Cops have. Cops do.
It ain’t pretty. It don’t look or sound (or smell) anything like in the movies. These asshats who think that the answer is to arm everyone so they could, for instance, shoot it out in a dark theater have never had a gun pointed at them and would shit themselves if they did.
They say it’s all about the Second Amendment and individual rights but what it’s about is the money. The gun manufacturers, who make up the vast bulk of the NRA’s funding, want to sell guns and make their cash.
End of motherfucking story.
New York City has the strictest gun laws in the country but that doesn’t make any difference because all the guns come in from the outside, up the “Iron Pipeline.” Dealers make straw purchases in states with weak gun laws—Texas, Arizona, Alabama, the Carolinas—and then bring them up I-95 to the cities of the Northeast and New England.
The goobers love to talk about crime in the big cities, Malone thinks, but either don’t know or don’t care that the guns come from their states.
To date, at least four New York cops have been killed with guns that came up the Iron Pipeline.
Not to mention the corner boys and the bystanders.
The mayor’s office, the department, everyone is desperate to get guns off the streets. The Job is even buying them back—a no-questions-asked cash-and-gift-card offer: you bring in your guns, we smile at you and give you $200 bank cards for handguns and assault rifles and $25 for rifles, shotguns and BB guns.
The last buyback, at the church over on 129th and Adam Clayton Powell, netted forty-eight revolvers, seventeen semiautomatic pistols, three rifles, a shotgun and an AR-15.
Malone has no problem with it. Guns off the streets are guns off the streets, and guns off the streets help a cop achieve job number one—go home at end of shift. One of the old hairbags taught him that when he first came on the Job—your first job is to go home at end of shift.
Now Sykes asks, “Where are we with DeVon Carter?”
DeVon Carter is the drug lord of Manhattan North, a.k.a. the Soul Survivor, the latest in a line of Harlem kingpins that came down from Bumpy Johnson, Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes.
He makes most of his money through the heroin mills that are really distribution centers, shipping to New England, the small towns up the Hudson, or down to Philly, Baltimore and Washington.
Think Amazon for smack.
He’s smart, he’s strategic and he’s insulated himself from the day-to-day operations. He never goes near the drugs or the sales, and all his communications are filtered through a handful of subordinates who go talk to him personally, never over the phone, text or e-mail.
Da Force hasn’t been able to get a CI inside Carter’s operation because the Soul Survivor only lets old friends and close family into his inner circle. And if they get busted, they choose doing the time over flipping on him, because doing the time means they’re still alive.
It’s frustrating—the Task Force could bust as many street-level dealers as they want. The undercovers do numerous buy-and-bust ops, but it’s a revolving door, a few gangbangers go to Rikers and there are others in line to take their place slinging the dope.
But so far, Carter has been untouchable.
“We have CIs out on the street,” Malone says, “sometime we get a twenty on him, but so what? Without a wiretap, we’re fucked.”
Carter owns or has pieces of a dozen clubs, bodegas, apartment buildings, boats and God knows what else and he spreads his meetings out. If they could get a wire into one of those places, they might get enough to move on him.
It’s the classic vicious circle. Without probable cause, you can’t get a warrant, but without the warrant, you can’t get probable cause.
Malone doesn’t bother saying this. Sykes already knows.
“Intel,” Sykes says, “indicates that Carter is negotiating a major firearms purchase. Serious weapons—assault rifles, automatic pistols, even rocket launchers.”
“Where are you getting this?”
“Despite your opinion,” Sykes says, “you’re not the only one who does police work out of this building. If Carter is looking for that kind of weaponry, it means he’s going to war against the Dominicans.”
“I agree.”
“Good,” Sykes says. “I don’t want that war fought on my turf. I don’t want to see that level of bloodshed. I want that shipment stopped.”
Yeah, Malone thinks, you want it stopped, but you want it stopped your way—“no cowboy bullshit, no illegal wires, no booming, no dropping your own dime.” He’s heard the whole speech before.
“I grew up in Brooklyn,” Sykes says. “In the Marcy projects.”
Malone knows the story—it’s been in the papers, paraded on the Job’s website: “From the projects to the precinct—black officer fights his way from the gangs to the upper echelon of the NYPD.” How Sykes turned his life around, got a scholarship to Brown, came home to “make a difference.”
Malone ain’t about to burst into tears.
But it has to be tough, being a black cop in a high position. Everyone looks at you different—to the people in the precinct you ain’t quite black, to the cops in the house you ain’t quite blue. Malone wonders which Sykes is to himself, or if he even knows. So, it’s gotta be tough, especially these days, all the racial shit going down.
“I know what you think of me,” Sykes says. “Empty suit. Token black careerist. ‘Move on and move up’?”
“Pretty much, we’re being honest, sir.”
“The suits want to make Manhattan North safe for white money,” Sykes says. “I want to make it safe for black people. Is that honest enough for you?”
“Yeah, that’ll do.”
“I know you think you’re protected by the Pena bust, your other heroics, by McGivern and the Irish-Italian Club downtown at One Police,” Sykes says. “But let me tell you something, Malone; you have enemies down there just waiting for you to slip on the banana peel so they can walk all over you.”
“And you’re not.”
“Right now I need you,” Sykes says. “I need you and your team to keep DeVon Carter from turning my streets into a slaughterhouse. You do that for me, I’ll, yes, move on and move up and leave you with your little kingdom here. You don’t do that for me, you’re just a white pain in my black ass and I will have you moved so far from Manhattan North you’ll be wearing a fucking sombrero to work.”
Try it, motherfucker, Malone thinks.
Try it, see what happens.
The fucked-up part, though, is they both want the same thing. They don’t want those guns getting on the streets.
And they’re my streets, Malone thinks, not yours.
He says, “I can stop that shipment. I don’t know if I can stop that shipment by the book.”
So how bad do you want them stopped, Captain Sykes?
He sits there and watches Sykes consider his own deal with the devil.
Then Sykes says, “I want reports, Sergeant. And everything you report to me had better be by the book. I want to know where you are and what you’re doing there. Do we understand each other?”
Perfectly, Malone thinks.