So the phony cop drug rip-off ploy can work to everyone’s advantage—which is why so many drug rip crews use it. In fact, in the world of cop drug rip-offs, bogus cops far outnumber the actual ones. It’s impossible to quantify crimes that don’t get reported, but I would guess that for every case of a Rachko/Vasquez–style drug rip—they were the two crooked NYPD narcotics cops discussed previously—there are probably a hundred cases of phony cops doing drug rips.
But phony cops or not, they cause IAB no end of headaches. If they’re real cops doing drug rips, obviously we want them. And if they’re phony cops doing rip-offs, we want them, too, not only because they’re drug dealers and thieves but also because they’re giving honest cops a bad name. But sometimes we don’t know for certain if they’re real or phony cops until we have them in the bag.
Like the case of the cop rip-off crew in Long Island City.
We’ve got this perp in Queens, a career criminal who’s been locked up on a drug distribution charge. He’s a midlevel player in a Dominican drug-running crew in Washington Heights, and now he’s looking at some serious time up north—so when our IAB investigators yank him out of a cell in Central Booking for a routine debrief, he’s ready to make a deal.
He tells us he’s been working as an informant for this crew of NYPD cops who are hijacking trucks carrying cocaine and stealing the drugs. This perp calls the cops and tells them when and where the trucks are transporting the drugs—he knows this because it’s his own crew’s trucks he’s giving up—then the cops swoop in and grab the drugs and the perp gets a cut later. Yes, he’s certain these guys are real cops, he knows a cop when he sees one—but no, he doesn’t know their full names, just their first names. So we sign this perp up as an official Department confidential informant, in return for which the DA will give him a break on the outstanding drug charge. And we start figuring out how we’re going to grab these crooked cops.
We don’t want to try to tail them and then take them while they’re ripping off an actual drug shipment. For one thing, it could be weeks or months before they do another drug rip, and in a surveillance like that we’re probably going to get made. Also, the drug couriers are probably going to be armed, the crooked cops almost certainly will be armed, and we definitely will be armed—heavily armed. The last thing we want is a three-way gunfight breaking out on a busy street. Instead, we want to take them in a controlled situation—so we set up a sting.
We have our CI tell the leader of the cop crew that there’s a shipment coming in, three kilos of cocaine hidden in a dresser in an old step van full of used furniture. On a Friday night when there won’t be anybody around, the couriers will park the van in front of a warehouse on a narrow side street in the industrial section of Long Island City, and it will be picked up by the CI’s crew a few hours later. (In a typical high-level drug deal, the buyers pick up the drugs at one location and then the sellers pick up the payment money that’s been left at another location. That way the drugs and the cash are never in the same place at the same time.) But during that time frame, the CI tells the rip crew, the van will just be sitting there, unguarded, and they can just walk in and take the dope. Easy.
It’s easy for them. For us it requires a lot of preparation. We park the step van in front of the warehouse with three kilos of “beat” cocaine hidden in the dresser and a surveillance camera inside to record the action. We set up an OP (observation post) in a rented warehouse across the street, also teched up with surveillance cameras, and put two semi-tractor trailers a few blocks away so when the arrest starts to go down they can roll up and block the street. Hidden in the back of each truck are a half dozen Emergency Service Unit A-Team cops—again, they’re the NYPD’s equivalent of a SWAT unit—in full combat gear: ceramic bulletproof body armor, helmets, assault rifles. The ESU guys also bring in an armored car and park it in a garage across the street from the step van, and we have a dozen IAB investigators hidden around the site. We’re loaded for bear—or rather, we’re loaded for armed cops-and-robbers.
That’s assuming they are real cops. From the names and descriptions our CI has given us—again, he only knows their first names—we haven’t been able to match any of this robbery crew to actual NYPD cops. But who knows? Maybe they’re real cops from another agency. We have to prepare for the worst.
In any event, just before midnight two cars roll up the seemingly deserted street, with a total of five guys in them. They’re all Hispanic, all have silver badges hanging around their necks. While three of them stand guard, the other two guys pry open the back door on the step van. With the surveillance camera inside the van filming, they go straight to the dresser and grab the three bags of bogus coke.
And then the wrath and voice of God descends on them.
The voice comes from a loudspeaker: POLICE! DON’T MOVE! NYPD! And when the perps fail to heed the voice and start to scatter, the ESU armored car bursts out through the garage door and an ESU guy jumps out and tosses a flash-bang grenade at the robbers’ feet—BOOM!
Flash-bang grenades are exactly that: They make a bright flash and a loud—really loud—bang and they give off some smoke, but unlike military grenades they don’t explode into potentially lethal fragments or create a potentially lethal concussion. They’re designed to disorient suspects, not injure or kill them; it’s sort of a shock-and-awe technique. (They were later effectively banned, by the NYPD, anyway, after a fifty-seven-year-old Harlem woman who worked for the city died of a heart attack after an ESU warrant team mistakenly raided her apartment and used a flash-bang grenade.)
With four of the robbers, the flash-bang does the trick. Their attitude seems to be, Well, if they’re going to throw hand grenades at us, I guess we’d better give up. They meekly raise their hands. But the last robber takes off sprinting down the street, straight toward the ESU guys who’ve dismounted from the tractor trailer, and when in the darkness he appears to be pulling a gun one of the ESU cops squeezes off a round from his assault rifle. Fortunately, it only grazes the bad guy under the armpit, because he turns out not to be armed. In fact, none of the robbers is carrying a gun—and none of them is a cop, either. Their badges look like NYPD shields, except they say “Security Officer.” These “cops” are just ordinary police impersonators—and not very good ones, at that.
Still, like so many other cop impersonators, these guys cause us a lot of trouble. Now not only do we have a robbery and criminal impersonation case to handle, but we also have to conduct an IAB officer-involved shooting investigation. That robber was just lucky that the ESU guy’s aim was off—those guys aren’t supposed to miss. And maybe that should serve as a warning to others like him: For robbers, it can be dangerous to play cops.
Except for the shot being fired, the IAB operation in Long Island City wasn’t all that unusual. We do a couple of operations like that a year, in cases where we’re dealing with a large number of cops or cop impersonators and there’s a serious potential for violence.
But more often the IAB Police Impersonation Group tracks down criminal police impersonators the old-fashioned way—through solid detective work. Sometimes it’s easy because the impersonators are dumb, like the rapist in East New York who gave his victim his phone number. But sometimes police impersonators can be ingenious and stupid at the same time—like the three cop impersonators who hit the Pay-O-Matic in Queens.
* * *
It’s eight o’clock in the morning, Valentine’s Day 2012, when the cop walks up to a female employee in the parking lot outside the Pay-O-Matic twenty-four-hour check-cashing store on South Conduit Avenue in Queens. He’s a white male, big guy, early thirties, bald with a brown goatee, wearing sunglasses, gloves, a blue raid jacket with “NYPD” on it, and an NYPD gold detective shield hanging from his neck. Two other white males in similar NYPD raid jackets and shields and wearing New York Yankees caps are sitting in a black Ford Explorer nearby.
The detective asks the female employee if she works at the Pay-O-Matic and she tells him
she does; she’s a teller. The detective pulls some photographs out of his pocket and shows them to her, asking her if she recognizes any of the houses shown in the photographs, which she does. One of them is her house, and she tells him so. He asks her who’s inside the Pay-O-Matic, and she tells him there’s only one other employee, the night shift teller. Then he starts pushing her into the building, his hand on her back, while the two other men in the NYPD raid jackets follow close behind.
The female employee is confused and intimidated, but she has already figured out this much: These are not ordinary cops, if they’re cops at all. But since they have a picture of her house, they know where she lives, so she’d better cooperate.
The detective with the bald head orders the night shift teller to open the double doors separating the customer area from the teller cage, the bulletproof-glass-enclosed area where they keep the cash—and now there’s no question about it: This is a robbery. One of the men pulls a gun and orders the night shift teller and the female teller to the floor, while the big bald guy goes to the open safe and starts stuffing money into a black plastic garbage bag; another robber empties the teller drawer. Then one of the robbers pulls out a juice bottle full of bleach and starts splashing it over the teller counter, the safe, the cage floor—anywhere the robbers might have left some DNA evidence. After warning the prostrate employees not to move, the robbers flee with $200,755 in the black plastic bag.
By the time the first patrol units get there, the robbers and the Ford Explorer are gone.
Since the robbers presented themselves as cops, IAB catches the case, although we’ll work on it with NYPD squad detectives and the FBI. (Check-cashing businesses, like banks, are federally insured institutions, and robbing one is a federal as well as a state crime.) And there’s one thing that’s clear to us from the very start.
These three guys almost certainly aren’t real cops. Because why would they be?
After all, it’s one thing for real cops to bang a drug dealer or a money courier, someone who’s probably not going to report the robbery. But it’s another thing entirely for real cops to rob a legitimate business of two hundred grand and make no secret of the fact that they’re cops. They know the crime is going to be reported; no matter how intimidated the female teller may be, she’s not going to be able to keep quiet about the $200,755 that’s suddenly missing, and neither is the other teller. These guys also know that every check-cashing business in the city is equipped with multiple security cameras—and these robbers made no effort to disable or avoid the cameras, or to hide their faces. If they’re real NYPD cops, it would take us about ten minutes to ID them; they might as well have left their NYPD business cards. So what’s the advantage in letting everyone know they’re real cops?
There is no advantage. So while we’ll keep an open mind on it, we’re almost certain these are impersonators—and therefore the case goes to Group 51, IAB’s Police Impersonation Unit.
There’s something else that we notice about this robbery. In some ways it seems like the perfect professional takeover. For one thing, the robbers had extensively cased the check-cashing store—employees had earlier noticed the black Ford Explorer parked nearby on several occasions—and they knew what time the teller shifts changed, so they could grab a teller outside and force her or him inside the building and then inside the locked cage. Since they had the photograph of the female teller’s house, they’d probably followed her home after work one day. The robbers also were in and out in about three minutes, just under the silent alarm response time, and there were no acts of gratuitous violence of the sort that a lot of amateurs commit.
Like I said, they seem like pros. And yet there are also indications that these three mutts are just that—street mutts trying to act like a professional robbery crew.
Take the bleach thing. Sure, bleach will destroy DNA evidence, if there’s enough of it. But a little juice bottle being splashed around isn’t going to do the trick. And besides, why bother? They’re wearing gloves, and unless they’re spilling blood on the floor, or unless one of the robbers deposits a big gob of spit on the counter, the chances that the crime scene guys are going to find a usable DNA sample are between slim and none. Yeah, maybe it looks cool and professional, but it could also indicate that these guys have seen one too many bank heist movies—which, as we’ll see, they have.
And there’s another reason to think that maybe these guys are amateurs. That photograph of her house that the first robber, the big guy, showed to the female teller? As he’s pushing her through the door, he accidentally drops the photo on the floor, and it’s still there when the robbers leave. On the back of the photo is the word “Walgreens” and two numbers—one of them a store ID number for a Walgreens in Queens, the other a receipt number for photo printing. When IAB detective Michael Visconti, the lead investigator on the case, checks it out with the Walgreens manager, he finds a copy of the receipt with a phone number and the first initial and last name of the customer—“E. Byam.”
In police work, this is what we call a clue.
True, as dumb mistakes by criminals go, this isn’t quite on par with the bank robber who writes his “demand note” on the back of his own apartment electric bill or an envelope with his own address on it and then leaves it on the counter when he runs off with the cash. (That has actually happened, and more than once.) But it’s pretty close.
There’s one problem, though. The name and phone number on the photo receipt trace back to a twenty-four-year-old Queens man, Edward Byam, who is African American, and eventually we’ll also connect the robbery to two of his friends, who are also black. But from the start, the victim tellers—both of whom got very close looks at these guys—have said that all three robbers were clearly white, and the surveillance tape bears that out. And all the press and TV reports about the heist have said that the three suspects were white. So all along we’ve been saying that we’re looking for three white guys, and then suddenly we wind up with three black suspects? You can imagine what a defense attorney could do with that.
But we’ve got a pretty good explanation as to why the white robbers are actually black robbers.
Early on in the investigation we release some of the surveillance photos to the news media and put them on the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers website. Most of the resulting tips don’t pan out. One tipster says they’re some guys he knows from Long Island. Another says he saw them on a TV show. Several tipsters say they are some real cops who they know, but while we check it out, we’re still pretty convinced that these guys aren’t real cops.
But there is one anonymous phone tip that’s interesting. The caller says he recognizes one of the faces—and it’s not a real face, it’s a mask. Not one of those plastic Halloween masks with an elastic band around the back of the head to hold it in place, but a Hollywood-quality, full over-the-head silicone mask. And when we take another close look at the surveillance tapes, we see it. The earholes are a little too big, and the “skin” at the back of the neck bunches up in an unusual way. It’s hard to believe we didn’t see it at first, but then, the victim tellers who were standing just inches away from these guys didn’t realize they were wearing masks, either. That’s how convincing these masks were—so convincing that three armed black robbers could put them on and have everybody swear they were armed white robbers.
So these guys aren’t just cop impersonators. They’re also race impersonators.
Police impersonators were a big problem for the Internal Affairs Bureau. This armed robbery crew wore Hollywood-style masks so realistic that eyewitnesses swore the thieves were white, but when we caught them they turned out to be black.
There aren’t too many companies that make these kinds of high-end masks. Eventually we find a company in Louisiana called CFX-Composite Effects that produces amazingly lifelike silicone masks—they made masks for the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, among others. They also sell stock masks in a variety of characters and ethnicities: black men, Asian men, white
men, males and females. And yes, before the Pay-O-Matic robbery they had sold a Mr. Byam three masks for $1,800; the stock model name was “Mac the Guy,” which was sort of a generic white man mask that could have facial and head hair added to it. In fact, Mr. Byam had actually sent the company some e-mails, praising the quality of the masks and promising them more business in the future.
The case comes together pretty quickly after that. The masks were shipped from CFX to the home of a friend of Byam’s named Akeem Monsalvatge, who was out on bail awaiting trial for the armed robbery of another Pay-O-Matic store in 2010. (That robbery did not involve police impersonation.) Subpoenaed records of a company that sold police gear online showed that Byam’s cousin, a guy named Derrick Dunkley, had ordered three NYPD raid jackets just like the robbers wore. Cell phone relay tower records showed that the men were in the vicinity of the Queens Pay-O-Matic on the day of the robbery. And when IAB investigators and FBI agents arrest the three men, they find three masks and a small bottle of bleach under Byam’s bed. The only thing missing is the money, which has already been squandered on trips to expensive resorts and spending sprees on Gucci, Christian Louboutin, Ralph Lauren, and Louis Vuitton clothes and accessories—not to mention a $12,000 diamond-encrusted Rolex watch—for themselves and their girlfriends.
And there’s another thing. We notice that the MO in the Pay-O-Matic robbery is similar in many ways to something we’ve seen before—in a movie. Specifically, the 2010 Ben Affleck movie The Town, in which guys in a professional robbery crew in Boston dress up as cops, put on silicone masks, splash bleach around robbery scenes, and gather information on victims and their families to intimidate them into cooperating.
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