“Who the fuck did I burn to get stuck here?” One of the cops interviewed in The Seven Five remembers asking himself this question when he was assigned to New York’s 75th Precinct back in the ’80s. Back then, the 75th — which encompasses the East New York stretch of eastern Brooklyn — was one of the deadliest in the country, with 100 or more murders a year. Poor and riddled with crossfire from the decade’s crack wars, it also led the city in police shootings. On the one hand, it was a miserable place to be a cop. On the other hand, it was a golden opportunity for a cop who didn’t mind breaking the law.
Screening at this year’s DOC NYC, Tiller Russell’s thrill ride of a documentary is constructed out of an intoxicating mosaic of archival news and surveillance footage, but revolves primarily around an interview with former police officer Michael Dowd. Arrested in 1992 after years of seemingly unrepentant mayhem, he lays out the details of his operation with obvious pride. Though the film starts with footage of a more dour and resentful Dowd testifying about his crimes in 1993, now he seems happy to play the out of control cowboy. Kenny Eurell, his onetime younger partner in larceny, appears to be more self-contained.
The two apparently built up a solid business ripping off everything and everyone they could get their hands on. According to Dowd, their motivations were fairly simple. By his reckoning, it made no sense for a cop who risked his life for $36,000 USD a year and a population who despised him not to take dirty money. Practically bouncing out of his chair as he recalls his rip-and-run days, Dowd asserts the importance of being seen as “good”, meaning that other cops could trust him to be in on the take and not rat on them. Working in such a trigger-happy precinct, it was a matter of survival, not morality.
Still, the systematic nature of Dowd and Eurell’s corruption is staggering even by Bad Lieutenant standards. They began with takes when they would bust in on an apartment, find a dealer’s cash and drug stash, and figure nobody would care if a few hundred or thousand disappeared before it got to the precinct. (As one of their accomplices puts it, “They just lost 50 grand and five kilos of cocaine, what are they gonna do, report it?”) Of course, such low-level graft was just the beginning. Before long, Dowd and Eurell were making $8,000 USD a week to act as security detail for drug lord Adam Diaz, whose network of neighborhood bodegas sold groceries in the front and kilos of cocaine in the back. They didn’t stop there, setting up their own cocaine ring in Long Island and teaming up with a coterie of other cops to perform burglaries. “I considered myself both a cop and a gangster,” Dowd says.
With all that cash, cocaine, and risk, the whole operation was doomed to come crashing down, and it did. Like most crime epics, The Seven Five turns into a tale of betrayed friendships, rationalizations, and regret. But throughout the film, we have the sense that just about everybody involved would do the same thing again. The thinking seems to be that it shouldn’t be just the bad guys making all the money. The Seven Five poses the question: when the supposed good guys are spending more of their time figuring out how to break the law than uphold it, what separates them from the bad guys?
The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
In the annals of crime, Mark DeFriest doesn’t appear to be a particularly bad guy. Nevertheless, he’s spent most of his life in jail. Gabriel London’s sardonic but deeply sympathetic The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest — screening at DOC NYC 16 November — makes no attempt to pretend that DeFriest wouldn’t be a handful for any community to manage. Highly intelligent but probably mentally ill, with the precise mix of attributes (high mechanical proficiency, an anti-authoritarian streak, and an adolescent’s prankishness) that make a quiet life difficult, his record spells trouble for any number of reasons. But it’s difficult to argue that decades of imprisonment, much of it in solitary confinement, best serve the interests of either DeFriest or society at large.
Film: The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
Director: Gabriel London
Cast: Mark DeFriest
Studio: Naked Edge Films
Year: 2014
Rated: NR
US Release Date: 2014-11-16 (DOC NYC Film Festival)
Rating: 7
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/t/thelifeandmindofmarkdefriest_filmreview_poster200.jpg
Lanky and sarcastic, the now middle-aged DeFriest was once a kid living in Florida when he was thrown in jail for four years after stealing his dead father’s tools (which DeFriest said had been willed to him) and then running away from the police officers who came to investigate. That might have been it, except that DeFriest almost immediately busted out of jail. In the years following, he kept racking up more strikes against him, fashioning jerry-rigged tools and fake keys time and again. After each attempt, he was locked up yet again, his sentence ballooning and the possibility of parole stretching ever further into the future. Each time he made another daring escape, the press covered the story of Florida’s great recidivist escape artist, which further hardened the attitudes of the authorities against him.
London tells DeFriest’s story primarily through footage of the work done by his lawyer and a psychiatrist who years ago classified DeFriest as competent to stand trial, but now says that DeFriest’s inability to stop his self-destructive behavior is a sign of serious mental instability. The film features as well some fantastical animated segments (with Scoot McNairy narrating) detailing his years in some of the state’s worst institutions, being gang-raped, beaten by guards, and slowly losing his mind in solitary.
Although DeFriest might have problems discerning some aspects of reality, he sees one fact crystal clear: “If I was just a rapist or murderer, I’d be out.” And so, even if the penal system calls DeFriest a threat, the film suggests that what he threatens is to embarrass that system, rather than to injure any public outside it.