Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney
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and for all, police corruption. The top brass won by surviving another corruption commission and could breathe a little easier. As I said, everyone won. Or did they?
How did the public win when crime seemed to be out of control? How did the hardworking men and women of the NYPD win when they were told their first priority was police corruption? When they signed up to be police officers, they thought their top priority would be fighting crime and improving the quality of life for the average New Yorker. Talk about mission incongruence!
Watching all of this, I had said to myself on more than one occasion, “Boy, if I ever get to the top, things will be different. I will make sure that the number one priority for every police officer and his boss is to fight crime and improve the quality of life. Police corruption? I'll deal with it, but it will not be my top priority.” Be careful what you wish for.
PART I
New York City
1
Getting on the Job
Jesus, Mary, and holy St. Joseph, he wants to be a cop.
—CATHERINE TIMONEY
Sometimes, when a chief of police or other high-ranking police official is interviewed regarding his career, he will say that he always wanted to be a police officer. Not me. I never gave much thought to becoming a cop. In fact, I was not very fond of police officers while I was growing up in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Police officers, like parents or teachers, told you all the things you couldn't do. Police officers and their authority were resented and to be avoided.
However, just as I was getting ready to graduate from Cardinal Hayes High School in the summer of 1967, one of my childhood friends, Brian Nicholson, convinced me and about six other guys to take the police officer exam one Saturday morning. Back then, the NYPD gave “walk-in” exams; no prefiling was required. You just walked into a local high school, filled out some papers, took the exam, and went home.
After partying the night before (typical Friday night partying back then was drinking beer in Highbridge Park, hopefully out of sight of the local police), we all got up early and took the downtown A train to lower Manhattan to the exam site. After a few hours, with the exam complete, we took the uptown A train back to Washington Heights and bragged to the rest of our friends that we were all going to become cops! One minor detail remained, however: Did we pass the exam? No problem. We could just tune in to WOR AM radio on Saturday night when an announcer would read out the “official answer key” to the various civil-service exams that had been administered earlier in the day.
That afternoon I had announced to my mother that I had taken the police officer exam and was going to be a cop. First, she looked at me in disbelief, then bewilderment, then amusement, then finally with maternal support. We sat at the kitchen table that night and listened to the announcer read off the answers in an unemotional, matter-of-fact manner: (1) a, (5) c, (17) d, (89) b, and so on. Before I knew it, all of the one hundred answers had been given. I needed to score a 75 to pass.
I added up the score as my mother watched over my shoulder. Yep, I passed! I scored a 76, which was more reflective of the Friday night beer drinking and lack of sleep that it was of my mental acumen. Or so I convinced myself.
My father had passed away a year before, but I am sure he would have been proud of his son becoming a New York City police officer. A month after I graduated from high school, my mother and sister, Marie, moved back to Ireland. We had come to the United States in 1961, but my mother never adjusted to the fast pace of New York City, even though we had grown up in Dublin, not exactly farmers. My mother had begged my younger brother, Ciaran, and me to return with her, but he and I were having none of that. While I had just graduated high school, Ciaran was only beginning his junior year at Cardinal Hayes High School. So he and I stayed together in the same apartment, and I worked numerous jobs while he attended high school and worked after school in a butcher shop. Things were just fine, if precarious.
Three months after graduating high school, I entered the NYPD as a police trainee, since I was not twenty-one yet, the required age to be a full-fledged police officer. Police trainees wore gray uniforms and did clerical and administrative work throughout the seventy-six police precincts and at other administrative offices, including police headquarters. But these were not nine-to-five jobs. Just like regular police officers, we worked “around the clock”—one week of 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., followed by a week of 4:00 P.M. to midnight, and then a week of midnight to 8:00 A.M. This shift work was actually beneficial to me since it allowed me to work another job during the day (before a 4:00 P.M. to midnight, and after a midnight to 8:00 A.M. shift), which augmented my miserable biweekly salary of $112 as a police trainee, not nearly enough to pay the rent and support Ciaran and myself.
In early October on a cold, wet morning, I took the subway downtown to police headquarters on Centre Street in the heart of Little Italy. A massive four-story gray building, New York Police Headquarters was legend and had been the backdrop for many movies and television series. I was quickly sworn in with a few other lads by the then city clerk Louis Stutman, a little Jewish man who had been born into this position, or so it seemed. I would later learn that the city clerk was a very powerful position in the city. I would also learn what a great and understanding man Mr. Stutman was, as he was one of the men who would decide whether or not I successfully completed my twelve-month probationary period as a police officer in the NYPD.
After I was sworn in, I was directed to report to my new command (whatever that meant), the 17th Precinct, located on the east side of Manhattan, near the United Nations and other landmarks, such as St. Patrick's Cathedral. The 17th Precinct was known as the “silk stocking” district. It certainly could never be mistaken for the “woolen sock” district, if such a district ever existed!
Up to this point in my life I had been inside only two police stations, the 34th Precinct (my neighborhood precinct) and the 30th Precinct (where my old CYO—Catholic Youth Organization—basketball coach worked). Both the 30th and 34th precincts in northern Manhattan were old, drab gray-brick buildings whose interiors looked worse than their exteriors. My new command, the 17th Precinct, was nothing like those turn-of-the-century monsters.
The 17th Precinct is located on Fifty-first Street between Third and Lexington avenues on the ground floor of a high-rise office building. There is a large glass window in the front with a glass door at the entrance that allows full view of the interior of the precinct, specifically the desk officer. In the back, out of view, were the cells, about eighteen in total, which temporarily housed prisoners while they waited to be transported to court. The 17th Precinct Detective Squad was located on the second floor, which is typical of the majority of precinct detective squads throughout the city.
My first two weeks as a police trainee in the 17th Precinct were a bit of a fog, especially because I was working in an entirely new and foreign environment. As I said, I was not particularly fond of police officers as a teenager, and so this was a strange situation. However, within three or four weeks, I began to get the idea of policing and to get used to being around police officers, and I was getting more excited by it, even though I was a mere paper pusher or telephone-answering service. I started to like what I was doing and soon began to love it. I was “in the know.” Initially, all the police officers shied away from talking to me, but as a few got to know me, the rest followed. These were incredible guys! After a while they included me as they shared their cop-on-the-street stories.
While the uniformed cops were the regular guys, the fun guys—the really cool guys—were the detectives from the 17th Squad. They dressed in suits, wore pinky rings, and carried themselves with a certain swagger. They were commanded by a gregarious young sergeant who would always let me know which detectives were “catching” (assigned to investigate the cases that came in during the evening) and the restaurants where they could be located in the event of an important case that needed their immediate attention or an incident that they needed to respond to. It was clear to me that these detectives had the world by the balls.
While the detective squad room was on the second floor, the really interesting offices in the building were on the third floor, which