Over a span of six years, the New York City Police Department received 16 complaints alleging that Police Officer Michael Dowd had been robbing drug dealers and dealing cocaine as part of a gang of corrupt officers in the 75th Precinct in the crime-ridden East New York section of Brooklyn.
That wasn't all. The officer drove to work in a bright red Corvette and sometimes had a limousine pick him up at the station house for gambling trips to Atlantic City.
Yet in a clear example of what went wrong with the department's handling of corruption cases, an investigative panel, the Mollen Commission, has concluded that senior officers repeatedly ignored allegations against Officer Dowd or blocked efforts to check them out in a deliberate policy to shield the department from scandal. Officer Dowd was eventually arrested by another department and is now facing sentencing on drug charges.
The senior officers' behavior, the panel concluded, was influenced by the tone set at the top. The panel's report, which will be released formally today, found that Benjamin Ward, who was the Police Commissioner when the first allegations were made against Officer Dowd in 1986, had been deeply shaken by a corruption scandal in another Brooklyn precinct at about the same time.
And it quoted Charles J. Hynes, who was then the state's special prosecutor for police corruption, as saying that Mr. Ward was convinced that further revelations of police misconduct would cripple the department.
But whatever the motivation, the commission said, Mr. Ward and Daniel F. Sullivan, the chief of the Inspectional Services Bureau from 1986 to 1992, "by their action -- or inaction -- created an unmistakable policy to avoid corruption scandals."
Mr. Ward said he could not comment on the report because he had not seen it. Chief Sullivan told the commission that his subordinates never informed him about Officer Dowd until 1992.
Because of the perceived policy, Mr. Dowd and his "crew" of crooked officers flaunted the illegal wheeling and dealing that brought some of them as much as $8,000 a week for not interfering with drug sales along with whatever cocaine they could steal as they broke down doors at drug dens and ripped off dealers.
And even though complaints about Officer Dowd had been submitted as early as 1986, his 1987 performance evaluation described him as an officer with "excellent street knowledge" who is "empathetic to the community." It concludes, "Good career potential."
Officer Dowd, who is 32, was finally arrested in 1992, not by New York City Police investigators, but by officers from Suffolk County. They had intercepted telephone conversations between the officer and a small-time drug dealer. He is now in the Manhattan Correctional Center awaiting sentencing on drug charges.
The revelations that grew out of Officer Dowd's arrest led Mayor David N. Dinkins to announce the creation of the Mollen Commission on June 25, 1992.
The panel's report concluded that for nearly a decade the Police Department had abandoned its responsibility to insure the honesty of its members.
Fearing that reports of corruption in their commands would damage their careers, senior officers looked the other way, the commission said. Information in internal investigations was deliberately fragmented, rather than woven together to form a pattern, and cases were closed well before all leads had been exhausted.
In the fall of 1992, a report issued by Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown blamed the department's failure to intervene in the crimes of Mr. Dowd and his fellow rogue cops on a breakdown in procedures.
But the Mollen Commission said it concluded that the problem was "a willful effort" by commanders of the Internal Affairs Division, the principal anti- corruption unit, to impede the investigation. Internal Affairs, it said, treated allegations against Mr. Dowd as separate incidents and withheld critical information from another investigator.
"By doing so," the commission said, "Internal Affairs commanders doomed any hope of a successful investigation of Dowd and other corrupt officers of the 75th Precinct."
Holdup Provides Example
One example of how police investigators failed to make the most of leads was the holdup on July 1, 1988, by three officers in the 75th Precinct of a grocery store that was serving as a front for drug dealing. Officer Walter Yurkiw and two others were charged with the crime after robbery investigators found the car they had used, with money and drugs visible inside, parked near the station house.
Three weeks after the robbery, the precinct commander, Deputy Inspector John Harkins, told Captain Thomas Callahan of the Internal Affairs Division that he had heard rumors that Mr. Dowd was also involved in the robbery, the commission said. A few days later, a precinct lieutenant told Internal Affairs that Mr. Dowd had reportedly been seen at a bar with Officer Yurkiw and the others shortly before the robbery.
About two weeks later, two drug dealers told an Internal Affairs officer that their drug organization was paying Mr. Dowd $3,000 to $4,000 a week, plus an ounce of cocaine, for protection.
All this came to nothing. Instead, the robbery investigation remained focused on the three officers.
A few months later, Officer Yurkiw's girlfriend, who told the police she used cocaine, got in touch with Internal Affairs, saying that Officer Yurkiw had threatened to kill her unless she provided an alibi for him in the grocery store robbery. She also told Internal Affairs about Mr. Dowd and others at the precinct.
An Internal Affairs officer reported that the woman's "credibility and allegiances were suspect." Yet, the Commission said, her testimony was nevertheless used.
Despite "incontrovertible indications of serious corruption, " the commission said, Internal Affairs never initiated a single investigation of Officer Dowd and, until the Long Island police intervened, the allegations against him "inevitably died a natural death."
