Justin Volpe offered his right hand, and I hesitated. It was small but powerful-looking. I remembered what Abner Louima said about a white cop who wore gloves in the 70th Precinct stationhouse bathroom.

"It is good to meet you," he said. "I always wanted to talk to you."

There was a graciousness about him. It seemed false and out of place in a police officer accused of sticking a toilet plunger up the rectum of a prisoner. He was on his best behavior. As we entered the room, he held the door. "No, go ahead," he said.

Click on image for larger view.

In the last 12 years, I've met the NYPD's worst rogues. Brian O'Regan and Henry Winter from the 77th Precinct were thieves who later committed suicide. Peter Heron admitted shooting and framing his heroin dealer. He went to jail. Then, there was Michael Dowd and his corrupt colleagues in the 30th Precinct. They all smile and offer their hands, but not in friendship.

"I am perfectly willing to believe all this is a lie if you convince me," I told Volpe, who is perhaps the most despised cop in America and single-handedly giving credibility to every allegation of police brutality in the country.

Volpe was controlled and soft-spoken. He plays the victim well. He is a weightlifter and built like a fire hydrant. It was easy to see him as some version of Mark Fuhrman on steroids.

"It didn't happen the way they are saying," Volpe said. "Now I know what it's like to be falsely accused."

"Then what happened?"

"It wasn't me."

"Then who was it?"

"If it happened, it wasn't me," he said. "It will all come out. I will be vindicated. It's like a nightmare and I can't wake up."

That is far as we got on that subject. He told me he would talk if I didn't press him on the facts.

"A lot of stuff is going to come out about that club [the Rendez-Vous, where the incident began]," he said. "There may have been a fight in that bathroom."

This is the cop alibi, spoken as if it would explain everything. A lot of cops talk in whispers. It was a gay club, they say in hushed tones.

From his bed in Coney Island Island Hospital last week, Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, and his wife, Micheline, told me about the Aug. 9 horror of being beaten with radios and having a toilet plunger shoved up his rectum through his intestines into his bladder.

"The cops who came here that Saturday morning told a nurse they found me bleeding on the ground," Louima said. "They told her, 'He was half naked and bleeding when we found him. Something happened in the club.' They said it was a homosexual thing. The coverup started there."

Volpe shook his head a lot during our two-hour conversation. "It wasn't me," he said again. "It happened before [at the nightclub.]"

Police and investigators for the Brooklyn district attorney's office say this is nonsense. If Louima had been violated at Club Rendez-Vous before he got to the stationhouse, he would have been bleeding when he was stripped at the front desk.

Volpe is much smaller than the crime with which he is charged and is shorter than I imagined. He wasn't wearing a suit, and his hair wasn't slicked back the way he appeared in court. He wore dungarees and a white linen shirt. There was an orange stain, the color of Cheetos, on the left shoulder. But he looks movie star cool in a shaggy Brad Pitt way.

His black hair is long on top and almost shaved on the sides, just as Louima described it. We talked in a room that was terrifyingly small, about the size of a precinct bathroom.

"They ask us to go out and save people," he said. "You see the terrible things in the city. You push hard to please the bosses. And then, this happens."

"You feel the bosses are pushing you to make arrests?"

"Yeah, but I'm not going to get into that. Morale is terrible. We work hard, and we don't get paid squat."

The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association has a bumper sticker, "No zeroes for heroes." But this is not about money or heroes. It is not about corruption. We call what happened to Louima sodomy because this is a family newspaper. But this isn't rape or a sex crime. This is dungeon stuff, sadistic torture in the middle of New York City.

Two years ago, the police union delegate in the 70th Precinct, Anthony Abbate, was running for PBA trustee. The election brought out a lot of bigotry in the precinct, and Abbate was said to be right in the middle of it. The union, I reported then, ran the precinct. When I was working that story, I saw Volpe on the street one day. He sneered at me. Abbate was later fired for racism and poor judgment.

"Were you one of Abbate's guys?" I asked.

He scrunched his face.

"I was never into the precinct politics," he said. "I was never into politics. They are only your friends when they need you."

"Did you say, 'This isn't Dinkins time. This is Giuliani time'?"

"No, we don't like any of the politicians."

He was with his father, Robert, a retired detective, and his girlfriend, Susan, whom I'd talked with before. She is black and grew up in the projects. She is a civilian employee at the 70th. They were holding hands as he spoke, black and white fingers, like their lives, intertwined.

Susan is both intelligent and courageous. She had told me that she did not believe Volpe, who basically lived with her, could be involved in anything like this. She said if he was lying about what happened, their life together was a lie, too.

"I will do anything for Susan," he said. "We were about to be officially engaged. Now this happened. I'm not sure how to proceed with our life. We aren't just dating. This relationship is at a whole another level.

"We were talking about where we were going to go on our honeymoon. We talked about racism. We sat and cried when we thought of bringing up kids in this world. I love her so much. I didn't want her to go through my pain.

"Protecting her is the most important thing. I will do anything to protect her. I don't care about me. All I care about is her."

I honestly couldn't see him as a protector.

His father, as a father must, sees him as innocent. "I can't believe this has happened to my father," Volpe said. "I look at him and I want to cry."

The senior Volpe wore a stylish black silk shirt and looked pained. He was a hero cop whose career is the stuff of novels. His partner was shot.

"You spend your whole life on one side of the law, and you wake up with a son who is Public Enemy No. 1," he said. "You always expect a knock at the door and for someone to say one of your sons was shot, but not this."

"Did he talk to you about what happened?"

"No, he came home in the morning, and I saw a laceration on his face the next day. He said he got smacked. That happens. He's a tough kid. But nothing about this. And then the world just explodes."

"Everyone that knows Justin says this is impossible," the senior Volpe said. "Everyone that doesn't know him says he is a monster."

"It doesn't matter what people say," I said. "What matters is what happened in the bathroom."

The son made a face.

"People will know what happened," Justin Volpe said, holding his head. "That's all I can say now. It didn't happen the way they are saying."

Maybe there is some truth in his denials. Maybe he isn't a racist. Maybe this all happened out of rage.

Volpe was struck at the club, investigators say, but by another man. He then grabbed Louima, the nearest black face. This was a mistake, and now Volpe wants us to think he is being mistaken for an abuser.

That isn't likely. When I mentioned Joey Buttafuoco, another infamous client of Volpe's lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg, Volpe scowled and winced.

"Oh, that fellow," he said. "Bad guy."

It seemed so absurd that Volpe was turning up his nose. Volpe's girlfriend is very much like Mary Jo Buttafuoco. Hopefully, her denials will end sooner.

The conversation turned to Volpe's photograph in the newspaper, the official one from the NYPD. He had no neck and appeared notorious.

"I look like Sammy the Bull," he snickered. "Like a gangster. It's a terrible picture. You never think it is going to make it out of the file at 1 Police Plaza."

Robert Volpe, a fabled and world-renowned detective, has made many cases with less evidence than they have built against his son.

"It will all come out," he said, shrugging and offering a knowing cop look.