Foreword
Randy
My introduction to violence came in 1962 when I was six years old. It arrived via a television drama called Combat! This weekly one-hour series ran until 1967 and followed a U.S. Army infantry squad as they advanced through France during World War II. It starred Vic Morrow and Rick Jansen with a cast of recurring characters portrayed by a host of different actors, including silent screen heartthrob Ramon Navarro, comedians Shecky Greene and Jack Carter, future Academy Award winner Robert Duvall, and Leonard Nimoy and Walter Koenig, before they attained starring roles on Star Trek. The violence on Combat! was glorious, courageous, and noble, as good triumphed over evil. My childhood buddies and I reenacted scenes in the woods behind our homes, complete with authentic plastic helmets and weapons manufactured by the Mattel toy company.
My introduction to real violence came three years later in 1964. It arrived via an alcoholic, abusive father. We were living above the means of his teacher’s salary, so he took a second job playing the piano in taverns. He began drinking when he was in the eighth grade, and in college he graduated to liquor and participated in promiscuous sexual activity. He did begin to settle into harmonious family life until he began working five to six nights a week in various bars where the liquor flowed and promiscuous sex was readily available. When the abuse started, it was generally aimed toward my mother, but eventually my older sister and I were caught in the crosshairs. You can put any modifier you want next to the word “abuse” and it eventually visited our family: verbal abuse, physical abuse, and etcetera. Unlike in the TV show, Combat!, this violence was horrific, cowardly, and dishonorable. The truly terrifying portions of the abuse normally took place when my father came home from the bar. To this day I still awaken every night between midnight and 1:00 a.m., as this was usually when he came home. I could tell from the way he closed the door whether or not I could go back to sleep or curl up in the fetal position as the “fight or flight” physiological responses coursed through my body. During the day I became an expert in assessing his behaviors, which let me know if it was safe to interact with him, or whether I should give him a wide berth. Dinnertime was the second most frequent occurrence of abuse, usually in its verbal format. We never knew which father would be joining us at the table—the charming, gregarious dad or the malicious, vindictive father. When I assessed that it was the latter, I attempted, sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully, to de-escalate the tension through humor or by diverting the conversation to something I knew was a safer topic.
Although these were not pleasant childhood experiences, they did wise me up fast. Alcoholics develop a talent for deception and manipulation, and learning to see through those traits served me well throughout my career in corporate security.
Dan
As fate would have it, I was raised in a working-class neighborhood in western Queens that bordered both the Long Island City and Sunnyside sections of the borough. The majority of the men in that area were construction workers and tradesmen, or some other version of blue-collar worker: police officers, sanitation workers, or other civil servants, like my father, a Transit Authority electrical worker. New York City at that time, which was the late 1960s and 1970s, was awash in crime and violence. It was not uncommon to see junkies gather in one of the local concrete schoolyards at night to use drugs. It also was not uncommon to be the victim of some form of violence, whether that was in a schoolyard fight with a classmate or while riding the ever-dangerous New York City subway system. I recall seeing more than one homicide victim on the streets and witnessing the police response and media attention that naturally follows such a discovery. I was mugged at age 13 and my sister was assaulted by a gang while on her way home from high school, both while on the subway. I also recall our home being burglarized when I was a child. Perhaps the most memorable violence-related event was the night that the police interrupted our slumber to follow a blood trail up the stairs to the small second-floor apartment my father rented to two fledgling Mafia members. The wannabe mobsters had already grabbed what they wanted and fled into the night. The next day, they were machine-gunned to death in a gas station—so it went back then in that place. Violence was all around me, including in my home where my older brother Jim and I used to spar with each other over the slightest of transgressions. More than one of these fights resulted in broken walls, furniture, and bones. My former Marine father was not amused. I look back now and think that the Ali–Frazier fights were nothing in comparison to my brother and me.
Despite my upbringing and familiarity with violence, I was still unprepared for what I would see and deal with on joining the New York Police Department in 1984 at the age of 21. My eyes were opened widely to the brutal violence that seemed to be a daily occurence in the poverty-, drug-, and desperation-filled neighborhoods in which I would work during my 20-year career.
As any experienced street cop or detective knows, you frequently come into contact with people moving toward violence. As such, and in an effort to minimize the number of fights and physical altercations you have to engage in, you develop an ability to de-escalate the violent person. This is an art that is learned by watching more experienced officers handle such people. Once you learn how to do this, it is the equivalent of a master’s degree in psychology. I found this skill to be invaluable when dealing with potentially violent people in my corporate and consulting roles.
In time I began to see past the act and its aftermath and to learn to focus on what was behind the violence. To be a successful police detective, you must understand human beings and what makes them do what they do to each other. What causes a person to take another person’s life or torture, strangle, rape, and abuse another human being? I soon saw that it was a variety of things, but most of it had to do with external influences. I truly believe that almost no one is a born killer, but that a lifetime of abuse and violence can form a person to act out violently with no hesitation. I also have seen countless cases where the only motivator was greed. The most curious to me, however, were the unfortunate souls who could not contain their emotions, caused by broken hearts or jealous streaks, and flew into rages, causing death and destruction. Theirs was a temporary mental condition with lifelong repercussions—a permanent and terribly incorrect answer to a temporary problem.
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