Condemned (48 page)

Although he denied it, even to himself, Sally Cantalupo had quickly become hooked on cocaine. He didn't have a bad habit, he told himself, he could quit if he wanted. It was just that life was so much warmer, comfortable, smoother, less hassled after he had a snort. The habit wasn't the problem, he assured himself many times. The real problem was how to afford it without his wife, and, more importantly, his father, knowing.

Sally had attended St. John's College to become an accountant. Billy Legs, his father, had insisted that his son become more than just another knock-around street guy, and, therefore, made sure that Sally studied to learn a profession. For years before he went to jail, Billy Legs had established an association with one of those combination lawyer-real estate—insurance-income tax-notary offices in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. All the people in the neighborhood for blocks around would buy their insurance or have Billy Legs' office prepare their income taxes every year. It added a measure of comfort and protection in life to be recognized as a client of Billy Legs, to be on a first name basis with The Man himself.

When Sally finished college, Billy Legs arranged for Sally to have a desk in the same office as his own. In addition, Sally's wife, whom he had met in an accounting class at St. John's, had obtained a real estate sales license, and Billy Legs arranged for her to set up a desk beside Sally's. Being an energetic woman, she decided that she could lessen the burden on Sally's shoulders by taking on responsibility for their income and finances, both business and personal, leaving for Sally the more important task of dealing with clients. As a result, Sally Cantalupo didn't have ten cents that his wife wasn't aware or in charge of. There was no way that he could siphon even fifty dollars a week from his income without his wife knowing about it.

Moses Johnson was superintendent of the housing complex known as Knickerbocker Village, near Catherine Street and the East River in Manhattan, where Sally and his wife had set up their first apartment. Billy Legs and Sally's stepmother had an apartment in a different building in the same complex. Sally would occasionally meet Moses Johnson at the bar in the Step Down Lounge on Market Street, and on several occasions, Moses had mentioned the pleasant escape he enjoyed in the arms of cocaine. One evening, down by the waterfront, in sight of the Brooklyn Bridge to the right, the Manhattan Bridge to the left, Sally Cantalupo first ventured into drugs' soft oblivion. The easy, confident feeling that resulted from the drug smoothed Sally's life, permitting him to ride out the incessant directives, the unremitting discipline others extended over his every waking moment. Life was far easier to cope with when he was a bit high.

Later, as his enjoyment of the white dream expanded, Sally found out that Tony Balls was doing a little snorting himself. They did it together a couple of times, totally in secret, since drugs were strictly off-limits for people in ‘The Life'—which included Tony Balls and even Billy Legs' son, Sally.

Just as his cocaine use was expanding, Sally learned that either Tony Balls' connections were drying up, or his willingness to break the rules so blatantly was waning. To the rescue, Moses Johnson, the Super in Sally's building complex, resurfaced. Through a connection with a Dominican building superintendent in the downtown neighborhood, Johnson developed a connection with some Dominicans in Washington Heights, where the White Dream was plentiful, and the price wasn't bad. The only problem was that the Dominicans were very cautious, and the system that they used to ensure there was no surveillance or undercover cops was tedious and required patience, a virtue that Sally was occasionally very lacking.

A short, moustachioed man with dark olive complexion exited the building and stood on the small stoop in front of the tenement building. He looked up and down the block, then nodded toward Sally Cantalupo, signaling that he could enter the building.

“How are you, my friend,” Sally Cantalupo said happily to the man as he walked with him through the entrance door.

“
Bien, bien
,” said the man, smiling. “You?”

“
Bien
,” said Sally.

“
Habla espanol muy bien, amigo
,” the man smiled.

“
Poquito, poquito
,” Sally Cantalupo laughed.

The interior of the building had a short hallway leading to a stairway on the right side. On either side of the hallway, entrance doors led to apartments at the front of the building. Alongside the stairway, a corridor led to a rear door and an outside yard. The entrance doors to rear apartments were farther back on either side of the hallway. Small television cameras were mounted on the walls of the hallway; one was focused on the rear entrance; another camera on the wall at the top of the stairs, surveilled all who used the stairs. The man with the moustache, according to an internal protocol with which Sally Cantelupo was now familiar, indicated that Sally Cantalupo should walk ahead of him up the stairs. This gave the people manning the television monitors upstairs a better view of the visitor.

In many lengthy, languid conversations overlooking the East River with Moses Johnson, Sally Cantalupo discovered that there were many people in his neighborhood who liked a little taste of the white powder. He realized, in his accountant-trained mind, keen with numbers and figures, that when he went to Washington Heights for himself, if he bought a little extra, and sold it to the discrete few he knew in his own neighborhood, he could finance his habit without his wife or father ever being the wiser.

As he reached the second landing, Sally Cantalupo knowingly turned to walk along the corridor leading to the next upward flight of stairs. There was another security camera on the far wall of the hallway, monitoring both the second floor corridor and the stairs going up to the third floor. At the top of the third landing, a camera was aimed down the stairway. Once on the third landing, the apartment door at the rear of the corridor was boarded over with heavy planks. The only accessible door on the landing was at the front of the building, reached only by walking along the corridor which was surveilled by a camera. As Sally walked the corridor, he heard the lock of the door ahead being electronically released.

Inside, an Hispanic man was seated behind a nicked, enameled-topped kitchen table on which, conspicuously, there was a machine pistol. Eight TV monitors, four stacked on top of four, were on one side of the table. Five of the monitors carried a miniaturized picture of some part of the hallway and stairwell outside. Another was an exterior view of the street from somewhere near the building. Another was of a man seated at a desk in a different room. The last was of a room filled with seated people.

Through a doorway on the right, Sally entered the room that appeared on the last TV monitor. It was the middle room of the apartment, which served as a waiting room for the customers before they were ushered into the
sanctum sanctorum
where the drugs were measured and sold.

Several people sat on a dilapidated couch and a couple of soiled armchairs, none of which matched, all of which looked as if they had been recycled from the sidewalk before the Sanitation Department collected them. Sally sat on a chair near two windows that were covered entirely by heavy curtains that had also been recycled from the trash heap. The room was brightly lit by a mechanic's extension light with a long orange cord that was plugged into the wall and suspended over the middle of the room from a string tied to the ceiling. Minuscule glimpses of the street could be stolen though irregular gaps in the center of the drapery. It was against protocol to touch the curtains or look out the window, since that would open a view of the apartment or its occupants to the outside.

“Okay, okay, party time. Who's next up?” said a short barrel of an Hispanic man who came into the waiting area from the back of the apartment. He had a machine pistol in his waistband. A tall, angular young man with glasses and flat, thin hair that hung over his forehead stood quickly, at obedient attention, ready to move forward. “Hold it, hold it, my man, don't be so anxious,” said the man with the pistol.

“Sorry.”

“No problem, no problem.” The short Hispanic waited while a woman came from the back room, stuffing something into her pants pocket. She kept her eyes toward the floor as she walked toward the entrance. There she stopped dutifully as the Hispanic in command of the TV monitors glanced at the screens. Satisfied that no one lurked in the immediate vicinity of the doorway, he pushed a button, activating the electronic door release. The woman exited, to be watched on the successive TV screens as she descended.

“Okay,
Senor
, you're at bat,” said the man with the pistol in his waist. He made a dramatic pass with his arms, directing the tall young man toward the rear of the apartment.

Those waiting on the chairs and couches, as the revelers at the March Hare's tea party, shifted one seat closer to the door leading to the interior. As the woman cleared the screen of the lowest level TV monitor, a new customer appeared on that monitor, beginning the ascent to the apartment.

Sally Cantalupo tried to act at ease as he sat, knowing that the security camera on the wall opposite the couch and chairs continually transmitted a picture of the waiting room to the monitor at the entrance, and to other monitors in the interior rooms.

After the ritual of entrances and departures had progressed to the point that Sally Cantalupo was first on the waiting line, a different Hispanic, equally equipped with a pistol, this one a .45-caliber semiautomatic, came out to escort Sally Cantalupo inside. They walked through a room in which there were two desks and some chairs at which several armed men sat or lounged, talking, sky-larking with each other. Another set of eight TV monitors, four atop four, were mounted on the wall above the desks. All eyes shifted momentarily to Sally as he passed through the room. Sally recognized two of the men from previous purchasing visits. He nodded, smiled. The two men nodded somberly.

The next room in the apartment was brightly lit. Several people were working behind tables on which there were scales, small plastic bags, larger bags, about the size of one pound coffee bags, filled with white powder. These people were cutting cocaine, taking what might have been 90% pure cocaine and diluting it with other, inexpensive, meaningless white powders leaning it to thirty-five to forty-five percent cocaine. After cutting, others were weighing and bagging the cut cocaine into smaller plastic bags that had already been rubber stamped in blue with the word ‘
Sueño
' (dream). These smaller bags were ten and twenty dollar bags for sale and distribution to customers, who might in turn, add to the price before selling it again. In one corner of the room, a man with an M-16 automatic rifle sat reading baseball scores from a Spanish newspaper.

In the last room, reached through a metal-clad door, behind a desk, his back to a wall that had “
S U E Ñ O
” painted in blue, four foot, paint dripped brush strokes, sat a fine-featured Hispanic, clean-shaven, in a mandarin-collared shirt, open at the chest, a gold chain and medallion hanging from his neck. A machine pistol was on the desk to the man's right. More monitors were mounted on the wall opposite the desk. Two more heavily armed men sat in the far corners of the room. The windows of the room had thick steel bars locked from within by heavy chains and padlocks.

“Hello,
Amigo
,” the man said to Sally Cantalupo. He smiled a wide, toothy smile as he spoke, almost without any trace of an accent.

“Hello,” smiled Sally Cantalupo. “How's it going?”

“Very, very good,” the man laughed easily. The two armed men snickered. The man glanced at the TV monitors frequently as he spoke. “What do you want to do today?”

“I'd like to pick up forty-five dollar—I mean, forty, five-dollar bags, forty of them,” Sally Cantalupo said as he stood in front of the desk, his hands behind his back.

“Sit down, relax,” said the man, motioning to a chair next to his desk.

“Thank you.” Sally sat.

“Cigarette?” the man said, offering Sally Cantalupo an open red box of Dunhill Cigarettes.

“No thanks,” said Sally Cantalupo. “I don't smoke.”

“Clean living. That's the ticket,” the man said with a tone of amusement. He put a cigarette in his lips, opened the top of a gold lighter which then spouted a gas jet flame. He blew out a spume of smoke. “My friend. I sit with you for a moment, because you strike me as an intelligent man. It's not easy dealing with”—the man groped the air with one hand for a word—“the common customers, and,” he said more softly now, “the people I have to work with.” He glanced at the men posted in the room, then the TV monitors. “This business is terrible,” the man continued.

“Really? I would have thought—with all the people, and all the customers that you have lined up …”

“No problem with customers. Plenty of customers. Not with the people who work, either. They're somewhat limited, numerous but limited.” The man inhaled, and blew another spume of smoke ceiling-ward. “It's the work itself. Stressful, you know? Always under pressure. Security. And the product, the supply is limited these days, for one reason or—I should say for one very good reason … whatever. It's nice once in a while to talk with someone intelligent, a good customer, like yourself—”

“Thank you.”

“You are a good customer, the best kind of customer. Careful, discrete, respectful. But,
disgradiamente
, I cannot give you forty bags. Twenty, perhaps twenty-two, okay, even twenty-five for round numbers. It's just not available right now. I have other customers. I have to be able to service them, too.”

“How long do you think that this thing is going to last—you know, the shortage?”

“I don't know,” said the man, tapping the ashes from his cigarette into a long distance arc toward a styrofoam cup on the floor a few feet from his chair. “Three points,” he exclaimed happily. Sally Cantalupo smiled, nodding. “You like the Knicks?” the man asked.