Blue on Blue Page 4
But while I’m telling them all this, I notice that the two IAD guys are exchanging looks. They’re almost yawning. They’re bored! It’s pretty obvious to them by now that they aren’t going to crack the Great Christmas Tree Caper of 1978 with me. They’re done with me.
That’s fine, Officer Campisi, the young IAD guy says. You can go now. We’ll let you know—but we’re pretty sure this will come back unsubstantiated.
There are several ways an Internal Affairs investigation against a cop can come out: “Substantiated” means the cop did it; “unsubstantiated” or “unsub” means the cop may or may not have done it but there’s insufficient proof either way; and “unfounded” means the cop is innocent.
Maybe the young IAD guy thinks he’s doing me a favor by telling me it would be unsubbed, so I wouldn’t worry about it. But I don’t see it that way. An “unsub” is like being found not guilty in a criminal trial; you might actually be guilty as hell, but they just couldn’t prove it. An “unsub” stays on your permanent record, and it carries a taint. An “unfounded” doesn’t stay on your record; it’s like the allegation against you had never been made.
Well, I’m not going to have an unsub on a theft allegation hanging around my neck for the rest of my career. Hey, I’m the guy who paid a dollar for a cup of coffee! And I’m especially not going to take an unsub when all it would take is a phone call or two for the IAD guys to determine that it was a solid unfounded. And I tell them so.
No way, I say. I don’t want an unsub. This is an unfounded. Call the patrol sergeant. Check with the precinct DO. Call the lady with the briefcase. Call the cabbie. The phone numbers are all right here.
Then the young IAD guy gives me another bored look and says: We really don’t have time for that, Officer. We’re very busy around here.
I’m of Sicilian heritage; all four of my grandparents were born in Sicily. And while I don’t want to shock anybody, people of Sicilian extraction are occasionally capable of displays of temper.
So when this IAD guy tells me they’re just too busy to make a couple of lousy phone calls to protect the record and reputation of another cop, I go Sicilian on them.
You’re too busy? I say, standing up from my chair. You’re going to give me an unsub because you’re too busy to do your jobs?
Now see here, Officer, the IAD sergeant says. You can’t talk to us like that.
I don’t care who you are! I say, waving my arms in the air—the Sicilian thing again. Make the calls! Do your jobs! If you unsub me on this I’ll sue you! I’ll see you in court!
And so on.
At this point, the PBA rep is tugging on my arm, saying: C’mon, kid, we’re outta here. He’s gone pale. A PO doesn’t talk to a sergeant like that. And no sane cop gets up in IAD’s grill.
The IAD guys, meanwhile, look shocked, even a little afraid. It’s as if they’ve got an EDP (emotionally disturbed person) in an NYPD uniform on their hands. But I don’t care. It’s a matter of principle.
Finally the PBA rep drags me out of there. A few weeks later I get another written notice from Internal Affairs about the theft investigation of me.
It’s marked “Unfounded.”
I don’t know if the IAD guys actually made any calls, or if they just marked it unfounded because they were afraid I’d go crazy on them again. I guessed it was the latter. And as far as I know, they never cracked the Great Christmas Tree Caper of 1978.
But even months later, it still rankled. It was bad enough that the Internal Affairs guys went after other cops. But what was almost incomprehensible to me was that when they’d had a chance to prove another cop innocent, those IAD guys hadn’t wanted to lift a finger.
One thing the experience taught me: No matter what happened, I would never work for Internal Affairs. Never.
That just wasn’t the kind of cop I wanted to be.
* * *
In March 2014 I retired from the New York Police Department after almost forty-one years on the job—the last seventeen of them as chief of the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. In fact, I was the longest-serving Internal Affairs chief in NYPD history.
A lot had happened during those forty-one years. By the time I left the NYPD it was a far different police force than the one I’d known when I was walking a foot post in the Seven-Three. And Internal Affairs was a far different unit than it had been when I got into the beef with those IAD guys in the 17th Precinct. During those four decades, both Internal Affairs and the NYPD had been fundamentally transformed.
And I strongly believe that the transformation in Internal Affairs was a major contributing factor to the transformation of the NYPD.
From the time I joined Internal Affairs in 1993 as an inspector in charge of the Corruption Prevention and Analysis Unit—I was named chief of the Internal Affairs Bureau three years later—I and the men and women in my chain of command did everything we could to fundamentally change the way we policed the police. We fought for and got new authority, new methods, new equipment and resources, new people, with new attitudes. We transformed Internal Affairs from a demoralized, ineffective, and widely unrespected unit of the NYPD into a modern, efficient, successful anticorruption force, one that has been emulated by police departments around the country and around the world. If the new Internal Affairs Bureau was not loved within the NYPD—it never will be—it certainly was feared, by corrupt and brutal cops and those thinking about becoming corrupt and brutal cops. And fear is simply respect in another form.
In creating the new IAB, did we wipe out corruption and misconduct within the NYPD? Of course not. There was corruption and misconduct before my time at IAB, there was corruption and misconduct while I was IAB chief, and there is corruption and misconduct now.
It’s different than it used to be, though. The old-style, systemic corruption of the pre–Knapp Commission days, when entire precincts were on the pad, is probably gone forever; so is the kind of almost casual brutality applied to suspects who ran or were uncooperative in an interrogation room. The new corruption and misconduct is more opportunistic, more secretive, more limited in scope, and thus harder to detect.
But it’s there. And any mayor or politician or high-ranking police official who says he’s going to completely eliminate corruption and misconduct from any big-city police department is kidding himself. As long as police departments continue to recruit human beings, as opposed to cyborgs, they will have to deal with the same problems among cops that other human beings have: greed, hatred, violence, jealousy, drug and alcohol abuse, mental instability, laziness, incompetence.
Sure, you can try to reduce corruption and misconduct, to control it, manage it. And we did that at IAB. While I was chief we reduced corruption and misconduct cases by more than 50 percent, even as the NYPD expanded in size. Even the harshest NYPD critics, if they’re honest, would have to admit that in terms of honesty and professionalism, the NYPD is a far better organization than it was in the 1970s and ’80s and early ’90s.
But it’s not perfect—and it never will be. It’s a simple question of numbers.
Whenever there’s a police corruption or misconduct scandal, people who support cops will always point out that 99 percent of cops do their jobs honestly and correctly. Actually, based on my experience in the NYPD, I think it’s a little higher—99.5 percent.
But do the math on that. In a Department with thirty-six thousand cops, one half of one percent is one hundred eighty cops. Which means that as chief of IAB, at any given moment, I had a hundred eighty seriously bad cops out there on the streets of New York City, armed with guns and shields and the enormous power of the law, who were willing to rob, cheat, abuse, and even murder people.
They were the ones who kept me up at night.
During my years as IAB chief more than two thousand NYPD cops were arrested for various crimes, and we investigated thousands more for other serious misconduct. Some of those cases made national and even international headlines: the cops who fired forty-one times at a man who
was standing on his front doorstep, and who turned out to be unarmed; the sadistic cop who savagely assaulted and sodomized a man with a broom handle; the so-called Cannibal Cop who fantasized about cooking and eating women. There were others, less sensational but still deadly serious: cops who stole millions of dollars from drug dealers; cops who trafficked in illegal guns; cops who beat up suspects after the cuffs were already on; cops who “flaked”—planted drugs on—innocent people; cops who sold their souls to make a few hundred bucks ripping off Manhattan street peddlers; the cop who stalked young girls online until he made the mistake of stalking an IAB undercover; the cop who robbed banks on his lunch hour. And on and on.
This book is partly about them, the one half of one percent. But it’s also about the hard realities of being a cop on the streets of New York City, about the challenges of enforcing the law while at the same time obeying it, about how hard it is for some cops to maintain their honor when others around them have abandoned theirs. It’s about battles won and lost on the street corners in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and battles won and lost in City Hall and the top floors of One Police Plaza. It’s about politicians like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg and the disastrous—in my opinion—Bill de Blasio, and how they handled crises, and it’s about police commissioners like Ray Kelly and Howard Safir and Bill Bratton, and how they shaped the vast, diverse, and often fractious standing army that is the NYPD. This book is about judges and prosecutors, lawyers and reporters, bureaucrats and union leaders; it’s about killers and drug dealers, undercovers and informants, about good cops posing as bad civilians and bad civilians posing as bad cops.
It’s about all that and more. But the real heroes of this book are all the good cops of the NYPD—and the small group of men and women who stand between those good cops and a few criminals in uniform who would bring them down.
It’s often said that police are the “thin blue line,” the narrow bulwark standing between the public and uncontrolled chaos and crime. And that’s true. Can you imagine New York City, or any city, without police? But within that thin blue line there’s an even smaller, thinner line of cops whose job it is to protect the public from bad cops, and to protect the good cops from the bad ones. They’re the men and women of Internal Affairs.
Their work is often misunderstood, by the public and by other cops. It is racked with uncertainties and ambiguities, not simple black and white but varying shades of gray. Even their successes are in a sense failures, because every time they catch a bad cop, that bad cop represents a betrayal of the public and of the Department’s values.
And yet, without them, without that small group of cops who operate in the shadowy gray corners of the cop world, the thin blue line would rot from within and ultimately collapse.
They are the police who police the police—the brave, honest, dedicated cops of the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau.
Chapter 2
* * *
SHIELD NO. 791
I’m standing outside the old 83rd Precinct house, at the corner of Wilson and DeKalb in Brooklyn, when I see my buddy Mike coming out the front door. Mike is one of my favorite cops, a tall, good-looking guy who always looks sharp when he’s on post—buttons and shield polished, shoes and belt and holster shined, his hat just so. He’s like an NYPD recruiting poster. So I fall into step beside him, and we trade a little friendly banter.
Caught any bad guys today? I ask him.
Not yet, he says, laughing. But I’m going to. You wanna help?
I’m young, eager, ready to put crooks in jail. And Mike would be a perfect partner.
You bet! I tell him, and he laughs again.
Okay, let’s go get ’em, Mike says. So we set off down the sidewalk, looking for crooks, and as we’re walking Mike takes off his NYPD hat and puts it on my head—and I’m thinking: I’m a policeman! I’m a policeman!
Of course, I’m going to have to wait a while before I can really help Officer Mike put bad guys in jail, because I’m still in the first grade. I barely reach up to Mike’s belt buckle, his hat is hanging down almost to my chin, and I have to take two steps to his one just to keep up. But someday . . .
There are basically two stories you’ll get if you ask a cop why he joined the NYPD. One is that he never gave being a cop even a second thought until one day, on a whim, or a dare, he went down and took the test. The other story is that he wanted to be a cop ever since he was five years old.
I wanted to be a cop since I was five years old.
I grew up in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a mile-square working-class neighborhood of row-house homes and apartment buildings and small breweries and textile factories and a commercial district on Broadway and Knickerbocker Avenue. It was the kind of neighborhood where everybody’s dad was a bus driver or a city sanitation worker or a barber or a maintenance man—working people. The comedian Jackie Gleason grew up in Bushwick, and later he used a Chauncey Street address for bus driver Ralph Kramden and his wife, Alice, on the TV show The Honeymooners.
The Honeymooners—that was Bushwick in the 1950s.
All four of my grandparents were born in Sicily, and were part of the flood of Italian immigrants who came to New York in the early 1900s. They all died before I was born, so I never got a chance to know them, but I always thought it was funny that both of my grandfathers were barbers—and both were bald. Both my mom, Josephine, and my dad—he was born Ignacio, but he changed it to Charles, and his friends called him Chappy—grew up speaking Italian as well as English, although sadly I didn’t. The only time my parents spoke Italian in front of me was when they didn’t want me to know what they were saying.
My dad worked for most of his life as an assistant engineer at the Hotel McHenry, later the Hotel 123, on West Forty-Fourth Street in Times Square, fixing plumbing, repairing plaster, rewiring switches, you name it. A small man with big, rough hands, he could fix anything—and at the Hotel 123 there was always plenty to fix. Although once elegant and grand, a haven for New York’s elite, like so much else in Times Square the hotel had started to decline in the ’50s and ’60s, and by the 1970s it was described in the New York Times as a “sanctuary for thieves, pimps, prostitutes and muggers.” (Times change. After a renovation in the early 2000s, the hotel is now the posh AKA Times Square residential hotel—and once again home to millionaires.) My mother worked a variety of jobs—in a luncheonette, a yarn factory, an old folks’ home.
So we obviously weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor, either. We lived in a four-room apartment on the second floor of a six-unit building on Suydam Street; the rent was fifty bucks a month. My parents never had a car, and never took vacations, but there was always food on the table, and love in the house. In the summer there was stickball on the street until the streetlights came on and day trips to Coney Island; Sunday mornings there was mass at St. Brigid’s Catholic Church and then in the afternoon a bus ride to downtown Brooklyn for movies at grand old movie theaters like the Albee or the Paramount. There were baseball games at Ebbets Field in Flatbush—although when I was six my heart was broken, along with almost every other heart in Brooklyn, when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles—and later at the Polo Grounds and Shea Stadium with the Mets. All in all, it was good to be a kid in Bushwick in the 1950s and ’60s.
Unusual for an Italian family, I was an only child. My mother had had a series of lost pregnancies, and by the time I came along my parents were both in their forties, so I was a pretty big surprise. But I still had a large extended family, with aunts and uncles and more cousins than I could count to play with. Six of those cousins lived at my aunt Kitty’s house, which was two doors down from the 83rd Precinct, a late-nineteenth-century building with a turret and parapets and granite columns at the front entrance—which is where my fascination with cops began. I’d see these guys going in and out of the precinct, uniformed cops like Mike, detectives in regular clothes with guns under their jackets, and I realized from an early age that they were respected, that people looked up to them.
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There were two Eight-Three cops that I particularly remember, Ed Kearney and Harry Schroeder, both Community Affairs officers who worked with local residents and the neighborhood kids, trying to fix problems, encouraging the kids to join the Police Athletic League, trying to steer them away from the bad elements. Harry, a solid, broad-shouldered man, and Ed, an African American, a big guy with a bigger smile, were both brave, tough, and thoroughly decent guys. Both would later retire as detectives.
I was in awe of those guys and many others from the Eight-Three. In fact, when I was a kid the only other thing I wanted, besides being a cop, was to someday stand in the cleats of Dodgers (and later Mets) center fielder Duke Snider—although I figured out pretty early on that that wasn’t going to happen.
My cop dreams were fine with my parents, even though unlike a lot of New York families, particularly the Irish ones, we didn’t have a long tradition of cops in my immediate family; I would be the first. Being an NYPD cop was considered an honorable profession, a step up for a kid from Bushwick. (I did have a distant cousin, Anthony Campisi, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War and an NYPD vice cop, who was stabbed to death by a pimp while making an arrest on West Thirty-Eighth Street in 1966. I’d never met Tony, but I remember my parents talking about it—and as tragic as it was, it didn’t for a second make me rethink my desire to be a cop.)
But my parents had one precondition to me becoming a cop: no matter what, education came first. My father had had to drop out of school after the sixth grade and go to work, my mother the same after the eighth grade. They were determined that I would do better, that I’d get a college degree. To that end, they spent money they really didn’t have to send me to Catholic schools, first St. Brigid’s for grammar school and then high school at St. John’s Prep in Bedford-Stuyvesant.