Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice

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Chapter One

NEW YORK

MAY 2001

Some fuckin' mutt in a tuxedo has stopped traffic by climbing to the top of the George Washington Bridge and threatening to jump. In Times Square, FBI agents and New York police detectives are having a shootout with a fugitive wanted for murder, robbery, rape, and kidnapping. And here in the Bronx I am climbing out of my car at the 47th Precinct'the Four-Seven in cop parlance — where a forty-three-year-old man has just been arrested for raping and strangling his eleven-year-old neighbor.

Outside the Four-Seven, photographers and angry neighbors form a tunnel of outrage during the perp-walk, when the accused murderer of the girl is marched from police car to precinct house. The crowd shouts, "Killer!"

"I didn't do it," says the man, Clarence Moss. Then quietly he says, "I'm sorry." He tells detectives that he drank beer and smoked crack all day, and when eleven-year-old Tamiqa Gutierrez came to the door to ask if Moss's grandchild could play, he attacked her and raped her for almost a half hour. She struggled so much that he choked her and she finally passed out. When he was done with her, he dropped her in the hallway just outside her apartment, and when her father found her, she was choking on her own vomit and blood. She died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

At the Four-Seven, I brief reporters on the case and go out of my way to credit the detectives, who did a tremendous job tracing the evidence back to Moss's apartment and getting him to confess.

I'm quiet as I leave the station house and climb into the backseat of my dark unmarked car. It doesn't matter howmany times you see a crime like this; it gets to you, the things people do to children. It's almost 8 p.m. and I've been going since 5:30 a.m. Yet I'm not finished. I still have two dinners and one police event to attend. In the front seat, two cops from my security detail wait for the next order.

Sometimes I can't believe where I am. At my desk I will occasionally remind myself by pulling out the solid-gold shield of the police commissioner, the shield that once belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Few people have any idea what it means to be police commissioner of the city of New York. I know there isn't another position like it in the world.

It's not just that I am in charge of the largest municipal police department in the nation'forty-one thousand officers, fifty-five thousand total employees in more than one hundred commands. More than that, I am responsible for the safety and protection of the eight million people who live in New York and the tens of millions of tourists and visitors who come to the city every year. Their safety was the most profound symbol of the resurgence of the city, its dramatic eight-year turnaround from near bankruptcy and out-of-control crime. When I got this job in August 2000, I promised to sustain and improve that resurgence, to lower crime even as national crime figures were beginning to creep back up. I also promised to improve morale among police officers and to repair relations with the community, especially minority communities, after the shooting death of Amadou Diallo.

I keep my promises.

So eighteen-hour days are common. I usually work six days a week, and often I work seven. On this day in May 2001, I open my eyes from the catnap in the back of my car when the radio explodes with traffic.

Something has happened at the Carnegie Deli. At first it sounds like a robbery. The two cops in my security detail are handling the car's four cellular phones. Sonny Archer turns and leans over the backseat. "It looks like five are shot, boss," he says. "Two DOA. One likely." Two are dead and one is about to go.

I nod to Mike Sanchez, my driver. "Let's go."

Within minutes, we're roaring down the West Side Highway, lights flashing and siren blaring, veering in and out of traffic. At 57th Street, four wheels — police motorcycles — are waiting for us. They swarm around my car, two in front and two behind, clearing traffic and escorting us to the scene through an obstacle course of taxis and limousines.

The Carnegie Deli is a landmark in Manhattan, an old-style restaurant and tourist attraction on the street level of a building at Seventh Avenue and 55th Street, in the heart of midtown. Outside, it's like a street fair, police and reporters and diners and theater-goers and the usual people gawking. I get a quick briefing and then climb the stairs to the sixth floor, to an apartment above the deli.

Until an hour ago, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Jennifer Stahl lived in this apartment, a former actress who supported herself by selling marijuana. On a door in the apartment was a cardboard sign listing six different types of pot and prices'from $300 to $600. On this night, May 10, 2001, she had been sitting around with some friends when a man rang her apartment from the street below.

She knew the man, a wannabe musician named Sean Salley. She buzzed him up but was surprised when she opened the door to see two men. The men had guns. They had Stahl's friends lie on the floor, and one of them began duct-taping their hands and feet while Salley allegedly took Stahl into a small room, which contained the marijuana and some money.

"Take the money, take the money. Take the drugs. Don't hurt anybody," Stahl said. Then there was a single shot.

"Why'd you have to shoot her?" asked the other man, who was duct-taping Stahl's friends in the living room. The next few minutes must have been terrifying for the four people in that room, who squirmed and tried to crawl away as the gunman walked around, held them each down, and shot them, one by one, in the head.

The living room of the apartment is a grisly sight — two young dead men on the floor. One of the men had just managed to wiggle one of his hands out of the tape when he was shot. As I stood over them looking at the carnage, I couldn't help but think about the people in this country who continue to say that marijuana is a victimless crime. Tell it to the people lying there in a pool of blood.

Jennifer Stahl is also dead, and another woman is seriously injured. Miraculously, one of the men was only grazed in the neck.

Back on the street I confer with Bill Allee, the chief of detectives, in front of a souvenir shop window full of Times Square snow globes and tiny replicas of the Statue of Liberty. I quickly brief reporters on what we know so far. We have security video from the stairwell showing two men climbing the stairs to the apartment.

For me this crime is a terrible reminder of what New York was eight years ago, when half the city's residents dreamed of moving away, when the crack epidemic raged violently, when crime and cynicism threatened to make this city fold up on itself.

It has been one of the greatest achievements of my life to be a part of New York's rebirth. Under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the New York City Police Department has managed a stunning reversal'a 63 percent drop in overall crime and an even greater drop in homicides — from 2,245 in 1990, to 671 in the year 2000. Even when the economy began to sour and national crime statistics began to flatten and even to rise, we managed to beat the numbers down here. We had even taken to calling New York the safest big city in the world.

The Lost Son. Copyright © by Bernard Kerik. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.