The Savage City by T. J. English Read Free Book Online

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    Scoring was an art Phillips had learned early in his career, while still a patrolman in uniform. One of his first partners was a ten-year veteran named Kenny Keller. It was Keller who taught him how to be a cop. Years later, in a memoir entitled On the Pad, Phillips recalled:
    Responded to a DOA with Kenny one day. It was a fairly decent apartment. But the individual had been dead for several days and there was a tremendous odor of human body which, once you smell it, you can never forget. It’s an excruciating smell; it makes you gag and it makes your eyes tear. But Keller was a very tough guy in his own way, not squeamish at all, and he proceeds to roll the guy around like he was a log. The more you roll him around, the worse the smell gets. All the secretions of fluid start coming out of the body. Sure enough, he finds about four hundred dollars [on the body], but the money is all wet and smells like the DOA. So he just takes it to the bathroom and washes it off, dries it on a towel and says to me, Willie, once it dries off the smell’ll be gone and nobody’ll know the difference.
    By the time of the Wylie-Hoffert murders, Detective Phillips had developed far more sophisticated scams for stealing money off the population he was sworn to serve and protect. One reason was that he had a head start: Phillips was inculcated into the ways of the department by his father, William R. Phillips Sr., who had retired from the force with a full pension in 1959. Bill Sr. was Irish American, part of a fraternal order within the department that filled out its ranks and shaped its destiny. For more than a hundred years the Irish had used the police department as their personal patronage system, to the point where the upper ranks of the NYPD read like a refrain from one of those old Bing Crosby songs, like “McNamara’s Band” or “Dear Old Donegal”:
    There came Branigan, Flanigan, Milligan, Gilligan
    Duffy, McGuffy, Malacky, Mahone…
    As a teenager, Billy Jr. sat and listened to his father’s friends—all of them cops—brag about the legendary scores they had made. His father had been assigned for ten years to the Policy Squad, which was in charge of policing the city’s thriving numbers racket; in places like Harlem, even the poor put down a nickel or a dime on the daily number. The Policy Squad was a license to steal, and it was worth $1,000 a month to Bill Phillips Sr.—at a time when a policeman’s take-home pay was fifty dollars a week.
    From the time Bill Phillips first passed the civil service exam and entered the police academy, the fact that his father had been “on the job” put him in a proud though not necessarily exclusive club. There were many young cadets at the academy with relatives on the job—fathers, uncles, and brothers. The talk among them often had to do with ways to profit above and beyond the lowly police salary. Phillips remembered: “There was a great awareness of this money being made in the street and a lot of the fellows made no bones about it. They just couldn’t wait to get out there and start making money.”
    Once he was part of the system, Phillips’s education was gradual and methodical. His first opportunity for an arrest came before he was even out of the academy. One night, he was on the town with another guy from the academy. They were both in their police “grays,” the uniform worn by recruits not yet sworn in as full-fledged cops. Phillips and his friend had picked up a couple girls in a bar. The friend took his girl up to a hotel room, while Phillips was “stuck down in the car playing a little grab ass.” From the car, Phillips saw a suspicious-looking black guy across the street approach a parked car and jimmy open the window with a screwdriver. The guy broke into the car and started gathering up items from inside.
    The would-be flatfoot sprang into action:
    I jumped out, try to grab