Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  She’d been a sergeant in IAB, a draftee, and she was involved in the Ramos case when it began—not a key player, but enough to know about the initial wiretaps on the PBA cops. Early on in the ticket-fixing investigation she makes lieutenant, and with her two-year commitment in IAB ending, she transfers out to regular duty in the 48th Precinct in the Bronx. Shortly thereafter, she’s having a drink at a bar in Rockland County with two other Bronx cops, a lieutenant and a PBA delegate, personal friends, and she tells them: Hey, be careful about talking about fixing summonses on the phone; IAB’s got wires up. So of course within hours the word is flying around among the Bronx PBA delegates and trustees. They start telling each other: Look, we gotta be more careful about making summonses go away, IAB’s got wires up, we’re gonna have to do it face to face from now on. We know they’re saying this because we’re listening to them talk about it on their phones.

  Let me repeat that: These cops are talking on their phones about not using their phones to fix tickets! I hate to say it, but some of these guys are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

  Well, at first we’re worried that the ticket-fixing investigation is completely blown, that we’ll just have to go with what we have already. And for a couple of months the ticket-fixing chatter slacks off.

  But it’s strange. A lot of these cops we’ve got wires up on don’t really believe it. We hear some of them say the female lieutenant who leaked the information is a “fucking kook” and “fucking nuts.” They know she used to be with “the rat squad”—IAB—and some of them wonder aloud if she’s still a rat, if this whole ticket-fixing investigation she talked about is bogus, if it’s some kind of unrelated IAB integrity test or something. So pretty soon they’re back at it again, on their phones, while we’re listening: Hey, I got this buddy of a buddy, he got a speeding ticket, can you take care of it for me?

  No investigation can go on forever, and by now we’ve been on this one for almost a year—almost two years if you count the initial investigation of Ramos and his crew. (That’s something that never comes across in TV crime shows, how long investigations can take. On TV, a detective will catch a case, investigate it, make an arrest, and have the perp in court without ever even changing his shirt; in real life, sometimes you can actually watch a cop grow old over the course of a complicated investigation.) We’ve got more than ten thousand monitored calls and text messages—ten thousand!—made by hundreds of cops talking about fixing tickets. But before we take it to a grand jury, there’s one other thing we have to do. We have to stage an IAB raid on every precinct in the Bronx.

  So in late 2010, we summon fifty IAB investigators into IAB headquarters on Hudson Street, swear them to secrecy, and lay out the plan. At precisely eleven a.m., you guys hit the Four-Oh, you guys hit the Four-Eight, and so on, every one of the twelve precincts in the Bronx. What we’re going to do is scoop up the precincts’ copies of summonses, tens of thousands of them, and we have to do it simultaneously at every precinct, because once the word is out that IAB is in the house we don’t want to give anybody a chance to start feeding the paper shredder. Unfortunately, one of our IAB investigators, a lieutenant, inadvertently blabs about the raid to a cop buddy, a sergeant in Queens, who quickly alerts a PBA delegate in Queens, who in turn alerts a PBA delegate in the Bronx; fortunately, by the time the Bronx delegate gets the word it’s after eleven a.m. and we’re already inside the precincts and securing the summonses records. (Both the blabby lieutenant and the blabby sergeant caught suspensions for that one.)

  Of course, after the raids on the Bronx precincts, the word is out. The wires on the cops’ phones come down, and we and the DA’s office start putting together evidence for a grand jury. In early 2011 a special grand jury starts sifting through the evidence in the ticket-fixing case and the case that led up to it, the investigation of Ramos and his crew. Over the next months the grand jury calls more than eighty witnesses, including cops and some of the civilians who got their tickets fixed—including the New York Yankees exec—and under grants of immunity compels them to testify about the ticket-fixing scheme. (Frankly, I wished that some of the civilians who asked to have their tickets fixed would have been charged, but it would have been hard to prove in court—and besides, it wasn’t my call.)

  At the same time the grand jury is calling in witnesses, we’re starting to call cops into a spare, windowless administrative hearing room in IAB headquarters on Hudson Street and GO-15-ing them—that is, ordering them to tell us about the ticket fixing, for which they’ll face Department administrative charges, in return for granting them immunity from criminal charges. Eventually, hundreds of cops will walk in and out of that room.

  Obviously, any case involving that many people isn’t going to stay secret, and this one doesn’t. A few weeks after the grand jury probe begins, the word is out—“BIG INQUIRY INTO TICKET-FIXING IN NEW YORK,” the New York Times headline says—and over the next few months more and more information about the scope of the police ticket-fixing scandal comes out. Pretty soon, the entire city is buzzing about what the papers are calling the “Tix-Fix” scandal.

  There’s a lot of talk in the press about the NYPD’s corrupt “culture,” and some writers are suggesting that Tix-Fix is going to be the most far-ranging NYPD scandal since the Dirty Thirty in the early 1990s. And the public is paying attention. Instead of saying the usual thing—Don’t you cops have anything better to do?—drivers who are getting tickets are saying to cops: Hey, who do I have to call to get this fixed? There’s even a scene in the TV police show Blue Bloods in which singer Tony Bennett, playing himself, asks Tom Selleck, who plays the NYPD police commissioner, if he’ll fix a speeding ticket for Bennett’s driver—an obvious reference to the brewing real-life scandal—and Selleck seems to agree. (I never asked Ray Kelly about it, but if he saw it, I doubt he thought it was funny. When Kelly was asked if he’d ever fixed a ticket, his response was “Never”—and no one had ever asked him to.)

  As I mentioned before, word about the looming scandal even has an effect on some of the Bronx DA’s unrelated criminal cases. In one Bronx DWI case, the defendant—a personal injury lawyer, no less—is acquitted by a jury after two of the cops who arrested him have to admit on the witness stand that they’re under investigation for ticket fixing; one juror later says of the cops: How can you trust such people? Worse, in an attempted murder case, another Bronx jury acquits a guy who was caught on a surveillance camera shooting at a guy in a Mott Haven apartment building after one of the cops involved in the arrest admits in court that he fixed two tickets for his sister-in-law—which the defense attorney says make him a “corrupt cop” who shouldn’t be trusted.

  Okay, sure, Bronx juries are notoriously anticop. But when a jury, any jury, trusts a personal injury lawyer and a street player with a gun more than they trust a cop, you’ve got a problem.

  Within the Department, word of the Tix-Fix investigation has an immediate impact. No cop is trying to fix tickets anymore, not only in the Bronx but citywide. Cops who might have legitimately called in sick on a day they’re scheduled to testify in Traffic Court come in anyway; they’d rather testify with a 101-degree fever than make it seem like they’re tanking a ticket. In the Bronx precincts, even though the wires have all come down, PBA delegates and trustees have pretty much stopped taking calls on their cell phones, on any subject—a clear-cut case of belatedly closing the barn door.

  And everybody is wondering: What’s the grand jury going to do? How many cops are going to get indicted behind this ticket thing? Some of the leaks from the grand jury say twenty cops, some say fifty cops, some say hundreds of cops.

  And then in October 2011, after months of work, the grand jury finally makes its decision. And the NYPD finds itself in something close to a state of civil war.

  * * *

  We had known from the start that not every cop who helped fix a ticket would be indicted. Some of the cops we overheard on the wiretaps were only messengers, passing along a ticket-fixing
request from a cop buddy in another precinct to a PBA delegate in their precinct. Some of the cops involved clearly felt some pressure from their PBA delegates to not show up on court day or otherwise help fix a ticket. Other cops had only been involved in fixing one ticket, or two. The DA—and through him, the grand jury—isn’t going to charge guys like that criminally. The Department will handle them administratively. Eventually three hundred cops will receive command disciplines, docking them up to ten days of vacation pay. Another two hundred more serious offenders are hit with formal departmental charges, with punishments ranging from dismissal to, in most cases, loss of up to forty vacation days—the rough equivalent of a $10,000 fine.

  But the organizers of the ticket-fixing scheme, the cops who fixed dozens of tickets, are in serious trouble. So is that former IAB lieutenant who had leaked information on the investigation. And so are Officer Ramos and his crew. In the end, the grand jury returns a sixteen-hundred-count indictment—sixteen hundred counts!—charging twenty-one people with various felonies and misdemeanors.

  Obviously, Ramos takes the hardest hit. He’s been cooling his heels on modified duty for more than year, and when rumors about the ticket-fixing investigation first come out, we pick him up on a wire talking about it. He’s not worried, he says, he never took any money for fixing a ticket, he says. This mope has no idea how much we have on him.

  And we have a lot. Ramos is charged with attempted robbery (the stolen electronics guy rip-off), attempted grand larceny (the motel rip), transporting what he believed to be a shipment of heroin to Brooklyn, selling counterfeit CDs and DVDs in his barbershops, insurance fraud, and filing of a false report of a robbery (his buddy Marco Mack’s phony complaint to IAB). And—icing on the cake—he’s also charged with four misdemeanor counts of official misconduct for fixing traffic tickets. His 40th Precinct pal, Sergeant Dopey Dude, is charged in the electronics guy rip-off, and four civilian members of the barbershop crew—Wanda (Mrs. Ramos), Marco Mack (aka Lee King), and two others—are hit with various drug possession, theft, and conspiracy charges. We scoop up Ramos and the rest of them, and put them in handcuffs, even before the indictments are unsealed.

  Of course, nobody cares much about the arrest of a dope-dealing, money-stealing crooked cop. But it’s the other fourteen defendants named in the indictment that cause a near riot in the NYPD.

  One of them is the chatterbox former IAB lieutenant, charged with three misdemeanor counts. Three others are the cops who made it “go the right way” for the friend of the PBA delegate who beat up the guy at the paint store, as well as the paint store owner who did the beating. But ten of the other indicted cops, who are facing hundreds of felony and misdemeanor counts in the ticket-fixing scheme, are all current or former delegates or trustees of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

  And when that news breaks, the PBA almost goes berserk.

  Even before the indictments were returned, union leaders had been arguing that fixing a ticket for a friend or a family member was “a courtesy, not a crime,” that it was a long-standing and common practice in the NYPD, and that no cop should be punished for it. Mayor Michael Bloomberg unintentionally contributed to that argument during a radio interview before the indictments came down, saying that while NYPD officers certainly shouldn’t be fixing tickets, that it was an embarrassment for the Department, it was also a widespread practice in many police departments, and he added—quote—It’s been going on since the days of the Egyptians.

  Well, I don’t know if cops in the Thebes PD robbed the Pharaoh’s coffers by fixing tickets on speeding chariots and illegally parked donkeys. But I bet if they did, Pharaoh wouldn’t have given them a command discipline, or even an indictment; he would have had their heads. And so what if fixing tickets was a “common practice”—and I would argue that it really wasn’t? Cops splitting up the gambling pad at every level of a precinct was once a common practice. Cops taking bottles of Scotch on the arm was once a common practice. Cops taking payoffs from tow-truck drivers was once a common practice. Is that the way these guys want the modern NYPD to be?

  As for ticket fixing being just a courtesy, not a crime, that’s an easy one: Check your Patrol Guide. Or the New York State criminal statutes.

  But the union doesn’t see it that way. The night before the indicted cops are to be arraigned—along with Ramos and his crew—the PBA sends out a text asking rank-and-file cops to show up in court to support them. When the indicted cops show up, there are a hundred off-duty cops filling the courtroom, hundreds more packed into the halls, and still hundreds more outside on the street, many of them carrying signs that say “It’s a Courtesy, Not a Crime” and “Since the Time of the Egyptians”—a reference to the Bloomberg thing. They’re shouting encouragement to the indicted cops, jostling reporters and TV crews, screaming curses about the DA, the police commissioner, and of course the “rats” in IAB. When some civilian counter-demonstrators start shouting “Fix our tickets!” the cops heap verbal abuse on them. Like I said, it’s a near riot.

  Hundreds of rank-and-file officers took to the streets to protest when more than a dozen NYPD cops were arrested after a massive IAB investigation into ticket-fixing. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association claimed that fixing tickets was just a courtesy—but to IAB it was a crime. (Getty Images)

  (To his credit, PBA President Pat Lynch makes it clear the protesting cops aren’t there to support Officer Ramos, whom he calls a “drug dealer.” The PBA hasn’t completely lost sight of its responsibility to oppose lawbreakers.)

  At the arraignment everybody pleads not guilty, and the ticket-fixing cops are ROR’ed—released–own recognizance. But Ramos and his crew take a harder hit. The judge slaps Ramos with $500,000 bail—in New York City, an astonishingly high bail for anything less than murder or violent mayhem—and he’s off to jail on Riker’s Island. His accused crew members are held on lesser bail amounts.

  Now it’s in the hands of the lawyers.

  It’s a funny thing about accused cops and their lawyers. A cop can sit on a barstool and rail for hours about the injustice of slick defense attorneys and lily-livered, criminal-pampering judges who allow critical evidence in a case to be tossed out because of an illegal search. But when a cop gets arrested, he’ll develop a sudden and profound reverence for the finer points of the Fourth Amendment.

  Which is exactly what happens in the ticket-fixing case. One of the first things the cops’ lawyers do is challenge the search warrants for the wiretaps—and although the legality of the wiretaps is eventually upheld, it’s a process that takes months, and then years. Although the former IAB lieutenant who leaked the investigation was convicted of a misdemeanor and sentenced to probation, as I write this most of the criminal ticket-fixing cases against the cops are still in the courts. (I should point out that nothing I’ve said about those cases hasn’t already been turned over to the defense lawyers or become part of the public record.)

  But justice moves more quickly in the case of Jose Ramos, the crooked cop who started it all. In October 2014, after a jury trial, Ramos is convicted on several counts stemming from our initial criminal investigation and later is sentenced to almost fifteen years in prison. But in fact, his trouble is just beginning—and once again, that trouble involves his old pal, and our old confidential informant, Sal.

  Go back a couple of years, when Ramos is stuck on Riker’s Island on $500,000 bail. Based on the indictments, he knows that Sal is the rat, the guy who put him into those rip-offs and that shotgunning drug deal that IAB set up—and as a result, Ramos would very much like to have Sal murdered. Sal is still out on bail for that bogus credit card scam and is expected to testify against Ramos. Ramos thinks that if he can put Sal out of the way, permanently, the DA won’t have a case against him. He’s wrong on that—we’ve got videotapes and undercover IAB cops to testify against Ramos, with or without Sal—but then, Ramos never was the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

  So of course Ramos mentions this desir
e to have Sal murdered to another Riker’s Island jailbird, and says he’s looking for a hit man to take out Sal. And what does that jailbird do? He does what every jailbird who’s looking to get out from under his own charges does. In return for a break on his own crimes, he rats out Ramos to a Corrections Department officer, who contacts his own Department of Investigations, who contacts IAB.

  We figure: Ramos wants a hit man? Okay, we’ll give him a hit man. We’ve got an IAB undercover, an African American cop who plays a perfect gangsta killer, and we get the jailbird turned informant to introduce him to Ramos on visiting day at the jail. Ramos explains that he wants this rat taken out, and our undercover hit man, who’s wired, tells Ramos, sure, he can get the job done, for five thousand up front, five more after it’s over. Life is cheap with these guys.

  Meanwhile, Ramos has gotten his wife, Wanda, who was released without bail on the insurance scam charge, in on the deal. All phone calls from Riker’s Island are monitored, so he and Wanda talk in kind of a dopey, childish code, but with what Ramos has already said to our undercover, it’s easy enough to figure out. He tells Wanda, in code, to take the money for the hit out of his Department pension fund and give it to the hit man.

  I mean, does this guy Ramos never learn? He’s already gotten jammed up by trusting one low-life criminal, his pal Sal, and now he’s put his trust in another low-life criminal, the Riker’s Island jailbird. He’s already been fooled by two IAB undercovers, the Miami drug dealer and the stolen electronics guy, and now he’s being fooled by another, the IAB “hit man.” He’s already been caught in dozens of incriminating conversations on tapped phones, and now he’s talking about a hit for hire, from Riker’s Island . . . on the phone!

  I guess the answer is no. Guys like Ramos never do learn.

  So eventually Wanda takes the cash out of the pension fund, but when our undercover goes to her house to collect the down payment on the hit, she balks, saying she doesn’t have the money. I don’t think she made our undercover; I think she just decided that, given her husband’s less than stellar success record as a criminal, she was afraid to be a part of any murder he had planned.