John Mackie isn’t quite sure what to make of his recent induction into the Dick Tracy Hall of Fame.
“It’s certainly an honor,” the former New York City police sergeant was saying last week from his Harbor Island Club home in Indian River Shores.
“The Dick Tracy comic strip has been around for a long time. I used to read it as a kid growing up in Brooklyn.
“But how’d they choose me?”
True, Mackie had received the NYPD’s third-highest honor – the Medal for Valor – and found himself on the front page of the New York Post following a February 1980 shootout in which he gunned down a thug who had shot and seriously wounded two of his fellow officers.
Then, after a fluke, on-the-job injury forced him into early retirement and prompted a move to North Carolina, he spent a year serving as the undersheriff of Buncombe County.
And, yes, after moving to Vero Beach in January 1990, he did write those five Manhattan-based police novels relying on his experiences across 17 years as a cop to create gripping storylines and compelling characters.
But Mackie’s mass-market paperbacks, despite enjoying more success than he expected when he embarked on a second career, have not achieved the acclaim of previous Tracy Hall of Fame inductee Joseph Wambaugh, another cop-turned-writer whose award-winning literary works include “The New Centurions,” “The Blue Knight,” “The Choirboys” and “The Black Marble.”
So you can’t blame him for wondering if someone was having fun at his expense.
“I had no idea there was a Dick Tracy Hall of Fame,” Mackie said. “When they first contacted me, I thought it was a hoax.”
It wasn’t: Mackie’s induction was announced in the May 3 comic strip, which included a cartoon drawing of his face and a brief biography that detailed his credentials.
As for how he was selected …
Mackie, 71, was nominated by Jim Doherty, a railroad cop who pitched his Hall of Fame idea to Dick Tracy writers Joe Staton and Mike Curtis in 2011, shortly after becoming the comic strip’s police technical advisor.
At least once each month, the Hall of Fame frame replaces the Crimestoppers’ Textbook panel.
“Sometimes, we make our selections based on themes, such as African-Americans during Black History Month, or Native Americans during Native American Heritage Month, or different types of law-enforcement officers, such as transit cops,” Doherty said. “I wanted to recognize cops-turned-writers.
“I was familiar with John Mackie’s writing, had become a fan of Thorn Savage – the lead character in all of his books – and I knew he had a noteworthy career as a police officer,” he added. “Everybody has heard of Joseph Wambaugh. This was a way to get John’s name out there and let people know about his work.”
Mackie, as you’d expect, is grateful for the publicity.
He hasn’t written a book since “To Kill A Queen” was published in 2006.
His novels are no longer in print. And he said he has no immediate plans to write another.
But he has successfully regained the publishing rights to his novels from Penguin/New American Library, and e-editions of all five books – “Manhattan South,” “Manhattan North,” “East Side” and “West Side” are the others – are the are available for purchase at Amazon Kindle, which gives him a 70-percent commission on every sale.
“I wrote every day for 10 years until I got published, and I think I got better with each book,” Mackie said. “My first novel, ‘Savage, NYPD,’ will never see print. It’s up in the attic somewhere, probably mouse eaten.
“When I finished it, I thought it was pretty good,” he added. “But not now.”
Now, he’s an accomplished author – something even he couldn’t have predicted when, after failing an English class, he quit school in the 11th grade.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Mackie’s boyhood dream was to play third base for his beloved Dodgers. A bout with polio, however, robbed him of the foot-speed needed to pursue a baseball career.
“I could hit with power, throw the ball through a wall and run enough to play as a kid, but I didn’t have the speed you need to play in the major leagues,” said Mackie, who was only 5 when he contracted the dreaded disease in 1949, well before Jonas Salk introduced his celebrated polio vaccine.
“I remember being released from the clinic on Christmas Eve,” he added. “A local newspaper reporter was there, looking for a story, and I told him I wanted to play third base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, just like Billy Cox. Well, he must’ve seen the story because, for the next couple of years, he sent me autographed baseballs and cards and even passes to go to Ebbets Field.
“I loved the Dodgers. I was heartbroken when they left Brooklyn.”
Unable to chase his baseball dream and not interested in going back to school, Mackie began working dollar-an-hour jobs he hated before settling in as a mechanic at the same Lincoln-Mercury dealership that employed his father.
It was there that he decided to become a cop.
“The motorcycle cops would come into the dealership and use an office in the back to do their paperwork,” Mackie said. “I got to know them and I really liked their style, the way they handled themselves. I felt very comfortable around them. It wasn’t too long before I started thinking, ‘Maybe I could do that.’”
The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. So he earned his high school equivalency diploma, took the test for the NYPD in 1966 and, less than two years later, enrolled at the police academy in Manhattan.
The academy course was supposed to run for nine months, but after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Mackie and his classmates were rushed into duty to help quell the race riots that were erupting on the streets of in New York.
“My first night out, I was paired with an old-timer and we were sent to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood,” Mackie recalled. “I remember seeing the flames and the smoke. Then the call came over the radio: ‘Man with a gun, shots fired.’ I’ll never forget racing through that riot-torn area.
“It was baptism under fire.”
But Mackie loved it.
“I enjoyed being a cop,” Mackie said. “A lot of guys say that, but I loved it more than most. The job was who I was. And I excelled at it.”
Three years later, after “pulling some strings,” he found himself on the NYPD’s elite Street Crime Unit – a 125-man task force charged with cleaning up a then crime-ridden city and getting the bad guys’ guns off the streets.
“We drove unmarked cars, dressed in plain clothes and wore our hair longer, all so we could blend in and get close to the criminals without them knowing we were cops,” Mackie said.
“We worked all five boroughs and we were all good street cops.
“The Street Crime Unit was less than 1 percent of the entire force, yet we were responsible for 85 percent of the guns being taken off the streets.”
Mackie was promoted to sergeant in 1977. Two-and-a-half years later, he found himself in the shootout in which he earned his Medal of Valor.
As he tells it: He was working the midnight-to-8 shift when, at roughly 2 a.m., he and the patrolman driving their cruiser saw two other officers enter a peep show, responding to a complaint that someone was dealing drugs inside.
Suddenly, they saw someone run out of the peep show with an officer in pursuit.
“He shoots one cop in the chest, so we start chasing him,” Mackie said.
“That’s when he shoots my driver in the face. So now it’s my turn.
“I’m the only one there to stop him from getting to 8th Avenue, where he could’ve easily disappeared into the crowd,” he continued. “He had to get passed me. He didn’t.”
The 1983 incident that led to his early retirement wasn’t nearly as dramatic.
Mackie said he and his driver were headed to an undercover drug buy when an “older woman” drove through a stop sign and her car rammed into the passenger side of their cruiser. The crash left him with injuries that would not allow him to return to full duty.
“So they retired me,” Mackie said. “I was only 40 years old – a young guy, an up-and-comer, ready to make lieutenant – and just like that, it was over.
“That was a very rough time for me,” he added. “I didn’t just lose my job; I lost my identity. Without the job, I didn’t know who I was.”
Mackie moved to Asheville, N.C., where his brother lived, and decided to pursue one of his life’s goals: building his own home.
He bought a lot near the top of a mountain and went to work. It was while he was building his house that the Buncombe County sheriff, under attack from the local media and lacking support from the legal community, sought his counsel.
“He had heard a retired New York City police sergeant was building a house at the top of the mountain, so he’d come up and I’d advise him,” Mackie said. “At one point, he offered me the job as undersheriff, and I did it for about a year before I stepped down for political reasons.”
After three years in North Carolina, Mackie decided to move to Florida, focusing on the area between Melbourne and Jupiter before settling in Vero Beach.
“The more I looked around, the more I liked Vero Beach,” he said. “And the more time I spent here, the more I felt I was home. Being a Dodgers fan, I knew about Dodgertown. But it wasn’t until I walked into Bobby’s (Restaurant) for the first time that I was sure this was the right place for me.”
Still, there was a problem: At 46, he still wanted to work.
But nobody wanted him.
“I couldn’t find a job doing anything here,” Mackie said. “I’d see an ad, fill out an application and nobody called. After a while, I started going into a heavy clinical depression – to the point where I was considering suicide.
“I had lost my job. I had lost my identity. And nobody wanted me.”
One day, after applying for a job installing window treatments, Mackie sat in his truck and decided he’d had enough. There would be no more job applications. Instead, he would pursue another of his life’s goals.
“I said to myself: ‘You schmuck, go home and write,’” he said. “That turned out to be a pivotal moment for me. I always wanted to write a book and get it published. By becoming a writer, I reinvented myself, created a new identity and regained my self-esteem.
“I was no longer John the cop,” he added, “and that was OK.”
Mackie said he always had a knack for putting together words, but, as he began to write, he wasn’t sure he could put together enough of them to produce a novel.
“Not a lot of first novels get published,” he said. “As it turned out, mine wasn’t very good, but I learned a lot writing it.”
All these years later, Mackie now seems to take as much pride in his wonderful work on the keyboards as he does in his heroic work on the streets of New York. Both are a part of who he is.
Just as his 17 years as a cop provided the experiences and insights he needed to write those novels, writing those novels provided him with the second act he needed to get past the heartbreak of no longer being a cop.
“I think I’m done writing,” he said. “I’d like to think I could do it again, but I’m not sure I want to.”
More important, he no longer needs to.
He’s a Hall of Famer.
