In George Santos’ 2024 Primary, It’s Detective vs. Accused Crook

As Rep. George Santos (R-NY) faces charges of being an allegedly shameless crook as well as a serial liar, those seeking to claim his seat include a retired detective who would be the only person in Congress with working knowledge of how to actually control crime.

During his time with the New York City Transit Police and then the NYPD, Det. Mike Sapraicone was one of a tight crew assembled by policing genius Jack Maple, whose strategies transformed New York from “Fear City,” with more than 2,000 murders a year, into the safest big city in America with less than 400.

Sapraicone had known Maple since they both attended Holy Child grammar school in Queens. Sapraicone was a Transit detective. Maple became a Transit lieutenant and covered a squadroom’s walls with what he called “the Charts of the Future,” computer paper on which his cops used crayons to color-code the details of each subway crime, thereby enabling them to spot patterns. Maple combined that with a basic precept as simple as those taught by the nuns at Holy Child: Treat every crime as if the victim were your mother.

When Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in 1994, he appointed former Transit Police Chief William Bratton the new NYPD commissioner. Bratton had come to recognize Maple’s genius and promoted him in one unprecedented jump to Deputy Commissioner. Maple extended throughout the city the precept about the importance of each victim. He thereby pressed NYPD commanders to treat Black=on-Black crime as seriously as Black-on-white crime. And that changed everything.

At periodic meetings called CompStat, the Charts Of the Future were updated to computerized pin maps, where a crime was represented by the same size dot, whether it was on ritzy Central Park South or the toughest street in East New York. Maple was liable to point to any of these dots and ask a commander to detail how he or she addressed the particular crime with the application of four operating principles: accurate, timely intelligence; rapid deployment; effective tactics; relentless followup.

Nobody was more relentless than Sapraicone as the NYPD generated a reduction in crime so dramatic that Bratton became a celebrity. A jealous Giuliani subsequently drove Bratton out. Maple chose to go with him, later noting that Giuliani never understood what caused the drop in crime for which he demanded credit.

CompStat continued, but it passed into the hands of people who began to use it as a personnel management tool, a way to control cops as much as to control crime. It became all about the numbers of arrests and summonses rather than the importance of each and every victim. But the underlying principle that a dot is a dot still kept crime at record lows.

Sapraicone stayed relentlessly true to the Maple mission until he retired in 2000. Maple fell critically ill with cancer and Sapraicone went to visit him in the hospital.

“I spent a good two hours with Jack,” Sapraicone recalled to The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “We both cried a little bit and, and laughed about a whole bunch of stuff.”

Sapraicone added, “I loved him. I learned a lot of things from him.

Maple died in August of 2001. Sapraicone started a successful private security company whose clients included Apple. He became a big success as he approached business much as he had policing with Maple.

“Strategies and looking at things and asking the questions nobody asks,” Sapraicone said. “And to listen to people…”

At the heart of it was what had also been at the heart of it with Maple.

“In my mind, like policing is common sense,” Sapraicone said. “You could train and do whatever, but it’s really all about common sense. If you don’t have common sense, you fail.”

In September, Sapraicone sold his business and pondered his next adventure. His wife, Eileen Daly-Sapraicone, is a Nassau County judge who had successfully run for Family Court and then Supreme Court. He had been intrigued by the process. He also began to feel that somebody had to do something as New York seemed in danger of reverting to the bad old days.

“People from Long Island don't want to take the train into the city,” he said. “And once they get in the city, they don’t want to go on a subway. It’s just gotten to a point where it’s just totally ridiculous.”

He then saw both an opportunity and a necessity when a compound scandal unfolded around his representative in Congress.

Sapraicone felt he had placed better people than George Santos in handcuffs.

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“He’s worse than a perp,” Sapraicone said of Santos. “He’s a stain.”

Sapraicone decided to make a bid for the spot, whether or not Santos manages to keep his seat until the primary.

“I said, ‘You know, I could do this, I can certainly do this kind of thing,’” he recalled.

Sapraicone is giving some press interviews and going on various TV and radio shows meeting with people who know Nassau County politics. He is also fundraising.

“I have to start to learn, how do I ask people for money?” he said. “I think that’s the hardest part of this whole thing. And I’ve got to raise a lot of money to make sure that I’m viable.”

If Maple were around, he would say Sapraicone is nothing if not relentless and the Charts of the Future just may see common sense come to Congress.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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