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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  Like the Knapp ban on uniform drug collars, registered in formant red tape was meant to slow down corruption. It may have, but it slowed down useful intelligence gathering as well. The drug dealing landscape was constantly shifting. Who knew if Little Punk would be riding dope over the Houston Street exit ramp tomorrow? And Ponte needed his money now. Guys like him were always between fixes. Twenty bucks went a long way when your informant might get sick without his bag of dope.

  Ponte’s hand steadied as he slipped the twenty into his hip pocket.

  “This better work out,” Frankie said. Ponte gave the thumbs-up.

  “Red Line, you watch. At least a package, papa.” He doubled the thumbs-up and smiled at me. I watched him run off to the roof stairs and wondered where and what he was going to cop. Probably not Red Line at Little Punk’s East River Park spot. Frankie turned to me, his poker face and even voice both back in place.

  “So let’s go get us a collar.”

  On our way out Frankie radioed the other guys in OP 8 and told them we’d be performing a watch on the off-ramp on Houston and the Drive that Ponte told us about from our RMP. He also arranged to have two guys watch the overpass at Sixth Street that ran between the Wald Houses and the park just in case.

  “Guys like Ponte are good but they’re still junkies and sometimes they only get half the story right,” he explained.

  When we’d been in place about half an hour, Frankie broke a lengthy silence.

  “These things sometimes take patience,” he said. I nodded. Some tours with Frankie were an undeclared contest to see who could say the least. But, sure as shit, a second later Tony’s voice came over the radio.

  “Heading your way, male black with purple hooded sweat jacket on a bike. He’s looking back and forth. Be careful, for sure he’s your runner.” Frankie and I bolted from the car, hustled up to the overpass, leapt over a guard rail, and crouched down out of sight of anyone coming up after us. Cars climbed up from the FDR, slowed at a stop sign in front of us, and turned onto Houston Street or went down the on ramp into the three-lane jam up below us. A dark-skinned Hispanic kid no older than eighteen rolled up on a BMX snapping his head from side to side inside a purple hoodie just like Tony said. I grabbed him and he yanked backward over the rear wheel of his bike like a guy in a western getting shot off a horse. Frankie and I both fell on top of him. The kid’s bike bounced to the pavement on its side and he fought like a bastard. All three of us were amped on adrenaline and it wasn’t as easy to get him cuffed as I thought. A station wagon honked at us as we dragged him over to the side of the roadway. Once we had the kid down we tossed him. Eureka. There were two hundred bags on the son of a bitch and each one was stamped Red Line. Everyone had a price, and everyone could be bought, sold, and caught. Little Punk was worth twenty bucks to Ponte. Two bags in Ponte’s arm netted us two hundred bags vouchered into evidence and taken off the street.

  Avenue D

  Evening shift and not much action. Gio and me hear about a shake-up at one of the dope spots at Third Street and conduct surveillance from an unrented apartment in the Wald Houses on the D that the building’s manager gave me the keys to at the end of the summer. It’s a good vantage point and the manager is a good guy, so the inspection and small amount of painting the apartment needs to get listed available in the NYCHA system isn’t getting done. There’s not much to see tonight, or at least nothing we hadn’t seen before that will help us unlock the higher mechanics of the street dope trade. I’m feeling restless. We both are.

  Back out in the RMP, I watch a blond chick in five-inch heels and a white leather mini totter out to a fancy pimped out Cadillac on the curb. NYCHA and the heroin trade are both equal opportunity, but most foot traffic on the D in the eighties is Hispanic. We nearly always stop and watch Caucasians and blacks we don’t already know to see what brings them to our little corner of the word: 99.99 percent of the time it’s the same thing.

  You don’t have to be a street genius to realize what this broad is all about. By the time she arrives at the Caddy, we’re there, flashing tin. The car, a total throwback seventies Super Fly–style Caddy looks familiar to me, but I don’t dwell on it at first. When he powers down his window and smiles at our badges, the driver, a rail-thin overdressed black dude, looks even more familiar than the car.

  “Evening, ma’am. Sir. Police officers,” Gio says in his best Joe Friday impersonation. “Help you with something?” I kick one of the fenders with my shoe to gauge just how fucked up everybody is. The guy snaps his eyes back at me but keeps his face pointed at Gio. The woman just sort of sways instead of jumping. What was obvious half a block away is depressingly clear up close. She’s a prostitute and a user with the double dead-eyed gaze of someone who’s surrendered way more of themselves than they can ever get back. She has on long opera-type gloves but they don’t quite cover an abscess and a small tangle of track marks on one arm. The guy in the car is clearly her pimp. I suddenly realize why the car looks so familiar. Holy shit. Small fucking world…I start to laugh.

  “Cat, right?” I say to the guy. He’s the Forty-second Street pimp who shot up Richie Gascon’s car on Eighth Avenue when we were in high school. It’s so far from what Gio expects to hear that he breaks character with a “what the fuck?” look at me. The pimp is stunned. I know his name but he has no idea why or how to play it. Is this good news or is he fucked?

  It’s like old home week all of a sudden. A few days before I see another familiar face on the D. This one’s from Canarsie. I know him as Taco. His kid brother is my age and was in some of my high school classes. It’s one of those perfect “Autumn in New York” type days and for once I’m not caring about who’s selling and what’s going down. But Taco’s clearly there to cop and it looks like he’s making to score from a guy we’ve used a lot for information. Worst of all, Taco calls me “Rambo,” a nickname nobody in Canarsie was gonna learn if I had anything to do about it, and starts whispering shit to me about who’s selling, and hints that he’s earned a few bags from me for sharing. It’s fucking surreal. The longest conversation I ever have with a guy whose brother sat next to me in algebra and it’s about trading fucking dope for information? No explanation, no apology, no “Hey, don’t tell no one in the old neighborhood but I’ve had some hard luck,” nothing. He’s a rat and I’m THE MAN? Nah, he’s Taco and I’m Mike and we’re both a long fucking way from Canarsie. I blow him off and two hours later I see him licking his finger, sticking it into empty glassines from the gutter then back into his mouth.

  Now this scumbag from the past, Cat. He’s got his act a little better together.

  “Yeah, yo Officers, my lady friend and I were just leaving,” he says pointing uptown with an upraised pinkie with an inch-long lacquered nail on the tip. I don’t remember that from the last time I saw him. He’s got both hands flat on the dash. It’s like a dog rolling over on his back in submission. He wants us to know he’s not going to pull anything out of his pockets or turn the motor on in a hurry.

  “Yeah? You and your lady friend mind stepping to the curb?” Gio replies. Cat looks at me.

  “Yo, listen,” the pimp hisses, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper, “can you give us a break, man?”

  “Why should we do that, Cat?” I ask, frankly enjoying fucking with the guy by using his name. He’ll never remember who I am in a thousand years. Cat looks at me with awkwardly theatrical confidence. He’s gotta be high on blow.

  “I know Rambo, man. Fastback and Rambo! We know those dudes!” What? This just got even weirder. I recognized him and know his street name and now he’s throwing around my and Gio’s nicknames like we’re his ticket out.

  Enough. “Get the fuck out of here,” I tell him. “Seriously, just get the fuck out of here. We see either of you anywhere in the projects again, we’re gonna tell your friends Fastback and Rambo how much you pissed us off.” I say the names like I never heard them before.

  The girl wobbles around the back of the car
and gets in. Cat the pimp thanks us and they drive off. Gio looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.

  “Feel like telling me what the fuck that was all about?” he asks. “You and ‘Cat’ go way back?”

  “Bro, you’re not going to believe me.”

  “Try me,” he says and walks back to the RMP. It’s probably the first time Gio’s ever seen me let a potential toss and bust slide and for sure the first skell I don’t ask about Davey Blue Eyes since White Boy Ronnie let the name slip. I steal one last look at the Caddy’s taillights heading back to Times Square and laugh again. Cat gets a pass. For old time’s sake. First Taco from Canarsie, now this. Small fucking world.

  Twelve

  After a month working with Frankie, word came down that his and Pete’s paperwork were done, their promotions were finalized and they were on their way to the Housing Detective Bureau at week’s end. The last night we worked together I asked Frankie a question that had started to bother me.

  “How’d you not get personally involved with this shit?” I asked him. “I mean you’re here all the fucking time, you watch these dealers fuck up so many lives. It’s almost like a personal insult, isn’t it? How do you keep your head on straight and not let it get to you?”

  “It’s a job, Mike. Just a job. Don’t ever take it too seriously or personally. You’re not here to clean up the world. If you make a good collar great, if one gets away that’s okay, too. You just can’t let the job and the bad guys and the baby mamas and the strung-out junkies get to you. Do your job, get promoted, and get the fuck out of the LES.” As he continued, I realized he’d had something he’d wanted to tell me. “This place isn’t worth you losing your job for, you get me? You try too hard to help these people and you’ll be the one going to jail for doing something shady. Do things by the book and you’ll be all right. If not, you’ll have Internal Affairs after you. You can worry about the perps, yeah. They’re assholes but they’re not to be underestimated. But worry about yourself. If you take this thing personally, you’ll do something that the department can’t ignore and they will hang you out to dry just as quick as the fucking dealers would push you into traffic. You don’t need that bullshit.”

  The short time I worked with Frankie the farthest I saw him cross the line was laying out some pocket money for information. Everything else was by the book. Maybe I already had my answer. Playing by the rules was the way that cops like Frankie and the other OP 8 guys kept their distance from the job. As good as they were, and as many great arrests as they’d make, guys like Frankie didn’t really care. They couldn’t. They didn’t trust themselves to keep from getting into quicksand by outthinking both the bad guys and the brass. I wasn’t sure I could ever work the way they did. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  With Frankie and Pete gone, Sergeant Andrews reassigned Gio and me to work with the other two Op 8 vets. Jerry Able was a tough-as-nails Irish guy who grew up on the last Irish block in Dominican-dominated Washington Heights. Jerry’s old neighborhood had one of the worst crime rates in the city and the Lower East Side held few surprises for him.

  My new partner Tony was close to thirty years old and came from a family of cops. He’d had a skin condition since he was a kid in Brooklyn. His face was always beet red and flakes of dead skin fell from his face and collected in his lap, on his shirt, and everywhere he went. I think he’d been getting shit about his face for most of his life. Some of the perps called him “langosta” or “lobster,” which made him crazy. Tony was an excellent cop who did everything meticulously and was great at taking notes and paperwork. He also had an infectiously retarded sense of humor. I don’t think we ever sat down for a meal without him telling the waitress, “Gimme a turtle soup and make it snappy.” You had to be there. Despite his skin flaking all over me, and a tendency toward nervous twitches, and flashes of bad temper, I really enjoyed working with Tony. No matter how out there or twitchy he would get, he was always up for it when things got hairy.

  Sergeant Andrews’s description of Op 8 as a family was truer than I first realized. Some days when me or one of the other guys started unpacking baggage of one kind or another it was like a bad breakfast table scene. One particularly muggy night the four of us had spent an entire shift patrolling PSA 4 together. I sat behind the wheel of RMP 9864 heading back to the Command. One of the perks of our company car was that it had FM radio. Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones were singing “Gimme Shelter” on CBS FM when Tony interrupted.

  “Hey, Mike,” Tony said, “why don’t we go over to the Seventh and gas up before we head back so tomorrow when I go to court I won’t have to stop.” The gauge had dipped below the quarter-tank hash mark. I could tell Gio was in a shitty mood. He’d been waiting to pop off at Tony for hours.

  “Let’s not and say we fuckin’ did,” Gio snarled.

  “Why the hell not? I always leave the fuckin’ car with at least a half tank of gas. You want me to start the fucking day tomorrow with the reserve light on?”

  “God for-fuckin’-bid you left it full just one time, though. Right?” Gio turned to me for some kind of confirmation. He was right but he was more intent on making the most of this petty bullshit than scoring a useful point. I wasn’t having any of it.

  “Leave me out of this, ladies,” I said as firmly as I could get away with. Jerry made a show of looking out the window like he was alone. Tony’s red face was flushing a deep plum in the rearview mirror. He began to scratch at it hard.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you anyway,” Tony yelped at Gio, “all night you’re acting like you’re on the fucking rag.” The two of them went at it like Jan and Marcia and I made the left to gas up at the Seventh Precinct. Suddenly the other radio drowned out the Stones.

  “Central, man shot, St. James and Madison! Perps are in a white Maxima they just got on the overpass to get on the Drive northbound.” The cop calling it in was out of breath. Horns honked in the background. Tony and Gio fell silent. I made a hard right across two lanes of traffic and headed for the FDR Drive.

  “Get on the Drive, we’ll stop traffic, they’ll run right into us!” Tony yelled. He and Jerry unrolled their windows and leaned out to wave back traffic we needed to cut off. Gio put the cherry-red dash flasher up and I flipped the lights and sirens on. We powered into and ahead of a stiff eastbound traffic flow and screeched onto the Drive northbound at Houston Street. I floored it for twenty yards then jammed on the brakes, and jerked the wheel. We skidded to a perfect angled stop across both northbound lanes, blocking any traffic coming up the Drive in our direction, and initiating a hail of horn blasts. All four doors opened simultaneously. Gio and Jerry already had their guns drawn. Tony and I pulled ours within a step of hitting the pavement. The horns stopped. We worked our way from car to car, down the growing column of stilled traffic. I’d been mainlining pure adrenaline since the call came in.

  “Over here! They’re over here!” Tony yelled. His gun was fixed on a trio of hoods in do-rags peering out from the windshield of a white Maxima. Jerry, Gio, and I were in the car and on them in seconds. We yanked them out and slammed them on hot highway tar. This was why I became a cop. I was on the line between under control and out of control and loving every second of it. Tony holstered his gun. “I got it, got the gun!” He held up a shiny nickel-plated .357 he’d found under a seat. With my knee on the back of my perp, I looked over at Gio. He’d just finished cuffing up his mutt and he smiled and flashed Tony the thumbs-up. The gas crisis was forgotten. We were family—temperamental but good in a fight. Jerry keyed up the radio and announced in a “listen up everyone else” voice, “Central be advised, Op Eight has three under for that shooting over by St. James.”

  Op 8 was by design an observation operation, not an undercover investigation unit. We were supposed to observe and arrest, and the other guys in Op 8 left it at that. A lot of cops act like they’ll catch something or get hustled somehow if they give their collar a lot of attention. Freezing out a perp once you’ve gotten his or he
r statement is classic cop behavior. During our time in uniform Gio and I had learned so much from our little backseat, sidewalk, and interrogation room Q&A sessions with the perps and victims we met, that it seemed like a waste not to continue the same work in soft clothes. I liked to listen and we really did want to learn how the dope business worked so that we could take it down. Just like in uniform, Gio and I asked questions, remembered what we were told, and made whatever we learned of value from the merry-go-round of bad guys that we spotted, tossed, collared, questioned, and either busted or let go, worth their while.

  Pete and Frankie had worked a few rats. Jerry and Tony gathered some info from their guys and handled a few snitches of their own. Gio and I took cultivating informants into new territory. No information was too insignificant. Nobody willing to share something we might find useful was turned away, or had to leave the street corner, stairwell, rooftop, or interview room empty-handed. By doling out twenties, giving back the odd stray bag or two of dope, turning a blind eye for a few hours while a street dealer made quota before shutting him down and most important, just by listening, Gio and I soon had so many friendlies on our hands that we struggled to keep them straight. Before long we were having to split our rats up between us and moved them in and out of lobbies, stairways, and roof landings so fast hoping they wouldn’t bump into each other.

  Every few years some anthropologist announces that there’s a defining quality about human beings that ought to replace the Latin adjective in the scientific name for the human species Homo erectus, “upright man.” The argument is that there are any number of other qualities that better describe what separates us from other apes than the fact that we walk standing up. If my time on the Lower East Side is any reliable indication, human beings should really be called Homo penintentiarius—“confessing man.” Within a year of getting into Op 8, the desire to tell us something seemed to be the unifying personal quality of everyone my partner and I collared, helped, or met. Every guy and girl who ratted out his or her boss or boyfriend, sister, spotter, neighbor, or competitor, had one thing in common—they each thought they were the only one with enough balls to talk to us. Pretty soon, in addition to quizzing the dealers and junkies we tossed and collars we made, people we’d never even seen before began coming up to us with stuff they thought we should know. We didn’t have to go fishing—the fish just jumped into the boat.