The Force

by Don Winslow

  They’re city officials—the kind who award contract bids.

  That’s where the Cimino profit center is.

  The Cimino borgata gets a piece of everything—a kickback from the contractor for getting him the bid, then the concrete, the rebar, the electrical, the plumbing. Otherwise, these unions find a problem and shut the project down.

  Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO, Giuliani, the Commission case, the Windows case.

  And they were.

  Then the Towers came down.

  Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into antiterrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero. Louie used to brag they took in sixty-three million.

  Nine/eleven saved the Mafia.

  It’s not clear now who’s in charge of the Cimino family, but the smart money is on Stevie Bruno. Did ten years on a RICO case, been out three now and is moving up fast. Very insulated, lives out in Jersey, rarely comes into the city, even for a meal.

  So they’re back, although they’ll never be what they were.

  Savino signals the bartender to get Malone a drink. The bartender already knows it’s a Jameson’s straight up.

  They sit back down and go through the ritual dance—how’s the family, fine, how’s yours, all good, how’s business, you know another day another dollar behind, the usual bullshit.

  “You touch the good reverend?” Savino asks.

  “He got his turkey,” Malone says. “A couple of your people tuned up a bar owner on Lenox the other night, guy named Osborne.”

  “What, you got a monopoly on beating up moolies?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Malone says.

  “He came up light on his vig,” Savino says. “Two weeks in a row.”

  “Don’t show me up and do it on the street, where everyone sees,” Malone says. “Things are tense enough in the ‘community.’”

  “Hey, just because one of your guys capped a kid means I gotta issue some kind of hall pass?” Savino asks. “This dumb shit bets on the Knicks. The Knicks, Denny. Then he don’t pay me my money. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Just don’t do it on my beat.”

  “Jesus fuck, Merry Christmas, I’m glad you came in tonight,” Savino says. “Anything else squeezing your shoes?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  “Thank you, St. Anthony.”

  “You get a good envelope?”

  Savino shrugs. “You want to know something . . . you and me? The bosses these days, they’re cheap cocksuckers. This guy, he has a house in Jersey overlooks the river, a tennis court . . . He barely comes into the city anymore. He did ten inside, okay, I get it . . . but he thinks that means he gets to eat with both hands, no one minds. You know something? I mind.”

  “Lou, shit, there are ears in here.”

  “Fuck them,” Savino says. He orders another drink. “Here’s something might interest you, you know what I heard? I heard that maybe all the smack from that Pena bust made you a rock star didn’t make it to the evidence locker.”

  Jesus Christ, is everyone talking about this? “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Savino says. “Because it would have shown up on the street already, and it hasn’t. Someone went French Connection, I guess they’re sitting on it.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t guess.”

  “You’re fucking sensitive tonight,” Savino says. “I’m just saying, someone’s sitting on some weight, looking to lay it off . . .”

  Malone sets down his glass. “I gotta go.”

  “Places to be, people to see,” Savino says. “Buon Natale, Malone.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  Malone walks out onto the street. Jesus, what has Savino heard about the Pena bust? Was he just fishing, or did he know something? It’s not good, it’s going to have to be dealt with.

  Anyway, Malone thinks, the wops won’t be beating up any deadbeat ditzunes out on Lenox.

  So that’s something.

  Next.

  Debbie Phillips was three months pregnant when Billy O went down.

  Because they weren’t married (yet—Monty and Russo were all over the kid to do the right thing and he was headed in that direction), the Job wouldn’t do shit for her. Didn’t give her any recognition at Billy’s funeral—the fucking Catholic department wouldn’t give the unwed mother the folded flag, the kind words, sure as shit no survivor’s benefits, no medical. She’d wanted to do a paternity test and then sue the Job, but Malone talked her out of it.

  You don’t turn the Job over to lawyers.

  “That’s not the way we do things,” he told her. “We’ll take care of you, the baby.”

  “How?” Debbie asked.

  “You let me worry about that,” Malone said. “Anything you need, you call me. If it’s a woman thing—Sheila, Donna Russo, Yolanda Montague.”

  Debbie never reached out.

  She was an independent type anyway, not really that attached to Billy, never mind his extended family. It was a one-night stand that went permanent, despite Malone’s constant warnings that Billy should double-wrap the groceries.

  “I pulled out,” Billy told him when Debbie called with the news.

  “What are you, in high school?” Malone asked.

  Monty cuffed him in the head. “Idiot.”

  “You going to marry her?” Russo asked.

  “She don’t want to get married.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you or she wants,” Monty said. “It only matters what that child needs—two parents.”

  But Debbie, she’s one of those modern women doesn’t think she needs a man to raise a baby. Told Billy they should wait and see how their “relationship developed.”

  Then they didn’t get the chance.

  Now, she opens the door for Malone, she’s eight months and looks it. She’s not getting any help from her family out in western Pennsylvania and she don’t have anyone in New York. Yolanda Montague lives the closest so she checks in, brings groceries, goes to the doctor’s appointments when Debbie will let her, but she don’t deal with the money.

  The wives never deal with the money.

  “Merry Christmas, Debbie,” Malone says.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  She lets him in.

  Debbie is pretty and petite, so her stomach looks huge on her. Her blond hair is stringy and dirty, the apartment is a mess. She sits down on the old sofa; the television is on to the evening news.

  It’s hot in the apartment, and stuffy, but it’s always either too hot or too cold in these old apartments—no one can figure out the radiators. One of them hisses now, as if to tell Malone to fuck off if he doesn’t like it.

  He lays an envelope on the coffee table.

  Five grand.

  The decision was a no-brainer—Billy keeps drawing a full share, and when they lay off the Pena smack, he gets his share of that, too. Malone is the executor, he’ll lay it out to Debbie as he sees she needs it and can handle it. The rest will go into a college fund for Billy’s kid.

  His son won’t want for anything.

  His mom can stay at home, take care of him.

  Debbie fought him on this. “You can pay for day care. I need to work.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “It isn’t just the money,” she said. “I’d go crazy, all day here alone with a kid.”

  “You’ll feel different once he’s born.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  Now she looks at the envelope and then up at him. “White welfare.”

  “It’s not charity,” Malone says. “It’s Billy’s money.”

  “Then give it to me,” she says. “Instead of doling it out like Social Services.”

  “We take care of our own,” Malone says. He looks around the small apartment. “Are you ready for this baby? You got, I dunno, a bassinette, diapers, a changing table?”

  “Listen to you.”

  “Yolanda
can take you shopping,” Malone says. “Or if you want, we can just bring the stuff by.”

  “If Yolanda takes me shopping,” Debbie says, “I’ll look like some rich West Side bitch with a nanny. Maybe I can get her to speak in a Jamaican accent, or are they all Haitian now?”

  She’s bitter.

  Malone don’t blame her.

  She has a fling with a cop, gets knocked up, the cop gets killed and there she is—alone with her life totally fucked up. Cops and their wives telling her what to do, giving her an allowance like she’s a kid. But she is a kid, he thinks, and if I gave her Billy’s full share in one whack, she’d blow it and where would Billy’s son be?

  “You have plans for tomorrow?” he asks.

  “It’s a Wonderful Life,” she says. “The Montagues asked me, so did the Russos, but I don’t want to intrude.”

  “They were sincere.”

  “I know.” She puts her feet up on the table. “I miss him, Malone. Is that crazy?”

  “No,” Malone says. “It’s not crazy.”

  I miss him, too.

  I loved him, too.

  The Dublin House, Seventy-Ninth and Broadway.

  You go into an Irish bar on Christmas Eve, Malone thinks, what you’re going to find are Irish drunks and Irish cops or some combination thereof.

  He sees Bill McGivern standing at the crowded bar, knocking one back.

  “Inspector?”

  “Malone,” McGivern says, “I was hoping to see you tonight. What are you drinking?”

  “Same as you.”

  “Another Jameson’s,” McGivern says to the bartender. The inspector’s cheeks are flushed, making his full head of white hair look even whiter. McGivern’s one of those ruddy, full-faced, glad-handing, smiling Irishmen. A big player in the Emerald Society and Catholic Guardians. If he weren’t a cop, he’d have been a ward healer, and a damn good one.

  “You wanna get a booth?” Malone asks when the drink comes. They find one in the back and sit down.

  “Merry Christmas, Malone.”

  “Merry Christmas, Inspector.”

  They touch glasses.

  McGivern is Malone’s “hook”—his mentor, protector, sponsor. Every cop with any kind of career has one—the guy who runs interference, gets you plum assignments, looks out for you.

  And McGivern is a powerful hook. An NYPD inspector is two ranks higher than a captain and just below the chiefs. A well-placed inspector—and McGivern is—can kill a captain’s career, and Sykes knows that.

  Malone’s known McGivern since he was a little boy. The inspector and Malone’s father were in uniform together in the Six back in the day. It was McGivern talked to him a few years after his dad passed, explained a few things to him.

  “John Malone was a great cop,” McGivern said.

  “He drank,” Malone said. Yeah, he was sixteen, knew fucking everything.

  “He did,” McGivern said. “Your father and I, back in the Six, we caught eight murdered kids, all under four years of age, inside two weeks.”

  One of the children had all these little burn marks on his body, and McGivern and his dad couldn’t figure out what they were until they finally realized they matched up exactly with the mouth of a crack pipe.

  The child had been tortured and bitten his tongue off in pain.

  “So, yes,” McGivern said, “your father drank.”

  Now Malone takes an envelope from his jacket and slides it across the table. McGivern hefts the heavy envelope and says, “Merry Christmas, indeed.”

  “I had a good year.”

  McGivern shoves the envelope into his wool coat. “How’s life treating you?”

  Malone takes a sip of his whiskey and says, “Sykes is busting my hump.”

  “I can’t get him transferred,” McGivern says. “He’s the darling of the Puzzle Palace.”

  One Police Plaza.

  NYPD headquarters.

  Which has troubles of its own right now, Malone thinks.

  An FBI investigation of high-ranking officers taking gifts in exchange for favors.

  Stupid shit like trips, Super Bowl tickets, gourmet meals at trendy restaurants in exchange for getting tickets fixed, building citations squashed, even guarding assholes bringing diamonds in from overseas. One of these rich fucks got one of the marine commanders to bring his friends out to Long Island on a police boat, and an air unit guy to fly his guests to a Hamptons party in a police chopper.

  Then there’s the thing with the gun licenses.

  It’s hard to get a gun permit in New York, especially a concealed carry license. It generally requires deep background checks and personal interviews. Unless you’re rich and can lay out twenty grand to a “broker” and the “broker” bribes high-ranking cops to shortcut the process.

  The feds have one of these brokers by the nuts and he’s talking, naming names.

  Indictments pending.

  As it is, five chiefs have been relieved of duty already.

  And one killed himself.

  Drove to a street by a golf course near his house on Long Island and shot himself.

  No note.

  Genuine grief and shock waves have blasted through the upper rank of the NYPD, McGivern included.

  They don’t know who’s next—to be arrested, to swallow the gun.

  The media’s humping it like a blind dog on a sofa leg, mostly because the mayor and the commissioner are at war.

  Yeah, maybe not so much a war, Malone thinks, more like two guys on a sinking ship fighting for the last seat in the lifeboat. They’re each facing down major scandals, and their one play is to throw each other to the media sharks and hope the feeding frenzy lasts long enough to paddle away.

  Not enough bad things can happen to Hizzoner to make Malone happy, and most of his brother and sister cops share this opinion because the motherfucker throws them under the bus every chance he gets. Didn’t back them on Garner, on Gurley, on Bennett. He knows where his votes come from, so he panders to the minority community and he’s done everything but toss Black Lives Matter’s collective salad.

  But now his own ass is in a sling.

  Turns out his administration has done some favors for major political donors. There’s a shocker, Malone thinks. There’s something new in this world, except the allegations claim that the mayor and his people took it a little further—threatening to actively harm potential donors who didn’t contribute, and the New York state investigators pushing the case had an ugly word for it—extortion.

  A lawyer word for “shakedown,” which is an old New York tradition.

  The mob did it for generations—probably still do in the few neighborhoods they still control—forcing shopkeepers and bar owners to make a weekly payment for “protection” against the theft and vandalism that would otherwise come.

  The Job did it, too. Back in the day, every business owner on the block knew he’d better have an envelope ready for the beat cop on Friday, or, failing that, free sandwiches, free coffee, free drinks. From the hookers, free blow jobs, for that matter. In exchange, the cop took care of his block—checked the locks at night, moved the corner boys along.

  The system worked.

  And now Hizzoner is running his own shakedown for campaign funds and he’s come out with an almost comical defense, offering to release a list of big donors that he didn’t do favors for. There’s talk of indictments, and of the 38,000 cops on the Job, about 37,999 have volunteered to show up with the cuffs.

  Hizzoner would fire the commish, except it would look like what it is, so he needs an excuse, and any shit the mayor can throw on the Job, he’s going to shovel with both hands.

  And the commissioner, he’d be winning his fight against the mayor on points going away, if it weren’t for this scandal ripping through One P. So he needs better news, he needs headlines.

  Heroin busts and lower crime rates.

  “The mission of the Manhattan North Special Task Force hasn’t changed,” McGivern is saying. “I
don’t care what Sykes tells you, you run the zoo any way you need to. I wouldn’t want to be quoted on that, of course.”

  When Malone first went to McGivern and proposed a task force that would simultaneously address the guns and the violence, he didn’t get as much resistance as he expected.

  Homicide and Narcotics are separate units. Narcotics is its own division, run directly from One Police, and they usually don’t mix. But with almost three-quarters of homicides being drug related, that didn’t make sense, Malone argued. Same with a separate Gangs unit, because most of the drug violence was also gang violence.

  Create a single force, he said, to attack them simultaneously.

  Narcotics, Homicide, and Gangs screamed like stuck pigs. And it was true that elite units have stink on them in the NYPD.

  Mostly because they’ve been prone to corruption and over-the-top violence.

  The old Plainclothes Division back in the ’60s and ’70s gave rise to the Knapp Commission, which damn near destroyed the department. Frank Serpico was a naive asshole, Malone thinks—everyone knew you took money in Plainclothes. He went into the division anyway. He knew what he was getting into.

  Guy had a Jesus complex.

  No wonder that not a single officer in the NYPD donated blood after he was shot. Damn near destroyed the city, too. For twenty years after Knapp, the Job’s priority was fighting corruption instead of crime.

  Then it was the SIU—the Special Investigative Unit—given a free hand to operate at will throughout the city. Made some good busts, too, and made a lot of good money, ripping off dealers. They got caught, of course, and things cleaned up for a while.

  The next elite unit was SCU—the Street Crimes Unit—whose principal task was to get the guns off the street that the Knapp Commission had allowed to get there in the first place. One hundred and thirty-eight cops, all white, so good at what they did that the Job expanded the unit by a factor of four and did it too fast.

  The result was that on the night of February 4, 1999, when four SCU officers were patrolling the South Bronx, the senior man had been with the unit for only two years, the other three for three months. They had no supervisor with them, they didn’t know each other, they didn’t know the neighborhood.