Albert Seedman

Albert A. Seedman (August 9, 1918 – May 17, 2013) was an officer with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for 30 years, known for solving several high-profile cases before resigning as chief of the Detective Bureau. He was the only Jewish officer to ever hold that position. After his retirement he was the chief of security for a New York area department store chain before retiring to South Florida.

Seedman established himself as a detective during the 1960s. He investigated many prominent crimes during that era, including the Borough Park Tobacco robbery and the Kitty Genovese murder. As the chief of detectives he reformed that branch by assigning detectives to specialize in certain crimes rather than just investigating whatever cases came their way when they were on shift. His tenure as chief of detectives of the city was short but memorable, marked by the Knapp Commission's corruption investigations which briefly cost him his job, several mob hits, and terror attacks carried out by the Black Liberation Army (BLA). When his superior officers hindered his investigation into the murder of an officer at a Harlem mosque out of fear of racial unrest, Seedman resigned his position and retired from the force, although he did not say that had been the reason for another 40 years.

Frequently and accurately described as "cigar-chomping" and "tough-talking", with a personal style likened by a colleague to a Jewish gangster, he was one of the city's most visible police personnel during the 1960s and early 1970s. Newspapers often included a quote from Chief Seedman; he was frequently on evening television news as well. He was always willing to speak to reporters even if he could not tell them much. After his retirement he wrote Chief!, a memoir of his time on the force and the high-profile cases he had been involved in, and appeared as a detective in the 1975 film Report to the Commissioner with Hector Elizondo and Tony King.

Early life

Seedman was born to a taxi driver and his wife, a sewing machine operator in the Garment District, on Fox Street, near St. Mary's Park in the South Bronx in 1918. He was given no middle name, just the initial "A". In school he served as a stairwell monitor, which he said later gave him the idea to become a police officer.

Police career

In the late 1940s, there were few Jews in the NYPD and none above the rank of captain. Seedman recalled later in his life that there was some attendant bias. "I didn't get the choice assignments", he said. "I think it was because I was Jewish."

Some photographers who arrived late complained to Seedmen. He brought Dellernia back out, but the defendant had his head low. Seedman forced Dellernia's head up and held him by the chin so his face would be visible. Seedman nevertheless displayed the photo on his office wall in his Long Island home. Seedman's detectives arrested the killer, Winston Moseley, six days later. The death sentence he originally received was commuted when New York abolished the death penalty for most murders, and Moseley served the remaining 52 years of his life in prison.

In mid-1967, Seedman, then chief detective for southern Brooklyn, made his reputation as an investigator who could solve baffling cases. While driving on the Belt Parkway one summer morning near Plum Beach, a young woman named Nancy McEwen suddenly drifted off the road onto the median strip. A police lieutenant in the car behind her pulled over to see what the problem was. He found her moaning, with her head slumped forward, and called for an ambulance. She died a short time later at Coney Island Hospital, where doctors found a small hole on the side of her head that turned out to have been caused by a bullet. Since only one window in McEwen's car was open, and none of them had been shattered, Seedman believed the shot had to have been fired from Sheepshead Bay or the nearby area, and that due to the distance and the car's speed, it was probably not intentional. He ordered detectives and uniformed officers to search the dunes and marshes for a possible shell casing.

Seedman contacted radio executive James Wilkerson, the owner of the property. He learned that Wilkerson was planning to return from a vacation in the Caribbean that day; in the meantime his daughter Cathy had been staying there, recuperating from a bout with the flu. Cathy was known to the FBI to be a member of the Weathermen, a radical left-wing activist group, and had been arrested at several demonstrations over the last two years. Seedman concluded that the explosion had been perhaps deliberately set, but did not know what the motive might have been other than Cathy Wilkerson's relationship with her father, from whom she was estranged. which had usually, like many of the NYPD's other high-ranking positions, gone to the Irish Americans who made up the bulk of the ranks. "The Jewish cop was an alien in an Irish universe," crime novelist Jerome Charyn recalled in 2004. Enter Albert Seedman, the first, last and only Jewish chief of detectives. It's the 1970s and Chief Seedman is all over the place, tough, flamboyant and foul-mouthed, chomping on a cigar, appearing at the scene of important crimes. He seemed more Irish than the Irish, as if he had co-opted their territory, their language, their domain.

The commission found evidence that in 1970, Seedman had accepted a free dinner worth $84.30 ($ in current dollars) from the New York Hilton Midtown, for himself, his wife and two guests. Since this was relatively minor compared to many of the allegations the commission was investigating, it notified Murphy's office before it began hearings that it would not be raising the check. Murphy, distrustful of the commission and fearing that it had an ulterior motive, sent out a press release announcing that Seedman had been relieved of his position as chief of detectives. After this made headlines on all the city's newspapers, the commissioner reinstated him five days later.

It was a challenging era for the department and its detectives. The city's homicides had almost quadrupled since the late 1950s, with a 30 percent increase in 1970 alone.

After the second attack, in January 1972, senior NYPD officials were wary of publicly attributing the killings to the BLA, or even acknowledging the group's existence. Lindsay had changed his party affiliation from Republican to Democratic the previous year in order to seek the latter party's presidential nomination, and his aides told the police that publicly discussing the investigation of an African American terrorist group, one they considered largely an invention of disgruntled former Black Panthers, dedicated to killing police officers would conflict with the mayor's campaign themes; they also feared exacerbating racial tensions in the city. In his news conference the day after the killings, Seedman downplayed notions that they were the work of the BLA although the police had received mail from them, taking credit and promising more. Imam Louis Farrakhan and the other worshippers present say the police interrupted them with guns drawn during prayers and refused repeated requests to wait or at least leave behind their guns, which the Black Muslims' faith forbade from being carried into a place of worship. At a press conference the next day, Farrakhan would claim it was a premeditated attack and the 9-1-1 call just a ruse.

In the ensuing altercation, one officer, Phillip Cardillo, was shot at close range with his own gun. Another officer's gun went missing; it has never been recovered. Police reinforcements arrived, as did the news media, and rumors spread throughout the neighborhood that the police had done something in the mosque they were trying to cover up. An angry and restless crowd had gathered as the police secured the inside of the mosque and tried to figure out what had happened. Two men were arrested and the other worshippers were in custody. Seedman planned to interrogate them when he arrived.

Seedman reluctantly gave the order to leave the mosque and free the suspects. The police department ordered all white officers to withdraw to several blocks from the mosque. As Seedman walked back to his car, dodging bricks dropped from nearby roofs, he decided to retire, ending his NYPD career two weeks later. At the time, he claimed his retirement was unrelated to the mosque incident; rather, he was attracting too much publicity and the department wanted to focus more on the uniformed patrol officers who made up the bulk of the ranks. Many of his colleagues believed the failure to fully investigate it resulted from senior police administrators' political cowardice; at his funeral, which uncharacteristically neither Commissioner Murphy nor Mayor Lindsay attended, Cardillo's commander angrily resigned from the department.

Seedman's role in the police's exit from the mosque was not known until a secret report was released in 1983, as Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Ward, who many officers blamed for the order to withdraw, was on the verge of becoming the city's first African American police commissioner. The secret report, known as the "blue book", indicated that Seedman, not Ward, had given the order. Confronted with this by a Newsday reporter, who wanted to know why he had not ever corrected the record, Seedman said "What good would it have done?" With the truth now known, Ward became commissioner.

He eventually retired from Alexander's before the chain folded in 1992, and moved to Boynton Beach, Florida. He kept a replica of his gold "Chief of Detectives" shield to show people, and told the author of a 2006 book about Jewish police officers that he still carried his pearl-handled revolver "in case there is trouble."

On May 17, 2013, Seedman died of congestive heart failure in Delray Beach, near his Florida home. He was 94.

In September 2019 several news outlets reported on the NYPD's longest serving officer, chaplain Rabbi Alvin Kass, who was hired by Seedman. "He really wasn't sure who the right one was," he said. "But he saw me about to play a game of handball and he figured 'a rabbi who plays handball. That's the kind of guy that ought to be the chaplain for the New York City Police Department.'"