Avenue D

While the neighborhood dealers cool off and quiet down, I work my informant contacts armed with a new weapon, the name Davey Blue Eyes. I put it to dealers, to junkies, that kid with the bat who hit an eyeball homerun—anyone and everyone who may have something to tell me about Davey Blue Eyes, where he came from, and how to bring him down. Initially I piece together the bio of a guy powerful enough to grant Arthur the freedom he abused to the point of extinction and then sanction Arthur’s execution along with a half-dozen Brooklyn bad guys, their families, and whoever was over to watch the game when the assassins came to call. Who did the killings didn’t really matter to me as much as who is operating a traffic light that went from red to green and allowed Arthur’s victims to become his executioners and Arthur and his boys in Brooklyn to become a cluster of snapshots, handwritten notes, and botanica candles in front of the project buildings they grew up in.

Backseat, rooftop, stairwell, and interrogation room conversations with Venus, Ronnie, and dozens of others gives me a composite picture of a guy that sounds like Lucky Luciano’s heir. What I learn is that in the Avenue D heroin trade, Davey Blue Eyes’s word is law. Half Italian, half Puerto Rican, project born and raised, Davey, like Charlie Lucky, is a product of the Lower East Side. By the time he joins the Marines at age sixteen, he’s already no stranger to guns and ammo. One story I hear repeated several times involves teenage Davey holding up another dealer at gunpoint in a back row pew in St. Mary’s on Grand Street during midnight mass on Christmas Eve.

The Marine Corps introduces Davey to heavier weapons and hardcore military tactics. When he returns to civilian life, he brings a flair for reconnaissance and a belief in superior firepower back with him. That’s not all he comes home with. Davey doesn’t just emerge from the Marines a marksman, he comes out with ordnance connections within the Corps that help him set up shop as a bona fide gun runner. Handguns are never a problem to get in Alphaville and even if you’re not connected, you or a friend with a cleaner record can just drive south to Virginia and pick one out at a sporting goods store. But Davey puts government-issue machine guns and grenades—stuff that couldn’t be had legally anywhere at any price—within reach of any local gangster who can pay.

Davey’s uncle is a connected guy who deals dope from a headquarters in a body shop near the boat docks in Mill Basin in the early eighties. Davey apprentices with his uncle dealing, collecting and, thanks to his interest in guns and the things he accomplishes with them, enforcing and regulating when his uncle encounters thieves and rivals. While I’m learning how to drive a patrol car at Floyd Bennett Field, Davey is running dope for his uncle a half mile away and forging his own links with a group of Chinatown-based smack wholesalers walking distance from his birthplace in the projects in the Lower East Side.

Visible is vulnerable and Davey makes a practice of being nowhere. “You know, him, yo. You seen him around,” snitches tell me, but if I have, I don’t know it. Davey’s Third and D dealers can chimp around in fancy cars, jewelry, and clothes, a debarked pitbull panting beside them and a stripper with a cast-iron septum cooing in their lap, as long as they stay earners and as long as they stay loyal. The flash life wasn’t for him, though.

There’s bound to be some chaos in a retail drug operation as huge as the one Davey sets into motion. His roots are deep and the people he puts to work know their connections with him are till-death-do-us-part solid. Davey doesn’t try to micromanage every aspect of his ant farm. He just taps the glass or grabs the Raid when he needs to. But there are always some things that call for a clear message, delivered personally.

A year or two prior to me arriving on the D, Davey discovers a pair of upper tier main dealers he’s known since grade school are stepping on already cut dope he fronts to them. They’d set a price knowing full well that if they sold for more they needed to kick back to Davey as a courtesy. Or life insurance. Not good. Davey takes care of the two personally. In broad daylight, Davey climbs the roof of a library building on East Houston Street, assembles the high-powered Barrett rifle he qualified with in sniper school in Hawaii and waits for his soon-to-be ex-employees to cross the street from Avenue D. Both die from single bullets the size of an adult pinkie finger vaporizing their heads in broad daylight. On-scene forensics find teeth scattered a half block away from the impacts. Davey’s so sure of his timing and tactics, he doesn’t even bother with a silencer. In two trigger pulls he joins the ranks of Lee Harvey Oswald and water tower sniper Charles Whitman by showing, like the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket said “just what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do.”