So that night the rip crew rolls up in front of the apartment house, six white and Hispanic males in three cars, including a Crown Vic; they kick the door to Apartment 5C and grab the $50,000 that’s in the two bags while our surveillance cameras record it. But before the bad guys can get out the FBI SWAT guys move in and, although this wasn’t part of the original tac plan, they toss a couple of flash-bang grenades into the apartment—BOOM! BOOM!—to give the bad guys a little shock and awe.
Shocked and awed they certainly are. When the FBI SWAT guys swarm into the smoke-filled apartment—FBI! On the floor!—the bad guys quickly drop down and give up. As it turns out, the badges they’re wearing are fake, and when we run the plate numbers of their cars, none of them, including the Crown Vic, comes back to the NYPD or any other law enforcement agency. The good news for us is that these guys aren’t crooked cops; they’re police impersonators, like so many other rip crews we’ve dealt with. The crew leader turns out to be a bail bondsman from New Jersey, and another member of the crew is a New Jersey bounty hunter.
Still, there are a few little problems with this FBI-led operation.
For one thing, when the flash-bangs go off in Apartment 5C, the 911 switchboard starts lighting up with calls from nearby residents reporting an explosion and fire. We hadn’t been expecting the flash-bangs to be used, and by the time we call the emergency dispatch center and tell them this is a police operation, the street is already swarming with sirens-screaming, lights-flashing FDNY fire trucks and buses—that is, ambulances. The entire operation scene is in chaos.
And there’s another small problem. When the FBI agents start counting bad guy heads in Apartment 5C, they make a pretty alarming discovery: Six bad guys went into the apartment, but they’ve only got five bad guys in custody. In the smoke and confusion, one suspect has gotten away, apparently through an open window at the back of the apartment.
Oh, and one other thing. One of the bags that had the cash in it is missing, too.
The deputy chief on the scene is calling me regularly and keeping me apprised about what’s going on. (Much as I’d like to be, I’m not at the scene, because my theory of management is to put my best people on a job and then let them do it; too much brass at any operation just gets in the way.) And my instructions to the deputy chief are clear: First, our IAB guys are to grab the remaining bag of cash—which they do—and not give it up for any reason. And second, IAB is to do everything possible to assist the FBI in recovering the missing suspect and the FBI’s missing cash.
That’s right—the FBI’s missing cash. Our position, and we’re sticking to it, is that $25,000 of the remaining cash is IAB’s money, and the money that’s in the wind—well, that’s the FBI’s problem.
Now, given the way the FBI ASAC treated my IAB guys, you may be wondering, Am I deriving any vengeful pleasure from all this? Do I enjoy imagining how the ASAC is going to have to break this bad news to his FBI bosses? Does it make me happy to envision the many, many reams of paperwork the ASAC is going to have to fill out to explain how the operation he masterminded is short one perp and a bagful of FBI money?
No, of course not. That would be wrong. How could you even think such a thing?
In the end, though, it turns out OK for everybody. It seems that when the flash-bangs went off in the apartment, and before the smoke cleared, the missing perp had grabbed one of the money bags and tossed it out the back window, then he crawled out the window and tried to make a Tarzan-style leap to a nearby fire escape—except that unlike Tarzan, he missed and fell five stories to the ground, suffering a nasty compound fracture to his ankle. Unable to walk, this guy crawled on his belly out from behind the apartment and up to one of the ambulances on the scene, where he told the EMTs he was a neighbor who was running over to see what was happening and he tripped and broke his ankle. The EMTs had no idea what was going on, or that a perp was missing—confusion still reigned—so they loaded him into the bus and were about to transport him to the hospital when one of our IAB guys happened to pass by and looked in the back of the ambulance and recognized the “patient” as one of the perps. So the perp went to the hospital, but he went there under arrest.
As for the missing cash—the FBI’s missing cash—we finally find it under some weeds and bushes in the backyard of the apartment where the perp threw it. We cheerfully return it to the FBI.
And in fact, the perp falling out of the window in the Bump-in-the-Night case actually plays out in our favor with another FBI unit that IAB often works with—the FBI civil rights unit, which investigates, among other things, allegations of police brutality.
Whenever a suspect is seriously injured during an arrest by NYPD cops, IAB investigates the incident. Sometimes it’s a shooting, sometimes a suspect gets a broken arm or leg while fighting the cops—and more often than you might think, it’s a suspect who gets hurt jumping or falling from a roof or a window, just like the perp in the Bump-in-the-Night case.
Almost any NYPD cop can tell you stories about doing a vertical and finding a suspect trying to hide by hanging by his fingertips from the roof ledge of a six- or eight-story building. Or about kicking a door on a drug warrant and having a perp jump out of a second- or third- or even fourth-story window, or if it’s higher than that, trying to shimmy down a drainpipe or leap to a fire escape or swing like Batman down a TV cable. And sometimes they don’t make it.
And sometimes if they don’t make it, they—if they survive the fall—or others will claim that they didn’t fall at all, that the cops threw them out the window or off the roof. So whenever a suspect is hurt in a fall, we conduct a thorough investigation. We interview witnesses, take statements from other cops at the scene, examine physical evidence like a drainpipe freshly pulled out from a wall or a freshly broken TV cable or the alleged victim’s handmarks in the grime on the very edge of a fire escape that was just a little too far away.
And in all my years as chief of IAB, while there were numerous cases of criminals throwing people off roofs, we never had a case where the evidence proved or even strongly suggested that cops had actually tossed a person out of or off a building. Sometimes witnesses changed their stories, in the same way that a witness who claimed to have seen a cop fatally push a twenty-nine-year-old man off a five-story building during the riots after the Kiko Garcia shooting in 1992 later admitted under oath that he had lied. Other times the physical evidence contradicts the allegation. I’m not saying it never happened in the long history of the NYPD, and I remember the aforementioned Sergeant Psycho threatening to throw another cop off a precinct-house roof. But in almost twenty years I never had a documented case of a cop actually doing it.
Still, there are always police brutality lawyers who never let the facts get in the way of a good defenestration-by-cop case. And if the allegation gets a little attention in the press, we’ll get a call from the FBI civil rights unit, wanting to see what we’ve got, to see if some citizen’s constitutional rights have been violated by being tossed out a window by police officers. Once we show them the evidence, they’ll say, Okay, we guess it didn’t happen—this time. But there’s always this lingering hint of skepticism, this suspicion that NYPD cops do this kind of thing all the time. It’s like they’re thinking: C’mon, you’re telling us that some guy intentionally jumped out of a fourth-floor window or took a Flying Wallendas–like leap at an eighth-floor fire escape just to avoid getting arrested? Surely the cops must have had something to do with it.
That’s exactly what I’m telling them. And after the perp in the FBI-led Bump-in-the-Night case takes a nosedive out the window and breaks his ankle, I’m also telling them: Hey, look, this kind of thing happens all the time, and not just with the NYPD. Do you think your own FBI guys threw that mope out the window?
So like I said, something good came out of our uncharacteristic clash with the FBI in that case. And in fairness, I should say that the FBI ASAC in question eventually came around—or at least he never tried to bigfoot IAB again. IAB’s
Group 25 and the FBI’s Public Corruption Unit agents, especially Supervisory Special Agents Bob Hennigan and Rodney Miller, continued to conduct joint operations just that way—with joint respect, joint cooperation, and joint effort.
But there was still one thing missing from all that joint-ness.
Feds being feds, IAB still never got joint credit at the press conferences . . .
* * *
I mentioned earlier that while I was chief of IAB we made it a point to cooperate with New York City district attorneys. But as the Long Island Soprano Cops case shows, there were times when the DAs in the suburban counties also reached out to IAB—and times when we reached out to them.
The case of the NYPD recruit and the hit man is a good example.
In the summer of 2006 we get a call at the IAB Command Center from an NYPD Academy recruit—call him Recruit No. 1—with a strange story to tell. He says he knows this other Academy recruit named Kabeer Din, a twenty-two-year-old Pakistan-born guy who had briefly served as a Baltimore PD cop before applying to the NYPD Academy. They both live in Suffolk County, and sometimes they ride into the city together on the LIRR (Long Island Railroad). It’s not like they’re close friends or anything—they’ve only been at the Academy together three weeks—but at some point Din starts telling Recruit No. 1 about the problems he’s having with his twenty-four-year-old India-born girlfriend, who also lives in Suffolk County. He wants to get married, Din says, but she doesn’t, so now he wants to find somebody who will take care of her—take care of her as in kill her. So does Recruit No. 1 happen to know anybody who’s in the hit-man business?
Recruit No. 1 can hardly believe it. He assumes this is some kind of sick joke, that the guy doesn’t really mean it. But then he starts to wonder if this might be some kind of Internal Affairs integrity test—IAB is everywhere!—to see if he’ll turn Din in. So he calls us—and at first we’re dubious. A Police Academy recruit asks another recruit who he barely knows to set him up with a killer for hire? It sounds pretty far-fetched—not to mention unbelievably dumb on Din’s part. Also, Din has been through police background investigations and psych screening twice—once in Baltimore, once in New York—and no one detected any problems. He did okay during his brief career with Baltimore PD, and in his even briefer career so far with the NYPD.
Still, we have to check it out. We set up a controlled phone call from Recruit No. 1 to Din, and while we’re listening in, Recruit No. 1 says: Hey, you know that thing you were talkin’ about? I got a guy who says he can do it for, like, three thousand dollars. He’s in the construction business, he’s connected, and he can make sure the “package” will never be found, you know, like buried under a parking lot or something.
So does Din say: What are you talking about? What guy? What package? What three thousand dollars?
No. What Din essentially says is: Great! When can I meet the guy?
Since this conspiracy originated in Suffolk County, and the intended victim lives there, this is going to be a Suffolk County case—if there is a case. We contact Suffolk County PD and the Suffolk County DA and together we work out a plan. Recruit No. 1 will tell Din to meet the “hit man”—actually a Suffolk PD undercover—in the parking lot at a strip mall near the LIRR station in Holtsville. We’ll have the hit man’s car teched up for audio and video.
So at the appointed time Din shows up, climbs in the car, and makes the deal with the hit man/undercover. He gives him two hundred bucks as a down payment and a credit card to hold as good faith on the balance, and he also gives him his girlfriend’s address and photo. No, Din says, he doesn’t care how the hit man/undercover kills her, just so long as she’s dead and buried and won’t ever be found. He also tells the undercover that once he becomes an NYPD cop he can provide the hit man and his Mob pals with guns and access to classified NYPD databases.
We—IAB investigators and Suffolk PD detectives—are monitoring all this from surveillance cars, and at this point we move in and arrest Din. The Suffolk DA charges him with second-degree conspiracy to commit murder—and, it goes without saying, his NYPD career is over.
But here’s the really strange part. His girlfriend, the young woman he wanted dead, testifies at his trial—for the defense! Before, she didn’t want to marry him, but now that’s he locked up for plotting to kill her she can’t live without the guy. After Din is convicted, she pleads with the judge to go easy on him so they can get married—a request the judge wisely rejects. He gives the former NYPD recruit seven to twenty years—and he also imposes a thirty-year restraining order barring him from contact with his erstwhile fiancée even after he gets out of prison. The judge says he hopes that by the year 2036 the young woman will have wised up.
Another strange case that had IAB working with suburban detectives and prosecutors happened in Westchester County. It’s November 2013, and this real estate developer in Yonkers is asleep in his bed when he wakes up with a searing pain in his head and his pillow covered in blood. Stumbling from the bed, he finds his wife lying apparently unconscious at the foot of the stairs, the victim of an intruder who she says knocked her out, then came up to the bedroom and shot a .22-caliber bullet into the husband’s head. It’s a miracle he’s still alive.
But while he’s in the ER, and the Yonkers PD detectives are investigating, they realize that something’s not right. There’s no sign of forced entry, the wife’s injuries are superficial at worst, there’s been a history of tension in the marriage, and the wife refuses to cooperate. They’re convinced she shot her husband, who for whatever reason is standing behind her on the intruder story—and they call IAB to help with the case. The reason they call us is because the wife is an NYPD employee, a Department psychologist who gives psychiatric screenings to NYPD applicants—which may partly explain why guys like the murder-plotting NYPD recruit mentioned above got into the Academy in the first place.
IAB handles cases involving corruption or misconduct by NYPD civilian employees as well as police officers—and allegedly shooting your husband in the head is pretty serious misconduct. We suspend her and assist the Yonkers detectives in the investigation, but at first there’s no indictable case, because the husband is still backing her up on the intruder story. It’s only later, after the NYPD psychologist wife files for divorce, that the husband decides that maybe she shot him after all. She’s indicted for attempted murder, and as of this writing the case is still pending.
There were a lot of cross-jurisdictional cases like that involving NYPD cops or civilian employees who lived in the suburbs. Most of them didn’t involve murder-for-hire plots or bullets in the head, but they were still serious: domestic violence cases with injuries, DWIs with property damage or injuries, NYPD cops getting into fights in bars, you name it. In the NYPD even cops who are off-duty are still on-duty twenty-four/seven, and when they get in trouble anywhere for anything even remotely serious, we have to look into it. So it’s important for IAB to maintain good working relationships with cops and prosecutors outside the city—and we did.
IAB worked with nonpolice New York City government agencies as well. For example, at one point we start getting a lot of complaints about money or jewelry being taken from Aided cases in the Bronx, people who were having some medical emergency and had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. Family members are saying that at some point between the time the cops and the Fire Department’s emergency medical technicians (EMTs) arrive at the scene and the time the patient gets to the hospital, Mom’s ring or Grandpa’s watch or some cash hidden in a bedroom dresser drawer has gone missing. And they’re blaming the cops.
But when we cross-check the incident reports, which contain the names of all the cops and rescue workers sent to the scene, we see that while all of the missing property cases involve different cops, they all involve the same team of EMTs from the Fire Department. That’s either a hell of a coincidence or one of these EMTs is stealing.
So working with the FDNY Inspector General’s Office, we make sure this p
articular EMT team is in the area and then phone in an Aided call to one of our rented IAB apartments. When the EMTs arrive one of our female undercovers is there, apparently unconscious. It’s not easy to pretend to be unconscious, especially in front of trained medical personnel, but this gal is good; I actually saw her practicing for the role, and if I hadn’t known better I would have called the morgue to have the body taken away. So anyway, the EMTs put her on a stretcher and load her into the ambulance, along with her purse, and en route to the hospital one of the EMTs fishes some marked bills out of her wallet. Later he’s confronted by the IG and IAB investigators and admits to a series of thefts; he’s arrested and later fired. We had a number of cases like that.
Okay, sure, there’s not a lot of money involved here; you might even think that these are petty crimes, not worth the extensive time and effort we put into them. But civilian city employees take an oath to obey the law just like NYPD cops do, and when they violate that oath there’s nothing petty about it. It’s corruption, and it undermines public confidence in government agencies. Besides, if it was your mom’s ring or your grandpa’s meager savings that was being stolen, you’d want the thief caught, too.
I have to emphasize here that in terms of corruption, the FDNY is the same as the NYPD: The vast majority of FDNY firefighters and EMTs are honest, hardworking, and in most cases incredibly brave; it’s the one-percenters you have to worry about. And running the integrity tests may have had some deterrent effect even on the one-percenters. Although we only did a half dozen of these integrity tests with the FDNY over a period of several years, the EMT union put the word out to its members over their website that the NYPD was running a slew of these tests—IAB is everywhere!—and reminding its members that they had to act professionally at all times. Which almost all of them would do anyway.
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