Detective The Inspirational Story of the Trailblazing Woman Cop Who Wouldn't Quit

CHAPTER ONE The day I nearly got my head blown off started like any other. It was August of 1971. And I was worried that I wasn't generating enough drug buys. Then, out of the blue, a case fell into my lap. It started when a field team from Bronx Narcotics requested a female undercover to make drug buys in the 41st Precinct, or the Four-One as we cops lovingly know it. Now, most of the field-team cops I had worked with were stand-up guys. Tough, experienced veterans who would go to the ends of the earth to protect your butt. Disguising themselves as plumbers, electrical contractors, city sanitation workers, street sweepers, and, in one elaborate ruse, a watercolor landscape painter in Central Park -- complete with beret, easel, canvas, and folding chair -- they would blend into the background and keep an ever-watchful eye on you while you made your drug purchases...just in case. But this team in the Four-One was new to me. I had never worked with them before. So I had no idea what to expect. Just before I was due to join them, I got a strange call from a Bronx detective who was an old pal of mine. "These are not your kind of people, Kathy," my friend told me. "You could get hurt." This detective felt so negatively about the Four-One field team that he threatened to "burn" me on the street -- that is, expose me to the drug dealers and the drug users as an undercover cop -- just to keep me from going out with the Four-One field team. He said he'd rather blow my cover than risk letting me get hurt. But I didn't want to get a reputation as a prima donna or a shirker. That kinda stink could ruin your career, all the more so since I was the rare female in an overwhelmingly male police department. Plus, business had been slow and I was eager to line up as many drug collars as I could before Labor Day. So I tried to smooth-talk my detective friend out of it. "If things don't feel right," I assured him, "I'll shit-can the operation myself. I promise." My friend was still uneasy about me hooking up with this new crew. But he finally agreed to back off on his threat to burn me. "Just take care of yourself, Kathy." Lieutenant Ballner, my crotchety curmudgeon of a boss in the Undercover Unit, gave me similar advice. "Just be sure you feel okay about this new team," he told me. "I don't want you futzin' around up there" --futzin'being the lieutenant's favorite expression for any sort of behavior that wasn't strictly by-the-book or on the up-and-up. The day of the buy operation was positively oppressive, with temperatures soaring into the upper nineties. Ten minutes into the drive up to the South Bronx, my clothes were sopping with sweat. The air conditioner in my car went on the fritz. Adding to the misery, my brakes burned out en route. I had to stop along the way and have new fluid put in them. Good omens, these were not. On my drive through the South Bronx, I got the full measure of the 41st Precinct, and it was not a pretty sight -- a 2.5-square-mile moonscape of run-down tenements and burned-out buildings, graffiti-spattered walls and garbage-strewn lots. Developers had tried to pump some new life into the area by erecting prefab housing, but just as quickly as these structures went up, the junkies and squatters would descend on them like hungry piranhas on raw flesh, cannibalizing the contents, sneaking in at night to steal the copper pipes and wiring and fixtures and sell them for quick drug money. Statistically speaking, this precinct had the distinction of being the most violent, the most murderous, and the most drug-infested in the whole city, if not the entire nation. Cops who worked the 41st Precinct likened the place to the Wild West. Taking a cue from their frontier forebears, the cops dubbed the 41st Precinct "Fort Apache" and took to wearing T-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with images of a beleaguered Alamo-stBurke, Kathy is the author of 'Detective The Inspirational Story of the Trailblazing Woman Cop Who Wouldn't Quit', published 2006 under ISBN 9780743283922 and ISBN 0743283929.