The appointment of Glanvin Alveranga, while engendering deep division within the Department, went largely unnoticed by the black community. South Jamaicans had jobs to perform and families to rear. To area residents, who had always regarded the police with deep suspicion, the addition to the force of one man made little difference. As the new Precinct Commander’s first month in office neared an end, few citizens were aware of his existence, let alone encouraged by it.
“I didn’t know Alveranga from no one,” Add Armstead later said. “I was concerned with making out a living, not running the police.”
Armstead’s concern was well founded. Two years earlier, he had moved into a small two-story wood frame house at 109-50 New York Boulevard in South Jamaica with Eloise Glover and her four children. He was the sole means of support for Clifford (age ten), Henry (eight), Darlene (six), Patricia (two), Mrs. Glover, and himself.
The Armstead-Glover union filled needs in both parties. Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1937, Eloise Glover had been unable to achieve stability or security on her own. Her father had been a seaman; her mother, a household domestic. For reasons she does not recall, she was brought up by an aunt on a farm outside of Mobile.
Marrying in her mid-teens, Eloise Glover bore four children, after which she was divorced. She then worked as a domestic for three dollars a day. In 1960, she moved to New York, leaving her four children with a relative in Alabama.
A large, gap-toothed woman weighing close to 200 pounds, Mrs. Glover was unable to cope with the pressures of big-city life. Softspoken and shy, extremely vulnerable to the world around her, she found temporary work in New York as a domestic but was forced to resign after contracting diabetes. Moving to Queens in 1963, she joined the ranks of South Jamaica residents receiving public assistance. Then she met Henry Blackman, who fathered two of her children—Clifford (born November 16, 1962) and his younger brother, Henry. She married Blackman in 1963, but he left several months later.
For the next few years, Eloise Glover survived largely on welfare and private handouts. Every Christmas, the St. Albans Congregational Church gave her a generous supply of canned food and clothing. As “church mother” for the Temple Gates of Prayer Community Church (the job entailed opening the church on Sundays and keeping it clean), she came to rely on “care packages” from that church’s congregation. She met Add Armstead in 1965 and subsequently bore two of his children—Darlene in 1967 and Patricia in 1970. In 1971, Armstead moved into her home.
“I know some people make a fuss about the way I’ve lived my life,” Eloise Glover says softly. “But a good man is hard to find. Add helped us with money. He was good with the children. And he didn’t beat me none. The two boys needed a man they could look up to, and he was the only one.”
Armstead and Glover lived the subsistence life that characterized much of South Jamaica. Their house was rotting and run-down. Gaping holes pockmarked the living-room walls. Monday through Friday, Armstead worked at the Pilot Automotive Wrecking Company from 7:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Saturdays, he worked from 7:00 A.M. until noon. He was one of three steady employees. By 1973, he had worked there for eleven years—four years longer than his employer, Tony Minutello, who had bought the business in 1966 and kept Armstead on as a “burner,” whose job it was to extricate car parts with an acetylene torch.
On Friday, April 27, 1973, Armstead left the junkyard at his customary hour of 5:00 P.M. His mood was buoyant. Friday was payday, and he had almost one hundred fifty dollars in cash in his pocket. Stopping at a bar, he had several beers, then made his way home for dinner. After the meal, he gave Mrs. Glover thirty dollars for groceries and turned on the television. The show bored him. The plot line was confusing, and he had already begun to think about the morning ahead. His boss had told him to get in early so they could load a shipment of motors onto a truck before noon, and it was Armstead’s responsibility to make sure the crane was in working order. He even had his own key to open the yard.
At 9:00 P.M., Armstead turned off the television, removed his shoes, and went to sleep on the living-room sofa. Two hours later, he awoke and put the set back on to watch Perry Mason. At midnight, he fell asleep again, unaware that within hours his life would be irrevocably altered.
As Add Armstead slept, Thomas Shea’s workday had just begun. It was almost 11:00 P.M. on Friday when Shea arrived at the squat four-story concrete and red-brick building that housed the 103rd Precinct police. His mood was not good. On Thursday night, he and his partner, Walter Scott, had made an arrest that necessitated his spending the better part of Friday in court. It wasn’t until late afternoon that Shea had gotten home, and now, after only two hours’ sleep, he was on the job again.
In many respects, the station-house layout underscored police-community tensions. Located catercorner from a large municipal parking lot, it seemed designed to shield what went on inside from probing eyes. Visitors entered the station house through a single door that opened onto a small reception area dominated by a long chest-high wood counter. Behind the counter, a raised platform six inches off the floor gave the desk officer an appearance of height to any civilian who entered. A heavy iron bar in front of the counter kept visitors a minimum of two feet away.
Only one chair was available for civilians, a clear indication that they were not expected to linger. If a visitor had legitimate business at the station house, it was transacted in the labyrinth of corridors and rooms that radiated from the reception area.
Several lights dangled from the ceiling with yellowed globes muting their glow. The walls, once ivory cinder block, were now gray. A huge American flag hung behind the counter. Otherwise, the reception area was bare save for two plaques opposite the door. One plaque read:
POLICE DEPARTMENT, CITY OF NEW YORK
58th Precinct Station House*
Borough of Queens
Erected 1927
James J. Walker, Mayor
The other plaque was more sobering:
103RD PRECINCT HONOR ROLL
In Memory of Those Killed in Line of Duty
William Long
Shield No. 15186
APPOINTED DECEMBER 1, 1954
CALLED TO REST SEPTEMBER 2, 1956
Kenneth Nugent
Shield No. 16022
APPOINTED NOVEMBER 11, 1958
CALLED TO REST AUGUST 21, 1971
William Capers
Shield No. 945
APPOINTED JANUARY 1, 1953
CALLED TO REST APRIL 3, 1972
Passing through the reception area, Shea waved to the officer on duty, then went directly to the roll-call room in back on the first floor. Most cops dressed for duty in the second-floor locker room. But one month earlier, Shea and Scott had drawn a permanent plainclothes assignment. Tonight, as always, they would wear civilian clothes. Shea, dungarees and a brown CPO jacket buttoned down the front with a gray sweatshirt underneath; Scott, jeans and a navy blue windbreaker.
The roll-call room was large and well lit. Two dozen metal frame chairs dominated the center with several vending machines off to the side. Shea checked the bulletin board for descriptions of wanted and missing persons, then thumbed through his memo book to make certain he had enough blank pages to cover a busy night.
Joseph Kossmann, the night Operations Lieutenant, walked by and nodded hello. A rotund man of medium height with bright red hair, he had a bulging stomach and a rear end described by one cop as “the biggest butt in history.” From 11:30 P.M. until 7:30 the following morning, Kossmann would be the commanding officer of the 103rd Precinct, responsible for supervising the station house and all cops on patrol.
One by one, the cops filed into the roll-call room, their heavy New York accents filling the air. Despite having been assigned to the precinct ten months earlier, Shea did not know many of their names. Nonetheless, he felt a strong sense of camaraderie with each of them. As always, there was a high visibility of guns.
Police regulations mandate that a loaded service revolver be carried at all times. For a cop to leave home without it would be akin to a Wall Street lawyer appearing in court without a tie. As a practical matter, most cops, Shea included, carried two guns.
At 11:15 P.M. Sergeant Joseph Kennedy called roll. Shea knew him by name and sight, nothing more. Still, Kennedy had a reputation as someone who looked after his men, and Shea liked him. For the coming night, Kennedy would be one of three sergeants responsible for supervising patrol-car duty. Thomas Donohue and Robert Bennett were the others. As Kennedy called roll, the cops strained to hear him. He had a deep, gravelly voice, extremely low in volume, and no one wanted to miss an assignment. Most of the men would spend the next eight hours in uniform patrolling an assigned section of South Jamaica by car.
Shea and his partner, Walter Scott, had a different task. Eighteen months earlier, the Department had implemented an “Anticrime Program” that placed hundreds of cops on duty disguised as drunks, blind men, Hasidic rabbis, taxi drivers, telephone linemen, and the like. The theory underlying Anticrime was that, without their giveaway blue uniforms, these cops would be better able to gather information and enforce the law. However, in South Jamaica after midnight, any white man was suspect as a cop. Thus, in the 103rd Precinct, late-night anticrime details were conducted by motor patrol.
Shea and Scott had been partners on the late-night anticrime shift since March 1, 1973. Their initial assignment had been general in nature. But in late March, they were instructed to concentrate on stolen cars.
An automobile-theft ring was operating virtually unchecked in the 103rd Precinct. Rather than steal cars in their entirety, the thieves stripped them.
Every day, four or five residents would come out to the street and find their automobiles without doors, hoods, or fenders. These parts, the police presumed, were sold to neighborhood body shops that had “requisitioned” them. But a check of shops in the area had proved futile. And one additional item was particularly galling. The thieves always escaped police detection. Not once had they been caught in the act by a passing patrol car. Thus, the precinct command had come to conclude that the “other side” had access to a police radio, enabling it to know exactly when and where the cops were on duty.
Careful monitoring by the opposition required a resourceful response. For the upcoming night, Shea and Scott had been instructed to radio the station house at 4:00 A.M. and announce that they were going off duty for a meal break. However, rather than leave the streets, they would then cruise anonymously in the hope that the car thieves would strike. Their real meal break would come an hour later at five.
As Shea and Scott left the station house at 11:30 P.M., they walked by prearrangement to Scott’s car. They drove separately to work every evening. Shea, in an ivory-colored Volkswagen; Scott, in a white Buick Skylark. Then, after roll call, they rode the streets together until 7:30 A.M., when they separated and drove home. The previous night, they had used Shea’s car. He was glad tonight was Walter’s turn.
“You tired?” Scott asked as they pulled away from the curb.
“Yeah.”
“It shows. Cheer up. We’ve got the next two nights off.”
As the car moved slowly through the streets, Shea stared out the window . . . Burned-out shops . . . Abandoned buildings . . . Cracked sidewalks with whole chunks of concrete torn away. Idle men holding bottles in brown paper bags stood huddled together, all of them black, each a potential adversary. During their first shift together, Shea had told Scott, “If I ever get shot, I want you to take me to Queens General Hospital. The emergency room there is better than the one at Mary Immaculate.”
Almost without thinking, Shea checked the position of his guns. One, a six-shot service revolver, was strapped over his left shoulder. The other, a snub-nosed revolver holding five bullets, was in a pants holster on the right side of his back. Both were .38-caliber models.
“Thank God the next two days are off,” Shea told himself. Maybe then he could catch up on his sleep and spend some time with his children. Tuesday had been his younger daughter’s birthday. Lynn was eleven now, one year younger than Cindy. The balloons from the party he had missed were still up in the garage.
Being a cop was detrimental to family life. He knew that, and it bothered him. Generally, when he got home from work, he ate breakfast, slept for four hours, then got up to socialize or run errands. After that, he’d take a three-hour nap, eat supper, watch television with Bonnie and the kids, and go off to work again. At one point, when Bonnie was finding it particularly hard to cope with the demands of semi-single parenthood, their family doctor had suggested he switch to daytime hours. But, somehow, the suggestion had never been implemented; largely, Shea knew, because he had wanted to keep working nights.
For a dozen years, Shea had always sought out late-night hours. Most cops derided the midnight to 8:00 A.M. shift, calling it the “witches’ watch . . . late show . . . graveyard hours.” The fact that it was a direct descendant of the famous Dutch Night Watch that had guarded New Amsterdam from dusk until dawn 300 years earlier did nothing to spur their civic fervor. But Shea was happy with it.
“That might sound strange,” he says. “But I joined the force because I wanted to do police work. Nighttime is when crime is at its peak. That’s when I wanted to be on the job. Besides, the time always seemed to go faster when I was busy.”
His tour began as evening workers—cleaning women, printers, waiters—were going home. Bars were letting out, their patrons easy prey. Generally, the first two hours were the busiest. Then, as the night wore on, the numbers thinned. By four o’clock, the last bars had closed and there was time for reflection before the pace picked up again. Leaving work each morning at eight, Shea and his partner saw most of the world moving in an opposite direction.
They were an odd couple, Shea and Scott. Both were physically unprepossessing. Scott, in particular, was a graceless man; five feet nine inches tall, 200 pounds, with short, stubby fingers and heavy thighs. Like Shea, he had always wanted to be a cop. Born in Queens, the son of a film technician, Scott had joined the force in January 1969 at age twenty-two and served in Manhattan’s 9th Precinct until February 1972, when he was reassigned to South Jamaica. In two evaluation reports, superior officers had graded Scott among the “bottom quarter” of their men. On one occasion, his hand had been broken by a pimp who struck him with a metal pipe. Rather than arrest the assailant, Scott had thrown him through a plate-glass window. Several years later, the Civilian Complaint Review Board had cautioned him about a report that, while issuing a traffic summons to a sixteen-year-old black, he had held a cocked gun to the youth’s head.
Within any given precinct, certain men get reputations as the kind of cops others don’t want to ride with. Some are unnecessarily aggressive and abrasive. Others fail to back up a partner in trouble. Generally, word gets around, and a cop whose own partner is on vacation will tell the roll-call officer, “I don’t want to work with so-and-so. Give me someone else until my partner gets back or I’ll call in sick.” Eventually one of three things happens to these unwanted men: They mend their ways, get station-house desk jobs, or pair up with each other. Shea and Scott were partners. Neither had enjoyed a steady companion in the 103rd Precinct until they found each other. By late April 1973, they had ridden fifty tours together.
As the night wore on, the conversation between Shea and Scott began to wane. Both men were tired and, by 3:00 A.M., what little dialogue there was came from the police walkie-talkie nestled on the seat between them. It was a compact one-pound model. Through it, they were able to monitor communications between precinct headquarters and the other radio-patrol cars on duty in South Jamaica. Walkie-talkies were treated with great respect. In addition to their communications value, they cost the Department $750 each. If a cop lost one, he was docked five days’ vacation.
At 4:00 A.M., Shea flipped on the transmitter of his walkie-talkie and, as prearranged, radioed headquarters that he and Scott were breaking for a meal.
Then Scott turned the car down a narrow side street and continued cruising. Moments later, the walkie-talkie sounded.
“I got a signal twenty-one on an auto,” the dispatcher intoned. “Two black males stole a cab. The location is Van Wyck Expressway and Liberty Avenue. Can someone meet the complainant in the Exxon station nearby?”
As Shea and Scott listened, one of the other cars on patrol responded in the affirmative. Several minutes later, a preliminary report of the incident was on the air:
RADIO CAR: Have units in the 103rd and surrounding precincts on the lookout for a yellow-and-red 1970 Chevrolet four-door Buzz-a-Ride Cab. It was stolen approximately fifteen minutes ago from Liberty Avenue and Van Wyck Expressway.
DISPATCHER: Any description on the perpetrator?
RADIO CAR: It was stolen by two male Negroes about twenty-three, twenty-four years of age.
DISPATCHER: Any weapon? RADIO CAR: Possibly a gun.
At 4:22 A.M., more information came over the walkie-talkie: “One perpetrator was wearing a white hat and black overcoat; the other a brown leather jacket. The cab has been recovered. The alarm is still active on the two male Negroes.”
There is nothing unusual about a taxicab robbery in the 103rd Precinct, and the one that occurred in the predawn hours of April 28, 1973, was no exception.
Shortly before 4:00 A.M., a twenty-one-year-old cabdriver named Frank Damiani had picked up two black men outside a bar on the corner of South Road and Waltham Avenue. When they arrived at their destination, one of the men pulled a gun, pushed it against Damiani’s ribs, and announced, “This is a rip-off.” Evincing more concern for his money than his life, Damiani leaped with his cashbox from the car and ran. Instead of firing or chasing after him, the two men simply drove off with the cab.
Damiani ran to the nearest telephone and dialed 911 to report the theft. The abandoned car was found shortly thereafter. No sooner had it been recovered than the walkie-talkie sounded again, this time with a report of shots at the Step Inn Bar on Hillside Avenue. Almost concurrently, Shea turned to Scott and banged his fist on the dashboard in frustration. Directly in front of them, by the curb at 115-20 142nd Street, stood a blue 1970 Chevrolet stripped of its doors, hood, and fenders.
Gritting his teeth, Shea noted the license plate number on the car, flipped a switch on his walkie-talkie to “transmit,” and radioed headquarters:
“Anticrime to Central. Can we have a ten-fifteen on New York registration two-four-five QFT?”
“Ten-fifteen” was a request that the dispatcher check his computer to learn whether or not the car in question had been reported stolen. A ten-sixteen reply would mean “yes.” Ten-seventeen would mean “no.”
“Are you holding?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yes.”
“Stand by.”
Seconds later, the first police unit to arrive at the Step Inn Bar radioed for an ambulance to be rushed to the scene. At 4:46 A.M., the dispatcher came back on again. “Anticrime, ten-seventeen on that New York plate [not reported stolen].”
“Can we have a name on that?” Shea asked.
“Stand by.”
The unit at the Step Inn Bar interrupted again to report that two persons had been critically wounded.
“Anticrime,” the dispatcher intoned, recapturing the air-waves. “The registered owner on that auto is Harry Heyman, 87-40 Francis Lewis Boulevard.”
The unit covering the shooting at the bar asked for a supervisor to be sent to the scene.
“Can you tell us what precinct 87-40 Francis Lewis Boulevard is in?” Shea asked.
“One-oh-seven,” the dispatcher answered.
Sergeant Joseph Kennedy interrupted to broadcast over the patrol-car radio that he would respond to the Step Inn Bar, where one man lay dead and another dying.
Shea climbed from Scott’s car to inspect the stripped vehicle. The owner didn’t even know what had happened. Leaning through what had once been the right front door, he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the insurance card.
“Let’s go back to the station house and call the owner,” he told Scott. “Then we can break for meal.”
“Come on, boy. Get up! Time to go.”
The alarm had rung five minutes earlier, ripping Add Armstead from a heavy sleep. Now, at 4:45 A.M., he was trying to awaken his son Clifford.
For almost a year, Armstead had taken the boy to work on Saturday mornings. Initially, Clifford had been reluctant to go. An awkward bashful child deeply affected by the loss of his natural father, he had been suspicious of this man who lived with his mother. But over time, his mistrust faded. Armstead was the only father he had known. Before long, the boy was going to the junkyard, not only on Saturdays but after school as well. It gave him a sense of accomplishment, and occasionally the boss even paid him a dollar for running errands.
“Wake up, boy. No time for dreams. We gotta be movin’. Gotta get up and go to work if you want to learn to be a mechanic.”
Shaking the cobwebs from his head, Clifford climbed from bed. In anticipation of the moment, he had slept fully clothed except for his shoes. Reaching down, he picked a deck of playing cards, a miniature wrench, and a plastic ornament bearing the words “Aloha Hawaii” off the floor. Then, after stuffing his bounty in a pants pocket, he pulled his boots on.
“Go quiet so you don’t wake your mother,” Armstead cautioned.
The boy was dressed in brown trousers, green nylon socks, and a long-sleeved brown shirt with a purple collar. The boots were black suede with two-and-one-quarter-inch heels. He was ten years old, five feet tall, and weighed ninety-eight pounds.
At the hall closet, Armstead stopped and pulled out a brown leather coat for himself, a mustard-colored jacket for Clifford. “Put this on,” he said. “It’s cold out.”
The boy obeyed.
“Better wear something on your noggin too, so you don’t catch cold.” Clifford reached for a white cotton fatigue hat and pulled it over his head. It was 4:50 A.M.
Outside, Armstead buttoned his coat to guard against the chill early-morning air. The temperature was fifty-three degrees, but dampness and dew made it seem colder. The junkyard was slightly more than a quarter mile away. Sometimes on Saturdays they took the bus. Sometimes they walked.
“I got it in my mind we should take the bus today,” Armstead said as they reached the street, “But I don’t see none coming. It ain’t but six or seven blocks. We can walk.”
New York Boulevard fronted an incongruous combination of industrial buildings and battered wood frame houses. It was an ill-paved, rutted road with two lanes running in each direction. The man and boy walked along the sidewalk with Armstead near the curb. Past the corner of New York Boulevard and Mathias Avenue, the sidewalk gave way to a trail of cracked slate. To the right, a large vacant lot stood littered with paper, tin cans, and broken glass. Five trees fifty to sixty feet tall rose out of the trash. Around the trees, rough underbrush one to two feet high extended to a burned-out garage in back. A narrow dirt path that had been worn into the underbrush by people crossing the lot extended from the street past the garage and through a break in a waist-high chain-link fence that divided the lot. All totaled, the area was fifty by seventy yards in size.
Walter Scott turned the white Buick Skylark north on New York Boulevard and cast his eyes aimlessly across the dreary landscape: dilapidated stores . . . crumbling houses . . . a run-down service station. As the car crossed 112th Road approaching Mathias Avenue, two figures walking in the opposite direction caught his eye. Both were black. One was dressed in a brown leather jacket. The other was wearing brown pants, a mustard-colored jacket, and white hat.
Turning his head to the side, Scott nudged his partner. “Hey, Tom. Over there on the far side of the road, those are the two guys from the taxi stickup.”
The destinies of Clifford Glover and Thomas Shea were about to collide.
* New York City’s police precincts were renumbered after the station house was built.