Chapter 98: Shadows of the City- Homicide, Mystery, & The Murder of Henryk Siwiak w/ Vic Ferrari

0:00 Hi guys. I'm Courtney and I'm Lisa, and welcome to the next chapter in the Book of the Dead, brought to you by Darkcast Network Indie Podcasts with a Twist. Hello, Hello, welcome to the next chapter of the Book of the Dead. Back with me today is Vic Ferrari. I had such a good time talking to him, and I know you guys are really enjoyed hearing his stories.

0:42 So he is back for more, and this time we're going to get a little bit more into the nitty gritty. So Vic, thank you so much for joining me again. It's really exciting to have you back. Oh Courtney, thank you so much for having me back. I really appreciate it. So I know last time we talked is definitely a little bit more lighthearted, more the craziness that comes with being a detective. But what I really want to know is what were some dark moments being a detective? How did even as like a rookie cop, you know, what did that look like? How did they prepare you for homicides? I should hope they're not just going to throw you into a homicide investigation. Go here, you go have fun. You know, how did they prap you for that. What was that like?

1:25 So it starts to the police Academy and it's not so much homicide, it's death. And you know, when you signed up for this, you're gonna you're gonna see it and you're going to be around it. So probably about a month or two into the police Academy, the NYPD's Police Academy, my class was twelve hundred recruits, which is a mid size recruit. A small police academy class is five hundred. Sometimes they go as big as twenty five hundred, and you're broken down into classrooms or companies of thirty. So one day, our company instructor tells us, all right, tomorrow we're going to go to Bellevue. We're going to go to the Morgue. And he's just telling us what we're going to see and what we're going to be prepared to see. But nothing could prepare you for it.

2:06 So it was like a class trip. We're in all little police academy uniforms and we walked down to Bellevue, which Bellevue is a tremendous medical center. They also have an insane asylum there. That's a story for another day. But so they take us to the morte and it was like something out of silence of the land. We get into like this freight elevator at like thirty of us and it's big. Well, maybe went in groups of fifteen each, I don't remember, but we go into the basement and I remember the second you got off. In that basement you could smell debt. It was like unmistakable. It was mixed with like in bombing fluid or chemicals. And it was cold. I remember like we were wearing jackets and it still was cold. Now, I was expecting from what I saw on television, like an episode of Quincy, where there would be one body laying on a slab with a guy with a tape recorder and a guy in a lab coat. It was nothing like that. It was more like an eight bay Jiffy loop and there was like eight slabs. There was eight bodies and they were cutting and I had never seen anything like it before in my life. And between each slab was a produce scale. So remember when you were a kid, your mother go to the market, there'd be a produce scale and you put a head of lettuce in there and you'd weigh it. They were pulling organs out of people weighing it and then writing shit down. And I remember them taking a brain out of a guy, putting it in the scale and whatever it was two point three pounds, and them laughing about it because the guy had a small brain. And what I found amazing was some of the tools they used at the margue. So if you've ever been to like a minor key or a Midas

3:37 where you need your muffler cutout or the muffler pipe, it's called a wizard tool. And what they do is they saw the back of your skull and then they grab it and it's like a movie. They pull your face over to the side and they cracked. They separate your head and they just reach out there and pop your brain out. And when they cut you open in the front, they sew you up with it actually looked like a rubber cord. It was. It was the grossest thing that I ever seen in my life. I remember some of the autopsy's there. There was a young man who had been shot multiple times and theme is standing there and he's got this tool. It looked like a forcips and he's reaching into each hole in this guy and he's digging around. He's pulling out a slug and he's dropping the slug on the table and it's like dank dankdink. Hanging over his shoulder is this gnarly detective who's eating an egg McMuffin and drinking a cup of coffee, and he's asking the meme, so what do you think?

4:40 And the emme turned around and goes suspicious suicide and everybody started laughing because the guy was shot like forty times. So I quickly realized that there's humor with death. But I also realized that that it was at that point in my training in the police academy, this was about to get real. And the the first time I saw a dead body outside of the Morgan again, I saw like eight autopsies going on at once. Was I was a rookie cop and I was standing out on foot and the sergeant said, come on, kid, you got a safeguard A doa And I was like, huh. So in the NYPD, when someone dies in their home or in a house or in a dwelling, be it a suspicious death or not a suspicious death? The police come, they start a preliminary investigation, They ask questions. The detectives come they ask more questions, they go through medications pills, they'll call the doctors names who are on the pills and speak to them. Then what happens is the detectives leave and the body isn't going anywhere until the medical examiner comes and makes the call on it. So what happens is there's only one medical examiner working in a burrow.

5:55 So in a place like the Bronx of Brooklyn on a Friday night with his multiple homicides suspicious deaths, you're gonna be there for a while. So the medical examiner'll come four or five, six hours later, he'll come in and he'll say, he'll look around, he'll ask questions, he'll go suspicious death. This body's going to the morgue. He's gonna get on the phone and the morgue wagon's going to show up. If it's not a suspicious death, he's gonna say, okay, he's going to tell the family, pull your funeral home, make your arrangements. But the cop has to stay there in that apartment or wherever until that body leaves. Called sitting on a doa. So, as a rookie cop, my first time sitting on a doa is My sergeant brings me into an apartment and there's a dead guy. And the guy died. He was probably middle aged, early fifties. He died over a coffee table. He was kind of hanging off the side of a coffee table and rigamortis had set in, which means your body starts to get stiff. And next to his hand on the floor was a pistol. But he wasn't shot. So what is this He died, there's no so they thinking maybe he did me. It was a small cowber round. Maybe we can't see the hole right that the detectives are moving them a crime scene, and the detectives are moving them around, right, they leave, but they leave me in the apartment with this guy while they're going to go canvass the neighborhood and ask questions. Well, it was a suspicious death, and I'm going to tell you how he got killed. The guy a couple of hours earlier or

7:26 the day before, was sitting on the sidewalk fixing his car. He was fixing his door. The door didn't line up and he got into an argument with the neighbor. They had a beef over something. The neighbor grabbed the guy's head took the car door and slammed his head in the car door several times, the doorjam and banged it. Guy sustained a massive head injury. The guy was able to get up, get into his apartment, retrieve a pistol. He was going to go back downstairs and resolve this in street court, where he died of a massive hemorrhage and fell over the coffee table and dropped the gun. So when the detectives went downstairs and started asking questions, what happened to Julio, Well, he had a fight with wan and one basically used his head as a door jam and slammed his head in the door a couple of times. They asked one, Yeah, we got it. We're fighting over a girl or whatever it was. That guy was charged with manslaughter or whatever he was charged. I was a kid, I was a rookie. I really had not All I did was sit in the apartment and watch a dead body until the medical examiner it came.

8:29 But as a young cop you do that a lot because you're expendable, so they throw you into these things. And what's nasty about responding to das, especially in residence when people die the family members get involved. This belonged to me. That belonged to me. So you're actually a referee in those situations. And you have to search a dead body. NYPD procedure is you got to go through their pockets, make sure to their wallet. If they're wearing jewelry, yeah, to take that off, you have to voucher it. You have to put it in a security envelope. Now, the old timers aren't going to touch a dead body. That's what the kids are for. And I can remember going in my first couple of days with an old time who would throw me a set of gloves and go there you go, kid, And I've had it. So would people die and they're in an apartment or a house for a couple of days, the gases in your stomach start to swell, you start to bloat, and if you touch that body or stop moving it around, it pops and all the fluid zoos out of it. So what you gotta do is, like I remember, there was there was an overweight woman one time that died in her bed.

9:37 The old timer told me we threw the comforter over and we rocked her and then we got the hell out of there and she just basically popped and then I had to put gloves on, and oh, it's like something out of a friggin horror movie. It's that's something I did not miss about police work. So one doay I had. I had just got into the precinct out of field training. I'm like, great, I'm not gonna to get as many days because I was come at you fast and furious, especially if you work in a precinct with there's a lot of old people. They're just dropping down in their apartment and you know, the neighbor smells something coming out of missus rosen Schwartz's apartment and we haven't seen her in a while, and then you got to break down the door and you know, find these poor people. So I was working at midnight and I was given the assignment go to this apartment. There's another rookie cop that's safeguard in the d away from the four to twelve. You're just gonna relieve him and wait for the medical examine. I was like, okay, I go up to the apartment. This rookie cop can't wait to get away from it. It's like all right, and he leaves, just leaves me up there. It's an older black gentleman.

10:42 He died in his apartment. He was in the hallway. He died between rooms. Look like a heart attack. And whenever I was on Ada, I don't know, maybe it's me. I used to just kind of like walk around the rooms and just try to get an idea of how this person lived and what they were like. And I'd look photos and stuff that were I wouldn't touch anything, but if there was something on the mantel and the guy looked like a decent guy, I could tell he was a bus driver. So I'm up there about a half hour. There's a knock on the door. I think it's the medical examiner. It's another old black gentleman. And he goes, that's my brother. Can I come in? I said, oh no, yeah, yeah, come on, and everything's taken care of. We're just waiting for the medical examiner. Just don't touch anything. Goes no, no, no, he goes. You know, he goes, and the guy is telling me, he goes. You know. My brother and I we grew up in North Carolina. We came up here in the nineteen fifties for a better life, and we both became bus drivers, they never married. One brother lived upstairs, one brother lived downstairs, and he's just telling me about his brother's life. Next thing I know, this guy goes into the fridge, comes out with two beers and he opens him and he hands me one. Now, I'm a rookie cop on probation. I'm not allowed to drink.

11:47 And I goes, sir, I'm not allowed to drink. He goes, son, I'm not drinking alone tonight. So what am I gonna do? Tell this guy? No. Me and this old guy are cracking beers right with his dead brother in the hallway, and he's just telling me about their lives. And it was fascinating. So about three four beers in there is a knock on the door. In comes the medical examiner. He's eating a slice of pizza, drinking of coffee, his pants are untopped, fucking slop, and he comes in. He looks at the body, asked about three questions. He goes, Okay, have the funeral home and take the body. You know, not suspicious debt, I said, all right, So the old guy calls the funeral home. The funeral home shows up, and that's another bizarre thing. When someone's got riga mortis, and you got to get him into a body bag.

12:38 They're stiff, so you're like breaking bones and cartilage and cracking them to get him into that bag. It's a friggin nightmare. It's like they pop. So we got him in the bag. They take him out, and I, you know, I thank the old guy for his hospitality. He goes into the fridge and he hands me another beer and he goes for the next time we meet. And I that really messed with my mind because I'm saying to myself, does he mean if he dies in his apartment, does he want me to find him? You know, was he thanking me like it was the bizarrest thing when he said that for the next time we meet, Like, well, the odds I was going to meet this guy again. And you know, I never ran into him again. And thank god I didn't have to go back into that building for that. But I never forgot that, And that's a story in one of my books. You know that it just was the bizarrest thing. But those are peaceful deaths.

13:32 If you want homicides, I can go into those two. Oh yeah, no, we need to go into We need to go into some of the homicides. I know you didn't work homicides really, you know, you were in auto crimes and organized crime, but did homicides ever cross over into your work, you know, did you have to work homicides? Yeah, So in organized crime, we're not responding to a homicide. But like I told Jo on last week's episode when we were talking about we were on a wire tap and these guys are talking about homicides in the past. So what we're gonna do is we're going to gather as much information as we can, and when we take down the case, we're gonna interview these guys and then we're gonna hand it to homicide because that's what those guys do day in and day out. You don't want to screw up their case. You don't want to step on anyone's toes. So yeah, I mean with the organized crime cases, if guys talked about homicides, we would run with it. But I came across more homicides when I was a patrol cop because you're responding to things. So sometimes the homicides are you know, people killing each other, and then there's sometimes police involved shootings. And one of the first police involved shootings I ever went to was.

14:46 It was the early nineties. It was like October. It was a warm night and it was raining and it was quiet, and we were at the other end of the precinct and a domestic violence comes over at this apartment at the sleepy end of the precinct. So the dispatcher gives it to a radio car and they're responding, and another car said, we'll get to back them up. So you got two cars going to this right. The next thing you know, the dispatcher goes over the radio and says, I'm getting multiple, multiple, multiple calls on this, So now you know it's something if everybody in the building is calling up and saying there's some crazy shit going on in apartment three B. So we said we're gonna go. So now you got three cars going and it's raining.

15:26 So the first radio car gets there. It was three story of four story garden apartments. First car gets there, pulls up on the side of the building, not in front, and it's raining. It's drizzling out, and these cops are in their early twenties, they're young, they're full of pisson vinegar. They get out of the radio car, they hear screaming from one of the windows. Ninety nine percent of cops would have went around to the side of the building and went from through the front door. They decide to go up the fire eskate. These guys go up the fire eskate. They get to the window, they look inside and there's a guy laying on top of a woman with a butcher knife and he's trying to cut her head off. These two guys get on the radio when they're screaming, get the frigging cavalry here. There's a man decapitating a woman. So now we're around the block. My radio car and the other radio car pull up out front.

16:16 We hear several shots bab bab by by mob right, so we go over the air. Shots fired. We run up the stairs. As we're coming up the stairs as a thirteen year ten twelve, thirteen year old boy, he's running down the stairs and he's screaming, he's killing my mother. He's killing my mother. So now I mean, now all hell's broken loose. We get up to the door. We're trying to kick in the door, and we hear two of our coworkers in the apartment screaming at the top of their lungs. Don't shoot, we're inside the apartment. Don't shoot, it's us. Open the door. They open the door. The two cops are in the apartment. They opened the door. And the first thing I'll never forget was it looked like someone lit a pack of firecrackers off in the apartment, because it's full of gunpowder because of all the shots that got thrown in there. As we're walking into the apartment, the second thing I noticed is there's not one thing in that apartment that hasn't been destroyed. The walls are broken, the toilet's broken, there's holes in everything. It's just the whole apartment's destroyed. Look like a hurricane went through it.

17:15 Now there's two bodies. As we get into the living room, she's laid out. Her entire neck is missing pretty much. The only thing that's keeping her head on her body as her spine. She's got a hole in her head from where he hit her with a hammer. And you know you see on TV when people die and their eyes are closed, her mouth was wide open and it was like something out of a harm or. She's looking right at me, but her whole neck was gone. He was a couple of feet away. What happened was the cops were banging on the window screaming at him, which diverted his attention from her. He got up with the butcher knife. He goes, oh, you want some of this. He ran over the window, threw it open, and he started swinging that knife and my two buddies back then we used to before we went to nine millimeters, we carried thirty eight, which at thirty eight is a larger projectile.

18:05 It just doesn't go as fast. It doesn't have as much speed, like a thirty eight goes nine hundred feet per second and nine millimeter goes twelve hundred fet per second. But with a thirty eight up close and personal, is gonna do more damage. So when he threw open that window, the two cops emptied their thirty eights into him, which sent him flying back into the apartment. He fell back, the knife flew out of his hand and went into the next room. So as we're walking around the apartment, I realized my feet are sticking to the floor. There's so much blood from the two of them that my feet were like sticking to the floor. So I told the two cops ago, I gotta get you out of it. You guys gotta go to the hospital. So my one friend is like, they're gonna think we shot an unarmed man.

18:47 The knife went into the next room. I go, dude, you're good. Just trust me on this. Don't touch anything. You know, you see in the movies the cops like, you're gonna go into the next room and pick up the knife. You don't do that shit. I go, dude, you're good. She's dead. You know you're fine. It's gonna be a good shooting. So we rushed him to the hospital and later on that night he's touching his pants. It was a hole, a slit in his pants. The guy got that close with the knife. It went through. The cops wear baggy pants because we're cheap and we don't go to the tailor. So when you get a pair of duty pants, no cop, unless you're in Florida. When they send you to the tail and they pick up the tap, you'll notice that white feedy guys they have fans are baggy because they're not going to the tailor.

19:28 That knife went right through his pant leg. Oh my god. And those guys were never the same after that, Like they were active cops. They were always making arrests. One guy was never the same again. I mean, he did his twenty years, but his focus was other and the other guy became like an ordained minister. So it definitely for people that think that like cops to shoot people and get over it. It affects different guys different ways. Oh absolutely, And I do think that's crazy when some people are like, oh, you know, like they don't care. You know, they're they're paid to shoot, or they're they're paid to do this, they're paid to just deal with it. It's like you're I mean, especially in a situation like that, it's already a traumatic situation, like you're watching a guy like kill a woman, but then the guy's coming at you and you have to shoot, like he's got a knife, he's already proven he could kill. He's gonna do it again.

20:18 That's so traumatic. Well, think of they're a straight they held cops are afraid. The average cop is afraid of getting in trouble. They're not afraid of losing their lives. I was never afraid of getting killed. I was afraid of getting in trouble. The reality is they could have shot him through the glass while he was hanging over her, stabbing her. The point that they waited that long for him to come across with that knife and open the window before they lit him up shows the amount of a strait they had until it got it was him or them. No, absolutely, And I think that's another thing that there's a misconception about that because obviously, yes, there are bad people in every job. Of course, there are good cops are bad cops, but like there's a lot of restraint there is. There is. There's a lot of restraint because I'm sure a lot of times that the natural reaction to stop something like that is to use violence or a brief horse or whatever, and you can't. That's asking for an even worse situation.

21:17 Right. Were there any homicides that didn't get solved that you either heard about or you worked on, even partially, that you you still think about. I don't know if it was stopped. So the NYP is so big. People think like you get involved in something and you're with it from beginning to end. When you're a patrol cop, you respond to things and unless it goes to trial or an arrest is made, you got to testify. You really don't know, so early in my career. We're driving over by co Op City in the Bronx and there's there's an abandoned dump on the way to City Island. And it was it was a Friday night. We were doing a six at night till two in the morning. Was late. It's about eleven o'clock at night, and we see fire trucks putting out fire on a little Toyota. So we pull up and we go what happened. They go, I don't know. We think it's an insurance job. They set a fire in the interior of the car, which that's in the Bronx. Back in the day, that was everybody's way to get out of a car payment was fifty cents worth of gas in a match, burn their car and then report it to their insurance company. So it was an interior fire.

22:26 No one was around. They take the plates off the back of the car and they go, let's open the trunk. They pop open the truck and there's two guys duct taped in the trunk. If one guy's looking at me, he's blinking, and the other guy's dead. He's got a bullet a couple of bullet holes in him. Then I look at the guy that's blinking at me, he's got a couple of bullet holes on it, Like holy shit. So we get these guys out of the trunk, take the duct tape off. One guy's dead, the other guy dies at the scene. But what we figured out was they were killed there because we found the shell casings on the floor next to the trunk. So whoever killed them tied them up, put them in the trunk, drove them over to that stretch of roadway where there's not a lot of people around at that hour, opened the trunk, lit him up, shot them both in the head several times, shut the trunk, and then set the interior on fire.

23:13 Oh my god, that sounds like something out of like a movie. Oh used to go walk all the time. It to be like you don't think about that, like no way. Well i'll tell you one that did get solved. That that's a wild one. Early nineties again. It was a Saturday night, September, early October. I'm actually the guy actually worked with was later killed. I'll go into that. Working with this cop, we're just coming off our meal hour. We took our lunch hour or dinner hour in the precinct and as we're coming out, the female cop on the on the ts the telephone switch book goes is people yelling in Spanish about it death in the house. I think it's a cardiac. Can you guys get up there? Like yeah, yeah, So we rush up there, sixth story, walk up, probably about the fourth floor. I can hear a screw. We get up to the apartment and the apartment's full of people. People are crying and screaming, and I'm kind of making my way through the apartment. The kitchen is like a galley kitchen that's kind of like it hooks off, and I see a set of legs sticking out of the kitchen. So I get into the kitchen and there's blood all over the walls. Now, if you've ever cut yourself, blood is bright red, but over time with oxygen, it turns like that rust color. So the blood was dry, and laying on top of this woman is her son, and he's just screaming and wailing and screaming, So like, come on, son, you gotta get up and get him up right. We bring him into the living room, get everybody out of the apartment. You know, it's his mother. She's been stabbed to dead. When was

24:45 the last time you saw your mother? He went from yelling and screaming and crying to measure when was the last time I saw my mother? Like four hours ago? Does she live alone? Does my mother live alone? So every question I asked this guy, he's repeating the question. He's buying time. I wasn't putting the screws to him. I was just asking him basic questions to get to the bottom of who are you? Who's this woman? How was the last time you saw her? So I turned to my part, and the apartment's been ransacked, and I'm looking around the apartment. I turned to my part and I go, do me a favor, write everything down. This guy says there's something not right with him. I get that he's upset, but there's just something not right. And the apartment's been ransacked. But then if you really look at it, it's been staged. So when a burglar breaks into your house or apartment, they're on the clock. The only overhead of burglars is getting caught, going to jail and getting his ass kicked by the owner. They're in and out, they're dumping shit out of the drawers, they're rummaging through it. They dumped the next draw Every drawer was dumped and then the drawers were put back. Who does that? The woman's bag is dumped upside down and placed right side up next to the dumb contents, and the credit cards were there. Now, this is the early nineties, before surveillance cameras. The credit cards. They would have burned through those credit cards. Whoever did this? That's odd. So the detectives come, they take him to the precinct to question him. We're tasked with hanging out with crime scene

26:20 and the medical examiner, so we voucher, you know, things in the apartment and stuff. And I get back to the precinct that night and I asked the detectives, like, what's going on with this? And they said, well, he knows more. We don't know if he did it, but he knows more than he's letting on. And he started getting a little ants. He didn't ask for a lawyer, which if someone asked for a lawyer, you can't question him no more. He goes. He started getting that he was tired and upset, so we didn't want to push it. We let him go home, but we're going to get up at six o'clock in the morning and drag him out of bed again. He just doesn't know it crossed the street from him. The deceased had three brothers that lived in the building across the street. They were asking all sorts of questions what happened to our sister, and the detective said, I think you should talk to your nephew.

27:10 Maybe you can get something out of him, because he's not really telling us. They said, okay. So in NYPD, here's another part of NYPD procedure. The first cops that respond to a homicide or a suspicious death the following day you have to go to the morgue to identify the body. It's just procedural. So my partner and I flipped a coin. Of course, I lost. Next morning, on a Sunday, on my day off, I get up, I put on my uniform and the morgue had changed. The morgue was at Jacoby Hospital, like I don't know, they were like between morgues or something. It was very shifty. So I go to Jacoby Hospital. It's a skeleton crew work and there's a young guy work in the desk.

27:52 I hand him the paperwork. I said him here to see this idea this woman. He goes, okay, so it, like I said, it wasn't like the drawers you see in the movie. It was like the seven eleven all right. You ever go into with seven eleven and you open the refrigerated door and you grab a soda, and then like you look in the back and you see some guy stocking shelves, like in the back. That's kind of what it was like. So he goes, He goes into this refrigerated room. He comes out with a gurney and he pulls off the sheet. It's a it's a Spanish guy with a beard. And I go, no female, Hispanic, fifty something years old? This you know this is a whino. This looks like a fucking homeless guy. He goes, oh, throws the sheet back on. The guy brings him back into the refrigerator room, comes back out with another another stiff, throws off the sheet. It's a black guy. I go, dude, I didn't come here to see every person that died last night in the Bronx. He had to see her.

28:51 Let me in there. So I walk in and it was like something out of a horror movie, like bad lighting, fluorescent lights, flickering, and I see all these dead bodies covered in sheets and in the NYPD, before they take the body, you fill out. It's called a toe tag. It's a little piece of oak tag with a string. And I recognize my handwriting and the deceased name. I pulled the sheet off. That's our right idea. I go back to the precinct and the detectives are celebrating. They're all high five in each other and stuff, and the Sun is sitting in a cell. So I go, what happened? So they got up bright and early. Thank god, the detectives were Spanish. They got up bright and early that morning. They went over to the building and when they were in the hallway they heard screaming in Spanish. The three uncles got up earlier, went to the apartment. The Sun was trying to leave the building and they go, where are you going? Like yeah, his bags packed, and they started yelling and screaming at him, and he explained that he stabbed his mother to death, and the detectives heard it because they were in the hallway. They laid back, they came out to kept them talking. He gave the whole thing up. So Sunny Boy was a crackhead, and he was on and off drugs, and when he was on drugs he would terrorize his mother and steal shit and abuse her and stuff. And she had enough, so she told him that Saturday afternoon, I watch you out.

30:15 I can't live like this anymore. He picked up a butcher knife and stamped it to death, took a shower, took the murder weapon, and all the bloody clothes he was wearing, put in a garbage bag and leaves the apartment and leaves the door Ajar, figuring I'll go I'll get rid of this stuff. I'll take off for a couple hours. One of the neighbors is going to see the door open. They're gonna find her. They'll call the police. I'll come back clean as a whistle. I don't know what happened. I went out. I was at my girlfriend's house. He comes back four hours later, after disposing of all this stuff. The door is still Ajar, but no one discovered her. People have seen him now coming and leaving the building. Now he's got to commit gets on the phony cour the precinct. Then he calls his uncle. Then he starts going into the song and dance with us and ultimately he was convicted of murder. I just checked a couple of weeks ago. That happened in nineteen ninety four.

31:11 He's still in jail. It's crazy stabbed his mother to them multiple times. Oh my god. Are you hear stories like that where like the kids like kill their parents for things like that, like the nonsense ry that's oh my god, speaking of oh my gods. You have you ever worked a case, whether it was homicide or when you were working with you know, the auto thefts and stuff. Was there ever a case where you were like, this whole thing is so bizarre, like none of this is real. This is not real life, Like this is the weirdest thing I've ever experienced. You know, was there anything like that that you had experienced on a job.

31:54 I mean, it's difficult for the average person, you know, and you grew up and you were raised, right, It's it's very difficult to understand why someone could kill somebody, whatever the motivation. You know, it's you know, unless someone's trying to hurt me or my family. You know, I wouldn't use deadly physical force on anyone. But when you start seeing these things and what people will do to other people for random acts of violence, or they just don't like somebody. Yeah, it's strange and bizarre. I've got a story like that. My old partner, we used to call him Cancer because he was in a couple of shoot he killed more people than cancer, But that's another story.

32:39 But he So it's the early nineties and we're young guys and we're going out to cop bars. And before I work with this guy, he used to work with a magician. Guy was a cop and in his spare time, yeah he was, he was an amateur magician, working kids parties and bar mitzvahs and shit. So anyway, we would go to the bar and we're trying to pick up girls and the magician would come over and he's making balloon animals and he's pulling flowers out of his sleeve and pulling coins. Like, how do you compete with this guy? So I told this guy I got his partner, I go get him out of here, Like, how do you compete with this guy? Goes If he spent more time doing police work than making balloon animals, he goes, he'd be the greatest crime fighter of all time. So, anyway, these two guys one midnight get called out to a basement apartment of a sixth story walk up in the Bronx, and it comes over COLLS fault nine one one COLLS fault hang up, So back then nine to one one, it didn't really pinpoints you to the apartment. So in six story buildings in the Bronx, and they're like underground layers, and there's usually one or two apartments where the superintendent lives and he lives there for free and he services.

33:50 He does all the work on the building. So they go down there and there's two apartments. They go to apartment number one. They bang on the door, no one answers. They go to apartment number two and my buddy's about to knock on the door, and the magician who's lazy, goes, come on, we made all this noise coming down here. No one's in there. This is bullshit. Let's go. My buddy goes to knock on the door again. He goes, come out and buy a cup of coffee, cops the cheap free coffee. My buddy doesn't knock on the door, and they leave. What they didn't realize is behind door number two, the super the building lived there and he was selling coke out of the apartment. He felt he got addicted to it. He fell behind on his payments to his wholesale he was buying weight in the drug world.

34:36 They don't, you know, cancel your cable or threaten to sue you. They're gonna kill you. So the guy knew we had a problem and he wasn't leaving his building very often. So to get this guy, they used to it's an old track. They brought an attractive female with them who was in on it. She knocks on the door. The guy looks out the window. He's like, oh shit, found money. He opens the door. The two hit men and her push their way into the apartment. They're pistol whipping them. Where's the money, where's the drugs? He don't have the answers. They shoot him in the head. They roll them up in a carpet. They take them out of the apartment, and they throw them in the incinerator the furnace of the building. So while he's going up like a Puerto Rican firelog, they go back into the apartment and they're ransacking it. Now the cops are outside.

35:26 Oh shit, we got a problem. So the two hit men tell the girl, listen, if these cops knock on the door, let them in. What we're gonna do is it's a railroad apartment. It goes straight through with doors off to the sides. Start yelling at you. They were Albanians. Start yelling at Yugoslavian. Point to the kitchen. Lead them down to the hallway. When you pass the threshold of this bedroom, throw yourself on the floor. We're gonna come out from behind. We'll shoot the cops. They got to commit. Now, we'll take the two cops out, we'll throw them in the furnace, and we'll get the hell out of here. Well, thank god, the cops said, knock on the door, they leave. Well, the super's got family, you know, two weeks ago by where's Julio? The super's family starts calling the detectives. The detectives get involved. They see there's another The last time this guy was seeing there was a nine to one one call two weeks ago. They bring in the magician and my buddy, you went into this basement. Yeah, did you knock on the door. We knocked on this door.

36:29 We didn't knock on that door. Okay, well he lived there, Okay, anything else? Did you notice, and my buddy goes, you know, well, we will leave. And we went upstairs to leave. I spotted a car parked on a fire hydrant. I wrote in a parking ticket that was the getaway car. He was registered to the girl. They bring the female in, she starts getting all squirrely. She gives it up, of course, trying to minimize her involvement. Been in for a penny, in for a pound. They bring in the two hit men. They locked them up. They go back to the building. Now it's February. They had to shut the heat off for two days until that furnace got cool enough, and then they had to go into and then they went in there and they were able to get his skull and his bones out of there. So that's a story in one of my books called Last Night a Magician saved my life because if not for the magician telling my buddy, don't knock on the door, you would have had three homicides.

37:25 That's great, like literally, if they had just knocked on the door like that would have been the end of it. So the last time we talked, he talked briefly about nine to eleven, and I should have asked this then but there is one on solved homicide in New York on nine eleven. It's the murder of Henrique Subyak. He's a Polish man. He was killed in Brooklyn. Do you know anything about that case? I don't, but I'm gonna look it up now. You should because I was going to ask you, like, it's the only one, only on solved homicide and it was you know, they they had no resources obviously its everyone was at ground zero. So he's killed in the street in Brooklyn on his way to a grocery store to work, like a graveyard chips because he didn't know anything was going on because he had no TV. He'd been here for like maybe a year. He had no TV.

38:11 You know, Holly knew was that he got sent home because a plane crashed into the tower. That was it and he I think it is Decatur Avenue. He died, he was shot, and they've never salved it. So I was curious if you had heard about it, because the only one it's it's it's a really interesting case. It's still unsolved, and it's one of those cases that drive me nuts because I wish it was salved like it but there's nothing there's nothing, no. No, in the cracks, and it probably yeah, and it probably wasn't. He was shot. He was shot, Yeah, he was shot. He made it up to like an apartment door, like front or of an apartment. He's banging on it, like asking someone to help him. But of course, you know, Marbles was freaked out, so no one's answering the door, and he died on the stoop. So the theory is that there was a witness that looked out their windows, saw a couple of guys following him, and he's lost because he got off the bus in the road.

39:09 I did hear about this? Yeah? Then now this sounds familiar. Yeah, he got lost. And so the theory is that it was a robbery gone wrong, which is very possible, but it's it's one of those cases that I'm like, any time I talk to someone like related or connected to New York and anyway, I'm like, do you hear about this case? Like to you do you think they're gonna solve it? You know what's gonna happen. I would bet if there was people, if they said if there was more than one person, I would guess it was teenagers. Teenagers are so dangerous because they don't you know someone's gonna rob you. They're gonna point the average They're just gonna point the gun at it. I mean, obviously things can go sideways, but a stick up guy during my time just wants your money. Means are very unpredictable.

39:53 They're trying to prove themselves. Like I got into so many car chases. I hated it when teenagers were driving. A. They don't add a drup and B. They'll do things. They could get someone killed. And especially you give a teenage or a handgun, things can go sideways very quick. It's probably a couple if it was. If the witnesses said that they sold more than one person, I would bet money with teens. If they didn't find a shellcasing. I mean, shellcasing can lead you back to the weapon. Shellcasings can have DNA on it, shellcasing can have a fingerprint on it. I'm wondering if it was with a revolver that wouldn't have spit out of shellcasing, and then they just tossed the gun.

40:34 If I remember correctly, they didn't find shellcasings. But he also did not die where he was shot. He made it a good amount of feet at least. Oh, yeah, it's possible the shell casing got lost though it got run over and went in a tread of a tire of a car or a truck that went by. Yeah, it's very interesting that you say teens though. Actually I had spoken to Alfredity John's We were talking about teens that kill and it was the same thing. They are kids have this superiority conference that the teenagers are so dangerous. I have encountered. I used to work with kids, and the older they got, the worse they were. For the kids that were my quote unquote bad kids, and it was you know, you you almost wonder, like what are you capable of? Because they're capable of anything.

41:22 Right, their imagination right, and they don't have the wisdom of an old time thief or you know, they're just not thinking, they're not thinking ahead exactly. It's more like I think it's like it's the thrill for them more than anything else. Absolutely, and to prove themselves. They were always trying to one up each other. It's very interesting. I never I never considered teenagers. I don't even think the police considered teenagers at the time. But there was only like five police officers working at because everyone else, like I said, it was that ground zero, they had no one working it. They don't, you know, you have watched that show the first forty eight. Yeah, and there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, the more time that goes by, the cases have been solved over years, but the more time goes by, the more other cases pile up. I mean New York when I was active, we were averaging over twenty five hundred homicides the year. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's unsolved homicides that you know, there's tons that people got away with. So the longer a homicide goes the trail gets cold and cold. That's not to say you can't solve it. If that case were to be solved, it's either going to be you said they didn't They didn't recover shellcasing.

42:38 If I remember correctly, they didn't recover shellcasings, and they had some people talking, but I guess this specific area where he died was pretty active with gang activity, so a lot of people were afraid to talk, so they really had very few witnesses on top of no real evidence. Yeah, so it's either going to be the way that case is going to be broken open one of two ways. The least likely is if the slug were to match a gun that gets recovered from someone. But you're talking twenty something years ago. The odds of that gun turning up somewhere probably slim to none. But you never know, could be under someone's bed somewhere and someone decides to use it one day, and where'd you get that from? And I got that from High Top? And then high Top you find out is doing time for this, and then they pull him out and he spills the bean.

43:25 More than likely, if that case were to be solved, it's either going to be an ex girlfriend or someone that knows something about it, and they'll look at its serious time and now it's a bargaining chip and they're going to give it up. Unfortunately, I agree, I do. I think I think it's gonna take the one person that knows something to be in a situation where they need to play that hand. Yeah, it's one of those cases that keeps me up at it and I ask everyone. I ain't gonna have me reading up on it. Jed, It's interesting. It's interesting. I did a whole episode on it. It's very interesting. It's sad because he, you know, he was here without his Family's family was in Poland. He was here just trying to make money to bring him here. And his wife had called him after she heard about the attack, and she's like, you know, where are you And he's like I'm fine, Like what are you talking about? Relax, Like it's not I don't know what you think it is, but it's not that. And then he ends up dying totally unrelated to the attacks.

44:21 It just happened to be coincidentally that night, on the one night where there was no police anywhere. I think there was even a quote from like one of the police officers on seeing that night saying something along the lines of like you couldn't take like this one night off from murder. Like, yeah, I thank you so much for joining me again. You were wonderful to talk to. You want to hear two quick stories? Yes, okay, because I know I know this show's format is darker things, but I'm going to tell you two dark stories that are kind of funny. I mean, so there's this one guy I knew. I wasn't a fan of his, actually know him before I was a cop. He was lazy, he's a foot cop up in Harlem, and it's a Friday night. He has every intention of going out for a couple of cocktails after work, and he gets stuck on a doa and a housing project on like the tenth of fifteenth four And what it is is an elderly gentleman used to meet another friend every day for lunch or dinner. He doesn't show up. His friend has the keys to the apartment. He opens the door, and the poor guy dies, died peacefully in his sleep. Cop shows up, The EMTs show up. The EMTs are like, yeah, he's gone. You gotta wait for the medical examiner. Cop turns the EMTs and goes, can't you take him to the hospital? And you know, they go, we can't move a body and take it to the hospital unless it's in public view, when it's not suspicious. If you dropped out of a heart attack on the street, they're gonna

45:53 take you to the morgue. He says, he didn't die in public view. They leave, detectives leave, Sergeant leaves, he's not going out tonight. About a half hour later, the cardiac gets called in so the same building, same floor, the two EMTs had gone downstairs with their equipment and eating their dinner in their ambulance. They had never left. They grabbed their board, they grab everything. They get off the elevator. They come running into the hallway. The dead guy that was in his bed is now in the hallway and the cop is standing there and they go, what the hell is this? And the cop goes, you're not gonna believe this. I'm sitting in the apartment. The guy jumped out of the bed. He said, oh shit.

46:42 He ran through the apartment. He opened the door and collapsed on the floor, and they go, no, he didn't. He's starting to have Rigga mortis. He's in the same position he was in the bed. You dragged him across the room and dumped him in the hallway. He goes, no, I didn't. They're arguing. Sergeant shows up. They start telling what happened. The CoP's stilling thes it's obvious the cop moved the body into the hallway. Long story short, he got suspended, He got dumped of his assignment, and they transferred him up to the Bronx. He lost thirty vacation days and was put on a ye appropriate if that happened nowadays, he would have got locked up somehow. And I never liked that guy before or after, but that's a true story. He moved a dead body to avoid working overtime. And the last story I'll leave you with, I'm in the precinct a couple of years, maybe five six years. This rookie cop is working there and I liked it. Nice guy, heads on straight, was a good cop, you know, would go out for beer once in a while.

47:40 And ago, what did you do before you were a cop? He goes, I'm a license more titian. I said, no shit. He goes, see, I still do it in my spare time, right, which I've kind of find with a music. So I said, you know, I go, if you want to be a detective, I said, the career path for you is to go to missing persons And he goes, why would I do that? I go to the missing person's unit. Loves guys like you because you know how to you're not afraid of the morgue. Would people die in the street with no identification or even in identification, they're gonna they're gonna fingerprint the dead body. And there's an art to that because even if the body is shriveled up in stuff. They stick a needle in their finger and they blow it up with saline solution and stuff. Basically, the missing person's unit is for people that aren't afraid of being around the dead. Well, this guy is a license mortician. He'd be perfect for it. So I told him, I go, if you want to be a detective, that's the quickest way.

48:38 He goes, all right, takes my advice. Within months, they snatch him up and he vanishes into the missing Person's unit. Now this happened in like ninety four, ninety five. Fifteen years later to go by and actually the guy that I call Cancer that was with the magician, I'm working with him now, right with detectives together. And he goes, I met a guy that knows you. I go, who? He goes My dentist go, what are you talking? I don't know any dentists. And he says the guy's name, and I go, no, he's not a dentist. He works in the missing Person's unit. He goes, No, he quit the job to become a dentist. What are you talking about?

49:19 He goes, he was an undertaker, became a cop, went to missing persons, did that for a couple of years, stopped doing that, went to dental school. He pulled my tooth out, so I said, no, shit, like, guy's an undertaker, and he pulled he pulled your tooth out. He goes, yeah, he goes, he speaks very highly of you, Vick. I go, well, that's that's that's nice, and he goes. He also said, if you ever have any problems, go see him. He'll do it for free. And I go no, and he goes. I thought you liked him. I do, but I know where his fingers were, you know, I don't know if I want this guy's handling dead bodies. I don't want his fingers in my mouth. So that's just that's another story from one of my books.

50:00 That's an interesting career trajectory. Understand about high IQ. Yeah, all those things. Nick, instant a pleasure as always. Do you have some amazing stories listen. I greatly appreciate it. And if I could just plug my website. Please do please see that was gonna be my last thing. It's you know, where can people find you? Yeah, so just go to Amazon type in my name Vic Ferrari like the car, where you can preview all my NYPD books for free, including my latest NYPD Presumption and Dysfunction. And if you like podcasts and want to hear stories from my NYPD career or me interviewing former NYPD members and gangsters and stuff like that, just check out the NYPD Through the Looking Glass podcast. It's available on YouTube and wherever you can find podcasts, Spotify and all that other good stuff.

50:52 Big thank you so much for joining me again. It's a wonderful to have you on. It's wonderful to talk to you. For everyone listening, please check out the source notes Fix website is going to be there linked to his podcast is going to be there. Check out his books. They're great. I have read a few of them myself. They're very good. As always, I hope you have a wonderful week and I will talk to you in the next chapter of the Book of the Dead. Bye, guys, thank you so much for listening to this chapter of the Book of the Dead. And don't forget that you can always connect with us on Instagram, you can connect with us on Twitter, and you can absolutely connect with us on Patreon. We also have a marcher as well that we have frequent discount codes coming out for so that you guys can get March hand drawn by myself at a better cost.

51:46 We hope you have a lovely rest of your week and just remember, please be kind and don't forget to always stay safe, stay curious, and stay vigilant. Bye guys, Bye A