We approach a bodega owner on the cop’s beat and get him to cooperate with us, and he lets us put an IAB undercover in the bodega posing as a guy running a numbers game. Posing as detectives with the Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB), which handles illegal gambling cases, two IAB investigators approach the targeted cop while he’s walking his foot post and show him a picture of the numbers guy. They tell him, Look, we’re making a case on this guy in the bodega, he’s making a lot of money, we don’t want you to do anything, don’t approach him, just keep an eye out, okay?
Sure, the cop says. Our undercovers give him a telephone number where he can reach them, and if the cop checks the NYPD directory he’ll see that the number appears to belong to OCCB. In fact, the number goes to what’s known as a “hello phone” in IAB headquarters. If a target calls the number, he’s not going to hear “Internal Affairs, Detective Schmedlap speaking.” Depending on the case, he’s going to hear a simple “Hello”—or in this case, if the cop calls the number he’ll hear, “OCCB, Detective Smith speaking.”
Remember, we have to make this look real, so whenever the cop is in the area we send some of our undercovers into the bodega. Our guys go in, stay less than a minute, not even enough time for a cup of coffee, and they come out without buying anything. To anybody who’s looking, including the cop, they look for all the world like numbers runners.
This goes on for a couple of weeks; we have to give the cop time to get comfortable with this. Then one day, while the cop is on post near the bodega, our OCCB detectives make a big show out of going into the bodega and arresting the numbers guy and hauling him out in cuffs. Naturally the cop runs over, and the detectives say: Thanks for the help, and could you do us a favor? Could you drive this guy’s car to the precinct?
No problem, the cop says. The detectives hand the cop the keys to the perp’s car that’s parked down the street, and they load the perp into their car and disappear. The cop gets into the perp’s car, an almost new Cadillac that’s one of the “flash cars” we have in the IAB warehouse. The Caddie is fully equipped with our hidden videotape cameras.
So the cop heads for the precinct in the Caddie, and as expected, he starts checking the console box and glove box and under the seat, where he finds three stashes of cash we’ve put in there, about a thousand bucks in all, all of the bills photocopied and marked.
We can guess what the cop is thinking. He’s thinking: Those OCCB guys didn’t search the car, they don’t know how much money’s in here, if I take a little nobody’s going to miss it, except possibly the perp—and screw him. The cop takes a couple hundred from each pile and puts it in his pocket—all clearly on tape. Again, we would have had a hard time proving past acts of corruption by this cop. But now we’ve got him dead to rights committing a current act of corruption. We arrest him, suspend him, and after he’s brought up on criminal theft charges he’s fired from the Department.
Okay, sure, there isn’t much money involved. And we devoted a lot of time and resources to catching the guy. So is it worth it?
You bet it is. There’s no such thing as small-time police corruption. And if we find a cop stealing, whether it’s a few bucks or a hundred thousand—and we get both—we’ll devote whatever resources are necessary to get him off the street.
We used the same basic principle to look for overly aggressive or violent cops as well. Here’s how it worked:
We get a complaint against a cop for excessive force—I called that cop an asshole, the complainant says, and then he smacked me in the face for no reason! Well, maybe it happened that way, maybe it didn’t. Since it’s a FADO complaint and there’s no serious injury we refer it to the CCRB, but when we pull the cop’s package we see that he’s had several excessive-force complaints. None was substantiated, but still, it’s worth taking a look. So we open our own concurrent investigation, and we bring in our undercovers.
There’s one, a young female officer who does a perfect crackhead, all skinny and jumpy and wild-eyed; she calls herself Millie the Crack Ho. We pair her up with another undercover, Marvin the long-haired, unwashed street drunk, and we put them on the cop’s beat, surrounded by undercover ghosts and hidden surveillance cameras. When they see the cop coming, Millie and Marvin start to argue: You bitch! You asshole! You whore! So of course the cop comes over, and as so often happens in real life, Millie and Marvin suddenly aren’t mad at each other anymore. They’re mad at the cop.
Who the fuck asked you, you fuckin’ cop! Mind your own fucking business! Get the fuck outta here! And so on.
During all this, Millie and Marvin are careful to keep their arms at their sides, hands in view, to do nothing that could be taken for physical aggression, or invite an arrest. They’re just talking trash to a cop—and the question is, What does the cop do?
In one two-year period we ran dozens of these “force-related integrity tests” around the city, in various forms, and in almost every case the officer did what he was supposed to. He told them to break it up, move it along, and he ignored the curses and insults. In only four cases did the cops in question overreact, usually by sending the undercover participants an “asshole” or a “fuck you” back, in which case they got a little command counseling on the proper deportment of NYPD police officers. In only one case—the one with Millie and Marvin—did the officer physically overreact. As Marvin was walking away, still mouthing off, the cop took a run at him and pushed him from behind, almost knocking him to the ground, and threatened to kick his ass if he didn’t shut the fuck up, and so on. That earned him a command discipline and lost vacation days.
Of course, those are just a few examples. As you’ll see, we run other targeted integrity tests that are a lot more complicated, with informants, phone wiretaps, bugs, months-long surveillances, multiple targets. The targets aren’t just uniformed patrol guys taking a few hundred here or there, either. But these examples give you an idea of how we do it.
Now, at this point I know what some of you are thinking, especially if you happen to be a criminal defense attorney or a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association union delegate. You’re thinking: Hey, you can’t do that! You entrapped those cops! Those cops wouldn’t have, couldn’t have stolen the money if you hadn’t set up the whole thing and dangled it in front of their faces! It’s not fair!
But it is fair. Cops use tricks to catch criminals all the time. Is there a rash of muggings of visiting Asian businessmen on the subways? The NYPD will put Asian American cops on the subways posing as businessmen, and when one of them gets mugged, the “businessman” and his backups will collar the muggers. Are old ladies getting their purses snatched in a certain neighborhood? A cop will put on a wig and a frumpy old dress and hobble down the street with a walker, and the next thing the purse snatcher knows the “old lady” has him up against a wall and under arrest.
Same thing with the integrity tests. In all the integrity tests we do, we run the scenario by the local DA’s office beforehand to make sure we aren’t coercing or encouraging the cop in any way to steal the money or drugs or to use excessive force. We simply set up situations in which a cop can choose of his own free will whether to do the right thing or the wrong thing. Calling that entrapment is like saying that a bank entrapped a bank robber just by being a bank.
But IAB integrity tests weren’t limited only to cops that we already suspected of corruption or misconduct, though. We also did random integrity testing—and that was the most controversial anticorruption program we had.
In its simplest form, a random integrity test works like this: We send out our IAB undercovers posing as citizens, and they approach random cops on the street with a wallet or a purse containing cash and credit cards. Officer, officer, they’ll say, I found this wallet (or purse) on the sidewalk. What should I do? Meanwhile, we’ll have surveillance equipment filming the encounter.
And the question is, What does this cop do with the wallet?
Does he notify his patrol supervisor of “found property” and go thro
ugh the proper steps to voucher it? If he does, he passes the test—although we won’t ever tell him so, because we don’t want to expose our integrity testing methods. On the other hand, does the cop tell the Good Samaritan that’s he’s too busy to take the wallet, that the Good Samaritan should just drop it in a mailbox and let the US Postal Service figure it out? In that case it’s an administrative failure, a failure to follow proper procedures, and he’ll probably wind up with a command discipline and loss of some vacation days. If the cop asks his sergeant what to do and the sergeant tells him to drop it in a mailbox, that’s a supervisory failure, and the sergeant is going to take a hit.
But what if the cop takes the wallet, thanks the Good Samaritan, then ducks into an alley and takes the money? That’s a criminal failure, and he’s going to be arrested, suspended, and dismissed from the Department.
Again, that’s the simplest form of random integrity test, one that we used a few times early on; most of the random tests we did were more elaborate. (Actually the random tests weren’t completely random. Usually we would run them in precincts that had high rates of complaints against cops—missing property, excessive force, etc.—but we didn’t have any specific cops identified.)
Here’s one example of a random test. We get a city bus and stock it with IAB undercovers posing as passengers, another undercover as the driver (he has a commercial license), and still another undercover as a loud, unruly drunk with cash spilling out of his pockets. With our undercover cars trailing the bus, the driver starts down Broadway and puts “Call Police” on his destination sign, the signal that there’s trouble on board. Naturally every cop the bus passes sees the sign and pulls it over and takes the obnoxious drunk off the bus. The question is, Will the cops take any of the money that’s spilling out of the drunk guy’s pockets?
Here’s another. We rent a room in a sleazy hot-sheet motel and put in a male and a female IAB undercover posing as lovers having a loud argument—not violent, just loud, so the guy at the motel’s front desk calls 911. When the cops show up, the female undercover is wailing—That bum! He lied to me! He didn’t tell me he was married!—and she runs into the bathroom. The male undercover just wants to leave—That broad’s nuts! I just wanna get outta here!—and since there’s been no violence the cops let him go. The question is, With the guy gone, and the woman crying in the bathroom, do the cops take any of the money or jewelry that’s lying on the dresser?
Some of the random integrity tests were a lot more complicated and lengthy. And sometimes they brought unintended results . . . like the Shop Right Collision auto repair shop scenario.
We’re getting complaints from some tow-truck drivers that cops aren’t following the proper rotation for calling tow trucks to accident scenes or breakdowns. Towing is a cutthroat business in New York, not so much for the towing fees but for the repair charges an auto shop can squeeze out of a customer if its tow driver gets the tow. In the old days, pre-Knapp, it was routine for drivers to pay cops ten or fifteen bucks to give them the tow—not much money, but still corruption. The practice had pretty much disappeared since then, but we’re wondering if maybe it’s coming back.
So working with the Brooklyn DA’s office, we open Shop Right Collision auto repair on a grimy stretch of Georgia Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn. We staff it with IAB undercovers who have tow-truck operator licenses and experience in the auto repair business. Posing as tow drivers, our guys respond to about a hundred tow calls, and when they arrive at the accident or breakdown, they don’t try to bribe the cop—we don’t want our undercovers arrested for attempted bribery—but with a wink and a nod they suggest that they’d be really, really grateful if the cop gives them the tow. And in every single case, the cop does the right thing; he tells our undercover tow-truck drivers to buzz off and gives the tow to the next driver in the rotation.
But the hoods connected to the Gambino crime family aren’t quite so ethically minded. We also put it out that in addition to towing and auto repair, Shop Right Collision is open for business in other fields—stolen cars, insurance fraud, loan sharking, bootleg cigarettes, anything to make a buck. Pretty soon some hoods from the Canarsie Crew of the Gambino family come calling, and after a seventeen-month investigation we bust thirteen members of the Gambino Mob on a host of fraud and racketeering charges. True, when we balance the books we find that Shop Right Collision lost $75,000 in business expenses—but hey, we’re cops, not businessmen.
There were endless variations of random integrity tests, but the bottom line is that in each scenario we gave the cops—and the Gambino Mob guys as well—the opportunity to do the right thing or the wrong thing. And guess what? In almost every case, the cops did the right thing.
Take the year 2012, for example. That year we conducted five hundred thirty random and targeted integrity tests. Of those we had thirty-four “administrative” failures, meaning the cops failed to follow proper procedures, and two supervisory failures, meaning a sergeant or a lieutenant or other supervisor failed to follow proper procedures. But out of those five hundred thirty integrity tests, how many were criminal failures? How many times did the cop steal the money or the drugs?
The answer is, six cops stole the money or the drugs or committed another criminal act. That’s right, six. Out of more than five hundred. That’s about one percent.
There’s good news and bad news in that. The good news is that in 2012 only six NYPD cops that we tested acted like criminals. The bad news is that six NYPD cops acted like criminals.
I know, there are people out there reading this, especially news reporters and cops who were never in IAB, who are saying: Those numbers are bullshit, the cops you did your little integrity tests on saw you coming, they made you, they knew you were IAB, you IAB guys are bumblers.
Well, I’m not saying our surveillance or undercover guys never got made. In a few cases—very few—a cop might mockingly say to our undercover: Oh yes, sir, thank you for returning this lost wallet, and how long have you been with IAB? Or maybe the cop would take on a stricken look, like he knew he was being watched, which he was. In cases like that we’d have to reassess our scenario, or maybe send the undercover back to our in-house Actors Studio for some more Stanislavski.
But consider this: In the late 1990s a Columbia University professor did a scientific survey of hundreds of NYPD cops. And one of the questions he asked every cop was: “Have you personally been the target of an Internal Affairs integrity test in the past year?” Based on how many cops answered yes to that question, the professor estimated that IAB conducted about six thousand integrity tests every year.
When the professor told me that, I couldn’t have been happier. Remember, we actually only did about five or six hundred integrity tests a year. But the professor’s findings meant that six thousand cops out there thought they’d been tested, they thought they had made us while we were running a test on them. Not only does that indicate that the tests have a deterrent effect—IAB is everywhere!—but it also means that in most cases, the drunk on the bus or the Good Samaritan with the wallet really was a drunk on a bus or a Good Samaritan with a wallet. The cops just thought they were IAB.
Now, I realize that some people think that randomly testing cops for honesty is, well, a little creepy, that it’s a violation of their rights. Cops—and the PBA—especially hate it. It’s insulting, they say, and why is it just cops who are being tested this way? Why don’t you randomly dangle cash or drugs in front of lawyers and judges and politicians and see what they do? Ironically, even civil liberties types and journalists, who are the first to complain about police corruption and misconduct, often think the integrity testing is Big Brother–ish.
I can understand that. But what are we supposed to do? Corruption undetected breeds more corruption—That cop is getting away with it, so I can, too—and we’re not going to passively sit back and wait for it to become endemic in the Department, like it was before the Knapp Commission. As for randomly testing politicians
for honesty, I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to that, although it’s not my call.
Besides, although the NYPD was the first big-city police department to institute a random integrity testing policy back in 1993—other departments have since followed suit—it’s not like we invented the practice. Blame that one on the press.
In 1974, ABC investigative reporter Brian Ross, then a local reporter in Miami, set up a police integrity test of Miami cops. Role players turned over thirty-one wallets containing cash to cops while Ross’s team filmed them. Nine of the thirty-one Miami cops were subsequently fired and/or criminally charged for stealing the money. Almost thirty years later Ross did the same thing in New York, turning over twenty cash-filled wallets to twenty randomly selected NYPD cops—and every single cop followed proper procedures and turned the wallet in with all the cash intact.
Like I said, the Officer-I-found-this-wallet routine had become pretty much old hat by that time. But I think it illustrates something about integrity testing. Random integrity testing isn’t designed just to catch a few crooked cops. It’s also a way to prove, to the public and to ourselves, that 99 percent of our cops are honest, that when given the opportunity to do the right thing or the wrong thing, they’ll do the right thing.
But integrity tests and surveillance cameras and recording devices aren’t the only tools we use to fight police corruption and misconduct.
Another important tool we have in the arsenal is a little plastic cup.
* * *
The NYPD has a simple policy when it comes to drug use by its cops, the same policy as the US military. The policy is zero tolerance. If you’re caught using illegal drugs or steroids, you’re fired. Period, end of story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or if you’re two months away from your twenty years. You’re gone, and your pension is gone, too.
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