This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I first read and finished "mid June of 2002".
I am a sucker for the Police Procedural Genre set in NYC during the seventies through the nineties, and this one was right up my alley.
'Pigtown' no longer exists (now the area is 'Wingate'), but it was in Flatbush and it was a kind of agricultural area of the city. As late as the 1930's it was still possible to find shanties with goats and pigs in Brooklyn. This area was the location of Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1912 to 1957.
The novel begins with the discovery of a body stuffed in a refrigerator. Beansy Rotulo was a minor 'made man' in the mafia and he was gunned down and placed in the fridge by two members of a Rastafarian gang.
The house where the body was found was owned by Andrea Russo, a woman who worked in a bar owned by Paddy Holiday. This man was a retired IAD cop and was working for the mob while on the job and still was a player.
Matt Stewart is the protagonist and he is a detective working at the NYC'Seven One Division'.
The most interesting part of the novel is about the widespread police corruption.
In 1963 there was a meeting called the Knight's Roundtable where the police commissioner asked the Intelligence Division what would happen if the department did away with 'good money'. 'Good money' was the phrase used to explain graft paid on gambling, prostitution, and loan sharking- anything but drug money.
So what they did is to put Frank Serpico, a lily-white, clean cop, into the most larcenous police district in the entire department. The Knapp Commission came in and shut down all sources of 'good money' and this opened the floodgates for drug money. This allowed the drug cartels to turn NYC into a wide-open drug supermarket by the 70's. And the kickbacks from 'good money' to 'drug money' expanded from thousands of dollars to millions. The police bosses were able to funnel most of the money to themselves under the new 'drug money' system.
I couldn't find anything on the Internet about this 'Knight's Roundtable' (in the book the name refers to the police commissioner by the name of 'Knight'), but something like this probably happened- A pact between the police and the mob.
From Publishers Weekly about the book:
"The gritty realism of Caunitz's new novel (after Cleopatra Gold), as in his earlier ones, reflects the more than two decades he spent with the NYPD. Caunitz's cops sound and act like the real thing, and his villains, while occasionally over the top, are fetchingly sinister (only the extravagant, mostly illicit sex here comes off as more fantasy than reportage). The murder of small-time hood Beansy Rutolo in the Brooklyn neighborhood dubbed ``Pigtown'' has a special significance for Lieutenant Matthew Stuart: the deceased's unexpected testimony once saved Matt's father from being kicked off the job for political reasons. Now the effort to track down Beansy's killers is revealing corruption that reaches deep into the Department-and goes back years. Matt is struggling with assorted personal demons too-the tragedy that ended his marriage; his secret relationship with a superior officer known as the ``Ice Maiden''; and an attempt to frame him for dereliction of duty. Caunitz's prose is flat-footed, weighed down with mundane detail, and his theme of ancient, festering corruption was old hat when Teddy Roosevelt was the city's police commissioner. Still, his feel for cops and cons matches anyone's, as evidenced once again by this flawed but still engaging novel, a police blotter come to life. Author tour."
No comments:
Post a Comment