Stone-Cold Cases

Midnight. the bronx. A scrum of Hispanic teenagers sneers as the Five Two Squad's ''shit box''--a dented and grimy 1987 Gran Fury with no working siren--rolls to a stop in front of a five-story tenement on University Avenue. The Man is as welcome here as a hooker in the Vatican. This is their turf. ''Latin Kings turf,'' homicide detective Mike Palladino explains in a stage whisper. As we exit the unmarked car, the small knot languidly unties, its members defiantly pimp-rolling away from the building.

It was five years ago, at the other end of Palladino's precinct, that Ronald Melendez bled to death on a filthy sidewalk after a drive-by shooter severed the main artery in his groin with automatic-weapons fire. The killer's intended victim wasn't even on the scene. Unlike the junkies and crackpots gathered tonight on University Avenue, grinning vacantly at the welldressed homicide cop, Melendez had a future. His Catholic high school graduation photo depicts a handsome kid with a soft, upturned mouth and a faraway gaze. Melendez was applying to colleges, planning a career in the music industry. But, as Palladino puts it, ''Wrong place, wrong night. Friggin' senseless death.''

Ronald Melendez is the reason Mike Palladino--the 52nd Precinct's one-man Cold Case Squad--climbs the staircase of this tenement tonight. He wants to interview the estranged wife of the man who, he believes, killed the kid with the future.

''I want this guy so bad, at the very least for Ronald's mom. . . .'' It is at moments such as these that Palladino appears much older than his 37 years, when his 16 years on the job seem like several lifetimes. Whenever he speaks of the plaints of the living, his narrow, intense face contorts into a mask of cracks and fissures. Dealing with the living, the survivors, he tells me, ''is the very worst part of a detective's work.'' This sentiment is understandable, for I, too, have spoken with Ronald Melendez' mom. Her voice cracking, Sonia Nieves describes her existence since her son's murder as ''horrible, depressing. I have no life.'' From her home in New Jersey, where she moved after Ronald was murdered, she paints a heartbreaking picture. Her 11-year-old daughter is in therapy, ''freaking out'' at loud noises, still too frightened to go to the movies. Every day since Ronald's murder she has prayed that this burden will somehow lift. ''But it never does. How much can I take? Nothing in the world will bring back my son. I have to have faith that they'll catch the person who did this and put him away, just so he can feel a little bit of the pain he's brought to my family.''

Back in the Bronx, Palladino spits out his words as we climb the stairs. ''Somebody's going to pay for Ronald Melendez' life. I know who the shooter was. I know who the driver was. I just know it.''

He cracks a sheepish half-smile, the tough guy embarrassed by this show of emotion. ''Unfortunately, I still have to prove it.''

Just days ago, after following the trail for years, after slamming into hundreds of dead-end leads and squeezing informants and never letting himself forget the anguish in Sonia Nieves' voice, Palladino was informed by one of his street squeals that the shooter was back from the Dominican Republic, living somewhere in the city. Breaks are mostly what a homicide detective's job is about. Palladino caught another one when the suspect violated his ex-wife's order of protection and ''kicked the shit out of her.'' The woman phoned Palladino in his squad room. ''My husband did somebody,'' she whimpered. ''With his brother-in-law. The Melendez kid. Arrest him. He's an animal.'' Then she hung up. The last Palladino knew, she was living in apartment 5C, here in the walk-up on University Avenue.

''Hola, pretty boys. Can I help you?'' The flouncy Dominican matron in the foyer drips cheap jewelry and cheaper perfume. She has applied her mascara with a trowel. More important, she's clearly the unofficial concierge, who will tip off the building that we have arrived.

''No thanks, mamacita,'' answers Palladino, flashing his best altar-boy grin. ''We know where we're going. Just need to visit with someone on the third floor.''

The stairwell reeks of urine and cat shit. As we climb, Palladino confides, ''Never tell 'em where you're really going--only mucks things up.'' At the fifth-floor landing, the detective stops cold, groans. He peers through the hole in the door of apartment 5C, where, it is apparent, the dead bolt has only recently been removed. The apartment is empty. ''Flew the goddamn coop,'' he mutters. ''Jesus!''

He bangs on a neighbor's door. ''She gone,'' a frail, frightened old woman tells us. ''Packed up. Yesterday. Don't know where. Nobody knows where.''

Palladino is frustrated but not deterred. Ronald Melendez' case file contains the shooter's last known address: an apartment at the corner of 180th and Audubon, from which he pushed crack. That was years ago, of course, but if there is a single maxim to homicide investigation, it is this: Killers can run and hide, but they eventually return to their old haunts.

''Up for a cruise through Harlem?'' the homicide detective asks.

To Palladino, old death is nothing new. For the past two years, he has been one of the few detectives in New York City whose sole directive is to investigate unsolved murders in his precinct. When Palladino clamps on to an old killing, one of his colleagues tells me, ''Mike's like a pit bull on Dexedrine.'' Prowling the northern Bronx, Palladino has proved as adept as he is tenacious in finding the faceless killers who years ago slipped through the cracks in the criminal justice system. So good, in fact, that as a result of his 18 clearances over that 24-month span, the 52nd Precinct's Detective Squad--once a ''detective's dumping ground,'' according to a high-ranking NYPD official--now rates among the city's elite.

Cold Case Squads are not unique to New York. Several cities--Miami, Washington, D.C. and Boston among them--employ teams of homicide investigators to bring forgotten killers to justice. But Palladino has honed the art of tracking cold trails. His routine consists of canvassing neighborhoods, sitting endlessly on stakeouts, digging spent bullets out of walls, plowing through pages of police reports looking for an overlooked clue and--most important--working his street sources. As he is fond of saying, ''The answers to old homicides are in the street.''

His sources are myriad: witnesses who hid in closets when bullets flew, dumped or battered wives and lovers finally willing to crack an alibi, convicted felons looking to deal their way out of jail time and the minor ''skels'' and ''mutts'' of his precinct -- the car thieves, grifters and burglars of the north Bronx with whom he has developed an intimate rapport.

''What are we going to do, wait for some yuppie from Princeton, New Jersey to show up in the Bronx in the middle of the night to witness a homicide?'' he asks one evening as he sits in his squad room, flipping through dozens of crime scene photos before starting his shift. Nearby is the box that contains his personal investigations, the 18 stamped Cleared and another halfdozen still open. Here is the softball player who was killed by a sniper from a moving subway car--''a real miracle shot''--while fielding her position. Here are the two Albanian brothers, each shot in the head three years ago by a car thief who wanted their custom BMW. Here is Ellen Wapnowitz, the student raped and left dead on a rooftop two decades ago. ''When you arrest someone for doing something like this,'' he says, gently holding a crime-scene photograph of the naked and bruised dead woman, ''there's so much more satisfaction to it than just doing the job.''

For all his diligence, local prosecutors still often subject Palladino's eyewitnesses to brutal examinations. ''Give me a break!'' he says. ''Murders happen at two A.M. Crackpots coming home from doing a burglary see a guy doing a murder. What can I do? Just because a guy has a record doesn't mean he doesn't have eyes.''

Many of Palladino's evidentiary battles are fought against Risa Sugarman, the veteran chief of the Bronx District Attorney's Homicide Bureau. Nonetheless (and with no prodding), Sugarman describes Palladino as protean, praising his ''uncanny ability to change his demeanor with street people, to adopt whatever--I hate to use the word pose--makes them feel more comfortable. Mike has a gift with witnesses. He can charm people. The witness who says, 'Screw you, I ain't talking' to the first detective working the case talks to Mike. He never pisses anybody off.''

After stints as a beat cop, in Anticrime (plainclothes) and in the narcotics unit, Palladino earned his detective's gold shield in 1987. The grinding details of homicide investigation--the computer searches for priors, the fingerprint matches, the hunt for elusive murder weapons and, of course, the establishment of a motive--came naturally to this self-confessed college nerd who grew up only blocks from the Five Two station house.

''Mike was always so serious, such a good student. I expected him to become a lawyer or an accountant,'' his (continued on page 96) stone-cold cases (continued from page 72) mother, Katharine, tells me one evening as Mike and his wife of ten years, Teresa, unpack groceries in the kitchen of their Bronx home. Katherine is sitting in her son's living room as four grandchildren vie for space on her lap. In a voice loud enough to reach her son, she adds, ''But a homicide detective? I can't wait for him to get out.''

Katherine's anxiety stretches back to her son's bloody police baptism. Thirteen years ago, while working Anti-crime Palladino shot and killed an armed robber who had drawn down on him. When, two years later, a Dominican gang called the Latin Kings put out a contract on Palladino and stalked him, off-duty, with two carloads of hit men, the detective hid the details from his mother for several weeks. It did not help when Katherine's youngest son, police officer Joseph Palladino, fell through a rickety staircase while chasing a burglar. He retired on a disability pension.

''Ma, c'mon, give me a break,'' the eavesdropping Mike yells from the kitchen. He enters the living room preening, stretching to his full 5'9'' height, comically puffing out his chest. His eldest child, seven-year-old Michael Jr., bolts to his father's side. ''You know I'm safe on the streets. Everybody who is out there knows me. I get around.''

But it is not only the streets over which Katherine Palladino frets. Recently she was awakened in the middle of the night by her daughter-in-law, who informed her that Mike had been grazed in the leg by a ricocheting nine-millimeter bullet while practicing at the police shooting range. ''Just a flesh wound,'' laughs the detective, who was back on the streets--albeit with a limp--within a week.

Palladino's burgeoning reputation has prompted relatives of murder victims from other precincts to seek his help. An attorney with the Brooklyn Legal Aid office even asked him to take over the investigation of her brother's five-year-old murder.

''I tried to explain to her that, I don't go citywide,'' Palladino says, laughing. ''If I were to walk into a detective squad somewhere way out in Brooklyn and say, 'Hey, how ya doin'? I'm from the Bronx and I'm here to start reinvestigating your homicide,' well, pretty soon somebody would have to start investigating my homicide.''

Later, after he has driven his mother home, he confides that he probably will take that ride out to Brooklyn to meet, with the Legal Aid attorney. ''You know, on the q.t.,'' he says. ''At least to read over her case folder.''

''Let me explain it. Good detectives make their own breaks. You can't make luck. But you can make breaks, which lead to luck. You knock on those doors, and then finally there's the witness who saw it all. Five out of six guys will knock once, twice, three times. Palladino will knock 33 times. He goes back over and over again. He's relentless.''

As Lieutenant John Browne strolls the fragrant, shaded paths of the Bronx Botanical Gardens, a busload of inner-city schoolchildren paroled from the classroom for a day run about. It is a gorgeous afternoon, ideal for a field trip. Browne has been the commander of the Five Two's Detective Squad since 1989. It was his idea to turn Palladino into the homicide avenger of the precinct.

The Five Two Zoo is a horse-head-shaped precinct with its neck growing out of the central Bronx, its nose dipping into the Bronx Zoo and its ears flaring toward suburban Westchester County. This residential enclave is a homeland for the uprooted, housing 130,000 souls within its two square miles--40 of whom, on average, are shot, stabbed, bludgeoned or otherwise dispatched each year. The Five Two boasts large Hispanic, Irish, African American, Italian, Indian, Korean and Albanian neighborhoods.

''We get the old-fashioned murders here,'' Palladino tells me. ''Domestic disputes. Fights over card games. Gang rumbles. Not just drug whacks, though we get our share of those, too.''

Browne established his Homicide Apprehension Team, as he calls Palladino and his former partner, Richard Jordan (who recently transferred out of the precinct), in 1993. Although Jordan and Palladino worked as a team, Palladino was the driving force. Browne's motive? The haunting voices of the living.

''Mothers, sisters, a brother, a father,'' he says, ''of somebody who was killed ten years ago, 15 years ago, five years ago, three years ago. The family is still waiting for an arrest. Calling me. I just think, If this were my mother or my father, my sister or brother, I would go to the ends of the earth. They sit at home every single day. It's all they think about. There's no closure. Nobody has resolved it for them.'' Browne pauses. ''It eats you up inside.''

Officially, a New York City homicide investigation is never closed. If you have information about who clipped Judge Crater, or who ordered the hit on Malcolm X, the NYPD would like to know. Unofficially, there's about a two-month window for a murder investigation to succeed or dry up and blow to the back of some musty file cabinet. One veteran New York City detective explains: ''Unless it's a big media case, if you can't ID the perp within 45, maybe 60, days, and there's no political pressure from the family or any connected bigfoots, the thing just gets old. You go on to more pressing cases. Lots of people get killed in this city, you know.''

It took Browne several years to mobilize his Homicide Apprehension Team. First, he had an office to rearrange. ''The squad was in need of some fundamental changes,'' is his politic description. In fact, when Browne took command of the Five Two, its homicide clearance rate--cases solved--was a distressing 42 percent, near the bottom of the borough and lagging well behind the citywide rate (the NYPD's Homicide Bureau cleared 64.2 percent of its 1572 reported murders in 1994).

As Browne reshaped his shop--only Palladino remains from the original 16 detectives in the squad Browne took over--clearances steadily climbed to last year's 94 percent. ''Fifteen percent to 20 percent of that increase was based on the HAT,'' Browne says.

Palladino caught Browne's eye early. In the lieutenant's first month on the job, Palladino worked six days straight, nearly 24 hours a day, to solve the puzzle of an Irish American teen who had been knifed to death. Soon after, an infant died in a local hospital. The medical examiner ruled the child had succumbed to a viral infection. But the baby's mother called Browne, crying, ''They murdered my son.'' His gut beginning to ache, Browne handed the case to Palladino.

''Mike went to that hospital and took a file cabinet full of medical records home to read--on his own time,'' says Browne. ''Eventually he proved that, contrary to the M.E.'s report, a nurse had screwed up and caused the baby's death.''

Eventually, Browne lifted Palladino and Jordan from their regular homicide rotation and had the detectives sift (continued on page 151) stone-cold cases (continued from page 96) through the precinct's open homicide files. Palladino set ground rules. The files they picked up would have to be stonedead. The original investigators, he told Browne, must be either retired, transferred to another precinct or deceased. Says Palladino, ''There are enough unsolved killings out there. I don't need to be stepping on someone's shoes.''

After Jordan was transferred in January, Browne left Palladino working alone. ''But that's not good for him,'' the squad commander admits. ''A good cop needs somebody to bounce ideas off.'' There's a new kid in the squad, Browne adds, transferred in from Narcotics. ''I'm thinking of handing him to Mike.''

Dusk gathers as the lieutenant, the father of two, looks at some of the children, then at me as we stroll through the Botanical Gardens. ''If somebody in my family were murdered,'' he says solemnly, ''I'd want Mike working the case.'' Then he adds what for a New York City homicide detective must be the ultimate accolade: ''Yeah, I think I'd want Mike working the case even more than me.''

The second-floor squad room of the Five Two station house is a maze of 14 government-issue black metal desks crammed into a room built to hold half as many. On each is a coffee-stained IBM Selectric III typewriter. The squad's lone computer is barely visible in a narrow alcove created by seven-foot file cabinets. The walls are papered with wanted posters, Legal Bureau updates, Red Light enforcement programs and insipid NYPD memos sent from downtown police headquarters (Ask a question, Solve a crime!).

The squad's sign-in sheet is lifted straight from a World War Two platoon movie: Slattery, Landesberg, Ciuffi, Deis, Leuck. Snippets of phone conversations are somewhat surreal, if only for their low-key approach to sudden and violent death.

''So you're saying he commuted to Yonkers to do the homicide?''

''Hold on, you're telling me it was the Spanish guy, and not the black guy, who actually fired the shots?''

''Mrs. Alvarez, how do you know it was Freddie who robbed your apartment?''

In the hallway between the squad room and the Anticrime Unit, a 12' × 12' closet is stuffed with cardboard boxes. Each box contains homicide case folders, some dating from 1906. (One box is labeled Open Homicides: 1928-1966.) This is Mike Palladino's reading room.

''I'd love to arrest some mutts who did somebody in, say, 1943,'' he says. ''Sometimes I come in here and read through cases just to see how the old guys did it.'' He'll select a file at random, ''and things just start to blossom in front of you. You pick things up, see things the investigating detective didn't see five years ago.'' And finally, he adds darkly, ''sometimes you read about how a crime happened and you get pissed off and say, 'Yeah, let's go after this one.'''

Each file, two to three inches thick, is stuffed with blue detective's reports, pink follow-up reports, the original in-vestigaior's personal notes (some printed neatly in bound notebooks, others scrawled on matchbook covers or cocktail napkins), crime-scene photos, witness lists and suspect lists.

Palladino pulls a folder that might as well be stamped Anatomy of a gold case investigation. In it is the saga of a Nigerian exchange student murdered ten years ago in a dispute over a soccer game--in the same Bronx park Palladino played in as a child.

Employing every trick of police work he knows, including pulling witnesses from obscure computer files and impersonating a Jamaican immigrant, Palladino recently made the arrest.

''The victim's name was Patrick O'Koto,'' he says, thumbing through the file with the nostalgic delicacy you or I might reserve for a high school yearbook. ''And nobody had a clue who did him.''

The original detectives on the case did come up with a street name for the perp. A black man called Stage was the killer, they learned. Trouble was, investigators could never locate Stage. Then, last year, Palladino received a call from a detective in the Manhattan North Squad who had collared an armed robber. ''Says he knows something about a homicide in your precinct, something to do with a soccer game,'' the detective informed Palladino. ''You can find the mutt on Rikers.''

Before visiting Rikers Island, a rock in the East River that is home to 15,000 inmates, Palladino headed for his closet. He scoured the Five Two's open homicide files. ''I go looking back one year, two years, three years,'' he says, ''but there's no soccer game homicide. Finally, I find it. It's a ten-year-old file. Friggin' 1985.''

The next day, during a two-hour interview on Rikers, the inmate uttered the magic word.

''Stage your man,'' he told Palladino.

''What's his real name?''

''I don't know.''

''Fuck.''

Palladino worked his street sources, plumbed the borough's nickname file. No Stage.

''What Stage did was sharp,'' he says with not a little admiration. ''After the O'Koro killing he changed his street name.''

Over the next six months, Palladino and his then partner, Jordan, downloaded every address within a three block radius of the park where O'Koro was killed into the NYPD's central computer system, asking it to identify anyone arrested at those locations, or any arrestee who gave his address as one of those locations--within the past ten years.

Left with a phone book-size sheaf of computer printouts, Palladino then discarded all but those of black men currently between the ages of 25 and 35, as the original case file describes O'Koro's murderer as approximately 20 years old. Back on Rikers, Palladino's potential witness said he thought Stage might be a marijuana dealer, adding that he was certain he could identify him from a photograph. So Palladino further winnowed his suspect list to black men between the ages of 25 and 35 arrested for drug-related crimes. After digging through reams of computer printouts and hundreds of mug shots, Palladino returned to Rikers for a third time.

''This guy's going through the deck of photos thick as a dictionary, and suddenly he flips one and slams his fist down,'' says Palladino. ''That's him,' he says. 'That's Stage.' I see on the card that the killer's real name is Everton Blythe. I also recognize this Blythe character immediately. He's Ganja the Jamaican. Everybody knows Ganja. Hell, he's still dealing reefer in the same park where the African kid was killed.''

Unfortunately for Palladino, Risa Sugarman in the Bronx D.A.'s office greeted his findings with a bit less enthusiasm. She did not deem his incarcerated armed robber a credible witness to a ten year-old homicide. If you want to nail Everton Blythe, she told Palladino, find us a second witness.

Considering it the height of fortune to find one witness to a decade-old killing, a frustrated Palladino nonetheless began working into the O'Koro case folder, revisiting every address, attempting to locate any of the 50 bystanders police spoke with in 1985. The task was disheartening. The African students who made up most of the soccer teams had returned home. Even Patrick O'Koro's family had moved back to Nigeria.

Finally, using both the Department of Motor Vehicles' parking-summons computer and a phony Jamaican accent over the phone, Palladino found a second witness who reluctantly agreed to testify. The detective recalls, ''The guy was still scared to death that Stage would do him, too.''

Meanwhile, the detective had built up something of a personal relationship with the drug dealer by pretending he was investigating a recent homicide that occurred in front of the building in which Blythe lived.

''All the time,'' Palladino says, ''I was calling him Everton. Finally, we got the warrant. We rolled up to him in the park. 'Hello, Detective,' he said. 'What's up, Stage,' I answered. If a Jamaican could go pale, Stage would have at that moment. He thought that name was buried along with Patrick O'Koro.

'''Stage,' I told him, 'you're under arrest for murder.' Talk about satisfaction. Man, that was satisfaction guaranteed.''

The iron door to the Rikers Island prison block slams shut. Lockout. Nobody leaves the rock for one hour. Nobody.

''You mean we can't get out either?'' Dominick Calvanico asks incredulously. Palladino just smiles at his new partner. ''Dom, my friend, you got a lot to learn.''

True to his instincts, Lieutenant Browne has paired Detective Calvanico--31 years old and new to the Five Two from Narcotics--with Palladino. But before Palladino escorts Calvanico into the realm of cold cases, the two are spending the night cleaning up one of Calvanico's loose ends--specifically, the remnants of a turf war that left a small-time Bronx drug dealer, as they say, airconditioned. The man was shot with both a .45 and a .32 before being finished off with two shotgun blasts. Now, one of Calvanico's snitches on Rikers wants to deal a name for time shaved. The name is Omar, a teenager who allegedly ditched the murder weapons. Midnight finds us trolling a four-block Bronx grid out of Hogarth's Gin Lane searching for traces of Omar.

Two days earlier, I had asked First Deputy Commissioner John Timoney if, given Palladino's success in the Five Two, the department would institute more Cold Case Squads.

''As I'm sure you've discovered,'' Timoney told me, ''Palladino is a special guy with special attributes. A real self-starter. I'd love to be able to find a bunch of Palladinos, especially in the heavy homicide precincts, and get them digging into old cold cases.'' In fact, Timoney conceded, he was discussing the notion with his chief of detectives.

I do not mention this to Palladino or Calvanico as we trudge from hoop court to bodega to dimly lit bar in futile search of Omar. In one second-floor pool hall and video arcade that fronts for a whore-house upstairs, I remain in the shadows as Palladino pauses to introduce his new partner to hard-looking ''old friends.'' I begin to think about what Timoney told me only when the two detectives give up on finding Omar for the night and start to debate their next course of action. It is close to two A.M., their tour of duty is nearly finished and I offer to buy them a beer.

''I wouldn't mind a beer. . . a little later,'' says Palladino. But the murder five years ago of a promising young high school graduate is never far from his mind. ''If you got nothing else to do, there's just one more thing I'd like to check out.'' He turns to his new partner. ''Dom, you get a chance to read through that Melendez kid's file?''

''A little,'' Calvanico responds. ''But--yeah, that's right.'' All that's missing is the cartoon lightbulb going off over his head. ''That shooter, the Dominican from down 180th Street. He doesn't come out to deal till after midnight, right?''

''Right,'' says Palladino, his widow's peak trembling like a tuning fork. ''Up for a cruise through Harlem?''

''Most guys will knock twice, three times. Palladino will knock 33 times. He's relentless.''