Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“One thing at a time, hoss. Stick with the cop for now. Okay, so there’s a mess going on out in the Ninety-fifth. It’s the Bad Apples. Is this McNally a Bad Apple?”

“When the mayor and Carroll were holding their press conference after the shooting, a reporter I was standing next to asked Carroll the same question.”

“What did Carroll answer?”

“As I recall, he didn’t. He bitched at me later about how the press was pissing on a fallen cop.”

Charlie wheeled over to the desk where he kept his computer and fired it up. Before he was grounded in a wheelchair, Charlie’s patience with things like computers and other similar gadgets had been nil. The last of the Luddites. But losing his range the way he had put a new spin on everything. Now he was Mr. Keyboard.

“Play it out,” Charlie said as he waited for his programs to come up. “Say McNally was the target. Or one of the targets. Anybody else of interest hit?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I haven’t really focused on the other people who were shot. There was a woman with a little boy. I was standing next to them when Diaz opened up.”

“That’s the problem when the cops close the books as quick as they did on this one. All the good investigating that could be done is just stopped.”

“Once they had Diaz in a body bag, they called it a day.”

“They knew it wasn’t a damn day.”

“McNally’s partner was there, too,” I said. “Cox. He was also working the parade. That’s two men from Fort Pete, plus Diaz.”

“The hero cop. He sure didn’t get hit. He chased the perp.”

“I chased the perp.”

“He chased the both of you.”

Charlie’s screen sizzled as a mountain scene appeared. He hit a few keys, waited, then hit a few more. “Where was Cox when his partner was hit? Do we know?”

“In fact, we do. Cox was helping a blind man who had suffered a heart attack. He was down on the pavement doing CPR.”

“Okay. So if Diaz was trying to take out both cops, maybe he couldn’t get Cox because Cox had dropped out of sight.”

“If,” I said.

“Everything is if.”

Right. Doubt everything.

Charlie muttered, “Bad Apple,” as he hit the keys again. Comfortable as he was getting with computers, he was still a two-finger man on the keys. He punched them hard, as if squashing an armored bug each time.

“It’s a little screwy, don’t you think?” I said. “If you want to kill your local neighborhood cop-or cops-why would you do something so elaborate, not to mention so public, an entire borough away? For that matter, how would Diaz and Ramos know that Cox and McNally were going to be working the parade? Or exactly where they’d be? See? It begins to fall apart.”

Charlie was only half listening. He had brought up something on his screen. “Pull up a chair, Fritz. Let’s get educated.”

For the next half hour, we read through every account and reference to the Bad Apple scandal that Charlie could come up with online. I was familiar with the general thrust of the accusations. A number of cops in the Ninety-fifth had allegedly been turning the neighborhoods they were supposed to be protecting into little fiefdoms. It was alleged that illegal raids would be held on the homes of suspected drug dealers, sometimes preceded by false calls to 911 as a means of “justifying” the raids, and that money was stolen as well as drugs, which the cops would later either sell back to the original owners or tag as their own and return to the dealer with the stipulation that the cops be cut in on the profit when the drugs were sold on the street. One editorial cartoon showed several cops standing with their hands stuffed with cash, looking up at the clouds and whistling at the sky while, all around them, dealers and users feverishly went about their business. The accusations also reported some cops tipping off dealers to impending legit raids. Payback was in money, drugs, sex or any combination of the three. Blackmail sex was said to be a common occurrence. A cop with a baggie of dope, according to the reports, could demand sex on the spot by threatening to plant the evidence and proceeding directly to the arrest. One woman was reported in The Village Voice as having a regularly scheduled rendezvous with two officers from the Ninety-fifth for just this sort of shakedown. “They call it a ‘baggie blow,’ you know what I mean? They come right in my apartment and tell my son to go on outside. Then they hold up that fucking baggie and shake it like it’s a little bell or some shit.”

The most extensive report, a piece in the Times , broke down the alleged police abuse into two categories: bullying and partnering. The first category was less scandalous. In many ways, this one was business as usual. Shakedowns, threats, minor blackmail, sex on demand. It was the alleged abuses in the second category that were threatening to make the Bad Apple story a significant one. Partnering abuses. Collusion. Mutual back-scratching. Working things out to the benefit of both sides. Blurring even the idea that there were sides. That sort of abuse on the side of the police was the worst imaginable. “Criminals with Uniforms” was how one of the headings put it.

Caught up in the allegations was Brooklyn district attorney David Sack, who was reportedly aware of the validity of some of the accusations but had been willing-unnamed sources said-to turn a blind eye, especially in the cases of falsified raids and falsified evidence, so long as he could count on a healthy conviction rate. When Charlie read this, he commented, “It looks good on the résumé.” It was Sack’s relationship with Martin Leavitt that had begun to turn up the heat on City Hall in recent weeks. The two had worked together closely when Leavitt was a prosecutor in Brooklyn. Leavitt was referred to in several accounts as having been David Sack’s mentor.

“Mentor,” Charlie said. “Isn’t that someone who teaches his tricks to someone else?”

The final related accounts concerned the murder-suicide of the two policemen at the end of October. No specific motive for either act was expressly spelled out, though there were implications that it was a case of one bad cop killing another, then taking his own life. There were also rumors that the cop who was murdered was a stoolie who had been informing on his fellow officers, a bad cop working to save his tail. The two dead cops were named Jay Pearson and Thomas Cash. However, it was a second pair of names that caught my eye. Charlie’s as well. These were the names of the first officers on the scene. The alleged murder-suicide had taken place in a junkyard some hundred yards from a Home Depot parking lot on the edge of Fort Petersen. Someone had phoned 911, reporting shots fired in the area. The closest officers to the scene arrived within minutes of the 911 call. They attempted to revive both of the men, but according to an EMS spokesman, Pearson and Cash had already “expired” by the time their colleagues arrived.

Commended for their efforts in attempting to save the men were Officers Kevin McNally and Leonard Cox.

“How’s that song go?” Charlie asked, swiveling his chair away from the computer. “They’re just too good to be true?”

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“A couple of things. You asked before how it was possible for Diaz and Ramos to know that two cops from the hood were going to be working the parade and where they’d be working it?”

“Right.”

“What if they didn’t know? What if one of these wonderful cops told them?”

“Which cop?”

“I’m liking the one who didn’t end up taking a bullet.”

“You mean Cox set up his partner? But why?”

“Could be one of a hundred reasons. I told you, it’s just a thought.”