I knew the guys in Four-One A/C. All were honest, dedicated cops who shared the same vision as me: lock up every criminal who was preying on the decent people of the South Bronx. The unit consisted of around twenty cops—the number varied because of transfers, promotions, and retirements—and two bosses, Sergeants William “Wild Bill” Taylor and John Battaglia. Both had over fifteen years on the job and were excellent street supervisors. A/C operated from an office on the second floor of the command and was largely autonomous. While the precinct commanding officer technically oversaw every cop in the command, he left A/C pretty much alone to do what they wanted. Why? Because they produced an astonishing number of arrests.
I sent a U.F. 49 (a letter written on an unadorned blank piece of paper—everything has a designation in the NYPD) to A/C for an interview. I didn’t have to wait very long. The interview process was very informal. A/C was a precinct unit, and everyone knows everyone in a precinct, similar to a small town. Cops were assigned to A/C because their arrest activity was not only high in numbers but outstanding in quality. In addition, disciplinary problems had to be nonexistent, their history of sick time should be minimal, and semiannual job performance evaluations needed to far exceed expectations. Me in a nutshell.
The interview with Sergeant Battaglia was relaxed and friendly. He’d seen me numerous times during the arrest procedure when his men and I were processing our individual collars. He told me I’d be good for the unit and I’d be assigned as soon as there was an opening. Within a month, I was in.
* * *
A/C is like any other assignment on the job when it came to being bounced around between various temporary partners until you make a good fit. All these guys were professionals; top cops in a command top-heavy with excellent cops. Picking one to partner up with didn’t have me looking for the best of the best, which would be near impossible because they were all the best. I was looking for that magic that cops detect right away when they find their perfect match. There’s no checklist of attributes. Mostly it’s about personality. Partners watch each other’s back and pull their own weight. But that’s not all. What makes a good partnership is the ability to work together for extended hours and get along. You may ride with someone day after day and feel perfectly secure with his policing skills, but if his personality rubs you the wrong way, you’ll dread going to work.
A month or so of bouncing from cop to cop was part of the scrutinizing process. I hit it off the best with Kenny Mahon, who had been assigned to A/C about a month before I was. Kenny was big, a solid guy who was also gentle—he never pushed his weight around. At six foot one and 220 pounds, he could’ve done that to great effect, but it wasn’t his style. There are many cops on the job who become bitter and cynical. Kenny had a positive attitude despite a combat tour with the army in Vietnam. He was tough when he had to be, always stoic, and focused. The term “the strong, silent type” described Kenny perfectly. Quiet and reserved, he exuded confidence. His size made him seem indestructible.
Funny thing was that if you saw him in civilian clothes, you’d never make him for a cop. He had an all-American look. With dark, short-clipped hair, he looked more like a football coach than a police officer. That haunted thousand-mile stare many cops develop after they’ve seen enough misery to last several lifetimes was absent in Kenny. Life may have been cheap in the Fort Apache battlefield, but you’d never know it to look at Kenny.
He was 100 percent cop while working, but when his tour ended he went straight home to his wife, Linda, and daughter, Melinda, in Queens. He was the ultimate family man. Just to be clear, going straight home after work was not the norm for many police officers, particularly after a tour from 4 PM to midnight. While most New Yorkers were in their jammies tucked away in bed, cops were wound tight and generally stopped for “just one drink” to unwind. The one drink usually morphed into several, and the “unwinding” only ceased when the bars reached their mandatory closing time of 4 AM. This was known on the job as a 4-to-4 tour.
While we didn’t socialize much off-duty given our disparate lifestyles—I was single, after all—we were thick as thieves when we worked together. Kenny had my back more times than I can count. He was one helluva cop.
And so it was that Kenny Mahon and Ralph Friedman took it upon themselves to rid the Four-One of crime. A lofty goal, but we gave it a good shot.
* * *
Kenny and I liked to work the roofs of tenements. We’d sneak up to a roof and scan the street with binoculars for anything illegal, drug sales being one of our main targets. Low-level dealers thought they were pretty slick by not carrying the drugs on them; they’d take a junkie’s money and direct him (or her) to where the stash was hidden, usually about twenty feet away. We’d watch the transaction, then go down to the street and make the arrest.
One day Kenny and I were out with one of the bosses, Sergeant Taylor, looking for arrests. A/C bosses were on the street with us; they were hands-on supervisors, unlike uniformed sergeants, who mostly supervised their platoon from a radio car driven by a chauffeur. Since we were a smaller unit, the boss could go out with us. The sergeants were always welcome; we were that kind of unit. Everyone worked together.
On this particular night we spotted a suspicious individual walk into a building. What made him suspicious? A cop’s antenna gets a signal mostly from street experience. You have a feeling. You notice things: a furtive glance, a tug on the pants (which might indicate the weight of a gun), anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes it’s just a hunch. In this case we observed a bulge under the man’s coat. It might’ve been a gun (or maybe not). Bottom line is, some people just look bad, like they’re about to do something illegal.
We followed him into the building. He was waiting for us—he swung his fist at me as soon as I cleared the door. Kenny blocked the blow, and a subsequent search yielded a .22 revolver. He fought us, but we prevailed quickly. After running his fingerprints, we found he was wanted for a murder in which the victim was shot six times while asleep in his bed. We couldn’t have known any of that. Like I said: a hunch.
On another occasion we spotted a guy loading a gun outside in broad daylight. We identified ourselves, and the thug fired a shot at us. We fired back, but the gunman made good his escape through an empty lot. Another time we got into a fight with patrons of an unlicensed social club when we attempted to arrest a man with a gun. It was the two of us against at least seven attackers. Before it all ended, it was their pool cues against our batons, and we had to call for reinforcements. The Tactical Patrol Force (TPF) responded as well as troops from our command. It was a brawl of epic proportions. The good guys prevailed. Kenny whacked a guy so hard with his gun that the pistol grip broke.
* * *
In the early 1970s, the Black Liberation Army (BLA) made its presence known. The BLA was a small group of radical criminals who decided to overthrow the government by exacerbating racial strife. Their plan included killing as many black-and-white cop teams as they could, thereby igniting a race war. It made little sense to me.
The BLA was already on the NYPD’s radar because it had attempted a robbery at a Fanny Farmer candy store next to Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. Members of the NYPD Stakeout Unit, which was created in 1968 to stem the tide of violent armed robberies, were stationed inside the store because it had been victimized by armed robbers a dozen times before. The Stakeout Unit’s sole job was to thwart robberies, and they were good at it, perhaps too good. Once the holdup men announced a robbery, heavily armed members of the Stakeout Unit would emerge from their cover and engage the robbers. There was usually gunfire. The cops always won. Robbery stats went way down, much to the delight of almost everyone except politicians, who deemed the unit “too violent.” The Stakeout Unit was disbanded in 1974.
On the evening of January 26, 1972, two armed men entered the store and announced a stickup. Three Stakeout Unit police officers emerged from a back room and identified themselves as cops. When both robbers whirled to face
them with pointed weapons, all three police officers unloaded rounds from two shotguns and a handgun into the bad guys, who were both mortally wounded. Before he expired, one robber muttered something about the BLA, the same group that had murdered two teams of black and white cops from the NYPD a year before. On another occasion, two cops sitting in their radio car as part of a security detail in front of Manhattan DA Frank Hogan’s home were machine-gunned by BLA members. They survived with devastating injuries. The NYPD thought the Fanny Farmer robbery was an attempt to raise money for the BLA (surprisingly, three weeks later another armed robbery occurred at the same store, leaving one bad guy dead and one critically wounded at the hands of the Stakeout Unit).
The NYPD had gone on a war footing the previous year when four police officers had been ambushed, but now the rank-and-file cops decided to take their protection to a higher level.
I’d made it my mission to catch these cop killers, and to that end I didn’t go anywhere without pictures of eight members of the BLA thought to be in the New York area. I also had pictures of them in my apartment, spread out in an array, right by my bed. Their faces were the last thing I’d see at night and the first thing I’d see in the morning. I had copies of the same pictures affixed to the dashboard of my personal car. I wanted these guys bad. The odds of running into them were small, but the best you can do is be prepared.
The murdered and wounded cops were all ambushed, taken completely by surprise without the chance to draw their weapons. Throughout the city, heavily armed off-duty cops took it upon themselves to protect on-duty cops while they patrolled in radio cars.
The NYPD only authorized its police officers to carry .38 caliber revolvers—woefully inadequate when going up against adversaries armed with automatics. We disregarded the rules and scrounged up heavy weaponry to protect our brothers. Off-duty cops commandeered their fathers’ World War trophies: Browning automatic rifles, Thompson submachine guns, and the cheaply made but effective fully automatic grease gun. Some Vietnam vets showed up with automatic rifles, the parts of which were smuggled back to the States piecemeal in packages sent to their families from the jungles and reassembled when they got home. Cops without access to that kind of firepower carried shotguns and sporting rifles. It wasn’t odd to see civilian cars with four off-duty cops each, barrels partly protruding from open windows, following sector cars around as they answered calls for service.
While there was never any confrontation between the off-duty cops and the BLA, the members of the radical group gradually were either killed in gun battles with the police or wound up serving long prison sentences. The only member of the group to escape justice was Joanne Chesimard, who escaped from police custody after murdering a New Jersey State Trooper. She managed to get to Cuba, where she was afforded political asylum by Fidel Castro. Chesimard was convicted in absentia, and I’m hoping she’ll finally face justice after the recent normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba.
Those were troubling, tumultuous times, and the city’s first encounter with domestic terrorism, but we would see more.
* * *
“Hey, Ralph,” Rafael Fernandez said, almost whispering into the phone’s receiver. “We gotta meet.” I was in the Anti-Crime office catching up on paperwork before the tour. Fernandez was my most valued confidential informant (CI).
CIs are the lifeblood of any cop’s skill set. Without reliable information from someone who lives on the streets, where the ebb and flow of crime is nonstop, many cases would go unsolved. As one seasoned detective once told me, “There aren’t too many Charlie Chans on this job. We need our snitches to help clear cases.”
In the world of CIs, Rafael Fernandez was one of the best; he was certainly my best. An informant is only as good as the information he provides. As in any other line of work, some people are better at what they do than others. Fernandez was always on the money; everything he gave me proved to be accurate. If I requested a search warrant based on information he’d supplied, a judge was likely to sign off on the warrant because of Fernandez’s track record of reliability. So when Fernandez talked, I listened.
Most CIs don’t become informants out of a sense of civic responsibility; they provide information on a quid pro quo basis. They give a cop some useful information, and they expect something in return. Usually it’s a few bucks; sometimes it’s a get-out-of-jail-free favor. In the 1950s and ’60s, before the NYPD began registering informants—making them part of the system by assigning them confidential numbers and keeping performance records—cops paid off their CIs with drugs, which were usually withheld from drug arrests. This practice was illegal and corrupts both the system as a whole and the police officer. Registering informants keeps them on the record and makes the police officer accountable for interactions with their CIs.
Fernandez entered my stable of informants when he volunteered to be my CI. This meant that somewhere down the road, I’d either overlook minor infractions of the law or pay him a stipend for the information he provided regarding a crime or just street gossip that might prove useful. The money was usually provided by a fund earmarked for that purpose. Sometimes, if the cash payment was minor, I skipped the paperwork hassle and paid Fernandez and my other informants out of my own pocket. Other cops did the same.
It also meant that if Fernandez was detained by another police officer, he could drop my name and he might be cut loose, but that was up to the individual officer. If that happened, I’d owe that cop a favor. If I released other cops’ informants, those cops would owe me. We have our own quid pro quo system too. This is how things get done and crimes get solved in big-city police departments. Cops protectively guard their relationships with their CIs. It’s considered a breach of protocol for one cop to poach another cop’s CI.
* * *
“What do you have?” I asked.
“Not on the phone, man.”
We agreed on an isolated place to meet outside the precinct. Needless to say, the life expectancy of a CI is limited if care isn’t taken to ensure his anonymity. Security is paramount, and I protected Fernandez as if he were family.
Our meeting was in the 44th Precinct on a frigid day in a deserted stretch of road not too far from Yankee Stadium, flanked by burned-out tenements and garbage-strewn lots. I was alone in my personal auto—I rarely brought another cop to a CI meeting because it tended to spook the informant—and I was early. It’s always a good habit to arrive early for a meeting with anyone other than your family or Mother Teresa. You never know what awaits you, the recent past with BLA ambushes fresh in my mind.
Fernandez slipped silently into my car while blowing into his cupped hands. He was thirty years old, skinny, with slicked-back black hair. He had a wispy goatee and was definitely underdressed in a skimpy leather jacket and jeans so old they looked to be paper-thin. “Friggin’ cold, man.”
We didn’t shake hands; we never did. No particular reason, it was just something that wasn’t done with CIs unless they wanted to. They usually didn’t. Maybe they had their own protocol.
I got right down to it. “Whaddya got?”
He looked around, eyes darting, looking for danger. There wasn’t a soul on the street. Junkies and criminals aren’t morning people. Besides, it was February and freezing.
“You know the Frances Bar thing?” He asked.
I was at a loss, had no idea what he was talking about. Then it hit me. “You mean Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan? The bombing?”
His eyes lit up. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it! I know who did that, man.”
Now he had my interest. About a month earlier, the landmark Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan had been bombed by the Puerto Rican separatist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN). Four people were killed and fifty injured. The tavern had been around since the Revolutionary War. George Washington was known to have tipped a few there.
The attack was in retaliation for what the FALN called a CIA-ordered bombing that killed three an
d injured eleven in a restaurant in Puerto Rico. FALN, a Marxist-Leninist paramilitary organization, was mostly interested in obtaining total Puerto Rican independence from the United States. They would come to be credited with 120 bombings on U.S. targets between 1974 and 1983. How blowing things up is meant to swing popular opinion your way is beyond me.
Fernandez had been in a crowded bar in the Bronx two weeks after the Fraunces Tavern bombing. A group of Hispanic men were close by drinking heavily and appeared to be celebrating. Others soon joined the group, and some of them began bragging that they’d taken part in the terrorist attack. Seeing a way to curry favor with me, he entered into the conversation and soon found himself meeting up with the self-confessed terrorists at bars and clubs throughout the borough.
“Did you get names, Rafael?”
“I got street names, man. No one goes by real names anymore, especially these guys.”
“So what do you think? These guys on the level or bullshit artists?”
Fernandez was an intelligent, streetwise person. I valued his judgment.
“The real deal, man. These guys did it.”
His steady eye contact and convincing voice swayed me. He believed what he was saying. If he was wrong, this would be the first time.
I pumped him for the street names, descriptions, hangouts, and names or descriptions of their friends, who might not be involved in the bombing but could be sworn as witnesses.
This was big. I wanted to get right on it, but I wasn’t so full of myself that I thought I could accompany Fernandez to one of these bomber get-togethers and lock up everyone by waving around handcuffs and a six-shot revolver. I needed to talk to someone.
* * *
Street Warrior Page 8