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NYPD Detective Jason Allison · NYPD Through The Looking Glass

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: I remember one night I followed uh I think it was uh an Acura Integra.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: I remember this fairly vividly because of what happened.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: And my partner and I, I'm driving and we're following him at a somewhat exceptional rate of speed.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you're making all these turns, and I don't know if you remember that area, but near that McDonald's that I mentioned over by Spofford Avenue, and there's like a triangle.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the road breaks off in one direction, and then there's like a triangle of sidewalk with some trees, and this is where all the cars would hang out.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm following this guy who does not want to stop and would rather not meet me that night.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he takes a turn and I take a turn.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: And shockingly, our Chevy Impala did not have the same handling capabilities.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I went hard right over the sidewalk, blew out our front two tires.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is in full view of, I don't know, hundred some odd cars and street racers.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's cheering, and now I got to get the car.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the precinct's only like a tenth of a mile away.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's just right on the other side of the Bruckner.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's underneath the Bruckner.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: But now my two front tires are out.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: My partner's cursing at me.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: And now I have to get the car to the precinct.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the only way to do that is to go through all of the street racers.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Jason Allison is a retired NYPD detective and author of the new book, The Killing Yards, a novel.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's available on Amazon, and I'll post the link in the comments section below this interview.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Jason, well welcome to the show.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, Vic.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jason, please tell our listeners a little something about yourself.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I uh Bronx born and raised, grew up in Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, and through that typical kind of path into policing, if you were, if you kind of came about in the 80s or 90s, seemed like a good job for a working class family.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I took the test and I came on in '98 and I went through a nine-month academy.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: They did not have nine months worth of material to teach us, and then they uh shipped me out to the 4-1.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I got started.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Where'd you go to high school?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Christopher Columbus High School over on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's still referred to.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: I know a lot of the schools have like undergone renaming and and kind of reorganization.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's still called Columbus High School.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: My mom went to Columbus.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: She was uh she graduated in 1959.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know who else went there?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Cy Sperling, the president of the hair club for men.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: So did actress Dan Bancroft.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: See, that's cooler.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so you you got me on that one.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: And your mom.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember Cy Sperling.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: We all do.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Again, if you had if you watched TV back then, you could not avoid those ads.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So your police academy was nine months, which I can't fathom because I remember my time was six months, and it was getting a little boring towards the end.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was like they were actually treating us like adults a little bit, not pushing us around as much, and there really wasn't anything to do.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So for not what what what were you doing like the last couple of months?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: There was a lot of movie watching, uh a lot of uh documentary watching that they that they had for us.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think the issue was, if I remember right, we had an exceptionally large class.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: We had there were three classes ongoing at once.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: So there were, if I remember, there were day tours, four to twelves, and that was seven days a week.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because usually I think it's like Monday to Friday.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a class that had started a month before us, and then we came in and everyone got shifted.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: They lost their Monday to Fridays, and everyone got shifted.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So the stop gap was they only have so many cars that they can put you through out of Floyd Bennett for the car for the auto training.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: They only have so many stalls out at the range and in uh in Rodman's neck.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so it it took that was where the everything got gummed up.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so there were a lot of times sitting in the in the academy on 23rd Street or 20th, whatever that was, the old academy was.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, that they didn't have much for us to do and they were just waiting for us to go drive or go shoot.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I spent a lot of time in the 4-1 precinct.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: That was your first command.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: When you when you came out of the academy, they they had done away with NSU, the rookies went to one precinct and they were kind of in field training.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: What was your first impression of the 4-1?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: 4-1 was quiet, which was kind of a shock because it has a reputation.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you watched the old uh Paul Newman movie in Ken Wall, you know, Ford Apache, the Bronx, and I grew up in the Bronx and it sort of had a uh a reputation.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: What I didn't know is that in the time from when I was born in 1976 until sh some time before I became a cop, the feds came in and kind of ravaged that place in terms of uh locking up all the violence.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I went to midnights shortly after whatever my field training was, those six to twos that they have you do.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I was very surprised to learn that I went entire tours without answering a job.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was deader than dead, especially in the wintertime.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the 4-1, you're right, but it's one of those places it's it's it's known for drugs, especially in the point.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of heroin and crack spots, but Hunts Point was known for its heroin spots.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have a lot of overdoses as a rookie cop?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, not as you know what, man, it's weird, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because I ended up going to narcotics later and I did not know it at the time, but I was living through the oxycontin epidemic, and that was all we were locking up were you know people in their 50s buying pills in the hub on 149 and third.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was out there, like I did not, I've I've never I mean, famously or infamously, Ken Caminetti, the four the former major league basically.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna ask you about that.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's crazy.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was just I had that as a question.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he this was after my time.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was only in the 4-1 for maybe three years, but um famously Ken Caminetti, major league or and uh uh NL MVP one year, I forget when, played for the Astros for years.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: He overdosed in Hunts Point and died out there.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I never really dealt with that.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: If if I do, if I did, none of them really made an impact now looking back 30 years later.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, we we ended up dealing with we had a lot of the you remember conditions, remember that was that a thing?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we had a lot of attention was we getting paid to the um the street racers out in Hunts Point and the Prosts out in Hunts Point, and less so for us, the uh the drugs.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: They were there, but it wasn't something that I dealt with on patrol as much.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and what when I used to work in task force and then later on in in autocrime, I you'd be in Hunts Point and there'd be crack lines and hero lines, and there were so many abandoned buildings in the point, they would just knock a hole through the concrete, the building be sealed up.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: They'd come in that building from around the block or two blocks away, and it's just a hole in the wall, and they'd start just dealing through a hole in the wall.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the 401 guys, I mean, they were aggressive with it.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: They would spray mace in there, sometimes they'd shoot fireworks in there just to get rid of them, but there was nothing it was nothing to see these lines.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: So can you explain to our listeners the point?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So Huns Point it kind of juts out from the southern or southeastern tip of the Bronx, um, out going towards into whatever, like Hell's Gate out there, kind of the waterways that that come out from underneath the Triborough Bridge when it splits and goes up into the East River and the Harlem River.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it is a mix, it's it's kind of a wild mix.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember, geez, I can't believe I still remember this.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: We had Adam, we had sector, I think it was Adam David and Boy Charlie were the two point cars.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And for the most part on midnights, especially in the winter, you were pretty much riding around, like I said, a ghost town, if not for the prostitutes, but it's all industrial.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: You get past a first few blocks.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: So if you if you come off of the Bruckner Boulevard and it's residential, but it's also a mix, a lot of car lots, a lot of auto parts, used car uh facilities.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the further you go out into the point, the more desolate it becomes.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of bizarre and it's kind of almost apocalyptic in a way.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the the if you go way the hell out, you end up at the barge, which I'm not sure if it's still being used, but there's a corrections barge that's moored out at the at the end of Hunts Point Avenue, and that is as far as you can go.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, you can go all the way through Hunts Point, and then you end up at a corrections facility.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that kind of tells you exactly the vibe of this place.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, with the street racing, did you guys have like a plan to stop these guys or w how did you deal with that?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, they always had plans.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: The plans were wonderful.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: But when you have 300 cars showing up and packed into an area, because the other thing is so you have the the reason why the street races came down is you had these really wide thoroughfares because so much of this was industrial and you had waste management out there.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: You had all of these, you had the the fruit market, the Hunts Point fruit and veggie market, um, which is, I think, even much bigger now than it used to be, because I think they also moved part of the uh the Fulton fish market or the Fulton market has been moved up there.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: But you had all these trucks coming and going.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the streets are very wide, and they were kind of sort of well maintained, uh, relatively as like New York City streets go.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: So you would get, you know, tricked out little hot hatchbacks, and you get some muscle cars, but it was a lot of like uh Honda Civic SIs and Honda Civic type Rs.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and these cars would come out and they would just set up shop at the McDonald's.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: The McDonald's is right off the Bruckner Expressway there by Spofford.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then they would roll out every now and then and they try to go down like East Bay Avenue and they try to do quarter miles off of there.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And basically the plan that they had for us was to kind of set up crosswise along these streets to try to prevent them from giving them like a long enough tra uh track to run down.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you would set up with the lights on and hopefully kind of dissuade them.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing they they would bring in aviation, I remember on some nights, it would become a detail.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: We'd turn out like two and 16 from other commands, and those guys are always really happy to be there.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: But and and they want summonses for like crazy stuff, like tints, I remember was a big deal, undercarriage lighting, which I think was illegal if you had it when you were rolling.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, and basically, but they never wanted you to to chase anyone, so occasionally you followed people.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember one night I followed uh I think it was uh an Acura Integra.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: I remember this fairly vividly because of what happened.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: And my partner and I, I'm driving and we're following him at a somewhat exceptional rate of speed, and you're making all these turns, and I don't know if you remember that area, but near that McDonald's that I mentioned over by Spofford Avenue, and there's like a triangle.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the the road breaks off in one direction, and then there's like a triangle of sidewalk with some trees, and this is where all the cars would hang out.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm following this guy who does not want to stop and and would rather not meet me that night.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: And he takes a turn and I take a turn.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And shockingly, our Chevy Impala did not have the same handling capabilities.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I went hard right over the sidewalk, blew out our front two tires.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is in full view of, I don't know, hundred some odd cars and street racers.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's cheering, and now I gotta get the car.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the precinct's only like a tenth of a mile away.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's just right on the other side of the Bruckner, it's underneath the Bruckner.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: But now my two front tires are out.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: My partner's cursing at me, and now I have to get the car to the precinct.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the only way to do that is to go through all of the street racers who are now letting me know that I am not a good as good a driver as I thought I was.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was pretty much if you ever watch Game of Thrones, Cersei Lannister goes the walk of shame.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was that was my walk of shame right there.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I was gonna ask you your most embarrassing moment as a cop, but I think we covered it.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I have others.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: I I I maced myself once.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there were plenty, plenty.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: I tripped doing uh working with ATF later, I did not see a chain across a uh a garage, or not a garage, but a driveway out in Brooklyn.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I hustling with the RAM and I tripped right over it.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: The ram went clattering on the ground, and I've I have a ton.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: We and the only way I I read uh a novelist who said everything worth doing lies on the other side of embarrassment.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I've explored that space pretty effectively.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: I know the McDonald's you're talking about, I think it was around 2005, they locked up a kid working in that McDonald's for putting glass and a cops hamburger.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I think then what the squad did was they sent another radio car through the drive-thru and had a couple undercover cops inside the McDonald's to see if the guy spit in their food, and I think he did.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: They arrested him, and I think of course the Bronx DA's office, n the case went nowhere, and the kid wound up suing the NYPD, the guy that worked in the McDonald's, and wound up getting money.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I remember that.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I don't remember how it turned out, but I remember that incident, and and and I don't remember because there was a point where um you know how how truth kind of bleeds into into fiction at a certain point with cops.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I you you are like the third or fourth person to tell me that recently.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I I remember when it happened, yeah.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I I never we were told never to go there.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like I never went there at all.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So in the 4.1, did you have any dealings with John Gotti's son-in-law at the recycling plant down at Hunts Point?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, I remember hearing about him.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, never had any dealings.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, as a it's kind of weird.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like I I ended up the the next 18 years of my career were were very, very good to me.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the job was very kind to me, and I liked the job a lot, and I had a good time with it.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: But in the 4-1, especially early on, I was not that pleased because I wanted, you know, you're a young guy, you want to do 4-12s, and I got the midnights despite there were some uh personnel uh issues that I did not agree with, but whatever.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I wasn't I wasn't dealing with a lot of people on the midnights out there.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, most of the people we dealt with were a lot of domestics, a lot of bar fights, owls Mr.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Wedge, if you remember that.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: But no, like the the more semi-famous or infamous kind of people that lived and worked in the confines.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really remember meeting many of them.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember responding to your first homicide in the 401?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Man, that's a good question.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've done a few of these now for the book, and no one's asked me that.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the first homicide, I remember my first homicide as a detective much later.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my first homicide, I would have to say, I don't remember my first homicide per se as an individual incident.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, wait, no, I do, I do.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: There was it was out in Hunts Point because we we responded, it was a shooting outside of a building, but the guy died inside of a lobby.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it was one of those apartment buildings on Hunts Point.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Those actually pretty well maintained.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember this this is what's weird, man.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: You look back and your memory kind of leaks a little bit the older you get.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the the thing that I remember about it is we had another guy who got assigned to the crime scene.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you're new and you're a rookie, no one wants to get assigned to the crime scene because you're locked down.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in theory, at least, you want to be out there rolling around.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, not that there was much to roll around with in some of those days, some of those nights in the 4-1.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember there was a one of us, kid named Freddie.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm not gonna say his last name because I I don't remember it, but I wouldn't say it anyway.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: But Freddie got assigned to to sit on the body in the lobby.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what I remember is going back multiple times to like bring him something to drink, bring him a power bar, bring him a sandwich, you know, kind of kind of spell him for a little bit, but you're just hang out with him.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I remember that body just laying there as uh even after crime scene left and the detectives left and just waiting for the OCME to show up, which was that was probably our first.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: I do remember before that, this is kind of a sad story.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: I do remember when I was in field training in the 108, which is Long Island City, we talked about this on the phone, the first place when they send you out for field training.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: The first DOA I ever sat on, I remember this vividly, was uh an older guy, uh an older homosexual guy who died of AIDS alone in his apartment in a very nice apartment in a very nice building in Long Island City.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the only reason why we knew about this is because he'd been dead for like six to eight weeks.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the smell overwhelmed the neighbors who did called up and they did what I don't think we called it a wellness check then.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: But there was something so epically sad about this guy who kind of almost looked like a like a mummy at this point, kind of huddled in the corner.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: He'd fallen off the bed.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember insure, you know the insure drinks?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: The that you kind of yeah, those milkshakes that are kind of nutritional, and those were there were pallets of them in this place.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: And two detectives who were the grisliest, they must have had 174 years on the job between them.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: And these two guys show up and they're smoking cigars and they look at me and the smell is just overwhelming.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: And they look at me and they go, You're sitting on this?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I go, Yeah.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they go, This is about the worst it'll ever get.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Okay.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the only thing they said to me.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember that guy passing away and thinking that he had no one else to check on him, and he had no one else that was like, hey, we haven't, I don't remember his name, but you know, has anyone seen Jimmy or whatever?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: And thinking that this poor guy died alone in this place with the lights out.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I I that has always stayed with me.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: So in the 4-1 you did midnights, did you ever work in any of the specialized units?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: They gave they gave us a GLA car, me and and these two other guys who were much more senior than me and pretty good at their jobs.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but they gave we had uh GLA was a big problem then, as I gather it's become again now.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: But um they gave us a GLA car and one of the guys who was again, he was doing a lot of work on patrol, uh, God bless him.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he was essentially doing a lot of insurance investigations, like after hours on his own time, he he'd stick around.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea was is he was starting to figure out how to lock people up on paper.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not gonna go into the details because I don't remember and I don't want to make a fool out of myself, and you being an auto-larceny guy would almost certainly know better.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Are we talking about Sully?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't gonna yes, uh yeah, we that is what we were talking about.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Love Sully.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Love Sully.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and Sully was doing this uh on his own time, and we were me and the other guy in the car were like, hey, are we supposed to be like running cars for plates and like you know, stolen vehicles?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, No, we got this.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and yeah, he was very good at I didn't know what he was doing, but his arrest, he made he built relationships with the Bronx DA.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: He had a few people in investigations that would charge his cases, and God bless him, and he was locking people up on paper cases, and they were going, you know, going to grand jury, and and that was our uh that was my only uh and brief uh flirtation with a specialized unit in a precinct.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, we're talking about Sully.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sully's got more time on the job with than me, but I I know Sully a long time.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh FYI, if you're thinking of burning your car, especially from the Bronx, don't do it.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna tell you why.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: When you burn a car, it sets off every bell and whistle in the world, okay?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you're gonna have three units looking at you.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have the fire marshal who comes around.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, you'll have four.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: You'll have the fire marshals that they're always interested in a burn.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: You'll have the sanitation police, sometimes they'll get involved.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: You'll get a guy like Sully in a precinct that figures out how to do the paperwork and builds, like you said, relationships with insurance companies.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then you got the auto crime division, the insurance fraud unit, and I've made a couple of those in my time.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So don't burn your car.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to go into how the investigation goes and how they know you burned said car.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it's funny, as you're telling this story, I'm looking at you and I'm like, I know exactly who he's talking about.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: I love something.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: I did not want to, yeah, yeah, I feel I feel a lot better now that I he he built a reputation clearly that went beyond the confines of one small case.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was ingenious.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, so after the 4-1, you go to the Patrol Barrow Bronx Anti-Crime Unit, which that's fun.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's plain clothes, you get to run around the city, they want robbery and GLA collars and Grand Law City collars.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: What did you think of that?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that was great.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: That was where I learned how to be a cop.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I ended up in a car with a lieutenant who was incredibly good at police work.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I learned how to cultivate sources, I learned how to operate off information, learned how to be selective and surgical because obviously that we were there.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: I went there after Amadu Diallo because essentially Bronx anti-crime was what street crime became when they broke up uh, you know, Randall's Island.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so they kind of sent the units all out to the precincts.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: We fell under the borough, and no one really wanted that gig.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: The only reason why I went there is because I volunteered.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think any I don't think anyone in their right mind looked at like, huh, what unit is under an intense amount of scrutiny and has just gone through a generational case and investigation and trial.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I want to go there.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went and it was me and another guy, and I got lucky, they picked me.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I I learned a ton there.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: We drive around the whole Bronx, you work in, I think we did six to twos, um, and all they wanted were guns, and and they were like, just, you know, just get guns.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I that was the first place I ever saw a kilo.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: That was the first place I ever saw a a clavo, a trap, which I'm sure you dealt with in in auto crime.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, and I just kind of was able to watch these people that have been doing this a very long time and surviving at it and thriving at it, and that was an absolute blast.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: The camaraderie in that office was unbelievable.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: We had such fun in that place.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Did you turn out of the borough or the old four four?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: The old four four initially, and then towards the end of my Time there.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think we were up in the 4-7.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: They moved us up there.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know where they are now.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even know if the unit still exists.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: I've been gone eight years.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I was in the old 4-4 in task force.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: What was your go-to precinct when you got the run of the borough?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Every cop's got their go-to precinct when they're looking for a collar.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't my choice.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: It was always a lieutenant's choice.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: And he him doing as much work as he did as long as he had, he was very good linking drugs to guns.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: We we paired a lot of uh a lot of crack stashes with pistols.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he was very good in the 4-6 and the 4-4 and kind of kind of the west side of the Bronx.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of interesting you bring that up, right?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because there were places that you felt or that I think that that everyone felt comfortable in, right?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like you know, like, okay, I know the people right.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know your spots, I know the people here, I know how this works, I know the streets.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: And there were places, and for me, that was like the 4.4 and the 4-6.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then there were other commands that were just like foreign ground, like the 4-7.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: I never did well in.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was uh I I never knew where I was, I never knew what direction I was traveling in.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Your old command, the 4-2, felt like a wasteland.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't I didn't know anything going on there.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, and then like uh so yeah, it would be it would be the west side and the 5.2.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: We did pretty well in the 5-2, also, actually.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: So did they let you guys develop informants and obtain search warrants?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they wanted you to hand that off.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, actually, we we did.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: We had a couple of very reliable CIs um in in borough crime that we were we had taken to SNC in Manhattan as special narcotics.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the beauty of SNC was that once your CI is proven, right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um you didn't necessarily need to take them physically back there.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like in the Bronx uh at the time, you know, every uh you needed to physically transport your CI and they needed to interview them, and I get that.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: But with SNC, as long as your CI was proven, it became an informed by.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so we were able the this this informant used to give us a lot of a lot of good intel, and we were able to just kind of go down there ourselves.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: And they, yeah, they as long as we were productive, we were given a pretty long leash by the borough.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: Were a lot of your search warrants in borough prime for guns?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Drugs that link to guns.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: We almost always had a a drug angle, a crack angle, and we would only they were never drugs only.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we only got drugs because the guns had moved on, but um they were always what we were after was the gun, at least on paper, because that's our you know, that's our mission.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: So they didn't want us crossing pat crossing paths with narcotics or or you know, SNOO, because SNOO still existed, although they were all uniform and they I don't think they did much in the way of uh warrants.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I asked about the drugs uh angle is I mean, to get a search warrant, you gotta run it through DEX.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes when for those of you who don't know, DEX is it's a system that basically everybody's supposed to play fair and law enforcement, and if they've got a location, or now it could be a person or a car or anything, you're supposed to fill out a form and put it in this database.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: So for argument's sake, if I wanted to get a search warrant at a location, I have to check the deck system and it'll turn around and say, Well, time out.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Jason's got a case there, or an ATF agent's got a case there.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm guessing if if if you guys were getting search warrants through the decks, a lot of times you would bump heads or hit like a log jam with narcotics.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think our lieutenant had he he he had kind of a reputation and he had friends everywhere.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he had I I remember dexing people because we would dex them, but I think it was all through a connection that he had that like because we didn't have we were still patrol and we were just we had a few guys who were left over from narcotics that were uh detective specialists, but um the rest of us, none of us were getting the shield.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't considered like an investigatory path.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: Our our you know, our access, our computer access was limited.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So he had someone that he was dexing people through, and it was under his name.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was all this was all above board.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: The borough knew about it.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: We weren't causing any kind of uh, you know, we weren't butting heads with anyone.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, it was only because of that lieutenant that we were able to do that.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: So after borough crime, you wind up in the narcotics division.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: How did you wind up in Brooklyn South if you're a Bronx guy?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because the NYPD is the NYPD, and they said, let's take this guy who doesn't know jack shit about Brooklyn and send him out there.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I volunteered.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: The reason why I went is that lieutenant I just mentioned, he went to joint fire or he went to firearms, not joint firearms.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: He went to firearms.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he told uh me and the other guy, my partner, he's like, hey, here's what you do.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Put in for narcotics, and then I can lateral you over to firearms because firearms is part of OCCB.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we put in, or I put in four narcotics, and my buddy had an in with ESU, and he was thinking for a little while of going to ESU, and I'm like, I am not climbing the Brooklyn Bridge, I'm not wearing like harnesses, I'm not hanging off of buildings.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's not me.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: You can be a fireman and God bless the ESU guys that do that, but I'm not like a gear guy.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, I didn't want to carry a rifle, I didn't want any of that.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I put in for narcotics, I get there and I and I call my old lieutenant and I'm like, hey, they took me.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then he said, like, yeah, unfortunately, we're not taking anyone.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm sorry.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like he he he was in a bad spot.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't his fault.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: He was promised something that he could have his people.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then there were other people who were also told they could have their people.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know how it goes.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, they sent me to uh to Brooklyn South narcotics?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Brooklyn South.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: We turned out of Bay Ridge, and um, I think the command I worked in was the 7-0.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was a blur of a time, but uh yeah, they I I I remember this was during a push.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone was kind of new in my in my team.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: None of us were really that good.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: We very rarely had undercovers because there weren't enough undercovers, so a lot of it was observations, and it was just it was another one of those situations where I was on a roof of a building many, many days, and I've had binoculars, and I'd be watching people step off.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: And because I didn't know Brooklyn, I didn't know what compass direction they were heading in.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know the streets, so I'm going, he's walking towards a tree.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that really doesn't help anyone who was trying to find this person when they say, Oh, you're walking towards a tree.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: That so yeah, it was it was not a match made in heaven.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: How long were you in Brooklyn?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: I do not remember.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say a year.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: I it was long enough.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Let me put it this way.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was long enough where I put in for the the the DEA, the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, and I got to the two-mile run.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember this.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I did the run on Riverside Drive at that park up in the what is that, like the 120s off the West Side Highway and or the Henry Hudson.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I did the run and I failed the run by like 90 seconds or two minutes or something.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they were like, Come on, you gotta just just train a little bit more because I could I could do push-ups all day, but I'm not a runner.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they were like, just, you know, just train up and and come back.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I went back to Brooklyn South, and they shortly after that, they moved me up to the Bronx, and I said, Well, I'm not, I'm not going to, because the other thing they told me in from the DA recruiter was, hey, you're probably going to go to Texas.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, shit, if I'm having a tough time handling Brooklyn, so I I pulled out of that.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, yeah, I made it back to the Bronx finally.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: But Brooklyn was a strange place.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know what Brooklyn was different for?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, here's here's my my outstanding memory.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: In the Bronx, we had crack came in tiny little ziploc bags, right?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: The tiny, tiny little zips.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: And in Brooklyn, they used saran wrap and they did twists.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'd never seen this before.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and here I am, what is this, 27, 26, 25 years later?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And my overriding memory is the fact that the crack came in a different packaging.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that to me was just mind-blowing.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that's my that's what I dealt with in Brooklyn.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Good food.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, Brooklyn South?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, definitely.
• 30:03
  unknown: Yeah.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Better food.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, our office of walking distance in Bay Ridge.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: We was at Third Avenue over there.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: We had some great spots.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, what teams did you have in the Bronx and Narcotics Division?
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was in the 4-1 the whole time.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm sorry, the 4-0, not the 4-1.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: The 4-0.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: I went to the 4-0, which was, like I said earlier, that we didn't or I didn't know it.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think anyone that I was working with uh knew that we were dealing with what would later be looked back on as like the whole opioid slash oxy epidemic.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because everything, not everything, but so much of what we did revolved around pills.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Did did you guys do control deliveries or rips?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: No, they didn't.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: This was they did not trust us to that level.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: Control deliveries were were not done.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: We did a lot of, we had, we had really good undercovers in the Bronx, like tremendous undercovers.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: And they were great forgetness warrants.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so we did a ton of warrants in the projects.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: We did a a bunch of warrants for not as much pills because the pills were always harder.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: But the and this is where, again, I'm sure you you are familiar with this, and a lot of a lot of your listeners will be familiar with this.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: The whole nature of the beast was getting bodies, right?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Just generating numbers.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the easiest way to generate numbers was to go to the hub and to lock up these, you know, 40, 50, 60 year olds who were buying oxies and percocets and Vicadins and just filling the van.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so we would have days when we would have, you know, seven, eight, nine people in the van, in the in the prisoner van, the P van.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it was easier.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so that became the path of least resistance to generating productivity.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And never mind that these people were not necessarily you can have your opinion about laws regarding narcotics.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the nature of what we're supposed to be doing, at least in theory, is right, you're supposed to be going after crack and heroin because it breeds violence.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think we got away from that and where I was, and that's why I did not care for the tail end of my time in narcotics, um, because we were just hitting the hub 149 and third, and we were hitting all these pill spots, and it was just draining.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: What was the biggest hit you got on a search warrant, narcotics?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing that spectacular.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: We were small potatoes, man.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we had the the the thing that I was more into is we would have occasionally some players that we had um dextered or that we were looking at or that we had, you know, we were hoping to get search warrants into.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: There would be a shooting or a homicide.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then we would be able to go over to the squad or we'd meet the squad at the scene and we would talk to them about like, hey, this is what we got, this is what we think is going on.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the first time I really got like exposure to the squad.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, although that's not entirely true.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's a there's a quick story from when I was in anti-crime.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: But basically, what I learned is that I seem to like the idea of kind of addressing the violence more than um the drugs.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying that like I'm some sort of crusader because I wasn't.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: I just found it more interesting from like a work point of view.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like I did not think filling the van was interesting.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: I did not think, you know, pounding a door.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: I all of our search warrant hits were like I'm talking tens of bags of crack.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: I never, I never stumbled across the kilo ferry doing narcotics.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: I stumbled across the kilo ferry in anti-crime, but never narcotics.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you said that you f your your initial uh interest into the detective squad was when you were a patrol cop and you had the kidnapping case, and you saw that the squad had later made the arrest with that, and that kind of jogged your interest in wanting to become a detective.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was um we had a case, uh it was not, it was actually in anti-crime.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: We had a burgeoning CI, like an off-the-book CI.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: He aspired to provide us information.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: And one day this person calls us up and is like, hey, my cousin or someone in his family got kidnapped.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And this guy was involved in the drug trade, of course.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so this person gets kidnapped and we ran with it as long as we could, which was not very long because we don't know what we're doing, even though my lieutenant was very good and probably the best pure cop I ever worked for or with.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: But we got to a certain point and he said, like, hey, we got to give this off.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we made the notification and major case shows up because I think kidnappings, legit kidnappings are major case.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so they kind of take our our complainant, who is not the victim, but he's kind of the witness who's saying, Hey, my boy got got kidnapped.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he kind of takes him, they put him in an Omar car, we don't see him.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And like a week later, I'm in the um the complaint room in uh Bronx Court, waiting to draw up some collar, and I'm sitting there and there's a guy across from me, and it was one of the detectives from Major Case.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I look at him, I recognize him, you know, every cop's asleep at like 9 a.m.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and he gets called, he's going through his folder.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: He gets his name gets called and he's going through his folder, and I see a photo of our complainant, our our CI, quote unquote.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, hey, did you ever make a collar on that?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, Oh yeah, I'm here right now.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm drawing it up.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, huh.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: And he got up and he went over and he talked to the DA and I didn't see him again.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm sitting there and I'm wondering, how did he go from what we had, which was basically my cousin got kidnapped, to he's here in the complaint room and he's like, Oh, yeah, I made collars.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was endlessly fascinating.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that was where I was like, Oh, I I I I want to do that.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: So when they were, I'm guessing when you were in narcotics and they were looking for volunteers, the train was coming through, you put in, and that's how you wound up in the 4-0 squad.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, the they did not want to let anyone go because people were trying to leave narcotics at the time.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I had a because we had that connection that I mentioned earlier with the squad, me and and my partner spent a lot of time in the squad trading Intel and getting Intel and trying to give them what we could.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a lieutenant there at the time who kind of liked me.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I said to him, like, hey, I want to come here.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Great, put in for it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I tried to put in for it and it and it didn't happen.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: I went back to him and I'm like, hey, I'm trying I'm trying to come and and it's it's not happening.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Let me make a call.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: And he made a call and shortly thereafter I got transferred over.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: This was in 2007, I remember, it was shortly after St.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Patty's Day.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I went so from the 4-0 module, I went to the 4-0 squad, which was convenient because I already knew the building.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um, yeah, and then I ended up there for seven years.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, how was the transition from the fast-paced world of get rabbing bodies and narcotics to all of a sudden now you're sitting around in a detective squad?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oddly enough, maybe it's because I'm an old soul, and obviously I I like to type because I wrote a novel, but I kind of dug it.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of dug I the I like that it felt more intentional.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I don't know what to say.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: I like talking to people, I like listening to people.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: I like that much more than I did, you know, doing strip searches in uh the prisoner bathroom downstairs or going to go into central booking.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, man, I find people fascinating, all different kinds.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so obviously, you don't feel that way necessarily in the moment because uh you end up as a cop kind of hating everyone, and that's unfort an unfortunate side effect of the work.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, I I really dug the nature of the work and so much of it was nonsense, so much not nonsense to the people who were involved, but like if you're doing ag you know, aggravate harassment complaints and you're carrying 300 cases a year, I would say three quarters of them are nonsense.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: But the shootings and the homicides and kind of the the crazy missing persons, like yeah, I I thought that stuff was endlessly fascinating.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: The 4-0 was known for the street-level narcotics trade.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm guessing a lot of the homicides you caught were drug related.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's weird, right?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because we ended up um you're talking about like earlier how the Bronx Tier didn't draw up that case uh against the kid in um in the McDonald's.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: So we had we had a series in 2010, we had a ton of shootings and and homicides and a ton is relative, right?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because 15 years before that, I remember seeing the board, it used to have the the homicide number 15 years ago, five years ago, last year, this year.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: And 15 years ago, it was like 75 homicides.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was some crazy, crazy number in in a in one single command.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't like that.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: When I was there, we would do like, I don't know, 15 to 20.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: That might be a lot.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: It might be even less than that when I was there.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: But summer 2010, we had a ton of shootings pop off all around the Cortland houses, and then um another house, another set of houses further down.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Shit, man, this is what happens when you get old.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember the name of the other house.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, it was it it it initially started as a drug beef, and then it expanded into more of like a gang war over respect.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we ended up kind of taking that to the U.S.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: attorney, and that case ended up going on for about two years, and then it went on for another two years later afterwards.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: It became a fairly big case.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh like one of the first of Operation Crew cut.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that was what I got off on.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: That was like, you know, the the kind of work that I dug was just everything was i initially drug related, but then it kind of became something more.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then with the federal system, you spend a lot of time talking to people.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: People you've arrested, people who are cooperators.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And when you talk to these people, it's kind of you get like a full story and the ones that are willing to tell the truth.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just, you know, the stories you get are just the the kind of stuff you can't make up on your own.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a case from the 4-0 squad that haunts you?
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, related to this.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: There was the only, I think the only true sociopath I ever arrested was this kid that ended up killing three people.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we ch he got charged federally with two of them.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: And one of them was a legitimate, honest to God, innocent victim that I felt bad for.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: This kid, the victim's name is Darrell Legister, and this kid that killed him, he did another killing.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: He stabbed a homeless guy in his in the stairwell of his own housing development, and he took a chain off his neck.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the old the old homeless guy was like in his 60s, you know, no family.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this dude stabbed him, took the chain, went upstairs, told his mother that someone's bleeding in the stairwell, and the mother called 911.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this is all obviously what we learned later after many years of talking to complainants and everything.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the same kid that killed him.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we never charged him with that.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: That was the only homicide of mine that I was assigned that I caught that I did not charge.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember the name of the victim, but that's how it goes, right?
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like the the the quietest, the least sexy victim, just this this older guy who is a drug addict and kind of sleeping in different stairwells, he gets stabbed just because he's there.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the the killer, he he's in jail for life, but yeah, he was he was never charged with that crime.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that one I kind of feel I wish we could have closed that.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: You're the first detective, I think, that I've had on on this this podcast um that that worked during the Comstat era.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the job has changed so much because when I when I was the young cop, detectives came and went in and out of the station as they went.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: There was no real pressure on them.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then Comstat came along and then can't Comstat became like chemotherapy and they never knew when to take their foot off the gas.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: What was it like as a detective in a squad where one police plaza is breathing down your neck and has access to everything you have, and you've got people who aren't investigators in management positions breaking your balls about well, what's going on with this?
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: You should do this, that you should do that.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: So do you remember?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: You might remember this.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember there was when the Hitler videos were big from that movie, like Hitler discovers?
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was a meme where there was basically like a three-minute clip from a movie called Downfall.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: And there was one that came out that was Hitler Goes to Comstat.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'll send this to you afterwards.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't working, but basically, well, not basically, I wrote that and it got kind of big.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: It got big to the point where Chief Timlin asked me for a DVD of the video, but I'll show it to you all the story's not going to work out because you're unfamiliar with it.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: But it's basically the absurdity of getting dragged down to Comstat in an era when you had to make like physical copies of this.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: Was when we had like physical case folders, and you had like Grand Larceny case folders.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't in the the Bram, but you had Grand Larceny caseholders that were like an inch thick just because of all the checks that were mandated.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you would then have to make four copies or like six copies of every case that they pulled for distribution so everyone could pick them apart.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: And there was something so sublimely absurd about a bunch of detectives on like a Thursday or Tuesday night panicking that they got to make copies of their cases because they were getting picked for Comstat.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't like, hey, have we made any progress on this case?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: The mindset became, hey, how do we explain what we've done on this case?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that mindset's a very different thing, right?
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because then the actual work in the case does not matter.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: What matters is how you can explain what you've done on the case.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've never been in the squad and you have and you've done investigations, it became a very different mindset.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that became the detec the detective sergeants and lieutenants kind of overriding concern was not necessarily obviously, yes, and especially with homicides.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like I don't mean to make light of this too much, but with certain kinds of cases, the level of attention, the level of fear that Comstat imposed on supervisors was astounding.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: That these were grown men with like 30 years on the job who would just melt because you had certain chiefs who had never been detectives and might have been very intelligent and very good managers of people, but they were not necessarily good investigators.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's two different things.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: But by the same token, and this is something that I've always said to people when I talk about it that don't know the NYPD is the NYPD manages itself on the lowest common denominator principle.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the assumption.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: That all of us are drooling idiots or lazy or do nothings.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so because it assumes that every that what the majority of us are that, it manages that all of us are like that.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that kind of that kind of colors how the job treats its people and also how the detectives and kind of treat the job.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, when you were talking about a detective making case folders to bring down so the flunkies at one police plaza could examine it.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think the NYPD killed more trees than Paul Bunyan.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's very true.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's I like I I've seen videos of Comstat.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and it's it's bizarre because like there there were incidents where you had pee you had guys that did not do their job, like flat out.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like let's let's call it what it is.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: It happens.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, there were also cases where guys did 98% of their job.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I say guys, I mean that in like a non-gendered way here, but there were people that did their 98% of their jobs and they concentrated on like that 2% that they didn't do.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: And regardless, it didn't matter if the the steps that weren't taken would not have produced an arrest because they almost never would have.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was just that these are the rules and you have to follow the rules.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: So well, it it dwar it it it basically got rid of independent thinking.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're so you're so concerned about what they may have made odd ass down there to make you or your supervisor look like a jackass, and if they don't like what they hear, they'll kick you out of your squad and send you to Brooklyn South from the Bronx, right?
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: That case isn't getting solved, or you know, cops don't have the time where detectives don't have the time to really dig into something or make that extra call.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that became part of the I remember sh towards the end of my time in the uh I left the 4-0 squad in 2014, and towards the end of my time or shortly thereafter, it might have been a year or two thereafter, the New York Times did this whole expose about how detectives in Manhattan, by and large, caught around a hundred cases a year.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: And detectives in the Bronx were catching 300 cases a year.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a whole like, oh, so different boroughs.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Shockingly, the Bronx gets less attention because if you were a victim, if you were complainant in the Bronx, you were getting that much less attention because your detective was under was overworked and and the office was undermanned.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so it became kind of a bigger issue.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, after the 4-0 squad, you went to a robbery task force called Sparta.
• 46:21
  unknown: Yeah.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Did you agree to that?
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was um because of that federal case that we had that that went really well through the work of a lot of people.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: I was just lucky to be a part of it.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: But um the Bronx robbery had a lot of issues with the Bronx DA in terms of getting them to prosecute commercial robberies.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, perps were going in masked up and you couldn't get IDs.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: And this was when video was prevalent, but not kind of omnipresent yet.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the guys in Bronx Robbery were frustrated, and so they started working on like an ad hoc informal basis with these ATF agents because ATF was able to charge Hobbes Act robberies.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: And Hobbes Act robbery under federal law is if you rob any commercial establishment that engages in interstate commerce, you are impeding interstate commerce.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore, it becomes a federal charge.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so these Bronx robbery guys had this relationship with ATF and with Southern District.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: I had a relationship with prosecutors in Southern District.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: They created this unit called Sparta, and I kind of somehow was able to worry my way in there.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we, for the last four years of my career, I ended up working with ATF agents.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: We had to take, you know, everyone gets a take-home car, you get treated like an adult, you work your cases, you do you kind of work the hours you need to work.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it was, I travel, I meant I traveled the whole country.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: I made arrests in California and Florida and South Carolina, North Carolina.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was wild.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was like the coolest experience.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, what you saw is that the mindset difference from a prosecutorial standpoint was Bronx DA always said, well, here's why we can't do it because of X, in terms of like bringing an indictment or charging case.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the mindset in southern and eastern districts of the U.S.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: attorney's office was, well, what do we have to do in order to charge the case?
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: And similarly, like with Comstat, that mindset change is a huge proponent of like getting guys locked up.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, having taken a couple of cases federal, I always found it fascinating the difference between federal prosecutors and the Bronx DA's office.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Manhattan DA's office was top shelf, I'll say that.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the feds have a lot more leeway, the sentencing guidelines.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: They can send you to jail anywhere in the country.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they have a lot more leverage on the individual getting dragged in there and handcuffed.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the whole the hammer that they wield from a sentencing point of view kind of compels cooperation.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so you, you know, once once people start knowing that like the feds, it's a federal case, it becomes a matter of who's going to break first.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you got a cooperator and then the floodgates open.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that they just have different tools at their disposal.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: Did you go into that case?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: I saw you talking about another uh podcast about the smash and grab that took you to California.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there was um in Midtown Manhattan, there was uh three guys wearing like zoot suits and fedoras.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um they they just they destroy, they they walk in with hammers to a watch shop and like on Fifth Avenue, or maybe Madison, I'm not sure.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: It was northbound, so it might have been Madison in the 50s.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: Broad daylight, gunpoint, um, a round goes off at some point, and they smash the uh the glass cases and they make off with like hundreds of thousands worth of watches.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: We track them on video, and and at some point we lose them, they change clothes in a dead spot.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: Long story short, through like um through MTA video, we're able to kind of narrow down where uh where they they emanated from, and it was from Brooklyn.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: And we got a connection through someone again, it's always like it's never as cool as you see in movies where like there's a moment of epiphany, and some detective is this brilliant, like, oh my god, it's all these connections fit.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's never that cool.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's usually something like someone blabs and then someone talks, and we got a tip to a kid, and we talked to the kid, and the kid gave us someone else, and we we get up on that guy's phone, and that guy is out in Sacramento.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so, this being the feds, like we okay, you're getting on a plane.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like we we had enough at that point through cell sites and through DNA and through uh uh witness statements and victim statements.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: We had an arrest warrant.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so me and a marshal go out to uh California, and we found out that the we had the the the marshals out there had the uh trigger fish or the stingray.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so they were tracking the phone and we had him narrow down to a house, but we wanted to verify and we a car comes out of the house and we stop it.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's not him, but the guy driving the car is like, oh yeah, he's in there.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I go, okay.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the marshals say to me, what do you want to do?
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: I say, What do you mean?
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's go knock on the door.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is the Northern District of California.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: We don't do that here.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: I said, What do you mean you don't do that?
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: And they go, no, no, no.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: The judges here don't like it when we knock on people's doors.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't mean like knock the door off its hinges.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean like most of what I did was knock on the door and be like, police, open the door, and you talk to people, blah, blah, blah.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Very, I was very lucky, almost never had to, like, there was very little violence in my career.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so they go, no, no, we don't do that.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the marshal I'm with is a New York guy.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, are you hearing this?
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, I've never heard of this bullshit before.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we say to the marshals, okay, how do you want to do it?
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they go, here's what we're gonna do.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there's all these marshals with all these cars with their push rant, uh, their push rigs on the the front ends of their truck.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: And this is, these are standalone single-family houses out in some housing tract in California.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time I didn't know it, but a lot of these homes had been foreclosed on during the Great Recession, so a lot of them were empty.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, we're gonna surround the house and tell him to come out with his hands up.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: And sure enough, that's what they did.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: They're on a loud speaker and they're like, We know you're in there.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: Come out with your hands up.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I looked to my buddy and I'm like, I can't believe we're doing this.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is but this bananas, let's just go knock on the door.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, This is never gonna work.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would never come out.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is never gonna work.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: 20 minutes later, the guy comes out with his hands up.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so that shows you A, what I know in terms of like maybe just listen to the people that work in a given area.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: They know what they're doing.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the guy came out and he he gave himself up.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: But like, and then you process him out in the the district court in California and he ends up the marshals bring him back to New York.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I just thought it was so again, talk about that surrealism.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was bizarre that I was doing the whole come out with your hands up.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: We don't do that in New York.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like you knock on the door, or if you have an arrest warrant, you take the door off the hinges.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: But um, one way or another, like I'm I'm going to that door.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's funny you bring up surreal.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: I always got a kick out of a perp's reaction when you brought them down to federal court and they thought they were going to Bronx Central booking.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you're bringing them down, they're like, What is this?
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, where are we going?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then you hand them over to the U.S.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: Marshals, and they come out in their stormtrooper suits, they start taking their shit off of them, and it just dawns on them like this is totally, and you're right, like within minutes they just start cooperating because it it's it's a foreign world to them.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, part of the big deal of why Bronx Robbery wanted to work with ATF is we took, like we worked out of an ATF office in the Bronx.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you lock people up, they weren't going to, you know, the 4.4, the 4-6 or whatever.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: You took them to this very kind of imposing relatively, because it's different, right?
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you've been through the system a bunch of times, you know, all right, I'm going to Bronx Central Book and I'll be there for 32 hours, I'll see a judge, I'll get our award.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: But all of a sudden, if you get taken out of what is familiar, it jars you, and that jarring sense of unease can kind of provoke people to talk.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: Jason, having worked with the feds, different agencies, what what what is the mindset differences between the agents and detectives?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: Huh.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's a good question.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it it's a number of things.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think agents are very good at utilizing the tools at their disposal, and they're very skilled at process and procedure.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I was very impressed with like the the vast majority of federal agents I worked with.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: There was one FBI agent um who he would kill me if I gave his name, but he was probably one of the best like pure investigators I ever spoke with or ever dealt with.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you talk about dexing people earlier.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: He called me up one day.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: There was a guy that we were looking at, and he called me up out of the blue.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: I had not spoken to him before, and he's like, Hey, are you looking at this guy, uh, Roger Key?
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Yeah, who are you?
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Oh, I'm so-and-so from the FBI.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Are you looking at this guy named Roger Key?
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: And none of us wanted to talk because it's that whole dance where, okay, now we're both looking at the same guy.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: But it turns out this particular FBI agent like was incredible, and we ended up doing some good stuff together.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think the federal agents are very good at process and very good at building cases.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, and this is I think detectives excel at talking to people.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that comes from the reality that that agents never do patrol.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no patrol component of federal law enforcement.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when you are forced by the job and the nature of the work, that like you have to talk to all different kinds of people in all different parts of the city, victims, witnesses, you know, storekeepers, sanitation workers, whoever.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think that makes you a better communicator.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is what detectives bring to the game.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think we talk to people in a much more relatable manner.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, watching one of your interviews and sitting here talking to you today, I noticed that you took the time to learn as much as you could about the job.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: Some cops go through their career and you talk to them afterwards, and it just would it always amazed me how they didn't know how the criminal justice system worked or different things with specialized units.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I that always felt I always felt that sad.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, well, why wouldn't you take the time to learn as much as you could about something?
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: It it could have helped you, but Yeah, I think and this is something that that I I've pointed out and and like it it kind of sticks with me, right?
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like is we all remember the worst engagement.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like you you remember the the bad time you were do you remember the time you were treated poorly in a restaurant by a waiter?
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that sticks out in your mind, but you don't remember all the times that you were treated like gold by a waiter in in a restaurant.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the issue is is that with policing, you remember the people that were really that didn't care about their jobs.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that was, I think, in my in my experience on the patrol level at least, you have a lot of people that just want to do the job and go home.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I get it and I understand why.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: But like, yeah, I I was never good at anything else.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was never an athlete.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was never cool.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: I I never had like the biggest friend circle.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like the only thing that I found I was kind of okay at was police work.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the only reason why I was good at that is because all you have to do is to want to do it.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's not this, we're not building rockets here, man.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like it, if you just took the time to learn and you cared about it, you could have that career.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: And and or at least you could when I was there.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what it's like now.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I that's I wanted to know what I was doing.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I I didn't want to look like a fool.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because as I as we've already expressed, and as it's evidenced by when I chase someone and in Hunts Point, it's very easy for me to look like a fool.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: So after you j after you retired, you got into writing.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about that.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh my uh I I retired at age 42, and my wife had and continues to have knock on wood, a very successful jewelry business, and she's from Massachusetts.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: I love it up here.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is where we live now.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, So what do you want to do?
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I I was always a reader.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I I love movies, I love TV, I love pop culture.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I want to write, try to write a novel.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, Okay, have at it.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I wrote two really bad novels that didn't get agents.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: And uh then I wrote a third novel that did get an agent.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: But for those, for anyone that cares about how publishing works, if you if you go a traditional publishing route, you get an agent, and then that agent tries to sell that book to uh an editor.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that book didn't sell.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: So me and that agent parted ways amicably.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: We both still see each other at functions and and everything's cool.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote another book, the one that is coming out, The Killing Yards, and new agent took me on, and it took a very long time because everything in publishing takes ages.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah, we sold that one, and that one should be on store shelves and Barnes Nobles and Amazons and independent bookstores on September 22nd.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: And but I write long answer to your question is I I kind of I write to get out of my own head.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like I don't have kids.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have a golden retriever down here, um, and she's awesome.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: But my wife and I don't have kids, and she works very hard for the entire summer.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I didn't want to be one of those guys wandering around the house that had nothing to do.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know what happens to those guys?
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: They they die four years after they retire.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't want to be that.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like writing gives me, even though it's such a small thing relative to everything that that is going on in the world, I feel like a little sense of accomplishment when I have a good day and I've I've put a bunch of words.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: You write, you know how it is.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you feel the same way when you you have a good writing day, you kind of feel like you've you've earned your your cheeseburger that night, you know?
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: But you feel like you've done something.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because the guys that that would retire and you either you they they start going to the Jolly Tinker uh at like, you know, one in the afternoon, or you know, the those guys that don't have like a purpose, and I've seen this even with guys from my age that that retired is there were guys that retired and then started driving like a school bus in upstate New York.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that lasted like a year or two because they're like, this is I I I this is boring.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then they went back and they became like uh an investigator with ACS or they go work private security for like MBC sports or something.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think you have to do something.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think if you leave, if you leave young, and I d how old were you when you retired?
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Your age.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: I was 40.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, 41.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so if you leave young, that's God willing, if you're healthy, that's half your life ahead of you.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think you can just sit around on your ass for half your life.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta use your brain.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: You have to, otherwise at atrophies, man.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then you, you know, it's I I see it like now you will lose it.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, tell us about your book, The Killing Yard.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is a uh it's a cron noir, it's a fairly gritty, fairly dark uh novel uh set in the 1990s New York City nightclub scene, and it centers around four characters that are linked to uh a fictionalized nightclub called Abattoir, which is kind of based on Tunnel, which if you were a club kid back in the 90s, you remember that and you remember uh the name's Peter Gation, and uh he was the owner of Tunnel, but basically it centers around the ecstasy trade and kind of a very driven, it's not focused on the cop character.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: There is a cop character who is very driven and makes remarkably bad decisions because he's young and stupid.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's basically how all of these kind different kinds of people end up getting linked to this nightclub and uh all the violence that is perpetrated by them in defense of protecting this this night spot.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I only came to that as like I was a club kid when I was young and I don't like doing research.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I knew I knew police work, I knew nightclubs, and I'm like, well, there we there we go.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we got this.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: Chase the last time.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: What's the name of your book and where can our listeners pick up a copy?
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: It is called The Killing Yards, and it comes out on December 22nd.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: You can get it on Amazon, you can get it at Barnes Noble, you can get it from any local independent, reputable bookstore.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I will be going on like a personal tour.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'll actually being if any of your listeners are still in the New York area, I'll be uh showing up at the mysterious bookshop on September 22nd.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know when this will go live, but um yeah, uh it it you can get it pretty much anywhere books are sold.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: Jason Allison, thank you so much for spending your time with us today.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me, man.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: This was a blast.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: This was uh a very good time, Vic.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely enjoyed it.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in Russell, Ontario, Pleasantville, New York, Quincy, Massachusetts, Greenville, Texas, and Shalot, Shalat, North Carolina.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you worked in law enforcement and had an interesting criminal background, please drop me a note on Twitter or Instagram at VicFerrari50.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like and subscribe button.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoy the content, check out my Amazon author page, just type in my name, Vic, Ferrari Like the Car, where you can preview all my NYPD books for free.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next week.