This time my brother’s life had been at stake. Part of my focus had been on Stu, which is natural while working with any partner. But when it’s your brother, things shift slightly. I was unconcerned for my well-being, other than that I needed to survive to make sure he did.
Our first off-duty collar together went well. There would be a few more, and we worked together like we’d been doing it for years. This incident subsequently turned into an episode of the nationally syndicated CBS television show Top Cops. Stu and I appeared on camera as narrators, with actors portraying us in the dramatization.
* * *
I recall one incident that I was involved in that I think would’ve been viewed differently if the same set of circumstances were repeated in today’s climate.
I was working in an unmarked car with one of the best cops in A/C, Stanley Gamb. Stan was a supercop among supercops, and he was already a legend when I’d first arrived at the Four-One as a rookie. About six years older than me, Stan had made more good arrests than probably anyone else in the command, and his rack of medals was impressive. He was very aggressive: bad guys in the South Bronx were afraid of Stan. I learned a lot from him and truly believe that watching and emulating him made me a better cop. Certainly, he was instrumental in my becoming the cop I became.
We were stopped at a red light when a frantic young Hispanic man ran up to our car claiming that he’d been robbed at gunpoint.
“How long ago?” Stan asked.
“Maybe ten minutes, man,” he said breathlessly.
We were about to do a canvass of the neighborhood with the victim in the car when the victim said, “I know who the guy is and I know where he lives. His name’s George Carter.” He described how he was dressed.
That changed everything, and we tried for more information, such as how he knew the robber’s name and where he lived. The complainant was vague: “Seen him around the neighborhood.”
“That might give you his name, but how do you know where he lives?” Stan asked.
“I dunno,” the victim said. “Someone musta told me.”
The more information you had regarding a criminal and his relationship to the victim, the better. While this incident could be exactly what the complainant was reporting, it could also be an ambush; lure two cops into a building and murder them. It had happened before.
Our gut feeling, however, was that the victim was telling the truth, but it seemed as if he wasn’t being forthcoming with all he knew about the guy who had stuck him up.
We put the complainant in the car and drove to the perp’s apartment building. By the time we got there, we had a very good physical description of the robber.
I said to the victim, “I don’t suppose you have an apartment number?”
I got a quick response: “Third floor, rear.”
This seemed too good to be true. Now, if George Carter surrendered and handed over his gun and the victim’s wallet, I’d be sure that there was indeed a God.
We left the complaint in the car and made it up to the third floor of the five-story dilapidated walk-up. A young black woman in her twenties answered the door. We displayed our shields and asked for George Carter.
“George isn’t home. I’m his wife,” the woman said. She closed the door around her, not allowing us to look into the apartment. “What’s this about?”
“Routine investigation,” I said. “You know when he’ll be back?” Stan was craning his neck trying to look past the wife.
The wife was nervous, but most people are when they talk to cops. “No … I don’t know. Maybe not until tomorrow. If you want…”
I heard a window open in the apartment and glanced at Stan. He heard it too. We pushed past the wife, who yelled, “Run, George!” I think George already figured that out for himself.
As we charged into a bedroom, we saw two legs slipping through a window. I reached the window first—in time to see our suspect, dressed as described by the robbery victim, land on the roof of the building adjacent. It was about a ten-foot drop. While we wanted to catch the guy, we didn’t want to break our legs doing it. We climbed down a nearby fire escape and were on the roof in time to see our suspect go over the ledge in an attempt to reach the street. We were on what was known as a taxpayer building, a two-story building that housed a retail store on the ground level, usually of the mom-and-pop variety. Our bad guy had taken the leap from the roof in an effort to escape.
By the time we got to the edge of the building, our bad guy was twenty feet below us on the street staring up at us. He was holding a revolver. As soon as he saw us look over the ledge, he fired at least one round at us. There were a handful of people on the street. No one ran; shooting at cops in the South Bronx is a spectator sport.
Stan and I fired back in unison, one round each, and the perp clutched his chest and crumpled to the ground.
We weren’t about to exit the roof the same way as our perp; jumping two stories to a concrete sidewalk could prove hazardous, and besides it didn’t look like the robber was going anywhere. We took the stairs three at a time and were beside the prone robber in less than a minute. The spectators who’d witnessed the exchange of gunfire were now gone.
Our bad guy was very dead; a bullet struck him square in the center of the chest. One of our rounds had found its mark, but we’d never find out which one of us fired the fatal shot. The round had been completely disfigured and useless for ballistic comparison.
This incident is what the department would call a good shooting, except for one problem … no gun. The revolver Stan and I had last seen in the late George Carter’s hand was missing.
* * *
While the lack of a gun was cause for concern, Stan and I weren’t that worried. In the South Bronx dropped guns and drugs don’t usually even have time to hit the street before someone snatched them up. Besides, we were two good cops with exemplary records; our bosses would stand behind us, and we’d either find the gun or prove with best evidence that he’d had one.
The Emergency Services Unit (ESU) responded to search the area for the missing gun. Over the course of the next few hours, they would find ten guns in sewers, garbage cans, vacant buildings, and empty lots. None of the firearms, however, would prove to be the right gun.
While ESU was doing their thing, Stan and I, with the help of numerous cops, searched the dead guy’s apartment. One of the uniforms found loose handgun ammunition. This helped our case, but we needed more. After the devoted Mrs. Carter had been removed to the station house, Stan and I searched every inch of the apartment.
While rummaging around a closet, I came upon a photo album. In this album were hundreds of pictures of the late Mr. Carter and numerous others. Near the middle of the album was a picture of Carter holding a revolver posed in a threatening manner. Bingo!
Such a picture might not seem like an oddity these days, when jerkoff criminals pose with all manner of firearms and post pictures on social media. Back then, to take a picture of yourself committing a felony was unheard of. Nowadays I’ve seen bank robbers display fans of money on Facebook after a holdup. The stupidity of criminals always baffles me.
The discovery of the ammo and the picture of the shooter holding the same type of weapon he used to fire on us, and a cooperative complainant, was enough to clear us of any wrongdoing. Of course, there’s the chance that Stan and I could’ve been indicted for murder, our excellent records notwithstanding. But the NYPD of that era considered a cop’s past history extremely important when evaluating a police incident and would give the officers the benefit of the doubt in cases where the involved cops had unblemished records. In our case a gun was never found, but a reasonable analysis would come to the conclusion that Stan and I had been shot at by the late Mr. Carter and that our return fire was in accordance with departmental guidelines.
We were still nagged by the victim’s knowledge of who stuck him up. He wasn’t vague in his ID of George Carter and knew much more than the average victim would’ve known. Being
the budding detectives that we were, we asked around.
It turned out that the victim and the deceased Mr. Carter had been involved in a homosexual relationship. Our best guess was that they’d had an argument, probably over money or drugs, and Carter decided to take what he had considered rightfully his. But did it really go down that way? We’ll never know, because investigating the incident would’ve exposed Carter’s and his “victim’s” alternative lifestyle, something not done in the macho South Bronx of the ’70s.
* * *
The Four-One continued to go downhill. In addition to the overwhelming incidence of violent crimes against individuals, we began seeing more of a mob mentality. Riots, once a rarity, began to proliferate. The almost daily media coverage of peace demonstrations (which were usually anything but peaceful) protesting the Vietnam War might’ve given cop haters an idea that there was strength in numbers when it came to harming the police. The Four-One was earning its nickname of Fort Apache.
Licensed cabdrivers wouldn’t enter the South Bronx on a bet. Holdups and murders of cabdrivers were epidemic in the city in the 1970s, and the odds of a cabbie not surviving a cruise through the confines of the Four-One were high.
Enter the gypsy cab, an unlicensed, uninsured private vehicle for hire. Gypsy-cab drivers would go anywhere, anytime, and were stuck up often, many times not surviving the encounter. The city had gotten a lot of heat from legitimate drivers who had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their cab medallions and were watching their livelihood infringed upon by gypsies, who meanwhile were expanding to other parts of the city. The Hack Bureau, which enforced taxi regulations, was unleashed to put the outlaws out of business. They swooped into the South Bronx and elsewhere, summons books in hand, and began to make the lives of the renegade drivers miserable.
These drivers considered the treatment they were getting by the Hack Bureau unfair and decided to stage a series of “peaceful demonstrations” to vocalize their point. One of the first demonstrations was held in front of the 41st Precinct station house by hundreds of alleged gypsy drivers (most of the demonstrators were neighborhood troublemakers who decided to make the police targets of their rage). The demonstration developed into a full-blown riot in minutes.
Any object that wasn’t nailed down was hurled at police officers assigned to protect the station house and keep the peace. An order came down from somewhere that the cops on the scene were not to get involved with the rioters. We were supposed to stand there and dodge debris.
We arrived at the station house to see rioters trying to breech the building and the overwhelmed cops doing their best to push them back. It was during an earlier riot that the desk officer, Lieutenant Lloyd Gittens, uttered the words that would forever be remembered in department lore when he pleaded with the borough command to send reinforcements: “Send help; we’re being overrun like Fort Apache!” From that day forward the Four-One was known as Fort Apache.
On another day with the same group I came as close to getting killed as I’d ever get—six shots fired directly at me, and not by a street punk … the shots were fired by a cop.
The Tactical Patrol Force (TPF) was a unit of nomad cops who traveled from command to command whenever the need arose, usually to address a specific crime problem … or a riot.
TPF was dispatched to help quell the riot and waded into the crowd, batons swinging. It was at about this time that my A/C team and I arrived on the scene, unaware that we weren’t supposed to be there because we didn’t have a radio—plus, we were in plainclothes with guns drawn. With a beard, numerous tattoos, and street clothes, I looked nothing like a police officer. While cops assigned to the Four-One knew everyone in Anti-Crime, many of the TPF cops clearly didn’t.
I knew I had a problem when I saw a uniformed TPF cop aim at me with his revolver. I didn’t have time to say anything that could be heard above the din, so I took off running. He emptied his weapon in my direction. The TPF officer missed with all six shots. Thank God he was a poor shot and that I could run fast. No one else was hit either.
I could take a hint. Retreating to a roof across the street, I found a cache of over a hundred Molotov cocktails, vicious little gasoline bombs in soda bottles that someone planned to lob onto the cops down below. Either I’d scared that someone away or he just hadn’t arrived yet. It wasn’t odd for neighborhood assholes to preload roofs with projectiles. The riot ended with casualties on both sides and many arrests.
My close brush with death hit me later in the day after the riot was suppressed. Every day was a new experience on the job. The reality that I may be killed had dawned on me long before, but I never expected my street persona to be so spot-on that other cops would take me for a bad guy. It shook me up. I was still wrapped up in my ability to survive, however. Call it the perceived invincibility of youth.
Not too long afterward I was back in the maelstrom when yet another riot threatened to overwhelm the station house. There was no reason for this “demonstration.” The main goal was to hurt as many cops and cause as much property damage as possible. Initially, a captain had ordered all the cops inside the house, the plan being to defend the building if the mob broke through the front door. As we waited for what we considered the inevitable, a thought ran through my mind that Fort Apache was about to become the Alamo.
The captain glanced outside to assess the enemy when he spotted a guy setting a marked radio car on fire with a burning torch. The captain had enough of curbing police response; all prior orders advising restraint went out the window, and the enraged boss yelled, “Get the sonuvabitch!” Sticks and stones may break my bones, but fuck with department property and it’s your bones that’re going to pay the price.
Cops poured from the station house like marauding barbarians and waded into the crowd, batons finding targets. Bodies dropped like bowling pins, but the guy who had torched the radio car took off sprinting up Simpson Street with me and my partner that day, Lester Rudnick, in hot pursuit.
He turned a corner and thought he was slick by dashing into a building. When we entered after him, the bad guy was already past the second floor. I figured he was headed toward the roof; if that happened, he’d run across the connected rooftops and down the stairs of another building. We had no choice but to continue the chase, hoping he’d run out of steam. We were right behind him when he ran headlong into the roof door—which by law is supposed to remain unlocked in case of a fire, but in this case wasn’t. Apparently, the superintendent had locked the door to keep burglars out of the building.
Our arsonist turned to face us, eyes wide, horror spreading across his face. He knew he’d run out of options. He uttered just two words—“Oh, shit”—and proceeded to take his beating.
The mission was accomplished; we’d nailed the arsonist, but back at the command things were still going full tilt. Fed up with self-control, the precinct cops were exacting payback. Rioters began to scatter, and cops were taking them down quickly. Within ten minutes the street was covered with moaning prisoners.
After that experience, people with a desire to take down Fort Apache had a change of heart. We had some mini riots in the future, usually by small groups of individuals protesting an arrest, but none like the battle we had engaged in that day.
* * *
With practically no time to catch our breath, Kenny Mahon and I got involved in a pursuit of a stolen car that spanned fifty miles and several upstate counties.
We had run the license plate of a suspicious auto that initially caught our attention when the driver kept eyeballing us in his rearview mirror. Since we were in an unmarked car, we figured the driver was savvy enough to make the car and us as police officers. Individuals that sharp are generally up to no good. I gave the driver a short blast on the siren to get his attention and gestured to the curb for him to pull over. He responded by flooring the vehicle, a late model Chevy, just as Central got back to us over the radio to say that the car was stolen.
The driver took us on a wild chase
through side streets before getting on the Cross Bronx Expressway, where he really let loose. Within seconds we were up to 80 miles per hour, careening in and out of traffic. Kenny broadcast the chase over the radio, and sectors from several precincts joined the pursuit as we passed through their commands. By the time the Chevy turned northbound on the Bronx River Parkway, there was a caravan of at least twenty radio cars behind him.
Within minutes we were leaving New York City and entering Westchester County. Marked and unmarked cars from numerous county departments were now joining the chase; we were up to about thirty police cars pursuing the stolen car at speeds up to 100 miles per hour.
Some of the pursuit vehicles began overheating or otherwise breaking down during the chase. Most cop cars, primarily those assigned to precinct patrol, are in bad shape and poorly maintained. They are meant for cruising side streets at low speeds; high-speed car chases are not their specialty.
Some cars in A/C were better than others. I always tried to get the cars in good shape, but I had to be quick to beat out the other guys who also wanted reliable vehicles. Fortunately, on this day I’d gotten the best car in the bunch, a new Ford Crown Victoria with less than ten thousand miles on the clock and a good-size V-8 engine.
We were keeping up with the Chevy as we entered Westchester County, now thirty-five minutes into the pursuit. The New York State Police were notified of the chase with a delay because they weren’t on the NYPD’s radio frequency. Several trooper cars joined in as we passed an entrance ramp. There were now over forty-five law enforcement vehicles in the queue.
State troopers are assigned cars with beefy engines because most of their patrol is done on highways and pursuits are pretty common. I was doing a steady 90–100 miles per hour when a trooper’s car roared past me like I was out for a leisurely Sunday drive. He rammed the Chevy, sending it into a spin. It finally came to a halt after crashing into a road divider.
Street Warrior Page 11