I was born September 4, 1941, at the French Hospital on Manhattan’s West Thirtieth Street, three months and three days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. My parents, James and Elizabeth Kelly, already had three sons and a daughter. My brother Donald, the one immediately ahead of me, was seven years old. My mother was forty-two, my father nearly forty-five, ancient to be having a baby in those days. I was named after my father’s brothers, Raymond and Walter Kelly.
I arrived in a New York that was big and bustling and loud, and the Kellys fit right in. In the middle of this frenetic city, we had our own close-knit world on the Upper West Side. We lived in a five-story walk-up apartment at 636 Columbus Avenue between West Ninetieth and West Ninety-First Streets with six spacious rooms. Living room, dining room, eat-in kitchen, and three bedrooms.
I used to lie on the living room floor, drawing pictures, which I was pretty good at, and showing my artwork to anyone who would look. We had an upright piano, though I never learned to play it, and large, creaky windows that looked down on the avenue. The landlord was Mr. Averett. To us, his name was a dirty word: “Averett, ugh,” like he was the worst possible person in the world. Nobody ever admits to liking his landlord in New York, then or now. The building isn’t there anymore. It was torn down to make way for a McDonald’s, which was then replaced by a luxury high-rise. In today’s crazy Manhattan real estate market, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Wall Street couple and their one baby are now occupying the space that seven raucous Kellys once did. Today, forty-eight dollars would barely cover a night in the parking garage.
Even the crime back then reflected an earlier time. When I was almost two, my mother left me in my carriage on Amsterdam Avenue while she ran into the supermarket, tucking her purse snugly behind my head. Today, this would be called asking for trouble—if not felonious child neglect. It seemed perfectly normal in early-1940s New York. So my mother was both surprised and angry when she came outside just in time to see a man reach into the carriage, push me aside, grab her handbag, and take off down the avenue.
“Hey!” she called out indignantly. But she was too late, and he was too fast. To me, the trust that story implies is as telling as the crime it reports.
My father, who’d served as a private in France during World War I, worked as a milkman, delivering dairy products in the predawn hours to people’s apartments, first by horse and cart and then in a boxy refrigerator truck. But in 1943, the Office of Defense Transportation ordered a skip-a-day milk delivery schedule to conserve home front resources. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia engineered a change in city regulations that made it cheaper to buy a quart of milk at the corner grocery, and the city’s milkmen became economic dinosaurs almost overnight. My dad wasn’t out of work for long. World War II was raging. The city’s defense plants were humming around the clock. He quickly caught on at Atlantic Basin Iron Works, a shipyard on the Brooklyn waterfront that was converting the 9,500-ton passenger steamship Rio Parana into the British Royal Navy escort carrier HMS Biter. The shipyard job paid well and lasted as long as the war did. But in 1945, after the Germans and Japanese surrendered and the emergency defense contracts all dried up, my father was out of work again. The postwar boom hadn’t started yet. Returning veterans were scooping up what few jobs there were. A forty-nine-year-old, second-generation Irish American like my father—high school diploma, basic blue-collar skills—wasn’t much in demand. But with five children and a wife depending on him, he couldn’t just wait around for his luck to change. He hit the pavement, picking up whatever work he could find. On Saturday afternoons, he started “shaping up,” as the union men called it, as a day laborer at the New York Times, tossing fat bundles of Sunday papers onto trucks at the loading dock on West Forty-Third Street. It wasn’t quite a living, but he was grateful for the shifts.
As a kid, I had no sense that any of this was cause for hardship. I certainly didn’t want for anything. Our family seemed on par with the other families in the neighborhood, a mix of first-and second-generation immigrants from different parts of Europe—dockworkers, tradesmen, shop owners, lots of stay-at-home moms. Our building had eight families and six or seven different ethnic groups, totally typical for the time. Next door to us on the fifth floor was Mo Bernstein from Mo and Joe’s Candy Store. Before Mo, the Kajandas from Norway lived there. Mrs. Kajanda was friendly with my mother. A floor down was the Waters family, the only other Irish Americans in the building. Next to them were the Collelas, Italian Americans. Their two sons both fought in World War II and flew B24s. It went on like that. On the third floor were a Czechoslovakian family and a French family. On the second floor were the Rothbergs, German Americans. Mr. Rothberg was the grumpy neighbor, impatient and nasty. Next to the Rothbergs were Dr. Kieve, a philosophy professor at Columbia University, and his wife. On the ground floor was Mr. Irving’s hardware store.
All the stores on Columbus Avenue were owned by people we knew. The Childcraft store. Mrs. Eagan’s music and candy shop. (The combination didn’t strike me as odd at the time. My sister, Mary, worked there after school.) The Mulaskis had a glazier business. They sold picture frames and fixed broken windows. There was Old Nick’s Bar. No one seemed rich. No one seemed poor. Everyone was climbing into the middle class or hoping to.
In early September 1947, the week of my sixth birthday, my mother walked me around the corner to St. Gregory’s, our local Catholic school. Four hundred kids, thirty-five in a class, far more nuns than lay teachers, five priests assigned to the parish. No one ever mentioned public school as an option for me. I cried all the way into the classroom my first day. The Presentation Sisters looked scary in their long black habits. Sister Athanasius prowled the halls, a big, hulking nun who sported a mustache. She carried a wooden bat she called “Athanasius Junior.” Even the youngest male students were required to wear neckties. But once I settled in, I grew to like the place. Miss Velasquez, my first-grade teacher, was really nice. The other kids were friendly to me. We didn’t have a school yard, but we played games at recess in front of the building, kick the can and Johnny-ride-a-pony and salugi and punch ball. We studied art and music, which you don’t normally think of as Catholic school staples, especially back then. I loved playing drums—on a desk, a table, a couple of water glasses, or even the little practice pads they had at school. At St. Gregory’s, the teachers believed in educating the whole child. When she put down that bat of hers, even Sister Athanasius turned out to be funny and kind.
I was Ray-Ray to the other kids, studious but athletic—not too quiet, not too talkative, friendly with just about everyone. I was an altar boy, which meant memorizing Latin. In first and second grades, I had leading roles in the school’s May Crowning, an elaborate pageant honoring the Blessed Virgin Mary. Alice O’Rourke put the crown on the statue. My friend Billy Carney and I were page boys. Our mothers made suits for us out of white satin and blue fringe, and I swear Billy and I looked like little James Browns. The only hitch was that I had measles the first year and my mother had to cover the spots with makeup. I hated the makeup, but you can’t call in sick for a May Crowning. The second time I was the picture of good health as Alice, Billy, and I and the rest of the school sang together, “O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today.”
That’s how it was being a Catholic kid in 1940s New York. They really were mostly carefree times.
When we weren’t in school, we had stickball on West Ninetieth Street—dodging the cars when we had to—fastball against the wall on West Ninety-First Street, and football in Riverside Park. There were endless numbers of kids to play with in the neighborhood and endless varieties of minor mischief—snowball fights, prank phone calls, dropping things off the roof—never malicious or destructive, just forbidden enough to be fun. The building rooftops were our hidden playgrounds. We could spend hours up there with our friends almost entirely beyond adult supervision.
We were Irish and Catholic and proud to be both. My mother’s family name was O’Brien, a close runner-up to Kelly in the who’s-more-Irish sweepstakes. Or was it the other way around? Regardless, all four of my grandparents were born in Ireland, in the counties of Roscommon and Longford. All came to New York in the decade before the Civil War. Ellis Island wasn’t open yet. They landed in a mostly Protestant city that was openly hostile to the Catholic Irish, who were thought to be intellectually suited for only the most menial jobs—and untrustworthy at those. Both my parents were born in New York, my father on September 21, 1896, and my mother on February 13, 1899. Though only one generation removed from the old country, my parents hardly talked about Ireland at all. They weren’t “professional Irish,” as my father liked to call those immigrants who behaved like they’d never left the Emerald Isle. My parents didn’t listen to Irish music or read Irish literature. They never once traveled to Ireland. I don’t remember my father ever ordering a Guinness—or, come to think of it, alcohol of any kind. I’m not saying he never did, but he never did around me. The Kellys were Americans, and that was that. Years later, long after I became police commissioner, I was asked to be grand marshal of the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I proudly accepted. It was a great honor and a lot of fun. But I didn’t grow up in what could truly be considered “an Irish home.”
In a similar way, I wouldn’t call my family’s Catholicism especially devout. I’d describe the Kellys as punch-your-ticket Catholics. We did what was expected of us in the religious department. My parents went to Sunday Mass together, accompanied by the children in the younger years. But my older brothers—soon to be joined by me and my friends—often showed up just in time, stood in the back of the crowded church, and slipped out right after Communion.
* * *
Both my parents loved us tremendously. I never doubted that. But those were different times. Parents were more hands-off back then. My parents were older by the time I came along. They’d been through all this before. Their approach, my father’s especially, was essentially, “Let us know if you need anything.” Sports was the one thing he and I bonded over at all.
My father bought our first television set just in time for the 1951 World Series, the New York Giants versus the New York Yankees, the first World Series broadcast live on NBC coast-to-coast. My father was home after a hernia operation, and we watched most of the games together. He was a huge Giants fan, and so was I. This was Willie Mays’s rookie season in the majors, but he was already my favorite player. We thought of the Giants, who played up at the Polo Grounds on Eighth Avenue at West 159th Street, as Manhattan’s team. They’d won the National League pennant in a thrilling three-game playoff against the hated Brooklyn Dodgers with Bobby Thomson’s legendary “shot heard ’round the world.” We were heartbroken when the overpowering Yanks with Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and Yogi Berra won the World Series four games to two.
My father was very much a man of his era. He was a small guy but physically strong. He was especially proud of his grip, which he got from being a milkman. I looked up to him tremendously. I thought he was the smartest person in the world. He did everything he possibly could to provide for us, but emotionally, he could be a bit distant. He’d bring home the New York World-Telegram. We’d read the batting averages and the box scores. But I don’t think my father ever said, “You want to go out to the park and throw a ball around?” We never went to a Giants game together, even though the ballpark was a quick subway ride from our apartment.
My mom was a totally different story. She was brimming with personality. She was tough—in a good sense—and naturally fun. She was warm and gregarious and could talk with absolutely anybody. She and my sister, Mary, were the ones who played the living room piano. She just had this cheerful confidence about her that seemed to say, “I know what’s right, I’ll do what I have to do, and everything will turn out fine.” She encouraged all of us to be ourselves.
Once I was safely in school, she got a job at Macy’s, working 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. as a dressing room checker, counting the garments people brought in and out. She always looked terrific, probably ten years younger than her age. She took pride in her appearance and dressed impeccably. I’m sure the Macy’s discount helped.
With my mother and father working and my older brothers and sister off doing their own things, my mother enlisted our neighbor Mrs. Waters to keep an eye on me after school. Every afternoon I’d go down to her apartment. She was a large person, in every sense of the word. She had a cat named Sligo and a thick Irish brogue, and her own kids were constantly getting into trouble. It wasn’t unusual for Mrs. Waters to grab my hand as we went rushing off to rescue one of her children from some fresh pile of trouble. She had opinions about everything and nicknames for almost everyone. “Here comes Piano Legs,” she’d say about a lady clomping up the sidewalks. Or “Oh, look,” she’d remark, “another baby carriage in front of the bar.”
When I outgrew the need for Mrs. Waters’s supervision, I went out on my own. I met my friends for pickup games out on the street and slowly began to toughen up. Sports played a major role in this. Like my dad, I was a small guy, but I was always a strong athlete. And I was pretty fearless. I got into skirmishes on the street, sometimes with boys older than I. It was mostly silly stuff—disputes over ball games, kids at school calling each other names. I found I could usually hold my own, a confidence that would serve me well later in life. But sometimes my friends and I were just idiots. We liked to climb on the backs of city buses, grabbing free rides and hanging on for dear life. Some other kids were even bigger idiots, riding on top of subway cars. Subway surfing, which I never did, was truly life threatening. A boy I knew got killed that way. Another kid fell off a roof and died. Today, deaths like these would garner breathless media coverage, complete with I-team reports, legislative hearings, and lawsuits. Back then, people were just sad. A certain amount of tragedy was taken in stride as part of big-city life.
* * *
As I grew older, the streets around me began to change.
I got my earliest taste of that change one Saturday afternoon as I walked in Central Park with one of my third-grade classmates. Suddenly we were surrounded by four or five older boys.
“Mira, mira,” I heard one of them say.
I had no idea what “mira” meant. But the boy was holding a baseball bat in a distinctly threatening manner, and I understood immediately what was happening to us. We were being robbed. Damned if I can remember my friend’s name, but we were two white kids in the park. The other boys were Puerto Rican. Our patch of the city was still teeming with thousands of white ethnic families like the Kellys—Irish, Jews, Italians, assorted eastern and northern Europeans, all living on top of each other. But the neighborhood was just getting its first wave of Puerto Ricans. Even an eight-year-old could sense fresh tension on the sidewalks and in the parks.
No one flashed a knife or a gun that day. The baseball bat was more than enough to grab my attention. One of the older boys reached his hands around my neck and started squeezing.
I could feel other hands reaching into my pockets. I had no money. No one had cell phones or other electronic devices back then. As I gasped for oxygen and my eyes began to bulge, I stole a glance at my friend, who looked just as terrified as I was. The boys were rifling through his pockets too.
The next thing I heard was someone saying “zapatos.” A couple of boys shoved us down on the path, while others yanked at our shoes. Barely pausing to untie the laces, they pulled the shoes right from our feet, then ran off into the park.
Neither of us was hurt in the robbery, except for our sense of security and our city-kid pride. But it was a genuinely rattling experience, one that stuck with me and made me empathetic to crime victims for the rest of my life: New York’s future police commissioner and his third-grade classmate walking forlornly home across West Ninety-First Street with nothing but dirty white socks on their feet.
* * *
The new families were moving to New York for the same old reasons our parents and grandparents had—for opportunity, for jobs, for the great American dream that the next generations might do better than the current one. These rolling waves of newcomers are part of what gives the city its energy, its diversity, its life. But such transitions rarely go entirely smoothly.
I got to know a few of the new kids playing ball in the neighborhood, especially a boy named Porfirio. One day, I didn’t come home in time for dinner. My mother decided I was missing and launched a frantic search. She finally found me in Porfirio’s apartment, eating Cheerios for dinner. We were having so much fun, I’d lost all track of the time. But as more Puerto Rican families moved in, it didn’t take long for attitudes on both sides to harden. My older brothers’ friends were trading hostile stares with Puerto Ricans. Fights were breaking out constantly. Inevitably, the younger kids like me were drawn in. There was no real way of avoiding it. I wasn’t looking for trouble, but all of a sudden, I was getting into fights on West Ninetieth Street. The new people spoke a different language and listened to different music. They sat outside their buildings for hours, while we came and went. They didn’t fold quietly into the life of the Upper West Side. They were trying to find a foothold in a newly adopted city. But the way we looked at it was that we had to defend the neighborhood. That was our job.
Our building superintendent was stabbed to death in front of our building—an unsolved murder. One day a kid put a knife to my neck. That fight, like most of them, was quickly broken up by adults nearby, but the knife was scary. There weren’t many guns on the street, but stickball bats were everywhere, as was the gravity knife, which had a blade hidden in the handle. A few people had homemade zip guns. Those shot bullets, though not with much velocity. I looked out our front window one evening and saw my brother Donald walking up Columbus Avenue with at least a dozen of his friends and something in his hand. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a bouquet of flowers. Walking directly toward them were a dozen Puerto Ricans. It was a Sharks-and-Jets scenario straight out of West Side Story—minus the singing, dancing, and Maria—years before the show ever reached Broadway or became a movie hit. Right then, a police radio car turned the corner, and a real-life Officer Krupke dispersed everyone. Just the sight of a police car had that power back then. I can still hear my mother’s voice calling for my brother to come upstairs. He kept walking, pretending he was deaf.
It was fascinating how the grown-ups reacted to all this. They weren’t sure if we should run or fight. I had a disagreement with a Puerto Rican boy one day, and Mrs. Dougherty, one of our neighbors, set up a makeshift boxing ring so José and Ray-Ray could duke it out. I guess you’d say she was the early-1950s New York version of the modern soccer mom. This was what passed for parental involvement back then. She even gathered a crowd to cheer us on. As I recall, I was creaming José before other neighbors stepped in and pulled us apart.
* * *
Some people blamed all the neighborhood’s problems on the arriving Puerto Ricans. That wouldn’t be fair. Among the old-timers, the Irish, especially, had their own rough crews. I’m not sure who would have won an all-out rumble, but our side was fortified with street-brawling dockworkers and some genuine hoodlums too. The Irish gang known as the Westies was farther downtown. But we had our local Irish gangsters, and they could find plenty of trouble on their own, often in a bar called McGlade’s, directly across from us on Columbus Avenue. You could see the sign from our living room window. McGlade’s was famous for being the place where Edward “Poochy” Walsh tended bar and was also killed.
Poochy was a midlevel local gangster. Once, a police officer named Mario Biaggi fired three shots at Poochy, narrowly missing him. Poochy, who was driving a stolen car that day, ducked just in time and got lucky. (Biaggi, a legendary cop, later went to Washington as a congressman from the Bronx.) But one night, when Poochy was pouring at McGlade’s, Elmer Burke came in.
Elmer hated being called Elmer. He much preferred his nickname, Trigger, which came from his wartime service as a U.S. Army Ranger in Italy and was even more befitting his postwar career as an extortionist, armed robber, and hit man. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t try—or at least claim he’d tried. “I don’t hold up the police station only because they get paid by check,” he supposedly once said.
How did we know all this? That’s hard to say. But it was common knowledge in the neighborhood, and no one doubted a word of it.
On July 23, 1952, Trigger got into a fistfight with a local hoodlum called Squeeky, who ended up in a puddle of pain on the floor in McGlade’s. When Trigger kept beating him while he was down, Poochy raised his voice in mild protest. Trigger finally stopped and left the bar. But once outside, he thought about the uncalled-for interference, turned around, and strolled casually back in. He shot Poochy in the face and left him on the floor, where he bled to death. Then, just as casually, Trigger walked back out to Columbus Avenue. Among those who took Poochy’s death especially hard was his sister, who was dating Trigger at the time.
This was the crime that finally put an end to Trigger Burke’s one-man crime spree. He was convicted of killing Poochy and sent to Sing Sing prison, where he was ultimately executed for the crime in 1958.
* * *
I was doing well in school. Very well, actually. For two years, I was named Smartest Boy in Class. Today, that honor wouldn’t be politically correct for at least two reasons: first, it might make the other kids feel less intelligent, and second, one of the girls would almost certainly be smarter than any of the boys. But I got two little statues for winning. Around that time, my father’s career also took an upward turn. His oldest brother, my uncle Walter, had connections with the Tammany Hall Democratic machine. Walter was the politically wired member of the family. He seemed to know everybody. Some people even said Walter Kelly could be New York’s mayor one day. But he was also a big drinker, so I’m not sure how far that would have gone. Still, my uncle used his political connections to take care of my dad. In 1952, he got my father a federal job as a cashier at the Internal Revenue Service. This was totally different from anything my father had ever done before. I was playing on West Ninety-First Street one afternoon with my friends when I looked up to see my father walking home from the subway in a suit and tie with a newspaper folded under his arm. I could hardly believe my eyes. My blue-collar father looked like a businessman. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him dressed that way, except maybe for Christmas Mass.
Finally, in the summer between seventh and eighth grades, my father moved us to the suburbs. Well, not quite the suburbs. The 1950s Upper West Side version of the suburbs: Queens. My father didn’t want to move, but, as he put it, “With everything that’s going on around here, it’s time.” We said good riddance to Mr. Averett and found a new apartment in Long Island City.
My father was concerned about me and my mother. The older children were mostly gone by then—or half in and half out. My sister, Mary, had just gotten married. My oldest brother, Leonard, was about to. My youngest brother, Donald, had just joined the Marine Corps, following the two oldest. I’m sure my father could see me making some poor decisions and running with a rougher crowd. I think he wanted to get me out of that environment before something more serious occurred. He was worried about the path I was going down.
When I showed up for eighth grade at St. Teresa’s in Woodside, Queens, I felt the discomfort familiar to anyone who’s ever been the new kid in class. I didn’t know anybody. But as I had eight years earlier, I adjusted fairly quickly. In many ways, western Queens was like the Upper West Side a decade earlier. It was mostly white but ethnically mixed—Irish, Italian, Jewish, French, and others. I quickly met another kid named Kelly, though his family was Jewish and their name had originally been Klein. We weren’t in Manhattan anymore, and that took some getting used to. But Queens did have one other benefit: it was that much closer to Island Park.
A few years earlier, my father had bought a small bungalow near the beach on Long Island’s South Shore. We were a long way from the ritzy Hamptons, in miles and in lifestyle. Island Park was a summer community of unheated bungalows. The Kelly cottage on Kildare Road had three tiny bedrooms, open beams, no drop ceiling. I believe my father paid about a thousand dollars for the place. We went every summer. Everyone relaxed. People whiled away full days in their bathing suits without stepping into a pair of shoes. I spent all day at Casino Beach, which was small but nice and packed with growing families and preening teenagers. There were kids everywhere. At night, there were movies projected against a concrete wall at the handball courts. I met new friends in Island Park, two guys in particular—Tommy Reichel and Gerry Schraeder. We did everything together.
My father loved that house, the only real estate he ever owned. He and my two oldest brothers, Leonard and Kenneth, worked on the house constantly. They were all very handy. They did plumbing and electrical work and added extra rooms. The place wasn’t constructed as a year-rounder, but my dad and brothers kept it in excellent shape.
I built my first career in Island Park, if you can call it that, climbing my way up the village’s teenage-employment ladder. When I was fifteen, I got a job parking beachgoers’ cars. People left their cars with us despite the fact that most of us were underage and unlicensed. We drove around the parking lot and, occasionally, outside it. After a summer of car parking, my friend Tommy Reichel and I passed the lifeguard test. Lifeguard was a big step up from parking attendant. Among the lifeguards were two new friends, Sammy Latini and Frank Ruddy, who provided endless laughter and fun times. Lifeguarding, I guess you could say, was my first experience in law enforcement, stopping kids from diving off the pier into shallow water and rescuing people from drowning. That happened far more often than you might imagine. The water looked calm but was deceptively dangerous. Those rescues produced an adrenaline rush and a glow of lingering satisfaction, feelings I’d be chasing for many years to come.
Island Park boasted plenty of good-looking girls, but one stood out from the rest. Veronica Clarke was her name. She was smart and tough, funny and beautiful. What I liked most about her, aside from her blonde hair and good looks, was her independent streak. She had a confidence far beyond her years. She came from a family a lot like mine—Irish American but not “professional Irish.” She was one of five children, like I was, though she fell in the middle. Her mother’s maiden name was Kelly. Her family was even more beach oriented than mine was. She had a brother and sister who were Casino Beach lifeguards. Veronica was the strongest distance swimmer—male or female—I’d ever seen.
When the Clarkes weren’t at the beach, they lived in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Her father was a New York police officer who chauffeured a high-ranking police executive. That was a big deal to everyone. But like me, Veronica envisioned a larger future for herself. In each other, I believe, we both saw something we admired in ourselves. We dated. Then we dated some more. I knew right away she was someone special.