Seventeen

The wire that went up on Animal’s phone was a gold mine. Some days I wondered if his finger ever got numb from dialing. Every deal he did, every bust, every hassle, every good, bad, or indifferent event in the day in the life of this particular bad guy warranted a phone call to someone. And as Animal made calls, we made recordings, took notes, collected numbers, and compiled evidence. When he made a quantity sale, we were there at the designated location taking pictures. When he or any of his boys came to Avenue D to check their spots, Gio and I made sure to pull them over and toss them.

The fact that these guys were occupationally paranoid and prerattled was an enormous asset once the wires went up. Everything we did, the apartment raids, traffic stops, small-time busts in plain sight were coordinated and intended to get Animal dialing and talking. He rarely disappointed. And he was often mad, scared, or wasted enough to forget to filter what he said.

A second wire to Guerro’s cell phone was just as fertile. Conversations veered from the changing economics of high-volume dope sales, to cars, girls, and where to get machine guns and grenade launchers. These guys and girls we heard on the two phones all had double lives—running the spots we knew on the avenue and selling, brokering, and middle-manning “weight” to anyone with the equivalent weight in cash off the avenue. The names of those talking—Cheo, Eggie, Ish, Tracy, Louie, Chowsky, Hoi, Tomato, Boobie, and two dozen others each had faces. When they met up for a buy or to discuss a beef we were there taking their pictures. Gio and I knew or recognized most of them from the avenue. As the wiretap continued, they were matched to addresses—apartments in the projects, and elsewhere in Manhattan, private houses in Bayside, Corona, and Brooklyn. DEA’s surveillance web grew to include the regular dealing spots on Avenue D, a car service front supposedly owned by Davey’s cousins the Alvarez brothers on Attorney Street, and a bodega on Second Avenue with half-empty shelves up front and a back room that hosted dozens of dope and money exchanges.

Just two wires were shedding such a bright light on what was otherwise a shadow world of drugs, cash, and guns that it became an organizational marathon keeping it straight. Between running their dope spots and making additional quantity sales like the ones we initiated through CS-1, Animal’s and Guerro’s phones were going nonstop. More DEA agents were brought in to cover what was closing in on forty different bad-guy associates in the circle. The wire room at DEA headquarters was like Grand Central station some days. On one side of the room a bulletin board was completely covered in a collage of mug shots and covertly taken pictures of our ever-growing cast of characters, their hangouts, homes, families, and cars. What came in on the wiretaps was logged on index cards and filed. To keep up with the constant phone traffic on both Animal’s and Guerro’s phones, Benton asked us to reach out to our chief and get four more cops from PSA 4 to share some of the listening and logging work. Gio and I had worked with the guys we asked for in both uniform and plainclothes. They were decent cops. Good with paperwork and reliable. They were also nervous as hell to be part of a federal cloak-and-dagger operation. Procedure required that the DEA group supervisor swear them in (they also had to see the U.S. attorney). When the supervisor fed them the “repeat after me’s” I added a few clauses about jumping in place and hopping around on one foot. They went with it until the group supervisor, me, and the other agents present started cracking up. Once all four cops were sworn in, they joined Gio and me with full federal marshal status.

If you’ve seen the movie Casino, then you know how listening in on a wiretap is supposed to work. Having obtained a Title III warrant, a duly sworn law enforcement officer is bound by law to only listen to and record incriminating wiretap evidence. The officer on duty switches on the receiver and recorder from inside the facility set up for listening for about thirty seconds at a time. If in the thirty seconds nothing criminal is discussed, then the officer is obliged to switch off and wait for another interval before switching on, listening in, and trying again.

Our targets were all business. No matter how paranoid they acted, the best most of Animal and Guerro’s crew could do was refer to a “K” or a “Z” of “videos” or “cassettes,” “big ones,” small ones,” and order a “limo” for nineteen Gs. Animal’s relationship with his girlfriend, Tracy, however, mixed business with pleasure so bizarrely, it was sometimes difficult to decide which was which. One day Tracy explained to Animal that an Italian guy at her job told her he could hook her up with dope.

“Bitch, you ever talk about my business again with that guinea motherfucker, I’ll kill you! I’ll beat that shit out of you and fuck you in the ass and put a fucking cap in your head, you hear me?”

“I’ll talk to whoever I want to! I don’t need your fucking say-so to do anything! I ain’t afraid of you, your gun, your wrinkly-ass dick, or nothing! Fuck you!”

“Fuck you! I’m coming there and I’m bending you over and fucking you in two! You do and say what I tell you or they’ll find you floating in Oyster Bay with a bullet in your brain and cum leaking out your ass! We don’t need shit from no guinea motherfuckers! Egg roll shit is the best shit there is! Don’t fucking tell me my business!”

“You ain’t man enough, pendejo! You try that shit with me I cut your fucking balls off and feed them to the dog!”

I could never figure out where Animal and Tracy drew the line. Did all the drug and harsh sex talk turn them on? They say couples need to communicate and compromise, but these two were in a world of their own. Despite the millions rolling in, a regular rotation of cars, clothes, electronic toys, and everything else, the two of them seemed to be having the same foulmouthed confrontational meltdown every time they spoke to one another. After Animal bought a new house for three hundred thousand cash Tracy complained that the carport was too small. Animal threatened to gag her with his cock if she didn’t shut up.

“I went into your house and found dope all over your bed,” she screamed at him one night.

“How the fuck did you get into my house, bitch?”

“Through the door which was unlocked, bitch!” she screamed back. “You better not be fucking using! Are you fucking using?”

“Yeah, I’m using,” Animal said. “Leave me the fuck alone!” She hung up on him. Two minutes later she called him again.

“I found the dog licking dope on the bed!”

“If you don’t stop calling me, I’m going to kill you and your family.” He was clearly on the street and alternating threatening Tracy and negotiating with someone he was with. “I’m going to cop some dope now. If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to send someone after you!”

Animal didn’t make good on his threat. But three months after CS-1 first contacted and bought from Jimmy Rivera, Jimmy’s body turned up on the corner of Houston Street and the FDR Drive, the same place Frankie Nieves and I tackled Little Punk a few years earlier. Jimmy had been shot four times by a nine-millimeter handgun. Though we didn’t get anyone taking credit on tape, both Animal and Guerro made it clear that Jimmy would still be alive if he had paid his dope bills on time. My snitches on the street said Animal did it himself.

Even though nearly everyone involved knew me on sight, and ID’ing me anywhere outside of the Lower East Side might start them finally asking themselves the right questions, I got a kick out of tailing Animal, Guerro, and the others on their rounds outside the neighborhood. I’d only ever seen these guys when they visited the avenue and I was enjoying observing and logging their other routines. Car surveillance and tailing takes practice. In the movies you see cops cutting off civilians while doing tails all the time. The reality is that another driver honking, swearing, and getting into a beef with you wasn’t worth it. If the noise didn’t alert your target to the fact that you were on him, you were likely to lose him while dealing with the irate civilian. There were a lot of little tricks—I always had a bunch of different rearview mirror and dashboard ornaments and decorations in my glove compartment so that I could change them up. Most people will remember those things more than the make or model of most cars. It helped that our quarries drove flashy sports cars, high-priced foreign jobs, and tricked-out Jeeps. It was tricky staying with a guy driving a Porsche with an engine the size of a washing machine in it, but thanks to Robert Moses’s narrow, pothole-cursed BQE and the constant snarl of New York City traffic, there was only so much the guys with the really hot cars could wind up.

As soon as anyone showed up in Alphabet City I pulled them over and tossed them and their ride. I especially liked hassling Animal. He’d had the mechanics at Tony’s install a big spoiler on the Mazda he was driving lately and it made him easy to tail. I’d go from hearing or reading him say something incriminating on the wiretap to listening to him brag that I couldn’t touch him in person.

“You got nothing on me, Rambo,” he’d say each time. “I’m clean and I’m staying that way. You got nothing.” If he knew that I was listening to him bitch about getting undercut by an uptown crew to Guerro an hour before he would’ve shit.

Working the case was a marathon. Weeks stretched into months and with the listening, observing, harassing, listening routine firmly in place I took a week’s worth of vacation days. While I was in Brazil training in jiu jitsu with the Gracie family, Guerro’s phone rang. It was Joco.

“You got my money?” Guerro asked him.

“Yo, I was on the corner on my way to see you and fucking Rambo grabbed me! Motherfucker ripped me off, can you believe that shit? Nineteen large, yo!” Three thousand miles away and I’m still the boogeyman for these guys.

Working with DEA was a godsend. I could strategically hassle the guys we heard on the wire down on the D and, as long as I stayed out of sight, do surveillance in Brooklyn and Queens where the growing investigation had spread to. It minimized my exposure in the Lower East Side in the wake of the hit scare while still allowing me to have a useful presence in the neighborhood. Once, after rattling one of Animal’s guys by pulling him over exactly where he’d said he’d be on the phone the previous day, I grabbed a perp a Ninth Precinct detective had asked me about a few months before the wire investigation began. When I arrived at the Ninth on Fifth Street, it was a total circus. The detective squad room was packed with everyone from rookies to two-star chiefs from all over the department trying to get a look at a guy the newspapers cast as a real-life Freddy Krueger—Daniel Rakowitz.

Everybody in the neighborhood knew days before it simultaneously made the front page of the Daily News, Post, Times, and Newsday. Musicians sitting around the guitar store on St. Mark’s Place, panhandler kids standing out front of Ray’s on Avenue A, dabbler junkies perched on barstools at the window of Vazac’s on B waiting for their man to come from Avenue D all heard versions of the same story. “The chicken guy killed his girlfriend!” Every day the story got retold, the scenario got worse. “The rooster guy killed her and he cut her up.” Then, “Crazy motherfucker chicken dude killed her, cut her up, and cooked her.” By the time it got to “Motherfucking psycho rooster man killed her, cut her up, cooked her, and fucking fed her to the homeless in the park,” the chicken guy, Daniel Rakowitz, was in custody.

Investigating homicide detectives learned more of what a lot of the neighborhood already knew. Rakowitz was a screw-loose kid in his late twenties who’d been in and out of psych wards in and around his hometown of Rockport, Texas, a short drive up Highway 35 from Corpus Christi. Heeding a call only he understood, he came to the Lower East Side mid-decade and dealt drugs around Tompkins Square Park. No band, no screenplay, no figure study, no novel like the hundreds of would-be Burroughses and Bukowskis who trickled into the neighborhood from small towns and suburbs. Rakowitz was just a Gulf Coast burnout who walked around with a tame fighting rooster under his arm telling himself and anyone that would listen that he was the numerically proven messiah and that he had pot, hash, and speed for sale.

Rakowitz was a pretty lousy drug dealer—he talked too much and was way too willing to get in anyone’s face about anything, especially religion, as long as there were eyes and ears on him. He was just one of those people that was always pushing things too far and confused challenging with irritating. You can’t turn every conversation with your customers and your suppliers toward God, the devil, numerology, and smoking your way to heaven without fucking up supply and demand. Unless they’re really hard up, most people who saw the rooster guy coming down the street turned the corner early.

There will always be a certain echelon of street creep using drugs, gullibility, a big-eyed stare, a beard, and a bullshit rap about Satan to make a social foothold in an outsider community. Rakowitz’s central casting blue-eyed Jesus look, the fact that he usually had good pot on him to smoke, no matter how bad the stuff was that he sold, and that he could cook earned him a pass from a handful of the transplants he harangued while selling dime bags and black beauties. The eighties Lower East Side was full of out-of-town girls and boys intoxicated by an image of a no-rules downtown Manhattan they cobbled together from movies, books, and records. In the pre-Internet days it wasn’t easy to find people that felt the way you did or liked the stuff you did, especially if it involved things nice people didn’t talk about. A generation of kids used the excuse of school or career to roll in the Lower East Side stink to get the smell of narrow-minded, intolerant, abusive, or privileged upbringings off their hide. Nobody bought Rakowitz as a guru, but he earned some admirers among the crusties, weekend peace punks, and runaways who hung out, got high, and lined up for free meals from the Hare Krishnas in the park.

Monica Beerle was none of the above. She was a dance student from the foothills of the Appenzell Alps in Switzerland who paid her school bills at Martha Graham by shaking her ass at Billy’s Topless on Twenty-fourth Street and Sixth. In the eighties titty bars like Billy’s were grittier and generally a lot friendlier than the upscale gentlemen’s clubs that would replace them over the next few years. Boogying on stage at Billy’s for tips from horny cabbies with one eye on her tits and one eye on the racing form fit a restless provincial European kid’s idea of vintage tolerably sleazy NYC.

Either Monica was drawn to Rakowitz’s blue eyes and lanky frame same as some of the patchouli-and-Mohawk teeny boppers who took the LIRR into Manhattan from Long Island when school was out, or she was attracted to the lease on the two-bedroom apartment Rakowitz rented on East Ninth Street. In any case, she began crashing at his place and covering his rent. The arrangement soured quickly when he turned out to be free with his fists and more interested in smoking dope, watching TV, and hanging out in the park than paying bills or showing up regularly at any of his part-time gigs prepping and cooking in catering hall kitchens around the city. Eight weeks after she moved in, Monica told Rakowitz to move out. Rakowitz refused. She asked him again louder and he refused louder. Monica yelled at him to get out in more harshly worded and strongly accented terms. Rakowitz threatened to beat her up and she threatened to call the cops. He shut her up with a hard punch to the throat then numbly watched her suffocate on her own crushed esophagus.

Rakowitz panicked. Using a kitchen knife, elbow grease, and the skills he picked up short-order-cooking his way from Texas to the Lower East Side, he broke up Monica’s limbs at the joints, cut her up, and skinned her. Most of her small frame went out to the sidewalk on garbage day in 3 mil plastic trash bags. The most incriminating parts of her went into a series of pots on the kitchen stove. But disposing of a human body was very different and far more difficult than prepping birds for banquet-size servings of chicken cacciatore. Nothing Rakowitz ever prepared caused him as much trouble as Monica. It turned out that cooking an ex-girlfriend down to unrecognizable bleached bone wasn’t as easy as it seems when pictured in your batshit crazy mind’s eye. The job took weeks and was only partly successful. Out of desperation, Rakowitz stashed the knife, parts of Monica’s teeth he had individually removed, wrapped in tissue, and placed in the fingers of a gardening glove, several large bones, and some deodorizing kitty litter together in a joint compound bucket. He eventually checked the bucket into baggage pickup at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Whatever plan Rakowitz had was rendered meaningless by the parade of witnesses in and out of his apartment during the boiling marathon, and by the fact that he couldn’t help bragging in the park about reducing his ex-girlfriend to brodo di carne. By the time the case broke and reporters came around, the park kids were only too happy to repeat every crazy rumor and claim Rakowitz made while passing a joint—he ate Monica, he fed her to the homeless, he used her as ingredients at his job. At the trial, the Manhattan DA even got some guy who lived in the park to say he saw a finger floating in a bowl of soup Rakowitz ladled out on a breadline.

When detectives from the Ninth arrested Rakowitz he led them to the bucket with Monica’s remains. Dazzled by the sudden spotlight he confessed to everything that crossed his pretzeled mind. By the time he went on trial, Rakowitz had decided that wasn’t such a great idea and pleaded innocent. No attorney materialized to represent him and Rakowitz defended himself using such unusual legal tactics as threatening to squirt a witness with a water gun loaded with “stagnant urine” (the fresh kind was too good for them, apparently) and offering to smoke a joint with the jury, who eventually found him not guilty by reason of insanity. Rakowitz was bundled off for a to-be-determined number of decades at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island, and the presiding judge declared the trial, “a lulu.” I’m sure Monica Beerle’s friends and family used a different adjective to describe their experience.

The detective whose perp I delivered showed me a Polaroid that Rakowitz had made out to the Ninth. It read: “I’d like to have you all for dinner.” Like everybody else, I laughed.

Something I read in the papers the next day stuck in my head and eventually something bad started to stick in my throat. After looking at the calendar, I realized Rakowitz was one of the guys I saw dishing out entrées at the El Caribe catering hall in Mill Basin during a close friend’s wedding reception just a few days before the arrest. I didn’t have anything but coffee for the rest of the day and didn’t order Italian food anywhere for nearly a year.

 

“Hey Mike, talk to you a minute?” Hamilton, one of the cops brought up from the PSA 4 Command had just finished a shift listening to the wire. I couldn’t read what was bugging him.

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Hey, you still seeing Mirabel?”

Mirabel was a girl I’d dated for nearly a year. We were together long enough that she’d met some of the guys at the Command. She was a looker and a flirt and men tended to remember her. When I met her she was a decorator doing store windows. I saw her driving down Avenue B in a custom Corvette convertible a few times and finally pulled her over and chatted her up. Mirabel lived on Long Island and had friends in the projects. I got her phone number and one thing led to another. We went out for a while but it never got too serious.

It hadn’t helped that when we met, I was still fresh from the Davey Blue Eyes hit scare and didn’t know who to trust. For the first couple months I was with her, I couldn’t fool around with her unless I was facing the door and had my .38 out of its ankle holster and under a chair by the entrance of any room we were in. The .380 I bought when I heard about the hit was under a pillow, and a four-inch Smith & Wesson on the windowsill stayed hidden under the shades. I liked her a lot, but it took months for me to be sure she wouldn’t set me up for the guys from Alphabet City. She never found any of the guns.

In the end she was too much of a party girl for me. Mirabel loved that I could get us into the World on First Street and the other clubs that used to pop up, get bled dry by the mob, and then close a year or two later in those days. I avoided abusing “Mastershield,” as Jack Genova called it in my rookie days, but waving my badge every now and then to get seats in the VIP section close to the dance floor didn’t bother my conscience much.

Mirabel’s friends were all night owls—DJs, bartenders, and bouncers—and she mixed well in the club world. It was never really my scene, but I was a bachelor in those days so I made do. The music was usually too loud for us to talk. Most of the people she knew could barely handle that I didn’t drink or get high, and when they found out I was a cop, they really freaked out. Sometimes, particularly at the World, we would run into dealers from the Avenue D crews. Those guys loved checking out and hanging out with the rich and famous who would take limos to a nightclub just a few blocks from the projects. Crooks and celebrities have been drawn to one another for years and in those pre-camera-phone days, it wasn’t unusual to see rock stars and movie actors getting high with made guys, dealers, and lowlifes. Johnny Depp drank beer in Avenue A bars at a table full of Third Street Hells Angels for a while. I remember one Sixth and D dealer bragging to me that him and his boys had posed for a picture with Madonna one night in her limo outside the World. When I called bullshit he pulled out a Polaroid of him, her, and two other guys all holding up champagne glasses to the camera.

I hadn’t seen Mirabel for months and I told Hamilton so. “Listen to this,” he said and handed me a pair of headphones. Hamilton played back a call that came in on Animal’s phone during his watch. I recognized both voices instantly. One was Tracy. She used Animal’s cell to make calls every chance she got. The other was Mirabel.

“See I told you it wasn’t going to do anything,” Tracy said laughing like it was girl talk. “You just leave it in your trunk for a couple days, no big deal.”

“You’re coming to get it, right? I can’t drive around with that thing in my car anymore. I’m having fucking heart failure.”

“Yo, mami, can you just come by with it? I’ll come down, I don’t want to have to bring it downtown with me.”

As the conversation went on, detouring into whether or not a hair-dresser they both went to had AIDS, it became clear that the thing in the trunk was an Uzi that belonged to Animal. Among the ordnance that Davey ran and that some of the Avenue D crew toted around, an Uzi was pretty common. But having one in your car was a twenty-year federal rap in the making for Mirabel.

“Any more like this?” I asked Hamilton. He shook his head and flashed me a blank index card. He came to me first before logging anything officially. I was right, he was a good guy.

“Thanks, Hamilton, I’ll take care of it,” I said.

“No problem, anything for you Mike.” Hamilton dropped the blank index card on the desk and walked away.

The case was building to the point where we were starting to apply for arrest warrants. If everything went off the way it was shaping up, we would be taking down enough dealers to fill a major league baseball roster—DL, farm system, and all. I didn’t want Mirabel to go to jail with them. She was a good person, she just had shitty taste in friends, and maybe boyfriends. Her getting jammed up may not have seemed like that high a price to pay for the case to go our way, but it still wasn’t right. And if Mirabel did get accidentally caught in the web DEA was spinning, what would happen when it came out that we’d dated?

I was taking a risk already, but I realized I needed to take an even bigger gamble—I had to warn her. Somehow she needed to understand that she was hanging out with people that were going to do her harm. It was going to require tact. I couldn’t jeopardize months of hard work by letting her know about the wire. If talking to her helped Tracy or Animal to catch on, our case would be ruined, agents’ and cops’ lives would be in danger, and I would probably go up on corruption charges. Still, I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I hadn’t at least tried to steer her clear of the head-on collision with the law that the Feds were scheduling for her friends. I’d done as much for sniffling junkies who had helped me out. Though we weren’t together anymore, it was still personal.

“I know you’ve been hanging around with her.” I’d arranged to meet Mirabel in a coffee shop in Long Island away from the eyes and ears of the DEA and the Alphaville crew. Her ’Vette was parked in the lot across from where we sat. I hoped that the Uzi was no longer in the trunk.

“No, I haven’t,” she said. It was instantly awkward. We hadn’t been in touch in weeks and now here I was telling her to behave herself like I was her father. She’d hated being told what to do when we were going out and now she was looking at me like I was nuts. The only thing I could do without jeopardizing the wire and the case was keep it blunt and hope that she got the message. I was banking on the fact that she already knew that I was so up in everyone’s business in the buildings and she wouldn’t interpret “I heard” literally.

“No. You have.”

“Mike, I haven’t! Why are you telling me this?”

I stayed as calm as I could without pissing her off even more. “Look,” I said, “it’s a free country, I’m not your boyfriend, I don’t want to fight, but I’m just telling you as a cop and as someone who cares about you, if you’re going to hang around lowlifes, you’re going to get into something you’re not going to be able to get out of. I know you have friends down on the Lower East Side. Hell, that’s where I met you, but you have to stay away from the projects, all those scumbags, their girlfriends, and anyone else that’s close to the Third and D perps.”

I studied Mirabel’s face. “I can see you heading for trouble and if something bad happens, I can’t make it all just go away.”

“I don’t know why you don’t listen! I’m not hanging out with anyone from the avenue!” Mirabel’s voice was getting less emphatic. I hoped it meant that what I was telling her was sinking in. I sighed and admitted to myself that I had done all I could. We moved on to small talk, wished each other the best, and left together, Mirabel to her ’Vette, me to my government-issued Camaro, and back to the wire room. By the time I got there she had already called Tracy.

“I was just talking to Rambo. It was crazy!”

Tracy and Mirabel quickly moved on to other topics. I could spend the rest of the investigation with my fingers crossed, or I could just move on, too. With so much at stake I had done everything I could, so it was back to work. Mirabel stayed out of jail. Her new boyfriend, a party promoter at Webster Hall and the Palladium, was spooked by Animal and his crew so Mirabel took a break from the Lower East Side and she and Tracy drifted apart on their own.

After about eight months of living, breathing, eating, sleeping, watching, and listening, Benton announced that he’d met with the U.S. attorney working with us and they’d decided it was time to make arrests. I’d spent more than half a year immersed in just how fast word traveled among Animal, Guerro, and their crew. Our case had swelled to involve nearly forty potential felons, yet we still needed to bring them in at the same time or risk losing anyone who heard about one of his associates getting led away in cuffs. These guys all had multiple addresses and the smart ones had money stashes and exit strategies.

After a marathon session of picking over index cards and photos, typing and retyping, the U.S. attorney took the 120 pages we prepared from the evidence we’d compiled to a federal judge. The judge picked over every conspirator’s name, their description, and the descriptions of the crimes they’d committed and the laws they’d broken, the drug sales, where they took place and the dollar amounts they represented, then issued forty arrest warrants and nearly as many search warrants.

Oscar Roland, assistant special agent in charge of Group 34, Benton, his partner, Gio, myself and Robert Stutman, DEA’s special agent in charge of the New York office met in Oscar’s office to discuss arrest strategy. A Colombian flag with a sign on it saying so many colombians, so little time hung in the hallway outside. Inside we finalized the tactical end of what was going to be a forty-warrant simultaneous bust that would slow the heroin deluge on Avenue D and elsewhere in the city to a trickle. Roland was a soft-spoken, light-skinned black guy from New Orleans with a spare frame and a lilting good ol’ boy accent. His desk held a cigar humidor full of expensive Cuban stogies, a wide-brimmed straw hat that he wore to and from work, and framed family pictures including one of his wife and one of their kids with Michael Jordan. His daughter, he explained once, was engaged to Jordan’s attorney. There were photos on his wall of Roland fishing, standing with confiscated bricks of coke, and shaking hands with President Reagan.

Roland did most of the talking. We all knew what the next moves were, and this tactical meeting was more a formality than a necessity, but Roland was engaging and upbeat and it felt good to see someone excited about something we’d all been working on day and night for half a year. Some upper-tier cops can get pretty rah-rah over anything, but Roland was a good guy, was genuinely proud of the work we’d done, and was looking forward to the next step.

I felt great about the case except for one thing: the index card I’d written Davey’s name on, and which had been joined early in the investigation with a blurry photo of Davey taken outside the Riis Houses by DEA, had been taken off the board months ago. For some reason, Davey had stopped dealing with Animal, Guerro, and the rest of the Third and D crew almost entirely. Mentions of him on the wire had been infrequent, and when they had come up, they were fleeting and dismissive. The best that I could guess, and some of what I heard from snitches confirmed this, was that Davey had beefed with Animal over something and that whatever it was wasn’t bad enough for him to go to war over. The Cherry Street crew led by the Navarro brothers, the guys who killed Felix Pardo and shot up Macatumba and Londie on the FDR, were still in a power struggle with Animal and Guerro’s guys, but their fight didn’t have enough of the definitive, case-closed killings I associated with Davey to make me believe that. Had Davey chosen a side? Was he playing both crews against each other as a smoke screen between him and DEA? Wherever the reason, Davey was laying low—so low that he was off the board.

Roland looked at a wall calendar and opened the floor to suggestions of what date to perform the massive bust and hit all the houses, apartments, and businesses we would need to in order to scoop everyone at once. He looked at the list of forty warrants for a moment and then casually noted that we’d need to ask the Housing PD chief for a hundred additional officers to round up our “forty thieves.” The name stuck for the rest of the investigation, the arrests, and the legal maneuvering and trial that followed.

A few days later, between three and four hundred law-enforcement personnel from DEA, Housing, NYPD, IRS, INS, and the FBI sat in cars outside Alvarez’s limo office, the grocery on Second Ave, every project building that anyone on our bulletin board lived in or frequented, the house in Oyster Bay Animal had bought with cash, and the attached three-bedroom in Ozone Park that Guerro shared with his sister and his mom, who were both also cited in the complaint and warranted by the judge. The Forty Thieves were about to become history.

Arrest kits with photos and descriptions of each of those charged, lists of aliases, places they frequented, the charges themselves, copies of the warrants and a list of prior arrests and convictions sat on the seat next to every arresting officer. The call came. In Ozone Park, Gio picked up his arrest kit at the same time I grabbed mine in Oyster Bay and hundreds of other cops checked their guns, grabbed their documents, and headed to their designated doorways.

I knocked on Animal’s door. He answered himself, wearing a robe and two days of beard. I smiled and thought, “I got you, you bastard, I got you and you are mine!” but before I could even tell him he was under arrest he read my mind. Animal’s mouth twisted into a sly grin as he looked at me and at the agents already searching his car in the driveway. He almost looked relieved—like he’d finally pieced together something that had been bothering him for a while.

“Rambo. Fuck. You got me.”