A Virgin Mary statue was on the lawn in front of Calabro’s house, something that I always found amusing, given his involvement with organized crime. Shoes slept in the pool house, which was part storage shed and part lounge for those enjoying the big in-ground pool. The structure held a sofa, a couple of chairs, a coffee table, and a bathroom and shower that Shoes somehow seemed to ignore. Vinnie put up with his degenerate nephew living out there only because he was family; the less he saw of Shoes, the better. Mullins and I had never once seen Shoes inside the main house.
Mullins pulled our van into the driveway, threw it into park and shut off the engine and lights. We walked around the right side of the house and into the backyard like we owned the place. Calabro had never once complained about Mullins and me—two thuggish-looking bikers—wandering around his property; he wasn’t scared of us. And besides, he had his own legal battles to contend with.
Shoes was just walking out of the pool house when Mullins and I turned the corner. We immediately hijacked our 140-pound CI and tossed him in the back of the van.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked him. “Big John is dead—his head was caved in. You got any idea how that may have fucking happened? You went into his house without me, didn’t you?”
Mullins seemed certain that Shoes was to blame, and he jumped in before the guy had a chance to react to my questions. There was no doubt in Mullins’s tone or line of questioning. “We know you fucking killed him,” he said without any trace of emotion. “We want to know how and when you did it.”
Shoes came unglued but said nothing for a few seconds. His face told the story. He’d had no idea what had happened to Big John. Mullins and I knew immediately that he hadn’t done it. He also gave us a very credible alibi.
“I didn’t touch the guy. I swear! What, you think I’m crazy?” Shoes said. He was adamant, saying that he never got near Big John’s house, that he had nothing to do with the murder and that he couldn’t believe we were looking at him for the crime.
People who are guilty of something act different than someone falsely accused. Very few people are clever enough actors to feign innocence. Trained interrogators often know right away because of the “tells” people give upon accusation. Shoes passed our test, and it was clear that someone else out there was responsible for taking out Big John.
I was deeply relieved that Shoes wasn’t involved. To be sure, bagging Big John’s killer had its allure. But God knows what Shoes would have said if he’d been arrested. Any chance of keeping a lid on the admittedly shaky decision to use Kerri on this assignment would have been blown in a big way. I also hadn’t been relishing the idea of having to explain to a prosecuting attorney how Shoes had invited me to become his accomplice in knocking off a drug dealer. How could a CI see an undercover cop as the perfect partner for a drug theft and possible drug-related murder?
Because of our involvement in the undercover buy, Mullins and I had to stay away from the investigation into Big John’s murder; we needed to ensure that no one outside of the investigating officers knew anything about Shoes’s involvement in our drug buy—or the involvement of our special police officer, Kerri. We were very concerned about reporters covering the murder. If word got out that Shoes had worked with cops on the drug buy, his life could easily be placed in jeopardy. The Union Beach Police Department, which had jurisdiction, turned over the investigation to the major crimes unit within the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office.
Union Beach’s McCabe gave the prosecutor’s office the full case file on our investigation into Big John, including the intel we’d developed through our CI, surveillance photos and more. He also told them about our use of the special officer in the drug buy; he laid it all out for them. The unit used our files as the basis for its murder investigation, and things seemed to be going well for a while. But then there was a major screw-up that put our CI’s life in danger.
As the media began probing Big John’s murder, Monmouth County Prosecutor John Kaye disclosed to a reporter for the Asbury Park Press that his narcotics officers had already made a drug buy from the dealer. The investigation was supposed to have been kept confidential.
Steve Zukka, aka Shoes, had told people that he was among the last to have seen Big John alive. It wouldn’t take an FBI investigator to put two and two together and start asking if Shoes had been a participant in the drug buy that Kaye had described.
We complained, loudly, up the chain of command. But the damage had been done, and Shoes was in danger. There wasn’t much we could do for him; our task force didn’t have the monetary resources or manpower to relocate him and give him a new identity. Shoes was pretty much on his own. He was meat on the street.
Somehow, Shoes was able to lie low and escape death. And Mullins and I were able to breathe a sigh of relief.
Pretty quickly, the major crimes unit determined that Big John and Ricky Jefferson had gotten into a heated argument over some bullshit thing that seemed important after a shitload of coke and booze had been ingested by the two men. The boxer took a hammer to the dealer’s head and literally beat his brains out.
Jefferson pleaded not guilty, setting the stage for a salacious murder trial complete with testimony from his transgender girlfriend, who enjoyed using a range of fingernail polish colors throughout the course of the trial. She vamped for the media while Jefferson remained stoic. But Jefferson went down hard, found guilty of premeditated first-degree murder.
CHAPTER FOUR
CLOWNS TO THE LEFT, JOKERS TO THE RIGHT
After the Big John takedown, we had a lull. We were partly dependent on street cops for some of our leads, and there just wasn’t much happening. When we had a “hot” CI, someone who was providing solid information to the task force, we’d work around the clock. Sometimes we wouldn’t sleep for three days. Now we had no hot CIs, and Mullins and I were getting impatient. Mullins decided to hit the phone.
Armed with literally dozens of reports on drug arrests from nearby towns, Mullins would track down the targets and cold-call them, not unlike someone working in a boiler room operation selling penny stocks. Each time, he’d tell the individual that he was a trucker who was continually on the road and needed to make a score. Most of the people he reached would simply hang up or tell him to go fuck himself—clearly the prudent thing to do, given that they were already facing drug charges. But he didn’t care, and he’d keep calling them back for weeks. He used the same story each and every time; he was one of the most tenacious individuals I knew.
One day, Mullins’s continued cold calls paid off. Hunched over his loose-leaf binder full of arrest records and fooling with a pen in one hand, he was on the line again, with a streetwise white kid named Tom Mason, who’d been picked up by local law enforcement for selling LSD. Mason lived with his mother in Aberdeen, and it was the mother who always picked up the phone.
Suddenly, Mullins’s tone changed, and he stopped twirling his pen. He shot me a glance, and I instantly knew that Mason had agreed to a meet. The target was ready to do a deal for a substantial amount of LSD. It was clear that Mason didn’t want anything to do with the stranger on the other end of the phone, but my partner’s smooth-talking and Mason’s greed were just too good a match. Better yet, there was no informant to protect in this case. If the deal went down, we could make an arrest as soon as we wanted; there would be no need for a cooling-down period. I high-fived Mullins and asked him to fill me in on the call.
Mason had agreed to a meet the following night, a Thursday, in the parking lot of an elementary school in Aberdeen. It was late June 1986, and the school was closed for summer break. The plan was for Mullins to meet Mason in the far corner of the school’s parking lot, which wasn’t visible from the road. We would get the kid into the back of our cargo van and have him sit on the folding chair we had back there.
We were psyched about the meet because we knew that the sale of a significant quantity of
LSD could bring a heavy jail sentence. We could paint a grim picture for Mason of the jail time he was facing and then flip him, giving us a way to bring down his supplier. Unbeknownst to us at the time, the enhanced penalties for selling drugs at the school were in effect at the time—even though school was closed and no kids were around. We would never have done the deal there had school been open.
Mullins and I needed a cover story for the meet, and we opted to be bikers again. We would tell the kid that Mullins was, indeed, a long-distance trucker—but that he was also the vice president of the Norsemen Motorcycle Club, and I was its president. We needed a large quantity of drugs for a major biker bash that was going down the following weekend in East Keansburg. The key was keeping Mullins silent. Although he convincingly looked like a biker, he could not talk the talk.
As we headed over to the school for the meeting the next day, I told Mullins, “Keep your fucking mouth shut. Just grunt, and I’ll fill in the blanks.”
He grunted roughly in response.
I pulled the van into the lot adjacent to Strathmore Elementary School on Church Street and drove to the secluded area in the back. Mullins and I both scoped out the school grounds to make sure there were no kids hanging out in the playground or ball fields. But it was after dark and no one was around. The two of us sat in the van and waited.
Mason drove into the lot about 20 minutes later and parked a couple of spaces away from our van. He slowly got out of the late-model Mercedes-Benz E-Class and scoped out the area before walking in our direction. I assumed he was driving one of his parents’ cars. He was in his early 20s, with straight, very long dark-brown hair. Mullins got out and slid the rear door open, showing Mason the folding chair.
“I have to fucking get over one hundred bikes into a fucking park, keep the motherfucking pigs off our ass and get these crazy fuckers high. You have any fucking idea how much of a bitch this is?” I asked Mason, who’d never seen me before and had no idea who I was.
Mullins grunted in agreement.
The expression on my target’s face told me all I needed to know. He was interested in making some quick money off me and didn’t really care who I was.
“Man, you want to make some serious money? Let’s get these fuckers smashed,” I said. You gotta come in on at least a hundred hits. Bare fucking minimum. These fuckers are sick. You know, man, some guys just drink and howl at the moon, but some got to get out there.”
Mason had no difficulty with the quantity; price was his issue. Rule number one for undercovers is to always haggle over the price. No one agrees to pay the price first proposed by a dealer. After some negotiating, we had a deal.
“This fucker’s alright, isn’t he?” I said to Mullins.
“Fucking A,” he grunted back.
Everything was going smoothly. Mullins was doing what I’d asked of him and keeping quiet. And Mason seemed ready to do a deal. But the deal wasn’t done yet, and I hoped that we could wrap this operation up quickly. The dealer did not look like a Don Juan, and I wondered if I could close the deal by offering him sex with a biker chick.
“Hey man, Juicy Lucy gonna be hot out there. Why don’t you come? I’ll have her show you a good time,” I said.
Turning to Mullins, I continued, “That fucking chick is flat out wild. Whatcha say, bro, this cat and Juicy Lucy?”
“Fucking A,” he grunted.
Suddenly, I sneezed.
Mullins looked my way and said, “God bless you.”
Mason looked like he’d been punched in the face. His eyes opened wide, and he looked at Mullins and then at me. Would a bad-ass outlaw biker say “God bless you” to another biker? There was only one answer: no.
I was sure it was only a matter of milliseconds before Mason bolted out of our van.
I smashed Mullins in the right shoulder with my left fist. “God bless me? You motherfucker, when has God ever blessed me?”
Before our target had a chance to react, I turned to him and said: “Are we good? If you’re bullshit, a lot of bikers are gonna be on me. That means I’m on you. But if we’re square, Juicy Lucy will be there with her fucking tongue out.”
“We’re square,” Mason said.
We set up another meeting for late in the afternoon the following day. Mason jumped out of the van, got in his car and drove away, leaving Mullins and me sitting in the dark van, cursing at each other. I was still pissed at the “God bless you.” And he continued to find the humor in it. He was also pissed that I was angry at him—because in the end we’d been successful.
The truth was, I thought Mullins’s slip of the tongue was funny, too. But I also knew that Mason could have easily realized that we were undercover cops and pulled a weapon on us. We were lucky—this time.
The following day, a Friday, we met Mason behind a local supermarket. Both of us were dressed as bikers. I was wearing my black leather jacket with the sleeves cut off and a grimy T- shirt underneath. Mullins was wearing jeans, a black T-shirt and black leather engineer boots.
Right on time, our target pulled into the parking lot in the Mercedes—and rolled into the spot next to our van.
Mason threw the van’s sliding door open and flopped into the folding chair. He pulled a vial out of his pocket containing more than 150 LSD tabs and asked if Lucy was still coming to our party.
I pulled out my gun and put it in his face.
“We’re cops, you stupid asshole,” I said, as Mullins pulled out his badge.
Mason’s face went ashen and his eyes briefly darted toward the door handle, which was beyond his reach. He opted to stay in his seat.
Mullins hopped out of the van, opened the sliding door and pulled Mason out while I kept the gun pointed in the target’s direction. Mason was in handcuffs within seconds. Turning this guy would be no problem, provided he had someone of real substance to give up.
My partner explained to Mason that he would be behind bars at the Monmouth County jail through the weekend—and not in some quiet holding cell at the nearby Aberdeen Police Department. A judge likely wouldn’t arraign him or set bail on such heavy charges until Monday. Mason would no doubt make great entertainment for gangbangers.
“I’ve heard of guys similar to you going queer in one night, and you have at least three nights,” I told Mason. “But maybe you can fight that shit off. What do you think?”
“I can’t go to jail, man,” he pleaded.
“Okay, maybe you do go to jail down the road,” I said. “It’s likely. Judges see LSD on a sheet and they picture their darling daughter grinning insanely and jumping out a window. But that’s light years away, and we aren’t gonna look for blood if you help us.”
“We will see to it you go home tonight,” I continued. “No heavy bail, on my word. No county jail, but you gotta give me some very good reason to save your virgin ass. Now is not the time to protect someone who would never do the same for you.”
Mason thought about it for a few seconds. “I can take you to the drug house right now,” he said. “Just keep me out of County, okay?”
“I give you my word. If you come through for me, you can sit next to me when I call the judge for bail.”
With Mason sitting in the back, we drove off to the drug house, which was located in a middle-class neighborhood in Marlboro and supposedly contained a cornucopia of cocaine, LSD and marijuana. Mullins and I knew we were taking a calculated risk; we had no intelligence on the owners of the house, or the people who may be inside, other than what Mason was telling us. Still, we knew the guy was scared, and his only way out of his predicament was to feed us good intel.
We pulled up in front of a sprawling, well-maintained two-story colonial on a tree-lined street. The house was set back about 40 feet from the road, and several late-model cars were parked in the driveway. It looked like a small party was going on. A typical drug house was so filthy that you had to beat the co
ckroaches away even during the middle of the day. Clearly that wouldn’t be the case tonight.
Mullins turned around and warned Mason that he was fucked if anything went wrong. He was going to introduce us and then keep his mouth shut.
Mason only nodded in response. He turned, grabbed the door handle, and slid the van’s side door open.
“Get back here,” Mullins quietly hissed at me.
“Fuck you! I’m getting my head straight,” I replied. Like other undercovers, I spent a minute or two getting focused before heading into any kind of a meet, in much the same way an actor would get into character before stepping on stage.
“Get the fuck back here now,” he growled.
Furious that I’d lost my focus, I walked back to the van.
“What the fuck is it?”
“Hey, jerk-off, your handcuffs are hanging off your belt behind your back. Great undercover man you are,” he said.
I reached back and felt the cold metal cuffs dangling over my belt. Fuck. Mullins was right. I couldn’t believe my blunder. I tossed the cuffs to Mullins, who put them in the front of the van.
Both of us laughed nervously. We were now even for the “God bless you” moment. I took a moment to get my focus back and somehow felt more confident than I’d been before.
Mason walked me in, quickly introduced us to his supplier—a guy in his early twenties with long, disheveled hair—and let me take the lead while he headed into the kitchen to get a drink. Judging from the home’s décor and the pictures on the tables, the place was owned by the guy’s parents. While they were away, the son was using his parents’ place to party and make some cash for himself.
About a half dozen men and a couple of women were in the living room, none of whom I’d ever seen before. There was some coke on the coffee table, and the supplier made it clear that he had loads of both coke and LSD.
Jersey Tough Page 5
