Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (28 page)

“Why do you stay and work here, Larry?” we asked him as we sat around the lunch table. We had heard very few reasons to want to be employed as a crime scene investigator in New York City. They get very little support, the pay is terrible, and there’s a lot of violent crime.

“I grew up here; I’ve lived here all my life,” Larry replied with feeling to our question. That’s the way it is with a lot of the cops with the NYPD. It’s a feeling; a belief in something bigger. It’s certainly not the money or the fame. Most guys on the force have to take side jobs just to make ends meet. And Larry’s no different. He’s the bodyguard for the lead singer of Skid Row—one Sebastian Bach. “I even sat next to the copycat Zodiac killer in high school,” Larry said. “That crazy guy painted his fingernails black back then; I knew he was a weirdo.” Where else in the world can you go to high school with an infamous copycat serial killer and grow up to be a bodyguard for a 1990s metal band? Only in New York, kids, only in New York.

“We certainly don’t work for the brass,” Larry said indignantly, flexing his giant muscled arms. Larry has ruffled more than a few feathers during his seventeen years with the department—but not among the people he works with directly. Each and every person we bumped into—whether another CSI or a detective from a different precinct—all said the same thing: “If something happened to me or my family, I’d want Larry to work the scene.” That speaks volumes about Larry and what he knows. “One supervisor said I was a diamond in the rough,” Walsh told us as we were sitting in the break room of the unit. “I have a photographic memory,” Larry Love said, rubbing his stubble. And he’s telling the truth. He remembers vivid details about every training and every situation he has ever been in. That kind of recall makes him a perfect CSI. It also makes him the perfect target.

“It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you fly with turkeys,” Larry said. Larry’s abilities, coupled with his uninhibited way of speaking his mind, have not made him a favorite son with some of his bosses. The department is so big that by default there’s often a huge disconnect between the administrators and the worker bees. This problem is exacerbated in the CSI unit, where the disconnect involves more than just knowledge of what is going on in the department. It involves knowledge of forensic science.

“They don’t know what the fuck we do,” one of the CSIs said, coming by to get a cup of coffee in the break room. “They think we do magic.” Indeed, the CSI Effect doesn’t happen only in courtrooms. There is a CSI Effect among administrators in many police departments across the country. We heard stories of guys not in the unit asking the CSIs to do ridiculous things, like taking a swab from a suspect and touching it to a cell phone to get his identity. We also heard stories of brass visiting scenes and becoming overwhelmed when some of the simplest pieces of equipment were used, such as a laser measuring device. Many of the older guys who have been promoted up through the ranks over the years are simply afraid of the science of crime scene investigation. It’s an attitude of “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.” And fear breeds antagonism in certain people.

“Sometimes they come down to the scene when there’s media,” Larry said, cleaning up his lunch. “And they ask stupid questions or make stupid requests. Any question they ask me, like how do I know something, I just tell them I put it to the Moulage test. They don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, but they can’t question it or they’ll look stupid. So they just nod their heads and go away.”

With lunch all but digested, Larry took us on a tour of the NYPD crime laboratory. Most states have a crime lab for the entire state, and some bigger states have more than one. But the NYPD has its own lab in the same building as the CSI unit, just one floor up. Most CSIs would give anything for that proximity. Day in and day out, investigators all over the country have to liaison with lab personnel, many not in the same city, regarding evidence that they have collected and sent to the lab for analysis. Yet in New York City, until the day we visited Larry, he had never been up to the lab—never. He knew no one; no one knew him. The two entities might as well have been a thousand miles apart. Once he submits the evidence that he has collected, he moves on to the next case—more proof that being a bigger department does not necessarily mean being better.

Though Larry had not arranged for us to take a tour, the police brotherhood provided us with the opportunity to visit the lab, which was as state-of-the-art as crime labs get. Nearly every process and application imaginable could be performed in the city’s laboratory, including microscopy, toxicology, and ballistics. The other unique thing about the NYPD lab was the amount of space dedicated solely to housing drug evidence. More space was dedicated to drugs than most labs have in total space. They had also recently confiscated a large amount of marijuana—a couple of pallets’ worth to be exact, which is a common occurrence in New York City. We each developed a contact buzz before we finished our tour.

Lining the interior of the drug evidence area was shelf after shelf of every conceivable type of drug that had been collected as evidence at the scene of a crime: Ecstasy, heroin, LSD, Vicodin, OxyContin, ketamine. Whatever your poison, it’s probably there. They had even confiscated tons of trial-size prescription drugs such as diazepam. The amount of drug evidence processed by the city was simply amazing.

As we rounded the corner from the drug evidence area, we came to the ballistics part of the lab. These areas in crime labs are always interesting, with hundreds of guns skewered on pegboard for display and easy retrieval for testing. Guns that are confiscated as part of a crime are kept on file as examples for future cases. The most interesting guns are always found in here. Homemade guns of every kind, and any kind of foreign gun imaginable, hang in the locker. Outside the evidence room was a glass case, a museum of sorts, displaying the weirdest and most famous guns that had been obtained over the years. Included in this gruesome collection of weapons was the .38-caliber pistol that Mark David Chapman used to kill John Lennon, as well as the .44-caliber handgun that David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” used in his rash of serial killings in the late 1970s.

With the tour of the forensic lab over, we went back downstairs to Larry’s cubicle to see some of the crime scene photos he’d taken while working on the tragic Staten Island Ferry crash that occurred in 2003. It was the worst tragedy in the hundred-plus years the ferry had been in operation. Larry worked the entire scene, documenting what had happened after the ferry violently slammed into the Staten Island Pier. “It’s just another scene,” Larry said of his work. Eleven people were killed, many dismembered or otherwise torn to pieces as the captain of the ferry slept at the wheel. The pictures were too gruesome to look at; most of the victims were unrecognizable as human beings, looking more like horrible Halloween costumes. Most CSIs that we have worked with over the years are able to separate themselves from their jobs. Otherwise, they would not be able to cope with all of the horror and human tragedy they are exposed to. Larry, though, and many others from NYPD, seem to have reached an even higher level of separation, which stems directly from the tragedy of September 11.

At about the same time we were looking at the pictures and going over the ferry case, a large crowd had gathered outside and was wrapping around the entire precinct. With the windows open, chants of “Kill the pigs who killed our kids” could be heard echoing off the outside façade of the building. The protesters were blocking the streets, the entranceways, and the exits. We were essentially trapped inside the building by an angry mob.

“What’s going on?” we asked, nervous about the events outside.

“It’s over the shooting of Sean Bell,” said Larry, obviously frustrated by the events unfolding. We were less than a month from the shooting when the protest occurred. On November 25, 2006, Sean Bell and two of his friends were stormed with a hail of police gunfire after exiting a strip club in Queens. The trio had been celebrating Sean’s last day as a bachelor; he was due to be married the following day. In all, fifty bullets were fired into the group, killing Sean and wounding his two friends.

“Why were so many bullets fired?” we asked of the CSIs who had gathered around to hear the protest.

“One of the cops thought he saw a gun,” one of the group offered up.

“When I first got into police work, all I used to do was chase down people with guns,” Larry commented, his thick accent deepening as the day went on. “I would be undercover and drive a car that looked like it belonged in a bad neighborhood, windows tinted dark black, and when we’d see a gun, we’d bounce and run after them, trying to get the illegal guns off the street.

“It was all a game—a dangerous game. Many times, the gun would be tossed and it would do the ‘Brooklyn Bounce’ before we could even get to it.” The
Brooklyn Bounce
simply meant that the gun was picked up and gone somewhere else fast.

Most law enforcement officers go twenty or thirty years without ever having to fire their weapon or even removing their gun from the holster, except to qualify at the range once or twice per year. Larry’s an exception. He has used his gun, and often. So have many other NYPD officers. But fifty bullets seemed very excessive in this case. “But why fifty, Larry?” we asked candidly.

“Well, the old saying goes, better to be tried by twelve than carried by six,” he replied, with a shoulder shrug.

As the sun set on our day in New York City and the angry mob dispersed into the cold night, we went to dinner with Detective Larry Walsh at his favorite eatery in Queens, the Rincon Montane Restaurant. It was like going to dinner with Norm from
Cheers
. He was a regular.

We were ushered to a small table near the back of the restaurant along the far wall, where Ramon, manager of the restaurant, presided over us as if we were royalty. The only thing Larry loves more than Spanish food is Spanish women; he greeted every waitress who came by with “How you doin’?” Though we were handed menus, Larry took control of the night, ordering in Spanish for both of us.

“You know, we had this endless wipe not long ago in Brooklyn,” Larry said.

“Endless wipe?” we asked, no idea what he was referring to.

“Yeah, an endless wipe; working a crime scene that never ends,” Larry said, motioning with his hands. New Yorkers have terminology for everything. But the most original was
space case
, which refers to a poor guy who gets sandwiched between the subway train and the platform. Larry’s endless wipe had been another one of those “I smell something funny” cases. When emergency services arrived on the scene at the apartment, the bedroom door had been sealed off with towels stuffed under the door and decomp fluids leaking under the doorjamb. They had to knock the door down, and when they did, they witnessed a woman jumping out the window and fleeing down the fire escape. Inside, they discovered a male in the bloat stage of decomposition, purging out the anus, leeching fluids throughout the apartment. “Dude had overdosed,” Larry said. The medical examiner determined that no foul play was involved. They eventually discovered that the woman had been the dead guy’s girlfriend, and she’d been mopping up the body fluids, pouring pine-scented cleaner everywhere, and hanging up air fresheners by the dozens, hoping to cover the smell. “She kept climbing back into the apartment through the windows to sell the dude’s shit for dope,” Larry said, gulping his beer.

“Did you catch her?” we asked Larry as the food arrived.

“No,” he responded, while making sure everyone’s order was correct, speaking fluent Spanish to the waiters. “Her only crime would be grand larceny if the amount she stole was enough. We got bigger shit to work on than that; we can’t work every petty crime.”

Just as Larry finished speaking, a guy came in off the street with a messenger bag hanging from his shoulder. He moved from table to table, until he reached ours. “DVDs?” he said, offering up his selection. This guy had every new movie imaginable, even movies just released over the weekend, all for sale at five bucks a pop. He also had hard-core porno for sale, “if you’re interested.” Larry motioned for him to move on and the guy did, never having a clue that he had just offered an NYPD officer illegal movies. “That shit just ain’t worth our time,” Larry said, digging into his heaping plate of sautéed garlic and plantains.

“Did that case smell worse than the Body Farm?” we asked Larry.

“I didn’t think the Body Farm was bad,” Larry said, shrugging his shoulders. “The worst smell I ever smelled was at Ground Zero.”

“Well.” We gulped. “You’ve avoided that conversation all day; anything you wanna say about your experience there?”

Larry ate a bite of chicken, then garlic and plantain, then he bent his head down again and spoke reverently. “I never want to relive the smell,” Larry began quietly. “Pulverized concrete, fiberglass, water, and bodies—never been anything on Earth like it.” Larry had been part of the first groups to arrive, going into the first tower that was hit.

“I had just dropped my kid off,” Larry said, taking a big swig of beer. “When the second plane hit, I knew—we all knew—that it was a terrorist attack.” Larry had been standing at Ground Zero when the second tower collapsed.

The first couple of days after September 11 were complete chaos. Nobody had taken charge, and everybody was sort of doing their own thing, trying to rescue somebody, anybody. Then, after a couple of days, most realized that the work had changed from rescue to recovery. That’s when the CSI units really got involved. “Each body part that we found got tagged and entered into a Global Positioning System,” he continued slowly. He then segued to the Pennsylvania plane crash site, led by emotion and a few Spanish beers. He’s not completely convinced by the official story of what happened there. “That engine was something like five hundred yards behind where the plane was found. Something else did that.”