My First Trip to New York City

So I have had many memorable trips to New York since my first in 1972, but the first was like none of the subsequent trips except that it involved theater.

The Shakespeare class at my college, of which I was not a member, was going to New York to see Much Ado About Nothing and Two Gentlemen of Verona. There were extra tickets available so I was invited along. The trip conflicted with a final exam in one of my other courses, but the professor said I could make it up.

“I do have an additional request,” he said. “I want to make sure you see all sides of New York City. Bring back a pack of pornographic playing cards.”

Well, many of the finest coming of ages stories have a quest myth and this was to be mine.

Our group stayed at The Times Square Motor Hotel which was cosily seedy or seedily cozy depending on how you see these things. When we first walked in a guest and the person in charge of the registration desk were insulting each other. Alas, I can’t bring myself to type what they were saying, but you can fill in with any number of colorful ethnic slurs. There was also a gentleman at a bank of pay phones going from one phone to another, picking up the receiver and shouting “Hello. Hello.”

We had some time to kill before the performance so we checked out the club attached to the motel. This was in the midst of Superfly craze and people were dressed as if they were movie extras. People ground their hips together and I sipped sherry. We couldn’t figure out why people were peering into the club. It was only later that we realized there were signs promising topless dancers.

The production of Much Ado About Nothing was wonderful. It was probably not the first live theater I had ever seen but it was the first that stayed in my memory. It starred Kathleen Widdowes as Beatrice and a wonderfully goofy Sam Waterston as Benedick. I can’t find that guy in the actor I’ve seen on Law and Order. The play was set in America at the end of the Spanish-American War and featured a marching band that came down the aisles and on to the stage. I was entranced all night but I had to get my sleep because there was hunting to be done the next morning.

So a small group of us set off in search of pornographic playing cards. We came to a promising location and went in. I didn’t know where not to look first. The guys on the trip, who I thought might make the request for me, headed toward the back of the shop. I went up the counter and and said, “I want to buy pornographic playing cards.”

The gentleman behind the counter took umbrage.

“I do not sell pornography. I do not sell pornography.” He took a breath. “I sell position cards.”

He slapped a plastic container on the counter. Yep, playing cards with people in positions. I thought I was set.

“That’ll be five dollars.”

Alas, my entire budget for the trip was eighteen dollars. No sale.

Our next stop was the musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. While I later saw a wonderful version of this play with Larry Kert in Washington, D.C., this production in New York seemed tired and the actors were playing to each other and not to the audience.

After that it was time to go. Much Ado About Nothing had been fabulous, Two Gentleman of Verona had been pleasant enough but I didn’t have the pornographic playing cards.

As we were about to leave, one of the women on the trip noticed that the motel had a gift shop. She went in and came running out.

“Stephanie! Stephanie! Look what I found.”

There for the low price of two dollars was a key ring with a small plastic container attached. Sure enough there were playing cards that featured a series of bare breasted women nestled in what looked to be kitty litter. (I’m sure it was supposed to be sand).

Pornography? Not really. But if my professor wanted proof that I had been in a part of New York that was sleazy, this was proof enough.

You know what they say. It’s a helluva town.

© 2015 Stephanie Patterson

We believe it, even when we shouldn’t

Sheila York

Reading: The Art Forger, BA Shapiro

Watching (in the Blu-Ray): The Drop

My best friend Kathy and I agree on a lot. We’re on the same side of the left-right political spectrum. We like the same music, movies and mysteries. And the munchies to have while we're enjoying them.

We also agree that we love TV. We admit it publicly. Well, all right, I admitted it for her. At the end of the day, we both like to click on the DVR and watch what’s there, like opening up a surprise gift. We agree on many of our favorite shows, and we have been loyal to them for years. And years.      

Here we are at Rockefeller Center at Christmas.
Kathy and I also agree that she is way smarter than I am.
When the temperature is 10 below, she wears a hat!

TV (and movie) writers get away with a lot of implausibility, and this occasionally irks some mystery writers, “irks” meaning tweeting/Facebooking/emailing about it till people start to mute/defriend/direct-to-junk-folder them.

If we want plausibility, we know where to get it.

But when it comes to reality, we agree to cut TV more slack than we do novels. Kathy and I understand that TV shows have time constraints that novels don’t. And that, while novels can be riveting while remaining inside a character’s head, that won’t work in visual media. And that writers on many shows have to crank out scripts even faster than James Patterson does books.

We sigh, but we understand why TV suspects regularly agree to be grilled by detectives without a lawyer. Otherwise, nothing much would happen. Many more suspects would agree to eschew the lawyer in real life if real life detectives would agree to spill to the suspect important details of their case the way their TV counterparts do in interrogations. We also understand that TV lawyers have to ask questions in court they don’t already know the answers to, so that a bombshell can drop, or you wouldn’t have any drama. In real life, you wouldn’t have any clients.

Kathy and I also agree to gripe about some shows set in New York City, even when we are devoted to those shows. To be clear, we do not mind when characters round a corner in Midtown and are suddenly in Tribeca. We understand about location availability and what works better for the visuals. But if you're setting your show in New York, you at least by golly ought to make some effort to make it look like New York.

We agree that Castle is the biggest offender of our favorite shows. It’s the version of New York City created by someone with deliberate ignorance and disdain, who never set foot in the city and doesn’t want to bother. Castle's NYC streets are wide, the sidewalks sparsely populated (and with mostly young white people in California colors), the buildings are low rise with broad windows. There is no New York vibe. Once, they put a motel with a parking lot in Manhattan.  

 

In (mild) defense of their ubiquitous use of broad, well-lit alleys for finding bodies, we do still have a few alleys left in Manhattan, and it's much easier to put a crew in an alley than on the street. 

You'll note however that, even when a real NYC alley is clean, it's narrow and sort of dark. Manhattan has tall buildings, and therefore no golden California light.

It annoys us that the show doesn't want to look anything like New York, but felt that their premise — a writer gets to run with the cops — required New York for cred. 

Having said all that, Kathy and I agree that we will follow Nathan Fillion almost anywhere.

We agree that Elementary has got a bit better at portraying New York City. Of course, when in your very first episode, your writers put a paupers cemetery on Manhattan's Upper East Side, you’ve set a pretty low bar. 

We agree that Person of Interest does the best job of portraying New York among our favorite shows. In fact, they do a darned good job. As a bonus, we get to see Kathy’s apartment building in one of the regularly used establishing shots of Detective Fusco’s precinct house (which was once a real precinct house, but is now a recreation center).

White Collar earned serious points by having characters take daytime strolls down real Manhattan streets and for having affection for the city. 

We agree we will really miss Matt Bomer!

In fact, at least in its first two seasons, its villains couldn’t tear themselves away from the Big Apple. They’d have a 24-hour head start on the heroes, but would choose to stick around so they could be caught. We agree this show ought to still be on the air, and highly recommend it for bingeing.

Recently, however, Kathy and I disagreed.

Yes, disagreed. We were discussing our continued devotion to the two shows whose setups seriously tip the scales of believability. But we disagreed on which was the bigger tipper.

So, let me ask you.

Which is the more preposterous? Person of Interest or Castle?

Is it more unbelievable that there’s a clandestine network out there seeking world power by using every electronic device on the planet? Or that the NYPD would let a mystery writer help them solve murders?

I’m going for #2 there.

I’ve found police detectives to be quite helpful in providing research assistance and sharing their colorful stories. But not one of them — not one — has ever taken me up on my offers to review case files for them.

On the other hand, I once made the mistake of donating money online to a national political organization, and I’m convinced they will chase me for another donation and find me wherever I am for the rest of my life.

Copyright 2015 Sheila York

Me and TR: Time Travelers

Last time, I reviewed Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York by Richard Zacks: a wonderful portrait of the NYPD and my City, 1895 to 1897, during TR’s two-year stint as president of the four-man Police Commission. I was less interested in Roosevelt than in the times, at first. All I knew of TR as the PC is that he left behind his desk at Police Headquarters, behind which all his successors have sat since.

I was astonished to find that the NYPD I joined on May 15, 1967 was one and the same that Roosevelt presided over in 1895: graft-loving, enthralled with the “victimless crimes“ of gambling, prostitution and after-hours saloons while motivated by a benevolent laissez-faire. TR’s crusade against vice that bred graft among his police force had a visible impact on Sin-City during the two years he held the police reins. In fact, his Sunday Closing Crusade, launched on June 23, 1895, had three Sundays later succeeded in shuttering 95% of the City’s roughly 8,000 saloons. (Then, the City was essentially just the Island of Manhattan.) No wonder TR was wildly unpopular with the working classes, especially the Germans, whose only day-off was Sunday. TR hoped to root out the police-run protection racket, starting with the saloons, then moving on to the gambling dens and brothels. But by 1898, with the return to power of Tammany Hall, the City was back on its natural course, TR just an anomalous historical blip on the collective memory. City residents and many in the State Legislature applauded his going. (He fled to Washington D.C., gratefully, to be the newly-elected President William McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy.)

As a rookie NYC Patrolman, I patrolled the streets in two Precincts from mid-1967 to mid-1969. After just three weeks in the Police Academy, we all were hastily “qualified” with the revolver and sent to patrol precincts in anticipation of a “hot summer” (spelled, riots). I landed in the 90th Precinct on Clymer Street and Division Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The old Nine-O was in the heart of the Satmar sect of Hasidism, a throwback to the Eastern European shtetls of the 18th Century. We walked four-block-long, one-block-wide foot posts along Bedford and Lee Avenues, the main commercial and residential corridors in that Jewish neighborhood. We walked solo five nights a week from 6 p.m. till 2 a.m. for the next six months. Our primary mission was to protect the Hasidim from marauders on bicycles from the Marcy Avenue Projects in the south; on Shabbos, the men in their Saturday best would wend their way after sundown to the synagogues for prayer and the bicycle thieves would swoop down to snatch the spodeks (mink fur hats) from their heads and pedal away. When we were not engaged in foiling that particular crime, we were sternly advised by the Nine-O Sergeants: Stay out of sight, stand in a doorway; don’t dare take any police action! (Not unreasonable, considering we’d received but a smidgen of the six-months intensive training normal for recruits at the Police Academy.)

Once, I was assigned to an RMP, when a veteran in his regular patrol sector was out and I became the recorder (passenger) as his partner drove. It was Sunday, we made several stops at bodegas; I waited in the car as directed while he went in. I didn’t see the two or three dollars known as Sabbaths paid by the store owners for being in violation of the Sunday Closing Law and selling beer, nor did my partner offer to share the tribute with me. Not so, next time, one year later, in my new Precinct, the 9th, on East 5th Street, in Manhattan’s East Village. A repeat performance: me the rookie assigned as Recorder with the veteran Sector Car man on a weekday day-tour, patrolling busy East 14th Street. As I monitored the radio, my partner entered a drug store on Broadway just off 14th Street. When he got back in the car, he handed me seven one-dollar bills. I knew what it was but didn’t hold out my hand, until he said, matter-of-factly: “Take it.” No overt threats, no steely gaze, just like that. To refuse would have labelled me suspect, untrustworthy, a loner without allies in a violent place. Later, I learned the singles were the police tax on the hotdog vendors (mostly Russian middle-aged women) working 14th Street, in violation of the City’s Anti-Peddling Law.

Was it wrong? Sure, but there’s ‘wrong’ and then there’s worse. Many cops made extra money where they could; giving the manager of the Fillmore East Rock Hall a ride to the Bank Night Deposit with the receipts, for example. Of course, it got out of hand when a stopped motorist would be offered the option of paying the officer a reduced fine on the spot rather than receive a traffic summons; and when the Police Radio Dispatcher asked for a car to respond to investigate a possible DOA at a residence. Volunteers were prompt and many, sirens screaming; some of my fellow cops would roll the body for cash and valuables, then ransack the apartment.

After two-and-one-half years as a policeman, I wouldn’t have considered myself naïve. Yet, when the New York Times published the revelations of whistle-blowing plainclothesman Frank Serpico in 1970, I reconsidered. A map of the five boroughs of the City was overlaid with a dollar-figure representing the monthly pad paid to each plainclothesman working in each Division to not enforce the laws against gambling, prostitution and after-hours Clubs. In Brooklyn’s 13th and 14th Divisions, the pad averaged from $300 to $500; similarly in Queens’s 15th and 16th, but Manhattan’s 3rd and 5th Divisions were the Gold Coast, with Harlem at the apex: $1,500 each month to those plainclothesmen lucky enough to be assigned to Harlem. Of course, luck had little to do with it; what counted was who your rabbi was within the Department, and your reputation for ‘trustworthiness’.

The Knapp Commission began televised hearings of its Investigation Into Corruption in the New York Police Department on October 18, 1971. That day, I saw a rookie I knew from my Police Academy class, Edward F. Droge, Jr., admit on the witness stand to shaking down gamblers in the 80th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he was assigned. It was implied that the practice was common among the cops of the Eight-O (since defunct). Droge was testifying under a grant of immunity to avoid jail. He had been caught earlier in the year taking a $300 bribe from a drug dealer in the men’s room of the Brooklyn Criminal Courts Building on Schermerhorn Street, downtown. He’d agreed in return for the bribe to testify in Court in such a way that the man would walk; unbeknownst to Droge, it was a Knapp Commission sting, the dealer having been wired by Knapp investigators to record their conversation. On a less personal note, I listened as infamous Plainclothes Officer William Phillips detailed his shakedowns of madams of upscale brothels in Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District. Phillips failed to mention, however, the pimp and the prostitute he was later convicted of murdering over a disputed payoff.

At the same time but off-the-radar, the U.S. Attorney was debriefing NYPD Narcotics Detective Robert Leuci, a member of the Department’s elite Special Investigations Unit, who—his Federal handlers claimed—was acting out of conscience in implicating his police partners and Mafia types in thefts of heroin and money from black and Hispanic drug dealers, whose stash houses were located through the planting of illegal wiretaps. Skeptics, however, believed that Det. Leuci had been caught red-handed by Knapp investigators and had made his deal. Det. Leuci was never charged and spent his remaining years till retirement in the Internal Affairs Bureau since no other NYPD detective would work with him.

In 1970, as well as creating the Knapp Commission, New York Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed a new Police Commissioner, Patrick V. Murphy. Murphy began cleaning house immediately and by 1973, when he left for greener pastures in Washington, D.C. (like Roosevelt), he’d revolutionized the NYPD. The Department was cleaner than the last housecleaning in the aftermath of the Brooklyn gambler Harry Gross scandal of the early 1950s—the big-time plainclothes grafters (called meat-eaters) either in jail or fired, and the signal Murphy response to the so-called Blue Wall of Silence, christened the Field Associates Program. Young cops recruited while in the Police Academy, brainwashed to view old Precinct cops as corrupt and report their suspicions to Internal Affairs. A cautious reticence settled in among the rank-and-file in the founded belief that you couldn’t be sure of whom you were talking to or who was watching. This clean slate of affairs lasted 20 years, more or less—till the advent of the Mollen Commission Hearings in 1993.

Robert Knightly

(Sources: Island of Vice, by Richard Zacks, Random House, 2012; NYPD: A City and Its Police, by James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, Henry Holt, 2000; The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption, George Braziller, 1973; The Patrolman: A Cop’s Story, by Edward F. Droge, Jr., New American Library, 1973.)

To NYC with Spouse and Tank

I always look forward to visiting New York City, but I approached my most recent visit with some trepidation. I’m still recuperating from knee surgery and most people today seem to make sustained eye contact only with their iphones. Is life so overwhelming that people can only handle it when it’s contained within the boundaries of that small screen?

But I digress. I was most interested in enjoying New York without being maimed or injured. Yelling “Look up! Look up!” as someone is about to knock me over doesn’t always work. English is the only language in which I can plead for my life and so many people are wearing headphones that speech becomes futile.

What was I willing to risk all for? Kenneth Branagh in Macbeth.

I bought tickets in December and the prospect of seeing Sir Ken has gotten me through hours of pain, slow progress in walking and the generally blah feeling one can have after surgery. Anytime I felt discouraged I would turn to my husband and say,

“We have tickets to see Kenneth Branagh in June.”

The keys to the successful trip were the flexibility of my husband, Bob, and the use of my walker (hereafter known as “the tank”). I have used the tank for years at mystery conferences so that I could move smoothly through crowds. What works in hotel halls works on the streets of New York. I could move more quickly and safely with the tank and the crowds parted.

Bob and I got to the Park Avenue Armory quite early and I went in through an entrance for disabled people. While my husband talked to the bartenders (there was no intermission so this would be the time to get a drink), I talked to the very friendly Armory staff.

When I professed my considerable affection for Kenneth Branagh, I was told, “You’re in a long line of people that would now include the women who work here.”

Bob returned from the bar with some scotch. We had wanted Laphroaig. Any number of sleuths drink it and we had just learned to pronounce it. (Check out YouTube). Alas, no Laphroaig was on offer so we settled for Glenlivet.

Soon it was time to join our clan. This was a most sensible way to seat a lot of folks in an orderly fashion. Since getting to the theater itself required walking over a very dark heath, I went by wheelchair.

Bob and I had good seats. My one regret was that we did not have seats close enough to be spattered by rain, mud or fake blood. I just wanted the opportunity to turn to Bob and say, “Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirched.” Yes, I know it’s not from Macbeth. It’s from Henry V. But daily life does not offer many opportunities to speak such lines and I wanted my chance.

Two uninterrupted hours went quickly by. I loved it all: the battles, the chanting monks, the witches. Most of all I love to hear Sir Ken do Shakespeare. He makes the speaking of the lines seem natural and effortless. (It’s not. I’ve tried it.)

I told myself that if I got any opportunity to make eye contact with Branagh I would give him a melting smile or do a little kissy motion. (You’re embarrassed for me, aren’t you? You think I lack decorum).

That moment did come about halfway through the play. But by that time I was watching Macbeth, not Kenneth Branagh. The king had killed people and was about to kill others. It was not a cosy moment. I let the opportunity pass.

Stephanie Patterson

Little Dogs

I left our little town of Lambertville, aka Dogburg, last Tuesday to go and party with Annamaria Alfieri at the Mysterious Bookshop in the big city, aka Gotham, in celebration of the release of Strange Gods, her latest book and the first in a new series. This time I took the bus, since driving home from Hamilton in the middle of the night seemed more than I was willing to deal with. The bus goes to the Port Authority Terminal straight from Lambertville. No worries.

I've started calling it Dogburg because so many dogs live in town these days. We have more dogs than children. I find that sort of sad. But, be that as it may, the close proximity of all these canines enables me to observe their social interactions. Have you ever noticed the way a small dog on a leash or behind a window will bark hysterically at passing big dogs? "Arf! Arf! I'll kill you! I'll kill you! If only my human would let me off this leash I would tear your throat out!"

I was minded to think of this as I stood on a street corner in New York City waiting for a light to change. A young man was crossing in the crosswalk, strolling along, intent on the music playing through his earbuds. The weather being warm, he wore a wife-beater shirt that showed off his extraordinarily well-developed body—somewhere between that of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and Hulk Hogan on extra steroids—and his tasteful, monochromatic tattoos. He may have been humming to himself. I couldn't say. You know how noisy it is in the city. You can hardly hear anything.

Suddenly a small red car came tearing around the corner intending to drive where the muscular man was walking. This was not possible, due to some basic law of physics. The driver, a weasely little fellow, became enraged at the sight of the big muscular man and began to curse at him loudly, hanging out the window and shaking his fist. It was a startling exhibition, the sort of thing I've not seen in Lambertville, at least not from a human.

The muscular man ignored him and strolled on. If he'd wanted to he could have picked up the little red car, driver and all, and flung it someplace out of earshot. But the big dogs don't have to do things like that.

You'll be happy to know that I got to the launch party safely, enjoyed myself, and went home again with a signed copy of Strange Gods. Now I'm going to settle down and read it. Looks like a winner.

The Capital of Earth

At the risk of putting others off and making people think New Yorkers arrogant, I insist that my beautiful city is the capital of the planet.

I first heard it called that on a plane on my way to Singapore.  During a stopover in San Francisco, I elected to stay on the plane and nap, given that I don’t sleep well in flight.  A cleaner came on just before the rest of the passengers were about to re-board.  In an accent that could have been German or Dutch, he asked me where I was from.  When I answered New York City, he immediately said, “Ah, the capital of the world.”  He referred to the United Nations Headquarters as part of the rationale for his opinion.  I agree with him, but only partly because of the UN.

Having the UN here is a blessing, generally speaking, but not every denizen of the town would agree this week—General Assembly Week, especially those who reside on the Upper Eastside.  When there are more than one hundred heads of state tooling around one’s neighborhood, gridlock is inevitable.

The buildings that house the international body occupy a seventeen acre site in the Turtle Bay section of town.    The enclave has extraterritoriality status.  That is, it is not really part of the United States—kind of like Vatican City being its own country though it is surrounded by Rome.

Having the UN in our midst costs New York about $5-7 million each year in extra security.  They are racking up a lot of that total this week.  But all in all, the city turns a profit on the presence of the UN.

So why did they put it here in the first place?  There were lots of contenders for the honor.  Most European countries wanted it in Europe.  But in 1945, almost that entire continent was wrecked by war and struggling to rebuild.  There were fleeting thoughts that it should be in South America.  One fanciful idea was to place it on ships in the oceans.  Since the United States was ponying up most of the money to support the institution (and still is), America wanted it in America.  And the Russians also said it should be in the US.

In the end, there were two major contenders—Geneva and New York.  New York won, partly because of the US financial support.  But also because NYC was already—in 1945—an international city.  For instance, thanks to all the immigrant communities, New York had presses that could print newspapers in all the different alphabets of the world.  Before computers and copying machines, this was an important consideration.  With only old-fashioned typesetting as an option, how could the United Nations communicate to all its members in their own languages without such printing capacity?   Geneva would have had to create all those foreign language presses.  No mean task.  But New York had citizens already speaking and reading newspapers  in all the major tongues—in Cyrillic, Greek, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, you -name-it.  We were international headquarters ready.

These days, there are UN installations in Geneva, Vienna, and Nairobi.  But the capital of the United Nations, of the planet itself, is right here.  Where else can you find in one borough—Queens—150 languages  spoken.  Every ethnic group, race, creed, color, religion, national origin is represented in our citizenry.   As regular readers of this blog are already aware, I am fond of saying that the panoply of humanity is here in force.  We all ride the subway together and no one cares about the color or creed of the guy sitting to them or the girl holding on to the same pole.  We are all residents of the capital of earth.

© 2013 Annamaria Alfieri

The Source Material Assembly Line

My friend Tim McLoughlin is the editor of Brooklyn Noir and its companion volumes. His novel, Heart of the Old Country, won Italy’s Premio Penne award, and was the basis for the motion picture The Narrows, starring Vincent D’Onofrio.

Robert Knightly

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The cliché of a writer being asked where they get their ideas, and the numerous clever responses conjured out of desperation, is legendary. My situation is a lot more pedestrian and straightforward. Although no one is ever going to accuse me of being prolific, the fiction I do turn out generally centers on crime, or on the kind of people likely to commit crimes on a pretty low rent scale.

I’ve worked in the criminal justice system for thirty years now. If I had been convicted of murdering someone that long ago in New York City I’d have since been released, so I’ve decided to go over the wall this summer and retire. But my career has certainly informed my choice of subject matter. And as I’m more inclined, in my reading and writing, toward the nickel-and-dime world than high-finance-money-laundering-type thrillers, it has suited me well.

I remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing the first time I heard a 710.30(1)a statement, but then, who doesn’t? I was a brand new, wet behind the ears Court Officer in the arraignment part of Brooklyn Criminal Court in the bad old early eighties. I was the bridgeman, the officer who stands in front of the judge’s bench, calls the case into the record, hands the judge the pertinent paperwork, and gets out of the way. It’s just like Law and Order, except louder and with physically unattractive defendants. It was my first case, and I announced it with confidence, then prepared the next docket while the key players discussed the fate of the accused. After preliminary conversation and a plea of not guilty, the judge turned to the rail thin blonde waif of an Assistant District Attorney.

“Motions?” he asked.

“Seven-ten-thirty-one-a,” she responded.

“Go ahead.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said, in an absolutely flat, professional tone.

“Anything else?” he inquired.

“No your honor.”

“Bail is set at one thousand dollars, cash or bond,” he said. “Next case.”

He tossed the court papers into the wire basket of finished work and looked at me expectantly. I glanced between him and the ADA, who was already reviewing a new folder, unsure what to do.

“Officer,” he prompted.

I picked up the next docket, called it in, less confidently this time, and stepped back.

It took me perhaps a half dozen cases before I realized that 710.30(1)a statements were direct quotes from defendants, usually made spontaneously at the time of their arrest. It was therefore not unusual that mixed in with the ubiquitous that’s not my gun and what weed? would be the occasional go fuck yourself or take these cuffs off and I’ll kick your ass. They are basically anything that gets blurted out during the arrest process. Arraignment in New York City Criminal Court is supposed to be conducted within twenty-four hours of arrest. In an effort to keep to that schedule, the processing of cases goes on from nine o’clock in the morning until midnight every day of the year at 120 Schermerhorn Street, just down the block from all of the shiny new condos and hotels now being raised in downtown Brooklyn.

Over the course of the three years that I worked in uniform, I listened to hundreds of 710.30(1)a statements, and came to view them as windows on the unrestrained id.

They can be chilling, as in the case of a man caught in Sunset Park disposing of the bloody remains of his pet pit bull: He farted so I stabbed him.

They can be heartbreaking when a man in East New York is arrested for robbery: I’m sorry. I was hungry. I needed the money. I got the blade on me too.

They can be embarrassing, as in a domestic violence case out of East Flatbush when a defense attorney has just told the judge that the court needs to take into account the social mores of other cultures: She doesn’t have my lunch ready for me when I go to work. I want her to do all the cleaning in the house. Today, I told her to make me breakfast and when I went downstairs she hadn’t made me breakfast. That’s how it started.

And of course, they can be hilarious. After all, if you can’t occasionally find humor in someone else’s misdeeds you have no business being a crime writer. My personal favorite was the young man arrested exiting the basement of an apartment building in Crown Heights where every washing machine and dryer in the laundry room had been vandalized. He was carrying a screwdriver, a hammer, and a pillowcase containing 250 quarters: Those are mine, I’m on my way to a PacMan tournament. The tools are to fix the machines.

This parade of tragedy and comedy occurs fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. And though the poor and anonymous comprise the majority of cases, every demographic makes an appearance. I have witnessed the arraignments of lawyers and doctors, police officers and priests, a former major league baseball player, and a judge. They are not the worst of humanity, but what they share is the airing of their worst behavior. The criminal justice system, by mandating long ago that these proceedings be open to the public, invented reality television without the TV, live and unscripted.

So if you’re looking for ideas, or trying to fine-tune that street lingo to be current to the last forty-eight hours, come down to any of the criminal courthouses. Not Supreme Court, but regular Criminal Court, where the nobodies stay, and even the superstars make that initial appearance. Enter through the smoke-stained revolving doors, their broken glass long ago replaced with Plexiglas. Pass through the magnetometers and be searched for weapons, and then step into an arraignment part and have a seat in one of the rows of church pew benches scored with decades of carved initials and expletives.

There’s a new show every three minutes.

Tim McLoughlin

My Life in Six T-Shirts

There used to be shop on Third Street in Greenwich Village where you could buy a cotton t-shirt and have the store clerks write anything you wanted on it.  I bought several during those years when making a statement that way was considered cool, even in the Village, the World Headquarters of Cool.  With the sale of our country house, a few of those shirts that I hadn't seen in years emerged from my unjustly extensive collection of memorabilia.  Somehow, the six shirts shown here wound up in one pile on my closet shelf.  They tell my story, not the whole tale of my life, but some of the significant bits.  The first two were on sale, as is, from the store.  The others show personal messages.  Here is what they say about me:

I went to Catholic school for 17 years, all of my formal schooling.  That experience was largely a blessing for a poor, working class girl like me.  The quality of my education was for the most part excellent, if rule bound.  On that score, a passage in The Once and Future King really spoke to me.  In that book, to teach the young Arthur about life and leadership, Merlin turns him into various animals.  When the future king is transformed into an ant and approaching the ant colony for the first time, over the entrance he reads, "Everything that is not compulsory is forbidden."  I could relate to that!  On the other hand, I went to a women's college on scholarship.  There I met brilliant nuns dedicated to educating the minds of women. I revere them.  They gave me my college degree as a gift.  And showed me that women could be gifted.  And take charge.

I emerged from college right into the transformative experience of the feminism of the 1960's. I have written elsewhere on this blog of my participation in what I call The Pink Collar Wars.  The nuns of my college primed my engine so that I might zoom right into the movement and have it broaden my horizons and multiply my possibilities.

When New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1970's, the real estate market wobbled for a few months, making a small house on 12th Street, badly in need of renovation, affordable for me and David.  A beloved friend whom we greatly respected for his real estate acumen and financial prowess, begged us not to buy.  "Buy near us in New Jersey," he said, pointing out New York's state and city income taxes, the city's sink-hole-of-depravity reputation, and the leafy beauty of the swanky suburban town where he lived, where we could have bought a mansion for the same price.  We agonized.  We even did a financial analysis that told us that, in the long run, it might cost us $10-20K extra per year to live in New York.  But we were in love with our city, warts and all.  We decided to buy that house on Twelfth Street.  During its chaotic renovation, while staying in New Jersey with my father, we drove in and rummaged around the dusty construction site to find clothes suitable for a friend's wedding.  When, in duds relatively filth free, we boarded a taxi to go to the church, David said, "We are more like a track team than a married couple."  The next week, when our daughter was still commuting through the Lincoln Tunnel to the 4th grade, I moseyed over the Third Street to get us team shirts.  Staying in New York was the best decision we ever made, in many ways, especially financially.

This shirt has more to do with my daughter's education than mine.  Brilliant as she is, she qualified for the ultra-prestigious Hunter College High School, a public institution where the 200 most brilliant New York kids, by a rigorous testing process, attended.  Because of the heady milieu where she had been studying, by the time she was ready to apply to college, she considered herself average or a little below.  She fretted that she would never get into a decent institution of higher education.  No amount of reassurance on my part calmed her fears.  "You're just saying that because you are my mother," she said.  I went to Third Street to get shirts that spoke about where her parents attended college.  I chose sayings to communicate that one did not have to go to Harvard to have a good life.  Her parents both started out just this side of destitute, and we both had jobs we loved that we're quite financially rewarding.  We were, after all, living in our own Greenwich Village townhouse.  Mine is the shirt you see here.  David's said, "Unimpressive State University."   Even having parents wearing such billboards did not calm her down much.  She got into the top four small liberal arts colleges in the country.  She went to Swarthmore!

I wore this shirt to Luciano Pavarotti's first free concert in Central Park.  I learned to love the opera, literally, at my grandfather’s knee. Music of all sorts of, including opera, brings me enhancement of my joys, solace in sorrow, companionship when I am lonely, help concentrating on any task at hand, and especially inspiration when I am writing.  I consider making music the highest calling for humans on this planet.  I can’t play a lick myself, but I am so very lucky to have been born into a family of people who can experience ecstasy when listening to music

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Most New Yorkers used to call that Pharaoh of old two-TANK-ah-men.  But when the first big exhibition of artifacts from King Tut’s famous tomb came to The Metropolitan Museum, Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s president, made sure we all learned how to pronounce the ancient name properly, with the accent on Tut (long o sound).  I got this shirt to wear to the show.  But I also keep it as another talisman of how lucky a person I am.  The photos of ancient Egyptian artifacts in my fourth grade text book were the first taste I got of the breath of history and the existence of exotic locales where one can see the art of the centuries. I have lived to see Karnak and Abu Simbel and to celebrate my 60th birthday at the Great Pyramids of Giza under a full moon. Not bad for a little girl from Our Lady of Lourdes School in Paterson, NJ.

I am keeping the shirts.  I don't ever want to forget any of this.

Annamaria Alfieri

Patriotism

I was ten years old when I first fell in love. The memory of the moment is as vivid as this morning.

I was walking down Broadway. My father and mother had taken me and my brother Andy to see the Easter show matinee at Radio City Music Hall, and then on our way back to Port Authority to catch the bus back to Paterson, New Jersey, we stopped at the old Lindy’s for a cheesecake before leaving town.

We had a waiter named Scotty who spoke with a thick burr. When he overheard our conversation about the difference between New York cheesecake and Italian cheesecake, he told us his last name: Di Felice! He was born in Edinburgh of Italian immigrant parents, and migrated to New York just after World War II. I still have the little green cream pitcher he gave me as a souvenir.

I remember what I was wearing — a blue and white hound’s tooth check coat over a dress my mother had made, black patent leather marjanes with white socks that turned down at the tops and were trimmed with lace, and a little straw hat decorated with navy blue velvet ribbon and silk flowers. After we left the restaurant and continued down Broadway toward 42nd Street and the bus terminal, evening had fallen on the Great White Way. Holding my mother’s hand (we were both wearing white gloves), I looked up at her and said, “Mommy, when I grow up, I am going to live here.”

“Yes, dear,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

But I had no doubts whatsoever. I was already in love. With New York.

I still am.

I understand patriotism as a concept. The United States is a great country. Its Constitution is a sacred text. But my heart does not swell when I hear “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It does when I hear “New York, New York.”

Here is the beginning of Woody Allen’s movie “Manhattan.” It describes exactly what it means to be head over heels for this place.

Annamaria Alfieri

Diary of a ‘Corrupt’ Cop: or, It Was the Custom

If you are past sixty and were a Patrolman in the New York City Police Department in the 1960s and 1970s as I was (not to mention the 80s), then the name KNAPP divides your memories, like Moses parting the Red Sea, into the nostalgia-drenched PRE- KNAPP Days and the paranoid POST-KNAPP World.

Sure, I took money; everybody did. It was the custom. But not with both hands like Patrolman William Phillips, nor with the princely touch of Detective Robert Leuci, nor stupidly like my buddy, Patrolman Edward F. Droge, Jr. It was more a Gentlemen’s Agreement: that the “gratuity” (a Knapp word) be offered, and bad manners to refuse. At least, that was the way things were when fellow-Brooklynite Eddie Droge and I joined the Finest on May 15, 1967, and that’s the way things stayed until KNAPP fell upon us like a pack of wolves on a herd of nodding sheep.

I refer to the Knapp Commission Investigation Into Allegations of Police Corruption in the New York City Police Department, anointed by Mayor John V. Lindsay on May 21, 1970, in the wake of a story in the New York Times on April 25, 1970 by muck-raking journalist David Burnham. It revealed the graft being paid by gamblers and whorehouse madams to every swinging plainclothesman in every Division in every Borough of the City. Well, not quite every plainclothesman. If Diogenes had still been abroad with his lantern, his quest for an honest man could have ended with Plainclothes Patrolman Frank Serpico. Serpico was reporter Burnham’s Deep Throat, who took a bullet in the face for his principles, but survived to become an international figure, the subject of a biography by Peter Maas and a movie starring Al Pacino.

The ‘pads’ (a cop word) guaranteed each plainclothesman $500 in an envelope each month if he worked in the Fifteenth Division in Queens, $800 if assigned to the Thirteenth Division in Brooklyn, $800 in the First and Third Divisions in Manhattan, and $1,500 in Harlem (the Dream Posting). It was all news to me; with three years on The Job I was still regarded as a rookie. Plainclothesmen worked out-of-uniform, were not dispatched on calls over the police radio. Worked in teams, focusing on their own pre-determined targets by surveilling them on stakeouts and illegally wiretapping their phones. They answered only to the Plainclothes Sergeant. Even a rookie knew that much. But if you were “in clothes,” you didn’t talk shop with outsiders.

The KNAPP Commission, headed by the Wall Street lawyer Whittman Knapp, invented the word corrupt and tagged the NYPD with it during its first public hearings in October, 1971. I know this because when Eddie Droge and I were appointed Probationary Patrolmen in May, 1967, nobody in the New York Police Department was corrupt. From 1967 till the coming of KNAPP in 1970, I don’t recall ever hearing corrupt or corruption applied to New York City policemen. Not because we didn’t take money or didn’t do what KNAPP exposed that we were doing, but simply because those terms weren’t in general currency then. It took Commissions like KNAPP and MOLLEN (the latter also named after its head, former Judge Milton Mollen, appointed by New York City Mayor David Dinkens in 1992 “to investigate Police Corruption, etc”) – to give corrupt, corruption and corrupt policemen the currency that has long outlived memory of the bodies that coined them.

I know this because New York City cops in 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 (and probably since time immemorial) — with as few exceptions as there are genuine saints in heaven, or wherever they reside — all of us took gratuities (another KNAPP word) of one sort or another. There were cops like me who, at end of tour, might end up with a little extra in his pocket or been fed “on the arm” (no charge) by a restauranteur. And then there were the Phillips, Leucis and Droges who shook down every gambler or drug dealer who crossed their paths. I never knew personally any Phillips or Leuci – whose raison d’etre was to score (a cop word) every gambler, prostitute, pimp, whoever had an illegal dollar in his or her pocket that they could get a hand on. Most cops were like me and, I suppose, Eddie Droge, at least at the beginning.

It’s the late morning or early afternoon of October 21, 1971, and I wake up in my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn alone, hung-over after a four-to-twelve tour the night before, which always extends to 4 a.m., the last four hours of which we spend in Cal’s Bar on East 5th Street adjacent to the 9th Precinct where I’m permanently assigned. I wake up and punch on the TV for the news and weather and there is my Police Academy classmate, my buddy Eddie Droge, in the witness stand testifying before the KNAPP Commission. Eddie has the youthful appearance of a 24-year-old. I can still see the kid-cop who, during breaks in the Police Academy gym, would bend our ears about the Beetles and joys of smoking pot. The only addition to the baby face is a pencil-thin moustache above his lip.
Aside from that, it’s the old Eddie Droge except that what he’s saying is not how I remembered the old Eddie.

He was describing to the KNAPP Commission, and the world, how he and his partner — and, it was implied, all the other cops of Brooklyn’s 80th Precinct, in Bedford-Stuyvesant — would routinely score any gambler they came across while on patrol. In fact, they hunted gamblers like deer in season. Gamblers apparently were always in season in the old Eight-O. And when Eddie and his partner were fortunate enough to snare their prey, they’d take the gambler indoors or strike the bargain in the back of the radio car. The gambler ransomed himself by agreeing to a ‘Monthly Pad’ for Eddie and his partner and the two other radio car crews in that sector — I forget the amounts mentioned, but it was per man per month, depending upon the size of the gambler’s action. I remember thinking if there were a lot of gamblers in the old Eight-O, it would add up.

Eddie was testifying under a promise of immunity because he had arrested a ‘mope’ (cop term) for selling narcotics in the 80 Precinct sometime earlier that year, but had been persuaded to accept $300 in the men’s room at Brooklyn Criminal Court at 120 Schermerhorn Street in lieu of giving truthful testimony at a Suppression Hearing on the arrest he had made. He sold the case for a $300 bribe. What Eddie didn’t know in the men’s room, however, was that he had been shopped by his arrestee, who had been fitted out with an electronic recording device by KNAPP investigators.

Eddie’s deal with the KNAPP Commission was his testimony, painting a picture of the routine, bottom-feeder corruption practiced by the ordinary cops of the Eight-O. And the 80th was meant to stand in for all seventy-five police precincts in the city at the time.

Eddie did what he had to do to avoid jail. He had been on a one-year leave-of-absence from the Department attending college in Los Angeles. I’m sure he intended to never return, to put the Job and the old life behind him. Yet, the Knapp investigators had coerced his return to testify, and the anecdotes he recounted rang true. Afterward, he was allowed to resign and return to California. At the time and still, from the vantage point of forty-plus years, I don’t fault Eddie for what he did. Cops don’t jail well. Once, I googled Edward F. Droge, Jr. He’d published two books in the 1970s about his police days: an autobiography, “A Patrolman’s Story,” and a novel; I’d read both. I didn’t know that he’d gotten a PhD in Education from Harvard, taught there, and over the past twenty-five years been headmaster at various private academies. Eddie had turned it around.

Maybe I’ll give him a shout, talk about the good times.

Robert Knightly

Chivalry is Not Dead—at least in New York City

Once known as the rudest city in the world, New York City has a new face. As a feeble, elderly resident, I can testify to this.

I cannot get on a subway without someone offering me a seat. Young, old, male, female, Hispanic, African American, Asian, Caucasian; everyone has offered me seats.

If I trip, ten people from ten different countries reach out to help me up and ask, “Are you all right?” Once, my life was saved by a woman who pulled me out of the path of a cyclist racing to deliver a pizza. And, I can’t count the times, when rushing for a train at Penn Station, someone has offered to carry my bag.

Recently, my husband and I spied a bookcase, in good condition, abandoned on the curb near our apartment house. Inveterate trash pickers that we are, we hauled it to the top of the three steps down to our entrance. We were contemplating the best way to get it down when two Hispanic women came running up, wrestled the bulky object down the steps, through the door, into the elevator, out of the elevator, into our apartment, and insisted on maneuvering it into place. When we tried to pay them for their services they laughed and left with a cheery farewell.

So, if you ever hear anyone calling New York a rude city, send them to me and I’ll set them straight, even if I have to hit them over the head to do it!

Robin Hathaway

URP! URP! URP!

That is the new sound that has replaced the old sirens on ambulances and other emergency vehicles in NYC. I found this out yesterday on my way to the Post Office. I was crossing the street in my usual early morning stupor, thinking my usual stale, unimaginative thoughts, such as, “Will I make it across before the little orange hand stops blinking?“

URP! URP! URP! came out of nowhere, causing me to stop dead in the middle of 34th Street, look up and down, trying to decide which way to run. By the time I had decided, the ambulance had swerved, still URPING, around me, and disappeared. Shakily, I made me way to the curb, and my favorite refuge, the old P.O.

“When did they introduce the new ambulance sirens?” I asked my favorite clerk.

”About a week ago. Did you run into one? You look a little pale.”

“Yeah, it almost ran over me.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“No, that’s okay. I’ll have a roll of stamps, please.” I fumbled in my pocketbook for the money. “Tell, me, Mike, do you think I’m getting too old to live in New York City?”

He looked me over carefully. “Naah. There ‘re a lot a people older than you here.”

Reassured, I made my way through the crowd and out into the street. Crossing 34th Street at top scuttle, looking both ways at once (an art only New Yorkers have achieved), I made it home to my quiet, safe apartment --- alive.

---Robin Hathaway