In this Chapter of the Book of the Dead, we sit down, with retired NYPD detective and author Vic Ferrari who has joined us, again, to delve into his experiences with homicides and death in New York City. From the grim realities of crime scenes to being present for autopsies, Ferrari shares his insights on what it's really like to work for the NYPD from, Rookie, to Detective. We also revisited the haunting case of Henryk Siwiak—the only officially recorded homicide in NYC on September 11, 2001. More than two decades later, his murder remains unsolved. Vic shares his theories and his thoughts on whether this case will ever be solved. Join us as we uncover the dark truths lurking beneath the city that never sleeps.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi guys. I'm Courtney and I'm Lisa, and welcome to
the next chapter in the Book of the Dead, brought
to you by Darkcast Network Indie Podcasts with a Twist.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello, Hello, welcome to the next chapter of the Book
of the Dead. Back with me today is Vic Ferrari.
I had such a good time talking to him, and
I know you guys are really enjoyed hearing his stories.
So he is back for more, and this time we're
going to get a little bit more into the nitty gritty.
So Vic, thank you so much for joining me again.
(00:51):
It's really exciting to have you back.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Oh Courtney, thank you so much for having me back.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
So I know last time we talked is definitely a
little bit more lighthearted, more the craziness that comes with
being a detective. But what I really want to know
is what were some dark moments being a detective? How
did even as like a rookie cop, you know, what
did that look like? How did they prepare you for homicides?
I should hope they're not just going to throw you
(01:18):
into a homicide investigation. Go here, you go have fun.
You know, how did they prap you for that. What
was that like?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
So it starts to the police Academy and it's not
so much homicide, it's death. And you know, when you
signed up for this, you're gonna you're gonna see it
and you're going to be around it. So probably about
a month or two into the police Academy, the NYPD's
Police Academy, my class was twelve hundred recruits, which is
a mid size recruit. A small police academy class is
(01:45):
five hundred. Sometimes they go as big as twenty five hundred,
and you're broken down into classrooms or companies of thirty.
So one day, our company instructor tells us, all right,
tomorrow we're going to go to Bellevue. We're going to
go to the Morgue. And he's just telling us what
we're going to see and what we're going to be
prepared to see. But nothing could prepare you for it.
(02:06):
So it was like a class trip. We're in all
little police academy uniforms and we walked down to Bellevue,
which Bellevue is a tremendous medical center. They also have
an insane asylum there. That's a story for another day.
But so they take us to the morte and it
was like something out of silence of the land. We
get into like this freight elevator at like thirty of
us and it's big. Well, maybe went in groups of
(02:26):
fifteen each, I don't remember, but we go into the
basement and I remember the second you got off. In
that basement you could smell debt. It was like unmistakable.
It was mixed with like in bombing fluid or chemicals.
And it was cold. I remember like we were wearing
jackets and it still was cold. Now, I was expecting
from what I saw on television, like an episode of Quincy,
(02:46):
where there would be one body laying on a slab
with a guy with a tape recorder and a guy
in a lab coat. It was nothing like that. It
was more like an eight bay Jiffy loop and there
was like eight slabs. There was eight bodies and they
were cutting and I had never seen anything like it
before in my life. And between each slab was a
(03:08):
produce scale. So remember when you were a kid, your
mother go to the market, there'd be a produce scale
and you put a head of lettuce in there and
you'd weigh it. They were pulling organs out of people
weighing it and then writing shit down. And I remember
them taking a brain out of a guy, putting it
in the scale and whatever it was two point three pounds,
and them laughing about it because the guy had a
small brain. And what I found amazing was some of
(03:31):
the tools they used at the margue. So if you've
ever been to like a minor key or a Midas
where you need your muffler cutout or the muffler pipe,
it's called a wizard tool. And what they do is
they saw the back of your skull and then they
grab it and it's like a movie. They pull your
face over to the side and they cracked. They separate
(03:54):
your head and they just reach out there and pop
your brain out. And when they cut you open in
the front, they sew you up with it actually looked
like a rubber cord. It was. It was the grossest
thing that I ever seen in my life. I remember
some of the autopsy's there. There was a young man
(04:14):
who had been shot multiple times and theme is standing
there and he's got this tool. It looked like a
forcips and he's reaching into each hole in this guy
and he's digging around. He's pulling out a slug and
he's dropping the slug on the table and it's like
dank dankdink. Hanging over his shoulder is this gnarly detective
(04:35):
who's eating an egg McMuffin and drinking a cup of coffee,
and he's asking the meme, so what do you think?
And the emme turned around and goes suspicious suicide and
everybody started laughing because the guy was shot like forty times.
So I quickly realized that there's humor with death. But
I also realized that that it was at that point
in my training in the police academy, this was about
(04:57):
to get real. And the the first time I saw
a dead body outside of the Morgan again, I saw
like eight autopsies going on at once. Was I was
a rookie cop and I was standing out on foot
and the sergeant said, come on, kid, you got a
safeguard A doa And I was like, huh. So in
the NYPD, when someone dies in their home or in
(05:20):
a house or in a dwelling, be it a suspicious
death or not a suspicious death? The police come, they
start a preliminary investigation, They ask questions. The detectives come
they ask more questions, they go through medications pills, they'll
call the doctors names who are on the pills and
speak to them. Then what happens is the detectives leave
(05:44):
and the body isn't going anywhere until the medical examiner
comes and makes the call on it. So what happens
is there's only one medical examiner working in a burrow.
So in a place like the Bronx of Brooklyn on
a Friday night with his multiple homicides suspicious deaths, you're
gonna be there for a while. So the medical examiner'll
(06:05):
come four or five, six hours later, he'll come in
and he'll say, he'll look around, he'll ask questions, he'll
go suspicious death. This body's going to the morgue. He's
gonna get on the phone and the morgue wagon's going
to show up. If it's not a suspicious death, he's
gonna say, okay, he's going to tell the family, pull
your funeral home, make your arrangements. But the cop has
to stay there in that apartment or wherever until that
(06:28):
body leaves. Called sitting on a doa. So, as a
rookie cop, my first time sitting on a doa is
My sergeant brings me into an apartment and there's a
dead guy. And the guy died. He was probably middle aged,
early fifties. He died over a coffee table. He was
kind of hanging off the side of a coffee table
(06:50):
and rigamortis had set in, which means your body starts
to get stiff. And next to his hand on the
floor was a pistol. But he wasn't shot. So what
is this He died, there's no so they thinking maybe
he did me. It was a small cowber round. Maybe
we can't see the hole right that the detectives are
moving them a crime scene, and the detectives are moving
(07:11):
them around, right, they leave, but they leave me in
the apartment with this guy while they're going to go
canvass the neighborhood and ask questions. Well, it was a
suspicious death, and I'm going to tell you how he
got killed. The guy a couple of hours earlier or
the day before, was sitting on the sidewalk fixing his car.
He was fixing his door. The door didn't line up
(07:34):
and he got into an argument with the neighbor. They
had a beef over something. The neighbor grabbed the guy's
head took the car door and slammed his head in
the car door several times, the doorjam and banged it.
Guy sustained a massive head injury. The guy was able
to get up, get into his apartment, retrieve a pistol.
(07:55):
He was going to go back downstairs and resolve this
in street court, where he died of a massive hemorrhage
and fell over the coffee table and dropped the gun.
So when the detectives went downstairs and started asking questions,
what happened to Julio, Well, he had a fight with
wan and one basically used his head as a door
jam and slammed his head in the door a couple
of times. They asked one, Yeah, we got it. We're
(08:17):
fighting over a girl or whatever it was. That guy
was charged with manslaughter or whatever he was charged. I
was a kid, I was a rookie. I really had
not All I did was sit in the apartment and
watch a dead body until the medical examiner it came.
But as a young cop you do that a lot
because you're expendable, so they throw you into these things.
And what's nasty about responding to das, especially in residence
(08:40):
when people die the family members get involved. This belonged
to me. That belonged to me. So you're actually a
referee in those situations. And you have to search a
dead body. NYPD procedure is you got to go through
their pockets, make sure to their wallet. If they're wearing jewelry, yeah,
to take that off, you have to voucher it. You
(09:01):
have to put it in a security envelope. Now, the
old timers aren't going to touch a dead body. That's
what the kids are for. And I can remember going
in my first couple of days with an old time
who would throw me a set of gloves and go
there you go, kid, And I've had it. So would
people die and they're in an apartment or a house
for a couple of days, the gases in your stomach
(09:23):
start to swell, you start to bloat, and if you
touch that body or stop moving it around, it pops
and all the fluid zoos out of it. So what
you gotta do is, like I remember, there was there
was an overweight woman one time that died in her bed.
The old timer told me we threw the comforter over
and we rocked her and then we got the hell
out of there and she just basically popped and then
(09:45):
I had to put gloves on, and oh, it's like
something out of a friggin horror movie. It's that's something
I did not miss about police work. So one doay
I had. I had just got into the precinct out
of field training. I'm like, great, I'm not gonna to
get as many days because I was come at you
fast and furious, especially if you work in a precinct
(10:06):
with there's a lot of old people. They're just dropping
down in their apartment and you know, the neighbor smells
something coming out of missus rosen Schwartz's apartment and we
haven't seen her in a while, and then you got
to break down the door and you know, find these
poor people. So I was working at midnight and I
was given the assignment go to this apartment. There's another
(10:26):
rookie cop that's safeguard in the d away from the
four to twelve. You're just gonna relieve him and wait
for the medical examine. I was like, okay, I go
up to the apartment. This rookie cop can't wait to
get away from it. It's like all right, and he leaves,
just leaves me up there. It's an older black gentleman.
He died in his apartment. He was in the hallway.
He died between rooms. Look like a heart attack. And
(10:48):
whenever I was on Ada, I don't know, maybe it's me.
I used to just kind of like walk around the
rooms and just try to get an idea of how
this person lived and what they were like. And I'd
look photos and stuff that were I wouldn't touch anything,
but if there was something on the mantel and the
guy looked like a decent guy, I could tell he
was a bus driver. So I'm up there about a
(11:08):
half hour. There's a knock on the door. I think
it's the medical examiner. It's another old black gentleman. And
he goes, that's my brother. Can I come in? I said,
oh no, yeah, yeah, come on, and everything's taken care of.
We're just waiting for the medical examiner. Just don't touch anything.
Goes no, no, no, he goes. You know, he goes, and
the guy is telling me, he goes. You know. My
brother and I we grew up in North Carolina. We
came up here in the nineteen fifties for a better life,
(11:30):
and we both became bus drivers, they never married. One
brother lived upstairs, one brother lived downstairs, and he's just
telling me about his brother's life. Next thing I know,
this guy goes into the fridge, comes out with two
beers and he opens him and he hands me one. Now,
I'm a rookie cop on probation. I'm not allowed to drink.
And I goes, sir, I'm not allowed to drink. He goes, son,
(11:51):
I'm not drinking alone tonight. So what am I gonna do?
Tell this guy? No. Me and this old guy are
cracking beers right with his dead brother in the hallway,
and he's just telling me about their lives. And it
was fascinating. So about three four beers in there is
a knock on the door. In comes the medical examiner.
He's eating a slice of pizza, drinking of coffee, his
(12:13):
pants are untopped, fucking slop, and he comes in. He
looks at the body, asked about three questions. He goes, Okay,
have the funeral home and take the body. You know,
not suspicious debt, I said, all right, So the old
guy calls the funeral home. The funeral home shows up,
and that's another bizarre thing. When someone's got riga mortis,
(12:36):
and you got to get him into a body bag.
They're stiff, so you're like breaking bones and cartilage and
cracking them to get him into that bag. It's a
friggin nightmare. It's like they pop. So we got him
in the bag. They take him out, and I, you know,
I thank the old guy for his hospitality. He goes
into the fridge and he hands me another beer and
he goes for the next time we meet. And I
(13:00):
that really messed with my mind because I'm saying to myself,
does he mean if he dies in his apartment, does
he want me to find him? You know, was he
thanking me like it was the bizarrest thing when he
said that for the next time we meet, Like, well,
the odds I was going to meet this guy again.
And you know, I never ran into him again. And
thank god I didn't have to go back into that
(13:21):
building for that. But I never forgot that, And that's
a story in one of my books. You know that
it just was the bizarrest thing. But those are peaceful deaths.
If you want homicides, I can go into those two.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Oh yeah, no, we need to go into We need
to go into some of the homicides. I know you
didn't work homicides really, you know, you were in auto
crimes and organized crime, but did homicides ever cross over
into your work, you know, did you have to work homicides?
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, So in organized crime, we're not responding to a homicide.
But like I told Jo on last week's episode when
we were talking about we were on a wire tap
and these guys are talking about homicides in the past.
So what we're gonna do is we're going to gather
as much information as we can, and when we take
down the case, we're gonna interview these guys and then
(14:13):
we're gonna hand it to homicide because that's what those
guys do day in and day out. You don't want
to screw up their case. You don't want to step
on anyone's toes. So yeah, I mean with the organized
crime cases, if guys talked about homicides, we would run
with it. But I came across more homicides when I
was a patrol cop because you're responding to things. So
(14:35):
sometimes the homicides are you know, people killing each other,
and then there's sometimes police involved shootings. And one of
the first police involved shootings I ever went to was.
It was the early nineties. It was like October. It
was a warm night and it was raining and it
was quiet, and we were at the other end of
the precinct and a domestic violence comes over at this
(14:57):
apartment at the sleepy end of the precinct. So the
dispatcher gives it to a radio car and they're responding,
and another car said, we'll get to back them up.
So you got two cars going to this right. The
next thing you know, the dispatcher goes over the radio
and says, I'm getting multiple, multiple, multiple calls on this,
So now you know it's something if everybody in the
building is calling up and saying there's some crazy shit
(15:19):
going on in apartment three B. So we said we're gonna go.
So now you got three cars going and it's raining.
So the first radio car gets there. It was three
story of four story garden apartments. First car gets there,
pulls up on the side of the building, not in front,
and it's raining. It's drizzling out, and these cops are
in their early twenties, they're young, they're full of pisson vinegar.
(15:41):
They get out of the radio car, they hear screaming
from one of the windows. Ninety nine percent of cops
would have went around to the side of the building
and went from through the front door. They decide to
go up the fire eskate. These guys go up the
fire eskate. They get to the window, they look inside
and there's a guy laying on top of a woman
with a butcher knife and he's trying to cut her
(16:02):
head off. These two guys get on the radio when
they're screaming, get the frigging cavalry here. There's a man
decapitating a woman. So now we're around the block. My
radio car and the other radio car pull up out front.
We hear several shots bab bab by by mob right,
so we go over the air. Shots fired. We run
up the stairs. As we're coming up the stairs as
(16:24):
a thirteen year ten twelve, thirteen year old boy, he's
running down the stairs and he's screaming, he's killing my mother.
He's killing my mother. So now I mean, now all
hell's broken loose. We get up to the door. We're
trying to kick in the door, and we hear two
of our coworkers in the apartment screaming at the top
of their lungs. Don't shoot, we're inside the apartment. Don't shoot,
(16:44):
it's us. Open the door. They open the door. The
two cops are in the apartment. They opened the door.
And the first thing I'll never forget was it looked
like someone lit a pack of firecrackers off in the apartment,
because it's full of gunpowder because of all the shots
that got thrown in there. As we're walking into the apartment,
the second thing I noticed is there's not one thing
in that apartment that hasn't been destroyed. The walls are broken,
(17:07):
the toilet's broken, there's holes in everything. It's just the
whole apartment's destroyed. Look like a hurricane went through it.
Now there's two bodies. As we get into the living room,
she's laid out. Her entire neck is missing pretty much.
The only thing that's keeping her head on her body
as her spine. She's got a hole in her head
from where he hit her with a hammer. And you
(17:30):
know you see on TV when people die and their
eyes are closed, her mouth was wide open and it
was like something out of a harm or. She's looking
right at me, but her whole neck was gone. He
was a couple of feet away. What happened was the
cops were banging on the window screaming at him, which
diverted his attention from her. He got up with the
(17:51):
butcher knife. He goes, oh, you want some of this.
He ran over the window, threw it open, and he
started swinging that knife and my two buddies back then
we used to before we went to nine millimeters, we
carried thirty eight, which at thirty eight is a larger projectile.
It just doesn't go as fast. It doesn't have as
much speed, like a thirty eight goes nine hundred feet
(18:11):
per second and nine millimeter goes twelve hundred fet per second.
But with a thirty eight up close and personal, is
gonna do more damage. So when he threw open that window,
the two cops emptied their thirty eights into him, which
sent him flying back into the apartment. He fell back,
the knife flew out of his hand and went into
the next room. So as we're walking around the apartment,
(18:31):
I realized my feet are sticking to the floor. There's
so much blood from the two of them that my
feet were like sticking to the floor. So I told
the two cops ago, I gotta get you out of it.
You guys gotta go to the hospital. So my one
friend is like, they're gonna think we shot an unarmed man.
The knife went into the next room. I go, dude,
you're good. Just trust me on this. Don't touch anything.
(18:53):
You know, you see in the movies the cops like,
you're gonna go into the next room and pick up
the knife. You don't do that shit. I go, dude,
you're good. She's dead. You know you're fine. It's gonna
be a good shooting. So we rushed him to the
hospital and later on that night he's touching his pants.
It was a hole, a slit in his pants. The
guy got that close with the knife. It went through.
(19:14):
The cops wear baggy pants because we're cheap and we
don't go to the tailor. So when you get a
pair of duty pants, no cop, unless you're in Florida.
When they send you to the tail and they pick
up the tap, you'll notice that white feedy guys they
have fans are baggy because they're not going to the tailor.
That knife went right through his pant leg.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
And those guys were never the same after that, Like
they were active cops. They were always making arrests. One
guy was never the same again. I mean, he did
his twenty years, but his focus was other and the
other guy became like an ordained minister. So it definitely
for people that think that like cops to shoot people
and get over it. It affects different guys different ways.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Oh absolutely, And I do think that's crazy when some
people are like, oh, you know, like they don't care.
You know, they're they're paid to shoot, or they're they're
paid to do this, they're paid to just deal with it.
It's like you're I mean, especially in a situation like that,
it's already a traumatic situation, like you're watching a guy
like kill a woman, but then the guy's coming at
you and you have to shoot, like he's got a knife,
he's already proven he could kill. He's gonna do it again.
(20:18):
That's so traumatic.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Well, think of they're a straight they held cops are afraid.
The average cop is afraid of getting in trouble. They're
not afraid of losing their lives. I was never afraid
of getting killed. I was afraid of getting in trouble.
The reality is they could have shot him through the
glass while he was hanging over her, stabbing her. The
point that they waited that long for him to come
across with that knife and open the window before they
(20:42):
lit him up shows the amount of a strait they
had until it got it was him or them.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
No, absolutely, And I think that's another thing that there's
a misconception about that because obviously, yes, there are bad
people in every job. Of course, there are good cops
are bad cops, but like there's a lot of restraint
there is. There is. There's a lot of restraint because
I'm sure a lot of times that the natural reaction
to stop something like that is to use violence or
(21:10):
a brief horse or whatever, and you can't. That's asking
for an even worse situation.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Were there any homicides that didn't get solved that you
either heard about or you worked on, even partially, that
you you still think about.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
I don't know if it was stopped. So the NYP
is so big. People think like you get involved in
something and you're with it from beginning to end. When
you're a patrol cop, you respond to things and unless
it goes to trial or an arrest is made, you
got to testify. You really don't know, so early in
my career. We're driving over by co Op City in
(21:50):
the Bronx and there's there's an abandoned dump on the
way to City Island. And it was it was a
Friday night. We were doing a six at night till
two in the morning. Was late. It's about eleven o'clock
at night, and we see fire trucks putting out fire
on a little Toyota. So we pull up and we
go what happened. They go, I don't know. We think
(22:10):
it's an insurance job. They set a fire in the
interior of the car, which that's in the Bronx. Back
in the day, that was everybody's way to get out
of a car payment was fifty cents worth of gas
in a match, burn their car and then report it
to their insurance company. So it was an interior fire.
No one was around. They take the plates off the
back of the car and they go, let's open the trunk.
(22:31):
They pop open the truck and there's two guys duct
taped in the trunk. If one guy's looking at me,
he's blinking, and the other guy's dead. He's got a
bullet a couple of bullet holes in him. Then I
look at the guy that's blinking at me, he's got
a couple of bullet holes on it, Like holy shit.
So we get these guys out of the trunk, take
the duct tape off. One guy's dead, the other guy
dies at the scene. But what we figured out was
(22:52):
they were killed there because we found the shell casings
on the floor next to the trunk. So whoever killed
them tied them up, put them in the trunk, drove
them over to that stretch of roadway where there's not
a lot of people around at that hour, opened the trunk,
lit him up, shot them both in the head several times,
shut the trunk, and then set the interior on fire.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh my god, that sounds like something out of like
a movie.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Oh used to go walk all the time.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
It to be like you don't think about that, like
no way.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Well i'll tell you one that did get solved. That
that's a wild one. Early nineties again. It was a
Saturday night, September, early October. I'm actually the guy actually
worked with was later killed. I'll go into that. Working
with this cop, we're just coming off our meal hour.
We took our lunch hour or dinner hour in the
(23:43):
precinct and as we're coming out, the female cop on
the on the ts the telephone switch book goes is
people yelling in Spanish about it death in the house.
I think it's a cardiac. Can you guys get up there?
Like yeah, yeah, So we rush up there, sixth story,
walk up, probably about the fourth floor. I can hear
a screw. We get up to the apartment and the
apartment's full of people. People are crying and screaming, and
(24:05):
I'm kind of making my way through the apartment. The
kitchen is like a galley kitchen that's kind of like
it hooks off, and I see a set of legs
sticking out of the kitchen. So I get into the
kitchen and there's blood all over the walls. Now, if
you've ever cut yourself, blood is bright red, but over
time with oxygen, it turns like that rust color. So
(24:26):
the blood was dry, and laying on top of this
woman is her son, and he's just screaming and wailing
and screaming, So like, come on, son, you gotta get
up and get him up right. We bring him into
the living room, get everybody out of the apartment. You know,
it's his mother. She's been stabbed to dead. When was
the last time you saw your mother? He went from
(24:47):
yelling and screaming and crying to measure when was the
last time I saw my mother? Like four hours ago?
Does she live alone? Does my mother live alone? So
every question I asked this guy, he's repeating the question.
He's buying time. I wasn't putting the screws to him.
I was just asking him basic questions to get to
(25:08):
the bottom of who are you? Who's this woman? How
was the last time you saw her? So I turned
to my part, and the apartment's been ransacked, and I'm
looking around the apartment. I turned to my part and
I go, do me a favor, write everything down. This
guy says there's something not right with him. I get
that he's upset, but there's just something not right. And
(25:29):
the apartment's been ransacked. But then if you really look
at it, it's been staged. So when a burglar breaks
into your house or apartment, they're on the clock. The
only overhead of burglars is getting caught, going to jail
and getting his ass kicked by the owner. They're in
and out, they're dumping shit out of the drawers, they're
rummaging through it. They dumped the next draw Every drawer
(25:50):
was dumped and then the drawers were put back. Who
does that? The woman's bag is dumped upside down and
placed right side up next to the dumb contents, and the
credit cards were there. Now, this is the early nineties,
before surveillance cameras. The credit cards. They would have burned
through those credit cards. Whoever did this? That's odd. So
(26:11):
the detectives come, they take him to the precinct to
question him. We're tasked with hanging out with crime scene
and the medical examiner, so we voucher, you know, things
in the apartment and stuff. And I get back to
the precinct that night and I asked the detectives, like,
(26:33):
what's going on with this? And they said, well, he
knows more. We don't know if he did it, but
he knows more than he's letting on. And he started
getting a little ants. He didn't ask for a lawyer,
which if someone asked for a lawyer, you can't question
him no more. He goes. He started getting that he
was tired and upset, so we didn't want to push it.
We let him go home, but we're going to get
(26:54):
up at six o'clock in the morning and drag him
out of bed again. He just doesn't know it crossed
the street from him. The deceased had three brothers that
lived in the building across the street. They were asking
all sorts of questions what happened to our sister, and
the detective said, I think you should talk to your nephew.
Maybe you can get something out of him, because he's
not really telling us. They said, okay. So in NYPD,
(27:17):
here's another part of NYPD procedure. The first cops that
respond to a homicide or a suspicious death the following
day you have to go to the morgue to identify
the body. It's just procedural. So my partner and I
flipped a coin. Of course, I lost. Next morning, on
a Sunday, on my day off, I get up, I
(27:38):
put on my uniform and the morgue had changed. The
morgue was at Jacoby Hospital, like I don't know, they
were like between morgues or something. It was very shifty.
So I go to Jacoby Hospital. It's a skeleton crew
work and there's a young guy work in the desk.
I hand him the paperwork. I said him here to
see this idea this woman. He goes, okay, so it,
(27:59):
like I said, it wasn't like the drawers you see
in the movie. It was like the seven eleven all right.
You ever go into with seven eleven and you open
the refrigerated door and you grab a soda, and then
like you look in the back and you see some
guy stocking shelves, like in the back. That's kind of
what it was like. So he goes, He goes into
this refrigerated room. He comes out with a gurney and
(28:21):
he pulls off the sheet. It's a it's a Spanish
guy with a beard. And I go, no female, Hispanic,
fifty something years old? This you know this is a whino.
This looks like a fucking homeless guy. He goes, oh,
throws the sheet back on. The guy brings him back
into the refrigerator room, comes back out with another another stiff,
(28:43):
throws off the sheet. It's a black guy. I go, dude,
I didn't come here to see every person that died
last night in the Bronx. He had to see her.
Let me in there. So I walk in and it
was like something out of a horror movie, like bad lighting,
fluorescent lights, flickering, and I see all these dead bodies
covered in sheets and in the NYPD, before they take
(29:05):
the body, you fill out. It's called a toe tag.
It's a little piece of oak tag with a string.
And I recognize my handwriting and the deceased name. I
pulled the sheet off. That's our right idea. I go
back to the precinct and the detectives are celebrating. They're
all high five in each other and stuff, and the
Sun is sitting in a cell. So I go, what happened?
(29:25):
So they got up bright and early. Thank god, the
detectives were Spanish. They got up bright and early that morning.
They went over to the building and when they were
in the hallway they heard screaming in Spanish. The three
uncles got up earlier, went to the apartment. The Sun
was trying to leave the building and they go, where
are you going? Like yeah, his bags packed, and they
(29:46):
started yelling and screaming at him, and he explained that
he stabbed his mother to death, and the detectives heard
it because they were in the hallway. They laid back,
they came out to kept them talking. He gave the
whole thing up. So Sunny Boy was a crackhead, and
he was on and off drugs, and when he was
on drugs he would terrorize his mother and steal shit
(30:09):
and abuse her and stuff. And she had enough, so
she told him that Saturday afternoon, I watch you out.
I can't live like this anymore. He picked up a
butcher knife and stamped it to death, took a shower,
took the murder weapon, and all the bloody clothes he
was wearing, put in a garbage bag and leaves the
apartment and leaves the door Ajar, figuring I'll go I'll
(30:33):
get rid of this stuff. I'll take off for a
couple hours. One of the neighbors is going to see
the door open. They're gonna find her. They'll call the police.
I'll come back clean as a whistle. I don't know
what happened. I went out. I was at my girlfriend's house.
He comes back four hours later, after disposing of all
this stuff. The door is still Ajar, but no one
(30:53):
discovered her. People have seen him now coming and leaving
the building. Now he's got to commit gets on the
phony cour the precinct. Then he calls his uncle. Then
he starts going into the song and dance with us
and ultimately he was convicted of murder. I just checked
a couple of weeks ago. That happened in nineteen ninety four.
He's still in jail. It's crazy stabbed his mother to
(31:17):
them multiple times.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Oh my god. Are you hear stories like that where
like the kids like kill their parents for things like that,
like the nonsense ry that's oh my god, speaking of
oh my gods. You have you ever worked a case,
whether it was homicide or when you were working with
(31:38):
you know, the auto thefts and stuff. Was there ever
a case where you were like, this whole thing is
so bizarre, like none of this is real. This is
not real life, Like this is the weirdest thing I've
ever experienced. You know, was there anything like that that
you had experienced on a job.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
I mean, it's difficult for the average person, you know,
and you grew up and you were raised, right, It's
it's very difficult to understand why someone could kill somebody,
whatever the motivation. You know, it's you know, unless someone's
trying to hurt me or my family. You know, I
(32:16):
wouldn't use deadly physical force on anyone. But when you
start seeing these things and what people will do to
other people for random acts of violence, or they just
don't like somebody. Yeah, it's strange and bizarre. I've got
a story like that. My old partner, we used to
call him Cancer because he was in a couple of
(32:36):
shoot he killed more people than cancer, But that's another story.
But he So it's the early nineties and we're young
guys and we're going out to cop bars. And before
I work with this guy, he used to work with
a magician. Guy was a cop and in his spare time,
yeah he was, he was an amateur magician, working kids
parties and bar mitzvahs and shit. So anyway, we would
(32:57):
go to the bar and we're trying to pick up
girls and the magician would come over and he's making
balloon animals and he's pulling flowers out of his sleeve
and pulling coins. Like, how do you compete with this guy?
So I told this guy I got his partner, I
go get him out of here, Like, how do you
compete with this guy? Goes If he spent more time
doing police work than making balloon animals, he goes, he'd
(33:20):
be the greatest crime fighter of all time. So, anyway,
these two guys one midnight get called out to a
basement apartment of a sixth story walk up in the Bronx,
and it comes over COLLS fault nine one one COLLS
fault hang up, So back then nine to one one,
it didn't really pinpoints you to the apartment. So in
(33:41):
six story buildings in the Bronx, and they're like underground layers,
and there's usually one or two apartments where the superintendent
lives and he lives there for free and he services.
He does all the work on the building. So they
go down there and there's two apartments. They go to
apartment number one. They bang on the door, no one answers.
They go to apartment number two and my buddy's about
(34:04):
to knock on the door, and the magician who's lazy, goes,
come on, we made all this noise coming down here.
No one's in there. This is bullshit. Let's go. My
buddy goes to knock on the door again. He goes,
come out and buy a cup of coffee, cops the
cheap free coffee. My buddy doesn't knock on the door,
and they leave. What they didn't realize is behind door
number two, the super the building lived there and he
(34:25):
was selling coke out of the apartment. He felt he
got addicted to it. He fell behind on his payments
to his wholesale he was buying weight in the drug world.
They don't, you know, cancel your cable or threaten to
sue you. They're gonna kill you. So the guy knew
we had a problem and he wasn't leaving his building
very often. So to get this guy, they used to
(34:48):
it's an old track. They brought an attractive female with
them who was in on it. She knocks on the door.
The guy looks out the window. He's like, oh shit,
found money. He opens the door. The two hit men
and her push their way into the apartment. They're pistol
whipping them. Where's the money, where's the drugs? He don't
have the answers. They shoot him in the head. They
(35:09):
roll them up in a carpet. They take them out
of the apartment, and they throw them in the incinerator
the furnace of the building. So while he's going up
like a Puerto Rican firelog, they go back into the
apartment and they're ransacking it. Now the cops are outside.
Oh shit, we got a problem. So the two hit
men tell the girl, listen, if these cops knock on
(35:32):
the door, let them in. What we're gonna do is
it's a railroad apartment. It goes straight through with doors
off to the sides. Start yelling at you. They were Albanians.
Start yelling at Yugoslavian. Point to the kitchen. Lead them
down to the hallway. When you pass the threshold of
this bedroom, throw yourself on the floor. We're gonna come
(35:54):
out from behind. We'll shoot the cops. They got to commit. Now,
we'll take the two cops out, we'll throw them in
the furnace, and we'll get the hell out of here. Well,
thank god, the cops said, knock on the door, they leave. Well,
the super's got family, you know, two weeks ago by
where's Julio? The super's family starts calling the detectives. The
(36:16):
detectives get involved. They see there's another The last time
this guy was seeing there was a nine to one
one call two weeks ago. They bring in the magician
and my buddy, you went into this basement. Yeah, did
you knock on the door. We knocked on this door.
We didn't knock on that door. Okay, well he lived there, Okay,
anything else? Did you notice, and my buddy goes, you know, well,
(36:36):
we will leave. And we went upstairs to leave. I
spotted a car parked on a fire hydrant. I wrote
in a parking ticket that was the getaway car. He
was registered to the girl. They bring the female in,
she starts getting all squirrely. She gives it up, of course,
trying to minimize her involvement. Been in for a penny,
in for a pound. They bring in the two hit men.
(36:59):
They locked them up. They go back to the building.
Now it's February. They had to shut the heat off
for two days until that furnace got cool enough, and
then they had to go into and then they went
in there and they were able to get his skull
and his bones out of there. So that's a story
in one of my books called Last Night a Magician
(37:19):
saved my life because if not for the magician telling
my buddy, don't knock on the door, you would have
had three homicides.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
That's great, like literally, if they had just knocked on
the door like that would have been the end of it.
So the last time we talked, he talked briefly about
nine to eleven, and I should have asked this then
but there is one on solved homicide in New York
on nine eleven. It's the murder of Henrique Subyak. He's
a Polish man. He was killed in Brooklyn. Do you
know anything about that case?
Speaker 3 (37:46):
I don't, but I'm gonna look it up now.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
You should because I was going to ask you, like,
it's the only one, only on solved homicide and it
was you know, they they had no resources obviously its
everyone was at ground zero. So he's killed in the
street in Brooklyn on his way to a grocery store
to work, like a graveyard chips because he didn't know
anything was going on because he had no TV. He'd
(38:08):
been here for like maybe a year. He had no TV.
You know, Holly knew was that he got sent home
because a plane crashed into the tower. That was it
and he I think it is Decatur Avenue. He died,
he was shot, and they've never salved it. So I
was curious if you had heard about it, because the
only one it's it's it's a really interesting case. It's
still unsolved, and it's one of those cases that drive
(38:30):
me nuts because I wish it was salved like it
but there's nothing there's nothing, no.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
No, in the cracks, and it probably yeah, and it
probably wasn't. He was shot.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
He was shot, Yeah, he was shot. He made it
up to like an apartment door, like front or of
an apartment. He's banging on it, like asking someone to
help him. But of course, you know, Marbles was freaked out,
so no one's answering the door, and he died on
the stoop. So the theory is that there was a
(39:02):
witness that looked out their windows, saw a couple of
guys following him, and he's lost because he got off
the bus in the road.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
I did hear about this?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Then now this sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, he got lost. And so the theory is that
it was a robbery gone wrong, which is very possible,
but it's it's one of those cases that I'm like,
any time I talk to someone like related or connected
to New York and anyway, I'm like, do you hear
about this case? Like to you do you think they're
gonna solve it? You know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
I would bet if there was people, if they said
if there was more than one person, I would guess
it was teenagers. Teenagers are so dangerous because they don't
you know someone's gonna rob you. They're gonna point the
average They're just gonna point the gun at it. I mean,
obviously things can go sideways, but a stick up guy
during my time just wants your money. Means are very unpredictable.
(39:53):
They're trying to prove themselves. Like I got into so
many car chases. I hated it when teenagers were driving. A.
They don't add a drup and B. They'll do things.
They could get someone killed. And especially you give a
teenage or a handgun, things can go sideways very quick.
It's probably a couple if it was. If the witnesses
said that they sold more than one person, I would
bet money with teens. If they didn't find a shellcasing.
(40:18):
I mean, shellcasing can lead you back to the weapon.
Shellcasings can have DNA on it, shellcasing can have a
fingerprint on it. I'm wondering if it was with a
revolver that wouldn't have spit out of shellcasing, and then
they just tossed the gun.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
If I remember correctly, they didn't find shellcasings. But he
also did not die where he was shot. He made
it a good amount of feet at least.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
Oh, yeah, it's possible the shell casing got lost though
it got run over and went in a tread of
a tire of a car or a truck that went by.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, it's very interesting that you say teens though. Actually
I had spoken to Alfredity John's We were talking about
teens that kill and it was the same thing. They
are kids have this superiority conference that the teenagers are
so dangerous. I have encountered. I used to work with kids,
and the older they got, the worse they were. For
(41:12):
the kids that were my quote unquote bad kids, and
it was you know, you you almost wonder, like what
are you capable of? Because they're capable of anything.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Right, their imagination right, and they don't have the wisdom
of an old time thief or you know, they're just
not thinking, they're not thinking ahead exactly.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
It's more like I think it's like it's the thrill
for them more than anything else.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Absolutely, and to prove themselves. They were always trying to
one up each other.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
It's very interesting. I never I never considered teenagers. I
don't even think the police considered teenagers at the time.
But there was only like five police officers working at
because everyone else, like I said, it was that ground zero,
they had no one working it.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
They don't, you know, you have watched that show the
first forty eight. Yeah, and there's a lot of truth
to that. I mean, the more time that goes by,
the cases have been solved over years, but the more
time goes by, the more other cases pile up. I
mean New York when I was active, we were averaging
over twenty five hundred homicides the year. Yeah, I mean,
(42:19):
I'm sure there's unsolved homicides that you know, there's tons
that people got away with. So the longer a homicide
goes the trail gets cold and cold. That's not to
say you can't solve it. If that case were to
be solved, it's either going to be you said they
didn't They didn't recover shellcasing.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
If I remember correctly, they didn't recover shellcasings, and they
had some people talking, but I guess this specific area
where he died was pretty active with gang activity, so
a lot of people were afraid to talk, so they
really had very few witnesses on top of no real evidence.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yeah, so it's either going to be the way that
case is going to be broken open one of two ways.
The least likely is if the slug were to match
a gun that gets recovered from someone. But you're talking
twenty something years ago. The odds of that gun turning
up somewhere probably slim to none. But you never know,
could be under someone's bed somewhere and someone decides to
(43:16):
use it one day, and where'd you get that from?
And I got that from High Top? And then high
Top you find out is doing time for this, and
then they pull him out and he spills the bean.
More than likely, if that case were to be solved,
it's either going to be an ex girlfriend or someone
that knows something about it, and they'll look at its
serious time and now it's a bargaining chip and they're
going to give it up.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Unfortunately, I agree, I do. I think I think it's
gonna take the one person that knows something to be
in a situation where they need to play that hand. Yeah,
it's one of those cases that keeps me up at
it and I ask everyone.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
I ain't gonna have me reading up on it.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Jed, It's interesting. It's interesting. I did a whole episode
on it. It's very interesting. It's sad because he, you know,
he was here without his Family's family was in Poland.
He was here just trying to make money to bring
him here. And his wife had called him after she
heard about the attack, and she's like, you know, where
are you And he's like I'm fine, Like what are
(44:12):
you talking about? Relax, Like it's not I don't know
what you think it is, but it's not that. And
then he ends up dying totally unrelated to the attacks.
It just happened to be coincidentally that night, on the
one night where there was no police anywhere. I think
there was even a quote from like one of the
police officers on seeing that night saying something along the
(44:32):
lines of like you couldn't take like this one night
off from murder. Like, yeah, I thank you so much
for joining me again. You were wonderful to talk to.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
You want to hear two quick stories? Yes, okay, because
I know I know this show's format is darker things,
but I'm going to tell you two dark stories that
are kind of funny. I mean, so there's this one
guy I knew. I wasn't a fan of his, actually
know him before I was a cop. He was lazy,
(45:04):
he's a foot cop up in Harlem, and it's a
Friday night. He has every intention of going out for
a couple of cocktails after work, and he gets stuck
on a doa and a housing project on like the
tenth of fifteenth four And what it is is an
elderly gentleman used to meet another friend every day for
lunch or dinner. He doesn't show up. His friend has
(45:26):
the keys to the apartment. He opens the door, and
the poor guy dies, died peacefully in his sleep. Cop
shows up, The EMTs show up. The EMTs are like, yeah,
he's gone. You gotta wait for the medical examiner. Cop
turns the EMTs and goes, can't you take him to
the hospital? And you know, they go, we can't move
a body and take it to the hospital unless it's
(45:49):
in public view, when it's not suspicious. If you dropped
out of a heart attack on the street, they're gonna
take you to the morgue. He says, he didn't die
in public view. They leave, detectives leave, Sergeant leaves, he's
not going out tonight. About a half hour later, the
cardiac gets called in so the same building, same floor,
(46:13):
the two EMTs had gone downstairs with their equipment and
eating their dinner in their ambulance. They had never left.
They grabbed their board, they grab everything. They get off
the elevator. They come running into the hallway. The dead
guy that was in his bed is now in the
hallway and the cop is standing there and they go,
what the hell is this? And the cop goes, you're
(46:35):
not gonna believe this. I'm sitting in the apartment. The
guy jumped out of the bed. He said, oh shit.
He ran through the apartment. He opened the door and
collapsed on the floor, and they go, no, he didn't.
He's starting to have Rigga mortis. He's in the same
position he was in the bed. You dragged him across
the room and dumped him in the hallway. He goes, no,
(46:55):
I didn't. They're arguing. Sergeant shows up. They start telling
what happened. The CoP's stilling thes it's obvious the cop
moved the body into the hallway. Long story short, he
got suspended, He got dumped of his assignment, and they
transferred him up to the Bronx. He lost thirty vacation
days and was put on a ye appropriate if that
(47:15):
happened nowadays, he would have got locked up somehow. And
I never liked that guy before or after, but that's
a true story. He moved a dead body to avoid
working overtime. And the last story I'll leave you with,
I'm in the precinct a couple of years, maybe five
six years. This rookie cop is working there and I
liked it. Nice guy, heads on straight, was a good cop,
(47:39):
you know, would go out for beer once in a while.
And ago, what did you do before you were a cop?
He goes, I'm a license more titian. I said, no shit.
He goes, see, I still do it in my spare time, right,
which I've kind of find with a music. So I said,
you know, I go, if you want to be a detective,
I said, the career path for you is to go
(47:59):
to missing persons And he goes, why would I do that?
I go to the missing person's unit. Loves guys like
you because you know how to you're not afraid of
the morgue. Would people die in the street with no
identification or even in identification, they're gonna they're gonna fingerprint
the dead body. And there's an art to that because
even if the body is shriveled up in stuff. They
(48:21):
stick a needle in their finger and they blow it
up with saline solution and stuff. Basically, the missing person's
unit is for people that aren't afraid of being around
the dead. Well, this guy is a license mortician. He'd
be perfect for it. So I told him, I go,
if you want to be a detective, that's the quickest way.
He goes, all right, takes my advice. Within months, they
(48:42):
snatch him up and he vanishes into the missing Person's unit.
Now this happened in like ninety four, ninety five. Fifteen
years later to go by and actually the guy that
I call Cancer that was with the magician, I'm working
with him now, right with detectives together. And he goes,
(49:02):
I met a guy that knows you. I go, who?
He goes My dentist go, what are you talking? I
don't know any dentists. And he says the guy's name,
and I go, no, he's not a dentist. He works
in the missing Person's unit. He goes, No, he quit
the job to become a dentist. What are you talking about?
He goes, he was an undertaker, became a cop, went
to missing persons, did that for a couple of years,
(49:25):
stopped doing that, went to dental school. He pulled my
tooth out, so I said, no, shit, like, guy's an undertaker,
and he pulled he pulled your tooth out. He goes, yeah,
he goes, he speaks very highly of you, Vick. I go, well,
that's that's that's nice, and he goes. He also said,
if you ever have any problems, go see him. He'll
do it for free. And I go no, and he goes.
(49:47):
I thought you liked him. I do, but I know
where his fingers were, you know, I don't know if
I want this guy's handling dead bodies. I don't want
his fingers in my mouth. So that's just that's another
story from one of my books.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
That's an interesting career trajectory.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
Understand about high IQ. Yeah, all those things.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Nick, instant a pleasure as always. Do you have some
amazing stories listen.
Speaker 3 (50:13):
I greatly appreciate it. And if I could just plug
my website.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Please do please see that was gonna be my last thing.
It's you know, where can people find you?
Speaker 3 (50:22):
Yeah, so just go to Amazon type in my name
Vic Ferrari like the car, where you can preview all
my NYPD books for free, including my latest NYPD Presumption
and Dysfunction. And if you like podcasts and want to
hear stories from my NYPD career or me interviewing former
NYPD members and gangsters and stuff like that, just check
(50:43):
out the NYPD Through the Looking Glass podcast. It's available
on YouTube and wherever you can find podcasts, Spotify and
all that other good stuff.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Big thank you so much for joining me again. It's
a wonderful to have you on. It's wonderful to talk
to you. For everyone listening, please check out the source
notes Fix website is going to be there linked to
his podcast is going to be there. Check out his books.
They're great. I have read a few of them myself.
They're very good. As always, I hope you have a
(51:14):
wonderful week and I will talk to you in the
next chapter of the Book of the Dead. Bye, guys,
thank you so much for listening to this chapter of
the Book of the Dead. And don't forget that you
can always connect with us on Instagram, you can connect
with us on Twitter, and you can absolutely connect with
us on Patreon. We also have a marcher as well
(51:38):
that we have frequent discount codes coming out for so
that you guys can get March hand drawn by myself
at a better cost.
Speaker 1 (51:46):
We hope you have a lovely rest of your week
and just remember, please be kind and don't forget to
always stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant. Bye guys,
Bye
Speaker 3 (52:08):
A
Hi guys. I'm Courtney and I'm Lisa, and welcome to
the next chapter in the Book of the Dead, brought
to you by Darkcast Network Indie Podcasts with a Twist.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello, Hello, welcome to the next chapter of the Book
of the Dead. Back with me today is Vic Ferrari.
I had such a good time talking to him, and
I know you guys are really enjoyed hearing his stories.
So he is back for more, and this time we're
going to get a little bit more into the nitty gritty.
So Vic, thank you so much for joining me again.
(00:51):
It's really exciting to have you back.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Oh Courtney, thank you so much for having me back.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
So I know last time we talked is definitely a
little bit more lighthearted, more the craziness that comes with
being a detective. But what I really want to know
is what were some dark moments being a detective? How
did even as like a rookie cop, you know, what
did that look like? How did they prepare you for homicides?
I should hope they're not just going to throw you
(01:18):
into a homicide investigation. Go here, you go have fun.
You know, how did they prap you for that. What
was that like?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
So it starts to the police Academy and it's not
so much homicide, it's death. And you know, when you
signed up for this, you're gonna you're gonna see it
and you're going to be around it. So probably about
a month or two into the police Academy, the NYPD's
Police Academy, my class was twelve hundred recruits, which is
a mid size recruit. A small police academy class is
(01:45):
five hundred. Sometimes they go as big as twenty five hundred,
and you're broken down into classrooms or companies of thirty.
So one day, our company instructor tells us, all right,
tomorrow we're going to go to Bellevue. We're going to
go to the Morgue. And he's just telling us what
we're going to see and what we're going to be
prepared to see. But nothing could prepare you for it.
(02:06):
So it was like a class trip. We're in all
little police academy uniforms and we walked down to Bellevue,
which Bellevue is a tremendous medical center. They also have
an insane asylum there. That's a story for another day.
But so they take us to the morte and it
was like something out of silence of the land. We
get into like this freight elevator at like thirty of
us and it's big. Well, maybe went in groups of
(02:26):
fifteen each, I don't remember, but we go into the
basement and I remember the second you got off. In
that basement you could smell debt. It was like unmistakable.
It was mixed with like in bombing fluid or chemicals.
And it was cold. I remember like we were wearing
jackets and it still was cold. Now, I was expecting
from what I saw on television, like an episode of Quincy,
(02:46):
where there would be one body laying on a slab
with a guy with a tape recorder and a guy
in a lab coat. It was nothing like that. It
was more like an eight bay Jiffy loop and there
was like eight slabs. There was eight bodies and they
were cutting and I had never seen anything like it
before in my life. And between each slab was a
(03:08):
produce scale. So remember when you were a kid, your
mother go to the market, there'd be a produce scale
and you put a head of lettuce in there and
you'd weigh it. They were pulling organs out of people
weighing it and then writing shit down. And I remember
them taking a brain out of a guy, putting it
in the scale and whatever it was two point three pounds,
and them laughing about it because the guy had a
small brain. And what I found amazing was some of
(03:31):
the tools they used at the margue. So if you've
ever been to like a minor key or a Midas
where you need your muffler cutout or the muffler pipe,
it's called a wizard tool. And what they do is
they saw the back of your skull and then they
grab it and it's like a movie. They pull your
face over to the side and they cracked. They separate
(03:54):
your head and they just reach out there and pop
your brain out. And when they cut you open in
the front, they sew you up with it actually looked
like a rubber cord. It was. It was the grossest
thing that I ever seen in my life. I remember
some of the autopsy's there. There was a young man
(04:14):
who had been shot multiple times and theme is standing
there and he's got this tool. It looked like a
forcips and he's reaching into each hole in this guy
and he's digging around. He's pulling out a slug and
he's dropping the slug on the table and it's like
dank dankdink. Hanging over his shoulder is this gnarly detective
(04:35):
who's eating an egg McMuffin and drinking a cup of coffee,
and he's asking the meme, so what do you think?
And the emme turned around and goes suspicious suicide and
everybody started laughing because the guy was shot like forty times.
So I quickly realized that there's humor with death. But
I also realized that that it was at that point
in my training in the police academy, this was about
(04:57):
to get real. And the the first time I saw
a dead body outside of the Morgan again, I saw
like eight autopsies going on at once. Was I was
a rookie cop and I was standing out on foot
and the sergeant said, come on, kid, you got a
safeguard A doa And I was like, huh. So in
the NYPD, when someone dies in their home or in
(05:20):
a house or in a dwelling, be it a suspicious
death or not a suspicious death? The police come, they
start a preliminary investigation, They ask questions. The detectives come
they ask more questions, they go through medications pills, they'll
call the doctors names who are on the pills and
speak to them. Then what happens is the detectives leave
(05:44):
and the body isn't going anywhere until the medical examiner
comes and makes the call on it. So what happens
is there's only one medical examiner working in a burrow.
So in a place like the Bronx of Brooklyn on
a Friday night with his multiple homicides suspicious deaths, you're
gonna be there for a while. So the medical examiner'll
(06:05):
come four or five, six hours later, he'll come in
and he'll say, he'll look around, he'll ask questions, he'll
go suspicious death. This body's going to the morgue. He's
gonna get on the phone and the morgue wagon's going
to show up. If it's not a suspicious death, he's
gonna say, okay, he's going to tell the family, pull
your funeral home, make your arrangements. But the cop has
to stay there in that apartment or wherever until that
(06:28):
body leaves. Called sitting on a doa. So, as a
rookie cop, my first time sitting on a doa is
My sergeant brings me into an apartment and there's a
dead guy. And the guy died. He was probably middle aged,
early fifties. He died over a coffee table. He was
kind of hanging off the side of a coffee table
(06:50):
and rigamortis had set in, which means your body starts
to get stiff. And next to his hand on the
floor was a pistol. But he wasn't shot. So what
is this He died, there's no so they thinking maybe
he did me. It was a small cowber round. Maybe
we can't see the hole right that the detectives are
moving them a crime scene, and the detectives are moving
(07:11):
them around, right, they leave, but they leave me in
the apartment with this guy while they're going to go
canvass the neighborhood and ask questions. Well, it was a
suspicious death, and I'm going to tell you how he
got killed. The guy a couple of hours earlier or
the day before, was sitting on the sidewalk fixing his car.
He was fixing his door. The door didn't line up
(07:34):
and he got into an argument with the neighbor. They
had a beef over something. The neighbor grabbed the guy's
head took the car door and slammed his head in
the car door several times, the doorjam and banged it.
Guy sustained a massive head injury. The guy was able
to get up, get into his apartment, retrieve a pistol.
(07:55):
He was going to go back downstairs and resolve this
in street court, where he died of a massive hemorrhage
and fell over the coffee table and dropped the gun.
So when the detectives went downstairs and started asking questions,
what happened to Julio, Well, he had a fight with
wan and one basically used his head as a door
jam and slammed his head in the door a couple
of times. They asked one, Yeah, we got it. We're
(08:17):
fighting over a girl or whatever it was. That guy
was charged with manslaughter or whatever he was charged. I
was a kid, I was a rookie. I really had
not All I did was sit in the apartment and
watch a dead body until the medical examiner it came.
But as a young cop you do that a lot
because you're expendable, so they throw you into these things.
And what's nasty about responding to das, especially in residence
(08:40):
when people die the family members get involved. This belonged
to me. That belonged to me. So you're actually a
referee in those situations. And you have to search a
dead body. NYPD procedure is you got to go through
their pockets, make sure to their wallet. If they're wearing jewelry, yeah,
to take that off, you have to voucher it. You
(09:01):
have to put it in a security envelope. Now, the
old timers aren't going to touch a dead body. That's
what the kids are for. And I can remember going
in my first couple of days with an old time
who would throw me a set of gloves and go
there you go, kid, And I've had it. So would
people die and they're in an apartment or a house
for a couple of days, the gases in your stomach
(09:23):
start to swell, you start to bloat, and if you
touch that body or stop moving it around, it pops
and all the fluid zoos out of it. So what
you gotta do is, like I remember, there was there
was an overweight woman one time that died in her bed.
The old timer told me we threw the comforter over
and we rocked her and then we got the hell
out of there and she just basically popped and then
(09:45):
I had to put gloves on, and oh, it's like
something out of a friggin horror movie. It's that's something
I did not miss about police work. So one doay
I had. I had just got into the precinct out
of field training. I'm like, great, I'm not gonna to
get as many days because I was come at you
fast and furious, especially if you work in a precinct
(10:06):
with there's a lot of old people. They're just dropping
down in their apartment and you know, the neighbor smells
something coming out of missus rosen Schwartz's apartment and we
haven't seen her in a while, and then you got
to break down the door and you know, find these
poor people. So I was working at midnight and I
was given the assignment go to this apartment. There's another
(10:26):
rookie cop that's safeguard in the d away from the
four to twelve. You're just gonna relieve him and wait
for the medical examine. I was like, okay, I go
up to the apartment. This rookie cop can't wait to
get away from it. It's like all right, and he leaves,
just leaves me up there. It's an older black gentleman.
He died in his apartment. He was in the hallway.
He died between rooms. Look like a heart attack. And
(10:48):
whenever I was on Ada, I don't know, maybe it's me.
I used to just kind of like walk around the
rooms and just try to get an idea of how
this person lived and what they were like. And I'd
look photos and stuff that were I wouldn't touch anything,
but if there was something on the mantel and the
guy looked like a decent guy, I could tell he
was a bus driver. So I'm up there about a
(11:08):
half hour. There's a knock on the door. I think
it's the medical examiner. It's another old black gentleman. And
he goes, that's my brother. Can I come in? I said,
oh no, yeah, yeah, come on, and everything's taken care of.
We're just waiting for the medical examiner. Just don't touch anything.
Goes no, no, no, he goes. You know, he goes, and
the guy is telling me, he goes. You know. My
brother and I we grew up in North Carolina. We
came up here in the nineteen fifties for a better life,
(11:30):
and we both became bus drivers, they never married. One
brother lived upstairs, one brother lived downstairs, and he's just
telling me about his brother's life. Next thing I know,
this guy goes into the fridge, comes out with two
beers and he opens him and he hands me one. Now,
I'm a rookie cop on probation. I'm not allowed to drink.
And I goes, sir, I'm not allowed to drink. He goes, son,
(11:51):
I'm not drinking alone tonight. So what am I gonna do?
Tell this guy? No. Me and this old guy are
cracking beers right with his dead brother in the hallway,
and he's just telling me about their lives. And it
was fascinating. So about three four beers in there is
a knock on the door. In comes the medical examiner.
He's eating a slice of pizza, drinking of coffee, his
(12:13):
pants are untopped, fucking slop, and he comes in. He
looks at the body, asked about three questions. He goes, Okay,
have the funeral home and take the body. You know,
not suspicious debt, I said, all right, So the old
guy calls the funeral home. The funeral home shows up,
and that's another bizarre thing. When someone's got riga mortis,
(12:36):
and you got to get him into a body bag.
They're stiff, so you're like breaking bones and cartilage and
cracking them to get him into that bag. It's a
friggin nightmare. It's like they pop. So we got him
in the bag. They take him out, and I, you know,
I thank the old guy for his hospitality. He goes
into the fridge and he hands me another beer and
he goes for the next time we meet. And I
(13:00):
that really messed with my mind because I'm saying to myself,
does he mean if he dies in his apartment, does
he want me to find him? You know, was he
thanking me like it was the bizarrest thing when he
said that for the next time we meet, Like, well,
the odds I was going to meet this guy again.
And you know, I never ran into him again. And
thank god I didn't have to go back into that
(13:21):
building for that. But I never forgot that, And that's
a story in one of my books. You know that
it just was the bizarrest thing. But those are peaceful deaths.
If you want homicides, I can go into those two.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Oh yeah, no, we need to go into We need
to go into some of the homicides. I know you
didn't work homicides really, you know, you were in auto
crimes and organized crime, but did homicides ever cross over
into your work, you know, did you have to work homicides?
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, So in organized crime, we're not responding to a homicide.
But like I told Jo on last week's episode when
we were talking about we were on a wire tap
and these guys are talking about homicides in the past.
So what we're gonna do is we're going to gather
as much information as we can, and when we take
down the case, we're gonna interview these guys and then
(14:13):
we're gonna hand it to homicide because that's what those
guys do day in and day out. You don't want
to screw up their case. You don't want to step
on anyone's toes. So yeah, I mean with the organized
crime cases, if guys talked about homicides, we would run
with it. But I came across more homicides when I
was a patrol cop because you're responding to things. So
(14:35):
sometimes the homicides are you know, people killing each other,
and then there's sometimes police involved shootings. And one of
the first police involved shootings I ever went to was.
It was the early nineties. It was like October. It
was a warm night and it was raining and it
was quiet, and we were at the other end of
the precinct and a domestic violence comes over at this
(14:57):
apartment at the sleepy end of the precinct. So the
dispatcher gives it to a radio car and they're responding,
and another car said, we'll get to back them up.
So you got two cars going to this right. The
next thing you know, the dispatcher goes over the radio
and says, I'm getting multiple, multiple, multiple calls on this,
So now you know it's something if everybody in the
building is calling up and saying there's some crazy shit
(15:19):
going on in apartment three B. So we said we're gonna go.
So now you got three cars going and it's raining.
So the first radio car gets there. It was three
story of four story garden apartments. First car gets there,
pulls up on the side of the building, not in front,
and it's raining. It's drizzling out, and these cops are
in their early twenties, they're young, they're full of pisson vinegar.
(15:41):
They get out of the radio car, they hear screaming
from one of the windows. Ninety nine percent of cops
would have went around to the side of the building
and went from through the front door. They decide to
go up the fire eskate. These guys go up the
fire eskate. They get to the window, they look inside
and there's a guy laying on top of a woman
with a butcher knife and he's trying to cut her
(16:02):
head off. These two guys get on the radio when
they're screaming, get the frigging cavalry here. There's a man
decapitating a woman. So now we're around the block. My
radio car and the other radio car pull up out front.
We hear several shots bab bab by by mob right,
so we go over the air. Shots fired. We run
up the stairs. As we're coming up the stairs as
(16:24):
a thirteen year ten twelve, thirteen year old boy, he's
running down the stairs and he's screaming, he's killing my mother.
He's killing my mother. So now I mean, now all
hell's broken loose. We get up to the door. We're
trying to kick in the door, and we hear two
of our coworkers in the apartment screaming at the top
of their lungs. Don't shoot, we're inside the apartment. Don't shoot,
(16:44):
it's us. Open the door. They open the door. The
two cops are in the apartment. They opened the door.
And the first thing I'll never forget was it looked
like someone lit a pack of firecrackers off in the apartment,
because it's full of gunpowder because of all the shots
that got thrown in there. As we're walking into the apartment,
the second thing I noticed is there's not one thing
in that apartment that hasn't been destroyed. The walls are broken,
(17:07):
the toilet's broken, there's holes in everything. It's just the
whole apartment's destroyed. Look like a hurricane went through it.
Now there's two bodies. As we get into the living room,
she's laid out. Her entire neck is missing pretty much.
The only thing that's keeping her head on her body
as her spine. She's got a hole in her head
from where he hit her with a hammer. And you
(17:30):
know you see on TV when people die and their
eyes are closed, her mouth was wide open and it
was like something out of a harm or. She's looking
right at me, but her whole neck was gone. He
was a couple of feet away. What happened was the
cops were banging on the window screaming at him, which
diverted his attention from her. He got up with the
(17:51):
butcher knife. He goes, oh, you want some of this.
He ran over the window, threw it open, and he
started swinging that knife and my two buddies back then
we used to before we went to nine millimeters, we
carried thirty eight, which at thirty eight is a larger projectile.
It just doesn't go as fast. It doesn't have as
much speed, like a thirty eight goes nine hundred feet
(18:11):
per second and nine millimeter goes twelve hundred fet per second.
But with a thirty eight up close and personal, is
gonna do more damage. So when he threw open that window,
the two cops emptied their thirty eights into him, which
sent him flying back into the apartment. He fell back,
the knife flew out of his hand and went into
the next room. So as we're walking around the apartment,
(18:31):
I realized my feet are sticking to the floor. There's
so much blood from the two of them that my
feet were like sticking to the floor. So I told
the two cops ago, I gotta get you out of it.
You guys gotta go to the hospital. So my one
friend is like, they're gonna think we shot an unarmed man.
The knife went into the next room. I go, dude,
you're good. Just trust me on this. Don't touch anything.
(18:53):
You know, you see in the movies the cops like,
you're gonna go into the next room and pick up
the knife. You don't do that shit. I go, dude,
you're good. She's dead. You know you're fine. It's gonna
be a good shooting. So we rushed him to the
hospital and later on that night he's touching his pants.
It was a hole, a slit in his pants. The
guy got that close with the knife. It went through.
(19:14):
The cops wear baggy pants because we're cheap and we
don't go to the tailor. So when you get a
pair of duty pants, no cop, unless you're in Florida.
When they send you to the tail and they pick
up the tap, you'll notice that white feedy guys they
have fans are baggy because they're not going to the tailor.
That knife went right through his pant leg.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
And those guys were never the same after that, Like
they were active cops. They were always making arrests. One
guy was never the same again. I mean, he did
his twenty years, but his focus was other and the
other guy became like an ordained minister. So it definitely
for people that think that like cops to shoot people
and get over it. It affects different guys different ways.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Oh absolutely, And I do think that's crazy when some
people are like, oh, you know, like they don't care.
You know, they're they're paid to shoot, or they're they're
paid to do this, they're paid to just deal with it.
It's like you're I mean, especially in a situation like that,
it's already a traumatic situation, like you're watching a guy
like kill a woman, but then the guy's coming at
you and you have to shoot, like he's got a knife,
he's already proven he could kill. He's gonna do it again.
(20:18):
That's so traumatic.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Well, think of they're a straight they held cops are afraid.
The average cop is afraid of getting in trouble. They're
not afraid of losing their lives. I was never afraid
of getting killed. I was afraid of getting in trouble.
The reality is they could have shot him through the
glass while he was hanging over her, stabbing her. The
point that they waited that long for him to come
across with that knife and open the window before they
(20:42):
lit him up shows the amount of a strait they
had until it got it was him or them.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
No, absolutely, And I think that's another thing that there's
a misconception about that because obviously, yes, there are bad
people in every job. Of course, there are good cops
are bad cops, but like there's a lot of restraint
there is. There is. There's a lot of restraint because
I'm sure a lot of times that the natural reaction
to stop something like that is to use violence or
(21:10):
a brief horse or whatever, and you can't. That's asking
for an even worse situation.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Were there any homicides that didn't get solved that you
either heard about or you worked on, even partially, that
you you still think about.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
I don't know if it was stopped. So the NYP
is so big. People think like you get involved in
something and you're with it from beginning to end. When
you're a patrol cop, you respond to things and unless
it goes to trial or an arrest is made, you
got to testify. You really don't know, so early in
my career. We're driving over by co Op City in
(21:50):
the Bronx and there's there's an abandoned dump on the
way to City Island. And it was it was a
Friday night. We were doing a six at night till
two in the morning. Was late. It's about eleven o'clock
at night, and we see fire trucks putting out fire
on a little Toyota. So we pull up and we
go what happened. They go, I don't know. We think
(22:10):
it's an insurance job. They set a fire in the
interior of the car, which that's in the Bronx. Back
in the day, that was everybody's way to get out
of a car payment was fifty cents worth of gas
in a match, burn their car and then report it
to their insurance company. So it was an interior fire.
No one was around. They take the plates off the
back of the car and they go, let's open the trunk.
(22:31):
They pop open the truck and there's two guys duct
taped in the trunk. If one guy's looking at me,
he's blinking, and the other guy's dead. He's got a
bullet a couple of bullet holes in him. Then I
look at the guy that's blinking at me, he's got
a couple of bullet holes on it, Like holy shit.
So we get these guys out of the trunk, take
the duct tape off. One guy's dead, the other guy
dies at the scene. But what we figured out was
(22:52):
they were killed there because we found the shell casings
on the floor next to the trunk. So whoever killed
them tied them up, put them in the trunk, drove
them over to that stretch of roadway where there's not
a lot of people around at that hour, opened the trunk,
lit him up, shot them both in the head several times,
shut the trunk, and then set the interior on fire.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Oh my god, that sounds like something out of like
a movie.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
Oh used to go walk all the time.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
It to be like you don't think about that, like
no way.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Well i'll tell you one that did get solved. That
that's a wild one. Early nineties again. It was a
Saturday night, September, early October. I'm actually the guy actually
worked with was later killed. I'll go into that. Working
with this cop, we're just coming off our meal hour.
We took our lunch hour or dinner hour in the
(23:43):
precinct and as we're coming out, the female cop on
the on the ts the telephone switch book goes is
people yelling in Spanish about it death in the house.
I think it's a cardiac. Can you guys get up there?
Like yeah, yeah, So we rush up there, sixth story,
walk up, probably about the fourth floor. I can hear
a screw. We get up to the apartment and the
apartment's full of people. People are crying and screaming, and
(24:05):
I'm kind of making my way through the apartment. The
kitchen is like a galley kitchen that's kind of like
it hooks off, and I see a set of legs
sticking out of the kitchen. So I get into the
kitchen and there's blood all over the walls. Now, if
you've ever cut yourself, blood is bright red, but over
time with oxygen, it turns like that rust color. So
(24:26):
the blood was dry, and laying on top of this
woman is her son, and he's just screaming and wailing
and screaming, So like, come on, son, you gotta get
up and get him up right. We bring him into
the living room, get everybody out of the apartment. You know,
it's his mother. She's been stabbed to dead. When was
the last time you saw your mother? He went from
(24:47):
yelling and screaming and crying to measure when was the
last time I saw my mother? Like four hours ago?
Does she live alone? Does my mother live alone? So
every question I asked this guy, he's repeating the question.
He's buying time. I wasn't putting the screws to him.
I was just asking him basic questions to get to
(25:08):
the bottom of who are you? Who's this woman? How
was the last time you saw her? So I turned
to my part, and the apartment's been ransacked, and I'm
looking around the apartment. I turned to my part and
I go, do me a favor, write everything down. This
guy says there's something not right with him. I get
that he's upset, but there's just something not right. And
(25:29):
the apartment's been ransacked. But then if you really look
at it, it's been staged. So when a burglar breaks
into your house or apartment, they're on the clock. The
only overhead of burglars is getting caught, going to jail
and getting his ass kicked by the owner. They're in
and out, they're dumping shit out of the drawers, they're
rummaging through it. They dumped the next draw Every drawer
(25:50):
was dumped and then the drawers were put back. Who
does that? The woman's bag is dumped upside down and
placed right side up next to the dumb contents, and the
credit cards were there. Now, this is the early nineties,
before surveillance cameras. The credit cards. They would have burned
through those credit cards. Whoever did this? That's odd. So
(26:11):
the detectives come, they take him to the precinct to
question him. We're tasked with hanging out with crime scene
and the medical examiner, so we voucher, you know, things
in the apartment and stuff. And I get back to
the precinct that night and I asked the detectives, like,
(26:33):
what's going on with this? And they said, well, he
knows more. We don't know if he did it, but
he knows more than he's letting on. And he started
getting a little ants. He didn't ask for a lawyer,
which if someone asked for a lawyer, you can't question
him no more. He goes. He started getting that he
was tired and upset, so we didn't want to push it.
We let him go home, but we're going to get
(26:54):
up at six o'clock in the morning and drag him
out of bed again. He just doesn't know it crossed
the street from him. The deceased had three brothers that
lived in the building across the street. They were asking
all sorts of questions what happened to our sister, and
the detective said, I think you should talk to your nephew.
Maybe you can get something out of him, because he's
not really telling us. They said, okay. So in NYPD,
(27:17):
here's another part of NYPD procedure. The first cops that
respond to a homicide or a suspicious death the following
day you have to go to the morgue to identify
the body. It's just procedural. So my partner and I
flipped a coin. Of course, I lost. Next morning, on
a Sunday, on my day off, I get up, I
(27:38):
put on my uniform and the morgue had changed. The
morgue was at Jacoby Hospital, like I don't know, they
were like between morgues or something. It was very shifty.
So I go to Jacoby Hospital. It's a skeleton crew
work and there's a young guy work in the desk.
I hand him the paperwork. I said him here to
see this idea this woman. He goes, okay, so it,
(27:59):
like I said, it wasn't like the drawers you see
in the movie. It was like the seven eleven all right.
You ever go into with seven eleven and you open
the refrigerated door and you grab a soda, and then
like you look in the back and you see some
guy stocking shelves, like in the back. That's kind of
what it was like. So he goes, He goes into
this refrigerated room. He comes out with a gurney and
(28:21):
he pulls off the sheet. It's a it's a Spanish
guy with a beard. And I go, no female, Hispanic,
fifty something years old? This you know this is a whino.
This looks like a fucking homeless guy. He goes, oh,
throws the sheet back on. The guy brings him back
into the refrigerator room, comes back out with another another stiff,
(28:43):
throws off the sheet. It's a black guy. I go, dude,
I didn't come here to see every person that died
last night in the Bronx. He had to see her.
Let me in there. So I walk in and it
was like something out of a horror movie, like bad lighting,
fluorescent lights, flickering, and I see all these dead bodies
covered in sheets and in the NYPD, before they take
(29:05):
the body, you fill out. It's called a toe tag.
It's a little piece of oak tag with a string.
And I recognize my handwriting and the deceased name. I
pulled the sheet off. That's our right idea. I go
back to the precinct and the detectives are celebrating. They're
all high five in each other and stuff, and the
Sun is sitting in a cell. So I go, what happened?
(29:25):
So they got up bright and early. Thank god, the
detectives were Spanish. They got up bright and early that morning.
They went over to the building and when they were
in the hallway they heard screaming in Spanish. The three
uncles got up earlier, went to the apartment. The Sun
was trying to leave the building and they go, where
are you going? Like yeah, his bags packed, and they
(29:46):
started yelling and screaming at him, and he explained that
he stabbed his mother to death, and the detectives heard
it because they were in the hallway. They laid back,
they came out to kept them talking. He gave the
whole thing up. So Sunny Boy was a crackhead, and
he was on and off drugs, and when he was
on drugs he would terrorize his mother and steal shit
(30:09):
and abuse her and stuff. And she had enough, so
she told him that Saturday afternoon, I watch you out.
I can't live like this anymore. He picked up a
butcher knife and stamped it to death, took a shower,
took the murder weapon, and all the bloody clothes he
was wearing, put in a garbage bag and leaves the
apartment and leaves the door Ajar, figuring I'll go I'll
(30:33):
get rid of this stuff. I'll take off for a
couple hours. One of the neighbors is going to see
the door open. They're gonna find her. They'll call the police.
I'll come back clean as a whistle. I don't know
what happened. I went out. I was at my girlfriend's house.
He comes back four hours later, after disposing of all
this stuff. The door is still Ajar, but no one
(30:53):
discovered her. People have seen him now coming and leaving
the building. Now he's got to commit gets on the
phony cour the precinct. Then he calls his uncle. Then
he starts going into the song and dance with us
and ultimately he was convicted of murder. I just checked
a couple of weeks ago. That happened in nineteen ninety four.
He's still in jail. It's crazy stabbed his mother to
(31:17):
them multiple times.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Oh my god. Are you hear stories like that where
like the kids like kill their parents for things like that,
like the nonsense ry that's oh my god, speaking of
oh my gods. You have you ever worked a case,
whether it was homicide or when you were working with
(31:38):
you know, the auto thefts and stuff. Was there ever
a case where you were like, this whole thing is
so bizarre, like none of this is real. This is
not real life, Like this is the weirdest thing I've
ever experienced. You know, was there anything like that that
you had experienced on a job.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
I mean, it's difficult for the average person, you know,
and you grew up and you were raised, right, It's
it's very difficult to understand why someone could kill somebody,
whatever the motivation. You know, it's you know, unless someone's
trying to hurt me or my family. You know, I
(32:16):
wouldn't use deadly physical force on anyone. But when you
start seeing these things and what people will do to
other people for random acts of violence, or they just
don't like somebody. Yeah, it's strange and bizarre. I've got
a story like that. My old partner, we used to
call him Cancer because he was in a couple of
(32:36):
shoot he killed more people than cancer, But that's another story.
But he So it's the early nineties and we're young
guys and we're going out to cop bars. And before
I work with this guy, he used to work with
a magician. Guy was a cop and in his spare time,
yeah he was, he was an amateur magician, working kids
parties and bar mitzvahs and shit. So anyway, we would
(32:57):
go to the bar and we're trying to pick up
girls and the magician would come over and he's making
balloon animals and he's pulling flowers out of his sleeve
and pulling coins. Like, how do you compete with this guy?
So I told this guy I got his partner, I
go get him out of here, Like, how do you
compete with this guy? Goes If he spent more time
doing police work than making balloon animals, he goes, he'd
(33:20):
be the greatest crime fighter of all time. So, anyway,
these two guys one midnight get called out to a
basement apartment of a sixth story walk up in the Bronx,
and it comes over COLLS fault nine one one COLLS
fault hang up, So back then nine to one one,
it didn't really pinpoints you to the apartment. So in
(33:41):
six story buildings in the Bronx, and they're like underground layers,
and there's usually one or two apartments where the superintendent
lives and he lives there for free and he services.
He does all the work on the building. So they
go down there and there's two apartments. They go to
apartment number one. They bang on the door, no one answers.
They go to apartment number two and my buddy's about
(34:04):
to knock on the door, and the magician who's lazy, goes,
come on, we made all this noise coming down here.
No one's in there. This is bullshit. Let's go. My
buddy goes to knock on the door again. He goes,
come out and buy a cup of coffee, cops the
cheap free coffee. My buddy doesn't knock on the door,
and they leave. What they didn't realize is behind door
number two, the super the building lived there and he
(34:25):
was selling coke out of the apartment. He felt he
got addicted to it. He fell behind on his payments
to his wholesale he was buying weight in the drug world.
They don't, you know, cancel your cable or threaten to
sue you. They're gonna kill you. So the guy knew
we had a problem and he wasn't leaving his building
very often. So to get this guy, they used to
(34:48):
it's an old track. They brought an attractive female with
them who was in on it. She knocks on the door.
The guy looks out the window. He's like, oh shit,
found money. He opens the door. The two hit men
and her push their way into the apartment. They're pistol
whipping them. Where's the money, where's the drugs? He don't
have the answers. They shoot him in the head. They
(35:09):
roll them up in a carpet. They take them out
of the apartment, and they throw them in the incinerator
the furnace of the building. So while he's going up
like a Puerto Rican firelog, they go back into the
apartment and they're ransacking it. Now the cops are outside.
Oh shit, we got a problem. So the two hit
men tell the girl, listen, if these cops knock on
(35:32):
the door, let them in. What we're gonna do is
it's a railroad apartment. It goes straight through with doors
off to the sides. Start yelling at you. They were Albanians.
Start yelling at Yugoslavian. Point to the kitchen. Lead them
down to the hallway. When you pass the threshold of
this bedroom, throw yourself on the floor. We're gonna come
(35:54):
out from behind. We'll shoot the cops. They got to commit. Now,
we'll take the two cops out, we'll throw them in
the furnace, and we'll get the hell out of here. Well,
thank god, the cops said, knock on the door, they leave. Well,
the super's got family, you know, two weeks ago by
where's Julio? The super's family starts calling the detectives. The
(36:16):
detectives get involved. They see there's another The last time
this guy was seeing there was a nine to one
one call two weeks ago. They bring in the magician
and my buddy, you went into this basement. Yeah, did
you knock on the door. We knocked on this door.
We didn't knock on that door. Okay, well he lived there, Okay,
anything else? Did you notice, and my buddy goes, you know, well,
(36:36):
we will leave. And we went upstairs to leave. I
spotted a car parked on a fire hydrant. I wrote
in a parking ticket that was the getaway car. He
was registered to the girl. They bring the female in,
she starts getting all squirrely. She gives it up, of course,
trying to minimize her involvement. Been in for a penny,
in for a pound. They bring in the two hit men.
(36:59):
They locked them up. They go back to the building.
Now it's February. They had to shut the heat off
for two days until that furnace got cool enough, and
then they had to go into and then they went
in there and they were able to get his skull
and his bones out of there. So that's a story
in one of my books called Last Night a Magician
(37:19):
saved my life because if not for the magician telling
my buddy, don't knock on the door, you would have
had three homicides.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
That's great, like literally, if they had just knocked on
the door like that would have been the end of it.
So the last time we talked, he talked briefly about
nine to eleven, and I should have asked this then
but there is one on solved homicide in New York
on nine eleven. It's the murder of Henrique Subyak. He's
a Polish man. He was killed in Brooklyn. Do you
know anything about that case?
Speaker 3 (37:46):
I don't, but I'm gonna look it up now.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
You should because I was going to ask you, like,
it's the only one, only on solved homicide and it
was you know, they they had no resources obviously its
everyone was at ground zero. So he's killed in the
street in Brooklyn on his way to a grocery store
to work, like a graveyard chips because he didn't know
anything was going on because he had no TV. He'd
(38:08):
been here for like maybe a year. He had no TV.
You know, Holly knew was that he got sent home
because a plane crashed into the tower. That was it
and he I think it is Decatur Avenue. He died,
he was shot, and they've never salved it. So I
was curious if you had heard about it, because the
only one it's it's it's a really interesting case. It's
still unsolved, and it's one of those cases that drive
(38:30):
me nuts because I wish it was salved like it
but there's nothing there's nothing, no.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
No, in the cracks, and it probably yeah, and it
probably wasn't. He was shot.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
He was shot, Yeah, he was shot. He made it
up to like an apartment door, like front or of
an apartment. He's banging on it, like asking someone to
help him. But of course, you know, Marbles was freaked out,
so no one's answering the door, and he died on
the stoop. So the theory is that there was a
(39:02):
witness that looked out their windows, saw a couple of
guys following him, and he's lost because he got off
the bus in the road.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
I did hear about this?
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Then now this sounds familiar.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, he got lost. And so the theory is that
it was a robbery gone wrong, which is very possible,
but it's it's one of those cases that I'm like,
any time I talk to someone like related or connected
to New York and anyway, I'm like, do you hear
about this case? Like to you do you think they're
gonna solve it? You know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
I would bet if there was people, if they said
if there was more than one person, I would guess
it was teenagers. Teenagers are so dangerous because they don't
you know someone's gonna rob you. They're gonna point the
average They're just gonna point the gun at it. I mean,
obviously things can go sideways, but a stick up guy
during my time just wants your money. Means are very unpredictable.
(39:53):
They're trying to prove themselves. Like I got into so
many car chases. I hated it when teenagers were driving. A.
They don't add a drup and B. They'll do things.
They could get someone killed. And especially you give a
teenage or a handgun, things can go sideways very quick.
It's probably a couple if it was. If the witnesses
said that they sold more than one person, I would
bet money with teens. If they didn't find a shellcasing.
(40:18):
I mean, shellcasing can lead you back to the weapon.
Shellcasings can have DNA on it, shellcasing can have a
fingerprint on it. I'm wondering if it was with a
revolver that wouldn't have spit out of shellcasing, and then
they just tossed the gun.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
If I remember correctly, they didn't find shellcasings. But he
also did not die where he was shot. He made
it a good amount of feet at least.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
Oh, yeah, it's possible the shell casing got lost though
it got run over and went in a tread of
a tire of a car or a truck that went by.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Yeah, it's very interesting that you say teens though. Actually
I had spoken to Alfredity John's We were talking about
teens that kill and it was the same thing. They
are kids have this superiority conference that the teenagers are
so dangerous. I have encountered. I used to work with kids,
and the older they got, the worse they were. For
(41:12):
the kids that were my quote unquote bad kids, and
it was you know, you you almost wonder, like what
are you capable of? Because they're capable of anything.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Right, their imagination right, and they don't have the wisdom
of an old time thief or you know, they're just
not thinking, they're not thinking ahead exactly.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
It's more like I think it's like it's the thrill
for them more than anything else.
Speaker 3 (41:39):
Absolutely, and to prove themselves. They were always trying to
one up each other.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
It's very interesting. I never I never considered teenagers. I
don't even think the police considered teenagers at the time.
But there was only like five police officers working at
because everyone else, like I said, it was that ground zero,
they had no one working it.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
They don't, you know, you have watched that show the
first forty eight. Yeah, and there's a lot of truth
to that. I mean, the more time that goes by,
the cases have been solved over years, but the more
time goes by, the more other cases pile up. I
mean New York when I was active, we were averaging
over twenty five hundred homicides the year. Yeah, I mean,
(42:19):
I'm sure there's unsolved homicides that you know, there's tons
that people got away with. So the longer a homicide
goes the trail gets cold and cold. That's not to
say you can't solve it. If that case were to
be solved, it's either going to be you said they
didn't They didn't recover shellcasing.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
If I remember correctly, they didn't recover shellcasings, and they
had some people talking, but I guess this specific area
where he died was pretty active with gang activity, so
a lot of people were afraid to talk, so they
really had very few witnesses on top of no real evidence.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yeah, so it's either going to be the way that
case is going to be broken open one of two ways.
The least likely is if the slug were to match
a gun that gets recovered from someone. But you're talking
twenty something years ago. The odds of that gun turning
up somewhere probably slim to none. But you never know,
could be under someone's bed somewhere and someone decides to
(43:16):
use it one day, and where'd you get that from?
And I got that from High Top? And then high
Top you find out is doing time for this, and
then they pull him out and he spills the bean.
More than likely, if that case were to be solved,
it's either going to be an ex girlfriend or someone
that knows something about it, and they'll look at its
serious time and now it's a bargaining chip and they're
going to give it up.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
Unfortunately, I agree, I do. I think I think it's
gonna take the one person that knows something to be
in a situation where they need to play that hand. Yeah,
it's one of those cases that keeps me up at
it and I ask everyone.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
I ain't gonna have me reading up on it.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Jed, It's interesting. It's interesting. I did a whole episode
on it. It's very interesting. It's sad because he, you know,
he was here without his Family's family was in Poland.
He was here just trying to make money to bring
him here. And his wife had called him after she
heard about the attack, and she's like, you know, where
are you And he's like I'm fine, Like what are
(44:12):
you talking about? Relax, Like it's not I don't know
what you think it is, but it's not that. And
then he ends up dying totally unrelated to the attacks.
It just happened to be coincidentally that night, on the
one night where there was no police anywhere. I think
there was even a quote from like one of the
police officers on seeing that night saying something along the
(44:32):
lines of like you couldn't take like this one night
off from murder. Like, yeah, I thank you so much
for joining me again. You were wonderful to talk to.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
You want to hear two quick stories? Yes, okay, because
I know I know this show's format is darker things,
but I'm going to tell you two dark stories that
are kind of funny. I mean, so there's this one
guy I knew. I wasn't a fan of his, actually
know him before I was a cop. He was lazy,
(45:04):
he's a foot cop up in Harlem, and it's a
Friday night. He has every intention of going out for
a couple of cocktails after work, and he gets stuck
on a doa and a housing project on like the
tenth of fifteenth four And what it is is an
elderly gentleman used to meet another friend every day for
lunch or dinner. He doesn't show up. His friend has
(45:26):
the keys to the apartment. He opens the door, and
the poor guy dies, died peacefully in his sleep. Cop
shows up, The EMTs show up. The EMTs are like, yeah,
he's gone. You gotta wait for the medical examiner. Cop
turns the EMTs and goes, can't you take him to
the hospital? And you know, they go, we can't move
a body and take it to the hospital unless it's
(45:49):
in public view, when it's not suspicious. If you dropped
out of a heart attack on the street, they're gonna
take you to the morgue. He says, he didn't die
in public view. They leave, detectives leave, Sergeant leaves, he's
not going out tonight. About a half hour later, the
cardiac gets called in so the same building, same floor,
(46:13):
the two EMTs had gone downstairs with their equipment and
eating their dinner in their ambulance. They had never left.
They grabbed their board, they grab everything. They get off
the elevator. They come running into the hallway. The dead
guy that was in his bed is now in the
hallway and the cop is standing there and they go,
what the hell is this? And the cop goes, you're
(46:35):
not gonna believe this. I'm sitting in the apartment. The
guy jumped out of the bed. He said, oh shit.
He ran through the apartment. He opened the door and
collapsed on the floor, and they go, no, he didn't.
He's starting to have Rigga mortis. He's in the same
position he was in the bed. You dragged him across
the room and dumped him in the hallway. He goes, no,
(46:55):
I didn't. They're arguing. Sergeant shows up. They start telling
what happened. The CoP's stilling thes it's obvious the cop
moved the body into the hallway. Long story short, he
got suspended, He got dumped of his assignment, and they
transferred him up to the Bronx. He lost thirty vacation
days and was put on a ye appropriate if that
(47:15):
happened nowadays, he would have got locked up somehow. And
I never liked that guy before or after, but that's
a true story. He moved a dead body to avoid
working overtime. And the last story I'll leave you with,
I'm in the precinct a couple of years, maybe five
six years. This rookie cop is working there and I
liked it. Nice guy, heads on straight, was a good cop,
(47:39):
you know, would go out for beer once in a while.
And ago, what did you do before you were a cop?
He goes, I'm a license more titian. I said, no shit.
He goes, see, I still do it in my spare time, right,
which I've kind of find with a music. So I said,
you know, I go, if you want to be a detective,
I said, the career path for you is to go
(47:59):
to missing persons And he goes, why would I do that?
I go to the missing person's unit. Loves guys like
you because you know how to you're not afraid of
the morgue. Would people die in the street with no
identification or even in identification, they're gonna they're gonna fingerprint
the dead body. And there's an art to that because
even if the body is shriveled up in stuff. They
(48:21):
stick a needle in their finger and they blow it
up with saline solution and stuff. Basically, the missing person's
unit is for people that aren't afraid of being around
the dead. Well, this guy is a license mortician. He'd
be perfect for it. So I told him, I go,
if you want to be a detective, that's the quickest way.
He goes, all right, takes my advice. Within months, they
(48:42):
snatch him up and he vanishes into the missing Person's unit.
Now this happened in like ninety four, ninety five. Fifteen
years later to go by and actually the guy that
I call Cancer that was with the magician, I'm working
with him now, right with detectives together. And he goes,
(49:02):
I met a guy that knows you. I go, who?
He goes My dentist go, what are you talking? I
don't know any dentists. And he says the guy's name,
and I go, no, he's not a dentist. He works
in the missing Person's unit. He goes, No, he quit
the job to become a dentist. What are you talking about?
He goes, he was an undertaker, became a cop, went
to missing persons, did that for a couple of years,
(49:25):
stopped doing that, went to dental school. He pulled my
tooth out, so I said, no, shit, like, guy's an undertaker,
and he pulled he pulled your tooth out. He goes, yeah,
he goes, he speaks very highly of you, Vick. I go, well,
that's that's that's nice, and he goes. He also said,
if you ever have any problems, go see him. He'll
do it for free. And I go no, and he goes.
(49:47):
I thought you liked him. I do, but I know
where his fingers were, you know, I don't know if
I want this guy's handling dead bodies. I don't want
his fingers in my mouth. So that's just that's another
story from one of my books.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
That's an interesting career trajectory.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
Understand about high IQ. Yeah, all those things.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Nick, instant a pleasure as always. Do you have some
amazing stories listen.
Speaker 3 (50:13):
I greatly appreciate it. And if I could just plug
my website.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Please do please see that was gonna be my last thing.
It's you know, where can people find you?
Speaker 3 (50:22):
Yeah, so just go to Amazon type in my name
Vic Ferrari like the car, where you can preview all
my NYPD books for free, including my latest NYPD Presumption
and Dysfunction. And if you like podcasts and want to
hear stories from my NYPD career or me interviewing former
NYPD members and gangsters and stuff like that, just check
(50:43):
out the NYPD Through the Looking Glass podcast. It's available
on YouTube and wherever you can find podcasts, Spotify and
all that other good stuff.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Big thank you so much for joining me again. It's
a wonderful to have you on. It's wonderful to talk
to you. For everyone listening, please check out the source
notes Fix website is going to be there linked to
his podcast is going to be there. Check out his books.
They're great. I have read a few of them myself.
They're very good. As always, I hope you have a
(51:14):
wonderful week and I will talk to you in the
next chapter of the Book of the Dead. Bye, guys,
thank you so much for listening to this chapter of
the Book of the Dead. And don't forget that you
can always connect with us on Instagram, you can connect
with us on Twitter, and you can absolutely connect with
us on Patreon. We also have a marcher as well
(51:38):
that we have frequent discount codes coming out for so
that you guys can get March hand drawn by myself
at a better cost.
Speaker 1 (51:46):
We hope you have a lovely rest of your week
and just remember, please be kind and don't forget to
always stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant. Bye guys,
Bye
Speaker 3 (52:08):
A
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Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!