Another Life (70 page)

Maybe it was in the cards the moment members of the mob started to write about their world. Maybe it had always depended on silence and secrecy. Maybe Bonanno himself, in his attempt to justify the world he lived in and set the record straight from his point of view, had helped to bring about the end of it by raising the curtain on what went on behind the stage.

The mob, it turned out, had been better served by
omertà
than by best-sellers, and in the end all that was left of it was a collection of recipes for people with hearty appetites who liked Italian food.

I
T WENT
largely unnoticed by those who criticized S&S for publicizing or enriching Mafia figures that we published even more books by cops and FBI agents—so much so that at one time when I was visiting One Police Plaza (headquarters of the NYPD), I remarked that everyone in the building seemed to be spending his time at a typewriter writing an outline or looking for an agent.

I began, as it were, at the top, by publishing the autobiography of Patrick Murphy, Mayor John Lindsay’s controversial NYPD commissioner. Murphy was controversial, in fact, only within the ranks of the NYPD—elsewhere he was universally admired. His view that it was not sufficient for an officer merely to refuse graft and bribes, that he must actually
report
on fellow officers who were corrupt, was regarded as revolutionary in the 1960s and still is. Murphy always seemed to me to be a man who would have been more comfortable as a Jesuit than as a police officer, but we worked well together and produced a very good book,
Commissioner
, which dealt in detail with most of the problems that still haunt the NYPD today. This was no small achievement. Before Murphy (and for the most part after him), it was unthinkable for a police commissioner to actually admit in print that there might be anything wrong with the NYPD, and the reaction to
Commissioner
within the
NYPD was pretty similar to that of Bonanno’s among the bosses of organized crime—a combination of shock and outrage.

Murphy was good-natured about the fuss. In his own quiet way, he was a pretty tough cookie, and being a cop himself, cops didn’t scare him—nor mayors either, for he proved to be famously resistant to Mayor Lindsay, who had been under the impression that his police commissioner would take his orders from City Hall. Perhaps because we both enjoyed target shooting, Murphy and I became friendly, and I developed a certain interest in policing. At the time, Murphy had stirred up a lot of bad feelings in the NYPD by opening up more command positions to officers who weren’t of old Irish police stock, and had even suggested that a black and a white officer might share the same police car, a notion so radical that mass resignations were threatened. Once, when I visited Murphy on the top floor of police headquarters, I pointed out to him jokingly that while big changes were being made at the precinct level, practically everybody on his floor, right down to the sergeants, was of Irish descent. It might well be Grabowski and Vitigliano in a prowl car, but on the way to the commissioner’s office the signs on the doors announced an endless succession of sons of Erin among the chiefs, deputy chiefs, and their staff. Murphy was not amused. It had apparently never struck him as strange.

I
T WAS
because of my friendship with Murphy that I went out to Detroit to meet with an even more radical police commissioner. Ray Girardin was a reporter who had been criticizing the Detroit police department for years, until a reform mayor, in a move that surprised everyone, put Girardin in command of Detroit’s police, with instructions to shake things up. In addition to the usual problems of a big-city police department—corruption, cronyism, antiquated equipment and methods—Detroit was saddled with a racial problem that made New York City look like the New Jerusalem. In Detroit, a predominantly white police force clamped down hard on an inner-city population that was mostly black and poor, in the interests of a white upper middle class that had long since moved out to the suburbs. Girardin became something of a hero—everywhere but in Detroit, needless to say—by rolling up his sleeves and forcing change on the Detroit police department. Many of those changes—“community policing,” a civilian review
board to examine charges of police brutality, nondiscrimination within the department—remain major and controversial issues in other American cities more than thirty years later. It was Girardin, largely forgotten, who first tried to put them into effect.

As it happened, Girardin’s reforms were swept away by an unexpected event—although perhaps not entirely unexpected by Girardin, since he had predicted it—the Detroit riots of 1967.

Affable and soft-spoken, Girardin promised to have me picked up at the airport by a police car and taken straight to meet him, which sounded a lot better than a taxi. When I arrived, two cops were waiting for me. In keeping with the Detroit police department’s well-earned reputation for macho policing, they carried huge amounts of extra ammunition on their belts, leather “slappers,” weighted nightsticks, the kind of old-fashioned policeman’s gloves that had strips of flexible lead sewn into the leather over the knuckles, and not one but
two
pairs of handcuffs. They looked at me stonily through dark Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses—anybody coming to visit Commissioner Girardin from New York was potentially the enemy, a liberal, a do-gooder, a bleeding heart, perhaps even a journalist. Wordlessly, they led me outside, as if they had just arrested me.

Inside their police car, two twelve-gauge Winchester riot guns were fixed in clamps to the dashboard and the floor, a sight not often seen in the Big Apple. I did not listen to the chatter on the radio as we drove into town from the airport, but I noticed a certain uneasiness in my two escorts, who were whispering to each other in the front seat. I asked if there was a problem. No, I was told, everything was OK, but they needed to make a slight detour, if I didn’t mind. I said I didn’t mind at all, at which point the siren and the flashing lights were turned on, and with a screech of tires we set off through the endless suburbs of Detroit, ignoring red lights and stop signs.

By now, the radio chatter had a certain hysterical tone to it, and even I could make out the word
shootings
and the phrase
officer in need of assistance
. We were driving through poorer neighborhoods now, and a number of black men in the streets looked at the police car with undisguised anger. From time to time I heard what seemed to me the sound of shots. At last the police car pulled to a sudden stop, my two escorts unclipped their shotguns, and they got out of the car. “Just stay put,” one of them said. “We’ll lock the doors. You’ll be OK.” I didn’t much fancy sitting in a locked police car for who knew how long, while angry
crowds roamed the streets, but the two cops didn’t pause long enough to debate the point—besides, better inside the car than out on the pavement as possibly the only white civilian for miles around. From time to time, somebody threw a rock or a bottle at the police car, and a couple of kids spat on the windshield. It was not exactly comfortable, but I told myself that for somebody who had lived through the Hungarian Revolution, this was small potatoes. Soon, there was an odor of burning. Through the windshield, I could make out fires. From somewhere behind me came the noise of breaking glass. I hunkered down in the backseat and hoped for the best.

What seemed like hours passed, though it was probably not more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Eventually, my two escorts reappeared, unlocked the door, and got in. They brought with them an aroma that I recognized instantly from Budapest: a pungent combination of spent gunpowder, sweat, and soot. They were clearly in no mood for explanations. Wearily, they reloaded their guns, then we set off again. Two or three times more we stopped and repeated this little drama, until we headed back toward the center of Detroit, away from the angry mob.

“We’ll have you there in a couple of minutes,” the cop next to the driver said, swiveling around to look at me. His face was darkened with smoke, and his eyes were bloodshot. Looking at him, I was reminded of the duke of Wellington’s remark on the first sight of his army in Spain: “I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.”

“What’s going on out there?” I asked.

“A riot.”

“How bad is it?”

“Pretty bad.”

“If they want to burn down their own neighborhoods, let ’em,” the driver said, with a shrug.

His companion nodded. “Sure. But you got to stop them looting. And shooting at us.”

They both fell silent for a moment. I had no difficulty in imagining what was likely to happen to anybody who was suspected of opening fire on a Detroit cop.

“You’ll be OK at headquarters,” the driver said. “I’ll say one thing for Girardin. At least he was smart enough to take a few precautions. I mean he must have seen it coming. That’s why he had all the manhole covers around headquarters welded shut. He didn’t want them pulling
the manhole covers, then breaking into the building from underground.”

Even in Budapest, I reflected, nobody had taken this precaution. The idea that the manhole covers around police headquarters had been welded shut at the last minute gave me some sense of just what was taking place here—a realization confirmed by the sight of my destination, which was ringed by armored cars and floodlights.

As it turned out—and not surprisingly—Girardin was too busy to spend any time with me. His office had the look of the Smolny Institute, from which Lenin directed the 1918 revolution: heavily armed men trooping up and down the stairs, weapons stacked everywhere, people rushing back and forth with urgent messages, an almost palpable sense of urgency in the air, and the unmistakable scent of violence everywhere. At least half a dozen people told me that the manhole covers had been welded shut.

I flew back the next morning, having been driven to the airport by another silent pair of cops, through streets that were deserted and over which hung a thick pall of smoke.

Few of my subsequent books from the right side of the law led me into any similar adventure. I was taken on a tour of Chinatown by the precinct captain, introduced to the NYPD detective who specialized in art theft, and spent a good deal of time at One Police Plaza, meeting prospective authors. Since law enforcement is a small world, I soon had books by FBI agents and even by U.S. marshals. Just like the people in organized crime, every law-enforcement officer has a story to tell, and most of them are good raconteurs.

I’ve never done a police cookbook, though. Not yet. Probably somebody is writing one right now in the front seat of a patrol car.

T
HE SEARCH
for a different kind of criminal, by a very different kind of cop, brought Peter Mayer and me together again briefly when I was presented with the opportunity to buy Ladislas Farago’s
Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich
, by his longtime (and long-suffering) agent, Maximillian Becker. Farago was the author of a best-selling biography of Patton and a kind of self-appointed expert on matters of secret intelligence. “Laci” (the Hungarian diminutive of Ladislas), as Farago was always called by his friends, was a rotund,
bearded man, with an ingratiating smile and definitely uningratiating eyes.

In Farago, I instantly recognized a type completely familiar to me: the transplanted Hungarian with the deliberately mysterious background who knows (or claims to know) everyone and is so far beyond scruples as not to understand their existence. Farago embodied all those stories about the cleverness of Hungarians—“A Hungarian is a man who enters a revolving door behind you, and comes out ahead of you”; “The Hungarian recipe for an omelet begins, ‘First, steal a dozen eggs.’ ”

Farago might have posed for the portrait of “the Hungarian on the make,” with his soft, heavily accented voice, his gestures, his charm, his endless fund of anecdotes, his hypnotic self-confidence, and his total imperviousness to abuse, insults, or refusals. It was a waste of breath saying no to Farago—he simply bounced back like an inflated rubber beach toy and came at you from another direction. Once, later in our relationship, when I had learned to be cautious, Farago appeared in my office in distress, tears in his eyes, to ask for a further advance of $5,000 against the book he had been writing for many months, none of which I had as yet seen because it was “too secret and dangerous” to show me. He had spent so much money on research, Farago said, that he was broke. His house was about to be taken away from him, his beloved, patient wife was prostrate with fear and distress, he was a ruined man if I said no. Nothing less than $5,000 could save him. He would go down on his knees before me, if necessary. I said no anyway—after several such pleas, Dick Snyder had warned me to turn off the money tap until we saw some manuscript—but Laci, far from breaking down or getting angry, kept right on smiling. “Well,” he said, “if not five thousand, how about five hundred as a personal loan, from one Hungarian to another?”

It was Farago’s thesis that the Fourth Reich was in existence and flourishing in South America and that an active Nazi underground was thriving there. He had set out to document this, and in the course of his researches had come upon proof that Martin Bormann was alive and well and living in prosperity as one of the leaders of this movement. Of course, there was a grain of truth to all this, as everybody knew, particularly since the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann. Farago documented a whole subculture of escaped Nazis, with their social clubs, their own German villages painstakingly re-created in the Andes and on the
rolling plains of Argentina. He even produced photographs of an annual beauty contest in which “Miss Teenage Nazi South America” was chosen in a beer hall draped in swastikas that looked alarmingly like the one in Munich from which the Führer had launched his movement.

All this was interesting, but what was sensational was the claim that Farago had found Bormann, not only alive and well but in control of a vast fortune in Nazi funds smuggled to South America in the last years of the war. Bormann, Farago alleged, had fled to Argentina with the help of the Vatican, paid over a substantial part of his fortune to Eva Perón in exchange for protection, then moved among half a dozen South American countries, and ended up in a convent-hospital in the windswept Bolivian Andes run by Redemptorist nuns, where “between freshly laundered sheets,” he recovered from injections designed to prolong his life and awaited the return to power of Juan Perón. Farago had not only actually
seen
the ailing
Reichsleiter
, but in a complicated transaction, for which we had paid him another emergency transfusion of money to travel to South America again, had acquired a beer bottle that bore Bormann’s fingerprints, as well as a photograph of Bormann taken as he crossed the Bolivian frontier on his way to the convent.