There was a certain military-chain-of-command-like structure in the Special Operations Division. Only one’s immediate superior was privileged to point out to one the errors of one’s ways. In Jason Washington’s case, his immediate superior was the head man, Inspector Peter Wohl, the Commanding Officer of Special Operations. Peter Wohl knew where he parked his car and had said nothing to him. That was, Jason had decided, permission to park by inference.

Sergeant Jason Washington and Inspector Peter Wohl had a unique relationship, which went back to the time Detective Wohl had been assigned to Homicide and been placed under the mentorship of Detective Washington. At that time, Jason Washington-who was not burdened, as his wife often said, with crippling modesty-had decided that Wohl possessed not only an intelligence almost equal to his, but also an innate skill to find the anomalies in a given situation-which was really what investigation was all about, finding what didn’t fit-that came astonishingly close to his own extraordinary abilities in that regard.

Washington had predicted that not only would Detective Wohl remain in Homicide (many detectives assigned to Homicide did not quite cut the mustard and were reassigned to other duties) but he would have a long and distinguished career there.

Homicide detectives were the elite members of the Detective Bureau. For many people, Jason Washington among them, service as a Homicide detective represented the most challenging and satisfying career in the Police Department, and the thought of going elsewhere was absurd.

Detective Wohl had not remained in Homicide. He had taken the sergeant’s examination, and then, with astonishing rapidity, became the youngest sergeant ever to serve in the Highway Patrol; a lieutenant; the youngest captain ever; and then the youngest staff inspector ever.

And then Special Operations had come along.

It had been formed several years before, it was generally, and essentially correctly, believed as a response to criticism of the Police Department-and by implication, of the Mayor-by the Philadelphia Ledger, one of the city’s four major newspapers.

Mr. Arthur J. Nelson, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Daye-Nelson Corporation, which owned the Ledger and twelve other newspapers, had never been an admirer of the Hon. Jerry Carlucci, and both the Ledger and the Daye-Nelson Corporation’s Philadelphia television and radio stations (WGHA-TV, Channel Seven; WGHA-FM 100.2 MHz; and WGHA-AM, 770 KC) had opposed him in the mayoral election.

The dislike by Mr. Nelson of Mayor Carlucci had been considerably exacerbated when Mr. Nelson’s only son, Jerome Stanley Nelson, had been found murdered-literally butchered-in his luxurious apartment in a renovated Revolutionary War-era building on Society Hill.

Considering the political ramifications of the case, no one had been at all surprised when the job had been given to Detective Jason Washington, who had quickly determined the prime suspect in the case to be Mr. Jerome Nelson’s live-in companion, a twenty-five-year-old black homosexual who called himself “Pierre St. Maury.”

When this information had been released to the press by Homicide Unit Lieutenant Edward M. DelRaye-who shortly afterward was transferred out of Homicide, for what his superiors regarded as monumentally bad judgment-it had been published in the Inquirer, the Bulletin, and the Daily News, Philadelphia’s other major newspapers, and elsewhere.

Mrs. Arthur J. Nelson suffered a nervous breakdown, which Mr. Nelson attributed as much to the shame and humiliation caused her by the publication of their son’s lifestyle as by his death. And if the police had only had the common decency to keep the sordid facts to themselves, rather than feed them to the competition in vindictive retribution for his support of the Mayor’s opponent in the mayoral election, of course this would not have happened.

Almost immediately, the Ledger ’s reporters had begun to examine every aspect of the operation of the Philadelphia Police Department with a very critical eye, and on its editorial page there began a series of editorials-many of them, it was suspected, written by Mr. Nelson himself-that called the public’s attention to the Department’s many failings.

The Highway Patrol, a special unit within the Department, were often referred to as “Carlucci’s Commandos,” for example, and in one memorable editorial, making reference to the leather puttees worn by Highway Patrolmen since its inception, when the unit was equipped with motorcycles, they became “Philadelphia’s Jackbooted Gestapo.”

A splendid opportunity for journalistic criticism of the Police Department presented itself to Mr. Nelson and his employees at this time with the appearance of a sexual psychopath whose practice it was to abduct single young women, transport them to remote areas in his van, and there perform various imaginatively obscene sexual acts on their bodies. The Department experienced some difficulty in apprehending this gentleman, who had been quickly dubbed “the Northwest Philadelphia Serial Rapist.”

The Ledger, sparing no expense in their efforts to keep the public informed, turned up a rather well-known psychiatrist who said that there was no question in his mind that inevitably the Northwest Philadelphia Serial Rapist would go beyond humiliation of his victims, moving into murder and perhaps even dismemberment.

A lengthy interview with this distinguished practitioner of the healing arts was published in the Ledger ’s Sunday supplement magazine, under a large banner headline asking, “Why Are Our Police Doing Nothing?”

The Monday after the Sunday supplement article appeared, Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich summoned to the Commissioner’s Conference Room in the Police Administration Building the three deputy commissioners and six of the dozen chief inspectors. There he announced a reorganization of certain units within the Police Department. There would be a new unit, called Special Operations Division. It would report directly to the Deputy Commissioner for Operations. It would deal, as the name suggested, with special situations. Its first task would be to apprehend the Northwest Philadelphia Serial Rapist. Special Operations would be commanded by Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, who would be transferred from the Staff Investigation Bureau of the Internal Affairs Division.

That was the first anomaly. Staff inspectors, who ranked between captains and inspectors in the departmental hierarchy, were regarded as sort of super-detectives whose superior investigative skills qualified them to investigate the most complex, most delicate situations that came up, but they did not serve in positions of command.

Staff Inspector Peter Wohl had recently received some very flattering press attention-except, of course, in the Ledger -following his investigation of (and the subsequent conviction of) Superior Court Judge Moses Findermann for various offenses against both the law and judicial ethics.

And Highway Patrol, Commissioner Czernich announced, would be transferred from the bureaucratic command of the Traffic Division and placed under Special Operations. As would other elements and individuals from within the Department as needed to accomplish the mission of the Special Operations Division.

Among those to be immediately transferred, Commissioner Czernich announced, would be newly promoted Captain David Pekach of the Narcotics Bureau. He would replace Captain Michael J. Sabara, the present Highway Patrol Commander, who would become Staff Inspector Wohl’s deputy.

In response to the question “What the hell is that all about?” posed by Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein of the Detective Division, Commissioner Czernich replied:

“Because the Mayor says he thinks Mike Sabara looks like a concentration camp guard and Pekach looks like a Polish altar boy. He’s thinking public image, OK?”