by F. P. Lione
Technically, we’re also not supposed to put anyone in the car without notifying Central, but we’re not gonna call for something like this.
As I made the turn onto 39th Street and headed westbound, Central came over the air with, “South David.”
“South David,” Fiore answered.
“We have a possible robbery in progress, males with guns at 47 West 37th Street between five and six.”
“Do you have a callback?” Fiore asked.
“There’s no callback. Male caller states he believes there’s a robbery going on in the building right now.”
As we rushed down 5th Avenue Joe said, “Isn’t there a geisha house there?”
“Yeah, halfway down on 37th Street.”
Most of the brothels, or geisha houses, as we call them, are between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue between 35th and 39th streets. They’re Mob run, stocked with Asian girls, and closed down only to pop up again on a regular basis.
As we pulled up we saw South Adam’s RMP there, and I heard Garcia tell Central they were 84, on the scene. Our sectors border at 5th Avenue. The east side of it is theirs, the west side of it is ours. When we dropped the drunk off we were in their sector.
Garcia and Davis jumped out of the car and had their guns pointed at a guy standing along the building line.
As we pulled the car up behind Adam’s RMP Joe put “David 84” over the radio.
Garcia and Davis holstered their guns and started tossing the guy on the wall.
As we stepped out of the car four more guys came out of a doorway about ten feet from the perp Garcia and Davis had on the wall. Garcia and Davis didn’t even see them.
“Watch these guys coming out the door,” Joe yelled as he stayed behind the car door and punched out his gun. I crouched down behind the hood of the RMP with my gun punched out and yelled, “Get against the wall! Don’t move!”
Joe and I charged at them with our guns up as they got on the wall pretty quick, looking panicked.
Something was up with these four, and we came up behind them with our guns still on them.
“Arms and legs out!” I yelled.
“Cover us while we toss them,” Joe called to Davis, who was between us and Garcia. Garcia stayed with the first guy, with his gun on his hip and one eye on us and one eye on the perp.
All five of them were Hispanic, dressed for a night of robbery in long-sleeved, dark, nondescript clothes that covered their waistbands. They all wore plain dark baseball hats with no writing on them pulled down on their foreheads.
I still had my gun out when I reached around to check the waist of the first guy lined up. He was the tallest of the group, maybe five foot ten.
“Gun!” I yelled as I got to his waistband, and my heart started hammering in my chest. I don’t know why it surprised me that he had a gun, but it did.
Joe had taken the last guy, and I heard him yell “Gun!” as the two guys in the middle started talking in Spanish. Both my guy and Joe’s guy had knapsacks on their backs, and we pulled them off almost simultaneously and threw them away from us on the ground.
“A lo major correnos?” the second guy in said to the third guy.
“Callate!” Garcia yelled to them. “They’re gonna run!” he said to Joe and me and then yelled to them again. “No te Muevas!” He switched back to English. “I’ll shoot the first one of you that moves!”
Garcia cuffed his guy and had him kneel down with his hands on the wall.
I grabbed the butt of the gun of the guy I was tossing and took a step back with his gun in my hand, still pointing my gun at him. Davis had his gun out, covering us. He stood behind us with his gun drawn out and down a little, not pointing at us but ready to shoot.
“Get on your knees,” I yelled to the first guy as I stuck the gun in my waistband. “Put your hands on the wall.”
I surprised myself by remembering to pray right then, throwing up a “Lord, please help us here and don’t let anybody get killed” prayer. I knew it wasn’t much in the way of prayers, but it’s new that I even think to pray in the middle of something like this.
I grabbed the second guy and went straight for his waistband and yelled “Gun!” again. He was one of the two talking in Spanish about running, and I wouldn’t take my eyes off him. I put the gun in my waistband, thinking I’m running out of room here, and I can’t toss these guys good kneeling on the floor like that.
Just then Joe patted down his second guy and yelled “Gun!” again.
Once Joe and I had all the guns, we could search them better. They weren’t talking now that they realized Garcia spoke Spanish. I guess English or Spanish we had them covered.
Joe and I walked back to where Davis was standing to secure the guns.
Three of the four guns were real. One was a .38 with a four-inch barrel, fully loaded with six rounds. I dumped the bullets in my hand and put them in the front left pocket of my uniform pants, and then I stuck the gun back in my waistband.
The second gun was a cheesy .380 semiautomatic. I took the clip out and stuck it in my right pocket and took the live round out of the chamber and stuck it with the clip.
Joe’s guy had a two-inch .38. What we call a policeman’s special, snub-nose five shot.
The last gun looked real but wound up being a cigarette lighter.
“Let me see that,” I said, pointing it at the ground and flicking the flame. I lit a cigarette and waited for my heart rate to slow down a little. I opened up one of the knapsacks. “Looky here,” I said as I showed them the knapsack full of money.
Joe opened the second knapsack and said, “Videotapes,” with a shrug.
Now that we had them all cuffed and on the ground, a guy came out of a black Lincoln across the street. He was about six foot one, 230 pounds, dressed in a suit jacket and pants with no tie. He had wise guy written all over him.
We were so engrossed with the five Hispanic guys we never saw him. He was looking pretty nervous, his eyes darting around like he expected someone to jump out at him.
“Can I help you?” Garcia asked, watching the guy’s hands.
“I’m the one who called you,” he said, nodding at the perps on the wall. He was sweating profusely, and I didn’t think it was from his weight.
“And who are you?” Garcia asked suspiciously.
“I work upstairs,” he said. He took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his forehead.
“Why’d you call?” I asked.
“I saw these guys going into the building.”
“So what made you think they were gonna rob it?” This from Garcia. “Did they have guns out?
“No. There’s been a group of guys robbing geisha houses,” he said.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
This guy knew whatever was going on here. He was being evasive, which made us suspicious. He looked like a wise guy but acted like a coward, like he was afraid someone was gonna jump out and shoot him at any minute.
“I gotta go check upstairs,” he said, turning.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, get back here. Where upstairs?” Joe said, signaling him to come back.
“Third floor.”
“You work in the geisha house?” I said, it dawning on me.
Geisha houses are Mob run. If he was running it and it was robbed on his watch, he’d have to answer for it.
He shrugged. “Yeah, I work there. I gotta get upstairs.”
“Come on, I’ll go with you,” I said.
“I’m coming too,” Joe said as he got on the radio and had Central have South Sergeant respond to 47 West 37th Street, nonemergency.
6
The geisha house was in a narrow, ten-story white brick building. The entrance led into a bronze-speckled marble-floored hallway to the elevator. There was a camera over the elevator, monitoring the front door.
“You have a gun on you?” I asked the goombah as we entered the building, thinking that might be why he was so nervous.
“No,” he said,
opening his suit jacket and turning around so we could look.
“What’s your name?” Joe asked.
“Rocco Marracini,” he said.
“You have some ID?”
He showed us his driver’s license, and Joe started writing down his info.
“How did you know they were gonna rob the geisha house?” I asked him again, wondering what his involvement was in this.
“As a courtesy when a place is robbed, they call the others and warn them with a description.”
“Kind of like an illegal community watch?” I asked him.
“Something like that,” he said with a shrug as Joe handed him back his license. He looked like a bulldog but acted like a wuss.
The elevator was old, the kind that bounces when it starts and you can barely tell it’s moving. There was a camera in the elevator in plain view, not hidden in the dome of a light, I guess so the madam could watch the clientele coming in.
“Where’d you call us from?” Joe asked.
“I was on my way home”—he held up his cell phone—“and when I crossed the street I saw them enter the building, and they fit the description of the guys that have been doing the robberies. One of them was standing out front.”
Joe continued to press him. “How many altogether?”
“Five. Four on the inside and the lookout. I waited a couple of minutes and called upstairs to the madam. When she didn’t answer I knew something was wrong. That’s when I called you guys.”
The elevator door opened, and there was a door right in front of us with a peephole. Behind us, above the elevator, was another camera so they could see who was at the door.
“Unlock the door,” I said, hoping there wasn’t a bloodbath on the other side.
His hands were shaking as he worked the lock, and he mopped his head again with his handkerchief.
“Step back,” I said once he got it unlocked. “Let us go in first.”
He stepped back, and I took my gun out and pushed the door open with my left hand, scanning the room, coming in low but not crouched in case anyone was in there.
The cool air from the air conditioning hit me as the door opened into the waiting room. There were three couches wrapping around the room with corner tables in between with lamps on them. There was a line of chairs to my right where clients picked their girls from, and to the left, behind the door, was a desk.
I counted two johns, four pros, and one madam, all with their mouths and legs duct taped. Their arms were taped behind their backs. One of the johns was shirtless, wearing pants and socks. The other was in his underwear and black dress socks. I guess they got robbed in the middle of a transaction.
The four Asian women looked to be in their twenties and were wearing various negligees, garter belts, and other prostitution-looking outfits. Their makeup was smeared, and some of them were still crying. The madam was yelling through her tape. She looked about sixty years old and was wearing black pants and one of those red short-sleeve tops that buttons at the neck that some Asian women wear.
I stepped in further and looked behind the door where the madam’s desk was. The first room on the right was the office, and Joe and I walked through it while the cowardly wise guy started pulling the tape off the females.
The safe in the office was open and empty, and there were papers all over the place. We continued down the corridor to the rooms where business was conducted. They reminded me of a doctor’s office except there were massage tables and soft lights.
The place smelled like perfume. It reminded me of the perfume girls wore in junior high school. I guess smells associated with the rush of puberty are right on the money with a lot of guys that pay for sex. They come here with that heated “I can’t get sex off my mind” mentality.
All the rooms were empty, so we went back to the waiting room. At this point everyone’s hands were free and they were pulling the tape off themselves.
The madam was talking a mile a minute in her broken English. She said the perps slapped her around to get her to open up the safe.
Just then Hanrahan came over the radio with, “South Sergeant to South David.”
“Go ahead, South Sergeant.”
“Is this confirmed?”
“Yeah, we’re on the third floor.”
“I’ll be right up.”
Joe and I started getting information from everyone in the room. The story was that while two of the perps were getting in the safe, the other two were ripping off the johns, taking three hundred bucks of one guy’s pocket money, his watch, and his wedding ring. They pistol-whipped the john in his underwear because he wanted to put his clothes on, and he had a pretty nice bloody welt on the back of his head. It was nice to know how serious these guys were after we found the guns.
The story everyone in the waiting room was telling was that the four men came in and drew their guns. They grabbed the madam and two of the pros in the waiting room and put them on the floor. Three of them went into the back and dragged the two Johns and the other pros into the waiting room. When they got all of them out there, two took the madam into the office for the money in the safe. One of them kept the gun on them while another taped them up.
Hanrahan came in with Noreen. “Whaddaya got?” he asked, looking around the room.
Joe and I went through the whole spiel with him, and he got on the radio and called South Eddie to pull Walsh and Snout off of robbery posts 4 and 7 and bring them to this location.
We collected all the duct tape. It was evidence and probably had fingerprints on it. The perps hadn’t bothered with gloves because the geisha house wouldn’t have reported a robbery and chanced getting closed. If Rocco hadn’t called and we hadn’t walked up on it, they would have gotten away with it.
“Who are you?” Hanrahan asked Rocco.
“Rocco Marracini, I work here.”
“How much was in the safe?” Hanrahan didn’t bother with what kind of work Rocco did here, as the detectives would interview him later. Even though it was an illegal operation, it was still a robbery. “I emptied the safe when we got the warning that the other geisha houses were being robbed.”
Yeah, and laundered the money through car washes around the tristate area.
“How much was in the safe?” Hanrahan asked with less patience than he did last time.
I watched Rocco think for a second before he said, “About seventy-five hundred dollars.”
I think it’s anything over ten grand you have to report to the IRS.
“We’re in the wrong business here, boss,” I said as Hanrahan shook his head.
The boss knew I was joking. Between my Catholic school upbringing and my father drilling into my head that ill-gotten money is cursed, I couldn’t work at something that wasn’t honest. Despite our Italian heritage my father has an aversion to bent noses and taught us never to get in bed with mafiosos.
“When Walsh and Snout get here, send them up. Have Rooney and Connelly wait outside with you guys,” Hanrahan told Joe and me as we were heading back downstairs.
When we got off the elevator we saw Rooney and Connelly outside with Walsh and Snout.
“They had guns?” Walsh asked, excited, when we opened the door.
“Three guns and a lighter,” I said as Connelly started making kissing sounds like we were suck-ups to the bosses.
“Three guns is nothing,” Rooney said.
“Better than the two vials and the crack pipe you called an 85 for last week,” I said. His call for assistance forthwith had us flying through traffic for a crack pipe.
“He swung at me, Tony,” Rooney snapped.
“He was waving the smoke from the crack pipe out of your face,” I laughed.
Joe called Central to tell them we had five under.
“That’s zero one ten hours,” Central said.
Walsh and Snout went upstairs with the complainants while we separated the perps and put them in the four RMPs to take them back to the precinct.
Each of the oth
er cars had one perp, and Joe and I had two, the lookout and the first guy I searched. We do this so they can’t talk to each other and get their stories straight before we interview them.
The lookout mumbled something, and Joe turned around and said, “Listen, no talking,” as he looked at each of them until they turned their faces to look out the window.
“You’re looking, right?” Joe asked to see if I wanted the collar.
“Sure, I’ll take it. Unless you want it,” I asked.
“No, I know you’re looking for OT,” Joe replied.
This was a great collar—armed robbery, plus the inspector would have an intel report on the geisha house. The inspector would love me when he went to the COMSTAT meeting this month with good numbers for the brass.
At the precinct we stopped the five perps at the desk. Lieutenant Coughlin asked, “Whaddaya got?” even though he already knew.
“Five for robbery,” I said.
“Any weapons?” he asked, all business.
“Three guns and a lighter.”
“Make sure you do a pistol index card on the lighter and give Terri the numbers off the guns so she can run them through the computer.”
“You got it, boss,” I said.
“When you search them make sure you know which property is theirs and which isn’t,” he added.
“I might not know until the complainants ID the stuff taken off them,” I said.
“Then put all the property on the pedigree sheets and you’ll sort it out later.”
“You got it, boss.”
We searched them at the desk again, this time going through their pockets, counting their money, and getting their pertinent information, making sure all the items were with the correct perp. Sometimes perps won’t give us their names, and in that case they go down as John Doe, but these guys knew they were screwed, so they were pretty compliant.
Joe left with a van to pick up the complainants at the geisha house, and Rooney, Connelly, Garcia, Davis, and I got the perps settled into the cells on the second tier. The second tier is over the parking lot and holds twenty cells, ten on each side, separated by a cinder-block wall. We separated them by eight cells and put the lookout in the holding pen in the arrest processing area. Garcia and Davis stayed with the four perps to make sure they didn’t try to communicate with each other.
