Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (7 page)
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.
1. La mise en scène
I
t is best to plan your excursion to Brownsville for a warm Sunday morning. This is when the neighborhood churches open their stained glass windows and the creamy-voiced tambourine ladies carrying on inside have a way of soothing the savage breasts of certain blasphemers on the outside—the ones loitering in dubious doorways, like spiders hungry for flies.
To get to Brownsville—which nobody in Manhattan nowadays has ever heard of, never mind that it was home to the departed pugilist Al “Bummy” Davis and later two other heavyweights by the names of Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe—you must catch the Brooklyn-bound 3 train. Hang onto your snatchables for the next thirty to forty minutes and you should arrive at the elevated Saratoga Avenue station relatively unmolested.
Now then, descend two flights of tired-out stairs. Feel the grooves beneath your feet, created over time by the lunch bucket hordes. Decades ago there was a lively after-shift crowd, too, arriving in Packards and Imperials and Cadillacs. The
shtarkers
and Mafiosi of Manhattan, all dressed up in their spats and sharkskins for copious meals in the trattorias of Mulberry Street, would slum it across the East River to Brownsville for dessert: a nice plate of biscotti maybe, washed down with genuine Brooklyn egg creams. Also maybe some business.
Upon reaching the sidewalk, the first thing you see is the Shop Smart Mini-Mart. In another day this was a round-the-clock pastry shop and candy store known as Midnight Rose’s. That and the headquarters of Murder Incorporated, which in truth was not, in the commercial sense, a kosher establishment.
The proprietor of Murder Inc. was a Brownsville homeboy by the name of Albert Anastasia, a.k.a. “Lord High Executioner.” He was a short, fat man with cold eyes and a habit of telling smutty jokes at the dinner table with his mouth full of food. He insisted that his Christian name was Albert, which sounded to him more American than what his birth certificate read:
Umberto Anastasia
.
In the enterprise directed from Midnight Rose’s, Umberto/ Albert Anastasia was assisted by Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. In contractual association with Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Messrs. Anastasia and Buchalter undertook approximately 800 acts of permanent violence before the count was forever lost on October 25, 1957.
At 10 o’clock a.m. on that date, a red Cadillac sedan containing a debonair Brownsville candy and pastry merchant pulled up in front of the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, which is now the Park Central but still situated at 870 Seventh Avenue. Mr. Anastasia slid out from the back of the Cadillac and strolled into the hotel barbershop for his daily shave and shoeshine. And on that particular morning, his weekly haircut.
He parked his blue chalk-striped suit in a plump barber’s chair of maroon leather, reclined, and closed his eyes. Mr. Anastasia was said to have been chortling under a hot white towel dropped across his moon face; he might have been plotting a preemptive strike against a certain business rival on the Italian north side of Brownsville who had whispered something about how the fat man at Midnight Rose’s was headstrong.
Unaccountably, Mr. Anastasia’s chauffeur sped away from the curb outside two minutes after that towel went down.
The Negro shoeshine kid started up with his brushes, as well as the song Mr. Anastasia got such a kick out of:
Shine
and shine / Fifty-cent a boat / Make you look like a New York
s’poat …
The Italian barber started in with his scissors where the flesh pooched out from his customer’s collar line. But when several gentlemen suddenly piled through the door, all wearing sunglasses and fedoras and bulky coats and waving large pistols, the barber and the kid took a break.
A barrage of bullets found their way into Mr. Anastasia’s chest, arms, head, and left rib cage. The fusillade was of such weight and velocity as to propel him out of the plump chair and down to the tiled floor, where he died in a crumple amongst his hair clippings.
There were no arrests following the assassination of Albert Anastasia. But it was generally accepted by police and wiseguys that the late Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo, along with four helpers, did the deed. Before Mr. Gallo likewise succumbed to a notable shower of lead—while dining at a Mulberry Street clam house called Umberto’s, of all names—he often referred to himself as a member of “The Barbershop Quintet.”
Crazy Joey (probably) whacked the Lord High Executioner at the behest of the late Carlo Gambino (more than likely), who looked and sounded like everybody’s
nonno
despite his being the namesake of what remains as the most prominent of New York’s five traditional mob families. As a lad fresh off the boat, Mr. Gambino had peddled Italian ices on Brownsville’s main stem, Belmont Avenue.
Mr. Gambino died of old age in 1976. His elaborate sendoff was orchestrated by a society funeral parlor and attended by a number of respectable New Yorkers, after which his body was buried in St. John’s Cemetery in Queens.
On the other hand, few had mourned the rude demise of Mr. Anastasia, largely due to his disgusting table manners. The Lord High Executioner lies below the sod of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
The Brownsville district of central Brooklyn is slightly more than two square miles in size. It is located downwind from the old bone-boiling glue factories of Jamaica Bay, which accounts for the fact that nobody with serious money ever lived in the neighborhood.
It has always been a tough place, Brownsville. Full of tough characters hanging out on the corners, glaring at you and spitting on the sidewalks. Tough gets you respect.
Sometimes respect grows, and festers, and turns to fear. People who can will leave a neighborhood at this point. They will tell new neighbors in new places about the glares and the spit they left behind. And soon enough the whole city is scared of a place like Brownsville, and content to let it rot.
The local police precinct, the 73rd, routinely tops New York in uniform crime statistics measured by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Unsurprisingly, Brownsville ranks dead last in expenditures for city services—medical clinics, street sanitation, health inspections, public schools, housing code enforcement.
Emotionally inclined immigrants almost anywhere else in the fable of New York, New York say the city’s streets are paved with gold. On sunny days, when the sidewalks of Gotham sparkle like gemstones, they swear they hear Frank Sinatra crooning,
If I can make it there / I’ll make it anywhere
…
In Brownsville, there is no percentage in looking for sunny lyrics in sidewalks as gray and dull as thrown-away chewing gum.
Before World War II, Brownsville was mostly Jewish and Italian, with an enclave of Syrians along Thatford Avenue and a longtime Moorish colony on Livonia Avenue. Today it is predominantly black, largely poor, and frequently combustible.
Many African Americans consider the ambitious neighborhood newcomers—working-class Caribbean strivers and entrepreneurs from Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania—as yet another reminder of how they have been profoundly shortchanged.
On busy Belmont Avenue, a fresh-cooked meal of
tiebou
djen
may be enjoyed at the several lively Senegalese cafés. The fragrant bowls of steaming hot fish and saffron-laced barley have become as ubiquitous in Brownsville as red beans and rice on paper plates.
You used to hear English on Belmont Avenue, even if the people speaking it used some other language at home. The people spending money today on Belmont mostly speak French.
Those with little to spend dream of hitting a good number and leaving Brownsville. When slim hope is dashed, there is always something to smoke or drink or inject in order to keep the faith.
Getting out is elusive. Getting high is total victory.
2. “Amy Fisher popped some bitch in the head …”
The plague came early to Brownsville. In the 1970s and ’80s and ’90s, the streets were conveniently full of decrepit buildings favored by crack cocaine dealers who could hole up inside, unseen by the twin threats of cops and hinky customers, and trade their poison for cash slipped through chinks carved in the walls.
An Amazon River of money and crack surged through Brownsville, flooding the neighborhood with fast profits and even faster degradation.
In the early winter of 1994, powerful forces in City Hall and the federal government accused officers of Brownsville’s virtually all-white occupation force—the 73rd Precinct—of being participants themselves in the chaos of crime and shame in those plague years.
The mostly young and tender officers of the 73rd did not live near their place of work. Save for fifty-three-year-old Patrolman Frank Mistretta, they did not even live in the city. Instead, most commuted daily from Long Island cop suburbs where they were born and raised.
In the early days of the plague, Patrolman Mistretta was one of two men determined to rid Brownsville of evildoers. Nobody actually heard him say “evildoer,” a word freighted with righteousness, but he might as well have; the basis of Frank Mistretta’s self-respect was his being a street cop in the neighborhood of his youth.
He was proud of his five hundred arrests and sixty-seven department medals. But over time, Mrs. Mistretta would come to despise her husband’s professional dedication.
She told him one day that while she loved him, she had no affection whatsoever for the NYPD. After which, Mrs. Mistretta grabbed her husband’s .38 caliber police special, swallowed the barrel, pulled the trigger, and was no more.
Brownsville’s other would-be savior is recollected for a charming smile that seemed to say,
Would I kid you?
Among other things, he was a minister of the Lord, which made him an easy man to clock. But in Brownsville, being a suspicious character is not necessarily a cause for alarm.
He had green eyes, strong coffee–colored skin, and magnolias in his voice. His name might have been what he said it was, Pastor Billy Rich.
According to the old domino players I spoke with on Herzl Street, the pastor led a congregation of exuberant worshippers from a rented storefront, a few blocks down from Brownsville’s last remaining synagogue and a few blocks the other way from a squat, shuttered factory where pine boxes for dead people used to be manufactured.
On the Sabbath, an elaborate crucifix shone in Billy Rich’s store window: a life-sized plaster Christ on His terrible cross, with red lights throbbing from the places where He was punctured with thorns and pierced with nails. Shouting and stomping behind the crucifix, Pastor Billy’s flock would implore Heaven for a miracle that would drive the crackheads out of Brownsville, just as Jesus had driven money changers from the temple.