Badge of Evil (2 page)

But as much ego gratification as Brock got from all this—and no one got off more on thinking of himself as a leader of men more than Lawrence Brock—there was nothing like the pure unrestrained physical joy of chasing a suspect, hitting an apartment, or getting in a shoot-out. This was why he had become a cop.

“Everything okay, boss?” his driver asked as they approached their destination.

“Never better,” Brock said, his broad smile visible even in the dark cabin of the SUV.

They pulled over at Sixty-Third Street, behind the rest of their caravan. Almost immediately, several dozen Emergency Service Unit (ESU) cops piled out of the other vehicles and disappeared into the night, headed for their prearranged assignments. The target was a fourth-floor apartment in a modest five-story building a block away on Fourth Avenue. They parked around the corner on Third to keep their vehicles out of sight.

An ESU sniper team was on its way to the rooftop of a building directly across the street from the target, where they'd focus on the bedroom windows that faced the front. The snipers did not have a green light to shoot, no matter how good a shot they thought they had. Their orders were clear: zero in on the windows, sight the suspects, and wait for further instructions. They were a last resort. They knew they'd only get a shot if the raid went sideways.

The narrow alleys on both sides of the building were each covered by a pair of ESU cops. There were four more on the roof as well as in the small littered space in the back. Six men had the street in front. The intersections were sealed off by patrol cars and the bomb squad was on standby several blocks away.

At the tactics meeting in the war room at police headquarters, Brock had said (demanded, really) that he wanted to be a part of the acquisition team, the elite ten-man unit that would take apartment 4C. Inside were five suspected terrorists, four of them foreign nationals—two Saudis, one Pakistani, and a Palestinian—and one American, who had an Egyptian father and a mother from New Jersey.

After two months of blanket, round-the-clock surveillance, which included phone taps and highly sensitive listening devices actually placed in the apartment by TARU (the Technical Assistance Response Unit, the NYPD's high-tech gadget geeks), the cops decided it was time to move. Though it was unclear if the suspects had secured sufficient explosives to move forward, Brock believed the men were serious; waiting any longer would be too risky.

As best they could tell from the wiretaps and surveillance, the target was the Herald Square subway station on Thirty-Fourth Street. Each man would carry a backpack filled with explosives into the station during the morning rush hour. The plan was to spread the backpacks out to maximize the death, destruction, and panic. But these men weren't suicide bombers. They'd use cell phones to detonate the explosives once they were safely outside.

It was highly unusual—unheard of, really—for a police commissioner to actually participate in a dangerous operation like this. But Brock was nothing if not unusual. He was an adrenaline junkie. High risk, high reward was the way he lived. As commissioner, he grabbed every possible opportunity to come down from his commanding wood-paneled perch on the top floor of One Police Plaza to do the things a regular cop does. He was both loved and hated for it. He was seen as a cop's cop by some and a grandstanding, ego-crazed cowboy by others.

Brock couldn't give a shit. He was having the time of his life. If people thought he was too tough or even a little crazy, that was fine with him. He'd happily wear those labels. He believed that every unconventional thing he did—even every mean-spirited, unpleasant rumor spread about him, for that matter—simply added to his growing legend.

But this night in Bay Ridge was extraordinary even for Brock. They were going to take down a heavily armed terror cell. There were serious risks. ESU would have to work within the tight confines of a small two-bedroom apartment, and unexpected things, none of them good, often happen in small spaces.

The commanders had made the decision to grab the suspects in the middle of the night to minimize the size of the operation and the upset to the neighborhood. With businesses closed, the streets deserted, and everyone asleep, the cops hoped to get in and out quickly and cleanly. Though they were taking a chance by not evacuating the rest of the building, they felt it was worth it. The ESU commander, a muscular, six-foot-three-inch hard-ass named Anthony Z. Pennetta—everyone called him Zito—believed he had enough intelligence on the apartment's layout and what the suspects had going on inside to pull this off without endangering the neighbors or his men.

With everyone dispatched to their posts, Pennetta had ambled over to Brock to exchange greetings before the action started. “Evening, Commissioner,” he said coldly.

“Zito,” Brock said, acknowledging the commander with a nod. “Nice night to make the world a little safer for democracy?”

“Absolutely.”

The two men stood on the street, in the shadows, facing each other in silence. A fine mist was in the air. Pennetta wasn't wearing his helmet and Brock noticed his hair was starting to thin. He almost smiled. Anything, no matter how small, that made Pennetta less perfect made Brock happy. He wasn't really in competition with Pennetta—he was the fucking police commissioner, after all, and Zito worked for him. But Pennetta made him uncomfortable. He was too tough, too confident, too tall, too smart, and too experienced. He didn't put up with any bullshit and he didn't give any either. He was straight up, almost too good to be believed, Brock felt.

Pennetta had been completely against Brock participating in the raid. So were his men. When Brock announced his intention in the tac meeting to be part of the team that would hit the apartment, Pennetta protested. Though he knew it was all about Brock grandstanding and getting post-raid face time on television, online, and in the papers, he tried to focus his argument on the safety issue.

If Brock wanted to risk his own ass, that was one thing. But Pennetta didn't want his men put at risk because the police commissioner was a reckless egomaniac. Hitting an apartment with five armed suspects inside required the kind of precision and coordinated teamwork that only comes from training together. “At crunch time,” Pennetta would tell his guys, “it's all about instinct. You revert to what's most familiar. You're only as good as your training.” ESU A-teams would practice this kind of exercise as a unit as often as a hundred times a year.

ESU was the police department's equivalent of the Special Forces. They handled the most dangerous, difficult assignments. They were the NYPD's elite—the fighter jocks, the fittest, best-trained cops on the force. They were mostly disdainful of other cops, whom they viewed as poorly trained slackers. They didn't like bosses either (Zito was the exception), who, in their view, did little except get in the way and suck up the credit. The last thing Zito's best guys, his number-one A-team, wanted to hear was that they had a new member, even if—especially if—he was the police commissioner.

They had no choice, of course. Brock was the final authority. In addition, he was the one who had received the original tip about the suspects. He'd passed the information to the head of the NYPD's counterterrorism bureau and they were off to the races. That's how this two-month investigation, which was about to reach its climax, got started. No one was sure how Brock had gotten the information, but it didn't seem to matter. Good intel was good intel.

With everyone in place, Brock and Pennetta walked briskly together to the scene. They were the entire command structure for the operation. In a typically ballsy maneuver, Brock had shut out the Feds. He'd never notified the Joint Terrorism Task Force—an uneasy alliance of cops and FBI agents—when they started surveillance of the suspected terror cell. And he'd kept a tight lid on while they were planning the operation as well. He had no interest in sharing any credit with another agency.

To prevent information about the raid from getting out now—and attracting half the cops in the city—nobody used the police radio. Everyone was communicating with point-to-point Nextel walkie-talkies. They were also intrinsically safe, which meant they gave off no spark that could, in a small space like the apartment they were about to hit, detonate explosives.

After walking almost an entire block in silence, Brock finally spoke. “I know what you're thinking and you're wrong,” he said as they headed toward Fourth Avenue. “I'm ready.”

“You have no idea what I'm thinking,” Pennetta said as they turned onto Fourth Avenue, which looked like an armed camp. “Two things are lighting up the nerve endings in my head—getting the job done and getting my men out safely. I wasn't worried about you screwing up; you're not even on the radar screen. That said, with all due respect,
sir
, this is still the dumbest fuckin' thing I've ever seen anyone in this department do. With all the shit that's being thrown at us, the last thing this department needs, this city needs, is another incident for the left-wing cop bashers to grab on to.”

Arrogant, self-righteous prick
, Brock thought.
Fuck you. This is my department, not yours.
He was so angry now it was an actual physical sensation, as real as stomach cramps or a bad headache. He wanted to let it out, to explode, but he knew he couldn't, not now. Neither man said anything else, and in a few moments they were in front of the target.

It was a plain, unremarkable white-brick building, just like hundreds of others built in Brooklyn and Queens after World War II. There were double glass doors that led to a small alcove with mailboxes and doorbells on one wall. Through another set of glass doors were a long hallway, an elevator, and a staircase. The ground floor once had several apartments and a large restaurant with a separate entrance. All of that space was now occupied by al-Noor Mosque.

The mosque had been around for about ten years and had grown so steadily that it had expanded twice, each time taking over adjacent storefronts and knocking down the walls. But even with the additional space, accommodating the surging Muslim community in Bay Ridge was difficult. Al-Noor served as a community center and offered day care, a K–12 school, and adult classes on the Koran.

Politics at the mosque mostly revolved around local issues. There were passionate discussions, of course, about the problems facing Muslims in various parts of the world, but al-Noor was not known as a hothouse for radical Islam. On Friday afternoons, the focus was on handling the crowds, not, as it was at some of the city's other mosques, on the imam delivering a fiery postprayer diatribe.

Loudspeakers had to be placed out on the street so that the hundreds of Muslim men who couldn't get inside to pray—and who filled Fourth Avenue, kneeling and touching their foreheads to the ground—could participate in the service. This was the mosque where the five suspects worshipped. And one of them, the American, worked part-time at an Islamic bookstore just down the street.

Pennetta briefly huddled with an ESU captain. Everyone was in position and ready to go when Brock and Pennetta walked into the building. The A-team was on the stairs and lined up in its stack—the neat, single-file formation they'd use to enter the apartment. The first two cops in the stack carried the heavy ram to boom the door. Cops called it the key to the city. The next two cops, one carrying a bulletproof, Plexiglas shield and the other armed with an MP5 fully automatic, recoilless submachine gun, would be the first inside.

These two-man units were referred to as bunker teams, and there were three of them in the stack. If the suspects were armed and ready, the first bunker team would take the big hit for everyone else. Brock was the shooter in the second bunker team. The last guy in the stack, called the doorman, was responsible for covering the apartment with an M4, a long, penetrating rifle, to make sure no one got in or out. Pennetta would handle overall command from the hallway, out of the line of fire, where he'd be ready to deal with any contingency and call for backup, the bomb squad, or the EMTs.

Pennetta took a last hard look at Brock, who had moved into position in the stack. The commissioner, psyched and energized again, couldn't read his stare. He assumed it was expressing anger and left it at that. He didn't want any distractions. After a few moments, Pennetta motioned to everyone to turn off their walkie-talkies. All communication from this point forward would be hand signals until they were inside the apartment. Then he gave the sign that it was showtime.

The cops moved quietly up the stairs to the fourth floor. The stack formed on the hinge side of the doorway to apartment 4C. Brock licked his lips a few times and tried to keep his breathing slow and even. All of the training, the months of surveillance, the hours of planning and preparation, would now come down to a precious few minutes. Pennetta winked at the doorman, who then tapped the guy in front of him on the shoulder. Each cop in succession then tapped the next guy until it reached the first man in the stack. It was like lighting a human fuse.

THWACK.
The night's silence was quickly, jarringly broken as the heavy apartment door was rammed and knocked to the floor. The bunker teams moved in rapidly.

“Police, get down. Police, get the fuck down,” the first cop inside screamed. “Two perps right, doorway straight ahead. Two perps on the right, doorway straight ahead.” The suspects were moving around, one behind an open sofa bed and the other across the living room by a big easy chair and a television. The apartment was dark and messy. There were clothes and papers on the floor; takeout containers were strewn all over a table in the living room.

“Stay the fuck down, you hear me? I said don't move. Not a fuckin' whisker,” the cop barked as he and his partner moved deeper into the apartment. There was a kitchen on the left that was empty. As the cops inched their way past, they could see a small table with three chairs and a pile of dishes in the sink.