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

by Robert Cea

  “What, did you miss your ride, Officer Cea?”

  I checked my watch and lied, “My girl’s running a little late, sir, so I was going to get some coffee.”

  He just nodded. “All right, see ya tomorrow afternoon.” He gave me a quick salute and stepped off the curb again. I needed to stop him. After my experience that day, there was too much to talk about.

  “Sir, do you mind if I ask you a couple of things? Won’t take up more than a minute?”

  He looked at me and then looked up to the sky. “Gonna rain, man.” He again glanced at his watch, then glanced at me, sizing up the situation. “There’s a place called Wanda Has Wings on Second Avenue and Thirty-second. I’m going to meet some people there. I’m walking. You can walk me halfway if you want. I’d invite ya’, but you know the deal about fraternization with superiors and local gin mills, yes?”

  As I kept pace with him, I felt inferior to this man. Maybe it was the war stories or the image that we’d all created in our heads about him, but I just did not feel that I was quite yet able to lead this man into battle. Though I certainly would have followed him. However, the objective of every instructor at the academy was to mold young recruits into leaders, not followers. After all, the public needed to be led, didn’t it?

  “What’s on your mind, Officer Cea?”

  “I just want you to know, sir, that that little mishap at the morgue wasn’t the norm, I just—” He laughed and shook his head.

  “C’mon, I don’t know any instructor who hasn’t had that happen to him at least once a trip to that house of horrors. It’s a normal reaction. It’s what was supposed to happen. You don’t think that every one of your fellow PPOs wanted to puke? If they didn’t, there would be something wrong with them. You need to know what you’re going to see out there, and that wasn’t nearly the tip of it, brother. Garbage in, garbage out, you know what that means, yes?”

  “We’re going to see a lot of nasty stuff out there, sir. Don’t let it get to us?”

  “That’s right, Cea. Don’t even think for a millisecond that you can take anything about this job home with you. I tell you this now because it is the most important thing that you should take out of here. If you carry what you saw tonight home with you, I guarantee you, you won’t last a year on the job, simple as that. I’ve seen the sharpest of guys who were as hard as nails, they truly were meant to be on this job, real heroic animals in the street, you know what happened to them? They burned out that quick.” He snapped his fingers. “Drinking, drug addiction, suicide.”

  The word “suicide” lingered. He paused. “Blew their brains out over some other poor schmuck’s misery. Far as I’m concerned, no mope with bad wiring is going to accelerate what is too short a gift anyhow, anyway; you understand?”

  This was hitting home in a big way. And it was clear the guy actually cared. I was emboldened, feeling that I had begun to search out a weakness and confront it. It was all going to be cool, really cool. But there was more that was on my mind.

  We kept walking. Sergeant Tom never took his hand out of his pocket, and his eyes tracked his surroundings: the people walking across the street, the man exiting the cab two blocks away, the homeless guy sleeping in front of the church. I realized I was looking at the same people, that the training was working.

  “Sir, that day that your partner, Conroy, came in?” He slowed; his gait was a little more guarded. “You mentioned something that I can’t quite put my finger on; you said that if we don’t fill out the UF250, we could be accused of being duplicitous on the job. What does duplicitous on the job mean?”

  He was quick to answer. “It means that if you don’t fill the paper out it shows that you don’t want the job to know that you jumped the said individual; now why wouldn’t you want to let the job know this? You could have other ulterior motives.”

  This was getting good. “Like?”

  “Like you were looking to rip the cat off.”

  “Rip the cat off.” I felt a rush of embarrassment, of absolute fear. Not once had the phrase “rip off” been used to any of the recruits, where we might actually be the perps. I guess the instructors and the powers that be did not want any of us to know that that dark part of street life, of street patrol, actually did exist. I didn’t even want to hear those words, “rip off.” Too fucking scary.

  “Whether you were dirty or you weren’t is not the job’s concern. The fact that you didn’t do what you were trained to do for six months wasn’t carried out and they’re certainly going to think the worst. That, my friend, is not the position you want to find yourself in, this I guarantee.”

  We got to the front of Wanda Has Wings. It was booming, a smoky place with loud music, men and woman huddled around the bar, dartboards and pinball machines. I did not see Sergeant Tom fitting in this place, at all. I was a little disappointed. Was he as mortal as the rest of us? He looked right into my eyes and I was sure not to look away. I wanted him to know that what he was giving me was bible. It might have well been written in the patrol guide, because it was sacred. “Listen to me, Rob; this is the greatest job in the world, by far. We are here for a reason”—he finally took his hand out of his pocket; he slowly waved it around the city almost gallantly as he continued—“to make this place habitable. That’s it in a nutshell. In order to do this, we as cops have to remain on top, and if you don’t take any of the nonsense home with you, you will remain on top. Remember, there are more than just the perps out there gunning for us, there are the scumbag defense attorneys. Staying on top means don’t let them beat you in court, do all the paper, be so fucking correct with your story, and never, not once, change that story about how you encountered him and how you locked him up. Because the second you deviate from your truth, that’s the day you lose credibility.” He looked inside, then grinned. “This little after-school lesson stays here, right, Cea?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  We shook hands and he disappeared into Wanda Has Wings. I stood there for a while, my head swimming. There was some traffic buildup in the street as cars were trying to make their way to the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel, not two hundred feet from where I was standing. Deviate from your truth? Be so fucking correct with your story? More questions, though I had the distinct feeling that these questions were not going to be answered by anyone but me. I felt like I was finally ready to start learning the true meaning of what it was to be a New York City police officer, on the inside.

  I walked back slowly, trying to figure out the deeper meaning of what he’d said. A blast of thunder shook the avenue; car alarms started to scream. Then the rain came down. I barely noticed. I made it to Twenty-first Street, under the FDR Drive, and got to my car, which was the only one there. I’d never seen the area so abandoned, so scarily empty. I immediately rose up when I noticed movement behind one of the stanchions. I dropped my leather bag next to my car and slowly approached. Although I was unarmed, there was something really sexy about being there alone. I now heard someone behind the large green cement pole. My heart was pounding; did he want to rip me off? I was three feet from the pole when a drunken homeless man fell over, out from behind it. My tongue tasted like copper as my heart almost shot out of my chest. The homeless guy fell backward when he saw me. He backpeddled, then ran. My breathing slowed down, though I did not move; the feeling was terrifying, yet so fucking exhilarating. What just happened?

  I started up the Plymouth and pulled out; I made a quick right onto First Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street. I was traveling in the opposite direction from the one I should have been going in to get home. Something was pulling me that way. I banged a left at Thirty-seventh Street, then another left onto Second Avenue. The rain was hammering the streets. I found myself parked across from Wanda’s. I trained my field of vision onto the bar… and there he was, Sergeant Tom O’Lary. He was sitting at a booth next to the window, alone. There was no one there he was trading war stories with, no beautiful woman amazed by his vast knowledge about the life, no gho
stwriter bleeding Tom’s memoirs onto the page. It was just him, alone and seemingly so sad. It started to make some kind of sense to me. After all, he too had just witnessed the removal of a man’s cranium. A body, a slab of meat with its brain scraped free of its container, then plopped onto a metal scale, weighed, bagged, and discarded with the rest of the city’s garbage. Garbage in, garbage out, Sarge. He’d also just unloaded some deep truths to a young man he was hoping would not burn out and fade away. Who would understand him? After all, those happy people in the bar were discussing the stock market or their pay raises, their weekend in the Hamptons or the curtains they’d just purchased at the mall. How could they possibly understand Tom’s language; that language that only a cop understands; the language of life and death? Was Sergeant Tom sitting there trying to be normal, trying to feel like he fit in, like he was part of the other world? Or was he trying to forget? Is this what you meant when you said garbage out, Tom?

  2

  “On the Outside”

  It was one of those days that said God loves this city. New York’s first real snowfall ended at around six in the morning and the snowplows and shovels had not yet blitzed the neighborhood, so everything was stark white. My shield was gleaming like cut Waterford crystal on my dress-blue coat. The gold double-breasted buttons that ran the length of the coat, up to my chin, made me feel like a soldier coming back from battle, victorious. My black leather shoes were so shiny I could actually make out the reflection of the fuses underneath my dashboard. The scent of my leather gun belt, of the clean, oiled, blue metal .38 revolver, the weight of it on my hip, it all moved me into an altered state of consciousness. I was through the training; now it was time to use it.

  From this day forward, we were not supposed to salute anyone other than superior officers; we were equal to the vast majority of the cops on the NYPD. The uniform cops in the street who would jokingly haze us as we walked to the academy in our recruit uniforms were now on the same level as us. Now it was just a matter of fitting in, but where?

  The graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden went by quickly, though long enough to keep my attention from waning and to reflect on everything that I’d learned in the past six months. Mayor Koch did his best to entertain his police force and their families without trying to sound too condescending. All of the big brass on the job, from the chief of patrol to the police commissioner, gave dignified speeches. They made us feel we should be proud to have made it this far, and our altruistic efforts could only make this city a better place to live. My thoughts exactly.

  Afterward Sergeant Tom gave us our assignments. He handed me a slip of paper, winked at me, and said quietly, in a thick Jamaican accent, “Fort Jah, fighting for the homeland.”

  Fort Jah was the unofficial name of the 6-7 precint, located in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush section. Every precinct is given a name by the rank and file, prefixed by Fort and then whatever the climate is there. For instance, the 6-6 was christened Fort Surrender. The story behind it: Back in the early eighties, the Hasidic community was outraged over the arrest of a very popular rabbi who was allegedly caught in a very compromising position with an alleged prostitute. So they collectively formed an angry mob of fur hats and long black wool coats and stormed the precinct, basically holding it hostage until the lucky cleric was released. Of course, the politically savvy Mayor Koch had the 6-6 precinct commander give in and release the prisoner before the NYPD sustained any more embarrassment. The 6-7 received its moniker because of its heavy Jamaican population. “Jah” in Jamaican means God. Now back in the day, the eighties, this area was number one in action in all of the city. It led in arrests, gun collars; ranked annually in the top ten in homicides, rapes, and robberies. You name it, this place had it, and I was heading right for it, like a hollow point ready to do some damage. This was also the place where Sergeant Tom and John Conroy had made their bones in the late seventies and early eighties, where most of their war stories had played out. I was thrilled to be going into such a busy house. My assignment was patrol in the 6-7 precinct at 0001 hours—midnight, in two days. Patty Pirelli was assigned to another nasty place on the other end of Brooklyn, the 7-6 precinct, in Red Hook. To my happy surprise, not only would Billy Devlin be joining me in Fort Jah, but he’d also be my partner.

  Fort Jah was a Brooklyn I’d never seen before. It was affectionately known as the “Badlands,” with burnt-out storefronts, jerk chicken, rotty houses, graffitied metal gates, barrel fires, and crackheads who moved through the dark streets like zombies. I had the very real feeling that I was not going to see daylight for a long, long time.

  The precinct was apparently always short of manpower. If you were sent here and you had some pull, you’d get out ASAP, transferring to a cushier house that wasn’t so miserable and dangerous. This was all part of the reason Billy and I were paired up. Generally, two rookies are never put in a car together as soon as they hit the streets, but as I quickly learned, nothing is normal in places like the Badlands. When they are short cops, the bosses on the desk will do whatever it takes, even turning out one-car units—one officer per car, another big no-no that was a given in the ghetto.

  On our first tour of duty, we cruised the streets of East Flatbush touching the outskirts of East New York. Billy’s body language and voice told me he was uneasy. He held on to his radio like it was another weapon.

  “This is unbelievable.” I was awed by my surroundings. I drove the RMP like a pilot ready to drop bombs on the thirty-third parallel. For some reason, I was like a kid in a candy store. I wanted to be a part of it, smell it, breathe it, be it.

  “No shit!” Billy was not nearly as psyched as I was.

  “I mean, Billy, can you believe this?” I laughed, the nervous energy getting the best of me.

  “Hey, fuck this, in two years we take the sergeant’s exam. After that the lieutenant’s test, and by the time we’re thirty, we can make captain.” He was hoping to salvage for the future something out of where he was right at this instant. I was not having any of it, wanting to get the most out of where we were at this very instant, right here, right now.

  “Then what, Billy, mayor?”

  “You’re fuck-A right, pal. You think I want to stay in this shithole, do you?”

  “C’mon, Billy, you can’t tell me that this isn’t everything you thought it was going to be. This is friggin’ amazing.”

  Before he could answer, the radio barked; central dispatch cut through the eerie silence the ghetto evenings are famous for: “Seven Adam, K.”

  “G’head, central.” Seven-Adam was John Conroy’s sector, or area of patrol, this evening. I’d seen him at roll call, standing in the back with some of the old-timers while the new guys were front and center. We didn’t take our eyes from the sergeant during roll call, but I was aware that he was in the back. I’d wanted to talk to him since his classroom visit to the academy some three months before, so this was the moment I’d been waiting for.

  Central gave Conroy the job. “Adam, ten-ten, foul odor. 4211 Rutland Road, apartment 5J.”

  Conroy’s voice came back over the radio. “We’ll check and advise, K.”

  “Adam. That’s Conroy, Billy,” I said.

  “So?” Billy could care less. I began to think that radio runs and straight eight out of the box were what he’d be all about.*

  “So c’mon. Let’s go swing by.” I was trying to be very nonchalant about it.

  “What, are you nuts? ‘Foul odor’—hello, it’s probably a DOA, man. They don’t need backup, Rob.”

  “I just want to say what’s up, Billy. We met the guy in the academy. Let’s tell him O’Lary sends his regards.” He frowned, trying to decide what to do. “C’mon, Billy, the radio is dead. We get a job, we can pick it right up. He’s in the next friggin’ sector, for Christ sakes. Let’s go!”

  I didn’t wait for his answer as I made a quick U-turn. I drove to the location at an easy pace since I wanted it to look as coincidental as possible. After all, thi
s guy could smell shit underwater, and the last thing I wanted to do was start raising flags on day one.

  I pulled the RMP down Ninety-second Street, one of those tight, one-way Brooklyn streets with rows of two-story railroad apartment houses on both sides. As we drove down the street, we could barely make out the addresses. The block seemed really dark; then it dawned on me—half the streetlights were blown out. Without any lights, it is harder to see what does not want to be seen. I also noticed movement on the stoops, though I could not get a clear picture of anyone. For all I knew, someone could have had an AK-47 trained at my head. Had they taken a shot at me, I would not have noticed anything other than muzzle flash and subsequently a killer headache, the kind you don’t wake up from.

  Down the street, we saw Conroy’s RMP pull up with no lights, from the wrong end, to a prewar building. He doubleparked, then got out of the car with another big uniform. They slowly made their way to the front. Conroy was casual in his demeanor, something I’d come to understand was part of his genius: Lull the bad guys into a state of calmness, then carpet-bomb the fuck out of them, into submission.

  I could see Billy did not regard this man in the same way I did. I think he wanted to learn at his own pace, with zero input from anyone other than our immediate bosses. I also think that Billy saw John as an A-type renegade, a loose cannon. Me, I knew Conroy had seen it all, done it all. I could learn an enormous amount from this salty veteran.

  We pulled in front of their RMP and got out. They both noticed us but kept on talking to a half-naked wire-thin Jamaican. Though it was barely thirty degrees out, the man only wore a pair of worn pajama pants and no top. He was sucking on what appeared to be a big, fat joint. Conroy and his partner stared at us blankly as we walked up; there was a very uncomfortable moment of silence. Billy just dropped his head in embarrassment. I smiled, then stuck out my hand. Conroy did not do the same.