Chapter 37

Brooklyn was my Uncle Joe’s little fiefdom.

He was the top cop in the borough and he had the job for a long time now.

He wasn’t that old all things considered because he was the youngest Captain in the history of the Department and rose quickly in the upper echelons of the hierarchy of the New York Police Department.

It seemed to me that Brooklyn had a certain magical air about it. At night, it didn’t have the sparkle of Manhattan but it was not as dark as Staten Island. The demographics were constantly changing inside Brooklyn proper and it had plenty of history dating right back to the War of Independence with battles fought with wins and losses on both sides and lots of blood running in the streets both soldiers and civilians. Brooklyn didn’t identify as being part of the Big Apple at night. It was a place to itself separate and not part of the big town hustle and bustle. Solid and unmoving, it was a world foreign to the Broadway crowd, disappointing to those looking for excitement and still an outdated and conservative place to set down roots at a reasonable cost of living in comparison to its sister across the river to the west.

Joe had an office in the downtown section and it was a short haul to the Brooklyn Bridge and the entrance to the big time in downtown Manhattan and the Hall of Justice that acted as a center of law enforcement for the Metropolitan Area. He used to get me press box tickets to the Brooklyn Dodgers games that gave me an up close and personal look at the game and the players with my favorite team the New York Giants. I always felt a little guilty about that but he liked doing it for me and I couldn’t refuse without offending him. I thing he felt he should be doing more for me but just didn’t have the time. The summer before I joined the military he got me a job down at Manhattan Beach and I turned from a redheaded Irish kid into a brown skinned Italian by the end of the summer. It was basically just picking up trash because the lifeguard jobs were all staffed by these older fucks that were into body building and were more interested in showing off their muscles instead of focusing on the girl’s pretty backsides in those tight little bathing suits that really made my day.

My Uncle was a big guy.

He was six foot seven and carried a lot of weight on those size eleven shoes. He took time off in the early forties to fight the Japanese in the Pacific and he got credit for the time on his police department retirement because it was the right thing to do when the country was involved in an “all out” war against enemies in two different theaters of the war. I was just a young snot-nosed kid in those years and was more interested in reading comic books than wondering where all the men had gone.

He had almost nine thousand cops under his command and he often lamented he needed another nine thousand just to keep the bad guys off the streets in in jail where they belonged. I almost got sent out to Staten Island right after graduating from the police academy but he pulled some strings and got me assigned to Brooklyn where he could keep a close eye on me and sort of mentor me like a rabbi everyone wanted above all else.

He had his office staff and a flying squad of hard hitters for the tough jobs and his bodyguard and two drivers to split the shift because he was on the job around the clock.

We were all high on the adrenalin generated by the charges being brought against the dirty eleven bad guys and I knew my Uncle was exhausted by the constant meeting with the police higher-ups who were conflicted about the whole thing and it was a miracle that they had even let it play out this far. It was a first for the department which was more into “cover up” than transparency in those days.

He had invited me down to the Brooklyn office to meet up with him for a quick lunch at a deli near the police station. I loved that place because they had the greatest French fries and roast beef sandwiches I had ever consumed anywhere ever. To top it all off, they had original New York style cheesecake that stuck to the roof of your mouth and slowly melted down your throat like molten gold. It was the sort of lunch that you had only once and awhile because the calories were enough to stoke the body furnace for an entire day.

During the meal he gave me a box that contained a German Luger that had been taken from a surrendered Nazi officer. He told me that his shooting buddy from the Navy had traded it to him for a Jap flag he had confiscated from a sinking Jap destroyer and kept in his office for conversation and bullshit.

He gave it to me because he already had two Lugers in his possession and didn’t think he needed three unless he was interested in opening up a gun shop with collection pieces as headliners.

I fell in love with that gun but still preferred my .45s because I was totally comfortable with the automatics.