Never Let Them See You Cry (21 page)

“You can sit down and convince a guy that pulling a robbery is not the way to make fifty dollars,” Clerke said.

Jerry Green and Wally Clerke got exactly what they deserved: They were honored as the best cops in the country by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
Parade
magazine published a story and pictures of them and their families.

Their bosses, displaying their usual wisdom, split up the partners.

Police brass don't understand the old adage:
If it ain
't
broke, don't fix it
. Green worked the bunco squad, breaking up con games, then homicide, the property bureau and back to homicide. He and Mary Jo had a second son, Jeffrey. Clerke worked patrol, riding a three-wheeler.

They hoped to work together again someday.

They never did. They never will.

The most successful partnership in Miami Police history ended forever when Officer Wally Clerke's car was firebombed in an ambush behind a looted Zayre discount store during the May 1980 riot. Clerke walked into headquarters, turned in his badge and walked out.

He never went back.

“I quit after the National Guard came in,” he explained. “The situation was under control, and there was no more immediate need for me to continue helping the city.”
Parade's
writer described them in 1973 as “such devoted policemen that neither can imagine himself ever doing any other kind of work.”

True then. Not now.

Clerke said he was selling his house to move to Stuart and become a charter fishing captain. I had trouble believing it.

“He's bailing out,” Green said. “I don't know what to say. He's looking for a better way of life. The firebombing didn't make him quit, but it didn't make him decide to stay either.”

Disillusioned by other pressures, Clerke had been considering a career change.

For eleven years, his associates at work were the street people, the robbers, the hookers, the pimps, the punks, the drunks, the stoned-out freaks. He had found it increasingly difficult not to want to spend his off-duty hours taking baths. “I like them personally. I empathized with them, but I can't reconcile their lifestyle. I felt I was contaminating my wife and daughter.” Every combat cop he knew, except Jerry Green, had been divorced, some several times. His own marriage to Susan was now shaky after thirteen years.

The riot accelerated his decision. “I'm disappointed at what happened,” he said. “I'm disappointed in the black community. They were finally getting clout. The Liberty City area was being fixed up. A lot of the old buildings were being knocked down.

“And there was,” he swore, “very little racial tension in the city. I could ride around and talk to people with no problem. I can't remember the last time I heard anybody yell ‘Pig!' or anything like that. Now it's gone back ten years.”

The career change failed to save Wally Clerke's marriage. He and Susan were divorced.

So were Jerry and Mary Jo Green, two years later, in 1982. He raised the boys alone, working midnights as a homicide investigator. Greg is in college in Tallahassee. Jeffrey is in high school. The job has not been quite the same for Green since Wally Clerke left. He lost a partner and his best friend. “When you had him around you had a hundred percent backup,” he says wistfully. He and Wally remain friends, but lead differing lifestyles. Wally has a new wife and a baby, and sells new cars in Broward County.

Green, now a midnight-shift sergeant, leads a homicide team in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the country. His current team maintains a better-than-85-percent clearance rate. He works weekends, investigating a growing number of street murders. Ten years ago robbers killed more innocent people: store clerks, taxi drivers, pedestrians, anybody who had a buck. Today most victims are less than innocent. Most murders are victim-related: robbers shooting dope dealers, other street people, other criminals. The use of assault rifles is on the increase. So are drive-by shootings, most by notoriously poor marksmen. At least half the time they hit someone other than the intended target.

Everything changes, and so did Jerry Green's solitary lifestyle. He skied on a police Olympic team at Lake Tahoe, invited out to dinner a former Miamian who had moved west, and they were married in late 1989.

Jerry Green still seems to be always at the right place at the right time. At the downtown Omni Mall, where he works off-duty security, he recently witnessed a murder.

The Omni, with its multiple movie theaters, is a magnet for youngsters. This night, a group spent their movie money playing video games. When they became noisy and disruptive. Green asked them to cool it and suggested they go home. The kids spilled out onto the sidewalk in front of the J. C. Penney store at eleven
P.M
.

As he watched from across the street, they frolicked in youthful horseplay—nothing serious. One little boy clamped another in a headlock. Green glanced away, heard a shot, and “saw a kid holding his chest. He staggered back and fell. The boy with the gun simply watched him, then walked away. He didn't start running until he saw me.”

The killer was twelve years old. The victim was eleven.

Green rushed across the street. “I looked down at him and he was dead on the sidewalk.”

The boy with the gun ran a block and vanished. He eluded police by climbing a tree. He later made his way home to OpaLocka, where Green and other cops surrounded his house. Suddenly a shot rang out and a bullet whizzed over their heads. Startled cops scrambled. The gunfire came from next door to the house they were surrounding. The elderly neighbor who fired it stepped outside and leveled his gun at police.

It is second nature for some people to start shooting when they see the cops.

The old man's family tackled and disarmed him. Half the police present went next door to deal with him, the others flushed out the twelve-year-old killer. The murder weapon belonged to his grandmother. He had broken into her house and stolen her gun while she was in the hospital.

There was no fight, just horseplay, until the other boy squeezed his head too tight—that was why the fatal shooting took place.

The suspect faces trial as an adult, despite his age. His police record dates back for years. His mother is a drug addict—has been all her life. Green said. “He had no adult supervision, his lifestyle is the same as kids in El Salvador and Lebanon. The kids with guns and assault rifles—a lost generation.”

Life has not changed much for Jerry Green. He is still the best street cop I ever met.

Another great street cop, Metro-Dade Sergeant Thomas Blake, is known as “Bulldog” for his relentless and dogged pursuit of professional criminals. It may take ten years and his personal vacation time, but he
will
track them down. Even his enemies call him a genius. When Bulldog Blake took the sergeant's test he ranked first among 450. His only hobby is hunting. He hunts professional criminals.

His waking hours revolve around police work. He is cunning and creative. Early one Sunday morning Bulldog tracked a jewel thief to a Hialeah home. How, he wondered, could he get the elusive fugitive, sought by the FBI for years, to open the door?

He yodeled. Yodeled. Loud and long.

“Who the hell are you?” cried the jewel thief as he threw open the door.

“Sergeant Tom Blake of the Metro Police Department. You are under arrest.”

This noted tracker of thieves was the first South Florida cop to use the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act as a tool against burglars. Designed to fight organized crime, RICO allows the law to seize homes, cars and businesses purchased with profits from illegal enterprise. When he arrested longtime thieves for five burglaries, he also charged them with racketeering. “They qualify,” he said. “They are career criminals, working thieves. They work with other burglars and with fences. It is their business. They have a job: stealing.”

A fifty-four-year-old burglar released after nine years of a thirty-year sentence enjoyed only thirteen days of freedom. Police got a tip that the thief, once suspect in two hundred burglaries, had resumed his old and bad habits, despite his sincere lectures on home security to homeowners' associations while in prison. Bulldog decided to watch him. When the man burglarized a townhouse and carried the loot out the front door, Bulldog called for backup. To stall the culprit until they arrived, he introduced himself as a member of the homeowners' association and engaged the thief in a conversation on home security.

He met his wife, Mary, on the job, after two cars crashed onto her lawn. Mary Blake shares her husband's sense of awareness. On her way to pick up the children at school, she saw a man stroll up and down the street, studying the homes. He had the “look.” She called her husband. Bulldog saw the man disappear behind a house. Minutes later, he followed. Four jalousies had been removed, and he caught the thief inside the house peering out.

When Bulldog saw a station wagon drop off a man dressed in black in front of a home in a residential neighborhood at one
A.M
., he assumed they were burglars. The station wagon circled the block. When the figure in black crept away from the house, Bulldog surprised him, to inquire what he was doing. The man in black claimed to be just taking a walk as the house behind him erupted in flames.

An arsonist, not a burglar, the man had been paid a thousand dollars to torch the house for the insurance. The driver who dropped him off was the homeowner.

Only once have I seen a criminal best the Bulldog. He took a captured thief, suspected of 250 burglaries, out of jail one day so the crook could point out the homes he had looted—standard procedure. At noon, Bulldog, the prisoner and another detective stopped for lunch—also standard procedure. The detectives ordered Cuban sandwiches, paying no attention as their guest placed his order in Spanish.

Then the meal arrived.

“It was a damn lobster!” cried Captain Marshall Frank, Bulldog's boss, when he got the bill. It listed $17.60—”for prisoner's lunch.”

“No way!” said the captain and kicked it back.

I called the detective to ask about the thief's lobster feast. “No comment,” Bulldog snarled.

Joseph Gennaro Carbone, a flashy burglar arrested in 1976, impressed Bulldog. Polite, cool, and thoroughly professional, Carbone had an associate show up to post his bond while he was still being booked. Bulldog stepped outside to catch the tag number of the man who arrived with the bond money. For eighteen months he kept a loose tail on both men. He investigated them and their activities even on his days off.

Carbone was a big-league burglar, one of the elite. A slick thief, he specialized in stealing from posh high-rise apartments, taking only cash or costly jewelry. If he found none, he simply left the apartment undisturbed. Bulldog learned that Carbone liked to flash wads of hundred-dollar bills in bars, drink Chivas Regal on the rocks and brag about wearing twenty-five thousand dollars in jewelry while pulling his burglaries. Bulldog noted where Carbone vacationed and the hotels he favored. He learned that the man summered in suburban Washington,
D.C
., usually at a Falls Church, Virginia, hotel.

Bulldog printed a flyer describing Carbone and five other burglars who wore cabana sets, tennis outfits or expensive suits on the job. When Tom and Mary vacationed they distributed flyers to police departments up and down the eastern seaboard, along the thief's winter route. Back in Miami, Bulldog noticed that the thief's car was unused for days. He soon found out why: Police he alerted had spotted Carbone and a confederate in Falls Church. They were tailed and caught emerging from a condominium complex, pockets stuffed with loot. Bulldog did not get the collar, but his dogged detective work had paid off.

Carbone was sentenced to eight years in Virginia and Maryland, fifteen years in Florida and five years in a federal lockup in Washington,
D.C
.

History repeated itself eight years later. Flashy jewel thief Joseph Carbone, tanned and wearing tennis togs, met Bulldog Blake again outside a South Dade apartment complex.

“Hi, Joe,” Blake said.

“Hello, Bulldog,” Carbone replied.

“It's been eight years, Joe,” Blake said and arrested Carbone, now thirty-seven.

“He didn't show it outwardly, but I bet he was quite chagrined,” Blake said.

Carbone had been paroled to Florida a year earlier. “He likes it here, there are lots of apartments and townhouses,” Bulldog said. His parole officer thought Condo Joe was working at a sports shop.

He was not.

Blake had been on vacation when fellow detectives heard Carbone was back in business. A car he had rented was spotted leaving the scene of a Kendall burglary. They called Bulldog at home.

He knew Carbone's style. Stay at a swank hotel, drive a rental car, use valet parking. Detectives found the hotel, and Bulldog, still on vacation, joined the surveillance. Just like old times—except that Blake could only stake out the suspect at night. Days he spent at home, babysitting his third child, a baby girl Mary had delivered three weeks earlier. So by day Bulldog Blake changed diapers and by night he stalked Carbone.

When Blake returned to work he set up a surveillance.

Spiffy in his white tennis shorts, Carbone left his hotel for work by 8:30
A.M
., driving a rented blue Buick. He wore an expensive gold watch, a gold ring with a diamond, thick gold chains and a gold bracelet. Detectives watched him stroll through a complex. “Casing apartments,” Bulldog said.

They trailed him to a building where only residents have keys, and watched him slip inside with a resident who was arriving home. “A common ruse to get into those buildings,” Blake said.

Detectives were unable to follow without a key. They waited until he emerged. Carbone, ever friendly, smiled. “Hi, how are you?”