THE PRECINCT | LIFE IN THE FIFTH - PART TWO
She kneels sideways on the seat, ducking her head and spiked gray hair against the roof. Officer Peters leans forward and carefully inserts the needle into her lieutenant's belly and pushes the plunger. Done.
Lieutenant Fanale sits back down and picks up her radio.
"How we doing?" she asks the officers near the pool hall. "Is he in yet?"
The Metrosexual
The little boutiques are Officer Stellmann's beat. Incredible, the changes around here. Fathers used to make their family wait in the car while they checked their building's foyer for sleeping homeless people. These days the most obvious crime is the Bolognese sauce. Today, fathers drop $20 on a round of rice pudding cups, from a shop that sells only rice pudding.
The boutiques boggle the minds of police officers, most of them with homes on Long Island or Staten Island: the stores seem to open when they feel like it, and sell about seven things, and they make a killing. Often high on price and low on security, the boutiques have been ripe targets for simple larcenies, young men darting into, say, the store Vice on Lafayette Street, grabbing a bunch of jeans and running out.
Officer Stellmann's business cards are tacked behind counters all over Little Italy and its younger, moneyed cousin, NoLIta. The officer, who is 31, began work in the precinct 10 years ago, a restaurant manager turned rookie cop aiming high. "I wanted to be a gung-ho cop. I wanted to make a lot of arrests. Rise up the ladder, be a big boss."
That's not quite what happened. He spent his first three years on two fixed posts, standing around, first at the South Street Seaport, then at the courthouse. "I didn't see a patrol car. I didn't arrest anybody. I hated it." It bored him into underachievement. "That ruined my whole aspect of becoming a boss on this job," he says.
"I thought it was going to be cops and robbers, gung-ho stuff. But our major crime is mostly car boosters, peddlers. That's a major thing for the precinct. This is more of a political precinct." More schmoozing than shooting. He became the precinct's delegate to the union.
He periodically drops by the shops on his beat, to check out the security, and the sales. "The joke in the precinct is I'm the metrosexual cop," says Officer Stellmann, who is from Queens and is known in the precinct as Sonny. "I get my nails done every month. I get a pedicure every two months. I get my eyebrows plucked, my body waxed. I like to dress well, to feel good. I love fashion."
The Rookie
One warm Friday, the anticrime squad tries its own trick, a pick operation. A plainclothes officer walks down Canal with her backpack unzipped. More officers follow - or "ghost " - her from a discreet distance.
The bait is a rookie, Officer Suk Too, 28, a Chinese immigrant who wanted to be a police officer since high school here. "They picked on us because we're small, me and my friends," she said. She is so short, she worries that she will never be able to patrol on a bicycle because she may not be able to reach the pedals.
"I'm short and I'm small, and every time I'd look up to a cop I feel like, wow, it must be really cool to be a cop," she said.
Cool, indeed: Last month, Officer Too, responding to a 911 call of someone throwing bottles out a window in SoHo, found herself in an elevator with a disturbed and rambling Courtney Love. She tried calming her down, and called her Courtney.
Today she looks every inch the part of a student strolling aimlessly, with her sunglasses and T-shirt and half-open backpack. If you look closely, you can even see a dollar bill sticking out of the wallet. People hurry and shuffle and glide and lurch past her.
No takers. An older officer tells her later that one guy seemed interested in the wallet, but that Officer Too walked off too fast for him to make his move. "You see somebody who looks good, you slow down," the officer says. "Let them have a chance."
In the old days, rookies stood in front of corpses, keeping the rubberneckers moving, or twirling their nightsticks at the seaport to ward off drug dealers and addicts. Now it's pickpockets and rock stars.
With the arrival of spring, Canal Street teems with residents, window-shoppers, tourists. Victims. It's not hard to imagine that some of the thieves use tricks that were popular a hundred years ago, when the area was the Five Points slum.
There is the Ketchup Trick: Guy comes up from behind and secretly squirts ketchup on the unsuspecting target, then points out the stain and offers to help, eventually picking the flustered person's pocket.
There are the second-story men, breaking into Chinatown apartments from the fire escape while the residents are out, looting the place, and leaving from the front door. Thieves from Brooklyn come over on the train, snatch a few purses, and are back across the East River before an Asian officer with the right dialect can take a report - if the victim calls the police at all.
Like wide neckties and disco, even the old tricks come back. "When's the last time you saw the rock-in-the-box?" an officer in civilian clothes asks, jerking his thumb toward the man locked up in the holding cell in the back room. The man had tried to sell the officer a camcorder, still in the box, for $150 on Canal Street. Inside was a hunk of concrete wrapped in paper.
There are still D.O.A.'s, dead-on-arrivals, that the officers regularly find in the precinct. Each one is a life lost, a source of pain to friends and family.
But when is a dead man in the precinct good news in the station house?
One night, a man rushes to a friend's apartment. He has not heard from him in days, and hurries to the little walk-up in Little Italy and asks the superintendent to unlock the door. It opens, but only a little. The chain inside is latched. Not good.
Officer Anthony Keck and his partner, Officer Wang Lee, respond to the call. Officer Keck leans back on one big boot and puts the other into the door, snapping the chain. Hand resting on his holstered gun, he walks inside the cluttered one-bedroom and peeks around a corner. He winces, turns back toward the door and says, "D.O.A."
The body is sprawled awkwardly on the floor, as if trying to roll over. The gray, sunken face is unrecognizable from the one on the man's California driver's license, a 46-year-old personal manager in the music industry who once worked with Herbie Hancock and David Byrne on soundtracks that led to Academy Awards for them. He was trying for a comeback.
None of the officers know any of this, or have ever heard of him. More arrive.
"You got a smoke?" one asks.
Another shakes his head.
"Oh, man, you quit?" the first asks. "How'd you do it?"
"Wanted to."
There is cocaine and heroin paraphernalia in the room. Variety and Billboard will publish short obituaries in the days ahead, but Compstat will not record this death. The numeral 1 in the precinct's murder column will not change in this apartment.
When is a dead man good news?
When he got that way himself.
The Enterprising Officer
Officer George Wolfrom, 32, has watched the sun rise over the neighborhood from behind the wheel of his patrol car since February of 2000, when he joined the department. It's great for golfing: off duty at 7:50 a.m. every day, teeing off by 10.
Officer Wolfrom is one of a handful of military reservists in the precinct. He shipped out to Iraq for half of last year with the Marines, mainly patrolling Nasiriya. He is single; there was no wife worrying back home, no children. Truth is, he loved it. "There was no better feeling as an American," he says. "I'd definitely go back if I was called."
If you're a police officer, there are two ways to leave the precinct. Ask to, or screw up. He has a plan: "My goal is to go to the Joint Terrorist Task Force. I have a little experience in fighting terrorists. It's something I think I would be very good at."
To get on the task force, an officer has to get his gold shield, make the rank of detective. Officer Wolfrom is smart enough to know that the department is thick with others who think they are headed to an elite unit, only to wake up for work 15 years later with the same uniform hanging on the back of the chair.
The job is like war that way. Promotions come quickly in combat, slowly during peacetime. In a department of some 37,000 officers, it is not easy to stand out.
Unless you catch a break.
In early April, Officer Wolfrom responded to a call in a neighboring precinct, a woman lying on the subway tracks. The police got her up and put her in an ambulance to Bellevue Hospital Center for a psychiatric work-up. Officer Wolfrom ended up taking her husband along in his radio car.
The next day, stuck in traffic after golfing, he heard a news report on the radio about the rape of a patient in Bellevue. The victim's description of the rapist sounded familiar: the husband. Officer Wolfrom called a detective. By the time he got to work shortly before midnight, the husband had been arrested.
Days later, Officer Wolfrom found himself dressed in a suit and standing beside Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly at a ceremony at 1 Police Plaza. The news media were there, cameras, the whole deal. He played down his role: "There's not many people at Bellevue that tall and wearing a leather jacket." The commissioner handed him a check for $500 and told him, "Spend it in good health."
He did, starting with a steak at Peter Luger. Coincidentally, that night was the precinct's private Spring Fling party at Capitale, a swank club in a former bank on the Bowery. He kept the suit on and smiled at the waitress with the tray of something called caponata. Not bad. Despite the year-old smoking ban, most hands at the party sprouted lit cigarettes like thin, pale fingers. His tie loosened, beer in hand, Officer Wolfrom spent much of the night being slapped on the back by his fellow officers.
A year ago, he thought, I was drinking warm water in Nasiriya. Wow.
Friends told him this couldn't be bad for getting closer to the task force. "This," he said, "hopefully speeds things up."
Anatomy of a Bad Day
At a recent community meeting, things were dragging. An elderly man in the back was insisting there had been a breach in parliamentary procedure.
The cellphone on Lieutenant Fanale's hip should have already rung to tell her the results of her blood test that morning, and whether she was finally pregnant. "I'm a nervous wreck," she muttered. Most of the officers in the building knew she was expecting news from the doctor. After all, this is the woman who, when she leaves the precinct house, shouts over her shoulder, "Heading out like a fetus!"
She finally got the call after 10 p.m. "It's not good news. That's why you didn't call, right?" she said into her cellphone. Around her, 10 officers stopped what they were doing and stared.
Pause. "What does that mean?" the lieutenant asked.
Pause. "So I might be pregnant right now?"
The officers exchanged looks. Might be pregnant?
"O.K. O.K. O.K. O.K. Should I be taking it easy or anything?"
The lieutenant hung up. The voice on the other end had said her hormone levels were high for someone who was not pregnant, but alarmingly low for someone who was. Yes, she might be pregnant. They would draw blood again in two days to be sure.
Some officers mumbled awkward congratulations as she dialed her mother. Most just disappeared.
Two days passed: Friday, the beginning of what was shaping up to be a long weekend. The night before in Queens, in the 109th Precinct, a stabbing occurred and was believed to involve Asian gangs; officers working the case were tipped that a retaliatory strike could take place in Chinatown. An extra slate of six officers and a sergeant were assigned the evening and midnight shifts for three days, a total of six overtime shifts. Nobody was getting a weekend.
And nobody needed one as badly as Lieutenant Fanale, standing, as sundown approached, in front of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. She directed another officer to keep traffic off this block of Mott Street until a wedding inside ended.
She was baptized in this church. She was on the way here when her cellphone rang. It was the doctor. She had been pregnant, but she had a miscarriage. "Sometime between Wednesday morning and Friday morning," she said outside the cathedral. Organ music seeped out from inside.
The lieutenant looked exhausted. A helicopter hovered overhead somewhere, out of sight. She thought it must be the police, part of the extra detail for the weekend, a show of presence beyond the uniforms on the street.
She was wrong.
A week later, the story was shown on the Channel 2 news at 11 p.m., the lead segment in the broadcast: "Why was a New York City street shut down for a wedding?" the anchor asked, staring gravely into the camera. "It looks like a well-connected couple was getting married and didn't want to deal with traffic. Now an investigation is under way into this controversial police perk. . . .''
The report included complaints from two or three people who live or work in the neighborhood, and a promise from a city councilman to look into the matter, calling the closing "completely unacceptable."
The helicopter overhead that day was Chopper 2, shooting images of the two stretch limousines.
Two days after the story was broadcast, Lieutenant Fanale was still fuming. "I haven't been able to sleep, I'm so annoyed."
The wedding was not a special case, she insisted. Between the parked limousines and construction across the street, cars had little room to pass that day, and the street was closed for less than an hour. The police did the same thing the day before for a big funeral in Chinatown.
"A lot of people don't understand; all they have to do is ask, and we'll accommodate them," she said. "It makes our jobs easier."
Yes, she knew the couple getting married, although remotely, through friends of her grandparents who lived for many years on the next block from the church. By that standard, she knows everyone who has spent any time in the neighborhood in the last half century.
"All those shops on Mott, Mulberry, they all have my cellphone number, in case someone picks their pocket or whatever. And these are the same people who are back-stabbing me," she said. "I don't have to give out my cellphone number. Technically, I could tell them to call 911."
She had the next two days off, her first two in a row since she was on bed rest with the implanted embryos two weeks before.
Epilogue
Captain Matusiak marked his first anniversary as commanding officer last week. The tug-of-war with Compstat continues: This week, he will try to keep the number of crimes below 24, the figure for the same week last year. The summer of 2003 was a wet one, and the weather kept the criminals indoors, but this season has been sunnier, and crime is down only about 2 percent.
Officer Wolfrom was transferred to the precinct's anticrime unit in June. He gets to work in plain clothes, and takes a step toward a gold shield. He works from 4 p.m. to midnight and squeezes in his golf before work. A few weeks after his Bellevue collar, a man he was trying to restrain on the Lower East Side punched him in the mouth, chipping a tooth.
Officer Too still walks her post on Canal Street and answers the phone in the station. From time to time, she gets to work in plain clothes, as she did in May, when she visited three Chinese groceries and bought a bottle of counterfeit cough syrup at each one.
Lieutenant Fanale is considering taking the captain's test, after completing her degree. She has not decided whether she will try again with pregnancy. "I'm trying not to think about it," she says. She was offered a job at 1 Police Plaza, a post in the domestic violence unit, but she turned it down. Too much desk work.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
