The Force

Except “Cowboy” Bob Bartlett, who wears shitkicker boots with skinny toes, “the better to go up a black ass.” Bartlett’s never been farther west than Jersey City, but he affects a redneck drawl and aggravates the shit out of Malone by playing country-western “music” in the locker room.

The “uniforms” in their bags don’t look like your run-of-the-mill cops either. It ain’t what they wear, it’s in their faces. They’re badasses, with the smirks as pinned on as the badges on their chests. These boys are always ready to go, ready to dance, just for the fuck of it.

Even the women have attitudes. There ain’t many of them on Da Force, but the ones who are take no prisoners. You got Tenelli and then there’s Emma Flynn, a hard-drinking (Irish, go figure) party girl with the sexual voracity of a Roman empress. And they’re all tough, with a healthy hatred in their hearts.

The detectives, though, the gold shields like Malone, Russo, Montague, Torres, Gallina, Ortiz, Tenelli, they’re in a different league altogether, “the best of the best,” decorated veterans with scores of major arrests under their belts.

The Task Force detectives aren’t uniforms or plainclothes or undercovers.

They’re kings.

Their kingdoms aren’t fields and castles but city blocks and project towers. Tony Upper West Side neighborhoods and Harlem projects. They rule Broadway and West End, Amsterdam, Lenox, St. Nicholas and Adam Clayton Powell. Central Park and Riverside where Jamaican nannies push yuppies’ kids in strollers and start-up entrepreneurs jog, and trash-strewn playgrounds where the gangbangers ball and sling dope.

We’d better rule, Malone thinks, with a strong hand, because our subjects are blacks and whites, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Italians, Irish, Jews, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, who all hate each other and who, in the absence of kings, would kill each other more than they already do.

We rule over gangs—Crips and Bloods and Trinitarios and Latin Lords. Dominicans Don’t Play, Broad Day Shooters, Gun Clappin’ Goonies, Goons on Deck (seems to be a theme), From Da Zoo, Money Stackin’ High, Mac Baller Brims. Folk Nation, Insane Gangster Crips, Addicted to Cash, Hot Boys, Get Money Boys.

Then there’s the Italians—the Genovese family, the Lucheses, the Gambinos, the Ciminos—all of which would get totally out of control if they didn’t know there were kings out there who would cut off their heads.

We rule Da Force, too. Sykes thinks he does, or at least pretends to think he does, but it’s the detective kings who really call the shots. The undercovers are our spies, the uniforms our foot soldiers, the plainclothes our knights.

And we didn’t become kings because our daddies were—we took our crowns the hard way, like the old warriors who fought their way to the throne with nicked swords and dented armor and wounds and scars. We started on these streets with guns and nightsticks and fists and nerve and guts and brains and balls. We came up through our hard-won street knowledge, our earned respect, our victories and even our defeats. We earned our reps as tough, strong, ruthless and fair rulers, administering rough justice with tempered mercy.

That’s what a king does.

He hands down justice.

Malone knows it’s important they look the part. Subjects expect their kings to look tight, to look sharp, to wear a little money on their backs and their feet, a little style. Take Montague, for instance. Big Monty dresses like an Ivy League professor—tweedy jackets, vests, knit ties—and the trilby with a small red feather in the band. It goes against the stereotype and it’s scary because the skels don’t know what to make of him, and when he gets them in the room, they think they’re being interrogated by a genius.

Which Monty probably is.

Malone has seen him go into Morningside Park where the old black men play chess, contest five boards at a time and win every one of them.

Then give back the money he just took from them.

Which is also genius.

Russo, he’s old school. Sports a long red-brown leather overcoat, a 1980s throwback that he wears well. Then again, Russo wears everything well, he’s a sharp dresser. The retro overcoat, custom-tailored Italian suits, monogrammed shirts, Magli shoes.

A haircut every Friday, a shave twice a day.

Mobster chic, Russo’s ironic comment on the wiseguys he grew up with and never wanted to be. He went the other way with it; as a cop, he likes to joke, he’s the “white sheep of the family.”

Malone always wears black.

His trademark.

All Da Force detectives are kings, but Malone—with no disrespect intended to our Lord and Savior—is the King of Kings.

Manhattan North is the Kingdom of Malone.

Like with any king, his subjects love him and fear him, revere him and loathe him, praise him and revile him. He has his loyalists and rivals, his sycophants and critics, his jesters and advisers, but he has no real friends.

Except his partners.

Russo and Monty.

His brother kings.

He would die for them.

“Malone? If you have a moment for me?”

It’s Sykes.

CHAPTER 3

As I’m sure you know,” Sykes says in his office, “just about everything I said in there was bullshit.”

“Yes, sir,” Malone says. “I was just wondering if you knew it.”

Sykes’s tight smile gets tighter, which Malone didn’t think was possible.

The captain thinks that Malone is arrogant.

Malone doesn’t argue with that.

A cop on these streets, he thinks, you’d better be arrogant. There are people up here, they see you don’t think you’re the shit, they will kill you. They’ll cap you and fuck you in the entry wounds. Let Sykes go out on the streets, let him make the busts, go through the doors.

Sykes doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t like a lot about Detective Sergeant Dennis Malone—his sense of humor, his tat sleeves, his encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop lyrics. He especially doesn’t like Malone’s attitude, which is basically that Manhattan North is his kingdom and his captain is just a tourist.

Fuck him, Malone thinks.

There’s nothing Sykes can do because last July Malone and his team made the largest heroin bust in the history of New York City. They hit Diego Pena, the Dominican kingpin, for fifty kilos, enough to supply a fix for every man, woman and child in the city.

They also seized close to two million in cash.

The suits at One Police Plaza weren’t thrilled that Malone and his team did the whole investigation on their own and didn’t bring anyone else in. Narcotics was furious, DEA was pissed, too. But fuck ’em all, Malone thinks.

The media loved it.

The Daily News and the Post had full-color screaming headlines, every TV station led with it. Even the Times put a story in the Metro section.

So the suits had to grin and bear it.

Posed with the stacks of heroin.

The media also lifted its dress over its head in September when the Task Force made a major raid into the Grant and Manhattanville projects and busted over a hundred gangbangers from the 3Staccs, the Money Avenue Crew and the Make It Happen Boys, the latter of which youth-at-risk capped an eighteen-year-old star woman basketball player in retaliation for one of their own getting shot. She was on her knees in a stairwell begging for her life, pleading for the chance to go to that college where she had a full ride, but she didn’t get it.

They left her on the landing, her blood dripping down the steps like a little crimson waterfall.

The papers were full of pictures of Malone and his team and the rest of the Task Force hauling her killers out of the projects and toward life without parole in Attica, known in the street as the Terror Dome.

So my team, Malone thinks, brings in three-quarters of the quality arrests in “your command”—serious arrests with serious weight that result in convictions with serious time. It doesn’t show up in your numbers, but you know goddamn well that my team has made assists in just about every drug-related homicide arrest—resulting in conviction—not to mention muggings, burglaries, robberies, domestic assaults and rapes committed by junkies and dealers.

I’ve taken more real bad guys off the street than cancer, and it’s my team that keeps the lid on this shithole, keeps it from exploding, and you know it.

So even though you’re threatened by me, even though you know it’s really me and not you that runs the Task Force, you ain’t gonna reassign me because you need me to make you look good.

And you know that, too.

You may not like your best player, but you don’t trade him. He puts points on the board.

Sykes can’t touch him.

Now the captain says, “That was a dog-and-pony show to satisfy the suits. Heroin makes headlines, we have to respond.”

The fact is that heroin use in the black community is down, not up, Malone knows. The retail sale of heroin by black gangs is down, not up; in fact, the young bangers are diversifying into cell-phone theft and cybercrime—identity theft and credit card fraud.

Any cop in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan North knows that the violence isn’t around heroin, it’s about weed. The corner boys are fighting over who gets to sell peaceful marijuana, and where they get to sell it.

“If we can take down the heroin mills,” Sykes says, “by all means, let’s take them down. But what I really care about is the guns. What I really care about is stopping these young idiots from killing themselves and other people on my streets.”

Guns and dope are the soup and sandwich of American crime. As much as the Job is obsessed with heroin, it’s more obsessed with getting guns off the streets. And for good reason—it’s the cops who have to deal with the murders, the wounded, cops who have to tell the families, work with them, try to get them some justice.

And, of course, it’s guns on the street that kill cops.

The NRA assholes will tell you that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Yeah, Malone thinks, people with guns.

Sure, you have stabbings, you have fatal beatings, but without guns the homicide figures would be negligible. And most of the congressional whores who go to their NRA meeting smelling nice and wearing something frilly have never seen a gunshot homicide or even a person who’s been shot.

Cops have. Cops do.

It ain’t pretty. It don’t look or sound (or smell) anything like in the movies. These asshats who think that the answer is to arm everyone so they could, for instance, shoot it out in a dark theater have never had a gun pointed at them and would shit themselves if they did.

They say it’s all about the Second Amendment and individual rights but what it’s about is the money. The gun manufacturers, who make up the vast bulk of the NRA’s funding, want to sell guns and make their cash.

End of motherfucking story.

New York City has the strictest gun laws in the country but that doesn’t make any difference because all the guns come in from the outside, up the “Iron Pipeline.” Dealers make straw purchases in states with weak gun laws—Texas, Arizona, Alabama, the Carolinas—and then bring them up I-95 to the cities of the Northeast and New England.

The goobers love to talk about crime in the big cities, Malone thinks, but either don’t know or don’t care that the guns come from their states.

To date, at least four New York cops have been killed with guns that came up the Iron Pipeline.

Not to mention the corner boys and the bystanders.

The mayor’s office, the department, everyone is desperate to get guns off the streets. The Job is even buying them back—a no-questions-asked cash-and-gift-card offer: you bring in your guns, we smile at you and give you $200 bank cards for handguns and assault rifles and $25 for rifles, shotguns and BB guns.

The last buyback, at the church over on 129th and Adam Clayton Powell, netted forty-eight revolvers, seventeen semiautomatic pistols, three rifles, a shotgun and an AR-15.

Malone has no problem with it. Guns off the streets are guns off the streets, and guns off the streets help a cop achieve job number one—go home at end of shift. One of the old hairbags taught him that when he first came on the Job—your first job is to go home at end of shift.

Now Sykes asks, “Where are we with DeVon Carter?”

DeVon Carter is the drug lord of Manhattan North, a.k.a. the Soul Survivor, the latest in a line of Harlem kingpins that came down from Bumpy Johnson, Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes.

He makes most of his money through the heroin mills that are really distribution centers, shipping to New England, the small towns up the Hudson, or down to Philly, Baltimore and Washington.

Think Amazon for smack.

He’s smart, he’s strategic and he’s insulated himself from the day-to-day operations. He never goes near the drugs or the sales, and all his communications are filtered through a handful of subordinates who go talk to him personally, never over the phone, text or e-mail.

Da Force hasn’t been able to get a CI inside Carter’s operation because the Soul Survivor only lets old friends and close family into his inner circle. And if they get busted, they choose doing the time over flipping on him, because doing the time means they’re still alive.

It’s frustrating—the Task Force could bust as many street-level dealers as they want. The undercovers do numerous buy-and-bust ops, but it’s a revolving door, a few gangbangers go to Rikers and there are others in line to take their place slinging the dope.

But so far, Carter has been untouchable.

“We have CIs out on the street,” Malone says, “sometime we get a twenty on him, but so what? Without a wiretap, we’re fucked.”

Carter owns or has pieces of a dozen clubs, bodegas, apartment buildings, boats and God knows what else and he spreads his meetings out. If they could get a wire into one of those places, they might get enough to move on him.

It’s the classic vicious circle. Without probable cause, you can’t get a warrant, but without the warrant, you can’t get probable cause.

Malone doesn’t bother saying this. Sykes already knows.

“Intel,” Sykes says, “indicates that Carter is negotiating a major firearms purchase. Serious weapons—assault rifles, automatic pistols, even rocket launchers.”

“Where are you getting this?”

“Despite your opinion,” Sykes says, “you’re not the only one who does police work out of this building. If Carter is looking for that kind of weaponry, it means he’s going to war against the Dominicans.”

“I agree.”

“Good,” Sykes says. “I don’t want that war fought on my turf. I don’t want to see that level of bloodshed. I want that shipment stopped.”

Yeah, Malone thinks, you want it stopped, but you want it stopped your way—“no cowboy bullshit, no illegal wires, no booming, no dropping your own dime.” He’s heard the whole speech before.

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” Sykes says. “In the Marcy projects.”

Malone knows the story—it’s been in the papers, paraded on the Job’s website: “From the projects to the precinct—black officer fights his way from the gangs to the upper echelon of the NYPD.” How Sykes turned his life around, got a scholarship to Brown, came home to “make a difference.”

Malone ain’t about to burst into tears.

But it has to be tough, being a black cop in a high position. Everyone looks at you different—to the people in the precinct you ain’t quite black, to the cops in the house you ain’t quite blue. Malone wonders which Sykes is to himself, or if he even knows. So, it’s gotta be tough, especially these days, all the racial shit going down.

“I know what you think of me,” Sykes says. “Empty suit. Token black careerist. ‘Move on and move up’?”

“Pretty much, we’re being honest, sir.”

“The suits want to make Manhattan North safe for white money,” Sykes says. “I want to make it safe for black people. Is that honest enough for you?”

“Yeah, that’ll do.”

“I know you think you’re protected by the Pena bust, your other heroics, by McGivern and the Irish-Italian Club downtown at One Police,” Sykes says. “But let me tell you something, Malone; you have enemies down there just waiting for you to slip on the banana peel so they can walk all over you.”

“And you’re not.”

“Right now I need you,” Sykes says. “I need you and your team to keep DeVon Carter from turning my streets into a slaughterhouse. You do that for me, I’ll, yes, move on and move up and leave you with your little kingdom here. You don’t do that for me, you’re just a white pain in my black ass and I will have you moved so far from Manhattan North you’ll be wearing a fucking sombrero to work.”

Try it, motherfucker, Malone thinks.

Try it, see what happens.

The fucked-up part, though, is they both want the same thing. They don’t want those guns getting on the streets.

And they’re my streets, Malone thinks, not yours.

He says, “I can stop that shipment. I don’t know if I can stop that shipment by the book.”

So how bad do you want them stopped, Captain Sykes?

He sits there and watches Sykes consider his own deal with the devil.

Then Sykes says, “I want reports, Sergeant. And everything you report to me had better be by the book. I want to know where you are and what you’re doing there. Do we understand each other?”

Perfectly, Malone thinks.

We’re all corrupt.

Just each in our own way.

And it’s a peace offering—if this turns into a big bust, I bring you with me this time. You star in the movie, get your picture in the Post, a boost in your career. And no one gives a fuck about Manhattan North’s numbers until you’re up and out.

“Merry Christmas, Captain,” Malone says.

“Merry Christmas, Malone.”

CHAPTER 4

Malone started the Turkey Run, what, five years ago, when the Task Force came into being and he thought they needed a little positive PR in the neighborhood.

Everyone up here knows the detectives from Da Force anyway, and it doesn’t hurt to spread a little love and goodwill toward men. You never know when some kid who ate turkey instead of going hungry on Christmas is going to decide to cut you a break, give you a tip.

It’s a point of pride with Malone that the turkeys come out of his own pocket. Lou Savino and the wiseguys over on Pleasant Avenue would cheerfully donate turkeys that fell off the backs of trucks, but Malone knows the community would get wind of that right away. So he accepts a discount on the turkeys from a food wholesaler whose double-parked trucks don’t get ticketed, but he pays the rest of the freight himself.

Shit, one decent bust more than makes up for it.

Malone doesn’t kid himself that the same people who take his turkeys won’t be dropping “airmail”—bottles, cans, dirty diapers—on him from the upper floors of the project buildings the day after tomorrow. One time someone dropped an entire air-conditioning unit from the nineteenth floor that missed Malone’s head by about an inch.

Malone knows the Turkey Run is just a truce.

Now he goes down to the locker room where Big Monty is getting into the Santa costume.

Malone laughs. “You look good.”

Well, actually ridiculous. A big black man, normally reserved and dignified, with a red Santa cap and a big beard. “A black Santa?”

“Diversity,” Malone says. “I read it on the Job’s website.”

“Anyway,” Russo says to Montague, “you’re not Santa Claus, you’re Crack Claus. Who would be black up here. And you got the belly.”

Montague says, “Ain’t my fault every time I fuck your wife she makes me a sandwich.”

Russo laughs. “More than she makes me.”

Used to be it was Billy O played Santa, even though he was skinnier than a rail. He freakin’ loved it, shoving a pillow under the suit, joking with the kids, handing out the turkeys. Now it’s fallen on Monty, even though he’s black.

Monty adjusts the beard and looks at Malone. “You know they sell those turkeys. We might as well just cut out the middleman and hand them crack.”

Malone knows every turkey ain’t gonna make it to the table, that a lot of them will go straight to the pipe or into arms or up noses. Those turkeys will go to the dealers, who’ll sell them to the bodegas, who’ll put them on the shelves and make a profit. But most of the turkeys will make it home, and life is a numbers game. Some kids will get Christmas dinner because of his turkeys, others won’t.

Has to be good enough.

DeVon Carter doesn’t think it’s even close to good enough. Carter, he laughed at Malone’s Christmas Turkey Run.

This was a month or so ago.

Malone, Russo and Monty were having lunch at Sylvia’s, each of them digging into some stewed turkey wings, when Monty looked up and said, “Guess who’s here.”

Malone glanced over at the bar and saw DeVon Carter.

Russo said, “You want to get the check and go?”

“No reason to be unfriendly,” Malone said. “I think I’ll slide over and say hello.”

As Malone got up, two of Carter’s guys moved to step in the way, but Carter waved them off. Malone took the stool next to Carter and said, “DeVon Carter, Denny Malone.”

“I know who you are,” Carter said. “Is there a problem?”

“Not unless you have one,” Malone said. “I just thought, hey, we’re in the same place, we might as well meet in person.”

Carter looked good, like he always does. Gray cashmere Brioni turtleneck sweater, charcoal Ralph Lauren slacks, large Gucci eyeglass frames.

It got a little quiet in the place. There was the biggest drug slinger in Harlem and the cop trying to bust him sitting down with each other. Carter said, “As a matter of fact, we were just laughing about you.”

“Yeah? What’s so funny about me?”

“Your ‘Turkey Run,’” Carter said. “You give the people drumsticks. I give them money and dope. Who do you think is going to win that one?”

“The real question,” Malone said, “is who’s going to win between you and the Domos?”

The Pena bust slowed the Dominicans down a little, but it was just a setback. Some of Carter’s gangs were starting to look at the Dominicans as an option. They’re afraid they’re outnumbered and outgunned and are going to lose the marijuana business.

So Carter is a polydrug merchandiser—he has to be. In addition to the smack that mostly leaves the city or at least goes to a mostly white customer base, he markets coke and marijuana as well, because to run his moneymaking heroin business he needs troops. He needs security, mules, communications people—he needs the gangs.

The gangs have to make money, they have to eat.

Carter doesn’t have a choice but to let “his” gangs deal weed—he has to, or the Dominicans will and they’ll take his business. They’ll either buy Carter’s gangs outright or just wipe them off the map, because without the weed money, the gangs couldn’t buy guns and they’d be helpless.

His pyramid would crumble from the bottom.

Malone wouldn’t care that much about the weed slinging except that 70 percent of the murders in Manhattan North are drug related.

So you have Latino gangs fighting each other, you have black gangs fighting each other and, increasingly, you have black gangs fighting Latino gangs as the battle between their big-money heroin bosses escalates.

“You took Pena off the count for me,” Carter said.

“And not as much as a muffin basket.”

“I heard you were well compensated.”

It sent a jolt up Malone’s spine but he didn’t flinch. “Every time there’s a big bust, the ‘community’ says the cops ripped some off the top.”

“That’s because every time they do.”

“Here’s what you don’t understand,” Malone said. “Young black men used to pick cotton—now you are the cotton. You’re the raw product that gets fed into the machine, thousands of you every day.”