NYPD Green

by Luke Waters

  For once, the cops couldn’t cope. The NYPD was not in charge. Nobody was in charge for a while, and when the smoke started to clear, it was obvious that America, land of the free and home of the brave, where personal freedom is cherished above all, was close to a state of martial law. The streets of the Big Apple were now run by camo-clad soldiers and Marines carrying assault rifles, their Humvees topped with .50-caliber machine guns, rather than police officers in puny sedans armed with nothing more than puny pistols and cans of Mace.

  Within a couple of days we were moved to a facility that was seldom mentioned but had been designated as an alternate to One Police Plaza as police headquarters in the event of just such an emergency. Two Police Plaza was located in a former Budweiser plant on the outskirts of the city, the conveyor belts and bottling equipment replaced by generators, powerful mainframe computers, communications equipment, a canteen, and an armory. Right then the main tactic employed by the Brass was to keep us out of Manhattan, in case there was another bombing. They didn’t know if there would be follow-up attacks, and if there were, what would be their target, and what form would they take? Would it be chemical? Biological? Nuclear? Standard explosives? More suicide attacks? At this stage it was just guesswork. These were the questions the city grappled with, and our orders were simple.

  Stand by, wait for further instructions.

  “I’m sick of this, buddy. Let’s grab a car and go down to the towers and see if we can do something,” Rosado suggested eventually. Myself and Billy Bruzack readily agreed, and five minutes later we were driving through streets now controlled by soldiers, M16 rifles slung over their shoulders. They checked our IDs and waved us past parked Humvees and trucks armed with machine guns. For people used to manning any checkpoints with pistols, this came as a surprise. We were no longer in charge of our own city, much of which was utterly unrecognizable.

  New York has been destroyed countless times by Hollywood, but to see it happen for real left all three of us stunned into silence as the scene of utter devastation surrounded us on all sides. It was about thirty hours since the attack, and rubble was piled up everywhere, half-collapsed buildings pancaked onto streets, and giant concrete beams, still barely attached to their superstructure by the metal cables added for extra strength, were slowly swinging from side to side—creaking and groaning high above our heads as heavy smoke continued to billow into the air, thick with dust.

  As we got closer to the center of the attack we could just make out the body bags lying in the streets, while our cruiser crawled past destroyed patrol cars, crushed fire trucks, and abandoned civilian vehicles, all blanketed in debris. The Hi-Viz strips on the jackets of FDNY (Fire Department of New York) members glowed through the dusk as they picked their way through the destruction with powerful flashlights, which hovered like fireflies on doorways, as they called out, in vain, for survivors.

  The city was now in near-darkness apart from giant arc lights set up by the military which cut a swath through air thick with particles of deadly dust that would hasten the deaths of many on duty that day. Asbestos in old buildings and benzene from jet fuel are both known carcinogens, and rates of leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid, prostate, and blood cancers amongst the first responders as the towers fell all soared high above the usual averages in the years which followed, meaning that the true list of victims from 9/11 may never be known.

  We grabbed Maglites and ditched the car, heading on foot to 5 World Trade Center—a low-rise office block in the shadow of Tower Two, which though badly damaged by the explosion was still standing—climbing over the rubble, stumbling as we made our way down to the basement level on precarious, hastily erected walkways to find a scene cut-and-pasted from a Pathé newsreel about the London Blitz.

  We scrambled helplessly, hopelessly through the basement but had to accept that there was nothing we could do for anyone buried there, and with the danger of further collapses, the three of us reluctantly picked our way back to the Buick and returned in silence to Two Police Plaza. We were soon put into twelve-hour shifts, a roster rearrangement which would last for the next six months and hasten the retirement of many cops over the following year.

  *

  New York City is full of reminders that the Dutch, not the English, were the first Europeans to settle here, from the colors of the state flag to the images on the NYPD shields. The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island all owe their names to new arrivals from the Netherlands, but nobody working on the 9/11 cleanup failed to be struck by the fact that the 1.8 million tons of rubble taken out of Ground Zero was destined for another place named by those emigrants, the eerily appropriate “Fresh Kills.”

  Temporary buildings had been erected on the western corner of Staten Island almost overnight to facilitate personnel from twenty-five agencies, including the NYPD, FDNY, Port Authority Police (PAPD), State Police, FBI, U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Army, the latter supplying generators, lights, refrigerated trucks, and kitchen equipment as well as cooks, mechanics, medics, and anything else required. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army worked together to staff the “Hilltop Café,” serving up hot food and drinks every day to fifteen hundred city, state, and federal employees, as well as producing stress management booklets to help people traumatized by what we had to face.

  Outside, the grim task of sifting through the rubble from “the Pile,” as rescue workers referred to the site, continued. The debris was first trucked down to the piers and dumped into giant 130-foot-long barges, which were then floated down to Staten Island. Upon arrival, it was trucked once more to our 175-acre rubbish tip, now filled with cops and federal agents armed with rakes and plastic buckets.

  I stood in one corner of the vast site, while thirty yards on either side Bruzack, Rosado, George Chin, Billy Brower, and Johnny MacMillan, along with other detectives and bosses from the 42, stood expectantly as cops from other precincts and agents from diverse federal agencies scattered throughout our sector waited for the signal to start digging and scraping.

  We were all in white one-piece Tyvek HazMat coveralls overlaid with Hi-Viz vests. Our lungs were protected by half-face respirators fitted with HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters, and our shoes remained behind in the changing huts, swapped for bright yellow steel-toe-capped rubber boots. Everyone was issued goggles, a hard hat, gloves, and heavy-duty ear protectors, but nothing could dispel the smell from the ever-growing mountain of despair, so gut-wrenching that it is difficult to put into words.

  You controlled the urge to hurl as you started to rake and put any item of interest in a plastic bucket, which was later taken to the Crime Scene Hut, where it was examined, photographed, labeled, and bagged for transport. Top of our priority list were the “black boxes”—which despite their name are bright orange—the all-important flight recorders. Each of the Boeing 767s was fitted with two of the devices, which are the size and proportions of a small toolbox—a voice recorder in the cockpit and a data recorder embedded close to the tail. None of the four was ever found.

  The U.S. Secret Service, which lost an agent in the attack, helped with our efforts and showed us pictures of a safe containing weapons, cash, and other sensitive material which was in one of their offices destroyed in the blast, but if it was ever recovered we heard nothing about it.

  As time moved on, other methods were used on the larger lumps of compacted debris, such as a giant spinning cylindrical separator which broke the material down into fragments before they were placed on conveyor belts, where cops, federal agents, and firefighters struggled to stay focused as they sifted through the detritus.

  K-9 cops and agents moved up and down past me with cadaver dogs, while the FBI had a forensic anthropologist on site for more detailed examinations. The Job later assigned Deputy Commissioner Maureen Casey to take charge of the attempts to identify the 4,257 pieces of human remains eventually recovered, comparing any DNA which survived against that found on personal items donated by the families of victims, such
as combs, hairbrushes, and toothbrushes.

  That was our work for the next six months, and for the first few weeks we did nothing else, our investigations suspended while we concentrated on raking through rubble. The search turned up other evidence, too. More than thirteen pounds of narcotics were uncovered from material taken from the Pile, along with thousands of rounds of ammunition and over $76,000 in cash. I personally found hundreds of dollars, along with a police radio and part of a seat belt from one of the aircraft.

  Standing there, looking at that cop’s radio, I couldn’t help thinking of the last words he or she spoke into it. Did I know that officer? Had we ever met? Would we ever catch Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda planners responsible for killing them? Sixty seconds later the radio was in my plastic bucket, on its way to the hut, and I returned to raking the mound once more.

  I suspect a large amount of the material we were sent to sift through was never properly searched and simply dumped into a landfill.

  *

  The attack on the Twin Towers also allowed a lot of criminals in New York to escape justice. Normally, when you returned after a week away, your desk would be piled high with new files, but there was no extra paperwork in my in-tray when I was told to resume more routine investigations, as little new crime was investigated, and while the work in Fresh Kills progressed I spent two days a week suited up on site and the rest of the week juggling old cases.

  But this was just one aspect of the 9/11 attacks. As defense and security spending soared, New York’s finest were amongst the first to benefit, and our wage bill went through the roof because of the new duty rosters. Just about every DT on the Job was getting twenty-four hours’ overtime in what had been his or her two days off, to which you could add on four hours’ overtime during normal workdays, too.

  Many detectives retired in the following months, some for personal reasons, but for most the decision was purely financial. Half of your earnings are matched by the taxpayer in your pension, so the overtime surplus following the attacks resulted in a far more generous package for officers approaching their last months on the Job. They decided to put in their papers before the city started to return to something approaching normality, knowing they would never be in such a strong position again.

  After a few weeks of sifting through death and destruction at Fresh Kills, I was happy to get back to what passed for normal violence in the 42. I was only back at my desk a couple of weeks when I caught the first homicide of my career. Strangely, 9/11 would play a crucial part in that investigation, too. If it wasn’t for the terrible events of that morning, the killer would never have been able to escape our clutches.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT AIN’T OVER TILL IT’S OVER

  My first big case in the 42 turned out to be one of the most memorable of my career. It took a twist right from the start when the victim died in full view of an incoming Homicide detective.

  *

  October 13, 2001: the 911 operator logs a call that a man has been slashed in the leg on the corner of East 163rd Street and Third Avenue. I rush over with Billy Bruzack, George Chin, and Johnny MacMillan and we arrive to find our victim, a twenty-two-year-old black Hispanic male named William Mallard, sitting on a steep hill, his two hands clamped on his thigh, which is bleeding profusely.

  Even as a rookie DT I know that we are looking at perhaps Assault One in the first degree. I’m keen to get stuck into the investigation, and squat down to talk to our victim, who, as it turns out, knows the man who has just stabbed him.

  “Filipe did it,” Mallard whispers as I lean in, notebook in hand, his voice weakening, his ashen face turning deathly pale.

  I pay little attention to an unmarked car that has just pulled up to the curb. Billy Bruzack greets the first to alight, Joe Hourihan, a sergeant from the Bronx Homicide Task Force. My partner is insisting I come over and be introduced, despite my reluctance to leave the victim, who is with paramedics.

  “Hey, Joe, whadda ya know, we’ve got one of your guys here—an ‘off the boat’ Irishman this time,” Billy says with a grin as I walk, hesitatingly, back towards our car, nodding in my direction as Hourihan offers me his hand.

  “Hi, howya doing—Luke, isn’t it? Heard about you. So where you from?” the newcomer inquires cheerily, as the other Homicide guys shoot the breeze with George and Johnny.

  “I’m out of the 42 Detective Squad, Sarge,” I reply slowly, looking back over my shoulder as the pool of blood surrounding our victim—who is now out cold—grows ever larger and starts to trickle downhill.

  Mallard is on the way out.

  “No, you idiot,” Hourihan replies. “I mean what part of Ireland are you from?” A silence descends.

  “Dublin, Sarge,” I say.

  He extends a handshake once more. “Hey, nice to meet you. Looks like I’ll be working with you for the night now, Luke,” my fellow Emerald Society member replies.

  “What do you mean? You’re Homicide, and this is an assault …”

  “Assault? Your boy is DOA. Take a look!” the sergeant invites matter-of-factly, amused by the shock on my face.

  “Or he will be by the time that bus reaches the hospital.” He points to the ambulance that is automatically called to all 911 incidents. “You couldn’t tell he was likely, Luke? C’mon, man. Look at all the blood!”

  “Holy shit! I … I was just talking to him. He told me, ‘Filipe did it,’ ” I blurt out.

  “Really? Hey!” Bruzack nods approvingly, clapping me on the back. “Good detective work, buddy! See, you guys? That’s why the Irish make good cops, Joe! Proactive!”

  To the casual observer it might look like the half dozen detectives couldn’t have cared less about the dead man being carted to the morgue or about catching the guy who killed him, but the reality was different. Death and destruction are our business.

  It dawned on me that the cops who had just pulled up already knew that someone had been murdered, a child was dead, or a police officer had been shot.

  They are New York City’s Grim Reapers.

  *

  By now the street was a hive of activity, as Patrol marked off the crime scene and kept the onlookers back, allowing our techs to gather the forensics and photograph all around them while we started a canvass for witnesses, who told us that Mallard had a beef with a guy he knew from the neighborhood, Filipe Santana. Santana, who was slightly younger than Mallard, but half his size, had pulled a knife to even the odds, lashing out with the blade. Unluckily for both of them, he connected, slashing the bigger man across the femoral artery.

  We had a name, but with the other man dead, Santana was elusive. Like many people living in the Bronx today, our suspect had links to the Dominican Republic and we suspected that he’d made it back there. Our theory was confirmed by his stepmother, who intensely disliked Filipe, for some reason. She told us that his brother, Ramone, and Filipe’s girlfriend, Tania Walker, had driven our fugitive to the airport. Amid the confusion post-9/11 he had slipped away.

  *

  As a DT you succeed or fail largely on your ability to successfully juggle cases, keeping several files in the air at the same time. The 42 was responsible for policing a square mile of what politicians and census takers refer to as U.S. Congressional District 16, a place where a third of the residents—about a quarter of a million people—lived below the poverty line, making it the poorest part of the country, on a par with Puerto Rico.

  Deprivation and depravity usually go hand-in-hand, and detectives in the precinct had to investigate about twenty murders a year, and perhaps three hundred other cases, too, meaning you had to review and reprioritize constantly during meetings with your CO several times every week to have any hope of keeping on top of things.

  Juggling, like any skill, only comes with time. But right then this was a luxury the Job couldn’t afford. Even when I did make progress on finding Filipe, within a couple of days I had to put the case folders away again and drive over to Fresh Kills to join the men
in the white suits and sift through the rubble of the Twin Towers once more.

  Extradition was an avenue we considered in our pursuit of Santana but it presented problems because sometimes the DR (Dominican Republic) authorities cooperate and other times they refuse. Refusal was the more likely option in our case because Filipe Santana would probably claim self-defense, which might result in a plea down to manslaughter. Although rendition could be used, it’s not something a CO would sign off on lightly, though in the years after 9/11 it became far more common for all sorts of serious crimes, many with no connection whatsoever to terrorism.

  The easiest method of bringing a suspect back to face trial is to get him to voluntarily surrender, and over the next few months I spoke on the phone with Filipe several times. I encouraged him to come back and get the whole thing cleared up, even sending him a plane ticket on two occasions, all to no avail.

  This case was clearly manslaughter in the first degree, rather than murder. But, as always in cases like this, we charged Santana under state law, in his absence, with murder in the second degree, leaving it up to the courts to decide if it should be a lesser charge. Our fugitive’s attorney accepted an offer of seven years, though all our discussions were theoretical, since our perp was on the run and remained a free man over the next thirty months. Every day other files came across my desk which took precedence, but whenever a new lead turned up I returned to the paperwork and kept shaking the tree, hoping to dislodge our suspect.

  Three years later, I picked up the telephone to hear Filipe’s stepmother on the other end of the line, who told me that our fugitive was back, working construction in Boston. She even gave me his telephone number, señor.