The New York Times-20080126-For Police Fix-It Man- a Scandal to Work On
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For Police Fix-It Man, a Scandal to Work On
Police officers sum up different bosses in different ways.
There are hatchet-men and yes-men, police commanders who can cut you down or sell you out. A Nervous Nelly is a liability; a cop's cop, an asset.
In this street matrix of management styles, Deputy Chief Joseph J. Reznick might well come under the heading Dominant/Aggressive, maybe even Hostile.
A lot of his decisions, I opposed, vocally, and he and I have disagreed time and time again, though he was always open to the discussion, said Detective First Grade Robert Rodriguez, 37, who worked for Chief Reznick in the warrants division. And in the end, time and time again, I was wrong.
Now, the arrest of four narcotics officers in Brooklyn has given the Police Department a black eye, and Chief Reznick, a veteran whose name pops up in all manner of big cases, and who began his career on a foot patrol in Washington Heights, has been brought in to clean up a scandal that has caused 80 drug prosecutions to collapse.
He is a fixer, of sorts.
In an interview Friday, joined at times by two members of the department's public affairs office, the chief would not discuss the drugs-for-informants scandal in Brooklyn South Narcotics, nor what his plans were in dealing with it. But he spoke at length about his career, and his outlook.
Chief Reznick, 56, grew up on Third Avenue and 33rd Street in Manhattan as the middle child of a city housing employee and a housewife.
My father would bring home bikes from the development that were discarded by people that lived there, and he'd have like a 20-inch wheel on the front and a 24-inch wheel on the back and we'd look at it and he'd say, 'Just ride it until the wheels fall off,' that was his motto, the chief said. I look at life like that now.
His father, Walter, died of complications of pneumonia in June 1967, when the chief was 15.
Chief Reznick joined the department in December 1973 after a stint in the Navy. He is about 100th on the N.Y.P.D. seniority list out of roughly 36,000 men and women.
But more remarkable than his longevity is the number of times he has been in the middle of the latest hot issue at the department, whether it be an internal scandal or a high-profile crime. In the process, he has made friends, and some enemies.
In 2006, when he oversaw the cold case squad, Chief Reznick sent a scathing memo threatening to transfer six detectives he saw as unproductive, drawing fury from the Detectives' Endowment Association but praise from the higher-ups.
He was involved in the investigation of the torture and killing of Jonathan M. Levin, a teacher, in his Manhattan apartment in 1997; the murder of Irene Silverman in her Upper East Side town house in 1998; and the murder of the girl they called Baby Hope, a 5-year-old whose body was found packed into a picnic cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway.
Baby Hope is still on my mind, he said. Still unsolved, 1991. July 21st.
Days after Officer Russel Timoshenko, 23, was fatally shot in Brooklyn last July, Chief Reznick led the chase for the suspects in the killing; they were captured in an area off Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania. In 1988, he was equally determined in solving the killing of Officer Michael J. Buczek, 24, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly recalled.
Chief Reznick is a no-nonsense police executive; a consummate professional who gets the job done, no matter what, Mr. Kelly said in an e-mail message. He added: In short, Chief Reznick doesn't quit.
It's been just a few days since he got the assignment to Brooklyn South Narcotics, and it promises to be among the most challenging in a busy career.
Two narcotics officers, Detective Sean Johnstone and Officer Julio Alvarez, are accused of lying in September about the amount of cocaine they recovered from a suspect. Detective Johnstone was later recorded talking about withholding drugs and the practice of giving them to informants.
A subsequent inquiry led to the arrests last week of two other officers in the unit, Sgt. Michael Arenella and Officer Jerry Bowens. The two are accused in court papers of taking drugs and cash they had recovered and of giving them to a confidential informant as payback.
As a result, four high-level police commanders have been transferred, and Chief Reznick has been brought in.
Chief Reznick would say only that he'll use my skills, my experience, as I've done in the past, to make good in Brooklyn South Narcotics.
He is a timepiece in a sea of fresh faces, a dinosaur on a department filled with Smurfs -- slang for a young officer in a blue uniform. He has the big hands of a boxer and the brutish frame of one, too. He fixes things at home, in Queens, where he and his wife, Patricia, a teacher at a Catholic grammar school, raised their three firefighter sons.
He likes it when bad guys go to jail, said Inspector Ken Cully, the commanding officer of the Manhattan North narcotics bureau, who met the chief in the early 1980s when they both patrolled in the 30th Precinct.
Looking ahead, the chief would say only, Some people come here, take this as a job and you'll see that when they hit their 20th year, they're gone. I've far exceeded that by 14 years now. I have no intentions of leaving.
[Illustration]PHOTO: Deputy Chief Joseph J. Reznick will deal with the drugs-for-informants scandal in Brooklyn.(PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED R. CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES)