Circle of Six (5 page)

I knew they could use me more at the hospital, interviewing the cops, giving blood, picking up family members, even a coffee run would be more helpful than standing outside the mosque. The thirteen had ended and I thought arrests were in the mail. But things were going to get much worse and keep on getting worse. This was just the beginning of a war—war that I was going to be directly in the middle of. This was just the beginning of five years of
hell.

If there were truckloads of people in the streets before, there were boatloads by the time I got back to my car to drive to the hospital. So I ran. We had another UC (undercover) car parked along Manhattan Avenue, in case one of us was summoned back to base while walking the streets. I was breathless when I reached it, thrilled that it was in one piece. As I drove, I reflected on what had just happened. It was big, bigger than any thirteen I'd ever seen. I tried to suppress the memory of Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones, two brother cops executed by Twyman Meyers and the BLA. I was at the Harlem morgue when the two lifeless bodies were brought in, riddled with bullet holes, covered in scorched tissue and blood. I and some other detectives had to undress Joseph Piagentini for the last time. It was a memory I didn't want to relive while driving to see Phil.

He was a friend, not only to me and the other cops of the 2-8, but also to the community. Selfishly, I didn't want those demons and nightmares again. I didn't want to face his young wife, Claudia Joy. What could I tell her? The guilt was crawling through my chest. I bit down hard and I rolled with it. This is what I did for a living, and on April 14, 1972, it wouldn't be just another day on the job.

I pulled up in front of St. Luke's. I was amazed at how many marked and unmarked cars there were. My first thought was,
who in the fuck is watching the streets.
Some cars had been left running, doors wide open, three and four deep trailing from the emergency entrance out into the street. There were RMPs from as far off as Brooklyn. I knew they were there to give blood or offer whatever assistance they could give, much the same as me.

I entered my dad's office across the street—there he was waiting for me like a beacon of hope and strength, standing tall in his starched suit and tie, not a hair out of place. I saw his shoulders slump when he saw me. It
was my father who had received the erroneous telegram, all those years ago when I was in Korea, stating I was missing in action. He had lived with that devastation for thirty-six hours before they corrected the news. I slowed and smiled; my lips and chin started to quiver. I felt my throat tighten; I knew he must've been worried sick. It was no secret what my job in the street was. I picked up the pace and he opened his arms. We didn't speak for a while. I felt his strong hands squeeze at my back. We both straightened and looked at each other. He asked, “You okay, Son?” I nodded, reached in, and kissed his cheek. He continued, “Everything is set up for the mayor and the police commissioner. We have private rooms for them. We also set rooms aside for the families.”

He laid his arm over my shoulder and we began to walk briskly to the triage. I was, for the moment, comforted. Cops were lined up in the long narrow hallway. Some were crying. Some were so angry they were punching at the walls. Others just stared off into space. There was a tight knot of cops standing in front of the first triage, but not inside. Dad and I both pushed our way through. It was Victor Padilla on a gurney, convulsing. Around the gurney was a doctor and two nurses trying to hold him down. Blood was cascading out of a dark blotch that was once his left eye, now gone. I noticed another cop outside the triage, staring at Padilla. He was seated on a chair, crying helplessly. Then I recognized him; it was Ivan Negron. His face was so distended with welts and bruises that I could barely tell who he was. He saw me approach and tried to stand. I urged him back down in the chair. Tears dropped down his bulbous cheeks. “They got my partner's gun, Randy. They got my partner's gun.” I assumed his jaw was broken because it was slack and he winced when he spoke. The words were thick and mumbled, as if his mouth were filled with marbles. I put my hand on his shoulder. He watched Padilla flopping violently on the gurney and started crying again. “Wasn't my fault, Randy. We were jumped. They got Victor's gun, Randy!” Both cops were out of commission. There was nothing I could do. Shock had already enveloped both of them. I didn't want my dad to see any more. I moved forward to the next triage station.

A wall of uniforms from the 2-8 Precinct surrounded the curtains. Another set of cops stood nearby, beside Vito Navarra, who was sitting rigidly on a metal folding chair. He saw me approach and stood, a little wobbly. His face was bruised; one of his front teeth protruded outward. His other teeth were caked in blood. He was beaten, though not as badly as the first two. Vito pointed into the triage that was closed off with curtains. I knew the doctors
were working on Phil; he'd lost massive amounts of blood. Vito continued to point beyond the curtains; he too seemed out of it, disbelieving, though somewhat more focused than Ivan. “It's Phil, Randy, it's Phil.” He balled his hand into a fist and shook it at the curtains, trying to understand what had occurred, how their world had been catastrophically rocked, all within seven minutes.

I looked around the triage, then up and down the hallway. It was filled with cops as helpless as me. Once again I was transported back in time—Korea. My platoon was pinned down trying to take a key position on the side of a hill, Pork Chop Hill. We were outgunned and outmanned, surrounded by nests of machine-gunning snipers. We could do one of two things: roll over and die, or fight the hopeless fight and just maybe come out the other side. One thing was for sure; if we didn't fight, we'd be slaughtered. I was an eighteen-year-old corporal paratrooper running and gunning up that hill. I was carried down twenty-four hours later, a sergeant with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. General Eisenhower's words had guided me up that hill, and now those powerful words resounded in my head once again:
Failure is not an option
.

I was back in the moment, at the hospital—real time—

I shook Navarra gently, “Look at me, Vito. Look in my eyes.” His sad confused eyes slowly shifted to mine. I needed to get him back to the mosque while the perpetrators' faces were still fresh in his mind. Vito was going to be instrumental in putting faces to the crimes. The longer we took with the
show-up
, the easier it would be for defense attorneys to convince juries that the injured cop's memory was tainted by hospital narcotics and other twisted angry cops.

He seemed to be looking through me. I shook him again and then pulled at my pinned shield, “You see this, Vito. Look at it.”

Then I grabbed his shield. I held both of them up. “These are who we are. They're what we do, and right now, it's our job to protect these.”

I pointed behind me to the room where Phil was being worked on. “We can't protect these, or him, from here. We gotta go make this right, and it ain't gonna happen at St. Luke's,
sabe
?”

The recognition of the situation seemed to flicker on. He quietly asked, “What about Phil, Randy?”

“This is the best hospital in the country. Whatever can be done will be done. We've got to get back there before anyone slips away.” He slowly nodded in agreement. I exhaled and clapped his shoulders, “Good, let's go.”

I grabbed a towel from a linen closet and placed it on Vito's face.

As we walked past the other officers down the hall toward the doors, I saw them, standing in the makeshift temporary headquarters; two men on the complete opposite poles of appearance, side by side, whispering, eyes shifting and probing, warning everyone to stay away. I'd met both of them sporadically throughout my career.

The tall distinguished looking man with a head full of sandy hair was Mayor John Lindsay. His suit was expensive, though understated.

From the day he was sworn in as the 109th mayor of New York, Lindsay was on a one-way street to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Everything the man did or didn't do was weighed and checked by his team of blue-blood political advisors about whether or not it would help his presidential aspirations. Everything from creating policy to the color of his tie.

The short bald man—hawkish, uncomfortable in his own skin, shoulders slumped—was Patrick V. Murphy, the current police commissioner. He'd had a stint in three other cities as a commissioner or its equivalent—Syracuse; Washington, D.C.; and his previous post, Detroit. Murphy wasn't really a cop; he was a professional commissioner. He was the type of man who spoke in grand non specifics. His passion wasn't crime fighting at all; it was administration, the inner workings of a 32,000-strong work force. Crime and justice seemed to bore the man. His crime-fighting platform:
introduce modern business techniques into the New York City Police Department
.

I didn't have a problem with these two personally. Politicos and opportunists like Lindsay and Murphy weren't news to me. Except for when it came to the BLA. Both the mayor and the commissioner were adamant that the Black Liberation Army didn't actually exist. Their statements to the public said that they were a “loosely gathered band of thugs,” not an organized group committing premeditated assassinations of the NYPD cops. Murphy backed it up by investigating each murdered cop case to case. They refused to admit that cops in New York City were being systematically targeted for death. Why?
Because it would be detrimental in winning the voters.
Lindsay couldn't look like he had lost control over the city. If there were coordinated cop killers out there doing
their
job—killing cops—then Lindsay and Murphy weren't doing
their
jobs. I guess we didn't have to uproot my mother and father from their home after all, because according to the mayor and the number one crime fighter in New York, the likes of Twyman Meyers and the BLA didn't exist.

I led Vito and tried to look away, but it was too late; they'd seen me.
Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy stepped in front of us. He never looked directly into my eyes. I didn't want to have this sit-down, but I was respectful of his position. The man was my boss, and standing next to him, Mayor John Lindsay, was his boss. Shit runs downstream, as they say, and any way you cut it, I was pretty far downstream.

I told Vito to stay put. Neither Murphy nor the mayor looked twice at the beaten cop. I had to move this along; time was either going to be an asset or a major stumbling block.

Murphy's head tilted to the side, looking down the hall beyond all those crying, angry, and frustrated cops, “What's your assessment, Detective Jurgensen?”

My assessment?
I wanted to grab this tiny little man who once wore the same uniform we did and shake him into the violent reality we were all knee-deep in. The fabric known as law and order, which once clothed us and kept the city safe, had been torn to shreds in the claws of human depravity. We were stomped, kicked, beaten, and shot, and he wanted an assessment of the situation? Memo to Commissioner Murphy: Hell has broken loose. But I couldn't do that. So I gave him the assessment, sugarless. “It's bad. Close to an urban war. The streets, Sir, are ready to explode.”

Only then did he look into my eyes. His head shook slowly “no” as he mumbled this fragmented half-question-half-statement, “Riot, What riot? There's no riot.”

I hadn't even used the word
riot
. Then he turned to the mayor, who still hadn't acknowledged either of us. “Everything is under control, Sir. The situation is being...handled.”

See, if Lindsay wasn't told there was a riot, then there really wasn't a riot. It's called plausible deniability. So when he officially dropped his hat into the democratic presidential nominating committee, he could say during his tenure, there was never a riot in New York as there had been in Chicago and Los Angeles. In his mind, no riot meant presidential nomination, simple as that.

I didn't wait for another rhetorical question. I turned, walked back to Vito, and said, “Whatever.”

In the basement of the mosque, sixteen Muslims were being detained by the police. The Black Muslim leader of Mosque Number 7, Louis Farrakhan, was there with another massive entourage to overlook the situation. The highest-ranking police official present was Deputy Commissioner Robert Daley. Daley's official position was Deputy Commissioner of Public Information,
or DCPI. It was his job to relay all truthful and pertinent information to the public and the media. When he reached the mosque, his assessment of the scene was much the same as mine—riot. Locals were dancing in the streets. A female newscaster had been stomped, doused with lighter fluid, and set ablaze. She had been rushed to St. Luke's. Other reporters were also stomped and stripped of their equipment. The roofs were raining bottles, bricks, and burning garbage. Generally riotous behavior. It's important to note that the crowds outside weren't the Muslims, but angry Harlem residents.

The newscasters at the scene had falsely reported that there was an ongoing shootout in the mosque, and that there was some sort of standoff between the Black Muslims and the police. They also reported that two police officers were shot, and both their guns were missing. This brought out multitudes of restless angry civilians with one thing on their minds—to tear shit up.

All of the information up to that point was wrong.
One
cop was shot, and four others seriously injured.
One
gun was missing, and another service revolver was recovered at the scene. There was no standoff; no one was shooting at the cops, and more importantly, the cops weren't shooting back at anyone.

Daley entered the mosque lobby and was awestruck by the amount of blood on the floors and walls. Chairs and a desk were overturned, and the walls leading up to the ceiling were marked with bullet holes. He interviewed a few of the officers to catch up. By then the building had been searched and it was empty. Apparently, the attackers had run down into the basement as soon as the cops arrived. There was only one way in and out of the basement, so it didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to know Phil Cardillo's shooter and the rest of the attackers were among the men being detained. In copland we call that a
groundball
, easy to field, easy out. But you know what they say: Everything is easy till it ain't.