Still, it’s enough. Ramos and Wanda are both indicted on murder-conspiracy charges. After being convicted and sentenced for the earlier barbershop crimes, in January 2015, Ramos pleads guilty to the conspiracy charges and gets another three to nine years tacked onto the earlier sentence.
There’s a postscript to the story of Sal the CI. In November 2012, while Sal is still out on bail and waiting to testify in the Ramos case, he reverts to form. He and a couple of pals arrange to steal more than three thousand iPads—fresh off the plane from China, and worth $1.5 million retail—from a cargo storage facility at JFK Airport and drive them in a tractor trailer to a storage facility in Virginia. As we had carefully explained to Sal when we first signed him up as a CI, any further criminal activity on his part would not only greatly diminish his value as a witness, but it would also eliminate any goodwill that we might have for him in return for helping us investigate Officer Jose Ramos. But of course he doesn’t listen. So after he’s busted on that charge, Sal winds up getting two and a half years in the joint.
Like I said, it’s been that kind of case.
* * *
So in the end, what did the Ramos/ticket-fixing investigation accomplish? Was it worth the thousands of man-hours, and the years of time, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that IAB and the Bronx DA put into it?
The answer is, You bet it was worth it.
For one thing, it took a seriously dirty cop—Ramos—off the street and put him in prison. That’s worth almost any amount of time and resources.
The ticket-fixing investigation also made the city’s traffic summonses system more accurate and more fair. Even while the investigation was going on, as the wide scope of the ticket fixing became apparent, it speeded up the introduction of a new computer tracking system that scanned all summonses as they came in, making it much more difficult to make a summons disappear.
But most important, the ticket-fixing investigation helped change the NYPD culture.
What helped turn New York City around in the early 1990s, what changed it from a crime-ridden, Third World–style hellhole into a safe and vibrant city was the NYPD’s decision to not only aggressively pursue serious crimes, but also to start enforcing the laws against low-level and “quality-of-life” crimes—subway fare beating, public urination, aggressive panhandling, and so on. It sent out the message that crime, any crime, wasn’t going to be tolerated anymore—and it worked.
Same thing with the ticket-fixing investigation. Although the investigation was concentrated in the Bronx, it sent out a message to every precinct in every borough in the city that corruption, even relatively low-level corruption like ticket fixing, would not be tolerated in the new NYPD. I won’t say that since then there’s never been a summons or a criminal case that’s been tampered with by an NYPD cop. But I can guarantee you that with the memory of the ticket-fixing case still fresh in everyone’s mind, no sane cop is going to risk his career and his livelihood by trying to tank a lousy $150 speeding ticket for his cousin’s wife’s nephew.
The old-style NYPD cops, the cynical hairbags who may look back fondly at the bad old days, may not like it. But everybody understands it.
When a cop willfully and intentionally breaks the law, it’s never just a courtesy. It’s a crime.
Chapter 13
* * *
POLITICS
I had never intended to spend half of my NYPD career investigating other cops. It’s not the sort of thing that any young cop dreams about on the day he graduates from the Academy.
But somebody has to do it. Somebody has to be the point man in the never-ending fight against cops who cross the line. And whether I liked it or not, that somebody turned out to be me.
What is amazing to me is that I lasted as long as I did.
You’ll remember that back in 1993, when then commissioner Ray Kelly told me he was sending me to the new Internal Affairs Bureau, he had assured me it would only be a two-year gig. And by mid-1996, I had done more than my promised two years in IAB, first as an inspector in charge of the Corruption Prevention and Analysis Unit, then as IAB deputy chief of support services and IAB executive officer, second in command under my friend Chief Pat Kelleher. During those two-plus years we’d done a lot to get the new IAB up and running, and I was proud of that, but I was looking forward to moving on, maybe as—this was being contemplated—the new commander of the Police Academy. I was a one-star chief by then, and the Academy commander job was a one-star chief’s position, and I’d always been interested in education. I thought I’d like to help instill in young recruits my love for the NYPD and my faith in the NYPD’s core values, and to help teach them how they could contribute to the new NYPD.
And in 1996 it was a new NYPD. Beginning with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and continuing through Commissioners Bill Bratton and Howard Safir, and with the help of visionaries like the aforementioned Jack Maple, the NYPD had begun its transformation into a proactive police department, not just a reactive one, attacking crime at the “quality-of-life” level and carrying through to more serious crimes. The CompStat system pioneered by Maple and others was allowing the Department to track crimes on a daily basis and deploy resources accordingly. And it was working. Murders had been cut in half since 1990, other crimes were plummeting, people were feeling safer on the streets, New York City was becoming not just livable but once again a thriving and vibrant city. As I said earlier, it was already being called the “New York Miracle”—and the NYPD was getting much of the credit.
In short, it was an exciting time to be an NYPD cop—and I was looking forward to sharing that excitement with new recruits. I figured I’d do that for a few years, then move on to something else. I had twenty-two years on the job by then, so maybe in a few years I would drop my retirement papers, finish my PhD dissertation in criminal justice at John Jay, and go into teaching full-time. One thing was certain: I wouldn’t be in IAB much longer.
And then one morning in July 1996, Police Commissioner Howard Safir calls me into his office. He’s smiling like he’s got good news for me. He says he’s making me the new chief of the Internal Affairs Bureau, the top guy. (Current IAB chief Pat Kelleher is moving over to the coveted spot of chief of detectives.) It’s a three-star chief’s position, so Safir says he’s bumping me up two grades, from one star to three, virtually overnight; I’m going to be what’s known as a “super-chief,” one of only seven in the Department. Yeah, it will mean I won’t get the Academy commander job, but for a guy who not too many years earlier had thought that passing the lieutenant’s exam was going to be the highlight of his career, becoming a three-star chief is pretty heady stuff.
And yet, when I get home that night and tell my wife, Arlene, about this big promotion, this is exactly what she says: That’s good news, isn’t it? So why aren’t you smiling?
She’s right. I’m not smiling. For two reasons.
One reason is that I know the average useful professional lifespan of an NYPD super-chief is about three years. That’s because New York mayors come and go, and since the mayor appoints the police commissioner, who serves at the mayor’s pleasure, that means that police commissioners come and go, which means that super-chiefs come and go. A new PC comes in, he understandably wants his own guys around him in the top slots, and since you’re the previous guy’s super-chief, suddenly maybe you aren’t so super anymore. Sure, if you aren’t quite ready to retire they’ll usually find some obscure place to park you for a few years until you drop your papers, but who wants that?
Well, as it turned out, my concern that as chief of IAB I would be caught in a rapidly revolving door proved unfounded. As I mentioned earlier, I would wind up spending more than seventeen years as chief of IAB, under four different police commissioners—which was unheard of. I would not only be the longest-serving Internal Affairs chief in NYPD history, but I also would be the longest-serving—or longest-surviving—three-star NYPD chief in modern NYPD history.
That’s mostly because the
dedication and hard work of the cops under my command in IAB—detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, administrative personnel, all of them—always made me look good. But I was also fortunate to serve almost all of my time as IAB chief under police commissioners who, although their personal styles were completely different, believed in what we were doing in the new IAB—and they wanted us to keep doing it.
I’ve mentioned them already. The first was Howard Safir, the former DEA and US Marshals Service agent and administrator who Mayor Rudy Giuliani brought in to replace Commissioner Bill Bratton in early 1996 after Bratton and Giuliani butted heads. (More on Bill Bratton later.) Safir, who incidentally was the first Jewish police commissioner in NYPD history, was a lot like the mayor who appointed him: tough, relentless, blunt, and never ready to back down from a fight—of which he had many, particularly with the police unions and the press. A longtime friend of Giuliani’s, and an outsider to the NYPD, Safir had zero tolerance for police corruption or misconduct, or for the much-discussed Blue Wall of Silence. He was a consistent and solid supporter of the IAB. His response to any IAB investigation, including the Louima case, was to make sure I had the resources I needed and then trust me wherever it went.
I also served, relatively briefly, as IAB chief under Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who was appointed to replace Safir after he decided in 2000 to go into the private sector. Kerik was a former NYPD narcotics undercover detective, a member of Giuliani’s protective detail, and the city commissioner of corrections before Giuliani named him police commissioner—a kind of temporary fill-in, since Giuliani was going to be term-limited out of the mayor’s office in just sixteen months. As police commissioner, Kerik was . . . well, let’s just say that in his heart he was always more of a street cop than an administrator or executive. He liked nothing better than to go out at night with his security detail, all of them tough cops, and actually make arrests. He generally left most of the day-to-day running of the Department to subordinates—including me at IAB. Colorful, affable, and often profane—he could out-cuss a sailor—Kerik also had a complicated personal life and some ill-advised friendships. Although there were never any corruption allegations against Kerik while he was police commissioner, later he was investigated by the Bronx DA and the US Justice Department for tax evasion and for lying during his aborted attempt to become the federal secretary of homeland security. As a result he served three years in federal prison—a reminder, I guess, that it’s not just beat cops who sometimes forget the oath they take.
And then there was Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who was reappointed as commissioner by Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in 2002 and under whom I served for twelve years as IAB chief. Kelly, you’ll remember, was the guy who shanghaied me into Internal Affairs when I was a deputy inspector in 1993—for which I have long since forgiven him. Since joining the Department in 1966 after his service as a Marine officer in Vietnam, Kelly had held almost every job there was in the NYPD, from street cop to police commissioner, a position he first assumed in late 1992 under Mayor David Dinkins. Although Kelly was a tough commissioner who initiated many of the concepts that dramatically reduced crime in New York City in the 1990s—including the dispersal of the so-called squeegee men whose shakedowns of drivers symbolized much of what was wrong with New York—he also maintained excellent relationships with the city’s many minority communities, an important function in a city as diverse as New York. But Kelly had the misfortune to be linked with a mayor, Dinkins, who was widely perceived as antipolice and soft on crime, so after Giuliani took over the mayor’s office on a tough-on-crime platform in 1994, he unceremoniously moved Kelly out and put tough-on-crime Bill Bratton in—which proved to be kind of ironic. It’s ironic because—as we’ll see—years later Bratton himself would have the misfortune (in my opinion) to be linked as police commissioner to another antipolice and soft-on-crime mayor in the form of Bill de Blasio.
In any event, after Bloomberg brought Kelly back to the police commissioner’s job—Kelly was the first PC in history to hold two nonconsecutive tenures in the job—no one ever mistook Kelly for being soft on crime, or on police corruption or misconduct. He continued many of his predecessors’ anticrime policies and even expanded some of them—including the controversial “stop, question, and possibly frisk” program (incorrectly shortened by the news media and politicians to “stop and frisk”) that took tens of thousands of guns and other weapons off the streets and saved thousands of lives. As a lifelong NYPD cop who had lived through some of the most troubled chapters in NYPD history, Kelly also understood that another widespread police corruption or misconduct scandal like those that produced the Knapp Commission and Mollen Commission could be fatal to the Department—and consequently he put resources, and his confidence, into IAB. As IAB chief I met with Kelly almost every day to brief him on ongoing investigations and explain new ones, and while he always wanted to know every detail, he never micromanaged. As far as I was concerned, he was the perfect boss, and the perfect commissioner. In fact, with his ramrod-straight posture, close-cropped hair, and Irish pug face, he even looked like the perfect NYPD commissioner.
So anyway, although I couldn’t know it yet, on that day in July 1996 when I told my wife about my big promotion, I didn’t have to worry about being shuffled out of the job after just a year or two. The guys I would be working for were going to back me up.
But as I said, there were two reasons I wasn’t smiling on the day I got promoted to IAB chief. The second reason I wasn’t smiling was because I hate politics—and by 1996 I’d already been around the upper floors of One Police Plaza enough to know just how savage the politics surrounding the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau could be.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not saying that IAB investigations are political. When we get a complaint or open an investigation, whether it’s about a cop on the beat or a senior member of the Department, we go where the investigation leads us—and nobody tells us otherwise. A lot of critics out there won’t believe it, but I’ll raise my right hand and swear in any court in the land that, with one relatively minor exception—which I’ll get to later—no mayor or police commissioner under whom I served ever ordered me or anyone under my IAB command to tank an investigation, or to go after a political rival, or even subtly suggested that I redirect IAB resources away from a given case. If one of them had I would remember, because that would have been my last day as chief of IAB.
I should point out that there are only two people in the NYPD who IAB doesn’t investigate if there’s an allegation of misconduct or impropriety—that’s the police commissioner and the chief of IAB. If something like that comes up, those investigations are handled by the city’s Department of Investigations or the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board or some other outside agency.
For example, one day in the Bronx there’s a traffic accident in which a guy in a white Oldsmobile hits another car, injuring the other driver, and then drives away. A witness gets the plate number, which traces back to my official Department car. That’s right, my Department car has been identified as the getaway vehicle in a hit-and-run.
So as soon as I hear about it I notify the Bronx DA’s office, the independent mayor’s Commission to Combat Police Corruption, and the New York State Police to conduct the investigation—and I think I’ve got a pretty good defense. My Department car is a brown Buick, not a white Oldsmobile. At my request, the New York State Police tow my car to the lab and forensically determine that it’s never been in a collision, much less a recent one. And at the exact time of the incident I was operating the scoreboard in front of a couple hundred people at the Abe Stark Arena in Coney Island where my son’s hockey team was competing—which is about as solid an alibi as you can get. It turns out that the witness got one digit wrong on the hit-and-run driver’s plate number; later we found the owner of the white Olds, who had conveniently reported the car stolen an hour after the accident.
Anyway, although IAB isn’t politica
l, it’s constantly involved as the lead investigating unit in politically charged situations—officer-involved shootings, excessive-force allegations, deaths in custody, police corruption. And there are plenty of political people and groups out there who are eager for an IAB investigation to support their preconceived opinions—and if it doesn’t, they aren’t shy about letting you know. The press, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the police unions, police brutality lawyers, race- and gender-discrimination lawyers, community activists, City Council members—the list goes on and on. There’s never any shortage of people on the outside who will tell you how IAB should do its job, or how IAB isn’t doing its job, or how IAB shouldn’t be doing its job.
For example, to paraphrase Henny Youngman, take the press . . . please.
It’s not that I don’t like newspapers and TV news. Hey, I enjoy fiction as much as the next guy—and to be fair, sometimes when covering cops in general, and the NYPD in particular, the reporters actually get it right.
But too often I’d see a news story about IAB and have to wonder, Where do they get this stuff?
The press seemed to take it as an article of faith that IAB would, if given the opportunity, cover up anything that was embarrassing to the NYPD. The Louima case is an example. As I mentioned earlier, by the time the story of the assault broke in the press, IAB already had hundreds of investigators working the case, and we were close to positively identifying the officers involved and making arrests. But since we couldn’t talk about it publicly until we had indictments, some reporters assumed that we’d been sitting on the investigation, and had only been roused to action by the public outcry.
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