Cop Shot – Mike McAlary, 1990 ★★★

A Helluva Drug

Every decade has its representative criminal activity: bootlegging in the 1920s; draft-dodging in the 1960s; dedicated disruption of service attacks in the 2020s. In the 1980s, crack cocaine was all the rage. Especially in the cities, its casualty rate had the quality of a pandemic.

Early one February morning in 1988, in the Jamaica section of Queens, crack claimed the life of rookie police officer Edward Byrne. He was in a marked squad car, guarding the home of a crack-crime witness when five bullets were fired directly at him. He was dead instantly.

As journalist Mike McAlary describes it in his account of the crime, Cop Shot, it was a murder that jolted a city, awoke a nation to the insidious nature of the crack trade, and triggered a rage-fueled hunger for justice. “This had only become the city’s biggest police investigation since Son of Sam,” he writes.

McAlary was a tabloid journalist in the gritty, respected tradition of Jimmy Breslin. Like Breslin, who became a national celebrity covering the 1976-77 serial murder spree of David Berkowitz, aka the Son of Sam, McAlary wrote in the tough, terse argot of the streets. Cops were often his heroes, sometimes his villains.

Cop Shot captures a sense of what life was like then, on the beat and in the courtroom. As a true-life police procedural, though, it is anticlimactic. Brutal as it was, the murder was almost mundane in its conception, planned by nasty thugs and executed by brain-fried underlings. The court proceedings were a triumph of emotion over reason. The main takeaway you get from reading it is a sense of waste.

Edward Byrne's funeral procession, February 1988. "We're all thinking the same thing," Det. Richard Sica would say later. "This is a stone-cold assassination. There are too many holes in the kid's face for it to be anything else."
Image by New York Daily News from https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamaha/former-nypd-see-parallels-to-1988-edward-byrne-shooting

It was a message murder, according to this post-arraignment exchange between attorney Scott Tulman and suspect Scott Cobb, ordered on behalf of crack-gang enforcer Pappy Mason after Mason’s arrest:

“What’s the message being sent out?”

“That’s the message. That even though they behind bars, they still give orders, and the orders be tooken, and it be done. They was proven, ‘Hey, ‘cause all of them be in, that don’t mean the show stops.”

By this time, crack cocaine was a show in no danger of stopping. It was attainable to those of limited means at ten dollars a pop, delivered an intense if short-lived high, and was readily available. Its impact on Black populations was especially insidious. Social justice advocates noted more Black people went to prison because of crack, revealing racial bias in enforcement.

Crack, or rock cocaine, was easy to sell and had hundreds of thousands of ready buyers in the 1980s. "In the summer of 1985, everyone wanted to believe crack another faddish drug," McAlary writes. "They hoped it would go the way of acid, mescaline, and angel dust."
Image from https://zh-cn.facebook.com/fox47news/videos/crack-cocaine-had-a-devastating-impact-on-the-us/10155802726393775/

There was another kind of bias at work, too; a bias toward murder.

Simply put, crack triggered murder rates places like New York City never saw, before or since. According to city police statistics, 2,262 murders were reported in 1990, the highest ever, when crack use was at its height. The murder rate gradually trickled down from there, falling to 629 by 1998. In 2023, a year crime remained a hot topic in city politics with many calling its streets too dangerous, 391 murders were reported.

Crack was a helluva drug, and McAlary saw its impact. “The city’s murder rate jumped from 1,200 in 1985 to 1,800 in 1988. By 1987, nearly half of the serious crimes in the city were being committed by crack users.”

In the case of Edward Byrne’s murder, the influence of crack is both clear-cut and indistinct. It is clear in that Byrne was murdered while guarding the home of a man named Arjune, a Guyanese immigrant who spoke out against crack sellers in his neighborhood. It was also clear that the murderers were part of a gang that made their income peddling crack. But why Byrne was specifically targeted was not as clear.

Edward Byrne had just been sworn in as a New York City police officer when he was gunned down on February 25, 1988. Today, a park and a street in the city are named after him, while his name is often invoked in discussions of protecting police.
Image from https://nypost.com/2023/07/26/getaway-driver-in-1988-assassination-of-nypd-officer-eddie-byrne-granted-parole/

It was assumed, and said by hit squad members themselves, that simply shooting a cop, any cop, was the objective that day. But late in the book, McAlary reveals one gang leader had a specific beef against a cop who had confronted him in front of his posse. It is suggested this specific cop, who was not Byrne, was known to have been pulling duty outside the Arjune home. Perhaps the hit was ordered to get him?

The problem with Cop Shot is that it is a book of the moment, working off fresh testimony both from the criminals (in videotaped depositions) and police officers who spoke to the author. It is very caught up in the emotions of a turbulent time. McAlary aimed for impact, not objectivity. In Cop Shot, everyone is talking loudly, and all at once.

Who, what and why aspects of this story get clouded.

McAlary is most engaging when laying out ancillary details of police and criminal life. He spends most of a chapter going over the reverse gentrification of South Jamaica from a haven of relatively well-to-do Black families to a criminal hotbed long vacated by those who could afford to leave by the time of crack’s emergence.

The intersection of 107th Avenue and Inwood Street in South Jamaica, Queens where Edward Byrne was stationed when he was murdered. By the time of his shooting, it was known to all as a dangerous neighborhood, never mind its rows of pleasant houses.
Image from https://bronx.news12.com/todd-scott-man-convicted-in-1988-murder-of-nypd-officer-eddie-byrne-denied-parole

There is also a disarming description of how police were rated when they were stationed in another Queens neighborhood:

Nobody talked to a Rockaway cop and a Rockaway cop never talked to anyone else. Some of this had to do with the geography, sure. But mostly the precinct was one big drunken beach brawl. Not that the people in Rockaway were mean-spirited. It’s just that Rockaway was where people came to sit in the sun and drink.

I come back to Jimmy Breslin as an influence on McAlary. Both were informal, candid writers and liked to communicate what they believed was the pulse of the city. Both were opinionated. Yet McAlary, who died in 1998, some 19 years before Breslin did, doesn’t come off so consciously obnoxious. Like Breslin he likes to lay into politicians, particularly conservative ones, but his asides are catty, not combative.

McAlary lets the people he reports on do much of the talking. This gives the book authenticity, but also a repetitiousness that grates over time. Long stretches of narrative are given over to transcriptions of video testimony where the suspects say the same things over and over. Similarly, cops and lawyers whom McAlary quotes at length make the same points with minimal authorial interjection.

Author Mike McAlary. At various times, he was a top columnist for The Daily News, The New York Post, and Newsday. He was also a writer of fiction and non-fiction and a Pulitzer Prize winner. In 2013, Tom Hanks played him on Broadway in a play called "Lucky Guy."
Image from https://www.wmur.com/article/monday-june-3rd-memories-of-journalist-michael-mcalary/5182260

McAlary spends much of the book spotlighting one detective, Richard Sica, part of the investigative team which broke the case. Sica clearly revealed some aspects of the case to make him valuable to the reporter, like putting McAlary in Byrne’s squad car when the murder went down, but he is not a particularly engaging personality as rendered here.

Sica admits to McAlary at one point he even dislikes the victims of the crimes he investigates: “Prostitutes, drug dealers, and robbers are hard to like. In my precinct, we don’t get too many dead good guys.”

Another detective, Edward Granshaw, shines brighter in the handful of times he gets mentioned, so much so you wish he had been the focus. “The only thing that really bothers me is that I will never know, conclusively, who shot Edward Byrne,” he tells McAlary at book’s end.

It’s a jaw-dropping admission. McAlary himself identifies Byrne’s killer very directly as being Dave McClary, a young gang member eager to prove himself. But the case is murky in its details. One of the arrested suspects claimed Byrne was murdered with a shotgun, while in fact it was done with a revolver. Three people were identified as active participants in the crime, then four, then five.

Five men wound up doing time for Edward Byrne's murder: Phillip Copeland, Scott Cobb, Todd Scott, Dave McClary, and Pappy Mason. Cobb, identified as the getaway driver, was paroled in 2023. The others still are in prison today.
Image from https://x.com/justcallmebhunt/status/879810667448086528?lang=bn  

The only living witness to the crime who was not part of the gang was a woman who sold her body for crack money. Rachel Moore was a shaky witness, not because she was afraid or unwilling to testify, but because her memory kept changing. Brave as she was about speaking out, crack had reduced her in a way nearly as total as Edward Byrne.

Then there was Arjune, the witness Byrne had been guarding the night of his murder. Arjune testified at trial as well, boldly declaring his lack of fear as he fingered the suspects as the killers. He was so bold that, according to McAlary, the jury figured he was making it all up.

The best take on how the case went down was given by one of the defense attorneys. Sal Alosco questioned how anyone other than the shooter, whoever that might be, could be convicted of murder. His defendant, Todd Scott, admitted to walking over to Byrne’s car with McClary, but only to see if McClary would do it.

Byrne's murder became an issue in the 1988 presidential campaign. Vice President George H. W. Bush carried Byrne's badge on the campaign trail and displayed it in the Oval Office after his election. McAlary's book reveals the badge was one of several replicas given out by Byrne's father.
Image from https://www.facebook.com/NYDailyNews/photos/george-hw-bush-carried-the-badge-of-nypd-police-officer-edward-byrne-during-his-/10155851493172541/?_rdr

As a defense, this ignores the fact being an accessory to a crime is no different under law doing the crime itself. But as Alosco told McAlary, who could say what really happened with a case like this:

“My client is a liar,” Alosco said. “Sure, he committed perjury. But whose perjury does the jury want to believe – Todd Scott’s or Rachel Moore’s? Todd Scott’s or Arjune’s? Everyone is lying and I’m tired of being spit at. My mother told me last night, ‘I see you on television and I think you are a defendant.’”

In the end, the convictions of all defendants electrified Sica and the other cops who attended the trials. But while Pappy Mason was eventually imprisoned, the man Mason worked for was allowed to plead out of a long sentence in exchange for cooperating with the federal government. A lot of what happened ended up making sense to no one.

In the end, Cop Shot tells of a horrible crime that exposed an ugly truth, with a resolution that brought its survivors a sense of justice that still managed to feel unsatisfying. McAlary does a good job laying out the broad parameters of the case but leaves off any conclusions, except one: The story of crack in New York City was just getting started.