Please remain standing, Mr. Dowd.
Raise your right hand.
I'd ask the chairman to please administer the oath.
Mr. Dowd,
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, so help you God?
- I do. - Thank you, sir.
Would you please be seated?
Mr. Amayo, 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 ten 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.
Don't move.
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.
There 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, Seven Five Precinct
back in the late '80s
was the deadliest precinct in the country.
The Seven Five 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 that 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,
and you could be sitting in the radio car on one corner
and hear shots going off 100 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?
No, the calls are still coming in.
Accident, a dispute, a fire, homicides, robberies, rapes.
You name it. It just doesn't stop.
People on crack with guns,
drug dealers with guns,
young kids with guns.
They were violent, man.
Violent, violent, violent.
Welcome to East New York.
Welcome to the land of fuck.
My name's Ken Eurell.
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, and 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 Seven Five 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.
Where... what county are you from?
Suffolk County.
Will your family be listening to your testimony here today?
Yes.
When did you enter the, uh, 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 officers.
The life in the academy is... 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... with the guy next to you, the guy...
You know, whatever side of you,
you be... you started to form a bond as a unit.
Did you personally treat it seriously,
the integrity training?
Uh, no.
And based on your conversations with your other recruits,
did they treat it seriously?
No, uh, that's how we all formulated
our own opinions from that.
And 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, the...
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 mean, I didn't even step on the street yet,
and I'm being told, you know,
"Slide in this direction with whatever you got to do.
Cover your ass."
That was the biggest thing 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 "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, uh, he witnesses something go down,
he's... he's 100% behind anything a cop does,
no matter what it is.
We began 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,
'cause he was the only one
that was gonna back you up when you needed help.
Mr. Dowd, at 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... is a transition process.
And 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.
Um, 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 takes... it's a process, 'cause...
just 'cause 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.
Units 2514 can transmit on...
In the beginning, as a good rookie cop,
you're gonna voucher what you find,
no matter what... no matter what it is.
And then after probably a year or two and you...
you been driving back and forth to work
for the last, you know, 400, 600 tours of duty
and, you know, you feel a little bit underappreciated,
you feel like no one really cares,
you know, you're really not stemming the flow of crime
like you thought you were gonna...
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, uh, "You know,
"I like, uh...
"You got about, you know, $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 backseat, and pulled out of the car,
and I drove away like I was gonna 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 reputa...
they were fucking out of control.
I met Mikey D, obviously, in the Seven Five.
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."
Chicky and I roll up.
We walk up the fucking staircase...
Man in his 20s... Rastafarian, dreadlocks...
answers the door, and 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,
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... as big as the fuck...
It was...
Gigantic bag of fresh marijuana.
A 55-gallon drum. That's the size of this bag.
It 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.
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 I 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 8 grand,
whatever we took from him,
left the house.
I think Chicky took the two guns 'cause he's a gun buff.
We told the guy, you know, "This is your lucky day.
You know, you're getting off scot-free."
It was 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... is anybody... did anybody know anything?
Where's the woman? Is this a setup?
All of a sudden she ran out, started to become paranoid.
This is not what cops are supposed to do.
It's fucking with my head a lot.
I was certainly nervous.
But, you know, 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, his 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'd been throwing this shit out for... for years.
Now it's... now all of a sudden,
it's a moneymaker.
I'm like, "Okay."
A kid had done a stickup on Fulton.
He ran home, hid in his house.
We knocked the door down, went inside.
I knew we were in a coke house.
There's triple-beam scales everywhere.
So I hacksaw this briefcase open,
I stuck my hand, and I ripped out this bag.
A plume of fucking white powder goes flying.
I said, "Ha! Pay dirt!"
Bags.
I'm putting bags in my coat.
At the time, it was $30,000 a kilo for coke.
So we know if had a half or a one,
we were getting $20,000 at least.
And I took the money, 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 Seven Seven Precinct.
And he calls me up, and he says,
"What's going on in the Seven Seven?"
"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.
12 officers had been charged with corruption
in a Brooklyn precinct dubbed The Alamo.
The Seven Seven scandal shook up the whole department.
When that broke, there were
huge rumors on how the next scandal
was gonna break in the Seven Five.
So all those dirty cops started leaving the department.
People doing crooked shit was afraid
a new scandal was gonna break out.
I wind up resigning shortly afterwards
'cause, uh, you know, I had felt the heat was on,
the pressure was on.
And I figured, "Hey, listen, you know what?
If I resign, you know, maybe I could 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 Seven Seven
was the Seven Five 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.
Right there.
Michael Dowd was a crook
who ended up wearing a cop's uniform.
You know, I heard the rumors
about Michael, you know, being dirty.
A once-in-a-generation corrupt cop.
No, it... it don't fucking bother me.
The normal person that's doing wrong
is going to have a fear of being caught.
That'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 an 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 was like a bloodbath.
I mean, there was 1,000 shootings a year
in my precinct alone,
you know, 100 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 got to trust him.
1752nd Avenue, 10-4.
About two years working into the Seven Five,
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.
'Cause 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 start 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... then his trust.
And it came to a point, I says,
"Why don't we 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's trouble."
He was totally corrupt.
They said to me, "No, don't work with Dowd.
"You're gonna 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.
From that moment forward, it was like a...
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... in what sense?
Well, uh, if a cop isn't good,
you might be more slow to react to his, uh,
calls for help and... 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 had been in the Seven Five 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 if 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, of some of the scores and how much money we made,
which was, you know, considerable amounts
for a policeman who's making $36,000 a year.
I probably made that in scores in the last year.
Give Dad 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 is a...
it's tempting... tempting situation,
and it opens my mind, which is what he wanted to do.
A few minutes ago
when you were saying
how you were making money off drug dealers,
you also said there were other ways to make money.
Is that what you're referring to?
Yes, there are other ways,
like, uh, burglaries, uh...
There are...
Well, did you actually engage in burglaries?
Yes.
Will you tell us some of the circumstances, please?
Um...
A 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-aged 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, uh, I had to prove to him that I was good.
So in order to prove to him that I was good,
I had to...
I had to give him some reason to think that I...
to know that I was good.
Mike grabs the 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 $100 bill,
and 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 for a burglary
over on Hegeman Avenue.
We get to the house.
I'm the lead cop in... into the house.
Anti-Crime shows up,
which is the plainclothes unit for the precinct.
I happen to just go back of the closet
and in the closet's Anti-Crime.
And the guy picks up a bag...
There'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, huh?
"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 got to take all that back.
"You got to stamp each bill.
"You got to initial each bill.
That's gonna take you for-fucking-ever."
"Yeah, you're right." He puts the bag down.
And I go back, rip open the bag,
take about 4, 5 grand, put it in my pockets.
I go...'cause 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 payphone and called Chicky.
I get a call from Mikey, and 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.
"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 gonna be... I'm keeping an eye on it.
I says, "Mikey, I'm stuck.
I don't have a car at this point."
I said, "Go rent one. Go buy... just get one."
"You better call somebody, you better steal one,
you better do something, but you need to get it."
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 could circle a block,
I didn't leave that door, basically.
I don't... 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 ahold of somebody who has a car,
and we go over there dressed as detectives.
After about the 40th time I circled the fucking house,
Chicky pulled up...
I knock on the door.
I flash a shield, a phony shield,
to the landlord.
And 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,
'cause it's one of those things
where you don't know what's gonna 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...
doesn't die down till maybe 15, 20 minutes later,
till you're home.
Doesn't die down, and you get the shakes.
I was in there maybe,
tops, minute and a half.
Good cop shows up, what do I tell him?
I'm not even on the job anymore.
I know I got Mikey handling everything outside
as far as any other units 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.
Anything could have happened.
I might have had to tune somebody up.
I might have been dead.
We search, 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.
The car takes off.
I go, "Oh, my God,
my buddy Chicky'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 got?"
I said, "I don't know, 5, 6 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 this job.
And we go to Atlantic City,
and we turn all of these 10s, 5s, and 20s
into $100 bills.
We sit down, and we play awhile,
we eat awhile, 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 cocksucker, he was...
he was impressed by the money,
and I told him, you know, "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 gonna 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 Siclen, 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 this scene.
You know, 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 said,
"Hey, Officer, what can I do for you?"
I went, I say, "Hey, my name is Baron."
He's like, "I don't give a fuck who you are."
He kept looking at my wife.
I go, "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, it's taken. That's my wife."
And I said, "Holy fuck, I can't believe that would...
Wow, you must be something."
And I think he used that as an excuse to come into...
you know, to get close to me.
Baron 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 we'd use
to do all the repairs and installation.
Drug dealers are the ones with money.
They want 18 speakers and stereos
and all types of stuff.
More they could 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 at him in the eye.
He looked at me in 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 Compania is 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.
José Montalvo, also known as Chelo,
was the original leader of the Compania
and was responsible for its operation.
Me and my partner are working on the drug side
of Chelo's organization.
Joe Hall and his partner are working on the murder side
of Chelo's organization.
I have a large carton of homicides
that I can attribute to La Compania.
Chelo 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 to heat seal jumbo 20s for distribution.
Their shifts matched the police shifts,
so if a shift for a police officer was 8:00 to 4:00,
then his shift at his spot was 8:00 to 4:00.
For Chelo, 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.
Chelo was not intimidating to look at,
but he has this darkness, you know?
He was a brutal guy.
He didn't think about it to have somebody killed.
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 in 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 crew...
really tough crew.
The time is now approximately 1840 hours.
We are conducting this video surveillance
for the Brooklyn North Narcotics area office.
My investigation, the La Compania investigation,
was two locations in East New York...
Pine and Pitkin and Norwood and Fulton.
Early on in the investigation,
we received information about Chelo,
that he was going to be at Norwood and Fulton Street.
I had borrowed a, uh, very nondescript surveillance van.
And we were right in front of the Pichardo Restaurant
where we knew 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 showing up
is a part of Chelo's crew.
And we said, "Well, we'll be able to identify
"who this person is, this person is,
this person is," 'cause 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 heebie-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, vroom,
of course they know no one's come in and out of that van,
and they've had their eye on it.
And I hear, "Mira! Mira!"
And then I see a guy walk over
and pop the trunk of a blue Chevelle.
The back 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 of 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 were in a, you know... like fish in a barrel.
And as they start to bring out the hardware,
I get the car around in time.
As we pulled out, two rounds were fired.
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...
Vroom, they start flying towards us.
So now I go, "Fuck."
They are absolutely in pursuit.
I put over the radio,
"Seven Five squad, I 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.
I jump over the sidewalk. They do the same.
They jump over the sidewalk with their sedans.
And I start to head towards the Seven Five Precinct,
to the fort.
I think we went down Essex Street
or Linwood Street,
and they stopped their pursuit.
Baron says to me that "I have a friend, Chelo..."
He has an organization in the neighborhood.
He's, uh, not too far from here.
And he wants to know if you can give me
some information about Narcotics...
if they're gonna bust, if they're not gonna bust.
I tell Kenny that we got a deal with this guy.
What Mike came up with was, $8,000 a week,
and we will offer our services
to this Dominican drug gang.
Chelo would pay Baron,
and I would pick the money up at Baron's shop.
That first burglary scene we went to
where Mike threw me the $100...
I thought I could always come back from that.
Now we're dealing with a major drug organization,
and it would... supposed to get systematic payoffs?
There's... there's no turning back.
There's no becoming a cop again.
Kenny and I pick up our money that Chelo had dropped off.
Get to my house.
Counting the money. The 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 gonna short me a dime?
It... he's... there's a line he cannot cross.
Mike was mad, Kenny was mad,
and, "Fuck this," and, "Fuck that," and...
You're not fucking me.
It's not happening.
So I sat in front of Chelo's drug spot for four days,
every night.
Just sat there. Chasing people.
Hitting the lights, hitting the sirens.
Chasing 'em, harassing 'em, pulling 'em over.
He fucking sends a message over to Baron,
"Tell that cop I'm gonna have him...
I'm putting a contract on him, gonna have him whacked."
Went to work the next day.
Happened to go down Fulton right in front of Hale,
and here comes this Porsche, pulling away.
I had never seen this guy in person,
but I knew it was his car.
I pulled him over.
"License and registration."
Of course, he doesn't know who the fuck I am,
'cause he never saw me.
He, you know, complies with my orders,
pulls out his license and registration,
insurance card.
I take it and 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.
He's... 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 a 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." I said, "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. Like, 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."
I don't know, couple hours later,
I get a page from Baron.
He goes, "Mike, Chelo just called me,
"told me the hit's off.
Come by. I got something for you."
Walked into Baron's office at Auto Sound City.
He handed me $700.
Mike is furious.
He doesn't want to have nothing to do with these guys no more.
Baron is a... is 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 José Montalvo,
who was also known as Chelo.
Then you had another organization
doing pretty much the same thing,
uh, run by Adam Diaz.
Nothing at all.
Because The Company was a fucking low-scale shit.
Half a gram, gram, shit, dimes.
Dimes.
He didn't have the connections I had.
I could take him out of the fucking business
in a heartbeat.
But I didn't want to do that. Why?
Because he didn't represent no... 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.
Balls.
And you got to be responsible.
I know I had a lot of kilos from 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 apiece, $3,000, $5,000... doesn't matter.
You're already responsible for that amount.
You better fucking come forward with the money.
Or fucking they kill you.
Don't make no difference to them.
I had several stores open in East New York.
Blake Avenue, Crescent Avenue,
Van Siclen Avenue, New Lots, and Vermont.
You... this a regular grocery store.
Any regular customer
will walk in 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 back.
In the back, it was a metal door.
You knock on that door, and the guy will
open the door for you, and you give him the money...
"I want half a key; I want 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 Porsche...
a 911, candy red, beautiful vehicle.
And I say, "Look, Baron.
"I don't like ghetto music.
"I like Julio Iglesias.
I like Bryan Adams, you know?"
♪ Look into my eyes ♪
"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 Porsche."
You're not gonna believe it.
When I came back to pick up my Porsche,
he didn't make not one hole on that car.
And the car sounded like a fucking club.
Not only did he put music there to listen to Julio Iglesias,
but he say, "You want somebody to 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.
Pbbt.
Baron 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 gonna raid your place."
I told Baron, "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 Baron about it,
and we tell Baron, "$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...
He had the cop look,
where you say, "Fuck, he's a cop."
Mike 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 gonna 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.
"I got what I needed to keep bringing my empire up."
I call one of my guys.
He brought me the money.
"Here, Mike.
Take a walk."
The look of Mike and Kenny,
when they first got the payoff...
Christmas in June, maybe.
Oh, me and Mike were... were ridiculously happy.
I mean, I know I was.
We had left there with a nice load of money in our hands.
We're two young guys with two young, beautiful wives
and young kids,
and it's almost like a time for celebration.
My wife was in the precinct that day
visiting her grandmother, who lived in the precinct.
Michael and Kenny picked me up.
I was sitting in the backseat.
I asked how their day was.
I tell my wife, "Reach in that paper bag.
"Can you give us a couple of beers?
"We got some beers, and we're gonna, you know,
have a couple of beers on the ride home."
"Oh, no problem."
I open it up, and it was money.
And I basically screamed.
I was like...
She's just beside herself.
She can't believe how much money's in that bag.
Money always feels good.
And I tried to reassure her, "Don't worry.
"Everything's gonna be all right.
We're gonna make some money, you know."
Mike was driving pretty erratically,
and he was going fast.
Mike was doing fucking 100 in a little blue Hyundai.
We get pulled over.
Before the cop even was out of his car,
Mike was out of his car
walking back to the cop with his tin 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/or drugs out of the building
and bring 'em to wherever his stash house was.
He asked us to ride 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 gonna 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... their Brinks.
We were, you know...
protected him, making sure he was not robbed.
He had a police escort.
Well, he did have a police escort, yeah.
Michael Dowd got me vest.
Police officer's bulletproof vest for me and my guys.
Original shit from the storage in the precinct.
So my guys used to wear it, like, with pride, you know?
Like, "Wow, Adam got it going on.
"Adam, he controls the cops.
We don't have nothing to worry about."
There was guys that were competition to me.
I give you a good example: the guy in front of me.
They call him Dominica.
Short guy.
Fat.
He think he's a gangster.
He a fucking pussy.
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 gonna happen to me?
The feds coming after me.
Can't touch the guy.
I say, "Fuck, what am I gonna do?"
I say, "Mike, I need this guy out of the way.
Please."
So what did Mike did?
He brought the fucking police officer car
right in his corner.
My customers was... were fucking going to his spot.
I said, "Wow, Mike. You the man."
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 the 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.
"All right, guys, closed for the day."
"What do you mean, Adam?"
"Closed for the day. Everyone, let's go."
I wouldn't leave not one guy there.
I would leave the store guy, the guy behind the counter.
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 DEA was a little bit upset, and Brooklyn North Narcotics,
who they worked in the joint task force with, 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 Dowd was a very loyal part of my crew.
Between me and him was like...
more like a brotherhood thing going on.
Like, I could talk to him
like I'm talking to one of my first cousins.
Baron 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.
Lot of plannings for the robberies would begin
with me and Mike talking about it in the patrol car.
"Talked 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. "Uh, let's send Chicky 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, and...
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.
Tried to figure out, okay, when the money was coming in,
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?"
"Oh, no."
"It 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, hit it later.
Mike had a friend in the police precinct.
Tall guy...
his fucking hands are like three of my hands.
Uh, 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 liked 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, um, we hit the place.
You walk in like you own the fucking place.
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-getter.
Mikey's just crazy.
He'll do what he wants, when 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 trained 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 the 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.
No.
Well, they just lost 50 grand in drug money
and five kilos of cocaine.
what are they gonna report?
Guys knew if they ratted us out...
wouldn't be pretty.
Not gonna say... 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.
This guy named Franklin...
fucking dopehead fucking asshole.
It was him and... the guy's name is Coke.
This guy got a fucking Uzi, nine-millimeter...
all kinds of fucking weapons.
Elvis is ready, closing up this place.
He had to put all the money together and bag it up,
$10,000 a package.
All of a sudden,
Franklin and Coke come and stick up the place...
stick up Elvis,
stick up 14 of my guys.
So we heard a commotion on the stairs,
and 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 Christmastime.
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 to 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 real guys
and a fucking pussy guy.
I would never open that door.
Kill me. I'm not opening that door.
Phew, wow...
Got to be $700,000, something.
I'm not worried about the money.
That ain't shit to me.
My problem is, they making my spot hot
'cause 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 got to 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.
Yeah, he did.
Um...
he's not around anymore.
Now, I'm not saying I killed him.
He's not around anymore.
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...
it was flowing nicely there for quite some time.
Every week, on time,
$8,000 is waiting for us at Baron's shop.
So we planned trips around Atlantic City,
stopped there with a limousine,
and picked it up on the way...
me, my wife; Mike and his wife, Bonnie;
Chicky and his wife.
They were counting money in the backseat.
The girls were all excited.
So it really made you feel like, you know,
you're there... you've arrived.
Um, my lifestyle was pretty good.
Trips, jewelry, vacations...
life was good.
We were rolling.
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.
A vacation, furniture, appliances
you pay for in cash.
Kenny and Michael's experiences
just brought them closer and closer together.
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's 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,
because 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 around this time?
Uh, '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 the 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 give it to Kenny.
It takes a lot of fucking man
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,
he wouldn't function.
You know what I mean?
But if Kenny would bring a whole bunch of cops and say,
"Adam, forget about Mike;
these are 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,
'cause 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 4:00 to 12:00.
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 were, like, a block and a half from the precinct
to drop off the prisoner at the precinct.
In that time, call comes over the radio.
And we hear, "10-13, shots fired."
A live call come over the air... not a 911 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.
Just fucking get out. Get out of the car."
And headed over to Bradford and Pitkin.
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 of 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...
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 it's...
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 telling Central
that we're transporting the cop shot to,
um, Brookdale Hospital.
To get this guy from Pitkin Avenue
to Brookdale Hospital was maybe five, six minutes.
Pitkin to Penn to Linden to Brookdale.
I'm on my way.
I'm fucking flying now...
lights, no sirens,
and I'm fucking...
I'm trying to close the door.
"Have them stand by. He was 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"...
"We're 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 Officer Venable was 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'm not... 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 them off.
No problem.
It'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... 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's...
that he did something to help Officer Venable,
that he did, you know...
he just happened to be there.
That's all that was.
Well, he talked about that like he was a real cop
because he... he took the, uh...
yeah...
no.
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, uh...
both.
We have this informant in talking to us.
He's giving us really good information.
I said, "Just, you 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 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 got cops working for us."
It sort of 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... you know, why start lying about something like this?
And 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?
Like, here, you know, it's... it's a...
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 Seven Five
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, perp.
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 them
and 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 Seven Five 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 can run all those lights and see nobody,
and then you're gonna pick him up on the Belt 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 to Michael Dowd, that meant nothing.
Wasn't like you were hurting "people."
You're 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.
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.
Pfft.
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, Eurell, and Yurkiw,
there wound up being, honest to God,
25, 30 people.
Michael Dowd is definitely the brains of the operation.
We started to look 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.
Said, "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, like, half a kilo a week
out of a bar in $50 envelopes.
There's... 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,
uh, that indeed you weren't questioned
and you weren't in any way caught
during the, um, course of all these dealings...
did that, for instance,
somehow embolden 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. I just lived it.
Just 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 was going through too.
So, all that combined,
it, uh...
it certainly shocked me.
I can't... 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 the undercover sends the coke to the lab,
we have quantitative and qualitative tests
done on the cocaine;
it comes back 95% pure.
Somebody was bringing pure coke into Suffolk County.
Based on your personal knowledge,
why weren't other police officers in your command
turning you in?
'Cause I'm still a cop.
Cops don't turn in other cops.
He's doing coke... as fast as he can get it from Diaz
is as fast as he's doing.
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
that, 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 coke."
I said, "What?"
I know he's doing his little fucking blow
sometimes in a while, but...
"Fuck everything. Fuck them. Fuck this.
I'm gonna do what I want."
And that's how he lived and worked
in the Seven Five.
You felt like you were God.
He said, "No, he's fucked up.
He's fucked up. He's a dopehead."
Invincible.
So it'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 when I knew he was no good
and that was gonna be the end.
I thought if I was getting too close, you could quit.
But you find out, when you're in the middle of the game,
quitting ain't too easy.
The game keeps pulling you back in.
And then you start to wonder,
"Maybe I will get pinched."
One Sunday morning,
we 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.
I'm like, "Did you see that?"
And I'm watching my rearview mirror the whole way.
They pull out from the curb and start following behind me.
But I'm not worried.
No coke at 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, 8:00 in the evening.
I had seen a couple cars following me.
I knew something wasn't right.
Harry owes me cash.
I go out during the night to 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 10:00 at night.
Dripping wet, and 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.
The desk officer pointed...
"The captain over there wants to talk to you."
I turned around.
A man walked in with a lieutenant's badge
and said, "Internal Affairs.
We want to take you for a department-ordered drug test."
Within two minutes,
Suffolk County Narcotics slams the front door.
Don't go in, guys. Don't go in.
Get down. Get down.
Vests, helmets, 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 to put my civilian clothes on,
and I get... 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 narcotics conspiracy."
They search my pockets.
They pull out the bag of cocaine I tried to unload.
The next picture that you see
is a daisy chain of cops
is being led 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 dealing 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 cop...
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 in to 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 five, six, seven, eight years.
This is just another... this is just another obstacle
I have to learn to get around, and I will.
In my mind, I was gonna get around this.
Here we are, out on bail...
it's about a month after our arrest,
uh, mid-June sometime...
facing 25 to life for drug trafficking charges.
It was at 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, uh, 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 you out?"
He 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 on the scanner."
We turn on the local scanner to listen to the local precinct.
The scanner's not on a minute, and you hear,
"Suspicious car on Avon Street."
There's no way you're 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 kept... I jumped back onto the Grand Central Parkway
and headed home.
We get the fuck out of there.
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.
I said, "All right, man, I'm gonna call you later."
And I notice 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,
"Dori 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... the noise of cars pulling into my cul-de-sac.
When they walked in my door, I knew it was Kenny.
How the fuck could he do this?
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 Eurell'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,
'cause 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,
Baron, 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.
Kenny's attorney's gonna tell him,
"Your exposure just went
"from whatever the state was gonna give you
to now you're looking at this in the federal system,"
and he's gonna 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 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 goin' on.
He goes, "You can't allow something like that to happen."
"Kenny, it's RICO.
"You're looking at 25 years.
"You're goin' 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 Troster gets me a micro-recorder,
and at that time, 1992,
a micro-recorder was, you know, that fuckin' big.
It was big,
big enough that if you're wearing it,
you're self-conscious,
like, "Holy crap, I got this big piece of equipment on me."
"We're gonna 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."
And, you know, when I hugged him,
I hugged him like I wasn't ever gonna see him again,
that this is probably gonna turn horribly wrong.
Michael's plan was to go to the house on Avon street
in Jamaica Estates, Queens,
knock on the door, deliver a bouquet of flowers,
and then they were gonna 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,
'cause I'm watching the news every day,
'cause we're almost on the news every night.
Totally separate story...
a lady was killed and murdered
because someone posed as a flower delivery person.
So I'm sitting there with my wife.
I'm like, "Oh, my God,
I hope Mike's not fucking watching the news now,"
'cause 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?
We did not change our plan.
Some other woman living in Queens
is not gonna not open her door for flowers.
The flower thing can be used a few times.
Not every flower delivery is a fucking armed robbery murder.
The recordings that Eurell made were extremely helpful
to prove Dowd's involvement in this crime.
We're trying to figure out exactly how we're gonna
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 gonna be delivered to Colombians
and kidnapped and executed is beyond me.
Michael's lying.
Kenny wore tapes.
The tapes reflect that Michael planned
to abduct the woman in Queens.
It was Kenny's words, never mine.
Go to the tapes.
Listen to the tape.
Kenny paged me
in the wee hours of the morning.
He says, "It's happening. We're doing it in the morning."
Agents are gonna go to this woman in her house,
tell her, "Listen, your life is in jeopardy.
"We're gonna put you somewhere safe,
"and we are gonna stay in your house.
"Michael's gonna come to do the abduction,
and Michael's gonna 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,
"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, said, "Hey,
we're DEA doing a surveillance."
There's no way you're hiding that.
Mike picked that up.
We get the fuck out of there.
As I'm driving, I see cars just converging from everywhere.
Now my mind starts spinning.
"How am I gonna make sure
Mike doesn't relate this to me?"
The plan was, DEA's gonna arrest us all and take us in
and make it look like I'm part of being arrested.
They were, at that point, gonna 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 bags 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?
We get all the way back to my house.
I went to go into his house; he told me, "Hold on.
I got to check on... see if my wife is dressed."
Kenny never stopped me from seeing his wife
dressed or undressed,
and now all of sudden, he's gonna check?
I was very suspicious.
Holy shit!
I'm running.
I 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 doors close.
She peeks out the window,
sees it's us getting back and Mike is there.
I throw those bags into the bedroom.
- Hides the bags by the door. - Out of sight.
She starts panicking.
I run into the bathroom, wet my hair...
Wets 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 and put on a robe,
and they're banging the door.
Why Kenny wasn't using the key...
I don't have no keys on me.
Walked in the house. The fuckin' house was empty.
I looked around... "Where's all your furniture?"
"Oh, you know I'm selling the house."
"Yeah, but why would you empty the fuckin' house out?"
"Well, it shows better when the house is empty."
Had a good answer, the motherfucker.
I'm freaking out.
Mike was supposed to be behind bars
and I would not have to deal with any of this confrontation.
Mike is pumped.
"Dor, Dor, we came this close to being arrested.
We were this close."
"Someone ratted us out. They knew we were there."
I'm like, "How they hell could they know that?"
He decides to go home and says,
"All right, man, I'm gonna call you later."
My only concern now is,
I got to get in touch with my lawyer and the DEA
and Internal Affairs and this other 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 got to 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."
'Cause I didn't know.
I'd heard Michael would fight. He's a cop, I...
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 could 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 that woman's life.
I was very surprised at hearing that Kenny had turned.
You know, you 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... 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,
he would have just fucking do whatever for him,
including time.
If I could relive that first moment
when 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. I...
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 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 in recess.
I always wanted to be a good cop.
I didn't come on the police department to be a bad cop.
I...
Yeah.
My dreams are about being a good cop.
Sad, though.
Never happened.
♪ The police in New York City ♪
♪ They chased a boy right through the park ♪
♪ In a case of mistaken identity ♪
♪ They put a bullet through his heart ♪
♪ Heartbreakers ♪
We lock up a guy,
and we're bringing him over to correctional center
for booking, and at that point,
like, a VIP entourage comes in as we're booking this guy,
and I hear, "Fuckin' Joey Hall."
So I look over,
and I said, "Hey, Michael, how you doing?"
And he said, "Joey, I just got 16 fuckin' years."
And I said, "Michael,
if it was up to me, you'd be doing more time."
And he says, "Hey, Joe.
"It was an honor to be arrested by you.
"Fuck those IAD guys.
They never got me."
He starts to walk away,
and he turns around in the hall,
and he says, "Hey, Joe.
"Hey, the year wasn't a total waste.
The Rangers won the Cup."
And then, with that,
he walks in, and you hear the cell door slam.
♪ A pain maker ♪
♪ Stole the love right out your heart ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ I wanna tear that world apart ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ I wanna tear that world apart ♪
♪ Heartbreaker ♪
♪ Stole the love right out my heart ♪
♪ Heartbreaker ♪
♪ I wanna tear that world ♪
♪ Wanna tear that world ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ I wanna tear that world apart ♪
♪ Heartbreaker ♪
♪ Stole the love right ♪
♪ You stole the love right out ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ They said she didn't have no chance ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ You stuck the pins right in her heart ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ Heartbreaker ♪
♪ I wanna tear that world apart ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ Doo doo doo doo doo ♪