On January 22nd, 2025 journalist/essayist/ screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper died suddenly at the age of 66. He was a friend as well as a fellow Baltimore-dwelling expat who hailed from Harlem. I ran into him often on the street, and we would stop to chat, sometimes for a couple of hours. Neither of us knew how to drive and Barry once joked that our constant strolling through the city was the reason we kept running into one another. “We’re New Yorkers, we’re used to walking,” he said.
As a fan of Barry’s work in the 1980s, his streetwise record reviews and essays published in The Village Voice and Spin were my introduction to his writing. He was one of the first “hip-hop scribes,” slaying with textual style that swaggered like a B-boy in prep school and was as inspired by the broken glass everywhere sidewalks as by the non-fiction prose of Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin and Truman Capote, especially In Cold Blood. Barry described the latter writer as, “My hero.”
Those stories, especially his longread classics on the early years of crack in Harlem, wild drug cowboy Larry Davis, and christening producer Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing musical era, served as inspiration for the next generation of post-New Journalism writers that included Da Ghetto Communicator, Karen Good, Sacha Jenkins and myself. However, beginning in 1990, it was Barry’s scripts for the hood classics New Jack City (1991), Above the Rim and Sugar Hill (both released in 1994) that people watched repeatedly and quoted flawlessly. We can see the inspiration of New Jack City in the personas (and hear it in the music) of Puffy, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, all dudes who went from the streets to suites with the swiftness of the film’s celebrated crack kingpin Nino Brown.
Fellow writer Nelson George, who Cooper helped years ago to get in at the Village Voice, first put me in contact with Barry in 1998 when I was helping the Larry Flynt-owned Black style magazine Code to scout for soulful contributors. When Barry told me he lived in Baltimore, the same city where my mom relocated in 1978, I knew it was time to visit.
Thirteen years after his last produced feature, I conducted an interview with Barry for the hip-hop issue of Stop Smiling magazine. Barry shared many stories over coffee at Xanzo Café on Charles Street. The tales ranged from schooling himself at the Schomburg Library, where he read Richard Wright and Countee Cullen, to smoking dust with his crew after watching a basketball game at the Rucker to meeting with homeboys outside Esplanade Gardens, the co-op building where he grew up from the age of 10, to discuss the latest films they’d seen.
“We met at the base of the Martin Luther King statue and that would be like our Algonquin Round table where we talked,” he recalled. “We would sit on the bench at 13, 14, 15 years old and be critically breaking down movies like Roger Ebert. The hustlers, the dope kids, the scramblers and the nerds all went there to discuss movies. Even the dope dealers were intellectuals.”
Located on 147th Street and 8th Avenue, Esplanade was two blocks away from the Roosevelt Theater. Once a jewel of the community, by the late 1960s it had become a grindhouse best known for showing horror, Blaxploitation and kung-fu flicks. According to Barry, that massive movie house also had a reputation for rodents. “We called it the Rat Palace,” he laughed. It was at the Roosevelt where he saw Shaft, Superfly (“I went to see that six times”) and Across 110th Street, which opened on December 19th, 1972.
Fifty-three years later I could imagine Barry sitting in the center of the theater, leaning forward slightly and lost in the graphically vicious drama projected on screen. The film was adapted from the 1970 novel Across 110th (Street was added to the movie title), by Wally Ferris, which was written as a fluke by a career camera man whose main gig was working for a local news channel. In the counterculture newspaper The Staff, sometimes crime writer Harlan Ellison praised the book. “I read Wally Ferris’s novel, Across 110th,” he wrote. “It was a tough and uncompromising naturalistic novel of underworld life in Harlem, not as good as Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson-Grave Digger Jones books, but a direct lineal descendant of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson in terms of honesty and dealing with the pragmatic realities of omnipresent violence. It was an upfront piece of street fiction, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.”
Decades later, writer/editor Andrew Nette gave the book and author a much-needed spotlight in Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 (2019). “The fact that Across 110th is such an interesting book and a vivid depiction of New York at the time it was written is in no small part due to its author, Wally Ferris,” Nette wrote in his excellent essay “City on the Brink: Wally Ferris’s Across 110th.” “Ferris was a union cameraman and stage manager for WNEW-TV in New York for almost forty years. He worked on the 10 o’clock News and most of their other regular programming. He was also a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn by parents descended from immigrants who had left Ireland during the Great Famine. He grew up during the Depression, brought up by his mother after his father, a policeman, had died at an early age.”
While today I too am a fan of Ferris’s brutal book, it was the film that I was aware of first, having seen it opening weekend at the Loew’s Victoria on 125th Street. The day before its release there was a gala premiere at the theater that included stars Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto. Outside the theater they were greeted by a cheering crowd of more than 200 surprised to see that type of event in Harlem.
Preparing the audience of more than 2,000 for the mucho spilled blood they were about to see on screen, Quinn, according to the New York Times, explained, “The excessive violence of the film is intentional, because desperation creates violence, and until we end desperation of my people and your people, we can’t end violence.”
Quinn’s crazed character Captain Mattelli (Sullivan in the book) brings a lot of violence and anger to every scene’s he’s in; a dirty cop who has no problem smashing Black suspects in the face while calling them the N word, Mattelli was a cop driven crazy by the streets he was supposed to be protecting and Quinn played dude with intensity. The year before I’d seen The French Connection at the same theater and Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman), was Officer Friendly compared to Mattelli.
Of course, it didn’t help his disposition when he was partnered with big, black Lieutenant William Pope, who towers over him in both height and intellect. Played with equal bravado by Yaphet Kotto, his character was a recent college grad that represented “a new kind of policeman.” But, as Mattelli tried to teach him, the job would soon change him. In one scene he offered Pope a shot of whisky. “I don’t drink,” Pope replied. Mattelli chuckled. “You will.”
While Ferris gave the characters more depth than their screen versions, especially Mattelli (who experienced a double whammy tragedy that explained his asshole-ness), director Barry Shear and screenwriter Luther Davis were faithful to the novel. Shear was primarily known as a television director, but his bugged-out debut feature Wild in the Streets (1969) is another favorite. Though Across 110th Street has been labeled Blaxploitation, it has also been embraced by the neo-noir crews and the followers of Quentin Tarantino, who snatched the dope Bobby Womack theme song for his third feature Jackie Brown.
Across a 110th Street opened with a 1968 black Cadillac cruising up the West Side Highway to the 110th Street exit, where it turned off. The Caddie made its way to 7th Avenue, turned right on 125th Street and kept moving until reaching the destination. The entire time the ride was in motion, the theme song blared loud and proud in true Blaxploitation style. Following the aural blueprint laid down by Shaft the year before, the song was soulfully funky.
“Isaac Hayes (Shaft) and Curtis Mayfield (Superfly) had done their things, and I told United Artists they could make me just as big, and they already had a film company too,” Womack told Phonograph Record in 1974. “So they got me the score for this film. Actually (composer/ trombonist) J.J. Johnson was already involved, but it was a chance at least to write some songs even if I wasn’t running the show.”
Womack told Steven Rosen of Music World in 1973, “I went back to LA and watched the picture and met the cast, got with J.J. (Johnson co-wrote the theme and scored the instrumental tracks) who gave me a lot of pointers on timing and there it was.” Two weeks later the music was turned in. Womack’s only criticism, however, was about the way in which the film coordinators handled the music after it was completed. “Like they had a guy’s head being put under the (iron) presses and they were playing something like ‘I Don’t Care How You Do It.’ I wouldn’t have no funky music like that when they were killing a guy.”
When the men got out of the ride in front of a shabby tenement, the audience recognized them as pale faced interlopers on a mission. They were Italian mob men coming uptown to collect $300,000 from the illegal numbers banks operated by Doc Johnson (Richard Ward). Inside the apartment, the black and white gangsters were doing their money counting and exchange when there was a knock.
Looking through the peephole, the door dude saw two black cops, but they were really just disguised as cops with a plan to rip off all the loot. The leader was Jim Harris, played by underrated actor Paul Benjamin. A building superintendent who grew-up hard, Harris had been to prison and was looking to finance his future with other folk’s funds. His partner in crime included fellow heist man Joe Logart (Ed Bernard), who froze when the bullets started flying and bodies began dropping.
In the book, Harris and Logart served in Vietnam together, but that connection was never mentioned in the movie. Both men were serious guys, but the same couldn’t be said for goofy getaway driver Henry J. Jackson. Portrayed with flare by Antonio Fargas, whose over-the-top flamboyance served as grim comic relief, he’s the weakest link.
In the book Jackson called it “the biggest bang-bang heist that happened around here in twenty years.” Though they made it out alive after Harris fatally machine gunned all the hoods and two cops, the next 24 hours proved to be the longest of their lives. While the marauding trio was splitting the cash, the cops, mafia, and Doc Johnson began searching for them. You or I would’ve been on the first train, plane, or automobile out of the hood, but these guys stayed within the confines of Harlem as though they were bulletproof. They weren’t.
It might’ve been cool if Jackson hadn’t decided to dress like a pimp in multicolored threads with a matching hat and take his cold cash (he kept his money in the freezer) to bar/whore house the 7-11 Club. That club reminded me of the spots and after-hours joints I’d heard about from DJ Hollywood, outlaw places where vice was nice and anything could happen.
It was at 7-11 where mad Mafia Man (a crazed Anthony Franciosa as Nick D’Salvio) found Jackson sucking on a whore’s toes and smashed a glass in his face. I was so used to viewing Franciosa as the cool reporter Jeff Dillion on television drama The Name of the Game, it was wild seeing him as a bloodthirsty son-in-law of the syndicate Don who relished thinking of new ways to torture and kill. That sadistic scene was one that stayed with me for years.
Writer Christopher Chambers, author of the forthcoming Street Whys (Three Room Press), says, “A lot of Blaxploitation films were cartoony even when they had better production values. This one is not. Across 110th Street was about as gritty as you can get in the genre and frankly if Barry Shear had continued to direct features he would have been the Peckinpah of urban crime.”
Chambers first saw it at the Carlin Drive-In in Baltimore when he was a kid, but has revisited it several times since. “I think its aged well,” he says. “As you see the cycles of 1970s decay in New York City, anticipate the ferment and gentrification, and indeed the relapses. People are dope fiends, thieves and hoodlums, murderers, gangster molls and femme fatales, johns and tricks, dirty cops, racist cops, uncaring politicians for a reason – those reasons don’t change.”
Across a 110th Street opened eight months after Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia masterpiece The Godfather, but showed different kind of made men. “I do love how this was the anti-Godfather,” Chambers added, “wherein Italian criminals aren’t dapper dons and white-collar legit businessman, but rather nasty violent thugs, which was reality.” Certainly, much of D’Salvio’s anger erupted when Black, gravelly voice boss Doc Johnson, who he tried to punk, told him straight, “You ain’t never gonna make it. You know that? What are you, 40, 45 years old? You were a punk errand boy when you married the boss’s daughter and you’re still a punk errand boy.”
Out of all the characters Doc Johnson was my favorite. An old-school numbers guy who rose from nothing, he reminded me of a few self-made men I knew (or heard about) back in those days: from business men to barbers, in-the-life pimps to Sonny behind the bar at the Shalimar, most of them cats made something from nothing. Though it’s been said that Doc was based on legendary gangster Bumpy Johnson, who just the year before was played by Moses Gunn in Shaft, actor Richard Ward brought a natural gruffness to the character that was also laced with humor.
After the death of Jackson, who was castrated, the cat-and-mouse chase became even more intense and deadly; so much happened that it was hard to believe it was all within a 24-hour period. Not wanting the spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen Across a 110th Street, but the final images of the black mobsters on the rooftop had me questioning the philosophical definition of good guys and bad guys for years.
As a champion of underrated writers, as well as authors who only published one novel, I was happy that Nette’s essay introduced me to the writing of Wally Ferris. Though Ferris worked on several books after the success of his debut, no others were published. “My father wrote almost every day and was working on a project up until the last days of his life,” Ferris’ daughter Elisabeth told Nette. “There are a few completed manuscripts.”
One completed project was a thriller called The Extradition, which his friend Wallace Stroby, a crime writer from New Jersey, had read. Stroby told Nette: “The Extradition was about a New York prosecutor and a tough cop who go to Brazil to extradite a Bernie Madoff-like character. By its nature it was a little dated. Not sure what the history of it was, but Ferris hadn’t had an agent since the early seventies, so I doubt it got around much. I think for Wally, the book and the movie were a fluke. He had a good-paying union job at WNEW and was raising a family, and I don’t think he wanted to upset all that to chase down some vague literary goal. At least that’s what I’m guessing.”
Wally Ferris died in July 2014. Unfortunately, Across 110th has been out-of-print for decades and currently sells for over a hundred dollars online. There is supposed to be a Scottish reprint this year featuring an introduction written by Stuart Cosgrove.
As a connoisseur of uptown crime narratives, I can see the influence of Across a 110th Street in Barry Michael Cooper’s cinematic joints, the Fat Jack/Harlem World narrative of “The Hip-Hop Shangri-La,” the Bumpy Johnson series Godfather of Harlem, and my 2023 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine short story “The Life and Times of Big Poppa,” a tribute to the uptown numbers game and, as the protagonist often said, “Back when Harlem was Harlem.”
Four days before Barry Michael Cooper died, he and I exchanged emails. I had interviewed him for a CrimeReads piece on NYC gang movies (The Cool World was a favorite), and he was responding. I don’t think we ever had a conversation or correspondence where Harlem wasn’t spoken about or touched on. During our last chat he brought up artist Romare Bearden, but we could’ve easily talked about gangster (and former Apollo owner) Guy Fisher, Daddy Was A Numbers Runner author Louise Merriwether, journalist Les Matthews (Mister 1-2-5), our buddy Nelson George (their daddy’s hung out at the same 7th Avenue bar) Claudine actress Diahann Carroll, rapper Spoonie Gee, or the countless other wonderful people and stories that have emerged from the golden streets of Harlem.
For more on the work of Barry Michael Cooper click here and here.
