Apaches (2 page)

“You proud of me now?” Giovanni asked.

“You goin’ back to school tomorrow?” his father asked, standing up, dusting off the back of his pants.

“Yeah,” Giovanni said.

“Then I’m proud of you,” Johnny Frontieri said. “And if you end up catchin’ a fish we can all eat, I’ll be even prouder.”

•    •    •

A
S HE GOT
older, Giovanni would often dream of a career designing great structures in cities around the world. His would be a life far removed from one confined to tenements and churches, a life in which a hard day’s labor was rewarded only by a solid meal. As a young man, he looked with disdain upon the fabric of his neighborhood—the old women longing for dead men, street hoods living off the gambling habits of the working poor, the church offering solace and peace to the faithful, demanding silent suffering in return. As an adult, he would pine for that lost world, but in his early years in
the New York City of 1955, Giovanni Frontieri was intent on hitting the fast lane out of his East Harlem ghetto.

The murder of his father brought those plans to a halt.

•    •    •

I
T RAINED THE
day Giovanni’s father died. His legs crossed, John was leaning back in a two-seater in the third car of a near-empty IRT train, on his way to work. It was nearly three in the morning when they passed the Twenty-third Street station. The passengers were either heading to a working man’s job or coming back from an uptown night of drink and dance. Three of the latter, two loud men and one giggling woman, sat in the middle of the car, to the left of John Frontieri. The men were drunk and unsteady, the taller of the two drinking from a pint of Jack Daniel’s, free hand resting on the woman’s knee. The train was stifling, heat hissing from open vents under the seats.

John Frontieri shook his head as he read his Italian newspaper. He was more concerned about Naples losing a title game to Florence than about the hard looks exchanged by the two men across the aisle. He didn’t see one of the men stand and reach for an overhead strap handle. John was reading about an open net goal scored on an inept Naples defense when the man standing pulled a gun and aimed it at the other man, who, five hours earlier, had been his best friend.

In a hard city, a man’s life is often decided by the actions of a simple moment. For Johnny Frontieri that moment arrived in the form of a train engineer who hit the brakes too hard coming into the Fourteenth Street subway stop. The squealing halt turned the man with the gun away from his friend and toward Johnny. The man stared at Frontieri, knowing, even through the haze, that it was too late to stop what had been done.

Frontieri looked up from his paper and knew he was about to die.

He was forty-one years old and had never missed a day’s work in his life. In the spark of an instant, the images of his wife and children meshed into one warm thought.

The doors to the train opened.

The bullet from the cocked gun hit John Frontieri in the forehead. The back of his skull spread across a subway map behind him as his newspaper fell to the floor.

The woman stared up at the standing man and the thin line of smoke from the fired gun in his hand. She then turned to look at the man in the corner of the train, slumped in his seat, blood thick as mud dripping down his chest. She shook her head, tears frozen to her eyes, and screamed.

A scream Johnny Frontieri never heard.

•    •    •

G
IOVANNI WAS DRIVEN
downtown with his older brother to identify their father’s body. He looked with impassive eyes as the white sheet was lifted to reveal the dead man whom he loved more than any other. There had been few words between the two, fewer smiles, no middle-American fantasies of touch football games in the yard, camping trips in the summer, or boisterous talks around a dinner table. There was just a love and respect built around a solid wall of silence. A love built on trust.

Giovanni Frontieri reached down, grabbed his father’s cold hand, and kissed it. He then turned away and never looked back. He never cried for the man on the icy slab, not then, not at the well-attended funeral, not at the cemetery. Giovanni would shed his tears in another way, one which his father would appreciate.

He would get even.

That night, riding in the back of a quiet squad car, heading home to a crying mother and two hysterical sisters, his slow breathing clouding the sides of the window,
Giovanni Frontieri decided to become a cop. He was sixteen years old.

He raced from high school to the army to the Police Academy with a boxer’s fury. On the streets, he hated the uniform but liked the taste left in his mouth from being a cop. He stayed clear of neighborhood tags, choosing instead to go for the big arrests. He never wrote up a parking violation, hassled a bookie, or shook down a numbers runner. He saw the working poor not as the enemy, but as important allies to be used against the larger fish that floated in the nearby swamps of drugs, murder, and shakedowns.

In November 1964, the same week Lyndon B. Johnson won a landslide presidential election, Giovanni Frontieri was moved out of uniform and into plainclothes. He was assigned to buy-and-bust operations in Harlem, a neighborhood he had watched change all too quickly from a haven of hardworking families living in well-kept apartments to the central headquarters for desperate men hungry for heroin. He ignored skin color, age, sex, and language. If you moved drugs on his streets, regardless of who you were or who you knew, Giovanni Frontieri made it a point to move you.

Three weeks into plainclothes duty, Frontieri scored his first major case. He brought down three members of Little Nicky Matthews’s drug crew, costing the gang $250,000 in cash profit and eventually earning them double-decade stretches behind bars. The junkies on the streets were hungry for their score, and the dealers were sour over the lost money. It didn’t help anybody’s image that the bust was orchestrated by a street cop who was as green as a dollar.

Four days after the bust went down, one dealer, Sammy “Dwarf” Rodgers, decided it was time to teach the young cop a lesson. He offered $25,000, a same-day cash payout, to anyone who would bring him one of Giovanni Frontieri’s eyes.

“Ain’t nothin’ personal against the boy,” Rodgers said
to members of his Black Satin gang. “I just need me a new key chain. Besides, I like the color of his eyes. They match my car.”

•    •    •

S
AMMY
R
ODGERS WAS
tall, well over six feet, with a big stomach, wide chest, and full Afro. The street called him Dwarf because he employed half a dozen dwarfs as drug couriers, sending them from house to house, door-to-door, pockets crammed with nickel bags of junk and rubber band rolls of cash.

“I love watching the fuckers walk,” he once said. “Move down my streets like fuckin’ robots. Time you see ’em, they already past you. Cops hate bustin’ ’em too. Makes ’em feel cheap.”

Dwarf was standing in front of his bar, La Grande, on the corner of 123rd Street and Amsterdam, when Giovanni Frontieri pulled his car up to the corner. Giovanni had grown solid, muscular like his father, his hair thick and black, his face sharp, handsome, and unmarked except for a thin scar above his right eye. He spoke in a strong but low voice, never shouted, not even during the heat of a bust. His first partner called him “Boomer” because of it, and the name stuck.

He stepped out of the car and walked over to the dealer, stopping when he was only inches from the man’s face.

“Hey, Dwarf,” Boomer said. “I hear you’re looking for me.”

Dwarf looked around at his men and then back at Boomer. He had to keep his street-cool facade or lose face. Any sign of a backdown to a young cop could easily give the gunmen behind him ideas, any one of which could end with Dwarf packed in ice.

“What I need with you?” Dwarf said. “I ain’t lonely.”

“Twenty-five large,” Boomer said. “That’s a lot to pay out for one eye.”

“Got me a business,” Dwarf said, “and you startin’ to cost me.”

Boomer reached a hand into the side pocket of his leather jacket, his eyes on Dwarf. The hand came out holding a black switchblade. Boomer clicked it open with his thumb and tossed it to Dwarf, who caught it awkwardly with both hands.

“You take it,” Boomer said.

“Take what?”

“My eye,” Boomer said. “You got the knife, so, take it. Right here. Right in front of your crew.”

“You crazy,” Dwarf said, inching two steps back. “Pull a move on me like this, you got to be fuckin’ crazy.”

“Take the eye now,” Boomer said, pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket, his voice steady and controlled. “’Cause it’s your only chance.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then your business is shut.” Boomer lit his cigarette with his father’s silver clip. “I don’t care where you go or what part of town you move your shit to. But if I see you on this corner ever again, I drop you and leave you dead.”

Dwarf held his ground, not a move, not a sound.

Boomer smiled and nodded, as if they’d just been exchanging pleasantries about the weather, then put both hands in his pockets and turned. He walked to the driver’s side of his jet black Plymouth and took another look at Dwarf.

“Keep the blade,” he said, smiling, cigarette still in his mouth. “And enjoy what’s left of your life.”

Boomer Frontieri got behind the wheel of the Plymouth, kicked over the 426 cubic-inch engine, shifted into first, and pulled out into the Harlem street traffic, radio tuned to Sam Cooke singing “It’s All Right.”

•    •    •

H
E SPENT EIGHTEEN
years on the force, rising to the highest rank he sought, gold-shield detective, faster than
anyone in the history of the department. In his career, working with a variety of partners, Boomer Frontieri was credited with more felony arrests and convictions than any other New York City cop. The job consumed him; he lived it and loved it. He never married and had no desire for a family. A bullet had killed his father, had left his mother alone at night, crying herself to sleep. He was a cop and he knew his bullet could arrive at any moment. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind.

Boomer kept his pleasures to a minimum. He worked out regularly, running as many as twelve miles each morning, long before it became fashionable. He would allow nothing to get in the way of the run. During all-day stakeouts, Boomer would, at some point, jump into the backseat, change into sweats, bolt from the car, and hit the pavement.

“What do I do if they come out while you’re gone?” a stunned new partner once asked.

“That’s why they gave you a badge and a gun too,” Boomer told him.

“They’re gonna know you’re a cop,” his partner whined. “The minute you step outta the car, they’re gonna know.”

“They already know I’m a cop,” Boomer said. “I’ve been sitting in front of their house all day.”

“I ain’t takin’ ’em down alone.”

“I’ll be back if you need me,” Boomer said, starting his run.

“How you gonna know if I need you?” his partner asked.

“You’ll be miles away.”

“I’ll hear you scream,” Boomer said, turning a corner, eager to break a sweat.

•    •    •

T
HE DARK WEIGHT
Boomer Frontieri carried into his work grew heavier through the years. He felt surrounded by the face and smell of death. It had touched many of
those around him, from partners to family members to street friends, but had merely toyed with him, hanging him from the brink before returning him to the safety net of a dangerous life.

When his mother died from a stroke in a New York Hospital bed, Boomer was asleep on his stomach in a crosstown hospital as a nervous intern sewed thirty-six stitches down his back, closing up a razor slash, courtesy of a pimp riding a cocaine high. His baby sister Maria, a month shy of her thirtieth birthday, was killed crossing a Jackson Heights street; the hit from a drunk driver’s front end sent her through the window of a shuttered bar. Boomer had to go to her funeral on crutches, his ankles shattered from a two-story fall off a fire escape. His brother, Carmine, suffered a severe heart attack when he was thirty-one years old and sat home in Bellmore, Long Island, living hand-to-mouth on a small disability pension. Boomer would spend time with him, the emptiness of his brother’s life further fueling his own thirst for action.

Three of Boomer’s seven partners died in the line of duty, each working by his side.

The majority of cops go through their entire careers never pulling gun from holster. Boomer was not one of those. He viewed his job under a bright, unmistakable moral light. To him, it was all a battle for turf. The dealers were foreign invaders. The more of them who went down, the safer it would be for a man heading to work, looking to keep a family fed and warm.

The truth be known, he enjoyed his dance with death. And that made him the deadliest type of cop to have on the street, the kind who never thinks he will live long enough to see a pension. In his years on the force, plainclothes and detective, Boomer had been involved in fourteen serious shootouts, half a dozen knifings, and hundreds of street fights. Once, his car was machine-gunned to pieces while he sat in his favorite Italian restaurant, eating a plate of pasta with red clam sauce.

“You just going to sit there and let them do that to your car?” asked his date, Andrea, a dark-haired detective working out of a Brooklyn fingerprint unit.

“It
was
my car,” Boomer said, wiping his pasta plate with a chunk of Italian bread. “Sold it to Pete Lucas over in Vice a couple of days ago.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

Boomer sipped from a glass of red wine and looked through the window at the shell of what had started the evening as a shiny Impala.

“To keep up his insurance payments,” Boomer said.

•    •    •

B
OOMER
F
RONTIERI NEVER
stopped working. Maybe it was because he had nothing else in his life. Maybe it was the feeling of power he got when he walked into a dark bar and every criminal eye turned his way. It could also have been the nods and smiles he garnered from the working people of the tough, put-upon neighborhoods he made it his business to clean up. Whatever it was, Boomer Frontieri was never far removed from the streets, always minutes from his next bust, doing all he could to cause havoc in the pursuit of civil peace.