When investigators hit the 30th Precinct, they found a crew of cops with free run of the streets. Police leadership was lax. Restraints were few. And there was a huge supply of cocaine and cash.
The result: The latest case of corruption in the nation's largest police department, with a dozen officers accused of brutally using their precinct in Harlem as a drug bazaar to clear huge profits."Up there, it was like winning the Lotto," said Bobby Machado, an investigator who helped expose the cops. "They know they have another chance to win the next day. There's so much money involved."
Investigators said what they turned up went far beyond officers accepting bribes. Over the past four years, cops themselves became robbers and drug dealers became business partners.
On the precinct's graveyard shift, corruption was as common as the nightly roll call.
"I was shocked," said Frank O'Hara, one of Machado's fellow investigators on the Mollen Commission, which was set up in 1992 to ferret out crooked cops.
O'Hara's reaction was justified. Among the investigators' al-le-ga-tions:
-A uniformed cop shot a drug dealer for his stash.
-A corrupt officer auctioned off a kilo of cocaine among three drug dealers.
-On-duty officers would, in a single shift, seize and resell dope for a $12,000 profit. Two officers split $100,000 in a single theft.
Breaking and entering was standard procedure to seize dope and cash, as was ripping apart cars to find hidden drugs, the investigators say.
One officer's phony testimony led to the reversal of a serious drug dealer's conviction. Hundreds of other cases involving the accused officers are under review.
When the police officers were arrested Friday, Police Commissioner William Bratton personally seized some of their badges and said their dishonored numbers would never be issued again.
Not even the buzz about an investigation halted the crime wave. "It slowed down, but it never went away," O'Hara said.
If the charges are true, the officers of the 30th Precinct could have done the Gambino mob family proud.
"I kind of looked at it almost like an organized crime family," O'Ha-ra said.
Three officers have already pleaded guilty, and three others were arrested earlier last month on assault and robbery charges in a sting operation.
The Mollen Commission's team - Machado, O'Hara and chief investigator Brian Carroll - looks at the job as chasing crooks, not cops.
"The drug dealers wear uniforms now," said Machado, a retired narcotics detective.
More arrests are expected in the 30th Precinct; other precincts also are under investigation, Bratton said.
The three investigators - all worked for two decades in the NYPD - laid out the prime ingredients for police corruption in the '90s: No. 1, drugs. No. 2, a lack of precinct leadership. No. 3, officers who operate without fear of prosecution.
It was the same way for the "Buddy Boys," the corrupt cops of the 77th Precinct in Brooklyn in 1986, and the Mollen Commission's first case of the year, the "Morgue Boys," a band of officers who robbed drug dealers and divided up the booty in an abandoned coffin factory.