partner had put up to rent the place and renovate it. Hersing himself was making next to nothing at that point, which contributed mightily to his resentment about even having to drive in each night and pick up the money.

  And now this! Was he going to have to deal with the Philadelphia police, too?

  These things turned in his mind as he waited for the fat man with the moustache. He longed for his old life in the Caribbean. But Hersing’s fond memory of the tropics slipped away as swiftly as his breath, a mingled vapor of smoke and steam, vanished before this gray winter vista of Center City.

  His contact pulled up in a blue Chevy Nova. Stepping into the car, Hersing introduced himself to a small round man with a round face and a gruff, up-from-the-streets Philly manner. The detective shook his hand and smiled. He said his name was George Woods. He was a vice officer assigned to the central police division. Woods did most of the
talking. He kept telling Hersing to relax. Once things were taken care of, there would be nothing to worry about. Just to make conversation, Hersing asked him about the car, and Woods told him that it was a standard city police undercover vehicle.

  Woods drove to a diner at Fifth and Spring Garden Streets. The diner was a classic affair, a chrome car with horizontal red stripes set on a brick base. Inside, business was easing toward the slow middle of afternoon. The air was still heavy with the odor of a hundred quick lunches. The two men slid into a booth of slick turquoise Naugahyde. There were mini-jukes beside each green Formica table, but the rock music that filled this joint jangled from a small radio a waitress had perched up on the wall of steel kitchenry behind the counter. Hersing ordered a cup of coffee.

  He sipped it as the vice officer explained how things would go. The scam was as old as police work. There would have to be busts. But if Hersing paid up each month, Woods would make it easy on him. It sounded like a good deal. It would be wrong to say that Hersing had expected this, but none of what Woods said surprised him. He didn’t know the ropes in Philadelphia well, but Woods evidently did. Hersing listened with interest as the detective explained that the district attorney’s office did not bother prosecuting prostitutes. It was a waste of time and tax dollars. Whoring never earned trials or convictions, but arrests alone were serious harassment. The threat of arrest was enough to discourage amateurs. A full-scale brothel bust would close down business for at least a day, and might send half of the shop in for booking. Whores might wait for hours in a jail cell before their pimp showed up to bail them out. It meant costly delays and attorneys’ fees, and it tended to frighten off the clientele.