NYPD Green

by Luke Waters

  Masella looked in my direction, but this new confession had come as just as much of a shock to me as it clearly was to her. Garcia went on to describe not only his role in this murder, but also his route to it, from the Cross Bronx Expressway to the crime scene, detailing how he and the other hitter waited for their quarry on Leland Avenue and shot him at point-blank range with two weapons: a powerful .357 Magnum revolver and a much less powerful .32-caliber pistol, a defensive handgun which fires a significantly smaller bullet.

  Masella was delighted to have potentially solved another homicide as part of our RICO case, but was concerned that these details were emerging so late, and she asked me to get over to Simpson Street to check the case folders without delay.

  An hour later Hector was back in the cell block with his homeys and I was over at Homicide with my files, staring at paperwork which was about to further damage the already tarnished reputation of the DA’s office. There was only one problem with the shooting which Hector had confessed to carrying out.

  It was not an unsolved homicide. According to the thick file in front of me, Derek “Gotti” Moore had been killed by a thirty-three-year-old New Yorker named Luis Vignold, who had spent the last two years on remand in Rikers, and his case was about to come to trial.

  ADA Christiana Stover, on behalf of the People of New York, would allege that on August 31, 2009, at 8:55 p.m., in front of 1512 Leland Avenue, the accused approached his victim, a twenty-two-year-old black male and Bloods gang member, and shot at him half a dozen times, two rounds catching him in the head, one of which traveled to his brain, killing him almost instantly.

  It was a curious situation.

  Jumping to conclusions is dangerous in police work, and it was possible that Hector, realizing he was facing life anyway, was simply holding up his hands to another crime as a favor to the real shooter, but my instincts told me otherwise, so I picked up the phone and called Christiana Stover to discuss the contradictions between her charges and our confession.

  The ADA and I had never gotten on, a personality clash which was not resolved by her recent marriage to Detective Jimmy McSloy, one of my longtime colleagues in Homicide, who’d just “got grade”—been promoted to D2, a boost in pay and status. I had been assured that the promotion was mine, and the wound was still raw: I was angry at being overlooked—I had a strong record as a detective and consistently excellent evaluations—but I wasn’t exactly surprised. Office politics is part of any large organization, and the NYPD is no exception. Playing favorites is part of playing the game on the Job. I hadn’t complained when my Irishness had gotten me looked after by the Brass, and although I felt frustrated, hurt, and unappreciated because of the recent lack of promotion, when I sat down and thought about it over the weeks to come, I realized that there was little point holding a grudge. Life isn’t fair. The trick is to make it work unfairly in your favor. I would move on—literally.

  Meanwhile, Vignold would face life in prison for a crime he may not have committed, so I contacted Stover. She seemed unimpressed by the questions I had and waved aside the issues raised by Hector’s surprise confession.

  “Mr. Vignold was identified by a witness on the street who saw him pull the trigger, Detective,” Stover replied, referring to the DD5 arrest reports I had in front of me, which showed that an eyewitness did indeed finger the guy, making no mention of an accomplice.

  “I don’t know what Hector Garcia’s motivation is, but there was only one shooter on this, and I am confident that Mr. Vignold was the man who killed our victim.”

  My conversation with Stover quickly over, I reviewed the details again. Detective work is about facts which either fit or don’t. Molding them can lead to miscarriages of justice.

  The ADA was so certain that I initially started to second-guess my assessment, and I went through the reports line by line, which chronicled a typical street shooting and solid follow-up work by the 43 Detective Squad and Bronx Homicide.

  Moore had been taken in for dealing, robbery, and escape from a detention facility in the past and ended up running with pretty dangerous criminals who had been arrested for crimes including attempted murder. The victim seemed to have changed his lifestyle little, according to one witness who confirmed that Gotti was a dealer, and word was the shooting was a message from rivals who wanted to control the trade on the block where he and his pals peddled drugs.

  The accused, Luis Vignold, was not an angel by any means, with several convictions down the years, but his rap sheet was no worse than those of a lot of young males in the ghetto. He also lived just around the corner from the gang members who were rivals to Moore and the Bloods. Vignold and Hector looked somewhat alike, though Vignold was lighter in skin color.

  Both were Hispanic males, aged about thirty at the time of the murder, with close-cropped hair and short beards. Our shooting took place as darkness started to fall and under streetlights, so it could be a case of mistaken identity on behalf of the main witness. In Vignold’s statement, he said that he fled when the shots rang out. Another possibility was that the whole thing could be a malicious complaint. It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to use the PD to settle an old score. Half of the tip-offs you get on dealers are rip-offs by other criminals who want to take them out of the game and control the corners themselves.

  However, none of this really mattered. All that concerned cop or prosecutor were cold, hard facts. Did the evidence point to Vignold as the shooter, or someone else?

  Reading through the files, it seemed to me that the evidence against our alleged shooter as trial approached was fairly thin. In light of a confession by an avowed killer, with seemingly nothing to gain from adding another homicide to his long list of charges, it now appeared flimsy.

  Hector had also provided details about the case which he could not be expected to know had he not been there or been briefed in detail by someone who was present—notably his declaration that he and Reyes had shot Gotti with two handguns, a .357 and a .32, from close range, while the witness talked about only one shooter. Now, if the deceased had been hit with bullets from both weapons, as Hector claimed, it should show up in the autopsy conducted after his death, so I drove over to have a chat with Dr. James Gill, the deputy chief medical examiner for Bronx County.

  Gill was a highly experienced doctor in his early fifties, an associate professor in pathology at Yale Medical School and New York University School of Medicine, regarded as an expert witness on this subject, having conducted autopsies on countless gunshot victims and even written about firearms deaths by law enforcement.

  He knew the importance of his findings on all parties involved in the shooting, and the seriousness of the questions I raised. Gill confirmed that the deceased was shot in the right side of the head, leaving an entry hole of three-eighths of an inch, which fragmented upon impact and entered the victim’s brain, killing him. He found that Moore was also shot in the right cheek, leaving a hole of one-eighth of an inch, the bullet seriously wounding him before lodging in his face, where it was recovered during the postmortem.

  Our expert was confident that the evidence was clear and that, just as Hector had said, our subject was shot by two very different weapons, of two different calibers, at close range, one of them fitting the profile of a round from a .357 Magnum.

  I reported these findings back to Stover, but she was unmoved and remained adamant that she was right, dismissing any suggestion that the People were about to go to trial in a few weeks’ time to convict an innocent man of attacking Moore. In my years on the Job I never saw a hitter use two such different weapons in a killing.

  I returned to the U.S. attorney’s office and Masella, Rob Riveros, and Brandon Waller sat down with me to discuss the ME’s findings and other paperwork we had on hand. We reviewed the evidence again, line by line, and talked through the various possibilities, trying to make a case against Vignold, but we all reached the same conclusion: Hector’s confession and the medical evidence were compelling. The ma
n on remand was innocent.

  “I think the best thing we can do here is to let me handle this part of the case, Luke,” Masella said decisively, and went away to consult with her superiors, after which another meeting was arranged downtown with Hector and his lawyer and AUSA Tim Kasulis, myself, Waller, Riveros, and, this time, ADA Stover, who brought the original crime-scene photographs for clarification.

  Once more our hit man walked us through the shooting, explaining how Levit ordered him and Reyes to kill Derek Moore, and how they drove to the scene of the hit, sitting in their car until their victim appeared.

  Our prisoner continued to outline the incident in minute detail, including an accurate description of everything Moore had been wearing when he was shot, without any prompting from his lawyer or anyone else present.

  Stover’s demeanor in the presence of the U.S. attorneys had thawed considerably, but even with the shooter sitting in front of her the prosecutor stuck to her guns, insisting that the evidence pointed to Luis Vignold as our killer.

  Masella was tactful and showed Hector a photo of Derek Moore, while the other attorney passed over the CSU photographs.

  “Yeah, that’s the guy we shot—‘Gotti,’ ” Hector said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  There was no way to explain his familiarity with these details and no suggestion that he knew Stover’s target, Vignold, or that Vignold was somehow involved with Hector in killing Moore.

  His only confusion was with our reluctance to accept that he and his buddy Rafi had whacked the guy.

  “That’s what I tryin’ to tell you. This is the homey we killed, and those are pictures of where we shot him. What don’t y’all understand?” he asked, staring at the photo in front of him once more.

  That’s when the ADA asked him to reenact how he shot the victim.

  Riveros looked at Waller. Waller looked at me. I looked at Masella. Masella looked at Kasulis.

  Hector looked at all of us in amazement. I tried not to laugh. It wasn’t the time or the place—a man’s freedom was at stake. But the scene was pretty amusing, since it’s not every day that a coldhearted killer is asked to get in touch with his inner mime for the benefit of the feds, attorneys, and a city cop.

  I shrugged my shoulders, and with a sigh, Hector did as he was instructed, making a pretend pistol from his forefinger and thumb and pointing it at an invisible body on the carpeted floor. He was about to shout “Bang! Bang!” when Tim Kasulis raised his hand, thankfully calling a halt to the farce as Hector prepared to shoot an imaginary victim in the face.

  “Enough. I think we have seen enough here.”

  Hector and his lawyer were ushered to another office, as, for the first time in our discussions, Stover conceded ground.

  “Well … uh … okay. I can go back to Ed Talty and talk to him about these new developments. Perhaps we can release Mr. Vignold on bail while the detectives investigate Mr. Garcia’s story in greater detail.”

  Kasulis and Masella both shook their heads.

  “No. The Bronx DA will order the immediate release of Mr. Vignold, Counselor. He has no case to answer, based on this evidence,” Kasulis concluded, his tone as polite as ever but the finality clear for everyone in the room to hear.

  Stover had no choice but to comply. There was no time to be lost. Rikers is probably the most dangerous place in New York, but fortunately Vignold seemed to have survived his ordeal in one piece and was finally released.

  The Bronx DA’s office had come within an inch of throwing its full weight and resources behind pursuing a prosecution which, on a bad day, with a careless jury and a distracted judge, could well have seen an innocent man sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime he did not commit.

  *

  The Creston Crew takedown had proved to be a turning point for me, both personally and professionally.

  I hadn’t told anyone in my office yet, but I had decided to pull the pin, take my pension, and retire. Any lingering doubts I might have harbored disappeared with all that had happened on the Luis Vignold case. I felt like my face simply didn’t fit in at Bronx Homicide anymore.

  I had been told I was next up for grade, and not getting the promotion was more than simply disappointing: it filled me with a deep unease and a lack of faith in the system I had sworn to uphold.

  Anybody who thinks the Job won’t be the same without them is more naive than I was in my earliest days, mistaking baseball superstars for barstool regulars on Long Island. I have seen countless cops come and go during my years; unless you are close friends or work with them for an extended period, their faces soon fade. We are all replaceable, and Luke Waters is no different.

  There was still time to knock back a few drinks over in Kennedy’s, where in many ways it had all started for me. The place hadn’t changed too much in the intervening two decades. Nor, I would hope, had I. A few pounds heavier, a lot balder, but the same person in every way that really counted.

  I had pulled the pin while I could still make that claim to the guy looking back at me in the shaving mirror every morning.

  My going-away party was a quiet affair, attended by the old gang from down through the years, along with the FBI agents and federal lawyers I had come to know well towards the end of my time. I was presented with framed certificates from the Bureau, acknowledging me for my work in bringing down the Creston Crew and on other operations. As I accepted the congratulations, I caught the eye of Paul Hurley, who loudly declared that no certificate from the head of the FBI could convince him that I was not still an idiot from Finglas who should have stuck to being a barman and made something of himself.

  Hurley’s son, Desmond, and my kids, Tara, Ryan, and David, all have been born in this country, meaning they will never face a battle for a green card. They are Irish-American in every sense of the word, comfortable in both cultures, little aware of the opportunities which holding dual citizenship will confer upon them in the future.

  Hurley had stayed behind the bar and made a success of it, but I had no real regrets about the decisions I’d made. I put about a thousand lawbreakers behind bars in my time carrying a badge, and although I made plenty of mistakes, I never took a dime I wasn’t entitled to, never set a perp up for a crime he did not commit. Not once did I have to pull the trigger off the range.

  Best wishes shared with all present, I stepped out onto Fifty-seventh Street and felt dizzy for a moment, as the whiskey and fresh Midtown Manhattan air combined. A hand reached out to steady me. It was Sergeant John O’Hara, whose skills as a pilot and instincts as a cop had been honed over three decades. He stood in the doorway, offering a final handshake.

  “So that’s it, eh, buddy? Tell me this, Detective Waters, looking back, would you change anything?”

  I paused for a moment, but I didn’t really need to think about my reply.

  “You know what, Sarge? Not a thing. I’m going to miss the circus, but I’m not going to miss the clowns. Even so, I wouldn’t change a bit of it. How about you? Would you do anything differently?”

  “Me? Sure I would!” O’Hara replied with a snort.

  “Really? What so, John? What would you do differently?”

  O’Hara looked at me with a deadpan expression.

  “Well, you know the time that asshole Larry Davis shot me, back in ’86?”

  “ ’Course. You’d have shot first?”

  “No … but I’d have ducked, buddy.”

  There are a lot of fantasies when you join the NYPD, but few fanfares when you exit the stage. And for me there were no songs playing softly in the background, just the best words of advice anyone ever got on the Job—the kind of advice, unfortunately, most will never hear.

  Theo Kojak couldn’t have said it better.

  When the punches, bullets, or recriminations start to fly, keep smiling, baby, and stand your ground.

  But don’t forget to duck.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my wife, Susan, for her support throughout my career, and to
our children, the light of my life, Tara, Ryan, and David. I strive now to be the husband and father that the Job sometimes prevented me from being.

  I write with fond regard for my parents, Vincent and Sheila, and my brothers and sisters Vincent, Thomas, Sheila, Lucy, and Bernadette: you mean more to me than I will ever be able to express.

  To my best friend, Paul Hurley: thanks for bullying me into joining you in New York City thirty years ago!

  I would like to thank everyone at Simon & Schuster for their hard work and determination. Thanks too to Plunkett PR for your help and advice.

  To the outstanding men and women in Bronx Homicide, who truly live up to our motto, “The Best Detectives in the World”: know that your pictures are still on my wall, and your stories will forever be in my heart.

  Special thanks are due to my commanding officer, Lieutenant Sean O’Toole, the sharpest knife in the drawer, and to all the heroes who pinned on a badge during my time, in particular Sergeant John O’Hara and Detective Danny Rivera, who raced towards the sound of gunfire as others ran from it.

  I am grateful to the staff at the Bronx Medical Examiner’s Office, particularly Dr. James Gill and Dr. Carolyn Kappen: you truly do God’s work.

  My thanks also to the best and brightest law enforcers I worked with, the tough and talented agents of Group C-30, FBI. To the U.S. Attorney’s Office SDNY, the crème de la crème of the nation’s law schools: your professionalism and dedication were both a revelation and an inspiration.

  I am especially grateful to Frankie Pellegrino (Rao’s Restaurant) for his incredible love and support through my journey and for always helping me.

  Finally, I would like to thank and acknowledge the following people who helped and advised on NYPD Green: Ed Conlon, Dr. Pat Wallace, and Dr. John J. McGrath (TCI College of Technology).

  About the Author

  © LUKE WATERS

  Luke Waters was born in Finglas on Dublin’s Northside. He initially planned on following in his grandfathers’ and brother’s footsteps in joining An Garda Síochána, but instead, in 1985, America beckoned. After some time as a barman, he enrolled in the NYPD, working his way from rookie through Narcotics, before becoming a Homicide detective. Luke retired from the NYPD in 2013 and now lives in County Cavan with his wife and three children.