A Police Story: Bushwick Burning

In May, 1975, I became a Patrolman again when I was evicted from Police Headquarters in Manhattan, transferred to the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The occasion was Operation All Out, aptly named for the filling of empty police cars in Precincts all over the City as 5,000 patrolmen were laid off by a City facing bankruptcy. Rigged budgets, the flight or collapse of neighborhood-based manufacturing, and reluctance of Mayors to say no to the pay and benefit demands of Civil Service unions were some reasons. Then one day in February, 1975, the banks refused to lend another dollar, to underwrite another bond sale, as the City sank beneath a debt in the billions. State Civil Service law dictated: Last in, first out. Spared by eight years seniority, I got my blues out of mothballs, said goodbye to the Police Legal Bureau, and motored over the Williamsburg Bridge and four miles up Broadway to the Eight-Three Precinct on Wilson and DeKalb Avenues, to take up the lance again.

Bushwick was predominantly Puerto Rican, alongside an older Sicilian section along Knickerbocker Avenue, a main commercial street, bordering Ridgewood, Queens in the north. A block away sat the 83rd Precinct Station House, a Victorian-era stone structure, turreted, with a corner tower and crenellated parapets, a medieval castle or fort. Instead of a moat, it had six steep stone steps leading up to a pair of massive oak doors barring entry. (In six years at the Eight-Three, I would participate in repelling all manner of invaders on those very steps: gypsy cabdrivers outraged at vigorous enforcement of traffic laws, local gangs seeking to spring their arrested hermanos inside, hordes of community agitators demanding entry for one thing or another.) In the 1960s, the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx took to calling itself “Fort Apache” but it couldn’t hold a candle to the Eight-Three which had more crime at the time than any other precinct in central Brooklyn. Impressive for a neighborhood that was just 24 blocks long by not quite as many blocks wide. The Precinct had 130 cops assigned, now including me.

And it was being burned out by its residents, block by block. Most of the houses were made of wood, covered in asphalt siding that burns fast and hot. Most were “old law” structures with air shafts over the toilets and stairwells, efficient chimneys for fires that burned like furnaces. There were three types of arsonists: landlords, for insurance or to clear a building of undesirable tenants; tenants themselves, looking to relocate at the expense of the City Welfare Department; and rejected paramours who’d start a fire in the first floor stairwell to show her. Of course, I didn’t know all this when I arrived in May, 1975, but I saw whole streets that were virtually vacant lots except for the burnt-out hulks of buildings, reminiscent of the city of Dresden. Then, shortly after arrival, I logged my first line-of-duty injury, getting struck over the head with my own nightstick, waking up in a bed in Wyckoff Heights Hospital.

It was like this. My partner, newly arrived from the Community Relations Division, and myself were sitting in an RMP in front of St. Barbara’s Church on Central Avenue. St. Barbara’s is Cathedreal-size, but you needed a ticket to get inside on Christmas Eve. It was Sunday morning and Mass was letting out when we noticed two males, a father and son as it turned out, rolling around in a bear hug in the middle of the street, god-damning (and worse) each other, not twenty yards from us and the church-goers. Despite having patrolman’s reflexes that had atrophied some during my peaceful years inside (likewise for my partner, it turned out), I leaped into action. I had detached dad from his son and as I succeeded in pining him underneath me as I fumbled with my handcuffs, son picked up my ‘nightstick’ (a 2-1/2-foot long club made of ‘cocubola’ wood from a Jamaican forest) and clobbered me over the head. End of story; also for my assailant who was apprehended a short distance away and occupied a bed in the prisoner’s wing on the floor below. I vowed there and then never to let go of my nightstick again, and, in future, to give rather than receive.

In the next few years, the cop reflexes returned and sharpened. I owe my renaissance to a Sergeant (call him Fred) and his ‘Precinct Conditions Car’. Fred and I had been patrolmen together in the 9th Precinct on East 5th Street, in Manhattan’s East Village in 1968 and ’69 before I went to SPRING 3100. We had been neighbors, dressing next to each other in the Precinct Locker Room on the top floor. In the way of things in the NYPD, Fred added me to his Conditions Car roster in December, 1976. ‘Conditions Car’ was a bit of a euphemism. His squad of three patrolmen and himself patrolled the Precinct, in uniform in an old ‘unmarked’ brown Plymouth—locking up drug dealers, gunmen, extortionate gang members, counterfeiters, and arsonists, of course, and raiding ‘chop shops’ (auto yards specializing in selling off stolen cars in pieces). The Conditions men, bemedalled, experienced cops, accepted me as one of them since “Sarge” had vouched for me.

And I did bring something to the table: I had just graduated with a J.D. degree from Fordham University Law School (Evening Division). I would be drafting their Search Warrants on an old Underwood in the Unit’s cubicle. Arrests came from reliable information, spelled ‘registered confidential informants’ (CIs). Conditions had a dozen CIs: men and women arrested in the past and now ‘working off’ their prospective sentences in the street where they could do themselves the most good. Their fingerprints and pedigree and status were on file with the NYPD. The Brooklyn District Attorney was on board, too, with the proviso that we would not bother Him with inconvenient details. (He needn’t have worried about that.) I drafted all our Search Warrants, bypassing the young assistant district attorneys at Night Court, going direct to the Judge, with my informant in tow to swear to the truth of his affidavit (a/k/a ‘probable cause’). I always tried to go to that same Judge in Night Court.

Even today, I remember our two most memorable CIs, code-names ‘Primo’ and ‘Blue Hat’. Primo, a canny old Puerto Rican, owned an auto yard off Flushing Avenue in the industrial section of Bushwick. He delighted in giving up his erstwhile competitors, and would, on occasion, throw in as added bonus the names and addresses of gun-sellers, counterfeiters and wanted fugitives. Whether a life of crime was truly in Primo’s past, we tactfully never enquired further. ‘Blue Hat’ was our go-to gal for drugs. Yes, a woman. And a bold one. She’d be on the ‘set’ at a street drug spot and go into her act—gesticulating wildly with her hands while dancing a little merengue for her audience, thereby telling us, watching with field glasses, by a prearranged signal like doffing her blue hat that the dealer was holding. Primo and Blue Hat went way beyond the call of duty, you might say. Because they enjoyed feeling like The Man, I believe, being a valued member of an informal civilian auxiliary Force. I remember them fondly.

Robert Knightly

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.

A Police Story: Spring 3100

I was a New York City policeman for 20 years: from 1967 to 1987, seminal years in the modern history of the NYPD, during which I rose from Probationary Patrolman to Lieutenant of Police. When I look back on that time, see again the faces and events, I remember how a writer-friend once described my career as “intersections with history.” Maybe, he had a point.

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It was August, 1969 and I’d been a New York City Patrolman just two years and three months. I was working nine-to-five in a suit, Monday to Friday, with an occasional Saturday substituting for one of the weekdays (my choice). I was assigned as a reporter/writer on SPRING 3100, the official Magazine of the New York City Police Department, which boasted on its masthead that it was The Magazine Written For And By Patrolmen. That was true: the Editor who brought me on was a Patrolman who’d spent his career on the Magazine; there were two other writers like myself and the Art Director who laid out the magazine and handled production—all of us lowly Patrolmen, except for the old photographer who’d been there even longer than the Editor and somehow had managed to rise up one rung to Detective 3rd Grade, the lowest of the detective ranks, without having ever detected anything except a good photo ‘opp’. (In the NYPD, like Life, it was who you knew.)

SPRING 3100 was a choice assignment, a secret closely guarded and not spoken of outside ‘the City Room’, what we called the large open room that accommodated our desks, the Art department and files, on the top floor of 400 Broome Street, a/k/a The Police Annex. Police Headquarters then was just across Broome at 240 Centre Street in a grand old building done in the monumental Beaux Arts style with a Dome, pediments and marble columns over the entrance facing on Grand Street. I once believed that I’d gotten to SPRING 3100 by pure chance, but don’t any longer.

I was a beat cop walking foot posts by myself (the custom then) in the 9th Precinct on East 5th Street in the East Village. As a rookie with just fifteen months on the Job, I was usually assigned to patrol on the down-and-out Bowery or on the battleground streets of ‘Alphabet City’ (Avenues ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’) when I read in SPRING 3100 that there were openings on staff for Patrolmen-Reporters. I applied, out of curiosity, although I was still caught up in the romance of being The Man on the Mean Streets of the City. I had been a professional reporter and editor for business magazines for the three years prior to taking the Police Test. I applied and The Editor of SPRING hired me on the spot, thinking he’d gotten a bargain in me, I’m sure, although he was to learn over the next three years that I was definitely a mixed bag.

240 Centre Street

My first assignment as roving reporter was to do a feature piece on the Police Aviation Unit that was celebrating its 40th Year in the air in 1969. I drove out to the Base in Floyd Bennett Field at the ass-end of Brooklyn in an “unmarked” Department car (That’s what we called the Chevys and big-ass Plymouths that were garaged in the basement of 400 Broome. We’d just call ahead and the car was gassed up and waiting.) My partner on the assignment was Charlie (I’ll call him that), the new photographer, my age. At the Base, they took us up in a Bell Jetranger helicopter. Flying over all the boroughs of the City, under the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges, up and down the East River out to the Harbor, I sat in the copilot’s seat behind the glass nose of the copter so that passing over the Statue of Liberty I felt that if I stepped out and down I’d set foot on Her Torch.

Spring 3100 was a 50-page, 8-1/2x11-inch, professionally-written—abundantly illustrated with photos, occasional art and a dab of color on the front cover—slick magazine that had come out every month since 1929. Its size was purposeful: folded lengthways, it fit snugly in the rear back pocket of its readership, the uniform cop on the street. Distribution was a stroke of genius: bundles delivered by Motor Pool trucks to every Precinct, Headquarters and Administrative Command in the City. Every cop paid $1.80 per month for the magazine which was included in “House Tax,” a small sum he had to kick in monthly at his Precinct, that also underwrote the shoe shine machine and store of polish available to him in the Muster Room. If the New York Journal-American had had a setup like ours, it might have survived.

I earned my spurs with ‘Cops In the Blue’, the Aviation story, one of the longest SPRING had ever run, dramatic photo spreads showcasing the old biplanes and their heroic pilots. I’d researched the hell out of the story for a month; the photos came out of the magazine’s archives or The New York Daily News’s morgue. In recognition, the Editor assigned me to write ‘All In the Day’s Work’, a dramatic log of street heroics by cops all over the City—starring rescued animals, people, and perpetrators’ arrests ripped from the pages of the daily papers, illustrated by photos from their morgues, written from an omniscient third-person point of view with commentary (mine). Each month, I’d open the column with an apt quotation, like: “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.—Amelia Earhart Putnam.”

My other assignment was the column, “The Retired Ring In” (‘Ring In’ is a term of art referring to the foot patrolman’s duty to call in to the Precinct Switchboard from a Police Call Box on the street at a designated time each hour). Retired cops living in places all over the country would “ring in” their doings with ample photographic documentation. And sprinkled throughout: news of the Departmnent’s doings with plenty of headshots of the Top Command (Bosses loved SPRING where their Over-Bosses would see their pictures and, hopefully remember they existed), a Law column, an Inquiring Photographer, a Cop Captions Contest, Obituaries, Want Ads, and the clincher, ‘Looking Them Over’—reports of arrests, personal foibles, meaty tales (the doer’s name in boldface type) by the Precinct Reporter, a Patrolman in that Precinct, in every Precinct in the City. Liberally illustrated with photos, of course. Pure genius.

Then, one day our Patrolman-Editor retired (frustrated that after all those years he’d never been promoted to Detective 3rd Grade), a tone-deaf Sergeant replaced him and the clock ran out on the rest of us.

© 2013 Robert Knightly
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