BEAT COP
TO TOP COP
A Tale of Three Cities
JOHN F. TIMONEY
Foreword by Tom Wolfe
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
THE CITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, Series Editors
Published in collaboration with the Penn Institute for Urban Research
Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Timoney, John F.
Beat cop to top cop: a tale of three cities / John F. Timoney ; foreword by Tom Wolfe.
p. cm. — (The city in the twenty-first century)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4246-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Timoney, John F. 2. Police—United States—Biography. 3. Police—United States—Case studies. I. Title.
HV7911.T563A3 2010
363.2092—dc22
[B]
2009046955
To Noreen, Christine, Sean, and lovely Leah:It's the cop's family that makes the real sacrifice.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Be Careful What You Wish For
3. From Sergeant to Management
5. Chinatown
6. Back to Headquarters Under Dinkins
7. The Bratton Era Begins
8. CompStat, Crowd Control, and the “Dirty Thirty”
9. The Beginning of the End
10. Interregnum
PART II. PHILADELPHIA
11. Philadelphia, Here I Come
12. Pugnacious Philly
PART III. MIAMI
13. Paradise Found: Miami
14. Free Trade, Free Speech, and the Politics of Policing
Conclusion: Where We Were, Where We Are
FOREWORD
Tom Wolfe
Ecce facies! Behold the face!
That face, belonging to John Timoney, has become a legend in its own time. In the 1970s, Timoney was a young New York City police officer assigned to street patrol in the South Bronx, the worst skell hole on earth. Everybody else on earth got an eyeful of the Bronx's skell-bent misery in the movie Fort Apache, the Bronx, starring Paul Newman, and the television miniseries The Bronx Is Burning. “Skell” is cop slang for a lowlife with the IQ and humane fellow-feelings of a virus.
All a policeman in the South Bronx had to do was cast his net, anywhere, anywhere at all, and he could haul in a wriggling, writhing, rattler-fanged tangle of toxic felons. Catching them was one thing. Taking them into custody was another. As cop lore had it, in Manhattan you could tell some skell he was under arrest and say, “We can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way—it's up to you,” and he would at least know what you were talking about. In the South Bronx you got ready to roll in the dirt from the git-go. Every police officer assigned to street patrol had that problem…except for John Timoney. According to the legend, Timoney never once had to draw a weapon to arrest a felon and take him in. He just gave him a good look at…that face…and even the most obtuse and poisonous viper became a mewling little pussy…and that face became a legend in its own time. Like most legends, I am sorry to say, this one is not entirely true. At one point Timoney was reduced to drawing his gun and engaging in a shootout before managing to bring in two drug dealers who had just fulfilled the dream of a lifetime in their line of work, found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, laid hands on enough treasure to retire in posh style and cover themselves with honor by collecting Pre-Raphaelite paintings, if they wanted to, and donating them amid posh pomp to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: namely, one hundred pounds of pure, uncut heroin.
By the time I ran into Timoney ten years later, he had risen to inspector, the third highest rank in the New York Police Department. Another four years, and he would become, at age forty-five, the youngest four-star chief in the department's history. Even someone in the grandstand, like me, could read the lines incised in that face, punctuated by a blunt nose, and immediately make out the words “tough Irish cop.” Timoney was the platonic ideal-typical incarnation of the breed. He was the real real thing, born in Dublin to working-class parents who, when their boy Sean—as they called him then—was thirteen, emigrated to New York with him and his younger brother, Ciaran. The boys grew up streetwise, as they say, or at least wise in the ways of the Studs Lonigan—style streets of Washington Heights, a neighborhood in far northern Manhattan right across the Harlem River from the South Bronx. Both boys joined the police force. Among sturdy Irish lads, it was as natural as breathing.
I remember asking Inspector Timoney if the NYPD still recruited Irish policemen. “Yeah,” he said, “we recruit them, but now they all come from the suburbs…and to tell the truth, a lot of them are cream puffs. These days if you want a real Irish cop, you hire a Puerto Rican.”
By now, Timoney had turned into a fitness fiend. He had begun running at least five miles a day, and that led to fifteen marathons and so many half marathons, more than two dozen, he and everybody else lost count. After he resigned as deputy police commissioner in New York in 1996 and became Philadelphia's police commissioner in 1998, the fiendish fitness obsession did wonders for the legend—just like that. A week after being sworn in as Philadelphia's top cop, amid heavy press coverage, Timoney happened to be on his daily run and had just reached the city's toniest downtown residential area, Rittenhouse Square, when an excited citizen cried out, “Hey! I know you! Aren't