The Savage City (23 page)

Sensing that the Lindsay administration was about to create a new CCRB by mayoral fiat, the city's largest and perhaps most powerful pressure group—the PBA, twenty thousand strong—took matters into its own hands. Before Lindsay could act, the organization preemptively circulated a petition to put the measure on a public ballot. After securing the thirty thousand signatures necessary for such a measure, the PBA referendum was added to the upcoming November ballot.

Throughout the spring, summer, and early fall of 1966, the PBA waged an aggressive and expensive campaign in support of its referendum. PBA president Cassese set the tone by charging that “communism and communists are somewhere mixed up in this fight. If we wind up with a review board, we'll have done Russia a great service—whether by design or accident.” A pro-referendum TV advertisement proclaimed: “The addict, the criminal, the hoodlum—only the policeman stands between you and him.” Much of the campaign exploited the city's inflamed and tangible atmosphere of fear. A newspaper ad pictured an empty city street littered with debris, smashed storefront windows, and a cash register broken open on the sidewalk—a photo of a Philadelphia street after a recent riot. The caption read: “This is the aftermath of a riot in a city that
had
a civilian review board.” The rest of the ad copy exploited the city's increasing reputation for terror: “Crime and violence are the terrifying realities of our time. No street is safe. No neighborhood is immune. New York's police force, probably the finest in the world, is all that stands ready to protect you and your family from the ominous threat of constant danger in the streets.”

A number of well-financed special interest groups supported the PBA's cause. The Independent Citizens Committee Against the Civilian
Review Board placed a series of “public service announcements” in newspapers and on billboards around the city. One billboard ad pictured a terrified young white woman alone in the dark standing at the entrance to a subway station. Below the photo was a warning: “The Civilian Review Board must be stopped. Her life…your life…may depend on it.”

At first, Mayor Lindsay had been slow to react to the pro-referendum campaign. But that billboard got his goat. “The only thing [it] didn't show was a gang of Negroes about to attack her,” he said. “It was a vulgar, obscene advertisement if I've ever seen one.”

By the fall, pro-review-board forces began to respond. Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP, denounced the pro-referendum campaign as “the slimiest kind of racism.” Wilkins wrote a letter to black religious leaders in the city urging them to preach against the referendum from the pulpit. “The PBA, the Conservative Party, the John Birch Society, the American Renaissance Party and others who want to kill the Board are no friend of the Negro,” noted the NAACP president. “Remember all the Negro-haters are lined up against the Board.”

Lindsay tried to rein in the debate, framing the issue as one of checking police autonomy, asking whether the people “were willing to let the police department of this city become a law unto itself.” To the people at large, though, the real core of the debate was a matter of black and white. Police advocates pandered shamelessly to a climate of fear; white liberals denounced the PBA as “Nazis” and “fearmongers” and the city's beleaguered Negroes seethed with resentment and anger in its churches, jails, and streets. Each overheated accusation and counteraccusation was another log on the pyre, each crackling ember smoldering an intimation of bonfires to come.

 

OFFICER BILL PHILLIPS
certainly had no use for an independent Civilian Complaint Review Board. He'd been on the receiving end of citizen complaints half a dozen times in his career, and each time the current CCBA had dismissed those complaints. That was the way it was supposed to be: cops looking out for cops. Phillips felt the same way as most cops: who wanted a bunch of liberals and minority groups passing judgment on the cop on the beat? It would destroy morale, undermine the department's confidence in itself.

Phillips had another reason for resisting the idea of a truly independent review board: he knew just how much of the department, from beat cops through the command structure, was on the pad. The last thing the bosses wanted was an independent board with the power to go through the department's dirty laundry. As far as Phillips was concerned, the fearmongering and race-baiting were merely an elaborate smoke screen. What the department was really worried about was having generations' worth of graft and malfeasance opened up to public scrutiny.

Phillips, of course, knew what he was talking about. His ten years on the force had been one long gravy train. In the last few months alone he'd perpetrated an array of righteous scores.

• In a bar on the East Side, he came upon a rich drunk who had thrown a glass and broken a window. The guy was embarrassed and ashamed, willing to do anything to make the potential drunk-and-disorderly charge go away. Phillips walked him home to his ritzy apartment on Sutton Place and shook the guy down for a thousand dollars.
  
• While working his beat in East Harlem, Phillips found a Puerto Rican man beaten up in the gutter. He found the guy who did it, took fifteen hundred dollars for not arresting him, and gave the Puerto Rican four hundred dollars to forget about the beating.
  
• Arriving at the aftermath of a street fight, Phillips found a man shot in the shoulder. He found the shooter and collected three thousand dollars to let him go.
  
• After finding a hoodlum who was wanted for busting up a restaurant, Phillips took him to the station house and handcuffed him to a chair in the squad room. He then told the hood he'd been identified through a two-way mirror and extorted three thousand dollars for not arresting him.
  

In all of these scores, Phillips spread the wealth around. He gave the shift sergeant a cut, or the lieutenant, or the precinct bagman who delivered it to the captain or deputy inspector or whoever it was who let it be known they expected a cut of all action that took place under their command. It was a sweet deal—a license to steal, as long as you didn't get greedy. Phillips wasn't worried about getting caught; his hustling,
for all intents and purposes, was sanctioned by the department. So many people within the system were in on it that he couldn't imagine ever being singled out for punishment or prosecution.

The money rolled in. Phillips's police salary, after taxes, netted him $140 every two weeks, but he was collecting many times that under the table. He kept no record books, never had an exact sense of what he was raking in, but it hardly mattered. “Money became just paper to me,” he recalled. “I pissed it away having a good time…. I always had five, six hundred walking-around money.”

At his house in Queens, Phillips kept cash scattered around the place—in a coffee can, under the mattress, in a shoe box in the closet. Eventually he got a safe-deposit box; later still he opened a brokerage account, which showed how little he was concerned about getting caught. Mostly, his accounts remained liquid: cash came in and was spent immediately.

In the summer of 1966, Phillips indulged a fantasy he'd had for a long time: he began taking flying lessons at MacArthur Airport, far out on Long Island. His wife, Camille, wasn't pleased; she felt it was too dangerous. But Phillips wasn't worried. As with most things, he was a quick learner, and, as he told Camille, flying a plane was a lot safer than driving a car. After a mere six hours of instruction, he was told by an instructor, “You're doing great. I think you're ready to fly solo.” Phillips took to the skies:

Phillips's engine had run out of gas, but no one had told him that all he needed to do was switch over to the plane's backup tank. He brought the plane down on the highway without a scratch. Meanwhile, a throng of onlookers—including an official from Federal Aviation—gathered at the site. There was also a newspaper photographer there snapping photos.

The next day in the
Daily News
there was a headline: “Off Duty Officer Lands Plane on the L.I.E.,” which is how Phillips's wife found out about it.

Phillips felt immortal. He loved flying high over the city, looking down at the buildings and cars, imagining the little people with their little lives packed together like fish in cans. There was poverty and crime and ugliness in this world, but up in the sky Phillips soared with the eagles.

Eventually, he and another cop, Jack Kelly, bought their own plane, a Cessna 150, for eighty-five hundred dollars. Phillips racked up the flying hours until he was as experienced as some commercial pilots. He and Kelly decided to start their own flying club. “I put a thousand dollars down and we took a loan for the rest,” remembered Phillips. “Then I set up a plan for a flying club, rules and regulations and all that kind
of stuff. I called it the NYPD Flying Club and I put posters in all the station houses. Never asked permission of the police commissioner. Figured fuck him, what could he do to me? I was flopped already.” The flying club was an immediate success. Cops from all over the city came out to the school on Long Island to log free flying time. It became a big social scene for policemen from many different precincts, all thanks to the largesse of W. R. Phillips, president. Before long, the NYPD Flying Club purchased two more planes, a Cherokee and a Cardinal, for a total of fourteen thousand dollars. Within a few months the club was self-sustaining; sometimes Phillips and Kelly even made a little profit.

Although Officer Phillips advertised his flying club openly in station houses, police brass asked no questions. The question of how a patrolman making less than $16,000 a year managed to finance the purchase of three airplanes, start up a costly business, and extend free flying time to cops throughout the city never set off alarm bells within the Internal Affairs Division (IAD). Phillips seemed to be untouchable.

One reason he flourished—Phillips believed—was that he knew the limits of thievery. He had an instinct for what he could get away with, and he rarely crossed that line. He also learned from the errors of others.

There was, for instance, the case of Officer Walter Jefferys. A policeman in the Two-Five who teamed up with Phillips on many scores, Jefferys was a top-notch hustler. He was especially good with traffic. He could spot license plates that were expired or had no inspection sticker, grounds to pull over a driver and shake him down. As Phillips put it, “You need a little luck to make scores, and [Jefferys] was lucky in traffic.”

Even before he teamed up with Phillips, Jefferys had a reputation of being a “heavy thief.” Yet he always seemed to be broke—thanks to a bad gambling habit. Huge amounts of money passed through his hands at the racetrack. Whether it was the desperation of his gambling addiction, or the sheer arrogance of a crooked cop believing he was above the law, something led Walt Jefferys to take unnecessary chances.

Jefferys made his big miscalculation on a night Phillips wasn't working. He was partnered with a rookie, a lad with perhaps six months on the job. In a squad car, Jefferys and his partner chased after a Volkswagen that they were tipped off was possibly “dirty” with narcotics. They brought the VW to a halt at 110th Street and the East River Drive. There were two young men in the car, and Jefferys and his partner commanded them to stand spread-eagle while they and the car were “tossed.”
Sure enough, the search turned up four bags of heroin, a couple caps of cocaine, and assorted pills. They confiscated the dope and put the two suspects, cuffed, in the back of the radio car. They slapped them around a bit and relieved them of their valuables—forty dollars in cash and a large, expensive-looking ring from one of their fingers. In addition, they worked out a deal: the following night, one of the kids would show up at a local restaurant with three hundred dollars for the cops. In return, they would not be prosecuted.

The next day, Phillips ran into Jefferys at the police pistol range on City Island in the Bronx. The shooting range was outdoors in a bucolic setting, with trees, a breeze from nearby Long Island Sound, and the smell of cordite in the air. The two veteran cops were firing off rounds when Phillips commented on the glistening new ring Jefferys was wearing. Jefferys just smiled; he didn't say where the ring came from, but he did mention that his new partner was pretty sharp, had a lot of potential.