After a pioneering career as one of the first black police detectives in Brooklyn, New York, Carl Payne finally got sick of the bright lights and came to Gloucester County.
Today, the 75-year-old’s manner is modest, so he has to be nudged into reminiscing about his past. Once started, however, he spins his tales with the enthusiasm and humor of a natural storyteller.
“Black patrolmen were always assigned to war posts,” he said of the walking beats at power stations and subways, presumed to be especially vulnerable to saboteurs during World War II. “They were never given a motor patrol. Then one day in lineup the captain read my name on a roster and said I was assigned to a motor patrol.
“He and the others laughed because I was the first black assigned to motor patrol. The clerk must have been in a good mood,” he said.
But the road leading to Payne’s career as a top-notch cop with the NYPD was a challenge.
“My dad died when I was 13. It was in the Depression. My mom was in the hospital, sometimes six months or a year at a time with heart trouble and rheumatism, and I was the oldest at home with three younger brothers,” he said.
An older brother was in the Civilian Conservation Corps and an older sister was married. Both lived away from home, where the only income came from welfare aid for dependent children. “Two or three days would go by, and we wouldn’t have anything to eat,” he said.
His father had been a cop in Barbados before Payne was born, he said, and knowing that may have helped break the ice with the cops in his neighborhood, the 73rd Precinct.
“I became friends with them, and they’d give me rolls and donuts to take home. I decided then that when I grew up I’d be a policeman, too.”
In 1943, when it was time to realize that childhood commitment, Payne applied to and was accepted by the New York City Police Department. He said he persuaded his older brother, Neville, to join also. Together, they quickly won respect on the street as being tough but fair, he said.
Frank Serpico, who became one of New York City’s most famous cops for publicly exposing corruption in the city department during the 1970s, a decade after the Payne brothers had retired, still recognizes the name.
“They did have a reputation for being a couple of tough guys,” said Serpico, who today lives Thoreau-like in a small log cabin on “an old Indian reservation” near Stuyvesant, N.Y.
Like Serpico, who became a pariah among his fellow cops, Carl Payne experienced isolation as the first black detective in the 81st Precinct. And, like Serpico, Payne didn’t let it break him.
Usually about six detectives worked each 16-hour shift, and they grabbed naps in the squad dormitory when they could, Payne explained.
But racial prejudice was still the norm outside his squad, especially in the higher ranks.
“I noticed that nobody would sleep in the bed I used, so I slept in a different bed each night,” he said. This odd game of musical beds continued for six to eight months until the other detectives eventually accepted Payne as one of them, he said.
Despite the constant racial prejudice, Payne’s performance as a patrolman and then as a member of a plainclothes “gangbusters” squad organized to break up youth gangs, soon won him a coveted gold detective’s badge.
Pride still glows in his face as he holds up a ring that was presented to him when he retired as a sergeant. The ring, made from the gold of his original badge, bears an image of the badge with its number, 547.
His promotion to detective came after 1+ years in uniform and another 2+ years in the gangbusters squad. He was recommended earlier for detective, he recalled, by a notoriously tough county judge who presided over the trial of what Payne says was the first bust for heroin dealing in New York City.
Needless to say, it was Payne’s bust.
Roger Able, a New York City policeman who is writing a book about the history of African-Americans with the city’s police department, said he has devoted several pages to the Payne brothers.
Able, who also is president of The Guardians, a society of retired African-American police officers, said he expects the book to be published before Christmas.
Payne, who looks as trim and spry as a man half his age, keeps fit by staying active. This includes hunting, fishing and singing in his church choir. He’s also a Freemason and serves as secretary of Berea Lodge 114 in Gloucester.
After retiring from the police force, Payne spent 10 years as head of security for the National Urban League, working out of an office in Manhattan.
He confided his urban weariness to a friend in a neighboring office who worked for the Moton Institute. That friend offered him a job as director of the Moton Conference Center in Gloucester.
“I checked it out, and I liked it,” he said of the pastoral retreat on the York River in Capahosic that was once the retirement home of Robert R. Moton. A son of former slaves, Moton became an educator at Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Payne took the Gloucester job and served for about seven years in the 1970s, he said, then retired in the county that had become his home.
His transition to the slower pace was smoothed by people he had known in New York who also found their way to Gloucester.
The biggest surprise among them was Sam Cook, who had crossed the path of Payne-the-policeman by running an illegal gambling house. Today the two are friends.
Payne was able to renew his love of pinochle with another transplanted New Yorker: the late Arthur Reid, who had run a produce business in Brooklyn. In Gloucester the old friends played pinochle regularly until Reid died about seven years ago, Payne said.
Stan Hall’s was the most familiar face. Hall arrived in Gloucester from New York after Payne did and then served a stint as head of Gloucester’s NAACP branch – as Payne had. Hall regards the older man as “the only role model I’ve ever had.”
Hall said that as a youth he was hanging out with a rough crowd when Payne started dating his older sister, whom he eventually married.
“My dad died when I was 17. Carl took an interest in me and straightened me out. Today he’s like a father, brother, best friend and brother-in-law, interchangeably,” said Hall, who went on to become a political organizer in New York and now works as a Middle Peninsula drug abuse counselor.
Encouraged by friends, Payne’s been jotting down notes for an autobiography he would like to call “Black, Blue and Payne.”
He has lots of stories to tell of his days as a patrolman.
“There were two gangs in the precinct then – the Robins and the Beavers.”
He paused for the laughter at such innocent-sounding names. “They didn’t have guns then,” he continued, “but they carried sticks and chains. They fought. They could hurt each other.
“I found out that the Robins were going to meet the Beavers for a rumble. I knew which way they’d be coming, so I waited along the route. Pretty soon they came along. There were about 15 or 18 of them.
“I lined them up against a girls high school and patted them down. That’s why I waited where I did, to embarrass them. I didn’t call for a patrol wagon, because it would have taken too long to get there.
“I put them in a formation, two by two, and marched them down the middle of the road to the station house. It was 18 short blocks down Nostrand Avenue and five long blocks on Gates Avenue. Traffic had to go to the side to get around us. I moved them to the side when the trolleys came, but they stayed in formation.”
Payne said he doesn’t know what became of those Robins, but he’s kept in touch with other youngsters he disciplined on the street. Some, like Hall, credited him with turning their lives around, he said.
“He was a terrific cop, and a perfect gentleman,” said former colleague Sid Wasserman, a detective assigned to the neighboring 79th Precinct who worked with Payne and became a lifelong friend.
Wasserman, who now lives in Florida, described Payne as “a ferret – when he got his teeth into anything, he wouldn’t let go. And he was fair.”
“Digger,” is how Frank A. Bolz Jr. remembers his former partner.
Bolz, a retired New York City police captain who helped create and then commanded the city’s first hostage negotiation team, remembers Payne breaking him in as a rookie detective.
“He had a propensity for people liking him. He knew how to treat people. Always had a smile,” he said.
He continued, “That didn’t mean you could get away with anything with him. He was tough when he had to be, but he usually got better results being polite at first.”
“Carl was very, very studious. He always looked good – like he never sat down. His trousers always had a crease in them,” Bolz added.
When the Payne brothers joined the all-black gangbusters squad, they rode in an unmarked car looking for kids who should have been in school.
“All the kids were afraid of the squad,” Payne said.”Once I remember my brother told a guy to jump, then he swatted him when he landed. He told him, `I didn’t tell you to come down.’
“A lot of times we’d give the kids a switch, then take them home to their parents,” Payne said of kids 15 years old and younger. A switch amounted to “a couple of whacks on the rear with my hand,” he said.
“I avoided locking up the black kids, because so many of them were locked up for trivial reasons. It was my way of atoning, I guess.”
Many veteran cops have their “close call” stories, and Payne is no exception. He’s been shot at “a number of times,” he said, and once ducked just enough to avoid being crushed by a load of bricks somebody had dumped out of a trash can from five stories up. “One brick brushed my shoulder,” he said.
The only time he was shaken, he said, was when he realized how close he had come to death following what started as a routine incident while he and two other gangbusters were cruising in their patrol car.
“There had been a terrible rainstorm. The streets were flooded and most of the street lights were out,” he said. One of the other officers, who was driving, slowed down to avoid someone who was crossing the street.
Payne continued, “The man started calling us names. He reached for something. I heard a `click,’ which I thought was a knife, so I jumped out and chased him. I caught up with him and tackled him and grabbed his wrist.
“He had a .38 revolver in his hand. We took him to the station and booked him.
I checked the gun the next morning and you could see that the firing pin had hit two cartridges. He had been about 12 feet away and looking right at me.
“When our ballistics man fired the gun, all six cartridges fired.”
Payne waited a moment before adding, “I always say I was fortunate that I never had to kill anyone.”
