It has always been a tough place, Brownsville. Full of tough characters hanging out on the corners, glaring at you and spitting on the sidewalks. Tough gets you respect.
Sometimes respect grows, and festers, and turns to fear. People who can will leave a neighborhood at this point. They will tell new neighbors in new places about the glares and the spit they left behind. And soon enough the whole city is scared of a place like Brownsville, and content to let it rot.
The local police precinct, the 73rd, routinely tops New York in uniform crime statistics measured by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Unsurprisingly, Brownsville ranks dead last in expenditures for city services — medical clinics, street sanitation, health inspections, public schools, housing code enforcement.
Emotionally inclined immigrants almost anywhere else in the fable of New York, New York say the city’s streets are paved with gold. On sunny days, when the sidewalks of Gotham sparkle like gemstones, they swear they hear Frank Sinatra crooning, If I can make it there / I’ll make it anywhere...
In Brownsville, there is no percentage in looking for sunny lyrics in sidewalks as gray and dull as thrown-away chewing gum.
Before World War II, Brownsville was mostly Jewish and Italian, with an enclave of Syrians along Thatford Avenue and a longtime Moorish colony on Livonia Avenue. Today it is predominantly black, largely poor, and frequently combustible.
Many African Americans consider the ambitious neighborhood newcomers — working-class Caribbean strivers and entrepreneurs from Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania — as yet another reminder of how they have been profoundly shortchanged.
On busy Belmont Avenue, a fresh-cooked meal of tiebou djen may be enjoyed at the several lively Senegalese cafés. The fragrant bowls of steaming hot fish and saffron-laced barley have become as ubiquitous in Brownsville as red beans and rice on paper plates.
You used to hear English on Belmont Avenue, even if the people speaking it used some other language at home. The people spending money today on Belmont mostly speak French.
Those with little to spend dream of hitting a good number and leaving Brownsville. When slim hope is dashed, there is always something to smoke or drink or inject in order to keep the faith.
Getting out is elusive. Getting high is total victory.
2. “Amy Fisher popped some bitch in the head...”
The plague came early to Brownsville. In the 1970s and ’80s and ’90s, the streets were conveniently full of decrepit buildings favored by crack cocaine dealers who could hole up inside, unseen by the twin threats of cops and hinky customers, and trade their poison for cash slipped through chinks carved in the walls.
An Amazon River of money and crack surged through Brownsville, flooding the neighborhood with fast profits and even faster degradation.
In the early winter of 1994, powerful forces in City Hall and the federal government accused officers of Brownsville’s virtually all-white occupation force — the 73rd Precinct — of being participants themselves in the chaos of crime and shame in those plague years.
The mostly young and tender officers of the 73rd did not live near their place of work. Save for fifty-three-year-old Patrolman Frank Mistretta, they did not even live in the city. Instead, most commuted daily from Long Island cop suburbs where they were born and raised.
In the early days of the plague, Patrolman Mistretta was one of two men determined to rid Brownsville of evildoers. Nobody actually heard him say “evildoer,” a word freighted with righteousness, but he might as well have; the basis of Frank Mistretta’s self-respect was his being a street cop in the neighborhood of his youth.
He was proud of his five hundred arrests and sixty-seven department medals. But over time, Mrs. Mistretta would come to despise her husband’s professional dedication.
She told him one day that while she loved him, she had no affection whatsoever for the NYPD. After which, Mrs. Mistretta grabbed her husband’s.38 caliber police special, swallowed the barrel, pulled the trigger, and was no more.
Brownsville’s other would-be savior is recollected for a charming smile that seemed to say, Would I kid you? Among other things, he was a minister of the Lord, which made him an easy man to clock. But in Brownsville, being a suspicious character is not necessarily a cause for alarm.
He had green eyes, strong coffee — colored skin, and magnolias in his voice. His name might have been what he said it was, Pastor Billy Rich.
According to the old domino players I spoke with on Herzl Street, the pastor led a congregation of exuberant worshippers from a rented storefront, a few blocks down from Brownsville’s last remaining synagogue and a few blocks the other way from a squat, shuttered factory where pine boxes for dead people used to be manufactured.
On the Sabbath, an elaborate crucifix shone in Billy Rich’s store window: a life-sized plaster Christ on His terrible cross, with red lights throbbing from the places where He was punctured with thorns and pierced with nails. Shouting and stomping behind the crucifix, Pastor Billy’s flock would implore Heaven for a miracle that would drive the crackheads out of Brownsville, just as Jesus had driven money changers from the temple.
On weekdays, the window contained a sign of shiny gold letters: GET RICH QUICK! Inside, the part-time ecclesiastic peddled life insurance policies of debatable legitimacy, though personally blessed. After business hours, clients were invited to enjoy cut-rate libations in the cellar bar.
In the spring of 1993, a felonious incident unreported to the police took place in that cellar. At half past 2 o’clock on an April morning, a non-investor walked right in and sat himself down at the bar. The interloper stood apart from the all-black crowd of woozy barflies not because he was white, but because he was seven feet tall and togged out in the impressive leathers of a motorcycle club.
Billy Rich, it was learned, was somehow in arrears. Details are murky, but the matter of serious delinquency was apparent by the determined presence of the giant in leathers. He took a hatchet from his belt and chunked the blade a full inch down into the mahogany and said to Pastor Billy, with a snort, “Get Rich quick, that’s real freakin’ funny.”
The barflies winced at the sound of splintering wood as the giant yanked his hatchet free of the wound he had made on the bar. He asked Billy Rich for a nice foamy draught, and said he expected “payment in full” within the time it took him to smoke a Camel and kill a brewski.
No doubt it was a mistake for Billy Rich to have responded with, “Forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
And most surely it was a mistake for him to have flashed his Would-I-kid-you smile as he drew one from the tap and set it out before the debt collector. Irritated, the giant again employed the hatchet, this time whomping it across the back of Billy Rich’s strong coffee — colored hand.
The barflies talk of how Pastor Billy’s broken hand shot up to his forehead like the distressed heroine of a silent movie, and how he fainted away to the beery floor. They talk of how his right pinky and ring finger remained on top of the bloody bar, twitching.
Billy Rich skipped out to whereabouts unknown, leaving Frank Mistretta as the sole guardian angel of Brownsville.
Knowing that evil lurked in the darkest and damnedest places, and without a wife anymore to complain about the exigencies of his calling, Patrolman Mistretta put in for the graveyard shift.
On February 2, 1994, one of first newspaper articles about the shame of Brownsville’s finest was published in the New York Times: