One of the newspapers I was reading this morning noted that crime in the city was on the rise and listed a series of charts and stats to demonstrate the point. I had promised you this piece last week and today seemed to be the perfect day to publish it given that news.
On two separate occasions in April of 2001 (read Postscripts for how I recall the date) Tony Carbonetti revealed an extraordinary secret to me. We were at his home for both conversations. What precipitated this discussion I no longer recall. But we were in his living room and in regard to something I had just said, Tony was trying to counter by making the point that any absolute can be fixed or fudged. "It's like the murder stats," he said. "What can you possibly mean?" I responded. He gave me a half cocked smile as if to say, "Come on, be real." "Those numbers aren't real," he told me. I was totally stunned. It wasn't that I didn't think we were capable of playing with numbers. I had just always assumed that the bedrock of Rudy's legacy, the extreme drop in crime, was real. We had made a fundamental difference based on our policies and practices. "Wait a minute, hold on," I said, "what are you saying? You can't fudge dead bodies. They either are or they aren't. You count em up and come up with a total. How in the world do you massage that?"
He gave me a look. The kind of look you give an idiot child, but one you care about; exasperated and patient all at the same time. "Happy Land," he said. "What, the fire?" I asked.
Happy Land was a low-rent social club in the Bronx that had a devastating fire that killed a lot of people during the Dinkins Administration. It was arson so the deaths all counted in the murder statistics that year. It wasn't really fair, statistically. It took what was already a bad annual number and made it much worse. For Dinkins, I mean.
"What if instead of counting all 40, or whatever the number was, you only counted it as one. Counted the incident instead of the bodies."
"Jesus," I said, "they did that? "No, Dinkins didn't miscount the numbers. Besides they couldn't do that with Happy Land, the number was too public," Tony explained. "But you're saying we do that," I asked, "count incidents instead of bodies when there are multiple murders?" "Yea, sometimes," Tony admitted. But I got the impression that because of my stunned reaction he was softening his answer. I got the sense from him that we were doing this more than just 'sometimes."
I was really floored. I was as stunned by that as by anything I had learned up till that point during those seven years. If you told me we played with the welfare stats and that the number hadn't come down from 1.5 million to half a million, I could have easily accepted that we played with those numbers. But the murder stat? That was the indicator that we and everyone else used to herald the amazing change that had taken place in NYC. People all over the world knew about that number. Trust me, I met with lots of foreign delegations and they all knew that year's murder stat and our cumulative crime reduction percentage.
When I left his office I felt a little sick and a little sad. I also wondered who at PD was responsible, actually responsible, for fixing these numbers. And who else at at City Hall besides Tony knew about this.
A
few weeks later I was hanging out at Tony's apartment. I dont' know
where Vinny was but he wasn't around. We were watching TV and
something came on the news about the police. The reference was
negative. Tony got kind of sullen and lowered the sound on the TV. "I
was in Rudy's office the other day and you're never going to believe
what he said to me." Rudy had been extremely moody and I could imagine
Tony telling me just about anything. "God, what now?" I asked.
"We were in his office, just him and me. We had just finished a meeting with Kerik and some guys from PD. The meeting hadn't gone well. After they left he says, sort of to nobody, although I was the only one there, "They're out of control." Who is? I asked him. "The cops. I've lost control. It's too far gone for me to do anything about it. There's nothing I can do at this point."
"Holy shit," I said to Tony, "have you ever heard him say anything like that before?" "Never," Tony said, "he's never even hinted before that he feels that way." "Where did it come from then?" I asked. "I don't know," Tony said, "it must be how he really feels."
That admission by Rudy was startling to me for a few reasons. First, I wasn't aware that he had acknowledged to himself what we all knew; that the cops had become uncontrollable in the city. Rudy was always the first to defend any PD action as history documents so well. Everyone else around him knew there was a serious problem but no one had ever heard him acknowledge it before. Second, it sent a chill through me to think that if he, Rudy, the mayor and chief police booster felt that the problem was so bad that even he couldn't control it, then we were in some serious trouble. I also knew that Rudy and Tony knew things regarding police actions that I was certainly not aware of and that statement by him made me think that there must be a lot more bad shit going on then I ever could have imagined.
POSTSCRIPTS:
Just for the record and since I do remember the date I thought I would recall why. I had just returned from a conference in Tampa immediately before my first conversation with Tony and I know the second one happened a few weeks later. Since I know that the conference was in April of 2001 I can place these events in that period.
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