Without Fear or Favor

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

“Not well. He’d always been possessive and jealous. I thought it was cute, the way he’d get upset if another man looked at me or I spoke to one. But now he started getting scary. He accused me of breaking it off because I had another boyfriend, and that I was sleeping around. He stalked me and showed up unexpectedly both at work and at home.”

  “How long did that behavior last?”

  “Months. He called every day, sometimes several times a day. He’d be angry and shouting, calling me a whore and threatening me and anybody I met in the future. Other times he’d cry and tell me how much he loved me and wanted me back. The first couple times he did that I said I’d go back under one condition: he had to shut down his company. But it was always the same. I didn’t understand, he needed the money; it was always about the money. I told him to stop calling me and stop stalking me, or I was going to go to the brass at the department.”

  “How’d he take that?”

  “He said that if I did, I’d be the one who paid the price. I’d lose my job and be prosecuted and then go to prison. But he’d get off because of his friends high up.”

  “Did you turn him in?”

  “Not then, no,” Pardo said. “I never went out with him again and wouldn’t take his calls. But I didn’t do anything, either. I believed him when he said I’d be the one who was punished and that he’d get even for me leaving him.”

  “And did he?”

  Pardo reached for the glass of water, which Karp stepped forward and refilled after she set it down. “Yes. One day I got back to the precinct after my shift and the sergeant said they wanted to see me in Internal Affairs.”

  “What about?”

  “Somebody had reported Gary, probably someone who got tired of paying him off, but Gary thought it was me. He denied the criminal stuff, but he told them about me cheating on the academy test.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told them the truth. I cheated. I thought it wouldn’t be that big a deal if I just came clean. After all, I was a good cop. I had several commendations, and I knew my sergeant liked me. I thought I might get written up, maybe even put on administrative leave without pay.”

  “Was that what happened?”

  Pardo bit her lip. “No,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “They said they would drop the criminal investigation against my part in Gary’s schemes, but I had to resign from the department. So that’s what I did.”

  “What about Proust?”

  Pardo laughed bitterly. “Apparently the investigation went nowhere. I heard from my sergeant later that Internal Affairs wanted to charge him but they were told to drop it. The union had stepped in and so had some higher-ups.”

  “Is he still with the department?”

  “No. I heard he retired a few years later, but I don’t know much more than that.”

  “What sort of an impact did losing your job with the NYPD have on your life?”

  Pardo started to answer but then choked up and buried her face in her hands. As she let out a loud sob, Karp walked up and offered her a tissue from the box on the rail. “Thanks, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” Karp said.

  “Do you need a few minutes?” Judge Kershner asked, leaning forward.

  Pardo smiled at the judge through her tears. “No, I’m fine. This was bound to happen.” She sniffed a couple more times and wiped at her nose before looking back at Karp. “In some ways, my life ended the day they took my badge away.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It wasn’t all at once, more of a long, slow downward spiral, but eventually I got to the bottom of the barrel and stayed there.”

  “Were drugs involved in that downward slide?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did that start?”

  “Actually before I became a cop,” Pardo said. “Gary liked to party, and he was into coke and sometimes speed. It was pretty recreational and I didn’t like it much. I stopped doing all of that when I got hired by the department. But after I got kicked off, I went to this party with a guy I was dating, and he offered me heroin.”

  “Did you snort it or shoot it?”

  “This was the kind you snorted, shooting would come later.”

  “Was it a problem right away?” Karp asked.

  “No,” Pardo said. “Some friends in the department hooked me up with a private investigation firm. The money was decent, though the work was pretty boring—mostly catching husbands cheating on their wives and insurance fraud. Easy work and a lot of partying in my off-hours. I snorted a lot of heroin and drank a lot of booze—I think to disguise how miserable I was inside.”

  “At some point did you start shooting heroin?”

  “I was at a party and somebody offered it to me,” she recalled. “They told me it was a better, more intense high. So I tried it. And they were right.”

  “How else does the heroin you snort compare to heroin you shoot?”

  “It’s not even close. One you want but can live without if it’s not available. The other you need, and you’d swear you don’t want to live if you can’t have more. Your body, your mind crave it. The only time you don’t want more dope is when you’re high, and as soon as that feeling is gone, all you can think about is getting more.”

  “Did you become addicted all at once?”

  Pardo shook her head. “No, there is a gradual buildup, and there were times when I realized what was happening and I’d force myself to go cold turkey. Sometimes I could go a few weeks, but the entire time all I thought about was how much I wanted it.”

  “How did you support this habit?”

  As he asked the question, Karp moved so that Pardo’s eyes had to stay on him. He knew this was going to be the toughest part of his questioning, and he didn’t want her to be concerned about the jury or spectators looking at her, judging her.

  “I had my job as a private investigator,” Pardo said. “But heroin has a way of taking over your life. At first, you can function, it even gives you energy and a feeling of being on top of the world. Like I said, the highs are intense, but there’s a flip side to that. One of the common side effects of heroin withdrawal is severe depression. I’d already had issues with depression since my teens and this just intensified that. Some days, unless I had heroin, I couldn’t get myself to get out of bed, or even answer the phone. Another side effect is paranoia, not a good thing for a private investigator.

  “I lost that job then every other decent job I got after that, even minimum-wage jobs flipping burgers. You stop eating when you’re a heroin addict, and you don’t care, all you want is that next hit.”

  Karp could almost feel the spectators in the gallery hold their collective breath, waiting for the next step in Pardo’s fall from grace. He knew she could sense it in the air, too, and felt for her.

  “I did anything for a few bucks,” she continued. “Went through the trash barrels in the parks for aluminum cans, shoplifted, and then I started . . .”

  What she said next was inaudible. “I’m sorry,” Karp said, meaning it, “but I’m going to have to ask you to speak up so that the jurors can hear you.”

  Pardo let out a deep breath and nodded. “I became a whore,” she admitted. “I let men use my body for money. At first, I charged a lot, when I was still young and not too far gone to seed. But the more heroin I did, the worse I looked, and the less men would pay. I’d do anything—oral sex, sex in cars, sex in alleys, sex in restroom stalls. There was nothing I wouldn’t do, no place I wouldn’t go, for the money to buy heroin.”

  The witness looked deflated, beaten. Karp wished he could have held back at this point, but he needed this kind of honesty out of her now. He believed it would help the jury understand how far she had fallen and what it took for her to testify today, as well as blunt the edge of the defense attacks that were sure to follow. “Where were you living by this point?” he asked.

  “On the streets,” Pardo said. “Occasionally, I’d get a cot and a hot shower at one of the shelt
ers. Sometimes a john would let me sleep it off if he sprung for a room. But I spent a lot of nights curled up on a park bench or under a bush.”

  “Wasn’t that dangerous?” Karp asked.

  Pardo shrugged. “I guess you could say that. I’ve been raped, robbed, and beaten unconscious.”

  Karp let the matter-of-fact statement sink in before he went on. “Were you ever arrested or charged with a crime after you left the police department?”

  “Yes, all misdemeanors for prostitution and drug possession. I’ve spent more than a few days and nights in jail. But like we say on the streets, at least you get three hots and a cot, and in the winter, it can be like going on vacation to the Caribbean.”

  “You have family in New Jersey,” Karp pointed out. “Why not go to them?”

  Pardo looked at him for a long moment. He purposely had not told her every question; the jury needed to see her honest reactions.

  “And let them know what I had become? No way. I’d have rather died. I wouldn’t even talk to them for months at a time, afraid that I’d break down and beg to come home.”

  “How did you explain that?”

  Pardo shrugged. “That I was busy, that I was working undercover as a cop. I never told them I got kicked off.”

  “When did they find out?” Karp said, turning to look out at the gallery.

  “A few months ago, when the press showed up at their front door and told them.” Pardo looked angry when she said it, but then her expression turned sad. “My mom found out that her daughter wasn’t a cop, like she thought, just a washed-up, drug-addicted prostitute, from some man she’d never met who showed up with a camera and the horrible truth.”

  As some members of the media shifted uncomfortably on the benches, Karp turned toward the reason she was on the stand. “Did there come a time when you stopped prostituting yourself?”

  Again the bitter laugh escaped Pardo’s lips. “When you’re a heroin addict, there comes a point when no one wants to pay for what you have to offer. No one with money, anyway. The others just take what they want. So I guess you might say I was involuntarily retired.”

  “So how did you survive?”

  “Well, the good news is I rarely had enough money for heroin. And I was fortunate to meet a sort of street preacher, I guess you might call him, though his name is David. He spent a lot of time talking to me about God and that no matter how far I’d gone down the road, I could always turn around and go back the way I came.” She shook her head. “He gave me and a lot of other homeless people a place to stay and hope. I don’t know how he does it, he doesn’t have a nickel himself, but he just has a way of making even people like me feel better about themselves.

  “What about heroin?”

  “One of the rules if you want to stay at his place is no drugs, but the thing is, I didn’t want it anymore.”

  “But how do you eat?”

  “Sometimes soup kitchens, but usually Dumpster diving.”

  “Explain ‘Dumpster diving,’ please.”

  “It’s like it sounds,” Pardo said. “You crawl into the big Dumpsters you see all over the city in alleys and behind buildings and scavenge for anything useful, like aluminum cans, clothing, or cigarette butts, and of course, food. You’d be surprised how much food gets thrown away that street people think of as a feast.”

  Then Karp brought her to the evening when Ricky Watts was shot. As he talked, he walked over to the prosecution table and picked up three photographs.

  “I was in Harlem going through a Dumpster in an alley next to a tenement,” she said.

  “When you say ‘going through,’ where were you physically?”

  “I was inside the Dumpster with the lid closed, having lunch.”

  Gasps and groans escaped the spectators. Kershner banged her gavel once.

  “Did something interrupt your meal?”

  “Yes. I heard voices near the entrance to the alley—”

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” Karp said, “but how far was the Dumpster from the entrance?”

  “Maybe twenty feet.”

  “All right, please continue. You heard these voices . . .”

  “Yes, so I lifted the lid a little to peek. You can never be too careful in some of these neighborhoods.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Three black males. One very large man who appeared to be in his mid- to late twenties. A second man, tall and thin, who also appeared to be in his mid to late twenties, maybe thirty. And what I’d describe as a pudgy teenager; he wore glasses and just seemed out of place with these other two, who were rougher.”

  Karp walked up to the witness stand until he was within arm’s reach. “Ms. Pardo, did there come a time when you were asked if you could identify the three individuals you saw that evening?”

  “Yes, you showed me several photo lineups.”

  “And were you able to make positive identifications of these individuals?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  Karp held out one of the photographs. “I am handing you what has been marked People’s Exhibit 32 in evidence,” he said. “Is this one of the individuals you identified?”

  “Yes, this was the largest of the men. He was probably six-four, three hundred pounds.”

  Karp smiled. “You sound like a police officer.”

  “Old habits die hard,” Pardo replied with a shy smile of her own.

  “Let the record reflect that the witness has identified the largest of the individuals as George Parker,” Karp said, and held out a second photograph. “I’m handing you People’s Exhibit 33 in evidence. Do you also recognize this person as one of the individuals?”

  “Yes, that’s the teenager.”

  “Let the record reflect that the witness has identified Ricky Watts.” Karp handed her the last photograph. “This is People’s Exhibit 34. Do you recognize this individual?”

  Pardo’s eyes flitted to Johnson and back. She nodded. “Yes, this is the tall, thin male.”

  “Do you see this man in the courtroom?”

  Pardo looked straight at Johnson. Their eyes locked, but he was the first to look away, smiling and shaking his head like it was all a joke. “Yes, he’s right there,” she said, pointing.

  Karp strode across the courtroom until he reached the defense table. He, too, pointed. “This man, the defendant, Anthony Johnson?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s him.”

  In the silence that followed the accusation, Johnson dipped his head and could be heard to say, “Lying bitch.”

  Karp stopped and stared at him, and then continued. “You said you could hear their voices. Could you understand what was being said?”

  “Some. I missed whatever they said initially because the lid was down. And after that, I had to be careful, so some of it was hard to hear. But I heard him,” she said, pointing again at Johnson, “tell the teenager, ‘They won’t be expecting you.’ ”

  “Let the record reflect that the witness indicated the defendant in her previous statement,” Karp said. “What else did you hear?”

  “The kid sort of stuttered, like he was afraid. ‘You . . . you . . . want me to shoot them?’ But Johnson said something about wondering if he’d picked the right man for the job. The kid said, ‘No, I’ll do it.’ ”

  “Did the defendant, Anthony Johnson, give anything to Ricky Watts as they were talking?”

  “Yes, he handed him a stainless steel revolver with an ivory or mother-of-pearl grip.”

  “Could you tell what caliber?” Karp asked.

  “Not a hundred percent,” Pardo said. “But it was a large revolver, not a little Saturday-night special.”

  “What happened next?”

  Pardo again nodded at Johnson. “The defendant told the boy to go into the building and wait. Some of that was muffled. I was afraid they were going to turn around and see me, so I kept ducking. But I heard Johnson say, ‘Boom boom and it’s over. If they’re still moving, shoot them in the head. Then get your a
ss out of there and we’ll meet you.’ ”

  “Then what?”

  “They walked off toward the front of the building.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got out of the Dumpster. I was going to run away before they came back . . . but I didn’t . . . I stayed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they were talking about shooting people. I . . . I couldn’t just turn my back. So I crept to the entrance of the alley and peeked around the corner. The two older guys, Parker and Johnson, were hanging out near a parked car. Then I heard two gunshots.”

  “You’re sure? Two gunshots?”

  “Absolutely. They were almost one on top of the other—ba-bang—but they were different caliber, so I could differentiate them. One sounded like a nine . . .”

  “A nine?”

  “A nine-millimeter semiautomatic. The other was bigger . . . a forty-five or maybe a forty.”

  “What happened next?”

  “The teenager came out the door. At first I didn’t think there was anything wrong, but then I saw the big red spot on his chest. He made it to the curb and then crumpled to the ground.”

  “What about Johnson and Parker?”

  “They walked over to him. They said something, and he”—again she pointed at Johnson—“took the revolver out of the boy’s hand. Then he looked up and saw me. He yelled for me to stop, but I ran down the alley.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “One of the abandoned buildings on the far end has an open entrance to the basement. There’s a tunnel system. It used to be used for hauling coal for the furnaces, now it’s mostly abandoned. I heard him running after me, but he stopped and didn’t come down into the basement. He knew that wouldn’t be safe.”

  “When did you see the defendant again?”

  “Not until you showed me the photo lineups.”

  “Sorry, I meant in person.”

  “Oh, you asked me to come down and see if I could pick him out of a standing lineup through a one-way mirror.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes. Immediately.”

  Karp walked over to the prosecution table and picked up the evidence bag containing the revolver. He pulled it out and showed it to her. “Is this revolver consistent with the type of revolver you saw the defendant, Anthony Johnson, hand to Ricky Watts?”