Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno by Mike Barry Page A

for relatives of relatives, impossible to crack, on a hereditary basis like the washroom concessions at the top nightclubs. Narco in the mid-sixties was the biggest, boldest thing a PD flatheel could fall into. Narco was supposed to keep the city safe and pure from the ravages of King H by working not on straight busts, which would have netted only small fry and little mainliners, but instead through a network of informants who, the PR work went, would be able to lead the narcs right to major dealers, the guys who were working the shit over with both hands and were at the absolute top, kicking shit at everybody. In truth, of course, all that the informants would lead narco to were small fry like themselves who were happy to show their appreciation for the cops by giving them a few dollars, and about a quarter of that would be then kicked back to the informant for his trouble. This made everyone happy: informant, dealer, and narc who would get it on both ends because he could cheat on the informant’s cut and now and then hold out on him altogether threatening a bust. The informants grumbled about it and there would occasionally be a nasty scene—almost every time you read about a narc being shot on or off duty or found in the trunk of his car, it was usually an enraged informant who didn’t want to be held out on any more. But all in all it worked pretty well, better than most things in the world, anyway. It certainly worked a hell of a lot better than Vietnam. As much as he hated it, and he did from the very first day there, Wulff had to admit that the system was quite workable.
    Every now and then the press would start twitching around, usually as the results of more circulation pressure coming from their intent to raise the advertising rates, and narco was supposed to go out and prove that it was keeping New York free of crime by helping to keep it free of drugs. In the beginning there were panicky scenes and shakeups every time the papers would send reporters out to East 4th Street and Avenue ? to pick up some stuff outside the local elementary school, and there would even be shakeups on the squad, but as the sixties went on, by the time Wulff had gotten with it, they had even that down to a system like the rest of it. What they would do would be to make a prearranged bust of a few informants who would have a stash, the stash would mysteriously disappear somewhere between the bust and the courtroom, and charges would be dropped for lack of evidence. Occasionally it was necessary, under severe pressure, to pick up a stash and hold it in the evidence room, but that worked out nicely too because when they finally did a complete search of the evidence room early in 1973 in the early glory days of the impending new drug law prescribing death for the pushers, they found out that some fans of the system had walked off with two million dollars worth of heroin, clean. That was nice. Wulff was able to get even with some of it, but that, of course, was much later.
    No, this was all back in the late sixties and early seventies, at the height of the narco operation when things were running free. And who was Wulff, who the fuck did he think
he
was to be sickened by it? Wulff was unable to come to terms with it at all. Not much more than enough to just barely save appearances for a while.
    It went back to Vietnam. He had been in Saigon, he had seen what drugs had done to that demolished city. Saigon was the drug carnival and capital of the world; it was a city totally devoted to the peddling of shit and Wulff found it easy to think toward the end of his hitch that this was perhaps what the truth of Vietnam itself might be. We were not fighting for freedom there, we were fighting for shit. Western dealers were hand to hand with the Orientals for control of the rich supply fields of Turkey, and Saigon was the place where it all came together in glittering embassies and ruined corridors and the explosion of the bombs that killed