The other Bill Long is the son of an NYPD patrolman shot down on the job in Queens more than 50 years ago; without any clever device except feeling, he has turned that September 2, 1956, slaying into a touchstone for reminding the public of the daily risks faced by police officers. He has been further inspired in this effort by the grim coincidence that his father, William Long, Sr., was shot while working out of the same house – the 103 Pct. in Jamaica — one of the NYPD’s most notorious cop killings, that of Edward Byrne in 1988, took place. (See photos and article about the 20th anniversary of Byrne’s killing.)
“I’ve really come to think of the 103 Pct. as part of my extended family,” said Long, speaking at his company’s headquarters in Plainview, L.I. “I’ve never been a cop myself and, frankly, I spent a lot of years trying to work out exactly where I fit in with the people who had worked with my father, with the cops I saw every day on the street. I knew I was at the epicenter of something, but it was also hard to put my finger on exactly what. It’s been in only the last few years that I’ve begun to understand the tremendous depths of the camaraderie of the people working in commands like the 103 and how that can stretch over generations even to those not personally wearing blue.”
Long was only three years old when the knock came to the door on September 2, 1956, to inform Maureen Long and her three children that her husband had been shot in a parking lot at 165th Street and Archer Avenue. (He died the next day.) The shooting occurred a day after the senior Long had marked his second year as a policeman and a day before the couple’s seventh wedding anniversary. As subsequently pieced together, the 27-year-old police officer, had stepped out of the stationhouse to go to the lot to put his raincoat in his car when he noticed somebody acting suspiciously around another vehicle. When he challenged the man, the latter reached for a gun, precipitating nine shots back and forth before the officer fell with a critical wound in the chest.
Although the suspect scaled a six-foot wire fence to make good his escape from the lot, the ensuing NYPD mobilization and the attendant publicity given to the hunt made it only a question of time before the shooter was nabbed. After several false leads, the search narrowed down to Virgil Richardson, documented as having purchased the murder weapon in Las Vegas while serving nearby in the Air Force. With the aid of the FBI, Richardson was arrested in an Atlanta bus station 10 days after the Queens killing. He was found guilty of first-degree homicide in March 1957 and executed at Sing Sing in November 1958.
“I was really too young to remember much of the commotion that went on at the time,” Long, Jr. admits. “I remember there were ceremonies when a police launch was named after my father, or maybe I don’t remember that so much as was told it years later. But I’ve tried to make up for it.”
He laughs as he pats one of two albums bulging with newspaper clips recounting the shooting, manhunt, and trial and execution of Richardson. But the albums have been the least of his attempts to maintain a connection to the father he barely knew. “When the 50th anniversary of his death rolled around in 2006, we were invited down for a ceremony and that was my first real personal connection with the cops there. My mother had never wanted me to be a cop. I’d been all geared up for it at one time, was all set to go to the Academy, but she begged me not to do it. That was no small thing in my family. My great-grandfather patrolled the streets when Teddy Roosevelt was the police commissioner at the end of the 19th Century. Even my mother’s brother, Robert Giordano, was a Burglary detective. In fact, he was in on the investigation for my father’s killer. But I understood why my mother asked me not to do it.”
While attending the memorial ceremonies for his father two years ago, Long had the idea of organizing a day for all those at the 103 Pct. “I thought of it as a celebration of heroes, and for me nobody epitomized that more than Eddie Byrne. You don’t want to sound maudlin, but it was always an honor to me to have my father and him associated.”
William Long, Jr., with his father’s NYPD Medal
With the assistance of the New York Racing Association, an outing was organized at the Belmont racetrack following a commemorative mass at Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, the church from which the senior Long had been buried in 1956. “There really was nothing mournful about it,” Long recalls. “That would have defeated the whole purpose. They even dubbed the seventh race that day Bill’s Barbecue. Too bad for Bill he got barbecued by picking the wrong horse.” He laughs. “But the main thing was to remind the families connected to the 103 Pct. — and I include my own in that — that there was a proud tradition in that house, that it was the kind of command people used to mean when they would point at a cop in the street and say, ‘Look at how straight he stands!’”
Although 50th anniversaries don’t come by every year, Long has also marked the deaths of officers like his father and Byrne by taking out a full-page advertisement in the New York Post every Memorial Day simply listing every cop killed on the job. “I’ve had a very full life,” he says. “I’ve been a commercial fisherman, I’ve owned a bar, and it was in the basement of that bar in Port Washington that I worked out the kinks in the audio system that, step by step, eventually got me to Clever Devices. But no matter how successful you are, you always owe others, and to me that debt starts with the kind of cop my father was and that Eddie Byrne was. You always have too many cops killed on the job, but you never have enough heroes.”