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Freebies As Friendship
January 7, 2019
The NYPD needs a new code of ethics, not just for cops but also for its top commanders and commissioners.
That’s the takeaway from the corruption trial that concluded last week with the acquittal of former NYPD Deputy Inspector Jimmy Grant and the conviction of a self-proclaimed Hasidic liaison with the department, Jeremy Reichberg.
The trial, which can best be described as “friendship and freebies,” has been an embarrassment for the NYPD. Guilty or not, how can anyone justify Grant’s private-plane junket to Las Vegas with a prostitute hired by Reichberg, the trip paid for by Reichberg’s pal, the feds’ singing canary Jona Rechnitz?
The feds charged that Grant accepted gifts from both Reichberg and Rechnitz; in exchange, the NYPD provided them with favors that included a helicopter flyover for a Reichberg boat party and help in obtaining gun permits. Defense attorneys argued those were merely favors among friends.
And if you naively believe such “friendships” were confined to the 66th Precinct in the heart of Brooklyn’s Hasidic community, remember that Rechnitz did some of his business out of the Chief of Department’s office and that a dozen chiefs and inspectors in different parts of the city were forced to retire after the feds alleged some of them had granted favors to corrupt individuals.
To be clear, this is not anything like the Knapp Commission scandal of the 1970s, when payoffs were systematically set up, right to the commissioner’s office. Rather, the Grant/Reichberg trial reveals lower-level corruption under the guise of “friendships.” Still, city rules prohibiting cops from accepting gifts of more than $50 seem simplistic. That’s why we need a new code of ethics.
Indeed, we only have to observe the behavior of the past four NYPD commissioners to see how the $50 rule was ignored.
In the 1990s, during his first tour as commissioner, Bill Bratton accepted free plane trips to the Dominican Republic and Aspen, Colorado, from Wall Street mogul Henry Kravis. Then-Mayor Rudy Giulinai used those trips as an excuse to fire him because Rudy felt Bratton was stealing the spotlight from him for the city’s crime reductions.
Bratton’s successor, Howard Safir, was comped by the Revlon corporation’s CEO to an all-expense-paid trip for him and his wife to the Oscars. Result: the Conflicts of Interest Board [under some pressure from this column] fined him $7,100, the cost of the trip.
Safir’s successor, Bernie Kerik, accepted $165,000 in renovations to his Bronx apartment from people seeking a city contract. Kerik also received a luxury rental apartment from a realtor. He ended up in federal prison.
Ray Kelly received some $40,000 worth of dues and meals at the Harvard Club paid by the non-profit Police Foundation. When Bratton returned as commissioner under Mayor de Blasio, he demanded the same. Does anyone wonder why chiefs and inspectors saw nothing wrong with accepting freebies as friendship?
“The message has got to come from the top,” says Frank Serpico, who knows something about police corruption. “You can’t say, Do as I say, not as I do.”
Yet neither Commissioner Jim O’Neill nor Mayor de Blasio has addressed those issues. The mayor, who doesn’t want to be reminded that Rechnitz donated $100,000 to his 2013 election campaign, said he had “no reaction” to the trial. “I tuned out, honestly, because it had nothing to do with me,” he told reporters. O’Neill called the so-called “friendship” scandal “a terrible chapter in the NYPD history over the past four or five years,” and offered this advice to his top brass: “Take a look at your friends before you become a chief and see who your friends are after you become a chief, and hopefully there’s not too many new ones because they might not be your friends for the right reason.”
