Chapter 1
Eddie
Everything changes.
Seasons, global politics, TV shows, sneakers and ice-cream flavors.
Nothing is set.
My father was a con artist who passed the profession on to me.
Laws existed, but they only mattered if you got caught.
These days, that doesn’t matter so much any more.
I moved from hustling insurance companies from the back streets to suing them in the courts.
A lawyer is a natural progression from the con game.
Those two careers share a lot of common elements – same skill set, similar hours and, at least in my case, either profession was likely to get me killed.
Maybe that last part says more about me than anything else.
Laws are supposed to apply to everyone, equally.
But no one believes that any more. I never bought it in the first place.
I’m a New York trial attorney and that gives me a bird’s-eye view of the sewer. Mostly I practice criminal law, but occasionally I step over to the dark side of civil law, where the real hustlers work.
I sat in court, waiting for the judge to begin a three-day civil case for harassment and false arrest against the NYPD.
My client, Errol Jackson, sat beside me in a new suit.
It was charcoal gray, and it still had the brand label sewn onto the outside of the right cuff.
I didn’t know if this was supposed to be a not-so-subtle hint to the jury that Errol had bought a new suit to make a good impression, or, more likely, Errol would take the suit back to the store for a refund after his case was over.
His dreadlocks were neat and perfumed, he was freshly shaven and he’d even polished his ten-dollar fake-leather wingtip shoes from Marshalls.
I’d represented him twice before, both times for low-level crime.
A year ago, Errol got caught shoplifting a box of baby formula from a CVS, and six months later he was arrested for an alleged assault on his boss – a restaurant manager who had decided to take all of Errol’s waiting tips because he was four minutes late to start his shift.
Errol denied hitting the guy, who was uninjured, but he admitted to a heated confrontation.
Considering this was an all-night restaurant that served hamburgers, waffles and pancakes to drunk people, a heated confrontation was not the worst thing in the world.
Before Errol finished his shift, he routinely had to wash the blood off the restaurant floor.
He was a young man with a family, just trying to make enough to keep a roof over their head and food on the table.
His older brother, Maurice, was a different story.
He’d fallen in with a gang and got busted regularly.
He was currently serving a dime for armed robbery.
As well as bringing shame on his family, Maurice also brought a lot of police attention down on them too.
When Maurice was put away, that attention shifted to his brother, Errol.
Patrolman Fabio Gennaro developed a particular interest. Maurice had assaulted him during one arrest, and Gennaro had taken it personally.
Now, the whole Jackson family were on Gennaro’s shit list.
If NYPD got a report of somebody dropping a piece of litter in that neighborhood, Gennaro would use it as an excuse to kick down Errol’s front door.
This culminated in an arrest a few months ago when a warehouse was raided ten blocks from Errol’s home.
Seventy-five flatscreen TVs and ten washer-dryers were taken in that raid, and the nightwatchman, who had been tied up during the heist, got a pretty good look at one of the perps who had trashed the security footage before they left.
The nightwatchman gave a description of one of the perps to officer Gennaro, and sure enough Errol’s home got searched and he was arrested.
They found nothing linking him to the raid, and I got the charges dropped when I tracked down the nightwatchman and found out the description he’d given to Gennaro didn’t match Errol.
That was the starting point for today’s court proceedings – a harassment suit and a false-arrest claim against NYPD.
In truth, this is rarely a good idea. Pissing off the police doesn’t normally work out well.
It just so happens that as a criminal defense attorney it was part of my job to piss off the cops.
This explains some of the trouble I’d had in my life.
There was good sense in backing away from a fight with the NYPD, even if you already had a target on your back, because if anything that target was just going to get bigger, unless you win.
And win big.
In order to win a case against the NYPD, or any other law-enforcement agency, you have to prove that the police lied. This is a high bar to clear. How do you convince anybody that your client, the guy with the rap sheet, is the person telling the truth and the decorated public servant is lying?
Most of the time you don’t clear that bar.
Better to settle.
My opponent in this case, representing the city, was Paul Shilton, a career lawyer in a dull suit who took pleasure in denying claims. In Errol Jackson’s civil case, Shilton had one piece of evidence that was crucial to his defense – Patrolman Gennaro’s police notebook.
The most important tool for every serving police officer in the US is their notebook.
They are trained to use it at every call-out.
They make notes in real time about interactions with suspects, witnesses, time of arrival at call-outs, scene descriptions – everything.
It’s much more than an aide-memoir or a diary.
Used properly, the notebook becomes a living record, almost like a separate eyewitness providing corroborating evidence.
Realizing the persuasive power of this tool, cops regularly abuse it, sometimes leaving blank spaces in the pages so they can fill in a more favorable version of events later.
This is a disciplinary offense that could cost them their jobs, but who’s going to find out?
Recognizing the potential for abuse of the memo book, a few years ago NYPD developed an app that replaced the leatherbound notebooks so that there was a real time digital record that could not be altered.
But guess what? For the shadier police officers, sometimes the app wasn’t working, or they couldn’t get a signal, so they reverted to their paper notebooks as a back-up. That way, they could tailor the evidence to suit the person they wanted to arrest and fill in the details later.
In Errol’s case, the nightwatchman told me he described a forty-year-old African American with short hair and a facial tattoo to Officer Gennaro. That description didn’t fit the mid-twenties Errol, who didn’t have tattoos and had very real dreads.
This was what I wanted to discuss with the city’s defense lawyer, Shilton. So far, he’d refused all invitations to settlement discussions. I wanted to make one last effort. Before the judge came in.
As I got up, I patted the tall pile of law books I’d arranged on the left side of the defense table and approached Shilton.
He was a young guy with a long career screwing people over ahead of him.
He stood, with a sour look on his plain face.
Tall, slim and pale, I formed the impression he spent his evenings laughing at TikTok videos of law enforcement officers beating up members of the public.
‘You don’t want to try this case – trust me.
We can settle now on favorable terms for everyone.
Twenty-five grand in damages for Errol, no admission of liability and we seal the agreement so there’s no bad publicity for the city.
Oh, and one more thing: Gennaro has to lay off Errol.
I want the cops to leave him and his family alone. ’
Shilton’s voice was high and shrill, as if he’d skipped puberty.
‘You’re out of your mind, Flynn. I know you’ve got the nightwatchman waiting outside to testify, but you’re forgetting he was held at gunpoint for four hours, he was coming off a fourteen-hour shift and he was too damn tired and traumatized to remember what he told the cops.
Gennaro has his notebook entry that corroborates his recollection of the nightwatchman’s description of the perp, and of course that description matched your client.
Did the nightwatchman write down the description he gave to officer Gennaro?
No. If he didn’t write it down that night, it didn’t happen. ’
‘Gennaro altered the description in his notebook to match Errol after he arrested him. We all know what happened after that. He went back to the nightwatchman, said he’d found the robber, a real nasty guy who had to be taken off the streets, and showed the nightwatchman Errol’s picture.
But what Gennaro didn’t envisage was the nightwatchman being a stand-up guy and resisting the pressure Gennaro put on him to identify Errol.
Look, twenty-five grand won’t break the city’s bank just . . .’
‘Did the nightwatchman write down, at the time, the description he gave to Gennaro? No. I already told you, if he didn’t write it down it didn’t happen. There’s no way to beat that argument in court.’
‘I won’t have to,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I won’t have to make any arguments. I don’t need to give an opening statement to the jury, I don’t even have to ask a single question. I’m going to win this case without saying a goddamn word. I’ve got the law on my side,’ I said, and pointed at the tall stack of law books.
‘Good luck with that,’ said Shilton.
I went back to the defense table, sat beside Errol. He had turned around in his seat to talk to his family. His wife, Shavawn, and his grandma, who had simply been introduced to me as ‘Grandma’, like she was everyone’s grandma, sat behind the defense table in the gallery.
Errol looked worried. Grandma gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.