In Support of P.O. Luigi Osso
Irvington Police Department
Supporters can send donations ect., to :
Irvington Police PBA
85 Main Street
Timmy, I wish you would forward the following message for me to everyone involved:
A Poem for her father, by Patrice Venditti-Boral
You will live on.
You were taken from us so early,
Unfairly and unjustly stolen from our family and our home.
You will live on.
You are still with us for every single moment,
Watching over each and every day.
You will live on.
You are missed more than imaginable,
Aching for you increasingly as time passes by.
You will live on.
You are here with us through our mother,
Taking on your role and forever carrying you in her heart, her soul mate.
You will live on.
You are alive through the eyes of your parents,
Wrapping their arms around us with unstoppable love and thoughts of their son with every blink.
You will live on.
You exist through your brother and your sister,
Showering us with affection and forever remembering their brother’s love.
You will live on.
You are present in every friend who had the great pleasure of knowing you,
Recounting unfinished stories of your laugh, your bravery, and your friendship.
You will live on.
You are honored by your community, whom you protected,
Recalling the truth of that fateful night your legacy is forever—our hero.
You will live on.
You shine through each of us—your daughters,
Wishing every wish for another moment to hold our hand, to walk us down the aisle, to hold your grandbabies or tell you ‘Daddy we love you.’
You will live on.
You are our love, our family, our friend,
Remembering you like a candle lit for eternity, your spark will never die.
You will be loved forever and you will forever live on.
Subject: Fwd: FW: NE 10-13 - VERY IMPORTA NT !!!!!! Chief Intro , ..VERY IMPORTANT ! CHIEF SEEDMAN ON CARDILLO CASE
Date: 5/2/11 6:50:59 PM
I'VE GOTTEN THE OK TO FORWARD AND POST ON RESPECTIVE WEB SITES
THIS
IS THE (ADDED/NEW CHAPTER) OF AN EXERPT FROM RETIRED NYPD CHIEF OF
DETECTIVE ALBERT SEEDMAN'S BOOK CALLED " CHIEF " , THAT WAS
ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 1973 . NOW RE-RELEASED AND INCLUDED IS THIS NEW
CHAPTER ARE ALL THE " PLAYERS " AND " DEAL MAKERS " FROM THAT INFAMOUS
TRAGIC DAY .
THANKS TO THE EFFORTS OF AUTHOR PETER HELLMAN , ONE CAN PURCHASE HIS SOFT COVER ON WWW.AMAZON.COM OR ELECTRONICALLY ON KINDLE OR NOOK .
FRATERNALLY
TIM MOTTO
Introduction to the new Edition
BETRAYED
By the nature of his work, and even more by personal inclination,
Albert Seedman was never one to readily reveal information about his job
as Chief of Detectives of the New York City Police Department. That
went double when the probing came from a journalist like me. From the
first hour I met him in his cavernous office at the very grand palace
that once was police headquarters on Centre Street, I knew that, as an
interviewee, he would be a tough nut to crack. If I posed a question
that delved where he didn’t want to go, which was often, the first
response I’d get was a puff of cigar smoke in the face.
Eventually, after writing a cover story about Seedman in The New York Times Magazine ,
followed by two years of collaborating with him on this book, I was
sure, maybe even cocksure, that I’d coaxed out of him most of the key
information about his exceptionally eventful 30-year career in the
police department. That included understanding the reason why, on
Friday, April 28, 1972, he abruptly resigned as Chief of Detectives.
That was two days before his appearance on the cover of the Times magazine, habitual cigar clenched between his teeth at a jaunty angle.
Seedman
hadn’t lied to me about why he quit. What he’d done was to share only
the periphery of his motivation, not its core. When Seedman finally
revealed what was really behind his resignation, almost forty years
after Chief! was first published, I asked him why he had waited so long.
He
delivered the answer with emotion cracking his 92 year-old voice: “I
loved the police department so much that I couldn’t drag it through the
dirt by saying what those bastards did.”
What
Seedman chose not to expose then was the recent and shameful conduct of
the highest echelons of the department in a case centered on the murder
of one of its own. By his own choice, it was his last case, and the
only one which he had been forbidden to solve.
About ten days before the magazine was due out, Seedman called me and asked, “When is that story going to be printed?”
“It’ll be out next Sunday, April 30.”
“That wasn’t my question. When does it get printed .”
“On the Tuesday night before it comes out.”
Seedman
growled and clicked off. On Wednesday morning after the press run, the
most famous chief of detectives in NYPD history announced he was
retiring. That Friday was his last day at work. On Monday, he started a
new job as vice president for security at a department store chain. The Times profile
became outdated news, and the editors were miffed. For me, the outcome
was positive: Seedman was now free to co-write his memoirs, which he
could not have done if he’d stayed on the job, and we quickly agreed to
do it together. Negotiating with him over a book contract turned out to
be a cinch compared to trying to extract information from him about the
inner workings of his criminal investigations.
Seedman’s
resignation, as he put it to me back then, was the result of a
disagreement over the future of the Detective Bureau between him and
Patrick V. Murphy, then New York’s police commissioner. Murphy had once
been a patrolman but never a detective, and he did not buy into the
glamour of the gold shield. His view was that “ The most important person in a police department is the general patrol officer .”
Detectives, by the nature of their work, were more independent and
secretive than patrol officers. Murphy was by nature an administrator
rather than a crime solver. It bothered him that detectives did not
always keep to regular shifts. If they were working on a pressing case,
the clock, and even the calendar, didn’t matter. What mattered was
getting the case solved. “How do we know where your people are, Al ?”
Murphy had once asked Seedman.
“I know where they are.”
That
answer was deeply unsatisfying to the commissioner. He wanted the
detective bureau reorganized, so that there would be more oversight, and
Seedman had done that for him. But Murphy had in mind a more
fundamental change. He wanted to elevate the stature of patrolmen, while
dialing back the elitist image of detectives. That meant reconfiguring
the standard patrolman’s dream of one day being awarded a gold shield.
Catch a bank robber, or save a citizen, and you could be spot-promoted
to third grade detective. Above that, there was second and, top rung of
the ladder, first grade detective to aspire to. The detective who had
caught one of the city’s most notorious killers, “Son of Sam” David
Berkowitz, for example, was immediately promoted to first grade.
Murphy
had indicated to Seedman that he wanted to eliminate detective grades.
He also pondered removing detectives from their independent command
chain and requiring them to answer to uniformed patrol officers. Seedman
had done as much reorganizing as he felt was constructive. He did not
intend to oversee the dismantling of the largest investigatory force in
the country, second to the FBI.
Seedman
was the most recognizable chief that the detective bureau had ever
known. So long as he remained, the bureau would retain its mystique.
“Once Murphy saw my picture on the cover of the Times magazine, I
couldn’t have stayed on as chief,” Seedman told me back then. That
seemed like a reasonable explanation of why he decided to resign
pre-emptively. With a high-paying, security director’s job awaiting him,
he’d have a soft landing.
Arthur
Fields, the publisher of our book, died on the day it went to press.
Even without him, the book did well, briefly becoming a best seller. And
then it went out of print for decades. Thanks to a program of the
Authors Guild called Backinprint, along with the dawn of ebooks, our
book got a new life. And that put me back in touch with Seedman after
years of being out of contact. I wasn’t sure if his unlisted number in
Florida, where he had retired, was still the same, or even if he was
still alive. But after one ring, I heard his familiar low and gravelly
voice: “Hell-o,” with the accent on the first syllable. Detail oriented
always, he told me that he had taken care to renew the book’s copyright,
allowing us to go forward.
And
now came an unexpected bonus: He was ready to tell the full and
dispiriting story of his resignation. For the first time, he spoke to me
of the Harlem Mosque case, in which the fear of racial rioting was
deemed by higher-ups all the way to Mayor John V. Lindsay, to trump the
proper investigation of the murder of a lowly patrolman.
The case began on April 14, 1972, 16 days before Seedman’s profile appeared in the Times magazine. At 11:41 a.m. that Friday, a call was made to 911:
Caller: “ Hello, this is Detective Thomas of the 2-8 Precinct .”
Operator: “ Yeah .”
Caller: “ I have a ten-thirteen [officer needing help] at 102 West 116 th Street .”
Operator: “ 102 West 116 th Street ?
Caller: “ Right, that’s the second floor .”
Operator: “ Second floor ?”
Caller: “ Right .”
Operator: “ Hold on .”
The
nearest patrol car was just around the corner. In barely a minute, it
pulled up in front of 102 West 116 th Street in Central Harlem, a corner
building notable for its bulbous gold dome. On its second floor was
Mosque No. 7 of the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims. Normally, the
steel front door would have been closed, but it was now wide open.
Patrolmen Phillip Cardillo and Vito Navarra dashed in. Right behind them
were the second responders, patrolmen Victor Padilla and Ivan Negron.
Nobody was at the reception desk in the small vestibule. The cops
started to dash up the stairs to the second floor, weapons at the ready.
They were met by more than a dozen young men of the Nation of Islam’s
security wing, called the Fruit of Islam. These dark-suited men blocked
the way to the mosque, supposedly the source of the distress call
moments earlier. Now came what seemed to be an attempted new distress
call, this time from the responding cops:
Unidentified cop: [ Inaudible screams ]
Central: “ Ten-five…is there a footman requesting assistance ?”
Unidentified cop: “— 116 th Street , central .”
Mayhem had erupted in the lobby and on the stairs leading to the
mosque. A scooter cop arrived and found a bloodied and dazed Vito
Navarra on the sidewalk in front of the building. Its steel door was now
bolted shut, with three cops still inside. Another arriving cop, Rudy
Andre, heard a gunshot within. Peering in through small square glass
windows in the door, he saw the ongoing struggle. The cops were
desperately trying to hold on to their guns. Andre shot out the windows,
then fired several more times into the ceiling. At 11:46, a new call
went out over police radios:
Central: “ Shots fire, shots fired, shots fired. 102 West 116 th , repeating units responding. 102 116 th , shots fired at this time. ”
Andre’s
shots, while apparently aimed over the heads of those within, caused
the Fruit of Islam soldiers to retreat down the stairs to the basement.
One of the three trapped cops managed to unbolt the door. Andre,
bleeding from a glass cut, along with a small army of cops who had
converged on the building, entered the vestibule. The stairs and floor
were smeared with blood. Bloody footprints led down the stairs. The
trapped cops had been beaten and one of them, Phillip Cardillo, 31, had
been shot. He lay at the bottom of the stairway he had tried to ascend,
mortally wounded.
A
detective named Randy Jurgensen, who had been on a stake-out a few
blocks away, was among the cops who rushed to the mosque. He would
eventually undertake an obsessive, rule-breaking, stop-at-nothing,
investigation of the case lasting more than one year. His book about it,
“Circle of Six,” written with Robert Cea, is a gripping read. The scene
he found was “ as close to a riot as anything I’d ever seen…a NYPD
helicopter hovered low; the womp-womp-womp of its blades swirled up dust
and debris….I stared at the four blooding cops being dragged and
carried into an RMP or ambulance .”
Seedman
was at his desk at police headquarters on Centre Street when “one of my
clerical guys came in and said two cops had been shot in Harlem. I told
my driver, ‘Let’s go.’” Arriving from the west, they hit gridlock two
blocks from the mosque. Seedman told the driver to park the car and
wait. He walked the rest of the way alone. Jurgensen, already on the
scene, wrote of the chief of detective’s arrival:
“ And
then I saw a man walking through the crowd. His bold advance divided
the masses in two. It was like Moses had appeared wearing a tailored
suit. He was tall and tan with wavy salt and pepper hair. He looked like
someone out of central casting, a throwback movie star from the
forties. You couldn’t tell who he was by his threads. Every cop he
passed saluted. He was chief of detectives Albert Seedman—my boss. ”
In
front of the mosque building, Seedman observed “a big, angry, crowd and
a lot of noise, and a bandaged guy in an ambulance, but no riot.” In
the vestibule, he saw cops in bulletproof vests searching for a gun that
had been stripped away from one of the responding officers. Downstairs,
a team of detectives were guarding sixteen Fruit of Islam men who were
sitting in chairs facing the wall, twelve feet apart. Standard procedure
called for questioning and fingerprinting each of the detained men.
Among them was likely to be the cop-shooter.
Seedman
was surprised to see Charles Rangel, the dapper Harlem congressman,
appear in the basement. Rangel had just conferred in front of the mosque
with Benjamin Ward, the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner for Community
Affairs. At the time, Ward held the highest departmental ranking
attained by a black officer, and years later, Mayor Ed Koch would
appoint him to be the city’s first black police commissioner. At the
mosque, his priority was to keep the community calm. Rangel announced to
Seedman that Ward wanted the mosque to be cleared of cops at once. This
edict was seconded by Louis Farrakhan, minister of Mosque No. 7. “He
was hanging around in the basement, but I didn’t have any idea who he
was,” says Seedman. (Farrakhan had been an antagonist of Malcolm X, who
had preceded him as minister of Mosque No. 7. Malcolm X was murdered in
1965 as a result of dissension within the Nation of Islam. Lenox Avenue,
also called Sixth Avenue, on the side of the mosque, got an additional
name in 1987: Malcolm X Boulevard.)
Seedman
remembers that Rangel told him, “That crowd upstairs, they know you’re
down here. I don’t know how long it will be before they come down. If
you don’t leave now, I can’t guarantee your personal safety.”
“I’m not asking you to guarantee my safety, Congressman.”
As
he had done countless times previously, Seedman was intent on getting a
criminal investigation off on the right foot. He didn’t imagine that
political fear would take precedence over law enforcement. But Mayor
Lindsay was then gearing up for a run for the White House. He needed
racial peace in his city. And so that became the urgent priority of his
police commissioner. “Murphy had been desperate to find ways to deal
with the threat of riots,” Seedman says. “He’d asked me to figure out
what we could do.” One precautionary step that Seedman had quietly
taken, with Murphy’s approval, was to borrow two buses from the transit
authority. Each morning they were driven to the police academy, then on
Manhattan’s East Side. “If we really needed to have a show of strength,”
Seedman says, “we could put helmets on the heads of two busloads of
cadets and give them nightsticks and send them to any scene of unrest.
Sometimes I’d stop by the academy to make sure the buses were there.
The
bus option was “made to order for the mosque situation.” Seedman called
Chief Inspector Michael Codd, a tall, formal officer of the old school.
As chief of department, Codd was the NYPD’s highest ranking uniformed
officer. Seedman requested permission to send two busloads of cadets to
116 th Street.
“Codd
used one word: ‘Denied.’ And he made it clear to me that we should
abandon the mosque in order to minimize the threat of a possible riot.
And then he hung up.”
Seedman
was stunned. Could this really be happening? He called back to the
chief of department to reiterate the need for the recruits. This time,
he was informed by a secretary that Codd had gone to lunch. With that
brush-off, the chief of detectives felt a door was being slammed shut on
his life as a police commander.
“I felt I had been betrayed,” he says.
Seedman
had already made a spot decision to move the investigation from its
home precinct to the 24 th precinct, just south of Harlem. “I knew that
the 28 th would be in turmoil, because of what had happened to its cops.
It made more sense to run the investigation out of a neutral precinct
house that was close by.” Seedman looked at the sixteen Fruit of Islam
men still facing the walls under police guard. Among them were
eyewitnesses to the shooting. One may have been the shooter and that
person, or another, may have been the caller whose false “10-13” call
had set off the events at the mosque.
But
higher authority had spoken. The chief knew he no longer had the power
to keep them under arrest. “For a split second, I thought about
disobeying Codd’s order to get out of there. But I would have been
fired. So I was a good soldier.”
Turning
back to Rangel, he said, “If you give me your word as a United States
congressman that you will deliver these men to the 24 th precinct house
at 3:30 this afternoon, I will release them to you.”
Rangel,
with Farrakhan at his side, gave his word. “He was very cordial,” says
Seedman. “We shook hands on it. I felt like it was a peace treaty. I
never dreamed that a man in Rangel’s position would not keep his
promise.”
“Okay,
let’s go,” Seedman ordered. In a state of disbelief at having to
abandon the crime scene, the cops followed John Kinsella, Manhattan
North detective chief, up the stairs. Seedman lingered a moment. When he
got to the top of the stairs, he didn’t see the others and didn’t know
they had slipped out a side door onto Lenox Avenue. “I would have
preferred to be with them,” he says. “Instead, I went out the front door
onto 116 th Street.”
The
milling crowd was “very dense,” and “not friendly.” Some in the crowd
had attempted to set a stalled city bus on fire. Seedman began to walk
the two blocks west to his waiting car. “Bricks were being tossed off
the roofs. The guys up there were tearing apart chimneys to get their
projectiles. One hundred and sixteenth is a wide street, so I moved off
the sidewalk into the very center of it, where it was easier to dodge
the bricks. It was a nice, warm spring day. People recognized me.
Somebody yelled, ‘Hey, Seedman, why don’t you go back downtown to your
Mafia buddies.’ I felt like pulling out my gun and firing a few shots.
That’s when I really made the decision that I would retire.”
That
afternoon, neither Rangel nor the suspects showed up as promised at
the 24 th precinct. But Farrakhan did. He demanded the release of two
Fruit of Islam men who had been arrested before the agreement had been
struck with Rangel.
“That
night, I had a party to go to,” says Seedman. “I didn’t have time to go
home first, so I caught a ride with somebody else and sent my car to
pick my wife, Henny. When I got to the party, I told her that I was
retiring.”
The
media was confused over the shooting at Mosque No. 7. Why had the
police entered a place of worship with guns drawn? Who had shot
patrolman Cardillo? Had he accidentally shot himself or been a victim of
friendly fire? The deputy commissioner for public affairs, Robert
Daley, passionately tried to persuade the brass to allow him to issue a
statement unequivocally stating that the officers who entered 102 West
116 th Street had done so in the belief that a cop in the second floor
mosque was in need of assistance. As for who shot Cardillo, the powder
burns on his uniform indicated that he had been shot at close range. But
the brass held back from timely approval of a statement that the cops
had acted properly under the circumstances.
Farrakhan
was not shy about his own slant on the affair. “The two policemen came
charging into our temple like criminals, and they were treated like
criminals,” he said at a press conference on the day after the incident.
Farrakhan
claimed that an unwritten agreement between him and the local police
required that no officer enter the mosque while armed. If there was such
an agreement, none of the responding cops seemed to know about it. In
any case, it would have been superceded by the 10-13 emergency call.
Later, Deputy Commissioner Ward, interviewed by the New York Amsterdam News ,
was contrite: “I believe my investigation showed, at least to my
satisfaction, that there were some errors made on the part of the
police. For those errors, and the consequences of those errors, I
apologize to Minister Farrakhan.”
By
then, Phillip Cardillo had been buried, leaving behind a wife and three
small children. Traditionally, the mayor and police commissioner attend
the funeral of a fallen officer. But neither official attended
Cardillo’s funeral. Lindsay had gone skiing and sent his wife instead.
Murphy and his wife had gone to Europe. That was the last straw for the
commander of the 28 th precinct, Deputy Inspector Jack Haugh.
Immediately after the funeral, he quit the department.
Forced
to abandon the crime scene and lacking witnesses and suspects after
their non-delivery by Rangel to the 24 th precinct, Seedman’s detectives
had scant chance to solve Cardillo’s murder. The source of the faked
call for assistance which set off the mosque case was never identified.
But an obsessive, year-long investigation by Detective Randy Jurgensen
did finally produce a credible witness to the shooting. His name was
Foster 2X Thomas, who came into the picture when he was arrested for
using a stolen credit card. A mosque member and baker in an on-premises
restaurant, Foster 2X was preparing lunch when he heard the commotion on
the stairway. He arrived in time to see another, very large, mosque
member, Lewis 37X Dupree, lift Cardillo off the ground and wrestle away
his service revolver. Then he got off one shot at close range into the
cop’s midsection. At the mosque school, Dupree was the dean of boys.
At
Dupree’s trial in November, 1976, Foster 2X Thomas testified calmly and
cogently about what he had seen that morning at the mosque. But,
lacking evidence that might have been gathered at the abandoned crime
scene, including a two year delay in scraping bullets out of the walls,
the testimony of a single witness wasn’t enough. Dupree’s murder trial
ended in a hung jury which voted 10 to 2 in favor of conviction. In a
retrial in 1977, Dupree was acquitted. Later, convicted of drug running,
he was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.
Even
after the two trials, the questions about what happened at Mosque No. 7
were not put to rest. In 1980, a Manhattan grand jury, convened by
District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, determined that the police
investigation which Seedman wanted to lead had been “ curtailed in deference to fears of civil unrest in the black community .” It further found that “ The
long-term interests of justice in apprehending criminals were
overridden by the short term-concern of preventing civil disorder.”
And
still the case has not been put to rest. In 2011, almost forty years
after Cardillo was murdered, a proposal is being considered by the local
planning board to rename 123 rd Street, where it borders on the north
side of the 28 th Precinct station house, Ptl. Phillip Cardillo Way.
The proposal is the idea of Deputy Inspector Rodney Harrison, commander
of the 28 th precinct, who spearheaded a petition campaign for the name
change that got over 2000 signatures. As of this writing, the only
memorial to Cardillo at his station house is his framed photo, hanging
with those of 12 other slain cops from the precinct, on the wall
opposite the sergeant’s desk.
I asked Deputy Inspector Harrison what impelled him to try to rename a street after a cop who was killed when he was a child.
Harrison,
a quiet-spoken black officer, explained that it went back to his days
as a young undercover narcotics detective in Brooklyn. At midnight on
September 21, 1996, dressed in mechanic’s clothing, he approached a
narcotics dealer in a housing project to try to make a buy. The dealer
was nervous. He said he didn’t recognize Harrison. Moments later, as
Harrison and his partner were heading to their car, the dealer and
another man caught up with them and shot his partner. Harrison returned
the fire, wounding one of the assailants. Displayed on the wall of
Harrison’s office is the N.Y.P.D. Combat Cross, a gold Maltese cross
suspended on a green ribbon. The second highest departmental medal after
the Medal of Honor, it is awarded for “heroism while engaged in
personal combat with an armed adversary.” Though his partner survived,
Harrison remains “very sensitive to the issue of a cop being shot.”
Every
spring, a parade of cops on motorcycles rides in honor of Cardillo. The
motorcade goes first to his graveside in a Queens cemetery and then
proceeds to Harlem to drive by the site of his murder. “I think that’s
nice, but I felt like, let’s do something more,” says Harrison.
Would
that the higher-ups had been as sensitive on behalf of Phillip Cardillo
as he lay dying. All that Albert Seedman could do in protest was to
resign and keep his silence until, having outlasted almost all the
others, he was an old man of clear and painful memory who no longer
smokes cigars.
Todd Cardillo renews calls on city to rename street in honor of cop dad 40 years after he was slain
Saturday, January 15th 2011, 4:00 AM
Matay for NewsTodd Cardillo wants a 28th Precinct street to be renamed in honor of his father, Phillip, a cop who was shot dead at Harlem's Nation of Islam Mosque in 1972.Todd Cardillo was just a year old when his father was shot to death inside a Harlem mosque nearly 40 years ago.
No one has been convicted in the murder of Officer Phillip Cardillo, a married father of three, even after police officials promised in 2006 a renewed focus on the case. The trail has gone cold.
Now an effort to honor the fallen cop - renaming the street in front of the 28th Precinct stationhouse where he worked - also has come up empty. Fear, red tape and a Community Board 10 moratorium on street renamings have brought the project to a halt, the Daily News has learned.
"All these years later, in reality, no one is going to go to jail for what happened to my dad," said the 39-year-old son. "But this is something that would give us a little bit of happiness, an acknowledgment that my dad did the right thing."
Officer Cardillo answered a bogus 911 call on April 14, 1972, reporting a cop in trouble inside the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 on W. 116th St. Cardillo, who was white, was shot and died six days later.
Fearing street unrest would escalate to a race riot, Mayor John Lindsay and then-Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy let 16 witnesses walk out of the mosque without being interviewed.
One suspect stood trial, but there was a hung jury. Then Louis 17X Dupree was acquitted during a retrial.
The murder has long been considered one of the darkest days for the NYPD, but it hurts much more for a son who knows his father only through photographs and stories.
"He died doing his job and doing it the right way," the son said. "But with the coverup and all the controversy, it was all brushed aside."
Last spring, the Cardillo family gained a valuable ally.
Deputy Inspector Rodney Harrison, the commanding officer of the 28th Precinct, got involved. He was the first person from the Police Department to approach the Cardillo family about renaming the Harlem street, on Frederick Douglass Blvd. at W. 123rd St.
The family was thrilled, but police sources said Harrison's supervisors were worried that moving forward without the blessing of the members of the mosque might ignite racial tension.
Harrison has told mosque officials and community board members about his plans to rename the street. He even passed along to Community Board 10 more than 2,700 signatures collected by officers from the NYPD and other police departments in support of the renaming. More than 200 Harlem residents also signed a document of support.
Deputy Inspector Kim Royster, an NYPD spokeswoman, said Harrison and mosque officials were planning a sitdown. Royster said there's no reason to believe the mosque would oppose the renaming of the street.
Still, it wasn't clear when the moratorium would expire.
Community Board 10 would not comment, but a source familiar with the issue said the moratorium was put in place while the city Department of Investigation probes an unrelated street naming that may have involved criminality.
Todd Cardillo is hopeful but taking a wait-and-see approach.
"What happened to my dad should be remembered," he said. "And it shouldn't happen again."
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/01/15/2011-01-15_todd_cardillo_renews_calls_on_city_to_rename_street_in_honor_of_cop_dad_40_years.html#ixzz1BVuaeuDD
Article written By Randy Jurgensen
which appeared in the
Daily News
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:18:40 -0500
Back In The Day 1971-1972
I read with great interest and pride a News editiorial entitled, No. 1 without a bullet, (January 14).
I quote, "in 1972 the N.Y.P.D. "racked" up 994 shooting incidents. In 2010 there were 93."
"In 1971, the year the department started keeping records, police killed 93 people and wounded 221. In 2010, the toll was eight dead and 16 wounded."
I am proud of my police department today.
Let me put some additonal figures of my police department "back in the day, 1971-1972". First and foremost, 13 cops (police officers today) were "set up and executed" simply because they were cops who represented law and order. There were bombings, too many to mention. We, the police, had no vests, no radios, we were outgunned and not supported. These acts were carried out by people of all color and different backgrounds. Again, the sole purpose was to kill cops. During this time, in our great city, there were over 250,000 registered (by arrest) herion addicts, regularly committing crimes to sustain themselves. If we had 250,000 people with TB, the city might have been quaranteened. They yearly homicide rate exceeded 2,000, that's 2,000 human beings murdered not in Viet Nam during the war, but in N.Y.C. We were called pigs" in fact, many of the signs at the various demonstrations read, "off the pig". We were leaderless, not supported by our own Commissioner or Mayor, in fact, they did not have time to attend our funerals. We buried our own and went out and did the job, trying to just hold the line. We have been told we were not as well trained and certainly not as well educated as today's police officers. Well, we did our best and sometime in the future, when we are again compared "racked up 994 shootings", please visit Police Headquarters and look at the Wall of Heroes for 1971-1972.
Randy Jurgensen
Homicide Detective, ret.
(20 years, Manhattan North-28 Pct.)
author of Circle of Six, the story of an unsolved murder of a police officer
Back In The Day 1971-1972
I read with great interest and pride a News editiorial entitled, No. 1 without a bullet, (January 14).
I quote, "in 1972 the N.Y.P.D. "racked" up 994 shooting incidents. In 2010 there were 93."
"In 1971, the year the department started keeping records, police killed 93 people and wounded 221. In 2010, the toll was eight dead and 16 wounded."
I am proud of my police department today.
Let me put some additonal figures of my police department "back in the day, 1971-1972". First and foremost, 13 cops (police officers today) were "set up and executed" simply because they were cops who represented law and order. There were bombings, too many to mention. We, the police, had no vests, no radios, we were outgunned and not supported. These acts were carried out by people of all color and different backgrounds. Again, the sole purpose was to kill cops. During this time, in our great city, there were over 250,000 registered (by arrest) herion addicts, regularly committing crimes to sustain themselves. If we had 250,000 people with TB, the city might have been quaranteened. They yearly homicide rate exceeded 2,000, that's 2,000 human beings murdered not in Viet Nam during the war, but in N.Y.C. We were called pigs" in fact, many of the signs at the various demonstrations read, "off the pig". We were leaderless, not supported by our own Commissioner or Mayor, in fact, they did not have time to attend our funerals. We buried our own and went out and did the job, trying to just hold the line. We have been told we were not as well trained and certainly not as well educated as today's police officers. Well, we did our best and sometime in the future, when we are again compared "racked up 994 shootings", please visit Police Headquarters and look at the Wall of Heroes for 1971-1972.
Randy Jurgensen
Homicide Detective, ret.
(20 years, Manhattan North-28 Pct.)
author of Circle of Six, the story of an unsolved murder of a police officer
N.Y.S.T.P.B.A. and SIGNAL 30 Fund
Helps a N.Y.S. Shields Member.
N.Y.S.T.P.B.A. PRESIDENT N.Y.S. SHIELDS VICE PRESIDENT N.Y.S.T.P.B.A. LEGAL COUNSEL
Trooper Thomas H. Mungeer P.O. Ronald Ramos Lt. Rich Mulvaney
NYSTPBA President T. Mungeer , and NYSTPBA Legal Counsel Rich Mulvaney presents a check to
NYS Shields Vice President Ronald Ramos from the signal 30 fund, to help and show support for his daughter who is suffering from cancer.
Donation was made possible with the help of and consideration from Michael E. Disilvio, and
NYSTPBA First Vice President Mark D. Robillard and the NYSTPBAs Signal 30 fund.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
An older piece that's truer than ever: "Why I'm Still Proud to Be a Cop" (originally published in the New York Daily News, August 28, 1997)
The New York papers are full of the tale of Feris Jones,
the 50-year-old NYPD officer who got up from her chair at the beauty
parlor to shoot it out with a 20-year-old perp who thought he was going
to rob the place. It didn't quite work out as he had hoped--he lost the
gunfight and, after a brief time on the lam, he went to the hospital
(yes, he survived and will be preying upon us for many years to come),
and then to jail. And she went to Police Headquarters to be promoted to
detective by the Police Commissioner and the Mayor.
How did she stay so cool? "That's my personality," she told the reporters. "I don't fuss about much."
The
newspapers will milk this story for a few days, then go back to writing
about how the cops' health coverage and pensions are bankrupting the
city and must be cut immediately. But the media's hypocrisy should not
make us jaded--it is she who is the star of this show, not them. In
what she did when she had to--and how she carried herself afterward--she
gave New York something to celebrate and someone to look up to.
The following piece appeared in the New York Daily News on Thursday, August 28, 1997--and, man, it's even truer now than when I wrote it.
Why I'm Still Proud to Be a Cop
by George Molé
I still
remember why I became a cop: I wanted to walk down a dark street and
make everyone feel safe. I wanted to see the kids crowd around, and the
girls smile, and the hoodlums slink off the corners, and the old people
unlock their doors and come outside on a summer night. All because I
was there.
Every
good cop starts with that enthusiasm, that heroic vision of police
work--but it's not always easy to hold on to. The maddening bureaucracy
of the job, the lack of support from the public and courts and
politicians, and the distorted view of the police often presented by the
media can disillusion the most idealistic cop.
And the
great, tragic scandals that at long intervals roil the department--like
the ongoing horror at Brooklyn's 70th Precinct--can shake a cop's sense
of pride, the confidence of being respected by law-abiding people.
But I
have worn an NYPD shield for seven years, and every day makes me more,
not less, proud to be a New York City police officer. Because every day
I see my co-workers doing the world's hardest job with skill and humor
and extraordinary grace.
Although I
don't speak for anyone but myself, I believe that most cops are, like
me, attempting to keep an open mind about the innocence or guild of the
accused Brooklyn officers. But the horrible allegations against
them--false or true--are so far outside anything I've seen in my career
as to seem the stuff of fiction.
Here's what I have seen:
Cops of
all races and both sexes work together with a mutual respect and
affection that should be an example for the rest of society. Cops know
that the ethnicity of the person who's watching your back in a dark
alleyway or on some desolate rooftop is quite unimportant.
Cops will
go out of their way to talk to or play with or comfort a child.
Perhaps thinking of their own children, they try constantly to counter
the negative influences, the lack of love and guidance, that many of our city's kids experience.
Cops will
almost always, even at the risk of their own safety, try to resolve a
situation with words instead of force. "Let's talk about it..." or "Try
to calm down, pal..." are always preferred to a stick or a gun.
And sometimes, while they're doing their jobs, they die. Unexpectedly, violently, painfully.
If cops
ask for respect, or the benefit of the doubt when they take action, that
request has been paid for, many times over, in blood.
I think
of Police Officer Vincent Guidice, killed last year with shards of
broken glass while trying to protect a battered woman. Don't bet the
rent money that Al Sharpton will organize a march to protest his death.
Guess
what: Cops are people. They're subject to the same weaknesses,
temptations and dark impulses as anyone else. But what's remarkable is
not that, on rare occasions, they succumb to them--but how rare those
occasions are.
So let's
condemn the very few corrupt or brutal cops. I do. But then let's
salute the rest of my 37,000 brothers and sisters in blue, who humble me
with their patience and bravery, their incredible decency.
Because
right now, somewhere in the city--maybe even in the 7-0--a cop is
handling some tense, potentially violent situation, keeping everything
cool with cynical wisdom and a sense of humor, common sense and the
right words.
He or she wears the NYPD uniform, and so do I. Nothing could make me prouder.
Thanks just isn't enough.....
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