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Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary talks with retired NYPD cop turned-author Vic Ferrari. Vic has written several books depicting his experiences as an NYPD officer and detective. They discuss a recent documentary, Blue Code of Silence, and a narrative movie about the same subject, Prince of the City. Vic and Gary discuss the problems of working with Federal law enforcement when uncovering corruption within a police department.
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Transcript
Gary Jenkins: [00:41:00] Well, hey guys, Gary Jenkins here, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I’m here with my good friend Vic Ferrari, another retired copper out of New York City. Welcome,
Viv Ferrari: Vic. Hey, Gary, how you doing today? Thank you for having
Gary Jenkins: me on your show. Well, it’s really great to have you back. I love talking to you.
Gary Jenkins: You know, it’s kind of like, you know, I sit down with my buddies once a while, about I don’t know, once a week, he’s easily for coffee or we go play golf and we, you know, we ended up telling old war stories. Of course it is. There’s such an ease between coppers and their life, right?
Viv Ferrari: We speak the same language.
Gary Jenkins: It’s funny. It’s, it’s, it’s a club, I guess. We have our own little club. It’s like the Palma Boys social club that Tony Fat Tony Salerno had, or the Bergen Hunt and Fish Club Ravenite that Gotti
Viv Ferrari: had. Yeah. I never saw the rate. Well, I did see the Ravenight years later, the Bergen Hunt and Fish club. I never saw, but the Palmer boys.
Viv Ferrari: Yeah. Remember
Gary Jenkins: that one, that one. [00:42:00] So anyhow, of course, this, this podcast is mainly about organized crime, but we like to spin off into other things. I’ve got a ton. I’ve got 400 and some organized crime stories out there, probably 375, but I like to spin off and other things. I’d like to give you guys. Kind of a little inside look at police department and police officers, detectives, and how we work with other agencies, particularly the FBI, the U S attorney’s office.
Gary Jenkins: Now happened to be watch actually Ken Couture, one of my Facebook guys that helps me administer my administrate my podcast group on Facebook posted a link or a post about a documentary called the Code Blue of silence. It was a, if you remember seeing the movie about the Prince of the city and this NYPD detective, Bob Lucy, who ended up working with us attorney’s office and the FBI and, and exposed a lot of corruption and both [00:43:00] in, in lawyers and bail bondsmen and, and other cops and in the court system in New York city.
Gary Jenkins: And I remember watching that movie Prince of the city. Back in the early seventies and it, like it brought it home, you know, working with the U S attorney’s office and Vic and I were talking just before we turned on the recorder here is like, it’s like dealing with a steamroller. If you get in their way, they’re just going to power over you.
Gary Jenkins: You got to do exactly what they want. And Bob Leuci found that out. And so I watched this Code Blue of Silence, which by the way, guys, I’d recommend is a really good documentary. I found it on Plax, PLAX. So I got ahold of Vic and I said, you know, let’s talk about this kind of thing, working with these guys and, and a little bit about the corruption that, that we’ve seen and, and not been a part of, but, but it’s always around anytime you got a big corporation even, or a big police department or a big operation of any kind, you’re going to have some bad apples in there.
Gary Jenkins: [00:44:00] There’s just no way about it, whatever you do for a living. So Vic said, yeah, that would be a good idea. He remembers a lot of that. He remembers the Knapp commission and Serpico, which was the other famous movie about that. So Vic agreed to come on now, Vic tell the guys a little bit more about yourself.
Gary Jenkins: You know, I know you were NYPD primarily in auto theft, organized crime, auto theft, and you’ve since written a lot of books. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself and your
Viv Ferrari: books. Hi, my name is Vic Ferrari. I’m a retired 20 year member of the New York City Police Department, but I retired detective.
Viv Ferrari: I worked in a lot of units, but including the Manhattan North narcotics division, doing a lot of buy and bust and search warrants targeting narcotics traffickers. And then later on my last 10 years, I was a detective in the NYPD’s auto crime division. So anything with chop shops, exporting stolen vehicles out of the country, changing vehicle identification numbers on stolen vehicles for resale.
Viv Ferrari: I got, I retired from the NYPD and I’ve written a series of behind the scenes NYPD books. I’ve [00:45:00] also created an NYPD through the Looking Glass podcast, where I bring on retired NYPD members and they share their stories. My books are behind the scenes look into the NYPD filled with funny stories, creative criminals, colorful characters I worked with.
Viv Ferrari: I point out the absurdity and the hypocrisy sometimes in the department. My books are just a series of short stories of what went on during my time period from 1987 to 2007.
Gary Jenkins: Well, interesting. And you’re one of those colorful characters yourself. I think,
Gary Jenkins: you can tell a story. I’ll never forget that story. You told about getting in that time to get that stolen card, make sure they didn’t get away with it or whatever. And it was all sprayed down with WD. Four on the inside, you’re like sliding around, you’re locked in it or something. And I was
Viv Ferrari: getting chased by an NYPD van.
Viv Ferrari: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Gary Jenkins: So anyhow, let’s talk about this a little bit. Now Bob Leuci was in the special investigations unit. They called it and that’s why they called him Prince. The book, the movie Prince of the city in the book by a guy named [00:46:00] Bob Daley. Robert Daley. And, you know, it was like, I remember that feeling. I was in one of these small units.
Gary Jenkins: There was only 12 of us and we had free roam of the entire, you know, Tri County, however far we needed to drive or whatever we needed to do. We had complete freedom. We, unless we were assigned to some particular surveillance or some particular day, daily assignment, which there weren’t a lot of those, we just had free reign to go out and try to develop informants.
Gary Jenkins: And. Follow mob guys around and see where they were hanging out, who they were meeting up with and what they were doing. You know, some guys abused that privilege and did a lot of shopping and some of us didn’t. And it’s just, that’s just the way it is. So, but I understand that feeling of, you know, if there was a working nights and there was a concert going on down at the auditorium, I just go down and badge my way in, watch, you know, 30, 40 minutes of the concert or a truck pull or, or whatever was going on, you know, we just go do it.
Gary Jenkins: Cause [00:47:00] we wore. T shirts and blue jeans primarily back then had slick cars, what we call slick cars. And so I understand that feeling of you’re invincible and you can do anything you want. And it’s a kind of has a little bit of a corrupting effect in a way, especially when you started partying at night and started drinking, but I understand that feeling.
Viv Ferrari: Well, the NYPD, so I was hired again in 1987. So a lot of these things with Serpico and Bob Lucy and David Dirk, this all happened 15, 20 years before I was hired, but it left a lasting effect on the department. But let’s go back to that time period in the early 70s. The New York City Police Department back then in the 60s From what I’ve seen, and what I’ve been told by the old timers, wasn’t that creative.
Viv Ferrari: And you know this when you become a rookie cop. When you’re in a precinct, there’s a lot of supervision. You’re not allowed to leave the precinct. You’re not allowed to go to the next precinct over to get something to eat. [00:48:00] You’re trapped. You’re assigned to a precinct. You don’t move out of that precinct.
Viv Ferrari: And it’s very difficult to transfer out of a precinct because the precinct commanders want a body for a body, which made that special investigations unit unique at that time period was a they’re putting cops in plainclothes, which the NYPD really didn’t like doing back then they did it, but it was very narrow on who they would put in there.
Viv Ferrari: And then like. You know, the movies called Prince of the City, these guys could go anywhere. Nobody really knew what they were doing. They were going to different boroughs, doing different things. They were coming up with a lot of things, but then you come to find out through Lucy that these guys were ripping off drug dealers, working with drug dealers, taking bribes, in some cases actually selling narcotics themselves.
Viv Ferrari: And then it comes down to, and I did watch the documentary, but I read up a lot about Lucy. You know, at first it looked as if he You know, had enough. He had seen so much and he’s like, you know what, [00:49:00] this has to stop. And he came forward and began to cooperate with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Viv Ferrari: And then I think the U. S. attorney’s office, but then you come to find out that he was doing the same thing as everybody else. And then it’s, well, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did they come to him and say, listen, we got you doing X, Y, and Z. You can go to jail for the rest of your life. Or you can step ahead, come clean and, you know, give up everybody and work undercover for a couple of years.
Viv Ferrari: And I think at first his, he was promised that he wouldn’t have to testify. And then ultimately he did, or his identity, his cover was blown as they would call it. But the thing about Lucy was he was never charged with a crime, which I found unique because later on in the NYPD, you know, we’ve had scandals like the dirty 30 and different things, regardless of who.
Viv Ferrari: You know, cooperated if their hand was in the cookie jar, they were charged with a crime and then it was up to the prosecutor to weigh. Did they give [00:50:00] enough evidence to walk or be given probation or or give a fine? Lucy actually got to keep his job, which I found incredible because usually. After you cooperate, you admit to doing something bad.
Viv Ferrari: Stealing. That’s it in the NYPD. There’s no second chances with theft or drugs. You’re out the door. From what it looks like, from what I was researching, Lucy did another 10 years. And I think they were using him basically as a doing propaganda for the NYPD as far as talking to the rookie cops and doing seminars for the police departments about how to target and recognize corruption.
Viv Ferrari: So I found that highly unusual. For a guy that admitted doing wrong things, but the job kept him. I found that unbelievable.
Gary Jenkins: Interesting. You know, they what, what you mentioned about whether the chicken or the egg, whether he maybe was caught with his hand in the cookie jar and somebody turned him or not in that documentary, they, they don’t really dispute that, that he was altruistic when he first went in.
Gary Jenkins: [00:51:00] But we’ll probably never know that for sure. But what, as he went in, he started giving up people and giving up situations. He, he, then they got, became suspicious of him and Rudy Giuliani in particularly was one of the U S attorneys assigned to that. And he was really suspicious of him and it kept pushing him and pushing him and pushing him.
Gary Jenkins: And he was, he was kind of a. I don’t want to want to say weak will, but he seemed like he had maybe some kind of a mental exaggerated sense of conscience or he had a conscience. I don’t know, but they kept pushing him and he, he, and he started giving up his partners, the guys he’d worked with an SIU, which he’d sworn he wouldn’t.
Gary Jenkins: And finally started. Admitting that he also took money. And that’s when that, by the end of it, that’s when they brought it down. And one interesting story, and that was, there was a bail bondsman and I don’t know if it was a cop or a lawyer, somebody he had met with, they got suspicious suspicious of him that he was wearing the wire.
Gary Jenkins: And they [00:52:00] were going to take him somewhere down the street out of a public view and, and pull his shirt off and, and he was blustering his way through. And as he walked down the street, he saw a guy standing out in front of what was a social clubs. We talked about the different social clubs, a social club.
Gary Jenkins: It was Sonny Red Indelicato, who was a Oh God, a Gambino guy. I think. Bonanno. But banana, that’s right. Bonanno guy. He was one of the three capos that got killed. I think later on and Sonny red, he somehow Leuci knew him or knew him through a relative or something. And he said, Hey, he said, ask that guy.
Gary Jenkins: And so they went over and they asked him, he said, yeah, he’s okay. And he got, he saved his bacon and mob guy saved his bacon that day. So it’s you know, it’s such a, such an interesting story that they’re just. You know, and, and that kind of stuff all came out in the documentary. It just like it was in the movie, I was suspicious about the movie.
Gary Jenkins: It was too good, but but apparently all that stuff happened. Well,
Viv Ferrari: yeah, like most movies, they embellish or [00:53:00] something takes too long to get to the point. Point so they’re conveniently cut out a part or sometimes, you know, a lot of times like in Lucy’s case, they made him, you know, look like a hero in the movie where like we were just discussing it, it kind of looks like at some point before he began to cooperate that he was involved in this too.
Viv Ferrari: What’s what’s funny about this is after this scandal blew up and you had all these cops, I think it was like NYPD members were indicted. There were attorneys involved in this that were arrested. I think a couple of judges, like you said, a bail bondsman, the NYPD always goes the opposite way of of the problem.
Viv Ferrari: So what they did was they disbanded the unit. And they realized that the temptation of drugs and money, they did not want uniform members making drug arrests. And that bled into when I first was hired, if you started coming into the station house, like if you were in a radio car, so typical NYPD precinct, say a busy precinct, they turn out 10 [00:54:00] radio cars a night.
Viv Ferrari: And I’m driving, and this is, I was in the 80s and 90s, you see a line of 15 guys walking up to a drug deal. The guy’s what’s called a pitcher. He’s pitching. He’s just. They form a crack line quick. There’s a manager goes, everybody get in line, get your money ready. Guy comes out and he’s usually in a hallway or something.
Viv Ferrari: Boom, boom, boom. If you run up that line and grab the guy with the bag, right. And he’s got 30, 40 miles of crack. You slap the cuffs on him. You bring them into the station house. Well, in my time in the eighties and nineties, depending on the precinct. You, you’d get a tongue lashing, like what the hell are you doing?
Viv Ferrari: First off, the desk officer didn’t want anything to do with it. Why are you bringing this crap in? Now I got to give you a narcotics envelope. What do you think? You’re saving the world with this crap, right? So the desk officer is pissed off. Before you know it, the patrol supervisor is going to come in.
Viv Ferrari: He’s like, great, I’m holding 15 jobs. You just took a radio car off the road to get involved with this bullshit. And now I got to pick up jobs. So. Depending on where you worked and who the supervisor was, they did not want street cops [00:55:00] making, we did it, making drug arrests on the street because, and if you did it enough, you’d find yourself walking a footpost or guarding a hospitalized prisoner or a DOA.
Viv Ferrari: But what’s unique is, what the NYPD did to their credit, was they started, it’s, SIU just basically was like, they went wherever they wanted, they, they created the narcotics division by Burroughs. And each borough has, has usually a full bird inspector running the operation. And then there’s a couple of captains.
Viv Ferrari: There’s so much supervision, because by the time I went into the narcotics division, it was almost like the precincts. So, I worked in Manhattan North Narcotics, so they split Manhattan in half. Manhattan South, I think, is from 59th or 57th Street to the Staten Island Ferry. Manhattan North is 57th Street to the Bronx border, right?
Viv Ferrari: So, right off the bat, you go, when I was in Manhattan North, I’m covering one portion of Manhattan, [00:56:00] okay? And in that one portion of Manhattan, I was assigned two precincts. The 3 4 and I think the 2 3, so Spanish Harlem and Washington Heights. So they really didn’t want us make an arrest unless we were authorized out of those 2 precincts.
Viv Ferrari: And when you went, there was always at least 1 or 2 sergeants with you. Sometimes the lieutenant came out with you. There was a lot of supervision is what I’m trying to explain. So you’re doing a buy and bust operation. You roll up. If you grab the guys, there’s a sergeant there. There’s a lot of quality control things with envelopes and putting the prisoner’s name on it while the property goes in.
Viv Ferrari: Probably nowadays they take photos of videotape this, but back then everything went into an envelope. When you did a search warrant everybody came. There was usually sometime the commanding officer would come. At least a captain, a lieutenant. I mean, so there was, there was no prince of the city days.
Viv Ferrari: It was two detectives kicking down a door. Sometimes they used to call it a Tom McCann search warrant because they didn’t have a warrant. They just got a tip and they went in there and boomed the door. And so by the time I [00:57:00] was in the narcotics division, it was down to a borough, down to a precinct. And there was a lot of supervision because they did not want the chance of cops going bad and nobody knowing about it.
Viv Ferrari: But that did happen because I got a story about that. But then with the NYPD, so things were working well, there really weren’t any scandals in the narcotics division for years. And then the NYPD did was they started creating in high drug precincts, new units, street narcotics units. So it’s usually a sergeant and three or four cops and they do observations.
Viv Ferrari: So if there’s a guy dealing In front of a building, you’ve got cops on rooftops with binoculars. They’re watching the guy hit off about 10, 15 people. Then they moved down and grabbed the guy, but there’s not as much supervision. And what happened was in a couple of precincts, I think it was the three, maybe, well, I don’t want to say which precincts because I’m not a hundred percent sure, but there was a couple of precincts where the SNHU units had a lot of allegations or a couple of guys went bad and what did they do?
Viv Ferrari: They closed up the SNHU units because they, they didn’t trust it. [00:58:00] But yeah, as a result of Lucy and his guys, the NYPD started compartmentalizing things.
Gary Jenkins: Interesting. We we used to call those Oklahoma search warrants. Somebody go around behind the house, say, help, help, help. And then somebody out front and kicked the door and said, well, I heard somebody hollering for help in there.
Gary Jenkins: Say, oh, you served as Oklahoma search warrant.
Viv Ferrari: I had a lieutenant. I went for an interview when I went for my first interview with narcotics. Oh, God, this has got to be. Early nineties. I remember one of the lieutenants telling me, yeah, times have changed. We used to kick down doors based on voices from God.
Viv Ferrari: Well, we’re much, I never heard that one before. I
Gary Jenkins: never did that professional today. That is for sure. And those controls, you know, we and my unit and intelligence unit, if they got a tip on a cop that supposedly was taking money, we would get assigned kind of not like internal affairs would only work on.[00:59:00]
Gary Jenkins: Cops that were violating procedures and had complaints. If there was somebody that made a complaint that there was illegal activity going on, then they gave it to our unit and we’d go check it out as best we could. And we followed one guy around all one night and we set him up, put some money, had him make a call and the money was missing after he left the call and, and then we’re following him.
Gary Jenkins: Follow him around, follow him around, get back to the station. They grab him in the station and they can’t find the money. That sucker had, he’d, we’d burn the surveillance, I’m sure. And, and hid the money in some manner. So, you know, you, you win some, you lose some, we, we had several other deals like that, but it’s it’s hard to, to catch.
Gary Jenkins: Cops that are hip, they just know, you know, they’ve got this antenna and these eyes in the back of their head is really hard to catch guys. I don’t think they can get away with anything anymore though. It’s there’s no, but I mean, but you
Viv Ferrari: know how it is, if you’re doing [01:00:00] something wrong, even the sharpest guy that’s doing something wrong, eventually his luck is going to run out.
Viv Ferrari: And one of the things they discovered with the Knapp commission, yeah. Was on the, on the precinct level, cops that would take and pay off from drug dealers and local business owners. What they would do is they, they would turn out with self addressed stamped envelopes on them. And then if they took money from somebody, they’d stick it in a self address to them and mail it to themselves.
Viv Ferrari: So if they got tossed at the precinct, it was already in the mail. So there was a lot of things that those guys do. They were footloose and fancy free, but like we were talking about the narcotics division. I’ve got a funny story. It’s sad, but it’s funny. Even with all the fail safes that I was talking about with the quality control.
Viv Ferrari: So I’m in narcotics and I’m off duty and I’m in this bar up in the Bronx called Pauline’s. Anybody from the Bronx that was a cop at the time knows Pauline’s and it had a tiny bathroom. You walk in and there was absolutely no privacy. There was a toilet and a urinal when you walk in. No. Space [01:01:00] guard or anything.
Viv Ferrari: So I’m in there doing my business and the door comes flying open. And this guy that works in the narcotics division, he wasn’t in my team. I didn’t know him particularly well, but I recognized him. He just, the dog comes flying in and he just walks in. He’s a mess. He’s sweating. He’s drunk. And he’s just starts pissing on the wall.
Viv Ferrari: Like he’s missing the toilet. Right. And I’m just looking at him. Like I got to get out of here. Right. So I’m trying to finish up. And he kind of looks at me. He goes, where do I know you from? And I says, we both work in narcotics. He goes, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But he was a mess. I didn’t think anything of it.
Viv Ferrari: I just thought he was drunk. But looking back, I should have paid more attention to him. So a couple of weeks or months later go by and he’s involved in a search warrant. It wasn’t his warrant. I think he was like a Bit player on it and they go back to the, they go back to the precinct and they’ve got a couple ounces of coke and some money and stuff.
Viv Ferrari: And you’ve got the sergeant there with the arresting office that did the search warrant. You got a couple of undercovers there and they’re going through the property and stuff. And this [01:02:00] guy walks over, they got a bag of coke on the table. He walks over to it in front of everybody, it takes like a scoop that you would have for like lemonade, scoops out a little bit of the coke, puts it in his own baggie and just walks away.
Viv Ferrari: So, this thing you kid around about law enforcement and break balls about things, that would not be one of the things that you would, even as a joke, you wouldn’t do something like that, can get yourself locked up. And everybody’s looking at each other like, this is a joke, right? So first they start looking at the sergeant like, Boss, this is a joke, right?
Viv Ferrari: And he’s, he, he, he’s like, looks like he’s seen a ghost. They asked the guy that got the search one. It goes. I don’t know what he just did. I can’t believe what he just did. And the guy walks into the bathroom. Guy comes out of the bathroom a couple of minutes later, high as a kite. And they just, they just can’t believe what they witnessed.
Viv Ferrari: So the sergeant played it cool. And he starts, you know, when you do a search warrant, there might be 10, 15 people involved. Not everybody’s going to stay the whole time for the overtime. So they start sending people home because they want to cut down on the overtime. [01:03:00] All right, Gary. All right, Vic, you guys can go home.
Viv Ferrari: Thanks. Thanks for helping us out. So the sergeant played it, played it close to the best. He told us. This detective who had stolen the coke off the table and snorted it. Yeah. Yeah. Go home. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Called internal affairs. And the guy lived in upstate New York. So it took about an hour or two.
Viv Ferrari: So internal affairs shows up at this guy’s house in upstate New York. They said, we’re here to take you for a dole test, which is our drug test. And he starts playing the game. Well, I don’t have to go. And they didn’t want to spend, you know, the night in this guy’s house. So what they did was they brought him to the local New York state trooper barracks and they said, listen, You’re either going to get suspended on the spot and fired, or you got to pee in this cup.
Viv Ferrari: So eventually, you know, he gave them a sample at, at, at the state police barracks. And ultimately they said he was like the highest level ever tested in the NY because he had just done it literally like two, three hours earlier. So, like I said, even, you know, with all these programs and, and, and things put in place.
Viv Ferrari: You know, guys still go bad. [01:04:00] Yeah, that’s
Gary Jenkins: it’s crazy. It’s crazy. It’s a whole different world. Sometimes out there on the streets that people don’t really understand. It’s not like TV it’s, it’s you got a lot of human beings that have a lot of problems. And this guy, he had an addiction problem.
Gary Jenkins: There’s no doubt about it. He had an addiction problem with substance and you know, who knows? Well,
Viv Ferrari: listen, but you get drug tested in the NYPD anytime you get transferred, Especially to like a sensitive unit or a specialized unit. The first thing they do is drug test you and they’ll random drug test you too.
Viv Ferrari: I mean, in my 20 years, I was probably randomly drug tested seven or eight times.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah, we had random drug testing after a while. I don’t, I probably got had to p test two or three times. I can’t remember now, but he used to, people used to claim that they bumped them up on the list because they were suspicious about him.
Gary Jenkins: Some of the bad boys who always hated management always say, yeah, they drug test me every week. [01:05:00]
Viv Ferrari: Yeah. We used to hear the same thing.
Gary Jenkins: Some things are universal, aren’t they? It’s always the bad boys that were in trouble about everything else.
Viv Ferrari: Well, the funny thing about that random drug test is I got randomly drug test two, three times tops in my first.
Viv Ferrari: 15 years. Then my last couple of years when I was coming up for retirement, I was like, every six months, I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. Right. No, no, it’s random. Like, yeah, I think you guys are trying to save a pension.
Gary Jenkins: Really? Well, it’s a whole different world out there. What about how much about Serpico?
Gary Jenkins: And did that, how did that play? Among coppers when, when you were on, I did, I’d have a lasting effect of the kind of the legend of Serpico and all that. How did that play? Well, I wouldn’t exactly
Viv Ferrari: call him a legend in the NYPD because you got to remember, right? So here I come 10, 15 years after Lucy [01:06:00] and Serpico and whatever you think of Serpico.
Viv Ferrari: The reality is a lot of people in the NYPD lost their jobs, got suspended, their names were in the newspaper, for right or wrong. So to drop his name or start asking questions about him, especially around the old timers, because you remember the guy you are talking to might not be corrupt or anything, but his neighbor, a brother in law went down with the ship.
Viv Ferrari: So you knew it was just something that you didn’t talk about. And if an old timer started. Pontificating and talking about it, you know, just to keep your mouth shut and listen as far as not ask too many questions or say, Oh, yeah, I became, I’ve seen it where a couple of times like rookie cops said, yeah, I became a cop because I saw the movie Serpico and then nobody would talk to the guy for like a year.
Viv Ferrari: So, yeah, he really wasn’t liked and I can guarantee you, I mean, no one’s around now from when he was [01:07:00] active, but yeah, he was not like. Immortalized in the N. Y. P. D. And a lot of things. That’s with gambling to which that’s another thing we’re overlooking because we’re targeting the drug aspect. I mean, illegal gambling before the states got involved in lotteries, right?
Viv Ferrari: So nowadays you could pick three, pick four, pick 10, whatever. In the old days before they had that in poor neighborhoods, You had, we used to call it the ghetto lottery and the mafia, and then, you know, Spanish groups were involved in it. And I don’t exactly remember how it worked, but the three, it was called the number, it was a three digit number.
Viv Ferrari: And I think it was off the attendance at the local racetrack the following day. And unlike the New York state lottery, we have to bet at least a dollar with the ghetto. Lottery, you can bet a nickel, a dime and the payouts were higher. So you would go and every store, like my neighborhood, there was a flood.
Viv Ferrari: Like we were talking about on the on another episode, Tommy Uva, [01:08:00] Tommy Uva’s family was associated. There was a florist on in my neighborhood where you go in the back. And you could play the number like I, I would coming out of the candy store across the street and you’d see a line of people going into into the back of the floor is playing the number or so.
Viv Ferrari: And there was a lot of money in that. And in the old days, the precinct cops, this really wasn’t involved with. Like the higher well, the money got kicked up to the higher ups, but in the precinct level, the patrol cops were protecting or taking money. It’s called policy taking money from these policy of gambling places to look the other way.
Viv Ferrari: And Serpico really that that’s before he got into the narcotics division that that was his hang up as far as. Hops to getting money from guys running these policy places, which ultimately is organized crime and the mafia. Yeah.
Gary Jenkins: You know, I’ve in that documentary, you’re talking about how people in modern times think about these guys that became so famous.
Gary Jenkins: They had [01:09:00] a Kathy Burke on there who had gotten shot and become an author. And there was two other guys on there. And I think they had worked organized crime or something. Any, all, all three of them. They like We’re very disdainful about Bob Leuci. I mean, it was like showed in their faces so much as they tried to question them about Bob Leuci.
Gary Jenkins: I was kind of shocked as how disdainful they were about him. Yeah. I, I
Viv Ferrari: mean, I didn’t know the guy. I mean, I didn’t watch the documentary, but I mean, I did, I read a lot of newspaper articles about him. I’m kind of indifferent because at first I was like, all right, well, he was trying to do the right thing.
Viv Ferrari: Then you find out, you know, did they come to him and make a deal? Like, listen, we got you doing X, Y, and Z. So you’re either going to play ball or you’re going to jail for the rest of your life, and we’re going to embarrass you. So, you know, I mean, like always the truth is somewhere in the middle. Yeah. I think
Gary Jenkins: I always think part of it is he became so famous and people are always jealous of somebody [01:10:00] becoming famous.
Gary Jenkins: And so
Viv Ferrari: it’s Oh, absolutely. Especially in the NY as a detective. So in the NYPD, there’s three levels of detective first grade, second grade, third grade. So when you get promoted from patrolman to detective. You’re making, and this is in my time, you’re probably making about 3, 500 more than a cop. If you get second grade, you’re making sergeants pay.
Viv Ferrari: And if you get first grade, you’re making pretty much lieutenants pay. And you know, some guys earn it. They, they, they, they get, they get promoted and other guys, it’s some chief’s daughter or grandson, or, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve seen guys that really deserved it, never get it. And I watch clowns get promoters, second grade and first grade, and, you know, they’re revered as these experts and things, and, you know, you wouldn’t ask this guy for directions.
Viv Ferrari: So you’re right. People do get jealous over that, right or wrong.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah, I know in my unit, I caught a lot of grief from guys that were kind of, they weren’t really [01:11:00] like stealing, but they were just always on the edge. And they knew that we were cops sometimes. And when I got promoted to sergeant, I had this one who had gotten promoted to sergeant was out in the same station I was, and I’d walk in and he’d just start braying at the top of his fucking lungs about, yeah, ain’t cops you following today, Jenkins?
Gary Jenkins: I just laugh at him and go on. Well, that
Viv Ferrari: tells you something about him. Yeah.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah, it did. Yeah, he was, he was what we affectionately refer to what I would affectionately refer to as a booger eating moron or a B. E. M.
Viv Ferrari: Well, the funny thing is, so like after all these guys that we’re talking about, Lucy and Serpico, the NYPD, they started beefing up the internal affairs division.
Viv Ferrari: So the way, and again, this is how it was in my time. You had in my time, you had internal affairs that was supposed to go after the big stuff. Then you had F. I. A. U. field internal affairs, those were the guys that would [01:12:00] nitpick over things, but you could still get locked up by them. Then, on the patrol side, not internal affairs, you had borough inspections that would come around and nitpick you for getting a haircut when you’re on your foot post or leaving five minutes early.
Viv Ferrari: Internal affairs would grant you that too if they could catch you, but. It just it got ridiculous to the point. So in the NYPD, and it’s probably going to start in a couple of weeks. Probably early November, we have what’s called the holiday integrity program. So what happens is I
Gary Jenkins: remember that
Viv Ferrari: here.
Viv Ferrari: They’ll stop cops in the street. They’ll stop. They’ll pull you over. You’ll you stopped at a light and someone will pull up with a Lieutenant shield. I’m Lieutenant. So, and so I’m Sergeant so and so for internal affairs. Please stop for a second. And they’ll open your trunk to see if you’re doing shopping on duty, or you picked up a bottle or something.
Viv Ferrari: Well, sometimes they wait for you in the, in the precinct parking lot. But yeah, I mean, there is so much supervision on the NYPD now, and especially now everybody’s [01:13:00] got a cell phone camera. I mean, the days, I mean, you. Would have to be a complete moron to take that job and think that you’re going to make money doing something out of bounds.
Viv Ferrari: It’s just, I can’t see it. I mean, I’m sure guys will do it. You have to be a complete moron to
Gary Jenkins: do it. Yeah. I think one last question about that is where did I read any, I read this, they, they like recruit internal affairs, recruits guys out of the academy and, and makes them sources. Yeah, I can explain that.
Gary Jenkins: work?
Viv Ferrari: Yeah, so, so you find out a lot of things. So, alright, so let’s back up. So when I first came on the job, if you said you worked in internal affairs or you had family that worked in internal affairs, you were shunned. Like the way the Amish will shun someone that’s not getting up at the crack of dawn and farming.
Viv Ferrari: Like you are shunned, and I’ve seen it, where you’ll walk into a precinct at roll call and this 30 guy. He’s in a corner and one guy standing off to the side and like, no one will work with this guy. [01:14:00] So Giuliani actually started this and Bratton and Maple and the guys that really turned around New York City.
Viv Ferrari: What they realized is you weren’t getting the best and brightest in internal affairs. Just weren’t. And especially, especially the cops going in there were thought of as cowards because the only way to get a detective shield in the NYPD is to go narcotics. Auto crime division, vice, you moved up the
Viv Ferrari: ladder. The quickest way to get a detective shields was to go into internal affairs and no one ever saw you again, like you just vanished and the NYPD, even though there’s 40, 000 members, it’s a family like this cop bars and everybody know, like I could ask, you could ask me a guy’s name. And I could call, make a couple of phone calls and find out, especially back then, where he worked, what kind of guy he was, what kind of girl she was.
Viv Ferrari: People in, in, in internal affairs were basically blackballed from the department. And they really weren’t getting the best and brightest. So what Giuliani [01:15:00] did, and those guys… So if you put in for a specialized unit as a supervisor, so in the NYPD, say you’re a detective in auto crime, and I get promoted to sergeant.
Viv Ferrari: Well, I don’t stay in the auto crime division. I go back to a precinct somewhere and I’m a patrol supervisor for a year or two. And then if I want to get back into a specialized unit, I have to go for an interview. I have to do the whole interview process again to go into the organized crime control bureau.
Viv Ferrari: So what they did was they made it like the NFL draft. So I get, I’m a detective in auto crime. I get promoted. I go work at a precinct for a couple of years. I go for my interview. Well, sitting on that interview was narcotics. vice and internal affairs and internal affairs gets their pick of the litter. So I worked in auto crime.
Viv Ferrari: I would be perfect for them. Why? Because I know all sorts of things with auto, auto insurance and, and, and, and staged accidents. So they’d want somebody like me. So what would happen is you would go for your interview and they would tell you, you got [01:16:00] to work in internal affairs for two years, and then you can work wherever you want to go in the department.
Viv Ferrari: And I would either have to say, No thanks, but no thanks. I’m going to stay on patrol or I’ll put in my time and then I’ll go to where I want those guys were not looked down upon because they were drafted. So those guys did their time in IEB and then they started turning up in narcotics. What that did was it educated us to how IEB thinks.
Viv Ferrari: So you had, so yeah, you had guys that were, you know, street cops, they go to IEB for. For a year or two as supervisors, not as cops or detectives, you still shine. But if you get drafted as a supervisor, there’s no stigma to it. And what we learned is what IEB does is they target, you’re right, recruits in the police academy.
Viv Ferrari: They look at guys and girls. There’s a, there’s a bit of a criteria what they look for. They’re not going to go to anybody with family on the job. So they’re going to go through your background and make sure your brothers, because if you turn to your brother, your [01:17:00] father, your cousin, like, what are you out of your fucking mind?
Viv Ferrari: You’re not, you don’t want to work with those rat bastards. So they’re going to find somebody sometimes, usually guys or girls that came from out of state where there’s no minimum friends in the state. They’re not going to bump into people that sees them out with somebody they shouldn’t. So they’re going to find, and they also target older people.
Viv Ferrari: So most recruits that go into the police Academy. You know, in my company class was between the ages of 20 with no life experience, we had a couple of guys, 27, 28, that’s who they target the older people because they have nothing in common with the other rookies, you know, you’re 27, 28, 30. Two years old, you got a wife and kids and a family.
Viv Ferrari: What do you have? What do you have in common with your fellow police recruits that just got out of high school two years ago? Nothing. So they want you kind of isolated. If you join the NYPD later in life with life experience and they’re not as moldable. So what they do is they’ll target again, people with no family on the job.
Viv Ferrari: Often they come from [01:18:00] out of state. And that are older that want that quick advancement because as a guy 27, well, I could be a detective. They don’t really understand that if you get that detective shield, it’s not worth anything. You’ll never be able to go work anywhere else because no one will ever talk to you.
Viv Ferrari: And then supposedly what I was told, they meet with a handler once a month. Where every six months and they on their day off or something, they’ll meet them at a diner and they’ll go out somewhere and they’re not supposed to testify. They’re supposed to be the eyes and ears in a precinct. So, say for argument’s sake, another internal affairs detective has a case in a precinct and all he’s got is the nickname of a cop that’s doing something he shouldn’t be doing.
Viv Ferrari: They’ll go, they’ll say, well, who’s got, say for argument’s sake, it’s the 4 4 precinct and this detective’s got a case of there’s a cop. beating up and robbing drug dealers. He’ll go to one of the IEB handlers and say, do you got any guys that’s in the 4 4 precinct? And they’ll go, yeah, I’ve got two. Do me a favor, ask them if they know this guy, this nickname.[01:19:00]
Viv Ferrari: So that that’s, you understand, they don’t really want them to testify and blow their cover, but they use them for intel. Wow. Which is what I was told.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Think they still do that? Are they still doing that today? Oh,
Viv Ferrari: absolutely. No doubt in my mind. That’ll never stop.
Gary Jenkins: Sure creates a lot of of fear and dissension, I would say, and, and division between management and rank and file when you always are having those.
Gary Jenkins: Guys out there like that. I don’t know. But oh, there’s
Viv Ferrari: no trust whatsoever. The rank and file members really usually don’t trust anyone above the rank of captain probably probably over the rank of lieutenant because once you become a captain, now you’re politicking. That’s what so up to captain in the civil service exams and then to become a deputy inspector, a full burdens back to deputy chief chief.
Viv Ferrari: Once that’s all promotional, it has nothing to do with civil service. So that’s when the politicking begins and that’s when people don’t start [01:20:00] trusting it.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, Vic Ferrari, I really appreciate you coming on. And it has been an interesting discussion and sharing of experiences and a little insight into the NYPD.
Gary Jenkins: Tell the guys again about your podcast and your books.
Viv Ferrari: Sure. So just go to Amazon, type in my name, Vic Ferrari, like the car, my Amazon book library. I’m up. All my books are behind the scenes about the New York City Police Department, including NYPD Through the Looking Glass Stories from Inside America’s Largest Police Department, which by the way, is also the name of my podcast.
Viv Ferrari: And again, I just bring on NYPD members to talk about their stories and all my books make their 10 paperback 2. 99 ebook download and they make great Christmas gifts.
Gary Jenkins: Thanks a lot, Vic. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Now you guys remember I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there.
Gary Jenkins: I just had a dude take a left right in front of me. I mean, I was inches away from disaster just the other night. So watch out for motorcycles. [01:21:00] And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve ever been in the service, go to the VA website and get that hotline number. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, you know, our friend, Mr.
Gary Jenkins: Ruggiano, a former Gambino dude went and witnessed protection or something. I, he must be back out now. And he ha he is a. Drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida so you could have a real deal mob guy, be your drug and alcohol counselor, and he has a hotline on his website. So take a look at his website.
Gary Jenkins: I think his YouTube page is reformed gangsters.com or reformed gangsters. Anyhow, you can find Anthony Ruggiano. Is it an Anthony? Yeah. Anthony Ruggiano. Yeah. Anthony Ruggiano. Anthony Ano the right, you know him, you know where he is Down in Florida.
Viv Ferrari: I don’t know where he’s in Florida, but he’s actually out of all the mob podcasts.
Viv Ferrari: He’s like my
Gary Jenkins: favorite. Yeah, he’s a good one. I had him on my show once and he’s a good guy too. I really liked talking to him. All right. Thanks a lot, Vic. Take care of me.