Paul Bacon

by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All

  I told Mulligan, “I don’t think we can call in the cavalry for a spitting perp.”

  “But the desk sergeant said we could,” Mulligan replied.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah, you know, if it came to that.”

  “It’s come to that,” I said. “Let’s call ESU.”

  An hour and a half later, Mulligan and I were sitting in the metal chairs outside his prisoner’s cell, still waiting for ESU to arrive. The perp was sleeping soundly, but with the threat of airborne spittle growing more real by the moment, the wait was becoming unbearable. I looked at my watch and whispered to Mulligan, “What’s your arrest time?”

  “About six hours ago,” he said.

  “I could have put three five-elevens through the system by now,” I said.

  Mulligan nodded.

  I asked him, “You couldn’t just say, ‘Thanks, lieu, but I’m not lookin’ to collar today’?”

  “No,” said Mulligan. “It was an order.”

  At around seven thirty P.M., the Two-four desk sergeant peeked his head into the tombs and waved us out into the precinct lobby. Mulligan was napping, so I left him with the prisoner while I went out to talk with the sergeant.

  The boss closed the door to the tombs behind me and said, “I thought you should know, ESU just pulled up in front of the house.” “Fantastic, I’ll wake up the perp now,” I said, and started opening the door to the tombs.

  “Wait,” the sergeant said. “They still gotta put all their shit on, so don’t wake up nobody.”

  I walked back into the stinky hallway, sat down in my chair, and watched Mulligan sleep. His mouth was hanging open, with a faint snore trickling out every few seconds. How could anyone sleep in here? Whatever happened between Mulligan and his perp must have been a battle royale to leave them both so exhausted.

  At eight o’clock, two officers in beefed-up uniforms walked into the tombs and started stomping up the hallway. Every part of their bodies was shielded by thick black padding, including a crescent-shaped flap that hung in front of their crotches as if to protect them from enraged Women’s Studies majors. Both men were wearing helmets, and one was carrying a clear riot shield with POLICE written in large, angry letters on the front. They looked like they were ready to put down an insurrection.

  I nudged Mulligan out of sleep and said good-bye while he was still coming around. “ESU is here,” I said under my breath. “Catch you later.”

  “Okay, sure,” said Mulligan, sitting up in his chair and rubbing his neck.

  I nodded politely as I slid past the ESU cops in the narrow hallway. Just as I reached the door, one of them turned around and said, “Before you go, could you back us up here?”

  “Back you up?” I said to the man dressed like a bomb shelter.

  “Just in case,” he said. “And grab a couple more cops from the lobby.”

  Until this night, I had been one of those New Yorkers who cringed whenever I saw a group of police officers surrounding one person on the street. Since cops seemed to come in pairs mostly, I thought two was the magic number for handling any one suspect, and any more than that was de facto brutality. And in fact it did take only two ESU cops to pull the prisoner out of his cell, but that was just the beginning. The perp didn’t actually wake up until he was out in the hall, when he began screaming and thrashing his limbs around. I saw this happen from the other end of the hallway, accompanied by Mulligan and the two cops I’d rallied for backup.

  “All you guys clear out now!” shouted one of the ESU cops, as if the perp was about to explode.

  I was already next to the door, so I darted into the lobby not knowing why. Mulligan came out after me looking just as confused.

  A voice from inside the tombs shouted, “Somebody open the nut-bag!”

  I looked at Mulligan, and he looked at me. “Nutbag?” we said simultaneously.

  “I got it!” one of the Two-four cops shouted back, and we turned around to see him unzipping a seven-foot-long brown canvas sack that was lying on the floor. Part sleeping bag, part casket, the “nut-bag” was shaped in the rough outline of a human body, with a breathing hole at one end and leather handles along its sides.

  The two ESU officers dragged the man out of the tombs, each holding one of his feet, while the prisoner continued to scream and flail his arms like he was drowning. When they’d gotten the perp completely out into the lobby, one of officers sat on the man’s legs while his partner struggled to get hold of one of his hands.

  Sitting on the prisoner’s arm, he looked up at me and Mulligan and told us, “One of you grab the other hand, and the other, hold his jaw shut.”

  Mulligan said to me, “You better take the head, or I’ll snap his neck.”

  We both went into action, but when I knelt down over the man’s head, I froze up. As far as I was concerned, if I touched someone’s face, we were dating. Of course, the idea that he might bite or spit at anything near his mouth also weighed heavily on my mind. I tried to reach in to help, but I found my palms glued to my thighs.

  “The fuck’s wrong with you?” shouted one of the Two-four cops, leaping around the prisoner’s body to take my position. He rushed at me like he was stealing home plate, so I bounded off to the side and wound up sprawled across the floor.

  I stood back up and watched the rest of the containment unfold as a bystander, relieved to see that the commotion had roused officers from every corner of the station house. Once I’d gotten out of the way, the perp was zipped into his nutbag after only thirty seconds of frenetic teamwork by seven grunting, cursing cops.

  * * *

  Helping Mulligan had been my only assignment of the night, so I decided to wait around while he tied up loose ends with the Two-four sergeant. I was standing next to the desk when a female paramedic approached me with a clipboard in her hand and a supremely pissed-off look on her face. She’d obviously just met the prisoner and was about to take him to the hospital. The man wasn’t claiming any injuries, but since he’d thrown a number of violent tantrums, he had to get a psychiatric evaluation before Mulligan could leave him at Central Booking for arraignment.

  “Where we takin’ your little friend?” the paramedic asked me.

  “He’s not my little friend,” I said, pointing at Mulligan.

  “Saint Luke’s?” Mulligan guessed, then looked at me.

  “Can you take him to Bellevue?” I asked the paramedic.

  She looked at her watch and said, “Sure.”

  Mulligan sneered at me and said, “Bellevue? Isn’t that a hellhole?” “It’s closer to Central Booking,” I said. “Unless you want the overtime.”

  “No, no,” Mulligan said. “I want to dump this guy as soon as possible. Thanks for all your help. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  As Mulligan walked out of the Twenty-fourth Precinct station house with the paramedic, I thought: Super cop!

  I rejoined my squad the following night hoping to make another five-eleven arrest. We drove around the Twenty-third Precinct in Spanish Harlem looking for the usual opportunities and came up with nothing. Around eleven o’clock, the sergeant told me to drive us back to the Nineteenth, but I was still in a collaring mood. I was wide awake, propped up by a bottle of Mountain Dew I’d bought from a vending machine at the Two-three station house. I lived on Mountain Dew and Cheetos these days. Before I’d entered the police academy, I’d been on a strictly vegetarian raw-food diet. I ate only nuts and beans and fresh fruits and vegetables, and this had done wonders for my energy level. I’d kept up this healthy routine through most of my recruit semester, but the academy had had vending machines, too. Over time, I succumbed to the superior taste and convenience of snack foods—first as a treat, then as a staple of my existence.

  Now powered by caffeine, corn syrup, and trans fats, I still had this amazing energy, which made me feel more invincible. If I could thrive on junk food at my age—eating like a teenager in my midthirties—then I thought I must be aging more
slowly than ordinary mortals. It didn’t matter what I put in my body or how much I abused it.

  So when my colleagues were ready to sign out for the weekend, I remained on the hunt. Driving down Lexington Avenue toward the Nineteenth station house, I kept one eye on the road and another eye out for traffic violations. Lexington at eleven P.M. was still a bustling thoroughfare, but this kind of multitasking was second nature by now.

  We were stopped at a red light four blocks from the precinct when a Nissan sedan pulled up along my side of the van. I looked down and scanned the passenger compartment. The windows were not tinted, so I had a clear view of the interior, seeing two men in front and a jacket laid across the back seat. While nothing criminal seemed afoot, I did notice a tiny infraction that most cops would have ignored: a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror. I knew I’d take some heat from my coworkers if I pulled the guy over for having an air freshener, so I didn’t say anything before I did it. When the light turned green and the Nissan rolled into the intersection, I hit the roof lights.

  Randall was the first to complain, “It’s thirty minutes before end of tour.”

  The sergeant said, “What is it now?”

  “Obstructed view,” I told him, just as the Nissan pulled over and came to a stop.

  “Fine,” said Sergeant Watts. “But do you really want to risk stepping into a bag of shit this late at night?”

  A bag of shit was anything that took a lot of time to deal with or exposed the officer to increased liability. Bags of shit were what guys like Mulligan stepped in, not me. My feet barely touched the ground these days, so I ignored the sergeant’s warning. I followed through with the car stop and ran the driver’s ID on the computer, which produced the following results:

  NYS Supreme Court Warrant: FAILURE TO APPEAR 05/19/03

  Charge: FELONY CRIMINAL SALE OF A CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE

  “Nice goin’, Bacon,” Sergeant Watts said. “Now we gotta toss the whole car.”

  Because the driver was wanted for selling drugs, everything in his vehicle had to be turned inside-out. While I handcuffed the driver and brought him into the van, the sergeant searched the inside of the Nissan, starting with the jacket on the backseat. In the pockets, he found twelve small bags of crack cocaine, two unidentifiable white pills, and a marijuana joint. The driver and his passenger both claimed the jacket belonged to someone else, but the law dictated that anyone within reachable distance of these substances was culpable for their possession. This meant that the passenger, to whom I’d planned on giving the car keys, also became a collar, and the vehicle I’d hoped to get rid of was now arrest evidence.

  Watts, Witherspoon, and Randall helped me get my prisoners and the car back to the Nineteenth. After that, they were gone. I had stepped into the proverbial bag of shit of my own choosing, and on the last tour of the week. They headed straight up to the locker room, done with police work until Monday.

  What ensued was a kind of lost weekend, except that much of what took place was fastidiously recorded into the public record. Over a fourteen-hour period, I performed no fewer than 120 separate tasks, most of which resulted in some kind of official document. Handling contraband was a stressful and exacting chore, since any mistake we made could be seen as an attempt to divert evidence for our own purposes. On this collar, I had to account for three different types of drugs, two pocketfuls of hundred-dollar bills, two cell phones, and one car. The joint alone required forty minutes and seven kinds of documentation to process: a quadruplicate voucher, a paper security envelope label, a plastic security envelope label, a handwritten property log entry, a typewritten property log entry, a letter of transmittal, and a request for laboratory analysis.

  And there were the prisoners themselves. In addition to being strip-searched, questioned, fingerprinted, and photographed, they both had to be fed and taken to the bathroom. I fervently believed in humane treatment for the accused—I just didn’t much like to provide it myself. I’d vouchered their huge wads of cash first, not realizing they’d need something for the vending machines, so I had to buy them snacks and bottled water all night with my own money. Of course, properly fed and hydrated prisoners had to visit the toilet almost every hour, and I had to be cuffed to them when they did their business. Before we left the Nineteenth Precinct late the next morning, I had handled, inspected, or facilitated the functioning of every part of their bodies. Thankfully, both of them were cooperative and hygienic, as crack dealers went.

  My arrest marathon ended at Manhattan Central Booking, a multilevel holding facility built under the Criminal Court Building at the southern tip of the island. MCB was like the Two-four tombs, only fifty times larger and totally packed. After de cades of high-volume justice, the smell of humanity had become institutionalized. It was a strong and diverse mix of body odors that, combined, smelled like a thousand pairs of dirty socks. We spent four hours breathing this air, shuttling around the facility, and standing in lines with other cops and their perps.

  After lodging my prisoners, I went back to the Nineteenth to change into street clothes and fill out an overtime slip. I presented the slip to the desk sergeant on my way out the door.

  “Fourteen hours and seven minutes? ” he said. He handed back the slip and told me, “I can’t sign that. Give it to your sergeant.”

  It was no big deal for me to get my boss’s signature next week, but I really wished the desk sergeant would’ve just taken the overtime slip. The slip was like a three-hundred-dollar check, and I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want to have to keep track of it, either, after all my sorting and counting and recounting and reporting and submitting and calling and printing and faxing and copying and filing. After my three months with the A-squad—in which I’d arrested or assisted in arresting someone on an almost daily basis—my mind was fried, kaput. I put the OT slip in my front pocket and hoped I’d remember it before I did my laundry.

  PART THREE

  COLLAR FATIGUE

  CHAPTER 19

  RETURNING HOME FROM THE ARREST late Saturday afternoon, I fell facedown into bed and went to sleep with all of my clothes on. I woke up around midnight with my pillow soaked through with sweat. Feeling a chill, I got up to close the window, then collapsed back onto my couch. The words cold and sweat crossed my mind before I nodded off to sleep again, but I was too tired to connect the dots.

  Monday afternoon, I got an unexpected phone call from a Sergeant Ailey of the NYPD Harbor Unit. I’d put in my application for the scuba team just the week before, and I was surprised to hear back so quickly. They’d just been waiting for someone like me to come along! I thought. No, the sergeant said; he’d been deluged with applications.

  “Every cop and his brother are trying scuba on vacation these days,” he told me, “and they all come back thinking they’re frogmen. But I see here that you’re a divemaster?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “A divemaster.”

  “How about patrol? You a hard worker?”

  “I collar all the time. That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

  “It’s part of it. How’s your sick record?”

  “Spotless.”

  “You sure about that? I got the medical division on my speed dial.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “In that case, consider yourself notified. I’ll call your sergeant today.”

  “You’re kidding!” I said. “That’s great! When can I start?”

  The sergeant cleared his throat and said, “Uh, you’re notified for the physical endurance test.”

  “I see.”

  “Hey, it’s a big deal just to be invited. And you got a whole month to get ready for it.”

  I was almost afraid to ask, “What are the requirements for this physical test?”

  “It’s a competition, so the only requirement is that you beat everyone else.”

  I swallowed hard. “How many people are in the running?”

  “About twenty guys.”

/>   “For how many slots?”

  “Actually, there are no slots yet. The winner goes on a waiting list for when the next guy quits Harbor. We do this every couple years.”

  “What are the events?”

  “A mile run, a five-hundred-meter swim, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts, treading water, and there’s an underwater mental-stress test in full scuba for whoever doesn’t drop out. It’s basically the same elimination process that the Navy Seals use, but we bang it all out in one day.”

  Beating twenty police officers in an endurance test of Olympic proportions wouldn’t be easy. Contrary to popular wisdom, my coworkers were not a bunch of doughnut-gobbling fatties. Sure, there were some honest-to-God porkers on the force, but for every one of them, I met two who looked like Mr. Universe. The NYPD employed thousands of former military members and reservists, and I was almost sure to meet a few of them vying for a spot on the Harbor Unit.

  I had a very short time to get into the best shape of my life. It seemed within reach, since only six months ago I’d run rings around my academy classmates in gym class. I’d put on about ten pounds since then, and my eating habits had fallen off, but I could turn back the clock. I’d done it many times before, so I decided to start right away with a quick run before work. I rummaged through my closet and found my old academy gym shoes: regulation all-white with reflective trim. I laced them up and headed out the door.

  My vigorous half-hour run around the West Village ended with a slow, euphoric march up the stairs to my apartment. It was my first decent workout in ages, and it gave me an intense runner’s high. My head and body tingled all the way into the bathroom, where I took a ten-minute cold shower to prolong the buzz. Toweling off and stepping into drier air, I could feel my skin breathing. Then, walking through my room, I saw my bicycle. It was stuffed in my doorway and looking sad and neglected, its tires low on air and its handlebars askew. How long had it been since I’d ridden it? It was too late for a ride before work, but what if I rode it to work? Why not? Well, work was ninety blocks away, but I could cover that easily in no time. It wasn’t raining outside, so I didn’t see any reason not to.