Maple, Linder form business

August 12, 1996

Jack Maple and John Linder, two stars in ex-police commissioner Bill Bratton's firmament, are going into business.

Maple was the architect of Bratton's seven vaunted "crime strategies," credited by some with dramatically reducing the city's crime rate. Linder conceived the strategies and was so inspired when he wrote them, he slept nights on a couch in Bratton's office at One Police Plaza.

Their joint venture will be known as - get this - "The Linder/Maple Group," and will involve the two of them running around the country, advising troubled police departments. First stop: New Orleans, where Linder is giving Maple a piece of his $140,000 action to shape up a department where two cops are on death row for murder.

The Linder/Maple Group may even rival First Security Consultants, the armed guard service Bratton heads while he tries to get on the police consulting circuit and listens to friends urging him to run for mayor against Rudolph Giuliani.

Although King Rudolph G. kicked Bratton out of One Police Plaza in April, he awarded Linder $300,000 to help straighten out the city's child welfare bureacracy. King Rudy also tried to lure Maple into remaining in the NYPD but couldn't meet his price. The Jackster wanted to be First Deputy Commissioner.

Maple then announced he'd work for Bratton at First Security until he discovered Bratton couldn't afford him, although Bratton was pulling down $20,000 per speech, and at least $40,000 for one overseas.

So in June, The Dapper One put his bow-tie, Homburg and Allen Edmonds Spectator shoes into mothballs and headed east, landing on a fishing boat in Montauk. Apparently tiring of the Hamptons crowd, he agreed last month to meet with Linder at an old haunt, the Plaza Hotel, where a couple of lifetimes ago as a transit cop, he went through a year or so of paychecks drinking at the Oak Bar to discover whether rich people were different from him. (He appears to think they have more money.)

Two weeks ago, he and Linder met at the Plaza's Palm Court to discuss details. Traveling incognito, Maple was spotted wearing sunglasses, a "Hamptons" sweatshirt, a shark fisherman's shirt and Gucci boat shoes.

Meanwhile, the memory of Maple at One Police Plaza lingers in the form of three hard contracts. Maple's ex-wife, Lt. Elizabeth Sheridan, formerly of the Transit Bureau, bypassed the regular detective screening panel and landed in the Cold Case Squad.

Ed Norris, the inspector who headed The Mape's Cold Case Squad - which deals in unsolved homicides - and whose office held Maple's espresso machine and punching bag, is now Deputy Commissioner for Operations, Maple's last title.

And Maple's inamorata, transit sergeant Brigit O'Connor, was given command of the Transit Bureau's Crime Analysis Unit, which still exists on the fifth floor of Transit headquarters at 370 Jay Street despite the NYPD's having its own unit of the same name.

Lies and statistics. Undeclared mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer says the NYPD is juggling the numbers on its recent police brutality figures.

The Bronx borough president says that CCRB complaints in the Bronx for 1996's first quarter increased 34 percent - from 114 cases in 1995 to 154 for this year.

But Police Commissioner Howard Safir says brutality complaints actually decreased for the same period from 226 cases last year to 212 for the first quarter of this year.

Why the discrepancy? In 1995, the CCRB did not include in its statistics, what are known as "administratively closed cases" - cases where an investigator is unable to contact a complainant or where the complainant fails to cooperate with the investigation. Those cases account for nearly 50 percent of all CCRB complaints.

In 1996, however, the CCRB statistics include the administratively closed cases, subtracted a year ago. In an Aug. 2 letter to Ferrer, Safir explained that the CCRB was now including them "to better track the origin of all complaints."

Ferrer doesn't buy it. "The CCRB is cooking the books to get a better outcome," he says.

Relationships. Ray Kelly has yet to forgive Mayor Giuliani for booting him out as police commissioner and replacing him with Bill Bratton.

Former First Deputy John Timoney has yet to forgive Giuliani after Giuliani passed him over for Howard Safir.

After Safir sought Kelly's counsel about the NYPD, Kelly attended Safir's swearing-in ceremony at City Hall. And while Safir flew home alone from Kelly's swearing-in as Under Secretary of the Treasury in Washington last week, Kelly was dining with friends, one of whom was Timoney.