by Luke Waters
“We jus’ robbin’ hats, man. Why’d da dude try to stop us?” one claimed in frustration. “We didn’t want to shoot nobody.”
Amou Fall’s brother later told me that there was tension between many African-American youths and local African immigrants. Some of the kids resented the success and hard work of these businessmen, most of whom wouldn’t employ the local kids because they didn’t trust them. In turn the kids ripped off the merchants, which ultimately could get out of hand, like the tragedy we were now investigating.
For the Fall family the killing was devastating, but for us it was yet another case, a straightforward enough case, too, and it represented a key moment in what would be a short career for Officer Jorge Arbaje-Diaz. Helping to close a homicide only a couple of years out of the academy was the sort of thing his boss would take notice of. A month later he would catch the attention of his boss again, and a couple million other people.
*
I was sitting in the squad room one morning flicking through a copy of the New York Daily News when I spotted a vaguely familiar face under the headline “Cop in Drug Disgrace” and a picture of a thirty-year-old officer holding a fistful of dollars.
“City officer busted for robbing and selling millions in cocaine,” the piece continued.
It turned out that the man who’d helped us put Amou Fall’s killers behind bars had a very lucrative moonlighting gig. According to the DEA, Arbaje-Diaz was garbage, and he had played a crucial role as part of a gang of stickup artists who stole money and drugs from pushers which were then resold to other dealers.
“This is a despicable action on the part of this individual,” Commissioner Ray Kelly told the paper. “It is the highest form of betrayal.”
The Transit cop used not only his uniform and badge, but also a car with lights and sirens, to pull dealers off the streets and confiscate their cargo, classic tactics for a narcotics sweep. In all, the feds estimated that Arbaje-Diaz and his accomplices netted 750 kilos of cocaine and four million in cash in robberies in the Bronx, Queens, and upper Manhattan, while they also targeted dealers as far away as Florida and Pennsylvania.
Earlier that year another Transit cop, not long out of the academy, named Christian Torres, was arrested after using his service pistol to hold up a Sovereign Bank in Muhlenberg, Pennsylvania, from which he stole $113,000. This was just months after he had robbed another branch, closer to home in the East Village—twice—during which he’d made off with a similar sum.
Even if you paid every cop a million dollars a year, corruption would still exist, and it can never be excused. However, you don’t need to have done your master’s thesis at John Jay College of Criminal Justice to realize that low pay and corruption go hand in hand. All you have to do is look at a few other police departments.
Mexico teeters on the brink of failure as a result of drugs, and police there regularly arrest hit men who turn out to be fellow cops, taking on contract killings as a way to meet their mortgages. Puerto Rico, a U.S. state in all but name, has similar problems, as does New Orleans, where corruption has long been a harsh reality of life, and here, too, the FBI refuse to work with all but a few carefully selected local officers.
When I entered the academy in 1993 the base pay for a rookie, with overtime, was something like fifty thousand dollars per annum, hardly a fortune but enough to get by on without turning to kidnapping, murder, or extortion. A decade and a half later, it hadn’t fallen, it had plummeted, hovering at just over twenty thousand, and as one cop who was arrested for pulling stickups told IAB, “You just can’t live in the city on twenty grand a year.”
The idea that the next time I bumped into the two kids we collared for the Amou Fall shooting they might be wearing their Police Academy dress blues seemed ludicrous, but it wasn’t far off the mark: if they got lucky on their day in court and cut a deal with a soft DA who was happy to accept a lesser charge, it meant that they would have a sheet clean enough to clear the NYPD selection process. Pretty soon rumors started to surface that a lot of our new recruits had criminal records, whereas when I came on the Job an unpaid parking ticket would see your application in the trash can at One Police Plaza.
Internal Affairs soon had their hands full with the graduates of the classes of 2005, 2006, and 2007. Home invaders and armed robbers who had managed to plead down to a misdemeanor were now carrying badges and guns, many carrying on with their old lifestyles while the Job turned a blind eye, the department desperate to fill spaces in an academy funded by federal money. We all turned a blind eye, in our own way, and if we did talk about it, we figured that Internal Affairs—the Rat Squad—would take care of the latest infestation, which was at best a cop-out on our behalf.
“Luke, you have no idea of the shit we’re dealing with from these cops hired a few years ago,” one of the IAB guys confided with a sigh as we sat watching the NYPD Gaelic Football Team trade punches with a Boston PD selection. “There are a shitload of criminals carrying badges in this city.”
Naturally the media used the unions’ outrage as a stick to beat Mayor Bloomberg over the head with, selling lots more newspapers in the process, so our publicity-savvy mayor did what any good politician would do in the same situation and increased the starting salaries to the old levels, knowing the problems would fade away, along with the coverage, once the press became distracted by another story.
By the time I retired, a uniformed cop with only a year or two of service was earning over $90,000 per annum before taxes, and clearing $100,000 gross even with only occasional overtime. Experienced guys brought home significantly more than that: I worked with several detectives earning $170,000 in a good year. Bloomberg’s attention now switched to the retirees, who were living longer and longer, typically drawing down maybe $2 million in total pension payouts per person before they passed away—which was a real worry to the accountants and actuaries because cops were a lot more health-conscious than when I came on the Job. The fast food, smoking, and hard drinking were giving way to gym membership and healthy eating.
Such a change in habits never really caught hold in the projects, and in certain neighborhoods dying for a cigarette had a more immediate meaning, as one nineteen-year-old woman found out at one a.m. on September 28, 2008, just a few weeks after the Amou Fall murder.
*
“Hey, where you goin’, girl? Fun’s just startin’!” one of the partygoers said to Julie Bryant as she headed out the door of one of the apartments at the sprawling Patterson Houses tower blocks at 315 East 143rd Street, just off Third Avenue.
One of the first projects in the borough, Patterson had offered decent families good-quality housing. But in the 1960s it declined like much of the South Bronx and now they were a regular stop for EMS and cops from the 40.
“Just stepping out, I’ll be back,” Julie Bryant replied with a smile, raising the cigarette between her fingers and slipping out into the hallway, where several other guests were gathered, the tips of their Newports and Marlboro Lights glowing through the thick smoke.
Earlier that evening Jonathan “Bebo” Rodriguez and some of his crew from the neighborhood had tried to gate-crash the private party, but left without much fuss when the hosts protested, and Julie was relaxed as she lit up and slowly breathed in the fumes, barely spotting the black male who had walked up towards the knot of people. It was Rodriguez. He suddenly raised his hand to reveal a black 9mm pistol, adding the smell of cordite to the narrow, smoke-filled hallway as he fired two shots into the chest of a man called Brandon Howard, a revenge attack for the victim’s alleged involvement in a previous murder.
Howard’s friends shrieked in panic as the bullets pounded through the young man’s body, and he collapsed and instinctively rolled over to protect himself. A 9mm round carries a lot of kinetic energy, but it travels at high speed, and there are many cases of people surviving a close-range hit when the shots pass right through. But our killer left nothing to chance, and stood over his helpless victim, pumping another fo
ur bullets into his torso, before turning to look Julie Bryant in the eyes. He disappeared back down the hallway before Patrol responded to the neighbors’ 911 calls.
Street justice in the Bronx was always being served, so Rodriguez’s stare was a warning to Bryant, and its meaning was not lost on the teenager, who was about to become a pawn in the justice system.
Witnesses are invariably traumatized by a shooting like this. People in shock will often tell you something which they regret later on, and several partygoers were so upset at the brutality of this murder that they nominated Rodriguez as our triggerman. I acted quickly with Detective Mark Davis, a fifteen-year veteran out of the 40, and tied them to their statements. Revenge shootings are regarded by most of the population in the projects in the same way as honor killings are in countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan: an inevitability which is no business of the police, so when it happens, just keep out of it—and if you get picked up, keep your mouth shut.
I ain’t seen nothin’. I don’t know nothin’.
While pinning the charge on Rodriguez would prove difficult, finding him proved simple. All I had to do was pick up the phone ringing on my desk.
“Detective Waters? Agent Sean Mullin, FBI New York Field Office. How you doin’? Hey, I hear you like this Jonathan Rodriguez for a shooting in the projects off Third Avenue? Yeah, I saw the notification. That’s why I’m calling. One of my CIs tells me he’s hiding out with his girlfriend, Jessica, at her apartment on Grand Concourse, near the Bronx Courts? Yeah, that’s the address my boy gimme, too. Thought you’d like to know …”
I told Mullin to thank his confidential informant and we made tracks to talk to Bebo’s girlfriend, who seemed more interested in the two-thousand-dollar reward money on his head from Crime Stoppers than her beau’s continued freedom. It took about five minutes for her to give up her man, who was then lying low just around the corner.
At five a.m. on December 2, just five weeks after the shooting, we took Bebo down. It was still pitch-black outside as we put our perpetrator in the back of a Crown Vic and drove to Central Booking. I let the girlfriend know that he was in custody and that we’d be in touch to arrange payment of the reward.
Half an hour later the phone on my desk rang again. It was an attorney named Dawn M. Florio—with an early morning wake-up call on prisoner protocol.
“Detective Waters, I believe you have a client of mine in custody?” said Dawn M. Florio rhetorically. Lawyers usually only ask questions to which they already know the answer.
I recognized Florio’s voice immediately. A former ADA in Bronx County, who was in her mid-forties, she’d spent a decade on the prosecutor’s side of the courtroom. She was now a gamekeeper-turned-poacher, building up a successful practice.
“Good morning, Counselor. What’s the name again? We have a lot of guys down here,” I replied, though I had a good idea of the next two words out of her mouth.
“Jonathan Rodriguez,” Florio responded.
“Who? Oh, him. Yeah, certainly we have a Mr. Rodriguez here. I only just arrested the guy an hour ago, so I’m surprised that—”
“Fine. Please ensure that he’s not interrogated until he can consult with me. You know the rules, Detective,” she interrupted. “I’ll be over shortly.” I got off the phone and let out a long, slow whistle as the air in the squad room turned blue with curses. We couldn’t figure out how Florio had gotten wind of our arrest and stalled our interrogation within thirty minutes of bringing Rodriguez in. We figured his girlfriend, who’d given him up in a heartbeat, maybe had second thoughts about snitching on a guy who thought nothing of shooting someone half a dozen times in cold blood.
Florio turned up an hour or so later and I escorted her into the interview room. I turned towards the door to let her confer with her client, who was so confident of his imminent release that he was telling his lawyer to relax.
“Don’t worry, ain’t nobody gonna testify ’gainst me,” he predicted with a smirk.
“Don’t talk to anybody, stay cool, and you’ll be okay, Mr. Rodriguez,” Florio cautioned. I closed the door and walked away. Attorney–client privilege isn’t only sacrosanct, it’s completely inadmissible in a court of law.
The fact remained that we had a silent suspect and no physical evidence. In fact, we had nothing apart from a few eyewitnesses, the most promising of which were Julie Bryant and another young woman, Keysha Hughes, and we had to play it out by the rules.
I could make an arrest on my own initiative on just about any charge—burglary, assault, robbery, even rape—anywhere in the city, but for a murder charge cops must first clear it with the DA. So before I drew up my arrest report I went over to talk to Ed Talty, a veteran lawyer who knew Florio well from her time as a prosecutor.
A gas station down the block served the best coffee in the city, and I knew how fond Ed was of a good cup of joe, which I presented to him on arrival. “Detective Luke Waters—he always remembers. And what do you guys give me? Nothing!”
He sat across the conference table, sipping his coffee, and listened intently as I outlined exactly what I had for him. He tapped the braces he always seemed to wear as I explained our lack of any real evidence.
Talty didn’t believe in trusting cops’ guts, but I made our argument and got the authorization I needed to make the arrest, right away running into a little problem—the 180/80 Clause, which in simple terms says in New York your case must be presented to a grand jury within five business days of the arrest. If you fail to do so, no matter how overwhelming the evidence is, your suspect must be released. They cannot be rearrested and charged again with this offense.
Keysha Hughes and Julie Bryant were already on the run, figuring it was better to disappear and be charged with contempt of court than risk being toe-tagged, but we followed up on another lead and drove over to 2645 Third Avenue—the home of Antonnette Boone, a cousin of our victim, who was also present at the shooting. As we scooted into the lobby we watched out, as ever, for airmail.
Going into the projects you got all kinds of stuff dropped on you from high above, ranging from the downright unpleasant to the absolutely lethal. A few years earlier a cop had been killed instantly in the Bronx when some local crushed his skull by dropping a bucketful of concrete on him. The worst I ever got hit with was a bowl of chicken soup, though at first I had assumed the yellow slime slowly trickling down my neck was something far worse.
The walls were full of holes, and the halls had the nasty tang of stale urine. Upstairs wasn’t much better. Our witness, Antonnette Boone, told us in no uncertain terms to piss off. She explained that when she testified seventeen years ago to the grand jury in a homicide case, the police left her to protect herself. She left me in no doubt that she had no faith in the system anymore or in its ability to protect her. I went to report back to Talty but the case had been assigned to one of his assistants, an attorney with whom I had not worked before.
The nameplate on her door, which, unusually for an office in Talty’s building, was shut, read “Shareema Gadson-Shaw.” Underneath another note read “Please knock.”
“Come on in,” a voice floated from inside as my knuckles tapped lightly on the paintwork.
“Sorry, Detective Waters, I was meditating,” Gadson-Shaw volunteered, sweeping the paperwork on her desk to one side.
My new colleague was a thirty-something black woman, and maybe this would help in persuading our black and Hispanic witnesses to come forward. I headed back to the projects and asked them to come down with me to the prosecutor’s office. The ADA got no further with Boone than I did.
“Look—it’s like I told this cop here. Don’t give a shit, even if it was my cousin got his dumb ass shot. Ain’t seen nothin’. Ain’t heard nothin’!” was our witness’s short and succinct response to the attorney’s questions.
We moved to the next witness, Keysha Hughes, who lived at 340 Alexander Avenue. Her mother, Linda, answered the door and told us she hadn’t seen her daughter in several d
ays, had no idea where she was, and even if she did, she would tell her not to testify.
“My brother was shot dead. Ain’t nobody helped him, so why should we help anybody?” she revealed. Though I hated to admit it, she had a point, and in her position I would probably feel the same. I was part of the system which had utterly failed these people, but I still had a job to do, and the five-day countdown was ticking in our suspect’s favor.
Mark and I dropped by the Monroe Academy for Visual Arts and Design at 1300 Boynton Avenue, passing armed security guards and metal detectors before being ushered into the office of the principal, a well-dressed forty-something white man named Richard Masser.
Far from being upset that we were there to question one of his students, Masser was actually relieved that we were seeking one of them as a witness, rather than as a suspect.
The teachers who spoke to Hughes’s classmates were told the teen had disappeared since the shooting. With the minutes continuing to tick by on the 180/80 clause, we were back on West 143rd Street to seek Julie Bryant. We spoke to her mother, Carmen, who seemed to take her role as a parent more seriously.
“My Julie only comes home when she gets hungry, and I don’t know where she lies up. I lost my daughter to the streets,” she explained, with a sad shake of her head. We were farther than ever from finding our witnesses.
Over at Bronx Regional High School, Principal Colin Thomas, a young black man, offered us further insight into the warped morality of the projects.
“Actually, Detectives, Julie came to me after this shooting and told me she saw the victim die right there in front of her, before asking me for a transfer. We haven’t seen our student since. She told me she was forced to come forward to you by the family of the victim. It seems they wanted justice and somebody else could take the risks.”
Old-fashioned police work hadn’t gotten us anywhere, so Jimmy McSloy suggested we apply for a warrant for a Pen Register Trap and Trace, which would allow us to triangulate Julie Bryant’s phone’s location. We quickly found our reluctant witness hiding, pathetically, under a pile of dirty laundry in a friend’s apartment at Gerard Avenue. She burst into tears as she was Mirandized and handcuffed before being taken back to speak with ADA Gadson-Shaw.