Green is for irish green card and all about the money

Inside Story The sleepy Cavan Town estate where Luke Waters now resides is a far cry from his Dublin origins, let alone the adrenalin-pumping life of a New York City cop responsible for well over a thousand arrests. The Celt hears his story...

Damian McCarney

having worked in the NYPD over the last two decades Luke Waters has a story or two. Sitting at his Loreto Wood kitchen table, and with a book to pitch, he’s happy to regale us. Along the way he notes “this isn’t in the book” with such regularity the Celt is left wondering what on earth is in the book? However, the yarns that do make print were colourful enough for Simon & Schuster, the biggest publishers in the US to snap up the rights for NYPD Green.
“NYPD Green: Green is for Irish, green is for green card, green is for all about the money,” says Luke in his hybrid Bronx-brogue as his wife Susan pours the tea. It’s Susan’s Cavan roots that explain why they’ve relaxed into retirement on the Breffni beat. “Your overtime depended on bodies [arrests]. Every body was five hours overtime. So if there’s four detectives and a sergeant and we all want five hours just today, we need five arrests. If we want 10 hours, we need 10 arrests.”
Despite the apparent cynicism of the job coming down to money, Luke insists he was always destined to be a cop; but he had expected it would be with An Garda Síochána. The gardaí percolate through the Waters bloodline - two sisters work in stations, a brother’s in the narcotics squad, cousins galore don the blue uniform daily, as do uncles, and both his granddads were founding members. Luke completed the interviews and was accepted into its fold, pending a medical. However a States-side holiday in 1985 came between Luke and his apparent destiny. He was smitten by New York.
After a spell mixing cocktails in bars (he’s eternally grateful to Cavan publican Connie O’Reilly for giving him a job) Luke eventually gained legal status and again opened the possibility of joining the police. In 1993 he entered the NYPD’s Police Academy, aged 27.
“It was one of the happiest days of my life because it was what I wanted to do from the time I could remember,” he says.
He found the Academy “a breeze”; the humdrum reality of his first posting, less so.
“When you come out of the police academy you are pumped up to fight crime,” notes Luke. He was assigned to the 17th precinct, the affluent, east side of Manhattan - a “very political precinct” with residents who are “very rich” and “very powerful”.
“I didn’t last too long in that precinct,” he says gleefully. Manning a static post at an ambassadorial residence, the only hint of excitement was to catch a chance glimpse of the local big shots - Sean Connery reportedly lived nearby. The tedium was finally broken by a woman dressed in such a way that, “you could tell she was somebody”. The lady reported a dog loose in a nearby park, but Luke didn’t share her concern.
“There’s a sign right at the front saying: ‘No dogs allowed’. So I just say, ‘Maybe the dog can’t read the sign’.
“I’m standing here day in day out, I’m waiting for the crime, I’m waiting for the bank robbery, and I get Fluffy the dog! I’m nodding my head - this is not what I signed up for...”
Minutes later Luke’s rushed in a patrol car, sirens blaring, lights flashing, to the commander of the precinct, nicknamed ‘Mussolini of Manhattan’ given his hard line on discipline. ‘Who the hell do you think you are - telling Mrs Heinz, the Ketchup Queen the dog can’t read the sign?’ barked his superior.
Fluffy-gate saw Luke ‘volunteer’ as a member of the Manhattan Task Force, which turned out to be a lucky break. The task force were the front line at riots or unleashed en masse in high-crime areas.
“If there was a lot of crime last Friday night in a particular area, we will go in there 200 cop manpower and flood the area and I can assure you there will be no crime next Friday night. It’s known as the omnipresence.”
The hairiest riot he was ever deployed to help quell was sparked when a cop, Justin Volpe, arrested a Haitian, Abner Louima at a gay bar, and proceeded to sexually assault him with a plunger handle.
“This is not in just an inch or two - this is right up; this is serious internal injuries. This was a big case; this was major riots with the black community in New York City, and we were losing control of this protest.”
Initially Luke felt sorry for Volpe, assuming a cop could never stoop so low. When Volpe pleaded guilty, and was given almost three decades in prison, where he remains today, Luke recalls, “my heart almost dropped”.
“Then I was outraged that a judge would give him 29 years - should have gave him life without parole.”
Being on the frontline, was this when he felt most vulnerable?
“I’ve been involved in police shootings, but it can happen anywhere. You can never let your guard down, you take nothing as routine.”
To prove the point he recalls one grim tale from his spell in narcotics. Now promoted to the rank of detective having proved his worth in the task force, Luke was deployed to make drugs arrests to justify overtime. He’s ordered by his superior, Kollmer, to arrest “a kid” smoking marijuana - it’s worth five hours’ overtime. Luke and his fellow detective only reluctantly cuff the kid because he is paralysed, having previously been shot in the back. Upon Luke’s colleague retrieving the kid’s wheelchair, “out slid a 25 calibre semi-automatic pistol”.
“Kollmer turns around and says, ‘See? I keep telling you guys - never let your guard down!’”
As the laughs subside, Luke adds that the kid also had vials of heroin for sale concealed in his wheelchair. However he appreciates that the anecdote could have had a tragic ending had the gun not slipped out.
“[Had] he got that gun in a cell, and a guy that has nothing to live for and he’s high on drugs - that’s the biggest nightmare of your career right there.”
The biggest nightmare that actually did befall Luke’s career - like many other cops - was the fall-out from the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. He had just rose to the rank of detective in Fort Apache in the 42 precinct after eight years in the job, but was now part of the biggest mobilisation of the NYPD ever. “It’s just a scene out of a war movie,” he recalls having seen the dust and debris strewn aftermath as news of friends and acquaintances killed in the attack filtered through. As the days passed, the rescue mission became a recovery mission, and he was deployed at the Staton Island landfill for the most macabre of duties, assisting medics in identifying the remains of victims from amongst the rubble, and transported on a barge from Ground Zero.
“Our job was to bring five pound buckets; you would fill one bucket up with body parts, and the next bucket for personal items.
“Truthfully I didn’t know what type of body parts these were, and I’m a detective dealing with a lot of dead bodies. Someone could say, it could be a bit of an arm, a bit of a leg, we didn’t know. We would try our best for the victims’ families to try to get some sort of remains back... We truthfully as detectives we did our best.
“Do you know what our biggest problem was? We had a new war on our hands - now I’m not talking about a hundred, or a thousand - I’m talking about thousands of seagulls. We’d be running and you’d turn around and grab the bucket and it’s half gone. I’m talking about no end of seagulls.”
The Police Department resorted to sound cannons to scare off the scavengers, but they soon became immune to it.
“The next cannon would go off - BOOM! - the birds would just fly two feet off the ground and back down. And after a while we just did our best.”
His best wasn’t always good enough in other aspects of the job. During the post-9/11 mayhem, and his mounting caseload, that he was also trying to solve his first murder case; a guy who was stabbed in the leg and bled to death just around the corner from the Police Department. His chief suspect was from the Dominican Republic (DR), so Luke entered the assailant’s details in the system for the customs’ net to close should he try to flee. Luke was therefore vexed with customs when he discover the suspect made it home. The customs officer was having none of it:
“He goes ‘Buddy, we’re on high alert here for terrorists, we’re not interested in some misdemeanour homicide in the Bronx’. With the confusion of 9-11 that’s the way it was. That’s what it was like for us to go through as detectives.”
Whether it’s cuffing drug dealers, or pursuing murderers, NYPD Green charts Luke’s attempts to do his best.
But how can he make the transition to civilian life in Cavan?
“In the beginning you sort of miss it, but you gotta remember we do this for a living, this is every day... it does get tiring.”