“I can tell you stories that will make your head spin, all day,” former NYPD officer Michael Dowd said. “One guy got shot in the head and still had a cigarette in his mouth,” he continued, by way of example. Dowd is getting his 15 seconds of fame right now for being one of New York’s crookedest cops in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A documentary about his exploits opens this Friday at IFC, titled The Seven Five after the East New York precinct Dowd policed and pillaged.

If you asked someone from central casting for a blue-collar cop who’s always cracking jokes, they’d be hard pressed to find someone better than Dowd. He’s a perfect fit for the big screen; and, in addition to this documentary, his story is en route to becoming a Hollywood movie. When I ask him about it, he quips, “What, you want a part in it?”

Dowd’s thick eyebrows are constantly moving up and down on his forehead, and he smirks when tells you about all the laws he flagrantly broke. “I did twelve-and-a-half years in prison. Can I laugh? Do I have to be remorseful forever?” He defends himself even before there’s an accusation that he might not be repentant enough. When you google Dowd, the first image that comes up is one from him answering questions during the Mollen Commission, a 1992 investigation into city-wide corruption in the police department. In the picture, Dowd is quite literally talking out the side of his mouth. That year, The New York Times reported: “a special mayoral panel asserted yesterday that the New York City Police Department failed at every level to uproot corruption and had instead tolerated a culture that fostered misconduct and concealed lawlessness by police officers.”

The Seven Five’s director, Tiller Russell, explained to me that the impetus to make the film came from the producer Eli Holzman’s interest in the Mollen Commission. When Russell came on board the project, his first job was to start tracking down former cops that might be willing to be in a documentary. Russell found Dowd.

“It was one of those weird drug dealer-type meetings,” Russell said, describing his first time meeting Dowd after tracking him down. “I got on the Long Island Expressway, got off, got back on so he could control the situation, make sure I was who I said, make sure no one was following us.” Right away Russell knew he had someone to build a film around. “Within five minutes of getting in the car with him,” he says, “I was like ‘this guy is a stone-cold fucking maniac but there’s definitely a film here and this guy is definitely a charismatic star.’ Whatever the morality of it, he lived through an extremely insane experience and he’s willing to be shockingly candid about it,” said Russell.