The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (2 page)

At that point, his minder appeared next to him with another sergeant who had evidently come in to relieve him. Soon, Adrian was tussling over the phone with them, and then he was being pushed back to the spot in the hallway, the phone growing smaller, the handset swinging by its cord.

“What—I can’t use the phone?” he yelled. “Have you arrested me? I have rights.”

“Just shut the fuck up,” one of the sergeants said and tightened the cuffs.

It must have been after 8 a.m. that Sunday, about 10 hours in, when a doctor wandered by. She sounded Eastern European and spoke with a thick accent. She asked him some questions. He made it clear to her that he was upset about his treatment, that he had been beaten up and dragged to the hospital, but he was most definitely not a danger to himself or others, and thus there was no reason to hold him.

“Do you feel they are coming after you?” the doctor asked.

“Well, they did,” Schoolcraft replied. “They came and got me.”

A couple of hours later, the new sergeant, James, arrived, and the nurses asked her within earshot, “His dad keeps calling. What are we supposed to tell him? What are we doing with this guy?”

“Tell him to call the 8-1,” James replied.

She made a phone call and then walked around a corner, outside of Schoolcraft’s field of vision. She was gone for about 30 minutes.

When she returned, there followed whispered conversations between the cops and the doctors, nodding of heads and making of notes, and then they told him he was going to be admitted to the psychiatric emergency room.

“For what?” Schoolcraft had asked. “For what?”

No explanation followed. He was simply, wordlessly wheeled into the psych ER and deposited on a chair in a corner, near the television. He sat there, dozed a bit, found some paper, and made notes of the sequence of events. He watched the television. It was stuck on the Fox News channel, and at one point, the police commissioner’s son came on and did a segment about beating a parking ticket. Sunday stretched into Monday before they came to him again.

Another doctor with a heavy accent came by to question him. And Schoolcraft asked the same question that had been bouncing around his head the whole time.

“Why am I still here?”

“We’re just trying to make sure you’re not going to hurt anyone.”

“Well, I’m not going to hurt myself or others,” he replied.

“Okay,” the doctor said. “But sitting there, and taking notes, it makes you look manicky.”

“Is that a diagnosis?” Schoolcraft asked. He didn’t get an explanation, but he could see that the machine was moving in only one direction.

He knew he hadn’t acted out, hadn’t done anything crazy. So why was he there? What did the cops tell the doctors? Could they have lied? This was the New York City Police Department, after all. The NYPD wouldn’t lie. Especially about a member of its own
thin blue line
, right?

And what about his apartment? Were they there, searching it? Did they know his secret? Had they discovered the digital recordings that he had so carefully made?

Schoolcraft’s ordeal had just begun. He spent days in the psychiatric ward without any real explanation for it. His dad made calls to everyone he could think of, but no one would listen.

A week later, he was on the phone with an attorney, Stuart London. Adrian asked, “What about my rights? What about the Constitution?”

“They don’t really go by the Constitution,” replied London. “They go by the Patrol Guide.”

CHAPTER 1

“I WILL FAITHFULLY DISCHARGE THE DUTIES”

I
n New York City, heroes are a dime a dozen. So are miracles. A white tourist with a crushed skull in Central Park is worth ten times a bullet-riddled black teenager in Bed-Stuy. Facts are fungible. Opinion is not. You tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth. Speak the truth, and nobody believes you. It’s a lot easier to leave than it is to come back.

In summer, bodies fall in the heat stricken with bullets, or knives, or fists. In spring, puffed-out corpses float to the surface, the leavings of weekend benders. In autumn, there is peace of a kind. And in winter, folks caught out freeze solid as hardwood.

Potter’s Field beckons. August, not April, is the cruelest month. November, not June, is the kindest. If you have nothing better to do, you can always drink, no matter the season.

The mayor talks in a blue room. Television guests wait in a green room. The Empire State Building changes colors. At night, through windows, flat screens flicker like fire pits whether you live in Hunts Point or Carnegie Mews. A newspaper can print a column on the sanctity of marriage next to a blowup of a salacious babe in a leopard-print bikini and still pretend to occupy the moral high ground.

Villains make better heroes. The best guy in the world is your worst enemy. The worst guy in the world makes miracles. The Bowery used to be interesting. The front page is called The Wood. Highway therapy is real. If you don’t go along with the program, they will dump you in a precinct as far from home as possible. And you need a rabbi to rise in the ranks, even if you aren’t Jewish.

But Schoolcraft, he never had a rabbi, and that was a problem.

It all started well enough, seven years before that night in Jamaica Hospital when it all finally, utterly, went to hell. The day happened to be in July, the year was 2002, and Adrian Schoolcraft was standing in the ranks of that year’s police recruit class in the gym of the old academy on East 21st Street in Manhattan, an ugly stone and steel and glass and gray building designed specifically to look boring. He wore the beige and gray tunic and dark pants and had a gym bag at his feet, just like the rest of them. The night before his dad—that’s Larry Schoolcraft—had given him some advice. His dad, a man for whom a sentence easily became a paragraph, which easily became a Shakespearean oration, and then an epic speech that mentioned the mayor, the commissioner, the FB-fucking-I, pudding, hand grenades, the mob, steroids, corrupt state senators, the Patrol Guide, and Frank Serpico.

But this time, the story goes, the elder Schoolcraft was mercifully brief. Bring two things, he said. Bring a watch. Bring a pen. The watch, so you’ll always know what time it is, and the pen, to make a note of it. Sure enough, that was the first question out of the instructor’s mouth. He checked the ranks for those two things. The guys who didn’t have them got written up. This man had another rule: black ink only. No blue ink in this department.

Schoolcraft was 27 then, beefy around the middle, about six feet, 240 pounds, balding slightly. In his first NYPD picture, he pulled his head back, leaving a slight jowl visible under his chin. He stared grimly straight ahead. His file listed him as of average build, with straight brown hair, a receding hairline, and of part American Indian descent. His face carried some acne scarring. He had a large cranium, an effect magnified by his short haircut. He looked like a guy who could, if he wanted to, walk through a brick wall. He did not have the personality to fit his size. He was soft-spoken, a bit shy, somewhat cerebral, quiet. He didn’t drink alcohol or smoke. He found bars boring and didn’t make friends easily. There was something about him
that suggested he was looking at what was immediately in front of him and either judging the subject before him or considering the alternatives.

Schoolcraft stood in those ranks with that group of men and women, white and black, Hispanic and Asian. Most were in their twenties, and most had either come from one of the boroughs, one of those places where the chicken bones roasted on the asphalt in summer, or an old-country ethnic enclave like Bay Ridge or Gerritsen Beach, or some suburban paradise-in-quotes on Long Island, Staten Island, or Rockland, with single-family houses on cul-de-sacs and above-ground pools in the backyard. Schoolcraft wasn’t even a New Yorker, in fact. He was from suburban Texas and was a registered Republican. He knew absolutely nothing about the big city. Depending on how you looked at it, in the end, that quality was either fatal in the NYPD or it allowed him to do what he did.

His full name was Adrian P. Schoolcraft. He used his middle initial in his signature. Growing up in Arlington, Texas, the thought of becoming a cop hardly crossed his mind. The family already had one police officer—his dad, Larry. His mom, Suzanne, worked her whole career in a bank.

Larry Schoolcraft and Suzanne Wait had met in high school in Johnstown, New York, a most anonymous of anonymous rust belt towns first settled in 1758, about 40 miles northwest of Albany, just under the gaze of the looming Catskills. The few highlights of Johnstown’s history include one of the last battles of the Revolutionary War; Congressman Silas Talbot, who oversaw the building of the USS
Constitution
(Old Ironsides) in 1797; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who helped organize the first women’s rights convention, which eventually led to women gaining the right to vote. Though it was once the site of dozens of tanneries and factories that specialized in leather gloves, the industrial core of the town had slowly dwindled over the decades. In 1975, a plant that made gelatin, founded in 1890 by one of Johnstown’s other famous residents, Charles Knox, shut down after the company was sold to Lipton.

Larry was adopted and grew up in relative comfort in a nice colonial on a 14-acre spread. His father, who spent his career at General Electric, believed the family’s most famous ancestor was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was born in 1793 about 30 miles southeast of Johnstown in Guilderland, New York. This ancestor was a geologist and ethnographer, but he also founded
a newspaper and a magazine, taught himself French, German, and Hebrew, and wrote poetry, all as a teenager. He worked in glass factories and then left New York for Missouri. He worked as an Indian agent in Michigan and recorded the lives of the Ojibwa Indians, and these writings won him a prestigious literary award. He opened schools to educate young Ojibwa and became a University of Michigan board member. His biggest contribution to literature was that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow relied heavily on his ethnography in the writing of the famous poem, “The Song of Hiawatha.” He is remembered in Michigan today by Schoolcraft College in Livonia and Schoolcraft County.

A month after they graduated from high school in June 1974, Larry and Suzanne married in the First Methodist Church in Johnson and had their reception at the VFW Hall. Just 18, Suzanne stitched her own wedding dress and all the gowns and hats for the bridesmaids. The couple desperately wanted to leave the oppressive confines of Johnstown, particularly Suzanne’s immediate family, and begin a life together elsewhere. Suzanne had the grades and the smarts for college, but Larry hated school and had no interest in college. He joined the army that August and went to Fort Dix in New Jersey, then to Fort Gordon in Georgia for military police school. During that period, Suzanne periodically came to visit on the weekends, and that was, as Larry recalled, “when Adrian came along.”

“She certainly wanted to get out of Dodge and so did I,” Larry said. “She was very capable and probably should have gone to college. She ended up being the only bank officer who didn’t have a college degree.”

In January 1975, Larry landed at Fort Hood, the sprawling military post outside Killeen, Texas, and the headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Division. Suzanne moved to Texas to live on the base with Larry. On June 21, 1975,
Soyuz 19
returned to earth, the Beach Boys played Wembley Stadium, the movie
Jaws
opened, and Adrian was born. Thirteen months later, on August 12, 1976, Suzanne gave birth to a daughter, Mystica. Larry and Sue were just 20 and 19, respectively.

Once Larry’s army stint ended, the couple opted to remain in Texas. The family moved to a small ranch-style house at 2811 Roberts Circle in the Dallas suburb of Arlington. Larry took a job in law enforcement, based on his military police training, and Suzanne found work in a well-known Dallas bank.

Over the next 25 years, Larry worked with the Austin Police Department, the University Park Dallas Police Department, and the Fort Worth Marshal’s Office. Later Suzanne took a second job in the bookkeeping department for the Texas Rangers.

The Schoolcrafts moved to a townhouse on the north end of Arlington at 1301 Lovell, where Adrian spent much of his middle school years. At some point, the developers of the housing tract fell into a conflict with the homeowners. Litigation followed. It was a sour experience for Larry and Suzanne and caused some financial strain and tension in the household.

Salvation from the housing conflict came when family friends—a bank official and his wife—said they were moving to Maine and offered their home to the Schoolcrafts. Their third move was into that house, where they would remain until the kids graduated from high school.

In his youth, Adrian was fairly outgoing. He played sports—soccer and football—but they never became a passion like they did for most Texas kids.

In his freshman year, Adrian attended Lamar High School in Arlington. He played football, mainly to get into shape. As a sophomore, he transferred to Martin High School, with 5,000 students, one of the largest in the state. It was an easy place to disappear. He did not play sports for his final three years of high school.

That may be because he had found another interest—making money. At the age of 14, he started working at the local Food Lion supermarket. “He was a checker, a bagger, a stocker, he did everything,” Larry said. “He always worked.”

The atmosphere in the household was often tense, Larry recalled. Both parents worked constantly. Juggling jobs and children and bills caused friction between two people who had different ideas about a lot of things. (Larry recalled years later that in one election he voted for Ralph Nader, the ultra-liberal, and Suzanne voted for George W. Bush.) Suzanne also had trouble with her health.

“There was a lot of fighting,” Larry said. “A lot of time, it was like a battle zone at home. The difference was that I would blow up and five minutes later, it was over. With her, once she got mad, she stayed mad.”

The couple came close to divorce a number of times.