American Gangster

9. Can’t Get Enough of That Funky Stuff

Across the river, in Newark, at a groovy little neighborhood dive with a black-dominated clientele, Richie Roberts — in a funky brown leather jacket and jeans — sat in a booth with Freddie Spearman, a scrawny-looking mustached guy with stringy brown hair whose pseudo-junkie style made him an ideal undercover cop.

“Freddie,” Richie was saying, talking louder than he’d have liked because of the jukebox blasting “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “this task force has got to be squeaky clean.”

“These are cops you’re looking for, right?” Spearman asked dryly, and sucked on his cigarette. He was so skinny he seemed to swim in his paisley shirt.

Richie grinned. “Yes. Cops who value a good bust more than a free season ticket to the Knicks.”

“ ‘Good bust,’ ” Spearman said, “in the strip joint sense?”

“All right, all right,” Richie said with a laugh, and he sipped his beer. “I don’t wanna come off as some damn Boy Scout. And these guys gotta be hard-asses to begin with. At some point on this gig, more than likely, the guns are comin’ out.”

Spearman blew a smoke ring. “Does sound like a good time.”

Richie leaned forward. “But, Freddie, you gotta understand — I’m reluctant to bring anyone in I don’t know, personally.”

“You know me, don’t you?” Spearman flicked cigarette ash onto the floor. “Well, I vouch for both Jones and Abruzzo. Stand-up guys all the way.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know but—”

Spearman held up a “stop” palm. “No ‘buts,’ Richie. We work together, Jones and Abruzzo and me. You want Ringo, you got to take Paul and George, too.”

Richie shook his head. “What about John?”

“Hell, you’re John.”

Richie laughed again. “Gimme a break... So where are they, these two stand-up guys?”

Spearman pointed over to the smoky joint’s crowded dance floor. “That’s Moses Jones. With the skinny-legs-and-all chickie.”

On the jukebox, Stevie Wonder had given over to Eric Burden and War doing “Spill the Wine.” A lanky black dude was dancing with a skinny white girl, so wild and uninhibited they might be leaving their best game in the practice gym. The dude had a serious Afro, a Fu Manchu mustache and a dark untucked shirt with collars pointed enough to put an eye out, and looked about as much like a cop as Spearman.

Which was to say, not like a cop at all.

“And that,” Spearman was saying, “is Al Abruzzo. With the big black mama.”

Abruzzo was a criminally good-looking young Italian in an untucked light blue shirt with its own eye-hazard collars; his sleeves were rolled up and some tattoos were showing, dating to his days in the military, most likely. The heavy-set gal seemed giddy having the attention of this cut-rate Marcello Mastroianni; and he was lost in the sight of her big bobbling bosoms.

Both Spearman’s buddies looked more like crooks than cops, so that was a good start. What Richie had in mind didn’t involve deep undercover, but his squad members would have to work the streets without getting made.

“Both are good with wires,” Spearman was saying. “Hooked up with good informants. They’re honest, far as it goes. And they’re fearless, farther than that. They’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

Richie raised an eyebrow. “Good to hear. Anything else to recommend them?”

Spearman grinned. “Well, they’re insane. Like you, Richie. What more could you ask?”

He couldn’t think of a thing.

Spearman’s trio made the last of Richie’s fifteen Untouchables, the rest of them handpicked by the detective, not from going through endless files, but out of his own knowledge of which other cops he’d encountered over the years worth recruiting — cops who seemed motivated by putting away bad guys and not money in a safe deposit box.

So it was time to go to church — that ground floor of the former Episcopalian house of worship had been cleared of refuse but otherwise little renovated, with a loose bullpen of desks moved in, some files and lockers on the fringes and at the front of the room a folding banquet table behind which two bulletin boards loomed like big blank slates, waiting for the work of the sixteen men in this room, in the days and nights ahead, to fill them.

Morning sunlight filtered in, turned shades of burnished yellow and brown thanks to the tall stained-glass windows along one wall, filling the gutted room with amber-tinged light, and reminding everybody that God was watching.

Richie perched on the table with the bulletin boards at his back and said, “Our mandate is to make major arrests. No street guys — small potatoes are of no interest. Main course meals only, guys — suppliers, distributors.”

His latest recruits, Spearman, Jones and Abruzzo, had taken the desks in the back, like delinquent students hoping to evade the teacher’s notice. Of the entire group, these three amigos were the most disreputable-looking, which made them ideal for what would soon come.

Richie got up and pinned to the bulletin board its first exhibit: a single, half-empty packet of heroin, bequeathed to him by his late partner, Javy Rivera. The blue of the distinctive cellophane bag popped against the brown of the tackboard.

He pointed to the little blue bag. “Heroin,” he said. “We’ll also target cocaine and amphetamines — we can skip the grass, unless we have a major haul on our hands.”

Spearman’s voice echoed up from the back. “Define major haul.”

Richie shrugged. “Thousand pounds? Less than that, let somebody not as important as us waste their damn time.”

A few grins blossomed at that remark.

In the back of the room, where they sat on one of their desks, side by side, Jones nudged the sleepy-looking Abruzzo, and Abruzzo nudged him back. Richie gave them the kind of hard look he’d received himself, over the years, countless times from countless schoolteachers.

And they gave him their attention, if grudgingly.

“We’ll be handling big shipments,” Richie said, “big money... and big temptation.”

Jones raised his hand.

“Yeah,” Richie said with a nod of acknowledgment.

“What’s with this story going around about you?” Everybody’s eyes were on Jones. “About you turning in a shitload of cash. That true?”

Everybody’s eyes were on Richie now.

“You’re half right,” Richie said.

Those eyes all widened.

“It’s a load of shit,” he said.

And everybody grinned in relief, their “teacher” going on with his briefing, in charge but one of the guys.

They began the next afternoon, on the streets of Newark.

Abruzzo needed to look like a junkie, and it hadn’t been a stretch: dirty jeans and wool cap were all it took to sell the story. He shuffled up to a dealer on the corner as Richie, Spearman and Jones watched from an unmarked vehicle, Jones discreetly snapping photos.

The exchange they saw take place was a simple one: ten bucks for a blue cellophane packet of H.

When they tested the powder back at the church, Jones taking the honors, the results were impressive.

“Stuff’s ten percent pure,” Jones said. “Strong enough to smoke, for all those suburban white kids who don’t like sticking needles in their pasty little arms. And the ghetto junkies? They’ll get high just on the thought of stuff this strong...”

The whole squad was gathered around the impromptu lab test taking place on Jones’s desktop. These were seasoned cops, but they all wore incredulity on their faces — none of them, Richie included, had ever heard of anything this pure on the street before.

Richie, his voice hushed enough for the church in its former glory, said, “Ten bucks. That’s all you paid for it.”

Abruzzo nodded. “Who says you don’t get bang for your buck these days?”

Jones was frowning. “Crazy thing is, this blue packet stuff’s about all that’s out there right now. Somebody’s cornered the market.”

“How’s it possible?” Richie asked. “Who can afford to sell shit twice as good for half as much?”

“I dunno,” Jones admitted, “but I’ll lay you odds that’s how they cornered it.”

Richie turned toward the bulletin boards.

One of them represented a project that had taken him all of yesterday afternoon: arranging surveillance photos that Toback had given him to display the hierarchies of crime families in New Jersey and New York, the known dope kingpins, almost all of them Italian.

“But who?” Richie asked. “Who?”

Jones shrugged. “New player, maybe?”

Richie and his squad had no way of knowing they were up against not only a new player, but a whole new ballgame, that in fact somebody from the minors had just moved up to the big leagues.

The process started overseas, in a cave in the Golden Triangle, where the poppies were processed, each bulb pierced, its white liquid oozing, changing into filthy liquids in wooden bowls, finally forming a gray paste.

It continued back home, in the Bronx, at the Chemical Bank where Frank Lucas would sit with a respectable Caucasian vice president who wire-transferred a sizable amount overseas to a Bangkok bank, where Frank’s friend, former Master Sergeant Nate Atkins, sat with a respectable Thai banker, who proceeded to convert the transfer to cash.

Nate would carry the ball for a while, sliding cash across a table at his Soul Brothers Bar to a pair of Chinese Triad gangsters.

Then in a tent at a jungle army base in Vietnam, Nate would hand still more cash to the two-star general he and Frank had met on his first East Asian business trip — the military brass had to get their cut, after all.

Nate’s next stop was Vietnam, at a landing strip where the air was chopped by propellers as wounded soldiers on stretchers were lifted onto a transport plane. Nearby, four large crates of Japanese TVs waited under cargo netting. And the pilot of the transport was stuffing more cash in a pouch, after he saluted Nate, as if the master sergeant’s uniform still meant something.

Nate’s role in the process had now played out.

Before long, at dusk at an army base in North Carolina, that transport plane had come and was about to be gone, taxiing for takeoff, leaving behind a pile of discarded TV boxes outside a supply warehouse.

At the perimeter of the base, several black servicemen transferred heavy, taped-up duffel bags from an army jeep into a station wagon, hoisting those that wouldn’t fit inside a roof rack. Two civilians — brothers of Frank Lucas — supervised, helping tie down the duffels with twine.

The Lucas boys headed north in their station wagon, down a rain-slicked highway, canvas tarp atop their vehicle flapping like the tongue of a happy hound. Before long, in the distance, the glow of the Washington Monument beckoned like the American dream coming true.

The process finally got to Harlem, as a black mom exited a discount drugstore into a parking lot, pushing a shopping car loaded down with her baby, bundles of Pampers and several cases of milk sugar.

That milk sugar found its way to Red Top’s apartment, where the ruby-haired woman in charge tended not just to the cutting of the powder, but to the cleanup. Her five table workers, in street clothes now, surgical masks dangling, wiped down surfaces, scales and other apparatus. Tens of thousands of blue cellophane packets of heroin were neatly arranged on two folding tables.

The process was complete.

The product was ready to hit the street.

Richie and his squad were hitting the street, too. But the squad leader’s bulletin board of dope kingpins did not include a shot of Frank Lucas, nor would that name have meant anything to Richie Roberts.