Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  So anyway, to get back to The Blond CI, she does a couple more deals with Bowens and his supervisor on the module, a sergeant, pointing out crack dealers and getting paid with money and cocaine taken from the dealers. Which is fine with her, but the problem is that Bowens also wants more sex from her—and after the second or third time, frankly she’s tired of this guy. This cop is always calling her up, stopping her on the street, demanding sex—the guy is insatiable. It’s like he’s stalking her or something.

  So when we get to The Blonde in our debriefings of recent drug arrestees, she’s ready to flip. Sure, she says, she’ll work for us against Bowens and the other narcotics cops. So we sign her up as an official Department CI—which is kind of strange when you think about it. Here IAB has an official CI who’s also working as an unofficial CI for a cop who IAB is investigating. She’s like a double agent.

  Of course, unlike Bowens, we’re not paying The Blonde with drugs or money that has been ripped off from a drug dealer. We’re paying The Blonde with Department money from the “confidential funds” cash that’s kept in a safe at IAB headquarters; eventually, over the course of the investigation, it will come to about fifteen hundred bucks, a hundred here, a couple hundred there. Also unlike Bowens—and this time it really does go without saying—no one in IAB is having sex with The Blonde.

  So with The Blonde working for us, we set up a sting.

  The Blonde sets up a meet with Bowens and tells him there’s this dealer she knows, she’s bought from him lots of times, and she’ll point him out, so Bowens and his supervisor, a plainclothes sergeant, pick her up in an unmarked car. The Blonde is wearing a recording device hidden in a wristwatch we’ve given her from our IAB tech unit, and she’s searched by a female IAB investigator to ensure she isn’t carrying drugs when she gets into the car. She spots the crack dealer on a corner in Coney Island and points him out. Bowens and the sergeant dream up some probable cause and then they move in with other members of the team and arrest the dealer.

  Except the dealer The Blonde fingered for them isn’t really a dealer. He’s one of our IAB undercover cops who can take an arrest—meaning that if he’s arrested and processed into the system his ID won’t come back as a cop. He’s got $250 in marked IAB bills on him, and forty small plastic bags of cocaine; he’s also got a couple of IAB ghosts backing him up, and a surveillance team is videotaping it. After the arrest, the sergeant tells Bowens to give The Blonde forty bucks and two of the bags of cocaine that they took off our undercover dealer—which she later turns over to us. The sergeant vouchers the remaining $210 and thirty-eight bags of cocaine.

  (Ordinarily, in a sting operation involving drugs, we use “beat” drugs—that is, phony drugs like pancake flour for heroin or powdered lactose for cocaine. But experienced narcotics cops will know the difference, and they may chemically field test the drugs, so in those cases we have to use the real thing.)

  So now we’ve got Bowens and the sergeant on tape stealing money and drugs and giving some of them to an informant—and the fact that they were stolen from an undercover cop doesn’t make any difference, legally. If they’d been stolen from a real drug dealer, that wouldn’t make any legal difference, either. It’s distribution of a controlled substance and larceny.

  Still, as I explained earlier, ordinarily we wouldn’t make an immediate arrest. We would leave these guys out there to see how far this goes.

  But in this case, we can’t—for two reasons.

  One is that while we’re investigating these cops, they’re still arresting drug dealers—and every one of those drug cases is going to be dismissed by the District Attorney’s Office, because the DA can’t ethically proceed with a criminal case in which the arresting cop’s actions are themselves criminal. They’ll also have to go back and look at every past case in which the suspect cops were involved and possibly have to dismiss them as well. We’re talking hundreds of cases here.

  And the other, even more important reason we have to wrap up this investigation is that these cops aren’t just using confiscated drugs to pay informants. We have reason to believe that at least some of the cops are using confiscated drugs to “flake” people—that is, they’re planting the drugs on people to frame them for crimes they didn’t commit.

  During our debriefings of perps who’ve been arrested by the suspect cops, a lot of them are telling us: I swear to God, man, I didn’t have no drugs on me when they arrested me, those cops flaked me! In another variation, perps tell us that an undercover narcotics cop intentionally dropped some marked drug buy bills on the ground and then busted them when they picked up the marked money, claiming they had sold the cop some drugs.

  Of course, you have to remember that most of these guys are chronic criminals with long arrest records, and in that world, the allegation that they were flaked by the cops is a pretty common lie. It’s right up there with the check is in the mail. But when we start hearing the same cops’ names over and over, we have to wonder. It’s not enough to criminally charge the cops involved—an accused cop’s defense attorney would have a field day with witnesses like these guys—but it’s enough for us to put these cops under scrutiny.

  And in one case, the flaking allegation isn’t from a career criminal. A man and his girlfriend, neither of whom had been arrested before, claim that earlier in 2007 a cop from Brooklyn South Narcotics had approached them in front of their home on Neptune Avenue in Coney Island, searched their car, and planted a small bag of crack in it, after which they were arrested. They spent about twelve hours in jail while being processed, and their case is still pending.

  Of course, legally and ethically it doesn’t matter if the flakee is a known drug dealer or an innocent young couple in Coney Island. Cops planting evidence on suspects, any suspects, is unforgivable. It’s one of the worst things a cop can do, and we can’t let innocent people, or even not-so-innocent people, wind up in jail because of it. We’ve got to put these cops on ice.

  So three months after the Brooklyn South Narcotics investigation began, we arrest the detective who, without realizing he was being recorded, had bragged about holding back drugs, and we also arrest the other narcotics cop who helped him bust the drug dealer in Coney Island. And once they’re publicly arraigned in court, the word is out in Brooklyn South Narcotics: IAB is in the house. From that moment the heat is on, and no one in Brooklyn South Narcotics is using confiscated drugs to pay informants or flake people.

  At the same time, we hit Bowens, at home, telling him what we have on him, and giving him the usual speech: You can’t be a cop anymore, and you’re going to be arrested, but maybe you can help yourself with the DA if you cooperate . . .

  He quickly folds, and he agrees to make a taped call to his sergeant. Bowens calls him up and says something like, Hey, I’m worried about this IAB thing. I can’t find The Blonde, but I think maybe she’s been talking to IAB . . .

  And what the sergeant says in response is exactly this:

  If they’ve got The Blonde, he says, we’ve got a problem.

  Well, we do have The Blonde—she’s now safely stashed away out of the neighborhood—and yes, these two cops do have a problem. Shortly thereafter we arrest them both for official misconduct and stealing money and drugs from our IAB undercover. Later we also arrest another Brooklyn South narcotics cop for flaking the couple in Coney Island. At the same time, we put more than a dozen narcotics cops in the unit on modified duty pending Department discipline, and Commissioner Kelly transfers the three top commanders of Brooklyn South Narcotics and the deputy chief in charge of the entire Narcotics Division for their failure to supervise the unit.

  Eventually four of the five indicted cops either plead out or are found guilty, and because there is no evidence that they kept any of the confiscated drugs or money for themselves, their court-imposed punishments are light—probation and community service. Even the cop who flaked that innocent couple in Coney Island escapes jail after he cries and begs for forgiveness. But in a tragic twis
t, Bowens, who like the other accused cops is out on bail while awaiting sentencing, somehow gets his hands on an illegal gun and, in a jealous rage, shoots and kills an ex-girlfriend in her apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn; he’s later sentenced to forty years to life in prison.

  Meanwhile, although I hate to look at it this way, the IAB investigation of Brooklyn South Narcotics makes a lot of drug dealers and drug users happy. The Brooklyn DA’s office has to dismiss almost two hundred past or pending drug cases that involved any of the cops implicated in the scandal; you can’t prosecute a case when one of your primary witnesses is a crooked cop. In some cases, the city pays people who were wrongfully arrested a thousand dollars for every hour they spent in jail.

  Are we happy that drug dealers are back on the street? Of course not. Is Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, who’s been in on the investigation from the beginning, happy about having to toss so many cases? Again, of course not. And we could have avoided it. We could have just popped the detective who made the inadvertent tape recording and let it go at that instead of conducting a widespread investigation. But that’s not how the new IAB works. Which is why it always astonishes me when critics accuse the NYPD and the IAB of covering up corruption to avoid making the Department look bad. They simply don’t know what they’re talking about.

  As for The Blonde, we encouraged her to seek treatment for her drug problem, but apparently she didn’t listen. More than a year later, when she testifies in a Brooklyn courtroom against one of the cops, a newspaper reporter describes her, not very charitably, as “a gum-chewing motor-mouth Brooklyn drug addict” who talks so fast that the court reporter can’t keep up with her.

  After that, I don’t know. I hope she got out of the crack life before it killed her. But when it comes to drug addicts, after more than forty years as a cop it’s hard for me to be optimistic.

  So did the IAB investigation of Brooklyn South Narcotics do any real good? Did it permanently eliminate the practice of paying informants with narcotics, or rogue cops flaking people? The answers are yes and no.

  As I said earlier, with the heat on not only in Brooklyn South but throughout the Narcotics Division, and with supervisors looking over everyone’s shoulder to make sure confiscated drugs were handled properly, the practice of paying informants with drugs virtually disappeared, at least for a while. And in our periodic follow-ups we didn’t find any credible evidence that Brooklyn South narcotics cops were flaking known drug dealers, or anybody else.

  But cops are people, and people tend to forget. As time goes by, supervision loosens up, cops get lazy and cynical, and think they can cut corners. So no, I can’t say there aren’t some cops out there who are breaking the law in order to arrest other people for breaking the law.

  But while it’s not my business to give advice to crooked cops—except to advise them to find another line of work—I do know there are some things that cops like that should never do.

  They should never forget to turn off the tape recorder.

  And they should never trust an informant.

  * * *

  Che Che wants to make a deal.

  It’s early 2001 and Che Che—it’s pronounced “Chee-Chee”—a low-level drug dealer and drug money courier from the Bronx, is sitting in a cell at the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, New York, looking at a ten-year jolt on a state drug conviction. And even though Mohawk is a medium-security prison, and thus at least marginally less dangerous and brutal than a max-security hellhole like Attica or Dannemora, Mohawk is unpleasant enough that Che Che has no desire to spend the next decade there.

  So Che Che calls his lawyer and says he’s got some information about a crime that he wants to sell; in effect, he wants to trade someone else’s freedom for his own. Okay, fine, the lawyer says, what have you got to offer?

  Of course, Che Che can’t just offer up some low-level mutt he did a drug deal with back in the day; nobody’s going to make a deal with one low-level drug dealer just to put another low-level drug dealer in prison. It’ll have to be something better than that.

  Which it is. According to Che Che, he can give up a couple of dirty NYPD cops, one of them a detective, one of them a high-ranking officer within the Department, who helped him rip off a Dominican drug dealer he was working for five years ago.

  Now that’s something a lawyer can work with. The lawyer calls the FBI, and since it’s NYPD cops who are involved, the FBI calls us—IAB. (Because the case comes to us through the FBI, it’s technically a federal case, even though we handle most of the investigation. More on that subject later.)

  So we send a couple of IAB investigators up to Rome, one of them a Spanish-speaker—although he’s lived in New York for more than a decade, Che Che’s English isn’t that great—to sit down with Che Che and see what he has, and what he wants in return for giving it to us. There’s some back and forth between his lawyer and the US attorney, but eventually there’s a deal: Che Che will give us what he’s got in return for no additional prison time and a recommendation for early release on his current sentence. And what Che Che’s got is this:

  It’s the summer of 1996, Che Che says, and he’s working for this Dominican drug dealer in Washington Heights. He’s supposed to drop off $60,000 in buy money to a supplier, but when he gets out of a gypsy cab at the busy corner of Grand Concourse and East Tremont Avenue in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx, two plainclothes cops in an unmarked car come screeching to a halt next to him. They jump out of the car and one of them shouts: Freeze, Che Che!—and then, while numerous passersby look on, they arrest him, handcuff him, put him in the car, and drive off. But it’s a bogus arrest, a rip-off, and Che Che is in on it. The two cops drive Che Che to a nearby park, take the cuffs off, hand him a wad of money, and let him go, keeping their share of the cash. Che Che later tells the drug dealer he’s working for that some crooked cops grabbed him and ripped him off.

  As you can imagine, this is a pretty high-risk strategy—for Che Che. Maybe his bosses will believe him, especially if they had their own tail on him, as drug traffickers sometimes do with their money couriers, who can independently verify the “arrest.” It wouldn’t be the first time one of their couriers had been ripped off by corrupt cops. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be the first time a dealer or a courier had staged a phony rip in collusion with corrupt cops, either. And if the courier’s bosses come to that conclusion, things will not go well for Che Che. But apparently he is believed, because nobody murders him.

  Anyway, that’s what Che Che is telling us. He’s also telling us that one of the cops is an old friend of his, a guy named Robert, a detective who at the time was with the elite Bronx Homicide Narcotics Task Force, which worked drug-related homicides; Che Che had worked for Robert as an unofficial, off-the-books informant, and they had gotten tight—another case of a cop getting too close to his snitch. Che Che says he doesn’t know who the other cop was, just some cop friend of Robert’s, but later he heard from Robert that the other cop had become a high-ranking guy in the NYPD, like a captain or something, but he doesn’t have a name. Che Che says that he and Robert did one other similar drug money rip in 1999, a few years after the first one, and got $30,000.

  So that’s what Che Che tells us. The question is, Is it true?

  Che Che manages to pick Robert out of a photo array, which indicates that yeah, at least he actually knows the guy. Robert had grown up in Washington Heights, where four of his uncles had been involved with Dominican drug gangs—a family connection that in the old days would have been a disqualifying factor for appointment to the NYPD, because having a father in prison or an uncle in the Mob or any other similar connection was considered a corruption hazard. But by the time Robert came on the job in 1990, the Department had decided that the sins of the fathers should not be visited on the sons, and that, plus the fact that the Department was having a hard time finding enough fresh bodies to fill the ranks, allowed him to get through.

  Other than that, he’s been unde
r our radar. He worked for a while in the 50th Precinct, a low-incident house in the far northern Bronx, then the Narcotics Homicide Task Force; currently he’s working as an undercover with the FBI/NYPD Joint Narcotics Task Force, where, we’re told, he’s highly regarded. And we’ve got nothing on him but the word of a convict.

  So we take a run at him. We hit him at home, and the minute our guys flash their shields and say IAB, Robert starts to fold. It’s basically like, Oh my God, you got me! Without telling him that his old friend Che Che gave him up, we let him know that we know everything, even though we don’t, and he says yes, he’ll cooperate. So we take him to the US Attorney’s Office, across the plaza from NYPD headquarters, provide him with a lawyer, and work out a deal: He can’t be a cop anymore, but if he tells us everything, and if he’s willing to testify against any other co-conspirators, he won’t go to prison.

  So Robert walks us through the 1996 rip in Mount Hope, and everything he says—date, time, place—matches exactly what we got from Che Che. He adds a couple of details, including the fact that he and the other cop were both off-duty, and that after the rip, when they went to Robert’s apartment to split the money, the bills were so heavily dusted with cocaine they had to wash their hands to get it off. Robert says he blew his share of the money paying off some long-overdue bills and taking his girlfriend on a vacation to Mexico.

  But the big question we have for Robert is this: Who’s the other cop?

  And when he tells us who it is, we can hardly believe it. We don’t even want to believe it.

  It’s Dennis Sindone, Robert says. Deputy Inspector Dennis Sindone.

  There are a little over a hundred deputy inspectors in the NYPD, and of all of them at the time, Sindone is probably the one thought most likely to be on track to make senior chief. On the force since 1983, the son of a retired NYPD detective, Sindone, thirty-nine, is a water walker, a guy whose climb through the ranks has been meteoric. As a sergeant with Bronx Narcotics Homicide Task Force, he was credited with helping make cases against two drug gangs that between them had committed more than forty murders; later, as a lieutenant and CO of the Bronx Special Victims Unit, he and his guys tracked down a notorious rapist who had attacked fifty women. Promoted to captain and assigned as CO of the 60th Precinct in Coney Island, Sindone compiled such impressive crime-reduction stats that after just thirteen months as a captain he had recently been promoted by Commissioner Bernie Kerik to deputy inspector. In fact, just two weeks earlier I had attended his promotion ceremony and had shaken his hand and wished him well. Outgoing and gregarious, with dark good looks, he’s popular with both subordinates and superiors.