New York's Finest

CHAPTER 1

Steven liked nothing more than to go dancing with his younger sister Clare. They would proceed from club to club until the four a.m. closing time. Or, they would just go to Butters Bar near their home in the suburban Long Island town of Rockville Centre. They had stocked the jukebox with their favorite 45s, and he would seem to become the music itself as he danced, danced, danced.

Any number of young women had been in a tizzy over six-foot-two, gleamingly handsome Steven McDonald. But his interest had immediately narrowed to exactly one when he met Patti Ann Norris at Butters in the spring of 1983. She was pretty and fun and entirely genuine.

Patti Ann was the second of six kids in an Irish Catholic family in the nearby town of Malverne. Her father was an English teacher at the local high school, her mother a homemaker from Boston. Patti Ann worked at Macy’s and studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. Meeting Steven seemed like another step in living life as it should be lived.

Steven was also from an Irish Catholic family, the third of eight kids, and the first boy. He had served as a Navy corpsman and had returned to civilian life to become the supervisor of housekeeping at a Philadelphia hospital, commuting home on weekends. He took a similar job at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York as he and Patti Ann began dating. They had been seeing each other for a year and she had already decided he was “the one” when he first mentioned that he was thinking of becoming a cop.

“By the way, I got a phone call today,” he told her. “I’m going to be starting the police academy in a month.”

Patti Ann would have been happy if Steven had just pursued a career in hospital housekeeping while she worked in the art department at Parents magazine. But Steven was the son and grandson of cops. The tradition stirred him as if it were a kind of melody that carried you from what had been to what should be, making fate more than just happenstance, turning an occupation into a calling.

Steven had grown up hearing tales of his maternal grandfather, James “Smiling Jim” Conway, who had been gassed as a teenage soldier with the Fighting 69th in World War I and then served five years with the Navy before joining the NYPD. Smiling Jim was ninety minutes into a midnight tour in the Bronx on November 12, 1936, when he came upon two gunmen who had just robbed Galvin’s Beer Garden on Beach Avenue.

Steven listened to how Smiling Jim had been shot in the chest and then lay sprawled on his back as one of the gunmen stood over him to finish him off. The bullet had struck the pavement beside Smiling Jim’s head, and he managed to get up on one knee and fire after the fleeing thieves. He had been reloading and spitting blood when a fellow cop arrived on the scene in a patrol car.

“You do the driving, I’ll do the shooting,” Smiling Jim had famously said.

Smiling Jim had kept firing as they gave chase, causing the getaway vehicle to crash. Only after the gunmen were in custody had Smiling Jim consented to being taken to Fordham Hospital. He had managed to offer a smile in keeping with his nickname when his wife arrived by subway along with their two young daughters, Anita and Catherine. He recovered and went on to be promoted to first-grade detective after capturing the murderer of an eight-year-old boy who was found sexually assaulted and strangled in an abandoned amusement park in the Bronx.

Smiling Jim’s younger daughter, Anita, had been just six when her father was shot and had never forgotten that early lesson in the dangers a cop faces. She had nonetheless married Police Officer David McDonald, the son of a Sanitation Department hostler whose wagon was drawn by a horse named after Tony the Wonder Horse ridden by cowboy movie star Tom Mix. Anita had repeated the same bedtime prayer each time her husband returned safe from another tour: “Thank you, God, for keeping us together another day.”

By chance, David McDonald had been standing by the entrance to Manhattan criminal court June 8, 1957, when gunfire erupted inside. A homicide suspect was attempting to flee, and detectives shot him seven times as he reached the bottom of the steps from the second floor to the lobby. David learned that the would-be escapee was Fred Hartjen, one of the two gunmen who had shot Smiling Jim. Hartjen had served twenty years and been freed only to be arrested soon after for murder.

David McDonald had subsequently made sergeant, but he had eight kids at home, and even with the accompanying salary boost he had to work a second job as a manager at Leonard’s of Great Neck, a Long Island catering hall. He was too seldom home, and that intensified Steven’s memories of such rare moments as standing with his father at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when he was a youngster. Steven would remember literally looking up to the figure in the uniform with sergeant’s stripes and a gold shield on the chest, by every important gauge bigger in his eyes than the outsized balloons that passed.

Steven’s father had retired in February 1975, still certain that becoming a cop was the best possible thing he could have done in life.

“Was it a good job?” a police academy classmate who had also retired asked David.

“It was the only job,” David replied.

But some of the younger cops still on the only job in 1975 were about to learn that it could be taken away like any other.

The banks had long been encouraging and assisting the city’s borrowing of billions as it struggled with the burden of more than 1 million people on welfare and the exodus of more than five hundred thousand manufacturing jobs. The banks now decided that the city was a bad credit risk. Bankruptcy threatened and mass layoffs were looming in June of that year, when the police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), sought to emphasize the need for cops by distributing a pamphlet at the airports.

“Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York” read the words below a drawing of a black-hooded skull on the cover.

The city had never before laid off cops, and it seemed generally inconceivable to the NYPD rank and file that it would actually happen. Then came the morning of July 1, when the teletypes in all the precincts began chattering on and on and on with the five thousand names of cops who had as of that moment suddenly ceased to be cops.

Those who were laid off had particular trouble getting new jobs because employers knew they would rush back to the NYPD if they were rehired. White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld, in the meantime, urged President Gerald Ford to deny New York emergency assistance.

FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD read the October 29, 1975, headline in the New York Daily News.

The Emergency Financial Control Board of bankers, business leaders, and local officials managed to avert bankruptcy, and the cops were gradually hired back over the next three years. But many were soured with a sense of betrayal. How could you be expected to lay your life on the line at one moment and be laid off at another?

But tradition retained its pull on Steven. His mother’s nightly prayer had seemed to be answered when his father safely retired, and now she would be repeating it for her oldest son.

On July 20, 1984, Steven became the latest of his clan to take the oath as an officer of the NYPD. He was one of 1,856 recruits in his academy class, and they had to attend in two shifts, as the facility on East 21st Street could only handle a maximum of one thousand at a time. All recruits were required to fill out registration cards asking questions designed to give the instructors a quick profile of them. Steven reported that his favorite book was Trinity by Leon Uris, his favorite play was Philadelphia, Here I Come!, and his favorite movies were The Quiet Man and A Christmas Carol. He was little different from many if not most of his fellow recruits when he wrote that he had joined the NYPD because “Traditionally, policemen have been in a position to help people in many ways, for many reasons, which has led to a high profile. It is a job where I can make a mark and a difference in society. A job I will be proud to be connected with.”

While he was in the academy, Steven went out to the movies with Patti Ann and saw The Razor’s Edge, a 1984 adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham novel in which a man who has suffered the traumas of war embarks along “the razor’s edge” to transcendental meaning. He finds himself, but loses his great love.

The Bill Murray character on screen had just called off his wedding when Steven turned to Patti Ann.

“You know what? Let’s get married,” he said.

He subsequently went to Patti Ann’s mother and father to ask for their blessing and then presented her with a ring. Her parents attended the police academy graduation the following month and met Steven’s family for the first time.

During the five and a half months in the academy 101 recruits had either been asked to leave or had simply dropped out. The remaining 1,755 graduated at Madison Square Garden on December 19, 1984. Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward told the graduates that he hoped they had broken in their new shoes, because most of them would be going on foot patrol. Mayor Ed Koch also spoke.

“We see the best in ourselves when we see you,” he said.

When cops are either promoted or leave the department, they turn in their shield at headquarters, where it remains until it passes on to somebody else. Steven had requested the one his father wore before making sergeant, and it had been available. Shield number 15231 was shining on his chest as he joined the other graduates in the traditional conclusion of the ceremony. They threw their white gloves ceilingward, looking to him like a huge flock of white doves that then fluttered down as he began his chosen life as a cop.

The rookies started out in Neighborhood Stabilization Units (NSUs), which were fielded as an added, high-visibility police presence. Each rookie was assigned an experienced training officer. Steven had the good fortune not to get one of the cops who remained bitter over the layoffs of nine years before. Detective Bobby Reid was uncommonly smart and had proven as a Marine in Vietnam that he could stay unwaveringly true to his immediate mission even in a monumentally discouraging situation. He took as much pride in wearing the uniform of the NYPD as he had that of the USMC.

Under Reid’s tutelage, Steven hit the streets with an NSU that ranged through several precincts in Lower Manhattan and saw a bit of everything. Steven’s first arrest was a young man who had been caught using a forged credit card by the private security at a discount electronics store. Steven was processing his seemingly contrite and cooperative prisoner at the Sixth Precinct station house when he discovered that the evidence had disappeared from the table where he had left it. Reid noted that Steven had handcuffed the prisoner to a nearby chair. Reid had a word with the prisoner, who owned up to having stashed the card under a tear in the cover of one of the chair’s arms. Reid explained that the lesson for Steven was to never trust anybody.

For a time, his NSU was detailed to the area surrounding Union Square Park. They were told to pay particular attention to the vicinity of the various dance clubs. And while in earlier days Steven had danced with Clare and her friends at Butters, he was now posted alone at the upper edge of Union Square, across Broadway from the Underground, a disco that occupied a full block. The entrance would be the scene of at least seven murders in the years to come.

On this night, partiers were going in and out of the Underground when suddenly Steven heard a call over his radio of a fellow cop in need of assistance.

“Ten-thirteen! Ten-thirteen!”

The cop was pursuing a suspect across a series of rooftops in Steven’s direction. Steven radioed that he was joining the chase, but a squad car pulled up and an NSU sergeant in the passenger seat ordered him to remain where he was in case the suspect came that way. The squad car continued down the street, where other cops were hurrying into buildings and on up to the roofs.

Steven stayed put as ordered and saw a man saunter from a doorway and light a cigarette. The man was a close enough match to the description on the radio that Steven went over to question him. The man immediately protested that he was being singled out because he was Black.

Steven politely asked the man to hold on for a moment and radioed for a repeat of the description. The response generally fit the man before him, but did not include one detail. Steven asked the dispatcher what kind of shoes the suspect was wearing.

“White sneakers” came as a response as audible to the man as to Steven.

Steven grabbed the man by the arm just as he sought to dash away in his white sneakers. Steven held on and he was now the one radioing “Ten-thirteen! Ten-thirteen!” Steven ended up down on the sidewalk with the man, who then tried to grab his gun. Steven would later say that he felt as if he were in some kind of slow-motion dream that ended when his fellow cops arrived.

On learning that the man had just stolen $8,000 in jewelry, Steven was thrilled to have made his first big-time collar. Reid then tutored him on another nuance of being a cop: You give the collar to the guy who was first in pursuit.

The excitement left Steven wanting to work where there was the most action. He sought to be posted to the busier parts of Brooklyn or the Bronx, where he could become a cop in the way of Smiling Jim. He was instead sent to a low-crime command where rookies were not normally assigned.

For all its fame, Central Park was a dumping ground for a particular kind of troublesome cop in the NYPD. Cops who were boss fighters or rule breakers were liable to be punished by being consigned to the very sort of high-crime commands where Steven had hoped to go. Cops in Manhattan who simply had difficulty getting along with the citizenry were liable to be sent to Central Park, where there was less interaction with people than in the surrounding densely populated areas. The idea was they would cause less trouble patrolling among the squirrels, estimated to number more than two thousand.

Then, during the same summer Steven graduated from the academy, a drug dealer at the edge of the park approached a uniformed figure whose hat visor had leaf-shaped gold embellishments. The dealer, who may have been sampling his own merchandise, apparently mistook the man for an airplane pilot and offered to sell him an illegal substance to really fly. The man proved to be Chief Robert Johnston, the highest-ranking uniformed member of the NYPD.

Johnston took this as a personal affront and ordered an immediate boost in the number of cops in the park. That included rookies who had been assigned to deter the drug dealers in much smaller Union Square Park. Steven now began doing much the same in Central Park even as he delighted in watching people jog and cycle and play softball and just stroll.

“The oasis in the city,” he called Central Park.