The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (31 page)

At any rate, he had other fish to fry. On August 8, lawyers for Schoolcraft filed a $50 million lawsuit against the city, Mauriello, Marino, Paul Browne, other officers, and various Jamaica Hospital medical staff. Larry and Adrian worked long hours with their lawyers—Norinsberg, Gerald Cohen, and Joshua Fitch—on the wording of the complaint.

The complaint was 63 pages long—a book by routine tort case standards. “This action seeks redress for a coordinated and concentrated effort
by high ranking officials within the New York City Police Department to silence, intimidate, threaten and retaliate against Adrian Schoolcraft for his documentation and disclosure of corruption with the NYPD,” the complaint began.

The complaint went on to accuse the NYPD of having an illegal quota policy and claimed that police bosses were instructing cops to “suborn perjury” on police reports in order to distort CompStat statistics. In order to discredit Schoolcraft, police unlawfully entered his home and had him forcibly removed in handcuffs, “seized his personal effects, including evidence he had gathered documenting corruption and had him admitted to Jamaica Hospital against his will under false information that he was emotionally disturbed.”

The complaint, which prominently featured the recordings, alleged that Jamaica Hospital “conspired” with the NYPD to deprive Schoolcraft of his rights for six days. As a result, he was “constructively terminated” from his position as a police officer.

It alleged that the performance evaluations were entirely tied to the quota, and Schoolcraft was in essence threatened to make his quotas or else. The precinct commanders “were so obsessed with making their numbers that they literally instructed officers to make arrests when there was no evidence of any criminal activity whatsoever. . . . Defendant’s myopic obsession with quotas came straight from the highest ranking officials in the department.”

Doctors with Jamaica Hospital failed to properly examine Adrian, failed to follow state mental hygiene law, and entered into a conspiracy to deprive Adrian of his rights. “In allowing the NYPD to dictate the medical policy at JMHC, and in utterly disregarding the legal requirement of Mental Hygiene law by ignoring objective medical evidence that [Schoolcraft] was not a danger to himself or others, JMHC departed from good and accepted medical practice by unlawfully confining him.”

The complaint also referred to Marino’s steroid case, noting that he was buying steroids from a pharmacy that was at the center of a criminal investigation that netted some $7 million in illegal proceeds. The document claimed that the NYPD ignored Marino’s “violent propensities and explosive temper” but was never disciplined for it.

The complaint also aired out Brooklyn North chief Gerald Nelson’s dirty laundry, alleging that Nelson, in a 2005 address to school safety agents, called parents “bitches who should be knocked over and handcuffed when they interfered.” Kelly, the complaint said, reprimanded Nelson but left him in place.

The complaint also alleged that Nelson tried to intimidate two officers who had filed internal affairs complaints, saying, “We have friends on the IAB, and you’re full of shit. If I see this in the paper, I will discipline you again. I don’t need this in my career.” Once again, Kelly did nothing.

It was all dramatic language, and the Schoolcrafts were fairly proud of the document. For once, it seemed as though things were going to turn around and go in a positive direction. But to their chagrin, the
Daily News
headline on the following day read, “Want My 50M Stat!”

The Schoolcrafts were ambivalent about the inclusion of a financial amount in the lawsuit, and now they felt they were being portrayed as only interested in getting rich. Nothing could be further from the truth, they said. They were also annoyed that the
News
used the same old unflattering picture of Adrian.

“It’s not about the money,” Schoolcraft said at the time. “We want this to get to court to get the truth out in the open. We’re not going to settle. People may not believe me but we’re not going to settle.”

Among the wags who covered police issues and were familiar with the often brutal and life-consuming paths of these cases, many were skeptical. “He’s not going to settle? Yeah right. He’ll take his money, and walk away when he can’t stand waiting anymore,” one reporter said.

The most controversial allegation in the lawsuit, at least among reporters, was that NYPD spokesman Paul Browne was present when Schoolcraft was dragged out of his apartment on October 31, 2009. Schoolcraft was convinced he saw a large bearded man who looked just like Browne speaking to Mauriello on the street.

Browne’s aides denied it right away, and at least in the media, the allegation tarnished Schoolcraft somewhat. In a revised complaint filed later, the allegation was removed, but the Schoolcrafts still believed it to be true.

As for the reaction to the lawsuit, the city offered a standard no comment. But there was this interesting comment on The Rant from a cop
calling himself “Blue Trumpet”: “Schoolcraft’s allegations have gone unrebutted for months because nobody is willing to put themselves on the record to refute what more and more appears to be the truth,” this officer wrote. “Multiple felonies, both state and federal, appear to have been committed against a cop who wouldn’t knuckle-under to official pressure and submit to the demand to flake citizens who hadn’t done anything wrong. Every cop should be disturbed by this case and the Soviet-style tactics conducted against one of their own.”

That summer also saw the Schoolcrafts pick up a new ally in the form of Frank Serpico, the most famous whistle-blower of them all, the retired cop who sparked a major police scandal in the late 1960s when he and David Durk reported widespread bribery of police officers, a practice known as “the pad.” This was the same Durk who went to IAB on Schoolcraft’s behalf in the summer of 2009.

When Serpico could not get the internal machinery of the NYPD to listen to his allegations, he went to the
New York Times
, which published a devastating account of the corruption. That led to the Knapp Commission and a series of supposed reforms.

One of his big moments came in his October 1971 testimony before Knapp, when he said, “The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which honest police officers can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.” Perhaps Serpico felt a kinship with Schoolcraft because during his long-ago ordeal, as Levitt reported, then-Mayor John Lindsay urged the
Times
publisher not to publish any of his allegations and called him “bizarre,” a statement that suggested the mayor was trying to paint Serpico as crazy.

Serpico was shot in the face during a drug raid, and there were always suspicions that his fellow officers failed to come to his aid. He retired soon after that and collaborated with author Peter Maas on the bestselling
Serpico: The Cop Who Defied The System
. The book led to an iconic movie,
Serpico
, starring Al Pacino in the title role. The film pretty much cemented his name in the American consciousness. There was even a television series starring David Birney.

Despite his success, Serpico’s ill feelings over his treatment by the NYPD lingered on. As he often said, he was still upset that his follow cops never called a 10-13—officer down—after he was shot. The only call that was sent was “shots fired.” He had never gotten a full accounting of the shooting and many other issues from the NYPD.

Even though he was vindicated in the popular media, he still held to the belief decades later that the circumstances around his shooting had never been fully investigated by the NYPD. Incredibly, he still hadn’t gotten a full look at the NYPD internal investigative file on him. Nor was he all that impressed in the end with the outcome of the Knapp Commission, as he wrote in an essay for Room for a View in August 2002:

Mayor John Lindsay, embarrassed by my revelations, appointed the Knapp Commission to look into police corruption, and a few small fish got fried,” he wrote. “Ultimately, as is usually the case with large scale corruption, the real culprits of my story were never brought to justice. They went on to become judges, politicians, commissioners and university professors. Men of base character are elected to the highest offices in the land. Such behavior may explain why we find ourselves in the mess we are in today.

I discovered corruption among my fellow officers, not realizing how widespread or institutionalized it was. No matter how high I went, the response was always the same. The concern was not how to eradicate the problem, for I was soon to discover they were all await of its existence, but what kind of threat would my revelations pose to the system itself.

At times, he wrote about current events and on some occasions about NYPD matters. In 1994, he wrote President Clinton asking him to open a federal investigation into police corruption and brutality.

In 1997, at age 61, calling himself “Citizen Serpico,” he told the New York City Council that America’s leaders were at the heart of the nation’s problems. That same year, learning that Giuliani was going to create a police-community relations panel in the wake of the police torture of Abner Louima, he said, “It’s just talk until they start doing something about it and stop lying about what really happened.”

In 1999, he spoke to the
Village Voice
’s legendary columnist, Nat Hentoff, about the continuing danger of retaliation against officers who spoke out. “Nothing has changed,” Serpico told Hentoff.

He created a website devoted to encouraging people to “do the right thing, and keep them going when they decide to take that lonely road.”

At the time Schoolcraft came forward, Serpico was living fairly quietly in upstate New York, a local celebrity, often holding court in a favored cafe.

On June 9, 2010, he weighed in publicly on Schoolcraft. “The NYPD had Officer Adrian Schoolcraft manacled and taken to the psycho ward for exposing the Police Department’s fudging of statistics,” he wrote. “Perhaps NYPD Commissioner Kelly is going to Israel to compare notes with Netanyahu on strategy to show the world how well they investigate themselves.”

On July 29, 2010, Serpico compared Schoolcraft’s treatment to what took place in the Soviet gulag. “The treatment of a cop who blows the whistle is the same in the Iron Curtain or the Blue Wall. . . . Welcome comrade.”

And so, after talking at length on the phone, Schoolcraft and Serpico finally met in person at Frank’s home. They spent a day together and shared a meal. Serpico later visited the Schoolcrafts and cooked them salmon for dinner.

Serpico would become an unofficial adviser to the Schoolcrafts.

As part of their strategy, Norinsberg created a website, SchoolcraftJustice.com, and other officers contacted him with their own allegations. One officer, from the 8-1, called him and claimed that Mauriello was given advance warning that Schoolcraft had gone to Internal Affairs. Another officer, assigned in the Bronx, claimed that the downgrading of crime reports was a consistent practice that he called “shitcanning.” Like Schoolcraft, this officer found reports that were questionable and followed up with victims. He claimed that his precinct commander would file legitimate crime reports as “unfounded” so they wouldn’t appear in the all-important precinct crime statistics.

At the end of August, the Schoolcrafts had a pleasant surprise when federal prosecutors in Brooklyn expressed interest in interviewing Adrian about his allegations. Schoolcraft traveled to Brooklyn in mid-September, sat
with members of the office for more than an hour, and shared pizza as they talked. Nothing came of the meeting. It seemed to be yet another mirage in the desert of government oversight. Even two years later, a spokesman for the office declined to discuss what, if any, decision they made.

At around the same time, an NYPD judge ruled that Deputy Chief Michael Marino—the man who ordered Schoolcraft into the psych ward—should be suspended for 30 days and serve a year on probation for using human growth hormone. Marino remained in place in Brooklyn North.

On September 9, the
New York Times
weighed in with a front-page story on the second batch of tapes that came out of the 81st Precinct. And the syndicated radio program,
This American Life
, aired a segment on Schoolcraft, which received dozens of sympathetic comments from listeners around the country.

One listener in Philadelphia described how NYPD officers handcuffed his wife on some specious three-year-old unpaid traffic ticket. “I can only assume that some officer was trying to reach his quota,” the listener wrote. A woman started a Facebook campaign in support of Schoolcraft.

In late September, as Bloomberg was defending the NYPD against quota allegations, and new allegations about downgrading were reported in the 66th Precinct, Schoolcraft reiterated his intent to stay the course in an interview with the
Daily News
. “This is not about money,” he says. “There’s not enough money in the state to get me to settle this suit. It’s going to trial and there’s no way around that.”