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By the early-morning hours on Monday, the Seven-Oh precinct is swarming with what cops call “suits”—IAB investigators—who are seizing arrest reports and other records from the desk. They’re also guarding the bathroom—a narrow, tile-walled room with a couple of sinks, a couple of urinals, and two toilet stalls—while waiting for the crime scene techs to arrive.
Meanwhile, the four cops—Volpe, Schwarz, Wiese, and Bruder—are trying to get their stories straight. A little after four a.m. Monday, Wiese and Schwarz, who are on patrol, come into the precinct for a meal break, see the suits, and hear that IAB is conducting an investigation into a sexual assault against a prisoner. Shortly thereafter they drive to a pay phone and call Volpe and Bruder at home, and a couple of days later the four cops meet in the basement at the precinct. Volpe initially says that it’s all BS, that if anything happened to Louima he inflicted it on himself; later his lawyer will suggest that Louima was injured while engaging in rough gay sex at the Club Rendez-Vous.
But it’s not going to fly. Not only do we have Abner Louima, a family man with no criminal record, as a witness. But pretty soon, the Blue Wall of Silence notwithstanding, we’re also going to have other witnesses in blue.
IAB Sergeant William Hargrove had been the first of our investigators to interview Louima on Sunday even though he was recovering from surgery and was still groggy. Louima gave us enough to launch the investigation, and for us to identify from the records the four cops who probably were involved, but he hadn’t been able to positively ID them yet.
By Tuesday Louima, although he’s still in the ICU, has recovered enough to talk to us at length. IAB Lieutenant Reinaldo “Ray” Daniels, one of our best Force Group investigators, who has already established a rapport with Louima, shows him four “photo arrays” of the suspected officers. Each photo array has six photographs, including the cop in question and five other cops who bear a resemblance to him but have nothing to do with the case.
(In any photo array or lineup, you can’t use people who don’t look at all like the suspect. For example, if a victim has described a suspect as a white guy, you can’t surround him with five black guys; even the dumbest, greenest defense lawyer in America could get an ID like that thrown out of court, which could also taint any evidence you discovered that was based on the victim ID. On the other hand, you don’t want to use photos that too closely match the suspect’s. As an obvious example, you wouldn’t put a photo of a suspect’s identical twin brother in a photo array. You have to find a balance.)
When Louima looks at Justin Volpe’s picture in the photo array, Lieutenant Daniels will later testify, his reaction is one of pure fear. His eyes get wide, and the vitals on his bedside monitoring machine—blood pressure, heart rate, respiration—suddenly spike.
Don’t be afraid, Ray tells him. Nothing is going to happen to you or your family.
He did it, Louima says, indicating Subject No. 4—Officer Justin Volpe. He’s the one who stuck the stick in my butt.
Louima can’t ID the second officer he says was in the bathroom, the one he says held him down in the stall while Volpe assaulted him. All he can say is that the second cop was the driver of the patrol car that took him to the precinct—which the patrol logs indicate was Schwarz. He can’t pick out Wiese or Bruder as two of the officers who he says beat him on the way to the precinct, but radio logs and desk reports have already told us they were there.
There are some inconsistencies in what Louima tells us. For one thing, he believes that the “stick” used to assault him was the handle of a toilet plunger; in fact, it will turn out to be the blunt end of a broken broom handle. He also claims that the second officer in the bathroom—“the driver,” later identified as Schwarz—held him down while Volpe assaulted him; later he will testify that he wasn’t certain what the second officer was doing.
But the biggest inconsistency in Louima’s story will come a few days later, when he testifies from his hospital bed for a grand jury—and later repeats at a press conference—that while he was being assaulted, Volpe had said to him “This is Giuliani time, not Dinkins time”—a reference to former mayor David Dinkins’s liberal policies versus Giuliani’s hard line against criminals and in favor of cops. Louima never mentioned that in his earlier tape-recorded interviews with IAB’s Ray Daniels, and later he will admit that he made it up. But while the lie isn’t crucial to the case, it makes it a lot harder for some cops to believe that the assault really happened.
But in IAB we need no convincing.
In 1999 former officer Justin Volpe pleaded guilty to sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken broom handle and was sentenced to thirty years in prison. I was determined to get at the truth of what occurred, and was proud of IAB’s work on the case. (Getty Images)
As expected, when the story breaks on Wednesday morning the public reaction is one of both horror and revulsion—not only in New York City but across the nation. Excessive force by cops is one thing—New Yorkers have heard that many times before—but this is sadistic, psychosexual torture of a handcuffed prisoner inside a police precinct. The Seven-Oh is immediately besieged by reporters and protesters, many of them carrying toilet plungers. Later the crowds outside the precinct will swell to four thousand people, with another fifteen thousand marching on City Hall.
Giuliani and Safir hold a press conference at City Hall to confirm the news reports—Giuliani calls what happened to Louima “shocking” and “reprehensible”—and I have to be there, too, standing in front of a roomful of reporters not only from New York but from around the world. The mayor and the commissioner handle all the questions, but for me it’s tough to have to stand there and tacitly admit that a member of the New York Police Department, the Department I had loved and served for so many years, could do something like this.
Rudy and the commissioner both later visit Louima in the hospital to express condolences. They’re followed by a steady stream of politicians and community activists—including Reverend Al Sharpton, who’s running for mayor in the Democratic primary—who denounce the attack in particular and the NYPD in general.
The vicious assault by some NYPD cops on Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a bathroom in Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct shocked not only the public but also the Internal Affairs Bureau, which assigned hundreds of investigators to the case. (Getty Images)
Also on Wednesday we order Volpe, who we’ve already relieved of his gun and shield, to report the IAB Brooklyn Borough offices, where we formally arrest him for aggravated sexual abuse and first-degree assault; he’s arraigned the next day and is released on $100,000 bond. A couple days later he and Schwarz are both indicted by a grand jury. On Thursday Safir suspends, reassigns, or transfers ten cops from the Seven-Oh, including the precinct CO, the XO, and the two sergeants on duty the night Louima was attacked.
Meanwhile, we’re continuing our IAB investigation. After the DA gets search warrants we search the lockers of every cop on the midnight tour and other areas of the precinct, looking for the stick used in the assault; we also search every Dumpster in the vicinity, and we even have the city Sanitation Department dredge the sewers, but we can’t find the stick. We also interview witnesses who saw the arrest at the Club Rendez-Vous—for help with that we draft into IAB two young, Haitian-born cops who speak Creole, both of whom turned out to be excellent investigators—as well as the EMTs who transported Louima and medical staff at the hospital who treated him. We also try to talk to other cops who were in the precinct that night, but the precinct PBA delegate has been appearing at roll calls, telling the cops to keep their mouths shut. For the first few days, at least, nobody in blue is talking. Except for Louima, we have no eyewitnesses to what happened in the precinct that night.
And then at 3:30 a.m. on Friday, IAB Captain Barry Fried, who had spent the previous twenty-four hours working nonstop on the Louima case, gets a call at home from a friend, another NYPD captain, who’s at the Seven-Oh. The captain tells Barry there’s a rookie
cop at the Seven-Oh who’s ready to talk—but he’s kind of shaky, and the precinct PBA delegate is trying to get him to shut up. Barry calls the IAB Command Center, and they call me, and we agree that Barry should go to the precinct immediately, and take a couple of IAB lieutenants with him, to grab this kid before anybody gets to him.
The rookie cop is Eric Turetzky, a shy, diffident kid who lives with his mother and grandparents in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. Turetzky is one of the cops who was at the club the night Louima was arrested, and although he didn’t see it happen, he was in the precinct when the assault took place. Disgusted by what happened to Louima, and troubled by the PBA’s attempts to cover it up—some PBA delegates are buying the story that Louima was injured during rough gay sex at the club—he decides, after talking it over with his family, to come forward.
At two o’clock Friday morning, while taking his meal break, Turetzky sees a police duty captain—Barry Fried’s friend—and a couple of “suits” in the CO’s office. The young cop thinks the suits are IAB—they’re not, they’re actually investigators from another unit who aren’t involved in the Louima case—so he goes in and starts telling them what he saw. While he’s talking to them a PBA delegate bursts into the room, demanding to know what Turetzky is telling them. The duty captain kicks the PBA guy out, but it’s pretty clear that the entire precinct knows what’s going on—and the kid is scared. So the captain calls Captain Fried at home, and when he and the two IAB lieutenants arrive they take Turetzky back to the IAB Brooklyn Borough offices at Nazareth High School—we rented office space there from the Catholic church—and turn on a tape recorder. And what the young cop tells them is this:
After Louima was booked, Turetzky saw Officer Schwarz lead him, rear-cuffed, with his pants down around his ankles, away from the holding cells and toward the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later he saw Volpe, his uniform disheveled and his shield number and nameplate covered up, taking Louima, his pants still down around his ankles, into a holding cell. In his right hand Volpe had a two-foot-long piece of a broken broom or mop handle, dark green or blue in color, that he was swinging like a sword, waving it in the air and hitting the wall with it. What Officer Turetzky tells us not only confirms Louima’s ID of Volpe; it puts the stick in Volpe’s hand. Although we still haven’t found the stick—we never will—we do find the bottom half of a broken broom handle that matches Turetzky’s description.
Turetzky is the first Seven-Oh cop to come forward, but not the last. With the word out that Turetzky is cooperating with IAB, other cops who were in the Seven-Oh that morning start to talk.
Officer Mark Schofield tells us that before the attack, Volpe had borrowed a pair of leather gloves; afterward, when he gave them back to Schofield, they were covered in blood and feces. Disgusted, Schofield threw them behind some lockers; we quickly recover them. Officer Kenneth Wernick tells us that shortly after the attack, Volpe bragged that he “broke a man down” by putting a stick in his rectum and had showed Wernick the broken broom handle. Although Officer Michael Schoer initially lies to us—I didn’t see nothin’—later he says that he, too, saw Volpe waving the feces-stained stick. In the end there are four cops ready to testify against Volpe—which, coupled with Louima’s testimony and forensic and medical evidence, will make a very strong case.
As horrible as the Louima case is, the NYPD—and specifically the IAB—can take pride in the way it handled the investigation of its own. (In fact, IAB later received an award for investigative excellence in the Louima case from the US attorney general.) Within a week, two cops—Volpe and Schwarz—are indicted for the assault in the bathroom, and in another week two more officers—Bruder and Wiese—are charged with assaulting Louima during the ride to the precinct. Numerous other Seven-Oh cops are facing Department discipline for failing to do their duty to help Louima or report what happened. We put together a solid case in record time.
In fact, there is only one significant mistake in our handling of the case—but it’s a bad one.
We had always said that we first became aware of the case at about four p.m. on Sunday, about thirty-six hours after the assault on Louima, when a Louima family member called the IAB Command Center. But throughout the case there were persistent reports that the first call to IAB about Louima had been made at about ten p.m. Saturday night—eighteen hours before the call on Sunday.
That didn’t seem possible, because I checked the records and couldn’t find any log of the call—and remember, all calls to the Command Center are logged. But then I listened to the actual tapes—and there it was.
What happened was that the Command Center was short a body on the phones that night, so they brought in a detective from another IAB unit who’d never been trained on Command Center intake protocols. And of course, he’s the one who caught the call from Coney Island Hospital on Saturday night.
The female caller was actually a Haitian-born nurse at the hospital, but for some reason she had said she was calling about her husband, who she said had been beaten and brutalized by police. She was nervous, anxious, and she kept pronouncing her “husband’s” name differently—Low-ma, Lee-ma, Loo-na. The IAB detective on the phone couldn’t make much sense of it. Finally she asked if she could call back, and the detective said exactly the wrong thing. Instead of keeping her on the phone and trying to get more information, he told her: Sure, call us back. And then he compounded the mistake by not logging the call and not telling the supervisor. Not until four o’clock the next afternoon, Sunday, did a member of Louima’s family call the IAB Command Center to alert us to Louima’s injuries—at which point we rolled out immediately.
It was a major screw-up in one of the worst and most shocking police brutality cases in American history—and my unit was responsible for it, which meant that I was responsible for it. It was only going to give ammunition to the anticop conspiracy theory that we tried to cover up the Louima assault, which we did not.
So as soon as I unscrewed myself from the ceiling, I called the commissioner and the Department immediately issued a statement admitting that IAB had “mishandled” the initial call, which probably was a little too generous. The press used the word “bungled,” which was closer to the truth. We established new protocols at the Command Center to make sure nothing like it happened again.
Did the eighteen-hour delay make any difference in the long run? I don’t think so. Louima was still too groggy and disoriented from his surgery on Saturday to ID any of the officers until Monday. And we developed information that Volpe had taken the broom handle out of the precinct soon after the attack occurred, so I doubt that our extensive search for the weapon used in the assault would have found it, even if we had started earlier. But I’ll never know for sure. And it remains one of my greatest professional regrets.
Still, as I said, we had built a solid case for prosecution in state court. And then someone decided to make a federal case out of it.
Whenever there’s a controversial police use-of-force case, and especially when there’s a racial element involved, the US Justice Department and the local US Attorney’s Office follow the case closely to see if there’s a potential civil rights case against the officers involved. Sometimes the feds will let the state case run its course before getting actively involved—the Rodney King case in LA is an example—but sometimes they’ll step in and take over.
Often there are practical legal reasons for that. Rules of evidence in federal court generally favor the prosecution more than in state court, and potential punishments are stiffer, increasing the odds that a defendant will make a plea deal or “flip” and testify against other defendants in the case. That certainly was true in the Louima case. In state court, Volpe and Schwarz were looking at a maximum of twelve and a half to twenty-five years; in federal court, they’d be looking at life in prison.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, a tough prosecutor and an outgoing politician of the old school, didn’t necessarily want to give up the Louima case to federal pr
osecutors, but I think that from the beginning he saw the writing on the wall. Two weeks after the assault on Louima, Hynes and US Attorney for the Southern District Zachary Carter agree that the case will go federal.
For IAB, the switch poses some problems. During our investigation we had granted limited immunity and interviewed almost a hundred Seven-Oh cops who hadn’t been directly involved in the assault but who might have seen or heard something, even secondhand. For legal reasons, some of the information that was given under a grant of immunity couldn’t be passed along to federal prosecutors and the FBI because they were concerned it might compromise the federal case. So although IAB continues to investigate the case along with the FBI, we have to bring in a new team of IAB investigators who hadn’t worked on the initial investigation.
It’s complicated in the way that real-life criminal cases, as opposed to TV criminal cases, often are. But in the end, there is justice—or at least partial justice—in the case of Abner Louima.
In February 1998 a federal grand jury indicts Volpe and Schwarz on civil rights charges in the bathroom attack on Louima; Wiese and Bruder are charged with beating Louima in the police car; and Sergeant Michael Bellomo, the patrol supervisor that night, is charged with covering it up. Later the grand jury adds conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges against Schwarz, Wiese, and Bruder.
When the trial finally begins in May 1999, Officers Turetzky (then a detective in IAB), Schofield, Wernick (then a sergeant), and Schoer all testify against Volpe. In the middle of the trial, with his defense falling apart, and confronted with the other cops’ damning testimony, Volpe suddenly decides to plead guilty. It isn’t a plea bargain; Volpe simply decides to throw himself on the mercy of the court.
When Assistant US Attorney Alan Vinegrad, the lead prosecutor in the case, calls to tell me about the planned guilty plea, I’m worried. The last thing I want is for there to be any doubt that Volpe had done exactly what he was accused of doing.
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