A Successful Investigation, Despite a Few Bad Haircuts

A Successful Investigation, Despite a Few Bad Haircuts
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
New York Times
November 10, 2011

The men came in one by one, sat down in the chair in front of the shop’s newest barber, and got their hair cut. They looked like customers at pretty much any other barber shop around the city. They paid, and went on their way.

But they were not like other customers. They were all undercover police officers.

And so was the man cutting their hair.

They were all in the shop, Who’s First Barber Shop II, on East 149th Street in the Morris Park section of the Bronx, trying to collect evidence during the early stages of what would become a sweeping ticket-fixing investigation, according to court documents, police records and people briefed on the case. The owner, a police officer named Jose Ramos, was believed to be aiding drug dealers.

But few of the undercover officers, it turns out, came back after their haircuts, according to one person with knowledge of the matter, and ended up contributing little to the eventual success of the investigation.

The reason they did not return had nothing to do with crime or criminals. It was simply because they did not like the way their colleague, the undercover barber, cut their hair, according to the person briefed on the case. And that is despite the fact that the Police Department was picking up the tab.

“Undercover officers have entered the barber shop to receive haircuts and attempt to buy marijuana, however they have failed,” according to an affidavit in support of a wiretap application sworn out on Oct. 23, 2009, by Ramon Valdez, a sergeant with the Internal Affairs Bureau. “An undercover officer attempted to work as a barber but there are no discussions by the targets of the investigation in the presence of the undercover police officer.”

The undercover coiffing interlude, and the failure thereof, was just one minor facet of a sprawling Internal Affairs Bureau investigation overseen by the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, that resulted in the arrests last month of 16 police officers. But it is a crystalline example of the unanticipated hurdles, and the vagaries of human behavior, that can complicate any undercover operation, no matter how creatively planned.

The idea was hatched in the summer of 2009, when the investigation of Officer Ramos was in its early stages, according to several people with knowledge of the matter and the police records. The link to ticket-fixing had yet to be discovered; the focus was on drugs.

The undercover officer had cut hair before joining the force, and the department paid for the cost of reinstating his license to cut hair, which was issued by New York State, according to police records. The officer rented a barber chair from the owner for about $125 a week on and off from early July to late September 2009, and worked on about a dozen days, according to the people and the records.

That is when his colleagues were sent in for haircuts, for which the department paid $10 each, according to the records. The hope was that they’d buy marijuana, or at least witness transactions.It was unclear how many undercover investigators from the Internal Affairs unit got haircuts from the barber over that time, but police records indicate that there were at least four. (It was also unclear how many nonpolice customers, if any, got haircuts from the planted barber.)

“The consensus was just that he gave bad haircuts,” one of the people briefed on the matter said. “They just didn’t like his haircuts.”

But the undercover barber, whose name was not made available, was never able to meet Officer Ramos, according to the affidavit and others filed in the case, as well as police records and the people briefed on the matter. Neither was he able to meet any of the other suspect officers, and only once in passing did he meet one of the drug dealers believed to be associated with the shop’s owner, according to the documents. He did not see any significant criminal activity, according to the documents.

As a result, Sergeant Valdez concluded that keeping the undercover barber in the shop was not productive.

“The use of an undercover police officer in furtherance of this investigation is, therefore, not feasible,” the affidavit said.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, would not discuss the barber shop and the efforts of the undercover officers there, saying, “The department does not disclose the details of undercover operations.” Despite the poor results, several people with knowledge of the matter said the idea to put the undercover officer in the barbershop was a good one.

Other issues arose during the undercover officer’s work in the shop, one of the people said, including the apparent difficulty Internal Affairs had providing support for the officer. Indeed, on at least one occasion, when the barber was invited to go out to a club one night with other people from the shop, Internal Affairs was unable to provide the necessary surveillance, and as a result the officer did not go, the person said.

The undercover barber was promoted after the investigation was concluded, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, elevated to the rank of detective second-grade in a secret ceremony last week at 1 Police Plaza.

While it was not immediately clear whether he was rewarded for his work on the ticket case, it seems unlikely, based on the complaints of his colleagues about his barbering, that he was promoted for his haircutting prowess.