Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

In which members of one group at one end of the block try to find and capture hiding members of an opposing group. A captured player is dragged into a chalk circle on the pavement at mid-block,by a hunter who holds him/her there long enough to holler, “Ring-a-Levio, 1-2-3!”

A spring afternoon in the Meadow, that “Long, loud scream” by Constance Casey

Prospect Park

Who” is important in this story: a man and four teenaged boys.

“What” is easy to answer: a bike and a gun.

“When” is a sunny afternoon in June.

“Where,” in this case, is unusually significant.

Our location is Prospect Park, the green heart of Brooklyn. Of the five boroughs of the city of New York, Brooklyn is the one with the least green space per person. On a map, the park is a bit to the west of Brooklyn’s dead center.

On the afternoon of June 1, 1993, a forty-two-year-old drama teacher named Allyn Winslow rode his new trail bike to a boulder near the top of Prospect Park’s Quaker Hill, where he’d often gone for picnics with his wife and two children.

He may have stopped atop the hill to lean against the big rock and savor a friendly, familiar place. He may have noticed he was just up from the Quaker cemetery where fellow actor Montgomery Clift is buried. He may have paused to adjust his bike seat or take a drink from his water bottle.

There’s no way to know.

Four teenagers surrounded him suddenly and tried to steal his turquoise bike. Winslow resisted by attempting to fend them off with a tire pump, and when he got on his bike and rode away, one of the teens fired a .22 caliber revolver — three shots into Winslow’s back, one into his buttocks.

Winslow, who had run three New York City marathons, made it down the hill and into the park’s Long Meadow — a bit less than half a mile — where he fell to the ground and died.

Three of the gunshot wounds were superficial. The fourth bullet angled up through his right lung to sever his aorta, the vessel that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body.

“I was trying to scare him,” said the shooter, sixteen-year-old Jerome Nisbett. This he told the police after his arrest a few days following the fatal shooting. His finger got stuck on the trigger and the gun just kept firing, he said.

At Nisbett’s trial, a police ballistics expert effectively rebutted that excuse: “In a revolver, the trigger has to be pulled one time for one shot to be fired, and then pulled again for the next shot to be fired.”

Winslow’s death generated enormous publicity, as well as understandable sorrow and sympathy among Brooklyn residents. Especially for those who used the park, the killing also generated considerable fear.

That a pack of African American boys, albeit a small pack, attacked a white man hit a raw, racial nerve. Although four years had elapsed between the crime at Quaker Hill in Prospect Park and the 1989 case of a white female jogger in Manhattan’s Central Park — in which a pack of five black youths out “wilding,” as it was called, raped their victim and then beat her nearly to death — memories were quickly revived.

Amidst high public emotion around Winslow’s death, arrests were made in a week and personally announced by the city’s first black mayor, David Dinkins.

That the four suspects were so young, said the mayor, “boggles the mind and crushes the heart.”

The murder of Winslow was a particular blow to those who lived on streets adjoining Prospect Park. Violent crime in their park had actually gone down in the 1980s and early ’90s, a brutal time elsewhere in the city, and Brooklynites had begun to relax — and to enjoy the woods and hills and water and lush green of Prospect Park.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) designed both Central Park, opened in 1858, and Prospect Park. Although the former is better known to the world, landscape historians consider the latter to be Olmsted’s masterwork. When Prospect Park opened to the public in 1870, Olmsted wrote to a friend, “The park in all its upper parts in the East Woods, the Dairy District and the Nethermead, is thoroughly delightful, and I am prouder of it than of anything I have had to do with.”

Both parks hit their nadirs in the 1970s. With the city’s finances in disorder, park maintenance was down at the same time crime was up. The number of visits to Prospect Park hit an all-time low in 1979, a mark all the more dramatic when one considers that Brooklyn’s population in the late nineteenth century was roughly a quarter of what it was in the late twentieth.

The salvation of both parks came about through the creation of public-private institutions — in Brooklyn, the Prospect Park Alliance — that raised endowment funds from government, community groups, and private donors to keep them from falling into disrepair again.

In an early account of the Winslow murder, a New York Times reporter wrote that the teacher died “in a meadow.” Gardeners and park historians know the place not as a meadow, but as the meadow — namely the Long Meadow.

Of all the fine features of Prospect Park, the Long Meadow most pleased Olmsted. (It still is the largest meadow in any U.S. urban park.) He was inspired by the grand sweeps of lawn designed for the landed gentry of eighteenth-century Britain. Olmsted modified the lawn idea, making the grassy area shaggier and edging it with native trees: oak, American elm, sugar maples, wild cherry, tulip, sassafras, and Osage orange. Before Olmsted, most European and American urban parks were more pavement than woods, usually focused on a fountain or statue surrounded by tight little combinations of domesticated ornamental plants, tidily fenced in.

Olmsted’s idea was that the park would strengthen democracy; that in a leafy setting, under the sun and in the pure air, the divisions between rich and poor could melt away. His forests and meadow — wild-seeking, but actually planned down to the last shrub — would be a source of what he called “peace and refreshment” for all classes; a retreat from the crowding, dirt, and noise of city life.

Opponents argued that a wooded park with secluded areas would encourage, as one contemporary editorial writer put it, “riotous and licentious habits.”

On the day of his death, Winslow’s four-mile ride from his Bay Ridge home, past Green-Wood Cemetery to Quaker Hill, probably took about a half-hour.

His four assailants — Robert Brown and Gregory Morris, each fourteen, and sixteen-year-olds Chad Jackson and Jerome Nisbett — were supposed to be in school that day. They bumped into one another at a laundromat around 1 o’clock in the afternoon and decided to go to the park because, as they later said, Gregory Morris didn’t have a bicycle whereas the other three did. In their minds, evidently, Prospect Park was the place to go to acquire a bike.

The group — three boys pedaling bikes with Gregory Morris astride handlebars, or sometimes just running alongside — first approached a woman practicing martial arts near the park’s band shell. Morris started “messing with” her bike, Robert Brown said at trial. The woman told the boys to get lost and rode off quickly. Then the four thought of stopping a Latino on a bike, but he too hastened away.

About half-past 3, they walked up Quaker Hill and spied Winslow and his bike. Brown testified that Morris said, “Let’s get him!” Brown further testified that Morris handed a gun to Nisbett.

There were no witnesses to the shooting, but people walking in the Long Meadow heard a popping sound.

“I hope that was fireworks,” one man said to his friend as they sat beside a nearby pond. But, he added, “Then I heard that long, loud scream.”

Allyn Winslow, who came to New York by way of Texas, was fully involved in the life of his adopted city. His two children, ten-year-old Jessica and eight-year-old Drew, attended public schools. On the morning of June 1, he’d walked his son to school from their Bay Ridge brick house — the one in which his widow, Marcy, had grown up. The couple had been thinking about moving to Park Slope in order to be closer to Prospect Park.

Winslow, who held a master’s degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, had performed on stage in several venues, including the Dallas Theatre Center. He had also acted in small film roles and several television commercials. Of late, he’d been spending more energy on his teaching and journal writing. According to his journal, the New York City marathon in November 1993 would be his last.

Shortly before his death, Winslow had started a vacation from his job at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, housed in the ornate Ansonia Building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. During the week prior to his death, he’d ridden nearly two hundred miles on his new bike — which he’d bought, along with one for his wife, in April.

Marcy Winslow was a legal secretary at the Manhattan law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. In her statement at the sentencing hearing following the trial of her husband’s killer, she demonstrated poise and familiarity with courtroom procedure as she broadened the picture of Allyn Winslow.

“The press only characterized my husband as a father of two and a drama teacher. He was more than that,” she said. “At [the drama academy] where he worked, he was not only a teacher but he was a counselor and a mentor. He was the person who gave the first-year students their welcoming speech. Many of the students told me how inspired they were after hearing his speech and were excited about having him as their teacher.”

Marcy Winslow concluded, “Jerome Nisbett will never know how much suffering he caused on June 1, 1993, and every day thereafter.”

Could Frederick Law Olmsted, with his vision of the civilizing influence of his woods and meadow, have imagined a fourteen-year-old handing a gun to a sixteen-year-old for the purpose of robbery?

A year before Winslow’s death, a published survey of New York City public high school students carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that seven percent carried handguns. One wonders about the truthfulness of the responses. Were some students afraid to admit they carried a gun, or were some ashamed to admit they didn’t?

The U.S. arrest rate for juveniles climbed sixty percent in the decade before 1994, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Youth crime of that period tended to involve wanting something in aid of popularity or prestige: A shiny new mountain bike made an even more attractive target than the latest pair of Nike sneakers.

As he delivered Nisbett’s sentence, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Francis X. Egitto said, “I have seen youngsters in this courtroom take a life for designer jeans, for earrings, and now for a bike... I say this to young people: When you take a gun out on the street for robbery, are you prepared to pay twenty-five years to life for the crime that you commit?”

Which is exactly what Nisbett got as the trigger boy tried as an adult. He is today an inmate at the Eastern Correctional Facility at Napanoch, New York.

In return for agreeing to testify against the others, Robert Brown pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced as a youthful offender to sixteen months to four years. Chad Jackson likewise received a light sentence — two to six years — on his conviction for attempted robbery.

Fourteen-year-old Morris, the boy who wanted a bike, was convicted of murder and sentenced as a juvenile in Brooklyn Family Court, where the sentencing standard is considerably more lenient. Additionally, Morris benefited from an oddity in state law, whereby additional leniency is granted in the event a murder is committed during a failed robbery; after all, Winslow’s mountain bike got away.

When Nisbett was taken off to prison, Marcy Winslow told a reporter that she was satisfied with the sentence, but no, she did not feel better: “My husband is dead.”

Nisbett’s court-appointed lawyer, Edward Friedman, has strong feelings about the trial after more than a decade.

“Who knows if he’s ever going to get out of jail?” said Friedman of his client. “The ringleader was a juvenile,” Friedman added, as if the trial had just ended. “My client had a bike; it was Morris who wanted a bike. Morris passes the gun to Nisbett and says, in effect, Show you’re a man.”

Friedman himself grew up in East Flatbush. He remembers being a kid walking home from summer evening concerts in Prospect Park in the late 1960s and feeling apprehensive, holding tight to his father’s hand. He has moved away from Brooklyn to a suburban town on the south shore of Long Island. So has Marcy Winslow.

Jerome Nisbett was barely literate, as evidenced by his written confession introduced at trial. At the time of the murder, he lived part-time with his mother in Bushwick and part-time with his aunt in Crown Heights. His father was a minister somewhere in the West Indies.

Attorney Howard Weiswasser, who represented Robert Brown, was asked how fourteen-year-olds like Gregory Morris acquire firearms. “Often, they literally find them on the street because someone has thrown away a gun used in a crime,” he said.

Attorney Howard Kirsch defended Morris. After trial, he said of young offenders in general, “These are the most dangerous kids in the world. They have no conscience, no control over their impulses. Their sense of morality hasn’t developed.”

Exactly how were Morris and his buddies caught?

“Like a lot of these kids, they couldn’t stop talking about it,” Kirsch explained. “They did it for street cred, to show how tough they were. If they had any brains, they’d keep it to themselves.” He added: “Once they’re caught, they sing like canaries.”

Why?

“Because they’re kids, because they’re stupid. Basically, they’re punks.”

Is there any defense against punks?

Olmsted’s biographer, Witold Rybczynski, was asked a few years ago what part of the designer’s personality we should emulate today. He responded, “It would be this sense of time, this sense of both patience and looking ahead, of saying there are certain things that take time and you have to plan for them and you just have to be patient.”

A park is a long time in the making, and is never complete. Olmsted planted many trees not much bigger than a broomstick; in placing them, he had to think years, even decades ahead. After construction and planting, Olmsted didn’t walk away. He monitored park maintenance and fretted over any modification of his plans.

The design of a garden, let alone a whole park, is not a game for those requiring instant gratification. There’s an old saw that defines gardening as the slowest of the performing arts — a philosophy that might surely have amused and pleased a drama teacher like Allyn Winslow.

Then there is Olmsted’s philosophy, which in the context of Winslow’s murder is ironic. For Olmsted once wrote:

Sweet Cherry: R.I.P by Christopher Musella

Sunset Park

Spider-Man was ready to save the girl again. Right there in front of the movie theater, the Cobble Hill Cinema. It was a warm night too; I don’t know how he does it, wearing that mask, and I have to wonder if those tights are made of that breathable fabric pro athletes wear. Behind the barricades, beyond the movie cameras and production crews, throngs of Brooklynites stood patiently in the warmth of the first night of summer, just to catch a glimpse of the actor Tobey Maguire donning the web slinger’s red and blue costume, and the damsel-cum-diva, Kirsten Dunst, waiting to be rescued. Meanwhile, in Sunset Park, not far from Cobble Hill, another piece of Brooklyn was waiting to be rescued that night.

Over on 3rd Street there was a block party. The johnny pumps were wide open. In Brooklyn, to beat back the clamoring heat of summer, we open up fire hydrants — what we call johnny pumps — and they spray out a stream of wet, cool relief, a break from the humidity and staleness called city air.

All along the riverfront — Brooklyn Heights, that is, where the famous span anchors us to lower Manhattan — families strolled along eating Grimaldi’s pizza. (Okay, fine, call it Patsy’s. The regulars have been fighting about that name for years.) And some were licking ice-cream cones. Everybody was taking in the last rays of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. With the longest day of the year, you end up with the shortest of nights.

This was all happening on the night of June 21, 2006, in the greatest borough in the world — Brooklyn. Home to Coney Island, Di Fara Pizza (better than Grimaldi’s), Prospect Park, and, if you believe a four-year-old named Gianna Maria, it’s where they make the balloons.

But something else happened that night. Something happened in Sunset Park, a section carved out of the pavement, bordered by the million-dollar lawyers of Park Slope, Russian laborers of Bay Ridge, and the Orthodox Jews of Midwood. That night in Sunset Park, a strip club known as Sweet Cherry, a haven for Mafioso types, drug lords, and sex peddlers, was finally shuttered. The iron gates were pulled and locked for the last time, an ending that the politicians, community boards, and law enforcement agencies had fought to bring about for years.

Sweet Cherry — where dancers took their struts, drugs and money changed hands, and sex was brokered by murderous bouncers — sat in the shadows of religion and justice. Saint Michael’s Roman Catholic Church, its high arching gothic entrance, cherubs and angels smiling on the rest of Brooklyn, was just an avenue away on 42nd Street. The Department of Justice, a square chunk of weathered cement and grimy blue tile, sits on Third Avenue and 29th, stoic and silent as you pass.

And there to complete the unlikely trinity was Sweet Cherry, keeping herself open despite all efforts to lock her down. It kept its stiletto heels dug into the pavement for more than ten years, remaining a growing community concern, with smarmy lawyers taking advantage of the political process that kept the sex trade alive. Heck, even old-time politicos need to cut loose now and then.

But in June of 2006, Lady Liberty, whose torch of justice and light of freedom is visible just a few blocks from the door — right there at the pier — had had enough.

A customer named Jorge misses the place. As he says — Sweet Cherry, rest in peace.

Remorse for a strip club?

Sorrow at the loss of a stage and a pole, strands of fake blond hair soaked with sweat whipping around in time to the shimmy of real live breasts? (No money for implants in this joint.) Sorrow at the passing of a place that inspired what some wags in criminal circles might call — heh-heh! — permanent violence.

How could there be remorse for all that? As we say in Brooklyn, fuhgeddaboudit!

I landed in Brooklyn in 1995. In Park Slope, where the young professionals were moving, where you can now rent a nice closet for about thirteen hundred a month.

Sunset Park is southwest of the Slope, set back from the East River’s edge, its west-east borders resting on a pier at one end and Fourth Avenue on the other. Past Fourth is Park Slope South, as the realtors tout it these days, in hopes of boosting rents for unsuspecting Manhattanites looking to escape and to save some of their Wall Street bonuses for themselves. (Good luck.)

From the pier it is all warehouses, concrete, and pavement. Rail lines for bygone freight cars are exposed in spots, laid across streets with patches of cobblestones where pavement peeled away like so much industrial scab. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a curvy swath of road peppered with potholes and cracks, juts through the neighborhood, veering and bumping riders on their way to or from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, gateway to Staten Island.

To the rear of boxy warehouses that sit like giant blocks piled up at the water’s edge are a scattering of limestone and brick row houses; some wood frame ones too. The views are magnificent: New York Harbor, lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, Lady Liberty, and Governors Island. All this in the panorama of Sunset Park.

The rising palisades of New Jersey lie on the horizon. And across the neighborhood, from Fourth Avenue down to the waterfront, apartments are perched over storefronts; some of the establishments gated in rusty aluminum, others open with vibrant neon, unchanged for years.

I always wondered what somebody’s life would be like living above a storefront. A sense of privacy is lost, I imagine. But if you happen to own the business down below, at least you’ve got a really short commute. I read somewhere that John Gotti kept a little old lady in an apartment up over the Ravenite, a Manhattan social club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. That’s where Gotti held his secret meetings, when the old lady was out shopping. But then the little old lady agreed to cooperate with the feds. They went into her place when she wasn’t home, wired a bug into a lamp so they could listen from a remote van, and that’s how the feds taped his conversations; that’s how they got Sammy “the Bull” Gravano to rat out his don.

In the case of Sweet Cherry, it wasn’t so easy. No federal agent could put a bug in there and hear anything over the mega bump-and-grind decibels pumped out of the sound system.

Sweet Cherry occupied the ground floor of an unremarkable building at the corner of Second Avenue and 42nd Street. Only in New York City, America’s capital of irony, can there be two streets with the same names mere boroughs apart — the lesser-known address of Sweet Cherry versus the world-renowned main stem of Times Square.

The unremarkable building at the Brooklyn corner of 42nd and Second has an apartment upstairs with windows guarded by drawn shades pulled too far to one side, revealing only a slash of darkness beyond.

From the opposite side of the street, I’m walking by on a dreary February afternoon, assessing the remains of the strip club.

There’s a big vertical sign, as tall as the building itself, with a curvy black-and-white silhouette of a dancer, set against a field of fuchsia, beneath the words Sweet Cherry in script. Another sign, this one running horizontal along the wall of the building, is smashed and cockeyed, with exposed dead fluorescent tubes. To the left of the tubes is a third sign with red lettering on a white board, also cockeyed and hanging from wires. It reads, BUILDING FOR SALE BY OWNER.

A delivery guy with a plastic sack of Chinese food dangling from his wrist is banging on the door of the apartment, checking the order stub for the address, looking up at the windows, waiting for some sign of life. Nothing.

I glance up at the windows again, and I can’t believe anybody’s inside of that apartment, or wanting to be. It’s all the kind of charcoal-gray so thick you can practically feel it. I imagine cuts of light trying to pierce through the cloth shade of a lamp; the shade is streaked in cigarette-yellow. All in all, not my kind of room.

A man appears at the corner. A big guy, a Latino from the hood. He attempts to help the Chinese delivery guy by yelling up to the window, something indecipherable to me. No matter how much the big guy hollers — nothing. The delivery guy gives up, disgusted at the waste of his time. I cross the street and ask the big guy what’s up in my own weak Spanglish.

“Good place to let loose, you know, good times,” he answers me in English.

I ask him his name. Jorge, he says.

“Some people got hurt here,” I tell Jorge.

“I don’t know about that stuff. Never happened when I was here.”

“What about the bad stuff I heard about — murder, dope, sex for sale?”

“Ah, come on, man. This is a bordello, bad things can happen. You don’t like bad things, you don’t go, right? Besides, it’s all dead and gone to me.”

It wasn’t murder, drugs, or intimations of rape that brought down Sweet Cherry. It was, ultimately, a decision — a cooperative, multi-agency effort, according to law enforcement types — that finally did it.

To be sure, three homicides in as many months helped: Irving Matos, manager of the club’s bouncers, was shot dead in his apartment; Wayne Tyson, a club patron, met the same fate as his associate Matos, only Tyson was knifed; and Edwin “Eric” Mojica, who ran a security firm that pimped out work to bouncers, was killed a few weeks after his buddy Matos was cancelled.

Usually it’s good things that happen in threes; at least that’s what they taught me in Sunday school. The cops needed an angle to shut the club once and for all, and what better angle can you ask for than homicide-times-three?

Murder was grist for a community board hearing in early 2005. Angry residents — the hard-working, daily-grind subway-commuter types — stood, one furrowed brow after another, demanding that Sweet Cherry be shuttered. We’ve got respectable businesses and families working and living side by side, they all said. Our kids are not safe with drunks from the night before stumbling around in the morning.

On went the grievances, one after another after another, from the frightened families. The politicos offered up the standard retorts and compulsory agreements.

Then lawyers on the Sweet Cherry payroll had their say.

In the end, and very quietly, the board granted renewal of a liquor license for Sweet Cherry — good through October 2007.

And the families were left wondering, who’s paying around here?

I ask my new friend Jorge what really happened in these parts.

“I used to go there a lot, to get away from the kids and the television,” he says. “You know, in Mexico, we never had a television. I come to America and my wife, she wants two. There’s one in the living room and one in the bedroom. I only watch soccer.” He slurps from a paper coffee cup. “So, I like to come here and meet my friends, and have some whiskey, and watch some naked girls. We had a good time.”

Didn’t it get rough sometimes? Wasn’t he scared?

“I seen some beatings, you know? Crazy shit, but you turn your head.” He thinks for a second and reasons, “If you aren’t getting hit, you stay out of it. But I heard stories, you know? You go anywhere long enough, you hear stories. They had one good fucking lawyer, I know that.”

The phone rang in the Court Street law offices of Lance G. Lazzaro, counsel for Sweet Cherry. On the end of the line was Jimmy DeNicola, owner of the club. After the hellos and badabings, the conversation probably went something like this:

Lazzaro more than likely commenced to educate his client about the tide that turned sleaze to please in Manhattan’s Times Square. Walk West 42nd Street from Seventh to Eighth Avenue in 1993 and you were greeted by XXX this and All Nude that. After the ’94 mayoral election, Disney’s mouse moved in and pretty soon the strip clubs, private viewing booths, and lap dances moved out — with many thanks going to the new Brooklyn-born mayor, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, crusader for the quality of life he said New Yorkers wanted.

So, big showcase theaters for glittery productions such as The Lion King transformed old Times Square into the new Square Times. Out went the shops selling sex, in came Starbucks and lattes. Even the little old guy with a neatly creased paper hat who sold hot dogs and burgers under the marquee of a dilapidated movie palace got the boot.

But what about the local sex-flick joints that were already operating before the new zoning law went into effect? With their business permits protected by grandfather clauses, they could still peddle triple-X videos and DVDs so long as they also offered some movies you wouldn’t mind taking home to the tykes. So, while a couple of wholesome titles were displayed in the windows, few copies were actually in stock. No such problem, however, with the likes of Debbie Does Dallas. Which could still be viewed in back if so desired, courtesy of a private booth. Just watch where you sit.

Likewise in outer-borough locales like Sunset Park, sex joints, so to speak, had grandfather clauses. They might be on Mayor Giuliani’s radar, but they were still open and doing brisk business.

Sweet Cherry opened in 1996. Joe and Jimmy DeNicola bought the property from a Manhattan Beach businessman named Louis Kapelow.

It’s been said that drugs killed the Mafia. The original bent-noses despised drugs. Colombo, Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese — none of them wanted their soldiers trading in dope. It was bad for business.

We all know what happened. As history tends to repeat itself, bad business came to Sweet Cherry.

Jorge tells me about a spring night in 1999, when Sweet Cherry was home to dancers with names like Chastity (really) and Jennifer (ditto).

“I liked it, you didn’t have to wear nothing fancy. No jackets,” explains Jorge. “I don’t own a jacket... My brother Manuel, he comes in with me. In like two minutes or something, Manuel’s off to the back room with a lap dancer. He comes out smiling about ten minutes later. Then this other guy comes in and walks up to the bar. He’s a gringo. He goes to the back with another gringo. Leaves about five minutes later. That’s when things started going wrong around here.”

Later, I check out what Jorge was telling me. As the press reported at the time, the story goes something like this:

A stranger walks up to the bar, a small baggie of cocaine is “exchanged with a patron” for twenty bucks. The stranger records the sale, and does so again on a number of successive nights. The stranger works for the NYPD Narcotics Division out of the Brooklyn South precinct.

Counselor Lazzaro gives his client a warning along the lines of, They’re going after the club, Jimmy.

Jimmy’s likely response? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

It meant the cops never named an actual person or persons dealing drugs. They only named the place — Sweet Cherry. Narcs demonstrated a “pattern of activity,” as prescribed by statute. In this case, the activity at Sweet Cherry was drug dealing. Establish that in a court of law, and the judge will say drugs, booze, naked women — they don’t mix, so shut it down.

Jimmy might have wanted a personal meeting with this stranger from Brooklyn South. In which case Lazzaro might have told Jimmy that hostility would be bad for business.

Lazzaro’s final advice? Probably: Keep your mouth shut, don’t do anything stupid, and we’ll keep you open.

An investigation proceeded, based on the narc’s account and his catalogue of illicit drug sales. The district attorney of Kings County brought the matter to state court.

The argument Lazzaro and his cocounsels put up was simple: People in the club have their backs to the bar because they’re watching the stage — and who wouldn’t be when Chastity and Jennifer were performing? Consequently, house management was unaware of drug transactions since customers’ hands were not observable.

On August 5, 1999, the judge ordered the temporary closure of Sweet Cherry and imposed a fine of $25,000. Big deal.

No doubt Jimmy DeNicola proclaimed his lawyer a genius. No doubt the genius told Jimmy to cool it.

Clients, a lawyer once told me, are the same as a doctor’s patients: They don’t listen to sound advice.

Staring at the gated front door, Jorge leans back, then forward, as if looking for something. He tells me, “It was like the judge took my hangout away. Then I seen this big dude out front one day. It was real hot. He was cleaning the front of the store. He says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be back.’”

That was August. Late in September, Sweet Cherry reopened.

On December 8, 1999, nine-year veteran NYPD Detective Joe Continanzi double-parked his car on Second Avenue. It was well after midnight, moving toward dawn. The air that night was unusually mild for a New York awaiting Christmas. Later in the day, New Yorkers would gather in Central Park to celebrate the nineteenth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. Continanzi’s girlfriend, Michele Miranda, was in the passenger seat next to him.

I like to think that if they were listening to the radio, Lennon’s “Instant Karma” was playing.

Michele slid out of the car to do what she came to do, which was to walk into Sweet Cherry and come back out with her friend, a dancer at the club. But when Michele returned alone, a group of loiterers in front of the club grabbed at her. Joe jumped out of the car. He didn’t get very far.

At the hospital, Joe told his sergeant, They jumped me. The doctor told him to lie still.

Lucky, the doctor said. The stab wounds missed Joe’s major organs. The doctor left and Joe finished telling his sergeant how he had been kicked, hit with bottles left and right, punched, and stabbed. The sergeant told Joe they nailed two of the droolers, and both had confessed.

Jorge was there that night.

“You spent a lot of time here, didn’t you?” I ask.

“Yeah, I know, some people think me and my wife, we’re not good,” says Jorge. “But it’s okay. She knows I don’t do anything bad. I come home to her... But that night even I get scared. That was some fuckin’ fight. Bitches slapping bitches, bottles breaking everywhere. I got out in a hurry. See, I was alone that night. Manuel was at work. That cop took a beating.”

Officer Continanzi’s lawsuit against the club failed. Lazzaro’s argument this time, that the bouncer’s responsibility ended at the door, prevailed. What happened outside the club, on the street, was not the club’s responsibility.

Sweet Cherry, still alive.

March 8, 2004. A cold rainy afternoon. A sixteen-year-old girl walks into the club. She lies about her age to the manager, Gabriel Bertonazzi. She needs work, she says, and she can dance, she says. She can dance real nice.

At this, a grin may have found its way to Bertonazzi’s double-chinned face. Dance, he might have said. Dance for me. He lets her know that he is the sole judge of talent for the club.

Inside, the smell of beer and liquor seeps from the floorboards in the heat and humidity of a place like Sweet Cherry, with its backlit mirror behind the bar revealing only the emptiness she feels as she removes her clothes.

Outside, the skies are steel-gray and cold as big trucks rumble through the neighborhood across broken cobblestoned streets. In the distance, salsa music plays on a truck radio somewhere.

Inside, a girl of sixteen shivers.

The man wants her to dance. In the world of third-rate strip clubs, it’s the same old story. You have to show the man what you’ve got. She steps back and looks around. This is what I have to do. Fine, this is what I’ll do.

Guitars rip through the silence of the bar. Like taking a bullwhip to a hummingbird, the guitar strings drown out the distant salsa. Stage music that twelve hours ago was in synch with the night is now out of sorts, like a bad suit at a black-tie affair.

She dances. She takes off her shirt.

She is alone in a room, with just this very large man watching her writhe to the music. In the same old story, she loses her dignity and whatever is left of her underage innocence as fast as she loses her clothes.

She dances in nothing but her g-string and spike heels, moving wildly to the syncopated rhythm, pretending not to look at the man’s big eyes. Then the music stops. She turns her naked body, perspiring beneath hot stage lights, and there’s a drop of sweat on a nipple, other drops between her breasts.

She’s hired. She gets what she wants, a job dancing, where a friend told her she’d make good money. It’s what she didn’t want that would haunt her, she would later tell the cops. She didn’t want him.

She had no choice, really. It’s just part of that same old story.

She kept dancing there, and she kept making money. She kept taking the pill too.

And at Sweet Cherry, the beat went on.

Then, in November, the raid came down.

Vice detectives raid hard and fast. The music scratches to a halt. Patrons don’t run as hard as they do in the movies. They think about it, but the place is surrounded by cops and you can’t get away.

The cops only wanted to check the IDs anyway. They checked everybody, including the dancers. Vice cops asked questions quick and fast, no time to think about answers, leaving the truth nearly as naked as the dancer: You’re only sixteen, were you here against your will, were you forced to have sex with anyone, were you raped...?

During the course of the next few hours, she told an avuncular detective a tale of how she had come to this unfortunate station stop in her life. A true tale of family dysfunction — and whose family isn’t dysfunctional? She told them about Bertonazzi, whom the detective was pleased to arrest on charges of rape and endangering the welfare of a minor.

A quick search online tells me that Bertonazzi made his $5,000 bail and was back to work a few days later.

I ask Jorge about the dancer. Jorge says that he remembers her. “She could dance. And let me tell you something, she had some pretty nice titties. They didn’t bounce that much. We all thought the tits were no good — not real, you know? But Manuel used some of his paycheck for a lap dance from her, and he touched them and said they were some real titties. Manuel don’t lie to me. He’d get smacked down if he did.”

She was only sixteen, I think, just a girl.

“You know something I don’t?” Jorge asks.

This is when it dawns on me that Jorge isn’t just some local who used to drop by to watch girls dance. The guy is an informer for the cops and the D.A., and his name probably isn’t Jorge.

“I think when you get into some sort of trouble, maybe you catch yourself and you make some changes,” says Jorge, or whatever. “Maybe you behave a little better and you keep the heat off. That’s how things work. Do your thing, just keep it quiet, keep the heat off. No one will bother you.”

Logic evidently unheeded.

I checked the court records. In March of 2005, the drugs charges came back again. The “pattern of activity” allegation was once more lodged against Sweet Cherry. Undercover cops bought two bags of cocaine and a bag of marijuana. Also, according to the cops, another trade started to surface: prostitution.

“This guy starts working here,” Jorge tells me. “His name is Irving. We call him Irv. Anyhow, Irv runs the door. He says if I need a girl, talk to him.”

Irving Matos was in his early forties and a respected man of his community. He was a member of HANC, the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County. Vice president of the board of directors, no less. He was also manager of the bouncers at Sweet Cherry. Some guys, you never know what they have under their fingernails.

Irving had a friend in the club: Wayne Tyson, a run-ofthe-mill hustler and sometime bouncer who ran a small prostitution ring out of his apartment in Brownsville.

Tyson was a frequent customer at Sweet Cherry. That’s where he met Matos. And that’s where the two of them met Stephen Sakai.

“I didn’t like that guy Tyson. He dressed nice, but he never smiled,” says Jorge. “I don’t like him the first time I meet him. And he’s the new bouncer. Sometimes he worked the door. If he’s got some freaky vibe or something, maybe I go in but maybe I don’t.”

Sakai, on the other hand, was a regular-looking guy, a tall black man, well-groomed. He got a bouncer job at Sweet Cherry through an agency that doled out that sort of work. The man who ran the agency was a guy called Eric Mojica.

During the course of a year, Matos, Tyson, and Sakai had their own inside gig operating out of Sweet Cherry, according to investigators for the Brooklyn D.A.

Bouncing at the door was their front, investigators claimed; steering patrons to prostitutes and skimming profits was the real action. The allegation went like this: Sakai got the nod from Matos and sent the patron his way; Matos sent him off to Tyson; Tyson got the john to the girl, collected the money afterward, and shared it with his partners.

But Tyson had his very own inside-inside thing, investigators said. A few of the girls interested in moonlighting on top of their moonlighting were given his address in Brownsville. No sense in Tyson passing up ancillary profits.

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to Sakai that he was getting burned. So say the investigators. He expressed his concerns to some of his Sweet Cherry colleagues and, as these things happen in the demimonde of bouncing, word got to the boss.

Eric Mojica controlled many of the bouncing gigs in New York City. He never cared much for Sakai — too cool for his taste. And just to show his regard, Mojica fired him.

After he lost his gig at Sweet Cherry, investigators said, Sakai was angry and took it out on Tyson — for reasons unclear to this day. He paid a visit to Brownsville, to a small apartment on Eastern Parkway, according to the investigators. He brought a knife, they said.

Tyson opened his door to Sakai, who confirmed his presence during questioning by police. Tyson had no reason to fear anything was amiss. The door closed. Tyson couldn’t have anticipated Sakai’s rage, investigators posit. Blood flew from Tyson’s head and neck. He was left alive, but bleeding to death.

A few days later, police visited Tyson’s neighbors in Brownsville to ask questions about the bloodied corpse they found in his apartment. Questions were also asked around the club, some of the replacement bouncers not seeming too disturbed that Tyson was gone. No one offered up anything. If you don’t say anything, you don’t know anything, and you don’t get in trouble with anyone.

By November 2005, Matos had grown seriously worried. Tyson was dead. He hadn’t seen Stephen Sakai in weeks. And there was no word on the street either.

For the time being, the johns kept coming to Sweet Cherry, and they kept getting what they were there for, and even if the business was slowing down, it now made up a trinity of sorts that was Sweet Cherry’s economy: dancing, drugs, and sex.

And one regular patron dead — so far.

Irving Matos went home one night to his basement apartment and did what his sort of mogul does: He eased himself into a lazy-boy lounger and watched television.

There was a knock outside, and then an insistent doorbell. He got up to answer it. He saw it was Sakai, looking his usual cool. Matos invited him in. They sat there and watched the TV.

After some brief catching up on the news about Sweet Cherry, Sakai said it was time for him to shove off. Don’t get up, he told Matos. I’ll show myself out.

Then he pulled a pistol from his coat and fired into the rear of Matos’s skull.

Sakai confessed as much to the police.

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?

Editors’ note[1]

The ghetto never sleeps, mister policeman by Robert Leuci

Atlantic Yards

My 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.

I could see faces at windows, shapes in hallways, forms traveling in and out of the darkness. Believe this when I tell you, the ghetto never sleeps.

I had been a visitor in many ghetto apartments — sometimes invited, most times not. I knew that on the coldest of nights, ice formed inside the glass windows and on the sills of those apartments. I had seen ice on the floors and on bathroom mirrors. Slum landlords regulated heat in that part of town so that none rose after 6 o’clock in the evening.

My father was right. Small wonder these people wanted to burn those buildings, equipped as they were with rats and leaky faucets that ran ice water and ceilings that dropped lead chips of paint into cribs where infants slept. I once saw a baby girl whose toes had been gnawed to stumps by a rat. I saw that and wondered what in the hell country I was in anyway.

The next time, when I spoke to my father I said, “You were right. Were you ever. Jesus!”

He smiled.

A recollection. Voices and faces. Tales like threads over and around a piece of time. So mindful I am of my experiences in Brooklyn that nothing goes away. Now, I can see myself as I was then: None of it was real, like I was in a movie, some dodo up on the screen, some character in my skin making his way through a world he didn’t understand.

I’m young and healthy. The drinking age in New York City was eighteen, but they wouldn’t serve me without ID until I was thirty. Baby Face, they called me. The cops and the street people, they all called me Baby Face.

Today I look in the mirror. “Baby Face,” I say to the reflection. “Yeah, right.”

I see myself sitting in homeroom at William H. Maxwell Vocational High School in East New York one morning. A bright fall day in Brooklyn and the teacher walks into the room. Passing as a high school student, I’m there to buy dope. The teacher smiles nervously at me, squints, turns around, then turns back and looks at me again.

The teacher’s name was Veltri, I called him “Red” when I was the pitcher and he was the great glove and strong hitting shortstop of our own John Adams High School baseball team in Ozone Park. Later, in the boy’s room, Red asked me, “How are you doing?” I said fine, that I was there to do something that had to be done. I told him I was a cop. He said, “Yeah, I figured.”

After a week at Red’s school, my job was done.

I was now standing in the principal’s office. I remember how that dip-shit came at me, how angry he’d been that I’d bought drugs from fourteen of his students.

He was horrified. He unbuttoned his coat and loosened his tie and shouted that I’d crossed the inviolable threshold of his school.

A great sadness came crashing down on me. I thought I had accomplished something good, something worthwhile, something that needed to be done. It was the first time I realized that although the world’s good people said they wanted evil exposed, in fact that was often the last thing they wanted.

The image I had of myself as a hero, as someone who was willing to do the work of an undercover cop — all of that was so much crap. This dip-shit principal didn’t want the crap; he wanted me to go away. Rocking back and forth, getting reamed in that man’s office, looking down at him seated behind his desk, I felt a swell of hopelessness; a claustrophobic sensation, as if I’d suffocate to death if I didn’t get out of there.

He berated me, telling me that I was taking advantage of his students — his kids, he called them. This being the same man who only a week earlier was so happy to see me, so pleased that someone would come and help figure out if there was a drug problem at his school.

Full-blown into his rant, I got this picture in my head of a fourteen-year-old kid in jeans and a sweatshirt, a knowing smirk on his face. The little piss-pot telling me he could get all the drugs I wanted, whatever I wanted, as long as I had the cash. Guns he could get me too, this little shit, this tough guy with the long hair flowing over his shoulders. A good-looking boy, the image of one of my high school buddies from a few years back. But my buddy wasn’t selling drugs, this piss-pot was.

Piss-pot’s mother was the president of the PTA, an important person. As was this man, this dip-shit of a high school principal. As were the many others to come later: judges, prosecutors, politicians, chiefs of police, some of my family, my friends, journalists, television commentators, cops — so many cops. Faces in my not-so-distant future, scores of good citizens, my unborn children — all of them asking me about similar and different cases. Why didn’t I mind my own business? I tried, trust me. I gave it my best shot. It just wasn’t possible.

Imagine what arresting strung-out junkies would do to you. Or how depressed you’d get from collaring people who couldn’t find their hands and feet. Between the crazy shit you saw both in the street and courthouses, and what you personally lost as far as moral perspective was concerned — being there, seeing it all up close and personal — well, if you had any brains at all you would see that it all boils down to a collective nervous breakdown of a person’s system.

Your eye saw it but your brain couldn’t really take it in. Like this one:

I’ve told it before — many times, several versions — but this is what actually happened.

It was late on a Friday when I walked into the Brooklyn arraignment court. It was a busy night, the place was jammed to the rafters and it turned the courtroom into a spectacle of craziness. It was a bazaar of victims and defendants, manipulators of all sorts.

I spotted Richard Smalls — “Sweet Dick,” they called him. He was standing against a wall amongst a bevy of his working girls. Dick was an informant of mine, a “benevolent” pimp with processed hair and sharkskin suits. He looked to all the world like Sugar Ray Robinson.

Sweet Dick didn’t bully or threaten his women so much as he charmed them. I guess he told them he loved them and made all sorts of ridiculous vows to protect them. Out of fear and loneliness a lot of street girls hooked up with pimps, slick guys who spared no expense or time winning and wooing them. Dick would keep at a new street girl with relentless pressure, over and over until she joined his crew. Most of these women didn’t have much going for them in the way of self-reliance. Sweet Dick’s women wore wigs and face paint and were street-pretty. They were heroin addicts, all of them.

I remember the way Dick put his hands on his hips, turned to look around the courtroom, giving the place his I-don’t-need-this-shit look. Then he turned back to me and said, “Man, you gotta help me out here. My brother got busted by some precinct cop — bunch of bullshit. The kid didn’t do nothing but ride in a car. The car was hot but he never knew it.”

I asked, “What would you like me to do?”

The five women standing behind Sweet Dick, as if on cue, gave me perplexed, piercing looks.

“You can go and talk to the D.A., have his bail lowered or something,” one of them said.

The assistant district attorney calling the arraignment calendar was — here, I’ll call him “Joe.” Joe was attorney for the state of New York, and that was unbearable to him. He longed to be in private practice and hauling down boxes of cash. Joe was an attractive guy, erudite in a Brooklyn sort of way. He knew his way around the courthouse, knew how to get things done.

Favoring navy blue pin-striped suits, off-blue shirts, and red ties, Joe had a full head of curly black hair. You’d make him as somebody who could work a lounge in Vegas.

“I have an informant here whose brother is on the docket,” I said to Joe. “Can you help me out? I’d like to get his bail lowered.”

He gave me a look, a supercilious grin, a look of both expectation and disbelief. I recall that it gave me a funny feeling, that look of his.

“Does he have any money?” Joe asked.

I went to Sweet Dick and asked him about money.

Dick inquired of his ladies, “Does anyone have any cash?”

The ladies searched their pocketbooks, by which I mean their bras, their panties. After much searching and shuffling about, they came up with about five hundred dollars in rolled-up fives, tens, and twenties.

I gave Joe what I thought was bail money — the whole rolled-up, scrounged-together hooker cash. He told me to go and get the prisoner. I just about lost it when Joe paroled the guy right there on the spot — into my custody.

“Whoa!” I said. “Wait a minute.”

“Parole’s better than low bail,” said Joe, smiling again. “Or no bail at all.”

The five hundred went south.

I left the courthouse that night and walked over to Court Street, to an Italian restaurant and bar called Café Roma. We called it “Chick’s place” on account of the owner, whose actual name was Charlie.

There was hardly anyone there. Just Charlie — Chick behind the stick — and some guy at the far end of the bar sitting in semi-darkness, sipping an espresso.

Chick was the most urbane of bar owners, a Brooklyn guy with a good education. Something of a philosopher too, with a fine understanding of the city, how it worked and what it took to own a bar and restaurant and survive. We were pretty good friends, and he was willing to take my word for it when I told him that the courthouse was a zoo and the lawyers were all fucking thieves.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Charlie, it’s complicated. But take my word, it wears you out.”

He looked at me close, then turned and looked down the bar. He turned back to me and said, “You should tell that man at the end of the bar. He’s a law professor.”

“Really?”

The professor hunched forward over the bar. He was wearing a gray suit that covered up the broad shoulders of an athlete. This was my chance to say something indignant, my chance to hold forth with a resounding, irate speech. There were any number of bizarre stories I could have told the professor — some incredible, some beyond that, the absurd and the ordinary.

“I understand you’re a law professor,” I said. “Well, I’d like to know what the hell you’re teaching these characters, because I’ll tell you, you go into that courthouse, it’s the same as the street. You need a scorecard to figure out the good guys from the bad guys. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

This professor had a way of glaring back at you when you spoke to him. Like he was calculating the right moment to cut in.

“Listen,” I told him. “Lawyers run the show. They’re the trendsetters, the role models. The prosecutors, judges, the defense counsels — they’re all lawyers.”

I remember how offended he looked as he explained to me that the vast majority of people practicing law were good people. They were dedicated, honest, and hard-working. So he didn’t know what I was talking about.

Everything he said was said softly, as if he were talking to himself. He was not trying to persuade me, simply stating a fact.

“Look to yourself,” he said. “How have you been behaving?”

The way he smiled made me think about the priests when I was a kid, how clean and innocent they all seemed. How they wouldn’t believe any of this I was saying about lawyers. If you tried to tell a priest about a thieving lawyer, he’d answer you with a question: So, tell me, how are you behaving?

When I was leaving Chick’s place, Charlie turned to me to ask, “So you talked to him?”

I nodded.

“That guy, the professor. He’s someone you should know. He’s going to be an important man someday.”

“He’s a professor, Charlie. Professors are naïve.”

“Not him. He was one hell of an athlete and he’s smart as they come. You remember what I tell you, this guy — this Mario Cuomo guy — he’ll be an important man someday.”

“Sure, sure,” I said to Charlie. “I bet he’ll be.”

I would run into Mario Cuomo now and again at Chick’s. We’d talk about the legal system, cops and lawyers, the courthouse and the streets. Blah-blah-blah — as if I could really tell him what it was I did in the streets.

Mostly he told me things. He was full of humanity. He was an old-fashioned, incorruptible moralist. I remember wishing to God I could talk like him, then wishing to God I could understand what the hell he was saying.

The brass were always telling us how we could win the war on drugs and wipe out the great plague. Their weekly memos and bulletins were quite inspiring.

I hasten to point out, we cops were not stupid. When we went out into the street up against that ocean of drugs, you couldn’t help but swallow in shame and complicity. Even if you didn’t pay attention you’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see that somebody was bullshitting somebody.

There are police stories and maxims that are passed down like legends from old-timers to rookies and from fathers to sons. For example: “You get pressed so hard they make you so crazy, they threaten and scream and call you motherfucker. You tell them if they don’t back off, if they don’t cool down, you’ll take this stick and shove it up their ass.”

I knew Robert Volpe, worked with him in the narcotics division. He was one of the kind ones, extremely talented. A fine artist, he had showings of his paintings at important galleries in Manhattan. There was not an ounce of white racism in his blood. His cop son Justin, a muscular guy with a Dick Tracy chin, is doing thirty years in prison for taking the stick end of a plunger to Abner Louima’s rectum in a highly publicized police-brutality case in 1997.

Justin Volpe is now a legend. When you talk to cops, and I do, they shake their heads when his name comes up. “Honest to God,” they say, “who’d believe it. Was that crazy or what?”

There are no mitigating circumstances, but there are some points that few people understand. First, Justin was engaged to a black woman, so it’s doubtful that racism played a role in his madness. Steroids, I think, may have played a role. But who really knows? His father, a truly decent man, dropped dead from a heart attack after visiting his disgraced son in prison.

The intersections of Fourth Avenue, Atlantic Avenue, and Flatbush Avenue constituted a drug marketplace that never shut down. An island stood at the heart of where those avenues came together, and on that island was a brightly lit stand where you could buy coffee, sodas, pizza, and soft-serve ice cream. There was an outsized Bickford’s cafeteria across the street, and a block south on Fourth was a doughnut shop. The stand, the cafeteria, and the doughnut shop were gathering places for junkies that went strong twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

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:

So it was for me on those Brooklyn streets.

The morgue boys by Thomas Adcock