A lot of cops have nicknames—not nicknames like Charlie or Bobby or Bill, but street nicknames. Other cops will start calling them something based on their appearance or their personality or whatever and the name will just stick. They’ll call one cop “Cheese,” because his last name is Romano, and this one is “Too-Tall” because he’s six-five, and this one is “Robo-Cop,” because he’s a policing machine, and this guy is “Pops,” because he’s a thirty-five-year-old rookie, or because his name is Popavich. And on and on.
Usually the nicknames are innocuous. But what if you have a cop that the other cops call “The Mechanic”? Is it because he likes to work on cars? Or is it because he gives “tune-ups”—beatings—to suspects? If a cop’s got a nickname that sounds aggressive or even just strange—Killer, Thumper, Cuckoo—you have to ask yourself why.
Like the case of the cop known as “Psycho Sarge.”
This is early on in my time at IAB. There’s this sergeant in the 19th Precinct in Manhattan, in a lot of ways he’s a good cop, with tons of arrests, medals, awards. But he’s got an alcohol problem, and when he’s indulging his alcohol problem he also has a problem with women. One night the sergeant gets drunked up at an Upper East Side bar and he sees this young female rookie cop—the sergeant is her training officer—come in, and he starts pawing her and making lewd comments, really making a scene. She’s understandably upset, so she files a sexual harassment complaint with the Department’s Office of Equal Employment Opportunity. When the sergeant hears about the complaint he grabs the rookie’s arm in the precinct station house, drags her up to the roof, and tells her if she doesn’t agree to drop the complaint he’s going to throw her off the roof! She believes him—and when she gets away she calls IAB.
This is serious. So in this case we immediately go out and take the sergeant’s gun and shield and put him on modified duty in another unit, answering phones or whatever, while the case is investigated. (He’s later fired.) Later that day I’m talking to the precinct CO, a deputy inspector, about this sergeant, and the CO mentions, casually, in passing: Yeah, the other guys all call him Psycho Sarge, I don’t know why . . .
Wait a minute, I tell him. Psycho Sarge? Psycho Sarge? You’ve got a cop, a supervisor, under your command that the other cops call Psycho Sarge, and you never bothered to find out if the reason they call him that is: (1) he’s psychotically obsessive about proper paperwork; or (2) he’s the kind of dangerous nut job who threatens to throw another cop off a freaking roof?
I can hardly believe it. It’s a failure of command—and the kind of thing that drives me crazy.
(By the way, except for “Charlie” the only nickname I ever had—that I know of—was when I was CO in the Sixth Precinct, and my high expectations and attention to detail led some of my less motivated cops to start calling me Captain Can’t-Please-Me. Campisi, Can’t-Please-Me, get it? But I could live with that. At least they weren’t calling me Psycho CO.)
So anyway, now that we’ve got a feel for who this cop is, we’ll go out and shake the trees a little—and how we do it depends on the case.
Sometimes we might do a “lifestyle” surveillance on the cop or cops in question, follow them around, see where they go, on-duty and off. Do they head home to the wife and kids after work, or do they hit the bars and strip joints? Who are they hanging out with? Are they visiting known gambling locations or unlicensed social clubs? That’s a violation of Department rules, and they can take an administrative hit for it, but it’s not necessarily a crime.
You have to be careful when you put a tail on another cop. Our IAB surveillance guys are some of the best in the business—they have to be—and we certainly aren’t going to tail a cop with two guys in suits in a stripped-down Crown Victoria; you do that, you might as well put a big flashing sign on the windshield that says “IAB.” Like on any surveillance, when you’re tailing a cop you use vehicles that fit into the background, with plates that won’t come back as being registered to the NYPD. IAB has a fleet of available undercover vehicles—upscale “flash” cars, 200,000-mile beaters, yellow cabs, UPS-style step-vans, a city ambulance, you name it; once we even rented a boat.
But every NYPD cop has had at least some training in surveillance techniques, and cops notice things other people might not. So no matter how good you are, if you tail a cop too close, or stay on him too long, there’s a chance that eventually you’re going to get made—that is, recognized as being a tail. And at that point, the investigation is blown.
Again, it depends on the case, but we may also start looking for other victims of the accused cop—like what we do with the EDIT debriefing program, but focused on this particular cop. If, say, the allegation is that the cop is arresting low-level drug dealers and stealing their money, maybe we’ll check the records, see who the cop has arrested recently, and then send some IAB detectives out to talk to them. We don’t tell them we’re IAB, or even the name of the specific cop we’re interested in, because maybe the drug dealer will try to sell that information back to the cop in return for a get-out-of-jail-free card—and we don’t want the cop to know that IAB is asking questions about him.
So maybe we’ll tell the perp that we’re with the NYPD Quality Assurance Division—there really is such a thing—and we’re doing a survey of people who’ve had contact with the police, and would he mind answering just a few questions? More times than you might think, the perp will go for it. We know from this drug dealer’s RAP sheet—Record of Arrests and Prosecutions—that he’s been arrested twenty or thirty times in his career, by a lot of different cops. So after a series of innocuous questions, we’ll ask him, casually: Did you ever have any problems with the cops who arrested you? You get ripped off? Kicked around? And maybe he’ll say: Yeah, there’s this one cop, Officer X, he ripped me for a couple hundred, ain’t no big thing . . . And that will be our guy.
It’s not enough to file a criminal case against the cop, of course; a street mope with thirty arrests on his record, a couple of felony convictions, and some prison time upstate isn’t going to shine on the witness stand, even if we can get him to testify. And even if you line up three or four more drug-dealing street mopes with similar allegations against the cop, a jury’s probably not going to believe them. To a jury, and a defense attorney, witnesses like that are just another way of saying “reasonable doubt.”
That’s a big problem with making cases against crooked cops. Let’s face it, crooked cops aren’t jacking up Wall Street hedge fund managers and stealing their Rolexes, or beating up suburban housewives in interrogation rooms in the Bronx. In most police corruption or misconduct cases—not all, but most—your witnesses are going to be drug dealers or gang members or junkies or prostitutes, or sometimes they’re corrupt cops who get caught and make a deal to testify against other cops. They all have credibility problems.
The bottom line is that in a lot of cases, it’s difficult if not impossible to convict a dirty cop for past acts of corruption. There’s just not enough evidence. It’s a lot better if we can catch the cop red-handed, in the act.
But how do we do that? Like I said, we can’t tail a suspected cop every minute for weeks or months, because we’re probably going to get made eventually—and even if we don’t, what are the chances we’re going to get close enough to actually see, and videotape, the cop or cops in the act of committing a crime?
For example, say we’ve got a crew of cops working midnights in the Bronx who are suspected of booming the doors of drug dealers’ apartments—that is, knocking them down with sledgehammers or rams—and then going in to steal money or drugs. Leaving aside the obvious problems with trying to tail a bunch of cops on otherwise deserted streets at four o’clock in the morning, even if we watch these guys go into an apartment building, and watch them come out, what have we got? Maybe they found some money or drugs, maybe they didn’t. If we stop them and they’re clean, the investigation is blown, and we’re never going to get these guys. Even if we go in afterward and find the drug
dealer who got hit, what’s he going to say to us? Yes, I’m an active drug dealer, and those cops took my stash, and could you please make them give it back? Not likely.
So sometimes we can’t wait for the crime to come to us. We have to be proactive and creative. We have to set up a situation, a scenario, in which a cop can choose whether or not to commit the kind of crime he’s suspected of committing. In other words, we have to do what’s known as a sting operation.
And to do a sting, we have to have great undercovers.
There’s a big difference between undercovers and informants. Informants are civilians, usually criminals, who are working with the police in return for money or for help getting out from under a criminal charge; in the NYPD they’re known as CIs, or confidential informants. Sometimes informants only provide information, and sometimes cops will use them to get inside a criminal operation, to make drug buys, for example, or to gather intelligence. Paid informants have to be registered as CIs with the Department, but they definitely are not cops.
Undercovers (known in NYPD-ese as “uncles”), on the other hand, are cops, fully sworn like any other cops, who are acting the parts of drug users, street skells, Mob guys—whatever is called for. Their job is to get close to criminals, make drug buys, get intelligence on an upcoming score, secretly record their conversations, whatever the case requires—and because they’re cops, they’re a million times more credible and more reliable than a CI. Most undercovers are new police officers who want to get their eighteen months of investigative experience and earn their gold detective shields, but others are veterans who just like the work. (Undercovers shouldn’t be confused with “plainclothes” cops, who wear civilian clothes but are instantly recognizable as cops by anyone with street smarts.)
Obviously, undercovers can’t look like cops. Your best undercovers are going to look too young to be cops, or too emaciated, or too short, or too weak, or too whatever. In some cases your undercover can’t smell like a cop, either. If an uncle is posing as a street skell junkie who sleeps in an alley, he’d better not smell like Irish Spring.
But it’s not just looks; undercovers also have to talk and act the part. An undercover has to be able to twitch like a junkie who feels the sickness coming on, or chatter like a crackhead who’s just hit the stem, or exude menace like a major drug trafficker. Undercovers have to be actors at heart, and in fact, we would often hire professional actors to come in and train our IAB undercovers in the finer points of the Stanislavski method—as in, Okay, I’m playing a crack slinger on the corner of Livonia and Stone in Brownsville. What’s my motivation?
Obviously, being an undercover can be dangerous work. Unlike an actor, an undercover cop who flubs his lines or fails to play his role effectively isn’t going to get a bad review in the Arts section of the New York Times; he runs the risk of getting a bullet in the head. An undercover can’t wear a vest or carry a shield when he’s working, and unless it fits in with his undercover character, he can’t carry a gun, either. So in almost every case, an undercover will have “ghosts” backing him up, other undercovers who can blend into the background and move in if there’s trouble. But the situation, the “set,” in an undercover operation is always fluid, so on rare occasions an uncle might find himself on his own.
In IAB we had about two dozen undercovers on a permanent basis, and we could get more if we needed them. Some were drafted into IAB, while others were brought in by our detectives who worked with them in the past. In my opinion they were some of the best undercovers in the Department—again, they had to be, because they weren’t going undercover against ordinary criminals; they were going undercover against other cops.
Undercovers come in all shapes. For example, we had a female officer whose parents were born in India; dressed in a sari, nobody was ever going to make her for a cop. Same thing with another female officer, who was in her mid-thirties but had prematurely gray hair; give her a little makeup, put her in a frumpy housecoat, hand her a leash with a miniature schnauzer at the end of it—she provided the schnauzer—and she was an old lady walking her dog, a perfect ghost. Another one of our uncles was a first grade detective with twenty years on the job; a few gold chains, a big pinky ring, and a flash car from the IAB garage and he could “dese” and “dems” and “doze” his way into making even streetwise cops believe he was a Mob wannabe from Jersey.
But on a sting operation against a corrupt cop, we don’t want to just see the cop steal the money. We want to catch it on videotape. And for that we call in the tech geeks.
The NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) provides equipment and expertise to any Department unit that needs recording devices, surveillance cameras, wiretaps, GPS tracking devices (known as “bird dogs,” they usually require a court order), and other technical equipment. IAB had first crack at any TARU stuff we needed—the other bureau chiefs sometimes bitched about it, but the commissioner always backed us up—and we also had our own group of seven or eight IAB technical guys based in a warehouse complex in Queens, a sort of mini-TARU, who were experts in deploying surveillance equipment. If they saw some gizmo in a technology magazine that looked cool, and if TARU didn’t have it, we could bypass channels and dip into our $2 million operations budget and buy it—making sure to get a receipt, of course.
When I started in IAB in the mid-1990s, and even more so now, the available surveillance technology—pinhole cameras, microrecorders and transmitters, and so on—was pretty amazing. Although putting a hidden recording device on someone is still known as “wearing a wire,” the days of taping a bulky Nagra tape recorder to an undercover’s body and hoping he doesn’t get searched are long over; now you can put an audio recorder in a watch or put a camera in a button.
So anyway, if we’ve got a cop we suspect of corruption, we line up our undercovers, get our tech guys set up, and come up with a plan, a scenario. We plan it down to the last detail.
Then we put the cop to the test . . .
Chapter 5
* * *
TESTING, TESTING, TESTING . . .
It’s a Friday afternoon on the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, and even though the traffic is backed up for miles, the sergeant is feeling pretty good. He’s heading home to Westchester, the weekend is ahead, time for barbecue and cold beers, and best of all, he’s got three hundred twenty dollars in cash—tax free—sitting in his back pocket.
We can guess what he’s probably thinking. He’s thinking it’s not the best score he ever made, but it’s not the worst, either. He could have gotten more, but you don’t want to get too greedy with these things. You wait for the right opportunity to come along, and when it does you don’t take it all, just a little off the top, a few hundred here, a couple hundred there, not enough for anybody to get too excited about. As long as you’re smart about it, as long as you’re careful, there’s no way you’re ever going to get caught.
But if that’s what the sergeant is thinking, he’s wrong. Although he doesn’t know it yet, he’s already been caught. We watched him take that money that’s in his pocket, and we’re watching him right now.
And in just a few minutes, life as the sergeant knows it is going to come to an end.
The sergeant’s trouble had begun two weeks ago, when we got an anonymous call on our PRIDE line, the one reserved for cops, and the unknown caller tells us there’s this Conditions sergeant in a Bronx precinct, he’s being funny with the money. Whenever they’re on a call and there’s money around he always wants to control it, he always personally vouchers it, or at least some of it, but it’s weird, and we should check him out—click! The call has the ring of truth, and when we shake the trees a little, check around with people we could trust, we find that while there isn’t enough there to make a corruption case against the sergeant, there is enough for us to believe that there might be a corruption case to be made.
And so the night before the sergeant heads home on the Major Deegan, this young Hispanic woman stands up at a Commu
nity Council meeting and starts complaining to the precinct CO about a guy selling dope in a park.
Like every precinct commanding officer in the NYPD, one night every month the CO has to go down to the Community Council meeting at the senior center or the Baptist church or wherever to meet with local citizens and talk about problems in the neighborhood; it’s part of the community policing thing. At this meeting, the young woman is giving the CO an earful.
There’s this guy selling dope by the park near my house! she says. Right by the park! He’s got a light blue Chevy SUV that he parks right there and he stands there selling marijuana! In the daytime! Every afternoon! I’m afraid to even take my kids to the park! You’re the police! What are you gonna do about it?
So the CO’s aide takes down the information and the CO tells the woman: Yes, ma’am, I’ll have my Conditions Team look into it. The precinct Conditions Team is half a dozen cops whose primary job is to respond to various quality-of-life complaints—teenagers hanging out and drinking in a parking lot, winos relieving themselves in an alley behind a bodega, some guy slinging reefer by a park. Whenever the CO catches a headache at a CC meeting, it’s usually the Conditions Team’s job to make the headache go away.
The sergeant is the head of the Conditions Team. So the next day the CO calls him in and tells him about the alleged drug slinger by the park and tells him to take care of it, get the guy out of there, and report back to him when it’s done. No problem, boss, the sergeant says, and a few minutes later he grabs one of his guys and they head out for the park. The sergeant and his partner, a police officer, are both in plainclothes—jeans and a polo shirt for the partner, the sergeant in a Yankees jersey, No. 44, Reggie Jackson’s old number, with their NYPD shields hanging around their necks—and they’re driving a beat-up, unmarked black Chevy. No one could mistake them for anything other than cops.
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