He meets Malone at the door.
“Denny,” he says, “we have to get this under control.”
“Working it, Inspector.”
“Work it harder,” McGivern says. “The Post, the Daily News . . . the ‘community’ is all over us.”
From two directions, Malone thinks. On the one hand, they want the violence in the projects to stop; on the other, they’re out there protesting against the police sweep of the gangs that’s been going on since the Gillette-Williams murders this morning.
Well, which do they want, because they can’t have both.
Malone works his way through the crowd to the briefing room where Sykes leads a meeting of the Task Force.
“What do we have?” Sykes asks.
Tenelli says, “The Domos are denying right, left and center they had anything to do with the Gillette shooting.”
“But they would,” Sykes said. “They didn’t anticipate the Williams killing and the heat from that.”
“I get it,” Tenelli says, “but this is more than the usual ‘I din’t have nothin’ to do with it.’ They proactively sent people to tell us it wasn’t one of them.”
“It wasn’t,” Malone says. “They subcontracted it out to the Spades.”
“Why would the Spades take that job?”
“Price of admission to join the Dominicans,” Malone says. “They figure that Carter can’t supply them with high-quality product, guns or people. They jump off now or get stuck on the sinking boat.”
Babyface takes his pacifier from his mouth. “Concur.”
“The question is why now?” Emma Flynn asks. “The Domos have been quiet since the Pena bust. Why do they want to start a shooting war now?”
Sykes throws a surveillance photo on the screen.
“I reached out to Narcotics and DEA,” Sykes says. “Their best information is that this man, Carlos Castillo, has come up from the Dominican to get the organization back in shape. Castillo is a full-blooded narco. He was born in Los Angeles, like a lot of the narcos of his generation, so he has dual Dominican and American citizenship.”
Malone looks at the grainy image of Castillo, a small, suave man with caramel skin, thick dark hair, a hawk nose and thin lips, clean-shaven.
Sykes says, “DEA’s had him on the radar for years but has never had enough for an indictment. But it all makes sense—Castillo is here to get the NYC heroin market straightened out. Vertical integration, from the DR to Harlem, from factory to customer. They want it all now. Castillo is here to lead the final charge on Carter.”
Flynn looks over at Malone. “You really think the Dominicans have coopted the Spades?”
Malone shrugs. “It’s a workable theory.”
“Or the truce between the Spades and the GMB simply broke down,” Flynn says.
“But we’re not hearing that on the street,” Babyface says.
Sykes asks, “What information do we have linking this shooting to the Spades?”
A lot.
The holding cells in the Three-Two, Three-Four and Four-Three are full of gangbangers—GMB, Trinitarios and Dominicans Don’t Play. They’ve been picked up for everything from littering to outstanding warrants, parole and probation violations, simple possession. Those that are saying anything are telling the same story that Oh No Henry did: the shooter—a few say it was shooters, plural—was—or were—black.
“I don’t imagine anyone is giving up names,” Sykes says.
He knows the GMB bangers wouldn’t give up a Spade shooter to the cops because they want to handle it themselves.
“All right,” Sykes says, “tomorrow we do verticals in the North buildings. Shake out the Spades, start hauling them in, see what falls out of the trees.”
“Verticals” are random patrols of project stairwells that the uniforms usually reserve for winter nights when they want to get out of the cold.
Malone can’t blame them—it’s dangerous and you never know when you might get shot or shoot some kid in the dim light, like that poor cop Liang who panicked and killed an unarmed black guy and claimed at his trial that his “gun just went off.”
The jury didn’t believe him and came back with a manslaughter conviction.
At least they didn’t send him to jail.
Yeah, the verticals are treacherous. And now they’re going to roust the Spades.
One of the mayor’s hacks says, “The community is not going to like that. They’re already up in arms about the last round of arrests.”
“Who dat?” Russo, eyeballing the guy who just spoke, asks Malone.
“Yeah, we seen him before,” Malone says, trying to dredge up a name. “Chandler somebody, somebody Chandler.”
“Some people in the community are not going to like it,” Sykes answers. “Other people in the community are going to pretend not to like it. But most of them want the gangs shut down. They want—and deserve—safety in their own homes. Is the mayor’s office really going to argue against that?”
Good for you, Malone thinks.
But the mayor’s office is apparently going to argue against it. Chandler says, “Couldn’t we do something more surgical?”
“If we had a named suspect, possibly,” Sykes says. “In the absence of that, this is the best option.”
“But the community is going to perceive arresting a large group of young black men as profiling,” Chandler says.
Babyface laughs out loud.
Sykes glares at him and then turns to the mayor’s guy. “You’re the one profiling here.”
“How so?”
“By assuming all black people are going to object to this operation,” Sykes says.
He and everyone else know why the mayor’s office is playing both sides against the middle—minorities are his voter base and he can’t afford to alienate them.
He’s in a tough spot—on the one hand he has to be seen to be trying to suppress the violence in the community; on the other hand, he can’t be allied with what will be termed heavy-handed police tactics against that same community.
So he pushes for an arrest while preserving for the record that he argued against the tactics that might best produce that arrest. At the same time, he’ll use the issue to deflect attention from his scandal onto the police department.
Chandler is saying, “After the Bennett shooting, we can’t afford to further alienate—”
McGivern, standing in the back of the room, says, “Do we really want to have this discussion in front of the entire Task Force? It’s a command matter, and these officers have work to do.”
“If you’d prefer,” Chandler says, “we can take this discussion to—”
“We’re not taking this discussion anywhere,” Sykes says. “We invited you to this briefing as a courtesy and to keep you in the loop, not to participate in decisions that are the department’s to make.”
“All police decisions are political decisions,” Chandler says.
He’s done his job.
If the operation results in an arrest on the Williams murder, the mayor’s office will claim credit. If it doesn’t, the mayor will blame the commissioner, preach against racial profiling and hope the papers cover the Job’s problems instead of his.
“Get some rest,” Sykes says to his cops. “We’ll go in tomorrow morning.”