old, drab gray-brick buildings whose interiors looked worse than their exteriors. My new command, the 17th Precinct, was nothing like those turn-of-the-century monsters.
The 17th Precinct is located on Fifty-first Street between Third and Lexington avenues on the ground floor of a high-rise office building. There is a large glass window in the front with a glass door at the entrance that allows full view of the interior of the precinct, specifically the desk officer. In the back, out of view, were the cells, about eighteen in total, which temporarily housed prisoners while they waited to be transported to court. The 17th Precinct Detective Squad was located on the second floor, which is typical of the majority of precinct detective squads throughout the city.
My first two weeks as a police trainee in the 17th Precinct were a bit of a fog, especially because I was working in an entirely new and foreign environment. As I said, I was not particularly fond of police officers as a teenager, and so this was a strange situation. However, within three or four weeks, I began to get the idea of policing and to get used to being around police officers, and I was getting more excited by it, even though I was a mere paper pusher or telephone-answering service. I started to like what I was doing and soon began to love it. I was “in the know.” Initially, all the police officers shied away from talking to me, but as a few got to know me, the rest followed. These were incredible guys! After a while they included me as they shared their cop-on-the-street stories.
While the uniformed cops were the regular guys, the fun guys—the really cool guys—were the detectives from the 17th Squad. They dressed in suits, wore pinky rings, and carried themselves with a certain swagger. They were commanded by a gregarious young sergeant who would always let me know which detectives were “catching” (assigned to investigate the cases that came in during the evening) and the restaurants where they could be located in the event of an important case that needed their immediate attention or an incident that they needed to respond to. It was clear to me that these detectives had the world by the balls.
While the detective squad room was on the second floor, the really interesting offices in the building were on the third floor, which housed the office of the Third Division Plainclothes Unit. These plainclothes officers worked for the division inspector (two ranks above captain) and were responsible for the enforcement of the vice and gambling laws as well as assorted other laws, especially those involving the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages. Their job was to enforce those laws, in the words of Mr. Dooley (the fictional character created by the nineteenth-century satirist Finley Peter Dunne), “meant to control the pleasures of the poor.”
As a police trainee I learned pretty fast that plainclothes officers were different from other police officers. They only worked nights, and not every night. So on a Thursday or Friday, they would enter the station house at one o’clock in the morning escorted by three or four ladies of the night who were wearing bracelets, but not the sort you buy in a jewelry store. They would deposit their charges in the holding cells and then proceed to the “124 room” (the clerical office) to type their reports. I watched this routine on a regular basis from my seat behind the telephone switchboard, where I answered calls from citizens who, at that time of night, were mostly inebriated.
After a few months on the switchboard, I was assigned to the 124 room one night because I could type. (I had taken typing at Cardinal Hayes High School.) That night, a couple of plainclothesmen entered the station with their female charges. They secured the arrested women in the holding cells and then came into the 124 room to type their arrest reports. Or so I assumed.
One of the plainclothes detectives came in wearing rings and assorted pieces of other jewelry and an open-collar shirt.
“Hey, kid, I can't type. Can you knock off these reports for me?” He put two dollars next to the typewriter. I dutifully typed the reports (six 5 x 7 sheets of heavy card stock alternating with carbon paper) and other assorted paperwork. When the reports were finished, the plainclothes officers retrieved their paperwork and their girls and headed outside to a waiting prisoner wagon for a trip to night court.
With the two dollars in hand, I walked over to my lieutenant, a silver-haired old Irishman with over thirty years in the department, who was barely awake and seemed bored by the whole arrest routine. When I showed him the two dollars, he responded, “Don't worry about it. They'll make that back in overtime.”
Some weeks later, the same plainclothes officers entered the station house at 5:00 A.M. This time they had in tow three or four guys who wore the same bracelets the ladies of the night had worn. In addition, they brought in box after box of liquor bottles and multiple cases of beer. They informed the lieutenant that they had just hit a “bottle club” on Third Avenue. The lieutenant nodded and handed them a stack of vouchers (property inventory reports) in addition to the normal arrest reports. A plainclothes officer came into the 124 room, where I was once again assigned, with the arrest reports and vouchers and placed five dollars next to the typewriter. He said, “Hey, kid, can you knock these off in a hurry? We gotta get to court before eight.” For a guy making $112 every two weeks ($1.40 per hour), a five-dollar tip for typing someone else's report was astonishing.
The Third Division Plainclothes Unit was probably the most infamous plainclothes unit in the city. It had a long and storied history dating back to before the Depression. In December 1968, at 157 West Fifty-seventh Street, two people (a man and a woman) were shot and killed and a third was seriously injured inside an apartment in this luxury building. It was believed that the victims were involved in some kind of prostitution ring and that the shooter was a member of the NYPD—Bill Phillips, a former Third Division plainclothes detective. Phillips was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the crime.
Also in late 1968, an address book was found inside a telephone booth and then turned over to a newspaper reporter. A front-page story with the names and addresses of bars and restaurants that were listed in the address book and that had given payoff money to the police appeared in the next day's paper—“proof” there had been a “pad.” (Pad was the slang for payoff. Those using police vernacular would refer to this guy or that place being “on the pad.”)
When the story broke, a duty captain was visiting the precinct and engaged the desk lieutenant in conversation regarding the address book. Half jokingly, he said to the lieutenant, “Look here, it says this restaurant paid a hundred dollars, yet the son of a bitch told us he was only getting fifty from that place. The lying bastard was holding out!”
Sitting there at the telephone switchboard and listening to the conversation, I was amused and yet a bit shocked at the casualness of the captain's conversation. But I must admit I was not surprised. The whole idea of pads and payoffs just seemed part of the everyday culture of the NYPD, and even a young, impressionable police trainee was privy to such conversations.
A few years later, the hearings of the Knapp Commission on police corruption were televised. The hearings featured numerous NYPD personalities, including the famous Frank Serpico. The plainclothes officers of the Third Division were also featured prominently in these hearings.
The net effect of the Knapp Commission changed the NYPD forever, and for the good. By and large, the recommendations of the commission were the right ones, including the notion of paying police officers better salaries and encouraging the education of young police officers. However, there was one particular downside to the recommendations. It made sense to recommend the elimination of plainclothes officers and the corruption they bred by establishing a centralized unit for narcotics and vice enforcement called the Organized Crime Control Bureau. But the unintended consequence of this recommendation was that local police officers were discouraged from enforcing narcotics, gambling, and other quality-of-life violations. This led to troubling situations where open-air drug markets flourished because, in order to prevent police corruption, uniformed police officers were strongly discouraged from making narcotics arrests. The irony is that average citizens, particularly those in tough neighborhoods, who observed
