Report to the Commissioner Read online

  Q: What’s wrong?

  A: I don’t know. I’m just very nervous in here. Is it okay if I sit over there?

  Q: Sure, go ahead.

  A: Thanks.

  Q: So you went into the 16th squad . . .

  A: Yeah.

  Q: Are you all right?

  A: (No response)

  Q: Do you want to stop for a while?

  A: I’m just a little nervous. I’ve been a little scared since they put me in here. I never get any sleep in here. I’ve been very scared. What’s going to happen to me? No one tells me. You know how detectives are, and the doctors are just as bad. My lawyer says everything’s fine, that I shouldn’t even be suspended, but I’ve heard lawyers talking to clients before. Jackson seems like a really tough guy, and I’ve heard about him before, and he’ll bury me, I know he will, if he thinks he’s got the evidence. Some of them think the grooviest thing they can do is lock up a cop. And they have to lock me up, Captain. That’s what scares me so much. They have to lock me up. Because if they convict me and put me away then everything’s fine for them. They had a bad cop, a bad apple, but he’s just one out of 35,000 and we’ve put him away good and you shouldn’t judge the department by one bad apple. But if they don’t send me away, then it’s like saying it wasn’t my fault, and so whose fault was it? I mean when a cop kills another cop, it’s gotta be somebody’s fault, right? Every guy riding a subway with a Daily News in his hands knows that everything is someone’s fault. So if it’s not my fault, then whose is it? They can’t answer that question, so they have to lock me up. And they’re gonna lock me up. They’re gonna do it, Captain. They’re gonna lock me up. They’re gonna say I took a taxi up to that flat, premeditating like hell all the way, and when I got there I shot her to death. Murder I. And if I want to cop out to manslaughter, maybe Jackson’ll let me. But I’m gonna go away, Captain. I’m goin’ away.

  Q: Bo—

  A: This is a creepy office. The whole place is creepy. The only thing I like about this place is that it’s quiet. No one talks to anyone in here, and when they do it’s in whispers. Sometimes there’s an argument or a fight or something and a lot of yelling back and forth, but then it stops and it’s quiet again and you don’t hear anything except maybe a radio way down low or the TV. The nurses never talk to anyone. It’s very quiet.

  Q: It’s nice sometimes, being where no one talks much.

  A: Yeah, except Joey yells a lot.

  Q: Who’s Joey?

  A: I knew him on the street. They used to pick him up a lot and send him in here for observation, and now here I am in here with him. He doesn’t have any legs. He pushes himself around on a piece of wood that’s nailed to two skate boards. He sells pencils on Seventh Avenue. He’s real mean. Sometimes he kind of goes off and starts swearing at people and biting at their ankles, and that’s when they send him in here. He told me yesterday he’d been in here twenty-seven times. I got to know him on the street. He had something to do with this case. You know that. He’s really got Basset’s number—Doctor Melton, the chief shrink here—this is his office. Joey hates him, and I see his point. Basset is weirder than anyone in here. Joey calls him Basset because of his cheeks and his jowls. He’s about sixty-five years old and they hang way down, and he never smiles, just hides in here, in his office all day. All his clothes are about a hundred sizes too big and he doesn’t wear any belt or suspenders and when he does come out of the office he walks around with one hand holding his pants up like he’d just jumped up from the john. About once or twice a day he comes out of his office and just moves around the patients, sort of like he was trying to be friendly, you know, making little gestures, putting a hand on someone’s shoulder or something like that, but there’s just the gesture there, there’s nothing behind it. Then he goes back into his office to hide some more. Joey really has his number.

  Q: Tell me a little bit more about Joey.

  A: He’s young, about twenty-five I guess, blond, not a bad-looking guy—just no legs and a little crazy is all. He’s not stupid, either. Maybe crazy, but not dumb. I think the only thing that keeps him alive in here is terrorizing Basset. He snaps at him like a dog and yanks at his pants and laughs like hell. You should hear that laugh, like a shriek. They won’t let him have his skate board in here, so he just sits on his bed till someone moves him to one of the chairs by the TV, and sometimes when the chairs are all full they sit him on the floor on a pillow. One of the other patients, I mean. The nurses won’t go near him because he bites them. Most of the time I do it. And that’s some experience, Captain, putting your hands under the wet armpits of a legless lunatic and lugging him over and setting him down in front of a TV set like some potted plant or something. One night we all went to bed and the TV was still on and a nurse came in and turned it off and about half an hour later I heard a sound and I listened and then I went over by the TV in the dark and it was Joey sitting there crying. No one had moved him back to his bed. So I lifted him up and put him on his bed and he grabbed my hand and I thought he was going to bite it, but I didn’t pull it away and instead he kissed it. Just kissed it and let it go. Boy, I didn’t get any sleep that night.

  Q: Tell me how you happened to get into the Police Department.

  A: It seems pretty strange, doesn’t it. Impossible. I was never a cop. Cops are born. I went to the academy and I wore the uniform, but I was never a cop. The academy was just like school. Everything they taught was very neat and logical and understandable. And not at all like what I found when I got out on the street. That was a different world.

  Q: Well, before we get into that, let’s go back further. Tell me something about . . . You’re from?

  A: New York. I was born in New York.

  Q: And your parents?

  A: My mother, too. My father’s from Charleston, South Carolina. His father had a restaurant there, outside the Naval Base. And when the war started, my father joined the Navy. He was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a Boatswains Mate, and when the war ended he got a job doing something, I don’t know what, at the Navy Yard there. And that was when he married my mother. And her father was a cop, and I guess he, my father, didn’t like working in the Navy Yard there too much, whatever he was doing, and so he joined the PD.

  Q: Where’d you live?

  A: Stanton Street, the Lower East Side, until I was eight, and then we moved to Long Island, to Massapequa, I think when Dad got his gold shield.

  Q: How’d you like Stanton Street? That’s a rough neighborhood to grow up in.

  A: Rough is right. When I was about six I was walking behind my brother who was walking with a couple of older kids, and I was just following, because the other kids were older and I didn’t like them, I was afraid of them. I think they were kids we weren’t supposed to play with, something like that. And they dropped back behind my brother a couple of steps and were whispering and I could hear them and they were talking about beating him up and taking something he had, some money or something, I don’t know, and I heard them, and I saw some empty bottles in a doorway and I picked one up and just kept walking along holding it behind me and when they jumped my brother I started swinging with the bottle. They were surprised as hell. They came off my brother and they looked at me like I was crazy or something, this little kid going at them with this bottle, and then they jumped me and they took the bottle away and beat the shit out of me until my brother came to the rescue and they got tired of pounding me and left.

  Q: How old was your brother?

  A: Three years older than me. Nine. And we were both really scared, because I was all bloody and we figured my father would kill us for fighting like that, and our clothes were torn and everything. So we tried to clean each other up a little, and then we went home and my father didn’t do anything. I remember he just told us to change our clothes, and my mother got all upset and cried, but my father never got mad or anything. We couldn’t figure it out.

  I was really happy when we moved. I didn’t like it there, on S
tanton Street, at all. I was always getting in fights. Not getting into them really—other people were getting into fights with me. I always tried to go around people, you understand? But around there it was like a way of life, big people beat up on little people. If you weren’t beating up on someone you were a sissy, there was something wrong with you. I didn’t mind people thinking I was a sissy if they wanted to, I mean I didn’t like them anyway whatever they thought. But all the time, everywhere I went, to school, to the store, anywhere, I was looking out for someone I’d have to fight with, just to keep from getting completely beaten up. So when we moved to Massapequa I was very happy. It was like moving into civilization. Grass and trees. And there was this kid across the street, Roger Berenson, I still remember his name, who made model airplanes. Not just model airplanes, radio-controlled model airplanes, big things, wing spans long as our arms, and he was only nine. I thought he was some kind of genius. We were very good friends. After the savages who infested Stanton Street, this guy was fabulous. And then later, in junior high, he got a little weird. Like in biology he was a little too eager to cut things up, you know what I mean? He’d dissect his own frog and then go around wanting to help everyone else cut up their frogs. He had a place in his cellar where he made radios, transmitters, everything, he called it his laboratory, and he had a lot of chemicals, not just a chemical set like you get for Christmas, but professional stuff he bought some place in Brooklyn, and he’d make bombs and take them out to the beach and blow them up, and then he got into rockets and he was blasting mice up in rockets. He was the first friend I ever had. And his sister. Dumb, really dumb. Her brother got all the brains. But she was nice, and she liked me and she was fairly pretty and we got along very well. Around junior high school when Roger started getting strange with the frogs and everything, and the bombs and rockets in the cellar, I started spending more time with his sister, going to movies and things. She wasn’t bad-looking, as I said, and she had this fantastic body, really an unbelievable body. We started out like friends, because I was always with her brother, and then we started dating, and she really drove me wild. She found out what kind of body she had and she was torturing me with it. I went out with her, off and on, for two years, and then I remember in high school I finally made it with her, after all that time, the first girl I ever made love to.

  But let’s see. Right. We moved to Massapequa and I wasn’t getting slaughtered any more. I had one more fight, the last fight I ever had in my life, before this thing happened. And it was over that same girl, Nancy Berenson, Roger’s sister. In high school, some older kid, a senior I guess, some jerk on the football team or something like that, started insulting her. She wouldn’t go out with him or neck with him or something, and one day in school, in front of me and a lot of other kids, he started telling her what great tits she had, and making faces like he was drooling over them, and he went on and on with it and he wouldn’t stop, and finally I hit him. And the minute I hit him, I knew I’d made a mistake. He was bigger than I was, and lots stronger, and he kicked the shit out of me. And the important thing, the significant thing about that, was the lecture it got me from my old man. It came out of him all ready-made, like he’d had it down for years, just waiting for the chance to deliver it. All about authority, and bullies, and responsibility. I was very embarrassed, humiliated, at the beating that kid gave me, and my father sat me down and he said that to get along in the world everyone has to have some kind of muscle, some kind of power, but that responsibility is more important than power. That someone who behaves with responsibility will always come out ahead of a guy who just has muscle. And that the most powerful thing you can have is muscle and responsibility. And that one of the things responsibility means is never betraying the power you have, or the people who give it to you, or the people who trust you to use it properly, who depend on your using it properly to protect them or help them. So my father made me feel like I wasn’t such a jerk for getting beaten up by that football guy, like I’d done the right thing in standing up against him, even though I got pounded. And I was impressed by what he said. Especially the loyalty part, the trust, not betraying. That was very important to my father, and I understood it and it was important to me. But it can make you tough. I mean it can make you too strong. A few months after I got that lecture, Tony, my dad’s partner, came over to the house and they were watching TV, flipping around the channels, and on one channel some young girls, thirteen, fourteen years old, were dancing, bouncing around, very sexy, like they’re making love to the television camera. And my father says, “Tell me, Tony, if you had a daughter like that, would you take her on a fishing trip or not?”

  And Tony just laughed and they changed the channel. They didn’t even know I was there. But I thought about it for a long time.

  Q: What’s a fishing trip?

  A: You know, where two people go out fishing on a boat and only one comes back, and says they had an accident.

  Q: A little while ago, you said you got into the job because of your father.

  A: Right. He wanted me to be a detective. So I joined the department, and because he had some good hooks I got into the detective division very fast, in a couple of months.

  Q: Is that all? That sounds like the short version.

  A: Well, he had wanted my brother to be a detective. My brother was three years older than me. But then my brother wanted to join the Marines, and my father didn’t want to fight against that, and I guess he thought that he could be a cop when he got out. But he never got out. I mean he was killed. Do you want to know about that?

  Q: I want to know about everything.

  A: Well, they just called and they told us Walt, my brother, was dead. I’d thought they always sent telegrams. But they called. And my mother came to tell me, and her whole face was covered with fear, like she didn’t know what would happen when she told me. Nothing happened. I was in his room reading, and I stayed there. Dad went out in the garden and pulled weeds. He didn’t know how to act, so he just didn’t act at all. No one knew what to do. Nothing that personal had happened to all of us together before. We all had dinner that night. It was terrible. No one said anything. I never knew sadness could be so embarrassing.

  I stayed in Walt’s room for two days, reading his books and thinking. It was as if it was my fault. As if I’d wished it, and it came true. Because it solved a problem for me, a big problem. I didn’t have to worry about the Army any more, or about C.O. status, or about the absolute living hell it would be for my dad if I claimed C.O. status, or about any of the things that were scaring me about going in the Army and having to kill people. Walt had saved me from that. Mother said, “They can’t take Bo now, can they?” And Dad said, “No, they can’t.” It was just about the only words anyone spoke for days after the phone call. I spent a long time trying to figure out the way I felt when Mother and Dad said that. I was happy. But was I happy that I didn’t have to go in the Army, or was I happy that Walt had been killed and so I didn’t have to go in the Army?

  Q: How was he killed?

  A: He was in Vietnam, and he’d been wounded, just a small wound in the hand, one of his fingers. Another man in his squad stepped on a mine and a little piece of it just took off my brother’s finger. And he was lifted out with some other wounded and when they were in the air they got a call to pick up some more wounded, so they went there and when they landed, my brother jumped out of the chopper with the corpsmen to help them, and the VC opened fire and hit my brother in the head. He died in the hospital in Tokyo. Do you know that only two percent of all the wounded that make it to Tokyo die? His face was shot away and a lot of his brain. I think maybe one of the doctors in Tokyo did him a favor and killed him, or just let him die. I wouldn’t feel bad about that. I think it was good, if that’s what happened. So anyway, then I was a sole surviving son so I wasn’t eligible for the draft. My brother saved me from the draft. He didn’t save the country or South Vietnam, but he saved me. And my father wanted me to be a cop. So I join
ed. I figured as long as Walt had saved me from the Army, the least I could do was the next thing to it and be a cop. I knew Dad would start pushing me in that direction anyway in a while, when everyone recovered, if we ever did, and I thought I might as well volunteer without having to be pushed. I owed it to Dad and to Walt and to whatever good reasons there might have been for my going into the Army. And I figured at least it would reduce the benefits I got from Walt’s being killed. But I was afraid. I thought about Dad and the way he was and what a good cop he was and the reputation he had and then I thought about being a cop like that myself and I was almost as afraid as I’d been of going in the Army. I knew I could never be like that. I didn’t think it was a bad way to be, but I could never be like that.

  So I joined the Police Department. I was at N.Y.U., thinking about going to law school, and instead I joined the Police Department. It was what my father wanted me to do, and what Walt would probably have wanted me to do, and to tell you the truth it was easier than arguing. I’ve always just preferred to do what people wanted me to do. When I was a kid I’d just sit and read and try to write poetry and stare out the window and my father would tell me to go outside and do something. I always just wanted to do what people wanted me to do and be left alone. Like at N.Y.U. my roommates were very radical, and they thought I should be radical, too. So I joined the SDS with them. I didn’t care about it at all, but everyone I knew was doing it and if I didn’t I would have had to spend a lot of time explaining and arguing, so I joined. It was easier, and it didn’t make any difference to me. And really, strangely, it paid off, because I had thought it would hurt me in the department, having been in the SDS, but it didn’t, they liked it, and they used it. When I got out of the police academy they put me right into Columbia, actually registered as a student, to try to get close to the SDS people there, and the Weathermen, but I only lasted two days. I really blew it. They had a demonstration the day after I got there, and I was in it, and they kicked me out of the school. They didn’t know I was a cop. An assistant dean—