But anyway, I get an offer. Would I be interested in being the chauffeur-security guy for the president of Railway Express, the old delivery company? The pay was $246 a month. I took it and ended up behind the wheel for five different presidents over 17 years. It was the right move at the time. My family was growing up and it gave me more time at home to see the boys growing up.”

But while hardly regretting his choice to move on, he also admits to having had more than one nostalgic moment behind the wheel of his limo. “I guess the thing you miss most, and I’ve heard this from a lot of cops, is the daily camaraderie. I think we were especially close-knit over at the 23 in those years. Some of it was just self-defense because when you reported from the Academy, some of the old-timers looked at you like you had to prove the world to them. I’m not saying they weren’t helpful, but they kept a distance and that made you closer to the people your own age.”

Sackett had an extra insight or two into the command’s atmosphere from eight years as a PBA delegate. “Money was a problem then and I see it hasn’t gotten much better since,” he says. “There was always room for a lot of improvement in everything from salary to morale. The reasons for a bad situation might seem different today from what they were back then, but maybe some of that is just a difference in names.”

As for his present situation at Atria, Sackett confesses to two ongoing frustrations. “Hey, I’m 96 years old, I spent most of my best years being a cop, and I’m a Mets fan. The trouble is, they got so many old teachers and scientists and lawyers and other people like that around here that it isn’t always easy to get a conversation going.”

And the second frustration?

“My subscription to the PBA magazine! They moved me out of my place so fast, my address fell off your rolls. So how do I sign up again?”

One of New York’s oldest NYPD survivors was assured he didn’t have to sign anything. Not only has the PBA sent him several recent issues of the magazine but also his PBA cards and other items.

hen you've worked for more than 20 years out of a command known as the Bucket of Blood, not too much should surprise you. But Lester Sackett was stunned recently when he walked into the public-events room of his seniors’ residence in Kew Gardens, Queens, and encountered a crowd of people gathered there especially for him. If nobody heard his cry of dismay, it was mainly because it was drowned out by the NYPD drum-and-pipe band that greeted his entrance.

“Oh, god, what is this?” wondered Sackett, his smile suggesting he already knew it wasn’t something bad. “What’re you all here for?”

Over the next 45 minutes, several past and present members of the NYPD and the PBA would tell the 96-year-old Sackett why they had come to the Queens Atria residence for seniors. Among the listeners were the one-time PBA delegate’s two middle-aged sons and their families.

The special day, elaborate as it turned out to be, had developed out of the purest of coincidences. A couple of months earlier, the nursing home’s director had requested protection after an assault. A security agency sent Jim Zarakas, a recently retired NYPD detective whose wanderings around Atria brought him into contact with Sackett. “One thing leads to another,” says Zarakas, “and it comes out that he worked his entire life in blue at the 23rd Pct. in East Harlem. That’s where I did, too!”

At different times, of course. In fact, Sackett’s stint at the command, from 1938 to 1961, had ended well before Zarakas’s arrival. “But there was still that extra sense of camaraderie. Especially when Lester would start telling stories about the old, old days at the 23 — stories that sometimes were very hard to relate to what the area had become when I was there. It had really earned the nickname Bucket of Blood.”

As Zarakas notes for the historically challenged, the beginning of Sackett’s time at the command then headquartered at East 104th Street corresponded with the Great Depression. It was also a period when the neighborhood was rife with gambling and prostitution. “Another time, another world,” Sackett chuckles now. “But it was also another world for me back then.”

That was a reference to the fact that he came from a Jewish family transplanted from Connecticut to Sunnyside when he was a teenager. “You did a lot of things if you were a Jew in those days, but being a cop wasn’t at the top of the list. In fact, one day after I’d announced I was going to be a cop, I go over to a friend’s house and his mother gives me a little grilling about whether I’m really serious. When I finally convince her, she shakes her head and she says, ‘Okay, but take pity on the peddlers.’”

Peddlers turned out to be the least of Sackett’s problems in first working patrol for 10 years and then serving as the youth squad officer at the 23. “West Side Story was the other side of Manhattan, but a lot of it wasn’t too different,” he says. “But to give you an idea of how long ago it was, they were talking about juvenile delinquency as some new idea!”

Some famous old New York City names also reside in Sackett’s stories. “The command extended south toward the big money, too, so you might have an assignment checking out the apartment building where somebody like Thomas E. Dewey, then the district attorney, lived. Fiorello LaGuardia also lived in the area.”

Even decades later, though, he can still shake his head at what he regards as his hairiest moment on the job. “Twice I had to fire my gun, but I didn’t hit anybody. The worst, though, was one night when I was on patrol with my partner Peter Rodriguez and we get a call to Madison and 115th Street. Two guys come running out of a bar and right after them comes this third one, more blood than skin, and he collapses on the sidewalk. The first two had beaten him to a pulp. Peter takes off after one of the runners, I go after the other. I’m a little ways along when I hear shots coming from where Peter had gone after his guy. I can’t tell you the scare I got. Was it the fugitive taking down Rodriguez? Should maybe I have stayed with him, not left him alone to go after somebody who obviously had a gun? I forgot about my guy and went back to where Peter had gone. Sure enough, the perp had turned on Rodriguez with a gun and fired. But, thank god, it was Peter who took him down. Fifty, sixty years later, I still think about that night.”

But what Zarakas and the other guests at Atria want Sackett to think about is his total 23 years of service. To this end, they present him with various citations from the NYPD and fraternal groups. Then come the better gifts arranged with the help of the Department, the PBA and individuals like Detective Joe Concetta. The first is a replica of the cap he wore on the job and that he puts on immediately. The second is a replica of his shield. And the third — and most astonishing to his sons and grandchildren — is a blown-up photo of him in his younger days. This brings squeals of admiration from some of the eighty- and ninety-yearolds seated in the salon and a blush to Sackett’s cheeks. But it is also precisely these gifts that galvanized Zarakas and others originally into organizing their afternoon. “The more I talked to Lester, the more I realized he had next to nothing to remember his days as a cop,” the retired detective says. “A lot of that was because of the way he ended up in here.”

It’s not the happiest story. A widower living alone in Flushing a few years ago, Sackett collapsed in his shower and lay there for some eight hours before being rescued. In the commotion about getting him to a hospital and then to a medical assistance facility, the mementoes from his police years were lost.

“Not that there were too many to begin with,” he says, constantly reminding listeners that practically five decades have passed since he left the NYPD. “I’d put in more than my 20 by the 1960s. At the time I was making $6100 a year. Hey, that was big money! When I’d gone on the job, it was two thousand.

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