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Handcuffed in the Hudson: The Murder of NYPD Housing Cop Robert Bonds · NYPD Through The Looking Glass

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, I came across a wild story the other day I wanted to share with you.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: On Saturday morning, I was having my coffee and spending entirely too much time on Facebook looking at one of the many retired NYPD groups.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: TJ English, who wrote the book about the Hell's Kitchen Gang, The Westies, I guess the book was written in the early 80s, maybe in the late 70s, really good book.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So they're doing a documentary on it.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I was like, oh, that looks pretty cool.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I was reading the comments beneath it, and someone wrote, Whatever happened to uh Robert Bonds, uh NYPD cop that was murdered by the Westies?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm reading it and I'm like, you know, like all NYPD members, I think I know everything about the police department.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I go, I've never heard of that.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Never, never heard about the Westies involved with a cop, never heard about the Westies killing a cop.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, me being me, I started digging into it, and I started finding newspaper articles about it.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a wild story I wanted to share with you guys.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I and after the story, I got a couple other things I wanted to share with you.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1985, there's this housing cop by the name of Robert Bonds, and he was hired in 1983.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So he had like two years on the job.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he was assigned to a special plain clothes unit in PSA 7, which is a housing unit.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is before the merge, so housing police was separate from the NYPD, but even still, I mean, we all acknowledge each other.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: So he worked in PSA 7 in the South Bronx, which my office decades later in the autocrime division was on the second floor of PSA 7, but his office was on 153 in Melrose, and my office was on 157 in Melrose.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: So this housing cop vanishes into thin air.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he was last seen on November 17th, 1985, and he had just worked a 4 p.m.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: to 1 a.m.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: shift.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Then he was off for two days.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: He had a two-day swing.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then he doesn't show up for two days.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: He just doesn't call in.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: He just vanishes.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: So on November 22nd, the housing police classified him as A-WOL.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now I I learned that in the police academy.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's very rare that a cop goes AWOL.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure people are going to have examples of it.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I never saw it.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's bad.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the NYPD in my time was one of those things.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: You tried not to come into work late.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: You came into work.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't like, oh, I forgot I had to go to work.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: You you showed up for work.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: You could get away with coming into work late, like in the Detective Bureau or like in OCC, but on patrol, there's just entirely too much supervision.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: You got a desk officer, you've got the patrol supervisor turning out the troops for the 4-12 or the 8-4 doing roll call.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: You've got the administrative lieutenant, the ICO.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: You start coming in late, it's going to get caught, and they're going to have it talking to you.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: For a guy to go A-WOL, that basically means that sets off bells and whistles.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Where is this guy?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Where is this girl?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where have they been?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So to dig into the victimology of this Robert Bonds, he was 28 years old.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: He was in all accounts in good health.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: He was separated from his wife, and he had two children, ages two and six.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, according to the new another newspaper article I found, when NYPD investigators they got into his apartment, he lived in Harlem on 7th Avenue.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So somehow they got in it.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: They either broke in or they got the key.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking for this guy.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Where the hell is he?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they found things in the apartment which they didn't go into, but they said they found things that that showed that things in his life weren't going well.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: So for whatever that means, it could have been unpaid bills they found piling up.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: It could have been threatening messages on an answering machine.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: It could have been signs of drug use.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: They just said they found things.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: They said that several times that indicated things weren't going well in his life.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, he was 28 years old at the time of his disappearance.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Both his guns were missing, his off-duty revolver and his service revolver.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he hadn't made any bank transactions before his disappearance and after.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And again, he was in good health, and he was 5'10 and 165 pounds.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: So after about a week of this housing cop Robert Bonds vanishing off the face of the earth, the housing police and the NYPD forms a task force of about 60 investigators trying to find out what happens to this guy.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the missing report for this Robert Bonds is filed in the Harlem's 3-2 precinct.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So at the time of his disappearance, Chief John Henry told the Daily News that Robert Bonds was troubled and going to personal problems stemming from a relationship with a female friend that went wrong.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they're looking at initially it's something boyfriend, girlfriend, an ex-boyfriend, uh, you know, a new lover and all that, maybe a love triangle.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So now they're kind of looking at it that something happened to this guy with the ex-girlfriend.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So dealing, looking into the victimology of this guy, and he had only had three years on the job, but during this investigation, it was leaked that Robert Bundes, before his disappearance, was docked 15 vacation days for failing to arrest a suspected drug dealer.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a little bit of smoke now that's starting to come up.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And only three years on the job.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're on probation for your first two years.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was a year back then, but probably two years.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So this guy's only got three years on the job.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's already lost 15 vacation days.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that says a lot.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Vanishes, no hide, no hair.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: This guy, they got nothing, right?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now again, he vanished in November of 85.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Six months later, a torso pops up in the Hudson River near Pier 57 near 15th Street.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's all the way on the west side of Manhattan.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the arms and legs are missing from this cadaver, and an autopsy showed that the torso was shot four times and one shot to the head with a 25 caliber.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they said the body was clad in a sweater with an empty belly band.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, cops will know this.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: A belly band, that was big when I got hired in the 80s.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Belly band is this elastic strap that goes around your midsection or your lower part of your body, and it's got a little pouch for an off-duty revolver.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was still on the body.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, that means whatever happened to this guy, he was carrying a gun.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously now it's it's it's a homicide, and the body was identified.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: There was something with his spine when he came on the job.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if he had scoliosis, but they were able to identify the body by x-rays, because obviously his head was, you know, and sitting in the Hudson for six months, it's deteriorating the point where you can't make an identification.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, to shoot somebody all those times, that's overkill.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: But between the amount of shots and the missing arms and legs, to me, that shows the killers weren't rushed into sposing him.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: They had privacy, be it in a basement, be it in a house, be in an outaway place.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Someone got a hold of this guy, and how his arms and legs come off, we'll get into later on.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, someone had time.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: So on February 21st, 1987, a member of the infamous Westies gang is arrested for the murder of housing cop Robert Bonds.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the guy's name is Larry Patrick.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: He was a theatrical stage handworker down in the theater district.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was 44 years old.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: He lived in Woodside, Queens, which is a heavily Irish populated art area, and he was charged with second-degree murder.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Larry Patrick was no stranger to the criminal justice system.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: He had a previous gun charge from the 1960s.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthal, who was a legend, gives a statement and he says slain Housing Cop Robert Fonds was involved with the Irish West Side gang, the Westies drug operation.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the article further states that Housing Cop Robert Bonds wanted more money for his involvement with the Irish gang, the Westies, and it threatened to expose their drug operation.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: When they arrested this guy, Larry Patrick, obviously did a search warrant of his house, and they found clothing and documents which showed he and Bonds had a relationship through the Westies.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know why.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: This guy had six months to get rid of all this shit.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: They might have found a gun, they might have found paperwork, they might have found a keepsake, who knows?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the so this guy that gets arrested, Larry Patrick, he goes to trial and he gets convicted, and he does 22 years in jail before he's paroled in 2010.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's way more to this story.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's all I could find at that point.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: There was this prosecutor by the name of Jeff Schlanger, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I found his name in these newspaper articles.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: I go, I wonder if this guy is still alive, right?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I start Googling and looking it up.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not only is this guy Jeff Schlanger alive, this former district attorney, he's written a book, Doing Right, From Prosecutor to Reformer, A Journey Through Crime, Corruption, Complacency, and Change.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's available on Amazon and it's an excellent read.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did was, this is on Saturday after finding all these newspaper articles, I reach out to this Jeff Schlager, and he goes, Oh yeah, I remember that case quite well.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he dropped a bombshell on me about more about this case.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: There were more people involved.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really want to spoil it because I'll get it wrong.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be, today is the 24th Monday.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be interviewing Jeff tomorrow, if all goes well, the 25th, and I'll have this episode out on Wednesday.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you, it's going to be a really good.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: This guy, Jeff Schlanger, he not only did he prosecute this case and he can fill in all the details of the Westies, and there's some crazy shit about this homicide, but this DA is also the guy that prosecuted John Gotti when him and Tony Lee Guerreri were defendants against they had uh the president of the, I think it was the Carpenter's Union, shot in the ass, and that case went to trial.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Gotti beats the case in trial, and the FBI knew that there was jury tampering going on and had an agreement with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: If we find out there's jury tampering, we'll give you the heads up.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: P.S.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't give him the heads up.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what winds up happening is Gotti gets out.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: But this guy Schlanger, he's prosecuted all these really interesting cases for the Manhattan DA's office.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that episode, I'll be able to cover more about this top that got killed.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, he's involved with the Westies, but he got killed.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: This guy's got a lot of good stories.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll have him on later on this week.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Again, his book is called Doing Right, From Prosecutor to Reformer: A Journey Through Crime, Corruption, Complacency, and Change, and it's available on Amazon.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I got so here's the second thing I wanted to share with you guys.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: I had on a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month or two ago, this guy, Bill Mack.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: He runs the NYPD uh Facebook page for uh Emblem and GHI coverage.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's a great guy.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: He's raising money to help fight these companies that are trying to take away our health insurance.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the DEA, the Detectives Endowment Association, just dropped a bombshell on us when they took away our Cigna um dental plan and they've saddled us with this other one, which appears to be way more expensive and doesn't cover nearly amount of the same things.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So a bunch of us are kind of banding together to fight this thing.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna have Bill Mack on.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about it hopefully this week.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to this other episode I'm gonna have with Jeff Schlanger.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Bill Mack's a great guy.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: He does this on his own time.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're a retired NYPD member, you should join that and you know your health benefits.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I came across this other story that's wild, but you're not gonna believe this one.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Francis Clifford Smith, three names, believed to be the longest serving inmate in U.S.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: history, has died just months before his 102nd birthday, after escaping the death penalty eight times while maintaining his innocence.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Smith was 25 when he was first sentenced to death for gunning down night watchman Grover Hart, a 68-year-old, married during an attempted robbery on July 23rd, 1949.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: My dad was like nine years old.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Over the next 76 years, he was supposed to have his last meal on eight different occasions, but was spared from the electric chair.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's when they had the electric chair, each time, according to the Boston Globe.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: He was believed to be the oldest inmate in the U.S.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: when he died this week in late June at 60 West, a secured Connecticut nursing facility that cares for older people in the justice system.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: He was cremated without a funeral.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Probably everybody he knew is dead.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's no one to claim the ashes.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Smith maintained his innocence all the while.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: He he claims and doubts, his claims and doubts from key witnesses ultimately led to repeated plans to execute him from being scrapped, often at the last moment.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about the luck of the Irish, this guy.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Most dramatically before his eighth planned execution, the officer who arrested Smith burst into a meeting at the Board of Pardons and declared that Smith did not kill Hart.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not even sure he was present at the murder, Major Leo Carroll announced to the Bureau of Pardons, then why did he sit on it for this long?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: A key witness who connected Smith to the crime had also done so in exchange for a plea deal.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Smith's death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1954.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: You believe this shit?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Still, he served 76 years in jail, except for three short stints of freedom, including twelve days on the run when he escaped in 1967.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was also granted parole in 1975, but only lasted 10 months before he was hauled back inside for a parole violation after being busted for petty larceny with a weapon.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: He rejected several attempts to go back on parole until 2020 when he agreed to go to a care facility where he would finally die.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: This sounds like Brooks from the Shorshank Redemption that was like Andy Dufresne's buddy in the library, the guy with the bird.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Brooks gets out of jail when he's really old and he's bagging groceries and he can't hang.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that does happen a lot with these guys that serve so much time and they get older.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're institutionalized.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And they can't handle it, they couldn't handle the world before, and now they really can't handle the world.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, you're in there that long.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be told when to wake up, you need to be told when to get online for food.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be told when you're gonna have everything.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: You basically treat it like a child.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: So then when you're outside, you got all these choices.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's overwhelming.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's even more overwhelming for an old man.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if this guy did it or not.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sad story.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about uh guys being out being in so long and they can't hack life.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of the Johnston gang, I had that guy Bruce Morrow on a year or two ago about that Johnston gang, those guys that were like robbing uh tractors and doing commercial burglaries.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Norm Johnston was in jail for like 15 years, and when he escaped, he only knew how to steal old cars.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when he was trying to get by, he couldn't even use the gas pumps.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't know how to use the electronic gas pumps.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was used to, you know, you go in and you put it in.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't have a credit card, didn't know how to do any of that shit.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's ultimately how he got caught.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, I got a lot of good stuff coming up this week, hopefully, if my guests can make it.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, I want to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in Burling, Burlingame, California, North Vancouver, British Columbia, Farmington Hills, Michigan, Bridgeport, Connecticut, at Hudson, Florida.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you worked in law enforcement and had an interesting criminal background, please drop me a note on Twitter or Instagram at VicFarroy.
• 14:23
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• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're really feeling strong, please hit the hype button on your mobile app.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if you enjoy the content, check out my Amazon Author page where you'll find my series of behind the scenes N NYPD books.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Type in my name, Vic, Ferroy Like the Car, where you can preview all my books for free.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again, everyone, and hang in with me this week.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have some really good episodes.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.