Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (5 page)
After a week or so, the DeNicola brothers began wondering about Irving Matos. Maybe he got the flu bug or something.
They called the police to investigate, after encountering an unbearable stench coming from his apartment. They found the decomposing body of Irving Matos, age forty-two, in front of the blinking television.
Brooklyn police put the Matos murder together with the Tyson murder: Both were no-forced-entry jobs, both were connected to Sweet Cherry, and the name Stephen Sakai was on the list of known associates of both corpses.
So was Eric Mojica.
Sakai found Mojica before the cops could.
A few weeks after Matos was found dead, Mojica turned up dead as well.
It took three murders to put the police onto Sakai’s trail.
On May 23, 2006, the 11 o’clock TV news helped the cops find Sakai.
Stephen Sakai, with three alleged murders under his gun-holding belt, was working as a bouncer at Opus 22, a hip nightspot in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. A couple of drunkards got into a fight outside the club, and Sakai would have none of it. He pulled out his .45 caliber and fired away. After the mêlée was over, the cops found four men shot, one fatally.
They picked up Sakai in Brooklyn a few hours later. He denied it all at first, but then a short time later, after some police persuasion, he admitted to being the gunman at Opus 22. He also admitted killing Matos, but denied killing Tyson. Still, they charged him with murdering Tyson and Matos— and Mojica.
By June of 2006, the ire of the people of Sunset Park had reached a boiling point, and now scorched the entire city.
Another bouncer had been accused of murder, this time by the Manhattan district attorney. A young woman named Imette St. Guillen had disappeared from a nightspot called The Falls, located in Soho. She was found dead the next morning, the alleged victim of a bouncer named Darryl Littlejohn, an armed thug with a criminal record. Thus did the city commence a crackdown.
Targets included the bouncers themselves and the hiring process clubs used—if any. The city urged greater background checks and tougher licensing procedures for both security and gun permits. Stephen Sakai had a security license, but not a gun permit.
And for Sweet Cherry, Lazzaro’s streak of magic finally came to an end. With drug and solicitation charges pending against his client, the DeNicola brothers, Lazzaro cut a deal with the New York City Police Department, the Brooklyn D.A., and the New York State Attorney General’s Office.
All felony charges were dropped and a civil suit was averted, while rape charges against Bertonazzi were also dismissed.
Robert Messner, assistant commissioner for the Civil Enforcement Unit of the Police Department’s Legal Bureau, called the deal “a very good example of cooperation by multiple agencies.” Sweet Cherry ponied up $50,000 in fines. No jail sentences, no probation. The DeNicola brothers pled guilty to misdemeanor drug charges, and were barred from ever again operating a nightclub in Kings County. All other charges were dismissed.
Stephen Sakai spent his nights on Rikers Island, awaiting trial in Brooklyn on three counts of murder in the second degree. He was later acquitted on one count and convicted on the other two; he now faces fifty years to life in prison. Meanwhile, he is still awaiting trial in connection with the fatal shooting at Opus 22.
Darryl Littlejohn, meanwhile, is also locked up, awaiting his day in court on charges of murdering Imette St. Guillen.
It was all over. The violence, the drugs, the sex—all of it over, just like that.
On the night of June 22, 2006, down on the promenade of Brooklyn Heights, families laughed and played and ate pizza and ice cream. The movie shoot in Cobble Hill was over, and Spider-Man slung his last web out of town.
Down under the Brooklyn Bridge, a newlywed couple held hands and had their picture taken.
In the neighborhood of Sunset Park, it was quiet on 42nd Street. The gates were pulled low on the entrance to Sweet Cherry. The lights were off, the deejay booth was silent, the bar was dry.
“It wasn’t pretty, and neither were the girls,” says Jorge. “But it was loud and it was fun, you know what I’m saying?”
He crushes his empty coffee cup, strolls to the corner, and flips it into a garbage can.
“I’m going to miss this.” Jorge looks at me, then the club. As he walks off, he says, “Take it easy, my friend.”
I think,
Remorse—for a strip club?
E
DITORS
’ N
OTE
:
Some of the information in this essay was originally
reported in “The Nine Lives of a Topless Bar: Complaints Hit a Wall
of Law” by Michael Brick
(New York Times,
May 31, 2006) and
“Strip Parlor Closes as Part of Plea Deal” by Michael Brick
(New York Times
, June 21, 2006).
THE GHETTO NEVER SLEEPS, MISTER POLICEMAN
M
y 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.