When Did I Start Looking Like a Cop?

By Joseph Belcastro

A Brooklyn native, Joseph Belcastro joined the New York City Police Department in July, 1983. He spent four years on uniform patrol, then another four years in the precincts plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit, before being transferred to the NYPDs infamous Street Crime Unit on Randalls Island. In his tell-all memoir, Joe describes his earliest encounters as a rookie cop in uniform, how he developed his unique crime-fighting strategies, and the partners he had along the way. Joes uncanny ability to follow his gut instincts, along with his determination and perseverance, led him to personally make over a thousand arrests, and to assist his partners in at least a thousand more. Ride along with Joe on his vehicle pursuits, sit in the back seat of his car stops, and in the process share the triumphs and disappointments in the life of a street cop. Its a ride you wont want to miss!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532009006

Joseph Belcastro

Joseph Belcastro had the drive, the ambition, and the street smarts to become one of the best undercover cops in New York City. Retired from the force for thirteen years, he is currently working as an explosion detection  canine handler.

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WHEN DID I START LOOKING LIKE A COP?

Copyright © 2016 Joseph Belcastro.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-0901-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0900-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016918189

iUniverse rev. date: 11/02/2016

Contents

Preface

1. About Me

2. I Get the Nod

3. Cops like Me

4. My First Day

5. NSU

6. Naked (of Knowledge) and Afraid

7. Off-Duty Collar (Not)

8. The Village Constable

9. They Call Me Bellhop

10. Hard to Make

11. The Stabbing Victim

12. Lucked Out

13. Hitching a Ride

14. I Didn’t Know That

15. It Was a Snowy Day

16. The Angry Fellow

17 Man with a Gun

18. Freeze-Frame

19. Flying

20. They Don’t Know Him

21. Plainclothes

22. Piano Keys

23. Box Cutter Robber

24. I’m a Girl

25. They Got Me Good

26. The Old Handkerchief Switch

27. Time to Go

28. The Street Crime Unit

29. I’m on the Sheet

30. The Color of the Shield

31. You Never Know Whom You Might Be Dealing With

32. Something Just Didn’t Lay Right

33. This Time It’s One Strike, and They’re In

34. Wannabe Westie or Make-Believe Cop?

35. What Are the Odds?

36. Bad Credit Score

37. Mama’s Got a Gun

38. Ambulance Chasers

39. One and Not Done

40. Old School

41. End of the Line

42. Time’s Up

43. Out-of-State Pursuit

44. Draw Your Own Conclusion

45. Pushed the Wrong Button

46. You Got Me

47. Side-View Mirror

48. The Things I’ve Seen

49. What’s Going On

50. Epilogue

PREFACE

P ure instinct is what transformed me from civilian to cop—forever. There was no going back.

I was a New York City police officer from July 1983 until July 2003. What follows is a compilation of short stories chosen from my twenty-year career policing the streets of some of the most dangerous precincts across the five boroughs of New York City. These stories provide an inside look into proactive policing in the eighties and nineties—a sampling, if you will, of what it was like to be a cop back then.

I will take you deep into the night, while most people were sleeping. Whether I was in uniform or plainclothes, my partners and I were out there, night after night, looking for the people who were looking to do harm to other people—bad guys out to destroy innocent lives and those of their families.

Not unlike hunters, we relied heavily on our instincts, watching and waiting. Observant, methodical, persistent, and determined, we got results, or we didn’t go home.

I suspect that there will never be another unit quite like the Street Crime Unit. The days of following, searching, and investigating suspects based on our training, experience, and gut instinct seem to be long gone. I am so grateful to have worked during a time when we were empowered to make a real difference. And live to write about it.

1

About Me

M y name is Joseph Belcastro. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1956. My father was a longshoreman (like Marlon Brando’s character in On the Waterfront )—guys who take the stuff off the ship but never take a trip on it. We didn’t have a car back then, so he used to take the bus and train to work, always with that hook hanging over his shoulder. My mother was a typist in this huge room with about fifty other women typists (I think that’s called a typing pool.) She worked in Brooklyn on Eighty-Sixth Street under the L train. I had an older brother and a younger sister.

We lived in the Dyker Heights section with all the rest of the Italians. I grew up playing in the streets: hide-and-go-seek, ring-a-levio, stickball, slap ball, scully, and army. We flipped baseball cards and played colors. We’d roller-skate with those metal skates that would clamp onto the outside of our shoes using skate keys. The neighborhood kids would form teams and play baseball in the summer and football in the winter. All I ever wanted was to be a baseball player and to play with the New York Yankees, of course. When I was around eight years old, my mother took me to the optometrist, who told her that I needed glasses. Man, that was like the worst day of my life! I used to keep them hidden in my pocket and only put them on when absolutely necessary. I was so ashamed I had to wear them when none of my friends did.

Things were tough for us growing up. We lived in a small apartment. Our furniture consisted of lawn chairs, cast-off hassocks, folding beds, and a kitchen table. By 1968 we were able to move to Staten Island; we bought a house with my great-aunt (on my mother’s side) and settled into Sunnyside. We lasted only two years there. My great-aunt turned out to be just one of a fast-growing group of people my father just couldn’t get along with, so we were forced to sell. We relocated to the Fort Wadsworth section of Staten Island, but now I was pretty far from where I had been attending high school, and it was taking me forever to get there and back every day. I got lucky in my senior year when my father brought home a used Gremlin for my mother to drive. She refused to even get behind the wheel, so I had a car I could use to drive myself to school every day.

I played baseball in high school but wasn’t good enough to get a scholarship, and my parents couldn’t afford to send me to college without one. There weren’t many options available to me back then, so I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Those two years would end up being the catalyst for everything that would come later on. But by the time I was (honorably) discharged, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I took a job as a security guard at a local hospital in Staten Island. I soon realized that was going nowhere; I suppose I could’ve taken advantage of the GI Bill and gone to college, but that wasn’t where my head was at the time. I had taken a couple of city and state law enforcement civil service exams, and the first one to call was a New York State correction officer. Both my buddy Les and I passed the test, and I talked him into taking the job with me.

We wound up relocating to Upstate New York to be closer to the prison we were assigned to, but after a year, I’d had enough. My girlfriend (who later became my wife) had dreams of moving to Florida to open a business of our own, so I left Les and the Department of Corrections behind and moved south. I worked for a furniture store delivering furniture and then moved up to selling it. After about a year, we were able to buy a small beer-wine-and-soda store. It was going well for a while until the day Les came to visit …

2

I Get the Nod

F or the past two years my wife and I had been living in Florida. I owned a small beer-wine-and-soda store, and we were doing okay. It seemed we had found our place and settled into what we thought life should be. If something was tugging at me, I wasn’t able to put my finger on it. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing—making a life for me, my wife, and the family we would one day have.

We were expecting our first child when my one of my best friends, Les, came to Coral Springs to visit for the week. He had recently graduated from the New York Police Department Police Academy, and he loved it. Born and raised in New York City, becoming a NYC police officer had always been a dream of mine (right behind playing for the New York Yankees)—a dream my wife had successfully talked me out of several times. But now she watched my face as Les told me how excited he was to be a cop and talked about how if I came back to New York we could even be partners one day. She knew there was no talking me out of it this time.

Les left promising that he would check with the NYPD Applicant Investigation Unit to see if I was still eligible to be hired. Les telephoned a few days later and informed me that I was good to go. It meant selling my business in Florida, packing up, and moving back to New York City and finding a place to live—all on the chance that I would survive the background investigation and the physical, medical, and psychological testing that is part of the lengthy evaluation process a candidate endures before he or she can become a recruit. I was risking it all, but I also knew that to not take this chance would be to live a life of what could have been.

It was 1981. We traveled to New York and found an apartment in the Grymes