From The Sky

Long Island City is located in North Queens. One end is the 59th Street Bridge to Manhattan, and the other end is the East River. The area is mostly warehouses and factories. At night, everything is closed, and the streets are empty, except for the prostitutes standing under streetlights, waiting for customers. All night long, the police chase the girls and the johns from one darkened doorway to the next.

On a midnight tour, at 3 AM, two cops sat in their patrol car on a desolate street between the silent warehouses, enjoying a cup of coffee. Then something caught their eye, and through the windshield, they saw a man attached to a parachute drop in front of the police car. He was dressed in a black SWAT uniform, a ballistic helmet with goggles. He landed flat on the soles of his combat boots, gathered up his parachute, and disappeared down an alley. Two seconds late, a second black-uniformed man floated down from the sky and landed next to the police car. He, too, quickly gathered up his parachute and ran down the same alley the first man had gone.

The two cops sitting in the patrol car looked at each other, laughed, and said, “Damn, IAB will do anything to spy on cops.”

I heard this story when I was a rookie cop. I always assumed it was just an urban legend that circulated throughout the police department for a laugh. The idea of covert paratroopers dropping into a New York City neighborhood in the middle of the the night seemed outrageous. But, recently, I repeated this story to a retired cop and he confirmed the story was true, and that he personally knew the cops who witnessed the two men floating down from the sky.

There’s a million stories in the Naked City. ~ AA