Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (12 page)
Considerably irritated at losing the Carmine Galante project after so much investment of his professional time, Mad Dog did a few robberies and freelance killings until he was arrested by an FBI task force in Rochester in early 1982; they collared him for an alleged bank job. The feds were confident they could send Mad Dog out of the state, namely to the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where John Gotti was incarcerated until shortly before his death in 2002.
Mad Dog credited an excellent pair of lawyers—recruited by his friend Ramsey Clark, naturally—for getting him acquitted on the Rochester bank robbery charge. But he would not so easily escape state prosecution.
The state hauled Mad Dog back into court for several homicides and assorted other violent crimes, culminating in a long murder trial in 1982, which ended in conviction and his being sentenced to eighty-seven years and six months, plus ninety-nine months to life.
But this is not the end of my story. There’s an epilogue.
What goes around comes around. Every cop subscribes to this philosophy. Which is relevant here because of an Irish cop I’ll call Danny.
When I was working the Bushwick precinct, Danny was assigned to the 9th in the East Village, my own first assignment in 1968–69. We used to drink together in Murphy’s Bar in Greenpoint, the very Brooklyn neighborhood where we were both raised.
Danny was a big, gentle guy who shouldn’t have been drinking; he couldn’t handle it. Neither could I. I quit the drinking life on New Year’s Day 1980. Danny didn’t.
Some years later, while he and his sergeant were bouncing in bars in Manhattan on St. Patrick’s Day, Danny fell into an alcoholic blackout and shot the sergeant to death.
Danny had no recollection of the shooting and put up no defense at his trial for second-degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years to life in prison.
State prison is a hard road for a police officer. Normally, a cop inmate is kept segregated from the general population. But Danny chose not to be confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. Instead, he went into general population and was soon confronted in the yard by a wiseguy of the Genovese persuasion, whose ass he proceeded to kick.
This earned Danny a mob contract on his life, whereupon the prison authorities transferred him immediately to another maximum-security facility—where, as fate would have it, he met Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan.
Mad Dog approached Danny in the yard to tell him that he’d heard how he kicked the wiseguy’s ass, and to tell Danny that he heartily approved. If the story he’d heard was true, Danny was further told, then he could take his place on Mad Dog’s personal work gang.
To go it alone in prison is to invite rape or death. Danny quickly confirmed the story.
Danny survived, unmolested. Actually, he was freed after eight years in prison when his conviction was overturned because of errors at trial. Instead of another trial, he was allowed to take a guilty plea in return for time served.
What motivated Mad Dog to save Danny’s life? Was it their shared Irish heritage? Or the fact that Mad Dog’s father was, of all things, a first-grade detective with Brooklyn’s 78th Precinct in Park Slope until his early death by natural causes in the 1950s? Or was it Mad Dog’s disdain for the Genovese family, which had turned a deaf ear to his appeals for help when the FBI task force was closing in on him back in Rochester?
Who knows.
One more thing, which is a grievance I have with Gail Sullivan.
In her book, she wrote that many law-abiding citizens, including an investigator for ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, describe Mad Dog as “one of the most respected inmates” in the New York State system. That may be so, and I accept that Mad Dog has done many good deeds while behind bars upstate; the rescue of my old pal Danny, for one, was a corporal work of mercy, as Roman Catholics say.
But just how is it that while Mad Dog lives so vividly in my memory, our fateful meeting rates nary a line in his autobiography?
Makes you feel like a blind date, a one-night stand, you know?
H
ave you ever heard a retired cop or prosecutor tell a war story, or write a memoir, where he wasn’t the hero? I haven’t and I’m tired of listening to all the air-bags blather on for fun and profit.
So I’ll tell you a tale of failure, with all the hope that confession is good for the soul. Bless me Father for I have sinned:
There was a time before I became a legend in my own mind for my piece of the action in the 77th Precinct investigation, the Howard Beach case, the capture of “Gaspipe” Casso, the first death penalty case in Brooklyn, the Colombo wars—yadda, yadda, yadda.
Back in spring of 1988 I was a green prosecutor, and I failed miserably during a trial called
The People of the State
of New York v. Gilbert Ortiz
, this being the case of an alleged 77th Precinct grass-eater, which is a term of art in the police profession meaning a cop of ordinary corruption as opposed to a meat-eating hog.
And Gil, let me apologize now for telling this sad tale. It’s the mid 1980s in New York City. Mayor Ed “How’m I doing?” Koch appoints Ben Ward as the city’s thirty-fourth police commissioner in early ’84. According to
Jet
magazine,
“Ward oversaw the nation’s largest police department during the
rise of the crack cocaine epidemic and a sharp increase in crime
and murder.”
What an understatement. The way I remember it, the city was a sewer, the precincts in the poorest neighborhoods were free-fire zones, and no one gave a shit about crime in the ghetto because the social scientists absolved us from effective law enforcement by telling us that the only way to cure crime was to remedy the root cause—poverty. Don’t hold your breath.
Imagine for a moment being a cop in one of the precincts in the heart of Brooklyn during those times—the 75th in East New York, the 73rd in Brownsville, the 77th in Crown Heights. Brian O’Regan, who committed suicide rather than surrender at the end of the 77th Precinct investigation, wrote in the note he left behind, “The precinct is hell.” And it was hell, in Brian’s opinion, because no one really cared what happened in the ghetto. I think he was correct.
If the 77th Precinct was indeed hell, the lords of hell were two sets of partners, so far as I know from evidence uncovered: William Gallagher and Brian O’Regan, and Henry Winter and Anthony Magno. They were the veterans, the leaders—except for O’Regan, the ultimate follower—and they set the standard for corruption in the precinct. It was a very low standard, nickel-and-dime compared to the thieves of Enron and thieves of Baghdad yet to be discovered in Iraq.
Petty the officers were, but so very corrosive to the oath they took to uphold the law. They robbed from the drug dealers, from the dead, from the violated. As a fireman of my acquaintance once said, they would steal a hot stove with both hands.
Into this hell comes Gilbert Ortiz, a twenty-two-year-old when he was arrested in 1986, a police officer since only two years before that. You didn’t stand a chance, Gil. No one in the police department was looking out for you. And you became my target because you were there—in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As I think of you now, I think of the kid who shows up at a pickup softball game and is the last one chosen for the team. He’s stuck in right field. Maybe nobody will hit the ball to him. Unfortunately for you, Gil, this was the corruption team of the precinct from hell and because you’re stuck in right field you get tagged with the loss.
But the tale I tell reveals itself not at a game, but at trial. So let us proceed.
In the spring of 1988, I took the short subway ride from the Office of the Special State Prosecutor at 2 Rector Street in lower Manhattan to the Brooklyn Supreme Court at 360 Adams Street, a trip I had made many times, though never before to try a felony case. Exiting the train in Brooklyn, I walked through the large, sterile plaza dominated by the State Supreme Court, built in the 1950s and designed by the same architects who created the Empire State Building. I drew no inspiration from the long, squat structure that would house the case of
People v. Ortiz
for the next week or so. While the Empire State Building raises the spirits with its soaring reach to the skies, this functional mausoleum of a court flattens all hope. It was here that defendants saw their last glimpse of a tired-out urban downtown before going upstate for their incarceration. And it was here that the hopes of prosecutors, who could not make their cases, were dashed.
As I walked up the courthouse steps, I remembered that it was also here, eighteen months earlier, that Charles Joseph Hynes, the New York State special prosecutor for the city criminal justice system, scheduled the arraignment of the “dirty dozen” cops from the 77th Precinct in Brooklyn.
It was a most extraordinary arraignment in which Joe Hynes, after addressing the judge in a stately manner—“May it please the Court”—made an elegant opening speech about the entire investigation and the reason we the prosecutors, the twelve defendants, their defense attorneys, and a full house of journalists were in court that day.
Joe had a commanding presence in the courtroom, and neither the judge nor defense attorneys objected during his speech. He talked about the scope of the corruption that led to the arrest of defendants who had betrayed their oaths as police officers. When he finished, he sat, leaving the “technicalities” of the arraignment to me and my colleagues, who had presented the cases to a grand jury for the return of indictments.
One by one we stood to present the charges, only to have the reading of them waived by defense counsels. One by one the defendants pled not guilty and we made bail arguments. Return dates and a schedule for motions and discovery were set.
I recall nothing from that day of police officer Gil Ortiz, charged with five counts that ranged from conspiracy in the fourth degree, an E felony, all the way down to a trespassing violation. Perhaps I should have paid more attention, because this was the case I would ultimately try. But my thoughts were on the charges against Officer William Gallagher, charged with eighty-six counts, ranging from criminal sale of a controlled substance, an A-II felony, down to the A misdemeanor of official misconduct. Gallagher’s was the case I had hoped to try—the first and most important case of the lot.
I also wondered,
Where the hell is Gallagher’s partner, Brian
O’Regan?
He had been scheduled to surrender with the rest, but had not reported to Internal Affairs division headquarters that morning. Was he in Ireland? That was surely where I would have been if I were he.
But those arraignments were long ago. Since then, O’Regan killed himself rather than surrender; Gallagher and three others pled guilty before trial; two other defendants were tried and convicted, two were acquitted after trial; and two others had indictments dismissed. Three defendants were left: Gil Ortiz, plus two others involved in the theft of precinct garbage cans—the bottom of the barrel, so to speak.
Today was my turn in that barrel, as prosecutor in
People v.
Ortiz
. I was not looking forward to the trial, given that the evidence was a single taped conversation between Ortiz and Henry Winter, one of two dirty cops who had flipped at the beginning of the four-month investigation. Winter was possibly one of the most corrupt cops in the precinct, although he had denied it in an earlier trial, accusing Gallagher and O’Regan of being even more corrupt.
Ortiz was represented by Barry Agulnick, an experienced defense attorney who specialized in representing police officers. He was one of the defense lawyers in the high-profile Michael Stewart case back in 1985, resulting in the acquittal of all the transit police officers accused by the Manhattan district attorney of killing Stewart during his arrest for writing graffiti in the subways. I knew Barry because he had represented Gallagher and had negotiated a realistic plea agreement for his client. The evidence in that case was overwhelming, and Barry knew it; he obviously had a different read on the Ortiz case.
This trial would only be my fifth; my first two as second seat counsel had resulted in convictions, my next two as lead prosecutor the same. I was not cocky about my skills, but thought I made a nice appearance, spoke well, was organized, and had done the prep work needed. I also knew the central weakness of the case: Henry Winter versus a good-looking rookie cop, namely Gil Ortiz.
We assembled in a large courtroom on an upper floor of Kings County Supreme Court to select a jury on that beautiful spring morning. I still did not fully understand the science of jury selection, and to this day wonder if it isn’t all just a crapshoot.
How do you tell in a few minutes if a jury prospect will be fair, if he or she will truly listen to the facts of your case and do the right thing? There are attorneys who wax poetic about their ability to identify a juror who will be good for the prosecution or good for the defense. There are old wives’ tales about the predilections of accountants, social workers, and church ladies. There are jury consultants who will tell you that if a juror grows roses, it’s a sure bet that person is patient and discerning. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now if I buy all that. What I did know is that I wanted smart people who could get along with their fellow jurors, make a group decision, and not hate my star witness—Henry Winter, a guy known to cops as a “rat.”
I prepared the prospective jurors to the extent that I could during voir dire interviews. They would be hearing from a witness who committed many other crimes himself before finally being caught and offered a deal for his cooperation, I informed the prospects. I then asked them if they could listen carefully to the testimony of such a witness, if they could fairly assess the truthfulness of his testimony, and if they could reserve judgment until hearing all the evidence. Both Barry and I explored prejudices that might get in the way of their rendering a just verdict, which is another way of figuring out if they could buy into the theory of our respective cases.