It’s like clockwork: every 20 years or so, a corruption scandal forces the NYPD into the hot seat. But how did this cycle begin? To find out, we go back over a century ago to the very first investigation into the police where the NYPD is put on trial like never before.

From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.

Empire City is made with a commitment to ensure the stories of those who were and are still  impacted by the NYPD are always part of the stories we tell ourselves about the police, about America, and about democracy.

Voices & References:

Carol Safir

Daniel Czitrom https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/emeriti-retired-faculty/daniel-czitrom

Cait Murphy

Bill Williams, descendant of Clubber Williams

Leslie Cornfeld 

Scoundrels in Law: The Trials of Howe and Hummel, Lawyers to the Gangsters, Cops, Starlets, and Rakes Who Made the Gilded Age

https://www.amazon.com/Scoundrels-Law-Lawyers-Gangsters-Starlets/dp/0061714283

TRANSCRIPT

Chenjerai Kumanyika: As I was working to grapple with everything I’ve learned about the NYPD, I got a phone call. It was from a woman named Carol Safir, wife of former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir. Carol’s the head of the board of trustees for the New York City Police Museum. She got my voice message asking to talk. And after we chatted on the phone for a while, she invited me to her home to talk more. Hey, Carol. Carol lives in Annapolis, Maryland. Her street is lined with historical looking houses. Each one with an American flag hanging out front.

Carol Safir: George Washington’s been in this house, and it has a long history.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: A long history in the United States. And you know what that means.

Carol Safir: Back then, there were a couple of slaves living in the basement. And this was an in-town house. This was not a plantation house.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Yup. As we start to get into things, it looked like Carol and I shared a real interest in the beginnings of the police in New York.

Carol Safir: The Police Museum did not ignore any of the early history. We covered the history from the very first bell ringer, the lanterns, all kinds of things like that that we could find.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But our conversation took a little bit of a turn when I asked Carol why she thought it was so important to have a museum specifically for the police.

Carol Safir: I would like everyone in New York to know they shouldn’t be fearing the police. They should be revering the police for the job they do. And unfortunately, the media sometimes hits that the opposite way.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: For Carol, the museum was kind of an extension of police public relations.

Carol Safir: The police are not out there to intimidate people. They’re there to help people.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: It’s kind of like saying they’re here to keep people safe. But as Carol talks, I’m remembering what historian Ed O’Donnell told me when I started this journey. He said the Carol was the person who first reached out to ask him about helping with the museum. And now that I’m sitting across from her, I asked, is it true the words violence and corruption were not allowed to be used in the museum?

Carol Safir: Violence and corruption is not part of the Police Museum story because there hasn’t been violence and corruption.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I expected, Carol, to want to lift up what she saw as the positive parts of police work in addition to the darker stuff. But to say that violence and corruption wasn’t even a part of the story that needed to be told. Wow. I felt like she didn’t have any idea of the scale of the problem.

Carol Safir: But when you look. At all of these police people compared to the 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 bad apples you can think of or you can can research. I don’t think they deserve to be mentioned in the Police Museum. Because then you’re then what you’re doing. Let me let me explain something then. What you’re doing is you’re saying. You’re glorifying criminals.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: For someone who wasn’t interested in glorifying criminals. Carol was very excited about an exhibit in the museum that featured Al Capone’s guns. She said she saw that as kind of a way to keep things fun. But when it came to crime that the police themselves have been involved in.

Carol Safir: There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of retired policemen who don’t want to see that in the museum. And the New Yorkers why why give anybody status, take up two inches of space in a museum for a criminal?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: What would you say to someone who says it feels like you’re kind of trying to sanitize the history? A museum should just present people with all the everything. And that is not an insignificant part. Right. I do wonder how we can learn some of those hard lessons if we don’t kind of look them in the eye. You know.

Carol Safir: We’re learning. We’ve learned them every day. I mean, we have our police forces very well, well-trained. There are so many of what do you want to call them? Checks and balances. You know, it’s it’s so different than it was in the early days.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: It’s funny that Carol should say that. Four years before Carol’s husband became police commissioner. There was a report that explicitly compared those early days of the NYPD to police in the 90s. And it said something that might come as a surprise to Carol. Violence and grift wasn’t just something that happened once or twice. The report said that for the past hundred years, New York City has experienced a 20 year cycle of corruption, scandal reform, backslide and fresh scandal in the New York City Police Department. 100 years. But you’re not going to find that story in the Police Museum if they reopen one day. Carol thinks we’ve moved past this history. She thinks the so-called checks and balances we have have all but eliminated violence and corruption.

Carol Safir: That’s exactly why the modern Police Museum doesn’t care what corruption happened down in some wherever it happened and when and why, it doesn’t matter. [music plays]

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I think it does matter. It matters because violence and corruption continues today. It matters to the victims of that violence and corruption. And it matters because even if the Police Museum doesn’t want to get the history right, I do. So we’re going to tell you the story of the first major investigation into violence and corruption in the NYPD. The first time a whole police department got put on trial anywhere in the United States. And for better or for worse, it set up a blueprint for how police would be investigated and held accountable that’s still being used to this day. From Wondery and Crooked Media, I’m Chenjerai Kumanyika and this is Empire City. Episode six. The Rotten Orchard. The story that kicks off the first major investigation of an entire police department in America starts on a windy Sunday morning in 1892. In church, the pews of the Madison Square Presbyterian are filled with people with money and influence bankers, industrialists and other members of New York’s upper class. And standing at the pulpit is a tall dude with the wispy beard, bushy eyebrows and glasses named Charles Henry Parkhurst.

Daniel Czitrom: He’s basically a mainline Presbyterian preacher.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Is he? Is he breathing fire when he preaches? Or is he more—

Daniel Czitrom: No, no, no, no. He’s much more of an intellectual. You know, he’s not he’s not Billy Sunday. He’s not, you know, Jerry Falwell. He’s not any of those guys. He’s a very cerebral guy.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Historian Daniel Czitrom says one day. Parkhurst, switched things up. Does anyone know he’s going to do?

Daniel Czitrom: No, so this is the thing that I think really shocked everybody, that it kind of like nobody really knew this was coming.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Parkhurst stands up in front of a packed house and delivers a sermon like no one in New York had ever seen. If they came looking for a nuanced take on scripture, they came on the wrong Sunday. In this municipal life. Our city is thoroughly rotten. From the start. Parkhurst makes it clear that he’s sick of the bullshit. He declares that the city of New York is under attack and that the greatest threat to the soul of the city is its own government and its own police department. They are lying, perjured, rum soaked and libidinous lot. While we fight iniquity, they shield and patronize it. While, we try to convert criminals. They manufacture them. Not only is the NYPD failing to protect and serve law abiding New Yorkers, he accuses the department of being actively in cahoots with the city’s criminals.

Daniel Czitrom: Parkhurst is the first person to use the term organized crime. Now, he didn’t mean it in the sense of Don Corleone and the Mafia. He meant it in terms of what he saw as this deep, deep, symbiotic relationship between the people running the city government and the police department and the vise economy of New York.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And, of course, Parkhurst is right. In the 1890s, the business of policing in New York City was extremely lucrative. The vice economy is still thriving and police are extorting even more people and businesses throughout the city. And we’re not talking just 1 or 2 bad apples, Carol. The entire police department is involved in this all the way up to the chief of police. The NYPD has grown into a straight up criminal organization with strong armed methods and a mafia style hierarchy.

Daniel Czitrom: There have been others before him who had, you know, thundered on about vice and moral turpitude and just, you know, the amount of alcohol, the prostitution, all that stuff. But it was strictly on a sort of moral basis.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Remember, Anthony Comstock? Reverend Parkhurst actually runs in the same circles as that evangelical zealot who tried to tamp down vice. But unlike Comstock, was mostly just obsessed with the corrupting influence of sexual desire. Parkhurst wants to take down New York’s whole police structure, including the cops at the top of the gravy train.

Daniel Czitrom: What made Parkhurst new and different was that he made it political because he called out the people who were running the city and said, You know, you guys are aligned with these forces. It’s a threat to our families, a threat to our kids. And we’ve got to, you know, get these people out of office. Nobody had ever done that before. No preacher, no minister had ever done that before.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: One writer at the time referred to Parkhurst’s address as a sermon bomb, and his sermon bomb exploded in the faces of some of the most powerful people in New York, and they clapped back. The mayor slams Parkhurst. The New York district attorney calls the sermon the core system most vindictive utterance from a pulpit that I’ve ever heard. The New York Sun calls for Parkhurst to be indicted, tried and punished for being a reckless criminal slander. But Parkhurst refuses to back down. The corruption he’s enraged about is all around him. He knows that anybody moving through New York’s underground entertainment venues with their eyes open can see it. So he partners with a private detective and comes back with the receipts.

Daniel Czitrom: Parkhurst strides into the church, and he plunks down on the pulpit this stack of papers that represent the affidavits that were made about what’s going on. And all right, here’s the proof. What are you going to do about it now?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Reverend Parkhurst gathers evidence and preaches sermons about the NYPD criminal behavior for two more years. But he and the folks he works with don’t really make a dent in the corruption. So he realizes he needs to up his game and figure out how to get politicians with more power involved. To do that, he taps into the one thing that politicians care about most winning elections. Fortunately for Parkhurst, the Republicans up in Albany are desperate to kick out the Tammany Hall Democrats. They’ve regained control of the police and are still running New York City. So Parkhurst uses his platform to tell state Republicans that they’ll never be able to take down Tammany if they don’t do something about police because in New York, police control elections. On election days they show up in force at the polling stations and sometimes they outright intimidate people. So state Republicans want to unseat Tammany Democrats. They’re going to have to take on the NYPD’s corruption. It’s early March 1894, and people are gathering in a cramped, dingy room in a courthouse in lower Manhattan. 6 state senators looking to take down Tammany Hall squeezed themselves in behind the main diocese and call the room to order. This will be the first meeting of the Lexow Committee. What will turn into the largest investigation into police corruption in the city’s history?

Daniel Czitrom: When the Lexow Committee began, there was a lot of skepticism from a lot of sides.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: There have been three smaller investigations into the NYPD in the previous 20 years, but each one devolved into an empty partizan exercise. And at first it seems like the Lexow Committee will be just as toothless.

Daniel Czitrom: The first session opens up in March of 1894. It’s a big nothing burger.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: If you were at that trial waiting for the police department to get put on blast, you would have been disappointed. In a long, wordy opening statement, the head counsel makes it clear that the investigation will have limited scope and that all he’s going to investigate is voter fraud. And so for months, that’s all they do. But then, just as the investigation slogs into its third month, someone new shows up in the courthouse, a former Irish revolutionary. Equal parts Atticus Finch and schoolyard bully. He’s a lawyer named John Goff.

Daniel Czitrom: It was sort of a striking figure physically. He was prematurely white. He was only 45 years old, but his hair was all white. He was sort of a fierce character who wasn’t afraid of anybody.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Just a few years earlier, Goff had been cited for contempt of court for yelling at a judge in the middle of a trial. And this kind of penchant for pushing people’s buttons is exactly what Parkhurst thinks is missing from the current hearing. So Parkhurst manages to convince Republicans in Albany to add Goff to the prosecution team.

Daniel Czitrom: And once Goff took control, the thing changed immediately. Goff begins to bring all these people in front of the Lexow Committee that had never had this kind of microphone before.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Goff tries something that no one had ever done in a police investigation like this.

Daniel Czitrom: He begins calling people up from the New York underworld to talk directly about their experience with police.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: These were the folks the cops extorted. And one by one, they get on the stand and detail the NYPD’s graft.

[clip of testimony]: He said, You give me $25 a month and there will be no trouble for me or for you. Something to that effect in your mind.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Through the summer, John Goff calls dozens of brothel owners, madams and sex workers to testify before the Lexow Committee.

Daniel Czitrom: And the brothel keepers and processors begin talking about stuff that many New Yorkers sort of knew about but nobody had ever said in public.

[clip of testimony]: People told me that if I wanted to open a business, I would have to see the police. . He just introduced himself that he was the new captain and that he wanted $500 and $50 every month.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And what these witnesses describe is a vast and well-oiled machine of police bribery and extortion.

[clip of testimony]: I was afraid for my family. / He said, I keep a bad house. / He said I would do good if I tried to stick with the police and give them some money so they would protect me. / But if you want to get out of this, you pay $75. If you don’t, I make it hard for you. After this, you pay regular every month.

Daniel Czitrom: Even at that point, many of the newspapers are saying, well, we can’t believe these people, you know, that they’re the prostitutes, they’re criminals. But eventually, the weight of the of the testimony begins to accumulate and you can’t simply slough it off. So it begins to gain a kind of momentum.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Through the end of the summer and into the fall. Goff puts witnesses on the stand. At first, it’s a brothel and bar owners. But then he starts to call butchers, cafe owners, shoemakers and printers. But Goff’s not finished. He calls up dock masters, stonemasons, steamship operators, fruit vendors and bookies. It becomes clear that the NYPD has their hands on almost every imaginable trade, both legal and illegal. It also becomes clear that in the pursuit of profit and power and often just for the hell of it, the police are capable of extraordinary cruelty. Eight months into the hearings, a woman in her late 30s takes the stand. She only speaks Yiddish and has to be translated by an interpreter. She tells her story fast and desperately and more than once breaks down in tears. Even the bond between parent and child isn’t safe from the NYPD. [music plays] Kayla [?] had come to New York just a few years before the commission started. She was a widow who lived in poverty with the three young children, Eva, Rosa and Melchior.

Cait Murphy: She saved money and she wants to start a cigar store. And so she does this. And the week it opens, a cop on the beat walks in and says, You need to pay me X dollars. Again, it’s essentially a protection racket.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Cait Murphy’s written about the commission and says that Kayla is targeted by the police. They try to extort money from her. But unlike most of the other witnesses.

Cait Murphy: She says no.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And she faces the consequences for it.

Cait Murphy: The cop gets her accused of prostituting herself with a young boy.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The detectives find a couple of phony witnesses who testified that Kayla’s a sex worker. Her bail is set at $500 and she’s told she’s going to jail and that the police are going to take away her children. She can hear them screaming as the police dragged them out of her house. By the time Kayla testifies at the Lexow hearings, she’s been separated from her children for 17 months. To get out of jail. The police forced her to do more than just give them a few protection payments. She was forced to sell her cigar store and give the police the proceeds. Her bail was really just a huge extortion payment. And even though she was free and it finally paid off the police, she wasn’t allowed to regain custody or even see her children.

Cait Murphy: You know, it’s it’s inexcusable. And there’s too many stories like that.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The commissioners at the Lexow Committee are devastated when they hear Kayla’s testimony and they’re so moved that they immediately start figuring out what they can do to help her. And one day in October, her children, Eva, Rosa and Melchior, are brought into the hearing room. John Goff says here, Ms. [?] take your children. While, we’ve had many harrowing scenes here and listened to many harrowing stories upon this witness stand. There’s at least one silver lining through the black cloud. Kayla rushes to her children. She hugs them and falls to her knees through tears. She blesses the commissioners in Yiddish and then takes her children home. As the investigation moves into the fall. John Goff calls a reporter named Augustine Costello to the stand. Costello’s a surprising witness for the prosecution. He’s in charge of the Herald’s Police Bureau and his office is located right across from police headquarters. He spent his years as a reporter in the trenches with the police. And after all that time he spent with the cops, he got pretty cozy with them. Over time, he came up with the idea to write an almost 600 page book of pro-police propaganda.

Cait Murphy: In the 1880s, he had written a book called Our Police Protectors, which is it’s almost unreadable.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: What’s the vibe? Our police protectors. What’s. What’s he. What’s he talking about?

Cait Murphy: Our boys in blue. They’re all wonderful and brave and handsome and honest. And it was written with the proceeds to go to the pension fund. It was not a, you know, a detached, intellectual effort.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: On page one. Costello says that he’s going to give a history of the New York police force, which is kind of like what I’m doing. But his history is almost the total opposite of what I’ve been learning. For Costello, it’s a story of progress with neither defeat, failure nor stagnation. And it’s kind of amazing what he leaves out. Remember that riot when NYPD beat the shit out of each other. Costello’s version, says Captain Walling, walked quietly down to City Hall alone and unassisted, and served the warrant on Mayor Wood. And that’s it. When he writes about the draft riots, he says it is not recorded that any one man failed to respond to the demands of the hour. Even though it’s extremely well-documented that the cops got their asses kicked and ran while the city burned and Black New Yorkers got hanged. And some of his strongest praise is reserved for Clubber Williams. Costello says Williams is undaunted and efficient. And he commends Williams for raiding and closing scores of illegal businesses. So if Costello loved the police so much, what could he possibly have to say against them? Well, it turns out.

Cait Murphy: Two of his assistants were arrested on a trumped up charge. Went to get them out and Clubber Williams arrested him, too. So he was thrown in the cells. And then he was later beaten up with brass knuckles and really, really damaged. So our police protectors a few years later, beaten to a pulp by our police protectors.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: When I first heard this story, I couldn’t get over the fact that the NYPD couldn’t even resist beating the guy who wrote a whole book of PR for him. And Costello couldn’t believe it either. Now, he didn’t see the police as protectors that would keep him and his family safe. He was terrified by cops like Williams.

Bill Williams: I would be afraid of Williams, perhaps before this Lexow committee came into existence because I knew that he could put me out of the way if he wanted to. I was afraid that he would do something to have me killed.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But Costello is just one reporter pointing at one incident as the trial pushes forward. The public wants more.

Daniel Czitrom: There’s this growing call from the press and from other people to reveal the system. How does it really work?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Revealing the system is hard unless you have police who are willing to tell on their superiors and break the blue wall of silence. And to everyone’s surprise, Goff finds one.

Daniel Czitrom: The guy who really reveals the system is a police sergeant named Max Schmittberger.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Schmittberger is a leading detective in the NYPD.

Daniel Czitrom: He’s well respected and he’s basically spilling the beans.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Schmittberger’s immersed in most of the NYPD big cases and is the fact start to come out. He’s feeling the heat. So when Goff offers him immunity in exchange for his testimony, he accepts.

Cait Murphy: He’s regarded as, in more modern parlance, as a snitch.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And Goff calls him up to the stand.

Cait Murphy: Schmittberger worked for Captain Alexander Clubber Williams in the Tenderloin, and he admitted before Lexow to taking bribes from all kinds of people. And then he got to keep 20% and he kicked up the other 80% to his boss. Clubber Williams.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: When Goff asked him why he’s cutting Williams in. Schmittberger basically says, if I don’t, Williams has the power to send men in and raid those houses and then I won’t get my cut. Schmittberger goes on to share that when he asked Williams to promote a patrolman in his precinct, Williams wanted $300. He said, You get the money and I’ll make him.

Cait Murphy: And he became probably the most important police witness at Lexow. He named names and he set out in detail how the system worked. And it was very much a system. And he was credible because he acknowledged his own participation.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Schmittberger is one of the few cops at Lexow who admits to any kind of wrongdoing. And it’s his testimony that starts to show it’s not just these individual incidents. It’s a whole system. Clubber Williams is a key player, but he’s not a bad apple. He’s the fruit of a rotten orchard. And Goff is ready to make the police confront the consequences of their unchecked violence by calling them out in court. [music plays] Goff calls in 90 police who had previously been brought up on charges of police brutality. Many were convicted, but somehow they still have their jobs.

Daniel Czitrom: And he’s also got a whole bunch of people bandaged, bloodied in slings cast who have been the victims of police brutality.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And with both the cops and their victims present. Goff starts calling officers to the stand, putting their disciplinary records on full blast. He calls Officer Richard [?], who entered a man’s home without a warrant and punched him in the head. He calls Officer George [?], who without provocation, attacked a woman in a liquor store, tried to pull out her teeth and threatened her with a gun. He calls Officer William [?], who tried to rape a woman in her own home and attacked her  husband when he tried to intervene.

Daniel Czitrom: He calls the police police, and they talk about what they were tried for and then they virtually were not punished at all. But this is the tip of the iceberg.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Goff also calls Officer Ambrose Hussey, one of the detectives responsible for arresting Kayla [?]. When a witness testifies against him, he loses it right there in the hearing room screaming, you stinking son of a bitch loafer. I’ll blow your brains out and I’ll shoot you down like a dog. The New York Sun reports that the testimony at Lexow reveals a condition of depravity and corruption in the Department of Police almost beyond human belief, the foulest moral cesspool that has ever been exposed in the history of a community. This is the same paper that just two years earlier considered allegations against the NYPD to be slander. And now there’s pressure on the committee to go even further.

Daniel Czitrom: There’s this growing call from the press and from other people go higher up. I mean, you know, we’re tired of hearing of these brothel keepers. And, you know, we’ve got a few cops who have been charged. You know, what about the bosses? You know, what about the people running the thing?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Finally, as the committee is about to come to a close. Inspector Clubber Williams takes the stand. Questioning Clubber should be a slam dunk for Goff. Officer Schmittberger and fanboy reporter Costello had already spilled all the tea. Plus, Williams had been through more department disciplinary trials than any other police officer in American history. And yet he’s still standing, terrorizing New Yorkers with impunity. But Goff is ready to put that terror to an end. And since Williams is one of the highest ranking officers questioned at Lexow, he wants him to answer not only for his actions, but for the whole department.

[clip of testimony]: Now, as to the department, Inspector Williams, it has been sworn to hear that the department is rotten to the core. Is that true? / No, sir. / That is a lie? Yes sir. It has been sworn to here by a cloud of witnesses whose testimony has been corroborated that corruption has run riot in every branch of the department. Is that true? / It is not.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  He’s not giving guff an inch.

Daniel Czitrom: Alexander Williams faces down Goff and basically tells him to kiss off and says, you know, look, you have nothing on me. Williams comes off as this surly, arrogant but fully confident guy who is not going to let some pissant prosecutor, you know, ruin his life.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Bold, totally arrogant and successful perjury.

Daniel Czitrom: That’s right. Exactly. The blue wall. The blue wall of silence. The blue wall of perjury.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Goff doesn’t do much better with the final witness. Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes. Byrnes is Clubber’s boss. And he’s head of the police. He’s been the top of the NYPD food chain for 15 years. But on the stand, Byrnes won’t admit to anything. He says he knows nothing about the massive system of corruption operating right underneath his nose. He says he hasn’t profited one dime from his police work. The idea that Byrnes was totally unaware and uninvolved with an operation that generated 10,000 pages of testimony was absurd. But that’s it. Committee hearings end in December 1894 with a whimper. After everything that’s come out. A lot of people are confused and enraged, including the preacher that kicked all this off.

Daniel Czitrom: Parkhurst said he thinks that, you know, they haven’t really done what they what they should have done. He doesn’t think that the committee’s been aggressive enough. Thinks they treated Byrnes with kid gloves.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: A few months later, the Lexow committee publishes its findings. The report acknowledges the scale of corruption in the NYPD. But amazingly, it only suggests minor changes. The State government reviews the report. And instead of demanding more, Republicans make a small adjustment to a police board that oversees the department, they add two seats for themselves, which is what they wanted to do all along. This means that Republicans will finally have some influence over the department. After years of Tammany Hall having total control. But there are no serious legal consequences for any of the police officials implicated during the hearings. And if you fast forward just a few years.

Daniel Czitrom: There’s not a single police policeman. Police captain. Detective. Police Commissioner. Inspector. Not a single person is in jail.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: While, Superintendent Thomas Byrnes and Clubber Williams resign shortly after they testify at Lexow. But they retire with full pensions.

Bill Williams: I think my grandfather realized that his father, you know, was not you know, he was not a legitimate man.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Clemmer Williams, great grandson, Bill, says the club’s corruption was so thorough that more than 100 years later, it’s still hard for his dad to talk about him.

Daniel Czitrom: I think he loved him and he idolized him, but I think that he was kind of ashamed of him, too.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And Bill Williams says that even though he’s proud to have police history in his family and he wants to be proud of Clubber Williams, it wouldn’t be right to defend Clubber’s corruption. And Bill says he knows that because in his own work, he has to make the choice to do the right thing every day.

Daniel Czitrom: I’m a plumber. That’s what I do for a living. Now, our family plumber took me under his wing and taught me the business. This is why I didn’t train you to rip people off. He said you worked with me and I never ripped anybody off. So that’s the thing. It’s sort of like I’m in a position where I could take advantage of people, but I don’t.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But Bill admits that Clubber did over and over again. And like most police today, with proven records of misconduct, he never really faced any accountability. And historian Daniel Czitrom agrees that as far as holding police accountable, not much has changed since Lexow.

Daniel Czitrom: You know, every so often I make bets with friends of mine when we had these police brutality cases, you know, I don’t think anybody’s going to jail. I don’t think anybody’s going to be even indicted.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: On the day I was born in a hospital in Harlem. The New York Times front page story above the fold was 219 pounds of seized narcotics found stolen from the NYPD by the NYPD. And then one week later, the New York Times featured a completely different NYPD corruption scandal. The headline read report says corruption in 1971 involved half the force. As a Black man in this country who understands the power the police have, the sheer scale of the numbers still blows me away. Half the force isn’t a few shady police. It’s over 10,000 shady police. And it illustrates that the problem isn’t just corrupt cops.

Leslie Cornfeld: Honest cops are not forthcoming about what they know is existing within their precincts.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Leslie Cornfeld was the deputy chief counsel to John Goff of the last Lexow style investigation into NYPD corruption. The 1992 Mollen Commission. And I got to say, I was pretty excited to talk to someone who basically had to face down the entire NYPD as a prosecutor.

Leslie Cornfeld: Who did you consider to be your primary employer Mr. Dowd? Who did you feel that you owed your allegiance to as a New York City police officer?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The Mollen Commission helped uncover how dozens of NYPD officers in the midst of the war on drugs had essentially become drug traffickers themselves.

[clip of testimony]: I guess I’ll have to say that drug trafficking.

Leslie Cornfeld: Could you speak into the mike, please?

[clip of testimony]: The drug traffickers.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Sometimes people who prosecute cases like this make them seem like egregious exceptions to the rule. But to lead the Mollen Commission, Leslie had to study the whole history of corruption in the NYPD.

Leslie Cornfeld: Police corruption and the New York City Police Department seem to evolve in cycles 20 year, 25, sometimes 30 year cycles.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: There are major lifestyle style investigations into NYPD corruption starting nearly 20 years later in 1912 and then four more times in 1931, 1949, 1970 and 1992. And Leslie admits something that I’ve never heard any prosecutor say.

Leslie Cornfeld: And it wasn’t that corruption emerged every 20 years or so, but that it was spotlighted every 20 years or so. So the question for us today and this year in this decade is now what? If we’ve seen repeated patterns for all of these decades when investigations take place? What do we do next?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But I guess one question I want to ask you is this. We’re doing a history of the police. I in my research have not been able to find a ten year period in that history where the NYPD functioned without systematic forms of corruption. At what point do you does a history sort of argue the verdict, that this is not an institution capable of producing public safety?

Leslie Cornfeld: Well, I think I would ask the question differently. I think that the question is, what are the actions that need to be taken to have the most effective police department possible?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I appreciate what you’re saying that. But people always say, how do we have the most effective police department? But what I’m actually saying is that the history of this police department should throw serious questions into whether policing is the thing that can produce public safety. I mean, I even worry about the word corruption, to be honest. For something to be corrupt, there has to have been a moment where it was functioning in a in a way that worked and then that was corrupted. I can’t find that moment. [music plays] When I think about the NYPD today, it makes me emotional. There’s so many incidents of misconduct. Sometimes I feel like people get too overwhelmed to care, either because they don’t want to hear bad things about cops or because they feel like if there’s no accountability, it just doesn’t matter to me. When we turn our heads, we actually contribute to the cycle. There’s one stage where police do the violence and then there’s another level of violence when we just bury the story. But these are people’s lives at stake, including people who were killed by the NYPD in my lifetime, like Eric Garner, Eleanor Bumpurs Kawasaki Trawick, when Rozario, Sean Bell, Akai Gurley, Amadou Diallo, Ramarley Graham, Erickson Brito and so many others. And each incident, everything that happened, every detail fucking matters. And if you were living through that detail, it mattered to you. And that’s doubly true when a cop from your own community is responsible. That’s next time on Empire City. Empire City is a production of Wondery and Crooked Media. I’m your host and executive producer Chenjerai Kumanyika. For Crooked Media. Our senior producer is Peter Bresnan. Our managing producer is Leo Duran. Our senior story editor is Diane Hodson. Our producer is Sam Riddell. Boen Wang and Sydney Rapp are our associate producers. Sound design, mixing and original score by Axel Kacoutié. Our historical consultant and fact, checker is History Studios. Our voice actor is Demetrius Noble for Wondery. Our senior producer is Mandi Gorenstein. Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our coordinating producer is Myrriah Gossett. The executive producer of PushBlack is Lilly Workneh. Executive producers at Crooked Media are Sarah Geismer, Katie Long, Tommy Vietor and Diane Hodson. Executive producers at Wondery are N’Jeri Eaton, George Lavender, Marshall Lewy, and Jen Sargent.