Paul Bacon (15 page)

My arrest marathon ended at Manhattan Central Booking, a multilevel holding facility built under the Criminal Court Building
at the southern tip of the island. MCB was like the Two-four tombs, only fifty times larger and totally packed. After de cades
of high-volume justice, the smell of humanity had become institutionalized. It was a strong and diverse mix of body odors
that, combined, smelled like a thousand pairs of dirty socks. We spent four hours breathing this air, shuttling around the
facility, and standing in lines with other cops and their perps.

After lodging my prisoners, I went back to the Nineteenth to change into street clothes and fill out an overtime slip. I presented
the slip to the desk sergeant on my way out the door.

“
Fourteen hours and seven minutes?
” he said. He handed back the slip and told me, “I can’t sign that. Give it to your sergeant.”

It was no big deal for me to get my boss’s signature next week, but I really wished the desk sergeant would’ve just taken
the overtime slip. The slip was like a three-hundred-dollar check, and I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want to have to
keep track of it, either, after all my sorting and counting and recounting and reporting and submitting and calling and printing
and faxing and copying and filing. After my three months with the A-squad—in which I’d arrested or assisted in arresting someone
on an almost daily basis—my mind was fried, kaput. I put the OT slip in my front pocket and hoped I’d remember it before I
did my laundry.

PART THREE

COLLAR FATIGUE

CHAPTER 19

R
ETURNING HOME FROM THE ARREST late Saturday afternoon, I fell facedown into bed and went to sleep with all of my clothes
on. I woke up around midnight with my pillow soaked through with sweat. Feeling a chill, I got up to close the window, then
collapsed back onto my couch. The words
cold
and
sweat
crossed my mind before I nodded off to sleep again, but I was too tired to connect the dots.

Monday afternoon, I got an unexpected phone call from a Sergeant Ailey of the NYPD Harbor Unit. I’d put in my application
for the scuba team just the week before, and I was surprised to hear back so quickly. They’d just been waiting for someone
like me to come along! I thought. No, the sergeant said; he’d been deluged with applications.

“Every cop and his brother are trying scuba on vacation these days,” he told me, “and they all come back thinking they’re
frogmen. But I see here that you’re a divemaster?”

“That’s right,” I said. “A dive
master
.”

“How about patrol? You a hard worker?”

“I collar all the time. That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

“It’s part of it. How’s your sick record?”

“Spotless.”

“You sure about that? I got the medical division on my speed dial.”

“Absolutely.”

“In that case, consider yourself notified. I’ll call your sergeant today.”

“You’re kidding!” I said. “That’s great! When can I start?”

The sergeant cleared his throat and said, “Uh, you’re notified for the physical endurance test.”

“I see.”

“Hey, it’s a big deal just to be invited. And you got a whole month to get ready for it.”

I was almost afraid to ask, “What are the requirements for this physical test?”

“It’s a competition, so the only requirement is that you beat everyone else.”

I swallowed hard. “How many people are in the running?”

“About twenty guys.”

“For how many slots?”

“Actually, there are no slots yet. The winner goes on a waiting list for when the next guy quits Harbor. We do this every
couple years.”

“What are the events?”

“A mile run, a five-hundred-meter swim, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts, treading water, and there’s an underwater
mental-stress test in full scuba for whoever doesn’t drop out. It’s basically the same elimination process that the Navy Seals
use, but we bang it all out in one day.”

Beating twenty police officers in an endurance test of Olympic proportions wouldn’t be easy. Contrary to popular wisdom, my
coworkers were not a bunch of doughnut-gobbling fatties. Sure, there were some honest-to-God porkers on the force, but for
every one of them, I met two who looked like Mr. Universe. The NYPD employed thousands of former military members and reservists,
and I was almost sure to meet a few of them vying for a spot on the Harbor Unit.

I had a very short time to get into the best shape of my life. It seemed within reach, since only six months ago I’d run rings
around my academy classmates in gym class. I’d put on about ten pounds since then, and my eating habits had fallen off, but
I could turn back the clock. I’d done it many times before, so I decided to start right away with a quick run before work.
I rummaged through my closet and found my old academy gym shoes: regulation all-white with reflective trim. I laced them up
and headed out the door.

My vigorous half-hour run around the West Village ended with a slow, euphoric march up the stairs to my apartment. It was
my first decent workout in ages, and it gave me an intense runner’s high. My head and body tingled all the way into the bathroom,
where I took a ten-minute cold shower to prolong the buzz. Toweling off and stepping into drier air, I could feel my skin
breathing. Then, walking through my room, I saw my bicycle. It was stuffed in my doorway and looking sad and neglected, its
tires low on air and its handlebars askew. How long had it been since I’d ridden it? It was too late for a ride before work,
but what if I rode it
to
work? Why not? Well, work was ninety blocks away, but I could cover that easily in no time. It wasn’t raining outside, so
I didn’t see any reason not to.

Still glowing from the ride, I walked into the Nineteenth Precinct muster room and saw Sergeant Watts sitting at the bosses’
table at the front of the room with his longtime buddy Sergeant Vinny Matrice. They both had pie-eating grins on their faces
when I appeared at the door.

“Hey, look, it’s Sponge Bacon,” said Watts.

Sergeant Matrice asked me, “Who’s your hook in Harbor?”

I said, “I don’t know anyone. I just put in an application.”

“Bullshit,” said Sergeant Matrice. “That’s a major hook. Come on, spill it.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Vin,” Sergeant Watts said, leaning back in his chair and pointing at me like I was a new motorcycle
in his driveway. “This kid doesn’t need a hook. He’s a worker.”

I heard a few cops laughing out on the floor, making me feel very slimy for getting praise from the boss.

Sergeant Matrice tried to rescue the embarrassing moment. “What’s wrong with you, Bacon? Why do you wanna work and make everyone
else look bad? It’s not worth it. Join Harbor and make the job work for you. Just get me in there, all right? I know how to
swim.”

Sergeant Watts wouldn’t let it go. “Check this out,” he said to Sergeant Matrice. “Last Friday, thirty minutes before end
of tour, Bacon pulled this guy over for having an air freshener on his mirror, you know the little tree thing?”

“The fuck?” said Sergeant Matrice, giving me an angry look. “I have one of those in my car.”

Sergeant Watts doubled over in laughter. “No, no! That’s not the good part. The guy popped a warrant, and we found all this
crack and other shit in the backseat. He had a passenger, too, so it was a double felony. Kid’s right out of the academy making
double felony collars.”

“You’re demented, Bacon. De-mented,” said Sergeant Matrice.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Sergeant Watts said, wiping a tear out of his eye. He started to talk again, but then he waved me toward
him. I huddled around his corner of the table and said, “What?”

The sergeant seemed to notice something once I got closer. “You okay, kid?” he said with a worried look.

“I’m fine.”

“You got little drops of sweat all over your face.”

“I do?” I said, patting my forehead and feeling the moisture. “Oh, right. I just rode my bike in.”

The sergeant said, “From the subway?”

“From Fourteenth Street.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It’s easy. At top speed, I can get here in twenty minutes.”

“Damn, maybe Vin is right. Anyway, I gotta tell you something, and don’t take it the wrong way, you understand?”

I nodded.

“No more five-elevens from you,” the sergeant said.

“Why not?” I said.

“Just, according to the lieu, all right?”

“Okay, but why?”

“It doesn’t look good when you make all the same kinds of collars. Makes you seem like you got an angle.”

I didn’t think I had an angle so much as a curve, a gentle curve. An easy way to what I wanted. I understood what the sergeant
meant, but I was sad that a good thing was coming to an end. “We do a lot of car stops,” I said. “If people pop, they pop.”

“They only pop if you run their licenses,” said the sergeant. “There are other ways of doing car stops, as I have tried to
show you many times.”

“All right,” I said, walking away from the bosses’ table.

“And wait, Bacon. One last thing,” he said, flipping through his papers and handing me a departmental form marked, APPLICATION
FOR NOTICE OF COMMENDATION.

“What’s this?” I said, noticing there were two copies.

“For your five-elevens,” the sergeant said. “You got six in a month. That’s two commendations.”

“They’re giving me medals for something I’m forbidden from doing?”

“You don’t want ’em?” said the sergeant, making like he was going to rip the applications in half.

“No, no, I’ll take them,” I said.

After roll call, I fetched our big blue van and pulled up in front of the Nineteenth station house. Sergeant Watts, Witherspoon,
and Randall were waiting for me curbside. Witherspoon walked around the front of the van, as though he was planning to drive.
Curious, I looked over at the sergeant, who had just hopped into the shotgun seat beside me.

“Get in back,” he told me. “Witherspoon’s driving.”

Because no one else had ever wanted to drive, I’d been behind the wheel every night since the beginning of MSU. “What’s going
on?” I said.

The sergeant pointed at the Israeli laptop and said, “We’re going to the Three-four tonight, and I don’t want you anywhere
near this thing.”

Witherspoon drove us to Thirty-fourth Precinct in Washington Heights, Sergeant Watts’s favorite place to do car stops. The
Three-four was home to the George Washington Bridge, the only roadway connecting the island of Manhattan to the rest of the
United States for miles in either direction. As such, the bridge served as a funnel for drugs, making the precinct a major
distribution point for two of the city’s most impoverished areas, Harlem and the South Bronx. Based on crime statistics, nearly
every block in the neighborhood was considered a “drug-prone location.”

This was why Sergeant Watts liked it. In a known drug location, busting people was easier, because the drug-prone status gave
us legal justification to take action on a lower standard of proof. In an ordinary neighborhood, a person standing on a stoop
was just standing on a stoop; in a place like the Three-four, we could say the person was “demonstrating behavior indicative
of acting as a lookout.” This meant we could stop people, using force if needed, and pat down the outside of their clothing
for weapons. The standard of proof required for us to get this far with a suspect was called reasonable suspicion.

According to the Fourth Amendment, if we wanted to take an encounter any further, we had to establish probable cause. Defining
this fuzzy term isn’t as important as knowing that it’s the exact same standard for making an arrest. In practical terms,
this means that if a police officer hasn’t already put you in handcuffs, he doesn’t have enough proof to search you or your
belongings—no matter what he says to convince you otherwise. Any items in plain view are fair game, but if it’s in your pockets
or concealed by you in any way, it’s your choice whether the cops have a look or not.

By setting the same standard of proof for searches and arrests, the amendment, written in 1789, remains the most significant
safeguard of our privacy. It’s packed with implications and benefits, a bonanza of civil rights wrapped up in a neat package
and tucked safely into the Bill of Rights. The problem was, and probably always will be: Almost no one really knows this law,
much less understands it. It was news to me when I learned about it at the police academy, so I could understand why our suspects
were so gullible.

For all the power vested in the Fourth Amendment, it was very easy to ignore. With one simple question—“You mind if I take
a look?”—we could go from reasonable suspicion to finding evidence of a crime. This question could be surprisingly disarming,
but in order for it to work on the street and hold up in court later, it had to be delivered with skill and precision. Expert
timing was required, and it needed to sound as offhand as possible—the way your doctor might ask whether you smoked cigarettes.

Sergeant Watts demonstrated a Ph.D.-level knowledge of the guilty conscience after doing thousands of car stops with the NYPD
Auto Crime Unit. Witherspoon and Randall, greenhorns in comparison, let him do all the talking whenever a car stop looked
as though it might lead to bigger things. So when Witherspoon and Randall pulled over one car early that night and found something
suspicious, they walked back to the van and let the sergeant know right away.

“Smells like weed, boss,” said Witherspoon. “You wanna toss the car?”

“That depends,” the sergeant replied. “You lookin’?”

Witherspoon glanced at his watch and said, “I better not. I’ve got plans later.”

The sergeant looked at Randall and said, “How about you?”

“Not if it’s gonna turn into a felony,” Randall said. Since felony collars required court appearances during regular business
hours—they could not be taken in overtime because we already had weekends off—Randall never bothered with them. For financial
reasons, he was strictly a misdemeanor man.

The sergeant shook his head at Randall, then turned to me and said, “I know you’re not a hairbag yet. So you want it?”

“I don’t know, boss,” I said.

“You gotta make real collars now,” the sergeant reminded me. “Here’s a chance to start.”

When Sergeant Watts and I walked up to the Mustang, I took the passenger side to leave him in control of the stop. Left to
my own devices, I would have done a quick visual search of the cabin and probably found nothing. A halfway intelligent driver,
even if he was stoned, could have easily hidden or discarded his stuff by now. Looking any deeper would require the sergeant’s
talents, a combination of soft-core brutality and hard-core seduction.

The sergeant approached the driver with a flashlight in his hand and pointed it in the man’s eyes. I couldn’t see the driver’s
expression from my side of vehicle, but I noticed he was clutching the steering wheel with both hands like he was still in
motion.

“Wuh-what’s all this about, officer?” the driver asked Sgt. Watts.

“Probably nothing, sir,” the sergeant said. “If I could just get you to step outside the vehicle, I can turn off my light.”

The driver stared back into the sergeant’s beam and said, “Oh, okay. Yeah, that would be good. Thank you, officer.”

“No problem,” Sergeant Watts said from behind the light. He didn’t move a muscle until the man opened the door.

As the driver stepped out, I got a better look at him. He was in his early twenties, with a gold necklace and perfectly styled
hair. He looked as if he was ready for a night on the town. The sergeant complimented his outfit, then walked him over to
the curb to have a “private discussion.”