Guarding the Guardians

Bit by bit, over the past several months, stories of police corruption in New York City have leaked out to the public. Last week the most sordid story to date was told by the first witness at hearings held by the blue-ribbon Knapp Commission, which is investigating crime in the department. William Phillips, on the force for 14 years, explained how he and innumerable other cops had taken graft as casually as they had handed out parking tickets. Payoffs for criminal protection came as regularly as paychecks--and often amounted to a lot more. Far from working to cut down the city's grimly rising crime rate, the police have been helping it grow.

As Phillips related it in a dry monotone, illegal money is available for the asking; sometimes, in fact, a cop does not even have to ask. Stores, bars and restaurants hand out free food, drink and cash to the cop on the beat. In order to avoid receiving summonses for petty violations, foremen on construction sites pay $5 to $10 per cop per week. When the city marshal evicts tenants, he ordinarily treats the patrolman who assists him to a few bucks. The cop who makes the day's assignments in the station house may get $5 a day from a patrolman looking for profitable work.

Telltale Integrity. This is the petty graft that is taken for granted, Phillips indicated. A cop who is greedy enough can go on to the big money to be made from gambling, prostitution and narcotics. The distinction that used to exist between "clean" and "dirty" graft has broken down; corrupt cops take what they can get and leave the moralizing to others. Depending on where he is stationed in the city, a plainclothesman can make from $400 to $1,500 a month for protecting the rackets. With luck he can make much more. Phillips told of three Queens plainclothesmen who split $80,000 that they picked up in a narcotics raid. Phillips testified that he knew of no plainclothesman assigned to gambling who was not on the take after two months.

Phillips learned fast. When he first joined the force, he did not get any offers for a while. He was being watched for telltale signs of integrity. When they did not appear, a fellow cop made the first approach by telling him where to get a free meal. From then on, he regularly freeloaded, though as he told the commission, he tried not to go to a restaurant during "real busy hours." The free meal is a first test of the corrupt cop. If he passes it, he is on his way. When a commission member asked Phillips how he could tell that a certain lieutenant was honest, Phillips replied: "He carries his lunch to the station house. Anyone that does that is clean."

Phillips was ambitious to climb the corruption ladder--almost a parallel career within the department. After once booking a man who had got into a fight, Phillips said that another cop asked him to forget the whole thing for $300. Phillips obliged. When he was promoted to plainclothesman, after three years on the force, he was given a $1,000 payoff on his first day on the job. His partners gave him some fatherly advice: "You're new here and it would look good for you if you gave the boss a piece of the action." So Phillips handed over the $1,000 to a lieutenant in the station house to divvy up. Phillips got back a mere $130. "I divided it up myself after that incident," he said.

Eventually, Phillips was rewarded with a choice assignment: duty in Harlem, where the payoffs are the biggest in the city. He soon was on cordial terms with gamblers known as Joe Cuba, Ted Cigar, the Gimp, the Gout and Spanish Raymond. He recalled his first meeting with a gambler called Eggy. "He walked over to the car and he says, 'Are you the new men?' We said, 'Yes, we are.' He says, 'You get $20 a day. Is that all right? We take care of the men who were here before you, we take care of you.' "

Within a few months, Phillips' 16-man Harlem unit was on the "pad" --that is, collecting graft*--from a variety of gambling operations. When a new man joined the unit, he was quickly scrutinized to see if he would fit in. "You can make a phone call and find out in five minutes who the individual is, what his habits are and whether or not he takes money," Phillips said. When a cop was transferred to a new post, the pad from his old station kept up for another two months. "Severance pay?" asked the investigating commission's aggressive chief counsel, Michael Armstrong. "Yes," Phillips laughed. "Two months' severance pay."

Take Action. To get Phillips to talk so freely was a major undertaking. The Knapp Commission, headed by Whitman Knapp, a prestigious Wall Street lawyer, was formed last May after public pressure forced Mayor John Lindsay to take action. At that time it had little more to go on than the testimony of an honest cop named Frank Serpico. To try to get some corroboration of Serpico's tales of graft, the commission employed the services of a shadowy electronics buff, Teddy Ratnoff, who is famed for his sophisticated bugging techniques.

He won the confidence of Xaviera Hollander, a 28-year-old Dutch-born madam on the fashionable East Side of Manhattan, by telling her that he wanted to observe the judges and politicians who frequented her brothel. One fateful day, Phillips, who usually avoided dealing with prostitutes because he felt they were untrustworthy, showed up to demand money. Ratnoff made a quick check, since all sorts of people claiming to be cops were in the habit of trying to shake down Xaviera. He found that, sure enough, Phillips was a bona fide policeman. "Let's wire up on him," a commission member told Ratnoff. They had their man.

On the Hilton. Phillips' revelations caused predictable outrage among New York cops. Even Commissioner Patrick Murphy, who has been vigorously shaking up the department and coming down hard on corrupt cops, thought that the Knapp Commission had gone too far. One "rogue cop," he objected, was smearing the entire force--and indeed Phillips had nothing to lose by telling a lurid story. But Murphy took the matter seriously enough to suspend temporarily his newly appointed chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, who had been given an $83 dinner for four on the house at the New York Hilton last March. After a few days' investigation, Seedman was reinstated--because he had not been in a position to do the hotel any favors and because he had not made a habit of freeloading.

Edward Kiernan, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, branded Phillips a "greedy thief." Most cops, while not denying much of what Phillips said, felt that he had given them all a bad name at a time when they need public respect more than ever. "If I made as much money as Phillips said," scoffed one detective, "I'd be living in a palatial estate in Westchester." Complained a subway cop: "Down here in the hole, how the hell can you take any graft? There's no freebies underground. But as far as the public is concerned, I'm just another crooked cop." One portion of the public was especially indignant. The Harlem numbers operators protested the fact that white policemen were taking so much money out of the community. They called for a 90-day moratorium on all numbers arrests and police payoffs while they draft legislation that would legalize numbers gambling. In addition, their bill will pledge them to return 10% of the more than $200 million-a-year take to the community for economic development.

The complaints about Phillips seemed difficult to take seriously after a 25-year-old former cop, Edward Droge Jr., was called as a witness late in the week. After four years on the force, Droge left the department earlier this year to continue his education at the University of Southern California. He testified that of the 70 patrolmen he had known at the 80th precinct in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, only two were not on the take. Despite the fact that Droge won eight citations, he casually accepted payoffs in cash or weapons. Gamblers would throw a roll of bills through a window into the back seat of his radio car, though once their aim was too good: the bills went sailing right out the other window. Droge was finally tripped up when he accepted $300 to let off a man whom he had arrested on a narcotics charge. The man was wired by the Knapp Commission. Before the hearings end this week, the commission promises to supply still more proof of wholesale corruption among New York's finest. Well-publicized probes of dishonesty in the police department have taken place off and on at least since Teddy Roosevelt was New York's police commissioner late in the last century. Unhappily, these probes never seem to have a lasting effect on the corrupted--or on the corrupters.

*In the course of the hearing, a whole vocabulary of corruption came to light. A "juice joint" is an afterhours place where liquor is sold. A "flute" is a soda bottle filled with whisky for officers. A "flake" is an arrest made with false evidence in order to shake the man down. An "accommodation collar" is an arrest made on a minor charge in response to pressure from above for a crackdown.

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