So now we’ve run three targeted integrity tests on Ramos, and he has criminally failed every one of them—and it’s all right there on video and audiotape. We’ve got him on charges related to burglary, robbery, and conspiracy to possess and distribute dangerous drugs, and the fact that he was stealing our money and moving our “drugs” doesn’t make any difference legally. Three tests may almost sound like overkill, but you have to understand that in each situation we’re trying to see if Ramos brings other dirty cops into the scheme. Also, when we finally do arrest him, we want him to know that we’ve got charges stacked up on him from now until the twenty-second century, and that if he doesn’t cooperate, if he doesn’t come clean on his own crimes and any other crimes he knows about, especially other crimes involving corrupt cops, the DA is going to come down on him like the proverbial million-pound shit-hammer. It’s a leverage thing.
And also, if you’re going after a cop like Ramos with just one or two serious criminal charges, you can be pretty certain he’ll be bounced out of the Department, but when it comes to a criminal trial, there’s always a chance that some smart defense lawyer will get him off. And in fact, in the case of Sergeant Dopey Dude, who helped Ramos with the phony rip on the electronics buyer, eventually he’ll be fired from the Department after a hearing, but at his criminal trial his less dopey lawyer will successfully argue that Dopey Dude was only doing a favor for his buddy Ramos, and that he didn’t even know the car stop in the Bronx was a rip-off. The point is, you never know what’s going to happen in a courtroom, and the more charges you have, the better off you are.
Anyway, we’ve been working the Ramos case for seven or eight months now, and so far it’s not that unusual a case. We’ve got one dirty cop—one and a half, if you count Sergeant Dopey Dude—that we’re going to take off the street, along with dope dealer Mack and several other civilian members of Ramos’s crew, including his wife, Wanda, who we’ve got on tape setting up a phony car insurance claim. It’s the sort of good, solid case we do all the time, but not something that’s going to garner much public attention. When the DA announces the arrests it’ll probably be a one-day story in the papers—“CROOKED COP NABBED IN BRONX CRIME RING!”—and then it will wend its way unnoticed through the court system.
But then, just before we’re about to bring the hammer down on Ramos, he gets a call on one of his wiretapped phones.
It’s a call that eventually will rock the Department, and the city—and the IAB itself.
* * *
At first the call to Ramos doesn’t sound like much. It’s some civilian friend of Ramos’s who just got a ticket for talking on his cell phone while he was driving on Fordham Road in the Bronx, and he wants Ramos to make the $130 ticket go away. No problem, Ramos says, he’ll take care of it. Ramos doesn’t ask the guy for any money to fix the ticket; it’s just a favor. Over the next week or so, while we’re listening on the tap, Ramos makes a series of calls to this cop and that cop and another cop, trying to fix the ticket, to make it disappear.
Ticket fixing? Well, okay, compared to Ramos’s other crimes, it’s not an earthshaker. It’s another charge of misdemeanor official misconduct, a charge of misdemeanor obstructing governmental administration, things like that, the sort of stuff that you tack onto the bottom of the multitude of charges in an indictment.
Except that in this case, it’s not just one fixed ticket, or a dozen fixed tickets. When we start looking into Ramos fixing the ticket for his pal with the cell phone, the case takes a whole new turn—a turn that leads us to the police officers’ union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the PBA.
A word about the PBA, which represents about twenty-two thousand NYPD police officers. PBA “delegates” are regular working cops who get a little extra money from the union to take care of their members’ problems, whether it’s a hassle with a boss, a dispute over overtime, even a personal problem at home. Delegates are the fix-it guys for other cops, and each elected PBA delegate represents about a hundred cops. PBA “trustees” are higher up in the union chain, they’re also sworn cops, but their only job is to do union business; each NYPD Patrol Borough has its own trustee, as do the various Police Service Areas and Transit Districts. (Detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains also have their own unions, and they’re all protected by the civil service laws. Assistant chiefs and above do not have a union, and serve at the pleasure of the police commissioner.)
The PBA and other police union officials do a lot of good things for their members. They’re vociferous defenders of cops’ rights, they help take care of the families of cops injured or killed in the line of duty, they provide legal assistance for cops in trouble. But too often the PBA leadership and delegates seem to forget that every cop’s most basic sworn duty is not only to enforce the law, but also to obey it.
Which brings us back to the Ramos case.
One of the cops that Ramos calls when he’s trying to fix the ticket is a PBA delegate in the 40th Precinct. Remember, we’re still trying to find out if any other cops in the Four-Oh are in on any of Ramos’s criminal schemes, so based on that information we get a court-ordered wiretap on the PBA delegate’s cell phone. While we’re up on the wire on that PBA delegate’s cell phone, we hear him talking about fixing other tickets with another PBA delegate in another precinct, so we get another wire up on that delegate’s cell phone, who starts talking about fixing other tickets with another delegate, so we get a wire up on that delegate—and on and on. Eventually we’ve got court-approved wires up on more than a dozen Bronx cops, almost all of them Bronx PBA delegates or trustees; we’ve got teams of IAB investigators crowded into the “wire room” at the DA’s office, listening in on their conversations. And it seems like these guys are spending half their time fixing tickets!
They’re not doing it for money. Nobody’s paying them to make tickets disappear. Usually they’re not even fixing tickets for members of a cop’s immediate family, or even somebody they know personally. Some cop will just call up the delegate and say, Hey, my wife’s brother’s stepkid got a speeding ticket, can you make it disappear? Or a cop will call and say, Look, there’s this friend of mine, he’s a good guy, he got a ticket, can you take care of it? And then the PBA guy will start calling around to other cops, trying to track the ticket down and make it go away.
There are several ways to do that. If it’s a fresh ticket, a cop can pull it out of the summonses box behind the desk in the precinct and tear it up. Or he can change a digit on the vehicle license plate number, in which case the record won’t match and it will be summarily dismissed. Or maybe a PBA delegate will arrange for the guy who got the ticket to plead not guilty, at which point the cop who wrote the ticket either won’t show up at the traffic court hearing, or he will show up and then intentionally tank it—Uh, no, Your Honor, I don’t actually remember why I stopped this guy. Either way, it’s case dismissed.
So maybe by now you’re thinking, what’s the big deal? All cops do that sort of thing, right? The answer is, No, they don’t. Like I said earlier, every cop has discretion when writing a ticket. Most cops I know won’t hang a ticket on another cop for parking illegally or a minor moving violation. (Serious violations like DWIs, driving while intoxicated, are another matter.) I’ve also known cops who wouldn’t give a ticket to a woman, any woman, because they couldn’t stand to see them cry, and cops who wouldn’t write a ticket on any guy with young children in the car, because they didn’t want to embarrass Dad in front of his kids. It’s officer discretion, and it’s completely legal.
But once a cop puts pen to paper in his summons book, that ticket is a legal document. And anyone who tampers with it, or conspires to tamper with it, is not only violating Department policy, he’s breaking the law.
I guess you’ll want to know, has anyone ever asked me to fix a ticket? Yeah, a couple of times during my career I’ve gotten a call from a second cousin’s wife’s brother-in-law, somebody who really doesn’t know me very well, and he’ll say s
omething like, Charlie, old buddy, I got this ticket, is there any way I can get it taken care of? Sure, I tell him, here’s how we’re gonna take care of it. If you’re not guilty, you go to court and tell it to the judge. If you are guilty, take out your checkbook and write out a check payable to the New York City Department of Finance.
That’s how I “fix” a ticket. That’s how every honest cop “fixes” a ticket. But the cops who are fixing tickets are not being honest cops—and it’s not just a few of them, either. We’re talking about hundreds of Bronx cops involved in one way or another with fixing thousands of tickets—most of them moving violations, even a few criminal summonses. And the key players, the facilitators, are the Bronx PBA delegates and trustees who are arranging all this over their cell phones . . . while we’re listening in.
Don’t get the wrong idea. Not every cop was into this, and not every ticket was “fixable.” While we’re listening to the wiretaps, we overhear a lot of cops who absolutely refuse to have anything to do with fixing a ticket. And in a lot of the conversations we’re listening to, as soon as the PBA delegate finds out the name of the cop who wrote the ticket, he’ll say something like, Nah, it won’t work, I know that guy, he won’t play. And that ticket goes unfixed.
Still, there are enough cops involved in this thing to make it a major scandal. It may not be as bad as the Knapp Commission scandal of the 1970s, when entire precincts were on the pad, or the Buddy Boys scandal of the ’80s, or the Dirty Thirty scandal of the early ’90s. But this ticket-fixing scheme is still corruption. It’s organized, widespread, and systemic; it’s costing the city millions of dollars in unpaid fines; and it’s not fair to the honest people of New York City. I mean, why should some mope who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a cop get to skate on a $150 ticket, while some working stiff who doesn’t have a cop connection pays the full fare?
So even though we know that going after PBA delegates is going to infuriate the union, and that the ticket-fixing scandal is going to infuriate the public when the news breaks, we can’t turn our backs on it.
Of course, for IAB, pursuing the ticket-fixing investigation is not a tough decision. It’s what we do. But to be frank about it, it takes some stones for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Bronx District Attorney Robert T. Johnson, both of whom have been in on the investigation from the beginning, to let it run its course no matter what. For Kelly it’s going to be an embarrassment, a major corruption scandal on his watch, and it’s going to have the police unions howling for his head. For DA Johnson, it’s probably going to endanger some of his pending criminal cases; as we’ll see, it’s not going to look good to a jury in a criminal case when the arresting officer has to admit under cross-examination that he’s currently under investigation for lying in a Traffic Court hearing to fix a ticket. And for Johnson, who’s an elected politician as well as a prosecutor, there are other dangers. What if we hear a cop trying to fix a ticket for a major campaign donor? Or the Bronx borough president’s second cousin twice removed? Who knows where this thing is going to lead, and at what political cost?
But despite that, at no time, from beginning to end, do PC Kelly or DA Johnson suggest, hint, or imply—much less order—that IAB or ADA Tom Leahy’s Rackets Bureau should ease up, back off, divert resources elsewhere. Of course, if they had, they would have had to find a new IAB chief, and a new Rackets Bureau chief; Tom and I are both committed to this case. But it never happens. We have free rein to see how far this thing goes.
But that’s going to take time. Like I said, we’ve got dozens of wires up, and we’re going to be listening in on them for months. Meanwhile, we’ve still got Officer Ramos out there, ready to be arrested, and we don’t want him walking around with his gun and shield for the next however many months the ticket-fixing investigation takes. But if we arrest him now, the wiretaps are going to come out in public and it’s going to blow the ongoing ticket-fixing investigation.
So we decide to run one more sting on Ramos. One of our undercovers tails him, close, in one of our IAB undercover cars, and just as Ramos is about to back into a parking space on the street our undercover slides his car into the spot. As expected, Ramos gets out of his car: Hey, buddy, what the hell you doing, that’s my spot, I was pulling right in there! There’s a brief argument, nothing violent, and eventually our undercover slinks away. Then a couple days later two IAB investigators in suits show up at Ramos’s home in Washington Park.
Officer Ramos, they say, did you have an argument with a man over a parking space a couple days ago? Ramos says: Yeah, sure, but it was no big deal, nothing happened. And then the IAB guys explain to him that the man in question had called 911, said he was threatened by a man with a gun, and the car plate number he gave to 911 traced back to Officer Ramos, so it wound up with IAB. While they’re telling him this, our IAB guys couldn’t be nicer or more understanding. Gosh, Officer, they say, we’re pretty sure this is bullshit, the complainant sounds like a nut job, but hey, we gotta investigate it, it’s just procedure, standard procedure, and the thing is, while we’re investigating we’re gonna have to put you on modified duty, so would you mind very much giving us your gun and shield?
Ramos grumbles about it, but he buys it. So now he’s on modified duty, working behind a desk in another precinct, and he still doesn’t know we’re onto him for the barbershop crimes. The funny thing is, while he’s on modified we’ve still got him up on a wire, and he’s still planning scams, and he’s still fixing tickets. And every month or so Ramos calls IAB, wanting to know when we’re going to close the parking space argument investigation, and we have to keep putting him off—Yes, Officer, we’re working on it, these things take time, please be patient.
It’s weird. But it’s that kind of case.
Meanwhile, we’re still up on more than a dozen wires at a time in the ticket-fixing investigation. A cop wants a speeding ticket on his daughter’s boyfriend to disappear so he won’t be disqualified from getting a cabbie license. A cop wants to kill a ticket on a friend of his who remodels kitchens. A cop wants to help his barber by making a ticket disappear. And on and on and on, hundreds and hundreds of them.
Again, there’s no overt discussion of payoffs to the cops for fixing the tickets. Why should there be? I mean, sometimes it can take three or four or five cops to fix a ticket, and who’s going to pay off five cops to make a $150 ticket disappear? But when you fix a ticket for a guy, it’s a favor in the favor bank, and maybe you collect down the road—free haircuts, maybe, or a heavy discount on getting your kitchen remodeled.
In fact, one of the few direct quid pro quos we pick up on the wires is when a Bronx PBA trustee calls a New York Yankees executive to report that he has successfully fixed a ticket for another Yankees front office exec. The PBA trustee doesn’t ask for any money, but he does mention that it would be nice if he and his wife got a pass for the exclusive Delta Suite at Yankee Stadium for the game that night. No problem, the Yankees exec tells him.
And it’s not just talk about routine traffic or parking tickets that we’re hearing on the wiretaps. In several cases, cops tried—unsuccessfully—to quash domestic violence charges or DWIs against other cops. In one case, the owner of a paint store on East 180th Street beats a guy up, badly, for no reason, and when the victim calls 911, the paint store owner calls a cop pal, a PBA delegate, who calls the responding cops on his cell phone and asks them to “make it go the right way” for the paint store owner—after which the cops tank the assault case and file a false report. That’s a crime in anybody’s book.
Of course, when you’re running an investigation involving hundreds of cops, and dozens of IAB and DA investigators and staff members—secretaries, clerks, technicians, and so on—you have to worry about leaks, intentional or inadvertent. You never know if one of the targeted cops just happens to have a cousin whose wife is a clerk in the DA’s office or a secretary at One Police Plaza and just might overhear something about cops and wiretaps and fixed tickets.
Leaks can happen. And I’m sorry to say that the first leak about the ticket-fixing investigation came from us, the IAB.
Remember when I talked about the speech I gave to each group of cops we drafted into IAB? How they might not like being in Internal Affairs and investigating other cops, but it was their duty to protect good cops from the bad ones? Well, another part of that speech was about their duty to keep quiet about ongoing IAB investigations, no matter who those investigations involved; in fact, they had to sign a document promising that they wouldn’t discuss any ongoing IAB case with anyone who didn’t have a need to know—including other members of IAB. (I signed the same form—and I should note that nothing in this book concerns any ongoing confidential IAB investigations.) If they violated that duty it was a form of treason—and treason is a capital offense.
The vast majority of our IAB investigators took that message to heart. But a few didn’t.
For example, we had an earlier case we were working with the FBI, looking at a Brooklyn narcotics detective suspected of “shotgunning” major-weight drug shipments for a big-time drug dealer. At one point the narcotics detective thinks he spots us tailing him—he was wrong, we didn’t have a tail on him that day—so he calls a friend of his, a sergeant in IAB, and asks if he’s being investigated. The sergeant surreptitiously checks the IAB files and calls the detective back and says: Yeah, they got a case on you and it looks like a big one. What they didn’t know was that we had a wire up on the detective’s phone and we were listening to the entire conversation. The IAB sergeant was indicted and kicked out of the Department.
So yeah, sometimes it happened. Sometimes IAB personnel felt more loyalty to their cop friends, even their crooked cop friends, than they felt to the Department, or the city, or the law.
That’s what happened to the lieutenant who blabbed about the ticket-fixing case.
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