“I’m not small,” she says when the topic comes up. “I’m concentrated.”
Which is no-shit true, Malone thinks now, sitting across the table from her. Hinman is ferocious, a five-four little ball of rage who came up the traditional way—Catholic all-girls school, Fordham University, then NYU law. Hinman’s feet can’t touch the floor from the barstool but she can drink you under the table. Malone knows. He went shot for shot with her the night she got a verdict against a dealer named Corey Gaines for killing his girlfriend.
Malone lost.
Hinman put him in a cab.
She comes by it honest—her father was an alcoholic cop, her mother an alcoholic cop’s wife.
Hinman knows cops—she knows how it works. Nevertheless, when she was a rookie ADA, Malone had to teach her a few things her father hadn’t. It was her first major drug case—long before she’d elbowed past her male counterparts to become special prosecutor—and Malone was in plainclothes in Anti-Crime.
But it was a whole kilo of coke Malone and his then partner Billy Foster made in a tenement on 148th. They got a tip from a snitch, but not enough to get a warrant. Malone wasn’t about to hand it over to Narcotics—he wanted the collar—so he and Foster went in on a gunshot warrant, arrested the dealer and then called it in.
It got him a chewing out from his sergeant and Narcotics, but it also got him attention. Normally he wouldn’t care if it also got a conviction, but he wanted this scalp on his belt and was worried that a rookie ADA—a woman, to boot—would jack up his case.
When she called him in for witness preparation, Hinman said, “Just tell the truth and get the conviction.”
“Which?” Malone asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Malone said, “I can tell the truth or I can get the conviction. Which do you want?”
“Both,” Hinman said.
“You can’t have both.”
Because if he told the truth, they’d lose the case on a Mapp issue because Malone had no warrant and no probable cause to enter the apartment. The evidence would become the “fruit of a poisoned tree” and the dealer would walk.
She thought this over for a few seconds and then said, “I can’t suborn or encourage perjury, Officer Malone. I can only advise you to do what you think you need to do.”
Mary Hinman never advised Malone to just tell the truth again.
Because the real truth that they both know is that without cops “testilying,” the DA’s office would hardly get any convictions at all.
This doesn’t bother Malone.
If the world played fair, he’d play fair. But the cards are stacked against the prosecutors and police. Miranda, Mapp, all the other Supreme Court decisions, give the advantage to the skels. It’s like the NFL these days—the league wants touchdown passes, so a defensive back can’t even touch a receiver. We’re the poor defensive backs, Malone thinks, trying to keep the bad guys from scoring.
Truth, justice and the American way.
The American way is, truth and justice maybe say hello in the hallway, send each other a Christmas card, but that’s about the extent of their relationship.
Hinman gets it.
Now she sits across the table in a courthouse meeting room and looks at Malone. “The hell did you do last night?”
“Rangers game.”
“Uh-huh,” she says. “You ready to testify? Give me a preview.”
“My partner, Detective Sergeant Phillip Russo,” Malone says, “and I received information from neighborhood residents that there was suspicious activity at 324 West 132nd Street. We had set up a visual surveillance of the address and observed a white Escalade pull up and the defendant, Mr. Rivera, get out. I didn’t have a conclusive reason to believe that it contained drugs, certainly not sufficient visual evidence to indicate probable cause.”
This was the cool part of their dance—take it the other way to convince the jury that you’re telling the truth. Plus, they expect it from watching television.
Hinman asks, “If you didn’t have probable cause, what gave you the right to force entry into the apartment?”
“Mr. Rivera was not alone,” Malone says. “Two other men exited the vehicle with him. One was carrying a MAC-10 machine pistol with a suppressor,” Malone says. “The other was carrying a TEC-9.”
“And you saw these.”
Malone says the magic words. “They were in plain sight.”
If a weapon is in plain sight, you don’t need probable cause. You have immediate cause. And the weapons were in plain sight—at Malone’s feet.
“So you gained entry to the address,” Hinman says. “Did you identify yourselves as police officers?”
“We did. I yelled, ‘New York City police!’ and our badges were clearly visible on lanyards over our protective vests.”
“What happened next?” Hinman asks.
We planted the machine guns on those dumb mooks. “The suspects dropped their weapons.”
“What did you find in the apartment?”
Malone says, “Four kilos of heroin and an amount of American currency in $100 bills that eventually turned out to be $550,000.”
She goes over the boring shit about the voucher numbers and how he could be certain that the heroin he seized was the same heroin now in the courtroom, blah blah blah, and then she said, “I hope you bring a little more energy at trial than you did in this session.”
“In the words of Allen Iverson,” Malone says, “‘We’re talking about practice here. Practice.’”
Hinman says, “We’re talking about Gerard Berger.”
This is how Malone sums up his opinion of Gerard Berger—
“If he was on fire,” Malone has said, “I’d piss gasoline on him to put it out.”
Denny Malone hates three things in life, not necessarily in the following order:
Child molesters
Rats (the human variety)
Gerard Berger
The defense attorney doesn’t pronounce his name like what you get at P.J. Clarke’s, he pronounces it “Bur-jay” and insists that you do too. Which Malone steadfastly refuses to do, except in open court, so he doesn’t look like a smart-ass in front of the judge.
Anywhere else, it’s Gerry Burger.
Malone isn’t alone in his hatred of Berger. Every prosecutor, cop, correctional officer and victim despises him. Even his own clients hate him, because by the time the case is concluded, Berger owns much of what they used to—their money, their houses, their cars, their boats, sometimes their women.
But, as he reminds them, “You can’t spend money in prison.”
Berger’s clients usually don’t go to prison. They go home, or they go on probation, or they go into drug rehab or anger management classes. They go back to doing what they were doing, which is usually something criminal.
He doesn’t care.