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But there was an issue with Terrell’s theory: Gomez, Hernandez and others involved in the suits weren’t the only people raising questions about him. The Civilian Complaint Review Board (C.C.R.B.), a city agency that investigates certain kinds of police abuse, had received over 30 complaints about Terrell, more than all but two other active cops. Most of these had been filed before Gomez began investigating him. Many were found to be “unsubstantiated,” but that doesn’t mean they were baseless. It means that the C.C.R.B. did not have enough evidence to prove whether Terrell had committed misconduct or not.
One incident spoke directly to the question of Terrell’s credibility. According to the C.C.R.B., a man claimed that Terrell searched his home without showing him a warrant. When the C.C.R.B. investigators interviewed Terrell, he said he was sure that the man had read the warrant because he asked questions about it. But two other cops gave a conflicting account, and the C.C.R.B. investigators learned that the man who supposedly read the warrant was legally blind. The C.C.R.B. noted that Terrell had made a “false official statement.” (Terrell’s attorney said the C.C.R.B.’s investigation was “biased.”)
The C.C.R.B. does not have the authority to investigate false-statement cases; instead it turns such cases over to the N.Y.P.D. According to the Police Department’s rule book, any cop who is caught intentionally making a false official statement in a “material matter” will be dismissed “absent exceptional circumstances.” There’s a reason for this. In countless cases, cops testify as witnesses. A lie told by a cop can lead to a wrongful conviction, or a conviction’s being overturned because of unreliable testimony. The N.Y.P.D. doesn’t disclose how often cops are caught lying. But in a 2017 report, the city’s Commission to Combat Police Corruption noted that the department charged officers with making false official statements in “far fewer instances than facts and circumstances seem to warrant.” Terrell was not dismissed. (According to his lawyer, he was exonerated.)
Terrell had also been investigated for sexual harassment by the department’s own Internal Affairs Bureau. According to leaked N.Y.P.D. records first published by BuzzFeed News last April, the bureau investigated Terrell in 2011 and 2012 and found that he had “wrongfully placed” his arm and “made inappropriate remarks to an individual known to the department under the age of 18” — an accusation that recalled Jessica’s claims. Internal police documents provided more details. According to those records, he remarked, on one occasion, “I want to give you a kiss,” and on two other occasions, “If you were a little older, I would marry you.” The department disciplined him, taking away 15 of his vacation days, but he kept his job. (Terrell’s lawyer called these claims “laughable” and said Terrell plans to file litigation against the city for unfair discipline.)
Citing continuing litigation, a Police Department spokesman declined to respond to specific questions about Terrell, but he noted that the police commissioner, James O’Neill, recently appointed an independent advisory panel to review the department’s disciplinary system. The panel is expected to announce its findings by the end of January.
Hernandez’s trial date was set for September 6, 2017. As he waited in jail, activists began rallying behind him, lauding him as an award-winning scholar who had taken a courageous stand against the system by demanding his day in court. Eventually his story reached Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, an organization led by Kerry Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter. The foundation posted Hernandez’s bail, allowing him to return home.
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The R.F.K. organization also enlisted a high-powered attorney, Alex Spiro, to take over Hernandez’s defense. One of Spiro’s first moves was to demand that Gomez, who was still acting as a sort of representative of Hernandez’s, stop talking to the media. He believed that if Gomez kept antagonizing cops and prosecutors, he would sabotage any chance Hernandez still had of getting the case dismissed. Gomez ignored him. At a rally for Hernandez held by activists outside the Bronx district attorney’s office, Gomez grabbed the microphone and called the office a “hornet’s nest of corruption.” He had no reliable proof that the prosecutors had broken any laws, but if the office really was a hornet’s nest, he was kicking it.
On the morning of the trial, Gomez got ready in his apartment. He blasted cologne at his wrists, slid his pants over his shoes (a trick he learned in the military) and took a swig of orange juice before heading out the door. “I’m going to go kick some ass,” he said. “Let’s go get ’em.” He got into his Corvette and drove to the Bronx Hall of Justice, a monumental glass building. For months, Gomez had been certain that he’d get the case dismissed. But as he walked up to the courthouse, he finally acknowledged that at this late stage, that seemed unlikely. Just then, the news reached us: Hernandez’s charges were being dismissed. “I was right!” Gomez shouted, bolting through the doors of the courthouse. “I was right!”
Inside the courtroom, a prosecutor read aloud a statement prepared by the Bronx district attorney, Darcel Clark. According to Clark, her office had conducted a “detailed review” of the case and learned that “one of the original witnesses is no longer cooperative.” Her office wouldn’t elaborate. But two months later, in November 2017, Clark announced that the U.S. attorney’s office had agreed to assist her office in conducting an investigation into “allegations” surrounding the case. In the same statement, she noted that she would not “tolerate misconduct by law enforcement.” Neither the Bronx district attorney nor the Justice Department would confirm whether this investigation is underway.
Many other questions remain unanswered. Did Terrell really coerce witnesses into lying? Did Gomez spread lies about Terrell? Was Hernandez really the menace Terrell claimed he was? If Hernandez’s case had gone to trial, a jury would have had an opportunity to review the facts, weigh the credibility of the opposing parties and arrive at a conclusion. But in a justice system founded on the principle that everyone deserves a trial, Hernandez had spent a year in jail without one.
Spiro, Hernandez’s attorney, laid the blame on a problem far bigger than any individual cop or prosecutor. If kids in the Bronx were arrested for minor offenses less often, he said, and were instead treated like kids in the suburbs, “where you speak to their principal and you put them in counseling,” where the authorities aren’t so quick to label them as “bad guys,” there would be fewer cases clogging the courts, and defendants wouldn’t have to wait so long to go to trial. Public defenders would have more time to meet with them. Prosecutors would be under less pressure to get them to plead guilty and would be less inclined to ask for bail amounts that keep defendants in jail. More cases would actually go to trial. “The system would work better,” Spiro said. And there wouldn’t be so much demand for a rogue actor like Gomez.
To Gomez, Hernandez’s story was the ultimate vindication of his work. He was featured in a documentary, “Crime + Punishment,” that made the rounds of film festivals, including Sundance, where Gomez was photographed on the red carpet. The film has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. He devised a piece of legislation that would create a new state agency with oversight of police departments and district attorneys’ offices throughout New York. He persuaded Nathalia Fernandez, an assemblywoman from the Bronx, to sponsor it, and it will soon be introduced.
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Hernandez, meanwhile, returned to court again and again for a number of other cases — mostly traffic infractions but also an old robbery case that had never been resolved. That case was dismissed, too, this past October on the condition that Hernandez make good on the academic potential he displayed in jail by completing a semester of college. A lawyer from the R.F.K. organization says he has enrolled at a four-year college and plans to attend.
Gomez soon turned his attention to a new client. The case had many of the same elements as Hernandez’s: a young man who was accused of a violent crime and claimed he was innocent; cops and prosecutors whom Gomez had accused of corruption; and a witness for the prosecution who switched sides after talking to Gomez. But this time, Gomez’s tendency to walk the edge would work against him. Rather than dismissing the charges, the prosecutor, Karen Ross, asked for a hearing to assess whether Gomez had committed misconduct in his contact with one of the witnesses. If she succeeded in persuading the judge that Gomez had meddled with the case, Gomez and his client could both be in trouble.
On the first day of the hearing in Queens in June 2018, a witness for the prosecution testified. She had previously told Gomez that she had been pressured to falsely identify his client as a murder suspect. At the hearing, she said something different: that Gomez had steered her to embellish the statement she’d given him. “He sprinkled some fairy dust on it,” she said, “and made it a little bit more than what it was.”
On the second day of the hearing, Gomez was called to the stand. Ross was unsparing, dredging up his past in the Police Department and insinuating that his investigative methods were careless and biased. Gomez snapped back at her, accusing her of corruption, until the judge, Kenneth C. Holder, shouted at him to “just stop talking.” When the prosecutor pressed him to reveal his source for a particular piece of information, Gomez, his arms folded across his chest, fired back: “The streets.” After interrogating him further, Ross strolled away from the stand, her heels clicking, and flashed a knowing smile to her colleagues in the gallery. “You would agree with me,” she said, “the streets don’t always have accurate information, correct, sir?”
In November, Holder issued his decision on the hearing. In a fiery 35-page memorandum, he blasted Gomez as a bad investigator, a disgraced cop and an “extremely argumentative” witness with a clear “agenda to publicly smear the prosecutor and N.Y.P.D.” In this case, unlike in Hernandez’s and so many others, the D.A. had actually turned over thousands of pages of documents to the defense, but Gomez, as the judge noted, had not reviewed most of them before “determining in his own mind that defendant was innocent.” In the courtroom, the judge determined that Gomez had committed misconduct, and then he announced that he had found the defendant to be complicit. A woman’s scream rang out. Guards restrained the defendant, who was out on bail, and led him off to jail.
Gomez wasn’t in court that day. When I called to tell him what happened, he was outraged. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he insisted. The prosecutors, the judge — they were all to blame. He said they all had it out for him and his client from the start. This speech went on for a while, and then he took a breath. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “What do you think?”
By that point, I had followed Gomez for almost two years. I had seen his work vindicate some people and fail others. Nearly all the lawsuits filed against Terrell, including by Shawn Nardoni and Anthony Floyd, had been dismissed by then, many because of insufficient or contradictory evidence. None of this reflected well on Gomez, who staked his reputation to the validity of those claims. He saw the system as corrupt, but his brand of street justice was full of its own contradictions and hazards — for his clients and himself.
I asked Gomez whether, in this case in particular, he had flown too close to the sun, pushed the envelope too far. “Pushed too far how?” he asked. If anything, he said, he should have pushed further. And then he returned to his enemies — back to the Police Department that humiliated him long ago, back to the prosecutors who wanted to destroy his career. “Their pride and arrogance is going to be their downfall,” he said, “and I’m going to bring justice to them. The day of reckoning is coming. Trust me.”
