Don Winslow on Crooked NYC Cops and Legalizing Heroin

It used to be there was a bubble over parts of New York, an illusion of peace and prosperity that seemed to hang over the Upper East Side, 57th Street, and a few other well-heeled neighborhoods where residents could feel generally optimistic about life, work and the cosmopolitan experiment while avoiding the subway system and the back of police cruisers. These days the bubble extends over much of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens, too. These are boom years, we’re told, go forth and walk the streets in safety: crime is down, salaries are up and we’ll figure out racism and wealth disparity another time, soon as the Canarsie Tunnel is fixed. Oh, and corruption in the NYPD? That was rooted out back in the Serpico days.

That, more or less, is where Don Winslow comes in. Over the last decade, Winslow has established himself as fiction’s foremost chronicler of the war on drugs, with gritty epics like The Power of the Dog, Savages, the Boone Daniels series, and 2015’s breakout bestseller, The Cartel, which charted the latest bloody chapter in the DEA’s history south-of-the-border and the reign of a Sinaloa boss based on the notorious El Chapo Guzmán. Guzmán has now been delivered to New York City, so it may only be right that Winslow, who was born here and once worked as a private investigator in the Times Square bad-old-days, should return as well. The Force, Winslow’s latest novel, tells the story of Denny Malone, a proud Staten Island cop, the lead detective in the famed Manhattan North special division, and as thoroughly complicated and corrupt a law enforcement official as you’re ever likely to encounter.

Besides serving as the NYPD’s hero of the hour, Malone is also the bagman (in this case he distributes “envelopes”) for a network of drug dealers, mafiosos, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, real estate developers, senior city officials, and the men and women in blue. Harlem is Malone’s “kingdom,” ruled by brute force, tribal divisions, and a constant stream of self-justification that allows him to believe he’s different than the traffickers he makes a living ripping off. This is New York when the bubble vanishes. It’s the city we try not to see, the one built on corruption, patrolled by sharks, cleft by race, rigged in favor of the rich, and every bit as implicated in the drug wars as Medellín, Santo Domingo, Juárez, or Nuevo Laredo.

“We’re the cartel,” one of The Force’s kingpins announces over a heroin deal, expecting the word to be a shibboleth and a threat. Malone’s answer conveys everything you need to know about his version of New York City: “No, we’re the cartel. I got 38,000 in my gang. How many you got?”

Earlier this week, I met up with Winslow in Bryant Park, just a few blocks from where he once worked as a private investigator. We talked about corruption, shootings, the heroin trade, the cartels, good cops and bad ones, and how the city had changed.

Dwyer Murphy: You were working Times Square in the 1970s. That’s a stone’s throw from where we are now. What was this part of town like back then?

Don Winslow: It was rough. The whole city was. I got here in ’76. It was the nadir of the city’s experience, that era of freezing to death in the dark and telling the city to go to hell. 1977 was the Summer of Sam. When you walked from Times Square over to Bryant Park, you felt like you were walking on the beach, only they weren’t seashells underfoot, they were vials. In those days, except for maybe the Upper East Side, there was no “safe” neighborhood, and all the parks were dangerous. Now, this place, Bryant Park, it’s beautiful.

DM: The Force is set in the “new” New York, but the pervasive feeling is that this city, this success story, was built on a foundation of graft, crime, corruption.

DW: Balzac said it centuries before I did: behind every great fortune is a great crime. New York is unique in many regards, but not in this one—to get anything done on a major construction level, palms are gonna be greased, envelopes are gonna be exchanged. The new image of the city is of something that’s squeaky clean and crime-free. It’s no doubt different than it used to be, but there are still problems. And at some point in time, the bill is going to come due on these lingering issues.

DM: What does that look like, when the bill comes due?

DW: It could be anything. If you have more killings of unarmed African-American men, there could be riots, something we haven’t seen here in a long time. Don’t misunderstand me, I hope none of this happens. Let me go on record saying I love this city. I love the passion. But it has its problems. The projects, for example, don’t seem to change. Harlem has certainly changed. All you need to know is there’s a Banana Republic next to the Apollo Theater. But what doesn’t change are the knots of poverty, whether in Washington Heights, Brooklyn, or the Bronx. The crime isn’t as obvious as before, because of the technology. We all have cell phones. It used to be you would see a lot of drug trading out on the streets. Now you don’t need to go to the corners because you can just text your drug dealer from your house, and he comes to you. But there’s still dealing, and there’s the crime and violence that goes along with it.

DM: Can we talk a bit about police shootings? They factor heavily in the novel, and just this morning, new footage was released of the killing of Philando Castile by a cop in Minnesota, a cop who’s been acquitted of all charges. It’s a tough video to watch. Obviously these shootings aren’t new, but the distribution of the footage of it is. I wonder how that’s changing policing.

DW: Everyone’s a journalist now. Cops are aware that they’re under scrutiny like never been before. Now with the coming of body cameras and car cameras—which of course the Chicago police have managed to break before going out on operations—that changes some moments, but not others. We both watched the Philando Castile footage this morning. That cop was very aware that there was a camera on him. But he got scared. My analysis is that this is a guy who should never have been a cop. He was frightened. The shooting happens incredibly quickly. You hear the Castile saying, “Sir, I have to tell you, I do have a firearm.” If he hadn’t said that, he’d be alive today.

Now, we don’t have the cop’s-eye-view. We don’t know what he saw. But it was damn quick. I’ve talked with cops about these shootings. Believe me, they’re tough conversations to have, because some shootings simply cannot be justified. If a guy’s running away, there’s no reason to shoot—that’s murder. But cases like this one might be more ambiguous. The law says—and the law needs to be rewritten—that if an officer is afraid for his or her life, the shooting is justified. That’s a pretty tough standard.

From the cops’ perspective, stopping these incidents is all an issue of recruiting and training. But the science is complicated. If you look at the science, which is what we should be doing, it’s clear that white people—let’s talk frankly—have either a conscious or unconscious bias that makes us more afraid of African-Americans than other whites. And white cops, when tested, overestimate the ages of black males, which means they overestimate the threat potential. There’s a lot of interesting research out there. So if we ask, are cops racist? The answer is, yeah, as racist as the society they come from.

DM: Do you think it’s changing the way police see themselves? It seems like there’s an atmosphere of increasing hostility between the police and the community.

DW: There’s always been an “us versus them” thread to policing, a circle-the-wagons mentality. And that’s been exacerbated, because the cops know every move is being watched and scrutinized. Every move might end them up in court. So they resent it, on a certain level. But the vast majority of police are out there trying to do a good job. One thing you’ll find when you talk to a lot of cops is how much they genuinely care about the victims and about the communities they serve. They really do. But a lot of those cops think, “damn, the public doesn’t trust me.” These are the people they’re laying their lives on the line for on a daily basis, and that’s not just a cliché—The Force is dedicated to 178 officers who were killed while I was typing the book. They think the community doesn’t like them and doesn’t trust them. That drives them further into that island. And what we need is exactly the opposite.

DM: I take it you spoke with a lot of cops in researching The Force. How did you earn their trust and get them to open up to you?

DW: I’ve known cops all my life. My godfather was a cop, and I was a P.I. so I worked with cops. I started talking to people who turned me onto others. And then it’s like any relationship. People talk about quality time with their spouse, their kids. There’s no such thing as quality time, there’s just time. If you’re not there for the little things, they’re not going to come to you for the big things. That’s true of relationships on any level. So this was a matter of spending time with people, showing them you were really going to listen, that you have an open mind, that anything they said was okay. If they told me “don’t use this,” I didn’t use it.

DM: Let’s talk a little about heroin and New York. Obviously there are parts of the country, the northeast especially, that are really struggling right now. You’ve been researching the drug trade for a long time, between The Cartel, The Power of the Dog, just about all your books, really. And this time you’re looking at New York. So how does the heroin trade work here? Where does it fit in the city’s economy?

DW: New York going back to the 1600s is a trading hub for the northeast because of its geography—because of the Hudson River, then the Erie Canal, and subsequently the roads that followed those waterways. Smuggling helped build this city. When the British were taxing everything, New York was a smuggling hub to New England, up the Hudson Valley, and down to the Central Atlantic states. Well, nothing’s changed. If you want to make a lot of money on heroin, you’re looking to send your product to population centers.

The newest heroin epidemic uses New York as a hub. The problem here is really two problems that are quite distinct. There’s a problem, of course, with heroin use in the city. You mentioned Staten Island before, also known now as Heroin Island. That’s a population that’s never really been into heroin before, and now it is, and we’re seeing a young white population dying in a way that’s somewhat new. There’s never an “epidemic” of anything until white people start dying.

So that’s one issue, but the other issue—the big money issue—is not the local sales of heroin in the New York metro area, it’s the heroin mills. New York is being used as a cutting and distribution center. That’s why you find the epicenter of this stuff in Washington Heights, because the neighborhood has easy access to Route 9. It’s that simple. And what’s happening now is the gangs have become retail distribution agents. They’re colonizing small towns. The Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Lords, they’ll send three or four people to a Holiday Inn in some town up the Hudson or in Ohio or Pennsylvania, and they’ll live there and take over the retail drug trade in the area, especially with heroin.

DM: That brings us to El Chapo Guzmán, the former head of the Sinaloa cartel, which is responsible for a lot of the fentanyl-laced heroin flowing into the northeast. He’s been extradited to Brooklyn. You’ve written, say, a thousand pages of fiction based on his exploits. Safe to say you’re familiar with him.

DW: I’ve been asked about El Chapo from time-to-time, yes.

DM: Why bring him to the States, to New York? What purpose does it serve?

DW: For one thing it’s PR. When you can successfully extradite a kingpin from Mexico, it makes headlines. There are lots of cases against him here in different jurisdictions, and there’s a momentum to federal prosecutions.

For Mexico, he’d become an embarrassment. For the cartels he’d become a liability. There was no way he would have been extradited if the cartels hadn’t signed off on it. By the time a guy like Guzmán is arrested or rearrested—after the ridiculous farce of this so-called escape—it’s already over for him. The deal is in.

Organized crime people stay in power as long as they’re making other people money. There were basically four people at the top of the Sinaloa cartel. Guzmán was one of them, the most visible, but by no means the most powerful. He didn’t have the political connections—that was a different cat. He was a brilliant businessman, up to a point, but then he started to screw up. He got greedy. He made a very silly error in Sinaloa, similar to what we’re talking about in New York. He decided he wanted a cut of the domestic drug sales there. So the Sinaloa guys who are selling heroin and crack in little grocery stores are thinking, “What does this guy need my money for?”

DM: That seems like a small hill to die on—local heroin sales in Sinaloa.

DW: It really was, but he did. It cost him half of Sinaloa. So he’s isolated in the northern half of the state, and his partners are saying, “Chapo, what the fuck?” Then he pulls idiot stunts like trying to bang this actress, which brings in Sean Penn. The Sinaloa cartel has historically been a conservative organization. They’re the IBM of Mexican drug trafficking. They don’t like that stuff. So he was already in trouble, and when he was recaptured, believe me the fix was in. If you really study that recapture, there were only two people who were not killed, Guzmán and his right hand man. What happened was Chapo’s remaining partners went to the Mexican government and said, “He’s over there in Los Mochis. You can have him, just don’t kill him.” That’s how he was recaptured.

Now in the meantime, other groups were coming up. His idiot kids are vying with their uncle, Guzmán brother, and a guy who was Guzmán’s right hand man for control of the cartel, and that cartel is vying with the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which is now probably the top dog.

Now that he’s here, the question is, what does he have left to trade? Names. Names of people in Mexico. He’ll be living in army bases for the foreseeable future. He’ll be testifying. Remember, he’s been a rat since at least 2001. What people don’t realize is that Chapo was cooperating with the DEA on a continuous level, through his lawyer in San Diego, to eliminate rivals and suppress the people in his own organization who were causing him trouble. He was a rat forever. The Zetas knew he was a rat. The Beltran Leyva group knew he was a rat because he ratted on them. This has been going on forever. I don’t think you’ll see him publicly come to trial. He’ll cut a deal because there are just too many names he can name.

DM: Finally—and feel free to say you have no opinion on this, but I have one, and I want to ask, given what we’ve talked about, and given the complicated portrait of the situation you lay out in The Force… Should heroin be legalized?

DW: I have a very strong opinion about this. It should be legalized tomorrow. Yesterday if it could have been done. Or at least decriminalized. We’ve been doing the same thing for fifty years, and it hasn’t worked. Fifty years of the war on drugs and what’s the result? Drugs are cheaper, more potent, and more plentiful than ever. Last year we had 62,000 people die of opioid overdoses, more than the number who died in car accidents. What we’re doing doesn’t work. You’re never going to successfully address this problem on the supply side. It cannot be done. And the ridiculous idea that it’s going to be done with a wall is an insult to the families of the people who have died.

DON WINSLOW: The Books in My Life

What was the first book you fell in love with and why?
Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. I mean, I was a kid and it was about a kid. And they taught the kid how to steal stuff. I was fascinated. Looking back on it, my first crime book.

Name a classic you feel guilty about never having read?
As I Lay Dying. Actually, all of Faulkner. I know, I know. And I’ve tried and tried. Can’t do it.

What’s the book you reread the most and why?
Not be pretentious, but I read War and Peace every five years or so. It’s a different book every time I read it, and it always leaves me in awe. I’ve read Lonesome Dove a lot, too. Also Michener’s Hawaii.

Is there a book you wish you had written and why?
There are a whole lot of books I wish I’d written, but let’s go with Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.  Because it’s the best noir ever written.

Originally published in Literary Hub.