He Took $8,000 Every Tuesday. The NYPD Missed Him 15 Times.

For six years a New York City police officer parked a red Corvette outside his own station house in Brooklyn. He owned four homes on a salary of four hundred dollars a week. Nobody asked. Michael Dowd joined the NYPD in 1982 and spent most of the decade in the 75th Precinct in East New York — at the time the most violent square mile in the city. By the end he was collecting eight thousand dollars in cash every Tuesday from a car stereo shop. Twenty times what the city paid him. Over six years, at least fifteen separate corruption complaints were filed against him inside the department. Not one was ever substantiated. When he was finally arrested, in May 1992, it was not the NYPD that arrested him. It was the Suffolk County Police, sixty miles away, for crimes he committed in Brooklyn. Twenty years earlier the Knapp Commission — the one Frank Serpico set in motion — had asked whether the NYPD had corrupt officers. The Mollen Commission asked a different question: whether the department could tell. Case File #010. CHAPTERS 0:00 Act I — The Corvette 3:07 Act II — East New York 6:37 Act III — Tuesdays 10:16 Act IV — Fifteen Complaints 13:35 Act V — Suffolk County 16:18 Act VI — I Guess I'd Have To Say SOURCES The Mollen Commission report, "Anatomy of Failure" (1994), and Dowd's sworn testimony at its public hearings on 27 September 1993. Both public documents. His sentence was reported as fourteen years by the Washington Post on the day; other accounts give sixteen. We use the contemporaneous figure. Photo: "Mike outside a poster for the UK premiere of Precinct Seven Five" (14 May 2015) by Ekardz, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. NEONOIR investigates real crimes — unsolved murders, mysterious disappearances, high-profile cases, and the stories behind the stories. Researched. Documented. Told without compromise. New case file every four days. FAIR USE DISCLAIMER Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act: fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research is not an infringement of copyright. We use images and content in accordance with YouTube Fair Use copyright guidelines. All rights belong to their respective owners. #truecrime #nypd #policecorruption