Confidential Police Records Left Strewn About Ruined Jail
October 25, 1998
By David M. Herszenhorn, New York Times

Mr. Finkle said the documents were probably forgotten when the bureau moved to new offices.

Designed by John Haviland, who also designed the original jail known as the Tombs in lower Manhattan, the Essex County Jail was built in 1837, a year after Newark was incorporated, and served as the county's main penitentiary for 133 years. It is the oldest government building still standing in the city and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. Later that year, it was used to film scenes for Spike Lee's movie ''Malcolm X.''

Plans are moving forward for a $350 million science park, featuring an international center for public health, on 14 acres of land surrounding the building. The former jail may one day become part of the science park, perhaps used as a power-generating plant, which would allow its outer structure to be preserved.

When the jail closed, the Bureau of Narcotics Control was a multiagency task force financed largely by the Federal Government, with investigators from municipal police departments and the county sheriff's and Prosecutor's offices who worked with Federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Richard M. Roberts, a former assistant county prosecutor who directed the bureau from about 1970 to 1981, said the jail building was used in part to keep the squad separate from the Prosecutor's main offices, which are in the county courthouse.

''The narcotics squad uses confidential informants and things of that nature,'' he said, ''and to have them parading before the courts and the people going to court would be counterproductive. We used it as administrative offices. We kept evidence there in some of the cells.''

Some of the old jail's administrative offices were also used to monitor and record wiretapped conversations. Today, dozens of transcripts of such conversations, in official D.E.A. logs, are still in the decrepit offices, piled on rusting metal desks.

Mr. Roberts, who left the bureau for a private law practice in 1981, said that from the outset, jail cells were used as storage rooms. ''We had a detective in charge of evidence, and deep in the bowels of the old jail we kept evidence that we confiscated and kept until trial,'' he said. ''If it were narcotics, we kept it for a certain period of time and then we burned it. We kept it until the case was over and the appeals time was gone.''

One of the more bizarre reports found in the old jail details the arrests in the mid-1980's of two men charged with breaking into the building and stealing items from the bureau's own offices, including nine portable radios, a television set, two typewriters, a sheriff's badge, a leather holster for a 9-millimeter gun and two loaded ammunition clips.

Even more bizarre is a memo about an incident that occurred while the burglary was being investigated. ''During the course of the above investigation,'' Detective Arthur Lang wrote, ''Detectives Calvin Thomas, Derrick Westry and the undersigned seized one military rocket launcher in front of 8 Sheffield Drive in the city of Newark, New Jersey. Said launcher was turned over to the evidence office.'

But most of the documents are routine, detailing charges against various suspects and the efforts of the law enforcement agents who investigated them. Architects, engineers and other planners working on the science park have made many inspections of the old jail, almost always escorted by the police.

Dillon Waltner, administrative and technical coordinator for University Science Park Inc., the company developing the park, and others who have visited the building say they noticed the abandoned records and other evidence, including a roomful of confiscated gambling machines. ''There are still quite a few old files that are in there,'' Mr. Waltner said. ''It's a scary place, isn't it?''

Another person who noticed the discarded records was Camilo Vergara, a Manhattan photographer and historian who is working on a book about American ruins. Earlier this month, Mr. Vergara toured the building with a reporter and two historians, Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and Clement A. Price of Rutgers University.

''You see those records and all the time people took in putting those records together,'' Mr. Vergara said. ''They have bearing on people who for all you know may be walking right outside.''

Mr. Vergara said he was drawn to the old jail for its architecture and history and had been awed by the eeriness of a place that once housed as many as 400 prisoners and where gallows once stood in a courtyard. ''It's a wonderful building,'' he said. ''It is a real ruin, with the smells, with the dilapidation, the paint falling, the plaster falling. This is not a flimsy structure. It was built to last.''

David V. Abramson, a Newark architect who was hired by University Science Park to conduct a study on possible uses for the building, has suggested that it be used as a power-generating plant.

''It's an incredible structure, one of grandeur and decay,'' said Mr. Abramson, adding that he expected any plans for the building to be hotly debated. ''This has been and will continue to be and will become a controversial issue. The historic preservation community looks at this, rightly, as a very significant resource.''