By Shavana Abruzzo
Crooks are supposed to be bad. Cops are not. Whether it was a case of outright lies, bad judgment or just plain old cold dispassion, the past 10 years have given Brooklyn fibber cop Charles Schwarz plenty of food for thought about why he dove – headfirst – into the murky sea of blue in the notorious Abner Louima police brutality case, which made poster boys of unspeakable cop violence out of the borough’s Finest and plunged the 70th Precinct into the depraved annals of far-flung history. The reviled officer, who was released from a Minnesota jail last week – and will serve the remainder of his five-year sentence for perjury in an upstate halfway house – is right to assume that there is not a welcome mat waiting for him in New York City when he finally enters society in May. Nor even a nook where he can hide, assuming he ever could. Schwarz was convicted of aiding in and, later, concealing an assault so lawlessly wretched that a decade later, it still haunts, harms and heightens tempers. Thanks to Schwarz’s lies, his former Flatbush stationhouse has become synonymous with the brutal attack, which took place inside it on August 9, 1997 after cops erroneously arrested the Haitian immigrant during a routine call to bust-up a fight outside a local nightclub. Months of legal wrangling, cover-ups and a choke-inducing blue wall of silence later, a trial unearthed the shocking horrors that Louima had been subjected to – not the least of which was being raped by ringleading cop Justin Volpe with a broken broomstick, which ripped a one-inch hole in his rectum and bladder, and sent the disgraced cop to the slammer for 30 years. Schwarz’s admitted lies shed light on the New York Police Department’s profound flaws and helped put cop-on-victim violence on the map for all to recoil from. Schwarz’s lies and those of his fellow ex-officers Thomas Bruder, Thomas Wiese, Francisco Rosario and Rolando Aleman cost this city’s taxpayers more than $8 million in reparation for the wounded, humiliated, tortured, but undefeated, Abner Louima. Schwarz’s complicity and later, his heated self-defense in the defendant’s pen, served to ignite and fan embers of distrust towards the NYPD from which the agency has never fully recovered. When law enforcers takes an oath of office, it becomes their obligation to protect the public – on and off duty. Charles Schwarz and his cohorts did anything but that when they decided to morph from cops into crooks. E-mail “A Britisher’s View” at BritView@courierlife.net. All letters become the property of Courier-Life Publications and are subject to publication unless otherwise specified; please include your name, address and daytime telephone number for verification.
