Years, Streets Turn a Cop’s Hair to Gray

Lt. Joe Iorio looks out of place among all the young macho cops getting ready to go out busting dope dealers.

The lieutenant is tall and gangly and gray-haired. When he puts his flak jacket on over his sports shirt, Iorio looks more like somebody’s uncle pulling on his down jacket to go duck hunting than a cop getting ready to go out with search warrants on drug raids.

But the lieutenant probably knows the streets of South-Central as well any cop. He started here when he was 25, and now that he’s 50, it looks like he will be finishing up here as well.

He has seen these streets go from tough to tougher. It used to be that a .38-caliber pistol would be about as heavy a gun as a cop would come across. Now it is no big thing to pick up assault rifles--Uzis and AK-47s. And the lieutenant has seen the spread of cocaine and drug money.

South-Central is not the la-la land of the Los Angeles image makers. This is a place where poverty and drugs and guns and gangs have made the streets so dangerous that even children are shot down with regularity.

Tonight the lieutenant is bringing up the rear of a five-car raiding party that is made up of two black-and-whites, a couple of nondescript Buicks and the garish purple Monte Carlo that Iorio is using. The procession swings onto 92nd Street, pulls to the curb and the young cops rush to a grimy little white frame house behind a house. Iorio slowly, calmly follows.

“Come out of there, or I’ll kill your ass!” yells an adrenaline-filled cop.

In the house in front, a woman’s voice cries, “Get down! Get down!”

The door and windows of the little house in the rear are guarded by iron bars. This is not unusual. Nearly all the houses in South-Central have similar devices--most of them as protection against robbery and a few possibly to keep out the police.

But the police have a key. It’s called The Hook, a big steel bar that is wielded so deftly that the iron gate to the little house is open within seconds.

No one is home. The tiny cluttered rooms are filled with a heavy, dank, slightly rotten odor. Goldfish swim in vivid green water in a tank near the front door. A white rabbit slowly hops through the living room. A big brown-and-white dog lies quietly on a pantry floor, nursing a dozen puppies.

The cops turn things over looking for dope. One of them opens the refrigerator and gags. The inside is crawling with maggots.

Another cop spots a small safe in the pantry behind the dog and her puppies. He gingerly slides the dog out of the way, and she does not object. The cop opens the unlocked safe and finds it swarming with cockroaches.

When the police leave, no crowd has gathered to watch. No one seems to have noticed.

The next target is an apartment house on 68th Street. As the police rush to a ground-floor apartment, a mail carrier walks down the stairs from the second floor, glances up from a handful of letters and continues on her rounds.

Again, the cops do not find much; some more cockroaches in the kitchen cupboards and a few hypodermic needles in the bedroom.

A knot of people have gathered next door to watch as the police leave. A couple of little girls dance on the lawn.

Half an hour later, the cops burst into an apartment on 59th Place. There are two young men in the living room. One of them complains in a high, whiny voice that he was already raided the night before by the police and that after they left, members of the Crips gang came in and beat him with a baseball bat because of some money he owed.

The cops search through the apartment. In a back room, in the glow of a dim lamp, the naked torso of a man seems to protrude from the center of a large bed that is covered with a purple spread. He looks eerily like a skinny caterpillar in a Disney movie.

The man is a paraplegic, his bent and useless legs are twisted behind and beneath him. The man is holding a roll of toilet paper in his hands and appears to be terrified of the young cops who speak to him in a gentler tone than they have used all night.

Iorio leaves the apartment before the other cops are finished searching. It is fully dark when he pulls away in the Monte Carlo. No one on the street seems very curious about the raid. One man stands on the corner, eating something and looking toward the apartment on 59th Place.

As the lieutenant heads back to the station, he sees the horsemen riding up the center of South Broadway. They are urban pleasure riders, he explains, whose horses are kept in a stable near the freeway.

The horsemen are as silent as shadows. The hoofs of their mounts are muffled by the grass of the median strip as they move like wraiths through the darkness of South-Central. Except for the lieutenant, no one seems to notice.