No two cops come out of the same mold. Like everyone else, they are the product of family and friends, schooling and the neighborhoods they live in. They are as varied and complex as other men, and each one must be seen in light of his own peculiar origins.
Thomas Joseph Shea was born in New York City on March 28, 1937. His father rewound commercial generators for I. W. Bliss, Inc, but lost his job when the company moved to Ohio. After a brief period of unemployment, Joseph Shea found work as a security guard and messenger for the First National City Bank in Brooklyn. At age sixty-one, he died of cancer.
Shea’s mother was a supervisor in the billing department of the Eclipse Mattress Company. “My mother was a great person,” Shea remembers. “Her name was Charlotte. She never got past eighth grade, but she had beautiful handwriting. She did the income tax for our family; she worked; she was one of the greatest people I’ve ever known.”
Charlotte Shea suffered from tuberculosis during her early and mid-forties. After the condition was arrested, she contracted cancer and died at age forty-nine.
“Back then,” Shea continues, “doctors believed in keeping their patients alive for as long as possible. We lived with death for almost a year. My mother lying in bed, her stomach all bloated up like she was eight months pregnant. Then, one morning, my father called and told me we were about to lose her. By the time I got there, she’d stopped breathing. I started pounding on her chest, giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation the way I’d learned at the Police Academy, but it was too late. I don’t know why I did it. I knew she was gone, but I didn’t want to let her go. Maybe I just wanted to hold her.”
Shea grew up in a low-income polyglot section of Brooklyn that reflected his family origins. One of his grandparents was Irish, one French, one English, and one German. His father was Catholic; his mother, Protestant. Shea was brought up as a Methodist.
For most of his childhood, Shea’s family lived in a small flat adjacent to an elevated train station in Brooklyn. He attended elementary school P. S. 65, Junior High School 171, and East New York Vocational High. He was a less-than-average student, totally uninterested in his studies. His playground was the street. Like his contemporaries, he skipped classes and got into street fights with random frequency. Generally, he tried to be part of the crowd but was self-conscious with girls because of a severe case of acne. Later in life, he would stand five feet nine inches tall, 190 pounds, with a ruddy face and fighter’s nose. He had no brothers and one sister, three years his junior.
“The thing I remember most about my childhood,” Shea says, “is that I always wanted to be a policeman. My parents taught me respect for law and order. I never stole or destroyed anything. I did what cops told me. If I was playing stickball in the street, which was against the law, and a cop drove by, the bat and ball disappeared. When a cop walked by, I said, ‘Hello, Officer.’ If I had ever come home with a policeman chasing after me—and I never did—my father would have given me a shellacking. Just the sight of a cop in uniform would have done it.”
At age seventeen, Shea dropped out of high school and enlisted in the United States Air Force. He wanted to be an air policeman, but an aptitude test revealed him to be “over-qualified” and, at the urging of his commanding officer, he began training to be an aircraft technician. Stationed in Japan, he worked mostly with ground instruments while studying for a high school equivalency diploma. In April 1958, after being honorably discharged, he returned to New York and took the next qualifying examination given for admission to the New York City Police Department. Then, while waiting for the results, he worked for Northwest Airlines, loading luggage and servicing planes. In April 1959, during services at St. Andrew’s Church in Brooklyn, an attractive green-eyed blonde sitting in a pew nearby captured Shea’s attention. Later that day, the minister approached him and said, “Tom, you’re a nice young man, but it’s disconcerting to preach while you sit there staring at a young lady. If it’s all right with her parents, I’ll introduce the two of you to each other. If I’m not mistaken, she also had her eye on you.”
On their first date, Shea brought Bonnie Stevenson to the annual Blue and Gold Cub Scout Dinner, where he was serving as a volunteer scoutmaster. They were married on December 23, 1959.
Shea’s credentials as a police applicant were average at best, but the numbers were on his side. The New York City Police Department in 1959 was midway through a hiring campaign that would raise its ranks from 18,800 to 31,000 men. Of the applicants who took the test with Shea, 60 percent passed, compared with 45 percent over the following three years. After the written examination, Shea underwent a series of personal interviews, and his wife was required by police investigators to sign a statement saying that she and Tom had not engaged in sexual intercourse prior to their marriage. Several years earlier, Shea had received a traffic ticket for an illegal turn on Mott Street in Chinatown. The Department required him to provide written proof of payment. It wasn’t until eighteen months after his job application had been filed that Shea was called for a physical examination. On May 4, 1961, he was appointed to the Department, assigned Shield Number 22737, and instructed to report to the Police Academy in Brooklyn for recruit training.
By and large, Shea’s fellow recruits had backgrounds similar to his own. They were from lower-middle-class New York City families, striving to move up a rung on the economic and social ladder. Virtually none had attended college. Twenty percent had received their high school diploma, which was mandatory for appointment, in an equivalency program. In general, their motivation in joining the force was twofold. They wanted the salary, job security, and pension offered by the Department. And they sought the respect, prestige, and authority that they associated with being a cop.
The Police Academy training program lasted eighteen weeks. Fifty-six classroom hours were devoted to firearms training; 192 to physical conditioning and defense techniques; 312 to general academic instruction.
“The first thing we learned,” Shea recalls, “is that in order to remain viable, society needs police. Our job was to preserve the fabric of society and, toward that end, we were to be given the power, where warranted, to use force. Then we learned about the risks that go along with being a cop. It’s the only profession in the world, except for the military in time of war, where a person faces unknown violence every day. When a fireman responds to an alarm, he knows how big the fire is and what has to be done to put it out. If a fireman dies, it’s a tragedy but it’s an accident. When a cop answers a call, he doesn’t know what lies ahead. It could be a shotgun blast in the stomach or a knife in the gut, a two-foot machete or a can of lye in his face. They taught us self-protection early, and it was a lesson they made stick. We all knew that, once we were cops, any minute someone could be shooting at us.”
Self-protection was an integral part of Thomas Shea’s police training. A cop, he learned, should not run up a flight of stairs when responding to an emergency call. If he does, he will be too winded to defend himself properly in the event of an attack. If a policeman uses his flashlight while pursuing a suspect, it should be held at arm’s length away from the body. A suspect is more likely to shoot at the light than at its holder. A siren, Shea learned, is not a license to speed or drive recklessly. Its purpose is to bring a cop to the scene of a crime as quickly as possible without endangering his own life. A cop should never keep papers or other material above the sun visor of his patrol car. In a high-speed chase, they might shake loose and fall in his face.
Police brutality and the use of unnecessary force, the recruits were told, were to be avoided at virtually any price. But if a fight did arise and a cop’s life was in danger, rules of fair play were to be ignored. In a life-and-death struggle, a cop is expected to use any weapon at his command, including thumbing an adversary in the eye, kneeing him in the groin, and butting an opponent’s nose, preferably splattering it all over the attacker’s face.
However, the most important lesson in self-defense was the “Eleventh Commandment”: cops protect each other. “You men,” the recruits were told, “will develop a warmth and camaraderie among yourselves simply by virtue of the fact that you are cops. You’ll eat together, work together, frequent the same after-hours bars together, and, in a few terrifying instances, die together. You’ll be praised and looked up to by some, hated and feared by others. But in the end, when the chips are down, you’ll be alone. Whenever one of your brothers is in trouble, move as though your own life depended on it. Someday it will.”
Shea graduated from the Police Academy on September 17, 1961. “It was a very proud moment,” he recalls. “I felt good. Being a policeman was an honored profession and an opportunity to serve the public. It was something I had always wanted, and finally I had attained my goal. It was the first time in my life I had done something that my family and I could be proud of.”
Shea’s first police assignment was with the newly created Tactical Patrol Force. In the eyes of the media, the TPF was a select group of six-foot-tall karate-trained experts who were New York City’s “roughest,” if not finest. Shea was five feet nine inches tall with unprepossessing physical skills and minimal knowledge of martial arts. Forty of the unit’s 125 men were rookies straight out of the Police Academy. Unlike most cops, they were not permanently assigned to a particular precinct. Instead, they were on citywide alert, assigned to precincts on a day-to-day basis according to need. Whenever a major crowd-control problem threatened to escalate into a riot, the TPF was called to maintain order. If the city was calm, TPF patrolmen were pressed into decoy duty.
It was as a police decoy that Shea made his first arrests. His uniform consisted of a red wig that had belonged to his mother, a scarf, raincoat, black skirt, blouse, women’s shoes, and falsies. His badge was pinned to a pair of Bermuda shorts beneath the skirt. Once, as Shea was sitting with his pocketbook on a bench near Central Park West and 108th Street in Manhattan, a man, taken in by the disguise, tried to seduce him. Several days later, at the same location, another suspect sat down next to him and began rummaging through Shea’s pocketbook.
“We couldn’t arrest someone until they actually took something and ran,” Shea recalls, “so I just sat there and pretended not to notice. The first thing this guy found was my police memo book, and I said to myself, ‘Shit, I blew it. Now he knows I’m a cop.’ But it didn’t seem to matter. He kept working his way through my things until he found my wallet and took off. My backup partner arrested him on the spot. It turned out the guy didn’t speak English so, when he saw the memo book, he didn’t know what it was.”
After two and a half years with the TPF, Shea was reassigned to the 90th Precinct in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Then, in April 1965, he was transferred to Brooklyn’s 79th Precinct. As with most cops, the vast majority of his hours were spent on “preventive assignment”—supervising an area in the hope that his mere presence would deter crime. When he was called to act, his performance was largely “service-oriented,” entailing situations that did not involve the commission of a crime—controlling traffic, administering first aid, giving directions, escorting parades, caring for lost children, delivering babies, and resolving disputes between cabdrivers and fares. Blaring radios had to be silenced late at night. If a fire broke out, Shea or a fellow cop called in the alarm, held back the crowds, sealed off the street from traffic, and guarded the building afterward to protect against looting. The average street fight was broken up without an arrest.
Family quarrels were generally disposed of in similar fashion.
Still, if police work was frequently service-oriented and dull, on occasion it could also be extremely dangerous.
“I had a friend in the Ninetieth Precinct,” Shea recalls, “a cop named Jerry Shrimpf. He had the bad habit of reaching into other people’s cars to shut the motor off when he stopped them for questioning. One day Jerry stopped someone for speeding and reached in like he always did. The motorist rolled his window up and took off at seventy miles an hour with Jerry’s arm caught between the window and the frame of the door. After two blocks, Jerry fell off and slid under the car. The back wheel took his head off. Then the driver hit another person straight on and killed him. Two people dead. The driver pled guilty to manslaughter and got seven and a half years.
“I was afraid after that,” Shea remembers. “But I guess that’s a healthy reaction. Any cop out on the street who doesn’t have a certain amount of fear is crazy. It’s not like I was trembling every minute, but the fear was always there—like riding a motorcycle. Anybody who rides a motorcycle and isn’t afraid will get hurt. It’s the same thing with being a cop. If you think you’re above getting hurt, that’s when it happens.”
“It” almost happened twice in 1967. On July 11, 1967, while on radio-car patrol, Shea responded to a routine call regarding a “disorderly person” and was attacked by a former mental-hospital patient armed with a meat cleaver. For the first time in six years on the force, Shea fired his revolver, striking his assailant once in the abdomen.
Four months later, on November 25, 1967, Shea was on motor patrol in the same area when a pedestrian flagged him down to report that an addict was shooting heroin in a nearby building. After following the informant inside, Shea climbed the stairs to the apartment in question and looked through a crack in the door. The room was small and dimly lit. Narcotics and narcotics paraphernalia littered the floor.
Shouting, “Don’t move. Police,” Shea kicked open the door and trained his gun on the lone suspect inside. The man froze, and Shea shoved him against a wall, then “tossed” him for weapons. Finding none, he ordered the suspect outside. As they reached the top of the stairs, the man whirled around, pulled a linoleum cutter from his sleeve, and ran a six-inch gash across Shea’s uniform just above the heart. At the end of its arc, the knife sliced through the skin between Shea’s thumb and second finger.
As Shea reeled back, the addict turned and ran for the fire escape. Chasing after him, Shea fired three shots, hitting him once in the leg. The perpetrator was convicted of assault and sentenced to two to five years in prison. The drug charge against him was dismissed because, during the fight and shooting, Shea had lost sight of the narcotics. Thus, there was no “chain of custody,” and the heroin was not admissible into evidence. At trial, the judge told Shea that, when he left the room, he should have carried the narcotics with him.
Shea’s work in the 79th Precinct won him recognition as a tough, “street-smart” cop. In December 1967, he was promoted to the Brooklyn North Task Force Narcotics Unit. Thirty-one months later, he was transferred again, this time to the Department’s Taxi-Truck Surveillance Unit. Taxi-Truck operated out of Flushing Meadow Park in Queens. It was responsible for the prevention and investigation of motor-vehicle-related thefts on a city-wide basis. Shea considered it his best assignment ever because of the flexibility involved. For twenty months, he performed in exemplary fashion. Then problems arose.
Shortly after midnight on March 19, 1972, two off-duty policemen allegedly assaulted and shot at neighborhood youths outside a bar and grill in Woodside, Queens. Shea was not involved in the initial assault. However, in arresting one of the youths (a fourteen-year-old Hispanic) for criminal mischief, he reportedly struck the boy twice on the head with the butt of his revolver. Shortly thereafter, departmental charges were filed against him.
Then, fifteen days later, Shea was involved in a far more serious incident.
While on patrol-car duty on the West Side of Manhattan, he and his partner (a cop named John Fitzgerald) were confronted by a man who shouted that he had been robbed and pointed toward another pedestrian. When the suspect (a twenty-three-year-old named Felix Tarrats) fled, Shea chased after him. The pursuit covered several blocks and, as Tarrats crossed the intersection of Broadway and 84th Street, Shea fired twice, hitting Tarrats once in the neck. On the basis of Shea’s testimony that he had shot in self-defense and only after the suspect had fired at him, Tarrats was indicted for attempted murder. The fly in the ointment was that no gun belonging to the suspect was ever found. Then Shea’s own partner, John Fitzgerald, conceded in court that he had not seen the alleged gun. The attempted murder charge against Tarrats was dismissed. The question of Shea’s future was unresolved.
In a police department where most cops never fire a gun at a suspect in their entire career, Shea had shot and wounded three men and allegedly pistol-whipped a fourth within fifty-seven months. In the course of fifteen days, he had been involved in two incidents that were questionable at best.
Still, in the eyes of those who held his fate in their hands, Shea had much to recommend him. A lot of cops come to hate their job after five or ten years on the force. Indeed, for many, the only thing that keeps them going is a pension plan that allows retirement at half pay after twenty years. The bosses felt that if a cop liked his work it was a plus factor, and no one liked it more than Shea. He loved it. He was a tough cop, who had made more than 200 arrests in eleven years—twice the city-wide average. He wasn’t polished, but he gave the Department eight hours of work each day, and then some.
“If told to go out and capture six lions running wild in the streets,” one colleague said, “Shea will try. He might bring back only five, but he’ll go after all six.”
Shea was the type of cop the police brass wanted on the force. The bosses felt that there was a place for him. The only question was where. After caucusing to decide his fate, they decided that Thomas Shea should be transferred to the predominantly black 103rd Precinct in South Jamaica, Queens.