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  There are no written or oral tests to become a detective. Under the rules, a police officer who works for eighteen months in an investigatory assignment—say, making drug buys and arrests in the Narcotics Division—is entitled to a detective third grade gold shield. (In recent years the NYPD has created two detective titles—detective-investigator for those who actively investigate crimes, and detective-specialist for those who have special skills or work noninvestigatory assignments.) You can also be given the gold shield as a reward for some conspicuous act of bravery or outstanding police work. And although everyone at NYPD headquarters will swear it isn’t true, you can also get your gold shield if you have a “hook” within the Department.

  Carrying the detective’s gold shield is a great job, and I thought about going that route. But for me it had one major drawback: Detectives don’t command anything. They are supervised by sergeants and lieutenants and captains. In terms of rank within the chain of command, detectives are the same as uniformed patrol cops.

  So if you want to command, if you want to lead, you have to take the supervisory career route.

  And from the time I entered the Academy, I wanted to lead.

  I stayed in the Seven-Three for a couple of months after the blackout and then transferred back to Manhattan Traffic. I took the sergeant’s test in 1978, and although I did pretty well, a lawsuit against the city concerning police promotions essentially froze promotions for several years; I finally made sergeant in 1982. I’d been teaching law at the Academy for the previous two years, which I enjoyed, but then they sent me back to Manhattan Traffic as a training sergeant, teaching rookies fresh out of the Academy the job. Later, as a lieutenant, I became the coordinator of special events for Manhattan Traffic, and after I made captain in 1985 I took over as commanding officer—CO—of Manhattan Traffic Area, managing traffic issues and coordinating presidential and other VIP events, parades, demonstrations, and so on.

  During all that I somehow managed to attract the attention of the famously gruff and demanding Chief of Department Robert J. Johnston Jr., the highest-ranking uniformed member of the NYPD—or at least, my physical appearance attracted his attention. I was a marathon runner back then, and consequently I was pretty thin, so while Chief Johnston didn’t know my name—there were hundreds of captains in the NYPD—when there was a special assignment the chief would say things like, Where’s that skinny captain? Put the skinny captain on it! Being skinny must have paid off, because in 1989 I was named commander of the Sixth Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village and the West Village.

  I always thought being a precinct CO was the best job in the NYPD. You’re in charge of a hundred to two hundred cops, depending on the precinct, which is a force that’s big enough to make a difference but small enough that you can know everyone in your command by name. There’s a lot of administrative responsibility, but if you have a good XO (executive officer) he or she can take care of some of that, leaving you free to get out on the street and get to know the precinct.

  I walked every street in the precinct, and rode around in an unmarked car on almost every shift. I loved being out on the street, on patrol or walking foot posts with the C-POPs, the cops in the Community Patrol Officer Program, who introduced me to the businesspeople and residents on their beats, or riding with the precinct ACU, the Anti-Crime Unit, plainclothes cops who work crimes-in-progress. I’d work my regular daytime shift as precinct CO, then change into civilian clothes and ride along with the ACU cops for a four-to-twelve—cruising along Bleecker and MacDougal streets in an unmarked Chevy, staking out the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, looking for robberies, muggings, purse snatchings, whatever, then chasing down the perp and putting him in cuffs. It was good old-fashioned police work, and for a guy who by necessity had to spend most of his time on administrative stuff, it was great fun.

  That’s the thing a lot of people don’t understand about being a cop, how much fun it can be. Sure, a lot of times it’s dull, routine, and frustrating, and sometimes it’s more dangerous than you want it to be. But to see a crime in progress and chase the crook down a sidewalk and tackle him and hook him up and bring him to justice—there’s a joy in that, a sense of exhilaration. It’s cops and robbers, good guys versus bad guys, and it’s the reason most cops, me included, became cops in the first place.

  And even during my regular duties as a supervisor, sometimes I got to help with arrests. One in particular I remember. It’s a seven-to-three shift, and I have “the duty,” meaning I’m the senior supervisor on call to respond to any serious incidents not only in my own precinct but in all ten precincts in Patrol Borough Manhattan South. An officer-involved shooting, a fatal traffic accident, a barricaded suspect—anything like that happens, I have to go there and take command of the scene.

  So anyway, I’ve got the duty, and I’m in a car on Allen Street, just riding around with one of my POs at the wheel, when I see these two Transit cops chasing a guy down the street, guns drawn. The Transit Police patrol the subways, but the sidewalks belong to the NYPD, so I jump out of the car and join the chase. And then I see that the Transit cops have caught the guy, they’re on the sidewalk, struggling with him—and there’s a gun in his hand.

  But the Transit guys aren’t doing it right. These two Transit guys haven’t secured the perp’s gun hand, so the gun is waving all around—this on a crowded Manhattan street. If this keeps up, either the cops or an innocent bystander, or both, are going to get shot. So I barrel into the perp, knocking him to the ground, and start pounding his gun hand onto the pavement until he drops the gun and it goes skittering away. Meanwhile, the Transit guys are just standing there, watching the unusual sight of an NYPD whiteshirt—lieutenants and above wear white uniform shirts instead of blue—grappling with a gun suspect on the sidewalk.

  Finally we get the guy cuffed and searched; he has a second gun on him as well. Turns out the two Transit cops had been taking a smoke break outside a subway entrance when they saw this guy shoot a man, and they gave chase. Which was fine, except their tactics were lousy, and even though they aren’t in my chain of command, I start telling them so. But while I’m chewing them out, and they’re standing there looking sheepish, I realize that I’ve seen one of them before. I look at him, he looks at me, and I say: Steve? And he says: Charlie? Turns out he’s a guy I went to high school with at St. John’s Prep—and you really can’t ream out an old high school buddy. Steve and his partner later got Transit Police medals for capturing the murderer, which was fine with me, even if their tactics were a little shaky. I was just glad that nobody else got killed.

  The Sixth Precinct was an “A” house, a low-crime precinct compared with others. In 1990 there were just two murders in the precinct—one of the victims was a local TV executive who was shot and killed in a phone booth—this out of more than twenty-two hundred murders in the city as a whole. But as a relatively affluent area with a lot of bars and clubs, robberies and assaults were a serious problem. Still, we managed to cut overall crime in the precinct by 15 percent, which earned my officers a Department Unit Citation.

  Crime stats were and are important for any NYPD commander, and although commanders don’t have quotas to meet, like patrol officers they do have “performance goals” for everything from summonses to arrests. Meeting those goals is usually a matter of hard work, for you and the cops under your command, but sometimes luck helps. For example, once when I was CO of the Sixth Precinct there was a “wilding” incident in the adjacent Tenth Precinct, with seventeen young men swarming into a bodega, knocking the owner to the floor, grabbing beers and cigarettes, and then all seventeen of them piling into a van and driving away. When the call went over the air, my patrol officers and ACU guys caught them coming through the Sixth Precinct and pulled them over, blocking the van’s doors with their cars and trapping all of them inside like Spam in a can, preventing them from scattering like they usually would. All of which left the Tenth Precinct CO a little annoyed. He had to eat another r
obbery on his weekly precinct crime stats, while I got seventeen easy robbery collars on mine.

  Bringing down crime stats in a precinct isn’t just about good police work, though. It also involves working with community programs like COP—Citizens on Patrol—which was one of the “community watch” programs we instituted in the Sixth. Of course, you can take the community policing concept too far. Some police commanders and departments put too much emphasis on the “community” part and not enough on the “policing” part. Muggers and armed robbers are never going to show up at a Community Council meeting to discuss their problems, and drug dealers aren’t going to help you organize a Clean Up the Park Day. Citizens can’t put bad guys in jail; that’s the cops’ job.

  But working with the local community is important. And in the Sixth Precinct that meant working with the LGBT community.

  Greenwich Village was the center of New York City’s gay community, which presented some unique situations. Generally the cops and the gay community in the Sixth Precinct got along pretty well; the days when undercover vice cops would linger in parks or public bathrooms and arrest gay men for violation of antiquated state sodomy laws were long gone. But this was at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and there were frequent marches and demonstrations on the streets and in Washington Square Park to demand more action on AIDS. Most of the demonstrators were good guys, and I sympathized with their cause. Once, at a candlelight march for AIDS victims, someone handed me a lighted candle, and even though I was working I carried it along with me.

  But as in any group, there were some elements that were more radical, people who let their anger get the best of them and threatened damage to people or property. One incident I remember was when I almost lost the former mayor of New York to an angry mob.

  It’s a Saturday night, and there’s a big AIDS awareness march coming down Fifth Avenue on the way to a rally at Washington Square Park. I’m out there with my sergeant, Jeff Nolan, and dozens of other Sixth Precinct cops, trying to make sure things stay peaceful. And then, just as the hundreds of marchers are passing by, a black limousine rolls up to the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue and out steps former New York mayor Ed Koch, who left office a few months earlier and still has an NYPD security detail. With three NYPD detectives from the Intelligence Division trailing behind him, Koch starts walking the half block from the corner to the front door of the apartment building where he lives at 2 Fifth. The former mayor isn’t there to observe the march; he’s just going home.

  As commanding officer in the Sixth Precinct, which covered Greenwich Village, I maintained a good relationship with the LGBT community. But sometimes things could get out of hand. Here, I’m helping to escort former New York City mayor Ed Koch away from demonstrators angry at his administration’s handling of the AIDS crisis. (John Penley)

  Koch has had a stormy relationship with the gay community, which believes he hasn’t done enough to fight AIDS; they’re especially incensed because Koch himself is widely rumored to be gay. (Koch always said his sexual orientation was nobody else’s business—and he was right.) So when Koch unwittingly steps out in the middle of the AIDS march, someone shouts: There’s Koch! Get him!

  There are two sets of words that no sane precinct commander ever wants to hear juxtaposed in his precinct. Those words are a former mayor’s name and “Get him!” And seeing this, I can hardly believe it. Koch has always made a point of not being afraid to confront hostile citizens at community meetings. But this isn’t a meeting at the senior center; it’s a street demonstration that’s getting out of control. I can hardly believe that his security detail would drop the former mayor off in the middle of a crowd of angry marchers instead of going around the back or waiting until the marchers had passed by. In fairness, it’s possible that Koch insisted on it, and his security guys were afraid to say no. But still.

  So Sergeant Nolan and I go bulling through the growing crowd surrounding him, grab Hizzoner by both arms, and frog-walk him through the protesters to the front door of his apartment building; his feet are barely skimming the pavement. We shove him through the door, not particularly gently, and then stand there, keeping the howling crowd at bay while the former mayor gets into the elevator. I was certain—and as I learned later, so was Koch—that if the crowd had gotten to him, he would have suffered some serious damage. They were just that angry.

  (Later I had words with the head of the Intelligence Division, who was in charge of the mayor’s security detail. He’s a deputy chief and I’m only a deputy inspector—I’d been promoted from captain a few months earlier—but I was hot, and I made it clear that if his guys want to let the former mayor of New York get beaten up or lynched by an angry crowd, I would certainly appreciate it if they would do it in someone else’s precinct. He was apologetic. Soon thereafter Koch showed up at the Sixth Precinct muster room to thank what he called “the brave police officers of the NYPD” who rescued him from the mob. Koch didn’t recognize me as one of the cops who had thrown him through the door, and given the rough way we handled him, I thought it best not to mention it.)

  Like I said, being a precinct CO is one of the best jobs in the Department—and if it had been up to me I might have stayed a precinct commander for the rest of my career. But the Department had a policy of rotating precinct COs out after a couple of years, whether they liked it or not. So in late 1991 they put me in charge of the NYPD Cadet Corps. True, it wasn’t as exciting as running a precinct, but it was considered a high-profile assignment—especially since the soon-to-be police commissioner, Ray Kelly, had not only started his Department career as a Cadet, but during his rise to the top he had once commanded the Cadet Corps program, and thus had a personal interest in its continued success.

  The Cadet Corps was similar to the trainee program I had hoped to join when I was eighteen. We would take kids in their junior and senior years of college and give them paid civilian jobs in the Department—part-time or full-time, depending on their college class schedules—while they continued their college studies. The Department would also provide tuition financial assistance that would be forgiven if they actually became NYPD officers.

  It was a great program, for the Cadets and for the Department—and for me. We’d put the Cadets through a shortened version of the military-style NYPD recruit training at the Academy—Stand at attention! Tuck in that shirt! Shine those shoes!—and teach them about basic police procedures. After that they’d go out to the precincts or other commands in Cadet uniforms—no guns, no shields—where they would answer phones, work the computers, process paperwork, that kind of thing. For them it was a chance to see police work close up and decide if a cop’s life was for them—and if it was, they would have both experience and seniority when they graduated from college and went into the Academy to become full-fledged police officers. For the Department it was a chance to fill regular NYPD recruit ranks with college-educated young men and women with a demonstrated aptitude for police work and an eagerness to serve. And for me it was a chance to continue my interest in educating young people. By this time, in addition to my work as a cop, I was an adjunct professor of law and police science at John Jay, and I was just a dissertation away from completing my PhD in criminal justice at City College of New York.

  The Cadet Corps was a popular program—almost too popular. We ran the Cadets through the Academy in ninety-person classes, and when I first took over we had ten thousand applicants for those ninety slots. Cadets had to pass the same physical and psychological tests as regular recruits, which narrowed the applicant field somewhat, but we had to keep raising the minimum requirements for the program just to keep the number of qualified applicants at a manageable level. Pretty soon it was harder to get into the Cadet Corps than it was to get into the Police Academy as a regular NYPD recruit.

  Running the Cadet Corps program was an important and rewarding job for me. But I figured that once I got the program where I wanted it to be, say in a couple of years, I would do something else—maybe
go back to the Patrol Services Bureau, maybe as a supervisor in the Detective Bureau or Organized Crime Control Bureau. There were plenty of things to do.

  Then on a Thursday morning in March 1993, I get a phone call at my Cadet Corps office at the Academy. It’s a sergeant calling from Department headquarters at One Police Plaza, and he tells me the police commissioner wants to see me.

  And from that moment on, my career as a cop would never be the same.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  THERE’S A NEW IAB IN TOWN

  Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is sitting at his desk on the fourteenth floor of One Police Plaza, the same carved mahogany desk once used by his distant predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, with his back to a window that looks out onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Kelly’s not a big man, but he carries himself like one, ramrod straight, hair cut short, looking every inch the Marine combat commander he once was in Vietnam, and the Marine Corps Reserve colonel he still was in 1993. A milkman’s son, he’s got almost thirty years in the Department, from patrol officer to commissioner. And as I walk into the office and snap a salute, I notice that his face looks drawn, almost haggard, as if he’s in pain.

  I hardly know Kelly—before this I’d only met him in passing—but I will serve under the man for fourteen years of my NYPD career, and I will come to recognize that drawn, haggard look.

  It’s the look he always has when one of his cops is killed in the line of duty.

  In this case that cop is Detective Luis Lopez, age thirty-five, an eight-year NYPD veteran assigned as an undercover in the Manhattan South Narcotics Division (MSND). The day before, March 10, 1993, Lopez was working a gun- and dope-trafficking case against some dealers operating out of a T-shirt silk-screening shop on East First Street in the East Village. One of the suspects agrees to sell Lopez $10,000 worth of drugs, and when Lopez comes back to the shop with three cops from his backup team to make the arrests, the suspects start firing. Undercovers posing as drug buyers can’t wear protective vests, for obvious reasons, and one of the suspects’ bullets catches Detective Lopez in the chest. An hour later he dies on the operating table at Bellevue Hospital. It’s only March, and Detective Lopez is already the fifteenth NYPD officer to be shot so far in 1993, and he is the first to die. Fifteen cops shot in a little over two months; that’s what it’s like to be an NYPD cop in the early 1990s.