A Police Story: Blackout Riots, 1977

The other day I watched an old movie on NetFlix, ‘The Summer of Sam’. It reminded me of my participation in the only full-scale riot I’ve ever been in. The Blackout Riots of 1977 enveloped all of New York City, lasting 25 hours officially or three straight days and nights, depending on who’s counting. No deaths were admitted to by officialdom as having occurred during the looting and arson, yet the event was second only to the 1863 Draft Riots during the Civil War in the scale of the insurrection and destruction to City neighborhoods.

July 13, 1977, started out very, very hot but had cooled off some by early evening when my girlfriend and I went to the movies. ‘Black Sunday,’ a thriller with Robert Shaw as a Mossad agent tracking Palestinian terrorists in Miami, was playing at the American, a down-at-the-heels movie house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a couple blocks from my apartment. It was the last chance to see the movie that had opened in the City in March; you didn’t go to the American otherwise, where the slightly tilted floor was sticky underfoot. Afterward, a few beers, then home since I’d worked an 8-by-4 Day Tour earlier and needed sleep.

At 9:43 p.m. on July 13, 1977, Con Ed’s power suppliers in New England and Westchester County got knocked out by lightning, causing, in classic domino effect, all the lights in NYC to go out and stay out. The city was in the midst of a heat wave when all the air conditioners failed, the subways ground to a halt, street traffic lights blinked out and the five boroughs were plunged into darkness. At that moment, I was in my apartment enjoying a cold beer. In the next hour, I heard over a hand-sized portable radio that looting had begun and was spreading in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Police Commissioner Michael Codd ordered all off-duty policemen to report for duty at their local precincts (big mistake), whereupon I went to bed.

My local Precinct was the 94th, dubbed by cops a “country club” for its law-abiding blue-collar Polish and Irish residents, in Greenpoint, at the northernmost tip of Brooklyn. It looked across the East River to the East 23rd Street Piers in Manhattan and over a puddle-jump bridge spanning the poisonous Newtown Creek to Long Island City (LIC), Queens. I wasn’t about to report to the 94th where I wasn’t needed; I’d head for the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where I was assigned and always needed. But first, I’d sleep awhile, being of little use to the NYPD in my present condition, exhausted and half-in-the-bag. I could expect my tour of duty to be of long, indefinite duration once it began.

At 3:00 a.m., I arose, dressed, checked the loads in my service weapon and off-duty 38-cal. revolver and started for the Bushwick Precinct, a mere four miles away. A quickie trip normally: cross under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, then straight up Morgan Avenue to pick up Wilson, then a short stretch to the turn-of-the-Century Victorian-style Station House looming over the neighborhood like a Norman Keep, at the intersection of Wilson and DeKalb Avenues. The only illumination came from my car’s headlights as I negotiated the eerily dark and silent streets; no traffic except for some souls sitting in cars parked at the curb with their headlights on.

The Precinct House was ablaze with light like Gatsby’s mansion on Party Nights. It drew me like a Beacon does a lost ship. Inside, Lieutenant Jones presided at the desk having been left over from four-by-twelve Tour as were the sixteen other policemen on duty when the lights went out. No one would be off-duty for the foreseeable future. Cops had responded to the SOS from Commissioner Codd en masse, most, unfortunately, ending up in the outer boundaries of the boroughs, closest to where they lived on Long Island and Upstate counties: all without uniforms or riot gear in neighborhoods where they were not needed. Not so in the Eight-Three; it appeared to my eyes that most, if not all, of the 130 cops assigned to the Precinct were present for duty “with hats and bats” (riot helmets and nightsticks). Everyone was in motion, as if the zoo cages had been flung open. No civilians were present in cuffs; the standing Order that had come down at the inception of the rioting was still in effect: “No arrests. Restore order.” (Please!!)

After a pithy briefing (“The shit has hit the fan, men”), I piled into an RMP with three other cops and we raced up Dekalb the three long blocks to Broadway, epicenter of the revolution.

Next Monday, Part 2: The Scene

© 2015 Robert Knightly

Lambertville Noir

The last time I ventured into the City I grabbed a handrail in the train station that was covered with City germs (or perhaps with traveler germs) and contracted a case of bronchitis that took me all winter to shake off. Nevertheless, a meeting of the New York Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America took place on Wednesday evening that I absolutely could not miss, featuring a presentation on noir films by the charming Scott Adlerberg. It was also an opportunity to hobnob with some beloved friends I hadn't seen in a while. Also a chance to dine at the Salmagundi Club, a wonderful old brownstone mansion on a stretch of Fifth Avenue that used to be very tony a hundred or so years ago. So it was worth the risk of encountering a few pathogens.

As I expected, I had a swell time. The Boeuf Bourguignon was delicious, the apple tart sublime, the friends in good health and cooking happily along with their writing careers. The presentation was entertaining and enlightening. We saw little scenes from Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Touch of Evil, and other swell movies. Directors who came to Hollywood to get away from the Nazis were responsible for much of the bleak pessimism that informs the Noir worldview. Europeans, you know. They have this attitude. And of course Orson Welles.

Thanks to Sheila York, who shepherded me on and off the unfamiliar subway, I happily caught the 10:11 train back to the Hamilton station, only to discover that in Hamilton it was raining.

Now began the truly noir part of the evening. I can barely see to drive on a clear night, let alone when rain is falling. I think it's these glasses. Anyway, I got out of the parking deck and onto Route 295 pretty much by memory. From there I was safe enough, traveling ten miles under the speed limit in the slow lane, until I got off onto 29 and turned north for Lambertville. On 29 the rain was joined by drifting clouds of fog. By then it was after midnight. Hardly anyone was out. Deer are a constant hazard on that road, so I was looking out for them, even though I understood that if they were there I probably couldn't see them. If those puppies got in my way they would be dead meat. Then I came to a sign that said, "Road Flooded." The road wasn't blocked off, so I knew the flooding wouldn't be catastrophic, but I slowed down a little more.

I drove through puddles. For those of you who don't know that stretch of road, there is a stone wall on one side of it and a canal on the other side deep enough to swallow a Toyota with a blind old lady in it. Suddenly another car came around a curve toward me, frantically flashing its lights.

What was I to think? I didn't have my brights on, having turned them down when I saw the lights of the other car coming. I thought, there's a herd of deer on the road, or a tree down, or a wall of water. Or a policeman. But why would I fear a policeman? I was cold sober, I was not a kid, and I was doing thirty-five miles an hour on a forty-five mile an hour road. I slowed down a little more, hypervigilant, and drove on.

I had almost reached the city limits of Lambertville when the lights of another car appeared behind me. I speeded up a bit so as not to be in its way and moved to the right as soon as we reached the four-lane stretch of the highway. The other car exploded with emergency lights. A cop! He was after me! I pulled over as far as I could and fished for my paperwork while he sat in his cop car checking my license plate for wants and warrants.

"Can I see your license and registration?" And so it went. He claimed to have stopped me because he clocked me at twenty-seven miles an hour, which is too slow. "There wasn't anybody behind me," I said. "I thought it would be okay." I refrained from mentioning that I seem to be too blind to drive at night, for fear he would yank my license and force me to walk the rest of the way home.

"Driving too slow is as dangerous as driving too fast," he said. I said, "Thank you, officer." We parted cordially. I knew he was just looking for drunks and stoners.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

I Was the Best...

How do you rate such a thing? Is it by the fallible memory of witnesses? After attending the recent Biannual 83rd Precinct Reunion and observing the old cops (my contemporaries) wander around the K of C hall with halting step, I think maybe not. I’m not too sure they all remembered where they were after awhile. But pictures don’t lie, they say.

In 1975, I assumed my alternate identity (although, truth is, it was assigned me). I was new to the Precinct (Brooklyn’s 83rd in Bushwick), having just been booted out of a soft touch as a writer on ‘Spring 3100’, the Police Department’s Magazine. I’d been swept up in ‘Operation All Out’: with the City on the brink of financial default, about 10,000 cops were being laid off and ‘bodies’ were needed to fill in out there. I was one of the bodies.

The Annual Precinct Christmas Party – for the children of the cops, local firemen, and any neighborhood kids in need of a Christmas Party – was just around the corner. Based on my body type, I was asked by the Precinct Union Delegate to ‘volunteer’ to be Santa Claus (that’s how he politely put it: my “body type” and “volunteer”), since their regular Santa had recently fallen down a flight of stairs “in the line of duty”. Of course. I recognized this was a Command Performance. The PBA delegate assured me that they had just the suit for me, white beard, gloves, and red cap with tinkle bells on the end.

The day of the Party, the Department spared no horses. The Mounted Unit was on hand to give the kids a ride around the track in Bushwick Park, adjacent to the Church Hall, the locale of the event. Also, an ESU (Emergency Service Unit) truck equipped with ‘the Jaws of Life’ that ESU cops use to cut people out of car wrecks, and the ‘Heavy Weapons’ employed at Hostage Scenes; kids could touch. But the piece de resistance was Santa Claus as He was flown in on a Department Bell helicopter, which then hovered over the park as He descended an eight-foot rope ladder to the ground, in Santa gear, bag full of toys tied to His back like a green cloak, amidst a horde of squealing children in numbers to incite envy in the Pied Piper. Santa then hot-footed out of the Park, His followers in tow, across the street to the appropriately named St. Nicholas’s Parish Hall.

I know I did good because I had encores over the next six years (until I was promoted to Sergeant and transferred out). In fact, one Christmas the New York Daily News did a feature on notable Santas around town. They called me “The ‘Copter Santa”. Doesn’t get any better than that.

Robert Knightly

Reunion: Where All the Old Men Pack Heat

There is one place where once every two years I feel at home: the Biannual Reunion of Former Members of the 83rd Precinct, NYPD. Of course, among the several hundred men (and a smattering of women) who packed the Knights of Columbus Hall on the night of September 16, 2011, a Friday, in Valley Stream, Long Island, there were also in attendance current members of the Command –young enough to be my children (if I had any). But being retired cops, we don’t go to see them (we don’t know them); we go to see each other, familiar faces, comrades – we go to see who’s left. And everyone who is, is carrying a concealed weapon.

Well, not quite everyone. Joey ‘G’ doesn’t have his – scruffy, his clothes as disheveled as I remember (could be the same leisure suit); the curly, unkempt blonde hair going to grey as you’d expect of a man in his mid-sixties. In the 1970’s, Joey ‘G’ was our go-to guy: a cop needed a ‘junker’ to get to and from work, see Joey. What else? Drive the Family Car in, park in and around the Precinct? With the neon light flashing; “COP’s CAR! COP’S CAR!” Definitely NOT – not in Bushwick, the car-theft capital of Brooklyn, not to mention the army of home-grown arsonists who were busy reducing streets of wood two-and-three-story homes to vast vacant lots.

Of course, this is not the Joey ‘G’ we remember: the hand you shake is no longer heavily callused with thin lines of grease in the cracked skin of the palms, and the soiled uniform shirt is gone – gone years ago with the Job and the pension, after his arrest. On the bright side, no one knew more about the Chop-Shops of Bushwick than Joey, or handed out more free ‘intel’ on the locations to the big ‘collar men’ in the Precinct. Joey ‘G’ has not aged well. (Naturally, I don’t use last names to shield the identities of the Indicted and Unindicted.)

I mingle, keep moving: no choice in a ballroom full of steely-eyed suspicious men; they might think I was wearing a wire (although the Statute of Limitations expired decades ago). I scan the faces, most of which are as familiar to me as family. I’m looking for Louie ‘R’, one of my former partners who hasn’t showed his face here for several reunions, the last time being shortly after his release from Federal prison. He’d served nine years for being part of a Drug Conspiracy selling heroin in Bushwick and neighboring Bedford-Stuyvesant.

In the late 1970s, Louie and I had been two of the four cops assigned to a special patrol unit called the 83 Pct. Conditions Car. Under the supervision of a gung-ho Patrol Sergeant, Freddie ‘S’, we patrolled in uniform in an ‘unmarked’ brown Plymouth – three normal-sized cops stuffed in the back seat, John ‘M’, our own Super-Cop, the driver and Sgt. Freddie, the Navigator. Our task? To stop all crime, arrest every bad guy the Sector ‘RMP’ (Radio Motor Patrol) cars could not manage because assigned to specified geographic areas, having to respond to an endless stream of assignments in their sectors from the Police Radio Dispatcher.

So we did the drugs, the gangs, the guns, the counterfeiters, chop shop garages, disorderly premises and who or whatever else needed Special Attention, within the two square miles comprising the 83rd Precinct. We executed Search Warrants which, being a lawyer (but not yet admitted to practice, my application having stalled in the Character Committee) I drafted, based on information provided by our stable of a dozen Registered Confidential Informants (‘CIs’). CIs were criminals we’d caught in the act and, with the acquiescence of the Brooklyn District Attorney and the Courts, we allowed to remain at liberty in order to ‘work off their cases’ on the streets. It was all according to Hoyle, strictly on the up-and-up, according to the customs of the day. The CI’s real names were recorded, their pictures taken, and a code name assigned to each man and woman, and they were duly warned that they must not commit any new crimes themselves while spying on their colleagues (theoretically). We rode herd on our CIs, of course, but after awhile it became unnecessary, almost counter-productive. Despite the obvious danger, they really got into their new roles, as if they were cops themselves (and in a sense that was true: they were our Deputized Agents, we told them).

One not-so-young female drug user whom we’d christened ‘BlueEyes’ had missed her calling. She’d developed a repertoire of tics – pacing back and forth, circling, twirling her hands, throwing her head back in loud laughter – to indicate the seller was holding. She’d let us know before she went on the set just what moves she’d be employing that day. Watching BlueEyes do her routines was like watching good opera (Violetta’s boudoir death scene in La Traviata comes to mind). Nothing as unremarkable as scratching her head or removing sunglasses for Ms. BlueEyes. It helped that she already had a reputation in the neighborhood as ‘loco’ before she hooked up with us. And, truth is, we felt affection for BlueEyes and responsible for all our CIs, careful never to put them into a situation we couldn’t control. Likewise, we cops were a tight band of brothers – until Louie retired and afterward did the unthinkable.

Louie was caught by the DEA in possession of a large quantity of heroin. After he’d retired in 1978, he’d worked as a courier for an Hispanic Drug gang. He was Puerto Rican and Bushwick, since the 1970s, was predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican, and Louie was a street-smart ex-cop. When a big-time dealer or his lieutenant is caught (and Louie was so regarded by then), he looks to make a deal: give the cops a bigger fish or a more exotic catch. He chose the latter, implicating our former partner, John ‘Super Cop’ in drug dealing in Bushwick. This was in the late 1980s. I was retired a few years already and John was a Detective Second Grade, the best investigator I’d ever seen, with more eyes and ears in the street than any cop in Brooklyn. His name was on the lips of every junkie and law-abiding citizen in Bushwick, and he was one of them, a Puerto Rican. For all those reasons, the Feds liked him for a dirty cop, and initiated a year-long investigation that ultimately came up with nothing. Yet he’d had to endure the endless questions from the Internal Affairs Bureau within and the DEA without.

So when Louie showed up a few reunions ago, the stage was set for a violent confrontation (which cops who’ve been drinking have been known to do).

TO BE CONTINUED –

Robert Knightly

Talking Murder in Florence

Leighton Gage and Annamaria 

This past weekend, we got a wonderful visit from the gifted mystery novelist and generous crime-writing colleague, Leighton Gage. Leighton is literally an international man of mystery. (Yes, I know, I should find a more original way to say so, but I cannot resist my only opportunity to write this sentence and mean it.) Having lived in several countries and visited many more, Leighton now lives in and writes about Brazil. You can read about him and his fascinating books at www.leightongage.com.

We talked murder at the dinner table, walking in the piazza, and sitting on the terrace. We also covered a lot of South American history and territory of which he has an encyclopedic knowledge.

On Saturday, we witnessed a parade that seemed to be the investiture of a new group of rookies for the Polizia Municipale di Firenze. It included a Renaissance Band in costume, lots of flags, and handsome modern day citizens portraying Dante and Beatrice and Savonarola (presumably at some point in his life between the Bonfire of the Vanities and point where he himself was burned at the stake in the Piazza Della Signoria).

The newly-minted cops looked great in their full dress uniforms. I dare any other municipality to show us a chicer police force.

This got me to thinking about effect all this pomp and circumstance might have on the success of law enforcement. In New York, after all, our young police officers, as far as I know, get what amounts to a High School graduation ceremony with uniforms. If they are lucky, they hear a speech by the mayor and have an opportunity to get their picture taken with their mother. To my knowledge, a guy wearing red and white stockings and carrying sword has never attended.

So what of the crime rate in these parts? A brief Google search produced the following paragraphs from Wikipedia:

“At 0.013 per 1,000 people, Italy has the 47th highest murder rate in the world. This makes the murder rate in Italy less than 1/3 that of the United States. Italy is also safer than Finland, France, Iceland, Australia, Canada and the U.K. and only marginally less safe than Spain, Germany and Holland.

Italy is also a country with lower rates of rape than most other nations of the Western world. It has the 46th highest per-capita rate of rape in the world meaning that Italian women are 7 times safer than American women. Similarly, Italy has a lower per capita rate of rape than most of the advanced Western countries in the European Union.”

Do you think this gift of safety for the Italian people has anything to do with the ghost of Savonarola showing up when the municipal police recruits receive their badges?

Annamaria Alfieri

PS: I scanned the crowd at the parade and saw no trace of Hannibal Lecter. Perhaps he was off somewhere having lunch.

‘LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE!’…

…I would taunt my prisoners in the holding cell in the Detectives Squad Room on the second-floor of all the Brooklyn Precincts I ever worked in. My goal was to break down the perp’s story till he gave up the truth. I confess that I was remarkably unsuccessful at extracting confessions by my methods, unlike my fellow detectives for whom the confession was the sine qua non of the ‘good detective’. As we all must know from having watched ‘Law & Order’ reruns without number, the police are allowed to lie to ‘persons of interest’ (TV, again), but I was not—and never could be—a Det. Bobby Gorn (Law & Order: Criminal Intent).

Not that I didn’t give it the ‘old college try’. When I joined the NYPD in 1967, I was already a college graduate, but not from City U’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which was so police-oriented that it was called by the rank-and file the ‘John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge’. At that time, lying was not a big topic of conversation among the troops in the field—unless, of course, you were caught in it. For example, if you were in pursuit of a drug seller or villain armed with a gun and he threw away those items as he ran—as they were wont to do—post-arrest when testifying on the witness stand, you swear, “While in pursuit and never losing sight of the subject, I saw him discard (gun or drugs) and recovered same from where I saw him drop it.” In the 1970s, this canned testimony became so frequent in the Courts that cases in which it was uttered became known as “dropsy cases”. Judges even began to express their disbelief on the record, but rarely found for the defendant and suppressed the evidence. But taking a hint from the judiciary, cops, always alert to the prevailing winds, changed up. The bad guys stopped discarding the evidence (even when they did), and so were found in possession of the gun which the officer had previously spied in his waist band and recovered from his person after a foot chase. Judge, DA, cops--everybody was happy with the new turn of events. To all the players, except probably the defendant, this was thought as a ‘white lie’, I imagine (having been instructed in Ethics by the Jesuits) that served a good purpose.

You might be asking yourself at this point: How can the police purposely lie under oath on the witness stand? Isn’t that Perjury, a Felony? Yes, of course, but the other players in the so-called Criminal Justice System—the Judge and the District Attorney—don’t object to the practice so long as there is no blowback, no scandal (meaning: Newspaper Headlines). Callous? Immoral? Nah! It’s just the efficient administration of ‘Justice’.

You need to understand that the principal product of the System is Numbers. For the Judge on the bench in the lower trial courts, the goal is to get through his calendar of cases every day: any lag will jam up the assembly line. On average, on any weekday, in the New York City Criminal Courts in each of the five boroughs, a judge will have to move 100 to 150 cases on his calendar during his eight-hour shift. If he fails, the cases pile up for the judge on the next shift. The Administrative Judges higher up write the report cards on their underlings. Advancement to County, Supreme, Appellate Courts depends on your standing among your peers. The prime directive: Don’t Make Waves! Move the Calendar!

The District Attorney, an elected official, the County’s top law-enforcer, is judged by the electorate on his performance, which the DA defines as the number of cases his Office prosecuted—especially, the number of Indictments he has gotten the Grand Jury to vote, and, even more especially, the number of convictions resulting from those Indictments. This is the DA’s Batting Average. And just as in baseball, if the DA’s average slumps, the voters may put him on waivers. Enter Plea-Bargaining: the grease that keeps the machine on track. When a defendant in an Indicted felony case insists on a jury trial--because he’s innocent or just pissed off by the DA’s Pre-Triial ‘Offer’ (that is, the number of years the offender must spend Upstate)--the period from his arrest through Indictment, Pre-Trial Hearings, and Trial to Verdict, averages one year. In the alternative, consider how many cases the DA can ‘dispose of’ (a term of art) by plea in a year? Dispositions devoutly to be wished for.

Consider the poor police at the bottom of the pyramid. 250,000-plus arrests in New York City last year. Cops are evaluated by their superiors based on their ‘productivity’; that is, the number of arrests made and summonses issued, the base line being ‘the quota’ expected from each patrol officer monthly. Or else. The basic police assumption: if you arrest enough law-breakers, the citizenry will be better off. In the past, the Department didn’t keep stats on the results of all those arrests—that is, how many resulted in convictions in court . The Conviction Rate was a litmus test for the quality of those numbers. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

So, to answer the underlying question: Why do cops lie on the witness stand in Court?

First, because they believe the perp is guilty and it’s up to them to get him off the street. The good cops I’ve known believe that, and the system within which they function encourages their belief. The statute making Perjury a crime is as little enforced as that which criminalizes Adultery. I can count the number of cops indicted for Perjury on one hand and have fingers left over. When it happens, it’s a hammer employed by a prosecutor to compel one cop to testify against another. For example, Patrolman Bill Phillips testifying about dirty cops like himself under a grant of immunity before the Knapp Commission Investigation into Corruption in the NYPD, in 1971; Office Charles Schwarz in the Federal prosecution of Officer Justin Volpe for the sodomy of Abner Louima in the bathroom of a Brooklyn Precinct in 1989.

Secondly, to comply wit the unspoken desires of prosecutors, who only want a sure thing, a case guaranteed to end in a conviction. What they DON’T want is the truth in detail of how the arrest came about, what the cop saw, did, heard, if it isn’t according to Hoyle, if it violated a Constitutional right of the defendant, no matter how plainly guilty he is. Cops know this from experience with the assistant DAs who prosecute the cases in the trial courts. They have seen the ambitious ADAs figuratively slap both hands over their ears rather than hear a detail that undermines the way it must legally happen. Next time, the cop will tailor his story so as not to offend those sensitive ears.

Thirdly, because they’re bad cops and lie to cover their sins, knowing that there’s no downside to lying within the System.

(Next time, Bad Cops…)

Robert Knightly