The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

This was the uniform of the Highway Patrol, which differed considerably from the uniform of ordinary police officers. They wore trousers and shoes, for example, not breeches and boots, and the crowns of their brimmed caps were stiffly erect.

Highway Patrol was considered, especially by members of the Highway Patrol, as the elite unit of the Philadelphia Police Department.

In the ordinary course of events, a rookie cop such as Officer McFadden (who had been a policeman not yet two years) would be either walking a footbeat or working a van in a district, hauling sick fat ladies down stairwells for transport to a hospital, or prisoners between where they were arrested and the district holding cell and between there and the Central Cell Room in the Roundhouse. He would not ordinarily be trusted to ride around in a district radio patrol car. He would be working under close supervision, learning the policeman’s profession. The one thing a rookie cop would almost certainly not be doing would be putting on a Highway Patrolman’s distinctive uniform.

But two extraordinary things had happened to Officer Charles McFadden in his short police career. The first had been his assignment, right from the Academy, to the Narcotics Bureau.

Narcotics had learned that one of the more effective—perhaps the most effective—means to deal with people who trafficked in proscribed drugs was to infiltrate, so to speak, the drug culture.

This could not be accomplished, Narcotics had learned, by simply putting Narcotics Division police officers in plainclothes and sending them out onto the streets. The faces of Narcotics Division officers were known to the drug people. And bringing in officers from districts far from the major areas of drug activity and putting them in plainclothes didn’t work either. Even if the vendors of controlled substances did not recognize the face of an individual police officer, they seemed to be able to “make him” by observing the subtle mannerisms of dress, behavior, or speech that, apparently, almost all policemen with a couple of years on the job seem to manifest.

There was only one solution, and somewhat reluctantly Narcotics turned to it. One or two young, brand-new police officers were selected from each class at the Police Academy and asked to volunteer for a plainclothes and/or undercover assignment with Narcotics.

A cop with a week on the job (or, less often, just graduated-from-the-Academy rookie) was not going to be recognized on the street because he had not been on the street. Nor had he been a cop long enough to acquire a cop’s mannerisms.

Few rookies, whose notions of police work were mostly acquired from television and the movies, refused such an opportunity to battle crime. When asked, Officer Charley McFadden had accepted immediately.

Some, perhaps even most, such volunteers don’t work out when they actually go on the streets. The tension is too much for some. Others simply cannot physically stomach what they see in the course of their duties, and some just prove inept. They are then, if they hadn’t graduated from the Academy, sent back to finish their training, or, if they have graduated, sent to a district.

Charley McFadden proved to be the exception. He was a good undercover Narc virtually from almost the first day, and got even better at it with experience, and after he had grown a beard, and come to look, in his mother’s description, “like a filthy bum.”

After three months on the job, he was paired with Officer Jesus Martinez, a slight, intense Latino who had been on the job for six months longer than Charley, and had learned the mannerisms of a successful middle-level drug dealer to near perfection.

They were an odd couple, the extra large Irishman and the barely over the height and weight minimums Latino. Behind their backs, they were known by their brother Narcotics Bureau officers as Mutt & Jeff, after the cartoon characters.

But they were good at what they did, and not only their peers understood this. Their lieutenant at the time, Dave Pekach, led them to believe that if they kept up the good work, he would do his very best to keep them in Narcotics even when their identities had become known on the street.

That was important. They didn’t tell the rookies at the time they were recruited, but what usually happened when undercover Narcs became, inevitably, known on the street was that they were reassigned to a district. There, they picked up their police career where it had been interrupted. That is to say they now got to work a wagon and haul sick fat ladies down narrow stairways and prisoners

down to Central Cell Room.

The way to become a detective in the Philadelphia Police Department was not the way it was in the movies, where a smiling police commissioner handed a detective’s badge to the undercover rookie who had just made a really good arrest. In Philadelphia, it doesn’t matter if you catch Jack the Ripper with the knife in his hand, you wait until you have two years on the job, and then you take the examination for detective, and if you pass, when your number comes up, then, and only then, you get to be a detective.

What Lieutenant Dave Pekach had offered them, instead of being sent to some damned district to work school crossings and turn off fire hydrants, was a chance to stay in Narcotics as plainclothes officers until they had their time in to take the detective exam.

Charley and Jesus would have killed to convince Lieutenant Pekach what good undercover Narcs they were, what good plainclothes cops they could be, if that would keep them from going out to some damned district in uniform.

And it almost came to that.

Captain Richard F. Moffitt, off duty and in civilian clothing, had walked in on a robbery in progress in a diner on Roosevelt Boulevard.

The doer, to Captain Moffitt’s experienced eye, was a strung-out junkie, a poor, skinny, dirty Irish kid who had somehow got hooked on the shit and was, with a thirty-dollar Saturday Night Special .22 revolver, trying to score enough money for a hit, or something to eat, or probably both.

“I’m a police officer,” Captain Moffitt said gently. “Put the gun down, son, before somebody gets hurt.”

The doer, subsequently identified as a poor, skinny Irish kid who had somehow gotten hooked on a pharmacist’s encyclopedia of controlled substances, and whose name was Gerald Vincent Gallagher, fired every .22 Long Rifle cartridge his pistol held at Captain Moffitt, and managed to hit him once.

That was enough. The bullet ruptured an artery, and Captain Richard F. Moffitt died a minute or so later, slumped against the wall of the diner.

The killing of any cop triggers a deep emotional response in every other policeman. And “Dutch” Moffitt was not an ordinary cop. He was a captain. He was the son of a cop. His brother had been a cop, and it was immediately recalled that the brother, a sergeant, had been shot to death while answering a silent alarm.

And Captain Dutch Moffitt had been the commanding officer of Highway Patrol. Highway Patrol had been organized years before to do what its name implied. The first Highway Patrolmen had patrolled the highways throughout the city on motorcycles. The breeches, boots, and leather jackets of Highway Patrol motorcylists were still worn, although radio patrol cars now outnumbered motorcycles.

Highway Patrol had become, beginning with the reign of Captain Jerry Carlucci (and later with the blessing of Inspector Carlucci, and Chief Inspector Carlucci, and Deputy Commissioner Carlucci, and Commissioner Carlucci, and now Mayor Carlucci), a special force.

Although the Philadelphia Ledger, which did not approve of much that Mayor Carlucci did, was prone to refer to the Highway Patrol as “Carlucci’s Commandos” and even as his “Jackbooted Gestapo,” just about everyone else in Philadelphia recognized Highway Patrol and its officers, who rode two men to an RPC, and who did most of their patrolling in high-crime areas of the city, as something special.

Getting into Highway was difficult. As a general rule of thumb, an officer had to have four or five years, good years, on the job. It helped to be about six feet and at least 175 pounds, and it helped if you had come to the attention of someone who was (or had been) a Highway supervisor—that is, a sergeant or better—and he had decided that you were a better cop than most. An assignment to Highway was seen by many as a good step to take if you wanted to rise above sergeant elsewhere in the Police Department.