Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  “The blacks get our guys back to the front door. There’s a big tussle here. Three of the guys—Negron, Padilla, and Cardillo—they get cut off in the scramble.

  “The doors get slammed shut, and the uniforms are back outside. They kick in the plates and out come the pieces. Shots go up into the ceiling, warning shots.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Hey, Forensic was all over it. Bullet tracks, angle of incidence, the whole thing. This wasn’t just a cover-up. You think if the guys had wanted to shoot into that pack, they couldn’t have killed a few black guys? They had their own men in there, three of them anyway. No way were they shooting into the crowd. They just wanted them back from the doors.

  “They get back inside the building, they find Negron and Padilla, they’re okay. They find Cardillo on the floor with a bullet in him. Dying. He bails out later at Lenox Hill and they find a police slug in him. His gun? Well, it’s in handgun heaven. He’s got powder burns, stippling—he’s been shot from up close. You tell me, if he was shot by his own men, who were all by this time out in the street, one hell of a long way from Cardillo, then how come the powder burns? And where’s his gun? Or did he shoot himself in panic? Some of the Muslims said he committed suicide when he got cut off. Well, whatever they say, I know, and all the guys at the Two-Eight know that the Muslims took his gun and shot him. He died and that was that.”

  “Not exactly, Wolfie. There’s a hell of a scene in the streets. They called it a Ten-Forty-five and upped it to a Ten-Forty-six. Over the next couple of days, while your guys were holding some of the Muslims, all hell breaks loose in Harlem. Naturally, everybody at One Police Plaza is shitting themselves. Jesse Jackson, Rucker, and this Mr. Farrakhan work the crowd up, demanding their rights, demanding that the Muslims the NYPD is holding be released. Calling them ‘political prisoners.’ That’s what I remember most about it, Wolfie. We all thought it was going to spread into the Bronx. Harlem was ready to go. It was a hairy three days. The whole force was on its feet.”

  “Yeah, Eddie. All that shit happened, and what comes of it? Does anybody talk about Cardillo? The papers are all going on about did we have a right to enter a religious temple? Did we have to be so brutal? Couldn’t we have asked for permission? Why did we feel we had to violate the freedom to worship?”

  “Farrakhan met with the brass, didn’t he? As the leader of Mohammed Temple Number Seven, he was the man in the middle, wasn’t he?”

  Maksins pushed his plate away and drained his wineglass. “Yeah, he was the man. It was his mosque and we were holding his people. The cop who died shouldn’t have been there. Let My People Go.”

  Kennedy could feel some of his own anger at the mosque shooting coming back to him. It was at once strange and familiar. It was in his nature to push these things down deep. There seemed to be nothing else to do with them. The man who shot Cardillo wasn’t going to walk up to the gates of the Two-Eight and offer himself to the balance.

  “Your beef here, Wolfie, it’s not just about Farrakhan, is it? I remember who was the Deputy Commissioner then, just as well as you do. I know who told the Two-Eight to release the Muslims and to back off from the whole thing after he’d talked to Farrakhan and Jackson.”

  “Yeah, so do I. Oddly enough, another black guy. Benjamin Ward, now our revered leader.”

  “It’s not as simple as that, Wolfie.”

  “Yes, it is, Eddie. They took his gun and they shot him; he died, and they walked. It’s as simple as that. Ward thought he was going to have a riot if they didn’t. He had all the black honchos on his case. Jesse Jackson. Dudley Rucker. And Farrakhan.”

  “You’re saying he was in a conspiracy with them?”

  “No, no, I’m not. But they blew it. They rolled over and let those guys fuck the department over, and they let them kill a cop without doing a goddam thing about it. And now Ward’s the Commissioner, and he’s busting white cops all over town. You figure it out, Eddie.”

  “What white cops? Those SNAP cops at the One-Oh-Six? You think they didn’t do it? They didn’t zap those black kids with that stun gun? C’mon, Wolfie, grow up!”

  “Eddie, you know as well as I do that the dealers and the pushers in that area have been using those stun guns on each other ever since they came out. You can buy the things for eighty dollars up on Forty-second Street, right over the counter!”

  “You’re saying the SNAP guys would never rough up a dealer to make their numbers?”

  “No … no, I’m not. I’ve danced a few shits around up on the roof, bounced them off the pigeon coops. I know how it works. Maybe they did it. Maybe they had the heat on them because of the numbers, the collars they had to show. Nobody’s talking right now about what it used to be like around the One-Oh-Six, about how the dealers were almost a union around there. There was so much dope on the street that the dealers were getting political, jerking around with community action groups, getting representation. School kids were nodding out all over the place. The SNAP program hit those bastards where they lived. Maybe some cops did get rough with those guys. So how was this supposed to have gone on for weeks and not one of the Field Associates makes his secret call to Internal downtown about it? You can count on it that if Internal had gotten even a hint about torture in the One-Oh-Six, they would have come down on the place like Airborne. It would have been raining slicks all over Ozone Park.”

  “Hey, Wolfie. Isn’t that what happened?”

  “No. There was nothing until that Davidson kid goes on TV with the burn marks. And then the junkies come out from under everywhere, squealing about brutality.”

  “Times change, Wolfie. Suspects are golden now. They walk around in the station house, it’s like they have this special glow. Everybody walks on his tiptoes around them now. You can’t ask them questions unless you’re going to charge them, and you can’t charge them unless you’ve Mirandized them, and you can’t Mirandize them unless you can ask them questions, which you can’t ask unless you’ve Mirandized them, and you can’t Mirandize them unless you’re going to charge them. Make one mistake, it’s your shield and your pension. Violate the guy’s rights, you’re sued in civil court. Every move you make, you know a pair of suits and a judge are going to spend a couple of days talking about how they could have done it better asleep. Cops are the only people in America, when you’re on trial, you’re gone until you can prove you’re innocent. But you’re after the wrong crowd, Wolfie. You’re wasting your time if you think the black guys are going to change their tune. Would you?”

  Maksins had a battery of objections, but Kennedy just raised his voice and rolled through them.

  “In New York, in America, you’ve got what? Three, four hundred years, we’ve been jerking the blacks around. Even Lincoln said the blacks were a damned nuisance. We’d have been a lot better off if we never dragged them over here. But we did, Wolfie. Your trouble is, you still think life is supposed to be fair. Farrakhan doesn’t give a shit about fair. Neither do The Guardians. What’s going on here, it’s a balance. We fucked the blacks and the Latinos over for a couple of hundred years. Now it’s their turn. They’ve got the liberals; they’ve got the press; they’ve got the timing. We’re up the tree and here they come, yapping and snapping. And there you are, Wolfie, there you sit. Six three, two hundred pounds, thirty-four years old, blue eyes, blond hair, pulling down forty thousand a year plus overtime for a job you’d do for free if they’d ask you. Got yourself a Dan Wesson three fifty-seven with interchangeable sights. You can shoot the nits off a gnat’s nuts at a hundred yards. You’ve got a wife—she’s got a body could give a yak the trembles. You’re wading through all the strange pussy a man can handle every night Rita’s on the late shift. And all you can do is whine about how the blacks don’t appreciate you and the faggots don’t appreciate you. The whole ACLU would like to unscrew your head and puke down your neck.”

  Wolfie managed to smile over that. Kennedy couldn’t see why. It was true. “You’ll keep your sergeant�
��s rank, Wolfie! You’re a good cop. Your only problem is you want justice, and you’re not going to get it. So fuck it. It’s ten cents a dance, buddy. It’s a tango in Roseland. It is what it is, Wolfie.”

  A beeper went off in Maksins’ coat pocket. Heads at the nearby tables turned while he fumbled it out and shut it off. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

  “I can see how you got your grade money, Eddie. Maybe you’re right, too. Maybe there isn’t anything we can do about the blacks and the ethnics. They’re going to get their way. Maybe it’s time they did. But there are a lot of cops around who aren’t as reasonable as you are, and they don’t give a damn if the minorities were jerked around for three hundred years. They don’t think they ought to pay for something that happened before they were born. And you tell me, Eddie, as a cop: How is the Department doing these days? Are we the good guys or the bad guys now? And if we’re the bad guys, you tell me why. Get me a depth charge, will you? I’ll call in.”

  Maksins was full of surprises. Kennedy had been inclined to dismiss him as just another racist cop, but cop racism was rarely a free-floating evil, rising out of vapor. It often came from a personal experience of injustice, some particle of genuine truth around which generalized feelings had collected and solidified. For Wolf Maksins it had been the unavenged killing of Phillip Cardillo and the role Benjamin Ward had played in the aftermath. For Kennedy it had been the growing gap between the reality of violent crime in the 41st Precinct and the position taken by civil rights activists who seemed to value nothing other than political advantage. The Four-One had been a war zone, a lawless outland where the only safe place for the women and children of the territory was the parking lot in front of the precinct gates. Rapists, addicts, killers, pimps and outlaw bikers, hookers and zombies living off adrenaline and violent nihilism preyed on the rest of the South Bronx. They had a reason for calling it Fort Apache, a reason as incomprehensible to the rest of the world as the true nature of the war in Vietnam. The Four-One had gotten trapped outside America, outside the rules. There wasn’t any law in that neighborhood. There was just your gun and my gun. No lawyers, no judges. Nobody from the ACLU. A war zone.

  If we’re the bad guys now, you tell me why.

  Maksins was right. In 1985 the NYPD had become the bad guys again, the thugs and brutes, the peril of the city. It started with Rudolph Hays, a black plainclothes cop who had shot and killed an innocent woman named Sharon Walker over a trivial traffic dispute. He had pulled out his gun and shot her in the back as she tried to run away. December 9, 1984.

  On January 3, 1985, Officer Joe Vacchio shot and killed Darryl Dodson on a gun run, a report that a man had been seen carrying a weapon. Dodson turned out to be holding a bunch of presents for his mother. Vacchio was charged with manslaughter.

  February 24, 1985. Officer Mervin Yearwood was charged with criminally negligent homicide when his revolver accidentally discharged during an arrest, killing a boy named Paul Fava.

  It got worse as the year went on. On March 15, on the eve of the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, the major NYPD event of the year, an RMP driven by Sergeant Fred Sherman struck and killed an elderly Park Avenue psychologist named Hyman Chernow, and injured a doorman. The RMP slowed enough to be identified, and then it sped away down Park toward the Helmsley building. It took a citywide search to bring Sherman out into the light, a career sergeant with a history of traffic violations and alcohol problems.

  Next it was Perry Novello, the off-duty officer who got into a dispute with an ex-girlfriend at a Greek restaurant. He assaulted Martha Medina. Before any other cops had arrived, Novello had beaten and handcuffed her boss, Jacob Koumbis.

  And then, on April 17, Mark Davidson, high school student in the Ozone Park area of Queens, called a press conference to show the cameras several pairs of match-head-size burns on his stomach and back. His lawyer alleged that the burns came from a hand-held electric-shock machine, called a stun gun, and that it had been used on him during a torture session in the basement of the 106th Precinct. A few days later, additional allegations came from two small-time drug dealers in the sector. After this story hit the news, the national press and every activist group in the New York State area descended on One Police Plaza. Ultimately, Benjamin Ward managed the firing, the transfer, or the forced retirement of every official in the chain of command leading from the 106th to Headquarters.

  On April 27, 1985, Commissioner Ward laid down the law to 327 ranking officers of the NYPD during a closed-door meeting at One Police Plaza, at which he promised that no captain would get promoted if his subordinates had a large number of brutality complaints registered against them. He asked for more discretionary powers under civil service regulations in order to be able to dismiss or demote questionable men. And he brought charges of “incompetence” against the 106th commander, Captain Allen J. Houghton. He also threatened charges against the precinct’s Integrity Control Officer, Lieutenant Stephen Cheswick.

  Ward also tried to get some distance from the SNAP program he had instituted in response to city pressure, claiming that the SNAP cops who were charged with torture were not “an authorized part” of his own Street Narcotics Apprehension Program. Kennedy thought that line was a tad coy.

  In the meantime, a lot of ancient horrors clanked back onto the political stage of New York warfare. Carol Bellamy, the City Council president, running against Ed Koch in the mayor’s race, asked for a special investigative commission into the NYPD, an echo of the hated Knapp Commission hearings of the early seventies, and Governor Mario Cuomo asked for an FBI task force to conduct its own investigation. The phrase “a blue wall” of silence got headlines. Civil rights groups asked for new hearings under ex-Knapp ramrod Roy Goodman.

  And by April 30, one of the best-loved police officials, Chief of Patrol Hamilton Robinson, the third-highest ranker in the NYPD, had resigned. Robinson was widely thought of as competition for Ward and Ward’s cronies, and many of the older men in the force interpreted his resignation as the result of opportunism and back-stabbing on the part of Ward and his clique. The spiritual collapse of the NYPD was just about complete by September of 1985.

  Maksins’ question was valid. Were they the bad guys? It looked like it, and judging from the press and the cloud of civil action parties fluttering over One Police Plaza like God’s own fruit-bat nightmare, everybody in the country had turned against them.

  Publicly, few members of the Department had much to say about the scandals. Privately, experienced hands such as Bill Abromaitis, the head of the Honor Legion, blamed politically mandated quota-hiring programs and the Big Mac financial collapse. Detectives like Bruno Stokovich and his boss, Richard Nicastro, blamed the lack of military service in new recruits. Everybody had an opinion about the state of the NYPD.

  Like every other member of the Force, Kennedy had felt the sense of personal humiliation that comes when your own service disgraces itself. It seemed fairly weak to point out that so many officers had lived up to their jobs in the same year. Out of roughly 25,000 members, there had been a total of some 6,000 complaints filed, half of which were for brutality. Aaron Rosenthal, the Deputy Chief in charge of investigations into Complaint Review Board charges, had privately circulated a list of 300 officers against whom there were multiple charges filed. As far as Kennedy and most of his friends were concerned, the numbers were almost insignificant, considering the size of the city and the number of violent incidents that the NYPD has to contend with every year. Kennedy had read a report from downtown which estimated that the total of serious criminal incidents the NYPD would have to deal with this year would probably round out at a record-breaking 625,000. That worked out to something like 40 criminal incidents for each serving patrol officer, of which there were over 15,000. That was 40 head-to-head clashes with criminals ranging from drunken bar brawlers to professional button-men and coked-out psychotic killers.

  And every one of those clashes had taken place out there in the streets, in the basements, on t
he rooftops, in the alleys, in that hidden land where the lawyers and the reporters never had to go, where the stakes were literally mortal and the room for hesitation and uncertainty no wider than a neuron, no more durable than a synapse. They were on you in seconds, and over you in a heartbeat. And whatever you did, no matter how frightened or how brave you were, the issue would always end up discussed in the club-room serenity of a court of law, by men and women who met for drinks when it was over, detached, privileged, and protected acolytes of cold-blooded Justice, who didn’t know, and didn’t care, about you or what you had been trying to do.

  Pointing to the thousands of police officers who did what was required of them in anonymity should not have struck Kennedy as a weak defense, but in the political and media combat of New York City, the old saying was true: If you’re explaining, you’re losing. The NYPD was losing.

  “Hey, Eddie. Earth to Eddie!”

  Maksins was standing over the table, a dark silhouette against a ceiling spot.

  “Buddy, you look like hell. What were you thinking about?”

  Maksins sat down with a tray of drinks, two tall glasses of draft beer and two shot glasses of Canadian Club. He picked up one of the shot glasses and held it over his beer glass.

  “Well, I gotta go back to the grind, Eddie. They just pulled my witness out of a Dumpster at Seven-oh-two East Fifth. He’s got his cock stuffed into his mouth. They think his hands might be in Queens. We can kiss Daphne bye-bye.”

  He dropped the shot glass into the beer and raised the draft to his lips, taking the whole thing in a single swallow, finishing with the shot glass upside down between his even white teeth. He exhaled, thumped the table, clapped Kennedy on the shoulder, and stood up with his hand in his jacket pocket.

  “You want to come along, Eddie? Kolchinski’ll be there. You can bum a deck of smokes and generally do the dog around the crime scene, maybe piss off another mole?”

  “I’ll pay, Wolfie. Put it away. No, I think I’ll go home. Bruno wants that Muro thing jumped on. I’ve got to get the papers caught up tomorrow and then go up to the Bronx. This means you’ll be packed up tomorrow?”