American Gangster (19 page)

It is chilling and inescapable. Tolerance levels have gone down. The Leelikes said the thing they hated most about the sleazos was that they're so snotty. In the old days, when Susan Leelike went to Cooper Union, junkies hung out in the Sagamore Cafeteria, near Astor Place. Dope fiends those days knew they were outcasts and acted accordingly. The Leelikes remembered these Burroughsian types with a touch of romanticism. Now, they said, methadone makes being a junkie legal. And the creeps have come out into the daylight, where it quickly becomes apparent that junkies aren't the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.

This hit home. A few weeks ago I was walking by Cooper Square. A guy in his mid-twenties was stretched out on the ground, twitching. He didn't look like a lowlife; he had French jeans on. A small crowd gathered around him. A cabbie stopped and put on his emergency blinker. The guy seemed to be having a seizure. Maybe he's an epileptic, said the cabby, pull his tongue out of his mouth. Two people went for the cops, another to call an ambulance. Finally an older man rolled up the guy's sleeve. The dude's arm looked like a Penn Central yard. The older guy threw the arm back on the sidewalk in disgust. “He's just a fucking junkie,” the cabby said. “A fucking junkie.” Half the people in crowd said, “Shit.” And everyone just split. Me, too. I split. When the guy's an epileptic he's human; when he's a junkie, fuck him.

So I knew the Leelikes had the trend on their side. Also, it was clear—they are determined. They are willing to run the risk of being called redneck—Susan Leelike says, “I hate it when they call me the white lady”—to get rid of sleazos. And they don't flinch when you ask them where they propose the sleazos go. “It's just not our problem,” they say.

Patrolmen Bob Woerner and Dennis Harrington are in an empty office above Glancy's Bar on East Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, hiding. Harrington and Woerner have been partners for six years. They used to
work the smack detail on Avenues A, B, C, and D (called avenues X, Y, and Z in cop parlance). But pressure from Sweet 14 and local politicians on the department to “do something” about Fourteenth Street brought them here eleven months ago. Since then Woerner and Harrington, tough and smart cops, have been the most effective (in terms of arrests) of the twenty men on the Ninth Precinct's “Fourteenth Street Task Force.”

Sometimes Woerner and Harrington walk down Fourteenth Street and ask buzz-brained cats, “Hey, man. What you doing?” It's a torture technique; they know that the toughest question in the world for a sleazo is “What are you doing?” Creeps' knees buckle under the weight of that one; they say, “I dunno, what
am
I doing?”

But what Woerner and Harrington really like to do is make busts. Which is why they are hiding in the empty room above Glancy's Bar with their binoculars trained on the action beneath the Palladium marquee.

Making busts on Fourteenth Street isn't tough. Sometimes guys will be so loaded they come right up and say, “Placidyl … Placidyl … oh, shee-it” before they realize they're talking to a uniformed policeman. It is tricky, however. First of all, the captain doesn't like cops to make too many arrests. He says busts take police off the street and put them in court. Primarily, though, when you're making “observation” busts on Fourteenth Street, you've got to see them good. Most of the sellers get their stuff from scrip doctors, which means their own name is on the bottle. It is not a crime to carry “controlled substances”—if the (not-forged) scrip is made out to you. Selling the stuff, however, is illegal. So, instead of just grabbing a single party, like a smack bust, cops have to get both the buyer and the seller as well as recover the stuff. They also have to see the deal go down perfectly—that is, if they're not into fudging evidence in court.

Woerner and Harrington say, Why fudge, on Fourteenth Street if you miss one sale, they'll soon be another. But still, it hurts when you've been freezing behind the Con Edison fence at Fourteenth and Third, waiting for just the right view. And then, right at the big moment, a bus goes by.

Tonight, however, it ain't gonna be no problem. Aerosmith is back in town at the Palladium and a dozen suburban kids are milling around in
front of the theater, looking to get stupid. Woerner and Harrington are licking their lips. All they need is a seller. And from down the street, trudging slowly up from Third Avenue by the poolroom, here he comes. In unison the cops shout, “
All right, Ernest James … come on, Ernest James
.”

Ernest James, a gangly guy with a face and beard like Sonny Rollins, came on.

He walked into a crowd of leather-jacketed white kids. Got into a conversation with one. Took him off to the doorway of the fight gym. Then it couldn't have been clearer if Otto Preminger were directing. Out came the bottle. There went the pill. Across came the three dollars. And down the stairs went Woerner and Harrington.

Like nothing, Harrington was reading Ernest James his rights. Woerner had the buyer, a blond boy from Pelham Bay, up against the wall. Ernest James, the perfect degenerate, pulled out a slew of false IDs, a pack of Kools, and looked impassively at the sky. Against the wall another kid was screaming to the spread-eagled buyer, “Jeff, Jeff … give me your ticket for the show.”

Ernest James was in big trouble. He had a goddamned drugstore on him. Ten bottles of pills in all: 26 big white tabs thought to be Quaaludes, 21 Tuinals, 15 Seconals, 40 unknown peach-colored pills, 34 unknown white pills, 23 ampicillins, 29 unknown yellow pills, and several dozen Placidyls. Most of the bottles were made out to Ernest James. Some to Ernest Jones. Others to A. Ramos. One was just to “Ernest,” which prompted Woerner to wonder if Ernest James was on a first-name basis with his pharmacist. Also found were two Garcia y Vega humidors full of 5- and 10-mg Valium. Almost all the scrips were supposedly written by one Doctor Jacob Handler of West 103rd Street. Doctor Handler is a Fourteenth-Street favorite. Harrington keeps a little scorecard of doctors' names that appear on bottles. Doctor Handler is way up near the top of the list. But the cops say nothing will happen to him because “it's tough to bust a doctor.”

Apparently to maximize his pill-gathering ability, Ernest James also had half a dozen different medical identification cards. Some were made out to the name William Summersall, others to A. Ramos and Ernest Jones. He also had a little notebook in which he has apparently been practicing
different signatures. Most are Ernest Jones. But there is also a page on which Texas Slim is written a dozen times.

Under the fifteen-watt glare in the Ninth's arrest room, Harrington books Ernest James. This is nothing new—Harrington has arrested Ernest James before. In fact, Ernest has six busts for pills this year already. Too bad, figures Dennis Harrington: Ernest James is not a bad guy. In fact, Dennis thinks, most of the guys he busts aren't real bad. Just a bunch of losers. Ernest James had $84 on him, but that had to be his life savings. Most guys have about $30. “Sometimes it is that ‘there but for fortune thing,'” says Dennis, who is haunted by the memory of his brother, who was “into junk.” He also thinks about that same picture they always show of Karen Quinlan. Dennis wonders if she got her downs on Fourteenth Street.

Asked where he got all the pills, Ernest James is cool. “I'm qualified to have as many pills as I want,” he says. Asked about all the different IDs, Ernest says, “I'm qualified to have as many names as I want.”

While the cops count up the rest of Ernest's stash, I ask him if he thinks the businessmen and cops can clean up Fourteenth Street. He says, “I dunno 'bout no cleanup. All I know is I wanna get to St. Louis. I can do security over there. I can't sell these pills no more. But if I don't, I got bread and water. My philosophy is that if the city put the clean in the street, they put the dirt in the street, too. Goes both ways. There is one thing that's sure. Ain't no way to clean up this. Cops come fuck up with Fourteenth Street, people just gonna go somewheres else. If they want to get rid of the dirt, they gonna have to shoot those motherfuckers. Line up those mother-fuckers and kill them. All of them. Dead.”

Woe is Ernest James. He got caught in the cleanup. Usually Ernest winds up with one of those mumbo-jumbo raps like time served or adjournment contemplating dismissal. In other words, he gets off. Not bad, considering pill-pushing is a class-D felony worth up to seven years. This time, however, Ernest James is taking the fall. The D.A. is making an example of him. A special grand jury on soft drugs is indicting him. Instead of the usual weekend at Rikers, they're offering Ernest a year. And that's if he pleads.

Tough shit, Ernest James. Add insult to injury: When Ernest got picked up on September 30, he claimed it was his birthday. No one believed him. But it was true.
Happy birthday, Ernest James
.

Another thing Ernest James was right about: If you move a sleazo, he'll just go somewhere else. You got to kill the motherfuckers … dead. Down in Chinatown, they say that's what Mao did with the opium addicts. Hopheads can't drive tractors, so Mao's guys just put them up against the wall and blew their brains out. Bet there ain't no sleazy corners in Peking.

For a society stuck with half a million sleazoids (conservative metropolitan-area estimate), this could be an eminently modest proposal. Discussing this alternative with liberal city councilman Henry Stern, he says, “Of course, I'm not in favor of killing these people.”

But Stern admits that he can't figure out what to do with them. “It's a dilemma,” he says, “maybe it's one of the biggest dilemmas in the city today.” Miriam Friedlander, another liberal councilperson who has been working closely with Sweet 14, also does not favor wholesale annihilation. She takes a more conventional tack, saying, “It's my primary function to break up that situation and get them out of the neighborhood.”

In place of execution, the politicians offer “redevelopment.” “Redevelopment” is a coming concept in the city-planning business. A modification of the pave-it-all-over-and-start-from-scratch school of urban studies, “redevelopment” essentially means taking over “depressed” areas and transforming them into middle-class shopping and residential areas. The best-known example of “redevelopment” is on Forty-second Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. A civic group came into possession of several “tax-arrears” buildings and redid them into boutiques. Henry Stern, Miriam Friedlander, Koch, and the rest feel that “redevelopment” is at least worth trying on Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. And with economic biggies like Charlie Luce, Helmsley-Spear, Citibank, and Restaurant Associates around, you know the job will get done right. Oh, boy, will it.

Of course, “redevelopment” stops short of final solutions. So Ernest James's philosophy holds up. Due to the hard-nose police work by the “Fourteenth Street Task Force,” the sleazos have begun a minor migration. Routed from parts of Fourteenth Street, they camped in Stuyvesant Park on Second
Avenue and Fifteenth Street. According to the locals, who say they pay extra rent to live near the park, the situation is becoming disgusting. Methadone addicts are leaving their bottles all over the place. Pill-pushers are dealing. The other day two of the he-shes got into a little mutual around-the-world.

The neighborhood forces rallied, led by one Jeanne Pryor, a right-minded lady who loves a firm grip on the bullhorn (who last week opened a cleanup storefront at Fourteenth and Third). They decided that the Thirteenth Precinct was not providing adequate protection from the sleazos. They demanded police guards in the park.

One night last month a protest march was organized. About 150 people showed up to carry signs saying things like
OUR CHILDREN ONCE PLAYED FRISBEE IN THIS PARK
. Others carried shopping bags full of empty scrip bottles they said were collected in the park. These were a present for Captain Joseph Neylan of the Thirteenth, who, Ms. Pryor kept shouting, “has been out to lunch for the past six months.”

The march, accompanied by a man in a kilt playing a bagpipe, began at Fifteenth Street and headed up Third Avenue toward the precinct house on Twenty-first Street. Ms. Pryor had planted stories in the
Daily News
, so the local television stations sent out crews to cover. Arc lights flooded the streets as Ms. Pryor led the chant of “junkies out of the park.”

As the march reached Seventeenth Street, it started to get interesting. A messed-up black guy bounded in front of the marchers and held up his hands like he was stopping a runaway team of horses.

“Stop!” he said, the TV lights glaring in his buzzed eyes. Stunned, Ms. Pryor halted in her tracks. The whole march bumped to a stop. There was a silence. Then the guy started chanting, “Junkies out of the park. Junkies out of the park.” The marchers stepped back. The guy kept screaming, “Junkies out of the park. Junkies out of the park.” Then he stopped and looked the bagpipe player right in the eye and said, “I'm a fucking junkie. I'm a fucking junkie. I'm a fucking junkie. Get me out of the park. Get me out of the park. Get me out of the park.”

The mock turned to a plea.

It was then that Jeanne Pryor should have acted. She should have taken out a 12-gauge shotgun and blown the creep's head off.

A strange adventure of youth, recalled. From the
Village Voice,
1977
.

I spied my old fat friend Bart the other day. Like old times, he was sitting in a snot-green foreign car eating a brownie and swigging milk from the quart container in front of Cakemasters on Thirty-fourth Street. For eight years of no see, Big Bart could have looked worse. The car was an improvement. Big Bart used to drive a Corvair that had holes in the floorboards. He heard that Ralph Nader said Corvairs were killer machines, moving time bombs, that they could go off the road, smash right into a crowd of unsuspecting shoppers, with a single nudge of the wheel. So Big Bart went out and got one with no front alignment. He was that kind of guy.