TELLTALE WORDS ON A 1996 TAPE ARE RECALLED IN A POLICE INQUIRY

Except for one extraordinary twist, the raid on Apartment 10B in March 1996
would have vanished long ago into the dense annals of New York
crime-fighting. A team of police officers and federal agents, hunting for
evidence against a drug gang, broke into the apartment, on upper Madison
Avenue. They pulled open drawers, looked in closets and upended cushions.
They left behind their search warrant, on which they noted that they had
not found the very first item they had come looking for: "monies."

Yet a fluke event - "once in a hundred years," as a lawyer later said -
provided a candid glimpse of the search and raised troublesome questions.

During the commotion, someone turned on a telephone answering machine's
recorder, apparently without realizing it. For the next 30 minutes, the
machine captured the clamor and chatter of the search: an exclamation, "My
God, that's a lot of money;" a wisecrack about the Constitution; a crude
racial remark about the apartment's residents, who were not home.

Seven minutes into the tape, a man can be heard quietly counting. "Six
hundred," he says. "Eight hundred. Nine hundred." Twenty-nine seconds
later, the sound of a zipper is heard.

Annette Brown, who lived in the apartment and played a minor role in her
son's drug business, later told authorities that $900 in cash had
disappeared from a zippered portfolio. The police and federal agents all
denied seeing money. At least three official investigations of Ms. Brown's
claim and tape led to no charges.

Now, eight years later, as the New York Police Department faces allegations
of corruption on a much grander scale, Carlos Rodriguez, the detective who
was in charge of tallying evidence from the Brown apartment, has again come
under scrutiny, for an entirely separate episode. This time, a retired
detective claims to have shared money taken from a drug dealer with
Detective Rodriguez, according to a person who has been briefed on the inquiry.

Detective Rodriguez is among 10 current or former police officers who
worked drug cases in upper Manhattan and are now under investigation for
their conduct over the last decade, based on claims of corruption from the
retired detective and his partner, according to law enforcement officials
and people with knowledge of the case. So far, the retired detective,
Thomas Rachko, and his partner, Julio C. Vasquez, are the only current or
former officers who have been charged in the case, indicted on narcotics
conspiracy, money laundering and other charges. Both men, along with
Detective Rodriguez and at least one former officer also under scrutiny,
have had discussions with prosecutors, people with knowledge of the
investigation have said.

Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of
New York, whose office, along with the Police Department's Internal Affairs
Bureau, is investigating the case, would not comment. Neither would a
lawyer for Detective Rodriguez.

The Police Department believes that no money was taken in the 1996
incident, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne said, so the case could not
represent a missed opportunity to stop the sort of misconduct now under
investigation. The department contends that the tape is a kind of audio
illusion, with the provocative-sounding section actually best understood as
jokes, sarcastic remarks or, in the case of the racial slur, simply
inappropriate language.

Even so, the accidental taping of the raid, and the investigation that
followed, offer a rare view of the perilous intersections of police, drug
dealers and cash. At times, drug dealers have been able to use false
allegations of wrongdoing as a weapon against aggressive police work. It is
also true that corrupt police officers have been able to steal from drug
dealers, assured that any accusation could come only from criminals whose
stories of wrongdoing would be viewed with the utmost skepticism.

In the Brown case, department officials said last week that they did not
think the tape by itself established that money was in the apartment, and
that Ms. Brown's credibility was weak. Her lawyer, Peter J. Neufeld, said
that Ms. Brown gave a straightforward account of petty theft, and did not
embroider her story with the more garish sums often mentioned in such cases.

Mr. Neufeld provided a copy of the tape from Ms. Brown's answering machine
that was returned to him by federal prosecutors after the investigation. An
account of the search of her apartment, as well as subsequent events in
1996, has been pieced together from the tape, from records that were
disclosed as part of an unrelated court proceeding, and from interviews
with Ms. Brown and law-enforcement officials.

The intrigue began shortly after the raid, when Ms. Brown returned home on
March 22, 1996, to find her apartment, at 1735 Madison Avenue, near 115th
Street, in disarray. A grown son, Garrick, was involved in dealing P.C.P.,
and though he lived in the Bronx, he was an occasional visitor to Ms.
Brown's apartment. Ms. Brown would eventually plead guilty to abetting his
operation, in exchange for a sentence of probation. Her son, who also
pleaded guilty, is serving a 15-year term in federal prison.

In an interview at her home on Friday evening, Ms. Brown said she recalled
seeing the answering machine dangling by its cord from the dresser, but it
was not her first worry. "That was my bedroom, and it was so messed up,"
she said. "I said, 'Where's my money?' It was in, like a binder that closed
along the sides with a zipper. The money was stuck down in it. The binder
was in the bottom drawer in my dresser. I think it was about a thousand
dollars. The binder was gone. Nothing else personal was taken - my jewelry
was still there, my coats."

As she and her sister began to straighten the apartment, the answering
machine was beeping or making some sort of noise, she said. "Evidently,
they knocked it over and they didn't know it was running," she said.

The next day, she met with Mr. Neufeld, who spoke directly with Mary Jo
White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Ms. White assigned the case to an assistant in charge of public corruption.
A grand jury began hearing evidence. Ms. Brown gave the prosecutors her
PhoneMate 3700 answering machine and the original tape. Mr. Neufeld
arranged for her to take a polygraph test at the New York Lie Detection
Laboratories. The examiner said she truthfully answered all the questions
about the missing money, a report from May 9, 1996, shows. The prosecutors
later repeated the polygraph; the results of that test were not disclosed,
but Mr. Neufeld said he thought that the prosecutors would have notified
him if Ms. Brown had failed.

The police inquiry into Ms. Brown's statement was handled by its Internal
Affairs Bureau, according to Deputy Commissioner Browne, the department's
chief spokesman.

On Sept. 4, 1996, nearly six months after the apartment was searched,
Detective Rodriguez met with Internal Affairs investigators and the federal
prosecutor. They asked about the zippered portfolio. "He does not
specifically remember the black organizer, but asserts that if it was in
the dresser he probably removed and searched it," an Internal Affairs
report says. "Rodriguez claims to have only vouchered receipts (beepers,
rent and cars) and only one list."

The answering machine tape was played for Detective Rodriguez, and the
investigators questioned him about the man heard saying, "Six hundred.
Eight hundred. Nine hundred."

"When asked to explain the counting he stated that it was not his voice but
that of Agent Fred DiRenzo," the report states, referring to an agent from
the federal Drug Enforcement Administration who had taken part in the raid.
"He believes that DiRenzo could have been counting 'chump change' or receipts."

Agent DiRenzo said he could not discuss the incident, but did not dispute
any of Detective Rodriguez's account. The agent is not under investigation,
according to Anthony P. Placido, the head of the drug agency's office in
New York. An internal agency investigation brought no charges of theft.
Detective Rodriguez was also asked about the statement made by a female
voice: "Oh my God, that's a lot of money." He said they had gone to the
apartment in search of a strongbox, which they found. The officer, he said,
apparently "observed the fairly large box and in anticipation of finding
the money, made the comment, 'that's a lot of money.' " The box turned out
to be empty, the detective said.

On that point, his version is consistent with what Ms. Brown says about
money in the apartment - that there simply was not much on hand. The
detective, however, denied that there was any cash. "Rodriguez firmly
asserts that at no time did he see money in the bedroom," the report states.

Ms. Brown went before the grand jury, and she said that most questions were
aimed at linking her to the drug ring. Little attention, she says, was paid
to the small amount of cash she said had been taken.

As an example, she cited investment documents taken from the apartment
during the search. These papers concerned money held for a granddaughter
who was living with her, she said. The child's aunt was the custodian of
the account, Ms. Brown said. "They were trying to say that was proceeds
from drugs, because the documents were coming here under the aunt's name,"
she said. "They were not concerned about my money in the drawer. They were
concerned about drug money. How did I get to a thousand dollars? I told
them I would save some every month. My son received S.S.I. I was on public
assistance. I knitted it together. They were giving the impression that
they didn't believe it was my personal money, that it was some other money."

Mr. Browne said Internal Affairs investigators felt she was vague about the
source for the $900 she claimed to have lost, and they could not confirm
that she had cashed the government checks in certain locations. He also
said that that she had changed her story "about where the money was in the
apartment."

Ms. Brown insisted that was simply not true. She said she told the
authorities her story only once, to the grand jury, and was certain about
the location. "That was my life savings. I chose to put it down there, in
the bottom drawer," said Ms Brown, who now works in a nursing home.

The police investigation also looked at the personal bank accounts of the
officers who had taken part in the raid. Asked if it were likely that
anyone would deposit a sum of $900 into a bank account, Mr. Browne agreed
that it was not, but said the efforts showed the vigor of the Internal
Affairs inquiry. "They went to great lengths to see if there was any
movement of money," he said.

The one area where the investigation found fault was with Detective
Rodriguez's language. While Mr. Browne said that the reference to the
Constitution having gone "out the door," was made in jest, a later remark
was deemed offensive. On the tape, Detective Rodriguez is heard discussing
the contents of a closet or medicine chest. "You're talking about nigger
people," he said. The detective told investigators that he was speaking to
Agent DiRenzo, a white man, and that the remark was not offensive in
context. Later, Detective Rodriguez changed that account to say he made the
remark not to Agent DiRenzo, but to another agent, who is black. The
detective was docked six days' pay, Mr. Browne said.

"Everybody who's looked at it feels that neither Rodriguez nor anyone else
did anything wrong, with the exception of the use of the racial slur," Mr.
Browne said last week. "The consensus is that there was no cash and nobody
stole anything."

In the end, neither the grand jury, the police nor the Drug Enforcement
Administration brought criminal or administrative charges for theft. The
federal authorities were not nearly as emphatic or sweeping as the Police
Department, at least in their only known public statement on the results of
the inquiry. More than a year after Ms. Brown turned over her telephone
answering machine, an assistant United States attorney, I. Bennett Capers,
told a federal judge that his office's "determination of the evidence" of
stealing "remains inconclusive," according to a transcript of an April 7,
1997, court hearing. Mr. Neufeld, the lawyer for Ms. Brown, said that he
was told by federal prosecutors handling the case at the time that they
thought money had been stolen, but could not determine who had taken it. A
spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Manhattan would not
comment.