NYPD Green Page 2

  If anyone from our estate did make a name for themselves, it was as a member of the Dublin team in Heffo’s ArmyI or, if really lucky, they were signed by an English soccer club, like my schoolmate Ronnie Whelan, who starred for both Liverpool and Ireland. Northsiders U2 showed us all that unlikely dreams could come true and along with Springsteen provided the sound track to my formative years—the pictures came from movies and television.

  Heroin had started to gain a stranglehold on a few working-class communities by the time I left St. Kevin’s for the nearby Patrician College Secondary School.

  Finglas was still untouched by its evils—the only drugs on offer were cigarettes, loose Woodbines smoked furiously and furtively behind the sheds lest my father spot the telltale signs. Despite the fact that he smoked a pack a day, he’d have killed us if we were caught.

  Patrician College had opened its doors a decade earlier to cater to the influx from the new estates, and my years there totally changed my attitude towards education. I was helped in no small measure by mentors like Brendan O’Reilly, an excellent teacher, who did everything to encourage me when I said I wanted to follow in the family tradition and join the police. My schoolwork improved dramatically, but I still struggled to play catch-up with Irish, which I needed to pass if I was to get through the gates of the training college in Templemore.

  My neighbor Hurley couldn’t care less about the Leaving Certificate. He had his sights firmly set on the USA, and New York in particular, an ambition echoed in almost every house on Kildonan Drive and in the entire country in the late 1970s.

  My father made front-page headlines himself shortly after the abortive JMOB raid when he was involved in another holdup: a raider walked into the shop and demanded the takings. My father grabbed the man’s revolver and the gun went off, the bullet narrowly missing Da’s head. The Martin Cahill wannabe took off out the door, with an irate shopkeeper a yard behind threatening him with a can of Batchelors beans.

  My old man was unhurt, but not for long once my mother found out the details. His careful attempts at a cover-up were somewhat undermined by the interview he enthusiastically gave to the Evening Herald and which appeared on the front page. That was my father. Lying was not in his DNA. Neither was lying down.

  Holdups, cons, and scams of all kinds were part of life in Haughey’s Ireland. The IRA used crime as a way to buy Semtex to bomb the Brits; ordinary criminals stole as much as they could to fund their retirement plans. With the top rate of income tax close to 60 percent and one in five adults unemployed, many otherwise decent people also became lawbreakers. Cash in hand, a nod and a wink, the black economy thrived.

  Competition for a place in the Garda College was fierce, but my brother Tom had already made a good impression within the force—which would have helped my application if I hadn’t failed my Leaving, Irish proving the stumbling block. “Luke, if you really want the guards, repeat the exam. What’s another year? Nothing over a career,” Tom advised me over a pint in the local pub.

  This time I had to study without the help of Brendan O’Reilly, who surprised us all by emigrating to New York, armed with nothing more than a set of brushes, a color chart, and a dream. It turned out that Brendan’s work would be inspired more by Dulux than any Dutch masters, as our old teacher switched from correcting piles of copybooks of dull prose to applying coats of brilliant white emulsion to the walls of new-builds along New York’s Long Island, a business which thrives to this day.

  Hurley soon followed him over, just another young buck sweeping the floor of a bar for five dollars an hour, but before long he was already making a mark on the city we would both call home for the next couple of decades.

  The only difference was that he knew it long before me. My sights were still firmly set on becoming a police officer in Dublin, and while Paul packed his bags I stuffed job applications into the postbox. I got lucky, landing a job as a security guard at Mostek, a U.S. computer company, in Blanchardstown. I made about £120 a week, more than my brother earned as a rookie pounding a beat in Dublin. I worked almost every hour that God sent and I paid the price when my results arrived. I had failed Irish for the second time.

  If I was smart I would have followed the advice of Tom and Vincent and stuck with the security work, but I had inherited my father’s stubborn streak. I decided to resit my already-repeated exam the following June and hit the books whenever I could.

  I sat my dreaded Irish exam for the third time and spent an anxious couple of months waiting for the results. This time around the markers must have taken pity on me: somehow I scraped a pass and my application to An Garda Síochána was back on track.

  My family’s service clearly helped my application and I made it through the initial interviews. That left just the medical—but that was months away. I quit the security job and took the bus into the travel agency on O’Connell Street. Airline ticket in hand, I went down the street to the Bank of Ireland and changed my punts into U.S. dollars, the bills identical in size and color. Then I rang Hurley to tell him I was coming over to New York on holiday. Or at least that’s what Immigration would mark on my paperwork.

  In reality I was heading to pick up some casual labor until I undertook my vocation that September in Templemore, County Tipperary.

  On November 16, 1985, I waved the family goodbye and boarded an Aer Lingus 747, which touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport some seven hours later. The trip changed my life forever.

  *

  I. Kevin Heffernan (nickname: Heffo) was a famous Gaelic football player in the late 1960s whose fans were known as Heffo’s Army.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LONG ISLAND ICED TEA

  Everything is different about this place: the money, the people, the big yellow taxi in which Hurley and his new girlfriend, a Swiss blonde named Brigitte, wait for me. In the U.S. the grins, the girls, the cars—everything is bigger, bolder, and brighter. We pull out and take our place amongst the red Cadillacs and green Camaros which vie for space on the bustling freeway, honking horns furiously at the cabdrivers who gesticulate out the window, giving neither an inch nor a damn.

  Feck it, even the traffic jams here are glamorous.

  As we headed towards Manhattan I caught my first glimpse of the city at night—skyscrapers standing out like a jagged mountain range, their looming shapes set against navy skies. We pulled off the I-495, went through the toll plaza, and on into the blinding brightness of the Midtown Tunnel for a one-mile trip under the East River.

  New York City was overwhelming to me: strange sights, sounds, and smells, yet still somehow familiar from movies and TV cop shows like Kojak. As we pulled up in Manhattan, I stared in fascination at Telly Savalas’s real-life counterparts sitting in their NYPD Plymouth Gran Furys, making sure nobody shot one of the tourists and gave Mayor Ed Koch a coronary.

  My Finglas neighbor Hurley had just graduated from broom jockey to barman in O’Reilly’s Townhouse on West Thirty-fifth Street and Broadway, just yards from the Empire State Building. It was a prime spot for a traditional Irish bar and O’Reilly’s had been doing good business under the management of Eoin O’Reilly, who had emigrated a generation earlier. And he, like so many Irish bar owners, would offer an immigrant not only a job, but also a lead on somewhere to stay.

  I crashed on their customer couch for the first few weeks. From there I bunked with Bill Donohoe, an Irish-American regular at O’Reilly’s who was always happy to put a newcomer up on the sofa of his small apartment on West Thirtieth Street. I spent the days taking in the sights of my new home, a city even bigger and more impressive by day—a world away in every way from recession-riddled eighties Ireland.

  There was a confidence in the air, a belief that here anyone could be anything they wanted to be with hard work, determination, and luck. It’s a lie, but a seductive one. I had always been confident, figuring somehow I could get where I wanted if I stuck at it. For the first time I found myself surrounded by people who felt just the same.
>
  Hurley didn’t have a work visa, but he was a man with a foolproof plan, which he explained over a pint of Guinness. He assured me the lack of paperwork wasn’t much of a problem. He might not have a Social Security number, but his aunties and cousins had birthdays, so he used those to make one up and urged me to do the same. Like countless other illegals, Hurley had been left well alone to get on with things, do his shift, and pay his taxes. The Immigration Service didn’t seem to regard anyone with a bit of a brogue as a priority. And so my pal was earning as much in a day as I made doing an eighty-hour week back in Dublin.

  Within a month of my arrival, Hurley tipped me off that his boss’s brother, Connie, was renovating his bar, Finn McCool’s in Port Washington. It was in a quiet Long Island suburb on a direct train line. Hurley figured Connie might be softhearted and softheaded enough to hire me as a barman, so I gave him a call.

  The elder O’Reilly gave me a chance and tolerated my mistakes as I learned on the job. The first thing to learn in the bar business in NYC was how to mix cocktails. Back home it was a pint or shorts, but in Long Island the preferences and practices were different. While every place had its share of beer drinkers, there was a steady demand for bright, mixed drinks with paper umbrellas. So my studies commenced as I learned how to mix a Manhattan, shake a martini, and not to laugh when someone asked for Sex on the Beach.

  I poisoned plenty of the New York Mets baseball fans who frequented the bar, particularly on game nights, high-fiving after every score. I worked alongside Brendan Larkin from Belfast and Gerry Carroll, who had helped Offaly deny Kerry the five in a row a couple of years earlier.

  I worked hard, but nowhere near as many hours as back in Dublin, and I saved as much as I spent, wiring my mother hundreds of dollars at a time. Sheila Waters became suspicious of my sudden change in fortune and about what could be paying me so well. “Ma, I keep telling you, a lad can earn a lot as a barman. There’s no recession here, not like back home. I’m as honest as they come!” I explained in a Times Square call box, hooked up to the unlimited international line for a grand total of five bucks.

  “Son,” Sheila would say, “tell the truth! And for the love of God, stop dealing drugs! Just say no!”

  Her scruples didn’t stop her from putting the cash away in Finglas Credit Union, though—Ma was nothing if not practical.

  Summer ’86, and Finn McCool’s was attracting more and more baseball fans. Friday afternoons were quiet before the match-day onslaught and I usually got to drive the boss’s Mercedes to the bank for the change we’d need later on. But one Friday was different.

  I had given the boss’s car keys to his wife and she still wasn’t back, so we had no wheels. The only other person in the joint was a local barfly everybody called Sid, a hefty Hispanic-looking man, not much older than me. He would hang out with his pals, a giant black guy called Darren (or maybe Daryl—I could never remember) and another named Larry or Lenny, chatting up women, knocking back beers on the house, and talking about sports. Sid had a solution to Connie’s conundrum. He tossed me a set of keys.

  “Hey, take my wheels, kid. They’re parked out front. You can’t miss ’em.”

  I stepped out onto the street expecting to see a junk pile of a Ford or Chevy. The road was deserted except for a top-of-the-line red convertible sports car. So I went back into the bar to break the news to Sid that his car must be gone, towed or stolen.

  “Wh-a-a-t? Are you for real? Someone stole my Porsche?”

  “Porsche? Oh, that’s yours? No, it’s still there. Thanks again, Sid,” I replied.

  I skipped out the door before he could change his mind about loaning a thirty-thousand-dollar convertible to a twenty-year-old newbie from Dublin. As I cruised along Shore Road, I put on Sid’s sunglasses and let the cool breeze blow through my hair. With three thousand dollars in a bag beside me, Dublin was, in every possible sense, thousands of miles away.

  A few days later the hometown team was on TV yet again and the customers were packed wall-to-wall. It didn’t really register with me that a few of the regulars were missing, including the guy with the Porsche. But hey, next thing, there’s Sid on the telly! I was thinking he must be as good at bumming tickets as he was drinks and had talked his way into the best seats in the stadium. But the next shot proved me wrong—it must be a guy who looked like Sid, my barstool regular, because he struck out one of the other team’s batters, sending Shea Stadium and all our customers into a frenzy. The camera panned to the Mets’ bench. A few of the other guys looked like our customers, too.

  “Connie, isn’t yer man there on the telly the image of that Sid? You know, the guy who loaned me the Porsche?” I shout over the noise. “And isn’t that his mate Darren? Darren Orange?”

  Connie had one eye on the TV but turned and stared. “You’re kiddin’, Luke? Tell me you’re kiddin’!” Connie pleaded.

  A roar went up in the bar as the Mets stole another base.

  “Luke, that ‘guy who lent you the Porsche,’ as you put it, is El Sid. You know, SID FER-NAN-DEZ?” Brendan Larkin shouted at the top of his lungs as the fans chanted Sid’s name in drunken unison.

  I nodded, pretending to understand, but Connie knew …

  “He doesn’t have a clue, Brendan! He’s a pitcher, Luke. And the ‘other guy’ isn’t Darren, you moron. It’s DARRYL STRAWBERRY. The other fella with them is LARRY-FECKIN’-DYKSTRA, you feckin’ eejit! They’re the biggest stars in the city. They’re the reason why half of Long Island is drinking here and keeping us all out of the poorhouse!” the boss said in exasperation. These regulars whom I had barely heeded were the Yank equivalents of Liam Brady, Frank Stapleton, and Paul McGrath.

  For some reason Connie didn’t fire me that night, either, and I was still in my “holiday job” when my mother phoned to tell me I had been called for my Garda medical. For all intents and purposes, this meant I was in the force and my dream of becoming a guard was about to become a reality. But in the States, other dreams—ones I never knew I had—were coming true. Coming out of dreary Dublin in the 1980s, I had arrived in the land of plenty, where I could make a thousand dollars a week, not to mention that the weather was great, the girls gorgeous, and they loved the Irish. Americans made us feel truly at home.

  The decision was an easy one. My future was in the bar business, and NYC would be home for the foreseeable future. I would have to be an idiot to give all this up to join the guards. That’s what I told myself.

  I didn’t know that a few years later an unlikely idea would form in my restless mind. Maybe, just maybe, I could still live out my Irish dream of entering the force, but it would be right here, reborn in the USA. All I had to do was figure out some way of becoming a citizen. Hey, how tough could that be?

  CHAPTER THREE

  FRANKIE MAYBE

  The greatest detective there never was wants an answer, and he’s tired of waiting.

  “So, what happened to that martini? Like I just said, straight up, with a twist,” the heavyset bald man instructs. “In a glass. Anytime this century …”

  That’s New York City for you. Just wait long enough and the world will go by, or maybe even sit down and order a drink. Telly Savalas has to wait, too, but only long enough for me to pick my jaw up off the counter and reach for a bottle of gin and a glass with a slice of lemon. I steady my shaking hand as I pour my childhood hero his martini.

  “I … I have to tell you, I grew up a huge fan in Ireland, Mr. Kojak!” I finally blurt out.

  “Good to hear, kid,” Savalas says, solemnly accepting my handshake. Forever the showman, he goes straight into character, the rest of the staff and customers at Brews on East Thirty-fourth Street unable to quite believe the impromptu performance they are about to witness.

  “Irish, huh? Who’da guessed? Okay … so you claim you’re a Kojak fan. Then you tell me, mister, what was my captain’s name in the show?” the superstar challenges, turning on the tough-guy act. I reply immediately.

  “Captain McNeil�
�Frank McNeil—played by Dan Frazer.” The words roll off my tongue.

  “Say! You are a fan, kid. Top marks. Well, you know you can’t have a show about the NYPD without an Irishman, right? So we got an Irishman. Now, can I get that martini from an Irishman? Guy could die of thirst over here!”

  Savalas would be dead soon enough, within a year, in fact, but on that afternoon he was full of life and looked exactly the same as he had on our TV fifteen years earlier. He took the time to chat about the show which had offered us, in days of two-tone, two-channel TV, a tantalizing taste of what life in that exciting, faraway city was surely all about: good guys and bad guys, black and white, crime and punishment. As I wiped imaginary streaks off the glasses, my star customer chatted about his New York, a city where he grew up as a son of Greek immigrants: a tough city, where he studied cops as he worked selling them newspapers and shining their shoes to help the family finances. This city which allowed an ordinary kid to lead an extraordinary life and pursue an unlikely dream. I didn’t tell him that I had already decided to follow in his footsteps—not on the screen but solving homicides, just like Kojak and McNeil.

  My short stay stateside lasted longer than I had intended, and five years flew by as I worked in half the watering holes in Manhattan. The first couple of years I was illegal, but in 1988 the Donnelly visas, offering green cards to successful applicants, were released on a phased basis and, at first, were viewed with deep suspicion by many undocumented workers. A lot of people swore it was all a scam, designed by the Man to help Immigration flush us out, arrest us, and ship us all back. But the cynicism soon disappeared once it was clear that the Irish were on a roll, winning almost half the first ten thousand visas on the list. This achievement was all the more remarkable when you realized thirty-five other countries were also included.

  The trick was to fill out as many applications as humanly possible—I must have completed about three hundred forms, and other applicants far more, which we returned from as many different locations as we could, driving all night across several states before dropping them in U.S. mailboxes along the way, just in case they were applying geographical quotas. I got lucky once more, and in February 1988 I took my seat on a packed Aer Lingus jet to travel back to the U.S. Embassy in Dublin. I had to do an interview and a medical assessment, both of which I needed to pass in order to get that sliver of green plastic. The jumbo was full of illegals from across the States and every one of us knew the high stakes in this game.