Michael Dowd was the kind of cop who gave new meaning to the word moonlighting. It wasn't just any job that the 10-year veteran of the New York City force was working on the side. Dowd was a drug dealer. From scoring free pizza as a rookie he graduated to pocketing cash seized in drug raids and from there simply to robbing dealers outright, sometimes also relieving them of drugs that he would resell. Soon he had formed "a crew" of 15 to 20 officers in his Brooklyn precinct who hit up dealers regularly. Eventually one of them was paying Dowd and another officer $8,000 a week in protection money. Dowd bought four suburban homes and a $35,000 red Corvette. Nobody asked how he managed all that on take-home pay of $400 a week.
In May 1992 Dowd, four other officers and one former officer were arrested for drug trafficking by police in Long Island's Suffolk County. When the arrests hit the papers, it was forehead-slapping time among police brass. Not only had some of their cops become robbers, but the crimes had to be uncovered by a suburban police force. Politicians and the media started asking what had happened to the system for rooting out police corruption established 21 years ago at the urging of the Knapp Commission, the investigatory body that heard Officer Frank Serpico and other police describe a citywide network of rogue cops.
To find out, New York City mayor David Dinkins established the Mollen Commission, named for its chairman, Milton Mollen, a former New York judge. Last week, in the same Manhattan hearing room where the Knapp Commission once sat, the new body heard Dowd and other officers add another lurid chapter to the old story of police corruption. And with many American cities wary that drug money will turn their departments bad, police brass around the country were lending an uneasy ear to the tales of officers sharing lines of coke from the dashboard of their squad cars and scuttling down fire escapes with sacks full of cash stolen from dealers' apartments.
The Mollen Commission has not uncovered a citywide system of payoffs among the 30,000-member force. In fact, last week's testimony focused on three precincts, all in heavy crime areas. But the tales, nevertheless, were troubling. Dowd described how virtually the entire precinct patrol force would rendezvous at times at an inlet on Jamaica Bay, where they would drink, shoot off guns in the air and plan their illegal drug raids.
Onetime Bronx patrolman Bernie Cawley, 29, now serving three years to life for narcotics charges and for selling stolen guns, told the commission why he was known to other cops as the Mechanic. "Because I used to 'tune people up,' " he placidly explained. "It's a police word for beating people." Suspects? he was asked. "No, I was just beating people up in general." In four years on the force, Cawley claimed, he assaulted people as many as 400 times with his nightstick, flashlight and lead-lined gloves. "Who's going to catch us?" he said, shrugging. "We're the police."