Who done it? No, who didn't

Joseph Goldstein has an article in The New York Times about a little-known, and unusual, job:

He is one of New York’s busiest casting directors, yet very few know of his work. “Light-skinned Hispanic?” Robert Weston mulled over the possibilities. He knew they would want five people; they always do. “Javier, Javier Jr., Eddie, Ray,” he said into a cellphone, “and I’ll get another Spanish guy.” Weston, 45, was not casting for an Off Broadway production, and his roster of extras would not need Actors’ Equity cards. For some fifteen years, Weston has been providing the New York Police Department with “fillers”— the five decoys who accompany the suspect in police lineups.
Detectives often find fillers on their own, combing homeless shelters and street corners for willing participants. In a pinch, police officers can shed their uniforms and fill in. But in the Bronx, detectives often pay Weston ten bucks to find fillers for them. A short man with a pencil-thin beard, Weston seems a rather unlikely candidate for having a working relationship with the Police Department, even an informal one. He is frequently profane, talks of beating up anyone who crosses him, and spends quite a bit of his money on coconut-flavored liquor. But Weston points out that he has never failed to produce lineups when asked, no matter what time of night. “I never say no to money,” he said.
Across the nation, police lineups are under a fresh round of legal scrutiny, as recent studies have suggested that mistaken identifications in lineups are a leading cause of wrongful convictions, and that witnesses can be steered toward selecting the suspect arrested by the police.
But, for all the attention that lineups attract in legal circles, Weston’s role in finding lineup fillers is largely unknown. Few defense lawyers and prosecutors, though they spar over the admissibility of lineups in court, have heard of him. Weston says he is always on call; his Bluetooth earpiece comes off in public only when he goes to the barber for his weekly $16 trim. His cellphone, he says, holds the numbers of some one hundred potential lineup fillers, mostly friends and acquaintances from the Mill Brook Houses, the public housing project in the South Bronx where he has lived most of his life. He often complains about how people hound him for the chance to make a few dollars through lineup work. “I can’t even play basketball on the courts or sit here and drink a beer,” Weston said on a recent afternoon. “People are always asking me if there is a lineup.”
Fillers are paid ten dollars for a local lineup in the Bronx. For each lineup that Weston fills in the Bronx, he receives ten dollars; he gets more if he sits in as a filler or if his services are required in another borough. This is Weston’s primary source of income. Some days he organizes as many as four lineups; on other days, none at all.
These days, the work has slowed.
“There’s not enough crime now,” Weston said. “But it comes and goes, and there’ll always going to be knuckleheads stealing phones.” Weston said he got his start compiling lineups about fifteen years ago, when he was interrupted while eating lunch outside in the Bronx. A police officer asked if he would participate in a lineup and if he could find some friends, too.
His reputation as someone who could fill a lineup grew, and detectives began to pass around first his beeper number, and later his cellphone number, which is now posted in some squad rooms. The reason detectives prefer him is simple: “He always picks up his phone,” said one seasoned Bronx detective, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because detectives are not authorized to speak to reporters.
As Weston’s approach demonstrates, staging a police lineup is hardly an exact science. Weston said he selected his fillers after detectives told him the sex and skin color of the suspect, and whether the suspect had facial hair. “Sometimes they want a guy with a full beard,” Weston said. “I got guys like that.” Weston brings the fillers to a designated meeting place on East 137th Street, where detectives pick them up and take them to the detective borough command in the Bronx.
But detectives are not always satisfied. “Every time I call him and I tell him I need light-skinned Hispanics of that description, he always brings dark-skinned ones,” a Bronx homicide detective, Luke Waters, testified earlier this year, according to a court transcript. “He wants to make money as quick as he can, and when he brings them in I don’t like them.”
Detectives said that colleagues sometimes had to remind Weston that, as a middle-aged black man, he could not sit in a lineup for a light-skinned Hispanic man or a much younger suspect. Still, Weston said he had appeared in countless lineups over the years.
In the Bronx, detectives have a number of ways to minimize differences in appearance, to encourage selections based on facial features alone. Although dramatized versions of lineups often hew to a familiar scene— think The Usual Suspects— the reality is slightly different, at least in the details.
For starters, in the Bronx, at least, the six participants do not stand, but sit on adjustable stools, so everyone appears roughly the same height.
And lineup participants in the Bronx typically wear a knit cap or a Yankees cap (photo) so that hairstyles are hidden. But here, the detectives say, they have to be careful: the suspect may pull the cap down over the brow, a gesture that could suggest that this person has something to hide. “If we didn’t help them, the perp is the guy with the skully over his eyes, every time,” the detective said. So detectives often instruct the suspect to pull his knit cap to the same place on his forehead as the fillers, the detective added.
Weston’s lineup fillers fall into four categories: black men, black women, Hispanic men, and Hispanic women. He said he had no candidates to match a white suspect of either sex. “They call me for that, and I don’t have that,” Weston said. “They go to the homeless shelter for white guys.” Weston is aware that his job is precarious, and that detectives could decide to find someone else to provide fillers. To reduce the chances of that, he said, he tries to avoid serious trouble. (A recent arrest for drinking a Corona in public does not fall in that category, he said.) Weston almost lost his role once, when a detective’s cellphone was discovered to be missing shortly after a group of Weston’s fillers left a stationhouse, the detective said. Detectives in the Bronx told Weston that, until the phone was returned, he would not be getting calls for fillers. After a few weeks, Weston was able to track down the phone and return it, the detective said. Weston said he was sensitive to how he appeared in the neighborhood, given his relationship with the police. “Don’t tell me I’m a snitch,” he said. “Just like I don’t tell any drug dealer how he should make his living, he don’t tell me how to make a living.” On this point, Weston wanted to be clear: all he does is provide fillers, no questions asked. “I don’t care what you’ve done,” he said.

Rico says another job he's glad he doesn't have. But it's nice to see the NYT using the Bronx correctly...