Like the 10 percent of the fishermen who catch 90 percent of the fish, 10 percent of the cops catch 90 percent of the crooks.
Some call these gifted cops streetwise, but the truth is that good street cops simply use all five senses—plus a sixth. Instinct moves them to the right place at the right moment. Other cops can stand on a street corner for twenty-three hours a day, and nothing happens. Street cops are there when it counts. The secret is timing.
Gerald Green is the perfect street cop, a quick study in curiosity, dedication and brains. Events that might happen once in a lifetime to another cop occur with peculiar frequency to Jerry Green.
While waiting on a hotel balcony for a man wanted on bad-check charges, Green saw two sunny-day strollers react to the sound of a siren. The siren was nothing but a distant fire engine, but Green noted its curious effect on the men in the street below. One darted into a doorway, pressing a shopping bag to his chest. The other stepped cautiously into the street, looked both ways, then signaled the first. They began to hurry away, peering over their shoulders. When a second siren sounded, the man with the bag scrambled into a shadowy doorway and flattened himself against the wall.
Green radioed for a patrol car. As the cruiser rounded the corner, the two men stepped into a laundromat. The bag was probably full of dirty clothes, Green thought, and radioed the patrolmen to disregard his call. But as the Miami police cruiser pulled away, the two men ran out of the laundromat still carrying the sack, and leaped into a car driven by a third man. Green keyed his radio: “Disregard that disregard.” The cruiser wheeled around. Officer Mike Brown jumped out in front of the car and forced it to stop.
The men spooked by the sirens were stewards on the M.S. Nordic Prince, which had just docked. In the shopping bag: eight pounds of high-quality marijuana compacted into bricks.
In court on other business, Green recognized a defendant named Bobbi Jean, a slightly overweight woman with a perpetual smile. He had busted her for forgery a year earlier. Her troubles now seemed far more serious. She had confessed to the brutal slaying of a convenience-store clerk, and Metro police had charged her with first-degree murder and robbery. During her hearing, Green heard the date the crime occurred. Wait a minute, he thought. He could have sworn she was serving ninety days on his forgery case at that time. He was right. Bobbi Jean simply liked to confess. In fact, she had confessed six murders to Miami police months earlier. They did not believe her. So she tried Metro police. They did.
She pouted that Green had ruined her scheme to join her lesbian sweetheart in prison. “Sending me there,” she explained to him, “would be like sending you to the Playboy Mansion.”
Jerry Green seems to find crime any place, any time. It was his night off, but his honey-blond wife, Mary Jo, had a two A.M. craving for a Cuban sandwich, and he drove off to find one. Instead, he found an armed robbery taking place on a street corner. He shot one robber, chased and captured the other. Mary Jo got her sandwich—at seven A.M.
Jerry Green and Walter Clerke are the same age, joined the department at the same time and soon became a team. They were perfect partners. Clerke’s father had been a police captain in Brooklyn’s tough Bedford-Stuyvesant section. At nineteen, Walter followed his father into the New York City Police Department. Assigned to the notorious 41st Precinct—the area of the South Bronx known as Fort Apache—he and his pregnant wife, Susan, vacationed in Florida. They decided it was paradise, a safe place to raise their child, far from all the crime and the drugs.
It was, then.
Jerry Green and Walter Clerke are legendary. With luck, guts and a sixth sense, the pair compiled an amazing record, arresting sixty-three felons in five months. Even while attending fulltime robbery seminars for two weeks, they managed to arrest four armed robbers and eight other felons.
Green was named Miami’s top police officer of the year in 1973. He was first to win all three annual outstanding officer awards, presented by the Rotary, the American Legion and financier William Pawley, in the same year.
There was another first at the award luncheon, in the fancy ballroom of a posh hotel. Green made the surprise announcement that he was splitting the thousand-dollar award with his partner, who had gone unrecognized. “It was a team effort—by the three of us,” he said. Team member number three was his wife, Mary Jo. “I could never give the time and the effort I do to my job without her help.”
“I didn’t realize that being a policeman’s wife would be so lonely,” Mary Jo Green, mother of Gregory, age three, told me at the luncheon. “If you have something planned, he doesn’t come home. But you just put dinner back in the oven. I don’t worry about him because when the situation is at its very worst, he’s at his very best.”
Their time together was always short. Jerry and his partner worked nights. Mary Jo sold auto insurance during the day. But he telephoned her office daily to recount his exploits of the night before. “You can hear it in his voice,” she said. “He loves the work so much.”
Green intended to celebrate the award with Mary Jo that night. But he did not arrive home until six A.M. the next day. Two armed bandits had been hitting a bar a day in cities north of Miami. They robbed the employees and patrons, locking them in rest rooms before fleeing in a stolen car.
Green and his partner had found a child playing with a wallet in Miami’s central district and discovered that the billfold had been taken in the bar robbery that day. The robbers must live in the neighborhood, they theorized, and probably returned there quickly after stickups. They told police in Fort Lauderdale, Hallandale, Dania and Hollywood to notify them at once next time the bandits struck.
That night of the award luncheon, the robbers hit a Hollywood bar. Hollywood police radioed descriptions of the suspects and their car to Green and Clerke, who raced to the north-south expressway ramp they thought the robbers would use.
“We got there about two seconds before they came driving off the exit. They were both smiling,” Green said.
They arrested the astonished robbers, recovered the gun, the loot and the stolen car.
The inseparable partners almost died together two months later.
A New Orleans man gave his clothes away that day in Miami. He no longer needed them, he said, “I’m not gonna live tonight.” He later shoved a gun in the face of a homeless man and forced him to crawl in the street, weeping and begging for his life.
Shortly before midnight, the man from New Orleans stepped out of his downtown hotel, blasted on barbiturates. He called a cab for himself and a man to whom he was selling pills. The Diamond cab driver, edgy about recent robberies, refused to allow them in his taxi until they lifted their shirts to prove they were unarmed. The men angrily refused. When a hotel security man tried to intervene, the frightened cabbie stomped on the gas and drove off. The man from New Orleans pulled a gun and waved it in the air, shouting that he should have shot the driver.
From their unmarked car a block away, fifteen minutes from the end of their shift, Green spotted the disturbance as the cab sped off. “Wally,” he said. “It looks like that guy in the black hat has a gun out on the street.” He drove toward the man, who stuck the gun in his belt and pulled his multicolored dashiki over it.
The officers drew their guns and ordered the two men to place their hands on the car.
The New Orleans man refused. “I don’t care if you’re cops or not! You’re going to have to kill me,” he shouted. “Come on! Let’s shoot it out right now. Kill me! Kill me!” He pulled his gun.
Green, frisking the other man, heard the commotion and saw the gun swing toward his partner. He ran to grab the weapon and all three grappled. Green and the gunman fell to the ground struggling. The man’s gun fired.
“I knew I was shot,” Jerry said later. “I had the wind knocked out of me. I was bleeding all over the place.” The bullet had slammed through his left hand and into his chest.
Clerke opened fire. He shot the gunman five times in the chest, from three or four feet away. The impact of the bullets showered Jerry with the man’s blood.
The man never flinched. Ignoring the five bullet holes in his chest, he fired back and shot Clerke.
“It felt like a sharp kick,” Clerke said. “My leg buckled.” The wounded officer stood in the middle of the street holding an empty gun; he had no place to hide, and the man who should be dead was still coming.
“Do something!” Clerke shouted to his bleeding partner. “I’ve got no bullets!”
Despite his wounds, Green said, the man “walked toward us, like a zombie, firing his gun. He was the living dead. I shot him, and it knocked him back to the car.” Green kept shooting, and the wounded man stumbled to cover behind the police car. “He had to be dead, but he didn’t know it. I shot him again. He ran down the street shooting back at us. I was shooting as fast as I could pull the trigger. None of the bullets stopped him.”
A normal person would have died or lapsed into shock after being shot, but because this man’s system was loaded with barbiturates, “he was a monster,” Green said, “the walking dead.”
Clerke ducked behind a pillar to reload. They continued to shoot until the man went down behind the tire of an eighteen-wheeler fifty yards away. It was over, they thought. “Then he started firing again. I saw him point the gun right at me,” Green said. The battle seemed neverending.
Clerke emptied his gun again, then scrambled to the car for their shotgun. Green reloaded his 9-millimeter semiautomatic Smith and Wesson. “We both opened up on him then. Wally with the shotgun, me with the handgun.” All they could see was the man’s legs. “Wally shot the heels off his shoes and shot holes in his legs. The man had holes in the bottoms of his feet.”
The gunman finally stopped shooting and began to fumble, fishing more bullets out of his pocket, trying to reload. The cops’ guns were also empty.
The gunman suddenly rolled over on his face. He had another dozen rounds of ammunition, but died before he could use them. The medical examiner counted twenty-seven entrance wounds.
During the initial struggle the gunman had dropped a bag containing several hundred pills. More were found in his room, uppers and downers, along with more bullets.
The second man had run when the shooting started. The hotel security man had chased him, but was knocked down by a ricocheting bullet.
The dead gunman was an ex-convict with a past history of rape, armed robbery, burglary, drugs and theft of a U.S. mail truck. When the death message reached his family, a half-brother in New Orleans was “indifferent.” His grandmother said he was a bad man, not allowed in her home. When police notified his mother that she could claim the body, she was uninterested.
“You shot him,” she said, “you bury him.”
The wounded partners shared a hospital room and admitted their luck. “Instinct told us he was dangerous, but we have restrictions on our use of firearms,” Green said. “We were ninety percent sure he had a gun, but we have to be a hundred percent sure. You can’t start shooting when somebody reaches under his shirt. They could be hiding narcotics. Our hesitation got us shot. When we were finally sure he had a gun and was going to shoot us—we were already shot.”
Clerke still carries a bullet lodged in his left thigh. In his left shirt pocket, over his heart, Jerry had a thick stack of field interrogation cards and mug shots, all fugitives he was seeking. The bullet went through his hand, plowed through the wad of pictures and slammed into his chest. Nearly spent, it penetrated no vital organs.
The wanted men may have saved his life.
Neither partner soured on police work—not then.
“This has been happening across the country,” Green said. “You can’t be afraid. The man wanted to take on some policemen. I’m glad he took on two who could handle him.”
Wally agreed that it was all part of the job. “You have to expect it and hope that you’re luckier than the next guy,” he said.
Their wives were terrified. “Jerry always tells me nothing bad can happen to him,” Mary Jo said fearfully. “Now I know that isn’t true.” The incident did have a silver lining: “He had to stay home to recover, and we were together every evening. It was great.”
Susan Clerke said she never wanted Wally hurt again, “but it’s been awful nice to have my man around the house.”
The partners continued to solve cases, make arrests and help rehabilitate people. They considered reform a major part of their job. “We don’t think in terms of punishing people who’ve done wrong,” Green said. “When we arrest a guy we think in terms of preventing his next crime, saving his next potential victim.”
“If they have any possibility of rehabilitation, we try to give it to them,” Clerke said. Some were beyond saving, so they focused their efforts on those who could be helped. “You come up with about one person out of ten who really deserves to go to prison.” The others responded positively to a chance.
“Junkies love their kids too,” Green said.
Assigned to a federally funded robbery-control program, the two cops worked with the courts and helped arrange probation, jobs and school enrollment for more than a hundred people. They put them in jail, then got them out and into work or college.
It worked.
Miami’s robbery rate dropped by 10 percent while it climbed by 15 percent in other communities.
“Face it,” Green said, “there’s no way a six-man unit is going to control robbery altogether in a city this big. So we’re taking another approach, trying to keep robberies down without staking out stores and shooting every hopped-up kid we see. We try to keep people from being hurt. We sit down and talk to people we know are doing robberies.”
“You can sit down and convince a guy that pulling a robbery is not the way to make fifty dollars,” Clerke said.
Jerry Green and Wally Clerke got exactly what they deserved: They were honored as the best cops in the country by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Parade magazine published a story and pictures of them and their families.
Their bosses, displaying their usual wisdom, split up the partners.
Police brass don’t understand the old adage: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Green worked the bunco squad, breaking up con games, then homicide, the property bureau and back to homicide. He and Mary Jo had a second son, Jeffrey. Clerke worked patrol, riding a three-wheeler.
They hoped to work together again someday.
They never did. They never will.
The most successful partnership in Miami Police history ended forever when Officer Wally Clerke’s car was firebombed in an ambush behind a looted Zayre discount store during the May 1980 riot. Clerke walked into headquarters, turned in his badge and walked out.
He never went back.
“I quit after the National Guard came in,” he explained. “The situation was under control, and there was no more immediate need for me to continue helping the city.” Parade’s writer described them in 1973 as “such devoted policemen that neither can imagine himself ever doing any other kind of work.”
True then. Not now.
Clerke said he was selling his house to move to Stuart and become a charter fishing captain. I had trouble believing it.
“He’s bailing out,” Green said. “I don’t know what to say. He’s looking for a better way of life. The firebombing didn’t make him quit, but it didn’t make him decide to stay either.”
Disillusioned by other pressures, Clerke had been considering a career change.
For eleven years, his associates at work were the street people, the robbers, the hookers, the pimps, the punks, the drunks, the stoned-out freaks. He had found it increasingly difficult not to want to spend his off-duty hours taking baths. “I like them personally. I empathized with them, but I can’t reconcile their lifestyle. I felt I was contaminating my wife and daughter.” Every combat cop he knew, except Jerry Green, had been divorced, some several times. His own marriage to Susan was now shaky after thirteen years.
The riot accelerated his decision. “I’m disappointed at what happened,” he said. “I’m disappointed in the black community. They were finally getting clout. The Liberty City area was being fixed up. A lot of the old buildings were being knocked down.
“And there was,” he swore, “very little racial tension in the city. I could ride around and talk to people with no problem. I can’t remember the last time I heard anybody yell ‘Pig!’ or anything like that. Now it’s gone back ten years.”
The career change failed to save Wally Clerke’s marriage. He and Susan were divorced.
So were Jerry and Mary Jo Green, two years later, in 1982. He raised the boys alone, working midnights as a homicide investigator. Greg is in college in Tallahassee. Jeffrey is in high school. The job has not been quite the same for Green since Wally Clerke left. He lost a partner and his best friend. “When you had him around you had a hundred percent backup,” he says wistfully. He and Wally remain friends, but lead differing lifestyles. Wally has a new wife and a baby, and sells new cars in Broward County.
Green, now a midnight-shift sergeant, leads a homicide team in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the country. His current team maintains a better-than-85-percent clearance rate. He works weekends, investigating a growing number of street murders. Ten years ago robbers killed more innocent people: store clerks, taxi drivers, pedestrians, anybody who had a buck. Today most victims are less than innocent. Most murders are victim-related: robbers shooting dope dealers, other street people, other criminals. The use of assault rifles is on the increase. So are drive-by shootings, most by notoriously poor marksmen. At least half the time they hit someone other than the intended target.
Everything changes, and so did Jerry Green’s solitary lifestyle. He skied on a police Olympic team at Lake Tahoe, invited out to dinner a former Miamian who had moved west, and they were married in late 1989.
Jerry Green still seems to be always at the right place at the right time. At the downtown Omni Mall, where he works off-duty security, he recently witnessed a murder.
The Omni, with its multiple movie theaters, is a magnet for youngsters. This night, a group spent their movie money playing video games. When they became noisy and disruptive. Green asked them to cool it and suggested they go home. The kids spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the J. C. Penney store at eleven P.M.
As he watched from across the street, they frolicked in youthful horseplay—nothing serious. One little boy clamped another in a headlock. Green glanced away, heard a shot, and “saw a kid holding his chest. He staggered back and fell. The boy with the gun simply watched him, then walked away. He didn’t start running until he saw me.”
The killer was twelve years old. The victim was eleven.
Green rushed across the street. “I looked down at him and he was dead on the sidewalk.”
The boy with the gun ran a block and vanished. He eluded police by climbing a tree. He later made his way home to OpaLocka, where Green and other cops surrounded his house. Suddenly a shot rang out and a bullet whizzed over their heads. Startled cops scrambled. The gunfire came from next door to the house they were surrounding. The elderly neighbor who fired it stepped outside and leveled his gun at police.
It is second nature for some people to start shooting when they see the cops.
The old man’s family tackled and disarmed him. Half the police present went next door to deal with him, the others flushed out the twelve-year-old killer. The murder weapon belonged to his grandmother. He had broken into her house and stolen her gun while she was in the hospital.
There was no fight, just horseplay, until the other boy squeezed his head too tight—that was why the fatal shooting took place.
The suspect faces trial as an adult, despite his age. His police record dates back for years. His mother is a drug addict—has been all her life. Green said. “He had no adult supervision, his lifestyle is the same as kids in El Salvador and Lebanon. The kids with guns and assault rifles—a lost generation.”
Life has not changed much for Jerry Green. He is still the best street cop I ever met.
Another great street cop, Metro-Dade Sergeant Thomas Blake, is known as “Bulldog” for his relentless and dogged pursuit of professional criminals. It may take ten years and his personal vacation time, but he will track them down. Even his enemies call him a genius. When Bulldog Blake took the sergeant’s test he ranked first among 450. His only hobby is hunting. He hunts professional criminals.
His waking hours revolve around police work. He is cunning and creative. Early one Sunday morning Bulldog tracked a jewel thief to a Hialeah home. How, he wondered, could he get the elusive fugitive, sought by the FBI for years, to open the door?
He yodeled. Yodeled. Loud and long.
“Who the hell are you?” cried the jewel thief as he threw open the door.
“Sergeant Tom Blake of the Metro Police Department. You are under arrest.”
This noted tracker of thieves was the first South Florida cop to use the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act as a tool against burglars. Designed to fight organized crime, RICO allows the law to seize homes, cars and businesses purchased with profits from illegal enterprise. When he arrested longtime thieves for five burglaries, he also charged them with racketeering. “They qualify,” he said. “They are career criminals, working thieves. They work with other burglars and with fences. It is their business. They have a job: stealing.”
A fifty-four-year-old burglar released after nine years of a thirty-year sentence enjoyed only thirteen days of freedom. Police got a tip that the thief, once suspect in two hundred burglaries, had resumed his old and bad habits, despite his sincere lectures on home security to homeowners’ associations while in prison. Bulldog decided to watch him. When the man burglarized a townhouse and carried the loot out the front door, Bulldog called for backup. To stall the culprit until they arrived, he introduced himself as a member of the homeowners’ association and engaged the thief in a conversation on home security.
He met his wife, Mary, on the job, after two cars crashed onto her lawn. Mary Blake shares her husband’s sense of awareness. On her way to pick up the children at school, she saw a man stroll up and down the street, studying the homes. He had the “look.” She called her husband. Bulldog saw the man disappear behind a house. Minutes later, he followed. Four jalousies had been removed, and he caught the thief inside the house peering out.
When Bulldog saw a station wagon drop off a man dressed in black in front of a home in a residential neighborhood at one A.M., he assumed they were burglars. The station wagon circled the block. When the figure in black crept away from the house, Bulldog surprised him, to inquire what he was doing. The man in black claimed to be just taking a walk as the house behind him erupted in flames.
An arsonist, not a burglar, the man had been paid a thousand dollars to torch the house for the insurance. The driver who dropped him off was the homeowner.
Only once have I seen a criminal best the Bulldog. He took a captured thief, suspected of 250 burglaries, out of jail one day so the crook could point out the homes he had looted—standard procedure. At noon, Bulldog, the prisoner and another detective stopped for lunch—also standard procedure. The detectives ordered Cuban sandwiches, paying no attention as their guest placed his order in Spanish.
Then the meal arrived.
“It was a damn lobster!” cried Captain Marshall Frank, Bulldog’s boss, when he got the bill. It listed $17.60—”for prisoner’s lunch.”
“No way!” said the captain and kicked it back.
I called the detective to ask about the thief’s lobster feast. “No comment,” Bulldog snarled.
Joseph Gennaro Carbone, a flashy burglar arrested in 1976, impressed Bulldog. Polite, cool, and thoroughly professional, Carbone had an associate show up to post his bond while he was still being booked. Bulldog stepped outside to catch the tag number of the man who arrived with the bond money. For eighteen months he kept a loose tail on both men. He investigated them and their activities even on his days off.
Carbone was a big-league burglar, one of the elite. A slick thief, he specialized in stealing from posh high-rise apartments, taking only cash or costly jewelry. If he found none, he simply left the apartment undisturbed. Bulldog learned that Carbone liked to flash wads of hundred-dollar bills in bars, drink Chivas Regal on the rocks and brag about wearing twenty-five thousand dollars in jewelry while pulling his burglaries. Bulldog noted where Carbone vacationed and the hotels he favored. He learned that the man summered in suburban Washington, D.C., usually at a Falls Church, Virginia, hotel.
Bulldog printed a flyer describing Carbone and five other burglars who wore cabana sets, tennis outfits or expensive suits on the job. When Tom and Mary vacationed they distributed flyers to police departments up and down the eastern seaboard, along the thief’s winter route. Back in Miami, Bulldog noticed that the thief’s car was unused for days. He soon found out why: Police he alerted had spotted Carbone and a confederate in Falls Church. They were tailed and caught emerging from a condominium complex, pockets stuffed with loot. Bulldog did not get the collar, but his dogged detective work had paid off.
Carbone was sentenced to eight years in Virginia and Maryland, fifteen years in Florida and five years in a federal lockup in Washington, D.C.
History repeated itself eight years later. Flashy jewel thief Joseph Carbone, tanned and wearing tennis togs, met Bulldog Blake again outside a South Dade apartment complex.
“Hi, Joe,” Blake said.
“Hello, Bulldog,” Carbone replied.
“It’s been eight years, Joe,” Blake said and arrested Carbone, now thirty-seven.
“He didn’t show it outwardly, but I bet he was quite chagrined,” Blake said.
Carbone had been paroled to Florida a year earlier. “He likes it here, there are lots of apartments and townhouses,” Bulldog said. His parole officer thought Condo Joe was working at a sports shop.
He was not.
Blake had been on vacation when fellow detectives heard Carbone was back in business. A car he had rented was spotted leaving the scene of a Kendall burglary. They called Bulldog at home.
He knew Carbone’s style. Stay at a swank hotel, drive a rental car, use valet parking. Detectives found the hotel, and Bulldog, still on vacation, joined the surveillance. Just like old times—except that Blake could only stake out the suspect at night. Days he spent at home, babysitting his third child, a baby girl Mary had delivered three weeks earlier. So by day Bulldog Blake changed diapers and by night he stalked Carbone.
When Blake returned to work he set up a surveillance.
Spiffy in his white tennis shorts, Carbone left his hotel for work by 8:30 A.M., driving a rented blue Buick. He wore an expensive gold watch, a gold ring with a diamond, thick gold chains and a gold bracelet. Detectives watched him stroll through a complex. “Casing apartments,” Bulldog said.
They trailed him to a building where only residents have keys, and watched him slip inside with a resident who was arriving home. “A common ruse to get into those buildings,” Blake said.
Detectives were unable to follow without a key. They waited until he emerged. Carbone, ever friendly, smiled. “Hi, how are you?”
Then he saw Bulldog Blake.
At their surprise reunion Bulldog charged Carbone with violating parole, attempted burglary and possession of burglary tools—lock picks found in the pocket of his tennis shorts.
“He’s put on some weight,” Blake observed later. “But so have I, I’m thirty-seven too, so I’m sympathetic.”
After eight years, Bulldog Blake finally made the collar.
Pete Corso was a spit-and-polish fresh-faced rookie when we met—not yet the seasoned street cop he soon became. A member of the elite Miami Beach Police task force, he was smart, eager and not afraid to talk to a reporter. One night Corso and crew busted a sleazy but influential bail bondsman with friends powerful enough to get him unarrested, which was what he boasted would happen. I didn’t know the task force even knew where I lived, but they pounded on my door, shotguns and all, at two A.M. Neighbors must have thought it was a raid. Awakened from a sound sleep, I found a notebook and took down the information from Pete while the others waited outside in an unmarked car. Arrest reports are public record, unless they disappear. Corso was smart enough to know that if a reporter knew all about an arrest it could not be surreptitiously undone.
Next time we talked he wanted advice. A budding Joseph Wambaugh, he was working on a novel about the job he loved. He had a good start but never finished it. His career got in the way.
He loved police work and took it so seriously that he suffered an ulcer. At one point, he even quit the force to sell insurance. The pay was better and the job easier on his ulcer, but he missed police work. The department welcomed him back. One of his assignments on the way up was public information officer, the spokesman designated to talk to the press. He jokingly posted a one-word sign above his desk: OMERTA, the Italian code of silence.
Pete Corso’s most endearing quality was his affection for his wife—his high school sweetheart—and his two little daughters. They had adopted one, then had one of their own. Both girls were beautiful, their pictures on his desk. “One’s adopted,” he would say, “but I can’t remember which one.”
He played tennis and stayed in shape, despite feeding his ulcer with milk shakes and ice cream. At age thirty-eight, Pete Corso was named Miami Beach police chief—evidence that sometimes there is justice, after all.
Good news is so rare on the police beat.
Pete seemed born to be chief. He tackled the job with the same vigor with which he tackled burglars and robbers fifteen years earlier as a rookie.
Still spit-and-polish, gregarious and glib, with a quirky grin and a ready laugh, the chief was apt to answer his own telephone, hours after his office staff quit for the day. He pursued a grueling schedule, instituting major changes in the 250-person department. Pete had advocated a strong “police presence” for years and now practiced it. He ordered detectives back into uniform, yanked officers out from behind desks, traded unmarked cars for police cruisers and sent them out to patrol the streets.
Appointed in April 1980, the popular young chief was on a speaking binge that summer, talking to as many as three major civic groups a day. In May, the Mariel boatlift delivered thousands of Cuban refugees, and by the end of July and early August, the city faced a sudden, dramatic increase in violent crime.
The chief reported the skyrocketing crime rate to the City Commission, attributing the rampage to criminals among the new Cuban refugees. It was the first time anyone had dared suggest such a thing in public. Cubans took offense. An editorial slamming the chief for his insensitivity to them was written for the “Miami Beach Neighbors” section of the Herald, an insert printed on Friday and distributed with the Sunday newspaper.
A Miami Beach publicist, a friend of Corso’s, called me in the newsroom late Saturday afternoon. “What do you think about Pete Corso?” he said grimly. From my vantage point on the police beat, I said, I was convinced that the chief was right and would safely ride out the storm. I thought the caller was talking about the controversy. He was not. He thought I knew.
Pete Corso was dead.
The police chief had spent the afternoon relaxing around his backyard pool. Three other families, all longtime friends, were guests. Corso barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers. Shortly after five P.M., he splashed into the pool. North Miami Deputy Police Chief Thomas Flom, a friend of eighteen years, was with him. Five children and three adults frolicked in the water, playing a fast-paced game of Keep Away with a rubber ball. Flom saw Pete gasping, his face down, in the shallow end of the pool. He thought Corso was joking. Then Pete’s wife screamed.
Flom dragged him from the pool and began CPR. A Pembroke Pines firefighter who lives nearby hurdled backyard fences racing to help. A city rescue unit arrived in three minutes. Medics suspected a heart attack. The CPR was excellent but it failed. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Pete was thirty-eight and seemed in splendid health. But it is not uncommon for someone under fifty to fail to respond after a coronary. Older people build up collateral circulation that helps to save them. Pembroke Pines Police Chief Jack Tighe, a former Beach police captain, once Corso’s boss, hurried to the hospital.
“It’s a nightmare,” Rom said. “We tried. We tried everything to revive him.”
The official finding was drowning, during a heart attack. Corso’s blood pressure had been normal. He had no history of heart trouble. Yet he had “hardening of the artery disease, similar to that of a seventy-year-old man,” said Broward medical examiner Dr. Ronald Wright. “For thirty to fifty percent of the people with this kind of disease, the first symptom is sudden death.”
An autopsy found no trace of the ulcer that had plagued him as a young cop fighting the world.
My story about the untimely death of the popular young chief appeared in the newspaper the same day as the already-published critical editorial, an awkward situation to say the least. Particularly since Pete Corso was absolutely right—perhaps the first public official to realize that Castro had flushed his toilets on us, sending the mentally deranged, the criminally insane and some of the most ruthless killers ever seen in this country.
Pete Corso was police chief for only four months.
Sometimes there is no justice, after all.