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

by Michael Codella; Bruce Bennett

  Fifteen

  Ana and her unborn baby recuperated somewhere in Flushing and we hit the snitch switchboard—canvassing the avenue for any leads or sightings of Black Hank. Davey Blue Eyes was going to be public enemy number two until we had Hank in custody or ID’d on a morgue slab. Until we caught Hank, every collar made through Op 8 would have the same Black Hank clause built in. Even a few of Davey’s hardcore Third and D crew tried to help out. Word of what had been going down in that apartment traveled fast and created a moral high ground everyone in the neighborhood perched on together.

  We kept asking, listening, and looking. Avenue D was too much of a magnet to guys like Hank. It was only a matter of time before he came back, and when he did we would hear about it. It was both a promising and frustrating search. Everyone we talked to said the same thing.

  “Yo, Black Hank, man—you know him! I don’t see him lately but he used to be around all the time, Rambo. You know him! Really dark, really ugly motherfucker! Like a really ugly Wesley Snipes!” I heard a different variation on the same tune everywhere we went. All my snitches described him the same way. I personally probably gave back a package of dope to users and informants while looking for the prick, and that’s what I heard from every one of them.

  “Did you feel that?” I heard something. Gio and I were on a field trip off the D as guests of DEA in Felix Pardo’s apartment. The search for Hank continued but life in Operation 8 went on. Felix was the dope dealer with deep Chinese connections that Davey Blue Eyes had kidnapped for a hundred thousand dollars about a year before. After Felix’s mother paid Davey, Felix went right back into business and today we were in Felix’s apartment in the La Guardia Houses on Madison Street assisting two DEA agents serving Felix an arrest warrant. But what was that sound? Like a faint irregular tick…

  “Hey, what the fuck!” Gio read my mind. He touched the back of his neck and shot me a weird look. As much as IAB was trying to pry us out of Operation 8, DEA was relying on us more and more. Raids, arrests, and searches like this one were becoming a regular part of the Op 8 plainclothes gig. I always felt appreciated and put to good use when I worked with Feds like Ruiz and the DEA agents arresting Felix Pardo today. This one started out pretty routine, but it was now getting a little strange. What the hell was that ticking sound? It was like it was coming from a few places at once.

  A few days before, the Feds had called and come down to the Command, told us about who they were after. We arranged a joint operation involving us and them busting down Felix’s door so that the Feds could serve their warrant, search for evidence, arrest Felix, and flip him.

  The Monday after meeting the two agents, the four of us from Op 8 and two uniforms from the Command met up before dawn at the La Guardia Houses’ management office. At our instruction building maintenance shut off the water line that served Felix’s apartment so he couldn’t flush anything he didn’t want us to find. With the uniforms in position in back of the building watching his windows, the DEA guys dropped Felix’s door and we were inside in a heartbeat. Felix was dressed in tiger-stripe briefs throwing what turned out to be his personal coke stash out a window when we came in the bedroom. I looked down and saw the uniforms outside trying to catch a few bags like fly balls, but they were stopped by a garbage-strewn hedge.

  In person, Felix turned out to be chill and up close his girlfriend was a knockout. Jerry and Tony made sure the two of them stayed seated on the edge of Felix’s waterbed like good boys and girls while the DEA agents tossed the place top to bottom. They came up with wads of cash and a small amount of drugs that was more of Felix and his girl’s personal stash.

  “Yo, Felix,” I called out to the bedroom, “you ever think of maybe getting a maid?” The sink in Felix’s kitchen looked like he was running a side business raising roaches. One of the DEA guys found his second and third roll of bills the size of a softball in a coat pocket in the living room. “Fifties,” he tells his partner. “Not bad, eh?” Another agent showed me a box of snapshots. I pulled out one of Felix smiling at the camera and toasting with little ceramic glasses at a table full of heavy-looking Chinese dudes on a restaurant deck overlooking Hong Kong harbor a world away from this shit hole.

  The more Gio and I looked through the shoebox of photos and the more I saw of Felix’s place, the more I began to wonder what his deal was. This guy was jetting around the world and making God knows how many millions a year, but his apartment looked like a kennel. Worse. A standard look inside the oven for drugs and cash let loose such a stampede of bugs that I gagged. Finally, out in the living room, we realized what those little tick sounds were. Gio held up what he’d just found on his neck. A roach. I felt a feather light tap on the top of my head and watched two roaches fall and land on a Polaroid of Felix in a Spuds MacKenzie shirt alongside a Chinese guy in the cockpit of a cigarette boat. Gio and I both looked up at the ceiling together. It was alive. Hundreds of roaches crawled across the ceiling, lazily dropped to the floor and made their way back up the walls at will. I had to concentrate not to panic.

  “Felix, what the fuck, man?”

  “They’re hard to get rid of.” Felix shrugged. We were all so skeeved that the DEA guys bagged what they’d found, and we escorted Felix and his lady out in record time. Weeks later a snitch told me that we missed over a million dollars in cash inside Felix’s stereo speakers. Too bad. None of us could’ve stood it in there another second.

  Within a year Felix was dead. Davey Blue Eyes gave the Navarro brothers from Cherry Street what they’d apparently been asking for for months—the no-blowback greenlight to kill Felix.

  One of Rudy Giuliani’s successful “quality of life” arrest binges, like his war on squeegee men, was an all-out assault on the millions of dollars of illegal fireworks sales leading up to the Fourth of July that had gone on for decades. It’s hard to adequately describe pre-Rudy Independence Day on the Lower East Side. On Third Street the Hells Angels took shopping carts and fifty-gallon oil drums, dumped hundreds of dollars in contraband fireworks into them, doused the whole thing with gasoline and, like it says on the package of Black Cats, would “light fuse, get away.”

  And they were the responsible ones. The Angels’ miniature artillery attack was at least avoidable. Everywhere else in the neighborhood, especially in the projects, it was a random rainstorm of exploding gunpowder, smoldering paper, and car alarms by the hundreds all going off at once. As Felix sat by himself swinging on a chain fence overlooking the East River on the Fourth of July 1988, one of the Navarro brothers walked up behind him and put a .38 round into Felix’s head behind his ear. Whatever vendetta the Cherry Street and the Third and D boys shared against Felix ended there. The gun’s report was completely lost on families grilling in the park below among the day-long explosions echoing all over Alphaville.

  A week after racing the Feds out of Felix’s roach motel apartment, Gio and I were driving around solo early in a four-to-twelve tour. We had the windows rolled down and stopped to check things out at Third and D, when we both realized that just about everyone working and hanging out on the avenue wasn’t checking us out, they were looking at something or someone at the far end of the block.

  Gio tensed. It was part of dealer protocol to make a show of ignoring us and this felt really unnatural and ominous—like we were on a collision course with whatever was down the avenue. Gio pulled the car over. A thirty-something black guy who looked like he’d been sleeping outdoors for a week approached our car. Every pair of bad-guy eyes on the block followed him. He looked like a bum, but he also looked familiar. Like a movie actor who got hit with an ugly stick…

  “What’s up?” I asked. The guy stood and stared with his mouth half open. “What can I do for you?” I said impatiently.

  “I heard you guys were looking for me,” he finally said. “I’m Hank.”

  The force of gravity within the Lower East Side projects was an incredible thing to behold. I learned later that before turning himself in, Hank hid out in
Brooklyn, Queens, and even Florida. Yet here he was, standing in front of us looking like all our snitches said he would. Jerry and Tony had made detective and were scheduled to get their gold shields before the end of the month. We had organized a going-away celebration after the tour, but it looked like that was going to have to wait. Here was Black Hank, and the detectives handling the case had for sure already signed out for the day. We would have to take Black Hank through the booking process ourselves.

  “Never freakin’ fails,” Gio said. “I dunno why I even bother making plans.”

  “Well, we have no choice. We may never find this prick again,” I sighed. Hank just stood there. We’d both calmed down about the 50 Avenue D case. Ana had sent a note saying that she and her baby, a little girl named Crystal, were doing fine and that she was working and living in Queens. I took it as a good sign that the rookie at the Command who Ana gave the note to and who knew nothing about her ordeal had described the girl that handed him an envelope with our names on it as a hot piece of ass. The world kept going around. Ana was getting on with her life and so were we. Hank would be, too, though outside of a very long prison sentence, his options were pretty limited.

  I was mindful of our audience and the need to give the avenue a little show and an abject lesson. There also was probably no one on earth that deserved a beating more than Hank did. Everyone knew about Ana’s situation, and what Gio and I had done to the first creep we caught. I looked at Gio.

  “We can’t just beat him like this right here. I mean he gave himself up.”

  “I know, but…” Gio gestured to the people all watching. Hank turned around and looked at them, too. “We gotta do something.” I thought for a moment. Whatever we did needed to look like we were in control for the block’s sake but not like a violation of Hank’s arrest rights for our sake. IAB was everywhere, it seemed.

  “Hank,” I finally told him. “You have five seconds to run.”

  “What do you mean ‘run’?” Hank said.

  “Count to five and run. Do it or else I’m gonna beat your ass so bad even your own mother won’t recognize you.”

  “You gonna shoot me?”

  “No,” Gio said, turning the car ignition off. “But listen to what the man’s telling you.”

  “I’m telling you one more time,” I said calmly. “Start running. Five, four, three.”

  At three Hank broke at a sharp right angle and took off in the direction he’d come. He made another hairpin turn into the projects. We were out and after him in a heartbeat. Gio caught up with him first. He grabbed Hank by the collar of his T-shirt, and swung him down to the ground as hard as he could. Hank fell right at my feet. The supreme boom-bash that Hank needed began with a series of kicks. In the two or so minutes we were on him, the two of us didn’t fuck him up anywhere near as much as we had his partner. We could’ve put him through a meat grinder and it wouldn’t have made up for what the two of them did to Ana. It must have looked spectacular from the sidelines, though. For the neighborhood, it was the treatment he deserved, and for anyone from the department who saw it or heard about it later, a perp had rabbited on us, and we enthusiastically gave chase and subdued him as we were trained to.

  Most Commands assign each officer little cubbyhole mailboxes. Usually, mine was filled with police junk mail—union papers, Patrol Guide updates, interdepartmental orders, and other things I rarely read. I’d go days or even weeks sometimes without even looking in my box. Maybe it was the note from Ana but for whatever reason this particular day I took a look in my box and found a handwritten note on what was obviously a page torn from a police notebook. “Mike, call me ASAP—Mark Testa.”

  Testa was a Brooklyn South major case detective that Gio and I worked with once before. A few months ago Central had radioed his number to us while we were on patrol, so I gave him a call.

  “Thanks for returning my call so fast,” he’d said after introducing himself and bullshitting a little. “So I hear you and your partner know everyone in Alphabet City.” It was a story we heard a lot. Testa was looking from someone who frequented the Avenue D projects, and word was that we were the game wardens there.

  “This may be a tough one,” Testa said, “but do you know anyone with a green station wagon that visits Avenue D?” He was investigating a fifteen-year-old kid who’d been stabbed to death and sodomized. The kid’s body was dumped in Testa’s precinct under the boardwalk near my old Coney Island rookie posting. Testa had the kid, lab reports, and a description of a suspect in a green Plymouth Volare station wagon. The car rang a bell. There weren’t that many station wagons around our little corner of the world. Gio and I both remembered one that sounded like it could belong to Testa’s guy.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “Don’t know what the guy’s story is, but I do remember the wagon.”

  “The perp who drives it supposedly likes young Puerto Rican boys and goes down to the Lower East Side a lot to get high and try to pick up kids. Anybody you can talk to over there that might know him?”

  “Maybe, yeah. I’ll see what we can do.”

  This was pretty soon after Sergeant Angelo took over Op 8, and we followed protocol and briefed the sarge before hitting the bricks to see if anyone had a fix on the station wagon and the man who drove it. Sarge was pleased and kind of surprised that a Brooklyn South gold shield had reached out to us in the Housing ghetto. He was new, but he was coming around and no longer assumed we made up the information we shared with him.

  “You really think you may know the guy?” Sarge asked.

  “We might,” Gio answered. We didn’t. But our snitches did.

  “He’s a pervert,” a corner dealer told us, “he likes kids and shit. White guy. Likes boys, gets high.” We made the rounds, got the same story and a few more details from a few more regulars. Along the way we emptied our wallets of twenties and tens. Each bill went into the hand of someone who knew we were looking to meet this guy and said they’d get ahold of us if they saw him.

  A few days later Sergeant Angelo was conducting roll call when someone up front at the Command yelled back into the Op 8 office.

  “Mikey C—call coming in for you.”

  When I picked up the phone, a voice on the other end said, “Rambo, that white guy with the green Plymouth is here looking to buy a bundle.” I recognized the voice. It was a guy we’d used as a snitch for months.

  “Keep him there,” I told the snitch. “Do whatever you have to do, but keep him there.”

  “Okay, Rambo. We’ll be near fifty Avenue D.” I hung up the phone and filled in the sergeant and the rest of Op 8 on what was going down. We all piled into 9864 and floored it to Avenue D. A green station wagon was parked right where it was supposed to be. The sergeant, Gio, and I approached the vehicle. My snitch was sitting in the front seat. He held a switchblade against the stomach of a white guy who looked like a chubby Don Knotts. The snitch smiled and rolled down the window.

  “He wanted to leave so I told him he couldn’t.” I was afraid to look at the sergeant. When I did, he looked like he was going to explode.

  “Thanks,” I told the informant.

  He folded up his blade and whispered, “He thinks I’m on the job,” and laughed. “Don’t forget me, Rambo,” he said.

  “I won’t,” I replied, already feeling like I’d sold him out. If the sarge wasn’t there, maybe we could’ve arranged something. But with him standing next to me and looking like he was going to smack my head, it was no use.

  “You got to come back with us,” I informed the perp who owned the car. “There’s some Brooklyn detectives want to talk to you.”

  “I shouldn’t have come down here,” he mumbled.

  “Yup, you shouldn’t have.”

  The drive back to the Command was quiet. Legally I had to lock up my informant for possession of the switchblade, unlawful imprisonment of the perp, and impersonating a cop. Of course I would never do that.

  When we tossed Testa’s perp, his pockets contained more
dope than the sarge had ever seen, and when Testa and another Brooklyn South detective came in to pick up their guy, the visit went well and attracted the right kind of attention at the Command.

  “I owe you for this one,” Testa said. He meant it. We’d explained privately how exactly we got his man, and he appreciated the position we were in. It would blow over with the sarge or it wouldn’t. Either way, this creep was off the street. The suspect confessed to the killing under questioning later that day.

  After they left, the sergeant cornered us. “You guys can’t do things like this anymore,” he said flatly. “It’s dangerous. It’s not good.” He was half right. We couldn’t do things like that anymore when he was around.

  Now, months later, I read Testa’s note and used the detectives’ phone to call him back.

  “Hey, Mark, what’s up?” I asked. “Everything all right?”

  Testa hesitated before answering. “Wait a second,” he said, “I should close the door.” I listened while Testa asked someone nearby for privacy and a door slammed.

  “Mike,” he said a moment later, “I have to give you a heads-up about something.” We weren’t buddies or anything so this had to be serious. “Look, I don’t really want to talk on the phone, you working a four-to-twelve today?”

  “Yeah, I just got on.”

  “Good,” Testa answered. “Where can we meet to talk in private?”

  “There’s a little joint over on Avenue A and Third, Lillie’s Restaurant. How’s that sound?”

  “It sounds good. I’ll be there around seven,” he said, then hung up the phone.

  “What the fuck you think this is about?” Gio asked. We sat at a back table in Lillie’s, waiting for Testa to show.

  “I got no idea. It can’t be good. He’s coming all the way from Brooklyn just because he didn’t want to talk over the phone.” Gio nodded. He was slipping into silent mode, which I hated.