The Savage City

by T. J. English

  DETECTIVE BILL PHILLIPS of the NYPD didn’t like black people much. And he didn’t try to hide it. As he said in his memoir, “I guess you could say I was raised prejudiced. I’m prejudiced against black people.”

  The die had been cast in childhood. Phillips was born on the East Side of Manhattan, but by the time he’d turned six, his family had moved to an apartment at West 161st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. He came from a police family: one of his earliest memories was of a police funeral for his mother’s brother, who had fallen down an airshaft while investigating a robbery.

  I was about three or four years old. That’s one of the first things that really sticks in my mind, hanging out the window and watching everything. There must have been a hundred and fifty policemen there with a big band. They had the funeral from my grandmother’s house because he lived there in a downstairs apartment. He was on what they called the Midtown Squad and the guys on it were chosen because of their appearance. He was a big, tall, good-looking guy. He was thirty-three years old when he got killed. It was a big thing in the neighborhood.

  One of the things Bill Phillips noticed was that being a policeman was like being a member of a private club. Irish American cops came from white neighborhoods; many attended Catholic schools or were at least products of a Catholic environment (Phillips graduated from LaSalle Academy, a Catholic high school in lower Manhattan). Cops stuck together. And one of the common themes at police gatherings was to complain about “the niggers,” how they were destroying everything.

  The word nigger, or some variation thereof, was common among New York cops, as it likely was among white construction workers, firefighters, sanitation workers, even journalists. The criminal justice system—cops, prosecutors, judges, bail bondsmen, and so on—was overwhelmingly white, and the expression of racial bigotry went almost completely unchecked. With cops, however, antiblack attitudes seemed to hold a special distinction.

  Another term that came up among cops in the 1950s and 1960s was mau mau. The term came from the Mau Mau Rebellion, a tribal uprising in which blacks took on British colonial rule in Kenya through a campaign of violence. The Mau Mau Rebellion was reported on in many newspapers and on the TV news, but it was written about with particular zeal in the pages of National Review, a New York–based, conservative magazine begun by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. The magazine, and Buckley himself, had become important cultural touchstones for many members of the NYPD, who considered the national media hopelessly liberal. In Buckley’s publication, the Mau Mau were described as “unspeakably bestial” and their rebellion presented as a kind of cautionary tale—the black masses rising up against the white power structure. The uprising was crushed by colonial forces in 1960, but the term “mau mau” lived on as a derogatory name for blacks who were perceived to advocate violent resistance.

  The Mau Mau were invoked to far different effect by Malcolm X in a speech he gave at a church in Harlem in December 1964. Speaking to representatives of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a gathering that was about one-third white, he referred to the Mau Mau as “the greatest African patriots and freedom fighters that the continent ever knew.” Malcolm suggested that blacks in the United States could learn a lot about the struggle for freedom by studying the violent liberationists in Kenya. “In fact,” he said, “that’s what we need in Mississippi. We need a Mau Mau in Mississippi. In Alabama we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem, in New York City, we need a Mau Mau.”

  Some in the mainstream press interpreted Malcolm’s speech as a provocation. By taking the terminology of the enemy and standing it on its head, he was engaging in a rhetorical counterattack that guaranteed his place in the eyes of some cops—and others on the right—as King Mau Mau.

  As much as violence, the representatives of law and order in New York felt threatened by the prospect of political organization among militant Negroes. In the early 1960s, white residents looked to the police to protect them from underclass encroachment—to stop the tide of history, as it were. As poor blacks and Puerto Ricans flooded into neighborhoods that had once been Jewish, Italian, or Irish, white policemen were expected to man the barricades. It was as if they were answering a silent plea from the white working-class population who lacked the means to flee: Please protect us. Help us hold the block. Keep the blacks away from our children and grandmothers. You are all we have.

  Some cops took this role to heart. The protector role was near and dear to many cops: even as Saint Michael protected the policemen, the policeman would protect the citizens. In the 1950s and early 1960s, this role involved white cops protecting white citizens from marauding Negroes, and some cops took to the role with fury and zeal.

  In My Father’s Gun, Brian McDonald writes that virtually every cop he knew, including his father and his brother, routinely used the word nigger. To Bob Leuci, who joined the force in 1961 and served with TPF units in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Brooklyn, using the word was a way of showing that you were a comfortable member of the club. If you didn’t, the implication was that there was something wrong with you, that you might be sympathetic to the niggers who were running roughshod over once-respectable, working-class white neighborhoods.

  Bill Phillips was certainly aware of these attitudes even before he joined the NYPD. His father, assigned to Harlem for much of his police career, was complaining about the niggers before it was fashionable. Phillips inherited his father’s views, and gibed casually with other cops about the blacks, but he wasn’t assigned to a black neighborhood, nor a unit like TPF that directly butted heads with blacks, so his feelings remained like a low-grade fever, active but not yet fully airborne.

  For Phillips, police work was less about Saint Michael than about making money. In this, too, he was a product of the system. Like racial attitudes, a taste for graft and profiteering was passed along from experienced cops to rookies. Phillips was like a sponge; he listened, watched, and learned from the best. Early on, while assigned to the One-Nine Precinct, he studied the technique of Lieutenant William “Wild Bill” Madden, whom he came to know and appreciate as a “master extortionist.” Few on the force knew how to set up a contract with the audacity and skill of Madden.

  Once, when Phillips and his partner, Kenny Keller, were having trouble squeezing an illegal payoff out of a citizen they pulled over for drunk driving, they took the guy back to the station house, where Madden was in charge. As Phillips later described it, “In a half hour, Madden, who is a complete professional, is on the phone with the guy’s brother.” Madden coerced the drunk driver’s brother to fork over five hundred dollars; no charges were filed. Madden received the money and passed along one hundred each to Phillips and Keller.

  Phillips learned from Madden. He learned that suspects are much more manageable after they’ve been sitting in a cell for a few hours with nothing to read, no one to talk to. They’re a lot easier to deal with after they’ve been reminded how expensive a lawyer is, how much bail bonds cost, how awkward it can be to miss several days of work—especially when there’s such a simple alternative:

  [Madden] had all kinds of tricks up his sleeve. He got one guy on some nonsense, I don’t even remember what, and he tells him it’s going to cost him one thousand dollars. The guys says, All I got is two hundred. Madden takes him right to the bank, the guy takes out a eight-hundred-dollar loan. Madden takes the money and now the guy is paying off the score to the bank every month…. Get enough guys like that, you can open your own bank.

  By the time Phillips was promoted to the detective bureau in 1960, he had developed his own reputation for excellence in the world of scoring. As a detective, he wore a nice suit and tie and circulated around Manhattan mostly unmonitored by supervisors. By late 1964, from upscale gambling operations, after-hours clubs, midtown construction sites, and various other ongoing scores, Phillips was taking in $1,500 to $2,000 a week—under the table—to augment his detective’s pretax paycheck of $200 a week. And he’d learned about
spreading the wealth, making sure that precinct commanders, inspectors, and lieutenants all got a piece of the action. That’s the way it was supposed to be done: if you made money within a certain division, the division had to be paid. Phillips wasn’t out to buck the system; he was out to use it to his advantage.

  His efforts were appreciated. Detective Phillips was known as an expert “conditions man,” a hustler who could examine the conditions in a precinct—construction projects, traffic issues, after-hours businesses, gambling parlors, whorehouses—and find a way to squeeze a few dollars out of the people responsible. Phillips showed talent and initiative for that kind of work, and soon commanders and partners were requesting him. He was establishing himself as a master extortionist just like Kenny Keller, Wild Bill Madden, and all the others he had learned from over the years.

  Being a moneymaker gave a cop high standing among fellow officers. Phillips’s stature gave him a certain swagger, which in turn enhanced his position on the street. A conditions man was someone you could see coming; the seas parted before him when he entered a room. This was the kind of cop that later became known as a Prince of the City.

  Inevitably, such cops developed attitudes that spilled over from the professional into the personal. Bill Phillips had been a married man for nearly ten years. He and his wife, Camille, lived in a modest split-level home in Elmhurst, Queens, far from the hubbub of Manhattan. Camille had her own friends, and as long as Bill fulfilled his role as provider and stayed out of trouble, she was content to let him do his own thing. She was a classic police wife, accepting her husband’s long hours away from home, his absences on holidays, his unwillingness to talk about even the most public aspects of his job. She wouldn’t tolerate him having affairs, but she knew he was on his own, free to run his personal life as he saw fit, and she rarely asked questions.

  Phillips had many women on the side—cocktail waitresses, coat check girls, stewardesses, and other “broads” who were dazzled by a detective’s gold shield and the smooth patter of a professional deceiver. Some of these women were one-night stands; others were more regular, like Olivia, a model he met at Le Club on the East Side, or Dolly, a hat check girl at Ginza, a midtown disco. With his slick black hair, sideburns, and swagger, Phillips was a bona fide player—one who always had cash to throw around.

  At the One-Seven detective squad, Phillips’ partner was Tony Delafranco, an Italian American variant of his Irish American lothario routine. Together, they spent much of their day trying to find women they could compromise into meeting them for drinks at a midtown bar, where they would turn on the charm and impress them with their power and connections. Phillips was usually a few steps ahead of Delafranco in his willingness to push the envelope.

  One night, without much preparation, Phillips told his partner that he’d worked out a scheme for them to spend a luxurious night with a couple of girls. At the internationally famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, Delafranco stood by, aghast, as Phillips explained to the night manager that they were two detectives working undercover on an important case. Phillips showed the manager their detective shields, then explained: “We’re working on a big swindle case, very heavy case, millions of dollars involved, and we have to make a big impression on this criminal. We’re going to meet him at four o’clock in the morning. We told the guy we’re staying at the Waldorf and we’re going to need a suite of rooms.”

  Suitably impressed, the manager called a bell captain over and told him, “Fix these gentlemen up with a suite. Whatever they need.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Delafranco whispered to Phillips. “If the boss finds out about this, he’ll bury us.”

  “Don’t worry about nothing,” said Phillips. “Just sign in.”

  Years later, Phillips remembered the details with glee: “A hundred-and-fifty-dollar suite. Up we go. Two bedrooms, a living room, fireplace, beautiful joint. We go out, get some booze, all kinds of stuff, big platter of chicken, potato salad. Even paid for some of it. We go back up, and when [the girls] get there we’re sitting in our underwear. Say, what the hell is going on here? Party time, girls.”

  A few weeks after the bacchanalia at the Waldorf, Phillips got a call one night from Delafranco asking if he could help him out by driving one of his mistresses home after work. Sure, said Phillips, no problem. He picked up his partner’s girlfriend, took her to a bar, and got her drunk. Then he took her to a hotel, where they had sex, after which he left her passed out in the bed.

  It’s about eight o’clock in the morning. I get on the phone and I call Delafranco. Hey Tony, it’s Bill. I just fucked your girlfriend. He says, You dirty son of a bitch, what’d you do that for? I say, I don’t know; I just wanted to see if I could.

  Being a cop in Fun City had its privileges. Bill Phillips was floating in the deep end of the pool, free from the concerns of lesser men.

  PHILLIPS WAS A bent cop, but being a bent cop wasn’t what got him into trouble. What got him into trouble was stepping on the toes of another cop.

  For years, Phillips had been one of many cops on the take. All around him the department was on the pad, receiving payoffs from arch and petty criminals alike. Taking money wasn’t only tolerated by cops, it was expected. What wasn’t tolerated were minor infractions of police protocol.

  One night, Phillips and Delafranco were in a bar owned by a friend, a retired detective named Pete. In the bar, Phillips noticed two undercover cops from the police commissioner’s Fag Squad, a special unit assigned to entrap and arrest homosexuals. On his way out of the bar, Phillips figured he would warn his friend, the owner and former cop, that there were undercover detectives working his bar. “Hey, Pete,” he said, “be careful, the PC’s here.”

  “Where?”

  Phillips nodded toward the two undercover detectives. Pete said thanks, and that was that—until the two detectives found out they’d been fingered by Phillips. They reported the infraction to their supervisor.

  Phillips was in trouble. He and Delafranco were both called before a disciplinary board. As was customary, they sent a bottle of booze to the chief inspector investigating their case. Phillips even called in his father, Bill Phillips Sr., who still had contacts in the department. Phillips wasn’t all that worried; it seemed like a minor infraction, especially for someone who was engaged in daily violations of police ethics on a grand scale. Still, he made sure he used his contacts, asked people to talk to people to talk to other people to ensure there would be no serious repercussions.

  At a hearing, the chief asked Phillips and Delafranco, “What were you doing in the bar?”

  “Making an inspection,” answered Phillips.

  “Did you make out the UF88 form?”

  “Sure.” To Phillips and Delafranco, it seemed like routine questioning. They explained to the chief that they never gave up anybody—that their friend the bar owner already knew that the two undercover investigators were with the Fag Squad. The hearing lasted ten minutes. Phillips left the room certain that everything was A-okay.

  Three weeks later, he and Delafranco heard the verdict: they were being “flopped” out of the detective bureau and demoted to patrolmen.

  Phillips was stunned. He went to the head of the Detectives Endowment Association, a kind of union for detectives, and pleaded his case. The president of the DEA said, “What have you ever done for me?” To Phillips, this was interesting; he’d spread money around to lots of people in the department, but you couldn’t take care of everybody. No matter how many people got a slice, there was always somebody who didn’t. Phillips had assumed that his years of payoffs were enough to protect him. Now he realized that, for every friend in the department, there was always someone else outside the loop, looking to even the score.

  There was nothing Phillips could do: just like that he was back in uniform, patrolling the streets like a punk kid just out of the academy.

  I was completely demoralized. Oh Jesus…. I was walking around in a fo
g. I had ten years invested in the job, am I going to throw them away? Halfway to a pension. In five years I’m vested. Fuck it, I’ll do nothing and coast for a while and see what happens….

  Phillips was essentially an optimist, always on the lookout for a silver lining. And there it was: he was assigned to the Twenty-fifth Precinct in Harlem, nirvana for a cop on the take.

  Phillips knew, from his father and from NYPD lore, that there was nowhere in the city where dirty money flowed quite like Harlem. All kinds of illegal activities were going on there, and the police were in on all of it: numbers, gambling, after-hours clubs, burglary rings, fences, loan sharks, prostitution, and narcotics. Phillips steered clear of prostitution and drugs; he was old-fashioned that way. The skells in the prostitution business were untrustworthy. And narcotics, well, that was a brave new world. Narcotics was O.C., organized crime. Dabble in narcotics and sooner or later you were going to wind up with dead cops. Phillips didn’t want that on his conscience. And in Harlem you didn’t need prostitution and dope to get rich; there was plenty of money to be made elsewhere.

  Phillips wasn’t thrilled about the idea of spending all that time in Harlem. He didn’t like black people; he was a self-proclaimed bigot. But a man had to weigh his prejudices against his opportunities. And for a hustler like Phillips, Harlem was a land of opportunity, a New Frontier.

  Maybe he could salvage this, Phillips thought. Maybe Harlem would be his salvation.

  It was a forty-minute drive from Phillips’s Elmhurst home to the Twenty-fifth Precinct station house on East 119th Street near Park Avenue. In East Harlem, Phillips drove past dilapidated tenements, debris, and human refuse, a reminder that he was no longer cruising the streets of midtown.