Fearless NYPD undercover tackles firearms, gangs and drugs in ‘Gunz and God’
"Gunz and God" is written by Stevie Stryker and Rocco Parascandola.
STEVIE STRYKERROCCO PARASCANDOLA
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, May 14, 2016, 4:50 PM
“Gunz and God: The Life of an NYPD Undercover,”tells the story of Detective Stevie Stryker, a now retired cop who spent the bulk of his career taking guns and drugs off the streets. His greatest skill — his ability to talk himself into and out of any situation — was honed as a kid, listening to his father, a Pentecostal minister known for his powerful sermons. Today, Stryker, who was known to his fellow cops as “Stevie Gunz,” is himself a minister.
In this excerpt, Stryker, deep into a gun deal, finds out his wire is not working, an undercover’s worst nightmare.
Detective Stevie Stryker got behind the wheel of the black Lexus, ready as ever to go buy some guns.
Next to him was Detective Leroy Dressler. He was relatively new to undercover work, had never before partnered with Stryker and had never worked a gun case. “We’re getting something bigger,” Stryker told Dressler.
“We’re getting something more than you normally get. I pray before I go out because I believe in a higher power protecting us, and I pray I don’t get hurt and I don’t have to kill anyone.”
A deeply religious man, Stryker tried not to wear it on his sleeve. God talk, he knew, made many people, cops no exception, a little uncomfortable.
But Dressler surprised him.
“I pray, too,” he told Stryker.
Both men bowed their heads down.
“Lord protect us from our enemies and let us not hurt our enemies,” Stryker said, “nor allow our enemies to hurt us.”
Game time.
At the housing project where the sale was set to take place, the detectives quickly learned from the informant, a guy in his 20s named Danny, that there were nine guns for sale, not two, as originally discussed. That would make for a stronger case in court. It also meant more chance of bloodshed.
“I remember telling Detective Dressler, ‘Don’t talk while we’re in there,’” Stryker said. “I was like, ‘I’ll do the talking. Do not sit with me. Stand off to the side just in case something goes bad because I’ll deal with whatever’s in front of me. You deal with whatever’s in front of you, but we will not sit together.’
“I also told him they might try to get us in separate rooms so they can go at us in separate conversations to see if our story’s right. So we have to be two steps ahead of them.”
The detectives got on the elevator with Danny. Before the doors closed another guy slipped inside. Stryker didn’t know him. Danny did.
“Money Mike, what’s up?”
He clearly was there for the gun buy. Stryker was nervous. Who invited him to the party? Why was he on the elevator? Were we being set up?
The detectives would later learn that the mini-transmitter in Stryker’s cellphone — the wire, or kel, as it is formally known — had gone dead, cutting off communication with their back-up team, also known as the field team. No surprise there. For all the gizmos and gadgets now used by most major police departments in America, including the NYPD, technology at the start of the 21st century was still a major concern in New York City. Radios often failed in the subway. And kels often didn’t work in bad weather, in the subway and in buildings with thick concrete walls. Such as the one Stryker and Dressler were standing in.
“Thank God the elevator’s working,” Stryker told Danny, unaware his back-up team couldn’t hear him. “How far would we have to walk if it wasn’t?”
Former NYPD Detective Stevie Stryker poses with his personal handguns in his Staten Island home.
(BONIFACIO,MARK,,NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
“We’re going to 12,” Danny said.
Cool, Stryker thought to himself, unaware that his back-up didn’t know the deal was on the 12th floor.
The ride went smoothly. They stepped off on 12 and Money Mike banged on an apartment door.
A woman answered.
Not typical, but it was her apartment.
Whatever. It was on.
“There are about four people sitting in the living room,” Stryker said. “There are pounds of coke on the table with bags and scales. It is definitely a drug den. Danny said, ‘I’m gonna go get the guy with the guns.’ I’m slapping everybody five. ‘Yo, what up? I’m Stevie.’”
An older man, maybe 60, was sitting on a chair and cutting up coke laid out on a table in front of him. Oddly, there was a boy, the woman’s son, 9 years old at the most, watching TV and oblivious to all around him.
Dressler took his post by the door.
“Have a seat,” someone said. Dressler played like a wooden Indian. Didn’t say boo. Didn’t move.
“He’s good,” Stryker said. “His job is to watch me. He doesn’t need to be sitting with me. He’s got hemorrhoids.”
Laughs all around.
Meanwhile, there was a shotgun on the table that was clearly meant to intimidate the detectives.
Stryker wasn’t fazed.
“That didn’t make me nervous,” Stryker said. “I always tell guys — get nervous when you can’t see the drugs and the guns.”
Dressler, however, was beyond scared.
He was honored that Stryker had enlisted him in the operation. On Dressler’s first day in narcotics Stryker was one of several undercovers to offer advice and help whenever it was needed. Dressler took him up on the offer. He never thought Stryker would be coming to him for help, but just an hour earlier Stryker found out his steady partner couldn’t work that day. Stryker could have postponed the buy. Danny would have understood. He and Stryker had done business before and Danny had come to believe Stryker was exactly who he said he was, a bad guy looking to buy guns. But Stryker decided against that. In fact, he was all set to make the buy himself. And he likely would have done just that were it not for Sgt. Rob Skellman.
Every undercover needs a good handler, a superviser who can coax the best work out of the undercover, push him to do better, ease up on the criticism when necessary and generally make the tough decisions to ensure everyone gets home alive.
Stryker's NYPD colleagues nicknamed him "Stevie Gunz" because of his track record of getting firearms off the streets.
(BONIFACIO,MARK,,NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
Skellman was that guy for Stryker. He’d been around the block. He’d been involved in shootings. And he’d spent a large chunk of his career supervising undercovers. He knew full well the dangers of overconfidence, of arrogance. He wanted none of this. Sure, Stryker had developed a rapport with Danny. But Danny was no different from any other dealer — he got used to a pattern, to a certain way of doing things.
He was, in fact, just like most of us, a creature of habit. If Stryker showed up alone, the s--t could have easily hit the fan if Danny’s mind started racing. Was Stryker solo because his sidekick got arrested? Did he flip on Stryker? Was Stryker now cooperating? Was he wearing a wire? And if so, might Danny just figure, in the heat of the moment, that he’d play the odds, pull his piece and put two in Stryker’s skull?
All of that took Skellman two seconds to analyze. Go get yourself another undercover, he told Stryker.
A knock on the door.
Another guy entered.
He had the two original guns — a 9mm handgun and a TEC-9 submachine gun — plus seven others up for grabs. Stryker wanted them all.
“One guy with a shotgun wants $400. I say, ‘I’ll give you $200,’” Stryker told them. “Then the guy with the two guns said, ‘I got other guns.’ Danny comes in with another guy. He’s got a couple of guns. I’m checking them all out.”
Dressler couldn’t believe his eyes. “What’s impressive is Steve’s ability to be able to control what was going on in the room. He sees the guns and it’s, ‘Oh, let me see that gun.’ Now, he’s got the gun in his hands. ‘You got bullets? You got bullets?’”
If Dressler was unsure of himself, Stryker felt otherwise, even when the sellers suggested a trip to the roof to test the guns.
“Of course, as a cop I can’t do that,” Stryker said. “Plus, it puts me farther away from my back-up. I might get thrown off the roof. I don’t know who else is up there. And, check this out: What if cops are doing a vertical? Then what? I’m gonna get shot by friendly fire?”
Vertical patrols are a staple of how cops fight crime in apartment buildings, especially the city-run housing projects.
Verticals, as they are best known, involve two cops taking an elevator to the top floor of a building, then slowly walking down the stairs, stopping at each floor to look for trespassers, drug dealers, loiterers and other troublemakers.
It is a remarkably unsophisticated, yet highly effective, police tactic.
And dangerous as hell.
In February 2016, two Bronx cops were shot and wounded by a man they stopped to question in a housing project stairwell. More than a year before that, in November 2014, a rookie Brooklyn cop, stepping into a darkened stairwell in a housing project in East New York, one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, was startled by a noise one floor below and unintentionally pulled the trigger on his already-drawn 9mm Glock. The bullet struck the wall, then ricocheted and struck and killed a young unarmed man who had just entered the stairwell with his girlfriend.
But at that moment, whatever fear Stryker had he tried his best to keep to himself.
“What I tell them is how stupid it would be to go to the roof, shoot the guns then get caught,” he said.
By now, the group was comfortable with Stryker. They agreed — itwould make no sense to go to the roof. F--- that.
Stevie Gunz is credited with taking over 200 guns off the streets of New York during his years of undercover work.
(BONIFACIO,MARK,,NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
Let’s eat instead, they told him. Have a drink. Relax. We’ll do our business in a little while.
Stryker would have loved to, but he knew the moment he let his guard down someone could be lacing his meal with God knows what.
He declined. Then his phone rang.
It was Skellman. He was unflappable, regardless of circumstance. But his job was to worry, to prepare for every possible contingency, to fret about things no one else considered. If he brought everyone home safe then thank God for that. And if guns, drugs and arrests came with that, well, that was all the better.
But Skellman wasn’t calling to see what Stryker wanted for lunch. Stryker knew the only reason for Skellman to call him in the middle of a buy was because there was a problem with the wire.
Skellman, not sure what danger Stryker might be facing — or if one of the dealers had grabbed the phone to answer it — was careful not to tip his hand.
“Yo, Stevie, what’s happening?” Skellman asked
Stryker froze.
The wire was dead. Not good but not uncommon. Like a running back reversing course when his blocking breaks down, Stryker didn’t miss a beat.
“Yo, Uncle Skell, what's up? ... Yeah, I’m good. I’m gonna need more money later on. I’m getting some good product up here.”
Then he hung up.
Or so he made it seem, leaving his phone on for the rest of the deal.
All good, Skellman, on the other end of the line, thought to himself. He and Stryker had in advance agreed that if a problem arose, if Stryker needed help and back-up needed to be sent in, he’d complain about what was happening inside the apartment.
“If he said, ‘My Uncle Skell isn’t going to like this,’ I’d know there was a problem,” Skellman said.
Fortunately, the dealers weren’t looking to rob Stryker and Dressler. With Skellman listening in the whole time the detectives finished up business and walked out of there without a scratch, their guns stashed in laundry bags, 100 grams of coke in Stryker’s pocket.
“Stevie Gunz!” a colleague yelled out when he and Dressler returned to the office and unpacked their haul.
A nickname was born.
“Gunz and God” is available as an e-book and in paperback on several websites, including Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and lulu.com. Names have been changed to protect the NYPD officers involved.
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"Gunz and God" is written by Stevie Stryker and Rocco Parascandola.
STEVIE STRYKERROCCO PARASCANDOLA
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, May 14, 2016, 4:50 PM
“Gunz and God: The Life of an NYPD Undercover,”tells the story of Detective Stevie Stryker, a now retired cop who spent the bulk of his career taking guns and drugs off the streets. His greatest skill — his ability to talk himself into and out of any situation — was honed as a kid, listening to his father, a Pentecostal minister known for his powerful sermons. Today, Stryker, who was known to his fellow cops as “Stevie Gunz,” is himself a minister.
In this excerpt, Stryker, deep into a gun deal, finds out his wire is not working, an undercover’s worst nightmare.
Detective Stevie Stryker got behind the wheel of the black Lexus, ready as ever to go buy some guns.
Next to him was Detective Leroy Dressler. He was relatively new to undercover work, had never before partnered with Stryker and had never worked a gun case. “We’re getting something bigger,” Stryker told Dressler.
“We’re getting something more than you normally get. I pray before I go out because I believe in a higher power protecting us, and I pray I don’t get hurt and I don’t have to kill anyone.”
A deeply religious man, Stryker tried not to wear it on his sleeve. God talk, he knew, made many people, cops no exception, a little uncomfortable.
But Dressler surprised him.
“I pray, too,” he told Stryker.
Both men bowed their heads down.
“Lord protect us from our enemies and let us not hurt our enemies,” Stryker said, “nor allow our enemies to hurt us.”
Game time.
At the housing project where the sale was set to take place, the detectives quickly learned from the informant, a guy in his 20s named Danny, that there were nine guns for sale, not two, as originally discussed. That would make for a stronger case in court. It also meant more chance of bloodshed.
“I remember telling Detective Dressler, ‘Don’t talk while we’re in there,’” Stryker said. “I was like, ‘I’ll do the talking. Do not sit with me. Stand off to the side just in case something goes bad because I’ll deal with whatever’s in front of me. You deal with whatever’s in front of you, but we will not sit together.’
“I also told him they might try to get us in separate rooms so they can go at us in separate conversations to see if our story’s right. So we have to be two steps ahead of them.”
The detectives got on the elevator with Danny. Before the doors closed another guy slipped inside. Stryker didn’t know him. Danny did.
“Money Mike, what’s up?”
He clearly was there for the gun buy. Stryker was nervous. Who invited him to the party? Why was he on the elevator? Were we being set up?
The detectives would later learn that the mini-transmitter in Stryker’s cellphone — the wire, or kel, as it is formally known — had gone dead, cutting off communication with their back-up team, also known as the field team. No surprise there. For all the gizmos and gadgets now used by most major police departments in America, including the NYPD, technology at the start of the 21st century was still a major concern in New York City. Radios often failed in the subway. And kels often didn’t work in bad weather, in the subway and in buildings with thick concrete walls. Such as the one Stryker and Dressler were standing in.
“Thank God the elevator’s working,” Stryker told Danny, unaware his back-up team couldn’t hear him. “How far would we have to walk if it wasn’t?”
Former NYPD Detective Stevie Stryker poses with his personal handguns in his Staten Island home.
(BONIFACIO,MARK,,NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
“We’re going to 12,” Danny said.
Cool, Stryker thought to himself, unaware that his back-up didn’t know the deal was on the 12th floor.
The ride went smoothly. They stepped off on 12 and Money Mike banged on an apartment door.
A woman answered.
Not typical, but it was her apartment.
Whatever. It was on.
“There are about four people sitting in the living room,” Stryker said. “There are pounds of coke on the table with bags and scales. It is definitely a drug den. Danny said, ‘I’m gonna go get the guy with the guns.’ I’m slapping everybody five. ‘Yo, what up? I’m Stevie.’”
An older man, maybe 60, was sitting on a chair and cutting up coke laid out on a table in front of him. Oddly, there was a boy, the woman’s son, 9 years old at the most, watching TV and oblivious to all around him.
Dressler took his post by the door.
“Have a seat,” someone said. Dressler played like a wooden Indian. Didn’t say boo. Didn’t move.
“He’s good,” Stryker said. “His job is to watch me. He doesn’t need to be sitting with me. He’s got hemorrhoids.”
Laughs all around.
Meanwhile, there was a shotgun on the table that was clearly meant to intimidate the detectives.
Stryker wasn’t fazed.
“That didn’t make me nervous,” Stryker said. “I always tell guys — get nervous when you can’t see the drugs and the guns.”
Dressler, however, was beyond scared.
He was honored that Stryker had enlisted him in the operation. On Dressler’s first day in narcotics Stryker was one of several undercovers to offer advice and help whenever it was needed. Dressler took him up on the offer. He never thought Stryker would be coming to him for help, but just an hour earlier Stryker found out his steady partner couldn’t work that day. Stryker could have postponed the buy. Danny would have understood. He and Stryker had done business before and Danny had come to believe Stryker was exactly who he said he was, a bad guy looking to buy guns. But Stryker decided against that. In fact, he was all set to make the buy himself. And he likely would have done just that were it not for Sgt. Rob Skellman.
Every undercover needs a good handler, a superviser who can coax the best work out of the undercover, push him to do better, ease up on the criticism when necessary and generally make the tough decisions to ensure everyone gets home alive.
Stryker's NYPD colleagues nicknamed him "Stevie Gunz" because of his track record of getting firearms off the streets.
(BONIFACIO,MARK,,NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
Skellman was that guy for Stryker. He’d been around the block. He’d been involved in shootings. And he’d spent a large chunk of his career supervising undercovers. He knew full well the dangers of overconfidence, of arrogance. He wanted none of this. Sure, Stryker had developed a rapport with Danny. But Danny was no different from any other dealer — he got used to a pattern, to a certain way of doing things.
He was, in fact, just like most of us, a creature of habit. If Stryker showed up alone, the s--t could have easily hit the fan if Danny’s mind started racing. Was Stryker solo because his sidekick got arrested? Did he flip on Stryker? Was Stryker now cooperating? Was he wearing a wire? And if so, might Danny just figure, in the heat of the moment, that he’d play the odds, pull his piece and put two in Stryker’s skull?
All of that took Skellman two seconds to analyze. Go get yourself another undercover, he told Stryker.
A knock on the door.
Another guy entered.
He had the two original guns — a 9mm handgun and a TEC-9 submachine gun — plus seven others up for grabs. Stryker wanted them all.
“One guy with a shotgun wants $400. I say, ‘I’ll give you $200,’” Stryker told them. “Then the guy with the two guns said, ‘I got other guns.’ Danny comes in with another guy. He’s got a couple of guns. I’m checking them all out.”
Dressler couldn’t believe his eyes. “What’s impressive is Steve’s ability to be able to control what was going on in the room. He sees the guns and it’s, ‘Oh, let me see that gun.’ Now, he’s got the gun in his hands. ‘You got bullets? You got bullets?’”
If Dressler was unsure of himself, Stryker felt otherwise, even when the sellers suggested a trip to the roof to test the guns.
“Of course, as a cop I can’t do that,” Stryker said. “Plus, it puts me farther away from my back-up. I might get thrown off the roof. I don’t know who else is up there. And, check this out: What if cops are doing a vertical? Then what? I’m gonna get shot by friendly fire?”
Vertical patrols are a staple of how cops fight crime in apartment buildings, especially the city-run housing projects.
Verticals, as they are best known, involve two cops taking an elevator to the top floor of a building, then slowly walking down the stairs, stopping at each floor to look for trespassers, drug dealers, loiterers and other troublemakers.
It is a remarkably unsophisticated, yet highly effective, police tactic.
And dangerous as hell.
In February 2016, two Bronx cops were shot and wounded by a man they stopped to question in a housing project stairwell. More than a year before that, in November 2014, a rookie Brooklyn cop, stepping into a darkened stairwell in a housing project in East New York, one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, was startled by a noise one floor below and unintentionally pulled the trigger on his already-drawn 9mm Glock. The bullet struck the wall, then ricocheted and struck and killed a young unarmed man who had just entered the stairwell with his girlfriend.
But at that moment, whatever fear Stryker had he tried his best to keep to himself.
“What I tell them is how stupid it would be to go to the roof, shoot the guns then get caught,” he said.
By now, the group was comfortable with Stryker. They agreed — itwould make no sense to go to the roof. F--- that.
Stevie Gunz is credited with taking over 200 guns off the streets of New York during his years of undercover work.
(BONIFACIO,MARK,,NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
Let’s eat instead, they told him. Have a drink. Relax. We’ll do our business in a little while.
Stryker would have loved to, but he knew the moment he let his guard down someone could be lacing his meal with God knows what.
He declined. Then his phone rang.
It was Skellman. He was unflappable, regardless of circumstance. But his job was to worry, to prepare for every possible contingency, to fret about things no one else considered. If he brought everyone home safe then thank God for that. And if guns, drugs and arrests came with that, well, that was all the better.
But Skellman wasn’t calling to see what Stryker wanted for lunch. Stryker knew the only reason for Skellman to call him in the middle of a buy was because there was a problem with the wire.
Skellman, not sure what danger Stryker might be facing — or if one of the dealers had grabbed the phone to answer it — was careful not to tip his hand.
“Yo, Stevie, what’s happening?” Skellman asked
Stryker froze.
The wire was dead. Not good but not uncommon. Like a running back reversing course when his blocking breaks down, Stryker didn’t miss a beat.
“Yo, Uncle Skell, what's up? ... Yeah, I’m good. I’m gonna need more money later on. I’m getting some good product up here.”
Then he hung up.
Or so he made it seem, leaving his phone on for the rest of the deal.
All good, Skellman, on the other end of the line, thought to himself. He and Stryker had in advance agreed that if a problem arose, if Stryker needed help and back-up needed to be sent in, he’d complain about what was happening inside the apartment.
“If he said, ‘My Uncle Skell isn’t going to like this,’ I’d know there was a problem,” Skellman said.
Fortunately, the dealers weren’t looking to rob Stryker and Dressler. With Skellman listening in the whole time the detectives finished up business and walked out of there without a scratch, their guns stashed in laundry bags, 100 grams of coke in Stryker’s pocket.
“Stevie Gunz!” a colleague yelled out when he and Dressler returned to the office and unpacked their haul.
A nickname was born.
“Gunz and God” is available as an e-book and in paperback on several websites, including Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and lulu.com. Names have been changed to protect the NYPD officers involved.