HIS BEAT: THE UNDERSIDE

13-Year-Olds With Guns. Hookers With Habits. Gang Talk In Graffiti. After
23 Years, He's Seen The Worst Hartford Has To Offer.

It didn't take Tony Battistone long to recognize the teenager sitting in
handcuffs on the curb of a Hartford street a few weeks ago. A year earlier,
the same kid, wide-eyed and panicked, had pulled a gun on him after a brief
chase. Battistone had nearly killed him.

It was the kid's eyes, still so childlike despite his street-smart
posturing, that made Battistone remember the run-in.

It had been a warm night in April, and Battistone and two other Hartford
cops were chasing a stolen car. The driver ditched the car in Frog Hollow
and a bunch of teenagers bailed out. When the cops caught up to the kid,
13-year-old Erick Albert, he swung around wildly, waving a gun at them.

Battistone was closest to Erick, just a few feet away, and he pointed his
own gun back. Drop it, he yelled, drop it, drop it now, dammit. For a few
tense seconds, Erick, his boyish face sweating even as the night grew cool,
held onto the gun, and Battistone got ready to pull the trigger.

And then the detective looked down and saw something that made him pause.

The kid was wearing slippers.

Jeez, he should still be in bed, Battistone thought in the time it takes to
squeeze a trigger. And looking up, Battistone could see the kid sizing up
the situation. If I shoot this cop, the kid seemed to be reasoning, I'll be
dead for sure.

Battistone could see Erick's grip on the gun loosening as if in slow
motion. To Battistone, the gun's release, and its descent to the sandy
pavement by the side of Putnam Street, took forever.

Now, here the kid was, back on the same street, one of several suspected
heroin dealers being rounded up by the cops, mixed up in the same life that
got him arrested and nearly killed. Battistone had to ask.

"If you'da been me, what would you have done?" the detective asked.

"Sheeee," Erick, now 15, answered, looking away with a sly smile. "I'd a shot."

When they squared off last year, Battistone charged Erick with reckless
endangerment. Erick went through the juvenile court system, where the
records of cases are confidential.

This go-round, after police found no drugs in the boy's possession, they
let him go. Battistone was hardly philosophical about the exchange.

"Hey, I'm sure I'll run into him again. It doesn't seem like he's learned
much," he said with a shrug. "I'm not sure it ever dawned on him how close
he came to dying. But if it did, it wasn't enough to change his ways."

After 23 years on the job, Battistone isn't one for reflection, which is a
definite advantage in his profession. As a cop in the vice and narcotics
division, Battistone, 45, is used to seeing the very worst that Hartford
has to offer.

Be Like Serpico

On any given night, Battistone may find himself posing as a john, trolling
for hookers ravaged by drugs and desperate for their next score.

The next, he may be up to his elbows in a fetid pile of trash in an
isolated alley where junkies go to inject their heroin, searching for a
stash of packaged drugs among used syringes and the sweat-stained cloths
used to tie around biceps before shooting up.

It isn't a pretty landscape, and it's one that often makes his fellow
detectives more than a little jaded. But he always knew it was the kind of
work he wanted to do.

It was watching "Serpico" for the first time that did it. The teenager
growing up in a Hartford suburb was instantly drawn to Al Pacino as an
undercover cop moving easily through the underbelly of New York City.

He takes pride in being able to see things in Hartford's worst
neighborhoods that remain invisible to others.

On patrol in the city's North End, Battistone stopped to examine some new
graffiti spray-painted on walls and driveways at Nelton Court, a
drug-plagued housing project. For him, the graffiti isn't a nuisance; it's
a source of information, written in the language of the street.

On this day, Battistone found the words "Real Deal" and "Big Noyd" written
on the asphalt. As one of the department's few experts remaining from the
gang wars of the 1990s, he interpreted them as a sign that drug traffic
there was controlled by a small group of dealers, with the nicknames of its
leaders spelled out on the ground.

"It's not like the old days around here, when 20 Love ran everything," he
said of the once-powerful North End gang that was broken up by cops and
prosecutors.

But Battistone sees signs of another powerful gang regaining its strength.
In the predominantly Hispanic southern half of the city, he spies more
graffiti depicting five-pointed crowns, the symbol of the Latin Kings.

"They've never really gone away, although they're much more underground
now," he said. "They still run a lot of the drug trade down there."

Overall, the influence of gangs in the city has diminished to the point
that Battistone is now the department's only full-time gang enforcement
officer. And when Battistone retires, which he plans to do in the next few
months, there will be few people to replace him, said Christopher Lyons, a
former partner of Battistone's who recently retired.

"He is an expert in undercover operations," said Lyons, who also was highly
regarded for his knowledge of the streets.

The Commuters

As long as he's worked in Hartford, Battistone said, the drugs have flowed
through the city's streets like a river.

It's gotten so bad, he said, that some dealers have made enough of a profit
to move to the suburbs, from which they commute to the city every day to
ply their trade, like insurance executives.

But there are times when the cops get lucky, especially if they're alert.
Such as the time, a few weeks ago, when Battistone spotted a teenager
holding a knife on another man in a drug deal that had turned into a
robbery at Park and Wadsworth streets. Battistone pulled his car up onto
the curb and, as he got out, the kid waved the knife at Battistone's
partner, Sgt. Franco Sanzo.

The detectives grabbed the kid by the arms and threw him against the car,
seizing the knife and searching for other contraband. The young man,
identified as 18-year-old Willie Barnes, was charged with breach of peace
and interfering with a police officer.

Battistone and Sanzo watched as the kid was placed into a cruiser and taken
away for booking. They got back into their car and kept looking for drug
dealers, unfazed by the kid with the knife.

When pressed, Battistone acknowledges there is one aspect of his job that
he's never been able to take lightly. As the married father of two
daughters, he said, he hates seeing the toll that drugs and violence take
on the city's children.

As he walked up a flight of stairs to inspect a popular heroin "shooting
gallery" on an apartment balcony at the corner of Broad and Jefferson
streets, Battistone saw a group of children spraying one another with a hose.

"These kids, what chance do they have?" he said. "They see the older kids
waving big stacks of cash from selling drugs, and a lot of that money puts
food on the table. What's gonna keep them in school?"

"Except no one tells them, you don't see a lot of drug dealers making it
past 30 without getting killed or thrown in jail."