- November 18, 2024
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Retired New York City detective Gary Rosen saw a small form at the side of the roadway one night not long after he moved to Palm Coast, and assumed it was a dog.
The he got a better look, and realized he was looking at a deer — the first one the city cop had ever seen outside a zoo.
Rosen is one of hundreds of retired New York City police officers who have moved to Northeast Florida for a quieter life.
He is also the current president of the Northeast Florida chapter of the NYCPD 10-13 Club, a national fraternal organization for retired NYPD officers.
The organization holds monthly meetings in Palm Coast and Ormond Beach, and has established scholarships for children and grandchildren of members.
Founded in part to give retired officers a way to organize against proposed retirement benefit cuts, it has also allowed them to share stories of their time in New York City.
“The thin blue line, 30,000 of us in those days, were the only thing holding the city together,” Rosen said. “Everybody depended on everybody else.”
Back then, if a call came over the radio that an officer was in trouble —a 10-13 call — the officers would keep coming, wave after wave, until that trouble was over, retired NYPD sergeant and current Northeast Florida 10-13 Club Vice President Joseph Phillips said. “They would just keep coming until somebody called it off,” he said.
And even calling for help could be tough, said retired NYPD sergeant and former Northeast Florida 10-13 Club president Eddie Woods. “We had no radios,” he said. “We carried a dime in our pocket for the phones.”
The environment city police officers worked in during the 1960s and ‘70s was often hostile, in some cases not only toward police officers, but to firefighters and other uniformed city employees, as well.
Firefighting trucks in the city used to have open tops, retired NYPD sergeant Joseph Phillips said. But then, people started pelting the trucks with rocks and bricks, and the city responded by making them covered.
City police officers got similar abuse, he said, and became targets of violence.
The “case that changed the job,” Phillips said, was the murder of Patrolman Phillip Cardillo in 1972.
Cardillo had responded to a fraudulent call that an officer needed assistance on the second floor of Nation of Islam Mosque No. 7 in Harlem.
The heavy, steel gates of the mosque, usually closed, were open when he and a few other officers arrived, “and they got in and there were 10, 15 guys waiting for them, and they locked it behind them,” Phillips said.
The attackers took the officers’ guns, and Cardillo was shot and later died of his injuries.
No one was convicted in connection with his death, and, in a break with tradition, the police commissioner and mayor didn’t attend the funeral.
The case divided the city and the police department and inspired several books.
Cardillo’s son Todd Cardillo is now a Palm Coast resident, and with the aid of police fraternal organizations, including the Northeast Florida 10-13 Club, he established the Patrolman Phillip Cardillo Scholarship for graduating high school seniors.
Local students Elizabeth Savone and Christopher Sovia were awarded the Patrolman Phillip Cardillo scholarship in a ceremony at the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 171 last month.
Despite the tough times in the city, Phillips said, the job came with rewards. “The people you worked with, no matter how hard the job got, you worked with a great group of guys and girls,” he said.
There were unexpected bright moments along with the danger.
Woods once delivered a baby on New Years Day during a call. He said it was the happiest day of his career. The family named the child after him.
As tough as things got, he said, “We had more good times, more laughs, at the precinct I worked at in the Bronx.”
