Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

In which two to six players assemble around a crooked course of obstacle lines and periodic stopping points chalked on the street or sidewalk pavement. Each player uses fingers to shoot a bottlecap (the “skelly”) step by step through the obstacle course, halting just before the stopping points. Succeeding players may elect to “kill” opponents by knocking into their skelsies en route to the finish.

The Creamflake kid by Jess Korman

Crown Heights

It was to have been a productive workday. He would grind out six more pages. In the television industry swamp, in that summer of 1985, “pages” meant scripted scenes that a producer deemed worth a camera’s time and trouble. This was how the Burbank geniuses measured their employee’s worth: How many shootable pages could the hack du jour grind out?

According to Larry Sloan, né Scharfsky, you could substitute the word pounds for pages. That’s what they wanted. Pounds of shootable crap for a low-budget series set in Brooklyn. They wanted to film “real people” and let them act out the stories, a terrible idea in which a bunch of nobodies carried on like somebodies. It was also wonderfully cheap to produce.

Manufacturing the six pages of this proposed disaster in his eight-by-ten rental office in the Artists and Writers Building on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills was no easy feat. The director Billy Wilder rented the office across the hall. The aging and iconic Kirk Douglas, carrying a container of English Breakfast tea, sometimes shuffled through one of the smoked-glass doors three down. Larry’s fellow tenants, highly worshiped avatars of the craft, were a stinging reminder of how low he had sunk in the scheme of things.

Larry Sloan was taking the buck and running. A shameful crime, he felt, but he was getting away with it. After all, nobody got hurt but Larry.

The walls of his office were painted in a particularly tired-out shade of gray. The cool of the Mexican stone floors seeped through his thin-soled Rockports. A dusty window looked out upon an alley, offering a glimpse of bougainvillea and the back wall of a garage. The stunning California sun, as reliable as it was relentless day after day, redeemed an otherwise grim view. As it is said in L.A., another goddamn beautiful day.

The pages were not coming today because Larry Sloan was somewhere else in his head, lost in his own Brooklyn, a long time ago, where his crime wave began.

The Creamflake Bakery, on Utica Avenue between Carroll and President, was a popular establishment in Crown Heights, catering not only to the Jews, but the Irish too, as well as some Italians — and, lately, newly arrived Caribbeans, whatever they were.

You could get challah at the Creamflake and Irish soda breads. Green cookies were sold on St. Patrick’s Day, of course, and elaborate confections were available for Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, and other religious events, such as when the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant the year before, which was 1952.

They called him Loo-Loo. The nickname had stuck since his baby days. He was ten now, and Al and Dotty still called him that. This was before being sensitive to your kid’s feelings was called “good parenting.” At P.S. 189 on East New York Avenue, the kids ragged on him about the girly-sounding moniker.

“It’s not Lulu,” he would snarl, spelling it out. “It’s Loo-Loo, you stupid moron.” This was the big put-down of 1953, the gilded age of “moron” jokes on the tube.

Anyhow, Loo-Loo’s skin was thick. He had tons of friends. He was a first-class punch-ball player. He could fire a pink Spalding — duly pronounced spaldeen — the whole length between a pair of sewer covers in a neat trajectory. Automatic homer. On President Street, this was status.

The other thing about Loo-Loo’s popularity was that Al Scharfsky owned the Creamflake. When your father sells chocolate cookies, jelly doughnuts, and charlotte russe, there is no shortage of kids who will gladly accompany you to the bakery for the sweet possibility of a handout.

Jack Horn was Al’s partner. Jack was in charge of cakes. Al himself took care of the breads and rolls. Everything was baked in old stone ovens with piles of coal that glowed eternally in the corners.

Loo-Loo hung around sometimes. Jack and his father would let him squeeze jelly into the doughnuts, using a metal contraption with a lever and a long spout. Sometimes, the Russian help baked alligator-shaped bread with raisin eyes, especially for Loo-Loo. Ten o’clock at night or so, the cops drove by to collect bags of “stale,” leftover breads and rolls which they took back to the 71st Precinct station house on Empire Boulevard.

Along Loo-Loo’s stretch of Utica was the usual constellation of neighborhood shops — fruits and vegetables, butcher, freshly slaughtered chickens, fish, dresses, radio repair, barbers, and a candy store with a soda fountain. Two blocks further up, the retail pattern repeated, including a bakery just like the Creamflake, only it was called the Union because it was near Union Street.

Although people preferred shopping as few steps as possible from where they lived, they would sometimes cross the continent into the next block. Which is why Al Scharfsky considered the Union Bakery his arch competitor, especially in the summer of ’53 with the place under mysterious new management.

Trolley cars once clanged their way up and down Utica, their motormen wearing neckties. Kids put pennies on the tracks and they got flattened out when the cars rattled past. Now there were buses, though the old tracks remained on the cobblestones as parallel reminders of the past, beyond Eastern Parkway into the unknown and ominous infinity of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

This was Loo-Loo’s universe. President Street terminated at the enormous Lincoln Terrace Park, which separated the Andy Hardy tranquility of Crown Heights from the mean and dangerous Brownsville, birthplace of Murder Incorporated. While the park had plenty of green spaces for a game, the kids preferred the “gutter,” a.k.a. the street. Two grand maple trees on either side were markers for first and third. The sewer cover in the middle was second.

Crown Heights was not at all like the fabled and dangerous Brooklyn of Cagney movies. It was more like some small town in middle America, at least the small-town America image perpetrated by Hollywood’s immigrant studio heads.

Very innocent. Very tranquil. There were rows of one-and two-family houses, some of them in the Renaissance Revival, Georgian, and Romanesque styles, sometimes bookended by five-story apartment houses on each corner. Looming shade trees, elms and sycamores, lined the sidewalks like protective uncles.

But for some, danger seemed near at all times. Something in the air, obviously lurking yet inexplicable; a conventional notion that someone was coming to get you if you didn’t watch your ass. One minute, everything seemed safe in the neighborhood. Then a cop car would come tearing down Utica on the way to a murder or a holdup someplace, its siren splitting the June air like heat lightning.

At the supper table, to make matters even more unsettling, Loo-Loo would sit staring into the dry chicken on his plate — chicken cooked to within an inch of its taste — exchanging looks with Rita, his little sister, while Al Scharfsky sang disturbing arias.

“It’s changing, you know. The whole neighborhood. They’re coming in.”

“Who’s coming, Pop?” Loo-Loo asked.

“People. The Immigrants. Coloreds. Spanish. People from Aruba.”

“Where’s Aruba, Pop?”

“It’s down there. The rich people go there for gambling and ha-cha-cha and the criminals from there come to Crown Heights.”

“What’s wrong if they want to come here, Pop? Maybe you’ll sell more rye bread.”

“They don’t eat rye bread, Loo-Loo. They eat their own food. Things with fish in it.”

“Maybe they’ll like your rye bread.”

“Maybe,” Al said, then changed the subject. “No sooner we got rid of Murder Incorporated, we got to deal with this element.”

“What’s an element?” Rita asked.

“A criminal element. Criminals are attracted to this neighborhood, honey.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rita, nodding her head, dimly satisfied.

Loo-Loo’s mother raised her hand to say, “They’re just poor people, Al. Besides, Murder Inc. around here, that was ten, twenty years ago.”

“Oh, they’re still around,” said Al. “Believe me, Dotty. And nearby — just over into Brownsville.” He lowered his voice, so as not to scare the kids, which scared the kids. “You saw on the Senator Kefauver hearings a couple years ago — those mobsters. Albert Anastasia. Frank Erickson. Frank Costello. They’re still around assassinating each other left and right. Some of them live right around here, probably.”

“I never saw Frank Costello on President Street,” said Dotty.

Al leaned closer to his wife.

“You know those people who just bought the Union Bakery?” Al paused. “They could be connected to the mob.”

Dotty snickered, which did nothing to soothe the frightened kids. “You’re crazy, Al. What would the mob want with a bakery? And why are you whispering?”

“I’m just saying, the criminal element’s all around and we have to be careful. Furthermore, look what happened to that shoe salesman last year — what’s-his-name, Arnold Schuster. A Brooklyn guy. One of us. An innocent citizen.”

Loo-Loo, an inveterate reader of the tabloids his father brought home every day and likewise an ardent viewer of the Kefauver hearings, enlightened his mother: “Anastasia had him bumped off. Schuster snitched to the cops about Willie Sutton the bank robber.”

“Where’d you get that?” Al asked his boy.

“From Kefauver. Remember, Pop?”

Al, grumpily attempting to keep control of the conversation, replied quickly. “Arnold Schuster had nothing to do with Murder Inc., which was before you were born, Loo-Loo. What you say we change the subject?”

“Murder Incorporated were the ones who threw Abe Reles out the window,” Loo-Loo now informed his goggle-eyed sister.

“Where’d you hear that?” Al barked.

“I dunno,” said Loo-Loo. Not wishing to be forbidden access to tabs, he lied, “The schoolyard.”

“Ah-hah! Schoolyard University,” Al said with disgust.

“They said this guy Abe Reles gave names of gangsters to the G-men,” continued Loo-Loo in a rush, “and the detectives were supposed to be guarding him, but then he fell out of the window at the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island and it’s a big mystery because they don’t know if he was pushed out of the window of room 623 or if he was trying to escape.”

Al eyed his son despairingly. “You know the room number, I see?”

The boy was on a roll. “They called Abe Reles ‘the canary who sang but couldn’t fly.’”

Al pushed away his plate. “Who’s feeding you this trash?”

“I’m interested in crime. Just like you, Pop.”

I’d prefer you to be interested in long division,” Al said, after which he grumped into the living room where he could read the Post and maybe the Brooklyn Eagle — and certainly the Journal-American and the World and the Daily Mirror, these three being the reading mainstays of the bathroom — after which he would probably doze off, having begun his day at the bakery at the usual starting time of 5 o’clock in the a.m.

Gangsters were just the half of it. Spies also fascinated Loo-Loo, especially the Rosenbergs.

Convicted of being in league with the Reds a couple of years back, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent up the river. Loo-Loo hadn’t thought much about it at the time; he was only eight, after all. But he knew Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were parents, like his own, and that they had two sons about Loo-Loo’s own age. This made the case seem closer to home than the business about the racket guys Senator Kefauver talked about, guys like Joe Adonis and Frank Erickson.

But the thing that kept the spy case hot for Loo-Loo was Al Scharfsky’s supper-table lament that it was an awful shame that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg were Jewish.

Weren’t they guilty?

Al summarized the case. “Guilty? They’re Jewish. We got enough troubles.”

One warm night in that June of ’53, Loo-Loo went out to Utica Avenue after supper for an ice-cream cone. Then he strolled to Chudow’s radio repair store, across the street from the Creamflake, to watch television. Very few people owned TV sets, and a small crowd had gathered, as usual, to watch a flickering black-and-white DuMont screen in the store window. This was evening recreation in Crown Heights.

The news was on. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing at sundown.

Loo-Loo worked his way through the onlookers, his cone dripping. There was no sound from the TV set, just the ghostly screen, with mugshots of the recently departed spies. A man in an Adam Hat and a business suit stood watching.

“What’s goin’ on?” Loo-Loo asked the man.

“They stole atomic bomb secrets, Sonny. Gave ’em to the Russians.”

Loo-Loo was silent. He already knew that.

“Yep. Espionage. They fried ’em both for espionage.”

“Jeez,” was all Loo-Loo could say, wondering what espionage was.

“Yeah, and they said that Julius went just like that after the juice was turned on,” said the man, snapping his fingers. “But they had trouble with the missus. Electrodes weren’t working right. A witness said he saw smoke coming out of her head.”

“Thanks, mister,” Loo-Loo said to the man in the Adam Hat.

Then his knees went soft, and Loo-Loo felt as if he’d be reviewing his supper in about a minute. Still, he managed to finish the cone. When he got home, he consulted his dictionary:

Loo-Loo also looked up clandestinely. Which made his heart thump even faster.

The phone rang. Stunned out of Crown Heights, Larry Sloan picked up. It was the producer demanding to know: “How many pages?”

“I haven’t counted. Leave me alone, Roger. I’m trying to work.”

“Well, work fast. We’ve got another project coming up. You could be right for it, Larry. No promises.”

“Want to tell me now?” Larry asked.

“We’ll talk about it,” Roger said, dangling the invisible carrot with which Larry was so familiar.

“Goodbye,” Larry said.

“Don’t go anywhere. Pages, okay? Later.”

Even before school let out for the summer, some June days of 1953 could be stifling at P.S. 189, this being the era before everything in the city was routinely air-conditioned.

On such blazing days, school ended early, releasing to the damp heat Loo-Loo and a couple of his inner-circle pals, Teddy Newman and Lester Dank. They hightailed it across Lincoln Terrace Park to the Creamflake, in the cause of a guaranteed gratis charlotte russe for each.

The coveted charlotte russe consisted of a slab of sponge cake set in a little white cardboard cup, topped with whipped cream and a ceremonious glazed cherry — a particular favorite of the chunkier Lester. As the boys entered, Al Scharfsky sized up the troop and ordered Manya, the Czech refugee beauty with the visible gold tooth who worked behind the counter, to give the boys what they wanted. Manya did.

Manya always wore a tight sweater, making it hard for Loo-Loo and his friends to keep their eyes off the cushiony outlines. Whenever Manya saw the boys staring, she smiled, and her gold incisor would catch the light in Slavic appreciation.

As instructed, she now gave Loo-Loo and Lester and Teddy a charlotte russe. Then Al asked his son’s two pals to take a hike because he needed to talk to Loo-Loo privately. This was unusual, but the boys left, their faces smeared with whipped cream as they stole a last look at Manya’s majestic sweater.

“What’d I do, Pop?”

“Nothing. Come in the back, we got a job for you.”

“We” meant Pop and Mr. Horn, who never talked much. The two men moved to the end of a long butcher-block worktable, motioning for Loo-Loo to come close. Back by the ovens, the Russians turned to watch.

Al Scharfsky lit up a Chesterfield and took a deep drag. He spoke in a muted tone, with exhaled smoke punctuating his words. “You know the Union Bakery?”

“Yeah.”

Al reached into the secret petty cash drawer under the butcher block and extracted a five-dollar bill. Loo-Loo knew about the drawer because it was where his father and Mr. Horn kept a gun in case of a robbery.

“Take this and go to the Union Bakery,” said Al, handing over the fiver to Loo-Loo. “Buy a chocolate layer cake. Don’t tell them who you are or where you’re from. Just give them the money and bring back a chocolate layer cake.”

“The Union is our competitor, right? Can I go in there?”

“Sure you can. Just don’t say nothing.”

“But why, Pop?”

Mr. Horn — in charge of cakes, after all — chimed in. “Because we need to know what they’re putting into the layer cakes,” said the man who didn’t say much. “Understand? It’s business.”

“But what if they find out that you sent me?”

Al placed a fatherly hand on his boy’s shoulder. “They’re not gonna find out, bright boy, because you’re not gonna say nothing. Just buy the cake. Is that so hard?”

“No,” said Loo-Loo. He liked being called bright boy. “I thought you said the Union is owned by the mob.”

“I didn’t say. I only heard.”

“They’re gonna know where I’m from.”

“No. They don’t know who the hell you are,” said Al. “You’re some kid buying a layer cake. Now hurry, before they sell out.”

All eyes were on Loo-Loo. Al, Mr. Horn, and the Russians were studying him, assessing his bravery. Especially the Russians, immigrants being naturally curious about matters of risk.

Al said, “You can keep the change, Loo-Loo. After you do it, that is.”

Mr. Horn inquired, “You ain’t a sissy, are you?”

With the fiver deep in his pants pocket, Loo-Loo proceeded up Utica toward Eastern Parkway — past Chudow’s radio repair shop, past the chicken store, past the fruit market.

At Union Street, a hotness crawled across his chest. It felt like the prickly heat rash he sometimes got in August, but this was only June.

Espionage! They were asking him to commit espionage. Loo-Loo, a bright boy, was about to procure secrets from the competitor and deliver said intelligence to the Creamflake.

Wasn’t this kind of thing against the law? Wasn’t it punishable by J. Edgar Hoover and his federal authorities, who had sent Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg to the electric chair? And what about that higher court in the sky that Al and Dotty had talked about when Loo-Loo was little?

At that moment, he caught sight of McEntee, the huge cop of the neighborhood. He was ambling down Utica with a bunch of grapes in one hand and a peach in the other. He was always eating something he got from the storekeepers for free. Loo-Loo jaywalked to the other side, trying not to look suspicious.

What if McEntee asked him where he was going? Would Loo-Loo confess? Kids could go to jail. The city was getting tough on juvenile delinquents. Loo-Loo had seen plenty of reform schools in the movies. Full of delinquents, mostly Irish kids who would beat the crap out of you if you looked at them funny. Especially if your name was something like Loo-Loo.

Loo-Loo passed Union Street now, and found himself in the repeat line of little shops. Then the big sign over the street like a movie marquee: Union Bakery. Loo-Loo dragged his heels over the pavement, shuffling forward. He didn’t want to move, but he was somehow moving anyhow.

What if it was true that gangsters had taken over the Union? Gangsters would know the minute Loo-Loo walked in that he was up to no good, that he was a spy for the Creamflake.

They’d grab him right there, take him in the back of the bakery, and tie him up, make him talk. So you won’t talk, huh? Hey, Tony, get a hot coal out of the oven and let’s burn a hole in his freakin’ head. Or else they’d stick the spout of the doughnut machine in his ear and press the lever, filling his skull with strawberry jelly. They did things like that, these gangsters. Loo-Loo had heard the stories, he’d watched the Kefauver hearings. And didn’t he faithfully study the crime blotter in the Daily Mirror, just the same as Al himself did during his long stays in the can?

But even if the Union guys weren’t gangsters, Loo-Loo reasoned, he was still doing something really wrong in buying their cake — clandestinely!

So when J. Edgar Hoover sat Loo-Loo Scharfsky down on Old Sparky, would the electrodes function properly? Or would smoke come billowing out of his head? Say — how about if Loo-Loo managed to escape to Coney Island and hide out in room 623 at the Half Moon Hotel? Would somebody toss him out the window, making it look like he did the old brain-dive?

Funny how the Union Bakery smelled just like the Creamflake. This was comforting for about five seconds. Things even looked alike.

Tall glass showcases displayed cakes and cookies, breads and rolls. Loo-Loo had never gone into this shop, of course — ever. It was off limits. Yet the merchandise looked so familiar, and the girls behind the counter looked so much like Manya.

A few customers were ahead of him, so Loo-Loo lingered at the counter, waiting his turn. What’s that? You say you can hear my heart beating, mister? That’s not my heart, it’s coming from the subway tracks. Get outta my way. I got business.

“What would you like, dear?” asked a cushiony Manya look-alike.

“A chocolate layer cake, please.”

“What size, honey?”

“Size?”

“Seven-inch or nine-inch?” The woman gave a nod of her head toward the showcase with the fancy cakes.

This was a monkey-wrench question, thought Loo-Loo, who felt as if he was suddenly coming down with a fever. If he hesitated, the woman would suspect. She’d send some kind of signal, and a couple of thugs would come bursting out from the back of the shop.

Loo-Loo studied the cakes. Don’t try anything, sister. My father owns a gun.

“Well, dear?”

“The nine-inch,” said Loo-Loo, figuring Mr. Horn would want as much as he could get.

Sister took the chocolate cake out from the showcase, slid it into a half-opened cake box, closed the sides, and deftly tied and bowed it with a curly red-and-white string that spooled down from the ceiling — just like the spool at the Creamflake.

“Two dollars,” she said. Loo-Loo dug in for the bill, passed it up to her, took the change, and ran like hell.

He shouldn’t have bolted out of the Union like that. He should have left slowly. But he couldn’t take it. They could probably hear his heart pounding in Brownsville, clear across the park.

Obviously, the woman suspected something fishy was going on. She’d be in the back by now, telling the hard guys. And then they’d come tearing out of the store after him.

If not the hard guys, then somebody. Cops maybe, or the FBI. Or even the dreaded “element.” It could be anybody, but one thing was for sure: Somebody was going to get Loo-Loo today.

It didn’t matter who. Loo-Loo was in too deep. He’d crossed the mob. He’d committed a federal crime. He was tangled in a clandestine web of lies. At least that’s how they talked when he listened to The Shadow on the radio. A web of lies.

But this was the real thing, not some stupid mystery show. Loo-Loo ran for his life, and the faster he ran, the faster the tears washed down his face. You big sissy! What are you crying about, you moron? The tears burned, and blurred.

The big hand seemed to come out from the sky.

It gripped his arm. It seized him powerfully and held fast, bringing the bawling Loo-Loo to a dead halt.

It was all over. The end of the line, and inspiration for the big block letters in tomorrow’s Daily Mirror: BLOODY DEAD KID SPLATTERED ALL OVER UTICA AVENUE.

Not quite.

McEntee’s shiny badge was slowly becoming visible through the big puddle of Loo-Loo’s eyeballs.

“Now where’s the fire, boyo? You looking for trouble?”

“No.”

“You know you almost ran into that bus? You trying to wreck a bus or something?” McEntee laughed. “You want to be more careful. You could hurt people, feller.”

“Sorry.”

“Watcha got in the box? Looks like a cake.”

Loo-Loo now sized up McEntee, noting with disgust how the big cop was smacking his lips. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s a cake.”

“How’s about donating a big piece to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association?”

“It’s for my father,” said Loo-Loo, prepared to run like hell again. “Gotta go!”

McEntee laughed.

They were waiting for him at the Creamflake. Al and Mr. Horn and the Russians and Manya in her sweater.

Wordlessly, Loo-Loo’s father took the Union box and had the boy follow him to the back, where he plunked the parcel down on the baking table.

Mr. Horn picked up a huge knife. He cut the string and opened the box and slid the chocolate layer cake onto the surface, positioning it under a glaring overhead light, and there it sat: pristine, a work of the baker’s art and toil, a prize.

Then — whack! — in a sudden motion, Mr. Horn brought down the knife, like it was a six-pound meat cleaver, slashing the chocolate cake in two. Everybody watched as Mr. Horn surgically slit the layers.

There were three layers of dark chocolate, with viscous spaces defining them: one space filled with raspberry jam, chocolate buttercream in the other. Again like the careful surgeon, Mr. Horn scraped at the fillings, determining their thickness, their richness. He handed a layer to Al, who tasted it.

Then the Russian bakers closed in for a taste. All the men made knowledgeable comments as they probed and dissected and sampled the enemy booty. Mr. Horn took notes, writing on a brown paper bag, which he would later hang over the worktable.

“You did a good job,” Al said to Loo-Loo. “Just don’t mention it to your friends.”

“Why not?”

“On account of it’s nobody’s business. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“How much change did you keep, Loo-Loo?”

“Three dollars.”

Al reached into the petty cash drawer.

“Here’s two dollars extra,” he said. “Go buy yourself a present at the Woolworth’s. Good job, kiddo.”

Loo-Loo heard the bleating siren of a cop car as it sped past the Creamflake, heading for Brownsville, no doubt, where somebody was holding up a liquor store or maybe a Plymouth exploded with somebody inside of it.

Loo-Loo studied the dollar bills, saying nothing. Five bucks in all. Pretty good. He stared at the engraving on the bills, particularly the triangle atop the pyramid with the one eye on it — staring back at Loo-Loo Scharfsky, as if it knew all about him.

“When we finish this project — remember, we got something more for you, Larry”

“What? A game show?”

“No. It’s a movie script we picked up. White Heat meets Diff’rent Strokes. A gritty urban story, only there’s no grit yet. We need you to — you know — Brooklyn it up.”

“Brooklyn it up?”

“Yeah. Think you can handle it?”

“Piece of cake.”

“Money’s good too.”

“I’m all over it.”

Editors’ note[2]

Mommy wears a wire by Denise Buffa

Borough Park

Judge Gerald Garson, a cigar-smoking, suntanning Brooklyn jurist, was known to hold court in chambers. After sliding off his heavy overcoat, he would strut around in his crisp, dark suit and talk nonstop at whoever would listen. Those who needed favors from the foul-mouthed seventy-year-old would give him their full attention. They’d laugh on cue.

Attorney Paul Siminovsky — young enough to be Garson’s son — was a sorry excuse for a lawyer, but a professional ass-kisser. When he wasn’t wining and dining Garson at the Brooklyn Marriott hotel’s bar/restaurant — feeding an estimated $10,000 worth of food and drink to the judge’s belly over the years — Siminovsky was hanging out with the jurist in chambers, right off the courtroom Garson controlled at 210 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights. The two men — Garson, the product of a well-connected Democratic family, and Siminovsky, who hoped to be adopted — shared the same sense of humor. For a while, they acted like a couple of frat boys.

The senior Garson sat behind his big desk one day in March 2003, making lewd and demeaning remarks about women, some of whom he was railroading in his courtroom. The sophomoric Siminovsky, then forty-six, popped candy into his mouth, indulging himself from the bowl on the judge’s desk.

“Rose Ann C. Branda. What’s the C. for?” Garson mused.

“I don’t want to say what comes to mind,” Siminovsky retorted.

“Cuchita,” the judge said.

“Cuchita?” Siminovsky asked.

“Cuchita banana...” the judge sang, as he waved his hands in the air from his chair.

Siminovsky laughed on cue.

Siminovsky was at home inside the judge’s private parlor, plopping himself into a black leather chair, crossing his legs, throwing back his big curly head, and laughing all the way to the bank.

Siminovsky garnered more jobs from Garson than any other lawyer. When kids needed to be represented in contentious custody battles, which paid tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, he was Garson’s first pick.

The powerful matrimonial judge — who decided the financial and familial fates of desperate men and women in highly disputed divorce cases — had a reputation of favoring those with brawn over those with breasts.

Anyone familiar with Garson’s courtroom knew Siminovsky was on a winning streak there. No wonder. Judge and jester hammered out cases behind closed doors — without opposing counsel, blatantly violating rules of fairness.

Siminovsky once told Garson to give a house to his client, Avraham Levi, who was getting divorced. And the judge guaranteed him a win.

“The house. Oh, you gotta order custody. His father owns half of it and he owns a quarter of it,” Siminovsky urged the judge at one point.

“Oh, you mean your guy,” Garson said.

“Yeah,” Siminovsky said.

“I’ll order, I’ll award, I’ll award him exclusive use on [the house],” Garson assured Siminovsky. “She’s fucked...”

Frieda Hanimov, a mother of three, feared she too would get screwed by Garson. Hanimov, a nurse who had reared three well-mannered children with her diamonddealer husband, noted that Garson was so abrasive to her in the courtroom one might think she was a crack-addled streetwalker.

“I’m a mother, three kids, married to a multimillionaire, and I lose everything. How could a mother lose?” she said. “I’m not a drug addict. I’m not a prostitute. How could you not be suspicious? I knew this judge was not normal.”

The feisty Israeli émigré was convinced her ex-husband had fixed the outcome of their custody case. And she was determined to keep her kids at any cost.

Hanimov, a sociable woman who made friends easily, had already been warned by Levi’s wife, Sigal Levi — who was fighting for her own children before Garson — that rumor had it wealthy men were able to fix their cases before the judgmental jurist. All they had to do was pay off the judge through a middleman, Nissim Elmann — a close associate of Siminovsky, who not so coincidentally had been appointed guardian for at least one of Hanimov’s children.

Elmann, a disheveled businessman who wore a yarmulke and an unbuttoned shirt under his tie, sold wholesale electronics just a few short miles from the courthouse. He worked out of a graffiti-emblazoned warehouse, which served as a front for a second lucrative business: brokering divorces and custody battles in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish communities.

A desperate but daring Hanimov — with more verve than the Energizer bunny — walked into the warehouse to see Elmann. At risk were her three priceless jewels: fourteen-yearold Yaniv, ten-year-old Sharon, and five-year-old Natti. She had given up everything in her divorce for them.

“They are my soul,” said Hanimov, who feared she would lose all three to her husband. He had already accused her of beating their eldest son with a belt — an accusation she tearfully denied, and of which she was ultimately cleared.

Elmann was a smooth-talking salesman, and used his shtick to convince men and women that they needed his services to get the upper hand on their soon-to-be exes in Garson’s courtroom.

“He said, ‘This guy is in my pocket,’ and I was like... I was in shock,” Hanimov said.

When Hanimov left Elmann’s electronics business, DVD Trading on Brooklyn Avenue, the not-so-dumb blonde — who had spoken to the shady businessman in Hebrew — knew that the rumors were true: Elmann was selling far more than DVDs and electronic equipment from his warehouse; he was peddling justice in Garson’s courtroom.

After that first visit, a frantic Hanimov called the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Within days, intrigued investigators had the nurse — very pregnant with her fourth child, the first by her second husband — going undercover, wired for sound.

“I was putting one [electronic bug] in my bag, the other one in my pocket, and the other one in my breast, in my bra,” she said.

This amateur sleuth — whom one movie studio has dubbed the Erin Brockovich of Brooklyn — has now been credited with cracking the biggest corruption case to ever rock the Brooklyn courts. The pregnant mother of three wore wires and captured conversations behind closed doors that would shock the public conscience.

Her heart raced as she made her way back into the salesman’s office, the metal gate of the desolate warehouse closing her off to the outside world, including the investigators sitting outside in an unmarked car.

“If he knew I had that device on me, he would shoot me on the spot. I was nine months pregnant,” Hanimov said.

She captured Elmann’s claims on audiotape in October 2002.

“Your husband paid money, a lot of money. And he has the upper hand,” Elmann told her.

“What is the upper hand?” Hanimov asked.

“Like whatever he says, he’ll get, okay? He also doesn’t care about wasting money because he knows that you don’t have money,” Elmann said.

Hanimov knew it was true. Cold hard cash — not motherly love — would win her three kids. She left Elmann’s warehouse crying.

About two weeks later, she met with Elmann and told him she would come up with her own money to win the bidding war for her children.

But, she asked, could he speak to those in control in the meantime?

“There’s no way. It doesn’t work like that,” Elmann told her in no uncertain terms. “Bring them something so that they will start to work. You’ll see something substantive, and you’ll bring the rest.” He added that otherwise, “Garson will destroy you... That’s business.”

They agreed on a $5,000 to $10,000 price tag.

Ever the salesman, Elmann then offered Hanimov a TV on the cheap. “A television like this, that I give you now for one hundred and fifty, costs three hundred in a store,” he said.

But Hanimov remained focused on the far greater commodity. Could Elmann really deliver?

He showed her Garson’s telephone number in his cell phone, and files of others he claimed to have helped. And the businessman reassured her in broken English, “He [Garson] will do everything for me. The problem is here, how much you can to sacrifice.”

Two weeks later, the investigation intensified, and a frightened Hanimov returned to the warehouse.

“If I scream, ‘Help,’ please help,” she told investigators who were listening to her over the wire from outside.

“Okay,” Detective Investigator George Terra reassured her.

Waddling with the weight of the baby she was carrying, she knew that once that metal gate closed behind her, she could be a goner.

“Even if they [the investigators] wanted to get to me, they couldn’t,” Hanimov said. “It’s [a] huge warehouse where they gotta find me.”

She made her way to Elmann’s office — with a $500 down payment.

Elmann told her that Siminovsky was in the warehouse. The lawyer’s Volvo was in open view outside. But the boorish barrister, who wouldn’t give her the time of day in court, was nowhere to be found.

“Why doesn’t he want to see me?” Hanimov asked Elmann.

“It’s dangerous, you know. It’s really dangerous,” he replied.

A week later, Hanimov arrived with more cash. And the electronics salesman gave her a lesson in law.

“What is ‘chamber’?” she asked.

“Chamber [is] where they talk, they arrange things before they come to court,” Elmann said. “And afterwards, they put on a show for you.”

Hanimov gave Elmann $3,000 in marked $100 bills, provided by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, to get Garson to perform for her.

Although pleased with her progress, Hanimov left the warehouse angry. As the metal gate lifted to let her out, she uttered a single word caught on her body wire: “Bastard!”

She gave Elmann $9,000 in total during the course of the five-month investigation, and noted that Garson and Siminovsky immediately began treating her with civility.

Throughout her visits with Elmann, Hanimov repeatedly insisted on listening in on a conversation between the businessman and the judge. “I am begging,” she said.

But the fast-talking fixer who boasted that he called the shots in Garson’s courtroom (although evidence shows the only one he had a direct link to was Siminovsky) wormed his way out of it.

“There is no reason for you to, I cannot let you hear such words,” he told Hanimov. “What do you want, that he [Garson] go to jail?”

By late November 2002, Hanimov had gathered enough evidence to give prosecutors probable cause to tap both Elmann and Siminovsky’s phone lines, and to plant a bug in the ceiling of Garson’s chambers.

Evidence tapes show that the two tangential targets were tight. They embraced when they bid each other goodbye one cold dark night outside the warehouse. Like close friends, they also reassured one another when things weren’t going well. When Elmann was uneasy about which way his client Levi’s case was going to go, Siminovsky, who was representing Levi, assured him of a win.

“I was getting Garson, I was getting Garson drunk for two hours. He’ll do what I want...” a cocky and confident Siminovsky said.

In January 2003, prosecutors decided to “tweak the wire” — to create an incident that would cause their suspects to engage in a flurry of phone calls. They sent their secret weapon, Hanimov, to bribe Siminovsky directly with $1,000.

“Siminovsky freaks out and goes crazy,” Assistant D.A. Noel Downey recalled.

Griping to Elmann the next day, Siminovsky said, “I thought she just flipped out and I thought she knew something...”

But Elmann reassured him, “No, she don’t know shit.”

Siminovsky, sounding a bit like his mentor Garson, boasted that he could have demanded sexual favors from Hanimov in exchange for helping her get her kids back. “You know what I could have told her?... I could have said to her, ‘You want your kids? Get on all fours and suck my dick,’” Siminovsky said. “You know what she would have done? She would have done it.”

Mother Nature was as cold as those words on the clear February morning when Siminovsky spied flashing lights in the rearview mirror of his Volvo — and pulled over not far from his house in Whitestone, Queens.

The probers worked quickly. They wanted to flip Siminovsky into cooperating with them against Garson before anyone noticed they had picked him up.

They took a scared Siminovsky to the austere Fort Hamilton army base in Bay Ridge for questioning. Once inside the prison-like complex, enclosed by barbed wire, they entered a cold room in a bare brick building and read Siminovsky his rights — but he didn’t want a lawyer. Confronted with the evidence against him, the father of two, wringing his hands and rubbing his head, asked to call his wife. Then, with the promise of a misdemeanor conviction and no time behind bars, the big-bellied barrister agreed to help investigators nail Garson.

“He flips in like fifteen or twenty minutes,” Downey said. “He folded like a house of cards.”

During the interrogation, Siminovsky’s cell phone kept ringing. It was none other than the judge himself.

“He wanted to go to lunch,” Assistant D.A. Michael Vecchione, head of the Brooklyn D.A.’s Rackets Division, said, laughing.

A week later, Siminovsky was in Garson’s chambers and gave the judge a box of cigars. “I feel like Groucho,” Garson said as he chomped on a stogie.

The turncoat lawyer put the carton in the top drawer of the judge’s desk. Siminovsky said he got the cigars from a client, but in actuality investigators bought the box, spending upwards of $200.

The action was captured in grainy black-and-white images by the eye of the camera above.

“Romeo y Julieta. Warning: Cigars are not a safe alternative to cigarettes...” the judge read from the carton, commenting, “They are not a safe alternative to sex neither... but what are we going to do about it?”

He then took the box from his top drawer and put it in the lower one as if to hide it in a safer place. Minutes later, the plotting protégé Siminovsky thanked Garson for all his help, and asked for more guidance regarding the Levi divorce.

“Because you have my head together. You know, you gave me little pointers. Now you just have to tell me what to write in the memo and then we’ll be okay,” Siminovsky said.

The judge helped Siminovsky draft the memo, seeming disinterested as he gave dictation.

“The only evidence in the case is... whatever the hell it was by stipulation or blah, blah...” he said. Then he gave a bit of unsolicited advice to Siminovsky. He wanted his boy to cash in on the extra work they were doing. “I am telling you, charge for it... This is extra... this was not contemplated... The judge made me do it... Fucking squeeze the guy...” Garson said.

Less than a week later, Siminovsky slipped an envelope containing ten marked $100 bills to the judge, as thanks for referring a client to him. The judge stuffed the envelope into his pants pocket, even though he was prohibited from taking referral fees. It was only after Siminovsky left that the judge, alone in chambers, opened the envelope and counted the cash. He panicked, and summoned Siminovsky back.

“Yeah, ah, Paul, this is, ah, Garson, do me a favor, ah, why don... ah, if you can get back here I’d appreciate it,” he told the lawyer by phone.

When Siminovsky returned, the judge said, “This is a lot of money for whatever you call it...”

He gave back the bills, but Siminovsky told him, “Don’t worry about it,” and threw the envelope on the judge’s desk.

Garson picked it up and half-heartedly tried to hand it to Siminovsky again — there was at least three feet between the far edge of the envelope and the tips of the lawyer’s fingers — and then put it in his desk drawer.

After a little more back and forth between the two, Garson finally said, “I appreciate it.”

Earlier that same day the judge had made a remark to Siminovsky about his work that would prove prophetic: “One of the greatest things about this job is I don’t know what the fuck I have tomorrow until I get here. I don’t give a shit either, you know.”

Two days later, the judge got the shock of his life, before he got to work. Investigators picked him up outside his Upper East Side apartment and took him to the same army barracks in the shadow of the Verrazano Bridge where they’d brought Siminovsky.

Garson was carrying the marked $100 bills — and insisted on a lawyer (not Siminovsky).

Once the attorney arrived, the judge refused to cooperate. That was when investigators asked if they could speak to him alone.

They fed Garson a little detail: The candy dish Siminovsky regularly reached into on the judge’s desk had broken recently — and had to be replaced.

That seemingly harmless anecdote got the judge’s attention. How could anyone know it unless the place was bugged? Then a peek at the cigar video had the judge singing a tune far different than his raunchy renditions in chambers.

A fidgety Garson — who took long pauses between sentences as if to catch his breath — offered to help prosecutors nail Brooklyn Democratic Party bigwig Clarence Norman. And as if getting pledged into Siminovsky’s new fraternity, Garson agreed to wear a wire. He maintained he could prove that on sale in Kings County was far more than the justice that prosecutors suspected, but whole judgeships.

Despite the try, Garson turned up nothing. However, prosecutors have credited the judge with providing information that led to Norman’s subsequent indictment on unrelated corruption charges.

On April 23, 2003, Garson traded his robes for handcuffs. He turned himself in — a stogie in his mouth, curl of smoke swirling upward — under the lights of TV and newspaper cameras, so his fingerprints and mug shot could be taken.

“When I asked him, ‘Why did you do this with Siminovsky? Why did you take care of him? Why did you accept that?’ he said, ‘I like him and he kind of reminded me of myself,’” Vecchione said.

Siminovsky has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of giving unlawful gratuities for wining and dining the judge in exchange for receiving lucrative guardianship jobs. Prosecutors have asked that he be spared jail time, but he could be sentenced to up to one year behind bars.

Having resigned from the bar and having promised never to practice law again in New York State, Siminovsky is doing manual labor in a warehouse to help support his wife and two kids. He’s a key witness in Garson’s upcoming trial.

Also busted were Elmann, Levi, and others, including a court clerk and court officer accused of steering cases to Garson’s courtroom for cash and cameras — bypassing the computerized random-selection process aimed at stemming corruption.

Among the others were a rabbi and his daughter, who greased Elmann’s palms in an attempt to get Garson to rule in their favor.

While most wore frowns as they looked forward and then to the side for the mug shots, Garson sported a smirk across his lips and a steely glint in his eyes.

Suspended without pay from his $136,700-a-year job and later retired, Garson maintains his innocence. He is awaiting trial on charges of receiving bribes in the form of drinks and dinners from Siminovsky. He is not charged with fixing cases for cash.

Garson claimed he was on his way to report Siminovsky to authorities when he was intercepted by investigators.

“I regret very much not turning in Mr. Siminovsky immediately,” he told CBS News as the media storm continued.

His lawyer, Ron Fischetti, has maintained the judge was set up. He has convinced a judge to throw out many of the charges. While Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes is appealing, left are one felony and two misdemeanors.

“It’s an extremely weak case and I think he’ll be acquitted,” Fischetti said.

Elmann — the mysterious electronics salesman — has pleaded guilty to thirteen counts, including seven felonies of bribery, bribe-receiving, and conspiracy. He’s throwing himself on the mercy of the court at sentencing and could get anywhere from probation to twenty-eight years. There is no evidence he knew Garson personally.

“You see, I bullshit these people left and right just for [them] to come up with money,” he once told Siminovsky. “... I don’t give a shit about them.”

Levi, fifty-one, has pleaded guilty to giving Elmann $10,000 to fix his case. There is no direct evidence that Garson ever received a dime.

Rabbi Ezra Zifrani, sixty-seven, and his daughter, Esther Weitzner, thirty-seven, each pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor conspiracy charge in exchange for 210 hours of community service and three years of probation. They made it clear in court the only person they knew was Elmann.

Court Officer Louis Salerno — caught on videotape taking from Siminovsky a bag prosecutors say contained a VCR and DVD player outside the courthouse for steering cases to Garson — was convicted at trial of two felonies: taking a bribe and receiving a reward for official misconduct. Salerno, fifty-two, faces up to seven years behind bars.

Retired Court Clerk Paul Sarnell, fifty-eight, has been acquitted of bribe-receiving.

Hanimov’s husband was never charged with any wrongdoing. There was no evidence to support Elmann’s claim that he had tried to buy the custody of his children.

Hanimov has landed herself a $200,000 movie contract with Warner Brothers for the rights to her story, heads a support group for women, and is looking forward to the final reallife scene of the saga, testifying against Garson.

“One of the happiest days in my life was when Judge Garson got arrested,” she said. “He destroyed many, many, many lives.”

Her best reward of all, of course, has been gaining custody of all three children. She is enjoying them now, along with the baby she gave birth to before Garson’s bust.

“If a mother loses her kids, she lost one of the parts of her body. When you take her kids away from her, her life is over,” she said. “Thank God, I have my kids back.”

POSTSCRIPT: Since this piece was written, more of the Gerald Garson saga has played itself out.

Nissim Elmann was sentenced to 1 1/4 to 5 1/2 years in prison.

Court Officer Louis Salerno was sentenced to 1 to 4 1/2 years.

Judge Jeffrey Berry, disregarding prosecutors’ recommendations for leniency, sentenced Paul Siminovsky to one year in jail.

Garson was convicted of bribe-receiving and receiving rewards for official misconduct after trial. He wept when he was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison.

In sentencing Elmann and Salerno, Berry declared, “Justice is not for sale.”

Beef kills by Rosemarie Yu

East New York

No one much cares what happens in East New York. Most folks outside of Brooklyn likely don’t know where the neighborhood is, much less how to get there. And for the most part you can’t blame them. In a city of eight million, where homeless people are scattered across city streets and at least a handful of violent crimes are regular occurrences in said streets, caring is a luxury you can’t afford. This was especially true in 1991.

East New York in ’91 was a neighborhood where abandoned cars littered the curbs because no one cared enough to tow them away. Children would be kept up at night by the sounds of semi-automatic weapons fired off in abandoned lots, which continued because they were rarely hushed by the subsequent wail of police sirens. It was a neighborhood where a small, narrow, darkly lit bar could house fully naked prostitutes dancing salsa in a corner and pass itself off as a “strip bar” rather than a whorehouse.

In one residential block, a marijuana dealer peddled his wares through a small hole, just large enough for a hand, cut into a small square steel plate installed on the wall of the house. The buyer would knock and state his order, then money and pot would change hands through that hole — with neither buyer nor seller ever seeing one another’s faces. It was well understood that in a place where the police don’t respond to the sound of machine guns, the DEA wouldn’t be busting marijuana dealers over nickel bags.

East New York in the early ’90s was a dumping ground for the city’s marginalized, each immigrant group that moved up and out replaced by the next off the boat. The population was primarily black and Latino and, for the most part, freshly arrived to these shores. It had, as yet, failed to enjoy the gentrification brought to other parts of Brooklyn by young families seeking spare bedrooms and middle-class professional singles pushed out of the Manhattan housing market. Crime, isolation, poor schools, and drugs would keep such potential gentrification groups uninterested for quite some time.

East New York was a strange island of impoverished, neglected housing projects amidst a sea of burned-out homes and commercial buildings that were never restored to use — by people with rent money, anyway. It was a long subway ride from the business centers of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and, lacking shopping centers, museums, decent housing, or any type of job prospects, the neighborhood offered the outside world little reason to ever stop by. It was a place where the isolation of its residents made them distrustful of outsiders, especially the law, meaning the police. And like any group of people left to their own devices, the rules of the outside world ceased to matter.

Handguns were plentiful and cheap, but were not regarded as flashy ornaments. Many residents, including teenagers, carried concealed guns and knives because they genuinely feared for their own safety. But though the 75th Precinct reportedly confiscated numerous unregistered weapons on a daily basis, countless more went unnoticed.

In ’91, the story of a skinny twitch named Bernhard Goetz was still fresh in everyone’s minds. Several years earlier, Goetz, who had taken to carrying an unlicensed handgun after his second mugging, encountered four black teenagers on the subway. The boys were carrying blunt screwdrivers they planned to use to break into video arcade games. When the boys approached him and asked for money, Goetz — in a fit of rage, fear, desperation, prejudice, or hatred, depending on the account you believe — fired his gun repeatedly into each of them at close range. The boys survived, with one left a paraplegic. Goetz, ultimately convicted only of illegal weapons possession, went on to run for mayor, then public advocate — both futile campaigns.

After the shooting, the “subway vigilante,” as Goetz was tagged by the tabloids, became the embodiment of either the proposition that a middle-class white male can shoot black kids with impunity, or of the desperation of law-abiding citizens fed up with crime run amok. Either way you looked at it, it was a sign of the racial polarization of the time.

In August 1991, this point was driven home even harder in Crown Heights, when a young Guyanese boy was hit and killed by a rabbi’s motorcade. Within hours, an angry mob looking to kill a Jew — any Jew — wreaked vengeance upon Yankel Rosenbaum, a bystander with the poor luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For the following four days, a torrent of unchecked, pent-up outrage from the neighborhood’s black Caribbean community poured onto the streets.

“The racial divide then was palpable and high,” recalled Michael Shapiro, a lawyer who defended one of the Jewish motorcade drivers whose out-of-control limousine caused another vehicle to collide, fatally, with the Guyanese boy.

The ensuing political fallout would shed light on a police department that hung back without getting involved, a conspicuously absent police commissioner, and Mayor David N. Dinkins — who appeared to lack any ability to manage the racial polarization.

The rest of the city stopped for a while and stared, jaws agape, then went about business as usual. This was, after all, blasé New York.

In the early 1990s, after years of steady escalation, the crime rate in New York City had hit its peak. In 1990, the city suffered 2,262 murders, 109 of them in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, just a year before three teenage boys met their end in the halls of their own high school.

Jason Bentley was a fourteen-year-old boy who was smart but underachieving, typical of a kid trying to fit in at Thomas Jefferson High School. He also adored his older brother Jermaine, whom he had followed to “Jeff.” Jason, like so many others teens, owned a handgun for what he believed to be personal protection.

Jermaine, unfortunately, had “beef” with another boy, Jesse, over an issue most adults would consider minor — an inaccurate rumor that Jermaine “disrespected” Jesse’s sister. But in the culture of adolescent boys in East New York, things escalated and, predictably, turned deadly.

So it was that on November 25, 1991, in the hallway of Thomas Jefferson High School, Jermaine and Jesse began a fight over a book bag that quickly heated up. And when Jason thought he saw his brother in danger, he pulled the gun to defend him and fired twice, missing Jesse, but unintentionally hitting sixteen-year-old Darryl Sharpe and a teacher.

The teacher was wounded and eventually recovered. Darryl Sharpe died.

“I did what I had to do,” Jason stated ten years later to researchers from the National Academy of Sciences, who came seeking answers about why kids shoot kids. To the boys themselves, it was simple. It was a matter of survival.

“A lot of the kids felt like they had to arm themselves,” recalled Maria Newman, who wrote extensively about the shooting and the kids at Jeff for the New York Times. “It makes me sad that it was so commonplace.”

To the Times and its readers, the shooting was news. To the teens at Jeff, the only thing new about it was the attention it garnered.

For some time, Thomas Jefferson High School had maintained a student burial fund because so many poor families wound up needing the service. The school had also set aside special grieving rooms where students who had lost friends or relatives could discuss their feelings and receive counseling. According to varying reports, somewhere between thirty and seventy-five Jefferson students had been killed over a five-year period, and a good fifty percent of the surviving students had been wounded in some way.

As more of the story revealed itself through media coverage, the city had to hear what most people probably didn’t care to know: For so many of New York’s children, violence was a part of everyday life, something to be endured with little hope of escaping.

The mayor had responded to previous calls for tighter security with the rotating use of handheld metal detectors; in practice, the detectors traveled to Jefferson once a week. Like many administrators and teachers, the principal, Carol Beck, had mixed feelings about the message metal detectors sent to the students. But in three months’ time, both she and the mayor would come to rue the rotating detector policy when two more Jefferson students were shot and killed at school.

This time, the killing was intentional, a grudge that one youth, fifteen-year-old Khalil Sumpter, held against two others — Tyrone Sinkler, sixteen, and Ian Moore, seventeen. The grudge resulted in Khalil gunning down Tyrone and Ian at point-blank range.

To the boys’ classmates, the shooting didn’t come as much of a surprise. Everyone who knew the boys knew trouble had been brewing among them. And although all three had had skirmishes with the law, no one really thought of them as “bad” kids, just regular guys with a beef.

Only in East New York, beef kills.

In East New York, a kid with a beef acted on it or faced the humiliation of his peers, which could mean he, himself, could be made a victim. Minor disputes, in that way, became matters of life and death.

Thomas Jefferson High School, though a beacon of hope early in the twentieth century for ambitious neighborhood immigrants, was clearly on the skids in the 1990s.

Early in 1992, on the very day of the murders of Ian Moore and Tyrone Sinkler, Mayor Dinkins came to Thomas Jefferson High to speak to the students, urging them to resist drugs and violence.

The mayor’s testimony addressed the day’s tragedy and touched upon his own personal history. David Norman Dinkins, the city’s first African American mayor, was raised by a mother separated from her husband, along with his grandmother. Both women were domestic workers. Young David refused to allow poverty and disadvantage to curb his determination to succeed.

The mayor’s visit and poignant memoir were meant to inspire hope in the desolate little strip of Brooklyn called East New York.

At least he tried.

Darryl Sharpe’s funeral was notable for who did not attend — neither the mayor nor anyone from his office; likewise, nobody from the police department or any other department of the city. During the service, the reverend called out for representatives of these institutions. He was answered each time with silence.

But Ian Moore’s funeral made up for the neglect. More than a thousand mourners, including Mayor Dinkins and a flock of other city officials, attended. The service was as much about mourning Ian Moore as it was a community that allowed such tragedy to occur.

When the mayor rose to say that Ian had “gone home to God,” the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood angrily responded, “What’s he going to tell God about us when he gets there?”

It was a service of soul-searching, anger, and sadness over the resigned acceptance of tragedy by the people of East New York.

The ensuing months saw antiviolence campaigns that included the mayor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and even Bill Cosby — all of them invoking Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message of nonviolence. At great expense, permanent metal detectors were installed by a side entrance of Jeff, complementing the one by the main lobby where stood the polished statue of the third president of the United States.

A number of students responded with something rare in East New York, something approaching optimism. But in the habit of people who have been ignored too long, most shook their heads and said, Nothin’s really gonna change. It was too much to believe that a few marches and visits from celebrities could alter poverty, drugs, and violence.

Maria Newman’s career as a journalist had taken her to several landmarks of poverty and violence — Los Angeles, Nicaragua, Cuba. But what she encountered in New York was more chilling, for the indifference with which it was met.

“Where was the outrage? That’s what I wondered over and over again when stories took me to places like Thomas Jefferson High School, where kids were killing other kids,” she said. “Where was the outrage?”

In 1993, Newman became a mother, at which point, she said, “I couldn’t look at stories like this.”

That was the year that the crime rate in New York hit an all-time high, with East New York at the top of the chart.

Then, suddenly and inexplicably, crime fell. The number of homicides in East New York dropped from 126 in ’93 to 44 by ’95. In an article for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, identified an “epidemic theory” behind the statistical turnabout.

Criminal justice players, including the lawyer Michael Shapiro, credited Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s crackdown on quality-of-life crimes and, in particular, “community policing,” in which police officers go out of their way to learn the particular needs of civilians on their beats.

Perhaps it had simply happened because the shootings were able to shine a spotlight on the culture of violence among the teens in East New York. Reverend Youngblood told researchers, “Maybe God allowed the violence to get out of hand so that we would finally pay attention to violence and young people.”

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, attention was indeed paid. In addition to metal detectors, the school established student retreats and antiviolence programs, which included posters that carried the images of a gun next to a coffin. But the change that would have the most widespread, lasting impact would be the decision by the schools chancellor to cut up large, impersonal high schools into smaller minischools focused on a theme, such as legal studies, civil rights, or fire safety.

And so it came to pass that in 2004, Thomas Jefferson High School, which had been placed on a list of seven lowperforming schools in Brooklyn, announced that it would accept no more freshmen, and instead opened its doors to four new schools that would be housed within its campus. The last of the “Jeffheads” graduated in June 2007, after a school year marked by little fanfare and no incident.

The public attention on Jeff died down along with the plunging neighborhood crime rate, and the area has shown some signs of revitalization, such as new apartment complexes and a shopping center. But a reduction in crime statistics doesn’t necessarily change the reality of poverty for those who continue to live it. For the kids who are too young to remember Jason Bentley, Khalil Sumpter, and the day the mayor came to speak, hope still seems illusive.

There are stories, less dramatic but nonetheless poignant, that don’t make the news.

Theresa Reel, a high school teacher who’d moved up to the city from Mississippi, recalled how one of her students, a quiet sixteen-year-old boy who’d never caused trouble, stood up one morning and began a noisy tirade on the hopelessness of school and life. After the boy was removed from her classroom, she learned that he was upset because his baby cousin had died only the night before of SIDS — Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. When the new teacher expressed her shock and sorrow at what had happened to the boy, the other kids in the class shrugged and told her, This is East New York, didn’t you know?

If anybody anywhere else in New York City noticed, they might surely have stopped for a moment and shaken their heads. Then, just as surely, they would have gone about their day.

Sesame Street for grown-ups by Aileen Gallagher

Cobble Hill

So, where else would Peter Braunstein head for cover but Brooklyn? He was a writer, after all.

According to his indictment, freelance journalist Peter Braunstein entered the Chelsea apartment building of a former coworker on Halloween evening, 2005, wearing a New York City Fire Department uniform purchased on eBay.

He thereupon set two small fires in the hallway, then knocked on the young woman’s door. When she answered, Braunstein chloroformed her, bound her, and sexually assaulted her for some twelve hours. For good measure, he videotaped the ordeal.

Soon after, on November 9, the police named Braunstein the prime suspect in the crimes and released photographs of him, taken on November 1 at a Super 8 Motel on West 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

The day after his Super 8 stay, Braunstein slid a personal credit card into a subway station vending machine and bought himself a MetroCard. Then he vanished. He could have been anywhere. He seemed to be everywhere.

The media website Gawker chided, “A CITY OF 8 MILLION PEOPLE, ALL WITH THEIR EYES CLOSED.”

As the New York City police department searched frantically for Braunstein, the tabloids delighted in flaying one of their own. The New York Post called Braunstein a “convicted creep” who was serving three years’ probation for menacing another woman. The Daily News went with the “kinky journalist” angle, noting that Braunstein’s victim worked at a high-end fashion magazine. And he had taunted her with designer shoes.

Until 2002, Braunstein was the media reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion trade publication that shared offices with W, the magazine at which his victim worked.

Braunstein’s desk at WWD had sight lines to the fashion closet, where young, pretty women flitted about with shoes and accessories for shoots and stories. Thirty-year-old Greg Lindsay, now a freelance writer and resident of Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill, inherited Braunstein’s gig at WWD and was assigned his desk.

“You feel creepy in the sense that you’re inadvertently scoping out these women,” Lindsay recalled. “That part in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter asks, ‘And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? We begin by coveting what we see every day.’ It was totally that.” Ten months after Lindsay characterized Braunstein with that line, the man himself agreed with the armchair analysis. In a jailhouse interview with the New York Post published on December 16, 2007, Braunstein quoted the same Silence of the Lambs bit “to explain his ‘theory’ of why he chose his victim.”

The journalists who populate this city as freelancers and staffers — the writers and editors who pump out the words and ideas that make this place the media capital of the world — began to question each other. There was concern for the victim and horror at the nature of the crime, of course. And not a little bit of fear.

All that along with the impulse to conclude, What a story!

Sex! Depravity! A police manhunt!

But this was no Dominick Dunne society murder. This crime involved two of their own. The alleged perpetrator had worked at enough editorial shops, and long enough, to know a lot of people in this smaller-than-we’d-all-like-to-think world. And so the writers turned to each other, with questions and motives and what-ifs and what-have-yous.

Writing in the online magazine The Black Table on November 16, Greg Lindsay tried to answer the questions: “No, I never met the guy... [A]nd the more I learn now about how much fear and terror and misery he has inflicted upon my former colleagues, the more relieved I am that I never met him, and therefore never gave him the benefit of any doubts.”

The next day, Braunstein was spotted in Brooklyn.

Walt Whitman made Brooklyn the writer’s borough. His own Brooklyn Heights neighborhood was home to the likes of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright — and is where Norman Mailer hung his hat, and boxing gloves, until his death in late 2007. Nearby Park Slope is home to contemporary novelists Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, and husband-wife authors Kathryn and Colin Harrison, among many others. (Brooklyn’s 11215 is rumored to be the American zip code with the highest concentration of published writers.)

Though the twentieth century was the age of Manhattan newspapermen — Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton — many of today’s journalists are Brooklyn-based, and not necessarily bound by employment to a single periodical. The northwest neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens belong nowadays to the freelance writers and magazine editors who attempt to interpret New York to the outside world.

These three neighborhoods, formerly distinct one from the other, have melded to the point where most residents who have established themselves during the past five or so years don’t actually know the lines of demarcation. Real estate agents, attempting to broker rentals surpassing prices even in Manhattan, sometimes call it one area: BoCoCa. And though the name is unpleasant to those people who label everything but themselves, it successfully blends the area into a mass of comfortable familiarity that attracts BoCoCa’s newest tenants.

Roughly speaking — some might say generously — the three neighborhoods run from Atlantic Avenue in the north to 9th Street in the south. West to east, BoCoCa extends from Hicks Street to Hoyt. From Manhattan, you take the F train to Bergen Street, Carroll Street, or Smith and 9th Streets.

Where mom-and-pop corner stores and butcher shops and bakeries once lined Court and Smith, the neighborhoods’ right and left ventricles now pump bars and boutiques. The restaurants have gained new respect among food critics; you are not necessarily eating Brooklyn food at Manhattan prices anymore.

Apartments are often entire floors of brownstones, large and sunny with the kind of amenities people leave Manhattan for — washers, dryers, dishwashers, backyards! — and include smallish rooms perfect for a desk and filing cabinet. BoCoCa is, accordingly, well-suited to those who write from home all day.

In the fall, when the treelined streets turn red and gold, and in the spring, when the canopy above you is green, it is enough to forget that you are even in Brooklyn — anyhow, the Brooklyn you thought you knew a decade ago. The Italian immigrants who settled there have given way to yuppies who fled the suburbs for the city.

While the old Brooklyn was made up of ethnic enclaves, immigrant warrens, and strivers’ rows of the middle class, BoCoCa has transcended traditional insularity. For some, this is all so different as to suggest that Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens — and most certainly the Valhalla of Park Slope — are not truly a part of Brooklyn anymore. For others, it is all some sort of über-Brooklyn, a Sesame Street for grownups where the neighborhood cinema shows foreign films and friends gather at readings rather than potluck suppers.

In warm months, the Gowanus Yacht Club on Smith and Warren serves beer outside on rickety picnic tables, sating its customers with a side of irony: The establishment is not at waterside. Laptops abound in cafés and bars, leaving a weekday visitor with the impression that no one here actually works. On Fridays, friends meet for drinks at Abilene and potential lovers set dinner dates at Grocery, the restaurant. Sunday mornings are reserved for brunch at places like Bar Tabac, or Bloody Marys at the Brooklyn Inn.

Where is Manhattan in all of this? Nowhere. Unless you have a staff job, Manhattan exists only as a place for meetings. The Gotham skyline is moot; the city that everyone thought they came for has been abandoned by many.

It was here, in this demimonde of BoCoCa, where Peter Braunstein was sighted on November 17, some two weeks after the Halloween attack, buying a cup of coffee — in a place named after the real estate brokers’ made-up moniker, the Bococa Café. (The café opened in 2005. It’s cheering and bright, and stocked with dozens of coffees you’ve never heard of. Go in the morning. The place shuts down early in the evening.)

John Arena, proprietor of the Bococa Café, was at work on the morning he thought he saw Braunstein.

A man in an overcoat bought a large coffee — “regular,” which in Brooklyn means with milk and sugar — and paid with two singles. Just as Arena was checking his face against a photograph in the New York Post, Mr. Large-Coffee-Regular took off without collecting his sixty cents in change. The customer was heavier and had longer hair than the photos circulating of Braunstein, but Arena did not doubt his identity.

“I looked at him like I saw a ghost,” Arena told the daily papers. “He caught on right away. In other words, he knew that I knew who he was.”

Large-Coffee-Regular left the café and walked north at about half past 7. Arena notified police.

By 9 o’clock, reporters and cops in riot gear were sharing the sidewalks with moms and strollers. Other officers perched on rooftops. The press trolled for a scoop and a team of dogs sniffed for Braunstein. “I was working from home all day,” Greg Lindsay remembered. “I heard the helicopters circling overhead for hours.”

A reader wrote in to Gawker to describe a “gaggle of reporters... standing across the street from the stupidly named Bococa Café.” Cops mingled with the press on the street while helicopters looked down from above. “On a side note,” the reader added, “a beat cop walked up to one of the cameramen and asked what was going on. The cameraman gave him the 411. I love when the media fill in the fuzz.”

Patrick Cadigan, who lived on Smith Street between Dean and Pacific at the time, was following the story in the papers and found the café owner’s account at least somewhat credible.

“He saw him, thought he recognized the customer, and the guy took off. That sealed it. It must have been him,” Cadigan said. “Or,” he considered, “it was a guy who got his coffee and wanted to leave.”

Braunstein’s mother spoke exclusively to the New York Sun, telling the conservative broadsheet that her son regularly drank coffee with milk and was likely at least somewhat familiar with Cobble Hill, as his ex-wife lived near the Bococa Café.

Sophie Donelson, then an editor at City magazine, believed Braunstein was around somewhere nearby, but doubted that he got his coffee at Bococa Café.

“No one really goes to that café. If he was at Bar Tabac or Patois, I’d believe it,” she said. “But there were moms and nannies everywhere and a rapist on the loose. It was such a weird juxtaposition.”

Gawker was quick to blast Bococa Café owner John Arena on November 18:

Clearly, this was a matter best left to police dogs.

With a pillow from Braunstein’s mother’s house in Kew Gardens as a reference, the NYPD’s canine members picked up the fugitive’s scent. A bloodhound named Chase tracked Braunstein two blocks and then lost him again, the Sun reported. A few blocks on, Chase showed signs of a trail. He took his handlers to an abandoned brownstone on Henry and Congress, but Braunstein wasn’t there. Police found no evidence that anyone had been there at all. But still, it was possible.

Possible enough for the Post’s Andrea Peyser, who gave Braunstein a shrill, staccato scolding for showing up in Brooklyn, headlined, BRAZEN BRAUNSTEIN’S GOT A LATTE NERVE. Whereupon the column tore into neighborhood residents for failing to lead the manhunt.

“As he walked through a neighborhood where his former colleagues live, no one recognized Peter Braunstein,” Peyser wrote. “That’s because no one was looking.”

But Cobble Hill is not the type of place for neighborhood watch groups. That’s more Park Slope. The mob did not light torches, grab pitchforks, and go from brownstone to brownstone. Instead, neighbors stayed home. Children disappeared from the streets. Police distributed Wanted leaflets with an unflattering drawing of a Jheri-curled Braunstein and the promise of a $12,000 reward for information leading to his capture.

“Every single door on our street had that blue flier attached with that awful, awful sketch,” Lindsay remembered with disgust. “For days you would see them up and down the street. Peter Braunstein had come to my block, my entire universe as a freelancer. He was there for at least a week, quasihaunting us.”

Lindsay tore the flier down — “I couldn’t bear to have it there,” he said — but Braunstein’s face lined Smith, Court, and countless cross streets for days. Patrick Cadigan saw the posters littering the train station for at least a week, but noticed that the fear died down after a day or two.

“I wondered why he would still be here unless he had a network of people hiding him, which didn’t seem very likely,” Cadigan said. He walked his girlfriend to the train station as usual, but tried to be more alert. Otherwise, what else was to be done?

Andrea Peyser’s urgings to the contrary, the people of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill got self-cautious. It is a similar mind-set to the one adopted after September 11: Protect yourself as best you can and be mindful that there is little you personally can do about terrorists flying into buildings or depraved sex offenders on the lam in your neighborhood. Detached thrills are perhaps, in part, why people live here.

Laura Davis was working at HarperCollins in November 2005 and sharing a Cobble Hill apartment with two roommates. One of them joked about seeing a man on the roof who may have been Braunstein. But in a serious conversation concerning personal safety, Davis said, “We talked about making sure we pushed the door to our apartment shut as we were coming and going, instead of trusting it to swing shut on its own. It had been left open many times before and I remember Peter Braunstein’s name being invoked as to why we needed to make a greater effort to close the door.”

Braunstein was spotted again on November 18, this time at a business on Henry Street. At M&N Cleaners, a man who the Post said was “looking rushed, and possibly covered in stage makeup,” asked for a coat hanger because he had locked himself out of his car. An employee told the tabloid that the customer was rude and demanding and then took off. “It is not known if Braunstein really had a car, or what he wanted with the hanger,” the Post reported dryly.

Then again, just past midnight on November 21, a resident swore he passed Braunstein walking east on Degraw between Hicks and Cheever.

So — memorize the face, lock the door, walk the ladies to the train. Be mindful to whom you sell coffee. Report all agitated people who lock their keys in the car to the police. Be vigilant during your late-night walks home. Because you never know who you might see.

“I have never known my son to even go to Brooklyn,” Peter Braunstein’s estranged father told the Daily News. The article — published on November 19 and smugly titled, CAFÉ SEARCH GROUNDLESS? — was the first whiff of doubt about Braunstein hiding out in BoCoCa.

The New York Observer, a contrarian weekly, pooh-poohed the bulk of daily tabloid reportage by suggesting in a December 5 article that maybe — just maybe — Braunstein had never been on the unglamourous side of the river.

“Forget the massive manhunt,” wrote the Observer’s Mark Lotto. “Is Peter Braunstein the last freelancer in New York who thinks he’s too good for Brooklyn?”

Well into December, more than two weeks after the last Braunstein sighting, there was no hint of him in Brooklyn. The Wanted posters got weirdly more detailed — Braunstein drinks Guinness and vodka! He likes beef curry with extra mustard! — but BoCoCa’s watchful citizens saw nothing.

Which makes sense, really, because when the city thought Braunstein was buying coffee and borrowing coat hangers in Brooklyn, the closest he got to the County of Kings was at a storage facility on 36th Street and Northern Boulevard in Queens, which is home to so few media folk that it took newspapers at least three days to report the extent of a 2006 blackout affecting more than 125,000 residents.

By half past 11 o’clock on the night of November 2, Peter Braunstein was in Cleveland. Not Brooklyn. He never came back to the city after that. He spent a few nights chewing a bartender’s ear about working on the plastic surgery TV drama Nip/Tuck. He said he was researching striptease joints for his next writing project — and isn’t that what they all say?

“He didn’t strike me as creepy,” the Moriarty’s bartender told the Daily News.

At the University of Cincinnati on November 17, Braunstein robbed a psychologist’s office at gunpoint for sixteen bucks in cash, plus a Visa card. He made his way south, first to Nashville and then to Memphis, where on November 28 he sold his blood for twenty dollars.

At the University of Memphis, better than a thousand miles from the Bococa Café, Peter Braunstein collapsed in a pool of his own blood on December 16. A campus police officer found Braunstein after a woman named Annette Brown, who’d seen him on the TV show America’s Most Wanted, spotted him walking around with a backpack and sleeping bag.

“I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine,” Brown told the Daily News. “They were very dark, empty, unfeeling, and cold. I felt like I was looking at a dead person, just evil. He was so close to me, I could have hugged him.”

Brown flagged a campus patrol car from a safe distance away. The car trailed Braunstein for a while, until an officer ordered him to stop in his tracks. Braunstein pulled a knife and began to stab himself in the neck. The officer sprayed Braunstein with half a can of pepper spray, but the knife went in and out thirteen times.

“I give up,” Braunstein said, dropping the knife. He fell and the officer took away the gun he was packing. Cuffing him, the officer asked his name.

“Peter Braunstein,” he said, after which he passed out. Alternate versions of the capture had Braunstein declaring, “I’m the guy the world is looking for.” But such are mostly television accounts and not to be trusted.

In his backpack, police found a video camera, two digital video tapes, and a diary. The tapes were blank. But in the diary, police read Braunstein’s commentary on his own press coverage.

“He was very interested in what was being written about him, and how he was portrayed,” a cop told the Daily News.

Under court order, New York police on January 23 released notes of a conversation detectives had with Braunstein shortly after his capture in Memphis. Braunstein laughed off media reports. “[He] stated that he thought the Cobble Hill thing was funny because he does not even know where Cobble Hill is located,” police told the papers.

On his return to New York, Braunstein repeated his Manhattan-to-Queens trip of the previous November.

First housed in Bellevue, he was then moved to Rikers Island to await trial. Braunstein’s defense team released a psychiatric report on June 1, 2006, indicating a likely diagnosis of schizophrenia. In her report, Braunstein’s psychologist said it was the gig at Women’s Wear Daily that made him snap.

“Working in the highly competitive, glitzy, and sexually charged atmosphere of a celebrity-driven fashion periodical was an extremely toxic and unsuitable environment,” according to the doctor.

Was it a life that he missed? When the Daily News published an interview with Braunstein at Rikers on October 8, 2006, it appeared that he was happy to chat. “Look, I used to do this,” Braunstein told the journalist. “I used to be you.”

Hear that, Brooklyn?

Postscript: Peter Braunstein was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault in a trial ending on May 23, 2007. The jury deliberated for only a few hours. In a letter to the judge pleading for leniency, Braunstein railed against the tabloid coverage of his case, singling out New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser. She “declared that I was not sick; I was evil,” Braunstein wrote. “This kind of tabloid rhetoric is essentially a mandate for harsh sentencing.” Braunstein is now in prison, serving an eighteen-years-to-life term.