Prometheus 6

Except those occasions where the crook is a cop.

Except for one extraordinary twist, the raid on Apartment 10B in March 1996 would have vanished long ago into the dense annals of New York crime-fighting. A team of police officers and federal agents, hunting for evidence against a drug gang, broke into the apartment, on upper Madison Avenue. They pulled open drawers, looked in closets and upended cushions. They left behind their search warrant, on which they noted that they had not found the very first item they had come looking for: "monies."

Yet a fluke event — "once in a hundred years," as a lawyer later said — provided a candid glimpse of the search and raised troublesome questions.

During the commotion, someone turned on a telephone answering machine's recorder, apparently without realizing it. For the next 30 minutes, the machine captured the clamor and chatter of the search: an exclamation, "My God, that's a lot of money;" a wisecrack about the Constitution; a crude racial remark about the apartment's residents, who were not home.

Seven minutes into the tape, a man can be heard quietly counting. "Six hundred," he says. "Eight hundred. Nine hundred." Twenty-nine seconds later, the sound of a zipper is heard.

Annette Brown, who lived in the apartment and played a minor role in her son's drug business, later told authorities that $900 in cash had disappeared from a zippered portfolio. The police and federal agents all denied seeing money. At least three official investigations of Ms. Brown's claim and tape led to no charges.