The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (39 page)

Timoney was my second major appointment, after Dave Scott, and word of it jolted the department. He was passing over sixteen of his bosses and jumping from a one-star to a four-star chief. He would be the youngest chief of department in NYPD history. It was a huge roll of the dice on a guy I'd met twice for a total of maybe forty-five minutes, but he had the highest recommendations, and once I could understand what he was saying, it turned out he made a lot of sense. Dave Scott was also very supportive and felt they could work well together.

We then focused on the rest of the department. It quickly became clear that in order to make the necessary policy changes, we would have to take out a large part of the department's senior leadership. The super chiefs were good people and good cops who had been on the job an average of thirty-five to forty years each. They were talented, but they were talented for another style of policing. Some of them were tired and wedded to the status quo. We were going to be moving fast, our goals were different from theirs, and it seemed some of them simply did not have the flexibility to change such long-standing status quo thinking on such short notice. I was going to demand results, and they had already told me, in the interviews with Linder, that they didn't think the job could be done.

Ray Kelly had tried to make significant changes in the operational practices of the department but had left the old guard at the top in place. Timoney had often joked with him, “Everybody's dragging their feet. What you've got to do is lob a grenade on the thirteenth floor,” where most of the super chiefs were housed. But there was a tough mayoral election coming up, and maybe Kelly's hands were tied. Along with the corruption problems being investigated by the Mollen Commission, it eventually cost him his reappointment.

It was very easy for Timoney to give free advice to Kelly. But many
of the super chiefs were Timoney's friends, and now he had to give me his recommendations on who we should move on. He stayed up two nights, anguishing. Finally, he made his decision: Many of them would have to go.

In the end, I chose Louis Anemone as chief of patrol, the person in charge of the day-to-day operations of the precincts. Anemone was a cop's cop. In his mid-forties, of average build, he exuded enthusiasm and confidence. After the Crown Heights riots of 1991, Kelly had appointed him disorder-control commander, and he put together a response mechanism for any riot or major disturbance that might happen in New York. Under his direction, the department routinely began to train all of its personnel to respond rapidly to any circumstances that might arise anywhere in the city. Nobody wanted another Crown Heights. My instructions to him were simple; in the same way he had focused on preventing riots and disorder, I needed him to prepare the department to reduce crime and fear.

I decided to retain Joe Borrelli, alone among the super chiefs, as chief of detectives and promoted Manhattan South Borough Chief Charlie Reuther to chief of the Organized Crime Control Bureau. I left Walter Mack in charge of the Internal Affairs Bureau.

I didn't think much of it at the time, but Giuliani did not seek a lot of input into my selections. He had said the police department needed major change, and I assumed he would get kudos, by extension, for bringing in a commissioner who was willing to make those changes. He did not get involved in the specifics; it was pretty much my show to run.

The only appointment I wanted his acquiescence for was deputy commissioner for public information (DCPI). City Hall was going to leave the decision up to me, but I insisted that they be involved. I didn't want them complaining later. The DCPI handles breaking news, manages all requests for interviews and information, and is intimately involved in the operational, administrative, and strategic decision making of the NYPD. The DCPI was our chief liaison with City Hall and needed to work intimately with the mayor's office to coordinate the constant contact between us, them, the press, and the Hall's own press people. I was leaning toward Al O'Leary, who had done such a fine job at transit. I was depending on using the press to get our message out, and I wanted that message delivered fully and with enthusiasm; I wanted someone the press would not feel was going to deceive them. Al was widely respected and I had great faith in his ability to do the job.

The Hall was less comfortable with O'Leary than with John Miller, a thirtysomething on-air investigative reporter for WNBC-TV who had done some favorable pieces about Giuliani when, as U.S. attorney, he had been walking brokers out of their Wall Street offices in handcuffs. He and the mayor were on a first-name phone-call basis. Miller had also become very good friends with Jack Maple, whom he had tried to get thrown behind bars ten years earlier. Miller and Maple were now renowned buddies and could often be found late at night at their favorite haunt, Elaine's. Both were known for their sartorial splendor (Miller preferred $2,000 Brioni suits and Dunhill ties) as well as their smarts. Maple was lobbying hard for Miller.

Miller was best known for walking up to John Gotti in the street and trying to get the organized crime don to talk. There was something very compelling about that brand of journalism, kind of like watching a man picking his way among vaguely tamed lions, and Miller obviously liked living with that edgy uncertainty. I interviewed him at my transition offices in mid-December. He walked in wearing an expensive suit and a big-shot attitude, behind which he unsuccessfully tried to hide his nervousness. He was interviewing for TV; he really didn't know how to interview for a civil-service position. I was worried about his ability to make the transition.

“Tell me again,” I asked. “You make $600,000 a year and you want this job that pays $95,000?” You had to wonder about his sanity.

“I've got to tell you,” he said. “This is something I've wanted to do all my life.” I was familiar with that kind of dedication and felt an immediate rapport. Miller knew cops, he had worked with them on stories, he knew the life. He was single, willing to get up at two in the morning and go chase calls. He would rather hang out with cops than go home. A successful career as a reporter had earned him a city full of great sources. He was a good writer and a ready raconteur. Having covered so many press conferences, he knew how to prepare for them and how to give the press what it wanted. I was a commissioner who was more than happy to talk to the press, who wanted an open administration, and he wanted to be on the team.

Okay. Miller would work out. I notified the Hall.

My transition team sat around a table at Bob Johnson's First Security Services offices in Boston and reported in. Things were bad: A major corruption probe was about to break; department morale was terrible; the uniforms looked like crap; the budget was going to hell. Dean Esserman, who by this time was deputy chief of police in New Haven, Connecticut,
said, “There are going to be two big differences from the last time you came to New York. Last time, no one knew who you were. You picked up a place, you put it together, and you couldn't do anything wrong. Now, you're coming back as the man who saved the New York subway system, the man who led the Transit Police to victory. How are you going to beat those expectations?

“Second,” he went on. “Last time, you came alone. There was a rumor you were going to bring people with you, and everyone in transit felt like they were going to be replaced. This time you want to bring in some of your own team. That could be a concern.”

Bob Wasserman said, “The five super chiefs run the department.” He named them. “They're Ray Kelly's people. They're going to kill you. They will control your time from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed, to keep you busy and out of the running of the organization. They will front you for speeches and meetings. They don't want the police commissioner to do anything. They just need a front man. So unless you get control of your schedule, they will control you. They're waiting to set you up.”

I heard everyone's report, then I slammed my hand on the table. “Listen,” I said, “I've just heard all the problems with the NYPD and the obstacles that are going to overwhelm us. Very good. Now we're going to go back around the room and you're going to tell me the solutions to these problems. You're going to tell me what we need to do. The day I walk in, I intend to hit the ground running. I want all resignations on my desk before I arrive. I will put my people in place on many levels, so I need to know who those people are. They're in the department. I don't have them. You find them. And when we finish going around this table again, you're going to have solutions. That's why I brought you aboard, that's why you'll stay aboard. I don't intend to be overwhelmed by them or by this job, I intend to overwhelm them.”

We weren't going to get killed, we were going to win. We would have a plan; they would contribute substantially to it, and they would make it work. I could feel the room go, “Well, all right!”

Maple, through his own sources and Wasserman's leads, had found a number of people in the organization who were well thought of as crime fighters. He organized secret meetings at the Sheepshead Bay Yacht Club, this old, broken-down place in Brooklyn where they weren't likely to be noticed, and he picked their brains. It was immediately clear that the New York City Police Department was dysfunctional.

First, it was divided into little fiefdoms, and some bureau chiefs didn't even talk to each other. OCCB didn't talk to patrol, patrol didn't get along with the Detective Bureau, and nobody talked to internal affairs. There was no coordination of effort. It wasn't even a priority. And it appeared that nobody in the department was dealing with the quality-of-life issue.

The organization was very military oriented, with a strict chain of command, and information didn't flow easily from one bureau to another. Each bureau was like a silo: Information entered at the bottom and had to be delivered up the chain of command from one level to another until it reached the chief's office. There it would wait to be dealt with. Even when a memo finally arrived, there was a less-than-acceptable level of cooperation between bureaus. At some point, it seemed like one would call another and have to take a number, like in a bakery.

“We have a drug problem up here in Washington Heights.”

“Sorry, we'll get to you in a couple of months. Narcotics is very busy now.”

Once the chief's decision was finally made, it had to be sent back to the bureau that requested the service and work its way back down that chain of command. It's a wonder anything got done.

When Maple analyzed the bureaus, the news got worse. How was the NYPD deployed? The Narcotics Bureau, he discovered, worked largely nine to five or five to one, Monday through Friday. The warrant squad was off weekends. Auto-crimes squad, off weekends. Robbery squads? Off weekends. The community-policing officers—those six thousand baby-faced twenty-two-year-olds who were going to solve all the neighborhoods’ problems—off weekends. Essentially, except for the detectives, patrol officers, and some other operations going round the clock, the whole place took Saturdays and Sundays off. The criminal element was working nights, they were working weekends, they worked late shifts and legal holidays. They were working harder and smarter than we were. No wonder crime was up, and prevention was down.

The NYPD had people bluffed. They had the reputation as the greatest crime-fighting machine in the history of policing, but the big blue wall was a lot of blue smoke and a few mirrors. They were good at responding to crime, they just weren't very good at preventing it. They weren't even trying to prevent it. They were cleaning up around it. My administration was going to commit itself to crime
prevention
.

If the NYPD was a bigger problem than we'd thought, so was the city. We identified the major problems: guns, youth violence, drugs, domestic
violence, quality of life, car theft, police integrity, and traffic. Then we set about to develop strategies to deal with them.

I tried to persuade Bob Wasserman to join me at the NYPD. I would have given him any position he wanted. His presence and progressive policing ideas would have been a tremendous plus for New York. Ultimately, he decided to go to Washington and be Lee Brown's chief of staff when Brown became President Clinton's cabinet-level drug czar.

Meanwhile, Giuliani's people had begun to push their agenda. Two of his representatives, Dick Koehler and Richard Schwartz, presented us with a sixteen-item list of campaign promises, including getting rid of the squeegee people, and said, in essence, “You need to do these things in the first ten days.” I told them we had a series of initiatives to reduce crime and systematically move the organization forward, as I had promised at my announcement, but that I would handle some of their requests, particularly the squeegee issue, immediately. I wanted to keep them happy, but I was not about to let them even begin to micromanage my department. We knew what had to be done. More important, we knew how to do it. That's what we'd been hired for.

THE MOSQUE INCIDENT OCCURRED MY FIRST DAY ON THE JOB AND GAVE ME A
quick immersion into New York policing and politics. In my first week, I had already been threatened with being fired. The department was in transition, we had a mayor who clearly wanted a large hand in police matters, we were going to have immediate issues every day to deal with, but we were looking at the big picture. I made it very clear within the department that we would not be ruled by the crisis of the day; we would handle all the police emergencies for which New York was famous, but we would keep our eyes on the more significant goal of reorganizing the NYPD and bringing down crime.

John Miller got a call from Cristyne Lategano, Mayor Giuliani's communications director. “What's Bratton got coming up?” They were relentless.

“Well, he's got the Channel 7 show and the Gabe Pressman Sunday talk show …”

“No more profiles in the papers,” she told him. “And cancel all those appearances.”

I had already accepted an invitation to appear on WCBS-TV's
Sunday Edition
the following week, and the Hall decided I could do it because they couldn't provide a persuasive reason to cancel. After that, Miller spent
much of his time trying to keep me out of the papers. It was not the job he had envisioned. “We are developing crime strategies,” Miller told every reporter who would listen. “We came in and told the city what we are going to do. Now we are behind closed doors, and rather than talking about the strategies, we'll be working on them. There will be no time for the commissioner to talk to the press.” We called it “taking the submarine under.”