How an undercover cop foiled a plot to kill former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly

Former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly speaks publicly for the first time about a plot by a Rikers Island prisoner to behead him and blow up police headquarters some 16 years ago.

But Kelly wasn’t scared, the longest-serving commissioner in NYPD history said in an interview with The Post ahead of a new series of A&E documents detailing how authorities thwarted the 2007 scheme.

“We identified this guy and he was in jail,” Kelly, 81, said, recalling David Brown Jr.’s plan to hire a hitman to kill and dismember him.

“I felt relatively safe,” said Kelly, who led the department from 2002 to 2013, coldly. “Actually, it didn’t really shock me. You probably don’t want to hear it, but that’s pretty much how it was.”

The macabre plot was eventually brought to a halt thanks to the work of an undercover officer – Kelly praised him and other similar investigators as unsung heroes.

Brown, a 47-year-old convicted Brooklyn felon, told an undercover New York City police department. Chuck Byam that he was furious at the November 2006 police killing of Sean Bell, who was gunned down unarmed on the morning of his wedding.

He blamed Kelly for the affair and wanted the chief cop to be beheaded as punishment and the NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza to be bombed, he told Byam. And he was willing to pay $165,000 to get the job done.

“Well, what I have to do is kill the police commissioner — I want him killed,” Brown told Byam in a clip from the first episode of “Undercover: Caught on Tape,” which airs Thursday.

“I just can’t take it anymore,” Brown continued in the recording, according to a clip shared by The Post.

“Every time something happens, how does the police commissioner support the police. It upset me to such an extent that I want him to be killed.”

Byam, a 25-year-old retired NYPD veteran who was interviewed for the series, said, “This guy has balls.”

“Not that he wanted to kill another drug dealer or rival. He wants to kill the NYPD commissioner,” Byam said. “It’s big.”

Byam, who is black, added that while he understands the frustration over the killing of black men by police, it does not justify another killing.

“I don’t understand how comfortable you are with wanting to take someone’s life,” he says in the episode.

According to Kelly, Brown’s threats were different from the standard ominous but anonymous phone call.

“The difference here was we knew who the man was… We knew he was violent and we knew he had money,” Kelly said. “He had a house worth at least $400,000, so it was different from other threats. That’s when we decided to use undercover.”

David Brown Jr told an undercover cop that he wanted to cut Kelly’s head off. Chad Rahman/New York Post

Byam had a pair of tape recorders in his pockets for a face-to-face meeting on Rikers Island on February 23, 2007, where the two of them were to agree on a hit.

Brown told Byam that he needed to kill Kelly immediately: “I want him to have his head cut off,” the documentary says.

“I need people to feel my anger and rage,” Brown continued. “Every second of every day he lives burns my soul. I take it personally every time he overlooks certain things.”

Brown then asked if Byam could get explosives to destroy the NYPD headquarters.

“I want it blown up,” he told Byam, adding that it was “the information capital of the world for the entire police department.”

“I want to feel like a terrorist,” Brown said. “I want them to feel like I’m a fucking terrorist, you know?”

Despite the perpetrator’s words, Byam concluded that the post-9/11 plot had nothing to do with real terrorists abroad. It was just one man with serious revenge.

They agreed on payment, shook hands, and then left, according to the documentary.

That was all the authorities needed. Brown was arrested and charged with two counts of harassment, eventually receiving an additional six years behind bars.

“I changed the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, I changed their lives,” Byam said in the documentary. “Although they will never know that I was responsible for this, I still feel good about the changes I made in New York.”

Although people have noticed. Then-President Barack Obama sent the detective a congratulatory letter, and New York Senator Chuck Schumer sent him a flag flying over the Capitol in his honor.

“I felt very flattered,” Byam says in the episode. “The fact that I was still alive when I received the flag is certainly an honor for me, a touching moment.”

Kelly was reportedly never in direct danger. Brown, convicted of 30 crimes, was mentally ill and confined to a wheelchair.

However, Kelly told The Post that he was “of course happy [Byam] was here.”

“He did a great job,” Kelly said. “You know, you don’t think about these things in the course of normal work… but when you come across something with all these details, with the specifics of the threat, it gives you cause for concern.”

He also praised undercover cops as unsung heroes who work in the dark for little pay.

“[Byam] is kind of symbolic of the work that undercover cops do every day,” Kelly said.

“They protect all of us, risking their lives.”

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