Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City's Lower East Side

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  Six

  Once the prescribed six weeks under FTO Jack’s wing came to an end I was free to use what I’d learned from Jack and the other vets I worked with to make collars on my own. Every day was a tug-of-war between discretion and compromise on one side, and a twenty-two-year-old’s natural desire to see action and get his kicks on the other. Protect, serve, and have fun. Don’t be an asshole, don’t pull anything stupid, don’t get caught if you do, and if you fuck up, deal with it. “Behave-a yourself.” Do your job the best way you knew how. The outrageous circumstances—harsh weather, violent behavior, drug-addled human misery and acts of cruelty in an overcrowded skyscraper—were simply the lay of the land.

  A group of black Muslim militants decide they’re going to have their own police force in a neighborhood high-rise complex? Okay. More power to them. They patrolled some private buildings that surrounded the projects and weren’t part of the Housing Authority, so as long as they stayed off our post and on my side of the law, and showed reasonable respect it was okay with me. Unfortunately, in every one of these organized groups of tough guys all raised in this very tough environment, there was one doing double time by working for bad guys. Positioning a housing cop downstairs with the black Muslim security guards when we did venture into one of the buildings they protected became as routine as dodging bottles, stepping around human excrement, and fighting off hypothermia on rooftops so windswept you had to lean in to keep from being knocked down. That way, we were sure that none of them could call up to whomever or whatever apartment we were sent to investigate and warn them we were coming.

  When the residents of Coney Island’s housing projects weren’t preying on each other, they were preying on the cops sent into their buildings to protect them. Early in my rookie season in PSA 1 I was returning from Central Booking in a patrol car. I’d made an arrest earlier in the day—a drunk-and-disorderly scumbag hassling a couple of young Puerto Rican moms pushing strollers—and was due back at the Command to fill out more paperwork and end my shift. Our Command—the actual precinct house—was located in the ground floor of the Site Four and Five Houses. Site Four and Five was a multistory poured concrete rabbit warren so sprawling and generic that even seasoned cops would get completely lost in its hallways or not be able to give the correct address for where they were when calling Central for backup.

  As I pulled into the Command parking lot I caught a white flash out of the corner of my eye and an entire refrigerator smashed into the ground like a meteor about a dozen feet ahead of my car hood. It sounded like someone had dropped a garbage truck. I froze until it dawned on me that if a stove was coming next, a patrol car roof was probably not going to stop it. Anyway, I couldn’t move forward with the smashed fridge where it was. I cautiously got out of the car and, looking overhead the whole time, muscled the smashed Maytag onto a narrow stretch of sidewalk before I ran back to the car and hauled ass back to the Command.

  “Some people will never like you in these projects, no matter what you do,” Jack told Louie, Phil, and me early on. Like most of what Jack said, his observation about the people we policed was true. My Maytag encounter just underlined it.

  It went both ways. Future lawbreakers take note: The system isn’t a faceless, remorseless, hostile mechanism. It’s a chain of people just like you doing their jobs. Everyone you encounter on your trip through the criminal justice system is shaped and controlled by the same stuff that made you break the law in the first place. Along the way to your final disposition—in jail, on parole, free to go, whatever—you will encounter people who are potentially as stupid, mean, crazy, guilty, noble, compassionate, smart, and every flavor of humanity in between as you are or aren’t. The only difference between you and the cop that cuffs you is that he or she has the law on their side.

  Make a cop, DA, judge, court officer, EMT, doctor or nurse’s already mind-rippingly hard job harder, and you’re making their life harder. Many of them will gladly return the favor. If you run on the cop that’s arresting you, he’s very likely to make it as difficult for you to get up once he’s dropped you, as you made it for him to catch you. Beat up your spouse or your kid? Maybe your arresting officer grew up in a household with an asshole like you at the head of it. Or maybe the cop is an asshole like you that beats his kids, too. If so, you’d better watch every gesture you make. With you in cuffs the very real, very imperfect person or persons who have taken you into custody have found a way to potentially make things right with their past or their conscience even if just for a night, an hour, or a second. Maybe they’ll make you stand next to an empty bench for half the night while they fill out paperwork instead of sit. Maybe they’ll do something much, much worse.

  Not long after our time in finishing school with Jack ended, my assigned partner and I responded to an assault call in the Surfside Houses. It was a “family dispute,” two words a housing cop hears, says, and reads about as many times in their career as a priest encounters “amen” in his, that had boiled over into a stabbing. The husband in this particular troubled household had been using his wife for a punching bag until the missus got fed up, or in fear for her life, took a steak knife, and plunged it into her husband’s thigh. My guess is that she was aiming for his balls. In any case, she’d been arrested for assault. We were sent to the happy couple’s apartment to get follow-up statements from the husband. But when we arrived on the scene we discovered that he had already been removed to Coney Island Hospital.

  “Help you, Officers?” A scowling doctor intercepted us at the nurses’ station on the floor we’d been sent to when we inquired about the guy on our patrol car radio on the way to Coney Island Hospital. The MD seemed particularly pissed off. I figured the poor son of a bitch screaming from one of the treatment rooms probably had something to do with it. We explained to the doctor who we were looking for and he directed us to the alcove where the screaming was coming from. My partner pushed back the curtain and we went in. What we saw inside kept me from having a hard-on for a week.

  The guy with the steak knife in his thigh had apparently pulled every stupid move in the book from the minute EMS arrived on the scene. He’d cursed out the cops, and the ambulance guys at home and in transit, fucked with the ER staff and every one of the doctors and nurses that examined his not altogether life-threatening wound. After knocking equipment over, trying to leave multiple times, bellowing about his rights and demanding to see his wife, his lawyer, and his mother to the point that even the sedated patients on the same floor were murmuring “shut up,” someone on staff with access to a catheter took justice into their own rubber-gloved hands. The guy lay there in front of us with a tube sticking into the head of his dick that I swear was the width of a roll of quarters.

  “Oh, we’ll come back later. I can see that you’re, uh, in pain,” my partner stammered. We got out of there as quickly as we could, hoping that the image of what we’d seen wasn’t burned into our memories forever.

  One particularly cold night Lou, Phil, and I were freezing our asses off together outside a building complex on Neptune Avenue and West Thirty-fifth Street, nearly opposite where the Cyclones ballpark now stands. The only people dumb enough to be prowling around in that deep freeze were the three of us. Louie was obsessed with three things—the law, which he could quote chapter and verse, proper radio call jargon, which he had down from the day he put on the badge, and girls. Tonight it was girls.

  “What about that window? There’s a red light in it…” One of Jack’s more casual briefings had touched on the fact that there were known to be prostitutes working out of individual apartments within the NYCHA buildings in PSA 1. Freezing and horny, Louie was playing spot the whorehouse and pointing from window to window up in the howling night sky.

  “Let’s get inside for a while,” I said. I hadn’t felt anything in my toes for long enough that it was starting to worry me.

  “Great,” Louie said. “We can go from door to door and listen for signs of struggle.”

  We
went in the back entrance of the building. None of us had “the key” yet, but it didn’t matter. The door was nearly off its hinges. Once inside we rubbed our hands and stomped our feet and tried to warm up as best we could for as long as we could.

  “Damn, it’s cold as a bitch,” Louie said. His expression changed as he looked down at the floor. Philly and I saw it, too. There was a small piece of a grating missing from an access panel in the floor that maintenance guys used to get into the cavernous cellars of buildings like this one. We bent down to see what had happened and suddenly heard the sound of some kind of echoing commotion.

  “What the fuck is going on down there?” I whispered.

  “Fuckin’ trespass and burglary for a start,” Louie said. Philly nodded.

  “Let’s go down.” There wasn’t much clearance on either side of the hole. But I was pretty sure that I could wedge myself through. “I’ll go first,” I said and shoved my gun deep into my holster and turned my belt halfway to the side so that it wouldn’t hang up on a corner on my way down into the basement. I hoped my .38 wouldn’t blow my dick off.

  The hole turned out to be more like a shaftway or duct like the ones Bruce Willis snuck around in Die Hard. After an eight-foot descent I emerged in a dimly lit basement whose half-football-field-long walls and low ceiling were lined with pipes, wires, and electrical conduit. Five thieves were tearing out copper wiring and fixtures on the far wall. As Philly and Louie dropped down the shaft one after the other, the five perps bolted. “Freeze,” we yelled, nearly in unison. Then the lights went out. We were in complete darkness with a five-foot head clearance and were the only thing between five panicked crooks and the one way up to the surface.

  One of the items that we were required to purchase at the academy was a huge metal flashlight called a mag. Department authorized mags gave off a nice solid beam of light and needed a lot of batteries to do it. The steel handle full of D cells made mags as efficient for breaking heads as a nightstick and most cops used them as much for putting out people’s lights as illuminating a room. We immediately put ours to both uses.

  I lit up the twenty or so feet in front of me just in time to see one perp running past me. I swung and the flashlight’s business end caught the guy squarely on the bridge of his nose. He went tumbling to the ground and my light flicked out. I jumped in the dark at where I saw him fall, landed on his leg, and managed to cuff him by feel. Later, I realized what I thought was sweat on my hands was blood from his face. Philly and Louie loudly struggled with other guys elsewhere in the dark. After all of us ran around in circles trying to catch and elude each other for a few minutes, Philly found his mag, got it on again and we rounded up all but one of the would-be metal thieves.

  Louie and I had managed to corner the final guy, but he was hurt and panicked and refused to obey our instructions to put his fucking hands in the fucking air. We couldn’t shoot him just for being too freaked out to listen. Louie dropped to one knee, lunged forward, and swung his nightstick onto the guy’s legs. The sound was sickening. I dove in and caught the guy full in the chin with an uppercut as he tipped forward. It made no difference—Louie’s nightstick had already stopped the guy cold. And vice versa. The guy was holding his legs and Louie was holding half of his nightstick in his hand. Louie’s cocobolo wood baton was top of the line. Getting hit with one of those sticks is like being hit with a cast-iron frying pan. I thought I’d just done an excellent impression of George Foreman dropping Joe Frazier but Louie hit the guy so hard his nightstick cracked in two on the guy’s shins as if it was a piece of china. The guy dove into my punch as he doubled over in agony.

  With all five perps cuffed up, and a van on the way to get us, we pushed our prisoners up on our shoulders, pulled them through the shaft, led the ones that could walk to the side of the building lobby, dragged the others, and arranged them together on the floor. It wasn’t until we were outside that we really looked at each other. Between the trip down and up, the chasing, the fighting, and the arrests, it looked like we’d gone deer hunting for a week in our uniforms. A couple of the perps even cracked up.

  Back at the Command the guy Louie wiped out was sent to Coney Island Hospital to see what could be done with his shattered shin bones. Most of the Command turned out to congratulate us. An underground battle royale burglary didn’t happen in PSA 1 every day. The three of us were put in for commendations and we each had to tell the story so many times to so many people in so many hearings and on so many forms that we made a small fortune in overtime. I’d kicked some ass, made a great collar, and got a medal and OT. Not bad.

  As much as PSA 1 seemed like it was the edge of the world, it was still Brooklyn, and it was still a neighborhood. As I walked my patrols I always made a point to say hello to people, to stop and talk when I could, and let it roll off my back when people looked away or said nothing back. One winter afternoon not long after the underground showdown, an elderly black woman who I recognized from the neighborhood came up to Louie, Philly, and me. I’d made a point of greeting her, to no real effect, for the months that I’d been on Coney Island. She was pretty anxious as she started to talk. Unable to make up her mind about which of us to speak to directly, she chose to look over my shoulder.

  “This old white man is not allowed to leave his apartment. He’s being held prisoner in his own home,” she explained. “A group of young boys are holding him there. They even walk the old white man to the bank on the first of the month and have him cash his Social Security check, and hand it over to them.”

  We asked her to run down the particulars as she knew them—the building address, apartment, how long she believed this had been going on, and how many guys were holding the man. She didn’t know his name and refused to give her own.

  After thanking her and comparing our notes we headed to the apartment the woman had described. I held my ear to the door. I don’t know what I was listening for. Finally, Philly knocked. If the old man or better yet some thug kid answered, we stood a chance of getting in and finding out if what the woman said was true. If not, we’d have to pass it up the investigative chain of command. Nothing. We huddled in the stairwell.

  “Fuck, now what?” I asked. Louie checked his watch.

  “Well it’s almost end of tour. We’ll have to give the info to the detectives.”

  “Like hell we will,” I said. “We got this information ourselves, we’ll come back tomorrow ourselves.” Louie and Philly shook their heads.

  “We got to give the squad the info,” Louie said.

  “C’mon, we don’t even know if we’ll be assigned to these projects tomorrow,” Philly chimed in.

  “I’ll talk to whoever does the roll call tomorrow,” I pleaded. “I’ll try and get us here tomorrow.” Philly and Louie remained silent.

  “What if the old guy gets killed tonight? What if the lady who tipped us decides to call nine-one-one?” Louie finally said. “We’ll all fuckin’ hang, Mike.”

  He was right. It was a risk I’d take on my own, but there were three careers at stake. When we got back to the Command the three of us turned over our notes to the detectives working that night. We took pains to let them know we wanted to stay as involved as we could.

  “Good work, guys,” Detective Weiss said. “We’ll see what happens with this thing.”

  “Yeah,” added his partner Detective Shea, “if anything comes of it you guys will be involved I promise.”

  Two days later it was on the cover of the Post and the Daily News: held hostage in his own home. Both papers carried the same shots of a poor old guy with a long white beard being helped to an ambulance by the detectives Shea and Weiss. This was more than a collar, it was an event. I later heard that the prison product scumbags who’d been leaching off the old guy’s SSA checks were also sodomizing him. The papers weren’t exaggerating for once—the old guy wasn’t just released, he was rescued from a hell in his own apartment.

  It was an arrest that I’d initiated simply by insisting on saying he
llo to an old woman who didn’t trust cops. None of us received anything—not a pat on the back, not a thank-you, not a nod from the captain. Both Philly and Louie later came to me and said we should have tried it my way.

  First week of April, opening day at home at Yankee Stadium. I’d set out on patrol solo on foot close to where we’d broken up the underground burglary. A skinny white guy in a greasy Members Only jacket walking across Mermaid Avenue caught my eye. His gait was sort of nervously cyclical—like he didn’t really have full control of his body. As I wondered what his problem might be, he bent down and picked something up off the sidewalk. That really got me interested.

  One of the corners of human psychology that the people who built housing projects didn’t give much weight to is the principle of out of sight, out of mind. A certain portion of residents living on high floors of project buildings will take for granted that any available window is a garbage chute. Empty cans, sprung mousetraps, newspapers, TV dinner trays, diapers, tampons, broken furniture—just about anything that people didn’t want in their homes could come sailing out the windows of the Coney Island projects at any hour of the day or night. “Coney Island whitefish,” slang for a used condom, didn’t derive from the condoms that wash ashore on the beach, it came from the fact that used condoms tossed out of the windows of the projects along Mermaid Avenue bloated and burst in the sun just like their namesake would if they were beached on hot pavement.

  “Who in their right fucking mind would pick anything up off the sidewalk on Mermaid Avenue?” I asked myself. What the guy picked up was a bottle cap, and I knew from the blacked and burnt ones littering project roofs alongside syringes and glassines that junkies used them to cook up their heroin and make it shootable. Gotcha! Beelining across the street, I grabbed the guy and shoved him up against a car. He was light as a feather and put up no fight whatsoever. Keys, change, a wallet with a few bucks—there was nothing in his pockets that justified my eureka moment. But he had a chemical stink on him that I would come to recognize down the line and croaked at me in a whiny voice that would also become synonymous with heroin users. Sure as shit, I reached into the waistband of his pants and come up with five little envelopes of white powder that were moist with sweat on the sides that had touched the guy’s torso. I cuffed him up and keyed my radio.