The Savage City (17 page)

Fear was no good for the city's self-image, but it did sell papers. In early 1965, the
Herald Tribune
launched a series entitled “City in Crisis” that would continue for months. Focusing on issues of crime and race, two young reporters, Jimmy Breslin and Dick Schaap, chronicled the early stages of a great city's descent into hell. “Women carry tear-gas pens in their pocketbooks,” they wrote. “Cab drivers rest iron bars on the front seat next to them. Store owners carry billy clubs next to the cash register. And people enter parks and the subways and side streets of New York, the most important city in the world, only in fear. The fear is justified. The weapons are justified.”

And another factor added fuel to the fire: it was election season in the Big Town.

The city's three-term mayor, Robert Wagner, had tearfully announced that he would not run for another term; it was largely believed that he would have lost anyway. The media's favored candidate was a handsome, reform-minded young Republican named John V. Lindsay; his opponents were Abe Beame, a clubhouse Democrat, and the writer and magazine editor William F. Buckley Jr., who was running as an independent on the Conservative Party ticket.

Campaigning in Kew Gardens at the very spot where Kitty Genovese
was murdered, Lindsay declared, “Something has gone out of the heart and soul of New York City.” A Lindsay for Mayor television ad showed an image of a dark and desolate Central Park, with a voiceover proclaiming that “fear has entered the bloodstream of the city.” The candidate's campaign literature was straightforward:

The other candidates shared Lindsay's view that crime and fear were the big issues. The conservative candidate, Buckley, made no bones about what he thought was at the root of the problem. “What is happening,” he said, “or is about to happen—let's face it—is race war.”

In March, Buckley kicked off his candidacy in a speech before six thousand Catholic policemen at the NYPD's Holy Name Communion Breakfast following mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. In the speech, Buckley noted that the problem in the city and country was “a society in which order and values are disintegrating,” adding, to great applause, that “the problem in New York City is too much crime, not too much police brutality.” He even criticized media coverage of civil rights protests in Alabama for including images of police beating protesters with clubs, leading the
Herald Tribune
to headline its coverage of the speech “6,000 N.Y. Police Applaud a Defense of Selma Cops.”

In stark contrast to Buckley, Breslin and Schaap sought to put the disturbing fact of crime in context, blaming much of what was happening on events in the South. “Every time a judge and jury [in the South] gets up from the grass and goes into court and lets a white man go because he shot a colored man, every time they make a mockery of justice in sleepy Haynesville [Alabama], we pay for it here in New York, where colored people seethe in their tenements and Puerto Ricans load up on junk, or wine, and then go out and steal for money.”

Newspaper accounts of shootings, muggings, and rooftop rapes
were used by political candidates to underscore their positions, whether it was for better conditions for the poor or for tougher police response. Throughout the spring and into summer, the mayoral campaign served as background noise to what was happening in the streets and in the courts, an overheated chorus in an overheated time.

As if on cue, a ten-second nightly public service message debuted on TV that seemed to feed the paranoia of the times. Over the local station's insignia, a disembodied voice announced: “It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your children are?”

Anywhere, parents hoped, but in the streets of the Savage City.

 

LIKE MOST COPS,
Bill Phillips didn't care much for John Lindsay. To him, Lindsay was an effete liberal, a WASP blue blood who seemed eager to capitulate to the minorities. Everyone agreed that crime was out of control and fear was ruining life in the big city, but that's where the agreement ended. Most rank-and-file policemen believed that what was needed was more force, unfettered police action. There was a growing feeling among cops that civil libertarians were gaining the upper hand, that the police were being hamstrung by left-leaning politics and, in some cases, outright communist propaganda. According to this line of thinking, criminals no longer respected the dictates of law and order; they no longer feared the police.

The irony was that the use of physical force administered by police had not waned much in the ten years that Phillips had been on the job. As Phillips recalled:

It wasn't uncommon to walk into a squad room and see a perp strung up by handcuffs, bleeding profusely—a sight described by Phillips, Robert Leuci, and others who served during this era. As Phillips put it:

In his time with the TPF, Leuci encountered an almost identical scene at the Forty-eighth Precinct station house in the South Bronx. Walking into a squad room to get an arrest form, he came across a black man who had been beaten and was hanging from a cage, “arms outstretched like Jesus Christ. Something had been put on the guy's head that looked like a crown of thorns.”

Leuci asked a detective, “What did this guy do?”

“Threw lye on a cop,” said the detective. “You wanna take a few licks?”

“No thanks,” said Leuci. “I'm busy with some other stuff.”

To many cops, Lindsay's talk of reform suggested that the NYPD's fundamental way of doing business would be irrevocably changed if he was elected. Methods that were deemed messy but necessary—methods no layperson or liberal could ever hope to understand—would be outlawed, and the city would descend deeper into mayhem.

Bill Phillips would claim he had no special fondness for violence as a tactic. “I mean, I'm not a merciful guy. If a guy comes at me to hurt me, then I don't give a shit about him. No holds barred. I'll beat him within an inch of his life. But once he's under arrest and he's in the house, it's all over.” Even so, Phillips would never have intervened in a police beating, nor would he report it to supervisors. Being a cop meant keeping your mouth shut.

It was also true that violence wasn't much help if your primary goal on the job was to score. You couldn't really beat a person into giving you money. It was far more effective to create a situation where a person was relieved or even happy to fork it over. There was “the flake,” the planting of evidence—that worked well, especially with innocent civilians. With criminals, the best way to squeeze blood from a stone was to allow them to operate, even
help
them to operate, and then exact a hefty tax in return. That way everyone made out and had a vested interest in keeping matters to themselves.

In Harlem in the summer of '65, numbers and gambling joints were
the name of the game. But another racket, narcotics, showed signs of entering into another Golden Era. The war in Southeast Asia had opened up the heroin market: soldiers black and white were returning with the habit, and networks of cultivation, purchase, and distribution were being established. It was a whole new ball game.

Phillips's attitudes about taking pad money from dope were old-fashioned, but he could see that the unwritten rules about drug money were in the process of going out the window. The stakes were too damn high. In 1962, the NYPD, working with federal drug agents, scored a major bust in the “French Connection” case. The team of detectives involved in that case formed the core of a new elite narcotics squad known as the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). Almost from the start, SIU was dirty, pocketing money that dwarfed anything Bill Phillips was cobbling together from his various scores. On top of that, the dope that was confiscated in the French Connection case—dope that was stored in the NYPD's property room—was discovered to have been stolen as part of an inside job. Some believed that the dope was pilfered all at once, but Phillips suspected that detectives had lifted the dope piecemeal—kilo by kilo—over the course of many years. The street profits from this dope were likely in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

For some time, people in Harlem had complained that police in the black community were profiting from the distribution and sale of narcotics. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. first made this accusation on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1960. The flamboyant congressman charged that “the dregs of the police force” were assigned to his home district of Harlem, and that they gave “plenty of protection” to narcotics sellers, collecting as much as $3,000 a month from each narcotics “drop.”

Powell named names, which got him into trouble. Along with identifying local dope peddlers such as Louie the Gimp, Slim Brown (nicknamed “Stoney”), a couple of characters named Buzz and Bikie, and many others, the congressman included the name of Esther James, who he claimed was a bagwoman for Harlem police. Esther James sued Powell for libel and was awarded a settlement of $210,000; instead of paying up, Powell skipped town, hiding out in the Bahamas.

In February 1965, the congressman was back in town. After giving another inflammatory speech from the House floor on police corruption
in Harlem, he reported that his life had been threatened and turned the written threats over to the FBI.

Powell's hyperbolic nature and broad accusations made it possible for white folks to discount what he was saying. The NYPD's public affairs officer, Walter Arm, even called Powell a “liar” in the pages of the
New York Times
. But many in the Negro community believed that the congressman spoke the truth: dope, numbers, and other vice operators flourished in the ghetto under the aegis of cops on the take.

Public complaints about police corruption had come up before. In 1948, the department had been rocked by a corruption scandal involving a gambling pad in Brooklyn operated by a well-connected impresario named Harry Gross. Gross's operation made payments regularly to nearly every division in the borough, their payouts implicating public officials with ties to City Hall. The investigation led to more than one hundred arrests and convictions and eventually forced the resignation of Mayor William O'Dwyer, an Irishman from the Old Country.

Still, even crooked cops shared Bill Phillips's reservations about scoring off dope—a belief that would soon crumble as soaring drug profits led to irresistible temptation.

Like many policemen in Harlem, Bill Phillips did make money from the dope trade, though in a roundabout way. Phillips's connection was a local hustler named Freddy Clark, a brawny, dark-skinned Negro who ran a real estate office and luncheonette at 119th Street and Madison Avenue. The real estate business was a cover for Clark's real business, as a significant player in the Harlem heroin trade.

Phillips first met Clark shortly after being flopped back to uniform. At the luncheonette, Clark approached Phillips with a container of coffee in a brown paper bag. “Don't throw the bag away,” said Clark. At the bottom of the bag was thirty dollars—fifteen for Phillips, fifteen for his partner. Clark asked for nothing in return; it was merely his investment in the police department. There were regular and larger payments to come.

Freddy Clark's investment in the NYPD proved to be a good move, because eventually he got arrested and charged with a triple homicide.

“Did you hear?” a cop said to Phillips one day. “Santy Claus is dead.”

“Whaddya mean Santy Claus is dead?”

“Freddy's locked up for homicide.”

“Holy shit,” said Phillips. “There goes thirty dollars a month right down the drain.”

The crime in question happened in an apartment on West 114th Street, where two brothers and a woman were gunned down execution-style while a baby screamed in the next room. After an underling of Clark's was arrested in connection with the murder, he told an assistant district attorney that he and Freddy had stormed the apartment and shot the men because they owed Freddy thirty thousand dollars. The woman, wife of one of the brothers and a potential witness, was collateral damage.

Freddy Clark knew that his alleged accomplice had turned informant. Even so, in a highly unusual move, the informant was placed in a cell with Freddy, the very person he had informed on. According to Phillips, the informant was visited in the cell by a black policeman named Charley Almanac, a good buddy of Clark's. Within days, the informant reneged on his confession. He wound up taking a plea and doing time for his role in the triple homicide; Freddy Clark served no time at all.