Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  On a chilly October morning in 1985, William Gallagher called Henry at home. The precinct’s union representative had heard some disturbing news from another union official, Ray Lessinger, the Brooklyn North trustee with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

  “We got to talk, Buddy Boy. I got some information,” Gallagher said.

  “All right,” Henry replied. “Tell me.”

  “Not on the ring-a-ding.”

  “All right, Billy. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Meet me at Marine Park tonight. Five o’clock.”

  The men met outside the park, and then walked. It was a clear evening with a chilly darkness descending as they strolled along, hands behind their backs. For some reason, Henry had hunting on his mind. Deer season would be opening soon. He would pack up his truck and drive north into the Adirondacks to spend two weeks roaming the woods, trying to take home a prize buck or doe.

  But William Gallagher didn’t have time for small talk.

  “Ray says they’re running an operation to try and catch you and Tony. One of the guys that was doing undercover work on you got into trouble with drugs. He got bagged himself. But Ray says the thing is still hot. You might not make it to Christmas. Ray says if you make it to Christmas, chances are you’ll be okay.”

  Gallagher went on to explain that the case was being handled by investigators assigned to Internal Affairs and possibly even the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Junior also said that as far as he knew only Henry and Tony had been targeted in the probe.

  “But look,” Gallagher said, putting his hand on Henry’s shoulder. “If anything goes wrong, just keep your mouth shut and we’ll get you the best lawyer we can. We’ll run rackets for you and everything. Money won’t be a problem. We’ll take care of you.”

  “Yeah.” Henry’s body shook with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. “No problem. You know me, Bill. If they come and ask me any questions, I don’t know anything.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “Don’t worry about it. Ray says it’s not that bad. He just wanted you to be aware of things.”

  “Tony and I chilled out after that. I went away hunting and told my friend Jimmy the garbage man what had happened. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Even if you do get jammed up, it isn’t the end of the world.’ But I was scared. I just wanted to make it through Christmas. I didn’t want to go to jail at Christmas time. We stopped taking money from Benny. That was over. We weren’t doing anything on the streets. I didn’t know it, but Crystal Spivey, a black female cop we hung out with, had arrested Benny with major-weight cocaine. And they turned him. Isn’t that great? Crystal Spivey busts the guy, they turn Benny to get me, and then they turn me so I can get Crystal. A neat little package.

  “So we weren’t into anything. Then all of a sudden we got a radio run one day in February to meet a complainant on the corner of Ralph and Pacific. We went looking but couldn’t find a complainant. We do see Benny, and he says, ‘Hey guys, how you been?’ He didn’t tell us he’d been collared, and Crystal never told us she arrested the guy. So now Benny is standing there on the corner saying, ‘Hey, can I talk to you guys?’ We put him in the car and drove away. We had no idea he was wired. We drove away and he told us, ‘I’m looking to open a new place. It will be like the old times.’ I think I said, ‘Yeah. No problem.’ This was Benny. We weren’t scared of Benny. He handed Tony the money—about two hundred dollars. We dropped him off and drove away. Tony looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know. Something’s not right. Benny was nervous. He was shaking.’ We went back and forth for a couple of minutes and I saw a twinkle in Tony’s eye and I’m sure he saw a twinkle in mine. I put my hand out and Tony put the money in my hand. I put it in my pocket and forgot about it. That was that.

  “They had a truck there. We never saw it. They were running videotape on us. Benny was wired. I think we took money from Benny another four or five times after that. He was always wired. We always took the money. We probably got about fifteen hundred total. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough money to catch us. Enough money to catch us and make us turn in our friends. We did a little better than Judas, I guess. How much is thirty pieces of silver worth anyway?”

  10

  “I know there’s somebody out there watching me.”

  Dennis P. Caufield, the superintendent of public works for the Long Island village of Valley Stream, was relaxing at home, his feet up, watching television in the den on the afternoon of Saturday, May 24, 1986. The former cop had rebuilt his life. His name was respected again. No one could strike a nail in Valley Stream without first getting Dennis Caufield’s signature on a building permit.

  And then, just before six o’clock, Dennis answered the doorbell and greeted his brother-in-law, Henry Winter, at the front door. Henry had bags under his eyes, Dennis noted.

  Dennis had already heard the cover story about his brother-in-law’s misadventure at sea, and he figured that Henry had been up all night fixing the propeller on his boat. But then Dennis saw an odd look in Henry’s eyes—a frightened expression that the former New York City police officer immediately recognized. On a night eight years earlier, Dennis had left work in the 75th Precinct to meet a group of police investigators in a prosecutor’s office. He had come home after the meeting with the same look in his eyes.

  “You want to talk?”

  “Yeah,” Henry replied, his eyes focused on the living room rug.

  “Here?”

  “No, please Dennis, not here,” Henry said, now looking up, his eyes already moist.

  “Let’s go to the firehouse then. We can always talk there.”

  They climbed into Henry’s truck and drove over to the Valley Stream firehouse, where they worked as volunteer firemen. They exchanged no words as they drove, an eerie silence filling the cab of the truck. Both men knew what was coming. They had never felt closer.

  Dennis led Henry into the firehouse and down to the basement, where they entered a small room, closing the door behind them. They sat down on opposite sides of a pine table. And then Henry began to cry. Dennis reached across the table, touching the shoulder of his wife’s younger brother.

  “Oh God,” Henry sobbed.

  After a few moments, he composed himself and started talking. In time, he told his brother-in-law everything. He explained that he had been taken in by investigators the day before and confronted with videotaped evidence of his own misdeeds. He retold, in intricate detail, the story of a good cop who turned bad. He explained why he had stolen, how he had been caught, and what the investigators were now asking him to do.

  Dennis listened and waited. He knew what was coming. Any second now Henry was going to ask him for advice. Should he, a cop in trouble, wear a wire on the guys he worked with in the 77th Precinct and become an informant like his brother-in-law, or keep his mouth shut and slink off to jail?

  “What should I do, Dennis?”

  For years, Dennis Caufield had been asking himself the same question. He had even told Henry once, ‘If I had to do it all over again, I never would have worn the wire. It’s not worth it. You do that and you’re not a cop anymore. You’re not a hero. You’re an informer. Cops never look at you the same after you send another cop to jail. You never look at yourself the same way either.”

  But now, faced with the chance to do it all over again and the opportunity to use Henry to correct what he perceived as a terrible wrong in his own life, Dennis could not ask his brother-in-law to do anything less than he had done.

  “You know what I went through. But you don’t want to go to jail, and believe me, they’ll put you in jail. If they got that much tape on you, and they wasted that much time investigating you, you will go to jail. I’m not saying for how long, but you will go to jail. Do you want to go to jail and have your kids grow up when you’re not around?”

  “No.”

  “The shit you were doing,” Dennis continued. “I’m not saying it was right, I’m not saying it was
wrong. But it’s better it happened this way. How would you feel if you were in a box? Somebody’s going to get killed out there. It’s better that you do what they want you to do and nobody gets hurt.”

  Henry had already made the decision to cooperate. Now he wanted to know how he would feel. He wanted to know how a man who betrays his friends lives with himself. He wanted to know how he could look at himself in the mirror, a razor at his throat, and never cut anything more delicate than his beard.

  “You’re shit for the rest of your life,” Dennis said, his own eyes now misty. “It will eat at your gut. There will be times when you’re going to flip out—break walls, punch windows. You’ll have headaches and nightmares. You’ll lose your friends and your self-respect. You’ll cry and you’ll fight with your family. There will be times when you’ll want to eat the gun. And it never goes away. You do this and it never goes away.”

  The men commiserated for another half hour and then left the firehouse, Henry driving Dennis back home. They talked on the telephone again several times over the next few days, but the firehouse chat put Henry in the right way. He was ready to do whatever he had to do to stay out of jail. But as he drove home that night, back to his unsuspecting wife and children, Henry focused his attention on one freakish aspect of the conversation. It seemed to Henry that Dennis had been staring him straight in the eye and talking to himself.

  On Monday morning, May 26, three days after being dragged into the special prosecutor’s office and identifying a group of their fellow cops as thieves, crooks, bandits, and drug dealers, Henry and Tony returned to their first tour of duty in the 77th Precinct. Henry arrived looking refreshed, his face severely sunburned and his blonde hair slightly bleached. There was even a bounce to his step as he entered the muster room to answer a 7:05 A.M. roll call.

  “Hey, Buddy Boys,” he said to no one in particular. “What’s doing?”

  Tony seemed to be in another one of his moods. He was heard cursing foil wallpaper and telling a younger group of cops, “Go fuck yourselves.”

  All seemed to be normal in the abnormal precinct.

  By the time Henry and Tony rolled out onto the streets, they had almost forgotten their new roles in the precinct. They had not yet been given recording devices to carry around. They drove out to their sector and parked the car. Then they talked, the dark, brooding weight of their fate finally settling in.

  “The guys are too smart in this precinct,” Tony decided. “I don’t see how we’re ever going to get away with this without anybody finding out.”

  Stopping to use the bathroom a few hours later, Henry and Tony walked into the station house and Tony was confronted by a young cop named John Tracy, a kid Magno regarded as his protégé, and his partner, Bill Hock.

  “I got to talk to you,” Tracy advised the veteran cop. “I heard something about an investigation in the Seven-Seven from my cousin who works in the special prosecutor’s office.”

  Tony was stunned. His mouth went dry. Somehow he managed to look uninterested.

  “Yeah? So what do you hear?”

  Tracy told Magno that his cousin, a secretary in the special prosecutor’s office, was at work on Friday when a group of cops from the Seven-Seven were brought in, one with blonde hair and blue eyes. He had been out fishing on a boat. He had a sunburn. Tracy’s cousin had advised him that she thought there was a big investigation going on in his precinct.

  “That sounds like your partner,” Hock added.

  “That sounds like bullshit. If something happened to Henry I would know about it.”

  “Do you think we should tell Gallagher about this?” Tracy asked, genuinely confused. “He might be able to find out more.”

  Tony was horrified. The investigation was blown even before it started. Henry’s blonde hair had gotten them in trouble again. Now they were going to jail.

  “Don’t tell Gallagher. You’ll get your cousin jammed up.”

  Tony walked around the station house looking for Henry, moving on legs that felt like jelly. He had to go to the bathroom. The conversation with Tracy had given him an instant case of diarrhea.

  “I came into the precinct and met Tony at the door. He pulled me aside and whispered, ‘They know. Tracy knows everything. They caught us. Tracy has a cousin in Hynes’s office and she told him they brought in a blonde, blue-eyed cop, possibly from the Seven-Seven.’ The guy’s got a sunburn and he’s a fisherman. Sound familiar, Buddy Boy?’ I said, ‘Oh, motherfucker.’ I know there’s only a couple of blonde guys in the precinct. What’s the odds of it not being me? Blonde hair, blue eyes, and I’m burnt like a lobster. Tony says, ‘How the hell are we going to get out of this? He knows it’s us, the investigation’s blown. We’re going to jail. Even though we said we would cooperate, they’re going to think we blew the investigation.’ Tony tells me to go see Tracy. We thought maybe he didn’t believe his cousin. It’s our only chance.

  “So I get Tracy and we go sit down at a table in the muster room. My hands are under the table because I’m shaking. Then he told me the story his cousin told him. He looks straight at me. I’m red from sunburn. I can feel my ears falling off because the guy is talking about me. And I’m sitting there saying, ‘No, it’s not me.’ He keeps asking, ‘Well, who do you think it is?’ And my mind is going, ‘It’s you, you stupid fuck, they got you.’ But Tracy just wouldn’t believe it. He had the right information and he wouldn’t believe it. Finally, I said, ‘Well, Tracy, you’re not going to tell nobody about this. You shouldn’t tell anybody because you don’t know who to trust. If you tell Gallagher you could get your cousin in trouble.’ The kid never opened his mouth about it. But I think Hock knew it was me the whole time though. How could he not? Nobody’s that stupid.

  “Tony was scared. I was scared. We went out to a phone and called the ‘hello’ number they gave us. We screamed, ‘We told you this was going to happen. These guys are too slick for you. They hear everything ten minutes after it happens.’ Eventually they calmed us down. They couldn’t even fire Tracy’s cousin for awhile. That would have given us away for sure. The thing that really saved us was a shooting. Two cops from the precinct got shot right after that. They put a prisoner in the back of the car without checking him for a gun. They had already taken one away from him. Who figures the guy for two guns? They put handcuffs on him, put him in the back seat and he pulled a gun from the small of his back and shot both cops. Then he jumped out of the car and two other cops shot him dead. The cops in the car both lived, but it was close. Everybody in the precinct was devastated. Tony and I had to go to the hospital with them. We were supposed to meet the investigators in a hotel near Kennedy airport that night. We called them up and told them about the shooting. They told us, ‘We don’t want to hear it.’ We said, ‘Hey, we got two of our fucking guys here that may go out of the picture.’ They came back, ‘We’ll be here when you get here.’ I hung up and told Tony, ‘These fucking guys, they ain’t nobody to fool with no more.’ And they weren’t.”

  By the afternoon of May 28, five days after they were brought in, Henry and Tony were literally rolling. Shortly after turning out, William Gallagher approached Henry and Tony as they sat in the park.

  “José Villarini wants to make a withdrawal,” he said.

  “What do you mean, make a withdrawal?” Henry asked innocently.

  “He wants to hit a place,” Gallagher replied. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “Okay,” Henry decided. “Meet us later on.”

  Tony and Henry left the park and drove directly to a pay phone, calling the ‘hello’ number. The cops explained that they were about to make a withdrawal. An hour later, a field operative assigned to Internal Affairs met them in front of the Brooklyn Museum, handing Henry a loaded tape recorder. He squeezed the bulky recorder into his pocket and drove back into his sector. A short time later, Villarini and Gallagher pulled up while Henry and Tony were handling a job.

  “So what do you want to do?” said Henry, begi
nning the first tape of Internal Affairs Investigation No. TF53s84.

  “Make a withdrawal,” Gallagher said.

  Villarini, who would later be suspended from the force for refusing to take a drug test, and was indicted for conspiracy, grand larceny, and official misconduct once he left the job, explained that he wanted to hit two drug locations, one at 277 Eastern Parkway and another at 409 Lincoln Place. The four cops crashed into several apartments without finding any drugs. The Lincoln Place address was an apartment house with no less than twenty apartments.

  “What apartment you wanna hit?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Villarini replied.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? This is your place.”

  “Let’s hit them all,” Villarini suggested.

  The cops groaned. Villarini was not a Buddy Boy. He was an amateur. As they left the building, Villarini grabbed a resident and frisked him, stealing a knife from the startled man’s pocket. Henry’s tape recorder picked up the cop’s frustration.

  “Hey,” Villarini said. “If I had to do this for a living, I’d starve to fucking death.”

  They were given tape recorders. Tony’s was an Olympus microrecorder, serial number 211417. The machine was one half inch thick and approximately four inches long. Henry got a Panasonic microrecorder, serial number 6BBRB09497—a thinner, shorter recorder that fit inside a pack of cigarettes. They also got brief instructions on how to operate the machines.

  “This is the ‘on’ button, this is the recording button and this is the volume button. You press this button to make it record and this button to make it stop,” an investigator explained. Henry got equally impressive advice on how to conduct an undercover operation. “Just go out and do what you would usually do,” he was told.

  The cops were supposed to record all their conversations in the precinct, with Henry’s machine as the primary recorder and Tony’s operating as the backup system. They would meet investigators on their way home from work, driving to prearranged drops. Tony usually met the plainclothes investigators at an intersection on Ocean Parkway near his home. Henry met his contact at the corner of Foster and Ralph Avenues in East Flatbush.