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Vic Ferrari | The Christian Reeve Podcast | #145 | · The Christian Reeve Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Christian Reef
• 0:03
  podcast. Today's guest is a retired, New
• 0:05
  York police officer and author. All the way from the United
• 0:08
  States is name is Vic Ferrari. Welcome to the show Vic, I did.
• 0:12
  Thank you Christian. Thank you for having me on your
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  show. I appreciate it.
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  No, no, the pleasures mine, obviously you reached out to me
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  on Instagram, which was really cool because I occasionally get
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  people reach out to me, but a lot of time I have to do a lot
• 0:23
  of research like Outreach myself and I was just looking it like
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  your career and everything and what you do and I just I Oh my
• 0:30
  God. This is such a goldmine
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  opportunity to ask you about so many different things because I
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  can imagine as a police officer you just have like stories for
• 0:39
  days and days and days and naturally.
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  I mean you're literally writing about it in books but before we
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  get like delve into that, I wanted to kind of bring it right
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  back to the very beginning of your career and just kind of
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  asked you what actually motivated you to pursue a career
• 0:54
  as a police officer because I think it's the sort of career
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  that's it's Like an easy thing, especially in a major city like
• 1:02
  New York. It's going to be unsafe, it's
• 1:03
  going to be tough, it's going to require a lot of you.
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  But what was your individual motivation for doing that?
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  Well, I grew up in the Bronx in New York City which was locked.
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  My family was lower middle class when I was a little boy,
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  probably about five years old during a snowstorm, my
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  grandfather went out to get the newspaper and broke his leg and
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  the police brought him home. And I'm five years old and these
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  two guys in these beautiful blue uniforms would, you know, gold
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  buttons and of course, every boy sees that gun.
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  I'm looking at them. And I'm like, who are these
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  guys? Like where they come from?
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  And from then, on in, that's all I could think of.
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  And there was a movie theater in my neighborhood, that was right
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  around the corner from the local police station.
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  And every time, my mother would take us to a satin Saturday
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  matinee, I would run over to the police cause and look in the
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  windows and just look at the equipment.
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  I stare at the cop standing outside the police station, the
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  way, they like rested their hands on the butter.
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  They're gone. And the way they interacted with
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  each other, it's like what this is like a secret society.
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  Something like this is pretty cool.
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  Then I started watching television and then you had all
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  these cop movies and cop shows and a lot of them will based in
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  New York city. So I said, fight by five or six
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  years old. I knew I wanted to be a New York
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  City, police detective, and my parents wanted me to go to
• 2:25
  college. And I Dad said, oh well, at
• 2:28
  least if you don't want to go to college, be an electrician or be
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  a carpenter, I would have none of it.
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  I mean, I just I wanted to be a cop and a detective, and by the
• 2:39
  time I was 21, I, you know, I went into the police academy and
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  then I had a wonderful 20-year career with the New York City
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  Police. Department, how did you get your
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  parents on side? It sounds like there was a lot
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  of struggle there, initially like, I mean, obviously come in
• 2:55
  yourself to an academy. He is going to you know, that's
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  that's a big first step. Like how did you get them to
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  kind of accept that you were going to do that and support you
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  in that? Well, they were supportive.
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  They just didn't want me to put all my eggs in one basket.
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  They want me to hedge. My bets that in the event.
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  I couldn't pass the physical. Oh yeah, something wrong with
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  me. I couldn't pass the
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  psychological that they their biggest fear was what if if I
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  couldn't get in, would I be that devastated that it would say?
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  Be back in life. So because I was that into it.
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  But like I said, my dad, I'll never forget this.
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  The day, the two terrible tragedy, the day that the
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  challengers space ship, blew up, my dad came home early for work.
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  That was about a year or two before I went to the police
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  academy. I did my dad never came home
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  early from work and this is, what are you doing, home?
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  He goes, come on, we're going. This is.
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  Where are we going? He says, I'm taking you out to
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  Queens. We're going to sign you up for
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  the electrician's test and I'm like, yeah, but the Space
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  shuttle blew up because I don't care about the space shuttle.
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  He goes, you but went out to Queen.
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  So like they were always trying to pull not in a bad way, but
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  they, they always wanted me to have a something to fall back on
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  in the event. My police career didn't go off.
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  Yeah, I think it's a small move, but It's Tricky, isn't it?
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  Because it's like when you're so, you know, fixated on
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  something that you want in life and you're so drawn to that and
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  any you feel almost like you're being drawn in the other
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  direction? And, you know, like when you're
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  young guy, you can't tell a young.
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  And anything they've got to learn for themselves, right?
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  You tell a young person. Something I don't know if you
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  have children, you seem like a pretty young guy.
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  I mean you wanted to do this podcast and if someone turns out
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  what you know, Christian you really shouldn't do that Pioneer
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  like and then then that becomes a slippery slope because the
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  more somebody tells you you can't do something.
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  What does it do? It motivates you to go that much
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  more forward. Yeah I'm hugely stubbing that's
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  been the story of my life. So anyone that says you can't do
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  this. I'm like, oh yeah, try me.
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  Yeah. No, I agree because I mean I've
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  seen how it can affect people in a negative manner.
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  I mean, I've had it in the past, I've had people.
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  I mean, I mean, I've told this story before but I'll tell you
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  since we're talking about it, I have many different things that
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  I'm pursuing in life and one of those things which I don't see
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  as much anymore but I still pursue it a little bit is music
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  and but that was what I wanted to do growing up and I hadn't
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  really considered other things then like you know my acting
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  goals and TV. Hose and podcast.
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  Like, you know, I didn't even know what podcast was it,
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  whatever age. Yeah, David don't know if even
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  existed them. But anyway, the point is, I had
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  this one goal such as similar to yourself and I was like, this is
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  what I want to do and you know, I obviously I had work elsewhere
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  and stuff like just a standard Supermarket job to keep things
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  going and what not when I was younger, but he just wasn't
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  working out. And I remember getting like
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  really frustrated and sad about it and I asked Someone who was a
• 5:58
  lot older than me, was a retired teacher.
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  And he just basically sort of gave me that look like, when I
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  told him that I was dissing music.
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  He looked at me, like I was just, you know, like okay.
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  Yeah. That's yeah, that's not
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  happening. So what do you really want to do
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  kind of thing? And you read that luck and you
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  understood completely what he was thinking.
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  Yeah, like yeah, exactly. And I to be honest, the biggest
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  thing about that was that, that was a first for me, too.
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  Actually My God, done a bit of hard.
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  You know what? Actually I listen to someone for
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  a change and you know, to be fair University, wasn't actually
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  immediately a success for me. I didn't go straight away, but
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  around that time I was a bit older.
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  I was like, 20 years old or something.
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  So, I went a few years later and it was a good move in the end,
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  but I haven't really seen the benefits of it until years
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  later, like, what I'm doing now is a direct result of that and
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  it weirdly it's actually helped all Of the things that I'm
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  passionate about but marketing is just fraught in everything
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  that I do. So it's kind of ironic but it
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  wasn't immediately like that. And my point with this anyway,
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  is that like I agree with your point, I think it is important
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  to have options to learn other things and, you know, even what
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  I do. Now, as a sort of the main
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  thing, the main thing that I do like I do freelance in lots of
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  different areas. But there's a main thing that I
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  do. um, and I'm doing all sorts of stuff that I never thought I
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  would do like sales and Recruitment and I just keep
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  looking at like hey it's just another Avenue in case I need
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  you know, it's just something else.
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  It's not what I want to do but it's like I don't know.
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  I grew up with this idea of always keeping your CV, kind of
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  varied and doing what you can and as many things as you can
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  and stuff. But I don't know, I think it's
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  different when you think you have like a particular calling.
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  Like with me it's Just I have a lot of different goals and I'm
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  trying to make them all work. But when you talk about your
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  career and what you do, it seems like it was more like a calling
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  like notes. This thing I need to do.
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  I need to put all my efforts into this thing and yeah.
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  Okay, maybe that's not the best thing.
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  You know, you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket but if
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  you know it's your Cooling and that's what you want to do and
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  what you see yourself as That's what you're going to pursue at
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  the end of the day. So, what kept you motivated?
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  You know, to keep pursuing that despite what other others were
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  telling you what, here's the thing.
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  So, I went my family wasn't overly religious, but they sent
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  me to Catholic High School because they felt that the
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  public school system, I would drive better in a Catholic high
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  school education. And the thing is, the Catholic
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  High School I went to was almost unknowingly Almost like a
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  factory. Mmm for civil servants,
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  specifically for the police department.
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  I mean, out of a graduating class of 250, my high school, I
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  think, 40 guys, I went to high school with just my year, 40
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  guys, became a policeman and the year before that, and the year
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  after that, and so on, and so on.
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  So even just sending me to that high school, all my friends
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  became cops like guys, I mean, entire class, Tons of guys that
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  I grew up with all, you know some really wanted it some like
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  oh you know what, maybe this is the career for me, somewhere
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  into it, more than others. But yeah, I knowingly that that
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  actually like strengthened it. Excellent.
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  And okay. I'm going to ask you like a
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  series of questions as I do in these interviews and I guess my
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  goal is always, I try to get a conversation rolling, get to
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  know my guest and kind of, but I do have a lot of sort of ideas
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  of things. I'd like to know about your
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  experiences as a police officer and also specifically teen New
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  York as well. But let's just keep it simple
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  for now. Like what were the best and
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  worst things about being a police officer, the best things
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  looking Ack, made a lot of friends.
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  Very good friends, lifelong friends.
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  I was an adreno still, am an adrenaline junkie, I mean, and
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  this is what I wanted. So, I mean, I got into probably
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  hundreds of car chases foot chases.
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  I love that stuff for me. It was like when you were a kid
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  playing cops and robbers? Well, you're really doing it
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  now. Don't get me wrong.
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  When you're a police, officer this consequences for these
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  thing, you could get really hurt.
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  But when you're young, you're invincible and you don't really
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  think about Out those things because that's going to happen
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  to somebody else. That's not going to happen to
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  me. The worst you see the bad side
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  of humanity. I've seen you know I've been in
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  countless homicide you know crime scenes, see people at
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  their worst. I was a first responder on 9/11.
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  I was actually at Ground, Zero walking around, probably by
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  about 1:30 in the afternoon. So, literally a couple hours
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  afterwards I was down there, wandering around with debris,
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  just Falling on top of me working working a lot of
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  holidays when friends and family are celebrating New Year's Eve
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  or Christmas. I'm standing down in Times
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  Square with a bunch of drunks waiting for the ball to drop,
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  freezing to death out there, the New York City Police Department.
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  The people there or great the administration, not so much.
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  I mean, yeah, it's candy. Cop in New York about how they
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  feel, if about the job candidly they love Of the co-workers and
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  everything else. It's the administration tends to
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  feed on its own. It's very political you know,
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  and maybe it has to be that way. I don't know I'm not that smart
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  but they didn't treat us very well.
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  Let's just put it that way. It's a little directions are
• 11:55
  going off to you outline there, but I guess I and I was kind of
• 12:01
  going to save this for a bit later but you know, since you
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  mentioned already I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about
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  nine. But I don't want to ask, like,
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  the standard obvious questions or no, kind of paint a picture
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  of you personally, in that moment.
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  So, how old were you, when 9/11 happened?
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  So when 9/11 happened, I was 33 or 34 years old.
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  I had already had 12 or 13 years in with the police department
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  and and I was not that you can never be ready for something
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  like that, but I had the software installed had a deal
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  with that. And my story is I was a
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  detective working at my office was in the Bronx and that
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  particular morning, I was supposed to go into Manhattan.
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  My pop my sergeant and I had arrested a guy for stolen cars
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  and he was going to to get himself out of jail, he won't.
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  He wanted to become a confidential informant.
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  What he was going to do was he was going to cooperate with us
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  and give us some people that work in Department of Motor
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  Vehicles that were pushing out bad drivers licenses.
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  So there was a meeting that morning.
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  Manhattan District Attorney's office, which is literally
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  blocks away from the World Trade Center.
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  So to get from the Bronx to Manhattan is about an hour and a
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  half ride with traffic. And by the time you find parking
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  and we had a, we should have left my office.
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  No later than 7:30 8:00 and my sergeants running late and I
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  can't leave without him. He comes walking into the
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  office. You know, well after 8:00 and
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  I'm like, come on, we gotta go. We're going to be late, we're
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  going to be holding these people because yeah, don't worry about
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  it. And while he's Screwing around
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  in the office. One of the cops from downstairs
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  runs up and says put the television on a plane, hit the
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  World Trade Center. So we thought it was a small
• 13:47
  plane. Maybe a pilot had a heart attack
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  or an aviation mistake and and as we're watching it, a second
• 13:53
  plane hit. So obviously we knew it was
• 13:55
  terrorism. That then the phone, the phone
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  started ringing off the hook, they tell us get into uniform
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  and Stand By, and By about what, like I said, probably about
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  1130. I was down there walk.
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  Around with, you know my office was about 120 guys.
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  My division actually 120 guys. Yeah, we were down there walking
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  around. How long, how long will you sort
• 14:20
  of out there on the ground with everybody?
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  Like, how long was this operation the first day on 9/11?
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  I was down there for about one, 1:30 in the afternoon and we
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  left. I remember specifically, we left
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  probably about 5:30 6:00 in the morning and they told us.
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  Okay, here's the deal. Be back tonight at 5:30 at
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  night. So literally I ran I lived up in
• 14:42
  the Bronx at the time. So I drove up to the Bronx
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  through all my clothes in the washing machine, you know, try
• 14:48
  to get As much sleep as I can, but then I come home, my answer
• 14:50
  machine is blinking off the hook, you know, because the cell
• 14:53
  phones went down. So everybody was calling my
• 14:55
  landline to see if I was okay. And what was it like down there.
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  And you know, my father was basically, the second I came
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  home. My father's banging on the door
• 15:02
  was like, fuck that side on month.
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  So because he wanted to know what happened to me.
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  So, yeah. And then for the next couple of
• 15:10
  days we were going down there and 12 and 14-hour shifts and
• 15:13
  then they pulled us back and then because I worked in auto
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  theft. EFT?
• 15:19
  What? There was so much debris down
• 15:21
  there, what they had to do was they had open up an abandoned
• 15:24
  landfill, in Staten Island that had been closed for decades.
• 15:27
  And then they started with heavy equipment, taking all the debris
• 15:30
  from the Trade Center and cars and bring it out to this, dump
• 15:34
  out, in Staten Island and then going through the debris.
• 15:37
  So, since I worked in auto theft, they were using us to
• 15:39
  like, cut open the cars that had gotten crushed to see if there
• 15:43
  were people in there, you know, so and sort through debris and
• 15:47
  you know, a Litany of things. I had to do to out there but
• 15:50
  that went on for months. Hmm.
• 15:54
  I really appreciate you sharing this by the way.
• 15:55
  I know it's not an easy thing to talk about but I think the
• 15:59
  reason I find it so fascinating is because It's something
• 16:04
  moments like these things. Like these don't happen.
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  Very often, you know, these kind of major event that the awful
• 16:12
  things happen. Every single day, don't get me
• 16:13
  wrong, but something like that where it's so outlandish and out
• 16:20
  there and everything like that was.
• 16:22
  One of the things I remember thinking, like what was it like,
• 16:24
  for the people on the ground? Like, obviously I know it's been
• 16:28
  well, documented, what it would look like for firefighters
• 16:32
  accept. But, like, given that, I imagine
• 16:34
  you would have had to do things, like, crowd control.
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  And as you said, looking for bodies and all these different
• 16:40
  things. But was there.
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  Anything else, like strange that you were asked to do or strange
• 16:45
  instruction? Or like what, how, how much did
• 16:49
  your life kind of change as far as the day-to-day in that
• 16:52
  period? Well, there was nothing.
• 16:55
  There was no crowd control at. It's like it lower Manhattan was
• 16:59
  a ghost town. It was like something out of a
• 17:00
  movie like a zombie apocalypse. Oops, I mean, we're walking
• 17:03
  around this pieces of paper and dust just raining down on us and
• 17:08
  the sunlight was having difficulties.
• 17:11
  Yeah. I mean, it was 1:00 1:30 in the
• 17:13
  afternoon and the closer you got to the Trade Center was like,
• 17:16
  the sun was like having a difficult time.
• 17:18
  It's like when they say like when a volcano erupts, and the
• 17:21
  sunlight can't get through the particles with something like
• 17:24
  that. The one thing I will never
• 17:27
  forget, we were coming down, I think Broadway, making our way
• 17:30
  to the Trade Center and everything.
• 17:32
  Covered in that volcanic dust. I mean that just asbestos or
• 17:36
  whatever it was fireproofing or just the building being
• 17:39
  pulverized. All you saw on the ground with
• 17:43
  thousands upon thousands of women's high heel shoes because
• 17:48
  all those women that worked in the financial district when they
• 17:51
  were fleeing not just the Trade Center but the buildings
• 17:53
  surrounding took their shoes off because they couldn't run in
• 17:56
  high-heeled shoes so they just threw their shoes and ran
• 17:59
  Barefoot the hell out of there. So you know what?
• 18:02
  Like holy, you know, curly shoes like you just I mean they were
• 18:06
  everywhere. So I'll never forget that.
• 18:09
  I remember there was a guy in like a space suit who just
• 18:13
  happened to walk by us with like a geiger counter.
• 18:15
  I don't know if he was with the government the military or some
• 18:18
  guy that had a geiger counter that was waiting for the day to
• 18:23
  show up. If there was just a lot of
• 18:25
  crazy, it was it was all hands on deck.
• 18:28
  We really didn't know what to do.
• 18:31
  The second night when we got down, there was a little more
• 18:33
  organized. But what his, what's funny?
• 18:36
  So, like probably by the third, or fourth day, we had so many
• 18:41
  people showing up to help like different law, enforcement
• 18:44
  agency. I mean, literally, four, five
• 18:46
  blocks from Ground Zero. It was a camper, from Chicago,
• 18:51
  like a bunch of cops from Chicago, jumped in a camper, a
• 18:55
  Winnebago and drove down there. Like, how the fuck did they get
• 18:58
  down here so fast? Like, they must have been over
• 19:00
  100. Miles an hour and it was funny
• 19:02
  because like they were just, just like the bizarre things
• 19:06
  like you're walking down there like a day or two after and this
• 19:09
  cars that are covered in that Ash and people wrote like
• 19:13
  obviously cops are fine and wrote In The Ash and the cars,
• 19:15
  like fuck you Bin Laden. It was just things like that.
• 19:18
  Would make you laugh, you know what I mean?
• 19:20
  It's like you're down there and it's like, oh God, I got a good.
• 19:22
  Do this again. And then you'd see something
• 19:24
  like that. It would make you laugh, you
• 19:26
  know what I mean? It was It was it was a crazy
• 19:30
  time. It really was like, you know,
• 19:32
  it's funny, you watch like a documentary and you see these
• 19:34
  poor guys that were in Vietnam and not that.
• 19:36
  I'm trying to say anything. I did was anything like somebody
• 19:39
  trapped in a jungle fighting? Not at all.
• 19:42
  But just you, it's just like there was so uncertainty with
• 19:46
  everything it was like, are they is another plane going to hit
• 19:49
  like for a while you would look up and if you saw a plane go by
• 19:52
  like you get nervous because is this over?
• 19:55
  So it was it was definitely a living.
• 19:57
  Moment to moment for a while. How did you kind of keep spirits
• 20:03
  up? Obviously, you gave an example
• 20:04
  there of like you know, you would use humor.
• 20:06
  Your humor is such a big part of especially as a coping mechanism
• 20:10
  when we're dealing with traumatic experiences but like
• 20:13
  given as you laid out there, you know, it's a tense time.
• 20:18
  Obviously, we know how things change with regards to air
• 20:20
  travel and stuff like that but like how did you navigate that
• 20:25
  day-to-day like How did you kind of keep yourself going?
• 20:29
  And you know, the people in your department?
• 20:33
  Well, the thing is, when you work for the New York City
• 20:35
  Police Department, your time is not your own, no two days are
• 20:39
  ever the same and you can plan your week or your day.
• 20:43
  Anyway, you want? I mean, I can tell you stories
• 20:45
  about I was like, okay, I'm going I got tickets for a show
• 20:49
  and I'm going to do this and then tomorrow I'm off and
• 20:52
  something happens and you don't go home for days.
• 20:55
  So by the time that happened, You just you're adaptable you,
• 21:00
  it's okay. You know what I mean?
• 21:02
  You're that you're you're trained.
• 21:05
  It's just, you know, it's like nothing else matters for a
• 21:07
  while. This is what I have to do.
• 21:10
  It is actually the thing. The thing is like it that not
• 21:14
  just 911, but like the police department and that ability that
• 21:18
  I have this insurmountable task in front of me, you know what?
• 21:22
  No one's going to help me or I got to get through this.
• 21:25
  I just have to grind through this.
• 21:27
  This is just Something I'm going to have to do, you know, it's
• 21:29
  whether it's a project around the house or removing popcorn
• 21:32
  ceiling and your friends tell you, you're crazy.
• 21:34
  You know how many days that's going to take it?
• 21:35
  It's like, what are you kidding me but that's nothing out.
• 21:38
  It's going to suck. It's really gonna suck for a
• 21:41
  couple of days, but I'm going to blast.
• 21:42
  I'm going to push through this. So by the time 9/11 happened,
• 21:46
  most guys, if I mean, at least with the guys that I worked
• 21:50
  with, in the guys that I know, it's like, no one had a nervous
• 21:53
  breakdown, or I'm sure there are people that did have problems.
• 21:57
  As a result of that, absolutely. But the people I was with and I
• 22:01
  was around, it's like, yeah, this really sucks.
• 22:04
  And, you know, we were, like, kids amongst ourselves talking
• 22:07
  about it and wondering, you know, the uncertainty of life
• 22:09
  and stuff. But at the same time it's like
• 22:11
  we had a job to do so we might as well just get this over with.
• 22:15
  Yeah, no. I mean, I think it speaks to a
• 22:18
  lot to yourself and what you guys do and did because at the
• 22:22
  end of the day, you know, you got choices.
• 22:25
  I mean, you can choose to kind of sit in Little bit and let it
• 22:29
  get to you or you can just keep going.
• 22:31
  And then, yeah, just use that as the coping mechanism.
• 22:35
  But I do want to ask you one thing.
• 22:37
  Was there a point when, as you said, because it wasn't like you
• 22:41
  were doing some things with we're taking months, as you
• 22:44
  mention that, the debris thing was something that was an
• 22:47
  operation that took longer. But inevitably, you know, there
• 22:49
  is crime every day. Lots of things going on in New
• 22:52
  York. So, eventually you would been
• 22:54
  doing other things. So, when you You sort of got
• 22:59
  away from that, was there a moment where you were able to
• 23:01
  decompress that, or were you just planning on as usual?
• 23:04
  And just, you know, get on, while plowing on as usual?
• 23:08
  I mean, because it's New York, it's it.
• 23:12
  New York never stops like a New York City Police Department at
• 23:17
  any given time as between 35,000 and 40,000 members.
• 23:22
  So I'll give them credit with this.
• 23:24
  They didn't want to burn us out. So they were rotating Us in and
• 23:27
  out. Sometimes you'd be out of there,
• 23:28
  you'd be going back to your office, working on cases for a
• 23:31
  week or two and then they bring it in for a day or two.
• 23:34
  So they what, you know, I mean after they figured it out and
• 23:36
  how they were going to do everything and go through the
• 23:38
  debris, and they started pulling us back and you know, basically
• 23:43
  facing us back into our cases because the reality is crime.
• 23:46
  Never stops New York, never stop.
• 23:48
  So they pulled us back and we just started going about our
• 23:52
  business. Did you actually see an increase
• 23:55
  in crime around that time? Because I would have thought
• 23:57
  that maybe some decrease, right? I would have thought people
• 24:01
  would take advantage of the situation and yeah.
• 24:03
  It was a decrease especially I mean, I worked in the Bronx
• 24:06
  which is an Outer Borough, which Bronx and Brooklyn are probably
• 24:10
  as far as in crime, the highest and know there was a decrease
• 24:15
  because everybody pays typically stayed in, you know what I mean,
• 24:18
  everybody, everybody was glued to the news, right?
• 24:20
  I mean, even the bad guys, take a break sometime, do you know
• 24:23
  what I mean? Like we, yeah, we would do a
• 24:25
  case, we would do a case. Like, you know, it Alan, Carr
• 24:28
  themes at night. You know what I mean?
• 24:30
  We have like a tracking device in a car thieves car.
• 24:32
  My lieutenant would say it's 2:00 3:00 in the morning because
• 24:35
  he's going to bed because at some point, they got to take a
• 24:37
  break. You know what I mean?
• 24:38
  And it's true. Criminals, don't were Bankers
• 24:41
  hours, but at the same time, even they got to get some sleep
• 24:43
  and they were fascinated. What was going on?
• 24:45
  So, yeah, crime crime, took a break.
• 24:47
  Don't what were their guys? That that said took, this is a
• 24:51
  great opportunity. Yeah, sure there were.
• 24:53
  But as a whole though, I'm absolutely positive from what.
• 24:57
  I saw crime was down, that's incredible.
• 25:00
  Yeah, no. I mean, it makes it makes
• 25:03
  perfect logical sense, but I also thought maybe the reverse
• 25:05
  would be true in that. Maybe people might see a window
• 25:08
  to like, oh, well, the police are not paying attention and I
• 25:10
  can get away with this. But yeah, I guess to be fair.
• 25:13
  That would have been a point where every New Yorker would
• 25:15
  have been just on edge for a little bit not knowing what
• 25:18
  comes next. And speaking of which one final
• 25:22
  question, just on the 9/11 stuff, I wanted to kind of know
• 25:26
  how that Changed your career as a cop, moving forward, because,
• 25:32
  as I mentioned earlier, you know, it affected air travel
• 25:34
  forever, it changed. A lot of things around the world
• 25:38
  including here in the UK, but in terms of your work and what you
• 25:42
  did like were there any new measures that came into place as
• 25:45
  a result of that or whatever? They just a little?
• 25:48
  Yeah, they used just a little differently.
• 25:50
  So, So I worked in the auto crime division, the auto crime
• 25:55
  division was under What's called the occb Organized Crime Control
• 26:00
  Division and they used to call occb other commands can borrow
• 26:05
  meaning you come into work, one day thinking, you're going to go
• 26:09
  after car thieves and they say, uh, put on your uniform and what
• 26:13
  they would use us for is a couple of times a month.
• 26:17
  They have us at the subway system, you know, like looking
• 26:20
  for suspicious. But with bags, they would they
• 26:25
  would throw us into these security things like Penn
• 26:27
  Station or Grand Central Station.
• 26:29
  Or there was a tunnel that ran between queens and Brooklyn a
• 26:32
  Subway that they were always afraid that God forbid that got
• 26:35
  hit. So they would have a couple of
• 26:36
  cops at each end of that tunnel. So they were using us more for
• 26:41
  security measures for a while and then eventually you know,
• 26:44
  once they created or boosted Homeland Security then we got
• 26:49
  pulled it back from that. Thank you very much for sharing.
• 26:53
  I really appreciate that. One of the things you mentioned
• 26:57
  another was a little bit humorous.
• 26:59
  When you were talking about, you know, criminals getting tired,
• 27:02
  which is just a thing that I've never really thought about with
• 27:05
  already like funny arrests. You made like, I don't know, you
• 27:08
  get guy when he's on the Twitter or sleeping or something, you
• 27:11
  rest in like what the sort of the funniest arrests.
• 27:14
  You had you want to hear funny stories about people.
• 27:16
  I've arrested. I've got so many.
• 27:19
  I've had repeat customers I've had gaudy, I wasn't expecting
• 27:26
  that question. All right, I'll tell you a quick
• 27:27
  story. So, one day my partner and I are
• 27:30
  driving around the Bronx and we go through a Home Depot, parking
• 27:36
  lot. You know what Home Depot is the
• 27:37
  Home Improvements. Yep.
• 27:38
  It's home, big Home Improvement chain here in the state.
• 27:42
  It's in August. It's about to rain.
• 27:45
  It's a muggy day and we just cruising through this parking
• 27:47
  lot in an unmarked car. Look, it's a regular Ford Taurus
• 27:51
  and I see this. This late model, Dodge Caravan
• 27:54
  with the windows rolled down, nobody in the Bronx, leave their
• 27:59
  call with their windows roll down right in a shopping center.
• 28:02
  So I'm in the back seat and I tell the guy in front I go,
• 28:05
  there was three of us on a cargo run that plate.
• 28:08
  Plate comes back. Stolen.
• 28:10
  So we come around, we're going to set up on it and jump on the
• 28:13
  guy once he gets in the car. Well, sure enough, the guys
• 28:15
  already in the car and he's pulling out of the parking lot.
• 28:17
  So the NYPD they don't want you getting into car chases.
• 28:20
  We still do it but they don't want to Still want it.
• 28:22
  So what you try to do is to try to follow a guy at distance in
• 28:25
  either you a wait till you get stuck in traffic and then you
• 28:27
  like tap is bumper, and while he's blocked in, you jump out
• 28:31
  and pull them out of the car, or what you do is you put it over
• 28:34
  the radio when you kind of try to hurt him in, right?
• 28:38
  So we're at a light that's just you have it.
• 28:41
  We're at a traffic light and then right past the traffic
• 28:43
  light is the on-ramp to a major highway.
• 28:47
  And I'm like, well we can't block them in, there's nobody in
• 28:50
  front of them. So we're gonna have to follow
• 28:51
  him for a while. See where he goes.
• 28:54
  Well, the guy looks up into the into his rearview mirror.
• 28:56
  He sees three white guys, in a Ford Taurus and back of him and
• 28:59
  he Slams on the gas, he makes us.
• 29:01
  So we start chasing him, he's ramming cause on the highway
• 29:04
  like shit, let him go. So I was pissed.
• 29:08
  It's fucking pissed. And I told my client, I'm gonna
• 29:09
  fucking get him. This, he goes, he's gone.
• 29:12
  Don't worry about that. So I went back to our office, I
• 29:15
  pulled the theft report, And the car was stolen a week before, in
• 29:20
  the same neighborhood, there's only a couple of types of
• 29:24
  people, it will steal a car and hold onto it for more than a
• 29:26
  couple of days and that's children, you know, teenagers?
• 29:29
  They steal a car and they drive it.
• 29:31
  They joyriding, they'll drive it until the wheels fall off or a
• 29:35
  drug addict. The drug addict will steal a car
• 29:38
  and they use it to commit other crimes.
• 29:40
  They use it to buy drugs, they use it, you know, if they're
• 29:44
  homeless, they're going to park in a field, they'll go buy some.
• 29:47
  When they'll Park in a park somewhere and they'll shoot up
• 29:49
  at Falcon fall, asleep in the car.
• 29:52
  It becomes like there that the house.
• 29:55
  So I knew this guy stole the car week before we still holding on
• 29:58
  to it. I did a summons check and I saw
• 30:00
  that the call was getting parking tickets around this
• 30:02
  housing project. So what I did was, I went next
• 30:06
  door to the guys in Vice and I said, can I borrow one of your
• 30:09
  eight cylinder cars? My partner's like you're out of
• 30:11
  your mind, we're not going to find this guy.
• 30:14
  We borrow an 8-cylinder call, we go back to the neighborhood.
• 30:16
  Five minutes later who comes fucking driving by.
• 30:18
  But my friend I said, see I told you.
• 30:21
  So now we're following Again right, we'll follow them around
• 30:23
  the Bronx, right? But this time we're really
• 30:25
  laying back and we're in a different car.
• 30:28
  So he goes into a gas station. Attendant comes over opens up
• 30:32
  the tank and sticks in the thing.
• 30:35
  We roll up in back of them. The son of a bitch.
• 30:37
  Looks in the mirror again and slant and takes off, but the
• 30:41
  nozzle and the hose were still in the car.
• 30:44
  So if you're out there to listen, if you ever wonder, what
• 30:47
  would happen that fucking nozzle stretched and then when it shot
• 30:51
  out of that, Call you heard Kaboom that metal life.
• 30:54
  That metal nozzle would have hit, somebody would have taken
• 30:56
  your fucking head off. So, anyway, the car takes off,
• 30:59
  we're chasing this guy around the Bronx.
• 31:01
  He mounts the sidewalk and he gets pinched between a fence and
• 31:07
  a Lamppost. That's got a metal box on it.
• 31:09
  The controls the traffic light, and that comes through the
• 31:12
  passenger side of that cat. Dodge, Caravan and shears, like
• 31:16
  half. If someone was in the passenger
• 31:17
  seat, it would have cut their head on it just like sheared a
• 31:20
  section of the car up. He jumps out of the car, he
• 31:23
  knows will put his description over the radio.
• 31:25
  So he's taking his clothes off. He's taking his shirt off, he's
• 31:29
  taking, you know, he's taking his hat, two hats coming off the
• 31:31
  shirts coming up, I'm jumping fences, chasing him.
• 31:34
  My partner comes around the block.
• 31:37
  We tackle them. We get him in cuffs and I'm
• 31:40
  looking at him and I go yeah. Go you son of a bitch Isis Isis.
• 31:44
  I know you, I know you because you never arrested me before I
• 31:47
  go. Yeah, I did.
• 31:47
  I said, I arrested you in a Buick about three years ago,
• 31:49
  with your family in the Carny, goes turns him on.
• 31:51
  Party goes your partner's. Got a really good memory and we
• 31:55
  sent them back up safe for a couple years.
• 31:57
  So like I said, we used to have every now and then repeat
• 32:00
  customers. Although, I mean, I've locked
• 32:01
  up, hundreds hundreds of car thieves and I've had a couple of
• 32:05
  repeat customers from time to time, you know, not that.
• 32:08
  I even knew it was them, you know, like this guy had I known
• 32:11
  it was him. I would have known exactly where
• 32:12
  to look for him. You know?
• 32:13
  All I saw was the top of his head through a mirror.
• 32:17
  Thanks for sharing. No problem.
• 32:19
  What's the on this? Just Moved his humorous
• 32:22
  criminals what's the like stupidest thing you've ever seen
• 32:25
  a criminal say or do or the way you just looked at them like why
• 32:30
  would you do that? You know.
• 32:32
  Alright so in the early 90s my partner and I were in uniform.
• 32:37
  We're driving around and I see two airbags had.
• 32:40
  Just started with cars it was the early 90s so the newer nicer
• 32:44
  cars were having air bags in them, right?
• 32:46
  So these two guys drive bias and they have a temporary plate,
• 32:49
  piece of cardboard that's hanging off the back.
• 32:51
  Back and the airbags are missing the passenger airbags missed.
• 32:56
  It's just so obvious. It's just two holes in their
• 32:57
  fucking dashboard and they drive by and they go into a McDonald's
• 33:01
  drive-through. So it's a temporary plate.
• 33:04
  So you can't run it in the computer and I go, there's no
• 33:07
  front end damage to the car. So someone took the air bags out
• 33:10
  of the car, right? So we pull them all over and the
• 33:14
  guy goes, he hands me like this paperwork that looks like
• 33:17
  bullshit and I go, what is this? He goes oh, it's a 96, our
• 33:20
  permit. This is the 90s I go.
• 33:23
  Where did you get that number from?
• 33:24
  He goes, no, no, no, no in North Carolina or South Carolina,
• 33:27
  forget he goes, they give you it goes.
• 33:30
  It's like a test drive, I go. So a car dealership gave you 96
• 33:36
  hours to test drive a car. Because ya go do they know that
• 33:39
  you just drove 800 miles to the Bronx like a test drive.
• 33:43
  The way I was schooled is it test drive is around the block.
• 33:46
  You know what I mean? Not 96 hours, and you go up to
• 33:49
  the Bronx. And oh, by the way, where are
• 33:51
  you Or in bags. Because I don't know, he goes
• 33:53
  when they let us use the car. There were no way I'm eggs in
• 33:56
  it. So my pot, this is before cell
• 33:58
  phones, we took the keys from when my partner, watch them, I
• 34:01
  went into McDonald's. I asked the manager I go.
• 34:03
  Can I use your phone? I call up this dealership and
• 34:06
  800 miles away. And I gotta listen, I said, I
• 34:09
  got these two clowns up in the Bronx with this car, so I gave
• 34:13
  him the vehicle. Identification number Isis, can
• 34:15
  you do a lot? Check.
• 34:16
  This guy goes. Yeah, that close supposed to be
• 34:18
  on the lot. I go.
• 34:18
  Do you give a 96? Our permitting has no.
• 34:20
  I never even fucking hurt. The things I said, okay, so
• 34:23
  we'll add a block. They sold the airbags.
• 34:25
  They somehow they got their hands on the keys to the car on
• 34:29
  a permit. They printed up this bullshit
• 34:31
  paperwork, they sold the airbags.
• 34:33
  They just driving around the Bronx, having a party with the
• 34:35
  car. It's the complacency that always
• 34:41
  gets me, like, the little details that you forget, and
• 34:45
  that don't get me wrong. Like, I'm not saying that.
• 34:47
  Like, when you steal these things, or you do these things,
• 34:50
  it's like, there's a criminal Ermine that work.
• 34:52
  And obviously you just forget especially if you're younger and
• 34:55
  ignorant of these things, but little things like that, when
• 34:57
  they like make some it up or I guess maybe they just got
• 35:00
  nervous. So they just came over random
• 35:02
  story and it's just like, no, I think the story worked for him.
• 35:05
  I think there's no doubt in my mind they got pulled over before
• 35:08
  and that story work. Okay welfare place that's what
• 35:17
  were Maybe some of your sometimes, call it the finest
• 35:22
  hour or your kind of more memorable moments is a police
• 35:24
  officer where you maybe you went for a particularly challenging
• 35:28
  moment or where you sort of came out the other end and you were
• 35:31
  like, you know what? This is my best day as a police
• 35:34
  officer. I worked on so many interesting
• 35:37
  cases and a lot of the cases. I worked with started off with
• 35:40
  auto theft and then ultimately, it would turn into homicides, a
• 35:45
  lot of these guys are worked on a case.
• 35:49
  We had a couple of Chinese this is in 99 2000.
• 35:52
  We had Chinese Nationals that basically what they were doing
• 35:55
  was they were they set up a warehouse in Brooklyn and they
• 35:59
  were paying our car. Thieves five thousand dollars, a
• 36:04
  car and are thieves were stealing up to 30 cars a month.
• 36:08
  They were going out to Brooklyn these cause we'll put in
• 36:10
  shipping containers, the shipping containers would get
• 36:13
  driven out to New Jersey. They were put on a train, there
• 36:17
  were real doubt. To Long Beach, California.
• 36:20
  And then the stolen cars, they're putting between three
• 36:22
  and four stolen Audi's per car. What they would do is they put
• 36:26
  two Audi's to stolen out, he's in the bottom of the shipping
• 36:29
  container they let the air out of the tires of the car would
• 36:31
  sit lower. Then what they would do is they
• 36:34
  would build a frame, a wood frame and then drive to more
• 36:38
  cause than so they can maximize get 34 cars per container then
• 36:43
  the cause was shipped out to the Pacific Rim and going to
• 36:45
  Shanghai. So we had Wiretaps going on, the
• 36:49
  Chinese Nationals, we had wiretap going on the middleman
• 36:53
  who is a Jamaican that was getting paid, five thousand
• 36:55
  dollars per car. He was farming out to different
• 36:58
  steel teams and he was paying $500 per feet.
• 37:02
  So he was making about 4,500 dollars for a car.
• 37:04
  So once we went up on the phones, we were all wiretap.
• 37:07
  Then we start hearing about these guys talking about
• 37:10
  murders, so like holy shit, this is getting good.
• 37:12
  Like, you know, it was good enough that we had, you know,
• 37:15
  Asian shipping, cause out of the country.
• 37:17
  Now, we got guys in the If I hire business and these guys
• 37:20
  would do when everything they were, they were hit and
• 37:22
  dealerships over the weekend, taking 10, 15 cars, they did a
• 37:26
  commercial burglary at a Harley Davidson motor shop in Virginia,
• 37:29
  motorcycle shop in Virginia, they hit them to 1.
• 37:33
  We can feel like a hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff.
• 37:35
  I mean these guys were big time and when it all came down, the
• 37:40
  one of the main thieves, who's like an expert driver and car
• 37:43
  thief. He was the getaway driver on one
• 37:46
  of these trigger men's Multiple homicide.
• 37:48
  Sides. So we got involved in that and
• 37:51
  then try keep going with the story, cuz yeah, please please.
• 37:55
  Yeah. So one of the homicides, one of
• 37:57
  the homicides was 10 years before we're doing this case.
• 38:01
  You got three guys and again, I'm kind of paraphrasing and
• 38:05
  this might not be 100% accurate. This is almost 30 years ago but
• 38:08
  from what I remember, you had three guys robbing banks up in
• 38:11
  Connecticut. One guy gets caught and doesn't
• 38:15
  rat on his friends. He goes away and does sometimes.
• 38:18
  Well, the friends with the money, they will make it from
• 38:20
  the bank robberies going to the drug business and they're the
• 38:25
  guys to see in Connecticut, if you want a kilo of coke or
• 38:27
  heroin or whatever, this guy gets out of jail and he goes to
• 38:31
  his friends and says, hey, equal Partners.
• 38:34
  I kept my mouth shut. So these two guys were treating
• 38:37
  him like a Lackey go kill this guy.
• 38:39
  Go pick up a kilo. Go beat this guy up.
• 38:43
  This guy wasn't having it. He was upset.
• 38:45
  So he kidnapped one of their couriers and put them in the
• 38:48
  trunk of His car for a weekend, beat him half to death, took his
• 38:52
  kilos and sent him back to the other two guys and said, I'm not
• 38:55
  fucking around. I want what's mine?
• 38:58
  So now these guys like well, he's got to go.
• 39:01
  So what they did was they farmed out they got in touch with our
• 39:04
  car thieves and a plan was hatched where a couple of them
• 39:08
  went up to Connecticut. They had a motorcycle, they
• 39:12
  follow this guy around when the guy stopped at a light, the guy
• 39:15
  in the back of the motorcycle, shot him with a Glock.
• 39:18
  Like Ten times, cut them into swiss cheese.
• 39:20
  They took off, they put the motorcycle into a U-Haul truck,
• 39:23
  close the U-Haul truck brought the motorcycle down to the Bronx
• 39:28
  and I don't remember if they chopped up the motorcycle, they
• 39:31
  kept using it again. This is 30 years ago.
• 39:34
  But, yeah, we saw that homicide and a lot more.
• 39:37
  I mean, the, the killer, I mean, he was a little Spanish guy
• 39:42
  who's like, 55 and 130 pounds soaking wet.
• 39:45
  I mean, this guy could fill a graveyard.
• 39:48
  Like he like we knew of about 13 homicides, I think we ultimately
• 39:53
  got him convicted on four or five, but we knew of about 13.
• 39:56
  We were pretty sure we could connect him to, we probably did
• 39:59
  way more than that. Thank you so much for sharing
• 40:03
  the story, I appreciate it. So during your time obviously
• 40:07
  you mentioned that you work with other departments and stuff like
• 40:09
  that. So and you started with auto
• 40:11
  theft, did you work in a lot of different departments?
• 40:14
  Then because I know sometimes obviously you have to kind of
• 40:18
  Were blocked Apartments. Yeah I'm just kind of I'm just
• 40:21
  kind of wondering what your journey look like as far as
• 40:26
  yeah. When I was a rookie cop
• 40:28
  brand-new out of the academy, they put you in field training,
• 40:31
  right? I did that for six months, then
• 40:33
  I went to a police station. If for your listeners out there,
• 40:36
  there's a movie was a big move in the United States and the
• 40:39
  80s, it's called Fort, Apache, the Bronx.
• 40:42
  It's what Paul Newman and they film that in my station house.
• 40:46
  So I worked in the South Bronx and And early mid 80s and the
• 40:50
  South Bronx was all burnt out abandoned building.
• 40:52
  I remember like walking around on a foot-post.
• 40:55
  Like, what am I even supposed to do out here?
• 40:58
  This, like crackheads walking about around selling shit, there
• 41:01
  really wasn't, it was just like a terrible terrible neighborhood
• 41:04
  to work. And from there, I got thrown
• 41:08
  into a DWI unit arrested drunk drivers, which I absolutely
• 41:12
  hated from there. I went into plain clothes, so I
• 41:16
  was pickpockets. Reason progress.
• 41:19
  It's not undercover. It's more.
• 41:20
  You're in, you're in plain clothes and you just going
• 41:23
  around high crime areas and you jump out when you see something.
• 41:26
  But I always, I was always picking off stolen cars.
• 41:29
  I just I grew up in a neighborhood where people used
• 41:32
  to steal cars. I knew what to look with with
• 41:34
  stolen card, so I gravitated towards that.
• 41:38
  I also worked in Narcotics for about a year and a half doing
• 41:42
  buy-and-bust. Operation is a couple of times I
• 41:44
  bought narcotics. Nothing on major run to cover
• 41:47
  just street level stuff like just walking up to a guy in the
• 41:49
  street, buying a couple of vials of crack.
• 41:51
  And then I last ten years, I was the detective in the auto crime
• 41:56
  division. Wow.
• 41:59
  And so, when you were kind of transitioning from, from each
• 42:03
  department, was, was there a lot of crossover work as far as
• 42:07
  like, you know, if you say you're in auto theft in and
• 42:10
  there's, you understand as a homicide going on, like you
• 42:14
  said, then that you're really pushing, You get to the end and
• 42:16
  make sure they get convicted and stuff like that.
• 42:18
  And so it's not a situation where it's just like you hand
• 42:21
  over to the homicide team. They deal with this that you
• 42:23
  still have some active involvement and there's like
• 42:25
  collaboration, I guess, is that right?
• 42:27
  Well yeah, seems like we're all right.
• 42:29
  So like we're doing a case on card things, right?
• 42:32
  And then we start hearing Rumblings on the phone, they're
• 42:34
  making references to homicides, like it came up on the phone.
• 42:38
  I think, I think something about you want to wind up like that
• 42:41
  guy in Connecticut real like, huh?
• 42:44
  That, that doesn't sound right. So then When one of the
• 42:46
  detectives thoughts, call it up different, you know, you got
• 42:49
  anything with, you know, homicides and motorcycles and
• 42:52
  yeah, actually we do, and then so, but the way we were
• 42:56
  stumbling upon homicides, these homicides had already taken
• 43:00
  place months. Sometimes years ago.
• 43:03
  It's not like, you know, you're responding to a hot, you know,
• 43:07
  there's a body there, you know what I mean?
• 43:08
  So, we're coming in late with gathering information.
• 43:11
  We're trying to we're trying to get this thing, you know, and
• 43:15
  then Once we think we have we don't want to send the homicide
• 43:18
  detectives on a wild goose chase.
• 43:21
  So you try to gather as much information as you can and then
• 43:26
  we'll bring on a homicide team or you know it depends on what
• 43:30
  we're working on you know someone that's got more
• 43:33
  expertise than us in a certain field, you know what I mean?
• 43:37
  So the homicide, you know what would happen is?
• 43:40
  Once we grab these guys for the car theft then we start pinning,
• 43:44
  the homicide Charges on it. It's the same as with the FBI,
• 43:47
  does with the mafia, you know, they suspect this guy did this
• 43:51
  homicide but what they scooped up his whole team, someone's
• 43:55
  going to talk, you know, at some point.
• 43:57
  Someone's going to say, shit. I don't want to do ten years but
• 44:00
  I do know that he killed somebody which is going to get
• 44:03
  me out of my 10 years in get him a hundred years.
• 44:06
  You know what I mean? Speaking of Mafia I just
• 44:10
  wondered what your opinion was on television shows like The
• 44:13
  Sopranos Etc. That And then also because you
• 44:16
  mentioned earlier, you know some of the media was good like what
• 44:20
  you grew up with like it made you maybe want to be a cop and
• 44:22
  Etc but obviously these things tend to glamorize these things.
• 44:26
  It's not always exactly how it seems, but what would you make
• 44:29
  of these sorts of shows that a depict criminals and criminal
• 44:33
  life and also that depict cop and being cops, that was it
• 44:38
  positive negative for you? What like children.
• 44:42
  Cops are like children. So when The Sopranos hit it, The
• 44:45
  funniest day at my office, every Monday morning for like an hour.
• 44:48
  That's all we talked about. All right, so, we did a lot of
• 44:52
  Mafia cases because out in Brooklyn them, that's the mob.
• 44:57
  That was a huge moneymaker for the mob was stolen.
• 44:59
  Car, stolen Parts, insurance fraud, making cars disappear,
• 45:05
  sometimes making people disappear.
• 45:07
  So, we did a lot of Mafia cases, someone's around the time, The
• 45:11
  Sopranos moved around, like there's a lot of truth to this.
• 45:15
  Sopranos, but look, they got a sum it up in an hour, you know
• 45:19
  what I mean? To show exactly how it work
• 45:21
  would take a week. Like, all right, so when real
• 45:24
  life, Tony Soprano, even before he became boss, he was a
• 45:28
  captain. He wouldn't be getting his hands
• 45:31
  dirty on, a lot of things. Tony Soprano, wouldn't be
• 45:35
  talking to his many guys as he did, the whole thing in the mob
• 45:40
  is the more people you're dealing with the more
• 45:43
  vulnerable. You water law.
• 45:45
  Because someone could be a rat. So those guys tend to insulate
• 45:49
  you know is if someone walked up to Tony and starts talking
• 45:52
  business, he go he need a smack the guy in the mouth or tell him
• 45:56
  get the hell out of here. You know what I mean?
• 45:58
  Like we did a case that was a mobster that was that was into
• 46:04
  everything. He also had a scrap metal
• 46:05
  processor and we had this guy like Hook Line and Sinker we had
• 46:12
  we would my Queen's office did was Sky ran an entire
• 46:16
  neighborhood. Like you couldn't open up a body
• 46:19
  shop or a junkyard in the neighborhood.
• 46:22
  Well, this guy was going to land on you and tell you how it was.
• 46:25
  So what we did was we rented out commercial space and we set up a
• 46:30
  junkyard and we thought he was going to send one of his
• 46:33
  underlings in there to smack around our undercover
• 46:35
  detectives. Well, he shows up which we
• 46:37
  couldn't believe the target shows up, don't you guys know
• 46:40
  who I am? You can't.
• 46:41
  I'll burn this place to the ground so we said okay what can
• 46:45
  we do to What, what can we do? So we start paying this guy off.
• 46:48
  He's involving Us in all these scams.
• 46:51
  We got them. The FBI finds out.
• 46:54
  The FBI comes to us and says hey.
• 46:57
  We want to be a part of this and well that me this wasn't my case
• 47:01
  but I'm like a bit player I was in another office but I got
• 47:05
  involved in it later on. So I think the Queens district
• 47:09
  attorney's office and our office told the FBI we don't need a
• 47:14
  partner. We're going to take this case
• 47:16
  down in a month. So what does the FBI?
• 47:18
  Do they leak a story that they're going after this guy for
• 47:21
  tax evasion? So now this guy is like,
• 47:25
  someone's talking about What does he do?
• 47:27
  He starts rounding up all his underlings and smacking him
• 47:30
  around. You had better not fucking talk.
• 47:32
  But the funny story with this is he brought in a couple of guys
• 47:35
  that he thought could be weak. That might not hold up to the
• 47:38
  scrutiny and he told him to show up to his scrap metal processor.
• 47:42
  They went into his trailer while he was smacking him around and
• 47:46
  read him. The riot act, he had to cause
• 47:48
  crushed. so after he gave them a beat and they came outside their
• 47:53
  cause with cubes of metal, So while they were inside getting
• 47:58
  yelled at he took, he had that cause picked up with heavy
• 48:01
  equipment and crushed into cubes.
• 48:04
  So you showed up in a 2000, Mercedes you come back into
• 48:08
  fucking. It's a cube of metal, it's a
• 48:09
  4000 piece of metal. So he got his point across but
• 48:13
  he still went to jail. What, what's the reality with
• 48:20
  with informants? Because obviously, that was
• 48:23
  something that was obviously, depicted in quite quite a lot in
• 48:26
  the It is, and it's just an interesting concept, but I
• 48:30
  wondered, is there any misconceptions about the
• 48:34
  realities of informants and how they work?
• 48:36
  And also, how do you actually ensure the safety of an
• 48:39
  informant like and protect them from actually getting hurt?
• 48:42
  What does a couple of different? There's a couple of types of
• 48:44
  informants, right? So the rarest like that, like a
• 48:48
  unicorn is John Q citizen. That's had enough, right?
• 48:53
  He's either he what he sees something going on at work or
• 48:56
  his neck. Store neighbors, a scumbag or
• 48:59
  his brother-in-law is doing something.
• 49:00
  God-awful and, you know, there's nothing to hold over his head.
• 49:04
  He's just doing it and he comes and says, look, Something
• 49:08
  terrible is going on. I want to help they're rare.
• 49:12
  It's like, it's like Halley's comet passing through most
• 49:16
  informants are is a guy or a woman if gotten a hand caught in
• 49:20
  the cookie jar, and they don't want to go to jail.
• 49:23
  So there's two types of ways to go with that.
• 49:27
  So one is, it's for it's called Court consideration.
• 49:31
  Meaning they're going to cooperate and If what they give
• 49:38
  up is sufficient. The judge or the district
• 49:44
  attorney Prosecuting, the case is going to tell the judge.
• 49:46
  Yes, he was arrested for this, but we would like no jail time
• 49:49
  or we would like him to be put on probation or we would like
• 49:52
  him to go into the witness protection program.
• 49:56
  There's other we worked with a guy that started off as we, he
• 50:03
  started off, as he got his hand caught in the cookie jar.
• 50:05
  This guy gave up so much stuff. I could tell you so many
• 50:08
  students old chapter about this guy.
• 50:09
  The book we used to call him the weatherman, because he could
• 50:11
  just tell, With the weather was going to be.
• 50:14
  He gave us Mike Tyson stolen motorcycle.
• 50:16
  But anyway this guy anyway he started off as got his hand
• 50:22
  caught in the cookie jar and for a year or two he gave us a ton
• 50:25
  of information and then when it was over he liked us and he kept
• 50:31
  calling us. So then what you have, he
• 50:34
  actually became and he gets put on a payroll.
• 50:36
  So, you know what? Yeah.
• 50:40
  Yeah, they get paid. Yeah.
• 50:42
  Yeah, some informants, get paid. Okay, just so you know he would
• 50:46
  give something up and you know I you know I don't when I was in
• 50:50
  Narcotics, I forget this is so long ago.
• 50:52
  I mean, I was in a context in the early 90s you talking 30
• 50:55
  years ago, but I think the Undercovers got paid something
• 50:59
  like 1,000 tequila. Like, you know what I mean?
• 51:01
  For every kilo they gave you know, that, you know, their
• 51:05
  Handler recovered. So but it's a slippery slope
• 51:09
  because you know, you lay down with fleas, you're going to get
• 51:12
  bit and inevitably, you know, you talk about people that delve
• 51:18
  into the, you know, the outskirts of society.
• 51:21
  You know what I mean? And they take a shortcut and
• 51:24
  they get involved in something or the people there with figure
• 51:28
  them out, you know what I mean? After a while, you know, this is
• 51:31
  the only guy that never gets arrested.
• 51:33
  He's the only one. The cops are banging on his
• 51:36
  door. You know what I mean?
• 51:37
  Like, this guy was just telling you about, right?
• 51:39
  He calls us up 10. I could tell you, so many
• 51:41
  stories about this guy. He calls us up one day, and he
• 51:45
  says, I was with Horatio. This guy Horatio was like this
• 51:49
  big time caught, the Dominican kid because I was with Horatio,
• 51:52
  we're going down the West Side Highway Horatio wants to check
• 51:56
  out some Honda's. So he I know what he's saying.
• 51:59
  He's saying they were going to go steal a Honda but he's just
• 52:02
  now. He's like trying to like change
• 52:03
  the story like yeah. Right.
• 52:05
  You're just wanted to look at Honda's, right?
• 52:06
  Right. Right?
• 52:07
  And you will oblige. So what going down the West Side
• 52:09
  Highway and we see Mike Tyson on a Ducati which is at the time
• 52:14
  like a 35,000 dollar motorcycle, egos so Horatio follows him to
• 52:18
  the Javits Center which is a Convention Center of Manhattan
• 52:20
  where they have the car show in different trade shows.
• 52:23
  He goes we couldn't believe it Tyson left.
• 52:25
  His Ducati parked on the street. He went into the Javits Center.
• 52:29
  He goes Horatio jumped on the bike, crack the ignition and
• 52:31
  stole it. I go great.
• 52:33
  Where's the bike? He goes, it's in Horatio's
• 52:35
  apartment. Racial lived in a ground floor
• 52:38
  apartment. If you've been I know you're you
• 52:40
  list is going to say well how could someone drive a stolen
• 52:42
  motorcycle into an apartment go Google will Washington Heights
• 52:46
  like looks like and you'll understand what I'm talking
• 52:48
  about. So he drives he drives a stolen
• 52:50
  motorcycle into his apartment. He's got it sitting there.
• 52:52
  I says give me the apartment and we're going to get a search.
• 52:55
  Warrant will go kick down his fucking door will get Mike
• 52:56
  Tyson's Ducati, so our informant tells us.
• 52:59
  No, no wait. He goes, he's got a couple of
• 53:02
  stolen motorcycles in his apartment.
• 53:03
  He goes, he's going to ship them to the Dominican Republic.
• 53:06
  Goes when he's going to ship those bikes he was I'll get you,
• 53:09
  the shipping container and you can pick off the shipping
• 53:11
  container before it leaves the country, which we used to do
• 53:14
  this many, many time. So I said, okay.
• 53:16
  Great. So I forgot about it about a
• 53:20
  month later on that. Forget it Sunday, I'm watching
• 53:22
  football. My partner calls me up because
• 53:24
  you want to make over time. This is for what he goes.
• 53:28
  Remember, all those stolen motorcycles Horatio's.
• 53:30
  Got I said oh yeah. Yeah, it goes.
• 53:31
  They leaving the country. I go.
• 53:33
  Well, we could pick off the shipping container tomorrow.
• 53:35
  He goes. They're not because they're not
• 53:37
  shipping them. By see.
• 53:39
  He goes to getting airlifted to go on air freight out of Kennedy
• 53:42
  airport. So literally they stole a van.
• 53:47
  They loaded this. And with all these, they took
• 53:49
  the motorcycles and they took them apart and bubble wrap them
• 53:53
  and put them in crates and then they were going to ship the
• 53:55
  stolen motorcycles out of Kennedy Airport on a Sunday
• 53:58
  night. So we're waiting to Kennedy
• 54:00
  Airport. Now, I'm rocking up and it's
• 54:02
  dollar bed with all these stolen motorcycles, that it, we picked
• 54:05
  them off. So all this guy used to give us
• 54:08
  so much stuff. One time, one time we're dry,
• 54:12
  rather forget we're driving around and he called we were in
• 54:14
  the Bronx and he calls us up and he goes, you guys want to make
• 54:17
  some overtime. I'm what this our informant
• 54:19
  talking to us like this, dude, you got to stop talking like us
• 54:23
  because he started picking up all the lingo and I don't do.
• 54:26
  You're gonna you're gonna sound like a cop?
• 54:28
  Yeah, so you goes, he goes, they just loaded for key or four or
• 54:33
  five. I forget five.
• 54:34
  We just they jump. They, he was there.
• 54:38
  They just loaded five kilos in a Ford Astro van, you know, like
• 54:42
  on like a minivan. You got the side door that
• 54:45
  slides open, you know, this like that.
• 54:47
  Step you take Take to get in these guys.
• 54:50
  Built a secret compartment in the step.
• 54:52
  He goes, they just loaded. Five kilos in the step, he goes
• 54:56
  to cause got Rhode Island plates.
• 54:58
  He goes the guys going to Rhode Island goes be careful.
• 55:00
  He says because there's one driver with the kilos he said
• 55:04
  but there's a crash car. So when you guys go to pull him
• 55:06
  over he goes he goes to crash. Cars going to hit the back of
• 55:10
  your car or try to distract you sit.
• 55:12
  All right, well will distract them.
• 55:14
  So what happened was we go up to the heights, the crash cart?
• 55:18
  The Chris Cole is morons, they got on the highway, we saw them.
• 55:21
  The Prescott got on the highway we cut off the other car, right?
• 55:25
  And the guy is just sweating, like I hate you doing
• 55:27
  everything, all right? You just sweat pouring off as me
• 55:30
  and it was a spring-loaded trap, if memory serves me correctly
• 55:35
  because some of those things are on Hydraulics would pistons.
• 55:37
  If memory serves me correctly, it was, you know, like the old
• 55:40
  cars, the emergency brake you would step down and he hit
• 55:44
  click, click, click click. When you step down on the
• 55:46
  emergency brake it popped, You're paying and the thing came
• 55:50
  up and the kilos were if memory serves me correctly.
• 55:53
  I found so many traps in cars that I get them.
• 55:56
  Confused Amazing stuff says you should do you know, have let
• 56:03
  your own podcast or something and I don't get me wrong, I need
• 56:06
  to yeah we know what I always thought.
• 56:07
  You're going to say you should write a book and I'm like dude
• 56:10
  I've got I've got five bucks. Yeah, we'll get we get to the
• 56:14
  books in a second but yeah, I was gonna say like this.
• 56:16
  You could you could just do so much with this.
• 56:19
  Like, I could I could literally talk to you for hours and hours
• 56:22
  and hours and I would love that. But anyway, let's let's talk
• 56:25
  about your books. So you're just you Basically
• 56:28
  you're the author of a series of books that offer sort of
• 56:30
  behind-the-scenes, look at life as a police officer.
• 56:33
  And you know, you obviously talked about share these sorts
• 56:36
  of stories within those books. But I think the thing that I
• 56:39
  wanted to kind of know is why actually motivated you to start
• 56:43
  writing about them. I mean obviously you had this
• 56:44
  20-year career and then was it sort of a case of what I want to
• 56:49
  do something with this or I want to I want to share these amazing
• 56:53
  stories or you know was it just a dream of yours to just be a
• 56:57
  writer and And that was no no not at all.
• 57:00
  I retired. I retired very young, I retired
• 57:04
  early 40s and then I became a police officer down in Florida
• 57:07
  and I absolutely hated it. So I under Tyree retired and I
• 57:12
  was bored and my friends. My friends used to tell me you
• 57:16
  got so many stories. You should start writing these
• 57:18
  things down. I said I don't know and and then
• 57:22
  I said you know you know law enforcement again.
• 57:25
  It's not a trusting society and I didn't On a burn, any Bridges
• 57:29
  would friends or family and they want to and the two things I set
• 57:33
  out to do. When I started writing, these
• 57:34
  police books was, I didn't want to embarrass any of my friends,
• 57:37
  get anybody into trouble. Get anyone divorced, I'm not
• 57:41
  Stout, I'm not a sour grapes, kind of guy like this people.
• 57:45
  I despise in my police career. I'm not going to sit there and
• 57:49
  Hammer them because you know shame on me.
• 57:50
  If I'm if I'm sitting in a pool with piss and I continue to sit
• 57:54
  in it, you're out of my life. I don't got to see you.
• 57:56
  No more don't get me wrong. There's a couple people my books
• 57:59
  that I give a kick in the ass to, but I try not to dwell
• 58:02
  because nobody likes a complainer, my books are just
• 58:04
  about more the wild stories and what was going on in the police
• 58:08
  department and how a police department works.
• 58:11
  And, you know, just funny stories, like I was just telling
• 58:14
  you about, you know, some of these informants, I work with
• 58:16
  and car thieves and, you know, guys, I locked up in the
• 58:22
  beginning of that. You mentioned that you sort of
• 58:24
  briefly were a cop in Florida and you hated it.
• 58:26
  Like, why? Why did you hate it?
• 58:29
  Was it just because it was so different to being a cop in New
• 58:31
  York? Oh yeah.
• 58:32
  Well think about it. So you know, listen to the
• 58:35
  older, we get the less likely we ought to change.
• 58:39
  We're setting our way. So I went from being a detective
• 58:42
  in the world's largest Police Department, right?
• 58:44
  Like working on all these interesting things, right fast
• 58:48
  forward, two years later. I'm in a small town in Florida.
• 58:53
  I'm driving in circles and I'm like, in an episode of Reno 911.
• 58:58
  It's just, you know, I'm chasing dirtbags under kidney pie, none
• 59:02
  to kiddie pools and backyards. It's like, I didn't have the
• 59:06
  patience anymore at 40, something years old.
• 59:10
  You know, a detective is one thing being a road cop.
• 59:14
  Is another. I didn't have the patience for
• 59:16
  the disputes anymore. I didn't have the patience for
• 59:19
  the drunk driving. I Knew Too Much.
• 59:21
  You know, when you're young you're flexible and everything's
• 59:24
  new and it's exciting then you get older.
• 59:26
  It's like I know what this you know, what's going to come out
• 59:28
  of someone's mouth before they say it, you know what I mean?
• 59:30
  And it was like it was the same thing all over again.
• 59:33
  And I'm like I remember I remember the turning point was I
• 59:36
  was at this Police Department about eight or nine months and I
• 59:39
  was working at midnight and I'm in a Dunkin Donuts because cops
• 59:43
  love coffee and I'll do my third cup of coffee at 3:00 in the
• 59:48
  morning. I'm like fuck am I doing right?
• 59:50
  Like I'm going to shorten my life being up in the middle of
• 59:54
  the night, drinking coffee for what?
• 59:56
  I'm, they're not paying me, much money.
• 59:58
  The department was great. I like the people there, they
• 1:00:01
  were nice to me. They actually this department
• 1:00:03
  treated me a lot better than Mike, the New York City Police
• 1:00:06
  Department, but it was me, you know, it was like I had changed.
• 1:00:09
  I was too old for this shit anymore, you know what I mean?
• 1:00:12
  And then when I went to tell them, I wanted to leave that.
• 1:00:15
  The guy, the chief was like, listen, can you just wait a
• 1:00:18
  couple months? We'll make it a detective.
• 1:00:20
  I said, no, I said, because Guys won't respect me.
• 1:00:22
  I says, I'm here, eight, nine months a year.
• 1:00:24
  You're going to make me a detective.
• 1:00:25
  I go this people that have been waiting for this for years ago.
• 1:00:28
  I'm done with this. I want to try something else and
• 1:00:31
  I did that's that's basically what motivated me, it took a
• 1:00:34
  while but that's what motivated me into getting into writing.
• 1:00:38
  And I was really nervous about writing my first police book
• 1:00:40
  because I didn't have the reception would be with my
• 1:00:44
  friends family, you know? I mean, most of my friends are
• 1:00:47
  cops, you know what I mean cell but everybody now I get phone
• 1:00:51
  calls. All's you should have wrote
• 1:00:52
  about this guy, you now everybody's a Critic.
• 1:00:54
  Now like I write a book and it's like and in my books I changed
• 1:00:58
  the names, the dates, the locations, the ranks because I
• 1:01:02
  don't want it to land on somebody but the thing is, my
• 1:01:05
  friends know who I'm talking about and I get all I know if
• 1:01:07
  that's, you know, that's a funny story to tell that I can write,
• 1:01:16
  you know. So you know the reception's been
• 1:01:19
  good sales have been good people like you.
• 1:01:21
  L4 nice enough to put me on their platforms.
• 1:01:24
  You know, it's working out for me.
• 1:01:27
  Congratulations, it's really positive 2 here.
• 1:01:30
  I mean, I mean it's the sort of thing like, I think at the end
• 1:01:33
  of the day, storytelling, will always be just one of the most
• 1:01:37
  enjoyable sort of aspects of human life, you know?
• 1:01:40
  I mean, it's it's what I pride myself on doing with this show.
• 1:01:43
  You know, is being able to share stories with others and also,
• 1:01:47
  yeah, that's learn and absorb someone's stories and just kind
• 1:01:50
  of like Put up, put a sort of a not like a magnifying glass into
• 1:01:55
  someone's life, but kind of like a little door into what their
• 1:01:59
  life is about and what they have to share.
• 1:02:00
  And it's just fascinating to me. Because I mean, I think the
• 1:02:04
  biggest thing that sticks out for me when you're when you're
• 1:02:06
  talking about these stories and sharing it is this idea that,
• 1:02:09
  you know, every day is different and like, that must just be
• 1:02:12
  really exhilarating to know that like, right.
• 1:02:16
  Yeah, I mean in a way, like I completely understand your
• 1:02:20
  decision to retire. That makes perfect sense to me.
• 1:02:22
  It's like you do it as long as you can and not like it's my
• 1:02:27
  personal sort of mentality is just never retire.
• 1:02:30
  Like that's just my mindset but I mean what I mean is that never
• 1:02:33
  stopped working. I'll just be going forward,
• 1:02:35
  right? Correct?
• 1:02:35
  Yeah, not like because some jobs you have to walk away from.
• 1:02:40
  You just have to because of just like physicality or as you said
• 1:02:44
  like there's other things involved, other things that and
• 1:02:47
  it's like you, no matter how much you might want to keep keep
• 1:02:50
  going. Whatever you just Just can't.
• 1:02:52
  So then you transition into other things and you do other
• 1:02:54
  things and you keep going. But one thing that I did want to
• 1:02:58
  ask you that I found interesting is what actually prompted the
• 1:03:01
  decision for you to leave New York.
• 1:03:03
  Like was what was that about? Yeah, well okay, so I love my
• 1:03:07
  job. Don't get me wrong, I mean I
• 1:03:09
  worked in this. I was lucky enough to work in
• 1:03:11
  the same office for 10 years and I had great supervisors, I had
• 1:03:15
  great co-workers but things change.
• 1:03:18
  I mean, it's just the progression of life.
• 1:03:20
  So, My friend started retiring, my supervisors started retiring?
• 1:03:27
  Well, moving on to different units.
• 1:03:29
  And before I knew it, my last year year and a half, at 41
• 1:03:33
  years old, I'm the old guy in the office.
• 1:03:35
  You know what I mean? Like, my lieutenant was my age.
• 1:03:37
  He was a nice guy. I had a younger supervisor for a
• 1:03:41
  while, who? I just, we just did not work.
• 1:03:44
  Well, so, I had to find another sergeant to work with.
• 1:03:46
  And my co-workers, you know, they were younger different.
• 1:03:51
  Ideas different. And I'm sitting around and I'm
• 1:03:55
  going, I have nothing in common with these people anymore.
• 1:03:57
  I went from being everybody outlived their usefulness.
• 1:04:00
  We just do, we were meant to evolve and the longer you sit
• 1:04:04
  around in a place. Yeah, I'm the guy.
• 1:04:06
  I'm the guy people come in. Hey Vic, I got this question
• 1:04:10
  about how if we should start up this case.
• 1:04:12
  Hey Vic. Yeah, on this wealth of
• 1:04:15
  information, but at the same time at 41, I got guys in their
• 1:04:19
  20s, they've got just there in the video game.
• 1:04:21
  You know what I mean? It's like, it's just different.
• 1:04:23
  There's a culture war going on and I said, you know what, the
• 1:04:26
  writing's on the wall and it's in crayon and shame on me.
• 1:04:30
  If I stay too long, you know, it's I can have a pension in a
• 1:04:35
  year and a half, I can do something else.
• 1:04:38
  Now, the move to Florida was growing up all my friends went
• 1:04:42
  to college and a lot of them became engineers and a lot of
• 1:04:45
  them got in, got jobs down here in Florida, working for
• 1:04:48
  engineering companies. So in my early, TS I used to
• 1:04:51
  come down here and visit and stay for a while and go to the
• 1:04:55
  beach and I was pretty acclimated to Florida.
• 1:04:58
  I would go a couple of times a year on vacation.
• 1:05:00
  I dated a couple of women that have down here at one time or
• 1:05:04
  another, so I knew Florida and you know, it was like I wanted
• 1:05:09
  to change. I just, I just wanted to change.
• 1:05:11
  And I said, you know what? If I move down to Florida, the
• 1:05:13
  worst thing that can happen is, I won't like it and I can go
• 1:05:15
  back to the Bronx. But I didn't, I mean, I
• 1:05:19
  absolutely love it down here. The weather is nice.
• 1:05:23
  You know, will live in all life here through covid.
• 1:05:26
  I mean, I've had a, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm very lucky, you
• 1:05:30
  know, some of it is the moves I made and like every all of us in
• 1:05:34
  life. It's a crapshoot.
• 1:05:35
  It's just luck. But you understand, yeah,
• 1:05:39
  fantastic. Thank you for sharing.
• 1:05:42
  Want to kind of ask you sort of a few questions just to kind of
• 1:05:45
  get a general advice from you. What's the best advice you've
• 1:05:49
  ever received? Oh, I've gotten my dad won't
• 1:05:56
  mind when I was a kid. My dad told me never get balls
• 1:05:59
  and stupidity confused. Yep.
• 1:06:03
  I don't remember what I did but my father pulled me aside.
• 1:06:07
  He goes don't get balls and stupidity confused, that's
• 1:06:09
  stupidity. You know, I'll never forget that
• 1:06:14
  that stayed with me when you go when you're a rookie and I don't
• 1:06:18
  know how it is. Now I'm talking to my day.
• 1:06:21
  God I feel so. When you go, when a rookie cop,
• 1:06:25
  when I was young, when you showed up in a police station.
• 1:06:30
  Yeah. You went through the police
• 1:06:31
  academy. Yeah, you're wearing a blue
• 1:06:33
  uniform? Yeah, you got a gun, the
• 1:06:34
  old-timers wouldn't talk to you. It was almost like the Amish
• 1:06:38
  when you're shunned. Like the old time is if you were
• 1:06:42
  in a car with an old time, he would tell you don't touch that
• 1:06:45
  radio. I'm driving.
• 1:06:48
  And you just sat there and you kept your mouth soaked up.
• 1:06:50
  The advice. I learned early was, keep your
• 1:06:52
  mouth shut and your ears open and you just looked around you
• 1:06:55
  watched. And it's like, yeah, this guy's
• 1:06:58
  an old scumbag or this guy came off as a scumbag, but actually
• 1:07:01
  he's a nice guy. He got burned once that's why
• 1:07:04
  he's tough to get to know. So yeah, you learn you
• 1:07:10
  definitely wearing like it NYPD Precinct different personality
• 1:07:13
  types and then after a while, if they see that, you're okay.
• 1:07:16
  And you're not a know-it-all You don't have a big mouth or you're
• 1:07:19
  not a liability, then they'll start warming up to you and then
• 1:07:23
  you might get invited to a club meeting after work or for a beer
• 1:07:26
  after work and then they start feeling it out.
• 1:07:29
  It's in a lot of ways, the mafia and the NYPD of the same, you
• 1:07:33
  know, in the mafia they say, You're only as good as your last
• 1:07:35
  dollar in the NYPD. They say, You're only as good as
• 1:07:38
  your last caller, which is your arrest in the mafia, you know,
• 1:07:41
  it's all about your reputation. Same thing with the police
• 1:07:43
  department, you know, it's if you're a coward, No One's Gonna
• 1:07:47
  Want. To work with you, they laugh at
• 1:07:49
  you. Um, you know, if you're running
• 1:07:51
  around telling the supervisor all this one, took an extra 15
• 1:07:54
  minutes on is how you know your ostracized.
• 1:07:57
  So there's a lot of similarities.
• 1:07:59
  Like I said, like we used to watch sit around and critique to
• 1:08:01
  Sopranos, there's a lot of similarities.
• 1:08:04
  How do you deal with people like that?
• 1:08:06
  Like because, okay, I get the general workplaces have these
• 1:08:11
  people. I've unfortunately had to deal
• 1:08:12
  with them myself but in in that kind of line of work, I mean,
• 1:08:17
  How do you handle people that that would I mean, I know you
• 1:08:20
  said that, you ostracize him and stuff like that, but like, just
• 1:08:23
  working day to day with people like that must have just been in
• 1:08:25
  when you did. Okay, so in every, okay, so
• 1:08:29
  let's take, let's get away from the detective.
• 1:08:31
  Let's talk about like, what? It's like to work in a New York,
• 1:08:33
  City police precinct, so any NYPD Precinct Police Station,
• 1:08:38
  there's 77 police stations in the city of New York.
• 1:08:42
  Each police station has between 100 and 400 cops.
• 1:08:47
  Even like the one in Midtown might even have more, right?
• 1:08:49
  So, you deal with a lot of personalities and you have three
• 1:08:52
  ships, right? And then you have specialized
• 1:08:54
  units per Precinct. So one one of the most despised
• 1:09:01
  again, this is in my time in any NYPD Precinct or the summons
• 1:09:06
  guys. Their job is just to write
• 1:09:08
  tickets. Be it parking tickets, movie
• 1:09:10
  tickets. That's their job.
• 1:09:12
  These people were despised in my day because they tend to be very
• 1:09:16
  antisocial. Social nobody really wants to
• 1:09:19
  work with them, they're odd. It's the guy that never had a
• 1:09:22
  pretty girlfriend or had you know didn't really react well
• 1:09:28
  with women. The kid that used to get picked
• 1:09:30
  on in school somehow they get into the police department and
• 1:09:34
  their power, is that pain? And they're going to write
• 1:09:37
  people tickets. We had guys, you know, writing
• 1:09:41
  sanitation workers in the garbage truck for you know, for
• 1:09:44
  speeding or pulling over. City bus that's loaded with
• 1:09:48
  commuters that he's sitting there right?
• 1:09:50
  In the guy a ticket or, you know, you get phone calls, you
• 1:09:55
  get a phone call from a cop and another Precinct.
• 1:09:57
  Do you know this guy? Yeah.
• 1:09:59
  What did he do? Now, he wrote my brother-in-law
• 1:10:01
  or ticket. Did he did did he tell them that
• 1:10:05
  Daddy new? Yeah.
• 1:10:06
  Gave my phone number and they still gave me a ticket.
• 1:10:08
  So you go to the guy and go to what happened?
• 1:10:10
  Oh I don't know. So if you're asking how that
• 1:10:12
  account handled Oh God guys. Like that you would come into
• 1:10:17
  work and you would see that guy's Locker upside down in the
• 1:10:20
  shower with the water running into it.
• 1:10:24
  Or there was one guy, he was short that used to pull that
• 1:10:27
  shit and you always used to put his boots on top of his locker.
• 1:10:30
  He was like five foot three. The guys crazy glued his boots
• 1:10:34
  on top of his locker. So you watching this little
• 1:10:36
  fuck. What?
• 1:10:37
  His arms up there. Trying to pull his boots off the
• 1:10:39
  locker and then he had to get a knife and cut the heel to get
• 1:10:43
  his boot off. And then he walked for me for a
• 1:10:45
  while, until I got a new set of boots, all the practical jokes
• 1:10:49
  that would go on and like you know, some of it was really
• 1:10:51
  mean-spirited towards guys that you Weren't pulling their weight
• 1:10:55
  or were, you know, just you abusing their privilege for give
• 1:10:59
  it out summonses. How did you deal with a
• 1:11:05
  corruption and police officers? That, you know, because
• 1:11:09
  inevitably, they were going to be substantially higher up to
• 1:11:13
  accept bribes and stuff like that.
• 1:11:14
  Like, how did how do you deal with that?
• 1:11:16
  And also like how do you avoid that yourself as well?
• 1:11:19
  Because I imagine it must be tempting times, okay?
• 1:11:22
  So I'll say this about the New York City Police Department.
• 1:11:25
  They make no point from the second year in the police
• 1:11:27
  academy. They tell you, if you're
• 1:11:30
  corrupt, if you're You can if you're taking money if you're
• 1:11:35
  stealing you're doing something out of line, we're going to find
• 1:11:38
  you and we're going to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the
• 1:11:40
  law. When I was in the police
• 1:11:41
  academy, they show countless videos of cops that got fired or
• 1:11:46
  through their careers away or got involved with drugs.
• 1:11:49
  They had we would get speeches from the internal affairs
• 1:11:53
  division. We would get speeches from, they
• 1:11:55
  would bring prosecutors down from different boroughs that
• 1:11:57
  would task to prosecute police corruption.
• 1:12:01
  So I'll give them. Credit with that like that
• 1:12:03
  telling you listen you want to fuck around.
• 1:12:05
  We're going to find out in a minute.
• 1:12:06
  We're going to nail your balls to the wall and rightfully so
• 1:12:09
  now would a police department with 35 to 40,000 people.
• 1:12:14
  You're going to get a couple of bad apples from time to time.
• 1:12:17
  Some are sociopaths that got past.
• 1:12:20
  All the psychological said all the right things and they're
• 1:12:23
  just laying in. Wait waiting for the perfect
• 1:12:26
  opportunity or scam to pull off. Then you got other guys that I
• 1:12:30
  don't think started off bad. And then got into a jam with the
• 1:12:34
  divorce bankruptcy. I don't know, they got bitter.
• 1:12:39
  They got passed over for something and they just they're
• 1:12:42
  going to take it out on the world and they start doing that.
• 1:12:45
  So yeah we've had I mean we've had some major police corruption
• 1:12:49
  issues. I knew a couple of guys that
• 1:12:51
  went bad. It was sad.
• 1:12:53
  I mean they threw away their lives but you know, I'll tell
• 1:12:59
  you what. Like, as a detective, I saw more
• 1:13:01
  of it. In a Precinct from time to time.
• 1:13:04
  Some would fail a drug test. For someone would go bad.
• 1:13:07
  You like shit? Did you hear about so-and-so as
• 1:13:09
  a detective? When we started going up on
• 1:13:12
  wiretap? Then, all of a sudden, you know,
• 1:13:15
  like one case with that, that case I was telling you about
• 1:13:18
  with the stolen motorcycles in the cause going to China, they
• 1:13:20
  were two cops in a Precinct in the Bronx that were hanging out
• 1:13:23
  with these car themes. And what they would do, is the
• 1:13:26
  car thieves would steal parts and stuff for their motorcycles,
• 1:13:29
  and give it to these two cops. But now there's a quid pro quo
• 1:13:32
  with. These two cops would do is when
• 1:13:36
  the thieves or a car or a motorcycle.
• 1:13:37
  They wanted to steal they'd meet up with these guys and give them
• 1:13:41
  the license plate number, and these two cops would run the
• 1:13:44
  Plate in that computer terminal and tell them.
• 1:13:46
  Yeah, this guy lives over here and then the thieves would know
• 1:13:50
  where to steal the car. You know what I mean?
• 1:13:52
  So they would given them, they would give it an Insight
• 1:13:54
  information where to steal a car where, you know.
• 1:13:57
  So I mean they got fired one of the last cases I was working on.
• 1:14:02
  There was a cop in Queens. He was bad like this just as I
• 1:14:07
  retired like just before I retire.
• 1:14:09
  We didn't take the case down yet.
• 1:14:11
  He like I retired but the case was still going.
• 1:14:13
  It was a young cop From Queens and we he was involved.
• 1:14:17
  He delivered a stuck heat. The cop delivered, a couple of
• 1:14:20
  stolen cars to a chop shop and we had them on.
• 1:14:24
  We had him on a wiretap him and his friend hijacked, a truck
• 1:14:27
  full of marijuana. In Ohio.
• 1:14:30
  Don't ask me how he got out to Ohio and they brought like a
• 1:14:33
  truck full of bales of marijuana.
• 1:14:35
  Back to Queens. Somewhere in the distribute it
• 1:14:37
  and he was also involved in. He had a friend that was a
• 1:14:40
  realtor out Long Island like we're millionaires live and The
• 1:14:44
  realtor would do is, when these people were showing their home.
• 1:14:48
  I mean, it's other people that aren't even in these houses have
• 1:14:50
  the time, but their houses a loaded with paintings and, you
• 1:14:54
  know, pieces of art. So, through the realtor, this
• 1:14:58
  guy and another guy would go and do burglaries in these houses
• 1:15:01
  because the realtor had been through the house before and
• 1:15:03
  knew that, this guy had a Picasso and this guy had a
• 1:15:07
  Rembrandt. So this guy, I mean he he I'm
• 1:15:10
  sure he did jail time because he was into some major shit.
• 1:15:15
  It must be very difficult, especially what you laid out,
• 1:15:17
  that as far as like, people going through, difficult, sort
• 1:15:23
  of personal things, and then, obviously that translates into
• 1:15:26
  them, make them making those sort of poor choices.
• 1:15:28
  I mean, because it's like, a what do I do?
• 1:15:30
  I how do I feed? My family kind of thing and it's
• 1:15:32
  like, sometimes you can understand that doesn't make it
• 1:15:34
  right. But you can at least understand
• 1:15:36
  where, why? I think I can understand that
• 1:15:40
  because you get a second job. You know what I mean?
• 1:15:43
  It's You go to your family for help, you know.
• 1:15:46
  It's like it's like doubling down on a bad decision, all
• 1:15:49
  right? You've gotten yourself in shit,
• 1:15:51
  but why put the other one in, you know what I mean?
• 1:15:53
  You got one foot in, you know what I mean, and you might go to
• 1:15:55
  jail. Wow, I mean, clearly, that's not
• 1:15:59
  big enough to tear and I mean, I don't know.
• 1:16:01
  Yes, you're right, but that's a whole other conversation right
• 1:16:04
  there. What's the biggest life lesson
• 1:16:08
  that you've learned so far? when I retired from the pulley
• 1:16:14
  up in New York, You know, I still thought I was invincible
• 1:16:20
  and then once I became a cop and Florida a year or two later, I
• 1:16:25
  had been out of it, you know, I wasn't going, I wasn't, you
• 1:16:28
  know, rocking and rolling every day and then in the small Police
• 1:16:32
  Department in Florida. I'm all by myself.
• 1:16:35
  And I don't know, the lay of the land, like, you could blindfold
• 1:16:38
  me in the Bronx and I'm going to find my way.
• 1:16:41
  I'm in Florida, North South East and West doesn't my navigation
• 1:16:45
  system, isn't there yet, I'm pulling over cars by myself.
• 1:16:52
  I've been out of it a year, I started to realize I was
• 1:16:55
  vulnerable. I started to realize something
• 1:16:58
  really bad could happen. Whereas up there, I never get
• 1:17:00
  even to the day. I retired, I never thought
• 1:17:02
  something would happen to me and down in Florida after being out
• 1:17:07
  of it for a year and then getting back into it and then
• 1:17:10
  they're being a learning curve. Irv, I suddenly started feeling
• 1:17:13
  vulnerable. Like you know what, I could get
• 1:17:15
  hurt really bad and that's definitely factored in my
• 1:17:18
  decision in addition to just not enjoying it.
• 1:17:20
  I said you know and on top of this, it's dangerous, you know
• 1:17:23
  what I'm you know, what I do the last 20 years for to get killed
• 1:17:26
  in 15 minutes up here So start the lesson I suppose is to kind
• 1:17:31
  of know when to to step away, I guess.
• 1:17:35
  Yeah, definitely. Yeah right.
• 1:17:37
  Well, thank you very much for sharing.
• 1:17:38
  Appreciate that. As we draw to a close for today.
• 1:17:42
  Do you have any upcoming projects or final thoughts that
• 1:17:45
  you'd like to share with our listeners?
• 1:17:47
  Yeah, in addition to these four NYPD books and writing a book
• 1:17:51
  right now, it should be out of the spring is called Confessions
• 1:17:53
  of a Catholic high school graduate.
• 1:17:56
  I was, oh, I was a wild kid. The high school which I didn't
• 1:18:00
  want to attend was probably the best thing that ever happened to
• 1:18:03
  me. I'm not overly religious but the
• 1:18:07
  structure kept me in line and then the police department took
• 1:18:11
  it the next way. I don't know where I would be
• 1:18:13
  without either of those institutions, there's a lot of
• 1:18:16
  wild stories in that book, the book opens up with me getting
• 1:18:19
  chased out of a confessional by a priest that really did happen.
• 1:18:22
  Oh my God and audible file kid, you know after like the third
• 1:18:26
  trivial sin and He kept yelling at me.
• 1:18:30
  I says, well father, you don't want me to be in here.
• 1:18:32
  I don't want to be it. Can we just call it a day?
• 1:18:36
  He lost his mind. He lost his, might get out of
• 1:18:39
  this booth, get out of this chair.
• 1:18:41
  So it's a long story because it was a couple of days before I
• 1:18:45
  was supposed to make my confirmation and confession was
• 1:18:48
  from five to seven. I think.
• 1:18:50
  And I was the last one there. So there was no one else in the
• 1:18:52
  church. And my father was waiting
• 1:18:55
  outside and if my father would see me running out of a church,
• 1:18:57
  my father would approve By me. So what I did was on my way,
• 1:19:01
  running out of the church, I shut the lights off, and I left
• 1:19:04
  the priest, in the dark church. So I ran out to the car.
• 1:19:08
  My father's, like, what are you running out of the church for?
• 1:19:10
  I'm like, oh yeah. You what do you say is a kid?
• 1:19:12
  You just give him some bullshit story and kids have the memory
• 1:19:15
  of a fly. My parents didn't go to mass.
• 1:19:18
  I never saw this priest before I go.
• 1:19:20
  He's this is Saturday morning, I'm sitting in a classroom, my
• 1:19:25
  little suit and tie getting ready to make my confirmation
• 1:19:27
  the priest walks into the room like a lineup and he goes, I'd
• 1:19:31
  like to have a word with that young man pulled me out of the
• 1:19:34
  room, through me, a classroom, and become and shit.
• 1:19:39
  So then the funny thing is, I make my confirmation I'm in
• 1:19:44
  front of I'm in front of the church with my family and would
• 1:19:47
  take it photo. Oh, so my father thought I was
• 1:19:49
  in a fight because like, my shame is what we screw around
• 1:19:51
  with your friends, and yeah. Yes, the priest comes walking by
• 1:19:54
  and he goes What a fine young man.
• 1:19:57
  And I'm saying to myself, this son of a bitch.
• 1:20:00
  He should he didn't want to tell my father.
• 1:20:02
  This was personal like he wanted he wanted the satisfaction of
• 1:20:05
  kicking my ass himself because I thought he's going to tell my
• 1:20:09
  father and he's just like what a fine young man.
• 1:20:11
  He's like squeezing my teeth and I'm like, holy shit but it's
• 1:20:16
  going to be a good book. Come wait to see it, though.
• 1:20:21
  I just want to say a massive, thank you for sharing all of
• 1:20:24
  your wonderful stories and for letting us learn a little bit
• 1:20:27
  more about you. It's been a wild ride.
• 1:20:30
  Yeah, thank you. And like all my books are
• 1:20:32
  available on Amazon. Just look up Vic Ferrari like
• 1:20:37
  the car. Big Ferrari and all my books are
• 1:20:39
  $10. They're available in the UK, I
• 1:20:43
  have my Kindle unlimited and Kindle Excellent.
• 1:20:47
  Wonderful. As I said before, thank you so
• 1:20:50
  much Vic. And to the listeners of the
• 1:20:52
  Christian re podcast be safe, be well, and I'll see you in the
• 1:20:57
  next one.