Navy bodies found in ship after crash
E COMES out of Staten Island, Don Winslow does, as do so many of the cops do in his new novel, “The Force,” which arrives in bookstores Tuesday and will immediately take its place with the great police novels, about New York City or any city. It is about a group of cowboy detectives out of Manhattan North, led by a character named Denny Malone who is good and bad and complicated and troubling and ultimately unforgettable, doing what he thinks he needs to do to uphold the law while holding himself above it for as long as he can.
“I loved ‘The French Connection’ when I was a kid,” Winslow says. “I loved ‘Prince of the City’ and ‘Serpico.’ I always had it in the back of my mind to write a cop book set in the city. And even when I was writing ‘The Cartel,’ I knew it was finally time.”
“The Cartel” was the second of two big, important books — the first was “The Power of the Dog” — that were like textbooks about the drug trade and drug wars in Mexico, built around the blood feud between a DEA agent named Art Keller and an El Chapolike drug lord named Adan Barrera. But as complicated a character as Keller was, and the rationalizations he constructed for himself about doing bad things for what he sees as the greater good, Keller has nothing on Denny Malone and the Manhattan Special Task Force in Winslow’s book.
“This is a story about cops who justify corruption because it helps them take bad guys off the streets,” Winslow says. “In the process they create their own definition of what it means to protect and serve.”
Winslow’s research for “The Force” did not just involve talking to scores of cops, but gaining their trust, in the process of creating the character of Denny Malone, someone who truly does come to the job of being a New York City cop with the best of intentions, but slowly begins to sell his soul a piece at a time, even as he’s becoming a celebrity on uptown streets and in the projects.
“Some of them really do act like rock stars,” Winslow says. “I met these guys. There is a charisma and power to them that’s palpable when they walk into a room. Some were apologetic about the things they did to get the job done. But some weren’t. And the one thing I came away with is the knowledge of how things get done.”
This is a work of fiction, of course, written by a man who admires cops and the work they do as a way of keeping the streets of the city safe, even the ones working the margins. Because of the research he did and the stories he heard and the story he tells in “The Force” if there is another corruption scandal possible in New York, like ones out of the stories from the past, he will not be remotely surprised. I ask what he thinks Frank Serpico
“We have one in New York would think of Denny Malone. about every 20 years, don’t we?” Winslow laughs and says, “I Winslow says. “I believe it’s happening don’t think he’d like him very again. I believe you can much at all.” read the warning signs in the Daily Stephen King calls the book News, about favors and gifts. “The Godfather” with cops. It is It’s almost a cyclical sort of thing. that; and about stop-and-frisk But having said that, I don’t feel and the ongoing war between the as if I’ve written a book that’s derogatory politicians who tell cops to keep to the NYPD. I’m a huge the streets of the city safe and admirer of the NYPD. But we then act shocked when they find have to face reality. These things out about the methods some of have happened and will happen them use to do that. It is about again.” drugs and race and religious race
He pauses and says, “Hey, Teddy hustlers, about uptown New Roosevelt began his career as York City from the Dublin House police commissioner because of bar to the St. Nicholas Houses in corruption.” the middle of Harlem to Riverside Park. Ultimately it is about Denny Malone, an ultimately dishonest cop who, as Winslow writes, honestly and righteously wants to be a good cop, but crosses one line and then another until finally there is no way back for him and the other members of what they call “Da Force.”
“It’s like the broken window theory, just for cops,” one NYPD veteran was saying to me the other day about cops like Denny Malone. “Little things really do lead to big things.”
“It’s not my job to be objective,” says Winslow, one of the best writers in America for a long time. “My job is to let people see the world through my narrator’s eyes. I just want to bring people into this world.”
He does this, splendidly, in a book dedicated to all the cops in America who lost their lives in the line of duty from the time he began writing a complicated book about a complicated job, in the most complicated city on earth.
“The people, they don’t know what it takes sometimes to keep them safe and it’s better that they don’t,” Don Winslow writes. “They may think they want to know, they may say they want to know, but they don’t.”
Until this book. THE BODIES of several Navy sailors — missing after a collision between a U.S. destroyer and a massive cargo ship near Japan — were found inside the ship, officials said.
Search and rescue crews discovered the remains inside the Fitzgerald’s flooded berthing compartment early Sunday.
It was not immediately clear if the bodies of all seven missing sailors were discovered.
A Navy statement said “a number of” remains were found. But the Wall Street Journal reported that all seven bodies were located.
The grim news came hours after the damaged destroyer limped into its home port.
The Navy ship collided in the dead of night with a container ship four times its size off the coast of Japan early Saturday.
Three crew members, including the ship’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Bryce Benson, were airlifted from the vessel by Japanese military helicopters during the ship’s slow 16-hour trip back to Yokosuka Naval Base south of Tokyo.
The three sailors awake, the Navy said.
The Philippine-flagged ACX Crystal was anchored at Tokyo’s Oi wharf, where officials were questioning the crew about the cause of the crash. The collision occurred 56 nautical miles southwest of Yokosuka, home to the 7th Fleet. were all