number of officers who were deployed on the streets of New York on a daily basis. Clearly, there were fewer police officers in 1978 than there had been before the layoffs, when five thousand officers were eliminated and another few thousand were lost as a result of attrition. Koch was committed to increasing the staffing levels at the NYPD, but he wanted some basic questions answered. How many officers were there? How many were available on a daily basis? And what, if any, would be the minimum staffing level necessary to police the city on a twenty-four-hour basis? With the assistance of academics and consultants, a new “scientific” staffing model was developed.
Narcotics Division
Once the blackout was over and the city had returned to some kind of normalcy, I was able to go back to my new job as a narcotics investigator. It was a completely different job than anything I had done before. I was required to use my brains to outsmart others who depended on their brains to make them money. It was a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. But it also opened me up to a new facet of policing—the whole idea of bringing the job home with you at night. In other words, thinking about my job while off duty. In uniform in the 44th Precinct, you worked eight hours in a police car, handled all of your assignments, maybe made an arrest—but at twelve o’clock when your shift was over, you went home, forgot everything, and then started anew the next day. No connecting dots from one day to the next. Even when I was an anticrime officer in civilian clothes, there was no notion of “investigating” a case. We would show up at noon, patrol the streets, sometimes make an arrest, then be finished by 8:00 P.M. and home watching Monday Night Football by 9:00.
In the Narcotics Division it was different. I was investigating individuals and sometimes organizations. I was trying to make sense and create an organizational structure around loosely knit drug crews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. I was investigating the Puerto Rican drug organizations on the Lower East Side, along with their Italian partners in Williamsburg and on Moore Street in Tribeca. One narcotics intelligence analyst informed me that there were more high-ranking mafioso figures in one building on Moore Street than there were in entire neighborhoods in the city. The stuff was fascinating, and it kept us thinking and rethinking and discussing and plotting on how we were going to gain entry into these organizations and bring them down.
While George Kennedy and I spent a great deal of time in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, we still had territorial responsibility in the Bronx. My team covered what was known as the Eighth Division, which included the 41st, 43rd, and 45th precincts. Technically, our team was responsible for the low-level and medium-narcotics trafficking in that entire area. In reality, we addressed only those complaints that came to our attention. A citizen might complain about open-air drug dealing on Story Avenue in the 43rd Precinct. We would respond, make a twenty-minute observation, and sometimes, if possible, make a street-level buy followed by an arrest (a buy and bust). This would prove that the Narcotics Division had taken action. If you thought seriously about it, however, that was a poor response and did little to alleviate the drug dealing that continued once we drove off the block. This would be an important lesson for me later on in the early days of the Bratton administration, when we began to look at the effectiveness of the Narcotics Division and its contribution to crime fighting, especially in terms of homicides and drug-related shootings.
However, there were some valuable lessons to learn from my narcotics days working on the drug gangs. One was that, the more you thought outside of the box, the better your chances were of succeeding. Especially in the case of “no-knock” search warrants of apartments and houses. The question always was: How do we get inside before the bad guy flushes the drugs down the toilet? For example, in one apartment unit within a six-story walk-up in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, the drug dealer's apartment overlooked the courtyard and the main entrance. In addition, he had lookouts on every corner ready to spot the narcs as they approached in their unmarked cars.
It is interesting the drug dealers did not fear a marked police car with uniformed officers inside. They knew that uniformed officers were discouraged, and in some cases forbidden, from making narcotics arrests. What we realized was that a uniformed officer in a police car caused no suspicion. If a uniformed car went by the apartment building, the drug dealers were not worried. Uniformed cops were not involved in “inside” narcotics enforcement.
After obtaining a search warrant, signed by a judge, George Kennedy devised a plan to take down that drug dealer in Morrisania as follows: drugs were to be dropped off at the apartment at 1:00 P.M. We would hit that apartment at 2:00 P.M. At 10:00 A.M. we had had our undercover officer, a scrawny Puerto Rican policeman with long hair and a beard, go into the building carrying a battering ram wrapped up in green garbage bags. When he went into the building, he gave the appearance of being a junkie burglar bringing home the stolen loot. The undercover officer took the battering ram to the roof and left it there in the green garbage bags off to the side. Kennedy and I, dressed in full uniform, borrowed a police car from the local precinct. We also secured a city ambulance and driver to add to the show. The ambulance pulled up in front of the location, and we arrived a minute later in our marked car and entered the apartment building as if we were handling a routine sick case. We walked into the building, observed but not suspected by the drug dealer. Kennedy and I went to the roof, retrieved the battering ram, walked down two flights of stairs, and announced our presence while simultaneously knocking down the door. After two bangs, we got inside the apartment and observed the dealer scurrying around like a rat on crack. We got him and his two kilos of coke before he had a chance to flush them down the toilet.
But there was a more challenging case a month later with our undercover officer Victor Cipullo, a good-looking Italian kid with balls of steel. Victor had been an undercover for five years and could buy from the lowest junkie on the streets as well as the high-end doctors at prestigious hospitals. There was no one from whom Victor couldn't buy. Along the way Victor had proved his mettle on more than one occasion when he had had to kill the drug dealers trying to rip him off. “Victor pisses ice water,” his lieutenant once noted.
The case in point was a sale of pure heroin from a house in the Soundview section of the Bronx. The house literally stood by itself on an abandoned street of mostly overgrown lots. Anybody coming onto the block was noticed immediately. Victor made the initial buy and three subsequent buys, called “B buy,” “C buy,” and “D buy.” With each purchase, the weight and purity of the heroin increased. While ordering the fifth buy, he asked for a kilo of heroin, having proven his credibility in making the previous four buys. And so the deal was consummated. The plan was to have Victor go into the house and get a sample of the kilo, which he would take with him to have it tested for purity. If the purity was high, he would return within the hour with $80,000.
When Victor left, the plan was for us to hit the house and seize the drugs. However, upon leaving, he transmitted to us, via his hidden microphone, a very important message: “My job is done. But you guys are fucked. There are three guys in there, all armed, and they're going to fucking kill yas! One of them is wanted for shooting a cop!” We met Victor a few blocks away, and he confirmed his transmission. He was having some fun at our expense, which was not uncommon for him. Like most of the undercovers, he always argued that he had more balls than the backup teams, that his job was the really dangerous job and that the backup team merely had to go in and make the arrest. The question quickly became how would we get into the house, get the bad guys, and recover the drugs, all without getting shot in the process.
Our lieutenant, Martin O’Boyle, viewed by many to be the most knowledgeable person in the whole of the Narcotics Division in New York City, proved his mettle that day by being not only a great leader but also an even better thinker. Within five minutes he had devised a tactical plan. We would use one large van and one unmarked police car. The large van, which looked like a UPS delivery van, held eight narcotics detectives. They were all secreted in the back and were armed with rocks that they had picked up at a nearby construction site. The second car held George Kennedy and me, along with Lieutenant O’Boyle. I had the battering ram to take the door down; Kennedy and Lieutenant O’Boyle carried shotguns.
