Precinct 19
Behind the Scenes at New York City’s Most High-Powered Police Station
Thomas Adcock
For Anne and Jessica
Acknowledgments
Writers sometimes don’t mind confessing that behind the scenes, as it were, there are lots of big people with lots of important help and encouragement. Without them, the authors might have just one more fish story to swap with his pals. That’s why books have pages like this. Accordingly, my salutes to:
Charles Sopkin, for suggesting this book in the first place;
Liz and Jim Trupin and Kim Sykes, for supporting the project heart and soul;
“The Angel of 103rd Street,” a remarkable young man whose Spanish translation and eye-opening companionship were invaluable to my travels through East Harlem.
some fairly mean streets, pitiful sights and some downright vicious types. All of which makes the job of the Nineteenth Precinct cop simultaneously challenging, coveted, dreaded and confusing.
I think the cops of the Nineteenth Precinct are the best in the world. Not to an officer, mind you, but certainly as a precinct unit. There are those who drink too much, those who are full of self-pity and those who cut corners. But there are also cops like Tony Ciffo and Jack Clark and John Laffey and Charlie Leinau. Few come better than these.
I spent about a year tagging along with the cops of the Nineteenth Precinct, who were good enough to allow me to be a fly on the wall with pad and pencil. There were times when I was trusted as an outside observer and times I wasn’t and that was the open-ended deal.
All of the incidents in the resultant book are real. Generally, the names of crime victims are changed to protect their privacy. A number of officers portrayed in the book are composites and have fictional names. That doesn’t make their experiences fictional, however, it just makes the balance of their professional and personal lives easier.
Certain editorial changes in identities, dates and circumstances were made in the writing of Precinct 19 in order to protect the integrity of cases pending before the courts. None of these changes alters the essential truths of the total story.
The reader will find, as did I, that the day-to-day life of being a cop in New York is a matter of slogging through violence and tragedy and dreariness and that sometimes the only human response is comedy. The cops of the Nineteenth Precinct are some of the funniest people I’ve ever known. God help us New Yorkers if our cops should ever lose their humanity, if they should one day stop laughing.
I’ve come to the point where I can pick out a cop on a crowded street, even when he’s dressed like everyone else. He’s as easy to spot as a bleeding man. Heavier, it appears, full of other people’s sorrows whether he realizes it or not. And his eyes are always moving, sweeping the street to make note of who belongs and who bears watching.
When a cop starts talking about public perceptions of police officers, there is a certain paranoid tone to his voice. An officer named James Martin of Manhattan’s Midtown North station house told the New York Times:
“This month we were all brutal racists, last month we were all drug addicts, the month before that we were drunks and sex fiends. A lot of times you get the feeling that the city doesn’t care, the public doesn’t care, that your partner and the other cops are the only ones you can count on.
“We’re the most visible, the most vulnerable and the least vocal. Cops don’t talk. They never know when it’s going to be taken out of context, and people aren’t going to understand it anyway. So you just read about it, you watch it, you put on the uniform and you go out and do your job.” I’ve never heard a cop’s lament more succinctly expressed. Here’s a hope that this book might knock a few holes into Officer Martin’s outlook.
Thomas Larry Adcock
New York, N.Y.
November 1983
Part I
Chapter 1
The lobby was jammed full of cops. Uniformed and plain-clothed, they streamed in and out of the East Sixty-seventh Street station house, greeting one another with backslaps and fraternal insults. Their hips were laden with jangling cop hardware—guns, clubs, leather-bound citation books, handcuffs, bullets and walkie-talkies. Half the cops were waiting for the sergeant to call night-shift muster back in the squad room in the rear of the station house. The other half were from the day tour and were anxious to hit the shower rooms downstairs.
A middle-aged woman in a short double-breasted jacket of lavender suède over pleated pinstriped wool trousers, a wool jacquard knit turtleneck sweater and silk scarf and snakeskin boots stood at the tall desk. A sergeant with a belly that protruded over his belt and a sweat stain running down the back of his blue shirt listened patiently as she shrieked something about her stolen Mercedes. A small-framed policewoman made her way through the crowd to the stairway, with a fat prostitute in tow who was practically comatose on heroin.
Then the maniac wandered in and the atmosphere became unusual.
He was tall, well over six feet, about thirty-five years old. And he was quite out of his mind on drugs and alcohol and private torment. All of his clothes fit him properly, but they were torn and filthy, as if he’d worn nothing else for days and slept in the streets. To some imaginary companion, he offered repeated assurances, “I’m okay. I’m okay now.”
The maniac’s eyes darted from cop to cop and his whole body began shaking violently as he pushed past the uniformed men, stopping in the center of the lobby. He planted his feet firmly on the floor at a wide stance, then raised his hands and started pulling at his hair and screaming, over and over, “Fucking cops! Fucking cops fucked me up! Fucking cops …”
The woman in the suède jacket seemed annoyed by the distraction. She turned to look at the maniac, who returned her gaze and quickly unzipped his trousers. She swore and turned back to the sergeant to continue the tale of her waylaid Mercedes.
The maniac started shoving at the cops around him, poking them in the chest and shaking off their attempts to steer him toward the door and back out onto the street before he got himself into trouble. He lunged at a knot of young officers near the sergeant’s desk and four burly men dressed in seedy jackets and greasy sweaters, not unlike the maniac’s ensemble, finally managed to grab him. They looked like garbage collectors after a hot day’s work. But they were cops. Street Crimes Unit—Manhattan, affectionally known by the acronym SCUM patrol.
The maniac was a regular customer.
A cop named Tony Ciffo drew the attention of the maniac, who spit his regard, a greeting that narrowly missed landing on Officer Ciffo’s forehead. The tour was not off to a good start for Ciffo.
The maniac, struggling wildly under the restraint of the four SCUM patrol cops, managed to get an arm free. He swung at Ciffo, landing a jab on his chest. “What’re you lookin at, eh?” the maniac screamed at Ciffo. “Wanna step outside?”
The cops ringing Ciffo offered up a small cheer of encouragement. One of them went for the front door and held it open.
“Yeah,” Ciffo said to the big man with the wild eyes. “I’d like nothing better.”
Tony Ciffo was about five feet nine, thickly compact and heavily muscular. His face was northern Italian, wide and swarthy but brown-hued rather than olive. His hair was a mass of light brown knots and curls, coarse enough to rip the teeth out of anything less than a steel comb.
Ciffo took off his sunglasses and carefully folded them, then handed them to another cop. Then he took a step toward the maniac, as if he were a small concrete wall that had learned to walk. The SCUM patrol cops released the maniac. Ciffo punched the big man’s shoulder, causing him to spin around. Then with his right hand, Ciffo grabbed hold of his neck; with his left hand, Ciffo held the seat of his pants. As Ciffo moved the big maniac across
the floor, the cop at the door opened wide the portals in preparation for an unceremonious parting.
Ciffo grunted and picked up the big man, raised him several inches off the floor and then threw him clear through the door. The maniac went stumbling and screaming down the stoop into the street, hit a blue and white Plymouth squad car at the curb and collapsed into a surprisingly small heap.
“What do you got on that nutjob?” Ciffo asked one of the SCUM patrol officers. His breathing was completely unaffected by having picked up a crazed giant and tossed him out the doorway like a bag of laundry.
“Nothing. He gets a little excited once in a while. No trouble, really, if we just turn him around and get him on his way. Thanks, Tony.”
Ciffo and some of the officers looked out the door. The maniac was considerably calmer than he had been just a few minutes earlier. He’d picked himself up and walked unsteadily down the street toward Lexington Avenue, bowing at the waist to every cop he encountered along his way.
Tony Ciffo shrugged his shoulders, retrieved his sunglasses and headed upstairs one flight to the little community affairs office at the top of the landing. He shot through the door in his customary manner, like a five-foot-nine blue bullet. A thin, young rookie cop in blue blazer and gray slacks and a Gucci attaché that only a police staff lawyer downtown would dare to carry stood up from a bench and stuck out his hand. His name was Valentine and this was his first day on the transfer assignment to the Nineteenth Precinct, Community Affairs detail. A college cop from a mile off.
Ciffo stopped for a split second and pumped Valentine’s hand and looked the rookie up and down, the way a cop sizes up everybody after a while, friends and collars and even fellow cops all the same. Initial distrust often paid in survival benefits. Then he said to Valentine, “Have a seat for a minute, right? I got to wash my face and take some vitamins.”
He talked to Valentine over his shoulder as he barreled through the office, banging a knee against one of the four metal desks butted together. He didn’t seem to notice the collision, but the desk gained yet another dent.
“Tony Ciffo’s the name,” he said. Then he turned on the water taps of a small basin on the wall at the far end of the office. “Not much action here usually, but we’ll do our best to flush out some bad guys for you your first night, okay?”
Ciffo tossed back his head and popped a handful of aspirins, cold capsules and vitamin C tablets with rose hips, all of which he washed down with a paper cup full of cold orange water. He bent over the basin and scrubbed his face afterward, making a great deal of noise about it. When he took a toothbrush from the cabinet over the basin, Valentine took the advice about having a seat.
Besides the two men, the only other person in the room was an overweight black high school girl hunched over a typewriter adjacent to one of the desks. She was oblivious to the officers as she stared mutely at the paper in her typewriter. She wore earphones clamped to her head, attached to a radio turned up so loudly it could still be heard by Valentine, seated ten feet away from her. She listened to one of the many AM radio stations that play music highly popular with inmates prior to incarceration in mental hospitals, gangs of leather-jacketed youths with chains around their waists who like to brawl on street corners in the middle of the night and proprietors of downtown shops specializing in drug paraphernalia.
The girl seemed narcotized. She chewed gum at quite an incredible volume, too, snapping and popping lustily as she pecked an occasional key of the Royal manual standard in front of her.
Her job was to copy handwritten numbers in the columns of a weekly precinct crime index report form to an identical form in the typewriter. Clerks just like her downtown in the central filing room at Police Plaza, an office complete with radios tuned to mindless rock and synchronized gum chewing, required those reports in typed form before stowing them away someplace for yet more typing by yet more clerks onto year-end, precinct-by-precinct crime index report forms. Somewhere, someone was trying to computerize all of this on the assumption that the high school clerks could do a speedier job of it all.
The point of all the clerical make-work was to interest New York’s teenagers in civilian careers with the police department. The girl who sat at the typewriter in the Nineteenth Precinct’s Community Affairs office wanted to be an airlines pilot, though.
A slat in the middle of the bench where Valentine sat waiting pinched his thigh. He stood up and rubbed his leg and wondered why in the world the station house for the prestigious Upper East Side of Manhattan was so appallingly shabby.
The Community Affairs office was one of four on the second floor. It was roughly twenty by twenty-eight feet, high-ceilinged and painted in several coats of coagulated institutional green. The windows were painted over too, glass and all.
Desks in the room were eaten away around the edges by cigarette burns. Chipped filing cabinets, against the walls were stuffed to capacity with the labors of semiconscious clerks; a Norelco coffee maker was wedged into a long-ago sealed-up fireplace; a G.E. battery-charge box for maintaining Point-to-Point shortwave radio broadcast power sat on a wood and steel cabinet next to the basin where Ciffo splashed.
Outside the office in the second-floor corridor, a vast echo chamber, was a cacophony of harsh noise. Cops yelled up and down the stairwell to communicate matters of intrastation business and gossip. There were also the ludicrously sterile strains of Muzak tunes, assorted ravings and cursings of manacled hookers and junkies and boosters as they were marched up and down the gritty marble stairs to and from the precinct holding cage and the constant, waspish static of hip-held PTP radios.
The place was a little short of a madhouse, Valentine thought. Yet he could see that every cop and clerk managed to zone out any sound but their own, or those sounds which applied in some way to their function or interest.
In the Community Affairs office, as in all offices on every floor of the station house, there were banks of fluorescent lights. They were the kind that allow no shadows, the kind that make everyone’s skin look unhealthy. On the open wall was a display of more than two hundred mug shots, mostly of black and Hispanic criminals, a very old and peeling Police Athletic League poster having to do with a boxing marathon pitting New York cops against New York fire laddies and a coatrack next to the door. Next to the coatrack was a printed sign, black on white, containing the inspiring legend:
Do something—
either lead, follow,
or get the hell
out of the way!
The girl looked up from her typewriter and crime index forms and actually stopped chewing for a moment. “Hi,” she said to the cop who took off his coat and sat at the desk next to hers.
He was tall and husky, with a round stomach and square shoulders, short red hair fringed around the sides of his head and wisped on top. “Hiya, beauty,” he said. His green jacket hung behind him on the chair. He wore a polo shirt with green and yellow stripes and lit up a mentholated cigarette, a Newport. He was Detective Johnny Maguire, in charge, among other things, of easing the transition for rookie officers transferred to the Nineteenth Precinct.
“Maguire here is our Irish Bumblebee,” Ciffo said to Valentine as he made introductions. “And he’s no relation to the former commissioner, no matter what he tries to tell you.”
Valentine and Maguire shook hands. Maguire looked him up and down and offered a cigarette, which was declined. Practically none of the younger officers smoked anymore.
“You married?” Ciffo asked Valentine.
“Nope.”
Ciffo lit a cigarette of his own from a pack of Marlboros in his left breast pocket. From his right breast pocket he fished out a stick of peppermint gum, which he also put in his mouth since his partner didn’t approve of his smoking. Before answering a nearby telephone, he said, “It’s good you’re single. You won’t believe the women you meet here. We got the highest divorce rate among officers in the whole damn city.”
Ciffo took the call and barked h
ello.
“Nothing heavy here in the One-Nine,” Maguire said, beginning his instruction. “But sometimes we’ve got fireworks. You never know. Whatever happens here is complicated, really complicated.”
Maguire hadn’t bothered to raise his voice to accommodate for the noise Ciffo made yelling at someone on the other end of the line and Valentine had to strain to hear, already at a disadvantage with the din from the corridor and the distraction of the tinny, muffled blasting sounds from beneath the typist’s earphones. He had a long way to go before he learned the trick of filtering out superfluous sounds.
“In one day,” Maguire said, “you can start with a burglary call at, say, Dustin Hoffman’s pad, then you might wind up your tour making out a report on some dead bag lady who sleeps nights under the Fifty-ninth Street bridge. You just never know.”
Maguire stood up. “Come on. Let me show you what I mean.”
Valentine followed Maguire through the corridor and the hubbub of mingling cops and crooks and lawyers into the adjacent Detective Unit squad room, a confusion of perpetually ringing telephones and discordant desk-to-desk debates on various episodes of neighborhood violence, pilferage and chicanery. From the Muzak box high up near the ceiling molding came the theme song from a TV cop show, NBC’s “Hill Street Blues.”
Maguire went to a desk occupied, for the time being, by a detective wearing a suit and a haircut of remarkably good taste, given the usual standards in New York detective squad rooms. His name was Tyrone Yorio. Behind him, taped to the wall, was a photostat copy of a Manhattan detective command circular dated August 6, 1930:
N.Y.P.D. Advisory No. 3813
RE: Missing V.I.P., Joseph Force Crater, justice, New York Supreme Court.
DESC.: Male Caucasian, age 36, medium ht & wt, no distinguishing scars, no tattoos.
PARTICULARS: Subj vanished en route to Westchester County estate from chambers in city; told wife he was “going for a swim”; late inquiries indicate subj withdrew large cash sums from various bank accts in city.
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