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[stereo buzzing]
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[tape player whirring]
- [Rudy] Bob.
The only way we can possibly prevent you from being indicted
is if you come forward, tell the truth,
we can try to work it out.
- [Bob] You want me to go and say
I did all these kinds of things, I'll never do it.
- [Rudy] Why?
- I'm not gonna implicate any of my friends.
I'll never hurt Mandato,
I'll never hurt Wolff, I'll never hurt Cody.
I'm not gonna do it, those are my partners.
I'm not gonna do it.
And so two guys go and both fuck yourselves.
[suspenseful music]
- [Interviewer] You were a hero to some
others were furious at you
that you broke the code of silence among police officers.
- Bob Leuci turned around on the essential problem,
the corruption that existed in the narcotics enforcement.
- It was so difficult to tell who was the good guy
and who was the bad guy.
What is right in this scene? What is wrong?
- [Man] Bob Leuci committed probably more crimes
than almost any other police officer
in the city of New York.
- He really thought he was going to be
this great American hero.
[traffic passing] [horn honking]
[phone beeping]
- [Bob] Hi Magnus, how are you?
- [Magnus] I'm good. How are you?
- [Bob] I feel better today.
Not great, but better.
- [Magnus] Could we maybe in the next month or so,
find a time?
- [Bob] I don't know.
I really don't.
I would think so, but I don't know.
I'm afraid, you know what I'm saying?
[suspenseful music]
- Yeah, he's one of the most complex people I know.
Cops today may not know Bob personally
or know anything about his unit, the SIU.
They say terrible things about it.
Because that's what you do to demonstrate your loyalty
to the brotherhood.
If there's a cop who rats on another cop,
his home will have a wreath put on the door
and the wreath is made up of a string of dead rats.
It's a sign, we're watching you buddy.
Watch your step.
[sirens wailing]
- Our next guest is a man who at one time
was a top New York City detective.
His testimony broke one of the biggest tales of corruption
ever uncovered in New York City Police Department.
- He gave up the code.
He made the NYPD look like garbage
and was a criminal just like the drug dealers
that he covered.
- How did you wind up being a crooked cop?
- When I was in training, his name was among the names
I was told not to work with.
His shield was for sale
and he was a disgrace to what we stood for.
And the thought was, if I worked with him, I could get hurt.
[soft guitar music]
- [Bob] A lot of people have gotten angry with me.
You know, why are you doing this?
Why are you opening this all up again?
And they throw darts at my picture.
We'll set it up and I'll do it, okay?
- Yeah, let's do that. - All right.
- Cool, okay, see you soon. - Bye, bye.
♪ Pool Hall, quarter a ball ♪
♪ Pick your stick and hang it on the wall ♪
♪ Aim slow, shoot it low ♪
♪ Fall for it all and you'll never know ♪
♪ There a black eight, won't roll straight ♪
♪ Scratch every match and you're easy bait ♪
♪ For a cue shark, shootin' his mark ♪
♪ To a pay day give away in the dark ♪
[dog barking]
- Don't you, that's too close!
Get--fucking back up.
Back up.
Jesus, these fucking Norwegian pricks.
Underneath my coat. - All right.
- [Bob] Does that make any sense?
- [Interviewer] How do you feel about this?
- Well, I mean, really it's hard in the beginning
but we'll get going and get it right.
- Having a documentary about him at this stage in his life
would really put things in perspective for him,
for his family, for his friends,
for anyone who saw it who knew him
from the beginning of this journey that he took.
[soft music]
- I should have the students sign up pretty soon.
I mean, I'm not sure,
I fill my classes usually.
I train police all over the country.
I talk to them about working undercover.
I try to explain to them what you have to do
to make sure you understand who you are.
Once you become a reflection of the people that you police,
you begin looking like them, dressing like them,
wearing your hair like them, talking like them.
You've been then taken by them.
That's a world you visit.
It's not a world you become part of.
And I became part of it.
♪ He is on your side ♪
- [Narrator] Yes, the man in blue is on your side.
Cooperate with the New York City police officers
in your neighborhood.
- My whole life from the time I was 18,
I always wanted to be a policeman.
[soft music]
There's a certain kind of bonding that takes place
that you don't find in any other profession.
And I couldn't imagine living any other kind of life.
[sirens] [police radio]
I was a good kid in high school.
I went to college and played football out in Kansas.
I never smoked a joint.
I never broke any law.
I took the test when I was 19.
I came back and I became a cop.
My father was a socialist, really a communist.
He didn't have a great love for the police.
And he hated the idea that I would become a cop.
And I probably did it more
because he hated the idea so much.
[upbeat music]
- [Reporter] New York City's Police Department,
by far the nation's largest with 31,000 men.
- Most of the policemen in this city
I think they have a very rough job.
I think it's a dangerous job.
- [Woman] The police is doing a good job in their duty
and if it wasn't for them,
a lot of crimes could have been committed.
- I was very strong pro-police.
My sense was that if I wear a uniform
and I tell you to do something, you do it.
I was a street guy very much.
[upbeat music continues]
I felt very much a part of the city.
The city was my city in a lot of ways.
[siren wailing]
I was young, full of energy.
In a short time, they put me into the narcotics division.
[people chattering]
- Bob Leuci was assigned to my office in Brooklyn
at the time, this was in the early 60s.
He looked like a choir boy and
very innocent looking and didn't look like a policeman.
[suspenseful music]
- When you heard the name Baby Face,
you knew it was Bob Leuci.
That was his name, Baby Face,
'cause he was so young looking.
- Good looking guy.
Very charming, very personable.
Could wrap you around his finger in a minute.
- We were colleagues,
you know, saw each other just about daily.
When they'd make arrests,
he was very good with the prisoners.
[man yelling]
- [Bob] Calm down, calm down, calm down.
Take it easy, take it easy.
- And because he was an easy going guy,
he was able to charm the prisoners
and get information from them.
- [Prisoner] What a small precinct.
This the lousiest precinct in the Bronx.
- It was mainly his personality that, you know,
that got him moving along.
- I was smaller than the average cop
so I used to get dressed up as a woman.
- Do you get a lot of kidding from the boys
when you have to dress up this way?
- You do feel self-conscious, you know,
in a way, feel that it isn't your normal dress.
You know, whenever you wear something
that's not your normal dress you think everybody's,
when you go out in the street you feel like,
know that I'm a man, you know, self-conscious.
- He had the guile and the persona to sell a character.
He was an actor.
[sirens wailing]
[police radio]
- The first thing I would do
as soon as I went out into the street, I would buy drugs.
It was so easy for me.
There were drugs everywhere
and people always wanted to sell me drugs.
And I'd make arrests.
[sirens wailing]
- We must wage what I have called total war
against public enemy number one in the United States,
the problem of dangerous drugs.
- [Reporter] Official estimates claim
there are now 300,000 addicts
of heroin alone and a growing proportion
of them are teenagers.
- Everybody in the whole block use heroin.
Old lady, 85, use heroin.
Young people nine to 12 use heroin.
- Nine years old? - Nine years old.
- I just tried it once, you know? I wanted to see...
I wanted more of the drugs, I want to get high at times.
- We've got to be harsh with those who are dealing in it
on the street level.
And that's what these youngsters are doing.
[pounding]
[officers yelling]
- Treating addicts as if they are criminals
and chasing them and fighting them and hitting 'em,
I did it for it years.
- [Officer] Easy, easy, easy does it, easy does it.
- Then I had plenty of guys who worked with me in the street
were great informants and then they would beg me for drugs.
And then I got to a point where I was giving drugs
to my informants.
I would do it every day almost.
- It was a method of getting information from the addicts
and it was hard to
curtail it,
but I made him aware of the dangers involved.
I imagined he understood.
[crowd chattering]
- [Reporter] Wednesday night,
two patrolmen were critically wounded
when their patrol car was riddled with 45 caliber bullets
apparently from a submachine gun fired from another auto.
- I regard this as the most dastardly possible act.
- At the same time,
there were these various liberation groups going around
killing policemen and shooting them in the back,
and it was a horrible, bad time.
- [Reporter] One officer, a negro,
was shot in the back of the head.
The other, a white man, had eight 45 caliber bullets
in his back.
- These people are the worst kind of vermin
that God ever put on this earth.
[people yelling]
[gun firing]
- We had 275 gangs in the Bronx where I was working
when I first started and they all hated cops.
[indistinct voices]
They were killing cops
like they would get a cup of coffee.
[intense somber music]
- They say that we were very brutal, you know, in those days.
But fact of the matter is there was brutality all around us.
Y'know, how would you expect us not to be?
[crowd yelling]
[people chanting]
You find that the only people you can trust
are other policeman.
You turn inward instead of turning outward.
You turn inward to protect yourself
you know, and it becomes this blue code of silence.
[indistinct voices]
- In order to fight and defeat this enemy,
it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.
I've asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority
and the funds to fuel this kind of offensive.
- The teams will be shifted around
to where the action is and where work can be performed.
[upbeat music]
- I wanted to be in this special unit.
[banging]
- [Reporter] The newly formed SIU,
Special Investigations Unit.
- It was a small unit within the narcotics division.
Some of the best detectives in the city.
They were the detectives that made
the French Connection case.
- [Reporter] 398 pounds of narcotics
worth at least $70 million.
- This was a combination of about two months
of investigation into the activities
of this particular group of people.
- They made up their own cases.
They got their own targets.
They did everything on their own.
[high pitched music]
- [Reporter] This is part of a 12 and a half million dollar
illegal consignment, enough to feed the habits
of all the city's drug addicts for several weeks.
[drumming music]
- [Man] Three out of five major European
and South American heroin rings have been busted
in the past a couple of years.
- But everyone in that unit was over six feet tall.
They were all ex paratroopers and ex Marines.
It was really a crazy unit.
And I was too small.
But I kept insisting
and I was going for interviews and writing, calling.
And finally, they gave me a chance.
I was the first one in the unit under six feet tall.
- Somebody once said they were the princes of the city,
they could arrest somebody or not as they choose.
They could do anything they wanted
the way medieval princes could.
They were untouchable.
And they were for a time.
[people chattering]
- What was special about the SIU was that
they didn't have any rules.
They were doing great things.
They were clearing drugs off the street.
They were stopping people from dying.
And so the rules didn't apply to them
and they knew that.
[indistinct voices]
As long as they were bringing in the drug kingpins,
nobody asked any questions.
They were the princes, they were the elite.
[suspenseful music]
- The amount of money involved
in the drug business is astronomical.
I mean, it's beyond anything you could imagine.
I would go into an apartment
where there were thousands of dollars laying around
all over the place.
These are people who could barely read or write
and they had more money than I could ever dream of having.
- And SIU came in contact
with the high level drug dealers
who had a lot of money to corrupt
the law enforcement system.
We sort of knew about it
but there was a culture of keep your mouth shut.
[piano music]
- Police corruption has always been there.
It got worse when we started enforcing the drug laws
very vigorously, the war on drugs created
or contributed to the corruption.
- I first went into the unit and I was there about a week.
I couldn't find a partner, no one wanted to work with me.
I never had trouble getting partners
but this particular group of guys wouldn't work on me.
I couldn't figure it out until finally somebody said,
"Look, people are afraid of you."
You know...
I said, "Afraid of what?"
Well, if there's money around,
people are gonna take some.
They were afraid if you were gonna be there,
and it was because I never took any money.
[suspenseful music]
- You're only making 250 a week.
It's tough.
And when some dirt bag out there turns around and says-
- "I can take care of your problem."
- "How about I give it 10 grand this week
and 10 grand every week from now on
and you just help me out a little."
It's very easy to be corrupted.
[upbeat music]
- There was a retirement party going on
from one of the major chiefs of detectives.
And every detective in New York City
was going to his retirement party, everyone.
[music continues] [laughing, cheering]
Except me and my team.
And they said, "Well, you guys brand new here.
What we want you to do is to drive
to this location in the Bronx.
And watch these two Cuban guys from Miami
who were gonna be in this motel."
Now they were supposed to be major drug dealers,
big time drug dealers from Florida.
I'm following the one guy,
he's going places all over the city.
He's going to places mostly in Harlem
and a lot of places in the Bronx.
[ominous music]
But he's not bringing anything,
he's picking things up all the time,
always picking up a bag, an attache case.
They go back to the motel
and they began emptying their hotel room.
So we call this guy out,
this Cuban guy and my Lieutenant spoke to him.
He says he'll get the keys from them
and go open the trunks of the cars.
It was the most money I've ever seen in my life.
[music intensifies]
Bundles of money wrapped in red rubber bands
all over the cars.
Cars start pulling up from this party.
A lieutenant and four detectives is five,
another sergeant and four detectives is 10, us four.
14 cops in the parking lot of this motel.
He's like, "I don't know, what do you want to do?
What should we do?"
There was no crime there per se
but they had all this money.
Everybody's standing around and he looks at me,
because we were brand new, me and my partner.
"What are we going do with it?
Take it? Return it? Turn it over to the police?
What should we do?"
Lieutenant then says, "Look, as far as I'm concerned
we take half the money, give them half the money.
If nobody objects, let them get out of here
and that'll be it."
And I look at him, I'm looking around
and I wanted to raise my hand.
I should've said something.
I should've done something, I could have.
And I think it may have ended right there
but I didn't have the courage.
[dramatic music]
- He could have been a good cop.
Had he operated in a different time or a different place,
he would have been a very good police officer,
but he came into a culture of corruption.
He became part of it.
- He might as well be dirty and make a profit
and do anything he could
because everybody around him was doing it.
And he adopted right away, became dirty.
- When you get to the level of SIU
and you're wearing the suits
and you're wearing the hats
and you're becoming engulfed in this new culture,
are you losing sight of who you really are?
- And I want to stop now, okay?
Okay?
And then we'll go on from there.
But right now I'm tired.
I'll be right outside. - Cool.
- Is that what you want to do, outside right?
- Yeah. - Okay.
[heavy breathing]
- It was really important to Bob
that the people that he liked adored him.
He wanted it to be all of his friends' best friend.
[soft music]
He was the oldest son in an Italian family.
And his mother thought he was the golden boy of New York.
She just thought he was the greatest thing in the world.
Almost every mother thinks that about their children
but I think she took it to a level
where he could never do anything wrong.
She had said to him once,
"If you ever kill anyone,
I know it's going to be for a good reason."
- And I began doing things that I would never
have dreamt of doing before I became a cop.
[upbeat piano music]
- The SIU evolved into a unit who were really
more gangsters than the police officers.
They took advantage of the opportunities that they had.
[slow jazzy music]
- They went to the best restaurants.
They dressed with Armani suits.
They had the best cars.
Why?
Because they were all stealing.
♪ Give it up, to give it up ♪
♪ You know what's on my mind ♪
♪ Give it up, to give it up, girl ♪
♪ You've been wastin' too much time ♪
- They took two bundles of stuff that I had, $5 each,
and $150 I had and they let me go.
- They came and took all my drugs and just let me go.
- Who's they? - The police.
- It was just breaking the law.
Just violating the law in a very serious way.
I mean, I committed, really, a lot of felony.
♪ Now give it to me ♪
- Let some people go and arrest others.
♪ Give it to me ♪
- I certainly used illegal wire taps
and bugged people's homes.
I bugged their phones.
- [Reporter] Using electronic surveillance,
SIU cops would find out when drug pushers
were about to make a big deal.
After a raid, the cops kept the most of the seized cash
and drugs for themselves.
[soft music]
- Once I went along with this program,
everybody's hugging me.
We all got together where the money was shared
then given to each.
Some people got a lot more than others.
It was a sense of all of a sudden, a belonging,
that we were all part of the same Robin Hood group.
[man laughing]
This whole business of a shared kind of doing something
you shouldn't be doing, everyone doing it together.
[background chatter]
95% of the people in that unit were corrupt,
including all the bosses.
And after awhile I just lost myself.
I was not a policeman anymore.
- Approximately 57 pounds of contraband heroin
seized by the police department in 1962
has been stolen.
[suspenseful music]
- [Narrator] The original seizure in 1962
known as the French Connection case,
one of America's biggest narcotic seizures.
- All the drugs was stolen from the property clerk
and returned to the street.
Nothing like this ever been done before.
That created an incredible investigation
that got into a unit that I worked at.
- The creation of Mr. Jerry's office
provides additional resources to deal
with this problem of corruption.
- No police office and no prosecutor,
no judge, no one involved in criminal justice
who becomes a defendant is going to be given
a special privilege.
- The case was bought over to me.
We had a lot of people on it.
Everybody was trying to find out how it happened,
who did it and why.
- There were two detectives in the SIU
that apparently were involved in that,
but there were 70 people in the unit.
- Well, we're not just talking about the French Connection-
- A lot of other drugs too, I agree.
Listen, all the rationalizations I've been able to make
over the years for the things that I did myself
and the other things that the SIU did in general
are kind of wiped away by that particular incident.
It was his corrupt world.
The whole atmosphere was corrupt.
- They were doing the same thing
that we were putting people in jail for.
It was stealing money, stealing drugs, selling drugs.
How bad can you go?
- [Reporter] Six weeks ago in Harlem
Black Panthers seized large quantities of heroin
from drug peddlers and poured it into the street.
They refuse to turn it over to police
because they insisted police would only re- sell it
to the pushers.
- I would have no sympathy for someone like me.
I would be very harsh towards someone
who behaved like I did.
- My father prioritized work over his family.
Being a detective, being a New York City police officer
was his life, he loved it.
But he wasn't home that often.
And there were times he'd show up
with some of his informants
and the majority of his informants were heroin addicts.
He'd bring them to the house.
Those are little things that would stick in my head.
Just these unusual things that were happening
around my house that weren't normal
day-to-day events for most homes.
He loved being out, he loved being about.
He wasn't loyal to my mother.
He wasn't a good husband from that standpoint.
His lifestyle was going the wrong direction.
He realized it.
[soft music]
- I was having a barbecue at my house.
And all my friends were there,
all the cops that I worked with came to the house.
And my father came.
"Look, I met all these guys, your friends,
these cops, they don't look like cops,
they don't act like cops, they don't sound like cops."
He said, "I grew up with gangsters.
They all sound like gangsters.
The way they talk, their view of the world."
They were all wearing diamond rings.
They were all wearing gold bracelets.
They were all wearing necklaces.
[indistinct chatter]
My brother was a heroin addict.
My father said, "It's people like you and your friends,
are responsible for that."
And I took a good, long close look at myself.
I was dressing differently, I was behaving differently,
speaking differently.
I said, "This is not me, I don't want to be this.
I'm a policeman, not a gangster."
- I think it's about time that something's done to prove
that. uh, New York City's police really aren't the finest.
- All the things that they've been doing,
taking the money, the bribes and everything else,
- That should be brought out in the open
and let's hope that this corruption ceases immediately.
- The easy people to point the finger at are the policemen,
that's too easy.
You cannot expose and end police corruption
unless you go after the real cause of corruption.
- [Reporter] The courtroom also has its rotten apples.
Prosecutors, lawyers, even judges and jurors.
- Our investigation has certainly shown
that we are not dealing
with a few rotten apples by any means.
It's not the rotten apples it's the barrel.
- We were investigating cops,
we were investigating judges, we're investigating lawyers.
It was a watershed of corruption in New York City.
The corruption went through the entire system
and had to go through the entire system to be effective.
[dramatic music]
- Someone got in touch with me at one point
and asked me if I would get involved in an investigation
investigating the criminal justice system in New York,
not the police.
[tape clicking]
Who is this guy?
Where does he come from?
What does he want from me?
And I couldn't explain why I was doing it,
why I was talking to him,
but the whole thing sounds scary.
- I had some information about Bob Leuci
because there were allegations of corruption
against any number of police officers in the SIU.
[ominous music]
I met with him in my office.
We talked for a couple of hours in the office.
He did indeed start by acknowledging
three different cases that he had been involved in
where he had been involved in corruption.
- [Bob] I think I may have found an important friend.
I wanted to tell him everything.
I want to get it out from me, I want to get it all out.
All the things that I had been doing
and all of the things that had me really uptight
over the last several years.
And I thought by confession that it would be over
and I would start new again.
- As it turned out we ended up talking
that first day into the night
until five o'clock in the morning and it broke off,
we got some sleep.
We came back, we did it again.
We did that for four days and four nights.
[clock ticking]
We are still talking about motivation and why,
and fear and anxiety, guilt,
the desire to be on the right side
after having been on the wrong side for so long.
- I have a feeling that they maybe had something on him
and that he chose to cooperate rather than be arrested
and being charged with something.
- I know what he was.
He was liar that got caught, a thief that got caught
and now he's playing the game.
- No one ever caught me doing anything wrong.
And I had never saw any good point
of my telling them all the things I'd done.
I told them I did a couple of minor things
so they would believe what I had to say.
Whereas I had done a lot of things.
[suspenseful music]
- Leuci had seen what was coming
and what he did was he got out in front of the curve,
as they say.
He began to cooperate before the investigators got to him.
[upbeat music]
- [Bob] I would show them where the corruption was
that the police were the least involved.
I never had a lawyer working in narcotics
that didn't offer me a bribe in one form or another.
I was shown that the entire court system was corrupt.
- I think my father truly believed
he was the smartest guy in the room,
like he could get involved in a way where he could dictate
how an investigation was going to go.
- We put word out on the street
that I had access to grand jury testimony.
I don't know if you know what that means.
It's private testimony
that's having to do with investigations.
If we set that out, people would get in touch with me.
[phone ringing]
A private detective got in touch with me
[muffled conversation]
and he said, "Listen, I have a client
who's a very big lawyer, big time lawyer
who would pay a lot of money to find out
what kind of testimony's going on in the grand jury
having to do with him."
I said, "I can get that information."
- Eddie Rosner was a very successful lawyer
in New York City.
He handled a lot of drug cases
and he was suspected of having fabricated evidence.
They wanted to get him
they were prepared to do anything to get him.
[dramatic music]
So they set them up through Robert Leuci
to commit an additional crime.
[tape scratching]
- Wearing a wire, we met.
We came with the New York City police detective
who was a friend of his.
And he asked me if I could get access
to this grand jury testimony
having to deal with one of his clients.
And I'll pay you a lot of money.
- They had him on tape
and they were determined to put him away
and get him disbarred.
[dramatic music]
- [Reporter] Edmund A Rosner was convicted yesterday
for bribing a federal official.
- [Reporter] Mr. Rosner wanted names of witnesses
that would be killed instead of testifying.
- [Reporter] Two NYPD detectives were also indicted
in the case.
- The double life that he was leading,
I think he actually enjoyed it.
Acting as an SIU agent, arresting people,
at the same time going after bad cops,
going after bad attorneys.
Once he took this role, he liked it.
[soft music]
- Some days I would wear a wire and some days I wouldn't.
Some days I have a sense from the last meeting
that they're gonna search me, you know?
So I'm not going to wear a wire.
Or other times I'm not worried about it.
I'm gonna wear a wire.
- Leuci was providing excellent, undercover work,
a whole wealth of important information
so he was a very valuable cooperator.
- He'd be invited to stealing money
because he was known as a corrupt cop
and they trusted him.
[beeping] [static]
- [Bob] My car's over here.
- [Man] Bobby, I'll call your house in about an hour or two.
- [Bob] I'm off until Sunday night, though, you know?
- [Man] All right.
[static] - He was a very, very good undercover,
because he could bullshit his way out of a paper bag.
[laughing]
- What he said was,
"If I fall on any corrupt cops in the way,
I'll get them for you too,
but I will not work against my partners."
[dramatic music]
- The word started to go out that Bob Leuci
was wearing a wire.
- As rumored for some months, a prime government witness
is from the ranks of the police department
and he apparently is ready to talk.
- Leuci had entrapped a bail bondsman and a detective
and they realized that he had been turned as cops say,
that he was working for the prosecutors
and they were going to kill him.
- They grabbed me, they put a gun on me,
they said they were gonna take me someplace, search me,
and if they found a wire, they were gonna kill me.
[music continues]
I had a wire on.
And when I sat the transmitter would sometimes turn
in its casing and the backside of it was metal.
And had burnt into my skin.
And I was dying to get my hands on his thing.
And I couldn't shut it off because they taped it
in such a way that I couldn't click it on or off.
And the guy who was driving goes,
"What the hell smells in here?
Did you step in dog shit? It's terrible."
It had burned through my skin.
I really thought I'm paying for what I'm done.
We were in the middle of a Little Italy.
And I saw this guy across the street who I had investigated.
His name was Alphonse Indelicato, Sonny Red.
He was a big time mafia guy.
He saw what was going on.
I said, "Look, go ask him if you could trust me."
And they looked at his mafia guy who was a major bad guy.
[suspenseful music]
[train horn blaring]
He tells them, "Look, if you think he's a rat, kill him,
but you better be right, because he's a friend of mine
and I like him.
So if you're wrong, I'll come after your ass."
And they were petrified of this,
everyone was afraid of this guy.
So they came back and they said,
"Well, if he likes you, you gotta be okay."
After that, I became very frightened.
- He didn't know that he was doing the right thing.
He hoped he was doing the right thing
and he hoped he would be able to protect his partners.
- They couldn't be closer.
Would you turn on your closest friends?
Let me ask you, would you?
Years of friendship and trust
and going to each other's barbecues
and religious, everything, they shared all of that.
- My world was the police world.
And I work with all these guys in different situations
and they all trusted me and took care of me.
It's only when someone who was part of it all
turns on you, that's when you get hurt
and that's when you get hurt badly.
[soft music]
[people chattering] [cameras clicking]
- I'm confident that my office can do anything
but that's probably one of my weaknesses.
[chuckling]
- I participated in the SIU investigation being led
by Rudy Giuliani who was at that time
head of the Corruption Unit.
Rudy and I spent an evening with Bob Leuci
and my task at that time was to debrief Bob Leuci.
[dramatic music]
We spent a lot of time going over the various teams
that Leuci work with,
which took weeks and weeks and weeks.
- [Bob] I'm not gonna implicate any of my friends.
Do you want me to destroy myself?
You want me to go and say
I did all of these kinds of things.
I'll never do it.
Why should I make cases against my friends
when I can make cases against other people
and accomplish the same thing?
And so two guys go and both fuck yourselves.
- Giuliani, who later was mayor of New York
and ran for president
became convinced that Leuci was covering up something.
- The vast majority he's been a good,
honest, law abiding, family loving, decent man
who'd do criminal things once in awhile.
- They began to pressure Leuci who slowly went to pieces.
- [Detective] What do you see reflected
in the mirror in the morning?
What are your children going to see in you
in three or four years from now
when they're old enough to decide what you are?
What does your wife see?
- Some of the people that he dealt with
were smart enough to see
that Bob was basically an insecure person
with an ego, and they played to that.
- And finally, Leuci cracked.
And with that, he began to talk.
[soft music]
- [Reporter] A jury heard detective Robert Leuci in person
and on tape yesterday.
- [Reporter] Tape recorded conversations
between detective Leuci and three men.
- [Giuliani] I can comment only to the extent
that there are public charges today.
- Giuliani wanted to be a known prosecutor, which he was.
I mean, he put everybody in jail.
[music continues]
- Several were indicted, several went to jail,
others If they didn't get indicted or go to jail,
they were fired from the police department.
- He got himself out of the jackpot
and put everybody else in it.
He sold his soul to save his ass.
- [Man] A private investigator overheard a conversation
between three or four people at the casino in Las Vegas.
They discuss the killing of Bob Leuci
and how it was to be done.
[explosion]
I became really, really paranoid at that point though.
- [Interviewer] Why did some cops want to kill him?
- Hopefully destroy the cases against them
if he couldn't testify.
Revenge for ruining their lives.
And he betrayed them.
- He had to go into the Witness Protection Program.
He had to be hidden from the world
[slow music]
His family, too, had to move out.
- My son, who's was a young, young little kid at the time,
he said that there had been a car
driving around the house where we lived.
You know, had gone around the block a few times
and it made him nervous.
- I was young, anywhere from four, six years old.
So, but having those marshals in the house,
there's something going on behind the scenes
that I'm not being made aware of.
No one's explaining to me what's happening.
But there are these men in our house.
Their concern was that if they didn't go after my father,
they'd go after his family.
- My wife and the children were moved
in the Catskill Mountains
in a little hunting lodge that I had.
[somber music]
I lived out in Governors Island,
which is a military base off Manhattan.
I was put under protection for four years
and I had 18 bodyguards who were all New York cops.
- Once my husband decided to do it, he gave me a way out.
He said, "Either you're going to go through it with me
or you could get out."
- Did you ever think about getting out?
- No, I don't think there was any question at any time.
- She's trying to make our lives as normal as possible.
She was the one who had the brunt of everything
that was going on at home while he was away,
when he was out testifying,
he was with marshals, he was secluded,
he was in different areas.
She was home with kids
hoping that the house was protected,
hoping the marshals do their jobs and that's difficult.
Sorry.
- I want my marriage to work out.
- [Interviewer] Is that in jeopardy
because what your husband did?
- Yes, I think so.
[drone sounds]
[people chattering]
- [Reporter] The question is whether the state could
or should indict Leuci,
now a federal witness who is cooperating.
- Leuci was portraying himself as having joined
with Scoppetta and the others to overcome corruption.
But
for all that claim of doing good and cleaning up,
there was an underlying filth, if you would,
a corruption that Leuci hid.
[suspenseful music]
- When you're dealing with an informant like Bob Leuci,
there's a tendency to fall in love with,
to become so favorable to the cooperator,
you're happy, you're pleased with
what the cooperators telling you
that you close your eyes to what should be obvious.
- He was steadfast that he'd committed four or five acts.
And the truth of the matter is he committed hundreds of acts
and he made an awful lot of money.
- Bob Leuci committed probably more crimes
than almost any other police officer
in the city of New York.
[pulsating music]
- I represented several of the
Special Investigator Unit detectives
who had been charged.
By that time,
there was a lot known about Leuci
in the sense of what he had done.
- [Reporter] Former narcotics detective Robert Leuci
admitted yesterday that he had committed
possibly hundreds of criminal acts
in which he previously had denied taking part of.
- [Reporter] Shaking down drug dealers
for as much as $40,000 and splitting the take.
Bribes of as much as $50,000
reportedly were paid by heroin dealers...
[distorted vocals]
- We had a ton of bad acts,
not only stealing and the corruption, but the lying.
"I lied before to these prosecutors and oh yeah, I did.
I lied in the grand jury
but now I'm gonna tell the truth."
Doesn't make any sense.
He looked like a fool to be honest with you.
- Never got prosecuted, no.
I was lucky to have friends.
I had some really amazing people on my side.
- Bob Leuci
turned around on the essential problem,
the corruption that existed in narcotics enforcement
without having been caught,
without having been pushed up against the wall
and forced to turn around.
He did it because something was happening inside of him
that bothered him about it, and that's a great credit.
- Giuliani said, "You can't jail this man,
not after what he has given the public
and what he's been through."
- I never ever dreamt it would ever turn
on the police the way it did.
And I guess they blame me for initiating it all.
Starting it all.
- [Carl] I trusted him-
- [Reporter] Carl Aguilas today has a secret identity.
He was one of the cops trapped by Leuci.
- He invited me over to his house one day
and the kitchen would be wired.
I'd be holding his baby on my lap.
And there was a real friend,
supposedly a real friendly type buddy, buddy situation.
However, I was being recorded.
We were like brothers, I trusted him.
[pounding]
- [Bob] I'll never hurt Mandato,
I'll never hurt Wolff, I'll never hurt Cody.
I'm not gonna do it, those are my partners.
I'm not gonna do it.
[pulsating music]
- Cody was supposed to testify.
[ominous music]
The night before he testified
he was to be babysat by two agents.
I asked him to stay with him through the night, they didn't.
The next day Cody went out,
sat down at Prospect Park and blew his head off with pistol.
[sirens wailing]
Bob heard that and he took out a bottle of Valium five
and swallowed it and ran out the office,
disappeared for a few days.
[somber music]
- [Bob] David Cody, he was one of a kind.
Everything he did centered around
the New York City Police Department.
Retirement parties, Christmas parties,
during the summer watching the Yankees.
I spoke to him.
That the only thing to do was to come in
and tell the whole story
and talk about the things not only he did,
but things that we all did together.
I thought that was the only sane way out
for us at that point.
But it was just too much for Dave to handle,
that's for sure.
[somber music]
- He could move past a lot of things in his life.
He could never move past that.
It was so hard for him.
- [Bob] There are certain things
you can't say I'm sorry for.
You're way, way past the I'm sorry part.
[birds cawing]
[newsreel music]
- A month ago Bob Leuci retired after serving 20 years
on the New York City Police Force
and he's with us here this morning.
One thing that you got out of all this.
- Well, one of the major thing that I got out of it
was an opportunity to change my life
you know, and to live a new life.
- Now, a book has been written about the special agony
of his life as a cop and as a citizen,
it is called "Prince of the City."
It was written by Robert Daley,
former deputy police commissioner here in New York City.
- I didn't know about detective Leuci
and I didn't want to meet him.
To me, he was just a corrupt cop.
I had no use for corrupt cops.
Then he called me up sometime later
and begged me to do his life story, to listen to him.
Leuci practically lived at our house.
He came every morning.
I wanted the title to be the cop who knew too much
and I got shot down.
The movie people said, "No, no, Prince of the City."
- [Reporter] Corruption within the NYPD
will become the subject
of a major Hollywood movie next year. [actors screeching]
Orion Pictures has just purchased
"Prince of the City" by Robert Daley.
- Nobody cares about me, but my partner. Fuck you!
- When I was 29 years old, I played Bob Leuci
and consequently I became a good friend
of Bob's over the years.
- At different times, he captured me 100%
and other times I think it was Treat. [Treat laughs]
And he's an actor
and, uh, he's a wonderful performer.
[soft music]
- There are no heroes. There are no villains.
Everybody was trying to do what they thought was best.
And that kind of complexity is endlessly interesting to me.
- Sidney said one of the reasons that he hired me
was I didn't really care what people thought of me.
I wouldn't worry about being likable
because ultimately the character becomes quite unlikeable.
[music intensifies]
- He embraced the fame.
Another part of his mind took over
and he thought of himself as a celebrity.
- I've been talking to someone recently
about writing a screenplay about
"The Return of Superfly" for example.
And it was a thought-
- Bob really has changed.
I shouldn't say for the worse,
but he isn't the man I married, not by any means.
- He didn't feel like his wife fit into the crowd
that he was now a part of.
You know...
dinner parties where Sean Connery was there
or going out with Rudy Giuliani and his girlfriend.
- The film and the book has put as much stress on the family
and my marriage as anything else that I've experienced.
- You're asking me about that movie.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- "Prince of the City." - Yeah.
- It sucked.
[soft music]
- [Reporter] The movie has also provoked controversy.
Some law enforcement officials say the film
falsely glamorizes Mr. Leuci
from the now defunct Special Investigations Unit.
- Makes me want to throw up
when I see them idolize him and say he was the hero.
Don't hold this guy up as a living example
of what you should do if you get your ass in a jam,
because that's not the right thing to do.
Don't get your ass in a jam.
Do it right to begin with.
- I don't see how anybody could stretch it
to make them a hero.
He was a weakling and a coward
that thought to save himself above everybody else.
- You making any money on the movie?
- Movie, hopefully will make money.
- He was a celebrity, but he was nothing but a crook.
- Absolutely.
- I think he enjoyed being a celebrity.
I think he liked being the center of attention.
And I think that's one of the things
that the hatred for Bob was,
that somehow he became the star,
that he got famous as result of this,
that he made money off of this.
- He's not enjoying this.
He's not enjoying this fame.
He's not enjoying this hero reputation
because he knows it's just not true.
- His career was ruined.
And his name will go down ever in history
as being a police rat.
[Bob speaking indistinctly]
- [Kathy] Just the mail today.
- I'll carry that.
- I just want to see how full this is, okay?
- Yeah.
- No, I'm gonna take the other tank.
This one's almost empty.
- I hardly use it all.
- [Kathy] Honey, it's almost empty.
It doesn't make any difference how much you used it.
- [Bob] I have the other thing, the nebulizer.
- [Kathy] Uh-huh.
- I'll just take that, that's enough.
- Are you sure? - Yeah, yeah.
- He really thought he was going to be
this great American hero.
Instead, he became one of the most hated men
in the police department.
You talk to people in the police department now,
they know his name and they call him a rat.
I'm not sure that was a good trade off.
[somber music]
[birds chirping]
He and his first wife divorced.
So he moved up to Rhode Island.
[soft music]
- I can't walk too far, you know, it's crazy.
- He was star of all the dinner parties up here
because they had this celebrity in their midst.
- You can't believe everything you read.
My last name is Leuci, L-E-U-C-I, look it up.
If you get a chance, Google me.
You may not be a fan, but you'll see.
[man laughing]
- Nice to meet you. - Nice meeting you, take care.
- You've gone from being hated in one part of the country
to another part of the country
where everyone thinks this is great.
[seagulls chirping]
[cars honking] [sirens wailing]
[heavy breathing]
[somber music]
- Well, a former New York detective
who famously exposed corruption in the NYPD
in the 1970s has died.
Robert Leuci put his life on the line to blow the whistle
on a narcotics unit that was accepting cash
and drugs from dealers.
His service was honored in the movie "Prince of the City."
He emerged from Witness Protection...
- If you ask 100 people,
how are you going to remember Bob in one word?
You're going to get 100 different words.
[somber music]
The people that loved him the most
were the ones who were not blind to his faults.
And he had plenty like everyone.
- I can't imagine my father will ever be seen as the hero.
I mean, what he did was heroic.
I think, he was directly responsible
for changing the culture
of the New York City Police Department.
[soft music]
- Did it make any real difference, Sylvia,
after all the agony?
- You know what the top
US drug enforcement official told me?
He said that his only regret was that Bob Leuci
is no longer in law enforcement.
And that it's because of him
that cops no longer routinely steal and deal drugs.
- [Reporter] As a result of the Leuci case,
the police department and the state in the last decade
have adopted new tactics to discourage
and uproot corruption in New York City.
- [Officer] That cancer that almost killed our department
some years ago will never ever happen again.
[audience cheering]
- The criminal justice system cleaned itself up
but the publicity that came out of those cases
put the fear of God into a lot of people.
[audience applauding]
- I think the exposure had a dramatic effect
on public understanding of police corruption.
- This man went a long way toward cleaning up
something that was very rotten
in the New York City Police Department.
- [Interviewer] Thank you very much, Mr. Leuci,
thank you for all the contributions
you've done to the police system.
- It did clean it up, but you know something?
It's a cyclical thing.
You think, oh, it's all cleaned up.
Four more years later, it happens again.
And it happens again.
[dramatic music]
- [Reporter] The corrupt cups were called good cups.
- 'Cause it was the blue wall of silence.
Cops don't tell on cops.
- [Reporter] Right now, 10 out of 75 police precincts
are being investigated for corruption.
- [Woman] 11 murders committed by
and for their mob benefactors.
- We are here today, again,
to announce public corruption charges,
this time at some of the highest and most sensitive levels
of the New York City Police Department.
[suspenseful music]
- I see cases just like the Robert Leuci case
every day today.
I see them today when police kill innocent suspects
and the police will cover for themselves
and prosecutors cover for the police.
It's important that we create a culture
whereby whistle blowers within the police department
are praised rather than condemned.
- It's been a while since I got wired up.
- [Interviewer] Leuci always used to joke about that.
- Yeah, well, he would know.
- Putting on the wire again. - He would know.
I hope there's a hell and he's in it.
[soft guitar music]
- [Bob] Someone once said that there are some teardrops
that just never dry.
And I don't think that time heals all wounds.
I wish it did.
♪ Pool Hall, quarter a ball ♪
♪ Pick your stick and hang it on the wall ♪
♪ Aim slow, shoot it low ♪
♪ Fall for it all and you'll never know ♪
♪ There a black eight, won't roll straight ♪
♪ Scratch every match and you're easy bait ♪
♪ For a cue shark, shootin' his mark ♪
♪ To a pay day give away in the dark ♪
♪ Lucy Ann your man's been out rambling ♪
♪ What will he bringing home to you ♪
♪ On the winds that sing of whiskey, wine and gambling ♪
[soft music]
[somber piano music]