The Official Detective To The Stars Nypd Gumshoe Serves As Adviser To Several Actors

The detectives’ squad room in East Harlem looks like, well, exactly like the detectives’ rooms in “NYPD Blue,” “Homicide” and countless other television shows and movies about cops.

There are battered metal desks, ringing telephones and, beneath a sign reading “Smoking Prohibited in This Area,” a detective in a natty double-breasted blazer shakes out a cigarette and lights it.

If everything seems just so utterly familiar even to one who has never set foot in a detectives’ room, that is because Hollywood does its homework. Every actor seems to portray a detective at some point, and often that means following around a real-life gumshoe for “research.”

A surprising number of stars, along with the occasional writer and producer, have seen the killing streets of New York through the eyes of one man, Thomas McKenna, a homicide detective who has been shadowed by Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Andy Garcia and John Turturro, among others.

“We look for fresh homicides so they can understand,” Detective McKenna said, echoing a bit of the Method portentousness that has led actors down this road in the first place. “See, you can read in the paper that somebody was killed, and not understand. However, if you see where somebody was killed, it has a completely different effect.”

McKenna, 55, looks like a casting director’s cop - stocky Irish torso, a small dimple in the tip of his nose, narrow eyes that doubt everything. His diction is spiked with slang as vivid and sometimes searing as the streets themselves. “Fresh kills” are recent homicides that land in a detective’s in-basket. “The Bastille” is the 28th Precinct station house in Harlem. Homicide victims don’t die in the detective’s parlance, they “get dead.”

His first lesson to actors is that appearances count. When Andy Garcia visited his office to prepare for the film “Black Rain,” McKenna said, the actor wore Bermuda shorts and had a pony tail down to here.

“I looked at him and said, ‘This is not going to work,”’ the detective recalled. “‘If I’m going to take you to crime scenes and interviews, I want you to at least look like you could be a detective.’ The next time I saw him he was sheared like a duck. He had cut off the ponytail and was dressed in a jacket. The producers said, ‘What did you do to Andy Garcia?”’

Actors have landed freshly coifed in McKenna’s in-basket not because they ask for him by name but because he is a member of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, an elite team to whom Hollywood has often turned for role models. Based on West 133rd Street, the squad investigates murders anywhere north of 59th Street, river to river.

McKenna has had a piece of some big cases. He tracked down witnesses in the “preppy murder” case against Robert Chambers in 1986. A few years later he extracted a confession from a defendant in the Central Park jogger case. It’s all in a book that McKenna wrote with William Harrington, “Manhattan North Homicide,” published recently by St. Martin’s Press.

He did not, however, write about his time spent baby-sitting actors. This seems odd, given that for police officers like McKenna, it’s almost part of the job description.

“They enjoy going around the streets, seeing what we see,” he said. “When I’m working, I ride the streets differently than you do. You ride in your car and see people. I ride and see criminals.”

He drove his unassuming Nissan up Frederick Douglass Boulevard, stopping for a light at 125th Street.

Not far from this intersection, McKenna and a few other detectives once brought the writer David Rabe and a producer to tour an infamous building where there were six or seven drug-related killings a year.

“When we pulled up in front, I got out of the car and yelled, ‘If you don’t have business in this building, get out now!”’ McKenna recalled. He didn’t want his civilian visitors walking into a confrontation. Even so, his guests’ mouths hung open in astonishment, he said.

“There was blood on the walls,” McKenna said. “There were bullet holes in every wall. There were some good people, too, and there were signs on their doors, ‘Crack not here. Try next door.”’

Raised in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, McKenna has spent much of his career in Harlem, including three years as a uniformed officer in the 25th Precinct, from 1965 to 1968.

He made 300 arrests in three years as a uniformed officer, he said, and was awarded his detective’s shield.

“In my 32 years I don’t think there’s a block here where I haven’t done some investigating,” he said.

He thought he was well known in Harlem until the day he arrived at a homicide scene on 128th Street with the actor John Turturro.

“We got a crowd of people around, saying, ‘There’s homicide; I know that dude,”’ McKenna said. “We thought they were talking about us.

“In reality they were talking about John Turturro, because he had done ‘Do the Right Thing,’ and all the kids in the ghetto had seen it.”

McKenna has noticed that every actor researches a role differently.

Turturro grilled the detectives the way they grill a suspect. Sean Penn, on the other hand, hardly asked anything. Instead, he attached himself like a barnacle to McKenna for more than two weeks, absorbing quietly for his role in “State of Grace.”

“The press would have you believe he’s a raving maniac,” McKenna said. “I originally thought, ‘Oh Christ, we’re going to have to bail him out of brawls all the time.’ But Sean is a decent guy. He’s intense. He’s really a character study.”

In spite of the famous faces that sometimes tag along, police work mostly comes down to the unglamorous legwork and desk work that solves cases.

“It’s nice,” McKenna said, to have celebrities along. “You get invited to the wrap parties, the premieres. It’s great. I enjoy it.

“But then the next day I get up and come to work. I don’t go to Hollywood and relax between shoots. It doesn’t change my lifestyle any.”