From a police point of view, a lot of what Ben Affleck and his crew did was implausible, even ridiculous, the sorts of things you’d only see in a movie. But the Pay-O-Matic robbery crew had apparently used The Town as a kind of training film; in fact, Monsalvatge had a picture of himself posing in a T-shirt with The Town movie logo on it.
But there was one big difference between the movie and real life. In the movie, Ben Affleck got away—and these three mopes didn’t. After a trial in federal court, they each got thirty-two years.
Again, these guys were more inventive than most cop impersonators. But they made the same mistake that other police impersonators make: They were living in a fantasy world, believing that just because they could look like cops they could also think and act like cops. But with no police or investigative training, they made dumb mistakes that real cops were quick to exploit.
So how can an average person tell real cops from police impersonators? I wish I could say there is some foolproof method, but there isn’t. The good news is that with more than 900,000 local, state, and federal sworn law enforcement officers in the US, the real ones far outnumber the bogus ones.
Still, I can offer a few suggestions.
Have you noticed that your neighbor’s high-school dropout son is suddenly walking around in a blue uniform and driving a Crown Vic with an antenna farm sprouting from the trunk? Does a guy you meet at a party announce right off the bat that he’s a cop, or an undercover cop—which, as I said earlier, is something most cops don’t do, and undercovers never do? Do you notice that one of your coworkers—or even your rabbi—is carrying what appears to be a badge of some sort?
Maybe it’s harmless, simply a case of someone who likes to fantasize about being a cop. On the other hand, a lot of guys who start out as seemingly harmless wannabes eventually graduate to serious criminal police impersonators.
So if you see something suspicious, do the public—and us—a favor.
Call the real police.
Chapter 10
* * *
OTHER AGENCIES
The Suffolk County police commissioner needs a favor. He wants to borrow some of our uncles.
He’s got this cop, thirty years old, seven years with the Suffolk County PD, a onetime Cop-of-the-Month who has taken a wrong turn. Some other Suffolk PD cops, worried that this guy is going to get them jammed up, have dimed him, anonymously calling their own Internal Affairs unit and telling them that Officer Cop-of-the-Month and possibly some other cops are using and dealing cocaine and steroids. These cops are bodybuilders who hang out at a place called the World Gym, and when they aren’t pumping up they’re partying at the nightclubs and “gentlemen’s clubs” on the East End of Long Island, acting like a bunch of junior Sopranos, Mob wannabes, always talking about the big scores they’re making, the scams they’re running; they’re all about gold chains, waxed bodies, perfectly coiffed hair—and don’t spare the cologne. Officer Cop-of-the-Month is also suspected of stealing some high-end camera equipment from this movie producer who has a place in the Hamptons; he’d been an extra in one of the producer’s movies—ironically, the title of the film was Wannabes—and he apparently has dreams of Hollywood stardom.
So the Suffolk police commissioner wants to put some uncles—undercover cops—in with these guys, get to know them, find out where this might lead, how many cops are involved, and exactly what they’re involved in. But while Suffolk County PD has its own very capable and efficient Internal Affairs unit, it’s a relatively small department, about twenty-five hundred cops, and they don’t have undercovers who won’t be recognized if they try to put them next to this cop crew. So could the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau help?
And my answer is the same as it always is when another law enforcement agency needs some assistance from IAB: No problem!
So after a full brief from Suffolk PD, we sit down with one of our undercover teams and start coming up with a plan. Our initial contact man will be an IAB undercover I’ll call Dominick. Dominick is a veteran detective, big guy, comfortably padded around the middle but sleek, with salt-and-pepper hair, beautifully manicured nails, and a tanning salon glow. He’s going to play a Mob-connected guy—not a made wiseguy, that would be too easy for a targeted cop to check, just a guy with some loose Mob connections—who runs a sham construction business and who’s always looking for a score: drugs, untaxed cigarettes, insurance frauds, whatever can bring in a buck. Dominick is a “dese,” “dems,” and “dose” guy, a thug in a silk suit, just the sort of guy these wannabes might respond to. Another IAB undercover, Nick, who’s in his mid-twenties but looks like he’s about eighteen, will play Dominick’s nephew and all-around gofer. The initial “meet” between Dominick and Officer Cop-of-the-Month is set for a strip club in Commack, Long Island, where a civilian who’s cooperating with Suffolk PD and who knows Officer Cop-of-the-Month will make the intro. We’ll also have IAB “ghosts” inside and outside the club.
Now, whenever we have to send our undercovers into bars or casinos or strip joints we make sure they fully understand the rules. To maintain their cover they’re allowed to have drinks—at Department expense—ideally no more than two in an eight-hour period, never so much that they’re physically impaired; uncles know how to nurse a drink and look drunk at the same time. They’re never allowed to take drugs; if a target insists they snort a line to prove they’re not cops, maybe they fake it or, depending on the character they’re playing, maybe they get all indignant and say something like, Whaddaya kidding me? Do I look like some kinda fuckin’ loser to you? I sell that poison shit; I don’t use it! (If an undercover is forced at gunpoint to take drugs, he or she is immediately pulled out and placed under medical observation.) If an undercover’s role takes him into a strip joint, the Department will pay the cover charge, but that’s it. The New York City Police Department does not, repeat, does not, pay for lap dances.
Oh, and there’s one other rule we make sure our undercovers understand: If while on undercover duty they win any money or other prizes in a lottery or raffle or game of chance, it’s our money, not theirs.
You might not think that such a warning would be necessary, but it is. Back in the mid-1990s we had a female IAB undercover working another case in a bar in East Quogue on Long Island, and when she bought a beer—with Department money—she automatically got one of those tear-off tickets for a car raffle. When, at the end of the night, they pulled the winning ticket out of the jar, the undercover won the car—a shiny new red $14,000 Plymouth Neon. Our undercover’s position was that the car was hers, and Walter Mack, then deputy commissioner for internal affairs, wanted to let her keep it. But the city Conflicts of Interest Board thought otherwise, and after a hearing the Department kept the Neon, and the precedent was set.
So anyway, we put Dominick and Nick into one of IAB’s undercover cars from the warehouse in Queens, one with a plate number and VIN that won’t trace back to the NYPD, in this case a three-year-old Mercedes; we want Dominick to look like a moderately successful crook, but not like a Mob boss with a brand-new Mercedes. Backed up by their ghosts, they go to the strip club, where they “accidentally” run into the cooperating civilian, who’s there with Officer Cop-of-the-Month. And then it’s, Hey, Dominick, how-ah-ya, how-ah-ya, hey, I want you to meet a friend of mine . . .
So does Dominick immediately start talking to Officer Cop-of-the-Month—who doesn’t identify himself as a cop—about drugs or scores or anything else? Of course not. After a few words, Dominick barely even looks at the guy. He’s just a businessman out for a good time. Dominick stays for a while, has a drink, looks at the girls—being an undercover can be a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it—and then he’s out of there. Officer Cop-of-the-Month doesn’t see him again for a week, maybe two, until Dominick just happens to come into another club where Officer Cop-of-the-Month is hanging out, and even then Dominick acts like he hardly remembers the guy. Oh yeah, you’re So-and-So’s friend, how ya doin’?
This
goes on for weeks, then months. (During this time, Dominick and the other members of the undercover team are working other, unrelated cases as well.) As in any undercover investigation, the idea is for Officer Cop-of-the-Month and his pals to get used to seeing Dominick and his nephew around, to feel comfortable around them—and eventually they do. At one point Officer Cop-of-the-Month invites Dominick and Nick to a party at his house, and Dominick gets into a conversation with a guy, one of Cop-of-the-Month’s wannabe crew, who sounds like an NYPD cop; there’s just something about the way he talks. Nephew Nick goes out and surreptitiously takes down the plate numbers of the cars parked outside, and when we run them, sure enough, one of them pops to a thirty-four-year-old NYPD sergeant who lives on Long Island and is on modified duty because of a domestic violence incident with his girlfriend. So now we’re not only helping Suffolk PD make a case on one of their bad cops, they’re also helping us make a case on one of our bad cops. We also find out that a couple of New York State Troopers are part of the junior Sopranos cop crew.
So how bad are these cops? Well, they’re using and dealing drugs, cocaine and anabolic steroids, and they’re making some money on it. Dominick vouches for a couple of other IAB undercovers who come in and make some hand-to-hand buys from these guys. But it’s not major-drug-trafficker weight.
But as for the “scores” these guys are always bragging about, we finally decide that that’s just the coke and the steroids talking. The only real scam we find Officer Cop-of-the-Month running is when he tries to talk Dominick into investing a million and a half dollars in a Hollywood movie project, an investment that he says will double in six months. There’s really no movie, of course, but if you locked up everybody who tried to hustle investors for a bogus movie project, half the people in LA would be in jail.
So the bottom line is that these cops aren’t the Sopranos. They’re the Jersey Shore.
Still, they’re cops, and the last thing we want is coked and ’roided up cops in our departments. Finally, after an investigation that stretches out over a year, the Suffolk County PD rounds up fourteen people on various drug-dealing charges, ten of them civilians, four of them cops: Officer Cop-of-the-Month, our NYPD sergeant, and two state troopers—all of whom are immediately suspended. One of the state troopers eventually beats the rap, but the other three cops are all convicted or plead guilty—and they aren’t cops anymore.
Now, although by IAB standards this wasn’t a particularly big case, it still required a lot of IAB time and resources. So why do we do it? Why spend NYPD time and NYPD money on somebody else’s case?
There are two reasons. One practical reason is that a lot of NYPD cops live in Suffolk County, as well as in Nassau and Westchester counties, so we get a lot of cases involving those jurisdictions. I know that if they need our help on a case today, we’re going to need their help on a case next month.
And the other, more general reason is that as far as I’m concerned, any law enforcement supervisor who doesn’t go out of his way to maintain good working relations with other law enforcement agencies—local, state, and federal—simply isn’t doing his job. Turf wars, interagency squabbles, personal feuds between agency chiefs—they may reflect human nature, but they’re also a waste of time, efficiency, and the taxpayer dime. And if you ask them, almost all law enforcement officials will agree with that—at least in theory.
But actually putting the theory into practice can be a little tougher.
* * *
In his book Crime Fighter, the late, great Jack Maple, a onetime Transit cop turned NYPD deputy commissioner under Bill Bratton, and one of the primary architects of the NYPD’s transformation in the mid-1990s, described what he called his “Fantasy Island” concept of cooperative crime fighting.
In Jack’s vision, at least once a week representatives from every law enforcement and law enforcement–related government agency in an entire metropolitan area will sit down at a meeting. There’ll be somebody from the metropolitan police force—like the NYPD—as well as cops from suburban police forces, county sheriffs, city marshals, state police, and highway patrol. The feds will all be there—FBI, DEA, ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), IRS, and even the Secret Service, which in addition to protecting the president and other officials also handles counterfeiting and financial fraud cases. Prosecutors from the local District Attorney’s and US Attorney’s Offices will be there to offer guidance on how criminal cases will be prosecuted in court. There’ll be officials from the local housing authority and building inspector’s office and the city fire marshal and child protective services, and even somebody from the US Department of Agriculture, which handles food stamp fraud cases. And when you got all these guys and gals around a conference table, they’ll do one simple thing:
They’ll share. They’ll share with everybody else detailed information on what cases they’re working on, and what they can do to help some other agency’s case. They’ll share intelligence on criminals who are on their radar, or who have dropped off their radar and maybe turned up on somebody else’s. They’ll agree to freely share resources and manpower and even funding. They’ll do everything but hold hands in a circle and sing “Kumbaya,” because hey, we’re all in this together, right?
Wrong. And that’s why Jack Maple called the idea of complete and unselfish cooperation between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies a “Fantasy Island” scenario. Sure, you can create your various “joint task forces” pairing local cops with state and federal agencies, and at the street level cops and federal agents can work well together. But Jack understood that as long as law enforcement agencies are staffed and led by human beings, there are always going to be petty jealousies and simmering resentments and competitive egos at work, especially at the upper management levels. You can try to control it, but you can never completely eliminate it.
Still, in the new IAB I think we came pretty close to Jack’s ideal. We had to. Because for us, cooperation with other law enforcement agencies was a matter of survival. If the NYPD was to continue to police itself, instead of having that function turned over to an outside agency with its own political agenda, the new Internal Affairs Bureau had to prove that, unlike in the old days, we were open, trustworthy, and capable of working with other law enforcement entities to clean up our own house.
We started with the prosecutors.
There’s only one NYPD, but there are eight different chief prosecutors in New York City that the NYPD deals with—five district attorneys, one in each of the city’s five boroughs; a special narcotics prosecutor for the city of New York, who handles high-end drug cases citywide; and two federal US attorneys, one in the Southern District (which covers Manhattan and the Bronx and some counties north of the city) and one in the Eastern District (which covers Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island as well as Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island). Each of the DAs has his or her own team of investigators—many of them current or retired NYPD detectives—who handle public corruption cases, including police corruption and misconduct, and each US attorney has a team of prosecutors who work with the FBI’s Public Corruption Unit, known as Unit C-14.
And every one of those DAs and US attorneys loves to put crooked cops in jail.
The reason is simple: Crooked cops make news. I mean, if you’re a DA or a US attorney and you call a press conference to announce that you’ve just charged some ordinary street mutt with beating up a bodega owner or moving a couple of keys of cocaine from Washington Heights to Brooklyn, how much ink are you going to get in the papers or airtime on TV? Zero. Because that kind of thing is a “dog bites man” story—that is, it happens all the time. But when you get a cop caught stealing a wallet off a DOA, or giving a handcuffed perp an extra baton whack within view of a surveillance camera, that’s unusual, it’s not something that happens all the time—in other words, it’s a “man bites dog” story.
Now, I’m not saying that prosecutors like to
go after crooked cops for the publicity alone. In my experience most prosecutors have a sincere and deeply held revulsion for public corruption and misconduct. Still, local district attorneys are elected officials, with a finely tuned sense of what attracts the voters’ positive attentions. And while US attorneys are appointed by the president, not elected by the people, they, too, generally have a firm appreciation for the value of good publicity. So when they get an opportunity to stand up at a press conference and announce the latest dramatic victory in the relentless war against police corruption and misconduct, you can bet they’re going to jump on it.
And in the old days before the new IAB, they wouldn’t even tell the NYPD about it. Say, for example, that the Bronx DA had an informant who gave up some crooked cops. DA’s investigators would work the case on their own, maybe arresting a crooked cop, turning him, and putting him back into a precinct with a wire to gather incriminating information on other crooked cops. This could go on for months, or a year, and the old Internal Affairs Division wouldn’t even know about it, because back then nobody talked to the IAD—not the DAs and not the feds, either. Rightly or wrongly, the old IAD had a reputation for leaking like a sieve, and no outside agency was going to endanger its investigation by bringing them in on a case. And then when the investigation was complete, the DA or US attorney would call the NYPD police commissioner and tell him: Hey, we’re indicting two or three or ten of your guys in the morning. And after the arrests the PC would have to stand there at the press conference, looking like a deer in the headlights, while the DA or the US attorney told the world how he—the champion of the people!—was cleaning out the rotten apples in the NYPD.
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