Letter from America
The scary thrill of finding bodies with the NYPD scuba unit
I’ve just read the obituary of Louis Eppolito, 71, New York’s ‘Mafia cop’.
Decorated for bravery in the 1970s, he was later famous for a role as a gangster in Goodfellas, where he also advised Robert De Niro on how to act like a wise guy. Eppolito ended up in prison, convicted of moonlighting for the Mafia, committing murder and leaking informants’ identities.
The obituary reminded me of the summer I spent in 1997, diving with the NYPD scuba unit on a magazine assignment. By then, the city had disinfected much of its grimy, glitzy, vice-ridden street life and, with it, the sharp tang of anything-is-possible adventure. Where, I wondered, could I find the banished seamy underside of the city’s secrets? Their last refuge: along and under the water. So I formally applied to do a profile of the scuba cops.
It was a harrowing assignment because the sewage treatment plants, now ubiquitous, were still works in progress. Three feet below the surface of the Hudson River and East River, everything went dark, thanks to curtains of pollution and natural silt. If you turned on a torch, a blizzard of particulates shone back at you. To keep all the sludge out, they used dry suits, which felt like inflatable space outfits. They worked every inch of water in and around the city, from Central Park to the Far Rockaways, looking for bodies, floaters, jumpers, sinking boats, ships bringing drugs and dangerous flotsam.
The prospect of finding a body deep in pitch-dark slime gave me nightmares, but I had to keep going until they turned up something worth reporting – which they infallibly did when I was recovering at home. So it took several weeks.
At one point, up in the Bronx River, a narrow thread of opaque water into which Bronx Zoo effluent (just imagine what those animals produced) had flowed since the 19th century, I lost contact and got stuck in the bottom. I just couldn’t get leverage to pull free. With every motion I mulched myself in deeper. I wafted in mephitic ooze for some minutes. Somehow they found me, which confirmed their tall tales of how after years of diving in blackout conditions you developed a sixth sense.
The veterans were real, old-style New York cops: burly, funny, boozy, fearless and full of dark humour. They’d taken over a crumbling, empty high-school building far south in then dilapidated Brooklyn, from where they’d zoom out in their launches. I took them to be authentic incarnations of legendary TV cop heroes, but the PC era had already made inroads. I had to beg Officer John Murphy to let me quote him when he told me the story of dragging a body up to the surface where he found himself besieged by floating sewage.
Another officer wouldn’t let me use his name when he reminisced caustically about the time two vagrants, blitzed on some substance, reported a third vagrant falling in and disappearing on a stormy day. The police launch arrived amid dense rain and choppy waves, the officer dived and, within ten minutes, fetched up the body, feet first, with blue sneakers on. The vagrants began to argue. ‘No, no,’ shouted one. ‘He had red sneakers on.’
‘Uh, sure, hold this and let me go back and find one with the right sneakers,’ said the officer.
I live in Brooklyn now and I often walk near one of our big adventures. Down along the East River in Williamsburg, they’re building two shiny, 40-storey, glass-and-steel skyscrapers where the Domino Sugar Refinery used to be. They’re keeping the rust-brick shell of the old Victorian-era industrial building with its huge chimney and they’ve built a very charming, popular park and promenade, where the loading docks used to be, almost under the Williamsburg Bridge.
One afternoon, we got called out to a possible jumper who’d climbed up the Williamsburg Bridge, right to the top. We waited in a launch on the water underneath while street cops climbed up and gradually approached him from two sides. My boat mates told stories of other jumpers. One officer said, ‘Nah, he won’t jump. They usually prepare and take off their shoes and socks.’ Another looked at his watch and mumbled sardonically, ‘Jump if you’re going to jump – you’re cutting into my lunch hour.’
The jumper threw down a bottle that nearly hit us. On the Domino loading dock, the labourers all stopped carrying the crates of sugar onto a freighter. They hooted and whistled and laughed as, high up, little specks of policemen converged on the jumper. As he was slowly escorted down the huge, sloping cable, he waved drunkenly back at the dock workers.
After the story came out, I went to visit the scuba cops. I’d quoted the lunch comment. The cop was furious with me. I said, ‘It was all in fun and people would love it.’ He said, ‘No. It isn’t like that any more.’
And now, of course, it’s hardly ever like that. It’s much safer these days but there’s not nearly as much fun and lunacy as there was in chaotic, crazy, old New York.