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

  To Rita, Marco, Bianca, and Santino,

  for their love and inspiration

  Courage can’t see around corners but goes around them anyway.

  —Mignon McLaughlin

  It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

  —Buddha

  Contents

  Note to the Reader

  From A to D

  A

  Avenue D

  Chapter One

  Avenue D

  Chapter Two

  Avenue D

  Chapter Three

  B

  Avenue D

  Chapter Four

  Avenue D

  Chapter Five

  Avenue D

  Chapter Six

  Avenue D

  Chapter Seven

  C

  Avenue D

  Chapter Eight

  Avenue D

  Chapter Nine

  Avenue D

  Chapter Ten

  Avenue D

  Chapter Eleven

  Avenue D

  Chapter Twelve

  D

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  Note to the Reader

  Alphaville is a work of nonfiction. While some court transcripts and affidavits have been used to prepare the manuscript, the characters and events described in Alphaville are based on the recollections of the authors. Various names, nicknames, times, dates, and identifying personal characteristics have been changed, and some characters created from composites of several people.

  From A to D

  Battling the late eighties’ Avenue D heroin trade as a cop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan fulfilled a need for barely controlled, boiling-over excitement that had gnawed at me for as long as I could remember. Alphabet City grabbed me by the throat and wouldn’t let go, and that was just fine. The neighborhood was a darkly primal and seductive forty-square-block stretch of city built on roots going back generations and a history that justified the shape it was in when I got there. Those roots—the lines of cause and effect, coincidence, fact, and rumor—crisscrossed, intersected, and doubled back through the streets, floors, and stairwells I worked, the lives of the people I helped and I hurt, and the faces, places, and events that brought me there.

  My story’s the same as everyone’s—it points back at a past I know and a past I’m still piecing together. What’s maybe different about me is that I knew my whole life that I was the son of a cop and only found out later that I was also the grandson of a former wiseguy. I grew up in a neighborhood shared equally by cops and gangsters, and went to work on a police force where keeping your job and successfully enforcing the law were often opposites. Once I got to Alphaville, a daily fight with a gang of smack dealers nicknamed “the Forty Thieves” and a guy named Davey Blue Eyes who put them and kept them in business earned me the nickname “Rambo,” plenty of attention from NYPD Internal Affairs, and a price on my head set by Davey and the bad guys I took down.

  When I was young, wild, and wearing a badge and a gun in my Alphaville days, I didn’t spend a lot of time marveling at how I managed to keep breathing. There wasn’t any time, or any point, in doing a lot of reflection. Once I’d been off the job for a decade or so, I started to think differently. Out of the line of fire, it’s only natural to pat yourself down for bullet holes, look back, and take stock of the close calls, the good choices, and the dumb luck that put me where I am now—alive and with family and friends so close and so real that those crazy years in the rearview mirror can almost seem like fiction.

  Taking a journey from Canarsie to Coney Island to the Lower East Side brought me to a full boil. I needed the heat, I needed that action, and I needed to use it to square those two sides within me—the past I knew and the past I didn’t, the cop side and the crook side that, in a way, we all share and show in the things we choose to do and choose not to do. Not many people have the chance to find out what they’re really capable of at the same time as they accept who they are and where they came from. I did, and I had the time of my life doing it.

  Avenue D

  Early summer, 1988. Sticky black bubbles on a new piece of macadam silently pop and drool oil as my partner Gio and I cruise up the avenue in R(adio) M(otor) P(atrol) 9864 for the umpteenth time today. We’re housing cops in our first year assigned to Operation 8, a plainclothes task force combating the drug trade in PSA 4. Our beat is a stretch of public housing that Justice Department statisticians and local junkies both agree is the retail heroin capital of the world. The Feds used your tax dollars to buy the car, fill the tank, and pay our overtime while we sit in it. RMP 9864 has power everything, FM stereo, climate control, the works. But we drive with the windows down and the radio off—taking in as much of the sights, sounds, smells, and faces as our senses can handle.

  Most people glaze over when they look at a block’s worth of inner city hothouse humanity. New York’s civilian population contains eight million experts at averting their eyes in order to avoid trouble. But with a badge, a gun, and a license to butt in, a New York plainclothes cop never thinks twice about looking the people they pass right in the eye.

  We’re connoisseurs of the flash of recognition that precedes those civilian darted looks away.

  We size up everybody—the steerers calling brands, the dealers making hand-to-hands, and the junkies crawling in feeling bad, hoping to walk out feeling nothing. We audition every face, every swinging arm, every sweating neck, every open eye that we pass. Who is waiting on someone? Who looks like they’re hiding something? Who’s new? Who’s missing? Who can we toss for dope and a collar or hit up for some information?

  There’s a sun up there somewhere beyond the rooftops but the sky looks like spoiled milk and the gummy yellow haze won’t betray a bright spot. I’m Brooklyn born and raised, we both are, and like the rest of the natives, I’ve learned that Mother Nature in New York can be as weird as any other local old broad talking to her shopping bags in a darkened movie theater or trying to convince her social worker that the people beaming gamma rays into her head are real. Heat lightning cackles above the Brooklyn skyline and her message is clear: “You may have it paved over, but it’s still a swamp.” Other places in the world, the summer months ebb and flow, the temperature rising up with the sun and going back down again after dusk. Here it’s like somebody turns the broiler on in June and finally remembers to shut it off again in September.

  The heat and the wet air smear sounds, smells, shapes, and colors. An anonymous clavero goes to town on a salsa track sputtering from a passing car stereo. For a moment the beat accompanies a steerer hawking bags of “Mr. T, Mr. T” for a corner smack dealer. His chant turns to “Five-O, Five-O. Yo, Rambo on the block,” as he catches sight of our car and my face. The salsa track briefly jams with the crackle on our dash police radio, then a snatch of distorted thudding dance music from somewhere else and a shrieking seagull come inland from the harbor to trash pick the Dumpsters behind the projects. The mix of sweat and cologne my partner and I generate are no match for the sour garbage stink, garlic, cigarette smoke, sweet-scented disinfectant Hispanic supers use in their building hallways, and rotten-egg East River tidal funk wafting in the windows with the sounds.

  Neighborhood girls calmly strut down the sidewalk so naturally flushed, sw
eat-shined, and breathless from the heat that it looks like they just got done fucking. But I’m not thinking about them. I’m not really thinking about anything. There’s a trancelike slow rhythm to a day tour in weather like this. You save your focus. Likely as not you’re going to need it for something later. The only thing going on in my head besides auto piloting the RMP and wordlessly registering and cataloging the world through the windshield, is a back-burner notion I can’t shake about a big-time dealer I’ve only recently heard about called Davey. Since learning the name Davey Blue Eyes a few weeks ago, I’m like a kid with a new swear word. But much as I love to shock the mopes I try it out on, it’s just too fucking hot to pull up on a dealing crew, peel myself off the seat, and collect more barely hidden surprised expressions by dropping Davey Blue Eyes’s nickname with the sellers and users on the D.

  Nearing Fourteenth Street I swing out to the right a little, cut left, and do a tight U-turn. It’s too hot for the tires to even bother squealing. That same hydrant trickles water mid-block on Sixth Street, but a different junkie drinks from it than the last time we passed. A Third and D dealer crew heavy I tossed less than a week ago makes a show of not recognizing us and curses in Spanish at the strung-out guy at the hydrant. The skell doesn’t react. He’s chemically unable to.

  It’s ninety-two degrees and 98 percent humidity, according to Pete Franklin on the Fan before I turned it off. This guy must not have heard—he’s shaking and scratching in a thick wool sweater so oily and frayed it could make a sheep move upwind. Junkies this far gone create their own shitty climate. The hot days are always the worst on them. The smack this guy shoots burns through his body faster in summer than it does in winter. Out in the street he’ll boot up, bark out vomit, and feel the high fade fast, leaving him jumpy and starved for more. The weather and his habit speed up the score-shoot-repeat cycle of his life like the conveyor belt on I Love Lucy.

  Up ahead, then alongside, then looking back in the rearview, two muscular Hispanic dudes walk together. One has a Puerto Rican Bart Simpson T-shirt on. Maybe they’re headed for a bodega for a cold soda or a little seven-ounce can of Bud. I think I know one of them from the Third Street dealing crew. Not a player nor a customer—maybe a neighbor of one of the main dealers who answer to Davey Blue Eyes, by all accounts the heaviest guy on the D.

  As I turn onto Fifth Street a white guy walks down the street with an aluminum baseball bat, silver with black tape on the handle. My mouth goes dry. Hold the phone. Time to focus.

  “Drive back around,” my partner says.

  Instead of looping around the block I do another U-ey, relaxing my hands as the steering wheel spins back into position and we head back up Avenue D.

  “Ted Williams…,” I murmur. “Yeah,” Gio says. A half block later we see that the first pitch is already thrown. Just off the avenue on Sixth Street the guy with the Puerto Rican Bart shirt convulses on the sidewalk. His head bends sharply away from his neck and his scalp gushes blood into the gutter. The silver bat flashes over the white guy’s head, he exhales hard and brings it down on the other Hispanic guy’s face with everything he’s got. Blood lazily sprays into the muggy air like he’s beheaded the dude with a Samurai sword.

  White Guy hits again, fast, then again, faster—like chopping down a tree. Either his fourth or fifth swing catches Hispanic Guy number two sharp across the temple. The guy’s eye pops out as if he had an eject button on the side of his head. The eye’s not just out, it’s torn completely loose. I’ve never seen anything like it. I bounce the RMP up onto the curb as the eye rolls to a stop in the street. All I can think of is the time a kid lost a fingertip in shop class in Canarsie and the teacher kept yelling “save the piece” before getting sick on the floor.

  “Police, get down! Get down!” Gio yells. We’re out with guns drawn in a heartbeat maybe ten yards from White Guy with the bat.

  “Drop the bat, get on the ground!” Gio’s got no cover. “Do it!” I add coming around the car alongside him. “On the ground now. Right now!”

  White Guy stops hitting but doesn’t start following instructions. Fuck. I hate this part. Once you pull your gun the game is rarely automatically over. It’s not rock, paper, scissors. Gun beats bat? If you train a barrel on a bad guy and he says “Fuck you!” what then? Shoot, threaten, reason, beg, what? We’re moving closer to him carefully but fast. I don’t want to pull the trigger.

  “Get down!” Gio says again. Even if he won’t drop the bat, if we get the guy on the ground that’s as good as disarming him. If he had anything hairier than the bat on him, we’d probably have found out by now. The bat drops a few inches as White Guy’s shoulders slump. He’s spent. His mind is having a hard time processing what he just did. Good, at least he’s not crazy. Gio holsters his gun a second before I put mine away, too. We go for a tackle.

  Planting my left foot, I spring up and kick out with my right. My leg hooks the guy, pulling him off balance. Gio slams into him as hard as he can. I swing my other leg around and manage to catch the guy in the side of the head with my foot as he tumbles to the sidewalk, then fall on top of him, using his rib cage as a nice, flexy landing pad. He isn’t going to want to laugh, cough, or sneeze for a few days. Somehow Gio’s still standing up. He drops down and cuffs the guy hard. We both grab him, letting him know that he’s helpless. I toss him fast: keys, wallet, condom—bingo—a few bags of dope. He’s not up to talking right now but we’ll make time to discuss those last items later. We shove him into the back of the RMP. A crowd lazily gathers. Nearly everyone points at the eye.

  Gio grabs the radio through the driver-side window. “RMP nine-eight six-four, have EMS respond to Sixth and D, two victims in serious condition.”

  Dispatch comes back. “What do you have at Sixth and D, K?”

  “Two victims assaulted with a baseball bat. One lost an eye. The eye is on scene. Have EMS respond.” Gio looks at the mope in the backseat. “What are you, fuckin’ Babe Ruth?” he asks as he lets go of the handset.

  Gio stays near the car and keeps looking at the guy. He’s beaten and cuffed but that doesn’t mean he won’t try to rabbit on us. My shirt sticks to my back with sweat and the front’s bloody from the takedown, probably from the guy he hit. I move out into the street to keep anyone from parking or stepping on the eye and wait for EMS. Two uniform city cops from the Ninth Precinct pull up to help secure the scene.

  “Hey,” one of the uniforms says after looking at the eyeball in the street, “I got my eye on you.”

  “Eye caramba,” the other uniform says, looking at the Bart shirt. “Eye yi yi.”

  I don’t say anything and just stare at the first uniform cop to shut him the fuck up. Both uniforms get the picture and slither away.

  EMS arrives a short time later. One tech is a burly guy who looks after the first bat victim. The other is a tall, skinny, big-cheekbone brunette that could’ve been a runway model a few years earlier. She takes in the scene expressionlessly, goes around back, gets an organ box and kneels on the blacktop. She unconsciously bites her tongue while carefully picking the eye up between her rubber gloved fingers and gently setting it in the box. It’s strangely sexy. She has a tattoo on her forearm. It’s still a few years before that becomes common.

  “You can save it?” I ask her. “Nah. Usually they dangle on the cheek by the nerves when they get knocked out,” she says to me as she gets up. The uniforms try to think of something clever. “You’d wrap it in gauze against his head and transport, but like this…? No chance. Do you know how much violent force it takes to actually clear the head like this?”

  I shrug and nod, pointing to where her partner works like a dervish on Puerto Rican Bart. Scalp wounds bleed like crazy and the tech looks like he’s been serving sloppy joes with his hands. “He took a few practice swings on him,” I reply. She kneels to help and everyone, including her partner, automatically checks out her ass.

  On the way back to our Housing Precinct Command, Gio looks at me crooked for a second.r />
  “What the fuck was that?” he asks. “What was what?” I know what he’s saying, and we both like to break balls.

  “The thing. With the foot?” Some cops love guns and collect them and know all the names of the different ammunition loads and accessories and stuff. That’s not my thing. I collect beat-down moves. One week I’m training in kickboxing, the next maybe in Hawaiian Kempo. There’s plenty of opportunities to try out the stuff I learn while on the clock. I’ve been boxing since I was a kid and eventually I will discover Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, a Brazilian grappling style that suits me well. But my first years in plainclothes I’m still sort of a pilgrim wanderer when it comes to working with my hands.

  “So, you studying ballet this week?” Gio asks. “You looked like West Side Story or some shit.”

  “Tap,” I say.

  At the Command, I sit across a desk from White Guy and fill out his online booking report. I know all about the revolving door that keeps the same faces passing before my eyes from the D to the command to the Tombs and back out again, but this guy is for sure not walking around unsupervised for at least half a decade. Both of the guys he hit would be lucky to live past the weekend and Patrick Aloysius Mahoney as White Guy’s known to his parole officer has priors like Calvin Murphy has kids. He’s been pretty chill from the moment we dropped him so I loosen his cuffs and Gio brings him a drink of water. A little blood trickles from one hand where he’s been cut by the cuffs. Where Patrick is going he’s gonna need both his hands in working order. If a perp hasn’t been an asshole, I try to make the remaining time I spend with them as painless as I can. Anyway, I wanted to talk to him about those bags of dope while we had some privacy.