Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD - The Rotten Orchard | 6

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

It’s like clockwork: every 20 years or so, a corruption scandal forces the NYPD into the hot seat. But how did this cycle begin? To find out, we go back over a century ago to the very first investigation into the police where the NYPD is put on trial like never before.From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.Empire City is made with a commitment to ensure the stories of those who were and are still impacted by the NYPD are always part of the stories we tell ourselves about the police, about America, and about democracy.Voices & References:Carol SafirDaniel Czitrom https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/emeriti-retired-faculty/daniel-czitromCait MurphyBill Williams, descendant of Clubber WilliamsLeslie Cornfeld Scoundrels in Law: The Trials of Howe and Hummel, Lawyers to the Gangsters, Cops, Starlets, and Rakes Who Made the Gilded Agehttps://www.amazon.com/Scoundrels-Law-Lawyers-Gangsters-Starlets/dp/0061714283Follow Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD on the Wondery App or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/empire-city/ now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Empire City early and ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. As I was working to grapple with everything I've learned about the NYPD, I got a phone call. It was from a woman named Carol Safer, wife of former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safer. Carol's the head of the board of trustees for the New York City Police Museum. She got my voice message asking to talk. And after we chatted on the phone for a while, she invited me to her home to talk more. Hey, Carol.

Oh, awesome. Carol lives in Annapolis, Maryland. Her street is lined with historical-looking houses, each one with an American flag hanging out front. George Washington's been in this house, and it has a long history. A long history in the United States. And you know what that means. Back then, there were a couple of slaves living in the basement,

and this was an in-town house. This was not a plantation house. Yep. As we start to get into things, it looked like Carol and I shared a real interest in the beginnings of the police in New York. The police museum did not ignore any of the early history. We covered the history from the very first bell ringer, the lanterns, all kinds of things like that that we could find.

But our conversation took a little bit of a turn when I asked Carol why she thought it was so important to have a museum specifically for the police. I would like everyone in New York to know they shouldn't be fearing the police. They should be revering the police for the job they do. And unfortunately, the media sometimes hits that the opposite way. For Carol, the museum was kind of an extension of police-public relations. The police are not out there to intimidate people. They're there to help people. It's kind of like saying they're here to keep people safe.

But as Carol talks, I'm remembering what historian Ed O'Donnell told me when I started this journey. He said that Carol was the person who first reached out to ask him about helping with the museum. And now that I'm sitting across from her, I asked, is it true the words violence and corruption were not allowed to be used in the museum? Violence and corruption is not part of the police museum story because there hasn't been violence and corruption. I expected Carol to want to lift up what she saw as the positive parts of police work in addition to the darker stuff.

But to say that violence and corruption wasn't even a part of police work in addition to the darker stuff. But to say that violence and corruption wasn't even a part of the story that needed to be told, wow. I felt like she didn't have any idea of the scale of the problem. But when you look at all of these police police people compared to the one or two or three or four bad apples you can think of or you can research, I don't think they deserve to be mentioned in the police museum. Because then what you're doing, let me explain something, then what you're doing is you're saying you're glorifying criminals. For someone who wasn't interested in glorifying criminals, Carol was very excited about an exhibit in the museum that featured Al Capone's guns. She said she saw that as kind of a way to keep things fun.

But when it came to crime that the police themselves had been involved in. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of retired policemen who don't want to see that in the museum. And the New Yorkers, why give anybody status, take up two inches of space in a museum for a criminal? What would you say to someone who says, it feels like you're kind of trying to sanitize the history. A museum should just present people with everything. And that is not an insignificant part, right? I do wonder how we can learn some of those hard lessons

if we don't kind of look them in the eye, you know? We're learning. We've learned them every day. I mean, we have our police forces very well trained. There are so many, what do you want to call them, checks and balances. You know, it's so different than it was in the early days. It's funny that Carol should say that. Four years before Carol's husband became police commissioner, there was a report that explicitly compared those early days of the NYPD to police in the 90s. And it said something that might come as a surprise to Carol.

Violence and grift wasn't just something that happened once or twice. The report said that for the past hundred years, New York City has experienced a 20-year cycle of corruption, scandal, reform, backslide, and fresh scandal in the New York City Police Department. One hundred years. But you're not going to find that story in the police museum if they reopen one day. Carol thinks we've moved past this history. She thinks the so-called checks and balances we have have all but eliminated violence and corruption. That's exactly why the modern police museum doesn't care what corruption happened down in some, wherever it happened, and when and why. It doesn't matter.

I think it does matter. It matters because violence and corruption continues today. It matters to the victims of that violence and corruption. And it matters because even if the police museum doesn't want to get the history right, I do. So we're going to tell you the story of the first major investigation into violence and corruption in the NYPD. The first time a whole police department got put on trial anywhere in the United States. And for better or for worse, it set up a blueprint for how police would be investigated and held accountable that's still being used to this day. From Wondry and Crooked Media, I'm Chinjerai Kumaneka, and this is Empire City, Episode 6, The Rotten Orchard.

What's the first step to growing your business? Getting people to notice you. But how do you do that? Two words. Constant contact. Your struggle with expensive, slow, and unmeasurable approaches to marketing your business is over. With Constant Contact, get email marketing that helps you create and send the perfect email to every customer. Connect with over 2 billion people on social media with an all-in-one tool for posting and sharing,

and create, promote, and manage your events with ease, all in one place. Join the millions of small businesses that trust Constant Contact with their marketing success. So get going and growing with Constant Contact today. Ready, set, grow. Go to constantcontact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. Constantcontact.ca. The story that kicks off the first major investigation of an entire police department in America starts on a windy Sunday morning in 1892, in church. The pews of the Madison Square Presbyterian are filled with people with money and influence, bankers, industrialists, and other members of New York's upper class. And standing at the pulpit is a tall dude with a wispy beard, bushy eyebrows, and glasses named Charles Henry Parkhurst.

He's basically a mainline Presbyterian preacher. Is he breathing fire when he preaches, or is he more reserved? No, no, no, no, no, no. He's much more of an intellectual. You know, he's not Billy Sunday. He's not, you know, Jerry Falwell. He's not any of those guys. A very cerebral guy.

Historian Daniel Citrum says one day, Parker switched things up. Does anyone know he's going to do this? No, this is the thing that I think really shocked everybody, that it kind of like, nobody really knew this was coming. Parker stands up in front of a packed house and delivers a sermon like no one in New York had ever seen. If they came looking for a nuanced take on scripture, they came on the wrong Sunday.

In its municipal life, our city is thoroughly rotten. From the start, Parkhurst makes it clear that he's sick of the bullshit. He declares that the city of New York is under attack and that the greatest threat to the soul of the city of New York is under attack and that the greatest threat to the soul of the city is its own government and its own police department. They are a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot. While we fight iniquity, they shield and patronize it. While we try to convert criminals, they manufacture them. Not only is the NYPD failing to protect and serve law-abiding New Yorkers, he accuses

the department of being actively in cahoots with the city's criminals. Parker is the first person to use the term organized crime. Now, he didn't mean it in the sense of Don Corleone and the mafia. He meant it in terms of what he saw as this deep, deep symbiotic relationship between the people running the city government and the police department and the vice economy of New York. And of course, Parkhurst is right. In the 1890s, the business of policing in New York City was extremely lucrative. The vice economy is still thriving, and police are extorting even more people and businesses throughout the city.

And we're not talking just one or two bad apples, Carol. The entire police department is involved in this, all the way up to the chief of police. The NYPD has grown into a straight-up criminal organization with strong-arm methods and a mafia-style hierarchy. There had been others before him who had, you know, thundered on about vice and, you know, moral turpitude and just, you know, the amount of alcohol, the prostitution, all that stuff.

But it was strictly on a sort of moral basis. Remember Anthony Comstock? Reverend Parkhurst actually runs in the same circles as that evangelical zealot who tried to tamp down vice. But unlike Comstock, who's mostly just obsessed with the corrupting influence of sexual desire, Parkhurst wants to take down New York's whole police structure, including the cops at the top of the gravy train.

What made Parkhurst new and different was that he made it political, because he called out the people who were running the city and said, you know, you guys are allied with these forces. It's a threat to our families, a threat to our kids, and we've got to, you know, get these people out of office. Nobody had ever done that before. No preacher, no minister had ever done that before. One writer at the time referred to Parkhurst's address as a sermon bomb.

And his sermon bomb exploded in the faces of some of the most powerful people in New York. And they clapped back. The mayor slams Parkhurst. The New York district Attorney calls the sermon the coarsest and most vindictive utterance from a pulpit that I've ever heard. The New York Sun calls for Parkhurst to be indicted, tried, and punished for being a reckless criminal slanderer. But Parkhurst refuses to back down.

The corruption he's enraged about is all around him. He knows that anybody moving through New York's underground entertainment venues with their eyes open can see it. So he partners with a private detective and comes back with the receipts. Parker strides into the church and he plunks down on the pulpit this stack of papers that represent the affidavits that were made about what's going on. And, all right, here's the proof. What are you going to do about it now? Reverend Parkhurst gathers evidence and preaches sermons about the NYPD's criminal behavior for two more years. But he and the folks he works with don't really make a dent in the corruption. So he realizes he needs to up his game and figure out how to get politicians with more power involved.

To do that, he taps into the one thing that politicians care about most, winning elections. Fortunately for Parkhurst, the Republicans up in Albany are desperate to kick out the Tammany Hall Democrats. They've regained control of the police and are still running New York City. So Parkhurst uses his platform to tell state Republicans that they'll never be able to take down Tammany if they don't do something about police. Because in New York, police control elections. On election days, they show up in force at the polling stations,

and sometimes they outright intimidate people. So if state Republicans want to unseat Tammany Democrats, they're going to have to take on the NYPD's corruption. It's early March, 1894, and people are gathering in a cramped, dingy room in a courthouse in lower Manhattan. Six state senators looking to take down Tammany Hall squeeze themselves in behind the main dais

and call the room to order. This will be the first meeting of the Lexile Committee, what will turn into the largest investigation into police corruption in the city's history. When the Lexile Committee began, there was a lot of skepticism from a lot of sides. There'd been three smaller investigations into the NYPD in the previous 20 years,

but each one had devolved into an empty partisan exercise. And at first, it seems like the Lexile Committee will be just as toothless. The first session opens up in March of 1894. It's a big nothing burger. If you were at that trial waiting for the police department to get put on blast, you would have been disappointed. In a long, wordy opening statement, the head counsel makes it clear that the investigation will have limited scope

and that all he's going to investigate is voter fraud. And so for months, that's all they do. But then, just as the investigation slogs into its third month, someone new shows up in the courthouse. A former Irish revolutionary, equal parts Atticus Finch and schoolyard bully, he's a lawyer named John Gough. He was a sort of a striking figure physically. He was prematurely white. He was only 45 years old, but his hair was all white.

He was sort of a fierce character who wasn't afraid of anybody. Just a few years earlier, Gff had been cited for contempt of court for yelling at a judge in the middle of a trial. And this kind of penchant for pushing people's buttons is exactly what Parkhurst thinks is missing from the current hearing. So Parkhurst manages to convince Republicans in Albany to add Goff to the prosecution team. And once Goff took control, the thing changed immediately. Goff begins to bring all these people

in front of the Lexile committee that had never had this kind of microphone before. Goff tries something that no one had ever done in a police investigation like this. He begins calling people up from the New York underworld to talk directly about their experience with police. These were the folks the cops extorted. And one by one, they get on the stand and detail the NYPD's graft.

He said, you give me $25 a month and there will be no trouble for me or for you. Something to that effect. Through the summer, John Goff calls dozens of brothel owners, madams and sex workers to testify before the Lexile Committee. And the brothel keepers and prostitutes begin talking about stuff that many New Yorkers sort of knew about, but nobody had ever said in public. People told me that if I wanted to open a business, I would have to see the police. He just introduced himself, that he was the new captain,

and that he wanted $500 and $50 every month. And what these witnesses describe is a vast and well-oiled machine of police bribery and extortion. I was afraid for my family. He said I'd keep a bad house. He said I would do good if I tried to stick with the police

and give him some money so they would protect me. If you want to get out of this, you pay $75. If you don't, I make it hard for you. After this, you pay regular every month. Even you don't, I make it hard for you. After this, you pay regular every month.

Even at that point, many of the newspapers are saying, well, we can't believe these people. You know, they're the prostitutes, they're criminals. But eventually the weight of the testimony begins to accumulate, and you can't simply slough it off. So it begins to gain a kind of momentum.

Through the end of the summer and into the fall, Goff puts witnesses on the stand. At first, it's brothel and bar owners. But then he starts to call butchers, cafe owners, shoemakers, and printers. But Goff's not finished. He calls up dockmasters, stonemasons, steamship operators, fruit vendors, and bookies. It becomes clear that the NYPD has their hands in almost every imaginable trade, both legal and illegal. It also becomes clear that in the pursuit of profit and power, and often just for the hell of it, the police are capable of extraordinary cruelty.

Eight months into the hearings, a woman in her late 30s takes the stand. She only speaks Yiddish and has to be translated by an interpreter. She tells her story fast and desperately, and more than once, breaks down in tears. Even the bond between parent and child a few years before the commission started. She was a widow who lived in poverty with her three young children, Eva, Rosa, and Melchior. She saved money, and she wants to start a cigar store, and so she does this. And the week it opens, a cop on the beat walks in and says, you need to pay me X dollars. Again, it's essentially a protection racket.

Kate Murphy's written about the commission and says that Kayla is targeted by the police. They try to extort money from her, but unlike most of the other witnesses, She says no. and she faces the consequences for it. The cop gets her accused of prostituting herself with a young boy. The detectives find a couple of phony witnesses who testify that Kayla's a sex worker. Her bail is set at $500, and she's

told she's going to jail and that the police are going to take away her children. She can hear them screaming as the police drag them out of her house. By the time Kayla testifies at the Lexile hearings, she's been separated from her children for 17 months. To get out of jail, the police forced her to do more than just give them a few protection payments. She was forced to sell her cigar store and give the police the proceeds. Her bail was really just a huge extortion payment. And even though she was free and had finally paid off the police,

she wasn't allowed to regain custody or even see her children. You know, it's inexcusable. And there's too many stories like that. The commissioners at the Lexile Committee are devastated when they hear Kayla's testimony, and they're so moved

that they immediately start figuring out what they can do to help her. And one day in October, her children, Eva, Rosa, and Melchior, are brought into the hearing room. John Goff says, here, Ms. Urchital, take your children.

While we've had many harrowing scenes here and listened to many harrowing stories upon this witness stand, there's at least one silver lining to the black cloud. Kayla rushes to her children. She hugs them and falls to her knees. Through tears, she blesses the commissioners in Yiddish and then takes her children home. As the investigation moves into the fall, John Goff calls a reporter named Augustine Costello to the stand. Costello's a surprising witness for the prosecution. He's in charge of the Herald's police bureau, and his office is located right across from police headquarters. He spent his years as a reporter in the trenches with the police.

And after all that time he spent with the cops, he got pretty cozy with them. Over time, he came up with the idea to write an almost 600-page book of pro-police propaganda. In the 1880s, he had written a book called Our Police Protectors, which is almost unreadable. What's the vibe? Our Police Protectors. What's he talking about? Oh, our boys in blue, they're all wonderful and brave and handsome and honest. And it was written with the proceeds to go to the pension fund. It was not a, you know, a detached intellectual effort.

On page one, Costello says that he's going to give a history of the New York police force, which is kind of like what I'm doing. But his history is almost the total opposite of what I've been learning. For Costello, it's a story of progress with neither defeat, failure, nor stagnation. And it's kind of amazing what he leaves out. Remember that riot where the NYPD beat the shit out of each other? Costello's version says, Captain Walling walked quietly down to City Hall alone and unassisted and served the warrant on Mayor Wood. And that's it. When he writes about the draft riots, he says,

it is not recorded that any one man failed to respond to the demands of the hour. Even though it's extremely well documented that the cops got their asses kicked and ran while the city burned and Black New Yorkers got hanged. And some of his strongest praise is reserved for Clubber Williams. Costello says Williams is undaunted and efficient, and he commends Williams for raiding and closing scores of illegal businesses. So if Costello loved the police so much, what could he possibly have to say against them? Well, it turns out... Two of his assistants were arrested on a trumped-up charge, went to get them out,

and Clubber Williams arrested him too. So he was, like, thrown in the cells, and then he was later beaten up with brass knuckles and really, really damaged. So our police protectors, a few years later, beaten to a pulp by our police protectors. When I first heard this story,

I couldn't get over the fact that the NYPD couldn't even resist beating the guy who wrote a whole book of PR for him. And Costello couldn't believe it either. Now, he didn't see the police as protectors that would keep him and his family safe. He was terrified by cops like Williams.

I would be afraid of Williams perhaps before this Lexile committee came into existence because I knew that he could put me out of the way if he wanted to. I was afraid that he would do something to have me killed. But Costello is just one reporter, pointing at one incident. As the trial pushes forward,

the public wants more. There's this growing call from the press and from other people, reveal the system. How does it really work? Revealing the system is hard, unless you have police who are willing to tell on their superiors and break the blue wall of silence. And to everyone's surprise, Goff finds one. The guy who really reveals the system is a police sergeant named Max Schmittberger. Schmittberger is a leading detective in the NYPD. He's well respected and he's basically spilling the beans. Schmittberger's immersed in most of the NYPD's big cases. And as the facts start to come out, he's feeling the heat. So when Goff offers him immunity in exchange for his testimony, he accepts.

He's regarded as, in modern parlance, as a snitch. And Goff calls him up to the stand. Schmittberger worked for Captain Alexander Clever Williams in the Tenderloin. And he admitted before Lexo to taking bribes from all kinds of people. And then he got to keep 20 percent and he kicked up the other 80 percent to his boss, Cleber Williams. When Goff asks him why he's cutting Williams in, Schmittberger basically says, if I don't, Williams has the power to send men in and raid those houses and then I won't get my cut. Schmittberger goes on to share that when he asked Williams to promote a patrolman in his precinct, Williams wanted $300.

He said, you get the money and I'll make them. And he became probably the most important police witness at Lexo. He named names and he set out in detail how the system worked. And it was very much a system. And he was credible because he acknowledged his own participation. Schmittberger is one of the few cops at Lexile who admits to any kind of wrongdoing. And it's his testimony that starts to show it's not just these individual incidents. It's a whole system.

Clubber Williams is a key player, but he's not a bad apple. He's the fruit of a rotten orchard. And Goff is ready to make the police confront the consequences of their unchecked violence by calling them out in court. Goff calls in 90 police who had previously been brought up on charges of police brutality. Many were convicted, but somehow they still have their jobs. And he's also got a whole bunch of people bandaged, bloodied, in slings, cast, who have been the victims of police brutality. And with both the cops and their victims present,

Goff starts calling officers to the stand, putting their disciplinary records on full blast. He calls Officer Richard Meany, who entered a man's home without a warrant and punched him in the head. He calls Officer George Lair, who without provocation attacked a woman in a liquor store, tried to pull out her teeth,

and threatened her with a gun., tried to pull out her teeth, and threatened her with a gun. He calls Officer William McHugh, who tried to rape a woman in her own home and attacked her husband when he tried to intervene. He calls up all his police and they talk about what they were tried for, and then they virtually were not punished at all. But this is the tip of the iceberg. Goff also calls Officer Ambrose Hussey, one of the detectives responsible for arresting Kayla Urchital. When a witness testifies against him, he loses it right there in the hearing room, screaming, You stinking son of a bitch loafer! I'll blow your brains out and I'll shoot you down like a dog! The New York Sun reports that the testimony at Lexile reveals a condition of depravity and corruption in the Department of Police almost beyond human belief.

The foulest moral cesspool that has ever been exposed in the history of a community. This is the same paper that just two years earlier considered allegations against the NYPD to be slander. And now there's pressure on the committee to go even further. There's this growing call from the press and from other people, go higher up. I mean, you know, we're tired of hearing these brothel keepers and, you know, we've got a few cops who have been charged. You know, what about the bosses?

You know, what about the people running the thing? Finally, as the committee's about to come to a close, Inspector Clubber Williams takes the stand. Questioning Clubber should be a slam dunk for Goff. Officer Schmittberger and fanboy reporter Costello had already spilled all the tea. Plus, Williams had been through more department disciplinary trials than any other police officer in American history.

And yet, he's still standing, terrorizing New Yorkers with impunity. But Goff is ready to put that terror to an end. And since Williams is one of the highest-ranking officers questioned at Lexile, he wants him to answer not only for his actions, but for the whole department. Now, as to the department, Inspector Williams, it has been sworn to hear that the department is rotten to the core. Is that true? No, sir.

That is a lie? Yes, sir. It has been sworn to hear by a cloud of witnesses whose testimony has been corroborated that corruption has run riot in every branch of the department. Is that true? It is not. He's not giving Goff an inch. Alexander Williams faces down Goff

and basically tells him to kiss off and says, you know, look, you have nothing on me. Williams comes off as this surly, arrogant, but fully confident guy who is not going to let some pissant prosecutor, you know, ruin his life. Bold, totally arrogant, and successful perjury. That's right. Exactly. The blue wall. The blue wall of silence. The blue wall of perjury. Goff doesn't do much better with the final witness, police superintendent Thomas Burns.

Burns is Clubber's boss, and he's head of the police. He's been the top of the NYPD food chain for 15 years. But on the stand, Burns won't admit to anything. He says he knows nothing about the massive system of corruption operating right underneath his nose. He says he hasn't profited massive system of corruption operating right underneath his nose. He says he hasn't profited one dime from his police work. The idea that Burns was totally unaware and uninvolved with an operation that had generated 10,000 pages of testimony was absurd. But that's it.

Committee hearings end in December 1894 with a whimper. After everything that's come out, a lot of people are confused and enraged, including the preacher that kicked all this off. Parkhurst is upset. He thinks that, you know, they haven't really done what they should have done. He doesn't think that the committee's been aggressive enough, thinks they treated Burns with kid gloves. A few months later, the Lexile Committee publishes its findings. The report acknowledges the scale of corruption in the NYPD,

but amazingly, it only suggests minor changes. The state government reviews the report, and instead of demanding more, Republicans make a small adjustment to a police board that oversees the department. They add two seats for themselves, which is what they wanted to do all along. This means that Republicans will finally have some influence over the department after years of Tammany Hall having total control. But there are no serious legal consequences for any of the police officials implicated during the hearings.

And if you fast forward just a few years… There's not a single police, policeman, police captain, detective, police commissioner, inspector, not a single person's in jail. Both Superintendent Thomas Burns and Clubber Williams resign shortly after they testify at Lexile. But they retire with full pensions. I think my grandfather realized that his father, you know, was not, you know, he was not a legitimate man. Clubber Williams' great-grandson Bill says that Clubber's corruption was so thorough that more than 100 years later, it's still hard for his dad to talk about him. I think he loved him and he idolized him, but I think that he was kind of ashamed of him too. And Bill Williams says that even though he's proud

to have police history in his family and he wants to be proud of Clubber Williams, it wouldn't be right to defend Clubber's corruption. And Bill says he knows that because in his own work, he has to make the choice to do the right thing every day. I'm a plumber. That's what I do for a living. Now, our family plumber

took me under his wing and taught me the business. He says, I didn't train you to, you know, rip people off. He says, you worked with me and I never ripped anybody off. So that's the thing. It's sort of like I'm in a position

where I could take advantage of people, but I don't. But Bill admits that Clubber did. Over and over again. And like most police today with proven records of misconduct, he never really faced any accountability. And historian Daniel Citram agrees that as far as holding police accountable, not much has changed since Lexile.

You know, every so often I make bets with friends of mine when we have these police brutality cases. You know, I don't think anybody's going to jail. I don't think anybody's going to be even indicted. On the day I was born in a hospital in Harlem, the New York Times front page story above the fold was 219 pounds of seized narcotics found stolen from the NYPD by the NYPD. And then one week later, the New York Times featured a completely different NYPD corruption scandal. The headline read, As a black man in this country who understands the power the police have,

the sheer scale of the numbers still blows me away. Half the force isn't a few shady police. It's over 10,000 shady police. And it illustrates that the problem isn't just corrupt cops. Honest cops are not forthcoming about what they know is existing within their precincts. Leslie Kornfeld was the deputy chief counsel, the John Goff of the last Lexile-style investigation into NYPD corruption, the 1992 Mollen Commission. And I gotta say,

I was pretty excited to talk to someone who basically had to face down the entire NYPD as a prosecutor. Who did you consider to be your primary employer, Mr. Dowd? Who did you feel that you owed your allegiances to as a New York City police officer? The Mullen Commission helped uncover how dozens of NYPD officers in the midst of the war on drugs had essentially become drug traffickers themselves.

I guess I'll have to say the drug traffickers. Could you speak into the mic, please? The drug traffickers. Sometimes people who prosecute cases like this make them seem like egregious exceptions to the rule. But to lead the Mullen Commission, Leslie had to study the whole history of corruption in the NYPD. Police corruption in the New York City Police Department

seemed to evolve in cycles. 20-year, 25, sometimes 30-year cycles. There are major Lexile-style investigations into NYPD corruption starting nearly 20 years later in 1912, and then four more times in 1931, 1949, 1970, and 1992. And Leslie admits something that I've never heard any prosecutor say. And it wasn't that corruption emerged every 20 years or so, but that it was spotlighted every 20 years or so. So the question for us today in this year, in this decade is, now what? If we've seen repeated patterns for all of these decades when investigations take place,

what do we do next? But I guess one question I want to ask you is this. We're doing a history of the police. I and my research have not been able to find a 10-year period in that history where the NYPD functioned without systematic forms of corruption. At what point does a history sort of offer you the verdict that this is not an institution capable of producing public safety? Well, I think I would ask the question differently. I think that the question is, what are the actions that need to be taken to have the most effective police department possible? I appreciate why you're saying that, but people always say, how do we have the most effective police department? But what I'm actually saying is that the history of this police department

should throw serious questions into whether policing is the thing that can produce public safety. I mean, I even worry about the word corruption, to be honest. For something to be corrupt, there has to have been a moment where it was functioning in a way that worked, and then that was corrupted. I can't find that moment. When I think about the NYPD today, it makes me emotional. There's so many incidents of misconduct,

and sometimes I feel like people get too overwhelmed to care, either because they don't want to hear bad things about cops or because they feel like if there's no accountability, it just doesn't matter. To me, when we turn our heads, we actually contribute to the cycle. There's one stage where police do the violence, and then there's another level of violence when we just to the cycle. There's one stage where police do the violence, and then there's another level of violence when we just bury the story. But these are people's lives at stake,

including people who were killed by the NYPD in my lifetime, like Eric Garner, Eleanor Bumpers, Kowalski Trawick, Wynne Rosario, Sean Bell, Akai Gurley, Amity Diallo, Ramali Graham, Erickson Brito, and so many others. And each incident, everything that happened, every detail fucking matters. And if you were living through that detail, it mattered to you. And that's doubly true when a cop from your own community is responsible. That's next time on Empire City. Follow Empire City on the Wondery app, Amazon Music,

or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. If you have a tip about a story you think we should investigate, please write to us at wondry.com slash tips. Empire City is a production of Wondry and Crooked Media. I'm your host and executive producer, Chinjirai Kumunika. For Crooked Media, our senior producer is Peter Bresnan. Our managing producer is Leo Duran. Our senior story editor is Diane Hodson.

Our producer is Sam Riddell. Bowen Wong and Sidney Rapp are our associate producers. Sound design, mixing, and original score by Axel Kukutye. Our historical consultant and fact checker is History Studios. Our voice actors are Betsy Zyko, Baxley Andreessen, Michael Mantel, and Sean Bolger. For Wondry, our senior producer is Mandy Gorenstein. Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our coordinating producer is Mariah Gossett.

The executive producer at Push Black is Lily Worknett. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geismar, Katie Long, Tommy Vitor, and Diane Hodson. Executive producers at Wondery are Nigery Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent. From Wondery, this is Black History For Real. I'm Francesca Ramsey. And I'm Conscious Lee. And every week we're going to be chronicling a lot of trials and triumphs from Black folks you ain't never heard about, even though we've been doing the damn thing since forever. Together, we'll weave Black history's most overlooked figures back into the rightful place in American culture and all over the world.

Because on this show, you're going to hear a little less. In August 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And a little bit more. Sam looks to his fellow students. They just as mad as he is. He can't stop thinking about the tragic war in Vietnam and the violent backlash to the civil rights movement. It's like the whole world falling apart and ain't nobody ready to make it right. The school board could do something to change it, but they'd have to listen first. Follow Black History For Real on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.