The following day, the Bayshore Narcotics Task Force began its work in the field. As awesome as the whole assignment was, we needed to show real results or our credibility would be compromised. We also needed to make allies of every police chief, patrolman and detective we came into contact with. We needed these guys to want to turn over low-level criminals to us so that we could use them as confidential informants. The only way we could do that was to be liked and respected—and treat our word as our bond. The unit had a lot of spirit, but not much in the way of equipment. We had one crappy old sedan and an old blue full-sized Chevrolet van—the sort used by tradespeople, with two seats up front and a large open cargo area. Like the MCNTF, we had no electronic surveillance equipment.
I felt that our best disguise was as bikers, and so we went with the idea that we were a chapter of the Norsemen Motorcycle Club. The guys were cool with the idea, but there was one obvious element missing: we had no motorcycles, and the powers that be weren’t willing to provide us with any. Somehow we managed to wing it. The van helped a lot, because motorcycle clubs always rode with a cargo van just in case one of the expensive custom bikes broke down. There was nothing worse than seeing a hand-painted and chromed motorcycle on the back of a tow truck.
Jack and I soon made our first bust using that van. We were driving down a highway near Union Beach in the Chevy when we saw two guys in their early 20s hitchhiking. We stopped to pick them up and headed down toward their destination, Keansburg.
“Hey, you got any dope?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” one of the guys said, reaching into his pants pocket and pulling out a very large bag of marijuana. Jack and I were stunned. We sat quietly while the guy pulled out rolling papers and made a joint. Maybe we were too quiet, because they immediately became suspicious.
“They’re cops,” one of the guys whispered.
“Fucking right,” I said. I hit the brakes and brought the van to a quick stop on the side of the highway. One of the guys hopped out of the back and tried to make a run for it, but I caught him, tackled him and brought him back to the van in handcuffs. Jack had the other guy in handcuffs, too. Both men had been unarmed.
As we headed over to the Keansburg Police Department to book them, Jack and I gave each other a quiet look. We were worried that these guys might be locals, able to describe us and our van to their buddies. But we had no problem maintaining our cover. The hitchhikers were from another part of the state, and there was no way they would be back here anytime soon. They were soon processed for felony-weight possession of a controlled substance.
In my biker days, I couldn’t have cared less if someone was carrying some weed. Even as a cop, carrying a small amount of marijuana was no big deal to me. But this case was different because of the quantity they were carrying and the casual manner they demonstrated. I was struck by their sheer stupidity.
Big Bad John Jankowski, a known drug dealer who had long avoided arrest, was target number one for the BNTF.
Jankowski was a major-league cocaine dealer, and his coke was always of high quality. He was a huge guy—a brutal one, too, and skilled with a shotgun. He lived in Union Beach, in northern Monmouth County, and had a brother, Stan Jankowski, who was a cop with the Middletown Police Department. The word on the street was that Stan fed his brother inside info to stay ahead of the law. But I knew Stan, and I knew that the word on the street was 100 percent bullshit. What kept the police away from Big John’s door was his reputation for violence and his excellent street sense.
No one would give up Big John, no matter how much jail time was at stake. They all knew that this bad actor liked shotguns and wasn’t afraid to use them. The trick was coming up with a plan to take him down without getting any of us shot or killed. I was also determined that the BNTF was going to take Big John down without any help—or knowledge—from the MCNTF. Though the two agencies had the same goals, there was considerable interagency competition; I didn’t want my former task force involved, and no one else did, either.
Big John had a modus operandi that was tough to penetrate as well. He sold virtually everything himself, right out of his house. Unless you were a close and trusted personal friend, you couldn’t score from him. The only way he’d deal with someone new was if the buyer brought his girlfriend or wife with him. If the cops were surveilling his house, the drug buys would always appear innocent enough; he was just having a couple of people over for a visit. But the woman was there for another, more sinister reason, too—satisfying Big John’s sexual desires.
After a buyer made a few scores with Big John, they’d realize that he had the best product and the best prices in town. They’d also see that he was reliable, with a solid supply of drugs. Buyers knew a good thing when they saw it, so they would keep coming back. Once Big John knew that a buyer was even slightly dependent on him, he’d change the rules of the game.
“Just have your girl come,” Big John would tell the buyer. “I don’t want you near my house. It’s too hot. If I see you instead of her alone, you got a real problem with me.”
And no one wanted a problem with Big John.
When the wife or girlfriend visited, Jankowski would demand that they give him oral sex—or there’d be no deal. The dealer would lay out a nice railroad-track line of coke on his living room table and tell the girl that she had a choice: snort the coke and give him head or leave empty-handed. Most girls wound up doing the deal John’s way; most of them were too afraid to ever tell their husbands and boyfriends what had happened, for fear that someone would end up dead.
That Big John used women in such a demeaning way was galling to all of us. I had multiple channels of information that corroborated his quasi-rape MO. We all possessed a deep appreciation for dark, and I mean real dark, humor. But there were no jokes about Big John’s method of sexual fulfillment. It made taking him down an almost sacred obligation. Some cops felt that these women put themselves in harm’s way by getting involved with serious dope dealers. Don’t buy cocaine and Big John won’t rape you, they argued. That was one view, but it wasn’t universal. Most saw John as the ultimate bully and abuser of the vulnerable. These girls may have been wrong, or weak, but they didn’t deserve the treatment they were getting from this asshole.
Jack Mullins and I spent weeks brainstorming and working our CIs, trying to get one of them to give us something on Big John. We were determined to get the dealer, no matter how long it took.
Then, in the spring of 1986, we heard about Steve Zukka, who went by the street name of “Shoes” because of his bizarre habit of stealing people’s footwear. He insisted that he’d known Big John for years and was adamant that he could help us take down the dealer—if we could get him a girl to take with him on the drug buy. Shoes was 140 pounds, about five foot eight, with long, greasy hair and several missing front teeth. He was related to organized crime thug Vinnie Calabro and would often sleep in Calabro’s low-budget pool house. Otherwise, Shoes had no real home, and he rarely showered. The guy was largely invisible in Union Beach.
Sitting in the task force’s modest office, Mullins and I tossed around different ideas for coming up with a female companion for Shoes—a tough task indeed. We had no access to female undercover officers in the BNTF, and we knew that my former unit, the MCNTF, wouldn’t supply us with one unless they assumed full control over the operation.
Mullins and I hit on the idea of using a dispatcher for the Holmdel Police Department who also happened to be a “special” police officer, meaning that she could work as a uniformed officer during peak summer periods, when the department was at its busiest. Essentially, the “specials” were part-time police officers, with less training than full-fledged officers, and often belittled as “rent-a-cops.”
The Holmdel dispatcher, Kerri Adams, was slender, with long, straight hair and a decent figure. To be sure, hanging with Shoes would be difficult for anyone to stomach, but she would get t
he chance to work a major undercover drug case. Maybe we could convince our superiors to green-light using Adams for this operation.
A couple of other elements had to be factored into the equation, too. First, Kerri was too pretty, too “normal,” to play Shoes’s girlfriend. I worried that Big John wouldn’t believe that Kerri and Shoes were actually a couple. Why would a girl like Kerri ever spend time with a guy like Shoes—much less sleep with him? In addition, rumors were circulating that Kerri was involved with a high-ranking member of the department. If true, how would that play into the equation?
I took the dispatcher aside and asked if she’d be willing to work with us, which she was. It was the kind of willingness that comes from seeing how cool UC work looked in the movies and on TV. She was blissfully unaware of how down and dirty this game could get, and I was hesitant to tell her. She had the nerve to do two very difficult things: be seen as Shoes’s girlfriend and buy coke from a genuine bad guy.
We took the plan to McCabe, the task force’s leader, whose response was lukewarm at best because of the dispatcher’s minimal training and lack of experience in the field. Still, he agreed to take the plan to Holmdel Chief of Police Bruce Phillips.
Chief Phillips agreed to go along with the plan and promised to take the heat if something went wrong. We all knew that it was a risky move and that we’d be putting a police dispatcher in harm’s way. If it went bad and Big John swatted Shoes like a fly and raped our UC, there was going to be hell to pay.
Still, Mullins and I intended to be there every step of the way, ready to step in if Jankowski, or Shoes, did anything unexpected. There was an upside to this case, too. McCabe and Phillips wanted to take Jankowski down in a big way, and they knew that we wouldn’t get many opportunities.
With close surveillance from Mullins and me, Shoes took his “girlfriend” to Big John’s house in Union Beach one Thursday evening. It was a large, comfortable two-story house with a wraparound porch, set close to the street. Shoes was clearly in love with his newfound friend, while Kerri did her best not to projectile vomit when she was close to him. It was hard to tell what bothered her more—his odor or his appearance. Mullins and I watched from a distance. It was a quiet evening, and both of us listened intently for any indication that the buy was not going down as planned.
After about 15 minutes, Shoes walked out with Kerri at his side. The two of them hopped into her car—a ratty old Honda Civic that we used for undercover work—and drove to our prearranged meeting spot behind a quiet commercial complex on Florence Avenue. Mullins and I followed in our UC vehicle, another nondescript sedan.
“We fucking did it!” Shoes said as I watched Kerri get out of the car and walk over at a slower, more controlled pace. She looked happy at having made the drug buy, too. Or maybe it was that she’d put a few feet between her and our ripe-smelling CI. She held up an eightball—an eighth-ounce of high quality coke.
“Oh, man, that’s beautiful,” I told Kerri as Jack listened to Shoes’s rapid-paced version of what had happened.
Big John was going down. I was sure we’d be able to do a second buy.
The four of us started making plans for Shoes and Kerri to make a return visit to Big John’s a few days later. Within hours, Jack and I had the coke safely locked away in an evidence locker and the written reports completed—with some help from Kerri.
Later that night, I went over the evening’s events in my head. I was pretty sure Big John wasn’t buying that Shoes and Kerri were boyfriend and girlfriend. The combination was just too odd. I had a hunch that he was thinking ahead to the day when he was going to tell Shoes to take a hike and insist that Kerri make a buy on her own. Kerri was attractive, and Big John was no doubt going to go back to his usual modus operandi. She would do one more buy from the dealer, and no more.
The next night, a Friday, Big John held a poker game in his house. It would prove to be his last night alive.
He had invited over a small group of his friends, including Ricky Jefferson, an up-and-coming white boxer who could hit like a mule and never seemed to bleed. Jefferson was there with his black transgender girlfriend. Jefferson’s reputation in the ring ensured that no one ever dared talk to him about his sexual orientation.
After a few hours, the other guys left—but Jefferson and his girlfriend stuck around for few more lines and drinks. At some point, someone picked up a ball-peen hammer and caved in Big John’s head.
It was around dinnertime Saturday night that Mullins called me to say that Big John had been murdered.
“We know who killed him,” Mullins said to me during the call.
An involuntary shiver ran through me, and I wondered if he could be right.
I reflected on the bizarre conversation I’d had with Shoes Thursday night, about an hour after he and Kerri made the buy from Big John. Shoes suggested that he and I rip off Big John’s sizeable drug stash.
“I did good, didn’t I, man?” Shoes said to me.
“Fucking right, man. You even set it up for next week,” I said. Shoes had stunned Mullins and me by arranging for him and Kerri to go back to Big John’s house to “double up” and make a second buy. “Gotta hand it to you, Shoes. No one can ever say you ain’t got balls the size of boulders,” I continued. “Anything else you want to talk about?”
“Yeah, but just between you and me,” he said.
We ducked behind a parked commercial van to get away from Kerri, Mullins and our backup team. Mullins shot me a glance as if to ask, “What the fuck is Shoes up to now?”
“Man, I just know Big John is sitting on two kilos of blow as we speak. He keeps it in the kitchen, inside a cupboard,” Shoes told me.
“Is that right? How the fuck you know where he keeps it?” I asked. “I know he didn’t show you. Also, how can you be so sure how much weight he’s sitting on? If you think we are going to rip the house on a search warrant, guessing he’s holding weight, you gotta stop going to the movies, man.”
“It ain’t like that,” Shoes said, gesturing with his hands as he continued his rant. “I got a friend, he fills me in. No, fuck no, no warrants. I want to sneak in and steal the whole load. You and me. I can move it. Make some serious cash. You know you can trust me to be straight with you. We been through so much. John thinks no one got the balls to do him like that. But I do. I got the balls and I won’t get caught by that fuck. A 4 a.m. in-and-out. We can be set, big-time.”
God help this stupid man. Shoes had no plan and even less of a chance of surviving if Big John even got a hint that he was thinking about ripping him off. Still, I wanted to hear more about the supposed stash.
“Okay, you go in and take him off,” I said. “What the fuck you need me for? Some kinda wheelman?”
“It’s not gonna happen, but that asshole might wake up at the wrong time, to take a shit or some bullshit like that,” Shoes said. “You gotta whack that bitch out. I don’t know anyone else could handle it. He could use an ass-kicking anyway. You’re the perfect person to give it to him.”
“Well, no shit. I don’t know whether I should be flattered or pissed,” I said, shaking my head at the absurdity of this conversation. I wondered what Mullins’s reaction would be.
“Shoes, I ain’t selling my badge for that scumbag’s yayho. No fucking way. Don’t ever fucking talk to me about it again. You got balls; start using your brains.”
My crazy CI looked deflated. I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.
“Man, I …”
“Shoes, we are still good. We all get carried away in this shitty business,” I said. “Next week, we double the cocksucker. When we take him down we’ll set it up so you can see him going down, he just can’t see you.”
Shoes walked away, but he was a simple read. He wanted to rip off Big John, and he was convinced that he could get away with it. Later I related the conversation to Mullins. Both of us thought he was nuts. Wi
thin a week, we’d double Big John and get him off the street. Shoes’s plan would become history.
With Big John dead, Mullins was now convinced that Shoes was to blame. The CI had gone ahead with his half-assed plan on his own, the dealer had discovered him and things had gone bad. Mullins and I agreed that we had to go pick up Shoes for questioning—and we had to get him now. Mullins said he’d swing by my place in Keansburg in a half hour or so to pick me up. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:30 p.m.
I was in my garage working out when Mullins called. The detached garage sat about 50 feet away from the two-story house that I shared with my wife, Jane, a tall, Nordic blonde who worked as a hostess in a nearby restaurant, and with my 125-pound dog, an Akita named Bushi. I’d converted the structure into a gym, and I routinely worked out in there—mostly doing weights and practicing my Korean Karate. The concrete floor was covered with mats. On this night, I’d been working on some karate kicks and other moves as the dog relaxed in the corner and kept one eye on me.
After a while, I headed inside to get cleaned up and put on some jeans and a black T-shirt. In the kitchen, I scribbled a note to Jane that I was going out working and likely wouldn’t be home for a while. Working late at night and occasionally on weekends was all part of my undercover work with the BNTF, and she knew it. Perhaps more importantly, Jane and I weren’t all that close anymore.
Mullins swung by my house to pick me up, and we headed over to Vinnie Calabro’s house, a big, glitzy bi-level in a large development. We were amped up, and the more we talked, the more we liked Shoes for the murder. He had the motivation and the opportunity.
Jersey Tough Page 4
