But there was a more challenging case a month later with our undercover officer Victor Cipullo, a good-looking Italian kid with balls of steel. Victor had been an undercover for five years and could buy from the lowest junkie on the streets as well as the high-end doctors at prestigious hospitals. There was no one from whom Victor couldn't buy. Along the way Victor had proved his mettle on more than one occasion when he had had to kill the drug dealers trying to rip him off. “Victor pisses ice water,” his lieutenant once noted.
The case in point was a sale of pure heroin from a house in the Soundview section of the Bronx. The house literally stood by itself on an abandoned street of mostly overgrown lots. Anybody coming onto the block was noticed immediately. Victor made the initial buy and three subsequent buys, called “B buy,” “C buy,” and “D buy.” With each purchase, the weight and purity of the heroin increased. While ordering the fifth buy, he asked for a kilo of heroin, having proven his credibility in making the previous four buys. And so the deal was consummated. The plan was to have Victor go into the house and get a sample of the kilo, which he would take with him to have it tested for purity. If the purity was high, he would return within the hour with $80,000.
When Victor left, the plan was for us to hit the house and seize the drugs. However, upon leaving, he transmitted to us, via his hidden microphone, a very important message: “My job is done. But you guys are fucked. There are three guys in there, all armed, and they're going to fucking kill yas! One of them is wanted for shooting a cop!” We met Victor a few blocks away, and he confirmed his transmission. He was having some fun at our expense, which was not uncommon for him. Like most of the undercovers, he always argued that he had more balls than the backup teams, that his job was the really dangerous job and that the backup team merely had to go in and make the arrest. The question quickly became how would we get into the house, get the bad guys, and recover the drugs, all without getting shot in the process.
Our lieutenant, Martin O’Boyle, viewed by many to be the most knowledgeable person in the whole of the Narcotics Division in New York City, proved his mettle that day by being not only a great leader but also an even better thinker. Within five minutes he had devised a tactical plan. We would use one large van and one unmarked police car. The large van, which looked like a UPS delivery van, held eight narcotics detectives. They were all secreted in the back and were armed with rocks that they had picked up at a nearby construction site. The second car held George Kennedy and me, along with Lieutenant O’Boyle. I had the battering ram to take the door down; Kennedy and Lieutenant O’Boyle carried shotguns.
The detectives in the van were instructed to pull up in front of the house, go to all sides of the structure, and throw their rocks at the windows to distract the bad guys inside. Simultaneously, I would hit the front door with the ram; we would make our entry, seize the three individuals, and confiscate the drugs. The plan went without a hitch except for one close call: one of the three bad guys with a gun went out the back window and confronted Sergeant John Loughran, who threw his last remaining rock at the bad guy with the gun and struck him in the head. Who said cavemen can't win?
The lesson here is that when things go okay, even though unorthodox methods are used, all is forgiven and forgotten. This was not the case on my seventh wedding anniversary, when I was involved in a shootout in New York's Lower East Side. Our undercover was shot in the chest when we attempted to execute a search warrant for a half pound of heroin. We had been working the Lower East Side for quite a few months out of the Bronx Narcotics Office, something in and of itself unusual. However, my informant was familiar with all of the big players in this neighborhood and parts of Brooklyn. Most important, he had never failed me. We had been focusing on a particular drug dealer when one evening, around 4:00 P.M., I got a phone call from my informant that a delivery of heroin had just been made to the drug dealer's social club, which was located on the second floor of a tenement building on Sixth Street between Avenues C and D. We quickly got our team together and headed down to Manhattan. Four of us went directly to the club while the fifth, Robby Morales, went to the District Attorney's Office to secure a search warrant based on the information supplied by the confidential informant. The four of us headed to the location with a plan.
Our plan called for us to drop off one of our undercovers, Chago Concepcion, a veteran undercover police officer who spoke very poor English but, like most good undercovers, always got the job done somehow. The really good undercovers took pride in the challenge; the harder the challenge, the better. But this operation seemed simple. Chago would knock on the door of the club and then in Spanish ask for some fictitious name. The expectation was that someone in the club would open the door, Chago would get his foot in, keep the door open, and then my other partner, Dicky Werdan, and I, would force our way into the club and freeze the occupants until Robby's arrival with the search warrant. We dropped Chago off a half a block from the club to allow him to “walk on the set.” We kept him under close observation as he approached. It was about 5:30 at night and getting dark. Snow began to fall. As Chago mounted the steps leading up to the front door of the building, some kind of conversation ensued, there was a commotion at the door, and the next thing I knew, shots rang out. Chago had his gun out and started shooting into the club. Dicky and I ran up the stoop on either side of the doorjamb. There was a flight of stairs leading up to the second floor, where a guy was holding a gun and shooting at us. We returned fire, not knowing if we hit the intended target. And then there was silence. I then heard Chago, who was now down on the sidewalk, scream, “I'm hit!” He put his hand underneath his green army jacket, and when he removed it, it was covered in blood.
We immediately got on the radio and called for assistance. “Ten-thirteen! Police officer shot!” Within less than a minute, we heard the sirens coming down Avenue B as the marked police cars made their way to us. Chago, with gun in hand, ran to meet them, with me behind him yelling, “Chago! Wait! Wait!” I knew what the responding cops would be thinking. The majority of cops at the time were white guys who looked like me. The Lower East Side was a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood. The responding police officers were going to think that the cop who had been shot looked like me and that the guy who shot him looked like Chago, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican. As we were running west on Sixth toward Avenue C, the first police car came to a screeching halt; using their police car doors for cover, these officers yelled to us to drop our guns. I immediately dropped my gun. Chago, who I assume was in shock, wouldn't drop his gun. I screamed at Chago, “Drop the fucking gun!” and then yelled to the uniformed officers that we were cops. While I looked like a cop, I could have also been mistaken for a denizen of the East Village, with my long hair, green army jacket, sneakers, and jeans. Chago certainly did not look like a cop. So who could blame the responding police officers if they shot someone who refused an order to drop his weapon? Somehow I was able to convince those two uniformed officers and their backup officers that we were cops, and so the standoff was resolved peacefully. Within ten minutes an Emergency Service Unit (ESU—in other cities this unit is called SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics]) was on the scene; we began an apartment-by-apartment search of the two abandoned six-story buildings on either side of the social club while Chago was rushed to the hospital. We located and arrested the shooter in a closet on the fourth floor of the abandoned building to the east of the social club. We recovered his 9-mm handgun in the snow in the back alley. The entire episode was carried on the eleven o’clock news.
I spent several hours being interviewed by a police captain regarding the discharge of my weapon. The interview was finished by midnight, and I then returned to the processing of the prisoner and drugs to answer more questions from the 9th Precinct detectives. By 8:00 A.M., all of the interviews and paperwork had been completed