S4 | E3 The Brooklyn Job (Part 1)

Break in the Case

New York Citiy Police Department

True Crime

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On July 31, 1997, ESU officers get a tip that some people have built a bomb in their Brooklyn apartment, and they plan to detonate it on the subway the next morning. What happens next is known as The Brooklyn Job. In Part 1 of The Brooklyn Job, two MTA/Long Island Railroad cops are approached on the street by a man who doesn't speak English. He has an urgent message, and the word "bomb" does not get lost in translation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is John Kowalchuk. I'm from Long Island, New York. I joined the Long Island Railroad Police in August of 96.
0:16.6	That's retired MTA Long Island Railroad Police Officer John Kowalchuk.
0:21.6	He had a 20-year career as a transit cop.
0:25.6	I became a police officer because I always had the urge to help people.
0:32.6	The MTA, Long Island Railroad Police, a separate agency from the NYPD, both shared the same goal,
0:40.9	to protect the citizens and property within the five boroughs of New York City.
0:46.1	As rookie police officers, Officer Koalchuk and his partner, Eric Huber, were on a rotating schedule.
0:53.9	Wherever the MTA needed extra manpower, they would be
0:57.4	assigned on patrol. Once again, here's Officer Koalchuk. We cover not just the train station
1:04.5	itself, but the property belonging to the MTA and the Long Island Railroad. The crimes we handle on the Long Island Railroad are pretty much the same crimes as you'd have anywhere else,
1:16.7	maybe not as frequently as an officer that works, say, a sector or a precinct.
1:32.3	On a midsummer night in July of 1997, Koalchak and Uber were assigned to the Long Island Railroad Atlantic Avenue station in downtown Brooklyn
1:39.3	at the intersection of Atlantic, Flappish, and Fourth Avenues. It started out as just a normal day.
1:47.0	We were working the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
1:52.0	to 7 a.m. tour, patrolling the station, making sure commuters are getting on and off the railroad without any incidents.
1:57.0	Kowalchuk had been on the job for less than a year. In that time, his instincts had grown immensely.
2:04.6	He became more observant of different behaviors, the erratic, the calm, and the ugly.
2:10.6	It was actually a very hot night well into the 80s still, so being that the train stations have very little air conditioning, if any.
2:21.9	We went upstairs and we were actually just standing at the top watching commuters and all pedestrians,
2:28.0	you know, walking around on Flatbush Avenue and Fourth Avenue.
2:31.3	There was a young man standing across the street.
2:33.9	He was making a beeline to us. I felt like I made eye contact with standing across the street. He was making a beeline to us.
	...

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