Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  Ward and the brass at One Police Plaza got their chance on June 30, 1975, when New York’s Deputy Mayor James A. Cavanagh ordered the dismissal of nineteen thousand civil servants by midnight. The city of New York came within inches of bankruptcy in the next year, until the Municipal Assistance Corporation, chaired by investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn, managed to put together a workable funding arrangement for the city. But by the time the fires had stopped burning in everybody’s bank accounts, seven thousand New York City police officers had been fired or forced into early retirement. No one believed that every one of these seven thousand men and women had been let go because of the Knapp Commission traumas, but some of those dropped were rumored to have been on departmental hit lists.

  In a way, the NYPD has been shaped by these two disasters. The Knapp Commission assaulted the pride of the department, and the Big Mac crisis of 1975 drove out most of its experienced, streetwise officers. In 1983 fewer than half the uniform patrol officers had more than three years of experience on the street. And it showed.

  Many of the outrageous patrol-side incidents making headlines in 1985 could be traced back to a serious shortage of skilled and seasoned officers, or to the changes in experienced officers whose pride and spirit had been cracked fatally during the 1970’s. Kennedy, like every other member of the force, knew that when you have a year in which more than a hundred revolvers are lost, an accident a day is reported in the squad cars, there is routine drug and alcohol abuse in the patrol function, and hiring quotas allow substandard recruits into the system to please various ethnic voting blocs, then you are asking for just what the city was getting: trouble in the NYPD. And when the administration of the NYPD had such serious doubts about its own officers that it sent permanent moles out into the precincts to spy on fellow members, then you had a managerial class that had virtually lost its entire police force. The NYPD practice of running full-time grab-bag entrapment and intelligence operations against its own people had outraged police departments all over Canada and the United States. As far as Kennedy was concerned, the surprising fact wasn’t that so many officers had no pride and no interest in the job; it was that so many of them still cared.

  He didn’t know, and he was sure Stokovich didn’t know, whether the mole who had filed on Kennedy was reporting to the Precinct Integrity Control Officer, or direct to some operative at Internal Affairs. The usual reaction to negative reports from Integrity Control officers, or from Field Associates, was to set up a sting operation against the accused man. The stings were sometimes obvious, sometimes less so. Kennedy’s first partner had run afoul of an IAD sting, one of the classics: the mysterious magical bank drop. Even a membership in the Honor Legion hadn’t stopped the IAD slicks from going after him.

  The man had been on a routine post patrol when an apparent purse snatching had taken place about halfway up the block. A black male had raced past a woman, snagging her purse as he went by, the typical tactic. The woman screamed, and Kennedy’s partner had gone after the purse snatcher on foot. The black male raced around a far corner and ducked out of sight. By the time the police officer had reached the corner, the man was gone. But a brown business envelope was lying in the alley. When he picked it up he could see that the envelope held three ten-dollar bills. There were no other identifying marks, and no other paper inside. Just thirty dollars in a brown envelope. Of course when he got back out on the street, the woman was gone as well. Maybe in Bent Forks, Nebraska, or Climax, Pennsylvania, or another small town, the policeman would have taken it right to the only bank and handed it over to Maudie behind the counter. In New York City, after spending the next half-hour trying to find the woman, he called in a report. When a buddy in an RMP suggested they keep a ten each and hand in the last one at the desk, he agreed. The IAD guys came out of the woodwork and busted him for corruption.

  There were a hundred similar scams, each one run against an unsuspecting officer after he had been fingered by an anonymous accuser as “corruption-prone.” They left money lying around, or they offered him a free meal at a local greasy spoon. They tried to sell him a carton of cigarettes that had “fallen off a truck” or a shirt at a discount. They tried to get him to accept a free drink at a local bar, or they arranged for him to be offered a “civil servant discount” at a grocery. And every time the officer went for it, the slicks would rise up out of the ground as if it had been sown with dragon’s teeth, and another cop’s career hit the wall. Was it fighting corruption or was it entrapment? Was the cop a criminal or a victim? And what cop could ever be bought so cheaply? It was a farce!

  Detective Kennedy was entitled to his anger; he knew that you can’t do the job without being in technical violation of at least ten obscure regulations in one of the Big Three bibles: the Patrol Guide, 620 pages; the Detective’s Guide, over 500 pages; or the Administrative Guide, pushing a flat 1,000 pages this year. It was widely believed by the membership that the guides had been written the same way the Internal Revenue guide had been written, so deliberately prolix and confusing, salted with hidden contradictions and procedural cul-desacs, that on any day every working cop was in violation of something. It made a kind of sense to Kennedy, because as long as they had you on paper violations, they had your career in the palms of their hands. They could break you anytime. You lived and worked on their sufferance. Even Oliver Farrell, who had managed to pare the job down to a few safe moves, had run afoul of a couple of regulations last year. And no detective in the NYPD could forget that Detective Eddie Egan, the cop who had broken the French Connection, was rewarded for his services by being hounded out of the NYPD on precisely this kind of paperwork violation. And when he had hit the street, Eddie Egan owed a month in back rent and had exactly $89.79 in the bank.

  “I am calm, Bruno. But no way am I hanging around to talk to the slicks on this one. I’m a goddam Gold Shield Second Grade and I’m fucking well not going to do it! They can have the shield if they want it. Just let them come ahead and take it off me themselves.”

  Stokovich exhaled slowly, settling into the chair. For a long while the two men sat in the small hot room and looked at each other. Kennedy watched the light change on the side of Stokovich’s cheek. He had cut himself, shaving probably, below the ear. Kennedy felt a sweet calmness slide over him. He had taken his position. Whatever came out of it, he could live with it.

  “Eddie … I didn’t think you’d get this pissed off about some Department bullshit. You and me, we’ve had more shit flying around our file folders than most of the guys in the Task Force.”

  “Yeah, Bruno, that’s true. And you’ve also got forty-eight departmental citations and awards. I have nineteen, including the Combat Cross with the celery. You’re in the Honor Legion. So’s Wolf Maksins. Deke Fratelli was up for the Medal of Honor the year before last, and I think he should have gotten it. Kolchinski has three Merit Medals, a Combat Cross, and there isn’t a man out in the squad room who doesn’t have bars up the ying-yang for police duty. Look at that plaque. The whole Task Force got a third Unit Citation in 1983. You’re a lieutenant in the goddam NYPD and you and I we do not take shit from IAD and we sure as shit take no shit from moles and snitches and I for one want to have this snitch standing right up here in front of me. So should you, Bruno.”

  “Jesus, Eddie … okay, okay. I see your point. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should raise the shit over this one. It’s not an IAD complaint, exactly. It’s a complaint through the Equal Rights office, under ‘Prohibited Conduct.’ One ‘A,’ it says. ‘Racial slurs’ and ‘prejudice toward any racial group.’ Relax! Relax, Eddie! I know it’s bullshit. But the IAD guys have to investigate it. Can you think of anybody you pissed off yesterday?”

  “Yeah. Bergman. Sergeant Bergman. He was desk officer at the Eighth yesterday, gave me a hard time about getting Marco Stradazzi brought in. Said I bypassed the chain. Also, maybe I was a little hard on a PW name of Stokes.”

  “Stokes? Don’t tell me, a short black broad, nice body, eyes lik
e she spends her weekends cutting the balls off boy scouts from Westport?”

  “Yeah! That’s her. How come you know her?”

  “She’s a steward for The Guardians. She’s always on the prod around the white guys. Ask Robinson about her. She’s a good cop, but she sees Klansmen under her bed. Frank had her once, on a canvass a couple months back. Remember the case? Nineteen-year-old retarded kid was into all those sexual assaults by the Con Ed plant on Fourteenth? Stokes was on the third platoon, four to midnight. Robinson wanted a few people to go through the shit on the roof of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt School, on Avenue D near Fourteenth? The sergeant told Stokes and a couple of other officers to climb up onto the roof and poke around. Stokes told the sergeant no, she wouldn’t.”

  “What do you mean, she wouldn’t? She’s a cop.”

  “She’s a black female cop. That’s different. She said the sergeant was only sending her up onto the roof because it was too shitty a detail for his favorite guys. He was sending her because she was a woman and a black, and that was racial prejudice. She said she’d go to the EEO if she had to. She knew her fucking rights!”

  “Was the sergeant handing her a shit detail? You know, busting her balls? She’s an abrasive bitch.”

  “Well, Robinson says no. The suspect was tossing clothing and evidence onto the roof. But the roof was covered with pigeon shit, old garbage. Nobody wanted to go up. Robinson says she was standing nearby, looking bored. Says the sergeant hardly looked at her, just told her to get up there and look around. Robinson doesn’t think he was ragging her ass. Anyway, she didn’t have to do it.”

  “Sergeant backed down?”

  “Yeah. More trouble if he chases her up there. She’d go straight to headquarters. He’d have to prove that he wasn’t a racist son of a bitch, which he is, anyway. I tell you, Eddie, it’s a different force today.”

  “Bruno … you think she’s the mole?”

  Stokovich shook his head. “Nah … she’s right up front with it. A mole, he’d be a party guy, everybody’s bud. See him at all the rackets—he’d know your favorite scotch. Stokes is a ball-breaker but she’s no mole.”

  “So where do we go from here? The mole could have been any one of twenty different officers who came and went at the crime scene yesterday. What do you want to do?”

  Stokovich thought it over for a minute.

  “Look, Eddie … this Ruiz case is right smack into a narco operation. Give me the Ruiz case, I can muscle it through without having to go official. I’ll take it from here. You’ve got solid leads, and I know the narcotics man in the sector. And I can work with Stradazzi. Guy’s not with anybody outside, but he’s got a rabbi downtown. He’s being cut in on some Intelligence operations. You can do this …”

  Stokovich flipped a carbon copy of an EMS report onto Kennedy’s lap.

  “EMS scraped this turkey off the rails at the Twenty-third Street IND around midnight last night. He had a stack, and a gold chain with a mezuzah on it. Mezuzah was reported stolen from a kid named Jamie Spiegel, got himself stabbed over on West Forty-sixth Street about an hour before. Spiegel is in Bellevue. You look into this. I’d like to know how the John Doe on the tracks got himself from A to B. I think he got some help. You take this, it gets you out of the building for a while. I stall the EEO and the slicks. Time works its magical spell. The papers get lost. IAD and the EEO guys get bored, find some other shmuck to hassle. When in doubt, ask for it in triplicate. How about it?”

  It looked good to Kennedy.

  “What about Mokie Muro? And that Olvera guy? Days are going by here, Bruno. We gotta do something about those bastards. This Muro thing, it’s working on me. All of us. I think those shits are up in the Bronx.”

  Stokovich was nodding. “Yeah, and don’t we have a citywide out on them? We got every cop in the city jumping out of his skin on that one.”

  “Yeah, well, you got me doing this jumper.”

  Stokovich shrugged and popped another stick of gum.

  “So? Do both. What’s the matter? You a cop or what? Take the city’s money—”

  “Do the city’s work. Who can I have?”

  Stokovich locked his hands behind his head and pulled hard. “Rrrrooowff! Jesus Christ I’m getting stiff. You ever going to go to work, Kennedy? Take Wolfie. He needs a run. But keep a leash on him. He bites somebody, it’s your ass!”

  Maksins was leaning against the bars of the holding tank, watching the biker, listening to him talk in his sleep. He had his suit jacket thrown over a shoulder, a custom-cut white shirt, pleated navy-blue slacks, a thin lizard-skin belt with a gold buckle. The butt of a large revolver was hanging out of a molded-leather Jackass rig on Maksins’ left side.

  When Maksins saw Kennedy heading across the room, he came over to his desk. The room had cleared out. Most of the men didn’t like to hang around when somebody was locking horns with the lieutenant. The fact that Maksins was still in the room meant that Stokovich had probably told him beforehand that he and Kennedy would be working together this shift. Maksins tugged at the crease of his navy-blue slacks and sat down on the edge of Kennedy’s desk, pulling out his revolver. He put it down on top of a case file. Kennedy picked it up and turned it in the light.

  It was a heavy blued piece with a vented rib running along the top of the barrel. The hand grips were oversized, shaped in zebrawood, crazily striped. The weapon must have weighed close to four pounds.

  “You got it, hah?”

  Maksins took the piece back, popped the cylinder out and spun it twice with a flick of his thumb. “Yes, I did. Had a time getting it by Tactics. Stokovich had some moaning and groaning to do about the thing. But I made it. Dan Wesson Model Fifteen. Four interchangeable barrels. Quick shift front sights. Had to send away for a special Jackass harness. You like it?”

  Kennedy wasn’t a weapons fan. His duty gun was a Chief with a .38 Special load. Now and then he wore his Airweight in an ankle holster. It depended on the clothes he was wearing. Chief, Airweight, it didn’t matter. He was lousy with both.

  “It’s a cannon, Wolfie. You fire this inside the city limits, you’ll blow out windows all the way up Fifth. Nice looking, though.”

  Maksins put it away and actually sat there scuffing the toe of his loafer over the linoleum, his head down, stalling.

  Finally: “You know, Eddie, I had the shines on my case pretty bad, year before I came down here.”

  Kennedy knew the story. He let Wolf tell it.

  “You know, Knapp may have fucked up Patrol. I know the guys major in doing the dog now, as far as narco busts or numbers. Integrity officer sees you even talking to a policy runner or a bookie, even a pusher, before you know it you’re bagged for ‘seen-in-corruption-prone-location-with-known-perpetrators.’ So now you can’t talk to any of your best street sources—the bankers, the guy who runs the bar, the local pimps. The guys who are most likely to help you with the serious cases because they’ve got a vested interest in seeing the block stay quiet. You know what I’m talking about? Yeah, well, after Knapp you have these snitches all over. They see you talking to a bad guy—pow. Right away, they make you for association. Knapp sent the bosses into a tizzy. You can’t even make a simple drug collar now unless you’ve got a supervisor at your back. You know the TOP changes that went through all the departments? Temporary Operating Procedures? When I was in Narcotics, we couldn’t even do a stop-and-frisk, turn a guy’s pockets, until we had a boss there with us. Not to protect the perp. To make sure that we weren’t just stripping the guy and taking his money. This is in Harlem, right? All because a few guys in Preventative and Enforcement Patrol got into shaking down the dealers and the pushers and levying the fine right on the spot. I mean, that’s really all that Bob Leuci and his squad was doing. Best way to get the assholes off the street was to take away their capital. The courts wouldn’t do it. So the narco squads did it on their own. I did it. I kicked their asses off the street and I took away their money. The PEP guys did it too. So, did the
silks on the Knapp commission ever ask about the rate of drug busts? Did they ever ask if there were fewer black kids dying in puke because of a hot shot or toxic smack? No, they didn’t. The Knapp lawyers only wanted to nail cops. I was working in Harlem and I know that the PEP guys did real work—they scared the piss out of pushers and dealers. What did Knapp or Goodman ever do besides bust good cops?”

  Kennedy had never heard such a speech from Maksins. “Hey, Wolfie, if you’re trying to hand me Bob Leuci as a good cop, what about his partners? He wore a wire against his own.”

  “Yeah. He did. They had him by the balls. You read his book?”

  “Yeah, I read it. What about it?”

  “Read it again, Eddie. Leuci, he’s learned something. I think the guy wishes he’d never so much as waved at one of those three-piece suits from Justice. I say the guy’s trying to send his squad a message. He figured he could get it across in his own book. He did, too.”

  Kennedy got up and put on his coat. “Wolfie, you are a very strange person. I did not hear you say what you just said about Harlem. I think you should be very careful about saying things like that around here.”

  Maksins looked over toward Stokovich’s office door.

  “Him? He sees it just the same way, Eddie.”

  “No, he doesn’t, Wolfie. He can’t.”

  Maksins and Kennedy followed a nurse with wispy blue hair and an orthopedic brace on her left leg down a long hall reeking of Lysol to Jamie Spiegel’s ward in Bellevue Hospital. There were four beds in the room. A plump woman wearing a pastel-striped dress got up when the detectives came into the room. She went right at them, stopping them in the middle of the ward, wearing a blend of hostility and supplication, smelling of floral perfume and medicinal hand cream. She held a white vinyl purse as big as a pullman pillow over her breasts. Her cheeks had been dusted with something like white flour and her mascara had run down into the creases under her eyes. She was distracted enough to have allowed it to dry there.