No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop

by Robert Cea

  No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop

  Robert Cea

  HarperCollins (2012)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Tags: Biography Autobiography, General

  Biography Autobiographyttt Generalttt

  A New York Police Officer's relentless journey into the criminal netherworld, told with brutal truth and honesty. Perhaps Neitzsche described Rob Cea's life best, way before he was born: "Take care when chasing the animals; for you can very well become the animal you are chasing." No Lights, No Sirens is a sojourn so dirty and nasty it defies belief. Rob Cea starts off as an idealistic young cop, a true believer in the system for which he works tirelessly. He is sadly mistaken. The system he tried so hard to appease ultimately led to his downfall and the ruination of his life. What separates this from other cop—and—robber stories is the brutal authenticity from the cop himself. We will see and hear exactly what is discussed in a patrol car. We will see how the law was—and is—routinely bent to make collars stick any way possible. And we will see how Cea slowly spirals to depths of hell. No Lights, No Sirens is simplistic in its scope: A young idealistic boy becomes a man through fire, and then becomes exactly what he has been chasing for so long, a hardened man possessed by demons. With rapid fire and gritty narrative, Cea writes about his fall to the depths, and his salvation. We see the dark side of detective work in New York's most crime—riddled neighborhoods from a first-hand view never before seen.

  NO LIGHTS, NO SIRENS

  THE CORRUPTION AND REDEMPTION OF

  AN INNER CITY COP

  ROBERT CEA

  DEDICATION

  For Lisa, Nicholas, and Olivia

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. The Beginning

  2. “On the Outside”

  3. “Test-i-Lie”

  4. Bully of the Badlands

  5. Mia

  6. “Escopeta Pequeña”

  7. “Welcome to the Jungle”

  8. Thirst for the Darkness

  9. “Shots Fired! 10-13, K!”

  10. The Slow Decline

  11. “Monster”

  12. Borges

  13. “G.O. 15 Not in Effect”

  14. Redemption

  15. The End

  16. “Endgame, Baby, Endgame”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Praise for Robert Cea’s No Lights, No Sirens

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Was this the end, finally?

  We were on a rooftop littered with empty crack vials and forties, his knee jammed into my solar plexus, making breathing impossible. The air I could inhale was filled with a coppery-tasting fluid—blood, my blood—and the harder I tried to breathe, the more I coughed out red lather. He lifted me, to throw me from the roof, but realized he’d have to follow me down. I’d cuffed our wrists together. I couldn’t see for the veil of red from when he’d bitten cleanly through both of my nasal chambers. The skin that was once the outer part of my nose had torn from my face and flattened. As I drew in breath, the skin tissue was pulled in and out. The pain was excruciating.

  Anywhere this scumbag mutt could exact pain he did. His huge right hand freely hit the upper part of my body. I was trying not to focus on the pain, taking comfort in knowing that I was receiving exactly what I’d set out for that late afternoon—to have all of the sins ripped from my body by an animal as dirty and as sinful as I’d become. It was a ghetto exorcism in the very place where it had all begun so many years before, the place where I had been baptized by fire as a young New York City cop, the streets of the Badlands in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

  My body suddenly became cold, numb. I was sure that I was going to die on that quiet rooftop and I was so fucking happy about it. I wanted to die—I deserved to die. With each vicious punch, I began to see black-and-white snapshots of what once was my life. Standing proudly in front of One Police Plaza in my dress blues…my first gun collar…my first drug arrest… the medals that had accumulated so easily… the first bag of smack I’d given away… the poor junkie snitch I was accused of murdering…my wife, Mia, holding our baby.

  The sudden realization of defeat and sorrow washed over me and I wondered how I’d gotten here. When was the exact moment I no longer was the cop, but had become the criminal?

  1

  The Beginning

  It was the early eighties. New York City was just starting to recover from the bankrupt years of the seventies, though the crime rate was at an all-time high and continuing to rocket out of proportion. Mayor Ed “How am I doing?” Koch was too busy self-promoting or writing books to realize just how bad the city really was. Of course, New York has always been a dangerous and volatile place, but things were out of control: 1,826 murders, 3,747 rapes, and 100,667 robberies in 1981. The murder rate would climb to 2,445 by 1989. To top it off, an average of five police officers a year were murdered. Yes, New York City was a war zone, and crack had not even reared its ugly head, at least not yet. When it did, things would get much, much worse before they got better. I was heading right for it. My number had been called by the department; I was entering the New York City Police Academy and I couldn’t wait.

  My older brother, Jeff, had already been on the job for over a year. He was exactly where he wanted to be: The juice, the action, it was what made it all so real for him. It’s what he had wanted to do his whole life, be a cop, and it’s what I had wanted to do since I could remember. Jeff has a great physical presence—he’s a natural leader—and with his uniform on and the medals that were starting to accumulate over his shield, he seemed larger than life. I would follow him anywhere. I wanted to feel that juice. I wanted to know that what I was about to do had some powerful meaning behind it. The long and short of it: I just wanted to help people.

  Jeff worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and at that time it was a virtual drugstore. The operation pressure points and TNT drug initiatives that solely targeted narcotics trafficking and street-level sales hadn’t yet been established, so the dealers and the junkies ran the show. Jeff would call me up on a Friday when he was doing a four-to-twelve tour and I would hang out with him on his foot post. I was a second-year student in college, and having been raised in a working-class section of Brooklyn, this gray, dark world was very unfamiliar to me. I was mesmerized by the tight, narrow streets where tenement buildings were piled one on top of the other, so close together that, looking up from the ground, they all seemed to meld into scarred brick monoliths. The burned-out storefronts, the garbage trailing from the doorways to the streets. The rat-infested alleys, the dark and dangerous courtyards where murder was a simple afterthought, the abandoned buildings where the walking dead fucked, sucked, and skin-popped to live. These images triggered something deep inside me. I was hooked, and there was no turning back.

  Each borough has its main thoroughfare: Fordham Road, the Bronx; Broadway, Manhattan; Queens Boulevard, Queens; Hyland Boulevard, Staten Island. And Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. Flatbush is the main artery carrying lifeblood through the center of the borough, running the entire length, south to north, for approximately eleven miles. It is said to be the longest avenue in the world. The south end connects Brooklyn to Rockaway, Queens, via the Marine Park Bridge; the north end connects Brooklyn with Manhattan via the Manhattan Bridge. Every couple of miles, the neighborhoods flow from good to bad, a microcosm of the borough. The neighbor
hoods at the south end of Flatbush, where I was raised, run from Flatlands to Marine Park. Clean mom-and-pop stores, wide streets with spotless onefamily houses dot the area. As you travel north, Flatbush Avenue narrows and snakes through the middle of Brooklyn, from East Flatbush through Crown Heights. Overcrowded and unkempt four-story apartment buildings, liquor stores, and “pot spots” are on every corner. Farther north, the dangerous urban landscape gives way to 526 acres of rolling meadows and luxuriant greenery: Prospect Park. Flatbush Avenue cuts through the eastern end of the park, and it is here that the affluent neighborhood of Park Slope begins. The tree-lined streets consist of four-story brownstones, turn-of-the-century mansions, and art deco apartment buildings.

  Some people have been born and died on this avenue. If there really are eight million stories in New York, this avenue owns half of them.

  The drive down Flatbush Avenue this morning seemed different to me. Yes, it was the same place I’d walked and driven down for the past twenty years. Same people, same pristine storefronts—Ebinger’s Bakery, Joe’s candy store, Gus’s delicatessen, Louie’s meat market, the family-run businesses that made the borough famous, stores I’d shopped at since I was a child. Yet now, even though I hadn’t had one day of training, I started to look at it all from a different perspective. I created scenarios in my head. If a man was robbing Joe’s, how would I stop him before anyone got hurt? A woman is screaming in an alley, two ways in, which is the safest and quickest route? The thought that I would be out there in those streets in six short months, making it a better place to live, filled me with incredible purpose. I was now looking at men and women twice my age as if I were their keeper. I wanted to chase away the monsters that had stalked these streets for so many years. I thought of the three thousand other recruits who were coming on to the job with me this day. Were they thinking and feeling the same thoughts I was?

  My destination, the police academy, on Twentieth Street, off Third Avenue, in Manhattan, was a place I’d been to many times to watch the cadets going home after a long day of what I thought was as priceless an education as any an Ivy League school had to offer. I recognized the incredible bond that these young recruits had with one another, the mutual respect and camaraderie forged at the institution where every cop who’s a member or has ever been a member of the NYPD has studied and trained. I was about to join this unique union of men who would run into out-of-control situations while everyone else was running out. My brother, Jeff, and the rest of these men and women were my heroes. I could not wait.

  I arrived at the academy at 0630 hours on July 12, 1982. I proudly wore my cadet uniform: navy blue pants, light blue shirt, navy tie, and black clunky shoes. If you were from out of town and saw a group of us walking down the street, you’d probably think we were headed to a busdrivers’ convention. There was nothing to identify us with the greatest police force in the world other than a cheap NYPD tie clip.

  The academy is a boxy structure, six stories of gray cement walls dressed with black slate tile framing the double glass doors. If it weren’t for all the uniformed cops moving in and out of those front doors, the building could be mistaken for some social services department. I entered the muster deck in the covered atrium and noticed a hundred or so class numbers taped to the wall. We’d been assigned our classes back at Brooklyn College when we were officially sworn in. Mine was Company B, Class 82-79. Home.

  I soaked everything in, ate it up with knife and fork. Hanging on the wall next to the double doors was the NYPD flag with its five green-and-white alternating stripes representing the five boroughs, and its twenty-four stars in a field of blue representing the original towns and counties of the city. In bold letters the flag read “Fidelis Ad Mortem,” Latin for “Faithful unto Death.” It bounced around in my head like a stray .22, making what we were about to do seem all that more important. The Devotion of yourself so completely to the cause of keeping the peace, to the point that you’d be willing to die for it. I certainly would.

  The recruits started to line up in front of the class numbers. I clocked my classmates. An overweight black guy named Lester Knowles who didn’t look like he’d been in-country very long. A tall, good-looking cat I’d seen smoking a Di Nobili on Second Avenue less than a half hour before, even though it was forbidden to smoke in public in uniform. I checked his nameplate: “Pirelli.” He looked as though he was clocking his classmates for who might be a degenerate gambler or have some imperfection he might be able to capitalize on, someone he could quite possibly run a game on. I enjoyed watching him watch everyone else.

  Billy Devlin fell in line. He was dark Irish, about twentyone, my age. He looked even more attuned to his surroundings than me and I sensed immediately that we shared the same vision. I could also tell that he’d been working out with weights, which told me he was smart enough to know he’d need an edge in the street. Now, was that edge needed because of a flaw he felt he had, or did he just want to cover every base? He caught me checking him out and smiled, then lowered his head respectfully. I did the same, and then I looked back at Mister Cool, Pirelli. This time he caught me watching him. I saw his mood darken slightly, but I did not look away. I didn’t want him to think I was some punk from Long Island, or “Cupcake Land” as it was referred to. I, probably like him, was from Brooklyn, and once you give a guy from Brooklyn even the slightest hint of weakness, you’re pretty much his bitch for the duration, and six months in Academy Land was way too long to be anybody’s bitch. He smirked at me, then dramatically dropped his leather bag to the ground, holding out the palms of his hands as if he were about to be cuffed. I smiled at the hard-core Brooklyn act. He slowly smiled, and then we both laughed. That’s when we heard a piercing whistle cut through the air. At that moment, we were the property of the city of New York.

  Our company instructor, Sergeant Tom O’Lary, did roll call every morning and every afternoon. If you were to see him on the A train, you’d think accountant, software programmer, quite possibly sous-chef at Alain Ducasse, he was so nondescript. Unless you looked in his eyes. There you’d find a completely different story. He had what we called the thousand-mile gaze—Sergeant Tom had seen it all, looked into the abyss and come out on the other side. Leopardlike, his eyes were clocking everyone. Not just the recruits in his class but also every recruit in the atrium and every civilian walking past the muster deck. He seemed to be thinking continuously, working out some problem, neutralizing situations before they might actually occur. Very few of the instructors had that look.

  After Sergeant Tom completed roll call of the thirty recruits in 82-79, we filed into the building one class at a time. Perfect formation; not one recruit looked anywhere other than at the shoulders in front of him. That is, of course, everyone except me and Patty Pirelli. I was looking at him, and he was looking at the perfect ass of a female probationary police officer (PPO). I give him a week before he gets bounced, I thought. Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  I shared my locker with none other than Mister Cool himself, Pirelli, and Billy Devlin. I was a minimalist, with a small towel, travel soap, my shorts, top, and sneakers. Devlin, the same. Pirelli, however, was packed as if he was ready to go on the lam at a minute’s notice. Shampoo, hair conditioner, hair gel, three types of brushes, skin toner, two beach towels, cologne, toothbrush, toothpaste, skin moisturizer, and exfoliating lotion. Exfoliating lotion? When we questioned him about it, his answer was quite succinct, as if he’d put a lot of thought into it.

  “Just because my paycheck says white-man’s welfare, that doesn’t mean I have to look or smell the fuckin’ part. You see some a the third-world gorillas they hired in this class? Last thing I want is some honey going down on me and her getting a taste a Lester Knowles. His fuckin’ balls look like they ain’t seen soap since before electricity, and where that Cro-Magnon’s from, I don’t even think they got that luxury yet.” We laughed. It was all about the puta for Patty and looking and smelling good. We knew Patty had wood for Lester Knowles,
not because Patty was a racist, but because it was a given that he pretty much hated anyone who wasn’t Italian. No, Lester irked Patty because appearance wasn’t at the top of Lester’s list. Lester had enough trouble understanding the English language; personal hygiene, that would have to wait. Patty didn’t let little things like the possibility of getting thrown out of the academy stop him from letting everyone know his distaste for the poor recruit. The drugstore on Twenty-third Street was making a small fortune on all the soap that Pirelli was buying and leaving on Lester’s locker before every gym class started. Lester, naturally, never received the soap, as the nearest recruit would swipe it off the locker before Lester got the message. Every moment, Patty was obsessing about Lester’s bathing habits. “Betcha’ this fuckin’ baboon is sellin’ the soap. I find out the cocksucker is making money off of my good graces, I’m gonna drown the prick in the pool.”

  Billy could not help himself, he only made it worse. “You know, Patty, chlorine is a natural enhancer.”

  “Fuck is a natural enhancer?” Patty wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Billy’s answer was going to be.

  “That means that whatever Knowles has on his body, like skin rashes, some kind of dysentery, athlete’s foot, crotch rot, whatever, the chlorine will enhance what he’s got, and anyone near him in the water will get it too.” Pirelli’s upper lip curled slowly, as if he’d just smelled his first ripe DOA. Slowly he smiled.

  “Then I’ll fuckin’ cap Magilla Gorilla.” Crazy thing was, though he was smiling, something told us he meant it.

  Of course, O’Lary keyed on this special relationship from day one, and he had the two of them sitting next to each other for the duration. “Learn to love your brother PPOs,” he’d say. Not so coincidentally, they were also made gym partners. That meant that for every training exercise we did in the gym, they were paired up. We all had to bite the insides of our lips to keep from laughing as Patty and Lester would be used time and time again to demonstrate the proper way of getting out of headlocks or leg locks around the neck. Patty was always made to be the victim to Lester’s aggressor. Lester’s armpits dripped with perspiration as he wrapped his meaty, hairy arm or leg around Patty’s head. Patty was rendered helpless not because of Lester’s strength, but because the hair under Lester’s armpits was actually braiding together into tiny dreadlocks. The odor was brutal.