The cop monitoring the VIPER camera immediately calls patrol and they respond to the scene. As with any unusual incident captured by the VIPER cameras, the monitors make three copies of the relevant forty-five seconds of video—one goes to the special operations lieutenant, one to the Housing Bureau, and one to the detective squad assigned to the case. Based on the video it’s clearly a suicide, not a murder, and the detectives are quickly able to close the case.
And that should have been the end of it. Except that a couple of weeks later, friends start calling the dead man’s girlfriend and his foster mother to tell them that the NYPD video of the man’s suicide has been posted on a “shock website” called “Consumption Junction,” which features gross, violent, and pornographic video clips. To make it even worse, the website is treating the suicide video as entertainment, and racist entertainment, at that—the suicide video is labeled “The Self-Cleansing Housing Projects.”
It’s true that the dead man had had some problems. He’d been running with street gangs and had a domestic violence arrest. Still, he doesn’t deserve to have his last moments turned into an object of fun for a bunch of sophomoric Web surfers hunched over their computers in their parents’ basements. And neither do the people who cared about him. They are understandably shocked and upset, and after they contact their City Council representative, the case comes to IAB and Group 7. The question in everyone’s minds—the dead man’s friends’, the politicians’, the news media’s, and ours—is how did a restricted-access NYPD video wind up on this stupid website?
Actually, for a group of investigators/computer experts like Group 7, this is not a particularly tough case. First they call the operator of the website, who is based in Atlanta, and ask him politely to give them the name or IP address of the person who sent him the video.
Of course, he initially refuses to give it up, citing various First Amendment and privacy issues. And we tell him we certainly understand his concerns, but then we explain, politely, that the video footage is official NYPD property, and that it is in effect stolen property that has been illegally transported across state lines. We also explain that there are these things called subpoenas, and search warrants, and that we have excellent relations with the FBI, which will be happy to send some special agents from its Atlanta field office to his home or place of business to discuss the matter further.
With that the guy quickly caves. He takes down the video footage, and he gives us an IP address that traces back to a former NYPD cop on Long Island who’s now with the Suffolk County Police Department. The Suffolk County cop cooperates—he didn’t mean any harm by sending it to the website, he says, and he wasn’t the one who put the racist label on it. He says he got the video footage from another former NYPD cop who’s now an FDNY firefighter. The firefighter tells us he got it from a friend of his, a detective in Brooklyn, who in turn tells us he got it from a sergeant, who tells us he got it from another sergeant in the detective squad in the Bronx.
It seems that the sergeant in the Bronx had been on night duty in the detective squad room and happened to see the video paused on a computer screen at an empty desk as he passed by; it had been viewed by one of the detectives assigned to investigate the suicide. The sergeant was just curious, he tells us, so he took a look, then sent it to his other sergeant friend on the assumption that he might be curious, too. The sergeant never dreamed that it would be spread around, he says, much less wind up on a shock video website. He didn’t mean any harm, he says.
Now, things like this traditionally haven’t been unusual among cops. They’ll often try to shock or gross-out each other with crime- or accident-scene photos, or with bits and pieces of the horrible, disgusting, and disturbing things they encounter on a daily basis; for cops it’s a kind of catharsis, a way of dealing with emotional stress. And when it was a case of one cop showing another cop a hard-copy photo from a case file, maybe there wasn’t really any harm done.
But to update Ben Franklin’s famous saying: Three people with computers may keep a secret if two of them—and their computers—are dead. In the Internet age, once something like this gets out there’s no getting it back—and it can cause real harm, not only to the dead man’s friends and loved ones, but to the cops who were just curious. In the end, the DA declined to indict any of the cops involved, but the sergeant who first leaked the suicide video got passed over for promotion and all of the cops involved got hit with command disciplines.
Now, so far the kind of computer-related cases I’ve talked about have been reactive cases for IAB and Group 7—that is, we develop some information about a cop, grab his computer or his smart phone, and backtrack through the electronic record to see what he has already done. But sometimes we have to be proactive, to find out not only where a bad cop has been in cyberspace, but where he’s planning on going in the future.
And the case of the cop and a fictional young girl known as “yngbunny90” is a good example.
* * *
One morning Sergeant Yalkin Demirkaya gets a call from his computer crimes counterpart at the NYPD Organized Crime Control Bureau’s Public Morals Division—basically, the vice squad. Their computer crime guys are a small group of investigators/computer wizards whose job it is to patrol cyberspace in search of criminals—especially child predators. The squad has a potential child predator they think we might be interested in.
I don’t have to tell any parent of a young child or teenager just how dangerous, and how common, Internet child predators are. The FBI estimates that every day there are a half million of these creeps online looking for naïve, lonely, and trusting kids to exploit, either by arranging personal meetings or getting kids to send pornographic images of themselves. They’re the cyber version of the old-style pervert hanging around a playground—except that the anonymity of cyberspace makes them a lot harder to catch.
To search for these predators, the NYPD’s Public Morals Division computer crime investigators, as well as the NYPD Detective Bureau’s Computer Crimes Squad and similar units in police departments across the country, put undercover detectives posing as young girls or boys on teen- or preteen-oriented social networking sites, then they wait to see if they get “hit” by a potential predator—that is, an adult, almost always a guy, who wants to reach out and make a personal connection. Usually the predator will pretend to be younger than he really is, somewhere around the targeted kid’s own age. It almost never involves an overt sexual suggestion at first; they don’t want to scare the kids away, and online predators also know that decoy cops are out there, looking for them. So at first the predators just want to be “friends,” to exchange personal information, including photos, and seemingly innocent messages. Investigators call the process “grooming.”
Undercover computer cops who work these kinds of cases get a feel for who the predators are when someone reaches out to them online—the words and phrases they use, the things they’re interested in, the directions the online conversations take. They can usually tell the difference between a fourteen-year-old boy who really just wants to make friends and a fifty-year-old child molester who thinks he’s corresponding with a fourteen-year-old girl. So while making sure they aren’t crossing the line into what a defense lawyer can successfully argue is entrapment, they try to draw the guy out, string him along, make him think without explicitly saying so that sex with an underaged girl is waiting for him. And once the predator makes an overt suggestion that they MIRL—meet in real life—and have sex, they can set up a meet and grab him.
Of course, this is a long, complicated, and often drawn-out process; again, the predators know the cyber-cops are out there, and usually they’re cautious. But fortunately, some of them are stupider than others.
Which brings us back to the potential predator the NYPD vice squad detective is calling us about.
The predator had hit the vice squad undercover—who was posing as a twelve-year-old girl—in a teen chat room called Mini-Skirt 13. (This is just before the explosion of
other social media platforms like Facebook and MySpace, which allow kids to post even more extensive personal information about themselves.) When the undercover online cop draws him out, the predator sends a profile—age, background, likes and dislikes, all of it made up of course—and he tries to set up an innocent-sounding MIRL, as in, Hey, let’s go get some pizza!
But the predator’s profile also includes a smiling photo of himself, looking every bit of his actual thirty-five years, with a pinched face and a five o’clock shadow—and incredibly, when the vice detectives look closely at it, there, right behind his blue-covered left shoulder, is what is clearly an NYPD holding cell. Since it’s not NYPD policy to let perps take selfies in the holding area, they have to wonder: Is this guy a cop?
Which, as it turns out, he is. When they subpoena the records for his IP address and get his subscriber information from his e-mail provider—the subpoena comes with a “do not notify” order so he doesn’t know he’s being checked out—he comes back as a thirty-five-year-old Transit Bureau cop, assigned to Transit District 2 in Manhattan. He’s got thirteen years on the job, a clean record, lives on Long Island, married to another NYPD cop who’s a narcotics detective, and they have one young child. And this creep—in deference to his family, not to him, we’ll call him Officer Kevin—is cruising the Internet looking for thirteen-year-old girls.
Since he’s a cop the vice squad guys hand the case over to IAB. And Yalkin and his crew start putting together a plan to nab this guy.
So far we don’t have anything criminal on him. He hasn’t overtly proposed any sexual contact with someone he thinks is a minor, at least not that we know about; at this point we don’t even have enough to get a search warrant on his personal computer. But we know what he’s after, in the same way that cops know that a guy walking down a dark street pulling door handles on parked cars to see if they’re locked is looking to boost a car. It’s not illegal to pull a car’s door handle, but we know if he finds one open, what he’s going to do next is a crime.
True, we’ve already got enough to suspend this guy for thirty days and bring him up on Department charges, because some of his communications with the vice squad online undercovers were made on-duty, with a Department computer, which was another mistake this knucklehead made. But unauthorized use of a Department computer not involving restricted databases is a relatively minor beef, one that under civil service rules probably could only get him dinged for a few vacation days and maybe put on modified duty. And if we pick him up now, what’s Officer Kevin—and his lawyer—going to say? He’s going to say: Sex? What sex? I never said anything about sex, I just like to talk to young people!
It’s creepy, and it’s a violation of Department policy, but it’s not a crime. So if we’re going to get this guy permanently out of the Department, and possibly into jail, we’re going to have to sting him.
So Yalkin and his guys create a fictional online thirteen-year-old girl, screen name “yngbunny90,” complete with background details: what middle school she goes to; the neighborhood where she lives; parents divorced; lives with her mom, who she says used to be a Playboy bunny and in whose professional footsteps she hopes to follow. Oh, and she also has, like, a super-crush on guys in uniform. We know what teen chat rooms our guy cruises, so when we put her out there he immediately hits, and they start sending private messages back and forth.
Again, our guys have to be careful to avoid anything that looks like entrapment. Our online character can’t bring up anything sexual, but she can portray herself as naïve, lonely, vulnerable, a bit rebellious. She says things like, I hate my mom, or School sucks, or Boys my age are soooooooo immature! You might not think that some grizzled, middle-aged, cigar-chomping NYPD detectives could pull off sounding like a young teen, but these guys are good; they can LOL and PIR (parent in room) and KPC (keeping parent clueless) like a bona fide thirteen-year-old.
Officer Kevin, for his part, plays the role of an understanding older man, always ready to listen to yngbunny90’s never-ending litany of teen problems, and he’s eager to meet her in real life—just for some pizza, of course. He even tells her that he’s a cop—after all, she loves guys in uniforms, and who could be more trustworthy than a cop? Which is pretty dumb. I mean, he knows online cops are out there looking for predators, and they’re going to be particularly interested in a predator who’s wearing a police badge. We know this is on his mind, because he tells her things like, Hey, you could be a cop. How would I even know?
But despite the risk, he keeps after her anyway. He’s got the same problem all of these guys have. It’s not his head he’s thinking with.
Or is he? Because suddenly, he drops out of sight. No messages, no communication, for weeks; he’s radio silent. So has he changed his ways? Or sought psychiatric help for his problem? Has he realized how dangerous what he’s doing is? Or has he somehow made yngbunny90 as a cop?
We can’t figure it out. Then at one point we send one of our IAB investigators to take a drive by his house, and there on the front lawn is a big cardboard stork with a sign that says, “It’s a Boy!” His wife, the NYPD detective, has just had another baby, and apparently our guy has other responsibilities to take care of.
But soon enough he’s back online, grooming yngbunny90—which leaves us pleased and pissed off at the same time. We’re pleased the case isn’t blown, but we’re pissed that this fellow cop, this now father of two, is back to being a low-life, child-stalking predator.
We know that if we’re going to make a provable criminal case on this guy, at some point there has to be an actual meet, which is a problem. Our female IAB undercovers are good, but none of them can pass for thirteen.
So we bring in a ringer. There’s a young woman, twenty-one years old—we’ll call her Megan—who worked for IAB while she was in the Police Cadet Corps and is now about to graduate from the Police Academy. She’s tiny, baby-faced, with a teen’s voice, but she’s got guts and she’s eager to do it; for a rookie just out of the Academy to get an investigative undercover assignment is like a dream come true, the first step on the road to getting a detective’s gold shield. So we bring her up to speed on the case, have her read through all the Internet messages to study her yngbunny90 character, and put her through a crash course on undercover work, including taking her to a public middle school to study what young girls are wearing these days—which to my admittedly old-fashioned sensibilities is pretty scandalous, lots of spaghetti strap tops and too-short skirts and way too much makeup. But an undercover has to look the part.
All along Officer Kevin has been pressing for a meet, and short of that, a phone number—so we give him one, a disposable burner phone that won’t trace back if he runs the number through the Department databases, which, being a cop, we know he probably will. He immediately calls Megan, who’s perfect—fast-talking, breathless, with that end-every-sentence-with-a-question-mark “up-talking” teenaged-girl style.
Officer Kevin seems more comfortable, and bolder, on the phone—and we’re recording every word. He almost immediately brings up sex, starting with things like, Oooh, you sound hot! and then, over the course of a few days, talking explicitly about having sex, even assuring her that he’ll wear a condom. Megan, for her part, is reluctant—I’ve never done anything like that before, she says—but Officer Kevin is soothing, telling her it’ll be okay, that she’ll like it, and so on.
Remember, this is a cop who thinks he’s talking to a thirteen-year-old girl. Just to have to listen to this is pretty appalling.
Anyway, now that’s he talking explicitly about sex acts, we’ve got him. It’s time to set up a meet—and make an arrest. Obviously, we aren’t going to send our undercover, Megan, into a motel room or anything like that, certainly not with a cop who’s probably carrying his off-duty gun. So Megan says she’ll meet him at a McDonald’s on Myrtle Avenue in Queens, and then they can go to her house because her mom’s at work.
Yalkin and his team will get to make the collar. Yes, they m
ay be computer geeks, but they’re also cops—and after listening to Officer Kevin run his ugly little game, they’ve started to take this guy personally.
Officer Kevin shows up at the McDonald’s at the appointed time, a paunchy guy wearing a black “No. 13 Alfonzo” baseball jersey—which under the circumstances is an insult to former Mets slugger Edgardo Alfonzo and the entire Mets organization—but he’s still cautious. He stands there for a while, casing the street, but he doesn’t make our surveillance van, or our undercover in the waiting cab. When he presses his face against the McDonald’s window and looks inside, he sees a big, Middle Eastern–looking guy in a booth talking on a cell phone—he can’t hear him through the window, but it’s Yalkin, speaking Turkish—and a frumpy, middle-aged woman sipping coffee and reading a newspaper, who’s another one of our ghosts. And he also sees Megan sitting at a table in the middle of the room with a cell phone—actually a radio transmitter—on the table.
It’s one thing to talk on the phone, but can a twenty-one-year-old woman really pass for a thirteen-year-old girl in person? Maybe not under ordinary circumstances, but this guy desperately wants her to be thirteen. When he sees her, his face lights up. He slides into the chair across from her and, sensing she’s nervous, he immediately starts soothing her, telling her it will be okay, he’ll take good care of her, it’ll be fun, and yes, he brought condoms. He’s eager to go to her house and get started.
We’re picking all this up in the surveillance van from the transmitter in Megan’s cell phone—and now this guy is done. At our signal, Yalkin steps up behind him and grabs Officer Kevin in a bear hug—with a guy as big as Yalkin, it really is a bear hug—and he barks out: Internal Affairs! Don’t move! At the same instant our other ghost moves in and pats him down for his gun, although it turns out that for some reason he’s not carrying it. We don’t want Officer Kevin to know just yet that Megan is an undercover, we don’t want him to know just how much we have on him, so acting out her role, she jumps up and says: It’s all right! He’s a cop! There must be some mistake! He’s a cop!
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