The NYC Robbery Department

Why am I posting a photograph of a banking establishment on my blog? Because this just happened a few days ago:

"NYPD cop Christian Torres, busted in Pennsylvania Thursday in a botched bank heist is suspected of robbing two other banks in Manhattan last year."

My first question after punching my fist through my office wall (and seriously hurting myself by slamming it into that first slab of reinforced concrete that we're building to house the secret counterterrorism vault), was why the hell this ass-hat had to generate two index crimes in Manhattan last year. Couldn't he have at least confined his unauthorized off-duty self-employment to Pennsylvania?

I'm also very upset that this clown was a former member of my prized Cadet Corps. That's where I started back in the day, pushing and shuffling important pieces of paper through the echelons of bureaucracy. Naturally, I wanted to immediately rip into whichever sorry excuse was in charge of hiring this idiot and making me look bad. I guess I really shouldn't have been surprised when I found out that the previous commanding officer of the Cadet Corps had his own little scandal unfold in the form of a domestic disaster last year. Decide for yourself what this Captain was doing in his office when he should have been working, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't meticulously reviewing applications.

And after the current Cadet Corps C.O. was finished kissing my proverbial behind, he - of course - professed to have been "taken by surprise" at this whole incident. Whatever.

So I called up Rafael next. He tried to heap shovels full of bovine excrement my way by playing semantics. Because Rafael apparently thinks that no actual investigation needs to "necessarily" take place, since the unit responsible is called "Application Processing Division" instead of "Application Investigation Division." I was about to launch Rafael's career into the vast depths of Viper Hell when George walked in and stopped me.

"Boss, I overheard your conversation while walking down the hall. Rafael's just doing his job. There's a reason we don't investigate as deeply as we used to," George proclaimed. "And why would that be," I asked. "Because we don't exactly want to find certain 'stuff' in people's backgrounds, if you know what I mean. That could - unnecessarily, of course - delay a candidate's entry into the academy."

I have to admit, George makes an excellent point. Also, Paul assures me that this whole story will get buried soon enough anyway. But even as I sit here massaging my bruised knuckles I can't help but feel that this is only the first wave in what is turning into a dangerous storm.

Still, I do have to wonder why we employ "investigators" at APD who supposedly couldn't find a single problem in this crooked rookie's "meticulous" background, yet a couple of armchair Sherlock Holmes types armed with a simple Google search uncovered this genius' MySpace profile about five minutes after the story broke? How is this possible? Are we shooting for the Guinness World Record in investigatorial incompetence or something?

And where the bloody hell is Charlie? Is he even on our payroll anymore?