Transcript for:
Testimony of Michael Dowd on Police Corruption

Please remain standing Mr. Dowden. Raise your right hand. I'd ask the chairman to please administer the oath. Mr. Dowden, do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in the course of your testimony during these proceedings? I do. To help you God. I do. Thank you Mr. Dowden. Please be seated. Mr. Armao, you may proceed. Thank you, Your Honor. Mr. Dowd, I'd like you to please keep your voice up and speak into the microphone so that everyone can hear you. Were you once a police officer of the New York City Police Department? Yes, I was. How long were you a police officer? Ten years and five months. Mr. Dowd, during those 10 years as a police officer, did you use your authority to commit crimes and acts of corruption in violation of your sworn duty to uphold the law? Yes, I did. While you were in uniform and on duty, did you commit thefts? Yes. Did you commit extortion? Yes. Did you engage in narcotics trafficking? Yes. Did you protect drug operations? Yes. Did you engage in personal drug use? Yes. How many crimes and acts of corruption do you estimate you committed as a New York City police officer? Hundreds. New York is in the grips of a crime wave. Crack is now sweeping New York. Justice Department officials now say there is a direct link between crime and cocaine. Evidence of heavy money and heavy violent drug traffic is all around. It was like the heyday of crack. Every city was having trouble with violence. New York City at the time was having 3,500 murders a year. And East New York was the worst part of that. It was a war zone. They were empty buildings. They were just living in them and running electric from the street pole to the houses. It looked like Beirut. East New York at the time was very, very poor, so you had all of the socioeconomic contributors to crime, all of that converging, and it just, it was a hotbed for crime in New York City. East New York, Brooklyn, 7-5 precinct. Back in the late 80s, it was the deadliest precinct in the country. 75 precinct runs north to south from Jamaica Avenue to Starrett City. Every year we led the city in homicides. We led the city in police shootings. There was a captain here who would take a Polaroid photo and say, give this to your wife so she'll remember who you were. It was the highest murder rate in the country in a little five square mile precinct. You had the fucking gangbangers and the drug dealers. You could be sitting in the radio car in one corner and hear shots going off a hundred yards away behind you. Who the fuck did I burn to get put here? It would scare Clint Eastwood. The radio doesn't stop, it's one call after another, after another, after another. You got a backlog of 200 jobs to answer already. So you handle one job, now you're down to 199 now. Calls are still coming in. Accidents, disputes, fires. Homicides, robberies, rapes. You name it, it just doesn't stop. People on crack with guns. Drug dealers with guns. Young kids with guns. Violent, man. Violent, violent, violent. Welcome to East New York. Welcome to the land of fuck. My name is Ken Urell. Grew up in Rosedale, Queens. Irish Catholic. Catholic school for 12 years. My mother worked in Manhattan as a bookkeeper. And my father was a construction worker. It wasn't a dream to become a cop. I became a cop because I really had no direction in life. I could have just as easily been a fireman. But the test that came out first was the police officer test. So that's the test I took, and I did well. I was called right away. I was called before I was 20 years old. We got our gun and shield. And I get assigned to the 75 precinct, East New York. Before beginning your testimony about your career as a police officer, Mr. Dowd, I'd like to ask you a bit about your background. How old are you? 32. Are you married? Yes, I am. How long have you been married? Eight years. Do you have children? I have two sons. Are you from the New York area? Yes. What county are you from? Suffolk County. Will your family be listening to your testimony here today? Yes. When did you enter the police academy? January 26, 1982. Did you receive integrity training at the academy? Some, yes. What do you mean by some? We had visits from internal affairs offices. The life in the academy is sort of like going to a parochial school, if you look back at it. It was a building time, a time to build a camaraderie. With the guy next to you, the guy, you know, whatever side of you, you started to form a bond as a unit. Did you personally treat it seriously, the integrity training? No. Based on your conversations with your other recruits, did they treat it seriously? No, that's how we all formulated our own opinions from that. Based on what you could see, did the instructors treat it seriously? Not at all. I recall having internal affairs, giving a lesson to the class. And after the individual left, our academy instructor looked at us and said, Now, you can go that way or you can go this way. You want to be a successful cop, you don't go that way. And this is the academy. I didn't even step on the street yet, and I'm being told, Side in this direction with whatever you got to do. Cover your ass. That was the biggest. Then you cover your ass so that you don't have to deal with internal affairs. Mr. Dowd, in your experiences in your first year, did you come to learn what it meant for a police officer to be quote-unquote good? Yes. Could you tell the commissioners and the public what it means to be good, in the police jargon as you know it? Well, being good is a cop that would never give up another cop. A cop that if he witnesses something go down, he's 100% behind anything a cop does, no matter what it is. We got to form a bond at that early stage. If you said blue, I said blue. You know, you said green, it was green. You know, I don't know, if Johnny says it's green, I saw green. You don't... You didn't... You always took the side of the cop that was with you, because he was the only one that was going to back you up when you needed help. I doubt in a precinct like the 75th precinct, did it become particularly necessary to forge bonds with other police officers there? Yes. Why was that? Survival. Learning the streets is a transition process. It comes from the other cops, too. You'll learn from them what the street is telling you that you don't know it's telling you. You'll learn the walk of someone with a gun. You'll learn the eye drift of someone who maybe has drugs on them. You start to learn body language. But it's a process because just because someone darts their eyes away from you, you're a rookie cop. You have no idea why they might be doing it. There comes a point where you have to make a decision on taking something that you find or vouchering something that you find. In the beginning, as a good rookie cop, you're going to vouch for what you find, no matter what it is. And then after probably a year or two, and you've been driving back and forth to work for the last, you know, 400, 600 doors of duty, and you feel a little bit underappreciated, you feel like no one really cares, you're really not stemming the flow of crime like you thought you were going to. And all of a sudden you see an opportunity come along and you know eventually one day I was hurting for money and I just took a risk and I pulled over a motorist who happened to be an 18 year old mystery back then it was called a Puerto Rican mystery no license no registration no plates no nothing but he had a nice thick stack of $100 bills on him. And I said to him, you know, I like, you got about $1,500 to $2,000 worth of tickets here. So I suggested that if he bought me a nice lobster lunch, I could let him go. And with that, he promptly took a couple hundred bucks out of his wallet, left it on the back seat, and pulled out of the car, and I drove away like I was going to get arrested, and I didn't, and I won. When I first went to the precinct, I hear about this guy Mike Dowd and a group of his friends. They had a reputation. A reputation they were fucking out of control. I met Mikey D obviously in the 7-5. Every now and then we would be paired up. First time I knew I could trust Mikey was um we had handled a walk-in at the precinct. We take this woman over to her house, her husband's there, he's beating me, can you just get me in the house, I want to get some clothes. Chickie and I roll up, we walk up the fucking staircase. Man in his 20s, Rastafarian, dreadlocks, answers the door. He sees us. and it looks like his world has just ended. So at this point, we know something's on. The woman runs in, she grabs a couple of bags of clothes or whatever, and she runs out, she's gone. So Mikey grabs the guy, we get him pinned. As I got him on the floor in his living room, there was a bag as big as a fuck, it was... Gigantic bag of fresh marijuana. A 55-gallon drum, that's the size of this bag, was filled with marijuana. Couldn't even tie the top. Stalks were sticking out of the top of the bag. I go, chicky, under the fucking couch. He goes under the couch, pulls out a duffel bag. I open up the bag. The thing was loaded with money. He pulls out two guns. I go, what else is in there? He goes, cash. He takes the fucking bag, closes it, and puts it back under the couch, takes the two guns out. I go, what are you doing? Fuck the guns. There's cash in that bag. I don't know how much money was in there. Minimum 20 large, 20,000, 25,000, around there somewhere. So look at Mikey, he looks at me. And I guess right at that point right there, I knew I could trust Mikey, and I knew he could trust me. So we peeled off about eight grand, whatever we took from him. Left the house. I think Chickie took the two guns because he's a gun buff. We tell the guy, you know, this is your lucky day. You know, you're getting off scot-free. It's a good score. Yeah, absolutely. I got two months worth of paychecks in my pocket and now I'm thinking, you know, all kinds of stuff runs through your head. Is this a plant? Is, uh, uh, is anybody, did anybody know anything? Where's the woman? Is this a setup? All of a sudden she ran out? Starts to become paranoid. what cops are supposed to do. It's fucking on my head a lot. I was certainly nervous, but after a couple hours went by, I wasn't too worried about it. Well, the guy says you took his money. Well, prove it. You got me on video, you got me on tape, audio, anything? No? Well, here's a word against mine. And I'm a cop. Things began to change when I started to find money and drugs at different locations. I was in control now. That gave me the real feeling of being in control. I've been throwing this shit out for years. Now all of a sudden, it's a money game. I'm like, okay. A kid had done a stick-up on Fulton. He ran home, hid in his house. We knocked the door down, went inside. I knew we were in a coked house. There's triple-beam scales everywhere. So I hacksawed this briefcase open. I stuck my hand in. I ripped out this bag of plume of fucking white powder. It was flying. I said, painter! Bags! I'm putting bags in my coat. Eh! Eh! Eh! At the time it was $30,000 a kilo for a coat. So we know if we had a half or a one, we were getting $20,000 at least. And I took the money and bought a condo in Myrtle Beach. I love to golf and I know Myrtle Beach was a golfer's haven and it's on a beach. 13 New York City police officers have been suspended. Police are accused of accepting money from drug pushers and committing burglaries. It's the worst police scandal in the city in years. A little crew of cops were raiding homes and raiding drug locations. My brother's a fireman in the 7-7 precinct. And he calls me up and he says, What's going on in the 7-7? Cops are coming into the firehouse and they're borrowing ladders and hatchets. The cops were using the ladders to go to these locations where they knew the drugs were and they were using the axes to break down the doors. These guys had no finesse whatsoever. These guys were absolutely berserk. Twelve officers have been charged with corruption in a Brooklyn precinct of the Alamo. The 7-7 scandal shook up the whole department. When that broke, there were huge rumors on how the next scandal was going to break into 7-5. So all those dirty cops started leaving the department. People doing crooked shit was afraid a new scandal was going to break out. I wind up resigning shortly afterwards. Because, you know, I felt the heat was on, the pressure was on. And I figured, hey, listen, you know what, if I resign, you know, maybe I can beat this. Mike Dowd was the only one who gambled. He bet that the department didn't want another scandal. The last thing the police department wanted after the 7-7 was the 7-5 to go down in this bust situation as well. There were not any other cops like Michael Dowd. He was a criminal. Dowd was a criminal. Look up in the dictionary, I don't give a fuck, and Mikey Dowd's picture is in there. It's right there. Michael Dowd was a crook who ended up wearing a... a cop's uniform. I heard the rumors about Michael, you know, being dirty. Once in a generation corrupt cop. It don't fucking bother me. The normal person that's doing wrong is going to have a fear of being caught. It's not Michael Dowd. Michael Dowd did not have any fear. I never had a fear about getting busted. Because the cops around me would never give me up. How busy was the 75th precinct? How many radio runs a day does it average police officer handle? I averaged about 250 calls a month. And in a precinct of that nature, you just mentioned a moment ago that it was particularly necessary to forge bonds with other cops because of survival. What do you mean, that you protect each other on the street? Yes, very much so. Do you believe if a cop is not a good cop in the way you describe it, that his safety in a command like that might be jeopardized? Yes. The streets of New York and Brooklyn in particular, you know, it's like a bloodbath. I mean, there's a thousand shootings a year in my precinct alone. You know, a hundred murders a year. You want to go home at night. So part of going home at night is the guy that's with you, you gotta trust him. About two years working into the 75, I had an opening in my car. Kenny was griping that the only one left around was this Michael Dowd. He was trying to find himself a partner. I was on the no-good list, so he wouldn't work with me, because he had heard all the stories. I actually went to roll call. I said, stop putting Dowd in the car, I don't want to work with him. And it fell on deaf ears. We started working together. Before you know it, we started to get a little bit of comfortability working with one another. He would take me to Joe's Bodega for some fucking Heinekens. We make a personal connection about our wives. We got married at the same time. We're both around the same age. We had sons at the same time. There was a real personal connection there. You know, I gained his respect and then his trust. And it came to a point, I said, why don't you make this official? And at some point he goes, you need a partner, I need a partner, you know. We're both good cops, you know, we got all this in common, let's be partners. Our future lieutenants. His friends would come over and say, you can't be with him. This guy is trouble. He was totally corrupt. They said to me, no, don't work with Dowd, you're going to end up in trouble, give up the car if you have to. It's no joke. This is a big mistake. I could see the pain he had to endure amongst the guys that he was very close with in order to become my partner. My response was, he knows what he's doing out there. He can handle himself in the street, I don't have to worry about him, and all I do bad is drink on the job. How much trouble can I actually get into? He stood by me. Kenny's the type of guy that if he's got your back, you know he's got your back. And I really, really admired him. And that moment forward was like a true love affair. I gave him my heart after that moment. Do you believe if a cop is not a good cop in the way you describe it, that his safety in a command like that might be jeopardized? Yes. In what sense? Well, if a cop isn't good... You might be more slow to react to his calls for help, which are quite a few. Is that particularly true if a cop is known as a rat or a complainant or someone who talks to supervisors? Definitely. More so. Even more so? More so. I have been in the 75 now I'd say approximately a year and a half maybe two years. At this point you're learning quick, you're moving quick, your mind's adapting. You still responded as a cop, but you saw an opportunity, you took and made money. So Mike starts talking about money day and night. There's money all over this precinct. How much money could be grabbed and be in our pockets? These drug dealers got money. Just look at these people. They're rolling in with brand new Porsches, brand new Jaguars. He's looking for any job to come over, any situation where he could get me to cross the line. He needs my full participation in order for him to make real money. And I told him, you know, some of the scores and how much money we made, which was considerable amounts for a policeman who's making $36,000 a year. I probably made that in scores in the last year. Give daddy a kiss. I'm making about $600 and change a week. I have a mortgage. I have two cars. My wife's not working at that time. I'm living from paycheck to paycheck. The thought of money coming in hand over fist, the way he's talking, it's a tempting situation. It opens my mind, which is what he wanted to do. ago when you were saying how you were making money of drug dealers you also said there are other ways to make money is that what you're referring to yes there are other ways like burglaries did you actually engage in burglaries yes tell us some of the circumstances please um Job comes over the radio. A woman's house down the block was burglarized. We get to the place and there's this high school age girl standing outside her front door. And we start going through the whole place, find out there's no burglars in the building. I had gotten a new partner at the time and I had to prove to him that I was good. In order to prove to him that I was good, I had to give him some reason to know that I was good. Mike grabs a girl and goes, do you know if your parents kept any money or valuables anywhere? So she called her mother, and her mother told her where the money was hidden. And I found it. For her. But she never got it. And he reaches up and he's feeling his hand around up there and he goes, nope, there's nothing here, they must have got it. And I'm not thinking really anything of it and we drive away. And Mike reaches into his pocket, pulls out a hundred dollar bill, he goes, this is for you. I'm like, what the hell is that? He goes, you didn't even see me take it, did you? He knows where it came from and he accepted it willingly. And I put it in my pocket. That $100 sat on the top of my locker, on the top shelf, for the longest time. I don't want to say the $100 bill haunted me, but I didn't spend it. And a couple of days later, I was in court, and he's working with this female cop. We get in the car, and we get a call from Burgdry over on Hageman Avenue. Get to the house. I'm the lead cop into the house. Anti-crime shows up, which is the plainclothes unit for the precinct. I happen to just go back in the closet, and in the closet's anti-crime. And the guy picks up a bag, it's a green fucking garbage bag filled with cash. So I look at him, he looks at me, I go, what are you gonna do, bro? Fucking spend the whole day vouchering cash? Just leave it there. Fuck it. So Mike smooth talks anti-crime. And explains to them, oh, you gotta take all that back, you gotta stamp each bill, you gotta initial each bill, that's gonna take you for fucking ever. Yeah, you're right, he puts the bag down, I go back, rip open the bag, take about four or five grand, put it in my pockets, and I go, I couldn't take the bag out, there's cops all over the place. We get in the car, back then we didn't have cell phones, so I went over to the pay phone and called Chickie. I get a call from Mikey. He says, listen, I need you to get over to this address. I was just there. I saw this bag full of money, but I got a new partner and I'm not doing anything in front of him. I need you to get over there right away while I'm working so this way I can watch your back. I got a bag full of money in an apartment and I'm keeping an eye on it. I said, Mikey, I'm stuck. I don't have a car at this point. I said, go rent one. Go buy one. Just get one. You better call somebody. You better steal one. You better do something, but you need to get one. So I circled the block for an hour and a half, just making sure no one would go in the house. This way, any way you can circle a block. I didn't leave that door basically. What is the other top things going on? I don't know. I'm sort of suggesting to her that I'm sort of keeping an eye on the house. You know, it's our responsibility to sort of safeguard the location. Finally I get a hold of somebody who has a car and we go over there and address this detective. After about the 40th time I circled the fucking house, Chickie pulls up. I knock on her door, I flash her a shield. A pony shield. To the landlord. He looks at it, what can I do for you, officer? I need to get into apartment so-and-so. The cops were just here. I need to check it out. We get in there, your chest is blowing up, because it's one of those things where you don't know what's going to happen next. You know what's there, you know what you're doing, all of that, but the adrenaline rush, it's nothing you ever felt. And that rush goes on, it doesn't die down until maybe 15, 20 minutes later, until you're home. It doesn't die down, and you get the shakes. I was in there maybe tops a minute and a half. What are you worried about in that minute and a half? Good cop shows up, what do I tell him? I'm not even on the job anymore. You know, I got Mikey handling everything outside as far as any other unit showing up or anything like that. So I know I'm pretty good there. So the only other thing I'm worried about is a bad guy. What happened to the bad guy? Anything could have happened. Tune somebody up, I might have been dead. Research, and exactly where Mikey said he saw this bag of money, it was there. It's all packaged the way drug dealers package it with the rubber band, $1,000 bundles, thousands of dollars in it. Thousands of dollars in it. The car takes off. I go, oh my god, my buddy Chickie's here. I pull him over, I go, how'd we do? He goes, oh, we got a fucking big bag full of cash and we're going back to my buddy's house and we're gonna count up. How much you guys? I don't know, five, six grand. So, I fucking banged out. early drove over to my friend's house jumped in a limousine and drove to atlantic city counting the cash we just fucking pulled off on his job and we go to atlantic city and we turn all of these tens fives and twenties into hundred dollar bills we sit down we play a while We eat a while, whatever it is, and then we come back with the clean money. You know, to put 11, 12, 15, 20 grand in your pocket in one day, you're like, holy fuck, I just made my year. Forget about Beverly Hills and all that other stuff. The ghetto is one of the richest neighborhoods there is. Look what you missed out on. This could have been yours. We could have went back after anti-crime. It could have been just you and me. I wouldn't have had to call them. $50,000? Fuck. Like any cheap-talk sucker. He was impressed by the money. And I told him, you know, as far as I'm concerned, if there's three pieces of rice on the table, my wife, my kids, then you. I'll go hungry. So that's how I see this. And he went, I'm in. I jumped in headfirst, man. I went in. Mr. Dowd, you said that you and your partner had agreed that you were going to graduate into more serious crimes at this point in your career. Did you accomplish that objective? Eventually? Yes. How did you accomplish that objective? Well, what had happened was, you know, through a... We met a... we had a very strong relationship with a local drug dealer. His name was Mr. Perez. I'm driving up Van Slippland and on my right hand side I see this very attractive Hispanic woman, very slender, red pump heels on, long black flowing hair, standing next to a shiny beautiful red Corvette. Immediately I was of course drawn to the scene. You got a beautiful woman standing next to a beautiful car. I mean how perfect could it get? I had my Corvette parked outside which was my showroom car. My wife was there cleaning the car and... Police car stopped right in front of my shop. This dark-skinned Dominican guy that looked like a string bean with long braided hair that came down to the middle of his back come up to the patrol car and say, Hey, officer, what can I do for you? How you doing? I said, hey, my name is Baron. He's like, I don't give a fuck who you are. He kept looking at my wife. What's up with this girl here? He goes to me, what girl? I says, this beautiful girl standing here. She's beautiful. He said, that's my wife. So in total disbelief, I said, get the fuck out of here. That's not your wife. My man is taken. That's my wife. And I said, holy fuck, I can't believe that would be. Wow, you must be something. And I think he used that as an excuse to come in, too. You know, to get close to me. Barron Perez was the owner of a stereo installation shop. Auto Sound City. In the front, it had a little store where they sell all the equipment. And in the back was the shop where you do all the repairs and installation. Drug dealers are the ones with money. They want 18 speakers and stereos and all types of stuff. The more they can put in the car, the better. So it's obvious that he has connections to drug dealers. I know his clients are drug dealers. He knows that I know his clients are drug dealers. He knows that I know he's a player. He doesn't know how much of a player I am at this point, but he sees the glee in my eye. I looked him in the eye, he looked me in the eye, we made an agreement as friends. So here I am, I happen across this individual running a proprietorship with nothing but drug money coming in and out of the place all day long. Maybe there's some way we can make money from this. La Compañia It's a very serious Dominican gang. They made a lot of money. Millions and millions of dollars. La Compania was one of the most powerful drug organizations at that time in New York City. Jose Montalvo, also known as Cello, was the original leader of La Compania and was responsible for its operation. Me and my partner are working on the drug side of Cello's organization. Joe Hall and his partner are working on the murder side of Cello's organization. I have a large carton of homicides that I can attribute to my company. Cello saw himself as a businessman. The company was set up very much like a business. They had supervisors, they had workers, they had runners. Runners would take the drugs from the Heights over to East New York, put it in a stash house. Then they had the manufacturing part where they had the heat sale jumbled 20s. The distribution. Their shifts matched the police shifts. So if a shift for a police officer was 8 to 4, then his shift at his spot was 8 to 4. For Cello, it meant when his vulnerability was highest, the police presence was lowest in the precinct. The only aspect of it that made it a little different than a business is if in a business, if you mess up, you get a reprimand. In his business, if you mess up, you got killed. Cello was not intimidating to look at. But he has his darkness, you know. He was a brutal guy. He didn't think about it to have somebody kill him. He killed a lot of people. The company was very violent. I mean, there were murders of people who were trying to rob them for the money that was at the spot. There were murders of people who were in the company who they perceived as a threat. There were murders of rivals. They brought people specifically from the Dominican Republic to work in New York whose only job was to kill people they saw as a threat. Just by the murders alone, we knew we were up against a tough, a really tough group. Really tough group. The time is now approximately 1840 hours. We are conducting this video surveillance for the Brooklyn North Narcotics Area Office. My investigation, the La Compagnie investigation, was two locations in East New York. Pine and Pitkin and Norwood and Fulton. Early on... investigation we received information about cello that he was going to be at Norwood and Fulton Street I had borrowed a very nondescript a surveillance van you were right in front of the bachata restaurant where we knew The members of the organization would hang out. The bosses would hang out. Tom and I are in the van, and we're comfortable. We're having our coffee. And then slowly we start to see people show up. So Tom, being a DEA agent, he starts taking the shots. And we're pretty excited because we know that everybody's showing up. It's a part of Cello's crew. And we said, well, we'll be able to identify who this person is, this person is, this person is, because at that point we had cooperators that would point to us, this is so-and-so, this is so-and-so. So we're saying, this is great. Time goes by and I kind of like look over and I saw a quick glance. I'm giving it a little bit more time, but I'm getting the eebie-jeebies. I'm saying something's up the way they're looking at us. I said, Tom, that's enough. Wrap it up. We got everybody. As I start the van, boom, of course they know no one's come in and out. and they've had their eye on it. And I hear, and then I see a guy walk over and pop the trunk of a blue Chevelle. The pack comes up and they start reaching in and they start bringing out hardware. I saw about maybe four or five guns come out of the trunk. Look at that car and I see a fucking street sweeper come out of the trunk of the car and I said, oh my god This is it. We're fucked. I had my little five shot Tom had his nine But we were fucking we were sitting in there like we're in a you know Like fish in a barrel as they start to bring out the hardware and get the car out in time As we pulled out two rounds of fire So now I'm really flying out of there and I'm looking at the rearview mirror, of course And I see the two headlights, and then I, they start flying towards us. So now I go, fuck, they are absolutely in pursuit. I put over the radio, 75 Squad, we got shots fired, Central. We're being pursued by two vehicles at Logan and Fulton. Central calls back, and she said, give me a description of the car you're chasing. I said, negative. I said, they're chasing us. I go down Atlantic Avenue, I go west, I jump over the sidewalk. There's a sidewalk divider there. Jump over the sidewalk. They do the same. They jump over the sidewalk with their sedans. And I start to head towards the 75 precinct to the fort. I think we went down Essex Street or Limwood Street and they stopped their pursuit. Barron says to me that I have a friend, Cello. He has an organization in the neighborhood. He's not too far from here. And he wants to know if you can give me some information about narcotics. If they're going to bust, if they're not going to bust. I tell Kenny that we've got to deal with this guy. What Mike came up with was $8,000 a week. We will offer our services to this Dominican drug gang. Cello. We pay Barron, and I would pick the money up at Barron's shop. That first burglary scene we went to, Mike threw me $100. I thought I could always come back from that. Now we're dealing with a major drug organization, and we're supposed to get systematic payoffs. There's no turning back. There's no becoming a cop again. Kenny and I pick up our money that Cello had dropped off. We get to my house. Counting the money, money is short. Mike is fucking pissed. They fucking shorted us. They fucking shorted us. I'm a New York City cop. I'm taking a risk of going to jail for a long period of time. And you're going to short me a dime? There's a line he cannot cross. Mike was mad. Kenny was mad. And fuck this and fuck that. You're not fucking me. It's not happening. So I sat in front of Chello's drug spot for four days. Every night. Just sat there chasing people. Hitting the lights, hitting the sirens. Chasing. him harassing him pulling him over he sends a message over to baron tell that cop i'm gonna have him i'm putting a contract on him whacked went to work the next day happened to go down fulton right in front of hail and here comes his porsche pulling away i had never seen this guy in person but i knew it was his car i pulled him over license registration of course he doesn't know who the i am because he never saw me you know Park complies with my orders, pulls out his license, registration, insurance card. I take it, throw it back in his fucking car and I go, You're gonna have me killed. And he looks at me and he doesn't know what the fuck to do. I'm standing there, I'm in his face, you're gonna have me killed? Why don't we do this? You get out of your fucking car and I'll be your real man. Get out of your fucking car right now. And we'll do a 20 fucking pace walk-off and we'll see who wins. Let's do it right now. You fucking owe me money and you fucking put a hit on me you motherfucker? No, no. Call it off right now. I never said anything about the money to him. You call it off right now. Or you see how this is for real. This is for fucking real. You can't just tell you're putting a hit on a fucking cop and me not fucking come find you. I did. Day one I found you. A couple hours later I get a page from Barron. He goes, Mike, Coachella just called me, told me the hit's off. Boy, I got something for you. Walked into Barron's office in Autostown City, he handed me $700. Mike is furious. He doesn't want to have nothing to do with these guys no more. Barron, he said, he's a businessman. So he says to me, I got another guy who I think can use our help now. So you had the company was a drug organization run by Jose Montalvo, who was also known as Cello. Then you had another organization doing pretty much the same thing, run by Adam Diaz. How does your organization compare to the company? Nothing at all. What do you mean? Because the company was a fucking low-scale shit. Half a grand, grand shit like dimes. Dimes! He didn't have the connections I had. I could take him off of the fucking business in a heartbeat. But I didn't want to do that. Why? Because he didn't represent no competition to me. And on top of that, his sister......was in love with me. Beautiful girl. I was banging the shit out of her. So what's it take to be the boss? Balls. And you gotta be responsible. I know how a lot of kilos on Escobar. Because I know the stamp. When you have a Colombian connection, if they bring you 1,500 kilos and you have it in a place, you're already responsible for that. I don't care if tomorrow the kilos goes down $2,000 a piece, $3,000, $5,000 a piece, it doesn't matter. You're already responsible for that amount. You better fucking come forward with the money. For what? For fucking they kill you. Don't make no difference to them. I had several stores open in East New York. Lake Avenue, Dresden Avenue, Pensacola Avenue, New Listen, Vermont. So you can get anything at your store. You can get Pampers or you can get 10 kilos. You, this is a regular grocery store. Any regular customer will walk on the aisle, take their cereal, take their whatever. The other clients that will go for the other product will walk quietly all the way to the the back on the back it was a metal door you knock on that door and the guy will open the door for you and you're giving the money I won half a key I won 62 ounces so when they come out of there they come out with a whole bunch of grocery but underneath all of that you got kilos When I saw Adam the first time, I said, this is the guy that we should work with. I knew Baron for a while already. I took him a porch on 9-11, candy red, beautiful vehicle. And I said, look, Baron, I don't like ghetto music. I like Julio Iglesias, I like Bryan Adams, you know? But I don't like those fucking big black boxes with big speakers. I hate that shit. But I want to hear the music. And I says, by the way, don't make any holes on my porch. You're not gonna believe it when I came back to pick up my porch He didn't make not one hole in that car and the car sounded like a fucking club Not only that he put music there to listen to who you glazer But he say you want somebody listen to black music you they could put it on Adam but it's up to you I had three fucking machines counting money and it's still not enough time. Barron calls me. He's got these two police officers who want to talk to me about they could protect your business and they could give you information about when they're going to ready your place. I told Barron, okay. Let's do a meeting with those guys. Kenny and I discuss a few things, and we go in, we have a meeting with Barron about it, and we tell Barron, $24,000 in our hands to talk. Fucking Mike was a fucking brain. He said, I think it was $25,000 down payment. So he could trust me. I said, no problem. We go in the back room. Baron makes a couple of quick introductions. The first time I saw Kenny, I knew he didn't have that gas to shit in him. He had the cop look. Where you say, fuck. He's a cop. I didn't. From day one, Mike didn't have that cop look. Mike was like me. Mike starts laying it down on the line. $24,000 down payment, and then you're going to give us $8,000 a week. We're selling him on the point that if we know of or are aware of any undercover activity in the area, we would inform him. We will make sure all the other places are raided. You tell us where your competition is. We'll make sure Narcotics knocks them out. We will tell you when Narcotics is in the area. Diaz was all for it. He wanted that clout. He wanted to own cops. Having cops gave him more power. Nobody can touch me. Nobody can touch my crew. I got what I needed to keep bringing my empire up. I called one of my guys. He brought me the money. Here Mike, take a walk. The look on Mike and Kenny when they first got the payoff Christmas in June, maybe me and Michael Ridiculously happy I mean I know I was We had left there with a nice load of money in our hands, with two young guys, with two young beautiful wives and young kids, and it's almost like a time for celebration. My wife was in a precinct that day visiting her grandmother who lived in the precinct. Michael and... Kenny picked me up. I was sitting in the back seat. I asked how their day was. I tell my wife, reaching that paper bag, can you give us a couple of beers? We've got some beers. We're going to, you know, have a couple of beers on our ride home. No problem. I opened it up and it was money. And I basically screamed. I was like, oh. She's just beside herself. She can't believe how much money is in that bag. Money always feels good. I tried to reassure her, don't worry, everything's going to be alright, we're going to make some money, you know. Michael was driving pretty erratically. And he's going fast. Mike was doing fucking 100 in a little blue Hyundai. We got pulled over. Before the cop even was out of his car, Mike was out of his car, walking back to the cop with his 10 out. What is he stopping a cop for? I'm like, you just, like, rode the median. I think you both are crazy. This is trouble. Adam would do his business, i.e. sell his dozens of kilos of cocaine in a day, and at the end of the day he'd have to make a serious move, like take his money and oil drugs out of the building and bring them to wherever his stash house was. He asked us to do it. right shotgun for him so that if there were people tailing him they would see that he had juice, that the police were protecting his moves. No one's going to try to rob him while they see a patrol car ten feet behind. Mike was in charge to protect my stuff from point A to point B. We were like their brinks. We were protecting him, making sure he was not robbed. Effectively he had a police escort. He had a police escort. Well, he did have a police vest. Michael Dow got me vest. Police officers, bulletproof vest for me and my guys. Original shit from the storage in the prison. So my guys used to wear it like with pride, you know? Like, wow, I don't got it going on. I don't, it controls the cops. We had nothing to worry about. There was guys that were competition to me. I'll give you a good example, the guy in front of me. They call him Dominica. Short guy, fat. He thinks he's a gangster. He's a fucking pussy. And he started giving me a hard time. Stealing my customers. Because he happened to be in front of my store. I can't kill him. His wife knew me. His mother knew me. Everybody knew me. If he's dead the next day, what the fuck is going to happen to me? The feds coming after me. Can't touch the guy. I say, fuck. What am I going to do? I say, Mike, I need this guy out of the way. Please. So what did Mike do? He parked the fucking police officer car right in his corner. Our customers would fucking go into his spot. Say wow, man. Good demand. Kenny and I happened by chance to be passing in the back of the location one day and we see unmarked cars, guys in beards, the whole unmarked droopy look going on and we say, hey, what are you guys up to? And they said, we got a spot, we're doing around the block later. Okay, great. I fucking hit the lights and sirens almost and go running around the block, jump out of the car, I go into the bodega, I take two Heinekens out of the freezer, I walk up to the counter and I go like this, shut it down now. So what do I do? I pick up all my guys, alright guys, close for the day. What do you mean Adam? Close for the day. Everyone, let's go. I will leave not one guy there. I will leave the store. The guy behind the canter. 20 minutes later, we drive back around and they had searchlights, dogs. The whole drug organization was being taken down that day. When the feds come or the state comes and try to purchase drugs, what are you talking about? We don't sell no drugs here. What do you mean? I came last week. I don't give a shit where you came or who you fucking purchased drugs from. We don't sell drugs, my man. We sell groceries. You want milk or bread? Come and get it. The DGA was a little bit upset. And Brooklyn North Narcotics, they worked in the Joint Task Force, was upset because they didn't find a gram of salt in the building, never mind a kilo of cocaine that they were looking for. Michael Davos, a very loyal part of my crew. Between me and him, it was more like a brotherhood thing going on. I could talk to him like I'm talking to one of my first cousins. Dan would call us on a Tuesday and say, your money's here, and it went like clockwork. I'm stunned at the shit I'm getting involved in. It's surreal to me. I'm like almost outside my body. A month ago, two months ago, I was a regular cop, and now I'm a criminal. A lot of plannings for the robberies would begin with me and Mike talking about it in the patrol car. Talk to Adam. Adam wants us to hit this spot. How do you think we should find out about it? We throw ideas back and forth. Let's send Chickie in. We all meet in a certain place, in a certain bar. And we figure out what we wanted to do and what we had heard and what we had saw. We started to get the reports from wherever narcotics had been. If narcotics went to a building or a location, we would start to stake out the location. I had to figure out, okay, when the money was coming in and when it was going out. who was coming in, who was going out. Who's the same guy we keep seeing all the time? Pull him over, pat him down. I see you here all the time. What are you doing here? I'm like, oh no, I says you live in Queens. This is Brooklyn. What are you doing? You visiting somebody? There's not a house around for blocks. What are you doing? Stuff like that. We would check it out first. I hit it later. Mike had a friend in the police prison. Tall guy, his fucking hands are like three of my hands. Walter? Yeah, Walter. Fucking big guy, huge guy. Motherfucker's big. Walter's a madman. Just straight up adrenaline. Go through the window, go through the door, didn't bother. Straight up madman. Michael liked the idea of me being around because I was a big fucking guy. 6'5", 290 pounds, I'd break your fucking neck if your neck needed breaking. The first time I saw Walter, I said to myself, bad. We like to have coverage. Cops working and cops off duty. We could put these things together where we were on duty and if the police got called we'd be the responding police team. We put it all together and then we hit the place. You walk in like you own the fucking place. Is everybody on the floor now? Fucking do what I tell you shut the fuck up. You knock somebody down You know you put a gun to his fucking head you fire a shot over his fucking head. That's an attention gap Mikey's just crazy. I'll do what he wants what he wants and where he wants to do it Michael's favorite line was what the fuck are you doing with my money? They put everyone on the floor, fucking take their money, take their drugs. Hell, man, it's all fucking police tactics. That's what they taught us in the police academy. Same way you were taught. Got a guy in the front, guy in the back, got an entry team. They train us to see things, make sure you're safe and your partner is safe. And if all that works, you walk out of there with a bag full of fucking money and the four or five people that you left behind saying, what the fuck just happened? There's plenty of times where we had to basically knock people out. There's times where we had to beat people. We weren't leaving there empty-handed. Are you worried these guys are gonna go to the cops? Why? Well, they just lost 50 grand in drug money and 5 kilos of cocaine. What are they gonna report? Guys know they ratted us out. Wouldn't be pretty. Not gonna sit here and say that we would kill somebody or something, but these guys knew not to fuck with us. So he went in there, fucking put everybody on the floor, guns in the fucking air, fucking kicked ass. He was his money's worth. This guy named Franklin. Fucking... Dope-haired fucking asshole. It was him and a guy's name is Cole. This guy got a fucking Uzi, 9mm, all kinds of fucking weapons. Elvis is ready to close in on this place. He had to put all the money together and pack it up. 10,000 a package. All of a sudden, Franklin and Cope come and stick up the place. Stick up Elvis. Stick up 14 of my guys. So we heard a commotion on the stairs when we saw Franklin. And the guy put a Magnum 44 right on the back of my head. The room went quiet because I was just waiting for that pop. Meanwhile, they were just taking everything. It was Christmas time. I was so fucking embarrassed. How the fuck I have people with guns and everything and these guys made it through. Went all the way upstairs to the third floor. Franklin is a fucking guy who has a drug habit who don't fucking see no danger. He don't give a shit. He goes talk to the guy who's backing up my door in front of the building. And he grabs the guy in the door and say, Open the fucking door. I'm going upstairs. The guy opens the fucking door. You open the fucking door, everybody else is in danger. See, that's the difference between a real gangster and a fucking pussy guy. I will never open that door. Kill me. I will not open that door. What did they tell you? Wow. Got the bill, $700,000 something. I'm not worried about that money. That ain't shit to me. My problem is they make him a spot hot because they started shooting to the air so the cops came. I told Mike and Kenny, I have a lot of money for you to find this motherfucker and just fucking put him in the car and call me. I'll take care of the rest. Me and Mike, we're off, we're gone. We're out looking for Franklin. Now we gotta get our product back. That's our product. This guy was pissing off our boss, as far as we were concerned. Within like six or seven days, Kenny and I found him, pulled him over. So Mike says he finds Franklin. Yeah, he did. So how do you handle that? What do you do? Um, he's not around anymore. I'm not saying I killed him. He's not around anymore. What happens to coke? Who did you consider to be your primary employer, in fact, at this point, Mr. Dowd? The department who gave you your shield, or the drug traffickers who were willing to pay you because of it? The money itself, it was flowing nicely there for quite some time. Every week on time, $8,000 is waiting for us at Barron's shop. We planned trips around the Lang City, stopped there with a limousine, and picked it up on the way, me, my wife, Mike, and him. his wife Bonnie, chicken, his wife. They were counting money in the back seat. The girls were all excited. So it really made you feel like, you know, you're there, you've arrived. My lifestyle was pretty good. Trips, jewelry, vacations, life was good. good we were broke how important was that new york city paycheck to you at this time well i used to forget to pick it up paycheck goes into the bank your paycheck pays all your regular utility bills your mortgage anything like that and i had a loan on my lincoln there was no reason not to have payments because i had cash to spend on everything else vacation furniture appliances you pay for in cash kenny and michael's experiences just brought him closer and closer together. I thought of him as my brother, my best friend. Like many good partnerships, you have to have a yin and a yang. You can't have two exact same personalities. You always let someone take the lead. He let me, and he did the paperwork. He was rock solid with the numbers. Kenny writes down every lottery number. Every Sunday, he writes down the lottery numbers. Does he play the lottery? No. No. I have notebooks. He kept things straight. Mike was in so many different directions. At this point, I had been drinking quite a bit. They were like brothers. I would say husband and wife because Michael literally took my husband out of my bed for sometimes no other reason than Michael needed to drink. What about your lifestyle at this point, Mr. Dowd? Could you tell the commissioners and the public what kind of car you were driving at around this time? 87 Corvette. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? We're making $600 a week, you can't afford a brand new Corvette. Michael, don't ever, ever bring that car to the precinct. Don't drive this fucking car to the precinct. The next day he brought that car to the precinct. The reason I drove the Corvette to work was my wife and I had a deal. Two weeks of a month she gets the Corvette, two weeks of the month I get the Corvette. It happened to be my two week period where I had no other car at the time. So, it was either drive her car, which, I didn't have a car. I gave it to Kenny. It takes a lot of fucking men to deal with this fucking guy all day long in that car. Mike was fucking nuts. I trusted Kenny implicitly. I knew that he would go against his own friends for me. Many aspects of gaining and building that trust and that bond just continued on a daily basis. And we never, one time, said no to one another. Without Kenny, you wouldn't function. You know what I mean? But if Kenny would bring a whole bunch of cops and say, Adam, forget about Mike. This is the guys that are working with me. I would say no. Without Mike, you're not welcome. We were the best backup team in the precinct. If shit went down, and you saw Kenny and me pull up, your life came back into your hands. The blood started to flow back through your body again, because they knew they were safe. One thing we did was always looked out for the other cops around us. So one night, Kenny and I were doing a 4-to-12. Some cops had a major armed robbery situation go down. Kenny and I showed up. We shanghaied the perp, put him in the car. We're like a block and a half from the precinct to drop off the prisoner at the precinct. In that time, a call comes over the radio. And we hear 10-13, shots fired. A live call come over the air. Not a 9-11 call. A cop yelling into the radio, screaming for his life. 10-10, shots fired. 10-13. And you hear the gunfire going off in the background. And it's maybe four blocks from where the precinct is. Tell the perp, get out. Get out of the car. And headed over to Bradford and Pick. We race off, we're the first ones on the scene. I think I was like third, third car on the scene. You hear rounds popping off. I don't know where they're coming from or where they're going. As soon as we pull up, you know, we're down, we open up the doors and the fucking shots are just going off. And the eeriest sight in your life. There's a cop in uniform, happened to be a transit police department sergeant, in uniform. And he's carrying this fucking guy. The guy was huge. He's carrying him in his arms like this, walking down the street. We still smell the fucking gunpowder. But all I see is a guy with a body in his hand, and he goes, He's a cop. So, you know, we don't wait for ambulances when the police get shot. Fuck that. Throw him in the back of our patrol car. Guy's legs are sticking out of the car. He was a big guy. And Mike takes off and I get on the radio, tell him, tell him Central that we're transporting a cop shot to Brookdale Hospital. To get this guy from Picken Avenue to Brookdale Hospital was maybe five, six minutes. Picken to Penn to Linden to Brookdale. Brookdale, I'm on my way. I'm fucking flying now. Lights, no sirens. And I'm fucking trying to close the door. Have them stand by, shot in the head. He's got a fucking hole in the middle of his head. We're screaming over the radio, get somebody at Brookdale Hospital to call and tell them we're bringing it. Bringing in a wounded cop. A New York City transit officer was killed last night in a spray of bullets from automatic weapons. Transit police officer Robert Venable, age 35, on the job with an undercover unit. I was hit with a lot of guilt after Don't Be So Sad, I'm always killed. I wanted to feel the pain, and I did feel the pain for him, but I had that sense of shame mixed in with pain, that I really don't deserve to share that pain with him, because I wasn't loyal. And you know when they kill a cop, how it is. Mike was so depressed about the whole fucking deal When that shit happened, he said Adam, I need you to find out who the fuck did this shit Man, help me out. I need to find this shit out, but I can't do it I just couldn't do it. If Kenny gets shot, fucking I'll find the guy. I'll take care of him. Or Chicky gets shot I'll fucking find the guy, take his balls out, cut him off, no problem, he's a pleasure. But someone I don't know? No way. You get worked up telling these stories, you know? I cried over it many times, you know. I did my crying. And here I was fucking saving drug dealers at one end of the precinct and chasing them at the other. He's trying to say that he did something to help Officer Venable, that he did, you know, he just happened to be there. That's all that was. He talked about that like he's a real cop because he took the, uh, yeah. So Mr. Dowd, let me ask the question another way. Did you consider yourself to be a New York City cop or a drug trafficker? Well, it's both. We have this informant in talking to us. He's giving us really good information. I said, just know no lies and tell us everything. And he said, you don't want to know everything. And I said, what do you mean? Like, you know, of course I want to hear everything. And he said, no, you don't want to hear everything, Joe, because I'm talking about boys in blue. And you hear that a lot when you're working drug cases. Oh, they've got cops working for them. And a lot of times it's just pure nonsense. It's the leadership of the organization spreading rumors that we've got cops working for us. It keeps everybody worried that if they cooperate... they'll find out about it. I had no reason to think that the information wasn't good because he's been good to this point. Why start lying about something like this? He says, oh, no, he's got a cop working for him. And he says, it's Mike the cop, and he drives a red Corvette. I felt like, fuck, you know, here, you know, it's a, it's a, you know, job was great to me. I love the job. You know, you hate to hear these kind of things. So, we call internal affairs and say, hey, Mike the cop drives a red Corvette, and they go, okay, we've got it. I have these cases from the 75 that the commanding officer has made me combine into one investigation, and it involves Dowd and his crew. So I went to the 75th Precinct. to obtain documents, parked my car in the rear yard. And as I was beginning to walk in, police officer Dowd is walking out the back door. I look him square as I'm walking by him. And the feeling that I get is perp. But the guy's in uniform, he's a cop. I'm having a problem reconciling this. The feeling that I get is purple. What I begin to do is observations. Following them on duty, following them off duty. And it's a very precarious thing to do. Remember, they're cops. If you're going to follow somebody, you have to try to do it, obviously without them knowing that you're doing it. And it's not like TV. You know, the guy pulls out of the parking space and you're three car lengths behind him. They never see you there. Yeah, it just doesn't happen like that. Michael Dowd had a red Corvette. He would pull out of the 75 precinct and he'd run every red light, looking into the mirror the entire time. So you have to devise another way of doing it. You don't start out... At the precinct you may start out on the conduit so he's gonna run all the lights and see nobody and then you're gonna pick him up on the Bell Parkway or the Southern State. Catching a cop by another cop is heartbreaking. If you're a cop and you took that oath it means everything to you that you represent and that you're correct. When you take this job you raise your hand. You take an oath, you say, I will give my life to save complete strangers. And Michael, now that meant nothing. It wasn't like you were hurting people, quote unquote. You were hurting a fucking scumbag drug dealer. Do you know what kind of pain and suffering that money caused on the streets? Do you know how many people's lives were ruined by the drugs that that money bought? In New York, drugs were blamed in last week's slaying of a New York City patrolman. The bodies of a mother and her two children were found wrapped in sheets and blankets. The victims were tied up and either shot to death or strangled. Drugs may have been involved in yesterday's massacre of ten people in a Brooklyn home. This was East New York, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, all low-income areas. People that were suffering enough for a whole lot of reasons. They depend upon us to keep it safe for them to just do the common everyday thing. Now, I have cops making it possible for this poison to get onto the streets, to destroy people's lives, to destroy entire neighborhoods. How corrupt was the 75? Top of the line. All the way to the fucking captain! I used to carry a radio so I could listen to who was doing what. Aside from Dowd, Yrel, and Yurko, there wound up being, honest to God, 25-30 people. Michael Dowd is definitely the brains of the operation. We started looking for other avenues to make money. We decided to distribute cocaine out on Long Island. We were purchasing large amounts of cocaine from Baron Perez and Adam Diaz. We used to stop at my house on the way home to drop off the coke. It was like huge bricks of glimmering primo cocaine. In my kitchen. My wife was disgusted, disappointed, you know, we got enough money, we don't need to be doing this. Please, please stop. At this point, we had some nice cash sitting around the two of us, so why don't we just back the cocaine operation financially? We enlisted one dealer and set him up in business. They mainly had this guy, Harry, distribute it. Harry didn't look like the brightest kid, not slick. Not especially smart. Harry was selling, you know, half a kilo a week out of a bar in $50 envelopes. There's never enough. There's never enough. I was using the undercover name Brian. I had a beard, I had a ponytail, earring. I got information about a subject named Harry. money was rolling in and he just kept wrapping it up and putting it away your feeling and your reaction to the fact that indeed you weren't questioned and you weren't uh in any way caught during the course of all these dealings did that for instance somehow Somehow I'm holding you to do more in this area. Did you feel free about what you were gonna do? First of all, there was times when I was shocked that I got away with so many of these things. I didn't know what stress was. just lived in. Fucking greed. Also, mind you, I was becoming heavily addicted to cocaine and alcohol. So my inhibitions were down. I had some personal problems I've gone through too. So all that combined, it certainly shocked me. I don't know how sometimes I showed up for work. I wasn't scared of the money coming in. But the drugs in the car, we're gonna get fucking arrested. I don't know how Kenny honestly felt about me doing it. He's becoming wired, he's becoming paranoid. I don't think it bothered him so much. On January 2nd of 1992 I made the first cocaine purchase from Harry. When our undercover sends the coke to the lab, where a quantitative and qualitative test is done on the cocaine, it goes back 95% pure. Somebody who's been pure coke in Suffolk County. Based on your personal knowledge, why weren't other police officers in your command turning you in? Because I'm still a cop, cops don't turn into other cops. He's doing coke as fast as he can get it from Diaz, he's probably doing more than he's selling. Even when the person they're depending on for survival is doing lines of coke in the RMP, is drinking daily to the state, and as you said you're sometimes a fall down drunk, even then they remain silent? Cops don't want to be labeled as rats. Cops depend on one another to survive out there. Kenny talked to me one time and said, Adam, Mike is crazy, he's going crazy, he's sniffing cars. I said, what? I know he do his little fucking blows sometimes in the wild, but... Fuck everything, fuck them, fuck this. I'm gonna do what I want. And that's how he lived and worked in the 75. He felt like you were God. No, he's fucked up. He's fucked up. He's a dumb head. Invincible. So he's like, fuck, how do I stop this guy? He never acted afraid. He never showed himself to be afraid. I considered myself both a cop and a gangster. That's why I knew he was no good. And that was going to be the end. If someone was getting too close, you could quit. You find out when you're in the middle of the game, quitting ain't too easy. The game keeps pulling you back in. Then you start to wonder, maybe I will get pinched. One Sunday morning... Where you go to my parents'house for breakfast. Pack up the kids in my car. Say hi. My wife gets in the car. I start driving down my block to the corner. See a white car. Someone in it. Sitting there on the corner on a Sunday morning is that typical undercover cop car. Mike, did you see that? I'm watching my rear view mirror the whole way. They pull out from the curb and start following behind me. But I'm not worried. No coke in my house. I'm like Ken. They don't need to have a scale and cocaine in the house to bust you for dealing drugs. It was like 7.30, 8 o'clock in the evening. I had seen a couple of cars following me. I knew something wasn't right. Harry owes me cash. I go out during the night, pick up my money, park in the driveway, I go in the side door, he's dripping wet. I mean dripping. We're talking May, it wasn't that hot, and it's night, it's 10 o'clock at night. Dripping wet. I'm like, something's not fucking right. I drove up to the precinct, I walked up the precinct steps, I felt the tension all around me, desk office appointed, the captain over there wants to talk to you, I turned around, a man walked in with a lieutenant's badge and said, Eternal Affair. We want you to take you for a department audit drug test. Within two minutes, Suffolk County Narcotics slams the front door. Vest, helmet, shield, rushing down the hallway. I'm like, fuck. They throw me up against the wall, they pull my gun out, spread my legs, cuff me up. As I walk down the stairs to change in the locker room, I realize there's a bunch of, like... Plainclothes police officers around me, following me, like blanketing me. So I take my fucking pants off, hang them in my locker, and I go put my civilian clothes on, and I got fucking coke in my pocket. So I'm like, okay, let's put on my pants with the cocaine in it. There's a guy sitting over here I never saw in my life, walks up and says, Suffolk County Police Department, you're under arrest for a narcotics conspiracy. They search my pockets, they pull out the bag of cocaine I tried to unload. The next picture that you see... Is the daisy chain of cops is being let out of a precinct in Suffolk County and they're New York City cops? There's a police story being told here in New York this week. The NYPD is under the gun again. Cops stealing drugs, stealing money and guns, shaking down shopkeepers. Six New York City police officers charged with conspiring to sell cocaine. It has become an all too familiar sight in New York. Cops arrested on corruption related charges. And a new breed of corrupt cops. None was more notorious than Officer Michael Dowd. He was dirty up to his eyeballs. The story of cops and robbers. See if you can tell one from the other. I was driving into work and I heard on the radio that New York City police officers had been arrested in Suffolk County. I felt like, fuck, Suffolk County got them? Suffolk County got them. I wasn't scared. It was almost like a sense of relief hit me. I was like, thank God it's over. Thank you for saving my fucking life. Nothing was off the table with me at that point in my life. It really didn't make sense to me what was happening. I was so used to winning every day. I'd been beating these people for 5, 6, 7, 8 years. This is just another obstacle I have to learn to get around, and I will. In my mind, I was going to get around this. Here we are out on bail. It's about a month after our arrest. Mid-June sometime. Facing 25 to life for drug trafficking charges. It was in my insistence that we try to develop a plan on how to minimize the damage at this point. There's a Colombian living in my house in Brentwood. He said, leave the fucking country. You're doing 25 to life in the state if they fucking hammer you. You are, you're done. You're done. He knows I'm in a spot. Comes to me and says, are you interested in doing a hit at this woman's house on Avon Street in Queens? There's a drug lord whose wife is holding on to a large sum of cash and cocaine that they owe this Colombian that's staying in my home. So the plan is to grab this guy's wife. Kidnap her, grab any money and drugs in the house, turn her over to the Colombians for execution. What's in it for me? He said, there's several hundred thousand in cash and at least ten kilos. He has this whole plan to flee bail with a kidnapping and murder scheme. I said, Kenny, this is my plan. Are you in or are you out? Pounds his hand and goes, we need to do this thing. He says, I'm in. Well, that's all I wanted to hear. I mean, my life was in turmoil. I don't give a fuck, it's me and Kenny back together again. Mike picks me up the next morning. We went off to Avon Street, we're driving our way there. As we approach... Kenny, you got the scanner? Let's see if the scanner works, see what's going on in the scanner. We turn on the local scanner to listen to the local precinct. The scanner's not on a minute, and you hear a suspicious car on Avon Street. There's no way of hiding that. Mike picked that up. Avon Street is two blocks long. It's got to be related to us. Well, when the call came in on the scanner, he said to me, we're going to the house. I said, whoa, why would we go to the house? The block is staked out. Mike, I came all the way this far. We're going to the fucking house. I said, you go to the house. I ain't going there. So rather than stop at Avon Street, I jumped back onto the Grand Central Parkway and headed home. We get the fuck out of here. As I'm driving, I see cars just converging from everywhere. sort of closing in on the location behind us. We get all the way back to my house. He decides to go home and said, all right, man, I'm going to call you later. And I noticed four, five, six more different, ten different vehicles following me. I'm finding cars, undercover cops, every fucking where, and I'm not believing it. I went home, walked in the door, looked at my wife. She says, oh, by the way, Dory told me... Last night, that if I never see you again, remember I love both you and Mike. I said, she said that to you? You didn't tell me this last night? She goes, well I didn't think it was important. With that, I turned around and I heard the police cars swinging into my cul-de-sac. The noise of cars pulling into my cul-de-sac. When they walked in my door, I knew it was Kenny. How the fuck did he do this? I was already in trouble! I was already in trouble! We decided to approach the person who appeared to be from our information and from the Suffolk County case, the less culpable of the two individuals. And so we reach out to Kenny Urell's lawyer. Kenny's attorney brings him in. I ask him his full name, what's his wife's full name. I get all the background information, and it sort of sets him at ease because now he's in a routine of answering questions. Then I throw out the name Baron Perez, and he looks at me, gets a shocked look on his face. They did not know at that time. That there's an ongoing federal criminal investigation that goes back years. They had been taping Auto Sound City, Barron, Michael Dowd, drug transactions that Michael Dowd bodyguarded for the drug dealers. They had informants inside the whole thing. They even had me on tape. Koenig's attorney's going to tell him. Your exposure just went from whatever the state was going to give you to now you're looking at this and the federal system. And he's going to have a come to Jesus moment. There's a Colombian living in my house. So the plan is to grab this guy's wife. I said, Kenny, this is my plan. Are you in or are you out? You've literally lost your mind. We're not fucking doing that. Kenny spoke to Marty, our lawyer. I go to my lawyer, I let him know what's going on. He goes, you can't allow something like that. to happen. Kenny, it's Rico. You're looking at 25 years. You're going down. You have to give him up. You have to. That was, you know, clear that I need to start working with the DEA. And I decide to cooperate with the feds. Mike Trostov gets me a micro recorder. And that time, 1992, a micro recorder was, you know, that fucking big. It was big. Big enough that if you're wearing it, you're self-conscious. I go, holy crap, I got this big piece of equipment on me. We're going to wire your phone in case Dowd calls and talks on the phone. Every contact, as much as possible with Michael, has to be on audio or videotape or both. I don't want to wear it anywhere on my chest, because we normally hugged each other and gave each other a kiss when we met each other. So I came up with, I'll wear it behind my calf. I got muscular calves, and I'll ace bandage it. He had like, it was like a little smirk. I'm like, I'm freaking out over here. My wife's like... What could you possibly be smiling about? I'm like, I feel like a cop again. Really? I'm just praying I get to see you again. You know, when I hugged him, I hugged him like I wasn't ever going to see him again. That this is probably going to turn horribly wrong. Michael's plan was to go to the house on Avon Street in Jamaica State's Queens, knock on the door, deliver a bouquet of flowers, and then we're going to bring her out, kidnap her. Take her to a motel and there she would be handed over to the Colombians. If we walked to the door with a bouquet of flowers, knocked on the door, she'd probably open up to receive the flowers. So, it was as simple as that. I didn't think it was a no-brainer. On the news, I'm sitting there watching the news because I'm watching the news every day because we're almost on the news every night. Totally separate story, a lady was killed and murdered because someone poses as a flower delivery person. I'm sitting there with my wife, I'm like... Oh my god, I hope Mike's not fucking watching the news now, because I know he's gonna want to call me and discuss it. Yeah, I'm watching it, yeah. Yeah, I know. I was gonna call you, but I figured what's the point? The motherfucker beat us to the punch, that's what pissed me off! We did not change our plan. Some other woman living in Queens is not gonna not open her door for flowers. It's a flower thing can be used a few times. Not every flower delivery is a fucking on-rob re-murder. The recordings that Yorel made were extremely helpful to prove Doud's involvement in this crime. We're trying to figure out exactly how we're going to grab the woman, grab any money or drugs in there, and then bring her off to the Colombians for the execution. Where Kenny comes up with the idea that this woman was going to be delivered to Colombians and kidnapped and executed is beyond me. Michael is lying. Kenny wore tapes. The tapes reflect that Michael planned to abduct the woman in Queens. It was Kenny's words, never mind. Go to the tapes. Listen to the tape. Kenny page me in the wee hours of the morning. He says it's happening, we're doing it in the morning. It's happening in the morning. We should be in the house by 11. Agents are going to go to this woman in her house. Tell her, listen, your life is in jeopardy. We're going to put you somewhere safe, and we are going to stay in your house. Michael's going to come to do the abduction, and Michael's going to get arrested. Didn't happen that way. Mike picks me up the next morning. We went off to Avon Street. As we approach, I go, Kenny, you got the scanner? The scanner's not on a minute, and you hear a suspicious car on Avon Street. One of the surveillance guys was parked near the house, and someone called the police on him. He identified himself as, hey, we're DEA doing surveillance. I said, man, please. There's no way of hiding that. Mike picked that up. We get the fuck out of here. As I'm driving, I see cars just converging from everywhere. Now my mind starts spinning. How am I going to make sure Mike doesn't relate this to me? Kenny, how do you know where we went? I don't know. I don't know. Kenny, was someone in there? I was just sitting there, sir. Kenny, they had the whole block pushed through. I texted you from the beginning, man, because of these fucking guys. How do you know they're not trying to set us up? The plan was the E.A. was going to arrest us all and take us in and make it look like I'm part of being arrested. They were, at that point, going to grab my wife and grab my kids and bring them to a hotel to keep them safe until they could figure out what to do with us after that. Troster called me and he said that I need to get out of the house. Got fucked up. We don't even know where Kenny is. I'm like, what do you mean you don't know where Kenny is? My wife has big... packed at the door ready to go waiting for the DEA to pick her up and save her. I had to wire him and now they're coming back? Get all the way back to my house. I went to go into his house, he told me, hold on, I gotta check on, see if my wife is dressed. Kenny never stopped me from seeing his wife dressed or undressed. Now all of a sudden he's gonna check? That's very suspicious. Holy shit! I'm running. Grab those bags, I run as fast as I can. My wife is thinking on the fly. She hears the car pull up in the driveway, the door's closed. She peeks out the window, sees us getting back and Mike is there. And I saw those bags into the bedroom. Hides the bags by the door. She starts panicking. I run into the bathroom. With my hair. Wants her hair like she's just getting out of the shower cause now it's taking her five minutes to answer the door. Took off my clothes. Put on a robe and they're banging that door. Why Kenny wasn't using the key. I don't have no keys on me. Walked in the house, the fucking house was empty. Looked around, where's all your furniture? Oh you know I'm selling the house. Yeah but why would you empty the fucking house out? Well it shows better when the house is empty. Had a good answer the motherfucker. I'm freaking out. out. Mike was supposed to be behind bars and I would not have to deal with any of this confrontation. Mike is pumped. Dora, Dora, we came this close to being arrested. We were this close. Someone ratted us out. They knew we were there. I'm like, how the hell could they know that? He decides to go home and said, all right, man, I'm going to call you later. My only concern now is I got to get in touch with my lawyer and the DEA and Internal Affairs and the Southern District to let them know what's going on. It's out of the bag now. He knows the DEA's got a surveillance going on. We gotta go lock up Michael. As we were pulling up to his house, there's kids playing in the street. I tell the kid, you need to go inside. Because I didn't know, I'd heard Michael would fight, he's a cop, there could be guns, I didn't want a kid around. And he runs straight to Michael Dowd's house, it's Michael's kid. And all of a sudden I hear, the sound of vehicles coming into my cul-de-sac. Oh fuck. It's over. Again. How the fuck did he do this? I didn't consider myself being a rat. Because a rat, to me, was a rat gets caught doing something, and then in order to get himself out of trouble, you tell on someone else. I was already willing to accept my sentence. Why would Kenny do this to me? Why would he put a wire on? Why would he fuck me like this? You want to say, yeah, I ratted on you about a murder and kidnapping scheme? Okay, I'm a rat. In my eyes, I saved a woman's life. I was very surprised at hearing that Kenny had turned. He could say he did it for his wife and his kids and shit like that, but I haven't had to turn my head around once today. I got no worries. I didn't rat on anybody. I just can't see going through life turning around, looking over my shoulder to see a face that I don't want to see anymore. Ain't nobody gonna crash me in the back of the head because of something I said to the police or a journalist. If Kenny would be Mike's real friend, I would just fucking do whatever for him, including time. If I could relive that first moment where he threw me that $100 in a car... As a 52-year-old man, there was a fourth option to the three options I saw. The fourth option was go to an outside agency. Not go to Internal Affairs and cut my own throat. Not accept the money and go along with him and not ignore it and be just as guilty. The fourth option, which I never saw as a kid, was go to an outside agency. I regret I ever met Mike. It felt as though I was cheated on by my wife. When Kenny turned on me. I missed him. Commission investigation has established that the New York City Police Department's anti-corruption apparatus is primarily a reactive rather than proactive and relies almost exclusively on complaints to gauge the extent of corruption in the department and in the city and to initiate corruption allegations. I'd like to point out the significance of this, which is that the majority of corrupt acts committed by police officers therefore go undetected. And uninvestigated by the New York City Police Department. Thank you, Mr. Dowd. This hearing is now recessed. I always wanted to be a good cop. I didn't come under police upon to be a bad cop. Yeah. My dreams are about being a good cop. Sad, though. Never happened. Oh, Lizzie, New York City Just a boy right through the park In the face of missing an identity The foot of foot at Chris Park We lock up a guy and we're bringing him over to the correction center. We're booking. And at that point, like a VIP entourage comes in as we're booking this guy. And I hear, fucking Joey Hall. So I look over and I said... Hey Michael, how you doing? And he said Joey. I just got 16 fucking years and I said Michael It was up to me to be doing more time he said hey Joe It was an honor to be arrested by you fuck those IAT guys. He never got me He starts to walk away and he turns around the hole and he says hey Joe Hey, the year wasn't a total waste the Rangers won the cup