THE NAKED CITY

Bad things happen in "the Pit," a notorious crime-infested ghetto in downtown Miami. REFLECTIONS FROM THE PIT is not just another collection of rehashed police stories with shootouts, car chases, and damsels in distress. These

 

“Character is who your are in the dark when nobody is watching.”

 

Michael Berish

 

THE NAKED CITY”

 

by

 

MICHAEL BERISH

 

 

            In 1948, a movie entitled The Naked City—starring Barry Fitzgerald—was released.  In the late Fifties, it was made into a TV series starring James Franciscus; both were filmed in New York City. 

The series consisted of sociological character studies that were explored within a setting of urban pathos—the process of life moving ever onward, resolving nothing.  An everyday story line would burst forth each week from the TV screen and be layered with insupposable events, and just when you thought it was all over and nothing else could possibly happen—Bang!—up popped another twist in the plot that confounded your imagination.  At the conclusion of each show, the narrator (in a voice-over) would intone: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them.”  

In the Seventies, I was a City of Miami police officer riding in the Pit, the Black ghetto in downtown Miami, and whenever one of those cycle of events—that staggers you back onto your heels—would happen, I’d turn to my partner and say: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them.”  Later in my career, I revised that adage to: “There are eight million stories in the Pit; this has been one of them.”  I’m not sure if any of my partners knew exactly what I was referring to (reference the movie or TV series), but they sure knew what I meant.  What follows is a peek into that human swamp, into one of those eight million stories.

*    *    *

            It was a hot summer night, nearly eleven o’clock.  I was riding “C” shift (the 9:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. tour of duty) in 40 Sector (the Pit) with a cop named Matt Miller when the dispatcher came on the air. 

“Three, Forty-Three.  Take a 13 (information call) reference: Check on the welfare of a woman in the alley of an apartment complex on the corner of Northwest Seventh Avenue and Twelve Street.  Phoned in by an anonymous caller.  No further information.” 

The QTH (location) was on the fringe of the Pit, a mixed Black and White neighborhood.  We were right around the corner and arrived within the minute.  Pulling up in front of the alley, my partner rolled down his window, listened for no more than two to three seconds, then said: “I don’t hear anything, let’s go.”

            “Wait a minute; wait a minute!” I replied.  “Let’s check it out.”  I was young and eager.  Actually, he was too; we’d both graduated from the same academy class, the year before.  As I climbed out of the patrol car, Matt said: “I’ll wait here for you,” as he drank his coffee.  It was later I discovered why he never went down that passageway with me: He was a coward.

            The high-rise complex was configured with four apartment buildings situated in a square, which enclosed an inner courtyard that was a parking lot for the tenants; the walkway I now stood in lead into this courtyard.  I turned off my radio (so as not to transmit my position), put my back to the wall (no sense letting anyone creep up behind you), and headed down the alleyway.  I slowly inched along the brick wall, letting my eyes adjust to the blackness.  As I came upon the darkened parking lot, I stood motionless and held my breath—a trick I learned from my first partner, Officer Stan “Spooky” O’Kofski.  In the stillness of the moment, you can hear that other person breathing, the one you were just chasing into the night, a twinkling ago, and who is now—hiding.  I scanned the long rows of automobiles.  My mind began to work overtime: What was that?! 

Sometimes your subconscious sees danger before you’re even aware of it; it’s a sixth sense and most cops have it.  My eyes went back and forth over the last column of autos.

There!, in that string of cars,…over there!  Wait a minute,…it’s gone. 

Was it just my eyes playing tricks on me?  Your mind goes weird on you sometimes when you’re alone in the darkness, down some backstreet lane.  

There!  There it is again; it just popped-up in that sedan!  That same string of cars: the third one from the left.  It’s a head!  It’s gone…Now, it’s back!…It’s a head, going up and down!    

            I drew my revolver and moved stealthily towards the vehicle.  I closed at a forty-five degree angle to the pillar (metal post that runs from the roof to the trunk) on the vehicle; this would keep me in the blind spot of the sedan and undetectable,…hopefully. 

When I reached the hardtop, I jerked open the driver’s side door.  There on the blood-splattered front seat lay an Anglo woman—Dorothy Wright—a widow of about sixty years of age; her underwear and panty hose were torn off, her dress hiked-up around her waist.  At first, I thought the perpetrator had taken a knife to his victim; the front bench seat looked as if he’d slaughtered a calf in there.  Later, I found the Coca-Cola bottle he’d used to subdue Mrs. Wright by knocking out her front teeth; she looked as if she’d just gone fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden.  I saw the look of horror on her face, the tears streaming down, her body convulsing in shock; but when she saw my uniform, her face changed in an instant.  She looked out from a tiny opening in the one remaining split and bloodied eye (the other was black and blue, and totally shut), then smiled through the remaining, broken-off stubs that once were teeth as if she’d just seen the beatific vision of Christ himself come to her rescue. 

In the next millisecond, a Black teenager exploded up and out of the automobile.  I use that word, teenager, loosely.  He was bigger than me, much bigger than me: At six-foot, one hundred-ninety pounds, here stood Jesse James Jackson, the teenager.  I jammed my Colt up and under his chin, where the jaw line met his Adam’s apple.  He rose up on his toes and begged: “Please don’t kill me!” as he furiously fumbled with his pants.  I thought he was going for the same frog sticker he’d used on the widow.  In the dead silence, you could hear the click of my revolver as I pulled the hammer back and pushed the handgun into his neck, raising him up further on the balls of his feet.  “Just give me an excuse to kill you,” I said.  I looked down for his carving knife; he was just putting his turgid penis back in his pants.  I nodded towards the alleyway.  “Run,” I told him.

            “What are you, crazy?” he replied.  “I know better; I’d never run.  I’m a juvenile.  The judge ain’t gonna do nutin’ to me compared to what you’d guys’ll do iffin I ran.”

            From the other end of the parking lot came Unit Three, Forty-One—Officer Stan “Spooky” O’Kofski—the veteran partner I rode with while on probation.  He spotted me between the parked vehicles, sped over, jumped from his gumball machine (i.e. squad car) and cuffed my prisoner—faster than a w***e highballing it past a church; that was “Spooky” for you; he was good.

            “Nice collar,” said The Spook as he attempted to hammer my “alleged suspect” in his left testicle with a Kel-Lite (big, heavy-duty, metal flashlight that takes four D batteries).

            I grabbed his arm and stopped him.  “Easy Spook.”

            “Always the soft one.  You’ll learn some day.”

            “It’s not that; it’s just that I’ll have to do the Use of Force Report when I end up schleppin’ him over to Ward D (where injured prisoners are taken at Jackson Memorial Hospital) with only one nut.  Then, what am I gonna say?  That old standard: He fell down?...No thanks.

“He’s my prisoner.  I’m responsible for him; that’s what ya taught me, wasn’t it?  Don’t let no other cops mess with your prisoner.  If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to take him downtown in one piece.”

            The Spook smiled; a smile that twinkled and he had a glint in his eye to go along with it.  “Ya did learn sumthin’ ridin’ with me, after all.”  He backed off. 

Now it was the perp’s turn to smile as we led him out to the sidewalk.  Matt was still in the cruiser, he hadn’t moved; in fact, when I put my prisoner in the back seat, he never even got out to help; he just said: “We get a collar?”

            Whenever a unit busted a murdered, or an armed robber, or a rapist, the entire sector would cruise by to eyeball the suspect for future reference.  That evening as we sat in the gumball (I had to do all the paperwork since Miller hadn’t witnessed anything, obviously), the rest of the sector took a mental note of the accused. 

Jesse was a minor, but the Assistant State Attorney (A. S. A.; a better title would be: Resident Flunky in Training)—Jerome Baylis—decided to try him as an adult.  Even though he was only sixteen-years old, he had twenty-one prior arrests from petit bicycle theft to B&E (Breaking and Entering) of a Dwelling. 

We went in front of a diminutive, Italian, Circuit Court Judge—who dyed his hair the color of coal oil, considered himself catnip to the ladies despite his already being married, and went by the name of Vincenzo Scarfanelli—to decide if Jackson should be bound over for trial as an adult.  Technically, the crime Jesse was accused of was “sexual battery,” according to the legislature.  In today’s culturally and politically correct world, it sounds so much better to be accused of “sexual battery” rather that RAPE!  It sounds like you have a slight hormonal disorder of the thyroid gland rather than what you actually are: a degenerate who’d smash out the front teeth of a sixty-year-old woman with a Coke bottle and then forcibly penetrate her against her will! 

Since the defendant had been incarcerated for the past two weeks in lock-up at Youth Hall, the question of bail was also to be determined at this hearing.  Mrs. Ruby Jackson, his mother, was there.  There was no Mr. Jackson; the rapist’s father could have been one of any number of men that Ruby was having carnal knowledge with at the time of her pregnancy. 

The mother was—of course—tearful and went on, and on, about how her son was “so wonderful, so devoted.”  It was a little like listening to the progenitor of Jack the Ripper catalog his virtues in a court of law.  Her past for drug abuse and prostitution were never brought up; they were “irrelevant” said the Assistant State Attorney.  I asked him: “Whose side are you on?”  To which he replied: “No one’s side.  I’m for the rights of the people.  I’m here to see that justice for all is done.”  Those are such nice, self-righteous words: “rights of the people…justice for all.” 

“Just a little misunderstood, at times,” is how Mrs. Jackson explained this latest “mishap,” as she called it.  If the “kind judge” would only release her son into her custody, she—as a “good mother”—just “knew” she could “straighten” him out.  She was the “good mother” of seven children; all on welfare; all—once they got past the age of reason—had criminal records.  She was raising a brood of gangsters. 

I was called to testify and told Judge Vinnie, “The time for straightening him out was long past.”  I was “counseled” here for expressing my “opinion.”  “You should stick to the facts,” said the judge.  I felt like saying: I should stick to the facts while this overindulgent mother is allowed to blabber all over the place about whatever pops into her shameless, drug-ridden mind.  I gripped my tongue between my teeth and never expressed my “opinion.” 

“Should bail be granted or not, Officer?” asked the prosecutor.

“No, sir,” I replied.

“Why not, Officer?”

“If he’s allowed free on bond, with his track record, this would only happen again.”  But, what did I know?  That was “just another opinion” of mine, according to the judge.  Judge Scarfanelli released him to his mother’s custody.  My “opinion” (another one I never got to express) was: If she was such a “good mother,” where was she when her son committed his prior twenty-one, now twenty-two, offenses?

            Ordinarily, here is where a story like this would end—ordinarily.  However, in this story, there are several postscripts.

*    *    *

Three weeks later, another “C” shift unit caught Jesse James Jackson RAPING a sixty–three-year-old Black/female, Mrs. Ethel Cumbie, two blocks away from his first “sexual battery.”  Again, he beat his victim, unmercifully.  Unfortunately for Jesse, the units in 40 Sector remembered him from the night they all tooled-by and eyeballed him.  According to the A-Form (arrest form) that was submitted to Ward D, the juvenile—who knew better and would never run—tried to…“escape.”  He was treated for a broken leg, a fractured wrist, three cracked ribs, a collapsed lung, and numerous contusions and abrasions to his face.  (Face was crossed-out on the A-Form and replaced by: entire body.)  According to most of the officers on the scene, he “got the thumpin’ he deserved.”  Thank God, another judge handled that bond hearing; the two-time rapist was denied bail.

The Assistant State Attorney was afraid we didn’t have enough evidence to convict. 

“My God!  Not enough evidence?!” I asked, incredulously.  “You’ve got the victim’s testimony, her clothing, photos of her disfigurement, toxicology reports, and testimony from the arresting officer who caught “the accused” with his Johnson in hand.  My God, man!, what does it take for you?  A signed confession in blood?!”

“Technically,” he said, “you got there too quick.  On that first sexual battery, it’s not really a sexual battery; it’s a sexual assault.  You opened that door before he actually penetrated Mrs. Wright.”

“Shame on me!” I said.  “Next time, I’ll slow it down a tad.  Really get the goods on the defendant.  Next time, I’ll sit out in the squad car with Officer Miller for a while; take a coffee break, maybe.  Give the victim more scream time.  Maybe if I dawdle long enough, I’ll catch a murder case instead of a little old measly ‘sexual assault.’” 

Not with standing my protest, the A. S. A. offered Jesse’s public defender two years for BOTH rapes, which he scarfed-up in a second.  Jackson plead in to the “sexual assault” and “sexual battery,” served half his time, and was back out on the streets before you could say: “rights of the people” or “justice for all.”

*    *    *

I received a commendation for the arrest, so did Matt since we were partners.  About a week later, we were chasing a suspect on foot up Northwest First Avenue for possession of narcotics.  The offender turned down a dirt path between some row houses off Sixteenth Street.  I looked back for Matt and saw him standing in the middle of the street, watching me.  I chased the perpetrator behind some buildings where he jumped me from a back porch.  We struggled over my gun, and he nearly shot me in the head (with my own gun!).  I finally wrestled it away just as a plainclothes detective named Bobby Gannon—having heard me advise of my last position over the radio—turned the corner and assisted me in handcuffing the suspect. 

Matt was waiting in the cruiser when I emerged from behind the houses.  I knew he saw me go down that passageway, and I knew he knew I was in a fight.  He never came to my assistance, nor did he even advise of my position.  After we booked the defendant (for which we BOTH got commendations again; Gannon did not), I told him that I was requesting a new partner next month; and for the remainder of the month, I’d do all the driving and write-up all the reports (Usually, one officer drives while the other writes reports, then they switch the next night). 

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m a one-man unit for the rest of the month!” I said, as I looked him in the eye.  He knew I KNEW: This job wasn’t for him; he didn’t have the guts for it.

*    *    *

Bobby Gannon was a big–time gambler.  He worked in the Robbery Unit and was caught (several times) placing bets over his phone with a bookie; he was completely addicted; it cost him his job.  He was a stand-up guy; I’ll always remember him for showing up when he did.  Bobby had a sixth sense for danger; he had this unique ability to always be in the right spot at the right time though how he got there no one knew, least of all Bobby.  He died several years later at the age of thirty-one from a massive heart attack while waiting in line at the movies.

*    *    *

            The prosecutor, Jerome Baylis, completed his basic training with the State Attorney’s Office, went into private practice, and ended-up defending people like Jesse James Jackson— only a whole lot richer—and made a very lucrative living at it.  He bought a home in Coral Gables (an affluent suburb of Greater Miami), hung around in much better circles, and joined the country club set.  He still didn’t have any idea what he was doing in court, only now he could charge a whole lot more for not knowing what he was doing.

*    *    *

            Spooky O’Kofski retired after thirty years of service.  He loved the sea and went into a boat-repair business in Ft. Lauderdale.  He lasted a year; not that the business went bust, Spooky went bust.  He got cancer of everything; it went through all of his body organs and he died within a month of its discovery.

*    *    *

Judge Vinnie was recalled off the bench in disgrace.  It seems the little sex-fiend had a defendant come in front of him on robbery charges and suggested to the perpetrator’s wife—in chambers—that if she did the dirty deed with him, he would acquit her husband.  She went to the prosecutor and the newspapers; the charges against her husband were dismissed; she didn’t have to do the nasty with Judge Vinnie, and he was stripped of his judgeship.  There is an old saying: You can be sure that whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.  His secretary came forward and complained of sexual harassment; he’d been chasing her around his desk for years, but she was afraid—until now—to come forward. 

I saw Judge Vinnie several years later on the TV show: 60 Minutes.  He was in private practice defending a client in West Palm Beach and decided not to introduce evidence that might have established his client’s innocence, instead trusting that his flowery oratory during summation to the jury, and his charismatic personality, would ultimately win the day.  This incompetent legal defense got his client the death penalty, something he might never have gotten if the Judge had used basic legal arguments that every first-year law clerk is schooled in.

*    *    *

            The following month, Miller was partnered with Officer Raul Rojas.  One night, Rojas went to make a disorderly conduct arrest and ended up wrestling some wild drunk to the ground; the suspect was transported to Ward D, and Officer Rojas spent the rest of the evening at J.M.H. being treated for bite wounds.  

The sector sergeant arrived after the fracas, just as Matt was stepping out of a doughnut shop with some milk in one hand and crème tarts in the other.  The sergeant couldn’t help but wonder: Why Raul—whose uniform was in tatters—was going to the hospital, and Matt looked as if he’d just stepped out of the pages of GQ?  Officer Miller was accused of cowardice, an administrative matter seeking termination and not lightly brought.  (This was the first and only time in my career I ever witnessed this particular charge ever being filed against an officer.)  He was summoned before the Civil Service, retained an attorney, and beat the charges; however, he quit within the year as word got around.  He was stigmatized with the Mark of Cain: no one would ride with him, nor back him up which can get extremely squirrelly, not to mention life threatening—the Blue Code at work.

*    *    *

            Jesse?  He had a very long, fruitful, and financially rewarding criminal career with only some negligible downtime for side trips to prison, never amounting to more than six months to a year at a time; and yes, he was busted again for rape.

*   *   *  

            And me?  Statistically, only five to ten percent of every academy class makes it to their pension.  Most are lost to permanent disabling injuries, quit, are fired, or become fatalities.  I was one of the lucky ones; I made it another twenty-one years to retirement.

*   *   *  

            Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Cumbie never fully recovered from their nights of tragedy.  The widow Wright expired in one of those nursing homes for indigent people and Mrs. Cumbie died within the year, run over by a D. U. I. (who was never apprehended ) one evening on her way home from services at the Baptist church.

            “There are eight million stories in the Pit; this has been one of them.”

 

THE END

 

 

 

Mike Berish’s website is: www.realmiamivice.com
His book is available on-line for $14.95 at:
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Registration Number TXu 1-178-466
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Reviews

[Andrew Uphoff]

I'm not sure if this is just because I'm not particularly into crime dramas, but I don't really know the point of this story or why I should care about the characters. Why are we following the main character(whom I don't even really know the name of, what he looks like, or what he stands for other than that his perspective on the court system is that it can be broken at times).

The only character in this entire story that I could understand who they were and what their role was is Matt Miller, and he's not even a main character nor a character that anyone is supposed to like. I don't even know what the formatting is like, or how the different parts of the story are broken up. It just seems like a jumbled mess with good paragraphing and presentation.

I'm not trying to put it down, I'm just trying to give you a better idea how someone who may not read things like this often will see it. Perhaps this is just a niche genre that I don't understand, but I also know that there are plenty of better ways to make a cop drama more interesting for a broader audience.

Either way, I think there is something to the story. There's a lot to be seen in this world(although I'm not entirely sure if it's entirely fiction, based on/inspired by real events, or if they are actual events). Keep on writing, I think you're doing a great job with editing, grammar, and overall presentation. However, there's definitely still work to be done!