Law and Disorder: How a Kid from the Bronx Became America's Top Drug Prosecutor

CHAPTER 1

A KILLING IN QUEENS

On the early morning of February 26, 1988, a rookie NYPD officer named Edward Byrne was parked in his radio patrol car. The block of Inwood Street in South Jamaica, Queens, had become infested with drug crews selling crack, a form of purified cocaine that had the entire city in its deadly grip.

A Guyanese immigrant, who went by the single name of Arjune, lived in a gray clapboard house at Inwood Street and 107th Avenue. An upstanding citizen, he had resisted the plague of narcotics trafficking in the neighborhood. But he’d paid for his bravery, as his home had been firebombed twice. One time, he picked up a flaming Molotov cocktail and tossed it back at his attackers, severely burning his hands in the process.

Still, Arjune didn’t back down. He was set to testify against the drug lords who were threatening his life and disrupting the peace on his block.

To protect the witness, the command at the 103rd Precinct in Queens assigned round-the-clock surveillance on Arjune’s home, which was why the rookie cop was stationed on the corner of Inwood and 107th that night.

Byrne, the son of a cop, had celebrated his twenty-second birthday only four days before. Relieving Officer Nancy Stefan a little after midnight, he climbed into the driver’s seat of the marked Ford Impala squad car and battled boredom during the early morning hours of that cold, cloudy night.

Two gunmen crept up on Byrne’s radio car, acting on the orders of their boss, a drug kingpin named Howard Pappy Mason, who was intent on intimidating not only Arjune but also the entire NYPD.

One of the gunmen, Todd Scott, tapped on Byrne’s passenger side window. Startled, the rookie cop turned his head, instinctively placing his right hand on the duty gun in his belt.

I’ll come around, Todd Scott mumbled, attempting to distract Bryne.

Atthesameinstant,theothergunman,DavidMcClary,sneaked up on the driver’s side, leveled a chrome-plated .38 revolver eight inches from Byrne’s head, and fired.

The window glass shattered, sending splinters into the rookie’s face. The copper-jacketed bullet ripped into Byrne’s jaw. McClary kept shooting. Four more bullets effectively destroyed the skull of Officer Edward Byrne, tragically ending his young life.

The duo boasted about the murder as they fled from the scene.

That shit was swift, crowed Todd Scott.

I seen his blue eyes, said McClary.

I wasn’t there.

The words spoken by the murderers of Officer Edward Byrne were documented from a trial transcript. The facts of the crime were established only in its aftermath in a court of law. This is my world—the justice system—where we seek to determine what actually happened in all criminal matters, large and small. Officer Byrne was one of the many people whose victimhood cried out for vindication. As a prosecutor in New York City, I came to know this story and thousands of others throughout my career.

My professional life was devoted to establishing truth in this admittedly flawed and imperfect system of justice. To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous line about democracy, the system of judge and jury is the worst form of justice there is, except for all the others that have been tried.

Why am I bringing up a murder that took place decades ago? What possible relevance could such a crime hold in the present day? Who now recalls the name Edward Byrne?

I remember. A lot of other people remember too. When Edward Byrne was assassinated in cold blood, I was serving in the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor in New York City. The city was in a terrible state back then, plagued by chaos on the streets, and ordinary citizens lived in fear.

I spent almost twenty-five years as a prosecutor in New York City, and I learned all about crime, violence, drug abuse, the criminal justice system, and the people who break the law. I faced off with some of the worst examples of humankind. At the same time, I was working with the best and most dedicated prosecutors and law enforcement officers in the country, tasked with the job of ensuring public safety.

For seven years, I held the position of the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor, heading up the only office in the nation solely dedicated to investigating and prosecuting felony drug cases. Prior to that role, I had worked for seven years as the Chief Assistant in Special Narcotics, and before that, I spent a decade as an Assistant District Attorney with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the country’s premier prosecutor’s office.

But before all that, I came from rather humble beginnings.

CHAPTER 2

MY HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Both sets of my grandparents came to the United States with the hope of escaping poverty and the pogroms they faced as Jews in Russia. My paternal grandparents and their three-month-old son, Morris, my father, left Russia in 1907 and somehow got to Southampton, England, where they boarded the HMS Saxonia and headed to Boston. Eventually, they made their way to the Lower East Side of Manhattan before finally settling in Brooklyn. My mother’s family came from a town in Russia known as Kalmica, or Kalmykia. It was a small town straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. Most of my mother’s family left for the United States around 1912 when she was an infant. My grandmother was one of eight siblings who had made it to America. According to my relatives, four of my grandmother’s siblings died in early childhood due to the poor medical care in Russia. My mother’s family and some of her aunts and uncles settled in the Bronx. The rest of her family settled in Brooklyn. All my great-uncles worked hard while the mothers took care of the children.

My father was a classic underachiever. Although very bright, he was not very ambitious. He never learned to drive and never made much money in his work as a supervisor for the Miller-Wohl company, which sold women’s dresses. After they married, my parents moved in with my grandparents in the Bronx in a three-bedroom apartment on Rochambeau Avenue. My older brother Steven and I shared a bedroom. It was not a good situation because my father never got along with my mother’s parents. They resented the fact that my father never tried to move up but settled for a fairly low-paying job.

Aside from my grandparents, everyone liked my dad. He had a good sense of humor, was always polite, and he rarely cursed. He read the newspapers every day and was well versed in politics and current events. He was also a very honest man and would get upset when he read about politicians being convicted of taking bribes or committing other dishonest acts. He always said that most politicians were crooks. I think it was his dislike of dishonest politicians and other lawbreakers that got me interested in criminal law and prosecuting the bad guys.

My father was the oldest of his four siblings. After finishing high school, he went to work to help support the family and allow his younger siblings to continue their education. One of his brothers, Sam, died in an accident as a teenager when he was riding his bicycle in the street and got hit by a truck. Another brother, Irving, worked for U.S. Customs. My father’s sister, Ray, the youngest of the siblings, went to college and got a degree from Brooklyn College. It was unusual for a woman in the 1940s to attend college. She lived a long and happy life and passed away in March 2023, a few weeks shy of her 104th birthday.

My mother, Tessie, was a housewife. She always had a lot of energy, and she needed it to deal with my grandmother, who had no education, spoke barely any English, and loved to get into arguments with people. Tessie was very creative. When she was in her seventies, she started writing poetry about people and places. She composed witty poems about me, my brother, and my kids. She actually submitted a poem to Reader’s Digest and won a prize for it. She loved being around people and family.

My mother had a sister, Ann, who lived in our apartment house, and a brother, Daniel, who lived in Manhattan. Daniel was a doctor, and was regarded as the prince of the family, mainly because he treated all my relatives for free.

I was born Robert Howard Silbering in the Bronx on June 6, 1947. I have only one sibling, my brother Steven, who is seven years older than me. Steven and I are quite different. My brother was a brilliant student. He graduated from City College and went on to achieve a master’s and PhD degree in organic chemistry from Rensselaer Polytech University in upstate New York. He furthered his education at the University of Minnesota with a post-doctoral degree in pharmacology, then went on to a successful career working for a number of pharmaceutical companies. Unlike me, he did not have an outgoing personality or a big interest in sports. We were members of the same family, but we had very little in common. My mother always raved about how smart my brother was and that he was an excellent student. She continually asked me why I couldn’t be more like him and study and get good grades. She was thrilled when he got his PhD and proudly referred to him as My son, the doctor.

We never did very much as a family. We never went out to eat, and we didn’t own a car. The only vacations we ever took were to the Catskill Mountains for a week where we stayed at a small hotel called the Youngsville Inn. I was the poorest kid of all my friends. While they went to summer camp, I had to make do with hanging around the schoolyard. Their parents all had cars, and they took trips and ate out. I had to work for everything I had. I worked to pay for college and law school, as well as my first new car, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. I was never afraid of hard work.

I never felt disadvantaged. I was a happy kid with lots of friends. I felt lucky to be surrounded by loving parents, lots of friends and relatives, and a neighborhood where I felt like I knew everyone who lived in the apartments and worked in the stores that lined the streets. It was a very comforting feeling.

I was blessed to have a reasonable amount of smarts, a good sense of humor, an excellent memory, and the two most important traits to succeed in life and work: good judgment and common sense. I also had an approachable, down-to-earth personality and got along with everyone. I couldn’t afford to be arrogant, and in truth, I had no reason to be arrogant about anything. I had a self-deprecating sense of humor and made people laugh when I made jokes about myself. I never had a big ego and didn’t get embarrassed easily. I was not sensitive to criticism and could handle the unkind remarks of others.

School became a home away from home for me, not because of anything that happened in the classroom, but due to the goings-on in the schoolyard. I attended Public School 80 for both elementary and junior high, with a student body that was over fifty percent Jewish. A Public Works Administration building created in the 1930s, the school remains a touchstone of my youth, but not for the classes I took there.

I was attracted to the sports fields in the schoolyard like a magnet. I would hurry out the door of our apartment building, turn right, and after a short walk along Rochambeau Avenue, I was there. Pick-up softball, basketball, and touch football games were always being played. At home, I would watch a lot of sports on TV, and because I lived in the Bronx, the kids I knew were all big Yankee fans.

That was the golden era for the Yankees, with Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra, so it was a great time to be a fan of the Bronx Bombers. I had pictures of the players up on the wall in my bedroom. When I went to Yankee Stadium with friends, we usually sat on the top deck behind home plate, paying $1.30 for a grandstand ticket. I spent a lot of time in the House that Ruth Built.

I took the subway everywhere, including Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden. When I was a teenager, my friends and I rode the subway all over the place and never really thought about crime or danger.

In my early days, I wasn’t much interested in school. I never had an interest in reading books. Academics didn’t mean anything to me. Even when I graduated junior high and went on to nearby DeWitt Clinton High School, I was only excited because Clinton had a history of excellent athletic teams.

DeWitt Clinton was an all-boys high school that was located a short distance from Mosholu Parkway and P.S. 80. Burt Lancaster had gone there, as well as the Get Smart actor Don Adams. A guy named Ralph Lifshitz attended Clinton a few years before me, who later changed his name to Ralph Lauren. Many other actors and politicians have gone to Clinton as well.

P.S. 80 might have been majority Jewish, but Clinton in my day was pretty diverse, with many Puerto Rican and African American students making up the seven-thousand student body. I might be looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but I remember us all getting along pretty well.

Whatever subjects I didn’t like, I avoided. I cut geometry all the time because there was nothing I hated more in life than geometry. My truancy got my mother summoned to Clinton to meet with the dean.

Your son is cutting classes, he informed her. He’s a smart kid, but he’s not applying himself.

She was called to these kinds of meetings so often that she became disgusted. I think I’m in school more than you are! she shouted at me one day. Back then, I had a baseball card collection that probably would have been worth real money today. She took all my cards and threw them out.

When I graduated from Clinton in 1965, I did not know what career I wanted to pursue. Well, actually I didknow what I wanted to be in junior high: I wanted to play second base for the Yankees. I gradually came to realize I wasn’t in the same league as Mantle, Maris, and the others. It was a hard day when I faced the sobering reality that I just wasn’t going to be good enough.

My next passion was to be a sportscaster. From watching Yankee games, I knew the language of sports, the play-calling, the patter, and the routines. I knew how the game was supposed to be played and who all the characters were. Mel Allen, the great Yankees announcer, was who I aspired to be, and I could imitate his style with uncanny accuracy.

But a career in sports broadcasting wasn’t in the cards either. My grades were not stellar; they were okay, but not great. I went to the required senior-class interview with the school guidance counselor.

I can suggest the colleges you should apply to, he said. Since you don’t have the best grades, you’re not going to get into City College, and you’re probably not going to get into Lehman or Baruch. What about a solid SUNY school like New Paltz? Or maybe you should consider private schools.

In the end, I chose Fairleigh Dickinson University, across the Hudson River from the Bronx in Teaneck, New Jersey. It seemed to me I was simply settling for the best school that would have me, but the school turned out to be a lot more than that.

I came to the realization that I had to take school seriously and not goof off anymore. Fairleigh Dickinson University—affectionately referred to as Harvard on the Hackensack—lit a fire under me. I had more or less wandered through high school, but as I started college in 1965, I felt myself emerge from intellectual limbo. I began to get interested in the material I was learning. I managed to finish my freshman year as an A student, a status that I had never achieved in my life. My curiosity about the world woke up. Maybe I had just matured a bit. Everything about studying and learning just seemed to click. It was during my freshman year, after taking a Constitutional Law class, that I started to think about a career in law.

While I was in college, I had virtually no spending money, and my parents certainly had none to give me. A boy with empty pockets needs to work. Thankfully, my uncle Daniel, the doctor, helped me out in that respect. He had a second home in Bridgeville, a small town in the Catskill Mountains near Monticello, New York. During his time in the area, my uncle had met the owner of the Salhara Hotel in nearby Woodbourne. He was able to land me a summer job.

This was the mid-1960s, marking the tail end of the golden age of the Catskill resort culture. The entire region was already dwindling from its peak in the 1950s, when over five hundred hotels, bungalow colonies, and summer camps dotted the landscape of upstate New York. The Jewish Alps, we called it, and the clientele was, in fact, overwhelmingly made up of Jews from New York City and the larger metropolitan area. Businessmen sent their families to the Catskills to beat the summer heat and would join them for the weekends.

If you’ve ever seen Dirty Dancing, read the Herman Wouk novel Marjorie Morningstar, or watched the TV series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, you might have a good sense of what the scene was like. But the real phenomena was ten times as intense as any writer could portray. It was a different era, the heyday of the Borscht Belt, with nightly entertainment from comics, singers, and dance bands.

In the summer of 1966, at the age of eighteen, I started out as a bellhop, schlepping luggage and on occasion helping out as a busboy in the dining room. The next two years I moved up to be a busboy and a waiter. It was a long workday. I got up at seven in the morning, had a quick breakfast, then helped prepare breakfast for the guests. By the time breakfast finished, it was ten-thirty and time to clean up and set the tables for lunch, which started at one. After a short break in the afternoon, the dinner rush was on at seven o’clock.

I loved the job. I had a great time schmoozing with guests and making good tips. Almost every night after work, the waiters, bellhops, and other staffers went out together. I was in college boy heaven.

After that first summer, the Salhara went out of business—a harbinger of the decline of the Catskill scene. But I was hired at a place called Green Acres the next summer. A year later, in 1968, I was hired as a waiter at Esther Manor hotel.

In 1968 it was the Summer of Love, when the flower child craze was in full bloom, but I