The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (10 page)

“She just didn’t want to deal with all of us,” Adhyl said.

Using a loan from a relative, Ramon Polanco found another apartment at 189 Audubon Avenue. But in order to get this place they couldn’t really afford, he had to make what turned out to be a devil’s bargain. Cheap apartments are such a premium in Manhattan that Ramon had to pay the current tenant $5,000 in cash so the tenant would turn over the lease to them. Ramon weighed the options. He had to decide whether to send his family home and deprive them of the decent schools and better chance in life, or take out a loan.

“He’s deciding whether to send us back or go into debt and borrow money,” Adhyl said. “Sending us back meant we wouldn’t get the education we needed or learn English, which he wanted from us. He decided to do the deal, and borrowed money.”

For Ramon, and for Adhyl, this was one of those important moments in life. Ramon Polanco borrowed the money from a fairly murky character, under the condition that he repay the debt in one year. This man returned not a year later, but in a week, and demanded the full amount. Ramon said
he couldn’t raise it. What could he do? He was supporting four children. The man replied by making Ramon an offer. All he had to do was watch a lobby and let them know if any cops show up. The man controlled an apartment in a nearby building that was being used to stash drugs.

Ramon Polanco, who had until then resisted the dark side of the street, had no choice but to agree. Thus he was drawn into the drug world, standing in the lobby of an apartment building as a lookout to warn the drug dealers above if the cops were coming. The atmosphere in his home turned tense and uncomfortable.

“That’s when the house turned very frustrating,” Adhyl said. “Mom and Dad were always fighting in the house. She would say, ‘I don’t want that money.’ She knew where it was from. The kids knew about it. But for people who came from where he did, it was not a strange thing to do. He’s not selling or dealing. He’s making $300 to $400 a week to watch this apartment and pay off the loan.”

A block away, someone tossed a bucket off of a roof and struck a police officer in the head, seriously injuring him. Two blocks away, a woman was robbed and thrown off of a fifth-floor balcony. There were three apartments in the building stashed with drugs. Kiko Garcia, a young drug dealer whose shooting death by a police officer touched off the three-day Washington Heights riots in 1992, was from the same Dominican town as the Polancos, and Adhyl went to school with his brother. During those riots, Polanco’s mother came and grabbed him from the baseball field at Highbridge Park and locked him in the apartment.

In 1993, Ramon Polanco was arrested on a minor charge but was out in two days. Months later, while going back and forth to court, he met a more significant drug dealer who wanted to hire him because he had a reputation for honesty.

“He’s making more money, and now he’s watching an apartment with a cash and drug stash,” Adhyl said. “One day, he’s helping a guy load two or three kilos of cocaine into a van, and that’s when he’s arrested again.”

The feds, it turned out, were watching the stash house and swept in on both men. Ramon posted $18,000 bail. The source of the leak turned out to be a young man who had been renting a room in the Polancos’ apartment with his pregnant girlfriend.

“He had grown up calling my father ‘Dad’ and my mother ‘Mom,’ ” Polanco said in an interview.

The feds wanted Ramon to take a plea that would put him in prison for six years. He couldn’t handle the time. So, in 1996, Ramon fled back to the Dominican Republic. Polanco remembers the police coming to his house to search for him.

Back in the DR, Ramon disappeared into the communities he knew and lived in a little house that was falling apart. He was gone for three long years and finally returned, slipping back into the country and finding a job as a gardener in New Jersey.

Then one day, the feds came back and knocked on the door. The Polancos’ former tenant, looking to cut a deal, had turned Ramon in, and he went to prison. “They wanted my dad to cooperate, and he refused, he said I have a family,” Polanco said. “If I tell you guys anything, they’re dead. He did five and a half years in a federal prison in North Carolina and was then deported.”

Meanwhile, Adhyl had grown into a teenager, and he saw the course before him: either get sucked into the drug world, as many of his friends had, or take the alternate, straight-and-narrow path. He was attending George Washington High School, a massive public school with a notorious reputation and a few famous alums, including baseball great Manny Ramirez.

“There was prostitution on the third floor, a stash room on the fifth floor where they sold drugs, fighting and violence,” Adhyl said. “Kids beating the teachers, the principal, 18- to 19-year-old kids in ninth grade, repeating the grade for four years. The gangs: Dominicans Don’t Play, La Familia, Netas, Zulu Nation, Latin Kings.”

He says some of his friends got professional baseball contracts, but he wasn’t good enough to hope for such an outcome for himself. So, instead, he focused on work. He got a job as a janitor in the school. When he turned 18, the school hired him as a math tutor and then as a teaching assistant at elementary schools.

“In order for me to keep the job, I had to keep my grades up,” Polanco said. “I had been working since I was 12 or 13 years old. It was the school that kept me out of trouble. Working from three to seven, eight, nine at
night, a student in the school, and also working. I think that’s what kept me away from everything else.”

At 19, he met his future wife, Elizabeth. She was a young teacher. She encouraged him to go to college, and Polanco fell into a life of working and going to school at Technical College Institute, a vocational school. He would leave at six in the morning and not get home until midnight. It was around this time that he began considering a career with the NYPD. He needed 60 credits to qualify to take the academy exam.

“I had many friends dead or in jail because they turned to drugs,” Adhyl said. “Coming from where we came from, we basically had three choices: drugs, the police, or working for the city. Two of my friends had become cops, beating the odds, and I thought I would try for it. I had never been summonsed or arrested as a teenager, and I thought I had a chance.

“I didn’t like people who do wrong. I thought that being a cop, helping people out, wearing the uniform, especially coming where I come from where the odds weren’t in my favor, I wanted to help people. But in the end, things were not like I thought they were.”

Polanco applied to the police academy in 2000, when he had amassed the 60 college credits, but as often happens, his name was not initially called. In late 2001, he got the call, but by then the hiring numbers were reduced for that class, and he was out of luck again.

He used his work money to send cash to his dad in the DR and helped him find a home. He continued to work in the schools and picked up security gigs as well. About two years later, he went through the process again.

Then, during a visit to the DR, Polanco was injured in a car accident, and that delayed him again. Then on July 11, 2005, he was finally hired as a police officer.

He took his turn in the academy on 21st Street. “They didn’t really teach me much in there,” he said. “The floor was nasty and filthy, so bad that you couldn’t put your feet down on it because you would get an infection. There were a bunch of rats. There were 2,300 of us, no room for anything. Everyone screaming at you. Some of them kept it real, some said whatever we learned was bullshit. They were more worried about our shoes not being tied
correctly, our hat not straight enough. I learned nothing there that prepared me for the outside.”

He graduated from the academy in January 2006. Mayor Bloomberg and a dean from Columbia University gave speeches. “I was extremely proud; it was a lot to go through,” Polanco said, remembered the date with some fondness. “It was like a dream come true. And I had a newborn baby on top of it.”

Like Schoolcraft before him, Polanco was sent from his academy graduation into Operation Impact, this time in the 46th Precinct, which usually had the highest crime in the Bronx. He was one of 100 cops sent there from the academy.

“There were already 400 cops in the precinct, and our job was to go out, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and write summonses and arrest whatever moved,” Polanco said. “We were stepping on each other to write summonses, parking, urinating, drinking. Trespassing was a big arrest.”

The pressure was constant. “The numbers were important,” he said. “There was a sergeant over me, and it was all about activity and numbers. One day, he sent me and my partner to some building on Andrews Avenue in the Bronx where tenants were complaining about a lot of drug activity in the building. Go check it out, they said. I stepped into the building. I probably arrested 30 to 40 people in the month.

“There was a big stash house on the third floor, they kept coming by the dozen. I remember the address: 1665 Andrews Avenue. I would go to the second floor and they would whistle. They would get a big surprise. . . . We arrested them for trespassing. It was very easy. I was never a superstar, I wasn’t there to clean up the Bronx. I remember a veteran officer told me, ‘This street’s been filthy since before you were born, and it will be filthy after you’re gone.’ I was there to do my job, to be a cop. We were shot at. We were running every night. We were always running. I was there to be a police officer. I wasn’t there to put hands on someone.”

In 2006, just as Polanco was settling in at the 46th Precinct, the man who had informed on his father to put him in prison was arrested again. The suspect fled to the DR and sought out Ramon Polanco. According to Adhyl, the suspect was concerned that Ramon had information that could put him in prison for a long time. He met him at a nightclub, got him drunk, lured
him outside, and shot him five times. Ramon Polanco, who had devoted his life to his family but entered the narcotics world out of necessity, died there on that street corner.

“My father was my everything, even though he made a lot of bad choices, but he also made the ultimate sacrifice,” Polanco said. “I had a very close relationship with him. I was extremely depressed. I sought department help for that. I was very, very depressed, and decided to try to track down this guy.”

By then, Polanco was a police officer in the 41st Precinct in Hunts Point, a desperately poor neighborhood in the South Bronx, stricken with hookers and drugs and crisscrossed with highway overpasses and industrial yards. He referred to it as “the poorest square mile in the country.”

The area was remote, and that made it perfect for conducting illicit deals and dumping bodies.

He used his new skills to go after the man who killed his father. His commanding officer in the 41st Precinct gave him the time to do it. “I took time off from PD to investigate my father’s homicide,” he said. “That was in 2008. I started calling Interpol, and I was trying to find out where he was, the extradition stuff. They were mean, they called police headquarters, saying there’s a cop calling and harassing us.”

Polanco believed there were witnesses to the killing and went to the Dominican Republic and searched for his father’s killer for two months.

“I was finally able to track him down with the help of a DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] agent,” Adhyl said. “He put me in touch with a prosecutor, and he got the man to show up at a court hearing. He thought it was for another case. They arrested him and brought him back to the U.S.”

U.S. authorities opted to convict the man on drug charges, rather than return him to the DR on the murder charge where, according to Adhyl, the corrupt legal system might have released him. “They feared if they sent him back to the DR, he would buy his way out of the case,” Polanco said.

By 2009, like Schoolcraft’s, Polanco’s view of policing had evolved. The years of pressure from commanders, particularly involving stop and frisk and ticket quotas, had begun to get to him. He found himself essentially being forced to constantly stop young African American and Hispanic men
over and over, many of them high school kids, people who reminded him of himself when he was their age. Very often, he saw, these youths were doing nothing suspicious, and it seemed utterly pointless and insulting to do what he saw as nothing more than harassment. He saw illegal searches, illegal stops, putting phony charges on people, putting them through the system.

“We’d make up a bullshit reason to justify the stop, when, most of the time, we had no reason to justify the stop,” he said. “We were told to say they ‘fit the description.’ But that just meant you were Spanish or black. It was just for the quotas.”

CompStat was the reason: “If last year we had 300 UF-250s, that means this year we have to match that number,” he said. “Otherwise you will be failing. You will be under, and if you have 7 major crimes, let’s say you had 20 major crimes during that time, you’ve got to make sure that yours stays under 20, because if it goes above, you’ll get in trouble.”

He spoke to his partner about the problem. “Our concern was if we keep arresting these kids for no reason, if we keep searching them for no reason, we are destroying their future,” he said. “Tomorrow these kids won’t be able to go to school, tomorrow these kids won’t be able to apply for a job. If they are criminals, we have no sympathy for criminals, but if they’re not criminals, they should not be treated as criminals.”

One of the pressure techniques was called “driving a supervisor.” “You will be taken off your duties as a patrol officer and you’re going to be on the street looking for someone to arrest at all costs,” he said. “Anybody who does any little thing, your job is to arrest him and bring him back and the supervisor is there to make sure that you do it. Only the people that didn’t meet the quota will drive a supervisor,” meaning that precinct bosses would pair an underperforming officer with a supervisor, and the supervisor would drive the precinct and force him to write tickets.

Polanco also objected to the constant pressure for summonses. On many tours, he would be sent to perform what was called directed ticket writing. He and another cop would set up at an intersection and write tickets, the point being to get the precinct numbers up, rather than to enforce the traffic laws. His supervisors didn’t want him to use his discretion, to give warnings. They just wanted the numbers.