We were scarecrows in blue uniforms.
After a grand total of five days of blackboard instruction and fifty rounds at the NYPD firing range, my new police academy classmates and I were standing out on the sidewalks of central Brooklyn pretending to be police officers. They gave us badges. They gave us handcuffs. They gave us guns—standard police-issue Smith & Wesson .38 Specials. They told us, “Good luck.” In early July 1966, riots had broken out in East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville, Brooklyn. Hundreds of angry young men were roaming the streets and throwing bottles and rocks. Already they had injured police officers and attempted to flip over a radio car. On one corner, police found eighteen Molotov cocktails. The borough commander was calling for reinforcements—and fast.
“Send the recruits,” someone suggested.
This was a truly dumb idea, busing untrained police recruits into an urban riot. It’s hard to list all the things that could easily go wrong. Someone clearly panicked at police headquarters on Centre Street. Nevertheless, we took our orders and traded our gray trainee shirts for police officer blue and hit the smoldering streets of Brooklyn as rocks and bottles flew over our heads. I was finally home from the Marine Corps but suddenly back on a battlefield.
Each recruit was paired with a more experienced officer. I drew a cop from the Tactical Patrol Force. I had the advantage of three years as a Marine Corps officer and almost a year of combat in Vietnam, but many of my classmates had never patrolled anywhere with a loaded gun. They just looked overwhelmed.
The rioters’ two main weapons of choice seemed to be height and gravity. Young men and a few teenage boys pumped with adrenaline and who knows what else hurled heavy objects off the rooftops—paint cans, bricks, cinder blocks, random pieces of construction debris. Every time an object hit the sidewalk, there’d be a loud crash, and everyone would scatter—police, shop owners, neighbors, whoever was standing nearby. It was low-tech but highly effective, and it kept everyone on edge.
“Incoming!” someone would shout, and everyone would jump back. It was almost impossible to identify the suspects. By the time you looked up at the rooftop, you’d be lucky if you saw the back of someone’s head.
I followed my new partner up the stairs of a six-story tenement on Pitkin Avenue to a roof where bricks were being tossed. The kids ran as soon as we got up there, leaping from roof to roof along the block. We found rocks stockpiled on the roofs.
* * *
The policy was clear: every New York police officer must complete a six-month training course at New York City Police Academy, which had moved from Hubert Street in lower Manhattan to East Twentieth Street in the Gramercy Park neighborhood. During my time there, however, everything was a little disorganized. The recruits took some of their police academy classes in local armories. When they could, the instructors took us out to the shooting range at Rodman’s Neck in the Bronx. Our training was conducted in little spurts. We kept being sent out to the streets to pump up the force numbers.
I knew the police academy wasn’t supposed to be like that, but none of it really fazed me. I was back in New York with my wife and baby son. I stayed connected to the Marine Corps by joining the reserves and serving with the Sixth Communication Battalion at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx. After three years of active duty, I didn’t want to just walk away, plus I knew the extra pay would come in handy. I felt like I was off and running, getting on with my life.
I made a couple of good arrests while I was still in the academy. The first one was on an 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. tour in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Around three o’clock, I was on West Third Street behind the NYU School of Law—a school I would graduate from with a master of laws degree—when I heard a sharp bang across the street. Gunfire. I recognized it right away. I looked up in time to see a woman fall to the sidewalk, two men standing near her, and a gun between them on the ground. The woman was screaming in pain. One man kicked the gun to the other. I ran toward the three of them, jumped over the woman, grabbed one man, and pulled out my own gun. The second man didn’t even try to run. Only then did I see that the weapon on the ground was a sawed-off shotgun.
The woman was still screaming. She’d been hit in the leg with birdshot. I warned the men not to move while another rookie, Bruce Drake, helped me put a tourniquet around her leg, which seemed to stop the bleeding. Pretty soon, the corner was crawling with police, and then an ambulance arrived.
The two men and the woman had all come out of a bar and got into some kind of argument. She said the shooting was intentional. The men said it was an accident. A kind lieutenant at the Sixth Precinct, Al LaPerch, helped me process the arrest. The doctors said the tourniquet saved the woman’s leg. I felt good about that, and the night’s adventure was written up in the Daily News.
A couple of months later, I made another arrest, this time in the middle of the day in the Garment District. I was working alone at Sixth Avenue and West Thirty-Sixth Street when I witnessed a large man punch a much smaller man for no reason I could see. I moved in to separate them. As soon as I approached, the big guy spun around and punched me in the chest, knocking my hat off.
The giant was breathing hard, wheezing, almost. He seemed nearly hysterical. He had a frantic look in his eyes. He had a hundred pounds on me and a good ten inches. He’d put all of it into that punch, but I didn’t give him time to throw another. I grabbed him and dragged all 260 pounds of him around the corner onto West Thirty-Sixth Street, off the busy avenue. There was a subway entrance there. I held the man against the railing long enough to handcuff him. He was relatively docile by then. A radio car showed up a minute or two later to drive him to the Fourteenth Precinct on West Thirtieth Street.
He got into the car without a struggle, but the moment the door was closed, he exploded a second time, kicking the seat and the doors, yelling words I couldn’t make sense of through the closed windows.
It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone go totally berserk, like a child having the worst tantrum ever, only he was a very large man. Back then, people were just starting to use the term EDP for “emotionally disturbed person.” He was charged with assault and sent off for a psychiatric evaluation.
I didn’t use any special tactics to subdue the man—no verbal judo, no martial arts holds. It was all fairly instinctive: just grab the guy harder than he grabs you, a skill I learned on Columbus Avenue and West Ninety-First Street long before the police academy.
Someone on the sidewalk had remarked, “Boy, that was a brave little cop.” Bravery didn’t have much to do with it, I knew. My reaction was mostly adrenaline and a willingness—more like an eagerness—to jump in and be involved. I’m not sure that’s something that can ever be taught in the police academy, even in a year when classes aren’t constantly interrupted by street duties.
I finished the academy as number one in my class. I took the sergeant’s exam even before I graduated. My Marine Corps service meant I had three years of seniority. I passed the test, although I’d have to wait another three years before my name came up on the sergeants list and I got the actual promotion.
At the academy graduation in March 1967, Police Commissioner Howard Leary gave me the Hiram C. Bloomingdale Trophy, an engraved revolver, which went to the student with the highest overall score in academics, physical fitness, and shooting. I think I probably deserved the prize for best arrest, too, but they didn’t give me that one.
I was officially a New York City police officer. I earned $173 per week, a bump up from the usual $144 because of my three years of on-the-books “experience.”
* * *
Before graduation, I’d been told I would be going to the Tactical Patrol Force. But assignments in the police department, as I learned from the very beginning, aren’t real until they’ve happened—and sometimes not even then. I was sent instead to the Twentieth Precinct on West Sixty-Eighth Street. Things hadn’t gotten much safer on the Upper West Side since my family left the neighborhood. If anything, street crime was worse. But it wasn’t rising crime that got me assigned there. It was bad publicity. The Daily News had just run a story saying the Twentieth Precinct had too many unmanned radio cars. The department had pleaded with city hall for extra vehicles. Mayor John Lindsay had found money in the budget to purchase 425 fully loaded Chevrolet police specials at $3,200 each. The total sticker price approached $1.4 million. And now, the News had photos of rows and rows of brand-new, idle cars. West Sixty-Eighth Street looked a bit too much like a Northern Boulevard Chevy dealership, and that meant a fast infusion of rookie officers—including me—to drive them.
I was learning something about how decisions often got made. But the work was interesting. You never knew what you would find when responding to calls in a radio car. I worked in a squad of eight or nine officers and a sergeant. The supervisors tried to pair the rookies with more experienced officers. We responded to whatever came in over the radio but also whatever we saw on the street.
“Needle Park” was a small triangle bounded by West Seventy-Second Street, Broadway, and Amsterdam Avenue, later made famous by the Al Pacino movie The Panic in Needle Park. The park’s official name was Verdi Square, but no one in the neighborhood called it that. The bench-flanked green space came down to a point like a needle, and the cops were constantly shooing the street addicts out of there. Just keep the junkies moving. Don’t let ’em stop. That was the thinking in those days.
Compared to the crack addicts of later years, the heroin users of the 1960s were a fairly benign group, as long as they had their drugs. They’d nod off on the benches and sit for hours by themselves. The real problems were the street muggings and apartment burglaries that often paid for their habits. We arrested the junkies for the crimes they committed, but they rarely stayed in jail for long. These people needed treatment and motivation, and that wasn’t the business we were in. The police, I soon discovered, were often asked to solve social problems far beyond their training or expertise.
* * *
Veronica, Jim, and I settled into our new home in Baldwin, Long Island. About thirty miles east of Manhattan, it had three bedrooms, a small backyard, and a one-car garage, the kind of house even a young cop could afford back then, thanks to the GI Bill. Our second son, Gregory, was born in December of 1968, after I’d already enrolled in the night program at the St. John’s University School of Law in downtown Brooklyn. The professors pushed us hard and taught us to reason like lawyers. Dean Harold McNeese was a master at the Socratic method of step-by-step interrogation. I still have Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. seared into my brain. I had the brilliant Mario Cuomo, New York’s future governor, as my legal research and writing professor and moot-court judge. The days were long but the weeks were short. Because of my college degree, I had gotten reassigned to the Youth Aid Division, a new unit that allowed me to work steady days and attend my law-school classes at night. Mostly, I picked up kids at local precincts and drove them to the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, the large juvenile lockup in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. I liked talking to the kids, who were too young to go in a regular police wagon. I got to see the inside of every precinct in the city. The first year, our classes met five nights a week.
A college degree was unusual for cops in those days. Even more unusual was a law degree. When I decided to go to law school, it wasn’t because I had a burning desire to be a lawyer. I thought law school might be interesting, and I’d heard I could probably get an NYPD scholarship. That last part didn’t happen. Since I was eligible for the GI Bill, the department let Veterans Affairs subsidize my tuition. Their attitude and mine was: Why let the military benefits go to waste? Because I was so busy, I didn’t get to enjoy law school fully. I endured it, more like. But I had a terrific study group: Scott Smith, John Burke, and the off-the-charts-brilliant Fritz Behr, who finished first in our law school class. Though raised Jewish, Fritz became an Ethical Culturist, then a Jesuit seminarian, and finally an NYPD lieutenant.
* * *
I was still in law school when the promotion to sergeant finally came through. There was something called Sergeants Preparatory School, but no one seemed to think it was especially important. The police department didn’t train its leaders anything like the way the Marine Corps did. I wouldn’t get to sergeants school until I’d already been doing the job for three or four months. After approximately zero minutes of police supervisory training, I was sent to the Twenty-Third Precinct on East 104th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues.
“Here are these guys,” the administrative lieutenant told me. “Supervise them.” Several of the officers I would be leading were older than me and had far more time on the street. As always, I was grateful for my Marine Corps training. One thing I knew for certain was that the leader wasn’t one of the boys. I didn’t hang out with the people I supervised. I also believed it was important to look like a leader. My pants always had creases. I shined my shoes and Brassoed my belt buckle every day. I had sharp creases in my light-blue wool shirts. When I became a sergeant, the shield I inherited, number 627, had been handed down through generations of sergeants. It was made of real brass, unlike today’s shields. By the time it got to me, it was a dull shade of brown. I shined it up until it positively glimmered.
The blocks we patrolled in the Twenty-Third Precinct—86th Street to 110th Street, where the Upper East Side gave way to East Harlem—were strikingly diverse. The northern two-thirds of the precinct was heavily Puerto Rican and saw a lot of drug activity. The southern third, which included Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, was affluent and almost entirely white. The precinct commanders when I was there—Solomon Gross, John McCabe, and John Rogan—had genuine respect inside the precinct and knew the community well.
That didn’t mean there weren’t problems. On my second night in the precinct, a plainclothes tactical patrol officer shot and killed a man who was robbing him on Fifth Avenue and 109th Street. When I reached the scene, bricks were coming off the rooftops again. Dozens of people were throwing things and shouting at the police.
The body was still on the sidewalk. That didn’t look good. I didn’t need sergeant school to know its presence was inflaming the crowd. “Get that body out of here,” I ordered.
I had two officers lift the body into a radio car and drive to Metropolitan Hospital. Then officers from Housing Police showed up. Like the Transit Police, they were a separate agency back then. Together, we led a brief charge against the crowd, pushing people back from the scene, urging everyone to go back home. Most of them listened.
Sometimes the drama originated from within the ranks, rather than on the streets. In January 1971, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association was up in arms over the Knapp Commission, which had been formed the previous April by Mayor Lindsay to investigate corruption up and down the New York City Police Department. By now, chairman Whitman Knapp and his four commissioners were highlighting plenty of it, and some of the cops were starting to feel picked on. Officers were mostly upset about their pay. It wasn’t bad money for the time. At about $11,000 a year, the average New York patrolman earned more than police in most cities. But the cost of living in New York was higher than almost anywhere else. A back-pay dispute erupted in a Brooklyn precinct on January 14, and the union called for a work stoppage. Within a day, the job action spread across the city as twenty thousand patrolmen stayed home. Suddenly detectives and supervisors were about the only people patrolling the streets. Calls simply went unanswered. As a sergeant, I found myself working the gate at Gracie Mansion one night during the strike. But with so much area to cover, I was constantly being called away, in and out of the precinct. Another night, a detective and I responded in a radio car to a disturbance at Julia Richman High School Annex. Students were fighting and throwing things in a giant melee. I was in uniform. The detective was not. I was the one who looked like a cop. It really was me against twenty high school kids. It took a minute, but I managed to calm everyone down. I had often found in tense situations that if I kept my cool, those around me would calm down, too. Calm, like anxiety and uproar, is almost always contagious.
The job action lasted six stressful days. Thankfully, the weather was on our side. Temperatures stayed frigid all that week, and the city survived with no early-January crime wave. Still, 1971 turned out to be a very dangerous year in New York, especially for the police. Fifteen officers were killed in the line of duty in those twelve months. Two of the deaths were accidents. One was a heart attack. But twelve were intentional killings—eleven by gunfire, one by knife. Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones were ambushed outside their radio car at 159th Street and Harlem River Drive by members of the Black Liberation Army. Arthur Pelo was gunned down as he tried to question a robbery suspect on Rockaway Avenue in Brownsville. Kenneth Nugent was shot to death when he interrupted an armed robbery at a luncheonette on Hollis Avenue in Queens on his way in to work.
Every one of these cases was different, but those officers’ combined sacrifice created immense anxiety on the force, and it manifested in unsettling ways. An officer who drove me turned up one day with an M2 carbine. “Get that back in your locker,” I told him. “That’s not how we win this war.” There was just a lot of wild stuff on the street.
As I completed law school that June and began studying for the New York State bar exam, stories about the rising disorder and crime in the city seemed to make the front page of the newspapers every day. Mayor Lindsay and Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy were facing growing demands to do something—anything. People began to openly wonder if this seething metropolis of competing constituencies was simply impossible to govern. Lots of New Yorkers were moving to the suburbs, the tax base suffered, and observers dubbed the trend “white flight.”
Murphy and his chiefs launched a new program of proactive policing. They installed an anticrime unit in each of the seventy-six precincts. The idea was to send plainclothes officers onto the streets and urge them not to wait around for radio calls. Instead, they were expected to seek out the crime and arrest the criminals. That sounded tailor-made for me.
John Rogan put me in charge of the Twenty-Third Precinct’s anticrime unit and let me choose my own people. I knew what I wanted—officers who had initiative, were street-smart, and could easily blend into the community.
The concept worked beautifully in our precinct. We blended in by using our own cars, including my Volkswagen Beetle, and borrowing taxicabs from a local garage. We got out on the streets and hid our radios like whiskey bottles in paper bags. Early on, it was relatively easy.
We lurked in empty doorways and waited until we spotted someone acting suspiciously—someone who appeared to be waiting for a mugging victim, casing a local business, or checking the door handles on parked cars on Fifth Avenue. We’d follow. One officer would watch from the sidewalk a block behind. The rest of us would parallel the suspect from a fake cab across the avenue until he committed a crime and we had a reason to swoop in. In one month, our anticrime unit made an astounding twenty-seven robbery arrests, an incredible number for a single precinct and a good indication of the magnitude of the problem. None of these were calls that came over the radio.
The street crimes we witnessed occurred primarily in the blocks just south of East Ninety-Sixth Street, the racially integrated part of the precinct. That’s where the easy victims were. Young men and teenagers were coming down from the blocks to the north. It was very common for us to find guns on the people we locked up.
One afternoon, we were patiently shadowing two young men when they walked into a Western Union office and brandished guns, demanding money from the clerk. We grabbed the men just as soon as they walked back out the door. They were carrying newspaper clippings in their back pockets about previous robberies they had committed. Some arrests were dumb luck. One day, we stopped our fake cab in front of the 92nd Street Y and I went in to use the bathroom. When I came out, a man lugging a television set was trying to get into the cab. He’d just stolen the TV from an apartment across the street.
“You picked the wrong cab,” I told him.
We cuffed him and found the apartment he had just burglarized.
* * *
As the years rolled on, more and more of the story of New York was becoming the story of race. On April 14, 1972, officers responded to a false 10-13 call—assist police officer—at the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 on 116th Street. Phillip and his partner were the first to respond. Once inside, they were attacked by fifteen to twenty people, beaten, and stripped of their weapons. During the melee, Officer Cardillo was shot at point-blank range with his own gun.
The mosque was in the neighboring Twenty-Eighth Precinct. No call for assistance ever came over our radio frequency. When I eventually heard what was happening, I went straight to the scene, arriving about an hour after the initial shooting. An angry mob had formed around the police barricades and were calling the officers pigs.
The people in the mosque refused to leave at first. Then Minister Louis Farrakhan and Harlem congressman Charles Rangel turned up to negotiate. In order to quell the crowd outside, Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman—with the consent, I am sure, of Commissioner Murphy—allowed the witnesses to walk away, giving them appointments to be questioned later at the precinct. Hardly any of them ever showed up. The standoff was grossly mishandled by the executive corps of the police department, and the officers at the scene all knew it.
Phillip Cardillo died six days later.
* * *
I loved my life in the police department. But I also had the law degree, and my older brothers were settling into professional careers, Donald at Emigrant Savings Bank, Kenneth in the press office at the United Nations, Leonard at the Phipps Foundation. Once I passed the bar exam, I started practicing part-time in Garden City and, with a couple of law school friends, enrolled in the master of laws program at New York University, an advanced course of study that focused on criminal law from a global perspective. I wasn’t interested in being an international criminal lawyer. I had no interest in leaving the police department. But I believed in education. There was money from the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to help pay the tuition, and I figured, why not? With all that going on, though, I hardly had time to breathe. Besides the law practice, the master’s program, and my day job at the police department—which was often a night shift or a four-to-twelve tour—I also had the Marine Corps Reserves. What got badly squeezed was the time I spent with my wife and two young sons. They were at home in Baldwin, and I was almost always everywhere else. I treasured the time we had together, but there was much too little of it. My family sacrificed tremendously in those years.
I kept coming back to the realization that police work was what inspired me. I’d never get rich doing it. I understood that. But it was far too rewarding to even consider abandoning—important, exhilarating, satisfying, almost addictive. Once, I was drafted to work in the NYPD Internal Management Consulting Section. My superiors kept seeing my college diploma and my law degree and assuming I craved a desk job. They were wrong. Two months in, I asked to be transferred back to the Twenty-Third Precinct. Then John Rogan went to the NYPD Crime Prevention Section and asked me to go with him as a sergeant. Part of his charge was to launch something called the Block Security Program. The department had never done anything like this before. Mayor Lindsay was planning to highlight the program in his upcoming presidential campaign as a fresh way of fighting crime. It made some sense, actually.
The idea was for local community groups to raise small amounts of money to pay for door locks, window guards, burglar alarms, security lighting, and other anticrime measures in their neighborhoods. The city would then match—or double or triple—those funds. The concept was promising, but no one had thought about any of the practical details. That was my job. I wrote the regulations, determined who was eligible, and established what the money could be used for. I received no guidance from anyone. I just did what seemed to make sense. I even called on my artistic talents to create a logo and draw the pictures that were used in the brochure. No one else seemed able or interested or available to make the Block Security Program a reality. I was the program, and city hall couldn’t get enough of it—or me. The experience gave me my first inside look at the upper levels of city government. And here was the best part: the program actually seemed to be working.
On September 13, 1973, Mayor Lindsay traveled to Washington to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee about this wonderful new program of his, and I went along. I didn’t get to say anything, but I sat behind the mayor in the hearing room as he testified, knowing that much of what he was touting had originated with me. Over time, I got to know Chief of Staff Jay Kriegel, mayoral assistant Steve Brill, and several of Mayor Lindsay’s other “whiz kids.” I saw Kriegel as the de facto mayor. He was amazing, making top-level decisions at city hall, and he wasn’t much older than I was. The crew around Mayor Lindsay emphasized to me how bright, young, energetic people really could have an impact working in government. That insight was genuinely inspiring.
After a brief stop at SOD, the Special Operations Division, I was promoted to lieutenant in 1974 and, of course, wasn’t sent promptly to Lieutenants Preparatory School. They’d get around to sending me eventually. In the meantime, my job was to address the turmoil inside the Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth Street.
Things at the NYPD always moved slowly until they didn’t. The Tenth Precinct cops were spending time at Off Track Betting when they were supposed to be on the job. In addition, one of the lieutenants had allegedly been using the captain’s office for trysts with his policewoman girlfriend. Clearly the place needed closer supervision. All the old lieutenants were transferred out. I was the new administrative lieutenant, sent to help the commander, Frank Lynch, gain control of the place. He was an erudite man, a rising star in the department.
The territory was a little bit of a sleeper—a narrow patch of Manhattan’s West Side that ran from West Fourteenth Street to West Forty-Third Street. The neighborhood, though mostly quiet, had its flashes of colorful action, as all neighborhoods do. A lot of this was concentrated around the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, a hotbed of street and vehicle prostitution. We had the “nobbers,” the “he-shes,” the “chicken hawks”—the cops had special terms for all the different actors in New York’s many-splendored underground sex drama. It kept the police in my new precinct busy.
It was during my time at the Tenth Precinct, where I was operations officer, administrative lieutenant, and integrity-control officer, that we had the first mass layoffs in NYPD history. I used to tell people with utter confidence, “There will never be layoffs in the police department.” I was certain of it—until the layoffs came.
In 1975 the city budget was awash in red ink. Regular people started to use the phrase fiscal crisis. President Ford refused to approve a federal bailout. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, the front-page Daily News headline bluntly summarized. The city came so close to bankruptcy that aides to Mayor Abraham Beame even drafted a statement announcing the city’s default. The solution to the fiscal crisis, when it came, was deep and painful. The municipal unions agreed to use their retirement funds to back city securities. City finances were put in the hands of the state Emergency Financial Control Board. City services were cut drastically. Salaries were frozen. Subway fares went up. Some hospitals, libraries, and firehouses were closed. Welfare spending was slashed. Tens of thousands of municipal workers, including three thousand police officers, were laid off and sent home.
It was a troubled time. The department was undermanned and hurting. One night in the Tenth Precinct, I found myself covering the desk alone on a late tour. Apart from me, there was one cop in the back with the prisoners and a civilian manning the switchboard. We had a single radio car on the street.
A man rushed into the station house. “There’s a guy stabbing a woman down the block,” he managed to blurt out.
There was no one else. “Let’s go,” I said.
I ran across Eighth Avenue, where I came upon a woman lying in a vestibule. There was blood on the walls. Still standing over her was a man with a broken umbrella. He had used the pointy end to stab her in the face. The woman was unconscious, and the man was obviously intoxicated. I grabbed him and waited twenty minutes for the ambulance and the radio car to come. The cop I’d left guarding the prisoners also showed up eventually. Thankfully, the woman survived. Later she sent me a nice thank-you note at the precinct. The man who attacked her was a second-felony offender. I testified at his trial.
It was years before the force was back to full strength. The city was almost unguarded at times in that era. We are lucky it wasn’t far worse than it was.
* * *
In every long police career, some assignments will be far more enjoyable than others. I bided my time in the Legal Bureau and the License Division before landing a truly wild, crazy, gritty, and constantly surprising post: Manhattan South Public Morals. I arrived in 1978, at the height of an era mythologized by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and Al Pacino in Cruising. Times Square in those days attracted every imaginable variety of hustler, pervert, and lowlife, and we had special squads for most of them. We had the pimp squad, run by Sergeant George Trapp. We had the pedophile squad. The gambling squad. The streetwalker squad. Once a week or so we’d round up the male cruisers too. That duty wasn’t too popular. We had officers from other commands who wouldn’t be recognized come in and pretend to be johns.
We covered everything south of Sixtieth Street and even did cases in Brooklyn and Queens, but the busiest territory was still Times Square. We kept an eye on Peep-O-Rama, Girls-Girls-Girls, and the grandest of the Times Square porn palaces, Show World, which featured “private viewing rooms” and stage shows by big-name adult stars like Vanessa del Rio. Certain things were allowed by law, and certain things were not. I spent one evening undercover at the Mineshaft, the gay leather club on Washington Street that inspired Cruising. I was in good shape and breezed right past the notoriously fickle bouncers. Once inside, I witnessed acts the nuns at St. Gregory’s had never warned me about.
Mixed up in all of this were some genuine organized-crime cases. There was money to be made in vice, gambling, and loan-sharking, and New York’s biggest mob families had always profiteered there. Sergeant James Malvey conducted a sophisticated racketeering case against Lucchese family figure Ray Argentina. One night in a dimly lit social club, we arrested Alphonse Persico, the Colombo mobster known as Allie Boy. On the chair where he’d been sitting, I found a loaded handgun. We arrested priests for pedophilia. We sent teenage girls back home to Iowa. In late-night raids, we’d tear apart a gambling parlor or an after-hours club, dismantling the bar with saws and crowbars, confiscating the liquor and cash, all the while knowing they’d be rebuilding the place by noon. We tried to keep up with the ever-changing fronts and euphemisms for prostitution—massage parlors, negligee modeling studios, body-scrub salons, escort services, intimate photography workshops, surrogate therapy sessions, and something else the next day. Say what you will about the sleaziness of the sex-for-money industry, but the proprietors had imaginative marketing skills.
Manhattan South Public Morals consisted of about fifty officers. John Ridge was the captain, a smart and colorful man. We had two undercovers working with us, Joe Mazzilli and Sal Montano, who could play dead-on mafiosi. They would get in with the wiseguys by going to bars and selling untaxed cigarettes. The mobsters were always looking for an easy scam. Joe and Sal played their parts perfectly.
We had Karen Clark, an attractive young police officer with some genuine acting skills. She could stand on any West Side corner. Eager johns kept soliciting her. We also had our own phony pimp, and we procured a Cadillac for him. He hung out at a pimp club called the Pork Pie Hat. The pimps arrived in fur coats and flashy jewelry. They squabbled over territory. They boasted about the girls who were making them rich, trading them back and forth to settle drug and gambling debts. In one of his reports, our undercover pimp wrote, “I’m in the back of the Pork Pie Hat, just bullshitting.”
“No!” I laughed when I read that. “This is an official police report. You can’t write that.”
We constantly heard stories about pimps at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and West Forty-Second Street picking up runaway girls fresh off the Greyhound from Minnesota and Iowa and Montana. Media reports frequently quoted Father Bruce Ritter, the charismatic Catholic priest who founded Covenant House, a well-respected shelter and social service agency for homeless youth. I sat one day in Father Ritter’s office as he told me chilling stories of pimps by the gates in the bus station, trolling for fresh recruits.
“Hundreds of them,” he said alarmingly. “It’s happening every day.”
“When? Where?” I asked. We staked out the bus station, and we never seemed to see any pimps. “We’ll go over and arrest them right now.”
He looked at me like I was clueless. “Everyone knows about that,” he assured me. Father Ritter promised to get back to me with more details. He never did, of course. No doubt the pimps were active and plentiful. We rarely had trouble finding them. And teens from small-town America did end up in the strip clubs, apartment house brothels, and porn sets of New York. I just didn’t believe the recruiting process was quite as out in the open as Father Ritter’s fund-raising letters portrayed. But who knows? In those wild days, it was often hard to tell the scary urban legends from the honest-to-God truth. Almost anything was possible in that murky world. Among the secrets that came to light eventually: the once-beloved Father Ritter was accused of sexual abuse by more than a dozen young men and boys, some of the same youngsters he’d been praised so lavishly for “rescuing.” Covenant House did a lot of good work, though. I hated to see its reputation trashed.
We had no illusions that what we were doing was permanent. One night, we’d sweep the hookers off Ninth Avenue. They’d come back the next night. The strip joint with “extra services” we closed on Wednesday would be open on Friday under another name. When we busted a pimp who’d been especially greedy or surly or brutal, the women who worked for him thanked us and smiled, then often went right back to work for one of his buddies. It would take a far larger revival of New York City to clean up the public morals of Times Square, and I hoped one day to be a part of that. In the meantime, our squad did what we could to keep a lid on things, nudging the city’s underworld in a more law-abiding direction.
The assignment certainly gave me an appreciation for the variety of the crime in the city. One night in Public Morals, we went to raid a high-end Asian gambling operation on East Sixty-First Street. The pai gow tables and roulette wheels shared the building with a restaurant, which had outdoor tables in an open patio. We had an undercover inside, but he couldn’t just unlock the place and invite the rest of us in. The entrance to the gambling parlor was blocked by two locked doors—an outer door of fortified steel and an inner door that wasn’t fortified.
With the two biggest men on the squad, I climbed over the wall and onto the restaurant patio. People eating dinner looked up with a typical New York nonchalance. No one said anything. My two large cohorts then lifted a metal grate that led to a narrow tunnel. I was the lieutenant, but I was also the smallest guy on the team. So I was the one who was going in. It was tight, but I crawled through the dark, claustrophobic tunnel. I felt my way to the end. Just as I’d been promised, the tunnel came up in the entryway between the two locked doors. I shimmied up cautiously and opened the heavy steel door to the outside. The others quickly slipped inside.
We easily forced our way through the second door. With a burst of shouts and waving badges, we announced the raid.
“Police! Don’t anybody move!”
We truly caught everyone by surprise, except for the diners on the patio, who’d thankfully just kept eating their dinners.
Most of our work never made the papers or got many thank-yous from city hall. But it was the little accomplishments that kept us going, even if the wheels were back to spinning the very next night.