Saints Of New York by R.J. Ellory Read Free Book Online Page A

Office, and then the US
Attorney would bring them to federal court in the Southern or Eastern district.
You follow me so far?'
    'Sure, yes.'
    'Well, the
federal courts have judges who are appointed by the President of the United
States, with advice and consent from the Senate. These boys, these judges, once
they're in, they're in for life. They got life tenure. Now we go back down and
look at the five District Attorneys. These guys get elected to four-year terms
by the citizens of their boroughs, and they operate entirely independent from
the Mayor's Office and the State Attorney General. They are not obligated to
co-operate with one another, and they don't take orders from higher federal or
state authorities. Co-operation has only ever occurred on a case-by-case
basis.'
    'The point
being?'
    'I'm getting to
that. So you have the NYPD, the FBI, the DA's Office, the New York State
Attorney General, the Organized Crime Control Bureau, the Brooklyn Organized
Crime Strike Force, and the original remnants of the New York Task Force which
had its headquarters in White Plains and field offices in Buffalo and Albany.
    'Each of these
groups is independent, and they all got their own snitches and CIs -
confidential informants - and their own cases. And you wanna get this shit
arranged in such a way as to bring about effective co-operation and the precise
application of the law? Hell, we have enough trouble getting a bust for parking
violations. These guys were fighting a losing battle even before they started.
The degree to which organized crime had infiltrated the police and the courts
was staggering. There are forty thousand officers in the NYPD alone, and they react to crime,
they don't proactively investigate potential crime. That's the job of the Feds, but the Feds are
limited to handling espionage, sabotage, kidnapping, bank robbery, drug
trafficking, terrorism, and civil rights violations. You get a murder or two
thrown in there, and unless the acting NYPD Homicide detectives can deliver
probative evidence that the homicide was in some way related to one of those
federal categories, they ain't got a hope in hell of getting FBI support.
    'Well, the Mafia
knew all this, and the bits they didn't know they could find out easily enough.
They knew that the borough DAs didn't work together, so they dumped bodies
along the borough divisional lines. Bullshit paperwork on which DA was
responsible for that piece of territory could keep the case running for months,
and then they get a judge who's on their payroll to dismiss it, based on the
fact that the NYPD and the DA's Office were hounding and harassing the
defendant unnecessarily . . . Some of the things that happened way back when
you wouldn't believe. Anyway, in the Nineteen-Eighties all these legal organizations
got wise, they started to get their shit together. Rudy Giuliani went into the
US Attorney's Office Southern District in 1970. Three years later he was chief
of the Narcotics Unit, and in 1975 he became an Independent and went to work
for Gerald Ford. After that he went into private practice, and when Reagan was
elected in 1980 he decided he was now a Republican. Reagan made him Associate
Attorney General, and from that position he supervised all of the federal law
enforcement agencies of the US Attorney's Office, the Department of
Corrections, the DEA and the US Marshals Service. In 1983 he came into his own
with indictments and prosecution of organized crime figures and he indicted
eleven people through '85 and '86. That sorry bunch of motherfuckers included
the heads of the Five Families, and Rudy got convictions and hundreds of years
of prison time for eight of them. He was the hero of the fucking century.
    'Now the OCCB
had been around since 1971, but it was in the
    Eighties
under Giuliani that they really started to kick ass and take names. That's
where you would have found the late John Parrish, forty years old and a cop
since 1957. He's got a seven- year-old kid and a