by Mike McAlary
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Buddy Boys
When Good Cops Turn Bad
Mike McAlary
For my wife Alice, New York’s finest
Prologue
Henry Winter lay in bed, dreaming. He was sleeping late, again.
In spite of all the recent developments in the New York City police officer’s life—a period of betrayal, deception and fear—Henry Winter had amazed even his own wife with his ability to fall asleep during this time of unrest. He didn’t tell his wife that the only time he felt unburdened now was when he slept. He didn’t have to record his dreams. Henry found sanctuary in slumber.
Crooked Brooklyn street cops were free from harm in Henry Winter’s dreams. They could speak freely without fear of punishment. No one played Henry’s dreams back on a little tape recorder, listening to them on a headset. No one plugged them into a videotape recorder either, watching them on a television. No one dissected the ghetto cop’s dreams, pulling out names and addresses, marking down dates and times of crimes committed by other members of the New York City Police Department.
Much later, Henry Winter’s dreams would turn to nightmares. Sometimes he would awaken in a cold sweat, his bedclothes sodden, his body twitching uncontrollably. Betsy Winter would be holding her husband, trying to shake him free of some unseen torment.
“It’s happening again,” she would say. “Isn’t it?”
Henry Winter would grab a cigarette from the pack of Newports on his nightstand and strike a match to it. Mentholated smoke would fill the couple’s tiny Valley Stream, Long Island bedroom. Then Henry would run his fingers through his blonde hair.
Yes, it was happening again, Henry would realize. And then the conversations—the headings on the tapes he was recording on a small machine he carried hidden in a pocket of his bulletproof vest—would come back to him. The conversations always began with the same introduction.
On some darkened and desolate Brooklyn street, Henry Winter and a faceless investigator from the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division would meet in an unmarked car, huddled over a tiny metal machine.
And it would begin again.
“At this time I am testing an Olympus microrecorder, model number L200, serial number 211417. This recorder is to be used to record conversations by Police Officer Henry Winter during a tour of duty on this date in the Seventy-seventh Precinct. Officer, do you realize that once this recorder is activated it will record any conversations by you or directed towards you?”
“Yes,” Henry would reply in a dead, colorless voice.
“Officer, are you willing to record all conversations of your own free will?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been instructed on the proper use of this recorder?”
“Yes I have.”
“This is the primary recorder to be used during your tour of duty. I ask that you have nothing in your pockets that would interfere with that recording. Is that understood?”
“Yes.”
“End of this portion of the tape.”
On the morning of June 22, 1986, Henry woke to the sound of a telephone ringing at his bedside. The phone sounded like an alarm. At first Henry was confused; a shaft of midmorning summer light shone in his eyes. He grappled with the phone, lifting the receiver with one hand and pressing a small button on a recording machine with the other. It was a practiced maneuver.
Brian O’Regan, forty-one, another police officer from Henry’s Bedford-Stuyvesant command—the 77th Precinct—was calling. O’Regan wanted to talk about the job. He had just finished working a midnight tour, and he was excited.
Brian O’Regan was about to engage in the single most important conversation of his life. It would be replayed before a special grand jury hearing evidence in the most widespread case of police corruption in New York City since the days of the Knapp Commission. One morning phone call to Henry Winter’s bedroom would ultimately lead a corrupt cop to the most desperate of acts.
“We had a very good night last night,” Brian said.
“Ver-ry goo-ood,” Henry replied. Now he needed to get more information. His role as an undercover cop demanded specific dates and times.
“What happened, Brian?”
“Oh, we got a job, Twelve-sixty Pacific Street, man with a gun, we had a complainant and all.”
“Twelve-sixty?”
“Yeah. Above the Chinese restaurant, Pacific and Nostrand. Last night we had a gun run there. And we met a complainant who’s the superintendent of the building. You would have loved this one—a Rastafarian man with all the dreadlocks, but he don’t want anybody in the building with no guns. And he says, real quiet like to me, ‘They’re dealing cannabis in the second floor right apartment.’ So Junior bangs on the door and they let him and the other guys into the apartment. Billy Gallagher’s there. Sammy Bell. Billy Rivera. They’re looking all over the place. Looking and looking. Don’t find anything.
“I’m outside, just standing there in front of the building, finger up my ass as usual, thinking, ‘What the hell’s the story? What are they doing in there?’ I look up at the fire escape. And ho-ly shit, there’s a fucking wad of money sitting on the fire escape.”
“On the fire escape?”
“I hauled ass upstairs. ‘Junior! Junior!’ I grabbed him. ‘Go to the front. The fire escape near the left window. All the way in the corner. Look, and get out there as fast as you can, some of the money is blowing away.’
“He goes out there. He calls me out in the hallway. He says, ‘Come here.’ He says, ‘What the fuck are we going to do with all of this?’ There’s a big wad of ones, tens, twenties. I says, ‘Oh, shit. We’re gonna have to voucher some of this.’ They had one hundred and seven nickel bags of marijuana. So I bring the money inside another room. I tell Junior, ‘Gimme the shit.’ And then I started shoving some money in my pocket, shoving it in my socks and everywhere else.”
“Beautiful,” Henry said.
“I grabbed Sammy and said, ‘Look, I found it.’ He says, ‘Oh man, there’s a lot there.’ So I vouchered one hundred and eighty dollars. One-eight-oh.”
“One eighty?”
“One-eight-oh,” Brian said. “We did nine-six-oh. Apiece.”
Henry was stunned. The cops had hit a jackpot.
“Nine … You did nine hundred and sixty dollars apiece?”
“Yep.”
“Nine-sixty for you, nine-sixty for Junior?”
“Yep.”
Henry needed to know about the other cops now. Had they been given a share of the stolen money?
“And did you throw Sammy or Billy anything?” he asked.
“We couldn’t.”
“Oh yeah, because you don’t know how good they are.” Henry sounded disappointed.
“That’s it. I mean, hey, naturally we would, but I’m afraid, you know. I don’t know anything about these guys. What am I gonna do, Henry? If you don’t know who you’re with, you can’t just go, ‘Here’s yours.’”
“No, Brian, you can’t.”
After a pause, Brian began again.
“Yeah. Then we did Classon Avenue.”
“Classon and where?” Henry wanted to know.
“Between Dean and Bergen.”
“Yeah, how did you do there?”
“Very bad. Seventy dollars and some of that funny stuff.”
Henry would have to be careful here. He would have to know how much drugs had been stolen and what kind. He would offer to fence the stolen drugs for O’Regan. Then he could turn them over to a prosecutor.
“What’s funny stuff?” Henry asked, already realizing that Brian had sto
len crack, a mutant form of cocaine that is smoked in a pipe.
“The funny stuff in the capsules.”
“Oh, the crack.”
“Yeah.”
“And I got fifty-eight for you, Henry.”
“Fifty-eight what?”
“Funny things in capsules,” Brian said. “You want them?”
“Yeah, Brian. You want me to get rid of them for you? I can ask my guy and see if he wants them.”
Brian sounded nervous. “Is he safe?”
“He’s good. Don’t worry about him, Brian. He’s excellent. Figure on getting about four hundred dollars.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No. He generally takes a third, so I give you two-thirds. I’ll give him a call tonight.”
“All right. Anything on stereos, televisions, VCRs?”
The prosecutors were up to their ears in electronic equipment. They wanted stolen drugs and guns. There are more headlines in New York City cops stealing drugs and guns, Henry had heard them say.
“No, that’s dead,” he said.
“So we shouldn’t even worry about taking that stuff no more?”
Henry hesitated. He didn’t want to be in the position of asking cops not to steal.
“Let me try and call this guy Tuesday and see what’s happening,” he said.
“Okay. So we only came out of Dean and Classon with seventy dollars. Plus we got eight no-responses.”
In other words, the dispatcher had tried to reach O’Regan and his partner on eight separate occasions at twenty-minute intervals. O’Regan and Gallagher had spent close to a third of their tour robbing people, Henry calculated.
“That sucks,” Henry commiserated.
“Yeah. But I told them we were on a job at Bergen and Nostrand. We covered there. That was no problem.”
“Hey, tell them to scratch,” Henry said.
“That was that. But while we were at Classon I was talking to a guy upstairs. And I told him we’re coming down on this crack. And he told me, ‘Why don’t you go down to Pacific and Classon. The all-night candy store. They’re dealing heavy there.”
“Oh, very good.”
“It might be a place you guys could do. He says he thinks it’s crack and reefer.”
“Pacific and Classon. Oh yeah, I think I know the place. It’s got the game machines in front?”
“You got it, Henry.”
“Oh good. Then we’ll take a look at him. That’s all. Take a look and see what the hell goes on.”
“It was a good week for us.”
“Okay Brian, I got to go. I got to jump in the shower.”
“Okay. See you in the morning.”
“Right-o, Buddy Boy.”
Henry Winter hung up the phone and switched off the recording machine. Then he looked up to find his wife standing in the bedroom doorway, staring down at him. Henry rewound the tape and played it for her. The conversation was a good one, an incriminating one. The special state prosecutor would be very pleased with Henry Winter’s work.
If Brian O’Regan had actually done everything he had just told Henry Winter about, O’Regan had talked his way into an indictment.
1
“We have a deal.”
Henry Winter was in the mood to catch some blues.
Out in Jamaica Bay and Long Island Sound, schools of bluefish were already starting their summer spawning run. By early summer, the waters would be bubbling with frenzied schools of bluefish traveling in hunting parties half a mile wide and an eighth of a mile long.
They are a strong, pugnacious breed—a fish that can weigh as much as thirty pounds and fight twice its weight. Built like missiles, bluefish have long, sharp, and irregular teeth, delicate blue scales, and a thin backbone. Fishermen regard them as demented fish—hunters that lose all self-control in the presence of too much of a good thing.
When the blues are running, a school will slam into a fisherman’s boat, flopping against the sides and devouring anything he throws into the bait slick—chopped-up mackerel, butterfish, cigarette butts, paper, even beer bottle caps. Excited bluefish will eat, vomit, and eat again. They think nothing of taking single bites out of passing fish from their own school. And if a fisherman keeps a small bluefish on the line too long, a larger one will come along and gobble it up. Once you get a school of bluefish in an eating frenzy, it is impossible not to catch them.
The blues were Henry Winter’s favorite fish. He liked the fight in them, and the fact that although they traveled in great blue waves, they were really only interested in preserving their own individual lives. Bluefish even reminded Henry of the cops he worked with in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 77th Precinct. Once the blue-jacketed cops had worked themselves into a stealing frenzy, their adrenaline pumping, there was no stopping them. They stole whatever was put in front of them on the streets—money, drugs, cars, electronics equipment, garbage cans, cigarettes, batteries, beer, and newspapers. It would be impossible not to catch them.
Henry woke shortly before 7 A.M. on May 23, 1986. It was Friday, the first day of a three-day weekend for him. The morning dawned clear, crisp, and bright, a fisherman’s day, a day to bag your limit.
He dressed quickly and quietly, careful not to wake his wife and their two daughters. He slipped into a pair of shorts and pulled white jogging pants over them. The elastic band was just slightly uncomfortable. At thirty-four, the six-foot cop was developing a new plumpness.
Looking like a sailor in white pants, a white T-shirt and white sneakers, Henry emerged from his house. He headed for the garage and packed up his fishing gear, loading it into the back of a blue 1982 Ford pickup truck, then returned to the house and the refrigerator, filling a small plastic cooler with ice and seven-ounce bottles of Budweiser. He placed the cooler in the back of his boat, an eighteen-foot Cobia christened Bolt Action, and secured his outboard motor, a water-cooled, seventy-horsepower Mercury. Then he hooked up the boat trailer to his truck and headed out.
Henry never even noticed the maroon Buick following him—a car filled with the kind of cops who bait city streets for a living, waiting for crooked cops to bite. His movements on that day are well documented. He drove west along the Belt Parkway, breaking off the highway at the exit for Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens, continuing south across a toll bridge that led to the narrow strip of Queens called the Rockaways.
Stopping briefly at a delicatessen, Henry ordered a bagel with cream cheese and peppers to go, with a chocolate Yoo-Hoo soda. Then he stopped at a bait shop to get something for the blues—a two-and-a-half gallon container of chum, a box of butterfish, and fourteen sickly looking mackerel.
On Beach Channel Drive in Rockaway Henry put his boat in the water at a public launch, leaving his truck and trailer parked in a lot across the street from a McDonald’s restaurant. Within an hour after leaving his home, Henry was on the water, motoring through an inlet and out into the Atlantic Ocean until he reached the Ambrose light tower six miles out.
There were already several boats in the area by the time he arrived. Some of them were drifting, a sure sign that they were fishing for fluke, a flat fish that looks sort of like a flounder with the measles.
Henry spent the rest of the morning chumming for bluefish, and caught three ranging from six to ten pounds. Before noon he headed back toward the inlet, drifting for fluke but continuing to bounce a butterfish along the ocean floor in hope of catching one more blue. He landed a dozen flukes but none of them were fourteen inches long—big enough to keep.
The watcher studying Henry Winter through binoculars was surprised at the patrolman’s display of lawfulness. It was odd that the same Henry Winter who took bribes from ghetto drug dealers would not steal from the sea. The watcher wondered what set of rules guided this cop’s life.
By two o’clock Henry had packed up his gear and headed back in. Judging by the size of his catch, some might have said that he had had a bad day fishing. But he was happy. He regarded any day on the water as a go
od one. He hardly even noticed his sunburn—or the group of men in sports coats scrambling for their cars as he pulled up to the landing.
After loading Bolt Action onto the trailer, Henry secured his gear and engine and headed back home. He stopped briefly as he entered Howard Beach to inquire how some men fishing off a bridge with drop lines had fared with the fluke, then he continued onto South Conduit Avenue. He had traveled about three-quarters of a mile when he heard a car horn behind him.
Checking his rear view mirror, Henry saw two white men in a maroon Buick waving at him frantically, a red, flashing dome light on the dashboard between them. He didn’t hear a siren, but then he knew what the cops wanted. Police Officer Henry Winter was driving an unregistered boat trailer. He would have to talk the traffic cops out of writing him a forty dollar ticket.
The Buick pulled up along the left side of Henry’s truck. The man in the passenger seat waved a gold shield out of the car’s window.
“Pull over,” the cop yelled.
“Ah, shit,” Henry thought. “Haven’t these traffic humps got anything better to do?”
He parked his truck on the shoulder and got out. As he walked to the back of the pickup, two more unmarked cars pulled up in front of the truck. Now Henry was surrounded by three sets of badges. Two cops wore bulletproof vests over their sports coats.
“What’s the problem, guys?”
“I’m Lieutenant Andrew Panico from Internal Affairs Division,” a man said. “I’m placing you in custody.”
“What for?”
“Official misconduct and three counts of bribery receiving,” Panico answered.
“That’s bullshit.”
“Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
Henry put his arms back. A cop stepped forward and snapped handcuffs around his wrists.
“Where’s your gun?” Panico demanded.
“Under the front seat of the truck.”
Winter was dazed. For the first time in his life, someone had put handcuffs on him. He had done the same thing to other people a thousand times. Now he felt disoriented, violated, humiliated. A cop led him by the arm to the Buick.
