Grand Central Noir

Fat Lip’s Revenge – by Ron Fortier

SO, YOU WANT TO HEAR about my experiences working as a cop at the Grand Central Terminal? You’re putting together a documentary on the old girl and want to know if I know any really good stories. Brother, do I have stories. But, yeah, there is one that stands out above all the others. Unique, you know what I mean. A gem of a tale that I do love telling folks.

Okay, then, I’m Michael Muldoon and I’ve been a Transit Authority cop for going on eight years now. But this story I’m going to tell you started long ago, back some thirty or so years and is about a character named Rawley “Fat Lip” Crawford. He’s a black dude who was born and raised in Harlem, pretty much on the wrong side of tracks in more ways than one. His old man had been killed in Vietnam leaving Fat Lip’s mother to raise him and his two older sisters. I guess that was the problem as Mrs. Crawford did okay with the girls but bringing up a rambunctious boy on the streets of Harlem by herself was just too much for her. As much as she wanted to prevent it, Fat Lip was going to get himself into trouble no matter what she did.

Now he got the nickname “Fat Lip” because of all the street brawling he did early on, and it seemed like every other day he’d come home with his bottom lip swollen, cut and bleeding. After seeing him like this half a dozen times, the other kids on the block started calling him “Fat Lip” and it stuck.

By the time he was sixteen, he got into the fighting game and boxed for a few years as a light featherweight. I mean he was always a tall and lanky kid with very little meat on his bones. He never did finish high school and after dropping out he thought boxing could be his meal ticket to a brighter future. Of course, that was a pipe dream and his now famous bottom lip really took a pounding until it got so mangled, its shape remained pretty much twice the size of his upper lip.

Two years was pretty much all he could take, never stringing enough wins to make him appealing to any of the regular fight club managers in town. When he stopped being able to get bouts, his boxing career was over. It was soon after this that his one uncle, Max Crawford, took pity on him and gave him a job as a mechanic in his garage shop over in East Harlem. Lo and behold, it turns out Fat Lip had a way with car engines and everything Max taught the kid, he drank up like a sponge. He even let him move in to the small two-room apartment over the station. Fat Lip got to loving cars, both fixing them and driving them.

Now the latter is how he came to the attention of a two-bit crook Brooklyn crook named Charlie Atwater. Atwater was thirty at the time and a career criminal with an ever-growing rap sheet as long as your arm. He’d done a few years in stir mostly for armed robbery of liquor and Mom and Pop stores.

Again, this was all about thirty years ago, and most of the tale I got straight from Fat Lip. Up until that summer afternoon that Atwater and his pal, Butch Levins, walked into his uncle’s garage to find him, Fat Lip had never set eyes on the two. Atwater told the kid he had a proposition for him and they should meet later to discuss it. Fat Lip says that took place at a diner down the street that night after he got done working.

Basically what Atwater and Levins had planned was to rob a downtown jewelry story and were looking for a wheelman, someone to drive their getaway car. Someone who was good with cars and could get them out of Manhattan before the cops knew what hit them. They had asked around and been told Fat Lip Crawford was the man to see. Now Fat Lip was no saint, remember, but he was still cautious. Having two men, both complete strangers, come up and ask him to help them pull a heist wasn’t an everyday occurrence. At first he was hesitant to go along with their offer until Atwater said they would split the take three ways. All Fat Lip had to do was drive them to the target, stay in the car, and then get them the hell out of Dodge when the job was done and for that he’d get one third of the haul. Naturally Atwater had no problems exaggerating his claims that they’d most likely each end up with thousands of dollars each.

Again, keep in mind I’m talking the 1980s here. And for a guy who never had much all his life, what Atwater was saying had its desired affect. The temptation was too great for Fat Lip to pass up and in the end he signed on to be their wheelman.

Now keep in mind, most of the story I got from Fat Lip himself long after it all went down. On my own, out of natural curiosity as a cop, I did some digging through the precinct files and was able to piece together how it all went down. Atwater was a smart cookie with balls. Pulling a daylight heist in the middle of Manhattan would be tricky enough, but he had a rather unusual gimmick on his side: the weather. You see, after casing the jewelry store, he then began watching the long-range weather forecast on the evening news. His idea was to pull the job during a rainy day so that visibility would be poor for both witnesses and the police attempting to chase them down.

Finally, in mid-June a weather pattern settled in predicting to bring at least two days of heavy rains. Atwater called Fat Lip and told him the job was on. That night, after work, Fat Lip took a bus into the Bronx and boosted a Mustang, which he then parked in the back of his uncle’s garage covering it with an old canvas tarp so the old man wouldn’t see it.

The following day, under dark clouds and constant, heavy rainfall, he, Atwater, and Levins carried out the robbery. It went like clockwork with Atwater and Levins charging into the small jewelry store wearing Halloween masks and waving their guns in the air. In five minutes they had filled two black satchels with diamonds, pearls, and other assorted gems that would later be valued at eighty thousand dollars.

Fat Lip sat in the Mustang, revving its engine, and when his partners exited the shop and jumped aboard, he let go the clutch and floored the muscle car making a quick get-away long before any patrol car could arrive on scene. He kept the pedal to the floor and wove them through the tight city streets until they were roaring over the Brooklyn Bridge. Two hours later they were deep into the woods of New Jersey. Earlier in the day they had left Levin’s Chevy Impala in an old abandoned barn. They abandoned the hot Mustang, switched cars, and then drove back into the city as clean as angels.

They dropped Fat Lip off at his uncle’s place. Atwater had told the naïve driver that it would take him a few weeks to find a fence and convert the stolen jewels into cash. Then they would all get together and split their ill-gotten gains. Poor Fat Lip had bought into it hook, line, and sinker. He had no clue what was coming his way.

Three days later the cops came barging into the garage with a warrant to search the place and Fat Lip’s apartment. Uncle Max was ready to blow a gasket and kept yelling at the cops that he’d call a lawyer and sue them. Meanwhile, the two detectives and three blues searched the place. It was later revealed in court that they had received an anonymous phone call saying Fat Lip Crawford was one of the men behind the downtown jewelry heist. Try to imagine Fat Lip’s shock when, while tossing his belongings, one of the bulls finds a small silk bag hidden beneath some shirts in his bedroom dresser. In the bag were two diamond broaches; part of the haul from the robbery.

Fat Lip was arrested and taken in for booking and arraignment. Two days later a Grand Jury indicted him for grand theft and he was held over for trial. His bail had been set at ten thousand dollars, a sum far beyond his means to produce.

Now I know what you’re thinking; that Charlie Atwater set him up to take the fall. Of course he did, and it didn’t take Fat Lip long to figure it out for himself. At the advice of the public defender appointed for him by the court, he spilled the beans and told the cops everything. The trouble was, by then both Atwater and Levins had vamoosed for parts unknown, leaving the kid to take the fall all by his lonesome.

Atwater had been savvy enough to know if he threw the authorities a bone, it would appease them just enough so as to have no real desire to man a lengthy, expensive manhunt for he and Levins. Oh sure, their faces were sent out via the FBI channels and would end up on the Most Wanted List. But hey, with close to eighty grand between the two of them, creating new identities wherever they ended up wouldn’t be hard at all.

Meanwhile, poor Fat Lip went to trial and was sentenced to twenty-five years at Sing Sing. His mother was devastated and as he was led off in cuffs to begin his new life behind prison walls, she stood weeping her eyes out, supported by his two sisters.

Over the next ten years, she and the girls would come to visit him whenever it was possible for them to make the trip. But then his sisters both got married and stopped coming. During his tenth year of incarceration his mother came down with cancer and died within six months of being diagnosed. He was given special leave to attend the funeral, under guard of course.

Ironically, it took place on a cold and rainy day.

Okay, I know, I’m getting way off track here what with Fat Lip’s history and all and this is supposed to be story about the Grand Central. Just let me grab another beer, my throat’s kind of dry, and we’ll get to that part.

Better, thanks. Like I said earlier, I’ve been working here at Grand Central Terminal for going on eight years now and I love the place. I mean, it’s almost impossible not to from the first time you walk into it from 42nd Street and see the Main Concourse with its high ceiling all painted up like the stars in heaven. Did you know those stars are on there backwards? Yup. The two guys who did it somehow got their prints turned around and didn’t realize it till the job was done. When the owners, the Vanderbilt family, found out, they told everyone that the ceiling was done to show how God looked down on the sky from his lofty perspective. Yeah, it’s a cool story. Honestly, there are hundreds of them about the station.

Here are some quick facts for you. It was opened in 1871 having been constructed by the New York Central Railway and is the largest train station in the world by the number of platforms. There are two levels below street level with 41 tracks on the upper one and 26 on the lower level. The entire terminal covers an area of 48 acres. Right smack dab in the middle of Manhattan. Statistics say more than 21,600,000 people come through the terminal every year.

Which is what brings us back to Fat Lip Crawford and how he ended up here. Back in those days, even with his record of good behavior, the system was much tougher than it is today and the guy ended up serving his full twenty-year sentence.

When he got out, things had changed and not for the better; his uncle had sold the garage and retired to Florida and most of his old Harlem friends were gone. He hardly recognized the neighborhood any longer. It was his sister, Flora, who took pity on him and let him stay in a spare bedroom until he could get himself a job.

Well, as it turned out, her husband, one Leo Runard, had a cousin named Booker Jackson who worked the shoe shine concession here at the terminal. Jackson was in his late sixties then and been doing a lot of talking about taking on an assistant and maybe even looking at quitting in the near future. One night, after dinner, Leo suggested to Fat Lip that he go down and meet the old fellow and see about getting himself a job.

At first Fat Lip wasn’t all that keen on the idea. You see, what he hadn’t told Flora or Leo was that ever since he’d gone up the river, he’d spent every day for twenty-five years dreaming of hunting down the men who had betrayed him, Atwater and Levins, and getting some payback. Though he was looking for a job, it wasn’t his main focus now that he was a civilian again. Still, to make his sister happy, he went down to the terminal to meet Jackson and talk with him.

Now Jackson was a great character known to most of the people who worked at Grand Central. A tall, white-haired black man, he had a belly laugh you could hear a mile away and he truly liked his job getting to meet people from all walks of life and help them look their best with a fancy, spit-polish shine. He liked to think he was helping these gents have a better day what with his friendly banter and attitude, and who is to say he didn’t do just that.

By then, I’d been working there for just under two years and considered Booker Jackson a good friend. In fact, I must have been on duty the day Fat Lip first showed up and introduced himself to the King of Shines, though I don’t recall that. From what I do remember, Fat Lip had been working at the stand nearly a week before me and my partner, Ed Bishop, met him for the first time.

He was tall, on the thin side with a forty-six-year-old man’s gray hair, cut short and a kind face that looked guarded. Old Man Jackson was all enthusiastic about introducing us to his new employee and how Fat Lip was going make his days a whole lot easier. I can remember all of us politely shaking hands and making nonsense small talk. Fat Lip’s eyes had widened slightly upon first seeing us and I knew immediately it had been our uniforms that triggered that reaction. I pegged him for an ex-con on the spot.

Thing is in the coming days and weeks, Fat Lip and I would gradually become friends just as I had done with Jackson. Guess the old man had told him I was a square shooter and bit by bit, Fat Lip loosened up. He took to Grand Central like a duck to water.

It was during that first year he worked with Old Jackson that, bit by bit, I learned Fat Lip’s story. At first he was hesitant to talk about it, but when he realized neither Ed or I were going to give him a hard time for being an ex-con, he was okay with talking about his all too brief life of crime and subsequent incarceration. I should point out, whenever Fat Lip ever mentioned Sing Sing, he’d add that come hell or high water he was never going back. Ever. And I believed him.

One day, on entering the Main Concourse, I spotted Fat Lip over by the coffee kiosk and went over to say hi. Ed had grabbed a newspaper off the rack near the shoe shine platform and jumped into the empty chair to get a shine on his black leather shoes. It’s always good idea to look sharp for the public, and the brass.

Anyway, Fat Lip was about to hand over a buck to the girl behind the counter for two cups of coffee when I stepped in and gave her a five spot to cover his order and then placed another for me and Ed. Fat Lip smiled and thanked me and we started jawing while the girl went about getting two more paper cups filled with java.

As we talked I couldn’t help but notice how Fat Lip’s brown eyes always seemed to stray as looking past me at the throng of people moving all around us. It was something I’d seen him do lots of time, much like we’re trained to do in the police academy. So I called him on it, asking if he was looking for anyone in particular.

Of course, I should not have been surprised when he said he was looking for Charlie Atwater and Butch Levins. He went on to explain he’d heard a long time ago that eventually every single New Yorker, all eight million of them, eventually went through Grand Central some time in their lives. He was convinced that some day both Atwater and Levins would return to the city and come through the terminal. And when they did, he would spot them and turn them in. Finally getting his revenge for what they had done.

Well, it was by far one of the most insane things I’d ever heard but I didn’t say it in those terms. Rather I kidded him that it was a pipe dream and both those dudes were probably living in Brazil these days. It would be the epitome of stupidity for either to ever come back to the city where they were still wanted. But Fat Lip wouldn’t have any of that. I could tell he was obsessed with the idea and no argument would ever convince him that he was wasting his time. After all, what harm was there in his thinking it could happen some day. I guess, at some point in all of our lives, we find something to obsess about, don’t we?

Anyway, that was his story and I quit bugging him about it.

A couple of days later I put in a call to a friend of mine on the NYPD, told him about Fat Lip and asked him to keep an unofficial ear out for anything concerning those two fugitives. Who knew, maybe someday something might turn up?

About a year later, Jackson, knowing that he wasn’t getting any younger, decided to call it quits. He had a young sister who lived in South Carolina somewhere and she had invited him to come down and live his retirement years with her and her family. Fat Lip was naturally worried when Booker first told him. Then the old guy told him he was leaving him the business lock, stock, and barrel. And he’d already paid the concession fees for the next two years; his parting gift to Fat Lip. I hear Fat Lip started crying when he heard this. It had been a long, long time since anyone, other than his family, had done anything so kind to him.

Well, if you didn’t know already, those of us who work in Grand Central think of each other as a family and on Old Man Jackson’s last day, all the gang that worked the Main Concourse threw him a small going away shindig right there on the floor. Maude, who was the ticket clerk under the giant clock, had baked a huge cake, and the folks at the coffee stand provided free java to go along with it.

It really was a great little party.

The very next day, my detective pal at the precinct called me saying he’d found out some information on both the late Charlie Atwater and Butch Levins. And yes, I did say late. Both were by then six feet under. According to my friend, Levins had died in a bank robbery shootout in Chicago four years earlier. Whereas Atwater was the real surprise. It seemed he’d ended up in Southern California owning a Pawn Shop, married and raised a family all under the bogus name of Sam Durant.

About six months ago, Atwater got sick with stomach cancer and began radiation treatments at a local hospital. One of the hospital’s security staff was a former L.A. county sheriff who thought Atwater looked familiar and somehow managed to get a cup with his fingerprints on it and passed it along to the local FBI boys. Sure enough, they tagged this Durant as the fugitive, Charles Atwater. So the FBI goes to get a warrant for his arrest, but the D.A., upon hearing of Atwater’s condition, opts to have him arrested but not taken into custody. A judge okayed some kind of house arrest seeing the guy wasn’t long for this world. And sure enough he died three months after being diagnosed.

So after hearing all this, I’m all set to see Fat Lip the next day and tell him what I just learned and that he can put his silly notion of finding these bums to rest once and for all. Thing is, at breakfast the next morning, my wife, Joan, convinced me not to do that. Yeah, I know, it didn’t make any sense to me either. At first. But she thought Fat Lip had made this obsession of his some kind of anchor that had kept him going through twenty-five hard years behind bars. And now, even though he’d found himself a great new life, it was still a crucial element of that life. A purpose for him to get up every day and keep going.

Yeah, she was right. So the next day, I went in to see how Fat Lip was doing on his first day without Old Man Jackson and he was doing just fine. He had a big smile on his face as he shined some pot-bellied business guy’s shoes. There he was rapping away without a care in the world. I just didn’t want to spoil that and never told him what I’d learned about Atwater and Levins.

End of story, right? Ha. Not by a long shot, my friends, for here’s where it really gets good.

So Fat Lip continues working the shoe shine station, and remember the ticket clerk I mentioned just now, Maude. Well, Maude was a divorcee with two teen-age girls and she and Fat Lip had hit it off. After Booker Jackson left, Maude started inviting Fat Lip over to her place for dinner at least once a week and before you knew it, the two of them were an item. Ed and I got a pool going as to when Fat Lip would pop the question.

It was getting on wintertime and as ever Mother Nature began dumping on the city with both frigid temps and lots of snow. Fat Lip would come to work in a heavy winter jacket, scarf and knit cap complaining how old Jackson must be loving the warmth of Down South.

Life was going good for him until the day Pollock’s Jewelry in Greenwich got hit. The thieves broke in during the night and got away with an estimated ten million dollars in uncut diamonds. Believe me, it made all the news never mind the top of our agenda roster at control. NYPD was up in arms, sending out dispatches by the dozen and their bulls were out canvassing every known fence and snitch they could collar in hopes of getting some kind of lead to the heist.

Thing is the day after the story broke on TV and all the papers, Fat Lip was as excited as a bull in the cow pasture. He shoved a copy of the Journal in my face the second he saw me that day and started in on how this was just the kind of job Charlie Atwater and Butch Levins would have pulled. He just kept going on and on about how he knew, deep in his gut, it was them. They were back and they had done it for sure.

God, I felt really bad for the guy. I was more than ever tempted to spill the beans and tell him what I knew, you know, about both of them being deceased and all, but I didn’t. I don’t know, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe if I had what happened next might have turned out altogether a different way.

It was three days after the robbery and Fat Lip had calmed down some. It was the height of the morning commute hours and a heavy blanket of snow was coming down on the city. People passing through the terminal were bundled up and their wet boots and galoshes left a trail of wet dirt and mud everywhere.

Ed and I had just grabbed our coffee from the little shop and were plowing our way through that wall of commuters when we heard a shout ring out. I tried to see over the heads of those around us and heard it a second time. It was Fat Lip way over on the other side of the concourse and he was pushing his way through people screaming at the top of his lungs. What he was yelling was a name – Charlie Atwater!

A cold chill went up my spine. What the hell was going on? I shoved my coffee cup in Ed’s hands and started trying to move faster toward where I’d last seen Fat Lip. Ever swim against the tide? That’s what pushing through a thousand New Yorkers is like during morning rush hours.

I caught a glimpse of Fat Lip and that sour feeling in my stomach got worse. He was holding up his wooden bristle shoe shine brush and I watched in total disbelief as he zeroed in on this young fellow in an expensive business topcoat and attacked him. Fat Lip just came up behind the poor guy and just like that whacked him along the side of the head with his brush. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

The guy stumbled to one knee and Fat Lip went at him again. Now people were scattering away from what they thought was a madman going wild. I yelled for Fat Lip to stop, but there was no way he could hear me. His victim had managed to get to his feet somehow and put up an attaché case to defend himself from Fat Lip’s blows. The left side of the guys face was covered with boot polish and deep scratches.

Fat Lip kept hammering away with his brush and managed to knock the briefcase out of the guy’s hands. It hit the floor hard and the lock broke, the case springing open and its contents spilling out papers and small black cloth pouches.

And just like that the young man rips open his coat and pulls out a pistol and shoots Fat Lip at point blank range.

The shot echoed through the main concourse like a cannon had gone off and if you think there was pandemonium before, now it was a damn stampede as several women screamed, some folks dove to the floor accidentally tripping others and it was bloody chaos.

Me, I’d pulled my piece immediately and flipped off the safety the second it was in my hand.

The crowd had dispersed leaving a wide-open space around the shooter and Fat Lip now lying in a pool of his own blood.

I yelled at the guy to drop his gun. He turned to look at me and without a moment’s hesitation brought his piece up and fired. Dear sweet Jesus, all these years on the force and I’d never once felt so damn scared. It’s a miracle I didn’t piss myself. But I didn’t plan on dying that day either and I fired back. Probably not the best thing to do considering how we were all surrounded by thousands of innocent citizens.

Still, by some miracle I nailed the asshole in the leg and he went down hard. I rushed up to him and ordered him to let go his gun. He was in pain and obeyed me, clutching at his bleeding leg.

Then Ed was there, gun out and yelling for back up and an ambulance in his belt radio.

I started for Fat Lip when a little balding dude came rushing out of the crowed carrying a doctor’s bag. Said he was a doc and dropped to his knees beside Fat Lip to examine his wound. Half a second later a pretty blonde in a nurse outfit under her coat appears and is helping the doc. He directs her to the guy I shot with orders to start a tourniquet fast.

You know, it’s what makes me love this city, those two coming out of nowhere to help out like they did.

Me, I went over and using a handkerchief, picked up the automatic the shooter had dropped. As I was doing so, I looked over to the contents that had spilled out of his attaché case. There on the wet, dirty tiles, scattered everywhere, were small, clear, uncut diamonds.

Yeah, yeah. I know you’re all getting ahead of me here. Hang in there, the end will blow you away.

The ambulances did show up from the NYU Medical Center on 33rd and FDR Drive. So did a dozen or so coppers and a couple of detectives. By the afternoon, both Fat Lip and his shooter were taken care of and luckily doing well. Fat Lip had been shot through the shoulder under his collarbone and nothing vital was hit.

Meanwhile the guy he’d attacked had been identified and the jewels in his case were the stolen Pollock diamonds.

So who was the guy? The computer files identified him as one Eddie Durant of San Diego, California. Name sound familiar? You got it: his father had been Charlie Atwater, alias Sam Durant who had died of stomach cancer the year before. You see, poor Eddie had the bad luck of having grown up to look exactly like his dad had when he was that age. The age Fat Lip had last looked upon Charlie Atwater. Fat Lip had never seen an old Atwater, so when he’d seen the kid moving through the terminal that morning, his memories of Charlie did the rest. He thought he was seeing Charlie and went after him accordingly.

Of course, by the time I got off work and made it to the hospital to see Fat Lip, Maude and her girls were already there. I told them about the shooter being Charlie’s boy and Fat Lip just looked at me dumbfounded. He had every right to be.

But I saved the best for last. You see, in cases like these dealing with stolen rocks, the insurance outfits offer up a standard ten percent reward fee for anyone who helps the cops get their merchandise back. For Fat Lip that meant he would be getting a check for over a hundred thousand dollars.

No freakin’ lie.

A few months later, Fat Lip bought an old garage down in Harlem, married Maude, and they moved into together at her place. Fat Lip used the money to pay for her girls’ college tuition and then put some of toward a halfway house for ex-cons. He even went as far as to hire several of them to work in his garage. It’s a going concern and he’s really a happy man these days.

Of course he found someone else to take over the shoeshine station and things at the terminal are like always. But I have to tell you, there’s not a day I don’t walk past that station I don’t think of Fat Lip and what went down. Guess you could say, in some kind of roundabout way, he did get his revenge after all.