Saints Of New York (7 page)

'Frank,
I need you here on time. Twenty minutes and I have I another appointment.'

'That'll
work fine, 'cause I have an appointment in fifteen.'

'Seriously,
I need you here on time. We can't get anywhere in fifteen minutes.'

'So
what do you want? You want me to stay or go?'

'Stay.
Sit down. We'll make a start. You were going to think about discussing your
father.'

'I
did think about it.'

'So
are you willing to talk about him?'

'Where
are you from, Doctor Marie?'

'I
can't see what that has to do with anything.'

'Humor
me.'

'Originally
I'm from Chicago.'

'Another
good gangster town, eh? So how long have you been in New York?'

'Three
years this Christmas.'

'You
know a lot about it?'

'Why?'

'Well,
New York is a union town. Always has been, always will be. Democrats generally.
Only exception was when they brought in Giuliani, who turned Republican in the
Eighties. He served his time with the US Attorney's Office for the Southern
District, became US Attorney himself, the big boss of the hot sauce, and then
he was Mayor from January 1994 to December 2001.'

'I
remember him from the 9/11 attacks.'

'Right.
And you remember when he ran for the Senate, and then the White House? He was a
tough guy, big heart, but up against more internal shit than he ever bargained
for.'

'In what way?'

'Hell, Marie,
you have to understand the nature of the city, some of its history, to really
appreciate what happened. What's still happening.'

'I've got time.'

'You really
wanna hear this shit?'

'I want to hear
about your father. That's
really
what I want to hear about, Frank.'

'Well, if you
want to hear about John Parrish then you have to hear all about the Saints of
New York.'

'The who?'

'The Saints of
New York. That's what they called themselves, bunch of egotistical assholes.'

'So who were
they? The only thing I hear about your father is how many decorations he got,
how he and his colleagues helped break the back of Mafia control in the city.'

'The truth and
what you hear are never the same thing in this business, believe me. The Fulton
Fish Market, the Javits Convention Center, waste haulage, the garment
industry, the construction business . . . hell, they were into everything.
Organized crime was so much a part of this city that no-one thought they could
ever be separated. But that's what the OCCB and the Strike Forces and the Feds
tried to do, and to a degree they succeeded. But even in their finest hour
there was still so much internal corruption, so much money passing hands, that
no-one ever really knew who was clean and who wasn't.'

'And your
father?'

'You really want
to know about him, then we'll have to begin at the beginning.'

'Then do that,
Frank.'

'Well, okay,
here we go. New York City. You got the five boroughs, okay? Manhattan, the
Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. We have one New York Police
Department, but each borough has its own DA. Then there's the Department of
Justice, and they have US Attorney's Offices in every federal judicial district
in the country. There are two districts in New York, the Southern in Manhattan
and the East in Brooklyn. The

DOJ also has the
FBI, and they operate independently of the US Attorney network. The FBI is
responsible for investigating cases, the US Attorney for prosecuting them. It's
supposed to be that simple. There are three FBI offices in New York City - or
were back then - Manhattan, Queens and New Rochelle. Each one worked
independently until the action against organized crime stepped up in the
Eighties and these boys started getting smart, working together. So you got
this system going on, right? The Feds raise the cases, the Attorney's Office
prosecutes. You with me?'

'Yes, go on.'

'Okay. Then
comes RICO. That's the federal act against racketeering and corruption, and it
gave the Feds the authority to investigate anything - and I mean
anything -
that
they felt might relate to organized crime. So the Feds started getting cases together
and bringing them to the relevant US Attorney's Office, and then the US
Attorney would bring them to federal court in the Southern or Eastern district.
You follow me so far?'

'Sure, yes.'

'Well, the
federal courts have judges who are appointed by the President of the United
States, with advice and consent from the Senate. These boys, these judges, once
they're in, they're in for life. They got life tenure. Now we go back down and
look at the five District Attorneys. These guys get elected to four-year terms
by the citizens of their boroughs, and they operate entirely independent from
the Mayor's Office and the State Attorney General. They are not obligated to
co-operate with one another, and they don't take orders from higher federal or
state authorities. Co-operation has only ever occurred on a case-by-case
basis.'

'The point
being?'

'I'm getting to
that. So you have the NYPD, the FBI, the DA's Office, the New York State
Attorney General, the Organized Crime Control Bureau, the Brooklyn Organized
Crime Strike Force, and the original remnants of the New York Task Force which
had its headquarters in White Plains and field offices in Buffalo and Albany.

'Each of these
groups is independent, and they all got their own snitches and CIs -
confidential informants - and their own cases. And you wanna get this shit
arranged in such a way as to bring about effective co-operation and the precise
application of the law? Hell, we have enough trouble getting a bust for parking
violations. These guys were fighting a losing battle even before they started.
The degree to which organized crime had infiltrated the police and the courts
was staggering. There are forty thousand officers in the NYPD alone, and they
react
to crime,
they don't proactively investigate
potential
crime. That's the job of the Feds, but the Feds are
limited to handling espionage, sabotage, kidnapping, bank robbery, drug
trafficking, terrorism, and civil rights violations. You get a murder or two
thrown in there, and unless the acting NYPD Homicide detectives can deliver
probative evidence that the homicide was in some way related to one of those
federal categories, they ain't got a hope in hell of getting FBI support.

'Well, the Mafia
knew all this, and the bits they didn't know they could find out easily enough.
They knew that the borough DAs didn't work together, so they dumped bodies
along the borough divisional lines. Bullshit paperwork on which DA was
responsible for that piece of territory could keep the case running for months,
and then they get a judge who's on their payroll to dismiss it, based on the
fact that the NYPD and the DA's Office were hounding and harassing the
defendant unnecessarily . . . Some of the things that happened way back when
you wouldn't believe. Anyway, in the Nineteen-Eighties all these legal organizations
got wise, they started to get their shit together. Rudy Giuliani went into the
US Attorney's Office Southern District in 1970. Three years later he was chief
of the Narcotics Unit, and in 1975 he became an Independent and went to work
for Gerald Ford. After that he went into private practice, and when Reagan was
elected in 1980 he decided he was now a Republican. Reagan made him Associate
Attorney General, and from that position he supervised all of the federal law
enforcement agencies of the US Attorney's Office, the Department of
Corrections, the DEA and the US Marshals Service. In 1983 he came into his own
with indictments and prosecution of organized crime figures and he indicted
eleven people through '85 and '86. That sorry bunch of motherfuckers included
the heads of the Five Families, and Rudy got convictions and hundreds of years
of prison time for eight of them. He was the hero of the fucking century.

'Now the OCCB
had been around since 1971, but it was in the

Eighties
under Giuliani that they really started to kick ass and take names. That's
where you would have found the late John Parrish, forty years old and a cop
since 1957. He's got a seven- year-old kid and a mortgage, and he has a network
of CIs and allies in and around the Brooklyn area to support. So: he's taking
money left, right and center any which way he can find it, and he's asked to
join the Organized Crime Control Bureau, supposed to be the cleanest, most
upright and honest crew in the city. These are the new Untouchables. These are
the guys who are going to break the back of the Mafia in New York. He gets with
them, and he finds out that a lot of these guys are no different from him, just
regular humps trying to make a living and not get shot. They got wives and kids
and mistresses, they have rent to pay, and they're as open to temptation as
anyone on the street. But now the stakes are so much higher. You give
information to the Mafia and the payback is huge. Where some cop would have
gotten a hundred bucks for looking after some businessman who wanted to lose a
truck full of TVs and claim the insurance, now he's given five or ten times
that much for looking the other way. Such cops stayed there for ten years,
never got so much as a caution or a written warning. They were the Saints of
New York, you see, and they couldn't put a foot wrong.'

'And they were all like this? All
corrupt?'

'God no, not at all. There were a
good percentage that stayed clean, worked hard, got the job done. But my
father, the big hero that everyone seems to have a hard-on for, the guy whose
standards I have failed to meet on
every
level, he
was
corrupt, and as far as I can tell he was probably the worst
of the lot.'

'And you resent it when people
compare you to him?'

'Resent it? Why would I resent
it. The motherfucker's dead.'

'I don't mean resent
him,
I mean
whether or not you resent the fact that people talk about him as a hero when he
wasn't.'

'People understand what they
want, they say what they what. I haven't got the time or the inclination to
change their minds. I think the fact that I know the truth is enough.'

'Is it? Do you really think
that?'

'Well, I fucking well hope so,
because I don't have anything else.'

'So,
tell
me what he was like. And these people, the Saints of
New York.'

'They were all
OCCB cops, and they were all crooked like fishhooks. A handful of them inside
the Bureau were making life very easy for the mob at JFK Airport.'

'The Lufthansa
heist? I've seen
Goodfellas.'

'Well, you've
seen the flag on the top of the mountain, sweetheart, but you ain't seen the
mountain yet. I'm afraid that is gonna have to wait. I have a new partner to
meet this morning.'

'Frank . . .
hell, Frank, this is why you
need
to be on time. We start into something like this and we need
to get to a good point before we leave it.'

'Life moves on,
you know? I'm sure your day is filled with excitements just as mine is.'

'Well. . . We'll
carry on tomorrow.'

'Sure.'

'And you're
doing okay otherwise?'

'I'm okay, yes.'

'You sleeping?'

'On and off.'

'You want
something to help you sleep?'

'Christ no. I
start down that route I ain't coming back.'

'Okay, Frank.
I'll see you tomorrow. You have a good day now.

Radick
and Parrish had not seen one another for a good two or three years. Radick had
come from Narcotics, had hung in there until what he saw and what he heard went
more than skin- deep. You could see only so many dead junkies, could
interrogate only so many dealers, watch only so many cases fold up and die,
before you started taking that shit home.

As far as
Parrish was concerned, Jimmy Radick looked exactly the same.

To Radick,
however, Frank Parrish appeared to have lost twenty pounds and aged a decade.
He wore the spiritual bruises of the conscience drinker: a double or two to
blunt the edges of the day's disappointments, another couple to soften the
guilt about drinking. It went downhill from there. The worst cases came in
still drunk from the night before, spent two out of five shifts with the
medical officer. Whatever wagon they kept trying to get on had a slide fitted.

'I don't need to
introduce you, do I?' Haversaw said. 'You already know one another.'

Someone was at
the door. Haversaw hollered 'Come in!' and Squad Sergeant Valderas entered.
Valderas was a career cop. Had never wanted for anything else, never
would
want for
anything else. He ironed a clean shirt every night for the next day.