The Soul of a Cop

The most decorated cop in New York City describes his experiences out on his beat, encountering killers, drug dealers, and others and putting his life on the line. Reprint.

By 1987, when Ragonese retired from the NYPD after 17 years of service, he'd won over 100 awards, making him the city's most- decorated cop. He won't win another for writing--even with the help of old-hand Stainback (Snake, 1986, etc.)--but his no-frills memoir does deliver plenty of action and a few sharp opinions. What Ragonese doesn't deliver on is the promise of the title. The soul of this cop is plumbed only uniform-deep (a typical reflective passage: ``Like most cops, I've gotten a bang out of arresting bad guys, but it would be nothing like I knew I'd feel rescuing good guys''). What we get instead is a fast-moving stream of the author's exploits, beginning with his most celebrated, keeping alive a woman trapped beneath a toppled construction crane in 1985. A flashback to his working-class Brooklyn boyhood follows, then a tracing of a glittering career in three divisions of the NYPD: an anticrime unit, where Ragonese caught bank robbers, shot a felon, and bucked for a detective's gold shield; EMS, where he grappled with ``jumpers,'' shot a crippled horse, helped a man crushed by a subway train to die with dignity, and finally got his gold shield; and the bomb squad, where he made two discoveries ``I've never been able to reveal publicly until now''--that, at Staten Island's infamous Willowbrook mental institution, he found (and was forced to cover up) a ``chamber of horrors'' strewn with body parts, and that he witnessed the NYPD using its Bronx firing range as a toxic-waste dump. The criticism of the NYPD implicit in both revelations is shadowed throughout, from bald accusations (``The NYPD has always denied that cops have to meet a quota of traffic summonses. That's a lie'') to gripes about office politics and potshots at fellow (pseudonymous) officers, adding spice to an otherwise straightforward chronicle. Meat and potatoes for hard-core cop fans. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.