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

by Robert Cea

  I drove east on Hoyt the wrong way on the one-way block. I accelerated, ducking one car after another until a truck pulled up the block. He had to have known we were cops, but the two brothas in the front cab were laughing as they continued driving forward, making it impossible for me to cut around them. I slammed my hand on the roof of my ride, Billy lifted the cherry light, turning it on and off quickly to make them move or back up and to reaffirm who we were. The scumbag driver knew we were going after someone, so he wanted to fuck the cop before we could fuck one of the upstanding neighborhood citizens. He smiled and lifted his hands up as if to say, Sorry, boss, didn’t see ya. At that moment, Griffin walked out of the store and saw my car pointing the wrong way. I knew he was going to take off, so I leaped from the car, leaving it in the middle of the street so the truck driver could not go any farther either. I had a subplot devised for this prick when I got back. If I got back.

  Griffin dropped the bag he was carrying. It exploded into glass and foam when it hit the ground as he took off. He was fast. I knew this was not going to be easy. Billy jumped from the car as well. He was as fast as I was, so I knew if Griffin got me, Billy was going to get Griffin, or the other way around. Whatever my differences with Billy—he may have been overly cautious and shaky at times—when push came to shove, he was no coward, not in this situation.

  Both our guns were out. I heard the radio crackle as Billy screamed into it. I was cool with that because I knew for sure that this was the shooter, and in all probability he was carrying the large gun that had done much damage to some poor cat on a dance floor just a few blocks away. We were on the east side of Warren Street, where most of the nonproject buildings stood—old, attached two-story brownstones, which meant that Griffin could not go left and disappear into the maze of walkways, alleys, and buildings that the projects would afford him. No, to get back to the projects he’d have to make a hard right, crossing our paths, and if he was holding on to anything that even remotely resembled a gun, I was going to shoot first and not ask any questions later, much the same way he had.

  He chose the cover of the projects and was now maybe thirty feet ahead. By the time I noticed his hand, it was too late. I saw the muzzle flash first and then heard the explosion and felt a concussed ping fly right next to my ear. It was almost a simultaneous occurrence, but there was enough of a gap in time between the two for me to take notice. I only say this because during a gunfight, you become aware of the oddest things. You’re not thinking of your loved ones at home, or what your demise would do to them. No, your long-term memory is no longer a functioning sense. The only thing you see is what is right there in front of you, what is happening in that instant. You are more aware of life at that moment than you could ever be, or would ever be again. You are so focused and in the moment that the air in front of you no longer becomes a transparent gas, it is a particle-filled mass, you can actually see air. The everyday sounds of the street are magnified and filtered, and at that moment I actually felt more alive than I had ever felt before. Maybe it was because I became so aware of death that these doors within me were unlocked and flung open? In any case, as horrible an experience as a gunfight is, it brings you that much closer to the meaning of life, to the beauty that we all take for granted every day, just walking in the street.

  I squeezed the trigger and dispensed six .38 rounds, probably in less than two seconds. In all my time shooting at the range, I had never noticed that the gun actually explodes from the bullet chamber. I saw the brilliant flashes of light erupt from the side of the gun, even though I never took my eyes off Griffin. The gun jerked up and down furiously, then it jerked down at the ground and there were no more explosions or pretty streams of light. I heard tinny clicking as I continued to fire even though my gun was empty. I ran furiously, holstering the six-shot while simultaneously pulling out my five-shot backup. I let those rounds go even quicker until I heard that same dull metallic click, click, click. I was empty, both guns useless. I kept running though, and trying to gun.

  “Rob, fucking reload. Rob, you’re hit!”

  It was at that moment that the cold reality of the situation invaded my stream of thought. I heard Billy’s gun explode furiously. I looked down and saw my hand bleeding. I checked myself for other wounds, but there were none. I continued on, after Griffin. I did not bother to reload, I don’t know why. I heard sirens in the distance. Billy had given excellent coordinates when he’d called the 10-13, and there must’ve been an RMP close by, because I heard the tires screeching inside the project atrium. An RMP jumped the curb and was moving fast, toward us, and more important, to Griffin. He made the left hoping to get into the first building he could, but he was trapped. He launched his gun toward the street, then got on his knees with his hands up. Tossing the gun was smart. He was clearly a seasoned perp, because he knew we were keyed on capturing him. The gun was secondary at that moment. In these situations, the gun would usually be picked up by some street mope watching the excitement, never to be seen again. This was called “the gun grew legs” in ghetto precincts. Now once we’d get to trial, if there was no gun found at the scene, it would be our word against the perp’s that he in fact was carrying and did fire on us. This, of course, was the cloud the jury of Brooklyn imbeciles would need to acquit said scumbag, allowing him to skate on the attempted murder and assault one of a policeofficer charge. This happens all too often, but the public never hears about these cases. A perfect example of this occurred back in the early eighties. An animal named Larry Davis shot seven dedicated ESU cops, some seriously. He escaped and was later captured. The scumbag defense attorney, William Kunstler, had the jury buying his completely fabricated story that the cops were a part of a major drug ring and were going to kill Davis. The poor young man was protecting himself. Just another reason to despise defense attorneys and what they’re really all about.

  I stopped running. In a zone of extreme focus, all I saw was Griffin kneeling comfortably on the ground waiting for his hands to be cuffed. I felt my feet pounding, one in front of the other, with immense determination. If Griffin was in the same mind-set I was, he would have to be feeling the sidewalk shake and rumble as I neared him, because with every step, that is what I felt. All sound disappeared except the drumming of my heart, my labored breathing, my footsteps, my teeth grinding together, the skin on my thumb and middle finger rubbing tightly together as I gripped the fiveshot. I got within an inch of Griffin and all I saw was my hand raise high above and come down with a tremendous thud on the back of his head. Now, I knew Billy was right next to me, and the uniform cops were in front of Griffin with their guns pointed at him, but all I could do was hit him over and over. I did not take notice of when he fell, or for how long I hit him; I knew it felt good though to give him some of the payback that he absolutely deserved. Some might say that’s not the cop’s job, that it’s up to a judge and jury to decide his punishment, and they’d be 100 percent right, but until you have actually been in the situation I’ve just described, you really can’t understand the fury that explodes from within you at that moment. The knowledge that it could’ve been you on the ground with a bullet hole in your head distorts any normal reasoning. I can quarterback that situation now and say damn, that was fucked, I should’ve just cuffed him and let the Brooklyn jury decide his fate, but I did not, and that is a fact.

  I felt sets of hands wrap around my middle section. I was being pulled off him. I saw my feet kick out, trying to stomp his head. I did connect with his face, but it didn’t matter. He was out cold by that point.

  I was not through. Before the bosses arrived on the scene, I had one more collar to make. Without missing a beat, I stood up and pulled away from the cop’s grip. I walked back out onto Warren Street, made my way to Hoyt, and spotted the prick truck driver who, had it not been for, Eddie Griffin in all probability would have been caught without a struggle, as we would have gotten the jump on him without a chase. He would never have known we were there till the cuffs were on him. I wal
ked up to the driver, grabbed him by his shirt collar, spun him around, and arrested him for obstruction of justice. I can guarantee you two things: He would not play chicky with the police again, and he was definitely no longer taunting us and smiling.

  The attending physician checked my hand at the hospital.

  It was swollen, though there was not a bullet or even a bullet hole in it. One of the shots blew up a bottle, sending shards of glass up into my hand, opening it up.

  After all the interviews from the riding ADA, and the precinct detectives, Billy and I sat quietly on two resin chairs just outside the ER.

  “We shouldn’t have been there, Rob. We were end of tour, our workday was over.” There was no anger or any emotion in his voice other than sadness. He spoke in an even, quiet tone.

  “Billy, we solved a body, took another animal out of the game, fairy squary. That’s what we’re here for, Billy, that’s what our job is.” I truly did believe what I was saying.

  “No, Rob, my job is to go home at the end of my tour. You knew who he was, we had a name, you could have given it to homicide, end of story, but no, you had to ride it out till the very end and then some.”

  “C’mon, Billy, had I given the info to homicide, he would have fallen through the cracks. You know how that shit goes, we been on long enough to know that. We did good and we’ll get the combat cross behind it—”

  He turned to make sure I saw his eyes; he was more determined now, though did not raise his voice. “Fuck the cross. Don’t you understand how close we came?” I didn’t answer him; those words were meaningless to me. As far as I was concerned, it was all part of the game. He studied me for emotion; I gave him nothing. I wasn’t condescending, but I also wasn’t running away from my belief that what had occurred was for the greater good, that the end justified the means. I saw him look away, to watch a woman violently puking onto the dirty linoleum. He turned back to me. “This isn’t working out, Rob. I am going to work with Pirelli. You can hook into Conroy’s team. It’s what you always wanted anyway. I need to slow down a little.” The words hit me like a sledgehammer. I remembered O’Lary from the academy. He was there because he needed to “slow down a little” before he got made. It was becoming clearer to me, but I did not want to face the truth. I was moving inexorably out of control, into the same path as my hero John Conroy, though I was too blinded by ambition to care. I had set unreachable goals; the only way I was to attain them, I mistakenly thought, was to allow this intelligent cop sitting next to me to do exactly what O’Lary had done to Conroy: leave. That was the biggest mistake I ever made.

  10

  The Slow Decline

  The breakup was smoother than I had anticipated. Billy started working with Patty Pirelli, since Pirelli had been invited to work in our detail, out of his plainclothes anticrime unit. Patty was as aggressive as I was, though he knew when to back off. He had a very go-with-the-flow attitude toward work and the job. He got his arrest numbers, made some impressive collars, and chilled in the time in between; that, I was sure, was how Billy wanted it, to make arrests when need be, and to work completely aboveboard. It was going to be interesting to see how the two fared, but I wasn’t going to obsess about it. Cops split up every day on the job for many reasons; mine was no different from a lot of others that occurred.

  My wedding was in two weeks; Mia had planned everything, right up to the limo ride back from our honeymoon in Mexico. I did not have to do a thing, which was fine by me. She’d even gone alone to the closing of the house in Kings Point. All I had to do was show up, which I did with very little enthusiasm. When I was home I wanted to be there, back in the Badlands. I was always at work earlier than I was supposed to be, reading 61s, which were the complaint reports of robberies, shootings, and murders, all the stuff that cops should be keying on, the crimes that I became a cop to solve. My personal life had been completely eclipsed by work and I was happy; my beautiful wife was not, though she put on a hell of a charade, which would come to an end like everything else.

  I was assigned to my new team, with John Conroy; our first weeks together we did quite well, gun collar after gun collar. Each arrest was brought to the ADA with the perp willing to do a video confession. Why? Because John Conroy had every perp in his pocket and they took his advice to the letter. This was a new trick I learned from John—lie to the perps, allowing them to think that confessing on camera would lead to an extremely light sentence, probably time served would be all, meaning that the time they served during their arrest, processing, and arraignment would be enough of a punishment served because of their willingness to come clean. I would never have believed that anyone could fall for this tactic, but John showed me how wrong I was and how the power of persuasion sent many bad guys away for many years. Once they did a video confession, there was nothing that a court-appointed attorney could do except to plead with the judge that the confession was given under duress, which basically meant that we’d placed our guns to the perp’s head to get the confession. After viewing the tape and seeing how relaxed and happy the perps were, they were promptly sentenced to jail terms in upstate New York. We did not know it, but we became the number one archenemies of every defense attorney working within the public defender’s office in New York City. And we were about to find this out.

  The wedding went off without any problems; Mia led me from the photographer to the dance floor, then to greet our guests, then back to the dance floor, then to the dais. She would find me in between each of these necessary wedding tasks sitting with John Conroy, strategizing on who was to get collared upon my return as he schooled me on who was who out there. I thought I knew all the players, but there was a list of guys in the streets who were smart enough to run much of the drug operations from behind fortified doors in and around the projects. These were the money players, and they mostly dealt in coke since the Shah had cornered the heroin trade in the area.

  The wedding ended, and the next morning we flew to the west coast of Mexico for ten days. By the third day, I wanted to get back. I started to realize that I could no longer talk to Mia about the simplest of things. She just did not see things the way I did, and how could she? She wasn’t privy to the darkness, and anyway, I didn’t want her to bear witness to that filth. So I pushed her out of that part of my life, and she slowly started to understand that that was the way it was going to be and accepted it. It was still wonderful to be in her presence and to make love to her, but it was the in-between time that wasn’t the same. We just didn’t have that much to say to each other. She tried, but I just wasn’t that interested in anything other than who was strapped, or wanted. It was that plain and simple.

  My tour for the day was a six p.m. to two in the morning; I arrived at the office at four in the afternoon. I was sitting with the PDU detectives, drinking coffee and studying wanted posters of perps from all over the country. I had a superb memory for faces, and I figured that these projects were a great place to hide if you were wanted by the law; I had already made collars off these very helpful wanted posters, so this time in the office allowed me to focus, to sear these faces into my memory.

  Tommy Mahoney was doing the day tour and was just banging out when I entered the PDU. He tilted his head at me, indicating that I should follow him, never a good sign. We moved to a back stairway. The four-to-twelve tour was downstairs in the muster room doing roll call, so we would not be bothered. Knowing the cops who operated in this place, I assumed that these covert little meetings took place here quite often through the years.

  Mahoney was sweating; he looked like he’d had a shitty tour and was unable to collar up for his cops. He leaned against a wall, lighting up a Macanudo Robusto. He blew out a thick ring of smoke and waved at it, clearing the air between us. I knew this conversation was going to be serious.

  “Got a phone call from a friend a mine who works at IAB.” He held up his hands to deflect my hatred and to defend his choice of friends. “Captains and above get assigned there, he’s good people, t
rust me, that is the last place he wants to be, fuckin’ scumbags…Anyway, he tells me there’s something going on in zone eleven, doesn’t know which precinct, or who is involved, but we are very fuckin’ hot.”

  I didn’t think that I was a target. After all, zone eleven encompassed many square miles of Brooklyn and housed three different precincts, including narcotics divisions and a handful of other organized-crime units. I didn’t think anything of it. I grinned and said, “You know how we do, boss, we ain’t ripping anyone off and we ain’t using, so what could they possibly get from us? We’re number one and two in violent arrests, Sarge. They’d be crazy to try and bust us out. I’m okay; you’re okay.” He slapped me on the shoulder, I went back to my work, and he went home. What I said I actually believed, but the truth was that everything I was involved in was dirty, right down to the video confessions we were getting from the perps that would lead to their ultimate demise. But I was believing my own lies.