Ralph Friedman holds the record number of combat awards for
a NYC cop for two reasons; the South Bronx of the 1970’s was a war zone, and
Friedman was nuts. During his wild career as an undercover drug cop he jumps
across rooftops, jumps out windows, gets dragged by cars, and has daily gun
battles with armed suspects. Starting his post-high-school life as a trucker
and finding it boring (no argument there) he opts for the NYPD. Now before we
go further, let me warn you (as all other cop memoirs will) that in the early
1970’s, nobody, absolutely nobody, wanted to be a NYC cop! The issue wasn’t the
pay (schoolteachers didn’t make much either) or the hours (lots of jobs require
night shifts) but the hazards. Cops were getting shot all the time, and the
Black Liberation Army was using cops for target practice. Cars full of off-duty
cops were following the radio cars, armed with semi-automatic rifles. For
Friedman, the attraction was the fighting.
Street Warrior
gives an account of not only the violence of the NYPD in the Bronx, but also
the way collars and booking were done. Cops who wanted to get into the
detectives or get promoted needed lots of collars, and that could only be done
according to convenience. Friedman had an advantage of working in the Bronx over
Manhattan; there was less auto traffic and the courts were faster. You could
grab a perp on the street, drive him back to the station in ten minutes, book
him, be back out on the street in half an hour, and make more arrests. The next
morning you drive to court, testify, and be back on the street by lunchtime and
make more arrests. On the one occasion that he has to go to Manhattan’s courts,
he gets stuck in traffic all day. He’s like “how the hell did the Manhattan
cops make more than one collar a week, when the traffic took all day and the
courts took all week?” He has a greater dislike for Manhattan traffic than he
does for the injuries he gets.
Unlike a lot of
the self-serving cop memoirs, Friedman admits to failed cases, particularly one
with the Fraunce’s Tavern bombing. He
gets a tip from a drug dealing informer about the bombers, but just as they’re
about to go into a wedding venue to identify the suspect, the dealer brags that
he has a gun. Goodbye to the whole operation, it now has to be called off!
Friedman regrets it all to this day, it would’ve been the one chance that
anyone had of catching the bombers.
It seems like it’s
not that hard to become a detective when you work in narcotics. Most of
Friedman’s work involves stalking around the neighborhood in scruffy clothes,
with plenty of shooting and punching. I
imagine that being a homicide detective would involve a lot more patience;
knocking on every door, checking dozens of numbers, spending cold nights in a
car and watching for a suspect who might, just might, come out of a building.
Those who read The French Connection
know that the famous drug bust involved spending nights in hotel lobbies,
fueled by coffee and dirty water hot dogs, waiting for the suspect to exit the
hotel. One word – boring! But Friedman’s career is a lot more exciting and has
a lot less of the waiting. In 1970’s South Bronx, you could find an armed thief
every ten paces.
Would I have
wanted to be a cop in NYC in the 1970’s? The answer is yes! What other jobs
were there anyway? My mother hated being a teacher in private Jewish schools
(those people didn’t need any help) and wouldn’t dare teach in the public
schools (might as well be a cop, no?) . Then there was my father’s career in
Chase Manhattan Plaza, and I doubt he liked the long commute or the expensive
suits he had to pay for (this was back in the day when the subway had no air
conditioning.) If you’re a cop, you can wear what you like to work, get free
parking space, change into your uniform when you get to work, and best of all,
get an instant gun-carry license. The gun license was no small asset in 1970’s
NYC.
Friedman’s
co-writer is Patrick Picarelli, the same writer who did Jimmy the Wags, another NYC cop memoir that I thoroughly enjoyed. The
storytelling is straightforward, nobody tries to wax poetic or put on airs. But
I won’t say that I like Ralph Friedman, and I won’t call him brave or tough.
Anybody can shoot, kick, and punch, especially if they’re empowered to do it
legally. Given, not everyone wants to risk getting shot but this guy wasn’t
married and he had no kids, so it wasn’t like he had anything to worry about. I
also doubt that anything the police did at the time made much of a difference, if
the South Bronx was as hopeless as he portrays it. Still, it’s a fun read, and
gives an uncompromising story of policing in the 1970’s.
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