for the beat cop on Friday, or, failing that, free sandwiches, free coffee, free drinks. From the hookers, free blow jobs, for that matter. In exchange, the cop took care of his block—checked the locks at night, moved the corner boys along.
The system worked.
And now Hizzoner is running his own shakedown for campaign funds and he’s come out with an almost comical defense, offering to release a list of big donors that he didn’t do favors for. There’s talk of indictments, and of the 38,000 cops on the Job, about 37,999 have volunteered to show up with the cuffs.
Hizzoner would fire the commish, except it would look like what it is, so he needs an excuse, and any shit the mayor can throw on the Job, he’s going to shovel with both hands.
And the commissioner, he’d be winning his fight against the mayor on points going away, if it weren’t for this scandal ripping through One P. So he needs better news, he needs headlines.
Heroin busts and lower crime rates.
“The mission of the Manhattan North Special Task Force hasn’t changed,” McGivern is saying. “I don’t care what Sykes tells you, you run the zoo any way you need to. I wouldn’t want to be quoted on that, of course.”
When Malone first went to McGivern and proposed a task force that would simultaneously address the guns and the violence, he didn’t get as much resistance as he expected.
Homicide and Narcotics are separate units. Narcotics is its own division, run directly from One Police, and they usually don’t mix. But with almost three-quarters of homicides being drug related, that didn’t make sense, Malone argued. Same with a separate Gangs unit, because most of the drug violence was also gang violence.
Create a single force, he said, to attack them simultaneously.
Narcotics, Homicide, and Gangs screamed like stuck pigs. And it was true that elite units have stink on them in the NYPD.
Mostly because they’ve been prone to corruption and over-the-top violence.
The old Plainclothes Division back in the ’60s and ’70s gave rise to the Knapp Commission, which damn near destroyed the department. Frank Serpico was a naive asshole, Malone thinks—everyone knew you took money in Plainclothes. He went into the division anyway. He knew what he was getting into.
Guy had a Jesus complex.
No wonder that not a single officer in the NYPD donated blood after he was shot. Damn near destroyed the city, too. For twenty years after Knapp, the Job’s priority was fighting corruption instead of crime.
Then it was the SIU—the Special Investigative Unit—given a free hand to operate at will throughout the city. Made some good busts, too, and made a lot of good money, ripping off dealers. They got caught, of course, and things cleaned up for a while.
The next elite unit was SCU—the Street Crimes Unit—whose principal task was to get the guns off the street that the Knapp Commission had allowed to get there in the first place. One hundred and thirty-eight cops, all white, so good at what they did that the Job expanded the unit by a factor of four and did it too fast.
The result was that on the night of February 4, 1999, when four SCU officers were patrolling the South Bronx, the senior man had been with the unit for only two years, the other three for three months. They had no supervisor with them, they didn’t know each other, they didn’t know the neighborhood.
So when Amadou Diallo looked like he was pulling a gun, one of the cops started firing and the others joined in.
“Contagious shooting,” the experts call it.
The infamous forty-one shots.
SCU was disbanded.
The four cops were indicted, all were acquitted. Something the community remembered when Michael Bennett was shot.
But it’s complicated—the fact is that SCU was effective in getting guns off the street, so more black people were probably killed as a result of the unit being disbanded than were shot by cops.
Ten years ago there was the predecessor to the Task Force—NMI, the Northern Manhattan Institute—forty-one detectives working narcotics in Harlem and Washington Heights. One of them ripped over $800,000 from dealers; his partner came in second with $740,000. The feds got them as collateral damage from a money-laundering sting. One of the cops got seven years, the other six. The unit commander got a year and change for taking his cut.
Puts a chill on everyone, seeing cops led out in cuffs.
But it doesn’t stop it.
Seems about every twenty years there’s a corruption scandal and a new commission.
So creating the Task Force was a hard sell.
It took time, influence and lobbying, but the Manhattan North Special Task Force was created.
The mission is simple—take back the streets.
Malone knows the unspoken agenda—we don’t care what you do or how you do it (as long as it doesn’t make the papers), just keep the animals in their cage.
“And what can I do for you, Denny?” McGivern asks now.
“We got a UC named Callahan,” Malone says, “going down the rabbit hole. I’d like to get him pulled out before he hurts himself.”
“Did you go to Sykes?”
“I don’t want to hurt the kid,” Malone says. “He’s a good cop, he’s just been under too long.”
McGivern takes a pen from his jacket pocket and draws a circle on a cocktail napkin.
Then he put two dots inside the circle.
“These two dots, Denny, that’s you and me. Inside the circle. You ask me to do a favor for you, that’s inside the circle. This Callahan …” He makes a dot outside the circle. “That’s him. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Why am I asking a favor for someone outside the circle.”
“This once, Denny,” McGivern says. “But you need to understand that if it comes back on me, I drop it on you.”
“Got it.”
“There’s an opening in Anti-Crime in the Two-Five,” McGivern says. “I’ll call Johnny over there, he owes me a favor, he’ll take your kid.”
“Thank you.”
“We need more heroin arrests,” McGivern says, getting up. “The chief of Narcotics is all over me. Make it snow, Denny. Give us a white Christmas.”
He makes his way through the crowded bar, glad-handing and slapping shoulders on his way out the door.
Malone feels sad all of a sudden.
Maybe it’s the adrenaline dump.
Maybe it’s the Christmas blues.
He gets up and goes over
