In the early winter of 1994, powerful forces in City Hall and the federal government accused officers of Brownsville’s virtually all-white occupation force—the 73rd Precinct—of being participants themselves in the chaos of crime and shame in those plague years.
The mostly young and tender officers of the 73rd did not live near their place of work. Save for fifty-three-year-old Patrolman Frank Mistretta, they did not even live in the city. Instead, most commuted daily from Long Island cop suburbs where they were born and raised.
In the early days of the plague, Patrolman Mistretta was one of two men determined to rid Brownsville of evildoers. Nobody actually heard him say “evildoer,” a word freighted with righteousness, but he might as well have; the basis of Frank Mistretta’s self-respect was his being a street cop in the neighborhood of his youth.
He was proud of his five hundred arrests and sixty-seven department medals. But over time, Mrs. Mistretta would come to despise her husband’s professional dedication.
She told him one day that while she loved him, she had no affection whatsoever for the NYPD. After which, Mrs. Mistretta grabbed her husband’s .38 caliber police special, swallowed the barrel, pulled the trigger, and was no more.
Brownsville’s other would-be savior is recollected for a charming smile that seemed to say, Would I kid you? Among other things, he was a minister of the Lord, which made him an easy man to clock. But in Brownsville, being a suspicious character is not necessarily a cause for alarm.
He had green eyes, strong coffee–colored skin, and magnolias in his voice. His name might have been what he said it was, Pastor Billy Rich.
According to the old domino players I spoke with on Herzl Street, the pastor led a congregation of exuberant worshippers from a rented storefront, a few blocks down from Brownsville’s last remaining synagogue and a few blocks the other way from a squat, shuttered factory where pine boxes for dead people used to be manufactured.
On the Sabbath, an elaborate crucifix shone in Billy Rich’s store window: a life-sized plaster Christ on His terrible cross, with red lights throbbing from the places where He was punctured with thorns and pierced with nails. Shouting and stomping behind the crucifix, Pastor Billy’s flock would implore Heaven for a miracle that would drive the crackheads out of Brownsville, just as Jesus had driven money changers from the temple.
On weekdays, the window contained a sign of shiny gold letters: GET RICH QUICK! Inside, the part-time ecclesiastic peddled life insurance policies of debatable legitimacy, though personally blessed. After business hours, clients were invited to enjoy cut-rate libations in the cellar bar.
In the spring of 1993, a felonious incident unreported to the police took place in that cellar. At half past 2 o’clock on an April morning, a non-investor walked right in and sat himself down at the bar. The interloper stood apart from the all-black crowd of woozy barflies not because he was white, but because he was seven feet tall and togged out in the impressive leathers of a motorcycle club.
Billy Rich, it was learned, was somehow in arrears. Details are murky, but the matter of serious delinquency was apparent by the determined presence of the giant in leathers. He took a hatchet from his belt and chunked the blade a full inch down into the mahogany and said to Pastor Billy, with a snort, “Get Rich quick, that’s real freakin’ funny.”
The barflies winced at the sound of splintering wood as the giant yanked his hatchet free of the wound he had made on the bar. He asked Billy Rich for a nice foamy draught, and said he expected “payment in full” within the time it took him to smoke a Camel and kill a brewski.
No doubt it was a mistake for Billy Rich to have responded with, “Forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
And most surely it was a mistake for him to have flashed his Would-I-kid-you smile as he drew one from the tap and set it out before the debt collector. Irritated, the giant again employed the hatchet, this time whomping it across the back of Billy Rich’s strong coffee–colored hand.
The barflies talk of how Pastor Billy’s broken hand shot up to his forehead like the distressed heroine of a silent movie, and how he fainted away to the beery floor. They talk of how his right pinky and ring finger remained on top of the bloody bar, twitching.
Billy Rich skipped out to whereabouts unknown, leaving Frank Mistretta as the sole guardian angel of Brownsville.
Knowing that evil lurked in the darkest and damnedest places, and without a wife anymore to complain about the exigencies of his calling, Patrolman Mistretta put in for the graveyard shift.
* * *
On February 2, 1994, one of first newspaper articles about the shame of Brownsville’s finest was published in the New York Times:
FIVE BROOKLYN OFFICERS
SUSPECTED OF DRUG SHAKEDOWNS
by Clifford Krauss
Five Brooklyn police officers suspected of shaking down drug dealers for cash, guns, and cocaine have been removed from active duty in anticipation that they will soon be arrested, police officials said yesterday. The officers, who are attached to the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, first came under scrutiny last summer when a former officer testified to corruption investigators that the five often broke down the doors of known drug dealers, and then divided their stolen booty in an abandoned coffin factory. Though known to other officers as “the Morgue Boys” for their choice of a headquarters, the five have not been publicly identified …
Soon enough, the names of cops scrutinized that previous summer during Judge Milton Mollen’s hearings on citywide police corruption would come to blazing tabloid light.
According to the interim Mollen Commission report of December 1993, a pattern began emerging in the department of “invidious and violent character: police officers assisting and profiting from drug traffickers; committing larceny, burglary, and robbery; conducting warrantless searches and seizures; committing perjury and falsifying statements; and brutally assaulting citizens.”
Under favorable plea deals or outright grants of immunity from prosecution by Zachary W. Carter, then the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, two officers of the 73rd wasted little time admitting their own guilt—in return for testifying against three of their comrades.
In police parlance, they were rats. The U.S. Attorney’s Office referred to them as government cooperators. Cooperating were Daniel Eurell, 29, and Christopher Banke, 25. Along with confessed dirty cops from other precincts—notably Michael Dowd and Philip Carlucci—Messrs. Eurell and Banke had been interrogated by the Mollen Commission. Also interrogated was Officer Kevin Hembury, yet another confessed Morgue Boy who had bitten the government’s cheese.
In an audio tape not heard at trial, but later quoted in the New York Daily News, Mr. Hembury is heard telling his fellow cooperators that they stood a good chance of making money from Hard Copy or some such tabloid TV show.
With reference to the televised interview of a teenager in love who went to prison for shooting the long-suffering wife of her middle-aged paramour, Joey Buttafucco, Mr. Hembury’s precise words were, “Amy Fisher popped some bitch in the head and got five grand. We’re the Morgue Boys. You don’t think we could get fifty grand?”
In addition to similarly florid testimony, the Mollen Commission staff and investigators for the Brooklyn D.A. and U.S.
Attorney’s Office assembled numerous boxes of documentary evidence in support of narcotics conspiracy charges against the remaining three alleged Morgue Boys.
Accordingly indicted and bound over for trial were Officers Keith Goodman, 29, who operated a part-time insect extermination company; Richard SanFilippo, 28, a bazookaarmed body builder; and Frank Mistretta, known behind his back as “the oldest rookie.”
3. “Look, we’re doing God’s work.”
When Mr. SanFilippo was unable to afford the continued expense of the high-profile criminal defense lawyer who counseled him during the run-up to trial, he turned to a young, good-looking attorney nobody had ever heard of outside of Brooklyn: Joseph Tacopina.
Mr. Tacopina w
as familiar with the territory. For young Joe Tacopina, Brownsville was an irresistible walk on the wild side, a short ride down Flatbush Avenue on the B33 bus from his parents’ respectable home in Sheepshead Bay. As a prosecutor with the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, he was assigned the borough’s most deadly turf, what his colleagues called the “gray zone” of Brownsville and neighboring Crown Heights.
Recently resigned from the D.A.’s office, Mr. Tacopina had accumulated splendid résumé credits for winning thirty-seven of thirty-eight homicide trials, efforts that were richly educational but which earned him less than $30,000 a year. He decided to switch to the more remunerative field of criminal defense.
When Mr. SanFilippo came his way, the closest that attorney Tacopina had come thus far to actually handling a defense case was carrying the bulging leather exhibit bags for his clients’ original choice of representation—the legendary Bruce Cutler, once banned by a judge from defending John Gotti, the deceased Gambino family don. (In so many words, the judge had accused Mr. Cutler of being the family consigliere.)
When not toting bags, Mr. Tacopina nursed coffee in midtown Manhattan diners and read the tabloids and hoped somebody would ring up the answering service he checked frequently. (Operators were instructed to explain that Mr. Tacopina had just stepped out of the office but would call right back.) Besides perusing the crime blotters, he spent his time worrying about where the money was supposed to come from to support a wife and two babies, not to mention a third one on the way.
So he took a night job at a private club, which allowed him to collect tips for checking coats in an airless room with a Dutch door. Behind the suspended minks and cashmeres, Mr. Tacopina pored through sixteen cartons of evidence in preparation for arguing his maiden defense case.
At trial, star prosecution witness Danny Eurell outlined the Morgue Boys’ modus operandi in rousting the proprietors of neighborhood crack dens and stealing money, merchandise, and available bling-bling.
“Sometimes we got in by verbally threatening people,” he said. “Other times, we would break in using any tools we had—battering rams, crowbars.”
The loot was divvied up before sunrise at the Herzl Street coffin factory. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles W. Gerber told jurors that the graveyard shift officers “thought they had a license to steal.”
In an interview, Gerber spoke of a precinct house atmosphere that might account for the attitude. “The average age of the police officers was some incredibly low number, like twenty-five,” he said. “You had a lot of kids who grew up on Long Island who had no stake in the community, had no common experiences with the people, no common upbringing. That, to some extent, is a recipe for disaster.
“It’s important that a cop is doing a job because he’s trying to help all those people who every day get up and get into the subway and go to work and make a living and raise families in a tough environment. People who go to church and do the right thing. This is the kind of case you prosecute because it’s the right thing to do.”
Counsel for the Oldest Rookie was Edward P. Jenks, who had grown up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Which in his youth could not be imagined as the hipster magnet it is today.
“My parents bought this brownstone on Bedford Avenue for seventy-nine hundred bucks. I am not kidding you. I loved it there because the weather didn’t matter, I played handball off the brick wall in the basement,” said Mr. Jenks. “And there was a joint everybody went to called Teddy’s Bar. They kept a pail of wontons you could eat for nothing.
“This’ll blow your dress up. That brownstone I grew up in? It’s going now for a million-two. The owner’s some guy probably down in his wine cellar where I played handball, probably having a pinot grigio.
“And the other day,” he added, “I see in New York magazine that a beer at Teddy’s gets four-fifty now.”
Outside the courtroom, Mr. Jenks and his client would engage in such reminiscences. And sometimes Mr. Mistretta would admit to the difficulties of being a beat cop in Brownsville, old enough to be the father of the youngster cops from Long Island, who didn’t know from handball.
On his client’s behalf, Mr. Jenks explained, “There was some feeling of mistrust from those younger cops. Like, what’s his story?”
Counsel for Mr. Goodman was Stephen C. Worth, a son of Brooklyn who was the borough’s district attorney in the late 1970s. In an interview, he spoke of the disgraced Michael Dowd, the first cop to rat on other cops before the Mollen Commission.
“It was no surprise to me there were drug-using cops like Dowd,” said Worth. “By the sheer force of numbers and the availability of drugs, you couldn’t be surprised about some cops turning out like Dowd.
“You had drugs literally on every corner. There were a million burned-out buildings. It was unbelievable how blatant it was.”
Worth, who spent a considerable amount of pretrial time riding in squad cars with the officers of the 73rd Precinct, added, “If I was a cop, I could have made twenty arrests a ride. But it would have just been shoveling against the tide. My guy Goodman and the other two who went up with him, Mistretta and SanFilippo, they’re saying, ‘Look, we’re doing God’s work.’”
4. “You knew I was a snake …”
Joe Tacopina figured he was smart enough to be a trial lawyer, even if he did not happen to possess the finest mind of his fraternity.
He learned something new and unexpected—and something very intoxicating—on the afternoon he delivered closing arguments for the defense in the trial of the Morgue Boys. The lesson serves him well today as one of the city’s most prosperous criminal defense attorneys and a frequent TV talking head on legal topics.
But there he was back in ’94, a hungry criminal defense lawyer who checked coats by night, arguing his maiden case— all alone in the courtroom well, with a stone-faced judge eyeing him from the bench, with the prosecutor pouncing at every opportunity to object, with the press out there still trying to figure out how to spell his name, and with the jurors thinking who-knows-what of him.
For a couple of awkward minutes, Joe Tacopina was scared. But as he warmed to his argument, he learned that all the pressure somehow made him at least ten percent smarter than he otherwise would have been.
And that got him flying high. Waving sternly at the government cooperators, he told the jurors:
Their testimony, their stories, remind me of an Indian warrior called Cochise. I don’t know if you ever heard of him, but he is allegedly a fierce warrior.
One day out in the plains, he comes across a snake. Cochise is going over to kill the snake. The snake won’t move. The snake was frozen. Cochise raised the weapon to kill the snake, and the snake made a plea: “Please, Cochise, don’t kill me, spare my life. Warm me up and I’ll never bite you.”
Cochise took the snake back to his tent, warmed him up, thawed him out. The second that Cochise sat down, the snake bit him.
“What did you do?” Cochise said to the snake. “You promised you’d never bite me.”
And the snake said, “You knew I was a snake when you warmed me up.”
I think we’ve seen, ladies and gentlemen, that immunity is an open invitation to perjury. I know the government was giving out immunity letters in this courtroom like lollipops.
Ladies and gentlemen, if the prosecutor can convict on the words of Eurell, Hembury, and Carlucci … on this type of evidence, contaminated by their motives, their lies—then the government can convict any of us. Our daughters, our sons, our neighbors—we are all at risk!
God gives us freedom, and Danny Eurell takes it away. God gives us liberty, and Philip Carlucci takes it away. God gives us life, and Kevin Hembury takes it away.
I’m going to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen.
What happened here is not right.
In addition to the rat cops, Mr. Gerber called forward a small parade of Brownsville crack cocaine dealers, whose civil rights had allegedly been violated by the three alleged cop assailants.
Jurors wasted little time in voting to acquit. Mr. Gerber acknowledged, “Some of the witnesses were not terribly sympathetic, like the street dealers with huge rap sheets.”
His investigator on the Morgue Boys case was Anthony P. Valenti, who had grown up in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, which he described as a place where a young man had three career paths in life: “The cops, the clergy, or the cons.”
Investigating a Brownsville case, he said, is complex. “You’re operating in a neighborhood where the good guys don’t want to help and the bad guys for sure don’t want to help,” said Mr. Valenti in an interview. “It’s tough.”
With the plague now gone, where does this leave Brownsville? “I don’t know if it’s better or worse,” said Mr. Valenti, “or any different at all.” For four years—through the Mollen Commission hearings, the investigations, the trial—the three Brownsville cops were put on what bureau cops call modified duty. Street cops know this humiliation as the rubber gun squad.
Officers Goodman, SanFilippo, and Mistretta sought redemption through departmental administrative hearings. “I want to get back out there again, on patrol,” Mr. Mistretta told the Daily News. “This is what I am, what I do.”
His gun and badge were returned, and Frank Mistretta was back on his post. He filed suit against the city in the amount of forty million, but a judge dismissed the action. He remarried and retired from the force and now lives in Florida.
Mr. Goodman was not so lucky. The department cut him loose. He became a full-time killer of household pests. Mr. SanFilippo won back his job, but eventually left town—and an apparently resentful ex-wife, who answered a telephone inquiry by asking, “You’re suing him too, I hope?”
She would not divulge his whereabouts any more precisely than, “He’s not here. He’s in Mexico.” In unmistakable terms, as the vocabulary of scatology allows, the ex–Mrs. SanFilippo offered fair warning of her litigious impulse.
5. Crime Scene
The coffin factory on Herzl Street is layered in four spraypainted gang graffiti, making it difficult to determine exactly who is in charge: Syc or Cripp 2XSS Gang or 2-S Deuce or Royal Deuce.
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