Love or Honor (3 page)

Phil took the exam as soon as he could, when he turned twenty, though he wasn't eligible for the Academy till twenty-one. He was doing an army stint as a medical corps-man when he flew back to New York on a furlough to take the exam, and he enrolled at the Academy just after his next birthday. Phil was serious, kind of old-fashioned: Describing how careful he'd been not to make any mistakes at the Academy, he said, “I was determined to mind my Ps and Qs.” He was amazed at the kidding around that went on, even about weighty matters, and at what he considered “childish horseplay.” But he kept a wry perspective on himself. “You have to remember,” he told Chris, “I was considered a serious person when I was four years old.”

Chris didn't find it surprising that he and Phil got on so well. He thought they were alter egos. Chris envied Phil for his stability; he thought Phil envied him for being so carefree. They made more arrests their first year, in uniform, than were made by plainclothes teams at the precinct. Phil called Chris “Butch” or “Partner.” He was going to college at night, determined to earn his degree and thus qualify for the FBI. “You'll never make it,” Chris teased. He knew Phil would do just about anything he made up his mind to do, but he kept hoping Phil would change his mind.

One sweltering summer day, another radio car pulled alongside theirs. A cop in that car handed Chris two cans of soda. Chris took the icy cans gratefully and passed one to Phil, who was driving. Chris pulled the tab and was about to drink when Phil spoke sternly.

“Did anybody pay for these sodas?”

Chris looked at the cop in the other car. “Did anybody pay for these sodas?”

When that cop shrugged, Phil threw his unopened can out the window. Chris pressed the cold can wistfully against his cheek, then threw his can out the window, too.

Phil drove around the corner and stopped.

“Those sodas weren't paid for, and we don't accept anything that isn't paid for,” Phil said.

“Right,” Chris said.

“I'm not saying it's corruption to take a soda,” Phil went on, “but it's better to make it an absolute rule not to take anything that isn't paid for.”

“Right,” Chris said.

“If you never take anything—anything at all—that isn't paid for, the other person is going to have more respect for you.”

“Right,” Chris said.

“I'm not criticizing you, Partner,” Phil went on. “I'm just telling you this for your own good.”

“That's right,” Chris said.

“Now, if we're in a diner or someplace,” Phil continued earnestly, “and somebody wants to give us a cup of coffee, we don't want to hurt his feelings. But if we have enough scruples not to take anything free, then we also have enough manners and tact to be able to say, ‘Thank you so much, but I know you'll understand why I can't accept.'”

“Oh, you are
so
right, Dad!” Chris said to Phil, who was four years younger. “Can we please go home now?” And they both broke down laughing.

Chris wasn't such a stickler as Phil; he'd have drunk that soda without a qualm. But on his own, he'd confronted the issue already. On his first post in Rockaway, he'd walked the boardwalk one late shift, then had gone to the only place still open in the predawn hours, a tiny deli. “How are you, Officer?” the deli man said in a friendly way. “Fine,” Chris said. “Give me a roast beef on rye with mustard and lettuce.”

The man looked embarrassed. “Well, how about a cheese sandwich?” he said.

Chris stared at him. “I said a roast beef sandwich.”

The man wiped his hands up and down on his apron, nervously. “Well, Officer, roast beef—I mean, it's—it's very expensive.”

Chris felt a little sick with humiliation, as he understood. “Look, I'm going to
pay
for this sandwich!” he said loudly. “And I want roast beef!”

After that, he was careful always to have his money in plain view, when he ordered something, though that didn't always work. At a coffee shop, a cashier told him, “We charge policemen half price.” To make it worse, she said it very loudly, so that everybody in the line behind him heard her.

“You charge me the price you charge everybody else!” Chris said, just as loudly. “How much do I owe you? Five dollars? Here's the five dollars!” He threw the bill on the counter and stalked out, not waiting for change.

Although Phil was always willing to lecture Chris, and Chris was almost always willing to listen, neither lectured other cops. They went their own way together. Chris tried to get Phil to laugh a little more, with considerable success. Phil tried to get Chris to clean up his act, with somewhat less success. When Chris would open a pack of cigarettes in the car, Phil would reach over, grab the pack and crumple it, saying, “That's bad for you, Partner,” and throw it out the window. Later, Chris would have to buy a new pack. Phil was constantly dieting, while Chris, slim and wiry, never had a weight problem. Sometimes they'd stop at a diner, where Chris would buy a burger and fries, take-out. He'd eat in the car, and when the bag was empty, Phil would stick his face in the bag, taking deep breaths.

Together they knew the satisfactions of police work, the unexpected adventures. One morning they stopped their car, seeing a crowd gathered in the middle of a block. A boy about ten years old was kneeling in the street, cradling a dog in his arms, crying. “My dog got hit,” he told them. “Please help me and my dog.” “Are you okay?” Phil asked. “Yeah, I'm okay, but something's the matter with my dog,” the child said.

They put the boy and the dog in the backseat of the car and drove to an animal hospital in the Bronx. “We don't take injuries,” the receptionist told them. “We only take sick animals. We don't take accidents.” Phil and Chris looked at one another; without speaking, they knew they were thinking the same thing. They all piled back in the car. With lights flashing and siren wailing, they hit the FDR Drive down to the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan, doing about a hundred miles per hour, Chris figured. They had the leeway to do whatever they thought necessary in an emergency; he radioed that they had an emergency. The Center took the dog and three days later, Chris drove back down, without sirens, to pick him up.

And together they knew the sorrow. Following an anonymous phone tip, they drove to an address just a few blocks from the station. It was an abandoned tenement building. There was no front door; the hallway was piled with rotting garbage and had been used as a toilet.

The upper floors were burned out; those stairs led nowhere. But there was a flight of steps leading down. Chris went first, picking his way carefully down the sagging steps to the basement. There was another long, narrow hallway, stretching toward the back. In the blackness, Chris shone his flashlight ahead as they walked cautiously along. Its beam picked out what seemed to be a large doll hanging from an overhead pipe. They got closer. A little girl in a white dress, barefoot, was dangling from the pipe, strangled with a coathanger.

Chris's second partner, Mac, was very different from Phil, more like Chris in his rambunctious nature. Working together in the anticrime unit, Chris and Mac were so effective, sometimes so colorful, that they'd caught the attention of the press. After they'd thwarted an ambush of a police car by members of The Bachelors gang—firebombs from a rooftop—and after they'd broken up a confrontation between The Bachelors and The Black Spades, one newspaper story labeled them “The Mod Squad.” If they weren't quite the supermen one piece suggested—“After a few quick punches by Chris, the gunman was subdued and disarmed”—they were undeniably successful. They made a hundred arrests, from disorderly conduct to homicide, their first year.

Mac agreed with Chris that cops sometimes should go beyond the drawn lines of duty. One arrest they made—a fourteen-year-old boy who'd confessed to setting a schoolmate on fire—began to bother them. Although the boy insisted he'd done it, and even his parents said so—“Take him, he is bad!” the boy's father cried—Chris and Mac began to have doubts. They'd heard bits and pieces of information on the street, so they kept on the case for five months, mostly on their own time since, officially, the case was closed. Finally they were able to prove the boy innocent. He'd been too terrified and inarticulate to explain what had really happened: Both boys had been playing with matches, but the boy who was burned had started the fire, and an old feud between the families had led the injured boy's parents to accuse the other child. The Legal Aid attorney praised the cops in court, and a long newspaper story carried the banner headline:
HERO COPS TIP SCALES OF JUSTICE FOR SLUM CHILD
.

“I got lucky,” Chris would mumble, embarrassed, when people congratulated him. Although he knew it was more than luck, and so did they, and he knew they knew, he did really believe that luck had been a factor in his life. He'd been lucky with Phil, who'd helped him get off to a good start in the department, which Chris felt had enabled him to take advantage, then, of his lucky break in being teamed with Mac. He was lucky to have met and married Liz. Before that, he was lucky to have had a father who, though Chris hadn't realized it at the time, had turned him in the right direction.

On the subway, heading down to the meeting, he hoped his luck wasn't running out.

He knew he wasn't in trouble, so he wasn't worried about a reprimand. He was clean as a whistle. What could they get him for? Coming back late from lunch? Not having his shoes shined? He'd been warned that, as an active cop, he could expect to be called down often to appear before the Civilian Complaint Review Board. But in seven years—nearly four hundred arrests—Chris had never been called down.

He was worried that this meeting might have something to do with the department's problems. The NYPD was still recovering from the revelations of widespread corruption that had led to the Knapp Commission hearings, which still cast a long shadow. Chris was angry that, in the public mind, all cops had been smeared. He'd heard one cop testify, on TV, that all cops commonly took money at Christmastime.

Chris was not deaf and dumb; he knew many cops who did. He knew payments on the side were often considered routine; under city law, a police officer was required to stand by when a marshal was carrying out an eviction order. Because the marshal needed that uniformed presence in order to do his job, the marshal customarily handed the cop a five-dollar bill. That sort of payoff was considered “clean money,” as opposed to a payment, say, for letting someone continue to deal drugs. Chris wanted no part of any payoff, clean or otherwise, but when it came to corruption, he felt politicians were guiltier than cops, especially in the Bronx, where he felt they were bleeding the place dry. And you didn't see those politicians laying their lives on the line every day. You didn't see them chasing a guy down the street, knowing that, any minute, that guy might turn and blast them in the face.

When it came to police corruption, Chris didn't want to get involved. He just wanted to be left alone, to go his own honest way. But it was that attitude that Frank Serpico, the cop who'd gotten the investigation rolling, had considered a big part of the problem: squeaky-clean guys who looked the other way, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, when comrades messed around with shakedowns. Who didn't want to get involved. Chris had met Frank; the 4-oh was part of the 7th Division in the Bronx, where Serpico was mostly based. Because Chris had spent nearly all his time there, in both pre–and post–Knapp Commission days, he was afraid he was going to be assigned now to the Internal Affairs Division, whose job it was to sniff out corruption, to dig out the bad apples from the big blue barrel. He dreaded the idea of being asked to spy on other cops. He hoped desperately that nothing was going to happen at this meeting that would alter his life as a cop, the life he'd come to like so much.

Sometimes he was surprised he liked it so much, considering he'd never wanted to be a cop and, in fact, had never liked cops. He'd seen them come into his father's coffee shops, always looking for a free meal or a sandwich, a cup of coffee, just hanging around, and he'd complained to his father that he shouldn't let the cops take so much from him. George shook his head in rebuke. “The policemen are our friends,” he told his son. “They protect us.”

Chris just shrugged and said no more. He and his father seemed to have little to say to one another, as Chris was growing up. For long stretches, they didn't even see much of one another. George worked from before dawn until late at night, six and sometimes seven days a week. He never stopped working. He'd washed dishes in restaurant kitchens, scrubbed the floors of restaurant toilets, determined to buy a place of his own someday.

The family was living on East 117th Street, in the Italian section of Harlem, when Chris was born in 1941. But George was planning to move from the neighborhood as soon as he could manage it. He thought the area was not respectable enough. Men said to be gangsters strolled the streets, hanging out at the restaurants, conducting their shameful businesses, playing cards and drinking, even during the day, at their social clubs. Chris was only nine when George moved the family to a better neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan, a block from Central Park, but he'd already heard a name he thought was funny: Three-Finger Brown. All he knew then was that it was a silly name, and that his father had great contempt for this man and all of his kind. “I spit on them!” Chris heard his father say, one day, and although Chris never knew if any specific thing had provoked his father's unusual outburst, the depth of George's scorn for men who dishonored their family name was abundantly clear.

Family was not just an important thing to George and to Chris's mother, Katrina; it was everything. George never sat down and talked to Chris about it, but from conversations Chris overheard, through the years, scraps of information he picked up, he was able to piece the story together.