Some Saints Sin (eBook)

Chapter 1

Santo Cavelli decided he was going to have to learn to keep his mouth shut. Being an undercover cop was a stress-inducing occupation but he had to learn to better control his emotions. Just do your job and move on will be his new motto. But that was a difficult discipline for him. He always was very vocal about his feelings. It helped him with his work. The work he loved. Dangerous sometimes, but also fun. In fact, to Santo it was more fun than danger. That’s why they called him the nut job from Spaghetti Park. Not to his face, of course. But he knew it, he heard the rumors. And he liked it … sort of. At least most police officers left him alone. Even those on his own team.

But Santo just didn’t feel good about his new surroundings. This was Manhattan South and he didn’t sense the support he was used to from the cops in Queens Narcotics. He knew these guys didn’t care about him. And why should they? He was different, a hot-shot from Corona and they didn’t like the idea that he was assigned to them. They knew he was being punished by his superiors back in Queens; they just didn’t know why. Santo was aware his reputation preceded him, earned or not. Cops always had a way of knowing about these things.

Just look at this situation, he mused. He was the only round eye in the group. The other cops on this team were Chinese. How dumb is that? He just didn’t fit in. Going undercover all by himself was the only way this would work. Being seen in public with this group would be a sure giveaway.

He remembered old television shows that always had a black cop and a white cop driving in an unmarked car, probably more to satisfy the networks or the civil libertarians than for portraying reality. How unmarked was that? Driving through Bedford-Stuyvesant or Crown Heights, Brooklyn? A white guy and a black guy would never be sipping coffee together in a car in those neighborhoods. That would be like saying, “Here we are folks! Your local cops. Run and hide, you muthafukkerrrrs!”

Santo clipped a pager to his belt. Actually it only looked like a pager. It was called a “KEL” and it really was a device that provided one way transmission back to his team in an unmarked van so they could hear everything Santo said or what was said in his presence. The reason for the one-way transmission was in case something happened in the van that made a noise, it wouldn’t play on the pager and blow his cover. He looked into the closed window of the van at a Chinese cop named Harry and pointing to his ear mouthed the words, “Can you hear me.” Harry replied with his fingers, “Five by five,” meaning everything was working. The Sergeant leading the investigation was standing next to Santo and said, “Five minutes. That’s all the time we’ll give you. Then we come in.” This was a prostitution bust and all Santo had to do was make payment with the recorded money he was carrying or just get a verbal consent on the wire.

But what Santo didn’t know was that the communication back to the van wasn’t working. Harry only said that because he was sure he could get it on line. He never did. Since it only provided one way communication when it did work, after Santo left to go to his assignment, his backup didn’t know what was going on and Santo didn’t know he was on his own.

Santo knew this was dangerous work, especially since he went into these situations without a weapon but he always believed he was more dangerous than those he came in contact with. They didn’t know what he was capable of. He did. When he was 15 years old he made it to brown belt status in Shotokan Karate. He would have made it to black belt but after an argument with his instructor he decided not to pay the $120.00 fee to have his name written on the board. Typical hot-head Italian. So, while he beat all his required competition, he wasn’t officially a black belt. But it did make him fearless when dealing on a one-to-one basis with whom he came in contact with. During his police career, his fellow officers always thought Santo was a good cop, but maybe a little edgy.

He left the unmarked van and started the two-block walk to where the take-down was to be. Ahead he could see two black Chevy Yukons with dark windows. Real subtle, he thought, but they were a block away from his target and wouldn’t be noticed. It was about 6:30 in the evening and there was still a slight glow from the sun on the horizon, the end of another beautiful and unusually warm spring day and the start of another operation.

During the five-minute walk Santo went over in his mind the reason he was exiled to Manhattan South. About two weeks earlier, while with Queens Vice, he was given the assignment of busting a gambling operation in Jackson Heights. Being that it was in an Italian neighborhood, he had dressed himself in a black leather coat, black Addidas sweat pants, a white guinea T-shirt, white Puma sneakers, topped off with a pork-pie hat. He held a lit cigarette … not to smoke it, since Santo didn’t smoke … but as a prop. He did his best to blend into the neighborhood and look like a typical local punk. He knew there would be surveillance cameras watching him when he got to the door of the target building and he would not be able to get in if he even slightly looked like a cop. He went into this operation without any communication but his ghost, an undercover who was wired watched his every move while walking on the opposite side of the street along with Santo and reported back to the unmarked van around the corner.

Santo walked up to the building and put the unlit cigarette out against the red brick doorway. This was just to give the person who was on the other end of the camera time to size him up. He rang the buzzer and waited. After about five seconds the door buzzed and Santo pushed it into the building.

As he let door go, he quickly glanced up to make sure there weren’t any cameras inside the vestibule. Feeling confident, he dropped a stick he was carrying up his sleeve on the door threshold to keep it from closing and locking so his team could follow him into the building after he got the second door open. He didn’t have to place a bet or anything, all he had to do was get both doors open. Finding the telephones and various betting equipment on the premises would be enough to close the place down and get everyone arrested. Santo was armed with his funny gun, definitely not NYPD standard issue. He carried a .380 Walther PPK into these operations. It was small enough to hide in his side pocket but was deadly if it had to be, especially at close range. Santo’s version was silver with ivory handles. He also had a cheetah skin holster for this weapon, specially made for him by a tailor on Manhattan’s Orchard Street. Although tonight, as with many undercover operations, he left the holster home and carried the gun just inside the waist band of his pants in his “Thunder Underwear,” briefs that were specially made with a pocket to hold “items,” in this case, his gun.

Entering the vestibule he was greeted by a staircase leading to the second floor with no other door on the main level so he walked up the single flight of stairs and came to a single door with a small eye-level window. A slightly built man let him in and he stepped into a large, noisy room. Men were milling around, reading the racing sheet or looking at a large blackboard. A couple of televisions were on. Some had racing from different parks while another had the local news. Santo quickly looked around and walked to a chalkboard as if to check out the day’s racing and give his team a chance to get to the second floor. He figured there were three or four workers plus a few men betting their salaries on a dream.

When Santo crossed the room, the man who had unlocked the upstairs door, now locked it and went about his work near one of the tables. Through all the noise on the second floor Santo could hear the low thud of the front door opening hard against the wall and the thumping of many footsteps running up the stairs. Everyone in the room, workers and betters, were accounted for in his mind so Santo jumped up on one of the tables, gun in right hand and his shield hanging around his neck on a chain, and yelled, “Police. Put your hands up.” After a one second pause he added, “You’re all under arrest.” He remembered Cary Grant saying that last sentence in the 1934 movie “Gunga Din,” as he entered a large cave with thousands of Thugee assassins. The ridiculousness of that situation always came back to him and he used it on many occasions. He waved his left hand into the room as if to beckon in his men from behind and said, “Take ‘em.”

Nothing happened. No team. No noise. Everything was silent.

Santo realized he was all by himself. Glancing at the door he could see his team looking in the window like kids outside a candy store while everyone in the room froze like statutes. But it only took the team two seconds to smash the door down and enter the room. A man behind the counter ran to a back room and Santo jumped off the table after him. He slammed a door shut but Santo kicked it open, busting the cheap handset lock. Leaping into the room he saw the man reaching into a closet for what looked like a shotgun. Santo jumped on top of the man and slammed him to the floor. He put his Walther into the back...