by Matt Apuzzo
In a few years, the new unit had made New York’s warren of ethnic neighborhoods seem much more manageable. There would be other programs; other trip wires to set. But with each new report, the chance of an al-Qaeda cell going undetected in New York seemed to diminish. Cohen’s new squad embodied the change he’d hoped to bring to the NYPD. They were acting more like intelligence officers and less like cops.
Inside the NYPD, it was christened the Demographics Unit.
• • •
In late 2006, when Captain Steve D’Ulisse waved Hector Berdecia into his office in Chelsea and told him he was being assigned to oversee the Demographics Unit, Berdecia didn’t know what he was inheriting. Berdecia was on leave from the Intelligence Division in 2003 when Cohen and Sanchez originally hatched the idea for the unit. On active duty in the US Army Reserve, he’d been in Iraq’s Babylon Province, near the lawless area south of Baghdad dubbed the “Triangle of Death.” He had been back a year and heard about a “Middle Eastern team” mentioned in passing around the office, but he didn’t pay much attention.
On Cohen’s orders, the sturdily built lieutenant with a shaved head and a broad, boyish smile had spent the past year creating and running the Citywide Debriefing Team. Each morning, the team would receive a list of people arrested in the past twenty-four hours and who were born in one of the NYPD’s countries of interest. Men between sixteen and forty-five were of particular concern. Berdecia and his detectives tried to talk to every person on the list. They were interested in tips about terrorism, of course, but they were after more mundane information too. Did the Egyptian cabdriver know where a new immigrant could rent a cheap room? Could the Moroccan student tell you where to buy a fake ID? Where do you learn English? What mosque do you pray at? Where’s a good gym? When you get to America, who helps you get on your feet?
The tactic had worked well in the 1990s, when everyone arrested on gun charges would get asked where to buy weapons. Even nonviolent criminals were asked. In the post-9/11 era, police were asking every Muslim what he knew about terrorism.
The debriefing job suited Berdecia. He’d spent nearly his whole career in plain clothes, rising through the ranks on his signature skill: sitting across from someone and getting him to talk. Berdecia had a knack for spotting what mattered to people. The father of two knew whether to play to their sense of family (“Do you really want to spend three summers away from your children?”) or to their manhood (“If you go upstate, do you want another man coming into your house taking care of your old lady?”). Out in the Seventy-second Precinct in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood during the early 1990s, Berdecia would buy a four-pack of miniburgers, fries, and a soda from the White Castle down the street and slide them across the table. I’m not your enemy, he’d say. No hard feelings. I just want to talk.
That was his strategy in Iraq, too, where he was a military police officer responsible for debriefing prisoners picked up by Iraqi authorities. He worked through a translator, but the tactic was the same. In December 2003, when US Special Forces were hunting for a former Iraqi brigadier general believed to be training an al-Qaeda cell, it was Berdecia who caught him, and without firing a shot. He had an informant tell the general that the US government was prepared to pay him $50,000 in reparations for bombing his land. All he had to do was show up and claim the money. And he’d receive an official apology, too. When the general arrived, he and Berdecia chatted over tea until the general was hauled away, hooded and cuffed, in the back of a military gun truck.
In his new job at NYPD, the debriefings were much easier. Many people were willing to talk. In most cases, cooperating didn’t involve ratting anybody out. It meant explaining a little bit about daily life in their neighborhoods.
D’Ulisse, whose glasses, bushy eyebrows, and mustache earned him comparisons to Groucho Marx, told Berdecia that day he wouldn’t have to give up debriefing. Cohen was giving him the Demographics Unit on top of his other responsibilities. The captain didn’t get into what the new job entailed, and Hector didn’t ask why he was getting the assignment. He just accepted. He was a keep-to-yourself kind of guy. He’d earned an Army Commendation Medal for heroism and combat valor during a firefight in Iraq. But rather than display it, he kept it in his garage, placed inconspicuously atop a dusty metal locker. He didn’t talk about what he’d done to earn it, not even with family and friends.
“Good cops make their bosses look good,” cop-turned-author Edward Conlon wrote in his memoir, Blue Blood. “And Hector was a one-man beauty school.”
Berdecia knew firsthand how New York had a way of hiding itself in plain sight. He was a Brooklyn native, the son of a longshoreman and the youngest in a home with four sisters. A family of Puerto Rican heritage, the Berdecias lived for a time in Wyckoff Gardens, a high-rise housing project with 1,200 residents. He grew up in the traditionally Italian neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. He’d been in and around the city all his life, but it was only now—after what he saw in Iraq—that he really started to notice the Arabic storefronts all around New York.
In Iraq, he had met lots of wonderful Iraqis and even started a Cub Scout troop there, using his son’s old troop banner. But, frankly, looking around his city, he was suspicious. He’d lost friends to terrorism: First there was John Chipura, who’d survived a 1983 Hezbollah bombing as a marine in Beirut but who died as a firefighter in the World Trade Center. Then came the commanding officer of his military police battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Kim Orlando, who was killed enforcing a curfew in Iraq.
Berdecia got his introduction to the Demographics Unit from one of his sergeants, Timothy Mehta. A burly, likable man of Indian ancestry, Mehta ran through some PowerPoint slides and reports explaining the unit and how it gathered information. Berdecia was impressed.
He believed there was an al-Qaeda cell hiding somewhere in New York’s ethnic neighborhoods, planning to strike the city again. And as he thumbed through the Demographics reports, looking at shopkeepers identified by name and ethnicity, at restaurants catalogued by the nationality of their clientele, he felt safer.
Not everybody agreed. Berdecia didn’t know it, but Cohen and Sanchez were sharing their innovative new model with a select group of outsiders. And some had serious doubts.
In the fall of 2005, for instance, a senior CIA officer named Margaret Henoch flew to New York to smooth over a dispute over another of Cohen’s new initiatives. With Kelly’s blessing, Cohen had begun stationing officers in foreign police departments so that in the event of a terrorist attack in, say, Paris or Toronto, the NYPD would have a direct line to information about the bomber and the device used. That information normally passed through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, but Cohen and Kelly believed that route was too slow. More importantly, they believed that the JTTF was too focused on the big picture. They wanted granular information that could help protect New York. They wanted someone who could, as Kelly would often say, “ask the New York question.”
Even with an annual budget of more than $3 billion, Kelly knew that obtaining approval to send officers overseas would be a tough sell in front of the parochial New York City Council. So he asked the New York City Police Foundation, a private nonprofit group, to pay for the program. The foundation was formed in the 1970s to help support the department. And since 9/11, it had become flush with cash. The city’s corporate titans eagerly opened their checkbooks to donate, especially when fund-raisers mentioned terrorism. The foundation’s gala dinner brought in more than $1 million each year. The mixing of corporate money and municipal policing created some unusual arrangements. For instance, an NYPD undercover operation into counterfeit merchandise was paid for by the foundation, courtesy of New York’s fashion industry. With their donations, companies were able to hire the NYPD to investigate the crimes most important to them.
Paying police to work overseas, however, raised eyebrows even among the foundation’s board members. If it was such a good idea, they asked, why not put it before the city council? In a meeting with
the foundation’s leadership in 2002, Kelly said that the council would never go for it. Every time crime rates inched up in some council member’s neighborhood, he’d get questioned about why the city was paying to keep a cop in Lyon, France. “I don’t like to be told no,” Kelly said. “So I just don’t ask.”22
The foundation agreed to foot the bill, with a goal of building relationships overseas to gather information and identify threats to New York.23
But the NYPD’s new arrangement quickly frustrated the FBI and the State Department, which had official relationships with foreign governments. After London’s subway and a bus were bombed in July 2005, Cohen’s man in the United Kingdom, Ira Greenberg, passed information from Scotland Yard back to NYPD about the bomb’s chemistry. Kelly then announced that information publicly, enraging the tight-lipped Brits. The incident strained relations between the FBI and British authorities, who threatened to withhold information from all their American counterparts. At the FBI, it was yet another reason to speak Cohen’s name through gritted teeth.
NYPD and FBI officials privately worried that the detective in Tel Aviv, Mordecai Dzikansky, was being used by Israeli intelligence officials to influence thinking in New York. Not that he had any secrets to spill or would ever betray any if he did. But Dzikansky had a drinking problem, and in a country where Israeli intelligence agents regularly try to recruit their CIA counterparts, an NYPD officer could be a useful pawn.24 From time to time, Dzikansky would get his colleagues to do favors for the Israelis, such as conducting surveillance in New York at their request.25
In France, the CIA station chief, Bill Murray, rolled his eyes over the NYPD’s arrival. On his way out the door, he told Cohen that he’d seen some of the police reports coming out of Lyon. “They’re shit,” he said. Cohen explained that he had to start somewhere. He had to do whatever was necessary to protect New York, and that meant having eyes and ears around the globe.26
In Canada, the first country to host the NYPD, the relationship had become a source of friction at the CIA station in Ottawa. That’s why Henoch went to Manhattan. With three CIA officers from the New York station, she met with the NYPD Intelligence brass in hopes of resolving that tension. Cohen wasn’t there, so Sanchez conducted the meeting. His assignment as Tenet’s representative to New York had ended in 2004, but CIA headquarters granted him unusual permission to take a leave of absence and officially become Cohen’s deputy. He no longer had access to the CIA’s intelligence files as an NYPD assistant commissioner, but Cohen and Sanchez still had their network of agency contacts in Virginia and New York.
Sanchez began by trying to allay any concerns about the overseas program. The NYPD guys in Canada were going to answer to Cohen, and, if they came up with something the CIA needed to know, the police said, they would call. It became clear to everyone in the room that the issue wasn’t going to get resolved. The department’s role overseas would continue to be a source of friction with the federal government for years, but it remained one of Kelly’s signature programs, even though it never produced a single tip related to terrorism in New York.27
As the conversation with Henoch continued, however, it veered away from the dead end that was the international program. It became a wide-ranging briefing on the NYPD’s new capabilities, including its Demographics Unit.28
Ira Weiss, a police detective and a dual US-Israeli citizen who was instrumental in setting up the Demographics Unit, explained that the NYPD had carved the city into zones and mapped each area based on a number of factors: religious affiliation, nationality, profession, and others. They knew where all the mosques were. They knew where the Sunni Moroccan barbers were, where the Shiite Lebanese butchers were, and where they prayed.
Henoch had a reputation as a skeptic. During the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002–03, when CIA analysts concluded that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, they put a lot of stock in statements by an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball. Henoch was one of the agency’s most vocal critics questioning Curveball’s reliability. She said the agency had fallen in love with its own analysis and hadn’t conducted a dispassionate review. By the time Henoch would be proven right, however, the US was stuck in the quagmire of Iraq.
Now, sitting with the NYPD, she felt a similar skepticism. She was impressed with the level of detail but didn’t see how it could be used to draw any conclusions.
“I think this is a really impressive collection of what’s where, but I don’t understand how it helps you,” Henoch said. If it was useful, she figured, maybe the CIA could replicate it. But she didn’t understand how collecting troves of information on local businesses and religious affiliations helped find terrorists. “You know what kind of people are in what neighborhoods. But you don’t actually know who’s in your city.”
She pressed them for an example. Was there some success story that summed up the program’s usefulness in its first two years? When she didn’t get it, she assumed that the NYPD was playing coy. Even in the post-9/11 era, intelligence agencies often jealously guarded their secrets. “I figured they were just lying to me,” Henoch recalled years later.
It did not occur to her that there might not be any stories to tell.
After nearly three hours, she left the meeting, angry that the disagreement over the international program was unresolved and confused about what the NYPD was doing. It seemed so backward. It would be like hanging out in all the churches, coffee shops, and bars in northern Virginia to figure out who worked for the CIA. It seemed to her like a huge waste of time, and Henoch was stunned that it was legal. But she figured that the NYPD wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t both productive and legal.
Berdecia assumed the same thing. There must have been something useful about his team that he didn’t understand, something to justify all the time and money being spent. Every now and then, rakers would complain to Berdecia about their assignments. They felt conflicted. They were cops, eager to protect the city. But they also knew that they were building files on fellow Muslims—immigrant business owners and members of their communities who’d done nothing wrong. Berdecia would reassure them. There was nothing insidious about what they were doing, he said. They weren’t collecting anything that couldn’t be observed by any other member of the public.
“At the very least, we can eliminate this guy from our list if he’s not a terrorist,” Berdecia said. “And we can find out who the terrorists are. And that’s your job.”
The truth, though, was that raking didn’t eliminate anybody from a list. It contributed to the NYPD’s growing files. One Brooklyn business that the NYPD labeled a Bangladeshi hot spot, for instance, was a restaurant named Jhinuk. The list of “alleged activities” included being a “popular location for political activities” and attracting a “devout crowd”.29 The Nile Valley Grocery in Brooklyn was noted simply as a “medium-size grocery owned by a person of Syrian descent.”30 Milestone Park, in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, was labeled a “location of concern” because it attracted middle-age Albanian men from the neighborhood: “This location is mostly frequented during the early afternoon hours when Albanians get together for a game of chess, backgammon, or just to have a conversation,” the rakers noted.31
Though it was against the law for the federal government to collect such information, Washington helped pay for the NYPD to do so. The Demographics Unit, like many Intel operations, benefited from a little-known White House antidrug grant that provided millions of dollars for cars and computers.32
There was pressure on the rakers to produce. When a Muslim detective wasn’t delivering enough information about community events or overhearing enough suspicious conversations, his sergeants wrote him up.33
When the Intelligence Division’s lawyer, Stu Parker, raised concerns that the Demographics files posed a potential problem for the department even under the new Handschu rules, the department set up a stand-alone computer at the Brooklyn Army Terminal for the files. It was walled off from the rest o
f the NYPD’s computer systems.
Under the new Handschu rules, the NYPD could keep those files only if they related to potential criminal or terrorist activity. So the very fact that the Demographics files existed showed that either the NYPD was violating the rules or the police saw the potential for terrorism wherever groups of Muslims gathered.
Sometimes that meant the rakers operated outside the city, in suburban towns on Long Island. There was even talk about scouring Baltimore and Los Angeles for hot spots, though neither materialized. In mid-2007 D’Ulisse sent Berdecia and his rakers to Newark, New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson River, where former NYPD deputy commissioner Garry McCarthy was the police director. At police headquarters in Newark, Berdecia and Sergeant Tim Mehta told a lieutenant that they could provide a breakdown of the city’s Muslim community. There was no evidence of a threat and no lead to follow up on. The Demographics Unit would simply spread out into the neighborhoods, explain who owns which businesses, identify mosques, and provide a law enforcement guide to the city’s Muslims. Berdecia didn’t know whether the Newark cops requested the report or whether they were simply allowing the NYPD to prepare it. He knew only that it was supposed to get done. Over the next several weeks, with a Newark detective as chaperone, Berdecia’s team raked Newark. They photographed mosques and religious schools, spoke with workers at deli counters, and produced a sixty-five-page catalogue of places where police could expect to find Muslims. Dollar stores owned by Egyptians and Pakistanis were on the list, as were Afghan fried chicken joints and corner stores owned by black Muslims.34 When Berdecia submitted the report to D’Ulisse, he said it had “no intelligence value” to the NYPD.
Berdecia’s initial optimism and enthusiasm about the Demographics Unit gave way to a growing frustration. Nothing his team did ever led to an arrest or generated leads on terrorist plots. While the Debriefing Team was out talking to people, helping spot potential informants, and trying to glean information, the rakers were spending their days sipping tea in cafés. They never received specialized training, so their reports contained numerous errors. Dino’s European Hair Style was put in a file because police noted that the owner was Albanian. But in reality, owner Sammy Eirovic was from Montenegro. Similarly, Sephardic Jews and Lebanese Christians were mistaken for Syrians.35