NEWSLETTER

Illustration by Christy Karacas

Been There, Done That

My dad is a retired cop and so is his brother. All my brothers and cousins are cops. Even my wife is a cop! I was NYPD before I ever put a shield and a uniform on—before I ever carried a gun. It was all around me. The only people my parents ever hung out with were cops. That ended up happening to me, too. I only hang out with cops. I couldn’t hang out with doctors or auto mechanics. I hang out with people who understand me and who I understand.

At this point, I wouldn’t encourage my son to be a New York City police officer. I would encourage him to go to Nassau or Suffolk County. They pay a lot better for doing the same job. The NYPD is very underpaid for the job it does. And that’s not all.

 The NYPD makes the public believe things that aren’t true. Back in the early 90s, there was a place called the Happy Lands Disco up in Harlem. One night there was a male Hispanic there who was upset with his girlfriend. He went into Happy Lands, which was an illegal social club where she was hanging out, and he torched the place. Something like 90 people died. One event, 90 homicides. The following year, Mayor Dinkins got on the air and said, “This year, homicides are down 32 percent.” Well of course homicides are down. The year before we’d had a huge mass murder! That’s how the NYPD practices subterfuge. They play with numbers. It’s PR spin.

I worked in an anti-crime unit on the Lower East Side. That’s plainclothes officers who respond to violent street crimes in progress. Sometimes we rode in a taxicab, sometimes in an unmarked car. We dressed like derelicts. The captain said, “Listen. We need to make robbery collars.” A robbery, by definition, is a larceny with force or the threat of force. So we would, by the stroke of a pen, change a larceny to a robbery. Let’s say someone got pickpocketed. We would say, “Were you scared, sir? Did he push you? Did he pull you?” We’d lean it towards a robbery. Then, boom! The amount of robbery collars goes up.

We have a saying in the NYPD: “When you become a sergeant, you lose one testicle. When you become a lieutenant, you lose the other one. When you make captain, you grow a vagina.” This really happens. Rock ’em, sock ’em cops lose their guts as they rise in the ranks. Sergeant, lieutenant, and captain are all civil service ranks. After that you have deputy inspector, full inspector, deputy chief, assistant chief, and full chief. Those are all discretionary political ranks. But a captain makes inspector on the backs of his cops. That’s just a matter of fact. The police department continually screws the cop. The real cops are the lowest rung on the ladder. Personally, I never wanted to be a sergeant or a lieutenant. I wanted to be a detective. I wanted to arrest people for crimes. I didn’t want to be a guard for the tennis open. I wanted to be a cop. I made hundreds of arrests, and I was involved in thousands. Working in Narcotics in Manhattan, I was taking 12 to 18 felony arrests a month.

My dad was a cop when things were different. It’s his opinion that the job ran better then. Everybody took care of everybody. To me, taking a cup of coffee isn’t corruption. On my first post, I worked all by myself doing the basic cop-on-the-beat thing. I was the sheriff of my town, and I did whatever I had to do. One of the things I was afraid of was being out there and needing help, so I made sure that the right civilians took care of me, and I did good by them. I can’t give a guy a summons for standing in front of his house with an open beer. He doesn’t live on Long Island. It’s not like this guy has a backyard, so I don’t think he deserves a summons and I’m not going to use my authority to break his balls. He’s out there with friends playing dominoes.

It’s very difficult to park your truck in Manhattan. If you’re a cop and you know this storeowner down the block—let’s call him Tony—gets his deliveries on a certain day, you don’t give him a summons for the truck that day. Then maybe he helps you out with something that he sells in return. In business, it would be called bartering. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. You go to see Tony, and he’d do right by you and give you a decent break.

I came on in 1984, when cops were still cops. People feared you, and fear equals compliance. That’s the way it goes. Today, cops pull out their guns on someone and they get laughed at. They know you can’t shoot them. But I never even had to pull my gun out. I carried a non-police-issue blackjack. If I took that jack out, they knew that I was going to open up their head for them.

We need to be a little more thick-skinned in general. I think that the ACLU has ruined this country. We’re allowing thirty or forty attorneys to dictate policy for the majority. That shouldn’t be the case. Here’s my line on being a racist: I hate everybody equally. I don’t go by their race; I go by the crime they’ve committed.

When it comes to the NYPD, it’s my opinion that the thieves and whores from 30 years ago are the ones making policy today. Ray Kelly was a cop 35 years ago. He was on the street doing what he had to do. And now, he’s holier than thou. A cop can’t take a cup of coffee for nothing because that’s corrupt, but captains, chiefs, and inspectors can go to restaurants with community leaders or whatever and get dinner on the arm. That’s called “community relations” instead of corruption. That’s just laughable to me.

DET. LOUIS A. BALESTRIERI


Birthing Babies and Busting Perps

Once I delivered a kid right in the hallway of a Bronx apartment building. That felt good, and it paid off. A few months later, the newborn’s grandfather, who was also the building’s super, tipped me off about a possible drug den in an apartment in the building. My partner and I went up to the door and got a whiff of gas. We knocked and knocked, and got no answer. We went up to the roof to look down into the apartment windows. As we did that, we saw some folks coming out the windows and down the fire escape. So we climbed over and ran down the fire escape. We look into the apartment and see a guy laid out on a bed. We think this guy’s dead, so we go in. Turns out he passed out from the drug fumes. The fucking place is a heroin and cocaine mill for a major player in Brooklyn. We made what was then the largest drug arrest and seizure by NYPD cops in uniform in history, taking in over $9 million in product and over $200,000 in cash. Had we been working for a small department somewhere else in America, we would have surely gotten a promotion. In the NYPD, it was just: “Get back to patrol!”

DAMON RUTA (this issue’s cover star)


CONTINUED:

A Cop's Life: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Next>

< PREV

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

NEXT >

POST A COMMENT [SIGN IN] Hi, in case you haven't heard, you can now sign up to become a "member" of Viceland.com, which entitles you to all sorts of amazing benefits like pictures and a nickname. Click here to make your own profile. You can still comment if you don't, but you gotta do it all 'nonymously.

Name:
Comment: