VIRTUALLY ALL OF NEW York City’s vast network of public housing was built during the liberal post-WWII era of Mayor Robert Wagner. Not that it was easily done, despite the prevailing New Deal mentality. The overwhelming question, even then, was whether or not “we” had an obligation to do anything at all for “them” and the prediction, as these red and yellow brick buildings went up, was universally bleak: substandard from the first, it was solemnly declared, they would soon fall into disrepair—“instant slum” and “breeding grounds for crime” were the phrases most often heard.
Tilley was born in 1962, just as the construction was getting into high gear and if he’d ever heard this depressing forecast (though he certainly heard plenty about “us” and “them”), he didn’t remember it. For Jim Tilley, New York’s projects were a fact of life, a given. Moodrow, on the other hand, had listened to the forecasts patiently, then was surprised at the city’s simple, effective solution—the creation of a special police force to serve the nearly five hundred thousand citizens living in the projects. Now each set of public houses has its own miniature police force, cops who come back to the same group of buildings day after day, until they (or the better ones, at least) can tell the good guys from the bad guys.
But, crime or no crime, the irony is still clear, because it’s New York’s alternative housing, the tenements built early in the century to house the vast labor force emigrating from eastern and southern Europe, that have fallen into disrepair. For all the poverty closed off by those narrow, yellow hallways, the projects, including the Vladek Houses where Mrs. Louise Greenwood lived, represent the housing of choice for most of New York’s poor.
The absolute proof of that assertion can be found in the ten-year waiting list for available apartments, even for apartments in the Vladek Houses which, an exception to the general rule, were completed in 1940 as part of the cure for the Great Depression.
The Vladek Houses, however, are only a small part of the network of subsidized projects blanketing the waterfront area of the Lower East Side, and as he and his partner drove toward Louise Greenwood’s, Moodrow ticked off the names as they drove south from 14th Street: the Baruch Houses, the Lillian Wald Houses, the Jacob Riis Houses, the Seward Park complex. “Nearly thirty thousand people, Jimmy, who need help to pay the rent. This neighborhood was never good. It was always dirt poor. First Irish, then Jewish and East European. Now it’s mostly Puerto Rican and Chinese with a few leftover whites and a gang of punk artists and yuppies north of Houston Street. And dope, of course. Probably the most dope of any place below 96th Street. You know how in black neighborhoods, it’s hard to tell the good kids from the bad ones? Well, we got punks down here with green hair knocking down half a million dollars a year making sculpture out of garbage. We also got punks who manufacture speed. Some of the guys out there with rings in their noses write for Rolling Stone magazine. You fuck with them, you find yourself on page one. But others, looking just exactly the same, like to pimp young runaways. Think you can tell ’em apart? The 7th ain’t a regular precinct. We got more than a hundred thousand Puerto Ricans living here. We got nine different kinds of ethnic whites above Houston Street. We got Chinese by the Brooklyn Bridge. We got Hasidic Jews on Grand Street. We even got junior executives in co-ops. It might be a pot, but most of the time, it don’t melt. It fucking boils.”
Moodrow parked the Plymouth next to what was left of the nearly demolished Gouverneur Hospital and the two cops stepped out into the noontime heat. There are no air conditioners in city houses and the pathways and small parks dotting the Vladek Houses were crowded with residents seeking the nonexistent breeze. Moodrow and Tilley walked from their car to the headquarters of Public Service Area #41, without looking too closely at the gangs of kids openly smoking joints. The two cops were about to check in with the housing cops, a courtesy that, if overlooked, would come back to haunt them if they should need a favor sometime in the future.
Naturally, the desk sergeant, an ancient warrior named Handlesman, knew Moodrow and welcomed him, “How’re the whores treatin’ ya these days, Moodrow? You got AIDS yet?”
“Yeah, from sharing a needle with your sister. This is my new partner, Jimmy Tilley. Guess what we’re here for?”
Brian Handlesman threw the young detective a close look, wondering how anyone could be so unlucky. Handlesman was extremely fat, even by the beefy standards of the NYPD, and he kept shifting his weight on the armless metal chair behind the small desk at the entranceway to PSA #41 headquarters. “I bet you’re here about Levander Greenwood. Am I right?” He laughed. “We got a bulletin today. In fact, we been gettin’ bulletins once a month for the last six months.” He gestured to a corkboard in the hallway leading to the back rooms. A mug shot of Greenwood glared from the case.
“That’s our boy,” Moodrow admitted. “Any word?”
Handlesman shrugged his shoulders. “I think you’re wastin’ your time. His mama got a restraining order nearly a year ago. He ain’t allowed within a hundred yards of the Vladek Houses. Last time he was here, he absconded with the fuckin’ rent money.”
“Were you here when Greenwood was a child?” Tilley asked. “Did you know him?”
“Shit, kid, I testified at his first juvie hearing. Long fuckin’ time ago. I told the hearing officer, Kill the little bastard. Now. Don’t let this kid grow up. They got mad as…What’s ya name again?”
“Jim.”
“They had one of these fag social workers there. Judy Cohen. Judy the Jew, I used ta call her. I swear ta fuckin’ Christ, Jim, every time one of these little animals stabbed someone, this bitch was up there tryin’ ta protect him. Tryin’ ta protect Levander Greenwood. I hada sit there and listen’ ta her fuckin’ defame me to the judge for over an hour.
“I mean, I been in these projects almost thirty-five years and I say Levander Greenwood was the meanest kid I ever seen. No shit. Even when he was stumbling along in diapers, he couldn’t be near the other kids. As he grew up, he got fuckin’ worse. Would ya believe that? He got fuckin’ worse.”
The fat cop hesitated, as if waiting for Moodrow or Tilley to dispute his claim. He stared at each; noted their silence. “One day, about fifteen years ago, we came up on him smokin’ a joint in a basement hallway where he wasn’t supposed ta be in the first place. Now we don’t wanna bust nobody for smokin’ a lousy fuckin’ joint. We know that’s the kind of bust gets a brick dropped on ya head, but the kids’re supposed ta play the fuckin’ game. When they see us comin’, they’re supposed ta run away. Greenwood just stands there lookin’ at me and my partner, Joe Jefferson, who was colored, by the way, darin’ us to make a move on him.
“Now Joe was a mean son of a bitch and everybody in the projects knew it. The kind of big, black ugly nigger hates all other niggers cause they ‘bring down the race.’ He walks straight up ta Greenwood and slaps the joint out of his mouth. Damn if Greenwood don’t uppercut him right in the balls. I mean the fuckin’ kid is only fifteen years old. Weighs about a hundred-twenty pounds.
“Naturally, I figure I gotta disabuse the kid from his violent tendencies. I mean Joe’s rollin’ around on the ground, fa Christ sake. So I go up to him, smilin’, and ask, ‘Why’d ya do that for?’ Then I jab my nightstick into his gut while the stupid nigger’s tryin’ ta come up with an answer. Doubled the little fuck over.
“Joe’s yellin’, ‘Kill ’em; kill ’em; kill ’em’ and I know we’re all alone down the basement, so I decide ta teach the asshole a lesson he won’t forget. I drag his fuckin’ black ass over to one of the steam valves. It was winter and the heat was goin’ full blast.
“‘Now I’m gonna show ya somethin’. They all say ya too stupid ta learn, Levander fuckin’ Greenwood, but this time ya gettin’ a lesson you ain’t never gonna forget. You’re gonna remember this every time ya try ta comb ya hair.’
“Naturally I didn’t wanna actually go through with it. I thought the kid’d break down and cry or somethin’, but he don’t even blink. He don’t even try ta pull back his hand.
“So what could I do? What could I fuckin’ do? I hada do it, right? I open the valve and the steam comes pourin’ out, but Greenwood don’t make a sound. Then I put his hand in it and he still don’t say nothin’. Blank face like a fuckin’ jigaboo Indian. Finally, I got disgusted. I just threw him down and took my partner out of there. I mean with a kid like that you ain’t got no fuckin’ choice. You gotta kill him. Right?
“We ended up puttin’ a buzzer in the mother’s apartment. Rings on the wall behind me. Figure if he comes knockin’, I’m gonna go huntin’. I got a special place on my wall reserved fa that nigger’s head.”
Racism exists in the NYPD, as it does in every other aspect of American life, white or black, but Tilley had never before heard it expressed so violently, or so blatantly. Here was a cop, a hair-bag finishing up his career behind a desk, admitting to the torture of a fifteen-year-old child as if torture was a police function described in the Patrol Guide.
The young detective looked over at Moodrow, but the big cop’s face was expressionless.
“You and a hundred other guys,” Moodrow said evenly. “When did you put the buzzer in?”
“A year ago. When the restraining order went into effect. I don’t expect we’ll see him around here again. His mother don’t have enough money to make the risk worthwhile.”
Moodrow shrugged. “We’re going up anyway, take a shot. You think the old lady’s home?”
“Do I look like a fuckin’ doorman?”