PRINCE OF THE CITY
"The policeman as flawed hero, a recurrent and enormously popular figure in contemporary fiction has never been done better…. guaranteed to raise the hair on the back of the neck of every reader."
—New York Times Book Review
“Fascinating—suspenseful—thoughtful,
and frightening” ---St. Louis Post Dispatch
“Enthralling” --Boston Globe
“To me Prince of the City is a lesson in morals. I've read it straight through four times Even for someone who has no interest in police work, no interest in drugs, in crime, it is fascinating and moving and intense because it's a story of moral dilemma, of one moral dilemma after another.
—Rudolph Giuliani, Assistant U.S. Attorney, later mayor, New York City
A full selection of The Book of the Month Club
A full selection of the Readers Digest Condensed Book Club
A major motion picture staring Jerry Orbach and Treat Williams, directed by Sidney Lumet
By the same author
NOVELS
The Whole Truth
Only a Game (available on Kindle)
A Priest and a Girl
Strong Wine Red as Blood (available on Kindle)
To Kill a Cop (available on Kindle)
The Fast One (available on Kindle0
Year of the Dragon (available on Kindle)
The Dangerous Edge (available on Kindle)
Hands of a Stranger (available on Kindle)
Man With a Gun (available on Kindle)
A Faint Cold Fear (available on Kindle)
Tainted Evidence (available on Kindle)
Wall of Brass (available on Kindle)
Nowhere to Run (available on Kindle)
The Innocents Within (available on Kindle)
The Enemy of God
Pictures
NON-FICTION
The World Beneath the City
Cars at Speed
The Bizarre World of European Sport
The Cruel Sport
The Swords of Spain
A Star in the Family
Target Blue
Treasure (available on Kindle)
Prince of the City (available on Kindle)
An American Saga
Portraits of France (available on Kindle)
Prince of the City
By Robert Daley
The True Story of a Cop
Who Knew Too Much
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information retrieval system.
Originally published by Houghton Mifflin. Later paperback editions published by Jove, Warner Books (1993) and Moyer Bell (2005)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Prince of the City: the true story of a cop who knew too much
by Robert Daley
Copyright © 1978 by Robert Daley Copyright © 2011 by Riviera Productiions Ltd
Introduction Copyright © 1994 by Rudolph Giuliani
Smashwords Edition
ISBN 978-1-4660 7391-3
1 Leuci, Robert, 1940- 2 New York (City)—Police-
Biography 3 Police corruption-New York
(City) 4 New York (City)—Police I Title
HV7911L44D34 CIP
363 2'092—dc22 2004-061442
[B]
INTRODUCTION
by Rudolph Giuliani
I first met Detective Leuci on the night he was almost killed. I was a real rookie that night, twenty-six years old, even younger than he was. I had been in the U.S. Attorney's office only ten months and had been assigned to a new unit just put together under Mike Shaw.
At that time the U.S Attorney's offices were on the fourth floor of the Federal Courthouse, the big imitation Greek temple on Foley Square. Four young attorneys had been assigned to work for Shaw, of which I was one. The offices were all in a row: Shaw in a fairly big office at one end, the four of us in small offices, then at the other end Nick Scoppetta, also in a big office. We didn't know who Nick was. He was supposed to be a special assistant U S Attorney. We knew Mike Shaw was our boss, but who was Nick? He was described as helping us on a special investigation, but we were not told what this investigation was.
We kept talking among ourselves who is this guy? I used to go into Nick's office and just talk to him, trying to find out. What's he doing here? What is this? We became very friendly, but still he wouldn't tell me anything.
We four young prosecutors were all trying cases and putting cases into the grand jury. Small corruption matters mostly: bribes, kickbacks. The Knapp Commission was investigating police corruption at this time, and one day we were told we would prosecute a group of Knapp's cases immediately after the public hearings ended.
Nick Scoppetta was still working apart from us. We still had no idea what his investigation was.
The star of the Knapp Commission hearings was Patrolman Bill Phillips, who testified to police corruption on all levels, with himself as the most skilled and farthest reaching corrupt cop of all As soon as the hearings ended I put Phillips into the grand jury. I prosecuted the corrupt lieutenant for whom Phillips served as a bagman, and I convicted him. Some other cops pleaded guilty but that was the only trial. There were also two Mafia guys involved. They worked for the Genovese crime family for Fat Tony Salerno.
Phillips knew Fat Tony and said he could get him on tape. Phillips was a shark, with all the instincts of the successful predator. So he was wired up and sent into Tony's social club in Little Italy. He went in there and the television set was on, and he shook hands with Tony. But when Phillips said to him, "Hello Tony," his voice came back through the television set. Immediately Phillips, as sharp as he was, yelled out- "The FBI has this place bugged!" and all the mobsters went running out into the street.
Anyway, Phillips got indicted for murder and most of the other Phillips cases collapsed. Ex-patrolman Phillips was later convicted and is presently serving twenty-five years to life.
I went back to prosecuting other corruption cases, and they got a little bigger: I convicted Congressman Podell; I convicted sixteen or seventeen people from the Model Cities Administration.
By this time we knew a bit more about Nick Scoppetta's operation. We knew there was a detective doing deep undercover work who wasn't going to be surfaced for some time
Police cases were not easy for me. I had four uncles who were police officers. I had lived in the same two-family house as one of them and when I was a child I would see him coming home in his uniform, and I would walk along with him. For a time I had the same kind of desire to be a police officer that many children have. Perhaps in my case it was stronger than in most.
As I got older I decided I wanted to be a doctor or a priest. Even after I became a lawyer I did not see myself working long in law enforcement. I went into the U.S. Attorney's office only to get trial experience, thinking I might stay three or four years, then become a defense lawyer. In he end I stayed eleven years, half as an assistant, and then later, half as U.S. Attorney.
It was a place were you could do the right thing in the right way, prosecute or not prosecute, using reason, emotion and common sense to make a decision that a computer might not make You were not only encouraged to make the right decision but protected while doing it This was true of the two U.S. Attorneys under whom I served, and it was true when I was U.S. Attorney myself. The pressure of the press and the political pressures were never allowed to interfere. When I give lectures on government issues to civics classes I tell them that's what all government is about, ought to be about: people sitting around trying to figure out what was the fair thing to do in a particular situation. What is the fair and just way to deal with this other human being.
There are a number of highly dramatic examples of what I mean in the book that follows, very difficult decisions that had to be made. I think they were all the right decisions. I feel very comfortable with them today, but they were very difficult back then. There aren't that many pure experiences in life, and what became known as the Prince of the City case was the first of them for me
I first met Detective Leuci on a Monday night. I was living in a small apartment in Queens and I was watching the football game on TV. About nine-thirty I got a call from Mike Shaw, my boss, who said I would have to come in immediately because the undercover police officer had got into great trouble that day. The two people who had tried to kill him were in custody. Nick Scoppetta's "deep undercover" investigation was blown, the cop would have to be surfaced, and tomorrow a great many people would have to be arrested all at once. Other people would have to be subpoenaed. A great many cases would have to be thrown into the grand jury almost immediately by myself and the three other young prosecutors.
However, these were cases we knew nothing about. Which to a young and inexperienced prosecutor was a horrifying prospect.
I drove in, parked, and went upstairs, and Mike gave me—gave us all—a whole bunch of documents I was in my office with the door open, reading for the first time about people I would have to question before the grand jury the next day. I was studying the papers and it was fascinating, and I became conscious of a guy pacing back and fourth in the hall outside. That's got to be the undercover detective I thought, that's got to be Bob Leuci, and I went outside and introduced myself
There was a chair in my office and I invited him to come in and sit down, rather than pacing. He wanted to know what the score of the football game was, so we talked about football for a time, and he told me a little about himself, how he had played a little football at some college in the Midwest I had never heard of. He was pretending to be cool, but I could see how upset he was. Well, he had nearly been killed that day. At one point I took him up and down the halls and showed him all the offices. If they were empty I told him who worked there, if they were in use I introduced him. I told him he would be testifying for the next year, year and a half, and these were the men who would put the cases together with him and take them into court. I was trying to reassure him. I gave him a tour of our entire floor of the courthouse. He seemed a very pleasant, ingratiating young man, but tense the whole time. Later he told me I hadn't reassured him at all. The thought of trials, cross-examinations, facing certain of the defendants, terrified him On the street he had been in charge. In here we were in charge, and he didn't trust us. He took me to be completely inexperienced. He said I looked fresh out of law school
He was called into Mike Shaw's office—Nick Scoppetta was in there too—and I went back to work on the documents As I read more of what Detective Leuci had done I became more and more impressed, more and more excited about these cases he had made at such great risk to himself.
I worked on the documents until about three-thirty in the morning, at which time Shaw and Scoppetta called us in and told us to go home. The two people in custody had agreed to cooperate. They had agreed not to burn the investigation. We couldn't be sure of them, but the decision had been made not to go public after all. Detective Leuci would go back undercover, and the investigation would go on.
It lasted some months longer, during which I would see Leuci from time to time, but I had very little to do with him until after Scoppetta and Shaw had left the office, and I was put in overall charge of all the prosecutions, and the whole thing unraveled.
To me Prince of the City is a lesson in morals. I've read it straight through four times Even for someone who has no interest in police work, no interest in drugs, in crime, it is fascinating and moving and intense because it's a story of moral dilemma, of one moral dilemma after another. It reminds me of Plato's account of the Socratic Dialogues. Like Socrates it ponders difficult questions— very often moral questions, sometimes intellectual questions— coming sometimes to inconsistent answers about those questions, particularly the dilemma about where your loyalties lie, what loyalty should be about.
I thought about the book again today when someone asked me if I agreed with Jesse Jackson's campaign in the schools—he is going into public schools telling youngsters that they should inform on other youngsters who have weapons Did I agree that that was the right moral development for children or not1? I said I did. That's often the question that's at issue in Prince of the City. Whose value system are we trying to protect here? A youngster should or shouldn't inform on another youngster who has a gun; a police officer should or shouldn't inform on another police officer who is stealing money or stealing drugs. Are we going to allow the value system of criminals to become our value system? Are we unable to analyze our way through that? In fact, there is no principle whatever involved in protecting a youngster who has a gun or knife, or in protecting a bad cop, loyalty is something higher than that Emotionally it's very very difficult, but the fact is that there is a much higher principle to be served than just emotional loyalty to people. What we're engaged in, in life, is trying to impose the uniquely human capacity to reason on sometimes apparently chaotic experiences. The exercise defines behavior as human.
You've got to ask yourself who you are, what you are, what you stand for What it means to be whatever you are, a police officer if that's what you are. What is it to be a police officer? Is it just a fraternity (and now a sorority as well), or are you serving something higher than that?
Prince of the City is a wonderful exercise in these big questions, which it raises very very dramatically and then answers in different ways; it creates in a dramatic and emotional way difficult moral questions that could easily be applied to people's lives in fifteen or twenty other different kinds of circumstances. That's what I think is the beauty of the book.
one of the most successful of all government enterprises because it changed the ethos of the NYPD. Before Detective Leuci and the Prince of the City cases, the police officer who wanted to be honest was often forced to be dishonest. The police officer who is dishonest now is the police officer who wants to be dishonest It's a different department now.
But if thou wilt offer a holocaust, offer it to the Lord.
JUDGES 13:16
And Samson said to the lad who guided his steps: Suffer me to touch the pillars which support the whole house, and let me lean upon them and rest a little.
JUDGES 16:26
Authors Note All of the events depicted in this book are a matter of factual record, and the people are real No names have been changed. The dialogue has either been taken from concealed tape recordings made at the time the events took place or been carefully reconstructed through interviews with the participants.
Book One
1
They were not ordinary detectives, nor even ordinary narcotics detectives. They were SIU detectives — Special Investigating Unit, New York Police Department — and during the long wait in crowded arraignment courts they stood out, and this was by choice. Their appearance was special, their prisoners were special, and their evidence was special.
Other cops, waiting, were in uniform, or else, if detectives, they wore street clothes: usually lumber jackets, sweaters, corduroy pants, or jeans — the rough clothing of rough men. SIU detectives had adopted a kind of uniform of their own. In winter they affected full-length suede or leather coats, and a number of them, underneath, wore business suits and vests. In summer, SIU detectives tended to sport Italian knit shirts and tailored slacks and loafers. They were forever observing and approving of each other's attire. Also, their fingernails were usually manicured, and in some cases lacquered. They tended to smell of strong scents, and they gave the appearance most times of having just stepped up from a barber's chair — an expensive barber's chair — and in fact, this was often the case. It had become ritual for SIU detectives to spend an hour or two under hot towels, pampering themselves, immediately after breaking a case.
Their prisoners, caged in nearby holding pens, were as extraordinary as themselves. Other cops arrested common thugs, or in narcotics cases, street junkies. The thugs, caged, looked as feral as beasts. The junkies huddled in corners, snot and tears caked to their faces, sitting sometimes beside pools of vomit.
SIU detectives did not bother with junkies, and they came in contact with thugs only by accident — if they happened, for instance, to witness a crime on the way home. Their prisoners usually were expensively dressed and often somewhat glamorous, being Frenchmen or Turks or South Americans, or high-ranking New York Mafiosi. These were the wholesalers, importers, and executives of the narcotics trade, and most of them, waiting caged with common criminals, were trying to puzzle out how the SIU detectives had ever got on to them.
As for evidence, other cops, as they waited, clutched a single gun or knife or crowbar — the weapon with which one or another caged defendant had stuck up an old lady or a store, or burglarized a house. Or, in narcotics cases, transparent evidence envelopes lay on the cops' laps. The envelopes could be seen to contain one or two, or four or five five-dollar bags of heavily cut heroin. Whereas SIU detectives held or sat beside brown paper bundles — or suitcases, or occasionally a steamer trunk — containing pure junk, uncut junk. Whatever the receptacle, it was filled to the brim with narcotics worth maybe a million dollars or more on the street.
Ordinary cops, waiting in court, were sometimes bloody and torn after violent arrests. SIU men always cleaned themselves up first. Court was, in a sense, their stage, and on it they were impeccable. Besides, they were so slick in the taking of prisoners that violence seldom was necessary.
Of course they were too close to the street to avoid it entirely, and certain of their exploits approached the status of legend among ordinary cops. Detective George Bermudez, driving along, one day witnessed the stabbing and robbing of one man by another. Leaping out of his car, he grappled with the assailant, who stabbed him in the heart. Bermudez not only did not die, he hung on to the assailant until help came.
Detective Eddie Codelia, having made an undercover buy in a Harlem tenement, was assaulted in the hallway by four men, who menaced him with guns and a hunting knife pressed to his face. Codelia fell to his knees weeping. He groveled. He begged for his life. He spilled money to the floor. The last thing to spill from his pockets was his gun, with which he shot all four men, killing two instantly.
SIU detectives disdained medals, and rarely put in for them. They were too good for medals; they didn't need them. But sometimes official recognition came anyway, and Codelia was awarded the Medal of Honor, the Police Department's highest decoration.
SIU detectives carried themselves with a kind of presence. They seldom mixed with other cops. In the police world they were as celebrated as film stars, and they were aware of this. In court, when the judge at last mounted the bench, whichever of them was senior would step forward and identify himself by full title: "Detective So-and so, Special Investigating Unit, Narcotics Division."
He would then cut into the head of the line. Invariably, other cops and detectives would let him do it.
When major crimes, particularly homicides, occurred in the city, commanders often borrowed SIU detectives in hope of breaking the case quickly. Detective Robert Leuci, for instance, once brought in a wanted murderer named Johnny Loco singlehandedly at the end of only two days. But it was against the strange code of the SIU detectives to take credit for such arrests. Invariably the murderer was turned over to some squad detective, while the SIU detective went home, or back to the narcotics case from which he had been taken.
To other cops SIU detectives reeked of success. They had style; also, obviously, they had money, more money than cops were supposed to have. But for a long time no one in authority noticed this, or wondered where the money might be coming from.
Of course they were the object of envy.
Not because they had rank. They did not. Like all detectives, they were patrolmen who had been designated to serve as detective-investigators. They held authority over no one. The newest sergeant outranked the most senior first-grade detective, and the newest patrolman was, technically, his equal.
The envy existed because the SIU detective, though perhaps still in his mid or late twenties, had reached the top of his profession; there was no other assignment as good as the one he had. The rules and procedures of the department, which weighted down every other cop, he ignored.
He was virtually unsupervised. SIU headquarters was on the third floor of the First Precinct station house, but some SIU detectives did not go near this office for months at a time, not even on pay day — they would send someone in to pick up their checks. Some of them, in effect, worked out of their houses or their cars.
They were rated on results only. All they had to do was keep making big cases, big seizures of heroin. That they worked hard was never questioned. They were men who would sit on wiretaps or surveillances for days, even weeks at a time, virtually without relief, and never put in for overtime. They were hunters. Theirs was the most elusive game of all, and the kill was always close — maybe tomorrow, maybe even today. They disdained overtime as much as medals or credit for arresting murderers.
But once a narcotics case was made, the major violators arrested, the heroin seized, once the ritual barbering had taken place, many would award themselves, unbeknownst to the Police Department, two weeks' vacation. Then, looking tanned, fit, and as expensively dressed as always, they would come back to work, begin a new case, a new hunt.
They had city wide jurisdiction. They chose their own targets and roamed New York at will. Someone once called them the Princes of the City, for they operated with the impunity, and sometimes with the arrogance, of Renaissance princes. They could enforce any law or not enforce it, arrest anyone or accord freedom. They were immune to arrest themselves. The Princes of the City — they liked this, and adopted it.
The Narcotics Division of the New York Police Department numbered, at the start of the sixties, less than two hundred detectives, all focused on street corner junkies and pushers. In October 1961 two such detectives, Sonny Grosso and Eddie Egan, stumbled upon a Mafia supply ring that imported heroin direct from France. A small squad of the best narcotics detectives then available was thrown together — never more than twenty men in all — and that was the start of the Special Investigating Unit.
Working in conjunction with federal narcotics agents, SIU detectives over the next several months put together their case, effected their arrests, and seized ninety-seven pounds of heroin — the largest street seizure ever up to that time — and in so doing they destroyed the Tuminaros as a major Mafia family. This famous case became a best selling book in 1968 and an Academy Award-winning movie in 1971. Although the world knew it as The French Connection, inside SIU it was always spoken of as the Tuminaro case. Conceptually it became the case every detective sought to match. And on the operational level it made possible the extraordinary freedom of movement SIU detectives came to enjoy; it dominated SIU for the twelve years the unit lasted.
During the sixties, as public outcry swelled and as the Narcotics Division expanded, SIU expanded too, though it never exceeded ten percent of the division's complement. From 1967 to 1972, the period of this story, it stood at about sixty detectives.
One captain, one lieutenant, and five sergeants comprised its command structure — not nearly enough to exert supervisory pressure over so many detectives working alone or in small groups in obscure corners of the city. Several commanders over the years attempted to put in controls, all of which were bitterly resisted by the star detectives, and all of which failed.
The sixty detectives operated normally in four-man teams. One member of each team usually was acknowledged by the others as team leader. It was the team leader's job to pick the target of each investigation and to give out assignments each day.
The team leaders were the elite of the elite. Most were in some way unique. Detective Carl Aguiluz, born in Honduras in 1935, and a naturalized American citizen only from the age of twenty-two, was an exceptional wire man and bugger, the best in SIU. An electronic technician before he became a cop, he knew telephones.
He had never been a patrolman in uniform, for immediately after graduation from the Police Academy he had gone to work undercover for BOSSI, a super-secret police intelligence squad, and he had infiltrated a communist cell in the East Village. When that assignment ended, he went immediately into the Narcotics Division as an arresting officer, and in time was promoted into SIU.
Most SIU detectives could tap a phone at the box in an apartment house basement. But Aguiluz could find the pair of wires that he needed four or five blocks away from the suspect's house. He could read where telephone lines went, and find the binding post. He could bridge his tap onto a dead line so that even experts — the FBI or telephone security — couldn't find it. Planting bugs inside suspects' houses was another of his specialties. He was a good burglar, and he understood the principles of directional transmitters. He left no clues, and no bug he planted was ever discovered.
Also, he spoke Spanish. He was among the first SIU detectives to concentrate on major Hispanic importers, and he quickly developed the technique which, in a later case, led him to the most monumental seizure of all, an entire closet load of heroin and cocaine straight from France. One of his partners was Joe Novoa, who was of Spanish extraction and spoke Spanish with a Castilian accent. Novoa, however, was fair skinned — he looked Irish or even Scandinavian.
In the presence of prisoners, Aguiluz would address Novoa only in English. He would then curse the prisoners roundly in Spanish, and angrily leave the room.
Invariably, the prisoners, as soon as the door slammed, would turn toward each other and begin to discuss their predicament in Spanish, never suspecting that the fair-skinned Novoa, staring stupidly off in some other direction, was at the same time drinking in every word.
Thus it was Novoa who learned of the existence and location of the secret closet, and its secret contents. But it was Aguiluz's ploy, Aguiluz's case.
The next day a newspaper photo went up on the SIU office bulletin board: eight or ten grinning detectives, arms around each other, standing behind a table on which reposed a hundred kilos of narcotics. Over this photo was pasted a hand-lettered headline: can you top THIS?
Detective Joe Nunziata, born in 1932 and raised in Brooklyn, had scarcely ever seen a horse before entering the Police Department. Nonetheless, he became a mounted patrolman in midtown, and it was on horseback that he made his earliest reputation. He seemed to understand everything about horses just as, when he came into Narcotics, he immediately seemed to understand everything about the drug scene, too.
As a team leader, Nunziata was a detective of extraordinary vision. He had instincts, and he obeyed them. He knew how to pick targets, and as soon as he had fastened onto one, he immediately saw the entire case as it would eventually take shape. Most times he was able to puzzle out, once arrests had been made, where the narcotics must be concealed. He once tracked down eighty-eight pounds of heroin hidden in the bottoms of wine bottles in the McAlpin Hotel.
Nunziata had an exceptionally open and engaging personality. Everyone liked him at once. Without trying, he tended to dominate every gathering he attended. At a party, before long, everyone in the room would crowd around Nunziata, for he exuded magnetism and charm. This same charm he used as needed when breaking cases. He could talk his way inside private places, and when he went looking for information, whether to the state parole board, or to one or another agency, the men he addressed were always anxious to give him whatever he wanted. Of all of the detectives in SIU, he was the one most admired by the others.
Detective Robert Leuci, as team leader, had more and better informants than anyone, for he was willing to spend as much time as was necessary to win a potential informant over. Once, when he learned that a certain dealer was about to enter his territory, he mobilized sixteen or seventeen junkies, furnished them with a description of the dealer, and stationed them at strategic places. Then he simply waited in the station house for the phone call that would tell him where his quarry had holed up.
Born in 1940, he was much younger than Aguiluz and Nunziata — also much younger than the other three members of the team that he led.
Though not as good a wireman as Aguiluz, he was adequate. Though not as magnetic as Nunziata, he was charming and perceptive, and when he went to people for information or help, they were anxious to accord it. He worked always against the biggest names in the narcotics trade, and he produced a great number of arrests, a great many seizures of substantial — as opposed to spectacular — bundles of narcotics. He had the best organized crime connections of any SIU detective, because his first cousin, John Lusterino, was a captain in the Colombo Mafia family.
In the street Leuci was known as a compassionate cop. He was the type of cop to whom vicious fugitives, fearing a savage beating from other cops, sometimes chose to surrender. They knew he would not hurt them.
All of the detectives mentioned so far are part of the fabric of this story, but its principal actor is Leuci — with Aguiluz and Nunziata as chief supporting players, and various prosecutors in the role of Greek chorus.
Leuci prided himself on being a tough cop — they all did — but in the end he proved far less tough than any of the others. Perhaps he had more conscience than they did, or perhaps he merely was more troubled by what all of them were doing. In any case, he was the one who stepped forward, and, in so doing, brought on the ruin of everyone else. It was almost biblical. Like Samson, he first did penance, and then he pulled the temple down.
2
In mid-February of 1971 Detective Leuci was called before the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption — the so-called Knapp Commission.
He was a few days short of his thirty-first birthday. He had a wife of seven years, Gina; a son, Anthony, who was five; and a newborn daughter named Santina. He lived fifty miles east of the city in a Long Island town named Kings Park, in a tract house in a development of tract houses, and six of the nine houses on his street were owned by New York cops. Thousands more cops lived in that town, and in surrounding towns just like it, and their cars, like an invading army, advanced on the city every day.
Leuci, both on and off duty, was a cop among cops.
A few months earlier he had been routinely transferred out of SIU, and his team routinely dispersed. He was now a precinct detective investigating common crimes, and his past, he had resolved, was behind him.
But he had been summoned to the Knapp Commission offices, where he was made to wait for an hour in a starkly furnished waiting room. He could see into certain offices. People came and went carrying dossiers. The purpose of the Knapp Commission, of those people, of those dossiers, was to send cops to jail.
The Knapp Commission had nothing on Leuci, but he didn't know this. He was waiting to be interviewed by a man named Nicholas Scoppetta, whom he had never met. As he waited, he had become increasingly tense.
Scoppetta, a former assistant district attorney under Frank Hogan, appeared at last in the waiting room.
"Bob Leuci?"
"Yes."
Scoppetta, thirty-eight, had a flat nose and looked like a light heavyweight prizefighter.
"Come into my office."
Leuci, though afraid, flashed a boyish kind of smile.
Scoppetta had expected to meet a case-hardened detective. Instead he was surprised at how young Leuci looked, and by the disarming smile. Leuci's countenance, Scoppetta thought, was almost cherubic. Though thirty-one, he looked as innocent as a choir boy.
Scoppetta's office was as stark and temporary as the waiting room.
"Why don't we talk for a bit? Let's talk about what we, the Knapp Commission, are doing here."
Leuci's fear had gone over into a kind of ingratiating anxiety. "I'd like to get out of here, personally," he said lightly.
Scoppetta at the filing cabinet was replacing folders. "Don't I know you?" he asked over his shoulder. "Didn't we put some cases together in Manhattan?"
He was trying to put Leuci at ease, but failed.
"No," said Leuci.
Scoppetta had studied Leuci's personnel folder, but it told little. He decided to switch away from Leuci to other cops.
"Let me ask you some particular questions. What about Carl Aguiluz? What about Joe Nunziata?"
"Outstanding detectives."
Scoppetta glanced at him sharply. "There have been a lot of allegations of misconduct against them."
Leuci said, "There are allegations against federal narcotics agents too."
"That's true. We can talk about that later. But for now we ought to talk about cops."
"Obviously. We are easy, aren't we? Cops are easy."
This interview, Scoppetta saw, was going nowhere. But the intensity of Leuci's anxiety was interesting. What, the prosecutor wondered, was behind it?
Scoppetta was, at this time, an unknown but ambitious lawyer. He had grown up in an orphanage. Later he worked his way through college, and through law school, working during his last three years for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. When he went to work as an assistant D. A., he showed himself to be a dogged but successful prosecutor.
Twice he had left public service to join law firms at big salaries; each time he had returned to low-paying jobs like this one with the Knapp Commission. The career he sought — the prestige, the relatively good money — he was determined to find while also contributing to the public good. The Knapp Commission was, to Scoppetta, either a six-month interlude before returning to private practice, or his best chance yet at a successful public career.
He decided to invite Leuci home to dinner.
"How about coming over to my place," he said. "My family is away. We'll have dinner. Maybe you can give me some tips on how I ought to approach my investigation."
Their eyes met across the desk.
Scoppetta began to refill his briefcase. "We'll ride up there now," he said decisively.
In Scoppetta's West Side apartment, Leuci walked around studying the pictures on the walls. Most were blowups of Scoppetta's wife and children. They were of exceptional quality, and they had been taken by the prosecutor himself.
"Tell me," called Leuci to Scoppetta, who was in the kitchen, "what do I call you?"
Scoppetta's head appeared in the doorway. "Call me Nick."
"Nick, what is it? What is it you want to ask me? I didn't do it, whatever it is."
"You're not under investigation. What are you thinking about?" Leuci had been identified to him as a totally honest detective who might be able to cast some light on corruption in Narcotics.
"Apparently you got something on your mind," said Leuci. "I wish you would tell me about it, and let me deny it and leave."
Scoppetta's head again appeared in the kitchen doorway. He smiled. "No, it's nothing like that. How do you like your steak?"
"Why don't you spend some time doing something important?" asked Leuci, feeling somewhat reassured. "Like investigating lawyers. You were in the Manhattan D.A.'s office, right? I'm sure there is all sorts of corruption in that office."
"There is no corruption in that office. I never heard even a hint of it. But maybe you know something I don't."
Leuci snorted derisively. "You're kidding."
"This conversation is starting to bore me," said Scoppetta, and he strode back into the kitchen.
But Leuci followed him. "The conversation immediately becomes boring when we talk about corrupt lawyers and district attorneys. You want to talk about cops."
Scoppetta put steaks and salad onto the plates and carried them to the table. As soon as the two men sat down to eat, Scoppetta resumed talking about corruption in the Narcotics Division.
But Leuci interrupted.
"Why don't we talk about lawyers I know to be corrupt," he said. "Why don't we talk about district attorneys that are corrupt?"
"Well, if you know anything about lawyers and D.A.'s I'd love to hear it. We'll work on that. But you know the Knapp Commission is here to investigate cops."
Neither was eating.
"Is it common practice to sell narcotics in the Narcotics Division?"
The detective's anger appeared genuine, though how could the prosecutor be sure?
"Those are the kinds of asinine stupid things that people write in the Village Voice or the New York Times. We don't sell narcotics. Dope dealers sell narcotics. We're not dope dealers, we're policemen."
"It's hard to distinguish between the dope dealers and the policemen sometimes," retorted Scoppetta.
Leuci said, "Why don't we talk about corrupt lawyers? Why don't we talk about how we can approach that?"
Scoppetta began to cut through the steak on his plate. "Why don't we eat," he said, "and forget all the bullshit?"
During dinner Scoppetta's questions became personal, and there was no talk of corruption. The experienced prosecutor, probing for a weakness, asked about Leuci's schooling, about his wife and kids, about his feelings for life, love, and the police department. About the Italian heritage both men shared.
From the age of sixteen, Leuci had had no other ambition than to become a cop, he said. He had passed the Civil Service test at nineteen, and had gone into the Police Academy at twenty-one in the first class for which he was eligible. Five months later there he was, a cop in uniform patrolling the streets of the city, and even the borough — Queens — in which he had been born.
There was no wife or kids or tract house yet. He lived with his parents and with his younger brother and sister in a quiet house on a quiet residential street. His father, formerly a semi-pro pitcher known as Hooks Leuci, was foreman in a pipe factory. His mother worked in a sewing-machine plant. They were honest, hard-working people who had come up out of an Italian ghetto in Brooklyn, and the day their son graduated from the Police Academy was possibly the proudest of their lives. They saw him as a police captain one day.
There were Mafia elements all around them, even within their own family, but they avoided these people, and they tried to instill their contempt for them in their son. Hooks Leuci, whenever he was in the presence of his sister Rosa Lusterino, realized that his son was a policeman, whereas Rosa's son Johnny was usually in jail.
Detective Leuci was the first member of his family ever to finish high school, and it was a big family — there were nine aunts. By police standards he was highly educated, for at eighteen he had gone to Baker University in Kansas to play football. He was a chunky, five-foot-nine-inch fullback. In Kansas, surrounded by prairies and by middle-class Wasps, he was miserably homesick. He yearned for the streets of New York, and when freshman year ended he hurried home to wait to be old enough to become a New York cop.
Every squad to which he was assigned he had led in arrests, and so his rise was quick. In February 1966, after less than four years in uniform, he was promoted to detective third-grade, and he got second grade in August 1969. These were pay grades only; as a second-grade detective he was earning sergeant's wages.
By then he had moved up into SIU, and was one of the elite. His street nickname had been Babyface, and now Scoppetta asked him about it.
Part of his success as a cop had been due to his exceptionally innocent appearance, Leuci replied. He always looked far younger than his years. As a rookie patrolman he could pass as a teenager, and even as he neared thirty he still looked very young. Hoodlums and dope pushers often failed to take him seriously until it was too late.
After dinner Scoppetta and his guest moved to the living room, and the interview continued. Scoppetta was searching for tidbits of information. But Leuci continued to refuse to talk about corruption, or about SIU.
"You're a very disarming guy," Scoppetta said. "I heard a lot about Bob Leuci before I met him today. The tough detective I heard about was nothing like the one I met and that I'm talking to now. The Bob Leuci I heard about I never would have invited to my home."
Scoppetta was still probing, still choosing each word carefully, still watching closely for each reaction by Leuci.
"All cops are like me," responded Leuci. "I'm no different. I represent what we all are."
"There are cops that are criminals," Scoppetta said. "There are cops that are real criminals. They have destroyed you. They have destroyed this Police Department."
Scoppetta probed more deeply still. "I know there is more to you than people think. First of all, some people think that you are a totally honest guy. I don't think that's true."
Leuci stared him in the eye. "I go out there and do what I have to do. I do my job."
Earlier, Scoppetta had extinguished all illumination within the apartment except for one lamp burning on the end table beside Leuci. Its circle of light enclosed both men. They were as isolated as characters on a stage. Beyond was outer darkness — the dark apartment, the darker city. Scoppetta had not contrived the lamp, he merely noticed it, recognizing its importance to Leuci's mood. It shut out the world. It established the intimacy of a confessional. Leuci was about to confess something, Scoppetta was sure of it. Whatever Leuci might confess only his confessor, Scoppetta, would hear.
Scoppetta said, "There's a lot going on inside you. I don't know what it is exactly, but certainly you feel guilty about something. Do you want to talk about it?"
"If I did talk about it, I would destroy myself."
"Not necessarily. You ought to think about telling me what's bothering you. You ought to think about a new beginning. A new life."
Leuci grasped at this notion. "You mean there's a potential that I could start over again?"
"You could cooperate with us, wipe the slate clean. Will you think about it?"
After a moment, Leuci said, "I'll think about it."
It was nearly dawn when they walked to the door. "I want you to go home now," Scoppetta said, "and I want you to ask yourself some questions. How do you visualize yourself? What do you see reflected in the mirror in the morning? What does your wife think of you? What are your children going to think of you three or four years from now when they're old enough to decide for themselves what you are? That's what we'll talk about tomorrow."
The two men watched the dawn come, Scoppetta from his window overlooking Central Park, Leuci as he made the fifty-mile drive out onto Long Island. Leuci, driving, wondered what he had started to tell Scoppetta, and why. His own willingness to talk, which he did not understand, was frightening, because he did not know where it would take him.
Scoppetta, on the other hand, was elated, and planning tomorrow's day. Leuci perhaps represented a breakthrough, the Knapp Commission's first. After six months no significant corruption had yet been proven by the commission. Where other commission lawyers had failed, he perhaps would succeed. He sensed an enormous potential in Leuci. The Police Department files were full of allegations about serious corruption in the Narcotics Division, and Leuci seemed on the verge of talking about it.
3
They talked the next night away, and also the next.
Yes, Leuci admitted, there was massive corruption in the Detective Division. There was massive corruption in the Narcotics Bureau. He was nodding vigorously. There was also massive corruption at every stage of the criminal justice system, starting with assistant district attorneys who helped detectives prepare wiretap orders, and routinely told them to perjure themselves, to lawyers who met them in hallways wearing three- and four-hundred-dollar suits, and came over and whispered that this case didn't mean anything, here's $50, $100, $500, $15,000, let's forget it.
The two men stared at each other.
Scoppetta said softly, "What are you going to do about it?"
"I can't do anything about it," Leuci cried. "What are you going to do about it? You are the guy who has the power to do something about it."
Scoppetta was an extremely skillful interrogator.
"Let's talk about my family, and your family, and the comparison," he said. "We are the same blood." It was an abrupt switch in mood, and it worked.
"Yeah, we are the same blood," agreed Leuci after a pause.
What about Leuci's brother, his sister, Scoppetta asked.
It was as if there was a switch concealed somewhere inside Leuci that Scoppetta, without knowing it was there, had somehow tripped. The detective began to talk about his brother Richie, who was five years younger, and who almost from infancy had had to wear thick glasses. The boy's parents had regarded this as a deformity — no one in the family had ever had to wear glasses before — and Hooks Leuci and his wife had been consumed by shame. They went to doctors to be assured that Richie's deformity was not hereditary, not their fault, and because of their shame, they shamelessly coddled the child, seeming to prefer him to Bobby, who was strong and would grow up to become a policeman.
But their shame over Richie's eyesight was as nothing compared to their shame when they discovered only a few months ago that he was also a heroin addict. Leuci's voice became husky as he described his brother's suffering, and his parents'. Richie had lost all manhood. He wept, he groveled, he would not work or even keep himself clean. He lived from fix to fix, and constantly begged his brother, the narcotics detective, for heroin with which to feed his habit.
Worst of all, said Leuci, and tears started to his eyes, he himself was being blamed by his parents for Richie's habit, for the disgrace and misery that had come to the whole family. According to Hooks Leuci, it was cops like his son who had allowed it to happen, cops like his son who allowed dope pushers to do their business, to hang around and infect innocent children.
Now Leuci began to describe a backyard barbecue. He had invited a number of narcotics detectives and their wives to his house, and suddenly, unexpectedly, his father had appeared in the garden. He had been out for a ride, and had decided to stop by and see his son. Accepting a drink, he began to speak to the detectives. At first he seemed pleased with them, commenting, "These are nice Italian boys." Then he began to notice how well-dressed they were, and how their pinky rings flashed in the sun; he listened to them talk about their trips to Miami and Las Vegas. His smile faded, he put his drink down, and he sought out his son, saying, "These guys are corrupt cops, and you're a corrupt cop."
Hooks Leuci had been a neighborhood hero, and of course a hero to his son. It had been Hooks Leuci's respect that Robert Leuci had always coveted most. Now Hooks strode to the door with Leuci calling after him, "Dad, you'll never understand. I couldn't begin to tell you what it's like, and what I have to do."
But his father went out, slamming the door behind him.
Scoppetta, listening, had been moved, partly by the story itself, and partly by Leuci's suffering as he told it. Tears had overflowed Leuci's eyes, and he had begun to weep. What did his parents expect of him? It wasn't his responsibility to watch Richie. They should have watched him themselves.
After a time, his tears dried, and he began to get angry. His parents understood nothing about the pressures on cops, and neither did Scoppetta, he said. What gushed forth next was, mostly, Leuci's shame. It was impossible to tell what exactly he was confessing to, or if in fact he was confessing to anything at all.
You people on the Knapp Commission, he said, are focusing on the Police Department. You tell cops that you are out to catch them taking meals, taking Christmas presents, giving drugs to junkies. It's absolutely incredible. Cops are looking at you and saying: You bastards. It's you guys, the assistant district attorneys, lawyers, judges who run the system, and the whole fucking thing from top to bottom is corrupt. We know how you become a judge. You pay $50,000 and you become a judge. We see stores open on Sunday on Fifth Avenue, but they can't be open in Little Italy. And then you wonder why cops stick together. The only people that know us, care for us, love us, are other cops. You people are just looking to hurt us. You want to lay on us the responsibility of fucking up the system.
Do you know what it's like to be a narcotics detective, Leuci continued. Do you have any conception? Do you know what it's like on a February night in South Brooklyn a block from the piers with two addict informants in the back of the car, both of them crying, begging you for a bag of heroin? Do you know what it's like going home fifty miles away, and getting a phone call five minutes after you're home saying, I blew the shot, please come back and give me another bag. And driving fifty miles back in, and watching him tie up, and walking out of the room. Then working with him the next morning and locking up some dope pusher that's just as sick as he is. It's an insanity. And going into the office and the lieutenant says you have to make five arrests this month. Do you know what it's like working six, seven days a week? You have to be one of the best, otherwise you go back to swinging a stick.
Scoppetta's every nerve was attuned to Leuci's mood. But his mind was racing, looking for the key word, each time Leuci paused, to keep him talking.
You're in Westbury, or West End Avenue, Leuci ranted on. We're in El Barrio, we're on 125th Street. You want us to keep everybody inside the barricades so you can stay outside. I'm on Pleasant Avenue and 116th Street at three o'clock in the morning, just me and my partner and Tony somebody that we have been following for three weeks, and he's going to offer me money, and me and my partner are going to decide whether we'll take it or not. You don't care about me. Some black revolutionary is going to whack me out if he gets a chance. Some newspaper is going to call me a thief whether I do it or don't do it. The only one who cares about me is my partner. It's me and him and this guy we caught. We're going to take him to jail and lock him up. We're going to take his money. Fuck him, fuck you, fuck them.
Scoppetta listened, waiting.
I see what kind of man you are, and I see what kind of man my partner is, and there's just no comparison, see? I'm going to side with him. He tells me it's okay Bobby, hey Bobby, it's you and me against the rest of the world. You guys are eating in the Copa six nights a week. We try to get forty dollars expense money, and the department won't even give us that.
Leuci swallowed painfully.
You're winning in the end any way. We're selling ourselves, our families. These people we take money from own us. Our family's future rests on the fact that some dope pusher is not going to give us up, or some killer, some total piece of shit, is not going to give us up.
To you, cops are detestable kinds of people. But the vast majority of cops are good, honest, law-abiding, family-loving, decent men. Some of them do criminal things once in a while, but they are the only people between you and the jungle.
The long monologue ended. It had been dramatic but unspeciflc. The only thing clear was that the young detective was in the grip of extremely powerful emotions which Scoppetta might somehow be able to harness.
He said calmly, "Why don't you do something about it? You have knowledge. You can provide evidence. You can make cases."
"I can make all kinds of cases. I can make cases against lawyers, too. I can make cases against district attorneys, I can make cases against people who pay cops. Why don't we do that?"
The Knapp Commission, Scoppetta said firmly, was obliged to concentrate on cops.
"Then fuck the Knapp Commission."
The following night Leuci was calmer, and the two men discussed in detail the type of investigation Leuci might be willing to undertake. First, said Leuci, Scoppetta should leave the Knapp Commission and set up a separate office.
Scoppetta nodded. It could perhaps be done. He saw himself accorded funding by the Justice Department and setting up a separate office, perhaps under the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York State.
Leuci meant to work primarily against corrupt lawyers, he declared. He wanted to put in jail district attorneys and judges who regularly solicited bribes, and defense lawyers who regularly seduced cops. If the focus was to be strictly on the cops themselves, then he would not take part. Any corrupt cops whom he might, so to speak, stumble over would go to jail too. But they would be incidental to his investigation. And he would not work against cops who had been his friends and partners in SIU. He was willing to wear a recording device. He was willing to handle marked money. He was willing to play a role, to risk his life for however many months or years the investigation could be kept secret.
Scoppetta was jubilant. "Do you realize how important this investigation can be? We'll do it together. I'll be with you every step of the way. What kind of cases can we make?"
As Leuci began to outline possibilities, it became clear to Scoppetta that what he was sketching were real cases, cases involving police misconduct. Leuci then selected one specific case, and painted in most of the details.
An SIU team, he said, had conducted a long investigation into a Mafia drug ring, but had failed to come up with enough solid evidence to obtain an indictment. The team then decided to contact the subject of the investigation, and offer to drop the case — which would have been dropped anyway — in exchange for money. Legally this was certainly bribe soliciting, and probably it was extortion — the line between the two crimes is somewhat blurred.
Leuci, because of his superb Mafia contacts, was enlisted by the team to make contact with the subject. He did this, and when the drug dealer agreed to pay $10,000, the case was dropped and Leuci collected a commission, though he did not tell Scoppetta how much.
Scoppetta had listened grim-faced to his tale. "What else?" he demanded, when Leuci had finished.
He had been involved in two other similar situations, Leuci said. He did not elaborate. He was watching Scoppetta carefully. He was not worried about being prosecuted. If Scoppetta tried it, which was inconceivable in light of the investigation offered, Leuci could always recant in court.
Nonetheless, he had just admitted to crimes, an admission he did not have to make, and there were some later who found this amazing. His motive, it seems clear, was twofold. First, he was sorely troubled by his past. Guilt and shame afflicted him like a disease. He wore remorse like a heavy overcoat everywhere he went. In making confession, he had hoped to assuage this crushing burden. And indeed, he did feel lighter after speaking out. Second, he was attempting to establish his credentials with Scoppetta; he was saying that, because his own past was dark, the investigation would work — he would be able to get close to some very bad men.