FOR POLICE FIX-IT MAN, A SCANDAL TO WORK ON

Police Officers Sum Up Different Bosses In Different Ways.

There are "hatchet-men" and "yes-men," police commanders who can cut
you down or sell you out. A "Nervous Nelly" is a liability; a "cop's
cop," an asset.

In this street matrix of management styles, Deputy Chief Joseph J.
Reznick might well come under the heading "Dominant/Aggressive,"
maybe even "Hostile."

"A lot of his decisions, I opposed, vocally, and he and I have
disagreed time and time again, though he was always open to the
discussion," said Detective First Grade Robert Rodriguez, 37, who
worked for Chief Reznick in the warrants division. "And in the end,
time and time again, I was wrong."

Now, the arrest of four narcotics officers in Brooklyn has given the
Police Department a black eye, and Chief Reznick, a veteran whose
name pops up in all manner of big cases, and who began his career on
a foot patrol in Washington Heights, has been brought in to clean up
a scandal that has caused 80 drug prosecutions to collapse.

He is a fixer, of sorts.

In an interview Friday, joined at times by two members of the
department's public affairs office, the chief would not discuss the
drugs-for-informants scandal in Brooklyn South Narcotics, nor what
his plans were in dealing with it. But he spoke at length about his
career, and his outlook.

Chief Reznick, 56, grew up on Third Avenue and 33rd Street in
Manhattan as the middle child of a city housing employee and a housewife.

"My father would bring home bikes from the development that were
discarded by people that lived there, and he'd have like a 20-inch
wheel on the front and a 24-inch wheel on the back and we'd look at
it and he'd say, 'Just ride it until the wheels fall off,' that was
his motto," the chief said. "I look at life like that now."

His father, Walter, died of complications of pneumonia in June 1967,
when the chief was 15.

Chief Reznick joined the department in December 1973 after a stint in
the Navy. He is about 100th on the N.Y.P.D. seniority list out of
roughly 36,000 men and women.

But more remarkable than his longevity is the number of times he has
been in the middle of the latest hot issue at the department, whether
it be an internal scandal or a high-profile crime. In the process, he
has made friends, and some enemies.

In 2006, when he oversaw the cold case squad, Chief Reznick sent a
scathing memo threatening to transfer six detectives he saw as
unproductive, drawing fury from the Detectives' Endowment Association
but praise from the higher-ups.

He was involved in the investigation of the torture and killing of
Jonathan M. Levin, a teacher, in his Manhattan apartment in 1997; the
murder of Irene Silverman in her Upper East Side town house in 1998;
and the murder of the girl they called "Baby Hope," a 5-year-old
whose body was found packed into a picnic cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway.

"Baby Hope is still on my mind," he said. "Still unsolved, 1991. July 21st."

Days after Officer Russel Timoshenko, 23, was fatally shot in
Brooklyn last July, Chief Reznick led the chase for the suspects in
the killing; they were captured in an area off Interstate 80 in
Pennsylvania. In 1988, he was equally determined in solving the
killing of Officer Michael J. Buczek, 24, Police Commissioner Raymond
W. Kelly recalled.

"Chief Reznick is a no-nonsense police executive; a consummate
professional who gets the job done, no matter what," Mr. Kelly said
in an e-mail message. He added: "In short, Chief Reznick doesn't quit."

It's been just a few days since he got the assignment to Brooklyn
South Narcotics, and it promises to be among the most challenging in
a busy career.

Two narcotics officers, Detective Sean Johnstone and Officer Julio
Alvarez, are accused of lying in September about the amount of
cocaine they recovered from a suspect. Detective Johnstone was later
recorded talking about withholding drugs and the practice of giving
them to informants.

A subsequent inquiry led to the arrests last week of two other
officers in the unit, Sgt. Michael Arenella and Officer Jerry Bowens.
The two are accused in court papers of taking drugs and cash they had
recovered and of giving them to a confidential informant as payback.

As a result, four high-level police commanders have been transferred,
and Chief Reznick has been brought in.

Chief Reznick would say only that he'll use "my skills, my
experience, as I've done in the past, to make good" in Brooklyn South
Narcotics.

He is a timepiece in a sea of fresh faces, a dinosaur on a department
filled with "Smurfs" -- slang for a young officer in a blue uniform.
He has the big hands of a boxer and the brutish frame of one, too. He
fixes things at home, in Queens, where he and his wife, Patricia, a
teacher at a Catholic grammar school, raised their three firefighter sons.

"He likes it when bad guys go to jail," said Inspector Ken Cully, the
commanding officer of the Manhattan North narcotics bureau, who met
the chief in the early 1980s when they both patrolled in the 30th Precinct.

Looking ahead, the chief would say only, "Some people come here, take
this as a job and you'll see that when they hit their 20th year,
they're gone. I've far exceeded that by 14 years now. I have no
intentions of leaving."