Authors: Randy Jurgensen
“This lens will read you a license plate at a thousand yards, or erect nipples on a cold day, same distance.” Then he handed me a bag full of film. “Type of truck you need Kid?”
“As nondescript as you got.”
We followed him out to the parking lot. There were flash cars, work vans, and yellow taxis. I saw a Con Edison work truck, bucket included. That would be the perfect surveillance vehicle. “I'll take the Con Ed truck.”
I turned to Vito, “You're gonna look good in that cherry picker, Vito.” We laughed, two kids in a candy store.
Back inside, José handed me the keys to the truck. He slid a giant logbook at me. “All's I need is your John Hancock, Kid.”
We stared at the open logbook. “José, we can't sign for this stuff. That's why we're here. We just need a loan for a couple of days. The job won't give us this equipment.”
“Job won't give it to you?”
“No, man, they don't want us anywhere near the mosque. We're on our own on this case. We're pretty much poaching for a collar.”
He slowly pulled the book toward him, realizing his own anger at the job, slamming it closed. “You've got to be fucking kidding me.”
Both Vito and I shook our heads. He said, “I'm so sorry, Randy. I mean really, this is fucked, but I can't backdoor this stuff, especially the truck, unless you give me a signature.”
Vito shook his head once again and walked out. José called after him, “Guy, I'm really sorry!” And I know he was, but that didn't help us. “Randy, I don't know what to say.”
“It's alright, José. I don't wanna get you jammed up.” I turned, “Be safe, José.” As I walked out of the building, I felt as though I was no longer a member of the NYPD. I was on the outside looking in. I realized that this
was definitely going to be my last case. But I wasn't going to slip on the bullshit so easily.
I had another plan.
I put on a good face for Vito as I got back in the car. He didn't try to hide his contempt one bit. “This job's got a million motherfucking dollars' worth of equipment to collar dope heads, but for a dead cop, we can't get a camera and a roll of film. I wanna vomit, Randy, you know that? This job and those cocksuckers downtown are a fucking joke. A dead cop, Randy, a dead cop. My partner...” His head dropped into his hands.
I drove for a while, not saying anything. Vito was right. He had every right to shut down. He didn't engage me, just stared out the window, eyes watery, red rimmed. He was hurt, lost. I knew he was never going to get over this. After a while, I said, “Vito, this case lives or dies with us. And whatever happens, good or bad, stays between us. You and I need to be simpatico on this. That shit that happened back there, it has to roll off our shoulders. If it doesn't, we're going to fall into a deep fucking hole, one we ain't getting out of so easily. I need you to promise me that whatever else happens, including this horseshit today, doesn't leave this car. We're partners now. I got your back, and I know you got mine, right?”
He nodded.
Sam DeMilia was an old friend from my patrol days who was now the president of the PBA. Since the very beginning of this fiasco, Sam was extremely vocal against the brass, particularly the police commissioner, and Mayor Lindsay himself. He called press conferences on the steps of City Hall where he rallied thousands of cops in protest. When he proclaimed that a citywide slowdown was imminent, the twelfth floor of One PP took particular notice. The PBA had essentially forced the job's hand into having the case properly investigated.
Sam and I both agreed that we should meet far away from the borough of Manhattan. I was too hot, and Sam and the PBA, in general, were always hot. We met at a low-key restaurant on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. He was alone and already seated when I entered the tiny family-style trattoria. Sam was an impeccably dressed bull of a man with a quiet take-charge personality, and he was a wildly popular union chief among the rank-and-file cops. He stood, holding out both his hands. We shook. At that moment in time, Sam was One PP's biggest enemy, and I, basically represented One PP. By taking this meeting, though we were old friends, I was meeting with the enemy. I had suddenly switched flags.
I explained my case to him, told him what I needed. I skipped over the speed bumps we'd hit. It would only have pissed him off even more and gotten us off course. He was inquisitive as to why the Chief of Detectives' office wasn't supplying me with the necessary equipment. I lied and told him the requests were caught up in bureaucracy, and it was holding me up.
He sat back, contemplating the nonsense I'd just fed him. Sam DeMilia was no understudy. Though his ID card read patrolman—the lowest rank in the NYPD—he wielded as much power as anyone at the porcelain palace. He was the shaman to the 30,000-member police union. Sam DeMilia was the man who negotiated pay raises, holidays, and sick leave with the city's administrators, and he protected that lowly cop on patrol from the councils of power at One PP. There wasn't one aspect of the Phil Cardillo case he wasn't aware of. He knew I was lying. But Sam was still a cop who wanted the killer brought in above all else. Sometimes people need to hear certain untruths to allow them move forward.
After a thoughtful pause, he began nodding his head slowly. He pulled a thin gold monogrammed cardholder out of his breast pocket. He removed a card, writing his direct work and home numbers on its back. He slid it across the table. “Where you working this, Randy?”
I lied again. “2-5 squad.”
2-5 locker room
just didn't have the pizzazz.
“You'll have the truck and equipment by tomorrow's day tour. From now on, call me direct. If I'm not at the office, you can get me at home. Whatever you need, please, come to me.”
“This has got to be on the down-low, Sam. The least amount of people involved, the better off I am, and the faster I can identify the suspects at the mosque.”
“Randy, I know they got your balls in a vice. The last thing I'm gonna do is help those pricks suppress their cowardice any further. Mark my words, Randy, I have a blanket party in store for all of them.”
The next morning, as promised, an undercover cop met me in the 2-5 squad. He handed me a canvas bag and a set of keys. He told me where the vehicle was parked, and turned and walked out as quickly as he had come in.
Inside the bag were three Nikons, as expensive and powerful as the Narcotics Bureau cameras, and boxes and boxes of film.
The truck was an excellent vehicle for the task at hand. It was an old-fashioned ice cream truck with a small cab in the front and a larger stand-up cab in the rear, with slider-type windows on its sides and back. Wrapped in
a large black duffle bag in the rear cab were police flares, a truck wrench, searchlights, a door ram, bolt cutters, an acetylene torch, and an assortment of sledgehammers and pickaxes. This would have been overkill on a bank heist. I got the message the PBA was sending loud and clear: Anything needed would be provided.
I hit the ground running. I set up one block west of the mosque. The rear of the cab had an unobstructed view of the front double doors. I focused the 800mm zoom lens on the entrance and I waited and waited and waited. Very few people entered the building, and the ones who had, moved in and out very quickly, making it impossible to get a clear frontal shot. I sat there for two days, grinding my teeth. I had to start thinking out of the box.
I walked to a pay phone and placed a call to the 2-8 telephone switchboard. I requested an RMP to eighty-five me, no emergency, three blocks west of the mosque. In seconds an RMP with two uniforms was there. I told them to double-park the RMP across the street from the mosque, pointing in the wrong direction about five car lengths to the west. I told them to do nothing, just sit in the car with the turret light on. They did as requested—no questions asked.
Back in the truck, I waited. I didn't wait long. The front door of the mosque opened, spilling curious FOI soldiers out onto the sidewalk to see what the cops were up to.
click-click-click-click-click-click-click
. The RMP pulled away in a matter of minutes, as instructed, and the FOI men filed back into the building. We did this for three straight days, until all the film was used.
The truck and all its equipment was returned, and I decided I'd need to find a new office where I could be alone.
We decided that Vito and I should work opposite tours, he in the mornings, I in the afternoons and evenings, which was a moot point since I'd been working sixteen-hour tours since catching the case. Vito's job was to field all calls and personal visits into the 2-5 that were pertinent to the case. What he was really doing was cooling out all the cops who wanted to know the progress of the case. He was happy. The cops were happy. I was free to develop and hopefully solve.
Larry Marinelli's office was located at Fifty-fourth Street and Tenth Avenue. It was a large facility with three smaller offices situated off its main reception area. Larry had one office, another office housed flatbed, plus upright editing bays, a film-developing kiosk, and a third office was vacant. Larry was well aware of my
real estate
problems in the NYPD, so
he magnanimously offered this space to me, no strings attached.
I was way off the radar and couldn't tell anyone, Vito included. By conducting an investigation at an unrecognized police facility, I was breaking NYPD operating procedure. If I got caught, I'd be fired, and I wasn't about to bring Vito down with me. That office was to become the unofficial Cardillo/Jurgensen war room.
I brought the film into the office and Larry developed the cartridges into black–and-white eight-by-tens. I'd acquired twenty excellent shots, all men. I pinned every picture to the cork wall, and I studied each face for hours, trying to decipher if I'd seen any of these men the day of occurrence, trying to jog anything in my memory. Only one of these men was familiar to me: Captain Youseff Shau, the militant leader of the Fruit of Islam. I'd met him on a prior assault case that I had caught, which involved one of his underlings at the mosque. I drew a blank on everyone else.
I took them to the street. I hit shooting galleries, numbers joints, and dope spots. I searched out every CI and wanna-be CI I'd ever met. I called in every favor I had ever given out. I wanted names to go with the faces. I came up empty.
I was faced with two problems. Once a guy became a part of the Black Muslims, he became a recluse from the community he came from. Many of the Muslims who were members of Mosque Number 7 were from outside the borough, so it was going to be almost impossible to get any credible street intel on them. Out of the twenty photos, I had just ID'd three. But I only had their Muslim names, not their birth names. After weeks of pounding the pavement and crashing dope spots, I was still coming up empty on any real pedigrees. I'd been through the NYPD Intelligence Division's files, and what they had on Muslims in New York could fit on the inside a matchbook. It was time to bring the case to someone else, and if I was caught, I'd be up for an early retirement. I was going to the FBI.
Every Wednesday night, agents from the FBI and cops from the NYPD played each other in a high-tension game of basketball at Manhattan's Regis High School. Bragging rights were on the line so the games were nice and spirited. Through all the wins, defeats, unpaid bets, and barbs, through all the trash-talk—somehow—lifetime friendships were made. That's how I'd become friends with a field agent named Joe Pistone. He was only six foot, but he could rebound better than anyone. Joe Pistone would go on to a lot of success within the bureau, and in the public eye, most notably as undercover agent, Donnie Brasco where he single-handedly tore apart the
hierarchy of the Bonanno crime family. He was also portrayed in the film
Donnie Brasco
by the actor Johnny Depp.
At the time, the FBI was finding and detaining draft dodgers of the Vietnam War. On numerous occasions, agents would turn up in Zone-6 with photos, looking for street names and aliases. If there was a familiar face, we'd share whatever info we had. Now it was time to reverse the process.
When I entered the building, I signed in as
Detective Eveready
. This was to insulate as many men as I could from the possible firestorm ahead.
Joe and another agent I'd known from the Regis basketball games, Al Genkinger, were waiting for me as the elevator doors slid open. I realized that they were leery about the prospect of helping me.
I followed the agents into a smallish clerical office/coffee room. Joe closed the door, offering us privacy, but this was the FBI, so I assumed even this room was wired for sound.
Joe and Al both knew of the case. Hell, if you worked New York law enforcement, you'd have to be in a coma not to know. They seemed concerned. For me to come to them had to be a last-ditch effort on my part, and it was.
Pistone leaned against a table, suddenly cocky. “Randy, you here to collect on a bet?” He looked to Genkinger confused, “Wait a minute, Al, we won Wednesday night, didn't we? Oh that's right, you weren't there, Randy.” He smiled.
I laughed, “That's cold Joe. Are we ever gonna get over this damn rivalry?”
Genkinger poured three cups of coffee. With his back to me, he asked, “So what's up, Randy?”
I zipped open my field jacket, removing the manila envelope that contained the photos. I pulled out the stack, handing them to Pistone. He went through them quickly, passing them to his partner, who breezed through them as well.
Pistone was careful not to use the words
Muslim, FOI
, or
mosque
. I took that as an affirmative; the room
was
wired for sound. He pointed at the photos. “The guys on your team, they gonna put their names on the jerseys?”
“Yeah, I'm having problems with them, though. They want their nicknames on the backs. I want real names to go on the jerseys.”
Pistone nodded. I'd already written my contact numbers on a slip of paper. I handed it to him. “I'm getting hammered on the prices for these damn things. Who are you using for your jerseys?”
“Guy I know in Brooklyn, he's cheap as hell. I'll call you in a couple of
days when I find out the real numbers on the jerseys.”