Ignoring her, as planned, Yalkin rear-cuffs him and frog-walks him out of the McDonald’s and into the backseat of one of our unmarked cars. And all the while Officer Kevin is pleading: Guys, you gotta believe me, I wasn’t going to have sex with her!
But we know better. We take him back to a debrief room at the First Precinct in Manhattan—the initial sex solicitation had occurred there, so he’ll be charged in Manhattan instead of Queens—but by that time this guy has wised up and wants his lawyer. He’s immediately suspended and charged with felony attempted dissemination of indecent materials, and also with misdemeanor attempted endangerment of the welfare of a minor. The charges are filed as “attempted” because Megan the undercover isn’t actually a minor.
Simultaneously with the arrest, IAB detectives show up at Officer Kevin’s house in Nassau County on Long Island with a search warrant in hand. It’s sad, really. Here’s his wife, the NYPD detective, standing there with a new baby in her arms, a toddler tugging at her hand, and we have to tell her what her husband has gotten himself into—and of course she’s stunned, devastated. We can tell from the look on her face that this is totally out of the blue; she had no idea. It’s what guys like Officer Kevin, or any cop who engages in criminal misconduct, seem to forget—that it’s not just their lives they’re putting at risk, but their families’ lives and welfare as well.
Under Department policy we take all the guns in the house, including the detective wife’s gun, which is unfair, because in effect it’s unofficially putting her on modified duty. But we figure that her husband probably is going to bail out, and we don’t want a gun in the house when he comes home. That’s partly because we don’t want him to shoot himself, but also because we don’t want her to shoot him, which in a situation like this could be a possibility. Sure, we could understand the impulse, but we don’t want to compound the tragedy by having to lock up the wife for murder.
With the warrant we also grab all the computers in the house, and when Group 7 looks at Officer Kevin’s computer, they find some pornographic photos of what appear to be underaged girls—which earns him another felony child pornography charge from the Nassau County DA.
In the end, Officer Kevin—ex-Officer Kevin—is dismissed from the Department with no pension, no benefits, and in a plea deal he gets a year each on the charges in Manhattan and Nassau County, to be served concurrently. It’s a pretty light sentence—but that’s not my call.
Because a cop is involved, the arrest and guilty pleas get some press coverage: “COP IN KID SEX STING!” says one tabloid headline. “PERVERT EX-COP ADMITS GUILT IN TEEN SEX SOLICIT!” says another.
Of course, I’ve been a cop too long to think that the possibility of being arrested and publicly exposed is enough to make these guys stop what they’re doing; they’re driven by urges beyond the reach of rational thought. But whether it’s an ordinary predator, or, far more rarely, a cop who’s also a predator, maybe it will give them pause. They at least have to wonder who it is they’re reaching out to on the Internet.
They have to wonder, is this really a thirteen-year-old girl?
Or is it us?
Chapter 12
* * *
IT’S NOT A COURTESY, IT’S A CRIME
It starts off as a simple case against a dirty cop in the Bronx. But by the time it’s over, years later, it has morphed into the biggest police corruption scandal in decades, a web of corruption that involves hundreds of cops.
Funny thing, though. A lot of cops, especially the leadership of the police unions, don’t think it’s corruption at all.
It’s December 2008 when an anonymous call comes into the IAB Command Center. It’s a female, young-sounding, and she’s angry. We’re thinking it’s probably an ex-girlfriend looking for some payback on the man who did her wrong, although we never will find out who she is. She won’t give the IAB investigator who catches the call her name, but she does give him an earful. There’s this cop in the 40th Precinct in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, she says, his name is Ramos, Jose Ramos, he owns a barbershop on East 149th Street, and this guy who works there, Ramos’s best friend, a guy named Marco Mack, is selling marijuana out of the shop. Ramos knows all about it, she says, in fact, he’s the boss of the operation, he’s a bad cop and somebody ought to do something about it. That’s all she’s gonna say, good-bye.
Well, I don’t want to say this is a routine allegation—no allegation of police corruption is routine. But it’s not like Officer Ramos is allegedly moving weight quantities of heroin, or ripping off people for tens of thousands of dollars, or is engaged in a murder-for-hire plot—although eventually all of those will come into play in this case. Still, it’s a legitimate allegation, so it gets assigned to IAB Group 21, which covers the South Bronx.
When we pull Officer Ramos’s personnel package and start looking around, we find that the anonymous caller’s basic information checks out. Ramos is forty, of Dominican heritage, the son of a retired NYPD cop now living in Texas, been on the job since 1993, a former PBA delegate in the Four-Oh precinct, no serious misconduct allegations, lives with his girlfriend, later his wife, a woman named Wanda, in a house in Washington Heights. And yeah, Ramos appears to be the silent owner of a couple of barbershops, although he hasn’t registered the shops with the Department as outside businesses, which he’s required to do. The two barbershops, both known as Who’s First—Who’s First I on East 138th Street, and a storefront shop called Who’s First II on East 149th Street in The Hub, a commercial section of the South Bronx—aren’t exactly upscale hair salons. A handwritten sign on the window at Who’s First II advertises men’s haircuts for ten bucks, boys’ haircuts for eight—which is about as cheap as haircuts go in New York City—and another sign pitches new and used DVDs and CDs for sale.
So we sit on the shops for a while, just watching, and sure enough, Officer Ramos, a slight, thin guy with a pencil mustache, is in and out of the shops all the time. And so is this Marco Mack guy, real name Lee King, an immigrant from Guyana who has a felony burglary conviction on his record, plus some drug arrests; he’s a known player in the Mott Haven drug trade. Mack is also driving around in a 2007 Nissan Murano that’s registered to Officer Ramos—it’s got Ramos’s police parking permit on the dash—and he’s also living in an apartment that has Officer Ramos’s name on the lease.
So right there we’ve got enough to scoop Ramos up and ding him on Department charges of associating with a known criminal, operating an unauthorized outside business, and unauthorized use of a police parking permit—which may not sound like much, but trust me, in parking-challenged New York City, a police permit is worth a thousand times its weight in gold, and loaning it out to some drug-dealing street mutt is serious business. And in the old IAD it might have happened that way. In the old IAD there was a tendency to grab the lowest hanging fruit, to take down a bad cop on the easiest charges and transfer him to another precinct or boot him out of the Department, because if you looked too deeply, who knew what kind of embarrassing facts—embarrassing to the Department, that is—might come out? But in the new IAB we don’t play that way. We want to see where this thing goes—and if any other cops are involved.
So we start building a case on this guy. And one of the first things we do is put an uncle into the barbershop to see what he can see.
Remember when I said that IAB could draft cops with special knowledge or skills? Well, for this case we need a Spanish-speaking cop who used to be a licensed professional barber—and after a quick search of the NYPD personnel files, we find one, a third-grade detective who’s actually already an investigator in IAB. We can’t order him to work as an undercover—because of the potential danger, being an uncle is strictly volunteer—but the detective is game. We fix him up with a phony background and a back-dated New York State barber’s license, along with a “Hello phone” number at IAB if anybody checks him out, and he manages to rent a chair at Who’s First II for $125 a week. Of course, a barber is supposed to bring i
n his own customers, so we start sending in other IAB undercovers to get haircuts from our undercover barber—haircuts paid for by IAB—and listen for any talk around the shop about drug dealing. They pick up some interesting intel, but nothing definitive against Ramos. (Later, citing confidential sources, a newspaper reporter will claim that some of the IAB undercovers were bitching that our “barber” gave lousy haircuts. I don’t know about that, but hey, the price was right—free, courtesy of IAB—and our undercover barber later got promoted to detective second grade for his work on the case.)
Meanwhile, working with the Bronx DA’s Rackets Bureau, which is then headed by a tough, aggressive prosecutor named Tom Leahy, we get court-ordered wiretaps on Marco Mack’s cell phone, and then on two of Ramos’s cell phones. And from what we hear over the taps, these guys are into everything—marijuana dealing, car insurance scams, counterfeit DVDs, bogus credit cards, you name it—and they’ve got a whole network of neighborhood players working with them, guys who’ve known each other for years. Ramos is stupid enough to be a corrupt cop, but he’s cagey enough not to be too specific on the phone, so we don’t have enough just from the taps to make a solid criminal case against him.
So we shake the trees a little. At one point, posing as investigators with the NYPD’s Trademark Infringement Unit—yes, there is such a thing—we raid the shop on East 149th and confiscate about fifteen hundred bootleg CDs and DVDs. It’s no big deal, raids like that happen all the time in New York, against bodegas, barbershops, street peddlers, anybody who deals in knockoffs—which it sometimes seems is everybody in New York City. The idea is to get Ramos and Marco Mack talking about the raid and their counterfeit DVD business on the tapped phones—which they do—without tipping Ramos off that IAB is on his case.
Another time we hear Mack talking on a tap about picking up eight pounds of marijuana from a dealer in Brooklyn. We tail him—he’s driving Ramos’s car—and after he picks up the dope and heads back into the Bronx, two of our IAB guys posing as borough narcotics detectives pull him over. They grab the dope and then tell Mack that it’s his lucky day, he can leave; as far as Mack can tell, it’s a drug rip by a couple of corrupt cops. So of course he calls Ramos—we’re listening on the tap—and tells him what happened.
We still want to find out if any other corrupt cops are involved with Ramos; remember, he’s a former PBA delegate, so he’s got a lot of contacts. We figure that when Ramos hears about the drug rip, maybe he’ll call somebody he knows in Bronx Narcotics and try to find out which detectives ripped off Mack so he can get the drugs back. But instead, Ramos is pissed off. The nerve of those dirty cops, ripping off his drug-dealing buddy! Apparently he wants to get those two crooked cops jammed up. So he tells Mack to call 911 to report a theft, and the 911 operator transfers the call to the IAB Command Center, which logs the call and takes down Mack’s report about two unidentified plainclothes cops in the Bronx who pulled him over for no reason and then stole his wallet—of course, he doesn’t say that the only thing the cops actually “stole” was eight pounds of marijuana. So here we’ve got the target of an IAB corruption investigation, Ramos, helping a drug dealer, Marco Mack, stiff in a false corruption complaint against two other corrupt cops who are actually IAB detectives investigating Ramos for corruption. It’s actually kind of funny—and it’s actually also an Official Misconduct charge against Ramos, an “A” misdemeanor.
But it’s just that—a misdemeanor. Marco Mack is done, we’ve got him on the eight pounds of marijuana, a serious felony, plus a bunch of other lesser charges, but on Ramos all we’ve really got are some guarded telephone conversations and some misdemeanors. It’s enough to get him out of the Department, but it’s not enough for any serious jail time.
Then we catch a break. From the taps on Mack’s phone we learn that one of Ramos’s crew—a career petty criminal we’ll call “Sal”—is planning a score with some phony credit cards. He has a machine in his apartment that can put legitimate credit card numbers on stolen credit card blanks, which he uses to buy electronic equipment that he fences at half price. We tail him and grab him in the parking lot of a Radio Shack loading a van with $20,000 worth of laptop computers that he just bought with the counterfeit credit cards.
Of course we don’t tell him we’re IAB. We want to turn this guy, make him work for us against Ramos, but if he won’t turn, and he knows we’re IAB, the first thing he’s going to do is tell Ramos that IAB is onto him, and our investigation is blown. So we tell him we’re detectives with OCCB—Organized Crime Control Bureau—and as we’re processing him on the credit card fraud charge we sit him down in an interview room and give him the standard detective debrief drill, about half of which is actually true. It goes something like this:
Look, Sal, you know you’re in some serious shit now, right? This isn’t fencing some flat screen that fell off a truck, you know? You read the papers? The DA’s hot about credit card fraud this month, it’s like a crusade with this guy, and he’s going to knock your rocks in the dirt. And look, Sal, let’s be honest with each other, you’re what, forty-four years old, do you really think you can stand to do a dime with those youngbloods up in Dannemora? You’re not built for up north, Sal; they’ll tear you up. But we want to help you, and all you have to do is help us. So tell us, do you know anything about guns in the neighborhood that you’ll share with us? Armed robberies? Burglaries? How about cops, any rumors about bad cops in the neighborhood? How about drugs, any dealers you can tell us about? Sal, c’mon, we’re trying to help you here.
So Sal thinks it over, and finally he says, Well, there’s this cop who owns the barbershop . . .
Bingo! Sal gives up his pal Ramos on a plate—marijuana deals, stolen electronics, counterfeit credit cards. And he agrees to work for us as a CI, a confidential informant, in return for the DA giving him a light jolt on the bogus credit card charge—in effect, no jolt at all, assuming he does a good job for us.
So now it’s time to put Officer Ramos into some serious crimes.
Earlier I said that the best way to catch a crooked cop isn’t necessarily to try to prove his involvement in past crimes, especially when your only direct witness is a low-life criminal like Sal. It’s far more persuasive to a jury if you can show the corrupt cop committing fresh crimes on videotape. It’s the targeted integrity test thing I talked about earlier—and we decide to run some tests on Ramos.
First, we have Sal the CI tell Ramos about a drug money drop at a sleazy local motel—this while we’re listening to the call. There’s $20,000 in cash in the room, Sal tells Ramos, put there by a dealer who’s waiting for a marijuana delivery, but right now nobody’s in the room. Ramos and Sal meet outside the motel, jimmy a window, and crawl in and grab the cash. Of course, it’s our room, and we’ve got the room wired for videotape, and the $20,000 is our money.
Well, actually half of it is IAB money, and the other half belongs to the Bronx DA. From the start we’ve been working this case with ADA Tom Leahy and his investigators in the Rackets Bureau, so we go half-and-half on all the buy money we use in the Ramos case. Obviously, Sal the CI has to give us back his half of the split, and all the bills have been recorded and marked in the hope that eventually we’ll be able to get the rest of the money back after we arrest Ramos. Unfortunately we never get it back—among his many other failings, Ramos has a gambling problem—but that’s the cost of doing business.
So anyway, the motel rip is Test One. Here’s Test Two. Sal tells Ramos that he’s got a guy who wants to buy some stolen electronics, some mope from Jersey or someplace who’s looking for a deal. The mope is supposed to meet up with Sal with $30,000 in cash, and then they’ll drive over in Sal’s car to pick up the stolen stuff. So Sal says to Ramos, why don’t they just rip the guy off? Being a cop, Ramos can do a car stop on Sal’s car and take the cash. They have to make it look real, though, so the guy won’t suspect that Sal is in on it, so it’d be better if another cop helped out. No problem, Ramos says, there’s this sergean
t in the Four-Oh—Ramos calls him “Dopey Dude”—who’ll do anything Ramos tells him to. It’s the first time we’ve got another cop tied in with Ramos’s criminal activities.
So at the appointed time, Ramos and Sergeant Dopey Dude, both in uniform, with Ramos at the wheel of a marked police patrol car, pull over Sal’s car at the corner of Exterior Street and East 149th in the Bronx. They make a big show of yanking Sal out of the car and putting cuffs on him, yelling that he’s under arrest, and they tell the guy in the passenger seat, the would-be stolen electronics buyer, to beat it, this is none of his business. The guy, who looks terrified, takes off running, and as soon as he’s out of sight Ramos grabs the $30,000 in cash, which is in a paper bag in the backseat, and tosses it into the patrol car. Ramos and the sergeant un-cuff Sal and they all drive happily away to divide up the money later. Of course, the terrified guy in the passenger seat is one of our undercovers, the $30,000 is our cash, we’ve got Sal’s car wired for videotape, and we’ve also got surveillance teams filming the whole thing.
Test Three. Sal sets up a meeting at a Bronx restaurant between Ramos and a drug dealer from Miami—Hispanic guy, gold chains, pinkie ring, the whole deal—who’s looking for a cop to drive a van with a shipment of heroin in it from the Bronx to Brooklyn. As I said earlier, drug dealers love to have crooked cops transport drugs for them, because if for any reason the vehicle gets stopped by other cops the dirty cop will just flash his shield and be on his way. During the meeting Ramos boasts to the Miami drug dealer—who of course is one of our IAB undercovers, wired—that he can drive around the city with a dead body in his trunk if he wants to, because he’s a cop. Ramos drives the van and the “heroin”—it’s pancake mix—to Brooklyn and collects $10,000 from our undercover, all on tape.
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