Michael Daly - New Yorks Finest: Stories of the NYPD and the Hero Cops Who Saved the City

The year was 1976. I was starting out as a writer at Flatbush Life in Brooklyn, and a prosecutor suggested I inspect a bullet hole in a subway sign to further an education left incomplete by Yale. The prosecutor had himself discovered it while investigating the account by a transit cop who said he had nearly been killed with his own gun. It was exactly where it should have been and thereby dispelled the prosecutors initial doubts.

I sought out the rookie cop whose proximity to violent death was recorded in a .357-inch circle punched in an overhead sign that thousands bustled obliviously past each day. His name was Jack Maple, and he was a perpetual learning experience as we became best friends. We spent many hours riding the trains and walking West 42nd Street, aka the Deuce, when the city was at its wildest.

I went with Jack to the hospital when his daughter, Jacqueline, was born. He drove my wife, Dinah, and me to NYU Hospital when she was about to give birth to our first child. He was trying to avoid potholes, and that prompted an accusation from the back seat.

I know why youre driving so slow! my wife cried out. You want to deliver the baby so you can get in the newspaper!

Sinead Daly was born soon after at NYU. Jack became godfather to her and to our second girl, Bronagh, to whom he would give his deputy commissioners shield when he was dying. I repeatedly put him in the newspapers and magazines for many reasons over the years.

I also wrote about Detective Steven McDonald, whom I met through FDNY Chaplain Mychal Judge. Mychal always said that just as the devil is to be found in evil, God is to be found in good. I have never known anybody as godly as Steven. He is who we all should be.

After decades of writing about Jack and Steven and other cops for the New York Daily News, New York magazine, and the Daily Beast, I wanted to collect those tales into a book along with stories I had not previously told. Cops in New York have been called the Finest since the aftermath of the Civil War, when the citys writers were seeking heroes to match those of the Union Army. This book is about modern day heroes who have lived up to this name. My focus is on Jack and Steven while including other cops whose lives occasionally intersected with theirs as New York was transformed from Fear City into the safest big city in America. For added source material I drew upon The Steven McDonald Story, the 1989 book by Steven McDonald and Patti Ann McDonald with E. J. Kahn III. I also used audio recordings of Jack made by Chris Mitchell, who wrote The Crime Fighter with Jack Maple.

Mostly, I was guided by my love for Jack and Steven, along with the other cops who actually are the finest of the Finest. They are well worth rememberingand honoringat a time when actions of the Lousiest in New York and elsewhere are feeding into an unfortunate tendency to judge the many by the few and giving all cops a bad name. I was with Jack when he died, and I saw Steven in his final hours. I have the privilege of living in the city their sons now serve.

The last I saw, the bullet hole was still there.