Norberto Torres’s biographical handout ran some ten pages of public relations’ obfuscation: reading it, one learned Torres’s birthplace (Ponce), his alma mater (St. John’s), his wife’s maiden name, and the ages of his children, but one still did not know the man. Flackery only confirmed the general feeling that behind Torres’s dead eyes was not so much a personality as a collection of appetites, wants, and desires. Like so many successful modern men, Torres seemed to live for the perks. The police commissioner of the city of New York was an alcoholic whorehound. He was frequently drunk on duty at his desk, and more than once television news had shown him intoxicated in public—without comment. Always without comment. The situation was too delicate. Torres was untouchable, the first Rican to have climbed so high. Hamilton had co-opted the media as well as the city’s minority leadership. No one wanted to call attention even to Torres’s failure to appear at the scene of the murder of a policeman, or his disappearance for two days, during which there occurred a fatal arson fire in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and the quintuple machete murder of five Bahamian dope dealers in Harlem.

During his no-shows, Torres was having a woman perform fellatio upon him. No secret. On the contrary, he bragged about it. Torres went about that part of his private life with an arrogance so vast it had to celebrate itself. In addition to a wife, Torres had a full-time mistress, another part-timer in the department who had the only other key to his private elevator, and several women on call elsewhere in Police Plaza, the kind who could not conceal their special connection to the commissioner. Morale low? Some old-timers wanted to spit when the principal players walked by.