Edward Conlon’s Book, “Blue Blood,” Tells of His NYPD Life
By Celia McGee, New York Daily News
Stick Edward Conlon in a lineup, which he’s done to lots of suspected perps, and he’d be the one looking a little different from your standard-issue, third-generation Irish-American (and very handsome) cop.
Almost like he lived another life at times.
Like his nice sports jacket might not be off-the-rack, or he gets his hair cut someplace fancy.
Like he could’ve graduated from Harvard, been one of those arch Lampoon boys, and later written for The New Yorker.
He’s got the wary posture of a street detective, but also the watchful smile of an Ivy League achiever.
Guilty, of all of the above.
His success is that he’s made detective in the NYPD - and this week publishes “Blue Blood,” a memoir of his years on the force, for which he scored a $1 million advance.
The book, which has gotten great early reviews, ranges from the daily, deadly details of street work to major cases like Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.
One devastating section chronicles Conlon’s heartbreaking work at the Fresh Kills landfill - helping process the World Trade Center remains brought there after 9/11.
The book took five years to write, but on balance, says Conlon, 39, “being a cop is much harder than writing.
“I’ve got the regulation terrible detective schedule of two nights and two days on, working from four to one in the morning, then showing up again at 8.
“And say you’re on a homicide for two days - you may or may not have an idea of who did it and why. The reasons are an embarrassment of riches: It’s someone in the same drug gang, someone from a different gang, a fight over a girl. There’s a lot of guns around. I saw a guy shot straight through the head the other day - and he survived.”
Conlon is full of praise for former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s crime-fighting agenda, which he considers a lasting success.
As for the current incumbent: “My opinion of the mayor is that I work for him.”
Right now, Conlon is assigned to the 44th Precinct in the Bronx, the area around Yankee Stadium. He’s happy to keep the status quo, including his rank, and says he’s not about to sit for the sergeant’s exam.
“In my job, I’ve just got the case, the victim and the criminal. Whereas my boss has my work, his work and his bosses’ work to worry about, and also taking care of his Compstat numbers, performing administrative duties and occasionally getting caught up in politics.”
And when a sergeant isn’t up to the job, it can make for an experience like the year and a half of hell Conlon and his buddies in the high-risk Street Narcotic Enforcement Unit suffered.
Conlon used a pseudonym in the late ‘90s when he began to write pieces about life on the street as a cop for The New Yorker. But the cover was blown when he signed his big book deal.
Fears that Conlon would be another Frank Serpico, the detective whose revelations rocked the department decades ago, worsened the situation, said the author.
“I can’t believe he’ll be happy if he reads the book,” Conlon says.
Unsure after what to do next after he graduated from Harvard, where he majored in English (and minored in the Lampoon), Conlon took a job with the social services agency Consultants for Criminal Justice Alternatives. But to get at New York’s problems where they really lived, he enrolled in the Police Academy.
Conlon’s first duty was patrolling the Claremont Houses, projects in the Bronx, south of Yonkers, where he grew up.
He knew about adjusting to new areas. As a teenager he commuted to Manhattan’s Regis High School on the upper East Side. But, he says, the school’s wealthy neighborhood was less of a challenge than “The 84th Street Gang - older boys from what was left of nearby Irish Yorkville, who like to wait around to beat us up.”
The most violent case he’s worked on lately was “a guy bludgeoned to death by his nephew and stuffed in a bag in the closet,” he says. “Both of them were overly fond of angel dust - which doesn’t bring out the better angels in our natures.”
Often, being a cop doesn’t, either. The strain can be hard on personal and family life. Nonetheless, “I’ve been dating someone for a while,” says Conlon of his magazine editor girlfriend.
The other good news is that, nine years into The Job, Conlon believes he makes a difference. “Oh, sure,” he says. “Every cop, every day, does.
“Usually I meet people when their lives have gone horribly wrong. Their house has been broken into, their husband is dead.
“How I treat that, how I talk to them and look at them, can make it less horrible.”