Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  It seems impossible. And yet . . .

  Robert tells us that he had been friends with Sindone since they worked together in the 50th Precinct—they were drinking buddies—and that when he approached Sindone with his plan for the Mount Hope rip Sindone had eagerly signed on. Robert says he also approached Sindone about helping with the second rip-off of Che Che in 1999, but that Sindone, then a lieutenant, had wanted more time to set it up, and a bigger score, so Robert had done it on his own. We will also find out that at the time of the first Bronx rip, Sindone was having money troubles, this after an earlier bankruptcy, and that he was dropping money that he really didn’t have at the $250-minimum blackjack tables in Atlantic City.

  And there’s another piece of evidence that we get. After Robert gives up Sindone, we put together a photo array to show to Che Che, who’s still in prison up north, to see if he can pick him out. Like I said earlier, a photo array is made up of a headshot of the suspect and five photos of other people (in this case, other cops) who look similar to him—not exactly the same, but not too different, either.

  So we put Sindone’s Department file photo in an array and show it to Che Che, who doesn’t know that Robert has fingered Sindone as the second cop. Che Che immediately IDs Sindone’s photo as the second cop who “arrested” him.

  All of which is persuasive. And both Robert and Che Che have good reason not to lie. For example, if when we check the records we find out that Sindone was actually on an extended vacation in the Caribbean on the same day Robert swears his old friend was helping him do a rip in the Bronx—in other words, if Robert lies to us—then Robert’s deal goes out the window and his admissions can be used against him in a criminal case, in which case he’s looking at forty years in the joint. Same thing with Che Che.

  But even though they have an incentive to tell the truth, Che Che is still a convicted drug dealer with a long criminal history, and Robert is still an admitted corrupt cop who has turned informer to save his own skin. These guys are not going to shine on the witness stand. We need more.

  So we have Robert make a phone call.

  After some rehearsals, we put Robert on the phone and have him call Deputy Inspector Sindone at his office at the Six-Oh. At first it’s all, How ya doin’, haven’t talked to you in a while, heard about the big promotion, congratulations, that’s really great—and so on. Sindone is happy to hear from Robert—he calls him “Bubula,” which is New York–ese for little buddy—and they talk about the old days for a while.

  Then Robert makes the pitch. He can’t be too specific, because any cop gets suspicious if another cop starts openly talking on a phone line about a score. So what he says is basically this:

  Robert says to Sindone: Look, I got this thing, like we used to do, it could really work out for the both of us, are you interested?

  And what does Sindone say? Does he say, Whaddaya talkin’ about? What kind of a thing we used to do? What’s this about?

  No, what Sindone says is simply this: Nah, I don’t do that stuff anymore.

  Anymore?

  It’s not a legally incriminating statement in and of itself. A defense attorney could certainly raise some doubt about what Sindone meant.

  But I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve heard dozens, even hundreds of wiretap and recording device tapes of corrupt cops talking about scores they’ve made or plan to make. And after listening to the tape, and considering all the other evidence, I still don’t want to believe it, but I have to: Deputy Inspector Sindone, the guy whose hand I shook a couple weeks before, did exactly what he’s suspected of doing. For a relative handful of cocaine-dusted bills, which he mostly pissed away anyway, he put his freedom and his career into the hands of a low-life drug dealer and a weak cop who gave him up with hardly a second thought, and then he went on with his life as if it had never happened.

  I never could really understand how any cop could do that. I couldn’t understand it then, and I still can’t understand it now.

  But whatever the reason behind it, it’s time to let Deputy Inspector Sindone know that his past has caught up with him.

  We don’t want to just arrest him. We want to put him in a position in which he’ll agree to cooperate, to tell us about other scores he made, if any, and if other cops, maybe even other former or current high-ranking ones, were involved.

  So instead of taking a run at him at home, or in the 60th Precinct, we have an administrative aide call him and tell him that First Deputy Commissioner Joe Dunne needs to see him first thing in the morning—nothing major, just routine. The next morning, Sindone, in a suit, not his DI’s uniform, shows up on the fourteenth floor of One Police Plaza and is escorted into the first deputy’s conference room. I’m already there, along with IAB’s Deputy Chief John Moakley and Lieutenant John Donnelly, the CO of IAB’s Group 25, which coordinates IAB investigations with the feds.

  The minute he walks in, Sindone can tell that something’s wrong. None of us is smiling; none of us is enjoying this. But before he can react I walk over to him and shake his hand—and then I don’t let go. At the same time, Deputy Chief Moakley moves in and gives him a quick pat-down. We’re looking for his gun—not because we’re afraid that he’ll use it on us, but because we’re afraid he might use it on himself. That has happened more than once with NYPD cops caught up in corruption scandals, and we don’t want it to happen again. But he doesn’t have a gun on him.

  Where’s your gun, Dennis? I say.

  It’s in my car, Sindone says, and we send someone down to get it. We’ve also arranged for some IAB investigators to take his on-duty gun out of his locker at the 60th Precinct.

  Meanwhile, Sindone is looking like the world is collapsing around him. It’s painful to watch. He keeps saying: What’s going on, am I in trouble? And we keep saying the standard IAB line: Look, Dennis, don’t say anything, just listen, we’re trying to help you here . . .

  So we take him across the plaza to the US Attorney’s Office and sit him down in a small conference room. We tell him a little of what we’ve got, without mentioning Robert or Che Che by name—although he has probably already figured out who gave him up. We explain how he can help himself by cooperating, but by this time Sindone has regained his composure, and he’s not buying what we’re selling. He wants to see his lawyer, he says—and the interview is over.

  We take his shield and put him on modified assignment, pending his indictment by a grand jury, so he’s not going back to the 60th Precinct. Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik transfers Sindone to a holding spot in the Property Division; a few days later he busts Sindone back to captain, the biggest demotion that civil service rules allow. Kerik is furious that a guy he just promoted and publicly praised is now the highest-ranking NYPD cop ever caught up in a drug-related corruption scandal—which is kind of ironic since Kerik, as we’ll see, has some secrets in his own background that are going to come back on him.

  Later Sindone is indicted by a federal grand jury for violating the civil rights of the unnamed drug dealer whose money he and Robert and Che Che stole—yeah, I know it sounds kind of strange, but that’s the way the federal law is written. He’s formally arrested and booked at that point. At his trial, Robert and Che Che are the prosecution’s main witnesses, and as expected, his defense attorney argues that Robert and Che Che are self-serving rats and snitches who can’t be believed—and the jurors agree. Faced with two admittedly unsavory witnesses, and bound by the “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden of proof, they acquit Sindone on the federal charges.

  But his troubles aren’t over. Despite the acquittal, he’s brought up on administrative charges at an internal Department trial, where the standard of proof is simply a “preponderance of evidence.” By that standard, after a hearing the deputy commissioner of trials finds Sindone guilty and he is dismissed from the Department. Sindone never stops maintaining his innocence, and although he files a number of appeals with the courts, the dismissal stands. Meanwhile, Robert resigns from the Dep
artment and gets probation, and Che Che gets a “cooperation letter” from the US Attorney’s Office that eventually helps him win parole.

  So is that fair? A lot of cops don’t seem to think so—not then, and not to this day. The Sindone case remains a kind of cause célèbre within the ranks, with a lot of cops—especially those who don’t know all the facts—arguing that Sindone was railroaded out of the Department solely on the word of a drug dealer and a crooked cop who ratted out another cop to save his own skin, which to cops is the worst kind of low-down, cheese-eating rat there is. But again, there’s an irony there. Every day, cops use drug dealers and informants and snitches to make criminal cases against civilians. But they get angry, some of them, when those same kinds of informants and snitches are used to make criminal cases against cops.

  There is one unusual postscript to the sad story of Deputy Inspector Dennis Sindone. In 2007, five years after being dismissed from the NYPD, he bought a lottery ticket at a convenience store in Rockland County, and when he scratched it off in the parking lot it was a winner—a big winner.

  “ ‘CROOKED’ COP WINS $1 MILLION LOTTO,” the headline in the New York Post announced. The story quoted Sindone as calling it “poetic justice.”

  And maybe that’s about half right.

  Maybe it was poetic.

  * * *

  It’s the day before Thanksgiving 2003, and the cops and federal agents from the El Dorado Task Force are staking out a money courier at the corner of Ninety-First Street and Astoria Boulevard in the East Elmhurst section of Queens. The mutt they’ve got under surveillance is a twenty-eight-year-old from the Dominican Republic who’s working for a Colombian drug dealer named Calvo, and inside the black backpack he’s carrying on his shoulder is $169,000 in cash.

  The task force guys know this because it’s their money.

  The El Dorado Task Force—which includes NYPD detectives, US Customs agents, IRS agents, other federal agents—has been on this investigation for months, trying to make cases against “remitters,” guys who take large sums of cash from drug sales in New York City, hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, then break them down into smaller amounts and wire-transfer the funds offshore, usually to Colombia. The idea is to evade cash reporting requirements by making it look like the wire transfers are small remittances sent by immigrants to their families back home.

  In other words, it’s money laundering, and the task force cops are following the money. One of their undercovers inside the drug operation gave the $169,000 in the backpack to the unsuspecting courier, who’s supposed to make a drop at the corner, and then the task force guys will see where it goes. They’ve got a surveillance camera running to film the money drop.

  But then suddenly two guys in a silver Toyota Avalon come to a screeching stop beside the drug courier and jump out of the car. One of them is Hispanic, average height, the other a big white guy with silver hair—and they’re both wearing Department “raid” jackets, blue windbreakers with the Department patch and “NYPD” in big white letters on them. They grab the courier, and the bag, and then the Hispanic guy unzips it, looks inside, and gives the big white guy a thumbs-up sign. They handcuff the courier and start to load him, and the bag full of cash, into the Toyota.

  And the task force guys, watching this happen, can’t believe it. What the . . . ? Who the hell are these guys?

  So they run over, badges out, and without saying who they are—they don’t want to blow the fact that this is a surveillance—they ask the guys in the raid jackets what’s going on. The Hispanic guy flashes an NYPD detective’s gold shield and says it’s okay, they’re with a special NYPD/federal narcotics unit.

  I’m on a wire, he tells the task force cops, which could mean that he’s working a wiretap case, or it could mean that the courier, or the cop himself, is wired with a recording device. Either way, it still doesn’t make any sense.

  But then, before the task force cops can say anything else, the guys in the raid jackets get in the Toyota and take off, with the courier and with the $169,000 in cash, while the task force guys stand there, mouths agape, stunned. And it’s all caught on the task force guys’ surveillance camera.

  So now the task force cops have to call their bosses and tell them that their surveillance target and their money are both in the wind, taken from right under their noses by two unidentified guys who appear to be other cops. I can only imagine just how unpleasant that conversation was. And then they have to try to figure out what just happened.

  They’re pretty sure that the guys in the raid jackets were actual cops. Sure, anybody can buy a knockoff NYPD detective’s gold shield, but these guys talked like real cops, and moved like real cops. One of the NYPD detectives on the task force even vaguely remembers the big white guy as an NYPD narcotics detective he’d known back in the day. And when they run the plate on the Toyota Avalon it comes back as being leased by the NYPD.

  But even if those guys are real cops—especially if they’re real cops—this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen. Whenever a law enforcement agency in the New York City area, federal, state, or local, wants to open an investigation of a drug location or a drug dealer or drug informant, they’re supposed to check the DECS computer system—Drug Enforcement Coordination System—to see if any other federal, state, or local narcotics unit has already targeted that person or location. If anyone has, they’re supposed to back off, or at least call the unit and ask permission to get involved. The whole idea behind DECS is to keep one group of narcotics cops from stepping on other narcotics cops’ cases—or worse, to keep one group of narcotics cops from raiding a location and maybe shooting another narcotics group’s undercovers who are working the case.

  But now these guys in the NYPD raid jackets haven’t just stepped on the El Dorado Task Force’s case. They’ve stomped on it and left it for dead.

  Funny thing, though. When the task force guys check the records, they find out that nobody from the NYPD has tried to open a file or run a DECS check on their case. If anyone had, it would have left a computer footprint. The only NYPD unit that can run a DECS check without leaving a footprint is us—the Internal Affairs Bureau.

  So now the task force guys, especially the ones from the NYPD, start to wonder: Were the guys in the NYPD raid jackets part of some IAB sting? Had IAB targeted members of the El Dorado Task Force for an integrity test? So the task force supervisor calls IAB and asks us, discreetly, if we just happened to have run an IAB integrity test operation that afternoon at the corner of Ninety-First and Astoria in Queens.

  In a way, it’s flattering that they would think we were involved—IAB is everywhere! But this isn’t something that IAB would do. We wouldn’t run an integrity test on a joint NYPD/federal task force without the federal agency’s higher-ups knowing about it. And we certainly wouldn’t have two IAB guys just grab $169,000 from other cops and run away with it to see what the other cops will do. If we do that, one of our guys could wind up getting shot.

  No, as soon as the task force supervisors tell us what happened, we know what we’ve got here. We’ve got two bad cops doing a drug money rip.

  Well, with the Toyota Avalon’s license plate and the surveillance tape, it doesn’t take a lot of superior detective work to ID these two guys. The Hispanic guy in the raid jacket is Detective Julio Vasquez, age forty-three, on the job seventeen years, used to work in the now-defunct Northern Manhattan Initiative antinarcotics unit, which had been created during the ’90s to flood drug-plagued Harlem and Washington Heights with hundreds of narcotics cops. Vasquez is now assigned to the elite Firearms Investigation Unit in Harlem, which concentrates on getting guns off the street; the NYPD-leased Toyota used in the drug money rip is assigned to him. The big white guy is Thomas Rachko, age forty-five, retired in 2002 after twenty years with the Department, including a stint as a detective in the Northern Manhattan Initiative, where he worked with Vasquez.

  Now, ordinarily we might have let these guys stay out on the street fo
r a while, put a tail on them, maybe get a wiretap up, listen to what they’re saying, see if other cops are involved. But that takes time, and this case is a red alert. After the confrontation with the task force guys, we have to assume that Rachko and Vasquez know they’ve been made on the money rip. They probably won’t run—cops who know they’re under IAB investigation almost never go on the lam—but they might get rid of the stolen cash. And the El Dorado Task Force would really, really like to get its money back before that happens.

  True, federal agencies like the FBI and the DEA and the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) and US Customs and all the rest are the envy of every NYPD cop for the vast amounts of cash they can bring into an investigation for drug buys, to pay informants, and so on; for every dollar the NYPD has for such purposes, the feds have ten, maybe twenty. But even the feds don’t want to have to eat the loss before their very eyes of $169,000 in cash.

  So we immediately scoop up Rachko at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx; the next day, Thanksgiving, we grab Vasquez at his home in Brooklyn. We make the usual run at them, to see if they’ll cooperate—Look, detective, we’re trying to help you here—but neither one of them bites, at least not yet. They want to talk to their lawyers. Later they’re arraigned on charges of grand larceny, money laundering, obstructing governmental administration, and coercion, and they’re both released on $50,000 bail each.