Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney

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СКАЧАТЬ detectives in the van were instructed to pull up in front of the house, go to all sides of the structure, and throw their rocks at the windows to distract the bad guys inside. Simultaneously, I would hit the front door with the ram; we would make our entry, seize the three individuals, and confiscate the drugs. The plan went without a hitch except for one close call: one of the three bad guys with a gun went out the back window and confronted Sergeant John Loughran, who threw his last remaining rock at the bad guy with the gun and struck him in the head. Who said cavemen can't win?

      The lesson here is that when things go okay, even though unorthodox methods are used, all is forgiven and forgotten. This was not the case on my seventh wedding anniversary, when I was involved in a shootout in New York's Lower East Side. Our undercover was shot in the chest when we attempted to execute a search warrant for a half pound of heroin. We had been working the Lower East Side for quite a few months out of the Bronx Narcotics Office, something in and of itself unusual. However, my informant was familiar with all of the big players in this neighborhood and parts of Brooklyn. Most important, he had never failed me. We had been focusing on a particular drug dealer when one evening, around 4:00 P.M., I got a phone call from my informant that a delivery of heroin had just been made to the drug dealer's social club, which was located on the second floor of a tenement building on Sixth Street between Avenues C and D. We quickly got our team together and headed down to Manhattan. Four of us went directly to the club while the fifth, Robby Morales, went to the District Attorney's Office to secure a search warrant based on the information supplied by the confidential informant. The four of us headed to the location with a plan.

      Our plan called for us to drop off one of our undercovers, Chago Concepcion, a veteran undercover police officer who spoke very poor English but, like most good undercovers, always got the job done somehow. The really good undercovers took pride in the challenge; the harder the challenge, the better. But this operation seemed simple. Chago would knock on the door of the club and then in Spanish ask for some fictitious name. The expectation was that someone in the club would open the door, Chago would get his foot in, keep the door open, and then my other partner, Dicky Werdan, and I, would force our way into the club and freeze the occupants until Robby's arrival with the search warrant. We dropped Chago off a half a block from the club to allow him to “walk on the set.” We kept him under close observation as he approached. It was about 5:30 at night and getting dark. Snow began to fall. As Chago mounted the steps leading up to the front door of the building, some kind of conversation ensued, there was a commotion at the door, and the next thing I knew, shots rang out. Chago had his gun out and started shooting into the club. Dicky and I ran up the stoop on either side of the doorjamb. There was a flight of stairs leading up to the second floor, where a guy was holding a gun and shooting at us. We returned fire, not knowing if we hit the intended target. And then there was silence. I then heard Chago, who was now down on the sidewalk, scream, “I'm hit!” He put his hand underneath his green army jacket, and when he removed it, it was covered in blood.

      We immediately got on the radio and called for assistance. “Ten-thirteen! Police officer shot!” Within less than a minute, we heard the sirens coming down Avenue B as the marked police cars made their way to us. Chago, with gun in hand, ran to meet them, with me behind him yelling, “Chago! Wait! Wait!” I knew what the responding cops would be thinking. The majority of cops at the time were white guys who looked like me. The Lower East Side was a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood. The responding police officers were going to think that the cop who had been shot looked like me and that the guy who shot him looked like Chago, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican. As we were running west on Sixth toward Avenue C, the first police car came to a screeching halt; using their police car doors for cover, these officers yelled to us to drop our guns. I immediately dropped my gun. Chago, who I assume was in shock, wouldn't drop his gun. I screamed at Chago, “Drop the fucking gun!” and then yelled to the uniformed officers that we were cops. While I looked like a cop, I could have also been mistaken for a denizen of the East Village, with my long hair, green army jacket, sneakers, and jeans. Chago certainly did not look like a cop. So who could blame the responding police officers if they shot someone who refused an order to drop his weapon? Somehow I was able to convince those two uniformed officers and their backup officers that we were cops, and so the standoff was resolved peacefully. Within ten minutes an Emergency Service Unit (ESU—in other cities this unit is called SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics]) was on the scene; we began an apartment-by-apartment search of the two abandoned six-story buildings on either side of the social club while Chago was rushed to the hospital. We located and arrested the shooter in a closet on the fourth floor of the abandoned building to the east of the social club. We recovered his 9-mm handgun in the snow in the back alley. The entire episode was carried on the eleven o’clock news.

      I spent several hours being interviewed by a police captain regarding the discharge of my weapon. The interview was finished by midnight, and I then returned to the processing of the prisoner and drugs to answer more questions from the 9th Precinct detectives. By 8:00 A.M., all of the interviews and paperwork had been completed and I headed off to court to arraign my prisoner. Oh, and by the way, I never made my wedding anniversary dinner. This was not the first, nor the last, sacrifice made by my wife and family.

      Two days later we were summoned to police headquarters to meet with the commanding officer of the Narcotics Division to review the shootout. I assumed we would get all sorts of accolades and pats on the back. Not so. The police inspector leading the discussion was Joe Flynn, a well-liked and well-respected narcotics commander. He was always kind and gracious in his dealings with us. However, this time was different. He said, “You guys will probably get a medal for bravery. And you deserve it. You also deserve a smack in the head for stupidity! Who the fuck do you think you are? Executing a search warrant without first calling Emergency Service cops? You guys are too ballsy for your own good. And what was it all for? A fucking pound of white powder? You got your partner shot for a pound of white powder? You guys are lucky to be alive, and don't ever let that happen again!”

      With our tails between our legs, we left his office. The point here is that, even when cops do brave things or make an outstanding arrest, if they use poor tactics or violate policy in the process, they need to be instructed accordingly. And we were.

      An interesting side note to the shootout was the impact it had on the use of bulletproof vests by police officers. Each Narcotics Office usually had a half dozen bulletproof vests available for officers to wear, at their option, while executing a search warrant. While Chago was an undercover officer on this night, he was not acting in a true undercover capacity (buying drugs), so before leaving the office, he had put on a vest underneath his bulky, green army jacket. It was a decision that saved his life. The vest stopped the copper-rounded bullet from penetrating his chest. There was a deep contusion with a lot of blood, but that was the extent of the damage. That night, the vest was held up in front of the TV cameras for all to see. This incident became the cause célèbre to rally the private sector to purchase vests for police officers.

      In the early years, private individuals contributed thousands of dollars to buy vests for the officers, which eventually embarrassed the city administration into accepting that as its responsibility. In the early 1980s, vests became part of the general issue equipment for all police officers. And an ironic note: one of the early contributors to the vest campaign was John Lennon, who was reported to have donated enough money to purchase a hundred vests. Years later he would be assassinated by a delusional fan in front of his Upper West Side apartment building across the street from Central Park.

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      From Sergeant to Management

      I'm in the New York Times; I'm dead in the water.

       —PATRICK MURPHY, CHIEF OF OPERATIONS

      I had passed the police sergeant's exam in 1973 with a decent score. However, with little seniority and no veteran's preference points, I wound up ranked between eight hundred and nine hundred on a two-thousand-person list. Historically, СКАЧАТЬ