everyone that this situation is not hopeless. Things were just this bad when I was a kid in Brooklyn in the early nineties. Actually, they were even worse. We used to get like a hundred murders a year in my neighborhood. But they turned it around. I’m not sure how, but they did it. Someone needs to look into those methods. We need to find out what those cops did there and do it here. Thank you.”
As she sat, a mustached white guy in an Orange County Choppers T-shirt and dusty jeans stood up.
“She’s right,” he said angrily. “That’s exactly what we need. We need a Giuliani. Some hard-ass who will make the cops do their goddamn jobs instead of stealing drugs!”
That got some hearty applause from the let’s-make-the-cops-put-down-the-doughnuts crowd. I looked over at Ed and Bill, who paid informants out of their own pockets and didn’t look like they had gotten a good night’s sleep in years, let alone taken a vacation.
“Giuliani?” someone called out. “That guy was a Nazi!”
“Damn straight he was a Nazi,” Mustache said. “The Nazi who saved New York City.”
The rest of the meeting wasn’t very effective. There was a lot of yelling, people venting their frustration. You couldn’t blame them. The Newburgh residents wanted their city back. They wanted to do the right thing for their town and for their families.
But how?
THE FIRST TIME Seamus spoke was when we got back into the minibus.
“I was thinking about what that nice young woman said,” he said after he clicked his seat belt in place. “About turning around New York. Did you know that Giuliani wasn’t the first crusader to clean up New York?”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“It happened in the late eighteen hundreds. The plight of the Irish in New York City after the 1849 potato famine was far worse than that of the poor people here in Newburgh. The Irish were considered a menace to society, and the run-down parts of the city where they lived were rife with crime and drugs, prostitution and gangs, and deplorable conditions.”
“We were the original gangsters?” I said with a grin.
“Exactly,” Seamus said in his brogue. “What turned it around was a moral and cultural revolution. A bishop named John Hughes went into the slums and took the people to task, condemning their criminality on the one hand and offering a sense of self-respect and hope through God on the other. Hughes was actually the one who started the Catholic school system. With his efforts, in a generation, all the criminals were cops and the Irish were solid citizens.”
“You think that might work, Father?” I said skeptically. “Me and you should walk down Lander Street thumping a Bible? I mean, really? Could I hollow mine out for my Glock?”
My grandfather looked very old as he shrugged and looked out the window.
“It’s in the DNA of young male human beings to enjoy acting like hooligans,” he said. “Everyone knows that. Nothing will ever stop that. The only effective curb to that unacceptable behavior is the presence of a larger male human being known as a father who will kick the young man’s keister when he acts up. Where are the fathers here?”
“So that’s it? Fatherlessness is the root of the gang problem?”
“It’s not rocket science, Mick,” Seamus said. “I don’t need to tell you how much hands-on help a teenage boy needs to become a self-reliant, law-abiding man.”
“You have a point there,” I said.
“Exactly. A mother can’t control a fifteen-year-old young man by herself. School can’t. So these kids run wilder and wilder until they get killed or the police have to step in.”
“They are wild,” I said.
“See, the Church emphasizes the family and frowns on premarital sex and divorce, and people laugh and call us killjoys and plug their ears,” Seamus said. “There are many ways to raise children and none is perfect, but anyone who says a traditional nuclear family isn’t the
He sighed.
“People say it’s society’s fault, and they’re right. In our society, fatherlessness is considered a lifestyle choice. But it’s not. To have a child and not be its father is criminal abandonment. You might as well leave your baby in his stroller on the corner and run away, because that’s basically what you’re doing. Without a father, these kids have been abandoned to the street, and hence the situation here in Newburgh.
“So all of a sudden these gangbangers are going to put away their nine-millimeters and drugs and settle down with formula and diapers? How’s that going to happen? And why didn’t you say all this at the meeting?” I said. “Put the message out there?”
“They don’t want to hear it from an old Irish priest,” Seamus said. “They’d shut me out as an interloper before I got to the podium.”
“Who should be the messenger, then?”
“I don’t know. Jay-Z might be a start, or that P. Diddy fella. The message has to come from someone prominent, someone who already has their respect. Bill Cosby tried to say some sensible things a few years back, but the secular crowd shouted him down. It has to be someone who won’t be shouted down by anyone. Someone with fire in his belly.”
“Jay-Z, Seamus? C’mon. That’s just not going to happen.”
“In that case, we need to start building more prisons and graveyards,” Seamus said. “Because if someone doesn’t come along and somehow convince these young men to live their lives in a different way, they’re going to go right on killing each other. Generation after generation after generation.”
“As much as I hate to say this, old man,” I said as I finally put the bus into drive, “I think you’re actually right.”
BOOK FOUR. ALL THE KING’S MEN
IN THE MIDDLE of the night-3:00 a.m. on Monday, to be exact-I got a call from DEA chief Patrick Zaretski. It was big news. Good big news, for a change.
A tip had come in on a group linked to Manuel Perrine. Apparently, a team of killers was holed up in a house in Staten Island. It was being speculated that they were there to plot another brazen assault at Perrine’s trial. The house was currently under surveillance while an arrest team was put together.
“There’s word that there’s an attractive brunette at the location,” Patrick said. “We think it’s that bitch Marietta, Mike. Hughie’s killer. We might have finally caught a break on this.”
By 4:00 a.m., I was on the New York State Thruway, flying at nearly a hundred miles an hour, with Jimmy Sanchez, a DEA agent from the joint task force who lived in Orange County. His car was an undercover vehicle, a souped-up Dodge Charger, and the bubbling roar of its 6.4-liter HEMI V8 was the perfect sound track to my mounting adrenaline and anticipation. My foot was aching to kick a door down-and even more aching to finally kick some scumbag, drug-dealer ass-as we headed toward New York City like bats out of hell.
We toned it down considerably by the time we got to the rallying point. We rolled up to the wagon train of DEA and NYPD unmarked cars already waiting in the deserted parking lot of a Chili’s on Richmond Avenue near the College of Staten Island.
