Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  But their lawyers are talking to our lawyers—“our” lawyers being the Queens District Attorney’s Office and the US Attorney’s Office—and eventually they both agree to talk in return for lighter sentences. And what they tell us and the prosecutors is what we already suspect: This isn’t the first drug or money rip they’ve done. And they aren’t the only cops they know who’ve done the same.

  This particular rip of the drug money courier had been Rachko’s idea, and the courier, the twenty-eight-year-old from the DR, was in on the plan. He had been one of Rachko’s unofficial off-the-books CIs back in the Northern Manhattan Initiative days, and he had always provided good information about drug houses and money drops and so on—and after Rachko’s retirement they had kept in touch. The plan was for Rachko and Vazquez to make a big show of arresting the courier in a busy public place—the corner of Ninety-First and Astoria—and then they’d drive off and split the money, after which the courier would breathlessly inform his bosses that he’d been grabbed and handcuffed by two corrupt cops who stole the money and then kicked him out of the car.

  As I said earlier, this is a pretty high-risk strategy for the courier; it’s the sort of thing that can get a guy killed. In fact, the day before the rip at Ninety-First and Astoria, one of Vasquez’s unregistered informants from the old days in the Northern Manhattan Initiative had been found handcuffed and duct-taped and extremely dead in the backseat of a car on East 205th Street off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a victim of multiple gunshots in the neck. We checked it out, of course, but we never found any reason to link that killing to Vasquez. After all, being a narcotics CI who’s working for the cops and the dealers at the same time is a situation fraught with mortal peril, and the list of people who might want such a person dead can be long indeed. And we really don’t think Vasquez is a killer; we think he’s just a thief.

  So anyway, Vasquez and Rachko tell us that on the day of the rip at Ninety-First and Astoria, Vasquez told his boss at the Firearms Investigation Unit that he was going out for lunch, then he picked up Rachko in the NYPD’s Toyota and they headed out to “arrest” the courier. And everything went according to plan until the guys from the El Dorado Task Force stepped up and asked them what’s going on.

  As they sped away from the scene, Vasquez and Rachko knew they were done, that it was over. Vasquez and Rachko didn’t know who those other cops were, and they didn’t know for sure that they had the courier under surveillance—the courier obviously hadn’t known that, either—and they didn’t yet know the whole thing was on videotape. But they knew those other cops didn’t just happen to be on that corner; they knew that much from the stunned looks on their faces as Rachko and Vasquez sped away; and they knew those stunned-looking cops probably got the plate number on the car. And they knew that if anybody asked why a detective assigned to the firearms unit in Harlem and a former detective who retired last year were arresting a drug money courier on a street corner in Queens . . . well, it was going to be a little hard to explain. Vasquez and Rachko knew that unless they were the two luckiest crooked cops in the world, the hammer was going to come down.

  So after they made sure they weren’t being tailed, they pulled over and quickly split the cash without even counting it. Rachko wound up with exactly $68,680, Vasquez a little less, the courier still less than that. They split up, but on his way home Rachko panicked; as we had expected, he wanted to get rid of the evidence. He stuffed his sixty-eight grand and change into a bag and tossed it into a Dumpster near the Hudson River, a few blocks away from his house in Riverdale. (Later, working with the feds, we’ll track the garbage pickup and disposal records and, amazingly, we’ll find the bag and the cash in a dump in the Bronx.)

  Vasquez, meanwhile, kept his cool. He stashed his share in a secured storage locker facility near his home, then went back to the Firearms Investigation Unit office acting as though nothing had happened. He and Rachko were arrested hours later. Shortly thereafter, the courier, who was still alive and well—either his bosses bought his story, or else they just hadn’t gotten around to murdering him yet—was picked up, too, and charged with money laundering and drug offenses.

  And now, after the arrest, Rachko and Vasquez, separately, with their lawyers present, sit down with the prosecutors to make a deal: leniency in return for cooperation. As usual in situations like this, the rule is that they have to give up everything, and hold nothing back. If later we find out they’ve lied, or withheld critical information, if some other crooked cop later fingers them in a rip they forgot to mention, then the deal will be off, the prosecutors will go for the maximum sentence, and any evidence they’ve already given us can and will be used against them. But if they’re completely truthful, and they agree to testify if necessary against other corrupt cops, the prosecutors will ask the judge to go easy on them. Although sentencing judges aren’t bound by any agreements between the defendants and the prosecutors, they usually go along with prosecutors’ recommendations.

  So Rachko and Vasquez start to sing, and name names. They tell us and the feds that sometimes together, sometimes with members of a small group of other cops from the Northern Manhattan Initiative, they’ve done dozens of drug and money rips. In almost every case, one of their off-the-books CIs would tell them about a drug or money drop, and they would hit the dealer or the courier and steal the money or the drugs, then split the cash with the CI. If they stole drugs, they’d sell them to another dealer and then split the cash. Most of the time the dealer or courier they robbed would be one of their CIs, like the courier in the Queens rip, and if they weren’t, they knew the dealers or couriers they robbed would never report the thefts; they were just happy that instead of arresting them the cops let them go, since the money or the drugs would be gone in either case. All told, over the years, Rachko and Vasquez figure they stole about $2 million from the dealers they hit.

  And where did the money go? Rachko claims that he’s got a gambling addiction, that he pissed away every dollar of his share of that $2 million—about $800,000—at OTB (off-track betting) parlors, betting on the ponies. We’re not sure we completely believe that, but we can never prove otherwise. Vasquez was a little more frugal. He tells us he’s got a huge stash of stolen and ill-gained cash in that storage locker in Brooklyn—$744,370 to be exact—which is quickly seized and deposited into government coffers.

  During the debriefings, Rachko is remorseful, emotional, ashamed to be exposed to his kids and to the world as a crooked cop. He’s a broken man.

  But Vasquez is different. At one point I’m personally debriefing him, and unlike Rachko, he’s not showing even a hint of emotion. He’s got a wife and kids, too, but if he feels any shame about being exposed to them as a dirty cop, I can’t see it. He’s cocky, even arrogant—a lot more cocky than a guy looking at years in prison should be.

  No, he tells me, he never engaged in small-time acts of corruption, never pilfered a few bucks from a drunk or a DOA or anything like that; there was no slippery slope. It wasn’t until he confronted the big money in narcotics that he got greedy, he says; he saw an opportunity and he took it—and then he took it again, and again. And unlike Rachko, he didn’t piss the money away. He and his wife, who works in a bank, have a nice town house in Boerum Hill, a gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn, but he’s not living a flashy lifestyle. That three-quarters of a million in cash in the storage locker? He says that is, or was, for his retirement, sort of like an off-the-books 401(k).

  Like I said, it’s a fool’s calculation. Because now not only is that three-quarters of a mil gone, but after seventeen years on the job, so is his pension, and his freedom. Once again, it’s the Million-Dollar Mistake.

  Anyway, while I’m talking to Vasquez about his many crimes, I’m wondering: Over the years IAB has done dozens of investigations and prisoner debriefs and integrity test stings in the Northern Manhattan Initiative’s area of operations in Harlem and Washington Heights, and we’ve arrested a lot of crooked cops. How did we miss t
his guy Vasquez and the others?

  So I ask him, wasn’t he worried that IAB would find and turn one of his informants against him? Wasn’t he ever afraid that one of his rips would turn out to be an IAB sting? And he says, no, he never worried about that. At first I take this as a kind of professional insult—I’m not afraid of IAB!—but then Vasquez explains why.

  He says he’d never been afraid of an IAB sting because he never did a rip that he or Rachko hadn’t set up from beginning to end. He had served warrants on drug dealers’ apartments with a million in cash sitting on a table, and pulled over cars with hundreds of thousands in the trunk, and he never took a dollar. Any one of those could have been an IAB sting operation.

  Instead, Vasquez tells me, he only did rips with people he knew and trusted, people who would never give him up, or in situations that he knew from his most trusted informants were legit. As for the Queens rip of the courier, well, that was just bad luck. How were they to know that out of the dozens, even hundreds of drug money couriers carrying millions of dollars in dope money around the streets of New York on any given day, their guy would be the one who just happened to be under surveillance by the El Dorado Task Force?

  And that’s the new face of major corruption in the NYPD. It’s not the Buddy Boys or Dirty Thirty scandals, with gangs of cops randomly banging down doors every night without really knowing what’s inside, or shaking down drug dealers for a few bucks at random on the street. The new face of major corruption in the NYPD is what we call “familiar corruption.” It’s one or two cops, working with people they trust—longtime informants, family members with criminal associations, people they’ve known for years—who are executing carefully planned rips of large amounts of cash or drugs. In familiar corruption cases, we can’t wait for the victims to report the crimes, because they won’t. We can’t wait for honest cops to come forward and report the crimes, either, even anonymously, because the honest cops don’t know about them. Instead, we have to try to work them from the inside, debriefing perps—drug dealers, money couriers, and so on—and hope that eventually we’ll find one who’s sufficiently jammed up to make him turn on his corrupt cop accomplices.

  The point is that catching crooked cops who are involved in familiar corruption like that takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of patience. But it never hurts to have some luck as well—and in the case of Rachko and Vasquez, we had some.

  Eventually Rachko and Vasquez both plead guilty to state and federal charges, and are sentenced to six years in Vasquez’s case and seven years for Rachko—an amazingly light jolt, considering that they could have been put away for life; it illustrates the wisdom of post-arrest cooperation.

  At his sentencing, Rachko cries as he apologizes for his crimes, blaming them once again on his gambling addiction. And as so often happens, Vasquez seems to be a different man on sentencing day than the cool, cocky crooked cop I’d seen during his debrief. As his wife weeps behind him in the courtroom, he, too, gets teary-eyed as he apologizes for his crimes, blaming them on “greed, avarice, and an egotistical attitude.” I’m sure his wife’s tears were real.

  Meanwhile, we’re investigating the other cops from the Northern Manhattan Initiative who Rachko and Vasquez had fingered during their debrief as being in on various drug and money rips—ten current or former cops in all, which is actually a pretty small number when you consider that some seven hundred cops were assigned to the Northern Manhattan Initiative.

  The problem is that a lot of those rips happened six or seven years ago, and Rachko’s and Vasquez’s memories have faded. They remember doing this rip with that cop, and another rip with that other cop, but the dates and times are vague. Like Rachko and Vasquez’s rip of the courier in Queens, most of the rips were committed off-duty or on meal breaks, they weren’t part of any official investigation, and no one was arrested, so it’s hard to reconstruct them based on any activity logs or arrest records. It’s not like the cops who did the rips were writing them down in their logbooks.

  Still, after months of debriefing perps and other cops, and going through what records are available, we’re able to give federal prosecutors enough evidence to charge two former members of the Northern Manhattan Initiative. One is a retired lieutenant, Rachko and Vasquez’s former supervisor, who agrees to cooperate with the investigation and later pleads guilty to stealing $110,000 in drugs and cash; he gets fourteen months in prison. The other is an NYPD detective, also a former member of the initiative, who admits in court that he stole $45,000 from a drug dealer and used it to remodel his home on Long Island; he gets two years.

  In the cases of two other former initiative detectives, including one who earlier had moonlighted as a driver for a New York real estate mogul named Donald Trump, there isn’t enough evidence for criminal charges. But Department administrative trials require a lower burden of proof, so we bring Department charges against them and both are fired—although Trump’s former driver later successfully appeals his dismissal.

  In the end, I guess you could argue that the entire Northern Manhattan Initiative corruption investigation was just a fluke, that it never would have come out but for the chance encounter between Rachko and Vasquez and the team from the El Dorado Task Force on that street corner in Queens. And maybe that’s so. Like I said, we had some luck on that one.

  But who knows? Maybe it would have eventually come out anyway, because secrets are hard to keep forever. After all, as the Rachko and Vasquez and Sindone and Brooklyn South Narcotics cases demonstrated, corrupt cops are often quick to turn on their former comrades when they get caught and are looking at a long stretch in the joint. As for confidential informants, ratting people out is their job, and no matter how much you might trust them today, when they get in trouble tomorrow and need to work their way out from under a prison sentence, they will happily give you up.

  Which is why I always wondered: How can corrupt cops sleep soundly at night, knowing that at any moment the crimes they committed long ago, and the people with whom they committed them, can suddenly come back to haunt them?

  The answer is: They shouldn’t.

  Corrupt cops should never sleep soundly at night.

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  WAIT A MINUTE—THOSE GUYS AREN’T COPS!

  The woman on the phone from Pennsylvania is angry and distraught, and with good reason. The man who fleeced her out of thousands and thousands of dollars is an NYPD cop—and what is the Internal Affairs Bureau going to do about it?

  The story she tells us is an old and familiar one. The woman—we’ll call her Betty—is middle-aged, a bit overweight, divorced, and lonely, and she has a thing for cops. So she goes on a chat room website called ILoveNYCCops.com and she meets this great guy, Angel Gonzalez—his online name is “Archangel”—who’s a detective in the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn. They trade messages back and forth for a couple of weeks, something clicks between them, and finally she invites him to visit her in Pennsylvania, which he does, and well, nature takes its course. Now she’s totally smitten with this guy. He’s young, early thirties, a good decade younger than her, in fact, and he’s sort of good-looking. An added attraction is the NYPD detective’s gold shield he carries, and the reassuring bulge of the Glock 9mm he carries in a hip holster; he makes her feel safe.

  So later he invites her to visit him at his home on Long Island, which is to say, the basement of his parents’ home on Long Island, where he’s been living since his divorce. When she gets there, she sees that the closet is crammed with NYPD uniforms and gear, and the walls are covered with awards, plaques, and framed attaboy letters, all praising Detective Angel Gonzalez for outstanding police work. He’s Police Officer of the Month, Detective of the Year, winner of the New York City Police Commissioner’s Award for Conspicuous Valor, and on and on. This guy isn’t just a cop, he’s a supercop.

  But there’s a problem. In a moment of postromantic bliss, Detective Gonzalez tells Betty a long and complicated tale involving his angry ex-
wife, a legitimate but off-the-books moonlighting job, a bank account in Puerto Rico, and certain sums of money owed. The bottom line, he tearfully tells her, is that if he can’t come up with $15,000 in two days, his ex-wife is going to call the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau and falsely accuse him of corruption, and his career will be in ruins. If Betty could just loan him fifteen grand—in cash, please—for a week or so, he’ll pay her back as soon as he can get his money out of the bank in San Juan. It will save his life, he says. And then he says: Betty, will you marry me?

  Betty is swooning. He wants to marry her! As for the money problem, she’s not worried. She trusts him. After all, he’s a cop.

  So Betty goes back home to Pennsylvania and rounds up the cash from her savings. Detective Gonzalez joins her there, and together they buy an engagement ring—on her credit card. The next day, Detective Gonzalez leaves with the fifteen grand—and then it’s like he drops off the face of the earth. He doesn’t write, he doesn’t call, he won’t answer her tearful telephone messages. And finally it dawns on Betty that this NYPD cop has not only broken her trusting heart, he has also fleeced her out of her hard-earned money.

  Betty remembers what Detective Gonzalez had said about Internal Affairs, how afraid of IAB he seemed to be, so she calls us. Of course we’re sympathetic. We don’t like our cops taking advantage of vulnerable women, and we especially don’t like our cops stealing their money. We open an IAB investigation on Detective Gonzalez for suspected fraud, and while there are some jurisdictional issues involved—the alleged crimes actually occurred in Long Island and Pennsylvania, not in New York City—we start building a case. Working with the Suffolk County DA’s office and the Pennsylvania police, we collect enough evidence to file fraud charges against Detective Gonzalez and get a search warrant on his house.