Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  New York Post headline writers had a field day with the case of the so-called Cannibal Cop, an NYPD officer accused of plotting on the Internet to kill, cook, and eat women. Officer Gilberto Valle was found guilty by a jury, but the conviction was later overturned on the grounds that Valle’s postings were fantasies he had no intention of carrying out. (New York Post)

  In the news media, it’s almost like the whole thing is just a sick joke—and while it is sick, it isn’t a joke. Whether or not Valle is legally guilty of conspiracy to kidnap, he’s clearly morally guilty of terrifying innocent women, betraying his family, and violating the oath he took when he joined the NYPD. I’m just glad the guy isn’t still a cop; since he’s locked up and can’t return to work after his thirty-day suspension, under civil service rules we can fire him—and we do.

  More than a year later the case comes to trial in US District Court in Manhattan—and the main issue is the same that it has always been. No one disputes the fact that Valle sent the sickening e-mails, or that none of the women he discussed had actually been physically harmed. The question is whether he ever intended to carry out any of his fantasies and committed any overt acts to further the conspiracy. The defense maintains that Valle has been charged with “thought crimes,” and that no matter how abhorrent those thoughts may be to normal people, under the US Constitution a “thought crime” isn’t a real crime at all.

  But the jury disagrees. After a twelve-day trial—Valle’s wife testifies for the prosecution, while Valle does not testify—the jury finds him guilty of conspiracy to kidnap and the lesser charge of unlawfully accessing a federal database.

  So it looks like we were wrong—there was enough evidence to convict this guy on conspiracy. But then it turns out we were right. In June 2014, while Valle is still awaiting sentencing, the federal judge in the case overturns the conviction on the grounds that there was no evidence presented at trial that Valle was actively conspiring to commit the acts he was fantasizing about. But the judge upholds the conviction for unlawfully accessing the database, and he sentences Valle to time already served—twenty-one months—and orders him to undergo psychiatric treatment and to refrain from visiting any fetish websites. Valle is freed under supervised release, meaning he has to wear an ankle tracking bracelet. In December 2015 a federal appeals court upholds the judge’s decision to throw out the conspiracy conviction.

  There are several postscripts to the Cannibal Cop case. That guy in New Jersey to whom Valle was supposedly going to “sell” a woman? He was convicted in 2014 in an unrelated case of plotting to kidnap and murder women, including members of his own family, along with a former New York City high school librarian and a former security chief at a Massachusetts veterans hospital. The guy from England, Moody Blues? He, too, was convicted in a separate case in Canterbury, England, of attempting to set up a tryst with a fourteen-year-old girl. All of the men argued, unsuccessfully, that they were just role-playing; none of the men was ever convicted of plotting to cannibalize women with Valle. The guy in Pakistan, screen-name Ali Khan, was never identified.

  As for Valle himself, after his release he told reporters he just wanted to get on with his life—which, when you’re known worldwide as the infamous Cannibal Cop, is a little hard to do. For example, when Valle posted a profile on the Match.com online dating site—the profile contained no mention of cannibalism—the tabloids were at it again. “CANNIBAL COP COOKS UP ONLINE DATING PROFILE!” one headline read. “CANNIBAL COP HUNGRY FOR LOVE!” said another. After the website yanked his profile, another story said, “He just wanted to meat a nice lady . . .”

  Valle also cooperated in making a 2015 HBO documentary called Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop—which, as the title suggests, argued that Valle had been prosecuted for his thoughts, not his actions. Valle, for his part, maintained in the documentary that the cannibalism fetish was just a phase and that he no longer has fantasies about cooking and eating women. He also apologized for what he called his “infantile actions.”

  Well, maybe so. Maybe someday former officer Gil Valle can put it all behind him—although, unfortunately, the NYPD never will. The tale of the Cannibal Cop has become an indelible stain on the NYPD—and it illustrates, in the most extreme way possible, a problem that I saw time and time again during my career as IAB chief.

  The problem is that sometimes cops and computers don’t mix.

  * * *

  Along with fingerprint collection/identification, radio telecommunications, and DNA technology, the use of computers and information technology has been one of the most revolutionary developments in law enforcement in all of history. And like most revolutionary developments, it has its upsides and downsides.

  The upsides are pretty obvious. When I came on the job in 1973 we wrote reports on typewriters and quintuplicate carbon paper—if you’re under thirty, ask your grandmother what those were—an archaic process that actually lasted well into the 1990s. Back then it could take hours or even days to get a fingerprint or photo ID, there were no easily accessible national centralized files of known criminals, plotting crime trends involved waiting for paper reports to slowly wend their way through the sclerotic bureaucratic system and then sticking colored pins into paper maps—well, you get the point. The Department was buried in paper, and criminals could often outrun their own paper trails.

  But they can’t outrun a beam of light in a fiber-optic cable or a wireless data transmission—and cops depend on it. Cops today would be lost if they couldn’t get an instant electronic fingerprint ID of a perp, or an instantaneous license plate check, or have access to the Department’s criminal database or the FBI’s National Crime Information Center or dozens of other databases, or be able to track crime trends on a daily or even hourly basis through the NYPD’s CompStat system. In short, computer and information technology have fundamentally altered the way cops operate—not to mention the way the world works in general.

  But as every parent knows—and as every cop should know—there are dangers and temptations in computer technology as well.

  And that’s why we created IAB Group 7—the Computer Crimes Investigations Group.

  Group 7 is IAB’s own “geek squad,” a team of about a dozen combination cop/computer experts, headed when I was chief by Sergeant Yalkin Demirkaya, a big, burly Turkish-born cop and certified computer genius who had been instrumental in setting up the NYPD’s vaunted CompStat crime-tracking system in the 1990s. (I was lucky to have been able to draft Yalkin into IAB when he made sergeant, this to the dismay of all the other bureau chiefs who wanted him, and I was luckier still when he decided to stay after his two-year IAB commitment was up. He remains an unparalleled resource and a true friend.) They are our go-to guys and gals on anything involving computers or cyber crimes by cops.

  Did we need a program to track corruption and misconduct complaints by every shift in every precinct, or to automatically schedule follow-ups on closed cases, or to instantly flag complaints against any particular cop? Do we need someone who can clone a hard drive without leaving a footprint, or defeat an encrypted data system, or track down an IP address anywhere in the world? Do we need antihacking and unauthorized access prevention and tracking protocols for our files? Or do we just need someone who knows his way around Internet chat rooms and message boards? Whatever we need involving computer technology, the Group 7 guys can do it.

  And we keep them busy—because as I said, sometimes cops and computers don’t mix.

  Most of the time the work-related computer trouble that cops get into is the same kind of trouble that people who work for any business or governmental organization get into. They’ll disregard the recommended twelve-hours-from-bottle-to-keyboard rule and send off a drunken rant to a coworker or supervisor, or they’ll text a hook-up note to a fellow employee who clearly isn’t interested. It’s all ill advised, and it can damage a cop’s career, but unless there’s a crime or a serious violation of NYPD policy involved—a physical threat, sexual harass
ment, online stalking, that sort of thing—then it’s usually not an IAB case.

  Internet porn is another computer-related problem that cops sometimes get into. Again, as long as it’s not criminal, like child porn, or indicative of some potentially dangerous psychological disorder, like the Cannibal Cop, then it’s none of IAB’s business—provided, of course, that the cop isn’t using a Department computer to access it. We’d occasionally get complaints from other cops about a cop accessing porn on a precinct computer, in which case we would usually just pass it along to the precinct or unit commander or to the borough’s investigations unit. The cop involved might just get a “yell” from the commander—a verbal reprimand of the “Knock that shit off!” variety—or maybe a command discipline.

  Production or possession of child pornography, of course, is illegal no matter how or where somebody accesses it. And while it wasn’t common, we had a few cases of NYPD cops being involved in child porn.

  For example, in 2013 we get a tip from an ex-girlfriend about a sergeant in Queens who had persuaded several women to sexually molest their own children, including some infants, while he watched online. We immediately open an investigation, get a search warrant for the sergeant’s apartment, and grab his computer. The Group 7 guys find a series of child porn videos so sickening that no one who has to watch them will soon be able to forget.

  As for the sergeant, he’s immediately arrested and suspended. (As of this writing, the court case is still pending.) Later he’s also implicated by federal investigators in another Internet child porn–trading ring involving more than seventy people, including an FDNY paramedic, a New York City rabbi, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supervisor, another NYPD cop, an upstate Boy Scout leader, the chief of police in a small upstate New York town—and on and on, most of them outwardly normal and law-abiding people, many of them in positions of trust.

  IAB investigators never high-five each other when they complete a case on a bad cop, because every arrest of another cop is an embarrassment to the Department and to ourselves as fellow cops, and therefore nothing to be celebrated. But like virtually all other cops, we despise people who are involved in child molestation or child porn or any abuse of kids—and if another cop is doing it, we take a lot of satisfaction, grim satisfaction, in putting him away. It’s not often that IAB gets attaboys from the NYPD rank and file when we arrest a cop, but when we slap the cuffs on guys like that, it’s always: Good job, IAB! We’re just glad that we don’t have to get those kinds of attaboys very often.

  Although it’s obviously not nearly in the same league as child porn, unauthorized access to restricted law enforcement databases is another problem among cops. From almost their first day in the Academy cops are told that law enforcement databases can only be used for exactly that—law enforcement. You can’t use them to get an ID on the attractive woman who lives in your neighborhood, or to run a background check on somebody you met at a party.

  Unfortunately, cops sometimes forget that. They also forget that every time they log on to a Department computer it leaves a record of their tax number and personal PIN, and a record of every database inquiry. Just making a restricted database inquiry doesn’t raise any flags, because some cops might run a dozen or more license plate or criminal background checks a day. But the record will always be there, and if the cop comes under investigation, like in the case of the Cannibal Cop, we can easily find every database query the cop has ever made.

  I said that a single database query doesn’t by itself raise any flags, but there is an exception. The names of movie stars and sports figures and politicians and other celebrities are flagged within the system, and if a cop runs a restricted database check on any of them, IAB is alerted—at which point the cop will have to explain exactly why he or she needed to know Bruce Willis’s New York address, or the stated height and weight on Kim Kardashian’s driver’s license. We’ve had a number of cases of cops running checks on celebrities, and usually they’ll say they were just curious, that they didn’t really mean any harm.

  But while curiosity may not kill the cop, it can certainly damage his or her career. Again, unauthorized access to a restricted law enforcement database is a misdemeanor, even if there’s no criminal intent. The cop may not be indicted and fired for running a background check on the attractive woman next door, but it’s certainly going to cost him money in the form of docked vacation days and hold up his chances for promotion. The Department takes this stuff seriously.

  But as I’ve said, cops are human beings, and like other human beings they sometimes let passion and jealousy get the best of them. And when you mix passion and jealousy with a cop who also has access to restricted databases, it can cause a lot of trouble.

  For example, we had this detective in the 40th Precinct in the Bronx, a twenty-year veteran, a respected guy. His problem is that his girlfriend, also a Department employee, broke up with him, and he’s desperate to know if she’s seeing any other men, especially other cops. So not only does he start running restricted database checks on some forty people, half of them cops, he also pays an illegal online hacking service $4,000 to hack into their e-mails. He’s caught when the FBI investigates the LA-based hacking service and discovers that one of its customers is an NYPD detective—and IAB launches an investigation. The detective later pleads guilty to a misdemeanor and is forced to retire.

  In another case, there’s an NYPD sergeant in Manhattan who is friends with a Middle Eastern woman living in Canada who is in a child custody dispute with her ex-husband. As a favor, the sergeant runs a federal database check on the ex-husband through a Department computer, which turns up the fact that he’s on the classified US terrorist watch list. The sergeant sends a printout to the woman, whose lawyer files it with the court, the argument being: This ex-husband can’t have custody of those kids; he’s a terrorist! The problem arises when local authorities start to wonder how an NYPD printout of classified information wound up in the court files in a custody dispute in Canada. They call the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties call us, and we easily trace it back to the sergeant. His favor for a friend costs him a federal misdemeanor conviction.

  Because of the nature of their work, cops have access to a lot of confidential computerized information that the general public has no need or right to see. That includes not only things like background files on individuals, criminal investigation records, crime scene and autopsy photos, but also digital videos from police surveillance cameras like the VIPER program.

  VIPER stands for Video Interactive Patrol Enhancement Response—as so often happens in the NYPD, you get the feeling that they came up with the acronym first and then filled in the words to fit. The program uses hundreds of closed-circuit, pan-tilt-zoom cameras to film and monitor activity in and around the public areas of public housing developments throughout the city—halls, stairwells, sidewalks, and so on. The digital images are monitored by cops sitting at TV screens in central locations at each NYPD Housing Bureau Police Service Area, and if they spot a crime being committed they can quickly notify patrol units to respond to the scene.

  Although the VIPER program has helped prevent or solve tens of thousands of crimes since its inception in 1997—including murders, robberies, and rapes—it’s also been a controversial program. One reason is that most of the cops who are monitoring the closed-circuit TV screens are on modified duty—which is to say, they’re cops in some kind of trouble. On any given day there are a couple hundred NYPD cops who are on modified duty, meaning they can’t carry a gun or wear the shield or perform full law enforcement duties. Some of them are currently under IAB investigation, some have been found guilty of offenses that aren’t serious enough to allow them to be dismissed under civil service rules but are serious enough that the Department doesn’t want them on the street. But they’re still cops, and they’re still being paid, and the Department has to put them somewhere—and where a lot of them are put is the VIPER program. Some City Council members h
ave questioned whether cops in trouble should be posted in a potentially sensitive assignment, but the Department view is that they’re closely supervised, and that we really can’t afford to take full-duty cops off the street to sit and watch TV screens all day.

  Critics like the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) also complain that the VIPER cameras are an invasion of people’s privacy—this despite the fact that they’re only a small portion of the estimated forty thousand or more government and private surveillance cameras in New York City. Let’s face it, when you’re in almost any public area in any city in America, you should assume that you’re on camera. And it’s worth noting that the NYCLU never complains when a surveillance camera catches a cop doing something wrong.

  Still, just because we catch something on camera doesn’t mean we’re going to release it to the public. If, say, a VIPER camera picks up two people having sex in a public housing development stairwell—and you’d be surprised how often that happens . . . or maybe you wouldn’t—we’re not going to share it with the world. Unless surveillance camera footage is introduced in a court case, or we release it to get the public’s help in identifying some suspects, that video is confidential, available only to investigators on a need-to-know basis, and it’s going to stay that way.

  Or at least it’s supposed to. Unfortunately, sometimes cops forget the rules—with unfortunate results. The case of the guy who killed himself in front of a VIPER camera is an example.

  It’s 2004, and a VIPER camera in the lobby of the Morris Houses in the Bronx picks up a twenty-two-year-old man kissing his girlfriend good-bye in front of the elevator. Nothing unusual about that, except that after the girlfriend gets into the elevator and the door closes, the guy pulls out a 9mm pistol, puts it in his mouth, and pulls the trigger, killing himself instantly. It turns out the girlfriend had just broken up with him.