What It's Like To...
What It's Like To...
What It's Like to Be a Member of the NYPD
Movies and TV shows often take us behind the scenes of the New York Police Department--but the truth is often stranger than fiction. Vic Ferrari spent 20 memorable years as a member of the NYPD, most of them as a detective. In this episode, he shares stories from his many hours on the job, and on the streets: targeting car thieves; sitting overnight with a just-deceased man; working at Ground Zero on 9/11; and lots of crazy anecdotes too (like how he almost got his gun belt stolen from a bathroom stall). Learn about what goes on during the different shifts--and which one is known for "big game hunting"--and why, despite everything, Vic doesn't consider himself "brave."
In this episode:
- Vic's interest in police work began at a young age (02:04)
- Inside the Police Academy (02:55)
- Qualities you need to be a good police officer (06:36)
- Why you can't play your day (or your week) in the NYPD (09:01)
- How you get yourself to repeatedly go into dangerous situations (13:11)
- One example of "I can't believe this was my work day today"(17:17)
- Day shift vs. 4:00-midnight shift vs. overnight shift (21:09)
- Why a sense of humor is essential in law enforcement (23:32)
- Working in the auto theft division of the NYPD (28:31)
- Being in the NYPD on 9/11 (31:41)
Want to know more about Vic?
- Find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vicferrarinypd/
- Follow him on X: @VicFerrari50
- Check out his books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B01IIQXLBC
Want to know more about "What It's Like To..."?
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[00:00:00] nothing good happens after 11 p. m. That's where you're running into shootings, homicides, rape, serial killers, terrible car accidents. Cause people are drinking too much at night. who's out after 11 o'clock it's cops, cabs.
for the most part, anybody floating around after 11 o'clock at night is up to no good.
If you're looking for a job with action and excitement and where no two days are ever the same. Being a member of the New York City Police Department might be it. My guest today, Vic Ferrari, spent 20 memorable years as a detective in the NYPD. He says that to police New York City's 8 million people, you need not only the world's largest police force with more than 35, 000 officers, but also a sense of humor.
Since retiring from the force, Vic has shared his experience and his humor in a series of books about his time at the NYPD. And he also now has a podcast. Vic, welcome. I'm so glad to have you as a guest on my [00:01:00] podcast.
Hi, Elizabeth. Thank you for having me on your show. I appreciate the opportunity.
I'm really glad to have you here. I think so many of us have this image of what the NYPD is like, mostly from, you know, movies, TVs, books, and that kind of thing. it seems like a kind of a serious place and then your books come along and show us the humorous side.
Well, it's
Where does the reality land?
funny thing is, I thought I knew what the NYPD was about before I got hired and I was a cop buff as a kid. I mean, there's a police station in my neighborhood and on Saturdays when my mother would take me to the movie theater, I It was like, screw the movie theater.
I want to hang out with the cops. You know, I was five
uh,
looking at the police cars and watching the cops, how they came in and out of the building and every little boy is fixated with that gun. every Saturday we would go to catch a matinee, I was fixated on the police cars.
And then later when I was 10 years old, my friends and I used to sneak into the local post office and steal FBI wanted posters off the wall and go around the neighborhood and [00:02:00] conduct manhunts and I didn't have family on the job, but friends, brothers and stuff, and just picking the brains of the cops.
I thought I had it all figured out. And then when you
go into the police academy.
Because you'd been practicing your whole childhood.
but I was practicing for another play and it was totally different when I got my foot in the door.
What was the Academy like?
Oh, I hated it. Um, it was six months of, uh, indoctrination. I mean, listen, they, they taught you a lot of good things. The biggest hangup I had with the police academy was the instructors weren't battled hardened people that, you know, had been in gunfights or made multiple arrests and had a lot of street experience.
You quickly figure out. There's people in the police academy, a handful of years older than you. So like how much street time did they really put in? And then you find out as you go along and learn how the job works, there's people in there that are either hiding or they want to study for the next sergeant's exam or the next lieutenant's [00:03:00] exam.
so in the police academy at the time, I don't know what it's like now, but they had steady hours, weekends off and all the time in the world to study. So it was kind of. You know, getting picked on by kids a couple of years older than you. And the ironic thing is, all they beat into our head in the police academy is, listen, when you hit the street, don't listen to those old timers.
Because they're just going to get you in trouble. Then you go to a precinct and the old timers tell you, don't listen to that crap you learned in the police Academy. That's nonsense. You just got to stand there like,
no,
the truth has got to be somewhere in the middle.
yeah, who do I listen to? So did you start getting some of these crazy experiences from day one in the police academy or is that a little more, sort of bootcamp structured? When did all these wild stories start happening?
it started in the police Academy. So, early on, I'm 21 years old and I came in a class of 1200 people. and they broke us down into companies, which are about 30 and. [00:04:00] There were a couple of guys in my police academy class that, I mean, they were wild and although it's a paramilitary thing and very structured, I mean, they were always causing problems.
It was actually quite funny, but the experiences and all the crazy stuff was later on when I was making arrest and in a precinct because in the police academy, It's very structured. But once you get out in the street and now you're dealing with people and then you have to learn different personalities you can't live a sheltered life and then become a New York City police officer and excel.
You just can't because it's coming at you fast and it's baptism by fire.
Yeah, I was going to ask, are there certain qualities or qualifications you feel like a person must have or can't have I guess you can't have a sheltered life. What are other things you must or cannot have you think to really succeed in that
Oh, no, we definitely get people that come through there with a sheltered life, but what's unique with the New York City Police Department. So at any given moment, there's 30 [00:05:00] to 40, 000 members, and you've got 77 precincts of police stations scattered across New York City's five boroughs, right? In addition to that, you have all these specialized units, and that's where people that live sheltered lives Will find their way, you know, you can't have someone that's gun shy or afraid of things working in the 4, 4, the 4, 6 precinct or the 7, 5 precinct on midnights where you're making multiple arrests.
You're in car chases. People are shooting each other. Those people tend to wind up in places like the truancy unit or the ceremonial unit or the puzzle palace. 1 police plaza doing something with paperwork. So, yeah. It's such a large department and there's so many different units that the people that really aren't going to put in the street time, they quickly figure it out.
Either they have a phone call or we call it a hook to get them out of there or they start putting in for things immediately because they're like, this isn't what [00:06:00] I signed up for. As far as qualities that you should have, you should be intellectually curious. You should be curious about things because a good cop is always asking questions.
He's always looking around. You have to be brave. and you have to use common sense and good judgment. one of the biggest misnomers and what I quickly realized, was. What I grew up watching television and movies is, when you become a cop, you're responsible for your actions. It's not like Lethal Weapon when you get into three car chases in a gunfight.
You go home and you're having a couple of beers and you're laughing at it. Oh, no, no. you get into a car accident, they're all over you. And if you get into multiple car accidents, you're not driving. You're going to be walking around for a real long time. They don't want you getting into car accidents.
That's why they don't want you getting into car chases for stolen cars. Did we do it? Yeah, of course, but if a car chase went sideways and God forbid, somebody got hurt, well, they're going to hurt you.
It's not like on television.
best case [00:07:00] scenario. You and I are working together 9 o'clock in the morning. A guy comes out of a bank had just robbed a bank and he's shooting at people and we shoot and we kill him and that happens at 9 o'clock in the morning. You're not going home for about 24 hours.
They are going to investigate that patrol supervisor, the duty captain is going to show up, people from police plazas are going to interview you, detectives are going to interview you, a district attorney is going to show up with a stenographer and take a statement, crime scene units are going to be there, and I mean, if the shooting doesn't look right, they put you immediately on what's called modified assignment, they take your guns, and they ship you off to one of the NYPD's versions of Siberia.
The court section on midnights or out at the Whitestone Pound where planes are flying over your head and route to LaGuardia airport every 15 minutes. And there's like a lost civilization of feral cats that live underneath the abandoned cars where you're walking through and they attack you.
So it's not like you see on TV where someone pulls a gun out and God [00:08:00] forbid, shoot somebody and it just gets glossed over. It's not, it's thoroughly investigated.
so is that kind of an example I referred to at the beginning, like no two days are ever the same. like, if you're supposed to show up at nine in the morning, you really don't know what your day is going to hold. And even if it's going to be eight hours long or 24 hours long, you really are just.
It's going with the flow of wherever the city is taking you that
Oh, it's happened so many, you can't plan, a life in the NYPD as far as day to day because You have to be flexible, and when you make an arrest, just a simple arrest, you are married to that person. You've got to bring him into the station house. You've got to search him in front of the desk.
You're putting him in a cell. You've got to fingerprint him. there's so much paperwork. Then after that several hours in the station house, then you've got to take him down to Bronx Central Booker, to Manhattan Central Booker, depending on what borough you work in. You go down there, guess what, the computers are down.
You're standing on line with a guy in handcuffs for [00:09:00] hours. And guess what? When he does go in down in central book and the desk officer down there asked him, are you sick? You're not feeling good. The guy goes, yeah, I'm a heroin addict. I'm going through withdrawal. Guess what? You got to take him to the hospital.
And get him treated and then bring him back. Yeah. And an emergency room. They don't fast track cops with prisoners. You're sitting there like everybody else. So a simple arrest that you think you're going to be done in 345 hours can take a day. Same as you think you're going home and there's a building collapse. They're going to take the day shift and send them to the building collapse and the 4 to 12 are going to handle patrol. So. Yeah, I've had things happen where I was at work two or three days without going home as just something happens. So no, you can't really plan your day.
or you're weak.
Yeah. Or your
You really don't know how anything is going to go. So can you just describe for those of us who don't know too much, what an officer versus what a detective does how did you decide to become a detective? How did your work [00:10:00] differ
So the flow chart of the NYPD works like this cop, you become a police officer. If you want to go up the civil service ladder, those are civil service exams. So to become a sergeant, that's a test to become a lieutenant. That's a test to become a captain. That's a test from captain up deputy inspector, inspector, chief, yeah. That's when the politicking begins. You gotta do a good job and know somebody and then you get the bump after a while. Alongside parallel of a police officer is detective. Alright, so that's not a civil service exam and you have no power over a cop, you can't order them around or tell them what to do.
But if you work in an investigative unit, narcotics, the auto crime division, vice, internal affairs, if you work there for 18 months, You get a good evaluations. You're promoted to detective. It's an investigative position and there's a slight bump in pay. I think it's like about 3, 000 a year. Uh, your chart is a little different as far as the amount of [00:11:00] hours you work a week
a patrol cop, you report to a precinct every day. There's three shifts, right? 8 to 4, and midnights and you're going out in a radio car or a foot post. And you're a slave to the radio. The calls are coming in and you're responding to the calls. You're filling out paperwork.
You're making an arrest. You're helping people the NYPD works. There's different types of detectives do different types of things. So in a precinct, usually on the 2nd floor, you have what's called the detective squad, usually depending on the size of the precinct and how busy it is. It's probably about 20 detectives up there at any given time and they handle what's coming in from patrol.
So. Well, A detective squad handles bounce checks, domestic violence, robbery patterns, burglaries, the occasional homicide that comes in. Then you have detectives that work in organized crime. That's where I worked the majority of my career. So narcotics, auto crime, vice, OSID, which is going targeting [00:12:00] specifically the five families of New York or organized crews or gangs. Then you have
like mobs.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah, the mafia
Wow, it sounds really scary. It sounds like a movie.
take another job. If you're scared, you know what I mean? It's it's, you know, it's kind of what I signed up for,
so I guess you weren't ever, awake at night thinking, Oh gosh, look what I have to get into tomorrow. you and your crew are just kind of brave people who feel like. We got this. We're going to jump into whatever lands on our plate tomorrow.
you know, I guess it is being brave. But at the same time, I won't ride a motorcycle. I'm not the guy that's going to jump out of a plane. to me, those seem like dangerous things to do that could shorten my life expectancy. When I was 21 years old, that's all I ever wanted to be is a New York City police officer.
And you just ignore really that part of your brain that tells you could get killed. It just, [00:13:00] it's not going to happen to me. And I mean, some years, 10 cops got killed a year in the NYPD. And you feel terrible, you grieve, but you don't think it's going to happen to you. You just don't.
And because if you start thinking that way, you're not going to be the first one going through the door. you chase a stolen car and the guy crashes and now it's off to the races. You're not going to chase that guy or climb a fence going after somebody. You're just not. So for me, it was like playing cops and robbers as a kid, but on a grander scale,
And could it also be that you felt like you had good training? I mean, clearly even the people who did get killed had the good training and had bad luck, but you probably went in and felt like. I have the weapons I need, I have the information I need, and It's not like me going in, where I have no idea what I'm doing.
you were well trained, you were prepared, and so that probably helped with this feeling of what I call bravery. It's different than jumping out of a plane.
so when I was in the police academy, it was six months. And. [00:14:00] they can't prepare you for the street. They just can't. And now they're in the academy, eight months, 10 months. That's great. Nothing is going to prepare you for reading body language. the biggest thing with a lot of cops they can't get over the first year is people lie to you all the time with a straight face.
And there's a lot of people with poker faces out there giving you BS stories that you've got to quickly figure out. I always say you go to a dispute. There's three sides to every story. What he said, what she said, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Huh.
lot of cops early on, it happened to me where you're just standing there and it's like, I guess he's telling me the truth.
it's a lot to digest that they can't teach you in the Academy. you have to be exposed to the street.
I'm sure it also matters a lot, who you're working with. You know, who you happen to be paired with and the people around you. Are you allowed to choose maybe as you get more experience who your partners
Well, when I first was hired, you went into field training for six months and in field training, they would sprinkle the [00:15:00] rookies out on foot posts. I worked in the South Bronx, so I was sprinkled on a foot post in the South Bronx, a couple of days a week. And then once in a while you would ride with the training sergeant.
Two rookie cops would be the training sergeant and they would respond to a lot of the crappy calls because they wanted you to get a taste of everything. So DOAs, homicides, and you're vouchering evidence. and I was lucky because I had a couple of really good field training officers.
I remember one time. It was like a wake up call to me, probably about four months into my field training and my field training sergeant, we're in the car. It's at night. We're driving around and I go, I don't understand why we can't be on our own. And he goes, what? Put two rookies in a car together.
I go, yeah, he goes, you don't have the eye for it yet. And I said, I think I do. And we're driving around five minutes later. he says, look over there and there was a radio car off in the middle of nowhere with its lights on, had a car stop with a couple of guys in the hood of the car.
He goes, did you see that? I go, no, he goes, get your ass over there and let's help them out [00:16:00] because here I am running my mouth. I got an ear for the radio. I've got that eye to spot things. And I just rode right by it and he turned around and, you know, give me a pull on the leash and goes, you just missed that, right?
Like minutes after I had just made a fool out of myself. So it takes a while to get seasoned and see things and get that ear for the radio.
well, yeah, there's no substitute for experience too. So everyone needs to get the reps under their belt, what was one of them? Most, surprising things that you came across, do you remember a day where you just came home and thought, I can't believe that was my work day today.
Oh, yeah. Especially early on. Um, I was a rookie cop right out of field training. I'm in a South Bronx precinct and, rookies always get the crappy calls. And from the 4 to 12, this gentleman died in his apartment. So, in the NYPD, when someone dies, the police respond, the EMTs [00:17:00] respond, and detectives show up and they're trying to determine is it a natural death or an unnatural death?
They're fairly certain it's a natural death. They leave a cop behind, even if the family is there, and you still got to wait for the medical examiner to come and even though the EMT has pronounced them dead, the medical examiner has to show up and that could take hours because there's a lot of people that die in New York City.
So you could be, we call it sitting on a DOA. You can be sitting with a DOA for hours. So obviously this guy had died earlier the 4 to 12 shift. I'm coming up on midnights and they go, Hey, rookie, go up to that apartment, relieve the guy that's up there from the four to 12. So I go up there and, uh,the cop tells me, we're waiting for the medical exam.
And he leaves. So I'm in the South Bronx. I was up on the sixth floor apartment. The windows are all open. It's dead of summer, right? No central air. And, uh, this guy expired. In his living room. He's laying there and, uh, you [00:18:00] know, I don't know what to do. I'm just kind of standing in this hot apartment, so I start looking at his photos.
Just trying to get an idea of who he was and did he have family. I just, it was my first deal,
You're probably just trying to pass the time too. That's your weight.
uncomfortable being in a room with a dead guy that's decomposing. You know, it wasn't my first DOA, but this was the one that really opened my eyes. And I'm up there about 45 minutes and there's a knock on the door.
I think it's the medical examiner. It's the guy's brother who lived downstairs and he goes, you mind if I come in? I said, sure. And, the guy starts telling me about him and his brother grew up in North or South Carolina. They came up North for better opportunities like 50 years ago. They both became bus drivers.
I remember that they both were retired. Either one of them married and they lived literally one apartment above the other. So the old guy goes into the refrigerator and he takes out two beers and he puts it on the table and he opens one for me. And I said, Oh, sir, I'm not allowed to drink on duty. He goes, son.
I'm not drinking alone, I'm [00:19:00] just standing there like, what am I supposed to do? I'm in this apartment, this poor guy, you know, he's there grieving his brother, so I had a cocktail with the guy, right, which I could have gotten a lot of trouble or even fired back then, and, it was the weirdest thing, I was up there with this guy for a couple hours.
Medical examiner shows up, the
apartment, looks around, goes, yeah, natural death, and then tells the gentleman, yeah, you can make your arrangements, call the funeral home, so he leaves, so we'll wait now for the funeral home, right, and we're still talking, funeral home comes, They take the body out and, um, I told the guy, listen, I'm really sorry we had to meet this way and, you know, I'm just kind of trying to bow out and he hands me another beer and I go, no, no, I can't.
He goes, but the next time we meet and it was the oddest thing because you know, I'm thinking to myself, does he mean he wants me to be the one that shows up here when he dies in his [00:20:00] apartment?
Oh my. Yeah. I
way I looked at it and, um, It just kind of unearthed me, and I left, yeah, I went home about 8 o'clock in the morning, and I'm just kind of laying in bed, like, I just can't believe I'm in this room, in an apartment with this dead guy, and then talking to his brother, and then he made that comment to me,
That way, the fact that it was sort of midnight to 8am I'm sure that timeframe always makes things a little more odd, right?
Well, the midnight
Nothing great happens in those hours.
so day shift in the NYPD day shift is usually older cops that don't want to get involved in anything and, you know, I hate to disparage my former employer, but the day to shift is usually. The report takers, they show up 5 minutes 10 minutes after something happened.
They take a report. They really don't want to get involved with an arrest. 4 to 12 is where they put the kids, the young cops, because you [00:21:00] need a lot of energy. You're racing at 30 calls a night. You're eating in the car. Sometimes you don't even get a meal hour. You just go, go, go, go, go. And then everybody goes out for a drink on the 4 to 12 midnight is big game hunting.
like you said, nothing good happens after 11 p. m. That's where you're running into shootings, homicides, rape, serial killers, terrible car accidents. Cause people are drinking too much at night. And that thins the herd for cops that'll work in the midnights, right? Because who's out after 11 o'clock it's cops, cabs.
is someone working late just passing through? Yes. But for the most part, anybody floating around after 11 o'clock at night is up to no good.
So to certain people on the force, right? Yeah. Choose to work that shift. Do some people say that's the fun one for
Well, the NYPD went to steady tours in the early 90s. But before that, we had what was called the nine squad chart. So there were nine squads in every precinct and you were rotating and everybody in the [00:22:00] department knew everybody.
Cause you were working with different people
Oh, I
when they went to steady tours, they kind of created three different police departments. If that makes any sense, because the day tour people really, the only time they see the 4 to 12 is when they handed them the keys to the vehicles, So it's three different police departments,
some people work midnight because they have second careers, so they work a midnight shift, they go home, they get a couple hours sleep, they've got some kind of business, some people do the midnights because they can get their kids ready for school, or you also have people on midnights that get dumped there to get punished, but there are guys and girls that love midnights and they tend to be the sharper cops.
you said it was big game hunting. That's a funny phrase, but they may be like the big challenge. so you told me Kind of a strange story. Was there something that just really made you laugh? because you have a lot of humorous stories in your books too, or you have a humorous take on them, I should say.
You have a great sense of humor, so,
of humor in law enforcement because [00:23:00] you're exposed to so many bad things that if you let it get to you, you're going to be a basket case. So, cops or effective ones, you've got to learn how to compartmentalize things, take the good with the bad and not dwell on things and move on for the bad things that you see and you're exposed to.
so many funny things. Um, yeah. One time I was in plainclothes. We were getting a ton of cars getting broken into. We follow this guy off the train. He's looking in cars, he's walking around, he's looking over his shoulder, he dips into a pizza parlor, he comes out a couple minutes later, and we watch him go around the corner, he breaks into a car, we roll up on him, we pull him out of the car, we put him against the hood of the car, I stick my hand in his pocket and I burn my hand, I'm like, what the f He had a hot slice of Sicilian in his pocket. He was a lunatic. He was a, we call them EDPs, Emotionally Disturbed People. But yeah, he bought a hot slice of Sicilian, put it in his pocket. And when I was searching him, I had like burnt cheese on mine. I'm like, [00:24:00] what the? That was the last thing I expected. We were
Oh my gosh.
scared the living crap out of me.
He had to save that pizza though. Get it in the pocket.
Yeah, I guess it was too hot for him. And he figured it would cool off while he was breaking into a Toyota. I really don't know the mindset.
Oh my gosh. You probably don't know the mindset of a lot of the people that you were apprehending and going after.
a lot of embarrassing things happened to me along my NYPD career, including one time I had to use the bathroom in a public place. I hang my gun belts on a hook in the bathroom stall. I sit down, I'm getting ready for liftoff, and a couple of teenagers run into the next stall, jump on the toilet, and try grabbing my gun belt.
It turns into a hockey fight.
Oh, my gosh.
S. I got my
gun back,
What do you do when you're in the middle of,
You grab your
gun belt,
and you need to use the bathroom?
uh, well, from that day forward, it sat in my lap.
Aha. Okay. Did you ever consider working [00:25:00] in a different city or moving anywhere else? I mean, New York just had so much more going on than any other even big city. Did you ever think like, Oh, maybe I'll scale it down a little bit?
It wasn't scale it down, but in the early 90s. there were a lot of NYPD cops that were moving down to Florida and you would hear in stories from everybody about how great it was to be a cop in Florida. So I had a friend that lived in Florida and I used to go down and visit, you know, in my 20s, spring break
And I started the process. because it's different down here. The police departments are small. So , if you already have the training, it's called a comparative compliance course where you go, I think, for three weeks of training, then you apply to different police departments, and then you've got to take a state exam.
And I was starting that process And I put that on the back burner, but I thought about it.
so speaking of narcotics, and you've mentioned other things, homicide, vice. various things. How does one [00:26:00] decide which ones they are drawn to or where you kind of become more of an expert, what you like, I
It depends. Um, some cops are just happy being patrol cops. That's what they want to do. The hours work for them. They like wearing the uniform. They like helping people. patrol and they're good at it. Others can't get out of their own way. Thank you. And they rack up either too many civilian complaints, or they don't have good evaluations, or they've screwed up so many times that they're dead, basically.
I mean, they're not gonna go anywhere. I grew up in a neighborhood where there was probably more car thieves per capita than any place else in the world. So as a kid,
Where was that?
section of the Bronx and I worked at a gas station and there was always guys blowing through there with broken steering columns, broken vent windows, trying to sell the car, trying to sell parts on the call, wanting us to fix a stolen car for them.
So I knew what to look for with stolen cars and I always enjoyed the thrill of a chase. So even [00:27:00] before I got into the auto crime division, I was always getting into car chases and locking up car thieves. And. I always wanted to get into the auto crime division, but the auto crime division and probably is like that to this day is very difficult to get into because there's only 120 detectives covering the five boroughs.
I was lucky enough that I had so many stolen car arrest under my belt and I had good evaluations that my former sergeant that I worked under in narcotics was in the auto crime division and I just happened to run into him one day and he goes, you know, we're picking up people and I says, I'm not going to get in there.
He goes, give me your application. I said, oh. I went, I had a good interview and next thing you know, I was a detective in the auto crime division for the last 10 years of my career
Oh, wow. And so what did that entail? you just literally would go after someone would say my car was stolen and you would go search that
No. So in New York City in the 90s, we were
See, that's the simple suburban girls
no, no.
tell me the real version.
New York City in the early 90s, New York was averaging over 150, [00:28:00] 000 stolen vehicles a year. So even if you were on patrol and you had a computer in the car, it was like playing the slots. You ran enough plates. You were going to get a hit and you're off to the races.
The auto crime division wants to target the head of the snake. Basically, will we pick off garden variety car thieves, the pains in the ass? Yeah, we do that all the time, but they want us going after the chop shops, the guys exporting stolen vehicles out of the country, organized gangs and crews that when we take them down, the numbers will go down because they're stealing in such volume. So we would go up on wiretaps, put cameras on locations, sometimes do undercover work, get undercovers into place. I wasn't an undercover in this case, but our unit... Actually, the Queens team had set up a trailer and opened up a junkyard and had mobsters starting to shake them down where they got all arrested, trying to shake down detectives.
So we worked on a lot of big cases.
Wow. did you go undercover [00:29:00] sometimes
but not deep. later in my career, 40. I have the look, I know everything about cars. So yeah, I purchased a couple of stolen vehicles a couple of times in cases, but not deep undercover. It was like just meeting up with a guy. And buying a stolen car.
That always seemed to me like that's like Academy Award level acting to be a really good undercover cop. You got to commit to your role. Keep going.
Uh, I saw more, undercover work when I was in narcotics. because in narcotics, you want to go up the ladder. And, you do it, buy and bust, I did a couple of buys in narcotics, I ghosted a lot, which means you follow the underco I wasn't an undercover in narcotics, but sometimes you would have a dual role, or you would ghost, meaning you would follow the primary undercover on a street buy, to make sure.
The by goes down, your undercover is able to get out of there safely and nobody messes with him
Wow. I bet your heart was [00:30:00] pumping on that.
first couple of times. Yeah. But then after a while, like everything else, it's just your job. But yeah, the first couple of times I was a nervous wreck
Things become routine that sound very dramatic to the rest
one time in an auto crime. We went out to Queens. I was. Gonna buy a stolen Lexus off this kid and, uh, the Bronx office never had all the good toys the mothership had, uh, so I had this tape recorder, a listening device. It was big and I had taped underneath my armpit and I was like, this thing is
gonna burn a hole in my armpit and I'm standing there. Me and my partner went. To meet with this kid to buy a stolen car and it was autumn but still it was hot and uncomfortable as hell and I was like moving around and a couple of times my partner like gave me a kick in the legs.
Would you stop being so jittery? I'm like this goddamn thing is killing me.
Has it changed? I guess with technology, maybe things have gotten, yeah, a little easier. Were you in the NYPD on 9 11?[00:31:00]
I was down there by 1 30 in the afternoon walking around.
So what did you end up doing on that day?
Well, not much. that particular day I was up in the Bronx, which is about 45 minute ride into lower Manhattan with traffic. I came in at seven in the morning. My sergeant and I were going to go down to court and the courthouse is literally blocks from the trade center. I was going to sign up a confidential informant.
This guy had it locked up for a couple of things and he wanted to play ball. He wanted to be an informant. So the plan was for me and my sergeant to meet with the district attorney and his attorney. It's called Queen for a day where the defendant gets pulled out of jail and Whatever he tells you, you can't use against him short of a homicide.
And if he's got fruitful information, possibly we'll get him out of jail and sign him up as a confidential informant. So my sergeant showed up to work late and I was on him. I was like, come on, we got to get going. And the 1st plane hit. So we put on the television.
We were watching on TV. The 2nd plane hit. We knew it was terrorism. The phone started ringing off the hook. They told us to [00:32:00] get into uniform and stand by and by 1 1 30 in the afternoon. We were down there walking around, but we really didn't serve a purpose. I mean, we're just walking around.
It was like something out of a science fiction movie. It was a ghost town down there. Everything's covered in that debris or dust. as we're walking down, I think it was Broadway. You could see like hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of women's shoes, high heels, because all those women that worked in the financial district, when they will get out of there, they can't run in their heels.
They just dumped them. And the closer you got to, ground zero, the more difficult it was to see because you had all these particles. Just blocking the sunlight. It was like a twilight and we got up. There was like that scene at the end of planet of the apes, where there's a big piece of the facade just stuck in the ground and planet of the apes.
It was the statue of Liberty head. And I'm looking at him like. how did this even happen? And it's down there till about 5 o'clock in the morning. And, uh, they told us to go home, run your uniform through the washing machine, and be [00:33:00] back by 5 p. m. the following day. And the first week I was down there, Then they pulled us out and then when they started lifting the debris out of the pile, I did the bucket brigade where you go down there and there's a trail of people and we look like ants on a pile of sugar and passing five gallon bucket, a joint compound with debris that would go down the line and they were sorting through it.
And then later, when they started bringing in the heavy equipment to clear stuff out. I got sent out to the dump out in Staten Island because we worked in auto crime. They had us opening up the crushed vehicles to make sure no one had perished inside.
wow. So intense to be, right there, a part of it.
Oh, yeah. you just didn't know what to expect going down there. chasing a stolen car or there's a guy inside who might have a gun, you know, you know how to handle that, you know, two large buildings. Knocked down by a couple of airplanes.
You really didn't know what to expect.
[00:34:00] Yeah. other things. I'm sure you've run drills of how to handle this, that, and the other thing. there was no prototype for dealing with this or the aftermath. So how did you know when it was time for you to move on from the department?
never thought about retirement until about a year and a half before I pulled the plug at 20 years. And a 20 year run with the New York city police department is America around. You got your ups, you got your downs, you're laughing, and there's all this wild stuff going around you as you're moving around. If you stay on that horse too long, Seabiscuit's gonna throw you on your head. Everybody outlives their usefulness. And I was in a great office for 10 years, I had great supervisors, but what happens? Things change. My supervisors are retiring or getting promoted to lieutenant. New regimes are coming in, at the top level.
A lot of my co workers are going different places, and I [00:35:00] saw myself at 41 years old, which is relatively young, as being the old man. In the office, and I knew at some point I wasn't going to be the go to guy anymore. Different supervisors were coming in with different ideas and I I never had a poor supervisor in my 20 year career with the NYPD and I got stuck with one there and I said, you know what?
This is a wake up call. It's time to put in your papers and learn how to do something else. It was a great run. And I had seen guys and women that had stayed too long and the way they were treated. And I said, you know what? It's just time to go and do something else. As much as I love it, the NYPD is never going to love you back.
So it's just time to go.
So it wasn't a sense of sort of burnout because I was thinking, on that job, do you even feel like you have days off? On your weekends, can you turn that job off ever? Or is it just exhausting?
I'm sure it was exhausting for some people. I loved it. It's everything I [00:36:00] wanted to do in life. So for me, I almost felt sad retiring, but I knew it was the right thing to do if that makes any sense.
Yeah.
It's like ending the
Well, then it was a smart
that you really care about, but you just know it's going to get toxic at some point or it's just not going to work out.
You knew yourself well enough and you knew the job well enough and you could see what was ahead.
No, you're 100% right. That's a good way to put it. Exactly.
So, then did you start writing right after that? is that what became your next career? Or did you go into something
Oh, no. I moved down to Florida and I, I reinvented, I came out of retirement. And I became a police officer down in Florida, which was a big mistake because here I am 41 years old. I came from work in organized crime in America's largest police department to a bad episode of Reno 911. And now I'm on midnight shift and I'm doing the domestics and I don't have time or patience for that.
The patrol had passed me by. That's a young [00:37:00] man's game. And they want you to learn how to wrestle alligators down. I had a half a day of learning how to wrestle an alligator with duct tape.
Wait, literally? Literally, Wrestle?
Oh no. Oh God. I was, I, no, I told them, I said, I'll shoot it. And they go, you can't, I'm just telling you right now, not wrestling an alligator.
Didn't want to do that. So I was a cop down here for a cup of coffee, six to eight months.
I was like, you know what? It was a great department, but the game had passed me. I'm going to retire. So I'm bored out of my mind and friends and family like, you know, you got all these great stories. You could tell a story. Why don't you get into writing? And that's what I did. And I started writing a series of books of behind the scenes look at the New York City Police Department with a humorous touch and they started selling and to sell books.
I started going on podcast and radio interviews and it just kind of turned into a little cottage industry for me.
people say, write what you know, talk about what you know, and you know this so well. It was your life. And as you say, You loved it. So who better to tell [00:38:00] these stories?
I'm lucky enough to have a career that people find interesting, right?
So if you were to do it all over again, as a young 21 year old, you're very happy with your career choice. it was a great path for you.
Yeah, if I could go back to the future, I'd do it all over again, sure.
I'm a moth to a flame. What else would I have done? my dad was a butcher.
well, Vic, it's been really fun. I've learned so much more about the NYPD. I lived in New York for a couple of years and had no idea everything that went behind the
So thank you, Vic.
Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you.