Transcript
Transcript
Transcript
My name is Mike Dowd. I was a police officer in New York City in the 75th precinct in East New York in the 1980s to 90s. I was arrested and sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for conspiring to steal drugs and self protection to drug dealers. And this is how crime works. They had 75,000 in the street that was supposed to come in the day I got arrested. You’re talking about a turnaround of about $200,000 in one day. When you get so full of it you almost asking for it to end, you know, you start flashing a lot. You’re asking for help. The corruption started between 19841985. So the first thing I ever did was I pulled over a Corvette. It had no license plates, no registration, no insurance card and he had stacked the hundreds in a bag. I had a choice to to to either lock them up and take the car and voucher it, put him in jail for a day or two, whatever, let him figure it all out or have him buy us a lobster lunch. So I suggested he give us some money for a lobster lunch. He left a couple 100 bucks under the seat and I told him let’s not see you ever see you again without plates and those other stuff registration. And I felt like I stole something and I was nervous. So that’s was the first time I did something like that. And it wasn’t like it was followed with many other things. There was a time where I didn’t do anything. It was just one of those can I try something and I did that was probably between 24 and 25 years old where it got significant, which would have been St. corruption like street level instead of vouchering drugs either. Threw it out or you kept it or when you’ve found some money on a scene in my case, you know, I took, I kept it, you know, so that’s why it was corrupt because I, instead of turning the money in, I put in my pocket. As a police officer, we were exposed to everything in the world, right? You’re the first on the scene to anything. Whether there was a burglary, it would show up and if there was something burglarized or not, there was an open entrance into either a home or a business. So at a, at a point or two in my career, there may have been something that I saw that wasn’t claimed and I may have. Picked it up and put it in my pocket. All right. You’re constantly aware of opportunities. So for example, you’re in a busy sector, in a busy precinct. You’re constantly going from one job to the next, call for assistance, robbery, burglary or murder or rape, whatever’s going on. And along the way you’re looking for these little opportunities, little rubrics of, of either drugs or, or cash. Usually, you know, in either order. Doesn’t didn’t matter. We took mostly money and then we, we got into systematic payoffs. Which was really with the best thing was because it kept us out of the street. Because the street talks too much. We got a call for a burglary at this location. It’s like a two-story walk. U go inside past the first level to the second level and the door handles broken off. So we walk inside and there’s a young black girl, one or two I can’t remember, sitting there hanging out. We got to call it. You broke in. Well a friend. It’s our friend’s place. They seemed legit, you know? It’s our friends place, they said. She said we could hang out here. So I happen to look around the apartment. I noticed something a little odd. It was sparsely furnished, but it was very clean. I said to the girls, well, what was, where’s the girl? She says, ohh, girlfriend was arrested last night and I opened up the closet and there’s like a black green Hefty bag filled with cash. So I’m like she said, got locked up for drugs. There’s cash in here that no one vouchered yesterday and these girls were in the apartment so. Someone got someone’s got to take this cash or at least with that walks in behind me is anticrime unit and they see me with the cash in my hand. They go ohh wait. I said ah yeah what are you gonna do voucher it and give it to the city. So I said I’ll leave it put it back in the closet. So we put it back in the closet and close the door and they take the 2 girls and arrest them for burglary. So. I get on the phone, I quote Chicky. I got chicken. There’s a house with a bag of money, he goes. I don’t have a car. Do you have car? He goes, it’s in the shop being repaired. I said, well, rent one, buy one, steel one, just get a car. He ends up calling one of our other guys. They pull up, they get out. They wearing their Blazers, make detective Shields that on them. They walk in the house and within 3 minutes they’re in the car ready to leave. So I pulled them all. I gotta say, how you doing? We got a big bag of cash here. Great. OK, so I go to the pay phone, I call the desk, I say listen, I gotta go home. My wife needs me for something. So I called basically begging for half a day off. We get a limousine and we go to Atlantic City and turn the fives and 10’s and 20s into hundreds and come back home. What about $40,000 in cash? Now listen, it’s a lot of money, you know, 40,000 in cash. Salary was probably 22,026 thousand a year at the time. And we put 40,000 in cash in a bag and we split it three ways. And we we had a nice time in Atlantic City back in the 80s. It was a crack epidemic was going on. Initially when we were making these arrests, we were overwhelming a system that was already overwhelmed. So we were discouraged from making minor crack arrests. Now, when I say discouraged, they didn’t say don’t make crack arrests because that wouldn’t be proper. But what they did say was, you know. After you’ve made so many arrests, the overtime mounts up and they put you on a not a good assignment to keep you from making arrests. It’s facts. So we learned that it was easier just to take. St. corruption, systematic payoff corruption and then investigative corruption. It was it was rampant. It was rampant. The money was too big. The oversight of the Police Department during that time, I think there were bones were learning curve themselves. And what do I mean by that? They had just gotten done with the NAP Commission incomes, the era of crack on the back of this and they were just not ready for the volume years ago. Corruption was basically topped. Down people in very high positions of power like lieutenants, captains and chiefs and inspectors that dealt with the community at large as far as decision making processes and who could be in business and who couldn’t. And then the the patrolman enforced the captain’s rules. The patrolman would never have to interact with the bosses. So the patrolman can do whatever the hell they wanted as long as no one said anything. What was the purse? Best person to victimize as a patrolman? Is a drug dealer in the street, He’s not going to call the police and say, hi, officer, I’m selling a large volume of drugs and your police officers are stealing my money. I mean, it’s just not the way it’s done now. Today it’s done, believe it or not, it is done like that today because they give them a pass and they take the corrupt cop, which is fine, that’s their choice. But it was so upside down that the street cops had more power than the bosses because you got a guy with a gun who’s got a lot of money. Not every organization, not every system. That way, but there were pockets. There were pockets. I could do that. And one of the examples I could tell people for fact, you have New York City joint task force working with a DEA agent. So you’ve got one or two DEA agents working with 10 cops and they were all considered DEA agents because they work under the purview of the federal government. They do long term deep investigations, which gets them to the level of very high drug distributions. And that’s where the money is. You’ll get a guy on the street selling. $10,000 a day in crack or or 50 or $100,000 a day in crack. But he’s getting that from somewhere. He’s getting that from 2/3 levels up as bricks of cocaine coming in where guys buying 1500 kilos at a time, OK. And when you get 1500 kilos at a time, that means you’re handling millions of dollars in cash. So if you’re an investigator. In the DEA, NYPD task force, they would deep into these organizations and they would let the guy know you need to leave the country and leave 10 million. Otherwise, we’re we’re taking you and that’s how that worked. A lot of guys would say this, well, we didn’t do that, Mike, and you’re disparaging all of us. I know you didn’t do this, but many of you knew about it, which in reality makes you guilty. I hate to say it and I’m not putting that on individuals, but if you know that I’ve done something corrupt and you don’t report me. 10 you’re corrupt in allows the system to continue the corruption by not pointing it out. Now you don’t want to be the one that called U on me and they haven’t gotten rid of Maine and I’m still there with my gun showing up to protect you or not protect you. So it really is a very delicate balance. It’s just out of survival instincts. Why would a cop tell on another cop if he knew? And many times I’m going to tell you straight up many times they didn’t know, but they sort of maybe knew. You see the difference?