American Gangster

13. Mean Machine

Every street cop gets used to the spike of fear that certain sights send through you. But that sick feeling usually didn’t come in the middle of sitting at your desk and going through the morning mail, which was what Richie Roberts was doing when he came across the deceptively mundane-looking envelope from the New Jersey Bar Association.

He sat staring at the thing, holding the letter in both hands, trying to get up the goddamn nerve to open it, the only color in his face provided by the amber light of the sun’s rays slanting in through the looming stained-glass windows.

Over at the bulletin boards, the trio who had become his squad within the squad — skinny Spearman, Afro-sporting Jones and matinee-idol Abruzzo — were revising the organized-crime food-chain chart, pinning up new surveillance photos of various Italian wise guys.

Jones was saying, “Ice-Pick Paul goes here—”

“Naw,” Abruzzo insisted, “he’s under Benny Two-Socks.”

Jones shook his head. “No, man, you’re thinkin’ of the other Benny, Benny the Bishop. Benny Two-Socks is Cattano’s deadbeat son-in-law.”

Spearman was nodding. “Jonesy’s right. You put the wrong asshole up there...”

Richie rose from his desk, came over, and the others looked over their shoulders at him while he studied the table of organization for several long moments. Then, as he began untacking photos, from the top down, the three detectives exchanged wide-eyed glances and shrugs.

Finally Jones asked, “What’re you doin’, Rich? We just put them up there—”

“For a cop,” Richie said, not lecturing, just stating facts, “the uppermost thing is the arrest. For a prosecutor, the arrest is nothing without the evidence to convict.”

Spearman said, “I’m in favor of evidence. Evidence is cool.”

Richie went on: “But we don’t have any real evidence on anybody on this board, so... down they come.”

“Gonna look awful blank,” Abruzzo said.

“We’ll fill it with new pictures.”

“New pictures?” Jones asked.

Richie nodded. “We’re starting over. From the street up.”

Abruzzo’s handsome mug twisted sarcastically. “What are you, all of sudden, a fuckin’ prosecutor?”

Richie just smiled at the guy, then tacked up his exam results on the bulletin board.

“Son of a bitch passed,” Spearman said, eyeballing it.

With a self-satisfied little smile, Richie went back to his desk and got back to work.

That afternoon, on a street in Newark, the four detectives sat in an unmarked car watching blue cellophane packets change hands. This particular dealer, a nondescript moke who might have worked in a drugstore or supermarket, seemed to specialize in white kids, college-looking types, who were making expeditions to the “bad” part of town for their fun powder; but the dealer was democratic: he sold to street junkies, too.

The buyers Richie and his team ignored; it was the seller who had their attention — though they did snap pictures of him, he was hardly their chief concern. Where he might lead them was.

When he’d sold his last packet, the dealer got in his own wheels and drove half a dozen blocks to a gas station/car wash, where he ducked into the service garage and was glimpsed by the detectives as he spoke with a burly black automobile mechanic. They got a blurry pic of what seemed to be money handed over to the mechanic; and then the dealer walked off.

At that moment, Richie’s interest in the dealer died, and they watched the garage for what seemed like hours and was minutes. A mechanic stepped out for a breath of fresh air, rubbing his hands with a rag — yes, this was the same brawny guy the dealer had handed money off to, meaning Richie now had his camera lens trained on a supplier.

He snapped a picture; it too came out a little blurry, but would suffice to go up on the new, almost bare bulletin board where a new table of organization was being built, each surveillance photo another brick in the wall.

The next day, Spearman — looking every bit the telephone lineman in his hard hat — was up top of a telephone pole outside that gas station. He was working hard, all right, but not improving the quality of phone service in the neighborhood...

And the day after that, an empty apartment above a storefront across from the gas station made the perfect place for Richie, Jones and Spearman to enjoy their take-out Chinese as a reel-to-reel tape recorder picked up various interesting conversations.

These seemed innocent enough, but sometimes the codes these mental giants used was just plain pitiful: “Those, uh, snow tires you give me last time come in yet? I’m gonna want some more of them... gimme one and a half more of them.”

Spearman almost choked on his Chinese, laughing.

“Wish I wasn’t just some poor dumb honest cop,” Jones said, grinning. “Then maybe I could afford one-and-a-half snow tires...”

A week later, Richie was getting a mini-tape recorder, no bigger than a pack of ciggies, taped to his bare chest, which he’d shaved for the occasion. Spearman wondered aloud if Rich had shaved his legs, too, but Richie was too preoccupied to toss a smart remark back at him.

On the table next to the bulletin boards rested a gym bag, nothing much to look at, but inside you wouldn’t find a jock strap, swim suit and socks: twenty grand in neat banded packets was stacked in there.

At the prosecutor’s office earlier today, Toback had sat in shirtsleeves and loosened tie, looking like a low-end disgruntled accountant, counting out the $20,000 in cash onto his desk.

“This is more than a year’s salary, Richie,” his boss said grimly. “If it disappears, I won’t be able to get you this kind of cash for a case again.”

“It’ll never be out of my sight,” Richie said.

“And here’s two bills out of petty cash,” Toback said, getting a much smaller packet from a small metal box in his desk drawer. “So you can look the part.”

The cashmere sweater and sharp slacks that gave Richie the correct mid-level wise guy appearance had taken the full two C’s and a little more out of his own pocket. But it was worth it: the mechanic at the gas station/car wash accepted Richie at face value, though maybe it was the gym bag of money that dazzled the guy, not Richie’s clothes sense.

The mechanic wiped his hands off on a rag and then again on his greasy jumpsuit before starting to count the ten thousand Richie had handed over. The bills were on a cleaned-off area of a workbench; the other half of the twenty grand was still in the gym bag, in Richie’s grasp.

“It’s got to be Blue Magic,” Richie said.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s the ‘Blue,’ all right. You can pick it up here, tomorrow.” The grease jockey completed counting the money, which he’d done by thumbing through, keeping the bands on the packets. “Where’s the rest? This is only ten K.”

“Ten K is half. You’ll get the other half tomorrow, on delivery.”

“No, no, no,” he said, lifting a hand that didn’t really have all the grease off after all. “We don’t play that, we ain’t fuckin’ Sears Roebuck.”

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable,” Richie said gently, “half down, half on delivery.”

“Well, go fuck yourself, then. That reasonable enough for you?”

Richie sighed and lifted the gym bag onto the workbench and gave the bastard the rest of Toback’s money.

Soon Richie was back in their unmarked car, with Spearman behind the wheel as they headed toward the George Washington Bridge, changing lanes to keep up with a pickup truck driven by the mechanic. They had seen the guy get in the truck with a grocery bag filled with their money (or at least it had better be filled with their money).

Richie, wrestling his way out of the cashmere sweater, was in the process of exchanging it for a T-shirt.

“I guess you see where he’s heading,” Spearman said dryly.

“I see.”

“New York. Is that where we’re going?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“Not exactly our turf.”

“What are they gonna do, arrest us?”

Behind five-buck Aviator sunglasses, Spearman arched an eyebrow. “We’re talking New York cops, Richie. They can do worse.”

Richie shook his head. “We’re not losing that fuckin’ money. We’re out of business, we lose that fuckin’ money. Go.”

Spearman went.

Followed the truck over the George Washington Bridge, with Manhattan right in their faces, looming in the windshield like the world’s biggest cemetery.

Before long they were in East Harlem; neither Spearman nor Richie was thrilled about that, but neither were they surprised. The pickup pulled up to a curb outside a Pleasant Avenue grocery store — Italians did dope business in this part of Harlem.

As the mechanic — no longer in his coveralls, but anonymous street clothes — entered the grocery, Spearman stopped just for a second, for Richie to get out, and went on. Richie crossed the street, just another honky getting honked at, and from the sidewalk did his best to glance inconspicuously through the grocery window, to see who the mechanic was contacting.

Only all the guy was doing was buying a cup of to-go coffee.

In the meantime, Spearman had taken the corner, going around the block. Richie was wishing he’d caught his partner, before that trip began, and almost missed the mechanic and his coffee exiting the grocery — in fact, almost got bumped into, and had to double back quickly so as not to be made.

As the mechanic got in the pickup, Richie looked around desperately for Spearman. This was the kind of street where trucks routinely double-parked for unloading crates and fuck you, if we’re blocking you. Horns were honking, and one of them could be Spearman, caught on a side street.

The mechanic started the pickup, and began to pull out.

Richie could not afford to lose that guy — and he sure as hell could not afford to lose that twenty grand. He hurried over to a taxi stopped at the light, and flashed his badge.

“Get out,” Richie said.

The taxi driver, a black kid alarmed by seeing this wild-eyed cop, just sat there; he managed to blurt, “What?” But that was all he did.

“Get the fuck out of the car!” Richie yelled, leaning in the cab like a demented car hop. “I’m commandeering your vehicle!”

The taxi driver had no idea what “commandeering” meant, but he knew this guy, cop or not, was a lunatic, and began hurriedly rolling up his window.

Richie reached in, got his arm stuck as the window came up, but managed to send his fingers down to pull up on the lock; then he yanked the door open and dragged the driver out, hurling him to the pavement, hard enough to make the guy yowl in pain.

Richie hadn’t meant to hurt the guy, but first aid was not his top priority right now; he jumped behind the wheel, swung the cab into opposing lanes to maneuver traffic, and then the vehicle was screeching around the corner.

Far ahead he spotted the pickup truck. That wasn’t great, but any closer and the guy might have seen or heard the commotion Richie had just made. Anyway, Richie had lost time to make up for: he gunned the engine, flew through a red light and glanced nervously at his rearview mirror where cars that had just missed him were almost colliding themselves.

The truck took a right turn, still way up ahead, and Richie barreled through another red light, took the corner and kept the truck in his sight — a couple car lengths ahead, now.

Several blocks later, Richie pulled the cab up to a yellow-painted curb as the mechanic, already parked, got out and went into a pizza parlor with windows as greasy as the pizza probably was. The detective got out, crossed the street, walked past the restaurant, trying to get a good look inside without breaking stride.

Then, from around the nearest corner, coming right at him, strode a quartet in dark leather coats, like a modernized pack of gestapo thugs, big guys with dark sleek slicked-back hair. He could also make out, beneath the heavy, expensive coats, the silk ties and dark, tailored suits and Italian loafers; Rolexes gleamed on their wrists. They might have been top Mafiosi, only they were cops. The so-called Princes of the City.

Special Investigations Unit guys — he had heard of them, and seen them around, or anyway one of them: the big guy in front with the Zapata mustache, that was Detective Trupo, though Trupo wouldn’t know him from Adam. These guys — much feared and often admired by other cops, both sides of the river — were known for two things: unlimited authority and outrageous corruption.

Richie ducked into the nearest alley, just as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were riding into the restaurant. In the alley he found a grimy basement window down into the kitchen that gave him a view on a tableau that made his guts tighten...

Trupo and the other SIU detectives burst in, guns in hand. The mechanic and a white guy in chef’s attire were in the midst of doing business, a metal food-prep table home to a meal of stacked money packets and a pile of blue cellophane baggies. Trupo supervised while one of his men slapped the mechanic and chef around, and then another detective gathered the money, stuffing it into a black bag, and the final detective slid the dope packets into another bag.The mechanic, who was a bruiser himself, started to protest, and Trupo slapped him with his automatic, a nine millimeter that opened a red gash on the black cheek.

No arrests were made. They just strode out of the kitchen, as abruptly as they’d appeared, the four lawmen departing with no suspects, just two black bags, one filled with dope, and the other with money courtesy of the taxpayers of the state of New Jersey. And Richie.

They came back up through the front door, same way they’d come in, and Richie was waiting.

They paused on the sidewalk, just outside the restaurant, frozen with casual contempt as this slovenly figure in a T-shirt had the balls to get in their way.

Richie, pointed at one of the black bags, said, “That’s my money.”

“What money?” one SIU cop asked.

Another said, “Who the fuck are you? The janitor?”

Richie discreetly passed around his Bureau of Narcotics ID in its little wallet. Trupo hung onto it.

Quietly Richie said, “Those bills are sequenced and registered with the Essex County Prosecutors Office. All begin with CF3500. Appreciate it if you’d check it out.”

A frowning SIU dick got in the black bag and thumbed through a few.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. He grinned good-naturedly, a rapist offering his victim a post-coital smoke. “Here I thought we had a score. Figured I had a fuckin’ Chris-Craft sitting in my driveway, for sure.”

“Honest mistake,” Richie said. “Just hand it on back.”

Another of the detectives wasn’t smiling. “This time we will.”

Then this dick smiled, too; and all of the cops, except top dog Trupo, laughed, one even patting Richie on the back. An affable lot of thieves.

But Trupo still had Richie’s ID, and was studying it like a clue at a crime scene. “When’s the last time I was in New Jersey,” he said. He had a pleasant baritone. “Let me think... a week ago never.”

His guys smiled.

Trupo smiled, too, but it was nothing to write home about. “What’re you doin’, Detective Roberts, coming over here without letting anybody know? Don’t you know you can get hurt doing that, overlooking the niceties?”

Richie returned Trupo’s smile. “Sorry. We followed that mechanic over here from a stakeout in Newark. We were kinda doing things on the fly.”

“That’s the way cases get kicked out of court,” Trupo advised, “doin’ things on the fly... Now you got your money. And we’re cool with that. Aren’t we guys, cool with that?”

Nods all around.

Trupo kept smiling; Richie would have preferred a frown. “Now never, Detective Roberts, ever come in our city again, unannounced. You come in to catch a fuckin’ Broadway show, you call ahead first and clear it with me.”

Then Trupo gave Richie a pat on the back, and the lead SIU detective and his fellow servants of the people went off, still hauling their bag of confiscated heroin.

Which somehow Richie doubted would ever find its way to an evidence locker...

At night the narcotics squad HQ still felt like a church; but the unholy quartet Richie had encountered that afternoon didn’t do much for encouraging him that God was in His Heaven and all was right with the world.

Toback, who was sitting with Richie at the banquet table by the bulletin boards, was waxing philosophical.

“What do we hate most?” his boss asked. “Isn’t it the transgressions of others that we fear we’re capable of ourselves?”

Richie said nothing.

“Thing is,” Toback said with an easy shrug, “cops are just people. They’re like—”

“Everybody else,” Richie finished, “yeah, I know. And some of ’em will steal no matter what. There can be a camera on ’em and they’ll still do it. And some’ll never do it.”

“Right,” Toback said. “But a lot of ’em are in between, Richie.”

Richie nodded. “Capable of doing either, depending on which way the wind blows, and how their department leans. Only these SIU guys — their department isn’t leaning, it’s falling down. Patrol cars don’t even stop in Harlem — just slow up and roll down the window so the dealers can toss the money in. Man, I’ve seen drops go down on precinct steps...”

“I know, I know.” Toback sighed, his eyes searching his new prosecutor. “What the hell were you doing on their side of the world?”

Richie shrugged elaborately. “That’s where the dope is coming from — Blue Magic. Out of New York. What am I supposed to do, ignore it? You think a narcotics squad can make it, busting two-bit dealers?”

“No. But can a narcotics squad leader make it, when a cab driver files aggravated assault and grand theft charges?”

Richie scowled. “Prick wouldn’t give up his ride! Motherfucker rolled his window up on me, would’ve dragged me from here to Kingdom Come.”

“Well, that’ll be handy, because Kingdom Come is where he’s suing the State of New Jersey to, unless he reconsiders when a settlement amount is offered.”

“I told him I was a cop. I showed him ID.”

“You stole his cab and broke his arm.”

“That was an accident.”

“Stealing his cab?”

“Breaking his arm! Hey, I was chasing your twenty thousand bucks!”

Toback’s face was unreadable, utterly bland, as he said, “I don’t want to hear about you going into New York anymore.”

Richie shook his head glumly. “Then this investigation is over. Might as well dismantle the team and go home.”

Toback smiled and something almost evil was in it. “You’re not listening, Richie — I said, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Oh.”

Toback folded his arms, leaned back in his cheap swivel chair and rocked a little. “You do whatever you have to do, go wherever you have to go, to find out who’s bringing this nasty shit into our country... Just don’t tell me.”

“... Thanks, boss.”

Toback got up, stretched and yawned, and said, “I think I’ll get some sleep. Why don’t you do the same?”

And that was just what Richie did.