THE GHETTO NEVER SLEEPS, MISTER POLICEMAN
My father was born and raised in East New York, on Hull Street and Hopkinson Avenue, one block off Fulton. He’d tell you he came from Brownsville; that’s the way he chose to remember it, and he spoke of his neighborhood devotedly.
The only member of his family born in this country, Pop was one hell of a ballplayer and a devoted follower of the socialist and East Harlem congressman, Vito Marcantonio. Pop loved Brownsville and was proud of its socialist history. When I became a cop we hardly ever discussed politics; in the 1960s, we hardly spoke at all.
In the back of my mind where memories flourish, I often think of Brownsville. As a kid growing up in Ozone Park—Pop thought Queens, just across the Bayside and Acacia cemeteries from Brooklyn, was best for us—I went every weekend to the street markets of Brownsville to shop with my mother. Her name was Lucy and she called Brownsville “Jew-town.”
One summer Sunday morning, I was playing stickball with my buddy Norman Bliestien. My mother drove by the playground to pick me up. In those days, going Sunday-morning shopping with my mother was at least as important as, say, going to the Crossbay Theater with the neighborhood guys to watch a movie. Or possibly my first sexual experience.
“Normie, I have to go shopping with my mom,” I tell him. “I gotta go.”
“Where you going?”
“Jew-town.”
“Where?” says Normie.
“Jew-town in Brooklyn. Pitkin Avenue, Stone Avenue. Down there.”
“That’s Brownsville. What are you, a moron?”
I’d always thought that Jew-town was the name of the neighborhood, like Ozone Park where we lived, or Richmond Hill or maybe Polack Alley in Woodhaven. I was ten years old, so what did I know?
Brownsville in those years was awesome. On Belmont Avenue—Stone and Pitkin too—there were rows of pushcarts heavy with vegetables and fruits and pistachio nuts and great round, thick, chocolate-covered halvah rings that were shoulder-to-shoulder with immense loaves of black breads, bagels, bialys, and pickles in enormous wooden barrels. In the shops there were appliances and clothing and shoes—special sample shoes, the only ones that would fit my mother, whose feet were tiny.
The shopkeepers loved my mother. They’d notice Lucy and shout her name; the commotion was unbearably loud and dazzling.
“Lucy, here Lucy—look what I got for you, only for you!”
My mother was beautiful. Small and beautiful with huge breasts. She was a Sicilian woman and they were Jews and the market women jumped for joy when they saw her. My mother greeted them as if they were family.
I learned how to slip and slide in and around fast-moving crowds as a little kid. Walking those streets, I worried that Brownsville’s uproarious world would swallow us up. But that urgency in my belly passed soon enough when Lucy laughed. She laughed a lot, and anyone could see that she loved being there. The little lady could shop.
Her astute eyes missed nothing. Shirts for my brother, a dress for my sister, Keds sneakers for me—only half sizes, with soles so thick that when I wore them I’d feel as though I could jump over a building and back again.
I can still see the people, closely packed along the sidewalk and overflowing onto the stone stoops that led to the shops. On the cold days in the winter it was a sight to behold, all those people warming themselves from the fires that rose out of black metal barrels, the fragrance of wood smoke mixing with the spicy essence of lox and salami. They are some of the most magnificent, clinging, and lasting memories of my childhood.
That was then.
Not until I became a cop in my early twenties was I to visit Brownsville again.
Years had passed and things had changed.
There were mountains of garbage in the little yards in back of the tenements where rats the size of small dogs prowled. No longer did I see women in ritual wigs, men in beards and long dark coats, boys with curls of hair dangling alongside their ears.
Brownsville faces were now black and brown and angry. It seemed new, but it was really the same old class struggle, only with different music. I was doing my best to understand the anger on the basis of hopelessly limited information.
During this rookie time, I was still living at home and the breakfast discussions with my father were becoming more and more heated.
“The yoms, Pop, they’re crazy. They live like animals and throw shit at us from the rooftops. I mean bottles and bricks. You know what a bottle or a brick would do to you thrown from six stories up?”
“Yom is a dumb word spoken by stupid people,” said Pop. “Don’t ever use that word in this house again.”
“Those people are crazy,” I told him.
“They’re not crazy. They’re poor and oppressed, and they’re angry. They take their anger into the streets. And let me tell you something, Mister Policeman, it’s going to get worse.”
My father was kin to all the demoralized and poor and out-of-work peoples of the world; his instinctive belief in the class struggle, back then, drove me up the wall.
“The bosses and landlords screw these people over in ways you could never understand,” Pop said.
“You have to see how they live,” I replied.
“I know how they live. You think we lived any differently?”
“Sure you did.”
He smiled.
“Drugs, Pop. The drugs are everywhere—on the rooftops, in the basements, in the hallways. And where do they get the money for those drugs? They rob, they steal, they burglarize. Their women are prostitutes. It’s a hellhole.”
“Mister Policeman, who do you think brought all those drugs into that neighborhood? I wish you’d stayed in school.”
In those days, I was assigned to the NYPD’s Tactical Patrol Force. The unit had been formed in 1959, the creation of Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy. At first, there were thoughts to simply name it Special Services. Except, having SS on the collars of New York City cop uniforms would have been less than wise.
TPF’s nickname was Kennedy’s Commandos. It was a specialized uniformed unit—most of the members were young and had been Marines or paratroopers. We patrolled across the city in high-crime areas.
Our special training focused on dealing with all sorts of civil disorder. Patrol in TPF was mobile and proactive and very aggressive. We all shined up our brass with silver polish. Our uniforms were always creased and unsoiled. It was there, in that unit, where I would draw my gun for the first time and shoot someone—in a place where I almost got shot myself, and the place where my first partner was killed.
In TPF, you carried yourself with poise, a kind of dignity and macho zeal. What I remember most about those years are the alleyways and backyards of the tenements, scary stuff, the sounds and smells and always the music—the sweet sound of salsa wafting up to the rooftops, how it made the scary stuff somehow go away.
Things happen quickly in the street, and as a cop you really don’t know what you’re doing most of the time. You’re just doing. Afterward, you can tell yourself any kind of bullshit you want. Say that you handled it well, it didn’t bother you one single bit, that you loved doing this or that, that you behaved heroically and you’re proud of yourself. “You would not believe this shit,” is what you tell people.
I had two partners, Dave Jackel and Pete Schmidt. Dave was six-foot-five and Pete was just about six-three. I was five-foot-nine, the smallest man in the unit; in my memory, we made a unique-looking trio walking our posts.
The TPF attitude was, action comes on so fast it’s not smart or safe to involve yourself in tentative assumptions or too much scrutiny. Speed counts.
* * *
“Fuckin’ muggers, I hate ’em.” This was Officer Pete Schmidt talking. “We break out the gym set on those bastards.”
Irony of ironies, after so many years I was back in Brownsville, standing with Pete Schmidt on the edge of a roof of a sixstory tenement overlooking Pitkin Avenue. I tried to mentally reconstruct the street, as it had been in my youth. The shops and pushcarts and most of the Jews were gone. The neighborhood had changed; it was now one of the most dangerous, squalid, and dilapidated areas of the city.
Remember, this was the early ’60s. A battle at the other end of the world was ratcheting up, and we had a drug war blazing in our backyard. At the time, even the most pessimistic observer could not imagine that we could lose both.
Most of time, when on patrol, I’d feel like the good yeoman crime fighter for the city of New York, the designated lightning rod for the madness that took place in ghetto people’s lives. In a short time I learned that along with street criminals, there were hard-working, good people in these neighborhoods, people who counted on me.
When I walked patrol, I eyed the alleyways, hallways, and storefronts. I wasn’t stupid, or very brave. I forced myself to go into the dark places, the long alleyways that ran between the tenements. At the end of those alleyways were doors that led to stairways that led to basements that were lit with candles, where mattresses were scattered on ice-cold floors, where rags were blankets and buckets were toilet bowls—the tenement cellars where desperate street people slept.
I could see faces at windows, shapes in hallways, forms traveling in and out of the darkness. Believe this when I tell you, the ghetto never sleeps.
I had been a visitor in many ghetto apartments—sometimes invited, most times not. I knew that on the coldest of nights, ice formed inside the glass windows and on the sills of those apartments. I had seen ice on the floors and on bathroom mirrors. Slum landlords regulated heat in that part of town so that none rose after 6 o’clock in the evening.
My father was right. Small wonder these people wanted to burn those buildings, equipped as they were with rats and leaky faucets that ran ice water and ceilings that dropped lead chips of paint into cribs where infants slept. I once saw a baby girl whose toes had been gnawed to stumps by a rat. I saw that and wondered what in the hell country I was in anyway.
The next time, when I spoke to my father I said, “You were right. Were you ever. Jesus!”
He smiled.
A recollection. Voices and faces. Tales like threads over and around a piece of time. So mindful I am of my experiences in Brooklyn that nothing goes away. Now, I can see myself as I was then: None of it was real, like I was in a movie, some dodo up on the screen, some character in my skin making his way through a world he didn’t understand.
I’m young and healthy. The drinking age in New York City was eighteen, but they wouldn’t serve me without ID until I was thirty. Baby Face, they called me. The cops and the street people, they all called me Baby Face.
Today I look in the mirror. “Baby Face,” I say to the reflection. “Yeah, right.”
I see myself sitting in homeroom at William H. Maxwell Vocational High School in East New York one morning. A bright fall day in Brooklyn and the teacher walks into the room. Passing as a high school student, I’m there to buy dope. The teacher smiles nervously at me, squints, turns around, then turns back and looks at me again.
The teacher’s name was Veltri, I called him “Red” when I was the pitcher and he was the great glove and strong hitting shortstop of our own John Adams High School baseball team in Ozone Park. Later, in the boy’s room, Red asked me, “How are you doing?” I said fine, that I was there to do something that had to be done. I told him I was a cop. He said, “Yeah, I figured.”
After a week at Red’s school, my job was done.
I was now standing in the principal’s office. I remember how that dip-shit came at me, how angry he’d been that I’d bought drugs from fourteen of his students.
He was horrified. He unbuttoned his coat and loosened his tie and shouted that I’d crossed the inviolable threshold of his school.
A great sadness came crashing down on me. I thought I had accomplished something good, something worthwhile, something that needed to be done. It was the first time I realized that although the world’s good people said they wanted evil exposed, in fact that was often the last thing they wanted.
The image I had of myself as a hero, as someone who was willing to do the work of an undercover cop—all of that was so much crap. This dip-shit principal didn’t want the crap; he wanted me to go away. Rocking back and forth, getting reamed in that man’s office, looking down at him seated behind his desk, I felt a swell of hopelessness; a claustrophobic sensation, as if I’d suffocate to death if I didn’t get out of there.
He berated me, telling me that I was taking advantage of his students—his kids, he called them. This being the same man who only a week earlier was so happy to see me, so pleased that someone would come and help figure out if there was a drug problem at his school.
Full-blown into his rant, I got this picture in my head of a fourteen-year-old kid in jeans and a sweatshirt, a knowing smirk on his face. The little piss-pot telling me he could get all the drugs I wanted, whatever I wanted, as long as I had the cash. Guns he could get me too, this little shit, this tough guy with the long hair flowing over his shoulders. A good-looking boy, the image of one of my high school buddies from a few years back. But my buddy wasn’t selling drugs, this piss-pot was.
Piss-pot’s mother was the president of the PTA, an important person. As was this man, this dip-shit of a high school principal. As were the many others to come later: judges, prosecutors, politicians, chiefs of police, some of my family, my friends, journalists, television commentators, cops—so many cops. Faces in my not-so-distant future, scores of good citizens, my unborn children—all of them asking me about similar and different cases. Why didn’t I mind my own business? I tried, trust me. I gave it my best shot. It just wasn’t possible.
Imagine what arresting strung-out junkies would do to you. Or how depressed you’d get from collaring people who couldn’t find their hands and feet. Between the crazy shit you saw both in the street and courthouses, and what you personally lost as far as moral perspective was concerned—being there, seeing it all up close and personal—well, if you had any brains at all you would see that it all boils down to a collective nervous breakdown of a person’s system.
Your eye saw it but your brain couldn’t really take it in. Like this one:
I’ve told it before—many times, several versions—but this is what actually happened.
It was late on a Friday when I walked into the Brooklyn arraignment court. It was a busy night, the place was jammed to the rafters and it turned the courtroom into a spectacle of craziness. It was a bazaar of victims and defendants, manipulators of all sorts.
I spotted Richard Smalls—“Sweet Dick,” they called him. He was standing against a wall amongst a bevy of his working girls. Dick was an informant of mine, a “benevolent” pimp with processed hair and sharkskin suits. He looked to all the world like Sugar Ray Robinson.
Sweet Dick didn’t bully or threaten his women so much as he charmed them. I guess he told them he loved them and made all sorts of ridiculous vows to protect them. Out of fear and loneliness a lot of street girls hooked up with pimps, slick guys who spared no expense or time winning and wooing them. Dick would keep at a new street girl with relentless pressure, over and over until she joined his crew. Most of these women didn’t have much going for them in the way of self-reliance. Sweet Dick’s women wore wigs and face paint and were street-pretty. They were heroin addicts, all of them.
I remember the way Dick put his hands on his hips, turned to look around the courtroom, giving the place his I-don’t-need-this-shit look. Then he turned back to me and said, “Man, you gotta help me out here. My brother got busted by some precinct cop—bunch of bullshit. The kid didn’t do nothing but ride in a car. The car was hot but he never knew it.”
I asked, “What would you like me to do?”
The five women standing behind Sweet Dick, as if on cue, gave me perplexed, piercing looks.
“You can go and talk to the D.A., have his bail lowered or something,” one of them said.
The assistant district attorney calling the arraignment calendar was—here, I’ll call him “Joe.” Joe was attorney for the state of New York, and that was unbearable to him. He longed to be in private practice and hauling down boxes of cash. Joe was an attractive guy, erudite in a Brooklyn sort of way. He knew his way around the courthouse, knew how to get things done.
Favoring navy blue pin-striped suits, off-blue shirts, and red ties, Joe had a full head of curly black hair. You’d make him as somebody who could work a lounge in Vegas.
“I have an informant here whose brother is on the docket,” I said to Joe. “Can you help me out? I’d like to get his bail lowered.”
He gave me a look, a supercilious grin, a look of both expectation and disbelief. I recall that it gave me a funny feeling, that look of his.
“Does he have any money?” Joe asked.
I went to Sweet Dick and asked him about money.
Dick inquired of his ladies, “Does anyone have any cash?”
The ladies searched their pocketbooks, by which I mean their bras, their panties. After much searching and shuffling about, they came up with about five hundred dollars in rolled-up fives, tens, and twenties.
I gave Joe what I thought was bail money—the whole rolled-up, scrounged-together hooker cash. He told me to go and get the prisoner. I just about lost it when Joe paroled the guy right there on the spot—into my custody.
“Whoa!” I said. “Wait a minute.”
“Parole’s better than low bail,” said Joe, smiling again. “Or no bail at all.”
The five hundred went south.
I left the courthouse that night and walked over to Court Street, to an Italian restaurant and bar called Café Roma. We called it “Chick’s place” on account of the owner, whose actual name was Charlie.
There was hardly anyone there. Just Charlie—Chick behind the stick—and some guy at the far end of the bar sitting in semi-darkness, sipping an espresso.
Chick was the most urbane of bar owners, a Brooklyn guy with a good education. Something of a philosopher too, with a fine understanding of the city, how it worked and what it took to own a bar and restaurant and survive. We were pretty good friends, and he was willing to take my word for it when I told him that the courthouse was a zoo and the lawyers were all fucking thieves.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Charlie, it’s complicated. But take my word, it wears you out.”
He looked at me close, then turned and looked down the bar. He turned back to me and said, “You should tell that man at the end of the bar. He’s a law professor.”
“Really?”
The professor hunched forward over the bar. He was wearing a gray suit that covered up the broad shoulders of an athlete. This was my chance to say something indignant, my chance to hold forth with a resounding, irate speech. There were any number of bizarre stories I could have told the professor—some incredible, some beyond that, the absurd and the ordinary.
“I understand you’re a law professor,” I said. “Well, I’d like to know what the hell you’re teaching these characters, because I’ll tell you, you go into that courthouse, it’s the same as the street. You need a scorecard to figure out the good guys from the bad guys. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
This professor had a way of glaring back at you when you spoke to him. Like he was calculating the right moment to cut in.
“Listen,” I told him. “Lawyers run the show. They’re the trendsetters, the role models. The prosecutors, judges, the defense counsels—they’re all lawyers.”
I remember how offended he looked as he explained to me that the vast majority of people practicing law were good people. They were dedicated, honest, and hard-working. So he didn’t know what I was talking about.
Everything he said was said softly, as if he were talking to himself. He was not trying to persuade me, simply stating a fact.
“Look to yourself,” he said. “How have you been behaving?”
The way he smiled made me think about the priests when I was a kid, how clean and innocent they all seemed. How they wouldn’t believe any of this I was saying about lawyers. If you tried to tell a priest about a thieving lawyer, he’d answer you with a question: So, tell me, how are you behaving?
When I was leaving Chick’s place, Charlie turned to me to ask, “So you talked to him?”
I nodded.
“That guy, the professor. He’s someone you should know. He’s going to be an important man someday.”
“He’s a professor, Charlie. Professors are naïve.”
“Not him. He was one hell of an athlete and he’s smart as they come. You remember what I tell you, this guy—this Mario Cuomo guy—he’ll be an important man someday.”
“Sure, sure,” I said to Charlie. “I bet he’ll be.”
I would run into Mario Cuomo now and again at Chick’s. We’d talk about the legal system, cops and lawyers, the courthouse and the streets. Blah-blah-blah—as if I could really tell him what it was I did in the streets.
Mostly he told me things. He was full of humanity. He was an old-fashioned, incorruptible moralist. I remember wishing to God I could talk like him, then wishing to God I could understand what the hell he was saying.
The brass were always telling us how we could win the war on drugs and wipe out the great plague. Their weekly memos and bulletins were quite inspiring.
I hasten to point out, we cops were not stupid. When we went out into the street up against that ocean of drugs, you couldn’t help but swallow in shame and complicity. Even if you didn’t pay attention you’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see that somebody was bullshitting somebody.
There are police stories and maxims that are passed down like legends from old-timers to rookies and from fathers to sons. For example: “You get pressed so hard they make you so crazy, they threaten and scream and call you motherfucker. You tell them if they don’t back off, if they don’t cool down, you’ll take this stick and shove it up their ass.”
I knew Robert Volpe, worked with him in the narcotics division. He was one of the kind ones, extremely talented. A fine artist, he had showings of his paintings at important galleries in Manhattan. There was not an ounce of white racism in his blood. His cop son Justin, a muscular guy with a Dick Tracy chin, is doing thirty years in prison for taking the stick end of a plunger to Abner Louima’s rectum in a highly publicized police-brutality case in 1997.
Justin Volpe is now a legend. When you talk to cops, and I do, they shake their heads when his name comes up. “Honest to God,” they say, “who’d believe it. Was that crazy or what?”
There are no mitigating circumstances, but there are some points that few people understand. First, Justin was engaged to a black woman, so it’s doubtful that racism played a role in his madness. Steroids, I think, may have played a role. But who really knows? His father, a truly decent man, dropped dead from a heart attack after visiting his disgraced son in prison.
The intersections of Fourth Avenue, Atlantic Avenue, and Flatbush Avenue constituted a drug marketplace that never shut down. An island stood at the heart of where those avenues came together, and on that island was a brightly lit stand where you could buy coffee, sodas, pizza, and soft-serve ice cream. There was an outsized Bickford’s cafeteria across the street, and a block south on Fourth was a doughnut shop. The stand, the cafeteria, and the doughnut shop were gathering places for junkies that went strong twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
A short walk from the Bickford’s was the Long Island Rail Road terminal, with tracks running under the streets of Brooklyn. Commuters—the good guys heading home to Mamma and the tykes in Massapequa and Hicksville—could stop for the lurid thrill of a quick ten-dollar blowjob, or else a ten-minute stand-up fuck from one of the dozens of hookers roaming those gathering spots.
I was an undercover narc and I could buy drugs all day and all night. Hordes of addicts and pushers were everywhere. Mostly I was buying dope from the walking dead, people so stoned that once they sold me drugs they might turn around and walk into an oncoming bus. It was no challenge at all. The dealers were ghosts who aimlessly walked the street. Fire your gun alongside their ears and they wouldn’t even blink.
The closer I looked, the more I found the drug world a dark, painful, and unforgiving place, a world where only the strong and quick-witted survived. And when they survived, it was never for long. The plague was far and wide.
I was convinced that what we were doing was poorly conceived and just as poorly justified. Back then, I had neither the expertise nor the experience to come up with any real answers. But at least I knew this war-on-drugs business was bullshit.
I have always believed in the inevitability of personal fate. It’s a paradox because although I was born and raised Roman Catholic, I do not believe in preordained destiny. I believe that if you find yourself in a serious trick-bag, that trick-bag is the ultimate manifestation of a series of behavior patterns. So if you can’t do the time, don’t commit the crime. You like playing in traffic? You’d better keep your head up and look out for the oncoming bus. I didn’t, and that’s another story.
Back in the day, as I am now able to say, those Brooklyn streets were a glorious show. When the full moon was out, there was no better place to be. You were in a place where you didn’t belong, using new language. You saw and did things you would someday pay for. But at the time, it was one hell of a soirée. The world exploded around you, there was excitement, you’d get tremors and goose bumps; it was party time.
The streets themselves had names that raise hair on the back of my neck because of what it was I did there. Van Brunt Street—and Union, President, Columbia, Kane and Pacific, Sackett and Hoyt, Fourth and Atlantic, Flatbush and Atlantic. Just moving through those streets late at night, when the only people out and about were pushers and hookers and street gorillas and pimps. Everyone searching for the drug, hunting for heroin, the “white lady.” I arrested a lot of drug dealers. As a cop, it was practically all that I did. But the number of dealers arrested meant nothing, changed nothing. There were always more.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his Notes from Underground, wrote:
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away … Man is bound to lie about himself.
So it was for me on those Brooklyn streets.