Jersey Tough

by Wayne Bradshaw

  Mullins, Alton Bennett and I were all scheduled to testify before a grand jury at the Monmouth County Courthouse on some of our drug cases late that morning. Normally, grand jury presentations are quite routine—a prosecutor tells the 23 grand jurors what the proposed charges are and then presents a bare-bones case, usually with just an arresting officer or victim. The prosecutor doesn’t have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt—that happens later, in a court of law. The grand jury process merely assures that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to present a case; the legal standard is lower. Most of the time, grand juries issue “true bills of indictment,” with few if any questions. Serving on a grand jury can almost be fun for citizens, because it’s a window into a world they don’t often see. It’s less fun for those whose paychecks get interrupted. Grand jury presentations were a piece of cake for me.

  After we testified under oath, the three of us decided to go out to get lunch together. We headed to a fancy restaurant for food and drinks. We always carried cash for a number of reasons. We never knew when we were going to make an undercover drug buy. And our superiors understood that some of the money we had would be used on food and drink—all as part of our work undercover. The more successful undercovers had access to larger amounts of cash; it was a results-oriented system. The tuxedoed bartender and maître d’ thought they had the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels entering their sophisticated establishment. We walked to the bar, looking every bit a one-percent biker crew in search of whiskey. The bartender looked blankly at us while drying some glasses, and we each ordered white wine. Looking a bit bewildered, he poured a chardonnay for the three of us.

  Wanting to be friendly, I asked a well-dressed older gentleman next to me what he was drinking. “Gin martini,” he said. “But never more than two at any given time. They will sneak up on you. By God, they can bite.”

  Oddly, none of us had ever had a martini, and it seemed like a nice idea to try one, or maybe two. Mullins ordered gin martinis for all of us. Bennett, who rarely drank, gagged on his and declared it “turpentine.” He went back to his wine. Mullins and I were heavier drinkers, and we decided to stick with the martinis. We drank them down as fast as the bartender could make them, even as the older guy sat there, shaking his head.

  As we walked outside, the combination of the fresh air and the heavy alcohol content of multiple martinis hit us; Mullins and I were plastered. Bennett dropped us off at headquarters, but not before urging us to call off the buy from the Jamaican. But neither of us could find a phone number for the target. We hopped into our undercover car and headed for the construction site.

  Mullins and I were both able to get out of our car without difficulty. But we found it incredibly hard to maintain our footing as we walked across the construction site, stumbling on each and every pile of dirt and bit of debris along the way.

  The dealer pulled up and we both turned to meet him. It didn’t take him more than a couple of seconds to realize that we were sloshed. When Mullins got closer to the dealer, the guy also caught a whiff of the alcohol on his breath. That was it. He told us both to fuck off, hopped back into his car and drove away. He was gone before we even had a chance to object.

  Then we saw our supervisor, Lieutenant John McCabe, pull up in his unmarked vehicle. It seems he’d been parked in the shopping center next door and managed to observe the entire sad sequence of events. Mullins and I both hung our heads in shame, ready for a well-earned dressing-down and feeling like two busted school kids.

  McCabe smiled at us and said, “You guys have been under real pressure for a long time. It’s okay if you blow one. As long as it’s just one. I’ll drive you home. No problem.”

  To say we would jump through a wall of fire for that man is not saying enough. Sometimes leadership is about action not taken.

  Middletown Detective Captain Frank Gleason, a highly placed, venerated and anachronistic commander, walked into the detective bureau one day and tasked me with taking down a man in Highlands, a borough of Monmouth County, who allegedly had 50 pounds of marijuana in his apartment.

  “Take care of it, ASAP,” Gleason told me. “Make me proud. Get it done, old boy.”

  Several hurdles stood between me and bringing this supposed criminal to justice: none of the cops I knew had ever heard of the guy; we had no informant; we had no one who even had a clue about any big marijuana shipment in the county; the Bill of Rights strongly suggests that we have a very good reason before asking a judge for a search warrant; and, lastly, the commander who gave us the name had no absolutely no other information about him.

  Absent any intelligence and without any informants, Mullins and I decided to try something outlandish. The first stop was a local pizza joint to pick up a cheese pie. The idea was that Alton Bennett, a sort of demented-looking mountain man, would attempt to deliver pizza to our target and try to either gain access to the apartment or see something that we could then use to get a search warrant or otherwise make some progress. Mullins and I would do the surveillance from our undercover vehicle.

  “I didn’t order a pizza,” the suspected dealer said, staring at the odd-looking delivery guy holding a cheese pie.

  “But aren’t you Jimmy Healey?” Bennett asked.

  “Yes, but I didn’t order any pizza.”

  “Well, can you let me in so I can show you this, maybe someone else here ordered it?” Bennett continued.

  The two men started arguing at the door to the apartment, as Bennett did his best to get inside, and the suspect continued to state—accurately—that he didn’t order any pizza and didn’t want any.

  Bennett was so upset about not making any headway that he absentmindedly started gesturing with his hands—and wound up with the pizza box being held vertically, so that the pizza slid to one end of the box. Mullins and I started laughing hysterically as we observed from the car. Bennett seemed increasingly infuriated by his inability to get inside.

  Suddenly, Healey threw his arms up in the air, yelled something and slammed the door shut. Bennett stormed back to his car, opened the door and threw the pizza in like a Frisbee. The three of us wrote up a report about our creative, but ultimately failed, effort and moved on.

  In the late spring of 1987, Mullins and I began working with an informant to set up an undercover drug buy in Keyport, a bedroom community overlooking Raritan Bay, just west of Hazlet and Union Beach. The informant, an African-American in his late 20s who worked on a garbage truck, had a sheet with some violent crimes on it, including assaults. He’d been picked up on drug charges and was trying to work them off by serving as an informant for us. He was way too slick for my taste. From my days riding with the Pagans, I knew that the assaults on his record were just the ones that he’d been caught for doing; I was sure there were plenty more.

  The buy was supposed to go down in a run-down part of Keyport where a tightly packed cluster of two-story residential buildings covered several blocks. Mullins and I checked it out early one morning and realized that it was something of a labyrinth. It would be virtually impossible to do surveillance on anyone inside the complex. The area also happened to be predominantly African-American, meaning that the white undercover members of the task force would immediately stand out. There was no way anyone on the surveillance team could remain stationary; they’d have to be in a car and mobile.

  I would be going in alone, with only the informant at my side.

  As usual, I intended to wear my biker stuff—blue jeans, a ratty T-shirt, a baseball cap with the Harley-Davidson logo and a pair of work boots. I ignored the black engineer boots that I usually wore and instead grabbed a pair of tall, tan-colored construction boots with laces. I didn’t tell Mullins, but I’d also decided to carry my five-shot Charter Arms snub nose in an ankle holster. Normally I didn’t go into a buy carrying a gun, but this time was different.

  I drove down to Keyport in my undercover car late one Tuesday afte
rnoon and parked adjacent to the residential complex. I met the informant outside, and he walked me through a maze of narrow alleys and corridors. We went down one corridor, then another and then a turn down a third. Finally, we walked to the end of a hallway where there were three doors. The informant opened one of them, and we went down a flight of stairs into a dingy and dimly lit basement.

  I immediately had the sense that something was wrong. There was no furniture around—no chairs, no couches. This wasn’t a location for a drug buy but for a robbery. I always carried at least $200 or $300 in cash, and sometimes much more. An eightball was going for around $225; a quarter ounce went for around $450.

  I heard voices and then footsteps as a half dozen men came down the basement stairs and stood facing me. They were street-hardened thugs, intimidating just by their presence. There were six of them, and only five shots in my Charter Arms. They stood there, playing it cool, smiling and joking and looking at me the way the jaguar looks at the bush pig; the hunter was being hunted.

  “Shit, these motherfucking laces,” I said, casually dropping onto a knee and reaching for my boot with both hands. I pulled the Charter Arms out of the holster and brought it up on the men, cocking the trigger as I stood.

  “I know at least one of you fuckers is packing,” I said. “I ain’t going down in this place.”

  They all held their ground and let me move past them, my finger never moving off the trigger. All of them had the pleasure of being aimed at for at least a full second.

  I backed out of the basement and up the stairs and made my way outside. None of them attempted to follow me. Mullins spotted me soon after I emerged. I hopped into his car, and we took off. I never saw, or talked to, the informant again.

  Later that day, I put in a call to the county prosecutor’s office and told the attorney that the informant was full of shit—and might have just tried to get me killed. Any chance the guy had of working off his charges disappeared after my call. That afternoon probably wound up costing him a couple of years in prison.

  One thing seemed certain that day: The cats that came down into the basement were for real. I knew just by their demeanor. They knew, too, that I had a hair-trigger pistol, cocked and locked. No one seemed alarmed or tried to play cocky, either. Nope. They were players.

  Closing in on two years undercover, I knew I had used up my share of luck. Besides, I really wanted to get a decent table at a restaurant.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  RENZO COMES TO TOWN

  I went back in the bag for two years, working as a uniformed officer, before I was made a detective again in September 1988 and got assigned to the youth crimes unit. I was okay with being a uniformed patrolman, pulling cars over for vehicle and traffic code violations and responding to various emergencies. But I preferred being a detective and was happy to be out of the marked unit. I had more freedom to pursue the cases and causes that interested me most, and that sense of personal freedom was important to me, too. In the youth crimes unit, I worked primarily with the administrations of the two big high schools in town. I had steady eight-to-four hours Monday through Friday, and an unmarked unit. It was a pretty nice gig that allowed me to feel I was making a decent contribution to my community.

  I said goodbye to our Chief Joe McCarthy, who was forced to retire due to mandatory civil service age requirements. That gave the politicians in town a rare opportunity to hand-select his replacement—someone who’d be loyal to them.

  Over time, I started to believe that the cops in town needed stronger union representation, and I thought about running for an elected position in the Middletown Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. I knew that becoming a PBA leader could hamper my career, but I cared about the men and liked the independent, no-nonsense manner in which the department had been run for many years.

  Then, in 1993, I saw Middletown Police Officer Mike Hoydis come under attack for an incident involving a fleeing murder suspect, and I decided that it was time to become active in the union. Police in Connecticut had put out an all-points-bulletin (BOLO) advising officers to be on the lookout for a man who had murdered his wife with a pair of scissors and was believed to be fleeing south in his car. From what we heard, he was still believed to be wearing his blood-stained clothes.

  Hoydis spotted the guy’s car, radioed for backup and gave chase. The suspect led Hoydis on a wild car chase through town, and the cop was finally able to stop him, with help from Red Bank Police, on the border between Red Bank and Middletown. Adrenalin pumping, Hoydis yanked the guy from his car and punched him several times before backing off and putting the man in cuffs. The suspect was put in the back of a squad car and taken into police headquarters, where he was processed in.

  Under interrogation by a Middletown detective, the suspect provided a full statement admitting to his wife’s brutal murder. “Have I or anyone else associated with your arrest mistreated you in any way?” the detective asked, following departmental protocol.

  The suspect said that the detective hadn’t mistreated him, but that one of the cops who arrested him—Hoydis—had slugged him a few times.

  The Monmouth County prosecutor was outraged and ordered his office to investigate. But the investigation stalled because none of the cops on the scene would testify against Hoydis, and it was just the suspect’s word against the officer’s.

  The prosecutor refused to let the matter die. He had his investigators call the Red Bank Police officers into an office, where they were shown copies of their financial records and warned that they could be suspended or indicted for interfering with an investigation if they didn’t tell the truth about what happened. They folded and, under duress, admitted that the alleged killer was hit a few times but didn’t sustain any injuries.

  Outside the Middletown Police Department headquarters with one of the agency’s marked vehicles. (Photo by Douglas P. Love)

  “We have the goods for assault and official misconduct. Plead him out. He gets fired, no pension, health benefits and no honorable release, just no jail,” the prosecutor told Hoydis’s attorney. Official misconduct is a second-degree felony, on par with non-aggravated rape or selling heroin. It’s punishable by five to 10 years in jail and up to $100,000 in fines.

  Hoydis pleaded out to avoid the roll of the dice in the courtroom. Most of the cops thought he should have gone to trial, since all that he did was throw a few punches at someone who was fleeing police after a murder. They figured jurors would side with the cop.

  Highlands Police Chief Howard Brey publicly declared that he wanted to hire Hoydis—that he thought the cop was a hero for bringing in a dangerous, fleeing felon. But the prosecutor squelched the hiring, too. Hoydis eventually got a job in the private sector as a financial advisor.

  I’d seen enough and decided to get actively involved with the union, with an eye toward becoming president. Soon enough, I was elected the union’s sergeant-at-arms (yes, the same position I’d held in the Pagans) and made head of its board of trustees.

  Not long afterward, I was transferred back to patrol division, in November 1993. I worked in patrol for another four years before getting transferred back to detective division in 1997. My assignments seemed to change based on my responsibilities with the union. I was a detective from 1997 to 2002 and then transferred back to patrol. I finished out my last year with the department, 2002–03, as a beat cop—which was okay because it kept me close to the action.

  My transfer out of the youth crimes bureau in 1993 outraged the administrations of the two high schools I was working with—perhaps because I was leading the department in arrests on a monthly average. I was visible and doing my job, and that seemed to matter to the high school principals. Both sent letters to the press objecting to the move—and one newspaper even wrote an editorial objecting to the transfer.

  But none of it made a difference to the police department’s administration. I had been doing some serious
weight training along with my continued Korean Karate, and that was where my energies would now go, along with my union work.

  The world-famous Brazilian Jiu Jitsu expert Renzo Gracie has a great saying about BJJ: “Look at the lions, the most dangerous of beasts. The lion is savagely adept at killing animals even much larger. A pure killing machine. Now take the lion out onto the ocean, where sharks hang out. Drop him into the water. The lion is just another meal.”

  At its simplest, BJJ is applied kinesiology. The practitioner attacks the joints or spine of his opponent by placing his body in a position to leverage its entire weight, often using his hips to bend one part of his adversary’s body in a particular direction, causing the joint or spine to break. So the fight becomes one man versus just one of his opponent’s appendages.

  Renzo Gracie, me, and Carlos Gracie Jr. at Renzo’s home in Holmdel, New Jersey, around 2004. (Photo by Barbara Bradshaw)

  Though simple enough in theory, it can take years to become an expert in BJJ—and not everyone is ready to take that trip. I was ready, and I started training with Renzo Gracie in 1993, when a business opportunity brought him to the Jersey Shore, and we met and became close friends.

  Today, I’m one of the senior practitioners of Renzo Gracie’s Brazilian Jiu Jitsu family—and one of the first six people in the United States to train with him. I often train others in the skills that I’ve patiently acquired from Renzo and other experts, including Karl Pravec, the “Silver Fox”—a second-degree black belt in BJJ who also happens to have a master’s degree in finance from Columbia University.

  Renzo and I walked in different circles, and when I met him, I didn’t expect him to be interested in becoming my friend. But he seemed eager to pursue the relationship, and he became my “Mr. Miyagi” (the mentor in the movie The Karate Kid). He was, and still is, my personal consigliere and the greatest positive influence both in terms of hand-to-hand combat and dealing with the challenges that life throws at all of us.