Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth Read Free Page A

open up fire hydrants—what we call johnny pumps—and they spray out a stream of wet, cool relief, a break from the humidity and staleness called city air.
    All along the riverfront—Brooklyn Heights, that is, where the famous span anchors us to lower Manhattan—families strolled along eating Grimaldi’s pizza. (Okay, fine, call it Patsy’s. The regulars have been fighting about that name for years.) And some were licking ice-cream cones. Everybody was taking in the last rays of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. With the longest day of the year, you end up with the shortest of nights.
    This was all happening on the night of June 21, 2006, in the greatest borough in the world—Brooklyn. Home to Coney Island, Di Fara Pizza (better than Grimaldi’s), Prospect Park, and, if you believe a four-year-old named Gianna Maria, it’s where they make the balloons.
    But something else happened that night. Something happened in Sunset Park, a section carved out of the pavement, bordered by the million-dollar lawyers of Park Slope, Russian laborers of Bay Ridge, and the Orthodox Jews of Midwood. That night in Sunset Park, a strip club known as Sweet Cherry, a haven for Mafioso types, drug lords, and sex peddlers, was finally shuttered. The iron gates were pulled and locked for the last time, an ending that the politicians, community boards, and law enforcement agencies had fought to bring about for years.
    Sweet Cherry—where dancers took their struts, drugs and money changed hands, and sex was brokered by murderous bouncers—sat in the shadows of religion and justice. Saint Michael’s Roman Catholic Church, its high arching gothic entrance, cherubs and angels smiling on the rest of Brooklyn, was just an avenue away on 42nd Street. The Department of Justice, a square chunk of weathered cement and grimy blue tile, sits on Third Avenue and 29th, stoic and silent as you pass.
    And there to complete the unlikely trinity was Sweet Cherry, keeping herself open despite all efforts to lock her down. It kept its stiletto heels dug into the pavement for more than ten years, remaining a growing community concern, with smarmy lawyers taking advantage of the political process that kept the sex trade alive. Heck, even old-time politicos need to cut loose now and then.
    But in June of 2006, Lady Liberty, whose torch of justice and light of freedom is visible just a few blocks from the door—right there at the pier—had had enough.
    A customer named Jorge misses the place. As he says— Sweet Cherry, rest in peace.
    Remorse for a strip club?
    Sorrow at the loss of a stage and a pole, strands of fake blond hair soaked with sweat whipping around in time to the shimmy of real live breasts? (No money for implants in this joint.) Sorrow at the passing of a place that inspired what some wags in criminal circles might call—heh-heh!—permanent violence.
    How could there be remorse for all that? As we say in Brooklyn, fuhgeddaboudit!
    I landed in Brooklyn in 1995. In Park Slope, where the young professionals were moving, where you can now rent a nice closet for about thirteen hundred a month.
    Sunset Park is southwest of the Slope, set back from the East River’s edge, its west-east borders resting on a pier at one end and Fourth Avenue on the other. Past Fourth is Park Slope South, as the realtors tout it these days, in hopes of boosting rents for unsuspecting Manhattanites looking to escape and to save some of their Wall Street bonuses for themselves. (Good luck.)
    From the pier it is all warehouses, concrete, and pavement. Rail lines for bygone freight cars are exposed in spots, laid across streets with patches of cobblestones where pavement peeled away like so much industrial scab. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a curvy swath of road peppered with potholes and cracks, juts through the neighborhood, veering and bumping riders on their way to or from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, gateway to Staten Island.
    To the rear of boxy