Roach motel

"Miss, I can't hear, I ca--" I say; I turn to the barking prisoners: "Would you guys shut the fuck up?" Finally I climb up on the chair, get a finger-hold on the wall, place a foot on the ledge, and perch my face up above the glass, where there are 3-inch-wide slits in the frame of the partition.

You want to make your case, this is the moment you need to make your case, and it's sad, you up against the wall like a broken Spider-Man, this is the only moment you'll have to say what really happened, what you think happened, before the judge looks you down -- but it's not working, there's no communication, the system is failing. Ms. Koslow leans forward herself, staring up at you, and red-faced starts to yell: "YOU'RE CHARGED WITH DISORDERLY CONDUCT --"

I tell her my side of the story (essentially guilty as charged: had a beer too many, no fists or bloodshed, but I baited some cops) and move into the corner and listen as the other prisoners come. Koslow will see 40 to 50 on a busy day. Aug. 22 would end up slow: Twenty-six arraignments by 5 p.m., nine for minor marijuana offenses -- a really slow day. On average, marijuana arrests are the court's No. 1 load, making up almost a quarter of all cases.

A wild-eyed guy named Camillo Negron shouts to Koslow, then takes me aside. Camillo claims he was driving through Red Hook in his souped-up Mazda when the cops popped their lights and sounded the siren. He says he committed no violation. "Cops see a Puerto Rican in a phat Mazda, they pull you over," he tells me. "Simple as that."

According to Camillo, the police told him he matched the description of a wanted criminal. They poked their flashlights into the car; they noticed Camillo had a roach of marijuana in the ashtray of the Mazda. Camillo, 34, was arrested on the spot and booked. He was never dropped into a lineup -- though this would have been standard procedure in a wanted case.

"I'll make you a bet Mr. Negron didn't even resemble the guy they were looking for," attorney Koslow later tells me. She sounds pissed. "I'll even make you a bet there was no 'guy' they were looking for.

"Let me tell you, for the record," she says. "Community policing in places like Red Hook consists of little more than rousting the residents on a day-in, day-out basis. How come they're not busting people with glasses of Chablis in the park after the Philharmonic? Open containers! Why stick with the 40s in the projects?"

In came Santiago, who had told us his story in the cell, twice, because I asked him to: It was a story that seemed so infernally unjust you wondered if he wasn't, at the very least, embellishing his account. And yet his tale is common in Red Hook. As Koslow put it: "The police would like me to believe that 100 percent of my clients are lying. I cannot believe that when so many of my clients are saying the same thing over and over."

Santiago, who is a janitor at a medical clinic, says he was picked up around 8 p.m. on Aug. 21. "I was waiting for a cab on the corner, with six others. Narcotics roll up, random -- I'm just waiting for my cab -- they roll up in two cars, a black van and a Ford Explorer, four-door, green, tinted windows. They jumped out, they start yelling at us. I stood there in shock.

"The first thing they said to me was 'Get against the car.' I got against the car. They asked me, 'Do you have any drugs on you?' I told them I had a half-ounce of weed in my pocket. I told them it was personal use, yo, I'm a smoker, I smoke marijuana."

I was skeptical. "There's no reason they stopped you? No probable cause?"

"No probable cause," he said. "I was standing on the corner and they just came up."

Koslow tells me this is routine, which should be news to no one. The NYPD's stop-and-frisk policies have long been a source of furious complaint in the ghetto. "There's a good chance the story he's telling you is exactly the way it played out. Mr. Lugo is a large Hispanic male. That he was stopped on a corner for doing nothing does not surprise me."

The officers cuffed Santiago, placed him in the back of the Explorer. "The driver was alright, he was cool," Santiago told me. "But the cop who cuffed me, he was in the passenger seat, this guy was so thirsty he was out to get whatever he could that night. He was calling to girls on the street, blowing kisses to little girls, calling them over to the car, 'Are you working?' The girls looked at him like he was stupid. 'She's a hooker,' he kept saying. 'She's definitely a hooker.'

"I was in the back of that car for two hours. They started asking me questions if I know of anybody with drugs or with guns, then they'll let me go. They telling me if I rat on somebody, gang shit, they'll let me walk out of the car scot-free. I told 'em I don't know nothing. I told 'em I got locked up in 1997, for attempted assault, I got wrote down outside the gangs, wrote down as 'neutral.' I was in prison for two and a half weeks, and then I copped out to five years probation. I been going to my probation, I work, I been doing everything the legit way."

This is true: I looked up Santiago Lugo's record. Attempted assault, '97, nothing on record since. "Most I been in for since is drinking beer on the street or smoking weed. This zero-tolerance shit they fuckin' enforcing.

"Listen to me, the narcotics who locked me up that night, these motherfuckers told me straight out, 'We gotta drive around for awhile. This is our overtime right now. We got two hours to kill. We don't want to bring you to the precinct yet.'"

They said that openly?

"They said this openly and proud."

When Santiago finally arrived at the precinct, he was strip-searched. He took off his laces and his belt and handed them to the officers, who surrounded him along the line of cells where the prisoners watched. Then he took off his shoes and stripped his pants, emptying the pockets to the floor. Coins clattered and his wallet thumped; the wallet had $180. The police checked the pants again, each pocket, as Santiago stood in his underwear; the cops then told him to drop his boxers to his ankles and squat. An officer peered up into his asshole and around his balls and told him to cough. Santiago described this for me in a quick, embarrassed voice.

In 1986, a federal appeals court declared it unconstitutional to strip-search misdemeanor suspects without probable cause. Did the police have probable cause with Santiago Lugo? Probable cause, Estajo Koslow tells me, is whatever the cops decide.

Next Page: Koslow turns to Santiago, offers to fight. "This case smells," she says

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