Free Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth by Tim McLoughlin

Which in his youth could not be imagined as the hipster magnet it is today.
    “My parents bought this brownstone on Bedford Avenue for seventy-nine hundred bucks. I am not kidding you. I loved it there because the weather didn’t matter, I played handball off the brick wall in the basement,” said Mr. Jenks. “And there was a joint everybody went to called Teddy’s Bar. They kept a pail of wontons you could eat for nothing.
    “This’ll blow your dress up. That brownstone I grew up in? It’s going now for a million-two. The owner’s some guy probably down in his wine cellar where I played handball, probably having a pinot grigio.
    “And the other day,” he added, “I see in New York magazine that a beer at Teddy’s gets four-fifty now.”
    Outside the courtroom, Mr. Jenks and his client would engage in such reminiscences. And sometimes Mr. Mistretta would admit to the difficulties of being a beat cop in Brownsville, old enough to be the father of the youngster cops from Long Island, who didn’t know from handball.
    On his client’s behalf, Mr. Jenks explained, “There was some feeling of mistrust from those younger cops. Like, what’s his story?”
    Counsel for Mr. Goodman was Stephen C. Worth, a son of Brooklyn who was the borough’s district attorney in the late 1970s. In an interview, he spoke of the disgraced Michael Dowd, the first cop to rat on other cops before the Mollen Commission.
    “It was no surprise to me there were drug-using cops like Dowd,” said Worth. “By the sheer force of numbers and the availability of drugs, you couldn’t be surprised about some cops turning out like Dowd.
    “You had drugs literally on every corner. There were a million burned-out buildings. It was unbelievable how blatant it was.”
    Worth, who spent a considerable amount of pretrial time riding in squad cars with the officers of the 73rd Precinct, added, “If I was a cop, I could have made twenty arrests a ride. But it would have just been shoveling against the tide. My guy Goodman and the other two who went up with him, Mistretta and SanFilippo, they’re saying, ‘Look, we’re doing God’s work.’”
    4. “You knew I was a snake …”
    Joe Tacopina figured he was smart enough to be a trial lawyer, even if he did not happen to possess the finest mind of his fraternity.
    He learned something new and unexpected—and something very intoxicating—on the afternoon he delivered closing arguments for the defense in the trial of the Morgue Boys. The lesson serves him well today as one of the city’s most prosperous criminal defense attorneys and a frequent TV talking head on legal topics.
    But there he was back in ’94, a hungry criminal defense lawyer who checked coats by night, arguing his maiden case— all alone in the courtroom well, with a stone-faced judge eyeing him from the bench, with the prosecutor pouncing at every opportunity to object, with the press out there still trying to figure out how to spell his name, and with the jurors thinking who-knows-what of him.
    For a couple of awkward minutes, Joe Tacopina was scared. But as he warmed to his argument, he learned that all the pressure somehow made him at least ten percent smarter than he otherwise would have been.
    And that got him flying high. Waving sternly at the government cooperators, he told the jurors:
Their testimony, their stories, remind me of an Indian warrior called Cochise. I don’t know if you ever heard of him, but he is allegedly a fierce warrior.
    One day out in the plains, he comes across a snake. Cochise is going over to kill the snake. The snake won’t move. The snake was frozen. Cochise raised the weapon to kill the snake, and the snake made a plea: “Please, Cochise, don’t kill me, spare my life. Warm me up and I’ll never bite you.”
    Cochise took the snake back to his tent, warmed him up, thawed him out. The second that Cochise sat down, the snake bit him.
    “What did you do?” Cochise said to the snake. “You