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Newton Street Division was southeast of downtown LA, 95 percent slums, 95 percent Negroes, all trouble. There were bottle gangs and crap games on every corner; liquor stores, hair-straightening parlors and poolrooms on every block, code three calls to the station twenty-four hours a day. Footbeat hacks carried metal-studded saps; squadroom dicks packed .45 automatics loaded with un-regulation dum-dums. The local winos drank “Green Lizard”–cologne cut with Old Monterey white port, and the standard pop for a whore was one dollar, a buck and a quarter if you used “her place”–the abandoned cars in the auto graveyard at 56th and Central. The kids on the street were scrawny and bloated, stray dogs sported mange and perpetual snarls, merchants kept shotguns under the counter. Newton Street Division was a war zone.
I reported for duty after twenty-two hours of sack time, booze-weaned off the Benzies. The station commander, an ancient lieutenant named Getchell, supplied a warm welcome, telling me that Thad Green said I was kosher, and he’d accept me as such until I fucked up and proved otherwise. Personally, he hated boxers and stoolies, but he was willing to let bygones be bygones. My fellow officers would probably take some persuading, however; they _really_ hated glory cops, boxers and Bolsheviks, and Fritzie Vogel was warmly remembered from his Newton Street tour years before. The cordial CO assigned me to a single-o foot beat, and I left that initial briefing determined to out-kosher God himself.
My first roll call was worse.
Introduced to the watch by the muster sergeant, I got no applause and a wide assortment of fisheyes, evil eyes and averted eyes. After the reading of the crime sheet, seven men out of the fifty-five or so stopped to shake my hand and wish me good luck. The sergeant gave me a silent tour of the division and dropped me off with a street map at the east edge of my beat; his farewell was, “Don’t let the niggers give you no shit.” When I thanked him, he said, “Fritz Vogel was a good pal of mine,” and sped off.
I decided to kosherize myself fast.
My first week at Newton was muscle rousts and gathering information on who the _real_ bad guys were. I broke up Green Lizard parties with my billy club, promising not to roust the winos if they fed me names. If they didn’t kick loose, I arrested them; if they did, I arrested them anyway. I smelled reefer smoke on the sidewalk outside the gassed hair joint on 68th and Beach, kicked the door in and drew down on three grasshoppers holding felony quantities of maryjane. They snitched off their supplier and fingered an upcoming rumble between The Slausons and Choppers in return for my promise of leniency; I called in the info to the squardroom and flagged down a black-and-white to haul the hopheads to the station. Prowling the hooker auto dump got me prostitution collars, and threatening the girls’ johns with calls to their wives got me more names. At week’s end I had twenty-two arrests to my credit–nine of them felonies. And I had names. Names to test my courage on. Names to make up for the main events I’d dodged. Names to make the cops who hated me afraid of me.
I caught Downtown Willy Brown coming out of the Lucky Time Wine Bar. I said, “Your mother sucks a mean dick, Sambo”; Willy charged me. I took three to give six; when it was over Brown was blowing teeth out his nose. And two cops shooting the breeze across the street saw the whole thing.
Roosevelt Williams, paroled rape-o, pimp and policy runner, was tougher. His response to “Hello, shitbird” was “You a whitey motherfuck”–and he hit first. We traded shots for close to a minute, in full view of a cadre of Choppers lounging on front stoops. He was getting the better of me, and I almost went for my baton–not the stuff of which legends are made. Finally I pulled a Lee Blanchard move, rolling upstairs-downstairs sets, wham-wham-wham-wham, the last blow sending Williams to dreamland and me to the station nurse for two finger splints.