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Last week, The Post revealed that some postal workers were scared to deliver to gang-infested Brownsville. “W” delivered mail for nine years in some of Brooklyn’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods. He recalled his on-the-job travails with The Post’s Michael Gartland.
One time I was working in Fort Greene. It was getting late, getting dark and I see these guys fooling with my cart.
“Dude, what are you doing?” I said.
“Screw you!” one of them said. They’re laughing. I’m in a bad mood. It’s snowing, and this jerk is going through my mail cart.
“Nah, screw you,” I told him. “Don’t screw with the mail.”
This kid got his macho up and was like, “Really, you think you can answer us back?” And he just opened his coat and pulled out the tail of a pistol.
I stepped back. I knocked on a lady’s window and told her to call 911. She let me in. And these kids moved it along. So then I spent the next few minutes riding around with the cops while another cop stayed by the mail.
And then I finished delivering.
I didn’t even bother to call the postal inspector — the postal cops are stationed out in East New York. You wait for them and you’ll be dead. There’s only so many of them to cover the whole borough.
There were blocks I worked on that I dreaded because you’d see dudes smoking weed, prostitution. There could be weapons involved, gangs. Sterling Place, all the way from Utica Avenue to Buffalo Avenue in Crown Heights — bad, bad, bad. It’s the gauntlet. Two of the worst blocks in Brooklyn for a letter carrier — no question.
You’ve got people buying and selling drugs open air in the daytime — crack, marijuana, heroin, open alcohol consumption in the street. You name it, you could get it.
People offer the mailman drugs all the time. People offer you liquor. One time a guy blew smoke in my face.
“Sorry mailman, but this is some good s–t,” he said. “You want some?”
“Nah. I quit a long time ago.”
You’ve gotta navigate your way through the drug dealers. One building I went into, there were guys on the steps, like 30 deep, smoking weed. The whole lobby was a haze of smoke. Thank God they only drug-test you once because sometimes I would’ve failed just from the contact.
You got buildings where you don’t have a key to get in. You gotta ring the bell. Sterling Place — that was one of those blocks where I had to bring a lot of mail back to the post office. One building, for a whole week, I just couldn’t get in there. It was a city building. No key for the door. Ring the bells, nobody would come down.
Another building, all the mailbox locks were broken. Can’t leave the mail in those — it’s against the rules.
If that’s what they’re seeing in Brownsville now, I don’t blame them for not delivering the mail. But sometimes you just don’t ring the bell. Because sometimes the attitude is: I don’t have time for this crap. The mail’s too heavy, and I gotta keep going.
Check days — when SSI and disability checks come out — that’s like the worst day for a postal worker. When you see those blue and white checks, you know it’s gonna be a long day. If you work a route in public housing, you’re going to have people crowding around you at the mailboxes.
And if you got busted mailboxes — check day, busted mailboxes — you’re not getting no check. It’s not gonna happen. When we tell people this, they don’t understand. The rules are you’re not allowed to deliver to a box that can’t be shut. Gotta bring it back. The mailman is supposed to file an undelivered-mail report.
It can sit there at the station for days — up to a week — until someone delivers it. That’s totally against the rules, but it happens.
Fixing the mailboxes — that’s the landlord’s responsibility. And the city of New York is the worst offender. In public housing, they don’t fix doorbells, they don’t fix mailboxes. And when they do, people just keep breaking them, so it makes sense they don’t fix them.
You find all types of stuff in the mailboxes. You find keys, credit cards, drugs. I found a pistol once. I left it in there. Because if it’s missing, the only guy who could have done it is me.
A lot of drug dealers do that because if they get pinched, there’s nothing on them — it’s all in the mailbox.