The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (37 page)

Finally, Larry felt he needed to get away from his son, not out of fear for his safety but out of frustration at his behavior. He ordered Adrian to leave the house. Adrian refused initially but then finally roused himself from the couch. Larry gave him $150, and Adrian walked off into the night to stay with a friend in Schenectady, New York. It was like the lawsuit had reached out across five counties and swallowed him whole.

What should have been an almost inevitable legal triumph now began to take on hints of a looming, cocked-up tragedy. Without new lawyers, the case would languish. How could it be repaired? How would Judge Sweet, a man not accustomed to putting up with BS, react? What lawyer would take a case like this more than two years down the road? Was it conceivable at that
moment that Schoolcraft would simply fade away? It seemed that the case was heading toward becoming an orphan.

“This case is in the toilet,” Larry said. “It’s all just sickeningly tragic. That’s why 95 percent of the time, they win. The only way you stand a chance is if you are disciplined, focused and persistent.”

He talked about leaving town for good, moving to New Mexico or Arizona. “I’m going to pack up, take my dogs, go to the southwest and change my name,” Larry said. “I have had it. I don’t care what happens anymore. This has become laughable.”

But that was just a moment, and things were maybe not so bad. Five days passed, and Larry still hadn’t spoken to Adrian. But he did receive a call from someone who mentioned that a lawyer named Peter Gleason was interested in taking the case.

The conversation roamed across the landscape of the case. Gleason promised they would pursue a more aggressive strategy than Norinsberg had. He was shocked that no investigators have been hired. At the end of the meeting, Adrian had new lawyers. Plans were made for a strategy meeting in New York the following week.

Gleason was a bit of a character. He had served as both a police officer and a firefighter before practicing law. He had offered to put his lavish Tribeca loft up as bail collateral for an accused high-end prostitute madam, Anna Gristina. He once tried to buy Elvis Presley’s house. The living room in his apartment was modeled on the Jungle Room at Graceland. He had been a real estate investor and had run for city council. He also produced a board game about the politics of 9/11—called “Ground Zero: It’s Only a Game to the Politicians”—accusing Giuliani, Pataki, and others of using the terrorist attack for their own benefit. But if he was going to be a good advocate for Schoolcraft, that was enough.

A day later, Adrian and Larry made up. The fight was just a symptom of the massive strain that the case had produced. They met on November 23 with Gleason and his partner at the Diamond Mill Tavern in Saugerties, New York, and signed representation papers.

Norinsberg filed a document with Sweet’s court removing himself as counsel, but he stubbornly left the SchoolcraftJustice.com website up for several weeks. For a while, he balked at turning over the files in the case until he was paid for his work, but he dropped that effort, too, Larry said.

On December 4, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown abruptly issued a statement that after a three-year comprehensive investigation, there was no criminal conduct on Halloween night when Schoolcraft was forced into the psychiatric ward by the police. The Schoolcrafts were shocked, mainly because they didn’t even know Brown was conducting an investigation. They viewed it as yet another punch in the shoulder from city government and were suspicious of its timing.

“It smells of bias, obstruction of justice and a betrayal of the public trust,” Larry said. “Once they took on the investigation, and failed to adequately investigate, that’s obstruction of justice. District Attorneys can go to prison like anyone else.

“Why wasn’t this presented to a grand jury or a special prosecutor?” Larry wondered. “If this had been presented to a grand jury, the citizens of Queens would have indicted. They would not let this stand. Brown would not let the citizens of Queens make the decision.”

As so, as 2012 came to a close, a big question mark hung over the case, and it seemed like anything could happen. Judge Sweet’s trial date was eight months away, set for September. There was more to come.

EPILOGUE OF A SORT

THE LIGHTNING ROD ON THE BUILDING

S
omeone in the know talking after hours about the Schoolcraft case once told me, “If you had walked into my office and told me this story, I would have said get the fuck out and find a good psychiatrist, and yet here we are.” Indeed, a lot of people felt that way, and yes, here we are.

As the New Year began, things started to look just a little better for the Schoolcrafts. They were still struggling with money, and they had jettisoned yet another lawyer in Gleason, but they found a new lead lawyer in Nathaniel Smith and a second in former federal prosecutor John Lenoir. There was talk of lifting the gag order and seeking three years of back pay for Adrian—none of which came to pass by the end of April. But the lawyers did serve a subpeona on Queens District Attorney Richard Brown about his Schoolcraft investigation.

This move was, for the Schoolcrafts, a welcome sign that their new lawyers were going to be more aggressive—a strategy they felt, to put it charitably, had been lacking over the previous two years.

On the other hand, on April 8, the Schoolcrafts heard from NYPD Inspector Louis Luciani. After keeping Adrian’s disciplinary case in limbo for three years, they wanted to go to trial. Luciani said the department would neither reinstate nor fire him.

“The department prefers not to take any employment action without a full hearing,” Luciani wrote.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Jamaica Hospital moved to bar all case attorneys and the Schoolcrafts from speaking publicly about the case in any way, claiming Larry and Adrian and their lawyers want to try the case in the media.

The city Law Department, while denying the Schoolcraft allegations, repeatedly declined to discuss the case with me.

Adrian and Larry have endured a lot of indignities and a fair amount of harassment, suffered some embarrassments, and lived hand to mouth for what seemed like an endless period. They have been blown off, ignored, criticized, and disbelieved. They have been stretched very close to the breaking point. And yet, three and a half years later, they are still vertical.

According to Larry, at least, Adrian has emerged somewhat from his funk. On one particular day, Adrian texted his dad a picture of himself standing in a freight elevator next to a large pile of plastic-wrapped legal boxes—the case files as they were being moved from law office to law office. It is a testament to his character that he can still handle the slow, dripping paper cuts of a war of attrition like this one.

But there is a mountain of work left to be done. With Sweet’s tentative trial date of September 2013 just months away, quite incredibly, not a single deposition has been taken in the 30 months since the complaint was initially filed. Just as shocking, no money has been spent on investigation—that is, interviewing the dozens of characters who make up this complicated storyline. And the attorneys have seen very little from the files of Jamaica Hospital.

The city’s slow-it-down strategy has been more than effective. Indeed, even this far into the case, the city is still arguing for a schedule that would put a trial off for yet another year.

On the other side, after all the disclosures of the last three years, Commissioner Kelly’s approval rating is as high as ever. A mayoral candidate, Christine Quinn, has already said she will keep him on if she is elected to replace Bloomberg. Kelly even seems to have his own TV show in Tom Selleck’s portrayal of Police Commissioner Frank Reagan on
Blue Bloods.
“Don’t worry about me, I’ve got pretty broad shoulders,” Regan said in one episode. Paul Browne has his own doppelganger on the show too, in the wry and wise counselor Garrett Moore, played by Gregory Jbara.

On February 5, 2013, there was another signal of Kelly’s stubborn front in the face of controversy. The department released a report that concluded
there was no racial profiling in the stop and frisk campaign. The message was clear: Kelly wasn’t going to back off on his defense of stop and frisk, despite the public criticism and the looming trial in the stop and frisk lawsuit.

As for some of the other characters in this story, most remain in one kind of limbo or another. Adhyl Polanco is no longer suspended with pay. He is now assigned to a VIPER unit in the city, where he spends stultifying days watching a video screen linked to public housing security cameras, his career on hold as his lawsuit plods through the courts. He, too, testified in the stop and frisk trial.

Robert Borrelli, the cop who stepped forward to report downgrading, remains assigned to the Bronx courts. He was out of work to recover from an operation for a while, and says he sometimes regrets coming forward and speaking to the media because of what happened to him after he did. It has been a difficult period for him, too.

Deputy Chief Marino remains in Staten Island, in a quieter command than he would probably like. And Mauriello lingers on as the executive officer of Bronx Transit, awaiting the end of a disciplinary process that seems never to end.

If you haven’t noticed, there is a theme here. Each of these men has basically been put on ice, pending some outcome in the misty, uncertain future. Setting aside the individual allegations and taking them as a group, one could argue fairly compellingly that they are all collateral damage in the struggle over the effects of CompStat. And Kelly really has no incentive to put them back into the fray until he (perhaps) and Bloomberg leave office in January.

So said a retired detective: “They are going to stall this until Bloomberg leaves. He’s out in January 2014. This is it for him.”

This detective said nothing larger will happen until the electorate sees the accuracy of crime stats (and the fairness police tactics) as a major issue. “Look, they are fudging the numbers in the 8-1, 7-5, 7-3, 8-4, whatever, but it only changes when the people in the community demand to see the numbers, when they say we’re going to vote around this, we want to see the true numbers.”

At this point, well before the trial, Schoolcraft’s legacy remains hard to foresee. As of this writing, he still has not received that Serpico moment—the big press conference outside City Hall, the big moment on the witness stand, that cathartic outcome, after which he can move on with his life.

In a complex story, Schoolcraft is a complex character. He is a bit of a cipher, a word that has two very different meanings. One meaning is a device that breaks a code, but it can also mean someone of no importance. Neither is completely true, but there is some truth to both. His work exposed a range of problems with CompStat, but he also disappeared upstate and in essence removed himself from the landscape.

Clearly the story suffered a bit after 2010. But perhaps the reaction to the Schoolcraft story was a sign of the times. Those big bold New York moments of the Knapp Commission, the Mollen Commission—those revelatory moments seem rarer these days. It’s as if the public doesn’t have the political will it once did to stand up to the big institutions. On the other hand, perhaps those Watergate moments never did really exist. Perhaps it was all miserable slogging through long wars of attrition, and only the movies exist to tie it all up in a neat drama.

Unfortunately, some in the media were unable to separate the man from his work. Indeed, Adrian is difficult, as is his father. But just because Schoolcraft was not the perfect source—few whistle-blowers are perfect, most in fact are fairly eccentric—that did not mean that he did not do a remarkable thing. In a bygone era, perhaps Schoolcraft would have gotten more of the respect that he earned. On the other hand, the media is like the ocean, and not even King Canute could stop the tide from rolling over the beach.

Most importantly, one can never lose sight of just how hard it is for one man to take on the most powerful police agency in the country and a city with such deep pockets. If one takes Schoolcraft at his word, he did not step forward for material gain. Thus, it did not make sense for him to then seek fame or glory or political status.

However, that is not to say he left no legacy no matter the outcome of his lawsuit. His tapes were a groundbreaking piece of history, and they influenced a whole series of debates. They gave unprecedented weight to allegations of quotas, crime stat manipulation, and civil rights violations. His tapes inspired other officers to come forward, too, and gave veracity to legal challenges against NYPD policies. Other officers have taped their commanders demanding quotas.

“He’s gotta be up in the top two or three of the most influential NYPD whistleblowers of the past 50 years,” said Darius Charney, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the stop and frisk class action lawsuit. “It’s so rare for
officers to come forward at all, and the depth of the corruption he exposed is pretty amazing. Just look at the viciousness with which the city has responded to him, and it’s not only the police department.”