by Luke Waters
“Pardon me, Officer, what are you going to do about that?” she inquired in a haughty tone, nodding in the direction of the small, sterile, immaculately kept garden which looked out on the tugboats steaming under the Queensboro Bridge, temporarily devoid of life apart from a guy standing, arms folded, a long leather strap wrapped around his forearm and a look of utter boredom etched on his face, click-clicking to his dog in between puffs of a cigarette.
Twenty yards away our perpetrator—aka Fluffy—urinated against a car before panting heavily and shamelessly exposing his hairy ass to our gaze.
“Officer? Am I not being clear? There is a sign on the park which states no canines of any sort shall be allowed to roam this area. Officer … ?” my complainant continued, eyes narrowing as she pointed to the Park Service’s notification in white letters on a black background which normal people with lives are too busy to pay any attention to. “Waters,” I added helpfully. “Officer Waters, ma’am, 17th Precinct.”
“So, Officer Waters, what are you going to do?” the old lady said, voice full of expectation.
Humor, that was what was needed here. A little levity to send this auld biddy on her way with a smile on her face. Good for community relations.
“Ah. Indeed. But, umm, well, you know, maybe little Fluffy there can’t read?” I suggested, with a sympathetic sigh. “Sure, what can you do, ma’am? The city is gone to the dogs!” Forty-five minutes later, a Ford Crown Victoria RMP shuddered to a two-ton halt at the curbside beside me.
“What’s the word, Sergeant McHugh? Not time for my break, is it?” I said with a puzzled expression.
“Fuck you, Luke! I’m glad you’re smiling, kid, ’cos you won’t be for long. I gotta haul your ass back to the House. What in Christ’s sake have you done? Get in, on the double! This other idiot will take over for you,” he shouted from the driver’s seat, as the passenger door flew open and a fellow rookie jumped out.
“Buddy, I got no clue what you done,” the sarge said helpfully, “but when you screw up, you don’t do it by halves. Don’t think I ever seen Smolka so angry.”
My heart went cold. Bruce Smolka. The Manhattan Mussolini. Shite.
“Maybe … sure, maybe it’s a promotion. You never know,” I replied hopefully.
“I look like a detective to you, Officer Waters? But I can guarantee you this, buddy. They’re gonna bounce ya, and bounce ya hard,” my driver replied, burying his hand in the car horn.
All too soon the car pulled up to the station house, and I jumped out and walked through the door, heart pounding. Lieutenant O’Shea, who had barely glanced at me over the previous six months, stood near the front desk, arms folded, slowly shaking his head from side to side as I tried to sneak past. He didn’t speak, just nodded in the direction of the stairs.
The whole time I was thinking—but, for once, not saying—they have finally found me out and I am moments away from a one-stop trip to JFK and a one-way ticket home. My several years as an illegal alien must have been discovered and my training, job, and entire life are going to be shredded as I am shipped back to Dublin. It was exactly forty-nine steps from that desk to Smolka’s office and I counted every one as I began the brief journey that I was thinking would end my equally short career until, pulse racing, I arrived at the door. It was open.
Smolka was fuming. At first he stood there without saying a word: his distinct military bearing and close-cropped hair gave away the fact that, though retired, he was still United States Marine Corps to the core.
“Who do you think you are, Waters?” Smolka finally bellowed with the enthusiasm of a drill instructor placed in charge of a bunch of conscientious objectors. “Well? Who are you?”
My lips moved wordlessly.
“I’m waiting. You know what, Waters? I know who you are, mister. And I should not know who you are. I should not be aware of your miserable existence in my station or on the face of this earth! Think you can tell a big shot like Mrs. Heinz—Missus Heinz, the ketchup queen of the entire US of A—‘Maybe the dog can’t read’? Maybe the dog can’t read! You worm! You shithead! You are going to regret this. You’re through at this precinct, you waste of space. Through!”
That was the point where he got really upset—as I tried to hide my relief.
Ten minutes later I filled an empty Cheerios box with my personal effects, took my spare uniform from my locker, and slammed the door, along with my time in the 17th Precinct, shut.
There was just time to wave goodbye to the lads in the muster room before collecting a little piece of white paper from the desk with details of my transfer to the Manhattan South Task Force, effective immediately. Unbelievably I had, in all but pay, been promoted.
*
Determined to turn over a new leaf, I reported for duty a little early the next morning, intent on keeping a low profile, determined to stay out of trouble.
“Hello, ma’am. Officer Waters, transferred from the 17th Precinct?” I said to the female cop on the desk.
The sergeant wasn’t only uniformed—she was well informed, and stood up from her seat, without replying, cupping her hands around her mouth and shouting back over her shoulder: “Inspector? He’s h-e-e-e-r-r-r-e!”
As if on cue, two men appeared at the top of the stairs. The older of the two was Inspector Fry and the man to his left, Sergeant Wolf. Introductions from my side appeared unnecessary.
“ ‘Fluffy the Dog,’ eh? The ketchup lady, right? Park’s gone to the dogs, eh? Ha ha! You clown, Waters! We’ve been waiting to meet you all morning!” said Fry warmly, the edges of his grin forcing his dimples against his earlobes as he extended a handshake, while my new sarge sent my uniform tie into orbit with a thump on the back.
“You’re our boy, all right, ‘Fluffy’! The rookie who got Mrs. Heinz pissed! Haven’t laughed so much in years. What a comedian! You ‘ketchup’ fast!” Wolf howled, as he joined in the laughter echoing around the dingy halls of my new home. News of this Manhattan transfer was music to my ears, and it remains one of the biggest breaks to happen to me in my career. I had started out in a deadhouse, ended up in the doghouse, and now was being welcomed to an “A-house,” an active station where you could make a name for yourself. Some luck.
CHAPTER SIX
PICK A POCKET OR TWO
“Señor, por favor—perhaps you help me, no?”
The skinny Hispanic kid with broken English and beat-up sneakers is friendly and polite as he hands you a printed business card. It’s the name and address of a lawyer, neither of which you recognize though you live just around the corner, and you’re struggling to explain this to him when a passerby, dressed in a sharp suit and carrying a briefcase, pauses to offer his help.
Pedro, as the youngster is named, explains as best he can that he has a ticket with several of the winning New York State Lottery numbers, worth, he thinks, about five thousand dollars, and needs this lawyer to help him because he is an illegal and can’t cash it in himself.
The sharp-suited newcomer is skeptical.
“Look, there’s a bodega on the corner where we can run the ticket, opposite that Bank of America. Let’s check it and if it’s on the level, well, maybe we can help you out, amigo.” Two minutes later, having asked the bodega owner for the winning numbers, you have established Pedro doesn’t have a five-thousand-dollar winning ticket. He has a five-million-dollar jackpot winner—but not for long, if the shark in the suit has anything to do with it. Out of earshot of the kid, the guy with the briefcase suggests a partnership. As it happens, his briefcase is full of cash—he’s on his way to lodge a sizable sum for a business client. He will front Pedro the five grand he still believes he has coming to him, provided you can cough up your half straightaway, which is the minimum he has to lodge on behalf of a client within the hour. Hell, you’ll both take two-million-five from the deal. It’s a win-win.
You call Pedro back and carefully examine the ticket. It’s perfect, right down to the lottery slogan, “Hey, you never know.” But y
ou do know. You know very well that you can’t let this opportunity slip through your fingers, so you ignore that little voice in your head and nod to your new partner, who smiles before turning to open the briefcase, offering the kid five thousand of his client’s money, telling him that you will cash in the ticket, just to help him out.
Pedro’s face lights up like Cinco de Mayo, and he calls down the blessings of numerous Catholic saints on your heads before skipping off with a backpack full of green back to Tijuana or whatever godforsaken place he belongs.
All you have to do now is go to the bank and pay your partner back his half share before you cash in the ticket, but as you cross the road he starts to panic at the thought of his client checking his account, finding zero, and dialing 911. Better that you hold the ticket, he suggests.
“You seem like an honest Joe, but I need something as a good-faith gesture. Give me—what—five thousand? You owe me two and a half thousand anyway, and I can lodge it uptown for my client right now. It means we are both happy, and we can meet up later at the lottery offices after I finish in the bank.”
You empty your savings account, and your partner passes you the ticket, along with his business card, pausing to hastily scribble down your name, number, and address from your driver’s license, telling you he’ll call you later, before shaking hands, hailing a taxi, and heading uptown.
The curtain falls, but it will be a few hours before you realize your role in this revival of that celebrated Manhattan melodrama, the “Spanish Lottery Scam.” Once more it has been its usual runaway success.
It’s probably not much of a consolation, but countless others have played the sucker, too, from bus drivers to nurses, doctors, professors, and lawyers, because greed is no respecter of IQ or education.
Not everyone is motivated by money, but a really good grifter, as a scam artist is sometimes known, has myriad variations for most of his little dramas, reading your prejudices and preconceptions like a book and seamlessly weaving them into his narrative. Sometimes your own honesty and civic pride will be used against you because these men and women are students of psychology, and history, too. Times may change but human nature, both good and bad, remains basically the same.
Although most NYPD cops deal with fraudsters at some stage, the Job has a number of specially trained units for tracking down these criminals, and seven months after being bounced out of the 17th by Smolka, I found myself joining the Pickpocket Squad, based in the NYPD’s Manhattan South Task Force on West Forty-second Street.
The remit of our small close-knit team, which was made up of six keen, motivated cops and our sergeant, Brian O’Leary, another graduate of the 17th, was simple. We were encouraged to act on our initiative, with a particular emphasis on activity on businesses on Fifth Avenue, such as Saks, Tiffany, and Cartier, and the rich customers who patronized them.
Brian had become very knowledgeable on these scam techniques from previous arrests and was in charge of the unit. He partnered me up with Jack Jaskaran, another recent academy graduate, while Tommy Byrnes was paired with Michael Edwards—both had strong Irish roots. Nick Palmari, an Italian whose father had been on the Job, partnered a female Hispanic cop called Judy Sena, who was as sharp and as tough as the best of us. O’Leary split his time between the streets (with us) and the office.
We all carried ASP nightsticks (expandable batons), pepper spray, and guns. And we had Nick, a man-mountain who was big since he was little. Palmari stood six feet six inches tall and spent most of his off-duty time in the gym. With him on the team the one thing we never had problems with was wannabe tough guys, which was important because on the street you could never back down. The Pickpocket Squad was not likely to be as dangerous as my first few months at Manhattan South, which I’d spent on riot duty. But these scammers were no less damaging to the city, its reputation, and its visitors and residents alike.
The idea for our unit was to mingle with the thieves, observing our targets from a variety of angles and positions, a difficult assignment since most were so subtle that we were lucky to spot them “dipping” a passerby. Those street thieves were highly sophisticated. They used everything from children to distract their victims to mechanical clamps hidden inside specially modified suitcases which would be placed over a target bag or purse. Often the person who took your wallet would be just one member of a four-or five-strong crew whose philosophy could be summed up in three words: “Distraction, then extraction.”
“Steers” acted as spotters for the crew, selecting victims in the crowd of tourists who stopped to admire buskers, who may or may not be members of the crew, or locals queuing for a bus.
One of the team would shout, “Someone just stole my wallet!” while the steer watched people pat their pockets, checking that theirs was still in place, before signaling a “stall,” who would bump this “mark” to distract them while a “hook” lifted the wallet with a featherlight touch, often palming it back to another member of the team in case he or she was stopped and searched.
All six of us in the squad dressed in smart-casual attire, trying to blend in as much as possible with these criminals and their intended victims, generally acting on intuition rather than intelligence, scanning faces in the crowd and watching body language to spot our perps. We often targeted people by sitting on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, eating an ice cream, and watching the drama unfold in front of us. The idea was to watch cars pull up at the red lights, and if the occupants “acted like perps”—looking out the windows at the pedestrians passing by or staring too closely into parked vehicles, for instance—we shadowed them, waiting until they pulled their scam.
Then we pounced, returning to their car later, where we often recovered a trunk full of stolen property from their earlier efforts.
We were on patrol one morning, walkie-talkies under our jackets, earpieces fitted, when Judy’s voice broke the static.
“You guys see that? The well-dressed Hispanic dude in the blue jacket just dipped that old man—over at the taxicab! Smooth as silk.”
Judy was the only one who had spotted the booster, but we knew our perp had indeed pinched a wallet when he discreetly slid it back into the old-timer’s jacket. It might have been an attack of conscience, but Jack Jaskaran, a Guyanan who was raised in Jamaica, Queens, and had plenty of street sense, didn’t believe in coincidence.
“Don’t make sense, Judy,” he said with a frown. “Nobody dips a mark and then puts back the wallet. Let’s follow these assholes.”
My partner Jack would retire a captain with a couple of degrees, including a master’s from Harvard, certainly one of the smartest cops I ever met, and early on we learned that his gut instinct usually proved correct.
We shadowed our targets, two respectable-looking Hispanic men in their thirties, both from behind and from up front. Two of the team kept the rest of us informed over the walkies, dropping back after a couple of minutes to let another two take over. Our suspects wasted little time in heading into Saks, a one-block-long, stepped wedding cake of a store which has attracted brides-to-be from around the world in search of that perfect dress since it first opened in 1924.
Jack and I showed our badges to a manager and were escorted to the security room while Judy and the three other guys posed as shoppers, sticking close to the two suspects as they picked out armfuls of designer clothing and took their place in line.
“Can you tell your girl to go through with this sale, but if they hand over plastic, get her to place it faceup on her till where you guys can focus in on it?” Jack suggested to the security camera operator, who selected the appropriate screen and picked up the house phone.
The sales assistant did as the supervisor instructed, and as her colleague zoomed in I jotted down the number. I called our direct line to American Express—the card on the screen belonged to a man whose date of birth was a match for the man in his sixties whose pocket was picked. Jaskaran let out a chuckle.
“That’s why they returned his wallet
! All they wanted was the plastic. If they had taken everything he might have noticed and canceled that card.”
The duo we arrested that day were slick and very professional, typical of the many South American thieves we nabbed on a regular basis, men and women who spent more stolen money on clothing and accessories every week than we made in a month. We dealt with thieves and con men from all over the world, but Colombians were amongst the best, partly because they’re amongst the best-looking—more proof of the research which shows people believe “what is beautiful is good.” How we view others is largely based on their appearance and the sound of their voice, rather than the words that come out of their mouth.
*
We were on patrol another morning soon after when we spotted a car pulled up outside a branch of Chemical Bank, a chain which would later become the cornerstone of Chase Manhattan.
The vehicle was a nondescript rented sedan, the preferred mode of transport for out-of-town grifters, but what tipped us off was that the man behind the wheel was behaving more like a getaway driver than a chauffeur. At first we suspected that we might have stumbled on a bank robbery, although Midtown gridlock made that unlikely.
Sure enough, when his well-dressed passenger emerged a few minutes later he was carrying neither a gun nor cash, but he was nervously glancing left and right. When he slid into his car I jumped out of ours, allowing Jack to tail them while I hurried back to ask the manager a few questions.
“The Colombian gentleman? Everything was in order, Officer Waters,” the pinstriped official said with surprise.
“He just changed some traveler’s checks—three thousand dollars, if I recall. Routine transaction for us here in Chemical Bank. What’s the problem?”
“We don’t know—yet,” I replied.
Through my earpiece I heard Nick and Judy report that the Colombian gentleman and his driver had just pulled up outside another branch, so Jack followed him inside and spotted our guy turning another three-thousand-dollar check into cash. This was repeated again at another Chemical Bank: the same transaction, the same sum. We decided we had enough to stop them and, pending an investigation, arrest them. So we let them return to the car and approached cautiously.