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Even though each member of the city's 400-man narcotics street squads has at least one informant working for him, corrupt cops hungered for more. Logan testified that they sometimes threatened a man with a "flake," or false arrest, to force him to become an informant. Logan once approached a man selling wigs on a street in Harlem. He told the merchant that he would be arrested for possession of stolen goods unless he provided narcotics tips. He did. It was scarcely news when a subsequent witness, Paul Curran, chairman of the State Commission of Investigation, called the whole narcotics enforcement program a "monumental failure."
Saying Thank You. Other testimony made clear that police corruption —"clean" or "dirty"—cannot exist without the connivance of the public. It was estimated that the cost of city building is increased by as much as 5% a year because of the bribes that contractors pay the police. The records of seven of the city's top hotels showed that they have been giving the cops $60,000 worth of free meals and rooms a year. From January to May of this year the New York Hilton provided 144 meals to 80 cops for a total bill of $4,662. In the first half of 1971, the Taft Hotel supplied free rooms for cops at a cost of $2,520. Though unlawful tips to public employees are punishable by up to a year in prison in New York, the hotel management dismissed the matter as a fact of life in the city. Said H. Richard Penn, an attorney for the Hilton: "It's the hotel's way of saying 'thank you!' "
The one genuine hero to emerge in the course of the sordid hearings, George Burkert, 23, was repeatedly interrupted by applause as he told how he rebuffed every effort by the cops to shake him down. A nighttime tow-truck driver, Burkert was constantly harassed by the police for not playing ball. He was handed tickets for a variety of niggling offenses, such as not turning on his license-plate light. Once he was issued 13 parking tickets in 26 minutes while he was sitting in a station house where he had been taken by the cops. Two police captains even paid visits to his boss and said Burkert was a troublemaker who had to go. Burkert was fired. The same thing happened at his next job. His boss told him that the cops had threatened to "start harassing my drivers" if he did not fire him.
Fed up, Burkert decided to do what the cops wanted him to do—but for the benefit of the Knapp Commission. Properly wired, he made a series of payoffs to the police, climaxed by a $30 bribe handed to two patrolmen right outside a station house. The transaction was filmed by a TV camera crew in a panel truck. The cops spotted the camera and pursued the truck. They managed to stop it, but let it go after the "producer" said they were only filming street scenes. Still, the cops were worried. What if the crew had been working for the Knapp Commission? One cop put in a call to Burkert. The cop suggested that, if they had been trapped, Burkert should say he had borrowed the money the night before and was only paying it back. Tf that did not work, Burkert might say: " 'Ah, Jeez, I was counting my own money, that's all. Jeez, I might have leaned my hand into the patrol car.' I mean you can say anything."