The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (48 page)

In February, only six weeks after we took over, the preliminary numbers showed crime down for that period over the previous year by 16.8 percent. But the first month was easy—it just showed what the NYPD could do if it paid attention. In March, the numbers were down 14.1 percent. The 1992–93 reduction had been 4 percent. Four percent? We could do 4 percent just by getting the cops’ hands out of their pockets. For the month of May, the city's crime was down 11.4 percent. Our reductions couldn't be considered one-shot cleanups now; month by month they were consistent, as they had been in transit. Conventional wisdom had it that police could have no effect on crime; we proved that wrong.

We were also having a very good time. My inner circle was becoming a tight group of good friends.

Every Sunday, Cheryl cooked dinner, and the single guys—Miller,
Maple, and LaPorte—gathered at our apartment along with their significant others of the moment. We ate and laughed and talked over the past week and planned for the week ahead. They also spent many evenings at Elaine's where the business of New York continued and where Cheryl and I occasionally joined them. Each of these guys could have used a woman in his life, and they were all out looking for her, as evidenced by the rapid turnover in their girlfriends. At times, Cheryl and I felt like we were raising My Three Sons.

Cheryl was waiting to be admitted to the bar in New York State. She was teaching at John Jay College and administering several federally funded programs. Things were not easy for her at first; I had a dream job, but she had to start all over. She never complained, but I knew she wasn't as happy as she could be. However, her fortunes turned when the O. J. Simpson case began to dominate the news. When she decided to discuss the trial in her class, all the local TV stations and CNN showed up. Afterward, the local ABC-TV affiliate and ABC national radio hired her to do on-air commentary on the trial. She developed a real flair for television and moved from O. J. commentary to a full-time position as a reporter at WABC-TV. She was articulate, attractive, smart, and quick—perfect for television. As her media career began to take off, I was understandably quite pleased and proud.

Miller had contacts all over New York, from the influence makers to the wise-guys. His years on television had made him instantly recognizable to, among others, maître d's, cabbies, and organized-crime hit men. Cops loved him because he understood and saw things their way. He was a valuable source of information coming into the commissioner's office as well as a master at directing the information coming out of it. I could find out the tenor of a situation, how things were playing where it mattered, from John. I didn't have to ask; Miller was a reporter, he reported. He was also pretty good at picking out the best restaurants in town.

Timoney and I became good friends. Though I'd had a hard time understanding him at first, I very quickly came to really appreciate him. He was one of the smartest people I'd ever met. I admired his willingness to speak his mind. He was quite outspoken and not as politically circumspect as he might have been, and it cost him from time to time. As much of an ego as I have, I think Timoney has even more, yet he made great sacrifices for his job. I could depend on him to steer me right about the department, its customs, capacities, and capabilities. He didn't sweeten anything, he was very direct and honest, and I appreciated that. I always felt when I
spoke with him that I was getting the unadulterated truth. I put a lot of trust in him and gave him great power. He was the NYPD personified. He was my rock.

Peter LaPorte and I went back to 1983, when he was an intern out of Northeastern University. He was smart and incredibly organized; people responded to him and liked to work for him. Some bosses will push things under the rug; LaPorte dealt with problems directly, corrected them, and moved forward. He had a phenomenal work ethic and was not shy about correcting people and telling them what was on his mind. As chief of staff, he became my right-hand man in the very complex commissioner's office, which he coordinated and controlled. He was the guy who dispensed favors, a master manipulator. Although he was barely thirty, people came to see him as a power. If people needed to get something in front of me, they went through Peter. In a department with more than its share of “rabbis,” he was the grand rabbi.

I trusted LaPorte to deal with City Hall, to work with Peter Powers, special counsel Denny Young, and company, to do battle with them, if necessary, so the mayor and I did not have to do battle with each other. He was a master of nuances and had good insights into what was really happening, as opposed to what we were supposed to think was happening. LaPorte had an impressive array of sources and networks and ears like
M*A*S*H
's Radar O'Reilly; you didn't want to be within fifty feet of Peter and whisper because he would pick up the conversation. In a sense he was my knight errant. LaPorte and Miller were my champions in dealing with the Hall: LaPorte kept Young and Powers away from me while Miller, and later Tom Kelly, had the unenviable task of dealing with their Madame Defarge, Cristyne Lategano (or as we came to call her, the Dragon Lady). When I had Maple, Miller, and LaPorte working for me, I had an incredible intelligence network. Peter grew in the job. He was my shield against the mind-numbing games and machinations continually flowing out of the Hall. I'll never understand how he didn't suffer a nervous breakdown.

Work and friendship merged quickly. Because I truly love what I do, I'm always on the job. I like the excitement of moving large numbers of people into action, and I like the adrenaline rush of success. I'm not the kind of person who will kick back and watch a ballgame with the guys; I am more likely to sit around and talk about the crazy scenes that happened during the day's work, the maddening politics and unique personalities that were getting in the way of eradicating crime in New York.

Most of what was getting in our way was City Hall.

Rudy Giuliani and I never had a cross word. It was arranged that way. We had weekly meetings—my senior staff and I, he and his—to go over a weekly report we prepared presenting information on major events of the past week, major events expected in the coming week, and future issues.

“On Friday, June 30 … an altercation occurred involving worshipers at the Elim International Pentecostal Church and Officers from the 79 Precinct. Members of the congregation attempted to prevent the officers from issuing parking summonses in front of the Church. Four Police Officers were slightly injured as a result of the incident and one arrest was effected. Meetings were held … at which representatives of the clergy, the community and the Police Department were present. These meetings produced specific plans to control the parking condition that generated this situation. No future problems are anticipated at this location….

“As you know, there have been several recent incidents which have involved alcohol abuse by members of the Department. In fact, this problem has reached the upper echelon of the Department. At a recent Crime Control Strategies Meeting it was apparent that the Commanding Officer of [a] Precinct was under the influence of intoxication. I have relieved him of his command and he has filed for retirement….

“[John Timoney] is finalizing his analysis and recommendations for a standard 9-mm round for all members of the agency…. I expect a draft of the report will be available for your review within the next two weeks….

“Please let me know if you would like more information about these events or issues.”

If there was going to be a battle, and there frequently was, it came during the preparation of this agenda, during the week, between our staffs. Issues that were generating friction at staff level were almost never discussed between me and the mayor. We both preferred to have them worked out at a lower lever. Peter LaPorte consistently duked it out with Denny Young, the mayor's consigliere. Ironically, they liked and respected each other.

We sent them crime strategies and they sat on them, ostensibly reviewing them. We were not empowered to implement these initiatives without the acquiescence of the mayor. For example, the Auto Theft Strategy was ready for months before they were finally able to schedule a press conference to roll it out. Because this was a comprehensive strategy, it ended up delaying many attendant initiatives, including one that was intended to address the problems of gypsy-cab drivers who were getting robbed. We
devised a program under which the department would issue stickers that said, essentially, “If I look like I might be having a problem, feel free to pull me over and check out the taxi.” The cop would not be accused of harassing the driver, and the driver would have the increased protection of the police. This was delayed while we waited for City Hall to get its act together; meanwhile, the crimes continued. The Hall was the black hole of law-enforcement action. Whenever possible, we would launch initiatives long before they were finally announced at City Hall press conferences.

Giuliani had worked long and hard to get elected mayor and understandably sought every occasion to present himself to the public in the best possible light. The Hall attempted to insert the mayor into every possible scenario and to ensure that the mayor received credit for the initiatives coming out of city agencies, including the police. While attempting to create positive coverage by controlling all media, they became para-noid about leaks. A source of increasing friction, suspicion, and hostility between us was the fact that these policies and strategies were delayed so long that they were bound to leak. That created particular problems in the police department because of my policy of inclusion.

I was not very concerned about the contents of our strategies leaking to the press; I was much more concerned about leaks relative to ongoing police operations in which lives would be placed in danger. The strategies were not kidnapping cases, they weren't homicide or terrorist investigations, they were development of public policy and I encouraged participants from a wide cross section of the department to be involved in their creation, development, and the announcement of the successful solution of crimes. If something leaked from so large a group, so be it.

Sometimes leaks, no matter how inadvertent, gave us a sense of how the plan might go over with the press and public. One of our potentially more controversial ideas—allowing local religious leaders to accept weapons from members of their congregations and turn them in to the police in return for the gun owner's anonymity—hit the papers and demanded comment. I said, “Look, I'm not going to license every minister in New York to become a collection point for Uzis. We need the police one step closer to that process.” We created an amnesty program for people who turned in weapons at the precincts. A bad proposal leaked, but it didn't do us any harm, and it certainly didn't bother me. My concern was not that the public learn about these strategies, only that they worked.

But City Hall went wild over leaks. We heard it from the mayor's staff, including the mayor's criminal-justice coordinator, Katie Lapp: “I'm
warning you, the mayor went ballistic!” And each time a strategy was announced and previews of it appeared in the papers the day before, we'd get the same accusation: We were leaking it to
The
New York Times
, the
Times
was our paper, we were playing it.

The Hall demanded complete secrecy so Giuliani could take the lead in announcing these strategies to the public and assume credit for their initiation and development. From a political standpoint it was understandable; he would need to show success in producing on his campaign promises to be reelected. No matter who created the concepts or was going to run the operation, the public unveiling of any and all police strategies had to come from the mayor.

My staff began to take umbrage at the attempt on the part of the mayor's staff to rewrite history. The strategies and most of the ideas involved in them had been born within the Police Department, but some in the Hall asserted that they had created them. At some of the joint meetings to discuss finalization of the strategies, some of the mayor's staff actually spoke of themselves as the principal authors. We had sweat blood developing and writing these strategies; now they were drinking it. Most of the time, Maple and Timoney just rolled their eyes. They joked with each other, sat in a corner, and whispered: “When Rudy was a kid, did he ever once get to school with his lunch money?” Still, the Hall persisted.

One way to stop the leaks was to stop including so many people in the conception of the strategies. I refused. The policy of inclusion was a major component in my management practice, and I would defeat myself if I caved in and abandoned it. Why should I exclude many of the ideas that were, in fact, strengthening the strategies? So the leaks continued and so did the raging.

The mayor's aides burned up the phone lines saying Rudy was furious, and after some bruising conversations, Miller and Maple and LaPorte trooped into my office and told me, “They are so crazed over there that when we go to the meeting this week, we'd better be prepared,” and they would click off the issues. They had devised a system to gauge just how irate the mayor was supposed to be: the phone-book scale—how many phone books they should put down their pants before they went to the mayor's office to take their beating. They had phone-book meetings and double phone-book meetings, white-page meetings and yellow-page meetings and yellow-
and
white-page meetings! They expected to go over there and have the mayor say to me, “Now, I think my people have talked to your people about this, but I want to go through it, you and me.” But I
never heard about it from Giuliani. He never brought up the inflamma-tory subjects at our meetings. “Meanwhile,” said Miller, “our heinies would be hurting for two weeks.”

Another factor in the mayor's difficult romance with the police department was that we were quite obviously having fun. Giuliani was a former federal prosecutor, and a large percentage of his inner circle had also come from that world. They had had incredible intimacy with cases and investigations, and while their business was now politics, law enforcement was what they knew, it's what they enjoyed. My job was fun, particularly dealing with my cast of characters. We briefed the mayor on some cases at the weekly meetings—“We have to call the U.S. attorney on this,” “We're implementing a unique strategy on that”—and it got their juices flowing. We could see it. They had all the frustrations of dealing with the budget and school issues and labor contracts, and when they got to the police, it was like recess. Our work was important and exciting, and it made news, and for the backroom boys at City Hall, it had the added benefit of being politically valuable.