King 1

  

                Frank “Piggy Wilson huffed hard as he charged up Spruce Street in the direction of the Great Falls, chasing after the two suspects that had fled the Market Street strip club.

                Even at the peak of his career forty years earlier, Wilson could not have caught up with the younger men, but at age 62, and many dozens of pounds over the recommended weight for the force, he lost ground with each frustrated step.

                He could hear their footsteps echoing ahead of him like rifle shots against the tall brick walls of the old mills to either side, their voices like wails of ghosts, both locked into a haunting embrace few people understood, least of all Wilson.

                Reports of shooting at the bar had brought several units to the scene, but only Wilson had caught sight of the two men slipping out the back door and down a narrow alley, managing to skirt the ring of police closing in on the club.

                Just where or how Wilson lost his radio, he could not recall. Responding to so many calls in such a short stretch of time, he might have dropped it in any of a dozen places or had it fall down a storm water drain as he ran.

                The city had rarely seen so much sustained violence during a single twenty-four hour period. Even the race riots of the 1960s, which left such deep scars on cities like Newark, had largely passed over the City of Paterson, as if the dark angle of vengeance could not bother to strike out against a place that had fallen so low, taking rude pity on the once great industrial city of America.

                But on May 16, 1987, as Wilson huffed and puffed and pretended he could when he couldn’t climb the hill, all that changed, as violence exploded in dozens of streets, all at once – and Mayor Frank X. Graves Jr., sometimes called “The Little Dictator,” ordered on a series of raids that closed taverns, strip clubs and notorious drug dens in an effort to put to an end the reign of what local newspapers called “The King of Paterson.”

                Yet if Wilson’s guess was right about the figures he pursued, the man Graves wanted most had slipped out of the net designed to catch him, as the King had done hundreds of previous times during his long criminal career, racing towards the very place he had performed his most daring escape twenty years earlier.

                Wilson’s grip slipped on the butt of his pistol, his fat fingers shaking so much he could barely keep the forefinger pressed against the trigger. In the few unbroken first floor windows of the mill, he saw his own ghostly shape hobbling past, pudgy face painted with sweat and terror.

                He dared not admit the depth of his desire to kill both men he pursued, though he knew he would likely get one chance, suspecting he could not live up to it.

                One or the other, perhaps both, might escape, and both had enough evidence to put Wilson behind bars for decades passed his planned retirement – explaining why he had not stopped at a public phone to call for backup.

                "In the confusion, I thought I could reach them first," he said. "Dead men don't testify in court."

                In the dark, Paterson glittered with a sprinkling of lights, giving it an sense of beauty it lacked during daylight hours, hiding the flaws of the so-called historic district, although a good sniff of air hinted of the numerous fires that had gutted the old mills -- from junkies seeking to keep warm as they stewed their next fix over open flames.

                Witnesses seated at the tables inside the Falls View Grill reported seeing the three men rushing passed their position, with a thin, panic and wounded man identified later as Puck Fetterland in the lead.

                None made a move to stop Fetterland or the man -- later identified as Maxwell Zarra -- chasing him. None called the department to report the fact that both men -- as well as the huffing and puffing Wilson carried pistols. During later interviews, each person claimed to have heard Zarra shouting for Fetterland to stop. The details of these memories varied depending on the level of intoxication at the time.

                All witnesses agreed that the three figures were equally spaced, and just far enough apart from each other to make it impossible to shoot each other -- although Fetterland apparently attempted several shots as he ran, misaimed desperate shots that ballistics later discovered hit brick walls far from their intended targets.

                Zarra's pistol, ballistics later determined, fired only once, and not during that stretch of pursuit. Although the bullet was never recovered, we believe it hit Fetterland later and was the cause of Fetterland's eventual death. Although Fetterland's body also remained unrecovered.

                A patrol car rushing late from the Totowa section of town ground to a halt near the double bridges that marked the crossing of the upper river. The report later claimed the officers saw Fetterland as he jumped in front of their headlights and vanished into the upper park near the gap for the falls. They were just existing their car to pursue when Zarra appeared. They ordered him to halt. He did not. The officer pursued.

                In the upper park, their report said, Fetterland screamed for Zarra to leave him alone.

                "Why don't you go back to her and let me be!" he shouted as he mounted one of the two narrow bridges that crossed over the falls' chasm. The footbridge used by tourists was closed by order of Graves, with a gate and a lock impossible to open quickly. Fetterland took to the other, unguarded bridge, one meant to carry a water viaduct, not people, so lacked the cage like fence that kept pedestrians from access to the gorge itself.

                "You're a son of a bitch!" the officers claimed Zarra shouted before leveling his pistol and squeezing off a single shot.

                Fetterland's thin figure staggered and twirled.

                "He looked like a leaf caught in a fast moving flow of water," Wilson said later. He had just caught up, but was too winded to reach Fetterland or stop the inevitable fall off the bridge -- even had he wanted to. He had just enough energy to lift his own pistol and aimed it for Zarra's head.

                The shot hit below where Wilson aimed, the bullet striking Zarra in the middle of the back. Wilson might have shot again, but one of the other pursuing officers, knocked his pistol down -- later reporting that he saw no reason to kill the disabled Zarra.

                "At that point," Wilson said later, "I knew it was all over."

                In the hours that followed, attention previous focused elsewhere in the city, centered around the falls, as the mayor committed more resources to the search for the body. A EMT team arrived to haul Zarra off to the Medical Center. But he did not die -- unlike numerous other people involved in the citywide conflict, including his roommate. That body was found behind a strip club on market street, two bullets lodged in his brain.

                The newspapers had a field day in the following morning's edition:

 

                Poet blasts crime king.

 

                In what appears to have been a romantic triangle gone sour, a local songwriter and poet shot the head of the Paterson crime syndicate dead in a dramatic gun battle at the brink of the Great Falls. Witnesses said the poet, Maxwell Zarra, shot once striking Puck "the boss" Fetterland once in the chest, sending him tottering over the chasm of the falls to his death.

                Mayor Frank X. Graves Jr. said the city is currently searching for the body, although with higher than usual water levels, he believes the body will not be recovered. Police investigators, however, found enough blood and hair on the jagged rocks below to predict death -- even if the gun shot had not killed him.

                "No one could have survived that fall," Graves said. "We believe the body struck three different places. If so, the bones would have shattered to such a point that shock would have killed him. He certainly wouldn't have been able to swim when he reached the water."

                Fetterland, sources claim, was -- until recently -- the undisputed crime boss of Paterson, operating drug dens, houses of prostitution and gambling facilities throughout the city. Although under the scrutiny of the Mayor's Task Force on Crime over the last few months, Fetterland's operations apparently went unchallenged for over a decade.

                Details behind the conflict that resulted in Fetterland's death remain sketchy, although several police sources claim it resulted from an dispute over a strip club dancer. Zarra, a full time cook at a local eatery and a hopeful country music musician, apparently incurred the crime boss' wrath when seeking the woman's attention.

                The dancer's name has not been released, but a spokesperson for the Passaic County Prosecutor’s office said the case against Zarra would be brought before a grand jury. It is expected to result in charges of murder against Zarra.

 

                "Does this mean I'm going back to jail?" Zarra asked during the initial interview at the hospital. At 37, he looked 23, with only a few wrinkles around the edges of his mouth testifying to the sometimes difficult life he led.

                "Not necessarily," I said. "But I suspect you will have to go to trial."

                Zarra glanced towards the window which looked down on Main Avenue, Paterson, the glitter of morning traffic almost beautiful from a distance, although even through the thick glass the sound of car horns testified to the impatience of drivers seeking to get downtown. But he seemed to stare beyond the mundane scene towards the hunk of stone that hung over that side of the city -- at the gap of low mountain that marked where the Passaic River made its northerly point before turning south again for its eventual trip to Newark Bay.

                "You want to tell me about it?" I asked.

                "You mean confess?"

                "Well, what you tell me could be used against you," I said. "But it might help you as well."

                "Do I have a lawyer yet?"

                "Do you want a lawyer?"

                "I suppose it would be helpful. We do have the death penalty in this state."

                I put my clipboard down and stared into the man's face. He looked ragged, his blonde hair limp and his chin thick with several days of stubble.

                "I'm just trying to get the facts straight," I said. "I'm not looking to pin anything down on you. That's the prosecutor's job."

                "But you work in his office."

                "Yes."

                "And what you find out will likely come out in court?"

                "Yes," I said with a sigh.

                "Then maybe we should talk later when I have my lawyer here. I wouldn't want to say anything stupid."

                "Your lawyer would likely tell you not to say anything," I told him. "That would be wise in other circumstances."

                Zarra frowned. "What do you mean other circumstances?"

                "I mean we have three witnesses who saw you shoot Fetterland. That part is cut and dry. Unless you can make a case for why you killed him, you'll get convicted on some level."

                "And serve time in the county jail?"

                "I'm afraid this kind of conviction would not send you there," I said. "You would serve time at the state facility in Rahway."

                "That's worse?"

                "By far."

                Zarra stared out the window again and stayed silent for so long I would have thought him asleep except for the intensity of his stare.

                "All right," he said. "What do you want to know?"

                I took up the clipboard again.

                "How long did you know Fetterland?"

                Zarra laughed. "Know him? I'm not sure I ever did. But I met him when I was 15 or 16 years old."

                The surprise must have shown on my face, drawing another laugh.

                "We're old buddies, him and I," Zarra said. "I guess you might say we were similar in a lot of ways."

                "Similar, how?"

                "We spent a lot of time on the street," he said. "I might have ended up like him. But I had people to look out for me, he didn't."

                "Who?"

                Zarra shrugged. "That's not important," he said. "I just did."

                "You almost sound like you feel sorry for Fetterland."

                This time Zarra emitted more of a snort than a laugh. "Maybe, or maybe I just came to understand things about him that made him the way he is."

                "Even so, you shot him in the end."

                Zarra glared at me. "I never said that. Maybe you should find someone else to talk to about it. If I'm going to jail again, I won't want to be the one to send myself there."

                "You went to jail?" I said, the startled sound in my voice obvious even to me.

                "Don't you people keep any records?" he asked.

                "Of course, we do. But I looked through your file, and found no criminal convictions."

                "I was 16. I'm not sure that would count. I eventually got probation."

                "But you said you served in jail?"

                "I spent less than a week in the county jail waiting for someone to post bail," he said. "That was enough to teach me about not wanting to go back. For any reason."

                "You want to tell me about that?"

                "No."

                "But that might shed light on this case," I said.

                "It might also send me to the electric chair," Zarra growled. "Go do your own digging, I don't have anything more to say. I'm sure you can find a trail if you did deep enough."

                "Look, Mr. Zarra, you're just making it difficult for yourself..."

                "Nurse!"

                "Zarra."

                "Nurse!"

                A black woman swept into the room, her white uniform as crisp as a rookie cop's.

                "You were asked not to upset our patient," she said. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

                I clicked close my pen and nodded, then rose from the chair beside the bed.

                "I'm sorry, Mr. Zarra," I said. "I hoped I could get some answers from you. After all, your case is most unusual."

                Zarra stared out at the landscape again, he remained fixedly silent, displaying a streak of stubbornness other people would later testify to.

                "Thanks anyway," I said, and left the room.

                Downstairs in the waiting room, a pack of reporters descended on me, barraging me with questions I could not answer. I waved them off. But I understood their desperation.

                Maxwell Zarra was a mystery man, the poet who had taken the law into his own hands. It was headline stuff, but without much in the way of background.

                Zarra, however, had supplied me with clues, and I immediately left the hospital to central processing, where I hoped the county still maintained files on previous investigations.

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