Cops and Robbers

By Richard Lacayo

Michael Dowd was the kind of cop who gave new meaning to the word moonlighting. It wasn't just any job that the 10-year veteran of the New York City force was working on the side. Dowd was a drug dealer. From scoring free pizza as a rookie he graduated to pocketing cash seized in drug raids and from there simply to robbing dealers outright, sometimes also relieving them of drugs that he would resell. Soon he had formed "a crew" of 15 to 20 officers in his Brooklyn precinct who hit up dealers regularly. Eventually one of them was paying Dowd and another officer $8,000 a week in protection money. Dowd bought four suburban homes and a $35,000 red Corvette. Nobody asked how he managed all that on take-home pay of $400 a week.

In May 1992 Dowd, four other officers and one former officer were arrested for drug trafficking by police in Long Island's Suffolk County. When the arrests hit the papers, it was forehead-slapping time among police brass. Not only had some of their cops become robbers, but the crimes had to be uncovered by a suburban police force. Politicians and the media started asking what had happened to the system for rooting out police corruption established 21 years ago at the urging of the Knapp Commission, the investigatory body that heard Officer Frank Serpico and other police describe a citywide network of rogue cops.

To find out, New York City mayor David Dinkins established the Mollen Commission, named for its chairman, Milton Mollen, a former New York judge. Last week, in the same Manhattan hearing room where the Knapp Commission once sat, the new body heard Dowd and other officers add another lurid chapter to the old story of police corruption. And with many American cities wary that drug money will turn their departments bad, police brass around the country were lending an uneasy ear to the tales of officers sharing lines of coke from the dashboard of their squad cars and scuttling down fire escapes with sacks full of cash stolen from dealers' apartments.

The Mollen Commission has not uncovered a citywide system of payoffs among the 30,000-member force. In fact, last week's testimony focused on three precincts, all in heavy crime areas. But the tales, nevertheless, were troubling. Dowd described how virtually the entire precinct patrol force would rendezvous at times at an inlet on Jamaica Bay, where they would drink, shoot off guns in the air and plan their illegal drug raids.

Onetime Bronx patrolman Bernie Cawley, 29, now serving three years to life for narcotics charges and for selling stolen guns, told the commission why he was known to other cops as the Mechanic. "Because I used to 'tune people up,' " he placidly explained. "It's a police word for beating people." Suspects? he was asked. "No, I was just beating people up in general." In four years on the force, Cawley claimed, he assaulted people as many as 400 times with his nightstick, flashlight and lead-lined gloves. "Who's going to catch us?" he said, shrugging. "We're the police."

"The cops who were engaged in corruption 20 years ago took money to cover up the criminal activity of others," says Michael Armstrong, who was chief counsel to the Knapp Commission. "Now it seems cops have gone into competition with street criminals." For cops as for anyone else, money works like an acid on integrity. Bribes from bootleggers made the 1920s a golden age for crooked police. Gambling syndicates in the 1950s were protected by a payoff system more elaborate than the Internal Revenue Service. Pervasive corruption may have lessened in recent years, as many experts believe, but individual examples seem to have grown more outrageous. In March authorities in Atlanta broke up a ring of weight-lifting officers who were charged with robbing strip clubs and private homes, and even carrying off 450-lb. safes from retail stores.

The deluge of cash that has flowed from the drug trade has created opportunities for quick dirty money on a scale never seen before. In the 1980s Philadelphia saw more than 30 officers convicted of taking part in a scheme to extort money from dealers. In Los Angeles an FBI probe focusing on the L.A. County sheriff's department has resulted so far in 36 indictments and 19 convictions on charges related to enormous thefts of cash during drug raids -- more than $1 million in one instance. "The deputies were pursuing the money more aggressively than they were pursuing drugs," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Bauer.

When cities enlarge their police forces quickly in response to public fears about crime, it can also mean an influx of younger and less well-suited officers. That was a major reason for the enormous corruption scandal that hit Miami in the mid-1980s, when about 10% of the city's police were either jailed, fired or disciplined in connection with a scheme in which officers robbed and sometimes killed cocaine smugglers on the Miami River, then resold the drugs. Many of those involved had been hired when the department had beefed up quickly after the 1980 riots and the Mariel boatlift. "We didn't get the quality of officers we should have," says department spokesman Dave Magnusson.

When it came time to clean house, says former Miami police chief Perry Anderson, civil service board members often chose to protect corrupt cops if there was no hard evidence to convict them in the courts. "I tried to fire 25 people with tarnished badges, but it was next to impossible," he recalls.

The Mollen Commission testimony could also lead to second thoughts on the growth of community policing, the back-to-the-beat philosophy that in recent years has been returning officers to neighborhood patrol in cities around the country, including New York. Getting to know the neighborhood can mean finding more occasions for bribe taking, which is one reason that in many places beat patrolling was scaled back since the 1960s in favor of more isolated squad-car teams.

The real test of a department is not so much whether its officers are tempted by money but whether there is an institutional culture that discourages them from succumbing. In Los Angeles the sheriff's department "brought us the case," says FBI special agent Charlie Parsons. "They worked with us hand in glove throughout the investigation." In the years after it was established, following the Knapp Commission disclosures, the New York City police department's internal affairs division was considered one of the nation's most effective in stalking corruption. But that may not be the case anymore. Police sergeant Joseph Trimboli, a department investigator, told the Mollen Commission that when he tried to root out Dowd and other corrupt cops, his efforts were blocked by higher-ups in the department. At one point, Trimboli claimed, he was called to a meeting of police officials and told he was under suspicion as a drug trafficker. "They did not want this investigation to exist," he said.

A similar story came from a black-hooded undercover informant who told the commission that in 1991 more than a dozen crooked cops from a precinct in Manhattan's East Village had even come up with the idea of a Fourth of July barbecue with local drug dealers. A plan by the local district attorney for the informant to attend, equipped with a listening device, was thwarted when commanders suddenly ordered the officer in charge of the barbecue arrested on drug charges. By tipping off the other officers, that had the effect of scuttling any wider inquiry. No other arrests were made, even though police found the names of five officers in the phone book of a drug dealer.

Last year New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly announced a series of organizational changes, including a larger staff and better-coordinated field investigations, intended to improve internal affairs. His critics say those changes don't go far enough. At last week's hearings two retired members of the internal affairs division, Sergeant James Dowd and Lieut. James Wood, described how they offered evidence last year that two officers were dealing heroin, only to watch department investigators bungle the probe, then accuse Dowd and Wood of wrongdoing instead. Much of that happened after Kelly's reforms had been announced. The Mollen Commission is expected to recommend the establishment of an outside monitoring agency, a move that Kelly and other police brass have expressed some reservations about. "No group is good at policing itself," says Knapp Commission counsel Armstrong. "It doesn't hurt to have somebody looking over their shoulder." An independent body, however, might be less effective at getting co-operation from cops prone to close ranks against outsiders. "You have to have the confidence of officers and information about what's going on internally," says former U.S. Attorney Thomas Puccio, who prosecuted a number of police-corruption cases.

Getting that information was no easier when officers were encouraged to report wrongdoing to authorities within their own department. In many cities that have them, internal affairs divisions are resented within the ranks for getting cops to turn in other cops -- informers are even recruited from police-academy cadets -- and for rarely targeting the brass.

"One of the things that has come out in the hearings is a culture within the department which seems to permit corruption to exist," says Walter Mack, a onetime federal prosecutor who is now New York's deputy commissioner of internal affairs. "But when you're talking about cultural change, you're talking about many years. It's not something that occurs overnight."

Dowd, who is scheduled to be sentenced this month on a guilty plea that could bring him 15 years or more in prison, put it another way. "Cops don't want to turn in other cops," he said. "Cops don't want to be a rat." And even when honest cops are willing to blow the whistle, there may not be anyone willing to listen.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles and Sharon Epperson/New York