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| Plainclothes transit cops Jesus Rodriguez (l) and Chris King work out their strategy for collaring turnstile jumpers. | |
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| P.O. Arlotta consults subway map while P.O.s Ed Shorte and Ijala Wilson help him assist lost passengers to find their way. | |
or
that specific scene, you had to be Ronnie Arlotta of Transit District
Three, headquartered at St. Nicholas Avenue and 145th Street. But you
could have just as easily been Ed Shorte, Ijala Wilson, Jesus Rodriguez,
Chris King, or any of the other 170-plus officers operating from the Harlem
command. The territory covered extends from 96th Street to Van Cortlandt
Park at 242nd Street on the 1-9 lines, to 148th Street on the 2-3 lines,
to the A train terminus in Inwood at 207th Street, and to 155th Street
on the B-D lines. In addition to the foot patrols of trains and stations,
three cars are turned out every tour for surface rumblings related to
subway problems. It makes for a lot of daily patrol variations, and that’s
without counting frequent back-ups to other parts of the city because
of temporary manpower emergencies.
When you talk about District Three stations, you’re not talking about little choo-choo platforms. Many of them are big enough to resolve the municipal agony of where to play the Jets, Nets, and Olympics. Some also reflect New York City history, as do the outsized public toilets on 155th Street (B-D), left over from the days the stop served the Polo Grounds for the baseball Giants (until 1957) and Mets (1962 and 1963). For its part, 125th Street is an uptown version of 34th Street, with its newsstands acting as oases through the tile-and-concrete desert. On this particular day, Shorte and Wilson stroll the arena, more than content to have commotion begin and end with the constant rattling of turnstiles at morning rush hour. Of course, nobody gets off that easily, and they soon have the too-familiar figure of “Can Man” in front of them. Can Man collects what the soda industry doesn’t bother picking up from MTA garbage cans; in this, he is just one of the many thousands of aluminum miners working the barrels of the city every day both above and below ground. But Can Man is just as interested in saving souls as redeeming old Coca-Cola containers, and this sometimes leads to the kind of ranting about secret divine formulas that cops like Shorte and Wilson have to curb before it spills over on commuters.
“We’re not going to see you again today, right?” Shorte asks Can Man. “You’re going to disappear like a magic trick, right?”
Can Man is indignant. “I’m everywhere Jesus is.”
“But he’s not collecting soda bottles.”
“I’m makin’ my living.”
“So are we all.”
“How about this?” Arlotta puts in. “We make an agreement. You can be everywhere making your living except where we can see you. How about that?”
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| P.O. Ronnie Arlotta tells "Can Man" where he can go. |
Can Man considers it with another heft of the sack over his shoulder; clattering inside are the contents of every trash can on 125th Street. “My work here is done,” he decides, then gimps slowly from the station plaza to a down staircase to the A.
Not all the hassles of a daily tour are as innocuous as an encounter with Can Man. Shorte, a 36-year-old Bronx native, especially would like to forget about the woman who jumped in front of a train on one of his tours. “Suicide by subway,” he shakes his head, “and there’s nothing neat about it. No matter how long you’re on the job and you pretend to have all these steel nerves about how you’ve seen it all, you can’t help thinking about what goes through a person’s mind doing something like that. Even as an outsider, you shudder a little. Then you think about what they must’ve been thinking doing it and waiting for the train to hit.”
Wilson wasn’t there for the suicide, and counts herself lucky for that. A Bronx resident who graduated from the Academy in February 1994, she has to search a bit to come up with what amounted to her hairiest moment in uniform. She finally decides the answer was a gun run a couple of weeks before, and that too turned out to be a false alarm. “Who’s knocking it?” she laughs. “Go on enough sweeps, you’re going to turn over the wrong rock at some point, and the longer I can put that off, the better.”
Both cops point to mid-afternoons, when the area schools get out, as the period of the day most fraught with problems. “You have to learn where to draw the line,” Wilson says. “The kids clown around with each other, even if they’re a little noisy, you don’t make a federal case out of it. They start annoying the other passengers, that’s different. And they start getting ugly with one another, that’s different, too. If a knife comes out, sometimes it’s already too late to do anything about it. It’s a balancing act. You have to know what’s too much. But I guess that’s the judgment ability of every cop on the job, underground or not.”
One definite peculiarity of the underground are the turnstile games — everything from simple fare-beating to the several variations on card-swiping that usually end up with a commuter wondering what happened to his Metrocard. For people angry at the world or at a physical constitution unable to handle more than one quart of scotch at a time, the turnstile can also be a machismo test when there’s a uniform in sight. “I remember one character who saw me standing near the gate and starts screaming ‘I’m going to beat this fare!’” Arlotta recalls. “He didn’t call me Officer Arlotta or Ronnie, either. Just stood there screeching like this was some ultimate symbol of all the things in life he’d had enough of. I just kept nodding, waiting for a move one way or the other. By about the fifth time of telling me what he was about to do, I got the drift he wasn’t going to do it. But I played it out as sternly as he was counting on me to. If I didn’t, he probably would have gone for it and, at the very least, I would’ve had to spend most of the next hour filling out a lot of forms.”
Rodriguez and King pull undercover duty at the A-C’s 163rd Street stop following serial fare-beating incidents. While Rodriguez serves as the spotter around the turnstiles, King takes up a position on the uptown platform, looking like the guy you want to keep an eye on before you lean over the edge of the platform to see if the train is coming. Why all the elaborate double-teaming for a possible $2 heist? Hey, it’s against the law, it’s a potential source of epidemic misdemeanors, and it epitomizes the kind of quality of life crimes targeted as preventable causes of bigger ones. As for the upstairs-downstairs surveillance deployment, that’s to avoid the telephone gambit, as in “I had to use the pay phone inside because Columbia Presbyterian needs to know right away if I’m a blood type match.” By having Rodriguez wait to radio King until the couple is descending the staircase to the platform, on the other hand, the beaters can't offer any evasiveness when they are collared.
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| Click on the picture above for the interview with Transit District 3's most valuable veteran, Ronnie Arlotta. |
As Rodriguez and King note, not all fare-beaters are hardened cases. Some truly are commuters who, for one reason or another, find themselves at the wrong end of the city without transportation money. But more often than not, they are practiced in the high jump as a normal part of their social exercise or as a warm-up to other athletic events on subway cars. A few of them get collared so regularly that they’re more machine guns than repeaters. Rose, for example.
An elderly woman with little energy left in her body, Rose long ago decided that the 96th Street turnstiles were superfluous and that she was destined only for the pass gate whenever she wanted to go somewhere. Quite a few years of free rides — not to mention ignored summonses — have gone into the decision to book her for her latest sally through the gate on the heels of an MTA worker. Standing before the District Three desk for preliminary processing, she listens for a few moments to back-and-forths about wagon pickup schedules and the like. “No, don’t bother about that,” she finally advises the duty sergeant. “I’m a special. I can’t go to central booking. You can look it up.”
He does just that, confirming that her diagnosed AIDS has to keep her out of the general booking mix. “You know the routine around here as well as we do,” he says to her.
Rose shrugs. “Go back and forth long enough, you pick up a few things,” she says.
— Donald Dewey’s latest books, both published this year, are The Tenth Man: The Fan in Baseball History and The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Game.
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