Where it all started

In February 1975 I got dumped out of my soft job as lawyer-intern in the Police Bureau at 240 Centre Street, the old NYPD HQ in the heart of Little Italy. I was finishing up law school at night at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. But I was desperatley needed to fill-in in the empty radio cars in Precincts all over the City after 5,000 cops had benn laid off during the Fiscal Crisis. I was the victim of Operation All-Out as were hundreds of other officers in "Details" around the city. I was assigned to patrol the 83rd Precinct in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a high-crime Precinct being compared then to Downtown Beirut. (Photo is of stoop leading up to heavy front oak door, where on more than one occasion, I was assigned to repel invaders intent on breeching the Castle to free their "homies". (The Precinct did, with stone turrets jutting from battlements and a moat-like side yard where the horses used to be stabled, resemble a Norman Keep). I continued my education as a street Patrolman here till the summer of 1981 when I was promoted to Sergeant and automatically transferred to patrol another bad-ass Brooklyn Precinct.