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| photo by Mike Roseberry |
New York has been portrayed for decades in movies and in
television crime shows – from Peter Gunn
with its jazzy Greenwich Village 1960s vibe (now in syndication) to Blue Bloods. I used to see the TV production trucks in
Brooklyn quiet a lot, especially Prospect Park.
It’s a lot easier to manage auto and people traffic in Brooklyn than
Manhattan. Crime shows glamorize the
criminal justice system – it’s just entertainment with good guys and bad guys,
just make believe. That was my attitude
until I started researching for a crime novel.
My interest in writing a crime novel started when I met retired
homicide detective Louis Scarcella at a coffee shop one morning. He was sitting with some friends and one of
them started talking to me. They found
out I was new to New York and asked me to join them again for coffee. They were all retired from their careers, as
I recall, and met there every morning.
I like to write in coffee shops, and several days later, I
met them again. When Louie told me he
had been a homicide detective, I asked if he’d be interested in helping me
write a crime novel. He agreed. Louie, as it turned out, was one of the most
decorated and lauded homicide detectives in New York City and many of his cases
had made headlines. For several months
we met once a week. He talked
specifically about his cases and snitches, and I asked lots of questions about police
procedure.
Louie arranged for me to talk to other (non-retired)
homicide detectives and police officers.
Everyone had various stories and were forthcoming when I asked
questions. There was one common issue
that they all spoke about – the smell of a dead body. One retired police captain I met at Lincoln
Center told me that whenever he was at the scene of a homicide, he used to take
his uniform off and worked in his underwear because even dry cleaning didn’t
get the smell off his clothes.
Louie also arranged for me to visit the morgue so that I could
understand for myself what they were all talking about. Inside the building, I could smell the morgue
rooms from 50 feet away, and I simply can’t describe it. I was inside the rooms for about 5 minutes
and the odor lingered on my clothes until I washed them. I have to wonder now, what people on the
subway thought about the scent as I traveled home that day.
The bodies inside the morgue were unclaimed. These were not murder victims; they were
people found in their own homes or on the street that no one had reported missing. The morgue attendant said they would be held
there for a few months, and if they were still unclaimed, they’d get buried in
a City graveyard.
The front room of the morgue held bodies on gurneys – one of
them was a woman whose bloated body was a light blue. The interior room did not have drawers, but
rather stacked metal bunks. All of them
full and all the bodies were mine-shaft black.
I had seen dead bodies before in car accidents, but that was in passing,
dramatic, momentary. This was more
real. This would eventually happen to
me.
I decided to research the decay of the human body and found
out there’s a body farm in Knoxville,
affiliated with the University of Tennessee.
People donate their bodies to science and their remains are sent to the
farm where scientists put the bodies in the trunks of cars, into water, into
closed containers, in plastic bags, or under a pile of leaves and study how
these different elements affect the decomposition process. They pass this information along to forensics
and police labs (among others). This
type of information helps a Medical Examiner to determine time and cause of
death.
From my research I learned that as soon as the body dies,
the bacteria in the stomach begin to eat away at it. The gasses these bacteria give off rise to
the surface of the skin causing the entire body to bloat and turn a beautiful
light blue (whick was the stage of the female body in the morgue). Then, as the gasses dissipate, the body
begins to turn black. During the final
stages of decay the body is black as coal (bodies in the back room of the
morgue had decomposed to this level).
It’s a mixture of gasses from the digestive system, various glands, as
well as the decaying blood that gives such a strong, distinctive, and
unpleasant odor.
About once a year when I was living in New York, a body was
found in an apartment because the neighbors reported the smell. One time the police responded to a call from
a Park Avenue building and found that a woman (70s) and her mother (90s) had
placed a man in a trunk after he died.
The woman explained that her husband had always wanted to visit Arizona
and she and her mother had intended to send the trunk there, but they didn’t
know how. I don’t know where the trunk
was sent, but the two women were sent to Bellevue.
But I digress.
After I’d learned as much about body decomposition as I
could stand, I asked Louie questions about trials and testimony, he recommended
that I sit in on a criminal trial in Brooklyn or Manhattan. So I did.
The first was not a trial, but a hearing. A 23-year old man had shot another man at a
party over a girl. The boy’s mother and
younger brother (wearing red colors) were the only people in the courtroom
gallery besides me. I wondered, why did he have a gun at a party, where did he get it, when did he get it, did he always carry it. That’s when I remembered something a cop told
me once – you have to make 100 wrong decisions before you get arrested the
first time.
I sat in on two criminal trials – one was the trial of a man
arrested for possession of crack cocaine, the other was a trial about gang
assault on a police officer. Those
trials changed my thinking forever about crime TV and caused me to lose
interest in writing a crime novel. A
criminal lawyer I spoke to told me that the criminal justice system isn’t about
innocence or guilt, it’s about luck.
Luck about who’s on the jury, who’s the judge, prosecutor, and defense
attorney and what’s going on in their private lives. You can be innocent and go to prison. Guilty and be set free. Luck. Sitting
in courtrooms of the criminal trials. I came to see the criminal justice system
like an amoral perpetual-motion steamroller that squashes everything in its
path.
The man on trial for selling crack cocaine was on disability
and testified that he worked for cash wages fixing cars. He had four children, two of whom lived with
him. He asked someone to babysit for him
while he went to visit a girlfriend and her teenage daughter. The mother went off to buy vodka, the
daughter went off to buy a soft drink, and he went off to buy some crack – just
for his own personal use, he claimed. He
wanted to smoke a woolie – crack
wrapped inside marijuana. The woman who
sold him the crack only had a few rocks,
which he purchased and he asked her to go get some more. She left.
He got arrested by an undercover cop.
I don’t know the verdict, because when the trial broke for lunch, I didn’t
return. The whole story was
disheartening to me.
In the other trial, the defendants were three men (23-24?)
who had gone to Catholic school together and happened to run into each other at
a bar on New Year’s Eve. At least two of
them were drinking heavily. They had an
altercation with an off-duty policeman who was not in uniform. Differing versions of how that came about
from either side, but all agreeing that the fight lasted about 45 seconds. The men, who had no criminal record, were
charged as a gang because New York law reads: A person is guilty of gang
assault in the second degree when, with intent to cause physical injury to
another person and when aided by two or more other persons actually present, he
causes serious physical injury to such person or to a third person.
They were all found guilty and two of them sentenced to
fifteen years in prison. The other one
was sentenced to one year.
I stopped writing about crime.
Over the past couple of years, several of Louie’s arrests
and subsequent convictions have been overturned – 8 so far – and those men who were in prison
have been freed and given large payments of damages from the City (over $30
million so far). Louie has been vilified,
but I wonder about the prosecutors who worked those cases and ignored the
flaws. What about farther up the chain
of command? Who turned blind eyes in
order to feed that perpetual-motion steamroller of the criminal justice
system? One person didn’t create this:
