On the night of June 22, 2006, down on the promenade of Brooklyn Heights, families laughed and played and ate pizza and ice cream. The movie shoot in Cobble Hill was over, and Spider-Man slung his last web out of town.
Down under the Brooklyn Bridge, a newlywed couple held hands and had their picture taken.
In the neighborhood of Sunset Park, it was quiet on 42nd Street. The gates were pulled low on the entrance to Sweet Cherry. The lights were off, the deejay booth was silent, the bar was dry.
“It wasn’t pretty, and neither were the girls,” says Jorge. “But it was loud and it was fun, you know what I’m saying?”
He crushes his empty coffee cup, strolls to the corner, and flips it into a garbage can.
“I’m going to miss this.” Jorge looks at me, then the club. As he walks off, he says, “Take it easy, my friend.”
I think, Remorse—for a strip club?
* * *
EDITORS’ NOTE: Some of the information in this essay was originally reported in “The Nine Lives of a Topless Bar: Complaints Hit a Wall of Law” by Michael Brick (New York Times, May 31, 2006) and “Strip Parlor Closes as Part of Plea Deal” by Michael Brick (New York Times, June 21, 2006).
THE GHETTO NEVER SLEEPS, MISTER POLICEMAN
BY ROBERT LEUCI
Atlantic Yards
My father was born and raised in East New York, on Hull Street and Hopkinson Avenue, one block off Fulton. He’d tell you he came from Brownsville; that’s the way he chose to remember it, and he spoke of his neighborhood devotedly.
The only member of his family born in this country, Pop was one hell of a ballplayer and a devoted follower of the socialist and East Harlem congressman, Vito Marcantonio. Pop loved Brownsville and was proud of its socialist history. When I became a cop we hardly ever discussed politics; in the 1960s, we hardly spoke at all.
In the back of my mind where memories flourish, I often think of Brownsville. As a kid growing up in Ozone Park—Pop thought Queens, just across the Bayside and Acacia cemeteries from Brooklyn, was best for us—I went every weekend to the street markets of Brownsville to shop with my mother. Her name was Lucy and she called Brownsville “Jew-town.”
One summer Sunday morning, I was playing stickball with my buddy Norman Bliestien. My mother drove by the playground to pick me up. In those days, going Sunday-morning shopping with my mother was at least as important as, say, going to the Crossbay Theater with the neighborhood guys to watch a movie. Or possibly my first sexual experience.
“Normie, I have to go shopping with my mom,” I tell him. “I gotta go.”
“Where you going?”
“Jew-town.”
“Where?” says Normie.
“Jew-town in Brooklyn. Pitkin Avenue, Stone Avenue. Down there.”
“That’s Brownsville. What are you, a moron?”
I’d always thought that Jew-town was the name of the neighborhood, like Ozone Park where we lived, or Richmond Hill or maybe Polack Alley in Woodhaven. I was ten years old, so what did I know?
Brownsville in those years was awesome. On Belmont Avenue—Stone and Pitkin too—there were rows of pushcarts heavy with vegetables and fruits and pistachio nuts and great round, thick, chocolate-covered halvah rings that were shoulder-to-shoulder with immense loaves of black breads, bagels, bialys, and pickles in enormous wooden barrels. In the shops there were appliances and clothing and shoes—special sample shoes, the only ones that would fit my mother, whose feet were tiny.
The shopkeepers loved my mother. They’d notice Lucy and shout her name; the commotion was unbearably loud and dazzling.
“Lucy, here Lucy—look what I got for you, only for you!”
My mother was beautiful. Small and beautiful with huge breasts. She was a Sicilian woman and they were Jews and the market women jumped for joy when they saw her. My mother greeted them as if they were family.
I learned how to slip and slide in and around fast-moving crowds as a little kid. Walking those streets, I worried that Brownsville’s uproarious world would swallow us up. But that urgency in my belly passed soon enough when Lucy laughed. She laughed a lot, and anyone could see that she loved being there. The little lady could shop.
Her astute eyes missed nothing. Shirts for my brother, a dress for my sister, Keds sneakers for me—only half sizes, with soles so thick that when I wore them I’d feel as though I could jump over a building and back again.
I can still see the people, closely packed along the sidewalk and overflowing onto the stone stoops that led to the shops. On the cold days in the winter it was a sight to behold, all those people warming themselves from the fires that rose out of black metal barrels, the fragrance of wood smoke mixing with the spicy essence of lox and salami. They are some of the most magnificent, clinging, and lasting memories of my childhood.
That was then.
Not until I became a cop in my early twenties was I to visit Brownsville again.
Years had passed and things had changed.
There were mountains of garbage in the little yards in back of the tenements where rats the size of small dogs prowled. No longer did I see women in ritual wigs, men in beards and long dark coats, boys with curls of hair dangling alongside their ears.
Brownsville faces were now black and brown and angry. It seemed new, but it was really the same old class struggle, only with different music. I was doing my best to understand the anger on the basis of hopelessly limited information.
During this rookie time, I was still living at home and the breakfast discussions with my father were becoming more and more heated.
“The yoms, Pop, they’re crazy. They live like animals and throw shit at us from the rooftops. I mean bottles and bricks. You know what a bottle or a brick would do to you thrown from six stories up?”
“Yom is a dumb word spoken by stupid people,” said Pop. “Don’t ever use that word in this house again.”
“Those people are crazy,” I told him.
“They’re not crazy. They’re poor and oppressed, and they’re angry. They take their anger into the streets. And let me tell you something, Mister Policeman, it’s going to get worse.”
My father was kin to all the demoralized and poor and out-of-work peoples of the world; his instinctive belief in the class struggle, back then, drove me up the wall.
“The bosses and landlords screw these people over in ways you could never understand,” Pop said.
“You have to see how they live,” I replied.
“I know how they live. You think we lived any differently?”
“Sure you did.”
He smiled.
“Drugs, Pop. The drugs are everywhere—on the rooftops, in the basements, in the hallways. And where do they get the money for those drugs? They rob, they steal, they burglarize. Their women are prostitutes. It’s a hellhole.”
“Mister Policeman, who do you think brought all those drugs into that neighborhood? I wish you’d stayed in school.”
In those days, I was assigned to the NYPD’s Tactical Patrol Force. The unit had been formed in 1959, the creation of Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy. At first, there were thoughts to simply name it Special Services. Except, having SS on the collars of New York City cop uniforms would have been less than wise.
TPF’s nickname was Kennedy’s Commandos. It was a specialized uniformed unit—most of the members were young and had been Marines or paratroopers. We patrolled across the city in high-crime areas.
Our special training focused on dealing with all sorts of civil disorder. Patrol in TPF was mobile and proactive and very aggressive. We all shined up our brass with silver polish. Our uniforms were always creased and unsoiled. It was there, in that unit, where I would draw my gun for the first time and shoot someone—in a place where I almost got shot myself, and the place where my first partner was killed.
In TPF, you carried yourself with poise, a kind of dignity and macho zeal. What I remember most about those years are the alleyways and backyards
of the tenements, scary stuff, the sounds and smells and always the music—the sweet sound of salsa wafting up to the rooftops, how it made the scary stuff somehow go away.
Things happen quickly in the street, and as a cop you really don’t know what you’re doing most of the time. You’re just doing. Afterward, you can tell yourself any kind of bullshit you want. Say that you handled it well, it didn’t bother you one single bit, that you loved doing this or that, that you behaved heroically and you’re proud of yourself. “You would not believe this shit,” is what you tell people.
I had two partners, Dave Jackel and Pete Schmidt. Dave was six-foot-five and Pete was just about six-three. I was five-foot-nine, the smallest man in the unit; in my memory, we made a unique-looking trio walking our posts.
The TPF attitude was, action comes on so fast it’s not smart or safe to involve yourself in tentative assumptions or too much scrutiny. Speed counts.
* * *
“Fuckin’ muggers, I hate ’em.” This was Officer Pete Schmidt talking. “We break out the gym set on those bastards.”
Irony of ironies, after so many years I was back in Brownsville, standing with Pete Schmidt on the edge of a roof of a sixstory tenement overlooking Pitkin Avenue. I tried to mentally reconstruct the street, as it had been in my youth. The shops and pushcarts and most of the Jews were gone. The neighborhood had changed; it was now one of the most dangerous, squalid, and dilapidated areas of the city.
Remember, this was the early ’60s. A battle at the other end of the world was ratcheting up, and we had a drug war blazing in our backyard. At the time, even the most pessimistic observer could not imagine that we could lose both.
Most of time, when on patrol, I’d feel like the good yeoman crime fighter for the city of New York, the designated lightning rod for the madness that took place in ghetto people’s lives. In a short time I learned that along with street criminals, there were hard-working, good people in these neighborhoods, people who counted on me.
When I walked patrol, I eyed the alleyways, hallways, and storefronts. I wasn’t stupid, or very brave. I forced myself to go into the dark places, the long alleyways that ran between the tenements. At the end of those alleyways were doors that led to stairways that led to basements that were lit with candles, where mattresses were scattered on ice-cold floors, where rags were blankets and buckets were toilet bowls—the tenement cellars where desperate street people slept.
I could see faces at windows, shapes in hallways, forms traveling in and out of the darkness. Believe this when I tell you, the ghetto never sleeps.
I had been a visitor in many ghetto apartments—sometimes invited, most times not. I knew that on the coldest of nights, ice formed inside the glass windows and on the sills of those apartments. I had seen ice on the floors and on bathroom mirrors. Slum landlords regulated heat in that part of town so that none rose after 6 o’clock in the evening.
My father was right. Small wonder these people wanted to burn those buildings, equipped as they were with rats and leaky faucets that ran ice water and ceilings that dropped lead chips of paint into cribs where infants slept. I once saw a baby girl whose toes had been gnawed to stumps by a rat. I saw that and wondered what in the hell country I was in anyway.
The next time, when I spoke to my father I said, “You were right. Were you ever. Jesus!”
He smiled.
A recollection. Voices and faces. Tales like threads over and around a piece of time. So mindful I am of my experiences in Brooklyn that nothing goes away. Now, I can see myself as I was then: None of it was real, like I was in a movie, some dodo up on the screen, some character in my skin making his way through a world he didn’t understand.
I’m young and healthy. The drinking age in New York City was eighteen, but they wouldn’t serve me without ID until I was thirty. Baby Face, they called me. The cops and the street people, they all called me Baby Face.
Today I look in the mirror. “Baby Face,” I say to the reflection. “Yeah, right.”
I see myself sitting in homeroom at William H. Maxwell Vocational High School in East New York one morning. A bright fall day in Brooklyn and the teacher walks into the room. Passing as a high school student, I’m there to buy dope. The teacher smiles nervously at me, squints, turns around, then turns back and looks at me again.
The teacher’s name was Veltri, I called him “Red” when I was the pitcher and he was the great glove and strong hitting shortstop of our own John Adams High School baseball team in Ozone Park. Later, in the boy’s room, Red asked me, “How are you doing?” I said fine, that I was there to do something that had to be done. I told him I was a cop. He said, “Yeah, I figured.”
After a week at Red’s school, my job was done.
I was now standing in the principal’s office. I remember how that dip-shit came at me, how angry he’d been that I’d bought drugs from fourteen of his students.
He was horrified. He unbuttoned his coat and loosened his tie and shouted that I’d crossed the inviolable threshold of his school.
A great sadness came crashing down on me. I thought I had accomplished something good, something worthwhile, something that needed to be done. It was the first time I realized that although the world’s good people said they wanted evil exposed, in fact that was often the last thing they wanted.
The image I had of myself as a hero, as someone who was willing to do the work of an undercover cop—all of that was so much crap. This dip-shit principal didn’t want the crap; he wanted me to go away. Rocking back and forth, getting reamed in that man’s office, looking down at him seated behind his desk, I felt a swell of hopelessness; a claustrophobic sensation, as if I’d suffocate to death if I didn’t get out of there.
He berated me, telling me that I was taking advantage of his students—his kids, he called them. This being the same man who only a week earlier was so happy to see me, so pleased that someone would come and help figure out if there was a drug problem at his school.
Full-blown into his rant, I got this picture in my head of a fourteen-year-old kid in jeans and a sweatshirt, a knowing smirk on his face. The little piss-pot telling me he could get all the drugs I wanted, whatever I wanted, as long as I had the cash. Guns he could get me too, this little shit, this tough guy with the long hair flowing over his shoulders. A good-looking boy, the image of one of my high school buddies from a few years back. But my buddy wasn’t selling drugs, this piss-pot was.
Piss-pot’s mother was the president of the PTA, an important person. As was this man, this dip-shit of a high school principal. As were the many others to come later: judges, prosecutors, politicians, chiefs of police, some of my family, my friends, journalists, television commentators, cops—so many cops. Faces in my not-so-distant future, scores of good citizens, my unborn children—all of them asking me about similar and different cases. Why didn’t I mind my own business? I tried, trust me. I gave it my best shot. It just wasn’t possible.
Imagine what arresting strung-out junkies would do to you. Or how depressed you’d get from collaring people who couldn’t find their hands and feet. Between the crazy shit you saw both in the street and courthouses, and what you personally lost as far as moral perspective was concerned—being there, seeing it all up close and personal—well, if you had any brains at all you would see that it all boils down to a collective nervous breakdown of a person’s system.
Your eye saw it but your brain couldn’t really take it in. Like this one:
I’ve told it before—many times, several versions—but this is what actually happened.
It was late on a Friday when I walked into the Brooklyn arraignment court. It was a busy night, the place was jammed to the rafters and it turned the courtroom into a spectacle of craziness. It was a bazaar of victims and defendants, manipulators of all sorts.
I spotted Richard Smalls—“Sweet Dick,” they called him. He was standing against a wall amongst a bevy of his working girls. Dick was an informant of mine, a “benevolent�
�� pimp with processed hair and sharkskin suits. He looked to all the world like Sugar Ray Robinson.
Sweet Dick didn’t bully or threaten his women so much as he charmed them. I guess he told them he loved them and made all sorts of ridiculous vows to protect them. Out of fear and loneliness a lot of street girls hooked up with pimps, slick guys who spared no expense or time winning and wooing them. Dick would keep at a new street girl with relentless pressure, over and over until she joined his crew. Most of these women didn’t have much going for them in the way of self-reliance. Sweet Dick’s women wore wigs and face paint and were street-pretty. They were heroin addicts, all of them.
I remember the way Dick put his hands on his hips, turned to look around the courtroom, giving the place his I-don’t-need-this-shit look. Then he turned back to me and said, “Man, you gotta help me out here. My brother got busted by some precinct cop—bunch of bullshit. The kid didn’t do nothing but ride in a car. The car was hot but he never knew it.”
I asked, “What would you like me to do?”
The five women standing behind Sweet Dick, as if on cue, gave me perplexed, piercing looks.
“You can go and talk to the D.A., have his bail lowered or something,” one of them said.
The assistant district attorney calling the arraignment calendar was—here, I’ll call him “Joe.” Joe was attorney for the state of New York, and that was unbearable to him. He longed to be in private practice and hauling down boxes of cash. Joe was an attractive guy, erudite in a Brooklyn sort of way. He knew his way around the courthouse, knew how to get things done.
Favoring navy blue pin-striped suits, off-blue shirts, and red ties, Joe had a full head of curly black hair. You’d make him as somebody who could work a lounge in Vegas.
“I have an informant here whose brother is on the docket,” I said to Joe. “Can you help me out? I’d like to get his bail lowered.”
He gave me a look, a supercilious grin, a look of both expectation and disbelief. I recall that it gave me a funny feeling, that look of his.
Brooklyn Noir 3 Page 4
