The Savage City

by T. J. English

  Phillips listened sympathetically to this European lady’s tale of woe amid the black rabble of the city. “Who was the arresting officer?” he asked. Hollander gave him a name, and that was that. Then they went over to P.J. Clarke’s for a drink. Hollander was impressed with Phillips, especially when he mentioned that he had his pilot’s license and ran a flying school. “You seem to be able to get around pretty well,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Phillips. “I move pretty good.”

  Over the next few weeks, Phillips went to work. Through his contacts at the local precinct, he was introduced to a patrolman named O’Keefe, whose beat included East Fifty-fifth Street. Phillips told O’Keefe: “I got a good operation up there. She’s making a good buck and wants to go on the pad. What’s it going to cost me?”

  O’Keefe thought about it; he didn’t really know. Sometimes, coming up with an equitable number was not easy. The money had to be spread around. How about $500 a month? The price included all the protection that O’Keefe could provide, plus an early-warning system. If the cop heard of any raids being planned for the madam’s premises, he would call and tell her Mister White was coming to town, and at what time.

  “That’s a fair price,” said Phillips. “Let me run it by Xaviera.”

  At a meeting with Hollander, Phillips made his pitch. Also present in Hollander’s small office on East Fifty-fifth Street was a guy named Teddy Ratnoff, who had been introduced to Phillips as Hollander’s “boyfriend.” The term, Phillips gathered, was being used loosely. Hollander likely had many boyfriends, some of whom she dated because they knew how to fuck, some because they paid money for the privilege, and some who offered services in return. Teddy Ratnoff was a guy who had worked in various city agencies, knew people in government, and advertised himself as a kind of Mister Fix It. Ratnoff presented himself as Hollander’s “financial adviser,” but to Phillips he seemed more like “a towel boy in a whore house.” At the age of thirty-three, prematurely bald, paunchy, with oversized glasses and perennially sweaty, Teddy seemed harmless—which is why Phillips was unconcerned when he sat in on their business discussion.

  “Good news,” Phillips told the madam. “I got a cop at the One-Seven who will be your rabbi. All it’s gonna cost you is two hundred for the precinct, five hundred for the division, three hundred for the borough, and a lousy one hundred for me.”

  Hollander winced. “That’s eleven hundred a month.”

  “Hey,” said Phillips, who was hoping to pocket six hundred a month on the deal, “you ask me, it’s a bargain.” To impress her, Phillips gave them names of real cops and commanders in the precinct he was supposedly paying off.

  Ratnoff was perspiring, Phillips noticed…but then Ratnoff was a sweaty guy.

  He was also wearing a wire. Teddy Ratnoff was recording the entire conversation as a part-time operative for the Knapp Commission.

  IN THE NEARLY six months since its inception, the Knapp Commission had toiled mostly in obscurity. From the beginning, it struggled with mandate issues and budgetary constraints. The commission had been created by executive order, which gave it the power to hold public hearings and the right to get subpoena power. Its initial funding came from a federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grant, but that was hardly sufficient or sustainable. Even some members of the commission felt the initiative had been set up to fade out and disappear as soon as possible.

  As chief counsel for the commission, Knapp selected Michael Armstrong, a square-jawed, thirty-one-year-old attorney with a boyish shock of brown hair and an impeccable reputation. From the beginning, Armstrong took the assignment seriously. If the Knapp Commission was supposed to be a paper tiger, nobody told Mike Armstrong. He immediately set up meetings with various leaders in law enforcement, the district attorney’s office, and in the community, to let it be known that the Knapp Commission meant business.

  In Harlem, Armstrong met with the editor of an African American newspaper. When he asked the man if he knew of any cops on the take in the black community, the editor was incredulous. “You gotta be kiddin’, right?”

  “Well,” Armstrong persisted. “In your opinion, who are they? Which cops are on the pad in Harlem?”

  The editor answered, “The dudes that are taking the money are the dudes that are breaking hands.” It took a few days for the meaning of this remark to dawn on Armstrong: the NYPD’s habit of physical abuse went hand in hand with its pattern of financial corruption. The department’s use of excessive force instilled fear everywhere in the community; it was the nonverbal facilitator behind many police corruption rackets.

  In his role as the commission’s chief liaison with the criminal justice community, Armstrong also met with assistant D.A. Joseph Phillips. Along with serving as prosecutor in the still ongoing Panther Twenty-one trial, Joe Phillips helmed the bureau that dealt with police corruption cases in the NYPD’s plainclothes division. He struck Armstrong as highly defensive, in deep denial on the subject.

  “You guys think everybody in the department is corrupt,” the ADA snarled at Armstrong.

  Also present at the meeting was Richard Condon, an NYPD deputy inspector working on corruption cases in conjunction with the D.A.’s office. Condon sat quietly smoking a pipe as ADA Phillips insisted there was no widespread corruption in the NYPD. At one point, Phillips turned to Condon for backup. “Go ahead, Dick, tell him. How many bagmen would you say we’ve got in the whole division?” Phillips was no doubt expecting Condon to lowball Armstrong—to put his estimate somewhere in the single digits, or maybe shrug and say “none to my knowledge.” Instead, Condon—a straight-arrow veteran who would years later become police commissioner—took his pipe from his mouth and said dryly, “Ninety-eight.”

  Armstrong tried not to laugh out loud. Phillips was apoplectic.

  Beyond grappling with the commission’s financial constraints—it would eventually reduce its staff from twelve to four—the agents also had a hard time focusing their investigation. They narrowed police corruption down to three main areas of operation: gambling, prostitution, and narcotics. The commission did uncover one major lead early: in 1969, Robert Leuci, the young New York cop who had found himself in the middle of the July 1964 street riots in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, had come forward to detail corruption within the SIU, which involved proceeds that dwarfed anything ever seen in the history of New York police corruption. Leuci’s revelations—initially unknown to anyone outside the Knapp Commission—were so massive in scope that Armstrong concluded that they were beyond the means of the commission to investigate. Reluctantly, he turned Leuci over to the office of U.S. Attorney Nicholas Scopetta, who initiated an undercover investigation that lasted years and eventually resulted in unprecedented prosecutions of police officers.

  Then there were Serpico and Durk, the cops who’d approached the mayor’s office and then told their stories to the New York Times. The two were willing to cooperate, but Serpico and Durk were well-known clean cops who knew only about corruption that they had turned down. They were useless to the Knapp Commission as undercover operatives.

  What the commission needed was a dirty cop, someone actively engaged in criminal scores that reached throughout the police command structure.

  “Frankly,” remembered Armstrong years later, “we had little reason to be hopeful. We were flat on our asses.”

  And then Teddy Ratnoff walked in the door.

  A self-proclaimed eavesdropping expert, Ratnoff was known to investigators around the city and state. One day, an IRS investigator named Brian Bruh, who was working with the Knapp Commission, mentioned to Ratnoff that they were looking to nail cops on the take in the prostitution business and were looking for a way in. “Any ideas?” Bruh asked Ratnoff.

  Teddy’s eyes lit up. “Have I got a prostitute for you. Xaviera Hollander. High-class European. She’s paying off a cop named Phillips.”

  The Knapp Commission didn’t know who Phillips was, and they couldn’t start asking around without a
rousing suspicions. The only way to proceed was to wire up Teddy Ratnoff and have him ingratiate himself with this cop, who Ratnoff said was tied into corruption at many levels of the NYPD.

  Ratnoff devised his own equipment, a transmitter he strapped to his chest underneath his clothing. The device picked up conversations and transmitted them to a recorder, manned by eavesdropping agents, at a separate location. Ratnoff’s equipment was homemade but state-of-the-art; he was something of a pioneer in the surveillance business, a man without much of a personal life who made his living spying on the lives of others. Still, corroboration was needed. When Ratnoff met Phillips at P.J. Clarke’s to make Hollander’s first payoff, Bruh and a handful of other agents were on-site, mixing in with the clientele as they monitored the transaction.

  “I got the five hundred for you,” Ratnoff said to Phillips as they stood at the bar.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” said Phillips, giving Ratnoff a hard look.

  “You’ll get the rest of it tomorrow,” said Teddy. For a little guy dealing with a swaggering cop, Ratnoff was surprisingly calm. In dealing with Phillips, he said later, “I was never afraid. I was convinced that Phillips was so hungry [for money] that he would never consider I was recording him.”

  Later that day, meeting again at Clarke’s, Phillips was met by Officer O’Keefe. “How are you, kid,” said Phillips, slipping an envelope to the cop. “Five hundred. Everything taken care of?”

  “Fine,” said O’Keefe. “Everything’s fine.”

  In the weeks that followed, the Knapp Commission investigators monitored the daily routine of Bill Phillips. He never suspected he was being followed; such a thing would have been inconceivable to him. If it had been an interdepartmental investigation that was closing in on him, he would have been tipped off about that. The problem for Phillips was that the Knapp Commission was not under the purview of the NYPD.

  There were more deals and more payments on behalf of Madam Hollander, all of them partially facilitated by Ratnoff. By early June, Phillips felt comfortable enough with the Hollander people that he even brought a contact of his own in on one of their schemes.

  Hollander had a friend who had been arrested on charges of possession of a fraudulent check, and she asked Phillips if he could make the charges go away. “Anything’s possible,” said Phillips. He reached out to a criminal defense lawyer he knew named Irwin Germaise. A well-connected, highly successful attorney, Germaise also happened to be crooked. When Phillips explained the situation, the lawyer said he could fix the case for $10,000 if they got it before the right judge.

  Fixing a case with an under-the-table cash payment to a judge was not uncommon at the time in New York; tales of judicial scandal hit the tabloids on a semiregular basis. Ratnoff and the Knapp Commission investigators were excited by the prospect: high-priced madam, crooked cop, crooked judge. That was big city corruption in a nutshell. There was only one problem: when Ratnoff explained the scam to Hollander, she balked at the price. She could make a small portion of the payment, but she didn’t have the whole ten grand.

  “So we scrounged the money together ourselves,” Armstrong remembered. “Some of it came from the State Crime Commission. The rest we all pitched in out of pocket. I borrowed some of it from petty cash at the law firm where I worked. That’s how we came up with ten thousand.”

  Irwin Germaise had a bad feeling about Teddy Ratnoff. He told Phillips, “That fuck. He’s a slimy character and I hate his guts. He’s the worst kind of guy in the world and if it wasn’t for the ten thousand, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  Phillips chuckled. Ratnoff was a weasel, all right, but for some reason he found him endearing.

  After meeting with Teddy a few times, the lawyer got spooked. At one meeting in particular, at Germaise’s penthouse home, he pointed a cane at Ratnoff and told him the cane was actually a gun that fired .45-caliber bullets. “One word from me and you’re dead,” Germaise told Ratnoff.

  A few days later, Germaise expressed his concerns to Phillips. “Bill, I think I talked too much to that guy. I did a little drinking and did a big mistake. I’ve been thinking about it now all weekend and I’ve decided the guy’s wired.”

  “Ah, no,” said Phillips. “He’s not wired. He’s a shithead, a schmuck. He’s nothing.”

  “No, I think he’s wired.”

  “He can’t be wired. He’s not that smart. He’s like a flunky in the whorehouse, that’s all.”

  “Well, he’s coming by the office at four tomorrow. I want you here when he gets here. We’ll find out if he’s wired.”

  The next day, Ratnoff showed up at Germaise’s office, wearing a wire. The office was in a high-rise building on Fifth Avenue, not far from Hollander’s bordello. Brian Bruh and another Knapp investigator were in the back of a van outside, listening in.

  Phillips and Germaise were waiting when a secretary ushered Ratnoff in. Phillips stood up. “Ted, come in. How you doing, kid?” He smiled and ran a hand over Ratnoff’s chest. The smile disappeared. He grabbed Ratnoff by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off the ground.

  “What’s the matter?” said Ratnoff, choking. “What’s the matter?”

  “Irwin, the man is loaded,” Phillips said.

  Ratnoff tried to laugh it off. “With what? What am I loaded with? Money?”

  Phillips reached inside Ratnoff’s jacket and ripped his shirt open, exposing wire, adhesive tape, and a small electronic transmitter. The recorder picked up the following conversation:

  Phillips: What is that?

  Ratnoff: It’s a paging system.

  Phillips: Yeah, take it off.

  Ratnoff: It’s a paging system, Billy…. Pick up the phone, I’ll show you. It’s a paging system.

  Phillips: Take it off.

  Ratnoff: It’s a paging system.

  Germaise: What do you page?

  Phillips: How come you’re so shaken now?

  Germaise: What do you page?

  Ratnoff: I’ll show you. Pick up the phone and I’ll page, right?

  Phillips: I’ll tell you what, if this is what I think it is, you know what you are?

  When they heard what was happening, Brian Bruh and the other Knapp investigator jumped from their vehicle, ran into the building, took an elevator to the eighth floor, and burst into the office. “I could see Ratnoff sitting, like, on a little stool,” Bruh remembered. “His clothes were ripped off, and Phillips was standing over him. You could see Germaise had been standing over him, too. He said, ‘What are you doing, sir?’ or words to that effect. I said I was from the Knapp Commission, and I wanted that man [Ratnoff] out of here.”

  Later, in his memoir, Phillips remembered the moment when his life turned upside down:

  I thought, shit, he’s wired, my life is gone, ended, obliterated by this one individual. It’s finished, dead. My reaction was, if I could just take this guy, and not kill him, but beat the shit out of him. I don’t know. Maybe throw him out the window.

  What the Knapp investigators did next was risky. Instead of arresting Phillips immediately, they let him stew on the situation for a few days. They were certain he wouldn’t flee: for such a hotshot, a man about town, his world was small. He lay on the sofa at his house in Queens for a few days and considered his options.

  Three days after the incident with Ratnoff, Phillips was having a drink at P.J. Clarke’s when Bruh and two other investigators appeared and asked him to “come downtown.” They brought him to 51 Chambers Street, Room 1130—the headquarters of the Knapp Commission.

  Phillips was introduced to Mike Armstrong. “We thought we were going to have to turn the screws,” remembered Armstrong. “But he had already made up his mind.”

  Armstrong still felt he needed to drive home to Phillips the gravity of what would be required of him—that he would have to come clean on everything he knew. “I started giving him the standard bit, you know. ‘You’d better realize that if you come across, you’ve got to come across all the w
ay; we don’t want to hear anything from you that isn’t true because you think we’d like to hear it.’ All that crap. ‘Some time in the future there is going to be a cross-examination in criminal cases on this, and you’re going to have to be subjected to it, and if you want a deal for yourself, you’d better be telling the truth right now.’ Well, I’m in the routine and he stopped me. He said, ‘Hey, Mister Armstrong, I’ve been sitting where you’re sitting, and I’ve had people sitting where I’m sitting. I know what I got to do.’”

  Afterward, the Knapp investigators took Phillips to dinner at the Old Homestead, a venerable steakhouse in the city’s Meatpacking District. There, Phillips regaled the investigators with stories from his career—some sad, some hilarious, all of them fascinating. Bill Phillips, second-generation NYPD, crooked cop, engaging raconteur, was about to become the most infamous snitch in the history of American policing.

  CORRUPT INSTITUTIONS ARE traditionally brought down from the inside. Dishonesty feeds on itself. In the NYPD, certain ways of doing business had gone unexamined for generations; the common belief was that the Blue Wall of Silence was like the code of omerta, a bonding agent more powerful than the sun. Shine a light in the darkest recesses of the NYPD and the glare from a policeman’s badge just might blind you.

  Mike Armstrong knew the score: no cop had ever been compelled to wear a wire and take down fellow cops. But he wasn’t willing to defer to the power of the Blue Wall. Armstrong had another theory: “Maybe it’s because nobody ever tried.”

  The Black Panther Party was another organization that demanded internal discipline and loyalty. Contrary to how the Panthers had been portrayed by some in law enforcement and the media, the organization was not created to kill cops. And yet there were Panthers who shot at cops and planned acts of violence against the police, who fantasized about taking their revenge against law enforcement. The gun was at the center of the Panther mystique, and violence—whether theoretical or practical—was an accepted mode of discourse.