The bigger item, days later, concerned the disappearance of prominent banker Wilfred Duke, late of Carver Federal Savings. “There’s been no word,” Mrs. Myrna Duke, the missing person’s wife, told one reporter. “Not a one.” Mr. Duke was a well-known Negro businessman, and his disappearance made the white papers downtown.
Few people understood the link between those two stories. Three of them—Ray Carney, Miss Laura, and Zippo—were inside or near 288 Convent Avenue on Wednesday, September 6, at nine-thirty p.m. The meeting had been hastily arranged.
Detective Munson had told Carney that he’d give him a heads-up when they were going to pinch Cheap Brucie. The deal that Carney had proposed in his office weeks before—the drug dealer for the pimp—neared closure.
But Munson didn’t call him in advance. The pimp was arrested late Tuesday night, and Munson called Carney shortly after three p.m. the next day. “I’ve been busy, what can I tell you?”
Carney rubbed his temple and paced his office. Now he had to scramble. “When does he get out?”
“Tomorrow earliest, he gets bond. I don’t know.”
Beyond the office window, Marie circulated in the showroom, recording the serial numbers of the Argent display models. She waved. Carney waved back.
The detective exhaled loudly into the receiver. “You don’t sound appreciative. You did me a solid, I got you back.”
From Carney’s vantage, Munson was not the only one who’d benefited mightily from the raid on Biz Dixon’s places of business.
A few weeks prior, the detective told Carney that no one in the 28th Precinct was inclined to touch Dixon, the kind of ice he was spreading around. Given the quality of his product, Dixon was fronting for an Italian gentleman who was circumventing his clan’s narcotics prohibition and didn’t want his name out there. But a Dixon bust might play better elsewhere, Munson opined, with other parties. At Centre Street, under pressure from Wagner to produce results for Governor Rockefeller’s antidrug initiative. With the Narcotics Bureau itself, where they were keen to arrest a crook who wasn’t paying tribute, or enough tribute, or had a rival who’d pay to have them kneecapped. Even the mayor, put to the test by his primary challenge next month. To punish Wagner for splitting from the machine, the Tammany bosses were pulling out the stops for their man Arthur Levitt. The mayor could use a friendly headline.
On August 31, a week before the primary, the junk agents raided Biz Dixon. Twenty-two arrests for possessing narcotics with intent to sell, selling to policemen, and other narcotics misdemeanors. Fourteen thousand dollars in cash confiscated, with who knows how much more pocketed by the cops on the scene. So what if in the end the product seized was no record-breaker, and the dope on the table had to be supplemented with contraband from other busts so it looked good for the cameras? It made the papers and the nightly news. The pictures turned out swell. They’d look nice in a frame and hung on the wall against the industrial sick-green paint of a municipal office.
What did Munson get out of it? Carney could only speculate what made the deal attractive to the detective in the end. Burnish his reputation as a player. Appease Dixon’s competitors who gave him envelopes. At any rate, he retailed the Dixon info to Narcotics, they followed up with undercover buys and their own surveillance, and everything was copacetic.
“They want to know who my informant is,” Munson told him. “Let ’em speculate. This week they love me. Next week? But this week they love me.” He said he’d honor the arrangement and get Cheap Brucie picked up.
“You want to know why,” Munson said.
Carney said he was curious, yes.
“He cuts women. I’d never take money from a fucking pimp, or cover for one,” Munson told Carney, “and I got no respect for guys who do.” Which sounded too pat. It wouldn’t be the first time that self-righteousness covered for a self-serving impulse. A few years later—when the game had changed, and the stakes, and a long-term relationship with a fellow you understood was an invaluable asset—Munson admitted to Carney that Cheap Brucie had a guy in the precinct looking out for him, and Munson hated this guy for stealing his lunch out of the icebox one time. Egg salad sandwich he’d been looking forward to all day. “Motherfucker has the nerve to call himself a cop.”
Maybe it wasn’t envelopes the city ran on, but grudges and payback.
Carney got off the phone with the detective. It was three-thirty p.m. If Cheap Brucie got sprung tomorrow, they had one night to pull it off. It was Wednesday, not Tuesday or Thursday, the days Duke typically had his appointment at 288 Convent Avenue.