from the heavy traffic on Franklin Street. ‘Isn’t this place a little… exposed? You can see everything.’
Gittens shrugged. ‘It’s not enough to see. We have to get the stuff, we have to catch them with the dope in their pockets, otherwise there’s no case. And we can’t get close enough for that. There are lookouts all up and down the block. You go down there, you’ll hear them whistling signals to each other. It sounds like a birdcage.’
A woman was entering the park now, at the corner closest to us, the narrow tip of the pie wedge. She was black, rail thin, with a knock-kneed walk and a rainbow-colored knit hat. A kid greeted her just inside the park. He seemed glad to see her, greeting her as an old friend, laughing, clasping her hand, pulling her close for a hug.
‘That kid’s a sweeper. His job is to steer the buyers to the right place. He’ll hang out near the entrance to the park, ask you what you’re looking for, figure out if you’re a player or a cop or just someone walking through the park. If you’re a buyer, he’ll tell you to go sit on one of those benches and he’ll give one of those whistle signals.’ Gittens whistled a little bird call, soft, under his breath, low-high-high-high.
The woman moved on. She sat on one of the benches next to a guy in a red FUBU baseball shirt.
‘ FUBU,’ Gittens said, ‘For Us, By Us. Those FUBU clothes went big-time and they started telling white kids it meant For U, By U.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s June Veris in the red shirt. He’s original MP. Used to run with Braxton when they were kids. Now Braxton just uses him as muscle.’
June Veris had muscle to spare. Big guy with massive shoulders that tapered down to a narrow waist. Veris sat a level higher than the buyer, his butt on the backrest, feet on the seat of the green bench. He chatted with the woman for some time before she reached into her pocket and slapped her hand down into his. The gesture was a sort of exuberant handshake. From our position, you could not see any cash being passed. Then Veris disappeared and a kid walked toward the woman.
‘That’s the slider,’ Gittens narrated.
The slider sauntered right past the woman. There was a little seesaw in his walk, a flourish. It was a walk the kid probably practiced, checking himself out as he passed store windows. He dropped something in a garbage can and kept walking. When the woman retrieved it, the three guys who’d been so friendly with her a moment before were nowhere to be seen. They’d melted away to the edges of the park. She hurried out of the park with anxious, bird-like glances.
‘The slider has the most dangerous job,’ Gittens said. ‘Nobody touches the dope but him. That way the risk to everyone else is minimized. Even if we catch the others, there’s no case because there’s no dope on them. Without an informant or an undercover buy, there’s no way to tie the sweepers or anyone else to the drugs. But the slider has to carry the drugs on him, so if he’s caught…’
There was a lull in the sliders’ business.
‘There’s a stashpad around here somewhere,’ Gittens lectured to fill the downtime, ‘to replenish the sliders. The kitchen will be somewhere else. It moves around. We close one down, another one opens somewhere else. It’s like Whack-a-Mole, you know that game? It’ll never end.’
‘What about Braxton? What does he do?’
‘Braxton designed all this. He runs this whole thing. If things were different, he’d have gone to Harvard Business School. As it is, he runs a damn good business. He doesn’t need Harvard Business School. Harold’s a player. He’s a damn smart guy’
‘And a murderer.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not like that,’ Gittens said.
Our man Michael finally emerged. He moved casually between the buildings, entering at the near corner of the park.
This time I did not need Gittens’s narration to follow the process. Michael was met by the same sweeper, who approached him tentatively. There were no smiles, no hugs. Presumably the sweeper did not know him, maybe even suspected he was a snitch. Whatever the reason, their chat took a little longer than the previous one. But the informant bluffed his way by the sweeper and made his way to a bench. Veris sat down next to him, easy to pick out in his cherry-red shirt, and it was Veris who actually took the cash. Gittens’s two twenties, the serial numbers recorded, disappeared into his pocket. After the money was passed, less gracefully this time, Veris moved off. A slider walked past to drop a plastic envelope in a trash can for Michael to retrieve.
‘Another satisfied customer,’ Gittens drawled as the informant quick-stepped out of the park.
Echo Park was quiet again. June Veris sat alone on his bench and soon was joined by another guy, who talked to him in an animated way. The sweeper loafed near the entrance awhile, then drifted back to his friends on the benches. Kids hanging out, nothing to do but yack with one another. If Gittens had not explained what I’d just seen, I wouldn’t have recognized it as a drug sale at all.
Michael emerged on the roof again and the search procedure was repeated. He emptied his pockets to reveal no money and a little plastic envelope that had not been there when he left. The ‘controlled buy’ was complete.
Gittens displayed the little opaque plastic square to me. There was a red boxing glove rubber-stamped on the package — Knockout.
‘Send them,’ one of the cops urged Gittens. He was watching the park, apparently anxious that June Veris — the target of this whole operation — would leave or simply pass the marked twenties to someone else. If that happened, there would be no way to tie him to the drugs. It was essential the cops arrest Veris while he had the sting money in his pocket. ‘Let’s go, Martin,’ the cop urged.
‘Not yet,’ Gittens said.
‘Let’s go! Send them now!’
‘I said, not yet.’
We waited through several more purchases, maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes in all. At one point a white kid in a Volvo pulled up to the park. He had shaggy red hair and a goatee. The Volvo had a Yale sticker in the rear window. ‘Hello there, Skippy,’ Gittens muttered. Only after a handful of others had scored their drugs — that is, when it was no longer obvious that our informant was Michael — Gittens murmured into his walkie-talkie, ‘Okay, go.’
Within seconds, four unmarked black cruisers converged on the park, pulling right up onto the curb to block the three gates. The kids in the park scattered. Cops ran after them, caught and tackled a few, disappeared down side streets chasing others. It was a joyful chaos.
As it turned out, Veris escaped. The operation failed. But as I think back on that day — even knowing, as I do, that Gittens probably expected Veris would escape, maybe even warned him of the raid — what I remember is that Gittens kept his word. He protected his informant. I remember, too, how it felt to watch that wonderful anarchy in the park, the riot of police and sliders all running, all shouting. From above, through binoculars. How I smiled. It was exhilarating. It was fun.
‘Listen,’ Gittens told Kelly and me afterward, ‘the question isn’t Who killed Danziger? Everybody knows who killed Danziger. The problem is What do you do about it? Nobody in this neighborhood will even talk about Harold Braxton, let alone testify against him.
‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know what Danziger thought he was doing. That case he brought against Gerald McNeese was an old beef, just stupid crackhead stuff. Ray Ratleff was a slider who came up short on a bundle the Posse gave him to sell, so McNeese tried to collect the debt. That’s all there was to it. Ray probably did the coke himself, then he told McNeese he got robbed. Ray Rat’s a pipehead. He’s not a bad kid. I mean, I like Ray. But he’s been on the pipe a long time, he just can’t help himself. Harold shouldn’t have trusted him with the stuff in the first place. It was his mistake, really.’
We were in Echo Park, where the drug market was closed until all these cops decided to go home. The three of us sat on a bench as Gittens illuminated the secret history of Mission Flats. There was none of the wiseguy Boston accent in the detective’s voice. He spoke in an adenoidal, Midwestern tone that matched his white sneakers and home-ironed khakis. The story he told was a different thing.
‘Ray gets into a hole and the debt piles up. So now Braxton has to respond. He can’t allow that kind of thing to go on, he’s got a business to run. He can’t just get ripped off and do nothing about it.
‘So Harold sends out McNeese to square the thing away. But G-Mac was a bad choice. McNeese has killed guys for way less than what Ray Rat did, and Ray’s basically harmless. It was like dropping a bomb on a mosquito. Maybe Braxton figured G-Mac would scare Ray Rat into paying, but Ray just didn’t have the cash because, like I said, any money Ray gets goes straight into the pipe.
‘Anyway, the only thing Ray has is this piece-of-crap Volkswagen Jetta. So one day G-Mac sees Ray driving
