Nine

When it came to crime, if New York was a melting pot, then the Lower East Side was a microwave. Neighborhood tenements had nurtured Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, and Meyer Lansky and provided a boot camp, hunting ground, and hideout for the full range of the worst of human behavior. So much so that it also became a proving ground and testing range for reformers. As far back as 1854, various private concerns had experimented with building or renovating model housing blocks for “improving the conditions of the poor.” Inspired by more sustained government-funded efforts in Europe, Mayor La Guardia spearheaded the first totally publicly paid for, constructed, and maintained housing block in the country in 1934. Even at the height of Roosevelt’s New Deal it took some doing. La Guardia first set his lawyers on Vincent Astor, the “boy millionaire” who had inherited a fortune after his old man went down with the Titanic. Once a court ruling halted haggling over a piece of real estate Astor owned on the Lower East Side, La Guardia oversaw the assembling of a poker hand of federal grants and state funds that paid for the mixed demolition and gutting (the Feds would only pay for “renovations” not new constructions) of a two-dozen tenement block on Astor’s former parcel bordered by Avenue A, First Avenue, and Second and Third streets on the Lower East Side. In 1936, the First Houses were born.

An assembled crowd on a freezing cold December day in 1935 stamped their feet, blew on their hands, and watched La Guardia dedicate the First Houses. Unlike the towering projects that would become the NYCHA’s norm after World War II, the First Houses were modest four-story buildings offering qualified residents (couples with kids had to be married and at least one parent had to have a job) comparatively spacious apartments with oak floors surrounding a shady tree-filled quad for about six bucks a month per room.

The apartments filled quickly, mostly with middle-income Italians and Jews. So did the massive collection of new addresses in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village north of Fourteenth Street. Privately funded by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, this maze of apartment buildings set on grassy cul-de-sacs established a comfortable, primarily middle-class lid on the boiling-over Lower East Side below Fourteenth Street. To the south lay Knickerbocker Village, another privately cofinanced development that like the Met Life complex quietly enforced segregationist rental policies that NYCHA and the First Houses didn’t maintain.

The First Houses were the NYCHA’s first child—well planned for, welcomed into the world, doted on, and given every break their deep-pocketed city and New Deal federal government “parents” could afford. But among those watching La Guradia cut the ribbon in 1935 was a guy with a housing plan for the city all his own. The residential buildings that were born from his ambition were more like the NYCHA’s pointy-headed step-children.

Robert Moses had unsuccessfully tried to take over the city’s public housing initiative for years but La Guardia stopped him cold each time. Finally after World War II, under ex-cop Mayor Bill O’Dwyer, a few years short of bailing out of office just ahead of a police corruption scandal, Moses was named construction coordinator for the city and putting up public housing fell under his control at last.

Post-war Manhattan was filling up, and Moses had an idea of how to stretch the remaining real estate a little further. If he couldn’t get rid of the poor altogether, Moses could at least push them off to the side. Using landfill, some of it rubble from the London Blitz brought to the U.S. as ballast in British freighters, Moses filled in the swampy eastern edge of the Lower East Side to extend it into the East River. Three massive construction projects went up on this virgin territory. One was the FDR Drive, a north–south highway that would allow cars coming to and from Jersey, upstate, and the outer boroughs to bypass the neighborhood altogether. Another was a strip of park between the highway and the water beyond connected to the neighborhood itself by bridges and walkways over six lanes of traffic. The third was a series of gigantic apartment towers that would eventually run from the edge of Stuy Town down to Knickerbocker Village.

A 1946 editorial in the New York Times took note of the foundations being laid (after some delay) on this new strip of designated low-income buildings. After Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper, these new towers would be the next steps, the Times said, toward “a Lower East Side we may view with pride instead of shame.” Once the federal government passed legislation to underwrite urban renewal programs in various American cities Moses had the financial muscle and legal mandate to fulfill his ambition to “tear down every building in the slums and put up new ones on less land, then bring the people back.” But the Times and the city planners, bankers, and politicians failed to appreciate the difference between the modest layout of the First Houses, the segregated middle-class enclaves of Stuy Town and Kinckerbocker Village, and the gigantic instant ghettos named after Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald, founder of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the pioneering infant health initiative at the Henry Street Settlement, that Moses oversaw.

The Wald and Riis houses hosted the same population surge and ebb as their sister buildings in Coney Island and the other Title I urban renewal buildings that came after. The garment and textile industry below Houston Street tanked during the fifties—a victim of the unregulated low-cost labor that made overseas factories irresistible to clothing manufacturers. The GI Bill and a cheap construction boom made owning a house possible for a new generation of Americans. Middle-class and working-class Lower East Siders alike were moving out to the suburbs as fast as they could pack. The people that arrived to fill the Riis, Wald, and other new Lower East Side projects and to join the relocated former residents of areas cleared out under Title I all over the city were mostly Puerto Ricans, who moved north to the U.S. after World War II.

Lucky Luciano had weathered World War II with a win on points. An ambitious Manhattan DA named Thomas Dewey had managed to put Lucky Luciano behind bars indefinitely on a trumped-up prostitution charge in 1936. The Feds had enough legitimate evidence to lock Luciano away on a narcotics rap at the time but Dewey’s instinct for PR told him that portraying Luciano as a pimp would play better in the papers. Lucky continued to run the Five Families crime commission he’d chartered soon after Maranzano’s funeral while waiting out a half-century jail sentence. Meanwhile, Western Europe was about to explode and the Mafia and the U.S. State Department were both on Mussolini’s shit list. Luciano kept tabs on the Five Families and waited for the Feds to sign up for visiting hours at Dannemora.

Once war broke out with the Axis powers, the U.S. government wasted no time reaching out. Luciano controlled the docks at home and had strong ties to the rabidly antifascist (and after the war, anticommunist) Cosa Nostra back home in Sicily. On the promise of a reduced sentence, Luciano made sure the New York waterfront stayed safe (or that his guys stopped spreading sabotage rumors and starting suspicious fires for the worried home defense forces to obsess on) and that General Patton could roll his tanks up through Sicily in record time.

After VE Day, Luciano was released and deported back to Sicily for his troubles. Back on the island that spawned him, Lucky built a heroin network worthy of the New World order and that took full advantage of his cordial relationship with the CIA. American Cold War spooks utilized Sicilian Mafia contacts all over Europe to keep tabs on communist governments and activities and disrupt labor organizations. In return, Luciano was permitted a free hand in finding new paths to the drug markets in his former adopted country.

The Sicilian Mafia established a powerful and efficient manufacture and export system that processed and moved opium, morphine, and heroin from the Middle East to Marseille and Sicily to Cuba to the U.S. But by the late fifties the U.S. mob had suffered some tough breaks. Narcotics sales and possession had been legally reclassified as federal crimes in 1951 and 1956 and bad breaks with congressional investigations and some lucky busts by various local law enforcement agencies had put an unwelcome spotlight on organized crime. Meyer Lansky’s beloved Cuba would soon be out of the picture courtesy of Castro’s takeover.

Heroin was too lucrative to give up on. In October 1957, a contingent of New York mobsters met with their Sicilian counterparts in a series of dinners and meetings in Palermo. Over local shellfish, wine, fruit, and espresso, U.S. and native Mafia, including Luciano hashed out a plan that would create stronger ties between the two halves of an organization divided by an ocean and, increasingly, by custom. At Lucky’s urging, the assembled racketeers also pledged to ramp up dope manufacture in Europe and actively concentrate heroin business in the poorest American neighborhoods. Urban renewal and slum clearance provided a new map for their sales regions.

By the early sixties urban planners and politicians were calling out the ideas and practices behind urban renewal for what they were—bullshit. Jamming poor people into huge towers cut off from everything that made city life worthwhile made no sense. Moses’s development juggernaut had created a half-assed urban dystopia that was only livable in the mind of a rich guy who would never have to occupy the buildings he created. Instead of the diverse, stimulating, chaotic shuffling deck of people and backgrounds, businesses, schools, jobs, and recreational opportunities that defined the rest of the neighborhood, the people of the Lower East Side projects were consigned to a high-rise holding area that cut them off even more from the city they lived in than the language barriers and prejudices they already had to contend with. Buildings like the Wald and Riis houses had been built as way stations for new Americans en route to that better life that everyone came here for. Instead they became as hard to escape in their way as Alcatraz.

At the same time a flood of dope from Europe, some smuggled directly into New York, some imported up through Miami was taking its toll. NYCHA’s holdings were well on their way to some 180,000 units and crime was growing right along with the acreage. New buildings like many of the ones I patrolled in Coney Island were now designed like fortresses with graffiti- and vandalism-resistant-tiled common spaces, caged lighting, and heavy steel fixtures that made them resemble slaughter houses more than vertical neighborhoods. By the seventies, with the city teetering on bankruptcy and the old system of rental qualification long scrapped, the Lower East Side public high-rises like Wald and Riis were battlegrounds.

The rise of the DEA and big busts like the Pizza Connection case at home, and political moves abroad, cracked and dented the old Mafia heroin pipelines. New avenues opened from Southeast Asia pioneered by Matthew Madonna, Frank Lucas, and Nicky Barnes. Mexican and South American suppliers and dealers entered the picture. The floodgates opened and heroin poured into the U.S. in greater quantities than ever before. As always, the mouth of the faucet was New York City.

When negotiations began between the British and the mainland Chinese on the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, Hong Kong’s crime cartels didn’t waste any time wondering about the outcome. A steady new stream of immigration from Hong Kong to Chinatown in the early eighties brought with it cheap and strong smack. Gangster or not, an emigrating Hong Kong resident could finance their new life in America by agreeing to bring a package of heroin with them, and hundreds did before the People’s Republic pulled the plug on Hong Kong drug sales. A Chinatown-based wholesaler could literally walk a couple kilos of dope to the Avenue D projects. Supply and demand rose equally, and Harlem and the Bronx, once the centers of U.S. heroin dealing, were soon eclipsed by Avenue D.

People tend to recall the eighties as the crack era. But rock cocaine couldn’t hold a candle to the new Chinese heroin coming into New York and getting sold on Avenue D at the height of crack media hysteria. The price point on a bag of smack made dealers a lot more money a lot more quickly than selling jumbos of rock. Chinese white heroin was so strong and pure that it was incredibly versatile. You could, if your customers weren’t too picky, step on it any number of times and still have them coming back for more. Both crack and heroin were virulently addictive, but cultivating a crack habit was like throwing yourself in a bonfire, while getting strung out on dope was more like slowly roasting yourself to death. Crack heads got to the can’t hide it, can’t hold a job, can’t keep a relationship level much faster than junkies. The honeymoon period with smack was more work-friendly, and dope addicts didn’t destroy their lives and families and therefore their buying power anywhere near as quickly as crackheads. That made them much better customers.

One of Robert Moses’s final brainstorms before stepping down in 1968 was a proposed superhighway interchange that would divert multilane freeway car traffic directly through Washington Square Park. Moses’s dream of an L.A. cloverleaf in the middle of Greenwich Village didn’t pan out. But an accidental part of his legacy was that the Riis, Wald, and other NYCHA developments on the Lower East Side—convenient to the FDR, bridges, and tunnels were the new heroin crossroads of the world.

The average white-bread cop saw the Lower East Side as some kind of jungle where amoral human animals preyed on each other and got what they deserved. To these guys the violent crime that threatened to gut the area was the residents’ fault, somehow. My new partner and I felt differently. You didn’t need to be a criminologist to see what the root cause was of all the lawbreaking and accompanying misery in and round Riis, Wald, and the other Lower East Side projects. Like the puke, blood, burglaries, and almost everything else that sucked for every Alphabet City dweller, the problem was dope.

In our first years on the job in PSA 4, the majority of the collars we made and the complaints we responded to could nearly all be traced back to or involved a bag of dope and a hand either buying or selling it. Assaults were usually junkie on junkie. Robberies were usually junkie versus someone who looked like they might be able to bankroll a fix, or kids looking to separate a visiting addict from his or her buy money. Homicides were evidence of a big-fish dope dealer like Davey Blue Eyes cleaning house—either exterminating competition or pruning his own workforce of a snitch or a thief in their midst. We didn’t see the project dwellers caught in the middle of this chaos as mopes or scumbags. It was too easy to paint everyone with a single brush. We saw most of the people on our beat as individuals simply trying to get by under very difficult conditions. We didn’t see their neighborhood as an irredeemable ghetto that needed to be walled up or nuked. We saw it as salvageable. We liked it there.

Gio and I both grew up a few miles from each other in Brooklyn. We knew a lot of the same people and shared a similar take on the Lower East Side that separated us from most of the cops we suited up alongside those first couple years in Alphaville. We had complementary attitudes about the things that mattered—the job, girls, the bad guys, and what we needed to do to get the most out of a shift in PSA 4. Most important, we both just loved the neighborhood—the crazy energy, the one goddamned thing after another adventure of it, the people we saw every day and took the time to get to know, from the drug dealers and skells, to the families and the sexy Puerto Rican girls who would flag us down to flirt.

We worked around the clock. Like Coney Island, shift rotation was either 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., 4:00 P.M. to midnight, or midnight to 8:00 A.M. But unlike Coney Island, we almost always worked together and with each other. Each tour had its own pros and cons. Day tours were great if you wanted your evenings to yourself, but they could become an unending series of radio runs responding to aided cases, which were tense, depressing, and almost never yielded a collar. I learned to appreciate what a hell being an EMS tech was working days. Sick, hurt, dying, and crazy people are never easy to deal with and some day tours Gio and I would literally go from one aided case to the next—chest pains in a twenty-five-year-old crackhead who looks sixty that turn into a fatal coronary before he’s even in the ambulance; a supposedly broken hip that turns out to be a bruise and a pinched nerve from passing out on top of an empty whiskey bottle; a baby that’s been dead for hours but whose mother still clings to it.

I enjoyed four to midnight the most. There always seemed to be something boiling up on the street for us to get in on, and the sheer volume of work meant we could pick and choose what to do and where to go. Between four and twelve the dispatchers at Central spat out jobs at a machine-gun pace. During these shifts we cultivated the cop’s art of listening to the radio with an ear for our call numbers amid the dozen or more listed in rapid succession, and for what might be an interesting call to respond to. Whether you were talking up a girl, listening to a ball game or fast asleep, you needed to respond when your number came up. Cops who couldn’t develop that kind of variable focus didn’t last very long on patrol.

The downside of four to midnight was that between all that radio traffic, surprise inspections from supervisors, and dealing with paperwork, we really only had about three hours in which to find a collar. The best shifts often ended early—we’d make an arrest during the first few hours we were on duty and then spend the rest of the time on the clock processing it. The worst involved babysitting a corpse or securing a DOA’s apartment until the medical examiner arrived or parking our butts outside of a hospital room where an injured perp was getting treatment.

After midnight was the fucking Twilight Zone. As anyone who lives in New York can tell you, a lot of the City that Never Sleeps really does kill the lights and hit the sack from the witching hour on. Not in Alphabet City. Late nights in the summer months the air itself seemed to sweat and everyone moved in either slow or fast motion. The girls out at that hour all go-go danced down the sidewalk, each to a different song. In the winter it was like a ghost town, but with ghosts sprinting out of sight as you turned a corner or huddling together over a trash can fire. It didn’t matter what the weather was—we always had a full late-night plate of fights in the street, muggings, EDPs (emotionally disturbed persons), shots fired, and the true classic of the wee hours, the domestic dispute.

Hot or cold, everyone we dealt with in the midnight to eight shift was high. Booze, junk, coke, crack, angel dust, or a cocktail of two or more. If they were already sad, whatever was in them at that hour made them sadder. If they were already set to start some shit, it made their fuse shorter. Nobody thought straight. Most of the people we went to see in the middle of the night had already made pretty questionable choices. We always had to keep our wits and our senses of humor about us. Some nights it was such an unending fucked-up kaleidoscope of weirdness that you had to laugh.

“Available RMP to respond to one eighteen Avenue D apartment one-X, ten fifty-two family dispute.” It was about two in the morning on a night that had already been a snoozer when Central broke the first patch of silence we’d had in a while. Gio grabbed the radio.

“RMP nine-two seven-seven on the way, K.” Somewhere along the way “K” had replaced “ten-four” or “roger wilco” as standard NYPD radio jargon.

Nothing escalates faster than a family dispute—usually couples having it out. The phrase “you always hurt the one you love” might have been written by a housing cop. I was driving and I hit the siren and floored it through the intersection.

“I hope it’s a good one,” Gio said.

“Yeah. Too slow tonight,” I replied. We’d already become connoisseurs of the family fracas. They broke up the monotony of a dull night like this one and were usually good as some kind of guerilla theater. Also, we were almost guaranteed a collar. What people rarely realized when they called the cops about a neighbor arguing, was that we were expected to arrest someone. The department had too many bad PR experiences where cops arrived on scene, talked everybody down and left only to be recalled when one of the people involved had managed to really hurt or kill another one after all. If we responded, we arrested someone. I stopped our car on the sidewalk in front of the address and we sprinted into the lobby. Ground floor apartment. Thanks, Central.

As we neared the door to apartment 1X we both turned down our radios and listened to hear whether the show we were about to referee was rated PG or R. The yelling and screaming was loud enough that I was surprised we hadn’t heard it on the sidewalk. One, two, three voices. Fuck. Gio and I looked at each other—an unspoken “on your marks…”—and I rapped loudly on the door. No one answered. I knocked again, this time with my nightstick and kept knocking until I heard the lock turn on the other side of the door.

“Who?” a female voice yelled from inside.

“Police officers. You’ll have to open up,” I said, turning my head to listen for anything else I might want to know before we met face-to-face. The door opened. The woman who answered was three hundred pounds if she was an ounce. None of it was clothing. She smelled like someone had marinated her in rum. A cigarette in the corner of her mouth traced an oval in the air as she slurred, “Who call you? Who? We don’t need you! Get outta mi casa! Go away!”

“Look, someone called. What’s going on here?” I stood up straight, leaned on the door, and spoke in my best “police business” voice. She was wasted and rattled and unconsciously she stepped back far enough that we pushed our way inside. The apartment stank of booze, cigarettes, and sweat. The plastic covers on a couch near the door had gone yellow from old tobacco smoke. Gio caught my eye as a male voice whined from the next room.

“Por favor, por favor, come back here. In here, in the bedroom!” I grabbed the fat naked lady’s hand by the wrist and brought her into the back room with us. Inside an even fatter and far hairier body lay handcuffed to the bed. Turns out this show was going to be rated X.

“Look, look what she did to me,” the guy whined. “She said we were gonna have some fun like this but she leave me here and she fuckin’ with her old lady.” As if on cue the fat lady started screaming at the guy in thousand-mile-an-hour Spanglish, lunged for him, and swung her arms wildly at his helpless body. I tried to hold her back, but with physics on her side she broke free and belly-flopped on the poor guy. The impact sounded like dropping a thanksgiving turkey in a kiddie pool of Jell-O.

“Lady, cut it out!” I wrenched her arm back behind her. “Sit down on the floor!”

Gio looked over my shoulder, eyes bugged, as a third hefty package emerged from the bathroom wearing a pink bikini bottom that nearly vanished into her rolls of flab. For a second I pictured Don King.

“I can’t find them! I’m sorry, but I had to call the police,” she screeched. “I can’t find the damn keys!”

“Okay,” I said to all three, “any more naked overweight people gonna pop out of anywhere, or is the clown car empty?”

It took some patience and a lot of repetition, but eventually we got the three of them calmed down. Gio decided not to let it die.

“Okay now, what’s the deal here?” he asked loudly, rubbing his hands together. “Who was fucking who, and when’s the next party?” The three started in again like he’d flipped a switch. I had to hide my face so they wouldn’t see me laughing. The joke wound up being on Gio. Lady Don King had found her keys finally. Neither responding officer had any intention of touching three hundred pound Moby Romeo so we coached the girls through the process of unlocking him. They were both too wasted to get the tiny key in the lock, however. The bed and the guy on it took up almost the whole room and there was no way they could get to his cuffs without crawling around on top of him. It looked like we might get stuck there all night. It was my night to drive and Gio’s night for paperwork and we both understood that unlocking fatso was on the paperwork side of the necessary humiliations of law enforcement. Gio drew the disgusting duty of slithering over the guy to unlock him.

“There’s a little handhold down there below his waist, if you can’t get leverage,” I told him. Watching him crawl up the guy redefined dirty work.

When we walked out of 118 Avenue D we were still laughing. Gio thumbed the radio and gave Central our disposition. We hadn’t made an arrest and needed to go on the board as having settled the matter to our satisfaction.

“Central, RMP nine-two seven-seven.”

“Go ninety two seventy-seven.”

“Central be advised that dispute at one eighteen Avenue D is condition corrected. If you get any more jobs there tonight, don’t send patrol units, send pizza.”

“I don’t know what that means unit,” the dispatcher said trying to stifle a laugh, “but copy.”