The assassination of Police officer Edward Byrne occurred at 3:30 A.M. on February 26, 1988, and became a symbol of the utter devastation wrought by the crack epidemic on urban America. The twenty-two-year-old rookie was ambushed as he sat in a parked NYPD radio car on a quiet residential street in South Jamaica, Queens. Byrne was protecting the home of a witness in a drug case, a Guyanese immigrant known only as Arjune. In retaliation for his prior complaints about crack dealing near his home, thugs had hurled Molotov cocktails at his front porch on two occasions the previous November.
As an accomplice of the assassin approached one side of the car to distract Byrne, his partner silently slithered up behind and pumped five bullets from a .357 magnum into the young cop’s upper body, an area where his bullet-resistant vest offered no protection. The gunman was whisked from the scene by a getaway driver and a fourth conspirator.
“The officer had no chance to do anything,” lamented a visibly anguished Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward at a press conference at Mary Immaculate Hospital, where Byrne was pronounced dead.
Byrne’s father, Matthew, a retired NYPD lieutenant who practiced law in Long Island, was suitably outraged. “My son Eddie was executed last Friday by people who don’t even deserve to be called people,” he railed after the slaying, as he stood on the steps of O’Shea Funeral Home, in Wantagh, a New York City suburb, flanked by his wife, Ann, and his three other sons: Lawrence, a prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office (Lawrence would go on to become the deputy commissioner of legal matters for the NYPD in 2014); Stephen, a Marine Corps second lieutenant; and Kenneth, a college student.
“An attack on a cop is an attack on society. We’re going to do more here because the killing was in connection with drug trafficking. That’s the added ingredient,” vowed Mayor Ed Koch.
Outrage over Byrne’s death reverberated throughout the country: President Ronald Reagan had called the Byrne family to express his personal condolences. Vice President George H. W. Bush took to carrying Byrne’s police shield during his 1988 presidential campaign after the slain officer’s father presented it to him.
An attack on a cop is an attack on society.
Detectives working around the clock soon learned that Byrne’s assassination was not in retribution against Arjune as originally thought. Instead it was part of a murder-for-hire contract initiated by an imprisoned drug dealer named Howard “Pappy” Mason, a top lieutenant in the drug empire of Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols. Mason was incensed at another cop (not Byrne) who had disrespected him in public by demanding that he cover his open beer with a brown paper bag. From his jail cell, he decided that somebody on the police force would have to pay.
Within two weeks cops had four suspects in custody—Todd Scott, nineteen; Scott Cobb, twenty-four; David McClary, twenty-two; and Philip “Marshall” Copeland, twenty-two. All were minions in Mason’s street gang, known as the Bebos, whose members sported flashy jewelry with gang-specific designs and spoke in a variant of pig Latin, and all four offered versions of the event that portrayed each of them in the best possible light under the circumstances.
Two of the top prosecutors in Queens, A. Kirke Bartley and Eugene Kelly, laid out the case before two separate juries weighing the fates of three of the four defendants. (Due to legal reasons, two of the suspects, Scott and Copeland, were being tried by one jury while Cobb was being tried simultaneously in the same courtroom by a different jury. McClary was tried separately.)
Prosecutors alleged that Mason had passed the murder contract on to his main enforcer, Philip Copeland, who hired the other three. “The order given from jail was carried out; the message was delivered,” Bartley claimed. “Five bullets shattered his head, ending his life… [It was] a message of death to Eddie Byrne.”
The most devastating evidence against them came from Scott Cobb’s seventy-minute videotaped confession in which he admitted to driving the getaway car but denied knowing that a cop was to be the target.
Scott Cobb said he had been listening to music when he heard gunshots and drove Todd Scott and David McClary from the scene. Todd Scott laughed about how he had witnessed McClary shooting Byrne. (McClary claimed Scott had been the one who shot Byrne.)
“Brains. I [Scott] seen the cop’s brains come out. I seen the brains.”
The shocking nature of Officer Edward Byrne’s assassination led to a massive outpouring of grief and stunned the nation. President Ronald Reagan called the Byrne family to express his condolences, and Vice President George H. W. Bush was given Byrne’s badge (no. 14072) by the slain officer’s father, Matthew, an NYPD lieutenant turned lawyer. Bush carried it with him on the campaign trail in 1988.
“Dave [McClary] was telling Todd [Scott] that after he [McClary] fired, Todd was standing there laughing. Todd was leanin’ on the car… [saying] ‘Hee-hee. Oh, you blew his brains out’… He [Scott] said it like a joke. He said he [McClary] shot the cop. ‘Brains. I [Scott] seen the cop’s brains come out. I seen the brains,’” Cobb said, quoting Scott, in his videotaped statement. “He says that’s what he [Scott] was laughing at.”
Philip Copeland (right) was one of four defendants charged with murder for Officer Byrne’s assassination. All would be found guilty and be sentenced to life, which prompted thunderous applause from about 150 police officers in the courtroom.
Todd Scott’s own videotaped confession was no less disturbing: “I seen the first bullet hit him. I saw his head down and his hair flying like, you know, a blow dryer. I seen the blood and stuff.”
The defense was unpersuasive. A girlfriend of Philip Copeland insisted that he was in bed with her when the slaying occurred. Todd Scott acknowledged being at the murder scene but denied approaching Byrne’s police car; he maintained he had been beaten by cops to make his videotaped statement. Scott Cobb testified he drove Todd Scott and David McClary to the scene but knew nothing of any plot to kill Byrne. The state’s witnesses, the defendants’ lawyers argued, were an unsavory bunch out for a piece of the $130,000 in reward money.
On the evening of March 29, 1989, a jury of eight men and four women found Scott Cobb guilty of Byrne’s murder; nearly ninety minutes later, a second jury, comprised of six men and six women, found Philip Copeland and Todd Scott guilty of the same crime. The fourth suspect, David McClary, was convicted by a separate jury of murdering Byrne on June 6, 1989.
Queens Supreme Court Justice Thomas Demakos sentenced each man twenty-five years to life and recommended they never be paroled. All four are still serving their sentences.
Howard “Pappy” Mason was indicted on federal racketeering charges in Brooklyn Federal Court, which included the Byrne murder. He was found guilty on December 11, 1989, and sentenced to life in prison by Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Edward Korman on January 7, 1994.
Two other suspects were convicted of firebombing Arjune’s home. As for Arjune, he was relocated under the federal witness program to Spokane, Washington, until a dispute with local cops led to him to be moved once more, to another secret locale.
Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols, Mason’s onetime boss, pleaded guilty to drug-related charges in a secret proceeding before the same Judge Korman on September 28, 1989. Although he became a federal informant, he is still serving a life sentence in Clinton Correctional Facility, in Dannemora, New York.