Wednesday, April 29, 2009, started just like any other day in New York City. I needed to do an errant and had to go up to the German Consulate on 49th Street to have my signature verified on some legal document my Berlin notary had sent me. It was a beautiful day and so I decided to take my old BMW K75 motorcycle for a ride up there. My plan was to go to Chelsea Piers for a swim afterwards. I had some busy weeks behind me putting together a show at Postmasters gallery in Chelsea and I felt like allowing myself an afternoon off.
After I finished my business at the Consulate and returned to the bike I had actually found a legal parking spot on 50th Street near 1st Ave I had a fateful idea. Maybe instead of cutting crosstown, I could ride up to Cycle Therapy, my garage, and have them look at the damaged blinkers. It was the second time this season that an idiot had knocked over the bike while it was parked on Rivington Street and the lenses on the signal lights were broken. The lights worked fine and I had fixed the lenses temporarily with gaffers tape, but it didn't look good and it needed to be taken care off.
Cycle Therapy is up in Harlem on 127th, between Third and Second Avenue. Amit, the guy who runs the shop, looks at the bike, goes back to his computer and orders the parts. I ask him about the inspection sticker that was punched for May 2009. "You have till the end of May, we'll do it when we have the parts. I will call you. Good bye." I get on my bike, turn right on Second Ave to take 125th over to the West Side Highway looking forward to my swim, relaxing on the sun deck at Chelsea Piers and continue reading Derrida's "Counterfeit Money," a book on the theory of the gift.
At 126th street a cop car behind me starts flashing his lights and turns on the siren and I move to the right thinking he wants to pass me. Looking back, I see them gesturing at me so I pull over at a gas station. Two cops get out and ask for my license and registration. I ask what's wrong and the cop tells me that I was "running a red light" when I turned at 127th. I ride my bike in NYC since 1991 and I am not in the habit of running red lights. Drivers in NYC hit the gas within a millisecond the light turns green. You don't want to be on a bike in an intersection when this happens. The guy's probably desperate to write a ticket I think. I give him my NY drivers license and my registration and am ordered to stay at my bike while they check.
It takes forever. Suddenly a black car speeds into the gas station lot. Two cops jump out and order me to put my hands up on their car and frisk me. "Do you have anything sharp in your pockets" one of the cops asks me. "No, just my keys" I answer as he empties my pockets. "What is this about" I ask, my mind racing trying to make sense of this. "You're under arrest" the cop says. "I am under what? What for?" "For driving with a suspended license" he declares. They put hand cuffs on me, order me in the back seat of their car and we drive off to the 25th precinct on 119th Street, while one of the cops rides my bike.
In the precinct they put my belongings in a manila envelope and order me to take off my belt and shoe laces. They count my money, 104 dollars and a few coins. Officer Jose Arroyo, the guy who arrested me, tells me I am allowed to keep up to 100 dollars. He gives me 60 and two quarters and they put me in a holding cell. I'm starting to feel a little bit alarmed by now and demand my cell phone to call a lawyer. Arroyo actually comes back with my phone and allows me to make a call. I call Martin Liu, an immigration lawyer and art collector who I recently met and who was the only lawyer I had on my phone. "You're what? Arrested? Which precinct? I send an associate up there right away."
I'm waiting in the cell sitting on the metal bench. Left to me is a black transvestite with a wig looking like a younger version of Michael Jackson. "What are you here for" I ask him. "Prostitution" he lilts managing a smile. The guy on the right was charged with assault and outside the cell, shackled to the iron bars, is a black woman in her thirties who apparently had sold bootlegged CDs on the street.
An hour later officer Arroyo comes back and hands me a card. It was the Chelsea Piers membership card of Michael Strage, the lawyer Liu sent up. Arroyo hands me my phone back and I can talk with the lawyer. "Hey, we go to the same club." "Yes, I saw your card in your wallet and I gave the officer mine to let you know I am here." Strage tells me that he has my belongings, but there was probably not much else he could do other than meet me later at Central Booking on Centre Street. He says it could take up to 24 hours in the worst case, but that he will try to speed it up. He asks me if I want him to represent me and I say "Hell, yeah sure, get me out of here."
Idling my time away in the cell I think what could have caused the suspension of my license. I had paid my insurance a couple of months earlier. The DMV in Albany had always sent me new registration stickers after I paid the 14 dollars for it online. I also checked the DMV web site regularly and paid my parking tickets. I wanted to make sure I had no balance on it, because sometimes when I am traveling abroad I let my friend Paololuca have the bike. He used to collect a lot of parking tickets over time, almost a thousand dollars worth, but he paid for all of them. Then I remembered another incident three years earlier in Harlem. A cop stopped me on 125th and issued two tickets for wearing RayBan aviator sunglasses and a helmet on which the DOT sticker had peeled off, although any idiot could have seen that it was a legal motorcycle helmet. I had also immediately offered to wear my goggles which I kept in the bike for cloudy days or longer rides, but there was absolutely no room for negotiation. I was so furious back then, that I wanted to contest the charges. I received a date for a hearing, but couldn't go because I had to be in Berlin at the time. So I wrote back to the DMV and said I wouldn't be able to make it and paid the summonses instead. Could it be that something got mixed up in the bureaucracy then? The DMV is not exactly known for accurate record keeping.
After a while Arroyo shows up again. I look at him and realize he's not totally comfortable with the situation. Strage must have spoken with him. But it's too late to change anything now, I'm in the system and the process has to run its course. He hands me back my license and tells me that normally he is required to tear it up. He also hands me 3 summonses and a receipt for the impounded bike. He tries to be friendly and we manage to strike up a short conversation. I ask him if he could tell me what possibly caused the suspension of my license. He tells me that the DMV records were "a bit mixed up" and he doesn't know what the exact offense was, but that the DMV records show my license suspended for two unpaid moving violations in March and May 2007. I told him that I am not aware of any outstanding tickets, that in fact last time I paid a parking ticket on the DMV website it showed zero outstanding balance. He tells me something about the DMV web site only showing "parking tickets" and not "moving violations." He continues to tell me, almost apologetically, that the officers are told by their superiors to target motorcycles between April and October.
So that's how the system works, these guys are told to produce a number of tickets no matter what, otherwise they don't get ahead in the system. I don't know if this order is specific to the 25th precinct or whether this profiling goes on city wide. I never had a problem downtown where I've been living and riding my bike for many years. But this was the second time now that I had a run in with the "law" in Harlem within a few years. It certainly explained the annoying helmet and sunglasses charge on 125th Street in 2006 and the current accusation of running a red light on 127th. He leaves me and I look at the summonses. One is for a "defective turn signal front right," one for a "defective turn signal right rear" and one is "unlicensed operator." Strangely enough, no ticket for "running the red light," which started this whole thing in the first place.
I while away my time in the filthy cell doing knee bends and stretch exercises. At one point they get me out of the cell and a Hispanic cop in shorts takes my finger prints and photographs me on a grey wall with a height scale painted on it. Around 5 pm the other three inmates are picked up for transfer. I have to wait longer. Around 6 pm, a female and a male cop take me to an old white and blue Ford with the words NYPD, Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect written on it. I'm in hand cuffs again and they take me by the arm and shove me on a bare metal back seat. The cuffs hurt, but at least we are finally on the way downtown to Centre Street. At least that's what I thought. But no, they turn north and take me to the "hub" at the 28th precinct. There I am stripped again and put in a single cell with a toilet. There is puke residue in the corner, the toilet is a mess, the stench of urine all over the place. I feel nauseous.
Around 8:30 they open the cell doors and line up ten of us. They take a long metal chain with shackles and cuff our left hands to it. One guy comes in late, a Dominican crackhead, still totally high, busted for "a snatch." He seems to know some of the cops already. "Hey you, are you Chinese?" he goes to one of the cops. They always identify the cops by their ethnicity. "You know Bruce Lee used to come up to Harlem to party and eat pussy! He and Khalid Abdul Muhammad, they would go out together and Muhammad was a Muslim and was not allowed to eat pussy, but they did anyway..." The Chinese cop didn't care much. But another big fat black cop in an oversized white t-shirt gave him a high five. Together they had known some famous karate guy in Harlem and they both visibly enjoyed their reunion. I realized they were two sides of the same coin, they grew up in the same neighborhoods, went to the same schools and are still playing robbers and cops together. In the end we are twelve guys, I am the only Whitey in the gang. I am between the crackhead and a black drug dealer with a missing front tooth and a baseball cap. We are led to a truck to take us to the Tombs. The crackhead is rapping "I am a lyrical wizard, I make sunshine out of a blizzard..."
In the truck we are squeezed together and the crackhead won't stop talking. Actually, at one point he said to be freebasing only on cocaine. "You can do anything you want when you smoke cocaine. Anything!" "Fuck all night?" one asks. "Fuck all night, man!" Then the drug dealer to my right talks about declining business. The economic crisis affects his business too. I bet a good portion of his wares ended up spicing up Wall Street investment bankers parties. "We used to make shitloads of money, man. But now? Shiiit." He doesn't like me and calls me a cracker. The crackhead comes to my rescue, "He's not a cracker, man. He's German. Red necks are crackers, not Germans." The black Muslim across the aisle in a white oversized sports jacket and skull cap smiles at me and says "Germans are good people, they like black people." The drug dealer, who claimed to be a member of the Bloods, didn't like this. "He's a cracker, I tell you, look at his neck, it's red." At this point I'm fed up with this shit. I had problems following their slang, the only crackers I know come as party food and so I told him "If I am a cracker then you must be a pretzel." Some laughed, but it didn't go over well with the Bloods dude. "Next time I see you in the hood, I blow your head off!" he shouts at me. From now on I keep my mouth shut.
The truck door opens and we are in the court yard of the Tombs. It's night now, the cranky metal entrance shutter door rolls down behind us. The gang is led downstairs and made to wait in a long corridor. As we wait I notice two white cops who are watching us. They must be detectives of sorts and were checking us out or simply training their cognitive skills. They are young, in their early thirties. One is an Irish guy with short reddish hair wearing a t-shirt, the other a good looking Tom Cruise type with a jacket and wearing his badge on a chain over his chest. At one point, after a staring contest, the Irish cop asks me "Five Eleven?" I ask "What?" "License suspended?" I nodded and told him I had no idea why. He said "Just take it as an experience." I've heard this line before from my lawyer when we talked on the phone at the precinct "Just stay calm, don't be sarcastic, the cops don't like it, and just take it as an experience." I told the Irish cop that I've had other plans for the evening. He shrugged. They were intelligent and of course figured out that I must be German or European. I felt like injecting a bit of drama into the scene and said "You know, you guys run around the world preaching about democracy and human rights and then you treat people like this for no reason?" and held up my shackled hand to him. The Cruise guy twitched and they both said nothing anymore.
Some guy comes, unshackles me and leads me into a small room with two female cops. One is doing some clerical work while watching a talk show on a huge old TV set, the other sits behind a desk with a computer monitor and talks on the phone with friends or family. She doesn't look at me, just motions with her free hand to a digital camera in the back. I look at the camera and she hits a key on her keyboard. Then she motions to the side wall where they've mounted a picture of an Irish setter puppy. I look at the dog and she takes my profile.
Next we are led into yet another corridor and frisked by a gang of rough and muscular black cops. They line us up against the wall and again we empty our pockets and put everything on the floor. The crackhead continues to talk back at them. They don't like it and after the second "Shut up!" the broke ass mutha fucka does the sensible thing and shuts up. Then there's a roll call and we have to state our dates of birth. Finally we can pick up our stuff and they give us back our shoe laces and belts and escort us to the cages.
A big room with about six or seven cages. About twenty people in a cage, some sleeping on the benches and on the floor. Garish institutional green cinder block stone walls. Fluorescent light flickering. Filthy floors, food crumbs everywhere, one open toilet and two pay phones. I was wondering before why Arroyo gave me 60 dollars and two quarters. Thoughtful guy, I would be able to make a phone call now. At the entrance there was a box with sandwiches and small containers of milk. I took my ration and after I sniffed on the undefinable brown spread on the stale bread I decided to throw it in the trash.
11 pm. My name is called and I am escorted upstairs into a holding cell with three small booths where people can talk with their lawyers. Most had court appointed legal aid. One young hip hop guy was running around frenetically asking for quarters to make a phone call. After he got some, he yelled in the phone "They got verything, my gold chains, my 5,000 dollar watch. Everything!" Finally my lawyer shows up. We talk through the screen. "There are two options," he tells me, "either we plead guilty and I probably can get you out with a $75 fine or we plead not guilty and we have to go back to court in a couple of months." It's a tough decision. I felt so fucking violated that I really itched to fight back. But then you think, is it really worth it? Do you want to spend your time and energy to go against this bureaucratic juggernaut, like some Don Quichote fighting the windmill in the seal of New York City. I couldn't decide. "Think about it," my lawyer said, "see you in the court room."
Ten minutes later, I am called into the court room. As I go in I overhear a police woman telling another waiting delinquent "Oh don't worry so much, it's judge Klein tonight, he is a good one." I take it as a good omen.
It's around midnight. All sorts of people sitting around the court room, cops, lawyers, bailiffs, clerks. I walk up to the bench where Michael already waits for me. High up, behind some sort of lectern, presides judge Klein, a stern looking man around sixty, grey hair, thick glasses. A stenographer typing on a keyboard below to his left. The case is read and he asks how we want to plead. I am still undecided and talk quickly to Michael who encourages me to take the pragmatic route. "Do you really want to be stuck here all summer waiting for a court appearance and it's not even sure we can get a better deal and it will cost you more money? And if you don't show up they issue a warrant..." I agree, let's get it over with. The judge proceeds to ask if I admit my offense. I twitch and turn to the side in frustration and anger. I know of no offense I committed. Immediately there is a chorus from the cops and clerks in the court room. "Face the judge! Face the judge!" I straighten myself and tell the judge "I would have to lie to you if I would admit an offense now." Judge Klein looks at me and responds "You can plead not guilty, do you understand?" At this point my lawyer jumps in "You see your honor my client is deeply aggrieved..." "You can also plead nolo contendere" the judge cuts him short. Michael takes 15 seconds to explain the legalese to me. It's basically a plea where the defendant neither admits nor disputes a charge, kind of a plea bargain. You still have the guilty charge stuck on you, but you don't have to admit any guilt. I think about it for a second and agree. "The fine will be 75 dollars and 80 dollars in court fees. Do you wish to pay now with credit card or do you want to pay later?" I agree to pay with credit card.
My hand is trembling when I sign the credit card receipt in the clerks office. "Running a good business here" I say, not exactly approvingly. The clerk glares at me. "Could have kept you here all night" he snaps back. Michael gets me out of the room quickly. "You shouldn't have said this, the clerks can be very useful. Without him you would be still down there."
We're out of the Tombs by 12:30 am Thursday morning.
To be continued...