That’s how it began, Malone’s campaign to goad Pena into trying to kill a cop.
They started with a club in Spanish Harlem, a real nice salsa place Pena had a piece of, maybe laundered money through. They waited for a Friday night when the place was packed and went in like storm troopers on crack.
The security guys at the door tried to jump ugly when Malone and team walked right past the line, showed their badges and said they were coming in.
“You got a warrant?”
“The fuck are you, Johnnie Cochran?” Malone asked. “I saw a guy with a gun run over here. Hey, maybe it was you. Was it you, Counselor? Turn around, put your hands behind your back.”
“I got my constitutional rights!”
Monty and Russo grabbed him by the back of the shirt and threw him through the plate glass window.
One woman had her phone on video and held it up. “I have everything right here, what you did!”
Malone walked over, knocked the phone out of her hand and crushed it under his Doc Marten. “Anyone else had their constitutional rights violated? I want to know right now so that we can rectify the situation.”
No one spoke. Most people looked down.
“Now get out of here while you have the chance.”
The team went into the club and busted that shit up. Monty took an aluminum baseball bat to the glass tables, chairs. Russo kicked in speakers. Customers scrambled to get out of the way. It sounded like a rainstorm on a tin roof as people dropped guns on the floor.
Malone went behind the bar and swept bottles off. Then he told one of the bartenders, “Open the register.”
“I don’t know if—”
“I saw you put coke in there. Open it up.”
She opened it and Malone took out handfuls of bills and tossed them over the bar like leaves.
A big guy in an expensive silk shirt, a real crema, came up to him. “You can’t—”
Malone grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed his face onto the bar. “Why don’t you tell me again what I can’t do? You the manager?”
“Yes.”
He took a handful of bills and shoved them into the man’s mouth. “Eat these. Come on, jefe, eat. No? Then maybe you keep your fucking mouth shut, except to tell me where Pena is. Is he here? Is he in the back room?”
“He left.”
“He left?” Malone asked. “If I go back into the VIP room and he is there, you and I are going to have a problem. Well, you’re going to have a problem—I’m just going to go Riverdance on your face.”
“Toss everybody!” Malone shouted as he walked to the stairs. “Call the uniforms! Tell them to bring a bus! Everyone goes!”
He went up the stairs to the VIP room.
The security guy at the door seemed unsure, so Malone made up his mind for him. “I’m a VIP. I’m the most important person in your world right now because I’m the guy who decides if you get thrown into a cage with a crew of spic-hating mallates. So let me through.”
The guy let him through.
Four men sat in a banquette with their ladies, gorgeous Latinas in full makeup, big hair and beautiful expensive short dresses.
Guns lay on the floor at the men’s feet.
These were heavy, well-dressed guys. Very calm, cool, arrogant. Malone knew they had to be Pena’s people.
“Get out of the booth,” Malone said. “Lie down on the floor.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” one of the men asked. “You’re wasting everyone’s time. None of these busts will stand up.”
Another grabbed his phone and pointed it at Malone.
Malone said, “Hey, Ken Burns, the only documentary you’re going to make is your own colonoscopy.”
The guy set the phone down.
“On the floor, lie down. Everybody.”
They eased out of the booth, but the women were reluctant to lie down because their skirts rode up too high.
“You’re disrespecting our women,” the first guy said.
“Yeah, they have a lot of self-respect, fucking pieces of shit like you,” Malone said. “Ladies, did you know your boyfriends kill little kids? Three-year-olds? In their beds. Yeah, I definitely think you should marry these honks. Of course, they’re probably married already.”
“Show some respect,” the guy says.
“You open your mouth to me again,” Malone said, “I’m going to bring a female officer in here to do an orifice search on your ladies, and while she’s doing that, I’m going to be kicking your brains in.”
The guy started to say something, but then thought better of it.
Malone squatted and said quietly, “Now when you make bail, you run and tell Pena that Sergeant Denny Malone, Manhattan North Special Task Force, is going to wreck his clubs, bust his dealers, roust his customers, and then I’m going to start getting serious. Do you understand me? You may speak.”
“I understand.”
“Good,” Malone says. “Then you call your bosses down in the Dominican and tell them it’s never going to stop. You tell them that Pena has fucked up and Detective Sergeant Denny Malone, Manhattan North Special Task Force, is going to hose their Dark Horse into the sewers as long as Pena is walking upright in New York City. You tell them they don’t run this neighborhood. I do.”
The uniforms were already downstairs when Malone got there—cuffing people, picking up vials of coke, pills, the guns.
“Everyone goes,” Malone told the uniform sergeant. “Possession of firearms, cocaine, Ecstasy, looks like a little smack . . .”
“Denny, you know these aren’t going to hold up,” the sergeant said.
“I know.” He shouted to the crowd, “Don’t come back to this club! This is going to happen every time!”
As he and the team walked out the door, Malone yelled, “May Da Force be with you!”
The captain then, Art Fisher, wasn’t a pussy, so he shouldered the weight.
The ADAs filed into his office screaming that they couldn’t and wouldn’t pick up a single case, the whole raid was a Mapp violation, a prime example of bad police tactics bordering on—no, crossing the line of—brutality.
When Fisher stonewalled them (“Are you afraid of some Chiquita suing you over an iPhone?”), the prosecutors went to their immediate boss, who in those days was Mary Hinman.
That didn’t work out so well.
“If you don’t want to take the cases, don’t,” she said. “But don’t make onions, either. Grow a pair and buckle up, the ride is going to get rougher.”
One of them said, “So we’re just going to let that Denny Malone and his crew of Neanderthals run roughshod over Manhattan North?”
Hinman didn’t look up from her paperwork. “Are you still here? I thought you left when I told you to go do your job. Now if you don’t want the job . . .”
IAB took a weak swing, too.
They were catching heat from complainants and the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
McGivern shut that down. He pulled from his desk a crime scene photo of the three children shot in the head and asked them if they wanted to see this on the front page of the Post with the headline internal affairs halts probe of child killers.