Throughout the Louima investigation, and right up to the trial, Volpe had maintained publicly that he was innocent, that whatever had happened to Louima, he didn’t do it; his lawyer and the PBA were still alleging that Louima was the victim of rough sex at the club. Some of the PBA delegates in the Seven-Oh, like the PBA rep who tried to intimidate Eric Turetzky when he came forward, were so aggressive in their defense of Volpe that it bordered on obstruction of justice.
So there was a feeling among many of the Department rank and file that Volpe and the other cops were being railroaded by IAB and the feds, that what happened in that bathroom hadn’t happened the way prosecutors said it did, that political pressure had been brought on the cops who testified against Volpe. Even some senior chiefs had stopped me in the hallways at One Police Plaza to ask me about the case—Hey, Charlie, did this thing really happen?—and though I couldn’t talk about the case, I could tell that they really couldn’t believe a cop would do such a thing.
So I don’t want Volpe to simply stand up in court and plead guilty to some vague assault charges. I want him to admit exactly what he did, and I strongly urged Alan Vinegrad to make sure that happened. Vinegrad didn’t have a lot of leverage—again, it was a straight guilty plea, not a plea bargain—but he promised to do what he could. And it must have worked.
The next day a shaken-looking Volpe stands up in court and formally pleads guilty, telling the judge that when he attacked Louima he was in “shock,” that he was “mad,” and that he wanted to “humiliate” Louima for disrespecting him. And then he says the words:
“While in the bathroom,” Volpe tells the judge, “while in the bathroom at the precinct . . . I sodomized Mr. Louima by placing a stick in his rectum. I then threatened to kill him if he told anybody.”
The judge later sentences him to thirty years in prison.
Meanwhile, the trial continues for the other four cops. In June 1999 the jury convicts Schwarz of civil rights charges—he is sentenced to up to fifteen years—but acquits the other three cops. The trial and appeals and retrials of the Louima case cops went on for several years, with Schwarz being released from prison in 2007. In 2001 the city and the PBA settled a civil lawsuit by Louima for $8.75 million.
The Abner Louima case was finished. But for the NYPD it would never be over.
It’s not fair—that F word again—to the vast majority of NYPD cops who end every shift with their honor intact. But that’s the legacy that Volpe and the other cops who were involved left the NYPD.
After Louima, people assume that NYPD cops are capable of anything.
Chapter 8
* * *
IF THEY’VE GOT THE BLONDE, WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM
It’s often said that a cop is only as good as his informants. The cop who has good informants will make a lot of arrests, he will shine in the eyes of his supervisors, and his career will flourish. Without good informants, a cop will barely have a clue as to what’s going on in his patrol sector or in his particular field of investigation—narcotics, organized crime, gangs, whatever—and as a result he will not make a lot of arrests, he will not shine, and instead of earning a gold shield, or moving up in the supervisory ranks, he could end his career living on Staten Island and pounding a beat in the Bronx.
Which is kind of ironic. After all, most—not all, but most—police informants are criminals: cokeheads, meth-heads, potheads, junkies, low-level drug dealers, prostitutes, petty thieves, gang members, Mob wannabes—in short, people who swim in the shallow end of the crime pool. But cops often need the cooperation and assistance of those criminals not only to fight crime, but to advance their careers.
Of course, that cooperation and assistance comes with a price. As I said earlier, most police informants are people who’ve been arrested and are trying to work their way out from under the charge. And it’s usually a onetime thing: They give up information on a more serious criminal and in return they get a break on their current crime.
But sometimes informants will agree to work for the cops on a more permanent basis. In that case, if the cops follow proper procedures, the informant will be photographed, given a code name, and be vetted for past criminal history; you don’t want a convicted rapist or other serious criminal as an informant. After that, they’ll be officially registered with the Department as a “confidential informant,” or CI. In return they’ll be paid with Department funds for providing information or other assistance—maybe thirty or forty bucks for making a “controlled buy” from a crack dealer on a street corner, which allows narcotics cops to swoop in and bag the dealer, maybe a hundred for giving up an illegal gun that some perp has stashed in an empty apartment in a public housing development. It’s all negotiable, and all payments to CIs are carefully recorded. And while a cop can’t officially give his CI a get-out-of-jail-free card, it’s usually understood that if the CI gets jammed up on some minor beef—emphasis on “minor”—the cop will at least try to help.
Cops handle their CIs in different ways. Sometimes a cop may play the role of a benign, understanding uncle who listens patiently to the CI’s problems, of which almost every CI seems to have an almost inexhaustible supply. Sometimes a cop will be the stern and demanding authority figure who pounds his fist on the desk and tells the CI that he’s a lying scumbag who’s taking him, the cop, for a chump and that he better start producing cases or there’s gonna be trouble. Sometimes a cop will be the buddy who likes to talk to the CI about Rangers and Knicks games before they go out and work a drug set on a corner. Cops will do whatever works best to keep the CI productive.
But it’s always an act—or at least it should be. No smart cop will ever tell a CI about his wife and kids, or about his new house on Long Island, or about what a jerk his CO is, or anything else the CI doesn’t need to know. A smart cop will always remember that a CI is just that—a professional informer, and a criminal to boot, and if given a better opportunity, he or she will turn on the cop in a heartbeat.
The bottom line is that no wise cop will ever trust or get personally close with his CIs. And it almost goes without saying that a cop shouldn’t have sex with one of them.
You’ll notice that I said it “almost” goes without saying.
Which brings us to the case of The Blond CI and Brooklyn South Narcotics.
* * *
It starts with a cop who forgot to turn off his tape recorder.
It’s September 2007 and two cops assigned to the Brooklyn South Narcotics Unit, a group of about two hundred fifty plainclothes cops and detectives who handle drug investigations in the patrol borough’s thirteen precincts, are riding in an unmarked NYPD car. One of them, a detective, starts talking about a bust he’d made the night before, when he and another Brooklyn South narcotics cop had arrested a drug dealer at his Coney Island home with twenty-eight small plastic bags of cocaine. But after the arrest, the detective says, they had only vouchered seventeen of the bags. They held back the other eleven bags of cocaine, the detective says, to give to their CIs as payment for information.
There’s only one problem with this conversation—a problem for the detective, anyway. He’s forgotten that the recording device he’s been wearing during another drug arrest is still running, capturing every word he’s saying about paying his informants with confiscated cocaine. After the detective turns in the tape as part of the evidence in the drug arrest, a supervisor listens to it—and he can hardly believe what he’s hearing. He does the right thing and calls us, IAB, and the investigation is on.
Now, narcotics cops paying off informants with confiscated narcotics has been around as long as there have been cops and narcotics. You may remember that scene in the film Prince of the City, where Treat Williams, playing a corrupt NYPD Special Investigation Unit (SIU) narcotics detective based on Robert Leuci, chases down a small-time heroin dealer/user in the rain, robs him of his heroin stash, and gives it to one of his informants. Back then, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, it was a common practice in NYPD narcot
ics units.
And in the old days, some cops even privately defended it, arguing that with the limited funds the Department had for paying informants, paying off their CIs with drugs allowed them to make more cases at less cost to the taxpayers. Besides, they argued, even if they did use Department funds to pay their CIs, the CIs were all addicts who would just use the money to buy more drugs anyway. So why not eliminate the middleman and just give them the drugs? Some cops even described it as a form of “noble corruption”—that is, breaking the rules to accomplish the greater good of more drug arrests.
But there are several problems with that argument. Here’s the biggest one:
Giving illegal drugs to informants or anyone else is against the law, and it always has been. When a cop gives somebody narcotics, he’s breaking the same drug distribution laws that he’s putting other people in jail for violating. The NYPD is in the illegal drug control business, not the illegal drug distribution business—and every cop knows it. There’s nothing noble about it.
Here’s another problem: Once a cop steps over the line of illegality, it makes it easier to take another step, and then another—especially in narcotics enforcement, where at the higher levels a cop may have to deal with money or drugs measuring in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Call it the slippery slope, or call it the in-for-a-dime-in-for-a-dollar theory, but a cop who steals dope from a doper to give to another doper, for whatever reason, is just a degree or two of separation away from banging a major dealer’s door and stealing a hundred grand in cash. I mentioned Bob Leuci and the SIU, and how they routinely gave drugs to informants? Well, of seventy detectives in SIU, two-thirds of them were indicted for ripping off drug dealers or other acts of corruption.
And there’s another big problem with cops paying CIs with drugs: The minute a cop does it, that CI owns him. That hyped-up, methed-out, doped-up junkie CI now has information that can put the cop in jail. And as far as I’m concerned, a cop who’s stupid enough to put his career and his future and his family’s future in the hands of someone like that is too stupid to be a cop.
So anyway, after listening to the detective’s inadvertent tape recording, we notify the Brooklyn DA’s office and open an IAB investigation into the Brooklyn South narcotics detective and the other cop. But we don’t immediately arrest them or put them on modified duty. The tape recording in itself isn’t enough for a criminal case—and as always, we want to see how far this thing goes. Because of the long history of narcotics-related police corruption, there are strict Department procedures concerning the disposition of confiscated drugs, including a requirement that a supervisor, usually a sergeant, makes sure that all the drugs confiscated during an arrest are vouchered. If no one’s doing that at Brooklyn South Narcotics, then there’s not only a command and supervision problem, but there’s a good chance that other cops in the unit are doing the same thing. Eventually our investigation targets every cop in the two ten-person narcotics “modules” or teams that work the Coney Island–Red Hook–Bay Ridge section of southern Brooklyn.
Based on arrest records, which show how much narcotics were vouchered in each arrest, we start quietly tracking down as many perps as we can who’ve been recently arrested by the Brooklyn South narcotics cops. Of course, we don’t tell them we’re IAB; we don’t want that on the street, because it will get back to the narcotics cops we’re investigating. Instead, we use the same gambit that I mentioned earlier. We tell them we’re with the NYPD’s Quality Assurance Division and we’re conducting a widespread and completely anonymous survey of people who’ve recently had interactions with the police, and we just have a few questions: Were the officers who arrested you polite? Did they use any offensive language? Did they behave in an overall professional manner? Oh, and by the way, did any of the officers happen to take anything from you during the arrest—say, for example, money or drugs that weren’t mentioned in your arrest report?
As you can imagine, it’s a ticklish question. Ordinarily it would not be in a drug dealer’s best interests to admit that, yeah, he actually had more drugs on him than what he was charged with. But we assure them—Scout’s honor!—that nothing they tell us is going to bring a heavier charge on them. And some of these mopes are smart enough to know that if the cops who arrested them are caught breaking the law by stealing drugs or holding back drugs for their own purposes, the criminal case against them goes out the window. No jury is going to believe the testimony of an arresting officer who’s been caught stealing drugs; the DA wouldn’t even take a case like that to trial—and as we’ll see, that’s going to become a major issue in the case against Brooklyn South Narcotics.
So some of the perps we track down are willing to talk to us about the narcotics cops who arrested them, and how some of their money or drugs went missing—including the Coney Island drug dealer whose arrest sparked the investigation. But their allegations alone aren’t enough to make a prosecutable criminal case—remember, these are drug dealers we’re talking about—and none of them is too interested in working for us in any kind of sting operation to catch the cops in the act.
And then we find The Blonde. That’s what the cops who know her call her—The Blonde.
I guess every crackhead’s story is sad in its own way, but The Blonde’s seems even sadder than most. She came from a good home, a decent family, had a husband and some kids, and she looks like she was once an attractive woman. But now she’s in her late thirties, totally cracked-up, emaciated-looking, trading herself for money or drugs. Yeah, she tells us, she got arrested for possession a while back by two cops from Brooklyn South Narcotics—and she’s seriously pissed off about it.
She’s not so mad about the arrest itself. For a crack addict, getting arrested is part of the job description. No, The Blonde is mad because one of the plainclothes cops who arrested her, Officer Jerry Bowens, age forty-one, twelve years on the job, is being a jerk. After he arrests her he tells her that he wants her to work for him as an informant—not an official CI who’s registered with the Department, but as an off-the-books informant. In return, Bowens tells her, he’ll give her some of the coke he takes off the crack slingers she helps him to arrest.
The Blonde says okay, and later she fingers a crack dealer for Bowens and other cops from the narcotics module. After the dealer is arrested, Bowens meets with The Blonde in his car and gives her a couple of twenties and some coke that he took off the drug dealer.
But Bowens isn’t quite finished. He starts talking to her, telling her how nice-looking she is, or whatever, and she’s thinking: Well, I know where this is going . . . And that’s exactly where it goes. She has sex with Bowens in the car.
Now, I’m no Dr. Ruth, but a few words here about cops and sex.
Is it a bad idea for a cop to have sex with a crackhead or a hooker or any other kind of criminal, petty or otherwise? The answer is, no, it’s not a bad idea, it’s a terrible idea. At minimum it’s conduct unbecoming and criminal association—which can cost a cop his job—and if the cop is coercive about it, if he says: Give me sex or I’ll put you in jail . . . then it’s rape, and it can cost a cop his freedom. Like I said, when you get personally involved with a criminal, you’re putting your career and even your life in that criminal’s hands. And yet it happens all the time.
Case in point: IAB gets notified that a rookie cop in Brooklyn has lost his shield; he says it fell out of his pocket while he was off-duty on the subway. Okay, losing a shield isn’t good, but it’s not a capital offense. But then a street hooker gets arrested, and when they’re processing her at the precinct, what do they find in her purse? The cop’s shield. To get out from under the prostitution charge, she gives up the cop, saying that while she was servicing him, and his attentions were elsewhere, she lifted the shield out of his pants pocket. But has the cop learned his lesson from having his shield stolen by a hooker? No. A day or two later we put a tail on him and he goes to Coney Island and picks up another hooker. He’s fired for criminal association and lying ab
out the lost shield.
Another case in point: We’ve got a veteran detective in the Bronx who arrests a young woman on a credit card fraud case. He takes her to the precinct, where she signs a confession, but then the detective tells her that he will make the charge go away if she will “take care of” him. She doesn’t want to do it, but she’s afraid the arrest will cost her her job at a hospital, so she agrees to meet him later in her car, where she performs oral sex on him and then uses a Kleenex to clean up. Next day she’s understandably feeling used and angry about this, so she calls us, IAB—and fortunately she’s still got the Kleenex with the detective’s DNA on it in her car. We put a tail on the detective, who’s a smoker, and when he tosses a butt we snatch it up, send it to the lab, and yeah, the DNA on the cigarette butt matches the DNA on the Kleenex. (That’s all perfectly legal. We don’t need a warrant to grab somebody’s DNA off something they’ve discarded, like a cigarette butt or a soft drink straw.)
Of course, when we pick him up, the detective claims the sex was consensual, and since it’s a he-said/she-said thing, the DA won’t file criminal charges. But for us it’s simpler: A cop can’t have sex with someone he has arrested, period; there’s too much opportunity for coercion. And he’s certainly not allowed to dump a case in return for sex. Eventually the detective is forced to resign from the Department after nineteen years and eleven months on the job—thirty days short of his twenty years. Talk about the Million-Dollar Mistake.
I could go on and on. During my IAB career I saw hundreds of cases where cops got jammed up over sex—sex with hookers, sex with drug users, sex with other cops who were not their husbands or wives, or with other cops who ranked far below them in the chain of command. Next to alcohol and greed, inappropriate sex is probably the number one killer of cop careers.
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