“When I worked midnights in Harlem, I’d see these security guards coming home at four in the morning. These are the people who become victims. Would anyone choose to work twelve hours a day for $5 an hour? I doubt it. But they’re doing the best they can. They’re poor and they have no choice where they live but it’s their life and they make the best of it. Any cop in New York can tell you about a shopkeeper or some old person in the neighborhood who wants to help us. They’ve been there twenty or thirty years. Maybe they own a dry cleaners, or some other small business. I’ve always felt these are the people the police have a special obligation to protect.” – Tony Diaz
Tony is a detective with the NYPD’s Major Case Squad – a coveted assignment offered only to the NYPD’s top investigators. Tony and other Major Case detectives work on bank robberies, high-end burglaries, kidnappings, art thefts and cases where a police officer is injured or killed with criminal intent. Major Case crimes frequently end up as plot lines for novels, films and television shows. Every story on one of the most popular television programs of all time, “Law and Order, Criminal Intent,” comes directly from the files of the NYPD’s Major Case Squad.
It’s important for Tony and his fellow detectives to have a solid understanding of forensic science and computer technology, as well as strong analytical and writing skills. We follow Tony as becomes obsessed with stopping the “lunch hour bank robber,” a man in a baseball hat with a gun, who successfully hit seventeen banks in midtown Manhattan before Tony and his partner put him in cuffs. He investigates a gang of sophisticated thieves robbing high-end jewelry stores all over the city, and a group of drug dealers who kidnap and torture a man who owes them money.
One of Tony’s more high profile investigations involved the theft of an unedited videotape of Marc Anthony’s and Jennifer Lopez’s wedding which the thieves were using to extort one million dollars from the couple.
Tony Diaz says his worst memory as a New York City cop was the funeral service for officers Michael Buczek and Christopher Hoban. Both men were killed in separate incidents on the same day, October 18, 1988.
“They had a joint funeral for them in this huge cathedral in Brooklyn,” Tony said. “Thousands of law enforcement officers, police cars, and motorcycles were there. When I saw this outpouring I started to cry. I’d only been on the job for a year and I kept thinking about my parents, especially my mother. I knew what it would do to her if I was the person they were burying that day.