Don't hold your breath for the start of a prime-time television series on the adventures of the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI). To be sure, the rooting-out of municipal dirtydoing will steal headlines no matter the locale. But the corruption won't play in Peoria. Like caviar, it's an acquired taste, and most Americans just don't get a steady enough diet of City Hall pocket-stuffing to whet their palates. Maybe the reeason is that aside from Chicago, no other city has its very own anti-corruption police force.
If you aren't satisfied with this gap in your television fare, Peter Benjaminson has come up with the next best thing to "Graft Squad" that the pages of a book can provide. He was the executive assistant to the DOI's commissioner during most of the Dinkins administration and part of the next. He has written an entertaining and insightful account of what he clearly sees as the Department's brief Golden Age under the former Mayor. Between the occasional dig at the performance of the Department in the current regime, Mr. Benjaminson, who is a seasoned investigative reporter and author, has a good time in Secret Police reminiscing over all the DOI handcuffs that ratcheted around the wrists of crooked city workers and bureaucrats and sent many a political overlord diving for cover ...
From a purely entertainment perspective, the best stories in
Secret Police have to do with the relatively minor issues of corruption. Take for example the former sanitation police officer who tore up summonses for a price and continued to steal them from his office even though he knew a surveillance camera had been installed inside. He put a cardboard box over his head before he entered the room, but DOI agents were hiding outside when he came out ... Secret Police presents the reader with enough public sector chicanery to make even the president of the Republic of Texas shake his head in disbelief.
From Kirkus Reviews
An employee of New York City's undercover investigative agency (and former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers) here reveals very little about very few cases. The Department of Investigation does some of the more interesting work in New York: Its undercover investigators look into white-collar crimes and corruption that the police don't have the resources to investigate. Benjaminson (Death in the Afternoon: America's Newspaper Giants Struggle for Survival, 1984) worked at the DOI in its heyday, from 1991 to 1993. The DOI, it seems, typically suffers from in-fighting, corruption, and many of the troubles it was formed to combat, but in 1991 Susan Shepard, who was dead-set on honesty, took command. The cases described here range from a welfare scam that netted $45 million to a parking- meter ploy that resulted in the loss of a lot of quarters. But the stories suffer from both a paucity of compelling material and from a mediocre telling. While Benjaminson is purportedly interested in justice, his real fury erupts when he details the number of times other departments, particularly the office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, took credit for DOI arrests. It's sad that Benjaminson has very little to say about the reasons for, and effects of, the light sentences the DOI criminals face. These white-collar criminals, all of whom have looted the city's coffers, get little to no prison time, and some are rewarded--the upstate water police, for example, preferred giving out speeding tickets to actually guarding the state's water supply, and as punishment were given brand-new cruisers. In his desire to claim bragging rights, Benjaminson neglects the bigger picture, and the book comes off sounding like a series of petty complaints. A catalog of minutiae that trivializes the crimes it reports and the DOI's relevance to New York. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
