EVERYONE GETS THE 'SHAME' TREATMENT
From stars to gangsters: Inside NYPD’s infamous perp walk
JOHNNY Depp had one. So did Christian Slater. Russell Crowe had one also, and he did not look happy.
They are just a few of the countless celebs to face their lowest moment in front of the camera — and they only wish these were sex tapes.
Instead, they were subjected to New York’s ultimate walk of shame, a rite of passage for criminal suspects that a fat bankroll, A- list status or friends in high places can rarely help to escape: the perp walk.
Part circus, and 100 percent photo op, it is a time- honored tradition that only in the Big Apple rises to the level of cinematic art.
Depp, accused of trashing an Upper East Side hotel, was paraded from the 19th Precinct station house wearing cuffs, shades and a scowl in September 1994.
Camera shutters clattered in 1986 as Martin Sheen grinned after an anti- nuke protest arrest and in 1992 as Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose laughed off getting pinched at JFK Airport for violently diving into a concert audience the year before.
Slater shambled boozily as hewaswalked in 2005 for grabbing a 52- year- old stranger’s behind on the Upper East Side. Crowe glowered as he was walked the same year for hurling a phone at a Soho concierge.
FEW“perps” have complained as loudly about getting walked as French horndog Dominique Strauss- Kahn. “I think it’s a terrible thing, frankly,” Strauss- Kahn— the former head of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for president in France before scandal struck — told CNN in 2013, two years after he was busted for an alleged sex attack at Midtown’s luxe Sofitel hotel. He was eventually cleared for lack of evidence.
“The problem is, it’s a moment where in all European, American society you’re supposed to be innocent, you’re supposed to be innocent until you’re convicted,” he griped.
For those less accustomed to the bright lights, the perp walk has served as an initiation into new and unwelcome fame.
“That was the least of it,” subway- vigilante shooter Bernard Goetz told The Post recently of his 1984 perp walk, even laughing at the memory.
Some find their first big- city walk so disorienting, they actually give an answer when the gaggle of press barks out the requisite, “Why did you do it?”
“She deserved it!” Emmanuel Torres responded, against all legal interests.
Torres had fatally stabbed a young woman during a Bronx rooftop rape in 1984; his recorded gibe was the evidence that convicted him.
In 2005, Latin Kings thug Isaac “Lucky” Almanzar was arrested by the feds in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on drug charges and gave obvious gang signs while being walked.
The photos were introduced at trial when he indignantly testified that he had never, ever been a gangbanger.
It’s really best to walk silently, advises famed criminal defense lawyer Barry Slotnick, who represented Goetz.
“I tell them to stand up straight, walk out, don’t smile. It’ll be over soon. Don’t look notorious. Ignore reporters, ignore the press, go through the process and hope that the jury will find you not guilty,” he said.
The cops assigned to do the perp walks are usually the detectives or officers who cracked the case or made the arrests.
They’re instructed to be presentable and to clean up their vehicle so that the cameras don’t capture a car filled with old pizza boxes, coffee cups or other junk, lawenforcement sources said.
Sometimes, even they get carried away.
IN 1995, John Lauro, a doorman at the Beekman Town House, an Upper East Side apartment building, was taken to the 19th Precinct station house on East 67th Street for questioning about a theft from one of the building’s apartments.
While Lauro was inside answering questions — and eating pizza and watching a Miami Dolphins- Pittsburgh Steelers game with cops — then- Channel 5 reporter Penny Crone, who lived in the building and wanted a scoop, made a stink because she needed video of Lauro for the 10 p. m. news.
So Detective Mike Charles took the hapless Lauro out of the station house in handcuffs, pulled his hood down and led him to a police car so Crone’s crew could get the shot. Then he drove around the block and brought Lauro straight back inside.
“When I saw Penny Crone there, I knew it was a setup. I knew I was getting screwed, that I was getting railroaded,” Lauro told The Post recently. “Charles even apologized.”
But the detective said he was only following orders. “I was told by downtown to dowhat the reporter wanted, so I obliged. I pulled the car in front. I took the guy in the car, we drove for a couple of blocks and came back,” said Charles, who has since retired.
Crone, now a real- estate agent, laughed at the memory.
“I had the hooks in, I had the hooks in! They [ the cops] were great tome, because I never wrote anything bad about them,” she told The Post onWednesday while vacationing in Florida.
“That’s what we did,” Charles added. “Everybody knew about it. This wasn’t the first time that we did something like this, and it wasn’t the last.”
THE Upper East Side’s 19th Precinct has a storied history of walks that goes beyond Depp being paraded in front of the cameras after trashing a hotel room.
Jets lineman- turned- woman- beater Mark Gastineau and “Preppy Murderer” Robert Chambers came through the same neighborhood station house.
“It was the 19th Precinct, we were highprofile. The cameras were always there. Every week we had a walk on TV. It was like we had our own series,” Charles recalled.
A judge was less sanguine after the charges against Lauro were dropped and he sued the department, ordering that perp walks could be performed only when suspects are being moved for a legitimate purpose.
“Posed” perp walks are a time- honored tradition.
One of the more infamous walks came in 1962, when NYPD Capt. Albert Seedman walked robbery suspect Tony “Red” Dellurnia in Brooklyn’s 62nd2nd Precinct.
Some reporters complained that they didn’t have a chance hance to get photos, with one shouting, “Hold his head up so we can get at least one good shot!”
So the obliging Steedman promptly walked Dellurnia again, grabbing him by the head ead to lift his face up to the cameras.
The resulting photo — of Steedmanstuck in withhis moutha stogie oth as he Dellurniagripped a around grimacing cd the throat — was as widely published and earned the captain a reprimand.
COPS are less obliging these days, so photographers for balky must suspects compensatens by plying their own tricks cks of the trade. “The pros always duck or drop and go as far forward as they can. If they [ perps] bow their heads and you can’t see their faces, you have to get under them,” veteran Post shooter Steve Hirsch said.
“Literally, you put the camera as low as you can, right under them, which gives you a completely strange view of the perp because you’re looking up at them.”
Fotogs have to be in the right place at the right time — which is harder now that the NYPD doesn’t formally give the press a heads- up, although quiet tips are still passed along the grapevine. Politeness can also pay off. When John Gotti was walked once, reporters killed him with kindness.
“Good evening, sir, how are you?” several photographers called to him.
But Steve Berman, a New York Times freelancer, took it one step further, asking the question in Italian, the paper reported.
“Buona sera, signore, come sta?” Berman asked, using the formal rather than the familiar form of the word “you” in Italian.
“Bene, grazie,” Gotti replied with a smile, as the photographers happily snapped away.
“Gotti,” John Miller, then the NYPD police spokesman who is nowa deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, said later, “brought the walk to a new level.”
Sadly, some stories about perp walks are just that— stories.
In the 1940s, notorious bank robber Willie Sutton busted out of prison — and quickly became an American folk hero.
When he was finally hunted down and arrested in 1952, a reporter asked him: “Willie, why do you rob banks?” according to Gotham lore.
“Because that’s where the money is,” Sutton supposedly replied.
But Sutton, in his own memoir, admitted he never gave the legendary reply.
“I never said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter,” he said— adding that he wished he had said it.
There have been efforts to ban or at least rein in the practice. After DSK’sDSK s perp walk drew international tional condemnation, City Councilman David Greenfield in 2011 proposed a law that would banb the practice.
“Even Mother Teresa dragged out by detectives wouldw look guilty,” he said. But then- NYPDNYP top cop Ray Kelly wasn’t buyingbuy it — and it ultimately mate went nowhere. “We have been walking in prisoners out of theth front doors of station houses for 150 years Department,”in the Police Kelly said at the time.
“This is how we transport people to court,” he said.
“I don’t think the genie’s ever gonna be put back inside theth bottle. That’s the way it is.”