It was embarrassing—and worse, it was inefficient. Why have eight different prosecutors independently investigating police misconduct and corruption in the NYPD when the new IAB is doing the same thing? But at the same time, how does one law enforcement agency—which is to say, us, the IAB—overcome years, even decades of mistrust and suspicion and silence with another law enforcement agency?
First of all, as Jack Maple envisioned, we share. We share intelligence, we share strategy, we even share informants. As I explained in an earlier chapter, in the new IAB, every single allegation of possible criminal behavior by NYPD cops is immediately forwarded to the appropriate DA’s office. It doesn’t matter if it’s cops allegedly mussing up a handcuffed suspect in the Bronx or a senior chief allegedly brandishing a gun in a parking dispute in Brooklyn, the Bronx DA or the Brooklyn DA knows about it from the start. If the DA decides that it doesn’t rate a criminal investigation, fine, IAB will handle it administratively. And if the DA decides to open a criminal investigation, IAB investigators usually take the lead, with a couple of the DA’s own investigators assisting. There’s a practical reason for that. A DA might have a couple dozen investigators available to handle corruption or misconduct cases, while IAB has hundreds. The important thing is that the DA will be kept informed every step of the way—and no one can ever say that the NYPD is dumping police corruption cases or sweeping police misconduct under the rug.
The value of personal relationships between agency heads is another important factor, one that I can’t emphasize enough. As I said earlier, most of the conflicts between law enforcement agencies originate not at the street level but at the boss level. But if my boss trusts and respects your boss, and vice versa, there’s an extra incentive for people to cooperate all the way down the line.
So as IAB chief I made it a point to establish personal relationships with all the DAs and their Public Integrity Unit heads. I met regularly with all of them to discuss ongoing investigations, and part of the discussion always included this question: Are your guys having any problems with my guys? If so, I would find out why. And if my guys were having any problems with the DA’s prosecutors or investigators, I knew that every one of those DAs would do the same.
Don’t misunderstand. That sort of trust and cooperation doesn’t happen overnight. It took months, sometimes even years. But eventually every DA in New York City was working with us, not around us, to investigate corruption and misconduct in the NYPD. In every nonfederal police corruption or misconduct case I’ve mentioned in this book, cooperation with the district attorneys played an important role.
True, there was one thing that never changed, and probably never will. We’d get a criminal case against some corrupt cops, spend hundreds or even thousands of IAB man-hours working it, then hand it on a plate to the DA to take to the grand jury. And then, at the postindictment press conference, the DA would stand there at a lectern bearing the great seal of the Office of the District Attorney and tell the assembled reporters how he and his dogged team of DA’s investigators had relentlessly pursued and apprehended these blue-uniformed betrayers of the public trust. Sure, somewhere in there, usually near the end, the DA would throw in a line about how much the District Attorney’s Office appreciated the invaluable assistance of the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau in bringing these corrupt cops to justice. Which always left me rolling my eyes and thinking: Assistance? He’s thanking us for our assistance? We handled the entire case!
That’s a natural reaction. For one thing, I wanted the public and the press to understand that the NYPD, and specifically the Internal Affairs Bureau, was policing itself, that the Department was trying to cleanse itself of corruption, that it wasn’t a case of the District Attorney’s Office coming in and cleaning up the Department. And I also wanted my IAB investigators to get more credit for their hard work—which is what this book is all about.
Sure, I can understand why the DAs do it; they have to win an election every four years, and IAB doesn’t. Still, it rankles a bit.
And it’s the same thing when we’re dealing with the feds.
The NYPD and federal law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, have a long tradition of butting heads. Yes, the NYPD works with the feds in a variety of joint task forces—the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the NYPD/DEA New York Drug Enforcement Task Force, the aforementioned NYPD/ICE/IRS El Dorado Task Force, and so on. They generally work well together, but there are always tensions, usually coming from the top down—and especially with the FBI. That’s because both the NYPD and the FBI are absolutely convinced that they are the premier law enforcement agency in the world—naturally I’m on the NYPD side of that argument—and that they can do any job better than the other guys can.
That’s particularly true in the field of counterterrorism. After the 9/11 attacks, under Commissioner Ray Kelly the NYPD vastly expanded its counterterrorist efforts, including the creation of a new NYPD Counter-Terrorism Bureau, the expansion of the Intelligence Division, the training and equipping of special antiterrorism “Hercules” teams, and even the posting of NYPD detectives in a variety of foreign capitals to gather intelligence on terrorist activities. It’s fair to say that this annoyed a number of high-ranking members of various federal agencies, including the FBI, who thought that counterterrorism activities in New York City and the rest of the US was their job.
Well, it’s one thing for the NYPD as a whole to have turf battles with the feds. After all, if the FBI uncovers a terrorist plot directed at New York City, nobody’s going to criticize the NYPD for not uncovering it first, because foiling terrorist plots is the FBI’s job. On the other hand, if the FBI single-handedly investigates and arrests some NYPD cops for misconduct or corruption, everybody’s going to say: Hey, why didn’t IAB know about these corrupt cops? That’s their job! What are they, asleep at the wheel?
So IAB had to cooperate with the FBI and the US attorneys—not the phony, forced-smile, grip-and-grin-for-the-camera sort of cooperation, but real cooperation from the top down. And we did that the same way we did it with the DAs—through free exchange of intelligence and the development of personal relationships.
Again, it wasn’t easy, because in the pre-IAB days the FBI and federal prosecutors had never talked to the old IAD about an ongoing investigation; sometimes the first time that NYPD officials would know of an FBI corruption investigation of the NYPD was when they read about it in the newspapers.
But in the early 1990s, Deputy Commissioner for Internal Affairs Walter Mack, himself a former federal prosecutor, tried to address the problem. In discussions with the US attorneys, we came up with a system to handle federal cases of NYPD corruption and misconduct.
Part of the new operating procedure was that if a potential case involving NYPD personnel originated with the FBI or the DEA or some other federal agency—for example, if an FBI informant gave up some allegedly corrupt cops—the criminal case would remain federal, but the feds would bring in IAB to jointly investigate the case. Because IAB had far more investigators than the federal agencies’ public integrity units, and far more experience in investigating corrupt cops, in practice IAB would handle most or all of the investigation, and the US attorney had the option of prosecuting the case in the federal court system.
But in any interagency effort, there also has to be cooperation and respect at the street level. And that’s why we created IAB Group 25—the Federal Liaison Group.
Cops by nature are suspicious of almost everyone—including other cops. Before they’ll completely trust each other they’ll spend a long time circling around each other and sizing each other up: Is this guy a hairbag or a hard charger? Does he really know what he’s doing, or did he get where he is because he’s got a hook? Will he be the first guy through the door on a search warrant, or the last? Can I trust this guy to watch my back?
The sniffing-out period takes a lot of time. So if you’re always randomly throwing together cops from different units—and especially different agencies—to c
onduct joint investigations, it’s going to be a long while before they actually get to the “joint” part. On the other hand, if you have the same NYPD cops working with the same FBI or DEA agents on case after case after case, the sniffing-out period is quickly over with and the cops and federal agents will actually be working together. They develop a camaraderie, and pretty soon they’ll be lined up together at the bar after work, trading war stories and arguing about whose top brass are the most screwed up. They become in effect a unit, not an odd collection of cops and agents who don’t know or trust each other.
That was the theory behind Group 25. We took a dozen IAB investigators, commanded first by the late Lieutenant John Donnelly and later by Sergeant Joe Clarino, and made them the lead group on any IAB case with a federal component. They were specially trained in federal criminal laws and procedures, and they worked closely with the New York US attorneys and the FBI’s Public Corruption Unit—the same people over and over again.
I’ve already mentioned a number of cases in which IAB and the feds worked together. The Louima case was one; the Dennis Sindone drug rip-off case was another; the Rachko/Vasquez rip-off of the $169,000 in El Dorado Task Force buy money still another. But there are numerous other examples. In one 2010 case, an FBI informant in Brooklyn gives up a cop in the 68th Precinct who’s smuggling bootleg cigarettes. That may not sound like much, but when you can buy cancer sticks for six bucks a pack retail in Virginia—less for wholesale, and for nothing if you just hijack them off a truck—and then sell them for twelve bucks a pack retail in New York City, well, the possibilities are obvious. With the FBI we set up a sting on this cop and other Six-Eight cops, using wiretaps and IAB and FBI undercovers, and arrange for them to transport stolen slot machines and even some guns—which we render inoperable—across state lines. In the end, eight current and retired NYPD cops are arrested, along with four civilians, and convicted on federal charges.
In another 2010 case, a robbery crew led by three NYPD cops—one a former undercover cop in the elite Intelligence Division—stages a bogus raid on a warehouse in New Jersey, flashing their NYPD shields and tying up a dozen employees before loading half a million dollars in designer perfume into some rented trucks. Because they’re NYPD cops, or claim to be, the FBI calls us in and we start a joint investigation. Actually it’s a pretty easy case, since these knuckleheads left behind at the scene not only a paper printout that we traced back to an NYPD computer, but they also left behind one of the rented trucks—which one of these geniuses had rented in his own name. We quickly roll them up and they’re prosecuted on federal interstate robbery charges.
Usually we helped the feds make criminal cases against bad NYPD cops in federal court. But sometimes the feds helped us make cases against bad cops in state court. Like in the case of the cop known as “Marty the Murderer.”
It’s 2001, and an off-duty NYPD sergeant named Martin Peters is having a violent argument with his ex-girlfriend, a newly hired federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention officer who is the mother of his two children, at her apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Enraged, Peters draws a gun—not his service weapon or off-duty gun—and shoots her three times in the head, killing her. During the melee Peters also accidentally shoots and wounds his best friend, a guy named Nigel, a childhood friend from Peters’s native Trinidad who was delivering some clothes for the kids when the argument started.
Being a cop, Peters knows he’ll have to come up with a cover story to divert attention away from him. So while his friend Nigel is lying there bleeding on the floor, Peters orders him to tell the cops that an intruder broke in and shot him and Peters’s ex-girlfriend—and if Nigel tells the cops otherwise, Peters says, he’ll kill Nigel and his whole family, best friend or not. Nigel knows that Peters is serious, so even though Peters has almost killed him—the shooting leaves Nigel a paraplegic—that’s the story Nigel tells the homicide detectives: a masked intruder broke in and shot him and the ex-girlfriend.
The homicide detectives don’t believe the story, and neither do we—and neither do the dead woman’s family and friends, who later tell us she was terrified of Peters, that he had physically abused her for years and used his position as a cop to intimidate her and her family into not reporting it. But with no physical evidence and the only eyewitness—Nigel—sticking by his story that an intruder shot him and the ex-girlfriend, the DA doesn’t have enough evidence to charge Peters. And we can’t even fire him from the NYPD. He’s not charged with a crime, and under civil service rules all we can do is take his shield and gun and put him on modified duty escorting prisoners in the Manhattan Criminal Courts building, where he’s shunned by other cops, who call him Marty the Murderer.
You can imagine how frustrating it is to have a cop like that on the NYPD payroll, but that’s the law. In fact, this guy even has the gall to sue the Department for not promoting him to lieutenant while he’s on modified duty!
But we never give up on the case. Finally, after almost four years of investigation, working with the NYPD Cold Case squad and ICE, we get enough evidence for the US attorney to file immigration fraud charges against both Peters and Nigel. It turns out that more than a decade earlier, shortly before he entered the Police Academy, Peters had obtained US citizenship through a sham marriage to a US citizen—a detail that somehow slipped past the Department background investigators. In other words, this guy should never have been a cop in the first place. As for Nigel, when faced with time in federal prison and then deportation back to Trinidad, where the social services safety net for paraplegics leaves something to be desired, he suddenly remembers what really happened on the day of the murder and agrees to testify against Peters. The Brooklyn DA’s office files state murder charges against Peters, who is later convicted and sentenced to forty-three years to life—and Marty the Murderer is no longer a cop.
Well, I could go on, but you get the point about our cooperation with the feds. It wasn’t just lip service, or public relations. In IAB we really did work closely with the federal agencies.
I’m not saying that every single joint operation that IAB conducted with federal agencies went smoothly. In police work there’s always a chance that things can go wrong—especially when some high-level supervisor decides that protecting his own bureaucratic turf is more important than getting the job done.
A joint IAB/FBI operation the feds called “Operation Bump-in-the-Night” is a case in point.
* * *
It starts like this:
The FBI has an informant who gives up a drug rip crew that’s hitting drug dealers’ apartments in Washington Heights, booming their doors and grabbing whatever cash or drugs are inside. The informant says that some of the guys in this crew are NYPD cops, that they’re driving Crown Vics and waving NYPD shields when they do the rip-offs. So the FBI calls us in, and together we set up a sting.
First we rent an apartment on the top floor of a five-story walk-up apartment building in a seedy, weed-choked residential section of Washington Heights, tech it up with surveillance cameras, and also rent another apartment on the fourth floor where we can monitor the cameras.
Of course, when I say we rent the apartments, I don’t mean that some FBI or IAB guys in suits simply knock on the apartment super’s door and plunk down the first and last month’s rent. At this point in the history of Washington Heights, chances are that if the super or the other residents in the apartment building aren’t actually in the drug trade, then they have an uncle or a cousin who is—and in five minutes everybody in the neighborhood will know that the cops are in Apartment 5C. In an undercover operation, even renting an apartment is an undercover operation. So we send in some of our Spanish-speaking undercovers—IAB and FBI—guys who look like drug dealers, to rent the apartments, and then over the next weeks we have other undercovers posing as dealers and runners going in and out of Apartment 5C; we have to make it look like they’re using the apartment as a drug and money drop.
The plan is to p
lant $50,000 in marked cash—half of it the FBI’s money, half ours—in two bags in the apartment and then have the informant tip the rip-off crew that the money’s in there. When the crew hits the apartment, we’ll have them on the surveillance cameras and a joint NYPD Emergency Service Unit A-Team and FBI SWAT team will burst in, put them on the floor, and then we’ll move in and cuff them and separately debrief them. (In cop talk, to “bump” somebody is to grab them unexpectedly, which is why the FBI is calling this Operation Bump-in-the-Night.)
Or at least that’s the plan until the last minute, when a new FBI assistant special agent in charge (ASAC), who we’ve never worked with before, suddenly announces at our final tactical planning meeting that there’s a change in the plan: The FBI SWAT team and FBI agents will handle the takedown and arrests by themselves, while our IAB guys will fall back and play a supporting role, and the NYPD A-Team won’t be used at all. Last-minute changes like this are almost always a bad idea, but when we and the ASAC’s own FBI guys start to protest, the ASAC gets his back up and says: Look, it’s an FBI informant, which makes it an FBI case, and the FBI is going to handle it. End of story.
Well, technically he’s got us there. That’s the agreement; their informant, they’re the lead agency. But hey, I work at One Police Plaza, so I know a little something about bureaucratic egos. And I know exactly what this ASAC is doing. He’s doing what the FBI brass has been historically famous—or infamous—for since the days of J. Edgar Hoover: He’s bigfooting the locals, letting them do the lion’s share of the work and then shunting them—us—aside so the FBI can grab all the credit.
I’m a three-star chief in the NYPD, which means I don’t take orders from some pushy FBI ASAC. So for a minute I think about pulling IAB out altogether. But that would be letting my professional ego get the better of me. Besides that, I have tremendous respect for the FBI public corruption squad agents who are on the team, their new ASAC notwithstanding. And having gone through a lot of these things, I suspect that before the operation is over, they’re going to need us.
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