Albert Seedman
Albert A. Seedman was an officer with the New York City Police Department for 30 years, known for solving several high-profile cases before resigning as chief of the Detective Bureau. He was the only Jewish officer to ever hold that position. After his retirement he was the chief of security for a New York area department store chain before retiring to South Florida.
Seedman established himself as a detective during the 1960s. He investigated many prominent crimes during that era, including the Borough Park Tobacco robbery and the Kitty Genovese murder. As the chief of detectives he reformed that branch by assigning detectives to specialize in certain crimes rather than just investigating whatever cases came their way when they were on shift. His tenure as chief of detectives of the city was short but memorable, marked by the Knapp Commission's corruption investigations which briefly cost him his job, several mob hits, and terror attacks carried out by the Black Liberation Army. When his superior officers hindered his investigation into the murder of an officer at a Harlem mosque out of fear of racial unrest, Seedman resigned his position and retired from the force, although he did not say that had been the reason for another 40 years.
Frequently and accurately described as "cigar-chomping" and "tough-talking", with a personal style likened by a colleague to a Jewish gangster, he was one of the city's most visible police personnel during the 1960s and early 1970s. Newspapers often included a quote from Chief Seedman; he was frequently on evening television news as well. He was always willing to speak to reporters even if he could not tell them much. After his retirement he wrote Chief!, a memoir of his time on the force and the high-profile cases he had been involved in, and appeared as a detective in the 1975 film Report to the Commissioner with Hector Elizondo and Tony King.
Early life
Seedman was born to a taxi driver and his wife, a sewing machine operator in the Garment District, on Fox Street, near St. Mary's Park in the South Bronx in 1918. He was given no middle name, just the initial "A". In school he served as a stairwell monitor, which he said later gave him the idea to become a police officer.Seedman grew up in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the borough, with many Irish American street gangs. Seedman did not get involved with them, however. "It was a Jewish block", he recalled, "and Jewish kids didn't fight."
After finishing high school he attended the business school at City College of New York, now Baruch College. Upon graduating in 1941 with a degree in accounting, he joined the New York City Transit Police because civil service paid higher salaries than any private-sector jobs available at that time, and police agencies paid the most. After studying French for a year, he left the department to serve in Army intelligence and the military police in France and Belgium, including the Battle of the Bulge. When World War II ended he rejoined the transit police, and thereafter the NYPD.
Police career
In the late 1940s, there were few Jews in the NYPD and none above the rank of captain. Seedman recalled later in his life that there was some attendant bias. "I didn't get the choice assignments", he said. "I think it was because I was Jewish." He also earned graduate degrees in public administration during this time.As a detective, Seedman was known for his unorthodox approaches to solving otherwise perplexing cases. "I try to imagine who was in a room the second before the murder," he recalled years later. In one case early in his career, a Bronx woman was found dead of a shotgun blast in the lobby of her apartment building. Seedman noticed an empty chair next to the building's stoop. Neighbors told him it was usually occupied by a man who sat there watching the traffic go by. Although the man normally was out shopping at the time, but Seedman insisted on entering his apartment through a window—where he found his body hanging from a pipe. The murder-suicide had occurred after the woman rejected him.
1962–1971: As detective
By 1962, Seedman had become a captain. That year brought him his first media exposure, to the brief detriment of his career. Two officers who had responded to a robbery in progress at the Borough Park Tobacco Company in Brooklyn, where Seedman worked at the time, were killed. It was the first time a pair of NYPD officers had been killed on duty in 30 years. When one of the suspects, Tony Dellernia, was extradited to New York after surrendering in Chicago, Seedman, as was customary, had him perp-walked in front of reporters outside the precinct house.Some photographers who arrived late complained to Seedmen. He brought Dellernia back out, but the defendant had his head low. Seedman forced Dellernia's head up and held him by the chin so his face would be visible. The ensuing image of Dellernia's contorted face, "... as if it were pizza dough", as The New York Times put it in 1999, while Seedman posed for the camera himself, sparked widespread public outcry. The American Civil Liberties Union demanded he be disciplined, and he was duly reprimanded after Commissioner Michael J. Murphy publicly expressed regret for the incident. A promotion to deputy inspector Seedman had been expecting was delayed. Dellernia was ultimately acquitted. Seedman nevertheless displayed the photo on his office wall in his Long Island home.
Two years later, Seedman came back into the public eye when he led the investigation into the murder of Kitty Genovese in the Queens neighborhood of Kew Gardens. The case had gained national attention when a story in the Times alleged that 38 neighbors had witnessed the crime in progress but did nothing about it, even as Genovese screamed for help repeatedly. Seedman's detectives arrested the killer, Winston Moseley, six days later. The death sentence he originally received was commuted when New York abolished the death penalty for most murders, and Moseley served the remaining 52 years of his life in prison.
In mid-1967, Seedman, then chief detective for southern Brooklyn, made his reputation as an investigator who could solve baffling cases. While driving on the Belt Parkway one summer morning near Plum Beach, a young woman named Nancy McEwen suddenly drifted off the road onto the median strip. A police lieutenant in the car behind her pulled over to see what the problem was. He found her moaning, with her head slumped forward, and called for an ambulance. She died a short time later at Coney Island Hospital, where doctors found a small hole on the side of her head that turned out to have been caused by a bullet. Since only one window in McEwen's car was open, and none of them had been shattered, Seedman believed the shot had to have been fired from Sheepshead Bay or the nearby area, and that due to the distance and the car's speed, it was probably not intentional. He ordered detectives and uniformed officers to search the dunes and marshes for a possible shell casing. After 2,400 people were interviewed and several other leads came to nothing, he pointed at a spot on the map and told his detectives to look for people who owned boats. That led to the shooter—a local gas station owner who had been on his boat that morning taking target practice at a floating beer can. One of his bullets had ricocheted off the water's surface and killed McEwen. A grand jury ruled it an accident, and no homicide charges were brought, although the shooter was fined $100 for violating firearms laws with the rifle.
Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
On April 6, 1970, a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village exploded in the early afternoon, damaging not only itself but several adjacent buildings, including the home of actor Dustin Hoffman and his wife. Responding firefighters at first believed it to be a gas explosion resulting from a leak and accidental ignition, but the senior responding detective was suspicious and called Seedman to the scene, where he set up a command post along with senior fire department officials and the FBI. Seedman's suspicions were deepened by reports that known survivors of the blast had left the scene and not returned.Seedman contacted radio executive James Wilkerson, the owner of the property. He learned that Wilkerson was planning to return from a vacation in the Caribbean that day; in the meantime his daughter Cathy had been staying there, recuperating from a bout with the flu. Cathy was known to the FBI to be a member of the Weathermen, a radical left-wing activist group, and had been arrested at several demonstrations over the last two years. Seedman concluded that the explosion had been perhaps deliberately set, but did not know what the motive might have been other than Cathy Wilkerson's relationship with her father, from whom she was estranged.
It took the fire department until after sunset to extinguish most of the fire. In the rubble police found two dismembered bodies, weapons, and enough dynamite to level the entire block if it had gone off; after the block was evacuated yet more was found, along with an antitank weapon. Seedman told the media it was the largest explosive device ever found in Manhattan. He asked James Wilkerson and his wife, now returned, to appear on television and appeal to Cathy to at least let the police know whether they had found all the explosives and bodies. Cathy never did. She and other Weathermen remained at large for most of the 1970s before surrendering to authorities; she was the only one to serve prison time. The Greenwich Village explosion had been an accident that killed three, resulting from the inexperienced leadership of the New York Weather cell attempting to build a bomb they intended to set off at an Army non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix that night, an attack intended to bring the Vietnam War to the American home front.