The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (3 page)

“Sometimes, the only reason I stayed was for the kids,” he said. “My friends were saying different things. Stay for the kids or leave, it’s better for the kids.”

“But I loved her and she loved me. She was a good mother, honest, hardworking. Money did not motivate her. She was a good person. She was talented and smart. She just had a real problem with saying she was wrong.”

Larry chuckled at that point, years later, wistfully. “The thing is, 98 percent of the time, she was right.”

There were days when Larry would go stay at a friend’s house just so he and Suzanne could have some time to cool off. “And then before long, I’m calling her or she’s calling me and saying it’s time to come home,” Larry said. “She was always there for me.”

Against this broad family backdrop, somewhere around puberty, Adrian’s personality underwent a change. While his sister, Mystica, was outgoing (a “social butterfly”), Adrian drew inward. He spent a lot of time by himself.

“He was much more outgoing as a kid, but after puberty, he kept his own counsel,” Larry said. “He wasn’t that impressed with the people around him. You gotta understand that the kids in his neighborhood had money and nice cars. They ran pretty fast. He didn’t drink or smoke. Didn’t see the need for it. He just didn’t fit the group.”

“He worked and he went to school, that’s what he did,” Larry went on. “No social life. No serious girlfriends. If he wasn’t working, I would drop him at the movies or at a mall. I would take him to work if I was working a special function. He liked movies and books, and he played video games a little bit. He always had money, and he liked to spend it. He outfitted his room with a nice stereo, television, high-end toy models. He would buy the models, and have a professional put them together and paint them so they looked really good.”

Why Adrian underwent this personality change in his teenage years is something of a mystery. It could have had to do with the wages of puberty. It could have been a latent streak of independence and self-involvement that had not yet bloomed or solitary interests that presented themselves. It also could have been the family’s money troubles and the arguments between his parents. It could have been the experience of dealing with his mom’s health troubles. Or it could have been a stew of all of these things. But these were
experiences that would inform the person he later became and provide a clue as to why he was able to do what he did.

Adrian graduated from Martin in 1993, a year that was very difficult for the family. On a single day, Larry was suspended indefinitely without pay from the Marshal’s service, sparking litigation that went on for years, and Suzanne decided to quit her job. The banking industry was going through a series of collapses and mergers. Suzanne had worked for First City Bancorp for many years. Texas Commerce Bank swallowed the company and began laying people off and mistreating the old employees. Suzanne didn’t like what she was seeing and couldn’t stomach it anymore, Larry said. “We went from having decent jobs to having no jobs in one day,” he recalled.

Larry’s legal battles grew out of his union activism. Working for the University Park Police Department during the 1980s, he recalled, he ran afoul of the chief for ticketing an influential schools administrator. That led to an indefinite suspension in 1984, which led to a lawsuit and an eventual $80,000 settlement.

In 1987, he went to work for the Fort Worth Marshalls office, serving warrants. He also shut down strip clubs violating a law that women had to wear pasties over their breasts. Meanwhile, he and a fellow officer unionized the force—which, he says, got him labeled a troublemaker.

Eventually, as he tells it, he was suspended indefinitely without pay in 1993. Trying to gather evidence of retaliation, he secretly recorded a city official telling him the suspension was arbitrary, but he never ended up using the recording.

He sued the city in 1995 and worked as a limo and shuttle driver to support the family. His claim was finally rejected on appeal in 2001 by Texas’s high court.

Ironically, many years later, his son would also be indefinitely suspended from a police department and would file a lawsuit that would take years to resolve, but for completely different reasons.

Whether what was happening at home factored in, or whether it seemed like a good idea at the time, in August 1993, a couple of months after graduating from high school, Schoolcraft joined the U.S. Navy while many
of his future fellow police officers were still steaming down the Long Island Expressway, drinking at Jones Beach, or ogling the girls in Coney Island.

Never attracted to glamour, Schoolcraft decided to become a Navy corpsman, doing work similar to that of a paramedic. He graduated from a special school in Michigan and was then assigned to the USS
Blue Ridge
, the command ship for the U.S. Seventh Fleet, based in Japan. He labored on the ship treating the kinds of injuries that come with working long hours in a giant casing of thick steel and stress—shattered bones, broken backs, gouged eyes, concussions, wide-open gashes.

Schoolcraft spent four years in the Navy. He was honorably discharged in July 1997 and returned home with two medals: the National Defense Service Medal and the Good Conduct Medal. By then, his parents had moved back to Johnstown, New York. “Sue wasn’t feeling well, and money was tight, she was looking for an escape and she thought she would find relief at home,” Larry said. “I really didn’t want to go back, but we were a team, and would be a team to the death.”

Then 22 years old, Schoolcraft enrolled in Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown and, according to his father, actually did quite well, well enough to get accepted to the University of Texas (UT), the large state school in Austin. Larry had a hand in this move, enlisting a friend who was in the UT law school to help Adrian through the application process.

Adrian started at the school in January 1999 and took a part-time job at Walmart. He had a car, a decent apartment, and a mountain bike he used to get to class. Larry was still consumed with his lawsuit against the city of Fort Worth and at the time was flying back and forth between Johnston and Austin every three months or so. He would stay with Adrian and work for an air conditioner repair company.

The University of  Texas was a pretty good school, and Adrian had worked hard to get there. Strangely, despite the opportunity, despite his academic ability, he dropped out after just one semester.

“He was miserable I guess,” Larry said, still dismayed at the result years later. “I don’t know what happened. I thought it was absurd to have an opportunity like that and piss it away. I have no idea why that did not work.”

These may be the words of a father, but it is an interesting observation: On the threshold of something better, Schoolcraft decided to walk away.

After leaving UT, Adrian took a full-time job at Walmart in the electronics department, which sold digital recorders, among other things, and then left after a while to work at Motorola.

There, working for the technology giant, he assembled microprocessors in a secure, sanitized room. He worked 12-hour shifts, dressed in a white jumpsuit and mask in order to prevent contaminating particles from entering the microchips. The work seemed to suit his solitary nature, and he remained there for about two years.

“It was a good job, good money, benefits, but not a very friendly working environment,” Larry said. He added, with another chuckle, “No interaction. I’m sure that’s why he did it well.”

In 2001, Adrian left Motorola during a round of cutbacks and returned once again to Johnstown. His mother’s health had worsened. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent new rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. She also had to undergo kidney dialysis on a regular basis. Adrian and his parents lived together in the house where Larry had grown up. Larry’s parents had long retired and were living in Florida, and the house needed upkeep and caretaking. So did Suzanne. Adrian and Larry drove her to her appointments with specialists in Albany and elsewhere over and over again.

“It was 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” Larry said. “Her family wasn’t helping, and my parents were in Florida most of the time.”

Then, on September 11, 2001, two jet airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, killing 2,753 people. Twenty-three of those killed were New York City police officers. At some point in those first months, when the media was thick with images of smoldering fires and cops and firefighters pulling 12-hour shifts in the rubble looking for body parts, Suzanne saw a television ad for the NYPD—recruiters were going to visit the state university at Albany. She had an idea. She thought Adrian should become a New York City police officer. He would make a decent candidate. He had the navy experience, the medical corpsman training, and nearly two years of college.

At first Adrian declined on the spot. He didn’t really want to go to New York City—too big, too loud. He had no interest in becoming a police officer. He was still trying to figure out who he wanted to be. His mother persisted.

“Adrian didn’t seek out this thing at all; the NYPD might as well have been Mars,” Larry said. “She could see some resistance, so she says, let’s go to Albany, we’ll go to Cinnabon, we’ll go to Chili’s, we’ll go to a movie, and you’ll take the police academy test. We’ll make a day of it. For Adrian, it had nothing to do with 9/11 either. It was really about a son going along with or placating his sick mother’s wishes.”

Adrian P. Schoolcraft finally relented, spent the day with his mother, and took the academy test. A few weeks later, the results came back. Suzanne called the recruiter, and he told her to read the number on the envelope. “He scored in the very top of the class; he’ll be hired,” the recruiter told her.

Several months later on July 1, 2002, Schoolcraft signed the NYPD oath, which said in part, “I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of police officer . . . according to the best of my ability.” There he was, standing in those ranks in the academy gym. He would enter a police department that, in the previous ten years, had gone through revolutionary changes that altered the city’s entire underlying law enforcement strategy, and eventually the law enforcement strategy of many police departments around the country.

CHAPTER 2

“THE PROFIT I WANTED TO DELIVER”

In the vast lore of the NYPD, the story goes, CompStat began in crayon.

In 1990, when Adrian Schoolcraft started high school in Texas, the number of New Yorkers annually shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and otherwise dispatched with bad intent in a single year climbed above 2,000. Crime was up in every category, and few people thought it could be brought down. A pudgy transit police lieutenant named Jack Maple, frustrated with the spiraling crime rate, came up with an idea far enough outside the box to be considered, by police standards, radical.

On the walls of his modest apartment, Maple—who affected a homburg, a bow tie, and Allen Edmonds Spectator shoes and spent his evenings in high-toned places like Elaine’s and the Oak Room at the Plaza—taped up a 55-foot-long diagram of every station in the city’s sprawling subway system. Using crayons of various colors, he placed a dot representing each solved and unsolved major crime at the station where it took place.

“I called them the Charts of the Future,” Maple told interviewer Raymond Dussault in 1999. “The beauty of the mapping is that it poses the question, ‘Why?’ What are the underlying causes of why there is a certain cluster of crime in a particular place? By looking at this, you can figure out where you need to be and when.”

In that initial phase, with his rudimentary map, Maple was able to spot, for example, the stations with the highest number of assaults. He could then review the actual complaints and look for trends or commonalities in those cases. Were there a lot of homeless people in the station? If so, that required more homeless outreach officers. Did the assaults take place after school? Then the city needed more cops in those stations during the after-school hours. Were folks drinking in the station? That should lead to more summonses for open containers. Rather than waiting for crime to happen, cops would now come up with ways to stop it from happening in the first place. The truly big idea here was that it moved commanders from reacting to crime to being “proactive.”

Maple’s Charts of the Future showed immediate results. Back then, the NYPD and the Transit Police were two separate agencies. Maple’s boss, Transit Police Commissioner William Bratton, recognized the value of those charts.

Meanwhile, with the city’s murder rate soaring, the mayor at the time, David Dinkins, and his police commissioners—first, Lee Brown, and later, Raymond Kelly—were employing their own strategy, known as “community policing.”

Under this strategy, specially trained police officers were put on foot patrol in troubled neighborhoods, the idea being that it was easier to interact with the community on foot than in patrol cars. Residents, the theory went, would then be more willing to talk to police about trouble in the neighborhood. The strategy required money, and for that Dinkins, Brown, and Kelly went to President Clinton and secured hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to hire thousands more police officers. Eventually, the money would swell the NYPD’s ranks to more than 40,000 officers, but a lot of it wouldn’t arrive in time to benefit Dinkins.

Even though crime began to drop in the last year of Dinkins’s term, he could not overcome the tabloid hammering over the crime rate. “Dave, Do Something,” one famous headline demanded. In a vastly Democratic city, he lost his re-election bid to a Republican, former federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, in a rematch of the 1989 mayoral race. Giuliani beat Dinkins in that racially polarized race by almost the same narrow margin that he lost to Dinkins in that earlier election. The crime rate, it seemed, had cost Dinkins
his job, and Giuliani would do everything in his power to make the public forget his predecessor’s accomplishments.

Schoolcraft was most of the way through his senior year in an Arlington high school when Giuliani snubbed Dinkins’s commissioner, Ray Kelly, and selected Maple’s old boss, William Bratton, who had left the transit police to run the police department in Boston, as his first NYPD commissioner.