The Savage City (47 page)

Another concern the commission had with Phillips was his use of language. As a product of the police culture, he used the word
nigger
frequently. Even while he was wired, he would refer to people as “that fucking nigger.” The investigators intended from the start for Phillips's secret recordings to be used as evidence for the prosecution at trial. But they knew that such casual use of racist language might offend potential jury members, black or white. Bruh tried to get Phillips to tone it down, but their star informant resisted: “I'll try, but I can't worry about that because that's the kind of language I use. That's the way New York cops talk.”

It was a testament to his skills at deception that Bill Phillips managed to stay undercover as long as he did: the very fact that this flopped detective, banished to East Harlem, had suddenly been reinstated to plainclothes status downtown was enough to raise suspicions. By September, though, rumors about Phillips had begun to spread. The final straw was
a phone conversation taped by the district attorney's office in an unrelated investigation. Two detectives, known to Phillips as friends and fellow “conditions men,” were having a conversation:

 

Detective
#1: Lou, about that guy.

Detective
#2: What guy? The old friend or the new guy?

Detective
#1: The old friend. Think the worst. Think the worst about that guy.

Detective
#2: Wow! Jesus. I'll talk to you later.

The Knapp investigators called Phillips in to play him the tape. After listening to the conversation a number of times, Bruh asked him, “Are you blown?”

“I'm blown,” said Phillips.

Phillips had gotten so caught up in his undercover job that he never really thought much about how it was all supposed to turn out. He knew he was likely to be called to testify at trial, but he assumed those trials would take place mostly outside the glare of public scrutiny. There may have been some mention of his having to appear at a public tribunal to discuss his career as a crooked cop, but Phillips never worried much about that. It wasn't until he was taken off the street, housed at a secret location, and told that he'd be called to testify live on television that it finally hit home.
How the fuck did I ever agree to do a thing like this?
he asked himself.

On October 18, 1971, the day the Knapp Commission hearings were scheduled to begin, a bomb threat was called in at the building on West Forty-fourth Street. An NYPD bomb squad arrived and searched the premises of the New York City Bar Association, home of the commission. There was no bomb. But what followed was potentially more destructive to the reputation of the police than any explosive device.

For a commission that began so inauspiciously—hampered by budgetary problems and a decided lack of political will—the public hearings were a sterling production. In the cavernous, baroque auditorium, with its wall-to-wall carpeting, mahogany wainscoting, and framed portraits on the walls, the room was charged with an air of both excitement and doom. Chairman Whitman Knapp, bespectacled, patrician,
sat at a large dais flanked by fellow commission members, looking like a modern Pontius Pilate. Two tables were set up in front of the dais, one for the witness and one for the grand inquisitor—lead counsel Mike Armstrong. A gaggle of microphones was set up on each table, and the room was adorned with klieg lights and cables that snaked across the floor. The room was packed with media and spectators. There had been nothing like it since the Kefauver hearings on organized crime back in 1950, or perhaps Senator Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which had unfolded in a similar atmosphere of hushed seriousness and high drama.

On the first day, Mike Armstrong sat before a bank of microphones to address Chairman Knapp and the commissioners. Armstrong explained that the findings of his investigation would reveal a vast system of police corruption that was spread throughout the department, but which primarily flourished in the plainclothes division. The first witness, whom Armstrong identified only as “Patrolman P,” would be a police officer who had been caught setting up a pad for the protection of an East Side madam named Xaviera Hollander. Undercover video footage was shown of what were said to be illegal payoffs between cops that included Patrolman P. For the time being, Armstrong said little more. It was titillating stuff—a fitting introduction for Phillips, whose name and face would not be known to the public until he stepped before the bright lights of the Knapp Commission to became the most infamous police informant in history.

By the time the star arrived to give his testimony, he had overcome his fears and was ready to perform. As usual, when Phillips committed himself to proceed, he did so at 100 percent. It helped that he looked like a New York detective out of central casting: nice suit, stylish tie, dark hair slicked back, sideburns worn down to the bottom of the earlobe in true 1970s style. His voice had the tone and timbre of the outer boroughs, what one reporter described as a “Queens-Irish-cop brogue.” He sat down at the witness table before an array of microphones lined up like a Mob hit squad; behind him sat a group of government-supplied bodyguards who would be his constant companions for the foreseeable future.

Facing Mike Armstrong, surrounded by government officials, Phillips laid it all out: “There is a pad in every plainclothes division in the city of New York.”

In a manner that was eerily calm and matter-of-fact, Phillips chronicled his immersion into the department's underbelly of corruption—starting all the way back in the Police Academy. On why he became a cop, Phillips said, “I wanted to get into a career where I could advance myself by my own initiative.” And so he did. “I worked in every precinct in Manhattan from the Thirty-second to the First, East and West, in one capacity or another—as a detective, uniformed patrolman, plainclothesman, youth squad and a detective in a district cruiser car,” he said proudly. And in every precinct and every division he got to know the “standup cops,” his term for officers on the take.

Occasionally, Commissioner Knapp interjected a question from on high:

 

Knapp:
And speaking not about your own group but about your knowledge of the division plainclothes who have the primary responsibility in that area, what percentage of the plainclothes men assigned to the division, to the Sixth Division at that time, do you feel participated in the pad?

Phillips:
Everyone, to my knowledge.

Knapp:
Everyone?

Phillips:
Everyone.

As much as Phillips's actual revelations about corruption, what mesmerized spectators watching in the room and on TV was the language that rolled off his tongue. The
Times
felt it necessary to print a glossary of references “unfamiliar to the general public.” Terms like
bagman, pad, flake, kite, score,
and
conditions man
entered the general New York lexicon for the first time. Citizens who caught even snippets of Phillips's testimony were getting a window into a hidden subculture, with its own language, codes of behavior, and elastic morality. Phillips's casual attitude in describing the department's culture of corruption shocked many, but that brutal honesty and apparent lack of remorse was the very thing that lent credibility to his words. You didn't have to like Bill Phillips, you only had to believe him.

For the better part of three days, Phillips named names and listed the exact figures that various divisions collected in exchange for
allowing gambling and other illegal operations to remain in business. Among other tales, he told the story of a plainclothes officer in Queens who walked out of a precinct with a paper bag containing $80,000 in proceeds from narcotics sales that he'd stolen from the property room. Such brazen theft was allowed to occur because the detective had already made sure his superiors were also getting a taste, right up the chain of command.

Phillips also walked the commission through various tape recordings that were made during the months he spent undercover. On one tape, he discussed setting up a lucrative card game in Queens with the help of an officer named Fritello. When Phillips saw Fritello, he said, “Hey, you son of a bitch. I hear you made a big score and you're set for life?”

“Nah,” said the cop. “Not that good. Only eighty thousand.”

“Eighty thousand? How the fuck did you get eighty thousand dollars?”

Easy, said Fritello, describing how he'd set up the game and who within the division got paid. As he spoke, his voice flowed through a transmitter strapped to Phillips's chest, which routed it to a recorder manned by Knapp investigators in a nearby van. Now it was being reviewed, in tape and transcript form, by a rapt audience at the commission hearings.

By the time Phillips was done, the public image of the NYPD had changed forever. New Yorkers would never again assume that corruption in the department was confined to a few rotten apples. The system Phillips described was elaborate and deeply entrenched—layer after layer of street cops, detectives, precinct captains, and division commanders, all of them on the take. The dirty money worked its way through the machinery like crude oil, greasing the wheel, making the world go round.

“Thank God his dad's gone,” one spectator told a
Times
reporter, watching Phillips testify. The spectator said he remembered Phillips as “a very decent lad, just like his father. I never guessed it would end this way.”

Of all the people who were floored by Phillips's testimony, no group was more startled than the members of the NYPD itself. Rank-and-file cops, veteran detectives, inspectors, and deputy commissioners all saw their world being turned upside down—not necessarily because they were on the pad themselves, but because the Blue Wall of Silence
was considered more impenetrable than the Berlin Wall. Phillips alone hadn't absolutely dismantled the wall, but his testimony was like an explosives-laden truck driven into the side of it, inflicting a level of damage few would have believed possible.

Sensing the crisis within the ranks, Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy did something that hadn't been done in twenty-five years: he made a shortwave radio address that went out to every precinct and squad car in the city. “There is no reason to be ashamed because one or another traitor to the uniform that you are wearing so proudly seeks to justify his own dishonesty by pretending that none of you are honest,” he declared.

Murphy also held a nationally televised press conference, in which he tried to contain the damage by maligning Phillips: “A very long story is being told by a corrupt policeman. A man who admits to a pattern of corruption over a long number of years in the department. A man who was caught in the commission of a very serious crime, and who obviously now is a man on the hook—squirming, squirming—to get the best possible deal for himself. And it's understandable to me, and I hope it will be understandable to every citizen, that a man in that position, a man who admits that he's been a bagman, a man who's attempted to make deals and probably has made many, that it will serve his own selfish purposes to attempt to create the impression that the kind of behavior he is engaged in is commonplace in the department.”

Kiernan, head of the PBA, took the occasion to attack not only Phillips but Mayor Lindsay, whom he blamed for the entire fiasco. Kiernan announced at a press conference that he was shocked at the “political implications” of the Knapp Commission hearings, and said he'd learned they were being held only because Lindsay planned to run for president of the United States. “He should immediately take steps to end this vicious unsubstantiated smear of the entire department,” said Kiernan.

There was one problem with these arguments: the Knapp Commission's revelations wouldn't end with Bill Phillips. In the following weeks two more policemen were called to testify, and their accounts corroborated everything Phillips said. Edward Droge, a former patrolman in Bedford-Stuyvesant, explained that the system of payoffs from numbers banks and dope dealers in Bed-Stuy was the same as in Harlem. Like Phillips, Droge had gone to New York City Catholic school; he was
considered a good cop, with six Excellent Duty citations and two meritorious citations. Droge said he was “surprised at first” by the prevalence of graft in the department, but that the practice of bribery “became so common it just grew on you.”

Another witness was Waverly Logan, a thirty-year-old black cop who had been bounced from a unit known as Preventive Enforcement Patrol (PEP) for taking $100 from a narcotics suspect. Logan said that every division gambling unit in the city was netting $400 to $1,500 a month for each plainclothesman. In the ghetto, said Logan, narcotics informants routinely stole money for cops in return for drugs.

There were more witnesses, including a tow-truck operator whom the Knapp Commission had wired up and sent out on the streets to ensnare dirty cops. In one of his many bribery encounters with a policeman, the tow-truck driver told a cop that he was worried about exchanging money near a precinct, where the transaction might be spotted. The cop was reassuring: “The cops are nothing. You know what we should have done? We should have taken you right into the station house.”

“The cops are nothing?” repeated the driver.

“Well, that's the easiest. Cops you never worry about.”

After two weeks, the hearings closed with a dramatic moment: Frank Serpico, the good cop who had tried for years to alert superiors about systemic police corruption, appeared before the commission and the media to deliver a statement. After the
New York Times
had identified Serpico as a whistle-blower, he had been shot in the face during a narcotics raid gone bad, and rumors inside and outside the department suggested that he'd been set up by disgruntled cops. Now Serpico described his efforts to alert his department supervisors about the corruption he'd encountered, efforts that were rebuffed at every turn. By the time Serpico finished speaking, the reputation of the NYPD was in shambles.