Raymond Berke is the first to admit it: The man who became a highly decorated veteran of the NYPD wasn’t the best behaved kid in Woodhaven.
But, after plenty of run-ins with the 102nd Precinct, Berke, who moved to Woodhaven as a 5-year-old in 1963 and lived there until 1987, decided that a life in blue may be just the thing for him.
“I was a punk kid – I was one of those teenagers, hanging out on the corner, drinking, no job, having the 102nd Precinct chase us constantly,” Berke said. “I didn’t like cops whatsoever, and I had no intention of becoming a cop. But, that helped me years later as a cop – I empathized with some of those kids.”
Finally, Berke’s father demanded that his son, who was unemployed at the time, take the test to become an officer.
“I took it on two hours sleep and a hangover – and I ended up loving it,” he said of his career that launched on the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1981 and vaulted him into a world of hundreds of murder investigations, including the case known as the College Point massacre, small time robberies, and high society thieves. He even became the first New York City detective to work with London’s Scotland Yard during an investigation of a multi-million dollar jewel robbery in Midtown Manhattan, which culminated in the arrest and conviction of a close friend of the Royal Family in Britain and of Princess Diana.
During so many of his cases, which were often splashed all over the front pages of city newspapers, Berke would think: I should write about this.
Finally, after Berke retired in February 2001, he found some time to start putting pen to paper, and his first book, “6 More Dead,” was published in late November.
“Throughout my career, we’d get in situations, and I’d say, ‘I’ve gotta write a book because nobody would believe this,’” said Berke, who now lives with his wife on Long Island.
The book takes the reader on a journey throughout a series of cases, but it focuses on two of Berke’s biggest: the College Point massacre and the jewel robbery.
Describing what came to be known as the College Point massacre – in which six people were held hostage and slain in an apartment in 1995 – Berke said that he “walked into the precinct on a Saturday morning hoping it’d be a nice quiet day.
“I got a notification we had a girl at Booth Memorial Hospital with her throat cut,” he continued. “I went to the hospital an hour later and saw this girl, Ana, in bed. I choked up on the stand later when I was describing this: She was in really bad shape; her throat had been cut and she had been shot in the head.”
The girl in the bed turned out to be 17-year-old Ana Figueroa, the sole survivor of the massacre who, in court, described the unthinkable crime in which she was held hostage, bound and gagged for hours in a College Point apartment with six others. After she was shot and her throat cut, Figueroa, then a student at St. Agnes High School in College Point, played dead until finally she, the one one still alive, was able to stumble out of the apartment and find help.
“Obviously she couldn’t speak when I got to the hospital – the swelling in her head was incredible,” Berke said. “I asked her if she knew who did this to her, and she wrote down on a piece of paper: Cuba.”
“I said, ‘OK, I’m gonna come back when you feel better,’” Berke continued. “I turned around to leave and her hand shot out and grabbed my wrist and pulled me back. She had a yellow legal pad and a pencil. All of this took an enormous amount of effort for her – her hand shook while writing. She was staring at me the entire time, she didn’t look at the pad, and she wrote: Six more dead.
By Anna Gustafson