The Force

by Don Winslow

You got thirty-eight thousand wearing blue, Denny Malone and his guys were the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent—the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest. The Manhattan North Special Task Force.

Da Force hit them all, but especially guns and drugs, because guns kill and drugs incite the killings.

Malone’s crew laid their partner in the ground—bagpipes, folded flag, black ribbons over shields—and went right back to work because the slingers and the gangs and the robbers and the rapists and the wiseguys, they don’t take time off to grieve. You wanna keep your streets safe, you gotta be on those streets—days, nights, weekends, holidays, whatever it takes,

At least, at last, tell yourself the truth. You know exactly how you got here. Step by motherfucking step. Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn’t true.

No, he started with his eyes firmly on the guiding star, his feet planted on the path, but that’s the thing about the life you walk—you start out pointed true north, but you vary one degree off, it doesn’t matter for maybe one year, five years, but as the years stack up you’re just walking farther and farther away from where you started out to go, you don’t even know you’re lost until you’re so far from your original destination you can’t even see it anymore.

Four A.M. When the city that never sleeps at least lies down and closes its eyes.

He’s convinced that if real estate developers could buy properties in the bottom levels of Dante’s Inferno they’d rename it “LoHel” and start throwing up boutiques and condos.

There are the gods of place and the gods of commerce, and if you have to bet who’s going to win out, put your money on money every time.

That’s the NYPD, though, he thinks. They give you a medal for being stupid, take your badge for being smart.

What we need is a holiday from the holidays. Just take a year off from any of them, see how it works out. It probably wouldn’t, he thinks.

They’ll put it on my freakin’ headstone: Denny Malone, he was always working. Fuck it—you work, you die, you try to have a life somewhere in there. But mostly you work.

The cops feel for the vics and hate the perps, but they can’t feel too much or they can’t do their jobs and they can’t hate too much or they’ll become the perps. So they develop a shell, a “we hate everybody” attitude force field around themselves that everyone can feel from ten feet away.

The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new “management” breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people—they believe the numbers say it all.

Boom—crime is down. Moneyball.

You may not like your best player, but you don’t trade him. He puts points on the board. Sykes can’t touch him.

The NRA assholes will tell you that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Yeah, Malone thinks, people with guns.

They say it’s all about the Second Amendment and individual rights but what it’s about is the money. The gun manufacturers, who make up the vast bulk of the NRA’s funding, want to sell guns and make their cash. End of motherfucking story.

New York City has the strictest gun laws in the country but that doesn’t make any difference because all the guns come in from the outside, up the “Iron Pipeline.” Dealers make straw purchases in states with weak gun laws—Texas, Arizona, Alabama, the Carolinas—and then bring them up I-95 to the cities of the Northeast and New England. The goobers love to talk about crime in the big cities, Malone thinks, but either don’t know or don’t care that the guns come from their states.

It’s the classic vicious circle. Without probable cause, you can’t get a warrant, but without the warrant, you can’t get probable cause.

We’re all corrupt. Just each in our own way.

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO, Giuliani, the Commission case, the Windows case. And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into antiterrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero. Louie used to brag they took in sixty-three million. Nine/eleven saved the Mafia.

Malone knows the unspoken agenda—we don’t care what you do or how you do it (as long as it doesn’t make the papers), just keep the animals in their cage.

What the general public doesn’t get—they think the Mafia are crooks? The guineas only wish they could steal like the hedge fund guys, the politicians, the judges, the lawyers. And Congress? Forget about it. A cop takes a ham sandwich to look the other way, he loses his job. Congressman Butthole takes a few million from a defense contractor for his vote, he’s a patriot. The next time a politician blows his brains out to save his pension will be the first time.

New York, New York, Malone thinks—the town so nice they pay you twice.

“This is Manhattan North,” Malone says. “The Task Force. We have one job—hold the line. The rest of it’s just details.”

“In the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘I can resist everything but temptation.’”

You’ll be there to spike the ball for the touchdown celebration. But you don’t want to know how I get you to the red zone.

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.

How do you cross the line? Step by step.

“That’s it,” Malone says. “No one can know I’m giving you information. I’m trusting you here.” “You can.” Yeah, right I can. You trust a reporter like you trust a dog. You got a bone in your hand, you’re feeding him, you’re good. Your hand’s empty, don’t turn your back. You either feed the media or it eats you.

“Do you know about Irish Alzheimer’s?” Malone asks. “No.” “You forget everything but the grudges,”

“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Monty says. “What?” “‘After this, therefore because of this,’” Monty says. “It’s a fallacy of logic. Just because this shit started after Levin came on doesn’t mean it started because Levin came on.”

Half the major bosses from the Five Families are buried out here. Luciano himself, Vito Genovese, John Gotti, Carlo Gambino, Joe Colombo, even old Salvatore Maranzano, who started it all. St. John is sort of the Gangster Hall of Fame.

Anyway, you tell yourself what you gotta tell yourself to do what you gotta do. And sometimes you even fuckin’ believe it.

“Life is trying to kill us,” she says. Life, Malone thinks, is trying to kill everyone. And it always succeeds. Sometimes before you die.

Hell isn’t having no choice. It’s having to make a choice between horrific things.

The key to staying alive in any kind of organized crime outfit is very simple—make other people money. As long as you’re making other people money, you’re safe. Start costing people money, you’re a liability, and crime organizations don’t keep liabilities on the books for very long. It’s not like they can write them off on their taxes.

Drug organizations don’t have HR departments. They don’t bring you in, counsel you, instruct you on how you can improve your job performance. What they do is they send someone you know, someone you trust, who takes you out to drinks or to dinner and tells you, Cuida de tu negocio. Take care of your business.