Michael Codella - Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York Citys Lower East Side

To Rita, Marco, Bianca, and Santino,

for their love and inspiration

Alphaville is a work of nonfiction. While some court transcripts and affidavits have been used to prepare the manuscript, the characters and events described in Alphaville are based on the recollections of the authors. Various names, nicknames, times, dates, and identifying personal characteristics have been changed, and some characters created from composites of several people.

Battling the late eighties Avenue D heroin trade as a cop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan fulfilled a need for barely controlled, boiling-over excitement that had gnawed at me for as long as I could remember. Alphabet City grabbed me by the throat and wouldnt let go, and that was just fine. The neighborhood was a darkly primal and seductive forty-square-block stretch of city built on roots going back generations and a history that justified the shape it was in when I got there. Those rootsthe lines of cause and effect, coincidence, fact, and rumorcrisscrossed, intersected, and doubled back through the streets, floors, and stairwells I worked, the lives of the people I helped and I hurt, and the faces, places, and events that brought me there.

My storys the same as everyonesit points back at a past I know and a past Im still piecing together. Whats maybe different about me is that I knew my whole life that I was the son of a cop and only found out later that I was also the grandson of a former wiseguy. I grew up in a neighborhood shared equally by cops and gangsters, and went to work on a police force where keeping your job and successfully enforcing the law were often opposites. Once I got to Alphaville, a daily fight with a gang of smack dealers nicknamed the Forty Thieves and a guy named Davey Blue Eyes who put them and kept them in business earned me the nickname Rambo, plenty of attention from NYPD Internal Affairs, and a price on my head set by Davey and the bad guys I took down.

When I was young, wild, and wearing a badge and a gun in my Alphaville days, I didnt spend a lot of time marveling at how I managed to keep breathing. There wasnt any time, or any point, in doing a lot of reflection. Once Id been off the job for a decade or so, I started to think differently. Out of the line of fire, its only natural to pat yourself down for bullet holes, look back, and take stock of the close calls, the good choices, and the dumb luck that put me where I am nowalive and with family and friends so close and so real that those crazy years in the rearview mirror can almost seem like fiction.

Taking a journey from Canarsie to Coney Island to the Lower East Side brought me to a full boil. I needed the heat, I needed that action, and I needed to use it to square those two sides within methe past I knew and the past I didnt, the cop side and the crook side that, in a way, we all share and show in the things we choose to do and choose not to do. Not many people have the chance to find out what theyre really capable of at the same time as they accept who they are and where they came from. I did, and I had the time of my life doing it.

Early summer, 1988. Sticky black bubbles on a new piece of macadam silently pop and drool oil as my partner Gio and I cruise up the avenue in R(adio) M(otor) P(atrol) 9864 for the umpteenth time today. Were housing cops in our first year assigned to Operation 8, a plainclothes task force combating the drug trade in PSA 4. Our beat is a stretch of public housing that Justice Department statisticians and local junkies both agree is the retail heroin capital of the world. The Feds used your tax dollars to buy the car, fill the tank, and pay our overtime while we sit in it. RMP 9864 has power everything, FM stereo, climate control, the works. But we drive with the windows down and the radio offtaking in as much of the sights, sounds, smells, and faces as our senses can handle.

Most people glaze over when they look at a blocks worth of inner city hothouse humanity. New Yorks civilian population contains eight million experts at averting their eyes in order to avoid trouble. But with a badge, a gun, and a license to butt in, a New York plainclothes cop never thinks twice about looking the people they pass right in the eye.

Were connoisseurs of the flash of recognition that precedes those civilian darted looks away.

We size up everybodythe steerers calling brands, the dealers making hand-to-hands, and the junkies crawling in feeling bad, hoping to walk out feeling nothing. We audition every face, every swinging arm, every sweating neck, every open eye that we pass. Who is waiting on someone? Who looks like theyre hiding something? Whos new? Whos missing? Who can we toss for dope and a collar or hit up for some information?

Theres a sun up there somewhere beyond the rooftops but the sky looks like spoiled milk and the gummy yellow haze wont betray a bright spot. Im Brooklyn born and raised, we both are, and like the rest of the natives, Ive learned that Mother Nature in New York can be as weird as any other local old broad talking to her shopping bags in a darkened movie theater or trying to convince her social worker that the people beaming gamma rays into her head are real. Heat lightning cackles above the Brooklyn skyline and her message is clear: You may have it paved over, but its still a swamp. Other places in the world, the summer months ebb and flow, the temperature rising up with the sun and going back down again after dusk. Here its like somebody turns the broiler on in June and finally remembers to shut it off again in September.

The heat and the wet air smear sounds, smells, shapes, and colors. An anonymous clavero goes to town on a salsa track sputtering from a passing car stereo. For a moment the beat accompanies a steerer hawking bags of Mr. T, Mr. T for a corner smack dealer. His chant turns to Five-O, Five-O. Yo, Rambo on the block, as he catches sight of our car and my face. The salsa track briefly jams with the crackle on our dash police radio, then a snatch of distorted thudding dance music from somewhere else and a shrieking seagull come inland from the harbor to trash pick the Dumpsters behind the projects. The mix of sweat and cologne my partner and I generate are no match for the sour garbage stink, garlic, cigarette smoke, sweet-scented disinfectant Hispanic supers use in their building hallways, and rotten-egg East River tidal funk wafting in the windows with the sounds.