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The NYPD Tapes
A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-Ups, and Courage
By Graham A. Rayman Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2013 Graham A. Rayman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-137-38127-9
CHAPTER 1
"I WILL FAITHFULLY DISCHARGE THE DUTIES"
In New York City, heroes are a dime a dozen. So are miracles. A white tourist with a crushed skull in Central Park is worth ten times a bullet-riddled black teenager in Bed-Stuy. Facts are fungible. Opinion is not. You tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth. Speak the truth, and nobody believes you. It's a lot easier to leave than it is to come back.
In summer, bodies fall in the heat stricken with bullets, or knives, or fists. In spring, puffed-out corpses float to the surface, the leavings of weekend benders. In autumn, there is peace of a kind. And in winter, folks caught out freeze solid as hardwood.
Potter's Field beckons. August, not April, is the cruelest month. November, not June, is the kindest. If you have nothing better to do, you can always drink, no matter the season.
The mayor talks in a blue room. Television guests wait in a green room. The Empire State Building changes colors. At night, through windows, flat screens flicker like fire pits whether you live in Hunts Point or Carnegie Mews. A newspaper can print a column on the sanctity of marriage next to a blowup of a salacious babe in a leopard-print bikini and still pretend to occupy the moral high ground.
Villains make better heroes. The best guy in the world is your worst enemy. The worst guy in the world makes miracles. The Bowery used to be interesting. The front page is called The Wood. Highway therapy is real. If you don't go along with the program, they will dump you in a precinct as far from home as possible. And you need a rabbi to rise in the ranks, even if you aren't Jewish.
But Schoolcraft, he never had a rabbi, and that was a problem.
It all started well enough, seven years before that night in Jamaica Hospital when it all finally, utterly, went to hell. The day happened to be in July, the year was 2002, and Adrian Schoolcraft was standing in the ranks of that year's police recruit class in the gym of the old academy on East 21st Street in Manhattan, an ugly stone and steel and glass and gray building designed specifically to look boring. He wore the beige and gray tunic and dark pants and had a gym bag at his feet, just like the rest of them. The night before his dad — that's Larry Schoolcraft — had given him some advice. His dad, a man for whom a sentence easily became a paragraph, which easily became a Shakespearean oration, and then an epic speech that mentioned the mayor, the commissioner, the FB-fucking-I, pudding, hand grenades, the mob, steroids, corrupt state senators, the Patrol Guide, and Frank Serpico.
But this time, the story goes, the elder Schoolcraft was mercifully brief. Bring two things, he said. Bring a watch. Bring a pen. The watch, so you'll always know what time it is, and the pen, to make a note of it. Sure enough, that was the first question out of the instructor's mouth. He checked the ranks for those two things. The guys who didn't have them got written up. This man had another rule: black ink only. No blue ink in this department.
Schoolcraft was 27 then, beefy around the middle, about six feet, 240 pounds, balding slightly. In his first NYPD picture, he pulled his head back, leaving a slight jowl visible under his chin. He stared grimly straight ahead. His file listed him as of average build, with straight brown hair, a receding hairline, and of part American Indian descent. His face carried some acne scarring. He had a large cranium, an effect magnified by his short haircut. He looked like a guy who could, if he wanted to, walk through a brick wall. He did not have the personality to fit his size. He was soft-spoken, a bit shy, somewhat cerebral, quiet. He didn't drink alcohol or smoke. He found bars boring and didn't make friends easily. There was something about him that suggested he was looking at what was immediately in front of him and either judging the subject before him or considering the alternatives.
Schoolcraft stood in those ranks with that group of men and women, white and black, Hispanic and Asian. Most were in their twenties, and most had either come from one of the boroughs, one of those places where the chicken bones roasted on the asphalt in summer, or an old-country ethnic enclave like Bay Ridge or Gerritsen Beach, or some suburban paradise-in-quotes on Long Island, Staten Island, or Rockland, with single-family houses on cul-de-sacs and above-ground pools in the backyard. Schoolcraft wasn't even a New Yorker, in fact. He was from suburban Texas and was a registered Republican. He knew absolutely nothing about the big city. Depending on how you looked at it, in the end, that quality was either fatal in the NYPD or it allowed him to do what he did.
His full name was Adrian P. Schoolcraft. He used his middle initial in his signature. Growing up in Arlington, Texas, the thought of becoming a cop hardly crossed his mind. The family already had one police officer — his dad, Larry. His mom, Suzanne, worked her whole career in a bank.
Larry Schoolcraft and Suzanne Wait had met in high school in Johnstown, New York, a most anonymous of anonymous rust belt towns first settled in 1758, about 40 miles northwest of Albany, just under the gaze of the looming Catskills. The few highlights of Johnstown's history include one of the last battles of the Revolutionary War; Congressman Silas Talbot, who oversaw the building of the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides) in 1797; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who helped organize the first women's rights convention, which eventually led to women gaining the right to vote. Though it was once the site of dozens of tanneries and factories that specialized in leather gloves, the industrial core of the town had slowly dwindled over the decades. In 1975, a plant that made gelatin, founded in 1890 by one of Johnstown's other famous residents, Charles Knox, shut down after the company was sold to Lipton.
Larry was adopted and grew up in relative comfort in a nice colonial on a 14-acre spread. His father, who spent his career at General Electric, believed the family's most famous ancestor was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was born in 1793 about 30 miles southeast of Johnstown in Guilderland, New York. This ancestor was a geologist and ethnographer, but he also founded a newspaper and a magazine, taught himself French, German, and Hebrew, and wrote poetry, all as a teenager. He worked in glass factories and then left New York for Missouri. He worked as an Indian agent in Michigan and recorded the lives of the Ojibwa Indians, and these writings won him a prestigious literary award. He opened schools to educate young Ojibwa and became a University of Michigan board member. His biggest contribution to literature was that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow relied heavily on his ethnography in the writing of the famous poem, "The Song of Hiawatha." He is remembered in Michigan today by Schoolcraft College in Livonia and Schoolcraft County.
A month after they graduated from high school in June 1974, Larry and Suzanne married in the First Methodist Church in Johnson and had their reception at the VFW Hall. Just 18, Suzanne stitched her own wedding dress and all the gowns and hats for the bridesmaids. The couple desperately wanted to leave the oppressive confines of Johnstown, particularly Suzanne's immediate family, and begin a life together elsewhere. Suzanne had the grades and the smarts for college, but Larry hated school and had no interest in college. He joined the army that August and went to Fort Dix in New Jersey, then to Fort Gordon in Georgia for military police school. During that period, Suzanne periodically came to visit on the weekends, and that was, as Larry recalled, "when Adrian came along."
"She certainly wanted to get out of Dodge and so did I," Larry said. "She was very capable and probably should have gone to college. She ended up being the only bank officer who didn't have a college degree."
In January 1975, Larry landed at Fort Hood, the sprawling military post outside Killeen, Texas, and the headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Division. Suzanne moved to Texas to live on the base with Larry. On June 21, 1975, Soyuz 19 returned to earth, the Beach Boys played Wembley Stadium, the movie Jaws opened, and Adrian was born. Thirteen months later, on August 12, 1976, Suzanne gave birth to a daughter, Mystica. Larry and Sue were just 20 and 19, respectively.
Once Larry's army stint ended, the couple opted to remain in Texas. The family moved to a small ranch-style house at 2811 Roberts Circle in the Dallas suburb of Arlington. Larry took a job in law enforcement, based on his military police training, and Suzanne found work in a well-known Dallas bank.
Over the next 25 years, Larry worked with the Austin Police Department, the University Park Dallas Police Department, and the Fort Worth Marshal's Office. Later Suzanne took a second job in the bookkeeping department for the Texas Rangers.
The Schoolcrafts moved to a townhouse on the north end of Arlington at 1301 Lovell, where Adrian spent much of his middle school years. At some point, the developers of the housing tract fell into a conflict with the homeowners. Litigation followed. It was a sour experience for Larry and Suzanne and caused some financial strain and tension in the household.
Salvation from the housing conflict came when family friends — a bank official and his wife — said they were moving to Maine and offered their home to the Schoolcrafts. Their third move was into that house, where they would remain until the kids graduated from high school.
In his youth, Adrian was fairly outgoing. He played sports — soccer and football — but they never became a passion like they did for most Texas kids.
In his freshman year, Adrian attended Lamar High School in Arlington. He played football, mainly to get into shape. As a sophomore, he transferred to Martin High School, with 5,000 students, one of the largest in the state. It was an easy place to disappear. He did not play sports for his final three years of high school.
That may be because he had found another interest — making money. At the age of 14, he started working at the local Food Lion supermarket. "He was a checker, a bagger, a stocker, he did everything," Larry said. "He always worked."
The atmosphere in the household was often tense, Larry recalled. Both parents worked constantly. Juggling jobs and children and bills caused friction between two people who had different ideas about a lot of things. (Larry recalled years later that in one election he voted for Ralph Nader, the ultra-liberal, and Suzanne voted for George W. Bush.) Suzanne also had trouble with her health.
"There was a lot of fighting," Larry said. "A lot of time, it was like a battle zone at home. The difference was that I would blow up and five minutes later, it was over. With her, once she got mad, she stayed mad."
The couple came close to divorce a number of times.
"Sometimes, the only reason I stayed was for the kids," he said. "My friends were saying different things. Stay for the kids or leave, it's better for the kids."
"But I loved her and she loved me. She was a good mother, honest, hardworking. Money did not motivate her. She was a good person. She was talented and smart. She just had a real problem with saying she was wrong."
Larry chuckled at that point, years later, wistfully. "The thing is, 98 percent of the time, she was right."
There were days when Larry would go stay at a friend's house just so he and Suzanne could have some time to cool off. "And then before long, I'm calling her or she's calling me and saying it's time to come home," Larry said. "She was always there for me."
Against this broad family backdrop, somewhere around puberty, Adrian's personality underwent a change. While his sister, Mystica, was outgoing (a "social butterfly"), Adrian drew inward. He spent a lot of time by himself.
"He was much more outgoing as a kid, but after puberty, he kept his own counsel," Larry said. "He wasn't that impressed with the people around him. You gotta understand that the kids in his neighborhood had money and nice cars. They ran pretty fast. He didn't drink or smoke. Didn't see the need for it. He just didn't fit the group."
"He worked and he went to school, that's what he did," Larry went on. "No social life. No serious girlfriends. If he wasn't working, I would drop him at the movies or at a mall. I would take him to work if I was working a special function. He liked movies and books, and he played video games a little bit. He always had money, and he liked to spend it. He outfitted his room with a nice stereo, television, high-end toy models. He would buy the models, and have a professional put them together and paint them so they looked really good."
Why Adrian underwent this personality change in his teenage years is something of a mystery. It could have had to do with the wages of puberty. It could have been a latent streak of independence and self-involvement that had not yet bloomed or solitary interests that presented themselves. It also could have been the family's money troubles and the arguments between his parents. It could have been the experience of dealing with his mom's health troubles. Or it could have been a stew of all of these things. But these were experiences that would inform the person he later became and provide a clue as to why he was able to do what he did.
Adrian graduated from Martin in 1993, a year that was very difficult for the family. On a single day, Larry was suspended indefinitely without pay from the Marshal's service, sparking litigation that went on for years, and Suzanne decided to quit her job. The banking industry was going through a series of collapses and mergers. Suzanne had worked for First City Bancorp for many years. Texas Commerce Bank swallowed the company and began laying people off and mistreating the old employees. Suzanne didn't like what she was seeing and couldn't stomach it anymore, Larry said. "We went from having decent jobs to having no jobs in one day," he recalled.
Larry's legal battles grew out of his union activism. Working for the University Park Police Department during the 1980s, he recalled, he ran afoul of the chief for ticketing an influential schools administrator. That led to an indefinite suspension in 1984, which led to a lawsuit and an eventual $80,000 settlement.
In 1987, he went to work for the Fort Worth Marshalls office, serving warrants. He also shut down strip clubs violating a law that women had to wear pasties over their breasts. Meanwhile, he and a fellow officer unionized the force — which, he says, got him labeled a troublemaker.
Eventually, as he tells it, he was suspended indefinitely without pay in 1993. Trying to gather evidence of retaliation, he secretly recorded a city official telling him the suspension was arbitrary, but he never ended up using the recording.
He sued the city in 1995 and worked as a limo and shuttle driver to support the family. His claim was finally rejected on appeal in 2001 by Texas's high court.
Ironically, many years later, his son would also be indefinitely suspended from a police department and would file a lawsuit that would take years to resolve, but for completely different reasons.
Whether what was happening at home factored in, or whether it seemed like a good idea at the time, in August 1993, a couple of months after graduating from high school, Schoolcraft joined the U.S. Navy while many of his future fellow police officers were still steaming down the Long Island Expressway, drinking at Jones Beach, or ogling the girls in Coney Island.
Never attracted to glamour, Schoolcraft decided to become a Navy corpsman, doing work similar to that of a paramedic. He graduated from a special school in Michigan and was then assigned to the USS Blue Ridge, the command ship for the U.S. Seventh Fleet, based in Japan. He labored on the ship treating the kinds of injuries that come with working long hours in a giant casing of thick steel and stress — shattered bones, broken backs, gouged eyes, concussions, wide-open gashes.
Schoolcraft spent four years in the Navy. He was honorably discharged in July 1997 and returned home with two medals: the National Defense Service Medal and the Good Conduct Medal. By then, his parents had moved back to Johnstown, New York. "Sue wasn't feeling well, and money was tight, she was looking for an escape and she thought she would find relief at home," Larry said. "I really didn't want to go back, but we were a team, and would be a team to the death."
Then 22 years old, Schoolcraft enrolled in Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown and, according to his father, actually did quite well, well enough to get accepted to the University of Texas (UT), the large state school in Austin. Larry had a hand in this move, enlisting a friend who was in the UT law school to help Adrian through the application process.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The NYPD Tapes by Graham A. Rayman. Copyright © 2013 Graham A. Rayman. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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