Latest / NYPD Through The Looking Glass / NYPD Police Officer Joe Badalamente

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NYPD Police Officer Joe Badalamente · NYPD Through The Looking Glass

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Once and a homeless guy was grabbed by a grizzly bear through the old McGillagorilla type pages.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: The guy got too close and the bear reached through and grabbed him and was mauling him.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: And Charlie took out his 38 revolver and shot and killed the bear with one shot through the heart.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: He could have taught Leonardo Leonardo DiCaprio a thing or two.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: He killed the grizzly bear with one shot from a 38 and got hate mail for the rest of his career.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: There wasn't even a PETA yet.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't even exist, but he got hate mail and he used to brag about so I came to the park in 86, so 15 years later, he was still getting hate mail.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um but what what what the hell was he supposed to do?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: The guy was and the guy died.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: The guy died.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the male used to say things like that.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: The guy died anyway.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: He was homeless.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure they didn't say homeless in 1971.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: He was a bum.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: You should have let him die.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like the old joke.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's Manhattan.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: People will step over a homeless guy to throw blood on a fur coat, right?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's the joke.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the way it was with Charlie.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's the best Zeus story that I could ever.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we have NYPD police officer Joe Battalamente.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: He's the author of many books, including his new one, The Big One, Reflections of an NYPD lieutenant.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Joe, welcome to the show.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot for having me, Vic.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Joe, why don't you introduce yourself?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Tell the listeners a little something about yourself.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like you said, my name is Joe Battalamente.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was with the NYPD from 1985 to 2005 A.D., uh so which means I'm actually retired longer than I was on the job.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh majority of my time after doing my field training in Brooklyn, I was in Central Park Precinct from 1986.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And but I left several times to do other things.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I worked at the hub site in the 2-5 precinct in East Harlem.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: A uh a couple of details, I pretty much did everything you could do in Central Park uh while I was there.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh SNOO, CPOP.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I was a community affairs officer for a short time, highway safety.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then I left about two years before I retired.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I worked at the academy in the executive development section.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh post-retetirement, I uh went right into financial crimes investigations for various banks and um learned a lot there.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh learned a lot about myself that I didn't think I was capable of.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the patience that it takes, the tediousness to sit in front of sometimes three monitors all day long.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've written two books.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh before this book, the the the big one, I wrote um a novel called The King and Me, uh Rock and Roll Fantasy.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of plays with the idea of Elvis, the conspiracy theory where Elvis faked his death to get away from the drugs and the fame.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Did stand-up comedy for many, many years.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've written an article for Police One now for four years.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so going forward, writing will be my thing because I enjoy the idea that I can do it from home and don't have to go to a comedy club or to a set.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've done some acting work, and writing seems to be the thing that I feel most comfortable doing.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell, so where'd you grow up?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Ridgewood, Queens.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was born in Manhattan at Mount Sana Hospital.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had a beautiful view of Central Park.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: For about two, three days I had a great apartment overlooking the park.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh went home to Middle Village, Queens, and then my parents moved us to uh Ridgewood, Queens, and went to grow up at Cleveland High School.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah, it was uh an interesting interesting childhood.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell We're about the same age and you came on the job young.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: What made you join the NYPD?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Pension.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh my parents, uh I wanted to be an actor, and I think that uh scared them.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: So um my father was a New York City sanitation worker for 30 odd years.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: So um they pretty much said I could be anything I wanted as long as it was a cop, a fireman, or a sanitation worker.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, you know, I was I you know, like every little boy wanted to be a cop, an astronaut, a fireman, you know.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I took the test when I was, I think I wasn't even 18 years old yet, actually.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: I took 1175, which was December, I believe, of 1982.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: That did well enough to get called right away, like by that summer.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember being in the academy gym doing the uh physical.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: And when I got up to the front of the line, the guy was telling people in front of me, All right, we'll see you in two months, see you in two months, see you in a month.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And they looked at me and looked up at me, we'll see you in a couple of years.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you had to be 20 at the time.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure what it is now to to get called.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um So yeah, what drew me to the job was the the mis I didn't have anyone in my family in the police department, uh uh and not not one person.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a very uh very mysterious, and I was very surprised to find out a lot of things like overtime for an arrest.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was something that I didn't expect.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, it was just um an unfolding for me.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I did my NSU in Brooklyn South at uh we used to fall out of the seven, eight precinct, um, I believe on Bergen.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought I was gonna stay in Brooklyn.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I was gonna be there for the rest of my career, and um got the orders that I was going to Central Park.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And about a week before the the the orders came down, we got flown to Central Park for a uh concert on the Great Lawn, like uh Romeo and Juliet, I remember it being like uh like a ballet.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: And um walking across the Great Lawn, which at the time was a great dust bowl, and having uh the wind blow the dust all over our uniforms.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually turned to one of my friends and said, Can you imagine having to work in this place full time?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And within 10 days I was officially transferred there.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was crazy.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So you went from Brooklyn South, which was basically mob land.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Allegedly.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: With my last name, I don't know anything about it, and I'm gonna take the fifth on that.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, you had that detail working out there.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: What what was your first impression?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Get like what was the orientation like when you get to the command?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like, for those of you who don't know, you get to an NYPD precinct, they sit you down, they introduce you to the delegate.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Excuse me, he has the cells, he has this, he has that.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm guessing Central Park was a lot different.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it was they were stables.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: They were stables for years before they became a precinct.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think the original building was built in the 1850s.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Again, there'll be a history buff that'll correct me, but I mean the the I don't know, you probably were there because she worked in Manhattan North, but there was a courtyard and the hay hooks was still there on what used to be where they would pull the hay up for the horses.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not talking about mounted.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about horses prior to there being a precinct.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then it was mounted, there was mounted there for a while, but I got there in 1988, July of 1986, right after the Fourth of July centennial.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it was it was interesting because again, it's it's a park.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's 843 acres.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, it was a place they sent some cops who couldn't get along well with others.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and um they were trying to turn it into a real precinct around that time because uh the uh Central Park Conservancy started in 1984, and they started the you gotta have park weekends where they would just have buckets of set up for money, and they did so well that they eventually took over running the park from the parks department.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you learned very quickly there who was in charge.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was the parks department, the conservancy, and you could literally be dealing with a homeless person as an aid or, you know, EDP, and then turn and you're dealing with a billionaire from Central Park West or Fifth Avenue.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So it did teach you to be very flexible.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but as far as orientation, I mean they walked us around the precinct, I remember the first day, and we walked by the anti-crime office that was probably the SNOO anti-crime and probably something else.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember them, the the cop who was walking us around, Georgie Johnston, saying, That's anti-crime, don't shoot them.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately, one of the officers was Stephen McDonald.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And within 10 days, Stephen was shot, and I did midnight's my first week in the park.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And my brother woke me up and said that uh a guy in your precinct just got shot.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like out of it.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: I go, my precinct, and it turned out it was Stephen, who I was lucky to know.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: I got to know him over many years, and he would always come to our promotion retirement parties, and I hosted the parties, so uh met him on many occasions, and in July I was invited to go to the uh to the renaming of the police academy and got to meet his son Connor for the first time as an adult.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: I used to play Santa Claus at the Priestum party, so I got to meet him as a very young kid, uh, but it was the first time I ever met him as an adult and uh Patty, who I had met a few times.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it was it was a very moving event, the renaming of the academy.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't expect to be as overwhelmed emotionally as I was by it.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife was surprised I was going, and I said, I got an official invite from the police commissioner from New York City from the NYPD.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: The last time I got an official invite from a police commissioner was on the day I retired to get the hell out of the building.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so I had I had to go.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: So like when you get there, what tours were you in a radio car, were you on foot most of the time?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like was it the nine squad shard?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: How did it work there?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: So as you can imagine, uh this m Adam Boyd, Charlie, David Eddy.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it was Adam Boyd Charlie and David Eddie usually on the day tours or something like that.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: So you didn't get into a car very quickly.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: They took us around at first in a in a in a sector to show us around.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: But um becoming scooter qualified was a golden ticket because otherwise you were on foot.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I remember spending many cold nights um on the Grand Army Plaza, 60th Street and Fifth Avenue, Columbus Circle, occasionally the dead middle of the park at the Bethesda Fountain, um, and then after the jogger incident in 1989, that became a fixed post.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the goal was to get scooter qualified as quickly as possible.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I probably took me about 18 months to get that.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And once you had that, then you had a little more freedom, you can move around.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I mean there were a lot a lot of foot posts.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they started the CPOP program probably 88, 89.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was absorbed into that eventually.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: I had a beat.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: My beat was the ramble in the park for about three or four years.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I was a fill-in for truancy all the time, which was very interesting.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's it's like the little rascals, right?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: The kids cut out of school and where are they gonna go?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: They go to Central Park, especially when it was nice out.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: When it was cold out, it was usually pretty empty.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: In general.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: So again, very unique place to be a police officer.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh made you very aware of um dealing with all different types of people, people from all over the world, all the time, even in the cold weather.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: You'd have i in one day you could have people approach you from four or five different countries asking for directions for the Met Museum.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, if to if we had the smartphones we had now, I mean, I probably would have have met people I could have visited all over the world, you know, had stayed in contact with through social media.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: You first got there and you pr how many rookies were with you, like twenty, thirty?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Not that many.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm gonna say about eight, nine people probably came in at about the same time as I did.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I see.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was I thought you were gonna have a story.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: For memory, you know.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, I thought you were gonna have a story like there were 30 of you, and then they put you out on foot posts and a couple of guys couldn't make their way back to the precinct because they weren't.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's good.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's that did happen.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: You really it took six months to a year before you really knew your way around.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because you you would jump in a car to get a ride down to post.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you'd have to take the bus down Fifth Avenue, back up Madison, you know.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, I remember being like turned around, especially in the area I mentioned, the Ramble.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's 40 acres in the middle of the park.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: It basically goes from 72nd Street.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Most people know the Bethesda Fountain, you know, it's from movies and TV.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: When you're looking at the fountain at the statue, behind there is the Ramble.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And when you're in there, you could get turned around, especially in the summertime.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: And tourists get lost all the time.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, listen, if you keep walking, eventually you're gonna hit a road.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna hit a building.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the Twilight Zone, right?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um But yeah, it it was it was and you know, and in a dangerous way too, you call a 13 in there, only the people in the park are gonna know where you are.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: You probably you work nearby in other commands.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you got to go through there, you you have no idea.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the old joke, the F-Troop joke.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, but make a left by the tree that looks like a rock, then a right by the rock that looks like a tree, and eventually you'll find your way.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of the rambles, can you explain to our listeners what that is and what goes on there in your assignment there?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: So historically, um it was a it became over time, I guess, by the time I got there, it was like that.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um when when gay men had nowhere to meet, when gay bars weren't as n numerous as they are, it became a place where guys would meet.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was, you know, there's no there's no uh what is it, uh, breast areas in Manhattan, right?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they would congregate in the park in the ramble.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately, many times were the victims of very violent robberies, and many times had to take 61s and eight of cards for guys who had their heads opened up.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, it was interesting through the 90s watching things change, and by the time I left in the early 2000s, just generally the the the atmosphere um of the homophobia had changed in in culture, in society.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: But for many, for many, many decades, I'm sure.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Al Pacino movie Cruising is about the ramble, largely, right?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: So um that's where that's what it was.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and you had to be sensitive to that.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: You had to know that that's what was going on.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, I work day tours, so I didn't have to deal with the, you know, the the more lurid aspects of it, I would say.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: There was a bathroom, you'd always have to make sure the bathroom was cleared out.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: You pull up with your scooter, you have your radio on, guys would sometimes run out.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but you wanted to make sure it was cleared out because families coming along, you know, tourists, they don't know when they're gonna walk into something.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's just right.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, no.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I could as you're as you're describing, and I I could picture, and that makes sense, you would have your radio going full blast before you went into the I wanted everyone to know I was coming.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Let's put it that way.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: How did how did the Central Park cops get along with the Parks Department?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh pretty.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they there were there were different levels, right?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you had the mounted guys from there, uh forget what they called them, but there was park enforcement patrol.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: And they did Yeah, those guys.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: They they understood the the the pecking order.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: They're not armed.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: They knew they needed us for certain situations.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember ever having any kind of uh bad interaction with anyone.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um what was more uh politically dangerous was the conservancy people who you might not know who they were.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: They'd be dressed like you or I right now, right?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: So you would see them.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: They'd be in their car, uh they're very sensitive to things like parking on the grass or any listen, I watched that park from 1986 to you know uh late 90s.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: The transformation was incredible.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: They literally re-landscaped that entire place little by little.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: The Great Lawn now is beautiful.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it's Kentucky Bluegrass.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um they did that all over.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: So more power to them.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the parks department itself, again, like any interagency thing, there was going to be some kind of friction somewhere along the line.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: But at the level I was at, a police officer, I didn't really deal with that level.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I would go to meetings sometimes as part of CPOP.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: When I was community affairs for a short time, I would show up and things, obviously.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um but somebody, maybe somebody like um who who was community affairs for a long time, like a friend of mine, he would probably have better stories about the about the conflict.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: But you had to be part politician.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's the other thing.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: You I think all cops do, right?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be psychologist, politician, you have to be especially on patrol in Manhattan, you you have to be.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those muscles were worked out a lot more in a place like the park.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell, Jr.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I just the reason I ask is because sometimes like security guards, they sometimes they'll kick up something and then the cops have to deal with the mess.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I was just kind of curious if they were always in over their head and then the cops had to come in and and straighten out a mess.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there were moments like that.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I do remember things like that, especially with emotionally disturbed people.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: There could be situations.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and again, guys on the 4-12, maybe the midnights, had to deal more with that type of thing.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I'd nothing nothing jumps out in my memory where it was uh a bad, a bad situation like that.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell You know, having I worked in a precinct that covered Van Courtland Park, which is large.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not Central Park, but it's been my experience that a park attracts every weirdo in a 20-mile area.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sex offender, devil worshipper, you name it, they go in there and they think that they it's like a cloaking mechanism in the foliage that they they're able to do whatever they do.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: What are some of the more bizarre things you ran into in the park?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I I have a thing I say to civilians all the time.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: I say, if you put on a police uniform and sit in Central Park, eventually every psychopath on the island of Manhattan will find you and want to have a conversation with you.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's not readily apparent that they're insane.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then slowly you realize, oh, oh, and then you're right, and that's why the radio is good because most civilians can't understand.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you hold up the radio and go, I gotta go, and you just take off.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um We had the woman, she was known as Jupiter's wife.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: She had like 30 dogs.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um she uh would hang around down by, sometimes down by the zoo, and she would collect stray dogs to the point where it got a little bad.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like she'd be walking around with 10, 15 dogs, whatever.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember one time that they had to take some of the dogs and she was given a problem.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I I decided to talk to her and I entered her world.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think she got afraid of me.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's what ended up happening.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like so because I she believed she was married to the god Jupiter.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: That was her thing.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew enough about Greek mythology and Roman mythology to have a conversation with her.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And before I knew it, I was gone somewhere.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the ESU guy said to me, Man, you you were in there.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: I go, Yeah, I was in there.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: But they were able to take her without a fight, which was nice, you know.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Then we had the pigeon lady that was in the um in the movie Home Alone.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think they had an actress playing her where she would sit still on the bench and have the pigeons cover her.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was a real person.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: That and I there was always people would say that these were wealthy people who had apartments off the park somewhere, and they would come in and hang in the park and pretend to be homeless.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know about that.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: But um Yeah, there was it was the weirdness was constant, nonstop.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: There was always among the homeless people and the sad part, you would have Vietnam veterans.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was going to college at John Jay and learning um stuff in psychology and sociology, the park was almost like a laboratory.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was like going to a lab.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: You I remember when I first heard about um when I first was learning about schizophrenia and then taught into a homeless guy that was a regular in the park, he would wear an army jacket and collect rocks.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: He would literally just put stones in his pocket, so his pants, he had cargo pants, and then sometimes his medication, it was explained to me by a doctor at the emergency room that they would give him some kind of shot and it would last a while.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: But when it would wear off, that's when he would become more the voices.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: I know I'm oversimplifying it and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but about mental illness, but he would get where he would appear more dangerous to passerby, right?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: So people would stop us and say, Well, okay, we have to do something.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: So we would bring him in every once in a while.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember my partner and I spending forty-five minutes emptying his pockets of the rocks to put him on the bus.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he was it was just f ev everywhere you could think of stones, pebbles, rocks.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I can't remember his name.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: But when he was medicated, the nicest guy well, he was even when he wasn't, he wasn't dangerous, but he came across.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: He was a big guy.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: But when he was medicated, you could actually have a conversation with him.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't listening to the voices.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you were a rookie cop in 1986 when Robert Chambers, the preppy killer, killed Jennifer Levin in Central Park.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Did you tell that story as a rookie cop coming in to do your tour?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: I so I was in the park for about six weeks at that time.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was I'm gonna say August 20th, off the top of my head, in the twenties.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Stephen had been shot the prior month, right?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot went on that summer.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: And um I went administrative sick.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: I remember having like spite the weird fever in the middle of the summer.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: And if you remember, on midnights, my my squad had rolled into midnight, so uh you only get one day.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the night that I was supposed to be that I got the one night off was the night the murder took place.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I would have been in that sector from what I remember, because I remember thinking, man, if I was working, I have ADD, so I probably wouldn't have been paying attention to the crime scene where she was.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: I would have been looking around, and he was sitting on the wall just east of the crime scene.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: There was like a under a tree, like a little uh worn-out area where the grass had been worn away, and he had sat watching the uh the cops and then the detectives, right, do their job.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, who knows?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I would have sp he had scratch marks, but he he left that area.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently they picked him up.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember, you might remember exactly why, but they knew remember his dad was like an executive at HBO and the mom was like a a nanny or something.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: But they had him in the station house when I came in for the midnight the second night, and um the lieutenant said, Don't suit up, just put up put um I guess I didn't even put a gun on, because I was gonna sit with him in the CO's office.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I sat with him all night.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: All night long I was alone with him.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: I was 21, he was 19.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So we had a lot to talk about.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the year the Mets were in the pennant race.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so he was a Mets fan, so we sat there and talked about that.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because later on, when I got debriefed and I was talked to by the DA, everyone wanted to know what we talked about.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we talked about.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about baseball.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: He kept falling asleep because I'm sure he didn't sleep the night before at all.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And um, very strikingly handsome guy.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: He looked like a young Elvis.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you know, this this is the thing that jumps out at me all the time.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're in there all night long, so you gotta go to the restroom.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I would ask if someone come in and relieve me.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I noticed out in the courtyard I mentioned earlier, it was packed with reporters, obviously.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: So when I came back in, I said, Man, there were a lot of reporters out there.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he went, Oh man, I don't want anyone to know about this.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: When when we leave, do you think we could leave out a backdoor?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how deluded he was.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like he thought that we could somehow keep this a secret.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't gonna get out.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And they did run him around that night a few times, and I went with the detectives um to Manhattan North homicide, back again to the park.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: We might have gone somewhere else, but back to the park.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And there's actually video somewhere, but I can't find it, of a chubby little kid with a really cheesy mustache walking up doing the perp walk out of the precinct, and the precinct was down a couple of steps.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we had the baseball caps at the time.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were short lived with the cap device on the baseball cap, and I had that on.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I was on the his right and the detective.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we walked up.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: And they played that for years and decades.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: You would see whenever the anniversary came up, they would show that file tape, but I don't know where it is.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: So fast forward to 2019, I worked at the Central Park Zoo for a couple of years as the assistant security guy there and um became very friendly with one of the women on the staff.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And one walked in one day and she was she was down.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: You could tell she was off.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Hey, what's up?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes, Uh, today's the anniversary of my niece's death.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: My niece's death.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Oh, what happened?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, She was murdered 30 years ago.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Murdered?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: What you know, that got my attention.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes, right here in the park.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: And very quickly I put it together and I said, You're Jennifer Levin's aunt?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, Yeah, and she started crying.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I'm so sorry.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: So what an odd thing for me to have been so closely involved in that and then meet her all those years later.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: But um Yeah.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: And he's up in my area somewhere now, as far as I know.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: He relocated to um up near the Muncie area in Rockland.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's the last I heard after he got released from the the drug arrest.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he did a lot of time for the Levin murder, got out, got busted again selling drugs wait out of an apartment in Midtown, and then he got wait another 18 years.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: He's probably been in jail 30 close to 40 years on and off.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it allows you.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but now that he was released, uh what I'm saying is he was living in Rockland uh as of a couple of years ago.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't know, I lost track.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't pay attention to that, so I don't know where he is.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Were you I mean, I said we're talking about Central Park, but there's a lot of wild things that happen in there.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Were you working the night of the Central Park jocker case?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was uh off.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was in Philadelphia with my soon-to-be wife, and uh when I came back that day, uh again, I had a knack for not being around when the stuff happened.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: But um a couple of my good friends were the arresting officers at the time.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh one of two other friends found her.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I almost had the body, but she's still alive now.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: The cold apparently kept her alive.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um we I was part of the grid search that morning.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: I remember that.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And they had us all uh you know, you guys, the detectives, explain what they wanted.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: And we walked the entire hundred and second street cross drive back and forth where everybody was like a foot apart from each other.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: I would say probably a hundred cops all together, the cops and detectives, just up and down looking for clues, looking for things.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um So no, I missed that night and morning, but I came in the next day and w walked right into the middle of the investigation.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: There must have been a media crush descending on that precinct.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and like I said, they made the uh 102nd Street Cross Drive a fixed post uh and I think to this day it might still be a fixed post.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh face-to-face relief.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um in n from ninety-four to ninety six there was a cluster of rapes in Central Park, including the John Royster case.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you remember that one.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Was that the one up on a hundred and over by the pool uh by the Hollow Mirror?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: John Royster was the guy, he he was basically a traveling crime scene.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: He raped a woman in Central Park, he killed a woman, I think, uh um over by Sutton Place in a um a laundromat.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: He stabbed another woman on on an overpass in Yonkers.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I remember this now, yeah.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: But uh Yeah, he um he he tried to rape a piano teacher.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh smashing her head on the asphalt until she was comosose, but thank God she survived.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: I remember that, yes.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um were you working the Daphne Abadella Chris Christopher Vasquez?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: That was the murder of Michael Moro, uh Michael Morrow near the lake.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was a young girl and a young guy, and she kind of basically worked him up to kill this homeless guy.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: I remember that as well.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um when you say working it, I was assigned to the precinct at the time, but no, I w I wasn't in that area.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't uh I didn't uh I wasn't in that sector, let's say.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well every cop dreads work in the West Indian Day Parade.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: You guys had the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which having worked in the Bronx, we got flown down there all the time.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: All the parades.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a certain amount of uh for a long time, I don't know about about now, but for a long time, uh the spirit of the law was enforced and not the letter of the law, right?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean you know, the there was a beer beer confiscation unit at the St.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Patrick's Day Parade, I remember.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm Irish and Italian, so I remember saying to the Irish Cups, there's no wine confiscation at the uh at the Columbus Day Parade.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um But somehow I never went to Times Square for New Year's Eve, never had to go, never had to go.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I wish I had, because I don't feel complete.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't experience that.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um the West India Parade I didn't have until the one right before 9-11, the week before 9-11.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: The first time I ever went.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I had 16 years on the job, my first West Indian Day experience.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I was I was sexually assaulted repeatedly.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was humped from behind over and over again, and then people would disappear into the crowd.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was quite an experience.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I still hear the song occasionally, uh, one of the songs that played constantly there.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh my God, that's the break.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then I went uh two or three more times before I retired.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um But I mean, I you know, I I I loved parades.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: I love my birthday's March 18th, so I loved going to the St.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Patrick's Day Parade every year because I was getting paid to be there, and it was on the eve of my birthday, and my name is Joseph, and if you know St.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Joseph's Day is the 19th.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it was always the start of a three-day weekend for me.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell The Central Park Zoo, did you get to sign to that a lot?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: And do you have any funny stories like animals escaping or someone being attacked by one of the animals or an idiot climbing into the enclosure?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: So a good friend had that beat, so I had to be just north of there, so I'd sometimes I'd come down to meet and hang out there.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I worked at the zoo after I'd retired from the job, right?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I got a behind-the-scenes look, and I did a one-man show called The Central Park Zoo back in 1999 and 2001.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that that's another story.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the great story, this can be looked up.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Charlie Dubleki, who I worked with at the end of his career, he looked like a bear.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: He was about 6'3, 6'4, white hair, he looked like a polar bear.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: And um he was assigned to the zoo post in 1971, and again, the history buffs, and a homeless guy was grabbed by a grizzly bear through the old McGillagorilla type pages.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: The guy got too close, and the bear reached through and grabbed him and was mauling him.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Charlie took out his 38 revolver and shot and killed the bear with one shot through the heart.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: He could have taught Leonardo Leonardo DiCaprio a thing or two.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: He killed the grizzly bear with one shot from a 38 and got hate mail for the rest of his career.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: There wasn't even a PETA yet.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't even exist, but he got hate mail, and he used to brag about so I came to the park in 86, so 15 years later, he was still getting hate mail.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but what what the hell was he supposed to do?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: The guy was and the guy died.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: The guy died.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the male used to say things like that.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: The guy died anyway.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: He was homeless.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you?
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure they didn't say homeless in 1971.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: He was a bum.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: You should have let him die.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like the old joke.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's Manhattan.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: People will step over a homeless guy to throw blood on a fur coat, right?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's the joke.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the way it was with Charlie.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you bring it.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's the best zoo story that I could ever done.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Great one.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Mic drop.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: You tell you're talking about the McGill of Gorilla bars at the zoo.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: So when I was a little boy, my mother of the story.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that movie Cops and Robbers comes out in 1973.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, which is filmed in Central Park Precinct.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's the movie with the scene where they break through the fence with the RP.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Where that fence was still fixed with the new fencing up until they redid the precinct 20 years ago.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Guys would always point it out.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the movie uh company had a fixed defense for that stunt.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: That was a true story, right?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: The Cops and Robbers.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was based on the new.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was based on it was based on two guys they called Batman and Robin.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty sure that was a little movie.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay, okay.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Batman and Robin Cops and Robbers was Joe Bologna and Cliff Gorman.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: Cops and um Super Cops was um Ron Liebman and David Selby.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that was about Batman and Robin.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Greenberg and Hands.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: I corrected.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: The year after Cops and Robbers came out, I'm a little boy and I'm begging my mother to take me to the Central Park precinct to see this.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm like not even 10 years old.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: So my mother takes us down, she would take us into the city during the holidays.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we go to see with a fence, and of course the fence was fixed, and to me it was a disappointment because I was expecting it to be exactly so.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: She goes from there, now it's cold, dead of winter.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: She takes us to the Central Park Zoo, and you're talking about the McGill gorilla bars.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're little, and there's a gorilla behind the McGill gorilla bars, and my brother and I are standing there, and we're probably tormenting the gorilla.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're under 10 years old.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: The gorilla picks up a pile of shit and charges the bars, and I went sideways, I went left or right.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: My brother ran straight back to my mother, and the gorilla hit my brother in the back in his Parker coat and everything, and my mother's screaming, the parks department brought us in the back, and they saw this jacket with like anti-gorilla shampoo or whatever, and she was so pissed off, but it's like we can imagine the diseases that could be in that, right?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, but back then nobody thought that.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's like, here's your coat.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: We we did the best we could, we towel dried it.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you've been to the zoo lately, there's a there's an enclosure when you first walk in, the snow monkeys.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: They look like baboons.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: They kind of have well that you would think what a baboon looks like, but they're called snow monkeys from the Himalaya.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: The water is so infested with viruses from them that if something gets dropped in there, you're not getting it back.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: And a woman dropped a diamond bracelet that was worth$10,000, whatever.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently the the guy had so much sentimental value, he was willing to pay not only to get it back, but to have it officially cleaned or something like that.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh speaking of movies, do you remember The Park Is Mine with Tommy Lee Jones?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it was an HBO movie.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was about a Vietnam vet who went John Rambo in Central Park and took over the park, which it's it's impossible.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: But it worked for the movie.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I saw the movie, I think I want to say 83 or 84, it was on HBO, and then get assigned to the park after that.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's only 843 acres.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that big.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: But that's one of the park is a there's an obsession with Central Park, you know, in film and TV and uh in a lot of videos were filmed there at the Bethesda Fountain.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: There was always something all year long, always something somewhere in the park being shot.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: Videos, movies, television series, helicopters flying low and slow, doing you know, like the opening scene, you'll see the credits.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of times you'd see uh helicopters going over and swimming.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they were doing, probably.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: You you must have met a ton of famous people working in Central Park.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you kept your eyes open, that was the thing.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: I my first celebrity spotting, not an A-lister, but I remember Aiden Quinn.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember the act?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know the actor Aiden Quinn?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: Why does that sound familiar?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you you know him if you see him.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: He's been around forever, uh trying to think of uh Does he have two different color eyes?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know he has light eyes, now he has salt and pepper hair.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: The the first movie, the big movie he was in back then was called Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I was sitting by the Ramble parking lot, and he came walking out of the Ramble, and he must have known the reputation the Ramble had because he walked right over to the police car and said, Hey, you guys know what's going on in there?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Do you?
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he started laughing.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, You're Aiden Quinn.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Yeah, like he saw the recognition in my eyes, I believe.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And again, it would the movie had just come out.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: This was the movie must have come out that summer of 86, and this was sometime in the fall.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, the list of people, if you're paying attention, but my favorite celebrity meet in Central Park was Bono.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big U2 fan.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I was sitting with my partner Aaron, and we were by the Banshell.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know where the band shell area is?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And he walks by with a young Asian woman I remember, and he had the stupid G.I.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Joe cap on.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: So this was the year, this was 98 or 99.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they walked by, and the reason I said Asian is because she was Asian, and that's what I remembered.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't want people to, why is he saying she's Asian?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I I my my partner said what every cop said ever, ever, when I said that's so-and-so.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's not him.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: What would he be doing here?
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I go, yeah, what would he be doing?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: What would he be doing in Central Park on a beautiful day, the center of the known universe?
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: Why would he be here?
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we rolled up, I rolled up the police car and he turned and I said, Hey man, I just want to say thank you for your music.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he put his hand on his chest and he said, Oh, that's so sweet.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he walks over to the car and he introduces him the woman and himself.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: He called himself Paul.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, I'm Paul.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I'm Joe, this is Erin.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: She's named after your country.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Actually, this is my country now.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I went, Oh, that's so sweet.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he started laughing because of saying that.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right, right.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then later on, another partner of mine, Laura Bolock, uh, we used to play this thing called uh celebrity poker, where whoever spotted the bigger celebrity won the hand until the next hand, right?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: There was no award.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: So she has a twin and she wanted to take her twin out to dinner.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Oh, I know this Italian place on 58 by Columbus Circle.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: So took her down there.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: We got out of the car, walked over, talked to the owner, and then we were coming back, and through the crowd parts, but we were walking north on 8th Avenue, sting, there's sting right in front of us.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: The police.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: So she had just lit a cigarette and she brought it to her lips so she couldn't say sting.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that was part of the rule of the game, whoever said the name.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I went, Sting.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he put his hands up like this.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was so funny.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we walked up to him and I said, We play this game called Celebrity Poker, blah, blah, blah.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: And he kept his hands up the entire time.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he turned to her and went, sorry.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because I said, I said, I won, and this is going to be a really difficult hand to beat.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: But my another one of them, I said my favorite, but Bruce Willis was filming Die Hard 3, and I was standing there watching them on a break.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Him and his friends were throwing a football around, and he said, Officer, and he threw a a line drive right at my chest.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, I dropped the ball.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: I picked it up, threw it back to him, threw it to his friend, threw it to me.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm in full uniform, and there's people everywhere.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I picked up the ball and I walked over to Bruce and I said, Look, I'm going to remember this for the rest of my life, and I'm going to be telling this story for the rest of my life.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't want to be on the front page of the New York Post tomorrow in uniform like this.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, I'm so sorry.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: I go, No, no, no, no.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm glad this happened.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I was doing stand-up at the time.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that night I was doing a show at the Boston Comedy Club down on uh down in the village.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I mentioned it to him, and he, you know, he pretended to really think about it.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Well, I gotta watch Daily's tonight, but if I don't, if I get out soon enough, I wasn't on my game.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was so starstruck that I was talking to him.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: I should have said to him, Why don't you grab your friends here?
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: We'll go in your trailer and I'll do my set.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if I make you laugh, put me in the movie.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I was 28, I wasn't, I just wasn't thinking sharp like that.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Another time, down by the uh Grand Army Plaza, summer storm was moving in, and Kevin Costner walks by, and I said to my sergeant, that's Kevin Costner.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, What did he say, Vic?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: He said, That's not him.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: What would he be doing here?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: What would he be doing here?
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: So right across from the Plaza Hotel, he's walking with his daughter, the skies open up, rain starts coming down.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Turn the van, make a U-turn.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: I said, We're picking him up.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we pulled up.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: The sergeant was just, he was, because now he sees it's him and he's so starstruck.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we pull up and I say, Mr.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Costner, he goes, Hey, I go, You guys want to ride?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Oh, that he I he might have said golly.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: He might, I know he's a California guy.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they jump in the back and I said, Would you guys like a tour of Central Park?
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Oh man, that would be great.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been here.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: I go, You've never been to Central Park?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Look, this was 90, this was right before the movie Tim Cup came out.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I come in and out of New York to sign contracts and go to award ceremonies.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: I never get to go around.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is like one of the first times.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we took him all over the park and we showed him things, you know.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then I said, Where do you want to go?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Can you shop but drop us off someplace where there's good shopping?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Yeah, Madison Avenue's right here.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I took him over to Hermes, I think, right over there.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: And as they were getting out of the car, the little girl, her name is Lily, you can look that up.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: She was such a sweetheart.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: She was like eight years old at the time.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: She steps out of the van and goes, uh, you guys go go catch some bad guys.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: She said, back into the van.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: But he was already outside, so he didn't hear my response, which was, yeah, we're gonna go do some good.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you remember in the Untouchables, they made fun of him for saying that, right, in the movie, because he was uh a Boy Scout, right?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that was that was uh while assigned to the park, those situations, those were the the the coolest meetings I ever had.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: But later on, after I retired, I drove Stevie Wonder and I had a 15-minute private conversation with Stevie Wonder.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: That was mind-blowing.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: You also you in your email, you said you met George Carlin.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: What was he like?
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so my idol, right?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, my idol.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was like seven, eight years old when my cousin Brian uh decided to show me George Carlin records, uh the the you know, the seven words you can't say on television, immediately in love with him, right?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um so he stayed at the plaza when he was in New York, and he came out and I saw him from across the street walking towards me, and he had um like a black members only jacket on, again, 86, probably going into 87.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I walked over.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: I still can't believe I had the guts to do it.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I walked over and I said, Hi, Mr.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: Carlin, how are you?
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Hey, what's up, kid?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to me, relaxed me right away.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then when he left, he said, keep an eye out, because that was an old joke of his about, you know, keep an eye out.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then about six months later, I saw him again, second time.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I walked over, I go, Hey, Mr.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Carlin.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, You're still here?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't let you go home?
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like as if I was there for the whole six months.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: So much later on when I started doing stand-up, uh, a friend of mine, Glenn Farrington, he ran uh something called the Cyber Cafe or the Comedy Cafe when the internet was very new, like '95.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I got I was able to get Carlin on an interview for him back in the time when before video was a thing on the internet where you would type in the questions.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I was able to No, he wasn't able to do it, but I got him on the phone.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: He answered that on the phone with me.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh another time, my wife on my 30th birthday took me to Englewood to see him, and we lived in Queens at the time, so Englewood might as well have been Kansas.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we went to the Englewood Theater, and I brought a videotape of myself doing stand-up at Caroline's.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I went up to one of the security guys and I said, I'm a cop in the city, and I'd met Mr.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Carlin a few times, and uh I'm a stand-up comic.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, Yeah, come with me.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: He took me backstage to meet him.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he didn't remember me, right?
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: But he was like, Yeah, I'll take a look at this.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: He took the tape, totally forgot about it.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: Months later, uh, the Long Island Railroad shooting.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: What was that guy's name?
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Colin Ferguson.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Colin Ferguson.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: My wife must have, yeah, she got home before me.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: This was the time of answering machines.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: She had heard the message.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: So she goes, uh, could you check the messages?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't check them.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I hit play and I hear, uh, hi, um, this is Colin Ferguson's sister, Sally.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking for legal advice.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking for Officer Battalamente, just like that, with like a high-pitched voice.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and then there was a total silence.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm looking at the I'm looking at the machine, and then here, hey Joe, it's George Colin.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to let you know I watched your tape.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: I l I listened, no, I watched.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: I watched your tape, and uh, you got some good chops there.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh just be careful with the Jesus stuff.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: He said something like that, because I made fun of religion.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you don't want to pull out the lie from he either said the lie or the life.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: I I never was able to discern what he said.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: And at the end he goes, and uh do me a favor, go look for some bad cops.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's plenty of them.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he said.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: And his grandfather was NYPD, which I didn't know during any of the inter And I found out doing state uh 1 PP security, I was friendly with one of the sergeants down there, and she told me when I told her this story, she goes, I walked him upstairs to the record room one day.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: I go, really?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, Yeah, his grandfather was on the job and he wanted to find his personnel fault.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and like an old command log, maybe from the command.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: He knew what precinct he had worked in.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: And um yeah, so he apparently used to his mother was a um a single parent back in those days, right, which was more rare.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: And when she would go to work as a waitress at night, she would tell him and his brother, if anybody knocks on the door, say my grandpa's sleeping and he's a cop.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: Even though it wasn't true, his grandfather didn't live with them.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: But so yeah, he he must have had I mean, he's been gone twenty years almost.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: He died in two thousand eight, but he must have been a little conflicted about that, right?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: Having NYPD jeans and being as uh crunchy liberal as he was in many ways.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_00: So Joe, well, you remember the NYPD, you were moodlining as a stand-up comedian, an actor, and a writer.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: When did you have time to sleep?
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the writing didn't really start heavy until later, but the the stand-up, the that was one of the reasons I stopped doing stand-up actually, because when I started doing open mics in 91, October of 91 was my first real stand, what I considered my first real open mic.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: I had done 89 at Governors on Long Island, but I I went on vacation and in Colorado and I had a dream on vacation where Jay Leno was standing at the curtain on the Tonight Show, and he was guest hosting all the time, remember?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I was a big fan of early Jay.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: He was much more edgy back then.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the music went up and it was a little foggy, and he turns and looks at me and goes, Hey, follow me.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he walked through the curtain, and that was it.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I woke up and I, you know, obviously you've been thinking about doing stand-up.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: And my wife said, That's a sign.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I got home, I called a friend of mine and got a list of open mics.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: And my first open mic was at the New York Comedy Club on 49th and 2nd.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: I signed up and used to be a bar called the Upper Room, I believe.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was upstairs that Sinatra had performed at.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that was cool, like the karma.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I started then, and by January of '92, um, I was asked to do my first professional gig to MC, the owner of the New York Comedy Club, Al Martin, who passed away two years ago.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he came up to me.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Listen, you kid, you know, probably called me kid.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was 26.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're doing great.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, You think you're ready to MC?
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: I got a ta I got a club in Brooklyn called Ossie's Table.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was an Orthodox Jewish restaurant in Borough Park, uh 13th Avenue, I guess.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: I go.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: My mom came with me, she wanted to come, so I picked her up and we went.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I got$50 to MC.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the middle guy was Steve Marshall, someone I'm still friends with, who became a mentor.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: And he I don't remember the the the man guys act, but the owner's son came over to me and said, Look, this is a very religious crowd.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, They're not all going to be Hasidim, but there's going to be a lot of Orthodox people.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: They're not big laughers.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: So if they smile at you, you have to take that as a laugh.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, I know your timing can get thrown by lack of laughter, so be prepared.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I was a professional doing for four months already.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: But I had good instincts because the first thing I said, I got on stage and I looked around the room.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't really have to pretend to be nervous, but I made it even bigger.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: I go, uh, I think there was a big mistake here.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: My agent told me I was doing the St.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Francis of Assisi father-daughter dinner dance.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I got a huge laugh, like a big laugh throughout the crowd.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Steve Marshall was eating his free kosher meal in the kitchen.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: He came out clapping and chewing and laughing and went like this to me.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that gave me such a rush of confidence that I did really well.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: I did really, really well from that point on.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: But what happened to your point about when did you sleep?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: I I my daughter was born in 97.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: So from 92 to 97, I did it.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know what it was?
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: I never fully committed.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: I had to be at roll call first thing in the morning.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was in the New York, New York's funniest cop contest at Standup New York on 79th and Broadway.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I met John DeResta.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: John DeResta is a stand-up comic still to this day.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he and I were really the only guys that showed up that were really doing it.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody else was like, they're the funny guy in their command, right?
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I always say I'm not not even close to the funniest person I've ever known.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Any given cop I worked with across time was funnier than me.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: The difference was I went into a comedy club and went on stage.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the same thing with Daresta.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we met there, I won the first round, there was no second round, and then there was a finals night, and John won that one, and he got the title of the funniest cop in New York, and I got a one-way ticket to Pelucaville.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: But John was always very committed, very, you know, he's been on stage probably a thousand times at this point.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: He keeps track of every set.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I never had that full commitment that you have to have.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: You have to want it like your hair's on fire and you want water.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's how bad you have to want it because you're not going to make it, whether it's a writer or an actor, a comedian, a painter like my wife.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're just not gonna it's not gonna happen.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: But you have to not care about that.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's the point.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you gotta still want to do it the same way all the time.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: I know guys have been on, you know, on the road for 20, 30 years that you say the way word hotel, they want to vomit.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're just so sick of it.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um but like Jerry Seinfeld's a multi-billionaire, and he still loves it.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I worked at the Gotham Comedy Club doing security, and I used to watch him come in and you know do sets, and you'd watch him working out sets at 70 years old, like a year or two years ago, and work out his entire Netflix special over a six-month period.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: He'd just pop in, pop in.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the great thing was the crowd never knew he was coming.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they would say, The MCs, yeah, the MCs were told, if you get a certain signal in the back, you just introduce Jerry, and that's what they would do.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, that's what great about the Gotham Comedy Club.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: You never knew who's gonna show up.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen, Jerry Seinfeld.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it would loud's not even the word, but the loudest I ever heard that club get, it holds about 300 people.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: I came in one night and there was a sign on the door that said, uh, we're collecting phones.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: So they do the thing with a little bag, they give you a bag with a lock.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the the manager comes over to me, he goes, uh Kevin Hart's been to be here tonight.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I had never met Kevin.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I tell you, man, the guy's very successful, but he's sharp.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: He's a street kid from Philly, and he knew he didn't know who I was.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I was with the group of security guys, and we walk him in through the one of the doors next door, and uh he gets out of the limo and he goes, Hey man, he looks right at me and says he knew everybody else, but he didn't know me.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: So he was letting me know that he saw me.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was interesting.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: And when he got on, when they introduced him, I probably lost some hearing.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's how crazy loud the club got, and a sustained applause for like a good three, four minutes, screaming and yelling.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: And he kilt.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: He was so good, and he was trying out stuff for his uh I think it was a Netflix special that came on.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the cool thing about working at the club.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'm doing security at this point, I mean, not doing stand-up.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: Getting to see all these guys.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I had done open mics with Jim Gaffigan, and I knew the first time I saw Jim Gaffigan that he was going to do well.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: Not not this well, not like 30 million a year, but I knew he was gonna be successful because he was different.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: He did that thing where he does what the audience is thinking.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I told the owner one night when he was on stage, I go, I gave Jim a ride in '97, right after my daughter Chiara was born.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: And my Chiara had jaundice.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of uh babies with Mediterranean genes have jaundice premature.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: It just means the liver's not turned fully on yet.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: So a little yellow, they keep them in the little uh under the plant lights in the in the hospital for a couple of days.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's all it is.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: They need some ultraviolet rays.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: So Jim takes the picture of my daughter off the visor and goes, Is this your kid?
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I go, it'd be a little fucking weird if it wasn't.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: And he laughed and he goes, Um, is your wife Asian?
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I go, No, no, she has jaundice.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Oh, I'm sorry.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I told Chris Mazzilli, the owner that it was great.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I tell this is 1997, June.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I tell Mazzilli the story in 2019, 2020.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Oh, you got to tell Jim the story.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: So Jim comes off stage and he's with his 13-year-old son out in the lobby.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I recount the whole story I just told you.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: So when I get to the point where he goes, Is your wife Asian?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: His son, who's 13, goes, Dad, it was so funny.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: He was canceling his father like 30 years later.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was 1997.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: That was not an inappropriate question back then.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of the cool part working at the club.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not doing it anymore, but I would get to see comics that I had worked with.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like one of my friends is the head writer for Jimmy Kimmel.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Another friend of mine produced three or four shows on Nickelodeon over the years.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Judah Judah Friedlander was on 30 Rock.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: He's the guy with the long sideburns with the thick glasses that always wears the baseball cap.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um these are the guys I hung out with in the open mindset, you know?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they didn't have jobs.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: They all just had graduated from college, and the jobs were like waiting tables, and they were trying to make it in comedy, and I had to be a roll call at seven in the morning.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't have the eye of the tiger.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: You really have to have that.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: You if you don't have that, you could be, and and I did.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: I had a modicum of talent, and I was natural on stage.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't really have a lot of stage fright.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it it's the other part, you know, talent is cheap.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's the hard work part in anything, in anything you do.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's the part that's, you know.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: My wife's a painter and she's very successful.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll often say to people, I'll say, Oh my God, how long does it take her to do a painting like this?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll say, 62 years, meaning, you know, it's your whole life that that that leads to that moment that she may be able to bang something out in two days, three days, where it would have taken her two weeks twenty years ago, right?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: So and same with writing.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you write every day, you start to see how things the synapses in your brain start clicking easier.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you you ask speaking of uh rubbing elbows with comedians, you had a really good story about Ray Romano and his brother uh Richie.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: Richie was a sergeant in Central Park, nice, super nice guy.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he heard somehow that I was doing open mics.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: So this was ninety-one to ninety two.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: And one day I was passing the desk and he grabbed me, he goes, Hey, you you doing stand-up now?
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Yeah, doing open mics.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, there's a difference.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Oh, my brother Ray does comedy.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of vaguely knew who he was from television, you know, not from the TV show, not from everybody loves Raymond.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: So he wrote down Ray's number and gave it to me and said, Give him a call sometime tomorrow in the morning.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: He'll talk to you.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Just tell him you're a friend of mine.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I did.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he stayed on the phone with me for like an hour.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, you know, watch out for this guy.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh how old are you?
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, 26.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Oh, you're a baby.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, just keep getting up on stage as much as you can.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um then 30, he ended up, he had studied with the same acting teacher, Joanna Beckson, that I did, who passed last year.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: And at the memorial this past spring, Ray was in the back.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: And when the when the memorial part, you know, the show part was over, I went to the back and I said, uh, hey, uh, he was sitting down next to Steve Sharepa from The Sopranos, because they both studied with Joanna.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I and it was loud, the music was playing.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I worked with your brother.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: I know I worked with Richie.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, What?
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I worked with Richie.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he stood up and he goes, I'm sorry.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: I go, I worked with your brother, just like he speaks, you know, the heavy, heavy Queen's accent, not little like mine.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he laughed and he goes, I'm sorry, I'm deaf.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we talked for a while, and I go, and you?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the charipper looks up at me.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: He's a big guy.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Um, right after 9-11, you guys were in Fourneau's restaurant going over a script, I guess, and you walked out, and then you came right over to me like a beeline, and you said, Hey officer, it's a rough time for the city and for the country, and how you doing, how you feeling.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I say, I never forgot that.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't have to do that.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: So he goes, Oh, you're welcome.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it was nice to be able to, you know, see both of them in one place like that and you know, thank them for different reasons.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I thanked Ray for the time he had spoken to me on the phone.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: He had no memory of it, obviously.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it was it was cool.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, Joe, tell us about your latest endeavor, this new book that you got out.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: So uh when I retired, like I said, I went to work in the banking world doing money laundering investigations.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't like it, but the money was too good to walk away from.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and ironically, it really taught me to be a better writer because every day you're writing reports that are called uh suspicious activity reports, financial reports, you're looking at spreadsheets.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I became friendly with a guy named Nick Bavaro, the second the second job I was on at Israel Discount Bank, and uh we hit it off really well.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: And two years a year ago, um I I write for a uh police website called policewan.com.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: And um my book, my Elvis book, uh the novel I wrote, led directly to that gig.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I I started doing 9-11 profiles a few years ago, and I was gonna do one on someone and it fell through.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I called Nick up and he goes, Yeah, I'll I'll talk to you.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we talked and it went well.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when that came out, September 11th, 2025, he got a lot of phone calls from people in the SU and from family members that wanted to hear more.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: So he approached me and said, How about if we do a whole book?
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, I've always wanted to write a book about my experiences.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I stupidly said yes, meaning, you know, unknowing that the work it was going to take to do it.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um we we spent a year talking at least once a week for two or three hours every Saturday morning, on the phone, sometimes on FaceTime, got together once or you know, once every two months in person.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: But we already knew each other for 20 years, 18 years, whatever it was.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we we had a very easy flow.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: And he he's the other guy that was born at Mount Sinai Hospital, so I stole his joke earlier about the apartment.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and very quickly I realized that this needed to be a memoir, not a biography.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't need to be his entire life story.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: And actually the first draft had a lot more about his childhood in it and a couple of beta readers, you call it.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: You send it out to a few people, friends, and I I learned from my Elvis book to choose people who read a lot because you want people who have a who are used to reading to give you critique for any writers out there.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: If someone doesn't read all the time, they might say, oh, that that was good or it was cute.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: But you're not going to get back the feedback you need.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people said there's too much up front.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: So the name of the book is The Big One, Reflections of an NYP due lieutenant.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that title kind of grew organically.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: Nick already had the big one in his mind because ESU guys used to say goodbye to each other at the end of a job.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see you at the big one.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like partly out of sarcasm that this wasn't big.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then after 9-11, no one used it anymore.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody stopped using it because that was the big one.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um so very quickly it became and I wanted very from the very beginning, I wanted it to be a fast fast read.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted it to be the kind of thing someone could sit down in one or two sessions and read through it.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it just kind of fell out over time into about 160 pages total.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and people tell us they like it.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's um it's a horrible, horrible subject.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's um i i i I people tell me, what do you want people to take from it?
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I say, well, the horror, the heroism, and the inspiration of the resilience of Nick and of all the first responders, you know.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: He's so gracious in the book, talking about his fellow uh cops and the SU guys, the fire department, even the civilians, like uh uh really um the best of times, the worst of times, right?
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, A Tale of Two Cities, I think that's the first sentence in that novel.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I felt about 9-11.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was the most horrific thing I hope I ever experienced.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: But the way people came together, I I heard a um a priest, uh Episcopalian priest say, um, when you think about all of the planning and all of the hatred that it took to make that day happen, yet it only took an hour for everyone to start showing up and bringing food and bringing help and people from I remember going through Times Square and seeing a cop from Chicago directing traffic at four in the morning.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: The checker had to stay where?
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that I knew it wasn't a New York City cop.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, what the hell?
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: But just like the the over feeling of over being overwhelmed uh with gratitude to uh for the help.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that that's the book, the big one, Reflections of an NYPD Lieutenant.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: You can get it on Amazon in hardcover, softcover ebook.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then we just last week put it on.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's now available on Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and a bunch of other sites that do uh in ebook only.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I've learned that most of the young people read on their phones, read on their computers, read on Kindle.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: I have to have a book in my hand.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've tried, but I can't do it.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: We did it because it was a story that needed to be told.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was very cathartic for Nick to tell the story.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: He told me a lot of things he said he'd never told anybody.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's a difficult read.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of I I warn people.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: I say there's a lot of things in here that are very hard.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: Even though I've read it a hundred times, editing it right over and over again.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'll still find myself choking up at certain points and getting swept up in the story.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, I I I appreciate you asking about it.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: What are the names of your other books?
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's one called um It's about Elvis, you know, the famous uh conspiracy theory that he's still alive and he faked his death to get away from everything.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, 1995, my wife and I were driving across the country.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: We stopped in uh Graceland.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: My mom was a big Elvis fan, so I'm an Elvis fan, but not like she was.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the line outside of Graceland was like two hours and it was like 145 degrees out, and I was like, we'll be back.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: Never never been back.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: But crossing Texas, I remember because that's when that conspiracy theory was really in the air in the early 90s, mid-90s.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I came up with this idea.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: And for years I told the story to people, my daughters especially, I would tell.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: I would I would pitch it to people.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_01: And this is great.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: You wrote this, and I go, I'm gonna write it someday.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: 2021, I'm at a barbecue on Long Island, July 26th.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the date because it was my brother's birthday.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm talking to a Port Authority captain at the pool, and he's wearing the charm, the lightning bolt, and it says TCB.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Oh, you're you're an Elvis fan.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, I've been wearing this for 35 years.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: No one ever knew what it was.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Really?
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: Elvis?
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I told my wife in the car, and she's always good to pointing out the signs, like Jay Leno in the dream.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: And she goes, Well, so I sat down.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: My parents had just recently passed, and uh August 13th was their wedding anniversary.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I sat down the morning of August 13th and I started writing.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: And by September, like right around now, at the end of September, I finished the first draft.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I showed it to my wife, who had heard the story a million times, and she goes, This is good.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: I go, Really?
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: She goes, Yeah, it's it's well written, but she's my friend, right?
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I showed it to a few other friends, and I got the same response.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, people had ideas to maybe change this, maybe add something here.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I spent the next eight months finishing it up, and then a friend of mine, the guy who said who produced shows for Nickelodeon, read it out in LA, he goes, Joe, look, he goes, put this on Amazon instantly.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Don't wait because the Elvis movie was about to come out.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, You wanted to have the free publicity of that.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I did, and to this day, it's been four years.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: At Gotham, I've been able to get it in the hands of people one degree removed from George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., like literally people who are friends with these people.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: More importantly, I wrote it with Nicolas Cage in my mind, because he's an Elvis nut.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: And with the right wig on and everything, he'd be a perfect guy to play, the 60-year-old Elvis, you know, uh, because that's how old he is in the novel.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's one of but right now I'm I'm starting another memoir for another cop friend.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh it's about a guy who worked up in Washington Heights and suffered a f a tremendous personal tragedy and ended up in Central Park.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: So he went from one of the one of the highest overtime guys in the city down to working in the park with me, and that's how I got to know him.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: So his story is incredible.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the drug dealers had a nickname for him up in the heights, and that's gonna be the name of the book, because it's a very catchy title.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we're working on that starting uh just a few days ago.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that's I I like writing, but I really love rewriting, which is interesting because a lot of people don't like that part of it.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to write, listen to me.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't come out perfect in the first draft, and that stopped me for a long time.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: You write, you know this.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's Hemingway who said that, right?
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: Writing is rewriting.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: In the rewriting, I think of it as sculpt sculpting.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think Michelangelo said the statue was already in there, I freed it, right?
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the marble.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_01: So the same thing with the first draft.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: You literally just vomit everything out as fast as you can.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: Go back, go back, go back, and you start, you know, sculpting it.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: You read it out loud to yourself.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: You have friends read it out loud.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: You you know, oh, that doesn't sound right.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: And showing, not telling, all of that stuff, you know.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: But you gotta you gotta do it.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's the thing.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can't just talk about it like I did.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I've I'm I'm so glad I finally wrote the Elvis book because that led to the gig on police one, which has led to other things, and then Nikki and I go doing that article and then doing the book because, you know, i I wanted to show my kids like you can't just dream.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: You have to take a step in the direction of your dreams.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I had already done that with the stand-up, and but with with the writing, I feel like it's something I can do if I'm lucky enough to live through my 70s, I can do it through through all that time.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: So well, I'll be sure to have the links to all your books in this comments section below.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it very much, Vic.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: Very much.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me on.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: Joe Battlemente, thank you for spending your time with us today.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: You're welcome.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great night.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Southbury, Connecticut, Anderson, Indiana, Greenville, Texas, and Roy, Utah.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you worked in law enforcement and had an interesting criminal background, please drop me a note on Twitter, Instagram at VicFerrari50.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like and subscribe button.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoy the content, check out my Amazon author page.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: Just type in my name, Vic Ferrari Like the Car, where you can preview all my NYPD books for free.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next week.