VICE AND AVARICE

Official who investigated corruption in New York police

Milton Mollen, who led a commission that found that the New York City Police Department had been “willfully blind” to drug-related corruption by organised bands of rogue officers in the 1980s and early ‘90s, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.

His son, Scott, confirmed the death.

The Mollen Commission was established by Mayor David N Dinkins in 1992 after five officers in two Brooklyn precincts were arrested by the Suffolk County police and accused of working as a ring to buy cocaine in drug-infested neighborhoods in their precincts and resell it on Long Island.

It quickly emerged that over several years the New York Police Department had repeatedly received complaints that one of the officers, Michael Dowd, was dealing drugs but had nonetheless allowed him to remain on the force, until he was arrested by the Suffolk County authorities.

Reports also surfaced that federal investigators were pursuing allegations of corruption by officers in other city precincts.

When Dinkins called on him to head the commission, Mollen had months before stepped down as deputy mayor for public safety, after a long public career in which he had been a top city housing official in the 1960s and a high-ranking state judge in the 1970s and ‘80s. His mission was to assess the extent of police corruption in the city and the department’s efforts to combat it.

In reports in 1993 and 1994, the Mollen Commission concluded that since the mid-’80s police corruption had been rife in five precincts across the city, high-crime areas in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx heavily populated by poor blacks and Hispanics. Groups of up to a dozen officers had, among other crimes, stolen drugs or cash from dealers, often beating them up, and then trafficked in the narcotics themselves, the commission found.

The finding that corruption was confined to small “crews,” as Mollen called them, in a handful of precincts contrasted with the conclusion of a similar panel in the 1970s, the Knapp Commission, which said the corruption it found had been an

0 Deputy Mayor Milton Mollen and Mayor David Dinkins in 1992 “extensive, departmentwide phenomenon”.

Like the Knapp Commission, however, the Mollen panel concluded that police officials had fallen short in fighting the criminality in its ranks.

The Mollen Commission found a “deep-rooted institutional reluctance to uncover corruption in the department,” and faulted “willfully blind supervisors” who “fear the consequences of a corruption scandal more than corruption itself ”. It held that the police commissioners during the half-dozen years it examined were ultimately responsible for the failure. The officials had served under Dinkins and his predecessor, Ed Koch, and had by then left the police force.

In releasing the report, Mollen described those officials as having been “honest officers” who had lacked “a sense of commitment to combating corruption to the fullest extent”. The former commissioners insisted that they had not been lax. In its final report in 1994, the panel said that the corrupt officers had established “distinctive corruption methods” in each of the five precincts.

But it also found what it called “predominant patterns”: “Cops committing theft from street dealers, from radio runs, from warrantless searches and seizures, from legitimate raids and searches, from car stops and drug couriers” and in off-duty robberies, as well as “cops protecting and assisting narcotics traffickers” and dealing and using drugs.

Milton Mollen was born in Brooklyn on 25 January 1920, to Hyman and Esther Mollen. His father was a produce merchant.

In the Second World War, Mollen, serving in the Army Air Forces, was a navigator on bombing run over Nazi-occupied France in July 1944 when his plane was shot down. He bailed out, was captured, and escaped from a German prison camp in April 1945.

After the war he attended St. John’s University, enrolling in its School of Commerce and then its School of Law, getting his law degree in 1950. After two years in private practice, he went to work as a lawyer in the City Corporation Counsel’s office, rising to executive assistant corporation counsel.

Mollen was named general counsel to the city’s Housing and Redevelopment Board in 1960 and was made chairman of it in 1962, putting him in one of the hottest seats in the administration. As it continued to push urban renewal projects, the board was being attacked as wrecking the character of neighbourhoods. The next year, Mollen said the city would also devote resources to preserving buildings suitable for rehabilitation.

He later served as a judge, and then as the administrative judge, in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn.after his four decades away from private law practice, Mollen returned to it after the Mollen Commission ended its work in 1994.

Mollen’s wife, the former Bebe Miller, whom he married in 1943, died in 1995. In addition to his son he is survived by a daughter, Ellen Mollen. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

Groups of up to a dozen officers had stolen drugs or cash from dealers, often beating them up, and then trafficked in narcotics themselves