Sons of the City

by Scott Flander

  Until a year or so before, Paulie was just another older white cop who complained all the time about the Department’s changing complexion. He believed affirmative action was ruining the Department, filling the ranks with minority cops—particularly females—who lacked the training, the dedication, and the instincts of old-school guys like him. He would barely speak to Yvonne, who was black, and to Marisol, who was Latino, and so they in turn wanted nothing to do with him.

  One night, though, Yvonne and Marisol saved his life. He had been chasing a drug dealer, and the dealer turned on him and somehow got Paulie’s gun away. He was about to shoot Paulie in the head when Yvonne and Marisol ran up and together knocked the guy to the ground. They said it was no big deal, but he never forgot.

  And so when he heard Marisol’s call for help over the radio, he pushed his car in that direction as fast as it would go. He was four blocks away, flying through the intersection of 48th and Spruce, when he hit the old man.

  Paulie had the light, even the most angry witnesses later admitted to that. But it was dark, and Paulie’s car seemed to come out of nowhere. And it wasn’t even Paulie hitting the man that people felt was so outrageous, so inexcusable. It was what happened after that.

  Paulie saw the man at the last second, an old black guy with a cane, stepping out quickly into the street. Paulie swerved to the left, hard, but he was too close, and the right front corner of his car caught the man and simply flicked him into the air. He was so light, Paulie barely even felt the impact.

  There wasn’t much Paulie remembered after that. Later, he recalled losing control of the car, and struggling desperately to keep from slamming broadside into a streetlight. But he had no memory of the crash, or of calling for help, dazed and bloody, before he passed out.

  We now had two assist-officer calls at the same time. There were a lot of cars coming in, everyone in the district, and they should have split up, fifty-fifty, on the two assists. But there was chaos on the radio, and for the first few minutes, Donna and Buster were the only ones who arrived to help Paulie.

  What they saw when they pulled up at 48th and Spruce was a police car wrapped around a streetlight, its windshield cracked from the inside, its red and blue lights still flashing.

  They didn’t see the old man—he had been hurtled over a row of parked cars, onto the sidewalk, out of sight. They didn’t even know he was there. And so while life slipped out of the old man, Donna and Buster stayed with Paulie. It wasn’t until a woman finally ran up to them, screaming and pointing, that they realized what had happened.

  Of course, the neighbors didn’t know that. All they saw was two white cops helping one of their own, ignoring the black man that cops had just run down. And still it got worse. When the Rescue unit pulled up, the paramedics saw the same thing Donna and Buster had—the police car. And they ran to help Paulie first.

  Word spread quickly through the neighborhood that night and the next day. There was no way the black community was going to forgive us—particularly after the papers reported that the old man had died on his way to the hospital. It never would have happened, people said, if the old man had been white.

  It turned out that Paulie wasn’t seriously hurt, and that Yvonne and Marisol were OK as well. But the people of West Philadelphia didn’t care about that. We were the enemy.

  That’s when the first beer bottles started getting thrown at passing police cars, exploding onto windshields with the sound of gunshots.

  FIFTEEN

  That night, Michelle wanted to see me. Could I meet her at her old apartment up in the Northeast? I got off at eleven. I told her it would have to be after that.

  “That’s great,” she said over the phone. “I’m really looking forward to seeing you again.”

  I got there around eleven-thirty. It was a garden-apartment complex off Roosevelt Boulevard, one of those generic, three-story, brown-brick jobs that could be anywhere in the country—Atlanta, Minneapolis, San Diego. This one happened to be across the street from a video store that also sold handmade water ice from a window.

  The apartment was on the third floor. I rapped on the door a couple of times with the little door knocker, and Michelle answered.

  “Hi, Eddie,” she said, giving me a hug. “Wait’ll you hear, I’ve got a great story to tell you.”

  I wanted to say I had missed her, I wanted to kiss her, but she was already leading me into the living room.

  “C’mon in, I want you to meet Theresa.”

  Michelle was still dressed, but Theresa was in a pink terry cloth bathrobe. She had one of those faces you call cute—sort of big, round, playful eyes, pug nose, cheerful high-school smile.

  Michelle introduced us and we shook hands, and I could tell Theresa was thinking, So this is the guy she was telling me about. I wondered what Michelle had said. Theresa got me a bottle of beer and then disappeared into a bedroom, and I sat down on the soft pink couch.

  Michelle was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a pocket, and though her hair was still curly, she looked less Westmount and more Northeast, more at home. I caught a faint scent of her perfume. It reminded me of the night we met, she must have been wearing it then.

  “Eddie, you’re never going to believe what happened,” she said, plopping down across from me in a padded white swivel chair. “But how have you been?”

  “Good,” I said. “I’ve been fine.”

  “How’s Nick doing, any better?” I had been keeping her posted on the trouble I was having with him.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m still pretty worried about him.”

  She nodded, concerned.

  “So,” I said, “what’s this thing that happened?”

  She popped up out of her chair and walked over to her purse on the kitchen table.

  “You’re going to love this, Eddie.” She opened the purse, took out a plain white envelope, and walked back over and handed it to me. I looked inside as she sat back down on the chair—the envelope was full of hundreds.

  “There’s three thousand dollars in there,” she said proudly.

  “You steal this?” I smiled. I expected her to smile back, but she was thinking about my question.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But you can tell me what you think.”

  A couple of mornings before, she said, Bravelli was going through the Philadelphia Post, looking for the latest story on the racial tension in West Philadelphia.

  “Mickey said—”

  “Bravelli,” I corrected.

  Michelle shook her head. “All right, Bravelli said what he’d really like to see are riots.”

  “Riots?”

  “Yeah, he’s hoping all this anti-police stuff is going to get out of hand.”

  “Because he doesn’t like cops.”

  “Well, yeah, but he says that if you put national attention on West Philadelphia, the black Mafia will just fade away.” “Interesting theory.”

  Eventually, Bravelli started reading the paper’s gossip column, by Jay Bender. One of the items was that some Japanese investors were considering buying Bikini Planet, one of the waterfront clubs on the Delaware. Bender said the “rumored” price for the club was $3 million, and mentioned that the Japanese were staying at the Fitler Hotel while they were making up their minds.

  “He was looking at that paper all morning. You could see his mind working, he was coming up with something.”

  “All morning,” I repeated. “Where was this, at the clubhouse?”

  “No, no,” she said, “at his house. Anyway—”

  “Was this like really early in the morning?” I asked.

  Michelle looked at me. “Are you asking whether I spent the night there?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Is that what you really think of me?”

  “No, but …”

  “Look, I didn’t spend the night at his house, and I’m not sleeping with him. I told you, that’s one of the reasons he respects me.”
/>   “And he’s stopped pressuring you?”

  “No, he still is. I think he can’t quite believe he’s got a girlfriend he doesn’t sleep with. It’s like, this couldn’t possibly happen. I’m sure he’d never admit it to anyone.”

  “I see. So he considers you his official girlfriend.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, but I knew Michelle couldn’t miss it.

  “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

  “Of course, Michelle. What do you think?”

  She relaxed a little and smiled. “You’re funny, you know that, Eddie?”

  “Yeah, I’m a regular laugh riot.”

  Michelle smiled at me for a while longer. Then, as if the last conversation had never taken place, went on with her story.

  After Bravelli had finished reading Bender’s column, he went into the next room and talked on the phone for about half an hour. When he came back he asked her if she wanted to make an easy few thousand dollars.

  “Doing what?” Michelle had asked.

  “You got to say yes first,” said Bravelli. “You got to agree before I can tell you what it is.”

  “That’s pretty stupid,” said Michelle. “Who would go for that?”

  Bravelli just gave her a blank look and said, “Well, we all do.”

  “Could you at least give me a hint?” Michelle asked.

  Bravelli started laughing. “A hint? You want a hint? What do you think this is, a fuckin’ game show?”

  That made Michelle furious.

  “I told him he couldn’t talk to me like that. I said, ‘You treat me with respect, or I’m gone.’ He got very apologetic, and said he’d never do it again.”

  Bravelli told Michelle he had worked out a “genius plan.” Was she interested?

  Michelle asked whether it was illegal.

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” Bravelli yelled. “Of course it’s illegal. How you expect us to make any money?”

  “That’s it,” Michelle told him. “I’m out of here.” She got up and started walking out the door.

  “But he called you back.”

  “Of course.”

  “Suppose he had just let you go?”

  “He wouldn’t have done that, Eddie. He’s never been in this situation before. He’s never had a woman who’s forced him to act like a regular person, instead of some image that he has to live up to.”

  “Mickey Bravelli could never be a regular person.”

  “Part of him is, though. And I think he wants someone to help him bring that out. He knows he’s not going to ever do it himself.”

  “Oh, my heart aches for the guy.”

  Michelle rolled her eyes, then continued. After she agreed to go along with the plan, whatever it was, Bravelli got on the phone and told Frank Canaletto to come over.

  When he arrived, Bravelli finally laid out his idea. He wanted to persuade the Japanese investors to forget about Bikini Planet, and to instead buy Jumpin’ Jiminy’s, the club on the waterfront that he and Michelle went to all the time.

  They’d pose as the owners, get the Japanese to agree to a sale, then take their deposit check and disappear. It’d be up to the real owners to deal with the mess that followed.

  “These Japanese, they should go for Jumpin’ Jiminy’s,” Bravelli told Michelle. “It’s newer. They like new stuff.”

  “How are you going to get them to believe you own the club?” Michelle asked.

  Bravelli smiled at her. “You and Frankie.”

  Canaletto, he said, would play the role of the owner of Jumpin’ Jiminy’s. He’d call up the Japanese at the Fitler and invite them to take a look at the club.

  Michelle’s job was to pose as the club’s manager and give the Japanese a tour of the place, sort of a sales pitch.

  “Having a woman in this is what’s gonna make it work,” Bravelli told her. “These Japanese don’t know how to deal with American women, it just confuses ‘em.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Michelle asked.

  “I read it somewhere.”

  Michelle told Bravelli she probably wasn’t the right person for the job.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Bravelli. “All you got to say is, ‘Here’s the friggin’ restaurant. Here’s the friggin’ bar. Here’s the friggin’ outdoor deck. That water there’s the friggin’ Delaware River.'”

  “What about the real manager?”

  Bravelli told her not to worry about that, either. He knew the assistant manager, that’s who he was talking to on the phone that morning. The club’s manager had the night off, and the assistant manager would let Michelle and Canaletto take over.

  Canaletto picked up the phone and called someone he knew at the hotel to get the names of the Japanese, and then rang their room. They agreed to take a look at Jiminy’s, and Bravelli sent a black stretch limo to pick them up. It turned out there were three of them, an older guy and his two sons.

  Michelle, wearing a blue silk dress, met them at Jumpin’ Jiminy’s front door.

  “Bravelli buy you the dress?” I asked Michelle.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, the father didn’t speak any English at all, but the sons were very fluent.” Michelle said she showed them around, and as she did, she called all the bartenders and waiters and waitresses by name.

  “How’d you know who they were?” I asked.

  “It was easy—they all had nameplates, like cops.”

  The Japanese seemed very impressed, and asked to take a look at the books. Michelle led them to the back, to the manager’s office, where Canaletto was sitting behind the desk. Canaletto opened up the books for them, and handed them the report of an accounting firm that showed Jumpin’ Jiminy’s to be in great financial shape. The assistant manager had laid all the stuff out in advance.

  Then, Canaletto and the Japanese started haggling. Bravelli had no idea how much the club cost, but he figured that if Bikini Planet was going for $3 million, Jumpin’ Jiminy’s was worth at least that much. So he told Canaletto to offer a better deal than Bikini Planet—$2.7 million.

  The Japanese took the bait. They first offered $2.4 million, and the two sides finally settled on $2.6 million. The Japanese evidently thought they were getting an unbelievable deal. During the day Bravelli had got one of his lawyers to draw up papers for the sale, and the Japanese were ready to sign them on the spot.

  “Canaletto was such a pro,” Michelle told me. “I knew he was making it up as he went along, but after a while, even I started believing him.”

  The Japanese agreed to make a 10 percent deposit— $270,000—to be put into an escrow account. Canaletto told them to make the check to a title insurance company that was actually a bogus firm set up by Bravelli. One of the sons wrote out the check, on a New York bank. Then, both Canaletto and Michelle escorted the father and his two sons to Jumpin’ Jiminy’s front entrance, where the stretch limo was waiting to take them back to the hotel.

  The moment it was out of sight, Goop pulled up in the Seville, and they all got the hell out of there.

  Goop took them right to Lucky’s, where Bravelli was waiting to start the celebration. They all sat at their regular table, and Bravelli ordered two bottles of Dom Pérignon. When Canaletto handed over the check, Bravelli actually kissed it.

  “I’ll deposit it tomorrow morning,” said Bravelli. “It should clear in a couple of days.”

  Everybody was drinking champagne and laughing, and then Canaletto’s cell phone rang. It was the Japanese, calling from the hotel. Canaletto didn’t say anything, he just listened, growing more and more angry.

  Finally, he yelled into the phone, “We still got your check.” The Japanese guy said something else, and the veins started popping out in Canaletto’s forehead. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, and pushed the button that ended the call.

  “We all waited,” said Michelle. “Finally he calmed down and said,
‘Those little Japanese fuckers are trying to fuck us over.'”

  The phone call, said Canaletto, was from one of the sons. If Jumpin’ Jiminy’s didn’t give the Japanese $10,000 in cash, they’d go to Jay Bender at the Post and say they backed out of the deal because of rats.

  “Rats?” said Bravelli.

  “Yeah,” Canaletto said, and then went into a Japanese accent: “We going to say big rats. Dirty rats. Run all over restaurant. Come right out of water, eat food in kitchen. No one ever come to restaurant again.”

  “They didn’t see any rats,” Michelle said. “I was with them the whole time.”

  “Of course they didn’t see no fuckin’ rats,” Canaletto said. “They just want the ten thousand dollars.”

  “We have their check,” said Goop.

  “Check no good,” Canaletto said in his Japanese accent. “Check never any good.”

  “Those motherfuckers are fuckin’ scammin’ us,” said Bravelli.

  “Can you fuckin’ believe it?” said Canaletto.

  “Who the fuck do they think they are?” said Bravelli.

  Michelle said they sat around the table, pissed as hell, trying to figure out what to do. Canaletto wanted to go over to the hotel and kill them. Bravelli thought for a while, then asked Michelle if the Japanese had mentioned whether they had already looked at Bikini Planet.

  “They said they went over there three days ago.”

  “Tell you what,” he said to her. “You stay here, have a nice dinner. We’ll be back in a little while.”

  An hour later, Bravelli, Canaletto, and Goop came back into Lucky’s, smiling and looking very proud of themselves.

  “More Dom Pérignon,” Bravelli said as the waiter held out his chair. “We’re going to finish the celebration.”

  Bravelli described what had happened. The three of them had gone to the hotel and instructed the Japanese to give them the cash they got from Bikini Planet. Bravelli’s hunch was that the Japanese had also used the same extortion scheme on Bikini Planet, and may have already got the money.