Pen, paper and policing
If there is one thing that sets “Blue Blood” apart from the average true police story, it is that almost nothing happens. You start into Edward Conlon’s story about becoming a police officer in New York City. You go through the requisite paces. He is in the police academy. He is on his beat for the first time. Conlon takes you back through his family history, his childhood, his relationship with his father, a Hoover-era FBI agent. Alternately, you flash forward to Conlon’s life as a newly minted cop on the rough streets of the South Bronx. All the while, you are waiting for that turn -- into, say, the French Connection case, or some big murder that he, alone, spent several years solving. It never happens. But soon you stop waiting -- in fact, you begin to suspect that in “Blue Blood” nothing big will ever happen. But by then it is not the pace of events that keeps you reading; it is Conlon’s writing that takes you over.
Conlon’s story is not a police-action drama or a mystery; rather, it is much more like the careers of most police officers. Most cops never make that big headline arrest. Most never fire their guns in the line of duty during a 20-year career. But though Conlon’s police career is typical, Conlon is not your typical cop. He looks like a movie star. He went to Harvard on a scholarship. After graduating, he drifted from job to job, finally linking up with a social service agency that worked to find alternatives to imprisonment for people charged with felonies. He spent a lot of time with criminals as their advocate, even arguing for them in court. Those are not the average precursors to a job with the New York Police Department.
We are introduced to many of the ghosts of the Conlon family. These ancestral scoundrels have a lot to do with why Conlon is drawn into what in NYPD-speak is referred to simply as “The Job.” There was his great-grandfather, NYPD Sgt. Patrick Brown, a turn-of-the-century cop who flourished in those neighborhoods where the lines between cop and crook could be seamless. Conlon writes: “He seemed determined that his appearance reflect his place in the world, and if his attire was a little flashy but of good quality, bespeaking both gentleman and gangster, then it may have described him more truthfully than he intended. In fact, after he retired to the horse room, where bets were collected and paid as the teletype hammered out news from the track, the progression from crooked cop to upstanding criminal could be viewed as a step in the right direction, at least in terms of appearances.”
Whereas great-grandfather Brown was an object of historical curiosity, Conlon was much more affected by his uncle, Ed the Cop. The uncle Ed stories combine enough benign rascality with enough of what is admirable about police work to make him the good ghost to Pat Brown’s bad ghost.
When Conlon comes on The Job, we are taken through his rites of passage: the first test of his authority and courage by young street punks; the first test of his compassion in his attempts to help those seemingly beyond help in the deadly cycle of big-city poverty and drugs; the comedy of nearly wrecking a woman’s apartment while trying to capture her vicious cat. This is precisely where Conlon’s stories take you in. He thinks with the cynical wit of a street cop but he writes like -- well, not like a cop.
His first dead body:
“My first murder was an awful one -- an old man on the floor in a hiked-up flannel nightshirt, who had been strangled, stabbed and beaten, his arms bent into unnatural angles like chicken wings, and though I felt sorry for him, I wasn’t unduly troubled.... The stillness of death transfixes me, reminding me that nothing living doesn’t move, not the deepest sleeper or a cat on the prowl, poised to leap. There is always some rhythm, some tremble or shift, that betrays animation. Only when that goes do they become motionless as photographs, as stones, and their meaning, like their movement, is only what they inspire in those around them.”
Here’s the story of another dead body, one he is assigned to baby-sit until the medical examiner arrives. The man has died at home by himself. There is a new television set in the apartment, among a world of old possessions. The room suggests that the man was all alone in his final days. Now his drunken stepson shows up with a girlfriend to demand the TV. “We loved him. We was his family! Let’s have that TV!” they wail. Officer Conlon closes the door on them. While he watches the new TV with the old dead man, the phone rings. It is a salesman peddling life insurance. When he learns that the prospective customer is already dead, he says, “Have you considered whether you have all the coverage you need, Officer?” Conlon hangs up and goes back to watching television.
The book is filled with stories that run from the Damon Runyon-like tales of street characters to the Catch-22 machinations of the NYPD. The irony, sadness and humor in the tales of cops, robbers and drugs, the simple fact that even your most loyal informant will betray you, provide a texture and richness that replace car chases and shootouts. We follow Conlon from his stint as a street cop in the housing projects through his promotion to narcotics investigator and thence to the vaunted job of detective. You find yourself falling, as you read, into the jargon of New York cops. You learn in brief flashbacks the history of the NYPD from Pat Brown’s day up to the time of Police Commissioner William J. Bratton (now the Los Angeles Police Department’s chief).
Conlon does a good job of explaining what Bratton did in the mid-1990s to cut New York’s crime in half, but the stories that follow you from the book are the human ones. He movingly describes sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center looking for clues that might identify the dead. And he has an eye for the twisted things that make street cops laugh or cry. This is not uncharted territory. Joseph Wambaugh began writing novels that captured the seamier side of cop life while he was with the LAPD more than 30 years ago. More recently, Ted Conover joined the ranks of New York state’s prison guards (officially, correctional officers) just so he could write about it. When he had enough material, he quit and wrote “Newjack”.
The chicken-and-egg question about Conlon is this: Is he a cop who decided to become a writer, or is he a writer who decided to become a cop? The latter seems more likely. I can recall meeting a young Ed Conlon in 1994. At the time, I was deputy commissioner of the NYPD, serving in the role of chief spokesman and spin doctor. Conlon, a fledgling freelance writer, stood in my office asking to be allowed access to the NYPD Hostage Negotiating Team during an actual hostage situation. He said that the story was for the New Yorker. He wanted to write a blow-by-blow account of the tension and drama as a skilled police negotiator barters with a gunman to spare a life. Several weeks later, on a bitter cold night, I found Conlon waiting outside the yellow tape at the scene of a hostage situation playing out in a city housing project. I took him into the apartment the negotiator was using as his command post, while a SWAT team surrounded the apartment where the “perp” was holding hostages. The piece -- which eventually ran in Penthouse, not the New Yorker -- showed Conlon to have a feel for writing about cops and the street, as if it were in his blood.
I lost track of him. Never knew he became a cop. Had no idea that he was “Marcus Laffey,” the young officer who wrote a series of dispatches from the street for the New Yorker. Then a gossip item in the New York Post announced that the mysterious cop who wrote New Yorker stories under the pseudonym Marcus Laffey had just signed a million-dollar book contract to tell the inside story of life as a cop in New York. In the six degrees of separation that is life, a reporter friend of mine was assigned by the New York Times to unearth Laffey’s real name and do a follow-up story. In two phone calls she learned his name was Edward Conlon. I argued with her that exposing Conlon to his fellow cops and the police brass would make it hard for him to tell the truth, but she did, and it may have. He writes in the book that many cops -- especially the brass -- were suspicious of him, his book and his motives. His partners, who earn the $44,000 annual salary that a New York cop is paid, had to feel strange about riding around in a patrol car with a guy who had a million-dollar book deal. If they were worried that he would tell all, he does not.
Conlon writes nothing about the occasional police corruption that a cop sees. Nor does he report any encounters with the occasional acts of police brutality that all cops witness at some point and a few join in on. But Conlon is still a cop today, and if he wrote of such things he would be separated from the flock. He would be considered a “rat.” It would be irrefutable evidence to cops that he is a writer first, a cop second. It may have started out that way, but somewhere it reversed. Conlon is clearly a cop first, and that is the meaning of the title “Blue Blood.” He may really bleed blue. But let’s not kid ourselves, he’s still taking notes. There will be at least another book from inside the NYPD. And now that he’s a detective, the odds are that before he’s eligible to retire, in 2015, he’ll eventually crack that one big case. *