The rookie had a square jaw and rebellious eyes. She also had a short fuse. Plain and not attractive. I was her partner, her mentor, and I was casually cruel and a racist with her.
She wanted to be a cop since being a kid.
I did my best to wear her down. To quit.
We rode the streets together nearly two years. I mocked law school. Sacrifice was for suckers. Life on the streets was the real meat and potatoes. I said she wasn’t tough, she wasn’t that smart, I told her, go along to get along. I was her partner, her mentor, and I was casually cruel and a loud-mouth know-it-all.
But being a cop mistreated would make her one mean lawyer all these years later.
In the future, that is, thirty years later, she became the ADA who cried wolf. She took on the police and the district attorney’s office and she won. She cleaned the stables.
Her charges were worse than cops sleeping at donut shops. Or drinking on duty. Or even visiting the big yellow whorehouse out on Saranac Ave on pay days. She detailed case after case of prosecutorial and police misconduct. Meticulously documented, all of her work.
It became a race issue when the daily newspaper and the local TV stations made it one. Several black civic leaders called a press conference at which each of them recited his or her list and complained of police abuse and racial intolerance.
I was the most flagrant example.
Maybe for believing in the BCPD. For defending the indefensible.
I defended the Black Dogs…
I said these fellow police officers were doing their job honestly, fairly, without regard for skin color or gender or … Each of them had a long and distinguished career and many citations and commendations. Citizens should be proud and grateful that men like them walked the beat…
Dodo bird that I was, I kept babbling and said that I honestly believe there were a good number of white people, myself included, who truly wish slavery had never taken place here. Idjit me said, that I’d love to go back in time and kill whoever came up with a plan to bring a bunch of black people here to America to be slaves.
I really should have kept my mouth shut.
Instead I said the new ADA (formerly known as the rookie) needs to choose her words more carefully or stay out of high profile cases. And I never said I knew her.
That same afternoon the news broke that the Bay City police waited seven weeks to arrest a lieutenant’s son who was caught on video sucker-punching a homeless black man.
As president of the Police Officers Association, as deputy police commissioner, I was what spies call a mushroom. I was kept in the dark and fed shit by the department, the brass, the Union and the uniforms.
I bragged about all of the guys and gals and all of the good shit they did every day. I believed what I heard and what I saw. There were no shadows within the shadows. They were all good cops.
What can I say about an interrogation room everybody doesn’t already know?
The Interrogation Room was yellow walls and wooden chairs. It was called the interview room. It has a table bolted to the floor and two chairs, a one-way glass, oh, and there’s a lock on the outside of the door.
We will decide when you get out.
Some guys–the Catholics on the squad–call the Interrogation Room the Confessional.
Sometimes the Interrogation Room was … off-limits to us.
The old days when I was a junior detective on the homicide squad, I used to call Interrogation the Tea Room. Best to let your perps steep a while before questioning them. I thought I was being cute. I was a jughead.
The Captain called me into his office, he wanted to talk with me, see where I stood.
“You do good on the dead priest, you could get promoted onto my personal team.”
No shit? The Black Dogs?
I almost burst into tears. Oh, Sweet Baby Jesus, fantastic!
I said, “Thank you, sir.” I almost tugged my forelock.
I couldn’t wait to flee the devil’s mouth and tell my wife.
He clapped me hard on my shoulder.
The Captain didn’t think I knew that he had his favorites.
He was considering letting me into his circle.
In time I gradually saw them as a coven of Bone-Snappers, crooked detectives under his command, who were known outside the station and on the street as the Black Dogs. Some of the bums on the streets called them the Dirty Dogs.
That circle that saw themselves as Knights of the Round Table. They were sanctimonious and righteous vigilantes. They called themselves Monks with Guns. Religious in their hatreds. The bad cop squad that brought down Captain Bukowski.
The first years I was there at the precinct as a detective, the captain was my role model in so many ways. He was mysterious and tight-lipped, deeply private and downright icy.
Say what you want about my Captain Bukowski, whenever he had his vacation days scheduled, he was still in the Department every day. Bringing donuts for the guys who had to work.
Yet in the future, this captain would be my personal downfall.
When he got promoted, I was the chump they put in charge of the show. Interim Commander of the Fifth District. Promoted because I always stood up for my old Captain. Because I always stood up for the Squad. My duty, my loyalty to the BCPD. Because I was dumb and always trusted my fellow cops.
The Captain would make it to Police Commissioner before he would retire. And then the week after his retirement party he would get busted for perjury and obstruction of justice for allegedly lying about his abuse during a civil law suit here at the station.
He just pled not guilty last week.
Being as how I was the head of the union, in the future as the big news broke, I was made out a public fool.
My own partner Royce would call me a disgrace.
Before my long slide backwards into the rank bowels of Guilt by Association, I narrowly missed being pushed into forced retirement.
After thirty years of a long and distinguished career with lots of commendations and citations, I finally learned the first rule of scandal: Don’t stonewall. Admit your mistake before others piece together the embarrassing facts.
Back out of the quicksand as soon as you spot it.
I soon heard what rumors, yes, gossip and scuttlebutt I would hear about the Black Dogs over the last thirty years. Not sure at first to believe the gangbangers, thugs, punks and nasty rotten bastards, but they all whined about Black Dog Brutality. Stories that similar, how could they not ring true?
One day one of the brass sent an email to everyone in Division by accident.
“Dempsey does a nice soft shoe around the evidence.”
My first big hint that I was the dancing monkey.
During that press conference I learned a litany of dirty tricks my colleagues the Black Dogs had done in the Interrogation room.
The rookie produced the Black Dogs’ Interrogation Handbook.
Well, that wasn’t its exact name. But the assholes actually typed out the instructions and gave each of their guys a copy. The exact title was “Instructor’s Manual.”
The next day every newspaper in Bay City reprinted it in full.
The following day was even more salacious. Seems all of the Black Dogs had identical tattoos. A grinning skull wearing a WW2 Nazi helmet and holding an assault rifle. Oh, and the backdrop of each and every tattoo was the flames of hell.
Turned out the Black Dogs Secret Society had at least twenty members, all with the same tattoo.
Ye shall know them by their fruits.
Of course the police are going to support another policeman. They scratch each other’s back. It is the “good ol’ boys club” mentality. Hey, in and of itself, loyalty and brotherhood is not a bad thing.
But officers like this who abuse their badge like this are the worst sort.
I remembered the day the federal and state prosecutors descended.
Stunned, with no choice, I worked with the Feds and the state troopers.
I opened the files and found the confessions and I was the first that noticed they were not in the prisoners’ handwriting. Oh, there was always a confession on file. But there were also ones that weren’t. I always wondered who wrote it for the suspect.
And I noticed the writer drew a circle over the letter ‘i.’
A dozen–odd cons all drew the same identical circle over the ‘i.’
We traced that to … A cop I once trusted. Godfather to my daughters—both of them—and he never missed a baptism or a birthday.
Well, an old friend with a long and distinguished career on the force.
The list got longer than my face.
In the years that came after that, the City agreed after multiple millions of dollars were paid out in settlements and some death row inmates were released.
Sworn officers were terminated outright and others who were allowed to resign in lieu of termination.
Years later, on my last day on the job I visited the precinct again. I stared at the Interrogation Room for too long. I hadn’t set foot in one for years. This room was a torture chamber. Always felt it should be tilted on its side so we could call it the Oubliette.
We drop you in. You never climb out.
I remembered how disgraceful this room had become.
Oh, the Black Dogs … and what happened to the perps they beat on.
Suspects once inside became perps. Some got suffocated with typewriters covers. Some got shocks with electrical cords. Some suspects were burned.
Some cops played Russian roulette with suspects.
That last day on the job I wouldn’t set foot in here.
I got feeling guilty as hell.
I should have stopped them. I should have done something.
Isn’t that what accomplices always end up saying?
One Black Dog said to me once, “He’s here voluntarily. He’s not under arrest.”
The Black Dogs had no problem blackmailing gays.
Gays got routine beatings.
Gay clubs got police riots after midnight.
Blacks got shot in the back fleeing.
Yeah, I could go on.
Just read the reports. There, in black and white.
A couple guys smothered a suspect with a plastic bag over his head.
Another couple guys gave him electric shocks.
There was a mock execution.
A cop stuck a gun in his mouth.
“Torture to get a confession,” the rookie said when she was the ADA.
I said, “How did you learn of it?”
I think she was surprised that I was no longer surprised.
Near the end I found a young black man lying on a morgue gurney, his eyes closed gently as if in sleep. Beaten until the spirit within had died.
At the morgue I was allowed to examine the body. His neck deeply grooved with the signature of a noose. Blood had pooled in bizarre patterns beneath the skin. Deep purple bruises mottled the back.
The lad was found hanging from two nooses, suspended from the rafters of an attic crawl space above his closet, the reports said.
Blurry photos showed no chair or stool nearby, only a heap of clothes in a laundry basket beneath his feet.
The Bay City police conducted no criminal investigation, the FBI noted. They collected no evidence from the room. Lifted no fingerprints.
Conducted no analysis of the rope or comparison between the noose and a knotted length of rope found in an open desk drawer. Officially, a suicide until the facts came out.
Doctor Hercules of the ME’s Office said, “His death was caused by internal bleeding from an injured liver. A result of internal bleeding in the abdomen, most probably after he was struck with a baton and shoved to the ground by police.”
The lad was dead before he hung himself.
The rookie’s accusations were dead-on. At the minimum, the police officers interrogating were racists.
While most of the interrogation was recorded, fully two-thirds was not “because of technical difficulties.”
What was oddest of all, in the eyes of the court and the public, was that 90-plus percent of those “technical difficulties” were the confessional segments, where the suspect “confessed to the charge.”
The Black Dogs, the brass, and the city came back saying that in subsequent recorded conversations, the suspects renewed their confessions.
Then it came out that routinely, for years, defendants and their lawyers were recorded in private rooms and through their phone calls.
But the rookie had more. She had specific incidents where our detectives (aka the Black Dogs) deliberately withheld evidence of innocence from defendants.
She had where these interrogations were skewed toward conviction. Where the DA’s office was infected, tainted by bigoted county politicians. Where ambitious white male DAs kept hiding exculpatory evidence from the defense. Where white judges kept squashing black appeals purely from bigotry.
Could we be any whiter?
What Bay City citizens said in public about me stung the most.
“The police are not above the law and they should be expected to be held to a very high standard.”
“Please tell me he won’t be getting a pension.”
“Dempsey is a rogue cop who has no business being in law enforcement.”
“Dempsey is an animal that needs to remain caged for the rest of his life.”
I worked at a desk in a cubicle in the Justice Center, sheesh.
“Give him the needle and be done with him already!”
“These cops think they live by different rules.”
“I’m a cop and I can get away with anything.”
On the other hand, there were two lovely Bay City folks, whose names I never discovered.
The first one actually said, “From what I saw on the news, he’s had an unblemished career as a police officer.”
The second one actually said, “Sounds like this guy was a good cop.”
But they both got drowned out by the loudest voice which was Reason and Truth and the Facts that said, “How many cops have you talked to that never lied?”
“He was the head of the pack!”
“Please lock him away and throw the key into the Pacific.”
“Send the punk to jail!”
“One to the head and the problem is solved.”
Hey, I was a disgraced cop. Guilty by association.
Too dumb to back away, I defended them.
Some criticism from the right wingers I just didn’t understand.
“Ghetto trash like this should get the death penalty.”
“What do you expect from 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty?”
“How about all the rape kits that are ‘backlogged’ for processing leaving those animals free to attack more victims?”
Those critics had their own agenda, of course, and the facts of the case were never any stumbling block for them expressing their heartfelt opinions about what jerked their chains. They changed the subject or threw dung at the cameras or raised threats or… Attack dogs, all.
Then there were the voices of my fellow cops.
“We can’t expect him to rat out his friends.”
Well, that was the best of that lot. Nothing precious there to cuddle next to.
It was me they were griping about. Me who had done nothing wrong.
My real crime was stupidity and stubbornness.
Stupid-stubborn makes a Fool. That was my real crime.
I wouldn’t be accused unless I was guilty.
Thinking I was innocent was pretending I wasn’t guilty.
I got more stupid-stubborn when I said at some press conference, “I think we need to take a step back and look at the big picture here.” I got lambasted so brutally by all sides that I forgot even what I was going to say next.
Oh, I deserved it. I was a jackass.
The rookie never dissed me.
The two guys I knew best on the Police Review Board called me Paccio, or fool. Those two Sicilian bastards, they didn’t think their sisters would tell me what it meant?
You don’t marry a Sicilian girl without hearing yourself called fool.
The word gets around.
As the insinuations and inferences accumulated, grew so much more vocal, I caught on my resignation was expected.
I didn’t resign. I hired an attorney from a law firm from the bank building in Public Square. I consulted with and listened to my attorney. I made no public statement. I did no interviews.
I kept my mouth shut. I accused no one of setting me up or framing me. I didn’t say, why me? I didn’t get gun-shy or timid. I didn’t wallow in self-pity. I didn’t break down in public and cry.
I kept my mouth shut and stepped back out of the light.
My attorney told me I was showing remarkable restrain.
The women’s magazines my wife gets at the supermarket say, when your spouse dies, you should wait a year before you do anything.
I was waiting a year before I did anything. I was biding my time.
All this time I kept thinking the Feds and the state troopers were using this time to build a case against me as an integral part of the case against the Bay City Police Department.
I sat terrified, hoping to slip quietly into retirement after my year was over.
Really I was waiting for the hammer to drop on me.
Accomplice. Accessory after the fact. Complicit. Enabler.
Very fecund ground to grow your flowers in.
Publically I winced only once, when the mayor said Jack Dempsey should be allowed to enter a probation program for first-time offenders that would leave him with a clean record.
See, I never went to trial. I was never charged with anything.
Once the Grand Jury made its report, the ADA wanted a public apology from me. She wasn’t mean and she wasn’t a bitch. She never dissed me and never said we rode together. We both remembered how I treated her on the streets. When she was the rookie and I the senior partner.
I made my apology in public. I wasn’t abject, but I was sincere. I knew what an asshole I’d been. Yes, I issued an apology and said, no, I wasn’t coerced. Still I was called a liar and worse. Well, yes, an asshole.
And I was truly sorry. I was grateful but silent when the rookie said, “Dempsey has been whipped already. We should cut him loose from the tree and let it go.”
After that, Bay City forgot about me, and I was even more grateful.
I was looking forward to meeting with her, shaking her hand and saying, “I’m sorry for all of the wrong I done you and all of the grief I gave you thirty years ago.”
The damage had been done. It was almost irredeemable.
When the Breaking News broke nationally: That white males were deciding cases outside the courtroom where blacks were suspects and whites were the victims, I found out all of the cases and trials were rigged against indigents and minorities.
Want the Cold Facts? Our solved murder rates dropped from 80% to 30%, the FBI cold-bloodily reported.
The media loved its hysteria.
The rookie (well, the ADA) was right all along.
She was right; there was jury-rigging for conviction.
Once I found out the truth, what was worse in my book was how they rigged some trials with defense attorneys who were addicts and alcoholics, even narcoleptics. In other cases, some defense attorneys were under suspension or had already been disciplined for misconduct.
She said we manufactured crime where it wasn’t. That we forged confessions that were timed for maximum publicity and maximum media impact. That our interrogators groomed the defendants into confession.
She was dead-on. She was correct.
I was dead-wrong. I was part of the nastiness. I was a chump who defended the indefensible without even investigating first. The mouth-gaping chump.
She said I was glamorizing and sanitizing a continuous travesty of justice.
She said I was celebrating unfair justice.
In one final act of pity, she said, “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
That one stung.
My illusions collapsed totally during the press conference.
The rookie’s big finish: “What is corrupt cannot be trusted.”
Whoosh. Guilt by association wiped me off the map.
I snuck down to Mexico’s western coast, a small hick town with few sidewalks and no Starbucks. I got a studio apartment three blocks from the beach and now I fish alone off the pier every day.
I didn’t live among cops in my retirement. No tailgating parties in the fall. No sports fishing cruises with the guys.
My wife remarried. My kids never visit.
How’d you know I have trouble sleeping?
Up north, the new District Attorney turned the fire hoses on the police stables and flushed away the old scumbags. She had little choice. After all, the investigations were tainted. All the defendants went free. All of the murders were unsolved. All of the cases had to be re-tried.
All of the real killers hadn’t been caught.
A PR disaster that only the rookie could handle.
This past year she became mayor of Bay City.
I sent her an unsigned postcard of palm trees and surf.
Congratulations! God bless you and Best Wishes!
The rookie and I both remember the streets.
I done her wrong.
by 
Fred Zackel
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- Dempsey and the Rookie - July 31, 2020
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