Paul Bacon

by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All

  He looked at the ceiling for a moment, considering his response, then told me flat out: “I winked at the CO.”

  This was not such a weird thing, since the commanding officer of the academy was a woman. Still, Moran was too self-conscious to do something that stupid by accident. There could be only one explanation.

  “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?” I said. “You were sick of being in charge, and you just said to hell with it.”

  He nodded again.

  I asked him, “But how’d you know when the assignments had been made?”

  “I know people,” he said with a shrug.

  CHAPTER 12

  I DID ENJOY ONE PRIVILEGE as second-string sergeant: I got to choose where we held our company’s pre-graduation party. I picked the Red Light Bistro at Fourteenth Street and Ninth Avenue, the intersection of three popular nightspots—the West Village, Chelsea, and the Meatpacking District. The dimly lit bar and grill was furnished with mismatched antique couches and chaise longues. Poster-size wine and beer ads from the 1960s hung on the walls, all of them in French. The usual crowd was mixed—local hipsters, drunks, and drag queens. I wouldn’t normally have brought a bunch of cops here, but it was less than a block from my apartment.

  Around eight o’clock, Bill Peters was the first person to arrive. We ordered cheeseburgers and beers, then sat together on a couch in front of a large window facing Ninth Avenue. Outside, young barhoppers in heavy winter clothing walked by in small, chatty groups. At one point, a transvestite in a short leather skirt stopped on the sidewalk and looked in our direction. She primped her hair and puckered her lips.

  Bill shouted at her from the other side of the glass, “Not interested!”

  “I think she’s just checking herself out in the window,” I said.

  Bill waved her away, complaining, “She’s blocking my view of the real females.”

  The drag queen squinted for a moment, then gave Bill the finger before walking off.

  Bill looked at me and said, “You live in a pretty gay neighborhood. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  Our waitress arrived with food and drinks, and I reached for my wallet.

  “Put it away,” said Bill, handing her a fifty-dollar bill.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s generous.”

  “Don’t get used to it,” he warned me, then said to our waitress, “I want change.”

  Bill and I were heading for the same precinct, so I raised my beer glass and said, “Shall we drink to the Three-two?”

  Bill picked up his cheeseburger instead. “I’m trying to eat here. Don’t remind me I’m spending the next twenty years in Harlem with you.”

  Other company members started showing up an hour later. Men I’d seen only in frumpy recruit uniforms were wearing faded jeans, open-collared shirts, and earrings. Women sported gobs of makeup, elaborate hairdos, and low-cut dresses. Six months of bad fashion were being exorcised in one night.

  Clarabel arrived at around eleven thirty and asked our hulking classmate Bobby Franks to help her off with her coat. A captive audience of men waiting to order drinks at the bar looked on. I could practically hear the tongues wagging as Franks slid off Clarabel’s ankle-length down jacket, revealing her skimpy red cocktail dress and the dangerous curves it hugged like a Maserati.

  Bill and I were standing across the room in view of Clarabel’s unfurling.

  “Quite a show,” said Bill. “Too bad she’s early.”

  “Three and a half hours isn’t fashionably late enough?” I said.

  “That was all for Moran’s benefit. And he’s not here yet.”

  “No, you got it wrong,” I told Bill. “They already did the deed. She’s over him now.”

  “Over Moran?” said Bill. “Are you sure there’s not something you want to tell me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t seem to know much about women.”

  My parents arrived in New York the next day—on different flights. My mother and father hadn’t seen each other since I’d graduated from college twelve years earlier. Their reunion took place in my apartment and started off reasonably well. With their ill-fated marriage long behind them, they at least acted like old friends.

  My father, Paul Sr., looked like a retired lumberjack now. He stood six foot two with graying temples, broad shoulders, and forearms as big as my thighs. My dad had given me his full name but none of his impressive genes. All we had in common physically was a receding hairline. Bodywise, I was the male version of my petite mother, Wells. I was taller and more muscular than she was, but not much.

  Previously, my mother had expressed doubts about me becoming a cop. She didn’t want me doing such a dangerous job, but when she took one look at my fully laden gun belt, she reached for it with both hands. “Can I wear it?” she said greedily, after she’d already lifted it up off my dresser.

  She put on my belt and my brand-new patrolman’s cap. She studied herself in my mirror, making stern and uncompromising faces. Then she reached for my holstered gun.

  “Whoa, Mom,” I said. “It’s loaded.”

  “Oops,” my mom said, pulling her hand away.

  My father, sitting on the futon, laughed at her.

  “Where are your handcuffs?” my mom asked while opening different pouches on the belt. When she found the cuffs, she shook them in my dad’s face and said, “All right, bub, on your feet. You’re under arrest.”

  My father looked incredulous, but only for a second. He seemed to realize this was an important bonding moment, a show of long-forgotten trust. He stood up with a wicked smile, looming nine inches above my mom, then put out his hands to be bound.

  My mother looked at me and asked, “Do I have to read him his rights?”

  “That only happens on TV,” I said. “In real life, detectives read Miranda back at the precinct.”

  “There’s nothing more to say? That’s not very dramatic.”

  As my mom reached out to shackle my dad, I put my hand between them. I couldn’t resist; he’d grounded me for a month when I was a teenager, and it was time for my revenge. I told my mom, “Actually, you’re supposed to say, ‘Turn around and put your hands behind your back.’ ”

  My mother instructed my father to assume the position. He slowly turned his back to her while giving me a worried look. I waved down his concern, hiding my joy.

  When my mom had slipped the cuffs over both his wrists, she asked me to take a picture.

  “Oh, okay,” I said, quickly grabbing my digital camera and lining up my parents in the preview screen before the Kodak moment turned into a brawl.

  “You do have the key, don’t you?” my dad said to me just as I clicked the shutter.

  I lowered the camera and said, “Shit, the key.”

  “Don’t joke around,” my dad said. “And watch your language.”

  I stepped around my mother and knelt behind her to open the handcuff pouch on the back of my belt. I pulled up the flap and tried to find the key.

  “What’s taking so long?” said my dad.

  “Nothing. The key’s just very small.”

  “How small can it be?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” I said, and shoved my finger behind a tiny leather flap inside the pouch. “Whew. Here it is,” I said, pulling out the key, the size of a microchip. “See what I mean?”

  While I was freeing my father, he said to my mother, “If I’d had handcuffs when we were married, you might not have been a runaway housewife.”

  “Fat chance,” said my mom.

  The next morning, I donned my full dress uniform, a three-quarter-length blue blouse with two rows of gold buttons down the front. Then I reached into my closet for my gun locker. I tapped in my secret code without looking, the locker beeped in response, and the front flap sprang open. Inside were my gun, which was nearly new, and my patrolman’s shield, which was decidedly used.

  My shield—a nickel-plated New York State seal embossed
with the number 1627—had once belonged to another cop. How many people had worn the shield before me was a mystery. So were the circumstances leading up to this moment, when I first pinned their numbers to my chest. The previous officer 1627 might have turned in the shield willingly or unwillingly. The last place he or she’d worn it might have been the back of an ambulance, or a morgue. One thing was certain: My shield had seen some kind of action. I didn’t see any bullet holes, but if I held it sideways and turned it, I could tell it had been bent out of and back into shape more than once. Wondering what kind of forces the shield had withstood in the past, I tried to bend it with my hands, unsuccessfully.

  After fixing the emblem to my blouse, I pulled my pistol out of the locker and slid it into an off-duty holster under my arm, where it would remain out of sight. Ideally, I wouldn’t be enforcing any laws on graduation day, so I probably wouldn’t need my gun. But the shield and the gun were a matched set; I’d been told to never carry one without the other.

  Four hours later, I was standing on a cement ramp leading into Madison Square Garden. A crooked line of dark-blue uniforms stretched from the street behind me, up the ramp, and around a wide bend. We were 2,108 recruits in all—with no supervision. Most of the things we’d been prohibited from doing at the academy were now being done with reckless abandon. Cops-to-be were talking on their cell phones and playing cards, smoking cigarettes and passing around flasks. Everywhere I looked, someone had a hat on backward, or handcuffs spinning on the end of a pen.

  We’d already been marched in and out of the main facility three times. With each rehearsal, we’d gotten further from achieving our goal, which was to fill in every seat on the Garden floor before the end of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” The official NYPD graduation song ran a little over three minutes, which, on our final try, was about five minutes too short.

  The long periods after the song ended had been awkward and tense. Walking past empty bleachers, all I’d heard was the aimless patter of unsynchronized footsteps. That, and the ranting of our graduation choreographer, Officer Skinhead. The man who’d tormented me at orientation in Brooklyn six months ago was back. Like before, he stood on a stage and shouted absurdities. Only now, he spoke through a sound system designed to overpower eighteen thousand screaming hockey fans. He seemed to think he could speed us up by micromanaging our every step and turn. “Not so wide! Pivot!” I heard him tell someone. “Shave off that corner, recruit! This ain’t no barbershop!”

  Our fourth run-through was the real deal. When the familiar Ba-ba bada-da started to play, I heard the crowd screaming like Ol’ Blue Eyes himself was waiting in the wings. Our line started moving up the ramp with newfound vigor. I reached the Garden floor halfway through the song and stared around in wonder. There wasn’t an empty seat in the place. It was 360 degrees of pure joy: flashbulbs, waving hands, and people jumping up and down in the aisles. When the music ended, no one in the audience seemed to care. They kept cheering as the white-gloved recruits marched to their seats, faces glowing with pride and relief. I tried to hold back the first few tears that welled up in my eyes. The next fifty or sixty, I didn’t bother.

  PART TWO

  COLLAR FEVER

  CHAPTER 13

  THE DAY AFTER GRADUATION, I was sitting on an uptown C train with a garment bag draped across my legs. A duffel bag sat between my feet, which I could not stop tapping on the floor. No longer a recruit, I could commute to work in my civilian clothes, but I was feeling more self-conscious than ever. Above my head, an electronic station map charted my path into the unknown. As the numbers went higher—Seventy-second Street, Eighty-sixth Street, Ninety-sixth Street—so did my pulse. At 110th Street, all the other white people got off the train, and I swallowed hard. I was in Harlem now. I looked around at the remaining passengers, all of them African-Americans, and forced a smile. An elder ly woman sitting on the other side of the car smiled back. Of course the old people are nice, I told myself.

  I got off the subway at 135th Street and walked briskly to the Three-two station house. I watched the passing cars closely for signs of an ambush. A silver sedan with tinted windows drove by me, then slowed down for no apparent reason. Its shiny rims kept spinning even as the wheels came to a stop. Custom-made rims were common where I’d grown up in California, but in New York City they were gangster accessories. I imagined a machine gun pointed at me on the other side of the dark glass. Was I being paranoid? Maybe. Would it kill me to pick up the pace? No. I tried to jog away from the blingmobile. With my hands full of gear, the best I could do was gallop. I turned down a side street while looking over my shoulder and bumped into a man about my age who was coming the other way.

  We both fell to the sidewalk, and I apologized profusely as I helped him back to his feet. He didn’t say a word as he brushed himself off, so I gathered up my bags and walked away. Then, he yelled, “Yo, officer!” How presumptuous, I thought. Just because I’m white, that means I’m a cop? I turned around and saw him waving a small, shiny object over his head. “You dropped your badge!” he shouted.

  Two blocks from the precinct, I started to realize that Harlem wasn’t so scary, at least not this part. It didn’t look all that different from my neighborhood. There were buildings and people and cars, and everybody was rushing around, looking too busy to make any trouble. I settled into the familiar groove and started paying attention to important details. I saw a pizza joint, a grocery store, and a restaurant that made soul food. I didn’t know what soul food was, but it sounded satisfying. I decided I’d try some—later. I wanted to get to the precinct and claim a locker before the other rookies showed up.

  I found myself nearly alone when I entered the Three-two men’s locker room. In the many rows of tall gray lockers, I saw only one other cop. A mustachioed man in his early forties, he looked like a veteran on the job. He sat on a bench wearing only uniform pants, applying a generous coat of underarm deodorant with a blank look on his face. He seemed lost in thought, so I walked past his row without introducing myself.

  I ambled up and down the corridors just looking at lockers. Covered in bumper stickers and pictures and trinkets, they were a trove of information about my new colleagues, much of it conflicting. One officer’s locker was decorated with a dancing line of Grateful Dead bears and an American flag sticker with the words, 9-11: NEVER FORGET. Another person’s locker featured a U.S. Marine Corps emblem next to a string of ASPCA stickers with pictures of a puppy, a kitten, and a bunny. Below both of these was a sticker that said, FUCK AUTHORITY. I saw a Monty Python film festival advertisement beside a flier for an all-female hip-hop group that said, WORD ON THE STREET IS THE NEW ALLURE ALBUM IS BANGIN’ . . . NO QUESTION. The last locker in the row had only one sticker, which read, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT. so shut up!

  I eventually made my way back to Deodorant Man, who was now in full uniform, combing his mustache in front of a mirror in his locker. He caught my eye in the mirror and said, “You just come out?”

  “Can you tell?” I joked.

  “Good. A sense of humor. You’ll need it,” he said, turning around and reaching out his hand. “Congratulations, by the way. My name’s Perry.”

  “Do you work the four-to-twelve tour?” I asked. Maybe he’d be my partner someday.

  He laughed as though I’d asked him if he was the attorney general. “I wish,” he said. “No, I’ve been a bad boy, so I’m on the midnights now. I’m just here to finish up a call-uh.”

  “A what?” I said.

  “A call-uh,” he repeated, pulling at his shirt collar and sticking out his tongue like he was being hauled away by the neck. “An arrest! Jesus, what are they teaching at the academy these days?”

  “I guess it’s pretty PC now,” I said. Maybe I’d missed out on something.

  “I guess,” he said.

  I noticed a splash of sunlight on the wall behind him, so I carried my stuff over for a look. At the end of the row, three available lockers faced a small plate-g
lass window overlooking the street. This was prime real estate. The area was bright, with plenty of room to stretch out, so I wouldn’t have people tripping over me while I got dressed. I looked at my watch and saw it was almost time for roll call. My new rookie coworkers would be showing up in droves any minute, so I decided my search was over. I slapped a combination lock on the door handle and started to unpack.

  “You don’t want one of those,” Officer Perry told me.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “The window,” he said. “You wanna get shot? Don’t forget where you are now.”

  * * *

  Our first roll call would be historic. Thirty rookies were coming into the precinct at one time, more than twice the usual number, and five newly made bosses were filling leadership slots that had never existed before. The walls of the Three-two muster room were covered in colorful charts and maps, meeting books were piled on tables, and a box of fresh summonses stood by the door.

  Stepping inside, I was initially drawn to the maps and walked right past the summonses. A lieutenant waiting at the door stopped me with a stack of parking tickets in each of his hands. “Yeah, this is it,” he said, giving me twenty blank summonses. “Welcome to the Three-two.”

  I slid them into my jacket pocket and walked into the room, searching for familiar faces in the crowd. Bill Peters was supposed to be in my squad, but I didn’t see him.

  A few minutes later, a female sergeant walked inside and closed the door behind her. “Attention at roll call!” she shouted.

  I watched my coworkers falling into formation around me. Fresh out of training, they snapped into five evenly spaced ranks with impressive speed. Our quiet efficiency seemed to please the sergeant. She smiled as she walked up to the podium and started to say, “Not bad,” before the door started to open again with a slow, queasy creak.