well, he’s a sharp dresser. The retro overcoat, custom-tailored Italian suits, monogrammed shirts, Magli shoes.
A haircut every Friday, a shave twice a day.
Mobster chic, Russo’s ironic comment on the wiseguys he grew up with and never wanted to be. He went the other way with it; as a cop, he likes to joke, he’s the “white sheep of the family.”
Malone always wears black.
His trademark.
All Da Force detectives are kings, but Malone—with no disrespect intended to our Lord and Savior—is the King of Kings.
Manhattan North is the Kingdom of Malone.
Like with any king, his subjects love him and fear him, revere him and loathe him, praise him and revile him. He has his loyalists and rivals, his sycophants and critics, his jesters and advisers, but he has no real friends.
Except his partners.
Russo and Monty.
His brother kings.
He would die for them.
“Malone? If you have a moment for me?”
It’s Sykes.
As I’m sure you know,” Sykes says in his office, “just about everything I said in there was bullshit.”
“Yes, sir,” Malone says. “I was just wondering if you knew it.”
Sykes’s tight smile gets tighter, which Malone didn’t think was possible.
The captain thinks that Malone is arrogant.
Malone doesn’t argue with that.
A cop on these streets, he thinks, you’d better be arrogant. There are people up here, they see you don’t think you’re the shit, they will kill you. They’ll cap you and fuck you in the entry wounds. Let Sykes go out on the streets, let him make the busts, go through the doors.
Sykes doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t like a lot about Detective Sergeant Dennis Malone—his sense of humor, his tat sleeves, his encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop lyrics. He especially doesn’t like Malone’s attitude, which is basically that Manhattan North is his kingdom and his captain is just a tourist.
Fuck him, Malone thinks.
There’s nothing Sykes can do because last July Malone and his team made the largest heroin bust in the history of New York City. They hit Diego Pena, the Dominican kingpin, for fifty kilos, enough to supply a fix for every man, woman and child in the city.
They also seized close to two million in cash.
The suits at One Police Plaza weren’t thrilled that Malone and his team did the whole investigation on their own and didn’t bring anyone else in. Narcotics was furious, DEA was pissed, too. But fuck ’em all, Malone thinks.
The media loved it.
The Daily News and the Post had full-color screaming headlines, every TV station led with it. Even the Times put a story in the Metro section.
So the suits had to grin and bear it.
Posed with the stacks of heroin.
The media also lifted its dress over its head in September when the Task Force made a major raid into the Grant and Manhattanville projects and busted over a hundred gangbangers from the 3Staccs, the Money Avenue Crew and the Make It Happen Boys, the latter of which youth-at-risk capped an eighteen-year-old star woman basketball player in retaliation for one of their own getting shot. She was on her knees in a stairwell begging for her life, pleading for the chance to go to that college where she had a full ride, but she didn’t get it.
They left her on the landing, her blood dripping down the steps like a little crimson waterfall.
The papers were full of pictures of Malone and his team and the rest of the Task Force hauling her killers out of the projects and toward life without parole in Attica, known in the street as the Terror Dome.
So my team, Malone thinks, brings in three-quarters of the quality arrests in “your command”—serious arrests with serious weight that result in convictions with serious time. It doesn’t show up in your numbers, but you know goddamn well that my team has made assists in just about every drug-related homicide arrest—resulting in conviction—not to mention muggings, burglaries, robberies, domestic assaults and rapes committed by junkies and dealers.
I’ve taken more real bad guys off the street than cancer, and it’s my team that keeps the lid on this shithole, keeps it from exploding, and you know it.
So even though you’re threatened by me, even though you know it’s really me and not you that runs the Task Force, you ain’t gonna reassign me because you need me to make you look good.
And you know that, too.
You may not like your best player, but you don’t trade him. He puts points on the board.
Sykes can’t touch him.
Now the captain says, “That was a dog-and-pony show to satisfy the suits. Heroin makes headlines, we have to respond.”
The fact is that heroin use in the black community is down, not up, Malone knows. The retail sale of heroin by black gangs is down, not up; in fact, the young bangers are diversifying into cell-phone theft and cybercrime—identity theft and credit card fraud.
Any cop in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan North knows that the violence isn’t around heroin, it’s about weed. The corner boys are fighting over who gets to sell peaceful marijuana, and where they get to sell it.
“If we can take down the heroin mills,” Sykes says, “by all means, let’s take them down. But what I really care about is the guns. What I really care about is stopping these young idiots from killing themselves and other people on my streets.”
Guns and dope are the soup and sandwich of American crime. As much as the Job is obsessed with heroin, it’s more obsessed with getting guns off the streets. And for good reason—it’s the cops who have to deal with the murders, the wounded, cops who have to tell the families, work with them, try to get them some justice.
And, of course, it’s guns on the street that kill cops.
The NRA assholes will tell you that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Yeah, Malone thinks, people with guns.
Sure, you have stabbings, you have fatal beatings, but without guns the homicide figures would be negligible. And most of the congressional whores who go to their NRA meeting smelling nice and wearing something frilly have never seen a gunshot homicide or even a person who’s been shot.
Cops have. Cops do.
It ain’t pretty. It don’t look or sound (or smell) anything like in
