Blue on Blue: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops

    Charles Camisi sounds like he had a great time as the head of the NYPD internal affairs. His career spanned almost 40 years and 4 police commissioners, starting at the worst time for New York, and ending in one of our best times. The Internal Affairs division, where he worked for most of his career, investigates police corruption, so basically he was policing other cops. As for the corrupt police that he busted, they range from Sergeants who sexually harass female subordinates to Inspectors who steal huge loads of cash.

   There aren’t a lot of surprises in this book; police officers start feeling invincible, and they take greater and greater risks, then they start robbing drug dealers (happens a lot in this book) and their crimes get so bold that they become visible to the authorities. Some of them have sex with female drug addicts who they use for informers, which opens them up to blackmail. The drug robberies are usually in collusion with small-time dealers that they know. Sometimes the police will simply do a drug raid, confiscate five figures in cash, and not voucher a few thousands. It ranges from pennies to hundred dollar bills.

    Some of Campisi’s cases involve peace officers using their badges to extort money, and they’re the easiest ones to deal with. Few cases involve brutality or excessive force, because that’s harder to prove in court thanks to “sovereign immunity.” Financial crimes, however, are easier to prove, and Campisi prefers when corrupt cops agree to be informants. If one bent cop is caught stealing a thousand dollars, he’s likely to know some that are taking even more, and that increases the chance that they’ll all end up implicating each other. The best chance of a conviction always rests on the witness testifying in court.

    One of the main obstacles covered in this book is the concept of “compelled statements.” If a police officer is told “give a sworn statement or face dismissal,” then any admission of guilt can’t be used against him in court. That makes the Internal Affairs detectives reluctant to question rogue cops. Aside from the basic report of events, Campisi couldn’t ask outright if they’d planted a gun, robbed a drug dealer, or dealt drugs. Instead, there would be a lot of work involved, watching the officer’s movements, finding out how many houses and cars he owned, watching what he did in his leisure time, and more. The advantage, however, is that some cops are apt to work for Internal Affairs if they want to move up. If you do a certain amount of full-time undercover work, then you get a detective’s shield.

    One of the most entertaining cases was that of Jose Ramos, which began when someone (probably a jealous ex-girlfriend) phoned and said “he has barbershops that are fronts for drug dealing.” Sure enough, Officer Ramos owned several barbershops that he hadn’t told the NYPD about (strike one) and rented space in the store to pirate CD vendors (strike two) and hadn’t reported the income on his tax return (strike three.) It would’ve been enough to fire him, but why not go for something bigger? He spent a lot of time with a known drug dealer, let the guy drive his car, and let him live in an apartment that he rented. Eventually the NYPD arrested the dealers her worked with, and they all gave evidence. After ending up in Rikers, Ramos tried to hire another prisoner to assassinate an informant, and got extra time on his sentence. It was the Ramos case that led to the ticket-fixing scandal.

    I’m going to give this book top marks. The author doesn’t try to make himself look like a big hero, and he doesn’t have any great prejudice against anyone. He makes things clear from the beginning, if you’re a cop with ten years on the force and you decide to ruin it by stealing, then you deserve your misery. I knew of some of his cases before this book came out, and I admit that they didn’t look like a big deal to me. But after reading this book, I see exactly how bad some of these cops really were. 

The Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, The History if an Idea

   

In the USA, the word “ghetto” has become commonplace among Black youth, applied to everything from music to clothes to food. As an educator, I saw few who understood the origin of the term, and a history lesson went in one ear and out the other. Long before Ghetto became an adjective, W.E.B. Du Boise encountered the Ghetto in Europe, and studied the aspects of a city having a restricted quarter. Some people, he found, lived there because they’d been forced to, while others lived there out of choice. Of the Jews that lived there by choice, he wondered if it was for defense. If not, was it to appease the Christians into leaving them alone? Or was it because it was the only place they knew?

    Duneier divides his book into four parts; Harlem and Chicago, 1940’s and present day. He devoted chapters to Horace Clayton, who fought to end racially restrictive rules that kept Blacks out of White areas. While there was no legal segregation in Chicago, it was still unsafe for Black Chicagoans to buy houses outside of the old neighborhood. The case of Virginia Dobbins is one example; she purchased a house, then found White neighbors openly vandalizing it, then White mobs surrounded the house, and the police harassed her constantly. The South Side of Chicago was crowded and dirty, but even with all the crime it was safer than a white area. Another problem with Chicago was the practice of Redlining, where the banks refused to lend money in area deemed “poor” by the Feds. Then came the Contract Buyer scam, which didn’t end until activists of both races fought to end it. Unfortunately, the change came too late.

    Duneier attributes Ghetto’s entrance into Black vernacular to Black soldiers coming back from WWII. Sociologists like Du Boise and Clayton saw the Ghetto as the origin of segregation, and as mentioned earlier, Du Boise had seen them up close. However, neither seemed to realize that for a Jew in Europe, living outside the walls might not have been practical. Those neighborhoods were the only place they knew, and might be the only place where they wouldn’t be attacked in the street. Even if the Ghettos were freed, did the residents have the money to live elsewhere? The same way that Virginia Dobbins found herself in unfamiliar territory in Chicago, a Jew living outside of the Ghetto, whether in Berlin Frankfurt, or Prague, faced too much risk.

    The Harlem section of this book is split between Kenneth Clark (1940’s) and Geoffrey Canada (2000’s). Clark, a Columbia-educated academic, found that White organizations were getting all the Federal money, while Black schools and non-profits were treated more like charity recipients. One of Clark’s more disturbing studies found a troubling problem among Black men; those that couldn’t find work or support their families were likely to lose their standing in the household, and be more likely to desert their families. This isn’t unique to Black families in the USA: I’ve heard that Ethiopian Jews in Israel and Bukharian Jews in Queens have had the same problem.

    Another issue behind the success or failure that the author doesn’t go into is private charity. Since the earliest days of immigration, the different ethnic groups (Chinese, Jewish, Irish, or Italian) had their own benevolent lodges, and they relied on their own when help was needed. I can cite a personal example; my family recently found the grave of a relative who died at age two in 1923, and the beautifully-carved headstone could not have been afforded on her father’s garment worker salary. There must have been a benevolent lodge that paid for it.

    Geoffrey Canada figures heavily in the contemporary section of this book, because in contrast to Kenneth Clark’s fight against the dehumanization of the Black family, Canada struggled against crack, crime, and teenage pregnancy. Ironically, Dr. Canada started his teaching career at a South Boston school full of violent Irish-American kids (made famous in the book All Souls: A Family Story From Southie.) No guns were involved here, just fists, and the boys only fought when there was an adult around to break it up. However, one thing that the author doesn’t explore is the issue of the job prospect discrepancy. An Irish boy in Boston has a greater chance of getting blue-collar job, most likely through a relative or the friend of the family. A Black boy, however, has no chance. The construction, trucking, and maintenance businesses are almost all White, and the Irish or Slavic businessmen are more likely to hire their own. Duneier cites Julius Wilson’s research in Chicago to support this; Wilson called it a “segmented labor market,” where skilled-work positions are closed and civil-service jobs become the only option. Dunier also mentions how the Civil Rights movement deluded young men; they’re taught to expect a pot of gold, so they reject manual labor, and they can’t start from the bottom and work their way up.

    A constant theme in this book is the comfort zone versus the need for safety. In the Dobbins case, the homeowner sought healthier lodgings, but wasn’t safe in the new White neighborhood. In the case of the Great Migration, Blacks from the Deep South sacrificed the communities they’d grown up with in order not to get killed by the KKK. On one hand, they’d be safe in the North from white mobs, but on the other hand they would only be safe in a Black neighborhood. While they would be safer in the North, they’d be leaving behind their church, their extended family, and their familiar support network.

    Chicago’s housing projects became a de facto Ghetto for Black residents, long after Black Americans were moving out. Unlike the Ghettos that Du Boise explored in the 1900’s, the Chicago neighborhoods had none of the restrictions. The Ghettos of Italy and Germany had walls around them, with gates that were locked at night. In contrast, Chicago’s “Ghettos” had none, those who wanted to were free to leave or enter. It was commonplace for Black Americans in Chicago or Harlem to leave the neighborhood to work, same as it is now. The difference though is that there were few Black people in the Chicago housing projects who had full-time jobs. If the parent was on welfare for 20 years, there would be no reason for her to travel out of the neighborhood, and the Cabrini-Green or Robert Taylor projects would be the only place that those single mothers knew. The children would then become fixed to the place, and get stuck.

   Geoffrey Canada’s approach is more practical and realistic. Back in South Boston, where the Irish boys would only fight when the authorities were present, he made the boys an offer; fight alone in the empty lot, or return to class. Most of them chose the latter, obviously, but it made an impression. He knew that you couldn’t persuade people to leave the neighborhoods they knew, but you could modify their habits. While working in Harlem in the 1980’s, he demanded to start a martial arts program which kept Black children out of trouble (for some reason, Asian combat sports do more to keep kids out of trouble than basketball and boxing.) His Harlem Children’s Zone, a network of schools and health services, is designed to improve things within the community, so it will be a safe and healthy place to be, not something that people are desperate to escape from.

    I’m going to sum this up with a personal experience. For a time, I worked in a construction company, with Ukrainian carpenters and an Irish supervisor. The Ukrainians, a tough and unsmiling bunch, were all teachers back in Ukraine. When I asked why they gave it up they said they couldn’t survive on a teacher’s pay back home. The desire for better pay I can understand, but what about the sudden change? How can anyone just pick up and leave behind all they’ve ever known? When I asked one of them how they handled the transition, he said “what transition, I had nothing to leave behind!” Unlike a Black family in the Great Migration, however, these Ukrainians had two major assets; first, they’d all learned vocational skills back in their old country that they could use in New York, and secondly, their entire extended family made the trip as well. Not only would they be more likely to get a high-paid job, but their elder relatives could watch the children while the parents worked.

   In the end, the only people who will make such a change are either desperate, or brave enough to make the jump.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

   After reading Craig Thompson’s Habib, where a little girl marries an older man (considered rape in most countries) I can see that he obviously connects with kids who are getting screwed, which is what this story is about. He and his brother live in the attic, share a bed, and if they make so much as a sound, their abusive father locks one of them in a closet. Don’t bother screaming that there are spiders in there or you’re afraid of the dark, because a guy who locks his kids in the closet won’t give a damn what they’re going through. If you wonder what motivates his parents to act like this, one word: RELIGION! Their parents are nut-job Christian fundamentalists, and they lay a massive guilt trip on the poor kid when he’s caught drawing a nude woman. It’s been said that people who go to church have fewer problems in life, but I have to wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Thompson use religion as an excuse for sadistic behavior.

Because his parents are so strict, he doesn’t learn to make decisions. He gets beaten up at school by the older boys, then molested at home by a teenage babysitter. The parents send him to some stupid Christian camp during the winter break (what kind of kid wants to spend his winter break at camp?) and he gets bullied there too. That is, until at age 16, when he meets a bunch of teenage misfits who flip the bird at authority. One of them, a girl named Raine, takes a liking to him, and that’s where the dynamic suddenly changes.

Raine’s family is even more messed up than Craig’s. She has two adopted siblings, both of whom are retarded, and the burden of caring for them falls on her. Her parents are not preparing those (adult) kids for independent living, and to top it off, she has a narcissistic older sister who takes parenting duties very lightly. I got the feeling that during the time Craig spends with Raine, he sees the dangers of letting adults make the decisions for you. In his family, his parents dictate what he should think, and in Raine’s family, the parents hand her the responsibility of caring for two retarded adults. It seems to get him thinking harder about his life.

The title Blankets comes from the fact that he and his brother sleep in the same bed, until the parents decide to spend more money getting them their own. But in some ways, Craig is left in limbo. It takes him a long time to really think for himself, and perhaps Raines family is the spur to leave home. Maybe he thinks that this is how he’ll end up if he stays. Being stuck taking care of his parents doesn’t sound fun, does it?

The drawings in this comic are extremely realistic, despite his use of sharp lines. It reminded me of El Greco’s paintings, with their gaunt, hollow-cheeked figures and depressed faces. The style works perfectly here. After all, Blankets is a depressing story about depressed people.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

    Years ago, a man came into my classroom and handed out fliers for his missing kid. Now this guy was big and intimidating, and he was clearly very angry, so I thought to myself “okay, he’s pissed off that his kid’s run away.” Not unreasonable, it can be stressful tracking down a runaway. But if he really wanted to find the boy, why did he give me such a blurry photo?

Tobias Wolff’s autobiography of his lousy childhood doesn’t have a an especially complicated story. It’s the 1960’s, the author’s parents split, the father keeps the older brother, his wife keeps their younger son “Jack” with her. First they go to Utah to try Uranium prospecting (does anybody even remember that craze?) and then to Washington State, where she hooks up with a brute named Dwight and things get rough. There’s no self-indulgence here, no self-pity or the “I had a horrible life” attitude. I expect that after living a life with unreliable parents, you learn to do more on your own, and he certainly does; paper routes, work, forging his report card so he can get into boarding school. When he finds out that his stepfather has stolen his money, he makes one last dash to get revenge; he sneaks back into the house, steals Dwight’s guns, and pawns them. This had to be the best part of the book.

Tobias Wolff’s memoir is no surprise to me, but the story isn’t typical of the period. His mother shacks up with a man who has kids and is legally married to someone else, so this would have raised eyebrows at the time. Then again, his mother is completely spineless, so why wouldn’t she shack up with a brute like Dwight? Since this was the 1960’s, a time when cohabitation was not allowed, I could tell it was going to be bad. This man already has kids of his own to take care of, so what does he want with a woman who brings along another one? Tobias’ older brother gets to live with their father, who doesn’t pay any child support, so in effect the boy is told that he doesn’t count. Perhaps he only expects the very worst? When he tries to escape by asking an uncle in Paris to take him in, his mother writes in advance that Toby has problems, so that option doesn’t work out either.

   Perhaps I’ not shocked by this story because I’ve seen it before. There are families where the father is an abusive drill sergeant, the mother is completely spineless, and the kids grow up angry. But This Boy’s Life takes place in the early 60’s, and not only was Tobias (he calls himself “Jack” in his youth) dealing with a brute stepfather and coward of a mother, but he was also dealing with a lack of rights. It was an era when a man wouldn’t get jail time for beating his stepson and stealing the kid’s money.

Back when I was 13, I was in a bible study class and we got to the part where the Jews say “let’s go back to Egypt, I miss the food, I miss the melons, I miss the onions.” The teacher said to us “we learn a lesson here, don’t dream of the past, it was never as good as you remember.” When I disagreed, he said “Ben, we didn’t have to lock our doors when I was your age, because we had nothing to steal!” As for this book, maybe the message is “the past sucks” and we shouldn’t look back? Perhaps this book is an anti-tribute to the Eisenhower-Kennedy era? It certainly makes life in the 50’s and 60’s look horrible; women had no rights, kids had no rights, men controlled the family finances, kids had no advocates, nobody ever believed a kid who said he was being abused.

This is why I never believed Michael Jackson when he said “I was robbed of my childhood.” I would say “childhood sucks Michael, you didn’t miss anything!”

Jack and Norman

   Tom Wolfe was not impressed by the “radical chic” phenomena of the 60’s, and he made it clear in his book. Whether it was Leonard Bernstein raising funds for the Black Panthers; or Jane Fonda stumping for the communists; or some rich Hollywood celebrity inviting activists to their party; Tom saw it as grandstanding, others saw it as slumming. Regardless, Norman Mailer took radical chic to new extremes with the cause of Jack Henry Abbott. The man of Mailer’s fascination was not a political prisoner or freedom fighter, but a 34-year old convict who’d done robbery, assault, and murder. Born to an Irish-American sailor and a half-Chinese woman who turned tricks, he was rejected by both his parents’ families for being mixed-race. He grew up in boy’s homes, juvenile prisons, then adult prisons, and by age 34 had a record of violent extremes. Not the kind of guy you want to have around. Mailer helped free him, death and disaster followed. This book tries to explain how and why.

    Jerome Loving, the author, is a professor at Texas A&M, so I’ll assume he’s dealt with his fair share of radicals in academia. His book has major surprises in store, even for people who are familiar with the Mailer-Abbott story. Most readers are familiar with the basic plot; Mailer was writing a crime book, Abbott the convict heard about it, he offered his knowledge about prison, and they exchanged letters. Mailer, along with Jerzy Kozinski, was so impressed with Abbott’s writing that he persuaded the parole board to let him go. Now here’s where the surprises come in; there was a huge amount of fraud involved, and Jack Henry Abbott was a seriously bad guy.

    Professor Loving makes a convincing claim that Abbott was embellishing a lot of his story. According to Abbott, he’d spent years in the hole, yet he was surprisingly well-read. Prisoners in solitary have no access to the prison library, and where he was incarcerated, you’d be lucky to get anything other than the Bible and the Book of Moron. So how did he read all the books on philosophy that he knew of? Books on Communism were definitely not on the high-security reading list, nor anything by radical authors, so how did he get them? It’s likely that he was lying about how much time he’d really been in solitary.

    From the get-go, the author stresses that Abbott was incredibly self-indulgent and blame all his bad habits on prison. Not one single mistake did he ever take responsibility for. As for the connection with Mailer, it was his book about Gary Gilmore, who like Abbott had been in Utah, that put them in contact. Abbott wrote that he was admirer of Marx and Lenin, which fascinated Mailer. However, Loving thinks that after Mailer did seventeen days in the loony-bin for stabbing his wife, he developed guilt for being too privileged. Was this Mailer’s way of atoning for his crime? Ironically, Gary Gilmore asked to be executed by firing squad to fulfill the Mormon law of “blood atonement.”

    I applaud the author for his unbiased writing on a highly debated topic. Some say that it was Mailer and Kozinski that got Abbott paroled, while others point out that it was in exchange for ratting out other convicts. There’s also the fact that the prison warden wanted him out, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore. Then there’s the misery that Abbott put his family through; when his sister and brother-in-law visited, they couldn’t touch each other, because he was sexually attracted to her and seeing a man touch her would set him off. At least his sister led a happy life without him. As for Abbott’s short stint at freedom, it soon ended when he stabbed a waiter to death for not letting him use the bathroom. Abbott didn’t want to go to New York in the first place; he wanted to go to Cuba or the USSR because they were Communist. Maybe that’s what should’ve happened? It would be a great way to get rid of American undesirables, shipping them off to Cuba and Moscow, places where nobody else seems to want to live. They sent us all of their criminals, so why shouldn’t we send them ours? Despite Abbott’s love of left-wing ideology, the Black Panthers had no use for him. They publicly criticized his behavior.

   Liberals have often had a sense of “feeling sorry” for men in prisons. I remember a Richard Pryor skit where he said he visited a prison and thought the Black men in there would all be political criminals. He was going to march in there and show solidarity with his “brothers.” When he came out, all he could say was “Thank God for prisons!”

Paris I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down

    Not a year goes by, it seems, without a memoir of an American in Paris; about the hostility of the people, the mysteries of the food, the shock of the conversational habits, the weather, the health, the streets, the other foreigners. Into this swamp of great misadventures and failed sojourns steps Rosencrantz Baldwin, a writer and self-described Francophile, on his first trip to Paris. I’ll spoil the plot for you, he ends up disappointed.

    One of the most prominent themes throughout the book is the perception of French speech as rudeness. At the advertising agency where Baldwin gets hired, he finds himself the butt of lewd comments from every colleague. Every single time he talks to a coworker, they make some stupid remark about his private parts. So, what does he do? He looks at a coworker who just spilled water on himself and makes a joke about that. The coworker is seriously riled. Let this be the first lesson for the American in Paris; they’re French, you’re not, and the two of you are not equal.

    On the subject of love and sex (what book about France could be complete without it), Baldwin finds that the French dislike the recently-elected Sarkozy for that reason. He publicly declares his love for his paramour, and in the eyes of the French, that’s a sign of weakness. There’s nothing as un-French as letting the woman you love get in your way, so when the diminutive President announces she’s the love his eyes, the people at the office roll their eyes. As for the treatment of immigrants, the author probably gets a better deal because he’s White and American. On the flip side, the Africans are not well treated, which he sees firsthand at a mandated seminar for foreigners. Almost all the students are African Muslims, and the tension is obvious; all of them have jobs, all of them work without a safety net, and all of them have no extended family in the country to fall back on. They’re the people that have it the hardest, and they’re the people that you don’t see. Yet here they are, having a pampered twenty-something tell them how to behave, talking down to them. The “teacher” implies that these grown men and women aren’t behaving well enough, and the “students” probably want to say “who do you think cooks your meal when you eat out?” The immigrants have become the new lower class. It’s the part of French life that the American in Paris wouldn’t normally see.

    Rosencrantz Baldwin does a great job of writing without bias, but in the end, it’s a depressing story. He starts out fascinated by the French, and ends up depressed, fed up, and resentful. What begins as the adventure of a lifetime ends up as a “Dear John” letter to Paris. Perhaps the problem is that he expected far too much? Or maybe he would’ve been happier in another part of the country, like Marseilles or the Breton Coast? I’m told that outside of Paris the French aren’t fond of the Parisians; they view them as overly bourgeoisie and snobby, and nobody likes the high cost of living there.

   Baldwin isn’t the first American (or Englishman) to not enjoy Paris. George Orwell lived there on a loaf of bread a day, and Adam Gopnik (in his memoir Paris to the Moon) found it tiresome. Going to live in Paris can be one of two things; either you love the experience, or it goes with a bang into the grave of idealism.

An Empty Spoon by Sunny Decker

    The good old days are debatable. Some people are nostalgic, some are glad they’re over. There’s a scene in the Book of Exodus where the Israelites long for the “good old days,” in their case it’s their life in Egypt. Sweating it out in the desert, they moan “let’s go back to Egypt, at least we had food and water.” They don’t seem to remember all the persecution, just the scraps of food they occasionally got. At the time I was learning this, my Bible teacher warned us against nostalgia. He said “we never had to lock the door at night, because nobody would break in, and that’s because there was nothing to steal!”

    An Empty Spoon reminds me why there were no “good old days.”  It’s a bleak memoir, with a few funny scenes in between, by Sunny Decker, a teacher in 1960’s Philadelphia. She taught at a bad high school, with all of the problems that we see 50 years later – drugs, broken homes, teen pregnancy – and there’s nowhere to turn. The parents were no help, and the building was a mess.

    There are some positive things that happen in this book. Decker gives a troubled teenage girl a copy of Anne Frank’s Diary, and the girl reads it with diligence. Then one morning the girl comes into class crying, throws the book at the teacher, and screams “you lied to me, she dies in the end!” I consider this positive; the teacher got the girl to read, and got her to think. Perhaps this girl was used to seeing friends or family get killed, and thought that Anne Frank’s two years of hiding in an attack would end with her escaping? Another funny story is where she takes the kids to see Streetcar Named Desire, and they think it’s a comedy. They see the big stupid guy in the bowling shirt, his spineless wife, his alcoholic bimbo sister-in-law, and they think it’s meant to be funny. The kids laugh so loud that the actors can’t concentrate.

   An Empty Spoon could’ve taken place right now, because almost every problem I see in this book is the same as what I see now. There’s a scene where a student, probably older than the others, shows up with his two children. Most would be horrified at the idea of paying child support at that age (no money left to tease the girls) but for this boy, it’s his way of promoting his virility. The girl he had them with is an Italian-American. I’m surprised her parents didn’t have her killed for getting pregnant by a Black boy.

    When we look back at the 60’s, we tend to think that it was an age of rights and progress, but like the Israelites in Exodus, we ignore the bad things. There were riots in almost every city, and crime and drug use increased. We have the Civil Rights movement to remember well, but after that was over, what did we have? There was poverty, crumbling schools, and family violence. Bill Cosby once said “when we won the battle, we started partying a little too soon.” I agree, but I have something to add; after the party, the whole country woke up with a 40 year hangover. Even Woodstock, that great festival of peace, love, and music, ended badly. Some of those musicians would soon die of drug overdoses, and let’s not forget, the “peace and love” didn’t go well at Altamont

   I’m going to give kudos to Sunny Decker for staying positive in a horrible time. She put up with all sorts of stuff from her kids, and even from Dick Gregory, who came to the school and told the kids to burn the place down (I’m not joking.) She was dealing with 20 year olds who couldn’t read, kids who showed up once a week, and 17 year old boys who were making babies with multiple girls. President Obama seemed to have a fondness for the 60’s, but I don’t. I wasn’t alive then, and I wouldn’t want to go back there. Even if I could warn the people of the future, I doubt they would’ve listened.

The 1960’s were probably our worst decade. Good riddance.