Beware the Night (7 page)

That night, after seeing the movie I lay in bed with the lights turned out, scared shitless being all by myself, and remember my father calling to see if I was all right. When he heard the sound of my voice, he knew I wasn’t, and told me to come and sleep with him. What a relief! I particularly appreciated that kindness from my father because he was a strict disciplinarian with a quick temper—a trait I’ve inherited myself, and struggle to control. My dad and I also have the same name, so my mother, Lillian, called him “big Ralph” and me “little Ralph,” even after I reached my full size of five foot ten and 200 pounds.

My mom was an easygoing woman who always had a smile on her face and liked to laugh and joke around. That made her popular as a beautician, and customers flocked to our kitchen in Flushing, Queens, every Saturday to get haircuts. I would eat my oatmeal surrounded by the cloying smell of hair spray, which I hated, and wish she’d get some other job.

Although we lived in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, my parents were Catholics. I wasn’t a particularly devout kid myself, even though I was an altar boy. I trembled throughout the first mass I served, terrified I’d somehow screw up and embarrass my mom and dad. Over the years my parents never pushed me to go to mass, saying they didn’t want to pressure me into religion, but thought I should make up my own mind. I got a good feeling from the old-fashioned church we attended, and sometimes went there at lunchtime to sit in a pew and enjoy the silence and warm protection I felt there. That church was a refuge during turbulent times in my youth—and I got quite angry when I went back there a few years ago and saw its beauty had been destroyed by an ugly, misguided renovation.

While my dad didn’t push God on me, his fondest dream was that I would become a professional baseball player. By the time I was three, he was putting a bat in my hand and teaching me how to hit. I quickly came to share this passion, and devoted every spare second to the game. I attended Queen of Peace Parochial School and played baseball for the Catholic Youth Organization every April. The rest of the time I played in pickup games after school; in the summer, I was out on the field with my bat from sunup to sundown, just for the fun of it.

As I got a little older, I got involved with a street gang, the Falcon Boys. Compared to the gangs I see now as a cop, ours was almost laughably tame. We never shot or stabbed anybody—and didn’t even carry weapons. Sometimes we’d get drunk and have fistfights with another local gang or get into some minor mischief around the neighborhood. I was afraid to take it any further than that, because my dad took me aside one day and said, “If the cops ever bring you home, I’ll break both your legs!” Being the kind of guy he was, I saw no reason to doubt him. His guidance was more powerful than any peer pressure, so even though my friends and I were a bunch of obnoxious little punks, I never got in any real trouble. In fact, thanks to my father’s warning, I was scared witless every time I saw a policeman!

Although I wasn’t much of a student—and certainly was no intellectual—I was an avid reader. When I was thirteen, I found a bookstore where I could get used books for a quarter apiece, and I eagerly devoured everything I could get my hands on about police work and the occult. When I heard the owner of the store telling another customer that he was going to the police academy, I thought he was incredibly lucky to be a cop chasing bad guys, just as I’d seen in the movies. At night I’d sit in front of the TV and watch cop shows, but every Saturday night it was
Creature Feature
and
Thriller Theater
for me. While I couldn’t get enough of these shows, they frightened my little sister Lisa, who always left the room when they were on. Though my young mind didn’t understand everything I was reading and seeing, I knew that some of the horror stories must be true.

My favorite books were about a pair of real-life psychic researchers named Ed and Lorraine Warren, who have been investigating the supernatural since the late 1940s. This couple, founders of the New England Society for Psychic Research in Connecticut, became internationally famous in 1972, when they were asked to investigate bizarre phenomena at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. An Army major there complained that a general’s residence on the property appeared to be haunted: His family often found that someone—or something—had rifled through their belongings or stolen valuable objects, yet no intruder could be found. A wet spot on a kitchen cutting board refused to dry, no matter what was done about the dampness; and an invisible force kept tearing the sheets off one of the beds.

Using her psychic ability, Lorraine inspected the building and detected several spirits. In one bedroom, she clairvoyantly felt the presence of President John F. Kennedy, to the amazement of onlookers who knew that he had slept there. In another room, her mind’s eye saw a bossy female ghost that she identified as the culprit in these mysterious happenings. She learned later that General MacArthur’s mother, well known for her extremely dictatorial personality, had ruled as lady of the house between the general’s marriages.

She also got a mental picture of someone else, a very angry African American man in a nineteenth-century Army uniform, strangely bare of military braid and emblems. This struck the major and his aides as improbable, since they knew of no black man at West Point during that era. The general, however, did some digging and discovered that an African American soldier was tried for murder at West Point around the turn of the century. Although he was acquitted, Lorraine felt sure that his anger and guilt over the trial was what made his ghost linger at West Point.

That was exciting stuff to me, but I was even more mesmerized by another of the Warrens’ cases, which took place in a Long Island suburb. Around Christmas of 1975, a young couple, George and Kathy Lutz, and their three small children, moved into a house they’d just bought. This house had a lurid history, since the oldest son of the previous owner had gotten up one night, grabbed his .35-caliber rifle, and slaughtered his mother, father, two brothers, and two sisters in their sleep. Within a month of moving in, the Lutzes fled their new home in abject terror, describing a savage supernatural assault that later became infamous as
The Amityville Horror.

Although I would have been content to while away my time playing baseball and reading these hair-raising but incredibly fascinating books, when I got to the third year of high school, my dad told me I should think about what to do with my life, should I not become a pro ballplayer. I said, “That’s easy, I’ll become a cop.” My picture of what police work was all about came mainly from cop shows on TV: I imagined nonstop action as I saved lives, solved mysteries, and made one spectacular arrest after another. After my high school graduation, I enrolled in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, mainly to play baseball for the college. If the major leagues somehow decided they could live without me, I’d at least be learning about law enforcement. And since I’m now wearing a badge, not a baseball mitt, it’s not hard to guess how things ended up.

In 1984 my childhood interest in cop life turned into what I now call “the Job,” when I entered the New York City Police Academy. I quickly discovered real-life police work wasn’t anything like TV shows: It’s hours of boredom, riding around in a patrol car looking for trouble—and responding to radio runs—with spurts of pure adrenaline and stress when you suddenly get a 10–13 call (officer needs assistance), flip on the sirens, and speed to the crime. On the way, your body gets pumped for action, so you’re ready to charge through a blazing gun battle, if need be, and collar the perps. Half the time, however, the emergency is over when you get there, and it’s back to cruising the streets while your racing heartbeat slowly drops to normal.

A year later, as a twenty-three-year-old housing cop, I was overwhelmed by terror in broad daylight after reading
The Haunted,
a book about a family under diabolical seige. Here I was a police officer who’d faced down armed perps in public housing projects, and I was scared to death in my own bedroom imagining the living hell these people had endured. The book confirmed what I’ve known for years: These aren’t just stories. Not only do ghosts exist, but there are spirits that are pure evil, which I now refer to as demons or the demonic. I remember thinking that I’d never want any of this to happen to me and had absolutely no desire to get involved with investigating this stuff.

Initially attracted by the action-filled aspects of police work, I began rethinking my life after being shot in the line of duty in 1986. I was off-duty at the time, looking out the window of my mother’s apartment, when I saw a guy running down the street with a box under his arm. Call it a cop’s instinct, but I knew something was wrong, so I strapped on my gun and went down to investigate. Then the guy started zigzagging down the street, the typical body language for a 10–30, police radio jargon for a robbery. I started running too, sure some poor soul—probably the nice storeowner down the block who’d been a frequent target of bandits—had been relieved of his valuables.

With all the running I did during my baseball playing, I caught the guy pretty quickly. The box tumbled to the ground, and jewelry spilled out. That was enough probable cause for me, so I drew my gun and identified myself as a police officer. The guy seemed meek and was shaking all over, but he suddenly grabbed my gun and got a round off.

Although I took a pretty good hit in the arm, and blood was everywhere, I managed to slam the guy against a chain-link fence and tried to wrestle my gun away from him. I knew if I didn’t, his next shot might be the last sound I ever heard. After a lot of screaming on his part, and bleeding on mine, I got my weapon back, but the guy got away. Somebody called 911, and more cops and an ambulance showed up in no time. I gave the anticrime unit (plainclothes cops) the best description I could of the perp—who was arrested two weeks later, and pled guilty to the attempted murder of a police officer—then let the paramedics put me on a stretcher.

With all that blood on the pavement, you’d think I’d had a major brush with death. Luckily, the wound turned out not to be that serious: The scar is now hidden under a tattoo reproducing a photo of my daughter Daniella’s face, at age three. I also have a portrait of my other daughter, Christina, on the same arm. I love having pictures of my kids there because no matter how old they get, I’ll always remember them as my little girls.

While I was at the hospital, the police chaplain came in case I needed the Last Rites. Talking to that priest made me feel guilty: I’d let my Catholic faith lapse after my days as an altar boy and rarely attended church or received communion anymore. In those days, religion just didn’t seem that important or relevant to me. I was working in a violent, dangerous environment that seemed to have little to do with God. My first assignment, Operation Pressure Point, landed me in Manhattan’s drug-infested Lower East Side to combat street crimes. There I saw “demons” in human flesh, predators who spent their days and nights robbing, raping, and killing their fellow citizens. Of course there were plenty of good people in this inner-city neighborhood too, but I rarely met them unless they’d been the victims of some ghastly crime.

People who are skeptical about religion often ask how I can believe in God at all. They see that the world around them is full of corruption and violence, and say, “What kind of God would allow evil to happen?” Even when my faith was at a low point, I never thought this way. What these people don’t understand is free will. God doesn’t interfere with people’s decisions in life, because He doesn’t want robots: He wants us to
choose
Him. But there’s a stumbling block along the way—and that’s the Devil. When people deny the existence of God, how can they possibly believe in His most potent adversary? But if anything, all this horror shows just how real the Devil, and the evil he inspires, is. It wears away at even the most devout cop: Alcohol abuse, divorce, and suicide are common among my fellow officers—and on every police force in the world.

Although I felt good about helping get crooks off the streets—first in the Lower East Side, then in the slums of the South Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn (East New York), and now as a sergeant in the Bronx again, where I work the midnight-to-8:00
A.M
. shift in the Forty-sixth Precinct—the savagery never stops. Although the Four-Six—“the Alamo,” as this precinct is known by cops—is only 1.32 square miles in size, it’s one of the busiest and most dangerous in the world. More than 118,000 people—nearly two-thirds of them Hispanic, one-third African American, with about 2 percent white and 1 percent Asian—live in this crowded inner-city area, which is also home to 1,950 violent parolees.

In a typical year, we investigate 32 murders—roughly one every eleven days—87 rapes, 682 violent assaults, 870 robberies, 1,022 burglaries, and 2,234 car crashes. Our cops also help 4,472 sick and injured people, respond to 76,789 radio runs (911 calls)—and make 10,353 felony arrests. Even in New York City, that volume of calls is incredible: When our seven sector cars turn out for patrol at midnight, at least 19 jobs usually await each one. As a sergeant, I have to respond to every serious call that comes over the radio. It’s my job to decide whether to make the location a crime scene and whom to detain for questioning and whom to release. I decide whether we need detectives, helicopters to chase suspects, an evidence collection team, the accident investigation squad, the canine unit, or a whole array of other specialized resources.

To give an idea of what that’s like, here are a few cases I handled this week: The first call came over the radio as a 10–53 (car accident). “One man down, likely,” Central added, meaning that there was a victim who was likely to die. At the scene, we reconstructed what happened: After smashing into a parked taxicab at such high speed that one passenger was flung through a window and landed eighty-three feet away, the driver sped away, utterly indifferent to the fate of his friend. We arrested the callous son of a bitch later that night. Although the injured man was lying in pools of blood and brain fluid when we arrived, he was still alive when the ambulance came.