On the Vice Beat

by Bruce McCabe

IT IS a rainy Monday night in March. Special Officer Pat Donahue and his partner, Vincent Angelo Celia, drive slowly up Washington Street in Boston in an unmarked dark-green 1964 Ford sedan. The windshield wiper has no discernible blade, and Donahue can barely see what is ahead. The manual shift keeps popping out of place.

As the car passes Lena’s Original 16 Submarine Sandwiches and the Washington Discount Sales, Cella observes that the streets are virtually deserted. “A guy’s just paid off his Christmas bills, he’s got his Easter bills, and his income tax, and he hasn’t got an extra ten or fifteen dollars to get laid,” he says.

Past the Center Theater (“In Color, 2,000 Maniacs! Color Me Blood Red and Blood Feast”) and the Amusement Center (Voice Recordings, Photos, Lunch Bar). Cella recalls a newspaper story in which a Philadelphia vice cop became a millionaire pimp until his wife found out and blew the whistle on him. Donahue laughs. They are passing the New England Barber School, the Pilgrim Theater ("Two Russ Meyer Hits! Good Morning & Good-bye and Mondo Topless”), and the Brewster Rooms (Moderate Rates Daily & Weekly, Lockers). “We were looking for Estelle for I and D and two rookies let her go,” Donahue says, shaking his head. “I saw that fag with the beret on Tremont Street the other night,” says Cella, peering out the passenger side.

Past the Downtown Lounge (“Now Appearing, The Maxima & Their Revue Plus The Jewel”) and the Air-Conditioned Billiards, past Johnny C’s Soulplace East and the State Theater (Prowl Girls and Run, Swinger, Run). “There’s Annie. I thought she was goin’ to Montreal to have her baby,” says Cella. “She’s givin’ up hookin’ for Lent,” says Donahue.

Past the Intermission Lounge (“Now Appearing, Roger Pace, King of Soul”), the Center Coffee Shop (Hamburg plate and Fried Potatoes, 85¢), and Big John’s Oldies But Goodies Land. “What happened on Mass. Avenue? I thought there was a girl over there giving out her key,” says Donahue. “We’ll pick her up in three months; she’s wanted on a default warrant,” says Cella.

Donahue stops the car in front of Ziggy’s, a hole-in-the-wall bar, and gets out. At forty he is a large man with a round, pleasant Irish face masking hard blue eyes. He wears a raincoat through most of the winter and smokes cigars. He has a facility for understatement, but will get angry if he thinks his easy manner is being misunderstood.

Cella’s door sticks. He can only get out on the driver’s side. Cella is short, compact, and thirtyone. He has tried smoking cigars, but can’t stand the smell. He is serious, intense about his job, and he watches Donahue’s every move. He wears a car coat.

The two go into Ziggy’s. The bartender is doing a crossword puzzle at one end of the bar while two lesbians sit drinking beer at the other. Donahue identifies the woman in curlers with the massive shoulders as Sonia Shaw, a bull-dagger, or male partner in the twosome. She is white, but Donahue says she is married to “a colored fag, and she could stand a pinch [arrest].” Her drinking companion, also white, is the femme, or woman partner, says Donahue, adding: “She goes with Chu-Chu Brown, a nigger butcher, and after one drink, she’ll try to scratch your eyes out.” Roger Miller sings on the jukebox at the rear of the room. For a moment Donahue eyes the girls, and chews moodily on a dead cigar butt. They continue their conversation without looking at him. The bartender looks up coldly, and says, “Everything OK?”

“It’s raining,” Donahue says. The detectives turn and leave.

SOME pinches are almost too easy.

“I don’t care what happens, as long as I come home in one piece,” says Mary Hunicott, climbing into the back seat of Donahue and Cella’s unmarked car.

The car is parked in front of the shabby Edwards Hotel at Broadway and Tremont. The detectives are drinking coffee out of cardboard cups and have the windows down to clear the steam off the windshield when Mary approaches the car. She is from New Hampshire and so new to the ways of the big city that she can’t tell tricks from vice cops. In her business, this is a fatal error.

The cops look Mary over carefully, appraising the stock. She is no bargain. She is acne-scarred on the right cheek, and her blond hair is shaved close to the scalp. She is wearing black boots, Levi’s, and a man’s white shirt. She looks like an undernourished boy.

“I’m gay, and I don’t like to hook, but I’m getting hungry,”she tells the cops in a high state of agitation. “I’m living with a nice old Negro man on West Concord Street who’s got a temperature of a hundred and four and needs help. He’s out like a light. I know you’re not interested in the story of my life, but I need money.”

Cella reaches down casually to shut off the sputtering two-way radio under the dashboard. “What are you offering?” he asks. A prostitute cannot be arrested until she does three things: solicits her victim, names her price, and indicates what she will do for the money.

“You name it,” says Mary Hunicott. “Straight will cost fifteen dollars, French five dollars each, and a half-and-half, twenty dollars.”

Her frankness embarrasses Celia. “What a hot ticket you are,” he says,

Mary answers, “I’m only being myself.”

“Where will we go? Where’s your place?” Donahue asks.

“We can’t go to my place. The guy I’m living with is sick. I don’t know what he’ll do when he wakes up and finds me gone. Besides, he thinks I’m a boy. He likes little boys.”

“We’ll take you to our place,”Cella says.

Mary gets in, and Donahue wheels the car in a big U-arc, pointing it in the direction of police headquarters, three blocks away.

“I have this little racket,” says Mary, confidentially. “I find guys who like little boys, and then I get them to give me money to stay with them, and then I run off. I’ve been in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Lord knows where, and I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

“Don’t be scared,” says Donahue. “You’re goin’ in for prostitution.”

Mary says, “You’re cops.” She is both terrified and relieved. “You can’t book me. I merely offered. You can’t book me without catching me in the act.”

“We can’t?" says Donahue.

“I read it in a psychology book,” says Mary.

“You better read it again.”

Being arrested by her tricks makes Mary react in a curious way. She is humble, almost a little girl. “I’ve never been in trouble before. Gee, just because a person gets hungry . . .” She is defiant, “I’ve made cops before, they’re no angels. You guys should be going after the active ones, not ones like me.”She talks in fits and starts on the three-minute ride to headquarters.

“I’ve spent my whole life in orphanages and foster homes. My mother wanted a boy. My wallet’s in Saugus. I’ve got no identification and I don’t care. Why don’t you pul me down as a homosexual, get it all down? I’m a special case. I used to be on the track team in school. I can run on ice and snow. That’s why they think I’m a boy.” The car pulls up in from of police headquarters. “Oh, well, at least I’ll get some food here. What the hell.”

Inside, Cella takes Mary’s statement, implausible, contradictory, and at times incoherent. Then he takes her in the elevator to the third floor to be fingerprinted and mugged.

A shirt-sleeved cop takes Mary’s right hand. He carefully presses each digit on an ink pad and then rolls it back and forth across a paper. “I believe this is a girl. We can tell by the prints,” says the cop. Even Mary wants to cooperate in solving the riddle. “I’ve got a curve on my thigh. Every girl has one. Take a look at it.”

She is told to sit on a stool. She does, and looks straight ahead while her picture is taken by the shirt-sleeved cop. “Hold it now—that’s it—OK—easy does it,”he tells her, as if he were photographing her for the society page. “You can wash the ink off your hands in the sink over there,” he says.

“What’s her name?” says the shirt-sleeved cop to Cella while taking out a book.

“Call me Mary Hunicott,” says Mary. “That sounds nice.”

She goes over to a hard bench and sits on it, lighting up a cigarette. “I gave the first nickel I ever made to a deaf-mute. I’ve been in Rochester and Manchester, New Hampshire, and Windham, New Hampshire. At one time, I was making one hundred and twenty dollars a week. That was twofifty an hour,” Mary says.

“That’s nice,”says the shirt-sleeved cop disinterestedly.

“I was raped in Laconia, New Hampshire,” persists Mary. “Raped and chloroformed. I don’t know who did it. I raced cycle for a while. I went to school with Grace Metalious’ son. Did he get his mother’s money?” She laughs nervously. “Is it true people laugh when they’re scared?”

A sullen long-haired youth in handcuffs is brought into the room. “Get over there,” says the uniformed cop villi him, pointing to an area in the approximate vicinity of Mary Hunicott. Smoldering with indignation, the youth moves over to the area.

“That’s Agnes and that’s Gertrude,” says Mary, pointing to virtually nonexistent breasts under her shirt. She is still trying to get the attention of the shirt-sleeved cop. “Would you believe in June I was almost a 36B? But I stopped taking hormones, and I lost twenty-five pounds. I’m a lezzie. It’s just oral sodomy. I want to go live in Illinois. When you get to be twenty-one in Illinois, you can do what you want.”

She turns to the boy in handcuffs. “I had a bra on yesterday,” she says proudly. “I really looked like a girl.” He looks at her, not comprehending.

“You’re not really different,” says the shirt-sleeved cop. “You think you are, but you aren’t.”

“1 know,” Mary says. “I hate to admit it, but it’s true.”

The shirt-sleeved cop turns to Cella. “Better get her out of here, she’s exciting me.”

THAT skinny one in the sweater, we’re scoopin’ her,” says Donahue, peering through his binoculars.

Somehow it is difficult to reconcile this Donahue, sitting behind the wheel of his car in a darkened, trash-littered alley, hunched up in his dirty raincoat, with the other Donahue. The other Donahue sits in the wall-to-wall-carpeted living room of his home, listening to Mantovani on the stereo and exchanging childish banter with his daughters and son. His shirt is open at the neck; he is smoking a good cigar; it is Sunday afternoon, and he is at peace with the world.

“I didn’t know if I’d like working with prostitutes, junkies, and filth,” says Donahue. “It’s not the cleanest job in the city.”

In fact, when he joined the Boston police force on April 21, 1956, it was “on a gamble—I wasn’t keen on it at first.” Donahue felt he had been boxed into the decision. His father, a Boston patrolman, had died of a heart attack at forty-nine, leaving Donahue, at twenty-one and in the Navy, the sole support of his mother and three sisters.

After serving eight years in the Navy Donahue went to work for his uncle in the taxi business. But whatever future there might have been vanished when plans for the new Southeast Expressway were announced. The road was going straight through his uncle’s taxi business. Donahue was married and the father of two small children, and he was still taking care of his mother. He needed security. He decided to become a cop. He almost failed the physical. He weighed 138 pounds, 16 less than the required minimum. He finally passed after several nights of feasting on loaves of Jewish rye bread, cottage cheese, bananas, and large quantities of water.

After almost thirteen years in the Department and six years with the vice unit, Donahue looks at his job unemotionally.

“I like it, although the job has its pitfalls and I get disgusted,” he says. “Especially now, with people’s view of the police. The guff you have to take. Their attitudes have changed in the last seven or eight years. At one time, everyone respected the police. I guess a majority of people respect them now. But certain elements don’t. The law-abiding average people do. Anyway, I’ve got too much time invested in this to get out now. What else could I do at the age of forty?”

Donahue and his partner, Cella, have worked together for four years. They know their strengths and weaknesses; how each thinks and will react in almost unimaginable circumstances. Their hours are 8 P.M. to 3 A.M., although they can stretch to 5 or 6 A.M. on busy weekends. The hours are determined by the whores. “The girls are smart,” says Donahue. “For a while, they’d ride by the office around 3 A.M. to see if our lights were on and if our own cars were still parked outside. Now we leave the office lights on all the time, and we park our own cars all over Boston.”

The salary is $160 a week, plus an average of $36 a week extra for court appearances. All overtime on the job is applied toward days off. There is no overtime pay. Although both are called detectives, they have not yet been awarded the grade or the $6 extra a week the grade bestows. Half-jokingly, Donahue says they haven’t got the grade because “we don’t know a politician.” He says: “We’d get it if we caught a couple of bullets.”

Vincent Angelo Cella is an unabashed homebody and family man. As one watches him play with his three-month-old daughter in the kitchen of his home, it is difficult to visualize him taking falsies and wigs from homosexuals, looking through women’s purses, or telling a whore with a black eye: “To get a kiss from me, you have to earn it.”

Cella joined the police department in 1962. He was always being urged by his father, a laborer with the city’s public works department, to take the Civil Service exams. Cella was also tired of being a cutter, operating a machine which cut cloth and plastics for a manufacturer of babies’ padded furniture. And, as he put it, “I like the outdoors.”

Any . . . inspector will tell you that without respect for the policeman, his job is possible. There are not enough police in the world to police a nation that does not wish be policed.

—David B. Wilson, the Boston Sunday Globe November 3, 1968

The men began policing vice activities after being scouted by lieutenants in the unit. Donahue was asked by a lieutenant who had watched him as a witness in several appeals cases and wanted someone who knew his way around the courts and the law. Cella was recruited temporarily for vice work after only three months as a foot patrolman. He was involved mostly in narcotics and drug work and was used occasionally as a decoy for bar girls. “With a day’s growth of beard, Vinnie looks like a North End thug,” says Donahue.

After four years, Cella feels a missionary zeal about his work on the vice squad. “We get these runaway kids, and we try to straighten them out. Sometimes they understand us, sometimes they don’t. When I was a kid, if there was a problem in the house, the iron fist was shown. There has to be discipline in the house, either the mother or the father. If the girls get vicious, you have to be strict with them. Show them the iron fist.”

THE work is frustrating.

Donahue and Cella go into the lobby of the Stevens Hotel, where the assistant night manager cashes their paychecks every Thursday. Donahue calls the assistant night manager “the cock-eyed pest" because one of his eyes is off-center and because he greets them the same way every Thursday: “You should have been here ten minutes ago.”

They drive over to check the Fitzgibbons Hotel, a flophouse on Tremont Street. On the way over, they see Amanda, a large, horsy Negro prostitute of about fifty. Donahue rolls down the window. “Better get off the streets, Amanda, you’re tHe best whore we got.” As they continue on, Donahue explains that Amanda is a “screamer,” and that when she is taken to court, she becomes hysterical. One judge has warned that any detective who brings Amanda into his courtroom will get a jail sentence himself.

Donahue and Cella pull up in front of the Fitzgibbons Hotel just as Beverly, an attractive Negro prostitute, hurries out.

“C’mere, Bev. What are you runnin’ for?” calls out Donahue. Beverly once worked as an IBM operator, but she is now a whore and a junkie. She is also the state’s prime witness in a murder trial, and well aware that Vice has been told to leave her alone.

“I’m just tryin’ to earn money to get out of town,” she says sulkily.

“What’s on?” says Donahue.

“Nothin’.”

“You still with Trotta or what?” Lou Trotta is a sergeant in Homicide who has designated Beverly untouchable for the vice unit. But Beverly knows Donahue knows what her status is and doesn’t answer.

“Is that your car?” Donahue points to a dirty old Thunderbirth Again no answer.

“All right, get out of here,” he says.

Beverly gets into the Thunderbird and drives off.

Donahue goes into the lobby of the Fitzgibbons in a foul mood. He goes over to the night desk clerk, an old man with a shriveled-up face who is reading a paperback. “Didn’t I tell you last week the Navy complained about sailors getting the clap here?” he says. “Do I have to draw you a picture?”

“It wasn’t me,” the old man says. “It must’ve been the day man.”

Donahue sits down at his office telephone to check out a number. Over his head, on the green washedout walls, is a wooden plaque which reads “God Bless Our Home.” Next to it is a “Certificate of Decency Award,” which reads: “Stamp out Smut: To the Vice Control Unit, This Establishment Has Been Approved by the Hyannis Civic Association as Upholding Standards of Decency.” The artifacts have been there long enough so that no one knows whether or not irony is intended.

The telephone number Donahue has on a scrap of paper was given to him by a sergeant who got it from a lieutenant. The information is that the girl’s name is Phyllis, that she charges $30 for a “house call,” and that she will invite you to her apartment if you tell her the Carter’s Milk man told you to call. Donahue is reasonably fast in repartee with girls on the street, but the telephone is not his medium. He is also uneasy because the number went through so many hands before it came to him. He dials.

“What do you want?” says an older woman’s voice sharply at the other end. Donahue is thrown off stride.

“My name’s Donahue, and I’m in—uh—Room 912 at the Martinsdale. The Carter’s Milk man told me to call.”

“The which?”

“The Carter’s Milk man.”

“I don’t need no milkman. I get my milk at the store.”

Donahue wonders, Is this a code? “Is this Phyllis?”

“No, it ain’t. You got the wrong number.” She hangs up.

“Someday I’ll get my diploma from the School for Making Lousy Pinches,” says Donahue, crumpling the paper.

Later that evening, Donahue and Cella made two more mistakes. They stopped a white man and a Negro girl on Columbus Avenue and asked them for identification. The woman turned out to be a quite respectable housewife, mother of three children, who was being relocated by Urban Renewal. She was looking for a new apartment with the help of the man, a representative of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. In spite of apologies on the part of Donahue and Cella, the man and woman telephoned a complaint into headquarters.

Cella went trailing after three white girls in a Volkswagen on Columbus Avenue, sure that they were prostitutes. They turned out to he social workers. A complaint was made to headquarters.

IN THE corner of the vice unit office sit two drunks on a bench. One is saying the Lord’s Prayer. The other one says, “I’m shivering. Why am I shivering?”

“You’ve got a package on,”says Donahue. “Just live off the fat of the land for a while.” He looks over at Alice emptying her handbag on a nearby table, at his request. Alice’s blond hair is filthy and wrapped in a bun. Her little girl’s face is heavily rouged. She weighs about 185 and could be anywhere between thirty and fifty. She wears a print dress under a black sweater, white fishnet stockings, and pumps. Alice may have been in the ball game years ago, but she is out of it now.

Somehow, the pathos and absurdity of what Donahue calls the endless race come back to focus on this woman, emptying a tacky little handbag in front of two drunks and two vice cops. The white bird dogs drive back to their unhappy marriages in suburbia, back to the respectability. The pimps, enjoying a peculiar immunity from arrest, will get other girls to work for them. Crackdowns on prostitution come and go, blowing hot and cold. But somehow it all gets back to Alice, emptying her purse in the police station.

Everybody has an explanation, a rationale, for the endless race. “It’s not that we’re against anyone having a good time,” says Donahue. “It’s that the prostitutes bring the mug boys, the addicts, the robberies, and the serious assaults. A guy can get his wallet grabbed, get his car stolen, or get beaten up. We shipped a guy to City Hospital in an ambulance with his throat cut ear to ear by a razor. These guys don’t know some of these girls carry five-inch razors in their hairdos, or in matchbooks. Some tricks get blackmailed. We had a girl who would pick up guys in bars, sleep with them, and take their wallets. The guy would get a call from her at the office a couple of months later and she’d say, ‘Remember me? I’m pregnant, and it’ll cost $400 to take care of it.’ ”

Cella’s rationale is more literal.

“Chapter 272, Section 53 of the General Laws of Massachusetts says that if there is proper evidence a girl is engaging in prostitution, she shall be convicted. subject to a fine of up to two hundred dollars and six months in the House of Correction, either or both. That’s the law on the books, and the policeman is charged with upholding it.”

Even the prostitutes themselves don’t have much to worry about. The standard sentence upon conviction is three months suspended and a year’s probation. The unwritten proviso is that site leave town for a year. Besides, as Cella puts it, “A girl can earn back in two hours what she pays in a fine.”

“I’m not going to cause any trouble,”Alice tells Donahue and Cella. “That’s my birth certificate— that’s my insurance policy. Don’t take that one, Officer, that’s my picture.”

“It’s Elvis Presley,” says Donahue, regarding the picture with surprise.

Checking her arms for tracks, Donahue looks at her right arm and says: “Those are cigarette burns.”

“They’re tattoos,” says Alice.

“Don’t tell me what they are. Who gave them to you?” he says sharply.

Cella looks up from the report he is writing at his desk. “Every time the police car came around, this bum would signal her from the corner,” he says.

“I’m staying with a man and his wife. The man is sleeping with his wife,” says Alice, biting her nails. Then: “I was threatened into doing this.”

“Who is he?” says Donahue. It is apparent he is angry now. “Who is this pimp? We’ll bring him in.”

Alice looks at Donahue in terror. “One’s name is Sid,” she says carefully. “I met them on the South side. I don’t recognize the other one. But I recognize Sid’s face.”

“What’s this pimp’s last name?” says Donahue.

“He steals cars, then he changes the plates,” says Alice, talking rapidly. “This is the first time I’ve been out on the street. They usually bring the tricks to me. I told you I’m not going to cause any trouble. It’s better down in South Carolina. They’re more decent down there. At least the colored guys don’t take you over.”

“Did he ever beat you up?” Donahue asks.

“Yes—”

“With his hands?”

“—because I won’t do what he wants. He carries a gun, a Luger, with him all the time. I’m deathly scared of him. What will I do when he finds out I’m not coming home?”

Donahue says: “Do you want to make a phone call?”

“I have no one to call,” Alice says. She begins to cry.