Avenue D

Gio and I make pulling Big Arthur Washington over and spread-eagling him on the hood of his Alfa in front of the whole neighborhood our 1987 summer project. We look for him every day we work the D in plainclothes and find him plenty of times, but the motherfucker is always clean.

“Rambo, you guys ain’t ever gonna find anything on me,” Arthur says to me each time as he calmly picks up the contents of his pockets off the sidewalk. “I ain’t going back to the joint. Not ever.” I still can’t figure it. Dope sales run like clockwork until Arthur shows up then all hell breaks loose. The organizational shadow I’m just starting to figure out seems to have vanished. Finally, a corner dealer named White Boy Ronnie reaches out to us about Arthur’s rampage. Ronnie’s a kid from a dairy farm in the Midwest who comes to the Lower East Side and starts dealing on the avenue instead of starting a band or whatever the hell it is kids come from a place like that to a place like this to do.

Ronnie is an Op 8 regular collar before Gio and I joined, but the other guys in the squad never make him useful as a snitch. Most of the young, lower echelon dope dealer kids doing hand-to-hands on the D have more professional jealousy for the dudes in the Third and D crew than professional ambitions to work their way in and up to become a member of the club. Ronnie’s different. He’s one of those guys who sees himself on top in a few years. He takes a liking to Gio and me and starts feeding us info now and then. My guess is he thinks he can use us to collar and hassle his competition and I’m only too happy to let him believe we’ll let him get away with it as long as he keeps us fed with info. It’s pretty nervy—he’s as likely to get shot for the stuff he tells us by the Third and D crew, as get collared by us or the Feds who increasingly come into PSA 4 to serve warrants and pluck out dealers that come under their microscope. That’s his fucking problem.

Like everyone else, Ronnie wants business to go back to normal. He tells us he’s worked it to stay on Arthur’s good side and has even middle-manned material to him. Since he and Arthur are close, he offers to let us know when Arthur is carrying a gun so that we can catch him dirty and get him violated back to prison. Ronnie also lets a new name slip: Davey. Come again? Davey Colas or Davey Blue Eyes as Ronnie calls him is apparently someone very heavy and very dangerous. Ronnie is pretty much a wiseass about everything but when we press him for details on this Davey guy he looks like he’s going to cross himself. Or shit. Apparently Davey and Arthur go way back and somebody owes somebody else in their business partnership big time. I figure we’ll find out more when we bring Big Arthur in with a solid weapons charge and offer to violate his ass back upstate for two decades unless he tells all about this Davey guy.

But before Ronnie can come through for us, Arthur seals his own fate. A week or so after my conversation with Ronnie, the whole avenue is buzzing about Big Arthur’s latest move. Apparently, Arthur sees one of the heaviest main dealers, an Avenue D native nicknamed Dougie Dee walking out of a bodega on Pitt Street one evening with his wife and daughters. Arthur doesn’t have a gun, but he has his mouth and his balls, and he goes out of his way to fuck with Dougie. He knows full well like we do that Dougie Dee isn’t a killer like some of the other main guys and would never carry a piece when he is with his family, so Arthur hassles him bad in full view of a busy project block full of eyes and ears.

“That your bitch-ass dope I grabbed yesterday, Dougie?” It was but Dougie Dee doesn’t answer. “That shit sold real good. My boy in Brooklyn, he sold that shit out in like half a hour. You think you coulda sold it that fast, bitch? Yo, let me know when you open another spot, I gotta grab some more of your shit, nigga.” Dougie takes his wife by the hand and walks faster. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going? I’m talking to you, bitch!” Dougie’s wife and kids look at the ground. Arthur lets them get across the street and then comes after them again. He makes a show of sneaking up behind Dougie and smacking him in the back of the head. “Ohhhhh,” Arthur said, “that hurt? Get the fuck out of here, punk ass! Go the fuck home and find me some more shit to sell!”

Arthur’s bravado is beginning to border on the insane. Yet everything I hear and see makes me believe that as over the top as he acts, Arthur knows what he’s doing, or at least thinks he does. He isn’t setting up shop on Avenue D as much as he’s diverting material to Brooklyn. Whatever the fuck Arthur’s plan is, it doesn’t involve taking over the lucrative PSA 4 drug franchise as much as leaching off it to stake a claim of his own across the river. Arthur has a pass and what we’re finding out is that it was issued by Davey Blue Eyes. This guy Davey has declared Arthur off limits. Nobody ever would’ve told us except that Arthur is fucking up too many livelihoods and lives.

After calling out Dougie Dee in front of the neighborhood and humiliating him in front of his family, Arthur’s ticket only has a few more punches left in it. Armed with a name, we start asking about Davey. Shit-scared of Arthur, people start telling us. Slowly, Ronnie, Venus, and others start saying the name more and louder. The word is that this guy Davey gave Arthur the Alfa along with carte blanche to do as he liked when he got out of the joint. What we hear is that Arthur either stood up and did time for Davey, or he had something on Davey that bought him slack. But the slack had run out. Whatever arrangement Arthur has made with Davey is apparently at the breaking point.

I doubt Arthur is thinking about Dougie when he comes out of the same bodega himself a half a month after humiliating Dougie in front of his family and the Third and D crew. Mobile phones are still a novelty and payphones are the way that dealers keep in contact with the people they need to talk to. Arthur has just finished using the coin-op phone next to sacks of rice inside the store. A Pitt Street regular named Pito sees Arthur go. He does what he’s told to do the day after the smacking incident—go to the nearest corner phone and call Dougie Dee. Arthur comes out of the store but before he can get to the double-parked black BMW he just bought for eighty grand cash, Dougie Dee calls out to him. Dougie has company. It’s not his wife and kids.

Dougie isn’t a killer but the guys flanking him—Londie, Macatumba, ChaCha, and Jimmy Rivera are some of the baddest bad guys on the D and are rumored to have done dozens of shootings. Londie for sure. Arthur goes pale for a second. Londie is holding a Uzi. Londie hands it to Dougie who momentarily struggles with the small gun’s awkward weight and heft.

“Shoot the motherfucker,” Londie tells him. Dougie Dee fingers the trigger and points the Uzi’s tiny business end up at Big Arthur’s chest.

“This motherfucker gots to go!” Macatumba yells. Dougie is shaking. “Fuck all y’all,” Arthur shouts as he breaks into a run. Dougie fires. Submachine guns look easy to shoot on TV because bullet-less blank cartridges cut down on their weight and make the shooting mechanism work less violently against the person squeezing the trigger. But in real life an Uzi belches clouds of burnt gunpowder gas and several pounds of lead bullets per clip out of a tiny barrel and is surprisingly difficult to aim if you’re not ready for it. Personally, I hate shooting machine guns. The motion and noise gives me a headache. Dougie’s a first-timer and clean misses with his first burst. He then rakes the gun back across Arthur like a fire hose, holding the trigger down the whole move. Lead tears chunks from Arthur’s arms and ass, but he keeps running.

Macatumba quickly shows Dougie how to change clips. Dougie’s into it. The other dealers all have guns out and are firing. Crime scene detectives later count over thirty shell casings on the sidewalk and street. Bullets lodge in Arthur’s back, punch through his legs and ricochet around him but he’s still going. Thick gobbets of his blood smear and spatter in front of and behind him. Big Arthur makes it to the ground floor of his mother’s building before he falls to his knees one last time. A second later, the guns have stopped, smoke is drifting past the upper floors of the projects and Arthur is the only person left on the street. A few breaths after that he’s dead.

Within forty-eight hours of Arthur’s last run, every one of his buddies with dope spots in the Brooklyn projects is dead, too. Most of them are shot in their apartments along with anyone unlucky enough to be there with them. As usual, we don’t hear about it from our informants until after it’s happened. But what we do hear about the murders, is that they’ve been done under orders from the same guy who gives Dougie, Londie, Macatumba, ChaCha, and Jimmy Rivera the greenlight to cut Arthur in half with nine-millimeter rounds—Davey. Davey Blue Eyes. We don’t have our man yet, but we have his name. We start using the name in every conversation with every snitch, dealer, and user in PSA 4 and start learning that this Davey guy has more juice than anyone in the dope business on Avenue D or anywhere else in the city.