Alphaville - Hardcover

Codella, Michael; Bennett, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312592485 ISBN 13: 9780312592486

Verlag: St Martin's Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Alphabet City in 1988 was burned with heroin, radicalism, and anti-police sentiment. Working as a plainclothes narcotics cop in the most high-voltage neighbourhood in Manhattan, Detective Sergeant Mike Codella made it his personal mission to put away Davie Blue Eyes - a stone-cold murderer and the head of Alphabet City's heroin supply chain. In this gritty memoir, Codella resurrects the vicious streets that Davie Blue Eyes owned, and tells the story of how he and his partner Gio bagged the forty thieves that surrounded Davie, slowly working their way to the head of the snake one scale at a time. Shining a cool light into the parallel forces, struggles, and stories that transformed the neighbourhood, Codella makes it clear that through all the beatings and gunshots, the foot chases and close calls, he and Gio both saw Alphabet City the same way: worth saving. With the narrative spirit of "The French Connection", the straight-up voice of Ed Conlon's "Blue Blood", and the insights of "Ladies and Gentlemen, "The Bronx Is Burning", "Alphaville" is at once the story of an NYPD detective, and of New York City itself.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL CODELLA was a New York City cop for twenty years.  He worked and supervised in the DEA, Secret Service Task Force, Special Frauds Squad, Missing Person's Squad, Operation 8, and several other outstanding and prestigious units throughout the City. Mike retired from the NYPD in 2003 as a Detective Sergeant.  He now divides his time between TV and film work, being a professional fight trainer, and running his Renzo Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy with his family.

BRUCE BENNETT is a writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun; a guitar player who has performed and recorded with the A-Bones, Hasil Adkins, Action Swingers, Yo La Tengo, and Andre Williams; and the writer and director of two award-winning short films, both aired on the Independent Film Channel. A Manhattan native and twenty year resident of the Lower East Side -- including the period covered in ALPHAVILLE--Bennett now lives and works in Brooklyn.

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Chapter One

“Make-a sure you behave-a yourself!” After my mother’s father Giovanni—“Papa”—passed away in the late seventies, I never heard those words spoken with a gravy-thick Italian accent again. Up till then it was as reliable as clockwork. Headed out the door to school, mass, to play ball, or fuck around I always got the same reminder. When you’re a kid and an adult you trust tells you to be good what you usually hear is “have fun” or “don’t get caught.”

Papa was a Sicilian-American of the Old World school. He always dressed like he was going to a formal sit-down with equals, always unfussily attended to preparing food and made sure to have a glass of wine with every meal. He made the best eggplant parmigiana I’ve ever had in my life and the lasagna he set down next to the turkey at Thanksgiving (a given in any Italian home) would be gone before the bird lost a leg. To him the simple things were the finer things. The way Papa peeled an apple was its own lesson in Old World precision and grace. He used a paring knife to painstakingly shuck the peel in a single uninterrupted spiral as if he were making a watch.

When my grandmother died the day after Thanksgiving 1972 my mother’s side of the family took turns putting up Papa. Actually, we fought over him. He was a great guy to have around the house. He took care of himself and let us take care of him in the right proportion. With Papa at my elbow I learned to make a grilled cheese sandwich, his favorite lunch, the right way—slowly, with just the right cheese, butter, bread, and frying pan temperature. It wasn’t a lesson in haute cuisine, it was an initiation into the old ways of doing things for a member of the microwave-and-TV-dinner generation. Not a formula, but a feeling—a sense for how things should go that a kid could relate to. I knew to cut the crusts off and always anticipated and felt the same pride when Papa would pronounce the results perfect and take his first bite. My sister and I still joke about it—he wouldn’t let her make his lunch. She rushed through it. Me, I was able to take it slow, savor the experience and get it done his way. I behaved myself. It was fun. We all loved him, and me, I worshipped him. I’d heard Papa’s words of advice as I headed out the door for just over five years when he died in 1978.

Even during baseball and football season, if Papa was staying with us, I’d hang out with him as many afternoons as I could. After lunch he’d hike his trouser cuffs and settle into the big recliner in the living room like a bocce ball in a catcher’s mitt and we’d watch The Mike Douglas Show together. Douglas was a toupee-and-leisure-suit guy who I guess must have had a singing career. His show was kind of an upscale Joe Franklin—John and Yoko would be on with Don Rickles. Alfred Hitchcock shared Mike’s couch with James Brown. The top of each show was the same—Mike would come out on the brightly lit flower-power set and do a song (usually a standard that my grandpa knew) before going into a softball monologue of corny jokes. It was routine and schmaltzy and engaging and surprising enough that Papa loved it. So did my mom.

But one afternoon, Mike followed a Totie Fields fat joke with a crack about Italians and the Mafia. At the time The Godfather was breaking box office records across the country. For much of the sixties organizations like the Italian-American Civil Rights League, led by Joe Colombo, moonlighting from running the mob family that bore his name, lobbied Hollywood and Washington long and hard not to use “the M word” in scripts or legal proceedings. TV and movies in those days usually substituted more ominous sounding but less ethnically specific terms like “the Syndicate,” “the Organization,” or “the Outfit” in its place.

Paramount, the company that made The Godfather, broke ranks on a picture called The Brotherhood with Kirk Douglas a few years before. It bombed. Threatened with union hassles and boycotts the suits at Paramount agreed to bleach “Mafia” out of The Godfather script. Around the same time Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell caved and ordered “Mafia” banned and excised from federal legal documents and memos. None of this kept Joe Colombo from receiving three bullets in the head at an IACRL rally courtesy of a hitman hired by his “Syndicate” rival Crazy Joe Gallo. Sticks and stones…

The Godfather was such a sensation that the dam burst. Overnight a word that had been taboo in movies and television for generations was okay after all. Not with my grandfather. As the canned laughter hissed out of the TV speaker, he got up, muttered something in his Italian dialect I wasn’t supposed to hear, changed the channel, and scowled wordlessly at the screen until supper. He never watched Mike Douglas again. My mother never watched it, either.

What I more or less understood at the time was that my grandpa Giovanni had arrived in New York from Sicily in the winter of 1900 aged eight years old with a paper suitcase in his hand. His sister had left the old country before he was born. They met face-to-face for the first time on the docks of the Lower East Side. Neither of them ever saw their parents again.

When they left, Sicily was still recovering from a civil war that saw thousands of their countrymen cut down. Their island was so remote and so barren of the coal and iron resources that leveraged northern Italy into the Industrial Revolution and the empire-building business that it was for all intents and purposes stuck in the Middle Ages. You couldn’t build a factory or a battleship with an olive or tomato harvest. You also couldn’t make a living in the fields and orchards in Sicily like you could doing just about anything on the other side of the Atlantic.

Thousands of years of invasions and occupations from Italy in the north and just about every country around the Mediterranean had made Sicilians tough and tight. Sicilian immigrants arrived in the New World with a suspicion of official rules and established authority and a trust only in each other that had been earned over centuries at foreign sword point. The Sicilian struggle for independence and survival played out against one enemy or another for centuries and in any war the line between crook and freedom fighter is hard to draw. Sicilians had hundreds of years of chaos and conflict in which to hone secrecy, brutality, and revenge into an art. American English has dozens of words in common use culled from Gallic, Yiddish, northern Italian dialects, and other immigrant languages. There are only two imported from Sicily—“vendetta” and “Mafia.”

By 1920, a million Italians (mostly Sicilians like my grandfather and his sister) had immigrated to the United States through New York Harbor. They were joined by about two million Jews driven from Eastern Europe from 1881 to 1924. Everyone was from somewhere else and the numbers grew larger every year. Legal and illegal opportunity knocked for new arrivals. The places to live were where other Italians had staked a neighborhood claim—Harlem uptown and inland from the waterfront on the Lower East Side at the downtown end of Manhattan. Gangsters and thieves lost their lunch over the same boat railings as everyone else headed to America to make some money. For these guys “yearning to breathe free” meant leaving home because they had to. Pioneers of American organized crime like Ignazio “Lupo the Wolf” Saietta and the Morello brothers left Corleone a step ahead of the gallows. Guiseppe “Joe” Masseria emigrated from Marsala to beat a murder...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312592485
• ISBN 13: 9780312592486
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar