IAB did a number of other integrity tests for city agencies that were having problems. One in particular that stands out is what I call the Bag of Bones case.
Again, we’re getting a lot of complaints, this time from Brooklyn, about property missing from DOAs, dead on arrivals, people who are clearly past help when the responding cops and EMTs show up. But when we look at the incident reports, once again it’s different cops, and this time it’s different EMTs as well. The only common denominator in the missing property incidents is a certain female morgue attendant—officially, a mortuary technician—who helped transport the bodies to the morgue. So working with the ME’s office and the city’s Department of Investigations, the plan is to take one of our rented IAB apartments, stock it with furniture and clothes to make it look occupied, tech it up with video cameras, plant some marked money, and then phone in a dead body call while the female morgue attendant is on shift.
The problem is, How do we get a dead body in there? We obviously can’t use an actual dead body as part of an integrity test, even if it’s a John Doe with no next of kin—that would be a violation of the laws concerning the disposition of human remains, not to mention being disrespectful to the dead . . . and more than a little creepy. So instead we get about sixty pounds of cow bones and offal from a slaughterhouse, put it in a duffel bag, and let it sit in the hot apartment for a week or so. Then we call in a “bad smell” report to the local precinct.
For a cop, bad smell calls are the worst. When someone dies alone in an apartment and lies there long enough for the decomposition smell to seep into the hall, you can imagine what it’s like inside the apartment. I don’t want to ruin your lunch, so just trust me when I say it’s not something you ever want to see, or smell. But cops have to do it all the time.
So anyway, the unlucky cops who catch the bad smell call show up and get the building super to let them into the apartment. No one’s inside, and the cops don’t know whether that bloody, smelly mess in the duffel bag is a cut-up human body or what. So they call the ME’s office—remember, the ME is in on the sting—and an assistant ME (AME) shows up with the female morgue tech. He tells the cops the bones are almost certainly not human, but he’ll have the morgue tech take them back to the ME’s office to make sure. The AME leaves, the cops wait out in the hall—they can’t stand the smell—and on the surveillance cameras we see the morgue tech grab $460 in marked cash that’s on the dresser. She’s arrested as she leaves the building with the bag of bones and the money in her pocket, and later she’s fired and prosecuted.
It’s actually kind of pathetic. I mean, here’s this morgue technician being paid just $37,000 a year to haul around dead bodies, many of them in unspeakable condition, a job that most of us couldn’t or wouldn’t do for a million bucks, and she ruins her life for a lousy few hundred dollars here and there. You may even be tempted to feel sorry for her—as I am, too. But again, corruption is corruption, no matter the amount of money involved, and the citizens of New York City have a right to expect that city employees will respect their property—even after they’re dead.
I could tell you more stories about IAB’s work with other agencies, but I think you get the point. Although police officers in trouble get the most attention, public corruption and misconduct isn’t just about cops; it’s about any public agency that employs human beings, with all the failings and frailties thereof. And as the biggest—and in my opinion by far the best—single anticorruption law enforcement unit in the world, the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau is in a unique position to help.
The aforementioned Jack Maple may not have thought it would ever be possible. But when it comes to fighting official misconduct and corruption, as far as IAB is concerned, we really are all in this together.
Chapter 11
* * *
CANNIBALS IN THE ETHER
It’s the late summer of 2012 and a woman named Kathleen has a problem. Her husband, twenty-eight-year-old NYPD Officer Gilberto “Gil” Valle, who works the four-to-twelve shift at the 26th Precinct in upper Manhattan, isn’t being as caring and attentive as a new husband and father of a one-year-old daughter should be. When he gets home to the couple’s apartment in the Forest Hills section of Queens, he’s withdrawn, sullen, uncommunicative; all he wants to do is log on to the Internet and tap away at the keyboard through the wee morning hours.
And there’s one other problem: Kathleen has reason to believe that her husband, Officer Valle, may be a cannibal.
The reason she believes this is because when she installs spyware on the couple’s shared Mac laptop computer—the spyware records every website visited and every keystroke—she finds that her husband has been perusing some really creepy “fetish” websites, with names like darkfetishnet, fetlife, darkfet, and so on, most of which seem to be concerned with sadomasochism and bondage, and even the torture, murder, and dismembering of women; there are images of women posed naked, hogtied, and covered with blood. She also finds that her husband has been using online screen names like “girlmeathunter” and “girldealer.”
At that point, she’s out of there. She packs up the baby—and the Mac laptop—and flies home to her parents’ house in Reno, Nevada. But then, as she looks deeper into what’s on the laptop, it gets worse. She finds that her husband and the father of her baby has been exchanging hundreds, even thousands, of e-mails with other men in which they discuss killing, cooking, and eating women—including her and some of her friends.
This is really sick stuff. The e-mails feature photos of the targeted women, including one of Kathleen in a bikini, along with details such as age, height, weight, bra size. In one e-mail with a guy whose screen name is Moody Blues, Valle talks about murdering a mutual friend of his and Kathleen’s, a young woman named Kimberly: Once she is dead, Valle writes, I will take her out and properly butcher her body and cook the meat right away. And that could be out on a rotisserie too. In another message Valle writes, I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus . . . Cook her over a low heat, keep her alive as long as possible. In another message he writes, Her days are numbered. I’m glad you’re on board. She does look tasty, doesn’t she? To which his correspondent replies, You do know if we don’t waste any of her there is nearly 75 pounds of food there.
And on and on, ad nauseam—literally ad nauseam.
To Kathleen, it doesn’t sound like these guys are kidding. She’s terrified for herself and for her friends and for other women out there. So she contacts the Reno office of the FBI, which contacts the New York Field Office of the FBI, which, since Valle is an NYPD cop, contacts us. That morning Sergeant Joe Clarino of Group 25, the federal liaison group, comes walking into my office with a case file in his hand and a strange look on his face.
Got one for you, Chief, Joe says. This you’re not going to believe.
So Joe starts laying it out. And as he’s telling me about the case, of course I’m shocked, as almost anybody would be—this is really sick stuff. But I’m really not all that surprised. Ever since the Louima case, I’ve made it a point not to be surprised by anything.
And it’s not like this guy is the first cannibal—alleged cannibal—I’ve ever heard of. For example, back in the late 1980s, when I had the supervisor duty in Manhattan South, there was a guy named Daniel Paul Rakowitz who I’d often see in Tompkins Square Park—he was hard to miss, since he looked like Charlie Manson and walked around with a pet chicken on a leash—who murdered his dancer girlfriend and then cut her up in the bathtub and allegedly served her body parts in a stew to his fellow transients in the park. (He was later found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a mental facility.)
More recently, I’d gotten a call from a friend of mine, Dietrich Reithuber, the chief of the homicide bureau in Munich, Germany—we’d met at the FBI National Academy, an international training program for law enforcement supervisors—who wanted my help in tracking down a potential victim of a cannibal. They had a guy in Germany named Armin Meiwes, aka �
��Der Metzgermeister,” The Master Butcher, who had advertised on a website called the Cannibal Café looking for people who would volunteer to be killed and eaten—and he got about two hundred responses from prospective volunteers, including at least one from the US. Let me repeat that: Two hundred people from around the world contacted this guy and said they wanted to be killed and eaten. True, the vast majority of them backed out, but one guy from Berlin actually met with Meiwes and was voluntarily killed and consumed; Meiwes was later convicted of manslaughter. My friend Dietrich was looking for other possible victims, and I helped him determine that the “volunteer” from the US was one of the ones who’d backed out.
So the subject of cannibalism, or at least people fantasizing about cannibalism on the Internet, isn’t completely beyond my range of police experience. Still, as far as anyone can remember, we’ve never had a cannibal or even a cannibal fetishist wearing an NYPD uniform and an NYPD shield and carrying a gun.
But the question is, Is Officer Gilberto Valle a real cannibal? Or is he just playing one on the Internet? Is he really plotting to kidnap and murder and eat women, or is it just some sort of twisted fantasy that he doesn’t really intend to follow through on?
Either way, we’re pretty concerned about this guy, and although we don’t have enough to arrest him—at this point, we can’t even prove that he personally sent the messages—until we get it figured out we don’t want to let him out of our sight. So we put a twenty-four-hour surveillance on him. We follow him home from the precinct, follow him back to work the next morning, watch where he goes, see whom he talks to. We also run a complete background on him, and discreetly talk to some people who know him.
And the only abnormal thing that stands out about Officer Gilberto Valle is just how outwardly normal he appears. He’s medium height, moon-faced, and a little pudgy, kind of a nebbish. He grew up in Forest Hills, parents were divorced, graduated from Archbishop Malloy High School, and then attended the University of Maryland as a psychology major. After graduation he joined the NYPD in 2006, and in the six years since then he’s had a thoroughly undistinguished career—no complaints, no significant arrests, no major commendations, average in every way. Currently he’s working as a driver for a patrol sergeant.
And the people who know him, cops and civilians alike, eventually tell us that he seems like a regular, normal guy. Of course, cops are hesitant to come right out and say anything bad about another cop, but if they think another cop is strange in some way they’ll roll their eyes, or they’ll hum the theme song from The Twilight Zone or somehow get the message across without directly saying anything. But we’re getting none of that with this guy. He’s quiet, polite, and has never expressed (except on the Internet) or displayed any hostility or aggression toward women.
And then there are the messages that we’ve retrieved from the computer that Kathleen took from their apartment. They appear to have been exchanged with people—we assume most of them are men, but who knows?—that Valle met on a website called Dark Fetish Network, or DFN, which has about fifty thousand members—about five thousand of them “active” members—who are interested in rape, necrophilia, erotic asphyxiation, and, yes, cannibalism. Members share photos and tell each other stories about those various activities, but the website’s home page has a disclaimer to the effect that it’s all just fantasy—“This place is about fantasies only, so play safe!” the disclaimer states.
Another thing about the messages that Valle exchanged: Although the photos of the women he sends with his messages are real, the details he gives about them—where they live, what their jobs are, etc.—are not. Other facts are made up as well. Valle tells his correspondents that he’s got a pulley device in his basement to hang women by their heels—but he doesn’t have a basement. He says he’s got a remote cabin in Pennsylvania where he wants to take women and rape and kill them, but we know from our background check that he has no such place. He says he has an oven that is, quote, Big enough to fit one of these girls if I folded their legs, unquote, which he doesn’t have. He makes “plans” with his correspondents to kidnap and murder three different women at three different locations on the same day, a physical impossibility. There’s no evidence that he ever communicated with his “co-conspirators” by phone, or that he even knows their true names or where they live.
And on and on. In short, there’s no hard evidence whatever that Valle physically attacked any women in the past or that he seriously intends to in the future. The more we look at it, the more convinced we are that this is all just fantasizing on Valle’s part—sick fantasizing, shocking fantasizing, but fantasizing nonetheless.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Officer Valle is blameless here. For one thing, when we look at the computer hard drive and check Department computers we find that he has compiled dossiers on almost a hundred women, including his wife, various college and high school female friends, women he met at social occasions, and even the female NYPD sergeant he drives at the 26th Precinct. The dossier files include photos and background information on the women, some of which he got by using Department computers to access the National Crime Information Center, New York Motor Vehicles Department records, and other restricted databases, which is a violation of Department policy and a misdemeanor under federal and state law. (We know Valle did that because he used his Department tax number and personal PIN to log on to the Department computer.)
He also obviously has deep psychological problems that somehow slipped by the Department psychological screening tests when Valle signed on in 2006. Every NYPD recruit has to undergo psych evaluations with a psychiatrist and take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, but when we check Valle’s records there’s nothing that stands out—although as far as I know the MMPI and the shrinks don’t focus on potential cannibalism issues. Still, not only should this guy not be a cop anymore, he should never have been one in the first place. This is one sick, depraved, deviant individual.
But again, is Valle engaged in an active plot to kidnap and consume women? We honestly don’t think so—and more to the point, we don’t think there’s enough evidence to prove it in a court of law. We want him out of the Department, of course, but we don’t think we have enough to put him in prison for the rest of his life.
The FBI and the US Attorney’s Office, however, take a different view.
As I explained in the previous chapter, any case involving an NYPD officer that originates with the FBI remains a federal case, with IAB’s Group 25, the federal liaison group, working with the feds. That makes perfect sense in a case like this, because while we’re primarily working the Valle investigation, the FBI has taken it across state and even international borders. From the messages on Valle’s computer they’ve identified three other guys they believe were engaged in an active conspiracy with Valle to kidnap, rape, and murder women. One of them is a twenty-two-year-old mechanic in New Jersey to whom Valle “promised” to deliver a drugged and bound woman for $5,000; another is a fifty-eight-year-old male nurse in England—the aforementioned “Moody Blues” guy—and the third is a man in Pakistan who goes by the screen name Ali Khan.
Again, we can’t see it, as least as far as a criminal conspiracy case against Valle is concerned. But it’s the feds’ call. So on October 24, after more than a month of investigation, the feds decide it’s time to arrest Valle.
As usual in these situations, we want to make sure we can grab him, and his gun, before he can hurt himself or anybody else. So we tail him to his apartment, watch him park his car, give him a chance to settle in, and then stiff in a call to his home phone—This is Officer O’Hara with the 112th Precinct, is this Mr. Valle? It is? Well, sorry to tell you, but your car’s been hit, you’d better take a look at it.
Sure, it’s an old trick, but it usually works. A moment later Valle walks out in jeans and a University of Maryland sweatshirt, and we and the FBI agents with us grab him. We always try to keep guys like this calm, so after he’s in ha
ndcuffs one of the guys on the arresting team gently touches him on the shoulder and says, Everything’s going to be okay.
But Valle knows better.
I don’t think so, he says.
And he’s right. We immediately suspend him without pay, and he heads off to the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he is held without bail in solitary confinement. And he’s soon to become one of the most infamous and reviled cops in the history of the NYPD—probably second only to Officer Justin Volpe in the Louima case.
The next day, US Attorney Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York holds a press conference at the federal building in Manhattan to announce Valle’s arrest on federal charges of conspiracy to commit a kidnapping—which can get him life in prison—and illegally accessing a federal law enforcement database.
I’m at the press conference, and although as usual I don’t take any questions, it’s not a pleasant experience. I mean, it’s bad enough when as chief of IAB I have to stand up on a press conference dais and tacitly acknowledge that one of our own has been abusing a citizen or robbing drug dealers or running guns or any of the “normal” kinds of cases that IAB handles. But to stand in front of the news media and acknowledge that one of New York’s Finest is accused of plotting to cook and eat women? That’s something different.
Of course, if Valle wasn’t a cop, it wouldn’t attract that much attention; it might be a one-day story. But given the opportunity to juxtapose the words “cannibal” and “cop,” the news media goes almost berserk with this one. For tabloid headline writers especially, this is a gift.
“CANNIBAL COP!” the headlines scream, not only in New York City but around the world. “MEAT THE WIFE!” is a headline over a story about Valle’s wife. “BONE APPETITE!” says another headline. And on and on.
Blue on Blue Page 32