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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

Maria looked up the steps, waited a few seconds after the echo faded and then whispered, “Ana, we always call her Pretty Ana, she’s in a lot of trouble. Her mother died last year and she was having a hard time making the rent, so she took in a black girl from East New York as a roommate. This black girl, she turned out to be really bad. Really bad. She got high all the time and she brought in a bad group of people in the apartment. Now the door is opening and closing all night. I know they’re selling drugs in there.”

  Gio and I looked at each other. We hadn’t heard of a spot in a fifth-floor apartment. I wondered if one of our network of rats was holding out on us. Sounded like Brooklyn scumbags without neighborhood connections. I guessed it was small-time and overpriced and they weren’t dealing Davey’s dope. The buildings were so vast that it was possible to go for weeks without going on the Third and D crew’s radar if everyone was new. “They made Ana a prisoner in her own apartment, they turned her into a junkie, they just took over her mother’s house.” Maria started to cry.

  “How did you find out?” I asked. “The door slamming all night…?” Maria sobbed.

  “Dios mío, I hadn’t seen Ana in like months but I came home from seeing my aunt and uncle in Bridgeport late last weekend and she was just standing there by the garbage chute like a ghost, holding a bag of garbage. She looked terrible, like she had AIDS. She told me everything. They sold all her mom’s furniture, TV, everything, and they use the place to sell dope and get high. I wanted to help her, you know? I tried to get her to come with me, but she said they would kill her. She said they would kill me, too. I told her I would call nine-one-one but she made me swear not to.” Her voice got even quieter. “I had to swear to her I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

  I was seeing red. We both were. These scumbags were doing this shit in the Wald Houses right under my nose? How fucking dare they! Didn’t they know we’d find out eventually and make them pay? The book said I wasn’t the law. My academy instructors, my superiors, even my dad if I ever asked would’ve reminded me of the same thing. IAB would’ve been only too happy to take away vacation days or put me up on charges to underscore that point. But hearing Maria’s story, I felt like the only law that mattered, and these fuckers had broken it. It was like how I felt about Davey Blue Eyes—they were fucking with me just by existing, just by what they were doing to the people around them. Maria wiped away her tears. “You guys won’t let her know I told you right?” I shook my head no.

  “Yo, Pino!” He was the first guy we ran into after hearing Maria’s story. Pino stood like he always did in front of 30 Avenue D selling dope. Pino had no fear of being busted. We must have added a page to his arrest jacket ourselves. He also had no fear of talking to us in public. He just didn’t care. Pino would give up his own mother with his father standing just out of earshot. He was smart enough to be relatively honest in what he told us, careful enough not to let anyone on the block hear him, and believable enough to persuade anyone that called him out, including his own boss, who in turn worked for Davey, that he was just being polite to Fastback and Rambo, even after telling us where to go and when to be there in order to make a solid drug collar that put Davey’s accounts in the red.

  “How’s business, Pino?” I asked.

  “It’s okay, Rambo. I’m just helping out a little trying to make a little something before I go to bed.”

  “Who you working for?” Gio asked.

  “I’m just trying to sell a little something for Londie.” Pino shrugged.

  “What brand dope is it?” I asked.

  “It’s KTU. Londie’s got KTU. You not gonna lock me up, Rambo? I’m almost through.”

  “Nah, you can work for a while,” I said, “but I need something from you in return.” Pino smiled and turned away slightly to make sure we had some privacy.

  “Okay.”

  “What do you know about fifty Avenue D, Five-YY?” He studied the faces of the people walking by and then the lightbulb went off.

  “Oh shit yeah, over in there on the fifth floor,” he said. “There’s this new jack nigga all muscled up and shit just outta jail a few months. He’s selling dope with this ugly black chick. Yo, if you saw her one damn time you won’t forget that face. The bitch could scare a dog. They’re fucking nasty, man. They use that place to sell and to shoot up, too. It’s a shit hole, always junkies and shit up there. Not cool, Rambo. All ghetto and unprofessional and shit.” Pino wasn’t done. He gossiped away like a housewife on a picket fence. “You know that guy Black Hank?” We’d heard the name. “Real badass, right? Brooklyn, right?” We’d heard that, too. “He’s up there all the time, too. I think they’re all cousins or some shit. Black Hank brings the shit in from Brooklyn. Why the fuck would you do that, you know? Like I’m saying, all ghetto and unprofessional. I bet someone puts them down pretty quick. You gonna bust them, Rambo?”

  “Maybe so,” Gio replied. “So, Pino, you can stay here a little longer but then you have to get going.”

  “Yeah guys, no problem.” Pino nodded as Gio and I walked away.

  “Time check K?” Gio barked into the police radio. “The time is now twenty-two forty-five hours, unit,” Central replied. It was ten forty-five. Late in our tour but neither of us was going to sleep on it. We were both furious and free to stay that way. Our next stop was a cluster of dealing spots down the avenue. A junkie, a white guy, was wobbling across the avenue and we pounced. I’d never seen him before. He was in his late thirties and clearly hardcore—a tall, thin dude stooped over with track marks deeper than the cracks in most sidewalks. He looked like he died but forgot to lie down.

  I pulled the guy’s pockets inside out and found three bags marked KTU. “Listen,” I said as I continued tossing him, “I just saw you cop this from Pino. He’ll swear to it, too. You want to keep this dope, and go on your way, you’ll do what I tell you.”

  “Yeah sure,” the guy stammered. “Anything you want, just don’t lock me up. I can’t do no more time.”

  A few minutes later, Gio, me, and our new deputy were around the corner from a fifth-floor apartment door. There was a dusting of soot around the door’s edge from cook fires and cigarettes. The area around the knob was covered in gummy fingerprints and there was a Jesus sticker in one corner. I pointed to the door.

  “Ever been there?” I asked the junkie.

  “No.” He shook his head. “They selling?”

  “Yeah. You’ve bought out of the buildings, though, right.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Of course you have. Well, the three of us are gonna go ahead over there and you’re going to knock on the door to make a buy. When someone opens up, though, I want you to take a hike down these same stairs we just came up, and don’t look back.” The junkie nodded. Sweat poured down his pimpled face. He still hadn’t shot up and was coming apart at the seams.

  Gio and I assumed positions on either side of the apartment door. I motioned for the junkie to knock.

  “Who that?”

  “Yo, I’m looking for something.” Nice. He didn’t even hesitate. This guy really was a natural. The peephole clicked, a door chain clattered, and the lock turned from the inside. Our junkie wasn’t the only one sweating. You always hope that everything just sort of comes together when you cowboy into an apartment like this. An advantage to the industrial impersonal design of the PSA 4 projects was that at least we knew how many rooms we were about to crash into and how big they were. That, the gun, the badge, the surprise, and a righteous anger I don’t think I ever topped while on the job, were, hopefully, all the advantage we’d need. They were all we had.

  The door swung open. The junkie ran back down the stairs. Gio and I pushed our way into the darkened room and shoved the big, muscular black guy at the door inside with us.

  “Fuck this,” the big guy yelled, “I wanna see a motherfucking search warrant!” Gio had been winding up since “fuck.” He hit the guy so hard it made the floor vibrate. The apartment was bare and pitch dark compared to the hal
lway. I could make out the guy falling to the floor. It was a hell of a punch. The impact coupled, I guessed, with crossed brain wiring from freebasing, actually sent the bastard into a quick seizure. Even with him shaking and crying like a baby, as his eyes rolled back down out of the top of his head a trace of that smug untouchable look he’d had when we came in returned to his face. I remembered the story Maria told us and stomped on his head twice. He turned to the side the second time and I caught him on the temple, then I switched to kicking his ribs. He went slack—not passed out, but resigned to the beating. He probably learned that move in prison. Fuck it. He wasn’t worth the leather.

  We cuffed him and dragged him around with us on the floor for a few feet as we searched the room. The ugly girlfriend was indeed a clock stopper. It didn’t help that she had hidden herself under a bug and stain-dotted mattress against a wall like a slug under a rock. She went slack as we cuffed her, too. The light was so dim and flat that I didn’t realize I was looking at a pregnant girl crumpled on the floor against the opposite wall until she sobbed. I walked over to where the girl was. She kept her head down and kept sobbing into her hands. She was tiny and emaciated except for her belly. It was hard to tell because of her physical condition, but I guessed she was about eight months pregnant. Jesus.

  “Ana,” I said. She nodded yes. “Everything’s gonna be all right.” Gio had parked the two perps next to each other. He stood over them as I helped Ana up and took her over to a counter alcove that passed for a kitchen. The sink and stovetop were crawling with bugs. I put my hands on Ana’s shoulders and held her firmly so she wouldn’t have to worry about falling down. She’d probably been crouched like she had been against the wall most of her waking hours. She looked at me. She had dark skin that made her yellowed eyes look huge. I vaguely recognized her. “You know me, Ana?” She nodded.

  “You’re Rambo the cop, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. She wiped her tears and looked at her hand.

  “You locked up my cousin once.” I half smiled.

  “Did he deserve it?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, he did.”

  “Good.” She smiled. I smiled back a little harder. As gently as I could I asked her to confirm what Maria had told us. Ana described how the guy and the girl we’d just collared kept her prisoner for several months and forced her to get high first by putting smack in her food, then letting her snort it once the hook was in, then shoot it up into her when she began to really jones for it. She rolled up her filthy sweatshirt and showed me her track marks. She explained how worried she was about the baby, how much she missed her mother, and how afraid she was of what quitting dope was going to do to her. Ana had drawn one of the most fucked-up hands I’d ever seen dealt but she was trying to play it as reasonably as she could with us. The baby was the thing that mattered to her. I fought to keep calm and get as much information from her as possible and not make this experience any worse than it had already been.

  She rubbed her stomach finally and described how a guy on the floor and a Brooklyn skell named Black Hank sexually abused her on a regular basis. They’d taken turns, done it together, had contests and pimped her out to the junkies that came and went at all hours for a few extra bucks while they watched. I shook my head.

  “The guy in there, right, he’s the one who raped you?” Somehow dialing back on the details and the head count, putting the blame where it began helped me to focus. She nodded. I gently took her by the hand and helped her make a positive identification. It was a little bit for her. She’d been in the dark so long I was sure she blamed herself on some level. But mostly it was for me and for what I was about to do. Ana pointed at the guy with her arm straight out and her finger extended taut like some kind of black-and-blue angel in a nightmarish Christmas pageant. I asked again, in a whisper, and pointed at him myself.

  “You sure it’s him that raped you?”

  “Yes. Him and Hank made me,” she whispered back.

  “Okay, stay here, Ana.” I led her toward the back of the apartment and went through a little mental checklist about human anatomy that I’d prefer not to share.

  Paying unregistered informants, busting guys on instinct, and creating probable cause later, letting junkies keep a few bags or dealers run dope for a few hours unhassled in payment for information—by this point in my career, I’d rewritten the Patrol Guide in order to suit my own needs. I’d lied to bosses, friends, and district attorneys, told IAB to go fuck themselves, and taught people I worked with to do the same. I’d committed my own crimes to ensure that arrests were made and bad guys went to jail. This time, here and now, in this dark, roach-infested apartment turned shooting gallery at eleven thirty at night in 50 Avenue D, I knew what I was doing was wrong. I also knew that it was right. I had gotten too involved but still I didn’t care. I looked at Gio.

  “Uncuff him,” I said, pointing to our scumbag perp. “He raped her. This prick and the other guy raped that girl.” Gio shook his head in disgust, bent down, and uncuffed the prick. He knew that he might just as well let me do what I was obviously about to do.

  He also knew that I had a thing about hitting cuffed prisoners. It wasn’t a distinction most cops made. The chance of being hit back or maybe catch a beating myself, the possibility that the perp could retaliate, maybe even escape, maybe grab my gun, just the danger of it made it fairer somehow. It wasn’t really true yet somehow it felt true. A shit-scared degenerate scumbag, still sweating from a seizure that had literally been pounded into his skull a moment before, and I would be even? Uh, no. Fuck it, whatever it was it was. Whatever I did, I did. That was probably a hundred times more thought than this piece of shit gave to fucking up Ana’s life.

  The perp stood up. He was around six feet tall and muscular—lean, with a long reach and broad, evenly knuckled fingers on big hands. I walked up to him and he backed up against the wall. Keeping my left free, I grabbed around his throat and squeezed him with my right. His carotid artery throbbed then stopped against the base of my index finger. I worked my fingers deep into his taught neck so that I could feel the blood supply cut off to his brain.

  “Do something, fuck face!” I growled. “Don’t just stand there, do something.” His eyes watered and he began to gag. Instinct seemed to be all he had left. He reached for my hand and tried to pull it off but that only made my grip more brutal.

  “Do something, fuckin’ punk ass!” His eyes drifted upward and I let him take some air into his throat and felt the blood pump back into his head before I clamped down again. We did this a few times—choke, release, breath, choke, release, breath until finally I let him pass out completely and fall to his knees. As he knelt gasping for air and touching his throat where I’d locked on to it, I brought my knee up and hit him in the mouth as hard as I could from a standstill. Blood surged through his teeth. I grabbed him by his collar.

  “Get in that bathroom.” Before he had a chance to respond I dragged him to the toilet doorway. He began to whimper and plead. I turned away from him, winked at Gio and in as light a voice as I could manage said, “I’m cool.”

  Gio nodded. “I know.”

  I flicked the bathroom light switch and was surprised for a second when it actually came on. Roaches scattered and I pulled my snub nose revolver from my waist.

  “Kneel there,” I said and yanked the perp down next to the toilet. The tiny bathroom was so filthy it looked like it had been tarred with creosote. The seat was long gone. Guys that have been in prison half their lives like this fuck are past caring about those kinds of niceties.

  “No man, please, I swear I didn’t do anything, I swear,” he begged in a scream—shrill and loud like a girl in a horror movie. He was beyond controlling his voice, beyond acting tough, beyond holding a girl down and working her over just for the sake of sensation. I hated guns but I wanted to shoot him so badly. “Please, I’ll do anything you want! My shit? You want money? Anything!” I jabbed him in the face with my gun butt then brought it down hard across his
head.

  “Shut the fuck up, scumbag!” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a sheet of looseleaf paper and pen I always carried and set them down in front of him. Putting the nose of my revolver against the rapist’s head, I took a page from The Godfather, cocked the hammer on my gun and said, “Either your confession, or your brains, will be all over that paper in five minutes.” Ink and sweat hit the paper in equal quantities as he began to write frantically. “The truth jerk-off, it better be the truth.”

  What he wrote was barely legible, but it was readable enough to implicate him, his girlfriend, and Black Hank, wherever the hell he was. There were enough facts to make a case for all three provided no one brought up what motivated this guy to confess. After a complete search of the apartment, Gio and I called for a car to transport Ana to the command where she would then be taken to the hospital. Gio and I took the two perps ourselves. Passing the case up to the detectives in our command was the right thing to do jurisdictionally. The whole thing needed some enhancement and fleshing out at a paperwork and evidence level in order to hold up in court, and we weren’t the guys to do that. Giving the case over to detectives would also help create a healthy distance between what really happened and how the tip, the arrests, and the confession would be portrayed in court. We were confident that the gold shields we turned the perps over to would be thorough and discrete. They reinterviewed the two scumbags and got the necessary details down like true professionals. I stayed in view of the couple during the interview process just in case one of them had a change of heart or a lapse of memory.

  What credit there was would wind up being shared. At this point in our careers, there was no way that we wouldn’t get an official nod or citation for breaking this case. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that Ana and her baby got looked after and we tracked down Black Hank. Mother and unborn child were in good health considering their dual chemical and physical ordeal. Doctors at Bellevue detoxed them, and the city put them up in an apartment in Queens where they waited out the weeks until they would meet face-to-face.