NYPD Green

by Luke Waters

  As soon as she hung up I dialed the number of a fed who was good at finding guys who would rather stay lost. Bald, bearded, and burly, Manny Puri served as a special agent with the U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service prior to joining the U.S. Marshals. Highly experienced, he just wanted to see every felon behind bars without letting interagency politics get in the way.

  Although 9/11 proved a big help to Filipe in making his escape, it would also play a major role in bringing him to justice. Technological advancements which were fast-tracked in the wake of the al-Qaeda-led attack meant that all calls made after that date in the USA could be tracked via satellite. We used a “triggerfish,” an ultrapowerful antenna and peripheral device which simulates a mobile phone mast site to trick your handset into automatically connecting into our equipment instead of the real mast used by the phone company.

  Once the unit has registered with our phony phone site, the target’s handset instantly transmits its mobile identification number (MIN) and other important information, such as the channel used, the MIN of every incoming call, and, crucially, the precise physical location of all the incoming and outgoing data. Simply put, it tells us where our fugitive is standing and is accurate to within a few yards.

  High-tech techniques are fine, but they work even better with some old-school police pressure, so myself, U.S. Marshal Manny Puri, and Detective Tony Curtin were dispatched to bring Tania Walker and Ramone Santana into the precinct. Tony Curtin was a fellow Irishman and one of the toughest cops I ever worked with, providing security to Gerry Adams on his visits to New York. We didn’t mention that Filipe’s stepmother was our informant, but implied the police had caught them on video in Newark Airport harboring a fugitive: a serious felony which would cost Filipe’s brother, who was applying for U.S. citizenship, his future.

  As a former illegal alien myself, I could understand more than most what the threat of deportation means, but just to be sure, we put pressure on Tania, too. We didn’t have to push too hard, because she knew that Filipe had been seeing other women while he was on the run. Any loyalty she felt evaporated with the news that the father of her child had been two-timing her.

  Tania confirmed that Santana was working up in Boston and supplied us with an address in Dorchester, Boston’s largest neighborhood. U.S. Marshal Manny Puri broke out the triggerfish data analyzer, which he connected to a speaker, showing us how it would beep louder the closer we got to our target’s handset.

  November 23, 2004, 10:30 a.m., was an unusually warm, sunny morning in Boston, and the guys renovating the outside of one of the houses were in T-shirts and jeans, their hammers bopping against the wall, as we emerged from a side street taking our cues from Manny, who was fixated on the triggerfish, which was beeping steadily.

  All of a sudden he stopped, stared at the machine, took a couple of steps forward, and then back again.

  “That’s him, Luke, that’s our boy!” he shouted, pointing in the direction of two of the construction workers.

  “Hey, guys, how are you doing?” I said, breaking the silence, my hand already on my pistol, the Boston PD cops to my left, Tony and Manny to my right, all with handguns now drawn. It had been three years since Mallard was killed, but Santana hadn’t changed much from the police photos we’d passed around earlier that morning.

  “Don’t move. Drop that hammer now, Filipe! Now!” I shouted as Tony Curtin reached for his handcuffs.

  Santana was calm and didn’t resist. Our fugitive knew right there it was over, and, without us asking any questions, confessed straightaway. This meant we could still use his statement, even though he hadn’t yet been read his rights.

  “I knew that guy from the neighborhood. He started the fight. How much time am I looking at?” Filipe said, asking if we could go by his apartment to collect his passport and other personal items. All fine by me, since we still needed to prove his identity for the state extradition warrant.

  After a terrorist attack, a few thousand man-hours of work by cops in the Bronx, the U.S. Marshals, Boston PD, and lawyers in the DA’s office, the cell phone in his jeans pocket was eventually what gave Filipe Santana away.

  *

  My one week in the Bronx would turn out to last a decade. Mike Collins, a gentleman as usual, was as good as his word and called me after my first couple of weeks to say my transfer over to the 25 had been approved. He didn’t seem surprised when I asked to stay where I was, learning from the likes of Brower, who, for all his quirkiness, was an excellent DT, and Bruzack, who was just as talented if more than a little mad—which maybe was an asset in this precinct.

  Any doubts I ever had about this vanished one morning early in 2002 when we pulled up at a red light at 138th and Cypress Avenue, a busy intersection a mile from the precinct, and a disabled gunman used our car hood as a rest to gun a guy down in the street.

  Any kid in the Bronx could spot our Crown Vic as an unmarked cop car from fifty yards away, but this stocky, bald Hispanic man in a red Yankees shirt limped up, drew his “trey eight”—street slang for a .38-caliber revolver—and took careful aim at the barbershop across the street before squeezing the trigger.

  “Holy Mother of Jaysus!” I shouted from behind the wheel, fumbling with the driver’s door with one hand, the other reaching for my 9mm.

  “Cocksucker!” snarled my passenger.

  Unfortunately for his victim it seemed Baldy was a real marksman, because the guy outside the barbershop was down after the first round. To judge by the cane our shooter was carrying, history was once again being made: another first for the 42. We had witnessed the Big Apple’s first ever “limp-by.”

  Mighty Whitey was unimpressed; he had his head under the dashboard and was reaching to grab my arm to pull me down, possibly saving my life. In his mind and in his attitude, Mighty was a tall, deep-voiced, heavily built black man; he listened to a lot of Barry White and knew the streets better than any cop in our squad. But this native New Yorker was doomed to go through life in a skinny white man’s body, no matter his love of jive. It was like casting Matt Damon in a biopic about Biggie Smalls.

  We paused for a quick tactical assessment of our options across the hand brake.

  “Keep your ass down, buddy! You wanna catch crossfire? Chill, man,” my partner hissed.

  “Listen, Billy, we have to grab this lowlife before he shoots some other asshole.”

  Our chat was interrupted by a further loud bang, as the gunman popped off another round. Whitey peered over the passenger window and ducked down again to report that our 180-pound hood ornament had indeed shot an asshole, and the victim was now gripping his buttocks harder than Madonna.

  My partner, right ear just inches from the floor mat, proposed an alternative to my idea.

  “Okay, here’s what we do. Nothing. We’re gonna wait and see if the guy he’s cappin’ is packin’ too, Luke.”

  We were so busy arguing that we didn’t realize the shooting had stopped. When we looked up we saw our perp, still seemingly oblivious to our presence, stick his handgun into the waistband of his pants. He limped off up the block as quickly as his walking stick would allow.

  Near the barbershop, his target lay moaning for help. A few yards away another man, unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but fortunate enough to stop a bullet with his hand, was also screaming in pain. We later discovered the intended victim was named Ronald Chestnut, who had unwisely chased our shooter with a screwdriver a couple of hours earlier.

  Before I could even get on the radio to call in the shooting, the plot took another sidestep into the surreal when a fourth man stumbled out the door of the barber’s, past the two injured victims, waving a pistol, a look of confusion on his face.

  It was a uniformed cop, but we took no chances and tasted our floor mat again.

  “Detectives Brower and Waters from the 42,” Mighty shouted from the safety of the gas pedal. “Who you?”

  “Antwane Reeve, out of the 44,” the dreadlocked officer replied, pointing
his piece at the gunman, who was moving slowly up Cypress Avenue. “Dude on the cane is the shooter, right, Detective?”

  “Yeah,” I said, leaning across Brower. “We’re goin’ to pull around the corner and see if we can cut him off, Reeve. Follow on after us.”

  We took off in lukewarm pursuit, as Reeve followed on foot, the flashing lights and sirens on the Crown Vic finally alerting our gunman that we wanted to have a chat with him. The scene was farcical, but no less deadly. Whitey grabbed his door and pushed it out at the waistband of the shooter’s jeans, sending him sprawling to the sidewalk. Our perp, Eugenio Cortes, remained on the ground, too shocked to offer any resistance, and within seconds Reeve arrived on scene, handcuffs in one hand, handgun in the other, to place him under arrest.

  We put the prisoner in the car and thanked Reeve for his assistance. Even though there were two of us on the scene we were glad of the help in collaring the guy.

  Despite being convicted of attempted murder, for reasons best explained by a judge, Cortes would end up walking, or at least hobbling, out of court a free man, getting just five years’ probation for his shooting spree.

  *

  Six years later Antwane Reeve stumbled upon another shooter with almost deadly consequences when out on a late-night stroll with his dog. It was early summer and Antwane ended up in an argument with a twenty-five-year-old mope named Michael Williams, who, unknown to the cop, had a dozen and a half previous arrests on his rap sheet and used a silver 9mm Taurus pistol to sort out his problems.

  The cop wisely walked away, but on the way back home he bumped into Williams again, who produced the gun and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit Antwane in the head but instead of killing him it just left a small gash. Amazingly, he was able to pull out his off-duty gun, return fire, and call in the attack to 911. The perp was so shocked that he fled and was found hiding in his momma’s house, where he was arrested and later charged with the attempted murder of a police officer.

  Reeve spent an hour or two in the ER with little more than a splint on his little finger. It takes all kinds of craziness to make this city, and make it in this city, too. Just like in the NYPD.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CURIOUS CASES OF U.S. CODE 18

  “Luke. How you doing? The Lou asked me to reach out to you. How’d ya like to come over to us? If you can drag yourself away from the 42, of course …”

  Joe Hourihan was part of the furniture around the Bronx, and there wasn’t a young detective in the borough who hadn’t hoped to someday get that call. In 1993, I had been just another probationary police officer in the academy, and one of the few amongst twenty-two hundred other green hopefuls who had never even fired a gun before. Less than a decade later I was being invited to join one of the most elite units on the Job by Homicide Joe, the man who had worked with me on the Santana assault-turned-murder case.

  Although I had made plenty of mistakes along the way, Hourihan saw something in me he liked and had been impressed with my progress in the intervening three years. There was certainly no shortage of those with more skill and more time served than I had, all excellent detectives who never got the opportunity they deserved, but unfortunately for them their families hailed from Tijuana or Tampa, not Cork or Carlow. Life is not fair, but when the dice are loaded in your favor, you don’t complain. Joe Hourihan had huge influence, and if he had put my name forward for Bronx Homicide, then the spot was as good as mine.

  A week later I found myself sitting across from the smartest man I’d ever met in the NYPD. Lieutenant Sean O’Toole was yet another Irish-American cop and razor-sharp, understanding exactly what his superiors required of him as a key commander in the most crime-riddled borough in the city. O’Toole was all about results.

  My new CO outlined my role in the squad, explaining that Homicide was about more than catching murderers: it was about stopping repeat offenders likely to end up in that category.

  With that in mind, he revealed that he was not putting me in one of the usual Catching Teams investigating murders. O’Toole had something a little more delicate in mind for me.

  “Luke, how would you feel about screwing people up for us? And I mean really screwing them up.” The Lou beamed across his desk. What O’Toole had in mind was a program I would come to know well: Triggerlock.

  Every cop knows the experts in this area are the federal agencies, so a couple of weeks later I joined another fifty or so police officers from departments all over New York State for a two-week-long program designed to teach us the real meaning of “making a federal case of it.” In the process they turned us into experts on the 1968 Gun Control Act and subsequent amendments—or, as we came to know and love it, Code 18. Triggerlock is the program and Code 18 is the code under which felons are charged.

  Under this federal statute anyone who is convicted of a felony, subject to a domestic violence protective order, or illegally resident in the country is not allowed to possess a gun. Depending on how many felony convictions you have, possession of a firearm could see you sent away for anything from three years to life. Career criminals with a history of violence need access to firearms to protect themselves and their interests, and Triggerlock has consistently been shown as the ideal method to put them behind bars for good.

  The word “federal” is key here. In the States, each state sets its own laws and appoints its own police officers on a city, county, and state level. These work with local prosecutors to bring offenders before the courts on local warrants. If found guilty, they are sentenced to time in local jails, courtesy of local taxpayers. Federal laws are also enforced, and this parallel system is funded by national taxes and run by Washington, D.C.: these laws deal with individuals and gangs which pose a larger threat and which can’t be contained by local law enforcement, as well as criminal enterprises that cross state lines. This division stems from the days of Prohibition, when gangsters would regularly cross state lines until the launch of the FBI put a stop to that. Today, the ATF, DEA, and many other agencies are funded better than many countries’ armed forces!

  In a federal case, federal agents and prosecutors target criminals under complex national laws, and the guilty go down for decades instead of years, moved to federal penitentiaries, often thousands of miles away, with no chance of parole. Of course, the feds need local support, and selected police officers are trained to liaise with federal programs. I was ultimately to be chosen for this specialized training and would gain expertise in a number of federal programs. Eventually, I would get the opportunity afforded to few cops on the city payroll: to work inside the most famous law agency in the world, the FBI.

  Some of our targets would try to outwit us—and avoid a sentence of fifteen years to life—in Triggerlock by removing the legally required serial numbers from a weapon. This action, aimed at making a gun less traceable, is a felony, playing right into the hands of a federal prosecutor. Being in possession of a defaced gun means you are looking at probably twenty years to life. Your efforts are also often futile, since a number of techniques are now used to successfully restore deleted numbers, including chemical etching, which will render digits long erased readable once more. Such initiatives, like the ATF’s Obliterated Serial Number Program, have the budget, staff, and expertise to tilt the balance in our favor.

  In order for federal charges to stick, though, the arresting officer still needs to establish ownership of that firearm, and there are three usual methods. The first is through fingerprints—you might lift some good partials from flat areas. Second is DNA, if you are lucky enough to find a fleck of skin or a hair trapped in the slide or hammer.

  The third, and most common in my experience, is through a confession, which often proves easier to get than you would imagine. You simply sit your suspect down in an interview room and ask him if the gun is his.

  “So, do you realize that there are no serial numbers on that piece we found?” you say, staring your prisoner in the face.

  “You foolin’? No way, man! I ne
ver knew that.”

  “No? Don’t play me! You knew, because you erased them. That’s five years, straight off, asshole. You’re history.”

  “No way, I ain’t goin’ down for that!”

  “So, let me get this clear: you’re trying to tell me that when you bought the piece there were no numbers on it! You take me for a fool?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. That’s how it went down. The guy who gave me the piece must have hacked ’em off.”

  There you have it. A confession that your suspect took possession of a gun which he believed had been illegally altered to avoid identification. The guy across the other side of the interview room has just given you a conviction, gift-wrapped.

  Felons are, in reality, nonpersons in the USA. At best, from the moment the judge’s gavel falls until the day they die they are second-class citizens, with none of the rights the rest of us take for granted, including grant aid, which is automatically denied to anyone convicted of a felony. That means that if you do try to turn your back on crime, there will be no money for college or business start-ups and no place for you in public housing. Felons are not allowed to vote, and at any point they can be stopped and questioned by members of law enforcement who have a reasonable suspicion they are up to no good.

  A felony conviction ends your life as you know it. Ferdinand Nazario would learn that the hard way when he chose not to stash several rounds of ammunition before entering his apartment. It was a mistake that would see him sent to prison for fifteen years over a fistful of bullets discovered on a routine check.

  *

  When Ferdinand’s parole officers had knocked at 4040 Bronx Boulevard for a routine check they were wearily invited inside. Contrary to the conditions of his parole, Nazario was out after the nine p.m. curfew, temporarily frustrating the duo’s efforts to perform a drug check, a standard test for felons released back onto the streets, but when he eventually was brought back he dutifully filled the sample cup with urine. The result was gold. Ferdinand Nazario was positive for narcotics.