Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  They get to the park, and, sure enough, here’s the guy, male, black, late twenties, sitting in a light blue Chevy SUV parked on the street. The sergeant walks up to the driver’s-side window while his partner takes up a tactical position on the passenger side. The sergeant starts talking to the driver, and the more the sergeant talks to him the more nervous and evasive the driver seems. He’s got an ex-con, cop-hating sullenness about him, and a career perp’s darting eyes.

  Excuse me, sir, the sergeant says, can I ask what you’re doing here today? You’re waiting for your friend? Yeah, what’s his name? Ummm? Whaddaya mean, ummm? Your friend’s name is Ummm? Oh, now you remember, it’s Steve. Does Steve live around here? Yeah? Which building? What floor? Can’t remember that, either, huh? Would you mind stepping out of the car, please? Would you mind showing me some identification?

  So the guy gets out of the car, and while the sergeant is talking to him, his partner is looking through the passenger-side windows. And there, partially wedged into the crack of the backseat, but still in plain view, is an open black plastic bag full of smaller plastic bags containing what is obviously marijuana; it’s weed packaged for sale. Contraband in plain view gives the partner the legal right to search the car—remember, from the Academy, SPACESHIPS—so he opens the door, grabs the bag of weed, and walks back over to the sergeant.

  Yo, Sarge, the partner says, look at this. It was in the backseat.

  That’s it. More than two ounces of marijuana is an “A” misdemeanor, so this guy is no longer a citizen; now he’s a perp. The sergeant rear-cuffs him and stands him up by the rear door of the SUV to search him, the perp protesting all the while: What are you arrestin’ me for? I ain’t done nothing! Fuckin’ cops! He doesn’t have any weapons, but as the sergeant is frisking him, he feels a large, soft bulge in the front pocket of the guy’s pants. He reaches in the pocket and pulls out a big roll of cash, mostly twenties and tens.

  Whoa! the sergeant is probably thinking. What have we got here?

  While his partner watches the perp, the sergeant backs into the SUV’s open door, almost into the driver’s side of the compartment, his hands out of his partner’s line of sight, and starts counting the money. As he’s counting he calls out to the perp: How much money is this?

  I dunno, the perp says, his back to the sergeant.

  How much money you got here? the sergeant asks again.

  I dunno, I just got paid, and my cousin give me some money he owed me and . . .

  The sergeant’s partner is watching all this with a kind of confused look on his face. He’s probably thinking, What the hell is Sarge doin’? Why’s he asking about the money? And why’s he standing like that? Tactically, it’s not the way you should do it. It’s kind of weird. And it’s not the first time, either.

  How much money is this? the sergeant says again, and the perp finally says, Shit, I dunno, maybe seven, eight hundred dollars? How the fuck I supposta know how much money I got in my fuckin’ pocket?

  The sergeant smiles. This mutt doesn’t even know how much money he has. The sergeant keeps on counting the money, which comes to exactly eleven hundred forty dollars. Then he splits it up into two separate rolls of cash, one bigger than the other, and puts them both in his left rear pocket.

  Well, okay, it’s not unusual during an arrest and search for a cop to put money or drugs in his pocket. He has to keep control of them, and he needs to keep his hands free to continue the search. But why did the sergeant split the money into two wads of cash?

  Now, at this point, does the sergeant sense or suspect anything? Does he imagine that all of the bills in his back pocket have been photocopied and their serial numbers recorded by us, and then marked with a UV pen? Does he imagine that the sullen, perp-eyed drug dealer he has in cuffs is actually one of our undercovers, an IAB detective? Or that the marijuana is ours, too, evidence from an old case that was about to be routinely destroyed? Does he notice the young Hispanic guy riding the bike by the park, or the young black girl sitting on the park bench with a school book bag beside her, talking on a cell phone—and if he does notice them, does he realize that they are our “ghosts,” our backup undercovers, put there to step in if anything goes wrong? Does he notice the empty parked car on the other side of the intersection with the Kleenex box on the deck under the rear window, or the gray van down the street with the tinted windows? Does he imagine that there’s a camera in the Kleenex box, and another camera in the van? Does he know how many people are watching him?

  Obviously he doesn’t sense or imagine any of these things. Because a moment later, the sergeant turns the perp around, then reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the larger wad of cash. He holds it up in the air and makes a big show out of saying to the perp, Here, I’m giving you your money back! He shoves the larger wad of cash into the perp’s pocket, while the smaller wad stays in his own back pocket.

  It’s a classic street skim, a traditional sleight of hand.

  And now the sergeant belongs to us.

  Yes, it’s possible that before end of shift some twinge of conscience or creeping suspicion will cause the sergeant to suddenly “remember” that cash in his back pocket and voucher it at the precinct; we’ll have to check on that. But we know in our hearts that’s not going to happen.

  The sergeant and his partner load the marijuana and the perp into their car and head back to the precinct. The partner takes the collar and starts processing the perp through the system. He vouchers the marijuana and then he runs the perp’s prints through the database in Albany; we’ve already set it up so that our uncle’s prints come back as belonging not to a cop but to a small-time dealer with a few priors, a short time upstate, and no current warrants. The sergeant probably notices that while the perp’s personal belongings are being vouchered and bagged in front of him—keys, lighter, cigarettes, the remaining wad of cash, which comes to exactly $820—the perp doesn’t complain about any money being missing. That’s good for the sergeant, but even if the perp did complain, so what? Perps complain all the time—that cop hit me, he took my money, those aren’t my drugs, that cop planted them on me, he flaked me, and so on. Nobody’s going to believe him.

  With the perp locked up the sergeant reports to the CO that the problem in the park is solved, they’ve got a good collar, drugs seized and vouchered—mission accomplished. The sergeant goes back to his desk and starts plowing through some routine paperwork. People are coming and going in the precinct all the time, so the sergeant probably doesn’t notice the detective in a suit and tie who comes in and passes by the holding cells. The sergeant doesn’t pay attention when the drug dealer in a cell calls out to the detective: Yo, you the boss around here? I gotta piss! Tell ’em to take me to the goddam bathroom! The detective ignores him and keeps walking. The sergeant doesn’t realize that the detective is one of ours, and that the piss-call from the perp is a signal that the sergeant didn’t voucher all the money.

  Finally it’s the sergeant’s end of tour, and a few minutes later he’s on the Major Deegan Expressway, thinking about cold beers and barbecue.

  The sergeant is coming into Van Cortlandt Park when he notices that right behind him there’s a blue-and-white NYPD patrol car with two uniformed cops in it. They turn on the lights and give him a single yelp on the siren and pull him over.

  The sergeant probably isn’t too worried; he doesn’t associate the uniformed cops with the stolen money in his back pocket. Maybe he’s got a burned-out brake light or something, in which case he’ll just badge them, show them his NYPD shield, and be on his way. He knows that if he was really in trouble, they’d send detectives after him, not uniforms.

  This is what we want him to think. The two uniformed cops are actually IAB detectives, temporarily back in uniform to put the sergeant’s mind at ease. The sergeant has a loaded gun on him, and it’s always possible that if he suspects he’s been caught he’ll resist, or as has happened before with corrupt cops who get caught, he’ll eat his gun and blow his
brains out. If he’s going to freak out, we want to get his gun first.

  The uniformed cops walk up to the car, one on each side, and the sergeant already has his shield out in the open window. The driver’s-side cop is apologetic, soothing: Oh, gosh, Sarge, we didn’t know you’re on the job, but there’s something wrong with your right rear wheel, could you step out for just a second and take a look? Maybe the sergeant doesn’t really believe it, but he wants to believe it, so he gets out of the car and the two uniforms quickly move in close, not rough but close. They ease his gun out of its holster and pat him down and take the wad of bills out of his back pocket. The sergeant sees that there’s another car parked behind the NYPD patrol car, an unmarked sedan, and two guys in suits and ties are walking toward him, and now he knows for certain. He knows who they are.

  They’re us. They’re IAB.

  And what the sergeant says is: Oh shit.

  There’s no shouting, no rough treatment. The IAB guys, a lieutenant and a detective, don’t handcuff the sergeant, or even take his shield. Instead they put the money in an envelope, then they ease the sergeant into the backseat of the sedan, and head back into the Bronx.

  We can guess what the sergeant is thinking at this point. We’ve seen it before. The sergeant is trying not to panic; he’s thinking there’s gotta be a way out of this. Maybe he can insist that the cash in his back pocket is his, maybe all we’ve got on him is that after he left the precinct the perp in the holding cell started claiming that the cops stole his money—and who are they gonna believe, some drug-slinging skell or another cop with twelve good years on the job? Or maybe he’ll tell us that it was a mistake, that he put the drug dealer’s cash in his back pocket when he was making the arrest, and when he pulled the wad back out he accidentally left some of the bills in his pocket. In fact, he had just noticed that money in his pocket and was about to turn around and go back to the precinct and voucher it when the uniforms pulled him over! Yeah, he knows it’s weak, he knows we won’t believe him, but hey, it’s not what we believe, it’s what we can prove.

  And besides, the sergeant may be thinking, what did he do that was really so bad? Take a few hundred bucks from a drug dealer? Big fucking deal. Everybody does it. They always have. And after all the years he’s given the Department, the shitty hours, the lousy pay—you try paying off a mortgage and sending two kids to private school on a cop’s pay—doesn’t he deserve a little extra now and then? These guys are cops. They can understand that.

  The sergeant starts to speak, to try to explain, but the lieutenant next to him in the backseat cuts him off, gently.

  Look, Sarge, do us a favor and don’t say anything, okay? Give us some time to figure out how we can fix this.

  It’s a glimmer of hope, a false one, but the sergeant seizes on it. He doesn’t say anything more.

  They bring the sergeant to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, to a windowless interview room on an upper floor, where we sit him down at a bare table. The ADA assigned to the case is already there. We read the sergeant his rights, and then we tell him: Don’t say anything, just listen. We know you took the money. Now we want to give you an opportunity to help yourself.

  There are some things we don’t tell the sergeant, because he doesn’t need to know. We don’t tell him about the call to our PRIDE line, tipping us off that the sergeant was stealing, which set the investigation in motion. We don’t tell him that the woman who complained at the Community Council about the drug dealer by the park is one of our undercovers, and that we knew the precinct CO would send him, his Conditions sergeant, to check out the complaint. (In most cases we would advise the CO if we were doing an undercover operation in his precinct, and ask him to cooperate with us, but for various reasons—nothing sinister—in this case we didn’t.)

  Although he’s probably already figured it out, we don’t tell the sergeant that from start to finish, this whole thing was carefully planned and orchestrated by us to see if he would do again what he was suspected of doing before.

  It was a test. And the sergeant has failed it.

  And there’s one other thing we don’t tell the sergeant. We don’t tell him that while we feel sorry for his wife and family, for him we feel . . . nothing. We’re not crusaders, or zealots, and we don’t gain any particular pleasure—or pain—in catching another cop committing a crime. It’s our job. Yes, it’s embarrassing that there are cops like him in the Department, but there will always be a few cops like him, just as there will always be criminals. And as far as we’re concerned, the sergeant isn’t even a cop anymore, he stopped being a cop the minute he started stealing money. Now he’s just another perp.

  We don’t tell him all that, but with the videos and the marked bills, we show and tell him enough for him to understand that it’s over; he’s done. The sergeant is a big guy, over six feet, maybe two hundred pounds, but in a small voice he says: Okay, yeah, I took the money.

  So we take a run at him: We’ll do what we can for you, Sergeant, you can’t be a police officer anymore, but maybe we can ask the DA to go easy on you. But you have to tell us the truth. How many other times have you stolen money? How about drugs? Who else is in on it? Will you work with us against other corrupt cops? C’mon, Sergeant, we’re trying to help you here.

  But the sergeant hangs tough.

  No, he says, he never took any money before; this was the very first time. We know he’s lying; this can’t be the first time he’s ripped off a collar, or rifled the pockets of an Aided case before the EMTs arrived, or snatched a couple of twenties off a dresser during a domestic call. No corrupt cop ever gets caught the first time. But we don’t have enough hard evidence to prove it in court.

  And no, he says, he can’t help us make cases against other corrupt cops, because he doesn’t know any other corrupt cops—and in the case of his fellow Conditions Team cops, that’s probably true. Why else would the sergeant hide his hands from his partner’s eyes when he skimmed the money? Later we interview all of them, including the partner on the videotapes, and they all tell us: No, we never dreamed that the Sarge was skimming—and even if we don’t completely believe them, we still don’t think they were in on it. We understand that, cops being cops, they don’t want to be rats. None of them admits to being the cop who called our PRIDE line, although one of them tells us, in a low whisper, that he’s glad we got the guy. Good job, he says.

  So after we get all we’re going to get out of the sergeant, we suspend him from the Department—which immediately stops his pay—and take his shield. One of our detectives leads him away to be booked and processed like any other criminal. Later his lawyer works out a deal with the DA: The sergeant pleads guilty to a misdemeanor, no jail time, community service, dismissal from the Department, no pension, no benefits. And then the sergeant, the former sergeant, disappears to wherever disgraced ex-cops go.

  And we move on to the next test.

  * * *

  We call them “integrity tests,” but they’re popularly known as “sting operations.” Integrity testing is another thing that sets the new IAB apart from the old IAD. In the past, using sting operations to catch corrupt cops was rare, only used once or twice a year. In the new, proactive IAB, we run about five or six hundred integrity tests of cops every year, setting up controlled situations in which a cop will have the opportunity to do the right thing or the wrong thing. The key is to make the situation seem real, so real that, like the sergeant in the Bronx, the cop in question doesn’t suspect he’s being tested.

  The test of the sergeant in the Bronx was one example of a targeted integrity test. Here’s another.

  We get a tip that a cop in the 33rd Precinct in Washington Heights is stealing money from drug dealers. We rent a run-down apartment in the cop’s usual patrol sector and tech it up with video cameras; we also rent another apartment in the building so we can monitor the video. While the cop is on patrol, our IAB undercovers, posing as DEA agents—not a stretch, since a lot of them previously were with
the NYPD Narcotics Division—call the precinct desk and say they need a uniform to come by to assist. Since it’s in the targeted cop’s sector, dispatch sends him to our location. When the cop arrives at the apartment, the “DEA agents” tell him that they’ve got an arrest warrant on the guy who lives there, but when they kicked the door to serve the warrant the guy was gone. They’re pretty sure there’s money and drugs in there, but now they need a search warrant to toss the place, so while they go get the warrant they want the cop to sit in the apartment and grab the perp if he comes back. No problem, the cop says.

  So as we’re watching on the hidden surveillance cameras, the undercover IAB guys leave, and they’re not gone three seconds before the cop starts looking around and—lo and behold!—he finds some heroin (actually pancake mix) and about $20,000 in bundles of marked IAB money hidden in the dresser drawers. He ignores the drugs, but he skims $6,000 of the cash—like the Bronx sergeant, they almost never take it all—and stuffs it under his protective vest. The DEA agents come back waving a phony search warrant and thank the cop for the help. The cop leaves and at the end of his shift he goes back to the precinct and doesn’t voucher the cash hidden under his vest. He’s arrested.

  That was a relatively easy integrity test; some are more complicated. Like this one:

  Two cops in a precinct in Brooklyn go to their precinct CO and tell him they suspect that another cop has been stealing from perps. They can’t prove it, but they don’t like it, they don’t want to be around this guy, they’re afraid of getting jammed up. (So much for the Blue Wall of Silence.) Instead of hiding the problem, the CO does the right thing and calls IAB. We tell him to sit tight; we’ll handle it.