Read Online Investigation by Dorothy Uhnak - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Dorothy Uhnak
Tags: USA
Ads: Link
office. We acted more as an information-collecting unit than as an enforcement branch of the department. The squad also handled security assignments, and since I spoke a passable French (my wife, Jen, is French-Canadian), I drew a lot of the glamour escort jobs: seeing to the safety of visiting foreign dignitaries or heads of government attending sessions of the U.N.; keeping between the body I had to protect and the various emotional demonstrators who had carried old political grievances to the streets of New York on behalf of citizens still in the mother country.
I felt sorry for the uniformed cops assigned to handle the political protesters; for the most part, the guys assigned to these various functions didn’t know what the hell the whole thing was all about, but they ended up being the only visible form of “oppression.” While the poor slobs on the street were yelling and shoving and provoking their own arrests, I was with the targets of their anger, be they Russian or Chinese or Cuban or Israeli or whatever, who were usually socializing politely with one another, drinking and eating at any number of gourmet luncheons, dinners or receptions. The closest thing to antagonism at these affairs would be one diplomat bragging to another about the marvelous custom tailor he had located in New York and then smugly and undiplomatically refusing to give the name of said tailor.
Occasionally, some nut in Hollywood would come up with some kind of gimmick to publicize an about-to-open film, and, the Mayor being ever anxious to attract film-makers back to New York and being himself one of the beautiful people who loved to mix it up with movie stars, we would be handed over as taxpayer-paid personal bodyguards to an assortment of producers, directors, male and female stars and celebrities. Some of the guys got sore about these assignments. I found them interesting: like a visit to a foreign world.
Even the hardest old-timers in the squad, the impossible to impress, would always remember the special assignments to the Secret Service contingent traveling to New York with John F. Kennedy. Usually, when you’re assigned to a top government official, you never get beyond a polite “Good morning,” but at the end of the day J.F.K. would wave a mob of us into the hotel suite, kick off his shoes, yank down his tie, break out the booze and egg us on to tell him our “war stories” about life on the streets of New York. I always had the feeling he was a buff; that under other circumstances he’d have been one helluva Irish cop, with that quick sharp wit and incisive way of getting right to the center of things with a few fast remarks.
The department went higher-education crazy in the late sixties and started to replace members of the various squads and bureaus, regardless of experience and performance, with college-educated men. Half the guys I worked with began hustling back and forth between assignments and classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, frantically compiling credits. I figured that either my years of various police experience qualified me or they didn’t qualify me for the job I had been doing for the last five years; which had earned me promotion to second-grade detective.
I got bounced—without prejudice—from the B.O.S.S. at the beginning of 1967, and Tim, who had just made captain and was assigned to a precinct in Brooklyn, arranged for me to be assigned to the Queens Homicide Squad.
I hated Homicide. I hated everything about it, including some of the guys I worked with who liked to pretend that they were instrumental in “solving” a case. Any cop worth his shield knows that unless a homicide is committed by someone close to the victim, the odds are that the perpetrator will remain at large. Unless you get lucky and an informant comes through for you. Informants—what the Hollywood cops call “snitches”—are the backbone of any successful police department. The informant is generally the scum
I felt sorry for the uniformed cops assigned to handle the political protesters; for the most part, the guys assigned to these various functions didn’t know what the hell the whole thing was all about, but they ended up being the only visible form of “oppression.” While the poor slobs on the street were yelling and shoving and provoking their own arrests, I was with the targets of their anger, be they Russian or Chinese or Cuban or Israeli or whatever, who were usually socializing politely with one another, drinking and eating at any number of gourmet luncheons, dinners or receptions. The closest thing to antagonism at these affairs would be one diplomat bragging to another about the marvelous custom tailor he had located in New York and then smugly and undiplomatically refusing to give the name of said tailor.
Occasionally, some nut in Hollywood would come up with some kind of gimmick to publicize an about-to-open film, and, the Mayor being ever anxious to attract film-makers back to New York and being himself one of the beautiful people who loved to mix it up with movie stars, we would be handed over as taxpayer-paid personal bodyguards to an assortment of producers, directors, male and female stars and celebrities. Some of the guys got sore about these assignments. I found them interesting: like a visit to a foreign world.
Even the hardest old-timers in the squad, the impossible to impress, would always remember the special assignments to the Secret Service contingent traveling to New York with John F. Kennedy. Usually, when you’re assigned to a top government official, you never get beyond a polite “Good morning,” but at the end of the day J.F.K. would wave a mob of us into the hotel suite, kick off his shoes, yank down his tie, break out the booze and egg us on to tell him our “war stories” about life on the streets of New York. I always had the feeling he was a buff; that under other circumstances he’d have been one helluva Irish cop, with that quick sharp wit and incisive way of getting right to the center of things with a few fast remarks.
The department went higher-education crazy in the late sixties and started to replace members of the various squads and bureaus, regardless of experience and performance, with college-educated men. Half the guys I worked with began hustling back and forth between assignments and classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, frantically compiling credits. I figured that either my years of various police experience qualified me or they didn’t qualify me for the job I had been doing for the last five years; which had earned me promotion to second-grade detective.
I got bounced—without prejudice—from the B.O.S.S. at the beginning of 1967, and Tim, who had just made captain and was assigned to a precinct in Brooklyn, arranged for me to be assigned to the Queens Homicide Squad.
I hated Homicide. I hated everything about it, including some of the guys I worked with who liked to pretend that they were instrumental in “solving” a case. Any cop worth his shield knows that unless a homicide is committed by someone close to the victim, the odds are that the perpetrator will remain at large. Unless you get lucky and an informant comes through for you. Informants—what the Hollywood cops call “snitches”—are the backbone of any successful police department. The informant is generally the scum
Similar Books
