- Joined
- Apr 27, 2007
- Messages
- 69,284
- Reaction score
- 143
New York's Finest Police Cover-Up - Page 1 - News - New York - Village Voice
awful.... awful.... but... not surprising. it's sad that this happened "a lot"... This article is very long so click on the link to read full story.
The Village Voice has learned that New York City's Police Department has spent nearly two years covering up an ugly, alcohol-fueled street brawl in which 10 rookie cops beat up a taxi driver outside a trendy Upper East Side bar. The NYPD has allowed the rookies' boss—a captain who witnessed the fight but didn't act to stop it and left the scene without speaking to investigators—to escape scrutiny.
None of the rookies were charged criminally with the December 2008 assault. Instead, it was the cab-driver victim who was arrested, records show. Meanwhile, the captain, William Pla, was subsequently promoted to commanding officer of the 23th Precinct in East Harlem.
And Sergeant Anthony Acosta, the man who waded into the melee and broke up the assault—a highly decorated sergeant who has made more than 1,000 arrests in his 20-year career—was slapped with administrative charges and chained to a desk without his gun or his shield for almost two years.
"I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how this happened," Acosta tells the Voice. "I did everything right. I feel like the lesson is, you know what, mind your business, stay in your house, don't get involved. I'm not one of those conspiracy people, but how the hell did I end up in this position?"
The cover-up and punishment of the officer who tried to break up the fight is another glaring example of how internal justice is meted out in Ray Kelly's NYPD. In the "NYPD Tapes," published earlier this year, the Voice showed how another whistleblower who has tried to bring NYPD injustice to light, Adrian Schoolcraft, was punished by being forcibly put into a hospital mental ward.
This new case also offers lessons about the byzantine world of One Police Plaza, where miscreants are promoted and do-gooders are punished by an arcane, plodding bureaucracy that operates almost entirely outside of public scrutiny. The Voice sent a detailed e-mail to the police department press office. There was no response.
In conversation, Sergeant Anthony Acosta, 44, is so professional that he insists on addressing civilians with the word "sir," even when he's off-duty. He is a stocky man, five-foot-six, 195 pounds, inked with a series of tattoos down his thick forearms that reference his days as a United States Marine.
He grew up in the Polo Grounds public housing development and East Harlem. His mother left him and his siblings when he was 10 years old. They then lived with his father in an abandoned building on East 103rd Street. When he was 14, Acosta moved alone into an apartment provided for him by his uncle, and started working to help pay the rent. He worked in the city's summer youth jobs program, and actually lied about his age to work in an ice cream parlor and a movie theater.
Acosta had planned to go to college after he graduated from Murry Bergtraum High School, which happens to be located next door to police headquarters. But his girlfriend—later his wife—got pregnant, so he joined the Marines to help pay for the expenses.
Acosta was a Marine for five years, from 1984 to 1989. He worked embassy security details in Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, and was also assigned to a task force that responded to terror incidents. (Years later, he would take a 2005–2006 leave from the NYPD to go to Iraq and help train its new police force.)
From the Marines, he went straight into the police academy. While he was still a cadet, Acosta responded while off-duty to a fire in a building next to his apartment. A mother had fled the apartment, leaving her two kids behind. Acosta climbed the fire escape, got into the apartment, and carried one of the kids to safety. He went back to rescue the second child, but fell ill from smoke inhalation. Fortunately, firefighters arrived and made the second rescue.
After he graduated from the academy, he went from patrolman to sergeant and worked in a succession of precincts in Manhattan and the Bronx. He worked in both uniform and plainclothes anti-crime units. Currently, he is the field intelligence officer for the 30th Precinct in Washington Heights, a highly sensitive and coveted post that involves "debriefing," or interviewing, suspects for information about other crimes.
During his NYPD career, he has amassed more than 1,000 arrests—a large number relative to most other officers. He has also earned 76 medals, including the Medal of Valor, one of the department's highest honors. He routinely receives high ratings in work evaluations.
He earned the Medal of Valor for arresting two men involved in a home-invasion robbery, after exchanging gunfire with one of the men. In another notable case, he arrested a pimp who had kidnapped a child to force her mother to prostitute herself. He set up a sting in which the mother convinced the pimp to meet with her. Once the pimp was arrested, the child was found unharmed in a Bronx motel.
In another case, he spotted a naked woman staggering away from a taxi cab. She had been raped by a pimp. Acosta arrested the cab driver for fleeing the scene, and helped catch the rapist, which led to the seizure of firearms from an apartment in the Polo Grounds Houses.
Following a rash of shootings in the 41st Precinct in Hunts Point, Acosta's anti-crime team arrested 19 people on homicide, assault, and drug charges. And there was the case in which he helped catch a drug crew and seized $400,000 in cash, five guns, and 18 kilos of cocaine.
Over 20 years as a police officer, Acosta had never spoken to a reporter before he agreed recently to give an interview about the incident outside the bar on December 17, 2008, that led, in its bizarre way, to his exile from the street.
The evening began normally enough, he says. According to his very detailed notes, he finished his tour at the 3-0, and met up with some colleagues at the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que under the West Side Highway. Then, after dinner and one drink, he headed to the Vudu Lounge at East 78th Street and First Avenue for a Christmas party organized by Captain William Pla, the commander of Manhattan North Impact, a unit composed of rookie officers sent to flood high-crime areas.
Acosta parked across the street, walked inside, paid Pla the $60 party fee, and chatted with some of the officers present. At about 11:30, the captain told everyone the party was over, and Acosta left.
He crossed the street, sat in his car, and made a couple of calls on his cell phone. He got out of his car to respond to what turned out not to be an accident, and then noticed someone being assaulted across the street in front of the bar.
A group of rookie cops had spilled out of the Vudu Lounge. Traffic on northbound First Avenue was going very slowly at that moment, and the rookies took the opportunity to cross against the light.
The young officers crossed in front of a yellow taxi driven by Levelle DeSean Ming, a 41-year-old Brooklyn man.
Ming had just come back from a trip to Kennedy Airport. He was about 10 hours into his shift. At the time, he was making about $400 a day as a hack, but he had to kick back half of that to the cab owner. He had child support and other debts to worry about.
"I was sitting there, and I tapped the horn, and I said to myself, 'Wow, people don't know how to act when they're drunk,' " Ming tells the Voice in an interview. "But this guy heard me, he was intoxicated, and he said, 'What did you say?' "
That guy, Ming later learned, was Police Officer John Virga. Virga reached through the window and punched Ming three times in the face. Ming says he opened the driver's side door and began to get out, but Virga slammed the door against Ming's chest three times, bruising his ribs.
Ming finally got out of the car, which turned out not to be a great idea. "I got out, he punched me more, I fought back, and then other people jumped in, punching and kicking me," he says. "I got knocked down. I got beat up bad. They must have hit me 30 or 40 times."
The telephone switchboard in the NYPD's dispatch center began to light up with calls.
"You got to get the cops over," says a Park Avenue doorman from New Jersey in his 911 call, who spoke to the Voice under the condition that his name be withheld, and happened to be in his car right behind Ming's cab that night. "They're beating the shit out of a cab driver. About 15 guys. They're fucking jumping him."
Seconds later, the doorman adds, "They're getting a two-by-four. I'm witnessing a big two-by-four being picked up."
"He honked his horn," the doorman tells the Voice. "They went ballistic, started punching his window, being dickheads. The cabbie did nothing wrong."
He continues to confirm details of Acosta's story: "The traffic was very slow. These guys came stumbling out in the street. One of them stepped in front of his taxi. All the cabbie did was honk the horn. They came over screaming at him and tried to pull him out of the taxi."
"I could have been the same guy," he says. "They didn't belong in the street. They obviously had a few drinks in them, and they thought they could do whatever they wanted."
In the second 911 call, a man tells a police dispatcher, "There's a fight breaking out here, right in the middle of First Avenue."
In the third call, a woman looking down from her window says, "A bunch of young people are chasing another person into the street. Oh, my God, they're in the middle of First Avenue."
"Any weapons?" the dispatcher asks.
"I saw a whole group chasing after one person, and I could hear somebody screaming, 'Let him go, let him go.' "
Acosta was off-duty. He could have kept driving, let the incident take its course, let uniformed cops handle it, but he wasn't the type of officer to walk away when there is a potential crime taking place.
"The altercation appeared to be growing," he writes in his notes. "I observed Captain Pla, his female companion, and several other people and other sergeants and lieutenants on the sidewalk watching the altercation escalate. . . . To me, the situation appeared to become violent, so I decided to take police action by intervening and dispersing the crowd."
One of the off-duty rookies was indeed holding a two-by-four, and was pushing his way through a crowd that appeared to be attacking the cab driver. Acosta identified himself and tried to grab the piece of lumber. "I'm a cop, let go," Acosta said. At that point, the cop dropped the two-by-four and took a swing at Acosta's face.
Acosta pushed his way through to Ming, the cab driver. He persuaded Ming to get out of the situation by getting back in his cab. Acosta put himself between the cab door and Ming, as the irate rookies tried to grab the driver, and tried to push the crowd back. With help from another off-duty sergeant, he ordered the crowd to disperse.
The woman with Captain Pla started screaming at the off-duty cops involved in the fight. "You're animals," she shouted. "You're savages. What are you doing?"
In the aftermath, as police sirens wailed toward the scene, several of the officers involved in the fight tried to flee. But they were stopped by plainclothes anti-crime officers.
Ming says some of the rookies told him to leave the scene. "I was like, wait a minute, there's something else going on here," he says.
It was only when the rookies were stopped by the anti-crime officers that Ming learned they were cops. "When I saw the shields, I was like, all this time, they are cops?" Ming says.
In the aftermath, a detective drove Ming to the precinct for questioning. In the car, the detective pledged to help him out. "He says, 'If you have any problems, let me know,' " Ming says. "He tells me I didn't deserve any of this."
A sympathetic captain wandered by as Ming was waiting to be interviewed by Internal Affairs. "We don't need cops like that," he told Ming. "They're not acting with good conduct."
Pla, Acosta says, remained on the sidewalk as the melee occurred, watching but not taking action. He says that, as the senior officer present, Pla should have intervened.
"He knows these guys, they work for him, he should have done something," Acosta says. "If those cops had been civilians, they would have been arrested."
As uniformed officers from the 19th Precinct began to arrive on the scene, Acosta says that Pla made a phone call.
As the anti-crime officers removed the off-duty cops from their car, Acosta walked up behind a uniformed officer named Mazzilli, who was looking on, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, "Officer, I'm a cop and I saw what happened."
Mazzilli spun around and grabbed Acosta by the wrist and demanded he remove his hand from his pocket. But because of the way his wrist was being held, Acosta couldn't take his hand out of his pocket.
Mazzilli, Acosta says, got angry, and repeated his demand. Acosta replied, "Listen, I'm a sergeant. Take it easy. I will do what you want, but you have to let go of my wrist."
"I don't give a fuck who you are," Mazzilli replied.
Mazzilli struck Acosta once in the face and threw him face-down to the ground. The irate officer then handcuffed Acosta. Acosta sustained bruises and a small cut to his face. He also hurt his back in the fall. He was dizzy and upset.
A sergeant subsequently uncuffed Acosta and had him sit in the unmarked SUV. While he was sitting there, he noticed that Captain Pla was still on the scene. He tried unsuccessfully to call and text Pla. There was no response.
He was approached by a lieutenant, who asked for his identification card. He asked the lieutenant if he could leave the SUV to speak with Pla.
"I pointed across the street to Captain Pla and I said, 'That gentleman right there, he's a captain,' " Acosta testified. " 'He saw everything that happened.' "
The lieutenant refused.
"Captain Pla can't do shit for you," the lieutenant said, according to Acosta. "You're better off just sitting in the car and shutting up."
awful.... awful.... but... not surprising. it's sad that this happened "a lot"... This article is very long so click on the link to read full story.
