Incident in the 70th Precinct (2024)

McAlary believed he was hearing the authentic voice of a desperate and courageous cop. Driving in from his house on Long Island the next day, he ran some checks on the name Louima—"standard Journalism 101 stuff," he told me—and headed directly to Coney Island Hospital. There, he met Brian Figeroux, Micheline Louima, and Abner's parents.

The group found a freight elevator—the passenger elevator was broken—and went straight to intensive care. "There was a cop on the door, and he nodded at me and let me in," says McAlary. "Either that cop was the dumbest cop of all time or he wanted people to know.

"It was one of the first times Louima had seen his family … and he started to cry.… They closed the curtain around us. And 40 minutes later, as we were leaving, an administrator was scurrying down the hall to throw us out. 'Who's in there? McAlary? We can't have this!' she said."

From his car, McAlary called his editor. "Clear the decks," he announced.

Four hours after the message was left for McAlary, Tom Bruder was coming onto his shift. He had already been tipped by Tom Wiese "that there was trouble on his Friday collar." "What are you talking about?" Bruder asked. He had a sick feeling in his stomach, he says. Wiese's call had been made at five a.m., and his voice was strained with urgency, Bruder later told me, but he insisted that Wiese had given him no details. When he got to the 7-0, he says, "Internal Affairs was all over the building." He looked down the vast corridor of his life and saw it caving in around him. He was two weeks away from his transfer to Nassau County and that huge raise. Speaking for the first time about the case, Bruder came to see me with his lawyer, Stuart London. That day, he says, he had called his partner, Jimmy Hughes. "Jimmy, you are not going to believe this," Bruder said. "I am not going to Nassau. There is an investigation, and I am in the middle of it."

By Tuesday afternoon, the news van from NY1 was on its way to Coney Island Hospital for the five p.m. live feed, but it ran into trouble on the Belt Parkway. Nevertheless, the reporter, Aram Roston, broke the story on the seven o'clock news. By six p.m., Garry Pierre-Pierre of The New York Times had phoned Tatiana Wah back and was on a conference call with Pastor Nicolas. He later dictated the facts he had gathered to the night rewrite person.

Not until seven p.m. did the telephone ring in Mayor Giuliani's white security van. It was the police commissioner. Safir said, "We have a serious problem." The mayor was attending his son Andrew's Little League game. He went home and "remained on the phone for the next three or four hours," he told Ted Koppel. The Times debated where to run the story, placing it not on page one but as the lead above the fold in the Metro section.

On Wednesday morning, Tom Bruder saw the mob of cameras at the 7-0 and left the precinct by the back door. McAlary's piece was on the front page of the News with a picture of a wan Abner Louima in his hospital bed and a banner headline: tortured by cops. "I could not read it," Bruder says. "I kept saying, 'What are they talking about?' I was silent the whole day. It was like, What? If this truly happened in the bathroom, then this is a sick thing and no one would be silent about it."

Five days after the alleged incident, Abner Louima speaks to the press about his ordeal from his bed at Coney Island Hospital.

The Internal Affairs squad was opening every locker at the 7-0. Volpe's dreadlock collection had reportedly been spirited away by his pals. Behind one set of lockers, the squad discovered a mop handle and had it sent out to the crime lab. The P.B.A. reps had also landed, and had imposed the 48-hour right to silence that is in their union contract. They met with Volpe, Bruder, Schwarz, and Wiese and told them in no uncertain terms that they would need lawyers. According to Bruder, Volpe's brother Damian was also present, acting as the policemen's representative. Bruder, said one senior investigator, appeared stunned, and stared at Justin Volpe when he said, "I am going to ride this out. It was a gay thing that happened at the club. We will ride this out."

That afternoon, when Bruder appeared at the P.B.A. attorneys' office to meet his lawyer, Stuart London, he was sobbing. "He could not walk into the conference room," London says. Two officers from Internal Affairs had gone to Bruder's door and taken his badge and gun. The atmosphere at the P.B.A. was ominous. Thomas Wiese's lawyer called Internal Affairs to say that Wiese would give a statement. "We don't want to talk to him until Friday," he was told. It took until Sunday to interview him. Wiese insisted that his partner, Charles Schwarz, had been nowhere near the bathroom. At the time, Wiese was completely unaware that Eric Turetzky had come forward and confirmed the identification of Charles Schwarz to the Brooklyn D.A. "I'm too upset to eat," Turetzky had told his mother, who urged him to go forward and "do the right thing." As he walked out of the precinct house, one P.B.A. delegate approached him. "What the hell are you doing?" the delegate asked.

"You know very well what I'm doing," Turetzky said.

The next morning, Wiese failed the lie-detector test and was indicted, but his lawyer says he passed a second.

It is a paradox in the N.Y.P.D. under Howard Safir and Rudy Giuliani that while there is zero tolerance for crime, there may not be zero tolerance for police crime—particularly brutality. A wink and a nod are given to hundreds of cases on a yearly basis. According to the comptroller's statistics, the number of brutality claims has more than doubled in the last 10 years, from 1,229 in 1987 to 2,735 between 1996 and 1997. The city has a method of dealing with such charges: it pays. In the last year, $27.3 million was paid out to settle claims, up from $19.5 million the previous year. With rare exceptions, the accused officers were not penalized. According to the Times, personal-injury claims against the Police Department have skyrocketed, climbing 80 percent during the past decade. This is due in part to an enlarged police force and the fact that there are more policemen on the streets, as well as to the weakness of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (C.C.R.B.), which rarely substantiates complaints. Although the number of complaints rose dramatically during Giuliani's administration, it went down 21 percent during the first five months of this year. In the previous administration of David Dinkins, the bar had been raised on acceptable criminal activities. Low-level drug dealers were not aggressively prosecuted, and in the case of the 1991 riot in Crown Heights, the mob was not quelled for four days. Giuliani created a different atmosphere. He hired as his police commissioner the innovative William Bratton and lowered the bar on criminal activities.

Are all these claims legitimate? The police complain that there are no civil or criminal penalties for filing a false claim. Still, the situation in New York, as in many other cities, is severe. In 1996, Amnesty International issued a searing report stating that there was a pattern of alleged abuse by the N.Y.P.D., particularly in high-crime precincts with large minority populations.

For many, the allegation of defiling Abner Louima's rectum with a stick was an aberration with intense sexual implications. "The most brutal cops I know are disgusted by the thought of touching a prisoner's rectum," said one police expert. "They might beat the shit out of someone and leave them for dead in a field, but they wouldn't dream of getting near their private parts." According to Earl Caldwell, an African-American reporter hired by the Times in 1967, "When you strip a man of his clothing and another man is holding him, there is something sexual being activated. This thing between black men and white cops is as old as the hills. It is not written about or talked about in the white press, but it sure is on the black side of town.… I know of white cops who pull guns on black cops to keep them silent when they see this kind of thing."

Caldwell, a specialist in police brutality, recalls how, in 1970, Philadelphia's police commissioner, Frank Rizzo, proudly dismissed the public outcry over a news photo of Black Panthers stripped naked on the street after a raid by his cops. "That was the first case like this that got national attention," Caldwell says. "To me, there is the ultimate question: Is this degradation or wish fulfillment?" Caldwell has said he was fired by the Daily News in 1994, when a column he wrote about a police officer accused of raping five black livery drivers was pulled by his editor. The News said Caldwell resigned.

"Most men are homophobic," Herold Nicolas told me. "To even think about what happened to Abner. A man's organ is four to nine inches and that stick was two feet long."

Samuel Nicolas said, "I've heard that several cops routinely ask young black guys to spread their cheeks. I don't know if this means they're homosexual, but if you castrate a man, it's a way of taking away his dignity."

Even the most compelling brutality cases are difficult to prosecute. The C.C.R.B. is characterized as ineffectual even by its supporters—only 1 percent of the recent complaints have reportedly led to disciplinary action. In court, the cases are often "shitcanned," in the parlance of the district attorney, meaning they are thrown out of court or receive a lesser charge.

When Nicole Marcano, an honors graduate of an elite women's college in Trinidad, came to America in 1989, she worked as a legal secretary in New York. Her boyfriend, Brian Benjamin-Benn, owned a Brooklyn body shop. One evening in 1992, she rode with him to deliver a Nissan Pathfinder to a customer. Two police cars from the 71st Precinct, in Crown Heights, followed them into the driveway of the house where they were taking the car. The officers questioned the ownership of the vehicle, even though Benjamin-Benn told them it was a repair job. "Every time he tried to explain, they pushed him against the gate with such force that he was hitting his head," Marcano says. When she protested, she claims, one police officer, John Pirozzi, smashed her in the face, knocking her unconscious. She was handcuffed and thrown into the backseat of the patrol car. She alleged that, when she came to, Pirozzi smacked her and said, "That's what happens when you assault a police officer, you little black bitch." Blood was pouring down her face, and she fainted.

When she told them she was a legal secretary, "they just scoffed, 'So, big deal,'" Marcano said. The routine delivery became a New York nightmare: Marcano wound up in Central Booking with a broken jaw, a missing tooth, and a face swollen to twice its normal size. "I was scared out of my mind," she told me. Twenty-four hours later, when she and Benjamin-Benn finally saw a night-court judge, Pirozzi had issued "a whole bunch of charges"—14 in all. The charges were dismissed, and after Marcano filed a complaint with the C.C.R.B., the Brooklyn D.A.'s office filed criminal charges against Pirozzi. The case was prosecuted vigorously, but the judge, Thaddeus Owens, an African-American, inexplicably set the jury's guilty verdict of aggravated harassment aside, saying he did not "believe [the defendant] did it because she was black." The conviction was later reinstated on appeal.

Ironically, the lawyer for John Pirozzi, Stuart London, now represents Tom Bruder. He also represented Francis Livoti, an officer acquitted of but fired for killing a Bronx man, Anthony Baez, with an illegal choke hold. London, once a Bronx assistant district attorney, describes the gauze around the allegations of police brutality as "a gray area." "There's an altercation. Someone hits the cop, the cop uses reasonable force, then you look at the injuries and try to figure out what happened," he says. London does not believe that Marcano is a credible witness.

A more recent case which might involve Tom Bruder has as yet been unreported. In July, two weeks before Abner Louima was injured, 25-year-old Nicola Fyff went to the movies with her boyfriend, Bernard Golson. Fyff and Golson were in a late-model Jaguar with Fyff's two small children and were stopped allegedly for speeding on Coney Island Avenue. Fyff, an African-American who then worked in Manhattan as a cosmetician for Vidal Sassoon, insisted that they were under the speed limit, but the white cops said they had clocked them at 80 miles per hour. Golson did not have his driver's licence, but he did have identification and the proper registration, which the cops, according to Fyff, did not ask to see. One policeman, in plain clothes, refused to show his own ID, Fyff claims, and said angrily, "Either get out of the car or I will break your fucking window." One of the cops also allegedly called Fyff "a fucking bitch" and threatened to take her children away. Later, Golson was charged with "disorderly conduct" but not with speeding. Fyff, according to her attorney John Lonuzzi, had never been arrested before.

When Fyff became hysterical at the 7-0, she was told by the deskman to leave. Tom Bruder had just arrived on the midnight shift. "He began physically pushing me out of the precinct," she says. "He said, like, 'Get the hell out.'" On the steps with her two children, she recalls, he lost his temper.

"He was, like, 'Get the fuck off the stairs.' He was out of control. He said, 'You are fucking trespassing!'" Then Fyff noticed the plainclothesman who had arrested her boyfriend leaving the precinct for the night. She ran over to write down his license-plate number. "Bruder sees this and says, 'Fuck this shit!,'" Fyff claims. "He comes to me, pushes us … and says, 'What are you going to do? Find his house and shoot him?'" Within minutes, she was handcuffed to a pole and threatened with the loss of her children. She was later taken to a hospital to have her arm X-rayed, but she had no visible sign of serious injuries.

"The doctor basically said to her, 'Get out of here. You are a liar,'" says Bruder, who remembered her immediately and was offhand about the incident. Bruder and his partner, Jimmy Hughes, were at the 7-0 when she returned. "They said, 'Nicola, you're an animal and animals belong in a cage.' They're playing this little game. I was handcuffed and they were walking back and forth in the hall. I said to my boyfriend, who was being held in the next room, 'Do you hear what they are saying to me?' He says, 'Just forget it. Don't pay attention.'"

Bruder vehemently denies Fyff's accusations. "She better have a lot of people who back that up.… She is jumping on the bandwagon."

Like Nicole Marcano, Fyff was taken to Central Booking and placed in a cell with "crackheads and the worst kind of people," she says. "I was ready to go crazy. I needed to see my kids. I am in for almost 24 hours." When she went before the judge, she had been charged with "threatening to burn the precinct down" and "kicking a cop in the stomach." Bruder told me that Fyff was "going crazy.… She stood outside and wrote down a cop's license number and was saying, 'I'll get your m.f.-ing family.' I said, 'You can't do that.'" Bruder was unaware that he is potentially facing another set of charges for assault, false imprisonment, and unlawful arrest. John Lonuzzi intends to bring a suit against the city, Hughes, and Bruder.

According to David Durk, the Police Department whistle-blower who helped persuade Frank Serpico to come forward in 1966, "Nothing has changed. Everything is the way it was when Serpico and I were cops. When I was at the Police Academy, I was given a formal lecture on how to take a bribe. [I was] taught how to give beatings without leaving marks. There is a level of hypocrisy and cynicism that is just mind-boggling.… There are all kinds of arcane things you could do. The specialty of the Suffolk department was great. They put telephone books on people's heads and used pipes to give them concussions, and, of course, there were no marks."

On August 19, the day I met Justin Volpe, his picture was on the front page of the New York Post with the headline braggart: 'no one jumps me and gets away with it.' The paper was on display in the deli downstairs from the office of Marvyn Kornberg, the shrewd and antic trial lawyer known as "the King of Queens Boulevard." In Kornberg's office the phones were ringing constantly as Kornberg slyly negotiated with the callers: "I've heard from everyone—Nightline, CBS, the News, the Post. Geraldo called and—this is the best—he said, 'Maybe Justin will come on and we'll pay for treatment.' He's got a setup where he pays for treatment for people? Can you believe this wackjob?"

Kornberg had invited me to his office to meet Robert Volpe, Justin's father. "You only get 45 minutes," he said. When I arrived, Justin was in the room. "I am not allowed to stay," he said sheepishly. Although Volpe's pictures made him look like a Mob tough, in this setting he was soft-spoken and well mannered. He wore a sweater and chinos and filled the doorframe as he lingered for a few moments with his father. Meanwhile, Kornberg shouted into the phone, "Forget it, Mary! Don't bring that Nightline crew here!"

Robert Volpe wore cowboy boots and a trendy blazer, and had his hair in a small ponytail. He told me, "I think I am going to wake up and this [trial] isn't going to be necessary. It just does not compute.… I will never believe it. People will use the word 'denial,' but it is so beyond what Justin is.… If you were in trouble, you would want Justin, because he cares."

"The only one who talks to Justin is Mike McAlary," Kornberg informed me roughly. McAlary had reported another scoop in the previous day's paper: that Justin Volpe had had a long relationship with an African-American woman named Susan, who worked as an aide in the 7-0. Was Kornberg trying to stop the Volpe-as-racist spin attached to the case? How could anyone think that Justin Volpe hated Haitians if he was involved with a black woman? According to Robert Volpe, the woman spent a lot of time on Staten Island with the family. Although Robert Volpe insists that he always encouraged racial tolerance, he also recalls that, the first time he met Susan, she and Justin had stopped by on their way home from the beach. "I smiled and made some comment about how the sun must have been hot today."

Incident in the 70th Precinct (2024)
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