Do you know the name of the current NYPD chief of detectives? Probably not, unless you’re a detective. The last time, and possibly the only time, a chief of detectives broke into the limelight was more than 40 years ago, during the 13-month reign of Albert Seedman, leader of the nation’s second-largest investigative force after the FBI.
Seedman, nearly blind but in full possession of his canny instincts, died at 94 in Florida Friday and was buried yesterday.
A couple of factors put the shine on Al Seedman’s three-star badge. For starters, he looked the part of a Big Apple detective chief: square jaw and shoulders, the piercing glint of his grey eyes, the onyx pinky ring, the ever-present cigar.
And then, there were the headline cases that came his way, one after another: The murder of Kitty Genovese, the rubouts of Mafia kingpins Joe Colombo and Joey Gallo and the destruction of a West Village townhouse that doubled as a Weatherman bomb factory were all his cases. So was the hunt for the Black Liberation Army, responsible for the murderous attacks on three different pairs of NYPD patrolmen. Under Seedman, the detective bureau broke all those cases.
In those days, the rulebook for detectives was informal. Seedman expected his operatives to work on a major case until it was solved, never mind days off, or whatever else it took to get the job done.
Though he was responsible for the big picture, Seedman was alert to tiny clues. As a young reporter, I once tagged along with him, early one morning, as he observed a murder scene at Belvedere Castle in Central Park. A gaggle of detectives was prowling around the body of a small man lying on a rock, a bullet hole between his eyes, but it was their chief who reached into a bush and plucked out a prescription-pill vial. It led to the murderer.
In April 1972, the celebrity chief of detectives abruptly quit. His resignation came the day after my cover story on him appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Seedman told me at the time that if he hadn’t resigned then, he’d have been forced out by police commissioner Patrick V. Murphy. In an era when the public was frightened by street crime, Murphy wanted to elevate the status of the uniformed patrolman walking his beat. The easiest way to do that was to deglamorize the detectives. As the most glamorous detective of all, Seedman would have to go. Rather than let that happen, Seedman proactively ended his 30 year career.
I accepted that version of why Seedman retired when I co-wrote his memoir of his great cases. Then, at age 92, two years ago, Seedman belatedly revealed the real reason he stepped down. It was because of the so-called Harlem Mosque case. On the morning of April 14, 1972, a band of Black Muslims attacked a pair of patrolmen responding to a false 10-13 (officer in need of assistance) call to the mosque on West 116th Street. In the ensuing scuffle, a patrolman was mortally wounded with his own gun. Seedman raced to the scene, where 16 suspects were being held while an angry crowd gathered. But with the threat of a race riot looming, Seedman and his detectives were ordered by higher authority to abandon the mosque.
Before he left, Seedman secured a promise from Rep. Charles Rangel to deliver the suspects to the police later that day. That promise went unkept. Nobody was ever convicted of the murder of the patrolman, Phillip Cardillo. In his 30-year career, it was the only case that Seedman was never permitted to solve. In disgust, he resigned, not least because neither the mayor nor the police commissioner attended Cardillo’s funeral.
Why hadn’t Seedman told me the real reason he resigned when we were working on his book? His voice cracking, the old man gave his answer four decades later: “I loved the department so much that I couldn’t drag it through the mud.”
Peter Hellman co-authored “Chief! Great Cases from the Files of the Chief of Detectives” with Albert Seedman.