The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (54 page)

“This drop exceeds any of the expectations we had when we first started,” said the mayor. We were going to have a great New Year's.

On New Year's Eve, Cheryl and I hosted Jack Maple and Bridget O'Connor, the transit sergeant he was dating, and John Miller and his date at our apartment for dinner and then took the subway down to Times Square to see the ball drop. The transit merger had been completed a few months earlier, and I had several nice conversations with the cops patrolling the platforms and the trains. Miller eavesdropped on a pair of elderly women talking about how safe they felt on the train at eleven-thirty on New Year's Eve and how good they felt about the city.

In Times Square, the confetti was blowing, the horns were blaring, there were hundreds of thousands of people celebrating in the streets, none feeling better than I did. The ball had been refurbished and for the first time would be activated by computer. The mayor was preparing to do the honors, and my gang and I stopped (minus, understandably, Miller) to say hello. As we walked through the crowd, I received many friendly salutes from the cops on the scene and heard a lot of “Attaboy, Commissioner!” and “Great job!” from the crowd. After the ball dropped, we all headed for, you guessed it, Elaine's.

Time
magazine was going to do a major feature piece on crime in America.
Newsweek
had spoken to Peter LaPorte earlier but had not put anything in motion. Our end-of-the-year crime figures came out and were impressive, there was some nationwide decline in criminal activity, and
Time
decided that community policing was the reason. They assigned Eric Pooley to report on the New York angle. Pooley had been a writer for
New York
magazine, and in his last piece before moving to
Time
had savaged Giuliani. He had quoted former Mayor Ed Koch comparing Giuliani to “Frankenstein's monster … you run at the sight of him.” Pooley had written, “What
is
it about this mayor that he can wholly dominate the political landscape and at the same time repel most everyone who inhabits it?…Greatness from a public servant demands heart and soul as well as brains and brass. Those close to the mayor swear he's got the first two.”

I understand
Time
or Pooley sent a researcher to interview the mayor, and I was not surprised to hear that she wasn't given much time by the
Hall.
Time
might not have been their favorite magazine; that summer, when our semiannual figures had come out, they had published a full-page article about New York's crime turnaround, centered mostly around Giuliani, but had run a picture of me, not him, standing with two cops in Times Square. Word got back to us that he had taken Lategano's head off over that gaffe.

When Pooley arrived we let him sit in on a Compstat meeting. Compstat is great theater; the interplay between the bosses and commanders is not unlike the tense parts of a cop movie. We also sat Pooley down with Jack Maple, an interviewer's dream who can fill a reporter's notebook with off-the-cuff remarks that are highly quotable, highly accurate, and highly perceptive. Within a week,
Time
called Tom Kelly asking for crime numbers and saying they wanted to take a photograph of me.

We shot it under the Brooklyn Bridge, at night, on the Brooklyn side, with the lights of Manhattan and the Twin Towers in the background. There was an icy wind whipping off the East River, and I had my trench-coat collar up. Ten days later I was on the cover of
Time.
The cover line read, “Finally, We're
WINNING
the War Against
CRIME
. Here's Why.”

Time
hits the newsstands on Mondays. That Sunday, a blizzard hit New York and shut down the city. Roads were impassable, we were in a state of emergency. The mayor held his first press conference of the day in our Command Control Center with the NYPD logo behind him. Larry Celona of the
New York Post
showed him an advance copy of the cover. The mayor said it was great for the City of New York.

Time
ships out of Connecticut, and because of the heavy snow its trucks couldn't get into New York City. The magazine didn't get any substantial distribution in our area until Thursday, the day Mayor Giuliani and I held our weekly meetings.

I hadn't heard anything from him all week, but that was understandable; he had an emergency to preside over. I was curious how he would handle the situation. An appearance on the cover of
Time
is mother's milk for American politicians, and I was sure he and his staff felt I had stolen it from him. Although I didn't read it this way, to some the cover line intimated that
I
was the reason we were winning the war on crime. That must have caused Giuliani some consternation; they had threatened to fire me for showing up on the front page of the
Daily News.

The mayor never mentioned any of it. We discussed police matters regarding the storm and whatever else was timely. To the best of my recollection, Giuliani's only public comment on the matter was, “Nice trench coat.”

THE NEWS THAT I HAD SIGNED TO WRITE THIS BOOK FOR RANDOM HOUSE HAD
been in the papers, and, although I briefed him on the contract, the mayor insisted on having Denny Young and the city's corporation counsel Paul Crotty review it, ostensibly to clear it with the city's Conflicts of Interest Board. “What I'm concerned about,” said Giuliani, “is that it follow the ethical and legal guidelines that are set for this.” There were precedents for city officials to write books—Ed Koch, for instance, had produced a best-seller while in office—and I did not immediately turn it over. I did not think it was necessary, and I wanted to get the project under way. I was concerned that I would deliver the contract and it would disappear into the black hole.

I also resisted what was clearly an attempt to embarrass me by questioning my ethics. I was the city's top law-enforcement official; for the mayor to imply publicly that I might have stepped outside the law was an insult apparently intended to impugn my character. The mayor could dismiss the police commissioner any time he wanted, he didn't need to read the fine print on my contract to know that; this public hand-wringing seemed calculated.

I concentrated on the work at hand, reducing crime and disorder in New York City. We had made remarkable gains, and 1996 was going to be
the year they were both expanded and consolidated. It was the year we were finally going to launch Juggernaut (though the word had been banned in City Hall). To get that done, I needed to transfer some personnel. After consultation with Timoney and Maple and my gang, we came up with fifteen transfers in all. This personnel juggling was routine, the kind of organizational caretaking best left to the person in day-to-day charge of the organization, and I had made these kinds of moves many times before. The Hall held us up.

Over the course of several months, under the guise of tightening the municipal belt in an increasingly worsening budget situation, City Hall had wrested control of many budgetary and personnel powers that the New York City police commissioner had traditionally held as manager over his department. Early in the new administration they instituted what they called the Vacancy Control Board, headed up by the mayor's first deputy, Peter Powers. Approval for all hiring and promotions now rested with the Hall. In the past that approval had been pro forma if the managers stayed within their budgets. But now the micromanaging began in earnest.

They started by controlling the numbers, but eventually they wanted the names. They started demanding the lists of our discretionary promotions: who we were making first- and second-grade detectives. They sought to use these discretionary promotions in collective-bargaining negotiations with the unions. They kept pushing it. Over time, they wanted to see not only promotions, but senior-level transfers. The department had always run the movements of its bureau commanders by City Hall, more as a courtesy than for any approval, and the comings and goings of lower personnel had never been subject to their whims. Timoney told me that during the Koch administration, everything had been left up to the department. Now, we had to get the Giuliani crowd's approval on minor moves as well as major ones, and they took an inordinate amount of time getting back to us.

I was out of town so Timoney took our handwritten list of about fifteen transfers and promotions to the regularly scheduled meeting with the mayor, who looked at it and didn't comment. Timoney called Denny Young to set up a meeting to discuss them, and when I called Timoney and asked how it went he told me, “This hump won't even return my call. I don't know what's going on over there. I've left fifty messages.” Finally, he made phone contact.

“Denny, we want to put these transfers through.”

“Well, let's talk.”

“What's there to talk about? We're shaking up the department.”

“Humor me. Let's just talk.” They set up a meeting. Timoney brought the list and began to go through it. Young refused the first promotion. Timoney presented the second, Young refused it. Timoney believed this was the largest transfer of chiefs in the history of the department, and Young was sitting there looking for all the world like he was going to nix them all.

The third proposed transfer was Deputy Chief Jules Martin. “He was Dinkins's guy,” said Young. Martin had been commanding officer of the police intelligence unit that provided security for City Hall and Gracie Mansion during the Dinkins administration.

“What do you mean, ‘He was Dinkins's guy’?
I
was Dinkins's guy.”

“He's loyal to Dinkins.”

“Nah, nah, nah. Denny, you guys still fail to realize we're loyal to the police department. You automatically get our loyalty because you're there. We were loyal to Koch, we were loyal to Dinkins, we're loyal to you. That's the way it works. Jules Martin is as loyal to you as anybody else on this list.”

“Yeah, but, you know, he worked for Dinkins.”

“Listen, I understand he worked for Dinkins. Now he works for you guys. He's been a good soldier, he's been real good, he deserves a shot. We need a black guy up there, it's Harlem, it's traditional, he's a lawyer, he's a terrific guy.”

“You say he supports us?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Has he made any public utterances in favor of the mayor?”

“Are you kidding me? We're police, we don't do that!” Timoney got disgusted. “I'll tell you what,” he said. “We're not getting anywhere here. My twenty-fifth wedding anniversary is coming up, I'm going to Saint Lucia. Bratton's on the way back, you can deal with Bratton. It's his police department.”

“No, it isn't,” Young spat. “It's Rudy Giuliani's police department.”

The next morning,
The
New York Times
reported that the mayor had rejected several of our top-level personnel moves. We assumed it was leaked by the mayor's people to show his power over the department. However, the Hall apparently felt the article made Giuliani appear heavy-handed. They asked two
Times
reporters, Clifford Krauss and Steven Lee Myers, to present themselves at City Hall to meet with Powers, Young, Lapp, and me and my DCPI. Rumors of our difficult relationship were spreading, and
Krauss asked for an anecdote in which the mayor and I got along. I told him we were not close personal friends but that we shared a vision for policing the city. He reposed the question in slightly different language, and I said, “I don't profess that the two of us skip down the lane hand in hand.”

By law, the New York City police commissioner's term runs for five years, and the term I was completing—begun in 1991 by Lee Brown and continued by Ray Kelly—expired on February 21. Under normal circumstances, my reappointment would have been routine. These were not normal circumstances. It was March 9. Krauss asked why I had not been reappointed. He was told words to the effect that they were just a bit behind in their paperwork.

After the meeting adjourned, Krauss and Myers were buttonholed by the mayor's inner circle and told that my reappointment was actually being held up because they wanted to see the book contract. I had given them an issue. I was not pleased to have my ethics impugned. Rather than fuel another week's headlines, I submitted the contract for review. (As of the publication of this book, I have still not heard from corporation counsel on the matter.)

There was another attempted embarrassment. When I first came to the city, Cheryl and I had met the financier Henry Kravis and his wife at a party given by one of the mayor's supporters. We had had dinner to-gether a number of times, and they extended an invitation for us to join them, traveling on their private jet, on two vacation trips to their homes in Colorado and the Dominican Republic, which we had accepted. During the flap over my book contract, a gossip columnist for the
Daily News
mentioned in his column that Cheryl and I were vacationing with Kravis and his wife and created the appearance that this trip was inappropriate. It wasn't, but it gave the appearance of impropriety, and raising the question of my ethics once again was a plus for the Hall.

Upon my return, at the mayor's request, Paul Crotty came to talk to me. I was under the impression he was coming as my attorney to advise me on the appropriate course of action as it related to this book. However, as soon as he came through the door, he showed me a list of every official trip I had taken during my twenty-seven months as commissioner, all of which had been approved, as required, by the mayor's office. He told me we didn't need to talk about the book deal, they were already looking at the contract; he wanted to talk about all these other trips. Shortly after our meeting, I was disappointed to find that the content of that conversation
made its way into the local tabloids. Needless to say, I was quite concerned that a private conversation between me and the city corporation counsel would end up in the media. The next time I met with Crotty, I brought my own representation, noted New York attorney Richard Emery.