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

promised you’d never bite me.”
    And the snake said, “You knew I was a snake when you warmed me up.”
    I think we’ve seen, ladies and gentlemen, that immunity is an open invitation to perjury. I know the government was giving out immunity letters in this courtroom like lollipops.
    Ladies and gentlemen, if the prosecutor can convict on the words of Eurell, Hembury, and Carlucci … on this type of evidence, contaminated by their motives, their lies—then the government can convict any of us. Our daughters, our sons, our neighbors—we are all at risk!
    God gives us freedom, and Danny Eurell takes it away. God gives us liberty, and Philip Carlucci takes it away. God gives us life, and Kevin Hembury takes it away.
    I’m going to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen.
    What happened here is not right.
    In addition to the rat cops, Mr. Gerber called forward a small parade of Brownsville crack cocaine dealers, whose civil rights had allegedly been violated by the three alleged cop assailants.
    Jurors wasted little time in voting to acquit. Mr. Gerber acknowledged, “Some of the witnesses were not terribly sympathetic, like the street dealers with huge rap sheets.”
    His investigator on the Morgue Boys case was Anthony P. Valenti, who had grown up in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, which he described as a place where a young man had three career paths in life: “The cops, the clergy, or the cons.”
    Investigating a Brownsville case, he said, is complex. “You’re operating in a neighborhood where the good guys don’t want to help and the bad guys for sure don’t want to help,” said Mr. Valenti in an interview. “It’s tough.”
    With the plague now gone, where does this leave Brownsville? “I don’t know if it’s better or worse,” said Mr. Valenti, “or any different at all.” For four years—through the Mollen Commission hearings, the investigations, the trial—the three Brownsville cops were put on what bureau cops call modified duty. Street cops know this humiliation as the rubber gun squad.
    Officers Goodman, SanFilippo, and Mistretta sought redemption through departmental administrative hearings. “I want to get back out there again, on patrol,” Mr. Mistretta told the Daily News . “This is what I am, what I do.”
    His gun and badge were returned, and Frank Mistretta was back on his post. He filed suit against the city in the amount of forty million, but a judge dismissed the action. He remarried and retired from the force and now lives in Florida.
    Mr. Goodman was not so lucky. The department cut him loose. He became a full-time killer of household pests. Mr. SanFilippo won back his job, but eventually left town—and an apparently resentful ex-wife, who answered a telephone inquiry by asking, “You’re suing him too, I hope?”
    She would not divulge his whereabouts any more precisely than, “He’s not here. He’s in Mexico.” In unmistakable terms, as the vocabulary of scatology allows, the ex–Mrs. SanFilippo offered fair warning of her litigious impulse.
    5. Crime Scene
    The coffin factory on Herzl Street is layered in four spraypainted gang graffiti, making it difficult to determine exactly who is in charge: Syc or Cripp 2XSS Gang or 2-S Deuce or Royal Deuce .
    At the end of the block, the elevated subway tracks of the 3 train provide shelter for a colony of hard-faced individuals who will sell you dope or themselves.
    One of them, a fellow named Daisy, said, “Yeah, I heard of the Morgue Boys.” So, were they guilty or innocent? “Man, it don’t matter,” said Daisy. “It’s Brownsville.”

FUN-TIME MONSTERS
    BY E RROL L OUIS
    East Flatbush
All of us had worked hundreds and hundreds of cases but never seen anything this horrible.
    —Detective Mike Hinrichs, NYPD’s most decorated officer
    K ayson Pearson and Troy Hendrix, already convicted of first-degree murder, spent their final moments in court in one final show of murderous bravado.
    “I have no regrets,”