The City of New York Commission Report (Mollen, 1994)

There are a million excuses for police corruption -- that they're underpaid, that they suffer stress, that their wives hate them, that they eat too many donuts, that their kids hate them, and that liberals use them as whipping boys. Read the official reports to hear the dreary recitation of why those who administer the laws never seem to obey them.

Re: The City of New York Commission Report (Mollen, 1994)

Postby admin » Tue Jun 23, 2015 6:58 am

PART 2 OF 2

The 79th Precinct Investigation

In early April 1989, at Friedland's request, Trimboli met Friedland at FIAU headquarters. There, Friedland took Trimboli for a walk in a nearby park. He told Trimboli that Chief Gallagher wanted the PBBN/FIAU to initiate an immediate investigation into activities within the 79th Precinct. According to Friedland, Gallagher said he had received information from a confidential source known only to Gallagher that the 79th Precinct had a "possible small 77th Precinct-like situation in existence" (See Exhibit C). Friedland directed Trimboli to undertake the investigation immediately, even if it meant diverting attention from the 75th Precinct case.

Although he feared expressing his views at the time, Trimboli saw this new assignment as another attempt to stop his investigation into the 75th Precinct. Trimboli's conclusion again has merit. After all, the new assignment could not have come at a more crucial time. Trimboli was preparing to use Royos as an undercover -- his first pro-active opportunity to penetrate the drug ring that was paying off Dowd and Eurell. Moreover, when Trimboli asked to meet Gallagher's informant, Friedland said Gallagher would not divulge the identity of the informant nor allow Trimboli to debrief him. When questioned by Commission investigators, Gallagher could not remember the identity of the informant nor recall when or how he received the information about the 79th Precinct. What he did remember, however, differed significantly from what he told Friedland at that time. According to Gallagher, his concerns about the 79th Precinct involved racial divisions among the officers in the 79th Precinct and had nothing to do with drug corruption. On Gallagher's and Friedland's orders, Trimboli spent over six weeks looking into the 79th Precinct. After many hours of surveillance, he did not detect a single patrol violation, let alone an indication of a 77th Precinct-like situation.

The Commission does not believe that it was mere coincidence that Chief Gallagher diverted the FIAU's time and attention from the 75th Precinct investigation, just at the time Trimboli's investigation showed the most promise of breaking another large police corruption scandal in Brooklyn North. Chief Gallagher must have had the fate of Chief Taylor in mind when he gave the order to redirect the FIAU to the 79th Precinct. After all, it was Gallagher who replaced Taylor as the Brooklyn North borough commander after the 77th Precinct scandal sidetracked Chief Taylor's career.

While Trimboli was made to chase red herrings in the 79th Precinct, his hopes of using Royos were dashed. Daniel Landes, the OSSP attorney working with Trimboli, informed him that he had learned from federal authorities that Adam Diaz had fled the country. In Landes's view, Diaz's absence made Royos useless to the investigation. He told Trimboli he was removing himself from the case and assigning it to Betsy Barros, another OSSP attorney. Trimboli strongly disagreed with Landes's conclusion that Royos no longer had value to the investigation. In Trimboli's view, IAD's refusal to assist him and the OSSP's decision to abandon the Royos plan in April 1989 killed any prospect for a successful investigation.

But Trimboli remained undeterred. He was determined to continue the investigation until every possible avenue had been tried. He undertook surveillance of Dowd and his associates on his days off and in his own car. He even ate his Sunday dinner in his car while observing Dowd's house on Long Island. And, during this time, he never once had an offer either from IAD or his FIAU superiors to provide him with any assistance.

Yurkiw 's Offer To Cooperate

Trimboli's last prospect of apprehending Dowd came from the same cop who triggered his investigation of Dowd fifteen months earlier: Walter Yurkiw. In October 1989, while Yurkiw was incarcerated for the R&T Grocery Store robbery, he had a telephone conversation with Trimboli from prison. Yurkiw agreed to talk about "the cop with the red Corvette" and others if he was visited in prison. When Trimboli advised the OSSP of Yurkiw's offer, Landes reentered the case. When Trimboli informed IAD of Yurkiw's willingness to talk and his intention of interviewing him, IAD prohibited Trimboli from doing so.

When Trimboli informed IAD about Yurkiw, IAD's Captain Nakovics told Trimboli that IAD investigators would conduct the interview of Yurkiw and that Trimboli was not invited to attend. Nakovics even ordered Trimboli to suspend his investigation until IAD had completed the interview. He required that Trimboli confer with him every two weeks to determine when Trimboli's investigation could be resumed.

Again, Trimboli was dumbfounded. IAD had once again intruded into his investigation at a critical juncture not to assist him but only to disrupt its progress. In Trimboli's view, there was no legitimate reason to prevent him from participating in the debriefing of Yurkiw, unless to control the information and thus the success of his case. For a month, Trimboli heard nothing from IAD about the results of the Yurkiw interview. But he did discover that IAD dispatched Sergeant Bradley and another IAD investigator by helicopter to the Oneida Correctional Facility in Rome, New York to interview Yurkiw. Obviously, despite their repeated assertions that they had no resources to spare Trimboli, IAD apparently had the resources when they wanted them.

By the end of November 1989, Trimboli had not received even a synopsis of the information IAD acquired from Yurkiw. Instead, what he received from IAD was yet another separate corruption case based on Yurkiw's allegations against ten current and former police officers in the 75th Precinct involved in the illegal use of narcotics (corruption case no. 89-2385). IAD was again fragmenting the case and assigning it out of IAD. When Trimboli reviewed the work papers, he found, to his amazement, no worksheet on Yurkiw's debriefing. He telephoned IAD and explained that if they expected him to investigate Yurkiw's allegations, he would need to see the results of the interview.

Finally, over a month after the debriefing took place, Trimboli received Bradley's worksheet. Incredibly, it was a brief, one-page summary providing no more than the barest account of Yurkiw's allegations against six officers in the 75th Precinct and one in the 105th Precinct (See Exhibit D). Even more incredibly, it contains not a single mention of Michael Dowd, although Yurkiw's offer was to talk about the cop "with the red Corvette."

To Trimboli and Commission investigators, Bradley's worksheet reflects a superficial interview of Yurkiw with no real interest in obtaining useful information about Dowd or any other corrupt police officer. In fact, the language of the worksheet attempts to minimize the credibility of Yurkiw's allegations. No wonder IAD excluded Trimboli from the interview. When interrogated by Commission investigators about the surprising lack of any information on Dowd, neither Bradley nor Callahan could explain it. Bradley testified that he asked questions about Dowd, but could not remember what Yurkiw said. As discussed below, a lack of memory about critical events was a common affliction among a number of IAD officials the Commission interviewed.

Final Developments

Even after IAD squandered the opportunity to acquire evidence on Dowd through Yurkiw, information about Dowd kept coming to IAD. In January 1990, IAD received yet another allegation about Dowd, this time from the Drug Enforcement Task Force ("D.E.T.F."). The D.E.T.F. reported that one of its informants, on personal business at the Whitestone Pound, recognized Dowd as a police officer he had seen sampling drugs in Auto Sound City with a drug dealer named Baron (Baron Perez) in April 1989. [8] Of course, this new information was consistent with all the other allegations IAD had received about Dowd and drug corruption. And consistent with their past practice, IAD's commanders treated the allegation as a new and unrelated case, gave it a fresh corruption case number (corruption case no. 89-2617), and assigned it to PBBN/FIAU where it became the twelfth Dowd corruption case IAD assigned to the FIAU and the seventh for which Trimboli was made responsible.

Like all the other 75th Precinct investigations assigned to Trimboli, this latest one was doomed from the start without IAD's resources and assistance. Although the D.E.T.F. cooperated with Trimboli, for security reasons, they could not make their informant available to testify.

As a result, the D.E.T.F. allegation against Dowd, like all the others, was closed as unsubstantiated. In fact, by December 1991, the PBBN/FIAU closed as unsubstantiated thirteen separate corruption cases against Dowd. Each of those closings was approved by Chief Gallagher and IAD's commanding officers Chiefs Moran and Beatty. Dowd, in the meantime, remained in uniform continuing his career of corruption -- this time in the 94th Precinct, where he had been assigned since February 1990.

Even as IAD and the borough commander were approving the unsubstantiated closing reports on the Dowd corruption cases, IAD continued to receive reliable evidence of Dowd's crimes. In March and April 1991, Callahan (who had been promoted to Executive Officer of IAD), dispatched IAD investigators to interview two informants [9] who were cooperating with the United States Attorney's Office in Manhattan in an investigation of a major drug organization.

In essence, both men told IAD investigators that in 1987 and 1988, the boss of their drug ring paid thousands of dollars each week to police officers fitting the description of Dowd and Eurell for protection and information about impending drug raids. The informants reported that the officers often dealt with a middleman, Baron Perez, who paid off the officers inside his store. Besides protection, the officers provided the organization with police radios and shields and transported drugs for Perez in their police car. The officers also sold Perez drugs that they robbed from competitors. One of the informants even identified Michael Dowd from a photo array.

By this time, these allegations should have had the strong ring of familiarity and the mark of reliability for IAD. Here again were two apparently reliable informants telling IAD that Dowd and Eurell were drug dealers -- not cops -- involved in serious crimes: protection rackets, robberies, and drug trafficking. Yet, despite this new information and the mountain of information already accumulated on Dowd over the years, shockingly IAD did not initiate a full-scale corruption investigation of Dowd or anyone associated with him. Instead, they classified these new allegations as a "preliminary investigation." [10] If by the Spring of 1991, IAD had still not determined whether a full-scale investigation of Dowd, Eurell, and other corrupt officers associated with them was warranted, it should not have been in the business of corruption investigations.

The preliminary investigation lasted for a year. Based on our review, the entire case folder contained only memoranda of the interviews of the informants. No other investigative activity took place. IAD never communicated this information to Sergeant Trimboli, despite his years of frustrated attempts to apprehend Dowd. In fact, he first learned this information during an interview with Commission investigators. He was visibly distraught.

Happily, in the Spring of 1992, Dowd made a critical mistake. Suffolk County police, while investigating a drug operation in Suffolk County, intercepted Dowd's, Eurell's, and other corrupt New York City police officers' criminal telephone conversations. In March and April 1992, the Suffolk County police made two reports to IAD that they had evidence that New York City police officers, including Michael Dowd and Kenneth Eurell (who had by this time retired from the Department with a tax-free disability pension) were subjects of an ongoing narcotics investigation. After the second call (IAD assigned the first allegation to the PBBN/FIAU), IAD assisted the Suffolk County investigation. On May 6, 1992, after six years as an open and notorious drug dealer and racketeer in uniform, Suffolk County detectives finally arrested Dowd, Eurell, and four other police officers. Trimboli could only read about it in the newspapers.

Comments

Trimboli's experiences raise questions that go to the heart of the competence and commitment of the Department's anti-corruption operations: how could the Department's internal investigators have failed to apprehend Dowd despite six years of clear indications of serious corruption and crime? Why did IAD fail to initiate a single investigation of Dowd and other officers assigned to the 75th Precinct despite extensive evidence of corruption? Why did IAD withhold critical information, witnesses, and resources that the FIAU needed to apprehend him? Why did IAD refuse to assist the FIAU to apprehend Dowd despite direct and repeated appeals for help?

The Commission was not satisfied with the Department's answer to these questions. By simply faulting the investigative structure and its lack of coordination and communication, the Department's Report on the Dowd case failed to address the full dimension of the problem. After all, the Commission found that there was plenty of information flowing from the FIAU to IAD but, curiously, not from IAD to the FIAU. In fact, IAD investigators withheld critical information from the FIAU investigators and denied them access to critical witnesses and resources.

Every one of the allegations against Dowd, furthermore, first came to IAD where its commanders reviewed and recorded the information before sending them piecemeal to the FIAU, which they knew lacked the basic resources to investigate cases other than minor misconduct. They monitored Trimboli's 75th Precinct investigation and received regular updates on its progress. On three separate occasions, moreover, the FIAU directly appealed to IAD's superior officers for help, and help never came. They knew the scope of the corruption problems in the 75th Precinct and never once even considered opening a broad 75th Precinct investigation. If IAD's commanders had wanted to, there was every opportunity to communicate and coordinate with the FIAU. The reason for the persistent failure of IAD's commanders to do their job cannot simply be blamed on just a bad structure. It necessarily calls into question IAD's resolve to pursue and root out serious corruption where its commanders knew it existed.

Nor can the blame for failing to apprehend Dowd be shifted to the OSSP. The OSSP was not the Department's internal investigator nor its inspector general. That role belonged to IAD and the FIAUs, which collectively had approximately five hundred investigators specifically assigned to root out police corruption. By comparison, the OSSP was a prosecutorial agency that, by 1986, employed only twelve attorneys and thirty investigators with city-wide jurisdiction over the entire criminal justice system, of which the Police Department was but one component. The OSSP, therefore, depended on the Department's internal investigators to conduct police corruption investigations and generate sufficient evidence to support a criminal complaint. When the prospect of generating such evidence existed, such as the plans to use Royos, the OSSP acted to further the investigation. To be sure, the OSSP was apprised of most of the information generated about Dowd by IAD and the FIAU. But much of it came to the attention of OSSP attorneys months after its usefulness expired.

Nonetheless, the OSSP cannot escape all blame for the failure to apprehend Dowd and other officers of the 75th Precinct. In a word, the OSSP's failure in this case was not to recognize that if the investigation were to succeed, it could not depend on the Department alone, without outside pressure and guidance, to generate the evidence. In light of the information it had about corruption in the 75th Precinct, its experiences with the 77th Precinct, and its own 1986 analysis of drug corruption trends, the OSSP should have pressured the Department to assign a team of investigators with adequate resources to launch a precinct-wide investigation, especially after the Yurkiw robbery case.

But whatever omissions and missed opportunities may be imputed to the OSSP, none relieves the Police Department of its responsibility to effectively police itself. To determine the cause of IAD's startling refusals to act in the face of such a compelling accumulation of information of serious corruption in the 75th Precinct, Commission investigators reviewed hundreds of documents, questioned dozens of IAD, FIAU, and other Department officials. Responses to the Commission's questioning followed a predictable pattern of shifting blame.

Lower-ranking IAD officers, such as Sergeant Bradley, said they knew Dowd was a criminal and IAD should have made strong efforts to apprehend him. But, as junior officers, they had no authority over how or whom IAD would investigate, especially because the command structure at IAD was so strict that even high-ranking investigators had very little input into IAD's policies or decisions.

Middle managers, like Callahan and Pietruntu, while asserting that the Department ought to have made a case against Dowd, shifted the blame to the FIAU. In their view, their role as IAD investigators was to investigate only the allegation assigned to them and nothing more. If IAD's commanders assigned a case to the FIAU, it was the FIAU's and the borough commander's responsibility to insure the success of that investigation. According to them, if IAD were to expand an investigation beyond the four corners of the original allegation, that order could come only from the commanding officers of IAD, Chief Moran, Chief Beatty, or their superior, the Chief of Inspectional Services, Chief Sullivan. They had no view of corruption as a Department problem that IAD and the FIAUs -- as a team -- were commissioned to root out.

As the lower and middle-ranking officers pushed the responsibility up the chain of command, those at the top of the chain pushed it back downward. According to Chief Moran, his subordinates never informed him about critical developments in the Dowd case, like the plans to use Royos and information from other informants. But what he did know about Dowd, he communicated to his boss, Chief Sullivan. According to Moran, even as commanding officer of IAD, he could not make the decision to initiate a case into the 75th Precinct without Chief Sullivan's approval.

For his part, Chief Sullivan repeatedly described IAD's failure to act against Dowd as "glaring omissions." But when asked why such glaring omissions occurred under his watch, Sullivan claimed that his subordinates never informed him about Michael Dowd until 1992, when IAD received reports of corruption from the Suffolk County Police Department. When he was showed an August 1988 memorandum addressed to him from Chief Moran summarizing numerous allegations against Dowd at that time, Sullivan claimed never to have seen the document. In fact, during the course of his testimony at the Commission's public hearings, Sullivan either denied knowledge or had no recollection of significant events over thirty times.

But what Sullivan did remember provided the answer to our original question about why IAD refused to act in the face of such overwhelming evidence of corruption. As the Department's chief internal investigator for six years, Sullivan was in a position to know the unspoken policies that guided the Department, the policies that are not printed in the Department's manuals or operations orders. What he knew, or believed, was that the Department -- in fact, the Police Commissioner himself -- wanted to avoid corruption scandals at any cost.

The Commission has concluded that high-ranking members of the Police Department including IAD's top commanders as well as the Brooklyn North Borough Commander scuttled Trimboli's investigation into corruption within the 75th Precinct. When asked at the Commission's public hearings why the Police Department was unable to apprehend Michael Dowd, Trimboli responded:

Question: Based on your first-hand experiences in conducting these investigations, have you reached a conclusion that there were other reasons that the NYPD was unsuccessful in apprehending Michael Dowd?

Trimboli: I believe, based upon my experience, and obviously this is something that was discussed in my office among investigators who were aware of what I was involved in, that there was a lack of resolve to go after these individuals because it would involve initiating a scandal to what had occurred in the 77th precinct and that it would be a tremendous embarrassment to the New York City Police Department. (Tr. 124)


Obviously, Sergeant Trimboli was a victim of his own Department's misdeeds. The list of victims, however, is a long one. The vast majority of honest officers in the 75th Precinct and throughout the Department, who rightfully expected the Department to protect their safety and reputation from the likes of Michael Dowd and his associates, and above all, the citizens of New York, who rightfully expect the Department to serve and protect them, suffered most.

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EXHIBIT A

STATE OF NEW YORK OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL STATE PROSECUTOR OFFICE MEMORANDUM

TO: Charles J. Hynes
FROM: Hershey, Hawkins and Mangum
RE: Corruption Allegations By Precinct
DATE: August 5, 1986

A review of all corruption allegations involving police officers and drug operations for the period from January 1986 through June 1986 demonstrated that a significant number of such allegations came from certain precincts. The following is a numerical breakdown of those allegations.

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An analysis of the allegations from the precincts (the 77th, 113th and the 9th) reveals common elements that may be characterized as corruption indicators. For example, in the 77th, where we have independent information regarding corruption, the allegations over the sixth-month period identify [DELETE] Restaurant (a.k.a. [DELETE] Restaurant) at Troy and Lincoln as a drug location which is frequented by unidentified police officers, one of whom is known as "Blondie". This information comes from three sources, two anonymous (a phone call and a letter) and one a registered confidential informant. Using the information from 77th to construct a model, the factors that should be considered in analyzing allegations from other precincts are as fellows:

• the source of the information
• specific drug locations
• the identities of drug dealers
• the identities of police officers
• the type of activity.

Utilizing these factors for an analysis of the 113th Precinct, there are a number of allegations that should be investigated. For example, two anonymous callers (1/29 and 6/1) report that unidentified police officers frequent the [DELETE] Grocery Store, at [DELETE] Guy Brewer Blvd, which is a drug location. The "twins" who run the spot have been seen sitting in an RMP with unidentified police officers. Three anonymous callers (3/12, 3/13 and 4/13) allege that unidentified police officers in an RMP enter a drug location at [DELETE] 115th Road and exit putting things into their pockets. One anonymous caller (3/13) and the president of a block association allege that drugs are sold from a house at [DELETE] 118th Road, which is owned by a police officer (identified as [DELETE] There are a number of other allegations that are similar to the ones received from the 77th, the most substantial of which involves a DEA investigation that point to two police officers involved with a female correction officer who sells drugs. (This case is assigned to [DELETE].

In the 9th Precinct, seven drug locations are identified, and the names of dealers are given in three of the cases. At least 3 police officers are identified as having some contact with certain locations, and a number of unidentified police officers are alleged either to be protecting drug spots or to have taken drugs from dealers.

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EXHIBIT B

POLICE DEPARTMENT CITY OF NEW YORK INTERNAL AFFAIRS DIVISION INVESTIGATING OFFICER'S REPORT

From: Sgt. William Bradley

Command: CIU #1

Case Number: 69 s 88

Accompanying Investigator(s): Det. Edward Addison

Subject: 75 PCT BODEGA ROBBERY

Time: 1330 hrs.

Date: Wed 11-30-88

On the above date and time the assigned investigators were present at [DELETE] [DELETE], Brooklyn to interview [DELETE], Yurkiw's former girlfriend [DELETE] [DELETE] stated that Yurkiw had verbally threatened her life if she did not provide him with an alibi for the night of 7-2-88 (night of robbery). She stated that he should tell [DELETE] (Yurkiw's attorney) not to worry that she would alibi for him. [DELETE] also stated that Yurkiw told her he would "get" Sgt. Bradley because he was romantically involved with her.

[DELETE] also told the undersigned that Yurkiw had told her that a contract is going to be put out on the members of the [DELETE] and [DELETE] families. Yurkiw told her that he could not hit [DELETE] or [DELETE] directly because the cops would know who did it.

It is also alleged that there is a group of about 25 cops assigned to the 75 Pct who at one time or another would rip-off known drug locations and bodegas that deal in drugs. [DELETE] said she knew this because Yurkiw had told her that at least 2 female cops are involved. One of the females is alleged to be the girl friend of PO Michael Dowd (currently on modified assignment assigned to the Whitestone Pound). The other female is described only as f/w with blond hair. [DELETE [DELETE] also stated that prior to the robbery at 923 Livonia ave she observed that address and others on a list that Yurkiw kept in his car of known drug locations within the East New York area. (alleged crack or heroin traffic at 923 Livonia).

[DELETE] stated that on 11-25-88 Yurkiw was in the process of picking up a package (cocaine) for Dowd at a house in the East New York section when a group of cops burst in and announced "Police". At this point the cops ordered all the people (15-20) to lay on the ground and systematically robbed them. Yurkiw was one of the "victims". Once the uniformed cops found out who Yurkiw was they returned his property to him. [DELETE] said that this practice has been going on since about 2-87. At the time of the alleged rip-off Yurkiw was in the process of picking up drugs for PO Michael Dowd and his brother PO [DELETE] currently on modified assignment and participating in the alcohol abuse program). It was also stated that Yurkiw and the two Dowds are couriers for major drug traffickers in the East New York area. They are alleged at this time to be skimming from the kilos of cocaine and dealing in "eight ball" (1/8 oz of cocaine). This practice has been going on for about two to three months.

During the course of the interview [DELETE] alluded to the fact that she has on occasion used drugs with Yurkiw and some of her friends. She stated that the last time was on 11-28-88 when Yurkiw came to her apartment with 2 "eight-balls". Yurkiw did one by himself and fell asleep. While there he allegedly got up during the night and broke almost everything in the apartment. [DELETE] then called her friend, unidentified, who came over and helped put Yurkiw back to sleep. Both females then consumed the second "eight-ball" of cocaine. When Yurkiw awoke that morning he became violent because the cocaine was not there and struck [DELETE] [DELETE] numerous times about the body. Yurkiw then left and returned on two occasions on 11-29-88. [DELETE] then notified the 62 Pct and formally filed a Complaint against Yurkiw (62 Pct 61#15505= Det Flynn assigned).

REGARDING [DELETE]

ALL INFORMATION CONCERNING POLICE MISCONDUCT WAS TOLD TO HER BY YURKIW

SHE NEVER WITNESSED ANY MISCONDUCT EXCEPT FOR YURKIW'S DRUG USE AND HARASSMENT PROPERTY DAMAGE CONCERNING HERSELF

SHE HAD NO SPECIFIC INFORMATION CONCERNING POLICE MISCONDUCT: E.G. IDENTITIES, LOCATIONS, TIMES.

SHE IS AN ADMITTED COCAINE USER.

SHE DESCRIBES YURKIW AS A HEAVY COCAINE USER SUBJECT TO FITS OF VIOLENT TEMPER.

SHE ADMITS TO A CHANGEABLE ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP WITH YURKIW.

HER CREDIBILITY AND ALLEGIANCES ARE SUSPECT.

Invest. Off. Rank & Sign. SGT. WILLIAM A. BRADLEY

Supr. CAPT. GUY K. SING

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EXHIBIT C

INVESTIGATING OFFICER'S REPORT

From: Joseph Trimboli

Command: PBBN/FIAU

Case Number: SG 89-1000

Accompanying Investigator(s) None

Subject: Initiation of Investigation

Time: 1230

Date: April 4, 1989

On this date the Commanding Officer of FIAU, Captain Friedland, advised this investigator in the presence of Sergeant Smalls that he had a conversation with Chief Conroy on April 3, 1989. During the course of the conversation Chief Conroy told Captain Friedland that a confidential sourse had reported to him (Chief Gallager) that the 79 Precinct has a possible small / 77 Like / situation in existence. The Chief asked that this unit monitor specialized units of the 79 Precinct including the Late Tours, Anti-Crime, CPOP, Sneu, and Topac. He asked that this patrol be monitored with a radio. Cpatain Friendland indicated that sme of our attention will have to be diverted from the Operation 966 (75 precinct) in order to comply with this new investigation. In addition the Chief provided Captain Friedland with the names of three officers formerly assigned to the 77 precinct whom he feels also bear watching (formulate an SG on each officer). These officers were P.O. [DELETE], 83 Precinct, P.O. [DELETE], 83 Precinct, and P.O. [DELETE] of the 81 precinct.

Captain Friedland's discussion of his conversation with the undersigned took place on 4/4/89 the morning after his initial conversation with Chief Conroy. on 4/[ILLEGIBLE] Captain Friedland had a second conversation with Chief Conroy and Chief Gallager during which they reviewed the strategy formaluated for this investigation by the undersigned.

On 4/5/89 the undersigned had a second conversation with Captain Friedland relative to this investigation. I.O. expressed concern over whether or not IAD had been notified that this investigation was about to begin. I.O. felt that the notification should be made before the investigation beins. Captain Friedland indicated that he did not know that the Chief had not already contacted IAD about this matter. I.O. also asked Captain Friedland whether or not the Chiefs source had given him specific information that would be of value to this investigation and was told that the Captain felt that we had been given all that the Chief was privy to.

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EXHIBIT D

POLICE DEPARTMENT CITY OF NEW YORK INTERNAL AFFAIRS DIVISION INVESTIGATING OFFICER'S REPORT

From: Sgt. William Bradley

Command: CIU #1

Case Number: Prelim 223/89

Accompanying Investigator(s) Lt. John Shields

Subject: EX-PO YURKIW/ALLEGED POLICE MISCONDUCT

Time: 1300 hrs.

Date: Mon 11/13/89

On the above date and time the assigned investigators were present at the Oneida Correctional Facility, Rome New York, and interviewed ex PO Walter Yurkiw. Yurkiw stated that he had reached out to his street contacts and that only one would supply information to him. This unidentified person also said that he would not talk to the Police until he gets arrested for something. Basically all of Yurkiw's allegations were things that occured while he was still a Police Officer. A synopsis of the interview follows:

A= Stated that PO [DELETE], 75 Pct Anti-Crime, and ex-Po's [DELETE] and [DELETE] [DELETE] deal guns in the 75 Pct. Yurkiw was asked for other independent witnesses who could verify this and said that the only one would be a guy named [DELETE] who lives on Halsey st in Brooklyn. No further information. Also reports that [DELETE] drives expensive autos.

B= PO [DELETE], 75 Pct, has a drug problem. No further information.

C= PO [DELETE], 75 Pct, runs drugs for an individual named [DELETE] from a bodega on Blake ave named [DELETE. [DELETE] was arrested in 1988 for drugs and at one point was debriefed by members of this division and SAAG Dan Landis. MR Landis deemed his information at the time believable but again unverifiable. No further information.

D= PO [DELETE, 75 Pct, uses marijuana. No further information.

E= PO [DELETE], 75 Pct, drinks on duty. No further information.

F= PC [DELETE], unknown Pct, has a cocaine problem. The assigned check the printout for NOS and no [DELETE] was discovered. No further information.

G= PO [DELETE] [DELETE] 105 Pct, was allegedly observed by Yurkiw in the winter of 1988/89 at Madison Square Garden in the mens room snorting cocaine. No further information.

H= Sgt. [DELETE], 75 Pct, does ripoffs of people in the 75 Pct. Yurkiw informed the assigned that [DELETE] did ripoffs of people in the 75 Pct and that EX-PO [DELETE], told him that [DELETE] used to do the same thin in the 30 Pct. Yurkiw said that [DELETE] did not wish to relate this allegation to IAD at this time.

NOTE: Yurkiw also stated that Lt. [DELETE] and Sgt. [DELETE] directed him to stop making drug collars out of his sector at known drug locations. Yurkiw said that [DELETE] and [DELETE] had ulterior motives for doing this but did not specifically say any misconduct was involved.

On 11/16/89 the following logs were refered to the field:

Log #89-10994 refered to Queens FIAU (subject-PO [DELETE], 105)

Log #89-11783 refered to B.N. FIAU (subjects: POs [DELETE] [DELETE])

Invest. Off. Rank & Sign: SGT. WILLIAM A. BRADLEY

Supr. LT. JOHN SHIELDS

_______________

Notes:

1. In the wake of the 77th Precinct disclosures, Chief Taylor, his executive officer, two captains, seven lieutenants, and fourteen sergeants were administratively transferred by Police Commissioner Ward. The precinct's commanding officer was demoted and transferred.

2. Farrell was the commanding officer of the 75th Precinct from April 1984 through December 1986.

3. By that time, Dubois had resigned from the Department. According to Dowd, Dubois resigned, ironically, because he believed that he, Dowd, and other officers of the 75th Precinct would soon be arrested based on rumors of a large number of imminent arrests of police officers in Brooklyn North. Little did Dubois know that the arrests would occur (four months later) in the 77th Precinct and not in the 75th. Dowd, on the other hand, continued his career of corruption for another six years until May 1992 when he was arrested not by the Department, but as the result of an investigation conducted by the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.

4. A Command Discipline is a notation of a minor infraction noted in precinct records. It may, or may not, be accompanied by a penalty.

5. Because of the possibility of their continuing cooperation with law enforcement, the names of these informants will be withheld.

6. The name of this informant has been changed to protect his identity.

7. The informant's name is withheld to protect his identity.

8. This was precisely the time Trimboli planned to use Royos in the investigation against Dowd.

9. Because of the possibility of their continuing cooperation with law enforcement, their names are withheld.

10. IAD conducts a preliminary investigation in certain cases to determine whether a full-scale investigation is warranted.
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Re: The City of New York Commission Report (Mollen, 1994)

Postby admin » Tue Jun 23, 2015 7:05 am

PART 1 OF 2

IMPORTANT QUOTES

Throughout its investigation the Commission staff sought to find police officers actually engaged in corrupt activities who could be induced to describe openly and for the record their activities and their knowledge of the patterns of corruption observed during their careers. We were informed by people experienced in police work that no police officer had ever given such information and that none ever would, even if he himself were caught in a corrupt act and were offered immunity in exchange for his testimony. The tradition of the policeman's code of silence was so strong, we were advised, that it was futile to expect such testimony from any police officer. The most that could be expected was anonymous information or, if we were extremely lucky, testimony given under oath on an anonymous basis. All of the experienced people with whom we spoke agreed that if even one police officer could be induced to give inside information based upon personal experience, the testimony would be of inestimably greater value than any other evidence the Commission might uncover.

The search for a corrupt officer who would speak frankly and openly uncovered not one but five. However, the first and potentially most productive of these proved to be too valuable to keep to ourselves. Robert Leuci was a detective who had spent eleven years on the force and who had been assigned to the elite Special Investigation Unit (SIU) of the Narcotics Division. He had met police officers Durk and Serpico in 1970 and led them to believe that he would back up their charges that SIU had not adequately pursued certain narcotics cases. In the fall of 1970 Durk arranged for meetings between Leuci and various assistant district attorneys, the State Commission of Investigation, and the staff of this Commission. In these meetings Leuci's statements were inconclusive and not susceptible to investigation. He subsequently indicated that his purpose in submitting to questioning had been to discover how much information the Commission and other agencies possessed.

In February, 1971, Leuci was again interviewed by the Commission staff, and this time he was convinced to tell all he knew about corruption in SIU and to help the Commission expose it.

Leuci told of a Narcotics Division infested with corruption. Drawing on personal experiences as well as those he observed and discussed with fellow officers, he described enormous payoffs by narcotics violators, illegal wiretaps used to facilitate shakedowns, involvement of supervisory personnel in narcotics graft, and arrangements between police officers and organized crime members which gave the latter protection from arrest and advance knowledge of legitimate investigations involving them.

Leuci worked with Commission agents for about one month and obtained a number of incriminating tape-recorded conversations with police officers. It quickly became apparent that he had incalculable value as an undercover agent. His work, if allowed to continue for as long as it was productive, could result in criminal prosecutions which might well expose a network of narcotics related corruption involving many police officers and stretching outside the Department.

However, an investigation calculated to accomplish this end would, if successful, last for many months, even years, and would require concentrating on obtaining evidence in specific cases rather than on gathering information for the purpose of identifying patterns of corruption. Because the Commission's investigation was due to end in a few months, we decided that Leuci should be turned over to law enforcement authorities with the time and manpower necessary for such an investigation.

In March, 1971, Assistant United States Attorney General Wilson and Whitney North Seymour, Jr., United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, were apprised of Leuci's activities to date and advised that the Commission was willing to forego any use of Leuci or the information he had provided in favor of an investigation directed at criminal prosecutions. The Commission also offered to refrain from revealing or further pursuing certain investigations into narcotics and related corruption which might draw attention to Leuci, and to allow the attorney and the two agents who had been working with Leuci to devote their full time to the proposed investigation. The Commission's offer was accepted.

The following month Commissioner Murphy and First Deputy Commissioner William H. T. Smith were informed of the investigation and arrangements were made to transfer Leuci back into SIU where he could work most effectively. The Commissioner agreed to keep his knowledge of the investigation entirely confidential and to give his full assistance whenever requested to do so.

The investigation was pursued with great success by the original investigative team aided by personnel from Mr. Seymour's office and, as the scope of the investigation broadened, by agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and a few carefully selected police officers. By the spring of 1972 federal authorities were confident that the investigation would result in far-ranging indictments involving organized crime members, police officers, and others in the criminal justice system including even judges.

However, Detective Leuci's participation in the investigation came to an end in June, 1972, when a story printed in The New York Times precipitated a general disclosure of his activities. Six indictments have so far been returned alleging corruption on the part of four police officers, an assistant district attorney, three lawyers, a bail bondsman and a private investigator. Other indictments are anticipated, but some of the most important cases have undoubtedly been aborted by the premature disclosure of the investigation.

The Commission could not, of course, call Leuci as a witness in its public hearings since at that time he was still working as a federal undercover agent. Moreover, findings in other Commissions investigations were withheld during the hearings so as to avoid areas where the focusing of attention might threaten his undercover activities. [xii] With his exposure some of the information disclosed by Leuci and certain of the results of his undercover work can now be discussed and have been included, where relevant, in this report.

***

Corruption in narcotics law enforcement has grown in recent years to the point where high-ranking police officials acknowledge it to be the most serious problem facing the Department. In the course of its investigation, the Commission became familiar with each of the practices detailed by Chief Cawley, as well as many other corrupt patterns, including:

Keeping money and/or narcotics confiscated at the time of an arrest or raid.

Selling narcotics to addict-informants in exchange for stolen goods.

Passing on confiscated drugs to police informants for sale to addicts.

"Flaking," or planting narcotics on an arrested person in order to have evidence of a law violation.

"Padding," or adding to the quantity of narcotics found on an arrested person in order to upgrade an arrest.

Storing narcotics, needles and other drug paraphernalia in police lockers.

Illegally tapping suspects' telephones to obtain incriminating evidence to be used either in making cases against the suspects, or to blackmail them.

Purporting to guarantee freedom from police wiretaps for a monthly service charge.

Accepting money or narcotics from suspected narcotics law violators as payment for the disclosure of official information.

Accepting money for registering as police informants persons who were in fact giving no information and falsely attributing leads and arrests to them, so that their "cooperation" with the police may win them amnesty for prior misconduct.

Financing heroin transactions.

In addition to these typical patterns, the Commission learned of numerous individual instances of narcotics-related corrupt conduct on the part of police officers, such as:

Determining the purity and strength of unfamiliar drugs they had seized by giving small quantities to addict-informants to test on themselves.

Introducing potential customers to narcotics pushers.

Revealing the identity of a government informant to narcotics criminals.

Kidnapping critical witnesses at the time of trial to prevent them from testifying.

Providing armed protection for narcotics dealers.

Offering to obtain "hit men" to kill potential witnesses.

***

In 1968, allegations of irregularities in the Narcotics Division led to an investigation by the Department's Internal Affairs Division. As a result of this investigation, many members of the division, including almost the entire staff of SIU, were gradually transferred out of the Division. However, three years later, this Commission's study of narcotics-related corruption revealed that both sectors of the Narcotics Division were still pervaded by corruption. Within the past year, there has been a nearly one hundred percent turnover in Narcotics Division personnel, but as the present commander of the Division recently told the Commission, the problem of corruption remains....

In June, 1972, a dismissed plainclothesman who had been assigned to the Narcotics Division was convicted in New York County and sentenced to up to four years in prison for his part in an extortion scheme which involved six members of the Narcotics Division. According to testimony at the trial, he and two other police officers contacted a restaurant owner and demanded $6,000, threatening to arrest his daughter-in-law on a narcotics charge unless he paid them. They further threatened to send the woman's two children to a foundling home in the event of her arrest. The restaurant owner paid them what they asked.

Within a few months, the same policeman, along with some other members of the unit, again approached the man and demanded an additional $12,000. The man told them to return in a few days, and in the interim he arranged for police surveillance of the next transaction. The plainclothesman was arrested when he accepted a down payment in marked money....

They told of participation in police shakedowns of narcotics "cribs" and said that it was standard practice for an informant to find a location where drugs were being sold in large quantities, and by attempting to make a buy with a large denomination bill, to induce the seller to reveal the hiding place of his cash supply....On leaving, the informant would arrange to return later to make another buy. On his next visit, as the seller opened the door, the police would crash in behind the informant. If the police felt they could score without risk, they would take whatever money and narcotics were available and let the seller go. If the amount of money was small, they would usually arrest the seller but still keep most of the narcotics, turning in only the amount necessary to charge a felony or misdemeanor as the case might be....

The Commission learned that it was not uncommon for defense attorneys in narcotics cases to pay policemen for such favors as lying under oath and procuring confidential police and judicial records concerning their clients' cases....

Evidence uncovered by the United States Attorney's Office in Manhattan in a current investigation of bribery by heroin dealers confirms the fact that corruption in narcotics law enforcement goes beyond the Police Department and involves prosecutors, attorneys, bondsmen, and allegedly even certain judges....

one Tactical Patrol Force officer who was apparently so confident of the acceptability of bribery that he attempted to arrange for a significant narcotics violator to bribe an assistant district attorney. He later pleaded guilty to bribery and resigned from the force after having served in the Department for eighteen years....

Theoretically, police may not secretly tap a suspect's telephone without a warrant. However, since strict constitutional safeguards and a certain amount of red tape surround the procedure for obtaining a warrant, it was not uncommon for Narcotics Division detectives to monitor and record the conversations of suspects without the required court order.

Since the Police Department has no official record of a wiretap installed without a warrant, no arrest is officially expected. Thus, information obtained by means of illegal taps can be used as easily to extort money and drugs from suspects who have been overheard as to make cases against them. Two Narcotics Division detectives were recently observed by a federal undercover agent as they engineered just such a score. The detectives illegally tapped the telephone conversations of a suspect in order to determine the extent of his dealings in narcotics. They then confronted the suspect with the evidence they had against him and threatened to arrest him unless he paid them $50,000. The suspect acceded to their demand and was given his freedom. The undercover agent, a former member of the Narcotics Division, told the Commission that in his experience the case is not unique....

Most often a police officer seeking to score simply keeps for himself all or part of the money and drugs confiscated during a raid or arrest. One former member of the Narcotics Division recently assigned to other duties told the Commission that in his experience eighty to ninety percent of the members of the Narcotics Division participated in at least this type of score....

The sergeant took a black fur coat from the trunk of the car and hid it in his own, while the patrolman walked away with a stereo tape device and several tape cassettes. Other situations described by Logan indicate that theft by police of furnishings and other personal property from premises where a narcotics raid had taken place were not uncommon.

Logan testified that his PEP Squad sergeant taught him the various techniques of scoring, and that such scoring was standard police procedure among his fellow officers....

"[T]he general feeling was that the man was going to jail, was going to get what was coming to him, so why should you give him back his money and let him bail himself out. In a way we felt that he was a narcotics pusher, we knew he was a narcotics pusher, we kind of felt he didn't deserve no rights since he was selling narcotics."... "[t]he feeling is that it is his word against theirs."...

Logan testified that he began to let suspects go after he had taken their money, so that they would be less likely to complain. This practice was in keeping with the philosophy of scoring taught to Logan by his sergeant: "[W]hen you are scoring a guy, try to leave him happy. If you leave a guy happy, he won't beef, won't make a complaint against you." Logan explained in his testimony that this could be accomplished even after a large amount of money was taken from a suspect by releasing him with enough of his narcotics to get him back into business....

Another detective, assigned to a squad in Queens, had been a full partner in a narcotics wholesale enterprise, and testified at the same hearings that when he decided to join the partnership, he discussed with fellow officers the fact that at least part of his heroin supply would come from holding back large quantities of heroin from important narcotics arrests....

Narcotics retained from prior arrests are also used for "padding," that is, for adding to the quantity of narcotics found on a subsequently arrested person, thus enabling the arresting officer to upgrade the charge to a felony. It is also common to use illegally retained narcotics to "flake" a narcotics suspect, that is, to plant evidence on a person in order to make a narcotics arrest....

Waverly Logan, in his testimony before the Commission, told of an occasion when he flaked a suspect. He had arrested a suspected narcotics seller and planted four bags of narcotics on him. At the precinct house the prisoner told two narcotics detectives how the arrest had been made. One of the detectives then took Logan aside and carefully instructed him on how to write up the complaint in order to make the case stick....

one patrolman testified that padding can also be accomplished by mixing the seized narcotics with adulterants such as quinine and mannitol....

The Commission found that police officers were involved in possession and sale of narcotics in a variety of ways, including financing transactions, recruiting informants and addicts as pushers, and share-selling, where the pusher is given drugs on consignment and retains part of the proceeds as payment. In addition, the Commission found it common for police officers to use narcotics as a medium of exchange for goods and services....

The Commission was able to verify the allegations that merchandise-for-drugs transactions between police officers and addicts were commonplace....

One plainclothesman, in the middle of a narcotics-for-cigarettes transaction ordered a gasoline powered mini-bike. The informant explained that it was still daylight and that he could not conveniently and easily steal a mini-bike in Central Park until sundown. The officer indicated he didn't care about the informant's troubles in obtaining a mini-bike, he just wanted it and, emphatically, that night....

In one of these a narcotics plainclothesman gave the two Commission informants a written list specifying thirty-one quart bottles by brand name. He told them to make sure to "come through because I need them for my daughter's wedding shower." The patrolman paid for the liquor with a quantity of white powder containing heroin, starch, quinine, and mannitol....

Another similar case which resulted in the conviction of a police officer involved a young woman, the addict mother of several children, who had been arrested on information supplied by her mother and her boyfriend, who hoped she would be treated. The arresting officer, a member of the Narcotics Division, persuaded her to become an informant and continued to supply her with large quantities of narcotics. The arresting officer later introduced her to a "gangster" -- actually another member of the Narcotics Division -- and together, by threatening to harm her children, they forced her into becoming a share-seller pusher.

Eventually her boyfriend complained to the Internal Affairs Division and an arrest was made. At one point during the investigation, the patrolman kidnapped the victim and held her in captivity while trying to frighten her into refraining from testifying against him....

In the case of one police officer who was convicted for selling narcotics, it was clear from the evidence that during the period covered by the charges, from the summer of 1970 to December, 1970, he had been a wholesaler of substantial amounts of cocaine. The conviction was obtained largely through the cooperation of another arrested former policeman, who on several occasions had acted as a distributor for him. The evidence included a secretly-recorded conversation in which the defendant discussed the possible effects of his distributor's arrest on his cocaine operation, the possibility of fixing the colleague's case, and the desirability of killing the informant who was responsible for the arrest....

A former Narcotics Division detective, while a member of the force, financed a narcotics wholesale business that dealt in one-eighth kilo quantities of heroin. He obtained some of the heroin he used for resale from an underworld connection, a wholesaler in narcotics....

a narcotics wholesale ring that was responsible for the monthly distribution of 1.5 million dollars' worth of heroin, revealed that a New York City patrolman provided armed protection as the ring made its deliveries....

Members of the Narcotics Division have helped known narcotic violators win amnesty or leniency from district attorneys' offices by fraudulently registering them as police informants and attributing arrests and leads from other sources to these "informants" on official Department records....

Captain McGowan testified, "that a member of our Narcotics Bureau learned the identity of an East Harlem character who was an informant for the Federal Narcotics Bureau and the allegation was that he passed this information on to the organized crime people in that area, that the informant was subsequently taken upstate and murdered, and the detective was paid $5,000."...

it is unfair of some City residents to assume that the existence anywhere of conspicuous narcotics trading proves that policemen are either directly involved or are being paid to close their eyes to the illegal activity. Very often, it is not police corruption, but the overcrowding of the courts and the penal system, and the difficult standard of proof required to convict an arrested suspect that are to blame for the apparent non-enforcement of narcotics laws....

When a police officer keeps for himself a portion of confiscated narcotics he is not always acting from corrupt motives. The Department's practice in the past of not providing money to pay informants, who usually are addicts themselves, created great pressure on police officers to use seized narcotics to pay for information.

***

The Commission found that payments to the police by contractors and subcontractors were the rule rather than exceptions and constituted a major source of graft to the uniformed police. It must be noted that policemen were not alone in receiving payoffs from contractors. Much larger payoffs were made to inspectors and permit-granting personnel from other agencies....

Corruption is a fact of life in the construction industry. In addition to extensive payoffs contractors make to police and others in regulatory agencies, there is evidence of considerable corruption within the industry itself. Contractors have been known to pay owners' agents to get an inside track on upcoming jobs; subcontractors pay contractors' purchasing agents to receive projects or to get information helpful in competitive bidding; sub-subcontractors pay subcontractors; dump-truck drivers exact a per-load payment for taking out extra loads they don't report to their bosses; and hoist engineers get money from various subcontractors to insure that materials are lifted to high floors without loss or damage. In this climate, it is only natural that contractors also pay the police....

the responsibility for inspecting certain permits and enforcing the ordinances outlined above lies with the police. The police officers charged with this responsibility have always been faced with a particularly tempting opportunity for corruption....

In a small job like the renovation of a brownstone, the general contractor was likely to pay the police between $50 and $150 a month, and the fee ascended sharply for larger jobs. An excavator on a small job paid $50 to $100 a week for the duration of excavation to avoid summonses for dirt spillage, flying dust, double-parked dump trucks, or for running vehicles over the sidewalk without a permit. A concrete company pouring a foundation paid another $50 to $100 a week to avoid summonses for double-parking its trucks or for running them across a sidewalk without a curb cut. (Concrete contractors are especially vulnerable, as it is essential that foundation-pouring be carried on continuously. This means that one or more trucks must be kept standing by while one is actually pouring.) Steel erectors paid a weekly fee to keep steel delivery trucks standing by; masons paid; the crane company paid. In addition, all construction sites were approached by police for contributions at Christmas, and a significant number paid extra for additional police patrols in the hope of obtaining protection from vandalism of building materials and equipment....

A promising method of curtailing construction graft which the Department has yet to use on a broad scale, would be a campaign to arrest contractors who offer bribes to policemen. The recent use in the Bronx of police undercover agents posing as regular policemen has led to the arrests of such would-be bribers.

***

payoffs from bars licensed by the state to sell liquor, along with those from construction firms, were the most common source of illegal outside income to uniformed policemen, and that unlicensed premises, operating completely outside the law, were paying substantial amounts to plainclothesmen and detectives. Like the construction industry, the business of selling liquor by the drink is governed by a complex system of state and local laws, infractions of which can lead to criminal penalties, as well as suspension or loss of license. Thus licensees are highly vulnerable to police shakedowns.....

virtually all bars were found to provide free food and drinks to policemen and also made Christmas and vacation payments to police. In addition, investigators found that many bars doing a substantial volume of business customarily made regular biweekly or monthly payments to the police. During the Commission's investigation such payments were usually initiated by the sector patrol sergeant who, bar owners said, would pay a visit to the premises and point out various violations or suggest that he could always flush the soap down the toilet and write out a summons for "no soap in the men's room."...

In one bar, Commission investigators were mistaken for detectives, and the owner told them, in a tape-recorded conversation, that he had recently paid the precinct captain. As a result of that incident the precinct captain, now a deputy inspector, has been brought up on departmental charges of unlawfully accepting $300 and then attempting to persuade the bar owner not to testify against him....

Behavior of supervising patrol sergeants in the Nineteenth, who were responsible for licensed premises inspections, was consistent with a pattern of biweekly and monthly payoffs to them by bar owners. Duty schedules in the precinct were arranged so that the three sergeants who were alleged to act as bagmen were always assigned to different shifts. They turned out to be a bar-hopping lot. The sheer volume of their visits to bars was out of all proportion to law-enforcement problems posed by licensed premises.

The most glaring example was one sergeant who invariably showed up in one bar or another ten minutes after going on duty and ordered a V.O. on the rocks, then proceeded to go from bar to bar for the rest of his tour....

In some cases, uniformed police officers shook down afterhours clubs. One owner of such an establishment told the Commission the following story, which was later corroborated by another source. Shortly after his bar opened, the local precinct captain paid a visit and asked the owner if he was running an after-hours bar. The owner admitted he was, whereupon the captain produced a neatly typed list of payments the owner was to make to the police for the privilege of operating. Listed were captains, lieutenants, sergeants, and sector car patrolmen, with the amount to be paid to each....

The Commission concluded during its investigation that the interests of both the police and the public would best be served by divesting the Police Department of responsibility for enforcing these laws except in response to specific complaints....Any corruption which may exist in such agencies is a lesser evil than corruption among policemen.

***

One group of stores most vulnerable to police who threaten to issue summonses for violations of the Sabbath Law were delicatessens and bodegas, which are seven-day-a-week Spanish grocery stores. Bodegas were doubly vulnerable, since their proprietors frequently do not speak English fluently, were unfamiliar with the maze of provisions in the Sabbath Law, and were unlikely to know where to go to complain about shakedowns. Every Sunday, the Commission found that many delicatessen and bodega owners paid police from $2 to $10, or the equivalent in merchandise -- usually cigarettes, cold cuts, canned goods, or six-packs of beer. In effect, these payoffs amounted to a license to stay open on Sunday. Proprietors who were unwilling to pay were plagued with numerous summonses for violations of the Sabbath Law and sometimes even for unrelated violations.

***

Although the Commission felt traffic payments were but a minor part of police corruption and chose not to devote any sizable investigative effort to the matter, it received a flood of complaints from citizens indicating that traffic payoffs are a subject of wide interest. And the staggering number of illegally-parked cars passed over by policemen issuing summonses bears silent witness to the prevalence of selective enforcement....

An employee of one major trucking firm, which did not payoff the police, told the Commission that his company paid between $48,000 and $60,000 a year in parking fines. By way of contrast, a Commission informant reported that another company, a large air freight concern, paid the police $15,000 a year -- a staggering amount, but a substantial saving over the amount paid in fines by the other trucking company....

The owner of a chain of six parking garages near Madison Square Garden told a Commission consultant that he had been paying the police $100 per garage per week -- a total of $600 a week -- until the Commission's public hearings began. At that point, he said the police raised the price to $800 a week on the grounds that it had become more dangerous for them to overlook violations....

Two policemen in a radio car stopped a motorist who had just made a U-turn and told him that they would overlook the violation if he "showed his appreciation."...


As for payments to police officers for overlooking moving violations, the Commission feels that motorists are often the instigators of such bribes and should be arrested. If the Department vigorously pursues its policy of arresting those who offer money to police officers, the practice will be much diminished.

***
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Re: The City of New York Commission Report (Mollen, 1994)

Postby admin » Tue Jun 23, 2015 7:06 am

PART 2 OF 2

At the first of these incidents another driver, who worked the day shift for the same garage as Burkert, was stopped by police officers while he was towing a wrecked new car in the Fifth Precinct in lower Manhattan. The officers apparently asked the driver for $30....A month later, when Burkert responded to an accident in Long Island City and received permission from the owner of the car for the tow job, he was approached by an officer who wanted to be "taken care of" on the spot....On a third occasion, when Burkert was approached by police as he was preparing to tow a car, he again set up a subsequent meeting and kept the date, accompanied as usual by a microphone and two Commission agents. At the meeting he told the police that he didn't know if his shop was going to be given authorization to make repairs on the automobile, and no money changed hands. The officer apparently resented not being paid off and issued a summons to Burkert the following day. Through another policeman, word was passed to Burkert that the resentful officer wanted $100 from the driver "to be friends."...On still another occasion, Burkert was approached at the site of a tow job by a police officer asking for money....shaking down tow-truck drivers was a prevalent practice in New York...

When police payoffs are made by towing companies, those companies are left free to harass and browbeat motorists who have been involved in accidents, often signing them up at the scene for repair work which will be billed at rates inflated at least enough to cover the payoffs. A second result of such payments is that the immunity from traffic summonses conferred on certain tow-truck drivers allows them to drive around the City in a manner dangerous to other motorists and pedestrians.

***

According to every police officer who cooperated with the Commission, it was common practice for policemen to make payments to each other for services rendered, ranging from the payment of a couple of dollars for typing up arrest reports to the payment of hundreds of dollars for choice assignments....The Commission heard numerous allegations of police officers paying other officers to handle routine work....both Droge and Logan stated that the practice of paying for temporary assignments was a common one. Payments were also made for getting one's choice of days off and of vacation dates. Phillips testified that the roll call man in a busy precinct could make $200 a month in this way...in some precincts, police officers bought permanent assignments from the administrative lieutenant for various amounts, commonly $500....appointment as a detective could be bought for a price which ranged from $500 to $2,000....police officers have bribed certain police surgeons to certify that they were permanently disabled, making it possible for those officers to retire early and receive all or part of their pensions. One doctor, a former police surgeon who has been retired for twenty years, told the Commission that surgeons took such kickbacks when he was in the Department, and that he believed the practice still to be in existence.

***

By far the most widespread form of misconduct the Commission found in the Police Department was the acceptance by police officers of gratuities in the form of free meals, free goods, and cash payments. Almost all policemen either solicited or accepted such favors in one form or another ....

It was not only the policeman on patrol who felt that his lunches should be provided free. Numerous examples were reported to the Commission of officers in the station house sending radio cars to local restaurants to pick up meals for police officers whose duties prevented them from getting out on the street....

The owner of one home-delivery food business which sold $2.00 fried chicken dinners found that his dinners were so popular with the police in his local precinct that they were ordering eighty to ninety dinners a week from him. This was substantially cutting into his profits, so he decided to start charging the police a nominal price of $.50 per dinner. This angered the police, who began issuing summonses to his delivery cars on every trip they made, resulting in $600 in summonses in one week. The owner called the Police Commissioner's office and explained his problem, and soon afterwards, he stopped receiving summonses. However, he had already dropped the $.50 charge per dinner....

Two patrolmen in particular confronted Commission investigators with a situation difficult to ignore by pulling up nightly to the back entrance of a fairly high-priced downtown restaurant located directly under the windows of the Commission's offices. The officers were served in their car by a uniformed waiter with a tray and a napkin draped over one arm.

Non-uniformed officers generally ordered less modest meals than uniformed patrolmen. Plainclothesmen, detectives, and high-level officers, who worked in civilian clothes instead of the conspicuous blue uniform, patronized a much wider selection of restaurants than the uniformed force, including many clearly in the luxury category. And the meals they ordered were often grandiose compared with the cafeteria-style food favored by uniformed men.

William Phillips, when assigned as a detective in a midtown precinct, regularly patronized, with other detectives, the very best restaurants, where he received gratis what he called "electric-chair meals." He reported that as he sipped the last drop of brandy after an enormous feast all he could think was "pull the switch, I'm ready to go!"....

The owner of one of New York's finest French restaurants reported to the Commission that he was approached by policemen demanding free dinners. When he flatly turned them down, they took retaliatory action: The restaurant was located on a street where parking was illegal before 7:00 P.M., and the police began showing up every night at 6:55 to tow away cars belonging to patrons....

The Commission's interest turned to hotels after a former hotel security officer came in with hotel records indicating that at least one hotel was paying off police in free meals, free rooms, and cash payments at Christmas....

Records from several of the hotels showed that they each fed as many as 300 to 400 meals a month to policemen in their employee dining rooms, mostly to patrolmen in uniform. The value of these meals was usually under $2.00 each. To get free meals in the employee dining rooms, the policemen generally went to the security office, where their uniforms -- or in the case of non-uniformed officers, their shields -- served as identification. They were either asked to sign the meal checks or hotel logs with their names and ranks or were given meal tickets to be turned in in the dining rooms. When the names given in the hotel checks and logs were checked against the precinct rosters, a sizable percentage of them proved to be false (including two uniformed officers identifying themselves as Whitman Knapp and Sydney Cooper, who was then chief of the Department's anti-corruption force).

In these same hotels, higher-ranking officers (sergeants, detectives, inspectors, lieutenants, captains, and one chief inspector) ate in the hotels' better restaurants, ordering the most expensive items on the menu, with the tab rarely coming to less than $20 per person in the larger midtown hotels. And the volume was substantial: over $500 a month at most hotels checked and $1,500 a month at the Statler-Hilton....

Bar owners and policemen also told the Commission that it was common practice for bars to offer free drinks to policemen. As discussed above in Chapter Eight, three patrol sergeants in the Nineteenth Precinct regularly spent their entire tours going from one bar to another. While the behavior of patrolmen was less extreme, there was plenty of drinking on duty and off by them, too, with no evidence of any attempt by superiors to stop it....

Payments to police at Christmas by bars, restaurants, hotels, department stores, and other retail businesses have long been a police tradition....A particularly rigorous campaign was waged against the practice in December of 1971, with the reported result that officers collected their Christmas gratuities in January, after the campaign was over.

Christmas money was usually collected in a fairly organized fashion. Early in December, lists were made up at many precinct houses, division headquarters, and squad rooms, on which were entered the names of all the businesses in their jurisdiction from which the police expected Christmas payments. The list was then divided up among the various officers, each of whom was to go to the businesses on his list and collect....

When asked how long the master list was, Patrolman Phillips said, "it was quite a long list, ten or fifteen yellow pages ... [it contained] every hotel, almost every bar, every cabaret, and other business establishments in the Seventeenth Precinct."...

The Christmas lists presented to hotels in particular were quite detailed, giving amounts to be paid to police officers of all ranks, up to and including the borough commander and Chief Inspector....

A number of merchants gave policemen gifts for services rendered and free merchandise. These included such items as free packages of cigarettes solicited by policemen from tobacco shops and grocery stores, free bags of groceries from retail stores, free service at dry cleaners and laundries, and free goods from factories and wholesalers. In his public testimony before the Commission Patrolman Droge stated that in one precinct in which he had served, police officers had used their tours to make the rounds of a bread factory, a frankfurter plant, and an ice cream plant, among others, stocking up on goods to take home. "I recall one police officer," said Droge, "who felt that if he didn't go home with a bag of groceries, then his tour wasn't complete."...

Proprietors of burglarized stores and factories, if they arrived at the scene before the police did, paid $5 a man to each officer who showed up. However, if the police arrived first, they often helped themselves to merchandise....

In many instances it is unfair to infer that payments of a gratuity necessarily reflected a shakedown by the police officer involved. A bar owner, restaurateur, or other businessman is usually most happy to have a police officer in or near his premises, and in a good many situations, payments -- particularly Christmas gratuities -- were made simply because the police officer became friendly with the local merchants in his patrol area. The fact is that the public by and large does not regard gratuities as a serious matter. While some may be offended by the occasionally arrogant way in which some police officers demand what they consider to be their due, most people are willing to allow a police officer who spends long hours providing protection for an area to stop in for a quick free meal or cup of coffee at an eating establishment which enjoys the benefit of his protection....

there would seem to be no reason why the practice of hotels providing free rooms to police officers could not be officially sanctioned. If an officer is forced to work late hours in any area of the City far from his home and is expected to be on duty or in court early the following morning, it does not seem unreasonable that he be provided with a hotel room, on a space available basis, with the expense being paid for by the City....

Assuming that hotel and restaurants actually do not wish to provide free meals and rooms to police officers, it has been demonstrated that they are not forced to. At the time of the Commission hearings, under the glare of publicity, many of the big hotels announced that they would no longer provide such services.

***

Although the Commission did not find conclusive evidence of police corruption involving loansharks, in the course of its work it came across numerous allegations of police collusion with loansharks and the nature of the business is such that corruption would seem to be an obvious hazard. Some policemen apparently shake down loansharks on a haphazard basis and others have been known to work for loansharks in various capacities, ranging from referring to potential borrowers to roughing up slow payers.

Another patrolman, currently under indictment in the Bronx, was described by Bronx County District Attorney Burton Roberts as "a $100-a-week collector for a loanshark operation."...Another patrolman in the Bronx is currently under indictment for allegedly operating a loanshark ring with two civilian partners....

Patrolman Phillips and others told the Commission that, when police officers were called upon to handle DOA's, they would sometimes go through the victim's pockets and steal anything of value. Likewise, when called to a house or apartment where someone has died, the police have been known to burglarize the premises if the deceased had been living alone. Similar burglaries have taken place after police officers escorted someone to the hospital, who turned out to be dead on arrival. In such cases, officers would take the dead person's keys and let themselves into his apartment, then take anything of value. Patrolman Phillips told the Commission that old people who die in the City frequently keep large sums of money hidden in their homes, apparently not trusting banks. He went on to say that thefts from DOA's in such circumstances have amounted to several thousand dollars....

Various informants told the Commission that truck hijackings almost always received police protection in one form or another. The Commission was told that various policemen were sometimes alerted ahead of time to a scheduled hijacking....

In the past few years, several instances have come to light of individual police involvement with auto theft rings. One of these dovetails with allegations received by the Commission that police officers sometimes ride shotgun for such outfits. The others involve payments for protection of such rings....

it was common practice for policemen responding to burglarized premises to steal items the previous thieves had left behind....

"Me and my partner went in the back of the building [where] a door was open. We went in. There was about six or seven radio cars out front. A lot of cops was inside. Everybody was stuffing clothes down their pants, in their shirt, up their sleeves. Everybody looking fat because they were stuffing so much clothes in their pants. And my partner was telling me that the owners usually take it out on their income tax...."

Commission agents, while conducting a surveillance of an afterhours bar after midnight, stumbled upon a flagrant example of what appeared to be a compound burglary. The agents noticed an unoccupied police car parked next to a meat packing company where a door was ajar. They soon saw men in police uniforms emerge from the packing company carrying large, paper-wrapped packages which they loaded into the car. In the next few hours, four other police cars (the entire motor patrol force for one-half of the precinct) responded to the site. Police officers from four of the five cars were seen putting packages from the company into their cars....

Before Phillips was caught by the Commission, he had arranged for a man accused of possession of a stolen $250,000 check to make contact with a lawyer who claimed he could bribe any of several judges. The man was represented in these negotiations by a Commission informant wearing a transmitter. The lawyer asked for $10,000 to fix the case, saying he could give an 80% guarantee of acquittal. The lawyer received an initial payment of $4,500 before the informant's transmitter was discovered by Patrolman Phillips and the negotiations broken off. The Commission has no way of knowing the truth of the representations made by the lawyer, who fled the country after being discovered....

The Commission received several allegations that applicants for pistol permits have made payments to the appropriate precinct captain in order to get permits. The fee was usually reported to be $100, requested by the clerical officer to expedite approval of the application for a permit, with the understanding that the money would be passed on to the precinct commander....

Companies doing background checks on job applicants have, in the past, paid police officers for looking through Department records to determine whether the applicants had criminal records, and for supplying copies of these records. In 1971, following an investigation by the Department of Investigation, nine policemen and fourteen corporations were indicted in New York courts for participating in the sale of records of this kind....One detective was found to have performed checks for at least seven companies for over fifteen years, netting more than $15,000 a year for this service....

The Commission heard numerous allegations from Gypsies and others that some policemen, particularly detectives assigned to the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad (PP&C), received payments from Gypsy confidence artists who swindle people who come to them for advice, particularly the elderly. In return for the payoffs, officers did what they could to insure that the swindlers would not be apprehended and arrested....

The most common of the Gypsy confidence games is the Gypsy blessing, usually perpetrated by self-styled Gypsy "spiritual advisors" on lonely elderly women who seek their advice. After several visits, they are usually told that the cause of their problems is a "curse" which someone has placed on their money. These women are told that the curse can be removed only by the Gypsy blessing, and they are advised to bring their money in to be blessed. When the money is brought in, the advisor sews it up in a special bag, which is switched for an identical bag containing paper. The victim is told to put this bag away in a dark place like a bank vault for a specified time -- often two years -- and warned that if she should open the bag before the time is up the money will vanish. The Commission was told that such thefts range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $40,000....

The number of people caught and convicted for participating in any type of criminal activity is always a small fraction of those actually involved. It is difficult to make arrests and even more difficult to satisfy standards of proof necessary for convictions with respect to many crimes which, nevertheless, are quite apparently being committed on a large scale. For the Commission's purposes, tape-recorded conversations in which corrupt police officers discussed their activities with undercover agents were invaluable even though such evidence is, under current law, insufficient to establish guilt without further corroboration. Using criminal convictions to measure the extent of police corruption is particularly worthless because the transactions are necessarily secret and those involved in them are extremely unlikely to complain....

In the past a number of administrative defects precluded effective investigations of police corruption in New York City and indicated a lack of adequate planning by the Department's top management. Specifically, the Department's machinery for detecting and investigating police corruption was fragmented and even when unified was not given official standing, adequate records, or adequate manpower. In addition, the Department often failed to use appropriate and effective techniques of investigation....

To correct this organizational fragmentation, the various units charged with searching out misconduct within the Department and with maintaining internal integrity and efficiency were brought together in an Inspection Services Bureau (ISB). Command of this Bureau was vested in the First Deputy Commissioner....However, until Commissioner Murphy took over the Department, the ISB lacked the authority and resources necessary for its job....

there are indications that there was also some reluctance on the part of top level police personnel to undertake investigations that might have led to exposure of widespread corruption inconsistent with the official line that corruption was limited to a few "rotten apples."...

An example is the untouched file of specific and serious allegations against New York City police officers that was found by Commission investigators in the course of an early investigation into narcotics corruption. The allegations, which concerned seventy-two officers, had been referred to the Department by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) during a fourteen-month period beginning in April, 1968....

Although the Commission found evidence that the existence and contents of this file were known to the supervisors of the Inspectional Services Bureau, nothing -- as far as the Commission was able to ascertain -- was ever done about the allegations until our investigators came upon the file in the late fall of 1970....

the fact remains that the Department was given reason to suspect that some of its members were extortionists, murderers, and heroin entrepreneurs and made no attempt to verify these suspicions or dispute them....

On April 30, 1970, two BNDD inspectors met with the Chief of the Narcotics Division. At this meeting, serious allegations against nine members of the Narcotics Division were revealed and discussed in detail....no departmental action was ever taken on these allegations....

In the files of the Internal Affairs Division, Commission agents found a request from BNDD for assistance from the Department in an operation which might have led to the exposure of certain police officers believed to be involved in the sale of narcotics. The request had been forwarded by Deputy Inspector John Norey, commander of the Intelligence Division, to First Deputy Commissioner Walsh, who in turn sent it to Supervising Assistant Chief Inspector John McGovern, then the commander of IAD and Walsh's right hand man in corruption investigations. The request was never acted upon. Instead, it was filed with an attached coversheet with two notations written on it in the hand of Chief McGovern. One note reads "I want to get our men out of that." The other, apparently referring to instructions from the First Deputy Commissioner, says, "Norey 11/19/69 -- IDC doesn't want to help the feds lock up local police. Let them arrest federal people."....

Responsibility for investigating corruption has always -- in theory at least -- rested with commanders. But as former First Deputy Commissioner John Walsh testified, reports submitted at six-month intervals from field commanders about corruption in their units always indicated the absence of corruption....

Whatever its obvious hazards, vesting primary responsibility for all but the most serious corruption investigations in the commands concerned appears to be the most rational way for the Police Department to deal with the problem on more than an emergency basis.

***

Investigation of misconduct is the first step in a sequence of possible actions against allegedly corrupt police officers. Within the Department the next step is the disciplinary process. The disciplinary options available to the Commission in corruption cases as well as others are limited. Moreover, even these options have not always been utilized fully or effectively. The formal disciplinary apparatus was and is overburdened and understaffed, and the range of penalties available to deal with officers convicted in Departmental Hearings is inadequate....

Early in his tenure Commissioner Murphy clouded the general excellence of his promotions by elevating to high rank a few officers whose integrity was widely questioned throughout the Department. These promotions raised doubts in the minds of many officers about the sincerity of his intentions to root out corruption....

Joseph McGovern, a former Supervising Assistant Chief Inspector and Chief of Inspectional Services, testified before this Commission that he could not think of a single precinct commander who had been shifted for failure to maintain the integrity of his command. Indeed there is little evidence to suggest that such derelictions by subordinates ever seriously impeded a commander's rise to higher rank....

Commissioner Murphy has revised departmental disciplinary procedures so that precinct commanders can immediately and directly discipline the men under them with penalties of up to loss of five days vacation time for a number of violations of departmental rules....With this important exception, the Murphy administration has been able to make few visible changes in the Department's disciplinary structure and procedures. On the whole, the structure and procedures are prescribed by the City's Administrative Code or the State's Civil Service Law and therefore can be changed only through the time-consuming and sometimes difficult process of legislative amendment. Consequently, the way the Department now handles major charges of misconduct against its members -- including most charges of corruption -- is the same way it has handled them for years....

The volume of cases reaching the Department Advocate and the Trials Deputy is seriously straining their capacity....over the year he himself probably averages three or four trials per working day....The Department Advocate is only a little better off than the Trials Deputy. He has a staff of six uniformed and two civilian lawyers. These nine men processed 1937 cases during 1971....It is easy to see that if eight men have an annual caseload of 1900, whenever one man spends more than a day disposing of a case another man has to dispose of two or three cases a day -- and that includes both preparation time and trial time....Lack of adequate time for preparation in the not very recent past was so common that Detective Frank Serpico, the chief witness in the departmental trials of a number of Bronx plainclothesmen, was put on the stand without having been given any opportunity to refresh his recollection and asked to testify concerning four-year-old events. However, the advocate's caseload has been reduced by the new procedure which grants commanders authority to handle command discipline cases. Before this new procedure was instituted, the Department Advocate's caseload was approaching 200 a month....

Since there were 909 cases pending at the beginning of calendar 1971 and 880 pending at the end of it, there was no great progress in clearing up the backlog. The Department Advocate estimates that the average time consumed between charges and disposition is six months or more. These delays pose a problem in terms of the thirty-day rule which governs departmental hearings. Under this rule, an officer suspected of or charged with misconduct is permitted to put in his retirement papers and retire thirty days later, at which time he becomes immune to departmental disciplinary proceedings and eligible to receive his pension if he has served long enough to qualify for one. This results in a thirty-day race, with a suspected officer seeking to retire before the disciplinary proceedings against him can be completed. Although only a handful of policemen escaped discipline by this route, the ones who did escape often were the most serious offenders. For example, there were ten thirty-day cases in 1970. Trials were held in seven of them, resulting in five dismissals from the force and two acquittals. In the first of the remaining three, the defendant executed a complex technical maneuver that probably will never be repeated. In the second, the defendant was in a psychiatric hospital. However, in the third case, a bribe-receiving case against a lieutenant that may well have been that year's most important case, the lieutenant's lawyer was able to prolong the trial, which began twenty-five days before the deadline, past that deadline's expiration, enabling the lieutenant to retire with his full pension....

There are no statistics reflecting the number of situations where a police officer resigned before charges were brought but after he realized he was in danger of being charged. Under these circumstances, the Department might well never attempt to bring charges since it is virtually impossible to complete disciplinary proceedings within thirty days unless the investigation and preparation of the case has already been completed....

Perhaps the most troublesome issue in the disciplining of policemen found guilty in departmental hearings is the inappropriateness of the available penalties. The Administrative Code provides no gradations of penalty between outright dismissal from the force and a fine of up to and including thirty days' pay or vacation followed by a year's probation. [i] The Commission has recommended that the disciplinary alternatives available to the Police Commissioner be broadened to include greater periods than thirty days. However, even the available penalties were often utilized in the past to treat corrupt officers in a lenient manner....

The Police Commissioner's decisions on penalties in disciplinary hearings are subject to judicial review, and in fact have been reversed in several recent, well-publicized corruption cases. The reasons for reversal usually centered on the requirement for pension forfeiture upon dismissal for cause from the force. This was one of the considerations that motivated the Commission's recommendation, discussed in the Summary, for the separation of pension considerations from departmental disciplinary hearings. The Department should not be obliged to keep corrupt police officers in its ranks merely because some courts feel that loss of pension is too harsh a penalty for some offenses....

It should be noted that a fine of thirty days' pay or less of active-duty officers is usually not all taken out of the next paycheck, but is taken out one or two days at a time from each subsequent paycheck.

***

Judge Fraiman characterized the Police Department as an autonomous and powerful agency which " ... does pretty well what it wishes to do and is not answerable to the Department of Investigation....This was clearly evidenced in the Police Department's failure to comply with Mayor Lindsay's May, 1969, directive instructing all City agencies immediately to notify the Department of Investigation of any allegation of misconduct or corruption involving a public employee. The Police Department did not comply until after the establishment of this Commission, when the Mayor issued an Executive Order in August, 1970, reaffirming this procedure.

-- THE KNAPP COMMISSION REPORT ON POLICE CORRUPTION: COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE ALLEGATIONS OF POLICE CORRUPTION AND THE CITY'S ANTI-CORRUPTION PROCEDURES[/quote][/quote]
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