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

system worked. The next stage of his education came when he arrested a kid on East Eighty-fifth Street for creating a disturbance. Patrolman Phillips, who had come upon a group of teenagers knocking over garbage cans and making noise, told the teenagers to straighten up the garbage cans and be on their way. The young punks obeyed, but half an hour later they were back at it. As Phillips put it, “One of the kids, a big kid, Irish, had to be a football player, starts to give me a little lip so I whack him right in the puss in front of all his friends…. He was completely enraged. He puts his hands up to fight. I grab him by the neck and I say, you’re under arrest.”
    Back at the precinct, Phillips got more guff—not from the kid but from other cops. It was considered a bad arrest. White kid, Irish, got a little drunk, so what? Phillips overheard the desk lieutenant say, “With all the shit out there, why does he have to lock up this kid?” The implication was: we lock up spooks, spics, chinks, and white trash. We don’t lock up Irish kids for no good reason.
    Phillips felt foolish; it was a rookie mistake. But once you booked somebody you couldn’t take it back. The kid stood charged with littering and simple assault. Not to fret: in the NYPD of the day, there was always a way out.
    Weeks later, with a trial date for the case now on the docket, a former cop named Pete Meagher contacted a cop named Doc Slaughter, who worked with Phillips in the One-Nine. One day, Doc said to Phillips, “Pete Meagher wants to see you about that kid you locked up. They want to know what they can do. Pete is a one-hundred-percent guy. An ex-cop.”
    Phillips, the rookie, was confused. He knew Doc Slaughter was pointing him in a certain direction, but he was too green to figure it out.
    â€œTell you what,” said Doc. “I’ll make an appointment. You’ll talk to Pete and we’ll see what we can do.”
    Phillips and Slaughter met Pete Meagher in a bar on the West Side, in Hell’s Kitchen. Slaughter made the introductions. In a thick brogue, Pete said to Phillips, “That’s my nephew you locked up. The lad’s going to college next fall, and he can’t take a conviction. Now, what can we do about it?”
    What did Meagher want to do? He wanted to give Phillips two hundred dollars to guarantee that the case came to a favorable conclusion.
    Two hundred dollars was a sizable sum to Phillips. His take-home pay was $130 every two weeks. Besides, he’d begun to feel guilty about the arrest: with all the shit out there, why did he have to lock up this kid?
    Phillips took the money, and everyone was happy. But now the rookie cop had to deliver.
    At trial, Phillips took the stand and described the incident.
    â€œIs this the man who did it?” asked the prosecutor, pointing to the Irish kid.
    â€œI can’t be sure,” answered Phillips. It was a direct lie—a perjury.
    The prosecutor was dumbfounded. “What do you mean you can’t be sure?”
    â€œWell, it was dark and there were some other people with him.”
    â€œSo why did you lock him up?”
    â€œIt looked like him, but I’m not sure.”
    â€œYou mean you’re not sure now?”
    â€œWell, yes, I can’t be positive.”
    The kid was set free. The prosecutor looked at Phillips like he was the biggest idiot he’d ever seen. How can you lock up a guy, you don’t even know what he looks like? Phillips felt stupid, and vowed that he would learn from the experience. “After a while you learn to write up the affidavit in such a loose way that you can’t get nailed like that,” he remembered. “You write it up so that if you can’t score, boom, you nail the guy, but if you score, you don’t look like a boob on the stand.”
    In later years, the type of behavior Phillips was engaged in would be referred to as corruption, but at the