“They come to my house three, four times,” once with a higher-up, Lee remembers. Next followed several days of meeting in secret with his new Internal Affairs handlers, Lt. Would Lee be willing to work with Internal Affairs, get Sung on a digital recording trying to frame him for rape? It’s always going to tarnish him.”Ī week later, Conforti called Lee into his office. So even if there’s a false allegation like that, and even if he wins that false allegation, his wife and his family is always going to see him in that light. “You see Conforti coming to the precinct with his wife, his kid, and he’s a stand-up guy. “He’s like, ‘Oh, you know, have one of the girls from the karaokes claim that he raped her.’ “I was like, ‘What are you thinking?’ ” Lee remembers asking his boss, as they drove to a pizzeria on 162nd Street off Northern Boulevard. NYPD official planned to frame officer for rape to cover up scandal: cop It was the PR girls that Sung thought of first, when he plotted to get rid of Conforti, says Lee. And the guy would be like, ‘No, $300.’ And she’d be like, ‘No, you’re going to give me $700 or I’m going to call the cops and say you raped me and robbed me.’ ”
“After they have sex for $300, she’ll change the price and be like, ‘Oh, you owe me $700. Some of them had Yam’s cellphone number, and they’d call him if they wanted help with a customer off-site, Lee says. They’re known as “PRs,” for “public relations girls,” Lee explains of the pretty, flirty Asian women who greeted male customers in some of the seedier karaokes. Sung, Yam and the hookers of the karaokes were already in league, as Lee would find out while going undercover for Internal Affairs. That’s the moment, Lee says, when the blinders fell from his eyes - when he decided to stand up for what is right, first as a wire-wearing, NYPD Internal Affairs anti-corruption informant, and later as a whistleblower against Internal Affairs itself. “We need to get rid of this guy,” Sung allegedly told him. How about, the lieutenant suggested, we get one of the karaoke club hookers to frame Conforti for rape? There was a new commanding officer at the 109 - Thomas Conforti, a straight arrow who didn’t play along. In summer 2013, Lee says, Sung took him aside and confided in him something terrifying. “We have a saying - you put on your blinders,” he says.
“People had ideas that something shady was going on,” Lee says now. Lee quickly learned to look the other way and became a “conditions sergeant,” tasked with policing the karaokes and nightclubs. “And you’d be like, ‘What do you mean?’ And they’d say, ‘Sung hangs out here, so just be on your toes, or he’s going to f–k with you.’” This is Sung’s place,’ ” Lee told The Post. “Sometimes we would do inspections, or we’d get a job, a 911 call to that area, and we’ll go to that location, and the cops would come up to you and say, ‘Hey, be careful. The two would stick their noses in anytime a 109 cop arrested someone in or around the karaoke clubs, or anytime vice or narcotics cops from outside the precinct made an arrest there. Sharing this interest was Sung’s right-hand man, Detective Yatyu Yam, then 34, a liaison to the Chinese community. Robert Sung, then 47, a wiry veteran with 20 years under his belt, who seemed to have a particular interest in the karaokes.
Steven LeeĮvery precinct has cliques, and the 109 was no different. It was 2013, and Lee had just been transferred to Flushing after eight years at a precinct in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush. “Everybody in the 109 - and some from other commands - kind of knew about it. “They go, like, ‘Yo, leave that place alone. “If you go out and try to summons somebody by one of the karaokes, you’ll hear from the lieutenant, or the detectives, or the other cops,” Lee says he noticed. These gaudy nightclubs of neon and mirrors, clustered on, and just off, Northern and College Point boulevards, offered pay-by-the-hour private rooms where tipsy patrons, mostly Chinese and Korean, could shout along to a karaoke machine.ĭrugs and women were also allegedly for sale, if you knew whom to ask. Steven Lee was assigned to the 109th Precinct in Queens, he realized some of the cops there were oddly protective of “the karaokes.”
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