* * *
I was three days back on full duty and in my apartment with my girlfriend—the same one I’d rescued from the tire-iron-wielding thugs—when I glanced out the living room window to see four men breaking into parked cars.
I sighed and said to her, “You’re not gonna believe this,” then I grabbed my gun and told her to dial 911 and report an off-duty cop making an arrest. She didn’t look happy. “And tell them what I’m wearing.” Last thing I needed was to be shot by responding officers thinking that the bearded, tattooed guy with a gun was a bad guy.
By the time I got downstairs, the car boosters were working on a Volkswagen. After hollering “Police, don’t move!” as loud as I could (it disarms bad guys when they think you’re a bit crazy), I placed them all under arrest. Turns out the VW belonged to a New York City cop who lived down the block. I didn’t know the guy, but this is New York; I didn’t know who lived next door to me either.
I spent the better part of the day processing the arrest and at arraignment. When I got home, my girlfriend was gone. No surprise there.
* * *
Most cops think that most of the training that rookies get at the police academy is a colossal waste of time. That attitude generally comes from the indoctrination rookies get as soon as they graduate from the academy and get assigned to a permanent command. They start believing everything they hear from seasoned cops.
“Forget all that bullshit you learned in the academy, kid. You’ll learn how to do the real job on the street.”
While some of the training is designed to teach rookies the substance of law rather than the enforcement of the law using discretion, which is what’s done in the real world of policing, it’s a dangerous overstatement to say that everything taught in the academy is useless. If I had disregarded all I learned at the academy, I probably wouldn’t be around to tell my story.
A good example of how academy training can be useful occurred one overcast, drizzly night when I was working with Bobby DeMatas and Eddie Fennell and we saw three suspicious-looking guys hanging out on a deserted street corner. We decided to talk to them. As soon as we got out of the unmarked car, the suspects made us as cops and took off running. While it was nice to know we were right about their being up to no good, having to chase three young guys who were fast as cheetahs wasn’t amusing. To make matters worse, they knew enough to split up after a block; two of them peeled off going west on Kelly Street, while the third kept going straight on Fox Street.
DeMatas and Fennell took off after the two while I stuck with the lone runner.
The guy ran into a deserted building, which was boarded up and dark. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, and I was glad I’d remembered to bring a flashlight because I was certainly going to need it.
I stood stock-still and listened for noise, senses alert, flashlight at the ready but not turned on. I heard something to my left, a shuffling sound. It could’ve been the world’s biggest rat, my guy, or some junkie who was taking refuge from the weather. I needed to have trigger discipline and the correct target in front of me. I was taking shallow breaths, almost able to hear my pulse pounding.
I recalled something I’d learned in the academy regarding the use of flashlights in a gunfight in a darkened area. The natural response was to hold the flashlight straight out in front to illuminate your path. Tactically, this was a mistake because holding the light outstretched in front of you could make you an easy target for your adversary. He’d shoot at the light; shame on you if you were standing behind it.
I extended the flashlight out to my left before turning it on. This move, getting the light as far away from my body as possible, saved my life. As soon as I activated the light, the shooter opened fire on it.
I fired one round in the direction of the shooter’s muzzle flash, and I heard a scream and the sound of a gun hitting the floor. I advanced carefully looking for the gunman, but he wasn’t to be found. When the Emergency Services Unit responded, it lit up the interior of the building with powerful lights. It appeared the shooter had discovered a way to exit without going past me. We found his gun and a trail of blood leading to the rear yard.
An alarm was broadcast to hospitals citywide, but no one matching the description showed up with a gunshot wound. My partners had better luck: they captured their two guys. Both were wanted on outstanding warrants.
I never forgot the tactical side of my training. While some procedures needed tweaking depending on the circumstances, the instruction had been spot-on.
* * *
My off-duty time was becoming more important to me. Despite the acknowledged danger of police work, I loved what I did. My swing—a cop’s version of a weekend, no matter what days it fell on—was time I could slow down. Unfortunately, my instinct for recognizing trouble never took time off.
Most cops go through their careers without making any off-duty arrests. This isn’t to say most cops avoid doing their job when they’re not on duty; it sometimes comes down to situational awareness, how observant they are. Everyone is different and just because someone is a cop doesn’t necessarily mean they’re streetwise and aware of what’s going on around them.
I was always in a state of hypervigilance. I didn’t believe this was intentional, just a by-product of where I worked.
My sanctuary was the gym. I loved working out, and the gym was a place I could unwind and lose myself in a strenuous session with weights. The gym was also the last place I’d expect to become involved in a situation that would lead to an arrest. The eyes give most of us away. There’s the “thousand-mile stare,” plus the constant looking around to continuously evaluate our surroundings. Most cops—active or retired—survey a room before entering it; it’s a subtle scan of the environment, not noticeable except to other cops. Show me an ex-cop who doesn’t sit with their back to a wall in a public place with a clear view of the entrance and comings and goings, and I’ll show you one who had a desk job or rarely worked the street.
My gym was located on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. I was in the locker room, and there was a guy about ten lockers down from me that I’d caught in my peripheral vision. He was hanging up his clothes, much the same thing I was doing, when I thought I saw a glimpse of what might be a gun. It was a fleeting moment, and I couldn’t be sure.
I gave the guy a closer look. He looked too young to be a police officer, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t armed legally … if what I saw was in fact a gun.
I waited until he left the locker room. Then I summoned the attendant, who had a passkey to all the lockers. I identified myself as a police officer and had the attendant open the guy’s locker. Sure enough, there was a gun. It was cheap semiauto—definitely not a cop’s gun.
I waited for the guy to return to the locker room, change, and leave the facility before stopping him outside. He wasn’t a police officer and didn’t have a license for the gun. Busted! Under arrest.
The case was eventually tossed because of my illegal search of the man’s locker. Constitutionally, my arrestee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in a secured locker and I’d violated his rights by not securing a search warrant before gaining access to the locker. But at the time, I had a decision to make: with no time to get the required warrant, I either had to make the arrest or let the guy go on his merry way. I knew exactly what I was doing when I locked him up. My object was to get an illegal gun off the street, a gun that might kill me, another cop, or a civilian. I stand by my choice.
I made a similar arrest in a different gym with comparable results. Win or lose, right or wrong, it was another gun off the street.
I was in another gym months later when someone I knew pointed to a guy working out.
“You know that guy, Ralph? He’s on your job.”
My grandmother looked more like a cop. He was out of shape, pasty-faced, and looked oblivious to the world. If he was a cop, he never saw the street or the light of day. Cops know other cops. I decided to make sure.
Small talk in
gyms is common; people bullshit with each other while waiting for equipment to free up or just to pass time between sets.
I made an inane comment about the weather, and within two minutes the inevitable question arose.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I’m a cop,” Dough Boy replied, an air of superiority entering the conversation.
“Oh, yeah? My brother’s a cop. When’d you come on?” I responded.
He gave me a date.
“How about that?” I said. “My brother did too. What’s your tax number?”
Police officers are given six-digit tax numbers when they’re sworn in, and they’re numbers you don’t forget. Most cops can tell exactly when someone came on the job by their tax number.
When he gave me a four-digit tax number, I knew I had him. I placed him under arrest and searched his belongings. He had a gun in his locker and a fake badge in his wallet. To an unsuspecting civilian it could’ve passed for a police shield. He was eventually convicted of carrying a concealed weapon and impersonating a police officer, both of which are felonies.
Phony cops, like phony military personnel, are quite common, but a fake soldier can’t do nearly the harm that someone impersonating a police officer can. Fake cops often carry illegal guns, and even a phony or duplicate shield can cause considerable damage. People who impersonate cops (and soldiers for that matter) are wannabes who, often, tried out for the job and were found to be unqualified. So they enter a fantasy world where they’d become what they couldn’t be in real life. Some take the fantasy to a higher level and commit crimes under the guise of being a police officer. Sick people.
Off-duty arrests seemed to be taking up my leisure time. Over the course of my fourteen-year career, I’d make just over a hundred of them.
Once, off duty, I was in a police-equipment supply store buying a holster when I noticed a guy in civilian clothes. He hadn’t talked to a salesperson; he was just wandering around the store. He stopped at a display case where a number of sample shields (“badges” to everyone other than police officers) were on top of a glass display case. The shields seemed to hold his interest. I couldn’t see what he was doing because he had his back to me, and he was also out of view of store employees.
He departed the store several minutes later, me right behind him. I challenged him on the sidewalk, identified myself, and searched him. He had stolen a dozen shields. Plus, he had a phony police ID and a loaded gun. I assumed he was going to turn the shields into NYPD shields and sell them on the street.
He eventually pleaded guilty to two felonies.
I had other off-duty situations that might surprise you, since I was a cop.
My brother, Stu, and I took dates to a boxing match at a local school one Friday night. The gym was packed with neighborhood fans cheering local boxers. Smoke hung heavy, and raucous laughter filled the air. A nonthreatening crowd if there ever was one.
As we were taking seats, one of two guys walking past us bumped Stu with more force than seemed accidental. I shoved the guy back a step or two, and his friend immediately got into my face and shoved me.
The fight was on. We were battling it out toe to toe within a few seconds. What we didn’t know was that the two guys had come to the fight with friends—about twenty of them—who were seated right behind us. They jumped in, and Stu and I were quickly overcome.
The school gym was set up with hundreds of folding chairs, which made excellent weapons. Excellent for them, anyway. Things were definitely not going well for the Brothers Friedman.
Spectators were screaming and running for the doors. Our dates disappeared to wait patiently in my car. The fight spilled into the ring and back onto the floor. I was buried under a mountain of folding chairs getting my ass handed to me. Stu wasn’t doing much better. Then, in the distance, we heard the sirens; the cops were on the way.
Several sectors arrived and pulled everyone apart. Once I was free of the fight and not tripping over chairs, I realized that the gun I kept tucked into my waistband was missing. My backup gun, also a .38 revolver, was secure in an ankle holster. My belt holster had evidently dislodged during the melee.
Only another police officer can imagine what went through my mind when I went to touch my gun to make sure it was in place and found nothing there. Losing a gun is devastating to a cop. If someone found it, the murder it might commit was in part your fault.
Two things happened simultaneously: my blood pressure shot up to stratospheric levels, and my heart dropped to my stomach. In addition to the embarrassment of losing a gun, the mistake was going to take at least five days’ pay from me, and the blemish on my record certainly wouldn’t help me get into the Detective Bureau. What’s more, the conditions under which I’d lost the gun didn’t exactly cover me; I lost it in a brawl, not in a life-or-death struggle with a bank robber. I envisioned my career circling the drain. By the next day, I could be walking a foot post in a cemetery.
As these doomsday scenarios were going through my mind, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A uniformed sergeant was dangling my gun on his finger through the trigger guard. “This belong to you? Found it under a chair.”
Relief swept over me instantly, and I thanked the sergeant, who elected to forget he ever found a gun. “Failure to safeguard” a gun is another department violation. Our night, however, was by no means over. We spent the next four hours in the hospital getting patched up. Stu got some stitches. No one wanted to make a beef, us especially. All we wanted was to get our dates and get the hell out of there. The four of us wound up going to my apartment and watching porn movies, too beat up to do much of anything else.
* * *
I figured it would be a good thing to get away from the Bronx every now and then. A night in Manhattan seemed like a good break, so I jumped on my Harley and took off for Chinatown in lower Manhattan, scooping up Maria, a woman I knew, along the way. We planned on strolling around and sampling some of the food the area had to offer: a nice, quiet, romantic evening.
We had a great time. After a few hours of gorging ourselves, I checked my answering machine. My brother called wanting to know if we’d like to join him and his date at the car races on the Connecting Highway in Queens, where I used to race before I became a police officer. I bounced the idea off Maria, who thought it sounded fun. We got on the FDR and headed north in light traffic.
I realized we’d arrive in Queens way too early. Stu wasn’t getting there for at least another hour, so I pulled off the FDR into an emergency vehicle cutout to hang out by the East River for a while. We found a bench facing the water, where we sat for a while doing what couples do to pass the time.
About a hundred feet to our left was a footbridge that crossed over the FDR. I observed three young guys coming down the ramp from the footbridge and walking in our direction, studying us as they got closer. I told Maria, “If anything happens, hit the ground.” Her eyes went wide, but she nodded. I drew my gun from my waistband and held it under my forearm with my arms crossed.
I was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and boots and had numerous tattoos and a beard. As a reminder: I looked nothing like a cop. But perhaps I didn’t look like a victim either, because the three guys passed us without saying anything and then strolled back toward the footbridge.
The story doesn’t end there; I kept watching them. They exchanged words with two guys and a girl at the foot of the ramp and with a couple in the middle of the footbridge. I didn’t know what they said, but I decided to find out.
I identified myself to the three people at the bottom of the ramp.
In a barrage of words (and some tears) they said they’d been robbed at gunpoint. I told them to stay put and ran up to the couple in the middle of the ramp. Same thing, robbed at gunpoint.
I ran toward the stickup men, who were still on the bridge. When I got close, I identified myself as a police officer. The three took off, but not before they fired several shots at me. I returned fire, not hitting anyone, and c
hased them off the bridge onto Seventy-Eighth Street, where they jumped into a blue Ford. The assholes had a getaway car, driver at the wheel. There were numerous pedestrians on the street, who scattered like cockroaches.
The Ford left rubber fleeing the scene but got stuck in a queue of cars at a red light. I knew if I tried to reach it on foot, the car would be long gone by the time I got there. I was left standing there, feeling useless. Then I spotted a cab cruising for a fare.
I leapt into the backseat and hollered, “I’m a cop, follow that car!”
The driver, a young black man, saw my gun and thought I was sticking him up. He reached into a cigar box stuffed with cash and began throwing bills at me in the backseat. The cab was still stopped as I saw the light turn green and the Ford fade off into the distance.
I slammed my shield against the Plexiglas divider and repeated that I was a cop. The money kept on coming.
“Please don’t kill me, man,” the driver pleaded. “Take the fucking money!”
It took me another thirty seconds to convince the driver I was indeed a police officer, but by that time it was too late.
Frustrated and pissed off, I knew I still had to report the incident because shots had been fired. I directed the driver back to the FDR, where I got my bike and Maria, told her what had happened, and explained to her that we needed to go to the 19th Precinct station house (the precinct of occurrence) to make a police report. I looked around for the five robbery victims.
“You see where the five people that were held up went?” I asked her.
“Last I saw they were walking south on the service road.”
The station house was in that direction, so naturally I assumed the victims went there to report the robberies.
At the station house I explained to the desk officer, a lieutenant, who I was and what had happened. He looked at me skeptically.
“And where are the victims of this crime spree, Officer?” he asked sarcastically.
That took me by surprise. “You mean they’re not here?”
The lieutenant shook his head. I could tell he didn’t want any part of what I was telling him. The 19th Precinct encompasses the Upper East Side, some of the priciest real estate in the country and not considered a high-crime area—far from it. Here was a story that defied credulity. All this desk officer saw was a mountain of paperwork and numerous official notifications on account of some shots fired by a cop who looked like a thug. I don’t think he believed anything I told him.
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