Sons of the City (22 page)

Mono was the guy who supervised this loose-knit confederation. He and his people handled the edged-off bets from the bookies, and made sure they were paying their 10 percent.

The Organized Crime Unit had never hit Hotshot, though at the time I was transferred we were close to going in. We had been wiretapping the place, trying to collect enough evidence for a search warrant. We already had a pile of transcripts from the phone tap. My favorite was a conversation between Mono and Spock, who was calling to place a couple of bets on horses at Philadelphia Park. Normally Mono didn’t deal with gamblers directly, but he would take bets from his fellow mobsters, who needed a bookie they could trust.

When people called Hotshot to place bets, they were supposed to use computer terminology. The problem was, not too many of the people in Bravelli’s crew were computer-literate. Including Spock, who couldn’t even stay with his code name, Dirty Harry. Here’s how the conversation went:

SPOCK: Hey, Bobby, this is Harry.

BOBBY MONO: Harry? Harry the fuck who?

SPOCK: You know, Harry … Harry … Fuck, man, Harry.

MONO: I know 10 fuckin’ Harrys. Which fuckin’ one are you?

SPOCK: Uh, Dirty Harry, Dirty Harry. How many Dirty fuckin’ Harrys do you know?

MONO: Oh, it’s you, you dumb fuck. Listen, pal, I got Harrys crawling up my ass.

SPOCK: (Unintelligible).

MONO: I know what you mean. (Unintelligible).

SPOCK: (Laughs).

MONO: What do you need?

SPOCK: I want to buy three computers, they all gotta come from Philadelphia.

MONO: Today?

SPOCK: Yeah, I’m fuckin’ buying today.

MONO: What’s your first one? SPOCK: Starting with the 1-RAM. MONO: OK.

SPOCK: I’m picking the 6 MEGS.

MONO: OK.

SPOCK: You got that? I’m putting my money on the 6 MEGS in the 1-RAM.

MONO: Yeah, I got it. 1-RAM. 6 MEGS.

SPOCK: No, the other way around.

MONO: Doesn’t matter, Harry. How much hard drive do you want?

SPOCK: I want 200 hard drives on the 6.

MONO: OK, 200 hard drive.

SPOCK: Next is the 5-RAM. I like the 12 MEG in the 5-RAM.

MONO: The 12 MEG.

SPOCK: Yeah, yeah, I been watchin’ this one for a while. I’m goin’ big, I want 500 on it.

MONO: OK, Harry, 500, you got it. Anything else?

SPOCK: Let me see now, let me see now, yeah, yeah, in the 7th RAM, I want to put 300 hard drives on the 2 MEG. On the fuckin’ nose.

MONO: Computers don’t have noses, Harry.

SPOCK: Mine fuckin’ better.

The moment Max had mentioned Bravelli’s computer, I thought of Doc. He was OC’s computer geek, and I knew that once he heard about this, he’d be salivating.

After I left Max at the McDonald’s, I called Doc and told him we needed to talk without Lanier around. He said to come on by the office, Lanier was gone.

When I got there, I laid the whole thing out, though I didn’t say who my confidential informant was. I was right, Doc was beside himself.

“Shoot, man, let’s go get that thing.”

“Doc, we’d need a warrant to even get in the place. And Lanier would have to sign off on it.”

“No, he wouldn’t. I can get one without a commander’s approval.”

“You must have a friend in the DA’s office.”

“Eddie, I got friends everywhere.”

I wasn’t going to argue with him. With that warrant, we could go into Hotshot and confiscate a few computers—including the one we wanted most.

T
hat night, West Philadelphia found another reason not to like cops. This time we didn’t bash anybody over the head, or shoot at anybody, or even lock anybody up. We just got some bad luck. But if we had set out to enrage the black community—if that had been our only goal for the night—we couldn’t have done a better job.

It began, as bad luck for cops often does, with an assist-officer call. Two women were pummeling each other on a sidewalk in West Philadelphia, and Yvonne and Marisol were dispatched to escort the two combatants to their respective corners.

Naturally, once the police arrived, the two women joined forces to defend their God-given right to kill each other, and attacked Yvonne and Marisol with their full fury.

Yvonne took a punch to the side of the head and went down immediately, and when she tried to stand up, she got a kick that cracked a rib. Then both women came after Marisol, who was barely able to put out a call for help on the radio before she went down as well.

Paulie Rapone wasn’t far away, and he flipped on his lights and siren and hit the gas. He would have done the same thing for anyone in the district, but he might have been going just a little bit faster because it was Yvonne and Marisol.

Until a year or so before, Paulie was just another older white cop who complained all the time about the Department’s changing complexion. He believed affirmative action was ruining the Department, filling the ranks with minority cops—particularly females—who lacked the training, the dedication, and the instincts of old-school guys like him. He would barely speak to Yvonne, who was black, and to Marisol, who was Latino, and so they in turn wanted nothing to do with him.

One night, though, Yvonne and Marisol saved his life. He had been chasing a drug dealer, and the dealer turned on him and somehow got Paulie’s gun away. He was about to shoot Paulie in the head when Yvonne and Marisol ran up and together knocked the guy to the ground. They said it was no big deal, but he never forgot.

And so when he heard Marisol’s call for help over the radio, he pushed his car in that direction as fast as it would go. He was four blocks away, flying through the intersection of 48th and Spruce, when he hit the old man.

Paulie had the light, even the most angry witnesses later admitted to that. But it was dark, and Paulie’s car seemed to come out of nowhere. And it wasn’t even Paulie hitting the man that people felt was so outrageous, so inexcusable. It was what happened after that.

Paulie saw the man at the last second, an old black guy with a cane, stepping out quickly into the street. Paulie swerved to the left, hard, but he was too close, and the right front corner of his car caught the man and simply flicked him into the air. He was so light, Paulie barely even felt the impact.

There wasn’t much Paulie remembered after that. Later, he recalled losing control of the car, and struggling desperately to keep from slamming broadside into a streetlight. But he had no memory of the crash, or of calling for help, dazed and bloody, before he passed out.

We now had two assist-officer calls at the same time. There were a lot of cars coming in, everyone in the district, and they should have split up, fifty-fifty, on the two assists. But there was chaos on the radio, and for the first few minutes, Donna and Buster were the only ones who arrived to help Paulie.

What they saw when they pulled up at 48th and Spruce was a police car wrapped around a streetlight, its windshield cracked from the inside, its red and blue lights still flashing.

They didn’t see the old man—he had been hurtled over a row of parked cars, onto the sidewalk, out of sight. They didn’t even know he was there. And so while life slipped out of the old man, Donna and Buster stayed with Paulie. It wasn’t until a woman finally ran up to them, screaming and pointing, that they realized what had happened.

Of course, the neighbors didn’t know that. All they saw was two white cops helping one of their own, ignoring the black man that cops had just run down. And still it got worse. When the Rescue unit pulled up, the paramedics saw the same thing Donna and Buster had—the police car. And they ran to help Paulie first.

Word spread quickly through the neighborhood that night and the next day. There was no way the black community was going to forgive us—particularly after the papers reported that the old man had died on his way to the hospital. It never would have happened, people said, if the old man had been white.

It turned out that Paulie wasn’t seriously hurt, and that Yvonne and Marisol were OK as well. But the people of West Philadelphia didn’t care about that. We were the enemy.

That’s when the first beer bottles started getting thrown at passing police cars, exploding onto windshields with the sound of gunshots.

T
hat night, Michelle wanted to see me. Could I meet her at her old apartment up in the Northeast? I got off at eleven. I told her it would have to be after that.

“That’s great,” she said over the phone. “I’m really looking forward to seeing you again.”

I got there around eleven-thirty. It was a garden-apartment complex off Roosevelt Boulevard, one of those generic, three-story, brown-brick jobs that could be anywhere in the country—Atlanta, Minneapolis, San Diego. This one happened to be across the street from a video store that also sold handmade water ice from a window.

The apartment was on the third floor. I rapped on the door a couple of times with the little door knocker, and Michelle answered.

“Hi, Eddie,” she said, giving me a hug. “Wait’ll you hear, I’ve got a great story to tell you.”

I wanted to say I had missed her, I wanted to kiss her, but she was already leading me into the living room.

“C’mon in, I want you to meet Theresa.”

Michelle was still dressed, but Theresa was in a pink terry cloth bathrobe. She had one of those faces you call cute—sort of big, round, playful eyes, pug nose, cheerful high-school smile.

Michelle introduced us and we shook hands, and I could tell Theresa was thinking, So this is the guy she was telling me about. I wondered what Michelle had said. Theresa got me a bottle of beer and then disappeared into a bedroom, and I sat down on the soft pink couch.

Michelle was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a pocket, and though her hair was still curly, she looked less Westmount and more Northeast, more at home. I caught a faint scent of her perfume. It reminded me of the night we met, she must have been wearing it then.

“Eddie, you’re never going to believe what happened,” she said, plopping down across from me in a padded white swivel chair. “But how have you been?”

“Good,” I said. “I’ve been fine.”

“How’s Nick doing, any better?” I had been keeping her posted on the trouble I was having with him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m still pretty worried about him.”

She nodded, concerned.

“So,” I said, “what’s this thing that happened?”

She popped up out of her chair and walked over to her purse on the kitchen table.

“You’re going to love this, Eddie.” She opened the purse, took out a plain white envelope, and walked back over and handed it to me. I looked inside as she sat back down on the chair—the envelope was full of hundreds.

“There’s three thousand dollars in there,” she said proudly.

“You steal this?” I smiled. I expected her to smile back, but she was thinking about my question.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “But you can tell me what you think.”

A couple of mornings before, she said, Bravelli was going through the
Philadelphia Post,
looking for the latest story on the racial tension in West Philadelphia.

“Mickey said—”

“Bravelli,” I corrected.

Michelle shook her head. “All right, Bravelli said what he’d really like to see are riots.”

“Riots?”

“Yeah, he’s hoping all this anti-police stuff is going to get out of hand.”

“Because he doesn’t like cops.”

“Well, yeah, but he says that if you put national attention on West Philadelphia, the black Mafia will just fade away.” “Interesting theory.”

Eventually, Bravelli started reading the paper’s gossip column, by Jay Bender. One of the items was that some Japanese investors were considering buying Bikini Planet, one of the waterfront clubs on the Delaware. Bender said the “rumored” price for the club was $3 million, and mentioned that the Japanese were staying at the Fitler Hotel while they were making up their minds.

“He was looking at that paper all morning. You could see his mind working, he was coming up with something.”

“All morning,” I repeated. “Where was this, at the clubhouse?”

“No, no,” she said, “at his house. Anyway—”

“Was this like really early in the morning?” I asked.

Michelle looked at me. “Are you asking whether I spent the night there?”

“I guess I am.”

“Is that what you really think of me?”

“No, but …”

“Look, I didn’t spend the night at his house, and I’m not sleeping with him. I told you, that’s one of the reasons he respects me.”

“And he’s stopped pressuring you?”

“No, he still is. I think he can’t quite believe he’s got a girlfriend he doesn’t sleep with. It’s like, this couldn’t possibly happen. I’m sure he’d never admit it to anyone.”

“I see. So he considers you his official girlfriend.” I tried to keep the anger out of my voice, but I knew Michelle couldn’t miss it.

“You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

“Of course, Michelle. What do you think?”

She relaxed a little and smiled. “You’re funny, you know that, Eddie?”

“Yeah, I’m a regular laugh riot.”

Michelle smiled at me for a while longer. Then, as if the last conversation had never taken place, went on with her story.

After Bravelli had finished reading Bender’s column, he went into the next room and talked on the phone for about half an hour. When he came back he asked her if she wanted to make an easy few thousand dollars.

“Doing what?” Michelle had asked.

“You got to say yes first,” said Bravelli. “You got to agree before I can tell you what it is.”

“That’s pretty stupid,” said Michelle. “Who would go for that?”

Bravelli just gave her a blank look and said, “Well, we all do.”

“Could you at least give me a hint?” Michelle asked.

Bravelli started laughing. “A hint? You want a hint? What do you think this is, a fuckin’ game show?”

That made Michelle furious.

“I told him he couldn’t talk to me like that. I said, ‘You treat me with respect, or I’m gone.’ He got very apologetic, and said he’d never do it again.”