The Tale of Two Jacks: The Gangster and the President

Denis Foley, a forensic anthropologist and historical archeologist, is author of the true crime thriller Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill (NK Burns Pub., 2006). He has a passion for researching the Irish in America whether they be gangsters, martyrs or rebels; most recently “On Tour and Exiled; James Connolly in America 1902-1905” in the 2013 issue of Saothar, the Journal of the Irish Labor History Society. He is working on his debut novel, Murder Most Irish, set in the Bronx and the Inwood Section of Manhattan.

Robert Knightly

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The Gangster Killed by a Politician

Former City of Watervliet Police Chief Francis Landrigan claimed that in order to understand who killed Jack Legs Diamond, aged 34, in a Dove Street rooming house in Albany on December 18, 1931, you had to go to the City of Watervliet next door and look into the affairs of the Hess brothers, Seymour known as ‘Big Mouth’ and Eugene. The brothers were Legs Diamond’s lieutenants in Watervliet, a small industrial city just north of Albany on the Hudson River. It was known as the Barbary Coast in the late Nineteenth Century because of its many bars and lawlessness. Eugene Hess was a clerk in the Troy Law Offices of Dan Pryor, Legs Diamond’s attorney. Seymour Hess, a member of the upstate Poka-Dot gang, guarded Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Kiki Roberts on Legs’s orders during his trial in Troy for kidnapping. Seymour was charged with keeping Kiki, the girlfriend, and Mrs. Alice Diamond, the wife, apart. Legs’s bodyguard, Watervliet Police Sgt. Frederick M. Broderick, and Legs were inseparable during the trial. Yet, Broderick was mysteriously absent the night Diamond died.

Legs routinely frequented Watervliet and the Village of Menands to gamble and drink in the Hess speakeasies. In Menands, he visited a ‘safe house’ and his vehicle fleet garaged at Tillinghast and Broadway. He owned garages in Watervliet as well and would bring booze in from Chestertown to Watervliet in funeral hearses. The Watervliet bootleggers as well as those from the City of Troy across the Hudson from Albany threw in with Diamond for access to his liquor distribution network. Diamond also operated a distillery in the Town of Halfmoon in adjacent Saratoga County. Dan O’Connell, the Democratic Machine Boss in Albany, also supplied the area with beer and liquor. He owned Hedrick’s Brewery. Dan and his brother Solly ran numbers, the baseball pool and prostitution in Albany and its environs. City-slicker Legs Diamond was not welcome in Dan’s City.

Dan O’Connell concentrated on the local baseball pool and bootlegging and politics. He sent his Albany Night Squad detectives, Sgt. William Fitzpatrick and Det. John McElveney, to warn Legs to stay out of Albany. O’Connell owned the Albany Police. Their squad cars accompanied caravans of liquor, transported from Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s warehouses in Montreal, across the St. Lawrence River and through the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation (still today the preferred route for contraband), to O’Connell’s warehouses in Albany. Dan and Joseph Kennedy, the millionaire father of JFK, were business partners. Kennedy had set up shop downtown in the Standard Building at 112 State Street, occupying the penthouse.

Legs Diamond, the young interloper from the streets of Manhattan, owner of the fashionable HotsyTotsy Club in Harlem, exiled himself from NYC to Acra, 130 miles away in the Catskills, after shooting to death two Club patrons. He’d stayed one step ahead of the NYPD. A hijacker of fellow bootleggers, Legs survived assassination attempts by the likes of Dutch Schultz and Vannie Higgins. The Higgins gang shot him five times; as a result, Legs, once known as ‘Gentleman Jack’, became ‘The Clay Pigeon.’ He retreated Upstate to recoup, and by all accounts was prospering.

Legs Diamond was one of the most successful of Prohibition Era gangsters, a shrewd businessman who accumulated millions. He was successor to Arnold Rothstein, whose bodyguard he’d been. Legs followed Rothstein’s example, branching out from booze to the more lucrative heroin and cocaine trade, traveling to London and Brussels on that business. Rothstein, labeled the ‘Gangster of Gangsters’, at his death was the richest of the Organized Crime tycoons and the leading illicit drug importer. Diamond reputedly killed Rothstein for putting the Feds onto his drug business. Darling of the national press and symbol of the Prohibition Era, Diamond mistakenly believed he didn’t have to play the Albany game of sharing the spoils with the Political Machine.

Pulitzer Prize-novelist and Albany newspaperman, William Kennedy, in a 2011 lecture at Freedom Hall in Troy, told a spellbound audience that as a reporter for the Albany Times Union he’d interviewed Dan O’Connell who admitted that he’d ordered his Night Squad detectives to eliminate Diamond. The details of the plot are pure Albany.

Legs had made a fatal error when he picked the rooming house at 67 Dove St., Albany, for his lodgings.

Sixty-seven is adjacent to 65 Dove, owned then by Charles Loftus, Democratic Committeeman for the Sixteenth Ward. Loftus informed Ward Leader Harry Wands of Legs’ presence as well as the times that he came and went. Legs was known to frequent the Kenmore Hotel, a jazz scene hotspot in Downtown Albany, speakeasies like the Parody Club on Hudson Avenue, and Kiki’s apartment on upscale Ten Broeck Street. Arriving home drunk in the early hours of December 18, 1931, he was passed out on the bed when Dets. Fitzpatrick and McElveney entered his room and fired three bullets into his head. A passing newsboy claimed he saw the killers in their fedoras speed away in a red Packard. A female witness reported seeing the detectives as they left the Dove St. address. The Albany Times Union’s presses on Sheridan Avenue were typesetting the story of Diamond’s murder before it had occurred; Police Reporters Joe O’Heaney and Ray O’Connor had been tipped by the Night Squad. As Robert Coleman, former Albany Assistant Police Chief, noted, in pithy understatement, “The Night Squad visited Legs that night.”

Back at Police Headquarters on Eagle Street, Det. Sgt. Fitzpatrick announced that he alone had shot Diamond. Det. McElveney let his superior take the credit. Edward O’Connell, Chairman of the Albany Democratic Party, thought that his younger brother Dan should have just roughed up Legs and escorted him out of town over the Dunn Memorial Bridge to the City of Rensselaer. Edward O’Connell, senior partner in the law firm of O’Connell and Aronowitz, hated bad publicity like the firestorm that erupted around Legs’ murder. But he needn’t have been overly concerned. Albany’s worst-kept secret was never revealed in the press. The Albany County District Attorney John T. Delaney did travel to Boston to interview Kiki Roberts, who’d fled to her mother’s house in New England, but no indictments were forthcoming. The police were reported by Hearst’s Times Union to be of the opinion that New York City gangsters Dutch Schultz or Fats McCarthy or the local Oley brothers killed Legs. A stolen car recovered on the Bethlehem and Albany Line on Route 9 was described as the killers’, abandoned and pointed south towards New York City.

Lawyer Edward O’Connell bridged the two sub-cultures in Albany. His brothers, Solly and Dan, ran the streets and the rackets. The patrician Anglican and Dutch Reformed elite—powerbrokers since the Civil War Reconstruction Period—were entrenched in the professions and business, as represented by Lt. Governor Edwin Corning. His son, Erastus Corning the 2nd, was to become Albany’s longest sitting Mayor, a 42-year-tenure, and Dan O’Connell’s successor as head of the Democratic Machine.

The Hon. Eugene Devine, a former Justice of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, demurred, nostalgically characterizing the Organization as more like a family, a clan, than a machine. Clergy, cops, wardmen, newspapers, big business and mom-and-pops had ties to the ‘family’ and Dan, the paterfamilias, saw to all receiving a piece of the pie. Judges, the Police Chief, the Mayor, all made pilgrimages to Democratic Party Headquarters at 75 State Street, or Dan’s home on Whitehall Road. Two former associates, an Albany Alderman and a Ward leader, remembered that O’Connell kept $250,000 in his safe at home while another insider recalled that Congressman Lee O’Brien carried $10,000 with him in a satchel at the Elks Club, “in case Dan called and money had to be immediately distributed.” Loyalty to the ‘family’ had its rewards, and, conversely, what was seen as disloyal, punished. An oft-repeated story has it that when Dan was told of a Democrat job-holder being seen at a Republican candidate’s fund-raiser, a phone call lost the man his employment with the State.

Legs Diamond didn’t stand a chance in Albany.

© 2015 Denis Foley, PhD, Curator, Lewis Henry Morgan Institute, SUNY-IT, Utica-Rome

(Next: JFK and the Albany Connection)

Me and TR: Time Travelers

Last time, I reviewed Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York by Richard Zacks: a wonderful portrait of the NYPD and my City, 1895 to 1897, during TR’s two-year stint as president of the four-man Police Commission. I was less interested in Roosevelt than in the times, at first. All I knew of TR as the PC is that he left behind his desk at Police Headquarters, behind which all his successors have sat since.

I was astonished to find that the NYPD I joined on May 15, 1967 was one and the same that Roosevelt presided over in 1895: graft-loving, enthralled with the “victimless crimes“ of gambling, prostitution and after-hours saloons while motivated by a benevolent laissez-faire. TR’s crusade against vice that bred graft among his police force had a visible impact on Sin-City during the two years he held the police reins. In fact, his Sunday Closing Crusade, launched on June 23, 1895, had three Sundays later succeeded in shuttering 95% of the City’s roughly 8,000 saloons. (Then, the City was essentially just the Island of Manhattan.) No wonder TR was wildly unpopular with the working classes, especially the Germans, whose only day-off was Sunday. TR hoped to root out the police-run protection racket, starting with the saloons, then moving on to the gambling dens and brothels. But by 1898, with the return to power of Tammany Hall, the City was back on its natural course, TR just an anomalous historical blip on the collective memory. City residents and many in the State Legislature applauded his going. (He fled to Washington D.C., gratefully, to be the newly-elected President William McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy.)

As a rookie NYC Patrolman, I patrolled the streets in two Precincts from mid-1967 to mid-1969. After just three weeks in the Police Academy, we all were hastily “qualified” with the revolver and sent to patrol precincts in anticipation of a “hot summer” (spelled, riots). I landed in the 90th Precinct on Clymer Street and Division Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The old Nine-O was in the heart of the Satmar sect of Hasidism, a throwback to the Eastern European shtetls of the 18th Century. We walked four-block-long, one-block-wide foot posts along Bedford and Lee Avenues, the main commercial and residential corridors in that Jewish neighborhood. We walked solo five nights a week from 6 p.m. till 2 a.m. for the next six months. Our primary mission was to protect the Hasidim from marauders on bicycles from the Marcy Avenue Projects in the south; on Shabbos, the men in their Saturday best would wend their way after sundown to the synagogues for prayer and the bicycle thieves would swoop down to snatch the spodeks (mink fur hats) from their heads and pedal away. When we were not engaged in foiling that particular crime, we were sternly advised by the Nine-O Sergeants: Stay out of sight, stand in a doorway; don’t dare take any police action! (Not unreasonable, considering we’d received but a smidgen of the six-months intensive training normal for recruits at the Police Academy.)

Once, I was assigned to an RMP, when a veteran in his regular patrol sector was out and I became the recorder (passenger) as his partner drove. It was Sunday, we made several stops at bodegas; I waited in the car as directed while he went in. I didn’t see the two or three dollars known as Sabbaths paid by the store owners for being in violation of the Sunday Closing Law and selling beer, nor did my partner offer to share the tribute with me. Not so, next time, one year later, in my new Precinct, the 9th, on East 5th Street, in Manhattan’s East Village. A repeat performance: me the rookie assigned as Recorder with the veteran Sector Car man on a weekday day-tour, patrolling busy East 14th Street. As I monitored the radio, my partner entered a drug store on Broadway just off 14th Street. When he got back in the car, he handed me seven one-dollar bills. I knew what it was but didn’t hold out my hand, until he said, matter-of-factly: “Take it.” No overt threats, no steely gaze, just like that. To refuse would have labelled me suspect, untrustworthy, a loner without allies in a violent place. Later, I learned the singles were the police tax on the hotdog vendors (mostly Russian middle-aged women) working 14th Street, in violation of the City’s Anti-Peddling Law.

Was it wrong? Sure, but there’s ‘wrong’ and then there’s worse. Many cops made extra money where they could; giving the manager of the Fillmore East Rock Hall a ride to the Bank Night Deposit with the receipts, for example. Of course, it got out of hand when a stopped motorist would be offered the option of paying the officer a reduced fine on the spot rather than receive a traffic summons; and when the Police Radio Dispatcher asked for a car to respond to investigate a possible DOA at a residence. Volunteers were prompt and many, sirens screaming; some of my fellow cops would roll the body for cash and valuables, then ransack the apartment.

After two-and-one-half years as a policeman, I wouldn’t have considered myself naïve. Yet, when the New York Times published the revelations of whistle-blowing plainclothesman Frank Serpico in 1970, I reconsidered. A map of the five boroughs of the City was overlaid with a dollar-figure representing the monthly pad paid to each plainclothesman working in each Division to not enforce the laws against gambling, prostitution and after-hours Clubs. In Brooklyn’s 13th and 14th Divisions, the pad averaged from $300 to $500; similarly in Queens’s 15th and 16th, but Manhattan’s 3rd and 5th Divisions were the Gold Coast, with Harlem at the apex: $1,500 each month to those plainclothesmen lucky enough to be assigned to Harlem. Of course, luck had little to do with it; what counted was who your rabbi was within the Department, and your reputation for ‘trustworthiness’.

The Knapp Commission began televised hearings of its Investigation Into Corruption in the New York Police Department on October 18, 1971. That day, I saw a rookie I knew from my Police Academy class, Edward F. Droge, Jr., admit on the witness stand to shaking down gamblers in the 80th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he was assigned. It was implied that the practice was common among the cops of the Eight-O (since defunct). Droge was testifying under a grant of immunity to avoid jail. He had been caught earlier in the year taking a $300 bribe from a drug dealer in the men’s room of the Brooklyn Criminal Courts Building on Schermerhorn Street, downtown. He’d agreed in return for the bribe to testify in Court in such a way that the man would walk; unbeknownst to Droge, it was a Knapp Commission sting, the dealer having been wired by Knapp investigators to record their conversation. On a less personal note, I listened as infamous Plainclothes Officer William Phillips detailed his shakedowns of madams of upscale brothels in Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District. Phillips failed to mention, however, the pimp and the prostitute he was later convicted of murdering over a disputed payoff.

At the same time but off-the-radar, the U.S. Attorney was debriefing NYPD Narcotics Detective Robert Leuci, a member of the Department’s elite Special Investigations Unit, who—his Federal handlers claimed—was acting out of conscience in implicating his police partners and Mafia types in thefts of heroin and money from black and Hispanic drug dealers, whose stash houses were located through the planting of illegal wiretaps. Skeptics, however, believed that Det. Leuci had been caught red-handed by Knapp investigators and had made his deal. Det. Leuci was never charged and spent his remaining years till retirement in the Internal Affairs Bureau since no other NYPD detective would work with him.

In 1970, as well as creating the Knapp Commission, New York Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed a new Police Commissioner, Patrick V. Murphy. Murphy began cleaning house immediately and by 1973, when he left for greener pastures in Washington, D.C. (like Roosevelt), he’d revolutionized the NYPD. The Department was cleaner than the last housecleaning in the aftermath of the Brooklyn gambler Harry Gross scandal of the early 1950s—the big-time plainclothes grafters (called meat-eaters) either in jail or fired, and the signal Murphy response to the so-called Blue Wall of Silence, christened the Field Associates Program. Young cops recruited while in the Police Academy, brainwashed to view old Precinct cops as corrupt and report their suspicions to Internal Affairs. A cautious reticence settled in among the rank-and-file in the founded belief that you couldn’t be sure of whom you were talking to or who was watching. This clean slate of affairs lasted 20 years, more or less—till the advent of the Mollen Commission Hearings in 1993.

Robert Knightly

(Sources: Island of Vice, by Richard Zacks, Random House, 2012; NYPD: A City and Its Police, by James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, Henry Holt, 2000; The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption, George Braziller, 1973; The Patrolman: A Cop’s Story, by Edward F. Droge, Jr., New American Library, 1973.)

A Police Story: Diary of a Dirty Cop

I had worked the four-by-twelve tour the night before. Early afternoon on October 21, 1971, I awake in my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, alone and hung-over. The four-to-midnight tour always extends till 4 a.m., the last four hours spent in Cal’s Bar on East Fifth Street, next door to the 9th Precinct (The Nine, as we say) where I’m assigned as a Patrolman. I punch on the TV for the news and there is my Police Academy classmate, my buddy, Eddie Droge. He’s in the witness stand testifying before the Knapp Commission, which has been investigating corruption in the New York City Police Department for the past year. I’m transfixed. Eddie still has that youthful appearance, he’s in his mid-20’s. The only addition to the baby-face is a pencil-thin mustache above his lip.

Four years earlier, Eddie and I were rookie cops in training at the New York City Police Academy on East 20th Street. The off-whiteish-colored building, built in the early-60’s, looked like it was undercover as a four-story parking garage. We had been sworn in as Probationary Patrolmen on May 15, 1967: me, Eddie and 250 other young men. No women (Their Day had yet to come). Eddie and I were assigned to ‘Company 67-17,’ our class designation, like a Home Room in high school. We were 43 boys from Brooklyn: seven blacks (Nobody was ‘African-American’ in those days), seventeen Italians, six Irish, three Jews, two Poles, two Germans, one Puerto Rican, and five of indeterminate European extraction.

There were four other companies, their complements of recruits also assigned by their Boroughs of residence. We were all young, nobody older than 30 and most younger. I was probably typical, at age 26. Eddie Droge was atypical at age 20. In fact, while we entered the Academy together, he was not sworn in till he reached the minimum age of 21, three days after we’d all taken the oath. Many of us had served in the military before joining the Department. It was 1967, Vietnam in full swing. Becoming a cop pretty much guaranteed you a waiver from the Draft. Eddie had not been in the Service, had a wife and three children, and had come straight from a job with Bell Telephone.

The Police Academy curriculum and intensive drill in the use of the ‘Baton’ (the Nightstick) and the Use of Deadly Force (the Gun) was supposed to last six months. It didn’t. On June 15, after four weeks of training, we all went to field commands throughout the City, having been hastily “qualified” with the Service Revolver—the City anticipated a “hot summer” (riots), a thing it anticipated with regularity in those days.

Eddie Droge and I ended up in the old 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, home to a large enclave of the Satmar sect of the Hasidim. I came to know Eddie as we patrolled in RMPs or walked adjacent foot-posts on Lee and Bedford Avenues, the main commercial streets around which the Hasidic residences clustered. We referred to the Hasids as “Beards” and believed without question the rumor that we had been sent to Williamsburg to save the Beards from their black and Hispanic neighbors: who, at sundown on Shabbos, would swoop down on bicycles and snatch the hats off the heads of Hasid males as they walked to Synagogue. Long fur hats of mink and fox tail—Spodiks—that cost about $1,000.

These were my thoughts as I watched Eddie testifying before the Knapp Commission. I learned later that he had been caught red-handed taking a $300 bribe to deep-six the case of a drug dealer he’d arrested earlier that year on the streets of Crown Heights. Unbeknownst to Eddie that day, in the Men’s Room at the Brooklyn Criminal Courts on Schermerhorn Street, their conversation was being recorded. Knapp investigators had persuaded the dealer to wear a wire. Eddie was allowed to resign from the NYPD without criminal prosecution in return for his depiction of the systemic, from-the-bottom-up corruption within the ranks of the NYPD. By Eddie’s account, his partners in the 80th Precinct spent a lot of their time chasing down gamblers and dealers to shake them down for protection money (known as “putting them on the pad”).

Back then when Eddie and I were rookies, it was not unheard of for street cops to take money. Hell, everybody took money. For most of us, it was a $5 tip for both you and your partner from a City Marshal to keep the peace at the scene of an eviction. A ‘pound’ and free meal for standing a fixed post in front of Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue because the Precinct Captain had a ‘contract’ with the owner. A sawbuck apiece to accompany the manager of the Fillmore East to the bank with the nightly take. It was viewed as a Gentlemen’s Agreement: a gratuity offered and bad manners to refuse. Of course, it did get out of hand; witness Eddie Droge. Eddie did what he had to do to avoid jail. Cops don’t ‘jail’ well.

Happy ending, though. Eddie became a teacher, got his PhD from Harvard, published his autobiography, “Patrolman: A Cop’s Story.” Lives in Massachusetts now.

Maybe I’ll give him a shout, talk about the Good Times.

Everybody's Corrupt

You may not know that Theodore Roosevelt once served as police commissioner for the City of New York. As a student of muckraker Lincoln Steffens and a life-long fan of T.R. I knew a little about it. I knew he had trouble with the police culture of New York, the corrupt Democratic machine, and the way things were generally done in the city. But I didn't know the details, or how badly things went for him, until I read Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York, by Richard Zacks.

It was the Protestant preachers, in particular the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, who first cast the light of general scrutiny on the sin that New York loved: prostitution, drink, and gambling. Parkhurst went out one night with a flash fellow of his acquaintance and took a tour of the low places of the city in order to denounce them from the pulpit. He was so horrified that he went out again the next night, and the night after. He soon roused the respectable people of the city, which is to say, the Republicans, to demand that the city be cleansed of sin. No illegal activity could take place without the complicity of the police. The Lexow commission hearings revealed them to be on the take, a great public scandal.

The aroused citizens voted out the Tammany mayor. The new mayor appointed the high-minded Theodore Roosevelt to the Police Commission to clean up the town. He started by creeping through the bad neighborhoods at night in disguise, getting the dirt on all the negligent cops he saw there. They began to shape up and look sharp. He forced them to raid all the brothels. No one was safe. He decreed that snitches were no longer to be paid for information, since they were criminals themselves and didn't deserve it. No undeserving person was to have a break. Homeless? Get a job. No longer would the homeless be allowed to sleep in the basements of police stations, on bare planks. They must report to the homeless shelter run by Protestant clergymen, where they would be forced to chop wood for three hours for their night's lodging.

Roosevelt closed all the bars on Sundays, because that was the law, handed down by the Republican legislators in Albany. Now in those days Sunday was the working man's only day off, his only solace a drink of beer. New Yorkers began to yearn for the return of Tammany. But Theodore Roosevelt was stiff-necked. Political expediency was never a part of his vocabulary. Right was right, and the law was the law. In vain did thirsty newspaper writers point out that the rich folks could drink at home on Sundays, or in their pricey hotels.

Then the wife of a prominent and powerful citizen was robbed of her jewels.

Without a stable of underworld informers to ferret out the thief, the police were helpless. Now it became apparent that virtue didn't work, not in New York City, perhaps not anywhere. Everyone, high and low, benefitted from the slimy network of corruption and bribery that the city ran on in ordinary times, and they wanted it back again. The rest is history. Roosevelt went on to become President of the United States, but that's a story for another day.

Kate Gallison

Diary of a ‘Corrupt’ Cop: or, It Was the Custom

If you are past sixty and were a Patrolman in the New York City Police Department in the 1960s and 1970s as I was (not to mention the 80s), then the name KNAPP divides your memories, like Moses parting the Red Sea, into the nostalgia-drenched PRE- KNAPP Days and the paranoid POST-KNAPP World.

Sure, I took money; everybody did. It was the custom. But not with both hands like Patrolman William Phillips, nor with the princely touch of Detective Robert Leuci, nor stupidly like my buddy, Patrolman Edward F. Droge, Jr. It was more a Gentlemen’s Agreement: that the “gratuity” (a Knapp word) be offered, and bad manners to refuse. At least, that was the way things were when fellow-Brooklynite Eddie Droge and I joined the Finest on May 15, 1967, and that’s the way things stayed until KNAPP fell upon us like a pack of wolves on a herd of nodding sheep.

I refer to the Knapp Commission Investigation Into Allegations of Police Corruption in the New York City Police Department, anointed by Mayor John V. Lindsay on May 21, 1970, in the wake of a story in the New York Times on April 25, 1970 by muck-raking journalist David Burnham. It revealed the graft being paid by gamblers and whorehouse madams to every swinging plainclothesman in every Division in every Borough of the City. Well, not quite every plainclothesman. If Diogenes had still been abroad with his lantern, his quest for an honest man could have ended with Plainclothes Patrolman Frank Serpico. Serpico was reporter Burnham’s Deep Throat, who took a bullet in the face for his principles, but survived to become an international figure, the subject of a biography by Peter Maas and a movie starring Al Pacino.

The ‘pads’ (a cop word) guaranteed each plainclothesman $500 in an envelope each month if he worked in the Fifteenth Division in Queens, $800 if assigned to the Thirteenth Division in Brooklyn, $800 in the First and Third Divisions in Manhattan, and $1,500 in Harlem (the Dream Posting). It was all news to me; with three years on The Job I was still regarded as a rookie. Plainclothesmen worked out-of-uniform, were not dispatched on calls over the police radio. Worked in teams, focusing on their own pre-determined targets by surveilling them on stakeouts and illegally wiretapping their phones. They answered only to the Plainclothes Sergeant. Even a rookie knew that much. But if you were “in clothes,” you didn’t talk shop with outsiders.

The KNAPP Commission, headed by the Wall Street lawyer Whittman Knapp, invented the word corrupt and tagged the NYPD with it during its first public hearings in October, 1971. I know this because when Eddie Droge and I were appointed Probationary Patrolmen in May, 1967, nobody in the New York Police Department was corrupt. From 1967 till the coming of KNAPP in 1970, I don’t recall ever hearing corrupt or corruption applied to New York City policemen. Not because we didn’t take money or didn’t do what KNAPP exposed that we were doing, but simply because those terms weren’t in general currency then. It took Commissions like KNAPP and MOLLEN (the latter also named after its head, former Judge Milton Mollen, appointed by New York City Mayor David Dinkens in 1992 “to investigate Police Corruption, etc”) – to give corrupt, corruption and corrupt policemen the currency that has long outlived memory of the bodies that coined them.

I know this because New York City cops in 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 (and probably since time immemorial) — with as few exceptions as there are genuine saints in heaven, or wherever they reside — all of us took gratuities (another KNAPP word) of one sort or another. There were cops like me who, at end of tour, might end up with a little extra in his pocket or been fed “on the arm” (no charge) by a restauranteur. And then there were the Phillips, Leucis and Droges who shook down every gambler or drug dealer who crossed their paths. I never knew personally any Phillips or Leuci – whose raison d’etre was to score (a cop word) every gambler, prostitute, pimp, whoever had an illegal dollar in his or her pocket that they could get a hand on. Most cops were like me and, I suppose, Eddie Droge, at least at the beginning.

It’s the late morning or early afternoon of October 21, 1971, and I wake up in my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn alone, hung-over after a four-to-twelve tour the night before, which always extends to 4 a.m., the last four hours of which we spend in Cal’s Bar on East 5th Street adjacent to the 9th Precinct where I’m permanently assigned. I wake up and punch on the TV for the news and weather and there is my Police Academy classmate, my buddy Eddie Droge, in the witness stand testifying before the KNAPP Commission. Eddie has the youthful appearance of a 24-year-old. I can still see the kid-cop who, during breaks in the Police Academy gym, would bend our ears about the Beetles and joys of smoking pot. The only addition to the baby face is a pencil-thin moustache above his lip.
Aside from that, it’s the old Eddie Droge except that what he’s saying is not how I remembered the old Eddie.

He was describing to the KNAPP Commission, and the world, how he and his partner — and, it was implied, all the other cops of Brooklyn’s 80th Precinct, in Bedford-Stuyvesant — would routinely score any gambler they came across while on patrol. In fact, they hunted gamblers like deer in season. Gamblers apparently were always in season in the old Eight-O. And when Eddie and his partner were fortunate enough to snare their prey, they’d take the gambler indoors or strike the bargain in the back of the radio car. The gambler ransomed himself by agreeing to a ‘Monthly Pad’ for Eddie and his partner and the two other radio car crews in that sector — I forget the amounts mentioned, but it was per man per month, depending upon the size of the gambler’s action. I remember thinking if there were a lot of gamblers in the old Eight-O, it would add up.

Eddie was testifying under a promise of immunity because he had arrested a ‘mope’ (cop term) for selling narcotics in the 80 Precinct sometime earlier that year, but had been persuaded to accept $300 in the men’s room at Brooklyn Criminal Court at 120 Schermerhorn Street in lieu of giving truthful testimony at a Suppression Hearing on the arrest he had made. He sold the case for a $300 bribe. What Eddie didn’t know in the men’s room, however, was that he had been shopped by his arrestee, who had been fitted out with an electronic recording device by KNAPP investigators.

Eddie’s deal with the KNAPP Commission was his testimony, painting a picture of the routine, bottom-feeder corruption practiced by the ordinary cops of the Eight-O. And the 80th was meant to stand in for all seventy-five police precincts in the city at the time.

Eddie did what he had to do to avoid jail. He had been on a one-year leave-of-absence from the Department attending college in Los Angeles. I’m sure he intended to never return, to put the Job and the old life behind him. Yet, the Knapp investigators had coerced his return to testify, and the anecdotes he recounted rang true. Afterward, he was allowed to resign and return to California. At the time and still, from the vantage point of forty-plus years, I don’t fault Eddie for what he did. Cops don’t jail well. Once, I googled Edward F. Droge, Jr. He’d published two books in the 1970s about his police days: an autobiography, “A Patrolman’s Story,” and a novel; I’d read both. I didn’t know that he’d gotten a PhD in Education from Harvard, taught there, and over the past twenty-five years been headmaster at various private academies. Eddie had turned it around.

Maybe I’ll give him a shout, talk about the good times.

Robert Knightly