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A red Mazda sped past a police officer’s unmarked car stationed at a tree-lined Staten Island intersection. The officer inside, Mathew Bianchi, clocked the Mazda at well over the limit and prepared to make a stop at a nearby streetlight. But the car blew through a red light. Bianchi turned on his siren.
Behind the wheel was a woman in her late teens or early 20s. As Bianchi began to explain why he had stopped her, she handed him a card.
The police unions distribute the wallet-sized courtesy cards — sometimes referred to as “get out of jail free” cards — to members, who in turn pass them out to friends and family. Bianchi had been instructed to let card carriers off without a ticket.
By the time he pulled over the Mazda in November 2018, drivers were handing Bianchi these cards six or seven times a day. But this woman’s card was a little older, a little tattered-looking. It was difficult to make out the contact information of the officer who had given it to her, which is usually written on the card’s back. So Bianchi did the wrong thing, which is to say, the right thing: He wrote the woman a ticket.
Though Bianchi didn’t know it then, he had just begun what would become a yearslong struggle to do the job the way he thought it should be done. He had inherited his moral obligations — and a strong dose of stubbornness — from his grandmother, who raised him on Staten Island. But he had no family in the Police Department, and no one who could tell him what to do when its leadership began to turn against him.
The month after he stopped the Mazda, a high-ranking police union official, Albert Acierno, got in touch. He told Bianchi that the cards were inviolable. He then delivered what Bianchi came to think of as the “brother speech,” saying that cops are brothers and must help each other out. That the cards were symbols of the bonds between the police and their extended family and friends.
Bianchi was starting to view the cards as a different kind of symbol: of the impunity that came with knowing someone on the force, as if New York’s rules didn’t apply to those with connections. Over the next four years, he learned about the unwritten rules that have come to hold sway in the Police Department.
“I was a little bit naïve and I thought that, if I’m doing the right thing and I’ve done nothing wrong, it’s very hard for somebody to articulate being able to punish me,” he said. “Doing the right thing — obviously, it’s effectively killed my career.”
Wish I Could ‘Give That Guy a Ticket’
Bianchi, 40, has a good memory for details, and a weakness for repeating himself. He comes across as stolid, sensible, eminently reasonable and completely obsessive.
He became a police officer late, graduating from the academy when he was 32. His background was unusual for the department, where many officers are second-, third- or even fourth-generation, and policing is the family trade.
Bianchi was born in Los Angeles. His mother, Martha Ramos, was a nurse, and his father, Anthony Bianchi, was an English teacher who moved to Japan when Mathew was 5. But much of his childhood remains a mystery to him, interrupted by the shock of his mother’s death when he was 7. He was told she had died in a car accident.
Ask Bianchi why he joined the department and at first, he answers vaguely: He saw it as an opportunity to do some good in the world, or a family member suggested he try it. But ask him repeatedly and eventually the answer changes.
“When I was a kid, I used to joke around,” he says. “I used to see people driving badly and it was like, I wish I could be a cop and give that guy a ticket. And that’s what I ended up doing!”
It is easy to draw a connection between Bianchi’s drive to write traffic tickets and his mother’s death. But he does not insist on it. “It’s not what I meant to do,” he said. “If I did, it was definitely something subconscious.”
After his mother died, Bianchi’s paternal grandmother, Frances Bianchi, whom everyone called Fran, brought him back to New York to live with her. She was mostly a stranger to Mathew. He knew her from the care packages she had sent across the country, filled with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures and magic sets.
Fran worked at a bank, attended church every Sunday and lived by a strict moral code. She was ferociously stubborn. But she and Mathew got along, and he was happy in New York, where he lived first in Brooklyn and then on Staten Island, New York’s most car-dependent borough.
After high school, he attended the College of Staten Island for a time but never figured out what he wanted to study and never graduated. He worked at Citibank, but his heart wasn’t in that either. Without really thinking much about it, at someone else’s suggestion, he took the qualifying exam to become a police officer.
Fran, whose health was declining, was thrilled — a big fan of “Law and Order,” she had fantasized about working for the department herself. She attended his graduation from the Police Academy in December 2015. When she died two years later, Bianchi, who was by then married, moved back into her house and fixed it up.
On patrol, where officers start their careers, a colleague had noticed that Bianchi was unusual in that he did not mind writing tickets. He suggested Bianchi apply for a job doing just that.
Shortly after Bianchi was transferred to the traffic unit, he was cleaning up around the house and stumbled upon a death certificate. His family, he discovered, had lied to him.
His mother had died in a car, but not in a crash. She had been found on Dec. 11, 1990, in a parked vehicle near a freeway overpass, with several gunshot wounds to her chest. The Los Angeles County medical examiner determined it was a homicide. (The Los Angeles Police Department denied a request for the related case files; as far as Bianchi knows, no one was charged with her murder.)
The truth came too late: The fable had already done its work in forming him. “I spent so much time thinking one thing happened,” Bianchi said. “Even now, it still feels that way.”
‘Letting This Person Go Is Fine’
When Bianchi first moved to traffic, the courtesy cards didn’t bother him. “The way they sell it to you is, ‘Move on to the next person,’” he said. “‘Letting this person go is fine.’”
There was no shortage of people who deserved tickets. Quotas are officially barred, but Bianchi said he was required to issue six tickets daily. He made between 15 and 20 stops to get there. The job was straightforward, with no training necessary. “They just threw me out on my own and that was it,” he said.
He caught on quickly. He learned that if the location of his cruiser was identified on Waze, the Google Maps alternative, he should move to another spot to retain the element of surprise. He developed a gruff, no-nonsense persona to encourage compliance. People hate receiving traffic tickets, but Bianchi didn’t find the encounters particularly nerve-racking. He felt he was doing what needed to be done.
But the thing he could never learn was how to tolerate drivers who had courtesy cards. Some were polite, but others were irritated about even being stopped, let alone ticketed. A sergeant’s wife refused to hand over her driver’s license; instead, she just stuck her card out the window, without looking at Bianchi.
And card-toting drivers didn’t learn from their mistakes — why would they? — so Bianchi found himself pulling over the same people three, four, even five times. Bianchi stopped one teenager about a dozen times; he got so familiar with the family that the kid’s father began sending him holiday greetings. (The kid is now a police officer.)
While Bianchi usually refrained from writing cardholders tickets, there were times when he just couldn’t help himself. As the months went by, he developed a reputation.
“I would get bashed on Facebook, I would get bashed in the cop groups,” he said. Retired officers called him a loser, and worse.
“You’d rather HURT a legit family member than write one (1) less summons,” one wrote.
He got in trouble with supervisors, too. Drivers would complain to the officers they knew, who would complain to Bianchi’s bosses.
Bianchi, for his part, complained about the courtesy cards to anyone who would listen. His friends in the unit all vented about them in a group chat, save for a union delegate who sat out those conversations. But Bianchi was the only one among them who repeatedly raised the issue with supervisors; he even filed complaints with the city’s Department of Investigation and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which examines police misconduct.
“It’s widely known that if you write the wrong person you will face consequences,” he wrote in one anonymous complaint he drafted on his phone. “All it takes is for a boss to make a call or a delegate to go to a chief and this poor officer doing his job is out of his unit.”
Last Stop
The stop that ended Bianchi’s career in the traffic division was unremarkable.
It was Aug. 31, 2022. He was parked above Hylan Boulevard, and a woman wearing scrubs passed him in her car. She appeared to be using her phone. Bianchi pulled her over on a side street.
The woman didn’t put up much of a fuss, Bianchi said. She didn’t have a courtesy card and she didn’t drop any names. Bianchi wrote her a ticket and sent her on her way.
Two days later, Bianchi was transferred out of the traffic unit and placed back on patrol. In a lawsuit he filed against New York City, he says that a supervisor told him that Jeffrey Maddrey, then the chief of patrol and now the department’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, requested that he be transferred. Maddrey, Bianchi was told, was friends with the woman he had stopped.
In a complaint he sent to the department’s internal affairs bureau directly after he was transferred, Bianchi said that the transfer was retaliation, “solely because the motorist I summonsed knows a chief and that chief is now mad at me.” And in his lawsuit, Bianchi said that the episode represented the culmination of his objections to the courtesy cards. After all his complaining, he said, he was being punished for doing the right thing.
The Police Department, asked about Bianchi’s claims about Maddrey and retaliation writ large, declined to comment, citing Bianchi’s pending lawsuit.
Chief Maddrey has been elevated by Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer who is more enmeshed with the department than any recent mayor. Adams has consistently championed police officers, particularly those in trouble.
Maddrey is a prime example: When he faced departmental discipline last year, Adams vocally defended him, undermining the authority of Keechant Sewell, who was then the police commissioner. Sewell resigned about a month later. Maddrey remains.
But if Maddrey was a beneficiary of the culture of loyalty and brotherhood, Bianchi — beholden to his personal history, an unshakable morality, a stubborn refusal to get with the program, or some unknowable combination of character and circumstance — was a victim of it.
Ever since that run-in, he’s been back on patrol like a rookie, with an irregular schedule that makes it hard to see his wife and daughter. New York City, after twice delaying its response to his lawsuit, issued a reply last month in which it denied the vast majority of his allegations, including those related to Maddrey’s role in his transfer.
Bianchi’s lawyer, John A. Scola, and a spokesman for the city’s Law Department both said that the parties were exploring a settlement: A conference is scheduled for Feb. 28. The spokesman, Nick Paolucci, declined to comment further while the case was pending.
In the meantime, Bianchi has tried to show that he still can be an exemplary traffic cop. Even confined to patrol, he’s managed to write hundreds of tickets. When new positions have opened in the 123rd Precinct’s traffic unit, Bianchi has applied, but others have gotten the job.
Bianchi believes in the brotherhood. But, he says, he doesn’t believe that he should have to fall in line no matter the situation. “Cops don’t always do the right thing,” he said. “A lot of times that speech is given when they want you to comply.”
All he wants is to be transferred back to traffic so he can get back to what he was, in some sense, made to do: Write traffic tickets to anyone who deserves them.
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