NYPD Green

by Luke Waters

  She was known to hang out with two other zombies, crackheads with a history of violence. One of them was immediately identified as a suspect and was already facing an Assault One charge after stabbing Jose Rivera, the super of his old apartment building.

  Normally Assault One is of little interest to Homicide, but the DT who caught the case did nothing with it, so when I learned that one of the crackheads had left the super needing twenty-one stitches, it gave me the ideal excuse to arrest this powerfully built six-foot-three, 240-pound black male and question him on the last time he saw our victim.

  When I picked the suspect up I told him he was being held on a murder charge, rather than the recent assault, just to see if I could rattle his cage, but he kept cool. He ultimately got two years for stabbing the super, good news for us, since we now knew exactly where he was—if only Nikki could get her head together and place him in the apartment with our victim.

  It was clear that Nikki Wiley felt something for the dead man, whose grandson she claimed to have once dated and who apparently gave her money whenever she asked. So, in her own drug-hazed way, she tried to tell us who killed her friend.

  In her most coherent statement our witness claimed she woke up at three a.m. with the sudden urge for a pizza, calling to her mother’s to borrow the money, and that she saw her old pals enter Jackson’s building at about six a.m. Nikki followed the two junkies inside and made her way up to the deceased’s apartment on the second floor to see if he had any baking soda, used to turn powdered cocaine into rocks of crack.

  Our witness later refused to sign this statement and left me banging my head against the wall in frustration, so we did whatever we could to keep her onside—even if that meant spending my morning in the cattery and the inevitable off-color jokes.

  Then Nikki missed a court date and reached out to me to see if I could help, so I spoke to the ADA working the case, Sarah Jacobson, and suggested that we put her in a prison rehab program for twelve months to see if she could get clean. At that moment Nikki was useless as a witness. Three-day binges are not uncommon amongst crack addicts, resulting in memory loss and even full-blown paranoid psychosis, as they occasionally throw their arms over their heads to protect themselves against the giant bugs scurrying to attack them. The prosecutor agreed, and we took the case before a judge. If Nikki could get her head together—even temporarily—and return to the land of the living, she might be able to take the stand against her two crackhead friends, who had disappeared off the face of the earth since the day of the murder.

  Even when you can’t find a suspect, you keep going; you make life uncomfortable for innocent people who care about that person you are trying to chase down. We used pester power, knocking at the door at the most inappropriate times. Birthdays, family BBQs, and parties are good. Christmases and Thanksgiving dinners? Even better.

  “My boy is innocent! Why are you harassing him and disturbing this family?” the mother of one of the crackheads demanded when she answered our ring at the family home on Seabury Avenue, a quiet and respectable corner of the Bronx.

  “That’s fine, ma’am. But like we said last time, you haven’t seen him, and we can’t find him at any of his usual haunts,” I replied. “Don’t you find it strange that he’s on the run if he’s done nothing wrong?”

  “He was scared, Detective!” his mother retorted, defensively. “Scared of you cops harassing him. Why can’t you go after real criminals?”

  I thanked her for her time and left a business card, reminding her that we’d be checking back regularly just in case he dropped by, and I paid a similar visit to the mother of our suspect’s five-year-old daughter, whose reply was the same as his mom’s.

  Our efforts soon paid off. The fugitive called me to explain his innocence.

  “Why you bothering my family with this bull, man? Back off and leave them be! I ain’t comin’ in to see any cops because I ain’t done nothing wrong!” he insisted before hanging up.

  Over the next few months we paid return visits to his family and reached out to the U.S. Postal Inspectors, the Department of Probation, the New York/New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), a multi-agency Fugitive Task Force, and U.S. Marshal Manny Puri to check on addresses in Richmond, Virginia, where we’d been tipped off that our suspect might be lying low, but once again we could find no trace of our suspect, and the investigation continued with little real progress being made.

  *

  It was a week before Christmas and the sidewalks of Manhattan were full of ho-ho-ho-ing as we handed out “Help Us Help You” posters to the old man’s friends and neighbors near Arthur Jackson’s building. We had little choice. But we caught a break, a bit of seasonal good cheer.

  I got a call informing me that one of Mr. Arthur’s crackhead neighbors had just been arrested with about forty grams of cocaine. His lawyer had contacted the DA to tell him that he had information which he was willing to trade.

  The man who potentially could help us put our chief suspect away was a former U.S. Marine, Tyrone Little. But when we produced our would-be informant at the Bronx DA’s office our drama took an utterly unpredictable twist.

  “Mr. Little, as you’re aware you are here today because we wish to question you on the murder of Arthur Jackson—‘Mr. Arthur’—at his home last November,” Sarah Jacobson said across the table to our interviewee.

  Little was represented by an attorney named John Mangialardi, and his opening comment amazed us.

  “My client is happy to talk to you, on just one condition. He is willing to make a statement that every morning he goes to buy drugs and comes back to the building beside where the deceased, whom he knew as ‘Mr. Arthur,’ lived.

  “On the morning of this man’s death, my client sat down at approximately five-thirty a.m. with [and here he mentioned the names of Nikki’s two pals] and a crack user he knows as ‘Nikki,’ and he has information pertinent to your investigation.”

  “We’re listening, Mr. Mangialardi,” Jacobson responded, tapping her pen on her desk. “What does he want in return?”

  “It’s quite simple, Ms. Jacobson. My client wants Detective Waters here to take care of this matter on his behalf,” the attorney replied, sliding a small file across the table towards the increasingly intrigued ADA, who bent back the flap of the foolscap envelope and eased out a xerox of a burial record and a copy of an old newspaper report.

  The piece, dated February 29, 1988, reported how a little girl and her mother were discovered hog-tied with articles of clothing. They had been raped, before being manually strangled in the mother’s apartment just down the block from where Arthur Jackson lived, at 1007 East 174th Street.

  Eighteen months before the horrific crime, the offices of Special Services for Children had ruled that the child’s drug-addicted mother, Selina Cooper, was no longer a fit parent and handed custody to her paternal grandmother, Phyllis Little, whom the girl lived with next door.

  The dead child, whose picture smiled happily at me from the newspaper article, was the daughter of our prisoner, Tyrone Little, and Selina Cooper, his dysfunctional common-law wife. She was a regular in a group who took drugs in apartments and motels with various men who supplied them with narcotics in return for sexual favors.

  Nobody had ever been charged with the rapes and homicides, in spite of compelling evidence against one of the men who’d partied with Selina Cooper, Robert Fleming, currently in prison and with a long record which included sex offenses.

  Little’s offer left me openmouthed with amazement, while the usually articulate ADA looked equally surprised by the “solve one for me, and I’ll solve one for you” proposal. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

  *

  I made a few calls and discovered that the investigation was now assigned to another detective, Wendell Stradford, in the Manhattan Cold Case Squad (MCCS), which was based in Brooklyn, and Nancy Barko, a senior assistant district attorney and one of the most experienced lawyers in the Bronx prosecuto
r’s office.

  I got a copy of Stradford’s report, which mentioned that victims’ swabs from the 1988 double rape-homicide had gone missing. The cold case DT held numerous meetings with forensics experts to try to locate the missing evidence and eventually discovered it in an evidence locker. On May 14, 2003, Stradford had joined Dr. Marie Sample, assistant director of forensic biology, and Helen Rafaniello, forensic scientist, at the ME’s office, where tests were carried out which showed a positive DNA match for Robert Fleming, twenty-five years old at the time of the attacks, whose semen was found in the body cavities of both mother and daughter.

  Without a doubt he was the rapist, and almost certainly, either by himself or with others, was also the killer. The problem was that while the lawyers agreed he might have killed our victims, the DA believed time had washed his record clean.

  Fleming was a real piece of work. At one point he had been living in Brooklyn, when his girlfriend was arrested by officers from the 71 for arson after trying to burn down their apartment with him inside. The unfortunate woman had discovered that he had infected her with HIV, an accusation other women had also leveled at our suspect.

  Fleming and the woman had then disappeared, but it was believed he had returned to live with his mother at 1160 Colgate Avenue in the Bronx, his address for many of the arrests earlier in his criminal career, which included sex offenses in California, as well as larceny, drug dealing, and possession. As so often happens, he had ended up back in the system anyway when he was picked up on other charges. But, despite his incarceration, no charges were brought on the rapes and homicides.

  I dropped by the DA’s office at 198 East 161st Street to see ADA Nancy Barko and to find out the reason for the delay. She seemed to be intimately acquainted with the facts of the twenty-year-old case, but to my astonishment had no intention of acting on them.

  “Robert Fleming? Oh, yes, I know all about the guy, Detective. Certainly, he is a match for the rapes, but the problem is we can’t pin the homicides on him, so we won’t be pursuing a prosecution,” Barko said with a shrug.

  “Are you kidding me, Nancy?” I said incredulously. “We have a career criminal who infects his girlfriends with HIV, and whose semen is found in the bodies of a skell mother and her poor little daughter, who are strangled after being assaulted, but the DA won’t go after the guy?”

  “Look, Detective, I know where you are coming from, but we simply can’t arrest him on this,” Barko said wearily. “We can prove he raped her, but we cannot prove he killed her, and as you know, the ten-year statute of limitations for the rape has expired, so he gets a pass on that. There may be no statute of limitations on murder, but who is to say that he didn’t just rape her and someone else strangled her?”

  “Who? Me, for one, Counselor. And any member of any jury. Do you really think they won’t convict this bastard? Give me a break!”

  Barko’s patience was lasting far longer than mine.

  “Luke, we would go to trial and get a conviction on the murder, but the same day the Court of Appeals would overturn it based on the doubt that someone else might have killed the child—”

  “Do it, then. Do it! Lock this mope up for murder. Are you crazy, Nancy? You’re letting him get away with this for the last five years?”

  Barko and I continued to argue, and I eventually stormed out, utterly frustrated. Since Robert Fleming had HIV he would probably be dead soon enough, and I couldn’t understand why the DA wouldn’t prosecute. Even if the case was overturned, it would be of some comfort to Little, and his mother, to see the man responsible for destroying their loved ones’ lives having to answer for his crimes.

  Plus, it would help me clear the Arthur Jackson homicide.

  I reached out to the cold case investigator, Wendell Stradford, a heavyset six-footer with over twenty years on the Job, who I heard was a worker. He did things at his own pace and resented interference, which was exactly how he viewed my questions.

  To make it worse, Stradford’s office was located in Brooklyn in a building once used by the now-defunct NYC Transit Authority Police Department and was now home to both the Manhattan and Brooklyn Cold Case Squads under the Fugitive Enforcement Division. I was far from home and far from welcome.

  Wendell and I did not get off to a good start.

  “Who do you think you are, to walk in here and ask me how I do my job, Waters?” the other detective demanded. “This is my case, and I’ve put a lot of time into it, so back off!”

  “That’s the problem, buddy,” I said. “You and Nancy Barko have already put lots of time into this, and you’ve got nowhere. I have an unsolved homicide resting on this, and I need to know if you’re going to sit on the case for another four or five years. Go and talk to Fleming,” I urged.

  “Don’t give me orders!” Stradford replied, pointing his finger at me.

  “Okay. Sit on your ass, then. I’ll go and talk to the guy, if you don’t want to,” I shot back.

  “You know what? Get back to your skells in the Bronx, Waters. You don’t know shit about this,” the other DT replied, rising to his feet.

  I had other conversations with my cold case counterpart over the telephone, even less pleasant than our first face-to-face, so it was with some surprise that I heard Wendell had gone out to Rikers Island prison for another chat with Robert Fleming. In his latest mug shot, Fleming was going rapidly downhill, the skin on his head, down as far as his eyebrows, peeled off to reveal a white layer underneath.

  The next news I got from Wendell saw me grabbing Kenny Umlauft and dancing a jig around Bronx Homicide.

  Wendell Stradford had just delivered a confession from our suspect that he’d raped and killed both Selina Cooper and little Joi. Justice for her father and his woman and child after all these years. And it should ensure his cooperation in the Jackson murder.

  A couple of days later I bumped into Nancy Barko at the Bronx DA’s office while I was over on another matter, and from the smile on her face I could see there were no hard feelings on her part.

  “Congratulations, Luke. We’re going to authorize the arrest of Fleming for the rape and the homicide.”

  On June 23, 2009, Case 564/2009 Pt. 40 came before the jury. Almost twenty-one years after he had raped and killed a mother and daughter, Robert Fleming was charged with two counts of intentionally causing the deaths of the victims and nine additional counts of felony murder during the alleged commission of rape, sodomy, and other sexual offenses.

  Nancy and I were delighted to see the case finally make court, but it did little to restore what small credibility the DA had with me or the cops I worked with. The Bronx district DA’s office was hit-or-miss. Some DAs were great, others poor. It was the luck of the draw who you got on any particular case. According to statistics, in 2013 the Bronx had a 31 percent success rate in jailing offenders for gun crimes, compared to 76 percent in Queens. Additionally, the Bronx had a 47 percent release rate of violent offenders, compared to 20 percent in Manhattan, and the confidential report indicated a substantial backlog in prosecuting felony cases—six months in some cases.

  The New York Post got an interview with Fleming in prison, and he told the reporter that as he was brought to court he felt his victims’ pain.

  “I told the detectives my cuffs were too tight. I thought of Selina and how she couldn’t ask anyone for help. I could ask. I felt bad she couldn’t ask for anyone.”

  After two decades, and facing his own death, it seemed Robert Fleming’s conscience had finally kicked in, but had he kept his mouth shut he would never have been charged with these crimes and it would have remained another dark stain on the Bronx district attorney’s record.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  END OF INNOCENCE

  Life changes you, new life particularly. When you become a parent, your whole way of looking at the world changes, along with your priorities. It was December 12, 2006, and with Christmas Day less than a fortnight away, all our six-year-old, Tara, and her younger brother,
Ryan, could talk about were toys and the speed of Santa Claus’s sleigh, worrying, at bedtime, about whether they’d been good enough for Santa to come. Our youngest son, David, was just nine months old and slept contentedly in his cot. Over the next few hours, I would be sharply reminded that other children in this city wouldn’t be lucky enough to have such childish concerns.

  Life is not fair, and we learn to accept it, but the day we accept the premature death of a child is the day we lose our humanity. Today would be the day Baby Binns was born, and would die, at the hands of the person she would have expected to protect her.

  *

  “Okay, guys, who’s up? Sounds like maybe some crackhead threw a kid off a roof. C’mon, Pete, time is money, buddy.”

  “Nice,” mutters Detective Peter Tarsnane. Always one to see the glass half empty, Miserable Pete slips his arms through a sweater, the first thing he’d laid his hands on when exiting the family home an hour earlier.

  It’s 8:20 in the morning, December 12, 2006, just two weeks till Christmas. In any other office across the five boroughs my announcement would be met with a deathly silence, but the other members of the B-Team at the Bronx Homicide Task Force—Miserable, Bobby Grant, Mike De Paolis, and Joe O’Neill—are half a career past appalled. But for all our hard-bitten practicality, the Job is about to show us all a side of human behavior we will find hard to believe.

  The Eastchester Houses on Burke Avenue are some of the better housing projects in this part of the Bronx. Bracing themselves for the media scrutiny which always surrounds child killings, police management have allocated all available resources to the address, starting with squad DTs from the 49, who are already on the scene.

  NYPD Unusual Occurrence forms have a section reserved for the age of the victim. In this case it reads “zero.” It’s only half an hour since our Jane Doe was discovered, facedown, naked, covered in bruises, cuts, and garden debris, by a couple of city housing employees inside a low fence by the grassy verges to the rear of the block of ten five-story-high buildings.