Transcript of NYPD Detective on Murder, Mobsters & Old New York | Jason Allison

Hey, folks. I'm Jack Murphy. This is The Team House, and I'm here with our guest today, Jason Allison. He's the author of The Killing Yards, which will probably be out as you guys are seeing this. September 22nd is the release date. It is a noir detective novel. I mean, it involves the police, but it also involves the 1990s club scene, the Russian mafia, the Israeli mafia.

Yep.

I mean, everybody's got a hand in these clubs, and there's a pretty epic conspiracy see that unfolds in the book. I really enjoyed it. I thought that, you know, it's interesting that you set this in the 1990s, and I grew up as a kid in the '90s, and now I'm seeing my generation have this very, like, nostalgic view of the '90s, which it really is nostalgia. It's like, it wasn't as great as you think it was, guys. You're a little bit older than me, and you were, you know, a professional or an adult and then becoming an NYPD detective. So you have a little bit of a different sort of perspective on the '90s, I think, than many people my age do.

Yeah. I mean, I grew up in the Bronx. Where'd you grow up?

In Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Oh, okay. I lived not too far from you for a long time. But yeah, like, I grew up in the Bronx and I'm 50 now. So in like, I became a cop in 1998. And before that though, in addition to being a cop in this city and a detective, I was a club kid. And so you were living that bohemian New York City lifestyle? No, I was the bridge and tunnel trash that was trying to get into the clubs, that couldn't get into the clubs because I was never cool, because I didn't drink and I didn't do drugs. But the good thing about that is I was able to watch all the stuff that other people did. And so you kind of remember it, and that, that when you're young, you know, whatever you're doing when you're young, it kind of becomes formative, right?

Sure.

Like I don't know how old you were. I think I heard on an episode you were like 19 when you joined the military.

Yeah.

So that becomes like, that's concrete now for you, that era for the rest of your life. And that era for me was concrete. And also I don't like doing research very much. And I don't know, like for your novel, I don't know how much research you had to do 'cause I think my vision of you is that it's all in your head.

For that novel, yeah, it wasn't research intensive. And I also got to the point as a writer where I realized like if I'm really digging into the literature, trying to find details to put in the book, I'm probably overwhelming most of the readers. Like, it's, it's more than they want.

I just saw, uh, an Instagram reel with Harlan Coben. Um, he writes suspense, and he's talking about, I hate research, and he advises writers not to do research. And he said that the reason why is because the more research you do, the more you want to put it in the book, right? And so it kind of slows everything down.

So I, uh, I mean, I, I like doing research, um, and it's a big part of my, my other job in journalism, but, um, I, I get what he's saying. Like, you have to be very careful about that, I think, when you're writing a novel.

I know a lot of stuff.

Right. And, and are you just using the book to show off how much stuff you know?

Right.

You know, as opposed to like telling a story and doing something for the reader or whatever the case.

Yeah.

Well, we'll get into it deeper. But, you know, you spent how many years on the police force?

20 years and 1 day.

Wow. And mostly as a detective?

Yeah, probably about 16 years doing investigations, less than 2 years in uniform. I learned early on that I wanted to get out of uniform. Stop Humping the Radio. And I've noticed, and we were talking before we started, like, there seems to be a common through line with the guys and women that you have on that in the military that wanted to do like Rangers or Green Berets or special ops or whatever the case might be. And it's because you don't want to do the boring stuff.

Sure. Yeah, that's true.

And so like, I wasn't good at anything. I wasn't a great student. I was not a good athlete. Uh, wasn't cool. And so I realized that like if you volunteer for stuff, sometimes they give it to you. So I got out of uniform shortly after 9/11.

So, so yeah, tell us a little bit like where you grew up in the city, right?

In the Bronx. Yeah.

Yeah. So give us the non-nostalgic, unvarnished view of growing up in the Bronx in the, uh, 1980s.

What was that like? Non-nostalgic view is I was the only white kid on my block. And we lived, it was me, my mom, and her parents. So it was 3 generations in a 1-bath walk-up. And I don't say that to like play like a poverty card, but just that like, that's just the way it was. And at the time when you're growing up, you don't know you're poor.

Sure.

But looking back now, I'm like, oh man, we were poor.

I mean, the Bronx in like the '70s, like parts of it looked like Berlin after the war. I mean.

Yeah, so there was the first, The first command I went to where I lived, I'm not like, I'm not claiming that like I grew up in the hardened streets of the worst neighborhood in the Bronx and I survived. Like, that's not true. I grew up in a neighborhood called Kingsbridge, which wasn't bad. I had a good time. I had a lot of friends, all different kinds of people. I had very few issues. The only reason why I said about being the only white kid is that's just how it was.

Sure.

And now I live in a place in Massachusetts where I don't see anyone who isn't white. And so you do start to get to realize maybe this comes with age. It's like when you are on the other end of that and you're the only person who looks different, that affects how you engage with people and that affects how you view the world.

Sure.

And I hope that it's made me softer and more understanding in my old age. I don't know if it has, but I try. But yeah, the first command I worked in, which was the 4-1, famously or infamously, You ever hear of the movie Fort Apache, The Bronx?

I've heard of it.

I'm sorry. Paul Newman, Ken Wall, based on a real story. Yeah, that it, it, it was called Little House on the Prairie. And famously, the station house is still standing, 1086 Simpson Street, because it was the only building on this block that wasn't rubble. And like, I, I, I, I, I listen to your episodes, I watch your episodes on, and guys are talking about like, you know, places in Afghanistan or Iraq. that were just leveled and it's just rubble and, and destruction. And it's like, yeah, if you go back and you look at photos of the Bronx in the '70s, it was a, it was a hellish place, man.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the 1980s New York was also like the city was going bankrupt. It went bankrupt in the '70s, right?

Yeah. Ford to Nex— Ford to Citi dropped dead when they were looking for a bailout.

And then, I mean, tons of crime, street prostitution, things that are kind of I mean, I'll ask you a little bit about that later, about how crime has changed in the city. But I mean, 1980s into the 1990s, I mean, the city was different. It was a little seedier.

It was much seedier.

Yeah.

And I try to get that out in the novel, but I remember, like, there's an incident that stays with me is we were going on a field trip to the Intrepid.

Yeah.

Which was the— if you were a boy—

Yeah, it's awesome.

It was the coolest museum in the city. And we're on a yellow school bus driving through Manhattan. We were on the West Side out by the Hudson Yards. and there were prostitutes walking the streets. This is like 10 in the morning, unabated, just sex workers going at it. And our teacher said to us, like, I forget how old I was, but it was grade school. And she said, now, you boys know not to talk to these women, right? And I'm like, well, I don't talk to any women 'cause I'm like, I don't know, 10.

These girls are married to the streets.

Yeah, but these women specifically, I'm like, they dress differently, they're intimidating. I'm not ready for this yet. But that, that stays with you. And to this day, that image of like the, the prosts walking the streets untouched, unchecked, uh, you know, that, that made it into the book. But that made it into like, you know, your memory of what the city was. And yeah, it was a much grimier place. Maybe not— Like, gentrification has a lot of negatives, and I think it's overwhelmingly negative, mostly because it pushes working-class people out of places where they can live. But at the same time, like, I remember a guy getting shot around the corner from where I lived. I didn't see it. We came across the aftermath, but the dude's lying there bleeding out, and I don't know if he lived or not. And uniforms are waiting for a bus to roll up. And I'm like, huh. And we didn't see that all the time, but it was much more frequent then than it is today.

And so you're, a kid now, I mean, as you become a teenager and into your early 20s in the 1990s, right?

Yeah.

And by that point, I mean, the city was still changing. I mean, and as you talk about in this book, Giuliani and the tough on crime and all that stuff is starting to come around. But I mean, the other side of it too is that AIDS really wiped out the sex working down in Times Square and all of that. was a part of it.

Um, what—

I mean, what were you experiencing?

You know, I mean, like, so much of that I get from kind of— I was living through it, but you don't know in the moment. And there's some cop stuff. Yeah, you're really young. You're right. You don't know what you're living through while you're living through it. And it took me a very long time to realize how damaging the AIDS crisis was to this city.

Yeah, yeah.

To like the, the artists and the music scene, the gay community.

Wiped out.

sex workers, prostitutes. Like, it was life-changing. And I think the other thing that people don't realize that might be hard to envision now in New York City that, you know, just elected a Democratic Socialist mayor is that only in 1994, New York City elected a Republican hardliner law and order guy who has since become a little crazy.

Looney Tunes.

Okay, maybe a lot crazy. But like Rudy Giuliani was a law and order, he was a US prosecutor. He was a US attorney.

Wanted to go after the mafia a lot.

Wanted to go after the mafia. There was a whole theory of criminal justice back then called broken windows.

Yeah. You wanna tell people about that?

Yeah, so—

That's where like stop and frisk comes from and stuff, right?

Right, so stop and frisk comes from a court case called Terry v. Ohio, and it authorizes a police officer who has not probable cause, but reasonable suspicion that a person is about to, has just, or is about to, or is in the commission of a crime. And you can stop that person and make inquiries. And that, based on the inquiries, might go up and you might search a guy, you might toss him, you might arrest him depending on what you find, or it might go down. You might be like, oh, this dude's just coming back from getting himself a beer at the Bogey. And what happened in New York City is the broken windows theory And I'm, I'm gonna, I'm sure the, the intellectuals will explain it better than me. But basically the theory is, is that if you have a building in an urban setting and kids are just taking up rocks and winging rocks at the windows and those windows break and no one replaces the windows, it creates an air of lawlessness and disorder. And a big thing that Giuliani ran on was this notion of the city as a place of disorder.

It is a city of chaos. And before—

He wasn't totally wrong.

Wasn't totally wrong. Before him, you've heard the term Fear City?

Yeah.

Okay, so in the '70s, they were giving out the— I think it was the police union. I hope I'm getting this right. I think it was the PBA was giving out flyers at the Port Authority bus terminal to people getting off the bus that said, welcome to Fear City. Because the place, the city of like, if you've ever seen Taxi Driver.

Yeah, you did not cut through Central Park in the 1980s at night.

No.

Like, that was not a thing.

Even into when I started going out, there were blocks. If you walked in Manhattan, there were blocks that you skipped. If you needed to get crosstown, it's like, all right, we can't go down 31st, but 29th is good. We can go down 29th. And it was this weird sort of knowledge that like before the internet, before social media, you don't know how you knew this, but everyone kind of knew it. It was almost like the zeitgeist. Like, you don't go down that block.

And there were blocks—

It's culture. Yeah, it's just the culture.

Yeah.

And yeah, so the city elected Giuliani, who ran on a law and order platform, who instigated a riot in City Hall Park involving off-duty police officers. And they did the whole thing, take the bridge, because there were a bunch of cops who basically stormed the Brooklyn Bridge to take it over. And so the on-duty cops who were trying to police this off-duty cop event, they're not really putting their hands on anyone. And so that became a whole thing. And there were a whole bunch of guys disciplined administratively, but no one was arrested. But yeah, the city elected a guy. That's how bad it was. To give you some perspective of— there were 2,100 people murdered in 1992. I think this year so far there's like 149. Wow.

That's a, that's a lot of bodies, man.

And that doesn't count the non-fatales.

The ODs and stuff like that.

Yeah, that doesn't count that. That doesn't get the— when I say non-fatales, I mean like everyone who gets shot who survives. Like, that's a whole other category. And I think a big thing— this is another issue with the drop in homicides, and we're getting ahead of ourselves, but the advent of battlefield medicine coming into urban hospitals is incredible.

Yeah, it's keeping people alive. It took a long time to get cops to carry tourniquets, man. Longer than it should have, but they do it now.

I— so I'm out 8 years and it's changed a lot even in that 8 years. ancient now, but like, I never— no one I knew carried any sort of medical supplies. The whole thing was, you know, God forbid your boy gets hurt, you throw him in the RMP and you get him to Lincoln. And then as soon as you get stabilized, you get him the hell out of Lincoln because you don't want to spend any more time in Lincoln than you have to. But they will save you if you're shot. They will save you. You get upstairs, they'll kill you.

What, what was the club scene like in the 1990s as you're a young guy trying to get into these exclusive joints?

So I made it into Tunnel a few times. I made it into Limelight, I think once. It was selective. Like, you know, it was the whole— it wasn't quite Studio 54, which I think most people have an image of sort of these pictures. If you go back, you can find them online of like Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who owned the place, basically picking who they want from the crowd.

Oh, based on looks or knowledge or—

Yeah, it was like, you have a look, you're in. You have a look, you're in. And some of the other clubs got like that to an extent, but you could get in. The problem I always had, like, women could get in much easier, but if you were dudes, they wanted the ratio right. And so if you're a bunch of guys going out, if there's 6 or 7 of you, You're waiting. Yeah, exactly. Bouncers don't want to be dealing with, with you guys coming in when they could have like 4 or 5 ladies that are gonna be coming in.

Um, man, I'm trying to pull up, uh, an article I saw. I think it was in New York Magazine. I'm not finding it though, but it's about a female club owner in the '90s, and she set up like this super like exclusive place. There's only 20 tables inside. I was just going to ask if you knew that one or not.

I didn't— a lot of my club knowledge, like, I went to these places. Like I said, I was never cool. I'm not— there's no stolen club valor from me. Okay. But I— my first wife, because cops and military, you got to have at least 2 wives.

Sometimes, sometimes 3.

We should all be so lucky. Hopefully I won't be that lucky. I love my wife very much. My first wife was in the club industry.

Okay, cool.

And she was a publicist for, and I think she still is, for big-time DJs. Like, I've had Christmas dinner with international DJs. And I got to see how these clubs run. And this is more into the mid-2000s, like 2005, 2006, around there. So it's, the scene has changed a little bit. It's a little more corporate. It's a little more professional. But the nature of running a club hadn't changed, and that's where I picked up a lot of— like I said, because I don't like doing research, so I'm just going to pull from what I know. But yeah, the people that run the clubs are fascinating people, man. They're businessmen and women, but it's a really strange industry, and it's very bunkered. Everyone knows each other. You can't screw anyone over because everyone— you know, you can't— you got to honor your contracts. But just like filling these clubs, especially before social media, the notion of like street teams, of giving— you'd get like a bunch of young kids, you pay them however much you pay them, go put up flyers, go put up posters on like construction sites at 3 in the morning, and that's how they got the word out.

You know, this neighborhood we're in right now, it's actually a big club scene. There's all these like warehouses here, clubs and raves and stuff like that.

So there's a club This is what happens when you get old and you forget names, but there's a club where a guy died recently, and then there was a report, and I think it's in Brooklyn, I think it's in this neighborhood, where there was a couple of gay clubgoers died, and they weren't sure if it's like a serial killer, but they— Yeah, they both—

Oh, is that like Mirage down there?

Yes, Mirage.

Yeah, yeah, that's right down here. It's over by Newtown Creek, is where people keep drowning.

That's exactly it.

Yeah, and there are these allegations that there's like a serial killer on the loose because You know, a lot of these kids would have to climb over like 6, 7-foot-tall fences to get into the canal in the middle of the night. Like, you're already tripping balls. Are you really doing that or not?

Right.

But apparently it keeps happening.

Yeah, it's weird. Like, there were very few— later when I worked homicides, I learned that there, at least in New York, for whatever reason, and there's been studies done on this, that not a lot of serial killers in New York. Son of Sam, famously. But that seemed to be a phenomenon in more rural areas. And now the whole idea is that like serial killers exist, but DNA and cameras and ubiquitous surveillance stop them before they get the serial kill part. They're just killers.

Right, right.

So, but yeah, man, the club scene was always just a place of intentional depravity and like anything went very, you know, fall of Rome stuff. And I dug it and I was jealous of it because I didn't drink. And I was shy and I wasn't good with girls. And I would see people, I didn't even want to dance because you have that image. Like if you're sober all the time, you're like, oh, you look stupid. Don't do this. Don't do this. And so I was always a guy on a wall, but you would get to see everyone like letting loose and you're like, man, I wish I could be like them. That's what I got out of it.

I just picture in my mind that club scene in American Psycho.

It's not far from it. I think in the novel, you know, because the movie, I love the novel and the movie.

Yeah. For different reasons.

Yeah. And I'm pretty sure they go to Tunnel in the novel. I don't know if it's specifically identified in the movie. But Tunnel was owned by Peter Gaétan, who owned most of— he owned Limelight, he owned Club USA, I think he owned Palladium. But he was a Canadian, French-Canadian, who ended up getting evicted from the United States of America for, I think, tax evasion. But the story, like, some of the stuff that happens in the novel is kind of inspired by what he went through, where they went after him for running an open-air drug market. And he went to trial in the Eastern District, and he won at trial, and he got his place back. But then, you know, the lifespan of clubs is just so fast. They fire, and then they burn bright, and then they die.

And this is also the era where, like, all that stuff is picking up in, like, the Meatpacking District and everything, right?

Yeah. So, Tunnel— I keep mentioning that 'cause that's, like, the anchor, and also, that's kind of where I placed my fictional version of Tunnel in the novel. But that was on, like, 27th and 12th, right on the water. And Meatpacking starts a little bit south of that. And Meatpacking ends up kind of becoming a little more, a lot more bougie, especially now.

Down the line, yeah.

Today, yeah, fuck that. SoHo House and everything. It's such a joke. But there's like that gap. Like I have this huge cultural gap where like when I was a civilian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was not cool, but I was aware of what was—

And then you become a cop and you're put into a time capsule.

Yeah, you exactly. And I don't know if it's like that in the military, maybe it isn't.

No, it totally is.

Okay. But we become institutionalized and you just become cloistered from the rest of the world. And there are guys who go out, like I went out even as a cop, like, but it was, it was different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're seeing the city differently.

And that's the thing, like, you know, 'cause we're, we're shooting this in Brooklyn. I came down here, I don't live here anymore, but when I used to live in the city, I was always on edge. And not for like situational awareness. Like, you have a lot of guys, we were joking before about like, I've never shot a gun, I've never shot anyone. And you have every other guest that's been in this chair talking about, so we were getting in a firefight. And I'm like, shit, I can't mess with that. I got nothing. But like, you're always on edge. You're always just in case, 'cause something like Times Square could go off, like what happened yesterday or 2 days ago.

Yeah.

So you're aware of it. And then you retire and you go through that transition to civilian life. And now I come back and I'm like, now I can just enjoy the city and I can view it as like, oh, it's artsy and there's interesting people and it takes on a different tone.

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It was a, a good job with benefits. And I don't know, I, like I said, I've listened to a bunch of your episodes. It seems like there are guys that, like, there seems to be like a through line, not with everyone, but with a lot of people, how they grew up and how they find themselves in these elite regiments in the military, is that there's very few people who grew up in like a 6-bedroom house that become enlisted people in the military. And I think the notion was, for me as a kid, is police work seemed interesting. You were outdoors, it was different every day, the pay was good, and the benefits like health insurance, and there was a pension, and you could leave at the end. And I found that interesting just from like a What else am I going to do? Um, I went to college, which I, I have a degree in criminal justice, which might as well, like, fucking water balloon they might have given me at the end because it's about that useless. I can't do anything with a criminal justice major, um, other than be a cop. Um, but yeah, I took, I took that.

I came out of college because you needed 2 years of college at the time. I don't know if you still need it. But I did see today on the train ride down that the NYPD just raised the age that you can take the test to become a cop to 42.

Yeah, I think it was 37 was like this, the city entrance exam.

It was 30. It was when I came on, it was 35 and my company sergeant was 37 and he got a, he got an extension or he got graced into the, into it because he was in the military. those guys. And he was also an artilleryman in the military, which meant— and I don't want to shout, but everything that he said was very loud. And so the whole time, 9 months in the academy, and he's 6 inches away from me and he's going, we're going to lunch now. I'm like, oh my God, military, man. Don't ever be in— don't ever be in the artillery. But yeah, they raised it to 42. So I think that speaks to maybe recruitment issues.

So you go to the police academy and, uh, I mean, what was your first assignment in NYPD? You were a beat cop?

Yeah, I, uh, well, um, I was in uniform, I was in patrol. We call them— you're running a sector car. So I don't know how deep into the weeds you want to go in this stuff, but like every, every city's broken up into 76 precincts and every precinct is broken up into sectors, patrol sectors, and Theoretically, you're supposed to ride around your sector all day long. And so we use a different phonetic alphabet than you guys. We have Adam Boy, Charlie David. So you would get a sector. And again, in theory, you would have one sector car per sector. And in reality, it's like, all right, a roll call. Murphy, you're 4-1 Adam Boy, Charlie David, Eddie Frank, Ida, because you can only turn out 2 cars for a precinct that's like 2 miles square. But yeah, I was in uniform. I got bumped to midnights pretty quick because someone else needed 4 to 12s, which when you're young, that's what you want because you get off of work 11:30, you go to the bars or the clubs, we call them 4 to 4s. And then you come back, you get to sleep all day and you come back at 4.

For a young guy, that's awesome. So they sent me to midnights. Which I hated at the time, but in hindsight, it was a blessing because no one wants to do work on the midnights. Almost everyone's trying to sleep. And the precinct I went to, which was Little House on the Prairie, Fort Apache, it got decimated by the feds in the early '90s. So the place was dead. I remember looking up at the board, and this was the same thing where I became a detective in a squad, which was the adjoining precinct. And they would say up on the board, on a whiteboard, it would say the homicides 15 years ago. 10 years ago, 5 years ago, last year, this year. And they would always track those numbers. And the homicides 15 years ago were like 79. And this is in 2 square miles. And then the homicides when I got there were like 6. So place was dead.

And what did the feds clean the place out for?

RICO. They come in and they, you know, the FBI and the DEA, 'cause all the violence was drug-related.

So there's like Serpico shit going on in this precinct back in the day.

Oh yeah. I mean, like that, that was famously— he worked— Frank Serpico worked in the— I think it was called like the plainclothes unit. I forget what it was called, but it became after the Serpico and the sort of the commission that came out of that, they reorganized or renamed it. It became the Organized Crime Control Bureau. And part of that was narcotics fell under that. And the majority of the violence, especially in the early '90s, was driven by crack. And the crack wars in the '90s are what drove those 2,000, 2,100 homicides a year. And so eventually, 'cause it's always a like, what's the flare-up? What's the issue? And then eventually they bring assets to bear on that issue. And so the feds came in, DEA, FBI, and they rounded up people. They RICO'd a shit ton of people. And, you know, the crime fell off. 'Cause the other thing you learn is that 95% of the crime is committed by like 5% of the people. Like the thing that kept me warm at night is that most people go to work and come home and they're trying to get by.

Yeah, they're not gonna swing an ax into your back or something.

No. And, but that 5% can wreak havoc and they did. And so, yeah, I was in uniform. I got an opportunity to like, you know, make some robbery collars. And that's about all you could hope for when you're in uniform. Maybe some stolen cars, GLAs. And we had a big issue with street racing. It was very Fast and the Furious back then because it was industrial. And on like Saturday night, we'd get like 400 to 500 cars rolling in.

Holy shit. Where was this again?

This was in Hunts Point.

Okay.

That's why I was a cop in the 4-1. And because also famously talking about before, The Hookers of Hunts Point on HBO. I don't know if you ever heard of it or saw it. That was a documentary show where they would interview, they would essentially do ride-alongs with like prostitutes working in Hunts Point. And that was our precinct at that time because there were areas that were industrial that after like, you know, 12 o'clock, got taken over by, you know, the street racers and the, and the pros and the pimps and everyone coming in to, you know, get a rub and tug. So we would just have cars circling the block and circling the block, and you get all these guys coming up, they're in suits and ties, and they're like driving home to Scarsdale, and it's like making a pit stop. Yeah, yeah, I got to take care of something.

It's— I have a friend who works in an industry that will remain nameless for this purpose. But, I mean, just again, how things have changed in the city. A buddy of mine was explaining how in his industry, in this business, Midtown Manhattan executive, business executives working in those skyrises, he was like, it is totally normal for those dudes to go and bang a Russian hooker in one of these massage parlors and then just come back to work and then go home to their family at the end of the day. That just happens. all the time. And I mean, it's interesting how like all that stuff has kind of been pushed off the streets. It's still there, it's just not visible.

Yeah, I think the internet's made that a lot different too now in terms of what you can order up. And sure, you know, it's, it's— and I guess that's good because the whole thing is like, if you ever watch The Wire.

Yeah.

Okay, so The Wire is tremendous in terms of how it, it depicts like an urban organism kind of functioning, 'cause they went after everyone in The Wire in terms of like calling out hypocrisy and nonsense. And, you know, there's a— I forget what season it is, but they create Hamsterdam.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Which is essentially like, we're gonna let people get high, but only in this area. And the idea is that then you can kind of argue, or politicians can argue that, look, drug arrests are going down here and violence is going down here, when in fact all you're doing is kind of concentrating it in a certain area. And I think that sort of— they play with the numbers like CompStat. And if you've ever heard of that, it's essentially a numbers-driven system to address crime. But CompStat statistics can be manipulated.

Is this where like the quotas come out of? The quotas that didn't exist, but they did?

So quotas are weird, right? Because like, I was never told you have to produce anything. But by the same token, okay, so I don't know, this is where like you kind of both sides an issue, right? Majority of cops I know don't want to do a thing, and I will go to my grave saying that. And I'm not saying like I'm better than that, it's just like the majority of cops that I knew wanted to do their 8 hours and 35 minutes and they wanted to go home. And maybe they had other gigs, but, but they didn't want to make collars, they didn't want to write summonses. And I didn't want to write summonses either, because for the most part, they're asking you to like summons the working guy and girl for like rolling through a stop sign, which I had sergeants order me to do numerous times. And that's not cool. But it's money. It's revenue generating.

Yeah. You want to go after criminals, not, you know, write tickets.

Right. And we had on the day tour in the 4-1 when I was a cop, there were guys assigned to those You don't see them anymore, but those 3-wheel scooters.

Oh yeah, the meter maids.

So we had like uniformed armed POs, members of the service, that had to write 50 parkers a day.

Holy shit.

5-0. And they had to— and they did that to keep their gig. And the gig was you work, you come in at like 5:30, you go home at 2, and you're off Saturday and Sunday. And when you dangle a carrot like that in front of someone, It motivates.

Yeah. I mean, it's still like that, I think. And I mean, I've seen even they got members of the New York City Parks Department out writing tickets for people in the morning.

Like, for what?

Parked on the wrong side of the street. Alternate side parking.

Oh, for like parkers?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's—

I mean, I can— not to jump ahead, but they were towing. I was a union delegate for a little while for the DEA, for the detectives union, and they were towing unmarked cars. belonging to, like, these are department autos that are double parked at courthouses because people were complaining that around the courthouse, especially in the Bronx, Bronx Courthouse is in a fairly busy area. And you would get cops who would double park out there. And so for a while, IEB started towing these cars. Here's the problem with that. Sometimes, yeah, you get a cop who's lazy and doesn't want to walk. And so he's leaving his department auto there. Not that we get them assigned, but But a lot of times what we're running into is we make a lot of arrests at court 'cause guys show up for other cases. Right, right, right. And more than once I would have, I'd get a phone call from a guy who's like standing on 161. He's got a guy in cuffs with his partner and their car's gone. And getting that back is like a 4-hour ordeal even for us 'cause there's forms that gotta be filled out.

And so yeah, like I, I, I get it. Like, people need to show that they're doing something, but I don't know where that stops. I don't know where that ends.

Right, right. If you incentivize it, like, are you incentivizing them to go out and invent crimes at a certain point? Right?

Right. And like, later on, I would, in the squad, I would see the opposite, like, like guys like choosing to, to what we call shitcan stuff, just because they didn't want to deal with it. Right. They don't wanna fill out the paperwork, which I never got because these were the same people who complained about this. No one complains more than— maybe, I don't know, maybe people in the military complain, but cops complain more than any human being on the planet. And you would have the guys that would complain, they're not paying us enough, they're not treating us right. And then an old lady would come in and say, I just got my purse snatched. And that same detective who was just complaining that they don't pay us enough is like, you're not gonna get your purse back. I gotta sit you here. You gotta look at all these photos. Do you really wanna do that? You're gonna be here for hours and then you gotta go to court. And then the woman would be like, well, I don't wanna deal with that. It's just, you know, when you chalk it up to like living in New York.

And I would say to these people, dude, you wanna screw the city, take every report you can and show, show the city like what's happening. You can't be complicit with the numbers going down while complaining that you're not getting treated right because you're part of the problem at that point. I sound holier than thou. I don't know how that's going to go over.

I always think there's that, that line in The Departed. What is Matt Damon's character? He says something like, no one's more full of shit than an Irish cop.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a very, you know, the joke is that like there's a very fine line between cop and criminal. And I think that maybe it's because we're exposed to them so often. And like, later in my career, I spent hundreds— maybe not hundreds, but I spent tens of hours in windowless rooms with guys that had killed like 4 and 5 people. And you just get their whole life story. And that kind of humanizes them in a way. Like, there's very few— there's only one legit— what I think was a legit sociopath, even though I think that phrase has fallen out of favor. But the majority of people that I dealt with that were killers were just born into horrendous situations. That's not, that's not to say that what they did was right or justified or rational, but like, you can kind of be like, oh, I get it. If you're born in a prison.

Right.

And your father's dead and your mother's doing 10 years, behind the 8-ball to start.

Yeah, for sure. So at what point did you take the, uh, you have to take an exam to become a detective, right?

So from the 4-1, I went to a unit that was called Patrol Borough Bronx Anti-Crime. And I can't call it what it really was because it was street crime by another name. And street crime unit was made famous or infamous in, you ever see the movie Nighthawks with Sylvester Stallone? Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. So street crime was a plainclothes gun unit. that started many years ago. They based out of Randall's Island, and they were a decoy unit. And there was a— the logo of the Street Crime Unit was Muggable Mary, and it was a dude who would dress up like an old woman and sit on a train doused in alcohol and wait for someone to try to rob her. And then you would pinch them. Okay, so then the Street Crime Unit, as things evolved, they kind of— there was an offshoot called the Taxi Unit. Which was probably more elite than, than any of us. Not to say that I'm not putting myself in any elite framing by any stretch. I was very lucky to work with a lot of good cops. But the street crime unit also infamously was responsible for the killing of Amadou Diallo. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. He was like, he had, was it a keychain or a lighter, a wallet that he had? Yeah. And they thought it was a gun.

Right.

So that incident, sort of the backstory of that is there was a serial rapist hitting the Bronx and what street crime and later the unit that I came into, which was street crime by another name, is that you would flood certain areas. They would look at crime trends.

Saturation patrols.

Yeah. And the idea is, is to get guns. That was the whole thing. And when I came into the unit, it was based in the Bronx Task Force, which is if you ever go up the Bronx on the Deegan, just north of Yankee Stadium. There's a very old precinct on the right if you're going northbound, right before the GWB split. And that was where our office was. And in that office were just these corkboards with Polaroids. And I mean hundreds of them. And all these Polaroids are all the guns that the unit has gotten. And the whole idea is that you wanted to get on the wall. Gotta get on the wall, gotta get on the wall. And you gotta get guns, you gotta touch steel. And so I was lucky. I was, active in uniform, and I made it into this unit. And the only reason why I made it into this unit is it was the aftermath of the Diallo situation, and no one wanted to go there. So I put in, and it was like me and another guy.

It was seen as a career killer at that point.

Yeah. It was also like the idea was, is that cops are very good at thinking everyone's out to get them. And so why would you put yourself in a situation in a unit like that Where you could, you know, potentially get hurt either through your own stupidity or sometimes like, you know, you do something that's not necessarily stupid, but you get in trouble. And so I was in that unit and I learned a ton from like really good guys that were very specific about who they stopped. And they were very good at watching people for a long time and noticing patterns of behavior because getting the gun is fine, but then you've got to articulate legally what led you to it.

Right. The probable cause and all that.

Right. And the first arrest I ever had in that unit, I was with a different supervisor, and that supervisor went after money and clavos. You know what a clavo is? Clavo is a Dominican kind of phrase for a trap in a car or a house.

Oh, gotcha.

Okay. So at the time, you had drug dealers coming over from Washington Heights and they would run across the 181 Bridge in like a lot of times Chevy Impalas, and they would have these vehicles registered to semicolons. Semicolon is essentially like it's a— you register a vehicle to Jack Murphy LLC, and on the registration it's not to a person, it's to Semicolon LLC. So we call those semicolons. And if you got a car with a semicolon, There was a chance that you had something. Do a little investigation. You talk to the guy. If he can't answer, if he's saying it's not his car, maybe do a little more investigation. I had a sergeant who did a search. He found like $12,000 and like a crack, a fragment of cocaine. And I explained this to the assistant district attorney in the Bronx the next morning because you write up your case and basically you get on the phone and you're like, hey, this is what happened. And then they write up an affidavit, you sign it, and that's that. And I say what happened. It's my first, I've been in this unit like 2 days. And she listens to me and she goes, listen, officer, I'm going to write this up, but this is probably the worst probable cause statement I've ever heard in my career.

And I was like, oh, this is a great unit to be in. And so, you know, I don't remember what happened with that case, but basically, yeah, the rest of the next 2 and a half years. Trying to get guns. And the way I got to detective was I went to narcotics, because if you go to narcotics, after 18 months you get the shield.

Gotcha.

And I hated narcotics.

How come?

Because much like writing summonses to the working man, narcotics, where I was, which was the 4-0, which is the very southern tip of the Bronx, which is also where I became murder police later. We didn't know it at the time. We're talking about like, you don't see the forest for the trees sometimes when you're in something. We were— I was in narcotics at the height of the OxyContin wave. And so everyone that we were arresting in this area, most part, not everyone, but majority of people we arrested were buying Percocets and Xanax and Vicodins. We call them sticks. They were all pills. And these were like, these were not people that were gonna go stick up a bodega or like engage in a turf war. These were like 55-year-old women that weighed like £300 that had like back problems. And the issue became a big deal in this neighborhood cuz you still have like people that are living there and you got kids that are trying to go to school, but it sort of congregated in this precinct. And so, Yeah. We would go out and scoop like 7, 8, 10 of these people a day, like for 3 days a week.

And I didn't see— it wasn't what I wanted to do. Like, I liked going after what I thought were criminals. Like, I don't know, you're still young at that point, you're like, I can make a difference, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fix this city. And so I tried like hell to get out of it. Plus, the other thing, from a more practical point of view, I spent a lot of times looking at assholes. A lot of strip searches.

A lot of prison purses.

A lot of Bronx wallets, man. And you're— everyone gets strip searched. And now you need a warrant for that. When I was there, you did not. It was— people got strip searched as a matter of course.

Cavity searches, everyone.

Yeah. And no one smells good. Everyone's going to the hospital. These people are like, you know, on the last legs. But they would never die. It's this weird sort of like netherworld where these people have a ton of diseases for— because they're just living a life that isn't healthy. But also they're— that will live to be 80.

And it's just weird.

They're just unkillable. And so I just got tired of dealing with this and everyone smells and it's just— we would do like— we had some crack sets and stuff that we would work and some dope was kind of sort of still big. But it was mostly pills and I hated it. And I hated doing search warrants up there because it was— I listened, said this a bunch, but you listen to the precision with which the guys and women that you have on the show, they talk about like CQB. Is that a term? Did I get that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And so they're getting into a room or a house somewhere in Fallujah or I don't know where. And it seems like so precise, right? Like everyone's got a job. Everyone knows you clear that corner, you clear this corner. Narcotics does a search warrant in the projects. It is a clown car of chaos, man.

Yeah.

If we get the door off the hinges, 'cause project doors might as well be like castles. If you can get the door off the hinges, what you're trying to do is get to the toilet before they flush everything. And there's no, Organized sort of tactical precision, and it just becomes everyone. We need to get a positive, right? Because you're you get a search warrant. You've got cause to be there. Either undercover buys or CI, a confidential informant, has bought at this apartment because so much of it has moved indoors because of flooding the streets, which was a byproduct of the you know the Giuliani and and broken windows. Is for a long time, uniformed cops could not make drug arrests. And then they took those handcuffs off, and so all the drug deals that went out on the street moved indoors. And so we would do these search warrants, and all you want to do is get a positive. You want to get one bag of crack, because that shows that you were good, it was a good faith effort. And everyone was afraid that if you knocked the door off the hinges and you didn't find any drugs, you didn't find any paraphernalia, that you opened yourself up to civil liability.

And so that's why it became whoever, whoever's warrant it was, whoever, whatever detective was like, we gotta get a positive. You gotta get me, we gotta get a bag of crack.

I mean, when you say civil liability, I've never heard of a police officer being like personally sued. Don't like the unions really step in at that point?

You're indemnified. Yeah. At least you were then. But it is not an enjoyable experience.

I'm sure it's not.

Yeah. And like, I've, I've been served papers a number of times. mostly by people that were in prison. You know, you can extrapolate from that what you want. But yeah, you do have to go to corporation counsel. And even though they are the city's attorney, you're always kind of like, do you believe me? Are you on my side?

When we had— years ago, we had Danny Coulson on the show, who was career FBI.

Yeah.

Dude, really interesting guy. And he was telling a story about CQB back in the good old days. You know, he came into the Bureau during the J. Edgar Hoover years and he got assigned here to New York City. And he said him and his crew of G-men, they go to like serve a warrant. They like kick down the door, bust it right off its hinges. They go in, they clear the whole place and they can't find the guy. And like, well, we had someone watching. We know he went in here. Like, where's— and they spent like 15 minutes looking through this apartment over and over again, and they realize he's underneath the door that they knocked down.

Yeah, man, it's, it's wild. We've had guys like hide behind kids and like, you know, they're gonna throw a kid at a guy. I had one guy do that, not to me, to another guy.

Did you have the, the, uh, The guy that had the tiger in the apartment?

No, don't. If he had a tiger in an apartment, I would've politely closed the door and said, you have a good day, sir.

That's a, that's like a famous New York City thing. The guy that had a full-grown tiger in his apartment.

Yeah, that was an ESU job. I remember. Um, nah, like I didn't, we had, we had times, we had tough times. I, I said about like, if you can get the door off, we had a hydro ram. Did you guys have those?

We didn't use them back then.

These were like a, like a, I don't know, a, a, suitcase that weighed £80, and then it had a brace, and you would put it on the door and it would literally spread the door jamb.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so, and then theoretically, boom, you hit it with the manual ram, door flies open, you're in, no problem. Every now and then that hydro wouldn't quite spread it far enough, but it would get to a point where you couldn't knock the door in, and then it's, it's stuck, and you have a gap. You can't get in, you can't breach the door, and then you're talking to the person inside and you're like, just please, just let us in. Just try to unlock the door and let us in, sir.

Yeah, sir.

And people would do that. They're like, fine, I just, I'm just fine. Whatever, man. Just come in here. So yeah, I got out of narcotics as soon as I could.

And that's how you made detective?

Yeah, I got my shield in narcotics. I was in Brooklyn for a while. Um, a blur. I don't remember any of it. I did not know where I was going. I don't know directions, compass points. I was out of, Lost in the sauce. I got back to the Bronx. I get out of the Bronx and I go from the narcotics team I was in, worked the 4-0, which was the southern tip of the Bronx. And I made it into that detective squad because I knew there was crossover because so many, so many shootings and homicides that did happen were involving drugs. So there would be a lot of crossover between what we were doing and what the squad was doing. And not to backtrack quickly, but like, I remember the reason why I wanted to become a detective is when I was in anti-crime and we're in plainclothes and your whole job is to get guns, get guns, get guns. We had a CI and that CI calls us one day and his buddy got kidnapped. And I'd never dealt with this before, kidnapping. My God. And so we talked to the guy and we're like, all right, this is out of our depth.

None of us know what to do.

And so kidnapping is a federal crime.

Yeah, I think. What are the laws with it if you got to move them across state lines? It wasn't— this one wasn't charged federally, but there's a major case unit. So there's like a protocol and you call the major case unit. Detectives showed up and they're like, all right, thank you very much. And they take our CI and we never see him again. And like a week later, I'm in the complaint room in the Bronx, which is where all the cops go to write up their complaints with the DA. You sit with the DA in a cubicle. that smells terrible, filled with bedbugs. And you write up your affidavit. And I'm sitting there waiting, asleep as we are. And there's a guy across from me, and he's looking through the paper, and I see the photo of the complainant— the, the— not the complaint— well, yeah, the witness. It was our guy. I'm like, hey, did you— and he's like, yeah, we found that guy. We made collars on it. And in my head, I didn't want to ask, but I wanted to ask, like, How do you do that? How do you go from like, hey, my boy got kidnapped, to finding the people, building a case, and getting them arrested?

And I just thought that was fascinating. And so I wanted to know how you got from like A to Z. And so that's why I wanted to be a detective. And also, like I've said, I'm not really a gun guy. So I wasn't going to ESU. I wasn't traversing the Brooklyn Bridge. I'm not dangling outside of a skyscraper. Like, I could, I could sit behind a computer. I can talk to people. I'm good at that. So that's what I did.

And what was the, um, I mean, there are different types of detectives, right, that do different types of work. I mean, where did you kind of start off at?

Uh, so in a detective squad, every precinct in the city has a detective squad. And so they're upstairs and they catch everything that happens within that precinct, at least initially. In some cases might get turned out to like other units, like bank robberies would go at the time to Joint Bank Robbery Task Force. Although there was a there were rules with that, like if a gun was displayed, it would go to Bank Robbery Task Force. But if it was a note, the feds didn't want it, so it stayed with Major Case. And then you get people you know pissing on each other about who gets to take what. But generally, we catch everything from Threats made over the phone, up to murders. And the way it works in the city, and I'm not sure if it works that way now, but the way it works in the city is that if you have a DOA, you have a guy gets killed and I catch it. And then there's a homicide task force that works out of every borough. And their job is to assist the squad detective. And so you're sitting up on Simpson Street, which is the place, Little House on the Prairie that I said before.

They all work out of there, and they get a phone call. And so now you get paired up with a guy that works out of the borough, and he's catching cases from all over the Bronx. And obviously, that's a bit of a roulette spin of the wheel there in terms of who you get to work with, because you know there's dynamics and personalities at play. And so one of the first questions we ask is we'd be at a crime scene. It's like, oh, it's a homicide. And inevitably, the first question is who's catching from homicide? And if it's like, oh, it's this guy, and you're like, oh God, I don't want to work with that guy. So then, yeah, you two essentially, you're pulled off the catching schedule for 2 weeks and you just work that homicide. Um, but you catch everything from everything that gets reported, everything that is left open to the squad.

What were some of the more memorable ones for you?

Um, my homicides were never the kinds of homicides that would ever make it into a Netflix true crime doc.

Law and Order episode.

Yeah, because my victims, my victims were not what true crime aficionados want to be interested in.

Like junkies and stuff.

These were young men, mostly Black and brown. These were not like young white women. And I think part of my issue with true crime is that we seem to have a predilection for focusing on a certain kind of victim.

Yeah, it's almost pornographic.

Yeah, it's a little gross, I think. And like, you know, most of my victims, most of them were not like objectively good people. Almost certainly, like, like very rarely does a true innocent victim get killed. Like this woman that got stabbed 2 days ago in Times Square. It's horrible. It's a tragedy. Most of my victims chose a certain kind of life or they were born into a certain kind of life and they were living that life. And it was violent and it was criminal. And, you know, sometimes that, that you get got, you get got, you, you get caught slipping. And some of my, my guys got caught slipping. But that doesn't mean that, like, they don't merit an investigation.

Right. I was gonna ask, like, is that a thing within the police force? Like, you know, this person wasn't a citizen, we're not really gonna look into it.

I, that you hear that a lot. And I, I, I've never really seen that. I think even I, I said before about like, you know, little old ladies getting turned out because they got a purse snatch. And there were lazy dudes. There were lazy dudes. There were stupid dudes. Um, there were people that just weren't good at their job. There were people that had 6 families with 3 different women. And so they didn't have time to do an investigation. But I think for the most part, everyone gives it their all when it comes to like serious stuff. especially homicides, you want to close those. But the motivation I always thought, and maybe this is just my own cynicism speaking, is that every time someone gets killed, the killer is saying to you, if you're catching, I'm better than you and you're not going to get me. And like, I never had this— I never had this notion. Like, there's a guy named Vernon Gerberth or Galbreath. I'm gonna get that name wrong. But he wrote— he was the CO of our squad before. I never knew him. Many years ago. But he wrote a number of books called Practical Homicide Investigation.

He literally wrote the book on, like, modern homicide investigation. And he was famous in the world of homicide investigation. And he used to say, remember, you work for God. And I never bought into that. And maybe that's my own atheism at play, but like, I always just didn't want to lose. And maybe that's not an answer that like someone wants to hear in terms of like, oh, I'm working for the city, I'm gonna— this citizen deserves justice. And yeah, that's true, but I always approached it as like, I'm gonna get you because I'm better than you.

Some personal motivation isn't bad necessarily.

Right. Like, I don't know. My grandfather was in the military during World War II, and like, he didn't— he didn't fight Hitler because Hitler was evil incarnate. I mean, that can be true. 2 things can be true. But like, he fought for the people next to him. And I've seen that. I don't know how true that is in movies or like, you know, Band of Brothers, but like, you end up Maybe you start out fighting for a cause, but you end up sort of like, it becomes much more intimate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, for me, like, the motivation was I just wanted to arrest murderers. And so we ended up, so many of our cases, we like, the biggest case that I was kind of involved in ended up encompassing like 6 or 7 murders and like 30 shootings. It became a RICO case. But, um, at the time, Ray Kelly was the commissioner and Ray Kelly didn't like working with the feds because of stop and frisk, because there was a lawsuit that ended up curtailing stop and frisk. It was a whole thing. Kelly and Mayor, um, uh, God, this is what happens when you get old.

I hope you can edit this out. Mike, uh, Bloomberg. Thank you. Goddamn, that looks terrible. Uh, but yeah, Kellyanne Bloomberg dug their heels in on stop and frisk, saying that it, it brought crime down, which it did. It also resulted in a lot of young people getting stopped and searched that maybe didn't deserve it. So then you have a philosophical question, which is, where is that line drawn? Like, yeah, we're, we're stopping people from getting killed, but are you alienating a whole generation of kids who are just getting hassled by the cops? And like, I've heard you talk about that with some of your guests about like what you're doing overseas, where it's like, are you just creating another generation of terrorists?

Right.

Not to equate like kids in the Bronx with terrorists. I don't, I'm not just saying that, but I'm saying like, you just had an episode with a guy who didn't like the cops. What's his name? The kid from Texas. The episode just dropped, but he said that like he got, him and his father got stopped by the cops. He ended up becoming a cop after he got outta the military.

Oh, Garduño.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he's like, I didn't— I hated the cops. And so you kind of get that. But yeah, we ended up having— we encompassed all these cases into one federal case and we worked with the Southern District U.S. Attorney and it became like 35 people got arrested. I could be wrong.

What was this, a gang?

Yeah, it was a gang war. It was basically there were kids from the Cortland projects, Cortland Houses, They had beef with kids from 2 other projects down in the, a little further south. And what you had is they would just throw rounds back and forth at each other. And sometimes people that aren't involved, civilians get hit. We had a city councilwoman's son get caught in the crossfire. He survived. Chinese delivery guy, he survived. But like, there's tons of others. But yeah, it was just this, it started out as a drug beef, but then it became—

Gang beef.

respect. And it became like, uh, uh, uh, rap songs and, and like, you know, SoundCloud drill, drill tracks. And maybe not drill, not then, but, but it became a lot about respect. And it's like, we just got beef. And I remember when we, when we took the case down and you end up getting cooperators— and if you want, I can talk about how that works— but you get cooperators and you talk to them at length.

When you say cooperators, do you mean snitches?

It's an ugly term, Jack. I prefer— I operate in a professional manner, and I believe that someone who sees the light and decides that they want to atone for their sins—

Before or after you gave them the third degree?

Well, funnily enough, I didn't flip this kid. The kid that sent the whole case, busted the case wide open, was flipped by 2 female U.S. attorneys. who were probably 2 of the best prosecutors I've ever dealt with, who they, he was locked up on Rikers for something else. And they went to him independent of us because we couldn't get, we couldn't break him. He laughed in our face. And these 2 women went out to Rikers and they're like, we're from the feds and you're gonna go to jail for the rest of your life if you don't, if you don't tell us everything. And the kid's like, all right, I'll cooperate. And the truth was, is we didn't have, we didn't have the, the, the case at that point. But he just, they saw the train coming because the biggest thing with the feds is the sentencing hammer that they wield. And this has become an issue along racial lines. The notion of the sentencing guidelines in the federal court system, and I think also in the state with the Rockefeller-era drug laws, differentiate between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. And there are people that are, that will, argue that the reason why that is, is that white people use powder cocaine, upper-class white people who have money, and crack cocaine is a, is a poor person's drug, a Black and brown person's drug, if you want to equate that.

Also poor white people. And so therefore, the difference in sentencing laws, which are much, much harsher for crack cocaine, are therefore racist. I think what those people fail to realize is what I said earlier in the '90s, Those 2,100 people that got murdered, and God knows how many people got shot, I don't have the number in my head, and survived. Those were the crack wars. Crack was a drug that precipitated insane levels of violence. And in response, lawmakers addressed—

The violence.

The violence.

That's what they were trying to target.

Right. And so, you know, we ended up charging crack laws. We ended up encompassing these, these 2 or 3 different groups. And we built cooperators. But basically, when you cooperate with the federal government, when you're charged or you're about to be charged and you throw yourself on the mercy of the federal court system, God help you. God help you. Sammy the Bull, famously Sammy the Bull Gravano, the guy who ended up cooperating, thank you, against John Gotti. You have to come clean for everything you've ever done in your life.

Yeah, open kimono.

Yeah, and the reason why is that if we find anything that you don't tell us about, we'll tear up your 5K letter. 5K letter is basically, there are no promises made. You know, you'll always say, I will get you out.

It's like your plea bargain kind of thing.

Not even that. It's basically what a prosecutor will do is they'll write a letter that says, Jack Murphy provided substantial assistance to the federal government In the following investigations, and then that gets given to a judge, and a judge takes this into consideration when sentencing a defendant. Now you've already pled guilty in this case. The kid that they went and they talked to at Rikers, I want to say he killed three people that we knew of, and he shot others, and he was part of this gang. So we recode the whole gang, the racketeering and corrupt organizations law, and so. Theoretically, a judge could look at this and still be like, no, Jack Murphy's a psycho. I'm not giving him a deal. You're getting 20— they use months in the federal system, which is confusing as hell to cops that can't do math. Because at the end of these trials, and we had a crazy trial, they would sentence like 487 months. And me and the other, my partner—

The calculator.

Yeah, we're like, 12, how many, what is that? And inevitably these brilliant attorneys would turn to us and be like, relax, it's like 38 years.

Idiot.

But yeah, you're essentially, you cooperate. You have to say everything you've ever done, even if you're not being charged with it. And we had issues before trial came up where there were people who did not admit to certain things that they did. And there was one guy in particular who was going to testify and the night or the, a few days or the night before he was gonna go on, I remember being in downtown in 1 St. Andrews and we got him in a room. It's like 10 o'clock at night. And we got a video, and I don't know how, how this didn't come out, but it's him handing off a gun to another kid at a shooting, and he held that back. And we're like, who is this? And he's like, um, I don't know, kind of looks familiar. We're like, bro, that's you. And finally he's like, yeah, that's me. Because we had like 3 other people telling us, oh yeah, that dude was there for that. He didn't tell you? But yeah, the That ended up closing out, I don't even remember, I don't want to inflate numbers, but it closed out a ton of homicides and a bunch of shootings.

And then after I left and went to another unit to end my career, other detectives came in and built off of that case. And, um, that was actually the first case in the federal system. There's case law on this where postings to social media were used against—

Really?

Yeah.

There was a guy who posted, um, getting up on MySpace, talking about the murders.

Facebook at the time. Uh, but not necessarily, just like posting photos and posting, uh, uh, sometimes they post, uh, YouTube of like guns and stuff. And then you get into like the forensic examination of like, there's a photo taken and then through the background, they're, they're in front of a window and you can't tell what they're, where they are, but through the window you can see a particular like water tower. Yeah. And the angle of the water tower and the building And then you go to where he lives, 'cause he's like, ah, I don't know that where that was or something. But it, you get into this minutia of what you have to prove. And then you take a photo from that spot where he was standing and it's like, oh, it was his apartment where the gun was. 'Cause you can argue, oh, I was at my boy's house. It was his, it was his piece. I don't know nothing. And then you take a photo and you're like, no, no, this was his house. And so you can match the water tower and it's, yeah, you can, you can run off into the weeds in terms of like, what is required.

What was like the craziest case that you caught?

I'm not going to say one of mine because most of mine were fairly run-of-the-mill. In terms of run-of-the-mill, I mean, like, as far as murders go, you get shot for salaciousness. I worked on this, but everyone worked on this. Come into work one morning and there's a night watch. Okay, so we go home at 1 in the morning. And then the next shift comes in at 8 in the morning. So from 1 to 8, the, the whole borough, every borough is covered by one set of detectives and they respond to heavy jobs, whatever that might be. And they start the investigation and then they give you a bunch of paper and they're like, I'm going to bed. And then you have this baby that you gotta raise to adulthood. And so there was a guy, a super, comes out at like 6 in the morning, you know, hosing down the sidewalk. And there's a garbage— there's a luggage rolling bag in the garbage. And he's like, oh, I tell these people not to do that. And he goes over to it and he kind of moves it. It's super heavy. And he looks and there's like what appears to be blood leaking from it.

And he's like, oh, that's not good. He's a super in the Bronx. He knows his stuff. And so he calls the cops. Cops show up and there's like a torso in the suitcase.

And who doesn't have a torso in a suitcase? Come on.

Every now and then that happens. Torso will occasionally show up. Actually, the murder that kind of sort of also inspired—

The Torso Killer.

No, this guy Michael Alig. There's a club kid. They chopped the guy up. They dumped him in the river. They dumped him in the Hudson in a suitcase. Suitcase washes up on Staten Island. Kids playing on Staten Island find the suitcase, open it up. Oh man, dead body. But I digress. So the wheels start rolling. We don't get a lot of severed torsos, you know, like the, the old New York Post headline, headless body and topless bar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the wheels spin up. And this was even then video was kind of starting to be pretty ubiquitous. Like most of our cases revolve in video. I have no idea how crimes were solved before DNA and security video.

Um, by good old-fashioned detective work, Jason.

By, by beatings administered with, to within an inch of a life. Yeah.

Handcuffing people to, uh, fire hydrants.

Also, you know, the other thing is that like back then, I think, and I was just talking about this with, with a writer friend of mine, is that I think before the advent of DNA and, and cell sites and facial identification, we were, as a society, we accepted Okay, we're going to accept what the police tell us on the stand. And I think that was like a social contract. And I think people suspected that there's still a lot of that. It's so much harder. I, I don't know.

Like when you go to jury duty, they ask you like, do you think a police officer would take the stand and lie? Now, who the, who in the fuck would say, no, I don't think that would ever happen.

I think so. I think you're not accounting for fear. Because I know, like, yes, absolutely, I agree with you. But I think in the modern environment, I, I would hope— the other thing is you can't account for is that people are stupid, and cops are no smarter than anyone else.

Corruption exists in every industry, you know, to include law enforcement.

I don't, I don't disagree with that. But I also think that nowadays there's a level of fear of prosecution for something like perjury. And there were incidents that put the fear of God into people I know.

We do put cops in jail sometimes.

Yeah. So there was a cop, there was a detective who caught a case, a shooting, and he worked the case. And on like New Year's Eve, the guy gets arrested because a lot of times detectives also don't go out and necessarily grab the guy. There's all these other units that hunt people.

Right, right, right.

And the guy gets caught. This guy was out, it was like New Year's Eve, I want to say, might be wrong. But he had had a couple and he comes in and he talks to the kid. He tries to get a statement from the kid. I think he does. I don't want to get the story wrong, but he talks to the kid without Mirandizing him.

Oh yeah.

And he gets up on the stand and he's asked during hearing, uh, it would be like a MAP hearing or a Dunaway hearing or Wade hearing. I forget the, the name anyway. Hearing to determine the admissibility of the statement. And he's asked, like, did you talk to him before Mirandizing him? No, absolutely not. And the judge gave this guy a bunch of outs. Is it possible that you did and you forgot? Absolutely not, sir. Is there a world in which this might have happened, detective?

No.

Well, the kid that got pinched was pinched by someone else, and he didn't get tossed really well, and he had his phone on him. And no one tossed him because the detective that came in would— came from home and he was out doing his— living his life. And he came in and he didn't toss him. And so this kid's sitting in there with a phone on him and he recorded this interaction on his phone. And this is before AI when you can argue, oh, it's phony, made it up. He got my voice. And that guy went to jail. Because he perjured himself. And I think that incident, I forget when that was. It was when I was in the detective squad. So it was between 2007 and 2014. I think that opened up a lot of eyes to like, we should really be on top of this stuff. We should know what we're talking about, don't you think? And so I think even now in this day and age, I'm sure there's, it still happens, but You're on camera all the time, man.

Oh yeah. Body cams. But the body cams are like, they, you know, prove that the police are doing the right thing like 9 times outta 10, you know, when complaints come down.

So that was the thing when bot— 'cause body cams were coming in when I was there and everyone's like, no, we don't want 'em. This is terrible. And my attitude was—

Turned out to be a good thing for them.

Yeah. My attitude was, guys, let, Let people see what we're dealing with on a daily basis. Like, it is chaos. And you still get guys who do the wrong things. We've seen it, you know, with shootings and, you know, horrible incidents across the country. But like, for the most part, if you are not a moron and you're acting in good faith, and in terms of like how situations change and how there's progression in terms of—

Sure.

escalation of violence or de-escalation of violence. I've mentioned this incident that just happened in Times Square where this mentally disturbed woman, I presume, stabs 2 people in Times Square right outside the substation. Yep. The cops surround her, they taser, the taser has no effect. They're ordering her to drop the knife. She doesn't drop the knife. They shoot her and she dies.

She, she like, from what I read, she came at one of the officers with a knife and even verbalized something like, I'm gonna kill you.

I mean, at that point, yeah, it is what it is. But it shows you, like, in years past, would someone have just came out and just dropped that woman without saying a word?

Yes.

Yeah, probably. Like, famously, there was, um, I forget how late, how long ago this was. There was an incident outside, uh, the Empire State Building, and there were 2 cops off duty. There was a shooting, and there were 2 cops off duty, or no, they were on duty, but they were working like a paid detail, which is like, um, you're in uniform, Um, but you're working like overtime to protect a building, but you're for presence, you're in uniform. I think this, this, they were on paid detail and they confronted this guy and they let like 15 rounds go and they hit like 6 civilians that were not involved.

And so something like that happened in Times Square like 12, 13 years ago. Yeah.

I never, like, there were guys I worked with that wanted to shoot someone. I was not one of them because I'm not a good shot, and neither were they. Most cops aren't. Do you know how they teach us to shoot? I don't know what they—

You shoot like once a year, right, to qualify?

Twice a year. You shoot 50 rounds at like— 50 rounds total. I forget the breakdown, but it's like 7 yards, 15 yards, 25 yards, and then they added 3 yards because most engagements are like from the hip, like where we are. And the 25 yards in a city, there's 10 million people in New York City. I couldn't hit the yellow target that is not moving or waving a gun at me. There's no way I'm taking a crack. I don't know the scenario that I would ever like chance a shot at 25 yards. And that's how they teach you. They don't teach you combat. Some of the special units get like sort of like building and you saw that Hogan's Alley sort of simulations.

Right, right.

And I think that's really useful. But yeah, it's very static and it's very— they teach you to pass. Yeah. They don't teach you to be in a gunfight.

It's not their job to be gunslingers either, in fairness.

Can I? Yeah, of course. Yeah. I didn't know if— yeah, it's fine. I'm gonna screw anything up here.

But yeah, at the same time, you know, if you, you're carrying a lethal weapon as a part of your duties and if you do have to deploy that weapon, you know, the results can be catastrophic if, We're told from jump, we're told you have to account legally for every round you fire.

You fired 16, we carried 16 rounds in our duty weapon, plus 15 in the magazine, 1 in the chamber. If you fired 16 rounds, you need to be able to say, why did you fire round number 9?

Right. And who the hell's gonna remember that in a firefight?

Yeah, like, and thank God I never had to fire, I never came close to shooting anyone. When I was a detective in the squad, I arrested most people without handcuffing them. You talk to most people, you get them in the car, you give them a spiel for something else. You have them accompany you. A lot of times with homicides, you're like, take a ride with us. And I was just shocked at how many people go.

So the story about the torso— the torso.

I'm sorry, I got way off.

No, it's okay.

We find another piece of luggage not far away containing the head, the arms. So now we have a—

As one does.

More or less an entire human body. It's kind of a sad story, actually. I shouldn't make light of it. But, you know, cops and military, very dark senses of humor. And so we start working the video back. So you get to where it happened, where they dropped it. And so now you're doing a video canvas and you find the first video. And, and there was a chief of detectives who thought that every video system was like in Manhattan. It's like in a nice air-conditioned room and you're sitting behind a desk and you're like, you know, you have, you're like on the Matrix and you're, you're getting into it. And in the Bronx, a lot of these video systems, these DVRs are like up in the ceiling tiles. They're in a basement in standing water. They haven't been chained, the dates are off, and you're trying to do the math where it's like, okay, today is September 2nd, this says it's August 15th.

Yeah, like the leap year and the daytime savings have rolled over a few times.

Yeah, and you're like, oh man, how do we figure this out? So then you start seeing like, okay, now we got the guy who dropped it, but it's just a person. It's not like you can't look at it, because the other thing that people don't realize Is that you can have video of someone and you can see his face, Luigi Mangione, let's say. And you're like, oh, okay, I know that guy. That's Jack Murphy. But you need someone to come into court, into grand jury and say, I've known Jack for 14 years. We served together in Iraq and at Fort— insert fort here. I'm sorry, I don't know any forts. Like, I know Jack Murphy and that's him on that video. But you need someone to say that. You can't just look at it and say, that looks like Jack. Let's go grab Jack and run him through.

Right, right.

So it's just a person at this point. And then you just track buildings and you're following this person and you're building like a path, like the route. And hopefully you don't lose him and you don't get run out of coverage from a building or from a bullet cam or from a traffic cam or something. And we track him back to a project. apartment or project building.

I'm just out of curiosity, like, as far as distance, like, how far were you able to track this guy back using static CCTV cameras that were in the neighborhood?

The whole way, I think. Yeah, there were, there were like a bunch of us. Like, again, this isn't like I walked in and said, I'm going to track this guy. Like, a bunch of us are canvassing.

But I mean, like, how far did this—

Oh, it wasn't, it wasn't very far. Maybe it's been a long time. Less than half a mile.

Oh, okay.

Because the other thing is that, like, if you're lugging a human body in a rolling bag uphill, because this is a hilly part of the Bronx, and you're not fit, you're not game-match fit right now, you know, you're not gonna be like, I'm gonna take this body all the way over there. Because the other thing is, there's a chance that maybe a cop might stop you.

Your roller bag that's trailing blood?

Hey, what's in the bag, sir? Uh, a butcher? I don't know. But yeah, it's less than— it wasn't a long distance. Not at all. So we track them back to the project department and there's video at the time in the project department, which was fairly new because a lot of certain— only certain projects got wired for video, which is another messed up thing is that like we had— it's another one of those weird, like how much privacy do you want to give up versus how much safety do you want to have? And there were certain projects that didn't get video for a long time. And the 4-0 had the highest concentration of housing development, public housing in the city. Like we had tons of housing. And this particular building had video. And so we were able to get this guy rolling out with his boy and we were able to show the video to a few people that we trust. Generally, You show it to like, if you show it, if you ask maintenance workers or supers, you don't ask 'em like, who is this? Like your first question's like, you have any problems in the building?

And if they say no, no problems, no problems, you don't trust 'em. But if they're like, I got a guy in on apartment 4D who's slinging heroin every morning, then you're like, have a seat. Let's have, you and I are gonna talk. 'Cause you can trust that guy. And also hopefully you can do something for him to help clean up his issues. But his housing development, maintenance workers and people. And I don't remember how we got— how we put a name to the face, but we did. And at that point, you have him coming and going, and you're able to track him to an apartment. And he was brought in. Again, one of those things like, hey, you want to come talk to us? And once again, I'm shocked. I'm shocked that anyone confesses. And I have a theory as to confession, but I'll get to later. I don't How long ago? But he gets talked to, he gets brought in, and we're able to kind of match the timeline. We're, we're getting there close. And he had a boy with him, a friend. And the friend is a little more concerned about this situation than the, the main guy.

And the friend is like, I'll tell you a little something. We went to, uh, we went to Brooklyn yesterday. And we bought a Sawzall. And so now the next thing is, because you gotta corroborate, now I'm in— he didn't know where he was 'cause he was a Bronx guy, but he knew like generally the neighborhood. So now I'm walking around Brooklyn going into every hardware store saying like, can I see your video? Can I see your video? Can I see? And eventually we hit on him and we see these 2 guys buying saws. And I've, to make a long story even longer, It's kind of a sad story. This kid, um, was young. He, uh, was taken away from his mother, um, put into foster care, was raised in foster care, didn't have a good time in foster care, as I would imagine most New York City foster kids don't. And he and his mom just ended up reconnecting and he just went back to live with her. It was the mother's apartment. And they'd been living together for a short amount of time. And, um, he had some issues mentally and he decided he was going to kill her.

And after he killed her, he called his boy, he put the body in the, in the tub and he called his boy and said, I need help. And his boy came over and was like, WTF, but also sure, let's hit the hardware store and get some tools. And so they chop up the body in, in the tub. And so we, you know, we, we get a search warrant and, um, uh, crime scene shows up and crime scene sprays that luminol and then they hit the blacklight. Place just blows up like, uh, like a nightclub.

Oh my God.

And so it's like, oh, hey, this is, this is pretty close. And then we get a search warrant for his phone and this is before phones were kind of impregnable. And they can still force phones, I think. I get, like I said, I'm outta the game a long time, so I don't know. But this was in the days of Android phones and, and he had a photo on his phone of him holding up his mother's severed head and a selfie like this.

I think at that point you've caught him red-handed.

And I said, boys, I'm no detective, but I think we got us a murderer. And of course, talking about cops being cops, That photo was on the COVID of the New York Post the next day.

Holy shit.

Because there's nothing cops love more than sending a photo of some sketchy crime scene to a journalist. And, uh, that became kind of a big deal in terms of, like, you know, it's— every murder is sad. At some point, every victim is someone's kid. In a 9-week trial, Were you in New York for Hurricane Sandy?

Yes.

Okay, so our trial was ongoing when Hurricane Sandy hit, and it was 9 weeks. And federal trials— I learned this writing novels. I wanted to write my first book that didn't sell. Shocking. Was really accurate. And I had an agent tell me, this sounds like it's really accurate to what police work is, and that's also really boring. And there's nothing more boring than a trial, especially a federal trial. There's a lot of, a lot of procedures, law and everything. But after that case, that was a kind of a big deal within headquarters. And they were very happy that this got done because it was one of the first of trying to work with the feds again in that capacity. And I was lucky to be a small part of it. And the feds were— the Bronx robbery was having a lot of problems with the DA's office in the Bronx and trying to get them to charge robberies, gunpoint robberies. And there are a number of reasons for that. A lot of it was just like trying to get IDs. Guys are messed up and like, you're, you're trying to like work cases where, how do you, how do you end up if you don't have DNA?

How do you put these people at these places? And Bronx DA, which is kind of difficult to work with sometimes in terms of prosecuting criminals. Bronx robbery was having big trouble. So they had started an ad hoc relationship with ATF, and ATF was able to charge Hobbs Act robberies. And Hobbs Act robberies is any— the robbery of any— anything, money or anything that impacts interstate commerce. So these books that you have here were all printed out in New York State.

Yeah, so if you rob a liquor shop, Yeah.

Yeah. You have, you have interfered with interstate commerce. And so what they started doing independent of me, I didn't know about this 'cause I'm still in the 4, the 4-0 at the time working my shootings and homicides, is they built a relationship with Southern District, the US Attorney's Office. And they were, they were charging Hobzocks and they were taking these cases from the Bronx and they were bringing 'em there. And so they wanted to formalize this relationship. So they created with ATF, they signed a memorandum of understanding, which I guess you guys deal with. Yeah.

It's just an agreement between 2 organizations.

Yeah, I know. I'm a cop, man. What do I know? Where they started this unit called SPARTA. And for the last 4 years, I got my own take-home car. I got to work banker's hours. And we just investigated citywide these any like gunpoint robberies of like basically commercial establishments. But then we started using that as a way to get into Like, not organized crime in, in the sense of like the Russian mafia, but like these crews that were also, in addition to doing robberies, they were also shooting people, they were also murdering people. They might also be involved in like, you know, stolen goods.

How does that work? I mean, you're saying it's not organized crime per se, but it's organized on some level.

Yeah, it's not— when I say like organized crime, I think that triggers a certain perception of people's minds.

Like the Godfather or something.

Yeah.

Right.

And so, yeah, these are like, like crews, because this is the other thing, is that they started calling— they didn't want to call gangs gangs, so they started calling them crews. And a crew is like a more loosely organized version of a gang. Semantics in my mind. But like, yeah, these are organizations that engage in crime for some financial benefit, but they're not sort of the traditional what you expect.

Yeah. Pledging Omerta and all this kind of stuff.

Exactly. Um, and so these, these— and, and, and also on the other hand, we ended up with a lot of like heroin addicts who were doing these robberies, um, which was another thing. Talk about like legalizing drugs, but that's a fallout that people don't necessarily want to deal with, is that yeah, there are— most drug dealers are nonviolent, but you do get people that are addicts who are like, I need to feed my addiction, I'm going to rob 13 hair salons in the Bronx at gunpoint. So yeah, basically you start building these cases and you're either trying to charge Hobbs Act because the, the sentencing hammer is so huge, or you're using that as a way in to close out other cases that couldn't be closed out otherwise. And like that, that was wild because I ended up traveling the whole country. We went This was, I was telling you offline, I needed to have like cool stories 'cause everyone that sits in this chair has like cool stories, way cooler than mine. But I track a guy who robbed in the, in Midtown, he robbed a watch store, smash and grab in the middle of the day.

And we tracked him to Stockton, California. So we jump on a plane.

Who the fuck comes from California to New York to knock over a watch store?

It's the other way around. He was a New Yorker. Oh, and he fled. He fled to California. Okay, I got you. And what I didn't know—

'Cause he figured they were looking for him.

Right. What I didn't know is that Stockton at the time had a lot of like empty houses that were getting bought up. You would probably know this more than me. There was a lot of like Chinese émigrés or Chinese money that was buying houses in Stockton. And there were a lot of just empty houses that were being purchased by foreigners, mostly from China. And this is back in like 2000, 2017, 2016. So we go out to Stockton, we're up on his phone because you get a search warrant for phones. So we, we know like kind of like where the phone is, but there's accuracy issues with regards to like how accurate you get. And eventually we track him to a house where, it's me, a US Marshal from New York, and we hook up with the, the regional task force from California. And so we're talking to these guys and they're like, all right, we, we stopped a car that came out of the place and we're like, Is this guy in there? And they're like, yeah, he's in there. Sorry. So we're pretty good that this dude's in there. And so the marshals from California say to me, what do you want to do?

I'm looking at him. I'm like, I want to knock on his door.

Book him, Dano.

I mean, what do you want to do? And they go, no, no, no, this is the Northern District of California. We don't knock on doors. I said, excuse me? So I'm with a New York City marshal, same agency. But in a different district, he's out of Southern District in New York, and there are different rules for how these this agency operates, and there's different rules. What I learned for every federal agency, depending on the outlook of the judges within a particular district, and the judges in the Northern District did not like enforcement actions of federal crime. I'm kind of being silly and sarcastic, but basically. They didn't want anyone like knocking on a door or taking a door off its hinges. So me and the, me and the other marshal, this guy Billy, I'm like, what is going on here? And I know, I said, what, how do you guys do this? I knock on the door. If he doesn't come out, we take the door off its hinges, we find him and we arrest him. And they go, no, no, we're gonna do it our way. So what they did, and I'd never seen this before, and to this day, I'm, just out of my mind.

They surrounded the house. These are single-family detached homes, which we don't have much of in New York. And they get on the speaker, watch robber, come out with your hands up, we know you're in there. And me and the, me and the New York Marshal looking at each other, we're like, did we just step into like a movie? What is going on here? This goes on for 20 minutes. I go up to the Marshal, I'm like, This is— no offense, I know you know your business. I'm not— I'm a guest. Thank you for helping us. I want to knock on the door and like, no, this works. I'm like, bullshit, this ain't gonna work. This guy— I wouldn't come out. About 10 minutes later, door opens up, guy comes out, does the whole thing, hands behind his back.

Boxer shorts with the hearts on them.

Yeah, they, they click them up and I'm like, that was the weirdest thing I've ever seen. Because in New York you have an arrest warrant. If I can articulate that, that, that person is in that house, if I have reasonable suspicion that he's in there, I can take that door.

Yeah.

You know, they made us do that in Iraq, in Afghanistan eventually. It's, we called it a tactical call out.

Come out with your— yeah, yeah. That's what they called it. That's exactly the term. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like come out with your hand. Did, did they listen?

Sometimes. Uh, and, and other times, you know, there's, you hear stories like they'd send out the women and children. They're like ready to get it on.

Oh yeah, that's probably a bad sign, right?

Yeah, yeah. But the dudes don't come out. Yeah.

I was just listening on the drive down to, uh, Luis Saucedo, and he was saying about how at a certain point the women would separate from the men and the men would be like, okay, we know we're gonna get, you know, you, we know that you're not here to kill us, so just put the flex cuffs on me and take me in and we'll deal with it. And it became very almost businesslike.

Yeah, yeah, it's a norm. You know, people get used to that.

Bizarre, man.

So you finished out your career working with the feds, cruising around with ATF.

Yeah.

Any other big cases before your retirement?

We had a lot of like the robbery cases for whatever reason in terms of like when you say big, like, like the cases to me that I think that stand out are the cases that don't make a lot of news. Um, and there was a kid, actually, I, I, I'll give you this one. There was a kid, Durrell Legister is the victim's name, and he was the only child of a working couple from up in the North Bronx. Um, and Durrell, to make extra money, was, uh, driving like an off-the-books cab. This before, uh, Lyft and Uber. And so he would just like, you know, you could hire him if you didn't— a lot of you grow up in New York. We didn't have a car. I didn't have a car growing up in New York City. And if you knew someone with a car, if you knew like, hey, I can hire you for like the night, I'll, I'll throw you like $40 to drive me around. And so this guy drove a dude around. Uh, turns out that dude was a bad dude from, uh, the 4-6 area and he had a big medallion on his neck and he came into our precinct and they were by a bodega.

And some of our bad guys that we were investigating in that federal case just before we took them down, um, they wanted that medallion and the kid didn't want to give it up. And the robbery was going on from the driver's side window. And, uh, the kid that they wanted to rob was in the passenger side. My victim is in the middle driving the car, civilian, like working dude. Young kid. And the kid didn't want to give it up. And the guy outside the window was like, oh yeah? Pop, pop, pop. And he hits— of course, the guy that they were trying to rob gets one in the ass and survives. And the kid driving the car gets hit like through the heart. Dead. This is his family's only child. And I've told a lot of parents that their child was dead. I've told parents that their child was dead because The police shot him. I've, I've worked, uh, police-involved shootings. Um, and that radically alters your opinion of how you approach criminal justice. And I think it's easy to discount certain victims, but when you have to tell someone, when you are the person knocking on the door and you're like, I need you to, I need you to sit down, they know right then.

And I had to tell this woman this, and I felt terrible. Um, and it took us forever to charge this, but this got wrapped up because we had, we had video, we had everything we needed.

We knew who did it.

And that kid that did that was the same kid that ended up stabbing another guy, a homeless guy. And that was my one murder that I never charged, is he stabbed a homeless guy in his own building. Just because this is the kid that I said was a sociopath. Because I spent time with him and I think there was something truly wrong with that guy. Um, but I was not able to charge that homicide while I was there. And there were other detectives who came on who were working these federal cases and kind of, you know, you realize that you're, you're a spoke in a wheel.

Mm-hmm.

And there are other people that are, will carry on. And they built a case many years later. where they were able to, uh, they were able to finally charge that guy. And I remember I was being there at the sentencing. This is many years later, 6, 7 maybe, because that's the other thing the feds do is that you're able to, you're able to close cases that would otherwise not get closed. And I was sitting next to the mother and sentencing happens. It's always anticlimactic. You think it's gonna be like the end of Untouchables. You ever see the movie The Untouchables?

Yeah.

Judge is banging the gavel and the music swells. It's never like that. It's very formulaic. And she goes outside into the hallway and I go outside and I'm like, you know, we— I didn't arrest the guy. I said, I just wanted to be here. And she's like, this is all good, but Darrell's still dead and I will never have another child because she was of a certain age. And, uh, that's not a sexy story, but I think it is kind of a story that, like, there's a lot of violence that doesn't get reported by the news, and that, that stuff happens every day.

Or like the fallout, you know, the follow-up, what happens in the aftermath of that.

Yeah. And, you know, that, that was, that was one that hung with me. The only other case I, to end on like a light note or to, to, to go out on something a little lighter is we, we were tracking a, when I was with ATF, we were tracking a robbery crew that was going to rob scrap metal company because this guy would pay all his workers or he, this guy would settle his accounts in cash. And so at some point I have to go up in aviation, which is helicopters.

Exciting.

Yeah, I get to go up. And so I would, I'm like, This is a thing that, um, cops love movies. And I've learned from listening to your show that military guys love movies. And so we get in the helicopter and basically what I was gonna do is we were gonna follow. We had information on where this guy was gonna go and the route he was gonna work, and we were gonna tail him from up top. This before we had drones. And this is going through Brooklyn and Queens, all, all the industrial sections. And the helicopter starts spinning up and I was gonna be the guy in, in like Black Hawk Down, that's controlling the firefight from up top. Like, I was really— yeah, he's gonna— I'm the link between the guys on the ground because the guys flying the— they don't call them choppers. They yelled at me for that. They call whatever the helos or whatever they call them. They're flying the plane. They don't do communications. I'm there for communication to link to the guys on the ground. And the rotor spins up and I go, Fucking Irene! And these guys looked at me and I swear if they could have thrown me out right then, because in Black Hawk Down, you know, you see that movie 100 times and that was like the go word, I think, in the movie.

I don't know if that's in the real story, but at least in the Ridley Scott movie, you know, the go word was Irene and Jeremy Piven.

I think, I think our helicopters overseas on a couple missions, we had a helicopter that had the same call sign. like Super 3-6 or something like that.

Oh, that's, that's not what you want. Like, oh man, that's, that's bad stuff. But yeah, but we get up and so this is kind of anticlimactic because the robbery didn't go down. But I said to the guy, I said to the pilot and the copilot, I'm like, hey, if this guy breaks containment down below, what do we do? And they go, we track him. We can outrun any car. Like, we can stay up here for God knows how long. Like, okay, great. I'm like, what if he bails on foot? And they go, we're going to set down and you're going to chase them. And I'm like, that's funny. And they look at me, they're like, you think we're joking? So we're cops, man. We do it just because we're up here. Like, if we can find a spot to put down, we'll put down, you go after them. And in my head I'm going, yeah, that's awesome. And part of me is going, this is nuts, man. You could find like what, a cemetery? Like, where would you even put a helicopter down in New York City?

Intersection, probably.

Oh my God, that's just what you need is to see me jumping out in my Ranger's hat and like trying to run.

I've never seen that though. I mean, I've seen like, you know, air ambulance landing on the side of the highway before. I've never seen NYPD put a bird down in the middle of the city.

They claim— and again, I don't know how many stories these guys are running past me. They probably get off on this stuff because we're all thinking it's cool, but they claim that they— it's been done.

Maybe.

Maybe.

So what ended up happening with that case?

They— that one wasn't my case. That one ended up— the robbery never happened. So it's basically with the other thing that we did is we did like, in addition to past robberies, every now and then CIs would come into information about like, hey, I know that they're going to knock over this warehouse that's housing like, you know, DVD players Use that for an example. And then we would set up on these places if we had enough intel and we would wait for the robbery to go down. Those didn't happen nearly as much, but back in the day, this is, this is before me, there used to be a unit in the NYPD called the Loft and Safe Unit. I think it's a Loft and Safe Unit. And what these guys used to do is that liquor stores getting knocked over 3, 4 times. This is, we're talking like the '50s or the '60s. Liquor store gets knocked over 3 times in a week. The liquor store owner makes all these complaints. They get the loft and safe unit in. These guys are all like stone cold killers that work in this unit. And so what they do is they put the cop behind the counter with like a shotgun.

And the 4th time the guy comes in to rob the place, loft and safe is like through underneath the counter and he just perforates the guy. And that's how it was. But yeah, it was, it was a, it was a different, different game then. I did laugh, you know, I'm looking over here. There's a, I don't know if you can see it on the video, but there's a photo of a guy carrying like, I don't know, is that an M4? Oh, Mr. Rogers. Is that Mr. Rogers?

I can't even— Yeah, it's Mr. Rogers, uh, when he was a LERP in Vietnam.

Was he actually?

No.

Oh, okay, good. You just nearly blew my whole perception of the man. But when I was in ATF, they, they used long guns for like arrest warrants. And then we got trained up with like long guns. Let me tell you, there's nothing worse than giving a bunch of M4s to idiot cops who have never like fired a long weapon before and saying like, sending them out there to qualify. But we would do these search warrants and we would, they would bring these guns. We'd have like 2 of these weapons on arrest warrants. And I'm like, I, I don't understand why you're bringing these. They, ATF did not work with bunkers. Did you guys use bunkers? Bunkers. Shields? Oh, no, no. Okay, so neither did ATF. You guys are probably too, like, fast and—

Yeah, I mean, we were also explosively breaching the door and going in. I mean, there wasn't— okay, we were playing an offensive game.

Okay, so yeah, so we didn't do that. The way, the way PD does it is like if ESU was doing an arrest warrant, they have a bunker, right?

Right, right.

And the stack and everything. And like I was talking about before in narcotics, you know, we didn't have a stack. We just had a bunch of clowns just flooding an apartment. There was no coordination. But with ATF, we start training with the federal system and they're very into like, you know, like you're up close and we used to do our guns out like this. And then we got taught about like weapon control and bring it in tight and—

Retention.

Yeah, yeah. And all that stuff. And that wasn't taught to us initially. I'm like, all this stuff is good. But then I would have like 2 ATF, we never deployed M4s in the city. But ATF guys would, rack them, bring those things on arrest warrants. And we're in like these tight confines and there's people above us, below us, on either side. And all I was thinking was, God help us if we gotta let like these rounds go, because I'm guessing those things can go right through drywall and—

For sure drywall.

Yeah. Even like a, like a stud, maybe they can get through. I don't know.

Probably it would frag— no, it would fragment in a wooden 2x4.

Okay, see, this shows you how much I don't know. But still, you're right, it would zip right through walls in a lot of these And not only that, like most of what we're doing is like hands-on, like grabbing people and you're like not necessarily fighting, but it's like a physical engagement. And I did not see the sense in bringing this weapon out like that. I'm like, just, we need just handguns. But ATF deals with different things in different parts of the country. And, you know, one of the ATF agents I worked with worked a case in Florida and they were going to talk to someone and they were driving up this long driveway. And there were different colored posts at regular intervals. And he said to— I wasn't there for this, but he said to his partner, he's like, what is this? And the partner, I think, was from Florida. He was like, oh, those are yardage markers for the guy in his house to see how far out if the feds were coming in.

Yeah, that he ranged it out ahead of time.

Yeah. Which is a disturbing thought. So I get it if you're using those weapons in, you know, other types of encounters, but in the city, I never saw the sense.

And so when you retired, I mean, what were you feeling at that time? Was it like a relief to retire? Like the stereotype is, you know, the cop from Staten Island that retires and moves down to Florida because he hates the city. What were you feeling at that time?

The worst day of my career was the day I filed for retirement because this was the only thing I'd ever did. I became a cop at 20, right at 22. Right outta college. It was the only thing I was ever— I mean, I hope I was good at it. I tried to be good at it. I loved it more than anything. I mean, I love my wife now, but like, I loved the work. I loved the camaraderie. I loved the ball breaking. And the day that I filed, which is a month before you retire, so there's like this weird interregnum when you're like a dead man walking. But you go down to the Woolworth Building, which is where the pension section is, down in Lower Manhattan, and they basically tell you, okay, these are your retirement options. If you choose this, this is how much money you get, this is how much money you get. And there's like different ways that you can work out how your pension works. And then, you know, they're like, okay, so, um, on this date you're gonna go down to headquarters, One Police Plaza, you're gonna turn in your shield and you'll get a different ID card.

And before that, you'll turn in all your gear that you have to turn in, most of which we own because they make you buy it. And that's it, you're good. And so the guy's like, all right, thanks for your service, take care, next. And I walked out into the lobby. This is like on the 18th floor. And there's like, there are these windows and the windows don't look out. There's like another building right next door. And I remember getting lightheaded. And I'm by no means the toughest guy in the room, believe me, but I never felt this sensation of aimlessness and fear. And I don't know, I mean, I've heard some guys talk about it on your show because you become institutionalized, right? And I had a plan for what I wanted to do and I was going to write books. And that only took, what, 7 years? But I had a plan, but we were moving away. We were moving to Massachusetts. And like, your whole life is, is as you know it. You've just put a timer on it. You pulled the pull, you pulled the brake.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And you said you only did 8 years in the military, right?

Yep.

Was it relief for you to get out?

Yeah.

Oh, okay. But you've seen like, you got like so many people that like Rangers, I would imagine people that like served in these kinds of positions have probably seen and done a lot more than what I did, obviously. But like guys that have done— if you've done it, if it's your whole career and your whole life, like it's, it's jarring.

It is. Yeah, it is jarring. I mean, it was, it was very jarring for me. It was just, I was also like pretty unhappy, I think, with the job by the time I left. So it was like, I knew I needed to go do something else.

You were, you were still a Ranger when you left?

No, I was in Special Forces when I, when I got out.

Would it be okay? Can I— can you tell me what the difference is?

Yeah.

Just as a— Yeah.

So they're 2 totally different units.

Okay.

Ranger Battalion. There's 3 Ranger Battalions. They are airborne light infantry unit. They go out and conduct direct action raids, airfield seizures, jump out of airplanes. They're the hammer, you know, go out and smash things. And Special Forces operates totally differently. They operate in 12-man teams. So small teams, and their specialty is unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, jobs that require a certain amount of finesse. You're going out and you're talking to people. Actually, some of those cop skills come into play there where you got to go out and build a relationship with the community. And SF can do direct action also, but They're designed to be more versatile, I think.

Okay. And you were in that when you left? Yeah.

Yeah.

And you had become disillusioned?

Yes, for sure.

Okay. So then for you, it was, it was probably a good thing to—

I, I knew I couldn't do that for another 12 years, you know? So it, it, it was sort of a relief to finally be outta there.

Okay. That's the, then you see that, that's the other thing is that like there are cops, many but not all, uniform cops that they hate the job, they hate the work, they hate the people, they hate the city, they hate everything. They're just balls of hate, but they want that pension. So now they're just gonna stick around and be miserable for 20 years as opposed to you who— yeah.

And then when they retire, they hate being at home with their wife. So they gotta go, you know, be the doorman at a club or something like that. Yeah.

I don't know, man. Everyone that I know, like there were guys that left work, and they became, uh, blue blazers, these, uh, CSOs, court security officers, down at court. And when you start doing that, you're working weird hours and you're irregular schedule. And at that point, I'm like, if you have a halfway decent gig and you want to work, like, it makes more sense to stay. But I don't know, I can't get into anyone's head. You can't like— Yeah, for sure. —prescribe what they should or should not do. Like, I, I miss— I went through not to get heavy, but some guys have gotten heavy on the show. Like, I went through a pretty— I went through a pretty dark time for a couple years because we moved and I didn't know a lot of people in Massachusetts. All my people were here. And God bless my wife, the only reason why I could retire is because she has a business and that business is going well. And I was pounding away at the keyboard trying to learn how to write novels. and getting rejected by agents. And eventually I, I came out of that, and I don't know what it was, but there is a period of like, okay, that portion of your life is over.

Right.

The other thing, right, the other thing that they tell you is the minute you retire, the day after you retire, you become irrelevant because you can no longer do anything. Like, my phone would ring, I'd be on vacation, I'd be in in Florida, I'd be wherever I was, and I get a phone call about a case. And it makes you feel like within this tiny little sphere of the world that you have some importance or some value and you're doing something. And I got a lot of like self-worth from that.

Yeah. I noticed with men especially don't do very well in retirement because now you don't have the job, you don't have the whatever sort of status you may have had beforehand. And now they're just sitting there, you know, watching Fox News all day. And the mental health, the physical health all starts to go downhill pretty rapidly.

There's a machine, it's different now, but there used to be a, there was a Finest Messages. It's this internal messaging system. Now it's moved to email. But when I came on, it was like a teletype with the ball, you know? And every day you'd get Finest Messages of like retired MOS, members of service is what we call them, retired cops who have died. And so, what you would have is you would have the name, the date they got hired, the date they retired, and their date of death. And every day, this would come out in the morning. And you would see for some people, they only made it 6 or 7 years after retirement.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you don't have something to do, like my wife and I don't have kids. I don't think you have kids.

Yes, I do.

Oh, you do? I'm sorry. So, yeah, my wife and I don't have kids. So, I can put energy into that. We have a golden retriever, but that's not the same thing. And so if you don't have something to do, you just sit around the house or you drink or, like you said, you just, just become angry. And I didn't want to be angry. I wasn't angry as a cop, thankfully. It was not in my demeanor. But like, yeah, I feared becoming like someone who did not— I've done this. This is what my fear was. And this is why I wanted to write a book because I wanted to create something. It's stupid. It's just it's a small novel, it's a small thing, right? It's not a big deal, but you built something. Because nothing— I don't— I can't speak for you, I can't speak for the military, but like what I did created nothing.

Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying. It's like when you get out, you want to like carve out your own identity and like, this is my thing now.

Yeah, yeah. And I would introduce people and then, you know, we, we'd go out and we meet people and like my wife has a business, it's very successful, and so she can have that to talk about. And it was like, well, what do you do? And it's like, well, I would say like, I'm writing, but I used to be this. And I would lean on that as a crutch. And I'm like, I used to be important in some way. I used to have value. And I, for a long time, I went through this, this place in my head where I'm like, I have no value.

How did you come out of that? Because it sounds like, you know, it was a long process to get to getting a book published. So in the meantime, you're toiling in the shadows here.

I'm writing a lot of bad books. I'm getting a lot of— that's the other thing, because you've learned is publishing is a hellacious place for mental health, and all you just get are rejections. And I wrote— this is my 4th novel. I wrote 2, they were terrible. I wrote a 3rd, it got an agent, it went out on submission, and in publishing, if you're trying to sell a book, you get an agent and then the agent tries to sell it to an editor. Sometimes, hopefully it sells. It didn't sell. Me and that agent parted ways amicably. And now you and I share the same agent. And, you know, he took me on, I wrote this book and he took me on as like a reclamation project. And I think all of my social outlets, came from police work because you get bunkered and you become institutionalized. All of my friends were cops. And then you retire and you move away. And now zero of my friends— I've like zero physical friends where I was. And I became friendly with a lot of people in publishing and writers and stuff. And they're decent people and good people who like open their minds and doors and taught me stuff.

And I've— they've become friends and like really good friends. But I always felt like I wasn't doing the thing. Like, I felt like a wannabe.

Mm-hmm.

And I said— and I've had like some short stories published, and, you know, I got like a regional award for a short story, and I was making headway. But I felt like until I physically produced a book, like, I just felt like I was a poser. And right around the time I started to get traction and I got an agent is the time that I kind of came out because I'm like, okay, maybe I can do this thing. And it kind of gave me a little more affirmation that like I wasn't done done. But yeah, like I have a friend who's got 29 years in and he's in Bronx homicide and he'll tell me stuff about what's going on. And, you know, you still get that itch where you're like, oh man, that'd be cool to do that. But you also realize like, you know, that, that life's behind you.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what was the, uh, the third book, the one that you almost sold? Does that bear any similarities to this one at all?

Only in the time it was set. Um, it was, uh, it's actually— I mentioned Amadou Diallo before. Um, but that, that notion of like looking for this legit— it was called the Spider-Man Rapist in the Bronx, and that is who they were looking for on the, the night that they encountered—

Because you had to like climb up scaffoldings and Fire escapes and shit.

Yeah.

Wanna know a fun fact about that guy?

Yeah.

I went to this school called Institute of Design and Construction way back in the day, and he was a teacher there.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah.

Small world.

The Spider-Man rapist was your teacher?

He, uh, he ended up getting caught and convicted down the line. But, um, yeah, I wrote, I wrote a one-night, um, I'm gonna sound like a, like a real literary schmuck now, It was what a writer friend of mine called a bildungsroman, or I'm not pronouncing that right, but it is a literary term to deter— to describe a novel that essentially describes the formative or spiritual awakening of a main character.

Okay.

This makes me sound like I'm a writer. You and I, we're writers now. We can say these words. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. I almost certainly am. But basically it was a one-night novel about a hunt for this guy.

Sounds cool, actually.

Um, I liked it. I was proud. I'm still proud of it. I would still like to see it, uh, come out. Um, it has a, a decent twist ending. Um, but that— the agent I had at the time sent it to like 4 editors and didn't bite. And he's like, all right, this book's dead. And I was like, what? And so then I wrote this and I sent that to him and he was like, uh, this isn't for me. So I said, okay, you know, we'll, you know, part ways. And then I found Alec, our agent, and, uh, Alec's like, yeah, I love it. And but it took him— shit, it took him like 16 months to sell it.

God, what do you think the— I mean, is that just like normal in the industry, like that kind of, um, toiling away to get to a success, to get to a yes? Um, or, or is this like something— do you think there's something— I mean, I know this is kind of a shitty question, but do you think there's like something about the type of fiction, not that it's bad, but like the genre or something that the industry just isn't interested in right now?

I think it's like readers. So now you're getting into like a question that's— that I've been tossing around in my head a lot. How many men do you know read fiction? Not a lot. When I grew up, my grandfather is of the greatest— World War II, the greatest generation, and he, he read novels like for fun and for pleasure. And the majority of people that buy novels are women. It's like 80%.

Yeah, yeah.

And so now you get to a chicken or the egg question, right? Like, there are people—

Right, are men not reading because we're not producing books for them?

Right. Or is it that men just don't wanna read novels? And there are guys like, like David McCloskey, um, is writing— he's a dude writing espionage fiction. Jack Stewart, a good friend of mine, he's a Top Gun naval aviator. He just put out a Tom Clancy novel called Pressure Depth. Um, his— that I'm 200 pages into that. It's awesome. But then the other question that I toy with is women are also more willing to read widely. Like, I think there will be—

I can see that.

I think there are more women that will read this. Not to say this is a dude's book. I don't know if you can say that, but there's like the whole notion of like suspense fiction, which is essentially what I describe And I'm not saying that as a pejorative, but like a suburban woman discovers that her life is not what she thought.

Yes. The, the book, you know, the, the work of literature about the middle-aged menopausal woman discovering herself like that. There, I mean, I'm nothing against that if there are readers who enjoy it, but there are much fewer men who are gonna cross over and read that type of work than the other way around. I think you're right there.

Like it, But then that gets to me. Like, am I not— like, I'm drawn to a certain— I realize I read a lot of male novelists. I read a lot of fiction. And all of my novelists, my novel heroes are men. And I don't know, that's not intentional. That's just how it's worked out. But like James Ellroy, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, John le Carré, they're men. And I don't know if I'm searching for something 'cause I never knew my father. And actually, if I don't— I don't know if you want to push it, but there's a funny story about my father and a half-brother I did not know I had. But basically, I don't want to digress. You can edit this out if you want. But basically, when I was a detective, there was an operation called the Real Time Crime Center. So I arrive at a scene, there's a dead body. I call this unit down at One Police Plaza and I say, this is what I got, this is where I am. And then this guy— this is in the advent before, like, ubiquitous smartphones. He— this guy or girl would run the location, and he's running the witnesses.

And so when I get back to the office, I have all these— all this paper of all these checks already done for me. It streamlines the operation, okay? I never knew my father. My last name is Allison. I'd been told unreliably that I had a half-brother who was on the job.

Really?

Same last name. I never met him. I go back, I— so you start getting to know these people, you know, you call real-time crime often enough, limited number of people. And you never see them. They work at One Police Plaza, you're out in the field doing whatever. And there was a Detective Allison, Keith Allison up there. And I ended up dealing with him a lot just because our shifts overlapped. So I'd call him like, Keith, what's up? It's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Many years later, I come to learn that he and I share a father. And we never really discussed this on the phone. Even though I think we both kind of maybe thought it, and I'm kind of weird with family, and I'm kind of weird, I guess, socially too. A chief once called me socially quirky. But this this detective, who he and I share a father, which is now legit like undeniable fact, he ends up marrying. a crime novelist who's published by the same publisher you and I are published by. So for years I'm talking to this guy and at first we didn't know him, but, and then we kind of figured out and then, you know, we, we did, I did ancestry.com 'cause I was curious and turns out I'm an Ulsterman or on my father's side from Ireland.

I don't know where you're from, your people.

I have no idea, but a woman in Ireland told me I'm probably from Cork.

Okay, I've been to Cork. Yeah, nice city.

Yeah, it is a nice place.

Yeah. Belfast, not as much. Not so much with the Belfast. But one day, not that long ago, I get an email from Ancestry that says, hey, Keith Allison, I hope he doesn't mind I'm using his name on here, but you know, you're second cousins. You're linked to this person genetically. And so that was like the kind of confirmation. And, you know, in full disclosure, he made efforts to like connect with me, and I haven't responded to those efforts. And I don't know, it's because my father was an alcoholic and I never knew him. I don't know what's holding me back, but it's more my own issues that I guess I have. Uh, yeah, man, that story didn't have the, uh, the happy ending I kind of thought it would have.

No, man, but I mean, yeah, it's a small world.

It's— yeah, it is. But yeah, um, that's wild. Yeah, I'm sorry, I had to get that in because it's just— it's a wild story that, uh, that just in terms of how weird it is that things happen, because I never knew why I became a cop. Like, I just wanted to Turns out that oddly it was also in the blood. It's so weird. It's very strange.

Yeah. All right, so tell us about The Killing Yards. This is a novel that's going to be out September 22nd.

Yep.

Uh, I paraphrased it. In your own words, what's this novel about?

Uh, this novel's about the hottest nightclub in New York City. Fictional, obviously fictionalized version of a tunnel of Tunnel nightclub, which was huge at the time. And, um, Jimmy Letner owns the club, but much like Ian Schrager, who is a former owner of Studio 54, the real-life owner of Studio 54, who has a felony conviction, he cannot own anything with a liquor license. And so Jimmy has to run this place with his wife Michelle. And, uh, Jimmy used to traffic cocaine. And he went away for it, and he comes back, and he is trying desperately to run a clean club. And it is impossible in New York City at that time to run a clean nightclub. And it is basically— it's a gritty noir about him trying to keep control of his club and fending off Mayor Giuliani and a very motivated, uh, young NYPD cop, and even his own right hand who's running his own schemes underneath Jimmy's nose and he doesn't know it. And, you know, I liken it— I don't want to use this— I use this aspirationally, but like I pitched this to Alec as like East Coast James Ellroy because he's such a huge influence.

And yeah, it's essentially— it's odd because Crooked Lane, our publisher, is kind of pushing it as a police procedural?

Yeah, not really.

Not really. But I think what it is, is I wanted to write— I wanted to write a mystery-ish, or at least a crime novel. But you can't just do it from the perspectives of a cop because they're so used to— like, readers are so used to, like, Michael Connelly and Louise Penny, and there's so many people who do it so much better. And so I think I just wrapped it up on what else do I know, and I know clubs, and I know this city. And yeah, it's essentially the best description is it's a gritty noir.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it fits very nicely into the noir or crime genre. One of my favorite scenes in the book actually was you write a scene about, this is a young cop, young NYPD cop, ambitious in a sense, motivated, got something to prove. He has a chip on his shoulder. And I kind of love this idea. I recently rewatched The Departed.

Yep.

And what fascinates me about that movie is that it's this kind of lazy bureaucracy, lazy cops like you talk about, just trying to get their pension, putting their time in. But then you have these 2 guys, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon's characters, and the problem those 2 guys have is that they're too fucking smart. and they're too ambitious.

Yeah.

And they want to get stuff done, and they end up causing chaos and all kinds of shit inside the system that would probably not have happened if they were just dumb, lazy asshole cops.

Yeah, it's like I've always thought that like all crime comes from a place of either want or bitterness or jealousy. And I don't mean want in a physical, like, I want this model. Like, I mean like a Like, it can be yours for the right price. Like, I want standing. I want respect. I want, I wanna be a person of import. I wanna be a man who matters. And I think that's specifically with men. I think men do criminal shit for totally different reasons than why women do criminal shit. And I think with us, it usually comes from a place of insecurity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, like, I, I was just curious about, like, like a— because I'm straight. I didn't know it at the time, and it makes me sound cooler than I was, but I was straight. I guess I am straight edge. I've never had a drink. I've never done drugs. Um, and I was always just curious, like, to, to put— like, there's a little bit of that cop character Ben. There's a little me of me in him. Um, but then there's also a little bit of the Jason Patric movie, um, Rush.

I don't know if you ever saw that.

I don't think so.

It's great. Him and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It's, uh, probably 30 years old now, but he's an undercover cop and they— and he gets hooked, uh, on, I think, heroin. And it's a descent into that. And I, I wanted to see how that would go.

My favorite, or one of my favorite scenes in this book, is when they bring the police officer— they bring, they bring this guy in to get drug tested, and he's like, oh dude, I'm so fucked. And he goes in there, and what is it, like the DA comes in and just blackmails the ever-living shit out of him?

Because everyone— that's the thing, like everyone I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a fairly cynical son of a bitch. And I think everyone is trying to get ahead, especially in a city like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything's up for grabs. Everyone has a hustle. Everyone has an angle that they're trying to play. And like that, the DA agent character is Valero. She's got her own thing and everyone has their own thing. And I don't know, did you outline your novel?

I mean, with like bullet points. It's not a real outline.

But like, it kind of— it went where it wanted to go, maybe?

Yeah, I think so.

Okay. And that's what I do. And I like— I don't— Don Winslow, I don't know if you know him, a novelist.

Yes.

So he told me once— I was lucky enough to have dinner with him a couple times— and he told me, do you outline? I said no. And he goes, good. I said, why? And he said, because if your characters don't surprise you, they're not going to surprise any of any of your readers.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I kind of was like, oh, that sounds great, I'm doing it right. Um, but yeah, like, I would tell— I tell my wife, like, oh yeah, you know, today I wrote this thing and this one character decided to do this. And she would stare at me and she's like, you realize you wrote the character, right? I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. Like, you know, these characters, they form a personality and then they do things that you wouldn't expect them to do. And she would stare at me some more and say, You wrote the characters. And I said, okay, we will agree to disagree on this point. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it's, it's coming from someplace inside you, but there's like a sort of internal logic that you're following that brings the character to a certain place.

Yeah. Or it's their logic. Or you try to get in their head. And I think, I don't know for you, but like, I think writing fiction and definitely reading fiction forces you to have a bit of empathy. And that's the thing, talking about like, men do men read? It's like men like to read history and military history and biography, and I love to read that stuff too. But I've heard there's a, a historian by the name of Dominic Sambrook, and he— great podcast called The Rest Is History. And he— they also have a book podcast, and they were talking about a Toni Morrison novel, I think it was Beloved. And he said that she's able to convey the horrors of slavery through a fictional story so much more effectively than reading a nonfiction book.

Yeah, it resonates with people.

Right, 'cause you localize the story in terms of like, you know, news.

And you relate to it on a personal level, right? Like this is a person this is happening to, not like an entry in an encyclopedia.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You look at Wikipedia and you're like, oh my God, 6 million people died in the Holocaust. But if you take one story—

Yeah, I don't know what 6 million means. I can't visualize that.

What'd Stalin say? One death is a tragedy, 6 million, a million is a statistic. is a statistic. Yeah.

And quantity is a quality of itself. Napoleon? No, no, that was Stalin also.

That was Stalin too. Yeah. I wish I had the knowledge base to be able to trade witty aphorisms back and forth.

Axioms. Yeah. And also in the novel, I mean, it fits into that noir genre because there's a lot of players in the game. You know, the one club It turns out it's the Israeli mafia that has their hooks into it. And then the rival club, the Russian mob, has their hooks into it. And now there really is like a turf war going on between the two.

So that comes from back when— because ecstasy is a big deal in the book, and ecstasy was just kind of sort of getting big. And matter of fact, it wasn't per se illegal in New York State at that time. Like, it wasn't specifically listed in the public health law. Um, but ecstasy came into the country mostly from 2 places. It was either Israel or Amsterdam. And I was sitting there and I'm like, huh, all right, what do I want to do here? And I'm like, I, I went to junior high school with a lot of, um, with a lot of Jewish friends. I went to junior high school in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. And so I kind of got to know a lot of like you don't generalize, but New York City is a, is a city of, of ethnic enclaves. And so you get to know how different ethnic— different cultures kind of function. And I just knew, or I felt more familiar, more comfortable writing, uh, you know, like from the Israeli point of view. So I started doing some research on that, and you start going down rabbit holes, and then you realize, I gotta write a book about the Diamond District next because That's another place that is bizarre.

Yeah. We had a Diamond District robbery actually. That was pretty fun.

And those are some of the, like, the only people who can get a concealed carry permit in the city, right?

Yeah. 'Cause every gun in New York City, the reason why, like, you go after guns is that you, you go to other places. When I was with ATF and, and local cops didn't give a shit about, about guns. They cared about drugs. But the assumption is everyone, everyone has a gun. And growing up in New York, like, no one has a gun.

Right.

Every gun you come across, I never came across a legally owned firearm in New York City. 20 years policing. I was in a gun unit. I was homicide. ATF, like, doesn't exist. And then you go down south and you go down south and we go to arrest someone in Jacksonville and we're working with ATF and Jacksonville PD and talking about like, the prevalence of guns is I'm sitting in the backseat of this ATF car and there's 2 ATF officers and they're looking at me and they're looking me up and down. I'm like, something wrong? And they go, do you have anything that says police on you? And I go, no, why do I want that? Because like up here we operated, you run silent, you run deep. Even though I'm a white dude, you try to throw a hoodie on, you throw a hat on, you try to blend as best you can if you're in plain clothes. And I'm down in Florida, it's 187,000 degrees. And they have all these police, different police identification, like Velcro patches attached up on the roof of the car. And they, they tear one off and they go, do me a favor, stick this on your chest, tear another one off and stick this on your back.

And I said, why am I doing this? Because I don't want to be known. I'm going to go up there and I'm going to— and they go, no, no, no. If Jacksonville PD doesn't know you're a cop, they're going to shoot you. And I said, what? And they're like, yeah. they shoot people because a lot of people have guns here. And I guess it's, you know, I, I don't know if it's different. It's a different culture, let's just say that. And they're like, they— you don't want to be seen just walking around like that. They, they're not going to ask you. And so I was like, oh, it's a different, different beast. Okay, I'll put these on. And then we, we ended up getting that guy. You know how we got him? Because I knocked on the door and then I said, is Johnny here? And they said, oh yeah, he's in back. And I said, bring Johnny to me. And I didn't have to stand outside with a bullhorn saying, come out with your hands up.

So the book is due out September 22nd. What else do you want to tell people about this?

Just that if you're into Jordan Harper, if you're into Dennis Lehane, if you don't mind the colorful curse word popping up every 3rd or 4th page. And you want like a slice. If you want to understand why New York is what it is today, I think you have to start here. And I think you have to start, you could even go back to the '70s.

Mm-hmm.

But I think I, what I tried to do was give people a sense of a time and place. And I think that version of New York is gone. It's never coming back. But I do think it was hella interesting while it was there. And I hope I just— I hope I did it justice.

So I hope people will go and check it out. Then preorder on Amazon.

Preorder Amazon, Barnes Noble, wherever you order books. There'll be signed copies. My local bookstore that I love is called Titcomb's Bookshop. They will have autographed copies. Um, the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. Um, yeah, and there's going to be an audio version for those of us that spend time in the car.

Do you want to promo the event too?

Oh, we can. Like, hey man, if anyone—

Yeah, tell people about it.

Yeah, if anyone's coming out to— if anyone's in the New York City area and you want to come out, I would love to meet, uh, anyone who's reading books in 2026, and I would like to shake your hand and thank you. Um, we're gonna be doing a book release event in the Mysterious Bookshop in Lower Manhattan. It's 58 Warren Street. It's It's gonna be on the 22nd of September at 6 o'clock. I'm gonna be talking to a really good novelist named Adrian McKinty, who's a New York Times bestseller. He's another Ulsterman. He's an Irish guy who writes thrillers, but he also writes these incredible detective novels set in the Troubles in Belfast.

Nice.

He's written like 9 of 'em. I highly recommend it. It's called the Sean Duffy series. Cool. Yeah, he's a really good writer. So we're gonna be talking and hopefully people will, uh, just— my wife's gonna be there. Just one person show up. That's all I want.

And it sounds like, you know, you're really into this. This is your 4th novel. You're still writing. What's next for you?

Yeah, Departure, something totally different because we have the same agent and you're writing a sequel to the Jeremy Lopez. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a sequel plotted out in my head to this, um, and I have a 3rd book plotted out in my head, but I'm, I, I, I'm revising. I'm on the tail end of revisions right now of something set in the modern era, something darkly humorous. You know who Shane Black is? He's a screenwriter. You ever see the movie The Nice Guys?

No.

Okay.

Iron Man 3.

Iron Man 3. Yep, yep. Lethal Weapon. Um, Shane Black is like famous for writing these like Huge spec scripts that got a lot of money back when Hollywood had money. But yeah, something that's like overtly darkly humorous. I kind of pitched it as Robert Kress meets Mick Herron, who writes the Slow Horse series. It's basically 2 guys that are really bad at their jobs. And I know a little something about that. So that's what I'm working on now.

Awesome, man. So I hope people go check out the book, go preorder it. And any final thoughts here before we get going, Jason?

No, I mean, just that I can't believe I'm in the team house, man. I hope it happens.

Yeah, man, dreams come true.

Dreams do come true. And all I kept thinking was, my God, I have no gunfights, no hellacious— I never got went down in a helicopter that got hit by an RPG. And I said, if anyone's still watching at this point, I hope we were entertaining, you know? Hell yeah. No, definitely.

Also a great Shane Black movie, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer.

I'm seeing that in a rep theater. I bought tickets for it already. They're screening it on December 13th in Massachusetts. Incredible movie. Great movie. That was his first movie back when he— when, uh, RDJ was like almost uninsurable.

Yep. And, uh, if you guys want to grab Jason's book, the links are in the description.

Yeah. So thank you everyone, and, uh, we'll see you guys next time.

Thank you.

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Thanks, guys.