Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

In which two teams compete. One team crouches into a single-file line, each person holding the waist of the person ahead. Members of the second team try one-by-one to hop atop the “pony” and to stay on for a certain amount of time before they’re shaken off.

Fun-time monsters by Errol Louis

East Flatbush

Kayson Pearson and Troy Hendrix, already convicted of first-degree murder, spent their final moments in court in one final show of murderous bravado.

“I have no regrets,” said Hendrix.

“Me and my brother, Troy, we’re the fun-time monsters,” said Pearson. He was smiling.

Pearson was still grinning when New York State Supreme Court Justice James Starkey ordered the pair to serve another twenty-two years in prison on top of the crushing murder sentence they had already received — life plus twenty-five years.

The sentence meant that even if some legal fluke nullified their life sentences, Pearson and Hendrix would spend forty-seven years behind bars. Neither man is eligible for parole.

It’s about as much prison time as you can get in a state like New York that has effectively abolished the death penalty. (New York has not executed anyone since 1963. The state still has a death penalty law on the books, but in June 2004 it was declared unconstitutional by the state’s highest court. There are no prisoners on New York’s death row.)

As of this writing in late 2007, Pearson and Hendrix are being held in solitary confinement — locked down for up to twenty-three hours a day. They will almost certainly die behind bars. But it’s not an excessive punishment, considering the vile and vicious things they did.

On April 24, 2003, Pearson and Hendrix abducted a pretty, petite twenty-one-year-old college student named Romona Moore off the street in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood. She was walking along Kings Highway, a well-traveled road, around 7 o’clock that evening.

It’s not clear exactly how Pearson and Hendrix got Romona off the street and into the basement of 5807 Snyder Avenue. The most likely scenario is that they simply attacked and dragged her into their lair — a move that might have been risky, given how many cars travel along Kings Highway and its side streets, but not impossible.

It’s likely, too, that the monsters employed a wicked charm in luring Romona to the vicinity of the small house where they attacked her. Both men, it turned out, were good at sweet-talking young women. They had a knack for appearing normal and friendly just long enough to put their prey at ease — before erupting in savage violence.

Pearson was twenty-one, Hendrix was nineteen. They knew nothing about the young woman they would butcher, although she lived only a few blocks from Hendrix.

Romona, the only child of Elle Carmichael, arrived in Brooklyn at age four when her mother moved from Guyana, part of a tide of Caribbean newcomers who turned East Flatbush into a bustling black neighborhood full of ambitious entrepreneurs and hard-working civil servants.

The deal was simple, and understood from the slums of Kingston to the hills of Trinidad: You could trade status in the Caribbean for opportunity in the States. It was common to find men and women who had been engineers, administrators, or bankers in the Caribbean working as maids, cooks, janitors, and cab drivers in Brooklyn, often with the prickly impatience of people eager to regain their stations in life.

They bought homes, started families, joined churches, and saved their pennies. Some kept two passports, and thereby dual citizenship, sending their children to stay with relatives in Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Barbados, Grenada, or Guyana every summer — all with an eye toward a triumphant retirement someday back on their sun-drenched islands. What began as a small Caribbean colony in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century grew by leaps and bounds over the decades; by the 1980s, East Flatbush was an island community with its own robust civic associations, political clubs, restaurants, and grocery stores.

The proud islanders who built the community never let the West Indian lilt leave their voices. But many grew to love their new home, and either sank roots in Brooklyn or joined New York’s age-old, working-class pilgrimage to the suburbs.

Romona was part of this immigrant journey, growing up with five cousins in the heart of Caribbean Brooklyn. She was dark-skinned with a bright, warm smile. One of her professors at Hunter College called Romona “very proper and very formal” in class. “She was the type of student who you would feel wouldn’t answer your questions but suddenly would come with a very smart response,” he said.

In her third year at Hunter, Romona didn’t have a special boyfriend, although she did have plenty of friends, along with a 2.8 grade point average. She was studying psychology and preparing to vault her family forward with a career in medicine. Romona was going places.

All that came to a halt on April 24, when Romona went to visit a male friend in the neighborhood and trade some music CDs. From there, she planned to walk to a Burger King on the corner of Church and Remsen Avenues, about a block from her home.

She never made it.

After grabbing her off the street, Pearson and Hendrix held Romona prisoner in the filthy basement apartment for at least three days. They stripped and bound her, putting a heavy chain around her neck and connecting it to her hands behind her back. Then they took turns beating, raping, and sodomizing her between bouts of swilling booze and smoking marijuana.

The basement was a house of horrors. Police found rubber monster masks hanging in the apartment, along with pinup photos of women in chains.

In that same room, Pearson and Hendrix burned the young woman with cigarettes — three circles just under her eye in a triangle meant to look like a dog’s paw, a sign of the Bloods gang the monsters claimed to belong to.

Pearson and Hendrix weren’t hard-core gang-bangers: In fact, Brooklyn is a world away from cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, where highly organized sets hold and defend turf. More likely, the pair were playing at being tough guys, knowing just enough gang lore to think burning Romona’s face might be a cool thing to do.

Later, at trial, the burns didn’t get much attention; the focus was on other brutalities inflicted by Pearson and Hendrix. They mutilated Romona while she was alive, hacking at her hands and feet with a saw.

“Classic sociopaths,” is how Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes would describe the pair.

At least one person saw Romona’s agony unfolding.

Ramondo Jack, a childhood pal of Hendrix’s, had moved from Brooklyn, but was in town visiting his uncle and other relatives in the old neighborhood when he ran into Pearson and Hendrix. The pair brought him into the basement, poured a few drinks, and displayed their handiwork. They showed off Romona like a trophy, pulling back a sheet to display the innocent woman they had defiled and brutalized and chained like a dog.

“He lifted up the covers and I saw this female laying there,” Jack later told a reporter. “She had a bruise on one of her hands and one of her feet. She had bandages on one of her hands and one of her feet. And she was bleeding from the middle of her face. And one of her eyes was swollen. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

“Say hi, bitch!” Pearson ordered Romona, according to Jack.

“Her voice was low — teary. One of ’em tried to saw one of her hands and her foot,” Jack later told a jury. “They both had smirks on their faces, like no cares.”

Romona Moore, three days into her ordeal, bloodied and beaten, quietly begged Jack to help her. The psychology major even kept her composure enough to try and play on Jack’s sympathy.

“You seem nicer,” she told the last outsider to see her alive.

Romona was wrong: Jack was not nicer. A nice person — hell, a normal, compassionate person — would have walked out of the makeshift torture chamber and immediately called the cops. Not Ramondo Jack. He’d moved out of the tough Brooklyn neighborhood years ago and started a family in Maryland. But he clung to the idiotic, immoral code of the street and its first commandment, Thou Shalt Not Snitch.

“I left,” he would later tell the jury. “I went home. I wasn’t happy about it. I was bothered.”

Just not bothered enough to tell anybody who could help.

And so Ramondo Jack put the incident out of his mind and went shopping, he told cops.

He will go through life knowing he lacked the spine to make an anonymous 911 call that might have saved a desperate girl’s life. Jack’s refusal to act reflects a shocking moral collapse in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, in which witnesses to vicious, inexcusable crimes keep their mouths shut and refuse to notify police or cooperate in any way.

For a few witnesses, silence is borne of the legitimate fear of being harmed by drug dealers or other urban predators. But for many others, like the cowardly Ramondo Jack, silence is immoral apathy — a desire to appear cool and tough like the neighborhood gangsters, but in reality a weak-minded refusal to take responsibility for stemming the violence and chaos that have claimed countless lives and even entire neighborhoods.

The syndrome was on display in Baltimore in 2004, where drug dealers brazenly sold an underground video titled Stop Snitchin’. The video featured dealers flashing guns and openly threatening to kill anyone who might dare to testify against them. Startled cops used the video to round up and prosecute the dealers, but not before Stop Snitchin’ and a companion T-shirt became runaway hits in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, including Brooklyn.

“The most frustrating thing is while you’re pulling your hair out of your head looking for the girl, these people directly across the street know — saw and know that a girl’s being tied up and held in the fuckin’ basement,” said Detective Mike Hinrichs, who took charge of the Moore case. “And nobody calls the police. Where are their heads? So far up their asses, I don’t know.”

About the only thing Ramondo Jack did for the doomed girl was to gently chide her captors.

“I was like, ‘What’s wrong with you all?’” he said.

Pearson and Hendrix just shrugged, and told him, “It’s already said and done. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Pearson and Hendrix were uneducated losers, the product of families so failed and broken that Hendrix’s grandmother did not know, or never cared to ask, about the makeshift torture chamber in her own home. Not even when Hendrix and Pearson lured a second woman off the street and raped her in the Snyder Avenue basement near Romona’s dead, battered body.

On the morning of April 28, 2003, the second victim, a fifteen-year-old student, arrived at school too late and found the doors locked. Hendrix was hanging around the building.

“He said, ‘Do you want to come and hang out with me and chill with me? It’s just one block in between the school and the house,’” the girl later recounted.

With that deadly snake charm the monsters could turn on, Hendrix persuaded the teenager to come with him. When the pair got to the basement on Snyder Avenue, the girl saw Pearson, the taller of the two, standing near a futon bed.

“The taller guy came behind me. I thought he wanted to come into the room, so I just moved aside,” the girl later testified. “And then he put the pillowcase on top of my head. They pushed me on the floor. They cut my book bag off, and they was taking, from what I felt, my shoelaces off my sneakers.”

She continued, “I was yelling for help. They told me that I should be quiet and that I shouldn’t act up because if I acted up they would have to kill me like they did the girl the night before because she was feisty. I stopped yelling and gave them my arms. They just tied me up and put a sock in my mouth and took the pillowcase off.”

The monsters told the girl about Romona. “While I was sitting in a chair, they had tape over my mouth and my eyes,” she told police. “He said that the girl’s body was behind me. And he asked me if I smelled it. And so he turned my head so I could smell it. I don’t know. It was a funny smell. I don’t know exactly what a dead body smells like.”

After raping the schoolgirl, Pearson and Hendrix fell asleep. Their victim managed to free herself, licking the adhesive off the duct tape that covered her mouth and loosening the ropes that bound her.

“I saw the taller guy by the futon [asleep] with a gun in his hand, and the shorter guy right by the door with a knife,” the girl said. “It was like a big kitchen knife. It wasn’t a steak knife. I tippy-toed out of the room.”

And finally, someone called the cops.

Police didn’t connect the fifteen-year-old’s rape story with the disappearance of Romona Moore until an anonymous tipster called Romona’s mother, Elle Carmichael, with chilling information.

“He told me that he heard a girl screaming a few nights ago. Then he told me something about Snyder Avenue. I was overwhelmed,” Carmichael testified. “I was hearing him, not hearing him. He was being really specific. He said they wrapped her up in plastic, and I think they killed her.”

The caller was the uncle of Ramondo Jack, the visitor who’d seen Romona in her final hours alive. Jack, who never contacted the police, eventually told his uncle what he’d seen, and the older man called Carmichael to tell her where to look for her daughter’s body.

Carmichael notified the police, then set out for the place the tipster had indicated, an abandoned house on Kings Highway. She got to Romona’s body minutes before the police arrived.

All this happened on May 11, 2003. Mother’s Day.

The most veteran, crime-weary detectives assigned to the Romona Moore case were stunned by the violence she had suffered.

“They shattered her jaw. Completely almost knocked it off her head,” said Detective Wayne Carey.

“Her whole face is gone between the maggots and everything else,” said another detective at the crime scene.

According to the medical examiner’s office, the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and chest, the result of being assaulted with a hammer.

“They had a hammer and a saw, and they used it on Romona. Well, all of us were starting to feel sick,” said Detective Hinrichs of the Brooklyn South homicide squad. Hinrichs is the NYPD’s most decorated officer.

“Getting killed is one thing,” he said. “But when you start to think what could have happened to this girl — what did happen. All of us have worked hundreds and hundreds of cases and had never seen anything this horrible.”

As Carey and Hinrichs began the grim task of working with NYPD forensics experts to find blood, teeth, and bone fragments to serve as evidence, Caribbean community leaders began taking the cops to task over how the case was handled.

For Carmichael, the problems began the minute she reported her daughter’s disappearance.

“It was total disrespect. All I got from the police was that if my child is out there and she don’t want to come back, you know, she don’t have to come back. No one came. No one called,” she told ABC News. “They had already said there was nothing they could do. And there was nothing they would do because she was twenty-one.”

Patrick Patterson, Romona’s uncle, said no amount of arguing by family members could convince cops to mount an immediate, sweeping search for Romona.

“They just brushed us off,” he said, “telling us, ‘Look, she’s gone somewhere with some male companion, she’s an adult.’ We kept on pleading with them, telling them she’s not the kind of person who would do such a thing. We pay taxes like everybody else. Why is there a double standard?”

By double standard, Patterson put his finger on a longstanding grievance in black communities: The police and New York media often give saturation coverage to missing-person cases when the suspected victim is young, white, wealthy, and living in Manhattan. In neighborhoods like East Flatbush, the treatment is very different: Pictures of missing black girls do not get splashed on the front pages, and police task forces do not instantly spring into action.

The police, of course, see things differently — and have their own complaints about a lack of cooperation from the community. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said Brooklyn detectives did all they were supposed to do when Romona was first reported missing.

“We would have had Romona alive and this [second] girl never attacked if these people would have picked up the goddamned phone,” said Hinrichs.

Things came to a head during an angry demonstration across the street from the 67th Precinct. “You sent fifty officers to Romona’s funeral. Not one officer looked for her. Not one!” shouted a young woman protestor. “All we wanted you to do was look! Look for her! She was right there, look for her! Her mother’s only child. Shame!”

“There’s an old saying in the [Police] Academy,” said a rueful Detective Ken Silvia, Hinrichs’s partner. “If you want to be a hero, go join the Fire Department.”

Recriminations quickly took a backseat to the search for Romona’s killers. It didn’t take long to find Hendrix: He was already in jail on Rikers Island on an unrelated charge. Hendrix quickly named Kayson Pearson as his accomplice. But Pearson was nowhere to be found.

Hinrichs’s team launched a manhunt, banging on dozens of doors all across the city, especially in Brooklyn and Queens. A tip led them some hundred and forty miles north of New York City to the state capital, Albany, where Pearson had once been busted on drug charges.

While looking for Pearson’s brother, a low-level Albany dope dealer, the cops found his wife — Kayson’s sister-in-law — who was on the outs with the Pearson family, saying she’d been raped and beaten by her husband. She gave the cops an earful, including the fact that the fugitive Kayson had sent her an e-mail asking her to send his Social Security card, birth certificate, and other identification to an address in Georgia.

That sent cops racing to the airport to catch the first available flight to Georgia. They had no authority to make an arrest out of state, but Georgia cops accompanied them to the small house where they were sure Pearson was hiding. He wasn’t there.

Flying back to New York — and closing in on a hundred hours without sleep — cops followed a fresh tip to a house in Yonkers where Pearson was staying with an eighteen-year-old girl he’d recently met. (The deadly charm had worked once again.)

Cops staked out the building and intercepted the young woman as she returned home. They showed her a picture of Pearson. She confirmed that he was inside and gave them a key to her apartment.

The capture was violent. Pearson had barricaded himself inside the bedroom, pushing the bed against the door. When cops burst in, Pearson lunged at them with a knife. A Yonkers cop shot him twice in the leg before he was taken into custody.

Back in Brooklyn, Hinrichs and his team were still shaking their heads.

“If you told me it’s two young kids snatching girls at random off the street and raping and killing them, I’d think you’re crazy,” said Hinrichs. “You know, this shit happens in fucking Idaho or some shit.”

Like everything else about the case, the trial was dramatic, violent, and sickening. Pearson and Hendrix each accused one another of murder, leading the court to pick two juries to hear the case — one to judge whether Pearson was guilty, the other for Hendrix. It made for long, complicated proceedings: It took twice as long as normal to find twenty-four jurors; every time evidence came up that might unfairly prejudice one set of jurors, the proceedings would stop and twelve people would be hustled out of the courtroom until the evidence was heard, after which they shuffled back in.

On January 19, 2006, several days into the trial, Pearson showed up in court dressed in white and wearing a yarmulke. Ever the charmer, he’d told his lawyer, Mitchell Dinnerstein, that he planned to convert to Judaism.

“We even recited some Hebrew blessings,” Dinnerstein later said.

It turned out to be just another con job by the murderous Pearson. A few minutes into the proceedings, members of Romona’s family noticed Pearson and Hendrix winking at each other. Both men saw they were being noticed, and accordingly brandished Plexiglas shivs, the nasty homemade blades inmates fashion out of jailhouse debris. The monsters had secreted the knives in their underwear before coming to court. Now they used the weapons to make a bloody bid for freedom.

Wheeling on Dinnerstein — the man he’d prayed with just minutes earlier — Pearson slashed him across the face. At the same time, Hendrix leaped over the rail separating witnesses from spectators, pouncing on a court officer and grabbing for his gun.

All hell broke loose.

There was blood everywhere. Dinnerstein’s shirt quickly became soaked in red. He would later need stitches to close the gash in his face. A fifty-eight-year-old court officer, Sergeant James Gorra, sprinted toward Pearson, who kept trying to stab Dinnerstein.

“I saw a weapon, and when he got close I gave a forearm as hard as I could and grabbed him. I couldn’t let him get behind me because the judge is behind me,” Gorra said later. “He hit me with the shiv twice, and then I flipped him over my side and then he hit me the third time. We were rolling around. I remember screaming out, ‘He’s going for my gun!’”

Albert Tomei, the sixty-six-year-old judge hearing the case, was at first puzzled by the chaos.

“While I was watching all this, I heard, ‘Gun, gun, gun!’” he said. “As soon as I heard that, I said, ‘I’m outta here!’”

Judge Tomei tried to leap from his perch on the bench and get to safety. “I’m not very good at jumping,” he said. “I missed the first time.”

Hendrix missed too. Officers swarmed over him, kicking him to the ground and hosing him down with pepper spray before he could get his hands on a gun.

Spectators fled the courtroom. Jurors dove to the floor. Romona’s mother, Elle Carmichael, was rolling on the ground, crying hysterically.

“They could have killed everybody in that room!” she screamed. “Hang them right now by the neck!”

Minutes after the escape attempt started, it was all over. Hendrix was wheeled out to an ambulance on a gurney, his face covered with an oxygen mask. He gave reporters the finger.

“In all my time on the criminal bench, it was the most frightened I’ve ever been,” Tomei later told colleagues. But there in the courtroom, amid the pandemonium, he was more blunt, looking at Dinnerstein’s soaked bloody shirt and voicing the feeling of everyone present.

“Holy shit!” said the judge.

Tomei had no choice but to declare a mistrial, which he did the following week. The juries that watched the escape attempt would be hopelessly prejudiced against Pearson and Hendrix. The judge also excused Dinnerstein from the case, assembled two more juries, and resumed the trial in February.

Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, the prosecutor assigned to the second trial, squeezed Elle Carmichael’s hand, then began explaining to the jurors what had happened to Romona.

This time, Pearson and Hendrix were banned from the courtroom and made to watch the proceedings via video feed to the Rikers Island lockup. On the rare occasions they were brought to court individually to testify in person, each man’s arms and legs were shackled, their hands encased in mitts and surrounded by twenty officers.

“Any outburst on your part, any showing of your hands or shackles on your part in order to create a mistrial, will not result in a mistrial,” Justice Tomei told Pearson.

The trial dragged on for weeks, but the outcome was never in doubt. Both juries convicted the monsters on all counts.

At sentencing, Judge Tomei told Pearson and Hendrix he would not call them animals.

“That word is not appropriate because animals do not torture each other,” he said. “You are a deadly human virus... a deadly vessel of human terror.”

Then he sent them to jail forever.

“You’re going to be consigned to a place where there is no love, there is no compassion — [a place that is] cold and lonely. And you’ll be consigned to that place for a very, very long time,” he said.

Elle Carmichael sued the city for more than a million dollars, claiming that delays in searching for her daughter — along with the fact that the police closed the case while Romona was still alive — contributed to her death.

But for Carmichael, money is the least of her concerns.

She moved from the home she shared with her daughter and went for months of psychological counseling. She carried a picture of her smiling daughter as a kind of talisman to ward off thoughts of Romona’s final terrible days.

“The one question I always ask is, Why did it happen? I feel like at my worst times, when I feel most helpless, that’s the question I ask,” she told a reporter. “It puts me into a trance sometimes, so I try to avoid that question. But I still wonder, Why did this happen?”

The killers have their own chilling answer to that question.

“We did it for fun,” Pearson said at his second and final sentencing, when he got an extra twenty-two years for the bloody escape attempt. “It was fun to see a system that has so much power and control lose it in a second. The judge — he’s the one with all the power — was running away, bumping his knee. That was the most fun I’ve had all my life.”

Getting to know Mad Dog by Robert Knightly

Bushwick

It is a convention of crime fiction that the detective is haunted by the case he did or didn’t solve. Me, I never was a detective. Too many off-duty incidents in bars.

But I did have some memorable moments, as in hairraising, as a patrolman in the 1970s in Bushwick specifically, the self-styled “Fighting 83rd” Precinct. And not without justification.

The ’70s in New York City was the worst of times, in that crime was rampant. The city was on the brink of bankruptcy, had laid off a quarter of the police force, and arsonists — for profit or revenge — were busy burning down the wood-frame tenements of Bushwick, to the point where whole blocks had the look of a lunar landscape.

But the ’70s were also the best of times, in that a cop never had a dull moment. Cops of the Fighting 83rd were a tight band of brothers; female officers had yet to debut in the patrol precincts. We were bound together by the shared perils of the street.

On the night of July 13, 1977, the lights went out in Bushwick and everywhere else in the city. In what the media has referred to as “blackout looting,” larceny commenced forthwith along a two-mile stretch of Broadway, the main shopping artery dividing Bedford-Stuyvesant from Bushwick. Bodegas, supermarkets, discount furniture emporia, a gun shop, jewelry, clothing, and shoe stores had the gates ripped from doorways, and the contents inside were carried off into the night. For extra measure, the stores were then set afire.

All that night and into the next day, we cops roamed streets that looked like the siege of Atlanta as pictured in the movie version of Gone with the Wind. And yet, despite the Sturm und Drang, it is not the events of that blackout night that remain in the forefront of my memory. That place of honor belongs to Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.

Mad Dog and I met in an after-hours Puerto Rican social club on a cold January night in 1977 when neighborhood cops — myself among them — were motoring through the streets of Bushwick in what was known as a “precinct conditions car,” an umarked Plymouth sedan, a.k.a. the “brown car,” the scourge of drug dealers, gunsels, chop shop operators, counterfeiters, and after-hours social clubs that catered to the ungodly.

Shortly after midnight, we exited said vehicle and burst through the barred front door of the Puerto Rican club on Jefferson Street, just off Knickerbocker Avenue.

As we made our entrance, glassine envelopes and various drug paraphernalia floated to the floor like autumn leaves. But what caught my attention was two white guys sitting by themselves in a corner, the only non-Latinos present. So my first words to the two, as they sat at the table looking up at me, were, “On your feet and against the wall.”

I gave the muscular guy to my left a little push against the wall, off which he bounced, spun around, and stood stock still, staring at me. He was Irish-looking, five-foot-ten with a mustache and chiseled features.

Thus, without benefit of names, did I make my initial acquaintance with Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.

The first thing I noticed about Mad Dog was his flat, dark, dead eyes, with which he assessed me for a long minute, then slowly turned around and assumed the position. His Italianlooking tablemate did the same, without objection.

Looking down at the floor, I found something that didn’t surprise me — a Beretta semi-automatic, which, I would later discover, was loaded with seven live rounds, one in the chamber. I hollered “Gun!” whereupon the four other cops with me focused attention on the two guys I had on the wall.

I didn’t find out who these desperadoes were until we got back to the precinct house for arrest processing. We had a dozen other patrons of the bar for various drug possession counts, but only Mad Dog and his companion for the gun.

In those days there were no computers. You made a phone call to the Bureau of Criminal Identification at NYPD headquarters in downtown Manhattan. BCI eventually identified one Joseph Sullivan, a.k.a. “Mad Dog,” on lifetime parole as a convicted murderer. His Italian cohort was Anthony “Snooky” Solimini, a Genovese soldier out of place here because around the corner on Knickerbocker Avenue were the Bonanno lads sipping espresso and plotting mayhem.

In those days, everything was done manually. You took a prisoner by the hand and rolled his fingertips over an ink pad and then pressed each one onto a print card. Then you handcuffed the prisoner and went through his personal effects. Then you vouchered (recorded and packaged) drug evidence for the police lab and the gun for ballistics, after which you transported the guy downtown to Central Booking, which back in the day was on Gold Street in downtown Brooklyn. There he would be processed further, and a cop like me would be interviewed by an assistant D.A., who would draft charges based on what I told him.

With these particular arrests, both my prisoners stood to be charged with felony possession of a loaded gun if I wanted to go by the book — but it was a tenuous charge to lay against both. What I had to do, practically speaking, was select the one more likely to have possessed the weapon. Based on my estimation of Mad Dog’s background, he was elected as the guy who made a motion under the table to toss the gun. A complete fiction, but no more of a fiction than those invented by prosecutors and judges in criminal court, where they are known as “legal fictions.”

Although my statement to the assistant D.A. could be seen as a lie, it was in fact expected as a professional courtesy. The last thing a prosecutor or judge wants to hear in a criminal case is what actually happened. What they wanted was what they could put together to make a solid case against whomever the perpetrator was that I had dragged downtown. So every cop in my day would say what he was expected to say in order for the wheels of justice to grind exceedingly slowly and for no bad guys to escape. This is no doubt true even today, as I do not expect anything has changed. So, the D.A. was pleased to accept my legal fiction that I saw Mad Dog ditch something under the table. After all, he had Mad Dog’s complete and lengthy history on his yellow sheet, so-called because a criminal record was then printed on yellow paper. Mad Dog had been paroled after being sentenced to twenty-to-thirty years in 1967 upon conviction of manslaughter. Yet there he was in 1977 in my clutches. Which was a mystery to us all.

What was known, though, is that we had a very bad guy on our hands. As the D.A. said, “We’re gonna stick it to this guy, he’s going back upstate.”

I could certainly endorse the sentiment. So I gave the D.A. a story he could live with.

We then adjourned to the courtroom. By this time, the sun had risen and day court was in session. In those days, the arresting officer actually went to court with the prisoner for arraignment. Not so today, as the police department, in its wisdom, has found a way to avoid all the overtime wages involved in having a police witness to a crime appear in court with the perpetrator.

So there we were, waiting for the case to be called so we could stick it to Mad Dog and send him back upstate where he belonged. Then Mad Dog’s lawyer appeared — Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general of the United States.

I recognized Clark, even if some of my partners didn’t. Certainly the court did, and so did the D.A., and he and the judge fawned all over the ex — attorney general. Of course, Clark didn’t have a clue as to criminal court procedure. However, the Legal Aid lawyer on arraignment duty couldn’t do enough for Ramsey, leading him by the hand through an unfamiliar process.

Oh! By the way, how was it that Mad Dog Sullivan got lawyered up with the former attorney general of the United States—?

Ramsey Clark had evidently been instrumental in gaining parole for Mad Dog in December 1975.

Since 1967, Mad Dog had been incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility, which is so far upstate you can hear Canadians hiccupping on the other side of the border. Maybe Canada is where Mad Dog had been heading when he escaped from Attica in ’71 by hiding in a delivery truck on its way out of the penitentiary gates; thus goes the honor to Joseph Sullivan as the only inmate in the history of Attica to ever have busted out.

But he wasn’t missing for long. Two months after his departure from the pen by truck, Mad Dog was captured on West 12th Street and University Place in Greenwich Village by agents of a state task force. A judge slapped an additional ten years onto his sentence and he was returned to prison.

Ramsey Clark was, at the time, active in the prison reform movement, and Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan became something of a movement poster boy. Just as the Brooklyn novelist Norman Mailer was attracted to the late murderer/writer Jack Henry Abbott, author of the acclaimed In the Belly of the Beast, so too was Ramsey Clark fascinated with Mad Dog Sullivan.

And just as Jack Henry Abbott had failed to mend his homicidal ways while on parole — thanks in part to Mailer’s efforts in creating a cause célèbre, Abbott was free to fatally stab a young waiter at the Binibon Café in the East Village — Mad Dog Sullivan also eschewed the path of redemption.

Some time after Ramsey’s intervention on behalf of inmate Joseph Sullivan, the newly paroled Mad Dog was a suspect in the execution of Mickey Spillane — ex-boss of the Irish mob in Hell’s Kitchen, not to be confused with the nom de guerre of a certain crusty pulp novelist. Spillane was shot dead on May 13, 1977, outside his hideaway apartment in Woodside, Queens, where he mistakenly believed he was living under the radar. Mad Dog was never charged with the hit, nor was anyone else.

As it happens, Mad Dog’s youth was spent in the vicinity of Woodside. He grew up in Richmond Hill, Queens, where he committed his first murder.

His last recorded murder occurred on December 17, 1981, when Mad Dog took a shotgun to John Fiorino, a reputed Mafioso and vice president of Teamsters Local 398. Mad Dog was convicted of killing Fiorino outside the Blue Gardenia restaurant in upstate Irondequoit, near Rochester.

Mad Dog is today a sixty-nine-year-old resident of the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York, eligible to appear before the New York State Parole Board for the first time in the year 2069.

Jack Henry Abbott died in the Wende Correctional Facility in 2002. Unless Mad Dog Sullivan sees his 130th birthday, his fate is likewise sealed.

— And so there I was in the courtroom with Ramsey Clark and his toady from Legal Aid. I sat and listened with foreboding. With an inkling that Mad Dog might not have to go north after all.

As it happened, my instincts were correct.

Later on, out in the hallway, the D.A. approached me and said, “Ah, we didn’t have a case anyhow.” I didn’t bother pointing out that he’d said earlier we had a very solid case.

Then Ramsey and Mad Dog emerged from the courtroom. Mad Dog had the grace and style to ignore us cops. Ramsey, being a gentleman, came over to me with a look of compassion and said these words I will never forget:

“Officer, I think justice was done.”

To which I replied, “I doubt it, Ramsey.”

Well, Mad Dog has stayed with me all these years and I have followed his career as best I can. I have discovered both what he’d done before we met in January of ’77, and what he did after. Most of this I learned from Mad Dog’s autobiography, entitled Tears & Tiers, a seminal book self-published by Mad Dog and his wife, Gail Sullivan, and first released in 1997.

One thing I learned from the autobiography was that before we met in ’77, Mad Dog had been paroled from Attica in December 1975 despite a murder conviction and, as mentioned, his being the only escapee from Attica back in ’71.

An extraordinary guy, this Joseph Sullivan, and an inscrutable situation from a legal point of view.

Not long after his parole, in May of ’76, Mad Dog had a relapse. He hooked up with an old comrade — a made member of the Genovese crime family — who brokered gainful employment as a hit man. Mad Dog was to be under the direct supervision of Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, top boss of the Genovese organization.

On July 20, 1976, Mad Dog did his first job for the family by executing Tom Devaney, an enforcer for the Mickey Spillane mob, forerunner of the more famous Westies gang of Hell’s Kitchen.

Mad Dog put a bullet in Tom Devaney’s head as Tommy was drinking at a Hell’s Kitchen bar. After which, on a sunny day in August of ’76, he did the same to another Spillane enforcer, one Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, in another saloon. In his autobiography, Mad Dog tells us that he also did three or four subsequent hits, but he doesn’t identify the bodies.

Then Mad Dog and I met, on January 29, 1977. A week prior to our evening meeting, in the daylight hours of January 22, Mad Dog gunned down Tom “the Greek” Kapatos on a Midtown Manhattan street, according to the autobiography and T.J. English, author of Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (HarperCollins, 2005).

When he walked out of court a free man, thanks to Ramsey Clark, Mad Dog was given a new assignment by his handlers within the Genovese family: the cancellation of Carmine “Cigar” Galante, boss of the Bonanno crime family who, ironically, began his career as a hit man for the late patriarch Vito Genovese (1897–1969).

Up through the summer of ’78, Mad Dog was running all over the city trying to corner Carmine Galante and knock him off. He explained in his book that he regrettably was unable to do so on account of being called off the job by Fat Tony.

On July 12, 1979, however, Galante was sent to his maker at the hands of others: murdered by close-range shotgun blasts just as he finished eating lunch in the back garden of Joe &Mary’s restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue, Bushwick. He’d been dining with his cousin, Giuseppe Turano, and his bodyguard, Leonard Coppola.

Then along came the shooters — Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato, Dominic “Big Trin” Trinchera, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, Cesare “CJ” Bonventre, and Louis “Louie Gaeta” Giongetti — and the rest became pictorial history. The tabloids captured a photograph of the late Mr. Galante sprawled in his own blood in the garden at Joe & Mary’s, cigar firmly clenched between his teeth.

Considerably irritated at losing the Carmine Galante project after so much investment of his professional time, Mad Dog did a few robberies and freelance killings until he was arrested by an FBI task force in Rochester in early 1982; they collared him for an alleged bank job. The feds were confident they could send Mad Dog out of the state, namely to the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where John Gotti was incarcerated until shortly before his death in 2002.

Mad Dog credited an excellent pair of lawyers — recruited by his friend Ramsey Clark, naturally — for getting him acquitted on the Rochester bank robbery charge. But he would not so easily escape state prosecution.

The state hauled Mad Dog back into court for several homicides and assorted other violent crimes, culminating in a long murder trial in 1982, which ended in conviction and his being sentenced to eighty-seven years and six months, plus ninety-nine months to life.

But this is not the end of my story. There’s an epilogue.

What goes around comes around. Every cop subscribes to this philosophy. Which is relevant here because of an Irish cop I’ll call Danny.

When I was working the Bushwick precinct, Danny was assigned to the 9th in the East Village, my own first assignment in 1968–69. We used to drink together in Murphy’s Bar in Greenpoint, the very Brooklyn neighborhood where we were both raised.

Danny was a big, gentle guy who shouldn’t have been drinking; he couldn’t handle it. Neither could I. I quit the drinking life on New Year’s Day 1980. Danny didn’t.

Some years later, while he and his sergeant were bouncing in bars in Manhattan on St. Patrick’s Day, Danny fell into an alcoholic blackout and shot the sergeant to death.

Danny had no recollection of the shooting and put up no defense at his trial for second-degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison.

State prison is a hard road for a police officer. Normally, a cop inmate is kept segregated from the general population. But Danny chose not to be confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. Instead, he went into general population and was soon confronted in the yard by a wiseguy of the Genovese persuasion, whose ass he proceeded to kick.

This earned Danny a mob contract on his life, whereupon the prison authorities transferred him immediately to another maximum-security facility — where, as fate would have it, he met Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.

Mad Dog approached Danny in the yard to tell him that he’d heard how he kicked the wiseguy’s ass, and to tell Danny that he heartily approved. If the story he’d heard was true, Danny was further told, then he could take his place on Mad Dog’s personal work gang.

To go it alone in prison is to invite rape or death. Danny quickly confirmed the story.

Danny survived, unmolested. Actually, he was freed after eight years in prison when his conviction was overturned because of errors at trial. Instead of another trial, he was allowed to take a guilty plea in return for time served.

What motivated Mad Dog to save Danny’s life? Was it their shared Irish heritage? Or the fact that Mad Dog’s father was, of all things, a first-grade detective with Brooklyn’s 78th Precinct in Park Slope until his early death by natural causes in the 1950s? Or was it Mad Dog’s disdain for the Genovese family, which had turned a deaf ear to his appeals for help when the FBI task force was closing in on him back in Rochester?

Who knows.

One more thing, which is a grievance I have with Gail Sullivan.

In her book, she wrote that many law-abiding citizens, including an investigator for ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, describe Mad Dog as “one of the most respected inmates” in the New York State system. That may be so, and I accept that Mad Dog has done many good deeds while behind bars upstate; the rescue of my old pal Danny, for one, was a corporal work of mercy, as Roman Catholics say.

But just how is it that while Mad Dog lives so vividly in my memory, our fateful meeting rates nary a line in his autobiography?

Makes you feel like a blind date, a one-night stand, you know?

True confessions by Dennis Hawkins

Brooklyn Heights

Have you ever heard a retired cop or prosecutor tell a war story, or write a memoir, where he wasn’t the hero? I haven’t and I’m tired of listening to all the air-bags blather on for fun and profit.

So I’ll tell you a tale of failure, with all the hope that confession is good for the soul. Bless me Father for I have sinned:

There was a time before I became a legend in my own mind for my piece of the action in the 77th Precinct investigation, the Howard Beach case, the capture of “Gaspipe” Casso, the first death penalty case in Brooklyn, the Colombo wars — yadda, yadda, yadda.

Back in spring of 1988 I was a green prosecutor, and I failed miserably during a trial called The People of the State of New York v. Gilbert Ortiz, this being the case of an alleged 77th Precinct grass-eater, which is a term of art in the police profession meaning a cop of ordinary corruption as opposed to a meat-eating hog.

And Gil, let me apologize now for telling this sad tale. It’s the mid 1980s in New York City. Mayor Ed “How’m I doing?” Koch appoints Ben Ward as the city’s thirty-fourth police commissioner in early ’84. According to Jet magazine, “Ward oversaw the nation’s largest police department during the rise of the crack cocaine epidemic and a sharp increase in crime and murder.”

What an understatement. The way I remember it, the city was a sewer, the precincts in the poorest neighborhoods were free-fire zones, and no one gave a shit about crime in the ghetto because the social scientists absolved us from effective law enforcement by telling us that the only way to cure crime was to remedy the root cause — poverty. Don’t hold your breath.

Imagine for a moment being a cop in one of the precincts in the heart of Brooklyn during those times — the 75th in East New York, the 73rd in Brownsville, the 77th in Crown Heights. Brian O’Regan, who committed suicide rather than surrender at the end of the 77th Precinct investigation, wrote in the note he left behind, “The precinct is hell.” And it was hell, in Brian’s opinion, because no one really cared what happened in the ghetto. I think he was correct.

If the 77th Precinct was indeed hell, the lords of hell were two sets of partners, so far as I know from evidence uncovered: William Gallagher and Brian O’Regan, and Henry Winter and Anthony Magno. They were the veterans, the leaders — except for O’Regan, the ultimate follower — and they set the standard for corruption in the precinct. It was a very low standard, nickel-and-dime compared to the thieves of Enron and thieves of Baghdad yet to be discovered in Iraq.

Petty the officers were, but so very corrosive to the oath they took to uphold the law. They robbed from the drug dealers, from the dead, from the violated. As a fireman of my acquaintance once said, they would steal a hot stove with both hands.

Into this hell comes Gilbert Ortiz, a twenty-two-year-old when he was arrested in 1986, a police officer since only two years before that. You didn’t stand a chance, Gil. No one in the police department was looking out for you. And you became my target because you were there — in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As I think of you now, I think of the kid who shows up at a pickup softball game and is the last one chosen for the team. He’s stuck in right field. Maybe nobody will hit the ball to him. Unfortunately for you, Gil, this was the corruption team of the precinct from hell and because you’re stuck in right field you get tagged with the loss.

But the tale I tell reveals itself not at a game, but at trial. So let us proceed.

In the spring of 1988, I took the short subway ride from the Office of the Special State Prosecutor at 2 Rector Street in lower Manhattan to the Brooklyn Supreme Court at 360 Adams Street, a trip I had made many times, though never before to try a felony case. Exiting the train in Brooklyn, I walked through the large, sterile plaza dominated by the State Supreme Court, built in the 1950s and designed by the same architects who created the Empire State Building. I drew no inspiration from the long, squat structure that would house the case of People v. Ortiz for the next week or so. While the Empire State Building raises the spirits with its soaring reach to the skies, this functional mausoleum of a court flattens all hope. It was here that defendants saw their last glimpse of a tired-out urban downtown before going upstate for their incarceration. And it was here that the hopes of prosecutors, who could not make their cases, were dashed.

As I walked up the courthouse steps, I remembered that it was also here, eighteen months earlier, that Charles Joseph Hynes, the New York State special prosecutor for the city criminal justice system, scheduled the arraignment of the “dirty dozen” cops from the 77th Precinct in Brooklyn.

It was a most extraordinary arraignment in which Joe Hynes, after addressing the judge in a stately manner — “May it please the Court” — made an elegant opening speech about the entire investigation and the reason we the prosecutors, the twelve defendants, their defense attorneys, and a full house of journalists were in court that day.

Joe had a commanding presence in the courtroom, and neither the judge nor defense attorneys objected during his speech. He talked about the scope of the corruption that led to the arrest of defendants who had betrayed their oaths as police officers. When he finished, he sat, leaving the “technicalities” of the arraignment to me and my colleagues, who had presented the cases to a grand jury for the return of indictments.

One by one we stood to present the charges, only to have the reading of them waived by defense counsels. One by one the defendants pled not guilty and we made bail arguments. Return dates and a schedule for motions and discovery were set.

I recall nothing from that day of police officer Gil Ortiz, charged with five counts that ranged from conspiracy in the fourth degree, an E felony, all the way down to a trespassing violation. Perhaps I should have paid more attention, because this was the case I would ultimately try. But my thoughts were on the charges against Officer William Gallagher, charged with eighty-six counts, ranging from criminal sale of a controlled substance, an A-II felony, down to the A misdemeanor of official misconduct. Gallagher’s was the case I had hoped to try — the first and most important case of the lot.

I also wondered, Where the hell is Gallagher’s partner, Brian O’Regan? He had been scheduled to surrender with the rest, but had not reported to Internal Affairs division headquarters that morning. Was he in Ireland? That was surely where I would have been if I were he.

But those arraignments were long ago. Since then, O’Regan killed himself rather than surrender; Gallagher and three others pled guilty before trial; two other defendants were tried and convicted, two were acquitted after trial; and two others had indictments dismissed. Three defendants were left: Gil Ortiz, plus two others involved in the theft of precinct garbage cans — the bottom of the barrel, so to speak.

Today was my turn in that barrel, as prosecutor in People v. Ortiz. I was not looking forward to the trial, given that the evidence was a single taped conversation between Ortiz and Henry Winter, one of two dirty cops who had flipped at the beginning of the four-month investigation. Winter was possibly one of the most corrupt cops in the precinct, although he had denied it in an earlier trial, accusing Gallagher and O’Regan of being even more corrupt.

Ortiz was represented by Barry Agulnick, an experienced defense attorney who specialized in representing police officers. He was one of the defense lawyers in the high-profile Michael Stewart case back in 1985, resulting in the acquittal of all the transit police officers accused by the Manhattan district attorney of killing Stewart during his arrest for writing graffiti in the subways. I knew Barry because he had represented Gallagher and had negotiated a realistic plea agreement for his client. The evidence in that case was overwhelming, and Barry knew it; he obviously had a different read on the Ortiz case.

This trial would only be my fifth; my first two as second seat counsel had resulted in convictions, my next two as lead prosecutor the same. I was not cocky about my skills, but thought I made a nice appearance, spoke well, was organized, and had done the prep work needed. I also knew the central weakness of the case: Henry Winter versus a good-looking rookie cop, namely Gil Ortiz.

We assembled in a large courtroom on an upper floor of Kings County Supreme Court to select a jury on that beautiful spring morning. I still did not fully understand the science of jury selection, and to this day wonder if it isn’t all just a crapshoot.

How do you tell in a few minutes if a jury prospect will be fair, if he or she will truly listen to the facts of your case and do the right thing? There are attorneys who wax poetic about their ability to identify a juror who will be good for the prosecution or good for the defense. There are old wives’ tales about the predilections of accountants, social workers, and church ladies. There are jury consultants who will tell you that if a juror grows roses, it’s a sure bet that person is patient and discerning. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now if I buy all that. What I did know is that I wanted smart people who could get along with their fellow jurors, make a group decision, and not hate my star witness — Henry Winter, a guy known to cops as a “rat.”

I prepared the prospective jurors to the extent that I could during voir dire interviews. They would be hearing from a witness who committed many other crimes himself before finally being caught and offered a deal for his cooperation, I informed the prospects. I then asked them if they could listen carefully to the testimony of such a witness, if they could fairly assess the truthfulness of his testimony, and if they could reserve judgment until hearing all the evidence. Both Barry and I explored prejudices that might get in the way of their rendering a just verdict, which is another way of figuring out if they could buy into the theory of our respective cases.

Jury selection was uneventful, with a minimum of posturing by either Barry or myself. Along with the judge, we ultimately believed we had a competent panel. For my part, I was happy with the twelve jurors in the box because I thought I had connected with a number of them, and that they considered me trustworthy. I’m sure Barry felt the same way.

After our jurors were told when to return for trial, Barry approached me to say, “I’ve never seen a prosecutor do what you did today.”

My first thought was that Barry was trying to play head games with me, even though that had not been my experience with him in the past.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“When you asked some of the jurors whether they would stick up for their views — even if all the other jurors disagreed — you were asking a defense attorney’s question. What are you looking for, Dennis? A hung jury?”

If I were not olive-skinned, Barry would have seen my blush. To any other attorney, I might have said, “Fuck you.”

But to Barry: “I just want strong, independent jurors.”

And Barry’s hunch was sound. I was indeed going for a hung jury. One of my colleagues on an earlier case had been stung with a not guilty verdict in ninety-six minutes flat. I was not about to let that happen to me.

Childish? Absolutely. But unlike the paragons of prosecutorial virtue we see in fiction, or in self-congratulatory memoirs, I had flaws and they were evident in this tactic. Certainly to Barry.

At some level, I believed in the case, even though I knew it was very weak. I had invested too much of my life in the investigation to just walk away.

Ultimately, it was my faith in Henry Winter and the investigation that inspired me to proceed to trial. Perhaps that was a mistake. But you can be the judge.

I met Henry after he’d been “flipped” by Joe Hynes, when I talked my way into being part of the investigative team that would run him as a confidential informant for an extraordinary four months.

Having a mole inside a notoriously corrupt police precinct was an investigative attorney’s dream. The role of investigative attorney — my job — is rarely portrayed by TV dramas that prefer to organize their shows law-and-order style: the cops investigate, the prosecutors bring police cases to trial. My job was and is the missing dimension in TV–Land. I actually ran the investigations I brought to trial.

True enough for the tube, most prosecutors “catch” cases brought to them by the police. Which is interesting, but nowhere near the excitement of building the case yourself. Investigative attorneys are thought to be wannabe cops. While there might be some truth to that, it’s too simple a notion. A good investigative attorney is always thinking about how the evidence gathered can be used at trial. Unlike the cops, our work is not over when the arrest goes down.

And so, as an investigative attorney for the New York State Special Prosecutor’s Office, I got to shape the investigation that would lead to the indictments and trials. Perhaps that is why I went astray in the 77th Precinct case. Chief John Guido, legendary head of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Division, used to say, “Don’t fall in love with your investigation.”

But I thought the investigation was so good. I thought the sum total of the evidence would overwhelm even the least culpable defendants.

Soon after Henry Winter and his partner, Anthony Magno, agreed to cooperate with my office and NYPD Internal Affairs, we sent them back into the sewer of the 77th Precinct to catch more corrupt cops. As part of the investigative team of prosecutors and Internal Affairs detectives, I met with Henry and Tony at least once a week for the next four months, and almost every day listened to the hours of tapes they secretly recorded while on duty in the 77th.

I got to know them more through these tapes than from our personal meetings: Henry, the smooth talker, full of fun and credible to cops, crooks, and the community; Tony, a man of few words, direct, tough, and angry. Henry delivered the evidence right from the start, Tony dragged his heels. Henry understood he had to work off his time in jail, Tony was reluctant. In time, I realized that Henry was a natural undercover operative and investigator. He was inventive and helped create scenarios that captured other corrupt cops on tape.

I have often wondered since those heady days of the investigation whether we were too much like the scientists who go out into the field to make objective observations but “contaminate” the environment by our mere presence.

Did we make it too easy to be corrupt by providing a convenient way to dispose of illegally seized drugs and guns, though our undercover buy-back program?

And was it the flagrant, seemingly undetected corruption of Henry and Tony that inspired Gil Ortiz to spend too much time with them? Was it unreasonable for him to consider them the true leaders of the precinct?

When the investigation abruptly ended due to a leak that we never traced with certainty (though we had our suspicions), I would spend hours with Henry and Tony going over the tapes, refining the transcripts, getting a better understanding of the crimes. We were never buddy-boys, but I did respect their work.

And my respect for Henry increased when he agreed to testify in this one last trial, even though the police department had told him he would be terminated after it was over. Henry always held the hope that the department would let him and Tony stay on the job long enough to retire with a pension. Fat chance.

Henry could have walked away from the trial and not testified, and I could have subpoenaed him. But how would that have looked to the jury, and what kind of testimony would he have delivered? The time for threats had passed. Henry had been the star witness in three previous trials and I, for one, did not believe we should send him to jail for his failure this last time to live up to his agreement.

But it never came to that. When I called Henry to tell him about the trial date, he came in and got down to business. He told me that he was pissed that the department had decided to cut him loose.

I told him, “You know, Henry, we have no control over what the department does.”

I started to remind him of our deal: Cooperate fully and he would never see the inside of a prison because we would make the extent of his cooperation known to the department. But he stopped me.

“I know what the deal is,” Henry said. “I promised to see this through till the end and I’m keeping my word.”

The “Thanks, Henry” that followed was difficult because I had learned that he had worn a wire against me and another prosecutor during preparation for an earlier trial in order to try and get us on the record making a better deal than the one we had actually made. We had restated our understanding of the deal and Henry thereby got no additional leverage. So it was hard to accept that the ultimate rat was doing the right thing. But that appeared to be the case.

With jury selection out of the way, I would have a chance to tell the panel just what the People planned to prove — a conspiracy involving Henry, the defendant, and another cop to “hit” a known drug location, steal the drugs and money, and divide the proceeds of the crime. I told the jury that they would hear the testimony of a corrupt cop who had agreed to cooperate, and that, most importantly, they would hear “with your own ears” the money being split after the hit — where no drugs were found. This was the core of my case.

Barry underscored the weakness of my position — the ambivalent taped conversation, called a “conspiracy” by the prosecutors, and the failure of the tape to demonstrate that his client had accepted any share of money at all.

No one wins a case during opening arguments. But the stage is set and the jury is given a road map of where it will be going. We all agree that the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to prove each and every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt — a heavy burden indeed.

After openings, I began with an Internal Affairs witness who could tell the jury that he met with Henry Winter on the day of the crime, provided him with a fresh tape, and put the appropriate “header” on it — identifying himself and Henry, as well as date, time, and place. Also that soon thereafter, he retrieved the tape from Henry, and that the money was taken from the location. He testified that he vouchered both tape and money and had brought the very same tape and money to court today to be introduced into evidence as People’s exhibits.

Another police officer provided the basis for the introduction of evidence that Ortiz was on duty that day in the same sector where the hit occurred. I had a police witness introduce a map drawing of the location in question so that Henry could show where the defendant and he had been during the incident. All this testimony went smoothly and, I hoped, showed the jury the competence of our investigation. But as we used to say in those days, Where’s the beef?

Henry was the beef — or sacrificial lamb, I should say, given my experience watching him cross-examined at previous trials. But Henry was no lamb. In fact, it was open season on rats who testified against those presumed to be innocent.

Henry and I had agreed that I would do an abbreviated direct examination of his past crimes and bad acts. Having seen Henry subjected to an all-day direct examination of his entire oeuvre of bad acts — dating back to when he worked in a Modell’s sporting goods shop as a teenager and marked down the price of baseball gloves for his friends — I decided to spare him the double-dose of confessing first to me and then to Barry. No matter, Henry still faced days of withering cross-examination by defense counsel to show him for a liar, a cheat, and a thief beyond compare.

When Henry took the stand, I quickly established that he had been a crooked cop, that he’d stolen money and drugs, that he’d resold the drugs, protected some drug dealers and extorted others, that he was not beneath stealing from the dead, and, significantly, that he’d been caught and had made a deal with prosecutors to avoid jail. Barry did not raise any objections to this testimony. After all, I was doing his job — undermining the credibility of my own witness. The theory here is that it’s better for the jury to hear it from the prosecutor, who is hiding nothing, than for the defense counsel to expose a cover-up by the prosecution.

I wanted to get as quickly as I could to the facts of the case — what Henry had done on the day of the crime, and what the defendant had said and done. And this is where I ran into trouble. Barry had an objection to every question I asked. And while some were legitimate, I thought others were meant merely to disrupt the flow of the testimony. Each time he made an objection, he asked for a sidebar conversation up at the bench with the judge outside of the jury’s hearing.

But soon our sidebars became so loud and heated that the judge moved us to the corridor. I became more and more frustrated as the frequency of the objections and sidebars grew. Barry was clearly setting the pace and controlling the courtroom and preventing me from presenting my case in a coherent manner. We seemed to fall into a pattern of me asking a question, then Barry making an objection and calling for a sidebar. After the pattern has been set, Barry would just make the objection, get out of his seat, and walk toward the corridor for his sidebar, followed by the judge.

Too much, I thought. This has got to stop. The next time the migration began and Barry was out the door and the judge was approaching the door, I held my ground behind the prosecutor’s table, looked at the jury, and said in loud voice, “Who’s running this courtroom anyway?”

Big mistake. Not only did I insult the judge, who let me know that she would not tolerate that kind of behavior, but I undermined her authority in front of the jury. We all know that jurors tend to have great respect for the judge and look to them as the fount of justice in the courtroom. I lost my temper, squandered some of the dignity of the prosecutor’s position, and may have jeopardized my case. I had acted unprofessionally. Nonetheless, while Barry continued to make objections, the processions to sidebar talks decreased significantly and I proceeded with my direct examination.

Henry testified about his tour of duty the day of the crime, his conversation with the defendant about hitting a drug location and splitting what was recovered, and that he had captured the conversation on tape. He testified that he had given the tape to IAD, initialed it, and had subsequently listened to the tape in order to confirm it as a full and accurate representation of the conversation that he’d had with the defendant. I asked him if the tape that had been introduced into evidence earlier was the same tape that he had made and listened to and he answered affirmatively.

“May I play the tape for the jury, your honor?”

“Yes, Mr. Hawkins.”

This was supposed to be the evidence that would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant entered into conspiracy with Henry to possess and sell the “found” drugs. Of course, it was Henry who would steal the drugs, if any were found, and “sell” them to us in order to receive money to split with his coconspirators. We had devised this plan in order to keep other cops in the precinct from selling it to their sources and putting the drugs back on the street. It was an excellent investigative move, but during this type of trial it was not always clear if jurors bought into our deception or even thought it was fair play.

Not really a problem in this case because no drugs were found, only money.

Once the jury, judge, attorneys, and defendant put on their earphones, they heard Henry speaking, laying out a plan to hit a drug location, suggesting that if he found drugs he knew where to sell them and that he would share the proceeds. It was clear that the defendant was present but not so clear that he agreed with Henry, an essential element of the conspiracy charge. Ortiz was told that he should cover the back exit of the apartment building to prevent drug dealers from escaping — the usual role for a junior police officer — and that Henry would go into the apartment and conduct the search for drugs and money.

Ortiz seemed to agree to cover the back exit, which in legal terms is an overt act in furtherance of a conspiracy. “Seemed” is the operative word. No clear agreement, no conspiracy. I knew I was on shaky ground with my agreement, but I thought that the conclusion of the tape could put me over the top and beyond reasonable doubt.

Ten minutes of tape went by as judge, jurors, and counsel heard Henry tromp around the empty apartment searching for drugs and money — and commenting from time to time about what a “shit-hole” the place was. Then we heard Henry discover some cash, with his comment on the find: “Not much, but better than nothing.”

The tape concluded with Henry apparently meeting the defendant outside the location and reporting better-than-nothing. In a clear voice, Henry counted out Ortiz’s share: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven — buy yourself a beer.” Henry laughed in his good-natured way. And we heard the rustle of the bills as they were being counted out. This constituting my “gotcha” moment.

Unfortunately, there was no taped response from the defendant. Dead silence.

I looked at the jury panel. Some jurors looked back at me with expressions that said, Is that all there is? So I switched off the tape, turned to Henry on the witness stand, and asked him to fill in the blanks with specifics.

“What, if anything, did you find at the location?”

“I found twenty-one dollars.”

“And what did you do with that money?”

“I gave the defendant seven dollars and kept fourteen to divide between my partner and myself.”

“And what did you do with your share?”

“I turned it in to IAD at the end of my tour.”

“And is this seven dollars, previously marked as People’s Exhibit Three, the money that you gave to IAD?”

“Yes.”

“How are you able to identify it?”

“I put my initials on the money.”

“Your honor, I ask that People’s Exhibit Three be moved into evidence.”

The judge said to Barry, “Any objections, Mr. Agulnick?”

“No, your honor.”

I continued questioning Henry.

“Now, could you describe what it is that you are doing at the conclusion of the tape with respect to the remaining money?”

“I’m counting out seven dollars to give to the defendant.”

“And did you in fact give that money to the defendant?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That concludes the People’s questions for this witness, your honor.”

I glanced at the jury and once again got the feeling that some were asking, once again, Is that all there is? Unfortunately, yes. That’s the case against Gil Ortiz. You either believe Henry or you don’t. You have a tape that is, at best, circumstantial evidence. Or you have no real evidence at all.

For me it was easy to believe Henry. For months he had trolled for evidence of corruption in the 77th Precinct and I’d never caught him in a lie. Most of his allegations were backed up by taped evidence — including assertions of corruption by Gallagher, Rathbun, and Spivey.

But as I look back now some twenty years after the events, I ask myself whether we should have charged the kid — a twenty-two-year-old who, at the time, was younger than my youngest son. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that I think about it more than any of the so-called successes of my career.

I had done my job and presented the evidence I had; now it was Barry’s turn. And did he ever do his job. He flayed Henry over the course of the next two days and made him admit that he was a liar, a thief, a man of no conscience, and someone who would do anything to avoid prison. To this last point I objected.

There was little I could do to protect Henry. He knew it and I knew it. He was a corrupt cop by his own admission. From time to time, I would object: “Argumentative, your honor,” or, “Assuming a fact not in evidence.” But these were bullshit objections, meant to give Henry brief respite from the onslaught of Barry’s cross-examination.

After a particularly grueling series of questions from Barry, I saw that Henry needed a real break; he was turning bright red with the embarrassment of his position. So I objected by employing Barry’s tactic: I asked for a sidebar.

As Barry and the judge moved toward the corridor, I collected some papers I thought I might need for the argument and saw Henry look at the jury, shrug his shoulders, and wiggle his ears. Some jurors laughed. No one seemed to notice and I kept it to myself. Here was Henry trying to reach out to the jury and portray himself as a human being. I probably should have informed the judge so that she could admonish him about inappropriate communication and instruct jurors that they were to disregard it as a prejudicial attempt. But I said nothing, deciding that if that’s what it might take for Henry to reestablish his humanity, so be it.

At lunch that day, after a recess in the cross-examination, I bought sandwiches for Henry and me and we went to the Promenade overlooking New York Harbor. We couldn’t talk about his testimony because that’s against the rules, and at this point in our careers we didn’t want to break them.

Henry was a wreck. He’d forgotten how difficult cross could be. I told him that he was doing fine and that he was doing the right thing. He was close to tears and I had to use all my professional skills to keep from joining him. I thought about the quiet, dark boxes of the confessional, where I secretly told my sins to a priest, who would absolve me by prescribing a simple penance of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. How perfect those confessions are — expiation without too much pain. God love the Catholic Church. But a public confession on the witness stand is something quite different, namely a public humiliation.

Barry ended his cross when it was clear to all that neither Henry nor my case had any credibility whatever. All that was left were closing arguments.

Barry led by declaring what any defense attorney would under the circumstances: Henry was a liar, a thief, and a cheat all of his life, and his “performance” in this trial was payment for his do-not-go-to-jail ticket. He called my evidence worthless, and maintained that his client was a good and honest young cop who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All that was left was for me to make a compelling closing argument and pull the conviction rabbit out of the hat. I spun the usual prosecution bullshit: If the People wanted to make up a story to frame the defendant, we would have done a much better job of it, and Henry had nothing to gain from accusing the defendant.

“What did he do?” I asked. “Take his own money into the drug spot and then pretend to count it out for the defendant’s share?” I worried that some jurors might be thinking exactly that.

The judge gave instructions to the jury and sent them out to deliberate, just before dinnertime. Which I considered a nice break for me: With an extra hour or so to eat before deliberating, the jurors just might be kept overnight.

The judge told Barry and me to be available in case of an early verdict. As the age of cell phones had not yet dawned, we gave beeper numbers to the clerk. I decided to have a bite at a local Irish pub rather than go back to the office. Some colleagues from the Special Prosecutor’s Office joined me. Foregoing food, we had a beer or two.

As time went by, I grew convinced that I had the jurors struggling with the evidence. I thought I must have done something right and ordered another beer, convinced that the jury would retire for the night without rendering a decision.

At about 10 o’clock, my beeper went off and I called the court — expecting to be sent home for the night. But no, there was a verdict.

There goes my hung jury, I thought. I returned to the courthouse hoping for a miracle. I ran into Barry in the corridor and he said that I tried a good case, given what I had to work with.

I replied, “You kicked my ass, Barry.”

The jury returned to its place in the courtroom, with nobody giving a sign I could detect of what their decision was. The judge asked the foreperson if a verdict had been reached and she said, “We have, your honor,” and passed the verdict sheet to a clerk who gave it to the judge. I noticed no extra court officers in the room — a telltale sign of a guilty verdict.

The judge read the verdict sheet and returned it to the clerk, who returned it to the foreperson. My heart raced as it always did right before a verdict, and I listened as the judge asked the foreperson, “On the first count of the indictment, how do you find?”

“Not guilty, your honor.”

Which was the same response to the remaining counts. And so, the last trial in the 77th Precinct investigation ended.

The judge thanked the jurors for their service and I asked if I could speak with them — customary practice for attorneys who want to know how jurors analyzed the trial. I moved to the jury box, from which most good citizens had fled but a few remained. I approached an attractive young woman whom I thought had listened with close attention during my closing arguments.

Before I could ask a question, she said to me, with some hesitation, “We tried, Mr. Hawkins, but there really wasn’t evidence.” I thanked her for at least considering the facts.

Another juror said, “We just could not believe Winter. He is so bad.” A few others offered their thoughts and I thanked them all before leaving.

Barry and his client were talking in the corridor as I headed for the elevators, which even during the day took forever to arrive. Normally, I would walk down the stairs to avoid running into the defendant, but tonight I waited, thinking the stairways might be locked due to lateness of the hour.

When the elevator finally came, I entered, alone. As the doors closed, there stood Barry and his client, taking a pause from their conversation. The defendant grinned. I pointed my finger at him and said, “Get ya next time.”

Nice work, Dennis. Very professional, especially since the system worked exactly the way it’s supposed to: I brought a case I could not prove beyond reasonable doubt and the jury found the defendant not guilty.

There I was, playing the Dirty Harry version of a prosecutor and making threats to a kid who smiled his awkward smile because he was relieved and didn’t know how to relate to the guy who just tried to send him off to jail.

It may not have been the last time I acted like an asshole, but it’s the time I remember best.

The next day, Barry called to ask what the district attorney’s office planned to do about the other indictments. I told him that we would have to review the situation. (We ultimately dismissed those indictments and referred the cases to the Police Department for administrative hearings. I was told that Gil resigned before those trials.)

“And Dennis,” Barry said, “you really shouldn’t have said that to my client.”

“I know, Barry, I know. Would you please tell him I’m sorry?”

Ah yes, confession is good for the soul. As is an appropriate apology. But some confessions do not absolve the guilt.

Gallagher’s partner wrote page after page of confession in the hours before he killed himself. Henry Winter confessed his sins three times over while sitting in the witness box. Some years later, he hanged himself at his home in Valley Stream, Long Island.

Today, I still carry their confessions with me, along with my own smaller sins, but sins nonetheless.

And I remember what Joe Hynes said to the New York Times some years ago on the subject of investigating cops: “[It] is the saddest job I’ve ever had. It destroys lives. If you enjoy it, you’re sick. If it gets to you to the point where you have trouble sleeping at night, you ought to be out of it.”

Thank God I’m out of it.

The body in the doorway by Patricia Mulcahy

Fort Greene

I never saw the body. I found out that Vladimir the antiques dealer, a.k.a. Bobby from Russia, had been shot in the head at point-blank range in the doorway of his shop at Vanderbilt and DeKalb because the drums were talking. This is how it went in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the mid-1990s.

Friends called friends to alert them to the fact that there’d been another mugging in Fort Greene Park, or gunshots heard from an unknown source on Adelphi at 3 a.m. A mention of Fort Greene on the news usually meant that another four-year-old had been shot tragically in drug-related violence in the Walt Whitman Houses. Myrtle Avenue was referred to as “Murder Avenue” by all and sundry. The local citizenry protected each other with all-points alerts about crime in an area labeled up-and-coming, yet still on its way to that elusive goal, whatever it meant to anyone who wasn’t a real estate broker.

Burnt out on tourists, nonstop street spectacle, and rising prices in Greenwich Village, I’d moved to Brooklyn in 1990, thrilled by the beautiful architecture, the wide, treelined streets, and the warm and generous spirit of the people who lived here. Hell, I got a free dessert the week I moved in. Christine, a Caribbean woman who ran a bakery at the corner of Carlton and DeKalb, told me, “Watch out going by the park after dark,” as she welcomed me with a delicious rum pudding. No one had given me free anything in the twelve years I’d lived in Manhattan. This was Fort Greene in a nutshell: Welcome, and watch your back.

Taxi drivers told me I was crazy to live in a neighborhood like this. Unspoken was the fact that I was white and the area was predominantly African American. Perhaps I was naïve, but I didn’t worry. In the nine years I’d lived on Jones Street between West 4th and Bleecker, I’d been mugged in broad daylight in the lobby, burglarized by a guy who called on the phone a week later to let me know he could come back anytime he wanted, and terrorized by a drug-and-booze-addled jazz musician neighbor whose friends I passed shooting up in the hallway on my way to work. How much worse could it be in Brooklyn?

It was tough in New York then, and things could happen anywhere: This was the common wisdom passed from one nervous neighbor to another. Watching your back was a way of living, the price of being in the big city, with all it had to offer. The worst thing that happened to me in Fort Greene was being labeled “white meat” by a bunch of teenaged boys eager to look tough for their cohorts. But if I stayed out late I hoped and prayed I would find a parking spot close to my apartment. Muggers exercised equal opportunity in their choice of targets.

In truth, I learned that for all its tough-talk swagger and reputation, Brooklyn had a big, warm heart. Living in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill felt like being in a village where everyone knows your name and people stop on the street to exchange pleasantries along with the latest news on tire slashings. We even had a plant thief on Washington Avenue who was fencing window boxes somewhere in South Brooklyn. My next-door neighbor, a divorcée with a BMW, a very active social life, and no visible means of support, left town one day and never came back, taking with her a baby who’d arrived under mysterious circumstances. Later, I found out that she had tried to sell the child back to the doctor who delivered her. There was never a dull moment.

Which brings us back to Bobby, shot dead in the doorway of an emporium crammed to the rafters with lovely chests of drawers and old Tiffany-style lamps and antique dining tables. The tall, rangy Russian, who was in fact from the Republic of Georgia and usually wore a broad-brimmed leather hat, à la Crocodile Dundee, was one of the many “gentlemen friends” who’d been seen coming and going to the house next to ours. I doubted that he was the one who threw a rock through the window at 6 a.m., necessitating a visit from a patrolman, or the one who set the fire in the foyer. But who knew?

At the time of the murder, rumors flew up and down the streets of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill: Bobby had been shot by his former brother-in-law, with whom he’d been in business until recently; it was someone from the Russian mob in Brighton Beach, from whom he’d borrowed money; it was the husband of one of his paramours — my next-door neighbor was just one of many.

Tillie Asnis, the landlady, had discovered the body in the doorway of the store. I met her when she was selling furniture, emptying the place for a new tenant. As I recall, she said little about the murder itself that day, and instead gossiped about the Russian’s way with the local ladies. That, too, was typical of the neighborhood then: Once a crime had been broadcast on the local grapevine, it was rarely discussed further. Better to keep a lid on things.

A frizzy-haired woman of Russian Jewish ancestry who’d moved to Brooklyn from the Bronx, Tillie lived above the shop with her children and grandchildren. A two-pack-a-day smoker, she reminded me of the characters on The Honeymooners, with her husky voice and no-nonsense demeanor. After running a dry cleaning store on the premises with her late husband for many years, she’d let the space to her son-in-law for a bike shop and a locksmith’s business before leasing it to Vladimir. Given his untimely departure, she was back to square one. Life went on, as did the need to pay the bills.

Though horrified by the manner in which the store had been vacated, I asked Tillie about the rent on the space after buying two chairs for fifteen dollars. At the time, I was a book publisher with no experience running restaurants, though I’d worked as a waitress in a country club, a truck stop, an icecream parlor, and an Italian restaurant in high school and college. The oldest in an Irish Catholic family with six children, I was as chronically overscheduled as the West Indian characters in the old Saturday Night Live skits.

In an effort to meet people in my new neighborhood, I’d volunteered as a writer and editor for a local quarterly called The Hill. A look at back issues alerted me to the previous existence of an espresso place in an old carriage house on Waverly Avenue run by students at Pratt, an art school situated in the neighborhood. What a brilliant idea for a shop in an area full of graphic and fashion designers, architects, and other people who worked at home and had no place to hang out other than the local Greek diners. And the corner of Vanderbilt and DeKalb was just three blocks from the Pratt campus. Didn’t art students and their teachers need cappuccino to fuel their creative efforts?

Though I loved working with writers, I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with corporate publishing, which had its own version of sword-and-knife play. In addition, I had come to relish my involvement in the Fort Greene community, and wanted to make a contribution to a place I felt had a bright future in so many ways, with its diverse population, its proximity to Manhattan, and its history-filled beauty. And if I didn’t take the space, it might become yet another real estate office, of which we had a plethora already.

I put my nest egg where my heart was: Hands shaking, I wrote Tillie Asnis a check for a security deposit and set out to convert an old antiques store into a cozy neighborhood café named in her honor. While I was out of town on a publishing trip, the Jamaican contractor and his Trinidadian crew performed a ceremony involving white rum and chicken feathers to purge the space of any bad spirits left over from the murder of the previous tenant. Despite the Caribbean version of an exorcism, predictions of failure were as common as rain in April. Word on the street was that no one in this neighborhood would pay $1.50 for a cup of coffee when they could buy it across the street at the diner for sixty cents. At the time, DeKalb Avenue had just one restaurant, the beloved Cino’s, a red-sauce fixture since the 1950s, and Starbucks was just beginning its retail march from sea to shining sea.

Fast-forward to the new century. I’d left publishing for freelance life. We’ll move right through the years of light foot traffic, employee theft and subterfuge, and near-bankruptcy at the store. Nothing I’d done in my life had elicited such an honestly enthusiastic and truly grateful response: Area residents stopped me on the corner, in line at the grocery store, and in the post office to tell me how much they loved my shop. Even in Manhattan, people I’d never met called across subway cars, “Hello, Tillie!” By the time we celebrated our tenth year in business in 2007, Tillie’s was considered a neighborhood institution, which made me feel both proud and definitely older.

Though friends and family members saw me as a Pollyanna when I opened the store, the survival of my risky venture validated my view of the neighborhood as a place filled with genuine potential, despite its dicey reputation. I wasn’t getting rich, but nor was I spending my days listening to my boss cavil about so-called “big books.”

By then, many more restaurants and coffee joints had opened not just on DeKalb, but all over the area, and real estate prices in Fort Greene had increased by such leaps and bounds that the New York Times real estate section could barely keep up. In 2006, a photo of the side of Tillie’s illustrated an article in the New York Times magazine about the death of bohemia and the invasion of the stroller brigade. How far we’d come from the days of Bobby the Russian’s sad demise.

Fears of rapid change — of the Manhattanization of Brooklyn by condo and office tower — now fuel the local rumor mill. Friends call friends to discuss not the latest shooting, but the sale prices of houses and coop apartments, and whether or not the area will change irrevocably for the worse when the Atlantic Yards development is built. After years of peace and quiet, there’s been a recent blip upward in the local crime rate, as the “have-nots” eye this newly fertile hunting ground of “haves.” Still, the neighborhood remains positively bucolic in comparison to the bad old days, which some longtime residents refer to with a sense of rueful regret. Though no one condoned burglary or car theft, there was a sense then that we were in it together, battling for a better future. Now that it has arrived, we aren’t all sure we like the way it looks. Fairy tales don’t start with bodies sprawled in doorways.

References to the Borough of Kings now connote not working-class pride or even street style, but a certain kind of city life that is artistically astute, relatively well-off, politically correct, and, yes, self-satisfied. For a taste of the old ways, you have to go further into what friends call “deepest Brooklyn,” where even in an era of drastically reduced crime all over the metropolis, there are still bodies on the ground, almost all dark-skinned.

At the funeral of one of our first customers, Frank Giaco, who sat in front each morning sipping coffee and smoking a smelly cigar, I nearly lost it when I saw a Tillie’s card in his coffin: Buy ten, get one free. In the best Brooklyn tradition, we hang on.

In which players who are not faint of heart assemble atop a structure of any sort — a fence, low building, rock, etc. One by one, they step forward to the edge and close their eyes while those behind give a sudden shove. As the game continues by round, the ultimate winner is the one player no longer afraid to take a blind leap.

Snapshots by Tim McLoughlin

Kings County Supreme Court

I have worked in the New York City courts for more than twenty years. All of that time in Brooklyn. All but one year in Criminal Court or the Criminal Term of Supreme Court.

My coworkers and I have borne witness to a generational slice-of-life of the criminal underclass. One of the things we have learned is that siphoning the antisocial actions of any individual through the filter of a government bureaucracy — however well-intentioned — turns even the most evil behavior into mundane drama.

Most of the defendants I’ve encountered are life’s losers: lost souls who, through bad choices, bad company, or just bad luck, are destined to spend their unhappy lives in courthouses, social service offices, rehab facilities, homeless shelters, and Rikers Island — in such an overlapping, dizzying whirl that I’m certain they often can’t remember which building they’re in on a given day, or why.

Then there are the bad guys: predators whose casual cruelty is too often mistaken for cool in their communities and emulated by kids a few years younger. But their stories, even the worst of them, are drained of passion in the halls of justice. The antiseptic nature of ritual proceedings will inevitably do that. Think of weddings, graduations, religious services, or oaths of office. Even being inducted into the Mafia is probably boring.

But what still gets to me are the snapshots — suckerpunches, facial expressions, snippets of conversation. The snapshots will catch you off guard. Sometimes they will shock and enrage you. Sometimes the snapshots will break your heart.

It can be the look on a mother’s face when her son is denied bail, or on a father’s face when his daughter’s rapist is released on a technicality. It can be the tense moment an innocent man spends in front of the bench pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit, knowing that he cannot roll the dice in hope of an acquittal because of his past record.

There are the elevator stories — complete novels played out in thirty or forty seconds while traveling from courtroom to lobby and back. I’ve made copious notes on them in the tiny spiral-bound journals I’ve always kept tucked in my jacket pockets. As I flip through them now some are meaningless, the memories lost. Others are so vivid I don’t need the prompt. These are the earliest and latest entries.

My fourth day of work:

Last month:

I am reminded of my first few years on this job when I worked in uniform, searching members of the public as they entered the building. I was shocked at the number of young women with infants, and remarked about it one day to an old-timer.

“Twenty years from now,” he said, taking a slow drag on his cigarette, “I’ll be long gone and you’ll be searching those kids.”

He retired seven years ago, and died a year later, and those infants are in their early twenties now. The ones that haven’t already been killed are coming through my doors, and the only thing that feels different is that you can’t smoke in the building anymore.

In March 2006, two high-profile cases were heard on the same day. One was the arraignment of Darryl Littlejohn, a nightclub bouncer accused of the torture and murder of a young woman named Imette St. Guillen, who had been drinking at the bar where he worked. That case had dominated the tabloid headlines and local news shows for weeks following her death. The other was the trial of two men, Troy Hendrix and Kayson Pearson, for the rape, torture, and murder of another young woman, Romona Moore.

Although Ms. Moore’s murder occurred almost three years before Ms. St. Guillen’s, it had only recently become famous. During their trial, her killers attempted to escape from the courtroom, using plastic knives to stab one of the defense attorneys and making a grab for a court officer’s gun. They were unsuccessful, but their efforts gave Romona Moore something that being abducted, raped, and murdered hadn’t provided: attention.

Though Romona Moore and Imette St. Guillen shared tragically short lives and sickening deaths, their backgrounds were quite different.

Imette St. Guillen was American-born, from Boston, living on Manhattan’s west side and attending graduate school.

Romona Moore was black, poor, and an immigrant. She was East Flatbush by way of Guyana, rather than Williamsburg by way of a trust fund, so even her Brooklyn pedigree was not newsworthy. There had been some notice granted due to her family’s grassroots campaign to locate her while she was missing. But as news items go, the discovery of her dead body was just a blip on the radar.

On the day of Darryl Littlejohn’s arraignment in one part of the courthouse, a jury in another part returned a guilty verdict in the Romona Moore case, convicting the murderers Troy Hendrix and Kayson Pearson.

I was standing in front of the building, waiting to meet a friend for lunch, when Romona Moore’s mother, Elle Carmichael, stepped outside with a few family members and friends. Dozens of reporters and cameramen surrounded her, calling out questions and requests for comments.

Ms. Carmichael composed herself, then spoke. She talked about her relief that the verdict had been what it was, and about her anger and frustration with the police department and the media. She sounded angry and frustrated; she sounded tired, although calm and resolved. She had been through an ordeal that few of us will ever have to endure, and finally, at the end of it, someone was paying attention to her daughter.

While she was speaking, the family of Imette St. Guillen emerged from the building. Almost every reporter immediately turned and walked away from Elle Carmichael. Her voice faltered a bit as she watched the parade of microphones and bobbing cameras moving away from her. Then she continued, concluding her statement to the four or five journalists who remained. When she finished, they too were gone in a flash, eager to catch up to their colleagues. Ms. Carmichael and her family were alone on the sidewalk.

I will never forget the look on Elle Carmichael’s face when she felt that, finally, her daughter was getting the notice she deserved. And I will never forget the look on her face when that moment ended. Sometimes the snapshots will break your heart.

No roses for Bubbeh by Reed Farrel Coleman

Coney Island

I once wrote that there were certain comforts to middle age. That just surviving till forty imbues you with a sort of weary serenity. You don’t sweat the small things quite so much. You’ve survived acne, probably marriage, maybe kids, and surely jobs you’ve hated. You realize that neither the loss of love nor your hair is apt to be fatal and that the kind of panic you felt every day in high school was now a distant, almost fond memory.

There is another aspect of middle age, however, that is of no comfort at all: things fade. As your eyes lose focus, so too does your memory. You can no longer recite the entire roster of the ’69 Jets or recall which games Art Shamsky started in the ’69 World Series. For that matter, you have trouble remembering kids on your block or who your seventh grade history teacher was. Until forty, your memory is like a vivid and complete jigsaw puzzle. About ten years later, pieces have gone missing. You scramble to replace them. Those replacements you do find are never quite as vivid. Others are lost forever.

Some things in a man’s life must not fade: the feel of his newborn children in his arms, his first Little League home run, his first taste of a woman. There is pain too that must not be forgotten: the agonizingly slow death of his mother, for example, or the murder of a nameless stranger.

For most of my early life, criminals were just a colorful part of Coleman family lore. The gangster, murderer, and world-class sociopath, Dutch Schultz, né Arthur Flegenheimer — a maniac who made even a homicidal lunatic like Ben “Bugsy” Siegel seem judicious — had a wicked crush on my bubbeh (that’s Yiddish for grandmother). Apparently, my grandfather, my zaydeh, whose blue eyes I inherited, owned a small grocery store in Hell’s Kitchen when they first came over from the old country. Back then, Hell’s Kitchen was part of Dutch Schultz’s territory and he ruled with an iron fist. Every business — Jewish-owned or not — was forced to pay heavy protection money. But because Dutch was so smitten by my bubbeh, he never made my zaydeh pay up. For a time, the story goes, Dutch sent roses to my grandmother every day.

Of course, I’ve always had a little trouble with this story. You see, I was very young when Bubbeh was very old. And even though everyone told me that back in the Ukraine, Anna Dukelsky was the greatest beauty in all the Jewish settlements, I had difficulty picturing my sweet, Chiclets-chewing bubbeh as Miss Shtetl of 1895. To me, she was a grandmother with thick-heeled black shoes and false teeth, a woman in a frock who spoke almost no English. Who could have a crush on my grandmother?

In the intervening years between Bubbeh’s death, a week or two before my brother David’s bar mitzvah in 1963, and that fifteenth or sixteenth summer of my life, I had a fair amount of exposure to petty crime of one sort or another. I’d had two bicycles stolen, gotten assaulted for lunch money, had my butt kicked a few times for no good reason by the neighborhood tough guys. I too had broken a few windows, helped myself to a few candy bars, kicked some undeserving ass. I suppose that was just sort of the price of doing business, part of the coming-of-age thing in Brooklyn.

In the ’60s and early ’70s, serious crime, even in Coney Island, was usually experienced at arm’s length. It was something that happened to a friend’s cousin or a friend’s friend. Sure, this guy I sort of knew from junior high, Mark Donchek, had been stabbed through the heart. One Monday morning the principal got on the P.A. and announced to the school that Mark had been murdered, but his death was like an extended absence. He was there on Friday and not on Monday. He might just as well have moved to Valley Stream over the weekend. Like I said, arm’s length. I haven’t thought about Mark Donchek for more than thirty years.

There was this other thing that happened, once. I think about it sometimes to remind myself that arm’s length is a myth, a lie we tell ourselves to feel secure. I tell it to myself when I’m on the road and away from my wife and kids. It helps me sleep.

Anyway, yeah, I was fifteen or sixteen. Like I said, things fade. We still had troops in Vietnam. I was working my second real job; my first with legitimate working papers. The year before I had gotten a job at the Carvel on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue Y by forging stolen working papers. So the next summer, the one I’m talking about now, I was working at Baskin-Robbins on Sheepshead Bay Road. I think I was making a buck seventy-five an hour, but in those days, one hour’s pay would’ve purchased at least three gallons of gas. A pity I wasn’t yet driving.

It was one of those scary gorgeous Brooklyn days when the sky is cloudless and endlessly blue. There was little humidity. A breeze was blowing in off the Atlantic and I could smell the ocean in the air, almost taste the salt on my tongue as I walked up Avenue Z from our tiny garden apartment on Ocean Parkway. I was at the age when a boy begins to notice the beauty in things: in the shape of a woman’s mouth, in the structure of an iris, in the way your father smiles. On most days I rode my bike to work, but that day I walked.

It’s odd now when I think of it, how walking up Avenue Z was like tracing a timeline of my early life. Although I wasn’t born there, Coney Island Hospital loomed large over the neighborhood. I tried not to notice. I hated hospitals. When I was four, my dad was diagnosed with bone cancer. He was in and out of hospitals so much that I thought the revolving door was invented to accommodate him. Next, there was the basement apartment on Z between East 6th and Hubbard Streets. It was the first place I remember. We moved three blocks away to the garden apartment when I was, like, three.

A few blocks up, there was P.S. 209 and the Avenue Z Jewish Center. P.S. 209 was built in the ’20s or ’30s, one of those beige brick behemoths that dotted the landscape of the borough. Unlike today’s user-friendly, welcoming school buildings, 209’s institutional look lent it a certain gravitas. Besides, its light brick walls were perfect for chalk stickball boxes and its prisonlike cyclone fencing made hitting a home run somewhat challenging. Though I couldn’t swear to it, I’m sure there were kids playing stickball and softball with Clinchers when I walked by that day. It was 1972 or ’73, before Metal Gear Solid 3 had replaced street games and made ghost towns of schoolyards.

Across the street was the Avenue Z Jewish Center. My zaydeh — yeah, the Ukrainian grocer from Hell’s Kitchen who had long since moved his family and business to Brooklyn — was one of the temple’s founding members, though there’s no plaque with his name on it. God, how I hated Hebrew school. During my bar mitzvah ceremony, I did my section of the Torah from memory. Judo Jack — that’s what we called our rabbi for the marshal art — like hand gestures he made during his sermons — had some sage advice for me that day.

“Coleman,” he whispered, “look at the back of my head when I speak. This way you won’t look like so much of an idiot.”

Nice, huh?

Next up was Coney Island Avenue, the unofficial borderline between Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay. On my side of Coney Island Avenue, the kids went to Lincoln High. Across the street, you went to Sheepshead. On my side, you went to Goody’s Luncheonette. On the other, you went to Z Cozy Corner Luncheonette. On this side of Coney Island Avenue, I had one group of friends. On the other, a different group of friends. Even at fifteen or sixteen, I thought it was weird how arbitrary and artificial borders can have such a profound effect on our lives.

So, what’s any of this got to do with anything? What does where I went to elementary school or my rabbi’s nickname or bone cancer or blue skies or roses for Bubbeh have to do with the point of this essay? Well, everything. On this day, something would happen to someone else that would change me forever, recolor my perceptions. I would have to relearn whole sections of what I thought I already knew. I would have to reexamine assumptions and presumptions and question where the borderlines were really drawn.

It happened across the border. When I headed beneath the shadow of the el, past the newsstand that had the best vanilla egg creams in Brooklyn, and I reached the bend in Sheepshead Bay Road where it turned to the water, I heard something. There was a pop, a crackle, like a firecracker, but not a firecracker. A gunshot! The wind carried it to me, a siren’s song. I followed it to its source.

Never the fastest guy in my neighborhood, it took me ten seconds to get to the post office on Jerome Avenue. At least I think it was Jerome Avenue. Like I said, things fade. A few years later, as I recall, the post office moved around the corner. But that day, in front of the old post office, there was a man. He lay on his back, head nearly in the gutter, his chest heaving, his arms and legs unmoving. I was about three feet from him, frozen.

Let me tell you what I remember about him. He wore heavy-rimmed glasses and his hair was stringy and unkempt. He was a thick man with a fat belly. He wore a short-sleeve shirt. It might have had stripes on it. I know for sure the shirt had a red spot on it where the bullet had bored into his gut. I recall thinking that there wasn’t much blood, that such a little hole couldn’t kill a human being. I was wrong. For a time, the world was deafeningly, torturously silent. I was not alone in my inability to move. The crowd around me was inert. I think we were trying to read his eyes through his glasses. Does he know he’s dying? Or maybe we just wanted him to ask for help. It was as if we were waiting for permission to move. Simon says, help the dying man.

Finally, someone came to him, propped a sweater or newspaper — I can’t remember — under his head.

“Call a fucking ambulance, for chrissakes!”

The fat man’s chest was still heaving when the ambulance from Coney Island Hospital got there. It seemed to have taken hours. That deadly silence long broken, the crowd buzzed in my ears. I strung together a narrative out of loose bits and pieces of conversation.

The man on his back was the manager of Wolfe Motors, the Ford dealership on Coney Island Avenue and Gravesend Neck Road. He had picked up payroll cash at the bank across the street and then gone to the post office. When he emerged from the post office, a white guy, or maybe Spanish — that’s what people called Puerto Ricans then, when spic seemed inappropriate — ran up to the fat man, shot him in the belly, grabbed the mail and the money, and ran. Sometimes when I think about that day, I imagine that I caught a glimpse of him or heard his frantic footfalls as he fled. But I didn’t.

The guy’s chest stopped heaving. The ambulance men — I don’t think anyone had yet coined the term Emergency Medical Technician — tried all sorts of things to revive him, to get his chest to move even a little bit. The ambulance men lifted the fat guy onto a gurney. One put a stethoscope to his chest. The other did something that is so ingrained in my memory that I can’t imagine forgetting it, ever. He removed the fat man’s left sock.

The sock was black Banlon and thoroughly worn, most of elasticity gone. With the sock removed, the ambulance man ran a tongue depressor along the naked sole of the fat guy’s pale foot. Even in the midst of it all, I thought that tongue depressor thing was bizarre, almost medieval. I’ve since learned he was checking for something called a Babinski reflex. As it happens, newborns and dead men don’t have them. To the ambulance men, the fat guy, once declared dead, was an object, no more worthy of their attention than the crumpled sock on the sidewalk.

He lay on the stretcher wearing one sock, his shirt with the little red dot, torn open. The entrance wound, now clear to see, was tiny still. There just had to be more blood, I thought, for a man to die. But the fact remained unchanged: The man was dead. I didn’t yet have an understanding of internal bleeding or of how bullets, as they slow, chew up human tissue. When, in a daze, I left to go to work, I noticed it was still a beautiful day. The world had not stopped turning. Yet everything was different.

I never knew the dead man’s name. I suppose I might have known it for a brief time and forgotten. There were posters put up around the neighborhood by his family and the cops. But the posters faded and frayed and fell off the telephone poles like the ones for missing pets or the guy who’ll rake your yard for ten bucks. To the best of my knowledge, the murderer’s never been apprehended.

Near the conclusion of my novel The James Deans, the protagonist-P.I., Moe Prager, having learned the truth about a thirty-year-old murder, goes to reveal that truth to the victim’s long-suffering mother. But as he steps out of his car to confront the dead boy’s parent with the truth, he stops himself and returns to his car. For at that moment, Moe learns the lesson I learned over thirty years ago.

In my writing, I try always to keep that day in mind. Whenever the urge strikes me to get too flippant or fanciful about murder, I remember. I remember that this nameless man had a family, and that for them his loss is nothing like the extended absence of a vaguely known kid from junior high. For them there is no such thing as arm’s length or closure or justice. Serious crime is not about glamour or fame or gangsters with funny nicknames. Murder is about pain and loss. Murder is no roses for Bubbeh.

The Brooklyn Bogeyman by C. J. Sullivan

Bensonhurst

The Bogeyman came to life in New York City in 1977. The fiend was born in Brooklyn in 1953, an unwanted child who was put up for adoption because his biological father — a well-off Long Island businessman screwing around with a Brooklyn housewife — would have nothing to do with this unwanted progeny. The kid’s penniless mother had no choice but to dump him on a family that wanted a child but were unable to conceive. Little did the couple know that the bundle full of joy they took out of Brooklyn was a monster.

The Furies must have been full of wicked humor as they walked the halls of that Brooklyn hospital on June 1, 1953. As soon as the Bogeyman was born he was taken out of Brooklyn. The Bronx and later Queens would have to deal with him as he morphed into a psychopath. In 1976 and ’77, as the evil started to cut short the lives of young kids from Queens and the Bronx, the people of Brooklyn thought they had dodged a bullet.

“Son of Sam is too scared to come into Brooklyn,” was a common boast of young Brooklyn men.

But like the Bogeyman of legend, he waited until everyone figured they were safe. Then he sneaked in during his last stages of malevolence and broke out his final act of wrath. And there have been rumors that Berkowitz’s killing in Bensonhurst may have been recorded and made into a snuff film.

David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” appeared in 1977 New York City as the place was at its nadir. His killing spree added to the woes of a seemingly dying metropolis. It was a city that was told to — in a famous Daily News headline — “Drop Dead” by President Ford. The coffers of the treasury were empty. Crime was rampant and the city’s answer was to lay off cops. Arson became pandemic, and with the ruined budget new firemen couldn’t be hired to help already overworked smoke eaters. If you were in New York in 1977, you knew murder and mayhem. Not much scared you, because if it did you would have moved out.

In fact, between 1970 and 1980 the population of New York dropped by 800,000 people. Many left, few moved in. New York was not a choice destination in those days. In 1976, when the Bogeyman started to come alive, he killed one person. Others, full of passion, jealousy, viciousness, evil, poverty, and anger killed another 1,621 people in New York that year. In 1977, the Bogeyman killed five and other killers came up with 1,548 murders. In those two years, 3,175 people were murdered in New York, yet it was the Bogeyman’s six killings that made the headlines. People couldn’t get enough of the story once it broke in the daily papers.

Everyone knew about muggings, shoot-outs, and drug wars. But for someone to come out of the shadows at night and gun down innocent girls and boys, well, that was beyond even a New Yorker’s ken. In the Big Apple, you’re usually killed for a reason, not just randomly picked out by a madman and slaughtered.

The origin of the word Bogeyman is hard to trace. In the southern regions of America, he is called Boogerman — elsewhere the standard appellation of Bogeyman applies. Some think it came out of Indonesia where the word bugis means pirates. Pirates were known to steal children and take them away from their homes to work on their ships. So parents would warn their children to be good or the Bugis would get them.

The Bogeyman’s legend has lasted and thrived for hundreds of years. Sam Raimi, the director of Spider-Man and one of the classic horror films of all time, The Evil Dead, is fascinated by the Bogeyman. Raimi once said, “He’s a mythical character that is the stuff of stories of generations. He is a horrible creature that consumes human beings...”

William Safire, the noted wordsmith for the New York Times, traced the oldest form of the word Bogeyman to thirteenth-century France. The word they used was Bugibu. In the later Middle Ages, Satan became known as Old Bogey. Safire suggests that there is a link between Satan and the Bogeyman. And some people — including Berkowitz himself — believe that Satan and the Son of Sam are also connected.

Safire explains how in Iceland the Bogeyman is puki, in Scotland he is called boggart, and in Germany he is Boggelmann. He also has theorized that the scarifier Boo comes from Bogeyman.

Writer Sharon K. West once did an essay on the fiend. “Bogeymen have no distinct habitat and can appear out of nowhere,” she concluded.

Well, New York had its own Bogeyman. No one knew where he lived and he did appear out of nowhere.

It was on April 17, 1977, that the Son of Sam came out of his lonely and twisted closet to show all of New York City just who they were going to have to deal with.

On that early Sunday morning at 3 a.m., a young couple, Alex Esau and Valentina Suriani, coming home from a date in Manhattan, were parked in a Mercury Montego along the lonely service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. As the couple hugged and kissed, David Berkowitz sneaked up to the car and shot them through the passenger-side window, killing them both.

He walked away and dropped a note addressed to NYPD Captain Joe Borrelli. In simple block letters, the message read:

After thirty years he has never really gone away.

In the summer of 1976, I started hearing some disturbing rumors about Satanic cults operating in the wooded sections of Orchard Beach in the Bronx and up in Untermyer Park in Yonkers. After Son of Sam’s arrest, it was revealed that his home address was a short walk from Untermyer Park.

I was employed that summer as a parkie at Orchard Beach, and one day as I was raking sand, a fellow worker said, “Yo, man, stay out of those backwoods here, they’re dangerous! Especially at night. There’s some sick shit going on out there with these devil-worshipping dudes. I think they kill dogs and drink the blood.”

I had been going to Orchard Beach since I was a kid and I couldn’t see devil-worshipping going down there. It was a place my father called the Bronx’s Riviera. The beach had seen racial wars, when whites would wander into what the Puerto Ricans had claimed as their section, or vice versa. But it is a big leap from stupid territorial brawls to Satanism.

Even so, I could believe it was happening up in Untermyer Park. That was in the suburbs and home to most of the heavy metal heads in the metropolitan area, including many who were interested in the occult. Back then I thought New York City kids were just too jaded to be into Satan. God has trouble drawing an audience in New York, never mind a second-rate deity like Old Scratch.

Untermyer was a weird park, though, and a lot of Bronx kids would go up there to cop marijuana or acid. The park was a former rich man’s sprawling estate located above the Hudson River. There were old, creepy Gothic towers with gargoyles on top and abandoned stone buildings throughout the grounds. It was thick with overgrown brambles, gardens, and woods. I could imagine, in the more secluded sections of the park, a band of hooded Satanists sacrificing dogs on nights when the moon was full.

Satanism did seem to be in back in those days. The movie The Exorcist was in rerelease (this was before video) and one of the most popular films of the summer in 1976 was The Omen.

I was having a hard enough time just getting by in 1976. Teenage years are tough everywhere, but in New York they can be particularly brutal. And one of the things I had never seen in New York was devil worship, so I was a bit intrigued. Every morning before work I would think about my Orchard Beach coworker’s warning, “Stay out of those woods, man.”

I would look into those foreboding trees on the other end of the beach and wonder. Then I would forget about it. Until one July 1976 morning when the night watchman at Orchard Beach was getting off duty and called me over to his car. He told me that at midnight he had seen a bunch of people on the beach wearing hooded black robes standing in a circle. He moved closer and heard them chanting and staring up at the full moon. He ran back to the parkie house, locked himself in, and called the cops. The figures were gone by the time the police arrived. We both shook our heads and I swore I’d never let the sun set on my ass at Orchard Beach.

On July 30, 1976, I was on a break from my parkie job. I sat in the shade of a locker room sipping a coffee and reading the New York Post.

One story on the front page caught my eye. A mile from Orchard Beach, in a neighborhood known as Pelham Bay, two young girls, Jody Valenti and Donna Lauria, had been shot the night before while sitting in a 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They were talking about their night at a New Rochelle disco when a lone gunman sneaked up on them and started shooting. He killed Lauria and badly wounded Valenti. She later recovered.

Wild story, I remember thinking. I finished the article and cynically thought it was a mistaken mob hit. The Pelham Bay neighborhood was no stranger to Mafia shootings. I figured the long-haired girls had been mistaken for some hippy drug dealers working the forbidden zone of a good Italian neighborhood.

The only problem with that theory was that when the mob boys hit, everyone dies. There are no witnesses left. In this shooting, only one girl died. Jody Valenti was able to give the police a good eyewitness sketch of the gunman.

After a day or two all the local dailies dropped the story. There were nearly twenty thousand murders in America in 1976. Poor and dead Donna Lauria was forgotten. (Though not by her father, who publicly threatened to kill Berkowitz in 2006, years after he was convicted of the murder.) What no one knew then was that the girls would later become immortalized as the Son of Sam’s first victims.

In 1953, Son of Sam was given the name David Richard Berkowitz. He was born Richard David Falco, and on his Brooklyn birth certificate, Anthony Falco was listed as his father. His birth mother, Betty Broder Falco, later claimed that his real father was one Joseph Kleinman, her lover who refused to have a baby with her. They remained lovers until Kleinman died of cancer in 1965.

The baby’s mother gave up the infant for adoption to Pearl and Nathan Berkowitz, a childless middle-aged couple living in the East Bronx. They switched the birth names around and called him David. Baby David was raised on Stratford Avenue in the Bronx. Nathan Berkowitz owned a hardware store and Pearl was a housewife. David was to be their only child.

In an attempt to interview David Berkowitz, I wrote him a letter and sent it to the prison where he is being housed. He answered.

David Berkowitz was, by all reports, a normal kid growing up in the Bronx. A number of his friends have stated that he was very good baseball player. His adoptive mother died in 1967 from breast cancer. In 1969, David moved with his father to Co-op City in the Bronx. They were a widowed father and son living together like in the TV show of that time The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

Berkowitz volunteered for the army in 1971 because he wanted to fight in the Vietnam War. He passed all his medical and psychiatric tests. In a typical illustration of government inefficiency, he was not sent to Vietnam, but to Korea. In June of 1974, he received an honorable discharge.

Berkowitz came back to the Bronx and got a job as a security guard, then left that position to become a cab driver. In 1975, after an armed robbery at his hardware store, Nathan Berkowitz left New York for Florida and gave the Co-Op City apartment to his son. Berkowitz soon lost that and then moved to New Rochelle and, finally, to Pine Street in Yonkers.

After moving to Yonkers he started working at a post office in the Bronx, pretty much finalizing the background requirements for a serial killer: got his army weapons training, did the rent-a-cop thing, a bid as a cabby, and now he was a full-fledged post office employee about to go postal.

One of the small pamphlets that Berkowitz wrote in prison and sent me was called: SON OF SAMhain [an ancient druid name for the highest-ranking demon] The Incredible True Story of David Berkowitz.

He explained that his cult members were “sons of sam... sons of satan!” He claimed that he became heavily involved with the occult and witchcraft in 1975.

None of his victims had any defense against .44 caliber bullets.

After Berkowitz’s July hit in the Bronx, he went out to Queens on October 23, 1976. There, he hunted down a man and a woman. The woman was the daughter of a New York detective. He found them in a red Volkswagen, on 160th Street in Flushing. Several rounds were fired into the car, shattering the windows. The woman was able to put the vehicle into gear and escape unharmed. The man suffered a head wound, but eventually recovered.

Berkowitz later said he went to a White Castle on Northern Boulevard to celebrate with a bunch of belly-bomber hamburgers. He claimed that shooting couples in cars was starting to be fun.

He certainly seemed to like Queens. On November 27, 1976, Berkowitz asked two girls on 262nd Street for directions to a nearby house. Before they could answer he opened fire, hitting both. They survived, although one remains paralyzed for life.

Neither of these attacks got much press. No one had made a connection between the three shootings in 1976.

That would change on the cold winter night of January 29, 1977 — the day that TV actor Freddy Prinze of the hit series Chico and the Man committed suicide. A young Queens couple went out to Forest Hills on a date to see a movie called Rocky. Afterwards they stopped for a drink at a local pub and then walked quickly to their car, parked on Station Plaza.

They sat in a blue Pontiac Firebird, shivering in the bitter five-degree temperature, waiting for the car to warm up. As they started to snuggle, Berkowitz opened fire, killing the woman, Christine Freund.

February 1, 1977 marked the first story in the tabloids that alluded to the fact that the shootings might be connected. A sketch was shown of the gunman; it looked like the Berkowitz we later came to know. The police now suspected they had a serial killer on their hands.

But this was soon forgotten because on Valentine’s Day 1977 a neo-Nazi nut stormed the Neptune Moving Company in New Rochelle, a town just north of the Bronx, killing five people and himself in an all-day siege.

The local news stations broadcasted live footage of this and the next day’s papers were filled with the horrific tales of Fred Cowan, a thirty-three-year-old man from New Rochelle. He was a bald, hulking six foot, 250-pound weight lifter. He was a self-described Nazi, and a hater of blacks and Jews. In a rage over being suspended from his job at the moving company, he decided to take out his Jewish boss and some of his black coworkers.

For days afterwards the papers and TV news were filled with stories on Cowan. What they all missed was his odd connection to Son of Sam.

On March 8, 1977, the now labeled .44 Caliber Killer took back the headlines by shooting a college student named Virginia Voskerichian as she walked home from the subway to her apartment in Forest Hills. As the gunman approached her, her only defense was her textbooks, with which she covered her face. The bullets tore through her books and found her head. The shooting was two blocks away from the January ambush.

This was a busy neighborhood, and eyewitnesses saw two completely different-looking people running from the scene. Two drawings were published; one looked like Berkowitz and the other showed a soft-featured person, maybe a woman, in a knit cap.

On March 10, 1977, New York’s littlest mayor, Abe Beame, held a press conference at the 112th Precinct, just a few blocks away from the last shooting. He announced that a murderer with a .44 caliber weapon was stalking New Yorkers and that an NYPD command called the Omega task force, manned with more than three hundred cops, had been set up to apprehend the fiend.

Then came the aforementioned April shooting in the Bronx, where Berkowitz dropped a letter giving himself the name Son of Sam. On May 30, 1977, he got the writing bug again.

David Berkowitz mailed a letter from New Jersey to the Daily News addressed to columnist Jimmy Breslin. I talked with Breslin about receiving Berkowitz’s missive. He was home in Forest Hills when it reached the News.

“A secretary called and read some of this madness to me over the phone,” Breslin said. “She really didn’t even want to read it. Said she was scared of it. It was an eerie letter. Very eerie. I told her to get rid of it and give it to the cops. I’ve made a conscious effort to not remember what it said. It was a sick letter written by a sick, depraved mind. It was hurled out of the depths of insanity... but I will say he is probably the only serial killer in history that knew how to use a semicolon.”

The letter started out: Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood...

This was reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s character, Travis Bickle, in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, as the character let go with a tirade to a politician in his cab.

Berkowitz’s letter went on:

It was signed Son of Sam. The return address was Blood and Family, Darkness and Death, Absolute Depravity, 44.

Breslin: “It has always fascinated me how they could make such a big deal over these serial killers. I mean, why study them? I find them depressing and dull. They’re a depraved, hideous, and grizzly lot of men who are not even worth studying. Forget them.”

After Berkowitz was arrested, Breslin felt spent.

“You were left with nothing after he was caught,” he said. “Just this little bug with a mind full of oatmeal.”

I asked him about people who deny that Berkowitz was the sole killer.

“They’re crazy. He was the one who did it. The guy pleads guilty to all the shootings. They’re a bunch of conspiracy nuts.”

Breslin went on to tell me that after Berkowitz was in jail, he wrote him another letter.

“It went something like, Dear Jimmy, How are you? And it was full of clichés like, The politicians are using me like a political football.” Breslin laughed and said, “The letter was written in a scrawl like a twelve-year-old would write. Completely different from the first one. I guess they gave him his medication in prison and then he was all right.”

The Daily News printed the first letter to Breslin and the Son of Sam was born.

Another one of Berkowitz’s prison pamphlets read:

Like most convicted felons, Berkowitz had a very convenient memory. No one in the media or police force had named him: The Bogeyman had given himself his own moniker, Son of Sam.

I took a ride up to some of Berkowitz’s old haunts in Yonkers. The years have changed the neighborhood as much as they have Berkowitz’s appearance. He has gone from a stocky, wildhaired youth to a balding, middle-aged man who resembles the actor Richard Dreyfuss. His neighborhood in the north of Yonkers has slid from working class to ghetto poor.

It was a quiet Sunday in a desolate area that looked like a depressed small town in the rust belt. I sat in my car in front of the old Carr house on Warburton Avenue. This is where Berkowitz said a 6,000-year-old demon lived with his dog and commanded him to kill from his apartment up the hill on Pine Street.

The Carr house was a rambling three-story wood frame, with new aluminum siding and four cars parked in the front yard. Above the house, up on the crest of a hill, I could see Berkowitz’s old seventh-floor studio apartment window, which had a curtain over it. I hoped it wouldn’t move.

I made a left onto the hill of Wicker Street and passed the home where Berkowitz said the Wicked King Wicker lived. It didn’t look he was home. Snaking up the steep drive, I came onto Pine Street and made a right. I started looking for Berkowitz’s old address, number 35. I found his apartment building, but it’s not 35 anymore. I guess they changed it to fool curious Berkowitz buffs. On a wall across the street was a sign: Beware of Dog.

I headed up North Broadway to Untermyer Park, where Berkowitz has claimed his Satanic cult held black masses. I made my way into a walled garden, and saw a sign that forbade photos being taken without a permit. I ambled around the gardens but stayed on the beaten paths. In a white stone gazebo there was a tiled floor with the face of a cherub in the middle. Someone had dug the tiles out of the angel’s eyes, leaving him blind.

I slid over to a long trail of stairs that led down into the thick woods. An unleashed Labrador retriever ran by me, its owner nowhere in sight. A brisk river wind kicked up and the late winter sun was setting over the banks of the Hudson. I hurried back to my car.

For a time, Berkowitz laid low. Then around 3 o’clock in the morning of June 26, 1977, a kid named Sal Lupo left a Queens disco, Elephas, with a pretty girl named Judy Placido. As they got into a red Cadillac, Berkowitz sneaked up and shot Placido three times. The windows exploded and Lupo ran back to the disco to get help. Placido survived.

The only thing bigger than the Son of Sam story that July was the citywide blackout on the 13th. New York went dark and looters went wild. More than three thousand people were arrested. Sam was momentarily forgotten.

Berkowitz took out his pen again and promised New York he would strike on July 29, to mark the anniversary of his first killing. That night, most city streets were deserted. No one wanted to tempt the Bogeyman. Cops sat in cars with female mannequins hoping to lure him into an attack. The night passed without incident and that somehow made things worse. We all knew it was coming.

On July 31, Berkowitz returned to the borough of his birth, Brooklyn. He drove around the neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bensonhurst as Stacy Moskowitz and Bobby Violante had their first date. They had gone to see the Robert De Niro/ Liza Minnelli flick, New York, New York, before driving back to Bensonhurst and parking on a quiet street. As they kissed, Berkowitz opened fire, hitting Moskowitz once in the head and Violante twice in the face. The Violante boy survived, but Stacy Moskowitz died a day later.

The Son of Sam had now killed six people.

There has been a rumor circulating for years that the Moskowitz killing was filmed, and has been watched ritually by “snuff” fanatics. Snuff films constituted a 1970s urban legend, movies that supposedly caught actual killings on tape. No credible source for such films has ever stepped forward, nor have any ever been found. Law enforcement officials claim that snuff films do not exist. Still, in Bronx bars and in the blogosphere, some swear Berkowitz’s crew of Satanists filmed the killing.

In a 1994 article on snuff films, Rider McDowell writes that journalist Maury Terry told him, “It is believed Berkowitz filmed his murders to circulate within the Church of Satan. On the night of the Stacy Moskowitz killing, there was a VW van parked across the street from the murder site under a bright sodium streetlamp.”

Terry believed a crew was in that van making a snuff film of the death of the twenty-year-old Brooklyn woman.

What finally brought David Berkowitz down was the bane of the average Brooklynite: a parking ticket. He received one that night, two blocks from the shooting.

On August 10, 1977, four NYPD detectives nabbed him as he approached his 1970 Ford Galaxy in Yonkers. His .44 caliber gun was sitting on the front seat. Berkowitz allegedly told the cops, “You got me. What took you so long?”

Sid Horowitz, a former court officer captain in Queens Supreme Court, went to Kings County Hospital with a judge to arraign Berkowitz for his Queens shootings. He told me his impressions of the Son of Sam.

“I am standing there with the judge and Berkowitz comes out with his head down. I remember saying to myself, ‘This is it? This is the Son of Sam?’ I couldn’t believe what a little twerp he was. He was a nothing. He just stared straight ahead with this blank look on his face. I left there shaking my head that this meek little nothing had killed six people.”

I went to Brooklyn Supreme Court to talk with J.B. Fitzgerald, a retired court officer who had worked security for all of Berkowitz’s Brooklyn court appearances.

Fitzgerald smiled at the memory. He and other Brooklyn court officers had been exuberant because they thought they were going to make a ton of money in overtime when the case went to trial. Also, since it was the biggest case to hit Kings County in decades, the courts were swarming with media and the officers were looking to become stars.

Fitzgerald was one of ten officers who escorted Berkowitz down a long hallway of 360 Adams Street on the seventh floor for a pretrial hearing. As they reached the back door to the courtroom, Berkowitz suddenly broke away from the officers and tried to throw himself out of a window. It didn’t work. All the courthouse windows have strong steel mesh reinforcing the glass. Security wrestled the wild Berkowitz to the ground. He bit one of the officers, then started to foam at the mouth.

Fitzgerald: “So we bring him into the major’s office to calm him down. I mean, ten guys are restraining him. One guy on one arm, one guy on the other arm, one guy on a leg — like that. After about fifteen minutes, he starts to calm down. We look around the room and it’s just Berkowitz and us. Then one of the guys says, ‘Maybe this flake really is a dog. After all, he bit Murphy.’ One by one we start letting go of him, and just let him lay there on the couch. I remember one guy lit a cigarette, and another said to open the window because it’s getting stuffy in here. I started to laugh, ’cause you gotta remember this nut just tried to throw himself out the window.”

The next day Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the rail between Berkowitz and the victims’ families.

“So Berkowitz walks up to the defendant’s table and he’s looking right at me,” said Fitzgerald. “Then he starts yelling, ‘Stacy’s a whore! Stacy’s a whore!’ I’m thinking he’s talking to me. Then I realize Stacy’s mother, Mrs. Moskowitz, was right behind me. The crowd went wild and rushed the bench yelling they were going to kill him.”

They hustled Berkowitz out of the courtroom and tried again the next day. Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the victims’ families in plainclothes. As soon as Berkowitz came into the courtroom, someone from the Moskowitz family jumped up on a bench and made a dive for him. Fitzgerald caught the guy in midair and wrestled him to the ground.

While awaiting trial in Brooklyn, Berkowitz caught a brutal jailhouse beating from another inmate in the Brooklyn House of Detention, causing his eyes to hemorrhage. Brooklynite doctor David Klein worked on his injuries.

Previously, in July 1977, Dr. Klein had operated on Bobby Violante’s eyes, saving his life, after Berkowitz had shot him in the head.

Klein told the Sun-Herald that he looked at Berkowitz and said, “I’m your doctor. I operated on one of your victims and now I am going to treat you.” Klein recalled his mixed feelings: “In the back of your mind you want to strangle him. But you have to respect your oath.”

Maybe the beating in Brooklyn did some good. On May 8, 1978, David Berkowitz pled guilty to all charges. In June he was sentenced to 365 years in prison. But his trouble in jail didn’t end. In 1979, an inmate slashed his throat. It took fifty-six stitches to close his neck wound, but Berkowitz survived.

Berkowitz may have pled guilty to all charges, but he now claims that he only carried out two of the shootings and that members of a Satanic cult he was involved with committed the others. Did he commit all the crimes he was charged with? There are two prominent theories about the Son of Sam case. One is that Berkowitz was a type of Manchurian Candidate assassin who, on some unknown command, was sent out to randomly kill. For proof they offer that one of his letters reads, I am programmed to kill.

The other theory is the one that Berkowitz has been braying about for years. Son of Sam was not one person but an evil Satanic cult that wanted to bring mayhem upon the city of New York. The evidence for that, besides Berkowitz’s words, are the police sketches of three distinctly different shooters. One of the closest eyewitnesses — Bobby Violante — said the shooter was a tall and thin blond man — very different from the chubby postman Berkowitz.

Maury Terry, in his book The Ultimate Evil, makes some good arguments for Berkowitz not acting alone. But Terry undermines his own perspective by connecting the Son of Sam shootings to the Mason family and every other murder with even the slightest whiff of Satanism that has hit the media from 1969 onward. Even so, there are some strange coincidences with David Berkowitz.

Berkowitz lived in New Rochelle in 1976 for a few months. His landlord worked at the Neptune Moving Company with Fred Cowan, the aforementioned Nazi, who went ballistic on Valentine’s Day in 1977, killing five people and himself. Renting a room to the Son of Sam and working with another mass murderer is beyond weird.

In August of 1977, an NYPD detective called Yonkers PD on a routine matter, checking out one David Berkowitz, who had gotten a parking ticket in Brooklyn the night Stacy Moskowitz was shot. The daughter of Sam Carr, Wheat Carr, answered the phone. She told the detective that she lived behind Berkowitz and claimed he was a serious whacko. She also told them that he owned guns and she suspected him of being the Son of Sam. The Daughter of Sam was the best tip PD had.

A month after David Berkowitz was arrested, the postman who had delivered his mail to 35 Pine Street committed suicide.

In 1982, Leon Stern, one of Berkowitz’s lawyers when he entered his guilty plea, was killed in his own house by an armed intruder. Stern was gunned down on May 8, four years to the day after Berkowitz gave his plea.

Both of the sons of Sam Carr — I guess that makes them the real Sons of Sam — were dead by 1980. John Carr committed suicide in North Dakota, putting a shotgun into his mouth and pulling the trigger. Berkowitz has suggested that John Carr (in his letter to Breslin he was identified as John Wheaties — Rapist and Suffocater of Young Girls) was a part of his cult.

The other son of Sam Carr, Mike Carr (The Duke of Death in the Breslin letter), died in a car crash on 70th Street and the West Side Highway.

I talked with former Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Dominic J. Lodato, who handled the David Berkowitz case from the civil side, when the families of his victims were trying to prevent Berkowitz from profiting off of any publications or movies about his crimes. Lodato, along with former Queens D.A. John Santucci, had his doubts about whether Berkowitz acted alone.

Lodato told me, “I was very leery about the case. There was a suspicion that there might have been more than one gunman. The police sketches clearly showed two completely different people, and these were from eyewitness to the shootings. But it wasn’t for me to decide that, and he did plead guilty, so that ended that.”

During the civil case, Lodato got plenty of motions from Berkowitz’s side. He remembered that one was for Berkowitz to change his name. Lodato couldn’t remember what he wanted to change it to. Lodato also received strange and threatening letters from Berkowitz whenever he denied any motions made by him. I asked about the letters.

“I wasn’t too scared,” said Lodato. “He was in jail and I guess you just have to have faith in the system.”

In 2003, I saw Berkowitz on television. He talked about being a born-again Christian and how he now sends Bibles to poor people.

A minister had sent him a letter in 1978. Berkowitz wrote back and said that when he got out of jail he would hunt down the preacher and kill him. Today, Berkowitz and the minister pray together and are, as the minister solemnly states, friends in Christ.

On the TV show, Berkowitz was shown a tape of Mrs. Moskowitz saying that she now believes he didn’t act alone and would he please just tell her who had murdered her daughter.

Berkowitz watched the tape and shook his head. “I can’t, I’m sorry but I just can’t do it,” he said.

Berkowitz’s Son of Samhain pamphlet ends with:

Berkowitz first came up for parole in 2002. He refused to attend the hearing, admitting he deserved to be in jail until his death. In 2004, he was denied parole and this year will be the same. Berkowitz will only leave prison in a coffin.

In 2005, Berkowitz wrote a book titled, Son of Hope. It is all about his conversion to Christianity and how Jesus is now his savior. Christian organizations push the book and the proceeds go to the needy. It seems that David just can’t quit writing.

When Berkowitz was arrested on August 10, 1977, the Post ran his picture with the headline: CAUGHT. Berkowitz’s eyes are unnaturally bright and he has the smallest smile on his face. Like he knows something that he’s never going to tell.

Son of Sam was bumped from the headlines that August thirty years ago after one week. The reason: the death of Elvis Presley.

He’s never gone away, either.

Slaves in Brooklyn by Kim Sykes

Weeksville

With land you have food, drink, and shelter,” Olga said in a lilting Caribbean accent. Her rusty eyes peeked over her mirrored sunglasses to register my reaction. “They created eminent domain while we were sleeping, you see. And all those shops over on Fulton Street are there to distract us.”

We were a few blocks from the Fulton Street Mall, standing in front of a row of Civil War — era buildings on Duffield Street that had been declared “blighted” by the city, in order to build a parking lot for a new hotel. The owners fought back, claiming the nineteenth-century buildings were part of the Underground Railroad, that they were the homes of abolitionists who harbored fugitive slaves on their way to freedom.

Signs that read Eminent Domain Abuse, the words circled and crossed out in red, were plastered on the windows and doors. Remnants of their historic past were still visible in the architecture of the small brick buildings, but over the years burglar bars and shoddy repairs had scarred what was left of any beauty. It would take millions of dollars to restore them to what they once were, but that was not going to happen. Using outside consultants, the city commissioned a study and found no conclusive evidence of Underground Railroad activity. The construction of the hotel had begun. Directly across the street from the homes, a bulldozer emitted a loud beeping sound as if it were counting the days until their destruction.

Olga had seen me taking pictures and came over to check me out. I could tell she wasn’t sure whose side I was on. I introduced myself but she would only give me her first name. “They make us slaves by taking away our land. You know, all these people going off to get their master’s degrees. I call them Master’s Degree. Because that’s who it is for. They get Master’s Degree to become highly qualified slaves.” Olga walked with me toward the Fulton Street Mall. She wanted to know what I was doing on Duffield Street. I told her that I was researching the city’s connections to the Underground Railroad for a play I was going to be reading in the fall. I’m not sure if she believed me.

The play is about Elizabeth Keckly, a seamstress who bought herself out of slavery and became the dressmaker to Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd. After writing her autobiography, Keckly moved to 14 Carroll Place in New York and I wanted to see it, but first I had to find it. Originally I assumed Carroll Place was in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, but there was no such street on the local map. I decided to go anyway, and after several hours of walking the neighborhood and asking around, I gave up. At home on the computer I discovered a Carroll Place on Staten Island, but I told myself Keckly was sophisticated, and a seamstress to the elite. It didn’t seem possible that she would live all the way out on Staten Island. There had to be another Carroll Place that Google Maps hadn’t heard of. One that had been lost or renamed in subsequent years. But the old maps in Manhattan’s Midtown library pointed to the New Brighton district on Staten Island, which in the 1860s was a fashionable summer resort. A place where the rich would bring their seamstresses and hairdressers to have on hand. It had been staring me in the face, I just didn’t like what I saw.

The librarian scolded me. “See, this is why we have to be wary when reading history. We have to ask who wrote it and what their motives were. You can’t change history because you don’t like what you find.”

Of course he was right, but I was not going to Staten Island. The building where Keckly lived had been torn down, and it wasn’t going to help me to look at what I was sure by now was an office building or a parking lot.

Researching the everyday lives of African Americans in the nineteenth century and earlier is like putting together a puzzle with almost all of the pieces missing. You get accustomed to seeing words and phrases such as, “most likely happened,” “probably,” and “no conclusive evidence.” Keckly’s memoir made it a bit easier. As a slave, she had learned how to read and write, and she freed herself and her son by paying off her owners. She achieved some fame as a seamstress and a companion to Mary Todd Lincoln. Even then, what was written in her book, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, seemed to me to have been composed mostly for white consumption during a time when few African Americans could read, or even purchase a book. I wanted to know about the daily life of a black woman in the 1860s, which was how I ended up at the library going through government and police records and reading old newspapers. But whenever I do something like this, I inevitably find myself taken in a completely different direction than where I started. That’s what happened when I began with 14 Carroll Place and ended up at the Underground Railroad homes on Duffield Street.

Olga was carrying heavy bags, so we walked slowly past the wig and pawn shops and the Rastafarians selling incense on rickety card tables. Without any regard to aesthetics, storefronts selling everything from french fries to sneakers were jammed next to each other. As we walked, a young woman raced by us talking on her cell phone. She was beautiful and she knew it. Her tight pants showed off her perfect figure and I marveled at her ability to walk in such pointy-toed, highheeled shoes. Everyone within twenty feet of her could hear her conversation. “Yo, meet me on Fulton by the Duane Reade!... Fulton Street!” It is hard to imagine that this Fulton Street was once a dirt road on which Harriet Tubman led escaped slaves to safe houses. The crowd around us was dense. Olga stopped to make sure I took it all in. Once again, she peeked at me over her shades. Downtown Brooklyn was undergoing major reconstruction. It was only a matter of time before even this stretch of consumer distraction became gentrified. I was going to ask what she thought about that, but we had arrived at the corner of Fulton and Flatbush.

In 2005, the city conamed this section of Fulton Street Harriet Ross Tubman Avenue in honor of the African American abolitionist who ferried slaves from the South to freedom in the North. Olga followed my gaze up at the signage. I was sure she was going to comment on the fact that Ms. Tubman had to share billing. I wondered about that myself since Robert Fulton, the steamboat inventor, also had streets named for him in Manhattan and elsewhere. She set her bags on the sidewalk without taking her eyes off the signs. Her red-and-white striped hat covered all of her hair except for fuzzy gray and black curls poking out at the sides.

“Look at the sign,” Olga said. “What do you see?” Fulton’s green metal sign hung above the one for Harriet Ross Tubman. Her lips curled into a half smile. I was missing her point. “But what else do you see? Look closer.” Fulton Street had been written in all caps and Harriet Ross Tubman’s wasn’t. If her full name had been in all caps, I thought, the sign would probably be too long and snap off in a stiff wind. But I said nothing. I played dumb.

“His name is capitalized!” she said, her finger pointing to the sign like a first grade teacher. “Except for the first letters, her name is in lower case! And you see, she is at the bottom. He is at the top. They call us minority. What does minority mean? It means less than, not as good as. That’s what they want us to believe. Minority. It’s in the dictionary. Look it up.”

On the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Fulton/Tubman, I listened to Olga’s tutorials on racism and capitalism. She told me about her family, how she is the only one to live and work in the states. How her children are back on the island of St. Vincent protecting the family land. I asked her where she worked, but she was vague, still unsure if she could trust me. I looked down at her bags and saw that they were filled with books. Occasionally, someone passed by and called out a greeting to her and she would respond, but she never lost her train of thought, moving from African land grabs to the biogenetic seeds that corporations are sending to the Caribbean and South America.

“They send us seeds that grow the vegetables for one season and then we have to buy the seeds again for the next year! Non-fertile seeds! These men are smart but evil. They are enemies of nature.”

All was going well until she moved on to religion, starting with Abraham and the Egyptian slaves and what was left out of the Old and New Testaments. It had nothing to do with Olga. It was me. When anyone starts talking religion, my eyes begin to glaze over and I want to run away screaming. It’s the fault of my Baptist upbringing in Louisiana that promised rewards only after you were dead. I politely interrupted Olga, thanked her for her insight, and told her that I had to get to the library before it closed, which was true. She gave me one of those half smiles again, this one with all sorts of meaning behind it. The one I went away with was, Can you handle what I’ve just told you?

At the Brooklyn Public Library, I was given a file labeled Plymouth Church. Inside of it I discovered a newspaper drawing of Henry Ward Beecher, the famous abolitionist minister standing before his congregation with a young girl at his side. The description under it read, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher auctioning “Pinky” slave girl. I had heard of Beecher, mostly because of his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but who was Pinky? What happened to her? In the drawing her long hair fell below her waist. Her features were Caucasian, except for a small rounded nose that hinted at Africa. Elizabeth Keckly would have to wait, I thought. I left the library and headed back to Brooklyn Heights.

Like most Americans, when I think of slavery I think of the South, which is why I was shocked to discover that in 1790, according to the first U.S. Census, Brooklyn was the second largest slave-holding city after Charleston, South Carolina, the center of the slave trade. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln came to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn to hear Henry Ward Beecher preach against the evils of slavery, which had been abolished for more than three decades in the state.

Lois Rosebrooks led myself, a young man, and his uncle to pew 89 where Abraham Lincoln sat in 1860, the day before he gave his antislavery speech at Cooper Union; the speech that would help win him the Republican nomination and set the stage for the Civil War. The young man sat in the pew while his uncle snapped a picture of his beaming face. Lois gave a brief talk about the day Lincoln visited Plymouth and then they left. The young man was on his way to college and had to catch a plane. Once they were gone, Lois and I settled in. This time, I took the seat were Lincoln had sat and imagined his long legs, his knees knocking against the pew in front of me.

Lois didn’t look anything like what her card said she was: Director of History Ministry Services. She was wearing a short-sleeved blue housedress with colorful flowers embroidered around the neck. Her reddish-brown hair was styled nicely, just below her ears. It was as if she were in her own home and any minute would offer me cookies and a cup of tea. I glanced down at her feet, half expecting slippers, but saw instead sensible black shoes. Her eyes sparkled when I told her I wanted to know about the mock slave auctions. It was obvious that she loved her job.

“Plymouth Church was called, by some, the Grand Central Depot” she began, with a strong, pleasant-sounding voice. “Beecher encouraged his congregation to purchase the freedom of actual slaves in order to draw attention to it. We’ve found evidence of at least eleven mock slave auctions in our files. We can tell by the financial records of the church. Pinky was the most famous. She was nine years old, and auctioned here just before the war. The church returned her to her grandmother.”

I looked around the large room. It reminded me of an Elizabethan theater with its crescent-shaped seating and no center aisle. Stained-glass windows flanked the second-floor balcony depicting famous leaders of the time, including Beecher, his sister, and Abraham Lincoln. A pleasant change I thought from the bloody crucifixion scenes found in most churches. When I asked how she came to be the historian for Plymouth, which was renamed Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims after a merger in 1934, she said, “I realized one day that something had to be done about the history of our church.” Her voice resonated off the high ceiling. “There was too much of it here.”

Lois had a presence and ease about her delivery that made me ask if she was a performer. “I used to sing professionally.” She tilted her head modestly to one side. The light caught a small flame of gray hair above her forehead. “I was a soprano. I would sing all over the city. I sang at Mother Zion up in Harlem for fourteen years. I started in 1967, or was it ’66? I’d have to check to be sure.

“At the time, Adam Clayton Powell, who preached at Abyssinian Baptist Church, didn’t like the idea of me singing in Harlem. In one of his sermons, he complained about me: Those black churches that hire white sopranos...” The memory amused her and me. “But soon after, Mother Zion’s choir went to sing at Abyssinian. Reverend Powell walked up to me and shook my hand and he said, ‘Welcome to Harlem.’”

All this time I had been talking to Lois about history and not realizing that she was a part of it herself.

I asked her if I could stand on the platform where Pinky stood. To my surprise, she said yes. I climbed the few steps up to the small stage, which was about four feet wide and eight feet long and covered in red carpet. Lois stood off to the side and told me about the baptismal recently discovered under the pulpit there, but the pounding in my chest rose to my ears and drummed out her words. The church was empty except for Lois and me; I crossed my arms protectively in front of myself. I couldn’t help but cast my eyes down, like Pinky’s were in the drawing. I felt exposed, vulnerable, and frightened. Mock or real, it must have been awful having your life in the hands of complete strangers, even well-meaning ones. I wanted to get down off the stage.

Lois completed the tour by showing me the basement under the church. A flight of stairs took us down to it. I ran my hand along the brick walls, piecing together yet another part of the puzzle. There were no records of who was hidden here, of course. Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the federal government could be called in to aid in the arrest and return of slaves to their masters. Runaways and those who assisted them were careful not to leave tracks — yet still I wanted to discover some mark, anything left behind; though I was sure that if such evidence existed, Lois would have found it long ago, as would the rats. “I have to stomp my feet on occasion before coming down here. That usually scares them off,” she said.

The basement was neat and clean considering we were under the church. There were three openings that led underneath separate parts of the building. The entrance to one of them was covered with an iron fire door that led beneath an addition that was built after a fire in the 1920s. Another was blocked by fallen debris and construction material, making it impossible to go inside; but the third opening was unobstructed. Lois switched on a light and I could see the brick pillars that held up the foundation. The dirt floor was strewn with rocks but there was plenty of room to hide.

“One day, the workmen for Con Edison discovered a tunnel under the street next to the church, but they filled it in before we were called.” Lois’s stricken face mirrored my own. “It was unfortunate. It could have given us valuable information.”

Knowing history, and having a physical place to connect it to, is a magical combination. It binds you to that place in time in a way books and films on their own can never do. To be where a momentous event happened, to sit were Lincoln sat, to walk were Harriet Tubman walked, brings the past present, so that for a moment their pain and sacrifice, victories and losses, are yours. Their mistakes are ours not to repeat, and their triumphs to advance upon. It’s why the Holocaust Memorial Museum keeps the shoes from the concentration camps, why we mark where George Washington slept, and why I asked to stand where a slave girl named Pinky once stood. Keeping these artifacts and preserving these places honors our past and is essential to our future.

After I left Plymouth Church, I walked through Brooklyn Heights on streets named after some of the earliest Dutch and English settlers — Hicks, Remsen, Boerum — landowners who made their fortunes in no small part from the efforts of slave labor. The homes are beautiful, pristine, like the homes on Duffield Street once were. Brooklyn Heights is a historic district, with well-documented evidence of its past. It is where, during the revolutionary war, George Washington and his men fought the British and where homes stood through which Harriet Tubman scuttled fugitive slaves to safety during the Civil War. Washington and Tubman couldn’t be more different, and yet their defiant spirit, their determination to do what needed to be done against a formidable enemy, is a large part of what Brooklyn is made of.

“May I have your attention, please?” said a young man who looked like he had just begun shaving that morning. I was on the train headed for Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I don’t mean to disturb you, but I’m selling candy this morning.” I buried my face in my newspaper. Others busied themselves with electronic devices or fiddled inside their purses. “And I’m not selling them for a basketball team or for a school. I’m selling them for myself. Me,” he said tenaciously. I looked up from my paper. I hadn’t heard this one before. “And I plan on spending my money wisely and in a responsible manner. Thank you.”

As our train pulled into the Utica Avenue station, an older gentleman, a black Muslim dressed in a long white tunic, called the kid over. “I don’t want the candy,” he said. “Take the dollar.” He shoved the money into the kid’s hand with as much cockiness as the kid had shown delivering his speech. Such a display of industriousness and pluck was a perfect introduction to my next destination.

African American historical landmarks are disappearing at an alarming rate. Too often what is left can only be imagined, but sometimes we get lucky. Weeksville was one of the earliest free African American communities, the center of intellectual, cultural, and economic life in Brooklyn. At its peak during the 1860s and ’70s, five hundred to seven hundred prosperous African American families lived there. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the first female African American doctor in New York State, and Moses P. Cobb, Brooklyn’s first black policeman, were among them. Some of the homes and churches were key stops on the Underground Railroad, undocumented of course; and there were at least two forgotten newspapers, the Freedman’s Torchlight and the People’s Journal. But despite that history, the four remaining structures of Weeksville had been scheduled to be torn down in 1968 in order to build more housing projects. Thankfully, they were saved by the efforts of James Hurley and Joseph Haynes, an historian and an amateur pilot, armed with an old map and a plane. They flew over the area and spotted an unfamiliar lane and several dilapidated homes partially hidden by overgrown weeds.

Hunterfly Road, which looks like a wide dirt path, runs diagonal to one of the modern streets. I entered the gate and found four perfectly restored pre — Civil War wood frames that look as if they were out of Colonial Williamsburg. The Hunterfly Road Houses, as they are now called, are surrounded by the Kingsborough projects, condos, and single-family homes built later in the twentieth century. They tower over the Weeksville Heritage Center like invading alien ships.

Like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes, these houses have small rooms, box-shaped, with low ceilings and narrow staircases that can only accommodate one person going up or down at a time. Architects working for the Center have discovered that two of the homes were built in the same style as Southern slave quarters. Inside, the rooms are sparsely furnished; the Heritage Center needs more funds.

I came armed with a list of questions, the answers to most of which could only be speculated upon. The town of Weeksville is where victims of the Draft Riots escaped to in 1863. Hundreds of blacks from Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn took refuge here from white mobs who lynched, burned, and beat them because they were angry about being drafted into the Civil War.

“We don’t know if anyone came to these particular homes,” Lauren Rhodes, the educational coordinator and guide, told me, “but there’s a good chance that they did.” The local celebrities back then, Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, Moses P. Cobb, and Junius C. Morel, a journalist and principal of Colored School No. 2, lived in Weeksville, but their homes as well as the school are now gone. The African Civilization Society met somewhere in Weeksville, and the Garnet Field Club practiced baseball in a field, somewhere. The Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, which took in homeless children and those fresh from slavery, now belongs to a repair shop for the New York City Transit Authority.

Thanks to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s online archives, I know that Harriet Tubman spoke in Weeksville, as did Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Elizabeth Keckly had a correspondence with Fredrick Douglass, and when she retired she taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the same place that Susan Smith McKinney-Steward worked after her retirement. At some time during her stay in New York, Keckly probably visited Weeksville, but I can only guess, since all that remains of the place is four little houses and a few churches scattered inside of what used to be its boundaries.

I was ready to work on the play, and though I didn’t find a lot of what I was looking for, I had a sense of what a woman like Keckly experienced in 1860 New York. Hope and fear is what African Americans were living with back then. Hope for a better life, and fear that the outcome of the Civil War would throw them back into slavery. On that the evidence is pretty clear. How wonderful it would be to see more of the places in which their dreams and struggles took place. Back at Plymouth Church, I had asked Lois Rosebrooks why white people tend not to think of black history as their own history. The minute the question came out of my mouth, I wanted to take it back. It seemed a rude thing to ask of a woman who has devoted much of her life to preserving African American history. I could tell she was taken aback by my question but thankfully not offended. “People are bored by history,” she said. “They don’t want to know it, black or white. I don’t know,” she continued, “I’d have to think more on that.”

Clearly, I had to as well.

I can’t stop thinking about what that librarian said to me: “You can’t change history because you don’t like what you find.” So much of American history lifts up our triumphs, while ignoring our infamy. And though black history is white history, much of it is a painful place to revisit, and so preserving it is not a priority. Changing it — or worse, destroying it — is like saying it never happened. The crimes are perpetrated once again.

In her retirement, Keckly taught at Wilberforce College before returning to Washington, D.C., where she died. The Harmony Cemetery, where she was buried, was paved over in the 1960s and her remains, unclaimed, were placed in an unmarked grave. Unfortunately, I won’t be going to Washington, D.C.