The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (29 page)

Indeed, when I sought the results of the probe later that summer, the NYPD rejected my Freedom of Information request. When I appealed, that request was also rejected. The NYPD was basically daring me to file suit.

The thing is, the report was simply about the operations of a governmental agency. It would not contain particularly sensitive material, and anything that was confidential could have been redacted. What the NYPD was doing in withholding the report was a clear distortion of the state’s public records law. As a result, the report did not reach the public for another 18 months, leaving questions about Schoolcraft’s credibility unanswered.

Then, three weeks after QAD sent the report to police headquarters, Kelly sent a signal about its contents. Kelly likely was also reacting to the pressure from Vann and other black politicians and clergy. Just before the start of the July Fourth weekend, he ordered Mauriello removed from command of the 81st Precinct and transferred to Bronx transit as an executive officer. Browne, Kelly’s spokesman, called the transfer “routine.”

Mauriello found out in a call from the chief of patrol, who told him he had been doing a good job in the 81st Precinct. As he later testified in an unrelated trial, Hall portrayed the move as a promotion, but Mauriello didn’t feel that way.

“I considered it a transfer,” Mauriello testified, going on to defend his record in the precinct, including the material on the Schoolcraft tapes.

“We want activity,” he testified. “So it’s not about numbers. It’s about the officer working. If there is a crime happening, I expect him to make an arrest. There was no pressure. It was just ‘do your job’.”

From Mauriello’s point of view, a lot of the statements on the tapes were legitimate efforts by supervisors to motivate cops to correct crime conditions in the precinct.

He talked about the challenge of covering the rougher spots in the precinct with fewer officers by putting footposts in those areas. “We had three very violent buildings that were at war with each other, and this goes back for years and years like the Hatfields and McCoys,” he said. “Of course, if they observe a crime I expect, you know, if you have probable cause, arrest somebody. If they observe a quality of life infraction, I want the condition corrected. If there is reasonable suspicion to stop somebody, I expect someone to be stopped. That’s their job.

“The people in the community loved it. They complimented my officers out there. And also it kept the criminals from committing crimes.”

Two weeks after the transfer, in a memo to the First Deputy Commissioner, QAD Deputy Chief Cronin recommended disciplinary action against Mauriello, two sergeants, and two police officers for improper crime reporting. However, this recommendation, too, stayed secret.

In the confidential memo, Cronin wrote that her investigators had confirmed that during Mauriello’s tenure, “complaint reports for index crimes are being improperly downgraded, and not being entered into Omniform [the NYPD’s complaint tracking system].”

Cronin also charged that Sergeant Matthew Ferrigno failed to take an assault and attempted robbery complaint on July 16, 2009. Further, she alleged that Sergeant Timothy Rodgers had failed to make sure a robbery report had been taken on October 17, 2009. She also charged that Officer Fernando Vasco and Officer Jason Surillo had failed to take that complaint and didn’t record it in their memo books. She recommended lower-level discipline for the two sergeants and the two officers. She made no recommendation in Mauriello’s case. In other words, Cronin did not seek to limit the potential case against Mauriello. That would come later from another unit. QAD, at least, had done its job.

On July 30, Sergeant Raymond Stukes—one of Schoolcraft’s main critics in the precinct—and Officer Hector Tirado were charged criminally with making a false arrest as part of an IAB sting. The charges would be eventually dismissed.

CHAPTER 13

THE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS DIGRESSION

I
n late May 2010, I received an email from a retired detective living in Florida named Harold Hernandez. Hernandez was 43 years old and had retired in 2007 after more than 20 years as a cop. In 2006, he was promoted to detective first grade, the highest and most exalted rank in the brotherhood of investigators. Typically, in the whole police department, at any given moment, there are fewer than 200 detectives first grade among more than 30,000 officers. Allowing for a few political promotions, the majority were merit based. Hernandez had made more than 400 arrests in his 20-year career and assisted in many others, and he earned 19 excellent police duty awards, four meritorious police duty awards, and three commendations. In other words, one could argue about whether Schoolcraft had been a good cop, but Hernandez had undisputedly been a very good cop. No one would say otherwise. And he had spent most of his career in drug- and violence-ridden parts of upper Manhattan, the same neighborhood where Adhyl Polanco was raised all those years ago. It was not a soft assignment.

Hernandez sent me an email, having read the
Voice
articles. He was moved by some force to reach out to me. Such moments were rare in the
scheme of things. The NYPD was many things, maddeningly bureaucratic, bad, good, poor, excellent, indifferent, committed, appalling, heroic, brave, but one thing it inspired was a hard, enduring loyalty. Even when a man was not loyal to his commissioner or commander, he would be loyal to the men and women he worked alongside. Even when he was not loyal to them, he would be loyal to his own accomplishments, to the perception his family and friends had of him. Even if a cop had left on bad terms, he would often refuse to discuss a thing, if discussing that thing would bring dishonor to the people with whom he served.

Moreover, the diaspora of the NYPD was vast, nationwide, and they were a sort of chorus that would in the quiet moments, over drinks, in small groups, on the fishing line, on the phone, over the Internet, either excoriate or exalt for sins or virtues real or imagined. In short, it took a lot for retired Detective First Grade Harold Hernandez to write the email, to talk with me, to agree to speak for the record. It was a big reach. He had never been quoted in any media in his entire distinguished career. And that, in this world of over-sharing and lack of loyalty, screamed integrity and honor. On the other hand, there was a powerful force pushing Hernandez to speak—his conscience, his mission to correct what he saw as misdeeds, a final attempt at correcting a record that had been buried for so many years. Sometimes a man can’t quite put something to rest until he has dealt with it. Closure is like that. Even when the waves have passed over a stretch of sand so many times that it is obscured, there is still evidence of its passing, and there in that passing is where integrity sits.

And the story told tells when he came in from the warm was this:

In 2002, a predator was stalking and attacking women in a leafy section of upper Manhattan, along Riverside Boulevard, known more for its stately pre-war apartment buildings than its crime rate.

The man was named Daryl Thomas. He was 32 years old. He worked in a law firm, managing a computer system. He had a wife and a daughter. And he lived in the same neighborhood.

He began trolling the darkened streets of his neighborhood sometime in August 2002. He would follow women—he preferred white or Asian women whom he thought would be more reluctant to fight back—home from the subway and accosted them at the door of their buildings. He would
show a knife from behind and try to force them into the building. If they screamed or resisted, he fled.

His victims included a light-skinned Hispanic woman, a waitress in a cop bar down the street. A German tourist. A Japanese woman. A musician, who long after she had recovered told a reporter that Thomas accosted her as she entered her apartment. He followed her into the building and into an elevator to her floor. He grabbed her and put the knife to her throat. She screamed and struggled. They both fell to the floor. He snatched her purse and fled. She chased him down and grabbed the purse. He punched her in the face. She went down but kept a solid grip on the purse. He then fled for good. She suffered a bruised face and a cut on her throat.

“He was trying to get me into my apartment,” she later said. “This turned my life upside down for more than a year. I had panic attacks. I didn’t sleep. There were days I couldn’t leave my apartment.”

Then, at 4 a.m., on November 3, 2002, a woman heard noises in the hallway of her building. Through her peephole, she saw a man pushing a woman into an apartment. She immediately dialed 911.

Officers Luke Sullivan and Patrick Tanner kicked the door in and found Thomas hiding in a closet. The things he had with him: a knife in his pocket, a backpack containing two pairs of women’s panties, and a length of rope. She was tied to a chair. She had been beaten. The equipment fairly shouted that Thomas had planned the assault; this wasn’t a drunken, spur-of-the-moment attack, and he intended to keep her there all night.

Thomas was left in a holding cell overnight and then brought to an interview room for what police call a “debriefing,” which is really an interrogation. Hernandez arrived with a cup of coffee and entered the room. At that moment, Hernandez knew only about the arrest on the previous night. Before he started in on Thomas, he bought him breakfast—an egg sandwich. Court records tell us that Thomas, for some reason, waived his Miranda rights and never asked for a lawyer.

And the conversation began. Hernandez recalled that Thomas didn’t need a lot of prodding. He launched into a story about one particular assault but not the one from the night before.

“Listen, you’ve done this in the past, haven’t you?” Hernandez asked.

“Yeah,” Thomas replied.

“How many times?”

“I don’t know. . . . Seven or eight times.”

“Where did these incidents take place?”

Thomas replied, “Pretty much in this area,” referring to the Fort Washington section of Washington Heights.

Hernandez paused the conversation there and left the room. He was puzzled. If there was a sexual predator working the neighborhood, the 33rd Precinct Detective Squad should have heard about it. There should have been added patrols. The suspect’s description should have been put out at roll calls. And yet there was none of that. He searched but could not find a record of any recent prior attacks.

There was one report, a sexual assault and robbery from September 23. Hernandez knew about that one because he had done the report himself, classified it as a robbery and attempted rape, and sent it on to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit for investigation. Maybe Thomas was responsible for that one. But his next thought was worse: Where were the others?

He then thought, “Maybe Special Victims forgot to notify the precinct that they have a pattern.” He asked and learned that no, there was only the one case. There was no indication of a what police call a pattern, a series of crimes fitting similar facts.

The declaration of a pattern would have triggered special attention from the police: patrol, detectives, plainclothes anti-crime unit officers, the sex crimes unit, and the robbery unit would all be on alert looking for a man fitting the description of the attacker. Since Thomas lived in the neighborhood, it would have been more likely that he would have been caught had a pattern been declared.

And then Hernandez figured out the problem. “It dawned on me that they [the precinct bosses] are fudging numbers and misclassifying cases,” he told a reporter years later. “So I start looking.”

He went back into the interview room and asked Thomas for the dates, times, and locations of the other attacks. He didn’t remember them offhand, but he said he could pick them out from the street. So Hernandez and Detective Barry Felder drove him through the neighborhood and had him point out the crime scenes. He pointed to 647 West 172nd Street, 779 Riverside Drive, 156–08 Riverside Drive, 560 West 170th Street, 620 West
171st Street, and two others. Hernandez returned to the station house and paged through every complaint report for the previous four months and finally unraveled the mystery.

Precinct patrol bosses had classified the prior incidents as criminal trespassing, which was a misdemeanor, except for one case, which was classified as criminal possession of a weapon. Hernandez read the actual “narrative,” or what the crime victim said had happened, and he saw the cases should have been classified, at a minimum, as first-degree burglary.

“The minute he grabs you in the hallway armed, that makes it a burglary in the first degree,” he later said. “They used every non-felony you could think of” to classify the cases. “If you read the narrative, they are describing some kind of sexual assault or attempt. He came up behind them, grabbed them, placed the knife to the neck, or displayed it. He would demand money or their cell phones. If they didn’t put up resistance, he was either going to fondle them or commit some other kind of sex crime to them.”

But supervisors had written the reports to downplay the seriousness of the crimes. “They look to eliminate certain elements in the narrative. You change one or two words, and you can make a felony into a misdemeanor.”

Back in the interview room with Thomas, Hernandez talked more. He asked him, “Weren’t you ever afraid that you would get caught in any of these locations?”

“Nah, I looked around, I never saw any cops,” Thomas said, adding that with each new assault, his brazenness and level of violence increased.

Within a week after Hernandez was able to put Thomas’s crimes together, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office charged the same incidents that had been classified as misdemeanors as serious felonies: first-degree robbery, burglary, sexual assault, and attempted rape. A Manhattan grand jury indicted Thomas in five of the assaults, charging him with numerous counts of first-degree attempted rape, robbery, sexual abuse, and burglary. But even as the evidence mounted, Thomas rejected plea deals that would have jailed him for 20 to 30 years. He went to trial in November 2003, testifying that he had been in a kind of “dream state” during his crime spree. He was convicted of all 18 counts in the indictment and sentenced in February 2004 to 50 years in a state prison in Romulus, New York. His earliest release date is 2045. He will be 75 years old.