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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
One of the most authentic and consistently illuminating portraits of police work ever, Blue on Blue describes the fascinating inner workings of the world's largest police force and Chief Charles Campisi's unprecedented two decades putting bad cops behind bars.
From 1996 through 2014 Charles Campisi headed NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, working under four police commissioners and gaining a reputation as hard-nosed and incorruptible. When he retired, only one man on the 36,000-member force had served longer. During Campisi's IAB tenure, the number of New Yorkers shot, wounded, or killed by cops every year declined by ninety percent, and the number of cops failing integrity tests shrank to an equally startling low.
But to achieve those exemplary results, Campisi had to triple IAB's staff, hire the very best detectives, and put the word out that bad apples wouldn't be tolerated.
While early pages of Campisi's absorbing account bring us into the real world of cops, showing, for example, the agony that every cop suffers when he fires his gun, later pages spotlight a harrowing series of investigations that tested IAB's capacities, forcing detectives to go undercover against cops who were themselves undercover, to hunt down criminals posing as cops, and to break through the "blue wall of silence" to verify rare--but sometimes very real --cases of police brutality.
Told in an edge-of-the-seat way by a born storyteller, Blue on Blue puts us in the scene, allowing us to listen in on wiretaps and feel the adrenaline rush of drawing in the net. It also reveals new threats to the force, such as the possibility of infiltration by terrorists. Ultimately, the book inspires awe for the man who, for almost two decades, was entrusted with the job of making sure the words "New York's Finest" never ring hollow.
A truly revelatory account, Blue on Blue will forever change the way you view police work.
Author Notes
Charles Campisi was Chief of the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau from 1996 to 2014. In his years on the job he developed model strategies for investigating corruption, which have been adopted by law enforcement agencies across the US and abroad. A graduate of the FBI National Academy and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he currently works as a Senior VP at the private investigation firm Cyber Diligence. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
Gordon Dillow has been a reporter, columnist, and war correspondent for more than thirty years. He has written for a number of newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times , and is the author or coauthor of numerous books. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Campisi, the chief of NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau from 1996 to 2014, explains his methods for combating police corruption in this highly readable account of his time heading the world's largest police anti-corruption unit. After conceding that eliminating all significant police misconduct is a utopian goal, Campisi places the thefts, brutalities, and other crimes in context by noting that the vast majority of cops do their hazardous work professionally and honestly. New York City newspaper readers will find many of the accounts familiar, but Campisi's insider perspective provides a different lens. He ends with brief commentary on the current state of policing in New York City. He's no fan of Mayor de Blasio, and expresses concerns about the reduction in the number of integrity tests since his retirement in 2014. Most eye-opening is his fear that "the NYPD will be infiltrated by sympathizers or even sleeper agents of ISIS or al-Qaeda or some other terrorist organization." The breadth and depth of his experience makes this a must-read for those interested in how police misconduct has been handled. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Chief Campisi of the NYPD gives the ultimate insider's view on police brutality and corruption here, gleaning war stories and insights from his 41 years on the force, 17 of them spent as chief of the department's internal affairs bureau (Campisi retired from the force in 2014). There are myriad books by street cops and detectives, but a voice telling what it was like to work internal investigations is rare indeed. He wasn't an outsider brought into IAB Campisi earned his street cred in Manhattan Traffic and then as a cop in the high-crime Seven-Three Precinct before becoming a commanding officer. The focus throughout is on police corruption and brutality, and Campisi has harrowing tales to tell, starting with a Seven-Three cop's absolute rage at Campisi after Campisi yells Stop! as the other cop is aiming his gun at the back of a running suspect. According to Campisi, The NYPD had a corruption and brutality problem from the day it was born. This book traces the reform of IAB from an agency that too often looked the other way to an active force for finding and getting rid of police misconduct and corruption. It's cops and robbers both ways here, with the excitement coming both from street stories and from tales of the intricacies of plotting against bad cops, with tools like wiretaps and sting operations. An unflinching exposé and a riveting read.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IF MYSTERY NOVELS APPEAL to the credulous child in me, true crime stories speak to my inner voyeur. In reading this current batch of books, I've walked alongside a prisoner on her way to her execution, learned how to poison a wineglass and watched a king's mistress do away with her rival. And that's only from the first book on my list: CITY OF LIGHT, CITY OF POISON: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris (Norton, $26.95), Holly Tucker's stylish study of crimes committed by the high and mighty during the 72-year reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Casual crime was so rampant in 1667 that the king named Nicolas de la Reynie as lieutenant general - in effect, Europe's first chief of police - and charged him with imposing law, order and civility on the rowdy city. Reynie went about his duties with admirable efficiency. He cracked down on suspected criminals, introduced streetlights to discourage thieves, established sanitary regulations (no more urinating in the streets and dumping chamber pots out the window) and took over the management of the overcrowded and dangerous prisons. But Reynie's powers stopped at the palace gates. There was nothing he could do about the criminal behavior of the nobles in the king's court - or about the king's own involvement in a scandalous series of murders known as the Affair of the Poisons. Tucker writes with gusto about Marie-Madeleine d'Aubray, the marquise de Brinvilliers, who dosed her father and brothers with arsenic for forcibly separating her from her rogue lover. For these vengeful deeds, the marquise had her head chopped offin a spectacular public execution. Tucker also finds high drama in the exploits of Catherine Voisin, a fortuneteller who became "the most notorious poisoner in Paris since the marquise de Brinvilliers." Poisoning a bouquet of flowers was one of Voisin's wicked methods of delivering death, but infusing articles of clothing with a toxic substance was also effective. One of her cunning schemes, happily aborted, was to kill Mlle. de Fontanges, a mistress of the king, by selling her a pair of poisoned gloves. For her years of service to the royalty, Voisin was gruesomely tortured and burned alive. Lest they sound quaint, the noxious potions sold to "men and women who wished to prune their family trees," as Tucker delicately puts it, were brewed in caldrons that also produced "tiny charred bones." Toads and snakes were common ingredients, but fowl were also fair game as test subjects, and many a chicken, turkey and pigeon gave up its life. To the author's chagrin, infanticide was also borne out by research. Nothing, it seems, was too great a sacrifice to make for the pleasures of this hedonistic age. If the 17th century was enamored of highborn villains, the Victorian age admired master sleuths with uncanny deductive skills, like Émile Gaboriau's wily French police detective, Monsieur Lecoq, and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle's immortal Sherlock Holmes. In his lively literary biography ARTHUR AND SHERLOCK: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes (Bloomsbury, $27), Michael Sims traces the real-life inspiration for the first "scientific detective" to the renowned Dr. Joseph Bell, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh celebrated for his uncanny diagnostic observational skills. His methods were "quite easy, gentlemen," Dr. Bell would assure his students. "If you will only observe and put two and two together," you, too, could deduce a man's profession, family history and social status from the way he buttons his waistcoat. Consulting detectives like Holmes are the heroic role models of a long-ago age. Modern detectives work out of police departments, where they sometimes find themselves investigating their fellow officers. BLUE ON BLUE: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops (Scribner, $28) is an exposé of the secretive work of the N.Y.P.D.'s Internal Affairs Bureau, written (with Gordon Dillow) by Charles Campisi, chief of that agency for almost 18 years. In police procedurals, bent cops live in fear of being called before the I.A.B., an awesomely powerful arm of the department charged with dealing with the dirt kicked up by crooked cops and questionable police practices. At first, Campisi writes with the voice of a Noo Yawker trying to be polite to visitors from another planet. But when he loosens up he's enlightening - and entertaining - on the procedures of this shadowy agency, feared by many, admired by those who work for the I.A.B. Enough about the cops. Let's get to the killers. In THE AXEMAN OF NEW ORLEANS: The True Story (Chicago Review, $26.99) Miriam C. Davis resurrects a madman with a meat cleaver (the ax came later) who made his first attack on a summer night in 1910. His victim was an Italian grocer who survived the assault. Over the next 10 years, he attacked and robbed a string of grocers, mainly Italian, and their wives. Some of them did not survive. In the middle of his rampage, the Axeman sent a letter to The New Orleans Times-Picayune, declaring himself "a fell demon from the hottest hell" and promising to spare anyone listening to jazz on the designated night of his next attack. This being New Orleans, the city was ablaze with lights and jazz music all through the night. Davis speculates that the Axeman, determined by the police to be a career criminal named Joseph Mumfre who was shot and killed by one of his intended victims, actually slipped through the police dragnet and lived to kill again. It's a shaky claim, but well argued. And who knows? As Davis reflects: "Perhaps in some obscure small-town newspaper there's a story of an intruder caught fleeing an Italian grocery in the middle of the night after attacking the proprietor and his wife." Killers are rarely as colorful as the Axeman; they're more likely to be nondescript creeps like Lonnie Franklin Jr., the villain of THE GRIM SLEEPER: The Lost Women of South Central (Counterpoint, $26). This upsetting account of a Los Angeles serial killer, written with passion by Christine Pelisek, an investigative crime reporter who spent 10 years working the case, blurts out a hard truth that no one wants to acknowledge: "Body-dump cases" aren't sexy. L.A. loves its gaudy killers and gives them fun names like the Dating Game Killer and the Skid Row Slasher. But nobody bothers to baptize nonentities like Franklin, who killed an estimated 38 black, crack-addicted prostitutes since 2002 (many more, if you go back to the '90s and count the ones in Fresno) and dumped their remains all over the county. As "the most invisible and vulnerable class of people," dead prostitutes are small potatoes when you consider that in 2006 there were six serial killers preying on the same 51-square-mile area of South Central L.A. Pelisek works up a froth of outrage about this and tries to restore dignity to some of the victims by drawing sympathetic and carefully detailed life histories for each and every one of them. The sad thing is, the recurring pattern of their lives - the unhappy home, the runaway escape, the demanding pimp, the drug addiction - destroys their individuality and makes each victim indistinguishable from all the others. Although women make ideal victims, not all women are born equal in the eyes of true crime writers. Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi touches on that raw nerve in the criminal justice system in UGLY PREY: An Innocent Woman and the Death Sentence That Scandalized Jazz Age Chicago (Chicago Review, $26.99). By revisiting the forgotten 1923 case of Sabella Nitti, the first woman sentenced to be hanged in Chicago, she exposes the real reason behind that harshest of legal judgments. Unlike those blond babes (like Roxie Hart, the floozy in the musical "Chicago") who were cleared of homicide by all-male jury trials, Sabella, an Italian immigrant who was as plain as a mud fence, was destined for the gallows. "It was the defendant's looks, most women agreed, that brought in the guilty verdict. The juries in Chicago were biased, and a beautiful woman . . . got away with murder, but women like Sabella got the noose," Lucchesi notes. Poor, illiterate and unable to understand English, Sabella was accused, without proof, of murdering her abusive husband. But in the unkind words of one female reporter, she was a "dumb, crouching, animal-like peasant" with dark, leathery skin and greasy hair. In Sabella's own cynical judgment, "Pretty woman always not guilty." Grace Humiston was an advocate for an earlier generation of lost and forgotten women, and her inspiring story demands a hearing. In MRS. SHERLOCK HOLMES: The True Story of New York City's Greatest Female Detective and the 1917 Missing Girl Case That Captivated a Nation (St. Martin's, $27.99), Brad Ricca makes a heroic case for Humiston, a lawyer and United States district attorney who forged a career of defending powerless women and immigrants. She took on causes like the exploitation of illiterate Italian laborers and the sexual enslavement of young girls. For her dogged work on the 1917 case of a missing girl that the police had given up on, the newspapers called her "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes." With the snow coming down on a bitter cold day in February, 18-year-old Ruth Cruger lefther family's home in Harlem to take her ice skates to a repair shop and promptly disappeared. Pretty young girls who go missing put the police on high alert and make the New York tabloid press go nuts. A month later, the police found a witness who saw Ruth get into a taxicab with a young man. After that, the trail went cold. But Humiston persevered, tracing her to a cellar where a local gang kept girls bound for the South American white slave trade. Yes! You can read it here: There really was a South American white slave trade, and crusaders like Grace Humiston really did rescue young girls from "a fate worse than death." Authors of true crime books have made a cottage industry out of analyzing what makes killers tick. Michael Cannell gives credit where credit is due in INCENDIARY: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling (Minotaur, $26.99) by profiling one of the pioneers, Dr. James A. Brussel, a New York psychiatrist who specialized in the criminal mind. In 1920, a horse-drawn wagon carrying 100 pounds of dynamite pulled up on Wall Street and exploded, killing 38 people and igniting a raging fire that swept down the street and sent hundreds of pedestrians running for their lives. The bomber was never caught, and "for the first time the word terrorism gained currency in the American vocabulary." The concept of domestic terrorism flared up anew in 1951, when a "mad bomber" who signed his work F.P. set offa bomb in the so-called whispering gallery of Grand Central Terminal, right outside the famed Oyster Bar. With an uncanny eye for locations sure to unnerve New Yorkers, F.P. set offdevices at the Paramount Theater, an old movie palace in Times Square; the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue; the Port Authority Bus Terminal; and in the lobby of Con Edison headquarters. (It turned out that F.P. had a legitimate beef with Con Ed.) After 28 attacks, Dr. Brussel, a Freudian psychiatrist who ministered to patients at Creedmoor state mental hospital, used "reverse psychology," a precursor of criminal profiling, to identify features of the bomber - his "sexuality, race, appearance, work history and personality type." Aside from an unseemly fight over the $26,000 reward money, the case was a genuine groundbreaker in criminal forensics. But enough about the good guys. Let's get back to the killers. Personally, I am partial to historical legends like "The Greatest Criminal of This Expiring Century," the man who terrorized Chicago during the 1893 World's Fair. "The Archfiend of the Age," to give him another of his many sobriquets, was said to have murdered "hundreds" of tourists who came for the World's Fair by luring them into his "Murder Castle," with its many secret passages and torture chambers. In H. H. HOLMES: The True History of the White City Devil (Skyhorse, $26.99), Adam Selzer concedes (a bit reluctantly, it seems) that it's all hogwash, tall tales aggregated by the newspapers out of gossip and rumor. Although Holmes confessed to 20 murders (and several aborted attempts), he was only ever suspected of a single murder, and those unseen rooms were probably for warehousing stolen furniture. Psychologists and criminologists promptly dismissed Holmes's detailed confession of his crimes, but his lurid storytelling made for stimulating reading. ("I cut his body into pieces that would pass through the door of the stove.") And the case continues to fascinate, as indicated by the huge success of Erik Larson's "The Devil in the White City." Let's end this on a classy note, by returning to Paris during la Belle Époque, when everyone knew how to dress. In THE COURTESAN AND THE GIGOLO: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Stanford University, cloth, $85, paper, $24.95), Aaron Freundschuh rings the graveyard church bells for a refined, if corrupt fin de siècleworld that passed away with a sigh. When the Paris police prefecture got word in March 1887 of a triple homicide on the Rue Montaigne, he knew what he had - yet another senseless murder of women from the Parisian demimonde. But this time attention had to be paid, because one of the victims, Madame de Montille, was a courtesan belonging to "an ethereal rank" of kept women known for their professional skills and fabulous wealth. The level of butchery linked the killings to a series of unsolved homicides that began eight years earlier. Had Jack the Ripper not made his dramatic appearance a year later, Freundschuh convincingly argues, the courtesan killings would have entered into the historical annals. These atrocities are every bit as disturbing as the Ripper killings, and the images of the victims should be approached with caution. For that matter, all true crime books should be approached with caution because they lack the gauzy perspective of fiction. But the hazards of the genre are worth it, because for all the imaginative thrills of a tall tale, nothing beats a true story. What's a great true crime book for summer vacation? "In Erik Larson's adept hands, the story of a long-ago serial killer in 'The Devil in the White City' reads like a gut-pummeling horror film. Readers are made to feel unsettled and uplifted." -MICHAEL CANNELL
Kirkus Review
A recently retired high-ranking New York City police supervisor recounts his career, with an emphasis on his unpleasant but necessary assignment flushing out corrupt cops.With assistance from journalist Dillow (co-author: Trauma Red: The Making of a Surgeon in War and in America's Cities, 2014, etc.), Campisi offers a compelling, educational, memorable account of his rise through the police department ranks until he was ordered to accept an assignment no cop ever wanted: to become part of the Internal Affairs Bureau, hostilely known among rank-and-file police as "the rat squad." Before his appointment, the bureau had been viewed as a dumping ground for incompetent, lazy, or previously dirty officers. With aggressive support from a new police chief, Campisi found ways to alter the reputation of the bureau while also improving techniques to catch and punish cops who cut corners, stole drugs, or employed excessive force. The author does not shy away from going behind the scenes of infamous cases, including the brutalizing of Abner Louima and the shooting death of Amadou Diallo. Refreshingly, Campisi rarely comes across as defensive about the police department, but he does emphasize that an overwhelming percentage of the 30,000-plus cops on the job in NYC handle their responsibilities as prescribed. Another element that Campisi relates without sounding defensive is the idea of the "blue wall of silence"good cops protecting corrupt cops. The author writes convincingly that such protective behavior is also common among physicians, lawyers, and many other professions. Though Campisi expected to remain within the Internal Affairs Bureau for two years, he served there for a record-setting 21 years before retiring in 2014. He is worried that since his retirement, the unit's aggressiveness might have been de-emphasized, with a parallel concern that the lax screening of cops might lead to terrorist infiltration of the NYPD. This superb memoir can be read for its sheer entertainment or as a primer on police workor both. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Blue on Blue Chapter 1 THE KIND OF COP I DIDN'T WANT TO BE Three stories about the kind of cop I didn't want to be. Story One. It's an early-summer evening in 1977, in Brooklyn's 73rd Precinct, the Seven-Three, and I'm chasing a kid down a cracked and cratered sidewalk lined with stripped cars and boarded-up and burned-out apartment buildings. There's another Seven-Three cop with me, and we're both yelling--Police! Stop! Police! Stop!--but of course the kid's not stopping. He keeps running--and the funny thing is, we're actually gaining on him. Ordinarily we wouldn't have a chance with a kid like this. We're both wearing full NYPD gear--blue uniforms, hats, belts, guns, extra ammo, radios, nightsticks, handcuffs, flashlights, clunky Knapp shoes--while the kid, a teenager, is wearing a white T-shirt and dark pants and black Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers; he ought to be leaving us in the dust. But the kid's problem is that over his right shoulder he's carrying a big black plastic garbage bag filled with swag from a burglary, and it's holding him back. Stop! Police! Police! Stop! We're almost on him, and now the kid makes a decision. He lets go of the plastic bag and takes off like a shot. Without the bag slowing him down, it's like he's turned on the afterburners. No way we're going to be able to run him down. And then something dangerous happens--something dangerous to the kid and, as it turns out, dangerous to my future as a cop. Of course, dangerous occurrences aren't unusual in the Seven-Three; in this precinct, dangerous occurrences are just another day at the office. The Seven-Three, which covers the Brownsville and Ocean Hill neighborhoods of Brooklyn, is what's known as an "A" Precinct or an "A" House, meaning it's a high-crime precinct--and for cops, it's a hard-luck precinct as well. There are a lot of good and dedicated cops in the Seven-Three in 1977, but it's also fair to say that the vast majority of them wish they were somewhere else--almost anyplace else. A few Seven-Three cops like the action, but most wound up there either through bad luck of the draw, like me, or because they'd gotten jammed up with their bosses in another precinct and had been sent there as a kind of unofficial administrative punishment. A precinct like the Seven-Three has a certain end-of-the-line quality to it. The attitude is: So what if my shoes aren't shined at roll call? So what if I duck that radio run? What are they going to do, send me to the Seven-Three? Still, even as they wish they were elsewhere, cops in an "A" House like the Seven-Three often take a perverse pride in working in a high-crime precinct. They look down on cops in lower-crime "B" and "C" precincts as something less than real cops, shirkers almost, and they give their own precincts nicknames that reflect the seemingly besieged and forgotten nature of their existence. The South Bronx has the 41st Precinct, the Four-One, which is called "Fort Apache"--later made famous in the Paul Newman movie Fort Apache, The Bronx--and to the west of us, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, there's the 77th Precinct, the Seven-Seven, known as "The Alamo." At the Seven-Three, we are "Fort Zinderneuf," or "Fort Z" for short, named after the far-flung and doomed French Foreign Legion outpost in Beau Geste. In the movie, the Legionnaires propped up the bodies of their dead comrades in the parapets to make the hostile tribesmen think the fort was more strongly defended than it really was. And that's what we are in the Seven-Three: bodies propped in the parapets, trying to hold crime at bay. And crime--murder, rape, robbery, drug dealing--is the one thing Brownsville has no shortage of. Once a thriving immigrant community, with a commercial section of furniture stores and greengrocers and kosher butcher shops along Pitkin Avenue, over the preceding decades its population has dropped by half--and what's left is a mile-square portrait of urban catastrophe. Half of the apartment buildings are abandoned, and half of those are blackened hulks, victims of arson or squatters' cooking and trash fires; the rest are boarded up in a hopeless attempt to keep out the skells and the junkies. Garbage pickup is haphazard at best, stripped cars sit for months without being towed, most of the fire hydrants don't work; in 1977 the city is still in a financial crisis, and Brownsville, which is almost exclusively black and Hispanic, is the last place the city is going to spend any money it doesn't have to. The remaining shops along Pitkin Avenue--drugstores, shoe stores, pizzerias, small grocery stores, most of them white-owned--struggle to hang on, but they hide behind heavy steel grates and shutters, even in the daytime, and at the end of the day, ideally before darkness sets in, the owners close up and scurry away, fearing for their lives. It's not that there aren't good people in Brownsville, and in Ocean Hill, too, another neighborhood in the precinct that's gone to rot. They're poor people--in 1977, except for the bigger drug dealers, every single person who lives in Brownsville is poor--and they're good people. But sometimes even the decent people look at us as if the disaster they're living in is our fault: You're the cops. Why can't you do something? As for the bad guys--the players, the dealers, the cornerboys, the gang members--they look at us with pure, undisguised hatred. The hatred isn't always passive. Some years earlier a guy had lunged out of an alley near the corner of Saratoga and Blake and virtually decapitated a Seven-Three police officer with a butcher knife. Gunfire is a nightly occurrence, and you constantly have to watch out for "air mail"--bricks or bottles or chunks of concrete or other debris being thrown from a rooftop or a window onto your head. Seven-Three cops even have a little jingle they sing about it: Bricks and bottles rain down on me / Because I work in the Seven-Three! Sometimes the missiles thrown at us are less dangerous but more disgusting. Once, earlier on, I'm in a sector car with a Seven-Three veteran when we get an Aided call at an occupied three-story apartment house--"Aided" means someone is having some kind of medical problem. When we roll up to the address I start to get out of the car, but my partner grabs my arm and tells me to hold on a second. He's looking through the car window at the building, up at the roof, and either experience or some sixth sense tells him something's wrong. This is a piss-bag, kid, he tells me, and sure enough, a few seconds later--splat!--a waxed brown paper lunch bag full of piss hits the sidewalk next to the car and bursts apart. Someone had telephoned in a phony Aided call just for the sheer joy of throwing a bagful of human urine at us. And it wouldn't be the last time, either. Piss-bags raining from the rooftops. Welcome to Fort Z. Like I said, in 1977 there are a lot of good cops in the Seven-Three. But if you aren't careful, if you take the crime and the misery and the hatred and the piss-bags personally, there's a good chance you might start thinking about throwing the piss-bags back. Which maybe explains what almost happens to the kid with the black plastic garbage bag. I'm not a complete rookie, I've got a few years on the job, but I'm new in the Seven-Three, so I don't have a "seat," a permanent assignment; I show up at roll call and I go where they tell me. On this particular early-summer evening I'm assigned to a foot post on Pitkin Avenue between Rockaway and Stone, and the adjoining streets--about six blocks in all. It's been a quiet tour so far, and when I get to the boundary of my post I see another Seven-Three cop who's working the adjoining post. I don't really know this guy--we'll call him Officer Romeo--but he's got a few more years on the job than I do, and he's been in the Seven-Three longer. I've heard some vague talk that he's got an attitude, and that some cops don't like to work with him. But it's just that, vague talk. So I walk across the street to his post to shoot the breeze for a minute. Hey, what's goin' on? Nothin' much. You? Nothin' much. Then, while we're talking, a citizen leans out of a second-story window in the building next to us and calls out: Officer! Officer! They're robbing the beauty parlor around the corner! So Romeo and I take off running, and as we round the corner we see the kid clambering out of a first-story window with that big plastic bag. We see him, he sees us, and the chase is on. There are a couple of things I notice at this point. One is that while the guy in the second-story window had said it was a robbery, which is the taking of property from a person by force or intimidation, it actually looks more like a burglary, which is criminal trespass with intent to commit a crime, in this case larceny. There's a "Closed" sign on the beauty parlor door, and the kid with the bag came out a window, so there's probably nobody inside the beauty parlor, which means it's not a robbery. Burglary and robbery are both felonies, but in practice burglary is a less serious crime. And the other thing I notice is that after the kid drops the black plastic bag and starts to pull away from us, Officer Romeo draws his gun, stops running, and takes a combat stance with his .38 revolver pointed at the running kid's back. He's taking careful aim. And I'm thinking: He's going to shoot this kid. No way. I stop, too, and I reach out and push Romeo's gun toward the ground, yelling, Don't shoot! DON'T SHOOT! And Romeo gives me a look that's first surprise, and then pure rage. What the fuck are you doing? he yells at me. What are you doing? I yell back. We can't shoot! He's just a kid! Fuck you! He's getting away! In the old days it might have been different. Back then, under the law, a cop could in some circumstances legally shoot a suspect who was fleeing the scene of a dangerous or violent crime such as an armed robbery. But in the early 1970s both state law and NYPD policy began changing. Now the Department allows cops to shoot only if the suspect poses an imminent threat of death or serious injury to the cop or someone else. The short form is that in most cases you can't shoot a perp who's running away. Still, there are gray areas--there always are. If Romeo shoots that kid, maybe he can claim that he thought the kid had reached for a weapon in his waistband. If he tells a good enough story, maybe the shooting will fly, especially if his partner, meaning me, backs him up. Fortunately for the kid, and for Romeo, and for me, it doesn't happen that way. As Romeo and I are arguing, out of the corner of my eye I see the kid duck into an abandoned apartment building a half block down the street. Argument temporarily forgotten, Romeo and I run down the street and into the building. Like the hundreds of other abandoned buildings in Brownsville, this one is a mess. The mongo men, the scrap metal scavengers, have already been through it, stripping out everything they can get a few cents on the pound for--plumbing, electrical wires, kitchen sinks, doorknobs and hinges, radiators. The skells and the junkies have camped out in it, throwing their garbage in the corners, sleeping or shooting up in one room and taking their dumps and pisses on the floor in another room--assuming they had the initiative to go to another room. The smell in the building is beyond belief--so bad, in fact, that even the junkies and bums have abandoned it. With our flashlights out--guns out, too, just in case--Romeo and I start a room-to-room, looking for the kid. In a second-story apartment, in a trash pile with a hinge-less door dragged on top of it, I see a black Chuck Taylor Converse sneaker poking out--and the foot inside it is shaking. All right, buddy, I call out, we got you. Come out of there, and let us see your hands. So the kid crawls out, covered in trash, hands up and still shaking. Later I find out he's sixteen. He's probably expecting some street justice for having run from us--not a savage beating, but at least a few thumps. And maybe under other circumstances, with another cop, his expectations might be justified. Remember, this is 1977. And this is the Seven-Three. Please don't hurt me, the kid says. I don't feel sorry for this kid. He's old enough to know better, and chances are this isn't the first crime he's committed, and it won't be the last. But I don't take his running away from us personally. We aren't going to hurt you, I tell him. But you're under arrest. So we search the kid--no weapons--and then cuff him and start marching him back to the precinct. On the way we grab the black plastic bag, and inside it there's a bunch of old hair dryers and brushes and scissors and half-empty bottles of shampoo--junk. The whole score probably isn't worth ten bucks. At the precinct, Romeo takes the arrest--it was his post, so it's his collar--and starts processing the kid into the juvenile justice system. I go back to walking my post. And that should have been the end of it. Except that over the next couple days I notice that some of the other cops in Fort Z are looking at me sideways. Like I said, I'm pretty new in the precinct, and they're looking at me like they're wondering what kind of cop I am. It turns out that after we brought the kid to the precinct, after I had gone back on post, Romeo started bad-mouthing me to other cops. I didn't back him up, he said. I was weak, he said. I was a pussy, he said, a coward. Calling a cop a coward is the second-worst accusation you can make against him, especially in a precinct like Fort Z. If other cops think you don't have the guts to fight when fighting is necessary, or that you won't back up a partner, they won't want to work with you, or even talk to you. You'll be shunned, ostracized. The only way you could be more shunned and ostracized is if the other cops think you're a cheese-eating rat, an informer, a guy who squeals on other cops. But what am I going to do? I can't go around saying: Hey, I'm no coward! That in itself would seem pathetic and weak. All I can do is keep my mouth shut and do my job. The next day the Seven-Three delegate to the PBA--Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the cop union--catches me in the locker room. He's a veteran, been there forever. He's heard the talk. So he asks me: Hey, kid, what really happened out there? Talking to your PBA rep is a little like talking to a priest. He isn't going to tell the bosses what you say; you aren't ratting anybody out. So I tell him the whole story, and when I'm done he pats me on the knee and says: Well, kid, you probably saved yourself a trip to the grand jury--meaning that if Officer Romeo had shot that kid in the back, I probably would have been called before a criminal grand jury to testify. I don't tell the PBA rep this, but if that had happened, I know what I would have done. I would have told the truth--that the kid was running away, that I hadn't seen a weapon, that in my opinion there was no reason to shoot. Even if it ruins my career as a working cop, even if in other cops' eyes it makes me a cheese-eating rat, I'll tell the truth. After that I don't hear any more about it. The PBA rep doesn't really know me, but I guess he knows Officer Romeo, and he must have passed the word that I'm okay. I don't get any more sideways looks. As it turns out, I don't stay in the Seven-Three that much longer--and neither does Romeo, although for different reasons. A few years later I hear that he'd gotten jammed up for shooting and wounding a family member during a domestic dispute and was kicked out of the Department. Of course, in the context of the Seven-Three, this incident with the running kid was no big deal. Romeo hadn't actually done anything illegal, nobody got shot, we made the arrest. But it made me realize something about myself. I knew that no matter how many piss-bags rained down from rooftops, no matter how much crime and violence and hatred I saw, I wasn't going to let the job turn me into the kind of cop who would shoot a running teenager in the back over a two-bit burglary. And if I saw another cop do something like that, no matter what the consequences, I wasn't going to cover it up. That wasn't the kind of cop I wanted to be. * * * Story Two. It's the spring of 1974 and I'm fresh out of the Academy, assigned to Manhattan Traffic Area, which covers Manhattan south of Ninety-Sixth Street from the East River to the Hudson. I'm standing in a coffee shop on Second Avenue, arguing with the owner about whether I have to pay for a cup of coffee. It's not what you think. I'm arguing that I should pay. And the coffee shop owner is arguing just as strongly that I shouldn't. This little drama had started just a few minutes earlier. It's a rainy day, so my partner and I are in an RMP--Radio Mobile Patrol, a marked patrol car--in uniform, riding around and responding to radio calls. At one point, my partner, Ed, a classmate from the Academy, and I decide to get a cup of coffee. Well, it's coffee for Ed. For me it's hot tea, milk no sugar. Yeah, I know. Cops are supposed to drink coffee, the blacker and more viscous the better; if your spoon won't stand up straight in it, it's not really coffee. But I like tea. Anyway, we pull the car in front of a coffee shop on Second Avenue. It's my turn to buy, so Ed, who's driving, stays in the car while I go in. It's a small place, half a dozen stools at the counter, a few booths along the wall; there are maybe ten customers in there. I walk up to the counter and give the counterman/owner my order--large coffee, black, extra sugar, large tea, milk no sugar, to go, please--and he turns around and walks over to the coffee machine. A minute later he comes back with two steaming Styrofoam cups. This is 1974, remember, so a cup of coffee costs a dime, and the same for tea. I don't have any coins, so while the counterman is getting the coffee I fish a dollar bill out of my wallet. But when I try to hand him the dollar, he puts his hands in the air and steps back like the dollar bill is radioactive. Oh, no, Officer, he says. For you, no charge. Free. Thanks, I tell him, but I'll pay. Just give me the change. No, no, no, he says. Free. No charge. Thanks, but no, really, I want to pay. Hey, like I said, no charge. I know this coffee shop owner isn't trying to bribe me with the free coffee. He's not trying to give me free coffee because he's afraid if he doesn't I'll start hanging summonses on every car that's parked in front of his shop. He wants to give me the free coffee because he likes having uniformed cops in his shop. It's like an insurance policy against crime. Even the most brain-dead mope isn't going to try to rob a place that has cop cars parked out front and a steady stream of guys in blue going in and out. And for most cops, free coffee or a discount on a meal is just part of the job; they don't give it a second thought. But I still want to pay. So we keep going back and forth like this, until the counterman, a short Greek guy, starts getting a little hot about it, like it's a point of honor or something. He's waving his arms and saying in a loud voice: Officer, for you, free! Finally he walks over to the far end of the counter and won't even look at me. Now, as a cop, you're always watching people, but when you're in uniform you know that people are also watching you. As I'm standing there at the counter with that unwanted dollar bill in my hand, I can feel the eyes on my back, and I can imagine what the other customers are thinking. Half of them are probably thinking: Whaddaya, nuts? Take the free coffee already. And the other half are probably thinking: A cop who won't take a free cup'a coffee? Gimme a break. What kind of scam is this cop running? It's getting embarrassing. So finally I hold the dollar conspicuously up in the air and say, in what is probably a too-loud voice: I'm leaving the dollar on the counter! I slap the dollar on the counter, grab the coffee and the tea, and get out of there before the counterman can chase me down. I jump in the patrol car and we take off. And when I tell Ed what happened, about leaving the dollar on the counter, he starts laughing. Of course, the story gets around. The veterans, the old-timers, start saying things like, Hey, kid! Are you the one who paid a dollar for a ten-cent cup'a coffee? And then they laugh like crazy. Naturally I don't tell them that it wasn't just a cup of coffee, that I got a cup of tea as well. That would have only made them laugh harder. And they probably would have laughed harder still if they'd known that the incident at the coffee shop on Second Avenue--which I never went back to--wasn't the only time I'd had trouble paying for hot tea or a sandwich while I was in uniform. It happened all the time--although in most cases, when I insisted on paying, the owner or cashier would eventually shrug and say: Okay, if that's the way you want it. The fact is that in my entire career as a cop, I never took a meal or a cup of coffee--or tea--on the arm. Never. Maybe you're wondering why. It's not just because the Patrol Guide, the NYPD cop's bible, prohibits accepting gratuities of any kind, free coffee and sandwiches included, and I'm afraid I'll get caught. The Patrol Guide prohibits a lot of things, from wearing white socks with your uniform to using a blue-ink pen instead of a black-ink pen to write a parking ticket. The Patrol Guide is about four inches thick, and even the most conscientious, by-the-book cop in the Department probably can't get through a shift without violating some obscure section of it. Besides, who's going to turn you in? The restaurant owner who, without being asked, gives you the free coffee or the discounted meal in the first place? Or your partner? C'mon. And I don't refuse to accept free meals because I really believe all those cautionary tales they told us in the Academy, about how taking even a single cup of coffee on the arm would inevitably put you on a slippery slope that will end up with you stealing wallets from DOAs (dead people) or ripping off drug dealers. I never thought a good cop turned into a bad cop because of a ten-cent cup of coffee. And it's not because I'm some kind of naturally saintly guy. I never lack for things to talk to the priest about when I go to confession. No, the reason I turn down the free coffee is because I figured out early on that, except for the occasional argument with a cashier, it just makes the job easier. If I take a free sandwich, it makes it harder to say no if the coffee shop owner wants me to give him a break on double-parked delivery trucks, or if he wants me to drop what I'm doing and scatter some teenagers who are loitering in front of his shop. I might bounce the teenagers or give a break on the delivery truck anyway, but it won't be because I think I owe the guy something. I'll do it because it's good police work--nothing more, nothing less. And when you do your job that way, the word gets around. Oh yeah, you're the one who paid a dollar for a cup'a coffee. You develop a reputation among other cops as a straight shooter, a guy who follows the rules and puts in an honest shift--a straight eight. As long as they don't suspect you of being a rat, other cops, even the less than honest ones, don't hold being an honest cop against you. They figure, hey, that's just the way he is. The point is that despite what some people may believe, in the NYPD being an honest cop doesn't hurt you with other cops. In fact, a reputation for being a straight shooter protects you. Which is why I can also say that during my entire time as an NYPD police officer, with the exception of a cop taking an occasional free cup of coffee or a discounted meal, I never once personally witnessed an NYPD cop engaging in an act of financial corruption. That may not sound believable. After all, I came on the job just after the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption--better known as the Knapp Commission--had held hearings and released its final report. After hearing testimony from honest cops like Frank Serpico, later portrayed by Al Pacino in the popular film, and from dishonest cops who'd gotten caught, among others, the commission concluded that corruption was "an extensive, Department-wide phenomenon," ranging from cops shaking down tow-truck drivers and prostitutes to cops selling drugs. According to the commission, corruption in the NYPD was rampant and systemic. So how can I not see it? Am I blind? Or just stupid? I'm neither. What you have to understand is that especially after Knapp, when the anticorruption heat was on, no bad cop with half a brain is going to rifle a cash register after a burglary call or roll a well-dressed drunk at a bus stop in front of you unless he's absolutely certain you're a corrupt cop, too. If you have a reputation as an honest cop, he would no more steal money in front of you than he would steal money in front of the police commissioner himself. And your reputation will follow you. Even in a Department with thirty or forty thousand cops (the number varies) there's always somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows you. Calls will be made and the word will get around--and if you're an honest cop, the bad cops will leave you alone. So yeah, I was the cop who paid a dollar for a ten-cent cup of coffee--and a tea. If I hadn't paid, if I had accepted that free cup of coffee, it wouldn't have been any big earthshaking deal. But that wasn't the kind of cop I wanted to be. * * * Story Three. It's 1978, a couple weeks before Christmas, and after a twenty-month layoff caused by the city's 1975 financial crisis--more on that later--and another stint at the Seven-Three, I'm back in Manhattan Traffic Area, assigned to the Scooter Task Force. On the Task Force we ride around in two-wheel Lambrettas or three-wheel Cushmans, mostly handling traffic and security and crowd control for special events--demonstrations, parades, VIP visits, and so on--but also taking other radio jobs as well. It's a good assignment for me. The hours are regular, and since I've just gotten married, and have been studying for the sergeant's test, that's important. True, it's not as exciting as being in the Seven-Three. Positive side? In 1978 Manhattan South still has its share of crime, but you generally don't have piss-bags raining down on you from the rooftops. On this particular day there's a demonstration scheduled at City Hall by tow-truck drivers, who are mad about something--in New York, somebody's always demonstrating about something--so I'm at the corner of Church and Dey Streets, on Scooter No. 3830, getting ready to divert traffic away from the demonstration area. Then at exactly 9:10 a.m.--the timing is important here--a cab pulls up next to me. Hey, Officer, the cabbie says, a fare left her briefcase in the backseat. She was gone before I saw it. What should I do? The Patrol Guide has the answer. It has the answer to almost every conceivable circumstance, including "found property" in the back of a yellow cab. I radio my patrol sergeant that I've got some found property and then I take the briefcase out of the backseat--it's nothing fancy, just a plain hard-leather briefcase--and put it on the trunk of the cab. I take out my memo book and start writing down the t/p/o--time, place, occurrence--and the cabbie's pedigree: name, address, phone number, medallion number, and so on. The briefcase isn't locked, so we open it together and look inside. There's not much, just a single credit card and some business papers that have a woman's name, address, and phone number on them. I inventory it all in my memo book, and I give the cabbie a receipt with my name and badge number. While I'm doing this the sergeant shows up, and I tell him what happened and he "scratches"--signs--my memo book with his name and the date and time: 12/13/78, 9:20 a.m. The cabbie leaves, and I've still got the briefcase. I don't want to carry it around with me in the scooter, so I ask the sergeant if I can take it over to the First Precinct house and voucher it. He's says okay, but be back by ten a.m. No problem. I drive over to the precinct, and the DO--the desk officer, a lieutenant--enters my name and the date and time in the Interrupted Patrol Log, which records why I'm off my post. The lieutenant checks the briefcase contents and hands me the voucher, which I put in my memo book. I go over to a typewriter and start pecking out the found property report, in carbon-paper quadruplicate. Then I call the phone number on the business papers and reach the woman who lost the briefcase. I tell her where she can pick up her briefcase, and what was in it when I opened it, and she agrees that there were just some papers and the one credit card. She's grateful--the papers aren't valuable, but they are important--and she keeps thanking me. No problem, ma'am, all part of the job. I hang up, log out at the desk, and I'm back on my post at 9:50. And then I don't give the incident even a second thought until just after Christmas, when I'm at roll call and the sergeant hands me a letter ordering me to report to the Manhattan South Field Internal Affairs Unit the following week, and to bring my memo book for December 13. Internal Affairs. The cops who go after other cops. Before the Knapp Commission, most police corruption and misconduct allegations were handled--or, some would charge, not handled--by precinct or borough commanders. After Knapp, the Department created the Internal Affairs Division, with a central office on Poplar Street in Brooklyn, and Field Internal Affairs Units stationed in every borough command. In the late 1970s there are about a hundred cops assigned full-time to Internal Affairs and another two hundred to the borough FIAUs. And with the possible exception of their mothers and their wives, everybody hates them. Sure, most cops acknowledge the need for some kind of internal anticorruption effort. As Knapp made clear, the old system obviously hadn't worked. But that doesn't mean that you have to actually like the IAD guys--and even the most honest and by-the-book cops don't. The IAD guys have a terrible reputation among the cop rank and file. As far as most cops are concerned, other cops go into IAD for only three reasons: one, they're cowards or shirkers who are too afraid or too lazy to work on the street; two, they're rats who got jammed up by their own corruption or misconduct and agreed to work for IAD and rat out other cops to save their own skins; or three, they're zealots who simply get a sick and twisted pleasure out of persecuting cops. It might not have been so bad if IAD also had a reputation for rooting out serious corruption and misconduct. But it doesn't. In the rank-and-file view, IAD seems more interested in busting cops for administrative violations--not wearing their hats when they get out of a patrol car, calling in sick so they can go to their daughter's dance recital, that sort of thing--than in spending the time and effort to go after really bad cops. Of course, the stereotype of IAD guys isn't accurate in every individual case. Some cops went into IAD so they could get the necessary investigative experience to qualify for a detective's gold shield, and IAD was one of the few avenues open to them. Some guys went into IAD because they honestly wanted to help rid the Department of bad cops. Still, the stereotype is accurate often enough that it is the stereotype. The regular cops are us, and IAD is them. They're the "rat squad," and nobody wants anything to do with them. But even as cops despise the IAD guys, they also fear them. Cops figure that even if they're innocent, the IAD guys can always find something. So a summons from Internal Affairs isn't something to be taken lightly. For a good cop it's a source of concern; for a cop with problems, it's a source of mortal dread. They never tell you what you're being called in for, what the allegation is. But the date of the memo book pages they order you to bring can give you a hint. So I go back and look at my memo book for December 13. There weren't any really unusual incidents, no arguments with a citizen that could have generated a complaint, no use of force, no complicated reports that I might have screwed up. The only thing that stands out on that day is that briefcase in the back of the taxi. I know I'd done everything by the book, and then some. But who knows? Maybe the woman changed her mind and decided that there had been some cash in the briefcase that was missing. Maybe the cabbie had used the credit card to make a quick purchase before he turned it in to me, and when the woman got the card statement she filed a complaint. It doesn't seem likely, but it's possible. Still, I have everything documented, so I'm not worried--or at least not too worried. Per SOP (standard operating procedure), I call my PBA rep and tell him I've been summoned, and he says he'll meet me there. So the next week at the appointed time I show up at the Manhattan South FIAU offices, which are on an upstairs floor at the 17th Precinct. I meet my PBA rep outside, and I ask him what's going on, why have I been called in? He shrugs and says, I dunno, something about a Christmas tree. Huh? What? A Christmas tree? Now I'm really confused. Two Internal Affairs guys in suits and ties are waiting for us. One of them is a regular police officer, a young guy who's the case officer, the other an older IAD sergeant. They aren't smiling, and they don't shake our hands. They usher us into a small, windowless, bare-walled room with a plain wood table and some chairs. It's exactly the sort of room in which squad detectives interview suspects--except in this room the suspects are cops. In police jargon it's called a "GO" room--"gee-oh"--an outdated but still used reference to General Order 15, the old NYPD regulation concerning administrative disciplinary hearings. On the table there's one of those old reel-to-reel tape recorders, and when the PBA rep and I sit down the IAD guys turn on the tape, identify themselves, state the date and time, and then tell me to state my name and shield number. Then they inform me that this is an official administrative hearing under PG Section 118-19, and they read me what's known as my Garrity rights. "Garrity" was a 1960s Supreme Court case that grew out of a police ticket-fixing investigation in New Jersey. Basically it held that a public employee can be ordered to give a statement in an administrative disciplinary hearing and can be fired if he refuses to answer or lies. But it also held that since it's a compelled statement, made under threat of termination, under the Fifth Amendment anything the employee says cannot be used against him in a criminal proceeding. Do you understand your rights, Officer Campisi? the IAD guy asks me. Are you satisfied with your representation? Are you ready to answer questions? I tell them I am. Officer Campisi, he says, were you on duty with the Manhattan Traffic Area Scooter Task Force on December 13 at approximately 9:30 a.m.? Yes. What was your scooter number? Three-eight-three-oh. Officer Campisi, the IAD guy says, were you aware of a Christmas tree lot situated at the corner of Greenwich and Seventh Avenue? Well, I know the intersection, I say. But I didn't know there was a Christmas tree lot there. And then comes the money ball. Officer Campisi, the IAD guy says, at approximately 9:30 a.m. on December 13, 1978, did you drive your NYPD scooter number three-eight-three-oh onto the Christmas tree lot at Greenwich and Seventh and intentionally remove from the premises without paying for it one approximately six-foot-tall noble fir Christmas tree? The question is so unexpected, so out of left field, that it takes me a moment to answer. Absolutely not! Later I get the story. It seems that a citizen had filed a complaint alleging that an NYPD cop on a Department scooter had driven onto the lot, hoisted a Christmas tree onto the back of his scooter, and taken off. The only description he had was that the suspect was wearing a blue NYPD uniform and that the number on the scooter started with three-eight; the last two digits had been obscured by the branches of the Christmas tree. So Internal Affairs is calling in every scooter cop with a three-eight scooter series number who had been in the area--about a dozen of us--under suspicion of having stolen the Christmas tree. Well, if it had happened the way the complainant said it did--maybe it did, maybe it didn't--it was a pretty stupid thing for a cop to do. Maybe the cop thought it was just a prank, something to show the boys back at the precinct--Hey, look, I got us a Christmas tree for the lounge! But what it was was petit larceny, and if that same cop had seen someone else do it he would have collared him for theft. It was the sort of thing that made cops look bad, so if it happened, I halfway hoped that IAD would catch the guy. But I want these IAD guys to understand that it wasn't me. I wasn't anywhere near Greenwich and Seventh, I tell them. And I certainly didn't steal a Christmas tree. Can you prove that, Officer Campisi? they say. Yes, in fact, I can. So I show them my memo book, with the notes on the found briefcase and the patrol sergeant's scratch by the time and date. I tell them about the DO's time and date entry in the precinct's Interrupted Patrol Log, and about the call to the briefcase owner, and the sergeant seeing me back on post. It's all there in my memo book. Unless I'm in two places at once, there's no way I could have been stealing a Christmas tree at the corner of Greenwich and Seventh at 9:30 a.m. 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. Excerpted from Blue on Blue: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. ix |
Timeline | p. xi |
Prologue: We're Watching | p. 1 |
Chapter 1 The Kind of Cop I Didn't Want to Be | p. 7 |
Chapter 2 Shield No. 791 | p. 29 |
Chapter 3 There's a New IAB in Town | p. 64 |
Chapter 4 To Catch a Crooked Cop | p. 91 |
Chapter 5 Testing, Testing, Testing... | p. 104 |
Chapter 6 Officer Involved | p. 127 |
Chapter 7 Excessive Force | p. 157 |
Chapter 8 If They've Got the Blonde, We've Got a Problem | p. 182 |
Chapter 9 Wait a Minute-Those Guys Aren't Cops! | p. 212 |
Chapter 10 Other Agencies | p. 232 |
Chapter 11 Cannibals in the Ether | p. 257 |
Chapter 12 It's Not a Courtesy, It's a Crime | p. 281 |
Chapter 13 Politics | p. 306 |
Epilogue | p. 333 |
Acknowledgments | p. 343 |