Michael Dowd, The Brooklyn Police Officer Who Became The ‘Most Corrupt Cop’ In The NYPD
Sundance Selects/YouTubeNYPD officer Michael Dowd was driven to crime by a low paycheck and easy access to drug dealers.
Michael Dowd joined the New York Police Department in 1982. He was assigned to the 75th Precinct in East New York, where over 100 murders happened each year.
At the same time, the introduction of crack cocaine in the early 1980s marked a significant turning point in the drug trade sphere.
Cheap to produce, highly addictive, and immediate in its effects, dealers flooded the streets with crack and got rich quick, sometimes making upwards of $1 million per week.
By contrast, a cop like Dowd, working in the second-deadliest jurisdiction of New York, made $600 a week. It didn’t take long for Dowd to do the math.
“There was a lot of anger in me,” he recalled. “These young punks were running around with all kinds of money and I was broke.”
Within a year of joining the force, Dowd accepted his first bribe from a man who owed thousands of dollars in traffic fines. Dowd let him go for “a nice lobster lunch” and $200 cash.
Moreover, after a massive scandal saw 11 officers in the 77th Precinct arrested for extortion in 1986, Dowd assumed the NYPD wouldn’t want to risk another scandal by indicting more criminal cops. Taking the chance, he doubled down on illegal activities.
Given that he worked in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York, Dowd figured that his supervisors weren’t paying much attention to him. He shook down dealers, extorted them with protection payments, and enlisted other cops to help out.
Eventually, he crossed paths with a Dominican dealer named Adam Diaz. Diaz bought Dowd out for a weekly salary of $8,000 and a signing bonus of $24,000 — quite a step up from the $600 the NYPD was paying him.
Dowd would warn Diaz of raids, and his crew of cops raided competing dealers for Diaz. He was manically euphoric, flaunting his wealth by driving a red Corvette to work and buying three houses in New York and a condo in Florida.
“Life was wonderful,” Dowd later said. “Wonderful, sinful, and glorious. I felt like Scarface, only I was a white Irish boy from Long Island.”
TheMikeDowd/TwitterToday, Michael Dowd works with Adam Diaz selling Dominican cigars under the business name, “The Seven Five,” referencing his old precinct.
By the early 1990s, Michael Dowd was making so much money on the side — $68,000 a week, he said — that he occasionally forgot to pick up his NYPD paycheck. But he’d also become a heavy drinker and frequently got high on his own supply.
His wife urged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. And on May 6, 1992, Suffolk County investigators barged into his drug house, arresting the drunk and high Dowd and his partner, fellow cop Ken Eurell.
Quickly released on bail, the pair met to discuss how they would move forward. Unbeknownst to Dowd, Eurell wore a wire in exchange for a lesser sentence.
Michael Dowd was arrested in July 1992 and indicted with 63 colleagues for murder, conspiracy, and drug-related offenses. Eurell never spent a day in jail.
The city established the Mollen Commission after it became public knowledge that Internal Affairs had ignored 16 complaints about Dowd over his decade in the NYPD, including allegations of drug dealing and robbery.
In 1994, Dowd was convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to distribute narcotics. He served 12 years of his 16-year sentence and now operates a cigar business with Adam Diaz — named after the precinct he shamed.
