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  Although I was commanding the Cadet Corps program, as a deputy inspector I had the duty that day, meaning I had to respond to any serious incident in Patrol Borough Manhattan South. So when the officer down call comes in I grab a car and a driver and race to the shooting scene. Detective Lopez has already been transported, three suspects are in custody, but the area is swarming with crime scene investigators and detectives from the Borough Shooting Team, taking measurements, collecting evidence, interviewing potential witnesses. Commissioner Kelly and other Department top brass show up briefly on their way back from the hospital, where the news is not good. My job is to take control of the scene, make sure everyone who isn’t part of the investigation is kept away—always a problem in a situation like this, when so many cops want to help—and to collect as much information as possible for a preliminary report. Almost twelve hours later, at three a.m., I finally get things wrapped up and head home for a couple hours’ sleep before going back to work. Then I get the call that the commissioner wants to see me at eleven a.m.

  Kelly takes my salute and then gets up and walks around the desk and shakes my hand, then we move over to some chairs and sit down. I assume that the commissioner wants to talk about the Detective Lopez shooting—he already has my report on his desk—and we do talk about it. We talk about Detective Lopez’s wife, now a young widow, and his thirteen-year-old daughter and his sixteen-year-old son, Luis Jr., who later will become an NYPD cop himself. We talk about how hard Detective Lopez’s fellow MSND cops are taking it, how tough cops at the unit’s headquarters at the Seventh Precinct on Pitt Street are walking around red-eyed, almost unable to speak. We talk about the upcoming funeral, which will be held at Sacred Heart Church on Staten Island, not far from the Lopez home, and which will draw seven thousand people, including thousands of cops.

  We talk about all that for about five minutes, and then Kelly tells me why he called me in.

  I’m transferring you, he says.

  It’s out of the blue, completely unexpected, but that’s the way it is in the NYPD. So I ask him where I’m going.

  I need you in Internal Affairs, Kelly says.

  Kelly tells me that there’s a transformation going on in Internal Affairs, that he wants me to be a part of it, that he wants me to head a new Internal Affairs group called the Corruption Prevention and Analysis Unit, which will track and analyze new patterns of corruption within the NYPD and help devise new strategies to combat it. It’s an important assignment, he says, and I’m the man for it. I’m to report to my new assignment first thing Monday morning.

  And my first thought is: No way.

  Internal Affairs is the last place I want to go. Internal Affairs is the last place anybody wants to go. Oh sure, everybody agrees that it’s important to fight corruption and misconduct, that it’s vital for the Department to police its own, and that Commissioner Kelly seems determined to fundamentally reshape Internal Affairs. Everybody agrees that Internal Affairs is an important job—as long as somebody else actually has to do it. The truth is that Internal Affairs is the most thankless, no-win assignment in the entire Department, the sort of assignment where, like I said, every success is also a failure. Yes, you can succeed by putting corrupt cops in jail or dismissing them from the Department. But every time you do that, you’re also announcing to the world that the Department, your Department, failed the citizens of New York City by allowing a bad cop on the streets with a gun and a shield.

  So I spend a couple of minutes trying to talk the commissioner out of it. I’m just getting the Cadet Corps program in shape, I tell him, we’re really starting to make things happen, and I know how important the Cadet Corps program is to him. And so on. And the commissioner just nods and says, Yes, the Cadet Corps is important. But this is more important.

  And that’s it. Ray Kelly is the kind of commissioner who’s open to advice and counsel from subordinates, but once he hears the advice and makes his decision, it’s end of story. The NYPD is a military-style organization, and when you get an order, you salute and do your duty. Besides, even as I try to talk the commissioner out of sending me to Internal Affairs, I’m feeling more than a little sheepish about it. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Detective Lopez died doing his duty for the city and for the Department. Compared with that, the personal career aspirations of a deputy inspector just aren’t that important.

  So I say, Yes sir! and we shake hands again. As I leave the commissioner’s office I notice that the clock on the reception room wall reads precisely 11:11 a.m. It had only taken eleven minutes for my life as a cop to change forever.

  I know I’ll do the best job I can. As Officer Lenny Swindell told me so long ago, If ya got a job, do the job!—and I will. And as the commissioner had assured me, it will only be for two years and then I’ll rotate out.

  Of course, as I leave Ray Kelly’s office, I don’t know that those two years will actually stretch to almost twenty-one. All I know is that our mission now is to transform Internal Affairs—and I know that’s not going to be easy.

  Because anybody who thinks he’s going to change the way the NYPD handles corruption and misconduct within its ranks has a lot of history to overcome first.

  * * *

  I love the New York City Police Department; anybody asks me, I bleed NYPD blue. But you can love something while at the same time acknowledging its faults and problems.

  And the NYPD had a corruption and brutality problem from the day it was born.

  The NYPD was created in 1845, replacing the motley collection of city marshals, night watchmen, and “Sunday officers”—who enforced the Sabbath laws—with a full-time force of about eight hundred patrolmen, supervised by captains and “roundsmen” who made the rounds to ensure that the men were on post. (One trick used by roundsmen on winter days was to touch a patrolman’s badge to see if the metal was cold; if it was warm, it meant the patrolman had been off sleeping or staying warm in a fire station or saloon, a practice later known as “cooping.” A century and a half later, the touching-the-badge trick would still be used by patrol sergeants making the rounds of foot posts.)

  From the start, payoffs from gambling operations and saloon and brothel owners were considered part of the job, which made police positions, particularly in the upper ranks, highly sought after. By the 1870s, when patrolmen were being paid twice the average workingman’s salary—about $1,200 a year, not including the so-called sugar from graft—the Tammany Hall political machine demanded a $300 payment for promotion to sergeant and as much as $15,000 for promotion to captain. Often that money was provided by saloonkeepers and gamblers in the sergeant’s or captain’s district as a kind of bribe in advance. Being a cop, especially a high-level cop, was a moneymaking proposition.

  (By the way, despite what you’ve heard, the word “cop” is not derived from “constable on patrol.” One story has it that before policemen had formal uniforms they wore star-shaped badges fashioned from common roofing copper—hence “coppers,” and then simply “cops.” Another theory is that in the early nineteenth century the slang word “cop” meant to take or seize something, so when someone was arrested he was “copped”—and from there came “coppers” and then “cops.” There are a lot of other theories if you want to look them up.)

  For the most part, the corruption was ignored or at least tolerated by New Yorkers. In the love-hate relationship between the public and the press and the NYPD that exists to this day, nineteenth-century newspaper accounts of the police usually centered on two other themes: cops gratuitously clubbing people over the head with their nightsticks, or heroic acts of derring-do by the men in blue—a cop stopping a stampeding horse or rescuing a child from a burning building or bringing a murderer to bay.

  It’s still that way. If you’re an NYPD cop you have to get used to the fact that in today’s headlines you may be a hero, but in tomorrow’s headlines you’re going to be a bum.

  But periodically the corruption would become so pervasive and so brazen that
it couldn’t be ignored. Suddenly newspaper headlines would be screaming about it, clergymen would be denouncing it from the pulpits, reformers would be demanding change, and the politicians—who were always shocked, shocked, to learn that there was corruption in the ranks of New York’s Finest—would appoint a committee or commission to investigate the problem. In the end, a few high-level Department heads would roll and some dirty cops might be sent off to prison—and everybody would forget about it until the next major scandal came along.

  In New York City that happened every twenty years or so, almost as regular as clockwork. The Lexow Committee in 1894, the Curran Committee in 1912, the Hofstadter Committee in 1931, the Helfand Commission in 1951—they all revealed widespread corruption in the NYPD, ranging from bribery to extortion and even to murder. The 1970–72 Knapp Commission, prompted by the reports of Officer Frank Serpico, Sergeant David Durk, and others, called corruption in the NYPD—particularly payoffs by gambling operations but also low-level corruption like free meals and accepting bribes from tow-truck drivers—an “extensive department-wide phenomenon, indulged in to some degree by a sizable majority of those on the force.” One of the Knapp Commission’s star witnesses was a dirty cop named William Phillips, who called his police uniform a “money suit” and who got caught shaking down a Dutch-born Manhattan prostitute named Xaviera Hollander, aka The Happy Hooker. (Phillips was later sentenced to life for killing two people in a brothel.)

  And after every one of those scandals, the Department brass announced that it was establishing new protocols to eliminate corruption from the NYPD ranks forever.

  Before the Knapp Commission, corruption cases in the NYPD had been handled by a variety of different units: the Commissioner’s Special Investigations Unit, the Bureau of Inspectional Services’ Special Investigations Unit, and so on. After Knapp, the Department created an Internal Affairs Division of about a hundred fifty investigators to handle major corruption cases, and Field Internal Affairs Units of about ten investigators each in every command borough—the same guys I’d encountered in the Great Christmas Tree Caper of 1978 investigation—to handle lesser corruption and misconduct cases. Internal Affairs started planting anonymous “Field Associates,” usually young cops fresh from the Academy, into the precincts to watch for and report corruption. The Department expanded integrity training at the Academy, and started showing recruits the I Used to Be a Cop training film. Precinct commanders were put on notice that any corruption within their commands would mean the end of their careers.

  And for a while it worked—or at least it appeared to. The type of corruption that the Knapp Commission uncovered, in which almost entire units were “on the pad,” extracting monthly cash payments from gambling operations that were picked up by police “bag men” and divided up along the line, from cops to sergeants to captains, virtually disappeared. Everyone seemed convinced that the Department finally had a handle on corruption.

  And then, in 1992, right on schedule, twenty years after Knapp, the NYPD got hit with Officer Michael Dowd—a guy the newspapers called “The Dirtiest Cop Ever.”

  Dowd, a firefighter’s son who grew up in suburban Suffolk County, always claimed that he was a good cop turned bad by a pervasively criminal NYPD culture, but I don’t buy it. As far as I’m concerned, he was a bad cop from the day he graduated from the Academy in 1982. Dowd wasn’t a victim of a criminal NYPD culture; he helped create that culture—at least on the midnight shift at the 75th Precinct, a high-incident precinct that covered the East New York section of Brooklyn.

  Dowd and his corrupt buddies in the Seven-Five were real pieces of work. Dowd later admitted that while in uniform he routinely pilfered cash from DOAs and while responding to burglary calls; he and his partners later graduated to stealing cash and drugs from drug-dealing operations that fronted as neighborhood bodegas, and when that got to be too much like work, they started taking protection money from a Dominican gang that ran the drug trade in East New York. Dowd reportedly even “arrested” a rival drug gang member and delivered him to the Dominican drug gang he was working for—and the man was never seen again. Dowd and his pals were using cocaine as well as stealing and selling it; Dowd later admitted that he sometimes snorted cocaine off the dashboard of his NYPD patrol car.

  The 1992 arrest of Officer Michael Dowd and other corrupt cops in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct rocked the NYPD and eventually led to a new, highly proactive Internal Affairs Bureau. (Getty Images)

  Dowd and five other cops were finally arrested in May 1992—but not by the NYPD. Police and prosecutors in suburban Suffolk County, where Dowd was providing cocaine to a local drug ring, made the arrests, which of course were trumpeted in the newspapers. “COCAINE COPS!” the headlines said.

  It wasn’t the first NYPD corruption and misconduct scandal since the Knapp Commission of two decades earlier. For example, in 1986 eleven cops from the 77th Precinct in Bed-Stuy—the so-called Buddy Boys—were arrested on charges that they knocked down drug dealers’ doors after sending in phony emergency calls and then stole money and drugs, which they later resold to other dealers. But the police brass had declared that the Buddy Boys case was an aberration, an isolated incident, not a symptom of a widespread problem. And initially they said the same thing about the Michael Dowd case. But there was one problem: It wasn’t isolated. Eventually it would come out that other high-activity precincts had similar gangs of corrupt cops.

  Perhaps even worse, people in the Internal Affairs Division had known for years that Dowd was corrupt, that there were problems in the Seven-Five, but nobody really did anything about it. The case fell to a single Field Internal Affairs Unit sergeant who got little if any backing from IAD in trying to build a provable case against Dowd and his fellow criminal cops. Instead, Dowd was transferred to some nothing jobs—guarding a police vehicle impound lot, that sort of thing—until finally, with the heat dying down, he was sent back to patrol in the 94th Precinct in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, where he resumed his drug-dealing activities.

  The newspapers called it a cover-up by a Department that didn’t want to admit that it had a corruption problem—which was about half right. It was clear that some high-level officials hadn’t been enthusiastic about exposing the Department to corruption charges. As a former head of the Internal Affairs Division later admitted, “A message went out into the field that maybe we shouldn’t be so aggressive [in pursuing corruption cases] because the department doesn’t want bad press. . . . When I went [to top commanders] with the bad news that two cops would be arrested in the morning or that three cops would be indicted, I felt like they wanted to shoot me.”

  That fear of bad publicity affected lower-level commanders as well. Corruption in your command was a career ender, whether you knew about it or not, so precinct commanders sometimes chose to simply reassign suspect cops—as had happened with Dowd—rather than call on IAD to investigate.

  As for the Internal Affairs Division, the Dowd case made it plain that it had some serious problems. In the old days of the Knapp Commission, corrupt cops had been divided into two categories: the “grass eaters,” cops who more or less openly took minor bribes and graft that came their way, and the “meat eaters,” corrupt cops who were constantly on the prowl to make more serious criminal scores. IAD got a pretty good handle on the “grass eaters,” but it failed to understand that the new model of corruption was the “meat eaters”—guys like Michael Dowd and his crew.

  There were other problems with the old IAD. It was chronically underfunded and inadequately staffed. It was isolated from the police commissioner by multiple levels of bureaucracy. The bifurcated command and control system of the Internal Affairs Division and the various Field Internal Affairs Units in each borough command led to confusion and bureaucratic infighting. Corruption allegations against cops weren’t being properly logged or processed; some sensitive allegations were relegated to a so-called tickler file, where they disappeared forever. IAD was also overly secretive, refusing
to share information with other Department commands, let alone with outside agencies such as District Attorney’s Offices and federal prosecutors—and in return, those agencies refused to share critical information with IAD.

  The old IAD also seemed more concerned about the small stuff than with the major corruption problems like Dowd—with the SCAN program being a prime example.

  I ran into SCAN—short for Stop Corrupt Activity Now—when I was CO in the Sixth Precinct. One day I started hearing the word that was spreading among my cops—Watch out, IAD’s here, they’re all over the precinct. It turns out IAD had flooded the precinct, which is only about one mile square, with half a dozen IAD teams, trying to catch cops taking bribes or committing other acts of corruption. (It wasn’t just the Sixth Precinct; they were doing it to all the precincts on a rotating basis.) The problem was that these IAD guys—guys in suits—were driving around in IAD surveillance vans and unmarked cars that looked exactly like what they were—IAD surveillance vans and unmarked cars. My cops made them in an instant. And the IAD guys were doing this on the day shift, not the midnight shift, when most serious police corruption happens. After several days of this, the worst the IAD guys could come up with was three command disciplines against some of my guys for things like being temporarily off post or smoking in uniform while on duty and in public view. I honestly don’t believe that any of my cops were guilty of corruption—but even if they were, these IAD guys never would have caught them.