What's the Matter with the Cops?

I’m in my living room watching the video of this Chicago cop shooting this black kid sixteen times, all but two shots fired at him while he’s down-and-out on the pavement. There are six other cops right there next to the shooter, their guns out, too, probably, but they don’t fire. Laquan McDonald, age 17, was by himself running in the middle of a highly-trafficked street with a pen knife in his hand. This occurred a year ago but it’s news today because the public just got to see a video of the shooting, captured by the camera installed on a police car. I’m betting some cop is in Dutch for forgetting to turn off that camera because that video is the evidentiary lynchpin making a reluctant Chicago Criminal Justice System (pun intended) charge the killer-cop with intentional Murder.

And that’s what he is: a killer-cop. I know this from 20 years as a Patrolman and Patrol Supervisor in the police precincts of New York City and an abiding interest since in police doings. To the initiated, the telltale signs are always there; for example, only that cop fired at the young man, then emptied his gun at him though already out-of-action on the ground—all this mayhem within seconds of getting out of his patrol car. Typically, the killer-cop is not an unknown quantity to the other officers with whom he works day-to-day nor to his sergeants who must file periodic evaluations of his performance. Without a doubt, the Chicago cop has history.

He is not alone nor a rarity. His brothers (apparently, membership exclusively male) are practicing everywhere in the country, primarily in big cities: New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia New Orleans, and others yet to be reported on the TV news channels. The virtually universal source of revelation of their deeds is the cell phone cameras used by civilian witnesses to record the interactions between the cop and his victim. Rarely is the action recorded by a patrol car dashcam, as happened in the Chicago shooting, because they’re routinely rendered inoperable if the car’s occupants have that discretion.

Why, I wondered, do all these civilians, typically uninvolved in the action, feel compelled to intervene remotely in a violent, unfolding event? Are they all just frustrated newspaper reporters like “Brenda Starr, Star Reporter” from the Sunday comic strips of my boyhood? Nah! I think they know, in the depths of their being, that otherwise the truth of what really happened will not be told. The police will lie, both the killer-cop and his brother officers who are under the duress of their work ethic to support him by word and deed. Back in the Bad Old ‘80s in the NYPD there were Narcotics cops who worked in teams that were designated “TNT”, the acronym for Tactical Narcotics Teams. To us lawyers who tried cases in the criminal courts, they were more familiarly known as the Tell-No-Truth cops. Their successor generation coined the term “testilying” to describe police testimony in Court under oath.

It’s P.C. to denounce and bemoan the Blue Wall of Silence as if the reluctance of policemen to inform on their fellows (as the police view it) is indefensible, unreasonable. Truth is, it’s a human reaction born of a comradery that must and will always exist among workers in a dangerous profession who must rely upon one another for mutual support—what motivates soldiers on a battlefield.

The problem for the rest of us, including government types who insist upon (and may or may not really want to know) the unvarnished truth, is that it’s hard to get at. Not surprisingly, the six Chicago policemen who witnessed the execution of Laquan McDonald by their brother officer, when interviewed by their superiors, echoed in their written statements some or all of the shooter’s claimed justifications, clearly contradicted by the video. One doubts that the Chicago Police Department or the Mayor were any more committed to the truth than the rank-and-file cop witnesses.

I don’t condemn the police, even those reluctant Chicgao cop witnesses. I regard them as victims, too, of the shooter. Killer-cops are employed in unknown numbers in Police Departments throughout the U.S., arguably even in the FBI that after internal investigations of 170 shootings of “subjects“ has yet to find a “bad shooting”. Killer-cops invariably bring down, destroy the lives of their comrades who covered up for them. Indictments for perjury or worse, loss of employment and pension, jail, are often the fate of lying cops.

A smattering of the NYPD experience with a few of the notorious killer-cops is instructive.

In 1994, Police Officer Francis Livoti killed Anthony Baez, while using his nightstick to choke Baez into submission in the course of arresting him for throwing a football on a Bronx street that struck the windshield of Livoti’s patrol car. Robert Johnson, the long-tenured Bronx District Attorney, unhesitatingly indicted the cop for Depraved Indifference Murder. Livoti elected to be tried by a single Judge rather than a jury (the routine choice of police facing felony charges, invariably in the Bronx where juries are regarded as anti-police). Livoti was ultimately acquitted by the Judge but fired by the Police Department after an administrative trial that found him guilty for the same conduct that was the subject of the criminal trial.

The Police Department procedures have been found by the Courts to be “civil in nature”: consequently, not Double Jeopardy under the Constitution. The U.S. Attorney had entered the picture, indicting Livoti for Violating Anthony Baez’ Civil Rights by taking his life. After trial, Livoti was found guilty and sentenced to 7-1/2 years in Federal prison. No one was taking cell phone videos in those days, but what stands out in my recollections of the Livoti case is one of the trial witnesses: a policewoman who was at the scene whose testimony at the trial put the lie to the defendant’s version of events. She suffered the shameful, usual consequences for telling the truth out loud about wrongdoing by a fellow officer: ostracized by her fellow cops on the Job, under the blind eye of her bosses. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil: a motto too many police departments live by.

Eerily, Eric Garner’s death last year on Staten Island in New York City echoed the Livoti case in salient details. Police were trying to arrest Garner for selling “loosie” cigarettes in a public park, a trivial, ticketable offense. Five cops piled on Garner to take him off his feet for handcuffing. The last one to pile on, Officer Daniel Pantaleo, applied the Department-banned chokehold to the neck of the much larger man, who choked to death. Unlike Livoti, it was all recorded on a bystander’s cell phone. Unlike Livoti, there was no trial. Although the Staten Island District Attorney presented the case to a grand jury, the jurors voted “No True Bill” (meaning no cop was found to have committed a crime). New York City cops and firemen are overwhelmingly represented in the residential population of Staten Island, known as the most politically conservative borough in the City. Despite the fact that Officer Pantaleo had a considerable history of civilian complaints for use of excessive force in making arrests, none had been proven to the satisfaction of the NYPD.

A readily discernable fact about the killer-cops is that they’re emotionally bent—shrapnel bombs waiting to explode. The fellow policemen they work alongside know it and pray they’re not nearby when it happens. Knowing nothing about that Chicago cop, I predict that he was a disciplinary problem known to his fellow officers and, tragically, to the police supervisors who over 14 years refused to get rid of him when they could. It is always the background in these cases. Virtually, the only reliable indicator of this sort of over-the-top violent behavior is on-the-Job conduct. To a man, the killer-cops have demonstrated it.

In Cleveland, Ohio in November, 2014, Police Officer Timothy Loehmann shot to death a 12-year-old boy within two seconds of getting out of his patrol car. The boy was in a public park waving around a BB-gun that looked like a .45 handgun. Significantly, Loehmann, a recent hire by the Cleveland PD, had a brief career with a smaller department just prior, which was about to fire him for “breaking down emotionally while handling his firearm on the training range” when he resigned. He then applied to four other local police agencies who rejected him before being hired by the Cleveland PD. No action yet by the local prosecutors.

In New York City on August 9, 1997, Officer Justin Volpe sodomized Abner Louima, a Hatian immigrant, in the bathroom of a Brooklyn Precinct with a broken broomstick. Louima was arrested during a free-for-all outside a Flatbush nightclub in that Haitian neighborhood. Volpe thought, mistakenly, that Louima was the man who punched him in the street. The U.S. Attorney immediately took jurisdiction, and indicted Volpe for the assault, along with three other cops who’d been with Volpe in the street and in the station house. Louima could only positively identify Volpe, and no cop corroborated the victim’s testimony or gave evidence against Volpe despite tremendous pressure from the federal prosecutors.

In the end, Volpe’s three co-defendants were acquitted in a jury trial while Volpe, during the trial, elected to plead guilty to Violating (Louima’s) Civil Rights, to avoid a life sentence. He was sentenced to 30 years in Federal prison; one co-defendant, Charles Schwarz, was convicted of perjury and served five years. Two other officers—not assigned to the 70th Precinct but present there that night while processing an arrest—were indicted by the Feds for perjury: essentially, they said they didn’t see what happened in the bathroom nor overheard any incriminating statements, but the prosecutors were intent on sending a message.

One cop pled guilty and went to prison; the other went to trial and, convicted, also went to prison. Both convictions were later reversed, the indictments dismissed, the cops freed, but not reinstated to employment by the Police Department. Officer Volpe was a known steroid abuser, whose violent outbursts should have given ample notice to his fellow cops and supervisors of what lay in store for them all. On a prior occasion when being dressed down by his Squad Sergeant in private, he exploded, flinging chairs about the room. No corrective action or punishment followed.

A moral here? A caution? The wages of sin for a loyal silence or, worse, lying under oath to protect a killer-cop, is more and more likely to be loss of career and/or prison, i.e. life-destroying. When will the good cops get the message?

© 2015 Robert Knightly

Blackout Riots 1977: Revisiting ‘Gone With the Wind’

Broadway is just what its name implies: a wide, two-way boulevard, running from the piers on the East River in Williamsburg in a southeasterly direction for 4.32 miles, ending at its boundary with East New York. It serves to neatly divide Bushwick to the northeast of it from Bedford-Stuyvesant to the southwest. The BMT subway line (the J, M and Z trains) runs overhead its entire length till it makes a sharp right turn into East New York and on into the Borough of Queens. The night of July 13, 1977 and into the early morning hours of July 14, there was a moon but the light it shed on Broadway came through the overhead tracks in weak patches. As we screeched left off Dekalb onto Broadway, we became engulfed in a jungle of black bodies racing helter-skelter, none empty-handed. A wall of metallic noise hit us from storefront gates being torn off by car bumpers with chains, a waterfall of breaking glass; above it all, the exultant screaming of the mob. We abandoned our RMP, locked doors, headlights full-on facing up Broadway that undulated with bodies far as we could see: hundreds, thousands, we couldn’t tell. Then we waded into the crowd, swinging our nightsticks at the moving targets.

Photo: Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times

Police Headquarters, having in the first hours divined the extent of the problem that was enveloping the five boroughs as well as the piddling number of policemen then ready to deal with it, had decreed there be no arrests. An arrest ordinarily required the arresting officer to remove his prisoner to the Precinct to complete the booking paperwork and lodge his prisoner, routinely taking 14 hours. No cop could be spared this night.

During the few hours of darkness left till dawn, our numbers grew as cops in plainclothes spilled from a commandeered City bus, wielding baseball bats. Up and down Broadway, looters beyond counting, smashed into and emptied stores—jewelry, furniture, drugstores, supermarkets the prime targets. They ran loaded down like pack animals—men, women, children. We’d chase and knock the men down; enter the broken stores guns drawn to drive them out. One stunned owner of a used furniture store on Broadway, slumped on a stoop adjacent to his emptied store, asked in anguish: “Where were you? They came across Broadway like a herd of buffalo!” Couldn’t think of an answer, went back to banging heads with renewed fury.

We heard over our radios that Al & Bob’s Sporting Goods store, down Broadway in Lower Williamsburg, was under siege. They must not get their hands on rifles and ammunition; RMPs rushed to that scene. Meanwhile, two cars with a heavy chain stretched between them accelerated up Broadway into the throng; in vain, as the looters ducked under the chain like Limbo dancers or fled to the sidewalks. A pickup truck with four cops on the flatbed appeared, lights on high beams, a cop with a Louisville Slugger leaning out from the running boards on each side cleared obstructions from their path ferociously. The men in the back of the truck tossed boxes of .38-caliber cartridges to us, in anticipation. The radio reported gunfire coming from the rooftops, yet I couldn’t swear to it, the sound of gunfire being indistinguishable in the tsunami of shattering glass, ripping metal, frantic burglar alarms, and the demented bellowing of people as they began to set fire to the emptied stores.

Finally, word came down: Arrest the bastards! Soon the wood structures on both sides of Broadway for blocks lit up the street in an eerie flickering light, then roared skyward in a conflagration, licking at the tracks of the train station overhead. The fires burned out of control till fire trucks took possession of the streets while the mob surged around them. At one dicey moment, cops manned the water canons on a truck, turning them on a threatening crowd, flushing them away. As the night wore on, faces covered in soot from the fires, our bodies leaking sweat from the heat, I remember idly thinking how familiar this scene as I looked heavenward at the towering flames, immediately making the connection: The Burning of Atlanta in the movie “Gone With the Wind.” The only souls on the street being cops, firemen, and looters.

As the new day dawned, there were many more of us engaged in the battle for Broadway. We numbered 142 men at its height, from the two adjacent Precincts, the 83rd and the 81st, according to the official Post-Mortems (weeks later). Looting fever had begun to spend itself and police tactics had devolved to a Game of Hide-and-Seek. We’d knock down and cuff the runners within reach but more often follow the looters into the broken-open stores. In a drug store, we found forty hiding in the basement; to arrest and transport all was beyond impracticable; we gave women and children a free pass. The men we stuffed into the back seats and trunks of the RMPs for a bumpy ride to the Precincts, where they were disgorged like clowns emerging from the Clown Car at the Circus. The Precincts had been ordered to house their prisoners since Brooklyn Central Booking cells were stuffed full already. In the end, my Precinct, the 83rd, had 145 guests for two days. Stuffed standing-room-only into the cells meant to accommodate 14 prisoners, the overflow chained to each other then to radiators, or dumped in a gated open yard that had once housed police horses.

We all made multiple arrests—one cop who’d arrived early, right after he’d observed the City go dark from the rooftop of his apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, arrested thirty; a late arrival, I arrested ten. Arresting officers were not fated to ever see their arrestees again. I no longer remember faces or details except for one slightly-built older fellow emerging from a furniture store carrying a red love seat on his back. I remember it was cherry red and that when I tripped him up with my nightstick as he ran, he let it go and sprang to his feet like a Jack-in-the-Box, declaring in irritation: “I’m not like these people! I have a job!” As the thing wound down by afternoon, the adrenalin replaced by fatigue after ten straight hours, I sat on the curb and watched firemen trying to control the conflagration devouring the structures along two solid blocks on Broadway. I was kept company on the curb by Wilton, the cop from Sunnyside, who’d been at it fifteen hours and was now nodding off, leaning into me.

When it was all over and the tally in: 3,071 looters had been arrested City-wide, 1,088 in Brooklyn alone. Along Broadway, 134 stores had been looted, 45 of them burned to the ground. A mile-and-one-half of commercial Broadway—30 solid blocks—had been destroyed. The fate of the 3,000-plus arrestees— having been held for up to a week in the Chateau d’If conditions of the local jails– was for most a slap on the wrist and release from custody. Few were charged with a felony, and none went to trial. The NYPD claimed that no police fired their weapons during the riot, except for two accidental discharges that hit no one, although two deaths were reported: one prisoner in the Pens at the Manhattan Tombs from heart failure, and one in a looted building from an undetermined cause.

Later, Assistant Chief William Bracey, Commander of Borough Brooklyn North, made the rounds of the Precincts to praise the men under his command. While addressing the cops of the Eight-Three as we stood in uniformed ranks in front of the Precinct Desk, he thanked us for “our bravery and fire discipline.” He was alluding to the Department’s official stance that no cop had fired his weapon in anger during the Battle for Broadway. At that, Officer Wilton, standing at attention in the next rank, said, loud enough to be heard by all: “Where was he? On vacation?’

The 83 Precinct holds a biannual Reunion at the American Legion Hall in Valley Stream, Long Island. A big turnout. I’ve made seven so far. I go to see the cops I worked next to, from 1975 to 1981. Old men, we tell each other stories.

© 2015 Robert Knightly

Sources: ‘The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City’, by Jonathan Mahler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); ‘Blackout Looting’ by Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter (Gardner Press, 1979); ‘BLACKOUT’, by James Goodman (North Point Press, 2003).

A Police Story: Blackout Riots, 1977

The other day I watched an old movie on NetFlix, ‘The Summer of Sam’. It reminded me of my participation in the only full-scale riot I’ve ever been in. The Blackout Riots of 1977 enveloped all of New York City, lasting 25 hours officially or three straight days and nights, depending on who’s counting. No deaths were admitted to by officialdom as having occurred during the looting and arson, yet the event was second only to the 1863 Draft Riots during the Civil War in the scale of the insurrection and destruction to City neighborhoods.

July 13, 1977, started out very, very hot but had cooled off some by early evening when my girlfriend and I went to the movies. ‘Black Sunday,’ a thriller with Robert Shaw as a Mossad agent tracking Palestinian terrorists in Miami, was playing at the American, a down-at-the-heels movie house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a couple blocks from my apartment. It was the last chance to see the movie that had opened in the City in March; you didn’t go to the American otherwise, where the slightly tilted floor was sticky underfoot. Afterward, a few beers, then home since I’d worked an 8-by-4 Day Tour earlier and needed sleep.

At 9:43 p.m. on July 13, 1977, Con Ed’s power suppliers in New England and Westchester County got knocked out by lightning, causing, in classic domino effect, all the lights in NYC to go out and stay out. The city was in the midst of a heat wave when all the air conditioners failed, the subways ground to a halt, street traffic lights blinked out and the five boroughs were plunged into darkness. At that moment, I was in my apartment enjoying a cold beer. In the next hour, I heard over a hand-sized portable radio that looting had begun and was spreading in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Police Commissioner Michael Codd ordered all off-duty policemen to report for duty at their local precincts (big mistake), whereupon I went to bed.

My local Precinct was the 94th, dubbed by cops a “country club” for its law-abiding blue-collar Polish and Irish residents, in Greenpoint, at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn. It looked across the East River to the East 23rd Street Piers in Manhattan and over a puddle-jump bridge spanning the poisonous Newtown Creek to Long Island City (LIC), Queens. I wasn’t about to report to the 94th where I wasn’t needed; I’d head for the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where I was assigned and always needed. But first, I’d sleep awhile, being of little use to the NYPD in my present condition, exhausted and half-in-the-bag. I could expect my tour of duty to be of long, indefinite duration once it began.

At 3:00 a.m., I arose, dressed, checked the loads in my service weapon and off-duty 38-cal. revolver and started for the Bushwick Precinct, a mere four miles away. A quickie trip normally: cross under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, then straight up Morgan Avenue to pick up Wilson, then a short stretch to the turn-of-the-Century Victorian-style Station House looming over the neighborhood like a Norman Keep, at the intersection of Wilson and DeKalb Avenues. The only illumination came from my car’s headlights as I negotiated the eerily dark and silent streets; no traffic except for some souls sitting in cars parked at the curb with their headlights on.

The Precinct House was ablaze with light like Gatsby’s mansion on Party Nights. It drew me like a Beacon does a lost ship. Inside, Lieutenant Jones presided at the desk having been left over from four-by-twelve Tour as were the sixteen other policemen on duty when the lights went out. No one would be off-duty for the foreseeable future. Cops had responded to the SOS from Commissioner Codd en masse, most, unfortunately, ending up in the outer boundaries of the boroughs, closest to where they lived on Long Island and Upstate counties: all without uniforms or riot gear in neighborhoods where they were not needed. Not so in the Eight-Three; it appeared to my eyes that most, if not all, of the 130 cops assigned to the Precinct were present for duty “with hats and bats” (riot helmets and nightsticks). Everyone was in motion, as if the zoo cages had been flung open. No civilians were present in cuffs; the standing Order that had come down at the inception of the rioting was still in effect: “No arrests. Restore order.” (Please!!)

After a pithy briefing (“The shit has hit the fan, men”), I piled into an RMP with three other cops and we raced up Dekalb the three long blocks to Broadway, epicenter of the revolution.

Next Monday, Part 2: The Scene

© 2015 Robert Knightly

Who’s Brian Williams? And Why Should I Care?

I sit slack-mouthed in front of the TV as the host of this News program discusses the “scandal,” the fall-from-grace of Brian Williams, the NBC News Anchor Numero Uno. I now know the name, the face and the story. How could I not, with its being shoved in my face daily by the silly, allegedly News People? Then his Internet Fan Club President, a serious-miened middle-aged woman (from the Mid-West, I presume, because aren’t they all?) says she’s grateful to the Network for re-instating Brian as a News Anchor because she’s missed him. Am I getting a sneak-peak into an Alternate Universe? Is this unstaged, real NEWS?

I accept on the evidence before my eyes that Williams is, indeed, loved by his Network executives and his fans like Mrs.-What’s-Her-Name. Apparently, his great sin was inventing stories of derring-do starring himself while covering the Iraq War. He put himself aboard a helicopter that came under fire at the front. Fact is, never happened. He misremembered, he says, being “in a bad place” then. He’s right about Iraq being a bad place, more so for those with their boots on the ground, rifle in hand, than for Williams.

His fellow journalists brand him with a Scarlet Letter and propose to wash his mouth out with soap, professionally. His fans just want him back on the air brightening up their lives. Old news clips flash on TV of Walter Cronkite, in fatigues and flack jacket, reporting the Vietnam War. Walter Cronkite, the Paragon. I recollect him (who doesn’t?) reporting JFK’s death in Dallas. But I mostly remember him as host of the Sunday night News Program, “You Are There.” In particular, as he reported from the scene at the Sack of Troy. Walter was no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma’m, in describing the wily stratagem of Ulysses and his band of good-ol’-Greek-boys. No way did Walter imply, even hint, that he was aboard the Trojan Horse when it rolled into history.

Frankly, I’d be the last one to throw stones at Brian Williams for gilding the lily. When I was a cop in the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in the mid-1970s, at end-of-tour we’d all end up in the B & G Bar, couple doors down from the Precinct Station House. And after we liquored up, we’d begin to rewrite freshly-made history. What happened on patrol that night; who did what to whom; how we saved the citizens of NYC from the Barbarians at the Gate—all was recalled, enhanced and fleshed-out, recast as befit good storytelling. The product became the Official Version forever after. Brian would have fit right in, felt to home at the B & G. Except our Bar is long gone, like any reliable memory of what really happened so long ago.

© 2015 Robert Knightly

The Man Who Spoke Out-of-Turn

I never thought he’d have the cojones to show his bare face in print again. I was wrong, he did and bad-mouthed the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, as he did in 2011, the last time the Circus came to Albany.

He’s Steve Barnes, the former restaurant reviewer for the Albany Times-Union newspaper, a man whose sharp tongue earned him a pasting in a restaurant parking lot by two men allegedly hired by the owner of another restaurant he’d been unkind to in print. The men were arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault in Albany Police Court but acquitted at a trial. Apparently, the jury thought Barnes had deserved his ‘review’ in the parking lot.

At the Times-Union Center show most recently, Barnes reaffirmed being bored by the nine tigers: “…much less fun than even the laziest house cat; they sit on trapezoidal platforms, snarling and swatting at the trainer’s stick before rolling over on their backs or putting paws the size of snowshoes onto a pylon. One of them defecated in the middle of the act. That was my verdict, too.

“The sad fact is,” Barnes continues, “that tigers and elephants and their wild brethren simply aren’t entertaining. The elephants—big, sad lumberers—are as placid as a pond and about as interesting to watch. Ponies, donkeys and llamas trot in circles. Some jump over things. It’s stupefyingly retro.”

Sadly, this man doesn’t get that it’s a wonder, a delight, to simply witness these magnificent creatures close-up—the tigers as they leap, snarl and slap their great paws in the air; the elephants as they trumpet loudly, lumber and queue up in a Conga line, front legs up on the backs of their sisters. The poet nailed it:

“Breathes there the man,
With soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said:
“Look, daddy, the tigers!!!
Mommy, the elephants!!!”

In a spirit of Reconciliation (Mr. Barnes does write a decent theatre review and he said he likes dogs), a word of caution, friend. Elephants have historically long memories so if you notice a big lumbering one in your parking lot, stay indoors.

Robert Knightly

The Tale of Two Jacks: The Gangster and the President

Denis Foley, a forensic anthropologist and historical archeologist, is author of the true crime thriller Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill (NK Burns Pub., 2006). He has a passion for researching the Irish in America whether they be gangsters, martyrs or rebels; most recently “On Tour and Exiled; James Connolly in America 1902-1905” in the 2013 issue of Saothar, the Journal of the Irish Labor History Society. He is working on his debut novel, Murder Most Irish, set in the Bronx and the Inwood Section of Manhattan.

Robert Knightly

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The Gangster Killed by a Politician

Former City of Watervliet Police Chief Francis Landrigan claimed that in order to understand who killed Jack Legs Diamond, aged 34, in a Dove Street rooming house in Albany on December 18, 1931, you had to go to the City of Watervliet next door and look into the affairs of the Hess brothers, Seymour known as ‘Big Mouth’ and Eugene. The brothers were Legs Diamond’s lieutenants in Watervliet, a small industrial city just north of Albany on the Hudson River. It was known as the Barbary Coast in the late Nineteenth Century because of its many bars and lawlessness. Eugene Hess was a clerk in the Troy Law Offices of Dan Pryor, Legs Diamond’s attorney. Seymour Hess, a member of the upstate Poka-Dot gang, guarded Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Kiki Roberts on Legs’s orders during his trial in Troy for kidnapping. Seymour was charged with keeping Kiki, the girlfriend, and Mrs. Alice Diamond, the wife, apart. Legs’s bodyguard, Watervliet Police Sgt. Frederick M. Broderick, and Legs were inseparable during the trial. Yet, Broderick was mysteriously absent the night Diamond died.

Legs routinely frequented Watervliet and the Village of Menands to gamble and drink in the Hess speakeasies. In Menands, he visited a ‘safe house’ and his vehicle fleet garaged at Tillinghast and Broadway. He owned garages in Watervliet as well and would bring booze in from Chestertown to Watervliet in funeral hearses. The Watervliet bootleggers as well as those from the City of Troy across the Hudson from Albany threw in with Diamond for access to his liquor distribution network. Diamond also operated a distillery in the Town of Halfmoon in adjacent Saratoga County. Dan O’Connell, the Democratic Machine Boss in Albany, also supplied the area with beer and liquor. He owned Hedrick’s Brewery. Dan and his brother Solly ran numbers, the baseball pool and prostitution in Albany and its environs. City-slicker Legs Diamond was not welcome in Dan’s City.

Dan O’Connell concentrated on the local baseball pool and bootlegging and politics. He sent his Albany Night Squad detectives, Sgt. William Fitzpatrick and Det. John McElveney, to warn Legs to stay out of Albany. O’Connell owned the Albany Police. Their squad cars accompanied caravans of liquor, transported from Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s warehouses in Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River and through the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation (still today the preferred route for contraband), to O’Connell’s warehouses in Albany. Dan and Joseph Kennedy, the millionaire father of JFK, were business partners. Kennedy had set up shop downtown in the Standard Building at 112 State Street, occupying the penthouse.

Legs Diamond, the young interloper from the streets of Manhattan, owner of the fashionable HotsyTotsy Club in Harlem, exiled himself from NYC to Acra, 130 miles away in the Catskills, after shooting to death two Club patrons. He’d stayed one step ahead of the NYPD. A hijacker of fellow bootleggers, Legs survived assassination attempts by the likes of Dutch Schultz and Vannie Higgins. The Higgins gang shot him five times; as a result, Legs, once known as ‘Gentleman Jack’, became ‘The Clay Pigeon.’ He retreated Upstate to recoup, and by all accounts was prospering.

Legs Diamond was one of the most successful of Prohibition Era gangsters, a shrewd businessman who accumulated millions. He was successor to Arnold Rothstein, whose bodyguard he’d been. Legs followed Rothstein’s example, branching out from booze to the more lucrative heroin and cocaine trade, traveling to London and Brussels on that business. Rothstein, labeled the ‘Gangster of Gangsters’, at his death was the richest of the Organized Crime tycoons and the leading illicit drug importer. Diamond reputedly killed Rothstein for putting the Feds onto his drug business. Darling of the national press and symbol of the Prohibition Era, Diamond mistakenly believed he didn’t have to play the Albany game of sharing the spoils with the Political Machine.

Pulitzer Prize-novelist and Albany newspaperman, William Kennedy, in a 2011 lecture at Freedom Hall in Troy, told a spellbound audience that as a reporter for the Albany Times Union he’d interviewed Dan O’Connell who admitted that he’d ordered his Night Squad detectives to eliminate Diamond. The details of the plot are pure Albany.

Legs had made a fatal error when he picked the rooming house at 67 Dove St., Albany, for his lodgings.

Sixty-seven is adjacent to 65 Dove, owned then by Charles Loftus, Democratic Committeeman for the Sixteenth Ward. Loftus informed Ward Leader Harry Wands of Legs’ presence as well as the times that he came and went. Legs was known to frequent the Kenmore Hotel, a jazz scene hotspot in Downtown Albany, speakeasies like the Parody Club on Hudson Avenue, and Kiki’s apartment on upscale Ten Broeck Street. Arriving home drunk in the early hours of December 18, 1931, he was passed out on the bed when Dets. Fitzpatrick and McElveney entered his room and fired three bullets into his head. A passing newsboy claimed he saw the killers in their fedoras speed away in a red Packard. A female witness reported seeing the detectives as they left the Dove St. address. The Albany Times Union’s presses on Sheridan Avenue were typesetting the story of Diamond’s murder before it had occurred; Police Reporters Joe O’Heaney and Ray O’Connor had been tipped by the Night Squad. As Robert Coleman, former Albany Assistant Police Chief, noted, in pithy understatement, “The Night Squad visited Legs that night.”

Back at Police Headquarters on Eagle Street, Det. Sgt. Fitzpatrick announced that he alone had shot Diamond. Det. McElveney let his superior take the credit. Edward O’Connell, Chairman of the Albany Democratic Party, thought that his younger brother Dan should have just roughed up Legs and escorted him out of town over the Dunn Memorial Bridge to the City of Rensselaer. Edward O’Connell, senior partner in the law firm of O’Connell and Aronowitz, hated bad publicity like the firestorm that erupted around Legs’ murder. But he needn’t have been overly concerned. Albany’s worst-kept secret was never revealed in the press. The Albany County District Attorney John T. Delaney did travel to Boston to interview Kiki Roberts, who’d fled to her mother’s house in New England, but no indictments were forthcoming. The police were reported by Hearst’s Times Union to be of the opinion that New York City gangsters Dutch Schultz or Fats McCarthy or the local Oley brothers killed Legs. A stolen car recovered on the Bethlehem and Albany Line on Route 9 was described as the killers’, abandoned and pointed south towards New York City.

Lawyer Edward O’Connell bridged the two sub-cultures in Albany. His brothers, Solly and Dan, ran the streets and the rackets. The patrician Anglican and Dutch Reformed elite—powerbrokers since the Civil War Reconstruction Period—were entrenched in the professions and business, as represented by Lt. Governor Edwin Corning. His son, Erastus Corning the 2nd, was to become Albany’s longest sitting Mayor, a 42-year-tenure, and Dan O’Connell’s successor as head of the Democratic Machine.

The Hon. Eugene Devine, a former Justice of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, demurred, nostalgically characterizing the Organization as more like a family, a clan, than a machine. Clergy, cops, wardmen, newspapers, big business and mom-and-pops had ties to the ‘family’ and Dan, the paterfamilias, saw to all receiving a piece of the pie. Judges, the Police Chief, the Mayor, all made pilgrimages to Democratic Party Headquarters at 75 State Street, or Dan’s home on Whitehall Road. Two former associates, an Albany Alderman and a Ward leader, remembered that O’Connell kept $250,000 in his safe at home while another insider recalled that Congressman Lee O’Brien carried $10,000 with him in a satchel at the Elks Club, “in case Dan called and money had to be immediately distributed.” Loyalty to the ‘family’ had its rewards, and, conversely, what was seen as disloyal, punished. An oft-repeated story has it that when Dan was told of a Democrat job-holder being seen at a Republican candidate’s fund-raiser, a phone call lost the man his employment with the State.

Legs Diamond didn’t stand a chance in Albany.

© 2015 Denis Foley, PhD, Curator, Lewis Henry Morgan Institute, SUNY-IT, Utica-Rome

(Next: JFK and the Albany Connection)

The March 17th Blues

It’s Saturday and it’s raining but if I were back in the City, it wouldn’t matter; it’d roll off my back. But I’m in Albany, where I live now. Don’t say anything, like “How can you call that cesspool of corruption home??”, as a friend indelicately put it when I announced my plan to move. Come to think of it, Rose’s response when I first broached the subject: “What??? Where!!!” fell short of unalloyed joy. This depression I feel in my bones on March 17th is only for today. ‘Buck up, boyo,’ the Irish spirits whisper, ‘the Thruway is a two-way street.’

Modern Albany was practically invented by the Irish, after they’d ousted their Dutch Protestant ‘betters’ who’d held power since the Civil War. Dan O’Connell won at the polls in 1921 and his Democratic Machine ran the City forever after, today still. Dan came from the Irish South End where his father owned a Bar. He cannily persuaded Erastus Corning the Younger, a Brahmin scion, to throw in with him, and the rest was history. Corning was Mayor of Albany for 42 years till his death in 1983, but if you wanted a big enough favor, you visited Boss Dan O’Connell, hat-in-hand, at home, up until he died in 1977. These were the days of the Ward Men whom you met on the street or in a Bar on Election Day to receive $5 for your vote. An Irish version of The Godfather.

Two things I know about St. Patrick’s Day in Albany: Go to the Ancient Order of Hibernians Hall on Ontario Street for the corned-beef-and-cabbage, boiled potatoes, carrots and two kinds of Irish Soda bread; and skip the Parade. The Parade actually occurs on the Saturday before the 17th. How un-New York is that! I went to it once, and was appalled. The Albany cops couldn’t control the corners at the intersections along Washington Avenue (or didn’t know how). On Parade Day, The NYPD would post officers on foot and horse on both sides of Fifth Avenue from East 45th St. to 86th St., then down 86th to Second Avenue, the last stop. (Of course, the APD has 350 cops while we had 35,000.) There were
Pipe Bands in the Albany Parade, but their leaders did not look like Detective Finbar Devine. Truly, no other human ever did. Six-feet-five inches, broad-shouldered and bull-chested, perennial Drum Major of the NYPD’s Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Corps; in kilts and the high Black Bear Hat, he strode up Fifth Avenue, marking cadence for his men with swings of his shillelagh-sized baton, like Finn MacCool straight out of the mists of Irish Myth. Finbar has been gone from us a good while now, doing his thing in the celestial Precincts, I like to think.

In The Day, it was a mix of pride and wild joy I felt marching up Fifth in the first rank of a uniformed column as a Sergeant of Police. We were hundreds but the crowds lining the route were thousands. Past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Cardinal, Mayor, et al preening in the grandstands on its steps, we moved past smartly to the wail of the pipes. New York loved us That Day and told us loudly. At the end of the march, we’d hit all the Irish Bars along Second Avenue, from 86th to 22nd Sts. Still in uniform, the drinks were free as were the women. Our destination was Molly Malone’s Pub, around the corner from the Police Academy on East 20th St. You’d have to shout over the din to be heard, the pipers competing with the juke box blaring out Danny Boy and The Wild Colonial Boy. I was in my 30s then and pronounced it good.

The world moves on; me, too. I know Albany cannot have the number and magical élan of those New York Irish bars I knew so well, now long gone. The world is drearier for it.

© 2015 Robert Knightly

My Writing Style

Donna Lagone is a fellow member of SinC's Upstate chapter, the Mavens of Mayhem. She's a Displaced Brooklynite like myself who lives with her husband and daughter in the Stockade District of Schenectady. She was for years a nurse at the Schenectady County Jail, as she was in Iraq during the War. REFLECTIONS, her first novel, got great reviews, so she's taken it on a world-wide Book Tour.

Tomorrow, by the way, is her birthday.

Robert Knightly

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Every writer approaches his or her computer, tablet, typewriter, or yellow legal pad in a uniquely different manner. I have always been interested in how a writer writes.

The idea for the novel Reflection to be truthful came from a writing prompt placed on a table at the creative writing workshop I was attending by our instructor. There stood an assortment of photos, theatre tickets, shoes, a silver hand mirror, along with a large ornate hair comb. Seeing the hand mirror, I was captivated, the seeds were planted. Then again having an idea for a story is only the beginning of the journey.

Time, place, and characters, get to know them the easiest way for me is by creating a storyboard advice given by a dear colleague, I make lists;

Characters: I do a complete personality study not only for my main characters but also secondary as well. Appropriate names that fit into the time and place of the story, you do not want to name your protagonist Tippy if she was born in Mexico in the year 1881. What are their likes, dislikes, hair color, eye color, types of clothing, foods, careers, important times in your characters’ lives. I also do a physiological study (state of mind, reactions in certain situations, introverted, short tempered, or weak willed etc.)

Time: A timeline is very important, dates of birth, marriages, deaths and in addition what historic events were occurring during that era. Day to day occurrences especially in a murder mystery are extremely important, even hour to hour as the murder stalks his victim. Reflection, takes place from the year 1915 through to 1999 almost a century so the timeline line had to be spot on.

Place: Where is the story-taking place, real time in your neighborhood, or Mexico in the year 1915. It matters not where you place story, what matters is you the writer becomes at home with, the country, neighborhood or planet for that matter your story is set in. I was fortunate to live in Mexico but not during the time of my story. I had to re-familiarize myself with the culture, travel, religion, and Mexican family life a century ago.

Research: Research, research, research if your information is flawed you will lose credibility with your reader and do not think you may creak by unseen. Some reader will know if your facts are correct no matter how obscure the topic. Research is fun still it must not become your focus, it is the means to an end, hopefully. This information is tacked on the storyboard and not all material is used in the story. It is there for my thought process only.

Now is the time to put pen to parchment and write.

I puke write, now I know that is not a lady like term yet that is what I do. I write whatever I have planned for the day if it is two or four chapters I write them. Ideas and creativity, conversation with characters and yes we chat, mostly they are telling me how to write their story, I find let lost in the mechanics of editing. I am disciplined and write up to six hours a day with Wednesday and Sunday off for good behavior. After puking for six hours the next day I go back with a fresh eye and edit, still trying to keep at bay the opinions of my characters. Editing and revisions are ongoing and good example of that is; I thought I knew the ending of my novel until it came time to write it. I woke up in the middle of the night and said no it cannot end that way, I tend to get my ideas at odd times and places more than I like to confess. I knew the ending now and went down to my office at three o’clock in the morning to write it. The next day I realized the new ending had been alluded to throughout the whole story without my knowledge on the other hand my protagonist obviously knew cheeky devil.

I am comfortable with my style of writing, it fits my chaotic life yet I am always open to change and finding new ways of putting pen to parchment and weaving an intriguing tale.

Donna Lagone

“Fast Talking Woman”

I’m a fast talking woman,

Tough, Strong,

Hey Mom, Hey Hon,

Cut to the chase.

A healer to the wounded and broken,

Fighter, counselor to the forgotten,

It’s OK, need a place to stay?

I am a fast talking woman.

 Perfect, flawed, young, old,

“Woman with Yellow Hair”

 Spirit from long past, a Crone,

A traveler who loves a cheerful hearth,

Come on let’s go, time is on loan,

I’m a fast talking woman,

With a heart that flies

And tears in her eyes.

Revisiting NYPD Past with Theodore Roosevelt

Last week I did a book review at the Albany Public Library. I’ve spoken there a half-dozen times, mostly about my own books and on one other occasion reviewing a biography of Clarence Darrow. Both times, I have to thank the Friends of the Albany Public Library (average age about sixty-five, I estimate) for prompting me to finally read a book I already owned that languished unread on the shelf among all the other Unreads. For the same reason they asked me to do Clarence Darrow (one criminal mouthpiece to another), they tapped me for Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York by Richard Zachs. Roosevelt was appointed on May 6, 1895 as President of the four-member Police Commission that ran the New York City Police Department. Tasked by Republican reformers to put the New York cops back on the straight-and-narrow, after thirty years of Tammany Mayors memories must have been vague as to when that last was.

In 1895, New York City was largely the island of Manhattan and “some parts of the Bronx”—which parts weren’t specified, but here’s a lament from a Bronx patrolman: “The next time I get that post I’ll demand an axe to hew a path through the forest, with a locomotive headlight to illumine the way, and a dozen red sky rockets to send up for assistance in case I fall into some gully or get tangled up in the jungles north of 180th Street.” (That’s how cops spoke of Staten Island in the 1970s.) The boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island did not merge into one New York City until 1898.

When Roosevelt (“TR”) took office, the City had 3,800 policemen in 38 Precincts, watching over two million people crammed into a dozen square miles, connected by a 5-cent cable car ride and four massive elevated train lines running north-south on Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenues. Physically, the City was recognizable but different. Madison Square Garden was a yellow-and-white edifice on East 26th Street, atop which perched on her tiptoes, a 13-foot gilded copper statue of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, lit up at night by 50 Edison Lamps, spun naked on perfectly balanced ball bearings, telling City dwellers which way the wind blew. At Fifth Avenue and 41st Street, the Croton Distributing Reservoir occupied the site of the future New York Public Library. No automobiles. Instead, “Tens of thousands of horses, carriages, wagons, public horse and cable cars, but not a single traffic light or stop sign and vehicles could ride in any direction on any street, no faster than 5-miles-per-hour.” No traffic cops. Horse thieves abounded in NYC; outlaw stables where horses’ coats were quick-dyed, tails clipped and wagons repainted, presaged the coming of the chop-shops of the 1970s.

More than 30,000 prostitutes worked daily from the upscale Tenderloin district (a 2-block-wide swath along Broadway from 23rd to 42nd Streets) to impoverished Russian Jewish girls charging 50-cents down on Eldridge St. In the tiny 9-square-block 11th Precinct on the Lower East Side, 250,000 mostly Polish and Russian Jews, lived and labored. Their pushcarts filled Hester, Allen, Chrystie, Forsyth, Delancey, Grand and Houston Streets, far as the eye could see seven days a week. Pushcart men paid a few dollars for the privilege of remaining stationary, to not have to move on every ten minutes as local law mandated; Italian bootblacks paid for prized corners and shined police shoes free. You could get a drink, and more, in the 250 saloons and 50 brothels in the 11th Precinct, even on Sunday. Especially on Sunday, the workingman’s only day-off.

Big Bill Devery, Captain of the 11th Precinct, plainly stated his view of such enterprises in his domain: “Take a payoff, let the people enjoy themselves.” Devery charged each brothel a $500 initiation fee and $50 a month; method of payment was “the police handshake,” a $50 bill palmed and passed. Saloons, gambling halls, pool rooms paid to stay open. It was this business as usual in every Precinct. Into this Sea of Iniquity, strode Theodore Roosevelt, on the arm of the Rev. Charles Parkhurst of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church on East 24th Street, a hop, skip, and a jump from TR’s ancestral mansion on East 20th. Rev. Parkhurst, the Prophet Jeremiah of the Republican Reform Movement, and TR who said, “Nothing must stand in the was of enforcement of the law.” Two peas in a pod on a Holy Crusade.

During the sweltering summer of 1895, TR succeeded in closing down practically all the City’s 8,000 saloons on Sundays, for the only time in residents’ memory. During the first fourteen months of his term, TR succeeded principally in that, although the NYPD followed his lead less slavishly in shuttering brothels and gambling parlors, as witnessed by the Department trials and firings of scores of policemen. (None of whom went to jail, however.) By the following summer of 1896, the Republican-controlled Legislature in Albany had had enough, as did a thirsty City. New York State’s Sabbath Law (an Excise Tax Law), on the books since 1857, forbade attending baseball games, horse races and theatre on Sunday, as well as the buying of most anything, especially alcohol. The newly-passed Raines Law, ostensibly even harsher on its face, primarily raised fees and taxes on premises licensed to sell alcohol, while providing an unanticipated boon to the City’s saloon keepers. Private clubs (like TR’s Union League) and ”hotels with 10 rooms or more” could sell alcohol to guests with a meal seven days a week. A construction boom was thereby launched that added 10 rooms to every saloon in the City that had ready access to hammer, saw and nails. A Tammany Hall Judge helpfully ruled that “a meal” could consist of a single sandwich, thus giving birth to the “Raines Law sandwich,” described by playwright Eugene O’Neill as “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese.” Never consumed, only one was legally required to be kept on the premises.

In April 1897, Roosevelt decamped with relief from the NYPD to his new job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in President William McKinley’s Administration. TR had tirelessly importuned his friend and Harvard classmate, U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, to rescue him from his pickle. In May, 1898, the new Police Board chose Captain Big Bill Devery, TR’s bête noire, as Chief of Police. As author Richard Zachs observes: “…despite one of the most concerted efforts in the history of New York City to crack down on whoring, gambling and after-hours drinking, all three somehow thrived.” As epitaph, Abe Hummel, an infamous criminal lawyer of the day, said it best: ”Roosevelt’s tombstone should read: ‘Here lies all the civic virtue there ever was.’”

Robert Knightly

On The Road Again

I met Jenny last year at the Book House, Albany's great independent bookstore when she was promoting her first novel, Cover of Snow, in the company of a bunch of mystery authors doing the same. I had no inkling that when she left the store, she, her husband and two children were getting in their SUV and heading West on her self-plotted and self-financed National Book Tour. On this April 26th, Jenny was back at the Book House solo to read from her second suspense thriller, Ruin Falls, now a member of Sisters In Crime/Upstate Chapter, having relocated with her family from New Jersey to Phoenicia, NY. Afterward, they all piled into their SUV again and headed out for Seattle on the Milchman National Book Tour, with her publisher Random House's blessings.

Robert Knightly

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Last year when my debut novel came out, my husband and I did the only logical thing. We rented out our house, traded in two cars for an SUV that could handle Denver in February, and withdrew the kids from first and third grades in order to car-school them.

OK, maybe it wasn’t all that logical.

But when you finally get published, after a thirteen year journey/struggle/battle, and you know that the only thing harder than breaking in is building a lasting career as an author, then you might just figure that you have to give this thing your all.

And given a certain amount of flexibility—i.e., your husband works in IT and is the most supportive guy in the world, and your children are still young enough to find it cool to spend 24/7 with their parents—you might also figure that grassroots efforts have helped launch businesses for ages, and why not get out there, introducing yourself and your work, one bookstore, one library, one reader at a time?

There was an event I did in Goshen, Indiana when exactly one person showed up. And he didn’t buy a copy of my book—something that always makes me upset for the bookseller who is going to all the trouble of hosting an event. But it turned out okay. The attendee bought a novel by a different author, which I recommended. And he told me that he wasn’t buying my book because he’d already read it, which was what led him to drive three hours to meet me in Goshen.

That evening became what I call a moment of the heart.

Did it make economical cents to drive to Goshen? Of course not. But it made a different kind of sense. The kind that says we write books because we want to connect with people. Getting to meet them face-to-face is a privilege and an honor.

Of course we also meet people in other ways these days. Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn have expanded my world in ways I couldn’t have envisioned. Especially not back when I began trying to get published…and there wasn’t any such thing as Facebook.

It was queries on cotton resume paper and ream boxes for mailing manuscripts. Last month I gave a talk at a college and when I used the phrase ream box I was met with blank faces.

I’ve aged out of something, I guess. But I also wonder if a new age might be coming.

An awareness that we all hurry too fast and try to do too much at one time. There’s slow food now, and maybe there should be slow reading. Slow book tours anyway. Something is lost when we cease investing in the moment and the development of relationships. Lost in our connections, and maybe lost in our writing, too.

I don’t want to be too blithe about any of this. There are only so many hours in a day, and writers are tasked with doing so much now that it can be impossible to keep up. Not everyone—not anyone really—can take seven months out of their lives to try to start a career.

But you don’t have to. In fact, I think seven days of this approach can add a dimension to your career, and even your life.

The first question I am usually asked when I speak about “the world’s longest book tour” is whether it was worth it. I answer that it depends on what worth it means. Judging a book tour by book sales makes little sense. By the time you’ve paid for gas, accommodations in some cases, and a bite to eat, you’d be hard-pressed to sell enough books to recoup expenses.

I could point again to the moment of the heart, but there’s another more tangible gain, which I call the ripple effect. What if I meet a bookseller who continues to hand-sell my books for months after I am there? What if there’s an attendee who doesn’t read what I write, but has a friend who does? Or one who’s a columnist for a major newspaper? What if a book club shows up just for fun? All of these things and more happened while I was out on the road.

As writers we are casting the stones of our stories into a massive sea. The more ripples we can get started, the bigger our chances for success.

My debut novel landed on multiple regional bestseller lists, and exceeded publisher expectations in other ways. When my second novel came out, my publisher decided to set up the first leg of the tour. That’s right—I’m now doing it all over again.

This time a fellow author decided to come along for the first 1000 miles of the ride, in the backseat with the kids sleeping against her. If Bob Knightly is kind enough to have me back to the blog, I will describe just what that was like.

Is all of this worth it? Please continue to follow along. Let me know what you think.

Jenny Milchman

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Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New York State. Her debut novel, Cover of Snow, published by Ballantine in 2013, was chosen as an Indie Next and Target Emerging Authors Pick, won the Mary Higgins Clark award and has been nominated for a Barry. Her second novel, Ruin Falls, came out in April.

Back Home on the Range

The Monday following Edgars Week I was back in Albany, but actually in the City of Saratoga. (I have yet to figure out if the ‘Saratoga’ where the Continental Army beat General Burgoyne is one and the same ‘Saratoga Springs’ that the highway signs tell me I’m in). Never mind. I was there at the Saratoga Police Pistol Range to qualify with both .38-cal. revolvers that I’d carried during twenty years as a cop in the NYPD—which, bye the bye, I last fired in 1987, the year I retired (and also when I last cleaned them, but that’s another story.)

I’m at the Range this Monday to keep from getting arrested. You see, I once had a Carry-Permit issued me by the City of New York as a retired Member of the Force “in good standing” (meaning not having been arrested anywhere since). When you leave NYC, however—as I did to reside in Albany–the Permit automatically expires, and the NYPD requested me to mail it back (I didn’t). I keep both revolvers—my off-duty 5-shot Smith & Wesson Chief and the on-duty S&W Police Officer’s Special—in my sock drawer in our bedroom on the top floor of our Row House in Downtown Albany. Not in a “locked metal box” as the Department prescribed. How in hell could I get to my gun with all deliberate speed to repel a burglar if I first have to remember where I stashed the lockbox key (recommended to be kept separate from the lockbox), then unlock the box to get the gun. There is a further complication in that the gun will not be loaded. At the insistence of my wife Rose, I keep the bullets in a different hidey hole because loaded guns in the house make her nervous. This, as you can readily see, adds an additional step to the whole business before I can Stand My Ground (as Floridians say).

Of course, there hasn’t been a single home invasion on my street in the seven years I’ve lived here, and I can’t really see a burglar climbing two flights of stairs to beard us in our bedroom, so it’s more likely that I will, in such circumstances, yell loudly down the stairs: “POLICE!”, then call them.

I’m not a gun buff. I still have the two revolvers I carried while patrolling the mean streets of the City, but none others. I’m sentimentally attached to them, which explains my presence this Monday on a Police Pistol Range. I owe it to The GRUMPS who arranged for the presence of eighteen of us—all retired guys, no gals—to shoot for certification under Federal law. The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act (LEOSA, 18 U.S. Code 926) authorizes me to carry my revolvers concealed on my person in every State of the Union, including the City of New York (which delights in locking up off-duty out-of-state lawmen who think they can bring their firearms into the City because their place-of-employment isn’t as finicky as NYC). We owe this boon to former President George Bush, the Son, who did one good thing after all.

The Saratoga PBA Range is a homey place, small by Big Department standards, accommodating just eight shooters simultaneously. Surprisingly, all the old cops were qualifying with revolvers rather that automatics like the Glock. It bespoke a long-ago time when police departments prescribed that its members carry the revolver because of its reliability: if you never cleaned a revolver, it would still fire, whereas a dirty automatic would jam, fail to fire. I fired 50 rounds from each revolver at a stationary paper target stapled to a flexible metal pole from distances of 25 yards, 15-, 3-, and one-yard. That one-yard is meant to simulate combat. You stand a little to the side an arm’s distance away and give the target a shove with your free hand, step back quickly with the foot opposite your shooting hand while drawing your weapon, holding it close in to your side a bit forward of your body (so you don’t shoot yourself), and let go three rounds rapidly at the bad guy. Your body is doing the aiming at the silhouette of a muscular, bald-headed, mean-looking white guy, with a gun in his fist pointing at you. This is a practical exercise since most police gunfights occur with the shooters within three yards of each other. The Range Instructor then scored our targets. I passed, respectably. (It’s like riding a bike, muscle memory.)

For the occasion, Rose had sewn me a Carpenter’s Apron in denim to hold the one hundred rounds I had to grab in handfuls to reload as I fired the Course. I bought the ammo at a store on a suburban route with a monster sign blinking: “GUNS”. I’d never been in a store like it, having in the dim past bought only from NYPD-affiliated shops clustered around the Police Academy on East 20th Street. I needed a pair of safety glasses, ear protectors, and bullets, of course. The bullets are called ‘wadcutters’, meant for shooting targets. The People Bullets are soft-nosed ‘hollow-points,’ designed to explode and expand within a body on impact, causing massive tissue damage. I remember the NYPD, when it decided in the 1990s to arm its members with these ‘.38-Specials’, calling them “humane bullets”. Actually, it had everything to do with the tendency of higher-velocity rounds to pass right through the bad guy, taking out innocent pedestrians in the line of fire. The lawyers referred to this unintended result of non-stop bullets as Lawsuit City. Incidentally, I was voted Best Looking Ammo Pouch on the Range that day by my fellow GRUMPS.

At the end of shooting, six of us went to lunch together at Ruby Tuesdays in a nearby mall. I had told my share of war stories during the morning, enough to merit the invitation. Two homicide detectives from Nassau County, one a member of the Saratoga Springs Police department, another a BCI investigator with the State Police, the last a sergeant formerly of the NYPD’s Bronx Narcotics Unit. All of us long retired from police work, me the oldest at table. I’d not met any of them before, although the Bronx sergeant said he and I had spoken at a GRUMPS Christmas Party. Our time had overlapped in the NYPD so we talked of the Old Days. As we stood around a picnic table waiting for our Relay to be called onto the range, I asked him if he planned on cleaning his guns that evening; he did. (I recalled the process: you wet cotton patches with Hoppe’s Gun Oil, attach them at the end of a thin metal rod that gets run through the barrel and empty chambers, then repeat with dry patches to remove excess oil.) He volunteered that he also dismantles the weapon to get at all the moving parts, and offered to show me how. I declined, noting that despite not having been cleaned in 27 years, the moving parts still moved, the guns fired. At first taken aback, he recovered, offering to clean both my revolvers for me if I bought lunch. I bought lunch.

GRUMPS is not an acronym as so much of police-speak is. Rather, the name aptly calls to mind a couple old codgers sitting on a park bench chewing the rag, remembering the Good Times, recast and immortalized in the retelling.

© 2014 Robert Knightly

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and the Memoirs of Mike Welch

And the Return of Mike Welch...

Robert Knightly

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I have just finished reading three of the four novels that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes: A STUDY IN SCARLET, THE SIGN OF THE FOUR, and THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. I’m halfway through THE VALLEY OF FEAR, and would like to finish it before I write this, but I can’t because I have to be done before my writing class tomorrow, and I am getting sleepy.

Anyway, reading the three and one-half novels has created two major impressions in me. One is that the real hero of the novels is Watson, in that he, through his devotion, provides a heart, and gives a heart for and to his friend Holmes. The real hero is certainly not deductive logic (a kind of old and ugly fellow who does not look too dashing in a deerstalker hat). I mean, who remembers how Holmes gets to the bottom of all these tangled cases? I don’t. I lose the thread usually before I am halfway through, and anyway, I kind of think deduction, what Holmes calls looking at effects and thinking backwards towards causes, has got severe limitations on it. I mean, causes can have many effects, and therefore (am I reasoning deductively here?) effects can have many causes. How does Holmes always know his backward reasoning is correct? Isn’t he just taking a stab in the dark, looking at evidence, at building blocks of a structure he calls a solution, and constructing a building in only one of many ways it could be built?

I don’t know, but without Watson, we have the 17th Century Enlightenment figure of Holmes with no Romantic relief, no yin for yang, so to speak. And Watson certainly is a romantic (he is always falling in love with some beautiful woman that comes calling on Holmes for help, and he certainly loves Holmes), and it is he, after all, who tells the stories. And they are romances, adventures, ripping good yarns (saving the Empire from rogues and rascals with a gentleman’s code of honor, with a little of Kipling’s White Man’s burden thrown in, along with a pro-capital stance so partial that the hero of “FEAR” is a Pinkerton), to be sure. And thank goodness Watson tells them! I mean, how stirring would Holmes’s description of the dreaded Hound be compared to that of Watson’s? Or the gloom on the Moor, or the city of London itself—diseased, miasmic, debauched: “the great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained,” a city which threw “monster tentacles” into the surrounding suburbs.

And so Watson, stalwart (and less bumbling than as betrayed by Nigel Bruce in the series of 1940s British movies I remember watching on WOR, WPIX, and PBS on rainy Saturday afternoons as a kid) and loyal, gives us the romantic portrayal of the adventures.

Now, my memoir, the story of my depression, partakes of both Holmes and Watson. It certainly is a romance, or at least is concerned more with the heart than the brain, but telling it has required me to examine evidence and construct a theory or story of my experience.

And I have been ever aware that what I have deduced from the evidence of my life, the journey I have taken from effects back to (supposed) causes, the story I have told, is a tentative one at best. And others, I am sure, would tell the story differently. My parents, for example. The title of my mother’s story about my life would be: CHRONICLE OF A SELFISH SINNER. My Dad is a bit more verbose, and would have one of those Eighteenth Century titles like Defoe’s (which could take up a whole page and, for some reason, have a lot of semi-colons): Lessons from the Life of a Loser; That life being the callow and craven one of my very own son; Blood of my blood; The supreme disappointment of my life; Which disappointment (among other things) hath led me to the brink of despair.

Anyway, thinking this stuff through is giving me a headache. I am sure a good big bowl of tobacco, some cocaine and a little violin music would help get these rusty synapses firing, but I don’t have access to any of those, so bear with me.

I have an intuition I need to talk about the unconscious. Indeed, it occurs to me that intuition emerges to our waking selves through the unconscious (an intuition I just had about intuition). The unconscious, that place the noir tough guy detective must go to crack the case, is the place where his love for the femme fatale is clouding his vision, unable to see the culprit although she stands right before him (with lipsticked lips [and legs?] slightly parted). It’s her, you idiot, I want to yell, but I know I would be an idiot for a dame like that, too.

Holmes does not trust intuition, pays no heed to the unconscious, relies solely on his sanctified scientific method. It’s the same thing a lot of memoirists do, or tell themselves they are doing—just objectively telling the story (just the facts, m’am, we don’t need a god-damned editorial). Holmes says more than once that he mistrusts women, and if intuition is a female trait (it may not be, but it is instructive that in Holmes’s time most people thought it was) then the ultra-masculine analytical Holmes is no fan of it either.

What I am getting at is this (here’s the cause and effect of my reasoning, the dialectical syntheses of it all, my Holmesian criticism of Holmes himself): If there is always more than one theory that fits the evidence, especially the evidence of personality, and the unconscious exists, then we are biased to look for the evidence that satisfies our hidden desires, or avoids our hidden fears. It would behoove Holmes to give the unconscious some credit, to plumb its depths in himself and his criminals (of course, this may be hard to do with Aspergers). Perhaps as the result of an unconscious fear he has of them, he has a blind spot about women (they are simply creatures not to be trusted, amoral, but predictable like your pet cat who would probably eat you if you died alone with her in the house). Holmes could be seriously overmatched by a female super-fiend, but he never confronts one, because Doyle won’t, or can’t.

And it is my hypothesis that the memoirist also ignores the unconscious, at great risk. It is this kind of neglect that allows the bully to write themselves as a victim and for the victim to write themselves as never having collaborated with their tormentors; allows the grandiose to portray themselves as modest (see Mein Kampf and the autobiography of Arnold Schwarznegger); allows the supposed sinner to make a lurid and sinful display of his or her sinfulness.

Of course, at the base of my theory is a kind of optimism, a belief in the kinds of final solutions Homes is so fond of, a belief that we can plumb the depths of ourselves, to go into the basement where all those gibbering, capering mad things are, and bring them to heel, outwit the archfiend Moriarty in ourselves, once and for all find the thing out. And then have the guts to write about it.

Something of Doyle’s own unconscious is on display for all to see in these stories, I think. He has a need to apologize for the Empire, I think, and does it by creating a world where you are either a gentleman or a blackguard; a Christian or a heathen; an upright thrifty and cheerful capitalist who can tie a double Windsor and owns, never rents, his tux, or a bomb-throwing swarthy anarchist; a boy scout or a pedophile (I know, I see the irony there, believe me).

And still the stories thrill me, I must admit. I know they can be a bit juvenile in their plotting, and the characterizations of the good guys and the villains can be simplistic, and yet I come back to them, to the nighttime world of the “cesspool that is London” to see if Holmes can catch his man, with the help of dear Watson, who, after all, is also trying to catch his. And me, mine.

© 2014 Mike Welch

Memoir: Remembering Dad

Mike Welch, our resident memoirist, returns with slices of life dredged up from the movie, Nebraska.

Robert Knightly

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Nebraska is a black and white movie that portrays the colorless life of a character who rages against that lack of hue with all his considerable, if addled, might. In the movie, there is an interminable, bleak stretch of RTE 90 between Billings Montana and Lincoln Nebraska that Woody Grant (played by Bruce Dern) and his son David (played by Will Forte) traverse on a Quixotic quest to collect one million dollars that the geriatric but extremely combative Dern thinks he has won from The Publisher’s Clearinghouse. It’s a long road, but at the end there is something of a reconciliation between the two, although coming back together implies once having been together, which these characters had never really been. My Dad and I were never really together, either, at any time during our journey or at the time he died in 2006. I’m now in the process of seeing if you can reconcile with someone who isn’t there, which is perhaps possible, or maybe can only be contemplated, like one hand clapping.

Dern and Dad. Dad and Dern. David realizes his dad is losing it when the cops call him after finding Woody feebly wandering down the road in Billings, insisting that his destination is not the grocery store or a bar, but Lincoln. I realized my Dad had lost it (he always had seemed to be in the process) when my brother called me to report the police had picked him up in the dead of night, dead of winter, walking down Main Street in Bay Shore, Long Island, in his bare feet. This was in the late 90’s, and I was not really surprised, knowing that when my Dad was in the manic stage of his manic depression, he did some pretty weird stuff. I hadn’t talked to Dad in years, having handed him off to my brother when I went to college, having carried him for much of my childhood. Now I was pulled back into the drama.

By the end, Dad loved only Louie Prima, Mickey Mantle, Paul Robeson and Winston Churchill. You’ll notice that there isn’t anyone on the list that he actually knew. Actually, he also loved his nurse at the mental hospital in New Jersey he ended up in when he lit his room on fire in the halfway house we had gotten him into (I didn’t mean to be incendiary, he said tearfully, but it was hard to believe he didn’t, knowing him), but he didn’t really know her, either. She made the mistake of smiling at him, is all, inspiring him to write semi-pornographic love sonnets to her.

It’s hard to say why Dad was the way he was. Like Mickey Mantle, who could hit home runs and bat for average, and who could drive in runs, Dad was a triple threat—he was annoying due to his bi-polarity, his personality and because he was, at the end, having multiple infarcts, or little strokes, that “disinhibited” him, as if he was not enough lacking in inhibition in the first place. My brother and I go back and forth about how much he was responsible for his behavior, but it’s ultimately not one of those questions you can answer.

Dad and Dern. By the end of their lives, neither liked much. Both could barely walk. My Dad, who did the barefooted trick “just to see if I could do it,” tried that summer to take a long walk on a hot afternoon, got dehydrated and took a seat under a tree to rest. He then found he didn’t have the strength to get up. A cop saved him again.

I took him to the theater to see the heartbreaking and funny Life is Beautiful, thinking that it was intelligent enough and grim enough for his taste, but he complained that it sucked, so loudly that I had to hustle him out of there before our fellow, irate moviegoers strung us both up. Not that he cared. Not for the movie, and not for the offended patrons of the theater, or for much else. To be fair, Dad did also like Cool Hand Luke: “Gentlemen, what we got heeere, is a failure to comyoonicate,” as the prison warden says in that movie, and that failure afflicts Dern and his son almost as much as it afflicted me and my Dad.

Nebraska is funny, in a savage way, and my Dad would have liked that. David’s brother gets into a silly fight with two very weird cousins over the dispensation of Dad’s (imaginary) fortune and their childish, kind of feminine flailing at each other is at once hysterical and pathetic. Humor just the way my Dad liked it. Grotesque, sad, bizarre—bring it on. Dern’s wife, the mother of the boys, visits the grave of an old suitor, and pulls up her skirt and yells at him across that border between life and death “Look at what you could have had if you hadn’t been so damned boring!” Dad would have fallen off his seat.

At the movie, Life Is Beautiful (which I watched to the end on video years later), the father (Roberto Benigni, no problem walking for him) is killed, but not without having saved his son from realizing the horror and despair of the death camp they had been in. Maybe that triumph of love and will was too much for Dad. In Nebraska, the reconciliation and resolution is much less clear and satisfying, but it exists. The son buys Dad a used pick-up truck, and for a short drive down the street where he grew up, Dern is greeted as a winner, having hoodwinked his hometown into thinking he bought the truck with his winnings. And Dern is happy, kind of, for a little while, and so is his son.

I couldn’t find that conciliatory gesture, or that gesture that would heal things, or perhaps the gesture that would have made my Dad sit up and take notice of me. For at the end, he dwelled on all those he felt had betrayed and humiliated him, and I was just his audience, not a player in the theater that was his life. Oh, that we could have gone on a quest, even a silly one, but we didn’t.

At the end, he was obsessed with what he termed the “humiliations of my pitiful life.” He set about redeeming himself, I think, by annoying people. I would take him to dinner when I visited, and we would eat steaks (he ate his with his bare hands) as he talked about what a horrible shrew my mother was, and his mother was, and how he wished he knew where his father was buried, so he could dance on his grave. I don’t want to dance on his. Really, I don’t.

He would rant and ramble, or sit silently and weep. He had a wild crush on that Filipino nurse, and talked about a preacher he had met and to whom he was going to bequeath his money, for some kind of People’s Church. When I tried to dissuade him of this, he informed me I just wanted the money for myself. He reminded me that I’d been a lousy adolescent athlete, a poseur whose only weapon was an intensity that better ballplayers were not intimidated by, and when I showed him a paper on Metaphor I’d written in grad school that was praised by my professor, he said it was “felicitously written, but basically bullshit.” And so it went, and so it goes sometimes still for me, when his voice visits me from across that aforementioned divide. Maybe I should have bought him a fucking truck.

© 2014 Mike Welch