Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [4]
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.”
• • •
SAMMY RODGERS 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