The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (55 page)

These were prosecutors; they were familiar with creating damage through investigation. I had seen them do it at the U.S. Attorney's office, I had seen them hound Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines out of office. It was not their practice to see opponents leave the battlefield with honor; for them, it wasn't over until you were carried off on your shield.

Reporters told us City Hall was shopping stories like crazy: “Check phone logs,” “Check travel records,” “Check …” They would find nothing damaging; there was nothing to find. Then the rumors began that I was going to, as Randy Mastro told
Newsweek
, “cash in” on job offers in the private sector. Supposedly, I was offered a high-level position at the Walt Disney Company. Despite my denials, that rumor persisted. There was nothing to it whatsoever, but they were trying to position me as a lame duck, which could seriously undermine my authority to run the department. To blunt the attacks, I surprised them all by publicly releasing information on all my trips, both personal and private, during the time I was police commissioner. I even took the additional step of reimbursing my hosts for several private trips I had taken. I could feel the skids being greased.

Despite their continuing efforts to stir up the media, they were still not in a position to ask me to leave. The decline in crime and disorder in New York was overwhelming and growing every day. Thanks to
Time
magazine, the issue of credit for that turnaround had been resolved. I had a team in place that was successful beyond anyone's hopes or expectations; to fire me and disband it because of personal ambition would have been seen as remarkably petty, not to mention completely against the best interests of the city.

However, it is very difficult to work effectively when you have lost the confidence of the people you work for. Giuliani had made it clear whose police department he thought it was. He had also made it abundantly clear that I would not be allowed to run it. There would be no coup de grâce for me. It was death by a thousand cuts: ethics investigations, constant headlines, meddling micromanagement, leaks, delays, disrespect. I observed the slow strangulation of my ability to run the organization. He created a situation in which I had no choice but to resign.

I had always intended to resign at the end of 1996, when everything I
had planned for the NYPD would have been in place. But after that issue of
Time
came out, the pace quickened. We knew there was going to be trouble. I began to explore outside job possibilities and to speculate as to the appropriate time to take them. I consulted with several friends and advisors, including Dr. Dee Soder of the CEO Prospective Group, a career transition consultant for senior-level CEO's, and Bob Johnson, who provided significant assistance on the best course of action. There were certain things, some symbolic and some operationally significant, I still wanted to accomplish. I wanted the Brooklyn North Drug Initiative, the modified successor to Juggernaut, up and running during my tenure, so City Hall could not take credit for its creation and development. Brooklyn North was finally begun in early March and brought immediate results.

I also wanted to march in the Saint Patrick's Day parade with my father Bill and my son David; they had not been able to make it the prior year. It was a gathering of eagles. Bob Johnson and Bob O'Toole came down specially from Boston. Jack Maple, John Timoney, and Peter LaPorte all walked with me. My whole security detail came. Only Miller was missing, but he was there in spirit.

Finally, after a number of months of discussion with my inner circle, I now had a date set. For their purposes, I needed to let them know. This was not a surprise; we had discussed it over Sunday dinners. At four o'clock Monday afternoon, March 25, I called my inner circle into my office and told them, “I'm leaving.” April 15 would be my last day. That evening Maple, Miller, LaPorte, Cheryl, and I went out to dinner. During the meal, we got word that an off-duty cop had been shot in a housing project on the Lower East Side. Maple left to investigate, I went to the hospital.

I really did not want to leave the job. We'd had many successes in my twenty-seven months as commissioner. Felony crime was down throughout the city by 39 percent, murders were down by 50 percent, and we were geared up for more. Our Brooklyn North Drug Initiative was producing immediate results, it would continue to prove a huge success, and I would have liked to have seen it through citywide. We had another initiative that would broaden hiring practices and make the NYPD look more like the community it polices. Against great odds, we had made New York a safer place to live, work, and visit, and we had convinced people that the police were making it a better city. We had not yet convinced them that this was being done by a department that was not disrespectful, and correcting that was high on my list of priorities. We weren't done yet.

Unfortunately, I was.

Rather than remain in an atmosphere of increasing siege, in an administration that was going to micromanage and interfere with the quality of our work, I decided to resign. I had scheduled a 10:00
A
.
M
. meeting with the mayor the next day; I hadn't told him why, although I think he suspected. Giuliani doesn't like surprises, and during the preceeding weeks, as his staff, through their press leaks, tried to push me out he would repeatedly call me personally to check on the rumors his own people were starting. Even at the end, he did not want to be upstaged.

I watched the headlines on the eleven o'clock TV news and then took my dog Charlie for a walk. I did that every night, went out for
The
New York Times
bulldog edition, came back, caught the tail end of whatever was on, and read the paper. Charlie and I walked around Columbus Circle, down Broadway past the shoe-repair shop and the jeans store, west on Fifty-seventh Street in front of Coliseum Books to the newsstand at the corner of Eighth Avenue. I bought the paper, put it under my arm and walked back. I remember its being chilly.

Years before, the city had installed pedestrian street lights on Central Park South, the wide crosstown boulevard where horse-drawn hansom cabs stand in front of an impressive lineup of well-known hotels. The three-block promenade between Columbus Circle and Fifth Avenue is a tourist haven, a destination, a showcase for upscale New York. That stretch of cobblestone sidewalks bordering the park would be very attractive all lit up, a nice place for the kind of charming stroll New Yorkers would like to take but can't often find.

Like so much of New York in the late 1980s, the lights had been broken and never repaired. They had been broken before I arrived, the large plastic globes smashed, the bulbs shattered, and in the two years I had lived there, no one had fixed them. I had reported them on several occasions to the transportation and parks commissioners. You'd think that in such a heavily trafficked tourist area, the city would take special care. It was a little matter, but it spoke to bigger issues, another broken window that hadn't been fixed. If the city wouldn't repair the amenities in such a lovely, wealthy, and highly visible part of town, what must it take to get something done in a poor neighborhood where only the locals are looking? I looked across the street at the darkness. Still broken.

The headline of the lead editorial read, “Thank You, Mr. Bratton.” That sounded all right. It was clear that I would not be commissioner much longer, and I thought that was a proper response. But the editorial itself
was not the one I wanted. The
Times
recognized the department's turnaround in reducing crime and disorder, but the editorial focused more on the difficulties between me and the mayor than on my team's accomplishments. It also included all the Hall's well-crafted criticisms of me. While I like good press, my style was really not to chase the newspapers, certainly not with the relentlessness of City Hall, who would spoon-feed selected reporters and then call editors immediately as they saw an unfavorable story and lean on them to make changes. I hadn't lobbied the
Times
to include angles that showed me to my best advantage. Perhaps I should have. I was disappointed. Still, the headline was good.

The next morning at six-thirty, my security detail, as always, was waiting downstairs. I said good morning, got in, and thumbed through the papers. “Well, would you look at this.”

The
Times
had changed the headline. What at midnight had read “Thank You, Mr. Bratton” was now “Time to Move On.” Had the Hall actually gotten to
The New York Times
? When they were asked, the
Times
denied it. It was, truly, time for me to move on.

The mayor called me in my office at about quarter to eight from the van he used for transport. He asked if I was resigning; he had heard it reported on the news. I told him I was and that I was sorry he had first heard about it through the media and not from me directly.

As Maple, Timoney, LaPorte, and I walked from headquarters to City Hall for the ten o'clock meeting, we were charged by a phalanx of media. John Miller was there representing WNBC-TV. Louis Anemone showed up at City Hall with his sidearm strapped outside his jacket. “I heard there was an unruly mob,” he said. “It turns out it was the press.”

There was nothing exciting about my telling the mayor I was resigning. We spoke briefly, I recommended that he promote Timoney to commissioner and Maple to first deputy, and then we met the press in the Blue Room. Nothing revealing was said there, either. Giuliani and I were both very politic and mutually complimentary. We even joked a little.

Timoney exited the press conference with a friend,
Daily News
columnist Mike Daly. He thought I had been too easygoing. “That was disgusting,” he said.

Timoney deserved a shot at commissioner. He was completely familiar with every facet of our operation, and with him in charge the NYPD wouldn't miss a beat. I felt the job should go to someone inside the NYPD's new way of thinking. Timoney himself had said as much to the
New York Post
's police-gossip columnist, Murray Weiss. “If I don't get it,”
he'd told Weiss, “I'm outta here.” Maple and Anemone, who the papers reported were both on the mayor's shortlist of candidates, both tried to talk him out of it. Anemone said, “If I get it, you're not going to stay?”

“You're a great man, Louie, but I'm outta here.”

Wednesday evening, the day after I resigned, Timoney had gone to bed about eleven. At one in the morning, Peter LaPorte called him. Maple's interview had been scheduled, Peter said, and Anemone's; Timoney's hadn't. He tossed and turned for several more hours, got up at five-thirty, ran twelve miles, and got to his office about eight. An hour later, one of my team came in and told him, “I just heard Peter Powers talking about Howard Safir.” Safir was the fire commissioner, a twenty-year friend of Giuliani, a former fed who had retired from the U.S. Marshals, and another name on the shortlist. “Powers said they were going to announce Safir as commissioner,” relayed the man. “Someone said, ‘What if Timoney says he'll resign?’ He said, ‘Well, nobody's irreplaceable.’”

Timoney's phone kept ringing. Come to City Hall at quarter to eleven; then eleven-fifteen, then, a quarter to twelve. There was a feeding frenzy on the TV news. The new commissioner would definitely be Safir. Reporters were calling looking for comment, and Timoney started to stew. He didn't like being treated like a yo-yo. “If there's no chance, what am I going over there for? I'm not going over,” he thought. “Screw him.”

Miller called. Timoney asked, “What's going on over there, Johnny?”

Miller, who knows everything, said, “I think it's Safir.”

“Well then, screw him. I'm not going to go over there if it's Safir.”

“No, you can't. It's like an order. You're a cop, you can't say no.”

“Well, if you put it that way. Okay, I ain't gonna be happy, but I'll go over there.”

Good soldier that he was, Timoney arrived. The mayor said, “I've decided on Howard.” Timoney began to see red. “I know you're upset, you're angry, but please, think about it. The cops need you, the citizens need you…. Don't do anything rash. Will you please think about it and talk to Howard?” The meeting was over in thirty seconds.

Back in his office, the reporters called and told Timoney all the things they'd known beforehand but wouldn't say, that the whole thing had been a done deal. One reporter said that a month or two earlier, Safir had told people in the fire department that he was going to be the police commissioner. Timoney was furious. He felt like a fool for even entertaining the notion that Giuliani might appoint him. “Who the hell does this guy think he is, treating me like this, treating the police department like this!”

Over lunch, as Timoney began talking with two old friends and retired detectives, things became clear. “I've gotta make a call,” he said. He phoned a friend,
Daily News
columnist Mike McAlary. “Mike, I'm outta here. There's no way I'm gonna prop up some lightweight.” He called Giuliani some names. “Put that in there,” he insisted.

So Timoney called Safir a “lightweight” in the paper. I got a call from Denny Young. The mayor wanted Timoney out of the building immediately. Our sources told us there was serious consideration being given to breaking Timoney down to the rank of captain. “I could care less,” he said. “I'm resigning, what's the big deal?” The big deal was his pension.

In the NYPD, your pension is calculated on the rank you hold on your last day on the job. We called the department lawyers and personnel administrators, who told us that resignations didn't take effect for thirty days, which meant that Timoney was vulnerable. Interestingly, they had been contacted by City Hall concerning the same issue. The rumors were true. If they busted him back to captain, his pension would decrease by $35,000 per year. Apparently, the mayor was prepared to cost Timoney $35,000 a year for the rest of his life for calling the new commissioner a lightweight. Timoney says this threat wasn't rescinded until Lou Matarazzo, head of the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, called Staten Island Borough President and Giuliani supporter Guy Molinari and told him that if the mayor took a run at Timoney's pension, there would be 20,000 cops on the steps of City Hall in the morning. City Hall denied the threat had ever been entertained, let alone made, but we knew different.