I gave Joe what I thought was bail money — the whole rolled-up, scrounged-together hooker cash. He told me to go and get the prisoner. I just about lost it when Joe paroled the guy right there on the spot — into my custody.
“Whoa!” I said. “Wait a minute.”
“Parole’s better than low bail,” said Joe, smiling again. “Or no bail at all.”
The five hundred went south.
I left the courthouse that night and walked over to Court Street, to an Italian restaurant and bar called Café Roma. We called it “Chick’s place” on account of the owner, whose actual name was Charlie.
There was hardly anyone there. Just Charlie — Chick behind the stick — and some guy at the far end of the bar sitting in semi-darkness, sipping an espresso.
Chick was the most urbane of bar owners, a Brooklyn guy with a good education. Something of a philosopher too, with a fine understanding of the city, how it worked and what it took to own a bar and restaurant and survive. We were pretty good friends, and he was willing to take my word for it when I told him that the courthouse was a zoo and the lawyers were all fucking thieves.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Charlie, it’s complicated. But take my word, it wears you out.”
He looked at me close, then turned and looked down the bar. He turned back to me and said, “You should tell that man at the end of the bar. He’s a law professor.”
“Really?”
The professor hunched forward over the bar. He was wearing a gray suit that covered up the broad shoulders of an athlete. This was my chance to say something indignant, my chance to hold forth with a resounding, irate speech. There were any number of bizarre stories I could have told the professor — some incredible, some beyond that, the absurd and the ordinary.
“I understand you’re a law professor,” I said. “Well, I’d like to know what the hell you’re teaching these characters, because I’ll tell you, you go into that courthouse, it’s the same as the street. You need a scorecard to figure out the good guys from the bad guys. That’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
This professor had a way of glaring back at you when you spoke to him. Like he was calculating the right moment to cut in.
“Listen,” I told him. “Lawyers run the show. They’re the trendsetters, the role models. The prosecutors, judges, the defense counsels — they’re all lawyers.”
I remember how offended he looked as he explained to me that the vast majority of people practicing law were good people. They were dedicated, honest, and hard-working. So he didn’t know what I was talking about.
Everything he said was said softly, as if he were talking to himself. He was not trying to persuade me, simply stating a fact.
“Look to yourself,” he said. “How have you been behaving?”
The way he smiled made me think about the priests when I was a kid, how clean and innocent they all seemed. How they wouldn’t believe any of this I was saying about lawyers. If you tried to tell a priest about a thieving lawyer, he’d answer you with a question: So, tell me, how are you behaving?
When I was leaving Chick’s place, Charlie turned to me to ask, “So you talked to him?”
I nodded.
“That guy, the professor. He’s someone you should know. He’s going to be an important man someday.”
“He’s a professor, Charlie. Professors are naïve.”
“Not him. He was one hell of an athlete and he’s smart as they come. You remember what I tell you, this guy — this Mario Cuomo guy — he’ll be an important man someday.”
“Sure, sure,” I said to Charlie. “I bet he’ll be.”
I would run into Mario Cuomo now and again at Chick’s. We’d talk about the legal system, cops and lawyers, the courthouse and the streets. Blah-blah-blah — as if I could really tell him what it was I did in the streets.
Mostly he told me things. He was full of humanity. He was an old-fashioned, incorruptible moralist. I remember wishing to God I could talk like him, then wishing to God I could understand what the hell he was saying.
The brass were always telling us how we could win the war on drugs and wipe out the great plague. Their weekly memos and bulletins were quite inspiring.
I hasten to point out, we cops were not stupid. When we went out into the street up against that ocean of drugs, you couldn’t help but swallow in shame and complicity. Even if you didn’t pay attention you’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see that somebody was bullshitting somebody.
There are police stories and maxims that are passed down like legends from old-timers to rookies and from fathers to sons. For example: “You get pressed so hard they make you so crazy, they threaten and scream and call you motherfucker. You tell them if they don’t back off, if they don’t cool down, you’ll take this stick and shove it up their ass.”
I knew Robert Volpe, worked with him in the narcotics division. He was one of the kind ones, extremely talented. A fine artist, he had showings of his paintings at important galleries in Manhattan. There was not an ounce of white racism in his blood. His cop son Justin, a muscular guy with a Dick Tracy chin, is doing thirty years in prison for taking the stick end of a plunger to Abner Louima’s rectum in a highly publicized police-brutality case in 1997.
Justin Volpe is now a legend. When you talk to cops, and I do, they shake their heads when his name comes up. “Honest to God,” they say, “who’d believe it. Was that crazy or what?”
There are no mitigating circumstances, but there are some points that few people understand. First, Justin was engaged to a black woman, so it’s doubtful that racism played a role in his madness. Steroids, I think, may have played a role. But who really knows? His father, a truly decent man, dropped dead from a heart attack after visiting his disgraced son in prison.
The intersections of Fourth Avenue, Atlantic Avenue, and Flatbush Avenue constituted a drug marketplace that never shut down. An island stood at the heart of where those avenues came together, and on that island was a brightly lit stand where you could buy coffee, sodas, pizza, and soft-serve ice cream. There was an outsized Bickford’s cafeteria across the street, and a block south on Fourth was a doughnut shop. The stand, the cafeteria, and the doughnut shop were gathering places for junkies that went strong twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
A short walk from the Bickford’s was the Long Island Rail Road terminal, with tracks running under the streets of Brooklyn. Commuters — the good guys heading home to Mamma and the tykes in Massapequa and Hicksville — could stop for the lurid thrill of a quick ten-dollar blowjob, or else a ten-minute stand-up fuck from one of the dozens of hookers roaming those gathering spots.
I was an undercover narc and I could buy drugs all day and all night. Hordes of addicts and pushers were everywhere. Mostly I was buying dope from the walking dead, people so stoned that once they sold me drugs they might turn around and walk into an oncoming bus. It was no challenge at all. The dealers were ghosts who aimlessly walked the street. Fire your gun alongside their ears and they wouldn’t even blink.
The closer I looked, the more I found the drug world a dark, painful, and unforgiving place, a world where only the strong and quick-witted survived. And when they survived, it was never for long. The plague was far and wide.
I was convinced that what we were doing was poorly conceived and just as poorly justified. Back then, I had neither the expertise nor the experience to come up with any real answers. But at least I knew this war-on-drugs business was bullshit.