It was Nasty Ass who tipped Malone that something was wrong at 673 West 156th. This was back in the early days of the Task Force, a fetid August night, and the snitch didn’t even want to be paid for it, not in cash or smack, and he looked shaken as he said, “I heard it’s bad, Malone, really bad.”
Malone’s team went to check it out.
You go through a lot of doors on the Job. Most of them are forgettable, indistinguishable.
Malone would never forget this one.
The whole family was dead.
Father, mother, three young kids ranging in age from seven down to three. Two boys and a girl. The kids had been shot in the back of the head; same with the two adults, although they’d been chopped up with machetes first—arterial blood had sprayed all over the walls.
Russo crossed himself.
Montague just stared—the murdered kids were black and Malone knew he was thinking about his own children.
Billy O cried.
Malone called it in—five homicides, all AA—adult male, adult female, three minors. And step the fuck on it. It took maybe five minutes for Minelli from Task Force Homicide to get there—the ME right behind him with the Crime Scene people.
“Jesus Christ,” Minelli said, staring. Then he shook it off and said, “Okay, thanks, we got it from here.”
“We stay with it,” Malone said. “It’s drug related.”
“How do you know?”
“The adult vic is DeMarcus Cleveland,” Malone says. “That’s his wife, Janelle. They were midlevel smack slingers for DeVon Carter. This wasn’t a robbery—the place hasn’t been tossed. They just came in and executed them.”
“For what?”
“Slinging on the wrong corners.”
Minelli wasn’t going to get into a border skirmish on this one, not with three dead kids. Even the Crime Scene people were shook—no one made the usual jokes or looked around for something to put in their pockets.
“You have an idea who did it?” Minelli asked.
“Yeah, I do,” Malone said. “Diego Pena.”
Pena was a midlevel manager in the Dominicans’ NYC operation. His job was to stabilize the otherwise chaotic retail business in the neighborhood, get the low-level blacks under control or move them out. Briefly put, you buy from us or you don’t buy.
Malone’s hunch was that the Clevelands had refused to get in line and pay the franchise fee. He’d heard DeMarcus Cleveland proclaim his resistance on a corner one night: “This is our motherfucking hood, Carter’s motherfucking hood. We black, not Spanish. You see tacos around here? Brothers doing the fuckin’ merengue?”
It got laughs on the corner, but no one was laughing now.
Or talking.
Malone and his team canvassed the building and no one heard anything. And it wasn’t just the usual “fuck the cops, they won’t do anything anyway” or the gangbanger “we take care of our own business” attitude.
It was fear.
Malone understood—you kill a dealer in a turf dispute it’s just another day in the neighborhood. You kill the dealer and his whole family—his kids—you’re sending a message to everybody.
Pónganse a la cola.
Get in line.
Malone wasn’t taking “I don’t know” for an answer.
Three dead children, shot in their beds, he went full Task Force on it. You don’t want to be a witness? Cool, you can be a defendant. He and his team rousted every junkie, dealer and hooker in the hood. They popped guys for just standing there—loitering, littering, looking at them wrong. You didn’t hear nothing, see nothing, you don’t know nothing? That’s okay, don’t worry about it, we’ll give you some time in Rikers to think about it, maybe something will come to mind.
The team filled up booking in the Three-Two, the Three-Four and the Two-Five. Their captain back then was Art Fisher—he had street brains and balls, and didn’t give them any shit about it.
Torres did. He and Malone about got into it in the locker room when Torres asked him, “What are you busting your ass for on this thing? It’s NHI.”
No Humans Involved.
“Three dead kids?”
“If you do the math,” Torres said, “that saves the city, what, about eighteen illegitimate grandkids on welfare?”
“Shut your stupid mouth or you won’t be giving blow jobs for a month,” Malone said.
Monty had to get between them. You don’t go around Big Monty to get into a beef. He said to Malone, “Why do you let him get to you?” Meaning, I don’t, why should you?
Who worked the case hard was Nasty Ass.
When he wasn’t whacked out, the snitch worked the streets like he was cop. (Malone had to warn him more than once that he wasn’t.) He went out of his way, took chances, asked questions of people he shouldn’t have been asking questions. For some reason this got to him, and Malone, who had long since decided that junkies didn’t have souls, had to reconsider his opinion.
But it turned up nothing they could use to get to Pena.
He just kept pushing the heroin—a product labeled Dark Horse—onto the street, and everyone was too afraid of him to get in his way.
“We have to go after him more direct,” Malone said one night as they sat in the Carmansville Playground tossing back a few beers.
“Why don’t we kill him?” Monty asked.
“Worth going to the joint for you?” Malone asked.
“Maybe.”
“You got kids,” Russo said. “A family. We all do.”
“It isn’t murder if he tries to kill us first,” Malone said.
That’s how it began, Malone’s campaign to goad Pena into trying to kill a cop.
They started with a club in Spanish Harlem, a real nice salsa place Pena had a piece of, maybe laundered money through. They waited for a Friday night when the place was packed and went in like storm troopers on crack.
The security guys at the door tried to jump ugly when Malone and team walked right past the line, showed their badges and said they were coming in.
“You got a warrant?”
“The fuck are you, Johnnie Cochran?” Malone asked. “I saw a guy with a gun run over here. Hey, maybe it was you. Was it you, Counselor? Turn around, put your hands behind your back.”
“I got my constitutional rights!”
Monty and Russo grabbed him by the back of the shirt and threw him through the plate glass window.
One woman had her phone on video and held it up. “I have everything right here, what you did!”
Malone walked over, knocked the phone out of her hand and crushed it under his Doc Marten. “Anyone else had their constitutional rights violated? I want to know right now so that we can rectify the situation.”
No one spoke. Most people looked down.
“Now get out of here while you have the chance.”
The team went into the club and busted that shit up. Monty took an aluminum baseball bat to the glass tables, chairs. Russo kicked in speakers. Customers scrambled to get out of the way. It sounded like a rainstorm on a tin roof as people dropped guns on the floor.
Malone went behind the bar and swept bottles off. Then he told one of the bartenders, “Open the register.”
“I don’t know if—”
“I saw you put coke in there. Open it up.”
She opened it and Malone took out handfuls of bills and tossed them over the bar like leaves.
A big guy in an expensive silk shirt, a real crema, came up to him. “You can’t—”
Malone grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face onto the bar. “Why don’t you tell me again what I can’t do? You the manager?”
“Yes.”
He took a handful of bills and shoved them into the man’s mouth. “Eat these. Come on, jefe, eat. No? Then maybe you keep your fucking mouth shut, except to tell me where Pena is. Is he here? Is he in the back room?”
“He left.”
“He left?” Malone asked. “If I go back into the VIP room and he is there, you and I are going to have a problem. Well, you’re going to have a problem—I’m just going to go Riverdance on your face.”
“Toss everybody!” Malone shouted as he walked to the stairs. “Call the uniforms! Tell them to bring a bus! Everyone goes!”
He went up the stairs to the VIP room.
The security guy at the door seemed unsure, so Malone made up his mind for him. “I’m a VIP. I’m the most important person in your world right now because I’m the guy who decides if you get thrown into a cage with a crew of spic-hating mallates. So let me through.”
The guy let him through.
Four men sat in a banquette with their ladies, gorgeous Latinas in full makeup, big hair and beautiful expensive short dresses.
Guns lay on the floor at the men’s feet.
These were heavy, well-dressed guys. Very calm, cool, arrogant. Malone knew they had to be Pena’s people.
“Get out of the booth,” Malone said. “Lie down on the floor.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” one of the men asked. “You’re wasting everyone’s time. None of these busts will stand up.”
Another grabbed his phone and pointed it at Malone.
Malone said, “Hey, Ken Burns, the only documentary you’re going to make is your own colonoscopy.”
The guy set the phone down.
“On the floor, lie down. Everybody.”
They eased out of the booth, but the women were reluctant to lie down because their skirts rode up too high.
“You’re disrespecting our women,” the first guy said.
“Yeah, they have a lot of self-respect, fucking pieces of shit like you,” Malone said. “Ladies, did you know your boyfriends kill little kids? Three-year-olds? In their beds. Yeah, I definitely think you should marry these honks. Of course, they’re probably married already.”
“Show some respect,” the guy says.
“You open your mouth to me again,” Malone said, “I’m going to bring a female officer in here to do an orifice search on your ladies, and while she’s doing that, I’m going to be kicking your brains in.”
The guy started to say something, but then thought better of it.
Malone squatted and said quietly, “Now when you make bail, you run and tell Pena that Sergeant Denny Malone, Manhattan North Special Task Force, is going to wreck his clubs, bust his dealers, roust his customers, and then I’m going to start getting serious. Do you understand me? You may speak.”
“I understand.”
“Good,” Malone says. “Then you call your bosses down in the Dominican and tell them it’s never going to stop. You tell them that Pena has fucked up and Detective Sergeant Denny Malone, Manhattan North Special Task Force, is going to hose their Dark Horse into the sewers as long as Pena is walking upright in New York City. You tell them they don’t run this neighborhood. I do.”
The uniforms were already downstairs when Malone got there—cuffing people, picking up vials of coke, pills, the guns.
“Everyone goes,” Malone told the uniform sergeant. “Possession of firearms, cocaine, Ecstasy, looks like a little smack . . .”
“Denny, you know these aren’t going to hold up,” the sergeant said.
“I know.” He shouted to the crowd, “Don’t come back to this club! This is going to happen every time!”
As he and the team walked out the door, Malone yelled, “May Da Force be with you!”
The captain then, Art Fisher, wasn’t a pussy, so he shouldered the weight.
The ADAs filed into his office screaming that they couldn’t and wouldn’t pick up a single case, the whole raid was a Mapp violation, a prime example of bad police tactics bordering on—no, crossing the line of—brutality.
When Fisher stonewalled them (“Are you afraid of some Chiquita suing you over an iPhone?”), the prosecutors went to their immediate boss, who in those days was Mary Hinman.
That didn’t work out so well.
“If you don’t want to take the cases, don’t,” she said. “But don’t make onions, either. Grow a pair and buckle up, the ride is going to get rougher.”
One of them said, “So we’re just going to let that Denny Malone and his crew of Neanderthals run roughshod over Manhattan North?”
Hinman didn’t look up from her paperwork. “Are you still here? I thought you left when I told you to go do your job. Now if you don’t want the job . . .”
IAB took a weak swing, too.
They were catching heat from complainants and the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
McGivern shut that down. He pulled from his desk a crime scene photo of the three children shot in the head and asked them if they wanted to see this on the front page of the Post with the headline internal affairs halts probe of child killers.
They didn’t want that, no.
This was all before Ferguson, before Baltimore and the rest of those killings, and while the Latin community was offended by the nightclub raid, it had no truck with baby killers, and neither did the black community.
Malone kept at it.
His team hit bodegas, stash houses, cash houses, clubs and corners. The word got out on the street that if you were dealing or shooting anything but Dark Horse, the police were going to turn the other way, but if you had Diego Pena’s product, Da Force was coming straight at you on a collision course, no skid marks.
And they weren’t going to stop.
Not until someone gave them something they could use on Pena.
Malone, he took it to a whole new level, one that broke the unwritten rules that govern the relationship between cops and gangsters. A dealer going down on his third bust gave up where Pena was really living, and Malone found him up in Riverdale and staked it out.
He’d watch Pena’s wife take their two kids to the ritzy private school. One day, as she was walking from the car to the house on the way back, he walked up to her and said, “You have nice children, Mrs. Pena. Do you know that your husband has other people’s families murdered? Have a wonderful day.”
Malone wasn’t back at the station ten minutes before a civilian assistant came up to tell him there was someone downstairs asking for Sergeant Malone.
She handed him a card. Gerard Berger—Attorney-at-Law.
Malone went downstairs to see an elegantly dressed man who had to be Gerard Berger, Attorney-at-Law. “I’m Sergeant Malone.”
“Gerard Berger,” Berger said. “I represent Diego Pena. Is there someplace we could go to talk?”
“What’s wrong with here?”
“Nothing,” Berger said. “I just wanted to spare you potential embarrassment in front of your fellow officers.”
Embarrassment? Malone thought. In front of these guys? He’d seen some of them have contests to see who could ejaculate the farthest.
“No, this is fine,” Malone said. “Why does Pena need representation? Has he been charged with something?”
“You know that he hasn’t,” Berger said. “Mr. Pena feels that he is being harassed by the NYPD. Specifically you, Sergeant Malone.”
“Gee, that’s too bad.”
“Go ahead and joke,” Berger said. “We’ll see how funny you think this is when we sue you.”
“Sue away. I don’t have any money.”
“You have a home in Staten Island,” Berger said. “A family to take care of.”
“Keep my family out of your mouth, Counselor.”
Berger said, “My client is giving you a chance, Sergeant. Cease and desist. Otherwise we will file a civil suit and an official complaint with the department. I’ll have your shield.”
“Well, when you get it,” Malone said, “stick it up your ass.”
“You’re dog shit under my shoe, Sergeant.”
“Is that it?”
“For now.”
Malone went back up to his desk. The whole squad had already heard that the infamous Gerard Berger had paid a visit.
“What did that hump want?” Russo asked.
“He gave me the whole you’ll-never-work-in-this-town-again speech,” Malone said. “Told me to lay off Pena.”
“Are you going to?”
“Absolutely.”
What Malone did next will forever go down in the folklore of Manhattan North as “Dog Day Afternoon.”
Malone went to see Officer Grosskopf of the K-9 squad and asked to borrow Wolfie, an enormous Alsatian that had been terrorizing Harlem for the past two years.
“What are you going to do with him?” Grosskopf asked.
He loved Wolfie.
“Take him for a ride,” Malone said.
Grosskopf said yes because it was very hard, not to mention risky, to say no to Denny Malone.
Malone and Russo got Wolfie into the back of Russo’s car and drove to a food truck on East 117th that was technically called Paco’s Tacos but was generally known as the Laxatruck, where Malone fed Wolfie three chicken enchiladas with chile verde, five mystery meat tacos, and a giant burrito called the Gutbuster.
Wolfie, normally held to the strictest of diets, was thrilled and grateful and fell instantly in love with Malone, licking him enthusiastically and happily wagging his tail as he got back in the car, eagerly awaiting the next gastronomic surprise.
“How long will it take to get there?” Malone asked Russo.
“Twenty minutes, no traffic.”
“You think we got that long?”
“Gonna be close.”
It took twenty-two minutes, during which time Wolfie’s joy turned to discomfort as the greasy food worked its way through his bowels and then demanded exit. Wolfie whined, giving the signal that Grosskopf would instantly have recognized as a need to get out.
“Suck it up, Wolfie,” Malone said, scratching his head. “We’ll be there soon.”
“This dog shits in my car . . .”
“He won’t,” Malone said. “He’s a stud.”
When they got there, Wolfie was twisting in discomfort and headed straight for the strip of grass outside the office building, but Malone and Russo took him inside, into the elevator and to the seventeenth floor.
Berger’s receptionist, a drop-dead gorgeous young woman that Berger was probably banging, said, “You can’t bring a dog in here, sir.”
“He’s a service dog,” Russo said, staring at her boobs. “I’m blind.”
“Do you have an appointment with Mr. Berger?” she asked.
“No.”
“What’s the matter with your dog?”
The answer became immediately apparent.
Wolfie whined, Wolfie whirled, Wolfie let loose an almost apocalyptic blast of steaming, chili-infused dog shit all over Gerard Berger’s (previously) white Surya Milan carpet.
“Oops,” Malone said.
Exiting to the sound of the receptionist retching, Malone patted the shamefaced but relieved Wolfie’s head and said, “Good boy, Wolfie. Good boy.” Then they took Wolfie back to the station.
The word got there ahead of them because they were greeted with a standing ovation, and Wolfie was lavished with pets, hugs, kisses and a box of Milkbone cookies tied up with a blue ribbon.
“The captain wants to see you,” the desk sergeant told Malone and Russo, “as soon as you get in.”
They returned Wolfie to a livid Grosskopf and went into Fisher’s office.
“I’m just going to ask you this once,” he said. “Did you take a police dog to shit all over Gerard Berger’s office?”
“Would I do something like that?” Malone asked.
“Get out. I’m busy.”
He was. His phone was ringing off the hook with congratulations from every precinct in New York City.
Grosskopf never really forgave Malone for abusing Wolfie’s digestive system, a hostility that was exacerbated by the fact that any time Malone came within fifty feet of Wolfie, the dog would try to go to him, because Malone had given him the best afternoon of his life.
Malone kept at it. Nasty Ass—and only God knew where he got this kind of information—told him that Pena’s wife was holding a surprise birthday party for her husband at Rao’s, the famous East Harlem eatery.
Pena, he was sitting at the big table with his family, his friends, more than one business leader, a few local pols, and he was opening his presents and took out a big package that was a framed photo of three dead children with a note: From Your Friends at the Manhattan North Special Task Force—No Happy Returns, Baby Killer.
Malone heard about it—from the wiseguys on Pleasant Avenue. He got invited to a sit-down with Lou Savino, whom he’d known since he was a beat cop in the bag. They sat outside a café with cups of espresso and the capo said, “You piece of work, you. You gotta cut this shit out.”
“Since when are you a message boy for the tacos?”
“I could be offended by that,” Savino said, “but I’m not going to be. We leave wives out of our business, Denny.”
“Tell that to Janelle Cleveland. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. She and her whole family are dead.”
“This is a pissing match between two sets of monkeys,” Savino said. “You got your brown monkey and you got your black monkey. What’s the difference which gets the banana? It’s nothing to do with us.”
“It better not be, Lou,” Malone said. “If any of your people are moving Pena’s product, all bets are off, I’m coming after them, I don’t care.”
He knew what he was doing—letting Savino know that if he wanted to deal smack, it had to be with anyone but Pena. It might prompt him to put in a call to the Dominican.
The key to staying alive in any kind of organized crime outfit is very simple—make other people money. As long as you’re making other people money, you’re safe. Start costing people money, you’re a liability, and crime organizations don’t keep liabilities on the books for very long.
It’s not like they can write them off on their taxes.
Malone was turning Pena into a liability—the man was costing his bosses money and trouble, and he was becoming an embarrassment, a guy who was letting himself be humiliated, his wife insulted, his businesses trashed; he became the subject of jokes.
You’re running for toastmaster general you want to be a comedian. You’re trying to take over the ghetto drug trade, last thing you want to be is funny.
You want to be feared.
And if people are going Celebrity Roast on you, even behind your back, they ain’t scared of you. And if they ain’t scared of you, and you’re not making people money, you’re just a problem.
Drug organizations don’t have HR departments. They don’t bring you in, counsel you, instruct you on how you can improve your job performance. What they do is they send someone you know, someone you trust, who takes you out to drinks or to dinner and tells you, Cuida de tu negocio.
Take care of your business.
“Just sit down with the guy,” Savino said, “is all I’m asking. We can work something out.”
“Three dead kids. There’s nothing to work out.”
“It’s always good to talk.”
“He wants to talk,” Malone said, “he comes in and confesses to ordering the murder of the Cleveland family, then he writes a statement. That’s the only way I sit down with him.”
But Savino played his trump card. “This isn’t him asking, this is us.”
Malone couldn’t refuse a direct request from the Cimino family. They were in business together, he had obligations.
They met in the back room of a small restaurant in the East Harlem neighborhood controlled by the Ciminos. Savino guaranteed Malone’s safety; he, in turn, promised that there would be no bust and he wouldn’t wear a wire.
When Malone got into the room, Pena was already at the table. White shirt, overweight, ugly, even in a thousand-dollar suit. Savino got up to hug Malone and started to pat him down. Malone knocked his hands away. “You patting me down? You pat him down?”
“He’s got no reason to wear a wire.”
“I have no reason to wear a wire,” Malone said. “This is not a way to start this sit-down, Lou.”
“Where’s the wire?”
“Up your mother’s twat,” Malone says. “Next time you eat her out, don’t say anything incriminating. Fuck you, I’m outta here.”
“It’s all right,” Pena said.
Savino shrugged and gestured at Malone to sit down.
“Who you taking orders from these days?” Malone asked Savino.
He sat down across from Pena.
“Do you want anything?” Pena asked.
“I’m not breaking bread with you,” Malone said. “I’m not drinking with you. Lou asked me to meet, so here I am. What do you want to say to me?”
“This all has to stop.”
“It stops when they stick the needle in your arm,” Malone said.
“Cleveland knew the rules,” Pena said. “He knew that a man puts not only himself on the line, but his entire family. That’s our way.”
“This is my turf,” Malone said. “My rules. And my rules are that we don’t kill kids.”
“Don’t try to be morally superior with me,” Pena said. “I know what you are. You’re a dirty cop.”
Malone looked at Savino. “Is that it? We’ve had our conversation now? Can I go, get something to eat?”
Pena set a briefcase on the table. “There’s two hundred fifty thousand dollars in there. Take it and eat.”
“What’s this for?”
“You know what it’s for.”
“No, you tell me what it’s for, you piece of garbage,” Malone says. “You tell me it’s for giving you a pass for murdering that family.”
“Pat him down,” Pena said to Savino.
“You lay a finger on me,” Malone said, “so help me God, Lou, I will wipe this floor with you.”
“He’s wired,” Pena said.
“You are,” Savino said, “you’re not walking out of here, Denny.”
Malone ripped off his sports coat, popped his buttons, opening his shirt, baring his chest. “You happy now, Lou? Or you wanna put on a glove, stick a finger up my ass, you wop faggot motherfucker?”
“Jesus, no offense, Denny.”
“Yeah, well, I’m offended, by you and by this baby killer.” Malone picked up the briefcase, threw it at Pena. “I don’t know what you heard about me but I know what you didn’t hear. You didn’t hear I was going to let some mutt kill three children on my beat and walk away. You offer me that briefcase again I’m going to shove it down your throat and out your ass. The only reason I don’t hook you up and haul you in right now is I promised Lou I wouldn’t. But that don’t extend to tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. I’m going to put you on a slab, if your bosses don’t beat me to it.”
“Maybe I’ll put you on a slab,” Pena said.
“Do it,” Malone said. “Come after me. Bring all your people, though. You call the wolf, you get the pack.”
Russo and Montague appeared in the door of the restaurant as if they’d been listening. They had—they’d been sitting out in a car taping the whole fucking thing with a parabolic ear.
“You have a problem, Denny?” Russo asked. He was sporting a smile and a Mossberg 590 shotgun.
Monty wasn’t smiling.
“No problem,” Malone called back. He looked at Pena. “And you, shitbird. I’ll ass-fuck your widow on your coffin until she calls me Papi.”
They geared up, heavy.
Started carrying freakin’ artillery.
It could come from any direction, from Pena or even from the Ciminos, although Malone doubted a Mafia family would be reckless enough to kill an NYPD detective.
They took precautions. Malone didn’t go home to Staten Island but cooped up on the West Side. Russo kept his shotgun on the passenger seat. But they still hit the streets, worked Pena’s operation, worked their sources, chipped away.
And Malone took the tape to Mary Hinman.
“Berger will walk through this like shit through a goose,” Hinman said. “You didn’t have a warrant, you didn’t have probable cause—”
“Police officers surveilled a fellow officer on an undercover operation,” Malone said. “In the course of those duties they heard a man confessing to a multiple murder and—”
“You want me to charge Pena with the Cleveland homicides based on that?” Hinman asked. “Career suicide.”
“Just bring him in,” Malone said. “Get him in the room. Let Homicide play him the tape and work on him.”
“You think Berger will let him answer any question other than his name?” Hinman asked.
“Try anyway,” Malone said, so tight, so frustrated, he was about to break out of his skin. “You owe me.”
How many convictions did you get from me testilying?
They brought Pena in.
Malone watched from behind the window as Hinman played the tape. “Cleveland knew the rules. He knew that a man puts not only himself on the line, but his entire family. That’s our way.”
Berger held his hand up to Pena to keep quiet, looked at Hinman and said, “I don’t hear anything even remotely close to a confession to or even guilty knowledge of the Cleveland murders. I heard a man expressing an admittedly repulsive cultural norm that, while reprehensible, is not criminal.”
Hinman turned the tape back on.
“There’s two hundred fifty thousand dollars in there. Take it and eat.”
“What’s this for?”
“You know what it’s for.”
“So now you think you have my client for attempting to bribe a police officer,” Berger said. “Except you don’t have the money. Perhaps the briefcase was empty. Perhaps my client was merely taunting Sergeant Malone in admittedly misguided retribution for his endless puerile harassments. Next?”
“No, you tell me what it’s for, you piece of garbage. You tell me it’s for giving you a pass for murdering that family.”
“Pat him down.”
Hinman played the rest of the tape.
Berger said, “I heard nothing incriminating. I did hear an NYPD detective threaten a subject and say that he was going to ‘ass-fuck’ his wife on his coffin. You must be very proud. In any case, this tape is not only useless, it would be inadmissible should you be so foolish as to bring charges against my client. A grand jury might be impressed; a judge would indignantly toss it in the garbage where it belongs. You have nothing on my client.”
Hinman said, “We have a line on the shooters and they’ll implicate your client. His moment to get on the bus, spare himself the needle, is now.”
It was a total bluff, but Pena flinched.
Berger didn’t. “Do I hear whistling past the graveyard? Or a tacit admission that your ‘case’ presently amounts to nothing? I will tell you this, Counselor, your police are out of control. I will take that up with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, but I would recommend you save your career by taking action and culling the rabid dogs from your pack.”
He stood up and gestured for Pena to do the same. “Good day.”
Berger looked straight into the mirror, took out a handkerchief, smiled at Malone and lifted his shoe. He wiped the sole and tossed the handkerchief into the trash can.
The neighborhood started to turn on Pena.
It was subtle at first, a mere leak. But the leak became a stream that became a flood that cracked open the wall of Pena’s invulnerability. No one came into the house—there wasn’t that kind of trust—but it was a nod, a flick of the head, the slightest gesture to let Malone know, as he cruised the streets, that a conversation was wanted.
Those talks happened on the corner, in alleys, in tenement hallways, in shooting galleries, in bars. Words about who killed them three kids, who Pena hired, who the shooters were.
Some of it was cynical; the informants wanted the flow of heroin to resume, the hassling to stop, Malone to shut down his relentless campaign. But a lot of it was conscience freed from fear as the tide started to turn.
A picture began to emerge that Pena had hired two ambitious up-and-comers who wanted to make their bones with him. And the community was especially angry because they were black.
Tony and Braylon Carmichael were brothers, twenty-nine and twenty-seven, respectively, with sheets that stretched back to the early teens for assault, robbery, dealing and burglary, and now they were looking to move up as wholesalers for Pena.
He had an entry-level job for them first.
Kill the Clevelands.
The whole family.
Malone, Russo and Montague crashed into the apartment on 145th with guns drawn, ready to shoot.
Pena had gotten there first.
Tony Carmichael was slumped in a chair, two entry wounds in his forehead.
Well, Malone thinks, we managed to execute one of the killers, anyway—indirectly, by telling Pena we were on the shooters. They searched the rest of the apartment but didn’t find Braylon, which meant that their case against Pena was still alive.
Malone went to Nasty Ass. “Put it out on the street. He reaches out to me, I promise to bring him in safe. No beating. He makes whatever deal he can make for testifying on Pena.”
Braylon was a dumbass—his late brother was the brains of the operation. But Braylon had to be smart enough to know that Pena was hunting him, Cleveland’s friends were hunting him, and his only chance was Malone.
He reached out that night.
Malone and his team picked him up in St. Nicholas Park, where he’d been hiding in some bushes, and brought him into the station.
“Don’t say a fucking word to me,” Malone said as he cuffed him. “Keep your mouth shut.”
He wanted to do this right. Called in and made sure that Minelli was ready to interview and that Hinman was present. Braylon didn’t want a lawyer. He gave it all up, how Pena had hired him and his brother to kill the Clevelands.
“Is it enough?” Malone asked.
“It’s enough to arrest him.”
She got a warrant on Pena, and Homicide went to pick him up—Hinman strictly forbade Malone to go.
Pena wasn’t there.
They missed him by minutes.
Gerard Berger had surrendered his client to the feds.
Not for murder, for narcotics trafficking.
Malone exploded when Hinman called him with the news. “I don’t want him for trafficking! I want him for the murders!”
“We don’t get everything we want,” Hinman said. “Sometimes we have to settle for what we can get. Come on, Malone, you won. Pena turned himself in to save his life and go to a federal lockup where his own people can’t kill him. He’ll do fifteen to thirty, probably die there. That’s a victory. Take it.”
Except it wasn’t.
Gerard Berger cut his client the sweetheart deal of all time. In exchange for providing intelligence on the cartel and testifying in a dozen standing cases, Diego Pena received two years minus time served, which meant that when he was finished ratting on the stand he would probably walk away.
A federal judge had to sign off on the deal and did, saying that the information Pena could provide would take tons of heroin off the streets and save more than five lives.
“Bullshit,” Malone said. “If it’s not Pena’s heroin, it will be someone else’s. This won’t change a thing.”
“We do what we can,” Hinman said.
“What am I supposed to tell the people?” Malone asked Hinman.
“What people?”
“The people in the neighborhood who put their fucking lives on the line to bring this guy down,” Malone said. “The people who trusted me to get justice for those kids.”
Hinman didn’t know what to tell him.
Malone didn’t know what to tell them.
Except they already knew. It was an old story to them—the careers of a bunch of white suits were more important than the deaths of five black people.
Braylon Carmichael received five life sentences to be served consecutively.
Denny Malone lost part of his soul. Not all of it, but enough of it that when Pena got tired of the straight life and went back to dealing heroin, Malone was both willing and able to execute him.