The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (50 page)

Giuliani lectured him. “This is one of those stories that affects the economic development of the city. It was out-of-towners, they were tourists. People who think about coming here see these stories. I visited the families and showed concern, I have been involved since the beginning, and when something like this wraps up, it's not the place of the police department to say, ‘Oh, we'll handle this whole thing.’

“You know, I have the distinct impression that
someone
over there … is putting someone
else's
agenda ahead of mine.”

Giuliani did not say he was pleased that the cops who worked this investigation had strung together a series of minute leads to track down the criminals and make this case. No, he was apparently furious that the department and the cops, who did all that work, had the temerity to announce it to the press without his being present. This entire blowup was over who was going to stand in front of those bright lights and take the big bow on national TV.

We continued to meet weekly with the mayor. We asked City Hall to release the statistics to the media that showed that crime was going down. They refused. The mayor was very upset when I then announced them at a meeting of an association of business people. Miller got a call saying, “What the hell is he giving out good crime stats for?”

During the mayoral campaign, Dinkins had said he was winning the war on crime because his administration had experienced a 3 percent decline, and Giuliani had made the rounds saying, essentially, “Numbers don't matter, and crime stats don't count.” So now, when he had great numbers and stats to work with, his problem was that he was on record as having previously disparaged their worth.

An article in
The New York Times
had noted that another city had put in place a gun strategy and their gun arrests were way up relative to ours. Maple tried to explain to the mayor that because of the success of our Gun Strategy, fewer people were carrying guns, and that the more we continued to pursue this strategy, the fewer gun arrests we could expect.

“No!” he said, gritting his teeth. “This number goes
down
and this number goes
up
!” Meaning, the higher the number of arrests, the lower the amount of crime.

Maple had spent many meetings sitting around saying, “What do you think about putting ten thousand people in Narcotics and putting on a full-court press against the drug dealers until they can't function? The game would be over if we did that. That's where all our crime is coming from, according to everybody.” Now he had his chance. “Well, Mister Mayor,” Maple said, “we could affect those arrest numbers to go up while these crime numbers go down, but … what do you think about throwing ten thousand people into Narcotics? I have a plan. You want to knock out crime? We can put ten thousand people into the Narcotics Division and take this place out. There will be no more crime.”

The mayor blinked. “Well, I don't know about that. I'd think we'd have to talk about that.” He had a budget to consider, he didn't want to spend the money.

“Well, that would be how to do it,” said Maple. “When you want to do it.”

MAPLE WAS PUSHING A BATTLE PLAN THAT WOULD WIN THE WAR ON CRIME IN
New York City, particularly drug crime, once and for all. When we came into the NYPD, Maple had gone “pollinating” among the chiefs. “If there were no drugs in New York City,” he asked them, “how much do you think crime would go down?” One chief said 30 percent, another said 40, another 50, another 90. He took the most conservative estimate. “The NYPD thinks that thirty percent of the crime in the city is somehow related to drugs. Why is it,” he asked, “that in an organization of thirty-eight thousand cops [he included transit and housing in his calculations] we have fifteen hundred people in Narcotics? Why do we have four percent of the department dealing with thirty percent of the problem? I don't understand this. This is not smart business.”

Maple took a number off the top of his head. “Why don't we just put ten thousand people in Narcotics and blow this place up? That's the end of the game.”

Maple says the chiefs looked at him like he was from Mars. We had already heard the mayor's reaction, so he just kept the idea to himself. Several months later, he asked Chief of Narcotics Marty O'Boyle, “Marty, under past programs like Pressure Point and TNT, the crime came down in the five- or ten-block area where we focused. Tell me what you would
need to take out the whole city. I want to know. Is it ten thousand cops? Is it five hundred thousand? Is it a million?” O'Boyle looked at him. “No, I'm serious. Amuse me.” They came to the conclusion that the task would take a little more than five thousand cops working full-time. We had the cops to do it; staffing level was at its highest ever.

Maple figured, “Okay, this is what we'll do. We'll take the city back borough by borough.”

To take Queens, we needed about eight hundred people. We needed around nine hundred cops for Brooklyn North and six hundred more for Brooklyn South. Staten Island would take a couple hundred. The Bronx needed about 1,200 and Manhattan North 1,400. “You go into Queens,” Maple explained. “You stay there for six months with eight hundred officers. There are some bad areas: the 103, the 110, the 113, the 114 precincts. You do everything that works: buy-and-bust operations, quality-of-life enforcement, warrants, guns, the whole thing. It works, we know it works. We do our job and take out the drug organizations and clean up Queens. Now we have it under control.

“After six months, you downgrade by about twenty percent, you leave six hundred officers in Queens as a standing army and slide two hundred over to Brooklyn North, plus another seven hundred. We give Brooklyn North the same treatment for four months, leave several hundred there and slide the rest to Brooklyn South and then Staten Island. When we've cleaned up there, we leave some and move to the Bronx. We finish with Manhattan. Within a year we kill crime in New York.”

When Maple finally presented his ideas and numbers at a general meeting, we knew we had a winning battle plan for the war on crime. We arranged to bring it to Giuliani. We were certain he would enjoy being the mayor who ended drug crime in New York. We called the plan Operation Juggernaut.

There were several obstacles we had to overcome before we could get Juggernaut under way. In a perfect world, we could swoop down on the city all at one time and crush crime, and the criminal-justice system would be able to handle the volume of arrests our plan was going to produce. But we did not live in a perfect world, and we would have to deal with district attorneys and judges who have their own caseloads and work schedules, and with the limitations of jail space in New York's already crowded system. The criminal-justice system was not designed for a police department to be effective, in which case it would be forced to become a high-performance organization itself. The courts were semifunctional; if we
showed up with thousands more prisoners, they could become paralyzed. We would have to reach some accommodation.

Budget was another factor. This would be an expensive operation. The city couldn't afford to promote and pay a large contingent of new detectives. But we had a cost-saving proposal. We would run Juggernaut and also allow these cops to bank upward of a year's time toward promotion before transferring them and their newfound expertise back to their precincts. Juggernaut would be a success, and I would have a total police force that was trained to deal with drugs. Dave Dinkins had bitten the political bullet and raised taxes to hire six thousand more cops. Surely Giuliani, who had campaigned on the issue, would do at least as much.

In early December, we invited the mayor and his inner circle to our eighth-floor command center, the Compstat room, with its bank of TV monitors and computer screens, and made a two-hour presentation. Maple and Anemone were the chief presenters. We reviewed the history of narcotics in the city and the NYPD's response to it. We organized our statistics and made our strong case. At the end, to leave them completely pumped up, Maple and Anemone's planning group, the Swamp, produced a war movie—“Operation Juggernaut”—with scenes of drug use, a background of stirring music, the NYPD busting down doors to get at drug dens, a daisy chain of perps being led away, happy kids of all ethnicities playing in cleaned-up streets, men and women in NYPD windbreakers doing the job. We were going to wage war on drugs in New York and win.

Prior to Juggernaut, the city's war on drugs had been our Vietnam; we were fighting a hit-and-run enemy and had gone in and made a lot of contact when we could, but we'd never held the ground. We didn't have the tactics or the will to win. Juggernaut was the Normandy invasion. We were going to overwhelm our opponents, take the ground and never leave, and systematically take them out. The focus of our effort was going to be on the source of the problem: the drug dealers. We weren't going after the users. We would systematically take out the low-level street dealer, the midlevel operator, and high-level kingpin. We would attack them consistently on all fronts at all times. If you were a drug dealer, you were a marked man.

Time was of the essence. In September 1994, the strength of the city's three police forces had reached its maximum manning level, 38,310 cops. We knew that we, along with the entire city government, were in for hard times with a shrinking budget. We also knew that we would not get any additional cops to replace those lost to attrition until the spring of 1996.
Compounding our staffing problem would be the loss of several thousand civilian employees as part of the mayor's reduction of the civilian workforce. The window of opportunity to use our expanded manpower would be between eighteen months and two years.

The mayor was impressed. “How much will crime go down?” he asked. “How would you process the arrests?” He was clearly enthused.

We followed this up at a meeting at City Hall. Maple, Timoney, Miller, and LaPorte were with me, and among the mayor's aides were Powers, Young, and Lapp. We brought in maps and charts and laid out the attack plan for the entire city. We produced budget people to discuss the financial details.

In our weekly Thursday meeting in the mayor's office, Lapp said, “Mr. Mayor, we're moving forward with this,” and discussed the million dollars a month that would have to be budgeted for the Correction Department. The mayor said, “It's money well spent. Let's do it.”

The next day, on a police boat coming back from a function on Staten Island, the mayor was still talking about the details and what a great plan we had designed. I was pleased that he was so enthusiastic. The NYPD and the city were going to have an excellent new year. We were going to overwhelm crime. Nothing quite like it had ever been proposed for any American city.

Sunday morning, Maple woke up and looked at the headline on the front page of the
Daily News.
“I knew the world was over,” he said. He called and woke up Miller and read the headline to him. Miller started laughing—it was either that or cry.

In large, bold letters, with “Exclusive” slashed across its front page, New York's Hometown Newspaper said, “
BRATTON'S JUGGERNAUT
.” The smaller headlines, each with an NYPD logo in front of it, read: “Cops prepared to invade Queens in ’95 drug-war offensive” and “Commish's ’94: Year of success & symbolism.” My picture took up about a quarter of the front page.

Juggernaut was dead. The mayor and I never discussed it again. He told Miller, “I'm not sure about this plan. I think it's ratcheted way too high.”

Two weeks previously, the
New York Post
had run an article under the headline “Rudy Plans War on Drugs,” which had outlined much the same initiative. We'd gotten no static about it. Patrice O'Shaughnessy of the
Daily News
, having run a “first week” article when I'd arrived, wanted to interview me about my first year. She had read the
Post
article and wanted
to know what our big plan for the new year was. It was the drug plan, only now it had a name: Juggernaut. “But it's already been in the
Post
,” she told Miller. “If something is going to bring change,” he told her off the record, “that will probably be it.” Miller wasn't shy about discussing our new plan; many of the details had already been in print with the mayor's name attached, the mayor had been fully briefed and was completely onboard, preliminary discussions concerning the plan had taken place with three hundred people in the department. O'Shaughnessy made Juggernaut her lead, and the
Daily News
chose the headline.

Giuliani was on the phone with Miller: “If we put in all these cops to make all these arrests, where are these drug addicts going to get treatment? Where are the social services?”

“Mister Mayor,” Miller said, “as I think Commissioner Bratton explained in the presentation, he doesn't care where they get their drugs, or if the price goes up, or if they can find treatment if they want it; he's worried about all the people they're victimizing every day. He wants to get them locked up. And if they get right out, he wants to get them locked up again until somebody in the drug-dealing community looks up and says, ‘You know what? This is too much trouble, getting arrested every other day. I think I'm going to stop dealing. You win, I lose, good-bye.’”

The mayor said, “Well, I'm not really sure about this.”

Miller thought, but kept to himself, “You said you were sure the other day at the end of the meeting.”

“We can't have these leaks,” the mayor said, returning to an old theme. “Where did they come from?”

Miller told him, “There are three hundred people involved in planning this program. They're training hundreds of undercover officers who have all been told where they're going and what it's about. They're requisitioning cars and office space from all over the department. There is no one who
doesn't
know about this. I think to say that this is being leaked by me or the commissioner or somebody on senior staff. … I mean, everybody in the job is now part of this. There was a presentation that you were present at that included one-hundred-plus people. And it was in the
New York Post
two weeks ago!”