The Force

Truth, justice and the American way. The American way is: truth and justice maybe say hello in the hallway, send each other a Christmas card, but that’s about the extent of their relationship.

Hell isn't having no choice. It's having to make a choice between horrific things.

The NRA assholes will tell you that “guns don’t kill people, people do.” Yeah, Malone thinks, people with guns.

In the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘I can resist everything but temptation.

the Times says there's a heroin epidemic, Malone thinks, which is only an epidemic of course because now white people are dying. Whites started to get opium-based pills from their physicians: oxycodone, vicodin... But, it was expensive and doctors were reluctant to prescribe too much for exactly the fear of addiction. So the white folks went to the open market and the pills became a street drug. It was all very nice and civilized until the Sinoloa cartel down in Mexico made a corporate decision that it could undersell the big American pharmaceutical companies by raising production of its heroin thereby reducing price. As an incentive, they also increased its potency. The addicted white Americans found that Mexican ... heroin was cheaper and stronger than the pills, and started shooting it into their veins and overdosing. Malone literally saw it happening. He and his team busted more bridge-and-tunnel junkies, suburban housewives and upper Eastside madonnas than they could count....

Life is trying to kill us,” she says. Life, Malone thinks, is trying to kill everyone. And it always succeeds. Sometimes before you die.

Step by motherfucking step. Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn’t true.

…he started out with his eyes firmly on the guiding star, his feet planted on the path, but that’s the thing about the life you walk—you start out pointed true North, but you vary one degree off, it doesn’t matter for maybe one year, five years, but as the years stack up you’re just walking farther and farther away from where you started out to go, you don’t even know you’re lost until you’re so far from your original destination you can’t even see it anymore

His old priests might have told him there's sins of commission not omission. It's not always the things you do but the things you don't do that will cost you your soul. Sometimes it's not the spoken lie but the unspoken truth that opens the door to betrayal.

Lady justice has a blindfold over her eyes, because she just can't bear to watch what happens

You call the wolf, you get the pack.

Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn’t true.

Let freedom ring / let the white dove sing / let the whole world know that today is a day of reckoning. As epigraph to Part III, quoting lyrics, Gretchen Peters, "Independence Day

The people, they don't know what it takes sometimes to keep them safe and it's better that they don't.

There are the gods of place and the gods of commerce, and if you have to bet who’s going to win out, put your money on money every time.

started with his eyes firmly on the guiding star, his feet planted on the path, but that’s the thing about the life you walk—you start out pointed true north, but you vary one degree off, it doesn’t matter for maybe one year, five years, but as the years stack up you’re just walking farther and farther away from where you started out to go, you don’t even know you’re lost until you’re so far from your original destination you can’t even see it anymore.

Do you know about Irish Alzheimer’s?” Malone asks. “No.” “You forget everything but the grudges,

If the world played fair, he’d play fair. But the cards are stacked against the prosecutors and police. Miranda, Mapp, all the other Supreme Court decisions, give the advantage to the skels.

Cops fall into two categories—grass eaters and meat eaters. The grass eaters are the small-timers—they take a cut from the car-towing companies, they get a free coffee, a sandwich. They take what comes, they’re not aggressive. The meat eaters are the predators, they go after what they want—the drug rips, the mob payoffs, the cash.

This look like college to you?” Malone asks. “You see coeds, Frisbees, man buns? You don’t take notes, you don’t write anything down. Only thing you ever write are your 5s. Notes you take on duty are discoverable. Some defense attorney shithead will deliberately misinterpret them and ram them up your ass on the stand.

New York City has the strictest gun laws in the country but that doesn’t make any difference because all the guns come in from the outside, up the “Iron Pipeline.

Guns and dope are the soup and sandwich of American crime.

So you got Black Lives Matter up your ass, every citizen a journalist with a cell-phone camera at the ready, and you go to work each day with the whole world thinking you’re a murdering racist. Okay,

Everyone thought the mob was done after RICO.... And they were. Then the Towers came down. Overnight, the feds shifted three-quarters of their personnel into anti-terrorism and the mob made a comeback. Shit, they even made a fortune overcharging for debris removal from Ground Zero.... 9/11 saved the mafia.

The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new management breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people. They believe the numbers say it all, and when the numbers don't say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.

You need the money, the cash flow, but it's more than that, admit it. You love the game. The thrill, the taking off the bad guys, even the danger, the idea that you might get caught.

We rule over gangs—Crips and Bloods and Trinitarios and Latin Lords. Dominicans Don’t Play, Broad Day Shooters, Gun Clappin’ Goonies, Goons on Deck (seems to be a theme), From Da Zoo, Money Stackin’ High, Mac Baller Brims. Folk Nation, Insane Gangster Crips, Addicted to Cash, Hot Boys, Get Money Boys.

At least, at last, tell yourself the truth. You know exactly how you got here. Step by motherfucking step. Our ends know our beginnings but the reverse isn’t true.

They shouldn’t look out the window when they hear shit,” Ron Minelli says. “But that was probably her whole life. She probably spent her whole day looking out the window.

Over my forty-year career as a defense attorney, I regularly came into contact with people who lied, cheated, and tried to bend the system so that they would come out on top. Most of them worked for the government. —OSCAR GOODMAN, BEING OSCAR