By Donald Dewey      Photos by William Baker

he ugly red swelling over the victim’s left eye says part of it. The slashed away jeans pocket says another part. But most telling of all is the 20-year-old’s refusal to accompany the EMS to a hospital for treatment. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he insists. “No more doctors.”

Police Officer Gil Altreche nods knowingly and glances around at the bleak, late-night tableau of Northern Boulevard. “No green card,” he mutters. “He’s afraid somebody’s going to report him to Immigration.”

Altreche’s partner for the evening, Sgt. Luis Valentin, sighs at the familiar scenario. Then Altreche tries again. “You’re hurt, you need attention,” he says, helping the victim apply an icebag to his temple more accurately. “Why don’t you worry about that right now?”

Below: P.O. Gil Atreche (left in center photo) and his partner for the late tour, Sgt. Luis Valentin, attend to injured mugging victim.

“I’ve got a black eye,” comes the reply. “I’ve had black eyes before.”

“He’ll have a lump,” an EMT tells Altreche. “The rest is up to him.”

Both the cops and the EMTs know they’re going to get no further than paperwork. The kid had walked out of a night club called The Black Door, had been accosted by two men carrying guns, and had stood helplessly against a wall while their woman partner had expertly cut away his pocket and come out with $680. For good measure, one of the thugs had slugged him with the handle of his gun before making off down Northern Boulevard.

The call to the robbery scene has come during a relatively quiet 4-12 for Altreche and Valentin, assigned to the 115 Pct. in Jackson Heights. While hardly the stuff of news bulletins, the robbery underlines for the cops the background story for many of their calls — the enormous number of illegal immigrants packed into bustling northwestern Queens. Many of them are Hispanics — at one time mostly from Colombia and the Dominican Republic, more recently from Mexico. The problem also exists, if to a considerably lesser degree, within Indian and Pakistani areas of the command.

	At night on Northern Boulevard, the heart of the 115.

According to Altreche, criminals don’t prey on places like The Black Door (La Puerta Negra) by accident. “Wherever those three perps are right now,” he says, “they’re figuring they hit the bulls-eye again. They know that kid won’t make a big scene tracking them down because he doesn’t want to go into a courtroom any more than they do. The trick for them is to work out of a place where the uncarded are likely to be, like this club. Then it’s bing-bang-bing.”

One of the running themes of the patrol on this particular evening is to watch out for a gang of Colombians who have raised the victimization of illegals to an art. As explained by Valentin, the gang works in packs of four around houses and apartment buildings where the uncarded have been seen or are likely to have taken up quarters. The two women of each group usually have leaflets of some kind to shove under doors, furtively checking door handles as they straighten up again. When they find an unlatched or otherwise vulnerable door, they go inside with one of the men while the fourth member of the team stays outside with a radio tuned to the police band. From eyewitness reports, the group’s Achilles’ heel is that each quartet rides around together for long hours at a time, attracting extra police attention to any car in the command with four occupants.

As much of an continuous enterprise as it is, the gang activity is nothing compared to what Altreche calls the “hot days” of the 115. “I got out of the Academy in July 1991 and came straight here,” the 37-year-old Spanish Harlem native says. “I’m not saying it was Fort Apache or anything like that, but you had drug dealers wall-to-wall. You used to jump out of your car on the most crowded streets and not know which dealer to go after first. The winner was usually the one who looked like he ran the slowest.”

Tonight, on the other hand, every street in the neighborhood has been operating in slow motion. This is no small feat for a command that extends from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to Grand Central Parkway, from Roosevelt Avenue to LaGuardia Airport. It is also the neighborhood over which a cop killing hung for 15 years before being solved — sort of. The cop was George Scheu, killed in the late ‘80s at the age of 22. Almost immediately, the killer was identified, but without enough evidence to charge him. Year after year, the 115 waited for some kind of smoking gun to show up, but it never did. Finally, knowing that the suspect wanted to be taken seriously as a mobster, the order was given to set up an elaborate sting in Flushing around a fake social club catering only and conspicuously to hoods. The suspect bit, eventually even confessing the killing of Scheu on one of several cameras hidden in the club. But then the charges were thrown out because of an entrapment finding. It took another couple of years before the suspect was given life imprisonment -- not for the cop killing, but for multiple drug-dealing convictions.

Altreche admits that wasn’t quite the ending he had in mind, least of all for somebody so cocksure of himself that he remained in the neighborhood for 15 years knowing all the time he was being watched. “I suppose if there’s any lesson in it, it’s be patient and make goddamn sure you’ve done as much as you can to collect evidence.”

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