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Date Posted: 13:23:08 03/14/25 Fri
Author: Detective Joe Trimboli
Subject: Joe Trimboli hero NYPD cop, Mike Dowd LOSER





Joseph Trimboli, an honest Internal Affairs officer on the New York City police force, set his sights on Michael Dowd, who would earn the newspaper nickname "The Dirtiest Cop Ever" -- a pursuit that became a five-year obsession. Mr. McAlary, a columnist at The Daily News and formerly at The New York Post, knows his city, its streets, its precincts, its politics and its characters, good and bad. His account has all the ingredients of an exciting novel.

Michael Dowd and Joseph Trimboli were both "blue-collar kids looking for some kind of future," Mr. McAlary writes. "They became cops because they didn't know what else to do with their lives." That's where the resemblance ends. Mr. Dowd was born in 1961 and raised in Suffolk County, L.I., one of seven children of an embittered New York City firefighter who taught his offspring that "the city was there to be taken for everything, by everyone."

Mr. Dowd learned his lesson well. In 1982, some two months out of the police academy, Mr. McAlary writes, "Officer Dowd suffered his first phantom injury." Within two years, he was calling in sick nearly once a month. That was small stuff for a shrewd man like Officer Dowd. He escalated to beating up and robbing drug dealers -- after all, to whom could they complain? Then it became routine for him to use, and sell, cocaine while on duty in uniform.

by 1987, Mr. Dowd was leading a band of corrupt police officers working out of his Brooklyn precinct. They regularly engaged in shakedowns, tipping off drug dealers about raids and dealing drugs themselves. The ambitious Mr. Dowd was on the payroll of one of New York City's biggest cocaine dealers, who had a direct connection to the drug lords of the Dominican Republic. Mr. Dowd's rewards were flashy: a red Corvette costing $35,000, four houses on Long Island and payoffs totaling $8,000 a week -- in addition to his regular police salary.

Mr. Dowd's flagrant conduct inspired many calls to the police department's Internal Affairs Division, where his case eventually ended up with Joseph Trimboli. Mr. Trimboli was born in 1951 and grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a pipe fitter. "In Joe's neighborhood people looked up to people with city jobs, which meant a secure future," Mr. McAlary writes. He dreamed of getting a detective's gold shield; that was his greatest goal. Instead, he was promoted to sergeant, assigned to a notoriously corrupt precinct and eventually courted by Internal Affairs. This unit is hated by police officers, but Mr. Trimboli was promised that if he joined, he would receive that longed-for detective shield within a couple of years. He accepted, figuring he could dog it for a year, not ruin anyone's career. He would look for minor violations -- sleeping on duty, buttons undone. Soft stuff.

But a funny thing happened on Joseph Trimboli's road to that gold shield. Crack hit the streets of New York, particularly in Brooklyn, where he was assigned. "Some of these cops seemed to have become cops just to get high," Mr. McAlary writes. And the cop whose name kept turning up in reports to Internal Affairs was Michael Dowd.

Beginning in 1986, Sergeant Trimboli dedicated himself to investigating Officer Dowd. It became an obsession that cost him his family, friends, health and hopes for his professional future. Although a mountain of information was compiled about Mr. Dowd's open involvement in the drug trade, for some inexplicable reason, Mr. Trimboli's requests for additional manpower, access to Mr. Dowd's financial statements, telephone taps -- any and all of the tools he needed that could have made a case against the worst cop in New York City -- were all turned down.

Amazingly, given the wealth of information on this renegade officer, because of a recent corruption case in another Brooklyn precinct, "the department was in no hurry for another police scandal," Mr. McAlary writes. In particular, the Internal Affairs Division "quit drug cases."

Wanting to expand beyond Brooklyn, in 1992 Mr. Dowd and his illicit colleagues began dealing drugs in their home county, Suffolk. The police there did what the New York City Police Department and the special prosecutor's office had failed to do: they conducted a solid investigation, which resulted in the arrests of 50 people, including Mr. Dowd, on May 6, 1992. In July, Mr. Dowd was arrested on Federal racketeering charges.

AT about this point, Mr. McAlary entered the story personally. Working at the time at The New York Post, he latched onto the story of the Suffolk County arrests and soon learned about Joseph Trimboli. He found him, and elicited "a huge tale of cover-up and disgrace" on the part of the Internal Affairs Division, a story that made the front page of The Post -- along with a photograph of Joseph Trimboli. Only then did Lee Brown, the police commissioner at the time -- who had previously stated that he considered the whole thing "a Suffolk County problem" -- order a special report on the department's internal affairs investigations. The main thrust of that investigation, Mr. McAlary contends, seemed directed toward finding out whether Mr. Trimboli was the source of Mr. McAlary's story, rather than toward the truth of the corruption allegations.

Mayor David Dinkins agreed to establish a police corruption commission, headed by Milton Mollen, a former judge. "However," Mr. McAlary charges, "once blinded by the television lights, the judge lost sight of his mission." He cut a deal with Mr. Dowd: if the disgraced police officer would testify before the commission, Mr. Dowd would not have to name names. Mr. Trimboli testified to the Mollen Commission after Mr. Dowd. Incredibly, he was not asked to name the police officials who should have acted but did not. "The hearings were largely an exercise in self-promotion," Mr. McAlary writes. "They had no lasting purpose, effect or conclusion."

Michael Dowd agreed to a plea bargain on the Federal charges. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison by Judge Kimba Wood.

Joseph Trimboli heard himself publicly praised by Mr. Brown's successor, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the very man who had interrogated him for hours about the leak to Mr. McAlary. He was promoted to detective squad supervisor, but the gold shield had lost its luster. After a bout of poor health, he resigned from the department and accepted a position as senior investigator in the Queens District Attorney's corruption investigation unit.

There are many serious questions that even Mr. McAlary cannot answer. Without the complicity of higher-ups, how could this entire operation have been carried out, openly, contemptuously, over so long a period of time? Responsibility filters down from the top; the climate for corruption has to exist in order for an operation such as Mr. Dowd's to flourish. Why were so few superior officers penalized for their failure to act? Three police commissioners -- Benjamin Ward, Lee Brown and Raymond Kelly -- were in place, yet no one acted until newspaper headlines forced their hand.

Mike McAlary has told a disturbing and frightening story well, but there are some major missing pieces.

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