The customer was nonchalant, low-key and decidedly without drama. He needed a minor repair, nothing more–a rip had marred the cover to his vest, and he asked a South Side tailor to sew it up.
The tailor, Roger Chernoff, was pleased to do so. It wasn’t until later, when he heard the news, that Chernoff realized what had damaged the bulletproof vest of his customer, Chicago Police Sgt. Peter Dignan. Dignan had been in a life-and-death struggle, a shootout that had downed two police officers and killed a suspected drug dealer.
“You know what? He didn’t say anything. That’s the thing–he didn’t make a big deal out of it,” said Chernoff.
His quiet, middle-aged customer had helped save the lives of two colleagues.
Such is the life of a tailor whose specialty is a new and perhaps somewhat disturbing one: bulletproof fashion.
In his cluttered West 63rd Street shop, Chernoff’s customers may choose from the popular blue-jean style or the elegant three-piece-suit vest, appropriate for executives and bankers. Then there’s the black leather look, a favorite among the vests’ most common customersstreet cops. Or a client may opt to bring in a favorite old shirtto be converted to bulletproof.
Once uncomfortable, bulky “steel armor” that reminded disgruntled wearers of the days of knights and lances, bulletproof garb is now evolving into a state of chic.
“I have black nylon, blue leather, black leather. I make them in any color–purple, white–here’s the blue,” said Chernoff, displaying sky-blue bulletproof. “I can make any length, any style. I’ve actually put the bulletproof vest in a few jackets, and some executives’ sports coats. . . . For one guy I did a Bulls thing–a Bulls logo on the back. Whatever he wants, I have it.”
It may be a sad commentary that a city is so accustomed to violence that citizens hide bulletproof vests under business suits, and neighborhood cops are routinely wrapped in space-age fibers that can stop a .357 Magnum slug traveling at 1,395 feet per second. But as violence becomes a part of life, it almost seems natural to take the next logical step and combine dressing for survival with dressing for success.
“They’re all going for it,” Chernoff boasted. “It’s a new thing.”
The demand for custom-made vest covers–met by Chernoff’s shop, Nate’s Leather on the South Side and tailor Joe Gala’s store, J.G. Uniforms Inc., on the North Side, two major suppliers–is definitely there, as the busy shops’ customers can attest to.
“I’d say 80 percent of them like to look good and they’re pretty fussy about it,” said Halina Gala, who works side by side with her husband, Joe, at their West Irving Park Road shop. “They stand in the mirror and say, ‘Do this here, and do that here.’ Some of them are so sharp.”
The end results draw frequent compliments from a public unaccustomed to designer body armor.
“A lot of times you get comments,” said Kurt Kourakis, a Chicago Police detective who sports a slick custom-made black canvas vest. “Like if you’re in a restaurant or something. People say, `Oh, the Fashion Police.’ Vests are in.”
“I’ll be honest with you, I get a lot of compliments on this,” said Larry Parker, an investigator with the Cook County sheriff’s office, who prefers the black leather look. “It’s kind of like a fashion statement while I work.” (Prices for men’s and women’s vests run $375 and up; covers, $65 and up.)
Civilians are picking up on the trend, too, though most body armor retailers won’t sell to just anyone. No laws govern vest sales, so it’s up to retailers to restrict them. After rap star Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down March 9 in Los Angeles, several men who said that they worked for rappers showed up at Nate’s to buy body armor, Chernoff said. “They were expecting some trouble, but I told them we can’t do it. You don’t know who’s who–I don’t want it to get into the wrong hands.”
After all, it was only about a week earlier that two Los Angeles bank robbers sent chills through police officers nationwide by engaging in a brazen daytime shootout–while wearing body armor.
Though Chernoff hesitates to sell the vests themselves to civilians, he’ll meet requests for fashion covers if a customer has managed to buy a vest elsewhere.
More and more people are wearing them–UPS guys, guys driving in bad areas . . . car dealers, professional people, lawyers. I did a couple of bankers,” Chernoff said. “That’s what it’s coming to, the bottom line: Everything is bulletproof.”
The evolution from pure protection to fashion may have been inevitable here in Chicago once the city’s police department started mandating the use of bulletproof vests in July 1993.
“We reached a point in our history when so many officers were confronting armed assailants that we thought it was necessary,” said Sgt. Frank Cascio of the Chicago Police Department’s Research and Development Division.
Partly to convince reluctant officers to wear the awkward, heavy garb, the department at that time started to allow the use of “overshirt carriers,” Cascio said. That is, cops would wrap their body armor in various fabrics so they could wear it outside their shirts rather than under them, making it cooler, more comfortable and easier to remove if they ended up inside, filling out paperwork or booking arrestees.
After that, it was only a matter of time before body armor began to look good. It’s a development that the vest manufacturers themselves aren’t 100 percent pleased with; the armor is most effective when it’s as close to the body as possible, said Thomas “Ed” Bachner Jr., a vice-president of Second Chance Body Armor, the company that won a competitive bid and now supplies the Chicago Police with Level II bullet-resistant vests. The level number indicates the strength of fire power the vest will absorb.
Chicago Police Officer Harrison Speakes sides with Bachner, wondering what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been wearing a vest close to his skin during a routine traffic stopa stop that almost turned deadly when the irate driver responded with gunfire.
“I was wearing mine next to the body–and I took five bullets in it,” Speakes said. “If it had been outside, one of the bullets might have slipped around or something.”
On the other hand, Bachner acknowledges that “the vest that fails the American police officer is the vest that fails to be worn.” So “we stand by our vests,” he said, even if they’re wrapped in blue denim or black leather. He also conceded that fashion may entice more cops to don the vests before they hit the streets.
Those who swear by body armor approve of just about anything that encourages more cops to wear it. Take Gerald Morehead, for example, a Grand County, Colo., deputy who abruptly discovered that his vest was more than just bullet resistant.
Morehead was working the graveyard shift on Feb. 14 last year when he got a burglary-in-progress call just after 1 a.m. He was speeding down the highway at 50 m.p.h. toward Granby, Colo., when he was suddenly confronted by a huge, hefty elk sporting impressive–and potentially deadly–antlers.
“A 1,200-pound bull elk jumped off the side of the roadway–a full elk and a full set of horns,” said Morehead. The deputy’s cruiser and the elk hit head-on, killing the animal and hurling it through the windshield, its antlers stabbing Morehead in the chest.
“His horns broke off on the center trauma plate of my vest, and it actually kept them from piercing my heart,” said Morehead. “There’s no doubt in my mind that if I hadn’t had my vest on, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”
His department hasn’t yet evolved toward bulletproof fashion, but he and a couple of his fellow deputies have heard about the vest covers. Said Morehead, “If that means the guys will wear them, well, whatever it takes.”
In fact, the use of body armor is rising rapidly. Last year, an estimated 64 percent of the country’s 700,000 local, state and federal law enforcement officers wore bullet-resistant vests, said Craig Floyd, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, a non-profit organization authorized by Congress.
That figure is the highest in history, he said, up dramatically from an estimated 23 percent just a decade earlier.
“Obviously it’s more than doubled and that’s the good news. . . . In 1996, we also saw a tremendous decline in the number of officers killed on duty,” said Floyd. “If you had to rank them, there’d be nothing higher than bulletproof vests as a reason for why that number went down.”
That, in turn, meant a historic breakthrough last year that got little attention outside of the body armor industry. For the first time ever, Floyd said,more cops nationwide were saved by vests than were killed in the line of duty.
More than 150 were saved while 116 were killed nationwide, according to William Brierley, a law enforcement consultant for the Survivors’ Club, an organization of those whose lives have been saved by body armor. The club is sponsored by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and Du Pont Co., maker of Kevlar, the bullet-resistant material used in many vests. Kevlar’s fibers, said to be five times stronger than steel, absorb a bullet’s energy.
Brierley said stories of last year’s saves are “still rolling in” from departments around the country.
Meanwhile, the 116 on-duty deaths is the lowest fatality figure since 1959, said Charles Higginbotham, spokesman for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. That figure is impressive, considering the fact that the country’s overall homicide rate went from 5.1 per 100,000 population in 1960 to 8.2 in 1995, while the overall crime rate increased from 1,887 per 100,000 in 1960 to 5,278 in 1995, according to the FBI.
“We’re great believers in the vest,” said Higginbotham.
Here in Chicago, saves have been less unusual than Deputy Morehead’s close encounter with the elk, but no less dramatic. Chicago Police Detective John Hamilton was hit by a sniper’s bullet just above his heart–a shot that surely would have killed him if not for his vest.
“I stumbled back. It knocked the wind out of me,” said Hamilton. “I thought I’d been hit by a brick.”
Later, “the doctor who treated me said I would’ve been dead. . . . He said it would have gone right through my heart,” said Hamilton, who ended up with a large bruise instead. He is now a member of “Police Survivors,” a group chartered last year, made up of Illinois officers wounded while on duty.
While Hamilton swears by the vest, other Survivors are less impressed–including one, Talmitch Jackson, who fears that one of the bullets that hit him actually went through his vest first. That is hard to investigate, he said; the vest disappeared in the chaos that followed the shooting.
There has been no recorded street incident of a vest failing to live up to its official standard, but a bullet may be “hotter than what the vest was rated for”–or could be an illegal armor-piercing bullet, said Wendy Howe of the National Institute of Justice’s Office of Science and Technology.
Those illegal slugs–which often have steel cores instead of the softer lead cores–were outlawed in 1985 and can’t be sold legally except to law enforcement or the military, said Edward Owen, chief of the Firearms Technology Branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Other Survivors members weren’t spared bullet wounds either, but through no fault of the vests themselves.
“I got shot in the head,” said Officer Dennis Dobson, “and the vest doesn’t go quite that high.”
The group’s president, Steven Tyler, was hit by multiple gunshots–including one in the face–that weren’t stopped by the vest either. But Tyler, one of the cops helped by Dignan during that South Side shootout, is convinced that body armor “stacks the deck in your favor.” After the shootout, Tyler spent his own money to buy a heavier than standard Level IIIA vest with superior stopping power. (When a vest’s bullet-resistant material is damaged, that material must be replaced; only the cover can be repaired.)
Chicago cops cringe at the fact that bulletproof vests are now reaching criminals–a phenomenon that hit Lt. David Dougherty when he arrested suspects in a neighborhood plagued by gang war, and found that they were equipped with body armor.
It was only slightly comforting when they “said it offered protection from other dope dealers and gang bangersnot protection from us,” Dougherty said. But cops never know. When Dignan and Tyler confronted their armed nemesis in his dark apartment hallway, they had no idea that the gunman had his own bulletproof vest. They caught him off-guard, without enough time to reach it.
“He was a big guy, a weight lifter. I hit the guy nine times before he died. . . . The ironic thing was, he had a vest himself. It was hanging in the closet. If he had got to it,” said Dignan, “we would’ve been in big trouble.”
