On his client’s behalf, Mr. Jenks explained, “There was some feeling of mistrust from those younger cops. Like, what’s his story?”
Counsel for Mr. Goodman was Stephen C. Worth, a son of Brooklyn who was the borough’s district attorney in the late 1970s. In an interview, he spoke of the disgraced Michael Dowd, the first cop to rat on other cops before the Mollen Commission.
“It was no surprise to me there were drug-using cops like Dowd,” said Worth. “By the sheer force of numbers and the availability of drugs, you couldn’t be surprised about some cops turning out like Dowd.
“You had drugs literally on every corner. There were a million burned-out buildings. It was unbelievable how blatant it was.”
Worth, who spent a considerable amount of pretrial time riding in squad cars with the officers of the 73rd Precinct, added, “If I was a cop, I could have made twenty arrests a ride. But it would have just been shoveling against the tide. My guy Goodman and the other two who went up with him, Mistretta and SanFilippo, they’re saying, ‘Look, we’re doing God’s work.’”
4. “You knew I was a snake...”
Joe Tacopina figured he was smart enough to be a trial lawyer, even if he did not happen to possess the finest mind of his fraternity.
He learned something new and unexpected — and something very intoxicating — on the afternoon he delivered closing arguments for the defense in the trial of the Morgue Boys. The lesson serves him well today as one of the city’s most prosperous criminal defense attorneys and a frequent TV talking head on legal topics.
But there he was back in ’94, a hungry criminal defense lawyer who checked coats by night, arguing his maiden case — all alone in the courtroom well, with a stone-faced judge eyeing him from the bench, with the prosecutor pouncing at every opportunity to object, with the press out there still trying to figure out how to spell his name, and with the jurors thinking who-knows-what of him.
For a couple of awkward minutes, Joe Tacopina was scared. But as he warmed to his argument, he learned that all the pressure somehow made him at least ten percent smarter than he otherwise would have been.
And that got him flying high. Waving sternly at the government cooperators, he told the jurors:
Their testimony, their stories, remind me of an Indian warrior called Cochise. I don’t know if you ever heard of him, but he is allegedly a fierce warrior.
One day out in the plains, he comes across a snake. Cochise is going over to kill the snake. The snake won’t move. The snake was frozen. Cochise raised the weapon to kill the snake, and the snake made a plea: “Please, Cochise, don’t kill me, spare my life. Warm me up and I’ll never bite you.”
Cochise took the snake back to his tent, warmed him up, thawed him out. The second that Cochise sat down, the snake bit him.
“What did you do?” Cochise said to the snake. “You promised you’d never bite me.”
And the snake said, “You knew I was a snake when you warmed me up.”
I think we’ve seen, ladies and gentlemen, that immunity is an open invitation to perjury. I know the government was giving out immunity letters in this courtroom like lollipops.
Ladies and gentlemen, if the prosecutor can convict on the words of Eurell, Hembury, and Carlucci... on this type of evidence, contaminated by their motives, their lies — then the government can convict any of us. Our daughters, our sons, our neighbors — we are all at risk!
God gives us freedom, and Danny Eurell takes it away. God gives us liberty, and Philip Carlucci takes it away. God gives us life, and Kevin Hembury takes it away.
I’m going to tell you something, ladies and gentlemen.
What happened here is not right.
In addition to the rat cops, Mr. Gerber called forward a small parade of Brownsville crack cocaine dealers, whose civil rights had allegedly been violated by the three alleged cop assailants.
Jurors wasted little time in voting to acquit. Mr. Gerber acknowledged, “Some of the witnesses were not terribly sympathetic, like the street dealers with huge rap sheets.”
His investigator on the Morgue Boys case was Anthony P. Valenti, who had grown up in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, which he described as a place where a young man had three career paths in life: “The cops, the clergy, or the cons.”
Investigating a Brownsville case, he said, is complex. “You’re operating in a neighborhood where the good guys don’t want to help and the bad guys for sure don’t want to help,” said Mr. Valenti in an interview. “It’s tough.”
With the plague now gone, where does this leave Brownsville? “I don’t know if it’s better or worse,” said Mr. Valenti, “or any different at all.” For four years — through the Mollen Commission hearings, the investigations, the trial — the three Brownsville cops were put on what bureau cops call modified duty. Street cops know this humiliation as the rubber gun squad.
Officers Goodman, SanFilippo, and Mistretta sought redemption through departmental administrative hearings. “I want to get back out there again, on patrol,” Mr. Mistretta told the Daily News. “This is what I am, what I do.”
His gun and badge were returned, and Frank Mistretta was back on his post. He filed suit against the city in the amount of forty million, but a judge dismissed the action. He remarried and retired from the force and now lives in Florida.
Mr. Goodman was not so lucky. The department cut him loose. He became a full-time killer of household pests. Mr. SanFilippo won back his job, but eventually left town — and an apparently resentful ex-wife, who answered a telephone inquiry by asking, “You’re suing him too, I hope?”
She would not divulge his whereabouts any more precisely than, “He’s not here. He’s in Mexico.” In unmistakable terms, as the vocabulary of scatology allows, the ex — Mrs. SanFilippo offered fair warning of her litigious impulse.
5. Crime Scene
The coffin factory on Herzl Street is layered in four spraypainted gang graffiti, making it difficult to determine exactly who is in charge: Syc or Cripp 2XSS Gang or 2-S Deuce or Royal Deuce.
At the end of the block, the elevated subway tracks of the 3 train provide shelter for a colony of hard-faced individuals who will sell you dope or themselves.
One of them, a fellow named Daisy, said, “Yeah, I heard of the Morgue Boys.” So, were they guilty or innocent? “Man, it don’t matter,” said Daisy. “It’s Brownsville.”
Part II
Johnny-on-the-Pony
In which two teams compete. One team crouches into a single-file line, each person holding the waist of the person ahead. Members of the second team try one-by-one to hop atop the “pony” and to stay on for a certain amount of time before they’re shaken off.
Fun-time monsters
by Errol Louis
All of us had worked hundreds and hundreds of cases but never seen anything this horrible.
— Detective Mike Hinrichs, NYPD’s most decorated officer
East Flatbush