Never Let Them See You Cry (22 page)

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.

Policemen are soldiers who act alone; soldiers are policemen who act in unison
.

—H
ERBERT
S
PENCER

Work the police beat long enough and the moment you dread will come: A cop you know will be gunned down. The moment you hear there has been a shooting, that a cop is down, you grab a notebook and dash for your car, mind racing, scanning a mental roster of men and women you know who work this shift, in that neighborhood. Could it be one of them? Sometimes it is.

Miami Beach cop Donald Kramer seemed an unlikely target. He worked no dangerous drug details, patrolled no seething ghetto, and was not a member of SWAT. He rounded up vagrants, drunks and derelicts and drove the paddy wagon to transport his prisoners.

Kramer came late to police work, and he sacrificed to do it. At the height of the Mariel boatlift, the city issued an appeal for more officers. Kramer, a dollar-a-year volunteer auxiliary officer for ten years, responded. At age thirty-nine, he sold his successful TV-repair shop to pursue a lifelong dream: He joined the department full time. An exuberant, fun-loving, laughing man, he loved attention and the job. The biggest joy for this pudgy middle-aged Jewish cop was to distribute Thanksgiving baskets to the needy and wear a Santa suit, with a silver badge, while rounding up drunks at Christmastime. The self-appointed guardian of South Beach winos and street people, he distributed cigarettes and a buck or two out of his own pocket. He often arrested the homeless so they could have a hot meal and a shower in jail.

One of them, a scrawny derelict known as “El Loco,” shot Kramer in the back.

It happened at dawn, before Kramer was even officially on duty. It was not unusual for him to be out at daybreak, sweeping South Beach streets for vagrants. On this morning, he parked his paddy wagon and walked alone down an alley behind a crumbling Washington Avenue apartment house. He was not wearing his bulletproof vest.

At the rear of the building, he encountered Andres Garcia Marrero, twenty-seven. The Mariel refugee known as El Loco had a history of arrests for weapons, rape, trespassing and resisting police. Kramer felt in no immediate danger. He did not radio for a backup. His rapport with transients and South Beach residents was excellent.

Georgi Caboerte, twenty-four, was in the bakery across the street, preparing the day's deliveries of fresh bagels, corn muffins and pastries. He heard five shots. An old man, a neighbor, came running across the street yelling, “Call the police! Call the police! A cop is shot!”

Berta McArthur, fifty-four, lived next door to the shooting scene. She heard shots, threw open her window and saw the crumpled officer facedown, blood gushing from head wounds, his service revolver still holstered.

Neighbor Maria Mercedes, fifteen, told me she heard footsteps. Then “Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! I thought it was firecrackers. Then somebody was yelling, ‘He's dead! He's dead!' And I saw cops running.”

Two rescue units, both with doctors aboard, arrived in minutes. The medics all knew Kramer. They tore open his uniform and began frantic attempts to revive him, radioing ahead to Mount Sinai Medical Center. The hospital alerted a trauma team and notified Dr. Mario Nanes, a neurosurgeon, at his nearby home. He sped to the emergency room, arriving only three minutes behind the wounded officer. “Time counts in these cases,” the doctor told me later.

Shot twice in the back of the head at close range and once in the back, Kramer had no pulse or blood pressure. Ten doctors joined a heroic attempt to save him and within fifteen minutes had restored his blood pressure.

A police escort rushed the officer's mother, Gladys, a small, bewildered woman, into the emergency room. His ailing father, Nathan, a patient undergoing kidney dialysis, checked out of another hospital and hurried to Mount Sinai.

As the doctors labored, police swarmed into the low-rent neighborhood where the shooting took place. SWAT conducted a building-to-building search. A police helicopter swooped low over rooftops.

El Loco was known to sleep on the roof of a block-long pastel building that housed the bakery, an Italian restaurant, a vegetable market, a clinic and a shuttered restaurant. Police had found his mattress and a makeshift lean-to after a small fire a week earlier. K-9 dogs were mustered in the hope they could pick up a scent. Seventy searchers closed off Washington Avenue.

The fugitive, disheveled and dirty, was spotted on a sandy strip of beach at 12:32
P.M
., five and a half hours after the shooting. He tried to run but never drew the murder weapon, a rusted Smith and Wesson .38-caliber revolver, or the knife he carried. Eyes vacant and bloodshot, he was whisked away in a patrol car.

El Loco was a bizarre and familiar figure to South Beach residents. Some thought him mute because he rarely spoke. Others said he continually paced Washington Avenue mumbling to himself in high-pitched Spanish.

“He has the IQ of someone you would find in an alley. I don't know why the hell he did it,” Lieutenant Alan Solowitz said.

Garcia, Officer Thomas Hoolahan said, was simply “tired of being hassled, tired of being arrested, tired of people telling him he would have to go. He apparently felt he had the right to do it.”

Kramer remained on life support, his brain damaged by bullets and bone fragments.

More than one hundred calls jammed the hospital switchboard, many from South Beach derelicts. Some had obviously been drinking. Many were crying. A man who slurred his words left a message. “Tell him all his buddies on South Beach are praying for him.”

I found Roy Howard, eighty-four, at a nearby bar, hoisting his first brandy of the day. “He's a good cop, everybody knows him,” he told me. The barmaid had once waitressed at a restaurant where Kramer would come in for “soup and matzoh balls.” He loved to eat, she said. “He was friendly, not mean like some officers.”

“He arrested me once for fighting in the street,” Robert Amor, twenty, offered. “He's a fair man. He's cool. The guy who shot him had to be insane or something.”

The mayor, the city manager, city commissioners and brother officers joined the grim hospital vigil. “We're hoping and we're praying,” Miami Beach Police Chief Kenneth Glassman said.

Kramer died two days later, four minutes after doctors disconnected his life-support system. He was forty-two.

Fellow cops, black mourning tape across their badges, remained at his side in death. Lieutenant Solowitz and several detectives accompanied the body to the Dade medical examiner's office for the autopsy and then to the funeral home.

“We just didn't want him alone there in the morgue. It wouldn't be right,” Solowitz said.

Repose was between seven and nine
P.M
. at the funeral home. The first mourner, a weeping elderly woman, arrived at eight
A.M
. Hundreds of people from all walks of life filed past the coffin, where Kramer lay in uniform, flanked by a police honor guard at attention.

Two rabbis presided, but the loss was ecumenical. At Miami Beach Community Church, the city's oldest place of worship, the Reverend Garth Thompson described Kramer as a “loving person who looked out for South Beach derelicts. He loved these people, and by one of them he was killed.”

Kramer made his usual rounds of South Beach one last time, in a hearse.

The fastest way to find out something is not true is to put it in the newspaper. City officials and cops all announced without hesitation that Donald Kramer was the first Miami Beach policeman killed on the job.

They were wrong.

One of my frequent correspondents among Florida pioneers clearly recalled a Miami Beach policeman killed in a gun battle during the late 1920s. No one at police headquarters or City Hall knew about any such thing. But there it was, in newspaper archives, on hard-to-read microfiche.

The old-timer was right. The first Miami Beach police officer killed in the line of duty fought a blazing predawn gun duel with desperados. He died a hero.

Thieves broke into a Fort Lauderdale auto dealership after midnight on Monday, March 19, 1928. The brazen bandits stole cash and a shotgun, then drove a brand new Hupmobile sedan out the showroom window.

Police set up roadblocks. At 3:45
A.M
., three Miami Beach police officers spotted the stolen motorcar traveling south on Washington Avenue toward Fifth Street. They ordered the driver to stop. The passenger in the big, boxy sedan opened fire. The police shot back, in a running gun battle. They lost the faster, more powerful car after a wild chase. The abandoned Hupmobile was found minutes later, its windows shattered by police gunshots.

The occupants had vanished.

Just before dawn, Officer David C. Bearden, husky and handsome, spotted two men walking along Ocean Drive near Twenty-second Street.

He asked what they were doing. They said they had been at the beach.

As Officer Bearden stepped from his car, one of the bandits fired a gun concealed behind a cap he held in front of him. The bullet caught Bearden just above his heart and exited his back, knocking him down.

No bulletproof vests in those days.

The fallen officer drew his own gun and returned the bandits' fire as they closed in on him. He shot both men, who scrambled into the officer's patrol car and drove off. Bearden crawled in pain to a police alarm box at Twenty-third Street and the ocean, a block away.

No hand-held walkie-talkies in those days.

Hotel employee Roy Widden, on his way to work, found Bearden slumped at the base of the pole, too weak from blood loss to stand. Following the officer's gasped instructions, he took the callbox key from his pocket and sounded the alarm.

Bearden was taken to the hospital. At 7:10
A.M
., Miami police found the two wounded men sprawled unconscious in a vacant lot.

One died soon after. In his pocket he carried a small metal disc. On it was inscribed:
THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH
.

The other man, shot in the head, would survive.

Bearden lingered for a day or so. He told his chief on his deathbed that his last wish was to be buried in his native Alabama. He was twenty-four.

On March 21, 1928, a news story reported that Chief R. H. Wood had escorted Bearden's body to Maplesville, Alabama.

My pioneer correspondent, John Bledsoe, nearly seventy-seven and retired to Okeechobee, was a Miami Beach milkman at the time. “Chief Wood,” he told me, “was a caring man, a good chief who thought a lot of his men, and they thought a lot of him.”

In the musty archives of the old City Hall on Washington Avenue was long-forgotten Resolution 1744, passed on that March 21, over sixty years ago.

Signed by then council president John Levi, it calls Bearden a “gallant officer,” and in flowery odes to his bravery, lauds his “supreme sacrifice … the shining example of his heroism and a quality of courage that would bring glory to any community.”

Officer Bearden had left “his name on the hearts of the citizenry of this city … We shall remember what David Bearden did here. His memory will be as inspiring as the light upon the mountains, or as the sunshine on the sea.”

Sounds like politicians.

They hailed his courage, and swore never to forget his “unselfish devotion.”

Then they did.

There was no other official trace, no record, no memorial.

Intrigued, I looked to Maplesville, Alabama, for more about the forgotten hero. Beardens still lived there, but none remembered the fallen policeman or where he was buried.

How sad, I thought, after calling what seemed like everyone in that small town.

But then I found David Bearden still alive in one heart.

“Everybody loved David,” Ora Carter Davis told me. “It was sorrowful when he was killed. He was a nice boy, he wasn't rough like a lot of people, and he was nice-looking.”

They were childhood sweethearts.

David lived in Pleasant Grove and came down to Maplesville where they “courted” at Saturday night square dances.

“We thought a lot of each other,” she said wistfully. “But we were kinfolk.” They were first cousins.

In 1919 she met a soldier named Joe Davis, and they got married. She was fifteen. “I married young,” she said, “and David, he just left.”

The girl David Bearden loved moved to a cabin on a creek bank and raised seven children. Her husband had died five years before my call.

Ora Carter Davis said David Bearden is buried in a churchyard at Pleasant Grove. At eighty, she now lived alone, with her memories. “My life has been sad,” she confided.

The deaths of Bearden and Kramer, fifty-six years and nineteen blocks apart, were similar both caught by surprise, both shot at dawn without warning, both in a leap year, both lingering briefly in local hospitals before dying.

“He was a true hero,” Chief Glassman said on reading the old newspaper story, “and it's only right that we remember him.”

City manager Rob Parkins, a former cop himself, said, “It would be tragic to be killed like that and forgotten.”

David Bearden, dead at age twenty-four in 1928, was remembered officially for the first time in more than half a century.

When I visit Miami Beach police headquarters now I always reread the shiny plaque in the lobby, honoring both David Bearden and Donald Kramer.

Neither is forgotten.

Shot cops are overlooked in many ways. The system slighted Donald Kramer. El Loco never went to trial for his murder.

He never will.

Experts concluded that El Loco was crazy. That should have been no surprise, given his nickname. In 1989, after five years of testing and legal arguments, a judge threw out the murder case against him. El Loco was considered too incompetent to be tried.

El Loco's public defender said his client was mentally deficient and dyslexic, had only a fourth-grade education in Cuba, was born partially deaf and then further damaged his hearing with a hand grenade. He speaks no English, and syphilis has caused more damage to his brain.