Trap (9781476793177) Read Online Free PDF Page A

honest or dedicated crime fighter in Gotham than the former college football All-American. Karp could tell by the look on his face that this was not a social call.
    â€œWe got another one,” Fulton said as he walked across the wood-paneled office and placed a copy of the evening New York Post on Karp’s desk. “Seen this?”
    Screaming off the top of the front page in the paper’s typical tabloid style was the headline: Skinheads Rampage in Central Park! A triple-stacked, sub-headline followed beneath with: Elderly Jewish Couple Hospitalized. 7th Hate Crime This Winter. Cops Apparently Clueless.
    Karp felt the old competitive zeal that tended to well up inside of him when evil reared its ugly head in his jurisdiction. The investigation into the surge in hate crimes by young neo-Nazi skinheads and the apprehension of the perpetrators was the responsibility of the New York Police Department. But it would be his office that would prosecute them when they were caught, and he intended—if the evidence indicated—to demonstrate in court that these were not isolated incidents, but part of a larger, organized conspiracy.
    He’d asked Fulton to track the cases and keep him apprised. So far the thugs had set fire to a synagogue, badly burning a rabbi who tried to put the fire out; assaulted Jews; and several months earlier in November gone on a rampage in the predominantly Jewish Diamond District, shattering windows before moving on to other Jewish-owned businesses they’d identified in different parts of the city. They’d chosen the date carefully, as it fell on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, when in November 1938 paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians in Nazi Germany and Austria ransacked Jewish-owned stores and synagogues. Shards of glass from the smashed windows had littered the streets, giving rise to the name. As German authorities looked on, without attempting to stop it, hundreds of Jews died, thousands more were severely injured, and more than thirty thousand were arrested and sent to death camps, never to be heard from again.
    Seventy-plus years later, the neo-Nazis in New York had accomplished their mission, and most had faded back into the shadows from whence they came. There’d been a few arrests, but the suspects had sullenly refused to talk, and the evidence against them had mostly resulted in a few misdemeanor assault and destruction of private property charges.
    The New York version of Kristallnacht had struck a particularly troubling note with Karp. Several years earlier, his twin sons had come to him and their mother, Marlene Ciampi, and announced that they had decided to pursue going through with the bar mitzvah. As Marlene had been raised in a strict Roman-Catholic family, but hadn’t brought up the boys as such, and Karp was Jewish more by spiritual and moral adherence than obeisance to strict religious practices, the decision surprised them. Their daughter, Lucy, was a decidedly devout Catholic and, in fact, claimed to speak to and receive guidance from a martyred saint from the sixteenth century. But the twins had never shown any religious inclinations.
    Although initially Karp had wondered how long the quest would last, he’d been pleased that the boys had stuck to it even though the road to their bar mitzvah had been more challenging than most. He’d even agreed to teach classes dealing with Old Testament morality tales at the synagogue when asked by the rabbi, and enjoyed both the challenge of reaching out to young minds and the extra time with his sons. But of late Zak had been wavering on his commitment to go through with the ceremony, and Karp wondered if the neo-Nazi rampages and the media aftermath had anything to do with that.
    The New York Kristallnacht had another personal impact on Karp. His friends, Moishe and Goldie Sobelman, owned Il Buon Pane, a small bakery on the corner of Third Avenue and 29th Street,