Badge of Evil Read online

  “I can’t say no to those eyes again, baby,” Supreme said with a smile. “Okay, you want it from the beginning, I’ll give you the book of fuckin’ Genesis. In the beginning, there was Church Jackson. Church was the baddest, smartest motherfucker in Harlem. He owned the drug business. I started runnin’ for one of his crews when I was fourteen. You know, doing errands and shit. Gettin’ them cigarettes, food, whatever they needed. It was what people downtown would call my internship. Slowly, I started doin’ more serious shit. Drop-offs, pickups, and selling a little weed they’d throw me. I didn’t actually meet Master Mind till I was like eighteen. He’s layers removed from the street, insulated, for protection. Anyway, by the time I was twenty I was one of his go-to guys.”

  “So this all started around the mid-1990s?” Lucy asked.

  “Yeah, I hooked up with them in ’96. I met Big K like eight years later. February of 2004. I remember ’cause it was Valentine’s Day and I was with my girl. It was a motherfuckin’ cold night. I mean freeze-your-ass-right-off cold. Coldest night I can remember. I’d bought my girl some scorchin’ Victoria’s Secret shit, for a little holiday romance. But it was so cold that night she didn’t even wanna take off her sweater.

  “Anyway, Church Jackson called me around ten thirty, and I had to get all up outta bed, get dressed and shit, and meet him at an apartment on One Hundred Forty-Eighth Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. It was an unusual situation. Let’s just say one of our sales managers seemed to be having a little problem with his bookkeeping, and we had a large shipment coming in that the motherfucker was supposed to be responsible for. So Church wanted us to pay him a little visit and make sure, you know, his spreadsheets were in order.”

  As Supreme talked, Lucy frantically took notes. She noticed that every once in a while the former drug dealer would lose the attitude and the edgy street argot and sound a lot smarter and more sophisticated than maybe he wanted to. Even though he lived in a Beaux Arts mansion, the whole gangsta thing was critical, she figured, to who he was and everything he was about.

  Lucy didn’t say anything while Supreme told his story, except to quietly utter an occasional “right,” just to make sure he knew she was listening. A. J. had always told her to stay out of the way once someone gets rolling. “Let the momentum work. Allow your subject to unload whatever it is they need to unload. Do not interrupt,” he’d tell her over and over. “Too many reporters want to hear themselves talk. They want their subject to like them or they want to show how smart they are. This is not about you. Save your questions until later. Even when a subject stops talking, don’t say anything for a few minutes. Silence makes people uncomfortable, and their instinct is to keep talking to fill up the space. And sometimes that’s when they let their guard down and give you the best stuff.”

  “So we’re in this apartment, which we used for an ‘office,’ ” Supreme said, actually making air quotes with his two hands around the word “office.” He did it in such an exaggerated way that Lucy knew he was teasing her, making fun, she guessed, of what he considered an overused, twentysomething-white-girl gesture. He smiled at her in a surprisingly gentle way and she couldn’t help but smile back.

  “There was some serious fuckin’ weight in that room and a substantial amount of cash too. We were explaining the importance of accurate accounting to this ignorant motherfucker who worked for us when the five-oh showed up. No knock, no shouted identification from the hallway, no nothin’, man. Two fuckin’ uniforms, patrolmen of all goddamned things, came through the door with their guns drawn. I’m tellin’ you, it was no joke. There was enough rock and pure coke in that room to send some niggas away for life, know what I’m sayin’? And the whole thing was supposedly some stupid-ass screwup. A fuckin’ mistake,” Supreme said in disbelief, as if the incident had just happened.

  “The cops said they were responding to a domestic-disturbance call. Some drunk-ass fool was waving a piece at his old lady, scarin’ her and threatening to cap her ass or some shit. The cops were supposed to hit apartment 504. But these two shining examples of New York’s finest musta been dyslexic or something, because the backward-ass motherfuckers came bustin’ into 405, which was our place.”

  While Supreme’s shock and indignation were sincere, it was all Lucy could do to keep from exploding with laughter. The absurdity of the situation and Supreme’s description of the cops were almost too much for her.

  “So as I’m sure you can understand,” he continued, “we were in a severely compromised position. Totally fucked, actually. But somebody musta been lookin’ down on our asses. Hey, Ira,” Supreme said, interrupting the story. “Ask Marta to bring us some iced tea or somethin’, okay? Iced tea okay?” he asked Lucy.

  “Ah, sure. That’d be great.”

  “See, Kevin was one complicated nigga,” Supreme continued. “He was an opportunist, an aggressive, ambitious motherfucker. He wanted to be a playa and he recognized immediately that night that his moment had arrived. The fuck they say about luck? It’s like when hard work and preparation meet opportunity, or some shit like that, right? Well, that night was Kevin’s motherfuckin’ shot at gettin’ lucky. He wanted it, no doubt. But did he have the balls to step up and take it?”

  Supreme told Lucy that Kevin Anderson grew up in Mount Vernon, a predominantly black suburb of New York, populated mostly by working-and middle-class families. During his last semester at Tulane he was involved in an ugly scandal when campus security found a large quantity of drugs and stolen final exams in his dorm. He blamed his roommate and the guys next door. To avoid a scandal, the school agreed not to press charges and to sweep the whole thing under the rug if all of them agreed to leave.

  Angry and bitter, Kevin returned to New York and finished his degree at City College. Then he entered the police academy. After graduation, he was assigned to uniform patrol in the Thirty-Third Precinct in Harlem. Supreme’s territory. In those days it was Supreme’s whole world. He knew every block of that precinct. And based on his experience getting stopped, hassled, chased, arrested, and slapped around a couple of times, Supreme believed there were basically three kinds of cops in the Three-Three, and probably everywhere else for that matter.

  There was the cop who signed in every day, worked his straight eight, minded his own business, and went home. He was just trying to earn a living, put in his twenty, and retire. There was the really gung ho cop, the guy on a mission who wanted to protect and serve, the guy who believed he could make a difference, maybe even change the world. Lastly, there was the predator, the dangerous, aggressive, macho cop who just as easily could’ve gone the other way. This cop loved the action and lived to mix it up in the streets. He wanted to lock up the bad guys, but not for the right reasons. He was all about what was in it for him. This was Kevin Anderson.

  “So Big K decided that night to step up and seize the motherfuckin’ moment. Him and his partner cuffed us like we were gonna be arrested. But once they had us secured, that crazy nigga tells his partner to go for a walk. He tells him, ‘No sweat, man, I’m huggin’ this. I’m all over it. I’ll meet you at the car in like fifteen minutes. I got somethin’ I need to take care of here and you don’t wanna be part of it.’ ”

  Once the other cop was gone, Supreme said, Kevin announced that he was their new business partner. Unless they wanted to spend the next twenty-five years in prison, they were going to give him 15 percent of everything they did. “But here’s the part that’s really fuckin’ wacked,” Supreme said. “He wasn’t just shakin’ us down. He actually wanted to be partners. Big K was offering to earn his end. I thought he was trippin’, man. The crazy-ass fucker told us he believed he could provide intelligence not only on police operations but on our competitors as well.”

  The plan was, in its way, genius. Kevin told Supreme that he was certain he could get his hands on CompStat data, the computer-generated statistical analysis of crime data the NYPD began using to clean up the city’s streets in the midnineties.

  F
or decades, cops had just muddled along, making an arrest when they saw a crime in progress or attempting to track down a perpetrator when someone reported being victimized. They were totally reactive. Prevention was not in the playbook. In truth, no one, not even the cops themselves, believed they could actually prevent crime.

  Once a year, the FBI would publish crime figures for every city in America. Once a year. And this was the only accurate intel the cops got about what kinds of crime were being committed, how often, and in which locations. In essence, the NYPD’s precincts functioned completely in the dark. How do you know where to put your resources if you don’t even know where the crimes are being committed? It’d be like trying to run a company without having up-to-date sales figures.

  CompStat changed all that. Every crime and police incident in every part of the city was tracked every single day by computer, which resulted in detailed street maps showing where the action occurred. So on any given day, a precinct commander knew exactly where the drug sales, the rapes, the purse snatchings, and the car thefts took place. And because he knew which corners, which alleys, which apartment buildings, and which subway stations had problems, he knew where to put his cops. It also meant that for the first time in the history of the New York City police department, precinct commanders could be held accountable for what took place on their watch.

  Kevin’s idea was to turn the CompStat process on its head. Used correctly, this information could be just as valuable to criminals as it was to the cops. For someone like Church Jackson, knowing where the cops were going to be, and knowing where his competitors were set up, was invaluable. Having this intelligence was like the street-crime equivalent of insider trading.

  “So we make the deal with Kevin,” Supreme continued. “I mean, what the fuck, yo, it’s not like we had any choice. We set a meeting for later in the week to work out the rest of the details. He said he was gonna have a partner, some higher-up in the department who’d provide most of the info and additional protection. But this guy won’t be at the meeting. He’ll stay in the background, remain anonymous. Then he takes off the cuffs and tells us he needs fifty K. Now. He wants twenty-five as a motherfuckin’ show of good faith, and twenty-five to make the cop who was with him look the other way. At that point I knew Big K wasn’t just jammin’. This was no spontaneous fuckin’ flash of lightnin’, all right? Somehow the crazy motherfucker had planned it. Man,” Supreme said, shaking his head and laughing, “that nigga was somethin’. ”

  Lucy’s mind was racing. She wanted to ask questions, to probe for details. But Supreme was clearly determined to continue telling the story and she didn’t want to place any obstacles in front of him.

  The partnership turned out to be an extraordinary arrangement for everyone. Church Jackson and Supreme made more money than ever—even with 15 percent coming off the top—and they didn’t have to waste time and energy protecting their turf and fighting off the competition. Kevin and his anonymous partner, who were raking it in as well, pretty much took care of that. The deal even made Kevin look like a first-rate, kick-ass cop. With help from Church and Supreme—the intelligence exchange was a two-way street—his arrest numbers were very strong and he started getting regular promotions.

  For five years, it was the perfect deal. And then Church Jackson turned up dead. Not just dead, but with his head and feet cut off. “The nigga was found in little pieces on a baseball field in Macombs Dam Park behind Yankee Stadium,” Supreme said. “It was no joke. You gotta be one crazy-ass motherfucker to do that. I’m talkin’ Jeffrey Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, Osama bin motherfuckin’ Laden crazy, know what I’m sayin’? They cut off his fingers and all ten digits were placed on the pitcher’s mound. Tryin’ to make it look like a ritualistic killing or some shit is one thing. But the psycho had to know if he dumped the body on that baseball field that a bunch of neighborhood kids would find it.”

  “Do you know—?” Lucy started to ask, but Supreme slowly held up his hand to stop her. He wasn’t ready to take questions yet. He got up out of his chair and started pacing as he talked.

  “This is where things really get fucked up. Church was into the whole secrecy thing. So even as tight as we were, there were still things he never told me. I don’t know for sure how he ended up in motherfuckin’ pieces spread out on the infield like human fertilizer, but I have a pretty good idea why. Big K’s partner was done; he wanted out. Maybe he was tired of dealing with it, maybe he was climbin’ the law enforcement ladder of success and he was worried about gettin’ busted. Fuck if I know. But once he made his decision, guess what? The motherfucker didn’t wanna worry about the shadows. He didn’t wanna look in the rearview mirror and see anything but a long stretch of empty road. Nothing to connect him to our highly profitable little enterprise. At first I wasn’t sure if it was Kevin or his partner who did Church. And for a while it didn’t really matter,” Supreme said, picking up his iced tea glass and taking a drink.

  “Kevin came to me shortly after Church was eighty-sixed and said it was just us now. Me and him. His partner was retired, and I guess you could say, so was mine.”

  “Whoa,” Lucy instinctively blurted, “weren’t you concerned at that point about Kevin’s partner? Why wouldn’t he kill you too?”

  Supreme allowed a half smile. “Patience, pretty girl, patience. I figured I was cool ’cause I had no idea who Kevin’s other half was. He dealt only with Church. And if they were gonna do me, they woulda done it. Why dick around and waste time putting a new deal together between Big K and me? So Kevin and me continued to conduct business more or less like we had before. And then after two years or so of our new arrangement, I started to move into the music business and out of the drug business. Less stress, know what I’m sayin’?”

  “So why the worry now?” Lucy asked.

  “Kevin called me a few weeks ago. I hadn’t heard from his ass in nearly two years. So I was surprised by the ‘Hey, brutha, how you be’ dial-up. The nigga says we need some face time, get together and talk about the old days, talk about business. Fuck, man, we ain’t got no business no more, that street shit’s behind me. In the rearview mirror. So I kinda played him, know what I’m sayin’? I said, ‘Yeah, we should do that. Lemme get back to you.’ Then the nigga turns up dead.”

  Supreme’s demeanor was different now. He was less playful, less engaged by his own storytelling. Lucy thought that even his facial muscles seemed drawn a little tighter. “Once I heard that, I knew somethin’ was goin’ down. I knew he called with some real shit; he wasn’t just trippin’. He didn’t give anything up on the phone, but I knew that the chickens had come home to roost. Suicide?” Supreme said with a rueful laugh. “Yeah, right. Not a fuckin’ chance.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Lucy asked. “Family man, decorated cop, under investigation by Internal Affairs according to the papers. Maybe it just got to be too much. Maybe IAB was closing in and the pressure was too much. Maybe—”

  “Maybe he’s in heaven now with Jesus and all the angels. Look,” Supreme said, moving toward Lucy, “I’m not interested in fuckin’ fairy tales and make-believe. Kevin was too tough, too smart, and too vain to kill himself. This motherfucker was raising a family and rising through the ranks of the NYPD while at the same time playin’ a key role in runnin’ a multimillion-dollar drug business. You wanna talk about stress? Pressure? My money’s on his old partner. And guess what? I’m the last of the motherfuckin’ Mohicans, the last critical loose end. If he’s lookin’ to clean the slate, I’m next up on the schedule.”

  “But you have no idea who he is,” Lucy said.

  “That’s why I called A. J. He’s got the best sources in the city. I’ve given you ninety percent of the puzzle. Go find the last piece. Quickly. Or this may be the last motherfuckin’ afternoon you and I get to spend together. And that, shawty, would truly be a shame.”

  • • •

  On the street, Lucy fumbled a little getting her iPhone out of her bag. She was so jacked up over Suprem
e’s story that her hands were shaking. “Okay,” she said to herself, “calm down. Take a few deep breaths and you’ll be fine.” The breathing helped a little, but what she felt like she really needed was a drink. That would have to wait. She wanted to get to A. J. while all of the details were still fresh. “YO,” she typed quickly with her thumbs, “SUPREME STRY IS A MAJR SCORE. A GRND SLM . . .”

  When her cell phone rang, she was already in a cab heading back to her apartment. “Hello,” she said a little too loudly. She was still so energized her voice actually startled the cabdriver.

  “So I guess it went pretty well,” A. J. said.

  “It was unbelievable,” Lucy said, modulating her volume. “I don’t even know what to say. I think I’m still in shock. Excuse me,” she said to the cabdriver. “Can you pull over here? I’m sorry, I need to get out.”

  She felt guilty cutting the ride short, so she overtipped. She didn’t want to discuss any details of the story within earshot of the cabbie. Now, standing in a doorway across from the public library on the corner of Forty-First Street and Fifth Avenue, she filled A. J. in on the details.

  “He just gave it up,” she gushed. “I mean all of it. The drug dealing, the complicit cops, how their system worked, using the CompStat intel, the murders, every amazing fucking piece of it.”

  “Good job, Luce. Make lots of additional notes now, okay?” A. J. said. “Where are you?”

  “I’m right by the library.”

  “Perfect. Go grab a chair in Bryant Park, or go to a Starbucks or whatever. Put down your impressions of him, the town house, the atmosphere, his manner, all of it. Do it before you lose it. Same thing with the quotes. Go through your notes from the interview right now and add whatever you missed. Fill in the details. Put in his inflection, what he emphasized, where he paused, and what he was doing while he talked. Do it now and I’m telling you, you’ll remember everything he said.”