Blue on Blue
More Praise for Blue on Blue
“This book is a must-read for those who want to know the real story behind police misconduct, written with unvarnished frankness by the man who knows the most about the problem. Told with the same gripping intensity as the best true crime, Blue on Blue takes the reader inside the most highly publicized investigations as they happened.”
—Thomas Reppetto, author of the two-volume American Police
“Reading Blue on Blue is like losing yourself in a good detective novel, except for two things. It’s fact, not fiction. And the bad guys are cops, being chased by good guys who are cops. No one has more insight into the hard work of ensuring integrity in policing than Charles Campisi, the NYPD’s longest-serving head of Internal Affairs. This book should inspire others to follow his example.”
—Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former director of the National Institute of Justice
“In the world of policing there is no more secretive activity than Internal Affairs. In Blue on Blue, Chief Charlie Campisi lifts the veil, showing the reader the twisted rationalizations, clever deceptions, and sometimes dangerous calculations of cops who are criminals. As the longest-serving chief of the NYPD bureau entrusted with the job of rooting out cops who betray their oath, Campisi proved perfect for the job. Although he always treated the accused as innocent until facts suggested otherwise, when evidence showed wrongdoing, he was both skillful and relentless in bringing the offender to justice. I appointed Chief Campisi for those very reasons and consider him the best-ever chief of IAB in the best police department in the world.”
—Howard Safir, thirty-ninth commissioner of the NYPD
“As a former police chief, I can vouch not only for the impressiveness of the detective work on display in Blue on Blue but also for the unyieldingly truthful picture the book paints of how real cops do their jobs every day. Anyone who isn’t a cop will find this book eye-opening, and everyone will find it riveting.”
—Gil Kerlikowske, former police chief of Seattle, Washington
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CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Timeline
Prologue: We’re Watching
Chapter 1 The Kind of Cop I Didn’t Want to Be
Chapter 2 Shield No. 791
Chapter 3 There’s a New IAB in Town
Chapter 4 To Catch a Crooked Cop
Chapter 5 Testing, Testing, Testing . . .
Chapter 6 Officer Involved
Chapter 7 Excessive Force
Chapter 8 If They’ve Got the Blonde, We’ve Got a Problem
Chapter 9 Wait a Minute—Those Guys Aren’t Cops!
Chapter 10 Other Agencies
Chapter 11 Cannibals in the Ether
Chapter 12 It’s Not a Courtesy, It’s a Crime
Chapter 13 Politics
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About Charles Campisi and Gordon Dillow
To my grandchildren,
Charles, Lauren, Cocomi, and Sarah.
Of all the gifts God has given me, you are the most precious.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of nonfiction. Everything in it is true to the best of my memory and the memories of others, although any errors are mine alone. A few details have been altered to protect sources and methods, including the names and descriptions of undercover officers and informants. Some other names have been changed or omitted to protect the innocent and the family members of the guilty.
TIMELINE
October 1952—Future NYPD cop Charles Campisi born in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
March 1974—Police Officer Charles Campisi, Shield No. 791, graduates from NYPD Academy and is assigned to Manhattan Traffic Area and, later, Brooklyn’s high-crime 73rd Precinct—also known as “Fort Z.”
June 1975—More than five thousand NYPD cops laid off during the New York City financial crisis, Officer Campisi included. Campisi rehired twenty-two months later.
August 1989—Captain Charles Campisi appointed commanding officer of Manhattan’s Sixth Precinct.
July 1992—Mayor David Dinkins appoints Mollen Commission to investigate corruption in NYPD. Corrupt cop Michael Dowd says he and numerous other cops routinely robbed drug dealers, sold drugs, and stole money from crime victims. Commission recommends permanent outside agency to monitor NYPD.
October 1992—Mayor Dinkins appoints former Marine and veteran NYPD cop Ray Kelly as police commissioner. Kelly launches new anticrime efforts, revamping old Internal Affairs Division (IAD) into Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB).
March 1993—Deputy Inspector Charles Campisi, currently head of the NYPD Cadet Corps, is “drafted” into IAB to head the new Corruption Prevention and Analysis Unit.
January 1994—Rudy Giuliani sworn in as mayor after running on anticrime platform. Police Commissioner Kelly is out, former Boston police chief Bill Bratton is in as new commissioner.
April 1996—After butting heads with Giuliani, Police Commissioner Bratton is out. Former US Marshals Service administrator and current New York City fire commissioner Howard Safir is in as commissioner. Murders in city drop below a thousand for first time in almost three decades.
July 1996—Safir promotes Deputy Chief Charles Campisi to a three-star position as chief of Internal Affairs Bureau.
August 1997—Haitian immigrant Abner Louima is sexually assaulted with a broken broom handle while in custody at the 70th Precinct station house in Brooklyn.
February 1999—Unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo is shot nineteen times by four plainclothes NYPD officers in front of his apartment building in the Bronx.
August 2000—Commissioner Safir resigns to go into private sector. Mayor Giuliani appoints Department of Correction Commissioner Bernie Kerik as police commissioner.
September 2001—World Trade Center attacked. Internal Affairs Bureau assigned to compile final list of the dead.
January 2002—Michael Bloomberg sworn in as mayor, brings back Ray Kelly as police commissioner—the first commissioner in NYPD history to serve two nonconsecutive terms. New York City crime rates continue to dramatically decrease.
November 2006—Sean Bell shot and killed and two other men wounded outside a strip club in Queens by cops who fire a total of fifty shots. No weapon found on the men.
December 2008—Anonymous call about a single bad cop leads to a massive IAB investigation of ticket fixing by cops in the Bronx. Hundreds receive disciplinary charges in what will be dubbed the Tix-Fix scandal.
October 2012—So-called NYPD Cannibal Cop is arrested after joint IAB/federal investigation of allegations he plotted over the Internet to cook and eat women.
December 2013—Murders in New York City at lowest level in fifty years—only 335 killings.
January 2014—Bill de Blasio sworn in as mayor after running on platform widely perceived as antipolice and soft on crime. Ray Kelly is out as police commissioner; Bill Bratton is in—again.
March 2014—Chief Charles Campisi retires after forty-one years with the NYPD, including almost two decades as chief of Internal Affairs—the longest-serving Internal Affairs chief in NYPD history.
Prologue
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WE’RE WATCHING
The subject is moving now, coming out the front door of his two-story apartment building on a tree-lined street in the Bronx and walking to a red Mercury
sedan that’s parked up the street. It’s his day off, so he’s wearing jeans, running shoes, and a heavy North Face jacket against the February cold. Maybe out of wariness, maybe just force of habit, as he gets into the Mercury he throws a glance up and down the busy street, looking for anything unusual in the flow of pedestrians and vehicle traffic, but he doesn’t see us—or if he does see us, all he sees is a young couple having a heated discussion in a drab Toyota parked at the corner, or a homeless man mumbling to himself as he picks through a garbage can halfway down the block. The subject doesn’t make our undercovers for cops.
We’ve had him under surveillance for a couple weeks now, watching where he goes, who he meets, listening on a court-approved wiretap to his cell phone. We’ve run him through all the databases, put together a complete pedigree. We know all about his ex-wife and his girlfriend, all his known associates, where he grew up, what restaurants and bars he likes, the grades he got in school, how many times he’s called in sick to work, where he goes on vacation; we know things about this guy that he’s probably already forgotten about himself.
We also know that he’s a criminal. Now all we have to do is catch him at it.
He’s pulling the Mercury into the street now, and we’re on him, but we’re staying loose, not getting too close. The subject is experienced, he knows how to duck a tail, and if we jam him too hard we might lose him. We’ve got three cars on him, one ahead, two behind, keeping civilian blocking cars in between, so if he blows a light or squares a corner we can keep him in sight, maybe run a parallel on him until we bring the other units back on the tail. But except for occasional glances in his rearview mirror, there’s no sign that the subject is concerned about being surveilled. Maybe he’s feeling cocky, certain that there’s no way we could be onto him. A lot of these guys are like that. Until the moment we put the handcuffs on them, they think they’re smarter than we are.
He’s crossing the Harlem River now, from the Bronx into Washington Heights, and still he doesn’t seem to have a clue that we’re watching him. He guides the Mercury onto a grimy side street off Amsterdam Avenue and parks near a five-story New Law tenement house, the kind with a combination courtyard and air shaft in the front; it’s listed in our narcotics database as a known drug location. There’s a lookout on the sidewalk in front, a young thug with a cell phone in his sweatshirt pocket, shivering in the cold, ready to signal if a customer’s coming, or if he sees a bunch of narcotics cops in unmarked Crown Victorias come rolling up to serve a warrant. But the lookout can’t make us; again, we don’t look like cops, and we don’t drive Crown Vics.
The subject gets out of the car and walks up to the front door. The lookout nods to him—the subject has been here before—and our guy disappears inside. From our informants, from our surveillances, from the wire we’ve got up on his phone, from everything we’ve put together on this guy, we know where he’s going. He’s going to a bare, cockroach-infested apartment on the fourth floor that some Dominican drug dealers are using as a stash house. Five minutes later he comes out the front door with a small black duffel bag in his hand—and we know that inside that duffel bag there are a couple kilos of crack cocaine.
Eventually, based on the information we give them, detectives from the Narcotics Division will put a case on those drug dealers on the fourth floor, sending in some of their own undercovers to make hand-to-hand buys and then banging the door with a battering ram and bursting in and arresting the dealers. But we don’t care about the drug dealers right now. Yes, we’re cops, but we aren’t narcotics cops, and the only thing we care about right now, our only target, is the guy who’s tossing that duffel bag full of crack into the trunk of his Mercury.
Because he’s a cop, too.
He’s a cop, but he’s not a cop like us, or like most of the thirty-five thousand other cops in the New York City Police Department. Yes, he carries the same shield, the same badge, that we do. He carries a gun like we do, and he took the same oath. Maybe he even stood next to some of us on the day we graduated from the Police Academy, the day we all lined up in our shiny new blue uniforms and tossed our formal white gloves in the air in celebration and became part of the brotherhood that is the NYPD. Maybe back in the day he walked some of the same foot beats that we did, rode in the same patrol cars, arrested some of the same criminals, the same perps, maybe he took the same risks and suffered the same hardships to make this city a better and safer place. Maybe once he was a good cop.
But no longer. Now he’s a crooked cop who’s shotgunning drugs, transporting trafficker-weight cocaine shipments across the city and down the drug distribution ratline to points south in Maryland and Virginia and North Carolina. For the drug traffickers he’s a perfect courier, because if he gets pulled over in a routine traffic stop or by some suspicious trooper on the Jersey Turnpike, all he has to do is flash that NYPD shield, maybe chat with the trooper for a few minutes about The Job, how long their respective Departments have been working without a union contract, how much their bosses suck, whatever, and then the trooper will wave him on, professional courtesy, cop to cop. That NYPD shield is his insurance policy, his guarantee that no cop will ever look inside that trunk.
And this is almost certainly not the first time that this cop has crossed the line, not the first time he has shotgunned a drug shipment or shaken down a drug dealer or beaten up a perp and taken his money or even pushed some citizen around just because he wears a badge and he’s having a bad day. Bad cops are seldom bad cops just once.
But now all that is over. Because the moment that cop puts that duffel bag of coke into his trunk, we own him. He belongs to us. We’re going to put this crooked cop in jail.
We could jump-collar him right now, pull him over as soon as he eases into traffic and turns the corner. But there’s no hurry. We’ll give him a little bit longer, we’ll follow him a little further, let him cross the George Washington Bridge and go interstate with the drug shipment, which effectively doubles the years in prison he’ll be looking at. If he was dead before, he’s double dead now. He just doesn’t know it yet.
So he heads south on the turnpike, still thinking he’s safe. And now, finally, it’s time. We have a couple of uniformed cops in a marked patrol car come up close behind the Mercury, then light him up and pull him over like it’s a routine traffic stop. As expected, he comes out of the car holding up that NYPD shield, thinking he’s going to badge his way out of it, but then we move in from behind the uniforms and grab him and take his gun and pat him down. All the while he’s telling us he’s a cop, he’s a cop, there must be some mistake—but then he realizes who we are, what kind of cops we are, and he knows that it’s over, that he’s done.
Soon we’ll sit him down at a table in a small, spare, windowless room somewhere, the same kind of debrief room where countless cops have confronted countless criminals with their countless crimes—and now he’s just another one of them. Except that, like almost all the crooked cops we arrest, he’s a virgin; no matter how many people he has arrested, he’s never been arrested himself—and things look different from the perp’s side of the table. He’s a big guy, taller and heavier than most, but in a tiny room, surrounded by honest cops, he suddenly seems kind of small.
Maybe he’ll be in a state of shock, stunned at how quickly he’s been transformed from cop to perp—a lot of them are. Maybe he’ll try to offer up some reason, some justification for crossing the line: My child support payments were killing me. I was just doing a favor for an old friend from the neighborhood. I got tired of seeing criminals and drug dealers making more money than I do. Everybody else is corrupt, so why shouldn’t I get a piece? We’ve heard them all.
But whatever he says, we’ll nod as if we believe him, and act as if we care. Then we’ll take a run at him. Look, we’ll say, you know you can’t be a cop anymore, but if you cooperate, maybe we can help you help yourself. So tell us, who else is in this? Are there any other cops involved? Will you make a recorded phone call for us? Will you wear
a wire against other crooked cops?
Maybe he’ll go for it. Now that he’s made the transition from cop to criminal, maybe to save his own skin he’ll take that extra step and go from cop to criminal to rat, snitch, informer. Or maybe he’ll tell us to go screw ourselves and ask for a lawyer.
Either way we’ve accomplished our primary objective. We’ve taken his shield away, and there’s one less dirty cop in the NYPD.
It’s a hard business we’re in, a hard world in which we operate. It’s a world full of lies and deception and betrayal, a world of snitches and informants, wires and wiretaps, surveillances and sting operations. It’s a world of good cops gone bad and bad cops gone worse, of cops who rob and steal and deal drugs and abuse and rape and even kill people. There are never as many cops like that out there as some people choose to believe, but for us, and for all the honest cops, there are always too many. And they are the reason we exist.
By necessity we operate in the shadows, in secret, separate from the rest of the cop fraternity. Some cops hate us, many fear us; if we walk into a roomful of other cops, conversations trail off, looks are averted, people move warily away. Even the good cops who understand that the job we do is vital and necessary are glad that they don’t have to do the job themselves. And so they hold us apart.
We understand all that, and we accept it. We have to. Because we are the Internal Affairs Bureau, the dreaded IAB. We are the cops who investigate other cops, the police who police the police.
And for us it’s enough that every cop, good and bad alike, knows that every hour of every day, we are out there.
Watching.
Chapter 1
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THE KIND OF COP I DIDN’T WANT TO BE