Free The Blue Knight by Joseph Wambaugh

so unbelievably good that they could expand into semilegitimate businesses and drive out competition because they had the racket money to fall back on, and the legitimate businesses couldn’t compete. And also they were tougher and ruthless and knew other ways to discourage competition. I always wanted to get one of them good, someone like Red Scalotta, a big book, whose fortune they say can’t be guessed at. I thought all these things and how mad I get everytime I see a goddamn lovable Damon-Runyon-type bookmaker in a movie. I started thinking then about Angie Caputo, and got a dark kind of pleasure just picturing him and remembering how another old beat man, Sam Giraldi, had humbled him. Angie had never realized his potential as a hood after what Sam did to him.
    Sam Giraldi is dead now. He died last year just fourteen months after he retired at twenty years’ service. He was only forty-four when he had a fatal heart attack, which is particularly a policeman’s disease. In a job like this, sitting on your ass for long periods of time and then moving in bursts of heart-cracking action, you can expect heart attacks. Especially since lots of us get so damned fat when we get older.
    When he ruined Angie Caputo, Sam was thirty-seven years old but looked forty-seven in the face. He wasn’t very tall, but had tremendous shoulders, a meaty face, and hands bigger than mine, all covered with heavy veins. He was a good handball player and his body was hard as a spring-loaded sap. He’d been a vice officer for years and then went back to uniform. Sam walked Alvarado when I walked downtown, and sometimes he’d drive over to my beat or I’d come over to his. We’d eat dinner together and talk shop or talk about baseball, which I like and which he was fanatic about. Sometimes, if we ate at his favorite delicatessen on Alvarado, I’d walk with him for a while and once or twice we even made a pretty good pinch together like that. It was on a wonderful summer night when a breeze was blowing off the water in MacArthur Park that I met Angie Caputo.
    It seemed to be a sudden thing with Sam. It struck like a bullet, the look on his face, and he said, “See that guy? That’s Angie Caputo, the pimp and bookmaker’s agent.” And I said, “So what?” wondering what the hell was going on, because Sam looked like he was about to shoot the guy who was just coming out of a bar and getting ready to climb aboard a lavender Lincoln he had parked on Sixth Street. We got in Sam’s car, getting ready to drive over to catch the eight o’clock show at the burlesque house out there on his beat.
    “He hangs out further west, near Eighth Street,” said Sam. “That’s where he lives too. Not far from my pad, in fact. I been looking to see him for a few days now. I got it straight that he’s the one that busted the jaw of Mister Rovitch that owns the cleaners where I get my uniforms done.” Sam was talking in an unnaturally soft voice. He was a gentle guy and always talked low and quiet, but this was different.
    “What’d he do that for?”
    “Old guy was behind on interest payments to Harry Stapleton the loan shark. He had Angie do the job for him. Angie’s a big man now. He don’t have to do that kind of work no more, but he loves to do it sometimes. I hear he likes to use a pair of leather gloves with wrist pins in the palms.”
    “He get booked for it?”
    Sam shook his head. “The old man swears three niggers mugged him.”
    “You sure it was Caputo?”
    “I got a good snitch, Bumper.”
    And then Sam confessed to me that Caputo was from the same dirty town in Pennsylvania that he was from, and their families knew each other when they were kids, and they were even distant relatives. Then Sam turned the car around and drove back on Sixth Street and stopped at the corner.
    “Get in, Angie,” said Sam, as Caputo walked toward the car with a friendly smile.
    “You busting me, Sam?” said Caputo, the smile widening, and I could